My English Teacher Asks Me to Expand
As a poet, an artist, the creative instinct supposedly favors expansion. To write, it goes, one must seek new horizons, new shores, new words, new worlds, new metaphors: ways to seek, feel, and exist in a world that have never been done before.
This is because writing is an act of imposition or in the words of Joan Didion- a “hostile act” that requires one to overcome their fear, their tendency for comfort and indulgence in order to be inventive, creative, to produce something different.
If you are successful in meeting these requirements, it is said, one day the work you create won’t even sound like you wrote it- it will be unexpected, better, greater, larger, diverse, and something entirely different from all that you have created before. This literary departure from oneself is the light at the end of every amateur writer’s journey: if you experiment, and learn and train yourself, your words and thoughts will transform into something different, something better, something that sounds less like you and more like someone with ‘real talent.’
This idea, that one, via expansion, can self-mutilate their creative voice till it is something of quality has always repelled me. Admittedly, this may be why so much of what I write may appear repetitive or uninspired. I am reluctant to leave what I know, and find myself writing again and again about the same themes: home, exile, return, home, exile, exclusion, belonging. It is a song that I have sung for years - one I hesitate to silence or tune.
I attribute this behavior to being the descendant of refugees and immigrants, for leaving home is such a brutal journey that it inverts every instinct for exploration a young, creative, enterprising girl should have and replaces it entirely with the instinct for return- a desire for a home that drowns out everything in the world but the yellow doors and potted plants of your memory.
Even when presented with the edges of the world and a chance to fly, I find myself turning around and flapping like an abandoned carrier pigeon: set on the sights of a home that I no longer belong to.
Thus, I hate believing that my creative excellence depends wholeheartedly on my versatility, my ability to, again and again, become foreign to myself. Why must I leave, must I veer my previous path and reattune my steps to the paths of Keat and Byron to write well? I have just begun to see where I am.
Why as a scholar, or teacher, editor, and friend, must I dispose of my language, my favorite words, my favorite halls of memory and replace it in the name of creative expansion? I have just begun to hear my voice again, rebuild my ability to speak, and it is already time to leave? Admittedly, perhaps this means my capacity for prose is ‘limited.’ for my diction, my syntax, my vocabulary is in the business of reconstruction, not invention. I am from a line of voiceless people: until I reckon with what it means to have a voice, I cannot risk, I cannot safely mimic, mime, alter, integrate, exchange, or borrow vocabulary lest I stop sounding like myself.
Surely, there is something about being a product of placelessness that ironically enough, forbids you from exploration/expansion. I am not ready to tilt towards that you call the sun when my roots have not been planted. I think, to some extent, that even my parents hoped that as a multi-hypenate child, I was to be cosmopolitan, would learn to straddle the world, but if anything it has made my art, my mentality, more close-minded, more singular: fixated on (by word and will) creating a place to call my own, a place that demands no explanation, a place, I dare say - one calls home.
Thus, my work, if you read it, often sounds the same: I once belonged to you, now I am cast away. This was once mine, but now I look from afar. I yearn for home, and yet I remain here. It is a rehearsal of grief, two generations delayed, and is too precious to be diluted by creative experimentation just yet: it is not art, it is a ritual of the highest order. An insistent offering to the silence I was born into.