Surprisingly, I found myself very interested in all of the topics of activism we explored during our week at Southampton. I have to admit, though, looking over the topics before the class began I looked at my mother with my eyebrows turned up, because I had no idea what Coastal Apathy or Urban Blight meant and more importantly, I didn’t like the idea of being forced to write about stuff I didn’t understand or really care much about. I’ve always been the kind of writer who will write a beautifully written academic essay, with great evidence to support my thesis and nice transitions within the body paragraphs (I’m not bragging, there’s a point to what I’m saying), but I’d do so very unwillingly, literally complaining the entire time I wrote. It’s not as though I had anything against what I wrote, but I don’t like prompts or really structured writing, because it stunts my creativity and causes me to overthink every single aspect of my piece. “Is this actually what the prompt was asking for? Do these ideas even connect? Should this be a separate paragraph? Is this how one grammars?”
Anyway, back to my point (because I was straying from the prompt again…). I really enjoyed the excursions and little talks we received about each of our topics, because it helped the prompts feel less restricting. The first day was my most productive writing day, and helped me produce a great story that I am passionate about. The talk that Fish Guy gave was really inspiring because it related so much to what I do at one of my jobs, as a Restoration Corps Worker on Jamaica Bay. Still, as much as I enjoyed that talk and all of the photos, and really do care about the treatment of our ocean/water (because it’s mostly me cleaning the literal trash out of the water and shorelines 10-4 every Monday-Wednesday), the reason I wrote so much that day is because the prompt was so broad instructing us to simply mention 4 of the 5 senses and not forcing us to mention Coastal Apathy. While I do talk to people about this topic, and feel passionately about it, I couldn’t work the topic into my story naturally, so I wound up leaving it out.
The second day, was much more difficult for me, simply because I felt more obligated to relate my story to the activism cause after that really inspiring TED talk that reminded me so much of my neighborhood. That day, we were also pressed for time and I had taken so many pictures that I couldn’t choose which one to write about. At the time, I decided to ignore the picture and just start writing about my experience with Urban Blight and things I learned in one of my previous classes about how you’ll find more non-residential/city/government buildings in the poorer/more black neighborhoods because the land is cheaper and they don’t really care about polluting the air for our black lungs. In my neighborhood we have the Sanitation Department, the Airport, about 5 supermarkets, numerous clothing departments, tons of hotels, and about twice as many long-term parking spots. That story, however sounded very bland (sorry to make you read even that section) and list-y, so I threw it away and wrote something new about what happens in the abandoned buildings in my hood, and I liked that story much better.
As a black female, you’d think income inequality would mean much more to me than it does, but frankly I’m only 18 and I’ve managed to get two well paying part-time jobs (and my parents still feed and shelter me), so I haven’t been filled with rage about that yet. The first thing that came to mind, while sitting in this beautifully groomed library garden, was how much my paternal family struggled growing up on a farm in a southern state where racism was disgustingly evident. I came up with a story that is somewhat modeled to be on the farm my family owns in Edenton, North Carolina, where the road that runs adjacent to it was never paved because it was on the side with black folk. To this day, just a short drive north of the farm will be full of former plantation houses, new white and beautifully built, all because white people were equipped with the tools (yes, even slaves y’all) to be successful and to this day many southern black families are suffering from the institutionalized racism that left them less educated and pays them less. Still, the word choice prompt made my story much more difficult to write, but it turned out alright if you ask me.
Anywho, day four was great because we got to visit the wildlife refuge (one of which I also work on), which was ridiculously beautiful and contained about 4x the amount of animals I was expecting it to. As someone who owns about 15 pets (some of them are fish y’all), and grew up with a total of about 30 at various different points, I felt passionately about the animal abuse topic, but again, the prompt tripped me up. I am a person who loves to write from the perspective of people, so having to anthropomorphize an animal in my story was very difficult for me. Eventually, I decided to write from the perspective of an animal kept in a pet store (fitting because many of my reptiles and my frogs came from a pet store), since I’d just seen a video about how Petco keeps their animals in terrible conditions. I hope that anyone who reads this piece will become more aware of how even a place that claims to care about animals may not necessarily treat them right.
Finally (been waiting for this one), Intolerance. As y’all may have noticed I am very passionate about my race, my culture, my people and when my professor said it was a free-write (ooh child, literally real tears of joy fell from my eyes), y’all know I was hype. I loved this activism topic, because it’s pretty much always somewhere in my writing. It’s hard for me to separate my experience/perspective as a black female from anything I write, because it’s really something I can never forget. My skin complexion literally gives me a unique experience in this world and I want people who don’t know what that’s like to hear it from me, and people who know exactly what it’s like to know that they are not alone in their experiences. The talk we heard from Robbye Kinkade was inspiring because she helped me understand that I shouldn’t be afraid to write what I feel just because I don’t want to offend or make people uncomfortable, and that is what will stick to me most from this week.
