I’m afraid of the future. I’m afraid of growing older and not feeling like I’ve done anything in my life worth remembering. I’m afraid of being average, and of being hated for what I believe in, or for what I want to do. I’m afraid of rejection, even though I’ve gotten better over the years at feeling like I’m afraid of nothing.
I’m afraid of the future as the past tense is being unwritten. I’m afraid that Shakespeare, Chekhov, and whomever we want to call the greater writers of modernity will fade like the poems of Anglebert. I’m even afraid of our collective nihilism, and I really want to change it, and I know others that want to change it, but I occasionally feel that it still pulls me in.
I’m afraid to look back and notice that the earliest we tend to remember literature is from 5th century BC, which is nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of years humans have existed. I’m afraid to think of all the works that don’t make it to the present, and all of the works that will make it to the future, because they adhere to some way of looking at the world that we don’t have yet. I’m afraid that, even if that art might be very good, art as we know might not exist.
I’m afraid of the future that is inevitable. I’m afraid that, someday, millions of years from now, everything that the human race has ever done will not mattered, because we’ll have been erased by a meteor or destroyed by atomic warfare, and unlike humanity, the earth shall dust itself off and begin anew, as it always has. I’m afraid because in a world like that, it doesn’t matter what Shakespeare or Kalidasa have done; if humans no longer exist, then no one will care about what was once done by humans. I’ I’m afraid because I’m slowly realizing how little it truly means to impact history, to impact a culture memory with your vision, because regardless of how deep or transcendent your vision is, the world strikes down those who have not humbled themselves to the world, and this especially will someday include humans.
Yet, I keep writing. Part of myself is inspired by fear. I want to tell everyone I’m a writer, and then for everyone to speak of me in the same tongue of the greats, because I want them to know I exist and am worth reading. I want them to see me as someone who’ll change the world, because otherwise, I might truly believe that I live a life that isn’t worth living.
But, I know there’s a part that isn’t driven by fear at all, the part of me that loves to live in my head and pull worlds from underneath me, the part of me that sees a beauty in the world that needs to exist and feels that only I can provide it, the part of me that knows it has to be me, and it can’t be anyone else, because I feel it, and therefore, it exists, and the part of me that knows that it doesn’t matter if no one will know my name, that no one might ever care about the worlds I create, because the world as we will someday know it will be nothing without the world that I can create.
December 6th, 2011: “the portrait of a Kiran as an immature twat…”
Like many who have come before me, I was someone who wanted people who had once thought of me as average to know that I was anything but. I was inspired to write poetry because I was depressed over my parents disowning me for my sexuality, at 17. After my parents realized that I was here to stay, as a queer, and I settled down, I began to write to heal my ego. I wrote and wrote and wrote (random stories that would fall apart, usually beginning with the conceit of “I want to write about a homeless woman/coal miner/ strong independent Latina!”), and showed it and showed it and showed it to anyone (literally anyone; I had no concept of a vision that actualized its words around itself). Even though I regret this part of my life, where I burnt bridges (but also made some great contacts that still love my work; hint: some very big magazines) and made an ass out of myself (well, not to everyone), this period was my apprenticeship to my art. I learned the act of creating structure/dialogue/characters, mostly by fucking up and learning from it. My apprenticeship culminated with my meeting Irini Spanidou, an incredibly brilliant and insightful writer who would come to be my mentor. Irini saw through my mask and, in it, a writer of promise, but of no use. I showed her one of my stories, she thought it was crap, and she was this close to writing me off, until I told her not to, because one of my stories, “Aurora of Eden,” got a nice note from Zoetrope All Story (it’s a story about an Inuit teenager who does drugs to hide the fact that she doesn’t see beauty in herself). She read the story, and thought it was beautiful. From there, we began working together, for a couple of months. She tore into my stories and saw nothing but talent (in a bad way; I was a talented writer that wrote about nothing). She told me I would have to stop chasing fame and ego, and instead try to write that which the world needed to be told. I left the independent study with several stories that, with her guidance, became worthy of existence, and a crushed soul. What would I write about? Am I a writer? Should I continue to write? I didn’t know. I felt like I had nothing to say.
All of those thoughts changed during the summer, when the flow between my body and the world became unblocked, and I began my journey to become one with the world. I saw a cover for TIME with a picture of a woman with her nose cut off, and a subtitle asking us to stay in Afghanistan. I was disgusted. Here was TIME magazine exploiting and appropriating this girl’s story, for the sake of a war. It made me want to barge into TIME’s office and tell them what-for, except I realized I was powerless, and therefore, voiceless.
Except, I realized that didn’t have to be the case. I realized I wanted to write about war, but not about war from the frontlines, but instead from the people who are fragmented by it. It was that realization that made me write “Until We Meet Again,” a novella about three voices, a mother who loses her child thanks to the war and then finds herself unable to emotionally connect with her husband, a son kicked out of the army because of DADT who then gets outed to his parents, and a refugee who must choose between staying in Georgia with his best friend, or moving to California to chase a girl that might not even remember him, that move in and out of each other, creating a story that reads both fragmented and united. I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back one and a half years later, I’m so proud of my story. On one side, I’m so happy that the stories of “war” remained on the surface, and that it’s really a story about having to move on and say goodbye to people in your life, in order to grow as a person. On the other, I could tell that “Until We Meet Again” grew from stories like “Aurora of Eden” or “Jihad of the American Fool,” but I hadn’t known at the time that the style I had created in that story would be one I would continue to develop in later projects.
Those projects came to me when I moved to Spain. I had decided to live in Spain mostly to write a collection of stories called “Jesus Lives in Madrid,” which became 8 stories about a black, Islamic Jesus who is born in Spain, but, because of how new immigration is, is treated as an immigrant, and therefore over the course of the stories loses his sense of identity and self (it went swimmingly, thank you), but something greater pulsed into me just a week after arriving. Me and my classmates were in Segovia, a small fort town near Madrid, when I started imagining hundreds of years of history unfolding in front of my eyes in the wide green hills that overlooked the castle. People fighting with bows, then guns, over religion, then race. I had seen in my eyes the history of Spain, and in that history, I saw hundreds of other histories. I realized that I wanted to compress the entire world into a novel.
That being said, a vision is a vision, and it takes time and years of practice to create something of worth. My trip to Segovia inspired The Hearkening, an incredibly ambitious book that I know I am going to write, but I am not ready yet. That being said, when I went traveling around Eastern Europe near the end of my year in Spain, I heard in my head on the bus to Zagreb the phrase “We are the Poorest Country in the World,” over and over again. I didn’t really understand why my imagination was haunting me with that sentence, but, after hearing the story of a beautiful Croatian girl with long brunette locks and a Cindy Crawford mole (no, she seriously should have been a model, and I’m not even into girls) who guided me to a train station, I felt the
