There's a post in me somewhere ...

... it's lurking, rising, moving through my veins, coursing through my brain. Until it reaches my fingertips. As I observe them swiftly tapping at the keyboard I notice it takes mostly only my middle fingers on each hand, right-hand-pinkie on the space bar, and sometimes index fingers jump in to help out.

Come to think of it, since I came to America back in 1988 I have been doing a lot of keyboard tapping. Indeed, until then I had never once touched a computer although when I was a teenager I had a type-writer that my mother gave me for my sixteenth birthday. I even took a short secretarial course in those days and learned the real way to let my fingers do the walking. Passionate, dramatic and intense stories flowed out. There was no stopping me. In fact, one of them was titled Bombs Won't Stop Me.

But, I digress.

From 1988 on, the computer became my morning, noon and night friend. For I had to write papers. I cannot even think how many. Let me see. If I close my eyes and think of all the courses I had to take to complete a BA, Masters, and PhD (including the dissertation) over the next nine years, well, it has to approximate a couple of hundred papers perhaps. And then there were articles, book chapters, a book, and, since January 2005, my blogs.

My fingers took on a groove all their own and now they function almost without my help. Like automatic pilots they fly my words around and about swirling, creating, dancing, jiving through the keys sending out pieces, posts, messages, even poems that I did not know were in me. Suddenly I look up on the screen and there I am: thoughts, ideas, opinions, mind, soul, heart, spirit, defined by words that came out of me. Pretty powerful stuff, let me tell you.

Now I am not clever, organized or scholarly like some people I know. I simply can not compare. Even though I have tried to match up. And, oh! Believe me, I have tried. After all, a person will do anything for the love of a parent. Anything at all. No, I am much more impulsive, irrational, and emotional. More often than not, I seem to allow my psyche to lead the writing even when I do have a plan, or an organized outline with the major points defined before the fingers start a-tapping.

Take my book, for example. It had been years in the making. All my life. All I needed was one e-mail communication, the slightest suggestion from an acquisitions editor passing through, for me to know I wanted to write that book. In an instant, a flash, the outline was prepared. I almost fell over at the sight of it. It took a tweak here and there and proposals were forwarded and accepted just like that! Try as I did to stick to the scholarly, rational way, my soul, brain, heart, life, childhood memories came roaring up and out onto the pages. After a few hours of writing each day I would sit back, read it through and sometimes weep with joy and relief at how I was allowing my self to emerge.

I specifically remember the day I wrote about my childhood, black African Nanny Margaret when I was growing up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). I recalled how she had to rise before dawn each day so that she could bring me tea early in the morning. I described her living in a small shack at the end of our yard. She had come to town for work, leaving behind her own children in a poverty-stricken rural area, hoping that other family members would care for her children while she tended to, among other things, my morning tea. I wrote about that woman who cared for me physically and emotionally morning, noon, and night forsaking her own children in order that she, and they, might survive. Even though, as I read back what I had written, I realized that as a child at the time I was powerless to change the system, feelings of grief and shame overwhelmed me. And I wept. While I became an activist growing up and was aware of racial injustice during those years, nothing was more revealing than when I wrote about my childhood memories of Nanny Margaret that morning.

Yes, there is a post in me somewhere. It is about self expression and reality, comfort, shame, guilt and life's complexities. It is about human emotion, especially fear, that drives us all to say and do things that hurt to the bone, or lift a person's soul supporting it to the heavens. Mostly it is about sharing myself so that maybe, if the other is brave enough to receive it, they might allow themselves to know who I really am. Vulnerable, compassionate, complex, frightened, emotional, fucked-up, human, loving, fallible, courageous, and, thankfully, irrational.

Comments

[tamarika]

Thank you, Elaine.

[Elaine of Kalilily]

Beautiful and moving post, Tamarika.

[tamarika]

Jean,
You are right. I would not want to conform to that very narrow definition of scholarly. In any event I don't think people who claim to be rational are so. Just in denial of their emotions and biases, and covering it up with what they term "rational analysis." In my experience, that's just another way of being judgmental and righteous.

I look forward to hearing about your summer journey (if you choose to go that route) if it is through your typing fingers or even, perhaps, with your feet.

[Jean]

I'm so glad to read this today. Feeling shitty lately. And wondering why, when lots of stuff is going really well. Another online friend suggested to me that I was "mourning old yous - including the you that didn't let yourself feel sadness." All of a sudden, in the midst of present feelings, fears and hopes for the future, I hit a wall and plunge into a deep hole of old, unresolved emotions. I hover, wondering whether I should push it away and march on, or stop and have a look, think about it, feel about it, write about it, try and see more clearly, and then put it down instead of dragging it behind me. I know the answer really. And today, describing the writing of your book, you reinforce it for me. I think I too may be doing some revisiting this Summer, in my mind, with my typing fingers, and perhaps also with my feet.

You wouldn't want, really, to conform to that very narrow definition of 'scholarly', would you? to have written your book with your mind, but not with your heart? Yup, thankfully irrational.