We Create as Citizens
I wondered if answering “Yes” to the question “Are you a writer?” would become its own set of borders.
The memory hasn’t faded with time: I am five and sitting in the back of the car, journeying along a specific road in South-West England. My home county hills rest on the horizon, looping and bending, just like the cursive handwriting I am learning in school.
We roll past Romani caravans, country manor houses, solitary walkers, farmers harvesting and as we drive, I picture the landscapes around me, pressing onto the printed pages of a book. I see snapshots framed by my car windows, like polaroids. Each frame is a story.
I feel all at once a crushing urgency, a longing to write, and a sense of loss as the scenes roll past the car windows. The photographs flutter from the windows in the breeze.
Before starting The Honeyeater Press, I had only really ever consistently written for my own eyes. But in my mind, I am writing all the time. As I roll past the scenes of my life, I am writing. Even if the words are not rolling onto pages, they are rolling on and on, in the hills of my mind, pressing onto pages.
But it is self-serving to hoard volumes inside of me that I am too unconfident to present to others? After all, if the hills of my home shine with God’s creative artistry, then somewhere too easily buried in my heart, I know I do too. I have always written and I will always write. But readers –the chance of risk, critique or rejection - bring fear.
Who will read what I write? Maybe I will write for the people I see inside the frames. Maybe I will write for those who are journeying with me. Maybe I will write to remind myself that my flickering windows reveal only one perspective.
Creators are also residents. Of course, our words and our stories are bound up in our communities, our worldviews, our nationalities, our ethnicities.
Our creations are formed by the places we call home. As well as being shaped by physical or geographical spaces, our creations are shaped by time too.
During the Black Death in Europe, tracts were handed out with the words, “Whoever wishes to keep himself healthy and fight against death from pestilence should flee anger and sadness, leave the place where sickness exists, and associate with cheerful companions.” Contrary to literature before it, entertainment and laughter began to be welcomed into art as a mechanism for healing, Larry Jiminez shares. The genre of modern fiction was born.
The Arab Slave trade to the East Coast of Africa which began in the 9th century, brought the smooth tones of Arabic to the staccato Bantu words of East Africa. Slavery and trade would irreversibly shape the vocabulary and language of the region long before colonialism distorted local languages with English.
In North Africa, Somali poets are obliged to support their clans using carefully chosen words recited orally by heart. Their poetry is integral to societal function, becoming a spoken persuasion to others. It often is a recitation of history, claiming honour and acting as an advocate for their communities.
Up until the Second World War, Japanese poetry followed the strict fixed forms of the haiku and tanka. But it was somehow insufficient, or impractical at least, to capture the grief and trauma of a generation marked by mortality. Free verse or gendai-shi emerged, marked by surrealism and metaphors. It would be this poetry which expressed anti-war sentiments in the 1960s and was used to portray the devastation of the Great Japan Earthquake in 2011.
As we have seen the rise of digital information over the last decade, the average human attention span is easily exhausted; it is now only eight seconds long. Micro-blogging with restricted word counts has challenged printed newspaper industries, and readers all over the world.
Inevitably, time and place shape the words that are thought, written and spoken. We know this to be true from our everyday conversations.
It’s for this reason that I think it is almost impossible for a global resident to create outside of an earthly identity, a citizenship or a nationality. As created beings, whether we acknowledge a Creator or not, we know that words ties us to the land - to place - in some way.
We are residents of a globalised world and we live by national rules. Our citizenship ascribes a value to us which we cannot choose.
What if my freedom to create as a writer and as a photographer, was defined by my government? The idea haunts me, but it is a common reality for the world’s artists. I have only recently experienced, during the pandemic, what it means to be physically bound by borders. But I do not know what it is like to carry the assumptions or artistic limitations borne by a citizen of Iraq, or North Korea or Mexico.
I have wondered if answering “Yes” to the question “Are you a writer?” would become its own set of borders. Would my words now belong to another? Would calling myself a writer detract from my own delight in creating? Would I have to live up to creating and producing consistently - instead of just observing from the passenger seat? But, then, I reason, isn’t an artist’s true delight discovered in serving others? I don’t need to write for everybody. I just need to write for somebody.
In Pilgrim’s Regress, an allegorical exploration of Christianity, C.S. Lewis writes, “Be sure it is not for nothing that the Landlord has knit our hearts so closely to time and place – to one friend rather than another and one shire more than all the land,” and I think about my Landlord-Author, who knitted together the hills of my home and my mind. Limitations aren’t always unhelpful.
Our hearts are knitted in some ways that we cannot untie. It is no coincidence that the thousands of pages I have written in scrapbooks and sketchbooks and across my thoughts are tied to a certain time, to a specific place, to someone, somewhere.
Now, as an adult, when I find the time to write, my heartbeat quickens in excitement. I am collecting polaroids which I thought were lost forever in the wind. I am not creating alone but as a citizen, surrounded by others. I am following a map that is not of my own making (thankfully). I am accepting that my body is bound by time and place, by borders beyond my control, and somehow this is liberating.
So, here I am sharing, even when fear or perfectionism may try to stop me. It helps that you are here with me too— with your own landscapes and your own tales fluttering from the windows of your eyes.