I could stifle my voice, or strip it. I know that I could, because we can do anything we put our minds to. I know that I could, but it feels very unnatural for me to strip my prose like that, in part because place is so important to me.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the struggle between conforming to expectations and staying true to one's artistic voice.
Jesmyn Ward expresses the inner conflict between the potential to modify her writing style and the natural inclination to maintain her authentic voice. She emphasizes the importance of place and personal expression in her work, suggesting that self-expression should not be compromised despite external pressures.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of authenticity in art during a creative writing workshop.
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
I made myself into a poet because it was the first thing I really loved. It was an act of will.
Wearing clothes should be a personal narrative of emotion. I always respond to fashion in an emotional way.
I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.
Songwriting is my gift from God
What I end up shooting is the situation. I shoot the composition and my subject is going to help the composition or not.
A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the planet.
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