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 realised I had spent the majority of my adult life doing two characters - Maude from 1972-'79 and Dorothy from 1985-'92 - and I really didn't know what I wanted to do after 'Golden Girls.' I knew what I didn't want to do - any more sitcoms, or wait for the next great role that might never come.
It's just someone has labelled us as having a different label to do what you do. I find that labels are the worst thing in the world for artistic expression.
Acting, to me, is about the incredible adventure of examining the landscape of human heart and soul. That's basically what we do.
Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
I look for things that are left of center, something you've only seen your whole life, but never heard. Hit it! With a stick! I have a guitar made out of a 2x4 that I bought in Cleveland.
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