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'm not a classical player. I don't want to be a classical player. I love to improvise, because things happen that never happen anywhere else.
I can get excitement watching rain on a puddle. And then I paint it. Now, I admit, there are not too many people who would find that exciting. But I would. And I want life thrilling and rich. And it is. I make sure it is.
When the uncreative tell the creative what to do, it stops being art.
Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.
Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
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