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.
Interpretation
Hip-hop serves as a vital means of expression and understanding for the characters in my writing.
In this quote, Jesmyn Ward emphasizes the significance of hip-hop as a cultural touchstone for her generation, paralleling it to the blues of earlier times. She suggests that hip-hop provides a unique linguistic framework through which her characters navigate and interpret their experiences in the world, thus highlighting its role not just as music, but as a vital form of storytelling and self-expression.
In practice
In a discussion on contemporary music's influence on society, you could quote this to emphasize hip-hop's cultural importance.
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.
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 think people make certain assumptions about what they're interested in reading or what others would be interested in reading, and when they think of poor black people in the South, they don't think people are interested in reading about those people.
The great problem was the selection of the readymade. I needed to choose an object without it impressing me: that is to say, without it providing any sort of aesthetic delectation. Moreover, I needed to reduce my own personal taste to absolute zero.
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
I've always sought to express a tension in form and meaning in order to achieve a veracity. I have come to the conclusion that the art world has to join us, women artists, not we join it. When women are in leadership roles and gain rewards and recognition, then perhaps 'we' (women and men) can all work together in art world actions.
I always give the example, if you turn on the radio today, black radio, Lenny Kravitz is not black. Bob Marley wasn't black: in the beginning, only white college stations played Bob Marley.
I'd like to do a number of films. Westerns. Genre pieces. Maybe another film about Italian Americans where they're not gangsters, just to prove that not all Italians are gangsters.
Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
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