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 ARTISTIC IMAGE IS ALWAYS A METONYM, WHERE ONE THING IS SUBSTITUTED FOR ANOTHER, THE SMALLER FOR THE GREATER. TO TELL OF WHAT IS LIVING, THE ARTIST USES SOMETHING DEAD; TO SPEAK OF THE INFINITE, HE SHOWS THE FINITE.
Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects, and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of colour. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.'
I just absolutely needed the theatre so desperately - it was my fate; it was where I was running towards. It was the place where I found peace and survival and all kinds of things.
Remember always that the composer's pen is still mightier than the bow of the violinist; in you lie all the possibilities of the creation of beauty.
Let me fall out of the window/ With confetti in my hair
The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain β and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.