When I'm working, I'm so narrowly focused on sound, language, rhythm, flow, that I rarely feel the emotion of the text. It's only after - long after - I've finished a piece that I can experience in any way its emotional charge.
Interpretation
The creative process can sometimes obscure the emotional depth of one's work until it is completed.
In this quote, Taiye Selasi reflects on the nature of her artistic process, emphasizing how her intense focus on the technical aspects of writing—like sound and rhythm—can detach her from the emotional resonance of her work. It is only once she steps away from the piece that she can truly appreciate the feelings and emotions embedded within it, highlighting a common experience among artists where the act of creation can lead to temporary disconnection from its emotional impact.
In practice
An author might use this quote during a workshop about the writing process to encourage others about the journey of creating art.
I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn't that they are inaccurate, but that they're incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn't that it's inaccurate, it's that it's incomplete.
I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.
The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.
I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.
I saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial not as an object placed into the earth but as a cut in the earth that has then been polished, like a geode.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
Fat people are so rarely included in visual culture that fat is perceived as a blot on the landscape of sleek and slim.
I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figurative or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars.
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