2003-09-22 - 10:52 p.m.
"The dissimilar language of poetry is our suggestion of a different language for this world. It is our attempt to restore to each word its specificity and resist the process of collective vulgarization and to establish new relations among words to create a fresh perception of things... It is a declaration of mutiny on board this world's ship whose course we are never allowed to direct."
-Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti
"Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both."
-C. Wright Mills from "The Sociological Immagination
Both these passages struck me in pieces I was reading lately (and I am not embarassed to admit I am reading the Sociological Immagniation for fun, not for school). Even though they were written half a century apart by men in very different circumstances in their lives who work and create in two very different disciplines, I think they strike me strongly for similar reasons. The concept of immagination is very important to me right now. To not loose the power to immagine a world where things can be different. To fight against the loss of that ability to not only imagine that world, but to create it. The insistence that words that are crafted (whether they be considered poetry, sociology, memoir, cultural studies, fiction, whatever...) that inspire this kind of immagining- for justice and freedom, for a knowledge of the self within history, can and are resistence, is powerful.
Writing is the activity which I have been doing the most throughout these past few years, throughout my life. Writing is not the only thing I must do to be an "activist" I know, but I also know that my desire to write and create art cannot and will not be separate for my desire for a world free of oppression and domination, a place where the words "self determination" don't sound so hollow. So I need to read other writers that feel this is so, no matter what academic "discipline" they may be pushed into.
