I write because it helps me to breathe. I write because there is a call way down deep in my soul to answer the questions being asked by my ancestors or ask the questions getting lost over time. There is a rumbling of knowledge they want to share that moves through me like a tsunami rushing toward the warm beaches of Jamaica, my other Mother Land. I write because I can. But that is never enough.
I write because the voices that scream in my dreams by moonlight and whisper in my ear by sunlight tell me that there is something else I must say, another story I must tell. My story, their story, our interwoven story.
My ancestors say, “Girl, you betta tell it.”
“I say, but I can’t.”
They say, “We picked you and now you have no choice. Cause we been watching you and you have a voice.”
I chuckle at the poetry in spirit coming to me from a parallel space in time.
“What voice?” I say. “I’m just a chick from Jamaica brought to America at four, going on five years old in ’72. My mama worked like a slave to give me what I needed. And now I need quiet. My time. I need quiet.”
“Write gyal!” they say, with a Jamaican accent so thick I thought I was standing on the hills of Montego Bay and listening to granny shout up to me to stop doing whatever it was I wasn’t supposed to do.
So I stop. Yeah, I stop.
And I listen.
Then, I go write.
The pen glides across the paper like I glide across my soul, searching for some truth that got buried with the dead. But the dead still tell tales, even without oxygen to give them the breath to speak. They tell tall tales, tales that stretch back to a time when cars and high rises, cell phones and televisions didn’t even live in the imagination of the metal used to make each, much less in the imagination of the people–people who lived and breathed to the cadence of something they could not see. Nothing knew…but somehow time knew it would all come. Time can imagine when we can’t.
So my pen glides, picking up the signals of moments in a past that spans millennia. Oh what a past. It does not speak to me, it speaks through me. And I create on paper, the new papyrus. Yes, I do what the ancestors tell me to do, even as they allow me to give a little piece of me to the paper. I share the space, humbled by the notion that I could have something to add to the richness of a past so unique, so profound and interesting.
Why do I write? Heck, there are days when I don’t know…because no one seems to be reading. But today, it doesn’t matter who is reading. I write because it helps me to breathe. I write because the sounds of words on paper, the pitch and tone, are musical notes that stream across the air singing songs of our lives, any life. Words are the drum beats of song and hearts that if stopped will die. I write because I want to create a heartbeat. I want to let there be life. I want to let the images I create move across the face of the waters and firmament. I want to fill the form and void with truths that are as steady as gravity.
The ancestors say, “Good. Keep on writing.”
I say, “Good, keep on teaching.”
I write because my soul said so, the ancestors said so, the universe said so…and if nothing else, I write because it is a beautiful thing to do. It is an amazing gift to share. I write because I can. But that is never enough. So for now, I’ll just write. Someone, somewhere out there, stranded on an island of self, will be rescued by my words that like a rope will travel to them, wrap itself around them, and lift them to safety, lift them into the land of the living.
The ancestors say, “This is why we wrote.”
VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
