The Birth of Bluesbadawoman
Written in 2010 as a final portfolio reflection for the Invitational Summer Institute I
by Vania Gulston
Writing is an opportunity for me to make the world into what I want it to be.
Ms. Nia's place is right off of Broad Street, on a small side street called Somerset. It's painted purple with blue trim and has a big sign right above the two front windows that says, "Ms. Nia's Soulword Hive." Ms. Nia is the queen bee.
Early in the morning--like 6 or something--you could almost always catch her outside on the sidewalk in front of the spot sweeping, shoveling snow, watering her flowers, or cleaning the hive's windows. The Soulword Hive is a cafe full of books and paintings; and passing by, depending on the day and time, you can catch whiffs of frying fish, barbecue tofu, tomato soup, bean pies, hot chocolate; hear the sounds of John Legend, the Diggable Planets, Lauryn Hill, Jill Scott, some house music; or maybe some old school jazz coming from the speakers on the walls inside.
Ms. Nia is this short little thing with a grand mind. What I mean by that is she has these big dreams. And whenever one of those big dreams popped inside her head, made her stop whatever she was doing to watch it take shape inside her mind, and got her real excited and lit up just thinking about it, then she knew that she was going to hold on tight to that dream and try hard for a long time to make it come true. That's what she told me one night when I was helping her clean dishes in the back of the cafe. She was telling me about how the hive was one of those dreams that she felt like she had to make come true before she died.1
I want there to be a Ms. Nia’s Soulword Hive somewhere here in Philadelphia, off of Broad Street on a small side street called Somerset. I wrote about it, so that I could read about it and escape into it every now and then. Every now and then, I click open the story on my computer and become part of that world that I long for so much.
Reading about it also makes me want to change reality so I won’t just have to live my favorite world in make-believe. Reading words--my own--makes me want to re-write the world, in Freireian terms.2 I am hoping, as well, that my words inspire other folks to try to create better realities.
Freire wrote that he taught people to read by presenting his students with pictorial representations of aspects of the world in which the object he was trying to teach the student to read as a word was contextualized. He used the example of teaching the word brick by using a picture of bricklayers building a house. In the process of trying to make sense of the picture, they were thinking critically of their world. I can imagine they were asking themselves, “What is going on in the picture?” and “How will the brick be used by the men building the house?” In answering the questions, they had to step back a little bit from their world to see it more fully. From that stance, more critical observation of their world could take place. In order to read the word brick, cultural practices had to be explained; they had to be “read.” By so doing, Freire argued, the student will “apprehend the word” and not just “mechanically memorize it.”3
A good reader, then—with each word that is read and apprehended—takes a critical stance towards the world.
Teaching reading in this way is, therefore, a political act if we follow Freire’s reasoning because it creates critical awareness of one’s world, which can serve to politically mobilize and organize people against their oppression. It is, thus, “an instrument of ‘counterhegemony.’”4
A good reader, then—with each word
that is read and apprehended—
takes a critical stance towards the world.
As a whole, then, a story, when read well can raise political consciousness, help one--as James Baldwin wrote--discover “the shape of his oppression,”5 and move people to change their world. When I write, then, I am harnessing the power to write a new world.
(Sound of city traffic: horns blowing, screeching brakes, car engines in moving cars. A loud WHIIISH sound. Sound of peddling, labored breathing. Sound of trash can falling and hitting the ground. WHIIIISH sound again.)
BLUESPIDERGIRL: [chanting] Ima do this. Riding on steel. Ima do this, and make a change that folks will feel for real. Got to make it there to folks' insides, where the good parts hide sometimes.
Ima do this. Riding on steel. Ima do this and make a change that folks will feel for real.
People are dying, yeah, I got to get to them quick; I'm rushing to the club to make this soul trip.
I can do this. Riding on steel. I can do this. Make that change that folks feel for real…I'm bluespidergirl. A black superhero riding on two blue bike wheels. I dance into folks' souls and make them feel…6
I needed a black superwoman in my world. There were no real ones. So I conjured one up using words during a radio drama workshop at a community media center. I “remade” my world using word bricks. In it, “nothing was forbidden; everything was possible.” The character I created was just what I needed. She inspired me to push a great superhero like her out of me.7
The power of words to spiritually rebirth a person is talked about beautifully by Jimmy Santiago Baca in an interview. I incorporated the following excerpt into one of PhilWP’s group performances.
A remarkable thing occurred to me when I came upon language, and I really began to provoke language to decreate me and then to give birth to me again. What I experienced was this: when you approach language in this being-reborn sense, you approach language in the way that the Hopis approach language, which is that language is a very real living being. That's how I approach language. I approach it as if it will contain who I am as a person. Now, when language begins to work itself on you and make certain demands of you, it begins to ask you to risk yourself and walk along its edge. When it does that and you do that, the Yoruba people in Africa have a symbol that they create, and it's made out of bamboo-leaves, gold, and rosary beads on it and so forth, and it curls up on itself. This symbol has a thick base so that it's almost like a gourd. It curls all the way around itself and goes back into the thick base, this is the gift that they give men who have given birth to themselves...
Which is what happened with me--I gave birth to myself.8
It is what is happening to me, as well. I slip into the words, away from a world that hurts a lot. I am Bluesbadawoman there. When I return, I am something other than the person I was when I left. I have experienced a dream world. I see it better in contrast to my real world and it makes me discontent. If I had the power to remake my world, it would not look like this. I know exactly what I would change. Because as I “limn[ed] the surfaces of actual, imagined, and possible lives” of my characters, of my world, of the world I presumed was my readers’,9 I found the imperfections and the things that are beautiful. I know what to put in, and what to throw out.
I was called ugly enough times when I was growing up that I started walking down the street with my head down. To hide my face even more from the world, I put a book in front of it; and when I read it, parts of me were able to escape to a different world. But the book about all the important parts of me, I have not yet read. The things that made me cry most often, were not the subject of any of the books that I slipped into. Having a big nose and having the word “ugly” lobbed at me from folks I passed on the street pushed me into safe spaces I created for myself that would keep my existence marginalized but less vulnerable to attack: my pink bedroom in South Central Los Angeles, my head in which the stories I read rolled themselves out like movies on a big screen.
In my pink-walled bedroom, I felt safer. I could close the two doors to my room, lay on my bed with a good book and escape beyond those South Central L.A. anchored pink walls to another world and not have to worry about someone shooting a reminder of my ugliness through the bubble of that imaginary world, busting it open, and ruining my day.10
But the books I tried to escape into did not read my story. So, they did not keep me from feeling very alone when I most wanted not to.
When I came into that pink-walled bedroom after being told by someone that I was ugly, the bed was used to cry on and then to sleep the pain off. I could not read. The books would only make me feel sadder because there were no ugly characters in there like me.11
How would it have changed me to read that part of my story in a book? How would reading that story have changed the way I left my pink-walled room to go back out into the world outside?
What I leave PhilWP with is an understanding of the power of words to “transform the way children look at and relate to the world.”12 Yes, it is very possible that words that grasped my reality, projected back at me with love and hope and a superhero storyline, would have moved me beyond looking for places to hide, and instead, towards asserting my claim to “a place to stand / And ground to defend.”13
I plan to write that book I needed back then, with the hope that it will create new worlds and new people. Thank you PhilWP, for sharing words that inspired me.
Words have power to transport and to remake a person, Baca wrote. After reading his book, I believed words held magic that could transform spaces and people. “They limn our realities—imagined and real--and help us see them better,” Morrison said in a lecture. I read her statement more than once because I didn’t want to miss her full meaning. Her words spoke to the idea that writing could be used as a tool of critical inquiry. In this sense, Freire argued, teaching someone to read can be a political act because if people back up off their world in order to see it better and be able to assign words to it—which is how Freire argued reading should be taught—then human agency as a force behind social constructs is laid bare.
And when we create new worlds with words, we give ourselves not just breathing rooms to escape into, but blueprints to create other real ones. But sometimes the worlds read about in stories are not better. They replay without challenging oppressive power dynamics and end on sour notes that don’t redeem. They don’t reveal truth, but hide it. Allison wrote, “The story of what happened, or what did not happen but should have—that story can become a curtain drawn shut, a piece of insulation, a disguise, a razor, a tool that changes every time it is used and sometimes becomes something other than we intended.”14 The story has power. It can help us see the vulnerability of social constructs; but it can strengthen and reconstruct them, as well. Babar the Elephant, Kohl argued, is not just the story of an elephant who loses his mother; it is the story of how an elephant moves within a world shaped by sexism, racism, and colonialism without doing much of anything to change those power dynamics. Kohl would not go out of his way to buy a Babar book, he explained, because “children don’t need to be propagandized about colonialism, sexism, or racism."15 In his mind, this short children’s story about the elephant has the power to do that.
And when we create new worlds with words,
we give ourselves not just breathing rooms
to escape into, but blueprints to create other real ones.
Going into next year as a writer and a teacher, I will harness this power of words that PhilWP reminded me of; and whip my world up a little bit; do my part to “decreate” it so it can be reborn. I will write that story for the lonely little girl that I once was; and remake myself in the process. I will push my students to look hard at the world and define it carefully with words; think about ways it can be deconstructed and reborn; then help them give their new worlds life on paper. In the process, I hope for their rebirth into bigger versions of their former selves. Not mere mortals, but superheroes, feeling their power to change the world.
References
1Gulston, Vania. Ms. Nia’s Soulword Hive.
2Freire, Paulo and D. Macedo. (1987). “The Importance of the Act of Reading” in Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. (pg. 36)
3Ibid. pg. 36.
4Ibid. pg. 36.
5Baldwin, James. (1988). “A Talk to Teachers.” In R. Simonson & S. Walker (eds.). The Graywolf Annual Five: Multicultural Literature. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press. (pp. 5).
6Gulston, Vania. Bluespidergirl and DJ Soul Driver at the Chi Spot Club: A Radio Drama.
7Allison, Dorothy. (1995). Two or Three Things I know for Sure. New York, NY: Dutton. (pp. 2-3).
8Interview. Jimmy Santiago Baca and John Keene. “Poetry is What We Speak to Each Other”: An Interview with Jimmy Santiago Baca. Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters. Winter 1994. (v. 17:1). (found online at: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/baca/interview.htm)
9Morrison, Toni. (1993). “Swedish Academy Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture” in Margaret Himley and Carini P. (eds.). “Descriptive Inquiry: ‘Language as a Made Thing,’” in From Another Angle: Children’s Strengths and School Standards. New York, NY: Teacher’s College Press. (pg. 131).
10Gulston, Vania. “The Book I Wish I Had Written”: Open Mic Piece. August 8, 2010.
11Ibid.
12Kohl, H. (2007). “Should We Burn Babar? Questioning Power in Children’s Literature” in Should We Burn Babar?: Essays on Children’s Literature and the Power of Stories. New York, NY: The New Press. (pp. 23).
13Baca, Jimmy Santiago. (2002). A Place to Stand. Grove Press. (pg. 226)
14Allison, Dorothy. (1995). Two or Three Things I know for Sure. New York, NY: Dutton. (pg. 3).
15Kohl, H. (2007). “Should We Burn Babar? Questioning Power in Children’s Literature” in Should We Burn Babar?: Essays on Children’s Literature and the Power of Stories. New York, NY: The New Press. (pg. 28).
Vania Gulston has taught social studies in secondary schools in Philadelphia for the last five years. In addition, she writes, dances, and produces community radio projects. Vania joined the Philadelphia Writing Project as a teacher consultant in 2010.
Vania's piece was submitted as part of the final portfolio submitted during the PhilWP Invitational Summer Institute I.