Fireman: Ma'am, were
you aware that your car was on fire?
[Bernadine
nods her head while smoking a cigarette]
Fireman: Ma'am, did
you start this fire?
[she puffs
smoke and plainly looks at him]
Fireman: You know,
it's against the law to burn anything except trash in your yard.
Bernadine Harris: [flicks off ashes from her cigarette] It
is trash.
Fireman: Look, this is
a nice area. Luckily, a neighbor cared enough. Listen, the next time you want
to burn something...
Bernadine Harris: It won't
happen again.
[she shuts
the door in his face]
One can only
dare to be such a badass like this character. A noble African American woman
named Terry McMillian wrote a novel titled Waiting
to Exhale which was adapted into a two-hour dramatic film in 1995. It is a
story about four African American females struggling with romantic
relationships, causing them to lose their sense of identity in the process. The
scene above is about Bernadine Harris burning her soon-to-be ex-husband’s car
with his clothes inside because he was leaving her for another woman. This
scene displays two things: destruction and cleansing. Although one should never
deface someone’s property, sometimes one must break down and dismantle
themselves in order to be reborn. In the
end, one can emotionally rehabilitate oneself and begin to create a new canvas
and embrace the person one is meant to be. Personally, I have not had romantic
relationship problems that have hindered my growth as a person. However, just like those four women,
I have allowed the people in my life to define who I am and how I behaved.
Worse, in acting the way I wanted to, it always felt like an act. When I
attended church, I had to be very proper and modest in my behavior and
appearance, yet the next day at school, I would be cursing and wearing crop
tops and a fake septum ring. My personality just did not seem to fit into any
one place. I divided myself into the multiple dimensions of my life, each one
requiring a different characteristic for be to embody. I have been waiting for
a chance to exhale and be satisfied with the person I am.
The first time
someone called me an “Oreo” was in middle school in the seventh grade. Just
like the cookie, being an Oreo is when one is black on the outside but acts
white or behave in ways that are not associated with the African American
community member stereotype. On a good day, this need to be properly black and properly American would not affect me so much. But being
told by a girl who was lighter than me that I am not black enough to be black
caused me to feel rejected by a whole community. I suppose I did not act black
enough to have a lot of black friends or act white enough to have any white
friends. I was in sort of a limbo state. I had friends, but I never felt like I
belonged anywhere which made me feel insecure in the way I spoke. Over the
phone, one of my aunts---that is, someone who shared my DNA---told me I
sounded like a little white girl: “so proper.” I knew she did not mean any
harm, but that comment felt so ignorant. I wanted to throw those words in a car
and watch the whole thing burn. Can I not be a proper black girl?
Gloria Anzalduá
was ridiculed for the way she spoke while she was in the United States. When
she went to attend “Pan American University, [she] and all Chicano students
were required to take two speech classes. Their purpose: to get rid of [their]
accents” (Anzalduá, 8). Both Anzalduá and I had people in our lives telling us
who we should be and who we already are. I strongly believe that the way one speaks and writes is strongly connected to one’s identity. Consequently, I have gotten
bolder over the years which has changed the way I act around people in certain
situations. My boldness gradually showed in my writing, and I had to learn how
to cohere my thoughts concisely. Yet something in my head told me to hold my
tongue and my breath as I slowly faded into the background.
Like school,
like theater: an ensemble member does not have a significant role. They are
just there to fill up some of the space on stage in the background. I was an
ensemble member in my own life. It is funny because that carried over to high
school when I became an ensemble member in musicals and plays. I never drank,
smoked, or had sex during middle school or high school. It seemed like all my
friends were partying and getting boyfriends and I was just there alone. I
began entertaining myself with the thought of becoming promiscuous. This idea
was a mixture of many things: I wanted to
experience being with a guy myself, and I wanted an escape from my
“goodie-two-shoes” life. Although I never actually put any effort into being
promiscuous, it always lingered in the back of my mind. I incorrectly associated
promiscuity with freedom because I believe that if one can do whatever one
wants with one’s body and with whomever, one is free. One is doing those
physical actions on one’s own time which I had never done before. I also felt
that if I became this kind of girl, I would be free mentally. I was born into
the Christian faith, but I never saw Christianity fitting into my life as I got
older. In the Bible it clearly states, "Nevertheless, [to avoid] fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband” (1 Corinthians, 7:2). Christianity promotes sex after marriage, not before. Just like
Plato’s cave allegory, Christianity was my cave. I did not live or explore
outside of that reality. My mother made me go to church every Sunday, even when
I told her that I did not want to go anymore. She yelled at me and made me go.
I wanted to rebel and go against my mother’s wishes.
As time went
by, I stumbled across a book in high school titled Loose Girl by Kerry Cohen at a local thrift store. It is a memoir
about her journey of promiscuity. At the back of the book, I read an interview
with Mrs. Cohen:
Q: Why did you write this book?
A: My own
saving began when I saw myself in the pages of my book, so my hope is that
girls and women will find themselves in Loose
Girl.
I found many
flaws in myself that Mrs. Cohen had as well at my age. I am glad she wrote her
memoir because it put my thoughts and potential actions of being “loose” to
rest. It made me realize that it is not necessary to be a loose girl in life.
It would have not made me live any more of a great life then I already had. I
understood the depths and consequences of actions that I was considering. This
life lesson goes along perfectly with Walt Whitman’s long prose poem, “Song of
Myself.” He wrote: “Trippers and askers surround me, / People I meet, the
effect upon me of my early life... / My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments,
dues… / These come to me days and nights and go from me again, / But they are
not the Me myself.” (Section 4). Everyone plays a part in one’s development,
which Whitman eloquently phrases in his work. It is the small things like the dues one must pay to form our identity. Perhaps it is the way one feels when dressed:
am I being controlled or freed by clothes? What really defines one’s character?
For me, it was the people in my life early on who influenced me, especially the
people who I went to church with. All the compliments they gave me made feel
obligated to attend service after a while because they were so kind and old.
Whitman made me realize that these things that have surrounded me since the day
I was born made me the person that I am today. The effects of these influences
were inevitable. Identity is inevitable. However, in life we get to choose
whether we want those influences to impact our identity, as Whitman noted. I
knew I did not want to be the person who I was at church because I was just
going through the motions and not living the way I truly believed life to be. I
agree with Whitman’s ending line: “Backward I see in my own days where I
sweated through fog with linguists and contenders / I have no mockings or
arguments, I witness and wait” (Section 4). Now that I have grown and am away
from that either/or middle school environment, I can breathe a little
more.
In high school
things got better. During my senior year, I decided to take a creative writing
class. My English teacher encouraged me to do so. He saw a potential voice in
me. I am not going to say that I emerged as a great writer, but I became more
articulate, more confident, more essential. He did not just let me sit in class
and stay silent. At the end of the semester, we had to present our final
project. It was an opportunity to get to know what everyone was thinking about
and how they chose to express themselves. I decided to write a book of poems.
Due to “senior-itis” (a wave of terrible procrastination and lack of motivation
among students during their senior year of high school), a lot of my poems were
weak. I did not commit on any one idea to really be as successful as I could
have on this project. I did not fail, but I was not proud of what I produced.
After this project, I learned something very important: I am afraid of being
ordinary and it showed in all my writing. I tried to sound smarter than what my
own knowledge could provide all because I had not discovered my authentic self, what Whitman calls "the Me myself."
 |
| Subway Art by the author |
One cannot
teach oneself authenticity. I looked up to so many recording artists who
exhibit this quality in their character. Since I did not know who I was, I
naturally wanted to emulate those who I want to be. I am still guilty of still
doing this today, but not as extremely as before. I am now more inspired by
their courage rather in trying to be like them. I found great relief in Alan
Watts’ concept on what being an individual means by calling all beings hoaxes.
“The word ‘Individual’ is the Latin form of the Greek ‘atom’—that which cannot
be cut or divided any further into separate parts. We cannot chop off a
person's head or remove his heart without killing him. But we can kill him just
as effectively by separating him from his proper environment” (Watts, 9). This notion of intrinsic wholeness goes back to
my theory of one having to destroy oneself to find oneself. Many people,
including me, have thought that entering into college is yet another journey of
self-discovery. To become the person that I want to be, I could not stay at
home.
Everyone’s life
has different scenes, just like a movie. There is an opening and closing line.
I have stepped up from behind the scenes and taken more control of my life. I
have begun to Gestalt my life by living as a whole human being rather than
choosing pieces of my life to live. An individual is one atom, one organism. I
have lived a life where I thought I did not belong. In reality, “[I] have been
fooled by [my] name…[believing] that having a separate name makes [me] a
separate being” (Watts, 11). Instead everyone is connected. Once one realizes
that one is neither more ordinary nor extraordinary than the other, one can
live the way one pleases. I have begun to realize this which has allowed me to
finally breath in and exhale.
Anzalduá,
Gloria. "How to Tame a Wild Tongue." (n.d.): n. pag. Web. 01 Dec.
2016.
The Bible: King James Version. Glasgow: Collins, 2008. Print. 01 Dec. 2016.
Cohen, Kerry. Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity. New
York: Hyperion, 2009. Print. 01 Dec. 2016
"Go to
Bing Homepage." Plato+allegory+of+the+cave+cartoon - Bing Video. N.p.,
n.d. Web. 01 Dec. 2016.
Watts, Alan. The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who
You Are (n.d.): n. pag. Web. 01 Dec. 2016
Whitman, Walt.
“Song of Myself” N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Dec. 2016
Whitaker, Forest,
director. Waiting to Exhale. Prod.
Terry McMillan and Ronald Bass. Perf. Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, and
Loretta Devine. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1995.