Things That Have Made Me Cry
I was recently telling my friend Besenia that I have recently turned a corner in my engagement with art. I have left a period of feeling jaded and come into a period of feeling earnest. What has this meant? In part it has meant that I have open to where other artists are trying to go, to the true and good. I have been able to follow their threads. One way I've become aware of this turn is that I've found myself crying (ok, sometimes bawling) in public.
Up til now, I've been letting myself engage and reflect in private, without needing to blog or post on listservs, but I think I'll come up for air for some public reflections and conversations. I'll say more as I feel like it, but to get us started, here is an incomplete list of things that have made me cry (I'll add as I remember):
The first words of the opera Margaret Garner
The last words of The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao
Up til now, I've been letting myself engage and reflect in private, without needing to blog or post on listservs, but I think I'll come up for air for some public reflections and conversations. I'll say more as I feel like it, but to get us started, here is an incomplete list of things that have made me cry (I'll add as I remember):
posted by Mendi Obadike at 9:26 PM
3 Comments:
You mentioned that the final words of Junot's book made you cry; they left me speechless. It's an extraordinary book, and I'm going to teach it next quarter. I wish I had time to reread it over and over again, but I don't. But it's one of the best I've read in a while.
Mendi,
I was recently at The Good Will in the West End (Atl) and was flipping through an old series of illustrated Time Life books on different regions of the country from the late 60s. In the book on the deep south (which they called "The Old South") I ran across a photo of several slaves sitting waist-high in a big bed of cotton. You've seen pictures like it a million times. But then I read a sentence that said something like (paraphrasing): "It is the southerner alone among Americans who truly understands history, for it is the South that lives most intimately with the consequences of its past."
I don't really do the crying in public thing, but I did get that pre-cry flutter in the chest. You know the one.
indeed I do
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