Inspiration in Pieces and Parts

I need a lamp in this room and a better chair.

ok...Check for complaints out the way.

There's am imminent thunderstorm and all I can do is continue to will it on. I've got the best seat in the house for it. I want to write a poem today, but we all know it just don't work that way- or does it?.. and here comes the first crack of thunder.



There is a picture of Lauryn Hill (below) that i absolutely love. It's a black and white. She's looking in the mirror, almost as if she is simultaneously checking her make-up and dreaming up a "thesis/ [and]well written pieces" ("Final Hour"; Miseducation of Lauryn Hill). i think the picture is from her inside album flap. It's nostalgic and regal. It's powerful, yet serene.  i can remember unwrapping the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill as an excited twelve year old- it was my first CD, and the first CD i had ever purchased with my own money. i used to close my eyes in my room with my bigass headphones as i listened to her velvet voice rap harder than dudes and sing melodies wrapped in the same rough blanket as Nina Simone. This picture makes me dream of my natural mother and about mothers. It is bound up, for me, with memory and imagination. . . 

In an essay titled, The Site of Memory, Toni Morrison discusses the impact of memory on her fiction writing. She expounds on the notion that "no matter how 'fictional' the account of these writers, or how much it was a product of invention, the act of imagination is bound up with memory" (198). I've been thinking about memory as it relates to our perception of ourselves, and as it conducts itself as a live, walking body in our daily narratives and in our interactions with others. What is real? Especially when it comes to identity formation.

 I think about the memory I have of my biological or "natural" mother as she puts it in the nameless letter I have from her-the only tangible thing I do have from her besides dna ( is dna tangible?). I also use the word memory as an image or idea rather than memory in the sense of recollection.  Someone in class asked how can you have a connection to something that you never experienced first-hand? She was referencing her white students who love hip hop, which is an interesting and somewhat naive question that fails to see the complexity and power of connection. Why do I love Junot Diaz- I have never been to the Dominican Republic? Why do I love Marvin Gaye- I am certainly not a "Troubled Man"?  The answer is not simple, but to answer it simply - our connections are bound up with memory.We find a connection and relate along different levels. Art, literature, and multiple stimuli work in many ways off of memory. Both conscious and unconscious, both willed and unwilled. And if memory and imagination are linked, I would go further to argue identity is predicated on this idea.

To say you know something comes with a complex bag of definitions. What does it actually mean to know? How can I take ownership of a mother I have never actually met ("met" as in the fixed terms of hand-shaking and "nice to meet you's"), but I would argue I have met her. It happens randomly on random days. I may be alone or with people and feel an instinct, a certain wrinkle in my smile, a new development in my voice, that I just know she has too.  Morrison would say (at least as a writer of fiction), "it is not an effort to find out the way it really was-that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way" (Thought, Memory, Creation, and Writing; 1984 p.385). I guess I am caught up in both the research and the aspect of memory.

 Much like recalling upon the fuzzy pieces or bits of a dream and attempting to string them into a narrative for others, we find ourselves adjusting to memory in the same way. It doesn't also fit neatly into beginning, middle, end, with neat character line-ups and plot development. It actually works against this idea of sequencing and order. Yet, it is still our inclination to make it do so. Memory works in the same vein. We see this fragmented narrative in Beloved, where the reader must rely on the disjointed memories of others, drinking it up, much like Beloved does with Denver's stories, to subsist or at least to remain within the story.

Who am I if I don't know my mother and have to rely on these fragmented pieces of a story? A 25 year old letter addressed "My Dearest Child" and signed "Your Natural Mother." Nameless, but identifiable health records. 2 months worth of journaling about me- a baby named "Rosa" from a Philadelphia foster care home.

yet, it is these pieces from which I begin to create the "parts" of a story, of an identity. It is not always a conscious creation- it hardly ever is. But, it is one that sits on, in, and under the building blocks of pieced memories.

As I have begun the "official" search for my biological mother, the interplay of emotions is often palpable, but rarely explicable- at least with the words I have. It's a push pull of the sort where I continuously ask myself are you sure you're ready? What will you do when you find her? What will you do if you don't? And still, outside my head, there are the questions from others. The private investigator: what do you know? The other adopted colleagues who have decided not to search for their own: Why now? How? What if...?

Still, I want the journey to establish new memories, despite the pandora's box of outcomes that await.