The How Big Is Your Voice Workshop

at Pangea World Theater last night was a primer in Midwestern diversity of descent: Indian, Hmong, Korean, Tibetan, French, Scandinavian, Irish, German. Adoptees, immigrants, American-born kids. Ranging in age from the articulate dancer in her late 20s to the bright self-possessed 11-year old, who arrived three-quarters of the way into the workshop, and was there "because my mother brought me."

It was one of those situations where you look at the group, toss all your prepared material out the window, and ask the gods to show you what you can offer them in the next two hours that will serve them. The gods delivered - I was amazed at how fully they all participated, how deeply they went into the exercises, how many asked at the end when there would be more events like this.

No matter how many workshops I lead, the beauty of people groping down past their fears to find their voices always moves me beyond words. Right now, I seem to encounter a lot of of young men, struggling for authenticity against the straitjacket of hypermasculinity this society imposes on them. Their willingness to be honest, vulnerable, questioning, gives me hope for all of us.

One young man wrote yesterday: "The voice of my culture is a small star, always at my back.

"

Minneapolis

Sunlight that dazzles off snow that sparkles. More theaters per capita than New York. Scarlet fire hydrants, with bright yellow caps and mittens on their single arms, stand in the snow at street corners like toytown policemen directing traffic.

My 6-week-old goddess-baby, Araminta, is an amalgam of nuzzly softs: thistledown hair, translucent skin, tiny snub nose dotted with baby acne, floppy neck, scalp that shifts and quivers under kisses - and steely sharps; marble-blue don't-mess-with-me eyes, a cry that could slice concrete. Araminta was Harriet Tubman's given name, which tells you something about the politics of Araminta's parents, my friends Pablo and Andrea. That and the fact that they asked me to be her godmother - and were delighted when I promptly amended it to goddess-mother. In my poem for her birth, I wrote:

"This child will never know
how not to make the personal
political; how not to believe
the political possible; how not
to throw her whole heart
into the struggle; how not to dance
in the journey to freedom."

I got mittens, I got goretex

I got thermals, who could ask for anything more? All packed and ready to head into San Francisco to perform at a holiday party for a group of non-profits. Then BART to the airport to catch the redeye to Minneapolis, where there's apparently a snowstorm tonight. I've never been in a snowstorm - snow is still a novelty to me.

I used to worry if my body was tired before a performance. But I've learned it actually works for me - I seem to be more open to just letting the energy of the poems come through. Kim says I perform best when I'm really confident or really tired, because I stop thinking about what I'm doing in both states, and just let the work take over.

As I feared

this blog is turning into the online version of the imaginary friend you had as a child - the person you talk to all the time in your head. The trouble is, it's too ridiculously easy to blog. If you're at your computer working, and a thought comes up that you find worthwhile, or funny, it takes 10 seconds or less to click to your blog page and type it in as you think it.

I've said - and believe - that my poems are my best thinking. What does that make my blog entries?

sexile

is a graphic novel by Jaime Cortez. He gave it to me after the Migritude show at La Pena on Friday night. I love it when other artists give me their book, CD, whatever, after seeing me perform - it's the best kind of tribute to my work.

I was saving Sexile to read on the plane tonight, but I dipped into it while I was eating lunch. Big mistake. It's totally compelling, hilarious, juicy - and now I don't want to put it down. Good graphic novels hook me that way - like Marjane Satrape's Persepolis, and Derek Kirk Kim's Same Difference and Other Stories. I stayed up past 3am reading both of them.

measures of success

I'm going through folders of workshops I've taught as I prepare for my trip to Minneapolis. In one, I came across a note I'd jotted to myself before the very first "How Big Is Your Voice" workshop I taught, at the National Youth Slam Championship in Ann Arbor. It said: "Measure your success by how much you've given, who you've served, not by the reception or the rewards."

I remember how nervous I was about that workshop and how it would be received. I need to remind myself of that measure of success as I negotiate each fresh set of fears that comes up with each new challenge in my work.

We seek justice

not because we delude ourselves that we can eradicate all injustice. But because justice is one of our highest human needs. It gives us joy, makes us fully alive, to engage in the quest for justice. It harms us, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, to deny our human need by numbing ourselves to injustice, by succumbing to the despair of "The world's so screwed up, why even bother?"

Wanted for Rape

say the profusion of flyers posted in the last week all over my neighborhood of Rockridge, Oakland. Caution: Armed and Dangerous, Black Male, 5' 8", 180lb. Generic composite image of black man in hoodie.

Why does this piss me off so much? A woman was raped - and that is a violation, anywhere, at any time, that sickens and enrages me. But I'm equally sickened and enraged by the selective tokenization of the crime that these flyers represent. The way they reinforce the myth that what women should fear most is attack by the stranger on a dark street at night. We know that the majority of assaults on women in this country are committed by men they know - partners, family, friends, acquaintances, dates, colleagues. We know that the greatest frequency of rape and assault outside the family and social network occurs within the most highly capitalized bastions of this country's power structure: the military, the prison system, churches, the invisible migrant and below-poverty-wage economy. So what does it mean when resources are concentrated on finding and punishing one individual, who happens to be black, in one wealthy neighborhood - as if that will make Oakland, or the Bay Area, or America, safer for women?

No, I'm not dismissing or trivializing the suffering of this particular survivor. I'm saying if we really take the violation of her person seriously, let's take it seriously for all women. Everywhere. Let's see flyers all over Oakland showing cops in uniform: Wanted for Rape. Soldiers in battledress: Wanted for Rape. Priests in robes: Wanted for Rape. Smug be-suited executives of Walmart, Taco Bell, every corporation that creates and sustains labor conditions where women workers are assaulted with impunity: Wanted for Rape.

People who rock

Vivek Prabhu - the man responsible for the daily improvements and upgrades to this website. He first heard my work on his way to SF airport, aired on KQED, in July this year. I met him in person in Chicago last month, at the Kriti Festival. One of my favorite memories of that trip is breakfast with Vivek, and his friends Calai and Thorani, at the Cheesecake Factory, all of us in hysterical mirth over things only funny to desis.

A man who claims not to have a creative bone in his body, Vivek delivers a constant stream of ideas to my inbox on how to make this site more user-friendly, appealing, effective. And displays great patience at guiding a technophobic poet up the learning curve of cyber-communication.

Arundhati Roy, Tariq Ali, Mahmood Mamdani

have all signed this petition -
An Urgent Appeal: Please Release Our Friends in Iraq,
located at the following web address:
http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/freethecpt

please sign/pass on if you feel able.

Being in Love

is pretty cool.

Being in love with your work and your life is even better.

Bopping down the street to 80s pop lyrics in your head:
Never gonna give you up / never gonna let you down / never gonna turn around and desert you / never gonna make you cry / never gonna say goodbye / never gonna tell a lie that would hurt you

and thinking: “How true. How profound. That’s exactly how I feel about Migritude.”
is just plain hilarious.

The other thing about being in love is that you always find parking spaces. Effortlessly. You just know, without thinking, which turn to take, which road to choose, and there they are.

Da Show

Okay, finally. People have asked how I feel about it, how I feel after it, what the night was like for me. I’ve needed 4 days for my reactions to settle in my head and body, and to digest the feedback received.

The first word I’d use to describe it is “watershed”. Kenny and Ruth confirmed it at breakfast the next morning, when they told me my work is in a different place now. On a whole new playing field. I have a sense of ‘before’ and ‘after’ about the show. Before I didn’t know, wasn’t certain, about theater being the right medium, about my capacities within theater, about the sheer extraordinary amount of work it took to produce and perform a show. After, I know. I trust my own knowledge about the work over anyone else’s opinion or judgment. I trust the sense of purpose and gut level conviction about continuing, whatever doors open or close, whatever works or doesn’t, whatever new ways come up to do it, whatever skills I have to master.

The next word is “learning”. I was learning until the moment I got home, at 1am, and began to take off my makeup. The entire show was an experience of having new elements tossed at me and catching or dropping them. From the lav mic taped to my body, which I worked with for the first time that night, to the hanging line for the saris, which we decided to do only the day before (until then, each sari went back into the suitcase), to walking into a shop on College Avenue that morning, saying “I’m doing a theater show tonight - I need makeup for stage lights and camera and I don’t have a clue where to start.” To realizing that if I cry on stage, I need tissues handy so I can blow my nose before the next piece.

There was the technical stuff – the mic cutting out (our best guess is that one of the wires came loose from the battery pack tucked down my waistband), the flat theater floor which made it hard for those in the middle and back rows to see me when I was sitting or lying down on stage. I’m sorry!!

There was the incredible unexpected rightness of how it felt to have the whole stage to move on. Despite how much I have to learn about stage movement, voice, acting; despite how much of my mind was on each thing I missed or fudged when I was up there; I felt so much of the work’s own intrinsic power, life, grief, joy, during its 35 minutes. I could have run it again, 3 or 4 times that night, on pure exhilaration, getting better and better each time. Rennie Harris said to me afterwards: “If you could do it, back to back, several nights in a row, you would really be in the space.”

So many moments still zing through my bloodstream:

∑ Peering out through the hole in the door into the theater and seeing the faces of friends and family in the audience. Thinking “My people are in the house” and doing a little crazy dance.

∑ The musicians – Irma, Mamuka, Robert, Vivek. The largeness of heart and endless generosity of talent, sharing, commitment they brought to the evening.

* Kenny and Ruth, driving in from Merced, showing up 200%, keeping the whole fundraising piece covered.

* All the volunteers: Shireen, Philip, my housemate Diana, holding it down so I didn't have to think about it.

∑ Sarah Crowell, my choreographer, making me laugh, taking me through warm-ups, telling me “we don’t see enough of your ass on stage……” when I panicked that the mic pack would drag my trousers down during the show.

* David (lighting designer) and Riley (set designer), the miracle men, solidly there from 10am until 11pm, utterly present and focused, solving every problem with skill and humor and ease. A living example of the commitment to craft that I aspire to.

* Kim (my director) saying to me in the dressing room, in the moments of pre-show tension: “You have it. All the rehearsing, learning, technique, has been so that you can go out there and let them fall away. Just let what you have come through.”

∑ How hard it was to come out of the grief at the end of the women’s testimonies in the Mau Mau piece. As if my body had dissolved and reformed around the red bundle of knots (the dead babies) and separating it would be violent surgery.

* Somersaulting in the Sister / Cape dance. I’d agreed, reluctantly, to cut that somersault out in tech rehearsal earlier that day – for the mic pack at the back of my waist. But it happened before I could stop it – thankfully it didn’t kill the mic

∑ Touching the saris on the hanging line when I walked off at the end of Sister / Cape. Each was living tissue reaching out to me. It was saying goodbye to my sisters, promising never to forget, promising to honor their histories.

* Shireen tossing roses at us on stage. So lovely and joyous and purely Shireen. Then challenging me on romanticizing Indian weavers in the Q and A.

∑ Kim, in the Q and A, describing what the 90-minute show will be, and the guiding ethos behind it. I’m so immersed in the specifics right now, I lose sight of the big picture. Each time I realize that she’s holding it, keeping us on course for the whole vision, not just the current stage, I’m filled with gratitude.

∑ Rodney, in his Q and A, saying “I’ll do whatever I have to do to dance – even if it means becoming an actor.”

∑ Sitting in the restaurant afterwards, with Rennie, Kim, and Rodney, eating fries off each other’s plates, zapping talk back and forth. Kim said to Rennie, “Shailja keeps asking me Why theater? Why do I need all this extra cumbersome stuff to do my work? What’s your answer to that?” Rennie talked about his own journey of making dance, and moving it into the theater space, learning what lights, staging, other elements add, learning how to keep the work able to stand on its own without them, but also using what they offer. “Don’t limit your opportunities. Give yourself as many ways to do your work as you can.”

∑ Coming home to a poem of praise in my in-box, rich with the detail of deep attention and genuine opening to the work on stage. Another kind of rose, tossed through cyberspace.

discipline

is a word and concept I've always had trouble with, and instinctively resist. Yet everything about this journey with Migritude is showing me how vital it is to have sustained daily practices that support the work - voice exercises, physical workouts, attention to diet, sleep, pre-scheduled time to rehearse, write, take care of the business. I resist 'discipline' because it has associations of authoritarianism, force. But yesterday my kairos therapist, Jan, said "I think you'll find the etymology of the word is quite different."

So I looked it up, and it's roots are actually "learning, teaching, pupil". Which suddenly makes it so much more approachable and embraceable.

icy extremities

What do you resort to when you wear thick bedsocks, tuck a hot water bottle under your feet, cocoon your body in 2 fat duvets, and your feet are STILL cold in bed?

enough with the flowers already.....

said someone who shall remain nameless in an email to me today. Someone else felt snubbed for not being included in my hot tub excursion. It throws me each time people actually respond to my blog. I think: Ohmigod - people are READING it!!

Which is why I've resisted blogging for so long (other than being a technophobe). Personal blogs all seem to go through the same stages:

1) You don't believe anyone's really reading it, so you're gaily unselfconscious about sharing your inner and outer life. It feels no different from journalling, except you look cooler in cafes typing into your laptop than scribbling in a grungy notebook.

2) You realize that at least one or two people ARE reading it, so you get more guarded. And you go public with it (if you haven't already) because you get curious about how many people could possibly care about your daily random burbling.

3) You realize that several people you know are reading it REGULARLY, and it turns into a kind of chat room with them, full of in-jokes and allusions that only they will get. You forget your blog is out there and accessible to everyone until...

4) Bam. You carelessly reveal a personal detail about your own life or someone else's and the revelation detonates all sorts of reactions and repercussions and you run around trying to deal with the fallout and make reparations and your blogging ceases abruptly. Forever.

Perhaps this is all really archaic to experienced bloggers - and there's a whole field of blog studies theory out there - the sociology, politics, and dynamics of blogging. And that's my other fear about blogging - it's like gaming. You get sucked in and you're hooked forever.

a floral bacchanal

is going on in our house. Kim's chrysanthemums are still going strong after almost 2 weeks. The flowers my family sent me on Friday seem to be multiplying as the buds open up and jostle for space. I've separated the bouquet into 3 vases, and given some of it away, but even the remains of the original still dominate the dining room table.

We have stargazer lilies and yellow roses in the living room. Blue irises, petals curved and extended like breastroke kicks, with deep purple flowers (multilayered, look like roses, but aren't) in the kitchen. Sunflowers and greenery in the dining room. Each flower is a song and a work of art and a meditation. It's hard to pull myself away and back to my desk :-)