I think that
I should start this post by admitting I am very nervous. I think I am nervous
because as I was listening to Denise last week, I struggled with being able to
follow a thought all the way through. What I mean to say, is I think I understood
fragments, different threads of the conversations but was unable to construct
the picture my classmates were able to paint. However, that being said I liked
the way Denise talked. I liked the way she moved her hands when she spoke, I liked
her pauses, I liked how she addressed the whole room and I liked the way she
made eye contact to everyone she spoke to. We made eye contact at one point,
which surprised me because I hadn’t really said anything the entire time. I
spent my time navigating what was being said.
The few threads I keep thinking
about are the configuration of time and space, Blackness as a creative body,
and touch as something violent, or something intimate. If I understand
correctly (which I admit I may not), but to reach the creative, to elude the
violence is to End the World – to expel our concept of linearity and refocus on
our self-conscious, a focus on ourselves not as a commodity but as a celestial
being. I liked this idea of emotion, touching, listening as a way to leave the dissimilatory
body. Leaving behind the body that creates these visual boundaries between
people and instead entering a realm of feeling, a realm of compassion. I think
compassion can develop in different ways. Yes, intimately touching someone
instead of doing so violently, but also by having something speak to you. For example,
when one identifies with a song, or a poem, or a story. In this context, I think
the celestial being is our passion, rather – eliminating physical difference.
I'll admit I'm glad to read that you felt nervous that way, because I share that feeling about last class. As much as I tried to focus on what was being said, I always felt lost amongst the various concepts used so eloquently by Denise. I felt overwhelmed because, for some reason, the words were not reaching me as they should have, as they do in other classes. Thinking back on the experience, I realise that parts of that confusion stemmed from my difficulties with understanding Denise's accent. As a native french speaker, studying in english has been a difficult yet rewarding challenge. But the bilinguism I thought I had mastered turns out to have been a very limited one, when faced with an accent I never heard before.
ReplyDeleteWhen Erin spoke of the same concepts last class, I was instinctively able to put the sentences back togheter. But when Denise spoke, my brain was receiving different sounds it wasn't used to because she pronounced differently, so it failed to interpret these sounds as the words and sentences they were supposed to represent. Perhaps if I had heard Denise lourder (amplified through a microphone), or perharps if I had the possibility to play back what she said, I could have gotten through to understanding it all. Practicing my ear is probably the only thing missing.
I am glad that I was able to learn about another one of my linguistic biases though this experience.