Finding Yourself in the World

Dateline: Dakar, Senegal 7.8.23

Hello and Welcome to Sitting in Silence, the newsletter about writing, craft, worry, and joy.

I write today from the Black Rock Senegal residency in beautiful Dakar. This is my first time to the continent and it’s thanks to wonderful support from Kehinde Wiley’s organization and others. I’ve loved to travel all my life and I’ve been fortunate to do writing related activities all over the world, including Holland, Belgium, and even Brooklyn, NY. Seriously though. This is a whole nother situation. One that I’m immensely grateful for. I went to the beach the other day and was happy to see so many local families frolicking in the warm waters, fathers carrying babies, mothers laughing, little kids plashing in the salty shallows. Later, back at the complex where I stay, I watched young couples traverse the big black rocks so they could sit and talk by the ocean. Drums played out of view. I struggled to find them. An associate said that she had just walked the beach but couldn’t find the drums either. The drums might have been inside me. They sounded like brass band drums back in New Orleans. I think this was Senegal’s way of saying Welcome Home, my child.

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Today, let’s talk about Finding Yourself in the World: Senegal

Last week, when I was teaching at the Sewanee Writers Conference in Tennessee, I had lunch with some students, and we got to talking about what makes learning possible. I’m overeducated myself with degrees in English, law, psychology. I’m sure there are more degrees I’ll nab at some point. I like learning almost as much as I like eating gumbo or getting lost in new places. One thing that my love—nay, obsession--with academic pursuits has taught me is that the learning process is constructively destructive.

When you enter any learning environment, you walk into that room with many preconceived notions. You walk in these patterns of behavior wearing a hole in the carpet of the living room of the life of your mind. This is what a rut is. The job of a school, residency, or other learning environment is to dissolve those notions. To free you from that rut. Broadly, in undergrad, I remember sitting in several classes (especially geography, history, sociology, and English) and beginning to realize just how big and diverse the world is, how multifaceted we human animals can be. Law school taught me about the tug of war between order and chaos that we humans engage in. Psych school showed me the patterns of behavior we all fit into, including the outliers with their outlier behaviors. Writing school showed me I’m not the only person in the world who dreamt of writing words like the ones you’re reading now, so get over myself and just write for goodness sake.

Life is like a house with a long hallway full of doors, each locked until you choose to walk through. To paraphrase Joanna Newsom, you don’t have to unlock the door. Just trust that you have the power to open it. You walk through a door for every age, every epoch, for every turn turn turn of your life. The air, lighting, and vibe shifting in each new corridor.

In early college, I’m 19 years old, the hallway is bright and open. I’ve only been to Florida (Disney World) and New York (Harlem) a few times. Nowhere else in the world. Now, I’m learning of the desert cultures that birthed all the world’s major religions and what makes certain city-states in Europe so obsessed with butter- and chocolate-making.

In law school, the hall is dark wood that smells of polish, burning lamp wicks, and the dust of dress shoes. I begin to realize that real power lies in the words we refuse to teach so-called common folks.

In writing school, the hall is messy, full of benches and smoke, overcast afternoon light from closed transom windows. The spirits of earlier generations of writers float through the stagnancy. It’s comforting.

I had been afraid of taking a DNA test. Leaving aside privacy and accuracy concerns, I wondered whether we humans are supposed to know so much about what we’re made of. Still, I did it. Just now, I searched for the 23andme report I paid for a few years back. Fittingly, I couldn’t find it. I dug through my computer files. Eventually, I went online to the website. Turns out I was looking in the wrong time. I thought I learned about my ancestry in 2020. Or maybe 2019. It was 2016.

What does my report say? It says a lot. I have a pinch of unspecified indigenous, which spans from the Americas over to east Asia. I’m 1/6 western Euro (British Isles up through Scandinavia; this all comes from my mother’s side). But I’m 76% genuine Sub-Saharan African, including connections to Nigeria, Congo, Ghana, Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and, of course, Senegal.

In the classic video game series, The Legend of Zelda, the main character is a little kid (or maybe an elf?) who must travel the lands to find the fragments of the Tri-Force, which represents all that’s good in life. By rejoining these fragments, he’ll be able to access knowledge, power, and so forth to save the world from a hideous evil. But first he must fight and overcome a host of ghosts, ghouls, goblins, and lawyers (just seeing if you’re still paying attention).

It’s a hard road for little Link with his flimsy wooden sword and shield. He can be hurt. He can die. The game can end. He can only win by finding new skills, tools, and allies. If he does this successfully—in other words, if he grows—then his world becomes a better place. That is until the next game in the series brings new challenges. This style of story comes straight from Greek and Roman myth, but also Japanese monogotari and African epics. Zelda is a world story because it shows a version of all our lives. We go through this world, if we’re lucky, collecting shards of knowledge that clarify the nature of existence and help us reconstruct ourselves.

Every time I’ve gone through an educational program or the like, the man who emerged is much different from the dork who entered. The same applies to travel, particularly if I was able to spend more than a few days in a place such as London, Paris, Windsor-Ontario, or Oxford, MS. Traveling and learning and growing are synonymous if you do them right. At least, that’s how it seems to me.

The creative mind requires, perhaps more than anything, the World. We must know the World to depict the world. We must know ourselves.

Here, writing from my fourth story studio with the great wide Atlantic—endless waves cresting and flowing--literally a stones throw away, I feel like I’ve found another shard of that Tri-Force. I can’t wait to see what it wants me to do with it.

Much more to come from lovely Senegal.