I have moved the blog to Posterous. You can read why here. I hope Posterous is a longterm online platform for me, but we’ll see. I’m not committing to it. What I am committing to is just being chill, relaxed, and casually posting on it. For now, I’m calling it my online home.

Thank you all for continuing to follow this Oasis, and I’ll see you over at the new spot on Posterous.

Take care.

If over 800 pages, what book was it?

I came across a fantastic teaser for a film called An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, written and directed by Terence Nance. I’m intrigued! The film centers on a man’s reaction to a failed connection with a woman he was expecting to meet. It was an official selection of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, and has received many other accolades.

You can visit the film’s web page here.

Have you lost anything important because you simply didn’t back it up? Did you discover something new and delightful while having to re-craft that work?

What are some backup methods you suggest for writers with volumes of work?

To me, how you might backup/sync up your work depends on what you use to write and how accesible you want that writing to be at any given time. For laptop/desktop writing, I recommend traditional external hard drive backup methods. For tablet/smartphone writing, aside from computer backups, I suggest using Dropbox in conjunction with a third party application that allows editing of text documents and Dropbox connection. There are several apps that allow this: for iPhone/iPad, I recommend Doc2, and for the iPad, Smart Office 2.

What do you do to backup/sync your work?

“One creates from nothing. If you try to create from something you’re just changing something. So in order to create something you first have to be able to create nothing.” -Werner Erhard (Intellectual, Academic, Lecturer)

What does this idea mean for the poet?

Erhard’s statement reflects how I’ve considered poetry and the idea of creating. I keep thinking about Genesis. In the beginning God created… Creation was done for us so that we will create. Is “nothing” a void? Darkness was upon the face of the deep. How could we imagine this? What does this mean to the concept of creation?

What is pre-creation? Is it pre-language? Is “nothing” absence? Is “nothing” “something”? Can we conceive or perceive “nothing”? How does one create “nothing”? If we utter “nothing,” haven’t we just, in a sense, manifested it? So, can “nothing” only be imagined to remain “nothing”?

My view of originality has often tied into the second statement from Erhard’s quote that seems to challenge the conventional idea of creation involving more than arranging pre-existing (created) elements – re-arranging an arrangement. That’s why I have a hard time saying artists are creators. We’re coordinators.

Creation, in a sense, isn’t really even humanly possible. It is specifically an act of the divine.

I think it could be interesting as part of a larger discourse on cultural topics.

Slang is a spontaneous, ever-changing linguistic explosion. It constantly uses old and new terms to describe old and new things. A word that means one thing today, referred to something else yesterday, and will denote something new tomorrow. Slang is transient, and is mostly defined by expansion and substitution. How often do you hear someone say “No one says that anymore!” It’s fluid, malleable, unpredictable. One term suddenly used to describe something could be just as valid as another term used in that very moment to describe the same thing.

Slang isn’t just national, or hemispherical, or regional. It’s also unique to families, social communities, friends and even households. It’s uncontrolled and uncontrollable. It’s political in that it undermines the political in the ongoing act of marginalizing and undermining itself – which is partly why I don’t think it can be taught in the classroom. Slang is, essentially, anti-establishment. Its words and meanings are especially contextual, being determined by the nature of what is being described, the person describing it, facial expressions, body language, tone, and other factors, and so I don’t think it can be taught academically. It’s taught in the moment by the factors of its very utterance.

Understanding slang is not about knowing the meaning of a word, but knowing how to assimilate it into one’s conversational identity. The idea of teaching slang is fine, but I wouldn’t know the purpose of such a pursuit, because the person in position to be taught it would not likely have a colloquial style that could absorb that language, anyway. Slang is mostly predicated on verbalization, or the public speaking, of a new or improvisational labeling of the universe. A person who would feel the need to be taught slang would not likely be in a situation in which he would even be exposed to, let alone called upon to interpret, such language.

What are your thoughts?

The forty minute film centers on the courageous stories of young women who have endured mistreatment, harassment and other difficulties – sometimes from their own family – because of the complexion of their skin and other physical characteristics. In their own words, these ladies examine the burdens unique to young black women as they grow into their unique identities. Their stories ultimately reveal how great an uphill journey accepting oneself can be.

“I felt that it was time to get our voices heard about our real feelings of skin color and how we felt about our identities within our communities and others,” says Celestin. “I just listened to some of the conversations and felt it was time to give them a voice to speak about how they feel about just being black.”

Celestin, a mother of four children – including fair-complected and dark-complected daughters – can emotionally and psychologically connect with the ladies of Black Rainbows. She remembers as a child feeling pressure about her own physical appearance, as it seemed light-complected girls were “always called pretty.” She recalls even putting Noxema on her face to imitate a lighter skin tone and putting a long towel on her head to pretend her hair was longer than it already was.

The feelings, ideas and perceptions that contributed to her, even playfully, adjusting her appearance to imitate the looks of light-complected women gave rise to Celestin’s desire to make the Black Rainbows documentary. Her experience of creating the film provided a platform on which to vocalize her ideas about her own identity as a black woman, and allowed her to connect with young ladies whose self-perceptions and experiences have been as difficult, if not more troubling, than her own.

In the film, one young lady, in particular, speaks about her hardships dealing with black boys criticizing the size of her eyes, nose, and lips. Another young lady tells a story about feeling so tormented from being ridiculed for being dark-complected and skinny, she began overeating so she could look fuller and more attractive. She even cut her hair and wore make up that lightened her skin tone, and told people who asked about her ethnicity that she was Puerto Rican or Indian. Another two ladies spoke about wanting to commit suicide because the pain they felt from being harassed about how they looked was so immense.

What are the causes of a damaged self-image amongst, particularly, young women of color? As one listens to the ladies of Black Rainbows speak, sometimes in tears, about the quiet turmoil and shame they have endured for being ridiculed as too skinny, too dark, or too “nappy,” it may become apparent how damaging jokes about appearance can be. There seems to even exist a perception that “color” jokes do not have a dangerous impact on the psyche and emotions of the people they are directed to. This presumption can be especially troublesome when we live in a media culture that affirms and exaggerates the negativity suggested in those seemingly innocuous jokes.

In fact, many “dark” jokes come from dark-complected people, often males. Though these taunts may not be ill-intended, Celestin suggests they may be projections of one’s broken confidence in his own identity. She sees such jokes as indicating discomfort, literally, in one’s own skin. What results is the oft-described behavior of diminishing the integrity of another because of one’s own lack of self-esteem. Unfortunately, young dark-complected women have too often been the target of this projection.

“The young lady in my film talked openly about how the effects of that hurt her deeply,” Celestin says. “You would think that our black men would be the ones to protect and respect us, not damage us.”

Celestin continues,”You never know what a young lady has gone through dealing with her identity. If someone has a negative self-image, it will be easy to tell jokes about someone else who may be their skin complexion or darker. If we really think about it, I think we are all guilty to a certain degree of doing this knowingly or [unknowingly].”

Even beyond their own ethnic community, Celestin notes how media publications and the fashion industry have, historically, treated the image of the dark-skinned black woman diminutively by making it absent. Popular culture has not affirmed the beauty of dark skin in the way it has emphasized the favorability of a light or white complexion. In some ways, this bias has presented obstacles to young black women who often look to those cultural sites for self-affirmation and confidence to fully accept themselves, especially if they do not find that confirmation anywhere else.

Though in recent times we have seen a rise in the number of dark-complected women in popular media, Celestin recalls a time when dark-skinned women were sparse in mainstream entertainment.

“Until recently, you really didn’t see darker complexion[ed] women on the runway, in magazines, and I am not talking about Ebony or Jet, but just in mainstream magazines,” Celestin says. “For me, I only saw white women or very high-complexioned women in magazines, billboards and commercials. All these women had long flowing hair as well. So, to me and many other young girls in my day, beauty meant light-skinned with long hair.”

Moreover, this kind of cultural bias towards light-complected women may explain another particular tendency: Over the past several years, one might suggest a trend has developed of black men notably being drawn to fair-complected women. Some black men even show disgust toward “nappy” hair and physical features of dark-complected women. One of the young ladies in the film talks about how she discovered one of the boys who would ridicule her actually liked her, but told her he teased her because he wasn’t supposed to like her – that black men weren’t supposed to be attracted to dark-skinned women.

Celestin says such an attitude of preference could be an attempt by black men to show some kind of status for themselves.

“This [trend] could come from major athletes and successful businessmen who see having a white woman or light-skinned woman as a trophy or sign of success.” Celestin continues, “All women that are darker skinned are confident in themselves whether our black men want to be with them or not. I believe that the stereotypes may come from what [black men] are seeing and following from the older generation.”

Despite this seeming trend and the influences that may have led to it, Celestin says black men deal with their own “color” pressures as well.

“In all fairness, our darker skinned black men do go through some of the same issues as darker skinned women,” Celestin says. “I remember hearing statements that ‘dark men are back in style again.’ All I could do is shake my head because, personally, that was the dumbest thing I had ever heard. I have a dark-skinned brother as well as a light-skinned brother with colored eyes. My darker skinned brother shared some things with me that broke my heart when we were teenagers that were comments made by our own people. I believe all darker-skinned people, whether male or female, go through some type of equal pressures.”

While black men may undergo their own “colorism” pressures from their families and communities, those men who are fathers should not allow such cultural burdens to distract them from using every opportunity to uplift the stature and esteem of their daughters. A father telling his young daughter her significance and worth, especially in a culture that seems to want women to always feel insufficient or inadequate, can be essential to establishing a strong self-attitude. One young lady in Black Rainbows says that she has never felt like she is not beautiful because her father always confirms and supports her. The impact of attesting the worth and integrity of a woman is of far greater benefit to her than mocking her skin color, criticizing the size of her eyes, belittling the texture of her hair, or demeaning the size of her body.

Celestin sees this kind of commitment to positive affirmation as integral to helping young women strengthen their view of themselves.

“They need to know that when they walk out the door that the real world may think different due to race, stereotypes, etcetera, but to not let that change their views about themselves,” she explains. “It’s very important that we love ourselves and not try to be anything that we are not. My father taught me years ago ‘you can’t go wrong by just being you.’”

Celestin sees such positive investment in oneself as essential if young black women are to assert their unique identities in the world they live in, regardless of the obstacles placed on them by their society, peers and even families. Loving oneself, though seemingly overstated, is underperformed. Despite the pressure of having to weather oneself against the elements of a society that is constantly succumbing to the idea of beauty rather than its truths, keeping oneself disentangled from negative dialogue is part of self-respect. As one of the ladies in the film says, “I have to find the confidence to go through the world and say ‘This is me, I’m dark.’”

The confidence the young lady speaks of does not only form from within, or simply involve the positive contributions of family and friends. It also comprises the efforts of community establishments such as schools, churches, and community centers. These organizations can be critical to communicating a message of uplift and assurance to young women who often look to a prejudiced media for those same confirmations.

It is not to be dismissed that sometimes the dialogue, even within the safety of community places, may still be difficult. In speaking on her experience of trying to talk to her teacher about some of her hardships, one young lady in Black Rainbows remarks, “Teachers look at me in this comforting way, but they don’t know how I feel whenever I try to really break it down to people. They seem as if they’re not listening to me.” Another young lady expresses the same disconnect, saying, “There’s no one else around to make you feel good. There’s no one else that’s hearing your cries.”

Celestin sees the concerted participation of informed leaders of social and community establishments as vital to addressing these exact kinds of difficulties and opening dialogue on the pressing issues surrounding self-identity. Workshops, classes, and similar platforms are imperative to creating relevant conversations. Celestin, herself, organized a conference in 2009 entitled “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall” that addressed subjects such as self-esteem and etiquette.

“It is important to have seasoned men and women who can shed educated and positive change when dealing with the color issues,” says Celestin, who is considering screening Black Rainbows at college campuses.

Celestin says she has observed an increased awareness of the issue of colorism amongst black media and popular figures. Black Rainbows is one of many dedicated efforts exploring this divisive issue. Families who have watched the documentary, Celestin says, have felt the impact of its message and call for dialogue.

“Sometimes these types of issues are not discussed until prompted by something [people] read or see from family members, and what some of them have or still are struggling with dealing with [are] the color issues,” says Celestin, a graduate of California State University, Sacramento, and the University of San Francisco. “What happens is once the family has that discussion, it normally spills out to friends and co-workers who also can be helped by what you talked about.”

Family, peers, the media, dedicated communities, conferences, discussions – all can contribute to a discourse that helps produce a positive sense of identity among young people – particularly women – living in a culture full of pressure and adversity. Still, though, how close will these efforts bring people to self-acceptance – in themselves and others – and cultural unity? What really needs to happen to definitively address cultural divisions over color and other physical uniquenesses? Celestin sees the solution as quite simple.

“If we can just get back to the basics of being kind to one another and treat people the way one would like to be treated, things would change faster in our community. But as long as enough of our black women down each other based on not just color, but social class – and the rolling of the eyes and the stare downs – I am sorry to say, things will stay stagnant. Stop hating on each other.”

Celestin sees diversity, especially within the black community, as a trait to be embraced. Black identity is not one physical identity, but many that are full of various colors, mixtures, and tones. This unifying outlook connects with Celestin’s titling of the documentary.

“’Black Rainbows’ came to me because one thing about the African-American race is we come in all shades.”

In this spirit, what Black Rainbows ultimately reveals is that a community is not divided by shade or color or lips or hair. It is divided by learned attitudes about its own uniqueness. What is not to be forgotten – what is always to be known about the special particulars of one’s own physical creation – is that all are formed by divine inspiration. For some, this knowledge can be a source of comfort and strength against the slanders of a sometimes cruel and difficult world.

As one of the young women says:

“Remember who made you and how he made you.”

*******************

For more information on Black Rainbows: The Colors and Self Images of African American Girls, or to contact author, filmmaker and community leader Marie Celestin, please search Facebook under “Marie A. Young.”

You can also contact Celestin’s distribution at:
Marie A. Celestin
New Century Press
1055 Bay Blvd., Suite C
Chula Vista, CA, 91911

To support the Black Rainbows project, please visit its Amazon page here.

* For more interview articles by Simone Youngblood, please search here.

“Jacob tried to lift his head but couldn’t. His eyes took a moment to find me; then they focused a little, faded, and focused again. His glasses were lying beside him on the walk.”

- A Simple Plan by Scott Smith

The film is terrific, and the book even more so. It takes a deep look at man’s capacity for evil, inviting conversation on how it is understood and what it means to human beings.

What’s your excerpt?

Which photo is your favorite?

If someone were to capture a picture of you with your writing platform of choice, what item would you be photographed with? Your phone? A typewriter? A laptop or computer? A tablet? An iPod or MP3 player? Napkins? Dare you say, paper?

Even yet, share your own photo!

Photo used without permission. Photo taken from Flavorwire. Photo copyrighted to its owner.