“To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.” Allen Ginsberg
I came across this quote on Twitter, and I’m looking at it now wondering what made me email it to myself. Surprisingly, it wasn’t about voice, my initial thoughts were about the second half of the quote. In particular, “province” and “consciousness.” Province for me is about the territory from which a writer writes. The world view, that informs the writing.
I’d never really thought about the territory of it, I just write. Not until the session on my MA Creative Writing course recently, when this was the theme for the evening. It quite blew me away. What I have noticed, more strongly in the past few weeks are the themes that arise in my work. Women, sex, young people and childhood, motherhood and inner city life. I love all of these subjects. I genuinely think of them as really very interesting! Does that make me a self-obsessed narcissist? These ‘themes’ are my life, past present and no doubt future. That’s not to say, they are all I will ever write about, but as themes they recur. Who know’s I might come out with an off the planet science fiction novel one day. Yeah right.
I also write about, moreover from the perspective (because territory I think is mostly about perspective and point of view) of the post-colonial experience, with the eyes of a first generation black british woman. My parents are from Georgetown, Guyana. They came in the 1950’s, my father first and my mother in 1966. England is all I have known. But I know it from this, ‘dual’ perspective.
I grew up in a household, where the accents carried the musical cadence of a Caribbean culture. Some derivation of an African language that had been transported across oceans and through generations and transformed into so-called creole. An accent, that learned English while on its travels and mixed with the rhythms of Ibo, Ongota, Shabo, Kwali, Jalaa and an arrangement of other languages that probably, will never be known, buried in the hearts and mouths of my African ancestors. That which remained, sounds something like my parents, aunts, uncles and their friends.
I was raised on meals that consisted of fried Snapper, salt fish and bakes, curried goat and roti, dhal, chick pea channa, pepperpot stew and hearty soups with cowfoot and pigtail boiled together with the dumplings and barley. Rice and peas, fried plantain, roast chicken and salad, nearly every Sunday. Salad which I covered with Heinz salad cream, which is quite a funny parallel to my own amalgamation of culture. My father listened to blues and reggae, and of course calyso and soca music. So did I.
I mean, I wouldn’t say that British culture was a complete shock to the system when I went (out of the household) to school. Of course we had television. Top of the Pops, Coronation Street, the Generation Game, Are You Being Served and all of the news readers were white, Moira Stewart didn’t come around until quite a few years later. There were very few representations of black people, except for Nina Baden-Semper and Rudolph Walker in Love They Neighbour and other comedy programmes like Mind Your Language and Mixed Blessings. Not exactly bastions of positive or even vaguely realistic black images.
However, when I did arrive at school, 90% of the people outside of my household were white. Quite a different scenario from what I went home to every afternoon. Yet as children, we don’t notice or make judgements on these situations, you just try and fit in, which is naturally what I tried to do. My secondary school was a convent school in Greenwich, London, which has fairly affluent surroundings. My peers were mostly middle-class where I was in the top set and for most of my school life the only black girl in the class. There I tried less to fit in for fear of what my friends from the inner city area in which I lived, would say if I came dotting my ‘i’s and crossing my t’s when I spoke.
These layers of what I now coin as my ‘dual culture experience,’ very much show up in my work. Not always in the subject matter but, certainly in it’s consciousness, or subtext. Julia Bell, my tutor at Birkbeck, impressed upon myself and my peers in that particular workshop, that the only way to explore and understand the territory from which you write, is to write. Only this, will reveal the truth of your world view. Good advice. Therefore, voice, I would surmise as a function of the territory of my writing. I like this because to me, it means I do not have to try to cultivate ‘a voice’ from some extraneous source. It is already there, within me, in my consciousness.
Ginsberg says, “To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. ..” Forget about having it heard! Well that’s all about to put my ego in check (ha!ha) My thing is all about writing to inspire others, otherwise, what is the point? But, how I interpret what Ginsberg is saying is that at, or in the moment of conceiving or creating the writing, thoughts and ideas about who is going to read it have to take a backseat. That actually works for me, because that provides a healthy level of freedom to simply write what is ‘there’ inside of me rather than attempting to write towards my own mind-made person or audience. This I think is different from writing to a muse, but that is another conversation.
If writing ‘without prejudice’ is to become a saint of my own province (territory or world view), that’s okay – I can work with that.
