Rita Dove, Edwidge Danticat, and the New York Times
Reality evaporates, and a quark restores reality. The change escapes notice. Good.
The reaction allows writing to produce stasis, the five-dimensional space in which we write.
If your mind, spirit, and body demand that you write,
write. But be honest, or, as we said in
the flame-blooming 1960s, be “for real.”
Writing that gains the world’s respect is not a spewing of disassembled
feelings, nor is it a pampering of your ego.
Writing is work, a disciplined discovery of patterns and ideas in
words. You must have a sense of human
history in order to know your address in time.
You must train yourself to cope with rejection and use it as a reason to
perfect your craft. Before you begin
writing, read widely and wisely. Study your
tools --- words and the options for organizing them. Study how and why your
literary ancestors, be they poets, philosopher, or historians of science, have
used the tools to communicate effectively.
Chew language slowly and reflect deeply on the ideas the flavors
release. Then write. Know for whom you are writing and why. Above all, discipline yourself and let your
writing become an act of love, a gift of talent for now and the future.
In a future, writing or literature becomes a tool for
interpreting the non-literary. Consider
the New York Times article “Dominicans of Haitian Descent Cast Into Legal Limbo
by Court” (October 24, 2013, page A1) by Randal C. Archibold. A strong interpretation of the article
requires reading Rita Dove’s poem “Parsley” and Edwidge Danticat’s novel The Farming of Bones (Soho Press, 1998;
Penguin, 1999). You can, of course, make
sense of the article by referring to those works of history listed in Danticat’s
“Acknowledgments” (311-312), which itself acknowledges “Rita Dove’s wonderful poem,
‘Parsley.’ “But the works by Danticat and Dove provoke a nuanced appreciation
of time’s eternal return in the linked story of the Dominican Republic and
Haiti.
Genuine writers do care what the world thinks of their work and
how that work gets rewarded in acts of understanding. Genuine writers hold fast to the wisdom of
Langston Hughes. They are for real and
free within themselves, so that a future can grasp reality’s evaporation and
reappearance.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. October 24, 2013
