Me and and a few of my fellow Tangerines: MFA class of Dec. 2011
…My father was a Methodist pastor and a social worker, but he was also an artist. When I was old enough to pick up a crayon, he taught me to draw. I learned by copying: my father’s handwriting, his bubble-lettering, his cartoon sketches; later I ripped pictures from books and magazines and copied those. I mimicked the styles of other artists. Eventually I sat on the floor of my bedroom for hours with one hand or foot stretched out in front of me, flexing my fingers and curling my toes, sketching my own changing shape.
Some of us are born this way.
The passage above come from “The Local Price,” an essay included in my Final Manuscript, the thesis I turned in a couple of weeks ago just before Antioch University awarded me a Master of Fine Arts in nonfiction writing. It was a last-minute addition to the piece, which for a year I had thought was about buying a painting from an artist in a marketplace in Kitwe, Zambia, about the cost and value of things. Turns out, as the essay developed I realized it was as much about how and why I value art, about the privilege and responsibility of creating beauty.
For that reason alone, it was a grueling essay to write. Because even now, if you asked me why I value art, why I think art is valuable–necessary, really–I couldn’t give you a straight answer. It would take me a long time to explain. And I would likely doubt myself the entire time. How exactly does beauty work in (and on) the world? Does it make things not just prettier, but better? Does it bring out the best in us?
I might get fried for this among fellow artists, but I don’t think the answers to those question are simple; I think they’re a conditional, nuanced yes.
*
So. This is my fourth time visiting Zambia; three out of the four visits, I’ve been volunteering in some artistic capacity, mostly painting Stuff on walls for kids: first an orphanage in downtown Ndola (I was seventeen). Then a wall in a children’s classroom here at Kafakumba, a few classrooms at Lifesong School, and a portrait of a nursing mother for a nurse I know (I was twenty-three). This time, a wall at Cedric Basic School and a few small things at Lifesong School again (now twenty-six).
And every time I struggle with the question of what exactly those efforts are worth. When I’m here, everyone I spend time with seems to be busy building businesses, employing people, making sure dorms and houses get built, taking kids to the clinic–in short, doing useful things–and so I find, occasionally, that I want nothing more than to be someone else. Somebody with different talents and passions.
The other afternoon, Matthew–the man who requested I do the mural at Cedric School–asked my friend Ken whether Kafakumba had ever had another visiting artist.
“We did,” Ken laughed, “waaay back. She painted at an orphanage. She’s…oh, well she’s sitting right there. And before that…ah yes, that was Sarah too.”
I shrugged and smiled sheepishly. “I’m kind of a one-trick pony.”
Why did I say that? First, it isn’t true; I’m kind of an artistic and literary multi-tasker, both as an educator and a practitioner. Second, it was practically an apology: I’m sorry I can’t do something else–something useful. Third, Matthew was asking me to paint, was telling me that the wall of the preschool room he had in mind was terribly dreary, was explaining that he’d really come to appreciate recently how much environment affects learning. He asked if I wanted to start the next day (I hadn’t even begun sketching yet). In short I think if he had his way, he’d keep me here for a year and let me paint the whole time. (It would take me a year to brighten that whole school with murals, but I sure wouldn’t mind spending a year that way.) While he was showing me around the school, Matthew pointed out the new playground, which a group of New Zealander volunteers designed and built. Like decorating the classrooms, he explained, a playground hadn’t been “a priority” for the last couple of years.
“Then I saw how much the kids used it and love it,” he said. What he meant was, paint anything; the kids will love it, he said.
I’ve heard this same sort of thing time and again, especially here in Zambia: that aesthetics and play constantly have to take a backseat to function and to everyday urgencies; that there’s a hunger for beauty but not always the time and energy to create it. And folks are grateful for those who can and do.
Why the ever-present instinct to apologize, then? I’m still not sure.
*
…Some of us are born this way: we have to make things, things we feel are extensions of our selves, our souls. I did, but I don’t recall asking why I made them. My relationship with art developed within a bubble of pure pleasure: at sixteen I still drew and painted primarily because I loved to draw and paint and because—like my father before me—I could. I believed I was an artist, but I didn’t yet know art as a privilege or an obligation and never questioned its function, its social consequences or cost. I didn’t yet know that art which expresses the self, an individual or cultural identity, could cost lives.
When my mentor, Hope Edelman, gave me my final feedback on that Manuscript, she wrote that it had been a pleasure to watch my writing grow and develop over the last couple of years. She wrote, to my astonishment, “You are truly the Real Thing.”
I wake up with words banging around in my head. I peer closely at colors: what colors make up the tone of a person’s skin, colors in a shadow, colors as they bleed together. For as long as I can remember, my deepest instincts–like finding food when I’m hungry or thirsty or laying down to sleep when I’m exhausted, and so forth–have included trying to put language and color to image and feeling and experience. I can’t really help it. But for the past two years I’ve also worked really, really hard to learn how to do what I can’t really help much better: to string words together so that they shimmer; to make stories as irresistible for others as they are for me.
I don’t feel like The Real Thing; I’m not sure I know what that means. But I would really LIKE to be The Real Thing, and I’ll venture a guess that it’s a combination of the some of us were born this way and the worked really, really hard and–at the end of a long, exhausting, doubtful day–straight-up conviction: that beauty is, ultimately, necessary in this world, and that making beauty is a responsibility and a privilege and should be treated as such.
*
So anyway. Tomorrow I head to Lifesong again, this time with Ben, to paint Stuff on walls for little kids: numbers, letters, musical notes and drama masks, and pillars of character. The last time I was at Lifesong, that Stuff made sick kids feel a little better, helped sad kids grin, and stunned ornery, noisy kids into silent delight. Every time I think it’s such a simple, small thing. Then again, I have to remind myself, it isn’t.
*
Nothing is more powerful than beauty in a wicked world. Play it, girl.
- Amos Lee, “Soul Suckers”
