Beyond, A Way of Being, Part VIII

BEYOND, A Way Of Being Part VIII: “Relating to our human differences as equals” (Audrey Lorde) A (Subjectively) racialized view of an art form created and practiced by peoples of colour, haiku. (Toyo submission) On Artistic Styles Here's Miles Davis speaks to the issue of style.

"Styles in music produce a certain kind of feeling in people. If you want someone to feel a certain way, you play a certain style. ... That's why it's good for me to play for different kinds of people because I pick up things from them that I can use."

When I'm out of this country I play different because of the way the people treat me, with a lot of respect. I appreciate that and show it in my playing. I want to make them feel good like the way they make me feel good. (Davis Miles, Miles: The Autobiography. Simon & Schuster, 1989) Well to paraphrase Miles, "styles in haiku/ehi produce a certain kind of feeling in people too. If you want to communicate a certain sentiment, you write in a certain style."

Writing haiku for folks in different countries, and even different online communities you pick up different things from them as well. Especially since haiku, tanka, & haiga are now multi­ cultural art forms, the response a writer receives is as varied as the backgrounds of the peoples that read your work. Present the same poem a year or a decade later and the response from people can sometimes evolve or differ from the same audience in Japan and or America. The issue here as I see it is that of an art form evolving, evolving at different rates in different countries and online communities which knows no national or geographic boundaries. The level of the peoples understanding and exposure to a variety of haiku idioms, from multiple writers and cultures varies as well, and is in constant flux.

I agree with Miles when he spoke of how performing for people in different countries can affect your performance and your artistic mood. Here I will paraphrase Miles once again, in regards to how this all applies to me.

"When I'm out of the country I too write differently, in part due to the way people treat me and react or don't react to my gender and blackness. For example, like whether American white women versus Japanese women, some rarely locking or not locking their car doors when I walk by. The people for instance in Japan and Canada treat me well, they and their police forces respect and befriend me (to varying & greater degrees in Canada), as a human being, more so than in my own country." Therefore, this effects and tinges the emotional state I write from, it motivates me to want to speak to this uplifting and positive experience of being treated this way while writing poetry. It in fact elevates me, physically, literally, figuratively, and spiritually, it elevates me beyond the mundane racist everyday treatment I experience in America. Once I'm emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually released from existing in an environment permeated by american style racism; then it's almost effortless to become open to seeing and experiencing spectacular awe inspiring moments, moments where divinity resides in nature and humanity."

Contradictorily creating, being inspired, and seeking out those divine moments while existing within an environment that emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually oppresses me is a skill set that has also blossomed and evolved within me over time. Still to do so routinely requires some ongoing rejuvenating or self­care.

So this is why and how all of these things affect my artistic mood and seems to infuse, motivate, and compel me to write about a foreign landscape and people. Leaving the country

(America) rejuvenates and enables me to see the world with wonderment, without being so guarded and cynical. It encourages, enables, and allows me to be more open to emotional and financial risk when, interacting with my fellow wo­man. There are ways to create this type of experience in the states, but it often requires creating a controlled environment of like or open­ minded peoples (a writer's colony­retreat, someone's home, a monastery, seminar, conference, etc).

In essence leaving the country opens up my writing style. It opens it up to moving into places of artistic experimentation and exploration in regards to my art form; it facilitates my tapping into creating as Tina Turner and Miles puts it "beyond what I know", much more frequently and easily.

Haiku's reference to divinity and nature transcends styles. In Japan nature was a representation of divinity, while most in the Anglo ­West (A­W) try to suppress nature as being divine. Why? Because of where the haiku's concept originates from, outside of eden, from the foreign (non­christian) woodlands of Asia. Haiku's spiritually laced natural overtones are at odds with most A­W concepts of how divinity exists from within the mindset of many christians; those A­W poets and their A­W audiences. This is why senryu are being co­opted and gentrified in the A­W and labeled pho­haiku.

This is for the most part not a conscious conspiratorial thing, but an issue of sticking to what is not so challenging, what is familiar, and most intellectually comfortable, literally, spiritually, and culturally. This is our A­W tendency to gentrify "other" foreign things, and mold them into more consumable literary commodities crafted for capitalistic consumption by the literate masses within dominant a­w society, and beyond. It's akin to an American office worker hearing a new foreigners name and then shortening it from say Abdujouporav to Abe. All of this is not to indite A­W Societies, but to speak to another universally intersectional truth. That truth is that all societies, cultures, races, and ethnicities, those that dominate or are being oppressed do much the same, its human nature. So they try to draw universal commonality from a culturally specific truth and then transfer that specific truth and reinterpreted it so that it fits into the context of their own culture or belief system. In doing so usually the core component in this case Dharmic spirituality, is made optional or secondary to nature’s primary source of A­W spirituality, which is indivisible from its religion. Thus, the christian gods divinity must be found to be not only present in Dharma's interpretation of nature's divinity, but be interpreted as the Christian origin of the Dharmic spirituality found in nature.

In this, I'm just speaking to and limited in my observation to the society and societies I know best, from the perspective of an oppressed person living in what is currently the world's most dominant society in decline. As such, I can easily perceive and speak to my society’s shortcomings and strengths. Since I both suffer and benefit simultaneously from them. It allows me to comfortably empathize and pierce insights into how dominant society filters and absorbs me. Me, a representative of its deepest roots and past, one it strives to move beyond, but is forever intertwined by, and feels it must suppress and oppress to feel superior and have a baseline to derive their perceived sophistication from; me, this most visible and racialized benchmark, me that demonstratively negro, invisibly West Indian, and implausibly Native American huuu­man.