on belonging
18 months ago, I stared at the following questions on my laptop:
You will need to submit three items to complete your application for the residency.
This application questionnaire
A brief artist’s statement
Examples of your work
A brief artist’s statement.
This was going to be my first artist’s residency ever. I was going to take a break from my everyday life and read and write on a Wisconsin farm for a week. All that stood between me and midwestern bliss was this damn application. I already loathed talking about myself excessively, let alone synthesizing my urge to do something I’ve felt driven to do for 20 years and counting.
Google gave me some useful starters: consider the themes that present repeatedly in my work. Look over the things I’ve written and connect the dots. I did and I realized, I write a lot about being on the outskirts. I'm drawn to figures like Jean-Michel Basquiat and his seemingly bottomless solitude. Or the loneliness of immigration and uprooting one's life for the promise of elsewhere.
I've always felt misunderstood in my “onlyness”. As in: only child of immigrants, only working-class girl, only black person, only any and everything. I’ve been many spaces that weren’t built for me thanks to an exemplary public education and high test scores. They’re also results of loving garage rock bands and sharpie-scribbled Converse and movies like American Graffiti while living in this body.
In adolescence and young adulthood, I looked for myself in art. I hungrily read black authors, then specifically black immigrant authors, then black authors who were children of immigrants. I saw much of myself in them. But I was disappointed when I inevitably spotted differences that made me feel more alone, more small. There’s comfort in groupthink and a snugness in the nook of a collective’s embrace.
I’m learning to embrace my “onlyness” because I can’t shove myself into tiny spaces. Or try to make myself less contrary, less wayward, less...Ola. The other day I watched Akwaeke Emezi talk about the magic of world-making, the freedom of creating your own spaces to belong. And that's what drives me to create: a need to carve my own space in the world.
This is one of my many homes. It’s a world of syntax and poetic device and textual analysis, true to the word nerd that I am. Welcome. I hope you know you belong to yourself before anything else.