Dominique Christina: Stretch Language & Challenge Thinking

I crawl out of graves.

Rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I learned to read the same year I was molested the first time by my stepfather (4 years old). I associate literacy with wounds opening and the aptitude to know what to call the bruises when they appear…and when they heal.

Beloved by Toni Morrison. Because everyone should. It’s a haunting. It’s a ritual. It’s alchemy. It’s ancestral. It’s so holy I have to hold onto things so I don’t float away while reading it.

It was a suicide note.

A wife. (Just kidding I think. I haven’t had any bad jobs.)

Read everything. Not just the stuff you’re sure you’ll like. And…do the soul work before you attempt to write down what happened. The poem should not precede your readiness to name; to tell the truth. If it does, it’s not what your soul wants to say. The ego perhaps but not the soul.

Yes.

God Dies by the Nile by Nawal El Saadawi. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Beloved by Toni Morrison. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Sylvia Plath anything. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurtson. The Color Purple by Alice Walker. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. TS Elliot. EE Cummings. Edgar Allan Poe. Shakespeare especially Hamlet and Macbeth. I could go on. Why? Because they’re brilliant. Because the writer and the writing risks something. Because there are marrow and medicine in these works. Because they show you how big language is. How urgent it is.

Beloved by Toni Morrison. It calls me into myself. It gives me back my name. And my memories.

Redbone by Mahogany Browne. Pink Elephant by Rachel McKibbens. Olio by Tyehimba Jess.

Everything I’ve listed above.

Rachel McKibbens. Mahogany Browne. Jeanann Verlee.

I like creative nonfiction a great deal.

One in which we forfeit language probably for barbarism and pedestrian ways of using the lexicon. It would be a wasteland.

Literally, everyone I have already named. I remain forever in awe of them all. I’m buying whatever they put out.

Hope not. But what do I know? I’m still kind of analogue about certain things.

I can’t prescribe what humanity needs. I would hope we read things that help us remain human. Help us know ourselves and love more deeply and respond to our gifts. But what that looks like for me isn’t necessarily the right equation for someone else.

I’ve mentioned Beloved by Toni Morrison too many times now so I’ll think of something else though that is my official answer. I guess I would say I was impacted deeply by The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor largely because it centered a community of women who were vast and complicated and broken in all the ways I understand and they were church for one another and they held each other accountable and curated a holy space for each other which is one version of heaven that exists in my head.

I, Tituba by Maryse Condé was essential to me. Stupid Hope by Jason Shinder. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers another. Too many to name, seriously.

Things that stretch language and challenge my thinking. Not sure what subject matter will offer that so I’m poised for any and all things.

Already wrote it. “Even the Moon Has Bones.” It’s a doozy.