i saw the most stunning image this morning. a woman, walking, floated above the ground--her hijab, silk blouse and iridescent skirt rippling on the current of air cut by her slim frame. i think i actually held my breath, transfixed until she vanished out of sight.

i sometimes wonder about the merits of bearing flesh when such beauty can be achieved fully covered.

there's a sister i met in brooklyn once, nzinga knight (above, picture taken from her blog), who designs hijab fashions. as a non-muslim, i cringe when i hear other non-muslim women lament the perceived burden of wearing a headscarf every day. of covering the body from head to toe.

i see so many women in new york who are able to create a unique, personal style within these boundaries--chic and effortlessly lovely. i also found this blog that praises all things hijab.

i suppose it is not appropriate to "rock" hijab if you're not a muslim. nevertheless, i find it very fetching.

so much reading and re-reading this week. bone black (bell hooks' memoir), coffee will make you black (novel by april sinclair), the joy luck club (amy tan's acclaimed novel), a collection of poems on the MOVE bombing by one of my hedgebrook sisters, daughter's mother (a play by amy evans, also a Hedgebrook alum). so i have been shedding tears on the 5-train home to the Bronx after work.

bell hooks writes prose poetry full of mystery and myth and a clarity i've never found in her nonfiction. i think, if i never read another "love" book of hers i will have learned all i need to know in this. she embeds a child's hope, terror, and frustration in each chapter, reminds me of that helpless feeling i am still shedding. amy tan reminds me of my mother's investment club, the susu women, who would break bread at each other's homes after a long meeting.

she reminds me that my mother is forever gone and i am left with a stack of black and white photos, the trails of the few stories she told, most locked tightly away in her soul's memory. and the MOVE poems. lives and loves burned up in fire. these poems haunt me, stories beg to be told.

lately i have been seeking coming-of-age stories to give some perspective on my novel. there was a collection of stories i read at hedgebrook, coming of age around the world (ed. by Faith Adiele, also an alum), which lead me to some really great writers. each one i read offered something i had forgotten or never considered.

and i now ask myself why i am writing this novel the way i am writing it, why i am not turning the bucket upside down before pouring in the water. there is something in soaking the floor, in seeping into all the hidden crevices that you can't even see. without conclusion or direction like the stories my father tells, one long thread running from my childhood up til now.

hoping to spend some good time this weekend just staring into space and letting the words appear. applying for a bronx council of the arts writing grant due next week. but really the application is just an excuse to sit with my writing. we have been too distant lately.

I have been back for over a month now. Not necessarily hiding from the public, but certainly from this blog. I developed a distrust for the public-personal while away at my residency in the woods, in my cottage, with a wood burning stove and an owl hooting outside my window. I think the personal should be private, and I think that blogging sometimes cheapens my experiences.

It is not truly possible for me to distill the essence of what happened to me in that month alone in the woods. Suffice it to say, it was the most overwhelming gift of divine love I've ever received. A love I never even thought was in the realm of the possible for me. And in that love, I was able to give birth to a novel I've been dreaming of and scribbling in notebooks for over three years. I also dreamt a piece of choreography that I had to get up and dance at five o'clock in the morning. And watched my student films with some of my writing sisters and had a chance to reflect on my process and progress as a filmmaker. And watched other marvelous novels, poems, and memoirs being born that made me feel like a witness to the unfolding of literary history.

I came away believing in myself as an artist -- as a writer, filmmaker, dancer, singer. Given the space, time, and opportunity to do anything, I found myself doing all those things quite organically -- and also taking long bike rides, picking up shells on the beach, picking flowers and raspberries and fresh salad from the garden.

I had not previously realized that this need to create was somehow programmed into my DNA, that my utter misery doing anything else was simply God telling me so. I also had not realized how much I really hate living in New York. I am in the process of making some changes, I think, that you cannot unmake. And I think it is a very good sign.

There is a quote by Anais Nin that states: And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

I imagine that my bud is only now blossoming, coinciding with my 28th birthday that I celebrated while away. Though I had always thought myself a late bloomer, I found myself to be the youngest woman at Hedgebrook (the next youngest was 41, the oldest 70). And they welcomed me with such respect and regard that I found myself maturing to my call to join the circle of women writers.

We had the most thrilling conversations about life, work, love, politics, and writing, that I wept bitterly while leaving. Wept over the ashes of my wood stove, over the drying petals of my birthday flowers, the cedar trees that swallowed the earth, the banana slugs that slithered on the foot path. I thought I was in danger of leaving my best and truest self there, and so I did not want to come back. Yet I find that marvelously creative woman is still with me, waiting inside every time I sit down to write.

And so I wrote on, fifty thousand more words in November, in NYC, back in the Bronx, completing NaNoWriMo for the first time. And I am still writing, silencing the din of the city, trying to write my way back to that peaceful place that I found in the woods with the women and the dahlias and the sunrise over Deer Lagoon.

I took a two week writer's workshop at City College taught by Marie-Elena John (pictured above center, in red), author of the critically acclaimed novel Unburnable. The workshop was advertised as a how-to course on writing your first novel, the reason I signed up.

Marie-Elena is a sweet, passionate, sincere woman plagued by Antigua time -- the equivalent of African time multiplied by three, sprinkled with a bit of salt, and served with local rum. I came the first couple of days, ditched the next day, came another couple days, ditched the next day, and showed up religiously the last four days to finish out the two-week workshop.

During the workshop, I sat in class critiquing the hell out of other people's work as if I knew something about writing. (Maybe the evidence supports that I do, but I have an incredible amount of self doubt around its validity.) This voice kept coming out of me when I spoke that made everybody stop to listen. It was a voice I hadn't heard from myself before. It was bold and certain, did not harbor the same apprehensions as I do personally. It sounded a bit like my blog, far bolder than I am in person.

So. Although I was kicking and screaming the whole time, the single greatest gift the workshop gave me was an opportunity to confront my self-doubt, even if only to sit with it like a friend for a couple of weeks. I haven't a clue what I'm doing, really, when I say that I am writing. It is amorphous, a bit cliche, and terrifying when I have to sit inside my insecurity for three or four hours a day and actually write.

At any rate, and likely because of my fear (which only exists to be vanquished), I have officially turned in my leave of absence papers to NYU and put film on hold. I need to finish this book so I can find my voice, grab hold of it, and run full tilt into the future. I leave school only to give myself a year to revel in my insecurity and, hopefully, learn to trust it.

I can't help but think that it is my own voice I am trying to become. Not thinner or prettier, taller or more fashionable, but rather bold, certain, and unapologetic.

I started NYU film school this week -- for the second time. To make a long story short, I began classes with last year's incoming students, but decided to take another year before starting grad school. I'm actually at least 2.5 times more excited this year than I was last year, which is a lot for me, because I'm typically too mellow to get excited about anything that doesn't involve some combination of sci-fi, vegan brownie-bottom cheesecake, or DJ Ian Friday.

In hindsight, waiting was one of the best decisions I have ever made. Unfortunately, unlike last year, I'm the only African in our class of 40-some-odd students, one out of six black students, and one out of two black females. At lunchtime on the first day, instead of talking with the other newbies, I commiserated with my fellow sistah who I abandoned last year, leaving her as the only (self-professed) angry black woman in the class.

She told me that the prof-politics are rough, which I had already heard through the grapevine. Nobody ever seems to understand her perspective or identify with the nuances of her black characters, deeming them implausible or unrealistic. While the most far-fetched white characters and plot lines are given a thumbs up. She got so stressed out about having to defend her choices and herself that her appetite suffered, ass disappeared, and hair started falling out.

Listening to her story, I finally realized what my secret weapon is, as articulated by one of my friends during a late-night powwow about my first day: I'm a non-threatening black female. I look like a softie, easily manipulated, swayed, or taken advantage of. Whether or not any of that is true, perception is 9/10ths of reality, and I'm beginning to think it could be quite useful if people underestimate how tough I am.

As nice as I look, I'm definitely blessed with a bit of Naija charm. Apart from 419 scams, Nigerians are shrewd and determined people. Maybe you have seen it in action. Your mother goes up to the register in a pleasant mood, setting the groceries on the conveyor belt quite calmly. The cashier rings them up, charging an extra $.10 per pound for her red onion, and suddenly the corners of your mother's mouth turn up, she sucks her teeth, and speaks in that angry-Naija-woman voice until the manager himself fixes the mistake.

I can definitely play the Naija card when I need it. In an industry dominated by white, predominantly Jewish, and entitled males, I will need to be tough. And I'm fairly certain that I will achieve my creative vision because of it.

I wrote a paper on W.E.B. Du Bois for an AP English class way back in high school. Our task was to write about a life worth living for a national high school essay contest of the same name. I first heard about Du Bois in Paula Giddings' When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America, a historical treatise of sorts that showed up on my AP History summer reading list, though I went to a predominantly white high school with a 1.6 percent minority population.

Well, let me tell you, reading that book was like seeing for the first time, the imprint of which I will never forget. Giddings' voice and vision of the world set off a fire in my brain that burned off everything else that came before it, leaving behind a fertile soil in which new seeds of knowledge were planted.

Du Bois made a lot of sense to me, way more than Booker T. from Tuskegee. I'm not a fan of accommodationism, though I'm also not a believer in radical revolution. Du Bois seemed to be somewhere in the middle and heavy on the intellectualism, which I was in to at the time.

I read his autobiography, The Souls of Black Folk (cried when I got to "The Sorrow Songs"), the Du Bois reader, anything else I could get my hands on for the paper. Wrote an essay of lyrical prose in which I walked through Du Bois's life, his impact, and considered what it meant for me to be a budding black intellectual in the '90s. Put my heart and soul into that thing and put it in a brown envelope bound for the contest committee. I was sure that my painstaking efforts would be rewarded in some way, though that wasn't my sole motivation.

Of course, you already know how it turned out. I clearly am not an accomplished writer who cites critical high school acclaim as the impetus for her writing life.

My friend Kenny, on the other hand, received honorable mention for an essay on JFK that I cannot for the life of me believe was half as good as mine. I say this not to be boastful, but to be perfectly honest with you. And the reason why Kenny bested me didn't occur to me until my college semester at Spelman, when my professor, Jelani Cobb, noted that a book about whaling (In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick) beat out a seminal biography of Du Bois (W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963 by David Levering Lewis) for the 2000 National Book Award.

A book about whaling.

If Du Bois wasn't important enough for a national committee of esteemed, literate writers, I doubt he made much of an impact on the moderately respected ones convened for the purpose of my high school contest.

All of this to say. I write in spite of overwhelming evidence that the powers that be are not that interested in my story. It is a challenge -- claiming my name, country, race, gender, and potential in spite of overwhelming evidence that I might not matter at all in the grand scheme of things. But it is a challenge that makes life worth living. Makes the struggle worthwhile, pushing against this cultural indifference to me and what I represent.

Sometimes I am disillusioned, struggling to find my way in a foreign, hostile land. Educated in a system that leaves me ignorant of myself, I search for how I fit in, where and when I enter. African, American, black, female. Empowered or disempowered. Slave or free. Coveted or despised.

But I write still. A part of a larger movement of black women writing their way towards a life worth living. Making sense of incoherence so that perhaps others might find their way too.