I spend Day One Hundred Sixty in bed. Today I am eighty percent of the way to Day Two Hundred. Today is a lost day, and when I wake up Saturday, I'm not a lot better, so I stay in bed most of Saturday, too. Then, as a spontaneous act of freedom, I tell Michael that I'd like to go with him to The Avengers (His date for this long anticipated movie cancelled on him. Poor guy.) So, he dresses me up in a Super Hero shirt and we drive into the city. I'm posting a short excerpt, p 63, from my 2006 Theisis: Blue Eyes Remembering Toward Anti Racist Pedagogy as I try to catch up on my postings. "Hot Chocolate Home" has some of the same flavour of my last two days. (The movie was great, by the way! Michael explained back story all the way into the city, so I even got some of the jokes.)
Hot Chocolate Home
Hot Chocolate Home
My poem that begins “What happened to the playful plan” ends with the cry, “I want hot chocolate home.” The night before I began “Chapter One: The Bessborough Massacre” I invoked a playfulness with which I hoped to return to my writing the next morning; however, by submerging under the ice of memory I felt more and more uncomfortable until I finally stopped and wrote a draft of the poem – to mourn the loss of planned playfulness – before I could go any further. Ruth Frankenberg (1996) says, “Indeed it may be that spiritual path of disidentification from what appears to be, is in reality the way home” (p. 62). By re-crafting an old narrative I was re-identifying and then dis-identifying that identity.
Finding the way home, then, entails finding the way out – out of the master’s house. This essay will ask, though, how I got in –into the master’s house – in the first place. For asking how we got in – into this mess called racism – is, I believe, an important step toward getting out Toward getting home.” (p. 62)
Like Frankenberg, I seem to be in the process of self-eviction, homelessness and longing for a true home.
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