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November 20^th, 2011: “Intro: I don’t believe in blurbs…”

I don’t believe in blurbs. Nor do I believe in telling people that they should read me. I believe in the power of art, the power of worlds that are so intricate, so complex, so reflective of the world that actually exists, that it’s hard to believe that they were created. Art moves us from X to Y. Art makes our world look just a smidge more pretty. There’s not enough art these days. There’s a lot of stupid Ben Stiller movies, there’s a lot of songs that don’t make sense, and there’s a lot of writing that’s trying to either send us back to the 19^th century or make us truly believe that the answer lies in cutesy texts that make fun of text message culture.

None of that is art. None of that aspires us to be greater than what we are. None of that persuades our world towards a greater direction.

We clearly need art more than ever, and our need for art becomes even clearer when we realize that the 21^st century doesn’t have to be an endless stream of youtube videos of puppies licking each other or contrived confessionals. There needs to be an alternative.

Let me say that I don’t believe that artists have to be part of movements. Sometimes, it’s only one artist for a ten year block, then another artist for a ten year block, and then maybe two for the next ten year block, which we then lump into a movement. If that was the world we were in, then I’d think it’d be very stupid to try to name a movement that might not even exist.

Art is at its best, however, when an entire group of artists are aligned with one turn of the world, and decide to represent that turn in a very similar way. I would be lying to myself if I didn’t feel like something on those lines was happening to us, right now. Look at Occupy Wall Street. Look at the protests in front of Washington against fracking. Now go over to Tokyo or Madrid or Sao Paolo and see those exact same protests. Then, check out those protests that were once in Cairo, but still in Damascus. After you’ve seen all those social movements, check out the work of JR, a French 28 year old who paints human eyes on the poorest parts of the world. Check out the music of M.I.A., the Sri Lankan Brit whose work zigs back and forth across continents and genres until you don’t even know what you’re listening to anymore.

The modernists saw the end of something great. The postmodernists saw a new cultural logic that was replacing that great. We see something great replacing what was once great. We no longer see the West, but the globe. But, that world can’t exist yet. We may want to party with that Brazilian you met at the bar last night and drink honey wine with her Ethiopian friend, but true globalization doesn’t exist yet. We think it exists, but it doesn’t.

So, let’s change that. Let’s get out of representative democracies (and for some people dictatorships) that don’t even care of our votes and move towards a system that does. Let’s re-imagine art as global so that new arts can be developed, ones that don’t just fuse West plus West, but West plus world. In fact, let’s toss away all those definitions of pseudo-progress and Englishtment, hat we’ve come to accept for the last four-hundred years in the West, the last four hundred years of oppression that defined the Global South, the four hundred years of isolation of the Far East. Let us throw it all away, and re-define our histories in the shape of the world.

That’s what my blog is all about.

November 26^th, 2011: “I’m afraid of the future...”

I’m afraid of the future. I’m afraid of growing older and not feeling like I’ve done anything in my life worth remembering. I’m afraid of being average, and of being hated for what I believe in, or for what I want to do. I’m afraid of rejection, even though I’ve gotten better over the years at feeling like I’m afraid of nothing.

I’m afraid of the future as the past tense is being unwritten. I’m afraid that Shakespeare, Chekhov, and whomever we want to call the greater writers of modernity will fade like the poems of Anglebert. I’m even afraid of our collective nihilism, and I really want to change it, and I know others that want to change it, but I occasionally feel that it still pulls me in.

I’m afraid to look back and notice that the earliest we tend to remember literature is from 5^th century BC, which is nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of years humans have existed. I’m afraid to think of all the works that don’t make it to the present, and all of the works that will make it to the future, because they adhere to some way of looking at the world that we don’t have yet. I’m afraid that, even if that art might be very good, art as we know might not exist.

I’m afraid of the future that is inevitable. I’m afraid that, someday, millions of years from now, everything that the human race has ever done will not mattered, because we’ll have been erased by a meteor or destroyed by atomic warfare, and unlike humanity, the earth shall dust itself off and begin anew, as it always has. I’m afraid because in a world like that, it doesn’t matter what Shakespeare or Kalidasa have done; if humans no longer exist, then no one will care about what was once done by humans. I’ I’m afraid because I’m slowly realizing how little it truly means to impact history, to impact a culture memory with your vision, because regardless of how deep or transcendent your vision is, the world strikes down those who have not humbled themselves to the world, and this especially will someday include humans.

Yet, I keep writing. Part of myself is inspired by fear. I want to tell everyone I’m a writer, and then for everyone to speak of me in the same tongue of the greats, because I want them to know I exist and am worth reading. I want them to see me as someone who’ll change the world, because otherwise, I might truly believe that I live a life that isn’t worth living.

But, I know there’s a part that isn’t driven by fear at all, the part of me that loves to live in my head and pull worlds from underneath me, the part of me that sees a beauty in the world that needs to exist and feels that only I can provide it, the part of me that knows it has to be me, and it can’t be anyone else, because I feel it, and therefore, it exists, and the part of me that knows that it doesn’t matter if no one will know my name, that no one might ever care about the worlds I create, because the world as we will someday know it will be nothing without the world that I can create.

December 6^th, 2011: “the portrait of a Kiran as an immature twat…”

Like many who have come before me, I was someone who wanted people who had once thought of me as average to know that I was anything but. I was inspired to write poetry because I was depressed over my parents disowning me for my sexuality, at 17. After my parents realized that I was here to stay, as a queer, and I settled down, I began to write to heal my ego. I wrote and wrote and wrote (random stories that would fall apart, usually beginning with the conceit of “I want to write about a homeless woman/coal miner/ strong independent Latina!”), and showed it and showed it and showed it to anyone (literally anyone; I had no concept of a vision that actualized its words around itself). Even though I regret this part of my life, where I burnt bridges (but also made some great contacts that still love my work; hint: some very big magazines) and made an ass out of myself (well, not to everyone), this period was my apprenticeship to my art. I learned the act of creating structure/dialogue/characters, mostly by fucking up and learning from it. My apprenticeship culminated with my meeting Irini Spanidou, an incredibly brilliant and insightful writer who would come to be my mentor. Irini saw through my mask and, in it, a writer of promise, but of no use. I showed her one of my stories, she thought it was crap, and she was this close to writing me off, until I told her not to, because one of my stories, “Aurora of Eden,” got a nice note from Zoetrope All Story (it’s a story about an Inuit teenager who does drugs to hide the fact that she doesn’t see beauty in herself). She read the story, and thought it was beautiful. From there, we began working together, for a couple of months. She tore into my stories and saw nothing but talent (in a bad way; I was a talented writer that wrote about nothing). She told me I would have to stop chasing fame and ego, and instead try to write that which the world needed to be told. I left the independent study with several stories that, with her guidance, became worthy of existence, and a crushed soul. What would I write about? Am I a writer? Should I continue to write? I didn’t know. I felt like I had nothing to say.

All of those thoughts changed during the summer, when the flow between my body and the world became unblocked, and I began my journey to become one with the world. I saw a cover for TIME with a picture of a woman with her nose cut off, and a subtitle asking us to stay in Afghanistan. I was disgusted. Here was TIME magazine exploiting and appropriating this girl’s story, for the sake of a war. It made me want to barge into TIME’s office and tell them what-for, except I realized I was powerless, and therefore, voiceless.

Except, I realized that didn’t have to be the case. I realized I wanted to write about war, but not about war from the frontlines, but instead from the people who are fragmented by it. It was that realization that made me write “Until We Meet Again,” a novella about three voices, a mother who loses her child thanks to the war and then finds herself unable to emotionally connect with her husband, a son kicked out of the army because of DADT who then gets outed to his parents, and a refugee who must choose between staying in Georgia with his best friend, or moving to California to chase a girl that might not even remember him, that move in and out of each other, creating a story that reads both fragmented and united. I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back one and a half years later, I’m so proud of my story. On one side, I’m so happy that the stories of “war” remained on the surface, and that it’s really a story about having to move on and say goodbye to people in your life, in order to grow as a person. On the other, I could tell that “Until We Meet Again” grew from stories like “Aurora of Eden” or “Jihad of the American Fool,” but I hadn’t known at the time that the style I had created in that story would be one I would continue to develop in later projects.

Those projects came to me when I moved to Spain. I had decided to live in Spain mostly to write a collection of stories called “Jesus Lives in Madrid,” which became 8 stories about a black, Islamic Jesus who is born in Spain, but, because of how new immigration is, is treated as an immigrant, and therefore over the course of the stories loses his sense of identity and self (it went swimmingly, thank you), but something greater pulsed into me just a week after arriving. Me and my classmates were in Segovia, a small fort town near Madrid, when I started imagining hundreds of years of history unfolding in front of my eyes in the wide green hills that overlooked the castle. People fighting with bows, then guns, over religion, then race. I had seen in my eyes the history of Spain, and in that history, I saw hundreds of other histories. I realized that I wanted to compress the entire world into a novel.

That being said, a vision is a vision, and it takes time and years of practice to create something of worth. My trip to Segovia inspired The Hearkening, an incredibly ambitious book that I know I am going to write, but I am not ready yet. That being said, when I went traveling around Eastern Europe near the end of my year in Spain, I heard in my head on the bus to Zagreb the phrase “We are the Poorest Country in the World,” over and over again. I didn’t really understand why my imagination was haunting me with that sentence, but, after hearing the story of a beautiful Croatian girl with long brunette locks and a Cindy Crawford mole (no, she seriously should have been a model, and I’m not even into girls) who guided me to a train station, I felt the need to write down my phrase and develop its world. So, I constructed hundreds of voices, some told in first person plural, most told in first person singular. It was all a hot mess. I stepped back. I realized I wanted to construct five regions that don’t exist in this world, but are imagined from this one, and I wanted to tell their stories, and are associated with being the poorest regions of the world, through the first person narrators who live in these regions and relate to that space through a greater tale that is weaved through their voices, and then first person plural narrators that come to tell the brutal and tragic histories of these regions through dyads like Mother-Son, Master-Slave, God-Devil. I wrote the second draft, and recently finished what I hope to be the final draft. Like “Until We Meet Again,” I’m proud of We Are The Poorest (Country) in the World. Instead of telling stories of genocide or war or famine, I told stories of a mother meeting her daughter for the first time, a sister comforting her sister after she loses her job, or a person confessing to being an atheist, ie stories we just don’t associate with places like the Congo or Curacao (not that I wrote about those regions either; again, regions that don’t exist in our world but are based in ours). I used the power of language like I did in “Until We Meet Again,” to fuse the narratives by having the last sentence of one paragraph respond to the first sentence of a new one, creating almost a dialogue that weaves between the different “I’s,” “we’s,” and the stories they share. Finally, six months after I wrote this first draft, Occupy Wall Street happened, a movement that centered itself on a multitude having the exact same type of global dialogue that I had created in my novel. It made me feel like, within the passing of a month, the postmodern world has ended and a new one had begun, and I was channeling that moment.

But, over time, I found myself less proud of my first novel. I still think it’s an important work, and therefore worth publishing, but in “Until We Meet Again,” I felt I had created a language that burst through the restrictions that language creates, that any person could see a part of themselves in that novella, instead of empathizing with a narrator behind a wall. That wall still exists in my first novel; in fact, I would say it’s the greatest critique I would give to that work, as well as the fact that it shows that it was clearly a novel written by someone still maturing into himself. That being said, both critiques I find minor, and I’m relatively proud of my novel, because it’s channeling the moment we live in now, tells a story that had to have been said, and does something innovative. I’ve just realized that I can do better.

In fact, I’ve started that “better” already. When I returned to the States, I found myself depressed. I was very upset being in a culture so industrial and consumeristic instead of historical and artistic. Furthermore, the memories of who I once was, both in high school (the fat, not attractive, super in-your-face, inconfident, depressed, unloved Kiran) and college (the overcompensating, super in-your-face, hyper-extroverted Kiran) bombarding me with the shame of who I once was. The process began as I found myself dreaming in a new world, a Global City that became named Monstropolis, a city once of a golden age where every language, race, and culture in the world coalesced had gone to ruin because of a disease that had wiped out its collective memory. I began to imagine caricatures of the world, a “Yugoslavia” that had killed his brothers out of the seven sins, and, feeling bad, resurrecting them at the dinner table and pretending nothing has happened, or “France,” a beautiful girl that only looks at herself in the mirror and no one else. At the center of this story is the Nameless Man, a person who has chosen to come to the city for no reason that he knows of. Every time he enters a new village, town, or space, he changes personality, and any time someone attempts to get into some form of relationship with him, he ends that person’s life. He refuses to be named, even as “man who bought my bread.” While this world grew in me, I started having horrible nights where I couldn’t fall asleep, nights where I’d think of girls who made fun of me for a high pitched voice, or being called out for trying to sit with people at a table where I wasn’t invited. They were memories that I hadn’t thought of in years.

Then, after I got back to New York, I started to rationalize my world in theory again. I had noticed that we were entering into a new era, a new moment, and as a result a new aesthetic, social, literary space, and I wanted to define it, even though I had noticed this just at the beginning of said possible movement. My imagination started to chase the world of what I later began to call “altermodernism” instead of my work, the exact opposite type of progress that had happened in Spain. I felt so overwhelmed by what I was trying to do, coupled with my post-Spain depression, and a sense that everything I did was a failure. I began to see a counselor. She made me realize something. In high school, my life became progressively worse until I was disowned by pretty much everyone I knew. When I went to college, I told myself that the Kiran of that time had died, and a new one began. I purposefully tried to create a new personality over my old one, a veil that was much more accessible, approachable, charming, lovable. Meanwhile, I’d show photos of my old self to people, telling them I was once fat, once incredibly awkward. I acted as if I was a member of the crowd that once pointed at me and laughed. I didn’t want to recognize that Kiran existed, and when I would, it would be only to point out how much better I was than him. My counselor made me realize that what I was doing was very unhealthy, that my old self didn’t die at all; he was underneath me all along.

And, that is where he remains, underneath Monstropolis. I am the Nameless Man, who chooses to escape the place I grew up and the family that raised me to hide from who I once was. Monstropolis represents the globe, the place to which I escape, whether in the sense of my vision, or the physical spaces I plan to live in (Portugal, South Africa, Italy, France, Russia, etc). I’ve realized that What Remains of Monstropolis came to me under fits of self-anxiety because it is now time for me and my art to become one, to take my memories and meld them over the warm steel of a sword into myself. In the same way that the Nameless Man finds the memories that caused him to become nameless through his interactions with the people of Monstropolis, I must now search the empty corridors and darkened streets of who I once was, in order to find myself and tell him that someone does indeed care about him, to hug him in my arms and tell him that he is loved.

It is through this first act of accepting and loving myself that the process in which I transcend my body begins. In order for me to write my greatest work, I’ll have to become so fused with, yet distant from the memories that were once my own that they appear to me like the memories of someone else or fictions I’ve created for myself. I can begin to take those fictions and place them into the bodies of people who aren’t me. I want to give birth to myself. I literally want to collapse everything that once made me who I am into the threads of history that have made up our world, and from that birth the globe as I know it. It will be that moment then, when my anxieties will disappear, that the hundreds of thoughts that flood my mind will suddenly calm, and I will no longer be the human that I once was. I will have exited this world, and finally find peace.

A list of my projects:

Finished:

Jihad of the American Fool – (Last Chance on 75^th Street, Aurora of Eden, Thankless Call, A Poetic Intermission: The One Night Stand of Flowers, Jihad of the American Fool, Song of Jack, Like Father, Like Son, A Facebook Message from the Person That Loves You, Until We Meet Again).

We Are the Poorest (Country) In the World – first novel

Jesus Lives in Madrid – a novel composed of 8 stories (Jesus Remembers, Jesus Buys Something, How Juan Betrayed Jesus, Jesus Lives in Madrid, Jesus Sees His Father, Jesus Fell in Love with a Gypsy Once, Jesus and the Bull, Jesus Dies)

Working on:

What Remains of Monstropolis – second novel

A Walk Through Western Streets – (A Walk Through Western Streets, Three Stops from Belfast, The Queen of Coimbra, and then the rest to be decided).

The Hearkening – to not be touched until after I turn 25.