strange to myself

strange to myself Lucy Zheng

“We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola’s father had dropped his seeds in his own little plot of black dirt.”

Antigone, in her rebellion, was sentenced to be buried alive. Pecola, the seed of a marigold, was planted in dirt that rejected her growth. Beloved, slain by her mother, was buried in a grave, with only seven letters to her life. The women are deposited in the earth, and the narrative ends. Or, in the case of Beloved, she returns, but as a reminder of the unending nature of trauma. But what if these women were the seeds of growth, of change, of healing from trauma? What would it look like for the seeds to sprout from the earth? What would bloom?

This class has pushed our learning in directions I’ve never traveled in a class. What has shaken me the most is how much we were asked to imagine. As much as the institutions I’ve been surrounded by have professed how much they prize creativity and innovation (which is perhaps merely valued only when it o ers something for the institutions to wield, something that abides by their definitions of utility), imagination to foster self-examination, self-expression, and healing both for myself and for the places I am within, is something I’ve seen consistently fade in myself.

I can think of reasons why I’ve felt compelled to throw out my imagining, certainly out of familiarity with and codependence on the structures I’ve grown up within, but also out of fear— fear that my imagining, which I haven’t even begun, will not come to fruition.

I could feel that uncertainty, that avoidance of imagining filling my mind countless times as we were asked questions I could not even begin to answer. I felt it as we were asked to depict Hortense Spillers’s “monstrous woman,” as we were asked to imagine what the ideal family would look like. (So many years of examining my own cold family, vowing not to perpetuate the same, and I still could not fully answer.)

I cannot say I have learned to imagine otherwise without bounds. But I have learned to think more in images, in symbols not fully concrete, but ones that provide me with questions to answer questions. Perhaps as these open up further possibilities, what I imagine for myself and for the world will begin inching towards realism, materializing from the nebulous haze of my imagination into something more substantial. And so, I ask, what if Antigone was the seed for rebirth, for healing? What would it look like for the “black dirt” of The Bluest Eye to not only support life, but for us to thrive within it, pump our hearts and breathe within it? What would it mean for us to bury our traumas, not to forget them, but to recognize the potential we have to grow beyond them, to imagine the trees and flowers that would sprout, blossom? What would it look like for the marigolds to grow that year, and every year?

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Is this a song?

When I listen to it, it begs to be expanded before it lulls me to sleep. But when I try to extend it, my attempts feel empty, lacking in depth and dimension and roundness of sound.

I may not have the means to sing beyond what is here yet. Sula herself perhaps could not. So I leave it here, a lullaby for Sula, a song and not a song, a cycle that resists escape and yet demands it.