Hey everyone!
I feel like jumping right into this piece which draws upon Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir, Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, more from Nadia Owusu’s Aftershocks, and a post-modernist exhibit at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (CCBB) here in Rio.
But before we do, I want to say thank you! This is my little passion project. It brings so much meaning in my life to carve out time to write and to share that with you just because (especially as Marcos recovers from surgery, I onboard to a new job, and we search for a new apartment!). My ask, as usual, is if you actually open this email (bless), read it, and take something away, why not share it?
Take good care of yourselves <3. Blessings e beijos do Rio!
Jodi
“If you are simply stating what you know to be true, the ego is not involved at all, because there is no identification. Identification with what? With mind and a mental position. Such identification, however, can easily creep in. If you find yourself saying, “Believe me, I know” or “Why do you never believe me?” then the ego has already crept in.” – Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, p. 84
I usually avoid starting essays with someone else’s words. It feels off to relinquish the most important real estate. So I’ve read, the voice of the author – “the delivery system for experience1” – must start singing in the first sentence.
The trick, writes Mary Karr in The Art of Memoir, is “finding a tractor beam of inner truth about psychological conflicts to shine the way”. Because voice, along with content and structure, is one of three ways writers differentiate themselves it needs to be not only unique and relatable, but also stable and knowable. It needs to be a defining feature, and so finding it is a labour of love.
In real life though tinkering with how we sound is not a crucial, admirable effort. It’s suspicious. In her memoir Aftershocks, author Nadia Owusu shares “code-switching”2 experiences, including a painful interrogation by an ex-boyfriend:
“Did you change your accent on purpose?” (It wasn’t a fully conscious decision, but it wasn’t completely without effort either.) “When it changed, did it change who you are in some fundamental way?” (Almost certainly, yes. Our voices, I think, are not just the vehicle through which we express ourselves, but also affect how we process and translate the world, how our dreams are made.) “Did changing accents ever feel confusing?” (Not really. Only because of other people’s reactions. Many people of color I know code switch.)”
In recounting her experiences as a Black multilingual, Nadia draws upon Zadie Smith’s essay Speaking in Tongues to further underscore the problematic, Western notion that we have one voice, and what it’s like for those of us who don’t fit this expectation. It’s one thing to adapt, play, and exercise our multitudes in what we wear, like to eat, and sound like on paper, so long as we keep our voice constant. If we don’t, as Nadia Owusu puts it, “it’s grounds to assume moral failure.”
A year and change expressing myself in a brand new-to-me language has muted a lot of the intra-personal, existential crises I used to worry about. I joke that because my vocabulary is limited in Portuguese I’m happier. I can’t deliberate about someone’s intentions or oversights. I talk about sea turtle sightings, food, and soccer. I’m different here, even have a whole persona glued together by a nickname (Jojo) because my English name is difficult to pronounce. This persona, no doubt, gives me license to be different in a way that would raise eyebrows back home, where it’s assumed we have One Voice because we’re One Person.
This is why Tolle’s passage I kicked off this essay with resonated with me. The ego-led process of identification is way more insidious than how we literally talk or write about “our” experiences. Tolle reminds us it’s the process of identification that's spiritually conflicting, not the content de jour. And yes, this applies even when what we’re identifying with is factually correct.
For me now, knowing thyself (if it has any non-cliché substance at all) is less about any particular set of values or principles. It’s more about prioritizing the deliberative capacity we have. That nebulous part of us that remains constant has nothing to do with our circumstances or preferences, let alone our accent(s) or voice(s). While it may be the closest in writing we get to intention, our voice is just another temporal thing we must learn how to rely on without identification, without a sense that this is who I am.
“Some people never forget the first time they disidentified from their thoughts and thus briefly experienced the shift in identity from being the content of their mind to being the awareness in the background.” – Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth.
For me, who we are is a lot more about observing and making peace with all the parts of us than it is about grasping any one, seemingly defining feature, like our voice. When I write (whether it’s of tractor beam luminosity or not) I do want to run with Mary Karr’s advice and show the inner truth about psychological conflict. I want to speak to the reality that who we are, if anything, is multifaceted.
Context-specific, yet timeless.
And we sound like grace.
The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr. WHAT A GIFT!
Another beautiful work Jodi! Or Jojo :) (Which is the cutest nickname ever btw.) It's really interesting to observe how your writing is becoming gradually more and more philosophical, psychological, and academic in a sense. I am curious if ever you would consider becoming a researcher where you could perhaps merge your impressive business and management skills with your passion for thick philosophy and deep psychology? Lord knows, MBA and HR programs could benefit from research that explores how these themes of identity and cultural dissonance fit into the world of commerce, HR, organizational psychology, and higher-level management. Just food for thought - might be cool to marry your two worlds one day. Or not. Just an idea. For now, it's very cool to see how your writing is changing when you have to freedom to just explore. Thank you for this piece. The pictures are stunning too. The exhibition of the devices as an audience staring back at as left me speechless.