Why We Art

Yesterday, my theatre teacher told us an actor is an observer. If you want to portray a sixteen-year-old girl, go to the high school cafeteria. Watch her sitting alone, peeling a tomato slice off of her burger. If you are going to play a homeless character, you need to talk to one. Ask if the concrete and blank stares soften with time. It is impossible to be someone without understanding what has shaped the entirety of their being. You need a certain degree of empathy. You need to be a student of the human experience.

I agree entirely.

I woke up incredibly early on January 13th to watch the Oscar nominations being released. I promised that if Greta Gerwig was nominated for best director, I would be hopelessly good for the rest of my life. Or Lulu Wang. Or Marielle Heller. So there I was, sleep in my eyes, clogged pores, black tea with milk, waiting, and waiting, lip reading the announcements because I couldn't find my headphones. I was taking a bite of my banana-peanut-butter-chia-seed mess of a breakfast, and the best director category was announced. Greta Gerwig wasn't on it. Or Wang, or Heller. I spilled chia seeds all over the keyboard. The Awkwafina snub came next, and I spilled more chia seeds.

Don't spill chia seeds on a keyboard, reader. They are impossible to get out.

We are reading The Great Gatsby in English class. Another roaring 20's, pretty cool, righttt? asks my teacher. Only if swing dancing comes back, I think. Jessie with the Jean Jacket told me we've not read a single text by someone who is not a dead, white, hetero-normative male. I like Jessie's jean jacket. It has lots of patches on it. I raise my hand and ask Mrs. Anderson, "are we reading any books by female authors this year?" She looks at me. "Well," she says, "I try to incorporate poems written by women into our activities... and the all-school read this year is by Elizabeth Acevedo..." In other words - no. Because in class we only read the story of one demographic. And unfortunately, pretty much no one bothers with the all-school read.

Also, the poems she incorporates into our activities? One of them was "Wild Nights" by Emily Dickinson. My teacher spelled her name 'Emily Dickenson.' I almost cried.

Here is why I do art - to explore who I am and how she fits into who we all are. I do art to capture the humanity in every human. For me, art is a mirror. We need to see ourselves reflected back from it. We need to see characters with our same struggles and our same colors and our same experiences. Junot Diaz, an author I deeply admire, once said:

"You guys know about vampires?... You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There's this idea that monsters don't have reflections in a mirror. And what I've always thought isn't that monsters don't have reflections in a mirror. It's that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves."

Art needs to reflect people. People are not all the same. Thus, art is not all the same, and the art we are exposed to should not be the same. The art we reward should not be the same. But that's not what I'm learning at school. I've only analyzed the world through the eyes of Jay Gatsby and Holden Caulfield and Charles Dickens and Erich Maria Remarque. This is not to say that these stories aren't important; on the contrary, they are crucial stories to tell. But all the other stories are, too. Crucial. I want to see a woman through a woman's eyes. I want her to be more than a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, because, shockingly, women are people, not concepts. I want to read the experiences of African Americans, and Indigenous Peoples, Latinos, Pacific Islanders. Give the high-schoolers a protagonist belonging to the LGBTQ+ community, and help foster a more accepting and empathetic world. All cultures, all ethnicities, all religions. If we read a classic that's incredibly racist, sexist, etc... let's have a discussion about it. Can we read it because of its problems, and to recognize how these problems persist today? Can we talk please, instead of pretending the issues aren't there? Where are the princesses in wheel chairs? Where are the princes who are allowed to cry? I want to understand. I want to be taught the world through a whole closet of shoes. I'll step into one pair, then another, and every time, discover something new. A new layer of empathy. A new mirror.

Art is to tell me why you hurt. Art is to tell me why you go on through the hurt.

Sophomore year is when you need to start making a plan. You're expected to research colleges, and figure out what you're interested in, and how to go about studying for the big tests. Abby, my sister, has known what she's wanted for always. She's going to be an engineer or in tech theatre. She's going to move to Florida and have a beach house and dogs. I admire her a lot, because I've known what I've wanted for never. This is the first year I've ever really had a general idea of how I want to touch the world. I want to do art. I want to be a film director (not just a female director, but a director - no one calls Quentin Tarantino a male director...) and a playwright and an actress. I want to tell stories. Art is the most real of things I've discovered in the world.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban confused me when I was little, because I do not believe in souls. I don't think there's a glowing blue light in us that can be sucked out by dementors. But to me, art is the thing closest to a soul. It's all of the lights and textures and colors in a brain thrown into the world. You stitch every bit of yourself into it. It's raw, it's vulnerable, and it is beautiful. Art reflects life, life reflects art.

The timbre of your voice is different than mine. Your gait and the way you balance the weight of your physicality are different than mine. We are not one voice. We are not one being.

Thus - we are not one story.

- Maya

Photo by Autumn Studio on Unsplash, Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash,
Photo by Rochelle Brown on Unsplash, Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash