The Process
My mother still feels like an immigrant. Although it has been over forty years since she has stepped off the boat from Greece and has become a success in her field, she still feels like an alien in this country.
This is why I chose being Greek as the topic for my first piece of this course. I wanted to explore diaspora in a more modern sense. I wanted to talk about myself on paper for once in college and not about some recent study on the effects of social media in the classroom. Even though I wanted to write from a very personal vantage point, I was not prepared for this process to push me into such a self-reflective mode of thought. But it did.
I tried to work through in my mind what it meant to be Greek and what my identity was in terms of it all. I was coming up with this and that, trying to play social scientist and analyze the Greek condition. I was prepared for some onion-peeling, but was surprised with the great amount to which I felt so attachd to this project. Of course, my repurposing is a personal essay, so the main topic was going to inherently be me and my experiences, but it turned into more than that. It turned into a whole web of varying ideas, even some that I feel are still quite inconclusive. It turned into a cultural and social explanation. It turned into a discovery.
When deciding which route to take with my repurposing piece, my mind immediately went to the original version of this text which was a narrative split into three voices: one my mother's, one my yiayia's, and the last was mine. It was an assignment given to us with the guidelines that it had to be in this form, for we had just read The Sad Passions, written in this segmented way.
For one reason or another, I just was not in love with what I had produced. It felt forced and it did not feel like mine. Since we were asked to choose something of this sort to repurpose, I decided to just talk freely about my life and about my mother. I wanted to talk about her family as well, and their impactful existance on my own cultural identity. I knew what I had to say was extremely subjective, and not scientifically supported, but I have such a personal attachment to the matter that I had trouble finding any other topic that I could stick with for the entire semester. I made the choice to discuess my Greek culture with one foot in the personal realm and one foot out as well. I wanted to be slightly more on the outside of things than I was in the original version, because I felt like I had some larger ideas I wanted to point out. It was hard to be stuck in such an intimate first person story-telling perspective such as the previous form. The Sad Passions was a very compelling book because each chapter sifted through the minds of the characters so intrusively, but that was a guideline given to us by the teacher and I wanted to do something different. I wanted to do more than just be a storyteller, which is why I used my family members and myself as examples for larger concepts. Each re-draft got more personal in some areas and less personal in others, yet all the while I knew I wanted to maintain a comfortable tone, a welcoming voice that could easily share my theories on the Greek-American condition without sounding like a lecturer.
In my mind, the only way I could go from there was to look at all my old photographs from Greece. I am a lover of film photography and have even built a make-shift dark room in my country house basement in Upstate NY. Every image on this website is my own, taken on my Minolta camera, and I felt that I could say something with my family's portraits for remediation. I didn't want to just compile old photographs and mix them in with new ones from our past vacations. I wanted to go one step further and find exact spots that my family and I have visited that my ancestors once lived. Sentimentality had a small part in this idea, but I also found it a funny supplementing piece for my Repurposing. We so clearly, as diasporic beings, want to return to the "homeland." For whatever reason, either to feel some out of body connection or to just say we have been there, the community of Whatever-Americans are suckers for the old country. And this is not a bad thing whatsoever, which hopefully is what my readers catch onto in my Repurposing. It is just one of the many links I have seen while thinking of my heritage, and while thinking of myself. Our connection to the homeland is very important for immigrants and descendents of immigrants.
Throughout this process I have realized that in terms of my writing, I am very much interested in myself. Not in the narcissistic way Kanye West named his 2013 album Yeezus (a combo of Yeezy and Jesus, I mean come on), but I do gravitate towards topics that give me the ability to draw from my own experiences. Maybe I have always known that, what with my various journals and confessional poems from high school, but this course has further illuminated this fact. So much so that I was actually able to produce an intelligible reason as to why I write in the first place. "Why I Write" is an peculiar piece, because although I offer reasons for my interest in writing, I still end up with an open-ended conclusion. Much like my conclusion for Repurposing. I am open to the idea that there will never be a final product of my work and maybe no final product to my thoughts or feelings. The editing process is never done in my mind. Just the other day I was re-reading an old poem I had written in my senior year English class, one I had barely gotten through when I read it aloud to my class because my tears were choking me up so much. As I read it again two years older, I found my hands were on my keyboard ready to make changes to the style, the stanzas, the syntax, because nothing is ever perfect nor is it ever complete. I had new feelings that I wanted to add to the poem, no realizations that I did not have in high school.
This process was exactly that-- a continuous stream of changes, re-working little parts until we were just a bit more satisfied than how we last left it. Right now, I can say I am satisfied. I don't mean to glaze over the fact that it was pretty damn difficult either, but after all the staring at my computer screen in the dead of night, I must say I'm happy with the final product. Sure, I had limitations. Like when I couldn't find any good research for my Repurposing and seriously thought about changing the whole topic. But there was something in the piece that kept me going. It starts with some thoughts and takes different twists and turns as I thought it all out on paper. You can see my thought process changing paragraph by paragraph, adding ideas and contradicting myself. And being very open to my contradictions. That could be a risk pattern of my writing style, but for now I really like it. It helps me see what the hell I think and why, because sometimes my brain is working way too fast for me to keep up. The act of writing the Repurposing (including all the supplemental pieces) functions as an auto-evaluation in of itself. This entire project is a collection of my growth and change within one semester. This is mainly why I love to write, to see changes and characteristics that are not apparent during the process, but prevelant when I look back at it later. That is precisely why this process was so entertaining for me and why it is going to be extremely helpful by the time I'm a senior. The transparency of my project will help me change as a writer within this program, and hopefully into my adult life.
