Present-ism
Have you ever woken up and realized how radically changed or different you are as a person? Not like a sudden change, just like a sudden realization that you are so different now than you used to be.
I had this thought this morning after noticing an upcoming interview on a Palestinian salt book cover pulling back the wallpaper and revealing the yellow wallpaper, and I thought what an excellent motif this to be, and how I actually just wanted to know more about the Palestinian book. I already know quite a bit about the book The Yellow Wallpaper. They taught that in schools, though perhaps maybe I did not quite understand the point of its representation in schools, even though my friends on the lawns preached it to me in between our discussions on Marx.
The Yellow Wallpaper is a 1892 gothic horror and psychological fiction short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman about a wife who is confined to a nursery for treatment for “hysteria” by her physician husband. In 1892, the wife’s crime of “hysteria” was working, writing, and stimulating her mind.
When my friends and I discussed these stories and other lesser known stories published around the time like Madame Bovary by French realist Gustave Flaubert, we understood that the only reason they were shared, published, or popular at the time besides their sensationalism is because the woman in the end was punished for her “crimes.”
Okay, okay, so my friends and I were probably, most definitely, discussing their assigned readings of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for their James Joyce class, and it was just me who had The Communist Manifesto stuffed in my back pocket, and I have never read Madame Bovary, but I know the nitty-gritty details of what it entails, and I still have that copy of the manifesto.
What I have always loved about Afro-Futurism is that it teaches us to dream about realities in which characters get what they deserve.
I’m not sure I write that way. A lot of my works of art tend to have unresolved endings.
The Palestinian writer’s page who I was on this morning is Isra J. Yousef, a writer herself. It was another writer she planned to host in interview. Isra J. Yousef is one of the places that Palestinian culture has been translated and represented to me. This is how I know that their revolution has largely been peaceful and cultural like ours.