Words on Walls

As I begin to write monologues and short stories for this project, I find myself thinking more and more about narrative voice.  When I write poetry, I use my own voice most of the time.  When using my own voice, I feel the least inhibited and self-conscious about my writing.  There are diction and syntax considerations, of course, and decisions about rephrasing to be made.  Still, when I’m writing from my own perspective, these decisions are generally meaning-oriented rather than designed to establish a particular narrative profile.

By contrast, when I write in other formats, I find that using the voices of others often feels necessary.  Right now, I am writing a series of monologues and short stories in response to my time in Belfast.  Most of the time, it feels wrong to write from my own perspective.  I find that from my own point of view, as a young American, I have little of weight to say of most aspects of life in Belfast.  However, though I want desperately to write from the point of view of a local to develop a voice of urgency, authenticity, and relevance, I find it hard to create a voice that a reader would find believable and coherent.  As Anne-Marie pointed out to me last week, one of the most formidable obstacles in creating such a voice is dialect.  In order to make a character from Belfast believable to the reader, it is important to capture the language of the city.  I’ve wrestled with language choice in my pieces over and over again, but until recently I felt that I had come to an impasse.  Then, about a week ago, my sister sent me a recording of a short story by Northern Irish author Benedict Kiely posted on the New Yorker website.  The recording, narrated by Colum McCann, is so quintessentially Northern Irish that I felt almost transported back to my time in Belfast this summer.  After listening to the story, titled “Bluebell Meadow”, I found that writing in a believable Northern Irish voice became immensely less intimidating and more natural.  I’ll keep trying to immerse myself in Northern Irish literature as I write!  Here’s the link:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2011/10/24/111024on_audio_mccann

While I’ve done a bit of blogging for courses during my two years at Duke, I’ve never tried anything quite like this before.  I’m creating this blog out of a desire to track my readings, encounters, and reflections over the coming months as they relate to a year-long creative project that I hope will emerge from these studies. Over the coming months, I intend to use this blog as a space to reflect on readings on walls and borders from my Independent Study with Robin Kirk as well as to respond to readings and experiences as they relate to my creative project (hopefully an interactive poetry and fiction exhibit).

It’s hard to know quite where to start, both with my independent readings and with writing.  The more I consider the topic of walls and borders, the broader the category seems… I’m trying to start producing work by consider some of the walls that I already know.

I’m just starting to learn about the West Bank Wall that the Israeli army built in 2003.  

But here are a couple that I’m much more familiar with:

Peace Wall in Belfast, Northern Ireland

Wall around Duke University’s East Campus

All three have been built for very different purposes and have certainly exacted different reactions from members of the communities in conflict.  Nevertheless, I’m starting to believe that while the stories behind walls are unique and remarkably complex, human beings living in walled spaces often experience similar questions and emotions and maybe even come to similar conclusions about what the presence of a wall means for them personally, for their families, and for their community.  Looking forward to considering these issues more fully in the coming weeks.