blocked, blocked, blocked, blocked, got up at 5am to write. nepa went off just as i realized i hadn't boiled water for tea to wake me up. stared at my screen and dozed between words. finally curled up on the couch with my feet on two stacked bound volumes of newspapers and my head in the deep hole in my couch and slept off with my laptop blinking and purring beside me. (thank God for my investment in an inverter and battery). woke up and decided to read a few more documents from the censorship board, three chapters for the ur-text on northern nigerian cinema culture by B.L. 11:42am haven't written anything. wishing i could do everything everyone wants me to do for them, wishing i could do everything i want to do, no duties, and instead doing nothing but read. sometimes reading helps me start writing. in this case, it just makes me wonder if i can ever write anything so long and so elegant and so beautifully cited, with theory interwoven throughout the historical detail.
i try to remind myself of the sermon in hausa i heard yesterday, "perfect love drives out fear." yesterday it was comforting, inspiring, left me with a glow throughout the day. now i just feel guilty. i do not love [this topic? myself? God? my lost love? my department? my friends whom i am disappointing by refusing to go out and visit?] perfectly, therefore i fear. i fear writing. i fear disappointing. i fear not meeting a deadline.
nonsense.
i do not fear writing. i love writing--this sort of meandering spiel, for example--the reason i started this blog back when i was writing my (awful) masters thesis. i can naval gaze through typing all day long and gain a lot of insight from it. i fear academic writing. the necessary perfection of it. the craft of it. the "jobness" of it. if this article were a blog post, I would be done with it by now, and with a million links and photos too. And probably hundreds of more people would read it than will read this book chapter.
enough kvetching, i've wound out some of the tension in my head. back to the article.
it's on censorship. and perhaps i should try getting myself to write by just not censoring myself. this is not an article for publication, i will lie to myself, it is a blog post that people can google at midnight. i can edit it out later.
2 comments:
"The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
Be intent on the perfection of the present day."
"Things done well and with a care, exempt themselves from fear."
William Shakespeare
HELLO. Ina fatan kina lafiya. I must confess that as a Nigerian writer and blogger,I am so impress with your blogs.
Wonder what you look like actually. But your work I believe tells a little about who you are. Nice blogs. Pls keep the words rolling and keep a SMILE.
Post a Comment