I WRITE FOR MYSELF, MY FIVE BEST FRIENDS, AND 9 MILLION OTHERS

Further Reflections On the Question of Audience

Stephanie Hsu in Everything Everywhere All At Once. Photo by Allyson Riggs

Our last newsletter sparked a number of questions about audience, and while I answered a few of these as best as I could, I thought it might be useful to expand on some of my comments.

One subscriber wondered if a writer ever should ever write for anyone other than oneself and I agreed with them.  A writer should write for themselves but I noted: -- how does one define or construct a self? The illusory unified modernist concept of self is one definition that's held sway for a long time but there are other definition of the self. Some of these are less individualistic, less atomizing, involve multiplicities, the imprints / voices / presences of others.

I also offered up the possibility that we can write for ourselves and, say, our five best friends, without compromising anything.  We could write for ourselves, our five best friends, and 9 million others and still keep faith with our art. 

In truth I find it far easier to soft-pedal shit and bend the art towards the Sith-hole of approval when I don’t have my best childhood friends in my mind keeping me honest, keeping me away from comemierderia.   

Yes, you can definitely write for your self and your self alone.  And at the same time… for others as well. 

Call it simultaneity.  Simultaneity is not only possible, in places like the Caribbean, it is essential to survival.

We are all Everything Everywhere All At Once, if we only look closely.

I Write for Myself, My Five Best Friends, and 9 Million Others¹

This is my credo.  I not only contain multitudes, ala Whitman, I contain multitudes and their opposites, their negations, simultaneously, ala Glissant².  People, dreams, books, songs, longings, experiences, places, non-places, gossip, learning, absences, feelings, specters and countless otros. This rhizomatic simultaneity has guided my aesthetic/political vision since my first book Drown.  

Édouard Glissant. Foto by Divulgação

I’ll have more to say about Audience (but from a craft perspective) but this dialogue about who we write for got me thinking about one final fact and we’ll end with that:

Fact: we all learn language in communion with other language users. 

And this happens before we’re even born.  As Lewis, Amini, and Lannon remind us:

Bathed for nine months in his mother's vocalizations, a baby's brain begins to decode and store them--not just the speaker's tone, but her language patterns.  Once born, a baby orients to the familiar sound of his mother's voice and her mother tongue, and favors them over any other.  In doing so, he demonstrates the nascent traces of both attachment and memory.

In other words, our language brains are always already constructed with others, through others, by others.  Even if we are speaking or writing or singing only to ourselves we are doing so with an instrument that was forged by community.

Yes, we may sing to ourselves, write to ourselves -- and ourselves alone -- but recognize that standing besides these solipsistics are other presences, other relations, that haunt our every I. 

1. I wish I remember the writer I stole that quote from, a quote I’m sure I’m mangling in my recollection; unfortunately the notebook in which I had scribbled the attribution got lost during Hurricane Sandy so if anyone recalls the source please drop me a note.

2. Writer, poet, philosopher, critic Édouard Glissant: https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2015/11/04/edouard-glissant/