Week 4 / Fall 2023: The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

For months, my inability to write has been weighing on me: a reminder that I had promised myself that I would not lose my creative practice to the academy. I would not let it make me into a robot.

I am not a robot. But I do find myself to be more pessimistic, more critical, more skeptical, than even a year ago. And—whether it's the skepticism that makes it difficult to write or the lack of writing that breeds the skepticism—the point is that this is not who I want to be, nor are these the conditions I want to create for myself.

So, for the last few weeks, I have been thinking about writing. About writing creatively. Writing like I used to. Making a practice of it once more. Mostly for myself. But also, for other creatives who might be thinking about doing this graduate school thing.

I was walking across campus on Thursday, after picking up some books from the library. And the weather was beautiful. Easy on the body. And it occurred to me that I was walking across the campus of Brown University, in the place called Providence by some, and that fall would be here soon, and it all kind of felt like one of those movies from the 90s and early 2000s. And, for a moment, I felt something like serendipity. Gratitude for this strange process that is graduate school.

And what occurred to me, as I was walking across campus, holding two library books about Rosa Parks, in this moment of serendipity, was that I finally knew how I wanted to write about this time: I want to write about books. Through books, the ones that I am reading, the ones that are terrifying me, the ones that move me to think differently. So, here I am, beginning there.

On Tuesday morning, a few days before this moment, I joined a Zoom call for my Professionalization Seminar. I was in Austin, Texas, having extended my trip for a few days, and between the trip and the sometimes debilitating feeling of being a graduate student, I did not complete my assignment for class: which was to write the first three paragraphs of a Research Proposal. Namely, start a proposal: with an introduction, your intervention, and your methods. And I just could not do it. Instead, I “arrived” with one paragraph for three different projects—a reflection of my perpetual indecisiveness since beginning this process—one closely related to my original project about Rosa Parks and freedom fighting and Yoga, one about black trans poetics in Sympathetic Little Monster, and one about why black people love Paramore or why I love Paramore or if I can still be black if I love Paramore. I was all over the place. Somehow both overwhelmed and bored. And thus, my time in the workshop was not the most productive.

But by the end of class, feeling both the shame of my lack of preparation and inspired by the other projects presented, I decided to commit to one. For now. To, at least, try it on. Which has been an important lesson throughout this time in graduate school thus far: sometimes you just have to try it on. To fake it. To pretend. And (perhaps) trust that something will feel right eventually.

So, after finishing my assignment (late) and receiving feedback from my professor, and listening to a podcast about Jeanne Theoharis’s biography on Rosa Parks, that is the book that I am carrying around in my backpack this week (well, at least one of them): The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Maybe my project will, indeed, find some grounding in her story. And maybe not. But that’s at least a blip of this week in books.