On Joyce and Being an Expat

Since, no matter what else I read, everything is gobbled up by Ulysses in my brain, and I want to find my way back into this project, I've been looking at the common threads.

Here's an interesting fact: James Joyce left Dublin to WRITE ABOUT Dublin.

Isn't that what I did? Isn't that what so many Southerners do?

Why couldn't he stay there? Why did he have to leave?

One of the reasons he left was the intense moral authority of the Catholic Church; the other was the authority of the British Empire. He felt there were nets tying him up, preventing him from being able to make the work he wanted to make. He left to free his mind.

I think about myself as a young woman, trying to come out, trying to be a sexual being, trying to be vibrant and alive, trying to be free in my own body. I left Memphis because I felt my body unfree there because of the authority of the Bible and the Belt.  Not only was my body hemmed in and judged and shamed; my voice didn't work. I'm not speaking in metaphor.  I lost the ability to sing twice in my childhood and once in college.  All three times I lost it because of the intense out-of-my-bodyness I felt when the singing teachers told me the ways I was doing it wrong. I couldn't sing in Memphis, home of the blues, birthplace of rock and roll, cradle of american musical civilization.

After college I got a job as an actress and moved to the big city. Atlanta. Atlanta was easier in so many ways. It was Southern but enlightened; urbane but drawling; the music was good, the food was good, the air felt right, not too far from home, but I felt freer there.

Two years later I relocated to the real big city. Chicago meant a sudden imprisonment in my accent; it meant a backwards step in my freedom because I came as a girlfriend, not as me; I had to lose myself to find myself and it was only when I came to Chicago that I awakened that nostalgia, that physical longing for the past, for home, even though home had been in so many ways oppressive.

The things I missed -- that I still miss -- are sensual.  Food. Soft air. Slowness, drawl, I miss the sounds of Memphis more than anything. The rhythms of speech that are curved not angular, I miss the diphthongs, oh how I miss them in my own mouth, I'm all clipped nasal midwestern now. Chicago hurts my ears.

It was when I got here that I started listening to country music. Before that I despised country music as the ultimate symbol of redneck racism, of smallmindness, of violence, of white boys dipping snuff leaning against  the back of their pick up trucks before school listening to Hank Williams Junior sing "Just a-swanging."

It wasn't until I moved to Chicago that I began to truly write. I wrote my first song. I wrote pages of memoir (all lost, all lost, things I am sure I no longer remember, but I ripped up the pages in embarrassment) and I began to find my singing voice and my writing voice, in this cold place that hurts my ears.  It's a joke I used to make onstage all the time, that I never would've written these songs if I hadn't moved to Chicago and gotten so damn cold I had to sing just to keep warm.

Joyce is a viscerally aural writer; that is, his words are at times almost physical experiences, in the body and ear as much as in the mind. At times he uses language to imitate the sound of music, especially in the Sirens episode of Ulysses. He described the technique he used as a fugue, and the words wind in and around each other in phrases and rephrases, with onomatopoeia and repetition and double and triple meanings that operate like layered notes, with senselessness that slowly (oh-too-slowly) reveals itself as sense.

I'm thinking of playing around with writing prose using blues forms or other southern forms of music (for some reason I love bluegrass best, even though it's from the other end of the state) as a way of bridging the space between my thoughts and my ear, especially since it was my cold and homesick ears that led me to write.