Infinity
Jacqueline Woodson’s brown girl dreaming is a beautiful coming of age story explored through crafted short poems. Together, the poems build upon one another to tell the story of a young black girl in the 1960s-1970s. The piece “the beginning,” captures the moment Woodson was given the best gift she could ever imagine: words. With the gift of words and the knowledge of how to use them, she shows us how we are able to create new worlds, how we can understand the past better, improve the present, and hope for the future. Or, as she says, with words we have infinity in our hands.
This particular piece (the beginning, 62-63), and the entire book, emphasize the vastness of time. Woodson talks about the lives of her ancestors as they were enslaved and faced unimaginable trauma, the courageousness of activists like MLK jr and Malcolm X, changemakers like Ruby Bridges and Rosa Parks, her own living family, and her friends. All of these people seem to exist at the same time when Woodson talks about them. She makes the past the present, the present the future, and so on. By bringing all of time to the same moment, she is creating infinity through her words and stories.
As writers, we are given the ability to make the world what we want, or need, it to be. Though not as easy to pinpoint as Woodson’s discovery of the powers of words, I was captivated by them at a young age, too. I wrote “books” and songs in my free time, read anything I could get my hands on, fell asleep to my dad telling me stories every night – usually from his own life, yet sometimes exaggerated, I’m sure – and obsessed over the idea of becoming an author. My dad owns a book printing and distribution company, and each time I visited his office I’d beg to visit the warehouse. There, I’d try to imagine how many books were inside the massive shipping boxes stacked on the massive shelves in the massive warehouse. The closest number I could pinpoint was infinity. The world opened up completely when I discovered that all of these books had words created by different people across the world, and I could be one of them. Like Woodson, the gift of words has transformed my life.
This particular piece (the beginning, 62-63), and the entire book, emphasize the vastness of time. Woodson talks about the lives of her ancestors as they were enslaved and faced unimaginable trauma, the courageousness of activists like MLK jr and Malcolm X, changemakers like Ruby Bridges and Rosa Parks, her own living family, and her friends. All of these people seem to exist at the same time when Woodson talks about them. She makes the past the present, the present the future, and so on. By bringing all of time to the same moment, she is creating infinity through her words and stories.
As writers, we are given the ability to make the world what we want, or need, it to be. Though not as easy to pinpoint as Woodson’s discovery of the powers of words, I was captivated by them at a young age, too. I wrote “books” and songs in my free time, read anything I could get my hands on, fell asleep to my dad telling me stories every night – usually from his own life, yet sometimes exaggerated, I’m sure – and obsessed over the idea of becoming an author. My dad owns a book printing and distribution company, and each time I visited his office I’d beg to visit the warehouse. There, I’d try to imagine how many books were inside the massive shipping boxes stacked on the massive shelves in the massive warehouse. The closest number I could pinpoint was infinity. The world opened up completely when I discovered that all of these books had words created by different people across the world, and I could be one of them. Like Woodson, the gift of words has transformed my life.
My dad's company warehouse in 2016 – the shelves to the left go on forever, I still can't conceptualize how many books are really inside the warehouse. As of last December, they had printed more than 12,000,000 books since 1996 (the company started in 1982, so there were more books before this count began in 1996).
Comments
Post a Comment