“You cannot act upon what you cannot see. And we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world. And it is not enough to stand against these dissemblers. There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity. And you will need that hunger, because if you follow that path, soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just their myths, not just their stories, but your own. This is difficult, if only because so much of our myth-making was done in service of liberation, in doing whatever we could to dig our way out of the pit into which we were cast. And above us stand the very people who did the casting, jeering, tossing soil into our eyes and yelling down at us, ‘You're doing it wrong.’ But we are not them, And the standards of enslavers, colonizers, and villains simply will not do. We require another standard — one that sees the sharpening of our writing as the sharpening of our quality of light. And with that light, we are charged with examining the stories we have been told, and how they undergird the politics we have accepted, and then telling new stories ourselves.
“The systems we oppose are systems of oppression, and thus inherently systems of cowardice. They work best in the dark, their essence tucked away and as unexamined as the great American pastime was once to me. But then a writer told me a story, and I saw something essential and terrible about the world. All our conversations of technique, of rhythm and metaphor, ultimately come down to this — to the stories we tell, to the need to haunt, which is to say, to make people feel all that is now at stake.”
