by Vanessa Kisuule
I am sat in bed, finally savouring a moment of stillness after our first workshop as a group. It has been a strange and illuminating day full of discussion, learning and the slow shedding of many layers of preconceptions about this project and what it will involve.
Up until today, all I knew was that some people who know a lot about bones were going to talk to us about some findings they had that could reveal more about what it was like to live as a slave. I knew that some very esteemed, very experienced writers were also commissioned for this project. I knew that I was the youngest and perhaps the only one who came from what I will tentatively call a more 'populist' angle of writing and performance. I have never considered myself a literary writer, though I resent the need to make these distinctions at all and find them redundant at best and reductive at worst. However, I definitely felt a (mostly self imposed) pressure to be 'taken seriously' – I did not want my relative youth and inexperience to make me stand out in the room for all the wrong reasons. Little did I know that every other person walking into the room today was bringing their own little invisible backpack full of imagined shortcomings with them. The atmosphere was friendly but slightly stilted at the beginning of the session. We sipped tea from paper cups and politely introduced ourselves to each other. I don't think any of us quite knew what to make of the fact that we were all in a room together with the purpose of creating a new and potentially groundbreaking narrative up from scratch.
It felt as though of all of us stood at the edge of a swimming pool in the thick of winter, all shivering and distrustful. None of us had done anything quite like this before and we were resisting this new territory. None of us were sure who was going to be the first to dip their toe in and tell the rest of us how the water is. I particularly felt like I was about to jump in to something with little to no idea of what the rules were – some of the other writers had at least already met eachother whereas I definitely felt that the workshop was my first real initiation into what this project was. It become apparent fairly quickly I wasn't the only one who felt unsure. At the beginning of the workshop we all shared our fears and uncertainties of what the project would entail. I was astounded to hear this room full of accomplished artists, all who seemed so much more formidable and experienced than me, express their trepidation. It was this that made me decisively shrug off my own fears quite early on in the session. I realised that this clearly had nothing to do with capability, but with mindset. We were all capable people in that room – we would not have been there, otherwise. It would seem that the success of the project did not rely on that and more in a willingness to bask in the unknown, to become child like explorers.
Nothing like this 'literary archeology' project has been done before and this does make one instinctively feel unsure as to what to do without an established template to draw reference from. But instead of seeing this as a detterent, I imagine it now as a giddy freedom that will test the true elasticity of my creative process. I will try and remember this feeling when later, inevitably, I will be sat in front of an explosion of scattered sheets of paper all covered in disparate lines and words that refuse to create anything coherent. I will remember this when I am sat in front of the blank white abyss of a Word document, silently screaming at myself to write something. I will remember this when I don't want to write, when I'm too tired to write, when I have lost will or faith or trust to write. I will remember this when the pain of this subject suddenly sears through me, when the paths of the past draw ominous parallels with the world as we now it. When I lose sight of what this is all about, I will pull the memory of how today felt from the deep recesses of my brain and take heart. I will remember and how honoured I felt to be in the room and how excited I was to begin the journey. How artless and joyous I felt when I unstrapped my ego and my fear from my back, took a big running leap into these unchartered depths and swam.