Reflections

The reflections unit required us to look within ourselves to discover our inner truths and identities. The goal of the unit was to produce reflective work which represented our personalized experiences and to visually present that work through what we created in our elective class. In English, we wrote a 650-word personal statement about ourselves which for some acted as their Common Application Personal statement when applying to college. We also read Citizen, by Claudia Rankine, which was a collection of lyrical essays and poems. We then were assigned to write our own lyrical essays, modeled after those we read in Citizen. In honors English, we read Notes from No Man’s Land, by Eula Biss, which detailed her personal experience with race and her racial identity throughout her life. Upon the completion of reading the book, our final assignment was to compare Biss’ work to Rankine’s within an essay.

Regarding my self-growth, I learned that I really enjoy capturing and detailing the personalized experiences of individuals. What I valued about the projects for this unit, was that I could capture someone’s identity through multiple different lenses and expose others to the intimate world we each live in.

Personal Essay

My personal essay focused on my growth as a first generation Ethiopian -American and journey to self-acceptance. I also write about how along the way, I was able to use poetry as a channel for me to creatively express my inner thoughts and opinions.

I re-wrote the Personal Essay three times before I finally was comfortable and confident to send to colleges as a  reflection of myself. My main difficulty at first was that I simply talked about my experience without truly showing what impact it had on me and how my experience has molded me into the person I am today. I feel as though I captured my being with my essay and feel that I did a good job at answering who I am.

The essay I recorded was the first version of my personal essay. The text below the audio is my final personal essay.

It’s rainy season in Ethiopia. My Grandfather’s old Volkswagen heaves to a stop at the red light and I am squished in the back next to several cousins. My petite eleven-year-old frame contorts itself into a position in which I can avoid eye contact with the beggars knocking on the car window. Instead, I look the other way and see a young mother on the side of the street, nursing her infant as her older child tries to sell candy to empty-handed customers. The light finally turns green and I begin to exhale the air I hadn’t realized I was holding in.
My parents have taken me to visit my grandparents in Ethiopia during the summer months from the tender age of one. They hoped that my siblings and I would immerse within the Ethiopian culture and make lasting family memories. Above all, they desired to instill a sense of pride in our ethnic heritage and, indeed, in ourselves.
My young mind, however, focused on the devastating poverty, and lack of hygiene and material comfort. I didn’t want this country to represent my family roots. Thus, I rejected my Ethiopian-ness.
I refused to take Ethiopian food to school or bring friends home in order to avoid the embarrassment of answering why either smelled “so weird”. I chose not to share about my summer months in Ethiopia when I returned to my elementary school in the fall. I simply didn’t want that association. In my superficial and unfledged mind, my Ethiopian heritage represented something undesirable.
The culture differentiating me from my peers became my fixation. I found reason to dissociate myself from those who weren’t like me, focusing on what I lacked and what they had. By sixth grade, my adolescent insecurity and anxiety about my ethnic difference from my peers had reached its peak. In losing who I was, I subconsciously lost the ability to advocate for myself.
The summer before middle school, I had a positive, adventure-filled trip to Ethiopia. With my family, I visited many of the country’s historic landmarks in the Lalibela and Gondar region. There, I learned about ancient civilizations and observed the pride of the people. Upon my return, I began to explore my identity in a positive way. I read more about Ethiopian history, immersed myself in the cultural traditions including the music and language, and started to lean more on the positive Ethiopian role models around me. I began to fully embrace my identity.
In eighth grade, when I was given the assignment to write about my heritage, I discovered poetry as a positive form of self-expression. Without reservation, I passionately detailed my personal growth as an Ethiopian-American. The overwhelmingly positive response I received from my community, as well as my classmates, was affirming. This particular experience sparked my love of poetry in a transformational way.
Poetry served as a space for me to breathe, a space of relief, inspiration, and self-respect. I began to develop a new understanding of emotion and self-expression. In high school, I continued to write poems about shared experiences including womanhood, faith, and race relations which has served as a catalyst for positive conversations on campus. Through rhythm and cadence, spoken-word has allowed me to recognize that a life lived honestly and with self-acceptance is the first step on a journey to acknowledging self-worth. Poetry has been the vehicle through which I’ve loudly embraced my ethnicity and has become the platform I’ve used to promote tolerance, acceptance, the celebration of diversity, and oneness.
Writing and performing poetry has helped me identify why I want to major in Communication studies. I have come to appreciate firsthand, how effective communication became a powerful tool to inspire others around me and build my self-confidence. Today, I lead a life in which I’ve learned to accept all parts of me, and tomorrow I wish to teach myself something new yet again.

Listener Lyric Essay

In English, we had to write a Listener Lyrical Essay styled after those written by Rankine within Citizen. I chose to focus on the immigrant and Black identity for my essay. The most difficult part of writing the piece came with fully representing my subject’s identity. I wanted to do him as well as his story justice. What I learned from this unit was that we don’t often look outside of ourselves and our personal narratives. However, it is important to hear and sympathize with others, seeing as we are humans who need the support and acknowledgment from others to survive and thrive in this world.

Listener Lyric Essay

Born the son of a King. Black hands painted your childhood gold.

An African country lay the soil for your roots to grow. A budding black flower in an all-black garden. Ubiquitous obsidian was all you knew.

The colored coat in which your hero was draped resembled yours

The accent which laced the tongues of your friends resembled yours

The afro which graced the head of your emperor resembles yours

Having been raised in a world such as this, never have you seen the shade of your skin as less than – even after the birth of a new life beneath a white light.

America. You had arrived in the land of opportunities. The country had cast its spell on you, inducing your years’ long sleep and entrapping you within the American Dream like being stuck beneath the sheets of Time’s bed.

Here your voice is a shapeshifter – you converse with others in one dialect, yet also speak in the tongue of your mother. You do not mind repeating phrases into ears unable to decipher your sentences cloaked in East African Amariñña.

Through the years, you came to realize the differing dispositions between you and those of dark complexion stemming from another world. Souls of feet hit the ground at offbeat tempos, onyx lips morphed into distinct shapes, and mouths amplified separate frequencies.

Yet those whose flesh had been dipped in lighter hues labeled you all the same.

You find it harder to teach your son self-love as he asks why he can’t be white.

You don’t know how to respond to the French man who asks what it’s like for Black people in America while you buy a sim card on vacation.             

You fall silent when your daughter says she’s been called the n-word 

No
Never
Nothing
Nice

Black people are not a Black person.

There’s no name to the bond between you and other Blacks.
You don’t remember when you began exchanging silent nods of acknowledgment with those of the same skin.

I see you.

You are wary of your actions in particular situations as you try to avoid perpetuating stereotypes of those you know not.

When the officer asks ‘why the attitude?’ you apologize at once to the Mr. who then becomes a Sir.

You ask your daughter to accompany you to pick up furniture from a local house because the homeowners would be more at ease seeing her as opposed to her father.

Well, it would’ve/might’ve/could’ve been about race. But was it always?

If less melanin was produced, lighter eyes peered back into another’s, a higher voice responded to questions, shorter limbs traveled treks, and frayed ancestors hadn’t cracked black satin hips to walk East-African rugged road distances. Maybe their bones wouldn’t quiver, their eyes wouldn’t shutter, and their hands wouldn’t stutter to open the door.

You hope your kids keep their tongue-twisting last name, your first name;
You hope your kids remember where they’re from.

There’s no need to get mad at those who mistake your status or competence. King is what you’ve been called, and you would never allow someone’s wet paintbrush to taint the gold within your veins,
Beneath your skin,
Behind your ebony sheath.

Perspective Piece

The perspective piece was assigned in Digital Media as a written rant or personal opinion piece that we would later record and animate an accompanying video to. Editing techniques I used in my video with After Effects include a fading effect when the images transfer from one to another.  Additionally, the Ken Burns effect, which is when you gradually zoom into the subject matter displayed on screen. This assignment helped me demonstrate who I am by detailing a significant part of my identity. There are many facets about an individual that can be assumed upon perceiving their race. I wrote this perspective piece with the intention to eliminate misconceptions about what it’s like to be Black and of the African Diaspora in current day America.

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This screenshot shows the production of my perspective video in After Effects.
This screenshot shows the production of my perspective video in After Effects.

Design Work

In our Design class, we created several pieces of work during the Reflections unit. The first was an Aboriginal style painting done on black construction paper. Then we created a collage of magazine cutouts onto cardboard. Finally, we made a black and white photographic diptych centered around the lyrical essays we wrote in English.

Aboriginal Art

 

Magazine Collage

 

Citizen Diptych
Citizen Diptych Artist’s Statement

My listener lyric essay encompassed the identity of an African male immigrant. I chose the passage, “The country had cast its spell on you, entrapping you within the American Dream,” because I felt as though it captured the common feeling many immigrants experience upon their arrival to the United States.

I chose to edit this particular photo for several reasons. The worker wearing the apron happened to be Black which aligned perfectly with the focused identity of my essay, a Black male. In addition, his body posture and diverted eyes suggest he is in the midst of working, which was yet another component of my passage: as immigrants come to this country, they find that hard work is the key to success and in turn the key to fulfilling the American Dream. I also appreciated how the man was in the background as opposed to the foreground of the image, which tied into the idea that Black men are often seen as less than, and are thus set aside in society. Furthermore, I decided to select the apron as opposed to the man himself because I believed it was a more explicit depiction of labor and better represented different contexts of work, immigration, and race. Every day, US workers alike wear some version of an apron to help them accomplish what they must and aid in their achievement of the American Dream.

After placing a black and white mask over my image and de-saturating the redness of the apron, I adjusted the levels of individual colors within the black and white mask to help brighten the image. With a different selection, I blurred the text on the poster behind the man to call the viewers attention away from it, as it was not the primary emphasis of my piece. Following that, I warped my text one word at a time so the process of filling the selection would be cleaner and simpler.

We made the Aboriginal art with acrylic paint and learned how to properly mix hues while still using colors within our color scheme. We used different small, round-tipped objects such as the eraser of a pencil, a toothpick, and a q-tip, to make the dots on our paintings. For the collage, we were provided with a wide array of magazines to choose from. I went with a bright color scheme and focused on portraying concentricity. While working on this project, it was really difficult to leave our work in one place and have it stay the same the next time we accessed it due to the cutouts not having been glued down until the very end. For my diptych, I edited the photo and assembled the diptych in Adobe Photoshop. To read more about my production process, see my artist’s statement below the image above.

This picture shows the first stage of my collage.
First stage of collage.

 

This image shows the second stage of my collage.
Second stage of collage.

 

Throughout the Reflections unit in Design, I learned the importance of color scheme and placement in my artwork. During this unit, I have also valued the projects we’ve done that didn’t particularly revolve around an English assignment. Those projects allowed me to explore my creativity and express myself to my greatest ability!

Welcome to my world!