Blurred Barriers

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Blurred Barriers
Topic Started: May 15 2006, 11:49 PM (112 Views)
theBluestPurple	May 15 2006, 11:49 PM Post #1
Haiku Posts: 297 Group: The Mighty Pen Member #2 Joined: September 1, 2004	the crowd favorite i guess, lol. review away please!



mirevas	May 17 2006, 03:41 PM Post #2
Drabble Posts: 336 Group: Members Member #10 Joined: September 8, 2004	Quote: “Woooooow. That was cray-zee,” she accented the last word strangely, and I glanced into her cloudy eyes with my confused ones, realizing that any part of tipsy-ness I was feeling earlier was now gone. Maybe Katie had recycled my buzz and added it to her own. I half-smiled at her, then turned to the window. juicy and textured. loved it. so i love the fullness of what you've written in this revision. the greatest thing, to me, is the split between your own fascination and your own fear, as it were. here: Quote: It was almost flattering to me to have these three strangers think they knew me, getting some recognition from someone else besides the supposedly ‘familiar’ faces that had come from the same country I had to Australia. an interesting idea, and one that i think people of color can relate to. whether i travel abroad or in america, i find that i always look for black faces in a crowd, even to the extent that after awhile, i'll pretty much speak to any black person i come across, elderly, kids, thugs, street urchins, because even though you know how to be alone, it's such a comfort not to be, and i Loved when you wrote about that aspect of your experience. wonderful. so if that's the fasination, or the pull, as least, the fear was here: Quote: Turning my attention away from the girls seemed to make them even more sure they knew me. Maybe I was supposed to be a friend of their’s who was trying to avoid them, I thought, my mind racing. I just wanted more than anything for them to stop staring at me. just one example among several where you express a feeling of discomfort, of knowing that your kinship with the girls didn't actually go that far beyond appearance, if that. i felt that you were tying the difference to what it means for you to be black, and for you to be American, especially considering the time you spent on what it was like to be the rowdy americans in australia. nicely done, but. . . i dunno, there was something about how specifically you tied National Geographic to your fascination in one specific paragraph, but then there wasn't that same kind of specific exposition about your Nationality. . . something in my reader's sixth sense was looking for it. you talked about race, and i kept expecting the sentence about not just being black in a crowd of white faces, but being black American, and that sentence wasn't there. not that it was lacking in the sense of being incomplete, but lacking in the sense of one idea (why fascination?) packing a bigger wallop than it's parallel (why fear?) and that's just a minor point on how the piece felt to me, not on it's integrity, which is incredibly solid. consider: Quote: If I had been alone at the station, maybe I would have stopped and talked to them, tried to correct the confusion through conversation between just the four of us. Or maybe the Flight Response would have taken over my intuition and I would have rushed onto the safety of the bus anyway. this sentence, especially where it was placed towards the end, told it all. and it was like, i knew why you might've stopped and talked to them, but it wasn't immediately obvious why you wouldn't have. i got it, from thinking back, but it wasn't right there. all told, nuri, this is an incredible piece. what you've added has given even more weight to that last line, even something profound, something global, incredibly human, and so timely considering the international climate. this is forward thinking literature; it does something fresh for the black experience that pulls us out of history and into the present, where we are still grappling. very well done, and still my favorite of all your pieces. thanks.



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