Why creativity is challenging for minority students | Mandy Moe Pwint Tu | TEDxUniversityoftheSouth

[Music] my therapist says fine is a word the sparrows use to describe autumn days in the south the taste of sun sweet popsicles on the tongues of frangipani girls tight-lipped with trauma waiting for the monsoon rains to melt away the planes in tennessee my parents met when the world was waning just slightly like the last veil falling in sunlit stupor onto the earth they met in the scent of frankie panty trees painted pink and freckled yellow loved with the taste of nightshade kissed with the cost of fine lining the length of their lips my parents plucked my name out of the sky spun it from silver drops of falling rain and wove it in the scent of petrichor mo puente like the rain like the opening of the sky my grandmother sifted syllables out of weather-worn pages stuffed in a woodworked room where my grandfather's ghost now stalks in amid verses of shakespeare and keats and wordsworth and came up with mandy from the latin amanda meaning worthy of being loved my father tells me i am worthy of being loved the day he leaves me my mother screams at the rain for marrying him in the first place i hide under beds and tables spelling out fine on the tips of my fingers praying that if i said it often enough i would become it my therapist says fine is the word the sparrows use when the air stings a little less sharp when the sky sings a little more grace than they are used to fine as the phrase i finessed and pressed upon my lips like a song scratching at my lungs like proving i'm worthy like giving until i can be loved like don't worry i'll be fine until i'm not you see for frankie penny girls fine as a word that flutters feels like broken winged flight like running away when i got the email saying i had been accepted to the university of the south with a full scholarship i convinced myself that it was here that i would belong i had heard that it was a predominantly white institution but i had no idea what that meant so i spent hours visualizing what i would do after that 28 hour flight from yango myanmar my hometown to suwanee tennessee how i would drive through the gates and feel that finally i had arrived the first day i walked into the dining hall i was taken aback by the sheer number of white students walking around with their trays piled up with food i could feel their eyes on me as i made my way through the lines and i didn't know what exactly they were seeing who exactly they were seeing but i quickly realized just how visible my ethnicity rendered me i was an anomaly but at this point i had mastered the art of being fine or at least acting fine so i swallowed that discomfort and went about my day determined not to think about it but as my first semester progressed things weren't getting better i was older than most of the students here i was on a scholarship i've always identified as burmese but now i was that asian girl i was a student of color although i had never thought about myself that way i dismissed most of the challenges of that first year by saying it's fine or i'm fine even when i very clearly was not in my sophomore year i became the president of the organization for cross-cultural understanding a student club run primarily by international students for international students this organization gave me a sense of purpose that i didn't know i needed that year i spearheaded the representations project which addressed the way our minority and international students are often asked to represent entire countries cultures races and religions i took all the discomfort and the frustration of my first year and channeled them into a series of events that centered on inclusion and belonging my every waking moment that wasn't dedicated to my classes was dedicated to this work i didn't feel like i belonged at this institution so i wanted to try and make sure that no one else felt the same way that the transitions of incoming students were if not smooth then at least easier the university let me do this work a few members the faculty and staff supported me as much as they could sometimes an administrator would show up to one of my events but even then the hope that we were making progress was coupled with exhaustion and despair i and the other students who were dedicated to this work knew that this was something we couldn't do by ourselves after a while i started to wonder was this why i applied to suwani no of course not i'm an english major i applied to this college because of my love of literature and creative writing i have been writing since i was 12 years old i was raised for the most part in yangon myanmar under a military regime where creative artists who dared to rebel against the government were routinely arrested and imprisoned so when i told my mother that i was going to be a writer she did everything in her power to convince me otherwise she believed and probably still believes like most of the country that there is no livelihood to be made in art or in creative writing but when something rattles your insides until the din becomes unbearable then you really don't have a choice in the matter so i wrote i wrote fantasy stories i wrote poetry i wrote to celebrate to mourn to love to the extent that i judged potential boyfriends by the number of poems that they inspired i then proceeded to write my way out of breakups out of falling out of love i wrote through my parents separation through moving to a different continent and then moving back i wrote to process i brought this intention and this dedication to the craft to suwani i was going to write here in the natural surroundings and classes everywhere i could think of but the further along i got with my work on diversity and inclusion the more difficult it became for me to find the time to write later it got even more difficult for me to bring myself to write even when i had the time and then one day i realized that i had suppressed my creativity so far deep within me that it became almost impossible to try and retrieve it but the work kept going and i stopped trying to retrieve it i told myself that it was fine that i wasn't writing as many poems that i was obviously letting my creative work suffer because this was the work that needed doing now and if i didn't do it who would and then i think about myself as the girl who was planning to apply to suwanee the girl who believed she'd spent half her time in the natural beauty of the campus seeking inspiration in budding daffodils the girl who'd weave poems out of raindrops and falling autumn leaves and sing with the sparrows about the changing seasons the girl who was going to edit for the literary journal and talk about writing with other like-minded students and then i think about all the other students of color who are active on this campus what did they want to do before they arrived what were their plans how would they have flourished if they had found this institution a little more welcoming a little more inclusive how many of them have transferred how many of them stay because their only choice is to persevere and how many of them tell everyone who asks that they're fine when they're not you see there's the condition placed on students of color at predominantly white institutions it demands that these students fight for their right to be listened to to fight for spaces where they are safe where they can flourish to fight for their needs to be met i wondered if writing this talk i'd have perhaps an inkling of an eventual epiphany maybe realizing all of this and recognizing the exhaustion on my own creative process i could choose to stop the work that i'm doing i could choose to go about my day as just a student i could take the classes that i wanted that would help me hone my creative craft or classes that i simply wanted to take for fun but can you imagine the kind of exhaustion that willful ignorance would bring i imagine it would be insurmountable that deciding not to address the issues that surround minority students like myself actively choosing to look the other way when i know their impact on my well-being and telling myself that this was all for the best would take its own immeasurable toll you see i'm searching for that middle ground that haven between my activism and my creative writing that would solve every existential crisis that i've had over the past three and a half years is there a career that would allow me to utilize my unique ability to turn caffeine into perfect diambic pentameter and hone my specialized skills of planning and executing a dialogue or panel in less than a week i'm sure there is but at this point in my life and in my collegiate career i find myself having to repeatedly prioritize my organizational work over my creative work while both are fulfilling to a certain extent one is inevitably much more exhausting than the other can you guess which one that is i'm still fighting i'm still out here forging spaces fostering conversation trying to ascertain that when i graduate the culture here will have shifted just a little so that incoming students can do for the most part what they came here to do study grow experiment create a thousand different versions of themselves try new things i know other students of color at this institution are fighting the same fight the elephant in the room this should not be my fight this should not be the fight of minority students at institutions of higher learning across the country and all over the world so to the institutions dedicated to fostering belonging for students faculty and staff from all walks of life i ask you to take a beat and think about what you're missing what your minority students could bring to the life and vibrancy of your campus if they weren't all so exhausted trying to make sure that their voices were heard that spaces existed for them to thrive if they weren't fielding microaggressions every day or having to represent entire aspects of their identities to their majority peers what might happen then if we arrived in spaces that were already welcoming and inclusive if we found our places a little more easily if we felt from the very beginning that we belonged here i can only speak for myself but i might write more poems they may sound more or less like this there's a piece of art at a museum in downtown chattanooga by glenn lygon called untitled and in brackets i am somebody the piece encompasses an entire wall with only the words i am somebody i am somebody i am somebody repeat it over and over until the ink trails off and blotches of black on white and i suppose the words start to lose their meaning that's what it feels like sometimes up here like the writings on the wall and the only people around to see it are the ghosts of the dead white men who we're told built this place made it what it is gray eyes gazing gaunt and haunting in younger faces they now look at us as if to ask if we're in the right place if we know what we're doing here on days like this it's hard to know the men on the walls you see will tell you that this mountain is not for moving it's for holding perfectly still between the spaces in your fingers because sudden movement will shatter it but i'll slap it on a canvas make the dirt bleed crimson and amber until it resembles something of my face tear the roots of mountain heather and spin them into verses that sound a little too much like lullabies in my mother's mouth when she chants the evening sky unto itself i will carve skin and bone and plaster into the eaves of the rooftops catch leaves and weave them to my liking hold out my hands and snatch the moon as she is falling drink her shine and spit out bars on par with the poets who came before and make of this place what i will etch i am somebody into the washed out limestone and hope it lasts hope it stays for longer than i can thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 362

Rating: 3.5454545 out of 5

Keywords: Creativity, Education, English, Identity, Leadership, Poetry, Students, TEDxTalks

Id: UqnMbpIyXos

Length: 14min 21sec (861 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021