Dear Sara,
Because as a documentor and writer I have
always been taught that the world is something that happens before my
eyes, or before my
lens, I have to admit that it rather surprised me, even disoriented me a
bit,
what was it that you were trying to ask of me. Aspects of my life that
will
emerge? That what I am going to do is about me as well? Rather totally
refreshing.
So much for the collective pronoun, so much for the third-person plural
when I
had to stay clear of it all each time, stay clear of it all all the
time.
I would venture to say that “risk” has always been an
irrevocable part of my life. My head always on the line for what I venture to
say, whether in prose, or in poetry, even in what should otherwise be plain accomplishment reports, what I try to write or what people ask of me to write in the vital world of work and transactional politics. Edginess is how my poet friends put it,
and not always in appreciation, and while as a writer-documentor, this trait of
mine distinguished me ("sharp"", “vitriolic,” “acid” or just “the crazy one”), this has
also, over the years, cost me a lot professionally. It’s never remunerative
to be critical; people, as a rule, don’t care about analysis, they only want to
be absolved; or worse, they only want your gratefulness your apology, your
servitude, in other words. In my work, I always crossed boundaries and broke
taboos, sometimes deliberately, but often, in spite of me. It had cost me, again and again, the friendship, the patronage, of important
people who had taken it upon themselves to be the moral guardians of certain
cultures and political turfs.
