Amber Simmons is a writer and web content strategist. See her portfolio and subscribe to her blog. Or, you can just drop her a line.
It’s funny how quickly priorities can change.
I’ve been a writer my entire life. When I was a little girl, my mother used to send me and my brother to our grandmother’s house outside of Cleveland for the summer. It was a much anticipated trip, as going away to grandma’s was like going away to another world–and that’s not much of a stretch if you compare Los Angeles to a tiny suburb in Ohio.
One year, the year I decided to write the great American Novel (I must have been all of 9 or 10 years old) I hauled my ancient typewriter with me. It was heavy as all get-out; an all metal monstrosity, painted cerulean blue, that I loved with all my heart. That typewriter, for me, meant creative freedom. I learned to type so that my ideas wouldn’t be hindered by the speed of my pen; I could type almost as fast as I could think, and never again would the perfect line of dialog escape me because my brain hand run off to bigger and better things while my fingers struggled to keep apace. As strange as it may sound, I loved that typewriter as much as any little girl loved her dolls or imaginary ponies.
That I brought my typewriter with me on my annual trip to Mecca is strange enough. But that action really symbolizes who I am and who I have always been. I never took watercolor paints with me. I never toted crayons, so much more portable, or drawing paper or even pencils. My outlet of choice was writing, and therefore I needed my typewriter.
How, then, did twenty years pass and lead me astray into graphic design? How did that girl who loved writing so much she carried a 20 pound typewriter halfway across the country on summer vacation turn into a woman who, in the course of a workday, might never touch a keyboard in favor of her drawing tablet?
I think the answer lies in one of my core beliefs: I believe the universe gives me interests so that I have something to write about.
Now don’t get me wrong: I enjoy writing fiction. I even love it. But I’m rather lousy at it. I get too caught up in things that don’t matter and at character development I am a hopeless mess. I’m an adequate storyteller, and when I relay events that more or less happened (I am an embellisher, but what writer isn’t?) I can do that with a certain amount of flair and sophistication, but when it comes to making something up from scratch? Well, it comes off that way–self-conscious, trying too hard.
But my real passion and talent is non-fiction. It’s why I performed so well in college, to be honest. I outperformed my peers not because I was smarter or because I had more information then they did. It was because I could write my way into the sweet spot in my professor’s mind every time. It was almost unfair the advantage I had with that single skill.
But in order to write compelling nonfiction, there has to be passion behind it. You have to do more than know your subject, you have to live it. You have to breathe it in, interpret it, internalize it, and breathe it out as something new, changed, different. And that’s what I did with religion and philosophy, and it’s what I do now with design.
I was gifted with a love for design because it gives me something wonderful to write about.
I bring all this up because someone stumbled upon this blog recently and emailed me to say that he enjoyed my writing, and though I didn’t appear to have interest in this blog anymore, he hoped I would return.
I was deeply ashamed, to be honest. And I remain deeply ashamed. I should not have so long neglected this space, no matter how busy I’ve become.
So I will write about design. And I will write about work and life and whatever else needs to be written about. This space needs to be filled.
The prodigal writer returns.
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First, wonderful article. There is a lot of commercialization and whitewashing of spiritual ideas, INCLUDING the standard Christian and Abrahamic. These days they seem to have become more about
I haven’t read the whole article yet, and while I think that you raise a lot of very good points, I think that some things upon investigation are more universal than you think. Your example of “smudging” for example, while apt ignores the idea that the herbs used in smudging have particular properties.
Sage is a very strong herb, and useful for particular things, just as salicylic acid (from willow bark, or other tree bark originally) commonly known as aspirin is useful for a particular thing. Sage just happens to be good for a certain kind of cleansing and awakening of spirits in a place that frankincense is not good for.
While appropriating Lakota words for a cultural ceremony as you describe is CERTAINLY questionable, and might not work for someone who was not Lakota, I would argue that the use of herbal properties in and of itself is NOT cultural appropriation, because it is using an “empirical” property of those herbs.
The other thing is… While your points about the danger of Jacksoninan “Manifest Destiny,” are very valid, there is a value in America’s lack of ground.
In Europe, people have killed each other for centuries, and may kill each other again, over small differences of grounded cultural belief which they believe/d to be linked to blood rights to religion.
There is no such thing as “blood right” to anything, not language, not culture, not religion. While I am completely against cultural imperialism, and cultural appropriation as a means of cultural domination, I think it is equally dangerous to assert that ONLY the Lakota have rights to their rituals, because that also justifies that ONLY the possessors of whichever religion by blood or by birth have the right to control those ideas, and that their anger and genocide of people who are “other” is cannonized by a blood right rather than an out-dated cultural norm.
If a person is willing to learn a religion and integrate a culture personally I see nothing wrong with learning a religion like a language. Someone who learns a language from birth will naturally have a better integrated and more complete relationship with that culture than someone who learns it later in life. I see that the problem is much the same with religious-cultural-appropriation.
Most people who try to learn a second language never really integrate into the language or learn its place in the culture from which it comes and therefore use it badly. But their mis-use (unless in very high volume) does not corrupt the implicit grammar of the language for the native-speakr.
That is the problem with religious appropriation as well. People don’t learn, and therefore corrupt the practices they are doing, like the mothers in your article. But they do not corrupt the original practitioners’ practice. The problem perhaps is their relative visibility, but even that… If it opens awareness of others to begin looking at the real depths of that practice– and it probably does– I cannot see it as evil or unjustified.
If they did that same ceremony and didn’t credit its source, I would find it more insulting.
As the Catholic Church in Mexico and South America has co-opted many native-traditions and denied the roots of them, and thereby their cultural independence from the imperial dominator– the Spanish over-culture. Or as many Mexicans also practice the “Quinceañera” unaware of its root in the Jewish-converso’s tradition of Bat-mitzvah. Those are TRUE denials and obfuscations of minority cultures.
Not integrating the basic mechanics of language, art, religion, or any other cultural element within oneself means that the results don’t reach the depth of spiritual achievement.
That in and of itself is sad, but i don’t think that it is motivated by a sense of cultural imperialism, but more a desire to find what one is missing.
Its funny. Im currently living in shanghai and this “whitewashing” is happening here, chinese style. Chinese people celebrate christmas. They have no clue as to what christmas really is (and anything having to do with religion here is restricted by law, so its hard for them to find out even if they wanted to). it is purely commercial. In fact, in the center of china, they actually counted down to midnight on christmas eve and cheered. Christmas here is completely lacking in any sort of spirit/warmth. It is simply a party. (Not quite at the Saturnalia level, but this is simply due to the fact the people have to work the next day. )
while I am not a religious person (i come from a mixed family so i was raised as everything and nothing), I am still offended by the existance of Christmas here. I would rather see nothing about christmas, than the tasteless, cold, chinese-style (by chinese-style i mean ostentation to the max with as many lights as possible) decorations that are hung from every corner in a money-hungry effort to attract consumers into business establishments. (and i thought the US was capitalist)