Originally, I wrote this story for a Riot Grrrl zine. The idea wasn’t mine exactly but came from a tweeter who heard about a Taqwacore zine I helped write and put together. I’m posting the next chapter for the rest of the crew but the lurkers out there can jump in too. Why not.

When I was in high school, my senior year English teacher assigned us an identity project. The details are hazy now, but every student had to make a mix CD, design cover art, and play a song for a radio show we recorded live in class on the day it was due. I went home to start the damn thing and somehow got the idea to chop up images from the CDs that had been lying around while I was busy growing up, Mariah Carey, TLC, the Smashing Pumpkins, and the like. I scrambled the whole lot of them into some kind of mess and glued it all together by hand. This was the first collage I made, a process that eventually consumed anything lying around the house.  With time the concept stayed the same but the ideas that inspire collages changed. They range from Fight Club and the Beastie Boys to Nirvana and SLC Punk and aren’t limited to movies or music. When Obama was elected, I felt like politicking and made a whole set from campaign photos and paired it with protest coverage from the civil rights era.

Back in high school though, the only reason I started a collage was because it looked cool.  I tore through magazines while my mother, the veteran journalist, sat upstairs reviewing piles of newspapers. I’d sit in the basement with the glossy pages, ripping whole spreads out and cutting them apart into shapes and figures that were later pieced together again with a theme. They became apparent once I moved out, mostly in college studying politics and the four years since then working and blogging. Now that I’ve perfected my craft, I basically do the same project we did in high school every week for a radio show a friend and I host in Madison. We interview artists and write about hip-hop and punk.     I spent this first night in the creative chaos alone though and finished only hours before deadline after a long night at Kinkos, just trying to “make it work,” as Tim Gunn says when the designers are strapped for time to finish a runway challenge.

The playlist had songs like “32 Flavors” by Alana Davis, an Ani Difranco rip-off, to “Wind” by Cat Stevens. I really can’t remember the whole playlist but it was pretty absurd. If you weren’t me back then and didn’t know where my head was at, the decisions wouldn’t have made much sense.  Maybe it looked awesome but the idea didn’t translate at school. I went into class that day expecting a pat on the back for my living, breathing Frankenstein creation. Bad call. I ended up with a C and the teacher lecturing me on how badly I didn’t understand the assignment for some reason or another, and I still don’t remember why. Maybe I just never figured it out. Who cares. I had poured my heart and soul into that piece and was livid at the time and not ashamed to show it. I was about to throw the project away when an artist in the class asked to keep it. Her name was Eve and in her honor, it’s kinda fitting to call this my genesis.

The ongoing beef between me and this teacher had wasn’t exactly ontological warfare or anything but at eighteen did feel like the end of the world. There’s some truth to calling the situation something that extreme even now, even if things have chilled out, and even if everything could be blamed on hormones. It all happened and that’s how I experienced it. I wasn’t sure back then and still not sure now why an essay on Invisible Man was the next project she chose to shit all over and fail me. She ended up accusing me of plagiarism because my writing was too good to be mine, which burned, and she was surprised it would make me freak out. 

The truth is I hadn’t read a single chapter of the book but it was second semester senior year. I doubt half the class read it either. What mattered is I knew the story and sat through discussions in class long enough to care. The weird thing is the thought didn’t cross my mind or hers that the book was made up by the author from instinct, experience, and personal truth too. She was just ticked off by me at that point, I guess, and had a reason to question the essay’s integrity. Like I said, she dropped an F on the desk before class and watched me suck in a tear fest for a while before asking me to leave the classroom. I haven’t felt emboldened like that since being a teen, crying like a war widow in the principal’s office and ended up getting out of the class for the semester. 

And we all lived happily ever after.

Actually, not quite but the most creative time in my life happened years later after college when I got comfortable in my own thinking space, especially when I started blogging about religion for the university. I could write about anything in the world, as long as it fit in with the project and shared positive news related to Islam, which is an awesome idea in theory but lacked focus. I had to work with the tension between my experiences and a whole world of people who actually followed the religion or grew up around people who did. Every bias, any stale belief, and each new idea was tested that year and blogging the whole messy process is how I got here, writing this.

My mom watches me on Twitter and Facebook in the same way I watched reality TV shows but thinks of what she sees more like the Jersey Shore than a Project Runway, chuckling at how earnest our solid rejection of her media is and how fluid we are about expression online. ”We’ll end up in a place we didn’t expect,” she wrote on my Facebook wall one time I was ranting about new media, indie creativity, and other things us kids have to figure it all out.  Well, here I am, unsure of what Riot Grrrl really means to anyone else but believing in women working together and helping each other figure out a way to make a common ground between punk and feminism. I wasn’t sure where to find a space not defined by race or background and open to change and new experiences but knew if I didn’t, we’d make one together. The jury’s still out on where it is besides online and Madison, Wisconsin but they’re out there.

We’re all a bunch of assholes, trying too hard to win when we’re not competing for much. Everyone ends up in the same place anyway. I hope people share their own stories however they want - collaging, making music, writing poetry, and just generally living life to the fullest. Personal, political, religious, or ridiculous questions about identity aren’t always focused, and luckily, punk isn’t either and can be a more creative space than school to play with ideas. Be a fucking punk and figure it out on your own. You’ll be in good company.

My bad on any typos. It’s a first draft, well not really, but please just pretend. Thanks, you guys.

1 year ago  /  3 notes