3/30/11

We are on a perpetual quest for identity.  We look for our selfhood in authentic experience.  We situate authenticity in the past - in our youth, and in our learned histories.  In attempt to reclaim these constructed romanticisms, our actions are rituals of longing and also belonging.  Archaic sentiments are no longer yours or my own; but rather, they are ours.  Both inherent and inherited, these desires belong to us with the intent of completing the histories that we have learned and have yet to.  Our effort is without reward, for these histories have been collected and carried across bodies, borders and dinner-tables.  Systems of memory continue to construct our past, present and future.  Conversations between what is the imaginary and the real, what has been given and taken, and what will be forgotten and found articulate our critical discourse: a narrative of which cannot be static.  Instead, we have become martyrs for an identity that is not only unattainable, but of which has never really existed for us.  Our perpetual quest ends where it begins: with the imagination.

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