Imitation Pieces
by Lucky Christiansen
Imitation Piece: On Kindness
The silence that drapes over the room when my mother is angry is worse than when she raises her voice. This is because the silence is a promise of consequence, while the yelling is in itself the punishment--the silence means she could do something worse, though I’m sure she never would. That’s not to say that the yelling is good. In every group of friends I make I find someone with a similar mother to mine, and we bond over the underhanded comments our mothers make and the way they hold our emotions like a hostage to be used for negotiations. I remember that the first time I had a sleepover at a friend’s house I didn’t want to leave in the morning--not because my friend was there, but because their home wasn’t quiet the same way mine was. When silence fell in their rooms, it was kind.
Growing up the way I did, it was hard to believe that some parents would let their kids do anything they wanted. Leaving the house at night or hanging out with friends without asking sounded like a fictional narrative from some live-action Disney highschool movie. Having an allowance and the freedom to spend it on what you want instead of being shamed every time you bought a game with your hidden birthday money was a mystery to me. I enjoyed spending time with friends whose parents were more relaxed, but it always worried me to some extent that my parents would find out. They liked it more when I hung out with a girl from my class who had a stay-at-home mother and a father who was high up in a construction company. The father was never around--I think I saw him just as much as his family did. The mother treated me like her own child and I did my best to help her whenever I came by. She was kind and polite, but you could tell that she was worn down. My friend never talked about her dad’s work, and I didn’t press her. The silence, for her, was a comfort.
I’m much more like my dad than my mom. We’re both quieter and have a tendency to retreat from the rest of the house for hours to do work or enjoy our own space. We’re both known for our willingness to spend our own time helping others, and I think he is the one that motivates me to be a better person. It was easier to learn to be polite and kind from watching him than my mother’s hushed corrections every time I spoke in a conversation. Sometimes I resent being kind. High school was full of people who wanted to skim off of your work to get by in the class, and I would let them. I.B. Biology was the worst, as I was known for the person who would get all the homework done, and would constantly be asked if others could see my sheets. I let them, because I felt too guilty about it to say no, even though it frustrated me that I had to do all the work.
People tell me that I am kind, and every time I stifle the reply “I don’t want to be.” My mother relies on my kindness to manipulate me, and my father and I are always saddled with more responsibilities than we can handle or others’ emotional states because we wanted to help or said we would listen to what they had to say, just this one time. But one time becomes ten, and suddenly I’m staring at a message from a guy and realizing that every conversation I’ve had with him for a year has been about his depression. I want to be kind, but I want to be a person first, and sometimes I don’t have the energy for both. Yet somehow, ‘person’ always falls last on the list of priorities.
My mother keeps asking me why I’m so quiet. I tell her I’m tired, and it’s true. I don’t have the energy to take up space, and I know that being quiet will keep her happy, or at least stir up less conflicts. But I’ve associated the silence with the anger, and I am uneasy.
Imitation Piece: There Is The Picture of Michael Jackson Kissing Whitney Houston On The Cheek
there is a painting of people in a downtown diner late at night & in the diner no one dares to move or breathe or talk to one another & in this picture it is a dark blue-green color suffocating the streets & the couple at the diner bar is illuminated in the yellow light but don’t seem excited that they’re able to see each other & their hands are rested on the same table but they won’t touch & the employee servicing the table is tired of the workday’s hours bending his back & he aches he aches he aches & the only other man sits alone with his back towards the window so he can’t be seen & he is so sick of being seen with his heart on his sleeve because there’s no space for a heart in a city & the picture is painted with cool colors but warm in the way a room with broken air conditioning is warm with no comfort to be found & the silence of the patrons is just as stifling & in the reflection of the painting’s protective glass I see myself sitting at that diner table & I feel alone
there is a bus full of children driving the 3 hours to Chicago from a small-town school on a field trip to an art museum & everyone is shouting to their friends like a flock of birds that doesn’t know where to go & I am sitting in a window seat next to a quiet girl & we share earbuds to listen to bad 2000s pop songs while the cawing grows louder & when the bus stops she is swept away by the exiting crowd & I am left to wander the museum alone
it is hard to see the exhibits because the plaques are taller than me so I step back & squint at these forgotten histories from a distance as my vision distorts the same way our perception of these past events did & the clay pots left behind by people who have died leaves an ache in me so I walk into the painting gallery instead & I see blue-green on the wall
the information card says Nighthawks on it & while I see no hawks or birds I can feel their gazes on the diner peeking out from windows or doors & I see a city full of people but no one to talk to which is worse because you are taunted by the connections that might have been & I see a place with no room for mistakes because everyone is looking at you & I see a diner that is supposed to be a refuge but people track in their burdens like dirt on their shoes & this scene is lonely like being left at a coffee shop for hours because the friend you wanted to catch up with never showed & these people at the diner are waiting for a friend they’ve never made & though I am too young too short too late to reach the painting I want to extend my hand to them
yet I am alone in a museum staring at a painting for too long as the kids in my group start to notice my stillness & I walk to the next picture out of worry or shame even though my eyes dart back to the blue-green streets & I am watched in a city where I wear my heart on my sleeve and I don’t want to be watched anymore
Analysis: On Kindness and There Is The Picture of Michael Jackson Kissing Whitney Houston On The Cheek
In my first imitation piece, based off of On Kindness (Abdurraqib pgs. 184-187), I followed a similar theme while trying to stay true to the heavy amount of emotive descriptions in the original. Both On Kindness and my imitation are based around one central topic. While On Kindness focuses on the idea of black anger, my imitation piece is focused on taking advantage of kindness and the danger in silence. The common thread between these two pieces is their focus on parents, and how our temperament changes based on the traits we share with our parents and have received from their actions towards us. Both essays use more of a passive voice and focus on looking back on the past more than describing an event as it unfolds. They both use expository and descriptive writing to explain situations and describe emotions. The syntax of both pieces uses longer sentences and paragraphs to split up the description-heavy writing, and the tone is reflective and slightly negative.
I chose to imitate On Kindness because Hanif Abdurraqib’s description of his parents and the effect they’ve had on his personality reminded me of my own childhood. While Hanif describes his parents in a positive light, like “her laugh was the type to echo through walls”, my piece contrasted against his with a more negative light on my parents, due to my experiences (Abdurraqib pg. 184). I wanted to follow the order of his story beats, starting out with describing his parents, then his friends parents, how his parents affect him, and closing by circling back to emotions mentioned in the first paragraph with the “smile, forcing its way along the edges of her mouth” (Abdurraqib pg. 187). I also wanted to follow the tone, or mood, of Hanif’s piece by using a more passive writing voice and reflecting back on events. The tone of both pieces is slightly negative, but I think On Kindness takes more time to bring up positive subjects than my imitation does, so the tones slightly differ there.
On Kindness, through its title and the quote “who benefits from this, our eternal facade of kindness? Is the true work of kindness owed to ourselves, and our sanity?” I was motivated to talk about my experiences with kindness and what I learned about it from my parents (Abdurraqib pg. 186). I related heavily to his discussion of kindness as a product of restraint and a well of empathy that can run dry, “even if I come up empty at the end” (Abdurraqib pg 186). I wanted to write about my struggles with constantly putting other people’s priorities before my own, and how I learned that from my parents.
In my imitation piece of There Is The Picture of Michael Jackson Kissing Whitney Houston On The Cheek (Abdurraqib pgs. 137-140), I chose to keep the same formatting and syntax used in the original piece while describing a trip I took in middle school to The Art Institute of Chicago. Our themes are very different and I chose to explore a different sort of topic while keeping the same unique style of writing as There Is The Picture of Michael Jackson. The original piece starts out with describing the photo, then takes a turn into personal experiences, and then back to describing photos in general with “it runs out that I want all pictures of me loving my people to be in color” (Abdurraqib pg. 140). It is written like one ongoing sentence for most of the essay, replacing all “and”s with ampersands and giving a more frantic energy to the piece. Paragraph breaks start without capitalization to give the illusion that they continued where the last one left off.
For my imitation, I started out describing Nighthawks, a painting I saw while on the trip to the museum, and then focused on the museum trip itself, describing the experiences I had that day. I circled back around to the painting itself and related the description of the painting to me, similarly to how Hanif brings back the topic of photos in his last paragraph. I started out with the same opening “there is a picture, & in this picture” diction and kept the same run on sentences and ampersand usage as the original (Abdurraqib pg. 137). I think this gives an intensifying feeling to the imitation piece the longer you read, as it strengthens the emotions from the painting and the anxiety of the field trip at the same time. As the essay can be seen as one single sentence, it’s like the emotions that have been building from the first paragraph only come to rest at the last.
I wanted to focus on Nighthawks for my imitation piece because it was a direct contrast to the topics in Hanif’s original essay, which focuses more on the frenetic energy of life, touch, and how “this type of love will shake the angels loose & send them running to their horns”, which is my favorite quote from this piece (Abdurraqib pg. 140). Nighthawks is a painting that means a lot to me personally, so I was hopeful that I could draw out the same amount of emotion from the painting as Hanif could from the photo of Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston. Both of my imitation pieces step from personal experiences and relationships, whether those relationships are with a piece of art or with people I know, and I hope I did Hanif’s work justice with them.
Abdurraqib, Hanif. They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Essays. [Columbus, Ohio]: Two Dollar Radio, 2017. Print.
Artic.edu. 2015. Nighthawks | The Art Institute Of Chicago. [online] Available at: <http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/111628> [Accessed 19 January 2015].
The silence that drapes over the room when my mother is angry is worse than when she raises her voice. This is because the silence is a promise of consequence, while the yelling is in itself the punishment--the silence means she could do something worse, though I’m sure she never would. That’s not to say that the yelling is good. In every group of friends I make I find someone with a similar mother to mine, and we bond over the underhanded comments our mothers make and the way they hold our emotions like a hostage to be used for negotiations. I remember that the first time I had a sleepover at a friend’s house I didn’t want to leave in the morning--not because my friend was there, but because their home wasn’t quiet the same way mine was. When silence fell in their rooms, it was kind.
Growing up the way I did, it was hard to believe that some parents would let their kids do anything they wanted. Leaving the house at night or hanging out with friends without asking sounded like a fictional narrative from some live-action Disney highschool movie. Having an allowance and the freedom to spend it on what you want instead of being shamed every time you bought a game with your hidden birthday money was a mystery to me. I enjoyed spending time with friends whose parents were more relaxed, but it always worried me to some extent that my parents would find out. They liked it more when I hung out with a girl from my class who had a stay-at-home mother and a father who was high up in a construction company. The father was never around--I think I saw him just as much as his family did. The mother treated me like her own child and I did my best to help her whenever I came by. She was kind and polite, but you could tell that she was worn down. My friend never talked about her dad’s work, and I didn’t press her. The silence, for her, was a comfort.
I’m much more like my dad than my mom. We’re both quieter and have a tendency to retreat from the rest of the house for hours to do work or enjoy our own space. We’re both known for our willingness to spend our own time helping others, and I think he is the one that motivates me to be a better person. It was easier to learn to be polite and kind from watching him than my mother’s hushed corrections every time I spoke in a conversation. Sometimes I resent being kind. High school was full of people who wanted to skim off of your work to get by in the class, and I would let them. I.B. Biology was the worst, as I was known for the person who would get all the homework done, and would constantly be asked if others could see my sheets. I let them, because I felt too guilty about it to say no, even though it frustrated me that I had to do all the work.
People tell me that I am kind, and every time I stifle the reply “I don’t want to be.” My mother relies on my kindness to manipulate me, and my father and I are always saddled with more responsibilities than we can handle or others’ emotional states because we wanted to help or said we would listen to what they had to say, just this one time. But one time becomes ten, and suddenly I’m staring at a message from a guy and realizing that every conversation I’ve had with him for a year has been about his depression. I want to be kind, but I want to be a person first, and sometimes I don’t have the energy for both. Yet somehow, ‘person’ always falls last on the list of priorities.
My mother keeps asking me why I’m so quiet. I tell her I’m tired, and it’s true. I don’t have the energy to take up space, and I know that being quiet will keep her happy, or at least stir up less conflicts. But I’ve associated the silence with the anger, and I am uneasy.
Imitation Piece: There Is The Picture of Michael Jackson Kissing Whitney Houston On The Cheek
there is a painting of people in a downtown diner late at night & in the diner no one dares to move or breathe or talk to one another & in this picture it is a dark blue-green color suffocating the streets & the couple at the diner bar is illuminated in the yellow light but don’t seem excited that they’re able to see each other & their hands are rested on the same table but they won’t touch & the employee servicing the table is tired of the workday’s hours bending his back & he aches he aches he aches & the only other man sits alone with his back towards the window so he can’t be seen & he is so sick of being seen with his heart on his sleeve because there’s no space for a heart in a city & the picture is painted with cool colors but warm in the way a room with broken air conditioning is warm with no comfort to be found & the silence of the patrons is just as stifling & in the reflection of the painting’s protective glass I see myself sitting at that diner table & I feel alone
there is a bus full of children driving the 3 hours to Chicago from a small-town school on a field trip to an art museum & everyone is shouting to their friends like a flock of birds that doesn’t know where to go & I am sitting in a window seat next to a quiet girl & we share earbuds to listen to bad 2000s pop songs while the cawing grows louder & when the bus stops she is swept away by the exiting crowd & I am left to wander the museum alone
it is hard to see the exhibits because the plaques are taller than me so I step back & squint at these forgotten histories from a distance as my vision distorts the same way our perception of these past events did & the clay pots left behind by people who have died leaves an ache in me so I walk into the painting gallery instead & I see blue-green on the wall
the information card says Nighthawks on it & while I see no hawks or birds I can feel their gazes on the diner peeking out from windows or doors & I see a city full of people but no one to talk to which is worse because you are taunted by the connections that might have been & I see a place with no room for mistakes because everyone is looking at you & I see a diner that is supposed to be a refuge but people track in their burdens like dirt on their shoes & this scene is lonely like being left at a coffee shop for hours because the friend you wanted to catch up with never showed & these people at the diner are waiting for a friend they’ve never made & though I am too young too short too late to reach the painting I want to extend my hand to them
yet I am alone in a museum staring at a painting for too long as the kids in my group start to notice my stillness & I walk to the next picture out of worry or shame even though my eyes dart back to the blue-green streets & I am watched in a city where I wear my heart on my sleeve and I don’t want to be watched anymore
Analysis: On Kindness and There Is The Picture of Michael Jackson Kissing Whitney Houston On The Cheek
In my first imitation piece, based off of On Kindness (Abdurraqib pgs. 184-187), I followed a similar theme while trying to stay true to the heavy amount of emotive descriptions in the original. Both On Kindness and my imitation are based around one central topic. While On Kindness focuses on the idea of black anger, my imitation piece is focused on taking advantage of kindness and the danger in silence. The common thread between these two pieces is their focus on parents, and how our temperament changes based on the traits we share with our parents and have received from their actions towards us. Both essays use more of a passive voice and focus on looking back on the past more than describing an event as it unfolds. They both use expository and descriptive writing to explain situations and describe emotions. The syntax of both pieces uses longer sentences and paragraphs to split up the description-heavy writing, and the tone is reflective and slightly negative.
I chose to imitate On Kindness because Hanif Abdurraqib’s description of his parents and the effect they’ve had on his personality reminded me of my own childhood. While Hanif describes his parents in a positive light, like “her laugh was the type to echo through walls”, my piece contrasted against his with a more negative light on my parents, due to my experiences (Abdurraqib pg. 184). I wanted to follow the order of his story beats, starting out with describing his parents, then his friends parents, how his parents affect him, and closing by circling back to emotions mentioned in the first paragraph with the “smile, forcing its way along the edges of her mouth” (Abdurraqib pg. 187). I also wanted to follow the tone, or mood, of Hanif’s piece by using a more passive writing voice and reflecting back on events. The tone of both pieces is slightly negative, but I think On Kindness takes more time to bring up positive subjects than my imitation does, so the tones slightly differ there.
On Kindness, through its title and the quote “who benefits from this, our eternal facade of kindness? Is the true work of kindness owed to ourselves, and our sanity?” I was motivated to talk about my experiences with kindness and what I learned about it from my parents (Abdurraqib pg. 186). I related heavily to his discussion of kindness as a product of restraint and a well of empathy that can run dry, “even if I come up empty at the end” (Abdurraqib pg 186). I wanted to write about my struggles with constantly putting other people’s priorities before my own, and how I learned that from my parents.
In my imitation piece of There Is The Picture of Michael Jackson Kissing Whitney Houston On The Cheek (Abdurraqib pgs. 137-140), I chose to keep the same formatting and syntax used in the original piece while describing a trip I took in middle school to The Art Institute of Chicago. Our themes are very different and I chose to explore a different sort of topic while keeping the same unique style of writing as There Is The Picture of Michael Jackson. The original piece starts out with describing the photo, then takes a turn into personal experiences, and then back to describing photos in general with “it runs out that I want all pictures of me loving my people to be in color” (Abdurraqib pg. 140). It is written like one ongoing sentence for most of the essay, replacing all “and”s with ampersands and giving a more frantic energy to the piece. Paragraph breaks start without capitalization to give the illusion that they continued where the last one left off.
For my imitation, I started out describing Nighthawks, a painting I saw while on the trip to the museum, and then focused on the museum trip itself, describing the experiences I had that day. I circled back around to the painting itself and related the description of the painting to me, similarly to how Hanif brings back the topic of photos in his last paragraph. I started out with the same opening “there is a picture, & in this picture” diction and kept the same run on sentences and ampersand usage as the original (Abdurraqib pg. 137). I think this gives an intensifying feeling to the imitation piece the longer you read, as it strengthens the emotions from the painting and the anxiety of the field trip at the same time. As the essay can be seen as one single sentence, it’s like the emotions that have been building from the first paragraph only come to rest at the last.
I wanted to focus on Nighthawks for my imitation piece because it was a direct contrast to the topics in Hanif’s original essay, which focuses more on the frenetic energy of life, touch, and how “this type of love will shake the angels loose & send them running to their horns”, which is my favorite quote from this piece (Abdurraqib pg. 140). Nighthawks is a painting that means a lot to me personally, so I was hopeful that I could draw out the same amount of emotion from the painting as Hanif could from the photo of Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston. Both of my imitation pieces step from personal experiences and relationships, whether those relationships are with a piece of art or with people I know, and I hope I did Hanif’s work justice with them.
Abdurraqib, Hanif. They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Essays. [Columbus, Ohio]: Two Dollar Radio, 2017. Print.
Artic.edu. 2015. Nighthawks | The Art Institute Of Chicago. [online] Available at: <http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/111628> [Accessed 19 January 2015].