The statement of purpose, or rather, in the back of my mind, it comes out as, the purpose of statement: the purpose of laying down the divisions that have brought you here, that you’re about to transgress and embark upon. To make clear a point: this is the point from where I am, hailing outward to all beacons, “This is me speaking, is there anybody out there?” How does one answer that question at this age, meaning my own, or even, “in this day and age?” The future is unpredictable, not just ups and downs and roundabouts: it contains tragedies and unexpected lemon rind squirts in the eye and the smiles of children; it unfolds and untwines, entangles and ensnares, moves along at its own pace. To sum up: always with each footfall, our hand in front of us feeling for a handrail, sometimes there, other times not, we ask, “What’s the point of this? What has led me here? Where’s the meaning of it all? What has been determined by memory or desire or even fate? What now? What further?”
Begin then from the little I know, the little I remember. A mother, a father, in a country where neither spoke the language, the language with which I am plagued, that I find myself in, surrounded and immersed, traveling further along than either one could have imagined having started from such meager beginnings. After elementary school, the mother was sent to the big city, away from the hills, to earn her keep. The father strolled by the zaharoplastion (pastry shop), saw the fifteen-year-old girl through the window and walked in. Four months later, they were married. He was twenty-nine at the time. His family bought them a house in New York. He had a job, she had a child. He had gambling debts and a mouth that stunk with explicatives, along with top shelf liquors. She had no water or electricity, just debt collectors at her door and bruises. He had a string of bad luck (or so he had told me when I would meet up with him two decades later), she had enough. He was told to leave after one night in particular, and I remember the particulars the most: the towel wrapped around her head and him pulling the phone out of the wall in his black socks and jockey briefs, I viewed it from the floor where he had thrown me; she huddled in a corner. He left. My childhood then consisted of hours playing in the garden behind the house, in what I later realized were weeds, immersed in silence. I learned to make my own toys that we couldn’t afford out of aluminum foil, twisting the silvery material into Godzillas and fighter planes.
Early schooling showed promise; I won storytelling contests in elementary school. There the writing started. It led to special placement in a junior high school where I was ostracized for being different, ethnic and silent. I took a specialized test to enter one of the three best high schools in New York City. Accepted to all three, I choose Bronx High School of Science. Sophomore year, November, a friend committed suicide by jumping off the side of the train, three feet in front of me. Winter of senior year, another friend, after having undergone three years of surgery to remove tumors from around his head, flew out the side window because he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt, twenty feet from the car that his parents had bought him after he had survived the final surgery that summer. That was January 9, 1990. I dropped out of high school on the seventeenth. I had my General Equivalency Diploma and was accepted into John Jay College of Criminal Justice by April. Making Forensic Psychology my major, I had hoped to find some sort of explanation for what the people in my life (my father, my friend, even my God) had done. I still hadn’t a focus, a purpose. My purpose, at the time, which I was quite committed to, was throwing this laughable life away. I still wrote, endlessly at times, but “what of it?” One professor, a creative writing course I took on the fly, looked at my work, turned me around, forced my eyes onto my own words, and asked the right questions. For two years, I have been finally listening, reading, being reintroduced to words, both in and out of required texts.
This is where I am now. This is what I want to do (there is still, amongst the public, the doubting belief that writing is indeed an activity, a doing, a motion across two physical planes). To be honest, I want to be the next Sophocles, the next Hemingway, the next Roland Barthes, or, even more so, the next Kenzaburo OÄ“. I’d like to teach, to pay the debt I owe to my mentor, to swing around others who have lost belief. I’d like to guide them because I have been there, in speechlessness (nothing is more despairing than that, even in wondrous moments: to be unable to place oneself in syntax, to be without meaning). To be a witness not only to my own life, as a writer, but also to the insight dawning on students’ faces, a new kernel of understanding in their eyes as they read Auster or Austen, Salinger or Perec. In the end however, it all comes down to words doesn’t it?
Each time I write, I have with me two layers of understanding: one is that, by writing, I can leap across into the imagination, into the unknown, into the something never before encountered; the other is a working knowledge of motivation and memory, of thought and language processes. I sometimes work twenty hours straight for a word, a phrase composed and transposing, having reached across and brought a piece of the world back to me, frozen and timeless. That is the purpose of statement: to reach across and bring back. This is my statement of purpose: I have something to say of our collective condition, or perhaps, something about my own humanity.