Identities Conclusion — How can I conclude?

Conclusion Towards Understanding: One Cannot Rightly Conclude

It was always me versus the world
Until I found it’s me versus me

– “DUCKWORTH.”, DAMN., Kendrick Lamar

           The movement of theoretical conceptions and formations of race, queerness, language and representation resists stability especially as they vary from city to desert to coastal alignments. To exclaim that you are real or to write that someone is, puts forth involutionary motion, involving the itemized list of experiences ground-up before you. The long and erratic traditions of walking as a movement for discovery and developing one’s philosophy continues in the expansion of the (be)coming of age genre. Walking through the setting that oscillates and turns around you creates expansive and growing motions within.  The genre stands as what Sara Ahmed names “backgrounds”, something which shapes an individual’s “arrival into the world” (545). The movement and shattering of placements beyond arrival is challenged by power-dynamics and hegemonic undercurrents experience by those writing and creating in the contemporary world of intersectional experiences.

           To say what one has ceased to be, is to resist the static oppression. To express what exactly you are ceasing to be is a powerful reclamation; it gleans from the terrain before you, it bends language to your testimony of realness. Through becoming-of-age, expansion and growth is exhibited as a constant instead of a process with a definite origin and definite end. Reading more works of art and literature with the formations distinguished in becoming-of-age stories allows the growth and hope instilled at these instances to be sustained towards opportunities of queer futurity and collective gleaning.

A Space for Self-Reflexivity

           In the methods and productions of self I have put forth for creating and utilizing a becoming-of-age genre and reading of texts, especially as they fall towards intersections of language, race, and queer subjectivity there remains, of course, a necessity for self-reflection. This reflection comes from an acceptance that I too have the need to participate in a process of becoming in order to endure this analysis and to understand my own faults, setbacks and limitations. All within this is performative; the participation in a program to ensure mastery of a subject and the consideration of grander arguments and theoretical work unravels as a performance where the stage and future moves in and out of focus. Above all, the emergence of the storytelling and the transformations it has made are, in the words John Conteh-Morgan (in the context of francophone theatre yet applicable to my chosen format of novels, poetry, and lyrics), unmistakably political (23). The political and pedagogical emergence in sharing a life in becoming shall be seen at any moment in our imposed timelines and persists through continually transformative language and creation. May stories that are becoming-in-age continue their presence in activism and education, and in turn spark encounters and engagements for creativity still to come.

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