Laila Ibrahim, Author
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NOOOO!!! Not To Kill a Mockingbird!

2/24/2016

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For decades I’ve included  To Kill a Mockingbird on my list of favorite books.  It’s right up there with the Harry Potter series, Ender’s Game, and The Color Purple in my mind and heart.  I believed it was powerful anti-racist story written to help people see the injustice of racism in our society.


Last summer I re-read it.  And a few weeks after I finished it, my whole family watched the classic movie.

As the credits rolled I was stunned and heartsick. I saw an entirely different theme in the story than I had so many years before. The primary message I heard from To Kill a Mockingbird is poor white people are racist and cause great harm to upstanding blacks. Educated, wealthy, white people are doing their very best to protect black people from the abuse of white trash, but they just can’t.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, the judge, the police officer, and the lawyer are heroes, working for justice. In reality, those are the categories of people who systematically created financial, educational, legal, and social barriers to disenfranchise black people.  Poor, uneducated, white people didn’t create the systems of injustice that we’ve all inherited. That was done by the most privileged people in society so they could keep power and create wealth for themselves.

I don’t doubt that Harper Lee set out to write a story to show the injustice of racism, just as I did when I wrote Yellow Crocus. Like her, I wrote it from my own context and time.  Like her, my perspective was imperfect. But then again, whose isn’t? If we wait for perfect, we’d never do anything.
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Live in the now...and yet

2/17/2016

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I’m enough of a Buddhist to know that NOW is the most important time of all.  Living mindfully in the moment is a blessing each time I get in that state of mind.

And yet...I find that I live by two questions that have nothing to do with the present.  Whenever I contemplate how I’m doing in my life I ask:

  1. If I were given one year to live, what changes would I make in my life right now?; and
  2. Am I taking care of business in case I live to 100? (it used to be 80, but some people live CRAZY long these days.)

Question one gives me an urgency about creating art and making time to travel. And it makes me less concerned with the messes I make around the house on a day-to-day basis.

Question two inspires me to take an honest account of our family’s finances and my personal physical fitness. And it motivates me to do deep clearing-out of drawers and closets so I don’t store garbage for years on end.

Both questions lead me to make time for the people dear to me, and to deepen my spiritual practices.

So I live in the now, and in the theoretical year from now and 50 years from now all at the same time.  Sometimes it’s dizzying, but for me the multiple views are well worth it.
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Done is better than perfect

2/10/2016

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I have Facebook to thank for a neat and tidy motto: Done is better than perfect.  I’ve practiced this philosophy for years.  I regularly tell people to strive for “B” work because you can get so much more done in your life--with more joy and ease--if you let go of it being perfect.

However, at this particular moment I’m having a hard time believing this philosophy.  I just turned in my ‘done but not perfect’ manuscript for my second novel, Living Right, and I feel a little nauseated. I think I’m ready for it to be in the world.  I really don’t have any changes to make. But could I have done more to make it a better story? I’m afraid that I and all the editors are missing something obvious.  I know it’s not a perfect story, but is it good enough?!

I turned it in, so obviously I’ve decided that it is. I will just have to accept the fact that the leap of faith that goes with putting art into the world is going to make my stomach drop.
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Perspective. Wow!

2/3/2016

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I took a drawing class last semester to try a new and interesting challenge.  It was both humbling and affirming. I learned a lot and became a better drawer.  Who knew?

Towards the end of the course we had a lesson on perspective. Drawing perspective is a very precise, technical process used to represent physical space accurately.  It involves rulers and throwing out what you know about the world. You draw a diagonal line to represent something you know is a straight line because that is the way our brains know how that straight line fits into a scene. Most of us figured out in elementary school how draw a box this way, but in a more complicated way  it’s what we use to represent city scenes and rooms. I’m more comfortable with abstract art and pretty colors.  Rulers, straight lines, and measuring are not my thing.  Precision? Not so much. But I opened myself up to the process, confident I would learn something.

The professor explained the process while simultaneously drawing.  She stared straight ahead, picking a spot in the scene to be her vanishing point.  She drew as she talked and explained how to do it, looking forward out the window. Then she looked away from the scene she was drawing and talked to us a bit.  She returned her gaze to the horizon, tried to finish her drawing, and then gave up because it just wouldn’t come together correctly. She looked at us and said, “I must have moved to the left or right a bit.  Then I looked back, I was looking at the scene from a different perspective, so the lines I started with stopped working.”

I literally gasped and asked, “You just move the tiniest bit and your perspective is totally new?!”  She nodded.  “Wow! That’s a great metaphor for life too!” I exclaimed.

In one way it’s such an obvious observation, but in another it was mind blowing. There are literally a gazillion-million perspectives.  Maybe an infinite number.  And if you shift, even a tiny bit, you can see a new one.  At every moment a new perspective is possible. Wow!
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    Laila Ibrahim is a passionate author set out to write stories of love's ability to transcend human-made systems of oppression.

     Living Right goes beyond the headlines to reveal the life and death stakes when a devoted mother struggles to reconcile her evangelical Christian beliefs with her son’s sexual orientation.

    Set in the antebellum South, Yellow Crocus is a rich, evocative tale of love, loss and redemption between an enslaved black woman, her privileged white charge, and their fight for freedom.

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