You were born in the morning, in the late afternoon, near night...

In reading Brown Girl Dreaming, I noticed something that made me think of A Tale for the Time Being. Nao has immense trouble situating herself in time. She talks about how “no matter how fast you write, you’re always stuck in the then and you can never catch up to what’s happening now” (Ozeki, 98). She talks about how her life feels like she is always trying to catch up with herself, saying “the word now always felt especially strange and unreal to me, because it was me, at least the sound of it was. Nao was now and had this whole other meaning” (Ozeki, 98). Nao is always whispering “now, now, now” to herself in an attempt to pin herself down in time. She said it drove her crazy that by the time she was finished saying the word “now” it was already in the past, and that made her feel like she was disappearing to. What Nao is touching on here is how impossible it is to view the past, present, and future as separate because they are continuous and ever-moving. Now is an indefinable kind of time because it cannot be pinned down. As soon as the moment passes, now becomes then.

This related to Brown Girl Dreaming for me because when I read about Jacqueline trying to pin herself down in time, she reminded me of Nao. Each time Jacqueline tries to situate herself in time, she finds that she is unable to. She lives in a constant state of dissonance related to herself as a time-being. Just as Nao is trying to pin down now, Jacqueline is trying to trace herself in then. This comes up when she is attempting to figure out something about how she was born, “My time of birth wasn’t listed/on the certificate, then got lost again/amid other people’s bad memory” (Woodson, 18). Jacqueline’s birth seems to be as indefinable as Nao’s existence, because just the way that Nao cannot pin herself in time because now can never be caught exactly right, Jacqueline cannot pin herself in time because her birth time was not recorded. The fact that her birth time was not recorded is very significant, because it means that she does not fit in with the long line of history that flows through her family, her house, and her experiences. She is not an official piece of this historical timeline because her birth time was never recorded. This also means that she must rely on the memories of others, their subjective and fallible personal records of time, instead of feeling like she can exist in an objective record of time, such as a birth record. Memory becomes incredibly significant for Jacqueline from the very beginning of her life, because other people’s memories of her birth time are all that she has to tie her into the timeline. Like Nao, Jacqueline exists outside of time. Unlike Nao, who wants to graduate from time, however, Jacqueline seems determined to try and place herself in it. She asks her family members when she was born to compare notes, and she draws on event-specific timelines to help her navigate the complex history she was born into and at the same time born out of. Nao keeps herself out of time by refusing to date her journal entries, while Jacqueline tries to situate herself in time by repeating words like “after” or drawing on African American history. She says "I am born not long from the time/or far from the place/where/my great-great-grandparents/worked the deep rich land/unfree/dawn till dusk" (Woodson, 1). From the first page, Jacqueline feels herself as out of place in time. She does not know what time she was born, only that she was born "not long from the time" that something definable happened.