A Gold Medal Portfolio Award is the highest honor students can receive in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Jurors choose portfolios by high school seniors whose works best represent the Scholastic Awards’ judging criteria: originality, skill, and the emergence of a personal vision or voice. These remarkable artists and writers will each receive a $12,500 scholarship.
For the next few weeks, we’ll be profiling the 2023 Gold Medal Portfolio recipients. Next up are Sarah Fathima Mohammed and Jeffrey Wang.
Sarah Fathima Mohammed
Through poems containing short, quickly passing lines, I hope to share the changing nature of our experiences. My poems mimic the feelings of girlhood, the process of learning how to settle into a shifting body and reckoning with how to take up unabashed space in that body. My creative nonfiction essays are written from a place of deep vulnerability, and they explore the intertwining of daughterhood, violence, queerness, and kinship in my life. By sectioning off vignettes in my essays using asterisks, I hope to share the interiority of Muslim girlhood, how moments of faith and violence are pressed up next to one another, fluid and limitless, quiet yet firm.
Using fragments feels true to me: it allows me to show my audience how I pick up the pieces of my experiences and honor the history of my body and my place in this world. Fragmenting sections of both my poetry and prose allows me to reach the heart of my experience, yet letting my poems come together in sinuous stanzas allows me to feel whole.
Water and Everything I Am Afraid of
PERSONAL ESSAY & MEMOIR
Sarah Fathima Mohammed, Grade 12, Harker Upper School, San Jose, CA. Suki Jayapalan, Educator. Writopia Lab, Affiliate. Gold Medal Portfolio, The Maurice R. Robinson Fund Writing Portfolio Award
I tilt my chin back until my forehead touches the lip of the bathtub. My arms are spread open, hanging off the sides of the small tub, fingertips wrinkled like socks that are stuffed into their baby-blue skins to make pairs. Eyes half-lidded but still open. I’ve learned to only close my eyes like this: two fingers pressed over each lid, my body bringing itself into dark, a darkness created by my own skin.
When I bring my hands to my face, eyes stilling like a whisper, I listen to the way my breath swells, slows—I am not facing a Zoom screen laced in the five colors of my teacher’s notes or my family at the dinner table, all rumpled and sweatpants-clad. I am facing the yellow-stucco ceiling, cracked and slackened like lips, facing God.
God’s greatest gift is making—how my own hands create night by closing my eyes. How the small plastic bottle next to me gives its own shape to a thin stream of purple soap smelling of lavender. How my mind holds this recurring image as if it were a language: a girl, dark-haired with porcelain skin, in a bath, covered in thick milk and flower petals, purple soap swirling in a glass bottle between her long piano fingers.
I am unmoving, my eyes closed, but I am making something, whether a palm-wide picture in my head or a loose fist or a heartbeat. I am creating, and in this moment, when my family is asleep and the bathtub water has run cold, and even the flicker of the buttery bathroom night light feels like an embrace, it’s enough.
There is some solace to this. My humanness taking over, hands directing when my eyes open, when they close, like an orchestra. To know that God is watching even if he is not. To let myself make and unmake the color of the night, the beauty of the night. To take beauty and make it real and dripping and sweet, clean-cut like how I imagine the milk bath girl and purple tufts of soap that come in a small, shiny bottle, fragile like a girl. To rewrite this time and place, for a moment, and make it silver-lidded: turn myself into porcelain-girl, water into milk, breath into flower. It’s a way to control my body with my body, control something in a world that feels uncontrollable.
***
You might be reading this essay and wondering where it’s going. I want you to know that I do not know either. All I know is that this moment is cyclic: I fall asleep every night with water from the bath still resting on my collarbone; I wake up and the skin at the tops of my fingers is still bunched together from the bath, knotted like rosaries.
***
At school, I am taught to not use second person in essays, to not use words like beauty and something and world because they are abstract. I am taught to take these abstractions and bring them into specific contexts: Turn beauty into woman, turn something into mouth or tear or fingernail, turn world into bathtub. But who am I to characterize the world? To tell you about what beauty means, and what you should imagine in your mind when I say something?
And I am taught to write about one thing: to choose either girlhood or godhood, sleeping or making, being lonely or being reflective, to not muddle the story, to keep its edges sharp and middle tender like a piece of meat. But the night is not made of only one photograph. I am trying to tell this story as honestly as I know how. I want you to understand that I am writing and running at the same time. Look. Yes, look here, right here, right now: at me, at this page (is there a difference?). This is how I am moving, like legs shivering underwater. This is how scared I am.
***
I set my phone to Do not disturb all day because I like the finality of it. The idea that, when I look in the mirror, there is a girl within me who has a sharp tongue who says, Do not disturb me, just as there is a girl within me who still falls asleep in her mother’s arms, and a girl within me who dreams about who she is and who she could be and never wakes up.
***
I wake up every morning and listen to the shower trickle, a melody that sounds like tears. This is beginning. This is ending. This is being baptized. How I sleep and wake up with pruned fingers, with water on my neck. There is no middle in this world where the days lap over themselves like water, where I know the innards of my home better than my own body, where my mother’s eyes are red-rimmed and I’m not sure whether they are from the light from her computer screen or tears.
But the one thing I am sure of is this. How every day starts and finishes: lightly, the bloom of the aching faucet, a cleanse, a song in which I can hear something other than the cackle of static from my laptop’s speaker, hear the sound of water made by God.
Once, I found a song in which a singer called her lover her everything. And it was before I was taught to not use abstractions, but it sounded vague even then, sounded abstract, and even then I loved the abstraction, wrapped my arms around the unknowingness of it all, how you could never know exactly what it meant. I couldn’t imagine my everything, but when I closed my eyes with my hands, I knew what color it was, what it felt like in my fist, what it meant to call a person that, all doe-eyed and softened like a window.
I’m not sure when water became my everything, when I started to turn toward the faucet like a horse turns toward an apple, head tilting downward, holding my breath. What I do know is that I began to look at water like a child when I was tired of home, of the way I could hear the pounding of soft rain in the dark but could never reach out to touch it, never running through it holding my backpack and my friends and a crumpled schedule, wilting like an old flower.
***
In the shower, I separate the thick knots in my hair the way my mother taught me: holding the roots with my fist and ripping the roughness of each heavy knot with my other hand. One section at a time, the rhythm of the breakage matching my tight breath—the making of my hands and the making of God, what he creates in me, fit together like a mother and a daughter. I wonder how my body fits with God.
I wonder if God is watching me tear my hair into pieces that look like fingernails—if, when kindling my breath, he is nodding or sighing or shouting Help. I find this unsettling, what to think of when I imagine God, what to think of when I imagine myself in relation to God, but I cannot explain why.
***
If you want to take away one thing from this essay, learn I am just a daughter, unsure, trying, trying, to make something from this, to understand how it works: my body, my god, this world—whether bodiless or godforsaken or both or neither.
***
In untangling my hair this way, my mother taught me to separate the body from its hurt, the girl from the grief. How it never hurts to split my hair with my own fingers when my other hand holds the roots tight against my scalp, as if saying Remember where you have come from, as if saying the body is capable of hurting itself without feeling pain afterward, just as it is capable of healing itself without processing the comfort. How, in this way, the body forgets the body, my roots forget what they have birthed.
***
I am scared of forgetting. My younger cousin has brown, soft lips that curve into themselves like the crumpling of paper when I tell her about girls in America, who listen to music instead of water, who worship man instead of God. I have not been able to see her smile next to me in a year. Sometimes, after joining classes on Zoom, every person around me in dimensions I cannot reach, my eyes burn. I close them, and I can’t see anything. Nothing. Not color or shadow or hand. I don’t know if this is a dream or not. I am scared that forgetting is as easy as closing my eyes, as easy as waiting.
***
Sometimes, I imagine dropping my phone, watching the glass give itself into shattering, fall down the shower drain like something special and smooth all at once. How, then, everything I have left would be gone, too, the people around me, the happenings of the world. I wonder how it would feel, exodus, becoming and unbecoming. Losing this small country built by hands.
***
I don’t have any right to tell this story. I am luckier than anyone I know. I am luckier than I can ever know. I am grateful every day for what I have been given: the chance to take long, hot baths and showers and dream and think about my place in the world.
I am telling you right now: Forget this essay. Read another essay, one about the breaking of the body, one about the intersection of struggle and identity, one that is immediate and heartbreaking and gives you call-to-action, makes you want to do something, no, need to do something so badly you are about to run away.
And this essay dissolves into words like everything, into gods and daughters, into trying to create something or trying to understand and failing, into the soft wilt of asterisks. And it is fickle and endless and half-baked because I am telling you only what I know. This is what I know.
***
There is no ending because there is no ending. I will remind you: This is a cycle. My hands are wrinkled when I write this. Tonight, in the bathtub, I will tell you I’m afraid, close my eyes under the weight of the bathroom ceiling, pretend God is watching again. There is something bigger than me, and right now, before I can fall asleep into a world created by God, I need to understand this.
Jeffrey Wang
In my portfolio, I chose to explore societal and cultural pressures surrounding the Asian American identity, posing the underlying question of “Why do I need to prove myself?” I deliberately chose to incorporate red as a core component of my pieces, representing the physical manifestation of expectations through the visual strain garnered by its vibrant intensity. Red does not have the positive connotation of love, happiness, and excitement, but instead symbolizes the internalized conflict and pain of not achieving the expectation of others and, most importantly myself. Red is a prominent color in Chinese culture, and my negative outlook on red mirrors my schism as a Chinese American. Dramatic lighting is also another integral aspect, as the transition from a dark to light background mirrors my own self-realization of navigating the expectation of society to discover a sustainable sense of self-worth. The contrast dark hue of blue and violet gives way to the lighter and more transparent layering of acrylic through glazing. The colors are blended slightly, creating an ethereal and flowing feeling alongside the use of reflections and water as a medium for actual self-reflection. Throughout the painting process, I reflected on my experiences and learned to forgive myself. I found myself opening up to others throughout my portfolio seeing the exploration of dynamic perspectives and relaxation of tight form, guiding the viewer toward possible meanings and questions about personal perception. My portfolio works to capture human connection, the driver of our experience and giver of purpose in life, by showcasing my personal development shaped by my investigation.
Featured image: Jeffrey Wang, Two Steps Back, One Step Forward, Painting. Grade 12, Coppell High School, Coppell, TX. Michelle Hauske, Educator; Region-at-Large, Affiliate. Gold Medal Portfolio, Blick Art Materials Art Portfolio
To see more Gold Medal Portfolio recipients, past and present, visit our Eyes on the Prize series.