Semester of Graduation
Spring 2019
Degree
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
English
Document Type
Thesis
Abstract
The following project began as an examination of and reckoning with my family’s history of secrecy, addiction, and violence in Memphis, Tennessee. It’s centered on where that history led me, the first person in my family to graduate from high school since 1969 and a first-generation college student, and where I saw that history lead my younger brother, Kerr-Dulea Freeman Neil.
The following project is centered on why I felt it was my responsibility to save Kerr-Dulea from a path he’d carved out for himself with what he’d been given by our elders, my childhood—a little girl’s witnessing of her family caught in an oppressive cycle—and the story of what led to Kerr-Dulea’s murder at seventeen years old just a few minutes away from our family’s home on the playground of Frayser Elementary where he attended school as a little boy.
Before I began to undergo the thesis, my project asked, “We inherited incarceration, abandonment, isolation, and dysfunction. Where can we go with these things?” During the process, I found the answer written in Kerr-Dulea’s life and death and written in my own life as well. Through prose that intensifies and explodes as it meanders through time, space, and complex emotions, my fragmented memoir is a conjuring, a calling upon of spirit. My thesis focuses on not only what leads to the death of young, black, American boys in communities where freedom of choice is often precarious, but also on what happens after death and how Kerr-Dulea’s death carried me deeper within and beyond reality.
Recommended Citation
Neil, Monterica Sade, "We're the Ones We've Been Waiting For: a conjuring" (2019). LSU Master's Theses. 4916.
https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/4916
Committee Chair
Joshua Wheeler
DOI
10.31390/gradschool_theses.4916