Norbaya Jameela Durr
Norbaya Jameela Durr is a multimedia artist hailing from southside Chicago, Illinois. Her art encompasses poetry, musical performance and production, graphic design, and creative writing. She is a biologist, chemist and literary and cultural analysis student, finishing her B.S. degree at Elmhurst University where she conducts independent research focused on plant biology, conservation, urban ecosystem development, phylogenetics, plant and microbial community ecology and restoration; and as an English major, she studies therapeutic literary analysis focused in multicultural bibliotherapy and bibliodidactics.
Norbaya is Chief Editor at IINSPIRE LSAMP Alumni Committee (ILAC), a 501(3c) that focuses on supporting BIPOC in STEM academics, profession and in industry, and is a writing tutor at Elmhurst University, spending her time editing and proofreading, and supporting student writing skills.
She is a 20-year leader and community organizer and a 6-year Board of Director at the Inner-city Muslim Action Network (IMAN), a non-profit organization whose work encompasses health and wellness and healing in the inner-city through running a FQHC (federally qualified health center), organizing and arts & culture; is a member of Sigma Tau Delta, an international excelled English honor society; a researcher in the GREEN lab (Green roofs, Ecology and Environmental lab) at Elmhurst University; an intern/member at the Morton Arboretum Soils Ecology & Plant Systematics lab and is a fellow at Rethink Outside funded by Blue Sky Funders Forum, a project that aims to improve BIPOC experiences and connection with nature/environment, where she will conduct her project summer 2022 titled Bibliotherapy With Nature. In this project, she will utilize literature to explore, cultivate and explore heal the self with nature with BIPOC women at a retreat.
After having studied herbal medicine, in 2017 she started her small-business, C. Art Press whose mission works to connect communities and individuals through herbalism, creative arts, literature/bibliotherapy and science education.
Atomic Particle Thoughts (2022)
“Atomic Particle Thoughts,” is a celebration of the growth I have made after realizing I was a child when I married, the experiences I have lived in search for love being a Black woman with a child and a sorrow I wrapped myself in for such a long while. I decided to make a short film since I have recently discovered I enjoy the process, even though it can be frustrating at times. I often make instrumentals that in the first 30 seconds there are drums drumming, bells belling and in the next minute flutes and harps are overpowering, reinforced with badass bass rhythms. Atomic Particle Thoughts is a poem I wrote that blends my academic passions in biology, chemistry and English trying to cooperate with my artistry. Creative writing can be such a process of healing, or it may yield me closer to an understanding that feels like an emotional expungement. I sit in my emotions and try to find a sound or make one that fits what I believe my thoughts sounds like, their vibration in space… I created two very different beats prior to Atomic Particle Thoughts but, after rest and reviewing the products--- the feeling I initially had about each of those draft beats left. Each time I listen to Atomic Particle Thoughts it retells me of those feelings I had in the retrospect of the experiences I share. I re-heal listening to it. After spending many hours developing the draft audio and then the visuals and then finally, pasting all the elements together, I became a critic and edited the work. Editing is where the real magic comes from. Even when I write poems, it is the refining process that brings my poetry to a state I find is peak.
In the process of doing my art, I seek to create community by sharing my work.
The poem
Soils are types of legacies
Of unraveled bodies listening to reborn you
Again, like how
The Atomic Particles in Thought
My child Marriage of love
Became like tarred rocks falling into gradients
Inside hands holding daggers and black hole
Folding me tightly bound in concepts of God
The ending of marriage brought on me
Peculiar senses of defeat and unworthiness
An unworthiness
And I yearn a solemn song
Long after the dragging of my body for gold
In a run to find a solace
I placed my feet in wandering waters abiding by rules
Found only in dreaming deep
Mine eyes whispered to that void of nothing
It caused the silent unworthiness in my blood
To seep into what looked like ground water
And I yearn a solemn song
In the remembering of sadness
How long was my sat?
Alone, rejected single woman with a child
How their masculine eyes clustered me pitiful
Black
poor
deflowered
I believed it too
That I should not hope to love and be loved
But see a heart yearning hidden in the wrapping of
Sensual erotic abandonment
Stays in that place when it cannot know another
I ran to a man licking his wounds by swaying my words
Until my poorness became a stain imparted in our kissing
I gulped reality and became again
The madness of alone
We drown sometimes in our beauty
Leaves us wounds cut to the bone
But we breathe again
What is the song of an absent heart drinking the smiles of a man?
A young man
Hungry for your erotic
Licking it
Softening the scars of your wounds
Rendering your skin like new again?