"You wanted adventure? How's this?" (Nyota Uhura)

Communication.

Now that's a daunting concept.

And this is a daunting piece for me to write.

Some of you might not think so.  Some of you might question how it could be difficult for anyone -- either communicating, or writing about it.

But for me?  It's really daunting -- because communication, for me, is, in and of itself, daunting; it's daunting because I have a hard time getting through to other people, and always have had trouble with that ... even when I was a little kid.  I always have -- and, maybe, always will -- have a hard time getting across even the most basic concepts to others.  Not the best trait for someone who wants to be a professional writer, you know?

Now, of course, you could argue that this is because I'm autistic, or that it's because I'm stupid.  I've heard both premises suggested, plenty of times, in my life.  I'm not sure which one is true.  Heck, I've been told I'm stupid more often than I've been told just about anything in my life -- for dozens and dozens of reasons, ranging from the fact that I have trouble communicating to the fact that, to this day, I still love cartoons as much as I did when I was a kid.

I try not to let the insults get to me, the same way I tried back when I was a little kid.

But it doesn't always work.  And sometimes, I lose my temper about it.  And sometimes the days can seem long, when I'm contemplating how a person who might not be the brightest person in the world can objectively figure out how smart they are.  And when I feel like that, it's an ugly cycle I've talked about before ... and it can make me feel like I should just curl up in a ball away from everyone.  After all, I reason, if I never even try to communicate with anyone, how can I ever fail to communicate with them?  And how could they ever accuse me of being stupid?

And, when I feel like that, which isn't as infrequently as I'd like ... well, those are times when I'm most in need of help from my heroes.  And one of the heroes who helps me the most in times like that  is Nyota Uhura.

Because Nyota Uhura has been my hero since the first time I saw Star Trek, when I was seven years old, visiting a friend's house.  I don't recall the specifics of the episode -- despite my pride in my memory, it's not perfectly photographic in the sense that there are unfortunate gaps.  But I remember that Uhura wasn't on any kind of planet-side mission, or commanding the Enterprise, or making a bamboo cannon, or running from giant rubber fried-egg aliens.  

Instead, she was doing what she did most of the time in the original show -- sitting at what appeared to be an incredibly-complicated communications center, with her earpiece in her ear.

And communicating.  And this was awesome to me.

And this was awesome to me on a lot of different levels.  It was awesome to me because, up until Uhura, I had never been able to see anyone on television -- who got to talk, and to be respected, anyway -- who looked anything like my best and fiercest and most beloved childhood friend, whom I'll call CK because I can't currently confirm her approval with inclusion in this piece.  Now, of course, this wasn't exactly the most critical, media-savvy view of what Uhura meant to a lot of people, and I wish that I'd been smarter and more aware of broader social issues when I was that age, but I'm including it here because it was important to me.  Honesty is part of this blog and I feel it would be dishonest not to mention that here -- because it's what got me to first notice Uhura, this crucial difference in how Nyota was portrayed so positively while also looking like my friend, which was something I almost never got to see in the media I consumed at that time.

But it was awesome to me to see a black woman who had such a positive portrayal, in direct opposition to the negative views of my family, who were uniformly racist and deeply-bigoted.  I knew the horrible things my family said about my best friend and other black girls or women weren't true.  Seeing that represented lifted my spirits and gave me hope that not everyone shared the ugliness that came from my parents and more distant relatives.

Of course, CK would come to love Uhura, too, once I introduced her to Star Trek, which she had never seen. There were no DVDs or Blu-Rays in 1979, after all, and so -- having tracked down what the show was called and when it was on -- my best friend and I sat and watched and thought Uhura was just the coolest.  Not Captain Kirk.  Not Mister Spock.  Not Scotty.  Not Sulu.  Not Chekov.  But Uhura.  And I loved Uhura so much that I even wanted to dress like her.  When a store near my house carried novelty t-shirts done up in the likenesses of the command uniforms of the various Star Trek crew members, I told my folks I wanted the red one.  Of course, I told them that the color red was like the color Scotty wore, which was also true, but I was choosing it for Uhura.  I wasn't exactly the bravest kid, as these blogs have shown.  But I chose Uhura, then, and I still choose Uhura, now, to top the list, whenever I'm asked who my favorite Star Trek characters are.

But it wasn't just because she was like my best friend, of course.

She also had a skill that I considered to be one of the most precious abilities a person could have.

She had the skill of communication.

"Hailing frequencies open," she would say -- or other lines similar to that.  And, at the time, I didn't know what "hailing" or "frequencies" really were. 

So I had to imagine them, because when I didn't understand something I would imagine it.  

And so I thought of hail. 

I thought of a storm of information, all raining down around Uhura's ears -- the way hailstorms would pelt my senses with chaotic noise, with an endless rain of sensory information that meant close to nothing and, for the most part, usually signified less.  And, so, this all made sense to me.  Of course, that's what it must sound like in Uhura's earpiece -- the endless noise of space.  And, to me, the endless noise of space didn't mean the silence of a vacuum.  I knew some of my sciences at that age, and I knew that space was supposed to be silent.  But I also knew that things on planets made noise, and explosions made noise if you were near enough to them, and people's voices all mashed together would sound like crashing waves of agonizing dissonance.  

And so I imagined that this must be what Uhura was hearing in her ear piece -- the sounds of whole planets of people's voices all mixed together, from thousands of worlds; and I imagined the sounds of whole galaxies exploding, or being born; and I thought of the noise of epic conflicts across a universe that was very likely at war -- because conflict seemed everywhere on Earth, so it had to be the same in space; and I imagined that Uhura's communications desk had the power to hear the entirety of all the noise in the universe, or to narrow that range down to focus on one cricket's chirping on a planet a billion light-years away from the Enterprise.

And yet ... she handled it.

She handled it.

She was like me, in the sense that -- to my way of thinking -- she had to sift through the mountains and mountains of noisy data that made up her efforts to understand what she was hearing -- and she totally did it.

And she did it ... with calm.

And that amazed me.  And it soothed me.  And it made me feel calm, with all the noise assaulting my head on a daily basis.  It didn't solve things, but it helped.  It helped me to see a woman who, as I imagined it, was being assaulted with all the communications -- all the sounds -- in the known universe, and yet could listen quietly to them -- could take them in ... and understand them ... and sift out what was important ... and then tell people -- in the briefest fashion possible -- what they needed to know to do their jobs.

And that was key to me -- because Uhura wasn't just listening.  She was also hearing.  And understanding.  And communicating right back to the universe.  And she was processing all of this in a matter of critical seconds -- seconds that a Captain, or an Engineer, or a Science Officer counted on to do whatever it was they needed to do for their jobs.

And this meant, to me, that Uhura had to not only do what she was doing, and sift the information, and understand it, and communicate -- but also had to understand everyone else's job, too!

It wasn't enough for her to merely be good at communications.  She had to be good at science, to know what she needed to know and understand what needed to be understood in order to sift through a mass of useless data and find the parts that Spock needed to know about and condense it down into a few seconds' worth of statements -- because the crew almost never had any time for more than a few seconds to decide what to do, to pick which action to take.  And it wasn't enough for her to merely be good at communications and science.  She had to know how Engineers worked, so she could relay critical information from the Engineering Deck to the rest of the crew, or vice versa.  She had to understand how to bridge those gaps in communication, or to make sure that there were no misunderstandings.  And it wasn't enough for her to merely be good at communications and science and engineering.  She had to be good at understanding medical information, which meant not only knowing how to communicate and comprehend medical issues on the Enterprise, but also how to handle complex medical situations where medics needed information relayed back and forth with only seconds to save lives.  And it wasn't enough for her to merely be good at communications and science and engineering and medical issues -- she also had to know tactics, and strategy, so she could make sure what she said to Klingons or Romulans or other Federation ships was clear ... which also meant she needed to know other alien cultures.  And other alien languages.  And, on top of that, there was the constant barrage of the noise in her ear piece.  

And yet, she would simply turn and say "Hailing frequencies are open, Captain."  Like none of it got to her.  Like none of it was overwhelming, even though it had to be overwhelming to anyone.

And there's more.

As perfectly-portrayed in the original series by Nichelle Nichols, Uhura was also depicted as a woman who was clearly the respected equal of all the men who made up the rest of the central crew.  There weren't, to my child's mind, issues of gender being discussed.  I know, now, as an adult, that there were problems with some aspects of how Uhura was occasionally presented onscreen -- but, for the most part, she was treated as the equal of all the other central command characters.

And this gave me hope.  It gave me so much hope for the future.  And it was and is hope I needed then and need now.  Because of where things are in this world when it comes to women and how we are portrayed, I want to think there can be a day when it is handled the way Uhura -- presented at the character's best -- got to be portrayed, with humanity and pride ... skilled and capable and professional and self-confident and self-determined.  I needed that.  I need that.  We need that.

And we still do, no matter who is playing the character.

Now, of course, to that end, I want to hand all respect to Zoe Saldana, as this is principally a piece about Uhura as a character, but Saldana's take on Uhura hasn't been given as much opportunity to stand out yet, because of what I consider to be severe problems with the portrayal of women in the J. J. Abrams' Star Trek films.  But I felt it necessary to mention her here, because Zoe is clearly doing everything she can with the character, even though it's not enough because of the restrictions placed upon her by scripts and stories that are less-than-friendly toward women.  I'll also add "Hang in there, Zoe."  She's fighting a tough fight to be seen by a disinterested studio and behind-the-scenes "creative" team who clearly hold animus toward women and people of color being at the center of a big Hollywood movie, let alone a character who represents both.  

You'd almost think the "creative" team behind the revised Star Trek isn't interested in communicating with the fans about what we want to see in terms of Uhura (and Sulu, and ... and ... and ... )

But, ah, there's that word again -- communication.

And communication through art and entertainment, in our culture right now, has become less important than other considerations -- like perceived marketability, merchandising, international distribution rights.  I heard it once said that where once our stories were sagas, we now instead have franchises.  

Like burger chains.  Like disposable elevator music.

Like plastic.

Except characters don't have to be plastic.  

They can still mean something -- and still do -- to many, many people.  They can be important, and the people portraying them can be considered as more than props for merchandise.

And characters -- and the actors who play them -- can have real impact on the real world, and make real changes in people's lives by the work they do. 

Characters like Uhura can -- and do -- and will -- inspire us.  

They will help us understand the importance of communication.  

They will help us understand what it means to reach out and communicate with others.

And you know what?

Communicating with others is what I do now.

For a living.

In the day-to-day work I do that pays the bills to keep the lights on, guess what I do?

I'm at a desk, wearing a headset, surrounded by computers ... helping people from all over the world.  

My job is ... to communicate.

And I believed in myself enough to get that job because of women like Uhura who helped me when I was growing up, and because of the people who portrayed and wrote her to be so powerful a symbol of what women can become, and achieve, and represent.  And how women can be smart, and skilled, and professional -- but also real, and vulnerable sometimes, and deep.

And now, as I sit at that desk on that headset, I'm doing a job I love where I'm listening to find the clues to what people I talk to need to know, so I can do the necessary research and find it out.  I have to hear horrible stories of struggle, to find empathy for people going through difficult times, and have strength to share their hardships, and to help them direct their actions.  And I have to know law, science, medicine, industry, art, culture, literature, business, finance ... and connect with people who live all over the place sharing the common need for help.

So it's ... sort of like ...  kind of like ... a certain other person's job.

So when I wore that red shirt that I knew was Uhura's that my parents believed was Scotty's, I was actually wearing the uniform of what I would someday be ... to a degree.

I'm not in charge of communications on a starship, of course.  Just my own life.

And, in my work -- and my life -- my hailing frequencies are open.  And thanks to Nyota Uhura, and Zoe Sandoval, and most of all Nichelle Nichols, I finally understand ... on so many levels ... what that really, truly means.