(Read while following instructions in parentheses)
The body is still known in the dark, known better because you must engage with senses other than sight.
A poem is known without the blind feeling for surfaces of recognition. The anatomy of a poem is known immediately, and must be autopsied. But what happens when you don’t just see text written out on the page? (HOVER SPIDERWEB) At what point does something become or stop being poetry?
The body doesn’t disappear in the dark. You just have to search.
(PERCEPTION)
Perception is heavily tied to sight. We are an image-based culture that believes in compartmentalization. Identification of a thing makes it easier to understand. It also makes it easier to destroy. (HOVER I) But identity cannot be based on image alone.
(PERSPECTIVE)
We all have multiple selves, multiple personas. Who you are in this classroom is not who you are with your parents is not who you are around close friends is not who you are, is not who you are, is not who you are.
Remember when you were in grade school. Remember trading pokemon cards or beanie babies. Remember writing, ‘If I had one wish, it would be to be an only child.’ Remember your embarrassment at yourself. (MEMORY) Remember that who you are is inextricable from who you were, who your family is and was, what your heritage means or doesn’t mean.
(APPLE)
Memory isn’t written like a tome to which you can return. It maps out like veins and roads, where remembering the embarrassment of yourself also includes the time you were hit in the nose with a soccer ball and bled in front of everyone, or the time you had to read ‘The man inserts the penis into the vagina’ aloud in health class.
(I)
But we are all these things, past and present, even the hypothetical future you. You are exactly who you want to be, who you project. But what do you do if the words don’t encompass what you are. Someone says, ‘Indian.’ Someone else says, ‘Biracial.’ Another, ‘Mixed Race.’ Behind each word is a history that you don’t feel connection to. (N) The term ‘Meztizo’ was coined for the children of European and indigenous Americans, to assign them a caste. The language of colonialism is continued colonialism.
(THOUGHT)
There isn’t a word to encompass you. (APPLE) There isn’t a category that fits your experience. No one can be an icon or image for a community or group of people, not wholly, because no one experiences perfectly the same dissonances. (N’T) So when you refer to these categories, are you destroying all of the things that you are not?
(DOOR)
To navigate my site, you must be curious. Like walking in a city with no map. Some doors don’t have their ‘open’ signs on, but that doesn’t mean that they’re locked. (NO) There are paths you don’t see and paths that lead nowhere and it is up to you to read your own narrative.
(DASH)
If there’s anything we all experience, it’s being in between. The things we see or read about are rarely entirely relatable. My dad still watches Outsourced because at least there are Indians present, even if they’re caricatures.
(WE)
They are still a part of him, (SIDESCROLL) as you are still a part of yourself as you move through identities, constructed by language or by images or by your own understanding.
(/O)
The body doesn’t disappear in the dark, and we do not disappear without language to describe us. Resisting language doesn’t mean destroying it, but expanding it. Perceiving it with every sense.