The word coexistence has a spatial component, and implies the sharing of space or cohabitation within overlapping territories; it also has a temporal dimension, suggesting simultaneous presence with others in the same moment in time.
What happens when those same people cling to the idea of forgiveness in order for them to sleep at night? They forgave to forget. And they expect me to do the same. I have. But they give themselves the power to forgive people who are unforgivable.
As a writer, my life straddles a basic division – I’ve often found myself attempting to translate experiences I had in a different part of the world, and more tellingly, in a different language.
The Argentinian writer Jorge Borges, blind, dared to say that anything that happens to an artist that does not destroy them is a gift. I don’t know if the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita would agree that his, for instance, extreme suffering at the hands of one of the world’s ugliest regimes, led by the CIA-backed Agosto Pinochet, was a gift.
Celebrating Cave Canem: Cornelius Eady, Morgan Parker, & Cameron Awkward Rich, in conversation with Chiyuma Elliott & Vincente Perez By: Menat Allah El Attma, November 29, 2021 Why not start at the darkest place? Morgan Parker, before reciting any poetry from the page, speaks it naturally. Imagine her words: yourself, to begin with darkness. If we […]
My work starts from the premise that slavery is process that is currently ongoing, and that Black voice is always (already) constrained by a white supremacist violence that hides its destruction behind liberal ideals such as progress, The Human, multiculturalism and more.
kawá/then [1] This piece is part of a larger collection of poems, Nez Perce Word for Shark, that draws on my heritage language of Nez Perce to explore the grammars of meaning and distinct aesthetics that emerge through its linguistic features. The collection also draws on figures and tropes from Nez Perce narratives. [2] qú’nes/condor; […]
notes from the understory (level 5) such that dust without my knowing is a subtle swirling viscosity surrounding you & me always or only the ‘always’ I know as this life dust is the cohesion & creates coherence between us dust of what all of us are & have been or at least this planet’s […]
