“The only way to be honest is to be haunted,” says poet Joseph Lease, closing a panel exploring “Where Art & Activism Meet” on Saturday, April 11th, the final panel time-slot of this year’s annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference in Minneapolis. He has said this elsewhere, but here it comes after reflection on Amiri Baraka’s long poem Wise, Why’s, Y’s (through which Lease speaks of the “lyric ‘I’ trying to get to the ‘we’ . . . the lyric ‘I'[that] can be the ground for critique . . . a ‘self-in-process'”) and the griot tradition.
In the wake of Sarah Fox quoting Eiko Otake of Eiko & Koma asserting that “mourning [is] one of the essential components of human survival,” in the context of “CRYING; A PROTEST” (crying for Ana Mendieta at the Carl Andre retrospective), in the context of Fox’s questioning (echoing Alice Notley): “What might we be leaving out? Not just in our poems, but in our consciousness, in our souls?” In the context of The Mongrel Coalition Against GringPo, Fox’s positing of the Tower archetype in Tarot as the figure for our time (disruption, chaos, revelation, explosive transformation, falling of old structures and orders), Fox’s referencing of Alice Notley’s “The Poetics of Disobedience“: “It’s necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against…everything. One must remain somehow, though how, open to any subject or form in principle, open to the possibility of liking, open to the possibility of using.”
In the wake of Kao Kalia Yang‘s heart wrenching discussion of her book The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, our “Secret War,” and what happens when to “say what happened” becomes “contested words.” Of the origins of her memoir, she says that after her grandmother’s death, she “started writing a long love letter” to her grandmother, “not intending to be a writer, just writing not to forget.” Here is where I don’t trust myself to remember even from moment to moment; in my chicken scratch notes: “I fight ^ write (?) to deepen understanding on the page and off it.”
In the wake of the first panelist, poet and activist Dawn Lundy Martin, addressing her work with the arts collective HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, the creation of the collective’s “Good Stock on the Dimension Floor: An Opera,” and the piece’s withdrawal (as protest) from the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Lundy Martin talks about the role of agitator, quotes Beth Loffreda (“White supremacy is fabulously hideously elastic and sensitive to minor insurrection; it will reinvent itself to small insurrectional transformations”), asks if perhaps narrative itself is a way of conscripting the body, asks how “you tell the stories that need to be told in ways that don’t deepen the groove of the already worn.” Of the collective, she speaks of the Whitney’s “totalizing desire to make us singular” (wanting one statement in one voice for the catalog, not wanting to list individual names of individual artists) and of the stifling “ways of attempting to script a singularity . . . especially . . . for artists of color.” She speaks of “collaborative, collective utterance . . . multiple utterance(s)” as “destabilizing before it even speaks,” of what happens when “the form itself makes a difference . . . the form itself is resistance,” when “the way of speaking resists.”
The “totalizing desire to make us singular”; a fearful exorcism, an attempt at un-haunting. Art and activism as haunted, haunting. I don’t know if the collaborative utterance, the multiple utterance(s) of the artists of “Where Art & Activism Meet” deliberately return again and again to themes of haunting, or if that’s inevitable when we’re honest, when we’re not letting ourselves and others forget, ignore, not know, not notice.
Amiri Baraka:
At the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean there’s a railroad made of human bones.