I am a vine creeping down the moon I have no keeper – There is no settling for the nonhuman. It is always turning, forever in […]
o meu avô
Na sua Pedagogia das Pedras, Jesusa Rodriguez nos conta como o nascimento é a materialização da energia vital que está dispersa e atuante no Universo. Ao nascermos, essa energia primordial se torna uma pequena faísca, que habita o nosso coração. Para nos reencontrarmos com a nossa vitalidade, é necessário travar a Xochi-Yolotl (flor-coração), a Guerra […]
The Difference Between Poetry and Rhetoric
The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children. – Power, Audre Lorde Lorde’s opening verses from her monumental poem Power kept coming back throughout the readings of the week. These words are always with me, I find them comforting when trying to live a committed and congruent […]
Corpus
Susan Leigh Foster examines this paradox, asserting that deeper awareness of one’s own movements––logically, an intensely interospective and therefore private ‘lived experience’ of one’s own body––actually allows access to understanding how another moving body might feel, a body that is external yet at the same time continuous with the subject…Kinesthesia, in short, implies an intimacy with […]
spirit in the mask-making
“Can we be presente in masks? At first it seems impossible. Within the mask not only the face but the heart is encased, one is separate and separated through concealment. Can there be a heartening beneath the hardness of stoicism? Can you be one with a mask (to be me, I have to walk and […]
The tiger and the jabutis
While I write this short response paper, there is an election happening in Brazil. I find quite ironic the fact that I am discussing the idea of being presente, as presented by Diana Taylor (2018), while feeling the frustration of not being there. There is a sense of being powerless about something as huge as […]
“Continual Creative Motion:” A Politics of Ambiguity
Diana Taylor concludes ¡Presente! with a meditation on walking theory and the “cultural coding” of walking which is never just walking (Taylor, 38). Recently, U.S. news has been saturated with images and stories seeking to reify the “migrant caravan” – an assemblage of Central Americans travelling mostly on foot towards the U.S. – Mexico border […]
Marielle, Presente!
When we gathered around the streets of Rio de Janeiro after the execution of black, lesbian councilor Marielle Franco, we hopelessly shouted “Marielle, Presente!” multiple times. Marielle and her driver were shot dead on 14 March, in a targeted assassination which unleashed a wave of anger across Brazil, and provoked urgent debate on the country’s racism, violence and […]
Ana Hina! Ana Hini! Ana Hown!
My tongue has always been my biggest sensory of confusion, it is why learning Spanish was a necessary transition from my colonizing split between English and Arabic, mi propia existencia “rajada” (Anzaldua). What can our presence create in between our ancestors’ walkways of history and the current political time? Anzaldua describes in her book, […]
Rajadas y Atravesados
The Borderlands is a porous territory, a locus of hybridity of ethnicity, race, language, and gender, as Anzaludúa poignantly proposes. She sees herself as atravesada por la frontera, split, rajada. Y esa raja, that split, positions her being in a state of open possibilities. It is the Coatlicue state, el estado de la serpent, a […]