Feeling Bloggy? betty's daughter is!

speak/ easy

for abbey lincoln

you know     a horn reaches past the body  past the ache  past the secret  past the silence     like the guitar reaches past the scream      past the flat line    past the flourish     like a name reaches past the ancestors    past the ovary   past the egg   and the water   past the light       like a remix reaches past its originary entrance   

your voice reaches back  it is a sankofa neck   nodding the ancestors through   folding me into myself  like the ripples of a deep and wide ocean          folding me into myself like flour enveloping sugar in an orange ceramic bowl

your voice reaches back  it is a skin-so-soft hand with perfectly polished red nails    it reaches back   it is a recipe recorded on tear stained tissue    it reaches back    it is a small curdled note worn honey thin   it reaches back   like a turtle's dream

you remind me what muh deah said about being fast  what my mama showed me bout being fast  what india arie sung about being    fast    you remind me  and i am thankful that I carry a little bit of a swing on a sunday porch with me   you remind me to reach past the creak   past the crack   past the slow heart beat and the fading eyes

you remind me to meditate on purple petals and tangerine dusks and that

moving slowly is not really bad/ moving slowly you see/ the wonders of the deep/ just waiting there for me

Step Up, Step Up, and See the Show:

A Critical Look at Fusco's The Couple in the Cage

..:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

            Fusco's video The Couple in the Cage critiques how objects, in this case bodies, transfer cultural knowledge.  The video stages the racist/imperialistic/fetishistic implications of "discovery," and highlights its relationship to violence and the museum as a platform or stage for such violence.  Additionally, the video provides a commentary on the role that the established temples of high art play in supporting and/or ignoring critical/artistic analysis which unties and debunks racist ideology boasted as truth about non-Western bodies throughout history. 

            One of the key aspects of the video is the impromptu responses of the   co-participants/spectators. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, responses by people of color illustrate a keen, at times visceral relationship to the staged/caged violence exhibited.  The screen revealed how this real, live experience with a circus sideshow harkens back to  a time in the not-so-distant past when their ancestors could have possibly shared the stage/cage for the amusement of a foreign audience.  Fusco writes, "Our performance was based on the once popular European and North American practice of exhibiting indigenous people of Africa, Asia, and the America's in zoos, parks, taverns, museums, freak shows, and circuses" (Fusco, 40). 

            In another vein, Euro-Americans and Europeans spectators, although to a lesser extent, insisted on engaging in conversations around authenticity.  One viewer said, "I feel like I'm being put on here."  Many other patrons, curators, and spectators commented on the exhibit not being real, without critiquing how historical museum practices propagated racist assertions about indigenous peoples that were also untrue or real.  Moreover, while people of color spectator/participants directed "their gaze inward" to really locate themselves in The Caged Couple ; Euro-Americans and Europeans seem dislocated and disjoined from how they  are in one way or another implicated in the staging of this exhibit. 

            Fusco suggests that, "People of color who believed, at least initially, that the performance was real, at times expressed discomfortbecause of their identification with our situation" (53).  Perhaps this highlight how certain spectator/participants had the privilege of buffering their bodies from the violent blows the piece highlighted in order to be amused, which speaks to the role the audience plays in politicized performance art.  How is the spectator/participant, who needs to be transformed by the work, to understand the far reaching (across time, space, and sphere) implications of  the piece then the work inherently fails, in the case mildly but possibly overall?

            An example of such failures include after school specials, public service announcements, and certain Life Time  movies which desire to reach and transform a target audience but often times are singularly understood or called to action by the former drug user, former battered wife, or former high school drop out and not the individual currently involved in the experience.  Fusco notes, "A feminist artist from New York questioned us after a public lecture we gave on the performance in Los Angeles last year, suggesting that our piece had 'failed" if the public misread it"  (55). 

            The question of audience comprehension reminds me of the responses of the class at the end of the viewing.  Some people got up and walked away, or immediately began the process of rearranging chairs and solidifying study groups.  Others, began switching cell phones on and sending text messages.  I, for one, had to just sit there and check in with my ancestors who experienced this violence.  I had to emotionally check in with my community who continues to experience such performed violence in the realms of the hip-hop video, the sports field, and the corporate office.  I needed to check in with myself to see how we are all implicated in the historical and contemporary circus of sorts that perpetuates the  energy that made this exhibit possible.