n. infantile pattern of suckle-swallow movement in which the tongue is placed between incisor teeth or between alveolar ridges during initial stage of swallowing (if persistent can lead to various dental abnormalities) v. [content removed due to Bush campaign to clean up the internet] n. act of nyah-nyah v. pursuing with relentless abandon the need to masticate and thrust the world into every bodily incarnation in order to transform it, via the act of salivation, into nutritive agency

Sunday, March 19, 2006

our barrios, mis amigos


My brilliant friends: engage Natalia Sophia Paz in dialogue on her new project. Here are her words:
"Who am I? A wet-back spic or suburbian Seattlefied white? Who am I but a bi-frocated tongue, a truncated light dying out and gentrified in the middle of the Belltowned night? Who am I? Lesbian, Queer, Straight, Bi, or Dyked-out and decked? Lowered but middled, a muddled class? An enigmatic presumed exotic? Who am I? Vendida? Gringa? Rarified beauty or academic spinster? Who am I? An angry brown bitch or blue collar scholar, or just a tugboater's daughter? Who am I, but to be scorned for passionate truths and thrown through endless Madonna/Whores for fodder? Who am I? Survivor of violence, the type that terrifies us into believing we are unworthy of zoot-suit pursuits? Who am I, temporary hysterical or derelict twin dislocated from her brother at birth? Who am I?

Who are you? We, the SubPopBarrio subjects? Why do we gather under so many names, so many barrios and borders but all having something in common? I'm asking for a short biografia, who you are, where we can find you now, and how might you be a hybrid of identities.

I want to know, what gets you up in the morning? Who and what inspires you? What would you argue, lose, love over? What are you passionate about changing? Tell me where you find yourself in this world, what barrio, what border? Who you are this morning, this afternoon, this night, this very moment? Who will you be tomorrow? Who and what do you want to be? Give us how you see yourself, how you want us to see you, and a thunder of thoughts."
I reside in the interum... time: created of the materials of space, not linear, not passed through linear, passed through like sheets that grow infinately vertical... between imagination and memory. the memory of my body, of their hands, of my own. the imaginary that will come, that i am dividing and replicating like the homunculi that sprout from my tongues.

two of my four grandmothers died young, one of a disease that erased memory, the other of a disease that proliferated the imaginary. i lie between the unspoken borders of their existance. my other two grandmothers i remember; one still reads my words; the other was a namesake and i never saw her again for eleven years now. not enough was said.

my family was poor, i picture peasants in the mud, forgotten bodies that were sometimes lashed, and sometimes ran about enjoying their breath. we were all small, undifferentiated, unspoken. our skin never spoke for our lives, never had to.

you get me up in the morning. everything else lies exactly on the line; can i speak about more than that: what inspires me? what i want to be? these are two hard to pin down. you are what gets me up in the morning... the idea that i might meet you.
Comments:
okaayyy, ah, i need to extend this much...
 
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