ARTISTIC STATEMENT
won't you celebrate with me...
that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
--Lucille Clifton
If home is truly where the heart is, then our bodies should always be spaces in which we feel welcome, safe, and free. However, the processes by which we are "othered" (colored, sexed, sexualized, and classed) often leave our bodies feeling like hotel rooms -- spaces we pass through with no real claim and no true privacy. Or, worse still, our bodies become prisons -- spaces that restrict us from experiencing the fullest expression of ourselves. My writing is an exploration of this state of being and whether or not it is possible to break free.
While my past writing is strongly aware of and often about the darkness of the past and present, I am beginning to write towards imagining a future in which black bodies and spirits will no longer be policed and destroyed. In other words,I am working toward creating writing that is
healing
metaphor dance
song
prayer
poem.
Writing that is itself freedom and home.
A note about my influences: I would not exist as a writer, or function as a human being for that matter, without the work of Audre Lorde, Suzan-Lori Parks, Adrienne Kennedy, Suheir Hammad, and Lorraine Hansberry. And Cherríe Moraga, whose belief in the possibility of freedom for me is often the only reason I still believe in it for myself.
2 May 2019: Things that have been recurring in my writing lately are consumption (being consumed by another), light (of the soul), seeing and looked/being looked at, and fracture of the self.
While my past writing is strongly aware of and often about the darkness of the past and present, I am beginning to write towards imagining a future in which black bodies and spirits will no longer be policed and destroyed. In other words,I am working toward creating writing that is
healing
metaphor dance
song
prayer
poem.
Writing that is itself freedom and home.
A note about my influences: I would not exist as a writer, or function as a human being for that matter, without the work of Audre Lorde, Suzan-Lori Parks, Adrienne Kennedy, Suheir Hammad, and Lorraine Hansberry. And Cherríe Moraga, whose belief in the possibility of freedom for me is often the only reason I still believe in it for myself.
2 May 2019: Things that have been recurring in my writing lately are consumption (being consumed by another), light (of the soul), seeing and looked/being looked at, and fracture of the self.