Of This

There is something about THIS

that leads to this

that makes me think of that

but I had to hold it in so I wouldn't post on Cinco De Mayo.

because ultimately it was all about this:

Everybody gets to go to my country but me- Nadia

It makes perfect sense to me that the students at THIS are having such violent reactions to merely desiring to take up space on their own terms. Especially in art, any art but especially those that involve the physical body as the primary tool, dance, theater, vocal music there is a strange disconnect.

The somewhat theoretical understanding of how much those physical arts owe to the experiences and expression of oppressions of POC and other marginalised peoples coupled with the constant burbling undertone of

" You are already in a discipline fighting for legitimacy , please PLEASE please don't make it even harder by mucking it up with your *GASP* politics"

Meanwhile everyone pats there backs on how "liberal" they are, and you look around and you notice in a class on transgressive art talking about POC artists you are one of few POC in the room and pointing out that no one can speak to that but you has just made you really unsafe.

That your perseverance, your struggle which is not noble fodder for dram but the only thing you could think of doing ( you being your mama her mama her daddy those play cousins) , that triumph turns into

a tequila swilling booze fest, and it's not that, that erasure for repressed idiots to get there kicks

but the fact that it's canceled because the news needs sweeps month xenophobia to stay relevant so they drummed up a faux epidemic that conveniently manages to feed off of a hatred so bad that

you can be killed in the street

but the link that gets play is the one about white people because well they're not them right.

Everybody gets to go home but us. They don't even make time to talk about us when they're talking about us.

It is always about art, because in the end anything where we seek to tell a story even a " factual one" we are framing and moving choosing and not choosing concealing and highlighting and creating something.

I'm trying to find a way to go home.

Home is a dream , a peace of art just outside of this real world , where we don't have to be sorry or useful or explain why we deserve to live. Where we don't have to take shit, where speaking our language, swaying our hips , or living our lives aren't excuses to try and crush us.

I just want to go home

Home is real , the hood, Guyana, Barbados , India,Portugal,Brasil,Haiti France , Ireland all those places with my father, aunties and uncles and cousins and for mothers and brogues that course through my blood, but are more real to me as places people go to be drunk , or feel calls to or one off facebook experiences to find yourself, with full intent of leaving the ashes of what it took to do so right there.

What about me , I was never lost? What about if I ever found myself I'd never leave, and I'd never sell it , and I'd never expect nobody to be grateful for giving me such a boon

When Nadia writes about literally being told having a connection to a place being seen as a bad thing , it reached inside me somewhere and squished

The idea that it is better to bring in complete strangers with little to no connection as " objective observers" rather than educate those whose lives depend on it to best be the voices for themselves

Because when we use those voices, we have the audacity not to talk about them.

We're selfish that way , not to want to consider the big global impact or the " bigger picture" but instead our lives right here right now.

There is no competition in it for us. I read this all the time through out the blogosphere about the death of newsmedia, PRINT MEDIA IS DYING , followed by a triumphant shout.

And I want them to stop being so excited, because there not better. Print media is dying, and bloggers dancing on it's grave ain't no better.

Nobody is talking bout being thorough , or being good, or being responsible or accountable, nobody trumpeting about citizen journalism is pointingo ut what those citizens look like.

They just excited to kill somebody. And what about us?

What about those of us who don't want to kill nobody to eat, to live , to not die.

What about those of us who want to make art to go home, to tell a story to love something, to jsut make a loud crash, to reach out and be WITH the people , not above them.

Everybody gets to go home but us?

That all the people who are suddenly discovering their responsibility to brown people , WOC, trans people that have "come on home"

( and how quickly that return home is followed by asking for money or sweat, or using home as bully pulpit to chastize someone else for doing the shit they did less than two weeks ago)

but don't understand why we would be so angry about them deciding that this is suddenly home.

BUt mostly you should think about THIS

and wonder why being this or that of the other thing makes wanting to go home

something we have to explain.