SWAMPS
How has my body been oriented? What are the ways it was forcibly made into a certain navigation practice?
I remember a few different times when I cried as an adult. I was sometimes in transit in a train, a plane or a bus and other times I was in a coffee shop. In my life, it had never been a question of if I was allowed to or not. Even though I was not encouraged to cry, no one ever told me not to do it. It was something in my body. Like a swamp that had been dried for agricultural purposes.
[Jehan Terriau had learned to dry wetlands from Dutch agricultural technologies in 1632]
A destroyed ecology from the past generations who thought only certain crops and a certain way to relate to living creatures was sustainable (vital to colonize).
Turning a body back into a swamp is a project that never arrives.
I first tried to stop planting anything. Trying to see what grows on its own. How do I self-regulate? And since a self is only sustained through fences and borders and I have no desires for more walls in this life, I started to talk about myself in plural. How do we (me-ecosystem) regulate?
I’m so sorry my belly. We won’t go back to swamp.
we just don't want to…maybe and don't know how.
I let me soak. Literally swimming more than I have before in my life, but also letting the failed relationships affect me and turn me into permafrost, frozen lake, lichen, swamp, bakeapple berry.
It is not a me-against-me kinda thing
Because I am of the world.
Ways of white men have first and foremost made lines in me. Grids and cubes. Graphics for if my transactional personality is likable, stronger, efficient or sufficient. Choreographic ancestrality is uncatered sorrow, self-hatred and systemic oppression with no time to honor things. Because I didn’t know what bakeapple berries are doesn’t mean they aren’t delicious. Systemic oppression is rhythmical. Ways of white men have first and foremost silenced my agency(and my surrendering) to rhythm.
(Agency)Being agent expresses being part of the discussion about desires and the direction of the body. Agency allows me to be otherwise, to be other than what I know of myself. It is to stop resisting the queerness of the world. It is about holes, sex, love, accounting, debts, laughter and cries. It is about seduction and safety.