The actual presence of I, the viewer, is required to truly apprehend the absence of you, the Other. These domestic ruins have been rafted from 
nowhere, from no one. I cannot sit in your chair, eat at your table. 
I cannot open your dresser and touch your shirts that will trigger eidetic memories of a dance or late night walk. The proximity between you and me is infinite. (And what kind of proximity do I need to write as witness? Should I have experienced the event myself? 
If I watched the video, can I write about it? Do I have to be related to the victim? And what do you mean by relation?) I can never metabolize what you went through yet I cannot escape your disquieting sadness, the burden of your solitude. How it unfolds even when I leave this space. What has become of you? What could have gone through your mind?

- Cathy Park Hong in Against Witness

No alimente el delirio de las redes sociales.









Postea en tu blog.

Y es este tipo de literatura la que sostiene mi esperanza, porque refleja la acción más alta a la que como escritores debemos acceder: el poder creativo sin disimular el terror al que un país nos tiene sometidos, sin callar nuestro hartazgo por la política de exterminio que parece controlar Centroamérica, pero con arte, pero con magia. Manifestando que no, no han podido arrebatarnos nada.

- Dolores Dorantes aquí

I want to embrace my naivete, my foolishness, my underconsidered belief in human possibility.

- Claudia Rankine

Il faut être ivre



Enivrez-vous

Il faut être toujours ivre. Tout est là: c'est l'unique question. Pour ne pas sentir l'horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous enivrer sans trêve.

Mais de quoi? De vin, de poésie, de vertu, à votre guise. Mais enivrez-vous.

Et si quelquefois, sur les marches d'un palais, sur l'herbe verte d'un fossé, dans la solitude morne de votre chambre, vous vous réveillez, l'ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue, demandez au vent, à la vague, à l'étoile, à l'oiseau, à l'horloge, à tout ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à tout ce qui parle, demandez quelle heure il est; et le vent, la vague, l'étoile, l'oiseau, l'horloge, vous répondront: "Il est l'heure de s'enivrer! Pour n'être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps, enivrez-vous; enivrez-vous sans cesse! De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise.

- Baudelaire: Petits poèmes en prose, XXXIII (1869)

CONTRA LA POLICÍA

Toda mi obra es contra la policía.
Si escribo un poema de Amor es contra la policía
Y si canto a la desnudez de los cuerpos canto contra la policía
También si metaforizo esta Tierra metaforizo contra la policía
Si digo locuras en mis poemas las digo contra la policía
Y si logro crear un poema es contra la policía
Yo no he escrito una palabra, un verso, una estrofa que no sea contra la policía
Mi prosa toda es contra la policía
Toda mi obra incluyendo este poema
Toda mi obra entera es contra la policía.
Toda mi obra es contra la policía.

- Miguel James

Translation to English here.

The son of a minister, Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was born on May 28, 1807 in the village of Môtier, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Agassiz was educated in the universities of Switzerland and Germany as a physician, like many naturalists of the time.

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From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried

and

this video

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As a member of the Transatlantic Committee “De-mounting Louis Agassiz”, I made the following intervention. I carried a metal plaque bearing a graphic representation of the slave Renty to the top of an Alpine peak, the Agassizhorn (3946 metres), on the borders of the Swiss cantons of Berne and Valais. In so doing, I took the first step towards renaming the mountain.

- Sasha Huber

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Archiving the Unspeakable Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia by Michelle Caswell

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Rather than celebrate Blackness as a cultural identity, Afro-Pessimism theorizes it as a position of accumulation and fungibility (Saidiya Hartman); that is, as condition—or relation—of ontological death. One of the guiding questions of Dr. Wilderson’s engagement with Afro-Pessimism asks, How are the political stakes of analysis and aesthetics raised and altered if we theorize the structural relation between Blacks and Humanity as an antagonism (an irreconcilable encounter) as opposed to a (reconcilable) conflict?

- Frank B. Wilderson

In the beginning there was translation. Without it there’s no expression, not even gene expression, no life. Even the untranslatable is vital for the process. And to splice one must first excise. Memory, with its trident of recall, imagination, and transformation is translation’s muse and taxonomy. Memory is sometimes unconscious cognition, other times absence. In an integrative age, grid and matrix rename the prongs, erect isomers or chiasms, employ catalog, entropy or the enzymatic for reproduction’s sake. Not all creation is equal. We’re not all butterflies. Meaning burns us as we burn it. Our predilection is replication and mimicry.

 - Fady Joudah, In the Name of the Letter, the Spirit, and the Double Helix



And then this poem by Roman Osminkin (translated by Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich):

you go to protest after protest
you read, foaming at the mouth,
about blighted injustice and the stormclouds gathering over the nation
you hand out literature
you wave flags
and you might think you’d end up in the top results at least once
but no
not once not even one time
best case scenario you’re implied between the lines in some local gazette
and that’s all she wrote
while now when he drops
just a snatch of fuckery
and thoughtlessly at that
your friend the poet is wallowing in glory
but since you’re fundamentally not vindictive
you write it all off to the warped logic of the media
and you forget your childish hurt feelings
after all what could be nicer
than your friend the poet alive, unharmed
standing in the doorway, smiling
opening a bottle of champagne
clamoring for a toast to glorious fuckery

And then reading this paragraph in this essay by Raha Namy:

Recently, any old kind you are becoming aware of a growing new sensation: wanting to move to a new land that will surround you with neither this nor that language, with yet another language. A place that will force you to face once again the challenge of coding and decoding, building language consciously and with effort, understanding it and not understanding it, simply trusting the still inaccessible sounds and forms to take you away into new mysterious territories. You are feeling the urge for yet another unknown, a place whose foreign oral environment will mirror your inner turmoil of constantly feeling like being an outsider, a foreigner, no matter where, not fully belonging in the first or the second land, in the first or the second language, forever needing to flow.

Hoy no tengo nada que decir.
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Hoje não tenho nada a dizer.
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Aujourd'hui je n'ai rien a dire.
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Jodi a mwen pa gen anyen yo di.
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Сегодня у меня нет ничего, чтобы сказать.