yesterday was the midterm elections. i just returned to texas from louisiana, after attending the 2022 American Studies Association conference in New Orleans... our session was titled “Poetry in a Time of Burning: Reading Sylvia Wynter’s “Ethno or Socio Poetics” from a 1976 issue of Alcheringa, a journal on ethnopoetics. If you are interested in reading the journal, full of brilliant scholars (such as Glissant), I can send you the pdf.
mostly though i am using this as a reintroduction to what i hope to do with this space. i don’t know what will happen with Twitter, but if at any point it becomes paywalled, i will probably leave. it’s been a busy year for me, but i will try to update this space at least once or twice a month - with thoughts, essays, poems. if you are subscribed and can afford it, a paid subscription goes a long way towards supporting my practice as a writer. i am an anticapitalist and don’t believe in this sort of exchange of words for money, so i will make my work available… but i have been without consistent work since 2020, and i have mad debt, so anything helps.
i actually have nothing to say about the elections because most of what i think will probably create an argument. suffice to say that my political ideologies are aligned with anti-imperialism, and i try my best to move in that way. at some point i would like to share readings and teachings from the EZLN, where i learned so much.
back to the conference… i have so many thoughts and feelings about it, which i may or may not share. but generally speaking, i had a moment during our presentation of looking into the chairs in the room, a space inside the Hilton along the Mississippi river, built over railroad tracks, and feeling dislocated - a space that one had to pay for in order to even be inside the room - to speak or to listen - to talk about foundations principle to property, violence, dispossession, capitalism, othering, class, racism, displacement, police (and much more). and while i can only speak for myself - having varied relationships to any and all of these themes, a part of me found the experience quite surreal that most of us in that room paid money to attend and talk in a room outside the conditions of which we were speaking about. perhaps i am processing my own feelings of complicity in these systems and adversarial emotions about participating in capitalism.. but i believe in the value of such thought and process and rigor.
i am home now, with my tea, thinking and reflecting on this experience. it’s a cold and foggy day here where i am, and many in texas know the past 27 years that the GOP has had state controlled power, will continue another 4 years. i don’t know what any of this means nor do i offer any solutions or answers… just thoughts for now… the struggle to be aligned with my politics often conflicts with survival. i am grateful to be able to have conversations such as the one we had during our time together in New Orleans, but i would be failing myself as a critic if i did not question the space or the institutions or myself. is non-participation an act of protest?
hope you’re taking care of yourself this wednesday. more soon!