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Prologue

When I was a child, my mom used to take me to the library every week. The librarians— Miss Carolyn, Miss Phyllis— were somewhere between high priestess and impossibly cool older sister to me. I read across the shelves of the children’s library from left to right, sometimes venturing up into the adult section to look at glossy art and nature books. These books were my companions, constant and warm and full of stories that made me feel like my inner stream of questions and feelings had homes outside of myself, currents of unfamiliar voices who shared the same qualities of pull that I felt inside myself.

What I hope to offer here is a sense of companionship for fellow artists, thinkers, dreamers, and movers wishing to engage thoughtfully and lovingly in this difficult, beautiful world. Because I am an in-between-person, racially and also disciplinarily, my impulse reaches in two directions:

  1. in solidarity with anyone who has ever tried to speak and found the languages they were surrounded by either too flatly disembodied or too solidly unreflecting to receive their lived truths, and

  2. in companionship with anyone who is engaged in the work of undoing the colonial assumptions and injuries that hold them back from being expansively present in the spaces that hold them.

What I offer here is a personal story about moving through musical and personal dissolution, and some of the people, experiences, and ideas that are giving me the courage to come closer to myself in the continuing wake of this experience. This is not a narrative of success or failure, not a tidy linear story with a moral at the end; it’s a practice log, a trace of continuing movement.

 

In these traces of movement, there are repeating patterns. They bend toward the ground of experiences that have sustained me and reminded me of movement when embodied habits have tightened me into fearful stasis: capacious love; community; embodied presence. They pivot on a sense that Audre Lorde describes in her beautiful essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” In this essay, which she gave first as a talk at Mount Holyoke College in 1978, Lorde reclaims the erotic from the illicit overtones of patriarchal, power-over frameworks and rewrites it as an experience of “self-connection shared,” whether through painting a fence or writing a poem or “moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love” (p. #).

 

Her words have joined with the examples of my many teachers and friends in helping me to step into a space of connection that, at its best, neither excludes nor closes in around my own experiences. I’m still getting to know this space, and I ask for forgiveness when I move too far in the direction of either self-involvement or self-negation. I am guided in part by something my advisor Claire Chase said during an ensemble class I was assisting her with at Harvard, during a group improvisation in which the wonderfully sensitive students were listening so carefully to one another to avoid stepping on toes that there was no floor of sound to respond to. Sometimes the most beautiful moments happen in the space right after you’ve collided. What Claire was asking was for the same depth and breadth of listening and attention, but with a courage and abandon that imagined taking space as a generative act, a mindset of abundance that stayed open to what was not easy and was often gorgeous.

 

With this guidance, I offer a personal story that is grounded in gratitude and hope for community, for love, for shared experience. I situate myself and my work in deep and humble solidarity with the people who inspire me to notice and reach beyond the oppressive structures and practices through which I live, and I hope that my continuing journey can offer a sense of less-alone-ness to anyone with whom it resonates.

. . .

 

Interwoven into this text and in the building in which I studied are papier-mache flowers, each one dedicated to a person or experience or collective to whom I owe the stories I share here.

 

This catalogue of gratitude (thank you, Ross Gay; thank you, Claire Chase!) could be written in infinite ways, and I hope that I continue to write it and rewrite it for as long as I live. Each person or source I thank contains and has given me multitudes, often overlapping and entangling in ways that go beyond the individual boundaries of citation. What I want to share in these flowers is a story of encounters—of the places and circumstances in which I came to know something, with the understanding that I would never have received this information or experience in that context were it not for the thousands of other ways other people and circumstances supported that interaction.

 

This is a limited view of a vast field that I hope will give you (whoever is reading this) a sense of less-alone-ness, maybe introduce you to some people whom you’ve not yet crossed paths with, and I hope communicate some of the warmth and depth of relation that I experienced in each moment of encounter. Thank you for being here with me.

. . .

Resonating through all of these flowers of gratitude is a field of sounds that I offer as a quiet and deeply felt offering to the Indigenous people, cultures, and ecosystems whose lands I have occupied and been supported by for my entire life. This is not enough, never enough; it is accompanied by a continuing violence that I am only beginning to step into right relationship with. I ask each person reading this to witness my commitment to solidarity and repair and to breathe with me as I step deeper into the difficult love of

undoing the violent structures of colonialism,

being present with shared grief for what cannot be undone, and

practicing the fierce and necessary hope that sustains collective action in this precarious and beautiful present.

 

These sounds are an offering for collective breath.

 

These sounds are an offering for people whose names I can’t share, for many reasons:

 

because I don’t know you;

because being an equal partner in my personal narrative could put you or your family at risk;

 

because I didn’t have the funding to support a collaboration with you;

 

because when I did have funding my affiliation with Stanford immediately called up institutional traumas and power imbalances that overshadowed our personal rapport and that I was unable to offset;

 

because you didn’t have the luxury of a family or financial safety net like mine;

 

because you didn’t have a home or a space to work;

 

because your life was erased by settler colonial genocide;

 

because your story is not mine, however much I love you.

 

These sounds are an offering for the present-day Muwekma Ohlone people, on whose traditional land Braun Music Building and Stanford University were built, and whose lineages draw from many different tribes indigenous to the present-day Bay Area, represented by the

 

Armija / Thompson,

the Santos-Pinos / Juarez / Colos / Armija,

the Guzman / Nonessa,

and the Marine-Guzman-Peralta, Marine-Alvarez / Galvan, Marine-Sanchez, Marine-Munoz, Munoz-Guzman, Marine-Arellano, and Marine-Elston / Thompson / Ruano

 

descended families.

They’re for the people of the Tuscarora Nation, who are still (as of January 2024) fighting for state recognition in North Carolina, and the Pamlico Nation, who were devastated by European disease and warfare, and whose ancestral homelands are occupied by the house that I grew up in (and that I lived in during the COVID-19 pandemic) in a suburb in Eastern North Carolina.

 

And they’re for the Black, Chinese American, Chicana/e/o, Latina/e/o, and all other people whose lives, in their full rich miracle of human awareness, curiosity, brilliance, and love, have been spent in slavery, forced labor, and poverty building railroads, cleaning classrooms and bathrooms and hallways, and otherwise creating and upholding the wealth without which Stanford would never exist.

 

I ask you, my advisors and my readers, for accountability and witnessing of this commitment: that this dissertation may be an act of solidarity with Black and Indigenous people, with people of the global majority, with queer people, with gender-marginalized people, with disabled people, with people who are unhoused, with anyone who has been excluded from the institutions and experiences that have brought me where I am. I ask for your help, that I may always become more and more aware of the internalized habits that are getting in the way of my value of love and solidarity; that I may approach this commitment with humility and curiosity and love. I ask that you witness with me the ways in which what I share came from experiences of pain that I know only as a blank, smooth stone deep inside my body, inherited from ancestors who both participated in and were hurt by the intertwined structures of colonialism and capitalism and racism.

Grief overflows its containers.

 

One side plus one side equals more than one whole.

In this contradictory space, I stand in solidarity with those least empowered, and continue to breathe with the unhealed wounds driving the violence of those in power.

 

This dissertation is an opening and a gathering. This dissertation is a protest grounded in love. It’s an expression of gratitude for and solidarity with everyone whose voices have been excluded from the institutions that shaped me, and who despite being physically absent from my program at Stanford became my guides to love and joy and movement when I was disabled by chronic stress-induced migraines and depression during my years in the program. May this institution and the world in which it stands become a garden of flowers for future generations inheriting your legacies.

sound file will be replaced with a spatialized mixdown of what will be playing through the installation, & button replaced with detail of flower

Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power." In Sister Outsider (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984, 2007), pp. ##.

Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015).

Flower for Christina Sharpe

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