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Sent to you by moya via Google Reader:
(A Performance Excerpt by Caitlin O'Connor)
She just wants to dance.
He just wants to groove
In his fly dancin' shoes.
Seconds lapse between his favorite steps, Doin' tha
Ass tap, dip back, hip thrust, she like that.
She dances because she can't fight the rhythm.
He grinds, he grins at the lyrics that he's hearin'.
He thinks he's got his certified ho and she's deafly dancing so she don't even know.
She just wants to dance.
He just wants to groove.
But the lyrics, they spit bullets
Into the faces of dancing girls
Who hope to exist meaningfully in this world.
As the music races, his hand he places in her face, in her spaces she had felt
His breath on her neck before
On the dance floor with the beat no longer
Thumping
Against space,
Behind a locked door.
Muted beat,
Lyrics play
She finally hears what he's got to say.
Ass tap, dip back, hip thrust, she like that.
He think she like that.
Syncopated rhythms of harsh hands.
Syncopated rhythms of harsh hands.
Syncopated rhythms her heart stands…Still. You dance.
You can dance. Do a dance-step
At a funeral or at the scene of a crime.
Rape with the words and rape of the body
Are both rape of the mind.
A victim of dance can promise you this:
When there is no longer a beat
The music doesn't always sound so sweet.
I open with this performance excerpt because this past week Caitlin closed my office door to purge a poem she'd been holding since we parted. It was a poem purposefully memorized. For months we passed each other, pitching empty promises and pocketing good intentions about reconnecting. When others cycled through my office, she sat unmoved–clutching her bag over her gut as if secrets were stashed there. She said I had to see her, to hear her—the near-tear and the crackle. She wanted me to bear witness to the poetics of her life.
Her poem haunts me.
On the one hand, I am ecstatic she distilled a semester-long discussion about hip hop feminism into a performance. The teacher-me says well done. On the other hand, the need-to-be-togetha-me has come undone with the fleshed-filled reminder that to do this work is to engage constantly in collective healing and self recovery. And women, we are not well. The stories we choose to tell are often triumphant yet traumatic. I wonder if the two represent our carefully choreographed two-step, our coping with the incomprehensible. So, we dance. So, we write. So, we try to get back (into) ourselves that thing that has been lost or taken from us. The triumph of self awareness and the trauma of sexual assault converse. Caitlin crystallizes what we've managed to dance around: the psychic toll of violence—real and representational. The victim-survivor trope she uses is a familiar one in our feminist creative-intellectual work. Why this trope? Why these stories?
We empty ugly onto the floor and the page to form art that moves folk, an art form that propels (a) movement. What are we moving toward? What do we make of this cathartic dance we write? Caitlin demanded that I see her, hear her. With recognition comes accountability. I just want to dance right? I just want to dance right. I just want to dance.Write. I sit with her poem and can't shake that we are stuck in a groove, listening to another woman trying to fight the rhythm while we sing the same tune.
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