Litany for Survival

Amiri Baraka's

working my rainbows (essays about performance studies)




CARRIE MAE WEEMS Untitled Outtake from The Kitchen Table Series 1990
silver gelatin print
edition of 5
28 1/4 x 28 1/4 inches

So sistas and brothas, you may have figured out now that one of the major tenets of peformance studies is that performance happens everywhere and is not just confined to theater spaces. Cars perform, organs (kidney, liver and such) perform, nature performs, technology performs, so on and so forth. Objects perform, art pieces perform, etc. Above you find a photo created by the brilliant Carrie Mae Weems. Anna Deveare Smith calls Weems a visionary. I am amazed (but not really) by how Weems captures time, emotion, tension, and narrative in this photograph. This photo moves, like cinema, like water, like relationships.

How is this photo performing? What is it doing? What motion is created in stillness? Is stillness a figment of our imagination? Can emotion stand quiet motionless? Should it? Where is the breath in this photo? How do the bodies house the breath? Release it?

The bodies in this photo perform: guilt, disappointment, blackness, womaness, shame, fear, confusion...I have always been drawn to hands how the hands flail in delight, protect from too bright sunlight, welcome a lover, feed, birth, create, cleanse, break apart. here the girl's hands communicate feelings of fear, regret, timidness. The mother's hands communicate authority, power, strength, tiredness.

The bible in all of its complicated and layered symbology could possibly stand in for father/husband figure seemingly absent in the picture. what does the presence of the bible say about black men, black community when objects take the place of people?

we could talk about light, the grain/texture of the photo, the shadow behind the little girl, how the scene resembles an interrogation room, why weems chose black in white instead of color, how the eyes speak or mute narrative, the fact that the glass of possibly liquor, possible cola (who knows) is the closest item to the audience/spectator and what that means to the overall composition of the work.

Interestingly, I want to take a moment to share a poem not about any of those ideas directly (or maybe in tandem with) the kitchen table.

1.

here, my knotty hair becomes a slick black street

2.

here, i learn this little light of mine here,

3.

two times two becomes four for the first time for me

4.

here, i want to lean over and taste the sun of yellow walls here,

5.

i am taught how to stir gravy with an arm akimbo, a cock-eyed knee, and an ear holding somebody's gossip

6.

here, was the first time i "made" my books with aunt shellie

7.

here

8.

here

9.

here, we sing a poem through greasy fingers and sideways grins

10.

here,

i learn about strawberries and how not to be called a ho

11.

here,

we celebrate my first period with play-coffee and cheese grits

12.

here,

i say i'm grown everywhere else but here