toulwooddreaming

[toulwooddreaming]

Notes from "Strike That" Seminar 12

Fargo: reads poem, "Lessons in Parsings," by Rashid Hussein

"my teacher dreams of the revolution"

our silence was the struggle

a peasant without land, he fought not with silence but with everything in him

dreams is not an active verb

of is governed by a preposition; the revolution does not take a revolution; does not fight, is the truth

we burned the chains of grammar and converted to the struggle

VLC - Eriola Pira : when were you corrected in your language? [promise of western capitalism that doesn't deliver] When have you made corrections to your own language early on?

[unsayable to sayable]

Demian (they/them) - shame connected to not knowing how to speak the Dine language and not being able to have a full convo with grandmother before she passed, and ceremony

SA (author of forthcoming Blackness Meets the Sea: On Crisis, Culture, and the Black Mediterranean

(the things that are difficult to parse)

-nation.land.ca (do not list specificity the indigenous people there) restricts the imagination when we search for whose lands we are on

-language, poetry - nouribe philips: mother tongue and absence of father's language; colonial tongue beating into the tongue into colonial language

-assigned english at birth, my mother's tongue

-to name myself in ancestral language

Fargo: Genocide fails (in descriptive qualities); think rather about this moment and Palestinian experience and language built between international law and legal frameworks

Nakba as a framework

-thinking of correction as an abandonment of particular kinds of language

-what the word correction does and does it do what it needs to do

SA: the refrain of "you're so articulate" ; separateness; to be articulated; distinct and discreet-- and that being a tool or technique of language itself; thinking about the biopolitical imperative of that

2013 discussion with Judith Butler ('language always fails us), p. 132-134 - how that failure is still one we need to thrust ourselves into

using white logics, white grammars (hailing many of us into what is wrong); thinking about a kind of corrective excess, dialectical relationship between what is true what is false, what needs correcting in a patriarchal, fascist way that is white supremacy and settler colonial imperialism.

we are articulating ourselves into new grammars and one way of doing that is turning to the poetic; breath life into new structures of language into a space that is a priori already disposessive

SA: Telling the story - the rehearsal (morrison - Beloved, i wrote my memoir, who is "we"

What Palestine requires of us concretely, move toward what freedom looks like

we are hailed in relation to institutions and we are excited when they give us something

until there are the bones of our people to tell us we didn't know shit in the first place