Event Type
A reading showcases new and emerging works by South Asian and Filipinx women and nonbinary writers and poets.
For many of us who have inherited queer and/or diasporic genealogies, lineages of ancestors who had to migrate elsewhere as an act of livelihood, preservation, or survival; familial histories of displacement or occupation, there is an intimate relationship to power we share. We understand too well what it feels like in the body, in meditation to exist so close to domination— to write and create under its weight and gaze. To do so is to enter an intersectional, alternative space, a liminal zone of both mourning and resistance, rage and radical love, nature and death. In her poem, “Morning,” Serena Chopra comes very close to describing this space as where loneliness is a wave of amplitude and pitch / In which the animal inside is not the animal without.”
Consequently, even in our grief work, our musings with the natural or spirit world we are always suspicious of dominant forces, dominant narratives, especially those that are driven by capitalism. We understand where there is capitalism there is the machinations of industry and war.
As feminist writers, our literary experimentations, our ecological and humanitarian concerns, our prayers, and our ritual work are moved by being in resistance to domination. In doing so, it bring us closer to hope and other alternative passageways through and beyond domination.