I'm going to read a poem.
It's a long poem about an artist named Ana Mendieta, who's
a huge influence on my work, even though she's
in a completely different field.
I don't know if some of you know who she is.
But she did kind of Earth art and performance art,
and she was Cuban.
She was exiled in the United States
from Cuba in some kind of special program,
and she was murdered by her husband.
But she is to me one of the most significant feminist artists
of the 20th century, so that's why I wrote this poem.
It's called "A Devil Inside Me" after Ana Mendieta.
"One.
Seven powers, ye who are so sticky
with our divine effusions, I kneel in thee with great piety
and exploit your intercession through the Great Spirit.
See my petition and grant me agency and vision.
Please remove any obstacle which causes me
to stray from the beauty way.
Olofi, I trust in the words 'The personal is political.'
Let it be so.
Two.
Art had a problem.
Her body was explicit abattoir with its ribbons
of sulfur smoke and raw animus.
Her body was a meteor, but it wasn't being written.
Press a hand into Earth's flesh.
Duplexity comes up like inception.
The body print is an illegible surge, a bleeding trace of self
en route.
The figure like a bottle of wine, stiff as a board,
grave as lead.
What moves underneath?
The moss silhouette, mute but vatic.
Three.
Inside the thicket, the tree.
Inside the tree, heart.
Inside heart, the water where body garlands to the surface
like fur.
The body a territory.
From inside the territory, call for reversal.
The call for reversal is native first.
Four.
Water encloses the body's vestige
in a conspiracy of sticks, or the body schemes
with verger and mud ambrosia in a tree trunk,
that baptismal consecration.
Art history banished the body and its sopping
glut and customary expulsion.
The body pushes back.
She is found embedded, heart exuded
in the wind, the study in stone outcroppings, in land, marvel.
Torrent of impulse, torrent of unlikeliness,
implacable corpse in the aesthetic mortuary,
and for this she brought the process of gunpowder.
For this work, audience and documentation from every vista,
each atom as witness and cohort.
Five.
Because she's marginalized in situ,
she stitches hairs to her face.
Her squinting mug is coarse mistress parody.
Bloodied mortification and witness
makes her work Marianism.
Raised in paper houses and their attendant infiltration,
immersed in these new reclamations,
she strips the land of its nationalist fripperies
for scrap metal.
Six.
The body is a battleground.
Drone attacks on it.
If it's broken, they buy it.
If it's splayed on the table for dissection, they bought it.
Blood is the enterprise.
The rocket in their pocket is a passport.
The wind tucks the ash into its pulsing, to seize that force
and dam up the rivers with it, and furrow the Earth
with an atoning blood cure, and rise up into a storm to divide
the sky, real prayer woven in the threads.
Seven.
It's natal, no hesitation.
She was brought up alien, arbiter of corpus release
and brute transients.
The crevasse effect craters into mistranslated exoticism.
Maps aren't the discourse for it.
The seam of long haired rosary wipes out that old sovereignty.
Automaton just never felt right, neither did
provincial white goddess.
The traces of fervor in the very ventricles
of the conjoined earths.
The terrain is dark asylum, positive darkness,
naturally mutilation.
Eight.
Why this kingdom?
You find the stone on a mountain fit with others like it.
Not trees, houses, villages, or wells.
This empire is disappeared.
Only seldom voices, stones with ours tethered to them.
The goddess is dead from treason,
so her people fade white as water in the cold,
then disappear into the stone horizon,
become the wall space."