[SPEAKING MOJAVE] Gracias por venir.
It's my luck to be here tonight.
Yeah, I mean, there are a million people to thank,
Grace, mil gracias for that very generous introduction--
the Ford Foundation, Agatha Gund of all people
who decided to sell a work of art hanging in her house that
suddenly opened up this money.
It's an incredible system we're all a part of.
And to suddenly realize what our roles in those systems are,
and how the systems function, and can
we possibly function within those systems--
if the things we were trying to do
can actually happen within some of the institutions
we're trying to accomplish them in
is a big question I have right now in my own work,
and in my own family, and in my own life.
Gracias also to the poet Elizabeth Alexander, who
has been an incredible selfless person, putting
in a lot of work that has taken her away from her own work
to make some of these things happen.
[MIC DISTORTION]
Sorry.
I have a screw in my knee.
So I wasn't sure if that's what that was.
[LAUGHTER]
Also to Tyler for just being a place
where someone like Dwayne Betts could bring this,
where we can all exist in our fullnesses side
by side with one another.
It's it was so interesting-- gracias Nadia
for coming up here and reminding us the power of story.
It's incredible, I think, to think about the ways
that you were talking about--
where is the-- who was up here with Nadia?
[INAUDIBLE]
Oh, yeah.
Gracias.
It was crazy to say detention centers were geographically
hard to get to, like reservations.
[LAUGHTER]
This is the same-- this is the system America began itself
with, and it has fulfilled its prophecy or its experiment.
In a way, we are as fully American
as we have ever been right now.
So that's something I think a lot about.
Yeah.
And the power of poetry, again, like I've said this before,
and I mean, I'm saying this in choir with many other people.
The imagination is a place that cannot be surveilled.
It's one of the places that they can't look into, and put
on camera, and control.
It's one of the reasons why we run our detention centers
and our prison systems the way we do, in such structured ways,
so that the imagination can be hampered in a lot of ways.
I've been just writing toward this project.
I have a sister who was--
who is recently out.
It was very different in my family
when I just had a brother who was in and out of prison.
For some reason, that's one of the ways we treat our men.
We hold them up to this idea of manliness and masculinity.
And so my brother in some way it was much easier to think of him
as being bad--
my bad brother.
Whereas when my sister went in, it was very different.
It's made me rethink so many different things.
But so, I've just been kind of writing
toward this, digging up things from Mojave history on through.
And so what I'm reading you is very raw.
I haven't done a lot of editing.
I'm sharing it with you in this space
and wondering what might become of it.
And as I'm here, I'm also wondering
what is the power of language in this space.
I think the ask was the not that we just sit and hear
language and poetry, but what will we do with it?
I really do believe in the physicality of language.
And it's in the action of language versus simply it
being something static.
And I do believe-- and it's not an idea
I have articulated fully yet, but there's
a way we can attack the law and logic of America at the top.
Except it's a place I'm not necessarily
sure how much of a dent we can make in that if we start there.
Because again, America is only being itself.
This is how America began.
And so, something I'm thinking a lot about
is how we build our bodies together in a different space.
And one of those spaces is in detention centers,
which are the new prison systems, which
are the new reservations.
And how do we build and get more people involved in these spaces
so that suddenly we begin to remember the fact that we're
alive.
We remember our lives and the lives of other people
while we're in these spaces together.