Thank you so much.
My name is Vidhu Aggarwal.
I'm part of the board, and I just want to thank Prageeta.
I came to Thinking Its Presence in 2015
and it was really a radicalizing moment for me.
And I feel so grateful.
And thank you-- where is Prageeta?-- for your vision.
You are truly a visionary and to me, a space.
OK.
OK, so we know that Jose Muñoz--
Esteban Muñoz.
I do not pronounce Spanish well, all right?
At any rate-- but he's a really important figure for me,
and the conference is based on his work on the Ephemeral
Archive.
And I was thinking about what to read and what to do.
And I was thinking of the moments
when I felt most brown, because he has this famous essay
"Feeling Brown, Feeling Down."
And for me, it's always the moments of travel,
of going through the airport.
And I had this one moment when I was a little kid flying
internationally from the US to India,
and we were stopping in London.
And I was thinking about how when you're traveling
you can find-- kind of feel a sympathetic attachment,
an effective vicariousness with other travelers
who might or might not share your identity.
When we were going through customs in London,
a man who was Sikh who was in front of us
had his luggage just tossed on the floor,
his underwear was everywhere.
And it was this moment of leaky shame for me
where I understood that this person was my compatriot,
and yet somehow--
and that I was implicated somehow in own--
in his clothing, in his stuff.
His stuff was my stuff.
We had this sort of implicit connection of baggage.
And I was a very small child.
I was 11.
But this was a moment of that.
The second moment that I would say
is when I was actually carrying my father's ashes
through customs in the United States
and bringing them back to India.
And I wanted to talk--
I don't want to really talk about it,
I'm going to read this poem about actually going
through security, which was a really strange operation
in which we had to get a woman named Fatima to help
us get a visa to go through.
OK, thank you, Fatima.
This poem is for you.
OK, "Notes towards a radioactive sutra 2."
The coordinates of my body ripen on a screen somewhere.
Full body scan with foreign hot spots and 1,000 secret arms.
Small doses of radiation bubble through my DNA.
I carry my body field into security
along with a luxe green velvet drawstring bag.
The bag is heavy and sensual.
It glows with heat, a green glow.
I'm carrying a cluster of desired spells, the neon
light of summer grasses, nuclear summer.
Out of the country, expensive and heavy,
heavy water, half life of a millennia near endless green.
I carry the bag with me into security.
I wait for the alarms to go off.
My body field and ocean with a bright sheen of sweat.
Everyone takes off their shoes.
Everyone takes off their jackets.
Everyone is a threat.
I hold my bag up to the inspector.
I take off my shoes.
The inspector opens the velvet pouch gently.
Inside the bag is an ordinary white cardboard box.
Does nobody notice the sheen, the movement,
the endless grasses?
The inspector wipes the exterior of the box with a test strip.
He does not open the box.
He is respectful.
He wears gloves.
He is loving towards the box.
He holds a test strip under the monitor, enchanted,
drowsed in spells.
I offered the inspector the death certificate.
I offered the inspector my passport.
Nothing beeps, nothing explodes.
I'm returning to the homeland.
Now I'm off.
I'm a daughter who carries a vessel under pressure.
A father, a nuclear engine.
A father bubbles through the DNA of a body field.
A father is what will not degrade,
despite being ground down into powder in extreme heat.