NONAGON FOR THE DEAD WHO ARE RISING

STATEMENT: This is an excerpt from the performance monologue and improvised text NONAGON FOR THE DEAD WHO ARE RISING, forthcoming in Numero Cinq magazine, March 2017 (http://numerocinqmagazine.com/)

TEXT EXCERPT:
NONAGON FOR THE DEAD WHO ARE RISING
– a polygon with nine sides all opened –

1. THE FIRST TO RISE

I miss my friend Robin. Robin Kilson. She was a black panther who was raped by the Black Panthers. And I met her when I was fairly young and she taught me a lot about betrayal, and betweenness, and belonging. And she died ten years ago and they say not to look into the face of what is sacred and to close your eyes or to avert your eyes or maybe just cover your eyes because then your eyes are still open and what you’re seeing is something beyond sight.
 
I think Robin talked so much about deprivation of belonging, and all of the places that she fought to belong in and arrived at only to realize she didn’t belong and she didn’t want to belong and I wonder if she feels that way now that she’s dead.
 
Does she feel a sense of belonging with the dead.
 
She’s not my relative. There’s no blood between us but she has felt like an ancestor ever since she passed away. More of an ancestor than my own ancestors, and there’s no reason for me to belong to her but I feel that I belong to her. And somewhere there’s a long thread that hasn’t been broken between the two of us.
 
Most of what we talked about were broken threads. Most of the time we spent together was holding threads to see if they would reach. She was a sixty year old quadriplegic African American Black Panther and I was a 19 year old lost child in the west and we would take these strings and somehow they tied together and the knots still hold but I know for her there were strings she tried to tie to people she thought were like her, other black panthers, other women, other afro-caribbeans, other people from Boston, other professors, other people in wheelchairs, other people with shaved heads.
 
I don’t think the strings that we always expect to connect are the ones that hold.
 
But the one that we tied, has held.