HACKING INTO THE HIJACKED BODY: DEVISING STRATEGIES OF BLACKENING, (SELF-) AUTHORING & QUEERING GAZE
Performance is a generative, playful, provocative, and magical space to radicalize the politics of the personal, of cosmic consciousness and of the spiritual, emotional, and the social in my life, while including others (audience) in such spaces. It is a medium that is difficult to describe what it is, or what it does as in my work, since I situate it within a myriad of spirals and multitudes of trajectories in terms of what it addresses, and how with a big focus on the condition of body(-ies,) and its endless possibilities of becoming that break with normative, capitalist, and colonial conditioning of the body.
In this essay, I travel back in time into my own past performance and textual creations and praxis, in order to build ‘body hacking’ at the center of my performative praxis, and the conceptual framework - the hijacked body as its object. My performative interventions are often multimedia performances that build visual and textual ritualistic outerworlds that exist between the material and the cosmic realm. Often building from performative personas that are inspired by an amalgamation of astrological charts and readings of “postcolonial astrology” (Kat Sparkly, A., 2021), histories of queer indigenous traditional roleship, West African, Caribbean and Latin american indigenous spiritual and shamanic practices.
In the poem-song part of dis’ body: poetics of self-aesthetics ( see notes 1) published text piece and also reworked for the live performance diasporic/dysphoric seas for the release of the anthology Periskop: Sorthed (2021) (meaning ‘blackness’ in Danish) in which the text was also featuring in the academic journal of historical debate from the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the Copenhagen University; I situate my practice within a decolonial praxis when I engage with and build elements from what I call blackening, an indigenization technological orchestrating device that I apply (and seek to do) in aesthetic, visual, textual, poetic and sonic levels in the composition of my pieces. An example of this lies in the retrieval and claiming of certain queer Africana linguistic terms in
Diasporic
Dysphoric seas,
where I develop an active relationship to these terms while also recognizing my diasporic self (and how that extends into discourse) as the poem song unfolds, using terms from queer urban slang from my everyday life and also around communities I navigate from actualizing a black queering of sorts in the text:
(...) queer is not translation,
We had our own languages
GÓOR-JIGÉEN // GÔR DJIGUÉNE (2)
Men who sleep with men Women who sleep with women
gender fluid bodies in one
transness
giddy homos
The sapphic
tribbing
Here I also ended up expanding a definition of queer within a blackening doing while situating itself historically before colonization offering a multitude of ‘queer’. Note here how sexuality, gender, Senegalese wolof linguistic terms for queer / gay/ trans gets remixed into verbal actions - sleep and tribbing. There is no separation between gender and sexuality here.
Furthermore, ritual being at the center of my practice, offers a space for interconnecting the material and the cosmic realms and establishing a bridge between the two in an endless organized dialogue, in which land, ancestry and the sensuous communicate, transform, and commune. The author Martínez-Cruz (P., 2023) on her essay “performance for innocents: Live Art Pedagogy for Rebel Artists with Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Luz Oropeza”, states that “ritual practices represent the efficacious end of the spectrum, with a repertoire of actions that conduct the receiver of the performance to a different state of being, as with coming-of-age ceremonies, healings, nuptials, funerals, and other rites that establish a connection to the divine (...) with the spiritual purpose of bridging the gap between the profane and the sacred''(p.75). By adopting the shamanic in performance art practice, the author, referring to La Pocha Nostra’s radical performance methodology, run by Gómez-Pena and other artist rebels, contextualizes and “figures a decolonial path towards healing and, (...) exorcizes the psychic disease load of Western imperialism, articulating fear, trauma, and desire” (p.75).
Similarly, in my own practice, I use ritual and the shamanic as a queering and blackening device to break with time zones, producing glitches within an arrest of time from the body-space interrupting several timelines within the history of our hijacked bodies. Which then results in a heightened awareness that makes it possible to access spaces of self, or, collective authorship and gazing.
The entire cosmos is reflected in a mirror of the human body
in motion as we,
walking embodiments of their consciousness
A reflection of the impulses
of Olurum, Olurum,
Olurum (3),
Olurum-wééé (expanded and elongated vowels)
Those,
the impulses of Olurum,
Obatalá (4),
Zambi-ô (5),
the zeroth gender
Video still from live performance diasporic/dysphoric seas performed at Jambatan Festival (2020)
Here, I am devising an evocation that is seen typically in ritual and shamanic spaces of orishas/deities within a queering rooted in ancestral West African spiritual practices while establishing a relationship of “mirroring”, between the human and the divine. While embodying an archetype of a genderless priestess wearing white cloth that has been soaked in water that drips into my skin reaching the floor where my feet lay on top of triangular mirrors, sitting there, sensuously resonating under my feet. And another visual echoing of mirroring also takes place within the soundscape which includes water sounds, and then within the scenography, with the suspended vases of water in the air standing in an arch around my body increasing an eco-sensuous energetic frequency between water and flesh. Consequently, creating an aesthetic that matches a melange of the cosmic energies of Olurum (and its various names) in a sort of traditional queer role embodiment whilst charging myself with the action of performing a rite I’m creating for a temporary community that is my audience.
Moreover, I use queering to critically build a methodology to disturb, subvert and develop an authoring gaze in this piece. I use queering both as a verb, and as an ignitor to ask questions, expand and rip meaning apart, undo and redo meaning and acknowledge its contextual multitudes, contradictions and transgressions. The work underlays poetic text in its essence recited live or composed as a sound track with other sounds, and then rebuilt live again with my own voice adding a cacophonic echo-like effect, or, distorting it like a glitch. Thus, also applying a sensuous aesthetic queering layer onto the poetic, not only in its textual composition.
Authoring gaze invites an array of different and multiple angles at once with queering, and makes possibilities infinite on the outcomes, yet, that is not to say directionless, or shapeless. The authoring gaze, already involving a queering of gaze, of a sensuous audiovisual aesthetics of body, gender, and race (and all the intangible that accompanies it), appearing both in text, video and live performance set up, and video editing, building a multi-layered foundation of hacking into and queering the hijacked body. The poem-song continues situating ‘queer’ within ‘body’ and ‘body’ within ‘queer’ in terms of race, sexuality and gender, and technology yet also descending into an experiential aspect of it all within a multiple sensorial consciousness that is discursive (language), cosmic (energetic), and erotic (senses).
Here, I am devising an evocation that is seen typically in ritual and shamanic spaces of orishas/deities within a queering rooted in ancestral West African spiritual practices while establishing a relationship of “mirroring”, between the human and the divine. While embodying an archetype of a genderless priestess wearing white cloth that has been soaked in water that drips into my skin reaching the floor where my feet lay on top of triangular mirrors, sitting there, sensuously resonating under my feet. And another visual echoing of mirroring also takes place within the soundscape which includes water sounds, and then within the scenography, with the suspended vases of water in the air standing in an arch around my body increasing an eco-sensuous energetic frequency between water and flesh. Consequently, creating an aesthetic that matches a melange of the cosmic energies of Olurum (and its various names) in a sort of traditional queer role embodiment whilst charging myself with the action of performing a rite I’m creating for a temporary community that is my audience.
Moreover, I use queering to critically build a methodology to disturb, subvert and develop an authoring gaze in this piece. I use queering both as a verb, and as an ignitor to ask questions, expand and rip meaning apart, undo and redo meaning and acknowledge its contextual multitudes, contradictions and transgressions. The work underlays poetic text in its essence recited live or composed as a sound track with other sounds, and then rebuilt live again with my own voice adding a cacophonic echo-like effect, or, distorting it like a glitch. Thus, also applying a sensuous aesthetic queering layer onto the poetic, not only in its textual composition.
Authoring gaze invites an array of different and multiple angles at once with queering, and makes possibilities infinite on the outcomes, yet, that is not to say directionless, or shapeless. The authoring gaze, already involving a queering of gaze, of a sensuous audiovisual aesthetics of body, gender, and race (and all the intangible that accompanies it), appearing both in text, video and live performance set up, and video editing, building a multi-layered foundation of hacking into and queering the hijacked body. The poem-song continues situating ‘queer’ within ‘body’ and ‘body’ within ‘queer’ in terms of race, sexuality and gender, and technology yet also descending into an experiential aspect of it all within a multiple sensorial consciousness that is discursive (language), cosmic (energetic), and erotic (senses).
Queer is (androgynous) black
double,
triple,
quadruple euphoria //dysphoria
male within female
female within male
the nameless within body
The body within merged code
this code being language, yet,
energy
Queering as a verb denotes a “troubling of lenses” effect on how we understand critically what binaries do in relation to one another. Take for instance man/woman, life/death, light/darkness, words that often function in opposition to one another in terms of definition. What queering does is that it disturbs this order, naming complexity and nuance in relation to how to understand power within such relations. The “naming process highlights the mechanisms that create and/or perpetuate understandings of difference and experience” (Young, T. (2012), p.126-127). Moreover, here, queering offers spaces of ambivalence and contradiction to coexist in discourse and meaning creation, making it possible to imagine what hasn’t been imagined yet, or to destabilize what has been imagined. And see possibilities to transform meaning and (sur)render it “out of line” from what has been classifiable (Russell, J. 2001) and known in the world. And to cross the lies, the distortions, and the violent absurdities of such language:
Gender inversion –said the French colonialists
My frequent use of queering as a verb, and discursive and material methodology in performance and textual work comes from, first of all, out of a desire to acknowledge the multitudes of ‘body’ not only within gender, race, and class within a historical, social, discursive political acknowledgement. Especially gender, such a vast element of the ‘body’, here is contextualized as “prosthetic” (Preciado, P. (2019). Preciado (2019) in his contrasexual manifesto substitutes Judith Butler’s reading of gender as performative - “as an action that preexists the agent and in which its performativity lies in its repetition, reiteration, and enunciation within its performance” - for a “made up body narrative” one, or rather, a “somatic fiction” of body. Moreover, in his critique to Butler’s argument, he delivers a “contra-grammar of gender, a queerography” (Preciado, P., 2019, p.8). Such meaning that there is always a possibility of hacking into its design, corporeality, cognitive or relational behavior, through unwriting ourselves from patterns and habits, and conditioning. And formulate a constant “somatic drag” (Preciado, P., 2019, p.8) that allows us to find and get lost in our bodies, decolonize parts of ourselves that have been hijacked, and our relationship towards our spiritual and land lineages.
My use of queering aligns with that offer, of creating interventions that play out always in an inter-relational framing expanding the indigenization of body with bonds to land, ecology, ancestry, and the sensuous within an anti-capitalist, and deco/anti-colonial perspective in an eternal relationship of affect and embodiment. Queering results then in a web of weaving of interrelationships between subject and meaning, and its affect through subversion, or, to rescue what has been made abject, and celebrate it while acknowledging the pain of that history in the same instance.
There is an inherent shift in the ways we view and do ‘gazing’ with queering. The gaze shifts to the unusual, the strange, the monstrous’ perspective even, at times, as opposing to the normative male gaze (which often means an cisgender, heterosexual white, racialized body, too) as centered, in Western canons, and the perspective we hear often and legitimized in the production of knowledge. A queer gaze looks at the affect and relation between different elements in subjectivity, and disorientates, challenges and destabilizes formations of identity, nationality, class, sexuality, gender, race, religion, ability, sanism, and age (Sara, A., 2006).
In the same way that Russell (2020) takes the power of glitch as a queering disruptive force, in a “collective congregation at that trippy and trip-wired crossroad” (p.7) of those same discursive identity elements. The glitch disturbs, and recognizes the disturbance (and the erratic nature) inherent in the absurd existence of the intersection of categories of marginality, and in its full (or even fragmented) awareness of how they interplay with one another in the body that experiences it. The author highlights the metaphor of “third eye of gender”, alluding to a “triple consciousness” of the entrails of marginality that “splinters” in a rhizomatic kind of way. My use of queering for the purposes of authoring gaze applies a sort of glitching effect that is seen in textual and aesthetic levels.
Furthermore, Lorde (A., 2007) asks us to turn inwardly as outwardly in taking control of gaze, often allocated to the ‘male /white gaze’, alluding to the power of the erotic as a force of cosmic consciousness that goes beyond the realms of sexuality, objectification and pornography. She writes: “self-love demands that we evoke our own gazes in a consumer-based culture producing patriarchal hetero-western-centric based gazes in mainstream global cultures. So, I ask you to reclaim your own gaze through a process of active consciousness”.
In my video and performance piece called “Body, Q Corpo-real (2019)”, I take Lorde’s idea of an erotic self-gaze and build a visual eco-poetic narrative and manifesto by interacting with ecological bodies such as water, plants, trees in movement improvisation influenced by the bodies around me. As an early strategy to defy the hijacked body and histories of violent gazing imposed onto me creating an intentional space of eco-resonance between my body and that of plant and water life. This eco-resonance gets taken further with the mantra-song script verses of the audio material of the video.
Body, Corpo-real (2018-2019)
Video still collage
The general colors of the video visuals were inspired by the chakra system: baby pink and green for the heart, yellow for the solar plexus located in the gut, and blue for the upper chakras corresponding to throat and third eye locations. These are somatic energetic points that form physical, metaphysical, emotional, and cognitive mapping of balanced and dysregulated frequencies between body, self and the world(s). Which can be activated or blocked by different conditions, states, and exposures. The colors amplify a multi-sensorial resonance between body and fauna as the somatic movements of the body depend on this relationship and are guided by it. There is both a sort of evocative biomimicry going on between my performer body and that of trees and fauna regarding how the body bends, curls up, twists, erects itself, and holds itself with subtle micro-movements.
Moreover, the video still 4, 6 and 10 appear with subtle and then vibrant multiplication of the body, or its limbs, creating an effect of glitching within the editing giving birth to a sort of double or multiple virtual body. The flesh tangent body exists with the one that resonates through the sensuous appearing in a slight transparent layer. Number 10 with the legs and feet multiplying serves as a high point for this merging of body and fauna as we have the impression that the legs arise from the ground upwards, just like trees, yet rhizomatically too through its limbs.
The gazing of most shots here are directed inwards or towards eco bodies and also returned by those same bodies, having them looking/listening to and with me. The round shape aesthetic highlights this circular movement of gazing and being gazed at in an endless invisible spiral. The text later also plays with this repetitive circular shape.
Gaze then expands into wide possibilities for what we could see and create, authoring our own lives, and our own subjectivity as it becomes and re-becomes. And orienting our experiences differently, unwriting ourselves out of cultures of normativity and patriarchal conditioning rooted in the many violent structures of the modern world. Turning queering and authoring gaze towards a hijacked body means then to view body as multitudinous and made of a glitch of immaterial errors while holding an autopoiesis nature of reproducing itself, ignited by the environment, yet existing at the possibility of building “rupture” and resistance to “its own conditioning” (Russell, L., 2020, p.8-7).
Take this fragment from the poem-manifesto of Body corpo-real:
Limbs dissected in salt
Processed salt inducing body cries
Body cries, gastric storms
Blood screaming in my veins from ancestors
Those, lived bodies
Came from the ground soil
The tint of the soil is imprinted in our skin
Soil, reflecting mirror, soil
Soil, reflecting mirror, soil
Soil translated into utmost nothingness
A paralysis of the flesh
There is a texturized descent from the visceral materiality of the body, departing from the ‘flesh’ into a cosmic transcendence by evoking ancestral historical links. ‘Blood’ is the vessel gushing in a mesclage of DNA, histories of migration, land displacement and affective memory processes at the interaction of living remembrance between flesh and land. The movement stops in an anti-climatic ‘paralysis’ in connection with what comes before - “soil translated into utmost nothingness”, alluding to an historicity of colonial rupture between the link of (ancestral) land and body. The flesh becomes paralyzed due to the trauma of relational abrupt rupture within the hijacked body.
Feet on the ground hearing trees
Feet on the ground eating from bushes
Feet on the ground, flora germinating
Wrapping roots enlacing the body
Green from the leaves whispers the ancestral gaze
My gaze shouting through my whole body once
My androgynous gaze fluid
Your body rendered more than words, bones, micro-movements, thoughts,
But a force
Your gaze is what you make it
In this section, the descent continues and then takes a slight ascent as a gentle invitation of sensible attunement with eco bodies creating the possibility for new becoming of the body through the tender, the erotic, fluidity and resonance. It asserts a new form of gazing while inviting the audience, the listener or reader to consider a new gazing too - “your body rendered more than words, bones, micro-movements, thoughts, but a force”. Ending with “your gaze is what you make it” reassuring the listener that they too have a gaze and that they have agency in the gaze they produce and the (self) gaze that becomes produced.
What is your gaze whispering to you?
I leave the question “what is your gaze whispering to you” hanging in the air in the last verse inviting the gaze of the reader to take over, as a quiet whisper even, just like the voice of intuition is often calm, assertive, and assured.
NOTES
1. This poem-song is an ode to Sara Collins’ “The splendor of Gender nonconformity in Africa” which was my first pan-Africanist encounter of gender nonconformist cultural reference.
2. From Senegal, in a Frenchisized Wolof
3. Also known as Oludumaré or Olurun from the Yoruba (rooted in Nigerian, West African locations and also found in Santeria in Latin America and Caribbean, Vodun, Umbanda and Camdomblé in Brazil, Angola) spiritual traditions where Olurum is an orixá (also written orisha/orisa)/divinity in these traditions known as the ruler of the skies and creator of earthly things and the universe. It is said to be the force of creation itself. It is a genderless orixá that only exists in spirit form.
4. Obatalá (also known as Ochalá or Oxalá; Orichalá or Orixalá) is the oldest "orisha funfun" ("represented by the color white), referring to purity, both physically and symbolically as in the "light" of consciousness. They are the creator of the humans and are a part of the cohort that is Olurun in Yoruba mythology and spiritual practices.
5. Another word for Olurun in a chanted version
REFERENCES
Ahmed, Sara, 1969- author. (2006). Queer phenomenology : orientations, objects, others. Durham ; London :Duke University Press
Lorde, Audre (2007) “Sister Outsider”, the crossing press feminist series
Preciado, Paulo (2019), Contrasexual manifesto, portuguese version, orfeu negro books
Russell, Legacy, (2020) Glitch Feminism, Verso Books
Russell, Jamie (2001), Queer Burroughs, palgrave
Young, Thelathia “Nikki”. "Queering “The Human Situation”." Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, vol. 28 no. 1, 2012, p. 126-131. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.2979/jfemistudreli.28.1.126.
this text was produced for academia while I was finishing my MA in performing arts as critical practice at THM
Written in 2023.
