The workshop focuses on the links between reading and memorizing and experiments with memorizing collectively, referencing the varied aural/oral histories effected in the 1851 speech “Ain’t I a woman?” by African-American abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojouner Truth. Stemming from divergent transcriptions and testimonies of Truth’s oration, you, together, with Read-in, can explore techniques of (re/dis)locating and embodying text, (un)disciplinary pedagogies, and listening intonationally.
I first got an announcement for this event through Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum’s newsletter. The newsletter said very little about the people behind this event (though the Museum itself is organizing it) so I headed to their website. I found this:
Workshop & Presentation organized by Read-in with choreographer Kristien Van den Brande and writer-performer Mari Matre Larsen and researcher Katrine Smiet
I googled those names. They are all white European. And I am genuinely interested in the thought process that led these organizers to the idea that a white woman could possibly “embody” and/or “dislocate” Sojourner Truth’s words which are a deep and visceral indictment of white womanhood. How could a white woman ever attempt to “embody” the experience of Black womanhood? This is nothing but a performative appropriation which erases all history, specifically, by showcasing three white women who do not have to answer this:
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place!
Instead, they will “embody” and “re/dis-locate” the text through some arty attempt at “memorizing” it. They speak of “listening intonationally” and I want to indict this idea right here. The very same white womanhood that defines the “proper tone” and what “civility” means, the very same womanhood that blasts over “angry Black women” and “scary women of color” now gets to “set the tone” for Sojourner Truth’s words?
To them, I say “MEMORIZE THIS”: the colonizer can never embody the colonized. The colonizer can never “dislocate” the displaced-colonized. The colonizer can never embody the womanhood that she attempts to destroy in order to define herself.
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