Date of Award
Spring 6-8-2024
Document Type
Honors Project
University Scholars Director
Dr. Joshua Tom
First Advisor/Committee Member
Dr. Jennifer McFarlane Harris
Keywords
poetry, emergent strategy, creative essay, art, revolution, cultural work
Abstract
This project, reaping in the dark, aims to answer the question ‘How do we live in a world where we were never meant to survive?’ Surrounded by heinous war and deathmaking, violent vulnerabilities, and demands that our own bodies must be contributions in the machinations of killing and exploitation, I found myself simultaneously isolated by the devastation, and empowered by solidarity and care networks and coalitions being formed in real time. In particular, I take part in and document my grief and grieving, love and loving in response to the new cycles of escalating violence in Gaza, the anticipated death of my grandfather, and the deaths and rebirths of my own trans and crip body. Grappling with how to respond, what was certain was that the death and dying that surrounded me had to be composted and turned into life. This project attempts to bloom possibility and create something beautiful in the midst of all this loss, to turn death into life, to get good at dying, myself.
Drawing from personal and political discomfort in the stagnation of death and dying, this multimedia composition features pages of prose and poems, soundscapes, conversations, images, artworks, protests, prayers, hymns, and other documentations that keep and compose me amongst my overflowing grief and grieving. This work arises in the lineage of Audre Lorde, and other crips and queers whose lives have made my life possible. I take on an embodied politic of (un)articulation to delineate the subtleties of life and survival in the imperial core, learning to harness the organic powers of change and generate new ways of being in this world. My work is an encounter with much of my own grief and love throughout my life, with careful attention to the ways my body/mind/spirit is interdependent with all life. In the form of compositional grieving, I encounter my body, family, community, humanity, and the natural world to ask what is lost and what is made possible.
Recommended Citation
Perez, Rae, "reaping in the dark" (2024). Honors Projects. 228.
https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/honorsprojects/228
Copyright Status
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Additional Rights Information
Copyright held by author.
Included in
Comments
A project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Arts degree in Honors Liberal Arts Seattle Pacific University 2024.
Presented at the SPU Honors Research Symposium on May 18th, 2024