The conversation you’re about to hear, “What kind of language are we left with” was held between Mirene Arsanios and Celina Su, and recorded in February 2021. 


With Mirene and Celina, both “motherless mothers without mother tongues,” we discuss the lineages of their languages, liminal subjectivities and the impossibility of “we” in light of differentially distributed access to resources. Together we consider how our social relations are being rewritten and disrupted in a time of ongoing crisis and disaster. We talk about alternative economies, how zoom killed the classroom. We contend with loneliness and the limits of the nuclear family, and what it means to be part of an amorphous, and constantly changing collective.


Following our conversation, you’ll also hear readings by Mirene and Celina from their own work. From Mirene you’ll hear an excerpt from Notes on Mother Tongues, published with Ugly Duckling Presse in 2020, and “A Collage in Progress” by Celina, also published in 2020, and which can be found in full at thepoetryfoundation.org.

Mirene Arsanios and Celina Su: What kind of language are we left with?

The conversation you’re about to hear, “The Tenses of Cultural Differences,” was
held between Monica de la Torre, Youmna Chlala, Sarah Riggs, and Alisha
Mascarenhas in April 2021. 
Monica and Youmna interrogate the past to investigate complex present times and
simultaneous states of reality. They contemplate the future as a place of potential
rather than collapse. Together with Sarah and Alisha, they question the notion of
heritage and the limits of empathy. They wonder how equivalences and differences
rather than same-same structures – in translation, art, film, and among people – can
better address the pressures of the present.
In the conversation, you’ll hear Monica and Youmna read from their own works.
Monica will read an excerpt from Repetition Nineteen, published by Nightboat in
2020, as well as an unpublished poem, while Youmna will tell us more about The
Paper Camera, the book she published, in 2019, with Litmus Press.

Youmna Chlala and Mónica de la Torre: The tenses of cultural differences

The conversation you’re about to hear, “The Positive Twist,” was held between Allison Cobb, Sarah Riggs and Jérémy Robert. Cobb starts by reading the preface to Plastic: An Autobiography, the book she published with Nightboat Books in 2021, where she describes plastic as the epitome of the Anthropocene, and its damages on a personal and global level. She elaborates on her relationship with genres and her environmental engagement. She talks about the togetherness of lived experiences when she documented her failure to communicate with the inhabitants Mossville, Louisiana, once dubbed “the most toxic town” in the United States. She walks us through the three stages of apology, the creative meanderings of fiction and imagination, as well as the joyous and sustainable strength that can stem from our understanding of the plastic tragedy, and how literature, in its own way, can fend off resentment and help locate the strength to take action.

Allison Cobb: Positive Twist

Political thinker and activist Françoise Vergès leads “Decolonize the Arts,” a collective whose aim is to question and critique the art world’s white-framed structures and increasing disparity. In conversation with Sarah Riggs and Omar Berrada, co-leaders of Tamaas/Earth Arts Justice, Vergès discusses everything from the relationship between bananas, racism, sex and capitalism to decolonial feminism, and the representation of blackness and otherness, or lack thereof, in films, plays, galleries and museums. Recorded at FiveMyles in Brooklyn on February 28, 2020.

Françoise Vergès (5/5): Future

Françoise Vergès (4/5): Decolonizing the Arts

Françoise Vergès (3/5): Race is Forbidden in France

Françoise Vergès (2/5): Tracing the Symptoms of Colonization

Françoise Vergès (1/5): Growing Up Off the Cartography

Anne Waldman gives an oral history, a glimpse into her personal archive that has shaped her artistic and activist life. She outlines a politics that imagines a new way of being together that might come from the suspension of everyday living this pandemic has brought upon us. Anne speaks of our planetary interconnectivity as a model for systemic change and spiritual awakening. She presents a politics and thinking that spans from her recollections of a working class upbringing to the dharma to a powerful poetics that reveals planet-eviscerating corruption as well as the sacred life of a manatee; these potent narratives give us footholds toward brightness in a dark time.

Anne Waldman (7/7): Politicians and Poets

Anne Waldman (6/7): The Role of Outrider Poets

Anne Waldman (4/7): Change Starts with a Broken Heart

Anne Waldman (3/7): Voicing the Caged Manatee

Anne Waldman (2/7): Communal Needs

Anne Waldman (1/7): Ethos of Thrift and Art

In which Sarah asks the Earth Arts Justice lead question about continuity between Jabari and grandparents, and parents. And Jabari speaks of his father, who is an immigrant, but unlike most politician’s tales of predecessors who overcome odds, Jabari speaks eloquently of his father’s resilient bends toward freedom, the wide open world, making unexpected “experimental” decisions, taking unconventional jobs and overstaying a student visa, all the while being also hardworking, dependable, modeling. What Jabari makes clear is how much his love for others, and desire for economic, environmental, racial and gender justice for all motivates his politics and teaching but also, how much he is willing to walk into a powerful and unscripted future to attain those goals.

Jabari Brisport (4/5): We Need Teachers of Color

Jabari Brisport (5/5): End of Capitalism through Collaboration

Sarah and Omar join Cecilia Vicuña as she travels through ancestral memory via tenderly-told stories of her childhood in Chile. From a young age, Vicuña came to define solidarity as the combination of love and creativity occuring in kinship, and so deeply mourns the connection lost to the pandemic and to racial injustice. Separated from people with whom we create art and movements, how do we go on? It is mountingly necessary for Vicuña’s continued poetry and art practice, which builds links out of a history that has been violently, deliberately obscured. She suggests that when our entire universe of knowledge is “forcefully removed” by colonization, our only recourse is through a memory not of linear record, but of sensuality, tactility, feeling, and heart. In this way, we build what is not only possible, but which memory tells us is precedented. Recorded via Zoom on May 25, 2020.

Cecilia Vicuña (1/7): Growing up with the Land

Cecilia Vicuña (2/7): Art and Climate: Erasing Our Forgetfulness

Cecilia Vicuña (3/7): Discovering Forgotten Histories

Cecilia Vicuña (4/7): Improvisation and Trust

Cecilia Vicuña (5/7): A Color that Doesn't Exist

Cecilia Vicuña (6/7): Reinventing Education

Cecilia Vicuña (7/7): Connection

Sarah Riggs and Alia Al-Sabi invite Safaa Fathy to discuss displacement, language, feminism, revolution, and ecosystems in this generous talk hosted by Earth Arts Justice. Poet, filmmaker and philosopher Safaa Fathy was born in the south of Egypt where the sand, the water, and the green fields inspired her to write her first poem, and where her uncle’s library and the restrictive atmosphere of her village created formative experiences for her. She describes how far she had to go in her travels as she came to understand her relationship to language through exile, while navigating institutional and outright racism in France. She shares her thoughts on the 2011 uprising in Egypt, as well as the current intersections of climate activism and the revolutions of Black, indigenous and people of color. She lifts up the young people of the world who are asking the questions her generation never asked.

Safaa Fathy (1/4): Never Arriving

Safaa Fathy (2/4): Environmentalism and Race

Safaa Fathy (3/4): Revolution and Hope

Safaa Fathy (4/4): Language

Punctuated by the sounds of tools, helicopters, and sirens in her Fort Greene garden, Lois Elaine Griffith discusses with Alisha Mascarenhas what it means to create, repair, and build community within and beyond the era of COVID-19. Lois considers the intersectionality of her father’s Caribbean-American influence on her life and the ways in which it has rippled throughout her experiences as a teacher, writer, and visual artist. As co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Founders Archive Project, she notes the urgent need for spaces that encourage self-expression in the spirit of the Cafe’s original mission- “from the street to the stage.” She stresses the formation of communities supported by and for the people as an access point to accessibility and the use of art to inform living. In the context of our current state, she explores the role of the artist, the “community of presence” that can be created when we listen to the internal and “native ways” in meaningful transference. “We’re living in the break,” so what comes after? How do we heal? Lois’ hope is for us to pay more attention to the people and things around us, to exercise physically, and mentally, and to “understand whose shoulders we stand on.” She claims that within this process, we too can be carriers in order to give back what’s been given to us, as her father always told her. The interview ends with a poem “Climate and diversity as everything is alive” composed by Lois in the form of a letter to Alisha, who reads it aloud.

Lois Elaine Griffith (1/4): Community of Presence and Writing

Lois Elaine Griffith (2/4): Art as Protest

Lois Elaine Griffith (3/4): Shared Vulnerability

Lois Elaine Griffith (4/4): Art is Essential Work

The word “tamaas” in Arabic means “connection." Since 2004, Tamaas has worked transnationally among various artistic disciplines in the U.S., Morocco, and France. Through our new branch, Earth Arts Justice, comes Invitation to the Species, a podcast series in which we ask guest speakers to think about what their grandparents and parents’ ways of living bring to the present moment, and how their own work connects in specific ways to collective eco-systems and our climate. Invited guests respond through interviews, readings and performances.

Invitation to the Species

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