such defeatist tone i have.
and perhaps that’s okay. life, an inevitable defeat.
not because we die.
but because we are limited.
because we have pain and sorrows and cannot exist in unabating pleasure.

i’ve reconciled this is good.
my indignation, childish.

we all suffer.
my suffering insists that I am neither here or there,
that I cannot recognize my mother’s face, fury, or songs.
that my rivers crash blindly without reason,
regurgitating, carrying the passions of a billion wicked men.

feigning and dancing, i know not who i am.
my ontology foreign.

i ought to
be discovered, perhaps.

i know not
how to be me.

I used to think that if I could name myself completely, I’d feel more certain in the world. That knowing would bring freedom. But the more I searched for answers on identity and purpose, the more I realized that certainty was never the point.

At Middlesex, I longed for a guidebook. I wanted someone to tell me exactly how to live, how to feel, and how to become someone worth becoming. I was a Black teenager in a white institution, taught that my life’s purpose was to fight, resist, and protest— to perform identity as a struggle.

Édouard Glissant permitted me to stop performing. He writes that we each have a right to not to be fully known or explained, a right to opacity. To embrace opacity is to step back from the tree of knowledge, to refuse the kind of knowing that conquers. I began to understand that I didn’t need to make myself legible to belong. Relation doesn’t require understanding. Poetry doesn’t need to be understood to be felt.

The show begins there.

It honors what can’t be named, what shifts in the shadows. The images don’t explain themselves. They aren’t lessons or symbols, but rather they hold presence. Like people, they exist once, present, singular and fleeting.

I Know Not How to Be Me is a soft refusal of certainty, an offering of wonder and rest and a slow undoing of the need to be known.

The show asks nothing of you.

With support from
Stacey B. McCarthy
and Roan Callahan.

Cenìnye