YEAH? NO, MAMÍ.
by Ricky Novaes de Oliveira
You know what I mean?
I can’t imagine you do—and that’s the point.
This week I present to you a bizarre artistic experiment in poetic form: “Yeah? No, mamí.” After a fortnight hiatus (in which I did admittedly play some Fortnite) from writing to you, I return in a glaze of boring: academic writing. But not quite. I’m having some fun here and trying to embrace the “art” part of art school.
I’m in a class about indigeneity in modern art; it’s a PhD-level three-hour-long seminar for students in the art history department, and it counts towards my master’s degree in Writing (with a capital-W thank you very much). In said class, we watched a movie called The Laughing Alligator, which is inspiration for my poem. [Aside: hmu if you want a link to the movie.] I won’t explain the movie, because I’m still trying to figure it out, and that’s what led to this poem, which I guess is more “art piece” than poem but I think it has poetic feet.
Here’s what I did: I wrote a response to the assigned movie and theoretical texts: I posted the response to receive course credit: I went to class: I listened to my professor’s lecture about what gets lost in translation, what gets lost in colonization, and what we have left to find in ourselves: I smelled tobacco when my professor stepped out for a smoke (really): I sat down after a long day and thought: I wanted to write a poem, because I have not written one in a while (been novella-ing): I returned to the words: I returned to what’s been said: I chopped up my posted response: I changed the words: I translated the changed words into Portuguese and then back into English and then into Spanish and then back into English: I arranged them into a shape that looks like an essay: I arranged them onto a face within a face from the movie so that the words disappear even though they are still there: I wrote a poem.
I think this would all make more sense if you were in the class with me.
But you’re not.
And this is all I have for you this week.
So here we are.
Thanks for being here.
I hope to see you there next week.
Laughingly, Ricky
PS: The same “poem” as above with a lighter background, in case you’re crazy enough to actually read every word.
“We will lose ourselves, more than we have already lost, if we continue watching/watering others without seeing/seeding/sowing ourselves.” There’s my nugget of meaning. It questions altruism, objectification, “othering”, white saviorism, and unequal power structures.
I feel like I’m in class with your colorful professor and a whiff of tobacco. 🤓
I hope she appreciates your process for creating meaning. Great title, btw!