Faculty of Art

Photography

Kinzi Dempsey

Belraha Poem & Transliterated Book

Poetry, satellite images and desert photos come together to create a dairy-like narrative that might be shared with others through affective play. This poem went through a process of translation by Kinzi's mother before being roughly transliterated back in to English text by Kinzi. This was done to discover if non-Arabic speakers might be able to engage in & emulate the experience of 'reading & reciting' as Kinzi did in her Arabic classes throughout her childhood, as well as to begin interrogate linguistic distortions.The transliterated poem & images come together in a PDF book form in the hope that future facilitations of reading & reciting might be possible: What do we sound like when we ('badly') speak another's language and tell their stories back to them? Join Kinzi at 11:00 AM EST on May 8 on Microsoft Teams for a time of collective reading, where participants will take turns reading aloud from the transliterated Arabic version of her poem. (Click the link directly below).

“From Gloria Anzaldua’s ‘La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness’, I find a text that feels to be a beautiful articulation of this space of personal self-realization, as well as community trans-national and trans-cultural engagement: "From this racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross- pollinization, an 'alien' consciousness is presently in the making—a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer. It is a consciousness of the Borderlands.Una lucha de fronteras / A Struggle of BordersBecause I, a mestiza, continually walk out of one culture and into another,because I am in all cultures at the same time, alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro, me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio.Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan simultaneamente."”