| Afrofuturism
by Tracie Morris
Love in 2010
Click, flicker, click
Click, flicker, click
Click, flicker, click
A gaze of the radius
Between the rays,
spectral bands play:
Features, faces
half-human
machinations — alienated.
Makeup grafted on faces
Second skin, bacteria
Encoded chameleon genes
Strategic fat shifters.
Click, flicker, click
Click, flicker, click
Click, flicker, click
Gotta Jennifer Janet ass
Last year: Hottentot made out of holographs.
Click, flicker, click
Click, flicker, click
Click, flicker, click
Thin but for injected lipids to form figures
In the midst.
Click, flicker, click
Click, flicker, click
Click, flicker, click
Click, flicker, click
Click, flicker, click
Click, flicker, click!!!
Culick! Culick!
© Tracie Morris, 2003
Comments:
This section of the play Afrofuturism, which uses dystopia as its theme, emphasizes the dystopia of desire and its potential impact on the human female body. We often associate medical advances as helping the body, but here I wanted to emphasize the structural or conceptual dystopia of sexism that impacts the structure of the female body. There is also a notion of racial encoding of the female. Her "parts" are sexualized in a racially specific way, but this notion of race is malleable to the extent that it can be grafted from one racial "type" to another. We see this today. Popular culture asserts the preference of white skin tones and nasal features (and skinny bodies), but suggests that full, "pouty" lips and large backsides (but only on skinny bodies), maybe even a bit of a tan, are attractive now. The conflation of these attributes and those of images of prostitutes and porn stars underscores, in my opinion, the stereotype of the Black (or Black-influenced)/sexually wanton (and wanting) woman.
Tracie Morris is a multidisciplinary poet and performing artist. She is a writer, educator, scholar, and actor who has worked in theater, dance, music, sculpture, and film. She has toured extensively throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, and Asia as a writer and bandleader. Her poetry and essays have been extensively anthologized. Tracie has participated in over a dozen recording projects to date. Her sound poetry is at the Whitney Museum and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning. She is writer-in-residence at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University.
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