READING BY M. NOURBESE PHILIP! PRESENTATIONS BY IBRAHIMA SECK AND SONYA POSMENTIER!
Moderated discussion to follow
In her essay “A Language for Grieving,” published in The New York Times, Sonya Posmentier describes her visit to the Whitney Plantation, now a museum and “site of memory” focused on the lives of the enslaved people who lived and worked there. “In turning the plantation into a memorial site and reorienting it to highlight the perspective of the enslaved, the owner and museum director constructed an architecture for grief,” Posmentier writes. “Can poetry do the same?” She goes on to discuss how by “making violence strange and unfamiliar, very different poets like [Gwendolyn] Brooks and [M. NourbeSe] Philip have gone beyond merely repeating its effects, like a viral video of a police shooting, and beyond the realm of the evidentiary to that of the imagination, where we might not only observe violence but mourn and counter it.”
“Sites of Memory: A Language for Grieving” will bring together Posmentier, Philip, and Ibrahima Seck, the academic director of the Whitney Plantation, to discuss these questions around mourning and imagination, the significance of an architecture (or poetics) of grief, and the challenges of making a site or text of memory into/out of what is omitted from the record. In an interview in Room Magazine, Philip writes that “archives are often very one-sided—having been constructed and preserved by the very people who were responsible for destroying the cultures and histories of so many peoples.” She continues, “Hence my interest in the archive of silence, the archive of the gap, the archive of the space, the archive of the erased space, the archive of the rupture. Is there a way of translating those ruptures, those spaces of silence?” How might the archive (as a site of memory) provide (or fail to provide) an architecture for grief?
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Location and Address
Frick Fine Arts Auditorium