Here is my 5-minute response to a free-writing exercise created by Kyoungwon Lee for her Healing Justice Track workshop “Knowledges We Intuit: An Experimental Writing Group for Radical Survivors of Violence” presented at INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (COV4) Color of Violence 4 Conference (March 2015, Chicago, IL).
Writing Prompt: What’s your intuition’s relationship to “criminality”? How does your intuition scramble, feel, coagulate, burst, eat the idea of “criminality”? What images or words come to mind when you meditate on the relationship? Is there a song or melody that could accompany your piece?
I intuit that we’re all criminals
I am a criminal, so are you, you, and you
Innocence denied
No purity, no innocence exists in this barren land
of us vs. them, good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, the dead vs. the living, free vs. the unfree
Nature doesn’t embrace the binary
I am beyond good and evil
I embrace the deviant body
bursting out of criminal, landlocked barriers of barbed wire fences
It’s the only way to imagine freedom
to embrace the shit, eat the shit, spit out the shit
and laugh loudly at having survived in the belly of the beast
Convicted of multiple crimes
Deviance, trespass, desire, pleasure, resistance
Prison cells are no match
for what I and we can intuit
in our bodies and imagine collectively
What is incommensurable
cannot be named
unknowable
cannot be spoken, only felt
heavy as heart ache
light as release.
Melody: Desert at night in the borderlands, la frontera.
Unmoored. Infinite. Unassailable. Expansive.
Lena Palacios, March 27 at approximately 3 p.m.