Artist’s Statement
Psalm for the Mismeasured and Unfit is an original performance written and directed by Cara Page. First performed as a staged reading for Haunted Files, its debut public performance took place at the Barnard Center for Research on Women’s 2019 Scholar and Feminist Conference, “Subverting Surveillance: Strategies to End State Violence.” It is dedicated to Black Trans/Femme Women, Indigenous Trans/Femme Women, and Trans/Femme Women of Color across physical, developmental, emotional abilities globally who have been subjected to testing, experimentation, and sterilization as an extension of state control and eugenic ideologies. This is dedicated to those whose bodies have been vilified and exoticized, raped and pathologized by white supremacy, scientific racism, and the medical industrial complex. And for the Black/Indigenous & People of Color birth workers, healers, midwives, doulas, and rootworkers who survived and birthed generations despite our attempted genocide. Performed by the amazing ensemble cast of Beverly’s Daughter Arts Collaborative; featuring Vesta Walker, Jaime Dzandu, Audrey Elaine Hailes, Jehan Roberson, and Sara Abdullah; from the artistic vision and choreography directed by Ebony Noelle Golden; in partnership with the writer and producer, Cara Page of Changing Frequencies, we time traveled through this psalm of pain to transformation and power.
The performance opens with the memory of the poking, prodding, and painful extraction of scientific racism that has been pervasively testing on Black women, many Communities of Color, Indigenous people, Disabled, Queer, Intersex and Trans people; Migrant and Refugee Communities, people who have been forcibly incarcerated and institutionalized for centuries, from slavery and colonization to the present day. In our blood, bones, and memories, as far back as we can remember, we have been terrorized, observed, objectified, used and abused by colonizers and colonialist institutions seeking to prove our inferiority through our anthropometry, literal bone structure, DNA, and bloodlines. We bear witness to the pain from scientific racism and racial capitalism that has justified experimentation under the false notion that we are less than human, or only subjects, objects, and animals at the whim of population control, eugenics, and slavery.
The performers, dressed in white uniforms, begin by replicating the sterilization, the needling, the forced physical and emotional interrogation, the tearing and ripping of experimentation committed on Black women for centuries while images of archaic instruments are visually projected on performers’ bodies. Some of the performers viscerally show the pain experienced from this terror. Then a healer appears and begins to conjure and move the energy, enabling those in pain to heal, transform, and recover, to collapse and release. Collapse and release. They find each other amidst the pain and hold one another. The energy moves into resiliency.
We hear the words “Mama, Nana, Grandmama, Auntie, we are waiting” echo through the room. We are waiting to be seen and heard and recovered in these waiting rooms of racist, homophobic, classist doctors and scientific genocide. The performers move into a reclamation dance of resilience and transformation, moving the energy to an exceptional soundtrack by DJ Petra while moving their power as survivors, healers, witches, midwives, and birth workers.
This is a prayer
A psalm
A tonic
A medicine
For our freedom from this vile history
And contemporary violence
Committed on generations, and generations
And generations to now.
We are still waiting to be seen, remembered, recovered, freed from these rooms.
The video was edited and produced by Sergio Tupac Uzurin of Native NY Video.
