I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.
I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.
I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.
I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.
I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.
I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.
I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.
I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.
I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.
I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.
Fanny Lou Hamer
after Ron Mueck
Here is a mass
of white upon white
skulls, tumbling
everywhere upon the galleries’ floor
a turning sea, resting
biting into another
black holes
shadowed sockets
promising questions without answers
a warning? a threat?
what remains long after our bodies have decayed
an impressive 100 skulls,
dwarfing visitors as they loom
here and here, cool, corridors
as catacombs above ground
forcing us to face our mortality, yes,
but also a certain care is needed in life for each other. Yes?
It is hard to explain what’s beautiful about a rather ordinary colored girl, a face difficult to discern in the crowd, an average chorine not destined to be a star or even the heroine of a feminist plot. In some regard, it is to recognize the obvious that is reluctantly ceded: the beauty of the black ordinary, the beauty that resides in and animates the determination to live free. Beauty is not a luxury; it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, a transfiguration of the given. Only the wayward appreciated this girl’s riotous conduct and wild habits— her longing to create a life from nothing. Only they could discern the beautiful plot against the plantation that she waged each and every day.
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives
Living Wild Studios 