Student Alex Haber reacts to Yedda Morrison’s recent BathHouse reading:
Yedda Morrison’s recent reading at EMU was haunting and uplifting, inspiring and queerly abstract. On a stage swallowed almost entirely in darkness (lit only by a tiny lantern, which the author brought on stage herself and set at her feet), Morrison read selections from her book Girl Scout Nation with an eloquent and crystalline voice that installed life into a collection of words already spilling with depth.
Somberness cloaked much of Morrison’s text (visually highlighted when Morrison abruptly went silent at her podium, only to resurrect wearing what appeared to be a dark veil over her face), though a certain enthusiasm was also clear, especially in her brief moments of song. The performance aspect of her reading was brave and delightful, as her incanting of bird calls was poetry all on its own.
Beyond her initial reading, Morrison showcased some of her recent artwork, including “Pre-Colonial Forest,” an erasure-inspired piece in which she began with an image by William Notman of men sitting around a campfire, and digitally removed the people, the activity, the life from the original, and presented her new piece as a gray, vacant trail in the woods. It was a fascinating look at a relatively new art form and process, which also tied in well with her second reading, a literary erasure project Morrison titled “Darkness.”
“Darkness” takes its name from Conrad’s classic Heart of Darkness, a novel about “civilized” Englishmen surrounded by cannibals in a river in the Congo, and spans the entirety of Conrad’s text using a digital white-out technique to remove words, creating new, discovered text in Conrad’s historic remnants. The reading of this text, performed by members of the EMU English Department faculty, was choral, involving four different readers speaking Morrison’s found text simultaneously, their separate voices woven eerily together in the dark. The effect was something very striking, as central words such as “earth” and “river” reappeared often in various stages, gorged with new and sensational life.
Morrison’s presentation concluded with a further look at some of her recent artwork, all of it innovative in form. From her decadent and ecologically aware wallpaper, to her intriguing engrossment with the photography of artificial plants, Morrison’s work is entirely unique, devastatingly evocative, and should not be passed by.