Kasandra David reacts to Yedda Morrison’s recent BathHouse reading:
Being unfamiliar with Yedda Morrison’s work gave me a unique platform from which to experience her performance. There is something to be said for having negative space in one’s mind; I completely without preconceived impressions of her art. If I arrived at the Bathhouse performance empty, then I left newly filled. Initially Girl Scout Nation felt like mossy forest browns and greens in the dark auditorium. I felt as though I was scouting myself, taking careful notes of the landmarks such as the inky oil-eye. But Morrison’s work erupted in a massive paradigm shift when birdcalls began to form a cityscape in the space I first took for pure wilderness. The different birdcalls seemed to compete with one another for audial space, like too many buskers on the same block. Just after that portion of the reading began to sound like organic, raw street music, the text convoluted again.
Morrison’s reading was suddenly electric with politically charged strings of words such as “triple homicide queer” – which hearkens to society’s ongoing problems with hate crime. Though she cited The Heart of Darkness as central to a different work of hers, I felt the tension of humanity’s relationship with wilderness keenly in Girl Scout Nation as well. There seemed to be a conflict between wanting to return to it (ecological, pastoral archetypal longing) and the reasonable desire to stay far away from it (lawlessness, disease, death) embedded in it.
While I was able to experience the reading this vividly partly because of my ignornance, there are obviously unfortunate aspects as well. I would have been able to contextualize her nuanced reading of Girl Scout Nation in relationship to the rest of its content had I actually read the book. I can only imagine how it would manipulate my understanding of the text as having gone to Bhanu Kapil’s reading of Humanimal did. Furthermore I missed out on mulling over the words with the benefit of her visual art. Which is clearly important to her intent, as Morrison took the time to point out she does not take the images as being merely backdrops to the text, and deliberately acts against that tendency in her reader.
At any rate, the reading was a fantastic experience, and Morrison gave an equally laudable performance. Her rendition of her own work was lively and lyrical, and wholly rewarding to witness. She gifted me with a handful of gems, such as a “hard-earned badge of deviance”, “no one can tell you what a girl is” and “society’s endless hiking procedures…indifferent scouts never complete her catalogue of atrocity.” If you’re going to appropriate someone else’s cleverness and remake it somehow into your own, I highly recommend attending a reading. You’ll leave with a fistful of diamonds.