Roach Sensuality: Towards a Soft Bestiality
What does it mean to open an aperture for unbridled desire?
How can we moderate our tribal and primate origins?
Is memory ever really lost, and how do we regain it?
America must keep images of Pocahontas in its sacred cathedral-like halls, preserving an artificial memory of a girl that stood between her people and oncoming tyrants. America uses her memory as a forgery, as forged and forced signature, to authorize its genocidal streak of governance. So it was, America began with the rape of an indigenous girl. Pocahontas was the first colony. Pocahontas was the first native seed killed.
When America was founded, it appropriated the constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy as it wrote its own system of legal codes. Along the perimeter of the Capitol Building dome, this story of conquest, violence, and Christian fanaticism is told, ensnaring those of us below in the grip of a venomous serpent’s coil. But the Founders, in their infinite shame and duplicity, removed one critical veto power that was written in the Iroquois by-laws: the ability of clan mothers to recall ineffective male leadership. Can you imagine that, if our congress had to answer to Black, Brown, and Indigenous grandmothers? That is what we would call an approximate utopia.
When I was diagnosed with HIV at 22, I felt I would also become a statistic of the early death of so many brown and black youth, another casualty in America's negligence of its people. Starting from the local, the performances at the Historic Jamestown living history museum are a refusal to succumb to the plague narrative of queer brown sexuality while also revising our relationship to vermin and the objects / places / and people that have unjustly been assigned to those words: Israel loves to call Palestinians “rats.”
In Spanish, the word “cuka” is used to refer to a woman’s genitals. I alter these stories of animality and animalization to produce a virulent rupture of history and destiny, one in which the virus and its necropolitics WORK FOR ME, WORK FOR US. They do my(our) bidding. I am (we are) its God and Goddesses. This is a process of liberation where pathogens function like nano robots invented through and by queer love-making. It’s our destiny to transform its story.
I placed three tropical cockroaches on my body and meditated in front of the Pocahontas statue. I downloaded one word from the ether: VARICELA, the scientific word for chicken pox, and very likely, the cause of death for this 13 year old girl, Matoaka. Abducted, according to many new histories, she is the first missing and murdered indigenous woman (MMIW). Correction - missing child. To her memory we submit a gentle act - the living breath, so as to heal, protect, and revive a life that should have been.
