This video is an excerpt of an original piece, written by Cara Page in 2018, entitled; “Psalm for the Mismeasured & Unfit” staged reading for Haunted Files. This performance is dedicated to Black Women & Indigenous Women & Women of Color globally, who have been tested on, experimented on and sterilized. For Black women whose bodies have been vilified and exoticized, raped and pathologized by white supremacy, scientific racism and the medical industrial complex. It is also for the Black birth workers, healers, midwives, doulas and root workers who survived and birthed generations despite attempted genocide.
The performance opens with the memory of the poking, prodding and painful extraction of medical racism that has been pervasively testing on Black women and many Communities of Color, Indigenous, Disabled, Queer & Trans, and Migrant/refugee Communities for centuries since slavery and colonization to now. In our blood, bones and memories for as far back as we can remember, we have been tested on, 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.
Performed by the amazing ensemble cast of Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative. Featuring; Vesta Walker, Jaime Dzandu, Audrey Hailes, Jehan Roberson & 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.
We are bearing witness to the embodiment of Black women’s pain from scientific racism under the guise of national security and being less than human, subjects, objects and animals at the whim of white supremacist, ableist, misogynist violence as an extension of popoulation control, eugenics and slavery. The performers begin by replicating the sterilization, the needling, the forced physical & emotional interrogation, the tearing and ripping of experimentation committed on Black women for centuries while images of the archaic instruments used are overlaid visually. While some of the performers embody the pain experienced from this terror.
Then a healer begins to conjure and move the energy and they begin to heal and transform and recover. They find each other amidst this pain and hold one another. The energy moves into resiliency as we hear the words of, “Mama, Nana/Grandmama/ Auntie 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 & transformation as they move the energy (to an exceptional soundtrack in the backdrop by DJ Petra) while we witness them 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.
sergiotupacuzurin.com