ANTI FEAR ASSEMBLY: Listening, Reflecting & Writing Workshop

darkness is a place/ color of potentiality, darkness is a place where the body can move freely, contours are lost, it is a place of freedom. 

-workshop participants, June 2020

Pamela Sneed is a beloved teacher and poet who has given so much inspiration and courage to her students and readers to move forward with writing and stopping their own silences, overcoming fear. We are so very grateful that she led us in a reading and writing response workshop. 

We started the session by opening up the mic to everyone to speak out loud fears which were at the forefront of our minds and bodies in that moment, that day, now. We found a way to be vulnerable together, to shed the pretense of ok-ness and stop our silences.

Below is a summary of the workshop structure and spoken and written words from the poetry workshop participants, intertwining personal, political, poetic, and imagined, with care, bringing privately held fears into community with others fears to embrace vulnerability and practice a collective experiment in community-building, trust, reciprocal care, and reimagining how we can be together.

Workshop Overview

• short introductory exercise in which participants are asked to say out loud anxieties or fears at forefront of their mind, in single word format rather than contextualizing, and keeping video on or off whatever felt comfortable. The words came in waves sometimes overlapping or people speaking in unison, going faster and slower and then slowly fading out with fewer words and longer pauses between words until we stopped. Then we were quiet for a moment, holding these fears and anxieties.  

Use senses to describe fear:

-- What does fear TASTE like

-- What does fear SOUND like

-- What does fear SMELL like

-- What does fear FEEL like

-- What does fear LOOK like

Writing shared by participants:

FEAR of Impatience. FEAR of burning out. FEAR of betrayal. FEAR of myopia. FEAR of the manipulation of truth. FEAR of no space to mourn, no space to rage. FEAR of disconnection. FEAR of erasure. 

Fear sounds like the cacophony of helicopters circling. Fear feels like fists pounding outward from my deepest core rattling to escape, in rhythm forcing my body to expand outward and inward simultaneously. Fear looks like the loss of vision from a rubber bullet to the eye, forcing myopia into my mind’s eye, fear chops away at the image I keep building in my head every day, trying to erase my chalk drawings. I keep coming back and redrawing them. Fear looks like the laziest eye snitching on us. Fear smells like cold, dirty metal, like money. Like you can’t tell them apart anymore. 

 . . . . .

Blacklisting 

Being put away for a long time for trying to change the world

 
Competition

 
Isolation

. . . . .

The authentic form of democracy is the ability to experience, and participate in enameling our fellow human beings to experience, liberty, equality (fairness) and accountability (transparency). This is what democra-capitalism, American form of democra-capitalism, has taken away from us. If these three concepts will be obeyed by us towards the others - and as an evolutionary biologist, I would include all of nature - the world will be a better place. To me, this is what Pamela is striving for, or at least, this is what I experienced from listening to her.


 . . . . .


0.using senses to describe fear:

0.taste - metallic (bloody)

0.sound - unending, painful, mechanical din that can’t be squelched by covering ears.  Vibrating and energizing the bones in my head and jaw

0.smell - putrid, barely detectable but with wafts that invade and take over my consciousness without warning

0.feel - fight/flight hormone rush to gut

0.look - dead eyed stare - sharp

Use line ‘unending, painful, mechanical din that I can’t escape from’ to start a one page stream of consciousness writing

. . . . .

  
Fear looks like loss of control, like being locked up in jail with one small window high up, so high that I cant reach, or no window at all, threat of execution; fear is an emptiness, without love; a desert, without people or animals or water, without an oasis. 

Fear smells like heaps of trash in the summer, disgusting smells emanating from unexpected corners, rising up and making me feel sick.

Fear tastes like metal, like cold things touching my tongue, giving my whole body a chill. 

Fear sounds like sirens, and bombs, or complete silence broken by crackling caused by something scary in the dark which I cannot see. 

 
. . . . .
  

Fear looks like an implosion, exposed and detectable, a fuel for perpetual (self) policing. 

Fear sounds like an internal shell shock, an accelerated fragmentation of logic bouncing within the limits of the body. 

. . . . .

Fear of 

paralysis (of my very own literal physicality but could extend outwards to a failed [r]evolution and continued socialization of lethargy), 

irreconciliation (I said before death, but ideally would be with life to spare, and I didn’t say with whom or what),

misunderstanding (mine of others and others’ of me).

losing people or becoming alone (as I evolve) 

Fear looks like...a sudden, untraceable shift in the composition of a face.

Fear sounds like...tunnelling: like all of my perception moves to the seat of my inner ear. Then, a high frequency at the threshold of human audition.

I wanted to know more about Pamela’s ‘taught to fear the forest’ part. I think it started with Pamela saying, “This is the first time in history that we don’t know the names of trees”. As I recall, she drew a distinction where black people have to make friends with the forest because they have had to cross through it to get home. Then, we’re taught to fear nature, disavow who we are. We are nature. I was surprised and very stimulated by this turn of her evocation.

As I thought about why the woods were scary for me growing up, I thought ‘because of people’ that might be in there. I wasn’t raised to be scared of wolves, the most predatory non-human-animal in our suburban Illinois forest preserves. I was told that wolves were scared of us. But for me the woods were a place of solace, a safe place. Even at night. But then with this it comes full circle...when the nature of humans is of the same nature of the forest, and we are scared of one another, then it could be said I am scared of the forest, and socialized to be so.

When I think about moving in the dark, I think about how the reason for feeling liberated there is because the social link dissolves. The social link depends on the image, your/my/our image. Moving with or touching another body in the dark allows those subjectivities to connect on a different plane...pre-social. Pre-identified, but with room for certain recognitions and confirmations. It can also be a place for fantasy, and projection. But I think if we were to stay there long enough that could eventually go away. The way a face or a body we can’t revisit becomes increasingly abstracted over time.

I think about skin reflecting light, and skin being absorbed in the absence of it.

. . . . .

ABOUT HOST

Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer, performer and visual artist, author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams and two chaplets, Gift by Belladonna and Black Panther. She has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Art Forum, Hyperallergic and on the cover of New York Magazine. She is online faculty in SAIC’s low res MFA teaching Human Rights and Writing Art and has also been a Visiting Artist at SAIC in the program for 4 consecutive years. She has performed at the Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Poetry Project, MCA, The High Line, New Museum and Toronto Biennale. She delivered the closing keynote for Artist, Designers, Citizens Conference/a North American component of the Venice Biennale at SAIC. She appears in Nikki Giovanni’s, “The 100 Best African American Poems.” In 2018, she was nominated for two PushCart Prizes in poetry. She will publish a poetry and prose manuscript Funeral Diva with City Lights in Fall 2020.

We invite you to order Pamela’s poetry and prose manuscript Funeral Diva published with City Lights in Fall 2020. “In this collection of personal essays and poetry, Pamela details her coming of age in New York City during the late 1980s. Funeral Diva captures the impact of AIDS on black queer life, and highlights the enduring bonds between the living, the dying, and the dead. Sneed's poems not only converse with lovers past and present, but also with her literary forebears—like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde—whose aesthetic and thematic investments she renews for a contemporary American landscape. Offering critical focus on matters from police brutality to LGBTQ+ rights, Funeral Diva confronts today's most pressing issues with acerbic wit and audacity. The collection closes with Sneed's reflections on the two pandemics of her time, AIDS and COVID-19, and the disproportionate impact of each on African American communities."

ABOUT HEKLER ASSEMBLY

HEKLER ASSEMBLY is a transnational space for art and cultural workers to share, discuss and collectively imagine new ways of instituting based on the principles of self-organizing, community care, critical thinking, political education, distribution of resources, and healing. With alternating hosts, we share practical, historical, and theoretical knowledge about collaborative, pedagogical, and governing models established in response to shifting regimes, colonial and neoliberal violence. We question and learn about radical hospitality and conviviality, eco-centered community organizing, instituting, and art practices that showcase the symptoms we need to transform. Most importantly we continue asking what can be the role of arts now and in the future. Assembly is envisioned as an open collaborative process that includes reading groups, conversations with practitioners, and the ANTI FEAR series. 

ANTI FEAR series are initiated in collaboration with New York-based artist and neurologist Sonja Blum. It is envisioned as a space into which we bring privately held fears into community with others' fears with the aim of building community trust, reciprocal care, and exploring how our fears are connected to reimagining the commons. We aim to create healing feminist environments that celebrate community care through poetry, movement, and other body work, readings, via guest hosts bringing varying practices that untie repressive knots that make us feel fearful and powerless. Prior to each session participants are asked to think about / try to identify fears that are at the forefront of their mind and body. Sharing fears within the group is optional at the start of each session.