Clémence Lollia Hilaire: Harvest

*: “No, not feeling it, sorry. I would build a concrete wall if I could.”

^: “Don’t be ridiculous.”

*: “… and what exactly did she want to record?”

^: “Who?”

*: “The woman filming, who else! Remember, the hospital? Pass the bissap drink.”

^: “She said she had felt the same pain.”

*: “And would filming it make the pain go away? And now what? Showing it? Sorry but I don’t get the logic.”

…

*: “The drink, please!”

^: “My mom used to tell me a folk tale when I was younger.
There was a man, with eyes so wide, he could see at 360 degrees without moving his head. For this reason he called himself the god of all gods. This wide eyed man mastered the craft of naming and classifying in rigid distinctions everything that surrounded him, from the smallest aquatic living being to the people whose belief he could not grasp…”

*: “You done with your story?
All I’m saying is, it doesn't make sense to put this pain under the scrutiny and judgment of those who simply haven't felt it.
I don’t get it.”

^: “If you gave me a chance to finish…
The only thing that one can be sure of when it comes to chronic disease: the pain will show up, and when it does, you cannot be sure you will.”

*: “Babe, I’m not sure I get what you mean?”

^: “Nevermind.

So, I continue my story: The wide eyed man only responded with what he thought was logical to what he could see. The optic was his realm, and his tools were shaped and sharpened solely to respond to sight.
You see, with this understanding he determined who…”

*: “… Who was part of his club and who wasn’t.
So basic Anarcha, I got it!
But if I go with your story, what confuses me is: why would SHE want to use the same tools as him? The one eyed man.

^: “The wide eyed man.”

*: “Why would she want to capture and show a pain that we alone have been feeling and continue feeling? That only WE understand. Let them have their phallocentric ordering of discourse and aesthetics. I just don’t want that representation.
I'm not opening the door!”

…

^: “I am only trying to understand, don’t shout at me!”

*: “There are pains one doesn't just expose, because of the risk of perpetuating a 
spectacle expected by those who created the representational regime she is now trying to make hers. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. 

^: “Maybe she simply forgot her basics? I don’t know.
Ok let’s skip to the end of the story:
Those who were defined outside the category the wide eyed man had considered his fellows, saw their eyesight split in two: Their right eye was able to catch and comprehend forms and categories that were dominant in the world; while their left eye had to be exercised to see through a different spectrum that only they could perceive…”

*: “Justice surely won't come from SHOWING.”

…

^: “Pass the gwosey drink please.”

*: “Dear, you're just too stubborn. What do you think, Lu? You haven't said much.

~: “The black woman bleeds over and thereby violates
and contaminates the edge and boundary 
between the contemporary moment 
and a persistent history of black subjection.”

*: “Can you please stop speaking in riddles, both of you!”

~: “I’m just reading from this book I found in the storage!
If we gonna stay locked in here, 
we might as well find something to do.
/ Creating new forms is necessarily a constant theorization
of our own conditions of (im)possibility, 
and exu-be-ran-ce /”

b: “It was better when you were quiet, you know?”

~: “We are living dead, fleshing out of form.”

*: “Stop being so pessimistic!”

~: “Precisely. The formless will recognize themselves.
Just let them in.”

    …

Conversation imagined by Dina Mimi and Clémence Lollia Hilaire.