SHIFT~ performance salon presents:
migration
by Erin Drummond & Mai'a Williams
August 13, 2021
An evening of movement and words that physicalized questions about migration, belonging & flight.
Shared at Dine Out Downtown, a Winona Main Street event in front of ORNO Gift + Home.
Photos by Sydney Swanson
Text by Mai'a Williams
migration
by Erin Drummond & Mai'a Williams
August 13, 2021
An evening of movement and words that physicalized questions about migration, belonging & flight.
Shared at Dine Out Downtown, a Winona Main Street event in front of ORNO Gift + Home.
Photos by Sydney Swanson
Text by Mai'a Williams
Erin Drummond (she/they) explores animist mystery through multidisciplinary art making. Her wildness-based practice spans sculpture, performance, painting, writing, and experimentation—probing personal and collective unconscious to form new stories and physicalities of belonging. erindrummond.com
Mai’a Williams (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist who primarily works in sculpture, performance, installation, poetry and prose. Their studio, curatorial and research-based practice weaves together their identity as a queer Muslim and a daughter of First Nations and Black American lineages, as well as their experience as a midwife and a mother. Their work is a response to revolutionary mothering, global Black death, their African and First Nations ancestry and joy. It is a reflection of living and working with Egyptian, Palestinian, Congolese, and Central American Indigenous mothers in resistance communities for more than 15 years.
https://maiawilliams.tumblr.com/
https://maiawilliams.tumblr.com/
migration text by Mai'a Williams
1.
I live in a small river town–Winona–on the border of Wisconsin and Minnesota.
I am not from here.
But then neither are most of the people who live here.
2.
I was going to write an essay, a meditation, and it was going to include a mythological animal.
Meditations on what is real and what is make-believe.
I wanted to write about my grandmother. About love. About language.
Instead I will write about violence and raising an anxious teenager in the upper midwest. And
how dreams feel under the weight of a police gun. And there will probably not be any
mythological animals in this–no mermaids, no centaurs, no unicorns.
My grandmother is dead. My lovers visit me in dreams. My language is full of bile and spit and
coughs. My language is full of interrupted and repeated cycles of words that lose meaning over
the decades and centuries. Words like: father, like justice, words like color. Colors like green,
colors like spring green, words like renew refresh begin again.
3.
But how fair is this? Because when I ask myself what I want, all I can do is move into a fantasy.
A world that will just stop long enough for me to catch up. All I can want is to be strong enough,
when I know I am not, when I know they just keep shooting and shooting and we have to believe
this time will be different.
4.
They can make us widows, make us homeless, make us hopeless, make us into the enemy they
need and we can’t legally make a corporate store window break open, we can’t set fire to a
withering bouquet of flowers in the third aisle, we can’t pop the mylar balloons, we can’t speak
the language that capitalists understand.
Peaceful protests, the president demanded, peaceful protests until 7 p.m. and then everyone
return to your homes, close your windows, listen to the pop! pop! of our dreams bursting onto
the streets like glass bottles shattering and glass men falling off the edge.
5.
What could be more fantasy than a world where we get to safely express the desire for heart and
heat and home and revenge, where we are allowed to go home to our babies, where we are
allowed to believe in something more than survival, more than falling down and getting up.
6.
In a little green house in Winona, we have two cats, Tigey and Popcorn. And in the backyard, we
have three chickens, two white ones, and one brown, in the backyard, named: Heather, Heather
and Veronica. These are the new young chickens. Five years ago when I first moved to this small
town, I insisted that we get chickens. My daughter’s father and grandfather spent a few days
building a chicken coop in the backyard and setting up the wire fence so that the chicks could run
free. They were Bianca and Jack the Skeleton. Bianca was white and Jack was black and orange.
I want to write about these backyard chickens and what it means to eat the hens’ eggs and feed
them the scraps from our meals. How they give me hope in something strange and sweet. They, I
assume, do not know about the apocalypse or the fading populations of bees, or how most days I
cannot write anything because it all seems so restless and pointless to care when I am just one
person and the world that I fought for and hoped for and put my body on the line for–that world,
that future, will never be and I don’t know if the world that we are entering is going to be worse,
but I damn well know it is not going to be better than the one I imagined I could create from
sweat, and muscle and work and resilience and trauma.
7.
I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, went to school in New York, and then traveled, and
then traveled some more: Africa, Europe, the Americas. All those years living out of suitcases
and duffel bags, out of backpacks and cardboard boxes. Gave birth to a daughter in the Twin
Cities. I had a series of lovers. Had a series of friends. Had a series of heartbreaks and
disappointments and missed opportunities. Woke up to a revolution or two on our doorstep.
Woke up to my daughter singing in her sleep. Woke up to the cold rain of Berlin in the
springtime. Woke up and woke up and then got ‘awaken’ tattooed on my arm.
Learned to ride a motorbike and learned to hitchhike and to start a fire with nothing but sticks
and matches and sea water on the coasts of the Sinai. I learned to dance like North African queer
boys and learned to haggle in Arabic, in Spanish, in Black girl audacity, in fire and local
currency and body language and secrets.
I keep starting over and starting under. Keep moving like a running target and finding new loves
and new haunts and ancient ghosts and ancient disappointments.
I learned to face my fears, walk into hell, learned to carry my daughter on my back and write
poems while breastfeeding and writing books while my daughter slept. Learned to say thank you
for the diaphanous sun and to recognize my grandmother’s favorite flowers in foreign lands.
10.
The beauty of the south–in Louisiana and Appalachian and the Carolinas–is that there are vibrant
communities of Black folks and Native folks and Black Native folks’ magic who for generations
have insisted on their survival despite white violence. They have insisted on their magic to be
mixed into the earth and the language and the music and the blood.
That magic reminds me to love the dead and the living who have taken care of this land for
thousands of years before and will love the land for thousands of years after. That I am a guest
here in the north and am welcomed here in the north as long as I know this is not my place. That
the dead have a right to ask me to leave.
It doesn’t take a phone camera to see the blue orbs in the sunrise on our land in South Carolina,
the blue orbs float like dust in the sunrise–blue black skin and blue black nights and the stars
settle on the sand and burst forth like rain.
Magic does not make the world fair. But it does give us a language for survival against the
impossible–against the white supremacists, against the eugenicist logic, against the refusal to
apologize, the refusal to make amends, refusal to make reparations. It does give us laughter and
joy and seven generations.
11.
I’ll be honest–it is not my work to make Wisconsin or Minnesota less racist. That is the work of
people who are from here. Who have family here. Who have to start talking religion and politics,
genocide and belongingness, at the dinner table and in their hunting clubs and in their book
clubs. That is the work of the ghosts here, the dead settler colonialists who took what was not
theirs, and gave violence in exchange. Who taught their white children and grandchildren that
they are blessed and not cursed for seven generations–as if the deep curses were not powerful
against the white settlers because the curses came from the first nations people that the
colonizers had made poor and hungry by taking away the beautiful world and made the original
people dead before their time and poisoned the land and the water and changed the weather patterns
and burned away the sacred.
They are still here. We are still here. The magic is still here.
15.
I know that love must feel the way my grandmother looked at her garden of flowers on Easter
Sunday. The lilies. The roses. The daffodils. The way she looked at the horizon. The way that
she looked at me.
When my friend and I are watching the fire roar and the birds race past the windows, the white
sky, the white snow, the white trees surrounding them and he and I gasp at the freedom. I know
that is something close to love.
I know that my grandmother never traveled more east than the Mississippi river.
She grew up in rural South Carolina under Jim Crow and–
(ritual tortures as the background shot. My grandmother standing in the foreground, church hat
cocked to the right of the frame)
She read the bible like an oracle and called my grandfather names under her breath as she wiped
her hands on a towel, as she served grits, oil sausage, cheddar cheese and fresh biscuits. She
spelled each letter. F/ double O/ L, so we kids wouldn’t know what she was saying.
She refused to get on a plane even though my mother would have taken her anywhere in the
world. “Anywhere, Mother, Paris.” Paris, where she could finally hear French being spoken
around her and not just in a classroom or out of her own mouth.
16.
She teaches me that if you can touch the core fire and keep coming back to it, then you don’t
have to be afraid of fire, because you are fire, and the earth looks new and full of possibility.
She teaches me if you fail, if it turns out that you were foolish, then you can turn around and
close that door.
But that usually, mostly, if you stay in fire rather than fear, then your fear will align with things
that are dangerous. And that knowledge is a form of freedom.
I know most people don’t want to touch fire, because they are afraid of being burnt or worse
dying. The way that I don’t want to learn to play guitar because I am afraid of my fingertips
having calluses. But the truth doesn’t mean being callous. It means feeling that the body is alive
even when everyone would like for you to play dead.
Everyday I talk to my grandmother. Like a prayer, like a thanksgiving, like a wail.
She tells me strange things like drink more water and walk more in the hillside woods and --
Have you ever met someone who has spent their life meditating and --
When I first did, I thought they would be the kind of people who float on a cloud, who are so
peaceful and soft and whisper, but they were fierce and intense and vivid and smiling like the
dead. And it was hard to stand next to them. Like a tuning fork next to a guitar, that heart is
pitched to --
Like my grandmother walking in fire wishing me luck before my next flight across the ocean/the
heavens holding me alive.
Like singing opera in a punk bar bathroom in Berlin the walls tiled and screaming with stickers
against everything–including hope.
29.
The Twin Cities and the suburbs are on lockdown starting at 7 p.m. after the police shooting of
another unarmed Black man, 20 years old, while his girlfriend was in the car, while his two-yearold
son was at home.
He was pulled over because his air freshener was hanging in his car.
I don’t know how tired I can keep being. I don’t know how exhausting the world can keep being.
I don't know I don't know idk idk
Can I be honest? I feel like the world owes me safety. To see me as something delicate and
breakable, something worthy of being alive. Worthy of being protected.
Another fantasy.
I am not super-hero-strong. And I don't know if I ever was.
What other people see as strength, I see as desire for the impossible– to get out of this world
alive. If not alive then–dancing on the head of a pin. Like an angel. Like a fantasy.
I’ve lived in fantasy worlds. Worlds where if I go out to the streets one more time, one more
push, one more scream, one more wail of wind that pushes me to the ground–we will push
ourselves forward toward liberation. Break through the invisible gates and steal what we cannot
buy.
But instead I fall, and fall safely with no broken bones, not because I am strong, not because it
isn’t dangerous, but because I've been training for decades how to fall to the ground and still be
alive.
30.
The last book I wrote was about survival. And yet, in the end I had no more answers than I did
when I began the book. How do we survive?
1.
I live in a small river town–Winona–on the border of Wisconsin and Minnesota.
I am not from here.
But then neither are most of the people who live here.
2.
I was going to write an essay, a meditation, and it was going to include a mythological animal.
Meditations on what is real and what is make-believe.
I wanted to write about my grandmother. About love. About language.
Instead I will write about violence and raising an anxious teenager in the upper midwest. And
how dreams feel under the weight of a police gun. And there will probably not be any
mythological animals in this–no mermaids, no centaurs, no unicorns.
My grandmother is dead. My lovers visit me in dreams. My language is full of bile and spit and
coughs. My language is full of interrupted and repeated cycles of words that lose meaning over
the decades and centuries. Words like: father, like justice, words like color. Colors like green,
colors like spring green, words like renew refresh begin again.
3.
But how fair is this? Because when I ask myself what I want, all I can do is move into a fantasy.
A world that will just stop long enough for me to catch up. All I can want is to be strong enough,
when I know I am not, when I know they just keep shooting and shooting and we have to believe
this time will be different.
4.
They can make us widows, make us homeless, make us hopeless, make us into the enemy they
need and we can’t legally make a corporate store window break open, we can’t set fire to a
withering bouquet of flowers in the third aisle, we can’t pop the mylar balloons, we can’t speak
the language that capitalists understand.
Peaceful protests, the president demanded, peaceful protests until 7 p.m. and then everyone
return to your homes, close your windows, listen to the pop! pop! of our dreams bursting onto
the streets like glass bottles shattering and glass men falling off the edge.
5.
What could be more fantasy than a world where we get to safely express the desire for heart and
heat and home and revenge, where we are allowed to go home to our babies, where we are
allowed to believe in something more than survival, more than falling down and getting up.
6.
In a little green house in Winona, we have two cats, Tigey and Popcorn. And in the backyard, we
have three chickens, two white ones, and one brown, in the backyard, named: Heather, Heather
and Veronica. These are the new young chickens. Five years ago when I first moved to this small
town, I insisted that we get chickens. My daughter’s father and grandfather spent a few days
building a chicken coop in the backyard and setting up the wire fence so that the chicks could run
free. They were Bianca and Jack the Skeleton. Bianca was white and Jack was black and orange.
I want to write about these backyard chickens and what it means to eat the hens’ eggs and feed
them the scraps from our meals. How they give me hope in something strange and sweet. They, I
assume, do not know about the apocalypse or the fading populations of bees, or how most days I
cannot write anything because it all seems so restless and pointless to care when I am just one
person and the world that I fought for and hoped for and put my body on the line for–that world,
that future, will never be and I don’t know if the world that we are entering is going to be worse,
but I damn well know it is not going to be better than the one I imagined I could create from
sweat, and muscle and work and resilience and trauma.
7.
I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, went to school in New York, and then traveled, and
then traveled some more: Africa, Europe, the Americas. All those years living out of suitcases
and duffel bags, out of backpacks and cardboard boxes. Gave birth to a daughter in the Twin
Cities. I had a series of lovers. Had a series of friends. Had a series of heartbreaks and
disappointments and missed opportunities. Woke up to a revolution or two on our doorstep.
Woke up to my daughter singing in her sleep. Woke up to the cold rain of Berlin in the
springtime. Woke up and woke up and then got ‘awaken’ tattooed on my arm.
Learned to ride a motorbike and learned to hitchhike and to start a fire with nothing but sticks
and matches and sea water on the coasts of the Sinai. I learned to dance like North African queer
boys and learned to haggle in Arabic, in Spanish, in Black girl audacity, in fire and local
currency and body language and secrets.
I keep starting over and starting under. Keep moving like a running target and finding new loves
and new haunts and ancient ghosts and ancient disappointments.
I learned to face my fears, walk into hell, learned to carry my daughter on my back and write
poems while breastfeeding and writing books while my daughter slept. Learned to say thank you
for the diaphanous sun and to recognize my grandmother’s favorite flowers in foreign lands.
10.
The beauty of the south–in Louisiana and Appalachian and the Carolinas–is that there are vibrant
communities of Black folks and Native folks and Black Native folks’ magic who for generations
have insisted on their survival despite white violence. They have insisted on their magic to be
mixed into the earth and the language and the music and the blood.
That magic reminds me to love the dead and the living who have taken care of this land for
thousands of years before and will love the land for thousands of years after. That I am a guest
here in the north and am welcomed here in the north as long as I know this is not my place. That
the dead have a right to ask me to leave.
It doesn’t take a phone camera to see the blue orbs in the sunrise on our land in South Carolina,
the blue orbs float like dust in the sunrise–blue black skin and blue black nights and the stars
settle on the sand and burst forth like rain.
Magic does not make the world fair. But it does give us a language for survival against the
impossible–against the white supremacists, against the eugenicist logic, against the refusal to
apologize, the refusal to make amends, refusal to make reparations. It does give us laughter and
joy and seven generations.
11.
I’ll be honest–it is not my work to make Wisconsin or Minnesota less racist. That is the work of
people who are from here. Who have family here. Who have to start talking religion and politics,
genocide and belongingness, at the dinner table and in their hunting clubs and in their book
clubs. That is the work of the ghosts here, the dead settler colonialists who took what was not
theirs, and gave violence in exchange. Who taught their white children and grandchildren that
they are blessed and not cursed for seven generations–as if the deep curses were not powerful
against the white settlers because the curses came from the first nations people that the
colonizers had made poor and hungry by taking away the beautiful world and made the original
people dead before their time and poisoned the land and the water and changed the weather patterns
and burned away the sacred.
They are still here. We are still here. The magic is still here.
15.
I know that love must feel the way my grandmother looked at her garden of flowers on Easter
Sunday. The lilies. The roses. The daffodils. The way she looked at the horizon. The way that
she looked at me.
When my friend and I are watching the fire roar and the birds race past the windows, the white
sky, the white snow, the white trees surrounding them and he and I gasp at the freedom. I know
that is something close to love.
I know that my grandmother never traveled more east than the Mississippi river.
She grew up in rural South Carolina under Jim Crow and–
(ritual tortures as the background shot. My grandmother standing in the foreground, church hat
cocked to the right of the frame)
She read the bible like an oracle and called my grandfather names under her breath as she wiped
her hands on a towel, as she served grits, oil sausage, cheddar cheese and fresh biscuits. She
spelled each letter. F/ double O/ L, so we kids wouldn’t know what she was saying.
She refused to get on a plane even though my mother would have taken her anywhere in the
world. “Anywhere, Mother, Paris.” Paris, where she could finally hear French being spoken
around her and not just in a classroom or out of her own mouth.
16.
She teaches me that if you can touch the core fire and keep coming back to it, then you don’t
have to be afraid of fire, because you are fire, and the earth looks new and full of possibility.
She teaches me if you fail, if it turns out that you were foolish, then you can turn around and
close that door.
But that usually, mostly, if you stay in fire rather than fear, then your fear will align with things
that are dangerous. And that knowledge is a form of freedom.
I know most people don’t want to touch fire, because they are afraid of being burnt or worse
dying. The way that I don’t want to learn to play guitar because I am afraid of my fingertips
having calluses. But the truth doesn’t mean being callous. It means feeling that the body is alive
even when everyone would like for you to play dead.
Everyday I talk to my grandmother. Like a prayer, like a thanksgiving, like a wail.
She tells me strange things like drink more water and walk more in the hillside woods and --
Have you ever met someone who has spent their life meditating and --
When I first did, I thought they would be the kind of people who float on a cloud, who are so
peaceful and soft and whisper, but they were fierce and intense and vivid and smiling like the
dead. And it was hard to stand next to them. Like a tuning fork next to a guitar, that heart is
pitched to --
Like my grandmother walking in fire wishing me luck before my next flight across the ocean/the
heavens holding me alive.
Like singing opera in a punk bar bathroom in Berlin the walls tiled and screaming with stickers
against everything–including hope.
29.
The Twin Cities and the suburbs are on lockdown starting at 7 p.m. after the police shooting of
another unarmed Black man, 20 years old, while his girlfriend was in the car, while his two-yearold
son was at home.
He was pulled over because his air freshener was hanging in his car.
I don’t know how tired I can keep being. I don’t know how exhausting the world can keep being.
I don't know I don't know idk idk
Can I be honest? I feel like the world owes me safety. To see me as something delicate and
breakable, something worthy of being alive. Worthy of being protected.
Another fantasy.
I am not super-hero-strong. And I don't know if I ever was.
What other people see as strength, I see as desire for the impossible– to get out of this world
alive. If not alive then–dancing on the head of a pin. Like an angel. Like a fantasy.
I’ve lived in fantasy worlds. Worlds where if I go out to the streets one more time, one more
push, one more scream, one more wail of wind that pushes me to the ground–we will push
ourselves forward toward liberation. Break through the invisible gates and steal what we cannot
buy.
But instead I fall, and fall safely with no broken bones, not because I am strong, not because it
isn’t dangerous, but because I've been training for decades how to fall to the ground and still be
alive.
30.
The last book I wrote was about survival. And yet, in the end I had no more answers than I did
when I began the book. How do we survive?