Performed as part of Pre-Ramble, David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, 2020
An Exorcise is Exorcism is a performance in three parts executed whilst listening to three episodes of Veritas Maat sees thru the veil podcasts about Guyanese Jumbies. The series of performances end with a reading of this poem
The Jumbie is a dark shadow
A haunting history’s ancestral ghost
Dancing a peripheral quadrille
Inhabiting the air
waiting to possess us
in many way it can
from a momentary glance that lasts a little too long
to a full blanketing of darkness
the warm, chilling memories of a cold caress
that you never had
but always felt
hunted
we try to ignore and forget
but it never totally leaves us
implanted
they shape shift
take many forms
can be seen through different lenses
as Sethe’s rememory
as a willed forgetfulness
new dimensions beyond the mind, now residing in repeated actions
preserved in institutions
practiced daily
a framework of unpredictable terror
ancestors and demons
remembrance versus forgetfulness
When there are no words for a haunting
The spectre finds form in something visibly invisible
This presence, never seen, always present
This way of knowing
grief and unrest in a prophetic vision of the past
An exercise in exorcism
rememory’s haunted manners
A transformative recognition
By Ashanti Harris 2020
Image credit: Isobel Lutz Smith
Image credit: Isobel Lutz Smith
Image credit: Isobel Lutz Smith
Image credit: Isobel Lutz Smith
Image credit: Isobel Lutz Smith
Image credit: Isobel Lutz Smith
Image credit: Isobel Lutz Smith
Image credit: Isobel Lutz Smith
Image credit: Isobel Lutz Smith
Image credit: Isobel Lutz Smith
Image credit: Isobel Lutz Smith
Image credit: Isobel Lutz Smith