University of New Orleans ScholarWorks@UNO University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations Dissertations and Theses Spring 5-13-2016 (un)plug in lotusland Laurin D. Jefferson University of New Orleans, New Orleans, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td Part of the Poetry Commons Recommended Citation Jefferson, Laurin D., "(un)plug in lotusland" (2016). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. 2161. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2161 This Thesis is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by ScholarWorks@UNO with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Thesis in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. This Thesis has been accepted for inclusion in University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UNO. For more information, please contact [email protected]. (un)plug in lotusland A Thesis Submitted to the graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Poetry by Laurin DeChae Jefferson B.S. Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2013 May, 2016 Table of Contents Preface: The Pain of Space & Proofs for Science Fiction ............................................................... 1 PROLOGUE ......................................................................................................................................... 13 i/I, you/You ........................................................................................................................................... 20 hemispheres ............................................................................................................................................ 21 no one tells you ...................................................................................................................................... 22 mothership .............................................................................................................................................. 25 remix ........................................................................................................................................................ 26 the helix of the cosmos is the lyrical ................................................................................................... 27 diorama: crash test dummy builds mannequin her white picket fence .......................................... 28 mutt in multiple ...................................................................................................................................... 29 poem as alien hand puppet ................................................................................................................... 30 if my eyes were clocks i could see space from my living room ....................................................... 32 the reckoning .......................................................................................................................................... 33 sluglines ................................................................................................................................................... 35 forever yours, astrid ............................................................................................................................... 36 diorama: mannequin writes a love letter in the dark ........................................................................ 37 (un)plug in lotusland .............................................................................................................................. 38 liftoff ........................................................................................................................................................ 39 eat me ....................................................................................................................................................... 40 cosmonaut ............................................................................................................................................... 41 voyager i, the golden records................................................................................................................ 42 ii uncanny valley ........................................................................................................................................ 44 holographic ............................................................................................................................................. 45 salt ............................................................................................................................................................ 46 diorama: dummy & mannequin play operation ................................................................................. 47 microchip ................................................................................................................................................ 48 space rhapsody ....................................................................................................................................... 49 alpha ∞ omega ........................................................................................................................................ 50 snakes & ladders ..................................................................................................................................... 51 astrid points to herself ........................................................................................................................... 52 dummy dummy ...................................................................................................................................... 53 Notes ........................................................................................................................................................ 54 Vita ........................................................................................................................................................... 55 iii The Pain of Space & Proofs for Science Fiction “Where else can black girls from the future go?” Diamond J. Sharp I come from nothing. I inhabit that residual grayspace of uncertainty. There is nothing more worth knowing about me. Mine is a story told over and over again. What was the use of opening a mouth I always believed to be empty? “I am a poet: I am always hungry” (Roethke 85). Muteness to mutiny. At once my mouth is open and waiting to be filled. At once, my mouth is open and ready to spew. The challenge is against regurgitation. The lesson my first poetry professor always tried to hammer home, the point, was to showcase the “falling apart,” a theme that appears continuously throughout this manuscript. It was not at all what I wanted to write. In fact, I avoided writing it and allowing those stories to surface in me, which have already created so much tension, dissonance. I had to learn how to eat, how to keep it down, how to make it new. In her book, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice, bell hooks discusses a similar discordant note by way of clinging to one’s own language, yet needing the “oppressor’s language” to communicate with a larger population. Explicating Adrienne Rich’s poem “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” both authors repeat the line “This is the oppressor’s language yet I need it to talk to you.” There are white men in these poems. White men have influenced these poems. Just as hooks writes: To recognize that we touch one another in language seems particularly difficult in a society that would have us believe that there is no dignity in the experience of passion, that to feel deeply is to be inferior, for within the dualism of Western metaphysical thought, ideas are always more important than language. To heal the splitting of mind and body, we marginalized and oppressed people attempt to recover ourselves and our experiences in language. We seek to make a place for 1 intimacy. Unable to find such a place in standard English, we create the ruptured, broken, unruly speech of the vernacular. Though these poems don’t always engage with the vernacular, the sentiment remains the same: “i could finally build me who i had wanted to” as I state in the poem “i/I, you/You,” calling to the idea that my body, my site of trauma, could be constructed outside of human possibility, including animal and cyborg anatomy. When I learned of the afrofuturistic aesthetic, I understood only one thing: a group of people systematically “othered” has continued to cultivate a narrative wherein their black bodies are not showcased fashionably and whose art and culture are not commodified. hooks’ call for the reimagining of the space which the body occupies, particularly the black body, mirrors this aesthetic. Given that Afrofuturism has only recently come under the microscope again for study, texts like Ytasha Womack’s Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture offer a place to start, defining the movement in a myriad of ways, but characteristically an intersection of art and technology as a means to create “an artistic