Language as Action

(4 Credits)

Reading and Writing Water If we listen to the water, what will we learn? “...it is really vain to attempt to express the nature of something. We notice effects and a complete account of these effects would perhaps comprise the nature of this thing. We attempt in vain to describe the character of a man; but a description of his actions and his deeds will create for us a picture of his character...water is essentially the element of life, wherever possible it wrests life from death. It is the great healer of all that is sick and has lost its living poise; for water forever strives after balance, a living balance, never a static one that would extinguish life. It is everywhere a mediator between contrasts which grows sharper where it is absent. Thus it brings together elements hostile to one another, constantly creating something new out of them. It dissolves what is solid, rendering it back to life.” - Theodore Schwenk, Sensitive Chaos “All water has a perfect memory....” - Toni Morrison, The Site of Memory “Words are waves. You learn to swim from the seduction of a wave that wraps you in foam. Words have the rhythm of the sea and the call of the obscure: Come to me in search of what you know not, the blue called out to you...” - Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence, translated by Sinan Antoon What are the language(s) of water... We will read and write water – as essential, as movement, as nourishment, as power, as story carrier, as cleanser, as resilience, as sensuous, as cold, as warm, as bubbling, as still, as wave, as ripple, danger and endangered, uncertain and constant, as beauty, as connector, as politicized, as mysterious, in relation to land, ownership, liberation, libation, spirituality, constructs of time; as body, as metaphor. As sacred. And more. We will attempt to work (and play), writing as water, with water, to water, guided by water. Which means a kind of fluidity. We will read, listen to, look at, watch and sense in all ways works in relation to [bodies of] water, from different perspectives, geographies, from and in varying forms including movement, film, visual art, sound. As water changes, flows, freezes/ melts; so does our writing, our making – as flood, as drought, as “fresh”, as “toxic”, as interspersing, from and in the individual body, and as from sky, from earth, as puddle, droplet, pond, lake, river, ocean and... as rain...as tears... Materials may include Sea and Fog, Etel Adnan; Freshwater, Akwaeke Emezi, theory of water, Lenne Betasamosake Simpson, Blood Dazzler, Patricia Smith, the work of Christina Sharpe, The Site of Memory, Toni Morrison, Water Wars, Vandana Shiva, Undrowned, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the visual work of Carolina Caycedo, and more.