Body Politic: Live on Stage!
Blog post featured in Bellevue Literary Review’s blog. View here.
November 2024
On Saturday, November 16, BLR took to the stage in a sold-out performance in NYC. Six storytellers shared their interpretations of Body Politic, BLR’s theme this year, to a rapt audience in the theater, as well as an even wider audience via livestream.
Bravo to storytellers Sofia Ali-Khan, Kelli Dunham, Delight Chinenye Ejiaka, Lena Gilbert, G.K. Jayaram, and Ginelle Testa who bravely shared their true-life, personal stories–without notes, slides or teleprompters. They were fabulous! And if you missed the show or livestream, stay tuned for the professionally edited film coming in 2025.
It’s (almost) showtime!
Storytellers rehearsed and shaped their performances with the help of producers Maggie Cino and Catherine Burns (former Senior Producer and Artist Director, respectively, at The Moth). The final rehearsal took place the night before the performance. In the green room, storytellers received final notes, producers discussed production logistics, and our co-hosts, BLR Editor-in-Chief Danielle Ofri and board member Ashley McMullen, went over their opening remarks.
Attendees filtered into the sold-out Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater at Symphony Space, picking up a complimentary back issue of BLR, and were greeted by the musical stylings of jazz musician Kwami T. Coleman.
Making an entrance
Ashley and Danielle opened the show with the importance of storytelling in healthcare. They shared their experiences as primary care doctors and what is missed when we don’t (or can’t) see the entirety of a patient’s story.
Ashley told the story of one patient, an older white veteran she met during the Covid pandemic, who was reluctant to trust a government doctor. “He was noticing that people were quick to dismiss him, to make assumptions about him and his abilities,” she said. “I knew a little something about that as well.” The two of them eventually came to establish a relationship over their shared connections to the South, their recent experiences of grief, and their opinions on what constitutes good salsa. “In every subsequent visit, he always tells me, you know, doc, I have a lot of love for you. And I always say I feel the same way.”
The stories
One by one, the storytellers stepped into the spotlight, welcomed onstage by Kwami T. Coleman’s music, stories translated into ALS by Avery Gordon and Candace Davider.
Up first was Delight Chinenye Ejiaka, a writing graduate student coming to us from Nigeria by way of Nevada. Delight talked about the pressure in her community to have light-colored skin, and the lengths people will go to adhere to this standard of beauty. In her story of her relationship to her skin color and to her mother—and to the use of bleaching products on children—Delight taught us the importance of embracing one’s own beauty:
“I have a picture of myself that I really love. My hair was shaved so low. My skin was hyper pigmented. I had a rebel fashion sense. In fact, I was wearing this white fluffy dress that seems ridiculous right now. But there was something about that picture. There was this laughter and joy and confidence that I had about me, and I wanted to protect that, and I wasn’t going to let anything stand in the way of that.”
Next was Sofia Ali-Khan, a public interest lawyer, ceramic artist, and author. Sofia took us through the frustrating and often terrifying process of finding a diagnosis for her young daughter’s mysterious ailment. After seeing 25 doctors, she said,
“I started to really wonder if, by advocating so zealously for my daughter with doctors who could not diagnose or treat her, I ran the risk of being blamed for her illness. …My family were racial and religious minorities, and I worried that we ran the risk of losing Zayneb, of having her taken away from us.”
Our third storyteller, Kelli Dunham, describes themselves as “the nonbinary nurse, ex-nun, and trauma-informed comedian that is so common in modern Brooklyn.” Their story of being in the ER with an infected knee was both harrowing and hilarious. It seemed that the healthcare team took the symptoms more seriously if they appeared more masculine than feminine. Kelli realized that they needed to…
“…take some dude-ification measures. I should put on my big oversize sweatshirt and my baseball cap…. So I did, and that worked! It was like the cloak of believability.
Ginelle Testa, who describes herself as a queer, sober, and body-positive author, told the fourth story. Rather than get a promised used-car for high-school graduation, Ginelle begged to attend “fat camp.” Ginelle charmed the audience with her story of a summers’ tasteless meals, sweltering work-outs, and teenage doubts, complicated by a revelatory romantic spark and the flickers of body acceptance. Ginelle met her new roommate…
“…Catalina–a vivacious, blonde who’s about 50 pounds heavier than me… I see the beautiful way her body curves and dimples… I look down at the stretch marks on my thighs and see tracks of shame…Catalina shows up in an aquamarine two-piece bathing suit and I am like, wow, she’s absolutely beautiful. I just want to kiss her belly..”
Lena Gilbert—writer, performer, and choreographer—told a raw and powerful story about the holes in the healthcare system that you don’t know about until you fall into them, about what happens when you end up on the knife-edge of pregnancy and abortion.
“I’m standing on the subway platform thinking, I’m bleeding. No one knows about it. I’m just another lady heading back to Brooklyn. I’m bleeding in that discrete way that women bleed. My womb is emptying…”
The final performer was G.K. Jayaram, who left corporate America to create schools for the children of India’s slums. His heartwarming tale of what happened when local bureaucrats threaten to shut down their program is set against his own story of how he almost missed out on schooling altogether because of a birth defect.
“From the moment I was born, our village got the news. People told each other and they concluded that this was an evil portent. It was not only a bad omen for the family, but it was for the whole village. From then on, we were not invited anywhere…”
The impact of storytelling
After sharing their incredible stories, our storytellers and co-hosts took the stage one last time for their final bow to the sound of Coleman’s piano and the audience’s applause. One audience member said, “It was inspiring and beautiful—and exactly what we needed. Each story felt absolutely necessary.” A livestream viewer commented, “What a beautiful evening!…All the stories were so tender and heartwarming.”
The professionally-edited film will be available to stream in early 2025. In the meantime, you can watch BLR events including last year’s live storytelling event on the theme of ‘Taking Care,’ our annual fall reading with writers from the ‘Body Politic’ issue, or our award-winning poetry-dance film “Reading the Body,” produced in partnership with The Paige Fraser Foundation.
Next up, RSVP for Narrative Arc—our (free!) online event on December 5th, featuring readers interviewing their favorite BLR authors about the creative process.
Excerpt of From Garments to Clothing to Ropa Americana: The Long Island City Goodwill as a Site in the Life Cycle of Clothing
Essay written for the Global Economies course at The New School.
Fall 2019.
Stepping off the 33rd St - Rawson stop on the 7 train, the quiet Long Island City streets certainly don’t prepare you for what is to come. A diner that’s never quite open greets you, and warehouses line the way to one block where the Goodwill is located. It’s important to come prepared; pack as light as possible, bring a large bag to hold your findings (one may or may not be provided for you, you can never be sure), and maybe some gloves or hand sanitizer if you’re prone to think twice about where these clothes have been. The Latinx ladies that have become regulars certainly do, hands gloved and white nylon bags tied to their waists with scraps of fabric scrounged from the infinite bins of clothing neatly lined up on the store floor. Entering is easy enough, squeezing yourself through the crowded aisles to search through bins is another thing; the walls are lined with shopping carts filled to the brim, the ladies picking through, motives unbeknownst to you. Eventually, the crowd begins to thin, and the extra room and fading music wakes you up out of your Top 40 radio trance. You notice a line, or rather, a crowd begins to form near the entrance of the store. You weren’t leisurely browsing the tangled mass of clothing, hoping to find a mint condition designer item or two. You were picking through scraps. Bins are pulled out from underneath your eager hands, and you run to join the rest as fresh, teeming new bins are brought out, aligned. People begin to line up, eyes hungrily rummaging through the wares. “No running, no pushing, no touching!” announces a Goodwill employee in both English and Spanish; one bin, apparently so irresistible it warrants rule breaking, is taken away back through a doorway as punishment. A stern “Walk!” echoes, as do footsteps scrambling towards bins. Quickly realizing you’re not meant to be part of this commotion, you step back as people indiscriminately stuff their sacks with articles of clothing, accessories, and even housewares. The organized chaos doesn’t last too long. While the resident ladies reign supreme, hauling their new finds back to their camping grounds, trendily dressed, out of place white people comment on their findings and how much of a mark up they can get by reselling on Depop. You see yourself as well in the clueless college students who are sprinkled here and there, although you don’t agree with their condescending looks and commentary on the crowd around them. You make a note to yourself that you’re not like them; from experience, you don’t wear poverty as a costume; you really are here to buy clothes you otherwise couldn’t afford. You find a shirt here, a new pair of pants there, but in the end you’re at the mercy of the ladies, hoping to sift through their rejects while they wait for the next round of bins. As you leave, you wonder what it’s all for; the amount the ladies buy is far too much to just be your run-of-the-mill wardrobe change out. You take your items all the way back to Brooklyn, ruminating on the long journey you took for some clothes.
***
But what of the clothes’ long journey? The ladies, largely Dominican, but also Mexican and Central American, weren’t just buying for themselves; these clothes get resold by them and their relatives in their home countries as sources of income (Correal, 2017). One example of this new site in the global economy of clothing can be seen in Ropa Americana (2003), which follows the journey of resale clothing from a Goodwill facility in Toronto, Canada, to a store in Costa Rica. In Toronto, the t-shirt that is followed is sorted by employees who receive “everything including the kitchen sink.” After a month-long stint in a Goodwill thrift shop, the unsold item is taken to a by-the-pound location like the LIC outlet, going through much the same process as described above. Here, the article, still unsold, diverges from the known path of being picked up by Latin American immigrant women and shipped to their countries. Instead, it is bundled with more unsold items and sold for a profit to “middlemen” who distribute the pallets of compressed clothes to various countries in the Global South. These middlemen, of which there are over 2,000 in North America, further sort and repackage the clothing to be shipped off to locations like Costa Rica. In a poetic dance, the clothing items cross paths with the produce industry, as they are shipped from Toronto to Costa Rica in containers once filled with bananas that originated in the same Central American country. From here, the clothing is unpacked and sold in Costa Rican markets, with people lining up bright and early to get their chance to snag American clothes.
***
From Mexican factories, to American markets and thrift stores, all the way to Costa Rican Ropa Americana shops, articles of clothing pass through many hands. However, at the LIC Goodwill outlet, the clothing takes on one of its most pivotal changes, as it seemingly ends one life cycle in the eyes of the American consumer, and is transformed by Latin American merchants into a once again desirable item to be sold elsewhere.
The Giants
Excerpt from Fish Scales, a memoir course final project.
Summer 2021.
In the Apocalypse, I am sure I would be eaten first by the other survivors. This is unless I have a use, a skill that could be beneficial at the end of the world, such as foraging and butchering and cooking and feeding them (using my abilities and not my flesh). I cannot even throw a stone.
When I cook, I like to watch quick YouTube tutorials on filleting and butchering, skills I daydream of using as I saw the dull knife back and forth through the flesh of a fresh-bought fish, daydreaming of putting these skills to use once I finally make the drive up to fish at Little Salmon River like I wouldn’t when I was a little girl on our Jordan Lake trips, because I belonged in a city, I thought, I said. A trip that often lives in my head on the bend before the end of the world. There I could prove I could be useful outdoors, too.
And when I slice across the ribs of the fish which has no meat and is better suited for soup, I imagine what would happen when the Giants get me, when the Giants disguised as clouds reach out and pluck me from the ground and drag me through the stratosphere to set me down on a towering slate stone table to pull me apart. When they get me, I hope there is meat on me, enough meat so their hunt is considered worthwhile, unlike my feelings of disappointment towards this needle-boned fish as I pick through its flesh and dislodge the spines. But bones are far from my problem, and I hope maybe the Giants can at least render my fat to fry other meat in, or maybe to make candles and light their homes or fuel their machines, so I could be of some use to the Giants. I hope my ribs slip out easily, easier than those of this fish, so that they can be done with me quickly, so I can soak into their stomachs or onto a length of yarn, bound between conical layers of molten beeswax.
One time I told my sister, the middle one, about the Giants that visit me in my daydreams while cooking, and she reassured me that it was alright to do that, because really it meant that I have empathy for the fish and the cow and the pig. One day I hope I can be even more useful, useful enough to thank the animals before they pass, before I carve into them, bless them in a language I don’t yet know, in the way I think the Giants would thank and bless me for being such an easy catch, so easy to be plucked and rendered down and used all up for my slivers of meat and globs of fat and bones for needles. Or maybe they are too small for that. I still haven’t pinned down the scale between me and them.
I left home.
Hunter College Admissions Essay.
2020.
I left home at seventeen, thinking, I am done with this. All of it. I was shy and afraid and I took the biggest, most selfish step I could to get away from North Carolina. I lasted all of six months in New York. They say mental illnesses start to show up between the ages of 18-24, but a big move, plus loss of contact with my father surely didn’t soothe any ailments I was experiencing. So my younger sister came up. We were going to help each other, but we proved too heavy for the other’s arms. So my mom and little sister moved up. And suddenly we were all here, and I felt myself regressing to being just the age I used to be, when I wanted to be older. It’s hard to feel grown-up when your mom is constantly measuring the distance of your hemline to the floor, skillfully eyeing the transparency of your blouses.
I felt all my leafy growth cut off, my piercings put away and closed up. My ideas of what it meant to be free were completely confused. But I kept going on the path I had set for myself as a kid. Oh, but how I would laugh (in the interview in my head) “Yes, I’ve wanted to do this since I was a child, I’ve done fashion, no wait, art, no wait, immigration based community organizing work since I was eight! It’s destiny!” And so I deviated more and more, hoping that these branches would converge thanks to forces outside my own control. It’s like that feeling I get on the bus, when I don’t feel like picking up those bagels my Mom asked me for, I let the music glaze over my eyes until - oh there goes the stop, I guess its pancakes today.
I recognize I like to pretend other things dictate my actions. Like how I say things just happen to me, I just happened to get that grant or that internship, or even New York. It just happened. I didn’t know I had the bus ticket money until the day of. I sent that application in ten minutes late, its a miracle they even responded at all. All those hours speedily typing away, writing essays, and documenting experiences. What, that? Don’t look at that. I realize now that ultimately it’s me who is in control (revolutionary, I know), and if that’s the case, this gut feeling telling me I had it right the first time, that my love of literature and writing could become something more, is worth listening to.
This morning I had to go to an appointment and I felt weighted by purpose once more, but the good kind, like your favorite comforter, draped across your body. I told my mom all my secrets just to be safe, so they can live in the ether and come back to me all grown up and true. I walk around deliriously happy for no reason at all, maybe because there’s no bus fare. I can take as many transfers as I want, I can wave my head to any song I like, and I can go anywhere at all.