Eva Rocha

.

[evarocha]

We have all heard that to be said.

But,

I, I am the people.

In me a multitude of genders and races co-habit.

I am the people-

my body, my face, my justice.

I am the people anywhere, not just here.

I am the people in the endless marches, endless migrations, endless exodus.

I, landless people of my country or any country.

I, the people.

I, transposed by a fence, am the people.

I, floating in crowds in boats, am the people.

and

I, building edifices or

I, buried beneath ruins in the orifices of disappearing cities.

I, the body hung from an old tree, the people.

I, dismembered, dispersed over land, the people.

I, under unfair and fatal sentences, the people. And

Yeah, I striped and blending into bars in renewed concentration camps,

Am the people.

In any other uniform, still

Am the people.

I, in never-enough mineral extractions anywhere,

the people.

I, any name in inhuman payrolls, the people.

I, trapped in slaving factories, the people.

I, in perverted, soiled rooms, waiting to be sold

Am the people.

I, a statistical number;

I, in front of a gun;

I, in pieces under non-pacific rivers;

I, cast away out from the arc of history.

I, with no identity.

I, in the unseen cemeteries,

Am the people.

Or I,

Who pray on my knees in the breeze of Guantanamo or Ghraib.

I, camouflaged as murder in any country.

I, inside obscure prisons.

I, with a leash on my neck.

I, a suffocating bag.

I with no Blessings of Liberty

I with no Posterity.

I, I, I

Am the people.

[@ Eva Rocha -scribed while walking among a million people in Jan 2017]

[evarocha]

E se eu cansei de ter que me definir para pertencer?? Não branca o suficiente antes, no elitismo paulista e nascida no interior. Quando entrando nos Estados Unidos fui registrada na imigração como black devido a lei de uma-gota-de-sangue-negro “one-drop rule” — todo descendente de negro é negro]. Depois da pandemia veio a nomenclatura BIPOC [black indigenous people of color - preto indígena pessoa de cor, como passei a ser classificada], e também a subcategoria Latina [que na verdade era um separatismo para se referir aos descendentes indigenas das américas, os realmente chamados Latinos]. De volta ao Brasil, meu fenótipo é obviamente indígena, mas minha avó indígena foi arrancada de seu grupo, desaldeada. E ai quê? Indigena em diáspora é indígena ainda? [Meu pai, indígena de criação, com seu terno feito para o dia de seu casamento é ainda indígena? Na discriminação que sofria me lembro que ele era sempre] Então me pergunto, qual é meu pertencimento?? Quando eu mudo de lugar, eu mudo de raça?? *Pai indígeno/preto, Mãe romani/indígena. E se tudo sou eu? Se todas as raças estão em mim — eu tenho direito à elas? Como artista, eu poderia simplesmente pertencer às artes pelo meu talento, assim como um artista homem branco poderia, sem eu ter que ser um gênero ou uma raça conveniente para uma classificação de inclusão dentro do racismo estrutural?

Uma grande parte do meu trabalho é sobre desumanização. Eu sou descendente de vários grupos que passaram por processos de desumanização. E quero poder comentar nesse processo do humano, como humano. Toda desumanização é uma desumanização como um todo- não apenas feita a uma raça, cor, grupo, mas a todos como humanos, ou como animais. É o mesmo processo, de escravidão ou genocídios de colonização ou perseguição, ou tráfico humano em tempos passados ou atuais, ou torturas [à pessoas ou animais]… Somos todos nós a sofrer e a infligir sofrimento. Tudo se relaciona a mim como ser que eu sou. É somente do ponto-do-Ser onde eu, nós, podemos comentar. De outra forma estamos sempre do outro lado do campo de alguém, ou de um algum grupo [maio, 2026]

[evarocha]

*A woman goes to live amongst the puritans in a closed society. They are morally programmed to not feel any emotion. She works as their maid. She feeds them and they feel uncomfortable by emotions of a sensorial, sensual nature. They taste it, but avoid digesting it to not disturb them. She is processing deeply sadness. She gambles to stay alive. She buys lottery tickets every month while surviving as a servant. She wins the lottery and decides to make them a dinner before leaving to regain her life. She made many dishes, not cooked in a puritan tradition but in an exotic taste. At the end, her friend asks her what she would do with the money she won from gambling. But nothing was left! She had used every coin preparing that last supper for the puritans. 

“An artist is never poor”

“Throughout the world sounds one long cry from the heart of an artist, give me the chance to do my very best” 

Babette’s Feast

[evarocha]

[evarocha]

Every afternoon

I hear of 

Dismembered corpsys 

Over the land

[Occupied land]

.

Laying down on gray soils I see

The reminding of what was

A city

A dismembered city near the

Dead Sea.

Every afternoon there is 

No after

-

This dissolution is in-itself

In my self

In our self 

[our collective self]

.

No one seems to remember

this 

After

Noon 

[no after]

Amnesia 

Present amnesia

Permanent amnesia

Anesthetic

Anti-esthetic 

Fragmented

Under remains

.

In the ashes of a disappearing city 

I sit

I sit on an imaginative chair

No,

On a concrete block I sit:

A remaining of a still-existing:

It is heavy and bulk

It is the last block.

It is the last of a place

Of a city

Of a civilization 

-a human construct-

It is the last concrete part of 

an all 

abstracted 

scene

.

It is later afternoon and

The sky is gray

The between earth and sky is grey

The disappearing city is gray

It is smoked gray

Ash gray

[]

I am dressed in black 

as the local women of this dystopian city

I am dressed in black 

Mourning black

.

Appearing in the smoke I see

The many women of a tragedy

Dressed in black-

Their faces barely visible 

They are dressed in mourning black

.

Only women mourn

Men strick 

.

Anyway,

I am in the mist of a gray disappearing city

I see many women dressed in black

[in a tragic chorus]

They walk 

slowly 

together

Like a human block

A moving formation 

A human formation

Individually together

They move in a

Silent Chorus 

[each women has a voice; all voices are one voice in the chorus] 

I hear their screaming 

although 

} there is no sound {

Their voices scrap their soar throat

silently 

It echoes silently

Into dust

.

There is no sound propagating in the

Vacuo 

Their vacuo

Our vacuo

Our Humanae black hole

non-existential

vacuo

.

Oh how insupportable loud are their voices’ echo

A nothing no-where to be heard

Echo!

What tragic line could they be saying?

What tragic line could each be ruminating so silently?

How heavy in pain could be a hand beating on one’s own chest?

How sharp may be the nails scraping one’ face in despair?

How sore are the knees bleating on the dirt soil?

Oh!

It is dark in the after

It is no noon nor night

- 

*You and I can remove ourselves from the scenery 

of the tragedy

And no longer 

No longer 

Sit 

No longer stand 

In the tragedy;

We can leave our sit on the well positioned concrete block

And remove ourselves as viewer

From where we stand in our abstracted block

[a point perspective fictional block from

where we watch]

We can abandon the scene 

And the concrete block from where we view

[and abstract ourselves] 

From the place where 

fictional characters 

of a tragedy

sing silently

The goat song

Of all sacrificed

[ ]

.

[Eva Rocha 02/24]

[evarocha]

[evarocha]

#one_cause_all_causes

[evarocha]

[evarocha]

[…and I, buried beneath ruins in the orifices of disappearing cities… Am the people]

[evarocha]

[evarocha]

#Rhetoric_alphabet

[evarocha]

Gatekeeper

It’s my job to say, “You can’t do that here.”

It’s my job to deny your objective.

It’s my job to deny you the next day, too.

It’s my job to wait for you the following day to deny you again.

It’s my job to wait for you the day after that and fall in love with you.

So it’s my job to deny my love.

“I won’t cry over my vocation,” I wrote.

But while writing in my diary,

I sometimes wept.

[by Kim Haengdook, translated by David Bowles]

[evarocha]

Talking to myself: how violent it is to even think about disappearing… Disappearing - that which I feared so much once! How self inflicted violence it is to have to disappear, to disappear and perhaps have to deny myself, what I am, what I became, to deny my own name, in order to regain myself.

[evarocha]

“We must never forget”

[Holocaust]

“We must never forget”

[September 11]

“We must never forget”

[Hiroshima bombing]

We must never forget

[_] [_] [

We must

never

[_]

We must

[Palestine]

We

[_]

_are to forget

before even acknowledge

[we]

[evarocha]

Power has a way to gaslight. It works in personal or collective situations: if one is oppressed and complains, power gaslights one to be wrong. If one helps the oppressed, power gaslights them to be wrong. Only power is always right.

[evarocha]

Anyone can always suppose they know from outside the life a person has and the excellent life conditions one can assume they may have. Anyone can criticize the necessities one may have to change any situation in their lives. But only we ourselves can understand the limits of what we can tolerate and the amount we tolerate after passed our limit. If I could give an advice to anyone who ever considered getting out of the world by your own hands, that would be: don’t take your soul out of your body, take your body out of situations that motivate such thoughts. And for ones on their surrounding: accept without criticism or control or revengeful feelings; respect and support their wishes to find different conditions to stay alive.

[evarocha]

Thinking: If France decides to call themselves Europe and their citizens Europeans, why would anyone from Spain or Portugal or even Sweden feel wronged when a so-called European asks them: “when did you arrived here in Europe?” Or say: “you Portuguese and Spanish may do this way but we Europeans do different; you should do it in an European way”

[ps. American is anyone born anywhere in America - which is a continent such is Europe. *Who has the rights to America and its name?]