My poetry key performance at Pinggg...K! and the state of liminality in which we all coexist.
These days I haven't had many words to say. Nothing but love, gratitude, sometimes rest, and sometimes movement in my professional and vocational life. Trying to find a way to balance both so I can live, eat, sleep, and enjoy by doing what I do.
But in the meantime, I'm grateful for the team behind Pinggg...K! Young at heart, rebel, open, from all ages, languages, backgrounds.
Bobba Cass, first of all, an outstanding figure in international poetry for several decades. Bobba Cass is someone who is always publishing new and fresh poems. A treasure that more than survive, thrives. Someone who honors liminality and who inhabits so many spaces and times, so many lives. I am grateful to share this one with him.
Mostly, I read poems from my book Meanwhile (Mientras Tanto)The central theme of this book was liminality, living between bodies, minds, places, and loves. It was published in 2020, and for reasons already discussed and acknowledged in history, I was unable to promote it.
But beyond the health and humanitarian crises, another reason I didn't promote it was a bit sillier. A bit more related to what people would say.
Is talking about "liminality" in or out?
Around 2022-23, everyone was talking about liminality. It was the favourite word of many posh kids who had graduated from Central Saint Martins, living in lofts in gentrified areas paid for by their parents, who thought they were alternative because they had nose piercings and dyed their armpit hair. They tossed the term around like a wild card to win every possible award and bursary grant. So much so, that they became a meme. Talking about liminality, thus, began to be cringe. And although I would have been one of the first to speak about it without any agenda and without following trends, I was ashamed. I felt cringe about myself. I locked myself and my need for expression inside a corporate case.
Time has passed, and no one talks about liminality anymore. Young people now follow other trends. Liminality isn't very compatible with matcha or labubus. Now, the trend is the tangible and the destructive. That that, when it's here, is here to destroy everything. Consumerism, hyper-technology, appearances, uniform life, lettering that resembles seminal fluid, even though the system doesn't want new ideas to be born.
Again, now because of this, I'm silent and ashamed. Like a yogurt that has gone off. If it's not because I'm talking about something that's "in fashion," it's because I'm talking about something that's "out of fashion."
But we all coexist in liminality.
On Tuesday, at my presentation, Bobba reminded me that the liminal is eternal. Not a hot or cold word, but a constant way of life that many of us navigate throughout our entire existence.
Bobba gave me a copy of his book Θáνατος (Thanatos), a series of poems about death, alongside paintings in which Alain Lucron honours funeral rites from his birth place of Madagascar. It was published in 2024 by Anerki Arts and Fox Books Ltd. On its pages, tribute is paid to other poets and personalities that, although their physical presence is no longer here, their legacy is as alive as ever.
This is how he signed his dedication:
Cynthia:
With great admiration for Meanwhile with its so many instances of the tactile escaping into insurgent moments of phrase, into a wavering and not necessarily confirming consciousness. I’m a long time admirer of Homi Bhabha and value your exploration of liminality.
xxxxxx Bobba
Liminality is not something just for posh kids or insecure millennials. No. Theorist Homi K. Bhabha was talking about it already since 1994, as "the interstices" in which we negotiate "intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value" beyond differences between races, classes, genres and traditions. It's precisely in this middle state that we are whole and we are united. Not in the chaos of the fleeting and the absolute, of what's trending on social media, not just for Rich White Guilt, nor for funding from private and governmental arts organisations.
No wonder they want to make liminality look like something very shameful.
Bobba really liked the first and last poems in my book. The bookends, that is. I had largely abandoned these two poems in particular because I saw them as the bread in a sandwich, not the meat. Also because of the aforementioned cringe that the "status quo" made us believe liminality caused either by being very in fashion or very out of fashion.
I'm learning to let go of shame. To celebrate the achievement of writing, being published, speaking, sharing, and coexisting in liminality. Because in this space, we all meet despite our apparent differences. Because, as I've said a thousand times lately, we are all one all.
And we all have something down there that goes "pinggg...k!"
More events this week:
This Wednesday 26th I'm doing stand-up in English for the first time in the UK. I haven't done it since August when I got here, not beyond conversational jokes between poem and poem. Not a routine per se, as I did at Puras Morras Open Mic, at Open Mic del Escocés, or at Tú No Me Mandas by Artista de Clóset in Monterrey, Mexico. I have several written routines, mostly as rants before going to sleep or as text messages I send to myself on Telegram when I'm in an embarrassing situation. Let's see how it goes. It's at Canalhouse Comedy Night in Nottingham.
The next day, Thursday 27th, I'm going to be at the poetry by WORD! poetry, at my very own Leicester. It's an International Day of People with Disabilities special. The main act will be Juliette Burton, a queen of the stage. She's also giving a workshop in the afternoon, and I'm going to take it. One of the co-hosts will be Teagan Buckley, one of my fave artists in the whole town.
I know this blog and this email go all over the world, and not everyone who reads it will be able to come. But I want to have everything documented. I want proof that this is happening. That I'm someone who is speaking and listening. That I didn't just appear out of nowhere or crawl out of a sewer. This is happening in the world, and if you read it in the world, it's happening in your world too.
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