Meet the Artist: Courting Risk: Blackout
On October 12, 2011, I went to the Meet the Artist event featuring the two poets, Natasha Marin and Khadijah Queen. I thought it would just be an event where everyone sat around and listened to the artists read their work and ask them questions. What happened was extremely shocking and a bit traumatizing for me.
When I first got to the event, I had thought I had gone to the wrong room, even though I asked the guard for directions, because there was no one in the room besides two ladies looking a bit Gothic and two children crawling around the floor in the center of the room. After talking with the ladies to confirm I was in the right place, I helped them out by placing one black crumpled piece of paper under each chair. These pieces of paper started out our event; In them were secrets written by people who attended Marin and Queens workshop last year. Everyone read the secret they had. Mine said, “I lied to my mother about how I broke my arm.” A solemn, tense yet awkward atmosphere formed as some secrets were shocking and confusing.
When we moved on to watching the videos Marin and Queen made, that atmosphere did not get any comfortable. I watched the first video, puzzled by what it was trying to say and did my best deciphering it as I would with poems, as I thought that was what the video was, a poem. Then the second video played. Like the first one, deep emotions were hiding underneath the video and the words. Then it happened. After staring strangely at a squid looking starfish, an image of a masked lady breast feeding a baby appeared. I was extremely thrown off by this. I thought that would be the only traumatizing moment of the event, but then the same masked lady suddenly appeared from behind the podium! And you might have guessed, she started breast feeding her baby in front of us. That was an extremely awkward moment for me, and probably for everyone else in the room, but I eventually got over it as I had to be there for an hour more, so I faced the situation head on and got myself comfortable!
Just when I thought this event could not get any surprising, Marin began to crawl around the floor with her child and give people different tasks. However, many of us were clueless as to what we had to do since she did not tell us what we had to do but just handed us something. When she got to me, she moved her little box of treasures in between us and pulled out black nail polish. I caught sight of the name of the color, Blackout, befitting for the event’s name and then she began painting my thumbnails black. I was not sure as to what I was supposed to do, so I just stiffly sat there on the chair and glanced back and forth from the video to Marin painting my thumbs. Once she finished, I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around to see Queen. She asked me if I wanted to paint, so not really sure as to what was going on I followed her to the back of the room and took a bottle of blue ink and a blue feather from her and began to doodle on the white paper that was taped at different places in the room.
After what felt like forever from painting/doodling on the white paper, we were finally called back to the center of the room as the event was over and it was questioning time. From Marin and Queens’ responses to the questions asked, they seemed very liberal, honest, and open with their personalities. Especially as they gave us advice on life and told us that this whole event was improvised, which was the final shocker of the evening, leaving me to go home mind blown from what happened.
