Writing Whiteness: Performance Art for The End of the World by Chris Tse
By Wasafiri Editor on September 5, 2020 in Poetry
a crowd gathers around an empty frame
suspended from the ceiling / some see the
face of their saviour / others find
themselves lost in a tunnel / those at the
front with their chequebooks at the ready
have the audacity to call it Art / they’re all
correct / but they’re also wrong to think a
price can be ascribed to something / we’re
only meant to talk about and not touch /
the crowd is given the option to replace the
frame with a mirror that only speaks the
truth / like how a bowl of rotting fruit
reveals bad luck or a time of death / we can
accommodate the truth if we all share an
understanding of what it means to be
willing to lay down our weapons / long
enough to notice the cracks in the ceiling /
even the shortest histories take their time to
course correct / to slip against the hands
that direct it / but for many in the crowd
it’s easier to look through nothing at a
familiar than it is to stare an unknown
enemy in the eyes / it’s easier to carry on
with letters written in invisible ink / even if
they’re ultimately mistaken for scrap paper
/ these are the thoughts that keep me up at
night / the policies and quotas they hold up
as progress, which I’d generously call
white noise / and the realisation we all
emerge from the same chaos / slamming
headfirst into riot after riot / if we treated
diversity panels like performance reviews
maybe we’d actually get shit done / instead
of slamming fingers in doors then blaming
all fingers for provoking doors / heaven
allegedly waits in a sky that sounds like a
badly dubbed film of two angels arguing
over who gets the remote / there’s a
correlation between a constant noise
designed to soothe and a puzzle we can’t
put back together / the crowd asks whether
we should all have a say in what deserves
to be safe in the frame / I’ve had too many
of these conversations under fluorescent
lights in offices and lecture theatres / on
stages before a paying audience / always
running the circuit of acceptable answers in
the wild clutches of self-preservation / it’s
like being trapped at a party that’s too
noisy and getting tired of explaining why
your hands are always bloodied / the
crowd knows what I’m talking about / give
us a frame and we’ll show you what a
lifetime of famine looks like / even when
we go to sleep with emptiness / we wake
with our bodies filled with visions of every
possible happening coming true
Watch Chris Tse perform his poem on our Youtube Channel:
Chris Tse is a poet and writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He is a graduate of the International Institute of Modern Letters, where he completed an MA in Creative Writing. He is the author of two poetry collections published by Auckland University Press: How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes and HE’S SO MASC. How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes was a finalist at the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and received the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry. Chris’ poetry and non-fiction have been widely published and anthologised in New Zealand and overseas, and he has appeared in festivals throughout New Zealand, Australia and the UK. Chris is currently co-editing an anthology of LGBTQIA+/Takatāpui writers from Aotearoa which will be published in 2021.
This poem is published as part of the online coverage for our latest issue, Wasafiri 103 – featuring a special section on ‘Writing Whiteness’ – which you can purchase here.
