Light Multiplies: Opening April 28

In January I was approached by Kayleigh Greenwell-Bryant of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center with the opportunity to serve as the 2023 Pauli Murray Art for Racial Justice Fellow. The position comes with studio space at STABLEarts, and a performance and exhibition space at Eaton DC. The catch? I have to assemble a performance and exhibition in a matter of just months.

So for the past few months I’ve been working feverishly. Writing and reading, learning new technical skills, collecting images and painting portrait after portrait. I am thinking about this exhibition as an illustrated essay, and the performance as a community ritual. I’m thinking of the whole thing as the first iteration of a much larger project.

The exhibition opening and performance will be on Friday April 28th at 7 pm at Eaton Workshop in DC. Reserve a ticket and please come!

The invitation came as I was preparing to travel to Bangladesh to visit my 95 year old grandmother and travel back to DC with my 74 year old mother, who had broken some bones in her back and needed help coming home. It was an emotionally grueling trip—two aunts, my mother, my grandmother all in such pain–everyone acting out of such desperation, out of such keen grief. Each and every woman had been so profoundly under-mothered by poorly equipped and traumatized. I saw my grandmother begging her daughters for mothering, my mother begging me for mothering—from the conversations I’ve had with friends since, I think you may be familiar with this. It is not at all unusual.

While I was there, my grandmother asked me to tell her story. A story that contains big, horrible traumatic experiences, the sort that can spill across the entire page of a life. Sometimes, when the darkness is engulfing, my grandmother sees her life as that big ink stain. Sometimes she sees it as a triumph. As I sat to interview her, to ask her what I should know, she gave me the worst stories. She also gave me these beautiful reflections of her own young spunk.

I am thinking of how African elephant and sperm whale populations, which are eusocial—meaning that adults cooperatively raise the young regardless of biological ties—depend on the health and age of the oldest matriarch. I am understanding the responsibility of being the oldest generation, a responsibility that comes upon all of us. How might we prepare ourselves to be the healthiest, wisest, most emotionally sound oldest population?

So I’m trying to assemble something new from all the old. I want to think about a ritual to carry our mothers’ light forward and lay their pain to gentle rest. For years I have been studying ritual, the history of mirrors, erased and devalued ways of knowing. I have been gathering so many myths.
I come back and back and back to Bhanu Kapil’s question: Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother? For many of us (all of us?) whose mothers were women living inside of a patriarchal, capitalist, racist structure, much of our mothers’ suffering came from far outside of themselves—from systems that starved and drowned them/their mothers, that did not believe them, did not value them, did not assign any weight to their pain, did not prepare them for us.

***Project Info***

Light Multiplies: Healing Upstream

In the debut of a multimedia exhibition and performance, poet, performer, curator, and community builder Seema Reza will lead audiences through rituals both personal and communal. 

Informed by personal experience and more than a decade of community-based grief and trauma work across military, incarcerated, addiction disordered, and displaced populations, Light Multiplies will make use of kinetic text, digital projection, and portraits on glass. Taking an understanding from ‘eusocial’ matrilineal mammal populations (in which the health and age of the matriarch determines the success of the youngest generation of the herd) Reza invites audiences to claim the right to safe and healthy emotional environments for themselves, for their immediate ancestors, and for those in their care. Each of our personal healing will have implications for generations to come. Light Multiplies highlights the urgency of intergenerational healing and affirms the capacity of communities of color to create and uphold rituals designed to multiply their own light. Light Multiplies asks: must trauma be passed down? Can we not only heal ourselves but heal up? How do we break the curses of our grandmothers? Light Multiplies calls for us to claim the responsibility to reflect the light of our mothers and the right to lay down what they carried. Together we prepare ourselves to be an oldest generation that is flexible, wise, and free enough to support the generations that follow us.