Resist Or Die

 

We ignore the dead to our own peril, and as all mysteries never remain hidden, the dead will continue to speak from their graves, unto a future uncertain and flawed.

When voices from the past continue to haunt the present, what future will be free of ghosts?

Can the weight of traditions protect us from the horrors of forgetting, or do we always we make a journey that others have made before?

Once we prayed in the words of parents, but then our world expanded and the prayers fell short of the reality of living under the oppressor’s boots.

Many activists set an example of selfless sacrifice, their lives stolen by the hands of those who feared change. 

They were caught between the forces they tried to change but could not fully escape.

Yet, change is inevitable and and to be alive is to know ghosts.

And now, we hear their whispers when we listen. 

The echo prompts us not to ignore the dead.

We are haunted by their disappearance, and we cannot outgrow the pain.

Can the future be free of the demons of the past and traumas caused by a brutal police force that served to terrorise people of colour in the land of their birth?

Resist Or Die

Generational perspectives are important to the preservation of memory, and censored memories are part of what constitutes a subservient society.

Providing a foundation for exploring themes of colonial trauma, this video poem is contingent, and quietly political in the sense of depicting various events into a unison of collective revolt.

When black people are governed by routines of adjustment to the mess of colonial tyranny, what other option is left for emancipatory action?

In this montage, memory appears in traces, returning them as images or accounts of colonial legacies of a an authoritarian regime.

Affective archives, fragmented narratives, and the question of how aesthetic resistance can be articulated beyond dominant regimes of visibility is the crux of this enquiry into the past of others who were instrumental in liberating many.

This video poem interweaves historical archival documentation, and local narratives of activists, with an experimental visual and sonic language, deliberately foregrounding ruptures of communal rage and resistance to open up forms of visibility beyond the strictures of oppression.

And on several levels, it is therefore a is a meditation on times of violent struggle for liberation and its witnesses.