Exotic Settlers

On the Artwork

ON THE ARTWORK - Manuscript Cartography by Exotic Settlers

The splatter paint over the faded pencil asks about the depth of the viewer. The viewer who chooses to go further than the paint enters into the experimental cartographic space where the name for this piece derives. While the content of the writing is obscured by the splatter paint, to view past the paint engages the viewer in multiple art forms as they clash (overlap) and harmonize (reveal new patterns and phrasings).

The choice of blue and green represent the sky and earth, as they are defined by this peculiar impression of their “settlement,” on the page. The sky and earth being part of a “settlement” connotes an entire world being impressed over the original impression on the page (the writing).

While settlement is often perceived as a calculated and technical mark of progress, it is in this sense being re-defined as an improvised chaos of pure human expression through the spontaneous splatter onto the penciled words, which originated on the page independently of any painting idea.

The splatter paint, in effect, embodies the “settler,” and its multi-colored facet further emphasizes its exoticism against the subdued writing.

While both the writing and the paint are part of spontaneous, fully improvised art forms of pure expression, the piece asks to defy the viewer’s preconceived notions of settlers as plain and understood and more; asks who the viewer resonates with, the settler or immediately observable and colorful expression (paint) or the original impression on the page which requires a bit more effort to engage with (writing).

The themes embedded within the paint and the writing, however, are expressed equally spontaneously and share the same space, either harmoniously or not relative to the viewer’s opinion, which aims at not presupposing any superiority between expressions of origination and settlement.

Preamble

PREAMBLE

Exotic Settlers charts the journey of experiencing the naturally transformative process of ending a period of transitional residence, and beginning to live in one place exclusively.

Questions of home, travel and what is foreign are approached creatively through a lens adjusted through self-reflection on these themes, which led to my own "settlement" within, as I have become more permanently resident in a specific place.

The transitional effect lingers psychologically whereby there are character archetypes and features of personal experience, which fade away and leave only a bitter nostalgia in their place, striking as a whiplash wound. This sensation is frequently common to those who stand their ground.

The concepts of the "settler" and normative stereotypes of the "exotic" are placed in abstract, sometimes jarring contexts as to displace fixed notions about any respective moral judgment.

The experimental verse goes through a process of intensified critique on our historic way of life as North American settlers and focuses this critique especially at our notions of the "other."

By the end of the collection, there is neither strict closure nor resolve about a permanent sense of home, only a greater awareness of perspective as it lies sometimes firmly, but mostly without any grasp on any actual "thing" on a ground of experimental, flowing, spontaneous expressions in language.

I remember Africa

A skeletal footprint

Awakening humanity

To Earth

Her

Being

Mater

4 Dreams

African man

Unknown age, possibly in 40s

Unmarried, jobless, refugee

From a civil war, torn country

From the Zaghawa/Bere ethnic group

Genocide.

Victim.

Contemporary colonization

Through culture, art and methodology of peace

Homicidal ontology of absolute despair

The civil question

Night of man

Unfathomable Arabic mysteries

In the bullet eye blood of African societies

Destroyed

In the name of the fasting

Hypocritical, artless God of the survival instinct

Deserted maw of East and North African history

And the pure hand belittled by a pistol

Joyless meeting, religious treason or genetic betrayal

The border past time's wall

Swept against the curb

With dead donkeys and automotive corpses of the industrial European mind

And a pistol

Disarming the crazed, confused Jewish-Arab tongues of Ishmael and Solomon

And the Earth's Abrahamic-African children of prehistoric destiny

A fragment of the human family

Apparent in the trade of hands

Between the opposite living metaphor of a Chinese lover’s cry

Fallen to the ash of the Sudanese war

In the Cleopatra cigarette smile of an immoral, yet necessary fire

Of the mammal skin hearth

Blackened

And booming emotional deities

Hidden in the slightly burned pages of the ongoing conquering

And suicidal rampaging of Mother Earth divine

Yet throughout brotherly and sisterly love prevails

Separation into the unfair glory of a broken now

Embittered jealousy and temptation

From the host of a brewing psychic sickness

Guarding the predawn

Monumental distance among the enchained

Battered souls of a deeply entrenched loss

Convoluted, exponential falsification of death's human mask

Still breathing

The attuned words of spiritual greed

In the crescent boon of a perfect desert sleep

Involved within

An enclosed world all their own

The forgotten beauty of an intoxicating truth

Still relieves the air above with its tempting

Yet out of reach and petrified

Animalistic burden

Feeding on the glow of the moon

The laughter of pagan lights streaks past the beyond

In pairs of 3 and 9

We forever move.

In a small hillside village overlooking a lake, east of Puebla, Mexico.

December 6, 2010

selflessness is the father of human survival

a feathered ear

upwards

a hummed prayer

soars without me

March 11, 2011

Overlooking the Bow River, Calgary

human life

Predicated on human life,

A delicacy, of what worth?

To live the most real dream

Inspired and enforced

To prepare a day and night

Ocean's curse

Praying in public, before the all-knowing

Tremendous falling

Into outer loves and inner minds

Born of hearts and wonders

Worrying and dying, striving and being

Wake

Yet still, to be amateur and go home

Alone

Not asking, to be known

From worldly youth

Our Hero admits to sex

Poverty, drink, the sleazy eye

That showered diseased genitalia and a hearse full of soot and pain

Roasted brains, coursing through the follicle greed of European spheres

Globalizing faintly in the Indian morning

Straining to see through elderly eyes

We weep for the names called over loudspeaker telephones

In the hands of the rich nations

Whose pour flushes the Earth

Into shit-eating hands

In the South, we wade

Through animals deprived of light

A sound

Sleepy, divine

Waves

Beautiful as a lover

Pure to the touch

Tempting you into the gridless beyond

Oil, lust, razor-sharp industry

Gas, rust and infamously insecure agro-business

Painstakingly counting lives over lunch

And reasoning out the meat, seed, and art

Instinctively, as if by intuition, it was needed

To prepare, when given the authority

For a mass death

A social trainwreck urge

To burn all

And leave the Earth free of our collective stain

Whose eyes tear weakly

Apart from national hope

And escape into the childless mourning of women

Jobless & domesticated

Post-war journeys

Becoming grim

Tricksters in the chariot fire of the Mosaic Canadian West

Classical, neo-fusion of human culture

Biologically fashioned to swipe the earth dry

From under their ancestor's feet

And leave civil rest to the Aboriginal few

Who linger and face the death of many

At every doorstep

Hooded, unnamed, unseen

We share our immigrant happiness

With the seldom

Who knew?

Chinatown Calgary

February, 2011

boiling over with truth

Mastery and youth

Bombshells breeding

Spit and drool over white

Lies preparing to sodomize the black nation

For its ultimate demise and scheming plight

Remembered from the European refugee law

That answers in mundane instances

Under the watchful eye of a tea slack Jaw

The Holden spy, dreaming in literary junk

Slavery for a wink into Sudanese arag bouts

In the desert city morning

Pith and poor

Angered minds

Blockading the frequent unfair toss out

From repatriating exile

Into the aftermath of Egyptian shari'a

God

Who numbs the pride of his tombstone children

With numbers to awe

Mediums dress over worldwide rage

As local prophet magicians in the New South pray

For rain to drop into a new continent

For the last time

March 7, 2011