Who am I?

Art
Consciousness
Life

These were the first three words of the e-mail I received prompting me to go see Ignacio Rivera perform on Monday night. I thought, “Wow! I love art, and consciousness, and life…but what is this going to be about?” Reading further along the page, I found these words: black-boricua, trans-entity, multi-gender, queer, pretty-boi, mother, poet. I was startled to realize that out of all these descriptions I could only understand three of the words. In fact, when trying to explain to friends what I was going to see, I found myself blundering. “Um, I’m going to see an artist, um a poet, really, do performances…like trans-gender, um, spoken word…” I realized that what had hooked me in, the words art, consciousness, and life, didn’t really do a good job of contextualizing the art, but then I went to this show and realized the art was right there, somewhere in those places I was having trouble articulating. Ignacio’s work is essentially about changing our need to contextualize people, how they live, what they do, who they are.

Ignacio Rivera started with a lesson. She said trans is “an umbrella term encompassing anyone who shifts, changes, alters, or fucks with gender in anyway.” As she put it, there are distinct differences in meaning between the words female and male and the words man and woman. Rivera’s pronouns of choice are “ze” and “they,” so out of respect, I will try to remember to refer to “them” as “ze” from now on.

The title of the performance was All of Me: performances, skits, and readings by Ignacio Rivera. Their first poem was entitled “Redefining Me.” In it, ze kept repeating the line “Who am I?” which was interesting because, honestly, I was wondering that myself. It soon became obvious that this question was the driving force of her work. The poem dealt with ze as a woman who identifies as a man, but it also dealt with their heritage as a Puerto Rican American growing up in New York. My favorite line was “What the fuck is English as a second language, when I’m not allowed to speak Spanish first.”

My favorite of their selection was when ze did a poem about their daughter. Rivera opened up to us and told us that when ze was younger their sister had sexually harassed them. Rivera then told us about the fear ze had after having a daughter that perhaps there was something in ze that could do that to their daughter. Ze wouldn’t let their daughter spend the night at other’s houses. Their daughter had to wear shorts under all of her skirts. The poem captured that fear so fully that I was near tears. I cannot imagine, but through Rivera’s poetry I can start to piece things together. Art. Consciousness. Life.

All of their performances were incredibly multilayered. Ze would sing, put on costumes and act, move around, define terms. Before the show I thought, “how much can you really do with spoken word poetry, you know, other than read it?” but ze’s work was so involving and poignant that it made me see that there could be more. Ze made me extremely uncomfortable. Ze cursed a lot more than I’m used to, talked about sex more openly than I’m used to, but ze also did a fabulous job of letting us into their life with poems about their time as a “dancer/sex worker” in Hawaii, their daughter, and their history as a victim of sexual assault. Ze seemed to be trading on the power words have to establish, if only fleetingly, moments of empathy and compassion. Their goal was to educate their audience, make us a little bit more aware of the social injustice and homophobia that exists all around us. So that even though I cringed every time ze said “pussy” or “dyke,” by the end I was nodding and thinking, “Yeah, fuck the gender binary…”