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residue of colonization -- nature inspo. Also need imagery for the unhoused as glitches in care and imagined as reincarnated spirits of the land 

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residue of colonization -- nature inspo. Also need imagery for the unhoused as glitches in care and imagined as reincarnated spirits of the land 

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Future world building -- communal imagining of a center for the true public (including our unhoused, unemployed, non-"law abiding")

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Future world building -- communal imagining of a center for the true public (including our unhoused, unemployed, non-"law abiding")

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ideally with Rashaad Newsome's work of AI

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My work dwells in an ecosystem of the interdisciplinary (literary, multimedia, narrative, performance art) and radical, material community organizing rooted in constructive reparations, or as I have coined "retroactive-reparations." ( Jean) If Abolition is the present, Afrofuturism is the future, Retroactive-Reparations is for the past - offering material, not representational methodologies of healing and make-goods for our Ancestors and Those Who Have Passed to receive their justice.

Theatre making and performance, along with material artist-activism is my response to the ongoing erasure and callousness I experience as a dark-skinned Black Queer femme living through active genocide. Thus, my cultural works are in service of Black liberation, love, and libation. Afro-folklore, particularly within the Haitian Vodoun canon, magical realism, generational gifts and healing, land memory and self-determination are major themes for me.

Horrifying my Haitian immigrant parents, I dropped out of a full-tuition scholarship at Howard University’s School of Business - as a kiss of death from the myopic appeals of Black Excellence, and left to study musical theatre at a state school in New Jersey, where I’m from. Disappointed by the scarcity of humanizing roles, I began to write in search of joyful, rebellious, sexy, and smart roles for Fat, Queer, and dark-skinned Black femmes of various ability and gender, particularly as my ability and gender transformed after several surgeries left me in chronic pain. From there, my writing shifted from righteous indignation to healing as a tool for longevity and a promise of a long, easeful life.

As I grew in my practice and my studies - largely defined by Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Franz Fanon, June Jordan- I deepened my deference to the spirit realm, our late elders, and our unhoused - which can be found in my work. BRICKS and KING AFUA both consider the knowing of land keeping the score, and leaving imprints felt in the body of those who dwell on lands that hold colonization and colonial gentrification.

BRICKS and KING AFUA are my latest developments. I am in final interviews with the Lakou Nou fellowship with Haiti Cultural Exchange, where BRICKS can be in further facilitated conversation with Haitian community members in Crown Heights. I am a teaching artist in creative writing with LEAP NYC and Writopia NYC, and am a studio associate over at ISCP where I develop Maliyamungu Gift Muhande's documentarian work. Narrative and story is my home base, as I believe all work is inherently political. Outside of my work, you’ll find me at food serves, or plotting on my next guerrilla art scheme.

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Logline:

A Haitian psychic mother and daughter are tasked by the spirit realm, Up Yonder, to save a Black colonial “lost city,” Weeksville, buried underneath rapidly-gentrifying Brooklyn, New York.

Pitch:

BRICKS, (a 20-YEAR MUSIC TOUR of RETROACTIVE-REPARATIONS) is an always-changing script-template

detailing the history-repeating shared injustice of "buried" towns.

We begin with a lost city, Weeksville, the largest Freedpersons town in 1832 and its desecration for the progression and expansion of Brooklyn, NY. We jump through time again and again, and land in the early 2000s – when Black neighborhoods still looked like Ashanti music videos. There, YOUNG MAELLE is able to see Weeksville spirits. She even makes new friends - but then things get scary as we consider how the spirits were moved and removed from the land.

Her mother, Colette, knows this burden too well. She gifts her spirit-blockers: Rose-

tinted, Baker-Miller pink sunglasses, concealing Maelle’s spirit world - turning the spirits into the ones ignored the most: our unhoused.

However, when Colette is called Up Yonder by the spirits to do their bidding - to restore Weeksville’s former glory and see its conquering city fall as it did in the

biblical story of Jericho – a mother fights for her child’s innocence Up Yonder, while down in Brooklyn A Young child Maelle becomes a woman.
Magic and machete fights ensure. In the end, we see how the spirit world is imperative for revolution as the walls indeed fall - and bricks of a new world are imagined communally.

The first act of BRICKS is written to center the living and spirit worlds of Weeksville

(buried beneath rapidly-gentrifying Crown Heights and Bedstuy- similar to Seneca Village under Central Park) but has intentions of a 20-year tour in other buried towns, where largely Black folks dwelled, call for a profit center to be demolished to replace it with a truly public and  well-maintained good for all - our elders, our pregnant, our children, our unhoused.

Future research will be done along with the local genealogy and historian community.

With that said, BRICKS Year One: Weeksville Script is complete. Year Two: Eatonville, Florida.(First act will be rewritten city-by-city to articulate each own’s accurate history.)

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BRICKS, (a 20-YEAR MUSIC TOUR of RETROACTIVE-REPARATIONS) is an always-changing script-template
detailing the history-repeating shared injustice of "buried" towns.
BRICKS considers the broken promises of gentrification. We begin with a lost city,
Weeksville, and its desecration for the progression and expansion of Brooklyn, NY. We
consider the spiritual implications of colonial-gentrification and wonder: As colonialism
bastardizes earth, is its residue of perversion the result of community violence on its
crust?
The story of BRICKS follows Colette Etienne’s desire to protect her young child, Maelle

from seeing the spirit-inhabitants of this “buried land” still here, still d welling. With rose-
tinted, Baker-Miller pink lenses, the tool conceals Maelle’s spirit world. However, when

the spirits call on the Etienne’s to do their bidding - to see the city fall as it did in the
biblical story of Jericho – a mother fights for her child’s innocence, and a child becomes a
free woman. In the end, we see how the spirit world is imperative for revolution.

BRICKS is incurring a pivotal phase in layering in the holiness of Toni Morrison's chapter
in Source of Self Regard, "A Race In Mind (The Press In Deed)" where Morrison critiques
the empty spectacle of media, and the privatization of public space:

"Public space... increasingly seen as a protected preserve open only to the law-
abiding and the employed, or rather to those who appear to be.

Homelessness has been recharacterized as streetlessness. Not the poor
deprived of homes, but the homed being deprived of their streets.
And crime is construed as principally [B]lack. Neither one of these constructions
is new. But as each affects public space, each affects public discourse."
Morrison’s wisdom in her blueprint text instills the urgency that art must have a tangible,
material call-to-action, justification, and benefit to the true public. And that perhaps the
spirits of buried communities like Weeksville, have reincarnated as the houseless on their
land, and as the “exoduses (voluntarily or driven)” (Morrison) lead us with hostile
architecture residue, displacement bills, and price -outs with eroded humanity outside of
profit. Most recent: Eric Adams and NYPD destroying encampment sites in NYC.
As organic ignorance is transformed into “manufactured error” (Morrison) - BRICKS
considers these errors as ‘glitches’ in our care. How our erasure of the homeless is the
erasure of our Indigenous, our Trans and Queer, our Black, our white working poor, and
ultimately our Dead. Living in a “shared injustice,” (Dayna Lynn Nuckolls) BRICKS realizes
our duty to protect and honor the evermoving margins and the violent exodus of the
marginalized in ensuring not just streets, but homes, public space, and care.
The first act of BRICKS is written to center the living and spirit worlds of Weeksvill e
(buried beneath rapidly-gentrifying Crown Heights and Bedstuy) but has intentions of a
20-year tour in other buried towns where largely Black folks dwelled, call for a profit
center to be demolished to replace it with a truly public, well-maintained good for all.
The first act will be rewritten city-by-city to articulate each own’s accurate history.
Future research will be done along with the local genealogy and historian community.
With that said, BRICKS Year One: Weeksville is complete. Year Two: Eatonville, Florida.

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Story
-Weeksville history
-James Weeks and the people of the water
- Maelle seeing spirits
-Maelle growing up
-Machete fights ensuing

Characters -- Maelle, Colette, Aunties, Cassandra/Matriarchs, Chiron, Spirits

Visual language --

Afro-futurism for our ancestors = retroactive-reparations for us

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James Weeks Discovering the People of the Water

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James Weeks Discovering the People of the Water

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The Dig: “You and I and You” by Terence Nance

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2000s style -- Ashanti, Ja Rule, Destiny's Child, Angela Stone to lock in the time of the gentrification -- Before and after Barclays Center

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Blue - deep blue = self determination
Lose color/white - colonial violence
Take on red - that becomes pink
Indigenous people - purple

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Maelle and her mother
Maelle and Chiron
Aunties
Up Yonder + Cassandra / Matriarchs
Weeksville - Daughters of the Dust
Modern BedStuy 1990s - Hype Williams, Ashanti, Jah Rule etc.
Jouvert - Black Caribbean energies
Eras and Aesthetics

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Petite Noir — La Vie Est Belle / Life Is Beautiful ft. Baloji (Official Music Video)

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