Welcome back for Zoeglossia’s Poem of the Week Series, curated by Kenny Fries, award-winning author of In the Province of the Gods.
Curator’s Note: Quintan Ana Wikswo’s suite of photographs, poems, and essays surrounds the Western State Lunatic Asylum, Central State Mental Hospital, and the State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded: three segregated United States government-run eugenics asylums in rural Virginia.
In 2009, Wikswo began working at these sites in an effort to uncover the experience of her great-grandfather, who was forcibly institutionalized at Western State Hospital and others near in Staunton, Lynchburg, Norfolk, and Portsmouth Virginia, as well as other sites segregated for mixed race people.
Under the pretense of providing routine medical care, “mountain sweeps” were state sponsored raids through the Appalachian mountains with vans to carry away disabled and especially mixed race residents. WIKSWO’s family history includes several incidents of relatives being hidden from the Sweep, although often unsuccessfully. In particular, these three asylums were used to segregate, persecute, and police the lives of people who were deemed noncompliant to social norms. With a proud and publicly stated ideology of wealthy white supremacist social purity, these facilities perpetrated catastrophic crimes against humanity throughout the entire 20th century, and created a legacy of bigotry that still pervades mental health institutions today.
She created the work at the mass graves, cemeteries, and medical facilities using salvaged government cameras and typewriters manufactured during the 1930s and 40s by institutional slave labor.
MOUNTAIN SWEEP
For Julia
Oh bone of my bone, an asylum pelvis striped bare of future kin.
Oh flesh of my flesh, brain etherized upon the table
in electrocutional display.
(Image description: Split screen of institutional buildings superimposed with sky and trees)
Behold this rosy fingered institution:
its pink fingers inside our skins render us limb from limb.
(Image description: Superimposed rustic colors of leaves, branches and sky)
A thread of different weight. Rough. Strange.
Twisted in spirals, in curls.
Our suspect blood confined, contained, bursting. My family line.
(Image description: Superimposed trees, leaves, and sky in rustic colors)
Ripe berry reds and purples are our bodies.
Strange fruit sliced open by the surgeon's knife.
(Image description: Wilted flowers and trees superimposed with a building)
The bodies of my people dwell here in the quiet, in the dark.
Underground.
There are night colors here inside us. Violet. Indigo. Night secrets.
Unspoken because we are told they are unspeakable.
(Image description: Gravestones superimposed with leaves and sky)
(Image description: Blue sky with clouds forefront)
We are taken away and not returned.
A car departed in the night. A stretcher. A body, tied down.
We are returned, different than before. Scars and stitches.
Something missing. A piece of brain. A bit of soul.
Our wounds as invisible as ourselves -
instructed to be silent in the night.
Oh soul of my soul,
where could they bury us, that we must not rise again?
No ditch knows deep enough for that.
Some root or fern will pin our secrets safe
til we uncut our tongues and speak.
(Image description: Clouds superimposed with an institutional building)
Oh mind of my mind, untie their binds and say:
no one shall be master of me here.
(Image description: Split screen of an institutional building superimposed with a sky and clouds)
Woman with brunette hair and expressive eyes leans against a railing.
Quintan Ana Wikswo is the author of the several books of text and photographs, including The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far (Coffee House Press) and the novel A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be (Stalking Horse Press). Her work appears regularly in Guernica, Tin House, Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, and others and is exhibited, performed and in the permanent collections of institutions including the Smithsonian, the Brooklyn Museum, the Berlin Jewish Museum, and others. A Creative Capital grantee in Emerging Fields, her work has been honored by a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship at the Lynchburg African American Cemetery, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at CERN, a Pollock-Krasner Endowed Fellowship at Yaddo. She has been an Endowed Visiting Professor in Human Rights, Creative Writing, and Gender Studies at multiple universities including City College of New York and California State University.