November 3, 2020
Honored that my suite of hybrid poems and photographs MOUNTAIN SWEEP has been chosen as a featured selection at Zoeglossia: A Community for Poets with Disabilities – it’s available to read/view online here with photo captions. My work was commissioned by curator Kenny Fries, writer and activist in disability rights, and legendary and visionary disability-rights editor Connie Voisine. The other featured poets in the special edition are Khairani Barokka, Naomi Ortiz, and Travis Chi Wing Lau. This work is close to my heart, as a neuroqueer disabled artist I feel overjoyed to participate in the community of self-deterministic activists who form the next generations of visibility, inclusivity, equity, and self-expression around the legacy and future of disabled people everywhere. This project in particular surrounds my own family’s forced incarceration for disability in the eugenics hospitals of Virginia and the South, and exists at the nexus of poverty, bigotry, and miscegenation that continues to this day – but will no longer remain hidden, buried, silenced, or obscured.
ABOUT ZOEGLOSSIA:
Zoeglossia is a new literary organization seeking to pioneer a new, inclusive space for poets with disabilities. Much like its forbearers Canto Mundo, Kundiman, Cave Canem, and Lambda Literary, Zoeglossia strives to create an open and supportive community that welcomes and fosters creativity. Through the creation of an annual retreat, poets from all backgrounds will have the opportunity to learn and develop from prominent, established writers, who also have disabilities. These retreats, which individuals will attend over a period of three years, will promote professional development among this shared creative community.Our vision for the retreat centers around emerging writers coming to campus for three days of intensive work. The three-day retreat will admit approximately eight poets, who will be mentored by two prominent poets with disabilities. A third writer will be responsible for delivering a keynote lecture and panel participation. All attendees—teachers and students—will present their literary writing at a series of readings open to the public. Teachers and returning poets will provide panel discussions on professional and literary issues, as well as one-on-one conferences with the emerging writers. Much like Canto Mundo, writers, once admitted will be encouraged to attend three times over the following year to earn the prestigious title of “Fellow.”
CURATOR’S STATEMENT ON WIKSWO’S “MOUNTAIN SWEEP”
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.
(c) 2020 Zoeglossia (Kenny Fries, Curator)