September 4, 2018
Old Dominion University has at last given me a home for the project dear to my heart: THE BOTTLE TREE, a site-based intersectional project working with graduate students to make hybrid text nonfiction chapbooks concerning the intersectional experience of Norfolk, Virginia in its dizzying complexity. Their books will be completed by the end of the semester, and will integrate original photographs (analogue!) they’ll be creating to accompany their texts. THE BOTTLE TREE: TIME, PLACE, AND TRAJECTORY IN HYBRID FORM WRITING AND VISUAL ART is a Special Topics Course in the Interdepartmental Arts and Humanities.
The ancient roots of the bottle tree reach back across space and time to Africa, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. Beginning in 1600 B.C.E., colored glass bottles were inverted over tree branches with the belief that at night, invisible beings would be mesmerized by the colors, climb inside them, and disintegrate in the light of day. During the 1600s CE slave trade in Virginia, this tradition was brought by Africans from the Congo. The favored tree for these bottles was the Crepe Myrtle – beloved in Norfolk, and a reference to the Bible that has long been associated with freedom and escape.
THE BOTTLE TREE: TIME, PLACE, AND TRAJECTORY IN HYBRID FORM WRITING calls upon this concept of gathering together the unseen, sifting through the pieces, and creating a tree adorned with the newly visible. Each student will develop a gathering of core concepts that interest them, with encouragement to focus each student’s ongoing experience within Norfolk, Virginia.
In this course, we will read and write nonfiction-based poetry, prose, memoir, essay, and hybrid genre constellations of place over time. We will avail ourselves of primary source materials, literary readings, and in-class and take-home exercises, as well as work with instant cameras as a complementary visual vocabulary.
For each student, successful completion of this course will yield a first draft chapbook of approximately 12-25 short texts in the genre or form of the student’s choice, with companion original color or black and white photographs.
NORFOLK: LEGACY & IDENTITY
Through exploring nonfiction forms, we will undertake a prismatic encounter with the complex, contradictory, intersectional legacy of Norfolk as a unique site over time. These legacies include, but are not limited to:
• sanctuary city for mixed race people, free blacks, former slaves, and African Americans
• military and Naval and NATO base during multiple wars and peacetime
• established territory of Chesipean and other Indigenous Tribes and Nations since 9500 BCE
• arrival and colonial site for European migrants since 1500 CE
• education and organizing hub for combat veterans of all races
• a hub for sexually unconventional people and queer people
• a source of employment and exploitation for sex workers and sexual entrepreneurs, especially women
• destination for refugee slaves, Africans, and free Blacks boarding the Underground Railroad
• embarkation point for slaves seeking sanctuary in the Great Dismal Swamp
• homeplace and incubator for significant African-American movements of liberation, education, rebellion, resistance
• marketplace for pirates and privateers
• locus for resistance to and experimentation with gender, race, class, and sexual segregation
A writing-intensive course, THE BOTTLE TREE will unite research (fieldwork as well as archival materials from 1600-1865, 1865-1950, and 1950-2018 and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s writings on Intersectionality), reading (rarely-encountered literature of the African diaspora from 1600-2018), and in-class and self-directed writing inclusive of all literary forms. This three-stage process will guide students through compelling encounters with relationship between literature and the people, places, histories, and ideas of liberation, resistance, intersectionality, identity, patriotism, human rights, colonialism, liberty, agency, self-definition, emigration, sanctuary, idealism, and the personal and emotional experience of place over time.
As a port and military city closely tied to both the South and the North, Norfolk was a harbor for the “Middle Passage,” receiving ships transporting Africans into slavery as well as an incubator for clandestine oceanic “waterways to freedom” for escape from slavery’s crimes against humanity. Norfolk was the epicenter for Gabriel’s Revolt and several other slave and free black revolts and resistance actions. Houses in Norfolk were safe houses on the underground railway, homes of mixed race families, sites of slaveholding, and meeting places for free schools, liberation movements, resistance, and creation. This intricate intersectionality meant white and black and mixed raced, free and enslaved people co-created visionary projects that impacted centuries of the American experience.
Using a series of prompts, writing exercises, and collaborative generations, students will create their own texts surrounding the role of African diaspora literature, language, and the spoken, written, and transcribed word. The resulting constellation of texts will form a collaborative literary anthology with multiple voices and visions encompassing centuries of past, present, and futurist perspectives. Like a tree with bottles that contains wandering spirits, this anthology will be a prismatic encounter with contemporary historically-engaged writing surrounding the experience of intersectionality.