Complex Things by Jazmin Maco
Last summer I was granted the opportunity to conduct a research project based in Kingston, Jamaica—my grandmother’s, my mother’s, and my home. At the end of my research trip, I left Jamaica with 16 rolls of film to be developed, a journal full of unfinished poems, and a new, focused interest on Kingston as both a geographical location and an immersive state of being, on motherhood as a foundational and integrally complex institution, and on the politics and poetics of witness art both as a noun and a verb.
Pool of Hands and Complex Things are two of six visual poems in my poetry collection entitled e-koh-ic. The collection consists of pieces of photos that I pieced apart, cut-up, and re-assembled into poems. I began by selecting a core of 12 photos I wanted to work from—out of the 16 rolls of film I developed at the beginning of the semester, essentially creating my word bank. From there, I cut out shapes, objects and people that acted as the words I would use to construct the visual poems. My working definition of a visual poem was and is as follows: a poem which uses visual elements and non-representational language to convey meaning. By heavily engaging the form of the photomontage—a collage made from photographs, or parts of photographs—this medium allowed me to address the concept of inherited affect and community memory. Pool of Hands and Complex Things were born from absence—the frame of what was left from the excised parts. Both of these poems act as meditations on motherhood—odes to my grandmother, Mom, and my late aunt, Edlette, respectively—in the world of their love and the ruin of their loss. The blurry, the coherent, the reactionary, and the introspective of experience and of memory are synthesized in these poems.
Throughout my time in Kingston and working with these poems, I recognized that I understood myself through my understanding of those around me and vice versa. For me, bearing witness was and is an absorption of echoes—from history, from the place around you, from the people you take the time to learn. In this sense, the whole of these poems is addressing the necessarily communal nature of e-koh-ic and my larger research project. These words and these images are as much of me as they are of the community that helped me generate them. I stand as a reflection, as an imprint, as an echo of the lives and histories I’ve been privileged enough to witness.
Medium: Photography, Collage, Visual Poetry
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