Pink Waves
Sawako Nakayasu’s Pink Waves draws on her practices as poet, performance artist, and translator. The text was written as part of a durational performance, on-stage, in 2019, in conversation with other works, including Waveform, by Amber DiPietra and Denise Leto, and Adam Pendleton’s collage work Black Dada, from which Nakayasu made “microtranslations,” which she glosses, lyrically, in her recent work, Say Translation Is Art (PDF):
Say microtranslation, say for example translate only one component of a poem, translate only the syntax, translate the syntax in its entirety, say translate the entire sonic landscape of the poem, say translate the spirit, the kinetics, the ghost that haunts it […]
Pink Waves contains three movements, each with eight numbered sections, the first of which contains one line, the second two, and so on, growing exponentially. The propulsive repetition of lines, often in altered forms, is interspersed with the accrual of new lines. Nakayasu expands each movement, modulating the energy into crescendos, or “waves,” of heightened emotion, while also creating an atmosphere, as a sound installation with layered voice tracks might, of immersion in another embodied mind’s many simultaneous fragments of thought and feeling.
The poem’s concerns are various, impossible to summarize, and associatively, but inextricably, connected: grief due to a friend’s loss (“she was elegylight and circumstance; she pitched her light away”), the violences of capitalism (“the grand narrative collapses under its own weight / I take a kick in the mouth for you, over and again”), physical pleasure (“yes we are erotic warm anemone”), and the history and possibility of the avant-garde (“no i do not speak Dada / the ringing sound you hear / is a higher transmission”), with references to work by a wide range of practitioners, from Kurt Schwitters to Gabrielle Civil.
In the middle of Pink Waves, the speaker asks: “would I be a writer without those who opened up space.” With this work, which Fred Moten calls “writing that listens,” Nakayasu, in turn, opens new space, staying, as she writes in the epilogue of the book: “true to the thickness as I move through time and space, in cross-sections of wave upon wave.”