![]() When I pulled my hair back in a tight ponytail, I could see a patch of scalp. But in that same period had my life evolved at all? Had I met anyone? Surprised myself? Stemmed the tide of collective crisis? My mother often urged me to dance, just a little, by myself in the kitchen - “It’s good medicine,” she said, “ despojo.” #DOWNLOAD SOFTWARE MATRIX STARLINK V HD ETHERNET PATCH# ![]() ![]() I’ve never known what “ despojo” means, precisely, though it’s a word I use with some frequency to express a physical craving for spiritual catharsis: “ Necesitamos despojo, quiero despojarme.” Or, watching a friend gain momentum on the dance floor and begin to enter a self-forgetful trance: “ Esoooo! Des-po-jo!” My Spanish-English dictionary has only the verb (to despoil, to shed leaves) and the plural noun (the spoils of war, mortal remains, rubble, waste). It’s strange to discover that a word I associate with rejuvenation technically has more to do with death and disaster. I guess “ despojo” comes to me, via Puerto Rican Spanish, in a register already worked through by ritual, by generations of people who’ve had to scavenge something good from the many losses of forced migration. ![]() The “ despojo” I’ve desired articulates a paradox. In order to repossess the body, it’s necessary to dispossess it in order to feel alive, it’s necessary to get in touch with what’s already dead. But when I say “ despojo,” I don’t always mean to sound so serious. Sometimes I mean that I want very badly to pin somebody to the club wall with my butt.Įven though it’s better, as my mother recommended, to dance alone than not at all, the “ despojo” I’d been dreaming of was social. In isolation, I’d felt myself stiffen into a form so familiar it had come to seem inescapable. ![]() I wanted my body to influence and be influenced by other bodies - this time not as a vector of disease but as a vector of pure feeling.
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January 2023
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