Poetry Night with Demian DinéYazhi´

THURSDAY OCT 16 | 7-9 PM

Join Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist Demian DinéYazhi´ for a powerful evening of ideas and words, with a reading from local multi-disciplinary artist Ann-Bernice Thomas. Demian, born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) and Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water), is a Radical Indigenous Queer Feminist artist and has been touring their latest publication AN INFECTED SUNSET over that last several months and we are thrilled that they will be making a stop here in Victoria.

“AN INFECTED SUNSET is an ekphrastic long-form prose poem first conceived in August 2016 in the wake of the Orlando nightclub shooting, police killings of unarmed Black men, and in the midst of the Standing Rock #NODAPL Resistance. During the writing of the poem the settler colonial nation state elected the 45th president of this colonized country, which revealed a sudden revival of extreme white supremacist nationalism.

As the social landscape evolved, the #LIBERATEDPOEM emerged as an offering to Indigenous communities and landscapes that strive for a decolonial and sovereign future emancipated from white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal settler colonial trauma drama. This performance poem is a reflection on queer sex, survival and death politics, indigenous identity, settler and heteronormative romanticism, environmental injustice, and the importance of honoring community.”  -Demian DinéYazhi´