Mad Woman’s ESL Poetry

Minah Lee’s performance with her artwork featured in Milton Lim’s video
Minah's performance with her artwork featured in Milton Lim’s video, cabaret at CAMINOS 2017. Photo by Brian Batchelor

2016-2017

Text & live performance by Minah Lee

Video by Milton Lim

Canadians often say to me, “You must be a Canadian or Permanent Resident, if you have been living here for more than a decade.” I tend to lose my words. Both my mother tongue and broken English don’t seem sufficient to explain. Where should I begin to give a sense of an immigration system written by the logic of a neo-liberal nation-state? I would rather be a body of ‘미친년,’ a degraded fallen woman, so please don’t take me seriously until I call you out and madly make out with you. I fell in love with her body free from legitimate bodies’ acceptance, a deceptive notion of consent. She utters fearlessly, not because her language is correct and direct, but because her language is doomed to be corrected and redirected. She dares to speak in front of you—the Indigenous peoples of this land, in the face of you—the settlers in this land, and in the midst of you—the migrants on this land.

Performance & conference

2017 OCT Mad Woman’s ESL Poetry – CAMINOS 2017 cabaret, Daniels Spectrum, Toronto

2016 NOV Unlanded & Mad Woman’s ESL Poetry, Cinema of Indeterminacy: presentation of films + panel discussions, San Fran­cisco State University’s 18th Annual Cinema Conference, San Francisco, United States

2016 JUN Stranger in a tenirjar- Multimedia collaboration on a performance/installation, member event at ViVO Media Arts Centre, Vancouver, Canada