Name/Here

Sun: A Poem for Malcolm X Inspired by His Murder 

                                                          Written By Adrianne Kennedy (1968)

There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.

- Malcolm X

        What happens to the 'self' when a profound sacrifice is necessary for the continuation of the cosmos? When the very architecture of our being loses its boundaries? SUN, by Adrienne Kennedy pays homage to the martyrs who have faced these very questions. But rather than retelling the narratives of their lives, she chose to explore the liminal space where the sacrifice to become something larger than themselves took place.

       Meditations on the events leading up to the the violent assassination of Malcolm X are pared with hours of research of Da Vinci's sketches -- Kennedy's poem becomes a response to unseen events, the construction and deconstruction of identity through landscapes. The layering of time and the fractured of the self bring to mind W. E. B> Du Bois' 'dual consciousness' - creating a modern mythology of sacrifice.

      It is the struggle of the cosmos, trapped inside the fragmentation of the human mind - erased and rewritten, leaving behind only a palimpsest. It is the processing of time, the construction of memories, dreams, icons and self. Creating and dismantling identity until a larger self is understood through the act of failure. What some have called "the science of nostalgia," is in fact a sacred knowledge with a eye towards the future, staring at half finished truths and partial ideas - finding beauty in the failure and the imperfectness of the eternal struggle