Project Genealogy (why I wrote SLAVE MOTH) - a podcast by Thylias Moss

This movie poam from May 2005 explores what led me to write the narrative-in-verse SLAVE MOTH when my son, the composer of the soundtrack for this short piece, was in sixth grade at a grade-six-through-twelve school. During a meeting, some parents wanted to ban a required ninth-grade ancestry assignment that was embarrassing, humiliating, and demeaning for disclosing that their sons could trace their ancestry no further than slavery. Right away, I realized the need for other models of slavery so that the shame being experienced could be attached to a broader, and I felt, likely more accurate context, one more able to embrace the range of possibilities of circumstances during slavery which, even if owners were benevolent, was unacceptable because ownership of human beings was unacceptable. Part of the horror of slavery is that benign gestures might make the peculiar institution seem acceptable, a good indignity. Imagination can make an incredible difference, and in fact made an incredibly negative difference for those mothers unable to imagine a plausible, less obvious layer of the history so embarrassing for their sons that they would prefer not to explore the rich offerings of a past that their ancestors obviously survived no matter what horrors were encountered. How awful that they were so willing to deny the testimony that survival can be. How awful that they could construct for themselves only constricted, generic, and simplified images of slaves. I remain impressed and inspired by survival. There are layers of experience in SLAVE MOTH, and the Perry household is a complex and dynamic system of existence, relationships stabilizing and destabilizing as alliances shift and feelings are poorly suppressed; there are conflicting understandings of responsibilities to self and to others, and power shifts according to what is stabilizing and what is destabilizing at any given moment. The fact that power shifts makes it difficult for any one person to wield it well or consistently. SLAVE MOTH offers access to more of the layers of humanity that some mothers in 2002 were unable to allocate to enslaved persons. I too spoke at the meeting; on my way out I informed the group advocating abolition of the genealogy assignment that my son, only in sixth grade that year, had had no trouble completing his assignment to write an ancestry poem. I commented that Ansted had traced his ancestry all the way back to the big bang, and considered himself a descendant of stardust. The text of his poem is part of"Project Genealogy,"and is also offered here:

Ancestry PoemWe all came from a single cell
a vast time agospecks coming to life in the oceans
of the planets and in spaceeveryone of us evolved from star dust
into the form we take on nowlooking at space through telescopes
at the next generation of star dustthat will breathe.

--Ansted Moss,22 October 2002.

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