‘To All the Girls with Heavy Names’
— Reneé Bibby
I have an unusual pick for today. As a graphic designer I spend my day at the intersection of words and art, yet too often I write and read only words—forgetting, even as it’s my day job, how often words are elevated by art, and art by words. The symbiosis of word and imagery isn’t new, but it has found the right soil and temperature to flourish on social media platforms like Instagram. The platform allows poetry and micro-fictions to cut to the quick of our zeitgeist with precision and real-time quickness.
An amazing example of this is the poetry/art piece, ‘To All the Girls with Heavy Names’ by Elisabet Velasquez and the Indigenous Goddess Gang. Velasquez’s poem is a triumph of protest. Demanding a name be spoken correctly is the opposite of a microaggression; it’s microaffirmation, a small, steady way to reclaim space and self against colonizers. Indigenous Goddess Gang connected that point right back to the historical context of this ongoing racial struggle by pairing the words with a vintage photo of young indigenous woman.
Recently, Democratic candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had to rebut political commentator John Cardillo’s efforts to discredit her by misconstruing the facts of her upbringing. She corrected him on the facts, and called him out, “Your attempt to strip me of my family, my story, my home, and my identity is exemplary of how scared you are of the power of all four of those things.” A name is a representation of all of those things. Heavy names everywhere … let’s hear them.