Meditation on Meditation on Dada

Thylias Moss's video “poam” “Meditation on Dada” blurs and problematizes history and language. There are a multiple of meanings in the actual words of the poem: “a mean Amin” is a reference to Idi Amin Dada, the infamous Ugandan dictator—it's a kind of textual playfulness, though the reference itself and the accompanying “meanness” of Idi Amin is disturbing. This line is also a reference to the title of the poem, and it changes how we would typically read “Meditation on Dada.” At first I thought this was a more-or-less straightforward title, and I figured I'd get a poem referencing the Dada movement. And there's plenty here that encourages that approach, since Dada was a leftist movement founded on the destruction of typical, bourgeois assumptions about art. The form of this poem itself challenges artistic norms, since it works simultaneously as visual, sound, and textual artifact. The text is presented backwards, denying conventional reading. There's also no coherent ordering to the different pieces of text, and it's sometimes difficult to establish any connections between lines. But conceptions of “Dada” keep blurring back and forth between the art movement and the dictator. The “decapitated heads” references Amin's violent executions of detractors and ethnic groups. Sheen, shekina, and sheena are all “defined” as an eating disorder, though the words have differences in the dictionary: sheen is “a soft luster on a surface,” shekina is a Hebrew word for the divine presence of God, and sheena (likewise of Hebrew origin) means “God is gracious.” The “weight of blood,” when seen next to the line about Amin, could be a reference to the dictator's ethnic cleansing of Uganda—or it could be something more ambiguous. The “curve of the cut” echoes the decapitated heads of the first “stanza” of the visual triptych, and the “getting ready to say” likewise echoes the “smiles cut into like a mouth.” Overall, “Meditation on Dada” is a dark and cryptic poem that blends general notions of art history with disturbing historical particulars.