“I, too, overflow” is an essay in sound, to apply a literary and textual nature to sonic resonances. To me, the page is a sea and sound lives in capsules. The page supposes and betrays linearity, but a text read aloud must be known only by the method of a voice delivering. The page defies time. The lyric moves alongside it, in perfect companionship.

To create something that forms to time, one does not begin in the present but always, only, the past. I was interested in what Marianne Hirsch called postmemory, that doubling of lives as they layer upon each other, and one bleeds into the next, their points of intersection mutative and indiscernible. By working with footage of my mother’s wedding, her personal oratory, and the ideations and assertions of feminist scholars and poets, I worked to stitch together these fragments along my own thinking of filial piety, a child’s debt, and that flightless bird we call freedom. I wanted to strip away the confines of that precarious word, choice, and work it into something that aligns with where we are, in time and in space, in inheritance and in legacy. Sometimes, it seems that to choose is the loneliest act in the world. I would like it to not be so.

But isn’t time always in pieces? I suppose greater poets than myself would know. This work is not a portrait without gaps; I’d like the connections to change over time, to alter with the annals of thinking, to be idea instead of fact.

Such is how stories move through the air. Sometimes we catch at it with our pens, our ears, or with our hands.

The title takes from “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Hélène Cixous’ vital essay on women’s writing and the creating, the finding of oneself in the realm of letters:

“I wished that that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst—burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn't open my mouth, I didn't repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What's the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naivete, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn't been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a. . . divine composure), hasn't accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn't thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble.”

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