Issue 38: Everyday Apocalypses | by Featured Writer A.B. Lim
I have been asked What are you? more times than I have been asked my name. My body is expected to represent much more than merely its flesh…
Everyday Apocalypses | by A.B. Lim
I have been asked What are you? more times than I have been asked my name. My body is expected to represent much more than merely its flesh.
I am asked if I speak English. I am asked where I’m really from. Where I was born. I’m asked what kind of food I eat. Where my parents are from. I’m asked which parent is which. I’m asked why I don’t speak Spanish, and why I don’t speak Chinese. Why I don’t know my own culture. When I insist that I’m American, that my parents are American, and that they’ve never spoken any other language except English, my words are chewed up, contorted in their mouths; spit back at me like insults.
I am interrogated so relentlessly that I sometimes doubt what I know about myself or if I am speaking at all. As if some parasite inside me consumes all language before it has a chance to escape my mouth. As if it feasts on what hangs at the top of my throat, hungry for all the words I try so hard to push through my lips.
On the street, my body is deformed, formed anew in the eyes of each person I pass. I am a threat, a contamination, a ruin with a human face. I’m spat on. Told to go eat dog meat. Told to go back to where I came from. My body a release valve for cruelty. As if their fear has no way to escape their bodies except through mine…
Read more from Everyday Apocalypses.
A.B. Lim is an artist, writer, labor organizer, and unapologetic introvert based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work delves into embodied memory and intergenerational trauma, exploring the body as an archive and unraveling the ruinous mythology of the nuclear family. Currently, she is creating artwork that combines ceramics and textiles while writing about the connections between memory and soil.
Issue 38 Highlights
Issue 38: Les combattants by Featured Artist Ousmane Bâ
Issue 38: dear Coral Grief by nawa angel a.h.
Issue 38: the void by Michael Nagle | Artwork by Kirk Read
Issue 38: Festival of Love by Mayur Chauhan
Issue 38: A Bridge is a Place by Marina Gross-Hoy
Issue 38: Everyday Apocalypses by Featured Writer A.B. Lim
Artists and Writers
We’re looking for features! To enter KHÔRA’s collaborative waters:
Team-based, collaborative, and curated, KHÔRA is a form that is continually opening. We invite you to join us in sustaining it together. We don't believe in rejections. KHÔRA’s 500 Words is about considering how multiple voices can be heard; how frameworks, traditions, and projects can inform each other; and how new perspectives emerge from collaboration and openness. If you are a visual artist or interested in sharing your artwork or images, ready about KHÔRA’s Images here.
If you love what you’re seeing, please subscribe, share, tweet, retweet, and post, and KHÔRA will be back soon with more from this issue.
With galactic gratitude,
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/KHÔRA squad
Swim around in KHÔRA.
 | A guest post by
|