Sandra Ruiz on Left Turns in Brown Study

Sandra Ruiz and I discuss her book, Left Turns in Brown Study; as well as her “kinesthetic, ancestral and emotional” writing process, genre-defying practice, multiple scholarly and artistic influences, the precision of citation, and collaborative performances/iterations of the book. For more information about creative responses to the book, follow the Minor Aesthetics Lab (MAL) on Instagram at @minor_aesthetics_lab

Image from the exhibition Sensory Riffs & Visceral Turns. Dancer, Estado Flotante, performs to music by Erica Gressman at Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, New York in an evening curated by Dusty Childers. Flotante is wearing a long, flowing white robe with the word “turn” on it repeated like newspaper print also designed by Childers. In the background displayed against the stark, industrial white walls are colorful abstract prints by Daniel Hughes Vernola. The audience sits along the edge of the concrete floor. The prints, fashion, movement, and sound are all in creative collaborative response to Ruiz’s book, Left Turns in Brown Study.

Chloe Cetinkaya: Thank you for joining me today! I sent you some interview questions. Were you able to see them?

Sandra Ruiz: I did! I want to begin by saying thank you for the beautiful review of Left Turns in Brown Study. You captured beautifully the sensory experience that I had, in full embodiment, writing this text, editing this text, and then engaging it once it was a material object in the world. Specifically, when you talk about the poem MIS C A R R I E D, and you cite this line, “I see form above meaning.” I'm grateful that you pulled out one of the major premises of this experimental text, which is to honor many forms (and their deforming) and to pull away from the colonial project of producing categorical forms, meanings, and studies that prevent us from thinking together in different ways. 

CC: I'm glad that my review spoke to your work in that way. Left Turns In Brown Study, was my first book review. I was a bit nervous about going deeper into the poems because I realized that you’re in conversation with specific scholars and artists who I haven’t engaged with as deeply so, I'm sure there's a lot of content that I wasn’t picking up on, that I wasn’t reading. But, I decided to read it from my point of view as a choreographer and performer and see what that might offer. 

SR: Yeah, I mean, that’s a great way to approach this book. Your review is so touching because it is written by someone who understands the relationship between moving and movement as one is in motion, an artist who feels the words as the moving senses. There's a sensory component to all of the poems and your writing captured that exactly.

To turn to one of your questions now, “Who do you hope will read this book?”, I think one of the things that the book attempts to do is provide an entryway for different types of feelers and thinkers and learners, and to also refuse the separation of distinct forms, including the separation of politics and aesthetics. I hope to get folks away from an allegiance to “studies” and toward the hard labor of study, even when joined to mourning and grievance and melancholia. I hope anyone with complicated emotions, neurodiverse ideas, lingering complaints, a need for justice and compassion, a desire to modify the terms of study and institutional studies, and desire for a promising left, will pick up the book and find an experience they might connect with across the pages. 

Visual score to Ruiz’s poem, EARLESS SHARK OR STILL A JANITOR’S KID, by abstract expressionist painter, Daniel Hughes Vernola. Colorful paint gestures on watercolor paper swirling around a gravitational center.

CC: Can you talk more about what the left is in this book?

SR: I mean, the amorphous left is a lot of coalescing moments throughout the book. It's capacious and limiting, but it is also about a way of living and thinking and learning that prioritizes subjects pushed to the margins, minoritarian subjects, vulnerable subjects. It honors an anticolonial, anti-imperial, anti-capitalist, anti-heteronormative relationship to thinking, to doing, to being together by apprehending difference as a moving ensemble rather than a stationed relation. It is also about the ability to critique within the position of the so-called left–how do we account for the vendidos who do the bidding and brutal work of Empires as they claim the left as authority and home? Political and social life is always a motion to be made into an evolving movement. 

In terms of form (maybe forming a left), many of the poems reference one another, so you’ll have a poem on perhaps page 50 that is actually in conversation with a line located on page 23. Additionally, not all of the pages are numbered throughout the book. You have to return to one of the content pages to figure out which page a poem is located on and fill in the missing numbers at the bottom of the page. This works to produce a way of reading that engages an alternative experience to common practices of learning and moving while reading. You’d have to go back in time to move forward in motion. This should be the ongoing exercise of “THE LEFT”–to return to the violence of the past to deliberately unmanifest its return. 

What was your experience? How did you read? Fundamentally the spirit of the text’s method is, how could you study together differently? And how did studying in that way do something for your body, your energy, your life and mourning with others?

CC: Yeah. I mean, your writing has an experiential relationship with the topics. Your embodied, sensory experience and often, your personal narrative, is intertwined with the theoretical and political. As I was reading, for example, BLEMISH   (TITLED TWICE) you write, “to be a butterfly on your back you will never feel”. I know it’s not about butterfly feet, but I was experiencing what it does to the senses if there’s a butterfly on your back; if you’re trying to feel so closely the sensation of those tiny, little butterfly feet through your clothes. It’s so delicate and quieting. Or in, To Be Soft, I had this image of thousands of disembodied tongues marching towards the sea, wagging and screaming towards the sky. The image made me salivate and so there was something like a kinesthetic empathy in my own tongue. And then, EPHEMERALITY’S BREEZE, the one where you’re whimsically tracing the signature with your finger, I can imagine the longing and the touch of the paper. There are so many poems that give me an embodied experience of feeling and touching something just by reading it. With that sensory experience comes an emotional one. That made me curious about your writing process. How did this way of writing come about? Is it because you were observing your own sensory experience and sharing it as you were in conversation with these materials? I’m curious about what that writing process was for you.

SR: Writing for me is always kinesthetic, ancestral, and emotional. It is a sensorial embodiment across dimensions, for and with others. It is, you know, an amplification of sounds and images and feelings and different ways of touching out and being touched. Up here (gestures to head), what is happening when I am writing is a 3D+ embodied experience of the word/world. When you talk about the tongues marching into the sea, I experience them as if we were all in the live scene together. Motion and movement are happening all at once, which is my energy experience of existing as a person in our shared worlds.

As I'm writing and the words are coming out, I'm also enacting the movements, or I'm marching, and I’m performing the words. The words become animated, alive, aligned with a feeling, an attunement beckons. 

This was a difficult book to organize because I had to actively remember what happened across the pages to turn back to move forward. For example, how does page 41 relate to page 21? And how does moving left help answer this question? The turning is as literal as it is metaphorical. You said something really beautiful when you wrote about the turn pages as scripts for dancers. They are scores; the moves you must make to get to the next sequence of words is a sequence within a series of sequences, which is eventually a movement. But I am also playing with the idea of a movement, a political and social movement, which charges forward against fascist ways of organizing our lives. I love that question, thank you. 

Folded garments are piled on top of each other mixed with prints of turn-pages from Ruiz’s book, Left Turns in Brown Study. Fashion and fabric design by Dusty Childers for the exhibition, Sensory Riffs & Visceral Turns, held at Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, New York.

CC: I was reading the typographical decisions; such as the turn pages, and the ways in which you use space on the page, punctuation and letters, or not. I saw those as choreographic decisions; they have a visual, physical presence and affect my attention as I'm reading, especially the ways you use space. You wrote in the beginning of the book about anachoreography, a theory introduced by fahima ife, and I was curious about that. I also know that you are affiliated with the Dance Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Is choreography an influence for you and what is anachoreography and how did it influence this book?

SR: Yes, I have an affiliate appointment in the Department of Dance and feel seen and held by that unit; and yes, choreography and movement studies, among other studies, are a huge influence across my work. In graduate school one of my mentors was Randy Martin, a choreographer, dancer, scholar, clever writer and so many other brilliant things. André Lepecki was also on my dissertation committee, so I had two prominent dance/movement scholars who were really influential in how I thought about performance, the writing of performance, and the performativity of movement. They both, along with many other mentors and teachers, stressed the importance of “degenrelization” across forms; to not participate in some myopic allegiance to a genre, but to see genre as an ensemble of moving parts. So yes, this book is choreographic; you can look at the turn pages and even the poems as kinesthetic scores, theatrical scores, visual scores, sensorial instruction pieces where theory is poetry, poetry is often theory, and directions are instructions for liberated study. And the empty spaces you mention are moments of silence, but also notations where sounds resonate across the apparent void. There are moments when stage directions enter a poem or a poem extends into an endnote or an endnote becomes a lyrical essay.  

The citations throughout the book are about enacting a type of precision, honoring labor, and visually amending a poem’s traditional form. It's rare that you will find a poem, even if it is a lyrical poem or what some may say is a lyrical essay, containing 80 citations. This precision extends toward the labor of Brownness to include a responsibility, accountability to those who did labor prior to one’s intention, such as another great mentor José Esteban Muñoz’s work on brownness. If Brownness is citation, how do we do the honest work of citing others and having dialogic encounters as ideas to be shared, rather than hoarded and weaponized? Every poem, every section, every piece of writing throughout the text belongs to a chorus of voices, to a type of study that moves past institutional studies (for example, Latinx Studies) to offer new forms and rigorous care for one another. 

In terms of anachoreography, poet-scholar fahima ife wrote Maroon Choreography, and it's written in conversation with The Undercommons by Harney and Moten. ife writes about the ongoing aesthetic afterlives of Black fugitivity, the stories history fails to tell in the act of disappearing voices from dominant archives. You'll notice in this gorgeous book that the author has a choreo-political kinesthetic approach to writing. ife mentions in the book, which I don't have with me so forgive me because I might be paraphrasing out of line, but that, and this also comes from André Lepecki’s work, that choreography is writing. So, yeah, I would say that in Left Turns, all of the senses are intentionally involved, forms and their manipulations, moving in and out of disciplines and studies, with a lot of improvisatory moments that mark the unknown, the feral and unfettered moments lingering in punctuations, open spaces, asides, typographies. You’ll notice line breaks that maybe shouldn't be a line break, punctuation that's missing, a playfulness with formatting, indentation that seems clumsy, but in fact they mark the breath of something other. That breath is called craft for me. How do you read, ingest, understand, feel that space as an ungovernable kind of craft(ing) in order to include the sounds of these often left for dead?

Promotional flyer for Sandra Ruiz’s, Left Turns in Brown Study: A Performative Conversation, moderated by Dusty Childers at the Bureau of General Services - Queer Division (BGSQD), a book store and cultural center in New York City. An image of Ruiz in a brightly-colored, geometrically patterned shirt with her book cover is on the right. The border is black with, TURN, written in white. The names of contributing artists are listed near the bottom left.

CC: When I read that you performed the text in New York City, I was so curious about what that meant. I know that this book has taken many forms through your collaborations with other artists, so I'm curious about what it means for you to perform selections from your book.

SR: Dusty Childers, a performance artist and curator in New York City, organized an event around the book at a queer bookstore (BGSQD) to highlight the components of kinship and made-family that live across the pages. They invited about 10-12 panelists, some former students of mine, others esteemed colleagues, some artists I have had the honor to write with/about to make a comment about the book or to offer an experience of reading it. Instead of reading the poems to the audience, these panelists participated in their own kind of performance, or offered a kind of performative address to a moment in the text. 

I also had the opportunity to read from the text in conversation with the panelists. This felt like the magical moment where what you have produced no longer belongs to you because it never belonged to you. In terms of performing versus reading the poems/essays/vignettes, I don’t have intense loyalty to the writing as it appears on the page, so when I am reading for an audience, the words shift with the energy field provided. I'm not necessarily reading the way the words appear on the page. I might change the script of it, or add something else for emphasis, or there might be something physical that goes along with it, or I might interject with a new line. So, it's not just what you see on the page that your ears receive. Some of these poems, as you pointed out, are scathing institutional critiques, or critiques of the anointed left and the revolutionary gatekeepers that are the disguised neoliberal cogs. They are critiques of institutions across many sites, including the institutions of difference. So how do you perform that in a way that doesn't just point your finger outward at everyone else, but also points the finger back at the writer? Humor. Shifting words. Surrender. Some humility. 

CC: Do you play with the textual spaces when you're performing?

SR: Yes. I spent a lot of time crying when I was writing this book, but I also spent a lot of time laughing in solitude. I was just chuckling, ha, ha, ha! And, I didn’t understand what was happening emotionally, but there's such a deep relationship between grief and sadness, and the light that comes from laughter, and these overlapping feelings often happen in those spaces. For example, one poem that I thought was funny (but written with rage), I don't know that anybody else does but you brought it up in your review, is WHERE THE TIMID TAKE THEIR NOSES FOR A WALK. 

CC: Oh, yeah! Ha, ha!

SR: So, it's basically like, hey, where are all the institutional gatekeepers acting as “the people” but doing the dirty work for the master? When I perform it, I change it a lot because I am energy reading the audience, as they are re-reading me. I'm always thinking about what's happening in a space that is not the space of the poem. I also like to play! I never want to forget that, because then I might lose my curiosity, and if I lose my curiosity, then I shouldn't be studying.

CC: Yeah, there's one poem, LONELINESS PROPERTY, that mentions the “champagne socialists”…

SR: Oh!

CC: I found that one very funny! I didn't include it in the review because I didn't really go into politics. But, I think that's where my question earlier about the left came from. I feel like it's (the left) very fragmented right now, I feel like there isn't a very coherent message that we're all together in this, working towards something. And there’s also a question of how would we even get there?

SR: It happens by unfollowing the rules of genre and form and discipline and practice and colonial infrastructure. We are where we are now because we took for granted the organizational ability of the right to be able to reorganize (or end!) our entire lives, just as they have been doing with the help of many of the left (whatever this really is!). History (our ancestors!) told us that it has happened, that it will always happen again, unless we are careful and precise, not only with how we do our study, but in our precision with others, including how we hold these criminal institutions accountable. We're accountable to one another. That is the greatest gift we have all been gifted; to be able to care for someone else, to love someone else so deeply that it's in every detail that we remain alive and enlivened in movement together.

After I was diagnosed with multiple chronic illnesses and disabilities, I had to reconnect with a body that was no longer mine as I understood it. I had to retrain my body almost as if I was standing outside of my body trying to recognize what it could do now. So much attention was given to the body proper and not enough attention was given to what was happening psychically and spiritually. Once I started to integrate everything, I started to become a different writer and human. I had to learn to sit with chronic illness, to sit with disability, to sit with suffering and sadness, to sit with how these institutions torture the already out-of-colonial-time body, mind, and spirit, and to accept that these institutions were never made for me to survive their violence.

Image of an installation from the exhibition, Sensory Riffs & Visceral Turns. Textiles by Dusty Childers. A curtain with ironed-on turn-pages from Ruiz's book hangs to the right of a long white industrial-looking hallway with concrete floors. A janitor's uniform hangs on the left next to a broom and a large red box that reads TURN down the side in white.

CC: I'm curious about how you see the challenges that you're faced with in the institution. How do you accommodate your chronic illness and disability now and how does that play out in your writing process?

SR: One of the things that becoming sick within the institution has shown me, and I say becoming sick because it's always an infinite process, is that I had to come to terms with the ways that they are organized around able-bodies and how they use that organizational model to establish how you might live, move forward, engage others. To break free of that, I had to learn to be deliberate in everything that I did - from how I decided to move, to how I decided to co-move with, to how I decided to listen, and to how I decided to un-listen to learning and study. For me, it all radically shifted once I realized that so much of my existence in academia felt like I was an entity walking backwards. As much as it appeared that I was moving forward, creating and producing, I was doing all of that by doing this (gestures as if backing up). That tension left all these new temporal cuts and gaps between the movements and that's where I started to produce a different way of engaging ideas and others.

CC: What do you mean by “walking backwards”?

SR: As someone who's neurodivergent and who has multiple disabilities, I learned to mask and perform the movements of neurotypical production, producing with the colonial project of walking forward in time as progress, in discipline, while being of forward time. What this feels like in my body and my mind is often a composition of a-harmonious, clumsy, forced, lacking destination and process steps and sounds. I had to learn to negotiate what’s offered to me and then learn to translate it all into a complimentary system that could work for me. And it's exhausting. It produces so much fatigue. 

CC: I know you don’t identify with being a poet or with any specific genre, and this book, to me, is a lot of things including a work of art. So, I’m curious about how the body has played a role in the way you make your art.

SR: I mean, writing is embodiment and without a frame for me. It’s my edgeless almost-lover.  To give some context, I've moved around so many units; I was trained in performance studies and then dropped into Latina/o studies, English, now I'm in Theatre. I do not belong to any of these units and I don’t care to belong anymore, which has been the most liberating gift for my writing. I just know that I'm curious about words, curious about making art, curious about being with others in study. I try to be careful, I love collaborating, I have a deep sense of responsibility to our shared worlds, to others, to all types of life forces. And I'm curious about how we cross boundaries and how we dissolve borders. I really love an edgeless edge, and for me, that happens by playing with words, sounds, gestures, energy channeling, etc., and holding them all accountable as I hold myself accountable to others.

I want to ask you, if you were commissioned to take one of these poems and create a dance to it, which one would you choose?

CC: Now that you’ve talked about the space on the page and this question of what happens in that space, I’d like to go back and see which ones inspire me most as scores. 

One poem that immediately comes to mind is, SPLITTING AIR, because I’m compelled by this idea of speaking across a boundary, and the way that you visually created a call and response on the page.

SR: To do that as a choreographic score, how would you split space? I mean, how do you split air? EPILOGUES AND CIRCLES is super movement based, too, I think.

CC: Oh, yeah! What I like about EPILOGUES AND CIRCLES, is all the other sensory things that are going on. As an artist, more and more, I want to interact with the environment that I'm in. When I read EPILOGUES AND CIRCLES, I want to be someplace where I can actually smell the tobacco and hot coffee and taste the plantains.

SR: I'm so happy you said that! It's about the smell of tobacco when you roll it and that textured smell that’s left planted on your fingers. 

CC: There are also specific movements described (in the poem), like toe presses and back bends, while there’s also this mystery of, what’s bending back? Is it the body or time or memory?

I also like this play with words, like the “a/o” in “d(a/o)wn”. That's something I didn't get a chance to talk about in my review, but not only do you insert letters into some of the words to create more than one reading, you also use words that have more than one meaning. I would look up a word and go back and read it with a different definition. It was an exercise in interpretation for me. That was also true for the CONTENTS page. I got hung up on it because I read it as a poem. Then I turned the page and there was the “traditional” Table of Contents and I was like, “oh, I had no idea that’s what it was!”

SR: Every section of the book is intended to have that effect, to get you to keep returning to study, to one another, to do the work that is required to love one another as “the first act of love is study.” It's all in the return. 

Photo taken by Pedro Lopez of Erica Gressman performing live music with Estado Flotante in graceful movement at the Sensory Riffs & Visceral Turns exhibition.

CC: The past is something that is in the present. Like study, we’re in the present and when we return to something from the past, we can relate to it differently.  

For example, you've figured out this way of working within the institution for yourself and your body with a disability and you’ve found some kind of permission there. When it comes to the poetry teacher you mentioned in, TEN SCENES IN GARGOYLES, you’ve found yourself in this place now where you can go back to that experience (of her telling you that citations don’t belong in poems) and give yourself permission to put citations and notes wherever you want to. There’s something about that, the word I want to say is healing, but I don’t know if that’s really it or not. But, there’s this process throughout the book of going back to unlearn, going back to relate to the past differently now with new possibilities for how to bring those past experiences forward into something else in a way that creates something new.

SR: Yeah, healing, liberatory, reckoning, redemption, structured forgiveness. 

CC: Now you've written these poems as a result of that process with citations. I love the citations because I love that window into what an artist is in conversation with, the influences on their creative process. It helps me to read the poem because I know what is influencing you.

SR: Citations let you eavesdrop, provide additional windows and details. They provide a story within the story.  Plus, who said that a poem couldn't be a chapter? Who said that a chapter (with so many citations) couldn't be a poem? I'm intrigued by how much we can learn, but not by what has been lent to us for study, but by the unseen, unknown. I love being a teacher and a forever student. I don't think that I could write anything if I hadn't been in the classroom and learned from students and collaborators like you. There's nothing more exciting than to constantly be learning together as opposed to creating this hierarchical dynamic that the academy constantly reproduces to keep making money for the para-university as the para-corporation. I hope that this book allows students to think differently about forms, about writing, about one another. 

CC: To write a book like Left Turns, you have to know your field of study so well in this incredible way. There’s this saying that you have to be a master to teach beginners. I don’t know if this book is necessarily for beginners, but it’s accessible because you can learn as you’re going, revisit it, and learn something new. Also, you have the theory and poetry together which makes it accessible to different people in different ways.

SR: I would hope that anyone who's considered a master of anything would always have a beginner's mind. What’s an expert? I am certainly no expert. But I know some things and knowing them just enough allows me to break their form and attempt to break through their frame.

Maybe a reader can only relate to three poems and that's how they understand the rest of the book, through those three poems. That's okay. Someone said that they read the book upside down. Someone else read it from the end to the beginning. Someone else created visual scores for each portion of the book to make sense of it. You can jump in and out anywhere. It’s a jam session. It’s a movement session.

CC: I was searching for metaphors in the turn-pages. Even before I read any of the poems, I spent a long time just looking at the turn-pages and thinking about what they could mean. I would go back and forth between the turn-pages and the poems that followed and find connections between them. It’d be fun to make a choreography in conversation with the turn-pages.

SR: I would love that! What can you do with it and how do you have a conversation with it? And how does it inform your practice? Because, if you inform your practice, I inform my practice and those reading the new iteration, inform their practices, then we have an incredible communal practice to pull from (and maybe that’s another way to imagine the left).

CC: Thank you so much for this conversation. We went longer than expected, but I'm glad we did. And, I'd love to interpret some poems through dance!

SR: I would love that! 

CC: Thank you, Sandra. I hope you have a good rest of your day.

SR: Likewise. I'm so grateful for you, Chloe. 

Sandra Ruiz, author, smiles at the camera on a sunny day. There is green foliage behind her. She is wearing a grey and white striped button-up shirt, a dark blue bandana scarf around her neck, and a braided necklace of natural fibers.

Sandra Ruiz is Sue Divan Professor of Performance Studies in Theatre at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and author of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance and Tears for Tears: Aesthetics in Grief Minor. She is the creator and producer of the Minor Aesthetics Lab.

Book cover with black background the title written in bold red letters, Left Turns in Brown Study. Author’s name, Sandra Ruiz, written in the center in white below a beam of light shining in the darkness. Design by Duke University Press.

Book Summary

In Left Turns in Brown Study Sandra Ruiz offers a poetic-theoretical inquiry into the interlacing forms of study and mourning. Drawing on Black and Brown activism and theory, Ruiz interweaves poetry, memoir, lyrical essay, and vignettes to examine study as an emancipatory practice. Proposing “brown study” as key for understanding how Brownness harbors loss and suffering along with the possibility for more abundant ways of living, Ruiz invites readers to turn left into the sounds, phrases, and principles of anticolonial ways of reading, writing, citing, and listening. In doing so, Ruiz engages with a panoply of hauntings, ghosts, and spectral presences, from deceased teachers, illiterate ancestors, and those lost to unnatural disasters to all those victims of institutional and colonial violence. Study is shared movement and Brownness lives in citation. Conceptual, poetic, and unconventional, this book is crucial for all those who theorize minoritarian literary aesthetics and think through utopia, queer possibility, and the entwinement of forms.