death on the mississippi

Excerpt from ‘Towards A Queer Theatre’

I knew before we even began our six month journey down the river that the Mississippi was dying. I did not understand why. Like many, I’d assumed pollution was the culprit, but the more people I talked to, the more it became abundantly clear that it is not pollution killing that great river: it is all our attempts to control it. By entrapping the Mississippi in a lock and dam system, the river is kept at a depth of at least 9 feet all year round to allow for barge transport, profoundly disrupting the natural ebb and flow of the Mississippi’s ecosystem. There were no longer times when the river could reach a low point, which the flora and fauna of the river system had evolved over millennia to need. 

The premise of our tragicomedy was that “The Mississippi will resist all attempts to control it. Great suffering has come and will come from such attempts.” The characters in our show were vagabonds of the river who had died because they lived outside of the norm of society. What we posited in our show is that the root of what killed them and what is killing the river are the same and suddenly, after six months of travel surrounded by toxic waters, passionate audiences, and more near death experiences than I’d ever imagined, I began to understand myself and the world around me in a new way. It was always about control. Which meant that resistance meant looking to the wild.