CA+T Premiers New Commissioned Works
Clare Counihan
Camba’s poems engage the challenges of inhabiting multiple identities—especially when some of those identities “illegal.”
LOS ANGELES, CA (Feb 2, 2015) -- The Center for Art and Thought (CA+T), a web-based arts and education nonprofit organization, is honored to announce the publication of a series of original poems by Soultree (Stephanie) Camba. The poems, commissioned by CA+T, are part of the Hidden project and reflect on the gendered and raced experience of “undocufolx,” Camba’s term for the undocumented people of the United States.
Soultree Camba is a multidimensional poet and activist, as well as a “singer, MC, visual art-maker, fighter, healer, and eternal learner.” Born in the Philippines and growing up in the Marshall Islands and United States, they have, in their own words, “struggled with finding a sense of belonging in spaces or with people because of the complexity of experiences and traumas of being an immigrant wom@n from a lower income family prone to various forms of abuse, violence, and privileges.”
Camba’s poems, responding to Hidden’s exploration of the material, bodily, and sensorial processes of concealing the people and traumas of everyday life, engage the challenges of inhabiting multiple identities—especially when some of those identities (“immigrant”) are “illegal.” From the demand for competitive authenticity to the sexual exploitation of undocumented female immigrants to the legacy of childhood abuse shaped by displacement within the law, Camba grapples with the challenges of being and becoming a self, marked by but healing from the assaults of a racist, patriarchal state that withholds citizenship and protection from its invisible children, students, and workers.
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