PIVOT

 

PIVOT, published by HELA Press, is an experimental, book-length poem exploring the profound act of turning—of changing one’s ways, direction, and perspective—with the Haitian Revolution as its cornerstone. It moves beyond historical narrative, scrutinising this epochal event through its critical junctures of rupture and radical reorientation. Using minimalist abstractions of language, Mason Jordan delves into the visceral and conceptual mechanics of turning: a turning away from colonial subjugation, and a turning towards new vocabularies of freedom. PIVOT examines international revolt, revolutionary fervor, and relation in the aftermath of transatlantic enslavement and European colonialism. Mason Jordan’s inquiry is about such future that would transcend the workings of violence, exclusion, and status quo—and about such language that would allow us to speak the world into existence anew, all over again.

 

In Mason Jordan’s voice, expressions of spoken word, performance art, and oral histories come together to foster relations and communality. Language is employed in PIVOT to exceed describing reality, as the poem itself becomes space for reality’s effective transformation. Repetitive and rhythmic, its meanings shifting continually, and the text draws its audience into a shared experience of close listening and imagining new, different ways of being together.