Gypsee Yo

About

Gypsee Yo, born under the name Jonida Beqo is a performance artist from Albania.In her work, she hopes to blur the lines between genres. She excels in dance, theater, storytelling, and is proficient in spoken word and slam poetry. She has an extensive resume, winning titles such as "Southern Queen of Slam" (2008), "Atlanta's Slam Champion" (2006-2009), and is a three-time semi-finalist of "National Poetry Slam" (2006-2008). Gypsee Yo has 3 poetry collections, of which are critically acclaimed. They are "I Do Not Fit Inside my Body" (1998), "The Last Nail" (1999), and "Wheh Life Grows Roots Inside a Suitcase" (2003).

She has toured internationally and has been recognized with the Dell'Arte Diversity Award by the American College Theater Festival and the Kennedy Center in DC for her work in theater (2004). Her work has been featured in both her native country and the US in tv and radio features.

Gypsee Yo currently resides in Atlanta, GA and performs workshops at a number of schools, universities, and churches across the US. She has written and currently performs in her one-woman show titled "Harabel," which premiered at Theatrical Outfit (2013).

The Sea of Unforget

She found me on Craigslist

When I was a two year's foreigner

A social security card

Screaming "Do not hire under the penalty of law"

So I was working as a seamstress for hire

For rich women in Birmingham

With closets the size of my old country

And yet nothing to wear

They liked my silence

The discretion of my hands, the

Thousand yards stare I wore for a face

They taught me how keep my place, they paid me leftovers

Gas money, and last season's shoes, they told me for their kind

Unlike my kind, starvation was a necessary choice

She has the name of old steel money

And golden plaques and lobbies

Of hospitals and libraries all over Birmingham

She wants me to construct her

A white noise replica of her mother's wedding dress

Same size, same color, same petite constricting size

She says she intends to fit

That is shrink fast in time for the wedding when I say

"Miss, I'd be more than happy to build you a gorgeous gown

In your beautiful size, after all

I believe in making clothes for the body, not the other way around"

She turns her back to me, an angry ship

The mast of her spine protruding beneath designer sails of silk

I am blasphemy, and untruth to say she doesn't have to mold

Bones to fit inside the cavern of that dress. To unholy the garment

To shun it, as a cathedral of trimmed women's voices

What would I know

Coming from burning bush

What it means to come from evergreen bristle

Southern girl's been raised on that religion

Duty to be pretty. Worthy to be seen

Believing only in the gospel according to mirrors

They wait for her everywhere, all clean cut and white shirt smile

Like a pack of Latter Day saints always ready to recruit

She wants to know if I'll help her, but all I can hear

Is my own grandmother's voice, the words she said to me

First time to sat me behind a sewing machine

She says "Make beauty, do not destroy it."

But the numbers she writes on my price tag are followed

By too many zeroes to ignore, thus

Begins are ritual

She comes to try the dress often

She asks me to zip her in

My mouth is a hot tub full of dumb bridesmaids

When I ask her to suck in

And when the zipper's teeth still don't meet

She becomes closed doors and running water

I stand in the middle of the room trapped, I swear

I cannot understand how someone can have everything and yet

Be so miserable. I am unfair.

I want to threaten to shred this dress with the fangs of my shears

I want to tell her to shut up. Like she already hasn't

I don't know to tell her about my country

About rape camps. About mothers and daughters in the same room

Same men. Breaking into them again and again. With hammers. And

Wrenches. molding their bones into shame they will wear

Seven years of shattered blood

I want to tell her, two years in this country mean nothing in the sea of unforget

I'm two years of unwords, unpoems, undone

I am a lost, narrative threat, my sewing machine

Cannot stitch like a typewriter

It cannot master the dialect of my longing

The jaws are tight with tension, they were not built for words

The needle is an unreliable tongue

Piercing through my solitude. Through miles and miles lost in translation

I want to tell her

I don't ever want to finish this cursed dress

Because I have seen what shrapnel can do to womens landscapes

But then I think of my own fears

Deportation, an entire semester's tuition, of my own wedding plans

So I sew for her again at night

WHen the radio plays static to kill the unbearable silence

Of a city that once used to fight people with bursting water and unmuzzled dogs

A city ran by her grandparents, their steel furnaces. Their luncheons with the governor

In the morning, when the humidity starts creeping through the screen door

Like the memory of violence neither one of us can escape

I see my grandmother's face folded upon mine in the window pane

And I'm ashamed of myself. What must she think of me?

Getting paid to zip a woman into her own silk cage

The day I handed over the dress, my silhouette

Slipped a murderous quiet to the kitchen door

Once used by her family's black maid

And that is the last time I ever handed a woman

A weapon against herself