My Father’s Name
digital video with sound, 2018
shot & edited by Sid Branca
voiceover text:
I shed my father's name like a snake, and then I ate the skin. held all that silent history in my hands and took it in like it was food, like I was starving, like it was that gourmet shit my father never cared for. and I spent years passing pieces of my father's name out of me in spasms, in waves, picking remnants out from underneath my fingernails even though I keep them short, because anything that sticks around too long becomes a weapon. time means the accumulation of hazards. us in that house, gathering dust. my body that must always be in motion. to be caught not in the midst of transformation is to be caught. mostly now I see my father's name in hospitals, and in the darkest corners of my mother's house where there are many dark corners. the recollection of my childhood has a grime to it, like old electronics. dust, but somehow sticky. static cling gone on too long. now I arrive like my ancestors, bursting out of small boats into new york city with all my hope in newness gestured wildly. but then I walk through a red door and my father's voice emerges from my mouth with all the wrong accents. I enter with a deep whining howl, and I leave with a suitcase full of dust. it has followed me all the way to a new house. a new name could not throw my bloodline off the scent. at least at long last I have stopped casting all these men to play him, and have taken on the role myself. I refuse to believe that if we do not //// /// /////// we become them, but I have already tried to be my mother, and that's when I set the house on fire. I look for the mother in my father's pain, I reach down into the dim memory of his daughter and I pull out a son, an infant wailing into the VHS static of my brother's birth, playing out in the living room at a dinner party. another memory I cannot confirm, another tape I cannot find or play. I imagine myself born a cowboy, and not a loud italian woman from new york. and the older I get the more I see his face in the mirror. but we were both born wrong, rolling up pieces of tape to pull dust off our vocal chords, pulling at our ill-fitting clothes, scratching at the lives we somehow built around ourselves by never throwing anything away. I have dedicated many hours to the fine art of discard, while still picking things out of someone else's garbage, and I rode that bike until the day I moved away. out of the trash everything comes, and into the trash everything returns. no one has to be their father, and that includes our fathers. no one has to be my father, and that includes my father. I will clean my own damn house.