Kaucyila Brooke
Text from dialogue balloons in
Tit for Twat
Madam and Eve in the Garden
Panel 1 : No Text
Panel 2:
Oprah: And it came to pass that she found herself alone in the Garden and she learned that she was called Eve. Eve was curious about her surroundings. To her the garden was a feast of fantastic forms to feed her hunger for knowledge.
Donahue: As she examined her research, Eve beheld that there were some plants that grew in pairs. From this she deduced that there could very possibly be another like her. Eve wished she had someone to help her with her experiments.
Panel 3:
Oprah: Now in another part of the garden lived another woman. And she was known as Madam. Delighted by the look of this land, Madam spent her days mapping all that came before her view. She wanted to understand all space simultaneously and panoramically. Although she had everything, Madam felt an emptiness and began to think something was missing.
Panel 4:
Maury Povitch: It has been said that in the other part of the garden Eve was busy distinguishing one thing from another. She knew that things that looked the same were often different.
Oprah: It occurred to Eve that it was all the little things together that made up the natural world.
Geraldo: It takes all kinds. , she thought to herself, and she passed her time cherishing all the sensations which enveloped her.
Panel 5:
Montel: Madam was instructed by God to name everything around her. She spent her days identifying and categorizing.
Jenny Jones: When Madam looked at the world around her. She knew she was a part of it yet separate.
Geraldo: Strangely enough, all was not as she thought it was at first, for Madam discovered that sometimes when she moved her head a certain way. She had glimpses of another space just beyond her peripheral view.
Panel 6:
Jane: On the twenty eighth day, Eve was taking an afternoon nap in the shade of a great tree. While Eve was sleeping, Madam, being a little sleepy herself , wandered under a canopy of leaves searching out a place to pass the heat of the day.
Geraldo: When Madam saw Eve she knew love. And when Eve awoke, she too knew love, Bother were filled with joy and thanks that their prayers had been answered. Now they knew that theirs was a paradise.
Panel 7:
Sally: some say the garden was a wilderness and others proposed it was protected by a wall from the wilderness. We have heard that others believe it exists in this time and all time which is now.
Some say that it is fact and should be taught as science. While other say it is fiction and should be forsworn as a vestige of an oppressive ideology.
After the break well talk with our special guests, the first couples, Madam and Eve, Adam and Steve. Well answer provocative questions about original sin and biological destiny. Today we will learn about the conditions and challenges that existed in Eden.
Can We Talk?
Panel 1:
Oprah: In the beginning there was Madam and Eve in the Garden and now in our endless search for origin we commence the next section which shall be called Can We Talk?.
As with every beginning, we believe in coherence. We shall use the ever popular outline of a future unity for the erasure of difference that will help achieve our ready-made synthesis.
Sally: Because controversy creates higher ratings, Can We Talk?, also asks if art, literature, history, religion and science limit our ability to recognize the contradictions of the self?
Maury Povitch: If we embrace the discontinuous, will we loose such principles as influence and the exception that we call genius? And without these concepts Can We Talk?
Geraldo: Is it monstrous to suggest that our lumpen bodies have always been stitched together out of a fabric of race, class, gender and sexuality?
Panel 2: no text
Talk Show Hosts:
Donahue: Welcome to our show! Lets have a big hand for the controversial
couple! Yes, its Madam and Eve all the way from Garden of Eden! Tell our studio audience and the people at home...How do you like modern civilization?
Oprah: Audience, We are changing history today here in our studio! Eve is a black lesbian! Lets celebrate our African Womans Heritage and give back to Eve the place of honor in the origins of culture. What an empowering image for our Black Sisters today!!
Audience:
* You cant be the original couple!
* YOU ARE DYKES!
* We want creation to be taught as science in school.
* We wont support your sin as science.
* Its obvious you are a glitch in time & space. You cant be here speaking now.
* Youre fiction not history.
Madam and Eve
M: No one ever listens to us! Do they Eve! All these Crazy rumors!
E: Have you heard the one about my boyfriend? I dont know anyone named Adam!
M: Can you believe it? People here actually think that Adam lives with us!
E: Never mind about Adam!
E: Every time you talk about yourself you talk about us! Really!
M: Well, Yeah! Madam & Eve or M & E is ME. So...We are ME and so are when you are ME!
M: Thank you! This naming project is very complicated. We had not named ourselves yet...
M: D-Y-K-E-S They called us DYKES!
M: I like it! Im a DYKE!
E: Im a DYKE too!
E: As to modern civilization...
We like it! Especially the microphone! This must really be paradise!
M: But we think your history and science stink! How could you leave Eve out like you did?!
M: Eve was framed!
E: As Oprah says, Im a big ol black DYKE. And Oprah is the one sistah you can trust.
E: Im your history keep your science off my body.
M: Im sorry all this happened to you, Eve. They tried to erase you!
E: Its funny how they believe in a fixed identity.
Panel 4 and 5 ( reading left to right across both panels but starting with top right of panel 5)
Adam and Steve in the green room:
A: Steve, What do they want to know? Im not used to talking...up to now the narration has been supplied by the author. Is it our show now?
S: I hope so. It seems that Eden is very popular here and is relevant today! Just suck up to the mic and be yourself!
Starting with Montel and reading across left to right
Montel: today you will see something that will shock and amaze you! Here you will have a front row seat to another first in talk show history! The first ever televised appearance of the original homos!
Audience (Blonde Woman): This is PSYCHO-GENESIS! Two men reproducing without women? No amount of surgery will make it right...It is simply unnatural. They want to give birth to the female within themselves! It is womb-envy!
Montel: Brought to you at great expense from the Garden of Eden, Adam and Steve have joined our studio audience to help us answer the question, Which man is the father?
Audience (Silhouette Man): You freaks are suffering from pseudocysis!!!! Adams rib created Eve. Then it was Eves punishment to bear the pain of childbirth. This is not productive. Reproduction is far below the true purpose of man!
Montel: Good point! Who is the daddy, here? What is the purpose of two genders at all if men can have babies?
Audience ( Black woman in polka dots): This is an act of surrogacy, substitution and preemption. you are not real!! If one or both of you are the father of our babies then we all have little monsters...a mockery of life as we know it.
Adam and Steve on top of talk show panorama
Adam: Who is this mysterious Eve??? Steve, I told you it was going to be difficult to satisfy audience curiosity. It seems we are the curiosities!
Steve: Hmm....Reproduction....it sounds so mechanical. Well, we are creating from our flesh and it .......will be an original individual. Women? Painful birth?
Steve: Look you made Adam cry!
Freaks!
Monsters!
I just think you should consider why.....
your idea of nature provokes you to act so monstrously towards us!
Adam and Steve left to right
Adam: When I saw all these lines I realized that there would be many unforeseen deviations.
Adam: Like my white skinned boy! I was so busy fulfilling our fathers plans...
But I know no that I was lonely before Steve swished into paradise!
Steve: I think it was my tits that mad him look. Nipples...(isnt that what were calling them?)...are so much FUN!
Steve: And then something began to change with Adams belly. We were filled with wonder.
Steve: We knew one another and then we knew we were to be blessed with an - other.
Adam & Steve: We are going to be Daddies! It is the beginning of our family! It is the beginning of you!
Bottom left of panel 4
Geraldo: Is it not the case if men copy women and have babies; and women copy men and have original ideas that then they no longer have a reproductive function? Did you not both imply by your claim to be pregnant, that there is no stable starting point? In fact there is no original - only the copy! Where does that leave us? Our time is up!!!
Panel 6 ( reading clockwise from top left to bottom right)
Eve, it doesnt matter what they say...We are the breakthrough.
The first ones to do it!
Me first!
Me First!
Me Fir
You first!
You firs
The beginning and the end.
The origin of
The origin of the species.
The missing link.
You think youre the missing link!
We are the lost work.
The lost language.
We are the avant garde.
The innovative creative originators.
The original text.
The seminal article
The genuine article.
The last word.
The rupture.
The cutting edge.
The real thing.
We are classic.
Top of the line.
Ahead of our
We were all that before it ever became fashion.
Authentic.
We changed history.
The flagship dykes.
We defined what it is to be dykes!
From middle left to bottom center:
Top of the line?
What line?
What lineage has been started?
Does the source of the spring tell you about the rivers delta?
Are the influence so easily drawn?
Why make human consciousness the original subject of history?
If you believe that we are your origin, can you see your future and transcend your present?
A continuous line from us
interruptions
like today on the talk show, it is difficult to trace teleological trajectories due to inter
