Tricia Hersey
speaker
156 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Tricia Hersey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Trisha, welcome. Oh my goodness. Thank you. I love that good bio read. It's very much like black church, you know, in the black church when the visiting reverend comes and they sit and they read his amazing bio or her bio and the person sits there and they just kind of like take it in. I did that. You did that. Yeah. You're like, OK, thank you. That's beautiful. Thank you.
I'm excited to talk with you guys.
Yes, you got it. I'm so glad you... Thank you, sister. Yes, it is. Thank you. Because it is deep work. It is. And it also... When I think about the work and me being a performance artist and theater artist, I really did play up the idea of a nap ministry. And like it is in a lot of ways, it's ironic. And I did try to play with the idea of a persona. Like I call myself the nap bishop.
So it does have this irreverent. playfulness, in your face, guerrilla art, performance ritual vibe to it. And so I lead people in to be like, oh, this is about the nap. This is about naps. Everybody wants to sleep. And this is beautiful, soft nap. And then they get there and I'm ranting about white supremacy and capitalism and trying to burn down both systems. So I'm like, yeah.
Have a pillow and then here's your flamethrower to like burn these systems down so we can all live and be free, you know? So I love that it is surprising, the mystery of that. That's what makes it really centered in an art practice.
Can you explain that? Absolutely. Yeah, I think a lot of this work, all of this work is really from a historical lens. You know, I was an archivist in seminary. So when I was in seminary, I was working in the archives on campus at Emory University and
And so I'm really always been a student of history, a student of culture and trying to figure out and look at things from the lens that it should be looked at, which is a lens of pulling back the veils and moving things back and seeing what's happening. And a lot of people don't know. That capitalism was created on plantations, that it comes right out of the chattel slave system.
And they're like, you say down with capitalism and capitalism is trying to kill us. And this economic system that we're living under that's killing all of us and the planet itself. Also, the planet is suffering because of it. They don't trace the roots back to the history of this idea of looking at a body.
As a machine, as looking at a human body as not being divine, as seeing us all as a tool for the production of wealth, for profit over people. And so when you bring that back and you start to begin to really study the history of what happened on plantations, the history of the Middle Passage, transatlantic slave trade. The way this entire culture was built on the backs of black and native people.
Then people are like, hmm, OK, that does sound super violent and super horrible. But we are all a part of it because we're all living in a system that moves like that. And so the system that I look at when I think about grind culture, I say. It's the same energy, the same ideology that was on those plantations. Work all the time. Have four or five jobs, plus a side hustle.
Have your hobbies as a way to make money. Never rest. Never... It's the same energy that looked at human beings, my ancestors, as human machines who worked 20 hours a day on plantations, who saw this unsustainable pace of machine-level production. It's still happening here in our corporations and in our world right now.
And then you look at white supremacy, this ideology, this systematic idea of a hierarchy on race. When you look at white supremacy being so violent and using bodies for centuries as tools of evil, like that's all white supremacy is looking at. It's devaluing our divinity. It's making... Everyone look at each other as not the divine miracles that we are.
It's really caused a true brainwashing and spiritual deficiency in all of us to be under a system like white supremacy. So you blend those things together and you get grind coach. You get this idea of a body not being able to be owned by ourselves. Like I say a lot. I don't belong to capitalism. I don't belong to grind culture and I don't belong to white supremacy. You can't have me.
I'm not going to be the one you're going to get. And so because of that, I'm resting. I'm using rest as a vehicle to disrupt it, to disturb that idea, to push back. And so it really centers itself in history. I speak so much about
the historical lens of Harriet Tubman, of the maroons of North America, my ancestors who were jumping off slave ships and leaving plantations and hiding out in caves for 15 years, not fugitives, not runaways. They never were part of the system. They just never were. They were like in the system, what's happening around them, but they marooned and said, I'm not a part of it.
To be in a world, but not of it. And so when I think about that, those are the deep, between what capitalism was doing. And when you do more research around slavery, plantation labor, read slave narratives, learn about what was happening. I mean, it's unimaginable brutality. It's unimaginable violence. ideas that you would look at a divine body like that.
And so that's where the idea of reclaiming our bodies as our own, reclaiming our spirits to not be connected to a system that sees us like that. And so I refuse to donate my body to the system any longer. So I'm resting.
Like it is a direct line. Absolutely. We just need to make the connections. And I believe we can't make the connections for a lot of reasons. But one of the reasons is that we're exhausted out of our minds because And when you're exhausted and when you're on the grind and when you're trying to keep up with this unsustainable pace, there is no time to sit and make connections.
So when I started resting, when I first started the organization, I just started personally experimenting with rest. Like I would go to school on campus and I would just sleep on the quad all day. It became a moment where it was like, let the chips fall where they may. And I'm just going to come to school, get the attendance credit. But I'm dying from exhaustion right now.
And the more I started to do that, the more things made sense with my research. Things made sense with my life. I've started getting better grades. I can make connections between what I was seeing and what I was feeling, what I was doing, like this disembodied experience. disconnection that happens in our bodies. People think not resting is just, oh, I'll get to it later.
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