RESISTING PALINDROMES/BIO
Bio
Annah Anti-Palindrome is a bay area based Optical Sound-Smith, writer, and Queer/Femme antagonist who hails from the working-class craters at the base of the Sierra Foothills. Annah performs using a variety of different mediums including a Line 6 (DL4) looping system, kitchen utensils, gas-masks, raw eggs, blood pressure cuffs, found objects, her body (mostly her throat), and more!
Annah is the co-editor of 1-2-3 Punch: How Misogyny Hurts Queer Communities, a curator for the East Bay’s monthly event, Culture Fuck!, and a collective member of Deviant Type Press (www.devianttype.net). Her written work has also been published in Transfer literary magazine, Buckets Kicked: Writings on Radical Grief, and in the QZAP (Queer Zine Archive Project) archives. She is currently finishing her first novel, Resisting Palindromes (a poem).
Annah’s music has been featured in the following films
- CounterRevolutionary, by Vanessa Lewis/JDX: http://www.qwocmap.org/
festival2011/sched_dir.htm - Otherwise, by Sunny Drake: http://www.sunnydrake.com/#!__
otherwise - Queer Farmer Film Project, by Jonah Mossberg: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yJpw0IOaZ
- In and out of the body Trailer, by Moe Lionel: http://vimeo.com/32244687
- The Girl with Magic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS0R8QITouw
Other project involvements
- Theater of Irregular Desire, Re/Generator Proj: http://www.goldduststudio.com/
desireresume - The Nature of Nomenclature: http://www.thequeerist.com/
events/the-nature-of- nomenclature-an-exploration- of-re-naming-within-queer- communities - The Sound Stike (Musicians Against SB-1070): http://thesoundstrike.info/about-the-sound-strike/artists/
- Ladies Rock Camp, Oakland: http://www.bayareagirlsrockcamp.org/pages/lrc.html
- The Poetic Liberation Collective: http://www.facebook.com/pages/
Poetic-Liberation-Collective/ 293778674740?sk=info - Spontaneous Combustion, SF: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/
spontaneous-combustion1 - Loopers Delight: http://www.loopers-delight.
com/cgi-bin/profiles.cgi?step= view_profile&id=011910051003 - John Cage SoundArt Proj.: http://www.artreview.com/
forum/topics/external-shows- events?groupUrl= humanemotionproject2009&xg_ source=activity&groupId= 1474022%3AGroup%3A397155&id= 1474022%3ATopic%3A1014573& page=5* - Vindicated Violence: http://www.flickr.com/photos/65113658@N05/6790010858/
Resisting Palindromes
Palindrome: a word, number, sentence, verse, or double-stranded sequence of DNA that reads the same backward and forward (ex: Anna, see bees, see bees Anna.) The term is derived from the Greek root “palin dromo,” which means “running back again,” “a recurrence,” or “a revolving cycle.”
My mother died in 2007 from a morphine overdose, at which point I changed the spelling of my name from Anna, to Annah. This was a cathartic shift for me— a shift which symbolically allowed me to resist the life of being a Palindrome.
We often reproduce the violent legacies that have been transmitted to us through the unspoken & overarching narratives of our childhoods. While the patterns we learn may define us, we are also defined by our processes of unpacking, analyzing and defying those legacies as well. The concept of Resisting Palindromes has held space for me to challenge the stagnancy I associate with identifying by a given-name I no longer relate to (as I have transformed in drastic ways since it was first assigned to me), and it also reminds me of the commitment I’ve made to myself, to consciously resist participating in the destructive patterns I’ve learned over time.
So, if a palindromic name exists as a constrained series of vowels and consonants that preserve an identity via a repetitious, backward/forward pattern, the only way I’ve found to disrupt this cycle and challenge my assumed predisposition, is to add another letter. anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna anna(h) annah. So to those of you who’ve so curiously asked over the years, “Why resist palindromes?” please know that it is not a request of those around me, but more a personal vendetta neatly folded up into a mouthful: a daily mantra meant to preserve my integrity— To keep me Inhabited.

