A Smile Split By the Stars, organized by Nasrin Himada, Katherine McKittrick, Sameen Mahboubi, and Cristian Ordóñez, explores the poetry of m. nourbeSe philip as an embodied event. Held last winter at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre in partnership with Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario, and Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography in Toronto, the exhibit was an ode to philip’s work and the ongoing collaborations around her poetry. The four co-curators, who are collaborators in work and life, exploit the limitations of the gallery space, inviting us to challenge how we have come to know geography. Katherine McKittrick is especially interested in how Black geographies are made alterable—experimenting with Black women’s anti-colonial grammars that evolve with and against the racializing forces of space and grammar is a central component of her research practice. Nasrin Himada, who recently published the introduction to Mahmoud Al-Shaer’s book, A Year on the Abyss of Genocide (2025), has exhibited the same ingenuity in curatorial programming at Agnes and writing. A ride-share together from an event around philip’s work was a chance encounter between Katherine and Nasrin, initiating a collaboration that became A Smile Split By Stars. The shows they have collaborated on, stemming from their deep engagement with philip’s work, pose a crucial question: how might a gathering, a conversation, an exhibit amplify the difficult philosophical questions constituted by Black and Palestinian intellectual traditions and struggle? Working within, across, and beyond colonial lexicons towards “revolutionary intention,”¹ this exhibit puts margins into speech and physical space. A Smile Split By the Stars animates spaces between phrases, syllabus, and the physical structure of the poem as requirements to understand and experience m. nourbeSe philip’s work. 

nourbeSe philip’s poem, “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones,” first published in 1988 in the journal Tiger Lily, and a key piece within her celebrated poetry collection, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989), sits on Katherine’s desk at all times. “I’ve been preoccupied with this poem because of the way that it introduces Black femininity. When I read it, as I’ve read it through the years, I didn’t know what to do with it,” Katherine said in a gallery talk last December.² The relative scarcity of critical attention to the specific poem, “Meditations,” is one starting point for the exhibit; though philip’s book-length poem, Zong! (2008), has been widely written about, “Meditations” has received less critical attention. (philip, who grew up in Trinidad and Tobago, is one of the most prolific Caribbean-Canadian writers.) Nasrin, too, has been engaged with philip for many years, beginning with an encounter with Frontiers, and then Zong!, and finally culminating in a friendship between philip and Nasrin.³ Debuting at Gallery 44 in Toronto last Spring, this iteration of A Smile Split By the Stars meditates on how this poem is present in the world, within geography, rhythms, times, spaces. Included with the curation were two reading groups and conversations, focused on engaging theorist Sylvia Wynter’s work on race, geography, and new humanism in relation to ongoing struggle in Gaza and beyond. By framing the exhibit—itself so carefully attuned to the stakes of language and culture in post-plantation contexts—through collectively reading and studying essays written by Palestinian writers who document and theorize unnameable violence, the exhibit particularly asks what the Palestinian struggle requires of us.⁴ Taken together, the co-curators ground knowledge production beyond the limitations to initiate language to which especially Black and Palestinian thinkers have been ascribed. They summon relationality to create unknown possibilities in the process.

The arrangements of A Smile—as an installation, a book-making practice, the large-scale textual renditions, a sound-circuit of an audio mash-up of four poets reading “Mediations,” and an archive that performs a possible vision of the poem—suggest a space of experimentation where ideas are spliced together, tested, and examined. In an essay written by Katherine, which accompanies the poem in the form of a handmade book indexed by nourbeSe philip and Yaniya Lee, she writes of her own experience with philip’s poem: “worry about mad, split, smile, broad, beautiful.” The handmade book is poised to provide us with something that is, if not an outright answer, perhaps an example of how we might respond: “Explain how this poem is not a reclamation of English or a counternarrative that centres us or me or you within existing hierarchies (this is not a poem that understands beautiful blackness as evidence of some kind of superiority) this is not a poem.” In these collaborators’ hands, the acts of insurgent grammar that constitute the poem itself can be thought of as a process of feeling and breathing. 

Projected onto the wall are images of the archive of the poem, which currently resides at philip’s home. These images, captured by Roya DelSol and turned into a slide projection by Sameen Mahboubi, illuminate the depths and character of her ongoing creative process. Radiant and shimmering surfaces of worn type-font paper and voluptuous annotated black-leather notebooks offer a glimpse into philip’s creative method in three dimensions, as we experience the poet’s thinking through post-it notes, to-do lists, and photocopied book pages. The images reveal her loose notes sprawl, early versions typed with annotations on a legal pad, manila folders and notebooks indexed with jottings (which burst with sticky notes and memorabilia), and the spiral-bound spines of her poetry books, such as “Honey in the Window.” Then, typed drafts with handwritten annotations in pencil. Personal notes read like a list: “pg. 27, unusual grammar,” then “28 – the section in black, “40 – silver.” These notes, clueing us into philip’s writing process, anticipate curious readers looking for “silver,” or viewers who feel called to fill in the white spaces with philip’s annotations to vividly imagine her process. With these images, simultaneously cryptic and expositional of the poet herself, the show complicates the portrayal of interiority; they are not interested in simply making philip’s work, or their own process, available to be “known” to the viewer. There is value in ambiguity, in the unfinished. 

More writing is covered by the typed title page: “She Tries Her Tongue.” In one verse of the poem, the writing itself blurred in the image, philip’s type-font reads: “Where sudden edges meet/ images blur/ bleed/ into each other/ as if the fixer didn’t quite work.” These lines, though shown for a few seconds, reveal their staying power. Sudden edges meet; philip’s poetry transforms space as we move within it, read and listen. The edges are not limiting, but unending, offering moments to reflect upon our own boundaries. Scholar Muna Dahir, who has helped sort and review philip’s archive, wrote in the exhibition text: “Throughout philip’s journal, a refrain appears and reappears: ‘I meet God in my poetry.’ Each draft becomes a kind of devotion, each revision a testimony of beauty made to the measure of her own voice.” Emphasized by the proliferation of the pages and the capaciousness of her revisions, A Smile Split By the Stars stages an archival intervention, as well as a new encounter by reactivating excerpts from philip’s archive, calling in viewers who would find the words, again and again, “-moon lip colour,” yet are unable to retrieve the lines fully on the page.

In the installation of the poem, words seem to float on the wall. The installation-as-artifact could be called pages or provocations: single letters disperse and drift in the air of the page, resembling stars constellating galactic space. Elsewhere, the unitary shape of a sentence is cleaved apart, as if the margin of the paper itself is a tool to cut the words so as to generate new ones. At times, these words resemble discrete sounds more than contiguous words: “lip/ colour,” or “full” separated from “moon.” Elsewhere still, there emerges the solitary letter ‘I’, which appears like a striking line floating just beyond the middle of the page. It becomes —all at once—a meditation on geometry, geography, and an experiment with the elements of boundlessness, finitude, and completion. Language, here, is not a discrete representation. There is no explicit call for revolutionary undoing. Rather, language itself is subject to unrest.

The installation, composed of 300 sheets of paper—these sheets are themselves “take aways” for viewers to retrieve— varying in texture and weight, offers the plain act of retrieving a layer of the poem. The striking scale envelops the viewer in the fragmentary pieces of words, swelling the experience of reading and experiencing the language. The time to feel the poem arrives: here, the installation, which viewers can retrieve and bring home in the form of a sheet, elicits them to contend with the weight of the language they know and are drawn to. Here, one takes part in the disassembling of language and its reassembly, animating the poem’s perpetuating power. That the raw number of sheets in the room changes as visitors engage begs us to consider the connectedness in and beyond the room. These layers represent the usefulness of the un-translatable or incommensurable; they can also represent the constant negotiation of language and geographic landscape in Black women’s experimental poetry. The active work against colonial grammar is an interrupted completion of the poem, transformed by the installation materials. Language, here, articulates itself as a geometric form, a willful visual shape. This serves as a reminder that a word, a phrase, a sentence may ultimately abandon the writer and speaker to become the reader’s own. More than this: that shape may become the very thing that renders legibility ineffective, as if exerting pressure on the violence undergirding coherence and linguistic representation. Here, each print is shown without a margin, making it so that the lines of poetry seem to be extensions of the frame. What emerges are the twinned gestures of undoing and creation—reifying the attention to power, as well as symbolic and real associations, that shift depending on who’s holding and listening.

Along with these visual elements, A Smile By Stars includes remixed and mashed up audio components, allowing for different considerations of the sonic beyond the terms dictated by the book, the page, and the written word. Katherine commissioned four creatives to read the poem—Juliane Okot Bitek, Trish Salah, Cora Gilroy-Ware, and Chloe Savoie-Bernard—as well as a five-track that features the four creatives and philip. Rather than simply recreating the poem, the mash-up is not defined by the overlapping of sound but rather by the vastness of inner life beyond public demonstrations. The poem, animated by a synthesizer-heavy audio track, breathes—when Chloe, one of the readers, doesn’t breathe between lines, it is as if the audio becomes breath itself. The bass runs riot within and beyond the white gallery walls. It is hypnotic and meditative against the noticeable and intentional whiteness of the space. The sound causes a distortion, almost a betrayal to the decidedly black-and-white lines on the wall. We don’t just hear the sounds; they move our bodies. The sonic exertion gives the impression of a chorus being assembled, a sound expanding and moving in preparation for the work of building something much larger. Thus, in following philip’s insistence that our breath and space between words trouble colonial lexicon, the multimodal show intensifies philip’s anti-colonial grammar. The sonic gives multiplicity to her live delivery, like the body it comes from. 

Therefore, sound itself is not only part of the narrative, but becomes engaged as an active agent and collaborator. Sound changes the room and how viewers are invited into it. The loop continues again and again, awakening new desires and experiences of having a body in space, asking: how does the exhibit create space for open-ended inquiry, for newfound connections with philip’s poem—which then make the girl with the flying cheek bones present in the poem and in the room — and the voices that touch us?  “When I heard Juliane read the poem, it changed the poem for me,” Katherine shared. The reading goes beyond polyvocality; rather, the re-readings insist on changing the meaning of the poem itself, calling forth how we understand language. This conceptual hum and sonic mix reveals an investment in the expansive and intergenerational scope of the poem. This proliferates the directive of sorts: Black feminist scholars have taught us that the racializing technologies can be cagey, shifting or reversing in the midst of struggle. The show requires us to slow down while we study what philip’s poetry means. It also requires us to remain on our toes, to focus on the perspective of struggle. The sonic layers work to counteract the spectacularity of the girl. Instead, layers invite an openness that lives beyond. Loss and incompletion are engaged in ways that are more patient and elastic, accepted as occasions for pause and reflection, without needing to be “fixed” or entirely filled in.

A Smile Split By the Stars: is there another way to describe a smile undergirded by violence?  But to assume only violence exists is to enter the space with preconceived notions, ones that philip and the curators attempt to work beyond. Race is not so easily registered in “Meditations.” Instead, the patterns and layers underscore our own spatial and felt relationship with the way that Black women have been telling different stories of space and language. What happens if readers are tasked with suspending their own understandings of race and representation? “In whose language am I (if not in yours)” repeats, as if asking the viewer to become aware of their own body as they read. Viewers begin to sense that race is not so easily knowable or categorizable. However, race is never mentioned—the narrative avoids familiar racial references, and thus Blackness is critically both there and not there. Yes, there are cues that one might think of as invariably racially coded: “woman with the behind that drives men mad,” for instance, referencing the sexualization of Black women’s bodies. Yet, the poem confronts what is unsayable and what is delimited by language. The exhibit becomes an invitation to find what philip points to as “where sudden edges meet”—rearranging layers until the reader comes along to reorient themselves in order to co-create the story.

While experimentation is at the core, the collaboration is ultimately a method of caretaking. Culminating years of work, Cristian Ordóñez meticulously took out a ruler to spatialize lines of “Meditations” on the wall; Muna Dahir and philip spent hours together at the poet’s house sorting through her archives, which would be photographed by DelSol with the support of McKittrick, Mahboubi, Dahir, and Ordóñez (it was collectively decided upon what to photograph, and then Nasrin, Katherine, and philip re-examined hundreds of images for final selection to be projected on the wall); Katherine commissioned four poets to read the poem, alchemizing each narration with music. The collective labor of reaching out to publishers to print hundreds of sheets of paper for the installation, each sheet the same dimension but different weights and thickness; the writing of grant applications and negotiating funding to maintain practices of Black women’s knowledge-keeping and making practices; the careful selecting of readings for group discussions; the invitations to interlocutors to convene and read Sylvia Wynter and Palestinian writers in the same room together. The image of the collaborators, holding each stage of the process, going through the poet’s archive over and over to decide which frame would enter the installation, not only emphasizes the various weights of the take-away sheets of papers viewers are able to leave with, but also invites deep connotations of care work and ingenuity. 

The exhibit asks: how do we employ improvisation and generosity with each other, even when the act of generosity is animated by limitations? In her book, Dear Science, McKittrick aptly writes of the political undergirding of collaboration: “Friendship is hard freedom. Maybe friendships effectuate consciousness and liberation and possibility.” She writes: “maybe [Black life is], in the words of Aimé Césaire, ‘poetically beautiful,’ and therefore outside of the terms of what they think we are.”⁵ This project is a reminder that so much of collaborative creative traditions and insurgent work is a dance between creativity and recuperative care. The deliberately collaborative curation of philip’s poem papers teaches us that the act of assembling an exhibit—the poem as the artist—is itself a mode of ongoing insurgent cultural production, yielding bountiful intellectual and creative outcomes. 

Endnotes

¹ Katherine McKittrick, Curatorial Talk, A Smile Split By The Stars, Question and Answer by Muna Dahir, Modern Fuel Art Gallery, December 4, 2025.

² Katherine McKittrick, Curatorial Talk, A Smile Split By The Stars, Question and Answer by Muna Dahir, Modern Fuel Art Gallery, December 4, 2025.

³ Himada, Nasrin. “For Many Returns.” Contemporary, January 21, 2018. https://contemptorary.org/for-many-returns/

⁴ These reading groups “Reading Through and With Sylvia Wynter” were facilitated by Nasrin Himada and Katherine McKittrick. They took place on  December 1, 2025 in Toronto and January 29, 2026 in Kingston.

⁵ McKittrick, Katherine. Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. 74.