Non-Executive
a prose poem in response to ‘The Plantation Plot’
This is a winning entry from the sixth Fresh Take 2025 writing contest. For the full list of winners and prizes, click here.
A&M’s Creative Edit is where we publish a creative response to an ongoing exhibition or display every month. These pieces can take a range of forms, from ekphrasis, to poetry, microfiction, creative nonfiction and more.
Noara Quintana, Evenings Of Water And Dense Forest, 2021, exhibition view in The Plantation Plot (2025), at ILHAM Gallery, Kuala Lumpur. Image courtesy of ILHAM Gallery.
It is quiet. Somewhere there is grain on the floor under a spotlight. Curation is also a harvest. What has been gathered, what has been abandoned, what has been left outside the frame. I recall rows of palms, the bunches brown and red, the air thick with sweat, the sun dazzling and nauseating and murderous. A plantation doesn’t end at the highway. Its work stretches far beyond the span of its human bodies. Now the laughter of human voices trails from behind. I don't want to say that the polished floors are pristine and purposeless but I wonder—where are all the men and women who still, today, rise before dawn to bend their bodies into rhythms of wages and labour, wage, labour. There is always more than just heat. Racism is a crueler climate. One thing I know about estates is prayer. There is cloth, there is paper, there is light. The fields appear pastoral, abstracted. More green in more frames. I imagine instead the vertiginous ache of work without reprieve. But human bodies are only scenery. One thing I know about estates is prayer. May our lords feel, just once, the fever they’ve made of our days. In the murmur between walls, the incantatory repetition of words attempts to summon a history still alive. Then again, what is the boldest stroke I can make? To reach. To refuse. I don’t believe art is powerless. But to live only in its mirror is to mistake reflection for touch.
