Reincarnation By Vaid-Menon Summary

Dark Matter is a spoken word duo created by the poets and activists Alok Vaid-Menon and Janani Balasubramanian. The duo is well known for writing and performing their spoken word poetry on topics relating to race and gender identity but they also write about regular things that go on in their lives that can be relatable to any population. In a solo performance done by Vaid-Menon called “Reincarnation,” they address the subject matter of being transgender and the relationship between them and their father. In the performance, Vaid-Menon uses their physical body in order to help emphasize the emotion in the spoken word poetry by using hand motions and facial expressions to not only communicate the feeling verbally but to also show the emotion physically. The physical delivery of a spoken word poem is just as significant as the verbal delivery of the poem because sometimes actions speak louder than words and the poet is able to accentuate the emotion and meaning of the poem.
The poem “Reincarnation” begins with a short narrative that Vaid-Menon gives their audience about their father. They immediately give the audience a bad impression of their father by associating him with being an “evil man.” In the narration, Vaid-Menon essentially compares their father to a person on drugs and from their

In the first half of the poem, Espinoza uses the moon to represent a transgender person because she wants to express the importance of respecting trans people but more specifically concentrating on trans women. Later in the poem, Espinoza writes, “We should be talking about the ways that blood/ is similar to the part of outer space between the earth and the moon/ but we’re busy drawing it instead” (Espinoza 19-21). She is trying to illustrate that trans people are still people because they are just as human as any non-trans