Adra Raine
24 July 2014
Dear Djamilaa,
Dear adopted sister. We first met in the orphanage. We grew up together in our adopted cities, in Southern California, Durham, North Carolina, China, Jamaica, Bandiaga. Living close to and distant from one another in time and space, we sought our homeland, our Ethiopia, our Namesake, the Origin of the Word, the Well of Silence[1]--the Creaking of the Word: the name the Dogon give their weaving block,[2] and the name N. gives his symposium talk, as he, as I, wonder what threads to pursue. I am writing to you with many threads in my hands; the letter is my weaving block. Like N., “The sense I get from this is that a) we can’t help but be involved in fabrication, b) a case can be made for leaving loose ends loose, and c) we find ourselves caught in a rickety confession no matter what.”[3]
My rickety confession. I first dreamed of you in another of our adopted cities, Orono, Maine: an inchoate memory now lucid--your music leading, and following, my staggered micro-beating, my stumbling dance through From a Broken Bottle.[4] I was a student in that city, and my professor at the university, Dave Kress, had written about Nate Mackey’s work for his dissertation at Penn State, and had given me a copy of an article he had published on Djbot Baghostus’s Run, an article which I read with fascination, lost from the very start, confounded at the title of its subject, how to pronounce “Djbot.” I understood very little, regarded it as enigmatic message in a bottle, to be deciphered at a later time. Later time arrived, having traced a wide circle, as if in my first encounter my back was to the text (reading with eyes in the back of my head), this time, a counter-clockwise spin landed me facing forward.
When now (with eyes in front of my head) I read Djbot Baghostus’s Run, I am struck--by an attack of sorts--by N.’s account of you receiving a letter addressed “Dear Dja,” sent by DB, which you thought might be “Djarred Bottle,” the band now going by the name Flaunted Fifth. Do you recall?
Djamilaa couldn’t help noticing that throughout the letter every word which normally begins with a “j” had a “d” added in front. It occurred to her that the
“D” in the signature “DB” at the end of the letter might well have taken the place of a “J.” She couldn’t help thinking that “‘DB” might be short for
“Djarred Bottle.” It was this which had brought her to the window. […] Djamilaa had no way of knowing however, that in the dream Flaunted Fifth was
caught up in the “j” in her nickname [“Dja”] was silent, that the dream she too was caught up in, dim as it was, was a dream of Dahomean “Da,” the
orphaned embrace animating their pursuit of an absent hand, an absent father’s absentminded caress.[5]
When I read this passage now, the eyes in the back of my head itch. The sensation returns me to a memory of sitting at my desk in Orono, wondering about how to say, see, and hear “Djbot,” puzzling at the enigmatic title of a work that I sensed would be important to me somehow, at some point. Back-of-the-head eyes recall to forward-facing eyes what they intuitively “understood,” as a feeling. “This is poetry as illumination,” I hear Audre Lorde whisper over my shoulder, “for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are--until the poem--nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”[6] “Djbot” felt right to me.[7]
Djarred Bottle; Jarred Bottle; Djbot Baghostus (who runs with Djeannine); B’Loon; Djbouche, Dredji; Didj; et al: the proliferation of names are more, or less, than alter-egos in the story-within-the-story, or dream-within-a-dream, that N. calls his “after-the-fact lecture/libretto from the symposium ‘Locus and Locomotivity in Postcontemporary Music.’” I feel compelled to remind myself that the sound of the weaving block, its rickety frame, sounds the bass note[8] over which I speak of these Namesake origins. The weaving block is spinning out threads that fold over, onto, and into one another. “Dj” is a loose end that I am leaving loose.
I am reminded of your sleepwalk to the outskirts of Elysian Park,[9] led by music whose source you sought, and N’s reflection on it: “As I’ve asked before, is there a calm one doesn’t come to question? Is there, that is, a structure that’s anything but an after-the-fact heuristic seed, a misleading, misconceptual sleep inside which to walk is to begin to wake up? Like it or not, we’re marked by whatever window we look through.”[10] I am looking through the window across my desk in Orono.
Fives years later, I was asked by Joe if I’d like to write about Nate Mackey’s work. I said, Yes, but realized I’d have to “speak thru rather than speak about” the work.”[11] It took me some time to identify who I was speaking to. But now I’m sure it is you.
Yours,
A
27 July 2014
Dear Djamilaa,
As Sun Ra warns: “Are you thinking of metaphysics / alone? / Well, don’t.”[12]
I’ve been thinking with friends a lot lately about revolutionary struggle, improvisatory living, and collectivity: ways of being that are closely tied to one another. I’ve been thinking about these ways of being in terms of how I navigate being a woman in a U.S. university; and, in relation to my position, how I study, how I read, how I teach, how I write. Last night I was hanging out with Mike and Navid. We were listening to Shabazz Palaces’ new album, while I was reading Audre Lorde’s poetry and prose. I came to “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” considered skipping it since I’ve read it many times before. Thought better (eyes in the back of my head twitching) and read it again. And re-read it. And read it again. My eyes growing wider each time, an increasingly irrepressible laughter gathering in my chest, rising to my face; every so often, I had to snap my fingers, at one and the same time expressing my appreciation of what Lorde had just said, and joining the beat of Shabazz Palaces, whose music sounded below my reading, like an interstellar marching band, cheering and chiding Lorde and me on, a 21st century Sun Ra Arkestra, broadcasting from/to Saturn, which is where we were, surround sound speakers maximizing Shabazz Palaces’ surround sound. I all but burst when I read:
But as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn
more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge, and therefore, lasting action comes.
At this point in time, I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches so necessary for survival, and we
come closest to this combination in our poetry. I speak here of poetry as the revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often,
the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.
[...]
The white fathers told us: I think therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us--the poet--whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.
Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom.[13]
When the album ended, I announced that I had something to share, gathered Mike and Navid to listen to Lorde’s essay in full. We spent the rest of the
night talking about it.
Nearly forty years after Lorde wrote “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” to write from our feelings remains a risk. But Lorde buoys my confidence that drawing on those hidden sources of our power to make poetry is what makes working with language an integral part of revolutionary struggle. “Distillation of experience,” including, or especially, dreams and feelings, are sources of knowledge from which we draw in order to speak our woman’s voice, to express ecriture feminine, to make language for that which no words have been spoken, though the words are thriving in the hidden (to be protected) reservoir of our experience. Protected, yes, Lorde chimes in: “They become a safehouse for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.” I am reminded of The Kurdistan Women’s Liberation Movement’s manifesto I’ve been reading, as they continue to be under siege: “the liberation of society is based on the liberation of women.”[14]The Free Women’s Army not only leads guerilla warfare, but social revolution as well, defeating patriarchal ideology, changing minds, changing ways of life. Isn’t this poetic revolution? Lorde reminds us that the liberation of women’s voices takes part in the liberation of women, takes part in the liberation of society: language is a real site of struggle, a necessary component of social and political revolution.
Need one be reminded? I guess a side-thought pricks at me (a thorn in my side): Language can be the subject of much anxiety and apprehension in the discourses in which I find myself a traveler, at locations in both the university and the “poetry world.” I’m pricked by a question that arises at these sites: Is language irreparably infected with ideology? But is this a question I take seriously? Doesn’t this line of inquiry lead, marchingly, to “the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean--in order to cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight?” Don’t these anxieties over language--worry over its subsumption into the circulation of capital, its inevitable or even essential reification, the idea that the cut of language alienates us from the Real--all similarly lead to dystopian “word play” that suggests there is no way out of ideology, so the best we can do with words is expose the disease, the limit, the end? I can’t help but laugh at this with Cixous: We “must … get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word ‘silence,’ the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word ‘impossible’ and writes it as ‘the end.’”[15] I’ve never understood all these theories of “the end” of things, circulating so widely these days: the end of history, the end of culture, the end of the human, and so forth. When people explain it to me, I understand the words, but it just doesn’t click. The end of whose history? whose culture? whose human? In any case, “the end” is not “the out” we’re after[16]: We inaugurate the impossible; we voice silence. Instead of the end, Jarred Bottle is “there to announce that the creaking of the word, the rickety, crackpot word, [is] at the root of all music, its motivating base.”[17]I recall, as Jarred Bottle does during his time in jail, that, in the prison house of language or not, possibly I am here to sing,[18] and “under the circumstances, to speak and to sing [are] the same.”[19]
The power of women’s voices to affect change leads me to your and Aunt Nancy’s “Halve Not, Will Travel” intervention in the band’s search for a drummer. Beating out recognition and refusal on the Kashmiri not drums, asserting a feminine voice and silence on the Iranian nay flute, your performance--N. calls it “an arraignment, a charge of inequality, a threat of secession[20]--is instructive. Three men and two women in the band, and all the drummers who had auditioned for the spot so far had been men. It’s amusing how the men had to be shocked into this recognition. But clearly you and Aunt Nancy thought/felt long and hard (or easy) about how to speak your distillation of experience as women in the band, in the world, in your bodies.
Aunt Nancy, on the nay, made a sound “semisung, semispoken, assertive yet semiwept (as though tears were the fluid medium whereby speech kept in touch with song).”[21] The weeping of tears is at once an expression of feeling, body, speech, and song. Words transmitted through the fluid medium of tears strikes me as a conception of mediation as transport--speech riding the currents of those deep reservoirs of feeling (song)--that stands in otherwise distinction to mediation as ideological entrapment. The names of the instruments you play--not and nay--suggests bodies that give voice to refusal. But your “no” does not speak negation, it asserts otherwise, otherhow.[22] An assertion backed by tears, it points “outward as well as in.”[23]
What song, speech, and weeping have to do with refusal, with not and nay, brings to mind Anne Boyer’s work, which I’ve been reading a lot of recently since taking a poetry workshop with her this summer. She has this great essay that I think hits on much of what I’m thinking about your and Aunt Nancy’s performance that day. The essay is made entirely of questions, which is itself a defiant gesture. I remember a male professor in his office one day advising me on my writing: Rhetorical questions are a sign of weakness, and more often used by women scholars. I wish I’d had Boyer’s essay with me that day, though I suspect he’d only have rolled his eyes, which I find more amusing than frustrating. I’ll show you a part of it that resonates with thoughts that you, Aunt Nancy, Audre Lorde, Jarred Bottle are leading me toward:
What is the direct trial that is today? [...] Is it that in our noises, our complaints, our indictments, our critiques, our narratives, our tears, our questions, a
language that is the existent but unheard mostly or heard only as the small roar of doing-as-planned, as trying-our-best, as slyly-resisting, the undoing
just enough, is it to make of our materials what remains a secret at literature, what remains as a code in unattraction, to make of these materials what
repulses and shudders off hands that would grasp it and pull it into circulation, so that what might in circulation poison the very circulation, what might
be the poison shirt that the terrible yes wears and adulterates itself by?
I hear Boyer here expressing exasperated anger alongside enduring resilience, both of which must be carried in the course of flight that our commitment to refusal lifts us into, the feeling that labors behind the insight that “[p]oetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” In other words, poetry must have a positive relation to language at the same time that it must refuse what is oppressive in its existing forms of deployment.
Poetry flies on the turbulent winds of refusal. Poetry for Boyer escapes the circulation of capital--capital as money, as labor, as bodies, as language--by repulsing the hands that would grasp it. Similarly, music for Jarred Bottle escapes “the shifting terms of incarceration”[24] and “minstrel derogation”[25] by tearing language, chopping it up.[26] In the end, Jarred Bottle’s speech at the jail is “comprised almost wholly of made-up words.” Creolization comes to mind as an example of refusal’s creativity, speech keeping in touch with song through the fluid medium of tears, refusal producing language that stretches toward “an otherwise inconceivable out.”[27] (“Jarred Bottle’s lecture took him back to his adopted boyhood in Jamaica...”[28]) The ‘no’ in Boyer’s essay produces for me a riff on creolization, when she asks:
Is it to keep this smallest record of how each ‘no’ to each question proliferates inside of capital’s terrible and glittering yes, inside capital’s bloodless
and touchless yes, to keep a record of the proliferation’s explanation, to document the proliferation’s demonstrations, to learn fully each lesson of
proliferation, to study that the no proliferating and circulating through the terrible yes is also to hear a lecture on the nature of the no, of who says it, the way
the no and yes counter, what is weak about the no, what is weak about the yes, what is strong about both, too, and showing something of the weakness of
the no and the yes also is it to study carefully and with great determination, with rigour and seriousness, the way any ‘no’ must be backed with the
movement and force and accumulation of bodies?
I am struck by the force with which we are brought to the root presence of the body at the end of this passage, to the flesh of our bodies that are refusing. Halve not. I’m thinking of the presence of your and Aunt Nancy’s bodies in your intervention, and obviously: how else could you make “your point?” But also the absence your presence brings light to. You show how the body can assert itself without being captured. I am thinking, for example, of the way that you and Aunt Nancy appear at the audition dressed in identical white cotton outfits, and upon handing out the business cards that announce “Halve Not, Will Travel,” you appear momentarily to the men to be dressed in black cowboy suits, guns holstered. The men rub their eyes, and the vision dissolves.[29] That your cowboy defiance could only be perceived by the men as an apparition speaks I think to the body’s defiance of capture. Just as silence and refusal underly speech’s positive assertion, absence supports the body’s presence. N. describes Aunt Nancy’s playing on the nay as carrying a theme of emptiness[30] that your playing on the not aids, as “one coudn’t help but now know that the not’s clay was a thin crust of nothingness which, like Aunt Nancy’s nay, echoed and implicated one’s own.” The force of the body’s refusal as emptiness expresses how, at the same time, the music is confidently and powerfully assertive. The flip-side perhaps of “the way any ‘no’ must be backed with the movement and force and accumulation of bodies.”
But N.’s reflection chides me:
There was a sense, of course, in which the music’s polemic and its metaphysical insistence were at cross-purposes with one another. If ultimately emptiness
and absence reigned, one had reason to ask, on what grounds did one critique and propose an alternative to the brunt exclusion and the sense of
social nothingness one suffered from? [...] It was a question, however, which Aunt Nancy and Djamilaa’s contestatory recital casually and with
infinite confidence and calm, simply brushed aside. It proposed a quandary they refused to inhabit or be inhibited by. [...] ‘No such problem,’
the music objected, outmaneuvering the ordeal and desperation which, owing not only to the not’s and the nay’s insistence, began gradually to let me
go.[31]
The not and the nay percuss refusal, resonating with Boyer’s ‘no.’ Refusal to answer to the terms that inaugurate exclusions in the first place. Lorde shouts from my desk: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house!”[32] It is the difference between refusal and negation that N., and the other male members of the band, are made to understand, know, feel through your intervention.
And isn’t this dilemma--how to reconcile refusal and assertion, absence and presence--precisely the one I find myself continually up against in my own writing? “Yes,” I hear you saying, “But don’t you know its irrelevant (‘No such problem’)?” Is the elsewhere that the non-dilemma (the problem that is no such problem) points to only a direction, a non-place that spurs our movement, not a destination at which one could finally arrive? Is this refusal also a refusal of place, and thus a commitment to fugitivity, to flight? But how and in what direction does this flight move?
When Djbot Baghostus--in jail for refusing to be interpellated by the call: “green means go”--is lying on the jailhouse bunk bed, exhausted by a lifetime of running, of “after-the-fact flight,”[33] he thinks about the Dogon po, “the tiny primeval seed” that germinates by spiraling in two directions: “The seed grows by turning.”[34] To follow the dynamic movement of circles spiraling outward and inward strikes me as an alternative to running in a straight-line directed toward the vanishing point of a horizon. Thinking about the speech Djbot Baghostus will give at this trial, he surmises:
Spiraling po would apprise the court of a “somewhere” one hears within the echo of an expulsion long out of reach. They would then advance to the
notion of asymptotic sprint, the idea of an “elsewhere” indigenous to “run,” teasingly native to the chase it escapes--so constitutively incident to the
reach it evades, he would add, as to be tantamount to the “nowhere” to which one refers when saying, “Nowhere to run.” Thus it had been that he saw no
point, he would argue, in going when the light turned green.[35]
Is the feminist argument, the ”oomph,”[36] that you and Aunt Nancy stage for your male bandmates a piece with Djbot Baghostus’s asymptotic sprint? Does its refusal reach beyond, or reconfigure, fugitivity? Does your “open-heart assertion”[37]spiral explosively like the po? Can the emptiness that you and Aunt Nancy assert, the silence that you voice, be understood in relation to these questions? Has the wrong question turned out right yet (as “Monk’s prediliction for the ‘wrong’ note which turns out to be ‘right’”[38])?
In any case, your open-heart assertion speaks to my own struggle to percuss my open-heart voice into registers audible and strident, to name what I know, to refuse what is irrelevant. Writing to you seems to keep me mindful of this. How much of my life has been spent writing to men? Enough I think. At this particular juncture in my life as a writer, as a woman, I want to write to women.
Yours,
A
3 August 2014
Dear Djamilaa,
Jessica returned to Durham yesterday from her trip to Pennsylvania. I and a few friends went over to her house last night for dinner. It was such a relief to see her. I told her about my recent reading of Audre Lorde, and sent her a copy of “Poetry is Not a Luxury” when I got home. She texted me this morning with a quote: “The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.” Yes! Her message got me thinking about the way we communicate through quotations, how I heard Jessica’s voice reading Lorde’s words, heard Jessica’s trademark “Yes!” in my own “Yes!” response. And it got me thinking about all of the various texts we’ve shared with one another over these past few years, the way we are building a library, how we take books off the shelves in turn, the texts in constant circulation, our voices and “Yeses” circulating with them. From a Broken Bottle is one of the first seeds of this collective library. Its roots have spread wide, and it keeps coming up.
I’m reminded of one of the first From a Broken Bottle “Yeses” I shared with friends when I was first reading the book. It comes from N.’s “April in Paris” composition, which has become a signpost chapter in my reading of the world, in my conversations with friends about revolutionary struggle, improvisatory living, and collectivity, in our weaving of collective imagination, collective dream, in all our rickety confessions that are involved in the Creaking of the Word. Although much of the chapter involves Jarred Bottle thinking about and missing his girlfriend April, who is in Paris dating a woman named China, “The stoplight chapter” is how I refer to it in conversation with the people to whom I have read or described it. (Often stumbling over the word “stoplight,” always on the edge of saying “spotlight.” Spotlight suggesting perhaps search light, surveillance tool, interrogation lamp,[39] minstrel stage,[40] press conference lights,[41] illumination as capture. All of this reminding me, as Jarred Bottle is reminded as he sits at the stoplight, that “the out” we are after, the revolutionary turn, often takes a dizzying spin to catch sight of, that “simple inversion finds itself invested in the very assumptions it sets out to subvert,” that “until we get dizzy with it, dervishly dizzy, we’ll forever be stuck in the same old rut.”[42] It takes a dizzying spin to catch sight of all the lights--green, yellow, red--coming on at once.) Here are the passages that I read to people--they are the passages that open and close the chapter:
Jarred Bottle let his right hand rest on his knee. With his left hand he went on gripping the steering wheel, waiting for the light to change. He brought his
right hand up from his knee and touched his upper lip with his middle finger. There were no other cars in sight. The light had been green as he’d
approached from a distance, turning yellow as he’d gotten closer and finally, just as he’d gotten to the intersection, red. He brought his right hand down
from his upper lip and let it come to rest on his knee again. It seemed absurd to be sitting there.
At a quarter to three in the morning his was clearly the only car on the street. Still, he sat there, waiting for the light to change, deferring to the nonexistent
traffic. He thought of a quip he’d heard once or twice: Revolution would never occur in a country whose people stop for traffic lights late at night when
there’s no one else around.[43]
[...]
Turning his gaze to the left and looking out the windshield, he finally noticed that the light had turned green. He was surprised to find that he now felt no
desire to move on. The green light wasn’t enough, wasn’t the go-ahead he’d been waiting for. By not moving he seemed to be insisting that the light
had no authority over him, that he’d been sitting there for reasons other than its being red, that its turning green was equally beside the point. Green
would get him neither to Paris nor to China. Green was irrelevant to the out he was after.
He was gratified to learn that sitting there could have an oppositional, rebellious aspect to it. The green light’s irrelevance prompted him to an even
more extreme or extravagant out. He would sit there for quite some time, not moving. The light would go back to yellow, then red, turn green again, yellow,
then red again, green and so forth. Finally a police car would pull up behind him and signal with its lights for him to pull over to the side. This he’d ignore as
well, forcing the cops to get out of their car and come to him.
The cops would ask him had he been drinking, ask what was the idea of just sitting there. He’d tell them he was a Rastafarian, that he was waiting for the
red, yellow, and green lights to come on at the same time. “All this time,” he’d explain, “I’ve been thinking about Paris and China, but it was Ethiopia
I was actually headed for.” The cops would have no idea what he meant.[44]
Yes! Right?! When I finish reading this to someone for the first time, I always look up, eyes wide, mouth hanging open, expectantly nodding, on the edge of my seat to hear it: Yes. This moment of exasperated waiting has become familiar. That thick moment of silence seeming to hold my fate in its hands, me pleading: Please tell me you understand. Please assure me I’m not just imagining this. Though at the same time: Tell me we are both dreaming it. A wish I’ve carried with me for so long: to share a dream. That thick moment of expectation extends, turns into the humid air we are breathing in together, takes on an architecture, turns out to be a Church we’ve stepped into. Thick air becoming resonant space, it fills with red, green, yellow light. Breathing together, and with Jarred Bottle, at the intersection of First and Main. Yes.
When I first read that Jarred Bottle notices how the intersection at which his car is stopped [spotted] “looked exactly like the intersection of First and Main in his hometown in Southern California,”[45] I realized that the intersection looked exactly like that of Fifteenth and Main in Durham, NC. I was struck, as Jarred Bottle was, by “the clarity and convincingness of [its] conception.”[46] Jarred Bottle attributes this lucidity to Aunt Nancy’s influence, her having played a Frank Wright record for him earlier that night, a melody from which he continued to hear, seeming to come from the horn of a car behind him, though there were no cars to be seen. They had been discussing his namesake lecture/libretto “Not Here, No There.”[47]“The work, he’d explained, would revolve around locale and dislocation.”[48] Fifteenth and Main is an intersection at which I have stopped [spotted] many times, often way past midnight, no other cars in sight. Every time I read or think about the stoplight [spotlight] chapter, this is the intersection I see. And everytime I come to this intersection at night, I think of the stoplight [spotlight] chapter: I am seeing and hearing Aunt Nancy’s/Jarred Bottle’s (N.’s/Nate Mackey’s) “set.” It is but one example of how this book bleeds into the world, or the world bleeds into the book. Or rather, shares blood. Shares a circulatory system. Circulation not of capital, but of revolutionary imagination. Is this lateral displacement?[49] Is this blocks turning into waves?[50] I read this chapter to Navid last winter while he was writing a paper, out of which he has started writing a longer piece. I was reading a draft last week that returned me again to the stoplight [spotlight] intersection:
In moments of effervescence, society has exhausted all possibilities exhausted itself out of the diagrammatic fixture of state, waving out of its
architecture, the way Jarred Bottle, that night behind the traffic light, thought of “mobilizing exhaustion”: “blocks turning into waves—the way cars on
a freeway, heard from a distance, tend to sound like the ocean.”[51]
Yes! Our collective library’s circulation sustains the breath of collective imagination, collective dream; as breath is sustained by the circulation of blood. Blood is words, and words are worlding. So many words, so many texts, are pulled into the gravitational field of From a Broken Bottle’s pulse. I see all of these textual circulatory systems orbiting one another, pulled into one another’s orbits: Constellating. A kind of intertexuality that bypasses any sense of center or periphery (as Glissant would have it). Heart-poundings. Lung-breathings. Jessica and I have both been reading Rachel Blau DePlessis’ work: “A book should be porous; it should have enough air and space, enough blue air, so that whoever enters it can breathe."[52]Amiri Baraka responds: “Spirit is literally Breath, inspire expire. Space, as it is specific to we, and us, & I (means Black), becomes speech. What Air is that (you mean Song, son? Or Sangre, Blood? or the hotness with which you blue, blew, singed you, didn’t it).”[53] I am excited by the way all these writers are speaking to one another, the way they are involved in an a-historical call and response that disrupts Historical chronology, inhabits and/or creates an otherwise, horizontal temporality, decolonizing literary “lineage” so that the word can breathe. This is “collective poesis.”[54] Revolutionary imagination is circulating! Yes.
Earlier this morning, I read the first part of the stoplight [spotlight] chapter to Karim for the first time, while he was making breakfast. From over his shoulder, he said, “Hey, that’s what I say. I said that before Mackey.” I responded, “Well, he wrote it before you were born,” to which he quickly quipped, “Yeah, but I just read it today. I’d already thought it long before.” We laughed--in part at Karim’s boast, and in part at the conservative view of chronology my response assumed. Karim added, “Though it’s nice to know we are thinking along the same lines. We should teach our students how to run stop signs.” This phrase--thinking along the same lines--strikes me now as thinking along shared arterial lines. From heart to limbs, we breathe together, dance together, bleed together; the words we share sustain this life of togetherness. When I say this chapter is a signpost for me and more generally, that From a Broken Bottle has had a huge impact on my thinking, I mean at the same time that it is has had a huge impact on my living. Of course. Words world is not a figurative statement.
In N’s first version of “The Creaking of the Word,” he reads some notes taken from a book on the Dogon that he’s jotted down on a piece of paper. The notes are titled, “Namesake Epigraph #1”:
“The Word,” said the old man, “is the sound of the block and the shuttle. The name of the block means ‘creaking of the word.’ Everyone understands
what is meant by ‘the word’ in that connection. It is interwoven with the threads; it fills the interstices in the fabric.”[55]
The circulation of texts in our collective library, the circulation of words worlding, is also weaving; intertextuality best understood as a matter of interweaving. The intersection of our adopted childhoods in Southern California, in Durham, NC, locale and dislocation: might the intersection be all the intersections of all of our adopted cities, collective memories from our adopted childhoods made lucid by the sound of the Word on the block and shuttle? Yes?
Yours,
A
5 August 2104
Dear Djamilaa,
Do you remember that time that N. was in the hospital for more than three weeks, “put upon by dizzy spells,”[56] taken by a mysterious illness that left the doctors in the dark?[57] Writing from his hospital bed he tells Angel of Dust, “What I’m getting at might also go like this: caressive haunted by corrosive imprint; imprint haunted by implicated hand; implicated haunted by complicated haunted by complicitous, evaporative embrace; evaporative embrace haunted by vertiginousimbalance…”[58] He’s writing, in part, about certain sensations he is experiencing there in the hospital room, suffering from an illness brought on by a transportive musical event. But, among other things, he could just as well be writing about falling in love, don’t you think?
There are many words haunting the words I write to you, in these letters which could be called love letters. It is a dizzying endeavor, this embrace. I am undoubtedly falling in love with you, with N., with every person who I’ve mentioned to you, whose words caress and haunt me.
I was talking to Karim this morning about polyrhythms and it reminded me of this passage from From a Broken Bottle, earmarked a long time ago, that I quickly found to read to him:
I was even more struck by the point the book [African Rhythm and African Sensibility] makes to the effect that polyrhythmic drumming implies an
absent, additional rhythm, a furtive beat one’s listening supplies or one’s dancing echoes. Thus the phrases “hidden rhythm” and “unsounded beat” which
recur throughout the book. That there’s a theology underlying this point comes to light as follows: “…it is God’s drum (Drum Himself) which beats the note
that is never sounded.” An interesting proposition emerges: Polyrhythmicity accents absence. It echoes or elicits an echo of what’s not there. It’s as
though the beat which goes without sounding made the heart pound harder, as though each gap were only an endlessly altered fit. It’s as though each fit
were a self-mending fracture, the lost or collapsing survival of which makes for deferred, refractory thresholds of empty causation. Think of this in relation
to the Dogon teaching that the drum’s head represents God’s ears. Remember that since God has no external ears, only auditory holes on the sides
of his head behind which he cups his hands in order to hear, his ears, in a sense, are the palms of his hands. To drum is to slap hands with God.[59]
Re-reading this passage today, with “love letter” in mind, has me thinking about how the coming together of friends, and lovers, produces a polyrhythmic drumming. There is so much movement among us, it slaps the air, doesn’t it? Vibrations. It must create a sound of some kind, supported by the absent rhythm between us, “the beat which goes without sounding” and makes “the heart pound harder.” I don’t mean the rhythm made by or in what is unsaid or unexpressed. What is unsaid or unexpressed is nonetheless present. Nor is absence sufficiently defined by the gaps that proliferate as people come together, communicate, extend toward one another. A gap too, as you’ve suggested, is a kind of presence, a space between--(almost) measurable, (almost) perceptible. But the absent rhythm is something else.
I am imagining a group of friends gathered, say in the living room at clubhouse, talking. And I perceive, sometimes clearly, sometimes very indistinctly, that there are all of these threads of communication taking place. Some of them are way beyond us, part of a larger web of communication that has been taking place over thousands of years, before and after us. There’s the psychological thread too--the latent conversations that run beneath what is manifest, everyone’s particular investments, fears, desires running beneath it all. And our histories intersecting. The absent rhythm though, whatever it is, reminds me that even if we were to say it all, there’s still that absence drumming with and between us. Our speech a drumming, slapping God’s hand. It is that in part that drives me to want to bear so much to you. After all, N. asks, “Could the hand God’s hearing lends itself be the very hand which beats the drum?”[60] I am beating a drum, compelled to introduce as many rhythmic lines into the mix as possible, in order to feel the absent rhythm’s power all the more acutely: “Polyrhythmicity accents absence.” If I could, I’d like to be able to say that in these letters,
I’ve sought to accent the sleeping resources which persist as preconditions to a fallow but fertile ground (to a fertile but unfurrowed brow, that is),
the supplement-soliciting plot of any only nominally inert conception. It’s exactly here, of course, that prospect and problematic intersect, deepening the
crisis to which they’re brought by a need to perform the act they announce.[61]
Though I have to admit that often in the process of writing, my brow has been very much furrowed.
Yours,
A
[1] Wilson Harris, qtd in Mackey, Nathaniel. “On Edge.” Discrepant Engagement. Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing. Tuscaloosa, AL: Univerity of Alabama Press, 2000. 260-64.
[1]Mackey quotes Wilson who writes in “Manifesto of the Unborn State of Exile”: “Language is one’s medium of the vision of consciousness … language alone can express (in a way which goes beyond any physical or vocal attempt) the sheer--the ultimate ‘silent’ and ‘immaterial’ complexity of arousal … the original grain or grains of language cannot be trapped or proven. It is the sheer mystery--the impossibility of trapping its own grain--on which poetry lives and thrives. And this is the stuff of one’s essential understanding of the reality of the original Word, the Well of Silence. Which is concerned with a genuine sourcelessness, a fluid logic of image. So that any genuine act of possession by one’s inner eye is a subtle dispersal of illusory fact, dispossession of one’s outer or physical eye.”
[2] Mackey, Nathaniel. From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. New York: New Directions, 2010. p.108
[3] Ibid 108
[4] Mackey, Nathaniel. Bass Cathedral. New York: New Directions, 2008. pp. 9-16
[5] Mackey. From a Broken Bottle. 178
[6] Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007. p.36
[7] Ibid 37
[8] Mackey, Nathaniel. Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews. Madison, WI:
[8]University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. p.4
[9] Mackey. From a Broken Bottle. 281
[10] Ibid 288
[11] Ibid 136
[12] Ra, Sun. The Immeasurable Equation: The Collected Poetry and Prose. Wartaweil: Waitawhile, 2005. p.289
[13] Lorde. Sister Outsider. 37-8
[14] http://www.kjb-online.org/hakkimizda/?lang=en
[15] Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs 1:4 (Summer, 1976): 875-893. p.886
[16] Mackey. From a Broken Bottle. 254
[17] Ibid 144
[18] Ibid 335
[19] Ibid 336
[20] Ibid 201
[21] Ibid 201
[22] Blau DuPlessis, Rachel. “Otherhow.” The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. pp.140-156.
[23] Mackey. From a Broken Bottle. 201
[24] Ibid 337
[25] Ibid 338
[26] Ibid 341
[27] Ibid 337
[28] Ibid 341
[29] Ibid 199
[30] Ibid 201
[31] Ibid 202
[32] Lorde. Sister Outsider. 112
[33] Mackey. From a Broken Bottle. 363
[34] Ibid 364
[35] Ibid 365
[36] Ibid 202 (“Double namesake negation, that is, wielded a pendular, contradictory brush, a self-scripted embrace which overlooked and, so doing, outlived every flaw in what, after all, was more ‘oomph’ than it was argument anyway.”)
[37] Ibid 203
[38] Ibid 338
[39] Ibid 342
[40] Ibid 342
[41] Mackey. Bass Cathedral. 146
[42] Mackey. From a Broken Bottle. 66
[43] Ibid 244
[44] Ibid 253-254
[45] Ibid 253
[46] Ibid 253
[47] Ibid 244-5
[48] Ibid 245
[49] Ibid 66
[50] Ibid 245
[51] Naderi, Navid. “overture to would-be dissertation.” (draft, summer 2014)
[52] Blau DuPlessis, Rachel. Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. p.4
[53] Baraka, Amiri. Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. pp.7-8
[54] Mackey. “Wringing the Word.” Paractrical Hinge. 40
[55] Mackey. From a Broken Bottle. 143-144
[56] Ibid 103
[57] Ibid 104
[58] Ibid 103
[59] Ibid 134-135
[60] Ibid 135
[61] Ibid 135
24 July 2014
Dear Djamilaa,
Dear adopted sister. We first met in the orphanage. We grew up together in our adopted cities, in Southern California, Durham, North Carolina, China, Jamaica, Bandiaga. Living close to and distant from one another in time and space, we sought our homeland, our Ethiopia, our Namesake, the Origin of the Word, the Well of Silence[1]--the Creaking of the Word: the name the Dogon give their weaving block,[2] and the name N. gives his symposium talk, as he, as I, wonder what threads to pursue. I am writing to you with many threads in my hands; the letter is my weaving block. Like N., “The sense I get from this is that a) we can’t help but be involved in fabrication, b) a case can be made for leaving loose ends loose, and c) we find ourselves caught in a rickety confession no matter what.”[3]
My rickety confession. I first dreamed of you in another of our adopted cities, Orono, Maine: an inchoate memory now lucid--your music leading, and following, my staggered micro-beating, my stumbling dance through From a Broken Bottle.[4] I was a student in that city, and my professor at the university, Dave Kress, had written about Nate Mackey’s work for his dissertation at Penn State, and had given me a copy of an article he had published on Djbot Baghostus’s Run, an article which I read with fascination, lost from the very start, confounded at the title of its subject, how to pronounce “Djbot.” I understood very little, regarded it as enigmatic message in a bottle, to be deciphered at a later time. Later time arrived, having traced a wide circle, as if in my first encounter my back was to the text (reading with eyes in the back of my head), this time, a counter-clockwise spin landed me facing forward.
When now (with eyes in front of my head) I read Djbot Baghostus’s Run, I am struck--by an attack of sorts--by N.’s account of you receiving a letter addressed “Dear Dja,” sent by DB, which you thought might be “Djarred Bottle,” the band now going by the name Flaunted Fifth. Do you recall?
Djamilaa couldn’t help noticing that throughout the letter every word which normally begins with a “j” had a “d” added in front. It occurred to her that the
“D” in the signature “DB” at the end of the letter might well have taken the place of a “J.” She couldn’t help thinking that “‘DB” might be short for
“Djarred Bottle.” It was this which had brought her to the window. […] Djamilaa had no way of knowing however, that in the dream Flaunted Fifth was
caught up in the “j” in her nickname [“Dja”] was silent, that the dream she too was caught up in, dim as it was, was a dream of Dahomean “Da,” the
orphaned embrace animating their pursuit of an absent hand, an absent father’s absentminded caress.[5]
When I read this passage now, the eyes in the back of my head itch. The sensation returns me to a memory of sitting at my desk in Orono, wondering about how to say, see, and hear “Djbot,” puzzling at the enigmatic title of a work that I sensed would be important to me somehow, at some point. Back-of-the-head eyes recall to forward-facing eyes what they intuitively “understood,” as a feeling. “This is poetry as illumination,” I hear Audre Lorde whisper over my shoulder, “for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are--until the poem--nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”[6] “Djbot” felt right to me.[7]
Djarred Bottle; Jarred Bottle; Djbot Baghostus (who runs with Djeannine); B’Loon; Djbouche, Dredji; Didj; et al: the proliferation of names are more, or less, than alter-egos in the story-within-the-story, or dream-within-a-dream, that N. calls his “after-the-fact lecture/libretto from the symposium ‘Locus and Locomotivity in Postcontemporary Music.’” I feel compelled to remind myself that the sound of the weaving block, its rickety frame, sounds the bass note[8] over which I speak of these Namesake origins. The weaving block is spinning out threads that fold over, onto, and into one another. “Dj” is a loose end that I am leaving loose.
I am reminded of your sleepwalk to the outskirts of Elysian Park,[9] led by music whose source you sought, and N’s reflection on it: “As I’ve asked before, is there a calm one doesn’t come to question? Is there, that is, a structure that’s anything but an after-the-fact heuristic seed, a misleading, misconceptual sleep inside which to walk is to begin to wake up? Like it or not, we’re marked by whatever window we look through.”[10] I am looking through the window across my desk in Orono.
Fives years later, I was asked by Joe if I’d like to write about Nate Mackey’s work. I said, Yes, but realized I’d have to “speak thru rather than speak about” the work.”[11] It took me some time to identify who I was speaking to. But now I’m sure it is you.
Yours,
A
27 July 2014
Dear Djamilaa,
As Sun Ra warns: “Are you thinking of metaphysics / alone? / Well, don’t.”[12]
I’ve been thinking with friends a lot lately about revolutionary struggle, improvisatory living, and collectivity: ways of being that are closely tied to one another. I’ve been thinking about these ways of being in terms of how I navigate being a woman in a U.S. university; and, in relation to my position, how I study, how I read, how I teach, how I write. Last night I was hanging out with Mike and Navid. We were listening to Shabazz Palaces’ new album, while I was reading Audre Lorde’s poetry and prose. I came to “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” considered skipping it since I’ve read it many times before. Thought better (eyes in the back of my head twitching) and read it again. And re-read it. And read it again. My eyes growing wider each time, an increasingly irrepressible laughter gathering in my chest, rising to my face; every so often, I had to snap my fingers, at one and the same time expressing my appreciation of what Lorde had just said, and joining the beat of Shabazz Palaces, whose music sounded below my reading, like an interstellar marching band, cheering and chiding Lorde and me on, a 21st century Sun Ra Arkestra, broadcasting from/to Saturn, which is where we were, surround sound speakers maximizing Shabazz Palaces’ surround sound. I all but burst when I read:
But as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn
more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge, and therefore, lasting action comes.
At this point in time, I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches so necessary for survival, and we
come closest to this combination in our poetry. I speak here of poetry as the revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often,
the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.
[...]
The white fathers told us: I think therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us--the poet--whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.
Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom.[13]
When the album ended, I announced that I had something to share, gathered Mike and Navid to listen to Lorde’s essay in full. We spent the rest of the
night talking about it.
Nearly forty years after Lorde wrote “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” to write from our feelings remains a risk. But Lorde buoys my confidence that drawing on those hidden sources of our power to make poetry is what makes working with language an integral part of revolutionary struggle. “Distillation of experience,” including, or especially, dreams and feelings, are sources of knowledge from which we draw in order to speak our woman’s voice, to express ecriture feminine, to make language for that which no words have been spoken, though the words are thriving in the hidden (to be protected) reservoir of our experience. Protected, yes, Lorde chimes in: “They become a safehouse for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.” I am reminded of The Kurdistan Women’s Liberation Movement’s manifesto I’ve been reading, as they continue to be under siege: “the liberation of society is based on the liberation of women.”[14]The Free Women’s Army not only leads guerilla warfare, but social revolution as well, defeating patriarchal ideology, changing minds, changing ways of life. Isn’t this poetic revolution? Lorde reminds us that the liberation of women’s voices takes part in the liberation of women, takes part in the liberation of society: language is a real site of struggle, a necessary component of social and political revolution.
Need one be reminded? I guess a side-thought pricks at me (a thorn in my side): Language can be the subject of much anxiety and apprehension in the discourses in which I find myself a traveler, at locations in both the university and the “poetry world.” I’m pricked by a question that arises at these sites: Is language irreparably infected with ideology? But is this a question I take seriously? Doesn’t this line of inquiry lead, marchingly, to “the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean--in order to cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight?” Don’t these anxieties over language--worry over its subsumption into the circulation of capital, its inevitable or even essential reification, the idea that the cut of language alienates us from the Real--all similarly lead to dystopian “word play” that suggests there is no way out of ideology, so the best we can do with words is expose the disease, the limit, the end? I can’t help but laugh at this with Cixous: We “must … get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word ‘silence,’ the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word ‘impossible’ and writes it as ‘the end.’”[15] I’ve never understood all these theories of “the end” of things, circulating so widely these days: the end of history, the end of culture, the end of the human, and so forth. When people explain it to me, I understand the words, but it just doesn’t click. The end of whose history? whose culture? whose human? In any case, “the end” is not “the out” we’re after[16]: We inaugurate the impossible; we voice silence. Instead of the end, Jarred Bottle is “there to announce that the creaking of the word, the rickety, crackpot word, [is] at the root of all music, its motivating base.”[17]I recall, as Jarred Bottle does during his time in jail, that, in the prison house of language or not, possibly I am here to sing,[18] and “under the circumstances, to speak and to sing [are] the same.”[19]
The power of women’s voices to affect change leads me to your and Aunt Nancy’s “Halve Not, Will Travel” intervention in the band’s search for a drummer. Beating out recognition and refusal on the Kashmiri not drums, asserting a feminine voice and silence on the Iranian nay flute, your performance--N. calls it “an arraignment, a charge of inequality, a threat of secession[20]--is instructive. Three men and two women in the band, and all the drummers who had auditioned for the spot so far had been men. It’s amusing how the men had to be shocked into this recognition. But clearly you and Aunt Nancy thought/felt long and hard (or easy) about how to speak your distillation of experience as women in the band, in the world, in your bodies.
Aunt Nancy, on the nay, made a sound “semisung, semispoken, assertive yet semiwept (as though tears were the fluid medium whereby speech kept in touch with song).”[21] The weeping of tears is at once an expression of feeling, body, speech, and song. Words transmitted through the fluid medium of tears strikes me as a conception of mediation as transport--speech riding the currents of those deep reservoirs of feeling (song)--that stands in otherwise distinction to mediation as ideological entrapment. The names of the instruments you play--not and nay--suggests bodies that give voice to refusal. But your “no” does not speak negation, it asserts otherwise, otherhow.[22] An assertion backed by tears, it points “outward as well as in.”[23]
What song, speech, and weeping have to do with refusal, with not and nay, brings to mind Anne Boyer’s work, which I’ve been reading a lot of recently since taking a poetry workshop with her this summer. She has this great essay that I think hits on much of what I’m thinking about your and Aunt Nancy’s performance that day. The essay is made entirely of questions, which is itself a defiant gesture. I remember a male professor in his office one day advising me on my writing: Rhetorical questions are a sign of weakness, and more often used by women scholars. I wish I’d had Boyer’s essay with me that day, though I suspect he’d only have rolled his eyes, which I find more amusing than frustrating. I’ll show you a part of it that resonates with thoughts that you, Aunt Nancy, Audre Lorde, Jarred Bottle are leading me toward:
What is the direct trial that is today? [...] Is it that in our noises, our complaints, our indictments, our critiques, our narratives, our tears, our questions, a
language that is the existent but unheard mostly or heard only as the small roar of doing-as-planned, as trying-our-best, as slyly-resisting, the undoing
just enough, is it to make of our materials what remains a secret at literature, what remains as a code in unattraction, to make of these materials what
repulses and shudders off hands that would grasp it and pull it into circulation, so that what might in circulation poison the very circulation, what might
be the poison shirt that the terrible yes wears and adulterates itself by?
I hear Boyer here expressing exasperated anger alongside enduring resilience, both of which must be carried in the course of flight that our commitment to refusal lifts us into, the feeling that labors behind the insight that “[p]oetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” In other words, poetry must have a positive relation to language at the same time that it must refuse what is oppressive in its existing forms of deployment.
Poetry flies on the turbulent winds of refusal. Poetry for Boyer escapes the circulation of capital--capital as money, as labor, as bodies, as language--by repulsing the hands that would grasp it. Similarly, music for Jarred Bottle escapes “the shifting terms of incarceration”[24] and “minstrel derogation”[25] by tearing language, chopping it up.[26] In the end, Jarred Bottle’s speech at the jail is “comprised almost wholly of made-up words.” Creolization comes to mind as an example of refusal’s creativity, speech keeping in touch with song through the fluid medium of tears, refusal producing language that stretches toward “an otherwise inconceivable out.”[27] (“Jarred Bottle’s lecture took him back to his adopted boyhood in Jamaica...”[28]) The ‘no’ in Boyer’s essay produces for me a riff on creolization, when she asks:
Is it to keep this smallest record of how each ‘no’ to each question proliferates inside of capital’s terrible and glittering yes, inside capital’s bloodless
and touchless yes, to keep a record of the proliferation’s explanation, to document the proliferation’s demonstrations, to learn fully each lesson of
proliferation, to study that the no proliferating and circulating through the terrible yes is also to hear a lecture on the nature of the no, of who says it, the way
the no and yes counter, what is weak about the no, what is weak about the yes, what is strong about both, too, and showing something of the weakness of
the no and the yes also is it to study carefully and with great determination, with rigour and seriousness, the way any ‘no’ must be backed with the
movement and force and accumulation of bodies?
I am struck by the force with which we are brought to the root presence of the body at the end of this passage, to the flesh of our bodies that are refusing. Halve not. I’m thinking of the presence of your and Aunt Nancy’s bodies in your intervention, and obviously: how else could you make “your point?” But also the absence your presence brings light to. You show how the body can assert itself without being captured. I am thinking, for example, of the way that you and Aunt Nancy appear at the audition dressed in identical white cotton outfits, and upon handing out the business cards that announce “Halve Not, Will Travel,” you appear momentarily to the men to be dressed in black cowboy suits, guns holstered. The men rub their eyes, and the vision dissolves.[29] That your cowboy defiance could only be perceived by the men as an apparition speaks I think to the body’s defiance of capture. Just as silence and refusal underly speech’s positive assertion, absence supports the body’s presence. N. describes Aunt Nancy’s playing on the nay as carrying a theme of emptiness[30] that your playing on the not aids, as “one coudn’t help but now know that the not’s clay was a thin crust of nothingness which, like Aunt Nancy’s nay, echoed and implicated one’s own.” The force of the body’s refusal as emptiness expresses how, at the same time, the music is confidently and powerfully assertive. The flip-side perhaps of “the way any ‘no’ must be backed with the movement and force and accumulation of bodies.”
But N.’s reflection chides me:
There was a sense, of course, in which the music’s polemic and its metaphysical insistence were at cross-purposes with one another. If ultimately emptiness
and absence reigned, one had reason to ask, on what grounds did one critique and propose an alternative to the brunt exclusion and the sense of
social nothingness one suffered from? [...] It was a question, however, which Aunt Nancy and Djamilaa’s contestatory recital casually and with
infinite confidence and calm, simply brushed aside. It proposed a quandary they refused to inhabit or be inhibited by. [...] ‘No such problem,’
the music objected, outmaneuvering the ordeal and desperation which, owing not only to the not’s and the nay’s insistence, began gradually to let me
go.[31]
The not and the nay percuss refusal, resonating with Boyer’s ‘no.’ Refusal to answer to the terms that inaugurate exclusions in the first place. Lorde shouts from my desk: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house!”[32] It is the difference between refusal and negation that N., and the other male members of the band, are made to understand, know, feel through your intervention.
And isn’t this dilemma--how to reconcile refusal and assertion, absence and presence--precisely the one I find myself continually up against in my own writing? “Yes,” I hear you saying, “But don’t you know its irrelevant (‘No such problem’)?” Is the elsewhere that the non-dilemma (the problem that is no such problem) points to only a direction, a non-place that spurs our movement, not a destination at which one could finally arrive? Is this refusal also a refusal of place, and thus a commitment to fugitivity, to flight? But how and in what direction does this flight move?
When Djbot Baghostus--in jail for refusing to be interpellated by the call: “green means go”--is lying on the jailhouse bunk bed, exhausted by a lifetime of running, of “after-the-fact flight,”[33] he thinks about the Dogon po, “the tiny primeval seed” that germinates by spiraling in two directions: “The seed grows by turning.”[34] To follow the dynamic movement of circles spiraling outward and inward strikes me as an alternative to running in a straight-line directed toward the vanishing point of a horizon. Thinking about the speech Djbot Baghostus will give at this trial, he surmises:
Spiraling po would apprise the court of a “somewhere” one hears within the echo of an expulsion long out of reach. They would then advance to the
notion of asymptotic sprint, the idea of an “elsewhere” indigenous to “run,” teasingly native to the chase it escapes--so constitutively incident to the
reach it evades, he would add, as to be tantamount to the “nowhere” to which one refers when saying, “Nowhere to run.” Thus it had been that he saw no
point, he would argue, in going when the light turned green.[35]
Is the feminist argument, the ”oomph,”[36] that you and Aunt Nancy stage for your male bandmates a piece with Djbot Baghostus’s asymptotic sprint? Does its refusal reach beyond, or reconfigure, fugitivity? Does your “open-heart assertion”[37]spiral explosively like the po? Can the emptiness that you and Aunt Nancy assert, the silence that you voice, be understood in relation to these questions? Has the wrong question turned out right yet (as “Monk’s prediliction for the ‘wrong’ note which turns out to be ‘right’”[38])?
In any case, your open-heart assertion speaks to my own struggle to percuss my open-heart voice into registers audible and strident, to name what I know, to refuse what is irrelevant. Writing to you seems to keep me mindful of this. How much of my life has been spent writing to men? Enough I think. At this particular juncture in my life as a writer, as a woman, I want to write to women.
Yours,
A
3 August 2014
Dear Djamilaa,
Jessica returned to Durham yesterday from her trip to Pennsylvania. I and a few friends went over to her house last night for dinner. It was such a relief to see her. I told her about my recent reading of Audre Lorde, and sent her a copy of “Poetry is Not a Luxury” when I got home. She texted me this morning with a quote: “The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.” Yes! Her message got me thinking about the way we communicate through quotations, how I heard Jessica’s voice reading Lorde’s words, heard Jessica’s trademark “Yes!” in my own “Yes!” response. And it got me thinking about all of the various texts we’ve shared with one another over these past few years, the way we are building a library, how we take books off the shelves in turn, the texts in constant circulation, our voices and “Yeses” circulating with them. From a Broken Bottle is one of the first seeds of this collective library. Its roots have spread wide, and it keeps coming up.
I’m reminded of one of the first From a Broken Bottle “Yeses” I shared with friends when I was first reading the book. It comes from N.’s “April in Paris” composition, which has become a signpost chapter in my reading of the world, in my conversations with friends about revolutionary struggle, improvisatory living, and collectivity, in our weaving of collective imagination, collective dream, in all our rickety confessions that are involved in the Creaking of the Word. Although much of the chapter involves Jarred Bottle thinking about and missing his girlfriend April, who is in Paris dating a woman named China, “The stoplight chapter” is how I refer to it in conversation with the people to whom I have read or described it. (Often stumbling over the word “stoplight,” always on the edge of saying “spotlight.” Spotlight suggesting perhaps search light, surveillance tool, interrogation lamp,[39] minstrel stage,[40] press conference lights,[41] illumination as capture. All of this reminding me, as Jarred Bottle is reminded as he sits at the stoplight, that “the out” we are after, the revolutionary turn, often takes a dizzying spin to catch sight of, that “simple inversion finds itself invested in the very assumptions it sets out to subvert,” that “until we get dizzy with it, dervishly dizzy, we’ll forever be stuck in the same old rut.”[42] It takes a dizzying spin to catch sight of all the lights--green, yellow, red--coming on at once.) Here are the passages that I read to people--they are the passages that open and close the chapter:
Jarred Bottle let his right hand rest on his knee. With his left hand he went on gripping the steering wheel, waiting for the light to change. He brought his
right hand up from his knee and touched his upper lip with his middle finger. There were no other cars in sight. The light had been green as he’d
approached from a distance, turning yellow as he’d gotten closer and finally, just as he’d gotten to the intersection, red. He brought his right hand down
from his upper lip and let it come to rest on his knee again. It seemed absurd to be sitting there.
At a quarter to three in the morning his was clearly the only car on the street. Still, he sat there, waiting for the light to change, deferring to the nonexistent
traffic. He thought of a quip he’d heard once or twice: Revolution would never occur in a country whose people stop for traffic lights late at night when
there’s no one else around.[43]
[...]
Turning his gaze to the left and looking out the windshield, he finally noticed that the light had turned green. He was surprised to find that he now felt no
desire to move on. The green light wasn’t enough, wasn’t the go-ahead he’d been waiting for. By not moving he seemed to be insisting that the light
had no authority over him, that he’d been sitting there for reasons other than its being red, that its turning green was equally beside the point. Green
would get him neither to Paris nor to China. Green was irrelevant to the out he was after.
He was gratified to learn that sitting there could have an oppositional, rebellious aspect to it. The green light’s irrelevance prompted him to an even
more extreme or extravagant out. He would sit there for quite some time, not moving. The light would go back to yellow, then red, turn green again, yellow,
then red again, green and so forth. Finally a police car would pull up behind him and signal with its lights for him to pull over to the side. This he’d ignore as
well, forcing the cops to get out of their car and come to him.
The cops would ask him had he been drinking, ask what was the idea of just sitting there. He’d tell them he was a Rastafarian, that he was waiting for the
red, yellow, and green lights to come on at the same time. “All this time,” he’d explain, “I’ve been thinking about Paris and China, but it was Ethiopia
I was actually headed for.” The cops would have no idea what he meant.[44]
Yes! Right?! When I finish reading this to someone for the first time, I always look up, eyes wide, mouth hanging open, expectantly nodding, on the edge of my seat to hear it: Yes. This moment of exasperated waiting has become familiar. That thick moment of silence seeming to hold my fate in its hands, me pleading: Please tell me you understand. Please assure me I’m not just imagining this. Though at the same time: Tell me we are both dreaming it. A wish I’ve carried with me for so long: to share a dream. That thick moment of expectation extends, turns into the humid air we are breathing in together, takes on an architecture, turns out to be a Church we’ve stepped into. Thick air becoming resonant space, it fills with red, green, yellow light. Breathing together, and with Jarred Bottle, at the intersection of First and Main. Yes.
When I first read that Jarred Bottle notices how the intersection at which his car is stopped [spotted] “looked exactly like the intersection of First and Main in his hometown in Southern California,”[45] I realized that the intersection looked exactly like that of Fifteenth and Main in Durham, NC. I was struck, as Jarred Bottle was, by “the clarity and convincingness of [its] conception.”[46] Jarred Bottle attributes this lucidity to Aunt Nancy’s influence, her having played a Frank Wright record for him earlier that night, a melody from which he continued to hear, seeming to come from the horn of a car behind him, though there were no cars to be seen. They had been discussing his namesake lecture/libretto “Not Here, No There.”[47]“The work, he’d explained, would revolve around locale and dislocation.”[48] Fifteenth and Main is an intersection at which I have stopped [spotted] many times, often way past midnight, no other cars in sight. Every time I read or think about the stoplight [spotlight] chapter, this is the intersection I see. And everytime I come to this intersection at night, I think of the stoplight [spotlight] chapter: I am seeing and hearing Aunt Nancy’s/Jarred Bottle’s (N.’s/Nate Mackey’s) “set.” It is but one example of how this book bleeds into the world, or the world bleeds into the book. Or rather, shares blood. Shares a circulatory system. Circulation not of capital, but of revolutionary imagination. Is this lateral displacement?[49] Is this blocks turning into waves?[50] I read this chapter to Navid last winter while he was writing a paper, out of which he has started writing a longer piece. I was reading a draft last week that returned me again to the stoplight [spotlight] intersection:
In moments of effervescence, society has exhausted all possibilities exhausted itself out of the diagrammatic fixture of state, waving out of its
architecture, the way Jarred Bottle, that night behind the traffic light, thought of “mobilizing exhaustion”: “blocks turning into waves—the way cars on
a freeway, heard from a distance, tend to sound like the ocean.”[51]
Yes! Our collective library’s circulation sustains the breath of collective imagination, collective dream; as breath is sustained by the circulation of blood. Blood is words, and words are worlding. So many words, so many texts, are pulled into the gravitational field of From a Broken Bottle’s pulse. I see all of these textual circulatory systems orbiting one another, pulled into one another’s orbits: Constellating. A kind of intertexuality that bypasses any sense of center or periphery (as Glissant would have it). Heart-poundings. Lung-breathings. Jessica and I have both been reading Rachel Blau DePlessis’ work: “A book should be porous; it should have enough air and space, enough blue air, so that whoever enters it can breathe."[52]Amiri Baraka responds: “Spirit is literally Breath, inspire expire. Space, as it is specific to we, and us, & I (means Black), becomes speech. What Air is that (you mean Song, son? Or Sangre, Blood? or the hotness with which you blue, blew, singed you, didn’t it).”[53] I am excited by the way all these writers are speaking to one another, the way they are involved in an a-historical call and response that disrupts Historical chronology, inhabits and/or creates an otherwise, horizontal temporality, decolonizing literary “lineage” so that the word can breathe. This is “collective poesis.”[54] Revolutionary imagination is circulating! Yes.
Earlier this morning, I read the first part of the stoplight [spotlight] chapter to Karim for the first time, while he was making breakfast. From over his shoulder, he said, “Hey, that’s what I say. I said that before Mackey.” I responded, “Well, he wrote it before you were born,” to which he quickly quipped, “Yeah, but I just read it today. I’d already thought it long before.” We laughed--in part at Karim’s boast, and in part at the conservative view of chronology my response assumed. Karim added, “Though it’s nice to know we are thinking along the same lines. We should teach our students how to run stop signs.” This phrase--thinking along the same lines--strikes me now as thinking along shared arterial lines. From heart to limbs, we breathe together, dance together, bleed together; the words we share sustain this life of togetherness. When I say this chapter is a signpost for me and more generally, that From a Broken Bottle has had a huge impact on my thinking, I mean at the same time that it is has had a huge impact on my living. Of course. Words world is not a figurative statement.
In N’s first version of “The Creaking of the Word,” he reads some notes taken from a book on the Dogon that he’s jotted down on a piece of paper. The notes are titled, “Namesake Epigraph #1”:
“The Word,” said the old man, “is the sound of the block and the shuttle. The name of the block means ‘creaking of the word.’ Everyone understands
what is meant by ‘the word’ in that connection. It is interwoven with the threads; it fills the interstices in the fabric.”[55]
The circulation of texts in our collective library, the circulation of words worlding, is also weaving; intertextuality best understood as a matter of interweaving. The intersection of our adopted childhoods in Southern California, in Durham, NC, locale and dislocation: might the intersection be all the intersections of all of our adopted cities, collective memories from our adopted childhoods made lucid by the sound of the Word on the block and shuttle? Yes?
Yours,
A
5 August 2104
Dear Djamilaa,
Do you remember that time that N. was in the hospital for more than three weeks, “put upon by dizzy spells,”[56] taken by a mysterious illness that left the doctors in the dark?[57] Writing from his hospital bed he tells Angel of Dust, “What I’m getting at might also go like this: caressive haunted by corrosive imprint; imprint haunted by implicated hand; implicated haunted by complicated haunted by complicitous, evaporative embrace; evaporative embrace haunted by vertiginousimbalance…”[58] He’s writing, in part, about certain sensations he is experiencing there in the hospital room, suffering from an illness brought on by a transportive musical event. But, among other things, he could just as well be writing about falling in love, don’t you think?
There are many words haunting the words I write to you, in these letters which could be called love letters. It is a dizzying endeavor, this embrace. I am undoubtedly falling in love with you, with N., with every person who I’ve mentioned to you, whose words caress and haunt me.
I was talking to Karim this morning about polyrhythms and it reminded me of this passage from From a Broken Bottle, earmarked a long time ago, that I quickly found to read to him:
I was even more struck by the point the book [African Rhythm and African Sensibility] makes to the effect that polyrhythmic drumming implies an
absent, additional rhythm, a furtive beat one’s listening supplies or one’s dancing echoes. Thus the phrases “hidden rhythm” and “unsounded beat” which
recur throughout the book. That there’s a theology underlying this point comes to light as follows: “…it is God’s drum (Drum Himself) which beats the note
that is never sounded.” An interesting proposition emerges: Polyrhythmicity accents absence. It echoes or elicits an echo of what’s not there. It’s as
though the beat which goes without sounding made the heart pound harder, as though each gap were only an endlessly altered fit. It’s as though each fit
were a self-mending fracture, the lost or collapsing survival of which makes for deferred, refractory thresholds of empty causation. Think of this in relation
to the Dogon teaching that the drum’s head represents God’s ears. Remember that since God has no external ears, only auditory holes on the sides
of his head behind which he cups his hands in order to hear, his ears, in a sense, are the palms of his hands. To drum is to slap hands with God.[59]
Re-reading this passage today, with “love letter” in mind, has me thinking about how the coming together of friends, and lovers, produces a polyrhythmic drumming. There is so much movement among us, it slaps the air, doesn’t it? Vibrations. It must create a sound of some kind, supported by the absent rhythm between us, “the beat which goes without sounding” and makes “the heart pound harder.” I don’t mean the rhythm made by or in what is unsaid or unexpressed. What is unsaid or unexpressed is nonetheless present. Nor is absence sufficiently defined by the gaps that proliferate as people come together, communicate, extend toward one another. A gap too, as you’ve suggested, is a kind of presence, a space between--(almost) measurable, (almost) perceptible. But the absent rhythm is something else.
I am imagining a group of friends gathered, say in the living room at clubhouse, talking. And I perceive, sometimes clearly, sometimes very indistinctly, that there are all of these threads of communication taking place. Some of them are way beyond us, part of a larger web of communication that has been taking place over thousands of years, before and after us. There’s the psychological thread too--the latent conversations that run beneath what is manifest, everyone’s particular investments, fears, desires running beneath it all. And our histories intersecting. The absent rhythm though, whatever it is, reminds me that even if we were to say it all, there’s still that absence drumming with and between us. Our speech a drumming, slapping God’s hand. It is that in part that drives me to want to bear so much to you. After all, N. asks, “Could the hand God’s hearing lends itself be the very hand which beats the drum?”[60] I am beating a drum, compelled to introduce as many rhythmic lines into the mix as possible, in order to feel the absent rhythm’s power all the more acutely: “Polyrhythmicity accents absence.” If I could, I’d like to be able to say that in these letters,
I’ve sought to accent the sleeping resources which persist as preconditions to a fallow but fertile ground (to a fertile but unfurrowed brow, that is),
the supplement-soliciting plot of any only nominally inert conception. It’s exactly here, of course, that prospect and problematic intersect, deepening the
crisis to which they’re brought by a need to perform the act they announce.[61]
Though I have to admit that often in the process of writing, my brow has been very much furrowed.
Yours,
A
[1] Wilson Harris, qtd in Mackey, Nathaniel. “On Edge.” Discrepant Engagement. Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing. Tuscaloosa, AL: Univerity of Alabama Press, 2000. 260-64.
[1]Mackey quotes Wilson who writes in “Manifesto of the Unborn State of Exile”: “Language is one’s medium of the vision of consciousness … language alone can express (in a way which goes beyond any physical or vocal attempt) the sheer--the ultimate ‘silent’ and ‘immaterial’ complexity of arousal … the original grain or grains of language cannot be trapped or proven. It is the sheer mystery--the impossibility of trapping its own grain--on which poetry lives and thrives. And this is the stuff of one’s essential understanding of the reality of the original Word, the Well of Silence. Which is concerned with a genuine sourcelessness, a fluid logic of image. So that any genuine act of possession by one’s inner eye is a subtle dispersal of illusory fact, dispossession of one’s outer or physical eye.”
[2] Mackey, Nathaniel. From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. New York: New Directions, 2010. p.108
[3] Ibid 108
[4] Mackey, Nathaniel. Bass Cathedral. New York: New Directions, 2008. pp. 9-16
[5] Mackey. From a Broken Bottle. 178
[6] Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007. p.36
[7] Ibid 37
[8] Mackey, Nathaniel. Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews. Madison, WI:
[8]University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. p.4
[9] Mackey. From a Broken Bottle. 281
[10] Ibid 288
[11] Ibid 136
[12] Ra, Sun. The Immeasurable Equation: The Collected Poetry and Prose. Wartaweil: Waitawhile, 2005. p.289
[13] Lorde. Sister Outsider. 37-8
[14] http://www.kjb-online.org/hakkimizda/?lang=en
[15] Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs 1:4 (Summer, 1976): 875-893. p.886
[16] Mackey. From a Broken Bottle. 254
[17] Ibid 144
[18] Ibid 335
[19] Ibid 336
[20] Ibid 201
[21] Ibid 201
[22] Blau DuPlessis, Rachel. “Otherhow.” The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. pp.140-156.
[23] Mackey. From a Broken Bottle. 201
[24] Ibid 337
[25] Ibid 338
[26] Ibid 341
[27] Ibid 337
[28] Ibid 341
[29] Ibid 199
[30] Ibid 201
[31] Ibid 202
[32] Lorde. Sister Outsider. 112
[33] Mackey. From a Broken Bottle. 363
[34] Ibid 364
[35] Ibid 365
[36] Ibid 202 (“Double namesake negation, that is, wielded a pendular, contradictory brush, a self-scripted embrace which overlooked and, so doing, outlived every flaw in what, after all, was more ‘oomph’ than it was argument anyway.”)
[37] Ibid 203
[38] Ibid 338
[39] Ibid 342
[40] Ibid 342
[41] Mackey. Bass Cathedral. 146
[42] Mackey. From a Broken Bottle. 66
[43] Ibid 244
[44] Ibid 253-254
[45] Ibid 253
[46] Ibid 253
[47] Ibid 244-5
[48] Ibid 245
[49] Ibid 66
[50] Ibid 245
[51] Naderi, Navid. “overture to would-be dissertation.” (draft, summer 2014)
[52] Blau DuPlessis, Rachel. Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. p.4
[53] Baraka, Amiri. Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. pp.7-8
[54] Mackey. “Wringing the Word.” Paractrical Hinge. 40
[55] Mackey. From a Broken Bottle. 143-144
[56] Ibid 103
[57] Ibid 104
[58] Ibid 103
[59] Ibid 134-135
[60] Ibid 135
[61] Ibid 135