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[Music] do [Music] do [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] do [Music] so [Music] do [Music] welcome to collective protest in rebellion a black study intensive by the center for african american poetry and poetics at the university of pittsburgh it's here where we consider the proposition that art and poetry and radical writing are revolutionary acts for certain it's when we practice in the creative mind that we access a reality unknown to us otherwise likewise it's in the experience of visual art music dance film narrative and poetry where our interior spaces are altered allowing us to enter the world as more compassionate empathetic beings we borrow from fred moton's notion of study when he says we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people it's walking talking working dancing suffering some irreducible convergence of all three held under the name of speculative practice we come together differently now but so many of us were compelled to enter physical space after weeks of pandemic isolation after the murders of george floyd and brionna taylor those protests are black study black study is a deep engagement with others it's stepping outside of your comfort zone with the kind of courage as cornell west says that looks unflinchingly catastrophic circumstances and realizes virtues like love and hope and faith we need speculative practice in order to reach outside of the intolerable and intractable present toward the future we deserve we are excited to be in community with you [Music] welcome to our second evening of the cat black study intensive collective protest and rebellion i'm dawn lundy martin i'm the director of cap and i'm also a poetry professor at the university of pittsburgh and i'm joined here with the co-creator of these events novelist professor and the writing program angie cruz i'm so thrilled to welcome you to tonight's event looking for language in the ruins with poet performer composer jerome ellis cultural historian and writer cydia hartman and poet scholar erica hunt me too i have no idea what's going to happen but i'm really excited to find out composer poet and performer jerome ellis's work explores blackness disfluency and music as forces structured by and that rearrange time conventional notions of time and time limits says ellis assume that people have relatively equal access to time through their speech sadia hartman's innovative cultural histories investigate the precarity of black life as she tells the stories of the unknown the dispossessed and the disposable using a mode she invented called critical fabulation hartman creates the space for a new kind of knowing erica hunt's poetry and prose makes starkly present the polarization of the world and how the quotidian language the language of the state and the language of the media shrink our imaginations what can save us in hunt's case writing on the edge of language or from the corner of the eye provides an urgent other knowing from the cracks in america's broken rhetoric but before we move to tonight's program we want to thank everyone that made this evening possible thank thanks you our sponsors thanks to the dietrich school especially we will lead with jerome's compositions sedilla's next and then erica erica is also going to be the moderator for these events so she'll be asking questions and engaging in conversation and making sure that happens a q a will follow please use the chat function while the event is happening so you can be in conversation with each other um and with the topics that uh our fabulous panelists bring up and if you want to ask a question hit the ask a question button thank you so much for joining us tonight thank you for joining us welcome jerome sadia and erica stoppage then's passage then stop it since passage then stop it then's passage then stop it then's passage [Music] i believe [Music] i believe in impediment [Music] i believe in giving away impediment [Music] i believe in also he has a black crap in his speech the craft has lost the craft secures proof of being above [Music] being is impediment being is apprehending being is pushing being as a chronicle [Music] years [Music] [Music] i am last not lost is a sawyer in the bay [Music] hey [Music] hey [Music] the northward [Music] of halls [Music] the reward shall scar the [Music] where is [Music] where is the horse where is the goal of the love the lord pretends to stutter [Music] [Music] [Music] the stutter is [Music] the stutter for is the stutter's a horse for speech [Music] so the stutter has run away from any [Music] government [Music] stoppage that's passage then stop it that's passage [Music] beautiful beautiful i'm erica hunt good evening everyone and i'm here just to welcome and to invite jerome into a conversation about these beautiful images that you've presented to us um so evocative and such contrast there between the person who tries to make a way in a box and then a saxophone in the air as if in flight bird flight right and then henry box brown too i brought to mind for me so jerome tell us more about this beautiful film hi erica thank you very much thank you for your your words um i'll start first by just um saying a few words about my stutter how it how it manifests um what the way it usually manifests is that i just stop speaking and a sort of silence takes over and sometimes my my body freezes and i say that because over the internet when i'm when i'm speaking with with people over video it can seem like uh like the internet has has dropped or something which which a dozen times um but um so everybody knows knows that and um yeah and i um i also think about lately i think about moments of silence and um how in our culture we use moments of silence often to reflect or to remember or honor those who are no longer with us or those who are suffering and so i invite um you all in the audience when i am stuttering you can treat it also if you want as a moment of silence and you can use it however you you like um i also want to just just thank don and and cap and all the organizations and sponsors that made this possible i feel profoundly honored being being here with you erica and sadia shortly [Music] well this life of life when i started making it i wanted to be in dialogue with you two and um i was guided by two lines from your your works your line enthusiasm has its own physics and and sadia's line the opacity a black song and i i wanted to to make something that um that kind of existed in between and around those those words from youtube which have been so uh inspiring for me um and guiding and um and i wanted to work with alice shepard um this wonderful artist and i'm i'm so grateful for for her and our our collaboration the collaboration i think is is ongoing i think this this little film that we just saw is is just the first installment in a way and i want to work with her for several reasons including because we have i feel such affinity with her on so many levels but including the fact that we we both identify as disabled um and i wanted to think about i want to think about fugitivity as well as protest and rebellion um not just from a black perspective and a black study perspective but from a disability her perspective um and emily greenwood used this this phrase last night in in the event with dion brand and harriet mullen which which was overwhelming for me and how beautiful that the whole event was uh emily green would use this phrase a fugitive study and to me that that really resonated with with me and with this what um alice and i are exploring in this work for me a question that i have had lately is um is the stutter a form the fugitive speech not just because it feels like when i'm stuttering that my voice leaves me escapes but also that the stutter itself feels to me like it escapes certain norms um and structures and strictures of of speech and verbal exchange so i've been thinking about that and um [Music] the the the two newspaper advertisements in the piece they are um from you know the the archive of so-called runaway slave advertisements that um appeared in newspapers in the us in the uk in the caribbean latin america um where you know a master or someone on behalf of a master would place an ad with a description of what they envisioned was was there was their property who had had run away and there's information about a reward and you know there's such a level of detail that they try to give as much detail as possible to you know to really ensure that that the person is captured and i've been working with only advertisements that mentions slaves who stutter or stammer or have or who have impediments or stoppages in their speech as a way of for me kind of engaging in a kind of and ancestral a practice um engaging with with with my my ancestors not just my enslaved ancestors but because stuttering is hereditary and i inherited my my stutter from my mother um i i i enter this space where i'm um i feel like i'm i'm able to communicate with um my ancestors in a way especially the ads the ads that i have have have have have found from jamaica um in the in in the video and life of life the first ad is from jamaica and the second one is from pennsylvania and um and the jamaica ones are really are particularly um intense for me because my mother is from jamaica and when i'm engaging with those you know there i feel that there is you know it's a very small chance but there's a chance that one of those fugitives who stutter who are describing the ads that they could be a blood relative of of mine if if not a spiritual relative you know and um and so what my my practice has been is that every day i i write out one of these advertisements by hand and i then write um lyrics and and lines by rearranging the words and the ads and so all the lyrics in the in the video are you use words that come from the ads and of course this is directly inspired by eminor bessie phillips zhang and her method there um and you know all these forms of meaning arise uh from from a a document whose purpose was you know extremely utilitarian and violent you know um how to sneeze i went away um you know to define what what else is there um and you and you and i and sadia we had a conversation where we were talking about tense and time um and she used the phrase of the other tenses of struggle and we talked about your poem surplus future imperfect and you know engaging with this material i've i've been thinking about the imperfect as a a form of the past that is unfinished or is ongoing because to me what what becomes clear when i engage with these ads is that what seemed to be a done deal that like the ad was placed and that's it and and it lives in the newspaper is revealed to me to be in fact that the ad is it is unfinished and rather the and the forms of meaning and what the language is doing there to me is unfinished because then if you can rearrange things and find new meanings then you you open up what seems to be closed you know it's is is the feeling that i often have there so yeah i mean there's there's a lot more i could say but i'll stop there for now oh i think you're muted erica thank you for that film and for those remarks about that your your work there they really help us um they help us think about how to make um um something valuable for us in the present out of something you know almost dead to us right so thank you thank you um i'm going to um introduce now sadia hartman who um this is a scholar and a writer and a thinker who's had tremendous influence on black study for poets and for visual artists and so forth someone else who has taken dead letters and made them live through what zadia calls critical fabulation but also she says what is the history of the present and have we looked and can we look deeply enough into what seems um like the catacombs can we go into the administrative archive and find something of use there that helps us brings us fuel for the present and so i'm so happy to be sharing space and time with both jerome and sidea and i want to invite her hi miss hey it's great to be here and i look forward to the conversation we'll have afterwards um yeah so i really want to thank don and angie for gathering us at this moment in time and i have an offering which is a rant so i'll just share that and talk about it afterwards so this is pro jane makes a modest proposal for improving race relations and saving us empire she doesn't say the sun's gonna shine in her back door someday or croon sometimes i feel like a motherless child a long way from home but she does assure us that the sun will come up in the morning she humbly proposes her own thoughts for saving democracy itself regarding these matters she proffers a remedy for what can't be repaired all the while explaining why we are compelled to wait extolling us to believe what we cannot any longer she is confident that this remarkable journey that we as americans are on will go on eternal dreams are as unstoppable as wars without n she coaxes we are all on the same team until we are not until democracy itself is on trial it is this presumption of good faith that makes our democracy exceptional and has allowed us to move forward since 1619. even a word as anemic as justice isn't forthcoming in her thoughts on the matter of a solution to the problem and a plan for reform just threadbare homilies about lesser evils pragmatic actions and realist solutions cautionary remarks about imminent dangers a trove of ready advice and diy instructions for the best ways not to smell even when we are knee-deep in it performatives for continuing to believe in the nation our democracy despite everything we know and all that we have lived america is beautiful exceptional and she believes she can rescue it at least 62 percent of white nationalists might still be converted as if there is an antidote for the transubstantiation of the poor white into planter oligarch and state executioner a corrective for every white citizen who has internalized the power of the police as if the plot against america isn't america crow jane's lecture is a composition deracinated from the field and choked with promises of state and civility it is reasoned measured not strident so as to ensure the willingness to listen on the part of those who aren't inclined to listen to any truths dropped from her lips and who prefer conversation without discomfort yes they are accustomed to dictating the terms of address but in her case they prove willing to suspend if only temporarily the rules of engagement the visceral disbelief in her worldview to see to the native informants predictable and determine chains of meaning like the quiet storm her modest proposal is easy listening nothing but legible speech with discordant legible speech without discordant tones or ugliness it is assimilable digestible the reassuring comfort of the familiar mammy fascism state craft and black and brown face no human cry no it or burn it down just this talent for becoming anything or nothing at all just reproductive labor and service of racial capitalism just the dulcet tones of a pledge of submission about to wait to keep waiting waiting until oblivion father may i master may i which is so much better than allegiance crow jane how you sound just how they like it sassy and revenge's how she gets them off so easily in conversation service by the hour or the term or the life sentence she sound devoted like a martyr for america like a woman waiting to get paid like she's on the clock for the project like declaration and allegiance or slave play like we have all the time in the world like 12 years a slave like 12 years left to save the earth isn't the beginning and the end of things like she can change the world one white mind at a time dear white people dear white people the mantra that might save us like the hustle and the booklets is black study like pimp slapping your girlfriend is the threshold to enlightenment and renouncing hip-hop like she isn't barricaded in her father's house practicing piano concertos as ordinary folks die for the vote likely fools like we stupid and don't know that reform is a synonym for fascism like the damned of the earth can live on promises and symbols this late in the day or be moved by earnest confessions and the gilded beauty of negro elites by the pornography of black objection and the bling bling of up from slavery narratives by vows and assurances of betterment and one day soon by learned discourse by the hermeneutic circle and communicative rationality by the polis and the agora by radical empathy by constituent power by insights honed in conversation with titans of industry and the g7 billionaires and their factotems philanthropists and diversity officers all of this as preamble and prelude to why we are compelled to wait the melodic tones of her voice submission as sweet as molasses the whispered insistence on patience the resignation to a higher wider power the comfort of soporifics battle hymns about duty and patriotism jeremiah's about the city on the hill our american democracy the content of our character the origins of our discontent our dreams are red white and blue too we are the true americans crojan how you sound the space between a rock and a hard place ain't home the fault line between disaster and catastrophe provides no refuge kittens born in the oven aren't biscuits crojan how you sound the poet ass but which nation ever said of you she is human so what allegiances do you have temporary and provisional whatever you try to fit in to your own demise you wrote shotgun to your own disaster crow jane how you sound the reverend doctor asks we have waited 400 years mutual aid direct action and inciting crisis will open the door to change not law and order not the party of the rich but an international association for the advancement of creative maladjustment crow jane how you sound the singer ass your democracy is killing me crow jane takes to the podium like a fish to water like a devoted servant in the house she is no red peter compelled to account for his appearance before the academy offering a personal history of captivity and cruelty negotiating the gulf between himself and man her speech is devoted to policing the crisis and averting the present dangers impaired citizenship is no obstacle or impediment to faith in the founding fathers the murder of her sister and the sentencing of her brother and still no doubts her faith is unwavering she waits and waits and waits and waits never despairing leading by example explicating tirelessly she assures us we won't have to wait forever we just have to wait long enough to get this old white man into office long enough to count the ballots long enough to quell impending dangers long enough to lure the nationalists and the patriots the soccer moms and the swing voters long enough to condemn the abolitionists the far left the black radicals and anarchists and went over the center-right long enough to secure late liberalism and quash all talk of anti-fascism anti-capitalism anti-blackness anti-colonialism and echo side long enough to stabilize and subsidize the markets and save the banks long enough for surveillance capitalism to make citizens and elections redundant long enough for data points to cultivate outcomes anticipate desire and produce thought exploit want exalt and intensify the illusory autonomy of the consumer's eye and knee long enough to create new incentives for accumulating wealth and evading taxes long enough for a more brutal regime of deprivation long enough to make our city safer long up to reform the police long enough to make live and let die crow jane condemns the looters and rioters the free issue the arsonists who burn the precinct who deface the proclamation who say free papers the intended audience cheers the convention hall rings with applause shouts of praise high fives and awkward fist bumps the ones clapping and heaping on the praise the members of the assembled body the convention the faculty senate the true objects of her address despite the talk of her son her nephew her cousin pookie they don't ask what is it when she is within earshot or laugh at the ungainly sight of her in the flesh colored suit the body bag so unkind to the dark erases they don't look as scance at her large rough hands thick wrists and broad shoulders or joke that there is nothing absolutely nothing petite or diminutive about her no negrita or little lady wouldn't want to drown in that hole they chuckle and wink behind her back man to man they concede wanting to do her brother too discourse on the incitement of pendulous breasts seattle pagia or not blonde wig or not like jefferson they disavow the wands of the very thing loathe orangutans prevaricate in notes on the state of virginia the rapturous dalliances of predator presidents and founding fathers rapists lie like hell in the state of the union senators deny and disavow the monstrous intimacies of thurman the trinities for dead slave girls at the planters club swear on their mama's grave to be loyal to the cause in the anti-miscegenation filibuster crojan smiles despite the black eye the swollen lips the blood filling her mouth as she endeavors to subdue the boys will we boys disarm her handlers her colleagues her allies her neighbors as if a bright smile or choked laughter might provide a solvent against hate goad indifference into affection transform negation into recognition make analogy out of antagonism how might she rearrange their desire how might she change their mind about her or anything else in a moment of panic she wants to retract everything get me out of this now but how bolt from the podium there is nowhere to run and hide so she catches her breath and proceeds ahead exhausted and foul humbled with gratitude earnest she laughs at herself with deliberate expedience she laughs exquisitely she goes high when they go low she reiterates the pledge i am not trying to reconstruct anything cro-jane how you sound the phil in critical race theory asks have you ever thought about destituent power and unlearning imperialism or the end of the world is beginning why do you want to coddle white folks and hold their hands why do you want to rehabilitate the settler have you read black reconstruction or recharge genocide or wretched of the earth or return to the source or black metamorphosis are you aware of the resonance between lactification and annihilation or the way your desire yields to our destruction cro-jane plays the part the vainglorious servant in the house shucking and jiving not putting on old master but dissembling before us trying to teach feel negroes the meaning of hegemony and its possibilities how the plantation belongs to us too how one day we might inherit it after the lesson she kicks it with the master downing a glass of his best bourbon and one swallow her diamond earrings and over the knee patent leather boots incongruous with the asana bag with the austenberg dress and the indigo head rag covering her plaits looking every inch the part a planter's pinup the b and d imago the role play the frightened humiliated trembling in front of the white master or the rebellious slave in need of correction she can play the part as well as her brothers in moonlight it can't be denied how dark and lovely how radiant the exemplary slave when jane sorry when crow jane restates it the plan for our obliteration sounds like a promise to do right by us like a proclamation of eventually all persons held as with all deliberate speed in due time shall be then thenceforth and forever except as punishment for crime she has been listening to them for so long that she thinks like they do rationalizing death apportioning blame imploring us to do better berating the unhoused and the impoverished for not getting their together explaining away each and every tragedy until the last black woman disappears a quiet extinction like bees and whales and insects and polar bears a slow death it is a tragedy cro-jane concedes but who is to bear the blame aren't we the agent and the executioner why love a hood rat why get tied up with a drug dealer we are guilty she explains because of who we love and how we live guilty because the decent reside with the criminal cro-jane cautions us to be reasonable please with us not to rush out not to burn loot and destroy van jones cries on the jumbotron and ask us to weigh it carefully the legal facts versus our narrative to make a choice the state or our sister we grieve and break the law make claim only to the dead we honor them because our very lives depend on it because our freedom hangs in the balance we will not fall into line or stay in our place or assuage our loss with empty slogans and symbolic pledges we will not accept that our lives are disposable or resign ourselves to the inevitable death that awaits us mad as hell matters love we try to live oh my gosh um i'm in that space right now where i experienced something like my my heart was calm before you started uh reading sadia and i i entered that space when i encounter um language by a thinker and artist that just affects my entire body and i really want to thank you for creating this work and sharing it with us today um last night one of the conversations was um about the redemptive possibilities for language and it's not like you can put a meta uh kind of you know language to the redemptive possibilities when you're in the presence of those redemptive possibilities i think you just experienced it and we just experienced that so i really want to thank you and i want to thank jerome um which brings me to a kind of question of the redemptive possibilities of time um sadia um your reinvention of what it means to do cultural theory and cultural history has been important to so many of us i think that it's like what it looks like what you do is what it looks like when the darkness of whiteness is no longer the lens through which the work is done so thank you very much a great compliment thank you and um now i will invite my friend and collaborator erica hunt to join the screen um erica uh all of my students know this that the first way that i encountered your work and you know this too but the rest of the folks watching all over the world don't know this um was through your essay the amazing essay notes for an oppositional poetics and it's the piece that really got me thinking really seriously for the first time i was in a first year in graduate school about not only the power of language to kind of to repress but the power of innovation to do something to that repression to do something to that language that has the power to subjugate uh so i want to thank you for that and um now we turn to erica hunt and her remarks thanks hi again um i'm grateful to don lindy martin and to stephan trippit and to the um angie cruz uh for this present this opportunity to speak with you to muse publicly um black study at this point and at this point in time and this topic of language from the ruins and um like what do we do as people who work with language are interested in words and what can they offer to us as tools tools of some sort um to get through the present time so i've got six slides and i just want to go through them very you know um language in the ruins so i've subtitled this the performance of hope in the face of catastrophe um and i guess what i mean by the performance of hope it's been a phrase that stayed with me um has been with me for a while and what i mean by performance is yeah performance in the sense of performative but also in the sense of rehearsal and this idea that um we don't actually know quite what even hope is or what survival is but we have to practice somehow something that um it this idea for instance gives us a way of reading and of reading the past in order for us to kind of practice not only what happened in the past but to kind of bring it into the present as present tools present um you know a way out of no way that we can uh use to survive what is could only be the apocalypse the end of their world perhaps the beginning of ours i've been thinking about the performance of hope in the context of the apocalypse how the end of the world has been on repeat certainly for african descended people for indigenous north americans the end of the world came and somehow was survived if just barely and then connected to that thought is that the end of the world may be a necessary thing if it means the end of white supremacy and patriarchy the performance of hope in the face of catastrophe is an aesthetic practice a practice combining theory and practice in which performance and rehearsal are linked for instance we don't entirely know what it is to live in a democracy in which every person is ascribed dignity that they're human and seen as human they social order suppresses our imagination and attempts as it can it contains us like that box again schooling employment conditions faith institutions they are involved in enforcing limit in policing us and incarcerating us in extinguishing the diversity of life experiments that generate democratic possibility for free black people so the heuristic of performance and practice gifts us with something using our minds our bodies hearts and imagination to enact and create situations encounters improv improvisations that call from us the sociality we dream of it's like practicing the muscles we will need to cultivate the new ground in which we can breathe so what about those words though hope and catastrophe in the same phrase yoked in dialectic a manic dance hope is a noun and often a verb that dares or is deluded deluded or diluted catastrophe is a threat it's calamity weaponized a tragic noun it's only that link to performance that phrase that retains a shred of agency she i we don rehearse a self ourselves finding a way out of no way haven't you and i seen the no way finding ourselves in the box discovering a means out of the box loot the out of the loophole of retreat in captivity or towards a freer state finding a way out of no way a semblance of getting free next slide please this is an image that has been with me for a while i've kept it it's by simone lee and chitra ganesh its title is borrowed from a gwendolyn brooks poem my dreams my dream my works must wait till after hell i've had this image in a folder for several years now and i'm drawn to return to it because it fuels in me this feeling of strength and resilience and obliteration of buried life fragility it maps the unyielding facts on the ground with which black women contend in order to get out of bed morning after morning day after day month after month year after year trying to overcome the feeling of being smothered one digs oneself out unburies the brilliance or leaves it buried an unremarked feat of endurance except for the blood pressure and the diabetes the eating the drinking the smoking the drugging all the means of self-medication that enables every day john henry ism this image says so much let's look at the gwendolyn brooks poem next slide my dreams my works must wait till after hell i hold my honey and i store my bread in little jars and cabinets of my will i label clearly and each latch and lid i bid beast firm till i return from hell i am very hungry i am incomplete and none can tell when i may dine again no man can give me any word but wait the puny light i keep eyes pointed in hoping that when the devil days of my hurt drag out to their last dregs and i resume on such legs are as are left me in such heart as i can manage remember to go home my taste will not have turned insensitive to honey and bread old purity could love a few words about this it's a 14-line sonnet with off-rhymes between bread and lid will and hell incomplete and weight again in hurt heart resume home and the last two lines the volta off rhymes insensitive and love these pairs especially but those between will and hell incomplete and wait again in especially hurt and heart intensify the feelings and thoughts of this poem the will to get through hell or waiting it's temporal lock on the present forever postponing the fullness the fullness of the life the lives we deserve wait other pears honey and bread sweetness and sustenance spread you live by colloquially but not alone honey makes that eating sweet connects the tongue to brain to happy stomach and fetus the throat and unleashes the voice activates the body energizes it jars and cabinets jars cabinets lids and latches represent the simple furniture domesticity little jars and cabinets of my will i label clearly our intentions conveying the power the power of naming and self-determination but the means of life are locked away aren't they be firm till i return again hell from hell hungry incomplete i am very hungry i am incomplete and none can tell when i may die again this life on hold its sweetness and sustenance are on pause might will be dead no man can give me any word but wait might as well be dead the puny lie don't you feel those words especially now when we wait we wait told wait wait wait i keep my eyes pointed in hoping that when the devil days of my hurt drag out to their last dregs and i resume i think that cliffhanger's face blank beside the words i resume when do i resume when we hold our breaths i can't breathe how can we wait because when is it that we or i or you resume or not legs and heart on such legs as our left me in such heart as i can manage remember to go home striking isn't it to remember to go home as if the we have that loss of markers memory the challenge of preserving space of mind or time to create or maintain home those final lines my taste will not have turned insensitive to honey and bread old purity could love you know those two lines could be a dissertation i won't do that but think about that that old purity that something has been lost our affections proclivities even a sense of self-determination has been altered such that even honey and bread can lose their saver so let's go back next slide to the language language in the ruins next slide please poetics of the archive so this section takes up the threads of my inventive co-panelists jerome and sadia and they've asked us to consider the archive and strategies for unlocking the lives of african descended people from its muffled quality its abdications of the of the administrative archive it's dodging its silences it's cementing over the facts of our brutal arrival to the americas its iron fist of laws its policies attitudes and ideology that have dimmed our light and shortened our lives my dear friend tanya foster says of the archive that it contains the language that lay ruin to our lives the language that lay ruin to our lives by such language lives have been lost erased and destroyed last year i taught a course called writing from the archives and my goal was to create a community of learning for my students and myself about the host of literary strategies aimed at revisiting archive but also not only the administrative archive but also the literary record the canon i wrote in the syllabus is it possible is it possible to imagine the texture of these lives even when they are omitted from the accepted record are there psychological emotional situational or linguistic resonances retrievable for making works of literary art in the present what poems are possible from a footnote we read sydia hartman's venus in two acts and also her magisterial work wayward lives and john keane's counter narratives and avery gordon's the hawthorne archive and of course amner bessie phillips zong we also read laylee long soldier whereas and somas look and robin cost lewis's voyage of the sable venus i am so grateful to these writers who have retrieved for us the history of the present we learned from them and were in readerly dialogue with writers who've engaged the historical record as well as classic texts to break the silences using strategies of counter narrative critical fabulation and reparative technique language from the ruins suggests that we do have possible means for retrieving potential histories and potential futures but that's not to say it is easy it is in fact very very difficult it requires courage and discernment it is a disentombment it is a disentomment it is not the record but the silenced record one seeks to resuscitate the lives the archives language laid into ruin we learn to read and though through what's left we learn to read all over again learning to read as if for the first time recognizing that we will have to read many times and each time with a different inflection just as when we read a gwendolyn brooks poem we read her poem of then and also now in this time to find the news news as recent as the acquittal of the officers involved in the death of brianna taylor as if gwendolyn brooks had placed all the piers in her poem in case we needed to find it again next slide this final image of braided hair adorned by red pigeon peas a variety only grown in west africa is my mnemonic to remind me to remain attentive to the living and speaking archive that may not be in a document written by a slave holder that it is placed in jars and cabinets of my will yet labeled clearly waiting it is a written record of sorts carried in gesture and expression that lifting voice of aretha franklin and amazing grace who got it from clara ward who got it from uh who gave it to fontella bass who got it from mahalia jackson who got it and transformed it from bessie smith and ma rainey and so on each person altering the sound to be in their bodies in order to linking them to the past the present to us and to show us how to be ourselves themselves savoring the honey savoring the bread those peas those are that's an ornament flashes of color and swinging braids catching the light of the sun the peas began as seed seeds of hope brought by africans kidnapped raped mutilated so many tossing their bodies into the sea asking the ancestors to remember them to assist them in walking back home the people who were enslaved and brought to south carolina similarly braided rice into their hair smuggled the rice into their garments to bring with them across the sea into a strange land that carolina rice is the archive slowly being written but also recorded told in red we are called to use our poetic ingenuity to call these lives out into language to mark the places where they lived and just as difficultly to respect its blanks thank you hey hey hey so happy to be here with you too yes the feeling's mutual yes such an interesting conversation i think to be had here with among us and also with the audience and um i wanted to just kind of open this up a little bit um and talk about um well i mean do you think you can really do you think do you think that there's something that we're retrieving from a footnote from a detail from a language and what are those languages and can we can we enter into that and can we come back somehow from the land of the dead and is it not dead big question but hopefully provoke something for you each whoever would like to jump in i it sent me the question and um in a way to uh different directions because i think uh like jerome i you have this great line um a stutter is like a horse and a stutter runs away from government and um so part of um the spirit of my rant was to try to um introduce a stutter into legible political speech right to run it you know uh to run away from government through a certain citation of it and i was really just some moved um erica when you were talking about tanya's uh description of the archive as containing um the language that lays us to ruin and i think that that's also something i was thinking about with this imposition of a certain framework of political legibility the terms are dictated we can't think outside of them but that language actually lays ruin to our life lays ruined to black life so um i guess there's the inadvertent formal reanimation of something when you reiterate it but i i wanted to think about it as a kind of um ruined state um and that there's no that there's no food or possibility for us there in that imposed conception of meaning and possibility and legibility um in in those political norms yeah i felt that as soon as you began and you said you said he said crow jane and i was immediately thinking of the reversal and the power of the reversal and as you were speaking throughout i was thinking about reversal and what happens when when you are hearing something in it and it's it's backwards you know it's it's not what you are used to hearing i i think erica what you were just saying about the rice as the archive and the pigeon peas and the braid to me there's something there too about as you would as you were saying sadia legibility that the white person looking at the braids they may think that the p is a is a bead or they may not even be able you'd be able to be able to to even identify the the p and identified the the seed to me there's there's there's a great power in being illegible and forcing eligibility into legibility there's a multiplicity of readings that i that is the gift of this which is that this is what the record says and it's mute on us it's always silenced about us but the re-reading the re-reading and the reading into and the imagining and the critical fabulation and the looking harder maybe it isn't even words maybe it's a gesture you know is actually what is our fuels us it tells us teaches us something you know is something that is of use to us it's our re-reading not our reading as as you know as it is conventionally taught as we are taught to see ourselves and to what to read ourselves in the record but somehow saying that we have the power of its transformation of its transmutation into something they did never intended for us to see in it never and that to me is sort of what is what language from the ruins or language in the ruins points to which is that even from what they said will never feed you because it was never supposed to feed you wasn't meant for you somehow we are able to to reread and extract something that is completely vital from us for us and so that's why i am so grateful always for how you think and how both of you think and maneuver in these spaces that we're supposed to be open and shut yeah not not shut at all not shut at all another question it's destabilizing it right it's destabilizing meaning destabilizing so i want to talk a little bit about that too um jerome so you know i kept thinking about i just read all about william box brown and how he was put in a two foot by three foot by three foot box and shipped from virginia to philadelphia he got there in one day it was considered a miracle of the post office and they tossed him about did that cross your mind any of that it did and it was alice's idea to dance in the box and to film herself dance in a box and as soon as she told me that idea or not not as soon as but shortly after she told me that idea i i i thought about him as well and she and i have been talking about monasticism and cells and the the kind of paradox of searching for a certain kind of liberty within within an enclosure and i there's something to me too about this question of um the image again of the rice and the peas and the image of the seed itself that the seed is also a very tight space that's inside of it and i was when alice sent me the um the video of her dancing i was so struck by you know the the the expansiveness of the forest as the frame of of the box you know um and i remember i i watched this um this event with with you sadia and fred moden um at duke and and i'm and there's this this passage into that that has has really stuck with me where you both were talking about um what does it mean to find an outside within and inside when you are in the hold of the ship and assuming that that we are on one level still in the hold what what does it mean to search for and outside there so i also think about that with um henry box brown what you know anna and of course the loophole of retreats and the garrett you know i think all those layers are are there yeah i mean i was thinking about that even in terms of you know the title like you know stoppage and passage um so this you know movement between um arrest and movements fugitivity and enclosure and i think what was so very powerful about watching alice in the box is precisely you know look what happens inside that enclosure look what happens in that amazingly restricted space right that there's something that um that is made there too so it's you know a box is uninhabitable but so how do you make a beautiful dance inside of it and so that was just really um you know lovely i mean one of the things that came up in that conversation with you know fred was also thinking about these practices of mourinho um where people fled the plantation but not to form a great state or not to kind of leave in an absolute way but to maybe leave for a few days or to live on the outskirts of the plantation and um you know but without leaving these signs of human habitation and thinking about that again as you know a really important ethics and something that we can take you know up in our practice now so all of those resources all of those critical tools all of that beauty all of that music all of that language that comes from uh you know what can't be born that situation of captivity of being held you know whether in the ship in the plantation or today held in the body of the state um so i i that was just so um powerful in the work so um i like this idea of um i want to reintroduce my idea of rehearsal you know um and that when we let everything be determined by the hold we're in that even the um even the most minute we let we let it limit us there's ways that we are limited by the you know certainly by institutional you know kinds of constraints and rules and regulations and how certain kinds of utterances can be produced and you know um uh how things get published how we exchange and somehow it limits what can happen and so i want to introduce this notion of practice and rehearsal of something that is not that seems to be outside of in a way it's a marinage of a different sort it's like what did what would it mean to sort of practice with each other outside of certain kinds of institutional holds and what does that mean what would that suggest to you for black study and for black practice that leads us you know past this impasse yeah i mean do you have any thoughts about that i don't know i'm asking you i mean it's okay i mean by the way crow james is a song right project um and you know crojan is is a way of really thinking about the centrality of the black femme to this like brutal racialized formation that you know we're living in and when so it was baraka and there are two you know really important books one is like by zakiyah iman jackson it's called becoming human and it's really thinking about these issues of um not simply the ontological negation of blackness but it's it's plasticity what it affords and it feels that the way in which our creative labors and capacities are constantly called upon is to reproduce this order that we're constantly conscripted um to make our you know capacities available for that and um wanting to say no and um erica edwards uh has a forthcoming book called the other side of terror and really thinking about black women's role in you know um in the cold war and neo-liberalism and in assuming forms of state power and so it's like oh so what are our aspirations what are our wants do we want to be inheritors of the big house yeah right yeah right where the big house isn't something that we can um imagine you know at all certainly it wouldn't be something that we would um desire so i don't know there are different kinds of repetition i mean there's that recurrences and you know changing same of rehearsal and then there's a kind of uh structural violence which seems to be about these recurrences like not being able to escape or break a cycle and um i i don't know i mean i am just i just oscillate in the zone between rage and grief these days and i just feel so so enraged that um that i am being you know um forced to quote unquote you know an act a choice that's not a choice at all right and and and black women in particular are being asked to be involved in a certain kind of labor in maintaining um and reproducing um you know law and order and the state and it is utterly um maddening [Music] say on a rehearsal it's you know i i wrote down what you said yeah with that what you're talking about rehearsing what hope might be yeah i i i work a lot in in theater and so rehearsal is like a very daily fact of my life though it hasn't been um since march but um i also think about i love to blur the lines between what is the performance and what is the rehearsal because often my favorite performances are at the rehearsal like i have many friends who are in theater and they'll invite me to rehearsal and i'll sit and i'll watch the performance and to me that was that was the thing i don't need to i don't need to to go and see the official you know thing so i you know and i and my the first music i studied as as as a musician was was jazz and i think the way rehearsing often works in jazz is very very interesting too is like sometimes you don't rehearse or that when you're on this on the on the stage at the club like that's simultaneously the rehearsal yes and the performance and there's an intimacy to inviting the audience into you know the space of of improvisation and you know saying like we're all rehearsing here uh in the same room and and that the musicians need the audience as much as the audience needs needs musicians you know and it's not that we we went and rehearsed here and now we're here we're gonna you know we're gonna perform so i i like to when i was listening to do you speak earlier i was thinking about the ways that you i felt like you two were blurring the the lines between what is a performance what is rehearsal yeah thank you for bringing up the the that element of how it's a collaborative process it's a collective process it's not just like individuals practicing but it's something that happens because there's a interaction between that conv there's some kind of conversation that's going on and it's also improvised in that moment right it's not yeah okay i think i'm i think we're supposed to take audience questions is that right okay there are some questions that are coming um let's see um it's a question for jerome how do you apply that concept of rearranging speech and time to musical composition where do you get musical inspiration [Music] well um thank you for the question and specifically in life of life um it's very relevant to what we were talking about with seeds earlier um i so the music sort of the sort of two main layers the music they're sort of the underlying um layers that that some sound like an organ at times and then there's the saxophone in my voice on top and the underlying layers i created using a specific process called it's called uh it's called it's called well the word does one sound itself right now so i'm going to let it be but what the process is is on my computer i have a program where i can i can import audio and i can turn the audio into tiny snippets of sound and the snippets of sound are called grains or seeds and what the program allows me to do is then to rearrange those grains so what i did was i took a recording from a few years ago a live recording of a concert i gave and i put into the program and then i made new music from that and to me it's it's in many ways parallel to the process of working with the ads because with ads you know i treat every word as a seed and see what what sprouts from that and see what new meaning sprout i applied the same process to my own music um and again to me it's this feeling of like well a few years ago on the concert somebody could say like well well like he played the concert now it's over but to me it's like what i what i played in that concert is was both a tree and a seat at the same time and now years later you know i'm i'm making new music from that so that's that's a process i've been doing a lot and as for inspiration i yeah i mean i i take inspiration from many places um my reading especially and and ideas um and theory and poetry and often it feels like my goal in music is is to translate um certain ideas into sound but that's a question i could answer for hours so i will stop here um first idea let's see um how do you maintain the energy to write and especially in these times you know what do you harness within you to write what is who who you what is this energy going towards towards your audience yeah yeah i mean um these are such really brutal hard times um but uh sometimes i write i feel just to hold on to um i was going to say hold on to my sanity but maybe really to hold on to my madness and to just um a firm um i don't know being a martian in this world and uh so i think it's um the the language of you know the imposed conceptual frame is so asphyxiating just to kind of the need to break it right to just to recalibrate um um yeah because it's you know nothing need be this way but but the discourses were so normalizing right and so sometimes it you know a writing exercise is just you know that reminder that oh no this is you know this is like a man-made disaster um so so yeah so it just um it's some air within the enclosure what are you reading this idea what you named a few things the zakiah jackson yeah edwards um you know all of you the i mean i think the for me um what's so important um about um what poets do is teach me how to make different thought forms that the way to think critically um [Music] isn't dictated by genre like i don't like i don't even know what i read was it wasn't it's not a satire it's not an allegory it's not a listicle but um so i think that just what i learned from you know poet theorists you dion harriet andersee there's such a rich um you know there's like a a a treasure trove of work and that just liberates me as a thinker and makes me feel like oh i can just um work however i choose to or what's what's the form of this thought like um sometimes one doesn't want you know to write uh a reasonable well-argued essay so what is the form of the screed of the rant the rave right um how do you sound that complaint so just like jerome you are trying to translate ideas into sound like i too am trying to do that like what is the um what is the form for the articulation of this experience of these thoughts this is a perhaps time for one more question okay um uh when creating your projects how do you go about raising the dead or making space for those who have been dispossessed or disappeared by anti-blackness without turning them into symbols of your own desire is that for me it's actually for both of you but i'm going to go to jerome and said so quick i think we've got two minutes yeah i think this is very important and it's something that i i definitely wrestle with very actively in this project i've been talking about um as i said it for me is an ancestral practice and for me one of the ways i approach this question is like really like speaking to them um and like trying to listen to them and and and my goal at all times is to or one of my goals is is to honor them and respect them you know it's it's i find it very challenging and and um you know like with the ads you know the ad is placed it's the slaveholder who places the ad and and the slaveholders writing about yes our ancestors and it's a very fine line between subverting the language of the master while respecting her um my ancestor and our ancestors um so yeah i mean it's i it's an ongoing thing for me and um and i and for me really like listening to um listening to norbessi and and reading about how she approached song really helps me because i i feel like a kinship in what's happening and the risks involved as as as this person says of turning turning turning an ancestor into us a symbol yeah sadia thank you for that that's really great this idea i'm not something that i'm always wrestling with like not um you know trying to make position the dead in service of our romances um i think um you know my approach is like try to do minimal harm and i mean like you know we we encounter these presences um in this linguistic field you know and that and language is already suffused with so much violence right so um and um so what are the ethics of that encounter and how do i minimize harm um and i think it's about you know i don't know it's it's it's a it's active it's an engagement it's not like there's an object and a creator there's like you know um it's an energetic feel that one enters and um i also feel acted upon i feel like um called to do something and you know norbeste said you know she's the presumed author of zhong and i think that that presumed authorship is about wanting to be in service of right um you know just existing within this larger sociality in this larger multitude where you're you know one of those grains one of those seeds but not you know sovereign or auteur wow this is a conversation um that could go on and i hope it will i hope it will continue we have to do our collaborative performance the next time yes yes yes yes please yes please thank you so much tonight was um so powerful um i took lots of notes on post-its but the two the ones that are in front of me now are um a great power to being illegible i love that that kind of you know it's a double-sided coin right the kind of what happens when you're misrecognized in the wrong way but then there's this other power to being not readable um and uh erica when you were talking about hope and catastrophe it reminded me of um when a bunch of us were invited by our friend ann waldman to think through how to grieve and dream at the same time i've been thinking about that since that invitation years ago but then it's like why the grief part um which brings me to sadia's nothing need be this way so i want to thank you all for your um for creating new work for tonight that is amazing um and for creating that new work in conversation with each other's work and the work um by um our friends from last night um dion and uh harriet um everyone from around the world there are folks watching and time zones where they should not be awake i want to thank those audience members for coming the cap team and invite everyone to come tomorrow night to see the photographer and social practice artist john lee who's also a medical doctor um and uh poet arrested i'll be moderating that panel alongside my colleague angie cruz so um we hope that you'll register for that thank you everyone and good night thank you all thank you thank you [Music] so [Music] [Music] you