Walter Marchetti - Movements of a fly on a window from 8am to 7pm through some day in May, 1967 - 1967

The creative process is about swimming in the paradox. Hypershapes reminds me that the act of looking in every direction at once, or moving while absolutely still, all of it is in my blood. It’s a trans position of being liberated. The waters are rising, the bridges are giving, the air is shocking, the belonging is fragile, the interstitial is liveness. Graphite, marker, glass on wood. 2022 via Instagram / Torkwase Dyson

Black compositional thought is a working term that considers how paths, throughways, waterways, architecture, objects, and geographies are composed by black bodies, and then how additional properties of energy, space, scale, and sound all work together in networks of liberation. There is a physical, material space of composition and then there is an energetic space of composition: how do they work together so that black people use those entities towards liberation? —Torkwase Dyson

way·ward | /ˈwāwərd/

“Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments” — Saidiya Hartman in conversation with Lindsay Reckson and Asali Solomon. Excerpt via vimeo / Haverford College Libraries

“And we look at these maps that have offered us as people and we know that these maps are leading towards something called unfreedom, something like slavery, something like death. Then we have to say that if there are lines moving me in this direction then there must be lines that move me away. So how to I invent another route, another pathway and how do I make life in the space of the terror?” — Andrea Davis

Excerpt via YouTube / Day 4: Closing Conversation. A Map to the Door of No Return at 20: A Gathering.

Keli Maksud, Untitled Composition, 2021

“In Beloved, Toni Morrison writes, “In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound and they all know what the sound sounded like.” Bending the words of John 1:1, “In the beginning was the word,” Morrison emphasizes the sonic resonance of sound and proposes the genesis of language as not word but song, heartbeat, foot tap, stomp, and breath. Language as enunciation—radiating, reflecting, and refracting through frequency and embodied memory. When we speak of language it is often in relation to speech, dialect, or vernacular, but the communication of sound and its ability to permeate the senses causing us to shake, sway, cry, and exclaim is a corporeal and sonic presence that keeps score across generations.”

Yelena Keller — In The Beginning There Were No Words, Duets

Toni Morrison — Beloved

In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound and they all knew what that sound sounded like.

– Beloved, Toni Morrison

The Black Catatonic Scream by Harmony Holiday

“Now we have to learn to listen to the speechless ruins.” A meditation on Black silence.

https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/the-black-catatonic-scream Excerpts: “We can trace how the unsayable, unspeakable, and unspoken align in Black music, and propel us into the confessional and verbose and pathological. But what are the effects of these sloping extremes on social, emotional, and spiritual life? Does the missing testimony terrorize the subconscious or find an alternative release, new dignity? I’m trying to locate, in Black silence, a balance between the forced and the deliberate, between I said what I said and never mind (redacted), between danger and comfort. Why do so many of us refuse language and linguistic articulation in our moments of shipwreck, and how do the ruins left by the unspoken legacy of soundless abandon become a surrogate language—one of threats, insinuations, eros, uprising, Blackness speaking while exceeding the verbal.” “Why are we obsessed with our music, speaking with our echo?” “Poetry and song are forms of that catatonic tendency to use words to declare forbidden narratives, to lead them down a lane that turns meaning into pure feeling and accesses the telepathic quality of that spinning inward. “ “Poems say no to becoming a pawn in the grammar. They defy the organization and hierarchies of meaning production that enforce the dominance of Western modes; they calmly abide nonsense knowing the wisdom and potential in the codes the West is too egomaniacal to be worthy of deciphering. Poems break the silence by giving it a rhythm to enter. They became my tongue in the place of an almost bribed quietness. Poems cured my catatonic tendency in many ways, broke a generational curse of ain’t nobody’s business, and restored our bloodline to its griot heyday where we were telling on everybody, crying on like newborns between hunger and divine laughter.” “The unsounded is the insistently unresolved, but how do we enter its unmentionable spaces and listen and find a way to respond when we haven’t even admitted to ourselves that there are whole events and sensations that we refuse to give to the kind of memory that words stitch to the heart and spirit?” “It is Black music’s task and calling to recover the unrecoverable vibration of truth locked in unspoken chaos and trauma. It is also the job of the body, or some hybrid poetics that uses music and gesture together, to move toward speech like a game of charades that no one really wants to win or escape. The Black and catatonic are my favorite singers of rigged redemption songs, and I’m urged to call our names.”

Fragments of Listening The Political Possibility of Sound: Salomé Voegelin

Colony & Protectorate of Kenya

Colony & Protectorate of Kenya

Fragments of Listening The Political Possibility of Sound by Salomé Voegelin

Keli Safia Maksud