17 EKIM, 2024

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17 EKIM, 2024

VIBRATING SENTENCES

The mysteries of finding ourselves in the trap doors of language. Artist, writer, and educator, Kameelah Janan Rasheed contemplates the textures and opacities of language as liberatory acts.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed

"…as if the line bore its own diacritical mark inside itself as a tendency for waywardness, line always about to go off like an (un)held note of David Murray’s, that Abbey-flared offness from a choir stayed up ahead to meet it."

– Moten, Fred. Renee Gladman and Fred Moten: One Long Black Sentence. United States: Image Text Ithaca, 2020

Letters, words, and sentences are not just static symbols on a page. They are alive. A twerking letter “i” pops so hard that it knocks the superscript dot to the ground, leaving behind a decapitated letter that now resembles a stunted “l.” This lively transformation of a letter into another, more playful form is just one example of the living nature of language. A cursive sentence: letters running hand in hand as they approach the line break, a casual entanglement. A daisy chain of soft kisses between letters forms the connecting ligature, a tender and living way of linking words. The paragraph’s rowdy punctuation forms a maze, leading the reader astray in an attempt to finesse a promotion from supporting character to protagonist. A faded line of photocopied text is struggling with the breakup between printer toner and substrate or the struggle between ink and paper. A footnoted translation of the word “silly” gets into a fight for not disclosing its previous etymology. I imagine the letters having a life with one another — dancing, breaking up, rebelling, hiding, fighting, tricking, and loving. What if it’s like a Toy Story, and when we go to sleep, the letters on a page get up and have a whole life of their own, independent of our wishes? What can one make of the interior lives of letters, words, and sentences? Saying this feels fantastical, childish, and naive. But I am all of these things. The text makes me giddy, and I feel like the backside of a pair of chartreuse green corduroy pants.

As a child, I spent hours downloading fonts and exploring the system fonts to find the suitable typeface to express best the interiority of my name or the title of yet another book report. This was later suspected to be an early symptom of Obsessive Compulsive Behavior, and I refused to start any writing assignment until I arrived at the optimal handwriting and typeface suited for the prompt. As such, there were indeed days when the paper wasn’t written because not being able to find the typeface or handwriting was the most optimal carrier. It would be odd to send your five-year-old outside in an ill-fitted jumpsuit, but I also don’t want to send my words outside without the appropriate attitude. I’d never send that sentence outside with a flared serif, tight kerning, and shallow descenders when we know she needs to wear a bracketed serif with irregular kerning and exaggerated descenders so she feels like gushes of wind are blowing through her apertures. This carried on with substrates as well. Before I learned in 2020 that I would much rather write spatially across a large wall or sheet of paper, I would spend hours searching for the most hospitable host or substrate. Was it paper or skin or metal? My mother recounts a story of one of my first political movements — convincing the Kindergarten teacher to invest in better poster paint because of the substrate's thinness. In geology, a substrate is the rock or sediment surface where chemical and biological processes occur. Likewise, in biology, it is the surface on which an organism lives and enzymes can act. Substrates, like stages, are occasions. All stages have their affordances: not all stages or substrates can be host to a sentence’s performance. Sometimes, we do not need the vellum paper or the acetate sheets; we need skin, fabric, sky, or wall. Which substrate is the best host for this performance?

Letters vibrate. They hum. They buzz. They are in motion. And most of all, they are living — metaphorically. But who needs more metaphors? Maybe we do not need more metaphors, but we rely on more metaphors because it is one of the limited technologies we have to describe language – we use language to describe language. I am writing an essay about writing an essay. The lasso cannot lasso itself. In The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World (1996), David Abrams writes:

Every attempt to definitively say what language is is subject to a curious limitation. For the only medium with which we can define language is language itself. We are therefore unable to circumscribe the whole of language within our definition. It may be best, then, to leave language undefined, and to thus acknowledge its open-endedness, its mysteriousness. Nevertheless, by paying attention to this mystery we may develop a conscious familiarity with it, a sense of its texture, its habits, its sources of sustenance. (Abram 1996, 52)

In leaving “language undefined…acknowledg[ing] its open-endedness,” we are reminded of the sociality of language. I do not only mean sociality in terms of language being learned through social interactions; I am also thinking about sociality as the relationship between words on a page as a social arrangement (consider concrete and experimental poetry where the relationship between the substrate and text is one of collaboration, negotiation, and friction). This social arrangement is consistently undone through the writer’s revisions and by the reader’s perception of the text (see: Umberto Eco’s invoking of the reader’s “ghost chapters”; poet and quantum mechanics researcher Amy Catanzano might call this an example of the observer effect where “the observer affects the observed…a reader can affect a poem’s meaning through interpretation”). Language is undone because we are always messing with it. We can’t help but write the sentence and then rewrite the sentence. The substrate is this stage to rehearse different relationships between language. Maybe our track changes are the markings on the browser screen – evidence of this sociality.

"This sentence comes in the form of an open tangle."

- Moten, Fred. Renee Gladman and Fred Moten: One Long Black Sentence. United States: Image Text Ithaca, 2020

In Fred Moten's 2015 journal article Blackness and Poetry, he writes:

We’re supposed to derive from the work, in its completeness, some sense of its rule. But what about the openness of the work, its internal sociality as well as the social relations of its own production, which not only escape but also succeed the works seizure…

Now, all of us who have read Fred Moten know that Moten loves page-long sentences. When I first began to read his work, I enjoyed chasing the tail of the sentence. Each sentence felt like a speculative incubator, an infinite set of nested parentheticals. I remain intrigued by “the social relations of its production” and “internal sociality.” Producing writing requires social relationships in its production, distribution, and revision. Consider a piece of published writing - maybe even this one. I am trying to gain traction, to find the handles on the words so that I can wrestle them into a state of glorified submission: this written text. Producing this work demands engagement with former selves, editors, text message exchanges, and more. Octavia Estelle Butler talks about this “primitive hypertext” or this shuttling between different texts in the production of her novels during a 1998 interview with Samuel Delany at MIT. Fred Moten, writing about Renee Gladman’s work in their collaborative publication One Long Black Sentence (2020), notes the “auto-correct resists a little, sometimes won’t let me do what I want to do, and then, after I finally defeat it, it leaves a little scar, underlining, marking what it takes to be mistaken.” This scar marks this sociality between the writer and the word processor, much like track changes. Moten echoes the openness that Lyn Hejinan summons when she speaks about the “open text” and Umberto Eco's surfacing of “the open work” – all are invitations to inhabit and cruise the holes in the text.

I can’t help but think of Pope.L’s Hole Theory (2002), an articulation that also evades articulation, Pope.L offers holes as “occasions,” “a voodoo of nothingness,” as opportunities to consider our relationship to lack and the impossibility of knowing or possessing. And at one point, Pope. L offers: “Maybe I should substitute 'Theory'/With the word: 'Practice.'/Or: 'Catechism.' OR: 'Homework.'” We practice holes. Holes are praxis, not prattle. He writes: “Beneath this [redacted] sentence [handwritten above redaction] is a hole.” How do we imagine Pope.L’s redaction as a hole alongside the hole he points to under his sentence? It becomes something like a set of nested holes – a black hole that swallows another black hole. What we know of black holes is that if we get too close, we will not escape their gravitational force, leading to spaghettification. To get close to the holes of a text is to take on the risk of a particular kind of obliteration and undoing. To read is to seek an intimacy that may ruin us.

Building intimacy with a text is reading the words and gleefully taking an “inferential walk.” Umberto Eco’s “inferential walks” are like cruising the implicit articulations in a text – filling in the holes with our associations to create “ghost chapters.” In The Role of the Reader (1979), Umberto Eco writes about “inferential walks” as a spatial activity, a choreography of wandering: “to ‘walk’ so to speak, outside the text in order to gather intertextual support.” (32) Inferential walks, much like Pope.L’s invoking, “Beneath this sentence is a hole,” encourage us to consider language as a series of hideouts, pockets, and cavities. The navigation of language’s hideouts and trapdoors requires a wayfinding technology not so much toward coherence but toward an errancy as is described in Betsy Wing’s translator notes in Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990): “Errance for Glissant…is not idle roaming, but includes a sense of sacred motivation.” I look to Saidiya Hartman for this technology of “sacred motivation.” In Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), she offers:

Waywardness: the avid longing for a world not ruled by master, man or the police. The errant path taken by the leaderless swarm in search of a place better than here. The social poesis that sustains the dispossessed. Wayward: the unregulated movement of drifting and wandering; sojourns without a fixed destination, ambulatory possibility, interminable migrations, rush and flight, black locomotion; the everyday struggle to live free… Wayward: to wander, to be unmoored, adrift, rambling, roving, cruising, strolling, and seeking. To claim the right to opacity. To strike, to riot, to refuse. To love what is not loved. To be lost to the world. It is the practice of the social otherwise, the insurgent ground that enables new possibilities and new vocabularies; it is the lived experience of enclosure and segregation, assembling and huddling together… It is a beautiful experiment in how-to-live.

“To begin with the otherwise as word, as concept, is to presume that whatever we have is not all that is possible. Otherwise [...] The otherwise is the disbelief in what is current and a movement towards, and an affirmation of, imagining other modes of social organization, other ways for us to be with each other.”

- Crawley, Ashon. Otherwise, Ferguson, Interfictions Online, 2016

Moten, writing about Gladman’s work in One Long Black Sentence (2020) asks two questions:

“Is there refuge in the sentence?”

“Is there an underground railroad in the sentence?”

Sentences are the cover story for under-the-radar behavior, a series of trapdoors for the reader to fall through – straight into the hole beneath the sentence. Might the underground railroad in the sentence be the path of radical and liberatory exploration? A comma that not only separates clauses but creates a pathway to a speculative future an “otherwise,” as Ashon Crawley reminds us? A subscript that sends our eye downward to imagine the proximity between the bottom of the number “8” and the crown of a letter as the measure of the possibility of something other than what we have now? In reflecting on my 2020 print “Black people/want irony,” I shared that I want the sentence to feel unfamiliar. Suppose we can read a sentence that bypasses the statistical expectations of collocation – this word must sit next to this word. In that case, we can consider the possibility of societal systems that bypass the historical expectations of who does and does not survive. The work resulted from an accidental juxtaposition while installing work, and I love a revelatory accident. Black people, colonized people – we desire a decade that does not rhyme with the last decade and encounters that break the rhyme scheme.

Read Past Protodispatches here