Brian Teare Introduces fahima ife

I first read fahima ife’s brilliant debut, Maroon Choreography, shortly after reading visual artist Torkwase Dyson’s essay “Black Interiority: Notes on Architecture, Infrastructure, Environmental Justice, and Abstract Drawing.” Maroon Choreographyimmediately constellated itself with Dyson and others whose work theorizes the Black Anthropocene / the Plantationocene — Christina Sharpe, Kathryn Yusoff, and Dionne Brand primary among them. But I could not not read ife’s choreography of black study through Dyson’s practice of “black compositional thought,” which Dyson describes as making work from “the black-inside-black position.” Visual artists and poets are both makers, and Dyson’s writing about her own poetics still seems to me consonant with my experience of ife’s. “In the act of making I understand that it is the integrations of forms folded into the conditions of black spatial justice,” Dyson writes. And, “Here I open up the power of abstract representation while engaging with the emotional implications of design space itself.” Black compositional thought is black-poiesis: a way of acknowledging, as ife does in Maroon Choreography, “the word is free / but we are not.” Like Dyson’s abstract drawings and sculptures, ife’s poems respond to social ecologies and spaces shaped by anti-Black institutions, infrastructures, and policies; like Dyson’s abstract drawings and sculptures, they are made from deep within a Black interiority that foregrounds itself so completely that ife can indeed claim “{the lyric has gone black}.” 

ife’s new work, “alchemical sirens,” presented here, both extends and reframes the transhistorical spatial imagination of their earlier sequence “porous aftermath,” which listens and bears witness to fugitive spirits, ancestral presences who escape the plantation economy and navigate the bayous of southern Louisiana. This new poem also concerns itself with Louisiana, but shifts its listening and witnessing to focus on the lasting impact of the tignon law of the eighteenth century. As ife writes in an email to me, “The tignon law prohibited black, mixed-race, creole, mestiza, and mulatta women from showing their hair in public. The law was an attempt to prevent desire in white men, of the property class, for the collective anima of black women. The law was an attempt to prevent desire, to signify plumage, to create desire. Or, the law was yet another code designed to keep sirens in their place.” As with ife’s earlier work, “alchemical sirens” answers the call of ancestral presences to “elevate our dead.” Elevate from elevare, first, “to render light,” and then, “to lift up.” Given the anti-Blackness that weighs heavily on Black women both then and now, given the Black Arts Movement–era initiative for “poems that kill,” how first to render light, how then to lift up? How to offer a “plausible love song”? “the new black art is this  — ” writes ife, “find the lost soul and love it.”