Its Ineffability Demands Another Larynx: On Sound, Grief, and Dionne Brand’s Inventory

Black Sound^[1]

A grief happened. A loved one lost a loved one, and in wanting to grieve, I remembered every other grief, and a string of loved ones gathered in my mind and pulled at me so tautly that I was without language. I was, in fact, outside of language, of what I could communicate. For a while, language existed solely outside of my imagination. Language was over there, where After was, and Finally, and Soon, and I was here. Here, where my body was a vessel grief found inadequate. Here, where I could not tolerate birdsong or the scrape of peeling bark outside my window. I could only listen to Pharoah Sanders. I listened to him for a long while. At first, albums. Then the album Thembi in particular. Then one song in particular: “Red, Black, and Green.” In it, I heard a thicket, an overgrowth of sound. Fibrous stalks. The sprouting of ridged leaves. As to what I was looking for in the open mouth of those horns, I was unsure. But it was a green overture my thinking could rest in for a while, and so I continued to listen.

……

Jazz is Black classical music. That’s what Nina Simone called it. So did Pharoah Sanders.

When asked where his sound comes from, Pharoah replies, “I listen to everything.”^[2] At that moment, a car horn goes off. Pharoah is changed by this sound. He must be, because he continues on like this. “Car horns. The squeaking of a door. I listen to everything. I listen to sounds, lightning and thunder.”^[3]

Listening is a way of gathering. Like Pharoah, I’m collecting memories when I listen to a sound. I’m collecting a way of thinking. In Dear Science, Katherine McKittrick writes, “I learn that the song helps us think about consciousness without being distracted by the demand for clarity.”^[4] To McKittrick, what we gather are clues, or “insurgencies.”^[5] As in, “The sound opens up a way of being black that ties consciousness to work, liberation.”^[6]

……

McKittrick’s clues returned me to Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk, and so, from a green thicket of sound, I wandered to “Venus.” “You know nothing about musical structure, the clerk says. But I can hear, the author says. I hear it as rhetoric. Liberatory.”^[7] What Brand hears is John Coltrane’s horn and Rashied Ali’s drums in the song “Venus.” What she hears she translates into a theory about writing, but how? Brand calls the horn a statement and the drums a conductor of time and order.^[8] What exactly is being said by the horn, I’m unsure. The more I listen, the more I am convinced that what cannot be easily answered can become an exercise of imagination. So the horn is a statement that aspirates, that breaks apart, and tries again and again to return to its opening melody and with each incomplete return makes a new sound. The drums witness this and keep time, hold steady, and secure this double act of looking back and moving forward.

What stabilizes us in moments of fragmentation and what do we learn when we fail to recover a former self? “Listening changes text. Listening changes things.”^[9] I wonder if a question like this led Brand to the tercet as a space of “expansion and contraction,” of looking back and forward^[10]. That the tercet helps contain as much as it anchors the life and world of whoever speaks within its three lines. It’s needed to sustain a text like Brand’s Ossuaries, to have the capacity to hold the devastation of an opening like this: “I lived and loved, some might say / in momentous times, / looking back, my dreams were full of prisons . . . ”^[11]

……

I wander back into McKittrick’s clues. “Song, story, invite the ‘ability to feel-with.’” McKittrick writes, citing Lisa Lowe’s words from The Intimacies of the Four Continents.^[12] What was I being invited to feel listening to “Red, Black, and Green”?

……

Like Brand, I heard a relationship in “Red, Black, and Green.” Not between a horn and drums, but between two saxophones. The song opens with the dissonance of these two sounds. Emboldened by each other, sharpening against each other. The effect is disorienting, and there is so much life. I want to turn the song off. But I can’t. How do I say this next part? The sound of a saxophone can feel so deadly and there are two, ratcheting up in pitch. Pausing for a breath. Ceasing to exist. Then another breath, and their desire to be obliterated by one another is reignited. There is so much life in how sound strikes up against an elsewhere, against that which cannot fully be said. I want to turn it off. But I can’t. Then one saxophone begins to play the same five notes, downward then upward, and to this new tempo, this new world order, every other instrument—the cymbals, the piano, the violin—organizes itself around the call. The saxophone that breaks first is the one that gathers them. In this gathering, there is a moment of relief. Relief is caustic. It has a cost. The cost is knowing relief can only be for a little while. The descent back to disorder looms. I want to turn it off. But I can’t. For now, there is no later, and no back to go to. Listening to this moment is like mercy. A lightning rod humming before the strike.

Black Inventory

A loved one lost a loved one, and the only loved one I could think of, I couldn’t think of in his entirety. I have one photograph left. In it, he is holding a smile. He is holding me. The plush arms of his chair are holding his own arms. It is evening. I know because the light from the floor lamp gently holds the shadows on our faces. I know it must be the floor lamp that lights us because we are in the living room where, had it been the morning or the afternoon, the light from the sliding door would have been the light that held our faces, and that light could never hold our faces as gently as this. We are being held in the photograph. The photograph holds us within a time when he was not yet held in a place where his belongings, his rights, his autonomy were withheld from him. A place where each body was held within a uniform. Their movement, their status, their possibility—all of this determined by the color of a uniform. Where, in the winters, the barbed wire around the perimeter did not have the decency to hold the snowfall and be obscured for a single evening. We are being held in a photograph. In the photograph, I have not yet found his cassettes. The cassettes he loved—so many, so many—which, at one point, had each held the side of his hand, his warmth, his eagerness, most likely, as he penned titles, dates. The black spools that held the songs he loved. The nightstand holds the cassettes, and I forget most nights that I sleep next to their silence. Knowing that cassettes often do not last more than thirty years. Knowing he did not. Knowing he, too, did not. Knowing she did, but it was not enough. Wanting to play the songs the cassettes hold and knowing that with or without me, they are disintegrating. My desire not enough to interrupt the process of demise. I heard all of this and nothing of this listening to Pharoah. I listened anyway.

……

In An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading, Brand recounts a photograph from her childhood. Posing among her sisters and a cousin, she is being directed by a man who holds up a colonial technology to his eye. She writes, “already I have changed, thinking of composing myself for the audience. I now recognize myself as authored, altered. As selected, sorted, from a series of selves for appearance and presentation.”^[13]

This is an early making of an inventory. There is a future-now self, observing a past-then self. The past-then self is contained by a photograph. The past-then self contains within her a beginning: a colonial education, the separation of loved ones, the unfamiliarity of her gendered body. There is the reader too, observing a future-now self doing the difficult work of retrieval, of sorting against the bright light of the camera.

……

The bright light of the camera is like the main saxophone in “Red, Black, and Green.” Like the drums in “Venus.” It is a great, sustaining force around which all else is organized. While writing this essay, I found a line from Robert Bresson I had once written in my notebook: “Build your film on white, on silence and on stillness.”^[14] Instead of the word film, I had mistakenly written life, and now I wanted to laugh at his imperative. Who was he to make me? Life was already always being organized around someone else’s command. Click. Click. I had written the line with derision, not knowing I was already in the process of composition. I was surprised by how easily a list emerged from me. What next? “The silence was pleased.”^[15] But I was not pleased. How could I be?

……

White linen. White paper. White picket fence. White arithmetic on ice. White rice. Water blanched starch white. Bark peeling back white. White linen. White paper. White picket fence. White arithmetic on ice. White rice. On the floor, a thousand white grains. Bark peeling back white. White lies and textbooks with a white house on the cover. In them, dead white faces, and none dear to me. Not a single one.

……

In her introduction to Brand’s Nomenclature, Christina Sharpe writes that Brand is “a poet who is working out, in language, what has survived the death of her politics.”^[16] The poet lives through cycles of loss and retrieval, her task of living is laborious in how she must collect, scrutinize, and grieve. This is how I understand the inventory. “An inventory is agape.”^[17] It is not only a logbook, a ledger, a form, but also a working relationship. It is a relationship of making. Of what is said, known, dreamt, felt, and desired, and the way these acts are held. It is “a register of accumulated observations.”^[18] That an inventory can take many forms is what makes it so Black, so Queer. It suggests that there is more fidelity in form—in being a tercet, an epigram, a horn, the drums—than there is in this flesh. After all, what is flesh to a groove, to a funk, to jazz?

……

Once, I was out on a walk, thinking of verbs. Prepositions, which express a relationship to place. Adverbs, which modify the quality of a life, in relation to circumstance. “What poetry allows is the removal of parts of speech so that a life may make sense to itself.”  Yes. Estranging parts of speech destabilizes the sentence. Unlatches what is possible for the I, the we, from the status quo. How much more clearly I hear their work in the absence of the verb. What that absence frees me to hear.

……

I hear Yasmine in Ossuaries: “I could not, I could not, I could not.”^[19] She is stuck in this refrain before beginning another list. Refrain is many musical things. A breaking. A refusal to go on. A restraint. A complaint. Inventories are made from this kind of exhaustion, out of difficulty, this striking up against im/possibility. “Such an encounter only brings more grief that you can handle.”^[20]

There is something about the verb could that unsettles me, leaves me up in the air. When my writing has left readers up in the air, I am often told I am missing narrative clarity. Clarity, meaning an issue of opacity, of relation. Brand is wary of narrative. “I think that for Black people, Narrative, as it is constituted now, is incapable of transmitting or sounding a tomorrow, beyond brutalization.”^[21] To exist beyond brutalization. Perhaps offering clarity to something like brutality, only makes more precise the placement of a boot on a neck. This is not a tomorrow I’m interested in living in. Somewhere, Yasmine is still refraining: “I could not, I could not, I could not.” And later, “I tried love, I did . . .”^[22] Yasmine lives where the verb fails; I’d like to live there too.

……

No more white. No stillness nor silence. If no silence, then no pleasure. Pleasure like elsewhere. Not here. Pleasure a sometime. A somehow. A walk. Necessary for me. How many blue things on this walk? Blue ink on my mind. On my fingers. My pen. German. Not a national of, but German-made. Full of blue ink. Blue cartridges in blue boxes. Blue water pitcher. Blue teacups. Blue comforter. Blue comfort. More blue in my apartment than blue in the street, in the world. Yes. Yes. Blue magnesium for sleep. Blue notes. Blue jokes on the fridge. Blue time in the kitchen like a hand in my mouth. Blue eye surveillant blue in the window. Blueprint of a tree, a house. Blue dawn. Blue jars of flour. Blue books with blue spines. Blue wonder at the blue mold. Blue mold with blue know-how. More than my own knowing.

……

“Without verbs, nothing can be done.”^[23] The verb I want to fail at is the verb “do,” its performance, its work. Doing. Done. Don’t. On that walk, I heard a wind chime. Wondered whether a wind chime could chime blue, and then June was in my ear. Blue beyond the feeling of blue.^[24] Then Billie. The curtain descends, everything ends.^[25] What ends? I thought. And can’t it be this: this silence? The silence being what surrounded this inventory of blue, its context. I live adjacent to a neighborhood whose silence I cannot dissociate from the East St. Louis Massacre. Or the Red Summer that endured longer than one summer, that had no twilight. Already this list of blue was coming undone. No wonder I thought of my apartment, the refuge that it was. This silence was not silence at all. It was through this not-silence that I heard the wind chime. My listening then interrupted by my sight. One. Two. Three officers in their blue uniforms, who, like me, were on a walk, enjoying the day. Blue beyond the feeling of blue. What ends? Without the verb, this list of blue was an attempt for nothing to be done. But something had been done. Some violence was already always in the process of happening with or without my being there. I abandoned the list and returned home.

Black Grief

An inventory begins when we give up on narrative, and that’s why it’s work to make one. An inventory asks us to sit in a grief that may never offer a narrative to satisfy our suffering or offer clarity about what has happened to us. By giving up this hope in narrative, we make room for something else: recognition. Recognition that we are changed, unsettled, estranged, and that through this practice, there is transformation. That after the authoring that is grief, or violence, or nation, to recognize ourselves again, we must do the work of altering, of making. In this, there is the inventory, a form which, like poetry, has “the ability to reconstitute language.”^[26] The inventory is rigorous, stiff, like xylem, and is a manner of seeing, imagining “between the then and the after, or the now and the after.”^[27]

To recover, to breathe, to continue.^[28] Brand believes making inventories, writing poetry requires courage and attention. McKittrick might say inventories are sustained by a methodology of wonder. Wonder, like the making of an inventory, is a rigorous, dynamic practice of “narrating-listening-hearing-reading-and-sometimes-unhearing.”^[29] Wonder signals Black living.^[30] Listening is one of many different ways to recover. An inventory, then, is not only the recovery of the self, but the way the self extends itself through what it finds along the way. The way we must utilize all our senses, all our ways of knowing and processing and feeling. An inventory is “this genealogy she’s made by hand, this good silk lace.”^[31] It is the tercet. The prose poem. An album. McKittrick’s hyphen. The blue ink I write everything in now, thinking of the Blue Clerk and her exhaustion.

It is difficult to write exactly how my grief is housed by “Red, Black, and Green,” except that it is an “alternative spelling” of my grief.^[32] After all, like Brand’s reading of Charles Mingus’s Pithecanthropus Erectus, Pharoah’s song is sound that escapes translation into language. “It’s a text of philosophical charge.”^[33] It suggests another territory. No, “its ineffability demands another larynx.” What was I being invited to feel listening to “Red, Black, and Green”? “Some instructions to leaping beyond the time that we live in . . .”^[34] The song opens with the dissonance of two sounds: now and after. Emboldened by each other. Sharpening against each other. I am there, alongside these sounds, striking up against im/possibility. An elsewhere. A place where my larynx, my hand, my heart, my flesh, are more than the one I have in this world. I am failing to reach this place completely. But this failure leads to a demand, a future. I know because I can hear gurgling when I press my ear against the door of this elsewhere. “Where did your voice come from? I collected it. . . . Gathered it.”^[35] Everything gathering towards these three clues, these three notes. Organizing around the call. It feels deadly. No. Apocalyptic. Where did your voice come from? From you and you and you. You who I see in a different form in this song. “Unpinned from all allegiances.”^[36] The cost is knowing relief can only be for a little while. The descent back to disorder soon looms. Disorder is the world I live in now. “To undo, to undo and undo and undo this infinitive.”^[37] I have such little time left. If disintegration, if fragmentation, if brutality, if these are the promises of this life, then I hope to find you again elsewhere. Even when “the residue of songs / from the cups of saxophones bring us to exhaustion.”^[38] To find another inventory. To worry and wonder another.^[39] That is how I want to meet. Natural blue.^[40] Let’s meet again wherever the verb fails.

A friend read the beginnings of this essay, where I was writing in circles about sound and estrangement. There was Pharoah Sanders, and Nina Simone, and Prince, and Solange, and many others. Circles and circles of them. I had no idea where I was headed. Then, my friend said something like, start with your grief, and I remembered a poem I wrote once about white linen and devotion, and I remembered how difficult it was for to me to call the poem what it really was: an elegy. But the sound the three syllables (el-e-gy) make is a beginning. It’s a sound to be caught by. Then this first line came, and eventually, so did the rest of this essay.

Listen to Nina Simone Live in Holland ’65 from 11:30 to 11:47 when Nina introduces her song, then from 18:05 to 24:10 when she sings it. Nina tells us she turned “Tomorrow is My Turn” into a protest song. The song is from a film about WWII French soldiers contemplating life after war. A protest song, like “Mississippi Goddam,” which she sang to ten thousand at the Selma to Montgomery marches, and which she will sing later on the same stage. She sings, “Though some may reach for the stars, others will end behind bars,” and the year 1965 steps inside of her throat.

When we step into a sound, who do we bring with us? I am urged to ask this question by the muscles in Nina’s hands. Although the straps of her dress, her neck, the lift of her chin ask another, and another. Is this what Pharoah means when he says the word “everything”?

Which moment exactly was it that changed Brand as she listened to John Coltrane’s “Venus” that made her listen again, and again? Can you find it?

Listen from 0:00 to 1:40 without knowing 1:41 to 2:05 is coming, without knowing 2:06 either. Listen and, for a moment, make 0:00 to 1:40 the new confines of your life. Your new form.

Listening to Pharoah troubles revelation. As in, revelation, divine and intervening, would be easier to endure than listening to this song.

At 5:11, Binti Cumar Gacal is moving towards the last chorus of “Bixiso ama Balad Xaawo”, and at 5:27, Binti’s gaze shifts to something just out of the camera’s reach. Then we see who made Binti’s heartbreak open into a smile: a woman in pink and black, who joins her onstage. She’s holding the end of her shawl and is wiping Binti’s face. They dance together. Binti brings a finger down her check, miming a teardrop, and the woman repeats the gesture. At the end of the song, the two women hold hands, step back onto the stage where the light gives way to the dark, and together, they bow in the shadows.

I think of the word held, how it holds my thinking in each sentence here. How I would not have been able to write this paragraph without it. The word held, hold, holds, in all its tenses, is a refrain for memory, is that woman’s shawl wiping my face, urging me on.

Can I hold the mic? Please can I hold the mic?

Somewhere, there must be pleasure in composition. Prince is rehearsing “Erotic City,” performing a soundcheck in 1984. He is adjusting all the sounds. Listen to the way he slows the song down, listens, tells the bass to go up two octaves. Listen like Prince listens to every layer. Listening to the now of the song and what the song could sound like if this . . . if that. . . . Making determined by an if.

Noname’s “Rainforest” says it all—0:58 to 1:08

X-Ray Spex is performing “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo” for Top of the Pops in 1978. Listen from 2:18 to 2:34. How the chorus loops onto itself, like an end that won’t stop catching against its beginning.

I once had a therapist tell me I needed to practice listening to my surroundings more often. But I already did. On my walks, I liked to listen to trees, the wind through the leaves, and try to bend the sound until it sounded like the lapping waves of the lake I grew up near. Or walking with a new friend, communing with the counterpoints of our lives, and walking until I thought of love and was no longer afraid of uncertainty. Listening is a way of making a door to another place.

What was my loved one thinking of as he recorded Third World to Shey Mire Dacar, from Aster Aweke to Peter Tosh? What kind of wonder was he making? What happens when I hold my ear to his ear, to the genealogy of sound he has made, knowing that for the rest of my life I will be without him, that my listening will not change this? What happens when I listen anyway?

Listen from 0:00 to 0:35, then to the silence from 0:35 to 0:40. Listen to that silence five times. Listen to the crackling, the clicking of this recording. When you listen to this moment, can you hear Pharoah’s saxophone, that aspiration, still gurgling in your ear? “In the dark / reaching for you / whoever you are / and / are you ready?” What demand, what vow do you hear in Pharoah’s sound, in June’s cadence? Commit your life to it.