I Mumbled At the Fire
“Silence often denotes something that is suppressed or repressed and is an interiority that is about withholding, absence, and stillness. Quiet, on the other hand, is presence (one can, for example, describe prose or a sound as quiet) and can encompass fantastic motion,” Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2004)
In her richly textured reflection, the brevity of Dionne Brand’s words belie the expansive affective terrain she traverses in the essay. She begins with a scene of “fantastic motion,” as she is spending her days “tuned to the stilled and heightened frequencies of everyday life.” What is the place of stillness in the midst of insurgency? Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet has been a (heartfelt? nomadic?) companion as I’ve navigated the absurdity, brutality, and anarchic possibilities of the past year. Black people are told that all this death, all this trauma, all these walls of captivity are simply errant configurations of the apogee of human civilizations — liberal democracy. That all of our struggles have meaning insomuch as they figure into a teleological movement of progress towards a “more perfect union.” By listening to the stillness conjured in Brand and Quashie’s respective pens, I have found new ways to embrace and explore my interior life as a legitimate terrain of creativity, evolution, and war as black and black-inspired rebellion raged in force all around me.
“Quiet, then, is the inexpressible expressiveness of this interior, an expressiveness that can appear publicly, have and affect social and political meaning, challenge or counter social discourse, yet none of this is its aim or essence,” The Sovereignty of Quiet.
Nordstrom and Robben, two anthropologists who survey a broad spectrum of research focused on the place of violence in everyday life, write the following:
“one can count the dead and measure the destruction of property, but victims can never convey their pain and suffering to us, other than through the distortions of words, images and sound. Any rendition of the contradictory realities of violence imposes order and reason onto what had been experienced as chaotic,” Fieldwork Under Fire (1995).
How to take experiences of black suffering & survival and transmute them into something else which does not strive towards narrative? This is a question that haunts me, yet one that has been addressed by an aesthetic insurgency in black music. The so-called “mumble rappers” have produced an aesthetic that embraces unintelligibility. The most salient feature of mumble rap — the quality that informs its popular designation — is that it is often difficult to hear the exact lyrics that the artists are saying on the track. I have this nagging hunch that it’s possible to map aesthetic revolutions in black art with the perpetually evolving atmosphere of antiblack violence. I would argue that this rejection of rap’s narrative-driven storytelling idiom is directly related to the conscription of the street rebellions and black death that birthed the Movement for Black Lives into the national progress narrative. Through the “distortion of words, images, and sounds,” can this novel aesthetic generatively inform how the representation class — pundits, commentators, academics, experts, etc — approach the chaos of antiblackness?
“This vampiric narrativization,” as Rizvana Bradley poignantly writes in her “anti-retrospective” on the year since George Floyd’s murder, is the only form narrative can take when it comes to blackness. Blackness is an incoherent object inasmuch as it can only be defined through the violence of antiblackness. The lifeblood of narrative is drawn from the veins of black people. Many of those violences come in the form of what Frank Wilderson calls “structural adjustment.” Structural adjustment takes place when blackness is forced to abandon its call for the end of the world as we know it, and instead join forces with those who seek to reorganize the world into a more palatable position. Attempting to fit black life — in all its mad glory — into the bounds of narrative is a form of carcerality that presents a barrier to the black dead who may be in search of rest.
What is lost in the attempt to render our lives legible? The power of narrative compels us to recognize that a disruption has occurred due to a viral pandemic, and that once this disruption is over, we will return to a normal state of affairs. But blackness has been denied normality ever since it became the negative constituent element of modernity. After rehearsing the common justifications for bringing people back to work in service of the almighty Economy, Brand quips, “These hymns we’ve heard, these enticements to something called the normal, gesture us toward complicity.” The violence behind the concept of “normal,” attempts to reduce the irreducibly fiendish and chaotic dynamism of life. I would go as far as to say the violence necessary to engender and maintain normality is a form of death, a vicious attempt to obstruct the indeterminacy of reality.
“…how to live life fully without being trapped by the expectation of resistance, how to engage the agency of the inner life?” The Sovereignty of Quiet.
Black people have responded and continue to respond to what Sylvia Wynter calls our narratively condemned status in myriad ways. I am wary, however, of those tendencies that seek to restore some semblance of agency, humanity, or life to the sentient beings onto whose bodies blackness congeals. In the words of Hartman, those projects are something “I consider obscene: the attempt to make the narrative of defeat into an opportunity for celebration, the desire to look at the ravages and the brutality of the last few centuries, but to still find a way to feel good about ourselves.”¹ I made some moves where I could, but I was not on the frontlines in the streets this past year. Instead, I have experimented with different ways of confronting and confounding narrative with the full weight of blackness. They included a weekly black radical theory Reading Rainbow-type broadcast, to a project in the works that seeks to craft sonic pastiches of the words of black radical thinkers mashed together in wild, original soundscapes. In what ways are the dynamic spectrums of black quiet a threat to narrative? What emerges at the seams of our thinking and doing?²
“As Aimé Césaire argues, poetic language respects the ‘knowledge born in the great silence of scientific knowledge,’” (Aimé Césaire’s “Poetry and Knowledge,” quoted in The Sovereignty of Quiet)
Brand’s unsheathing of the violence that animates calculus and narrativization gets straight at the heart of my political project as a social scientist. I have been vexed by questions of disciplinarity for as long as I can remember. Social scientists are ceaseless in their pursuit of “documenting the dead and measuring the destruction of property.” The social scientific arsenal³ turns black suffering into troves and mountains of data, and black resilience into narratives of human salvation. Such projects sicken me because rarely do people stop and think, “What do we want/expect this data to do?” When collecting data and crafting narratives become ends unto themselves, liberation is foreclosed. Consider this a call for dialogue with black mathematicians and statisticians — what does the idiom of calculus generate in a world structured by the neoliberal refrain of risk management? And how does it relate to the position of blackness described by Hartman as defined by “accumulation and fungibility?”
Is it possible for the institutions of public health to divest from the calculus of individualistic risk management, and move towards building an ethos of shared vulnerability? I add Brand’s “reckoning” to my toolbox of concepts necessary for the end of the world — reparations, redress, decolonization, abolition — but these concepts can only actualize on the foundation of a new grammar for understanding black suffering. A grammar that narrative seeks to hold in perpetual captivity-on-display. What if, for example, it was the case that last year once all pretenses of COVID-19 being some kind of fairytale “great equalizer” melted away and statistics showed that black people were dying at astoundingly disproportionate rates, nonblack people felt an immense sense of relief. That medicalized data of black suffering serves to nourish and comfort in-the-know professionals and white liberals rather than galvanize their spirits towards social change? A true reckoning with this antiblack world, in the words of Trouillot, requires demands that are “too radical to be formulated in advance of their deeds.”
¹ Hartman, Saidiya V., and Frank B. Wilderson. “THE POSITION OF THE UNTHOUGHT.” Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (2003): 183–201.
² Here I draw from Jared Sexton, who I will quote at length,
“If one were looking for a good place to generate some talk of afro-pessimism and praxis, it might be at the point where something uncountable and unaccountable happens, right along the seam between theory and practice, where that often overlooked and largely misunderstood third term introduces itself: poiesis. Between our thinking and doing, there is always something of our making, the unconscious dimension of our thinking-doing through which newness enters the world, within it and against it.”
Sexton, Jared. “Affirmation in the Dark: Racial Slavery and Philosophical Pessimism.” The Comparatist 43 (2019): 90–111.
³ See the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva, particularly Toward a Global Idea of Race
