I've shared this stretch of transcription without breaking it up because the flow of Matana's words is so much a part of what I understand in them. But there are so many moments that I want to dwell in and sit with.

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In an article entitled "The Emotional Labor of Black Women" (April 2021), Alexis Yeboah writes about her experience as "a Black woman from Minneapolis, who lives less than a mile from where George Floyd was murdered." [4]  The labor of tending to the embodied memory of trauma while simultaneously caring for the ways in which others receive the story of this trauma extends through and beyond generosity into something physically unbearable (the name given to the medical framework that Yeboah refers to, the Superwoman Schema (SWS), speaks to this violence) [5].

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The fact that Matana turns from their labor toward my own experience navigating artistic modes of expression in academia leaves me without an adequate response. I’m uncomfortable with the vastness of Matana’s generosity, and also grateful for it; for the layers of care in their turning to me and touching my academic struggles to their labor to make their lived experience accessible in spaces that have previously erased it. They mention W.E.B. Dubois's concept of "double consciousness" (which he first wrote about in the 1903 article in The Atlantic, "Strivings of the Negro People"), with which he referred to the way in which people racialized as Black must negotiate reality both as their internal selves and through the assumptions and projections of those who perceive them. The term has been extended by numerous people since its first use [6], and in the context of Matana's words it calls to my mind both the constant internal translation of what is legible versus what is felt (what Matana's turn toward my experience acknowledged), and the emotional labor that extends into justifying one's humanity and defending one's life (which extends far and deep beyond my experience).

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In Brown Skin, White Masks, [7] which Matana also refers to, Hamid Dabashi adds another dimension to the ties between racialized double consciousness and language. Dabashi is writing in reference to a classic text by Frantz Fanon, entitled Black Skin, White Masks:

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Central to Fanon's view of the colonized mind is the significance of language in the alienation of the black person, an ugly colonial process Fanon aimed at reversing via disalienation. His primary frame of reference was autobiographical; he dwelled especially on the moment when the Martinican, having gone to France and perfected his French, returns to his homeland: "The black man who has been to the métropole is a demigod." With this focus on language at the point where literary and cultural proximity to the white world enables and authorizes the colored person, Fanon anticipates the emergence of the native informer: "All colonized people—in other words, people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed to the grave—position themselves in relation to the civilizing language, i.e. the metropolitan culture." [8]

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The importance of the written word in dominant European post-Enlightenment cultures (which was enabled by the dualism that separated written language from embodied language; see below) meant that positioning oneself in relation to the "civilizing language" would enforce a process of alienation not only from one's native culture, but also from one's own body. [9]

 

I also want to bring forward and hold onto the strand of collectivity that anchors Matana's words. My original question was about the importance of oral exchange in their compositional process. What I hear now in their answer is how their physical presence with their collaborators, and the relational language of speech as a supplement to written signs, enabled a quality of support and collective care for their collaborators' well-being. It's difficult to imagine sustaining the depths to which they take the particular story that they share in Coin Coin Chapter Four without the collective energy that Matana invokes through their creative and emotional labor. I return again to Jennifer Nash's insistence on the impossibility of writing certain species of loss without also attending to the form in which one writes. Nash brings up the importance not only of technical skill to her concept of "beautiful writing," but also of relational care and vulnerability:

 

Of course beautiful writing is also a matter of technical

skill, but I am particularly interested in emphasizing the “act of sacrifice,” the deliberate connection between writer and reader and the vulnerability of the writer that this writing makes possible as part of its critical and political investment in engaging its reader affectively. [10]​

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Speaking, writing, and musicking all have the capacity for sustaining relational care and the "act of sacrifice" that Nash emphasizes, but the embodied presence that's fundamentally wrapped up with oral communication makes relationships harder to ignore and easier to build on.

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The last part of this conversation-interview with Matana that I want to bring forward before following these threads outward is a quality that I could call love or, with Franz Fanon, a quality of affirmation that suffuses even their firm refusals. Here is Fanon in the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks:

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Man is not only the potential for self-consciousness or negation. If it be true that consciousness is transcendental, we must also realize that this transcendence is obsessed with the issue of love and understanding. Man is a ‘yes’ resonating from cosmic harmonies. [11]

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It’s this yes-ness that I’m humbled by and drawn to in Matana, the opening and openness that burns in the face of an undoctored witnessing of everything that tries to shut it down. I read farther in Fanon and find a passage in which he defines “real love” as “wishing for others what one postulates for oneself when this postulate integrates the permanent values of human reality” [12]. I let this sink in for a bit –

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wishing for others what one postulates for oneself // when this postulate integrates the permanent values of human reality.

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I’m reminded of something that Matana said later in the interview, that “through the Coin Coin project I’m definitely trying to build some sort of monument to the human experience (which I’ve said way too many times).” Their musical actions are relational on both a personal and monumental level. bell hooks brings this home in her definition of love as "as an action rather than a feeling" [13]. "When we choose to love," hooks writes, "we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other." [14]

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From these intertwined strands of love, racial violence, collectivity, and embodied communication, I turn to the work of Sylvia Wynter.

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. . .

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I've not had the opportunity to meet Sylvia Wynter, but there's an oral history in the Stanford Digital Repository in which she speaks to an interviewer about her life and work, and from this I get a very different picture than the one that I initially scraped from my attempts to parse her writing. [15] Sylvia Wynter (born in 1928 in Jamaica, which was then a British colony) is a critical theorist, a writer of stories, plays, and novels, a dancer, and a professor emerita at Stanford. Her energy is palpable in this interview (conducted in 2017, when she was eighty-nine years old), and it helps me to reformulate her dense sentences into jagged, energetic gestures that meet and cut through the canonical texts she engages.

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The title of the text that drew me from Matana's words to Sylvia Wynter [16] deserves space to breathe:

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Unsettling the Coloniality

of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom:

Towards the Human, After Man,

Its Overrepresentation—An Argument

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Sylvia Wynter begins with a quotation from Michel Foucault, in which he makes the bold claim that “Man” (the concept) is a relatively recent invention within European culture, a result of a fundamental re-ordering of knowledge. She follows this with a series of quotes ranging from medieval studies to lyrics by the brilliant musician Nas (Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones), through which she brings Foucault’s claim into a broader and more nuanced context. Wynter’s argument is this: that the idea of “Man” as it was invented in colonial Europe is fundamentally racialized and racist in its conception, and only includes a small subsection of the human species within its limited boundaries. Or rather: that this act of violence (the invention of a concept of “Man” that pretends to be representative of humanity—that overrepresents itself—but in fact only makes space for the white male European aristocracy from whom its definition came, thereby cutting off all racially othered humans from its protection) is the root of the defining struggle of our times:

 

The argument proposes that the struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves. [17]​

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Wynter builds this argument from the work of decolonial scholars Aníbal Quijano (sharing his description of the “‘Racism/Ethnicism complex’ on whose basis the world of modernity was brought into existence from the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries onwards”) and Walter Mignolo (sharing his identification of the “colonial difference” that served as the foundation of modernity) [18].

 

From this crack, like a forensic archaeologist, she traces the fissures of “all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources” [19].

 

I’ve made my home within a small feathering of these cracks, one that presents in the form of disciplinary divisions of musicology, ethnomusicology, composition and performance. These divisions come from the legacies of what is sometimes called “European common practice” music [20], in which the fluid and often collective cultures of religious and secular music-making solidified into a more individualized culture of composers, performers, and listeners.

 

Sylvia Wynter traces the ways that this racialized invention of Man was a deliberate strategy adopted by Renaissance humanist aristocrats to shrug off the power of the Church. [21] Crucially, this hierarchy hinged on establishing the supremacy of rationality over “subrational” (coded animal) others.

 

By inventing a hierarchy that was based on the division of rational from subrational (racialized) beings, the secular Spanish state in collusion with colonial apologist Ginés de Sepúlveda was able to supplant an older hierarchy that was based on supernatural purity over lay impurity (and which, in the form of the papal church, was getting in their way of territorial expansion)  [22].

 

Through this, they set in motion a world order that would lead to “‘the rise of Europe’ and its construction of the ‘world civilization’ on the one hand, and, on the other, African enslavement, Latin American conquest, and Asian subjugation.” [23]

 

The hierarchical separation of rationality from subrational and racialized others re-inscribes the dualism that extends from Plato’s separation of ideal spirit from matter [24] through Descartes’s separation of mind from body [25]. Hannah Arendt identifies this dualism as an inherent part of oppressive power structures:

 

The Platonic separation of knowing and doing has remained at the root of all theories of domination which are not mere justifications of an irreducible and irresponsible will to power. [26]

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This is a much larger structure than I can address here, but I want to focus on the part that intersects with my experience as a musician and a scholar.

 

As someone raised in U.S. institutions, I've become accustomed to an academic system that sorts people into subcategories according to whether they create structures for making music (or sound), whether they make music (or sound), or whether they think about making music (or sound). Yet I have yet to meet someone in music studies who doesn't cross these boundaries.

 

PhD programs centering practice-based research, meaning a variety of critical methodologies that are guided by, investigate, or enacted through artististic practice, are widespread, especially in countries in which D.M.A.s, or doctorates of musical arts, have not gained widespread acceptance [27]. (For a survey of these disciplines as they stood in 2009, see Baz Kershaw, "Practice as Research through Performance" [28].) But as with any institutionalized discipline, there are debates about what qualifies as “artistic research” versus simply “art.” What’s at stake beyond institutional recognition is often the means of living: funding for research, and a seat at the table in which those in power decide what is important.

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Katherine McKittrick, who works at the intersections of Black and colonial studies and critical-creative methodologies, describes the violence of disciplinary division:

 

Discipline is the act of relentless categorization. In many academic worlds categories are organizational tools; categories are often conceptualized as discrete from each other. Categories are things, places, people, species, genres, themes, and more, that are grouped together because they are ostensibly similar. Categories are classified and ranked [. . .] Disciplines are coded and presented as disconnected from experiential knowledge; experiential knowledge is an expression of data (The objective census numbers factually show that the poor living here experience . . .). Disciplines stack and bifurcate seemingly disconnected categories and geographies; disciplines differentiate, split, and create fictive distances between us. Discipline is empire. [29]

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I'm interested in the spaces between disciplines of artistic research, artistic practice, and ethno/musicology, because these disciplines share a capacity for critical engagement that is often disrupted by unspoken hierarchies.

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Lucy Cotter, in the introduction to her beautiful collection Reclaiming Artistic Research, speaks directly to the ways in which, even under the umbrella of so-called Artistic Research, traditional (scientistic, objectivist) ways of knowing remain the measure of a work’s critical contribution. [30] After a playfully formatted opening, she switches to a more traditional paragraph form:

 

I feel under pressure to get on with talking to you about artistic research and I am using standard writing conventions again to hurry things along. But I am aware that all these structural choices reflect assumptions about how art relates to other forms of knowledge. They declare the status of the visual and the material relative to the linguistic and demonstrate how under-acknowledged hierarchies suppress other registers of knowledge, both material and sensory. In fact, the apparent unimportance of these things brings us to the core of a power struggle within much of the discourse surrounding artistic research until now. Namely, that academic-led protocols often drown out art’s sensibilities, even on those occasions when academic and other non-artistic institutions claim to be interested in art’s potential to research or create knowledge in other ways. [31]

 

I want to pause here, because in my academic pace of reading—one practiced in order to get through the reams of articles assigned to me or considered necessary in order to achieve expertise for the next submitted article—I would have (I did) read that preceding paragraph too quickly to notice its many nooks and crannies. I feel under pressure, as Cotter writes, to hurry things along.

 

So I take a detour, light a candle in honor of Petra Kuppers. Breathe. Here, again, are Lucy Cotter’s words, interwoven with how they reflect in my slower gaze:

 

I feel under pressure to get on with talking to you about artistic research and I am using standard writing conventions again to hurry things along. But I am aware that all these structural choices reflect assumptions about how art relates to other forms of knowledge.

 

Structural choices reflect assumptions, assumptions about

the value of art

relative to 

other forms of knowledge.

 

They declare the status of the visual and the material relative to the linguistic and demonstrate how under-acknowledged hierarchies suppress other registers of knowledge, both material and sensory.

 

When a hierarchy (words over sounds/images/bodies) is unacknowledged,

when an unstable ground is portrayed as solid,

 

people (things, ideas) disappear.

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In fact, the apparent unimportance of these things brings us to the core of a power struggle within much of the discourse surrounding artistic research until now. Namely, that academic-led protocols often drown out art’s sensibilities, even on those occasions when academic and other non-artistic institutions claim to be interested in art’s potential to research or create knowledge in other ways.

 

Where do they (people, things, arts, ideas) go for shelter when they disappear?

 

The paradox here is that art’s epistemologies open up precisely at the site of representation. They open up through attention to form, through play and through the ability and desire to question the terms of the discourse, rather than provide supplementary knowledge. [32]

 

If you are made to speak in a language that disappears you, what do you become to survive?

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I want to dwell in this space of disappearance.

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.

.

.

 

I begin here, in this document, with the voices and experiences that I can’t name or bring into this space without betraying the intimacy and confidence that enabled those experiences and our co-presence to exist.

 

In honor of the multitude of experiences and people who occupy the gaps between these words, I want to share a video that centers the sound of a personal conversation/interview that I recorded using a contact microphone buried in sand. This video is dedicated with gratitude to the scholars and cultural practices who have modeled ways of marking, honoring, and engaging with what has been erased or what cannot be said within the boundaries of academic space.

 

To Matana Roberts, whose Coin Coin albums exemplify the possibilities of embodied theorizing and archiving to me, and whose care moves me to extend my care beyond what I can hold alone. Each chapter of Coin Coin contains multitudes. [33] Among these multitudes: each chapter is a critical-historical text written in sound, an embodied archive and a theoretical critique, an act of and a call to collective resistance against White Supremacist, patriarchal oppression, and an expression of deep, capacious love.

 

To Saidiya Hartman, whose example in “Venus in Two Acts” [34] and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments [35] leads me toward the possibility of engaging with what can’t be known. In “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman grapples with the question of how to give space and voice and life to people who have been erased from dominant archives, and at the same time “respect what we cannot know.” [36]  She writes in urgent hesitancies: naming the ways in which the slave ship’s log tells us that someone was present who was not deemed worthy of more than passing reference, the name of Venus, which in the same instant it gives her possibility, also collapses her into a generic idea circumscribed by death. She wants to write not of the violence enacted on this name, but of the girl who inhabited the space cut open by what we can’t see. And she ultimately chooses not to tell this story, because it’s impossible to do so. In the act of narrating this impossibility and also her struggles against it, she begins to tell another story, one that can’t be collapsed into a binary of presence or erasure. [37] 

 

To Christina Sharpe, who offers the critical-creative practice of “wake work” as another way of inhabiting the ongoing legacy of violent erasure, a practice that incorporates the many inflections of the word “wake” (an ongoing trail of what has passed, as a ship; the act of “keeping watch with the dead”; the practice of being conscious, awake. [38] Sharpe's words give name and shape to the humanity that "slavery and its afterlives" erases over and over again  [39], and holds space for the humanity that Black life lives in this wake [40].

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To Dylan Robinson, xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah) artist, curator and writer, and to the generations of Indigenous people from and with and alongside whom Robinson speaks, as he honors the boundaries of intimacy and of accessibility to Indigenous knowledge and community in the introduction to his brilliantly caring Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. [41] And to Métis artist David Garneau, whom Robinson brings into this book as one of his conversation partners, and who speaks about the “irreconcilable spaces of Aboriginality” that are “gatherings, ceremony, nêhiyawak (Cree)-only discussions, kitchen-table conversations, email exchanges, et cetera, in which Blackfootness, Métisness, and so on, are performed without settler attendance.” [42]

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To Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, who offer the “undercommons” as the vital and vitally disruptive center of academic institutions, a space in which they center study as “what you do with other people”: study as fundamentally relational, “talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.” [43].

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To Shawn Wilson, whose book Research is Ceremony [44] 

demonstrates how research "isn’t just like a ceremony, it is a ceremony." [45] The purpose of any ceremony, Wilson writes, "is to build stronger relationships or bridge the distance between aspects of our cosmos and ourselves." [46] Reading Wilson's work made it possible for me to imagine the ways in which the different relationships that I cultivated within, through, and outside what is visible in this dissertation are all interconnected and crucial parts of the work of research. “Knowledge," Wilson writes, "cannot be owned or discovered but is merely a set of relationships that may be given a visible form.” [47] Yes, yes, yes. Thank you.

 

To Esperanza Spalding, who in the opening class of Songwrights Apothecary Lab (Harvard, Spring 2022) said: "There is always a beyondness." There is always a beyondness, and there's never any way to extract what is present from that beyond, just as "there's no way to extract the phenomenon of music from the web surrounding it." Thank you to Esperanza Spalding for the ways you weave that web. [48]

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And to Denise Gill, whose silent interview in "Listening, Muhabbet, and the Practice of Masculinity" [49] was the direct inspiration for the interview I recorded below.

 

The sound in this video is an interview I recorded through a contact microphone buried in sand. The visuals grew from a "seed prompt" gifted to me by Haruna Lee in the context of their course Multi-Hyphenate: Liberating our Artistic Selves (Fall 2020), which was to make a film that incorporates my body in motion.

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