In this episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, jamilah malika and Jessica Karuhanga sit down with producer Katherine McLeod to talk about the sounds and sound-based practices that have informed their projects as recipients of the 2020-2021 SpokenWeb Artist-Curator in Residence Award.
In this episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, jamilah malika and Jessica Karuhanga sit down with producer Katherine McLeod to talk about the sounds and sound-based practices that have informed their projects as recipients of the 2020-2021 SpokenWeb Artist-Curator in Residence Award. For her residency, jamilah is building an online archive highlighting Black women sound artists across Canada to provide inspiration and representation for future sound art from Black femmes across Turtle Island. Jessica is creating “a sanctified Black space in the form of a website that celebrates aural, visual and somatic witnessing” through shared audio recordings of personal stories.
jamilah and Jessica share two pieces of audio from past works that set the groundwork conceptually and methodologically for their current projects. As the producer of the series ShortCuts on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed, Katherine brings her approach of using an audio clip as the starting point for conversation. When talking with jamilah, they start by listening to the audio composition “Listen to Black Womxn” and, when talking with Jessica, they start by listening to the audio composition, “ALL OF ME.” In between these conversations, Katherine talks with SpokenWeb RA, poet, and spoken word artist Faith Paré about her work with jamilah and Jessica in listening to and searching through the SpokenWeb audio collections with their projects in mind. Questions of the archive and the archival impulse run throughout these conversations about the sound of sound art, archival recordings of voices speaking specifically as Black women and Black non-binary folks, the vocalic body in and as archive, and the agency of the listener. All of these questions start with talking, or, as jamilah says early on, “talking about talking.”
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producer:
Katherine McLeod (PhD) researches archives, performance, and poetry. She has co-edited the collection CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Jason Camlot, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). She is writing a monograph that is a feminist listening to recordings of women poets reading on CBC Radio. She is an affiliated researcher with SpokenWeb, produces ShortCuts, a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed, and curates the site Where Poets Read. She is the 2020-2021 Researcher-in-Residence at the Concordia University Library. Find her at @kathmcleod.
Featured Guests:
jamilah malika (SAIC, MFA '19) is an artist and writer contemplating refusal, repetition, dedication and intimacy. sometimes this means text off page, sound, video, textile, photocopies and/or objects at times combined as installation. whether embroidering yaki ponytail hair on burlap, mounting paper sculpture or shaking up spaces with sound, she centres Black womanhood with care. her work has played or shown from Berlin to LA and across Canada including Contemporary Field Gallery (Vancouver,) Circuit Gallery (Toronto) and Artscape (Peterborough).
Jessica Karuhanga is a Canadian Ugandan-British artist whose work addresses issues of cultural politics of identity and Black diasporic concerns through lens-based technologies, writing, drawing and performance. Through her practice she explores individual and collective concerns of Black subjectivity – illness, rage, grief, desire and longing within the context of Black embodiment. She has presented her work at SummerWorks Lab, Toronto (2020), The Bentway, Toronto (2019), Nuit Blanche, Toronto (2018), Onsite Gallery, Toronto (2018), Museum London, London (2018), and Goldsmiths, London, UK (2017). Her writing has been published by C Magazine, BlackFlash, Susan Hobbs Gallery and Fonderie Darling. She has been featured in AGO’s Artist Spotlight, i-D, DAZED, Visual Aids, Border Crossings, Toronto Star, CBC Arts, filthy dreams, Globe and Mail and Canadian Art. She earned her BFA from Western University and MFA from University of Victoria. She lives and works in Toronto, Canada.
Faith Paré is a poet and performer of Afro-Guyanese and Québécois ancestries. Her writing is forthcoming in Carnation, and has previously appeared in GUTS , Ossa , and Shameless Magazine. Faith is a proud alum of Our Bodies, Our Stories, a creative collective for queer, trans Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour artists mentored by Kama La Mackerel, and she recently completed the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s 2020 Mairuth Sarsfield Mentorship for Underrepresented Writers under the guidance of Dr. Gillian Sze. She is studying for her Hons. B.A. in English and Creative Writing. Find her @paretriarchy and faithpare.com.
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SpokenWeb’s 2020-2021 Artist-Curator Residency Award was adjudicated by Dr. Kristin Moriah (Queen’s University) and Tawhida Tanya Evanson (Mother Tongue Media). Find out out more about the residency, the projects, and the process here: https://spokenweb.ca/announcing-the-spokenweb-artist-curator-in-residence-fellows-fall-2020-winter-2021/
Listen to the full audio of Jessica’s composition ALL OF ME https://soundcloud.com/kichoncho/all-of-me
Read jamilah’s article “Listening Feels” in Canadian Art: Frequencies (Spring 2021).
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Music used in episode:
Original SpokenWeb Theme by Jason Camlot
Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/34642
Links to sounds and artists mentioned in this episode:
Lillian Allen: https://lillianallen.ca/
Octavia Butler, Kindred: https://www.octaviabutler.com/kindred
Michelle Pearson Clark, Suck Teeth Composition (After Rashad Newsome):https://www.michelepearsonclarke.com/suck-teeth-compositions/
Nikita Gale, Hot World: https://www.nikitagale.com/hot-world
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals:https://www.alexispauline.com/
Jessica Karuhanga, through a brass channel: https://www.jessicakaruhanga.net/through-a-brass-channel
“Riddim and Hardtimes” by Lillian Allen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pm80etkAzE
Shani Mootoo fonds, https://www.lib.sfu.ca/about/branches-depts/special-collections/manuscripts
Soledad Munoz: https://soledadmunoz.com/
Rashad Newsome, Shade Composition: https://rashaadnewsome.com/performance/shade-compositions-pittsburgh/
Jeneen Frei Njootli: https://www.jeneenfreinjootli.com/
Rucyl, Sound Prism: https://rucyl.com/
00:08
SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music
[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voices]
00:18
Hannah McGregor:
[Music Continues: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]
00:35
Hannah McGregor:
My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I'll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. An archive is a space of collective memory, a place where materials deemed to have historical or social significance are stored and ordered. But who controls what is collected – what gets remembered? Archives are inherently political. And we can rethink the archive as a space for celebrating marginalized voices, for contending with historical exclusion violence, and under-representation through addressing the politics of the archive, what futures might we imagine? In this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, artists and SpokenWeb fellows jamilah malika and Jessica Karuhanga sit down with producer Katherine McLeod to talk about the sounds and sound based practices that have informed their projects as recipients of the 2020-2021 SpokenWeb Artist-Curator in Residence award.
01:44
Hannah McGregor:
We also hear from SpokenWeb RA poet and spoken word artist Faith Paré about her work with jamilah and Jessica in listening to and searching through the SpokenWeb audio collections. Questions of the archive and the archival impulse run through these conversations about the sound of sound art, archival recordings of voices speaking specifically as Black women and Black non-binary folks, the vocalic body in and as archive, and the agency of the listener. All of these questions start with talking, or as jamilah says early on, "talking about talking". As the producer of the ShortCut series on the SpokenWeb Podcast feed, Katherine brings her approach of using an audio clip as the starting point for conversation. Here are jamilah malika, Jessica Karuhanga, Faith Paré, and Katherine McLeod [Begin Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] with "Talking about Talking". [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]
02:46
jamilah malika:
[Begin Music: ‘Night Watch’ by Blue Dot] I'm reading Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. And she has this quote here – chapter one is called "Listen", and she says, "listening is not only about the normative ability to hear, it is a transformative and revolutionary resource that requires quieting down and tuning in."
03:08
Katherine McLeod:
That was jamilah malika. jamilah holds the position of Artist in Residence with SpokenWeb this year.
03:15
jamilah malika:
Hey everyone, I'm jamilah malika and I'm so happy to chat with you today, Katherine, about sound and my upcoming project with SpokenWeb. [End Music] I am a sound artist. I also work with tech stuff – page, but also thinking about video and installation. Mostly my practice is thinking about Black women and care. So whatever I make, no matter what it looks like, or what it reads like, or sounds like, Black women are always at the center. [Music Interlude: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]
03:48
Katherine McLeod:
For this episode of the SpokenWed Podcast, I sat down over Zoom with the two recipients of this residency, jamilah malika and Jessica Karuhanga. In these conversations, we'll start with an audio piece and we'll learn how the piece began, the voices that inform it and how it's influenced the current residency projects.
04:11
Audio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview
Why don’t we jump right into talking about the audio that you sent over and use that as our ground –
04:17
Audio Recording, jamilah malika, Zoom interview.
Okay! Cool.
Katherine McLeod:
The way that I approached these conversations was like sitting down to talk and listen together like we do on shortcuts. Yes, I'm Katherine MacLeod and you may recognize my voice from ShortCuts, a monthly feature on the spoken web podcast feed on shortcuts. I play a shortcut from spoken web audio collections as a starting point for reflecting upon what it means to listen to archival sound for my interviews with jamilah and Jessica, I thought I’d try using the ShortCuts approach in which an audio clip would be the starting point for our conversations. Listening to this piece was how jamilah and I started our conversation and that's what we will listen to now. This is “Listen to Black Womxn” by jamilah malika.
05:51
Audio Recording, “Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika:
[Layered background sounds] This is / As a Black woman / which is / Black, Blackness/ calling myself / constantly being called out for/ my people/ my people/ I even subjugated myself and tried to hide / thinking about/ as a Black woman/ it's expected/ it's expected/ it's expected/ my people/ my white boyfriend/ I said "hi, thank you!"/ [inaudible] talking in a way that makes white people comfortable has become a second skin/ I worked for 24 years in a telecommunications company without using my Trinidad dialect /super comfortable/ super comfortable/ dialect/ [Repeated breaths] Yeah/ Um, um /Yeah, um/ I've been moving and loving / My spirit in a way, I feel it/ As a Black woman/ in my spirit I can feel it /moving, trusting/ [Repeated breaths]/ in spirit I can feel it/ navigating /it's so powerful /yeah / power/ like I said/ brown girl that was Black/ authority/like I said/ in relation to others/ brown girl that was Black/ brown girl that was Black/ brown girl that was Black/ finding space for yourself/ finding space for yourself/ less small /with and in my body in totality/ [Repeated breaths] Um, ah, um, and, um, um, uh, / Yes, what do you feel it is in order to get your needs met?/ Which seems like a lot, but all of those things are happening/ Ugh! I don't know [Laughs]
10:31
jamilah malika:
Yeah, “Listen to Black Womxn” is such a community – and lonely – it was such a weird evolution of a project. I was out in Chicago at the School of the Art Institute having a really hard time. And I was in this cool class – it was called psychoacoustics and it was led by this great artist named Kamala Patterson. And he had asked us to think really broadly about a sound project, and thinking about how sound occupies space. And I started thinking a lot about code switching and how in the space of the school, I was doing something with my voice in certain exchanges, notably with white women, where I was trying to mimic pitch and tone and like register as a way to navigate a lot of this terrible tension around being a Black girl who was making a lot of trouble.
11:38
jamilah malika:
So in my first month and a half at that school, I was in about five meetings with admin about things that we talked about in Canada, like cultural competency and decolonizing your curriculum, and what's going on with your cannon, and how can you transform that and make it more accessible for different kinds of people. I was trying to figure out how to be a part of shifting that, and hearing myself bend and contort vocally. And so I thought, "Oh, I'm just going to do a project where I record myself doing these shifts." And I just, I felt so lonely [Laughs]. I was just really intensely lonely. And I just put a call out to my friends, like "can you send me audio of yourselves just talking about what it's like to talk as Black women?" Just talking about talking –
12:37
Audio Recording, “Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika:
Less small/ how I'm actually always in my body / in totality/ in relation to my body/ in relation to/ trusting [Breathing]
12:48
jamilah malika:
[Audio Recording of “Listen to Black Womxn” continues and fades] I made it for the class and then I took it to a sound symposium at school, and I felt really weird.
13:54
jamilah malika:
And other times I've had it playing in conjunction with a video work. Other times through headphones, and I ask people to look in a mirror and watch themselves listen. And then there's a notebook where I ask them to leave me a reflection. What does it feel like to listen to Black women? And the idea of: pay attention. So once it was at Prefixed Gallery and they have an audio art gallery, so that's like this just very nice enclosed space. And a curator who saw it there reached out to me and asked me if I would design an enclosure. So now, I got to think about what's the interiority of that sound as an experience of what I could wheat paste in terms of a collage, or what the smells might be in that space or what the lighting would be like that space. So it's really been this exciting evolution at work.
14:57
Katherine McLeod:
It's fantastic to hear about all the different iterations of it –
15:00
jamilah malika:
[Laughs] Yeah.
15:00
Katherine McLeod:
– and there's so many things from what you just – because the piece is about the speaker and the speaker's voice, but really – especially as I made a note of the word relation that starts to emerge through. And so thinking that even in the presentation of it, if there's a sense that there's a connection between the sound and the listener and that you could be part of developing a sound booth to design that experience, or really to be thinking about "how is this sound reaching the listener, and what is that experience like?" And so then the piece becomes about that listening experience too, which is really, really fascinating.
15:36
jamilah malika:
I'm always really curious – what is it like to listen to Black women? When's the last time? – so some of the prompts in the notebook were like, "when's the last time you listened to Black women?" And what are those circumstances? And I think one of the showings was around the moment of Trump's election and there was so much social commentary around –we should have listened to Black women and this idea of the Black women in your office or the Black women in your private personal spaces – how do you listen? When do you listen? Do you listen? I'm really interested in that as a bigger question.
16:20
Katherine McLeod:
Circling back to that very first – the very first sound that we hear in the piece. Could you speak about that?
16:25
jamilah malika:
Yeah. Like the non-verbal. And I think there – in the first iterations I made, they were very legible and I think – somewhere conversations with friends, with advisors, what is a move more towards like fugitivity, and mystery and not explaining everything? And so a lot of those [makes sounds] – those sounds, they do a lot more. They do the thing they're talking about – and how we can't explain everything, but it can be something the body does - just a letting go of something or a sucking in of something and how that just comes out really organically.
17:24
Katherine McLeod:
And even the sound of it – I felt like it caught attention. You almost do take a breath yourself or just kind of really pause – the breath is so integral, but also it really says it says everything. So it's –.
17:39
jamilah malika:
Yeah. You know, and there's ways – I'm Nigerian and Trinidadian and in both of those cultures, we suck teeth and Michèle Pearson Clark has this beautiful sound work that's also a visual, it's an audiovisual work that's just acquired by the National Gallery. It's exciting when sound work is becoming a part of that echelon of art to me, because that work, you know, it's “Suck Teeth Composition”. And it's really just about that sound and everybody making that sound and how that sound relates to grief and to emotion and to all kinds of responsiveness and and it has meaning. And Michèle names that work “Suck Teeth Composition” after Rashaad Newsome. And he's an African-American sound artist and that – his work is called “The Shade Composition” and it's all these Black women making all these nonverbal sounds. And I learned about it only after making “Listen to Black Womxn”. I was like, "Wow!" It's this really beautiful performance where he has all these Black women on stage.
19:00
jamilah malika:
And it's really orchestral and like a symphony of these nonverbal sounds. It's really– it's very special about these – [Laughs] like I just did it. These sounds that are just a part of knowing Black women. If you're –in knowing this kind of little responses. But it's very personal, it's very intimate.
19:31
Katherine McLeod:
Yeah. And it also – thinking too about something becoming something that is so personal and intimate becoming, say a composition or becoming compositional. And I did think of the way that the voices – like I wrote down the word polyphonic at one point of thinking about what it creates. And it really – it's this overwhelming sort of polyphony of voices, but they're, and they, they become very musical. It felt like a very polyphonic experience in listening to it –.
19:57
jamilah malika:
Yeah. There's definitely rhythm. And I think there are places when I really played that up. And it just –it felt good.
20:06
Katherine McLeod:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it feels good to listen to as well.
20:11
jamilah malika:
Yeah! That's great to hear.
Katherine McLeod:
And I love the idea too of it being sort of – coming out of also thinking about talking about talking too –
20:20
jamilah malika:
Yeah.
20:20
Katherine McLeod:
– because that's something that – just thinking of it's a way too, to think of how we connect as bodies together too. So....
20:32
Audio Recording, “Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika:
[Words with echoes and layered sounds] Just as I am/ As a Black woman/ Power in her voice/ That's her bass/ that's her bass / that's her bass / that's her bass
20:40
jamilah malika:
When it comes to the SpokenWeb project, this is really an opportunity to build an archive that shows that Black Indigenous and People of Colour artists who make sound works, who are women, femmes, gender nonconforming, are really contributing to what sound art looks like, and it doesn't have to be verbal. So Nikita Gale is a sound artist who I really love who makes works that – there's an installation she has where it's water rolling off of drum kits. And there's an artist named Ruth Seal, some Black woman who makes a solar informed sound work. Right. So has these panels and they are connected to different notes and they sat out in this field and they just produced sound. Right? There's just so much sound art that is really about found sound, about evoking sound, and also all the way into the spectrum of recordings that include voice, and how do Canadian Black artists show up in this work?
22:17
jamilah malika:
And in my work, I know who I'm in conversation with. I don't know who else knows. So the project is really about giving –and I hate to use the word visibility because it's not about visualuality right? Because it's giving an audibility to these sound artists who I'm really certain that when it comes to people who face the burden of representation and just the way the art as the market drives certain trends in reproducing Black pain and trauma. And I think what sound does is it undoes what visualuality does. And I think it does what visualuality cannot. It makes the listener almost interrogate themselves in a different way than looking. When I think about art and its limitations or its libertory capacity, I really think that sound art is this really exciting opportunity to free yourself of visualuality and to give whole new possibilities in terms of relating to the audience.
jamilah malika:
I hope the website as an archive serves to highlight these Canadian contributions. I think there might be some works like across Turtle Island, but largely Canadian contributions to sound art – and in my greatest hopes will inspire a lot of young people who are Black Indigenous and of colour to try their hand at some sound art. There's some great stuff in the archives like Lillian Allen, so sound poems, and Faith Paré as being really super helpful, helping me navigate the archives. So I think if I had to kind of go into the SpokenWeb archive and dig around myself, I would probably be having a way harder time. So it's really helpful that Faith, as someone who's at SpokenWeb is really collaborating with me and I owe her a great deal for helping me figure out –she's like, "okay, kind of what are you, who are you looking for?"
24:51
jamilah malika:
And I'm like, "Okay, these people, these people, these people." And she's like, "Got it". And so there's some great recordings of Shani Mootoo that she's found. And so it's – Shani is a writer and a novelist and also a painter it's this quite large range, so Shani talking is going to be included. And I think it does – this idea of drawing a circle is kind of where I'm at in this moment of like, what is in, what is out, how do I make something that feels not comprehensive, but as generative as possible so that people are like, "Oh, there's all kinds of possibilities". And yeah, I think kind of hard definitions isn't really what I'm going for, but more so this feeling of range. [Begin Music: ‘Night Watch’ by Blue Dot]
25:50
Katherine McLeod:
After speaking with jamilah, I was interested in the kinds of resources in the SpokenWeb audio collections that she might be tapping into. And what could these recordings tell us about the sound of Black women's voices in the archives? She mentioned SpokenWeb RA Faith Paré and I asked Faith about what she had found so far and also about the process. [End Music: ‘Night Watch’ by Blue Dot]
26:17
Faith Paré:
Yeah. I think what was really interesting and starting off with Cumulus project reading through it for the first time after she was selected by the jurors and starting to get acquainted with it and our first Zoom meetings, was how much I felt immediately that her project, as well as Jessica's, was going to impact my own research as a Black woman poet with a huge research interest in Black cultural production in Canada. I'm really invested in taking a look at Black created artifacts and my own experience at SpokenWeb for the last year or so – almost a year – has been digging through and seeing what is also in the archives that is waiting to be discovered or waiting to be animated in a particular way. Last summer, I had worked with the Words and Music shows metadata and community collection which contains a lot of spoken word.
27:16
Faith Paré:
That's a tradition that's full of Black innovators, and it's a tradition that I've come out of and I'm very familiar with. From the get-go I revisited this collection because I'd grown to know it so closely and known grown to know the curation and the collaborators on that project. I started off by essentially listening to pieces that I had already listened to a few times – sets by Lillian Allen, for example, or Takita Tanya Evanson. And then from there, it was a matter of consulting Swallow, which has SpokenWeb's open source metadata ingestion system, as many will know, and using keywords around Black poetry and poetics in an attempt to find recordings from other institutions. Because we have lots of community collections, there were also really exciting pieces by young Black spoken word artists, who may be recording technically for the first time, as well as there were more formal readings coming out of SFU, for example, of Esi Edugyan and Juliane Okot Bitek And there was also some materials too that probably will make it into the final, just because of the particular interests that jamilah has run her project, which is really about honouring the sonic artistry of Black artists. But there were some interviews as well with Gwendolyn Brooks and the Amiri Baraka, and some more materials of Amiri Baraka's that I wouldn't have expected to find not only in SpokenWeb's archives, but just to Canadian archives, per se, as well.
28:50
Katherine McLeod::
In terms of recordings that really sort of caught your attention, what would they be?
28:55
Faith Paré:
Well, I'm a huge, huge, huge Lillian Allen fan. And particularly when we think about Lillian's career and her huge influence in dub poetry, not only in Canada but in the Caribbean and around the world, that dub poetry is the perfect example of a form that integrates a literary form, and what's going on in a studio, and also the oral performance tradition and also rejects all of those labels at once.
29:38
Audio Recording, “Riddim and Hardtimes” by Lillian Allen
[Caribbean Beat] Riddim and hardtimes [Singing] [Speaking] [Repeated]
29:38
Faith Paré:
To hear some of her work again in the archives was very exciting. And because I also have a huge interest in what a Black aesthetic is and what tradition of Black criticism around poetics is finding some of those Amiri Baraka interviews was very, very exciting too. And I'm very excited to revisit them. And we also –me and jamilah had another gushing moment when we got sent some Shani Mootoo recordings and Shani Mootoo is an Indo-Caribbean, particularly Indo-Trinidadian writer. She's not Black, but because jamilah is Trinidadian and has a relationship and all of Shani’'s work, we had this, "Oh, wow!" moment of, I can't believe this is like sitting in an institution. We haven't been able to listen to it! So, it's one of those things where I think when you're researching, everything is never going to make it into the final cut, but still finding those recordings and knowing that they can enrich your own listening experience, or also you can pass them along to someone else who might benefit from it.
30:48
Katherine McLeod:
It makes me think too, that it really – in finding these recordings, it's also changing the sound of SpokenWeb as a project and sort of it not only changes the sound of what one thinks of in terms of the sound of it [Music Begins: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions], but also the what kind of sound based research can be done through its archival collections.
31:13
Jessica Karuhanga:
I really think storytelling is about self articulating. It's also about witnessing. It's also about every assertion or an affirmation of presence that I am here. [Music Ends: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions] I am Jessica Karuhanga – I also go by Kichoncho. I am a multi-disciplinary artist.
31:39
Katherine McLeod:
I spoke with Jessica on Zoom. We started with an audio clip of where it all began. It is a piece called "ALL OF ME". You can find a link to the entire piece in the show notes for this episode. We started our conversation by listening together to the opening section.
32:05
Audio Recording, “ALL OF ME” by Jessica Karuhanga:
[Electronic Orchestra Chords - interspersed and underlaid throughout] People ask me all the time, what kind of stories do you want to tell? And I say exhume those bodies. [Choral Singing] Exhume those stories. The stories of the people who dreamed. Big. And never saw those dreams to fruition. People who fell in love and lost. [Choral Singing] Because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life. [Choral Singing] [Drumming and singing begins, underlaid] I don't want to think about the past so, like, I don't really, like, I don't really like to think about nostalgia because it just makes it sad because we don't really have a family anymore. I don't know sometimes like, cause like, just when you think about happy memories with your family, but, and you remember when your family was happy, your family is just so not even existed anymore. So thinking about those happy times, or we had like a childhood and, and we would get in the van and go camping every weekend. And our, like our summers used to be us as a family, swimming in the pool and how happy we were and I guess sometimes you gotta think about that stuff because you remember when you were just like purely happy and just didn't have to stress out about, about the dynamic that your family was in, because you thought – felt safe and you felt secure. So I feel like I feel nostalgia. I feel nostalgic for the feeling of when I was a child and I felt secure and safe and happy, and I didn't have any care in the world. I'm really – I was nostalgic about not necessarily even nostalgia – I just yearn for that feeling. And I wish I knew at that time that I should enjoy that feeling because I have – because of all the stuff that was going to happen. And like, I guess it makes you look forward to when I have children of my own, I want them to have those memories and then never let those memories get ruined, like the way that those memories have kind of been ruined for me. Yeah. Is that good? Sure. [Vocalizing music]. [Piano chords] There is no time in the past that I want to return to in my life because I have trouble relating to who I was in the past. I can never quite return to that headspace. I experience regret and time travel for me would be an opportunity to correct those mistakes, rather than stay within the same history as it played itself out.
35:35
Jessica Karuhanga:
“ALL OF ME” is the name of the piece. It's an assemblage of voices, Black women, femmes, nonbinary, gender non-conforming folk, and I basically ask people who are close to me – so there's that innate trust there, which felt very pertinent – to just address how they were feeling. The original voice that we listened to, the initial voice is an acceptance speech that Viola Davis made for an Emmy or a Golden Globe. I remember being really blown away by this because she was articulating something for me that transcended – kind of affirmed or reminded me that there's a lot that you're still injuring in doing the work or the work that she may be doing, a person that I do not know, but I felt there was analogies I could draw to my experience. So I was very moved to that notion of exhuming and withstanding these kinds of thresholds. So yeah, that just felt like the initial impulse.
36:42
Jessica Karuhanga:
And then I was – from that I wanted to just hear from people that I know intimately to speak to these kinds of alterities, these self-forming self articulations – the imagination, like how we imagine ourselves. So, I find that in moments of despair, there are two-fold responses: one that is kind of this nostalgic past tense, looking to the past, romanticizing it. And then it's like, for what? For whom? Often the greater your proximity to whiteness or able-bodied cis-hetero embodiments, maybe the more likely you are to have this kind of nostalgia, or it's about these alterities, they're trying to imagine, a kind of Afro-future, or maybe it's just an entirely different dimension. And there is one of the speakers who speaks to – later on to dimensionality and time travel and all these beautiful, strange things. So, it's in a constellation with Octavia Butler's thinking and is – actually, the project was heavily inspired by texts of her as like Kindred and Black science fiction as well. So that's –it's really through the voice I feel like there's something there that maybe is tied to storytelling, mythmaking, and like oral rituals.
38:11
Katherine McLeod:
Yeah. I'm thinking the opening line of like, "they ask me all the time, what stories do you want to tell?"
38:17
Jessica Karuhanga:
Yeah. I really wanted to take you kind of on a journey –a journey like where you begin being hyper aware and attentive to every word that's being said, but that the music can be a kind of compliment or buttress or support to that voice. So, I listened over and over and over again to the recordings I recorded on voice memos, on recorders that I have – so they're a mix of low and very high fi, depending on if I can meet in person for person or if we are geographically dislocated. But I basically listened – spent time with these recordings after getting their consent and okay to use the material, and just spot about what sounds could compliment it. Already in having these voices, it speaks to a history of assemblage and sampling, and these kind of markers of hip hop, R&B, pop music, all music at this point involves a lot of sampling and remixing.
39:24
Jessica Karuhanga:
There's all these different stylistic things that happened that were really just me kind of reflecting back –back and forth between us. So I really wanted to reinforce that kind of call and response. So I asked a question, they responded to it and I– and when they're comfortable a few seconds into speaking, it becomes kind of free form. You kind of lose yourself in the storytelling. And then the same –then I respond again with the sound. So it's this kind of call and response in the actual making and coalescing of the project. And also it's a project that's about, it's almost 30 minutes long, the entire piece, so it's something – I mean the experience, or witnesser always has a choice to stay or go. And also I usually have it playing on a loop on headphones, kind of evoking what might be a listening booth at music stores, just as an experience.
40:19
Katherine McLeod:
To step outside the conversation for a moment on Jessica Karuhanga’s website, there's some documentation from a piece called through a brass channel from 2017. I wanted to ask her about a woman moving while listening to headphones. I asked her if she was listening to “ALL OF ME”.
40:41
Katherine McLeod:
– the visual of the listening... so I had to ask you that.
40:43
Jessica Karuhanga:
Absolutely. And what are you privy to? So, you're close. Yep. Yes and no. So, in that installation, it's – I call it like a multi-vaillant, multi-channel installation. So I had about six different works that were either sculptures, video installations, and whatnot. So, in that documentation of the performance and exhibition making, you are really saying, seeing exhibition making happening in real time and temporality, which is also like an element of music making it space making, but it's like oral, you know? And so that person, they're listening on headphones to the sound of a video that's looping, but you're not privy to the screen. And that was also a structure – a structural or a devisive choice I made – that when you entered the space, through the doorways, that the back of the screen would be towards you.
41:50
Jessica Karuhanga:
So you as a spectator have to acknowledge that being a viewer, observer is a verb, is an action, that you are complicit in the space making. So someone else can go to the listening booth, listen to “ALL OF ME”on their headphones and then be watching what it is you're looking at. So that's why I was saying yes and no. It's both, the two co-exist – is because someone actually had that experience where they were – they're explaining to me that they had the headphones on and they were listening to “ALL OF ME”. And then they saw the performer in the corner, swaying back and forth with their headphones on kind of in their own world and felt like there was a moment of synchronicity, a moment that they shared that was temporal that no one else could embody and experience. So I really was wanting to cultivate that.
42:44
Katherine McLeod:
After hearing that response, I knew that I had to ask Jessica one more question about through a brass channel. I saw that the performance had featured a guest M. NourbeSe Philip, and I had to ask her about what that performance was like.
43:01
Jessica Karuhanga:
through a brass channel was the installation, and “ALL OF ME” was one of the art-i-facts in that constellation of words. So there – there is that another project was called Kiss the Sky, another object, and they all had different names. The video that the person's witnessing with the headphones on is called Moon and the 12th House. And there were four constant performers that are circulating the space. And I just basically told them come and go, as you please. And the roommate, the initial kind of precursors or determinants were, "I want you to come to the space with an object or a gesture. That's something that only we share." So someone brought in an urn, someone else brought in turmeric, someone brought in salt, someone brought in cloths. And at first you were using them the way that the general public might think to use them. Like salt, I'm pouring it out, picking it up.
43:56
Jessica Karuhanga:
I'm like –a scarf. I'm folding it, unfolding it. But over time, it went from not just using these objects to like the wall becomes material. The headphones that have a utilitarian function for visitors becomes an art material as well. So that's where those boundaries started to blur. It's like giving that – in the spirit of liberatory politics, giving that freedom to the people I invited in to activate the thing. And then with NourbeSe Philip we met through a childhood friend of mine who has worked with her for years. So through this connection of a mutual close person in our lives, we kind of built this friendship, or this like – from my side, it's deep affinity and respect and reverence. And also from someone who's very kind and generous and you feel like they're approachable.
45:01
Jessica Karuhanga:
And so just based out of that kind of respect or affinity– I shot my shot, so to speak and asked if she would be willing to be a guest in my piece. And I think she found it really interesting because I don't think she considers herself a performance artist, even though she does these – every year, this kind of elergy. And to be clear, I think the enactment raison is not at all a performance. It is like a reading. It is a response. It is elergic. So it isn't – it isn't an enactment that happens annually or sometimes multiple times a year. It's different from performance art capital. But even with my performance art, I'm not – precisely because I am a Black queer person, it's very different for me because of the gaze that I'm there, that we have to deal with but have no power over. It also doesn't feel like performance art for me.
46:00
Jessica Karuhanga:
It's not – I'm not ever playing a character. It's never play time for me. In fact, it's exhausting. And that is why I told the performers, show up however you are, if you need to take a break, if it's only for 15 minutes today, if it's for four hours, what is it that you can do? So in asking Nourbese I –yeah, we didn't, I just invited her. We'd decided on a date. We opened it to the public for people who wanted to witness. So we had seating there. And we kind of just improvised and intuited what we did. So she brought in leafs from [inaudible] – photocopied leafs and some libations and other ritual objects, because that was also –it was already happening in this space. And we just did this call and response.
46:52
Jessica Karuhanga:
I couldn't tell you if it lasted an hour or two hours, there's no documentation of it at all. Maybe some poor quality cell phone photos that were very discreetly taken so as not to disrupt the energy exchange that was happening. And the few people that shared with me, their experiences of watching us said, they thought we rehearsed it. Like there are moments of profound synchronicity or just sharing. Like there was a moment where she was making these sorts of sounds or gestures, and I kind of received it, but my eyes were closed. Just these beautiful moments that happen over and over and over again. And I think it involves trust and risk and an openness to allow for something like that to happen, to not want to control the thing, to understand that it isn't, that it is art, but it also transcends art.
47:45
Audio Recording, “ALL OF ME” by Jessica Karuhanga:
[Electronic Orchestra Chords - interspersed and underlaid throughout] People ask me all the time, what kind of stories do you want to tell? And I say exhume those bodies. [Choral Singing].
47:56
Jessica Karuhanga:
I guess I'll start with how my relationship to SpokenWeb took shape or came into vision. The feel of the vision. There was an open call and I responded. And then was at a moment where, we are reeling around more unmoored from not simply the deaths of George Floyd and others – just the kind of response to that. Like suddenly, because we are all forced to be silent and home and obedient kind of proletariats to care – suddenly people were like, "Oh, I have proof I'm witnessing anti-Blackness differently". And so there's this retraumatization that was also going on. So I had a lot of feelings thatI was going through, a lot of grief, a lot of rage, a lot of this. So that there's that bit and then all the opportunities predicated – are riffing off of people's guilt. Do the Instagram takeovers, to do, to make art, not even people naming that it's directly a result of this, but we know that it is no coincidence you have all these positions popping up in institutions of Black people doing Black things and the IG takeovers, whatever it is, like all of these positions being formed in the wake. There that's the second bit. The third bit is in my way of dealing that was plugging out and ignoring that thing. And in resistance to the pervasive circulation of images, violent images being like, I want to return to this other space. I want to be with the music I'm doing. I want to – I want to feed my senses, nourish my senses, and I want to start to heal. So I actually was remembering this piece in that project and as a whole and how nourishing it was for a different point in my life where I was also dealing with a lot of grief and illness.
49:54
Jessica Karuhanga:
And some friends of mine had brought up the project. So I was like, okay, there seems to be this need for this. I found myself sharing a lot of voice notes with close friends. And I was like, Oh, there's something here with the voice note, even musically, how something like an interlude functions as this kind of interstitial thing. So I kind of put all those things together and vomited up a proposal very last minute, kind of undulating –should I, shouldn't I? And then I was like, no, I'm gonna, this feels important. I'm going to just do this. It'd be nice to have support and resources to help make this happen because I'm one person and I don't know how much I could actually facilitate different people being vulnerable. You know, I'm not a therapist. I don't have a practice like that and all of these things. So that's kind of what happened.
50:43
Jessica Karuhanga:
I responded to this open call. I got selected. And now what – how that has to do “ALL OF ME” is “ALL OF ME” was started within my own circle. These are people that I cared deeply about. These are close friends. But I wanted to bring it expanded outward to people who are not my family, but are kin, are fam. So I was like, Oh, maybe it has to be an open call. I want to facilitate something that is bigger than me, larger than me. That can become a self-sustaining thing. So that's how I arrived at my current project, which is basically a digital artwork, website repository for people to unleash their stories.
51:27
Katherine McLeod:
We've covered a lot. But I was wanting to ask you about whether you see this as an archive...?
51:31
Jessica Karuhanga:
I think it is. I think– I have this project that is also involved sound and performance called a #carefree. And with that, I made a video collage out of all the images and videos and Vines - when Vine was still a thing – and Twitter. With that is all archived cause hashtags are a form of archiving or classification we can say, classified through carefree Black girls. And I was like, Oh, it's interesting –or carefree Black boy– and I was like, Oh, what if all of these things – I assembled all of these things into this visual assemblage and I responded to them. So again, that call and response thing is there. What if it's cues for choreography? So I think of it in a similar way because these people are still living people, they're present. They were in the moment and present when they made these videos. It's all about self defining. Like I am deciding the terms of how I reveal and conceal and what I share, what I don't share.
52:38
Jessica Karuhanga:
That's where the social media bit is distinct, but interesting. So I do see this as in proximity to that or in a constellation of that. So it is an archive, but I just don't feel like oftentimes when we speak about archive particularly in relation to Indigenous subjectivities, I mean that globally. So let's get even more specific about African peoples. There's primitivism, it's always about this past and this thing of like, rareify our subjectivities to the past as objects, so a larger thing, like these museological conversations, cabinet of curiosities, these kind of colonial capturing of artifacts and living beings, whether they be plant life or humans that are captured. So yeah, archive is loaded. [Begin Music: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions] Artifact is loaded, but I don't know what other words to use. It is situated in not saying, but in a space of reclamation or something
53:40
Katherine McLeod:
At one point, Jessica refers to the recordings as "cues for choreography", a phrase that not only suggests that the recordings invite a response, a doing, a making, but also that this doing and making might happen in another medium or art form altogether. I think back to speaking with jamilah and how throughout our conversation, she was sitting beneath a vivid painting, and only when our conversation veered into the archives towards the end and about the writers whose voices are recorded there, she mentioned Shani Mootoo and that the painting behind her was in fact, a Shani Mootoo painting. [End Music: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions] I tell that story here, because it feels as though it brings it all together, the painting, the recording, the speaking body in front of the painting, the listening, the conversation.
54:32
jamilah malika:
Shani is a writer, and a novelist and also a painter. I'm actually sitting under one of her paintings.
54:42
Katherine McLeod:
I wanted to ask you but I was like, Oh, maybe I'll wait til the end [Laughs].
54:46
Katherine McLeod:
They were all invitations or responses to "cues for choreography". And thinking back to that, painting reminds one that talking about sound art is not only talking about sound. Talking about talking is not only about talking. [Begin Music: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions]What kinds of cues for choreography do the sounds of this podcast activate? In which practices of everyday life might this activation bring a kind of freedom? What might you make in response? [End Music: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions]
55:21
Music:
[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]
55:36
Hannah McGregor:
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is SpokenWeb team member Katherine McLeod of Concordia University. Thank you to Jessica Karuhanga, jamilah malika, and Faith Paré for their candid discussion and contributions to this episode. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland. And our assistant producer and outreach manager is Judith Burr. A special thanks to Dr. Kristin Moria of Queens University and to Tawhida Tanya Evanson of Mother Tongue Media for their role in adjudicating the 2020-2021 SpokenWeb Artist-Curator in Residence Award. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWord Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. [Begin Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there. And we'll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]