In(capacity), A Meditation on Black Speech & Writing
As a Black writer I am tasked with making sense of this violence without being overwhelmed and disoriented by it. In other words, my writing must somehow be indexical of that which exceeds narration, while being ever mindful of the incomprehension the writing would foster, the failure, that is, of interpretation were the indices to actually escape the narrative. The stakes of this dilemma are almost as high for the Black writer facing the reader as they are for the Black insurgent facing the police and the courts. — Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism
I might’ve come to the conclusion that I could not hold my tongue even if I tried. Folks say that idiomatic expressions are nothing more than dead figures of speech, but I refute that claim. Idiomatic expressions, in the case of the Black writer, could very well be brought to arrive at the suspicion that anything and everything I am saying is alive. It’s almost as if there is this fluttering shift in between speech and writing on the outskirts of the living and the dead — making itself known to me when I want to express myself and my subsequent assumption that no one cares not because they weren’t listening, but because they were.
Here the tongue is mightier than the sword and for almost more than two decades, I’ve refused to put away my blade. At times, I ruminate on the feeling that I shouldn’t speak at all. Even when I freestyle, I suspect that when I stop to think of something to rhyme with — there is a fleet moment in which the vehemence of what I’m saying clamps down on the next utterance — the next thought — forcing myself to stop because my head is too inflamed with things to say — even if it’s one word or a whole sentence.
In many ways, we’re left to contend with this axiomatic paradox that as coerced as Black speech is, there is something freeing and binding about our speech — about performance that doesn’t just leave a bad taste in our mouths. There’s a contorted feeling of brief relief and joy that I was seen — but then a subsequent towering feeling of lament, of anxiety, and anger. An intellectualization of, “well, you know they hate you, why continue to concede to the ruse of recognition?” There is a yearning for recognition but also a yearning to be unseen because of what becomes of being seen:
That’s the paradox of being a Black artist — you got to want to be looked at by these people who hate looking at you. — Fred Moten
I think Black people — Black writers are left with civil society’s ultimatum: to speak one’s mind or to say nothing. Civil society’s more inclined to receive the nothingness of Black speech. If anyone asks me how I am, there is an underlying inclination for me to answer them, but in a way I refuse to refuse its ultimatum, even when I am unconsciously policing myself to say nothing at all. If the grammar in which I articulate to the respondent is not the lot of what I yearn to express, most if not all of what I’ve said — what I’ve written, then, is omitted in interlocutory life. Even if I happen to be visibly more apprehensive of the respondent’s reaction to my verbosity more than I am of what I’m about to say, there is something that gets to the core of who I am — or just what I’m feeling that says fuck that. It’s more to the Black writer than my expressions.
I am a series of essays — a plethora of discographies of various music albums — from Sun Ra’s Omniverse, Jean Deaux’s Krash, to Lupe Fiasco’s Drill Music In Zion — a labyrinth of murals. What other vehicle and tenor could I utilize to illustrate not only that I have a lot to say — to utter, but also that I am a lot to say? What is intriguing and disquieting about this is that a respondent doesn’t need to exist for me to utter a word. No auditor has to be there. In fact, neither respondent, auditor, or interlocutor has to hear or read what I’m saying — what I’m expressing. To put it in one way, I’m constantly protesting — fighting white civil society and its junior partners in my head as I am externally. This perpetual war is for me to put together the syntactical infrastructure that will effuse the entirety of my expressions:
One’s writing proceeds with fits and starts that have little to do with the problems of building the thesis or finding the methodology to make the case. As I write, I am more aware of the rage and anger of my reader-ideal (an angry mob as readers) than I am of my own desires and strategies for assembling my argument. Vertigo seizes me with a rash of condemnations that emanate from within me and swirl around me. I am speaking to me but not through me, yet there seems to be no other way to speak.
I am speaking through the voice and gaze of a mob of, let’s just say it, White Americans; and my efforts to marshal a mob of Black people, to conjure the Black Liberation Army, smack of compensatory gestures. It is not that the BLA doesn’t come to my aid, that they don’t push back, but neither I nor my insurgent allies can make the case that we are worthy of our suffering and justified in our actions and not terrorists and apologists for terror who should be locked away forever.
A one-on-one conversation is never enough for me. Spatiotemporality, for Black folks, is a bane in that there exists such an ontological constraint that the war isn’t just one occurrence of building upon this syntactical infrastructure for us to speak — for us to write — for us to make art — for us to be. We spew cascades of logorreic diatribes that make way to seep into every crevice of the earth, but civil society already has barriers set up to block off our unceasing cacophonies. To the point of exhaustion we must always fortify our syntactical infrastructures again and again should it fall, because it will — mobilizing on our own accord what must be annihilated in our path to let the effusions pass through. Life is less exhaustive when niggas come together to bridge them.
If only it were that easy.
I overlook in isolation the amassing of thoughts and feelings that ache to let themselves out even if they seem to never reach the senses — though they always do. I’m a universe of sentences that extend beyond the (in)capacity of interlocutory life. Even with the opps, fascists seething at the mouth to seek a kind of subservient brevity or quietness, I can never be silenced even if my fungible flesh is not put to the use of their gluttonous consumption.
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Patrick Jonathan Derilus is a Nyack-born American-Haitian independent Goodreads author, writer, music producer, and educator who resides in Brooklyn, New York. His pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. He writes poetry, short stories, and essays. He is published in RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, Cutlines Press Magazine, Linden Avenue Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the author of Perennial: a collection of letters.
