Portals of Possibility

Victoria Adukwei Bulley: I’d been thinking for a while about how poetry so often seems like a game of approximations, especially for those of us for whom the English language is a hostile tool to work with, given its history. I was interested in what we do to put words to our own uses, considering what is said as much as what isn’t. This was a key thread that formed the creative aspect of my PhD, and the foundation for what would become the collection. A while later, I was involved in a programme of events honouring Toni Morrison at the ICA. DJ Lynnée Denise was also part of the roster, and I was stunned by how she used a blend of music, film, image, and archival material – a practice that she brilliantly terms DJ Scholarship – in a talk about Morrison’s work. It was transformative just to witness. We spoke afterwards about Morrison’s oeuvre, about how assuredly resonant yet understated her writing is, and also about Saidiya Hartman, whom I’d interviewed a week before. I mentioned how both writers’ work held such powerful quietude at their core, which was when Lynnée asked if I’d read The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture, by Kevin Quashie. And what a gift that was, because that text – once I got my hands on it – gave me a framework for what I’d written already, and for how I could push further, deeper, into thinking about the black interior; about the inner life as both an individual and communal source of liberation; about fugitivity and even surveillance. It was ironic because quiet is a word that has followed me for most of my life, usually as a synonym for introversion, but Quashie’s text assisted me in working with it as a poetics, a site of emanations that shape the entirety of our lived experiences.

VAB: Funnily enough, I actually did consider naming the book Quiet/Black Noise, exactly as you’ve put it here. I liked the doubleness of that as a title. The reason why I didn’t call it that was because I felt that Quiet, for all its perceived simplicity and plainness, was way more subversive given the scope of the book. It is quiet, but also, it isn’t. It toys with the assumptions that are made about it. Arriving at the meaning of ‘black noise’ was incredibly helpful for me because, while by definition it suggests a kind of quiet that’s inflected by seemingly random, unscripted instances of sound, it also felt numinous and useful as a kind of praxis of black imagining and acting or non-acting. I mean this in the sense that it encompasses not only a kind of minimalism but also a kind of unwarranted liberation – a potential to break character, to lose composure (what is randomness if not something uncomposed?), to glitch, to go off-script so that a new plot might occur – and the belief that this can happen of its own accord, organically. In that apparent lack of sound there is, too, the subterranean, the underground, that ‘undercommons’ that Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write about.

A space where, beyond surveillance, something other happens. There is a quote by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge that I didn’t use in the book but still keep as a touchstone: When no one observes us, not even ourselves, our particles regain their wave aspect. I’m so fascinated by all of this – the paradoxical idea that black noise is a kind of potent empty space that is simultaneously full of possibility. And in the locale of my own life, I would translate black noise as a necessary psychological landscape. One that can be stepped into, or fallen into, especially during the most mundane activities – cooking, washing up, going out for a walk, listening to a specific song. Seemingly vacant acts which, out of the safety of their routineness, sometimes throw open new portals of thought.

VAB: I feel a sense of loyalty to the effort it takes to keep Ga alive in my life. It’s mostly through conversations with my mother and asking her for translations of words and sayings. Sometimes it’s as simple as looking at a household object and reminding myself of what it’s called in the language. Or trying to do that and then realising that I’ve forgotten. And then learning again becomes a kind of re-memory. It can be frustrating because, as the poem explores, there’s no other way to see this than as having been robbed of the chance to live more fully in a different language-world, one that might fit us better – those of us to whom this applies – and not the one of our colonisers. All the same, the language is still alive. I take it word by word.

VAB: In that piece in The White Review, what I’m celebrating about Hartman is the sense that it takes skill to know how to write just enough. Only enough – and not too much. Such finely calibrated, meticulous control. And integrity, too. To know what not to say, whether because it’s not your place and the secrets aren’t yours to tell, or because you know less than you could easily pretend to, or because you want to write for those who are really looking closely and know what to notice – not just those who will throw a passing spectatorial glance. In terms of writing about history, there has to be respect for the ways that you weren’t there – respect enough not to force your way in. In which case, working with care for those who were there demands the kind of writing that constructs a negative space for their existences: to at least gesture at the shape that contained their happenings. Hartman’s work does this in incredibly delicate and rich ways. I don’t know that I’ve succeeded in the same way, but the attempt itself has felt worthy. The book has done for me what I needed it to, which was to be a place in which I worked things out. That’s a personal fulfilment. I hope that the work contains something of what it reaches towards, that its gifts are felt and its failures forgiven. If there’s anything I’d like the book to leave in those voids, I would want it to be that act of reaching.

VAB: In ‘dear little b,’ and across the book there is a reckoning with the idea of not wanting to be entirely visible or legible – be that to anyone at all, or more directly to an external, objectifying eye, such as the state or even the marketplace in which one (or one’s work) exists. There’s a lot of irony in asking ‘haven’t we been capital forever?’ but there is just as much seriousness in that question too. It’s not a light-hearted enquiry. Ultimately the question is about the intentions behind capitalisation (or the lack of it), about wanting to pay attention to where such demands are superficially or stylistically motivated. Essentially: when does it become a call for recognition (and whose recognition?), and does that alter a material condition (B/black life in an anti-black world) or merely reform its presentation? Letters are the bread and butter of a writer, and yet in the process of stringing them together as words we forget that they are, at their basic components, symbols first, signs.

I’m thinking now of the essay ‘Ode to the Ampersand’ by Donnalyn Xu, which mentions how the ampersand is the shape of a ligature, for example. It’s literally a drawing of a knot. Or a bow. So, in the space of ‘dear little b’ there’s a cautiousness about signs and their uses. The poem rejects capital(isation) as a signifier of validation and humanness, turning instead towards the lowercase – the ‘laying low’ – as a modality that recognises what has also been necessary for black survival.

VAB: June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks are each luminaries for me; I find in their work a choice to be direct, to write with urgency, without mincing words. Thinking about the pressure to ‘perform’ one’s politics, I see this as a noisy artefact of social media’s relentlessly consumer-focused, branding-heavy algorithms, many of which have probably restructured our neural get pathways by now. I mentioned earlier that quiet is a word that’s followed me for a long time. I haven’t liked this until recently. Once I realised that the difficulty I had with being described in that way was because of the pressure you mentioned – a pressure that prioritised I artifice over substance – everything changed. Is it safe for our politics to be a performance in the first place? What if they were embodied? And can we tell the difference? I want to make a habit of asking: if I believe X, what does that look like in practice – especially when nobody is looking? Poems are one thing, but what do I actually need to do? We use the word ‘love’ often, for example. But what would we do if we couldn’t say love to make it known and felt through action?

VAB: ‘About Ana’ came about quickly and didn’t change much through edits. I wrote it following a session that Pascale Petit facilitated during a retreat for The Complete Works. We had been given images to write from and I had the one described in the poem, which is a still from Mendieta’s film Untitled (Blood + Feathers #2). I was drawn to her work for the way she used her body in relationship to the earth – as though her body was once a part of it but had been separated and was seeking to return. The poem charts a process of thinking about her death, and it maintains a certain observational distance until just before the end, when the loss sets in. It was only after writing the poem that I noticed the echoes between her work and her death, the feathers and flight and falling.

VAB: I think the weight of a moment absolutely does occur to me in the midst of it, which is why I have to write things down later. ‘Whose Name Means Honey’ was written on the Central Line on the way home from the experience that it’s about. I’m writing as a way to keep things that feel like they’ll be lost otherwise – by me, through forgetfulness, or to the wear and tear of the world. Writing about certain moments feels like giving them the space on an altar that they deserve, so I can revisit them later. At the same time I also know that a poem can often be a kind of hoarding. I try to remind myself to treasure the ephemeral.