The Sonics of Blackness

When captured Africans first arrived in the United States, in what we now understand to be the start of the largest forced migration in human history, it was as a foreign people. Their customs, dialects, aesthetics and cultures all drastically differed from that of their captors in a land they would be forced to cultivate. Their bodies, now flesh relics of a past life, still belonged to a foreign continent and a foreign temperament. However, somewhere within the daunting 246 years of enslavement that lingered before them, this notion of alienated citizenship transformed and African became Black. Although their bodies alluded to a distant land, their imagined natal context now established itself in and on American soil. Their language, customs and aesthetics, while still laced with the legacy of their homeland, saw its genesis and resided in a newfound people. This world ending yet world making phenomena was one that video artist and cinematographer Arthur Jafa closely explored in his visual art and discussed at length in his 2017 In Your Face: Interview. When asked to describe his creative process and the intentions behind his installations, Jafa notably commented that his work attempted to:

“articulate the complexities of [Africans becoming Black]. That transition, one’s identification with an imagined,...oftentimes unrealistically edenic understanding of what that natal context looked like, and operating in a space with a lot of gaps. Filling those gaps in and imagining that the way one felt was the way they looked traditionally. Until you came and saw what the tradition looked like. You realized the shit filled in and [that] you made up out of necessity...grew out of that moment when the African body appeared in white space”.

Jafa’s exploration of this transitional phenomena was one reflected in black art since the dawn of American slavery. As Black Americans began losing sight of their explicit African traditions, whether it be due to the passage of time or force by their captors, the yearning and necessity to maintain a connection to their past world and make sense of their newfound identity and physical conditions remained. Out of Black peoples’ re-imagined African tradition and aesthetic as a means of remembering, both during slavery and in modern day, came something entirely new. Black art resided in a previously unknown realm because the Black American body was previously non-existent. Black people’s desire to remain connected to an identity that was simultaneously separate from that of whites, yet entirely inseparable, unintentionally brought about the creation of Black Art. While Jafa examined this monumental occurrence through the medium of visual assemblage, it was also strikingly expressed via the artforms of dance, oral tradition, writing, and most interestingly to me, music.

Throughout its evolution, Black American music has expressed an intangible yet entirely tangible “something” that was birthed from this historic event. Regardless of genre, era or demographic of the listener, the emotions captured in Black music were overwhelmingly palpable yet somehow indefinable. While often communicated via instrumentation or vocal technique, Black American music has never had a lone, commonly agreed upon, physical component that was the pinpointable generator of such emotion. It could not solely be described by the timbre of a voice or instrument, the skill of the player, the arrangement of a piece, nor the engagement of the listener. Yet there was always a distinctive thread throughout Black people’s musical expression that tapped into a greater spirit.

This quest to define such a phenomenal occurrence was further explored in writer and poet Amiri Baraka’s book Blues People. In an attempt to trace this mysterious emotional motif through Black American music, from the first group of enslaved Africans to modern day, Baraka interestingly assigned the term blues to this affective frequency. He wrote that, “the term blues related directly to the Negro and his personal involvement in America….Blues meant a Negro experience, it was the one music the Negro made that could not be transferred into a more general significance than the one the Negro gave it initially”. Although also assigned to a specific genre within the musical tradition, Baraka’s use of blues transcended any singular style of music. It was instead a feeling, a pulse, a rhythm that extended beyond any one person, genre, song or time period, yet uniquely lingered among black bodies throughout generations. Even as Black music transformed and evolved over the course of American history, much like its people, it occupied this changing same of emotional blues that breathed into all denominations of musical expression.

With this in mind however, one must beg the question, why was this musical phenomenon most sustained in Black Americans? Why was Black music, through all its evolutions and aesthetics, the pinnacle of popular music and osmosed thru every other genre? Why were Black people the ones most able to capture this? If, according to Jafa, this moment tied directly back to the birth of Africans becoming Black specifically via the horrors of slavery, why had it not rung true for other groups of enslaved people? While exceptional in its practices, the enterprise of slavery neither began nor ended with Black Americans in 1619. Whether it be thousands of years ago with Jewish people under Egyptian rule, Ancient Romans in Antiquity or the Eastern European Slavs in the medieval world, slavery has stained the chapters of human history since its inception. However, while the practice of slavery was not unheardof, the perspective shared among American participants endured a drastic shift in comparison to other civilizations.

This transformative thought process was one author Robin Blackburn recovered in his book, The Making of the New World Slavery: From Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800, where he outlined the history of slavery on a global scale. One example stemmed as far back as the Christian Church via the eyes of St Augustine, the bishop of Hippo, from 396 to 430 A.D.. Blackburn wrote, with accompanied interpretations from writer Gervase Corcoran, that in:

“the early Christian Church...the doctrine of ‘original sin’ meant that all deserved to be slaves. The slave was fortunate that his or her sinfulness, shared with all humankind, was receiving earthly punishment.... Gervase Corcoran explained St Augustine’s view as follows:

‘Everyone who was a slave, was justly a slave. From this one cannot conclude that every master was unjustly a master because he was a sinner too. According to St Augustine, to be a master was a condemnation too, because he was exposed to the libido dominandi [desire to dominate], and the more he acted as master (i.e. disposed of his inferiors for his own use), the more he was a slave’”.

Although held thousands of years ago, St Augustine’s perspective reflected the common sense of slavery leading up to the enslavement of Africans in the Western world. While the condemnation of slavery was reserved for those seen as damned in this life, it was still believed that all of humanity, regardless of skin color, caste or creed, would eventually meet the same fate. This notion that even the master, would not only one day become a slave, but that he too was a slave if he gave way to an excess of force was non-existent in American culture. As was depicted in images, documentaries, songs, and other forms of retelling, the Black American slave was subjected to unique physical and emotional horrors. Such terrible acts however, were only achievable and explainable with a devastating misalignment of a mutually understood humanity. Although the belief that “everyone who was a slave, was justly a slave” was rhetoric shared between the ancient Christian church and the white American master, the seemingly irrevocabile understanding of a common humanity was not. Never before had the destructive act of dehumanizing an entire peoples been so heavily practiced. Although slaves in antiquity were subjected to atrocities, the basic assumption of humanity remained between slave and master.

This division was especially reinforced with the hierarchical interpretation of race. As described in her book, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, author and academic Saidiya Hartman documented that, “it was not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the line between the slave and the free separated Africans and Europeans and hardened into a color line….race established a hierarchy of human life, determined which persons were expendable, and selected the bodies that could be transformed into commodities”. As Hartman observed, to be deemed a slave solely predicated on race was a newly imagined occurance and transformed the arch of American slavery and future cultures.

Out of this racial makeup also stemmed previously unknown customs of intense systematic oppression. This was particularly revealed in the ways in which American laws were formulated as a means of dampening Black people’s daily practices and expressions. In a law passed in 1740 titled the South Carolina Slave Code, it was decreed that:

“as it is absolutely necessary to the safety of this Province, all due care be taken to restrain the wanderings and meetings of Negroes and other slaves, at all times...and their using and carrying wooden swords, and other mischievous and dangerous weapons, or using or keeping of drums, horns, or other loud instruments, which may call together or give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes; and that all masters, overseers and others may be enjoined, diligently and carefully to prevent the same...And whatsoever master, owner or overseer shall permit or suffer his or their Negro or other slave or slaves, at any time hereafter, to beat drums, blow horns, or use any other loud instruments or whosoever shall suffer and countenance any public meeting or feastings of strange Negroes or slaves in their plantations, shall forfeit ten pounds…”.

Laws such as these underlined the exceptional circumstances of American slavery. It was no longer an individual condition reserved for sinners. This was now a law of the womb and a means to suppress and control.

In his book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, psychiatrist, researcher and author Bessel van der Kolk studied the bodies and minds of patients who experienced extreme trauma. In an attempt to mold public understanding that trauma affected individuals in all aspects of life rather than temporarily and siloed, van der Kolk wrote, “chronic emotional abuse and neglect were devastating…Not being seen, not being known, and having nowhere to turn to feel safe was devastating…If no one ever looked at you with loving eyes,...then you needed to discover other ways of taking care of yourself. You were likely to experiment with anything...that offers some kind of relief”. The conditions of trauma via the forms of neglect and abuse that van der Kolk’s patients endured directly resembled the experience of the Black American slave. It was a cruel and unusual punishment to not only brutally enslave people, but to criminalize the body, assembly, and any overt musical expression as was found in laws such as the South Carolina Slave Codes. With each passing legislation, Black people quickly found themselves living in a country where each mode of “relief”, as van der Kolk described, used to live beyond the physical conditions of their trauma, were systematically criminalized and therefore made life threatening practices. Black people were forced into a system that required them to break the law and disobey in order to live and create. With intense measures however, came intense responses.

Throughout her written works, critically acclaimed author Toni Morrison regularly grappled with discourses on racial constructions such as these. Much like Arthur Jafa with his installations, Morrison regularly probed at the mystical elements of Black bodies existing in white spaces. One metaphor she invoked and regularly contemplated was that of the house versus home. As described in her 1997 essay, “Home,” Morrison believed that the “house,” a four-walled structure with echoes of the master’s “house rules,” represented America’s racialized reality; Race was both acknowledged and a constructed blueprint for everyday life and interactions. She wrote that if forced to “live in a racial house, it was important, at the least, to rebuild it so that it was not a windowless prison into which [she] was forced, a thick-walled, impenetrable container from which no cry could be heard, but rather an open house, grounded, yet generous in its supply of windows and doors. Or, at the most, it became imperative for [her] to transform this house completely. Counterracism was never an option”. Morrison’s metaphorical house, while based in theory, was the physical reality of black people in America. Laws followed by and preceding decrees such as the South Carolina Slave Code demonstrated systematic attempts to close up the windows, bolt the doors and silence the Black occupants in a metaphorical “house” they were constantly prevented from owning. With each attempt at overt musical expression and cling to some resemblance of freedom like Morrison described, Black people not only faced immense backlash but physical and legal harm. Much like van der Kolk’s writings on trauma, “not being seen, not being known, and having nowhere to turn to feel safe was devastating”. With all means of overt expression constantly being regulated and removed, there was seemingly nowhere left to turn. However, in the face of being locked out of everything, Black people were forced to improvise and use whatever resources were left at their disposal. They had to turn inward.

While the “house” undeniably drew parallels to what was most readily apparent in American society, Morrison was much more intrigued by the somehow more elusive “home.” A “world-in-which-race-does-not-matter as something other than a theme park, or a failed and always-failing dream, or as the father's house of many rooms. I am thinking of it as home...How to be both free and situated; how to convert a racist house into a-race-specific-yet-nonracist home. How to enunciate race while depriving it of its lethal cling?”. Morrison’s concept of home was a powerful one. Home represented times when black people had a space or private moment where the concept of race was acknowledged and celebrated, yet not obstructive. Where external constructs and gazes were neither the focal point nor a smothering consideration.

Although Morrison’s desire for home may have been imagined as a physical space or exact location, it also resided in Black American music. Much like Amiri Baraka and his writings on blues, Toni Morrison’s imagining of the home lingered in an unseen space that could not be outlawed, stolen or removed by force. Throughout its evolutions, music remained what Morrison described as “a race-specific yet nonracist home” and what Baraka deemed as blues; always relating “directly to the Negro and his personal involvement in America”. If, in the United States, to voice musical expression meant to have it punished and criminalized, the only method remaining was to internalize that expression. With each passing generation and evolution of Black American music, it maintained its overwhelming power to communicate and move, while remaining intangible. It persisted in a space that appeared as public, yet achieved moments of recognition and identification that went beyond the verbal. With each silencing law or act, Black music transformed into a coded language and feeling that only Black people could access. Regardless of the assigned term, whether it be blues or home, Black American music lived in something that went beyond what was readily apparent and accessible and the key to unlock that home was lived experience.

Booklist

A Seat at the Table, Solange, 2016

To Pimp A Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar, 2015

What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye, 1971

Blknws, Khalil Joseph, 2019

Love is the Message, The Message is Death, Arthur Jafa, 2018

Dreams are Colder than Death, Arthur Jafa, Unreleased 

In Your Face: Interview - Arthur Jafa, SHOWstudio, 2017

Affect Economies, Sarah Ahmed, 2007

Dawn, Octavia Butler, 1987

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, 1952

Blues People, Amiri Baraka, 1963

Home Essay, Toni Morrison 1997

Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin, 1961

The Improvisative, Tracy McMullen

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic, Saidiya Hartman, 2006

“South Carolina Slave Code 1740,” U.S. Constitution, 1740

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Bessel van der Kolk, 2014

Poetics, Aristotle, 335 BC

The 1619 Project, The New York Times Magazine, 2019

Othello, William Shakespeare, 1604 

The Making of the New World Slavery: From Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800, Robin Blackburn, 1997

1. Saint Augustine on Slavery, Gervase Corcoran, Institutum Patristicum "Augustinianum", 1985

Antigone, Sophocles, 441 BCE

Benin Bronzes, British Museum, Discovered 1897