Black music and poems heals wounds, opens time, and key to the affs model

My thesis is that blackness, dysfluency,[1] and music are forces that open time. Opening brings possibilities: temporal refusal, temporal escape, temporal dissent. But because thesis also refers to a downbeat in music, my thesis must move, must metamorphose, like music. Sound is vibration, a wavering band of energy, endless restlessness. For us to perceive it, the sound waves emitting from the source must make our eardrums vibrate. Du Bois begins each chapter in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) with lyrics and a few bars of musical notation from spirituals. With this gesture he makes the page vibrate. He contraposes the vibratory nature of music with the essentially lapidary nature of writing. As the cover flap to a collection of José Arreola’s works reads: “La escritura fue originalmente cincelada en piedra. Mediante la mano es una incisión del espíritu [Writing was originally chiseled into stone. A spiritual incision moving through the hand]” (1995). So the beat goes on and new theses arise with each laying down of foot to ground (for thesis also refers to the stressed syllable of a foot in verse). Harriet Jacobs reminds us that black loops in black music (including but not limited to rap and house) are always black loop(hole)s of retreat;[2] that black music, like black escape, is a never-ending activity and never an achievement. And when the black stutterer loops a syllable (m-m-m-m-m-m-mother), this too is a black loop, black music, black activity. My thesis is that if (fluent) speech has been used to police the border between humans and non/subhumans, then black dysfluency enfleshes (to borrow a term from Ashon Crawley) the paradox of black humanity.[3] Are black people humans? The jury’s still out on that. And who’s on the jury? Further: if speech is a property of the living, black dysfluency enfleshes the paradox of black life itself. Do black lives matter? If so, why does the phrase need to be “repeated and recited incessantly?”[4] We live within the veil, and the veil is ever waving. How can we think about blackness and dysfluency together?[5] We can begin here: About this time my master came down the field. I became very bold and answered him when he called me. He asked me very roughly how I came to plow up the corn, and where the horse and plow were, and why I had got along so slowly. I told him that I had been talking with God Almighty, and it was God who had plowed up the corn. He looked at me very strangely, and suddenly I fell for shouting, and I shouted and began to preach. The words seemed to flow from my lips. When I had finished I had a deep feeling of satisfaction and no longer dreaded the whipping I knew I would get. My master looked at me and seemed to tremble. He told me to catch the horse and come on with him to the barn. I went to get the horse, stumbling down the corn rows. Here again I became weak and began to be afraid for the whipping. After I had gone some distance down the rows, I became dazed and again fell to the ground. In a vision I saw a great mound and, beside it or at the base of it, stood the angel Gabriel. And a voice said to me, ‘Behold your sins as a great mountain. But they shall be rolled away. Go in peace, fearing no man, for lo! I have cut loose your stammering tongue and unstopped your deaf ears. A witness shalt thou be, and thou shalt speak to multitudes, and they shall hear. My word has gone forth, and it is power. Be strong, and lo! I am with you even until the world shall end. Amen.’[6] Or we can begin here: Bernie Mac’s stuttering nephew is waiting at the bus stop. The bus pulls up, the driver opens the door, and the boy tries to ask a question. Impersonating his nephew, Mac closes his eyes, nods while shaking the microphone, and says “uh” four times. After sixteen seconds he returns to his “normal” voice and says, “Bus driver closed the door and drove the fuck off.” Next day same thing happens. “Bus driver closed the door and drove the fuck off. He ain’t got time for this shit here.”[7] “I’m gonna begin by borrowing a thought from Glissant: when we regard each other, we should tremble.”[8] This is how Teju Cole once introduced Fred Moten at a reading in honor of T.S. Eliot, who wrote: “For most of us, there is only the unattended / Moment, the moment in and out of time. / The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, / The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning / Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts.”[9] Or we can begin with my mother Pauline. I inherited my stutter from her. She was born in Higgin’s Land, St. Ann, Jamaica. Her father Charles, aged one hundred at time of writing,[10] is head pastor of a storefront in Canarsie, Brooklyn. My master looked at me and seemed to tremble. My thesis is that blackness, dysfluency, and music are shaped by forms of subjection enacted in the sphere of time—what I call temporal subjection. But because these three forces open and shape time, they create alternative temporalities that can help us heal from the wounds of that subjection. Healing, too, is an activity, not an achievement. Temporal subjection enacted against black people occurs in many spheres. Brittney Cooper examines several in her work: black women’s reproductive health; legal and extralegal murders of black people; racially skewed correlations between zip code and life expectancy; and the conceptualization of history itself.[11] Here I’ll focus on the plantation, and two scenes of temporal subjection discussed by Mark M. Smith in Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South. The first comes through the testimony of a former slave “named”[12] William Byrd, interviewed in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration: Master, he had great iron piece hanging just out side his door and he hit that every morning at 3:30. The negroes they come tumbling out of their beds. If they didn’t master he come round in about thirty minutes with that cat-o-nine tails and begins to let negro have that and when he got through they knew what that bell was the next morning.[13] Slavery’s ontological brutality knotted together time, sound, and violence. According to Smith, because masters wanted to inculcate time obedience in their slaves but didn’t want to give their slaves watches (“time-owning slaves would, after all, readily become like free, time-negotiating northern workers”), they generally kept clocks and watches for themselves.[14] They communicated clock time using bells, horns, and other sounds. And if the sound wasn’t obeyed, the whip intervened. When Byrd says ”they knew what that bell was the next morning,” he’s pointing to the ways that knowing the time, for slaves, was often shadowed by knowing the sound of that time (bell, horn) and knowing the consequences of not obeying that sound. The whip was an extension of the clock.