No Earth Left Unturned: On the Maiming and Modifying of Body-Lands

Hawks Nest Tunnel, Courtesy of Elkem Metals Collection, West Virginia State Archives

dec 10, 2024

this experimental work marks a site of exploration through the visual traces of imperialism and attendant excavation of the earth’s surfaces, plumbing of its depths, and the interior-exterior spaces of colonized bodies.

my hope throughout this was to begin thinking about the visuality of imperialism—of bodily harm, resource extraction, physical labor, intoxicated perspective, race, and aesthetic markers—and see what attention to those properties might help me think through in terms of the ways that these processes take place in material, temporal, and psychological zones. i think that part of this attempt at articulating has ended up following a narrative direction more than I had planned for—and because of that, does not dwell for long enough on these topics. it keeps flowing, with the expectation that you might take from it whatever you can grab. i want to practice living with ideas for longer, but that was beyond the scope of this project. somewhat inspired, then, by the fast pace of industrialization, expansion, and colonial appetite. even as i try to talk about resistant methods, i am still embedded in this particular colonial project and its logics.

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      “Words 

       are ripped 

       from the belly

       of her throat 

    before they can be born. 

       Before they can flutter 

       in this space / between us— 

       an unturned layer of earth I 

       can no longer cultivate.” 

       Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, “On the Couch with Būbū Neien”

The dust is getting everywhere. Splayed across the white walls, strewn across the floor; in his hair, on their clothes, on her cheeks and on her hands and in her mouth and in their eyes. Remnants of coal combustion flavor their food and coat their tongues, not washing down with water. This is vandalization in Black [1]. The pages of their books are written in soot—the footnotes are in blood. But there’s no time to wipe away these traces of imperialism. Spit what you can from your mouth, but your arms keep swinging, keep picking up, keep on pulling your weight. Step into Rebecca Harding Davis’s (1861) “Life in the Iron-Mills”:

Masses of men, with dull, besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body. (Davis, 1; emphasis added)

From the outset, this is a scene of darkened affect, turned downward; this hazy place and the weight of its emotions dull, but with muscles sharp with tension and localized pain. Roiling with heat and sweat, what sticks to your skin? In your throat, the air clings and suffocates, your back bent over to cough with the weight of heaping and hauling already reshaping your spine. This particular imagery resonates with Fanon’s conceptions of muscularity where, “In the colonial world, the emotional sensitivity of the native is kept on the surface of his skin like an open sore which flinches form the caustic agent; the psyche shrinks back, obliterates itself and finds outlet in muscular demonstrations…,” (The Wretched of the Earth, 56). While those subjects mobilized towards imperial productivity are not always indigenous—also settler and arrivant—the carnalities of indiscriminatory colonial domination are physically palpable in both of these passages. Here, too, Fanon is speaking about the peripheral qualities of that emotional weight, which is both dull and heavy in Davis’s scene, this surface quality and emotional attention even more visible later:  

He griped the filthy red shirt that clung, stiff with soot, about him, and tore it savagely from his arm. The flesh beneath was muddy with grease and ashes,—and the heart beneath that! And the soul? God knows. (Davis, 15; emphasis added)

Here the trace of emotional weight is layered, towards interiority [2], but shifting our attention to the epidermal effects and postures of imperialism might also prove to be a generative site for thinking about the toxicity of urban construction, and about raciality as it relates bodily alterations and the vectors of life and death. 

“These roads will take you into your own country,” begins Muriel Rukeyser’s “Book of the Dead,” its recapitulation in the closing poem continuing: “Seasons and maps coming where this road comes / into a landscape mirrored in these men,” (Rukeyser, 106). Here in the sparkling reflexivity of asphalt marks one of the clearest examples of physical and affectual similarities of conceptions and treatments of bodies and landscapes. Tracing the destination-oriented paths we have paved only leads back to ourselves. The maps are outdated and the GPS can’t locate us: but we’ve paved one another in petroleum and rock, so we follow ourselves. This particular passage introduces the concept of the mirror to work with, but pulling on the poetic cables and fibers that weave Rukeyser’s collection together might offer an even more significant image of this reflexivity between the modification of the land and those who work it. Trace the image of affectual opening in these two images:

There, where the men crawl, landscaping the grounds / at the power-plant, he saw the blasts explode / the mouth of the tunnel that opened wider / when precious in the rock the white glass showed. (“The Face of the Dam: Vivian Jones,” Rukeyser, 78; emphasis added)

The youngest boy did not get to go down there with me, / he lay and said, ‘Mother, when I die, /  I want you to have them open me up and / see if that dust killed me. (“Absalom,” Rukeyser, 84; emphasis added)

Although there are different intentions each with different emotional weights in both of these passages, what is shockingly similar in terms of physicality is that sense of opening—the mountain blasted open with explosives, and the future of the young boy opened with surgical instruments. Again with alternative intentions set for this fissure of body-lands, both images strain with the sharpness of hunger for silica and its afterlives. And even with this mirroring of motion and appetite in mind, we might shift focus toward the causal relationship of these actions. It might be possible, then, to say that the blasting open of the tunnel resulted in the postmortem opening of the young boy. But we might also keep in mind Jasbir K. Puar’s attention to formulations where, “Debilitation is therefore not just an unfortunate by-product of the exploitative workings of capitalism; it is required for and constitutive of the expansion of profit,” (The Right to Maim, 81; emphasis added). As a necessary precondition, the young boy’s body must be sacrificed to dust in order for the widening of the tunnel and the expansion of future profits. The death of laboring in toxic sites, then, is an investment towards accumulating wealth. Puar expands the stakes of this claim, too, by positioning not necessarily death, but debilitation as being used, “to achieve the tactical aims of settler colonialism,” (Puar, 144). Those subjected to labor here are not killed spectacularly by growling machines or resonant explosions, limbs flying or crushed in freak accidents—they are debilitated, still capacitated enough to work, with death showing up only when the job is done [3]. 

Down the hill, the river turns through valleys; arteries carrying the lifeforce of the city: steel, lumber, water, money, and floating bodies; “...dragging itself sluggishly along, tired of the weight of boats and coal barges,” (Davis, 1) [4]. “Sloping as gracefully as thighs, the foothills,” “the overhead conveyor / slides on its cable to the feet of chimneys,” “here the severe flame speaks from the brick throat,” “the roaring flowers of the chimney-stacks / less poison, at their lips in fire, than this,” (“Alloy,” Rukeyser, 95-96; emphasis added). Even in these sites of capture and heaviness (which is everywhere), the human body has become a primary tool for capturing the beauty and sublimity of nature’s grandiose wonder. The indigenous folks of Turtle Island [5] have shown us how understanding the land as our Mother [6] is required for land stewardship, reciprocal interspecies relationships, and the sustaining of life and memory, and yet—we as settlers continue to demonstrate over and over again how insidiously patriarchy and white supremacy radiate in our interaction with our mothers and their mothers and their mothers who are our mothers. The seeming fertility and innocent vacancy of the land, from the hungry colonial gaze, is exactly that of misogynistic yearning for the subjection of our mothers and their daughters and our Mother/s. In thinking of this pillaging of mothering bodies alongside Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s uncultivable “unturned earth,” (“On the Couch with Būbū Neien”) [7], we might turn to June Jordan, who says in her (1980) “Poem About My Rights,” that, 

they fucked me over because I was wrong I was 

wrong again to be me being me where I was

wrong 

to be who I am 

which is exactly like South Africa 

penetrating into Namibia penetrating into 

Angola and does that mean I mean how do you know if 

Pretoria ejaculates what will the evidence look like the 

proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation on Blackland 

and if 

after Namibia and if after Angola and if after Zimbabwe 

and if after all of my kinsmen and women resist even to 

self-immolation of the villages and if after that 

we lose nevertheless what will the big boys say will they 

claim my consent: (Jordan, 2)

The repetitive strokes of frustration and anxiety structure the relentless rhythm of this passage, riffing on the erotic force of colonial penetration, from the past (“I was”) into the present (“is like”) and further into the future (“and if,” “and if,” “and if”). Still thinking with Puar, the severing of mind—the psychological warfare of “wrongness” and overkill of the potential for life even into the far reaches of time—is itself one of the “tactical aims of settler colonialism,” (Puar, 144). But not one that Jordan will consent to: her “resistance / [her] simple and daily and nightly self-determination / may very well cost you your life,” (Jordan, 4). This precise declaration of everyday resistance, then, becomes the articulation of one site of settler colonial combustion [8]. Every accumulating force of imperial domination, the archive of blood and limbs and tongues and dignities and hearts, are unleashed in a self-immolating, cannibalizing fit catalyzed by Black livingness [9]. The “brutal hegemonic violence [that] casts its arteries of murder and profit over every corner of the earth,” (Khadija Haynes, 2024) is woven into a carnal web that ensnares the pulse of settler colonial life. And, for some, that web is woven from bodily sacrifice; following Jetn̄il-Kijiner in narrative once more:

VII. / There is an old Chamorro legend / that the women of Guåhan saved their island / from a giant coral eating fish / by hacking off their / long and black as the night sky hair // They wove their locks / into a massive magical net // They caught the monster fish // and they saved their islands (Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Fishbone Hair)

While Jordan’s is necessarily not a spectacular revival but rather the resistance of mundanity, what emerges from sympathetic resonance with Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s narrative poetics is that livingness in the plural has the potential to intercept the manifestation of settler colonial logics. You will have to sacrifice something. Imperialism’s hunger will not stop at scrapes and light bloodletting, will not be satisfied with single limbs or the air from your lungs or—

traces left on your skin

in oil or blood or dirt / soot // charcoal smudge

(scar, break, sever)

whiteness might be

ephemeral

might be

clear as glass, 

might be just as fragile

will soon shatter

into one-hundred-and-eighty-six million [10] tiny fragments

will soon revert to grains of sand

“impeccable white shores 

  gleaming 

  like the cross burned 

  into our open 

  scarred palms,” [11]

sparkling, iridescent, incandescent

shaved ice, falling snow

that will melt into 

the salt of the ocean

filtered through gills and lungs

finally combining with bone fragments

that never survived the trip

and you:

who survived differently

will haunt,

steam and salt-spray mist

from crashing waves;

mining the white rock

into smaller pieces

no longer able to hunger

dehydrated with salty thirst

or 

thrown into evaporating clouds

burned off by sun

or

frozen, cracked, chiseled

sent flying freely

swallowed, not whole but in mouthfuls

      multiple breaths

      mixed in spoonfuls

      of cough syrup

      pressed tightly into

      decongestants and suppressants

((( light     headed vertigo,,  swirling    // drifting ,   ,   , , in  off-kilter   ellipses )))

colonial nausea

whiteness blinded

can no longer stand

two feet planted

must:  sit at the mouth of the tunnel

and bear the blast;

“sensory imprints” [12] of

“radioactive energy and megatons of tnt,” [13]

two-thousand-pound bombs falling

one-hundred-and-eighty-six thousand times over.

Notes:
1/ Following twentieth century descriptions of industrial aesthetics, David Stradling notes, “Soot could stick to exposed skin, collect in nostrils, lungs, eyes, and stomachs. It clung to buildings, walls, books, and dishes, and could not be simply brushed away. Soot found its way into cupboards and closets, attics and cellars, and it colored the cheeks of the city’s children as they played in the dusty streets,” (Stradling, 1999; 25). Thinking poetically about these aesthetic markers—often not welcome, or seen as invasions to white purity—this covering of the town’s surfaces might be described as vandalization, not in often-observed sprays of color, but entirely in black.

2/ What is interesting about this parsing through the layers of subjecthood is its contrasting directionality to that of much of the language that surrounds body modification, where becoming and self-realization is a process of moving aspects of interiority to the surface of the skin. The weight of this laboring is so heavy that it pierces not just to the beating heart but to the soul.

3/ Jill Gatlin’s analysis of Hubert Skidmore’s novel Hawks Nest emphasizes this maintenance of laboring capacity observing that, “Even after the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel disaster, corporate lawyers argued that ‘workers were healthy whether or not they had fibrosis [of the lungs] if their work was not impaired.’ They defined disease not by body-environment relationships but by terms of production—in this case, workers’ productive capacity,” (Gatlin, 2008; 163, emphasis in original).

4/ I include this poetic description from Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron-Mills keeping in mind that the river in her description shares affectual similarity to the endurance of enslaved folks’ forced labor, or in her words: “When I was a child I used to fancy a look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river slavishly bearing its burden day after day,” (Davis, 1). In my inclusion and continuance here, the river—if it takes on that weight of enslavement and imperial domination—might be observed as another body-land exploited by racial capitalism.

5/ One beautiful narration of the lineage of this indigenous name for the land of so-called “North America” can be found in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass.”

6/ I am continually learning from indigequeer Peruvian artist Galle (@gallermic/@vivir_sabrosa) about the sovereignty of Mother Earth and her multiplicities: “Water is our first home, our origin, and we couldn’t survive without Her. She is medicine, and it makes perfect sense to start any sustainability project, like a farm from sacred aquaculture,” (posted on Instagram on Nov 28, 2024); “under the releasing energy of the Full Moon, we asked Mother Fire D34th to the system,” (posted on Instagram on Nov 21, 2024).

7/ Without dwelling here too long, my inclusion of Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s “unturned earth,” further contextualized in the epigraph to this paper, is emphasized by its inability to be cultivated, and thus its literal representation of the ravaging of colonial imperialism not as a generative site of production but rather as an accumulating pile of artifactual death.

8/ I want to note here that the resistance of mundanity, of Black livingness, is explosive for white supremacy and powerful for that property, but is itself not strong enough to decolonize especially at the imperial core where the liberal inclusion of others fuels the colonial project. I’m thinking with Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s article “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” and continuing to think with Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, where each of these authors emphasize the need for realizing the materiality (rather than abstraction) of decolonization through methods such as armed resistance.

9/ The term “Black livingness” comes from Katherine McKittrick’s Dear Science and Other Stories, Duke University Press, 2021.

10/ An estimated 186,000 Palestinians have been murdered in so-called “Israel” as of July 2024—a number recorded by the journal Lancet, without the inclusion of those left under rubble, and not accounting for the thousands more killed as of the time of this writing.

11/ The quoted lines come from Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poem “History Project.”

12/ This term comes from Jessica A. Schwartz’s analysis of the impacts of the United States thermonuclear weapon (“Castle Bravo”) as felt in Rongelap Atoll, including Ailingnae and Utrik Atolls: “Yostimi Compaj, born in 1942 in the midst of World War II, retains sensory imprints of the bomb as well: ‘First, there was a great light that came to the island [Utrik]. It was beautiful, with shades of pink like the early-morning light.’ The stunning visual display was caused by Bravo’s radioactive mushroom cloud, which rose into the stratosphere to an altitude of more than 115,000 feet and spread 70 to 100 miles in diameter in under ten minutes,” (Schwartz, 2021; 1).

13/ The quoted lines come from Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poem “History Project.”

Bibliography

Davis, Rebecca Harding. Life in the Iron-Mills. The Atlantic Monthly, 1861.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 2021.

Gatlin, Jill. “An Epistemology of the Everyday: Occupational Health and Environmental Justice in Hubert Skidmore’s Hawk’s Nest” in Literature and Medicine 27 No. 2 Fall 2008. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

Haynes, Khadija. A Fetus on the Dirt Road: Against Imperial Feminisms, Claims of Mass Rape, and Exploring the Theory of Sepulcherality. Published by Hood Communist, November 2024, (https://hoodcommunist.org/2024/11/28/imperial-feminisms-claims-of-mass-rape/).

Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Kathy. lep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter. University of Arizona Press, 2017. 

McKittrick, Katherine. Dear Science and Other Stories. Duke University Press, 2021.

Puar, Jasbir K. The Right To Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Duke University Press, 2017.

Rukeyser, Muriel. “Alloy” in The Book of the Dead. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.

Schwartz, Jessica A. Radiation Sounds: Marshallese Music and Nuclear Silences. Duke University Press, 2021.

Stradling, David. Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Alloyed Labor, Automated Life: Racial Mattering in Muriel Rukeyser’s “Alloy”

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november 1, 2024

this is a story about a mechanized flow of movements, lifting, piling, accumulation, raciality, intoxicated perspective, heat, and shimmering. about animacy, and visuality. about what is seen versus what is actually at play: what is said and what fades into the ambiance.

“Sloping as gracefully as thighs, the foothills

narrow to this, clouds over every town

finally indicate the stored destruction.

Crystalline hill: a blinded field of white

murdering snow, seamed by convergent tracks;

the travelling cranes reach for the silica.

And down the track, the overhead conveyor

slides on its cable to the feet of chimneys.

Smoke rises, not white enough, not so barbaric.

Here the severe flame speaks from the brick throat,

electric furnaces produce this precious, this clean,

annealing the crystals, fusing at last alloys.” (Rukeyser, 95-96)

Immersed in this visual scape simultaneously cloud-covered, smoky, narrow, and crystalline, shimmering white, enflamed, we step into the rift of silica production. This is a land impacted by bodies, and too, the landscape itself a body shaped and extracted from by laboring bodies. This is a bustling environment, with sonic effects: almost entirely silent here, except for the severity of the roaring flame which “speaks from the brick throat,” (Rukeyser, 96). Of course sound can be conjured by movement—by the “travelling cranes,” reaching into the earth, by the conveyor which “slides on its cable,” by electric furnaces crackling and the process of metallurgic fusion—but what we are offered in terms of language is absent of sonic description, and it is also absent of human life. This is an environment which would be animated by the extracted labor of racialized workers, but what we are given by Rukeyser in this poem is an automated environment, a body-like amalgamation of machinery, which sustains and reproduces the lethal conditions of extraction and toxicity which propel white modernity. 

The “crystals” annealed (made malleable) here are the sparkling memory of silica gathering: that beautiful scene of glimmering potentiality which ends in the repeated deaths of those forced to precariously extract it, and the soil and sky it occupies after being blown from its rocky form. Like those absent bodies likely operating the extractive machinery which fills this poetic space, the toxic effects of silica exposure have also been absent from public discussion about the bodily impacts that the effervescent crystal has on those forced to gather it. Thinking once more about this excavated ground as running parallel to the excavated bodies of racialized workers (blasting silica from the earth, digging their own graves), Jill Gatlin offers up generative material with which to theorize. Gathering from the novel of Hubert Skidmore, one of Muriel Rukeyser’s contemporaries who wrote about the same tragic scene at the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel, Gatlin adds that, “Skidmore’s emphasis on body-environment interactivity anticipates and augments later twentieth-century discourses on pollution and toxicity by figuring the body as a porous and malleable space,” (Gatlin, 160). Again, it is worth rearticulating that as much as the earth is shaped by imperial devastation and toxicity, so too are the bodies asked to meet imperial demands shaped and devastated, rendered contaminated.  “Annealing the crystals,” both silica and those most proximate to its transformation are made malleable, not generatively, but with the purpose of being shaped into the colonial world of the white imagination. 

alloy (n.), “an inferior metal mixed with a precious one,” (Oxford Dictionary). [1]

Throughout Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead,” it is possible to trace threads between materials and racial markers: the purity of clean, gleaming whiteness, precious crystal, sparkling snow; and the shadow of billowing smoke, “not white enough.” Attentive to where images conjuring shining light or long cast shadows intersect with connotations of whiteness and Blackness (or Otherness), it might be possible to more clearly trace the histories of imperial violence which radiate from sites of environmental devastation. But what is interesting here is that Rukeyser offers alternative ideas of raciality that run counter to those which are most readily found on the surface. The smoky residue of alloy creation turns out to be “not white enough, not so barbaric,” (my italics), whiteness rather than Blackness being most proximal to barbarity, this proximity resonating with the “white murdering snow,” where whiteness has the potential to kill. This uncovering of the lethal reality of white supremacy is quite valuable to consider, but this automated environment might be offering up yet another mode for thinking through the racial dynamics at play in the devastation of body-lands [2] and body-cities [3]. 

While whiteness maintains its incentive to kill—one possible reading of “the stored destruction”—an alternative possibility opens up when we notice that the “murdering snow” is not blinding but “blinded,” (my italics). Returning once more to the invisible animation of this constructed environment, is it yet another possibility that those who worked intimately with the machinery and their precariousness are not absent, but shined out of view? What happens when we notice the fragility that comes from the singularity of whiteness?

alloy (n.), “a metal made by combining two or more metallic elements, especially to give greater strength or resistance to corrosion,” (Oxford Dictionary).

Thinking of “Alloy” from the perspective of the definition above, the incompleteness of whiteness is even more palpable. White subjects, crystalline and glassy, are not only considered beautiful, but also rendered incredibly fragile. Knowing the inevitability of its breaking, whiteness seeks additive relationships with Black death to build strength (“resistance to corrosion”). This history of fragility runs parallel to twentieth-century attempts to counter the aesthetic impact of black soot and smoke from coal mining:

A clean, pure, well-planned, impressive, and white city set the standard at the turn of the century. Chicago’s White City, constructed largely from flammable materials painted to resemble stone, did not survive a series of fires over the next few years, and attempts at its replication in other cities, through the construction of impressive, neoclassical municipal buildings, did not survive years of soot. (Stradling, 26)

With new attention to flammable materials, Rukeyser’s “annealing” flame turns white substance into a malleable material with which to construct fragile worlds, ready to be shattered “finally” by the “stored destruction.” Here the potentiality for shattering earth is found in the smoke clouds which envelop the scene in darkness. The white world (which can never be sustained) is seemingly automated, but actually driven by combusted Black life as potential fuel. 

One more set of questions from David Stradling’s “Smokestacks and Progressives” might offer kindling to imagine the futurity of contending with these racialities:

Here, in the dense and shifting clouds of carbon and sulfur, drifted visible evidence of the contradictions of progress, urban life, and the new civilization. And while the black smoke obscured the present, as urban residents squinted with stinging eyes, the smoke could also obscure the future. To what end would this dirty civilization progress? (Stradling, 22)

In a similar structure to these questions, I am wondering one more time about that “blinded field of white murdering snow,” which highlights the incompleteness of the colonial gaze. Might it be possible, in noticing that the white imaginary thrives on Black death as its fuel, that the potentiality of this fuel is not singular. The combustion of Black life burns so brightly that the Overseer’s [4] perspective is blinded. The white world can never be sustained. Soon these structures will be overgrown. Only “travelling cranes” will observe the wreckage.

alloy (n.), an additive property of white desire and Black death which results in the inevitable combustion of Black livingness [5], obliterating fragile white constructions.

Notes

1/ This usage of interspersed definitions is inspired by Christina Sharpe’s book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Duke University Press, 2016. She imagines these “italicized repetitions as a reminder, a refrain, and more,” (Sharpe, 135, notes).

2/ After Ana-Maurine Lara’s chapter “body-lands” in Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty, SUNY Press, 2020.

3/ After Elizabeth Grosz’s essay “Bodies-Cities” in Space, Time and Perversion. Essays on the Politics of Bodies, London: Routledge, 1995.

4/ The use of the term “Overseer,” which conjures plantation violence, is used in this perspectival sense in Kathryn Yusoff’s Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race, Duke University Press, 2024.

5/ The term “Black livingness” comes from Katherine McKittrick’s Dear Science and Other Stories, Duke University Press, 2021.

Bibliography

Gatlin, Jill. “An Epistemology of the Everyday: Occupational Health and Environmental Justice in Hubert Skidmore’s Hawk’s Nest” in Literature and Medicine 27 No. 2 Fall 2008. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

Rukeyser, Muriel. “Alloy” in The Book of the Dead. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.

Stradling, David. Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Punctuating the Architecture of Improvised Struggle: Listening to the Temporality of Violence and Resistance in the Movement for Palestinian Liberation

may 6, 2024

this is one of those practices at articulation, with attention to punctuation in its linguistic and sonic sense but also noticing the ways that death is punctuated. what i characterize as ‘resistance’ here is not the same as what i would call resistance now, knowing the necessity of the axis—it might be that some of these words slip into the rubric of liberalism. but i still resonate with this writing as a marker of my own conceptualization and my own attempts at articulation. i want to revisit that attentiveness to sound: to be continued.

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The Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) are invading Rafah now, scattering bombs and bodies and earth and air towards the unlivable. The land is dotted by explosions, which are also punctuating lives at their choreographed ends. And “music” continues in the core of this empire, where some sounds and gestures of the occupation reverberate the air and the ground in similar and different articulations. The violent, sharpened brutalizing of bodies at the center and margins of imperialism resonate together, but so too do the rhythmic banging on objects and incantations of un/freedom that sound together from the mouths of folks not proximal to the genocidal enactment but located in the place from which those movements are generated and funded. These soundings—this “music”—are, again, not those that are captured on the concert stage at a designated moment of shared consumption or within the soundproofed walls of recording studios, but those primordial sounds of resistance that are taking place in the streets, without spatialized acoustic resonance but in an open flow to the sky.

This is What Resistance Sounds Like

They are passing out gallon buckets from my work place now, and some folks have drumsticks to hit them with (of course, we’re gathered outside of a music school). This is the first gathering I’ve been to in protest for Palestine after months of signaling towards awareness and criticality against nationalism—after months of tens of thousands of bodies blown by the violent force of occupation. So the words are slow to come, but the rhythm hits in a way that I can access. And those hits build a new space of resistant energy that flows through my body and out of my mouth with more ease. Punctuations of sound build up the architecture of this place (a social place but also somewhere marked and contained by the sidewalk and security officers). 

In drawing up a history of music’s temporalities surrounding the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, Nahid Siamdoust inserts into this archive the reflections of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini on the intoxicating qualities of music, who says:

“One of the things that intoxicate the brains of our youth is music. Music causes the human brain, after one listens to it for some time, to become inactive and superficial and one loses seriousness…Of course music is a matter that everyone naturally likes, but it takes the human being out of the realm of seriousness and draws him toward uselessness and futility…A youth that spends most of his time on music becomes negligent of life issues and serious matters, and becomes addicted—just like someone who becomes addicted to drugs, and a drug addict can no longer be a serious human being who can think about political issues…,” (Khomeini in Siamdoust, 9).

There is a truth to this claim that music might take folks into alternative states of consciousness and being, in movement and posture and attention. (Musics necessarily contain within them a positionality of the creatives taking part, and a potentiality towards resistance of multiple forms.) And, in this truth, there is also that directionality which notices an intoxicated state as that which is generatively unproductive to imperialism. Together, disrupting the driving force of racial capitalism, demanding an end to arms manufacturing and monetary complicity in genocide, the collective song of protest is beautiful in its productive unproductivity. Beautifully articulated later in her “Soundtrack of the Revolution,” Siamdoust translates for us the importance of music as a different kind of world building—these performances take place in certain spaces, but also create spaces of their own for folks to be in. Both in live (“physical presence”) and virtual realms, music generates spaces of simultaneous experiencing and responding, drawing on (as in performativity) and also expanding “communal memory.” It seems that the location of these gatherings to listen to or perform music determines the freedom to express/converse (ie. some religious and other “private” public spaces were barred from governmental insertion, and have allowed for a freedom in the underground). And so, these rhythmic articulations on buckets and other objects, in stomping and clapping, craft a space of resistance for us to be in solidarity with one another. We are making this space for us. “We keep us safe,” we shout in unison. 

And this is also an invocation of different spatialities and temporalities, both cross-generational and international. This space of collective protest is improvised by those who begin to join and those who must leave—reading with care for the needs of this particular community of folks at this particular time, and continuing to riff on resistance as arms of the state wrap around in attempts to contain and disperse—but it is also a space built with the praxis of those who have been in the struggle for liberation. The practice of drumming/stomping/clapping is mirrored across the Atlantic, and the words which fit inside those punctuations echo at gatherings globally. We might not yet be in worlds where Palestine, Sudan, and the Congo are not occupied by genocidal forces, but the rhythmic articulation of protest crafts an architecture of bridges where resistant energy might transfer between those sites of violent occupation and those of us distanced and under the spell of imperialism’s drive.

Un/Freedom, Choreographed from Without

The shuddering of explosions unsettles me now in listening to the sonic space which Mazen Kerbaj improvises within through my headphones in a contained and quiet room of this institution. Six-and-a-half minutes over and again. This is all we are allowed entrance to of Kerbaj’s “Starry Night” 2006 improvisation/unwilling duet with the IOF whose bombs shatter through the quiescence of Beirut's nightlife. Fluttering, flickering, granular, breathing, the trumpet circulates the air of this (colonially) occupied space. And I am reminded of what Laudan Nooshin speaks to in contextualizing improvisation as a musical practice: 

“[Ingrid] Monson, for example, discusses the ways in which improvisation in jazz became a metaphor for freedom both musical and social, especially in the context of the American Civil Rights movement and growing black political consciousness in the United States. At this time, ‘a broad range of social, spiritual, transnational, and political meanings became attached to the improvisational tendencies implied by the term modal jazz’, and the idea ‘that it might be possible to experience or even create freedom through improvisation…,’” (Nooshin, 250).

Improvisation as a historical practice generatively permits us access to spaces where we might find freedom from expectations of perfection and mastery, or where representations of freedom might be articulated. But what of improvisation (as in Kerbaj’s) which denotes experiences or expressions of unfreedom, occupation, brutalization? What are we as listeners to make of those six explosions which mark this six-and-a-half minute window? What are we to do with Kerbaj’s seeming lack of physical urgency here—his soft continuance, and the mundanity of it all? Is it possible to notice the violence of those detonations, the unfreedom/occupation/brutalization they send flying as shrapnel, but also to conceive of those piercing sounds as purposefully placed in time and target by the forces of imperial genocide; as a kind of score? Nooshin gives us more to think with in relation to the score in improvisational method:

“This has, in turn, highlighted particular kinds of difference between, on the one hand, creativity which generally takes place away from the performance context and whose product is usually a score requiring further creative acts to be realized as music in performance; and, on the other, that which takes place in performance and which does not result in a physical product (other than perhaps a sound recording, which differs from a score in following rather than preceding the performance),” (Nooshin, 254).

Here, improvisation tends to be placed in the second of these possibilities, as that where creativity happens in the performance without a deliberately studied set of instructions. But what seems to open up here in Kerbaj’s offering is that there is a physical product—studied before (the IOF’s mapping of this occupied territory) and after this captured recording—which is the land itself and the indentations, excavations, toppling, bones, blood, and spirits which are left in the explosions’ aftershocks. 

Through this imperially choreographed punctuation of land and life by colonial powers, can we feel or hear those nuclear bombs which explode (multiple times) daily across the Atlantic, over homes in Rafah? What does the emotional potency of feeling the reverberations of those explosions say about us? And in the way that the rattling of percussive objects construct a space of vocalized resistance, is it possible for us to channel those emotionally charged explosive reverberations in such a way that this empire is utterly shaken to its rotting core? 

Bibliography:

Kerbaj, Mazen. “Starry Night.” Beirut, 2006. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIo4dh884hE)

Nooshin, Laudan. “Improvisation as ‘Other’: Creativity, Knowledge and Power: The Case of Iranian Classical Music.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 128, no. 2 (2003): 242–96. 

Siamdoust, Nahid. Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran. Stanford University Press, 2017