STEVEN J. FOWLER

When encountering the musidrawology of Dathini Mzayiya I was asked a new question. It was a question echoing many that had spurred me to years of research and work. My question was why had the handwritten, and all that entails in uniqueness and idiosyncrasy, been taken from the poet? In witnessing the brilliance of Mzayiya I realised I had failed to enquire far enough, and had not yet asked why has the sound of writing been taken from the poet? And deeper than this, why do we not hear ourselves writing?

I have not yet come across work so profoundly shedding light on the sound of writing. It is as generative as it is beautiful, as immediate as it is essential. This is a work giving us something back, because we have taken it for granted. Because our ears forgot that when we write we put the sound of that writing into the world, long before the signifiers of our marks take on language, or anything like language.

Mzayiya’s work is elegant, physical, present. Its making is essential to its aesthetic, evoking raw geometries, crowding the canvas with lengthy signatures hexing upon each other, creating layers of scratched secrets or dozens of abstract micro-poetries. All this fundamentally soundtracked, through reverberations, resonances, shudders and taps. The wind through an old house. A literary artistic carpentry. A planing, pushing, striking, stroking. It is work in time, as much as it is a work in sound and mark.

As is often the case with the modes and methods and means of expressions that have proved consistent in their emergence, sui generis, from people in (it seems) all places and at all times, we are forced to discover them anew, described as new, because of the words we use to describe them and how those words sit in a context of learning and sharing. This is to say, the musidrawology of Dathini Mzayiya sits as original within a grand tradition, lost as a clear through line in the human history of writing, because we use different words to describe it.

Let us add musidrawology to Asemic Poetry, Pansemic Writing, Free Writing, Cinematic Drawing, Abstract Poetry, Experimental or abstract calligraphy, Neo-linguistics, Xeno-linguistics, Writing art, Handwriting art, Logogrammatic art, Glyphs or Glyphic art, Lost languages and Automatic writing.

But let us say this is the first of these practises (that I know of) to put sound alongside, or before, the mark.

As long as humans have been making marks that echo writing, and the miraculous instinct we have to write and record in language, they have been doing the same with the sound of language. So from scribbles and doodles, and primal scripts, to pictograms, ideograms, logograms, to structuralist explorations and alphabets we don’t understand to lost languages, and hoaxes, we also can trace the mutterings, utterances, diddlage, scatting, chanting and other abstract non-song, non-speaking vocal expressions of human beings. There is then, a distinct poetic artistic tradition from the dawn of human culture which engages the non-linguistic but language-evoking in both marks and sound. What is the profundity then of a work that engages both?

In the written artworks of Dathini Mzayiya we encounter work of the mark that remembers the sound of that mark. It takes us into every scratch we have made on paper, even every strike our fingers have made on keys. It brings us to the sound of chalk on a board, quill on parchment, or stone on stone. Of the rhythmic incidents of writing, of the sonic consequence of our desire to make our words. Its brilliance lies in its individuality, its particularity, offering us such timeless universality. It reminds us we need not be in service to the word in order to write, and beyond that, there is another potential – that we might listen beyond the word, as it comes into being.