How does one begin to think of beauty in a place that remembers nothing except ruin? To speak about blackness or anything that implicates it is already a stutter. It is to do something that cannot be (un)done. It is a mockery to language and speech. It is to expose the immaturity of all that is vocabulary.
Black students were chanting and the police were shooting. Students had to start running the police continued shooting. Students hid behind walls and some beneath tables but the popping sound of the gun was relentless. This cycle continued for days, weeks, months, years, decades and some argued that it had been going on for centuries. Black students were fighting against the increase of university fees. Black students are dying for university fees to decrease. Others were shouting words like Land and Dignity. Students carried placards written ‘Decolonization Now’. The media reported that the students do not have an idea of what they are fighting for or against. Some reported that they were fighting because they were too lazy to study. Almost everyone had a different opinion on why students were chanting and singing and carrying rocks. There were others who provided recommendations on how the students should be fighting. Some joined the students. Some students eventually became fatigued and they stopped waking up in the morning. Younger students joined in. Women started caucusing and men started noticing. We started seeing sjamboks. The police continued shooting. The popping sound of the gun was unwavering. Films were created about the incidents and books were written. Leaders were created and the masses accepted their status. They sang praises, wrote poems and painted murals. Leaders got arrested and the masses showered them with more love. They appeared in magazines and were attending conferences around the world. A few whispered their discomfort about how their leaders had changed. Nothing changed, the police did their thing and less people went to the protests. Many educated mouths had already prophesied that the students were wasting their time. Their predictions would have been correct but now it was not only just students, but pensioners and the homeless had joined. It was round about the same moment that koketso poho started singing louder.
lord,
jazz salvage us
relieve us
rescue the screams
hear &
let the sound of the horn be lifted
so that our prayers are heard
share our prayers
the millenniums of screams in graveyards
black prayers
so that we fight the enemy
fight the enemy
our enemy
reincarnate us –
we want to fight our enemy
jazz
even
(even when it is unbearable)
even when it is unbearable to be in this world
(when we are struggling)
struggling against our enemy
(death give us strength)
let your spirit give us strength to conquer
(to defeat the enemy)
We will defeat the enemy.
(even)
(even when it is difficult)
even when we are mired in difficulties
(when we are being stripped bare for our enemies who took to look)
when we are naked for our enemies to castrate and rape us
hear
hear the prayers
our laments
listen to our mourning
so that we struggle together joint in spirit and in soul
joint in flesh and in bone
The lyrics are usually followed by a hum that is paradoxically saturated by a jovial melancholy incapable of being represented by letters. The humming cannot be explained simply. It is something too heavy or too dark for narrow categories of modes-mediums of understanding and {expression}. The humming becomes a feeling. It becomes a feeling that can only be heard by the things living in seamless nothingness or those at the depth of the waters beneath the sea and above the sky. It can be heard through feelings, which is to say that the acoustics cease, momentarily, to matter. Something more emerges. It creeps up and it feels like jazz without ivory or brass. It imposes itself on the sleeping, never before awakened senses of the thing. It introduces a familiar newness that that only the spirit and not the mind remembers. The hum taps in a memory that is independent of the neuro. The tapping of the hum speaks nothing to the anatomy but insists on being intimate with the meta-the spirit. The Hum can only be understood because it is felt. The beauty, yes the life, is that those that can feel it can only feel it because they are a specific accumulation of nothing/flesh. They are black and are recognized, treated and/or violated as such. How they feel the Hum cannot be theorized. How they feel cannot be studied. They, themselves are a theory. They are a ‘theory in/of resistance’. They are not just a condition but an experience. They are an experience not of a condition but they are a rich experience within a condition.
The black experience.
The next time anyone says:
(lord)
(lord salvage us)
which is to say:
(jazz) – shouts
(jazz we recognize you) – in a declining pitch
I will have to weep because the rhythm and melody of the two are prima facie colloquial but when expressed and heard in unison and in their duality they transcend into a tragedy that is worthy of appreciation (not analysis or theorising). The appreciation will not happen through dialogue or speech. It requires silence, stillness, receptiveness and maybe more. More could mean an appreciation that demands more than just an ‘appreciation’. I have no control over how these two bracketed phrases [1] (lord qua jazz)(lord salvage us as jazz we recognise you) (word beneath a sentence) makes one feel and it invites minimum anxiety that I am unwilling to inquire. This is because, as I have tried to show, the inquiry will most likely be of no fruition in certain ways that do not implicate efficacy and necessity of the ‘Hum’ itself. To know that you are truly black is to feel the ‘Hum’, especially when it is spat, sung, vomited and ‘hummed’ by a certain Koketso Poho.
| 1. | ↑ | (lord qua jazz)(lord salvage us as jazz we recognise you) |