012926 / REHEARSING OTHERWISE
REHEARSING OTHERWISE is a series where I share experiments in writing rooted in black study1. These are dispatches from the rituals of play I facilitate in my own writing practice, embodying disobedience (or, dis-embodying obedience)2 through methods of reading and writing Otherwise34. I publish these tangential5 drafts with commentary as a gesture toward the revision process.
For this rehearsal, I’ll be focused on reading Otherwise, using prompts6 to respond to the text chosen below.
How do you write non-readability into the text?
This page of notes from my studio session notebook was once coherent. It was some combination of grounding my thoughts, and playing around with drawing and graphic writing to loosen up what I’m sure was a tough work session. And I thought the writing ended there. I honestly just collage to have something to do with pages of my notebook that are filled up, finished, completed, no longer in use. But I think my collage process is writing too, my hands moving my mind into quiet and coming up with this. It is not so easy to take the same journey with the pen—if i’m not instantly making sense then everything feels wrong, there’s a familiar pressure I run into with the feeling of needing to write in order. In order of coherency, in order to say something (and it must be impressive, immediately), in order to ‘be writing’ in some obvious way. So this collage-writing is my non-reading.
While reading this text, what brings you pleasure?
I noticed when bringing this text into digital form I assumed it was upside down—the ‘wrong way.’ But it is always a pleasant surprise remembering that there is no wrong way when I non-write like this. Similar to confronting the blank page when generating writing, it can sometimes be daunting to read. When I read this collage-writing, however, I suddenly come alive to all the uncharted pathways that non-writing on a page can reveal. What is a wrong way if you can read (and by extension, write) any way?
How do you disengage with a desire for plot/narrative, and instead seek a more embodied way of moving through a text?
“What does service to the apps process need from me?” is suspended in a wall of writing that cannot be read from the same angle; it contrasts—it is all background noise. The strips of blank notebook paper amidst the noise become silences. There is less of a narrative building from left to right, top to bottom, and more of a soundscape. When it doesn’t feel right to read in the colonial choreographies of reading, then I guess I don’t have to. I can listen, instead.
And that brings this rehearsal to a close.
Thanks for studying alongside me,
— Paris
“…there is a distinction to be made between black studies and black study. Despite its radical origins, Black Studies as an academic discipline is now assimilated into the corporate university and too often reduced to performative reform. Alternatively, study is ‘a mode of thinking with others separate from the thinking that the institution requires of you.’ As a mode of practice, as Stefano Harney puts it, study is happening with and against the university and, most importantly, outside the university…I would posit that black study is the practice of refusal of Western civilization.“ — djones, Black Study as Practice: Claiming the B-Side as Black Study. (2023). ↩
“There remains some aspect of my speaking that expects a different mode of expression than English provides…This comes from a desire to resist assimilation, but equally, it arises out of a sense of exploration or adventure, a sense of puzzlement: as if something has happened to my occupation of the language, where a kind of split occurs. I move through it and see myself moving at the same time. It’s a double consciousness, a questioning that simultanates my rendering of experience.“ — Renee Gladman, The Sentence as a Space for Living: Prose Architecture ↩
I came into the concept and praxis of ‘Reading Otherwise’ through Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s Keynote on Visibility for Center of Book Arts 2022 Conference. ↩
“I think these ideas of world building really gives this freedom of also trusting what you already know and what you're already carrying, but also try to imagine other ways of being together, or other ways of encountering something. …thinking about alternative histories that is not through the lens of colonialism…there’s always a possibility to think of other ways of being together.” — Sandra Mujinga, “"I cheer for the monsters." | Artist Sandra Mujinga | Louisiana Channel.“ (2023). ↩
“A tangent can be a generative digression that invites learning or an abrupt change in course that introduces you to new ideas. Tangents are not mistakes rather, they are offerings…A tangent is a form of waywardness…” — Kameelah Janan Rasheed for Orange Tangent Study ↩
see footnote 3. ↩