032526 / 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.
[Image description: A digital phone scan of a blank notebook page with blue, wide-ruled lines. Handwritten text from the other side of the page is visible as impressions and indentations. The top of the page is white, and cloudily transitions toward a blue tint toward the bottom.]
In the reading process, what brings you pleasure?
I remember flipping through my notebook, ready to begin planning out my studio session, and I paused on this, the underside of a page already written on. The light from my window amplified the ridges of what was written, and yet the most rigid thing about language–it’s ability to carry meaning, felt the most absent. What is typically such a punishing block in a writer’s experience (a blank page) suddenly felt very magnetic. Not because I had overcome a block and was ready to write, but because I could re-encounter what I’d already written in this strangely pleasurable way.
How do we read a text without seeking ourselves? What does it mean to go into a text seeking Other things?
What exactly am I reading here? What was legibly written? Its impressions? I feel the need to explain that there’s a legible side that this image doesn’t show, but implies. But then I might be running away from Other things, these things here underneath. Perhaps I am reading the movement in between: the flipping of the page to reveal this Other side.
How do you disengage with a desire for plot/narrative, and instead toward a more embodied way of moving through the text?
Whatever I’d written doesn’t make sense anymore because we’re looking at it from underneath: the Other side of the substrate my processing is etched within. On this Other side, it seems as if this writing isn’t thinking at all, just scritches and scribbles, clouds of ephemeral markings. Rather than a set of sections positioned intentionally on separate parts of the page, this is clumpy and spacy, undemanding of beginning or end. More like drifting.
Thanks for rehearsing & 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. ↩