061726 / REHEARSING OTHERWISE
An announcement + rehearsal notes on reading Otherwise.
★ Announcement: Hey, y’all! I am facilitating Rehearsing Writing, a 1:1 writing consultation service for generating writing thru experimental pedagogies. If that sounds like a means of support you (or another artist/writer you know) have been needing, then check out the full Service Invitation in the newsletter archives for more details. You can schedule a free Intro. Call between now and June 23. ★
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 reading Otherwise while working with the Moonlight Screenplay book, published by A24 Films and released in 2019.
![A plush, red background frames a hand holding a pale, blue book. The book cover reads “A24: New York, NY; Book Number 003; Moonlight, written and produced by Barry Jenkins; Story by Tarell Alvin McCraney.” In the center of the book cover is an image with a rich blue hue, of a young black boy, shirtless, looking toward rushing ocean waves.]](https://assets.buttondown.email/images/60c85935-cd35-4b0b-af2e-9bb39411dd8f.jpg?w=960&fit=max)
i) What brings me pleasure while reading is the weight of the book: each page is sturdy. There’s a semi-rough texture that produces a pleasant sound when turning each page. I use the sounds to tune into the unexpected delight of sensorial reading: sight becoming less dominant, and reading becoming more multi-dimensional.
ii) I read with my body by feeling the sensation of the pages. Some are roughly textured, some are smooth. Some have a finer texture than others. Some pages are multi-textured. I listen by way of touch like a composition, judging which textures to turn up and turn down as I skim through each sound. Or, might these textures be silences?
iii) I disengage with the desire for plot by refusing to move with the text based on its written narrative. I look past, or ignore, the story told by words and instead follow other points of interest. If this book is its own landscape, I opt to meander rather than take to the narrative choreography. I don’t go as far this way, but then again, it’s not efficient to read so wrongly. The achievement of completely moving through a chapter, or even a page, is no longer what I’m tuning into. So I end my reading session without a familiar sense of accomplishment, knowing that when I attempt to refuse the plot again, there will be tension.
★ ★ ★
Thanks for rehearsing 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 ↩