Murmur—Onajide Shabaka

“Murmur”

“A murmur that occurs when the heart muscle relaxes between beats is called a diastolic murmur. A systolic murmur occurs when the heart muscle contracts.”

In Mu, 49 Marks of Abolition, Sora Y. Han uses the metaphor of a murmur to describe her mode of study. The book’s study aims to create a calligraphy of the murmur, where each stroke is a poem that leads to the next. Fred Moten writes that an essential element of Mu is gobbledygook, pidgin, baby talk, bird talk, or Bird’s talk. Moten says that the untranslatability of See Hyesoon Kim’s bird language becomes a desire to reach places that have never been.

Bird Rider “channels its voice through the shaman… in the voice of a bird, chirping. Nobody understands the chirping.” ref. See Hyesoon Kim, “Bird Rider,”
p. 167.

Sora Y. Han’s poetic meditations on the freedom struggle come alive in the empty spaces between words, letters, and pictograms that span her many languages: English, Korean, Chinese, jazz, law, and poetry.

In Maroon Choreography, Fahima Ife speculates on the long (im)material, ecological, and aesthetic afterlives of black fugitivity. In three long-form poems and a lyrical essay, they examine black fugitivity as an ongoing phenomenon we know little about beyond what history tells us. As both poet and scholar, Ife unsettles the history and idea of black fugitivity, troubling senses of historic knowing while moving inside the continuing afterlives of those people who disappeared themselves into rural spaces beyond the reach of slavery. At the same time, they interrogate how writing itself can be a fugitive practice and a means to find a way out of ongoing containment, indebtedness, surveillance, and ecological ruin.