SPEAK! by the SPEAK! Women of Color Media Collective
(Liquid Words Productions)
When I first listened to SPEAK!, the spoken word collection put out by the SPEAK! Women of Color Media Collective, I shied away from reviewing it. I was too biased, I worried. I couldn’t be objective. Some of the contributors read (and have written for) this very blog! It was fairer, I decided, to review works by people I’d never met or spoken to.
Blah blah blah. Fuck that. This collection is wonderful.
“I speak to live into my skin… I scream for my family, for my life, for your life, and for the ones to come,” says Adele Nieves in the CD’s opening track, “Why Do You Speak?” She sets the tone for the entire collection, tying personal histories to entire nations, connecting people to peoples. These voices whisper, yell, sing, rhyme, ponder, call, muse (think of the double meaning of the word “muse” – think of a muse channeling her inspiration through her own voice instead of silently bestowing it on someone else). There are so many great moments that it’s hard to figure out which ones to highlight.
Aaminah Hernandez’s piece, “When I Speak,” was one of my favorites. It begins with a telephone ringing and the beep of an answering machine. From the format, one might expect a sort of epistolary piece, but in a striking move Hernandez seems, at first, to address no one in particular. She ruminates on those who seek out Muslim perspectives, but panic when a Muslim woman – or, even more frightening, a Muslim woman without a college degree, or a Muslim mother – opens her mouth. “Surviving isn’t education… and being well-read only matters if it was guided by professors and resulted in something to frame,” she says, her voice measured almost to the point of monotone. The format is slyly appropriate for the subject Hernandez is tackling; one gets the sense that after being shut out of mainstream discourse, she’s entering it through the back door. But who is she speaking to? Whose answering machine is this? Perhaps she’s speaking past her listener, just as other speakers have done to her. Both her and Lisa Factora-Borchers’s criticisms of academia are incisive – why, their pieces ask, do you need a degree to talk about your own experience, your own truths? Why are you a sought-after commodity if you have culturally-sanctioned credentials, and a voice on an answering machine if you don’t?
Nadia Abou-Karr contributes two pieces on the Palestinian experience, “We Will Never Forget” and “Genocide.” In the second piece, she explores the role of the US mainstream in appropriating, repackaging, and mass producing the Holocaust as a tragedy like no other in the history of the world – in other words, the only “real” genocide. I was of two minds as I listened. On the one hand, I thought of the rage I felt at hearing John McCain and Sarah Palin chirp, “We don’t want another Holocaust!” in order to win an election – as if they gave even the tiniest damn about the members of my family who were disappeared after Germany invaded Poland. On the other hand, I couldn’t escape the visceral suspicion and discomfort I feel when any non-Jew appears to suggest that we talk about the Holocaust too much, or in the wrong way. I could feel myself bristling – but healthy bristling will happen when raw subjects are discussed frankly. And even that discomfort is minor when you consider the main point of the piece: that if we agree that each group has the most expertise on their own oppression, then Palestinians need to be able to use the term “genocide” to describe the ongoing erasure of their culture, land, and lives. (Think of this idea in relation to Hernandez and Factora-Borchers’ critiques of credentials and degrees. One of the main themes running through this collection, whether it’s Palestine or privileged feminism or the Song of Solomon, is the subversion of hierarchies and the questioning of accepted narratives. The Israeli government knows what it’s talking about; Palestinian civilians don’t. Academics and men and white people know what they’re talking about; everyone else does not. Meanwhile, the people who supposedly don’t know what they’re talking about are living and hurting and dying.)
Most of the pieces rely on minimal sounds – light percussion, synthesizers, background noise – if there’s any sound besides the speaker at all, so E. Rose Sims’ “On Cartography and Dissection” is a jarring change of pace, with an orchestrated score that matches the dark tone of her exploration of monsters. The piece is a brilliant series of connections between colonialism and transphobia and racism, with mapmaking serving as a metaphor for the naming and conquering of the human body. Flags are planted, already-established realities are ignored, and healthy, natural identities are twisted, by colonizers, into “a wrongness, a distortion.” Sims’s voice brims with sadness and anger as thunder crackles behind her and she ponders what Medusa felt the first time she saw her own reflection.
There are delightful moments of humor in the collection, too. BabyBFP, giggling, reads a poem about her cats, and the CD begins to draw to a close with a spirited rendition of “I Feel Pretty.” When I saw the title on the track listing, I was afraid it would be corny, but these ladies pull it off.
“What is this thing called ‘love’? And what does it mean to radicalize it?” BFP asks at Flip Flopping Joy. The idea of radical love is, as usual, being appropriated and twisted beyond recognition by mainstream “movements,” but SPEAK! is – I think? I feel? I’m new at this and the term resists definition – a work built from real radical love. It’s beyond the romantic or the superficial. “We don’t get to say, ‘I am woman, hear me roar’ – we say, ‘I am woman, dear God, I hope you find my sister today,'” Black Amazon says in “Something Else to Be.” In many ways, it’s beyond analysis.
Oh! And if you need any more evidence that you should procure a copy of this CD, all proceeds go towards helping single mothers attend the Allied Media Conference in Detroit this July. Listening parties, workshops, and a zine are options available to you.
So get it already! Get this CD posthaste. Listen, learn, and love.
ETA: Looks like Cara and I posted about this at the same time!