Restorative Community Project Session 2:

A moth’s hearing is fifteen times that of a humans, you said. That was fact number 47. Meaning, on a still night, they can hear a lover’s heart palpitate with the clarity of glass. But so can I, I think to myself as I rest my head against your chest. Fact number 102 was that I was wrong. 

1. I never quite understood the appetite for white noise machines. Especially those designed to facilitate sleep. It’s not like when asked to think of the most soothing place on earth, that sanctuary from the pressures and duress of our achievement society, you would conjure up an image of the ocean. In fact, being able to hear the eddy of a nearby body of water would be disturbing to say the least. And yet we have purchased into this mythological place of restoration, sonically transporting us to shelter through the very reminder of a brutal chaos that purs closeby. Then again, I wonder how this is any different from sleeping next to you. 

1. In Listening to Images, Tina Campt reeducates our hearing practice towards the many haptic modalities of sound and its visuality. For to do so risks an act of biologic impossibility: Listen with your flesh and not your ears. When she rests her massive mind against the passport photos of new diasporic black families, what does she hear in its affectivities? The answer: unleashed emotional particles that undulate from the filmic capture and announce itself in what is only “accessible… at the haptic frequency of vibration, like the vibrato of a hum felt more in the throat than in the ear.”(emphasis added) A hum. The hum of the dead. The hum of everyday resistance. So tell me, can a moth hear mine? 

1. I refuse to wait and find out. So let's suppose it can’t. Silence. It's a ridiculous and cosmic concept. The absence of sound. Against my own volition, you have enforced it upon me and it is heavy. Deeply felt. And still loudly heard. Saidiya Hartman, in this way, is more moth than she is cultural historian in that she seems to be able to hear the infinitely undetectable flutter of life that desperately reveals itself in the archival economies of slavery and more often, its afterlives. Silence. She hears it or maybe through it to speak of our impossibility as witnesses to the spectacle of terror and its survival. When I asked Micah what he would have said were he Sojourner Truth, he replied silence. 

1. “But none but Jesus heard me” so said Truth in her only famous address. What's the difference between being unheard and being silent she asks. The former is your fault and the latter, mine. But at least both are black. 

1. Black Noise: “What gives you the right to love black music, this irruption out of and into catastrophe?” asks Moten. The answer isn’t as inane as Frost’s famous dictate, “the best way out is through,” but something like “I just don't want to be free baby” (Etta James). “out of and into” I think to myself. 

1. Scholars of race often turn to the primal scene from Fredrick Douglas’ Narratives to theoretically locate the experiential formula of American racial formation. Conceptually, it refers to that moment in which the non-normative and raced body is shot into the unknowing subject; attaching itself like skin but usually as a sign for murder. I was not born knowing I had to be eradicated; you had to teach me that first. 

1. The importance of Douglas’ insight warrants a longer citation of a later movement in his meditation: “The slaves selected to go to the Great House Farm, for the monthly allowance for themselves and their fellow slaves, were peculiarly enthusiastic. While on their way, they would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came out— if not in the word, in the sound;—and as frequently in the one as in the other. They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone. Into all of their songs they would manage to weave something of the Great House Farm. Especially would they do this, when leaving home. They would sing most exultingly the following words:—

   “I am going away to the Great House Farm!

   Oh, yea! O, yea! O!”

   This they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do. I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, affects me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathy for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him in silence analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul;—and if he is not impressed, it will only be because “there is no flesh in his obdurate heart.”

1. The voice of children are not unlike noise in that both are often cast off as uncommunicative, nonsensical, and retarded. But one class with our kids and you would realize just how unmoth-like you have been. Their noisemaking goes something like this:

Jazaret: black girls are disappearing 

Talia: women just do it better 

Safeeah: 

I can hear the birds