NGLitcholalia

(E)Dub

Soundtrack: Sister Nancy — “What A Bam Bam”

An algorithm is a set of processes or procedures or instructions or rules in order to answer a question or solve a problem or make a series of calculations. If I search a word in a search engine, the algorithm will go through this process in order to give me a series of results. I am in the same process

Can I ax you a question?

What is (E)Dub?

Depends on where you hear it? How you hear it?

Some dictionaries define (E)Dub as conferring knighthood. “You’ve been dubbed Sir Mixalot”

It could also mean:

To give a distinctive title or name

To remove the fleshy parts on the head of a bird

To not hit a golf ball correctly

To be clumsy or inept

To smear a body or building with some kind of material like clay, grease or dung

To add in sound effects, soundtrack or another language to a film, TV or sound production

To create a new recording from a previous recording

To make an artificial fly of strands of thread for a fishing hook (basically, the imitation of a bug to lure a fish in)

To trim, sculpt or smooth large pieces of wood with a tool that looks like an ax

To be Black as in Dublin, a black pool in Ireland where the Poddle stream met the River Liffey to form a deep pool at Dublin Castle

I knew it as a Jamaican music style in which a record was stripped down to its bass and drums and included ghostly audio effects like echoes, delays and reverbs, and spoken or chanted words over the instrumentals.

How do we wuk the dissemination of sound?

Let’s break it down down down down dow nnnnnnn:

What are some of the words we associate with (E)Dub music?

What a Bam Bam Bam Bam Dilla Bam Bam

Soundtrack: Scratch Lee Perry — “Disco Devil”

Sound system culture

Lee Scratch Perry

Studio Black Ark

Why name it Black Ark?

We would have to think of the relation of the Bible to Rastafarianism?

The study of the Word?

Let’s start with Echo:

From Louis Chude-Sokei’s "'Dr. Satan's Echo Chamber': Reggae, Technology and the Diaspora Process,"

:“…hear our metaphors of self and national belonging. This music has helped us ground

ourselves in communally created myths that sustain us in the protracted experience of

dispersal. After all diaspora means distance and the echo is also the product and signifier of space”

Can we think of the Black Ark as Sankofa: The Sphinx Limboing Through Time

A hybrid creature of time

Soundtrack: Debtera Records’ Artist Ras Terry Asher/Conscious Sounds — “Genesis to Revelation” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfhSGUuRqKg

What is an Ark? The Ark, a reference to the Biblical Noah’s craft or the Ark of the covenant, which is believed to be a container that holds the most sacred relic(s) of the Israelites. Essentially both operated as a kind of archive or recording of the past — Noah with saving what animals he could before the earth was flooded and the Ark of the covenant, which holds artifacts, such as the two stone tablets of the commandments. In Hebrew, the word for Noah’s ark is Te’vah. For the Ark of the covenant, it is Aron. Allegedly, the word te’vah is related to the Egyptian word Dbt which means coffin, sarcophagus, chest, box or shrine. (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%AA%D7%99%D7%91%D7%94 ) Some claim tevah, as a homonym, also means dumbfounded or alarmed, in a state of shock. Tevah without the h supposedly means nature. It can also mean to sink, drown, depress or stamp or even shape and form. And also it is related to the word for the name for Word in Hebrew, Dabar. (https://www.balashon.com/2010/09/teva-and-tabaat.html) Another word I forgot to mention was duppy, a ghostly figure. Te’va can also mean counsel, or heavenly angels.

So in what sense am I talking about (E)Dub? Maybe in all the senses, at once? Did you know that onomatopoeia is the poetry of naming? (E)Dub — The sound of recording anything dowwwwwnnnnnnnn.

Soundtrack: Saint Yared Choir, Debtera from Ethiopia, Live in Cologne, Sacred Music, Liturgy, Part I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42eOOTMIdbQ

Back to Black Ark. Did you know that Ethiopia (Ediopia 1) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%91%E1%BC%B0%CE%B8%CE%AF%CE%BF%CF%88#Etymology 2) Dedun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedun ) claims to be the true holders of the Ark of the covenant? That the queen of Sheba, Makeda, took it from Solomon and brought it home to Ethiopia. Whether that’s true or not; I don’t know. But, Ethiopia has been a source for the religion of Rastafarianism, which helped shaped what is current Jamaican and Caribbean music overall.

Soundtrack: Lee Scratch Perry — Covenant Dub

Let’s look at the other word for Ark (Ark of the covenant) — Aron. Aron may have several roots. It may come from the Egyptian word for reed or cane. The letter R, which may have represented a mouthpiece, an utterance, a statement, a spell. If you have trouble speaking because of some trauma or neurodivergence, you might need something to help you speak, like an instrument, a studio, a new language, an opening, a prepositional word to move towards or move to words. In Semitic, it is related to the word for coffin or closet. Of course, when you hear aron, you think of his brother Moses. Aaron’s name origin is a bit of mystery. Some say it means bearer of martyrs, kind of like a relic holder, or a Roaring lion, a loud sound, or a weapon like an arrow or an ax, or a high elevated space, a piling up of matter or information, like an ark or archive or poetry. If you have trouble speaking, it’s sometimes because you can’t easily access the memories in your body. They’ve been buried in the trauma, in the flood, in the constant migration of nature. But sometimes you might have a power tool that may help you remember to fight against the forgetting, to become enlightened, or mad or aroused into living, like a noble gas that acts as a preservative (you can look that up yourself): ( 1) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Aaron 2) https://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Aaron.html ). But also what other words sound like ark, like Aron — art? Art’s root is connected possibly to a lot of words with that sound, some of which has been misrepresented in history to create false sense of superiority when it actually may have just meant to be aligned or in harmony with your highest form or capacity to create or as in Yoruba, your ori or guiding head:

“The studio must be like a living thing, a life itself. The machine must be live and intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine and the machine perform reality. Invisible thought waves — you put them into the machine by sending them through the controls and the knobs or you jack it into the jack panel. The jack panel is the brain itself, so you got to patch up the brain and make the brain a living man, that the brain can take what you sending into it and live.” — Scratch Lee Perry

(https://books.google.com/books?id=xPRTOytFgacC&q=I+see+the+studio+must+be+like+a+living+thing,+a+life+itself&pg=PA120#v=snippet&q=I%20see%20the%20studio%20must%20be%20like%20a%20living%20thing%2C%20a%20life%20itself&f=false )

Soundtrack: Lee Scratch Perry — “International Broadcaster”

The machine is not your slave. It is living being in conversation with you.

Back to (E)Dub

Or Dabar, which means to pronounce or to bring something into form or to name something because it holds information, the ability to name (https://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Dabar.html)

Soundtrack: Saint Yared Choir, Debtera from Ethiopia, Live in Cologne, Sacred Music, Liturgy, Part II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R--FLT91zs

Or let’s think of the word Debtera. What is a debtera, you may ask? Back to Ethiopia (Ediopia). Allegedly Jesus may have spoken in Amharic, a language found in Ethiopia. A Debtera is an Ethiopian migratory, nomadic priest, who performs rituals in exchange for resources (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtera). They may be what you think of as a living word, a sound system. If a group of people are a nomadic group, so are their sounds. In Chude-Sokei’s Walking with Sound, he mentions how sound technologies (“implements of sound”) are often used as a way to declare presence in a space, as a form of resistance, redefining and claiming space, self-expansion and duplication (pg 36, 38 https://www.dropbox.com/s/p8i7j7cga4igz7r/Soundwalking%20Chapter%202%20%281%29.pdf?dl=0 )

How do you capture a wandering sound?

Did you know Dabuka in Zulu/Bantu language means to break, to grieve or to originate? (https://repository.up.ac.za/bitstream/handle/2263/12522/002_p1-49.pdf?sequence=9&isAllowed=y 2) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dabuka )

Delay

Soundtrack: Lee Scratch Perry — “Spirits Speak”

To leave or go away (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/delay). A delay is like an echo but the sound recurs at a later time and is longer and more sustained.

At the end of Black Ark Studios in 1979, Perry took a Black marker and wrote all over the studio’s surfaces before burning it to the ground. Why? I don’t know. He claimed it was due to unclean spirits. Apparently he went mad. But madness can also mean poetry as in the need to change, anger as well can mean poetry as in the need to force something, and (w)ood as well can mean poetry as in Wodin or the Vates, prophets steeped in the language of the ecstatic possession.

In indigenous cultures, a term called daubing, is when a mixture or mortar is smeared over pieces of wood, it can also refer to graffiti. It is one of the oldest ways to build structures. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wattle_and_daub ) Sometimes you need to bury what once was for it to become something else.

Soundtrack: Max Romeo, The Upsetters, Lee Scratch Perry — “War Ina Babylon”

When you’ve been carrying a heavy tongue, when you know you have to leave a space, all you may have left is a recording or writing. You won’t be there, this is the end and this is what is left for someone else to find or for the earth to reclaim. A writing that is a ghostly echo of the past, sealed in the ground, like the bones of Echo in a cave. Allegedly, when Perry tried to rebuild the studio, another fire happened. It needed to rest and in the Pentecostal fire some other creation can come.

Let’s think about Babylon. Babylon has come to represent in Rastafarian faith, the oppressive empire or system. But originally the name Babylon, along with Babel, as in tower of Babel, meant the gate of God. Babel, was a place of a mixture of languages, a place of noise, sound interference, and confusion. Like a piling of information that turns into a tall, looming structure. The gate as in a channeling or entrance for something else to come in, like a god or a new chapter in a text. The “bab”’s root may have been connected to the word for return or coming, to produce, a driving force, to oversaturate with an anointing (a reference to the use of oil in cooking or spiritual ritual), to wear out or break open, a troubling of one’s self as if you are a cursor, moving towards another direction because you are in an oversaturated place now. ( 1) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/B%C4%81bilim#Akkadian 2) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%A8#Arabic 3) https://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Babel.html 4) https://smithsonianeducation.org/migrations/rasta/terms.html )

Too much noise in this space, all the information has piled up into nonsense, becomes meaningless, (remember the word woke?) and a new expression is needed…Call this the diasporic osmosis of (E)Dub — the desire to scatter the word from a place of higher concentration to a place of lower concentration or how to use prophetic language to push you to somewhere else, to create something new out of your hurt, or how to build pyramids or how to reconstruct Osiris or to make a vow of disruption (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmosis 2)https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BD%A0%CE%B8%CE%AD%CF%89#Ancient_Greek 3) https://books.google.com/books?id=8FzyCAAAQBAJ&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false )

The Reverb and The Remix: A New Temporal Program or Record Device

Soundtrack: The Gatherers — “Words of My Mouth”

Some old names for Ethiopia: 1) Abyssinia, which came from the root habash, meaning mixture or collect together ( 1) https://www.etymonline.com/word/Abyssinia#:~:text=Abyssinia%20(n.),the%20different%20races%20dwelling%20there 2) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%AD%D8%A8%D8%B4#Arabic )

2) Nubia, which possibly came from the root Nwb for to weave, gold or cloud in different languages or for the Noba/Nbt people (https://www.etymonline.com/word/nubia )

3) Meroe, meaning unknown 4) Kush, whose meanings showed no results other than possibly having similar meanings to Ethiopia

Soundsystem speakers are stacked from the bottom — Woofers which produced lower frequencies, to midrange speakers to Tweeters, which produce the highest frequencies. All sound depends on architecture and every home is haunted by an other, they both have the same root, home and haunt. Who is the duppy in the space? What is missing in the record? Whose sounds are missing? What records are missing? Who has removed one’s ability or the technology to write oneself into history? To pierce through the exclusion?

Soundtrack: Sister Nancy — “Only Woman DJ with Degree”

One (e)dub-related name I did not mention before was Deborah, also known as the Queen Bee, literally the root of her name is associated with bees and the organizational structure of communication of bees in their hive. (https://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Deborah.html ). Therefore we can call this sound system, The (E)Dub House.

Deborah was known as the only female judge (at that time, a judge was a military leader) in the Bible and a prophetess. Patriarchal leaders will often downplay Deborah’s importance and her self-proclamation as a prophet and judge in Judges 5 in the Bible. Deborah is also called the wife of Lappidoth, which might translate to that she’s a wife of torches, or a fiery woman ( 1)https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/deborah-bible 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah 3) https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges%205&version=KJV )

Soundtrack: Sister Nancy — “Roof Over Mi Head”

The last thing a male-dominated space wants is a woman with ambition…

What a Bam Bam Bam Bam Billa Bam Bam

A re/verb A re/mix A re/sponse A babbling talk A not-quite-human, an othered person’s speech

The sounds of the lower frequencies

Bam Bam. What are all its meanings? A loud sound. A nonsensical person. A child’s babbling. A tree. A seat or throne. A pot. A construction of an overarching presence and its raining down. The movement of the mouth. (1) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bam 2) https://www.wisdomlib.org/definition/bam 3) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bambino#Italian 4) https://blog.oup.com/2010/07/bamboozle/ 5) https://etymologeek.com/ltz/Bam/12848689 )

How do you declare your presence when you are told you don’t belong there?

Dub music as well as other genres of music tend to be a male, cis-hetero dominated space. Women and queer people who are part of these spaces are often ignored, erased or downplayed in the records of history.

Soundtrack: Sister Nancy — “What A Bam Bam”

In Sister Nancy’s hit record, “What a Bam Bam,” she samples the phrase from the Toots and the Maytals’ song Bam Bam, and uses the phrase as a pushback against the sexist and misogynistic politics of reggae, dancehall and dub culture that tells her women are not meant to be MCs. She emphasizes that she’s a lady not a man, that MCing is her ambition and it's from creation. Her transgression against the boundaries of dancehall culture is empowering. But Sister Nancy, whose name reminds me of Aunt Nancy, a character inspired by trickster character Anansi, knows she is verbally skilled and deserves to be in that space and that her confidence is seen as a threat.

Sister Nancy was Jamaica’s first female MC to deejay (rap patois lyrics) on a sound system.

Soundtrack: Scratch Lee Perry — “Disco Devil”

Speaking of tricksters and mythic creatures, growing up I heard about the La Diablesse, a folkloric character who transgressed gender and human binaries, which is what diablo means, across a divide. She looks feminine but her legs were animalistic, resembling goat hooves. The non-binariness of Sister Nancy’s ambition, wandering around, past the limit or boundary was a self-expansion, an extension, a pros/thetic bam bam.

(https://afropop.org/audio-programs/dread-inna-inglan-how-the-uk-took-to-reggae )

Who are the names of women who were also originators in Dub, Reggae and Dancehall?

We have Dawn Penn and her famous song “You Don’t Love Me” with the repeated No, No No. ( 1) https://gal-dem.com/dawn-penn-royal-festival-hall/ 2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BMfIgVBCl4 3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZV06KsWt54 )

Soundtrack: Dawn Penn — “You Don’t Love Me”

We have Marcia Griffith, who you may have known sang Electric Slide and Feel like Jumping

Soundtrack: Marcia Griffith — “Feel like Jumping”

In Edward George’s The Strangeness of Dub series ( 1)https://dwellerforever.blog/2022/12/dub-as-an-act-of-love-an-interview-with-edward-george 2) https://morleyradio.co.uk/series/the-strangeness-of-dub/ ) he mentions Margarita Mahfood (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Mahfood ) who was inspired by Nyahbinghi and Kumina drumming styles from the Congo which later influenced Ska, Reggae and Dub (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumina#:~:text=Kumina%20also%20gives%20it%20name,drumming%2C%20and%20Jamaican%20popular%20music )

There have been women who have helped to develop spaces and studios for music — Sonia Pottinger, Patricia Chin, (https://www.grammy.com/news/women-essential-reggae-and-dancehall)

How about Nzinga Sound System, a woman-centered sound system in England? (https://vimeo.com/845752767/recommended )

“We need to create this critical massive information that really refutes that thing that we don’t exist” — from Sonic Vibrations trailer

Soundtrack: Margarita Mahfood — Woman a Come

Did you know DJ Kool Herc’s sister Cindy Campbell was the one set up some of the the first hip hop parties?

( 1) https://writersmosaic.org.uk/content/sonic-vibrations-who-cant-hear-must-feel-michael-mcmillan/ 2) https://writersmosaic.org.uk/content/sistas-in-sound-sonia-boyce-carol-leeming-yassmin-foster-denise-noble-and-lisa-palmer%E2%80%8B/ )

Theresa Dhaliwal Davies, the curator of the Museum of London’s exhibition Dub London said “Women didn’t always feel connected with reggae, she says, but dub offered something more embracing, almost evangelical in form. In the oral histories she’s recorded for the exhibition, women – some now in their 80s – tell of how dub “spoke to them” in a way reggae never did. “They’d feel that vibration and how important it is,” Dhaliwal Davies said.

“The A-side of a record would speak to me of politics, race, class, humanity,” said Sister Stella of Rastafari Movement UK – a collaborator on the exhibition. “But it was the B-side that gave me a deeper, almost electric surge of strength. It’s the bass – it pushes out all negativity and allows space for magnificent ideas, of hope for my people.” (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/sep/27/soundtrack-of-a-city-how-dub-reggae-shook-and-shaped-london )

Soundtrack: Bass sounds

Let’s get Dowwwwnnnnnnn

We also have Caribbean poets and dub poets like Louise Bennett-Coverley (a.k.a. Miss Lou), who was influential in popularizing Jamaican patois on the island. (https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/reggae-dancehall-women-music-industry-8343821/ )

The rise of women Dub poets showed how women used their vocal power to access a genre that was not always accessible for them. Communal approaches to sonic technology must include the fact that there are others existing in the space of sound not just the ones with the recording machine or studio. What does it mean to include sound makers who are not given access to sonic technologies as when Kyra Gaunt talked about in The Games Black Girls Play, the ritual and communal sonic technologies of black girl handgames. (https://books.google.com/books?id=N45OBoLx-mYC&pg=PA5&lpg=PA5&dq=kinetic+orality&source=bl&ots=NRKcrpBmvn&sig=ACfU3U18Qe4F_-dcH_JUrbvwmYviBzD4ww&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwio_uDv2s7uAhVnQzABHWi-Bm0Q6AEwBXoECAoQAg#v=onepage&q=kinetic%20orality&f=false )

Soundtrack: Isha Bel — “Tun Up the Sound”

Referenced in Caribbean Cultural Identities edited by Glyne A. Griffith, there is a writeup about Evelyn O’Callaghan’s Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women, describing how Caribbean women’s literary writing used the same techniques as the Dub musical genre:

(https://books.google.com/books?id=PAbgqItFN1AC&pg=PA138&lpg=PA138&dq=%22women%22+in+caribbean+dub+music+history&source=bl&ots=H_K0fDdWPn&sig=ACfU3U0gyfD8I04Uo3LYAMhGckxu8X78NQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwituuTTtaqAAxVWElkFHei-ACU4FBDoAXoECAIQAw#v=onepage&q=%22women%22%20in%20caribbean%20dub%20music%20history&f=false )

Disruption and re/vision: What a bam bam: the pros/thetic word. Sister Nancy dubbing the master narrative and adding in the missing data for the algorithm of historical records. When we read a work like M. NourbeSe Phillip’s Zong, we see the same tradition of dub poets. Women used their voices to transform the spaces around them and their bodies embody sonic memories, re/verberates and re/sponds to the sound with their own sounds.

From To Be Dub, Female and Black:

Towards a Womban-Centred Afro-Caribbean Diasporic Performance Aesthetic in Toronto by Ric Knowles

Soundtrack: Vibronics, Sandra Cross— “Sound System Girl”

“This essay traces the contributions of Afro-Caribbean women, particularly Rhoma Spencer, ahdri zhina mandiela, and d’bi.young anitafrika, to a developing performance aesthetic in Toronto that is grounded in Caribbean cultural texts. It focuses on ways in which the work of these women has consciously challenged and queered Canadian and Caribbean theatrical and performance forms as well as heterosexist and masculinist cultural nationalisms and colonial modernities. Spencer, through her company Theatre Archipelago, employs a “poor theatre” aesthetic, a presentational sensibility, exhuberant performances, and a richness of language, all grounded in Caribbean traditions such as carnival, ’mas, and calypso, to speak in complex ways about the politics of class, gender, and race with a clear emphasis on women. mandiela, through her company bcurrent and especially through her plays dark diaspora…in dub! and who knew grannie, has invented and developed a new form, dub theatre, out of the Jamaican-based traditions of dub poetry. d’bi.young anitafrika has followed in mandiela’s footsteps, contributing to the women’s dub tradition through the invention of what she calls “biomyth monodrama” as exemplified in her sankofa trilogy. These women have constituted a Toronto within the city that functions as a transformative space operating at the intersection of nations, sexualities, and performance forms to queer traditional theatrical hierarchies, together with the largely masculinist ethos of much Caribbean performance and the narrow chronopolitics of modernist colonial “development.” They have created and continue to develop entirely new, empowering, “womban-centered,” and “revolushunary” Afro-Caribbean forms that are (re)grounded in traditions of the grannies, the griots, the nation languages of the people, and movement and language that emerge from and celebrate Black women’s bodies in a transnational Canadian-Caribbean diaspora.

Soundtrack: ahdri zhani mandiela — “Dark Diaspora”

9 But it is Spencer’s mentor at b current, ahdri zhina mandiela, who has been responsible for the invention and naming of the first unique and identifiable Afro-Caribbean diasporic performance form in Canadian theatre. With her 1991 show dark diaspora…in dub!, subtitled “a dub theatre piece,” mandiela not only launched b current, but forged a new form, not out of carnival, ’mas, or calypso, but out of her own political and poetic practice as a dub poet.12 Dub poetry emerged in the 1970s and 80s in Jamaica out of the practice of MCs, or “toasters,” talking over the “dub,” or instrumental side of reggae recordings, where the songs were stripped to their bare, rhythmic essentials and used as dance tracks. The rhythm-driven, embodied, and performance-based poetic form that emerged from this was deeply influenced by the revolutionary and celebratory Black politics, practice, and popularity of Bob Marley and Louise (“Miss Lou”) Bennett,13 their bringing into respectability of Jamaican, or “nation language,” and Marley’s Rastafarianism.14 As dub developed and spread globally in the 1980s, the three international centres where it most flourished were Kingston, Jamaica, London, England, and, notably, Toronto (see Allen 16), where, partly because of the developing feminist scene in the city, many of the form’s leading practitioners have been women. And many of these women—including Lillian Allen, Afua Cooper, Motion (Wendy Braithwaite), Dee (Deanne Smith), amuna baraka-clarke, and d’bi.young (see Knopf)—have either womanized or queered the dub form itself, in reaction to its mainly masculinist roots. Included prominently among these artists is ahdri zhina mandiela herself, whose early, 1985 volume Speshul Rekwes (“special request”) includes distinctly womanist poems such as “young girls on the street” (12-16), “ooman gittup” (38), and especially “black ooman” (41-41). Although many since the 80s have rejected the term “dub poetry,” preferring the more expansive terms “performance poetry” or “spoken word,”15 others feel that these later rubrics for an already expansive form strip dub of its politics, its roots in class, race, resistance, and empowerment,16 its distinctly Caribbean lineage, and its ties to the nation languages of the archipelago. As Carolyn Cooper argues, “when ‘dub’ poetry is dubbed ‘performance’ poetry it goes genteelly up market” (81).”

Bringing it back to Douglass and the autobiography, women dub poets develop their own as Audre Lorde calls it biomythography, and automythobiographical by queer dub poet mandiela, which moves beyond the singular self, but towards the heteroglossia of Black women mentioned in the previous broadcast. Sound transcends body, going in and out of it, going into other bodies. Dub’s function is to queer a space as Edward George says. In “…Sara Ahmed’s 2006 book, Queer Phenomenology. There is a sense in which we not only communicate who or what we are, but must inherently create identities for ourselves — a process that is made explicit when we find ourselves coming to terms with a gender identity or sexual orientation that is deemed to be “other” to the norm. Indeed, to be “oriented” at all, Ahmed argues, is to “know where we are when we turn this way or that way”. It is to have a sense of “our bearings”, she writes: “We know what to do to get to this place or to that.” But in order “to become orientated, you might suppose that we must first experience disorientation.

Soundtrack: Grace Jones — “Nightclubbing”

Though any sense of orientation is perhaps thought to be innately visual in its nature — we understand how our position in a given space is relative to certain landmarks that surround us — Ahmed argues that orientation is a far more embodied than simply visual exercise. Borrowing the fitting — and somewhat perverse — analogy of walking blindfolded into a room from Immanuel Kant, she notes how we orient ourselves in such circumstances by first walking this way and that, arms outstretched, ears open, nostrils flared, coming to understand our position through an ad hoc process of repeatedly turning and turning again. “Space then becomes a question of ‘turning’, of directions taken, which not only allow things to appear, but also enable us to find our way through the world by situating ourselves in relation to such things.” Extending Kant’s analogy and borrowing a further subversive reading by Martin Heidegger, Ahmed notes how orientation also becomes “a question not only of how we ‘find our way’ but how we come to ‘feel at home.’”

But not everyone feels at home in the same spaces, or in and with the same bodies. There is no one place for us all to be, socially speaking, and so it is necessary to embrace a kind of multiplicity in how we all orient ourselves across different positions. This is the very sense of positioning designated by the word “queer”, Ahmed argues. She notes how the word “is, after all, a spatial term, which then gets translated into a sexual term, a term for a twisted sexuality that does not follow a ‘straight line’, a sexuality that is bent and crooked.””

From Xenogothic’s Space-Time Attunement:Notes on Edward George and the Strangeness of Dub

(https://xenogothic.com/2023/03/05/space-time-attunement-notes-on-edward-george-and-the-strangeness-of-dub/ )

Our sense of orientation, proprioception, begins with the ear.

Back to the scream

Poet Afua Cooper says of ahdri zhina mandiela’s work

“dark diaspora… in dub is not simply interested in narrating our grief and loss. mandiela as woman and poet, does not suppress her rage. She lets it out, confronts it, wrestles with it, dances with it, engages it, and finally transforms it into positive action. Though dark diaspora is a story of sorrow, it is ultimately a story of love. (44243, emphasis added)”

( https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/TRIC/article/view/20309/23429 )

I am lost in a space

I am in a space of disorientation

I am turning and turning and turning in every direction

Searching for an all-encompassing sound

Let’s listen to and read some women poets and thinkers:

Soundtrack:

d’bi.young anitafrikav—“Queer Reflections on Dancehall, Spice and Coming of Age in Jamaica” https://nowtoronto.com/music/queer-reflections-on-dancehall-spice-and-coming-of-age-in-jamaica-pride/

Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze

“Dubwise” https://open.spotify.com/track/62TdIl4v1EqpBrOF0XBoab?si=e7076c33b603492f

“Sound De Abeng Fe Nanny” https://open.spotify.com/track/2FdlSTh59UDK1jLjgq9oO3?si=3ee8ff29b6e04732

“Testament” https://open.spotify.com/track/5ZRYcXMYGTBSPokQ3Q1iX1?si=effc04aca2c74d4e