NGLitcholalia:
By Sherese Francis
Soundtrack: Louis Armstrong — “Heebie Jeebies”
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? And I do mean to say it as “ax”
What is NGLitcholalia?
Begin with
I am lost in a space
I am in a space of disorientation
Uprooted in a sweeping possession by another
And all that is left is a screammmmmmnnnnnnnn
I am searching
Looking for an all-sweeping all-encompassing sound
Echolocation Echolocomotion Echolocution
Here’s a result From “Echolocution”
“As someone whose history of research, writing and performance has been focused on sound, it’s long been my contention that, as the great field recordist Chris Watson has stated, “events haunt spaces.” The sonic enables related but distinct appreciations of history and culture, particularly in spaces haunted by trauma if not violence. The sonic also, has long been a space where those without the power of bodily or cultural sovereignty are able to commemorate and recall their versions of history, particularly when it is erased or occluded. Echolocution takes seriously the role of listening in history and the role of sound in archiving. It is based on the understanding that our knowledge of space and time depend as much on the auditory than on other sensibilities, and that the auditory is arguably a more privileged and sometimes democratic mode for the apprehension of memory. We have learned this from music, which, after all, prepares us for sound. What can we learn if we return to sites of trauma and violence through sound and techniques of listening?” — Louis Chude-Sokei ( 1) https://www.goethe.de/resources/files/pdf209/echolocution2.pdf 2) https://www.goethe.de/ins/us/de/sta/bos/ver.cfm?fuseaction=events.detail&event_id=21996774 3) https://www.facebook.com/people/Echolocution-Sonic-Arts-and-Archives/100064661804793/)
Absorbing and structuring noise — a fragmented dispersal of original sounds around in the environment into some sense…
In searching through a word and all its possible sounds, these were the ran ran ran ran RAM/dom results I have found…
What is NGLitcholalia?
A power tool A pros/thesis
The form of the breakage, the slip of the tongue, the ability of sound to find cracks in a space or even bend space, the speaking in tongues, the arrival of new sounds in all possible directions, a piling up and sculpting of information into a form, a word of praise, recording or account, poetry…
Let’s break it down:
NGL: What is NGL? Depends on where you hear it? How you hear it?
Soundtrack: Zulu Warrior Vocal samples, sounds and loops https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhcHyn32iAc
NkuluNkulu — the original ancestor in Zulu?( 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unkulunkulu 2) https://indigenouspeoplenet.wordpress.com/2022/09/17/mythologies-of-the-zulu-people/ )
Maybe Anga? Anga meaning source or he can. Kiss. Press into. Compress. A narrow loop. Bending up or bending into. Also found in Maori language: a framework or shell…
( 1) https://books.google.com/books?id=_QIUAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA8&lpg=PA8&dq=anga+zulu&source=bl&ots=g9BsHDxLZ5&sig=ACfU3U0Jjt0FgWnbEZAFNvK3Xhvmp02u2A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwisgc-8oaWAAxWuD1kFHcX0DKs4FBDoAXoECAMQAw#v=onepage&q=anga%20zulu&f=false 2) https://maoridictionary.co.nz/search?&keywords=anga )
Maybe Angola? — a title for an authority figure, a name of a country? (https://www.goethe.de/prj/zei/en/pos/21722738.html )
Or N’golo? — Kikuyu word for power? (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346916079_NGOLO_Remembering_the_African_American_Child_as_a_Normative_for_Self-Healing_Power )
Or Engolo? A type of martial arts with sweeping movements, possibly related to capoeira (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engolo )
Could it be related to Ankh? — the Egyptian symbol for life
Or is it the root of animal, animacy, animism? aNG? As in breath, fighting for breath. (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h%E2%82%82enh%E2%82%81- )
A loop, a bubble, a repetition, a firming of form that forces a breakthrough into being or the name for God, NTJR?
Or Is it English? What is English? Angles? Ang/les? An/Gles? When the Germanic groups that migrated to England viewed the land, allegedly they thought it looked like a fish hook. Or it could have meant having skills in fishing, or the shallow coastal waters that allowed them to arrive on land. (https://www.etymonline.com/word/angle?ref=etymonline_crossreference#etymonline_v_13434 )
An angle, a bending, a loop, a repetition, a firming of form, a tool of power
What is the history of a sound? Is it possible to find one direct root of a sound? Or only entangled ones?
Soundtrack: Sherese repeating NGL
Let’s take Anglo-Saxon:
The word today has become a historical myth? A power tool? A word used to firm into form a false sense of superiority.
From Smithsonian Magazine’s article,
“The Many Myths of the Term ‘Anglo-Saxon’” (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/many-myths-term-anglo-saxon-180978169/ )
What is in a sound that could be erased in the records of history? Did you know Black people existed in Early England? Since the time of the Roman Empire? Maybe even before? Did you know Britains were basically migrants? (https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-black-people-britain )
What is the root or roots of a sound?
Soundtrack: Sun Ra Arkestra — “Possession”
Glitch: What is a glitch? Sound needs space in order to manifest, including the body as a space. What does it mean to start to slip out of a space into another?
Sound artist Camille Norbert described Sun Ra, the Jazz musician, as:
“Information experimentation made flesh, finding slippages in truths, myths in realities, or even multiple time dimensions in the present.”
(Anthony Elms John Corbett, Terry Kapsalis., Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun-Ra, El Saturn and Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground 1954-78 (Chicago: White Walls, 2006).24 )
Basically, he’s a glitch. When you begin to move from one material space to another and find yourself somewhere in-between many spaces, what do you call yourself?
In “Speaking in Tongues” by Angela Spivey about pastor Michael Dyson, we see how speaking in tongues, or being multi-lingual is related to the movement from a space, whether by choice or in this case, forced removal.
Let’s read:
(https://endeavors.unc.edu/end1295/tongues.htm )
Do you know what code-switchin’ is? It is as Dyson calls it, “This state of betweeness that humans occupy.” The ability to glitch a language —N Glitch Glish Gliss Gluss Gloss Glogg Glock Clock
The tongue is a time and space traveler, a search engine.
( 1) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glitch 2) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gloss 3) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B3%CE%BB%E1%BF%B6%CF%83%CF%83%CE%B1#Ancient_Greek )
A glitch is according to the dictionary: a sudden malfunction or irregularity in a system or equipment tool. So, according to the dictionary, a glitch is always a bad thing, right? But what if I have a need for a different function and I am only given a singular tool? My tongue? With a singular function? To speak English. N Gl Gl Gl Glish Gliss Glitch. The creative source has an urge to surge to another function — to glitch. To figure out how to operate differently with a singular tool. Glitch Glish Gliss Gloss
From the slippage to the enlightenment. The gloss is a direction, an arrow, a cursor, a click click click click clock clock
Am I buggin’? Am I trippin’? Maybe? But I have landed into an ecstatic sound
Soundtrack: Gospel singing sound sample
Bishop TD Jakes Preaching and Speaking in Tongues (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEuHPIX_g1M )
Glossolalia: What is Glossolalia? Speaking in tongues or uttering words or sounds unknown to the speaker or that don’t have any easily accessible meaning. The meaning is not yet known or not yet associated to the sound. In several Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity traditions, speaking in tongues is a ritual act to show you are possessed by the Holy Spirit. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaking_in_tongues )
There is also Xenoglossy, a related phenomenon, where a person during some sort of paranormal activity, can suddenly, allegedly, speak a foreign language that they couldn’t before. A medical condition, called Foreign Accent Syndrome, which is related to brain trauma, is when a person develops speech patterns that sound like a foreign language (1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_accent_syndrome 2) https://sites.utdallas.edu/fas/ 3) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19230178/ ) Another medical condition related to it is aphasia, which result is loss or impairment in the ability to speak and to understand speech. Global apahasia, which happens in dementia, can mean language fluency, understanding and repetition are impaired. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU4IHUhLF8M )
What does all of this imply? Slippages and breaks often require you to make new forms of speech to articulate the movement and deformation. And trauma is not just physical but also mental. Being forcefully moved is disorienting. Phasing in and Phasing out each point of a life.
Soundtrack: Moonlight Benjamin —Papa Legba
Creole language for example is often referred to as broken European languages. But the word Creole’s root refers to creation and growing. Like raising a child. Those processes inherently involved some sort of slippage and breakage. Creole language articulates the forceful movement from your home to another land and the shock of encountering other cultures.
Ecstatic speech — when you’ve been moved out of place, what does it sound like? When you are standing on shaky ground, what sound is made? What used to mean something, has lost its place? Feels asemic as if it has lost all meaning? Or has it gained new ones? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asemic_writing )
In “Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora: Black Women Writing and Performing Race and American Culture” by Mae G. Henderson speaks about the heteroglossia, multi-lingualness (polyphony, multivocality, and plurality of voices pg 6), of Black women’s speech and writing. Whereas glossolalia tends to be private and inaccessible, heteroglossia is a public discourse, between Bible and Babel:
What is at once characteristic and suggestive about black women's writing is its interlocutory, or dialogic, character, reflecting not only a relationship with the "other(s)," but an internal dialogue with the plural aspects of self that constitute the matrix of black female subjectivity. The interlocutory character of black women's writing is, thus, not only a consequence of a dialogic relationship with an imaginary or "generalized Other," but a dialogue with the aspects of "otherness" within the self. The complex situatedness of the black woman as not only the "Other" of the Same, but also as the "other" of the other(s) implies, as we shall see, a relationship of difference and identification with the “other(s)…”Speaking both to and from the position of the other(s), black women writers must, in the words of Audre Lorde, deal not only with "the external manifestations of racism and sexism," but also "with the results of those distortions internalized within our consciousness of ourselves and one another." (Pg 3)
Soundtrack: Recording of Zora Neale Hurston in the Commandment Keeper Church in Beaufort, South Carolina (Dust to Digital) (https://twitter.com/dusttodigital/status/1343215391590535168 )
Like Janie, black women must speak in a plurality of voices as well as in a multiplicity of discourses. This discursive diversity, or simultaneity of discourse, I call "speaking in tongues." Significantly, glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, is a practice associated with black women in the Pentecostal Holiness church, the church of my childhood and the church of my mother. In the Holiness church (or as we called it, the Sanctified church), speaking unknown tongues (tongues known only to God) is in fact a sign of election, or holiness. As a trope it is also intended to remind us of Alice Walker's characterization of black women as artists, as "Creators," intensely rich in that spirituality which Walker sees as "the basis of Art.”(Pg 5)
I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness as I discover you in myself. —Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
There's a noisy feelin' near the cracks crowdin' me ... slips into those long, loopin' "B's" There's a noisy feelin' near the cracks crowdin' me ... slips into those long, loopin' "B's" of Miss Garrison's handwritin' class; they become the wire hoops I must jump through. It spooks my alley, it spooks my play, more nosey now than noisy, lookin' for a tongue lookin' for a tongue to get holy in. Who can tell this feelin' where to set up church? Who can tell this noise where to go? A root woman workin' ... a mo-jo, just to the left of my ear. —Cherry Muhanji, Tight Spaces
(https://sfonline.barnard.edu/sfxxx/documents/henderson.pdf )
Lalia — What does the end of Glossolalia mean? English is a language of nonsense speech. All language to an extent is. It requires bodies to make it have real meaning.
We can define speech as a kind of m/othering tongue, much in the same way M. NourbeSe Phillip writes in She Who Tries her Tongue. Do you remember lullabies? The lull part of the word has the same root as lalia, to make a sound, like a howl, to babble like a baby, to mumble, to talk nonsense. (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BB%CE%AC%CE%BB%CE%BF%CF%82#Ancient_Greek )
Soundtrack:
Delfonics — “La-La Means I Love You”
Sun Ra Arkestra — “Lullaby to Realville”
La la la la la means I love you!
Maybe a kind of divineness.
Glossolalia is connected to divine language and one of the words we think of when it comes to divinity is Hallelujah! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_language)
When we say Hallelujah are we remembering a lost m/othering language?
“In Speaking In Tongues: More Than Gibberish” by Markesia Barron:
“As a person born and raised down south and brought up in a black church — -speaking is tongues is not anything foreign to me. I’ve seen my grandmother, great aunts and uncles, and different elders of the church speak in tongues since I was a child. Where other people may be turned off or even frightened by the shouting, wailing, and possessed-ness of this spiritual practice, for me it is comforting. It is home.
I’ve been wondering for a while why that is. Why I’m able to renounce everything else associated with Christianity except for that one thing. I especially started to wonder about it more as the time neared for me to get on the plane and head to West Africa for three weeks. Leading up to that departure, I had begun to speak in tongues weekly. During random car rides to and from work I would find myself in tears, mumbling and grumbling — speaking in tongues. I even found myself taking the long back roads from the town I worked to the town I lived, passing fields and antebellum style homes.
Now I can see the correlation between that time and what I feel to be true now — -but it wasn’t until I was in Africa that it finally hit me, Tongues, is probably directly related to our African ancestry. I remember the day this really clicked for me, I was sitting in the living room of the apartment I was staying in listening to some of the locals speak in their native language, Wolof. As I was listening and not understanding a lick of what they were saying, I began to feel a sort of familiarity. There was something about the heaviness of the tongue, the way the words danced aggressively out of their full lips that resonated deeply with me — and reminded me of a language I knew already myself. Speaking in tongues.”
( https://medium.com/@markesiatbarron/speaking-in-tongues-65ebdb0fde8b )
Soundtrack: Guelewar Band of Banjul —Djaraama / From : Tasito (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HORByIVJlg )
Ella Fitzgerald — “How High the Moon” and Scat (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GUmxnYheK0 )
When we hear sounds like scatting from Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong or to now mumble rap, are we remembering the sounds of a language(s)?
My tongue has always felt heavy with tense(ion) - hottentot …
We tend to think of Hallelujah, which means praise to god, as a word and not a sound. But what if we thought of it as a sound, especially the first part, Hallelu, praise? ( 1) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%94%D7%9C%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%99%D7%94#Hebrew 2) https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-edition-april-1-2018-1.4589950/the-strange-joyful-history-of-hallelujah-from-the-old-testament-to-today-1.4589972 )
Soundtrack: Ululation from Wambura Mitaru https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fPGqEpLYuQ
Photojournalist, author, documentary filmmaker, editor and founder of Mukurukuru Media, Lucas Ledwaba speaking in Expresso Show’s “Capturing the magical celebratory call of ululating in Africa”)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkCCV_rcgtA
Hallelu —if you play around with the word in your mouth, you might start to do what is called a ululation. What is a ululation? A ululation is an ancient vocalization practice in many indigenous cultures, like in Zulu Bantu cultures, in which is a howling or wailing noise to express strong emotions like celebration, praising and honoring others, and comfort in grief. ( 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ululation 2) https://www.facebook.com/BBCnewsafrica/videos/ululations-what-you-didnt-know-about-this-ancient-sound/559561731834018 / 3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fPGqEpLYuQ 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkCCV_rcgtA 5) https://soundstudiesblog.com/tag/ululation-in-levantine-society-the-cultural-reproduction-of-an-affective-vocalization/ )
La la la la la means Ha-lle-lu
Question: is La in the scale a divine note? Something that soothes our broken brains? The baby screaming and the mother’s lullaby?
Soundtrack:
Mahalia Jackson — “Trouble of the World”
Nina Simone — “I’m Feeling Good
Miriam Makeba — “Mbube”
Ululations were often vocalization practices done by women and this connects back to the screammmmmmnnnnn. Fred Moten, from In the Break, has talked about the Aunt Hester scene in Frederick Douglass’ autobiography and the scream representing the articulation of trauma (whippings Aunt Hester received), but also Douglass’ coming into his own subjectivity as an author. The resistance in the scream and it echoing in your ear. A force formalizing like the voice of god making a universe, the unified voice of a hybrid creature like a sphinx. And then the scream turns into a song. Moten compares Hester’s scream to those slave songs Douglass writes about later in his autobiography: “"tones loud, long, and deep [that] breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish.” All a reminder of breath of life, the lived experience, some kind of piercing, loud sound to travel across space and time NGLitcholalia
(http://www.rhizomes.net/issue29/vaziri.html#reading-position-11 )
In Henderson’s essay, she writes: “The self-inscription of black women requires disruption, rereading and rewriting the conventional and canonical stories, as well as revising the conventional generic forms that convey these stories. Through this interventionist, intertextual, and revisionary activity, black women writers enter into dialogue with the discourses of the other(s). Disruption—the initial response to hegemonic and ambiguously (non)hegemonic discourse—and revision (rewriting or rereading) together suggest a model for reading black and female literary expression”
Do you know what the name of Jesus means: your result is a scream or to cry out to call out an NGL…What saves you is the improvisation of the screammmmmmmnnnnnn