The work of Moor Mother, the moniker of Camae Ayewa, is a rampant and wayward practice. After uploading a hundred tracks on Bandcamp, Moor Mother released her official debut studio album Fetish Bones in 2016. This was followed, apart from visual art expositions and poetry collections, by a myriad of one-off and long-term music collaborations and projects. As a poet, she is a member of the free jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements; she explores punk music on the second album True Opera (2020) by Moor Jewelry, a collaboration with artist Mental Jewelry; she makes up the vocal component of 700 Bliss, a project with DJ Haram that mixes club music rhythms with dissonant samples from Middle Eastern music; she has put out the somewhat more accessible hip hop album Brass (2020) with billy woods; she also lends her lyrics and voice to the first half of Wrecked (2019), an album on which British duo Zonal create a highly spatial form of bass music and noise; etc. Her voice can also be heard on one-off collaborations with bands varying from the popular London jazz outfit Sons of Kemet to the seminal avant-garde jazz ensemble Art Ensemble of Chicago on their fifty-year anniversary record, We Are on the Edge (2019) – a title derived from Ayewa’s lyrics. In short, Moor Mother’s presence is wide-ranging, making her one of the most influential figures in contemporary alternative music.
The common musical denominators in Moor Mother’s projects are improvisation and a raw and dissonant sound – with a particular mix of genres such as noise, industrial, bass music, political hip hop, (hardcore) punk.[1] Ayewa’s vocal performance moves from a clear and solid diction to a melancholic whisper, from an aloof to a snarling bawl, from minimal melodies to rhythmically complex raps. Her theme is resistance to – and survival in the face of – the violence and suffering that black people have had to endure from slavery until now. Memory is important in her work, even as she aims to generate a tradition of the future.
For Ayewa, music is a liberation technology. ‘Ways to open yourself up, ways to liberate communities, liberate yourself. Frames of thinking – you know, the power that music has to bring people together, the power that people can write their own dreams and destiny’, she says in an interview with Emily Pothast for The Wire (2019). Music as a means to plot your own plot; not next to the plantation as in the time of slavery, but in a plantation that now covers the whole urban environment.[2] From Ayewa’s poetry collection Fetish Bones (2016):
Haiku East Side
(for Devin)
he tried to escape
aint that easy nowadays
concrete plantations
Liberation is barely possible. The track ‘Sonic Black Holes’ captures this sentiment. Drones and other noise drown out samples of black voices and melodies, of which some are borrowed from various historic registers of black music, like the lines ‘I can feel you’ (soulful) and ‘ain’t nobody ever gonna hear us’ (bluesy). Being mixed over and against each other, these lines expose an impasse in black discourse: they contradict each other in their focus on empathy and on not being perceived respectively. In the aforementioned interview in The Wire, Ayewa describes ‘the feeling of screaming in a sonic black hole (…). We’re here protesting and sharing stories, but when everything else is so loud, how do you penetrate through?’ Moor Mother screams, but who can hear it?
The loud environment in which Moor Mother produces, creates, improvises and collaborates is not the post-racial multiculturalism that contemporary political discourse wants us to believe exists, but on the one hand a necropolitics in which black people, as Achille Mbembe puts it, are reduced to disposables (consigned to prison, trauma, mutilation, death),[3] and on the other hand a culture in which blackness gets fetishized and appropriated: ‘That anti-black’s programmed in your head / now you wanna steal my culture / Already killed my father / Now you wanna stop my bread’, as Ayewa puts it in ‘Ring the Alarm’ of 700 Bliss.
The liberation technology that Moor Mother wants her music to be is thus far from evident. Her work rather records the impasse of a liberation drive that doesn’t have any easy ways out for black life.[4] Different from Cruel Optimism (2011), in which Lauren Berlant describes the impasse for the precarious subject, bereft what they call ‘good life fantasies’, as an improvisation with genres of reduced affectivity and limited acting, Ayewa’s improvisational practice in the impasse of black life has an intensified affective reach, moving between indignation and consolation, anger and melancholy, without taking up heroic or melodramatic subject positions: ‘i resist to being both the survivor and the victim’.[5] Moor Mother’s work is a sonic design of this impasse.
Time space collapse
‘Negroes played jazz as they had sung blues or, even earlier, as they had shouted and hollered in those anonymous fields, because it was one of the few areas of human expression available to them’, writes Amiri Baraka, one of Ayewa’s poetic inspirations, in his collection of jazz essays Black Music (1968). Ayewa clearly situates her music in this tradition of black music, developed out of the experience of slavery: the insert to Fetish Bones depicts black farmers working the land; the first understandable words of that record, for me at least, are ‘everyday a slave’; and ‘slaveship punk’ is one of the nominators she uses to describe her music. References to slavery and plantation recur in all of her work and are part of a poetics of remembrance and time travelling.
With her partner, the sci-fi writer and lawyer Rasheedah Phillips, Ayewa theorizes and practices time travelling in the multidisciplinary community project Black Quantum Futurism (BQF). It consists of music, art projects and activism, and has a DIY-attitude in its commitment to repairing marginalized communities through a focus on retrieving and retaining cultural and social histories. Central to this project is an alternative experience of time, as summarized in Moor Mother’s song, ‘Zami’: ‘No more master’s clock / we travel spaceways.’ The dominant linear sense of time is experienced as oppressive and needs to be replaced with a more expansive and futuristic alternative.
The master’s clock symbolizes the linear time that organized enslaved life on the plantation. In her contribution to the BQF-zine Space-Time Collapse I: From the Congos to the Carolinas (2016), Phillips writes how masters coded the body with both the whip and sound: ‘bells, horns, public clocks, chants, songs, speech patterns, and the like were used to regulate slave labor on the plantation’. Linear time is repressive for BQF because it presents events as fixated and delineated elements on a forward-moving timeline. From that perspective, slavery has ended and is sealed away in the past. BQF insists that the experience of the plantation has continued after the emancipation because both a linear sense of time is integral to American life and intergenerational trauma of slavery causes black people’s sense of time to consist of ‘temporal tensions’ and ‘overlapping and conflicting temporalities’.
Against a temporality that bars oppressed communities from their future, BQF wants to develop, through (Afro)futurism and African traditions, other spatiotemporal practices that are more healing and supportive for the survival of marginalized groups, and that allow black and linear senses of time to occur simultaneously – and this ‘in the way that light co-exists both as wave and particle on the quantum level’. BQF especially mobilizes the temporal dynamic of ‘retrocurrences’: ‘a backwards happening, an event whose influence or effect is not discrete and timebound – it extends in all possible directions and encompasses all possible time modes’. Timelines disentangle and take on cyclical or layered forms.
Such disintegration of linear temporality can be found in both Moor Mother’s lyrics and music. Ayewa writes speculative texts in which she channels her study of (the African diaspora of) black life. Striving for the full story, she doesn’t offer a personal account, nor a single narrative, but aims to assemble several perspectives and different timelines to break information out of the linear temporality to which it is shackled. ‘Our past futurism, the hopes and dreams of our ancestors, act as important metaphysical tools that serve as agents to help one discover hidden information in the present time’, she writes in the first BQF-zine Theory & Practice (vol.1). In her lyrics she often creates a myth in which a black figure moves through history, takes up several perspectives, registers the violence against black people but also the happiness and care that exist within those brutal situations. Those myths can connect closely to specific events or situations, like domestic violence, but also take place in an undetermined spacetime that short-circuits the linear timeline.
‘The idea is to travel throughout the race riots / from 1866 to the present time’, starts Fetish Bones’ opening track ‘Creation Myth’, based on the poem ‘Battlefield Replica Symmetry Retrospectra’ from the poetry collection of the same title as the album. From the Memphis Race Riots that took place in the early phase of the Reconstruction, the period in which slavery was abolished and the formerly enslaved got civil rights, a body moves to the riots of the Red Summer of 1919, to those in Watts 1965 and Ferguson 2014. With every riot, the body further deteriorates: ‘only god knows how i made it to ferguson’, subsequently reciting thirteen names of women who haven’t. Time folds back upon itself. After Ferguson we go back to 2009 Oakland, where the voice is certain of its death but then finds itself back in 1866: ‘the white men dropped me off at a black cemetery (…) / the same place i was in 1866’. Here there is no social progress; after the abolition, liberation coexists with violence. Time gets haunted by a spectral ‘black shadow / blowing in the wind / dripping a ironic thickness of things never changing’. On a personal level, black people are never free from past suffering as well; at birth they hear ‘that you must be both / dead and alive’. Moor Mother delivers this text with a distorted voice – put forward in the mix, in contrast to many other tracks – against the background of a gritty sound collage. Fragments of free jazz mix with samples of previously sampled material from hip hop music and eventually turns into a static noise while the voice gets louder, stronger, more resolute.
By piling several layers of divergent historical sonic material in ‘Creation myth’ and other tracks, Moor Mother not only creates a temporal collapse in the lyrics but also in the music. African rhythms, spirituals and gospel, blues and shreds of free jazz – Moor Mother assembles all these different manifestations of black music and connects them to noise, static and dronelike beats, futuristic spaceship sounds, soundscapes and recordings from her neighborhood. By sampling the voices of the young black women like Natasha McKenna and Sandra Bland who died of racist police violence, Moor Mother also includes more contemporary material. The violence is grounded in the present, but the sonic collage gives it the weight and dimension of history. This ensures violent events are not isolated: each expands into the black history of America; black history concentrates itself in one incident while simultaneously spilling out of it.
Confrontation / catharsis
‘Remember me? Remember me, fresh from the grave / Fresh from the blood and sweat of a slave. / Remember me?’ Moor Mother asks in a direct, punklike style on ‘After Images’; the pulsating, typical four to the floor-beat and an easy to ‘sing along’ chorus (‘Cause after they come for me, they gonna come for you, 5432’) make the track easy to dance to, while the moaning blues sample and the distortion give it a fierce but also melancholic character. It is this particular combination – of references to the slave trade, the plantations, the deadly violence against black bodies with a sound collage that compresses a sonic black history into all sorts of hard noise – that have given Moor Mother’s music the predicate ‘confrontational’, and also ‘visceral’, ‘direct’, ‘real’, ‘uncomfortable’.
My first listening experience was similar: the feeling that something happened, that I was and became present to the nightmare of our historical present, that this sonic landscape enclosed something real that is missing in so much other music. There was the feeling of witnessing a reality that I, as a white male subject, could escape because of that same reality. Now I wonder if such interpretation of the music as confrontational isn’t too mimetic and expressive. If such reading, in short, isn’t fetishizing, as it so strongly depends on Ayewa’s blackness. It gives the music and lyrics a historical charge that is absent in similar sonic experiments of white musicians that rather speak of an always somewhat abstract existential anxiety. Consuming Moor Mother’s musical evocation of black suffering allows the white listener to get nearby, to be a witness, to possibly reflect about one own’s complicity – and in a way that allows us to settle comfortably in that position, that attention, those thoughts, without having to be truly close.
Moor Mother’s music aims to resist such fetishization. ‘Trying to save my black life / By fetishizing my dead life / Fuck, get away from me’, sounds the pre-chorus of ‘Deadbeat Protest’, after which she repeats above a quick pounding rhythm: ‘Did you see my dead body at the protest?’ This sentence evokes a spectacular image of black suffering that however does not permit the (white) listener to situate themselves in the position of a witness. The sentence evokes violence, but simultaneously explicitly asks if you have seen the violence, if you were a witness at all. Just because white life exists by the grace of and at the expense of the black body, it seems impossible for the white listener to respond affirmative to that question.
The chorus of ‘Deadbeat Protest’ resonates with the last lines of Fetish Bones:
use my dead body as a raft to survive the flooding that’s coming (…) use my dead body as a raft cos time’s still floating and always turning back / use my dead body as a raft / use my dead body
Whereas the former track centralises spectacle and observation, in the latter Moor Mother softly and empathically sings above a minimal melody about sacrificing oneself as a form of care. Here we touch upon another way in which Moor Mother’s music has been described: not as confrontational, but as cathartic. John Morrison in a review of Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes (2019) for The Wire:
Moor Mother’s twisting, grating music is a medium by which we can dig deeply into the root(s) of [black people’s] pain. This is not noise made to merely disturb aesthetic sensibilities; this is noise designed to exorcise generations of ancestral trauma.
As the quote indicates, it is not one or the other; confrontation and purification are in a tense relation with one another. What characterizes Ayewa’s music and makes it different from the more typical manifestations of the hard genres she incorporates, is that it doesn’t have a structure of tension and release, nor does it have a continuously fast rhythm. Nor do the noise, bass and drones expand so strongly that they become spatial and effect a state of trance. In Moor Mother’s work, the tension remains, the release is absent, the songs are short. She often uses repetition in her lyrics, but the direct tone and its address to the listener do not allow the latter to get carried away in some incantation. The affect is anguish, screamed out majestically. It’s screaming through, against and because of the suffocation of the black subject.
Scream
The scream is central in Fred Moten’s understanding of black aesthetics. Moten draws on one of the most well-known screams of black history, that of Aunt Hester in Frederick Douglass’ life narrative (1845). Hearing ‘the most heart-rending shrieks’ of his aunt becomes a sort of primal scene of slavery for Douglass: ‘It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle’ of which he feels himself to be both ‘a witness’ and ‘a participant’: he witnesses the violence but also takes part in it as he needs to undergo the violence and his observing gaze cannot stop it. Whereas Moten cites this passage extensively in In the Break (2003), Saidiya Hartman refuses to do so in the introduction of her study Scenes of Subjection (1997). Such reproductions, she argues, happen all too often and quickly, amplifying the spectacular character of black violence. In contrast, she wants to look at scenes in which violence is not self-evidently present, at ‘the diffusion of terror and the violence perpetrated under the rubric of pleasure, paternalism, and property’. She looks at practices in which the black subject is both subjected and constituted into a subject, such as dancing.
In the opening pages of both In the Break and Black & Blur, Moten examines Aunt Hester’s scream and Hartman’s ‘diffusion of terror’ in his discussion of black art and of black music in particular. He writes that Hartman’s suppression of the primal scene causes it to get reproduced in each of the scenes of subjection she analyses. In a similar way, Moten continues, this uncontained scream is dispersed in black art and music. Another passage of Douglass’s narrative is suggestive of this. Just like Aunt Hester’s scream, the singing of the enslaved makes him conscious of slavery: ‘To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery’.
With the spreading of Aunt Hester’s scream in black music, Moten does not undo the scream of its violent context, but rather suggests that this context is equally boundless. Like BQF and Moor Mother, Moten and Hartman do not perceive slavery as a historically delineated event, but as a ‘durational field’ that stretches to contemporary experience. Because of the disappointments of the civil rights movement and, earlier, the Reconstruction – described by Hartman as a ‘point of transition to what looks more like the reorganization of the plantation system than self-possession, citizenship, or liberty for the “freed”’ – they do not focus on repair through central western notions of political emancipation, such as self-determination and citizenship, but through rather everyday acts of informal social and aesthetic collaboration that embrace life in its rampant excess.
For Moten, black music is not a remedy against or a compensation for black suffering, but its registration: ‘Jazz does not disappear the problem; it is the problem, and will not disappear. It is, moreover, the problem’s diffusion.’ This is not the invocation of a constant re-experience of an unreachable trauma, as that would still hold out the possibility of compensation, whereas life post-slavery has demonstrated its absence. The music rather creates ‘a perpetual cutting, a constancy of expansive and enfolding rupture and wound’. This may sound (afro)pessimistic but, just as for Douglass, the songs of the enslaved could contain ‘the highest joy and the deepest sadness’ simultaneously. Moten speaks of this music as ‘a terrible beauty. It hurts so much that we have to celebrate. That we have to celebrate is what hurts so much’. The pain is heavy and unpronounceable, but the wayward social collaboration of jazz as an aesthetic practice, can repeat, record, and transform that terrible beauty.
Both confrontational and cathartic, Moor Mother’s music holds a similar paradox. Her musical styling of black pain simultaneously wants to evoke a reevaluation. In her contribution to the first BQF-zine, she writes:
I use sonic noise and tonal memory to act as a compression of all sounds to both agitate negative and positive vibrations, breaking through the cyclical vortex of oppressed Black identity and consciousness in America. Similar to the makings of a rainbow using light to create a septum [sic; spectrum] of color, I collapse sound to create a frequency of discord and meditation, a fundamental paradox of pushing through a reality while simultaneously experiencing it.
The music is confrontational in its reliving of the pain, and it redeems by trying to move beyond it.
Confrontational catharsis
Hartman’s skepticism about the spectacle of black suffering concerns how such images interpellate people. Are we made into witnesses that acknowledge suffering or are we made into voyeurs that feel both attracted to and repelled by the violence? ‘At issue here is the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between witness and spectator’, Hartman writes. Moor Mother’s spectacularizing of black suffering focuses on that uncertain line and that precarious condition of empathy. She does that by often addressing the listener, like in the aforementioned example of ‘Deadbeat Protest’ and almost all other quotations. In many of her lyrics there is an undetermined ‘you’ that positions the listener differently according to their race. On the title track of Who Sent You?, the second album by Irreversible Entanglements, Moor Mother repeatedly spits questions to the listener: ‘who sent you’; ‘what are you doing here?’; ‘what did they tell you? / to patrol / oversee / redeem / crucify’. The guest is unwanted, even if they potentially have ‘good’ but paternalizing intentions: ‘to make sure the kids get to school safe / instead of running away from the end / into the dark’. Who needs to feel addressed here? How are you involved in these narratives and how do you need to position yourself to the scenes she portrays?
The undetermined use of pronouns brings Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) to mind. In each poem, a ‘you’ gets confronted with a situation of micro-aggression in which the black subject is either all too visible or invisible. For the reader, that ‘you’ can be intimate if they are also victims of such racism, or it can create a distance when the reader is a white subject. This ‘American Lyric’ is far from lyrical. The poems look like prose and the tone is one of exhaustion and weariness: ‘Just this morning another, What did he say? (…) Yes, and this is how you are a citizen: Come on. Let it go. Move on’. Rankine points to an affective relation to American citizenship that is founded on the endurance of violence, even if its accumulation is barely bearable.
While Rankine’s collection is characterized by affective depletion and exhausted performance, Moor Mother’s ‘you’ can be dead but its intense affects still demonstrate a will to act. If Citizen, with its emphasis on looking, situates the reader in a position of empathetic witness or complicit spectator, then Moor Mother’s listeners are always involved in a narrative scene, either because of the intimacy that includes them or the aggression that puts them at a distance – but nevertheless interpellates them as being involved. Take the disaffected offensive tone of ‘who taught you to be a witness of our mother’s death? / You are saying you love me after you’ve broken my heart / my blood, the blood, our blood boils in response’ (‘Repeater’), or the empathetic urging, if not begging, ‘Don’t die / Don’t hold your breath’ that follows the line ‘The whites are killing’ (‘Don’t Die’). Both quotations show how Moor Mother’s use of undefined pronouns, whether combined with proper names and group designations or not, create a strong dynamic of distance and intimacy.
Moor Mother’s lyrical myths and sonic collages of black music devoid these tracks of all individualizing tendencies. From this history and sociality – the latter which I here understand, with Moten, as a way of being together that precedes processes of individuation and individualization into autonomous subjects, nations, or any other institution – a voice advances that addresses the listener. Even so, it’s not about that voice and that listener: the interaction of sounds contains a whole history with a particular power relation, a distribution of the sensible (who’s allowed to talk or not, who’s allowed to see or not, etc.) and a dynamic of intimacy and distance. We derive from history and can come together again differently in that history.[6] Ayewa in an interview:
A lot of people feel so isolated and alone, but I guess what I’ve been trying to do sonically is show that we’re not separate: more and more people are performing and talking about the black experience in America, but this is a world experience. We talk about fighting borders so much, but then we put up these borders for each other.
That is why the fetishization needs to be broken. In fetishization, object and subject remain separate in a narcissistic identification with the good, present, and attentive human being. The invitation of Moor Mother’s work does not involve the complicity of the fetishizing attitude: a joyful reflection about the painful truth of one’s own complicity in black suffering. It is rather, as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten would say, complicity in being an accomplice. It is about plotting and conspiring with others: ‘To be complicit with others, to be an accomplice, to live in ways that always provoke conspiracy, a conspiracy without a plot where the conspiracy is the plot’.[7] It is about a different way of being together in the impasse; a way that starts from everyone’s incompleteness and their need for an accomplice.
That does not immediately lead one out of the impasse. Moor Mother’s music makes uncomfortable and resists, but is simultaneously wary of the reach of its scream. An awareness of the limitations of the labor of black music as a liberation technique has entered the plantation of contemporary black life, as the rest of the world has always appeared to be louder and made that liberation unheard of. Despite its confrontational and cathartic aesthetics, Moor Mother’s music does not hold any immediate revolutionary promise. It rather makes us hear the impasse we’re in while also struggling not to be of it.[8]
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Hans Demeyer is Associate Professor of Dutch and Comparative Literature at University College London. He is the co-author of Affectieve crisis, literair herstel: De romans van de millenialgeneratie (2021; Amsterdam University Press; with Sven Vitse) [Affective Crisis, Literary Repair: The Novels of the Millennials], and his current project focuses on the affective, cultural and political aspects of the contemporary as disintegration. Outside academia, he has written for Extra Extra, Politics/Letters Live and for numerous Belgian and Dutch cultural and literary magazines.
Insta handle: @_hans_demeyer
X: @dmyrhns
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A version of this essay was published in Dutch in the Belgian literary magazine nY, issue 44 (October 2021). This translation is a slightly altered and abbreviated version of that text. Image via wikimedia commons.
Notes
[1] In more recent work that appeared after finishing this essay, this musical blend seems to change somewhat to a less confrontational sound. In a profile in The New York Times (22 September 2021), Ayewa says about this difference: ‘I want it to be accessible so you can play it when you’re hanging out with your mom or little sister (…). You can still get the message but it’s not over your head, you know? The feelings are still there.’ The new work is a modification from Moor Mother’s project as I discuss it here, rather than a break from it.
[2] The intertext here is Sylvia Wynter, ‘Novel and History, Plot and Plantation’, Savacou, 5 (1971), 95–102.
[3] For Mbembe, a straight line can be drawn from the plantation to today’s terror; see the chapter ‘Necropolitics’ in the book of the same title (2019)
[4] About the title of her solely on LP released record The Motionless Present (2017), Ayewa says in an interview with The Fader (22/3/2017): ‘When I was thinking about [the title] The Motionless Present, I was thinking about how there’s so much happening right now, the movements, but there’s this standing feeling when it comes to change. It definitely feels like nothing is changing. And I just look at all the problems that still remain.’
[5] This paragraph is influenced by George Shulmans essay ‘Fred Moten’s Refusals and Consents: The Politics of Fugitivity’ (2021), an excellent introduction to Moten’s political philosophy. Shulman’s comparison between Berlant and Moten in relation to the impasse inspires the way I frame Moor Mother’s work. This essay is further strongly indebted to Fred Moten’s understanding of black music as argued in for instance In the Break (2003) and Black and Blur (2017), cf. infra.
[6] This paragraph is inspired by the chapter ‘Entanglement and Virtuosity’ in Moten’s Black and Blur.
[7] Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, ‘Plantocracy and Communism,’ in: All Incomplete.
[8] The intertext here is Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, The Undercommons (2013): ‘to be in but not of’.
New Critique 