"Naked Voice" Ramblings

Karen in the previous post brought up a question I had as well while re-reading Barthes: can one transition between pronunciation and articulation? Can both exist, albeit in tension, within the same song? the same artist?

This semester, I am also taking a class in the English department entitled Poetry and Music. Currently we are reading dub -poetry and those inspired by the Creole-based sound literature: the likes of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Kamau Brathwaite. Although dub poetry is known as a poetry of thematics, usually dealing primarily with themes of immigration, racism, injustice and oppression, for me it is the space in which the friction between music and language has most clearly existed. A classmate commented that the poem was "difficult to close-read," that perhaps we were not supposed to close read because by doing so, it would make it into an aesthetic object trivializing the revolutionary impulse of the poem. I wanted to respond: "Pish-posh, read Barthes." (Which we will later in the week). Dub-poetry was made to be listened to, if not read aloud, then to cultivate music in the mind's ear. It is a close reading that happens aurally, not with the eyes. Perhaps its my own unfamiliarity with the Creole-language which diminishes the preeminence of semantics, but I find myself drawn to the diction of the read/sung poem: dub poetry is about rhythm, about enacting language, making one's voice move and transfigure syllables and phonemes.

For my long essay in class, I plan on writing about one of my favorite poems by Brathwaite entitled "Stone." The poem, although not traditional dub-poetry borrows from that tradition. Brathwaite is known for theorizing upon the Creole-language and using a technique called the transplosion of words, which is about colonized cultures reappropriating, reinfiltrating the dominant culture through language. To transplode words is to address the dislocation, the displacement, the exile experienced by not just human bodies, but human language and then creating news words to reflect particular experience.

The reason I am drawn to the poem "Stone" is because it is an emotionally and physically exhausting poem to read aloud (and I must read it aloud). Not only has Brathwaite created new words in a semantic sense, but he dislocates, disjoints words in this poem - using periods to break open words, so you don't know where to begin, where to end, where to take a breath, where to place sounds upon the tongue or in the throat. Like dub poetry, this poem rings in my ears long after I, my professor, or Brathwaite has finished reading it. Like dub poetry, this poem affects my language, my speech, my music long afterwards. I carry it with me. I yearn for it.

It is a punctum.

I tend to read poetry aloud because I like the feel of consonants and vowels on my tongue. Each time I have read "Stone" (A link to a not so great copy of the poem. I also have a mp3 of Brathwaite reading it that I wish I could share). I have tried to do something different: pronounce words differently, inflect here, soften there, pause and pause, race breathless, constrain and flatten the throat, the tongue, the chest, my fists. The more familiar with the poem I have become though the more it seems like a battle between articulation and pronunciation - the emotional meaning of the poem, a concentration on the breath, has seeped into my reading, sometimes, I fear, renouncing attention to diction, to my "tongue, [my] teeth, [my] glottis, [my] sinuses, [my] nose" (The Grain of the Voice, 271) therefore losing the grain.