Meditations on Black Silence From Harmony Holiday at Triple Canopy

Poet and archivist Harmony Holiday has a new piece, "The Black Catatonic Scream," at Triple Canopy. In this digital project, Harmony meditates on Black music, Black silence, her "fellow hushed criers," her father's catatonia, Nipsey Hussle, Maya Angelou, and collisions therein. An excerpt:

...Poetry and song are forms of that catatonic tendency to use words to declare forbidden narratives, to lead them down a lane that turns meaning into pure feeling and accesses the telepathic quality of that spinning inward. If you can use language beyond its desire to curtail the imagination with sense, you can shut out any naysaying voice in the psyche; you can kill off your weakest alter egos and integrate yourself in the wild nonsensical where all epiphanies reside and go to hear themselves born eternal. Dad’s bouts of silence promised me a lifetime of poems as the rupture between the unknown and the unspeakable, the private disaster and the private joke, the ghost of yesterday and the soul of tomorrow. Either I, too, would have had to shut down for weeks at a time to process the hostile rants of Western life, or I would be lucky enough, as I have been, to find the unlawful antidote to a loss for words—a swarm, a benevolent excess that equates to the same refusal to give your understanding away.

Poems say no to becoming a pawn in the grammar. They defy the organization and hierarchies of meaning production that enforce the dominance of Western modes; they calmly abide nonsense knowing the wisdom and potential in the codes the West is too egomaniacal to be worthy of deciphering. Poems break the silence by giving it a rhythm to enter. They became my tongue in the place of an almost bribed quietness. Poems cured my catatonic tendency in many ways, broke a generational curse of ain’t nobody’s business, and restored our bloodline to its griot heyday where we were telling on everybody, crying on like newborns between hunger and divine laughter.

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