AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Roll Call: Gabrielle Civil vs. Black Time or the déjà vu

Transcription by: Kristen Jeré

Rashidah Ismaili: I'm grateful that she was around all that time, but the time that I spent with them is now becoming a memory that I'm trying to turn into words.

[Naima’s voice overlapping with the Gabreille Civil’s chanting over a steady drum beat with techno rhythm]

Naima: Flap, flap, flap

Gabrielle Civil: Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time

Gabrielle Civil [In Spoken Word]: I want to take advantage of

                                                        time / I want to claim /

                                                        time / I want to activate myself in

                                                        time / I want to allow /

                                                        / / SOMATIC CONNECTION / /

                                                        time / what is beautiful and to allow for

                                                        time / to cultivate the wild within myself /

                                                        time / and space as a form of

                                                        time / deep, velvety blackness /

                                                        the texture of the most black red rose petals

Gabrielle Civil: Hey, I'm Gabrielle Civil. I'm a Black feminist poet and performance artist, and this is a special episode of VS’ Roll Call on my current obsession—the slippery nature of Black [echoing] time, time, time.

Gabrielle Civil: What exactly is “Black time”? Black time is never ending, is this pandemic, is taking a long time, is what we make—not what we have—is what happens if we take our time, is what happens when time takes us back, is what happens [record scratch and words repeat] when time takes us back, is flashbacks and flash forwards, is time, and time again.

Garbrielle Civil: Black time isn't fixed or just one thing. Black time can be a lot of things. It's the way Black folks live memory across the diaspora. How we express time. How we make history, pass the time, and dream the future, and our poetry in our lives and creative acts. Black time for me is about generational cycles, fledglings and elders. The poetry of how we pass things on or don't. How we make things happen. How the same things keep happening. Two steps forward, two steps back. Oppression and resistance. The “changing same” or what I call, the déjà vu. Here's a little of what I call the déjà vu:

Garbrielle Civil [In Spoken Word]:

1. the déjà vu is not not a strip club in ypsilanti
2. this is to say when you tell your sister yolaine that the name of your next book is the déjà vu and she laughs and says, herman says, isn’t the déjà vu a strip club in ypsilanti? herman is her  husband, and we won’t get into how he and his brothers might  know about this club, you just laugh and say back
3. that maybe it is

 [sound of tape rewinding and words playback, twice]. “Three, that maybe it is. Three, that maybe it is.” [record scratches again this time forwarding].

Garbrielle Civil [In Narration]: 10. mining Experiential Echoes. Black creatives have long been mining Experiential Echoes and Black time. If you haven't read Octavia Butler's novels, Kindred or Parable of the Sower, you're in for something good. While you're at it, check out Black Quantum Futurism’s amazing art projects. Absorb Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ extraordinary M Archive. Or listen to Nikki Giovanni’s “Ego Tripping” on repeat.

Nikki Giovanni [In Spoken Word]:

I was born in the congo

I walked to the fertile crescent and built

[record scratches and words repeat]

I was born in the Congo.

I walked to the Fertile Crescent and built [words fade and Civil begins speaking again]

Gabrielle Civil [In Narration]: Steeped in all this, I decided to embark on my own quest in Black time. Join me as I talk to some Black poets and thought leaders in my own life about what Black time has meant, or might mean, to them. [record scratches forward]

Rashidah Ismaili: [In Spoken Word]:

She is a descriptive term

sitting on stoops,

too tired to walk.

Experience has shaded

her youthful poetry.

Time waits on corners

watered by bloods and dogs.

Gabrielle Civil [In Narration]: That's Rashidah Ismaili, acclaimed poet, playwright and fiction writer, reading from her poem “Harlem Nuances” from her collection Cantata for Jimmy. When I first thought of Black time, I thought of this poem, and really, I thought of her. Born and raised in Benin, Rashida has lived in Harlem for decades. She was active in the Black Arts Movement and a founding member of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa. Rashida is a true fountain of memory. She knew everybody.

Rashidah Ismaili: These were the people that I met when I went to Paule Marshall’s [home]: Rosa Gee, Louise Meriweather, Maya Angelou—they were inspirational. They were so sophisticated. They did things that I wouldn't do. I couldn't do. I mean, like drinking and smoking. But it wasn't just because they drank and smoked that I thought they were sophisticated. There was a whole thing—the way they presented themselves. I mean, they dress like...how I want, you know what I mean? Like, this is who I am. Maya would walk in, and she, I mean, she's already like six foot. She was wearing high heels. You know, long before this big stiletto things that people are walking around on now. God knows how they walk. And she'd come in and she’d say, “Paule, open the windows, I'm taking off my shoes.” And she’d take off her shoes (LAUGHS). They were very loyal to each other, and they were very political. Rose, Rosa, was the one who mounted the protests at the UN when Lumumba was assassinated. I mean, she was fearless. They climbed out on the ledge and dropped the banner. [record scratches forward]

Gabrielle Civil [In Narration]: Again from the poem, “Harlem Nuances”:

Rashidah Ismaili [In Spoken Word]:

Sometimes at night

she thinks she hears

the sounds

history has recorded.

Her lights are out.

The current is dead.

Candles have ways

with forms.

 [record scratches forward].

Rashidah Ismaili [In Conversation]: Now that I'm old, and I have an expansive memory, a lot of my friends who have been on this life journey with me have died. Paule Marshall, she died at 90. Burnett Colton-Ford, she was 70, and she died of breast cancer. And so now that I'm older, for I look at, say, Bernie, who dies at 70, but all the things that she was able to do in the 40 years that I knew her. I don't see young, Black women going into publishing for young readers with the passion that she had. And so I worry about the continuity of time—what's going to happen to all the work that she did.

Gabrielle Civil: So, Ms. Rashidah, when you think of Black time, what do you think of?

Rashidah Ismaili: When I think of Black time, I think of how Africans and, especially in the diaspora, it's very interesting how we continue, and how we conceive of time and ourselves in that. It isn't just the collection of experiences or aging; it's more than a collection. It's a gathering of all the things known and unknown that are part of who and what we are, whether we know it or not, whether we understand it or not. I think about Baldwin, for whom this collection of poems was written. I met him at Paule Marshall’s house; she had met him when she went to France. He was there, always had a cigarette. He had a cigarette, *like this*, and a glass, *like that*. And he was always smoking and sipping, smoking and sipping. And one time he said something, he said, “My soul looks back and wonder how I got over.” And Audre Lorde used to say, “You don't understand. We are victorious. Because we weren't supposed to be here. We were not supposed to survive.”

Gabrielle Civil: When I think of Black time, I think of my younger self. Ms. Rashidah, What did you know or not know when you were younger? What did you not understand?

Rashidah Ismaili: I think that the younger me did not know how to navigate the male/female, man/woman socializing situation. And I always blamed myself, I thought, and I'm thinking of one person in particular, “I really, really...I really liked that person,” and the person never showed any interest in me. And then one time, we were at a poetry reading, and he gets up and makes an announcement, “I dedicate this reading to the woman, a woman, I've always loved,” and it's me! Why didn't you say that 25 years ago? (LAUGHS). He's dead now, but that's okay. He died two years ago. But oh God, I thought he was, oh. I had such a crush on him. He was exactly what I love. He was tall. I mean, extremely tall. Very, very black and smooth. He was an African American. Oh my God, just palpitations of the heart, nervous stomach—the whole thing.

Gabrielle Civil: When I hear Ms. Rashidah talk about her crush, I can see her as a girl, a young woman, wishing this tall, black, smooth African American would love her. I can hear that youthful heart still beating in the voice of the elders speaking to me today. And I think how we all carry within ourselves, those earlier moments, those earlier versions of ourselves. This reminds me of the end of Ms. Rashidah’s poem “Harlem Nuances”, “She will rise one day on new legs with fresh skin. Then dance down to the river, waving her young ones home.”

Rashidah Ismaili [In Spoken Word]:

The Story is locked

in beads and braids.

She will rise one day

on new legs with fresh skin,

Then dance down to the river

waving her young ones home.

Gabrielle Civil In Spoken Word]:

Dear Gabby,

I've been thinking about you a lot lately. Well, cowering a little at your judgment. Am I ruining it? Being a grown up. Some of the things I do I know would meet your approval. I make money and have sex although not enough of either. Yesterday, in the middle of the day, I felt so worn out by the White School that I drove, exclamation point, to the grocery store in my own car, exclamation point, with my coat over my pajamas. Something mother would never approve of in a million years. And bought a whole bag of cheddar kettle chips and then slipped back into the house and under the covers and ate them all, alternating between reading shapeshifters and watching Hulu, which doesn't exist for you now, but which you will greatly come to enjoy. This is all something you would do, or rather, would have wanted to do all those years when you felt worn out by the White School but couldn't drive, and dreamed and worried about it, and depended on other people to take you places when you knew so much where you wanted to go.

Where did you want to go? Everywhere. The peaks of the snowy White Alps in a Nestle commercial, pretty word places like Montparnasse and Beijing, faraway cold places like Alaska. You would threaten our mother, “I'm going to Alaska for college,”. Such imagination for white places, when what you really wanted was to go to a party, to have your hair done pressed and curled with no rain out, no freeze, no rain scarf and have it stay. To be put together, or at least, to look that way. I've managed that, well, at least most of the time. Okay..some of the time. It's those furtive, fugitive moments where you come back to me. In a bodega, what we called “the party store” in Detroit. When I'm standing next to the candy and see the Bubblicious and Now & Laters I think of you, now and later.

You were such a good girl. You obeyed. When you first read a song in the front yard by Gwendolyn Brooks you knew it was about you. And I see you there, running your fingers across the spines in the front yard. And I love and miss you so much, even as I know you're still right here. Then, another dream. One hard winter, Gabby, in the faraway cold place where I used to live. My friend Ellen told me that you came to her in a dream. You know, Ellen, the tall, white lady who ended up the mother of a Black girl of her own. She told me that she saw you on a playground, and that you stepped away for a minute to transmit a message. You said to her, “When you see me, tell her I said, ‘You have time’.” “When you see me, tell her I said, ‘You have time.”[record scratches and words repeat again but this time at a faster speed]. “When you see me, tell her I said, ‘You have time.”

[words repeat again, but this time at normal speed and in Naima’s voice]

Naima:  “When you see me, tell her. ‘You have time.’

[words begin overlapping with each other. “Flap/Fly” is said by Naima with steady rhythm in sets of three. the phrase “Black time” is said by Gabrielle Civil repeated at a faster speed]

Naima: Flap, flap, flap

                   Fly, fly, fly

                   Flap, flap, flap

Gabrielle Civil: Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time.

Gabrielle Civil [In Conversation]: Do you remember this conversation?

Dr. Michelle M. Wright: I remember you. But I don't know, I mean, I’m an academic, you know. We're always shooting off our mouths.

Gabrielle Civil [In Narration]: That's Dr. Michelle M. Wright, a professor of English at Emory University. Michelle is a perfect person to consult on the nature of Black time, as she's the author of Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. Michelle is brilliant. Her work offers new insights into formulations of Black identity, history and time. Along with being an accomplished scholar, Michelle also played a pivotal role in my life.

Gabrielle Civil: [In Conversation with Dr. Michelle M. Wright]: And you encouraged me and you said, “Oh, yeah” . . . "You were just like, “If you have any interest in this at all, you should, might as well just apply and see what happened.”

Gabrielle Civil [In Narration]: And the rest is history. That's actually one of the things I wanted to talk to Michelle about. If Ms. Rashidah’s memories were one way to think about Black time, Michelle’s take on Black history becomes another. To be clear, Michelle isn't exactly a proponent of the concept of Black time.

Dr. Michelle M. Wright [In Conversation]: I'm always really hesitant to say that there is a Black time, because I worry that that moves us back into this homogenous notion of Blackness and all Black people live in a time space that's behind white folk.

Gabrielle Civil [In Narration]: Michelle doesn't believe in a singular, reductive notion of Blackness, and to keep it real, neither do I. Michelle, though, connects this problem of a singular, reductive notion of Blackness to depictions of Blackness in history.

Dr. Michelle M Wright: Yeah, absolutely. We tend to think of Blackness as a historical identity when we're forced to define it. And that makes sense, right? It's like, how do we know that you and I are both African American? We think immediately to the enslaved past, or perhaps a more recent past of civil rights, Black power, and we see all those historical events as having informed our identity. And in many ways, when we’re reacting to or protesting racism or, you know, engaging with an ally, it’s the politics that came out of those historical events and the philosophical arguments that came out of it that get us thinking about what is Black and what is not Black, what is problematic and what is not problematic. So on the surface, it all looks good like, ”Okay, that works. That's great.” But the moment you start arguing that, and you start thinking about historical depictions of Blackness, if you're queer, if you're female, if you come from the Caribbean, and perhaps your family emigrated in the 1920s, or late 19th century, or two months ago, you start to feel that you're beginning to be left out of some of these histories—which is why we have all these books on Black feminist history, Black queer history, because we're left out of those timelines. The problem is the way that we think of history and the way that we think of time. And it's so striking, because it's how we assume time works, right? You are trying to teach a class, you draw a line on the chalkboard, and then you start marking off names and dates—people know exactly what you're doing, and you're communicating all this amazingly complex history all at once. So, you can understand why we have linear timelines. But then you get this question of okay, one (LAUGHS), who says, that time moves forward, right? Okay, like you've got a clock, time’s moving forward, but also, the clock is circular. [Adult woman’s voice from before saying “Black time” overlaps with Dr. Michelle Wright's speaking in a soft whisper].

Dr. Michelle M Wright: So time is going in circles. We don't move through our lives going forward. We would like to believe that time is naturally progressive, but we all have, we can look at our own timelines of our own lives and see (LAUGHS), you know,  maybe we peaked in high school, you know (LAUGHS), and it's been a struggle since then. So this progress narrative doesn't really work.

[sound of record scratching, rewinding]

Gabrielle Civil: How old are you?

Naima: Six.

Gabrielle Civil [In Conversation]: What is your favorite thing about being six?

Naima: Um, I don't really know. I just really like being six.

Gabrielle Civil [In Narration]: That's Naima [redacted last name], the daughter of my friends Juma and Ellen. Ellen was the one who conveyed the message to me from my younger self in a dream. A tall white lady, Ellen ended up the mother of a Black girl of her own. Naima is that Black girl. I figured if I was talking to Black creative thought leaders about Black time, Naima would be an excellent choice. She's smart, joyful, and believes in Black girl magic. When we talked, she really liked being six. Although, she was also looking forward to her seventh birthday. When I asked her why, she answered with great wisdom, “Presents.” I asked her some other questions.

Gabrielle Civil [In Narration]: Do you have a favorite memory?

Naima: The time me and Grandpa went to get ice cream. Grandpa got chocolate; I got raspberry chocolate chip.

Gabrielle Civil: Have you thought about what you would like to be when you grow up?

Naima: I would like to be a rock star. And I would like to be a pianist. And I would like to be a singer. And I'd like to be a swimmer and a dancer. And I also want to be a friend. I've been helping my neighbor raise butterflies. Well, we find the eggs and then take care of them till they turn into butterflies.

Gabrielle Civil: Naima, do you know how to tell time?

Naima: A little. I've been learning.

Gabrielle Civil: if you hear the phrase “Black time” what does that sound like to you?

Naima: I don't know.

Gabrielle Civil: Yeah. I'm trying to figure it out too.

[Naima and Gabrielle Civil’s voices from earlier begin overlapping each other]

Naima [said in sets of three with steady rhythm]:

Flap, flap flap 

Fly, fly, fly                                                                 

Flap, flap, flap

Gabrielle Civil: [starts slowly, speeds up, then slows down at the end]:  Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time, Black time.

Gabrielle Civil [In Spoken Word]: We are trying to conjure colored people's time. Resistance, resilience, portals, self care, community care. A world where Black people take their time.

Rashidah Ismaili: I think the déjà vu is when the elements have not really clarified themselves. So it's, it's a kind of uneasy feeling, this shiver up your back. You know, I'm feeling like, “I know this, but I don't,” you know? But what's happening? And so, I think for me that déjà vu is that—but the slipperiness. I mean, I'm thinking of how we process it—both here, and in the diaspora, and in Africa, at least. And I'm speaking very generally, because Africa is a very complex amalgam of people.

Gabrielle Civil [In Narration]: The immensity of the idea of Black time starts to swell. And I think of how much I'm trying to channel and explore. And I wonder if I'll ever really understand it, figure it out, know it. And then I flashback to something Dr. Michelle Wright said.

Dr. Michelle M. Wright: But the other thing, of course, I realized is, “Oh, nobody really knows what time is. There are a lot of different ways in which it can be represented.” Which means I don't need to make up some theory about time in order to make all different types of Blacknesses fit. Instead, I can simply think about time as actually one moment. The now—the right here, the right now, not the present, and we didn't come out of the past, and we aren't moving into the future. Instead, all those tenses are right here in this moment. And then we're doing it in the now.

Gabrielle Civil [In Spoken Word]: The Déjà vu: Nine, keen recognition. Two a noticing in the body, a prickling intuition, a mingling, an overlay. Second sight ,blind spots. Six repetition, reenactment, recurrence, reckoning. Ten. One, an inherited shield, an embodied call, tumbling from dreams, 2021. Recalling and channeling for Black dreams and Black time in a pandemic. After George Floyd, what could I gather and make this mean, the Déjà vu marks constellations of positive and negative time, even as it reckons with Black feminist memory. It revels in time travel and leaps.

jayy dodd [In Spoken Word]:

Every Morning I Have to Make Sure This Is When I’m From

 in this moment, I will take whatever design is available

how many rituals done & undone, again? a humidity primed

           for this spectacle. to say partial. how many times have I known

the other intimately? turn alarm into music. everyday,

           some kind of orchestral moment.

Gabrielle Civil [In Narration]: That's jayy dodd reading from her poem “Every Morning, I Have to Make Sure This is When I'm From” jayy is a poet and performance artist and the author of the poetry collections, Manish Tongues and, one of my recent faves, “The Black Condition Ft. Narcissus”. jayy is smart, stylish, funny, and was hype to talk with me about Black time.

Gabrielle Civil [In Conversation]: Title of this, “Every Morning, I Have to Make Sure This is When I'm From”. So let's start like this—when are you from?

jayy dodd: I have to make sure every day. And I don't...I think it's whenever I don't feel present is when I feel bad. Because I think that in one hand, I am a firm believer that time is actually more apathetic, like it can heal, but it can rot. It can do these things that feel fantastic, but it can ignore them completely. And bad festers the same way good losses. And so it's like, I think that we put a lot of valence and moralistic value on time, because it literally makes us feel better. But, it is not care. And so it's like, time does not care about, you know, your intention. If you are working and manifesting, you'll get it. But if you're not in sync with time, it'll be at the wrong time, it'll be after you need it, it'll be before you can handle it. If we can imagine time, what it wants to do, it's minding its’ goddamn business.

Gabrielle Civil: What is the role of poetry in that, and especially for you as a poet, how does poetry intersect, or not intersect, or help to support or help to evade some of these experiences of time that you're describing?

jayy dodd: Poetry for me is usually a marker of time. Time marker of like, the language, the body, the sense that I feel in those presence. And then using them as like a personal metric for how far I've come, or not, from those places.

Gabrielle Civil [In Narration]: When we first started talking, jayy talked about relationships between Black time and Trans Time and her work as a poet, and in her life, as a Black transgender woman.

jayy dodd: I’m having this new sort of imagination, because I was just like, before I decided to transition, I just could not literally imagine myself past 25. Like, I just couldn't like, if you were ever to sit me down and be like, “What do you want to be at 30?” I was gonna be like, “Will I be? At 30”? “What will I be? Alive”? And so, between the end of college and my transition are really just like, an amorphous period of like, figuring out what to do with all this time that I didn't ever expect to have, or, at that point, even really want. First of all, the two years of my transition, I would spend hours a day in the mirror, just looking in the mirror, just looking at my face (SNAPS), just I convincing myself (SNAPS) that I was real, like, “You're here (SNAPS), you're here (SNAPS), you're here (SNAPS),” and so, I haven't needed to look in the mirror to get out of something in so long, that I forgot that that was a place that I would go to get out of something—my reflection could be a place in time. That's probably the place that I come back to most, and I see with my transition and the hormones, like my face changing and my body changing. And so it's like, if I wanted to believe in time, now's the time, because I can literally see it, see how time is changing my physical form—this thing that I wanted no part of, not to exist is now, you know, becoming a garden before me. And so I love that. I love that.

Gabrielle Civil: So jayy, when you hear the phrase “Black time”, what do you think of? What does that mean to you?

jayy dodd: Yeah, when I think of Black time, I think of the rhythms we make to lock in our sentiments, and emotions, and expressions sort of both outside of time and inside the times you're in. Also just like the fact that, like I feel like Black people understand apocalypse different, because we are, have always been at the end time. We've always been post-abduction, we’ve always been post-invasion, we’ve always been post-human. And so I think that if you were you sort of born into an “after”, then what is time to you? And so a lot of people have decided that we're already dead. So every day that we live we are outside of common time. So yeah, so I put Black time as also this sort of like resistance of just simple, Black being in a time that doesn't want us, [a time that wants] to kill us. So yeah—rhythm, sound and resistance,

Gabrielle Civil [In Narration]: Rhythm, sound and resistance. Rhythm, sound and resistance. Yes, those are the things I hear too in Black time and Black poetry across the diaspora. And I heard it too in the voices of everyone I talked to about Black time, and the Déjà vu. The poets and the scholar, the elder and the child, and everyone in between. In Black time, we are all living memory—making and unmaking history, passing the time, dreaming the future, revisiting the past, and transforming it all into the now.

Gabrielle Civil: Thanks to Rashidah Ismaili, Michelle M. Wright, Naima [redacted last name] and her mom, Ellen Marie-Hinchcliffe, jayy dodd, and Zetta Elliott. You can find Rashidah Ismaili’s poem “Harlem Nuances” in her collection Cantata for Jimmy. You can hear more of Michelle Wright’s analysis of epiphenomenal time in Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. You can read jayy dodd's poem “Every Morning I Have to Make Sure This is When I'm From” in the Binnington Review, Issue Eight. The letter to Gabby can be found in my essay written with Zetta Elliott “Opening up Space for Global Girls” in my book Experiments in Joy. The lines on Black time and the Déjà Vu can be found in “Sphericity,”“Wild Beauty,” and “the déjà vu” all from my forthcoming book The Déjà Vu these were used with permission from Coffeehouse Press. The book drops on 2/22/22, February 22, 2022. Get involved, people, get involved. The producer for this episode was Tyree Rush, and it emerged to the VS’ Roll Call series of the Poetry Foundation. Thanks and blessings to everyone in the program. See you in Black futures. Peace