I’ve been thinking a lot about history and myth-making as I work on another piece. Edouard Glissant’s work inspires me a lot and it feels like the universe is working to bring various readings across my path that are in conversation with the work of Glissant.

Rolando Vazquez’s Vistas of Modernity enriches my engagement with Glissant’s work and vice versa and I can’t recommend Vistas of Modernity enough. While I was reading Vistas of Modernity, I found myself moving back to some passages from Glissant and then returning again to Vistas. In my head, it felt like there was this rich conversation going on between these two thinkers. There’s a lot to process and a lot to think about and I feel like rushing to make a post on it would not do any justice to the work. But definitely, anyone who’s interested or who is engaged in decolonial work would benefit a lot from looking up Glissant’s work and Vazquez’s Vistas of Modernity.

While reflecting on these two works, and while working on the new short piece, I found myself thinking about the relation between music and mathematics: about algorithms and improvisations: about waveforms and spacetime. A lot of times, I feel like a chicken scratching at the surface of concepts where comprehension lies just beyond my reach–like that word that you know is waiting to be uttered at the tip of your tongue, but you just can’t vocalise it yet.

The new piece is me working on concepts that intrigue me. It’s also influenced by the idea of history, re-membering (as Rolando writes it) and myth-making.

All these thoughts tumble together to inform the practice I am developing when it comes to the workshop practice. The idea of employing various mediums and ways of creating or re-membering or un-remembering history….these are things that I feel are key to the work and are necessary to what we want to achieve with the Invitation to Dreaming.

The hungry mind led me to Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination by Brent Hayes Edwards. I’ve only cracked the book open, but in the introduction there’s a passage that captured my imagination. Here, the author writes that: “Oral history’s importance lies not in adherence to fact, but in its departure from it, as imagination, symbolism and desire emerge.”

I think on how we can sometimes get stranded or blocked by the idea of story not aligning with empirical data and I’ve been thinking too about how a lot of history is told from the viewpoint of the conqueror or the coloniser.

Anyway, this is because I find myself rather obsessed with the question of the use of speculative fiction in the work of decolonisation.

A beloved friend of mine spoke of this kind of writing as a form of exorcism and the more I think on it, the more I love how this resonates with the idea of myth-making and how important it is for us to recognise that the myths we create are not subordinate or less important but are rather of equal value and equal importance. Do we even need to explain why it is important to us? Do we even need to make everything comprehensible or transparent?

Glissant in Poetics of Relation writes this: “For more than two centuries whole populations have had to assert their identity in opposition to the processes of identification or annihilation triggered by these invaders. Whereas the Western nation is first of all an “opposite” for colonised peoples, identity will be primarily “opposed to” — that is a limitation from the very beginning. Decoloniality will have done its real work when it goes beyond this limit.”

I think then to myself that the capacity to think beyond data and to think outside the box, to imagine beyond what is presented as “these are the facts” are tools which help in the work of decoloniality. Myth-making, the de-linking of the personal and the empirical, the creation of tangents and speculations, the ability to think outside of time.

My mind works away and picks at process and about how to bring these ideas into the workshop practice. How to encourage new and aspiring artists to bring this kinds of concepts with them into their core work.

Again, I find myself thinking of points of origin and how starting from the self, meeting the artists at where they are in that moment is an essential part of the work. Histories, stories, songs and other creations which are personal to us are also linked to the wider world. Family stories are where myth-making starts. Family histories are part of our personal myth-makings too. Beyond the personal portraits, beyond the familial, we see the world as a backdrop. How is that family myth set within the world around it? How do we create myths that originate from our selves? What’s important is that these myths come from us. From creators whose voices have often been elided–the sound you miss or skip over–like jazz creators, we must improvise. We create and bounce off each other’s words and worlds, we mix and play to create myths that sound like and belong to the self. They don’t have to adhere to an existing narrative, they belong to their selves, just as we belong to our selves.

There is a lot to think and reflect on as I think of this and as I consider on how to bring that into my practice.

To you who are on the journey, sing your songs, write your myths, dance your dances.

She’d always known space had shape and form of its own. It wasn’t always visible, but it was there. Now, its patterns and undulations were visible to her. She could see it curving around to accommodate her sire; could see it flowing and moving to accommodate static instruments, to accommodate her/self/; and now, she could see too how it lent itself to shadows that took on a form of their own as they came to stand beside her sire. 

-From To the Tune of the Wild Ones-