[electric] NOTES: maroon choreography by fahime ife

ELECTRIC NOTES

Explore the stories, theories, and works of Black and Indigenous American scholars.

Maroon Choreography can be placed in the tradition I’ve been identifying as [Ancestral Recovery Work] as evident in her prefatory note in which she identifies her passed grandmother as her “primary interlocutor” and “unseen collaborator”: “My practice in Maroon Choreography is an attempt to collaborate with my grandmother’s spirit, to shape knowledge, to practice developing a theory informed by the knowledges she could not express while she was here, as flesh, among the living” (xii). I think of this spiritual collaboration through the terms of ancestral rites and writing, which can be expressed through ife’s “practicing and articulating the imprecise (im)materiality of our shared air, the nonfungible porousness I share with Levada, a woman who could not read or write in her time but who continues reading and writing through me” (xi).

So much of Maroon Choreography is about unbecoming as it “attempts to move outside the blackness-as-enslavement narrative, to instead move inside a collective black interior way of breathing” (xii). Maroon Choreography’s focus on the continuance between life and death invokes breathing as a primordial function that we emerge from the womb already knowing how to do naturally. In this way, ife’s poetry is a tribute/testament to how our divine primordial essences exist as originally and inherently cosmic before being categorized and reduced by the racial and gender constructions of the settler state.

IMPORTANT METHODS AND THEMES

Questioning the Mythic Human Body:

“I began with a series of questions on the mythic human body, questions about proprioceptive sense limits, how a body moves in space, how we make sense of our movement in space, and how to expand our flesh limits” (ix).

Anachoreography as Method:

“Anachoreography is a recursive practice of refusal. I refuse the choreographed apparatuses of coloniality, its methodologies, its origin stories, its naming rituals, and its movements” (ix).

“Anachoreography is the feral spirit of study, waywardness, tarrying, ritual, practice, rehearsal, shoal, ceremony, series, rematriation, wake, duration, intimacy, pause, and refusal—given to us in the poiesis of black studies, ecological studies, performance studies, affect studies, and indigenous studies” (ix).

Echolalia:

“Through Maroon Choreography, I ask, what if the entire narrative of enslavement and settler colonialism is just echolalia?” (x).

CLOSING REMARKS and QUOTES

Maroon Choreography is a poetic rumination on the (nonmaterial) afterlives of slavery and colonialism. It takes themes of porosity, movement, and oscillation to deeper yet nonmaterial levels through its reflections on breath, life/death, blackness, indigeneity, land, and more.

“etymology made them design / made them blackindian / and maroon / made them names they did not call themselves / like divided in two / or gender / names not taken { but given } not owned / :: possessed :: records not blank but bloodstained { they eat names } etched in oil-slick vinyl / red as ink as feather / { desire / wanders } in black dawn as cicada / comes all night bold they come { quilombo }” (28-9).

“as their flesh tongues ethereal bone / they come together as / precision / tantric as the wind blows they tremble / ecstatic as midnight / departure / no more flesh and blood and calcium / no more joint tissue ache / not water / ethereal as horizon blues they / communicate as / liquid edge / without tongues and limps and vocal cords / tongue mother become breath / as air comes / when they come together in rhythm / they are seven no more” (25).