BE
Black Experimental Women Writers on Interdisciplinary Craft
Rochelle Spencer | February 2024
Shay Youngblood, Chantal James, Opal Moore, Kyla Marshell
“Her voice reminds me that I’m alive. Words begin to drop from the ceiling onto my head.”
—Shay Youngblood, Soul Kiss
“It was the kind of picture that children like Ham imagined coming alive, the figures unsticking themselves from their two-dimensional poses on the wood to dance under the sun.”
—Chantal James, None But the Righteous
“I keep a grand piano / in the living room / glossy black baby grand / single wing lifting / in a flight of silence”
—Opal Moore, Lot’s Daughters
“It had been a while, but I remembered these songs. I remembered them as songs I never intentionally listened to—they just were, like air and pollen.”
—Kyla Marshell, “Distancing #16”
In 2002, The Voyage of the Delfina, a multimedia installation about a ship transporting enslaved peoples, sails into Atlanta. The installation features one hundred performers: some dressed in black, while another third, draped in white, symbolize death—the humans who died during the voyage. Filmed inside the walls of Spelman College, an HBCU and a women’s college, the installation forces conversation and connection. Opal Moore’s “Children of the Middle Passage” poems ground a powerful piece conceived with visual artist Arturo Lindsay . . . Haunting music from saxophonist Joe Jennings and percussionist Omelika Kuumba Bynum produces a collective ache, a longing. And words on a black screen reinforce The Voyage of the Delfina’s ambitious goals: “We hoped to challenge the anonymity imposed upon Africans who did not survive the Middle Passage by ‘naming’ the children who were lost.”
The popularity of the piece continues to grow: after The Voyage of the Delfina left Atlanta, it traveled for a German tour; poems from “Children of the Middle Passage” appear regularly in journals, magazines, and a collaborative book project with Lindsay.
An excerpt from The Voyage of the Delfina was also part of a 2022 panel about Black experimental/hybrid writing and its enduring power. Opal Moore, Shay Youngblood, Kyla Marshell, and Chantal James talked about their work with warmth, intelligence, and urgency. They write about the Middle Passage (Moore), Black Lives Matter (Youngblood), shifting concepts of “home” across the Diaspora (Marshell), and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (James). They write, fearlessly, perhaps because they’ve examined their subjects from multiple lenses. They write, relentlessly, about how they’ve created work that investigates the ways life has rerouted and pressed against generations—and how those generations forged new pathways and pressed back.
But when four women gathered to discuss their craft, their ways of experimenting and creating new hybrid forms, the intention wasn’t to create a manifesto or even an unbroken, well-defined argument.
We wonder, like everyone else, about stories and their power. So there was nothing brittle about our conversation. This was a boss-lady conversation, a generous talk centering women—not because men aren’t creators who can develop vital and inclusive visions—but because many people still lodge the idea of “artist” with masculinity. (In writing and literature classes I’ve taught, some students still refer to the author as “he,” regardless of the writer’s actual gender.) We wanted to upset people—not because we’re mean (we pay our taxes and volunteer)—but because we want to create a world where anyone with a broad mind, compassion, imagination, and curiosity can see themselves as artists. Yvonne Bynoe’s essay in Black Art in America reminds us that Black women and other women of color may have been underrepresented in galleries, but that doesn’t mean that creation or intellectual production didn’t happen. We can feel optimistic because, within the last fifteen years, we witness people paying more for work by women and women artists of color. The original title of our presentation was “Four Women”; we purposefully referenced the Nina Simone song, her powerful revelation that rage and struggle can swell us, can make us lose fear and focus on freedom-creation. People want us angry because anger can be a tool for addressing social injustice; what these BE writers push us towards, perhaps, is understanding a humanity that has room for anger and joy, imagination, vulnerability, exhilaration, sadness, love, and expectation. We can, in the words of another Nina Simone song, also have moments of “Feeling Good.”
Writing achieves its purpose when it captures and retells genuine experience . . . The writers in our conversation dove into the specific to arrive at work that speaks to many. Along the way, they asked a specific question: How do we tell stories that startle us from hum to fully developed song?
Perhaps. James told us that her debut novel purposefully invoked “an experimental nonlinear approach to the narrative” that “helped [her] to explore the driving idea that many times are contained within one moment and that moments are overlapping.”
Overlapping moments, unconstrained time . . . Can fluid writing help us see connections? Over time, do we hear or witness our voices flow into each other? A section from James’s award-winning novel, None But the Righteous, reads, “To the faithful it matters not that I lived . . . When I was living in my own body, I surrendered my life to god. They would spit at my mother, my sister, and me in the streets when I was a child, because we were poor, because my mother’s color designated her as a slave and mine designated me as a bastard.” James’s writing listens? Or, perhaps, invites us to hear? We listen as a ghost, based on great spiritual ancestors from the African Diaspora, begins to “walk up into Ham’s bones.” Ham, James’s protagonist, tells his story in the years before and after Hurricane Katrina; still, his voice is intercepted and transmitted by a multi-voiced community, including the ghost who haunts him (or rides him, as Zora Neale Hurston would remind us). “I don’t mind being seen as experimental or avant-garde,” James tells us. “A lot of what I admire is avant-garde. The story dictated to me how it wanted to be told. I wanted to make sense of the destruction, the devastation, of Hurricane Katrina. It really did seem the trauma was on a biblical scale.”
We want to create a world where anyone with a broad mind, compassion, imagination, and curiosity can see themselves as artists.
Ham’s life isn’t easy. The trauma begins young. Even before Katrina, Ham has spent his life searching for family—the people who raised him weren’t there. And as Ham journeys from New Orleans to Atlanta, in sections titled “What Is Fallen,” “What Is Restored,” and “What Is Redeemed,” we float in and out of varied perspectives, from the independent Mayfly to the cruel Miss Pearl to more introspective characters like Bo, Gomez, and Deborah. It’s what James describes as “non-Western approaches to the conceptualization of time and space.” In None But the Righteous we hear the strange call of the spirit world; it’s a virtuoso novel, reminiscent of the work of Jesmyn Ward. And as James’s polyvocal conversation invites people in, she performs a kind of call and response with the reader. Characters from different generations and moments in time allow everyone to feel as though, at some point, they are part of the narrative. That generates a forceful novel.
A similar feat occurs in Shay Youngblood’s masterful Architecture of Soul Sound, an experimental film featuring architecture, dance, readings, and performances. We played an excerpt from Architecture of Soul Sound during the panel and heard Youngblood’s voice speak Japanese as well as her lightly twinged southern dialect. The images from Architecture of Soul Sound astonish us: we see green flashes of nature and the sketches and schemas of houses, the homes from the many places where Youngblood has lived and journeyed. She discusses experiencing racism and feeling like an outsider, as dancers move around her, swaying as gently as clocks. Part of the artistry flows from Youngblood’s fearlessness: watch her point out the porous boundaries of race, of gender, and curl into an awareness of the specificity of culture.
Youngblood is no stranger to experimentation. A celebrated novelist and playwright, she is known for being innovative. During a recent phone call, Youngblood told me that Atlanta’s Horizon Theater is reproducing her plays. The demand for smart, experimental work seems to be growing: “Salt Box, a play I wrote nearly thirty years ago, is being revamped with a new introduction,” Youngblood told me. “It’s my most interdisciplinary project yet. The play draws from visual art and oral history; it includes the creation of live murals.”
What we admire about Youngblood and her plays, novels, and films is her ability to balance something at home and specific with an understanding of how deeply we’re connected. Architecture of Soul Sound, which was recently included in The Routledge Companion to Surrealism, incorporates specific memories of her childhood and adulthood; we witness her intricate knowledge of places, even when she doesn’t always belong. As writers, we have to hold conflicting ideas and sensibilities, often within the same moment. Perhaps all of the panelists—Youngblood, James, Moore, and Marshell—share an interest in temporality, the way dreams of the future fuse with the horrors and triumphs of the past. Youngblood investigates multiple ideas: the complicated legacy the American South leaves Black people, the challenges of living abroad and being one of the few people of your ethnicity, the love you can have for your community even when you don’t feel understood.
Black women and other women of color may have been underrepresented in galleries, but that doesn’t mean that creation or intellectual production didn’t happen.”
Youngblood recognizes that people constantly rebel and embrace culture(s). This loving rebellion may be part of what it means to be a Black experimental woman writer. In an essay about Toni Morrison, a writer whose experiments constantly reinforced her themes (who can forget the opening of The Bluest Eye?), scholar Piper Kendrix Williams reminds us that if we don’t reject conformity, we can end up “split in two.” Youngblood’s work rejects conformity, recognizes multiplicity, and still accepts or sees a connection with a larger community. It’s a magnificent tension. Youngblood’s work serves as a reminder that the American South is part of the Global South; she reminds us that the Black southern drawl is distinct and cosmopolitan.
Architecture of Soul Sound addresses some of the key questions from the panel: Does creating new ways of telling stories aid our critique? Does it help us dissect problems or draw attention to specific ideas through the forms you’re creating? It’s hard to imagine Architecture of Soul Sound exploring as many ideas as it does without its specific form: the words from Youngblood, the glowing green images spilling onto screens with the shifting architectural schemas, and her beautiful, free-flowing performers release an energy. They soar into a space where we’re thinking about bodies and belonging, and the spaces that allow us to breathe freely.
Architecture of Soul Sound is both film and a memoir; it has parallels to Kyla Marshell’s memoir in progress, A Seed Is a Star. Marshell works in multiple forms; in addition to her memoir, she creates with poetry, music, printmaking, and design. She tells us that working in these different forms have inspired her creativity and freed her from some of the pressures of writing a deeply personal memoir: “I’m working on a memoir centering family, and some of the same ideas are coming out but in a different form . . . Those things about family are showing up in other ways. I don’t feel the same pressure to write and archive and publish. With printmaking, I don’t feel the pressure to be ‘good.’ I’m not looking for feedback, but instead, enjoying the process of being reactive and problem-solving and expressing ideas that may not be for public consumption.”
Parts of Marshell’s memoir chew you up and leave a mark; that was my experience from the parts I read. It examines the parts of our families that have been lost, forgotten, or kept from us. That’s a pain that is hard to describe, let alone write about. Marshell’s creative nonfiction appears in several magazines and journals, and she’s familiar with making deadlines, with writing lustrous but precise prose within tight frames. But now she had to give herself permission to be free: “I’d gotten really good at making myself write, but now I’m trying to be an inspired writer. The things I’ve been making you could characterize as visual art. I was making these cloth masks by hand. Then I started making clothes by hand. It’s a slow-going process—but I was doing it for the process. And I made a cute short set, three pairs of shorts, and a dress. And I’ve started printmaking.”
We forget the slow, careful attention required to make anything “by hand.” Marshell’s writing is in conversation, then, with the art, often made by women or communities of color or both that’s quietly revered for its craft(wo)manship. Marshell writes, “Like my uncle, like me: we were lovers of data. Some people’s memories captured feelings, a certain shift in light on a day without a month or year. My uncle remembered the length of every Parliament record; how much he’d paid, down to the cent, for every movie or bottle of soda. For me, it was names, birthdays, the outfit I wore on some day in the sixth grade.” She piles on details, reminders of what people’s efforts try to preserve: family, life, memories.
In our panel, we wanted to honor the many ways that stories are being told and the varied ways projects are being created. For the discussion, we played excerpts from The Voyage of the Delfina and Architecture of Soul Sound; we created postcards with QR codes that included links to discussions of Black women’s experimental work; we created a dress with pictures of the creators.
As we talked about the various kinds of Black experimental art, I realized the beauty and genuine achievement of this work: both communal and generous—informed by societal realities without being didactic. Youngblood told me that “several interviews with Black women have informed my plays. I talked to Black women, from different walks of life, who shared their stories with me.” This willingness to listen helps us to paint a more vivid and complex portrait. Listening to people of the same race or gender but from different generations and geographical regions may be especially helpful in expelling certain misconceptions. When I described one misconception—how some people have told me that Black artists don’t research their work and write about the same thing, the resurfacing of trauma—Moore provided a thoughtful response.
Writing a story can be a way of challenging the apathy that can set in, inthe long
struggle for social justice.”
“We hear that everything that Black people produce, creatively, is about the same thing: hardship,” Moore explains, “but Black artists are also examining the specificities within struggle. For the Voyage of the Delfina project with visual artist Arturo Lindsay, we immersed ourselves in the story of slavery. I did a lot of reading on slave ships and how ships were transformed to transport people—the shipping industry blew up when the slave trade was initiated. People kept detailed records about the ships and which ships were better for hauling people, but the origins of the people were unknown. So we end up knowing the names of ships but not the names of people . . . Our first iteration of this project explores the ship.”
Our best experimental writers tell stories and ask questions, but they don’t tell us how to think. Reading their work is a process of inquiry and working through ideas. Still, James tells us that writing a story can be a way of challenging the apathy that can set in, in the long struggle for social justice. “My characters fight for their own individual freedom, but it’s not necessarily tied to social justice. We saw increased political awareness in 2020 with Black Lives Matter and after Hurricane Katrina. We can’t draw an explicit connection between these two movements. But we momentarily saw an increase in social justice. A few years after Katrina, we saw the way Black New Orleans was being neglected. An apathy had set in again.”
In our conversation, these women spoke about the experience of having other people enter their creations. James said that writing her novel None But the Righteous has made her aware of how much she enjoys the process; her dream is to write more books, to “have more books overflow bookshelves.” And people want them: their books, their words, their artistry in all its forms . . . James’s novel has won acclaim. Youngblood is having a new production of her play Square Blues at Atlanta’s Horizon Theater in July. Marshell’s work is frequently commissioned. Moore also receives frequent requests for her work, which often explores history or the present while referencing or incorporating futuristic film or technology. Moore and Lyndsay’s moving and ground-breaking installation about the Middle Passage incorporated television screens that showed images of the ocean. When we played a five-minute video from the Voyage of the Delfina installation, it prompted audience questions: How do we locate more works that incorporate history and talk honestly about slavery and its legacy? Where do we find them?
We couldn’t discuss everything, but we tried to explore some of the new work coming out and past and current influences on our panelists. People don’t like to use the word “Renaissance,” but we’ve studied the Harlem Renaissance and BAM. We know that in times of social injustice and challenge, people turn to art to express new ideas and motivate us to change. With the Afrofuturism movement and other related futurism movements including Africanfuturism, Chicanafuturism, and Indigenousfuturism, it looks like we’re soaring into another moment of almost obscene cultural production.
We see amazing work that crosses and blurs boundaries; we see powerful imaginations building and inspiring more creativity. In her landmark study, Afrofuturism, Ytasha Womack reminds us that “Women Afrofuturists have decision-making power over their creative voice. They make their own standards and sculpt their own lens.” These artists may not always consider themselves Afrofuturists, but their work provides a futuristic way of thinking about writing, which seems to be growing more interdisciplinary, more hybrid. During the conference, we showed a stunning short lyric video from photographer, filmmaker, and poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s website; her gaze positions the Black woman as active creator/inventor as one of the most natural things in the world. We also showed images from Afrofuturist Affair, whose installations explore time travel and community building. So we’re continuing our research. We’re inspired by Mendi + Keith Obadike, a married couple who are also an artistic team, and their sound and video installations. We’re enthralled by Faith Adiele’s graphic novels, the innovations she has made with memoir (inserting diary entries and experimental typography into a narrative) and audio storytelling. We’re excited about work from the poet Tonya Foster, who tells us how much films inform her poetry. We’re listening: composer-poet Janice Lowe has created an album based on her acclaimed poetry collection.(In an interview with Josephine Cheng, Lowe notes that “working in a multimedia way is just a natural extension of my interests in music and writing.”)
It’s possible newer technologies will allow for more expanded conversations across disciplines. We see that now with electronic literature anthologies, and forward-thinking journals such as Obsidian, that slay with silver-edged videos and motion poems that take your breath away . . . The experimental writers we’ve been studying and researching explore photography, film, music, and the visual arts. A brief phone interview with Tonya Foster revealed how she spends time with film: she “would carry a camera with [her]” and take video of New Orleans. This kind of work allows someone, already a wonder at crystalizing language, to think in terms of the image and how to “create a new language.” And Foster’s comment strikes us with truth. When a people have been visually exploited, reclaiming an image has particular resonance and potential.
Of course, so does sound. We see language time travel, jump and bound into new spaces. In a scene from Chantal James’s new novel, None But the Righteous, she describes the return of the high-top fade:
The hairstyle she gives him, which had been popular around the time Ham was born, is recently back in fashion. It allowed a man’s hair to progress in length and thickness from near-bald around the skull’s base—where it could become a canvas for the geometric designs of one’s heart’s content—to full and high over the top.
That language is specific: “Canvas.” “Geometric designs.” The passage has a rhythm; “length and thickness” parallels with “full and high.” It’s musical language that reminds us art is always around us, everywhere and wondrous. Clearly sound plays a role in the work. James argues that sound was essential to her story. James scrutinizes people you know—and it’s a loving scrutiny, an extended conversation with your cousins and neighbors. Deborah, the woman wielding the electric razor and giving the haircut, is an artist “steady and professional” as hair falls “soft and silent upon the floor.” The familiar sounds of the razor, the banter in the kitchen-barbershop, are part of a known world; still, a couple of pages later, James will use sound to introduce the unfamiliar, an underwater dream world filled with “metronomic whispers.” The concrete world we know juxtaposed with the “hidden, suspended and isolated” dream we don’t is powerful. It somehow makes the spirit world sharper, more defined.
“Using a first-person narrator who was a disembodied spirit to tell the story of a protagonist living in the human body allowed for the interplay between the voices of the dead and those of the living,” James explains. “That's important to me in how we see our lives too . . . I was trying to inhabit this voice that had supernatural features and ability while also being true to, I guess, the United States South,” James says. “This is a book about spirit possession, and it’s experienced as a voice.”
Marshell, a trained musician, also views sound as essential to this work. “I think sound is important in my poetic life. When I’m actively writing poems, the rhythm comes to me before the words themselves . . . It’s okay to shift and to change. Music is also part of my identity and creativity.”
Our best experimental writers tell stories and ask questions, but they don’t tell us how to think.”
We discussed music and sound even before the panel discussion officially started. Shortly before we began, Opal Moore reminded me that The Voyage of the Delfina incorporates music from saxophonist Joe Jennings and percussionist Omelika Kuumba. Their names, Moore told me, should be announced at the beginning of the presentation; sound, Moore explains, is essential to understanding the work, its particular exchange of language, ideas, and meaning. We’re always thinking about all the oral traditions that inform our work. Moore tells us that “our imaginative project on the Middle Project examines that liminal space between Africa and the Americas, and it’s a conversation that takes a lot of engagement . . . We presented in four or five cities in Germany, and Joe Jennings (no relation to John Jennings) designed the music . . . We should have intergenerational and cross-class discussions about Black people. We have to start asking what does it mean to pursue freedom, even if people don’t agree on what you mean by that. Freedom is a conversation.”
We want to see more work from communities of color, from working-class writers, from writers across the globe. We’re excited about work created collectively. Shay Youngblood’s Architecture of Soul Sound spanned an array of locations (Japan, China, Hawaii, Texas, Costa Rica, and Germany) and featured performances from Shay Youngblood, Florinda Bryant, Tonya G'beda Lyles, and Tuy?n Quang Thái. The piece explores “the connections between architecture, memory, history, and the environment” and was hosted by allgo, an organization supporting and celebrating queer artists of color and the City of Austin Economic Growth and Development Department. We’re reading about Gabrielle Civil and her work with her collective, her work with collaborators Rosamond S. King and Madhu Kaza creating art objects and performance pieces. “It feels like my writing,” Civil explains, “has become the only place to claim authority over my own language.” We’re influenced by writers who play with language and form and who may not consider themselves experimental but whose work challenges and inspires us: Civil calls Margo Jefferson’s nonfiction “pretty amazing,” and Evie Shockley’s research on the avant-garde has influenced several studies and our panel . . . And we’re interested in the phenomenal work being created by men of color and other women and all kinds of diverse and intersecting communities, but when it came to our panel, we needed more time . . . When Black women writers experiment with form and take us to new and freer places, you always want to discover more.
Panelists’ Recommended Texts
James: Leontyne Price biography, Maurice Carlos Ruffin; people should never stop reading Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, or Gayl Jones.
Marshell: Janelle James; LaToya Hobbs
Moore: The 1619 Project; Toni Morrison’s Black Book
Youngblood: New Horizon Theater’s Black Women Speak
Suggested Resources
The above-mentioned websites
Faith Adiele
Tonya Foster, “A Swarm of Bees in High Court” (audio)
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Duriel Harris
Janice Lowe
Rasheedah Phillips
Journals
African American Review
Aunt Chloe
Callaloo
Fiyah
Kweli
Midnight & Indigo
Mosaic
Obsidian
Torch
Transition
Rochelle Spencer is the author of AfroSurrealism and a lecturer at LaGuardia Community College.
Shay Youngblood is the author of two novels, Black Girl in Paris and Soul Kiss (Riverhead Books), and a collection of short fiction, The Big Mama Stories (Firebrand Books) and the recipient of writing awards from the Edward Albee Foundation, the NAACP, and the Pushcart Press.
Opal Moore is author of the poetry collection Lot’s Daughters (Third World Press), a Cave Canem alum, and the recipient of several honors, including a Fulbright and a Bellagio Fellowship.
Kyla Marshell has earned fellowships from Jacob K. Javits, Cave Canem, and MacDowell, and was named one of the “7 Young Black Writers You Should Know” by Ebony.com.
Chantal James, author of None But the Righteous (Counterpoint Press), has received a Fulbright fellowship and was a finalist for the North Carolina Literary Review’s Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction prize.
