Round Table

A lot of my work tries to decolonize time and tries to root it back in more indigenous West African cosmologies. The process of pouring libation is usually done before important ceremonies like naming ceremonies funerals, even birthdays, right? And its purpose is to conjure the spirits of ancestors to also join in with the merriment of those who are gathered, to ensure that the ceremony is successful or to ensure that the ceremony has their blessing.  

So when I'm engaging with time in that poem, it’s this idea of black eternity. Like everyone gathered is present, right? But we're also able to conjure those who came before us. To also continue this culture, these traditions, et cetera. And it was also sparked by this idea of like malleable time. Like the various portals in which we in our present worlds can conjure and also manipulate time.  

Many of the names that I mention in the poem itself, they also come from my tribe’s practice of Kradin or “soul names,” which are names given to children based on their day of birth. So like my name Kweku—it signifies that I’m born on Wednesday and every day of the week has its own deity or god. Think of it almost like star signs, right? Sagittarius, Scorpio, et cetera. But for us it's based on the day of the week.  

When I was writing the collection I’m like, okay, like what would it mean for us who come from this system of naming that is so bound in time to also be impacted by something as earth-shattering and traumatic as colonization or enslavement? If you come from a place where your children are days of the week, if you lose a child, you've lost a day of the week. And how does that then render your experience of time? Does it make your time go faster? Does it slow down your time? So those are all kind of questions that I was trying to answer through the collection as well. 

Making Time  

The Artist made a film of Time Clock Piece. It’s stitched together from photographs he’d taken of each time he stood in the same spot when he punched the clock every hour on the hour for an entire year—a total of eight thousand six hundred and twenty-seven clock punches. (he missed a hundred and thirty-three of them.)  

The film works like time-lapse photography: one hour is collapsed into one second, so the Artist appears to be shuddering slightly in place, the creases and wrinkles in the gray uniform he wore every day rippling as though a parasite were crawling underneath the surface of the cloth. His hair sprouts from his shaved head and grows past his shoulders. Next to him is the punch clock itself, the hour and minute hands spinning wildly around the dial like an out-of- control time machine. From beginning to end the film is about six minutes long.  

When life is reduced to its minimum, he said, time emerges.  

Alice at the bodega, deliberating over brands of beer and distracted by the resident cat, gray with yellow eyes, licking furiously between his toes on top of a stack of delivery boxes. Near the register a customer called out his order for a ham sandwich on a roll, pickles, provolone, no onions. She was late for dinner party at Nobu’s. His latest project involved collecting grocery lists that he’d found during his walks through the city. He’d buy the items on the list and take photographs of each arrangement. The dinner party was a way to use up all the perishables he’d accumulated—eggs, nopales, half-and-half, tomatoes—before they went bad. 
 

“I’m making the food up,” he warned Alice. “It’s too crazy for a real recipe.”  

Alice told Nobu that the project made her think of the gig economy shoppers she sometimes saw at the grocery store, identified by the cheerful carrot on their polo shirts and the intensity with which they stared at their phones and raced from one display to another.  

“Except, of course, you’re not getting paid and no one’s expecting to receive your groceries on the other end.”  

“Maybe I do gig shopping if my art doesn’t sell,” Nobu said. Was he joking? Sometimes it was hard to tell with him; his aspect was generally absurdist, which both charmed and mystified her. Alice wasn’t sure how Nobu made a living. She knew he sometimes taught art classes to children and earned a commission here and there. The children, he once told her with good-natured resignation, made fun of his English.  

She’d first met him years ago at an after-party for a mutual friend’s art opening. At the time she was working a photo project (since abandoned) of chairs discarded in the streets of the city. They talked for a long time about their shared admiration for the artist Yuji Agematsu’s miniature trash dioramas—exquisite mucks of hair, gum, candy wrappers, and dead bugs that the artist, a pack-a-day smoker, found on his daily perambulations, then arranged in the cellophane sleeves of cigarette packs.  

Earlier that morning, Alice had read a news item about a New Jersey woman who’d been found dead in her car in a convenience store parking lot. There was no foul play: at the time of her death, the woman was working three part-time shifts for a donut conglomerate that used workplace efficiency software to configure her schedule. She worked mornings at the Newark train station, overnights in Linden, and weekends in Harrison, bagging crullers, mixing ice macchiato, warming up chicken biscuits and ham and cheese flatbreads, for $8.25 an hour. On the day she died, the woman did what she often did—crank her car seat back so she could catch a short nap between shifts, keeping the engine running for the heat. Except this time a gas can overturned in the cargo hold of her SUV.  

Was this a death by algorithm? For the purposes of the Project, Alice had been researching the effects of sleep deprivation. As a method of torture, sleep deprivation goes way back, at least to the sixteenth century. The Scots found it useful to shake out the witches among them. It was standard operating procedure in Stalin’s gulag. In Guantánamo, it went by the code name Operation Sandman.  

Three days into Time Clock Piece, the Artist would have begun feeling the effects of lack of sleep. First, a fog descends. As his brain mulched, the slightest irritant would set him on edge. Next, delirium seeps in like gas in a windowless room. As the months wore on, the Artist would have found it harder and harder to keep his eyes open, and when they were open, his dulled brain would barely be able to process the sensory information his eyes took in.  

Which was why he eventually had to rig a system of twelve alarm clocks to go off all at once. Still, that was not enough. He set the alarm on his wristwatch next to a microphone and attached that to a loudspeaker. Still managed to sleep through more than a hundred clock-ins.  

When we sleep, we can’t work, we can’t shop, we can’t eat or drink, we can’t download, surf, or stream; our movements can’t tracked be by a global positioning system; the movement of our eyeballs can’t be mined for data. Human beings used to sleep an average of eight hours a night; now it’s down to six and a half.  

The punch clock was invented in 1888 by an American, a jeweler who lived in Auburn, a town off the tip of the Finger Lakes. From her volunteer gig, Alice recognized Auburn from the return addresses on the envelopes sent by people in prison. 

When the clock was invented, time was too.  

Although the Artist’s dreams were constantly being interrupted, his dream life was where he experienced the greatest freedom from the project, even when the dreams were bad. I dreamt I didn’t want to be an artist anymore. Many times my dreams were about my illegality and the immigration authorities trying to catch me. Or sending me back to Taiwan, and I would try to cross the Mexican border to come back again.  

Punch clocks aren’t necessarily punched anymore. The new systems are biometric: you clock in by submitting your fingerprint, finger vein, palm vein, iris, or retina. Sometimes it’s your entire face.  

Time monitoring with a human touch is how one manufacturer puts it. Which is some bullshit. With biometric time clocks, you can’t, for example, punch in for a friend who is running late because of a child’s doctor’s appointment or who is hungover with his head over a toilet.  

The punch clock did not invent time but its surveillance.  

You could be friends with someone in New York and for years and never see the inside of their apartment. The dinner party was the first time Alice had been to Nobu’s. It was a dark one- bedroom railroad that he shared with a roommate in Ridgewood. The guests were piled around the aluminum table in the kitchen. Yusef Lateef’s light-footed Eastern Sounds blew from a laptop. Alice sat nearly in the lap of a woman in a scalloped white dress that reminded her of cake frosting. The woman was showing Alice her favorite app against wasting time.  

“First, you set a timer,” she explained in a vaguely Slavic accent, displaying her phone. “Then, look, you can see, this tree sprouts on your screen. What is so cool,” the woman continued, “is that the app is connected to a real-life tree farm—in Chile, I believe. The more time you spend on your activity, the more trees get planted.”  

“What happens if you get distracted?” Alice asked.  

“The tree, it gets sick and dies until there is nothing but a dead stump.” The woman shrugged. “I maybe kill an entire forest shopping for shoes and doing Tinder.”  

“Is there a version with a garden?” Nobu asked. His glasses were fogged up from the pot boiling on the stove, which made him look like a mad scientist. “I’d rather grow vegetables.”  

The same year the punch clock inventor filed a patent, a Buffalo man became the first person to be legally executed by electric chair. The theory was that being shocked with a high-voltage electrical current would be less painful and more humane than death from hanging. But it took two tries and eight minutes for the man to die.  

The first execution by electric chair took place in 1890 at Auburn State Prison, the second oldest state prison in New York. Auburn was also the first penal institution in the world to profit from prison labor. Historically, the men imprisoned at Auburn made clothes, shoes, boots, nails, carpets, buttons, carpentry tools, combs, harnesses, brooms, and buckets. They manufactured steam engines and boilers.  

They also made clocks.  

People on death row aren’t allowed to enroll in educational or vocational classes. This is because they’re understood to have no future, so such classes would be a waste of taxpayer money.  

But at San Quentin, the men on death row are permitted to take one type of class: art. The Artist is often asked how much he suffered to make the piece. He replied that he didn’t suffer. I have pleasure to do the piece. Some who have written about Time Clock Piece point out how exhausted the Artist looks. Yet when Alice looks closely at the Artist’s face—in the film, in the photo stills—she doesn’t see it. What she sees is the will of a man stitching himself into time. Only after the piece was completed was the Artist disconsolate. He felt that way after all his pieces ended, he said, because it meant returning to the life of an ordinary man.  

The sort of the tragicomic concept of the quote unquote project is one of the things my novel grapples with, and the project being this thing that many of us work on that isn't remunerated for financially, but is sort of our soul. 

And what do we do with this thing, this project that we wanna make, that we can’t seem to not make or maybe feels scarily sometimes that we can all too easily discard because it’s like, this isn’t being—I'm not getting paid for this, et cetera, et cetera.  

So how do we make our project time, our art time, essential, not only for ourselves, but for a lot of our friends who make art and are always kind of waffling? How much time they're able to spend on it, how much they wanna pursue it . . .It strikes me as a lot of the caregiving that artists and editors give to each other, because we’re sometimes the only people cheering each other on through the really hard patches. So I think the Artist is really great to think of for that because of his intense devotion to his own work, which was largely ignored at the time that he was making it. 

An excerpt from my novel Activities of Daily Living which is partly about the durational artist Tehching Hsieh. 

Go with me here. The legendary actress Beah Richards once said she believed identity had something to do with love—with the degree of love that can be absorbed. Some questions for you: What do you look like when you are loved? How do you move? How do you breathe? What can you see that you might not otherwise? If I extend “you” from one to many (y’all) I might ask: What do we look like when we love ourselves? What can we move together when we are loved and when we love? Can we alter/altar our states of being to welcome it?  

I was loved. That may be the defining aspect of my being. I was loved by a family and a community fractured by the seismic wake of the serial assassinations of the Civil Rights Era and the subsequent rightward political landslide; a family and a community whose commitment to love was greater, for a time in time, than the impediments they faced. I was forged in a multivalent environment that held a distinctive Blackness borne of the meeting of Great Migrants and their children and their children’s children with New England Blacks and Caribbean folks; that also, however improbable this may seem to readers today, held a range of white folks including immigrant and first-generation workers, and, as in the case of my own mother and grandmother, folks who transgressed their whiteness in intimate and transformative ways through radical acts of love and surrender. The dignity of work was centered and the currency of local connection and community responsibility were upheld. I have said a million times this love didn’t have anything to do with people necessarily liking one another. It was not a shallow, sugary love. It was the love that asked us to face blind spots and willful ignorance, and to dare to name the unspeakable horrors in our histories. The sound of that love echoed through the air even as the occluding and corrupting force of Reaganomics strangled the vitality of the Northeast corridor and forced people into dire choices born from cruel material circumstances. It was the love worth dying for because it was the love worth living for. It was the love spun between upheaving Uranian sparks and limiting Saturnine rings.  

I was loved. And I loved. That love was an extension of will. A clear-eyed intention. That love was a choice—a series of choices, in fact. That love was a bedrock bond of community that depended on each individual’s contribution to the jam. That love was a force—a revelatory, binding and animating force. If identity has something to do with the degree of love that can be absorbed, as Richards pronounced, I say remembering and rememory (Morrison’s concept) has something to do with the force of love’s light. The clarifying fire that allows us to see trans- temporally, to crack open the silences, and to, as the Egyptian Book of the Dead says, “give a mouth to Osiris.” The myriad violences of the United States’s meta-narrative deform not only our capacity to prefigure but also the health of our memories. May light shine for all we who communicate across the ragged edges of our corrupt inheritance, who know that scrapes and deep cuts await, but who trust the scars as warrior marks, the near misses as echolocation, the continued practice as prophecy.  

SATURN: a. Hymn to Welcome; b. Hymn to the Record.

I really believe love dilates time. I think it is a force when applied that helps us to experience something. Talking about that eternal versus the quotidian, the materiality—it helps us to experience the ways in which we have been settled, colonized, by these external systems. 

And when we have a passion for something, whether it be for our work, for another human being, for a cause, for life itself writ large—time starts to move in different ways in our experience.  

And this was very heightened for me when I worked on the Saturn video. Two years ago, my mother passed away and just this Friday my father passed away. And I was with him last week while he was in his hospice. And one of the things that was so funny—my brother and I were there together—we would look up and we would look at each other. We’d be like, how long have we been awake? What did we eat? It just felt like time suddenly became this other thing than something that would be measured by a clock. 

And internally, there was a different kind of energy that I had. Like most of us, as a result of the pandemic, I’ve been so scattered, so distracted, having so many things on my plate. Suddenly I was able to focus on one thing and be at my father's bedside for eight hours in a row without even knowing that that much time had passed. 

I've always been interested in—when I think about the historical continuum of all of our cultural traditions that have in some way or another been violently affected by settler colonialism and its legacies—what it means to still find our unimpeded connection to love and how that love can create space that there's no way for them to settle. You can’t colonize that thing, right? But you can prevent us from being habitually engaged with it. We can be blunted, we can be wounded, we can be distracted.  

PHENOM  

TEMPLE

Sip on joy the purest drink Move to make 
Thought to think 
They can feel us from afar Avenues and boulevards  

White collar cannibal Whatcha gonna do Everyone's a tendon 
So who you gonna chew  

I will not equivocate 
If that's so let's celebrate  

Shamefully shame's claim on me Led my life with infamy 
But I don't call it 
I don't solve it  

I dissolve it Famously  

I've been so politely at the bottom Pull it tight boot strap 
Strap it on and top em  

I've been so politely at the bottom Pull it tight boot strap 
Strap it on and top em  

In the past 
I was patient Now I'm so tired  

Fa fa fa feverish few I will not drop it Power cowards never stop it 
I have nurtured 
You corrupted  

I am erupting Don't interrupt it  

Careful I'm an animal 
Trap trap trap 
First of the secondary class class class 
You know I don't trust you what's the catch catch catch Don't you fucking touch me I will gnash gnash gash  

Cause I am an old phenomenon And I am an old phenomenon  

Show them we believe  

See the unforeseen 
Sharpen canine teeth 
Get those ringside seats 
When the scorched of the earth Come back by sea  

Sip on joy the purest drink Move to make 
Thought to think 
They can feel us from afar Avenues and boulevards  

I've been so politely at the bottom Pull it tight boot strap 
Strap it on and top em 
I've been so politely at the bottom Pull it tight boot strap  

Strap it on and top em I've been so politely at the  

In the past 
I was peaceful Now I'm on fire I'm a creature I'm a feature 
Of the future And I am on fire  

But I am an old phenomenon  

I lost my city in the light of day 
Thick smoke 
Helicopter blades 
Heaven and earth I've never moved so fast You'll never know the fear your mama has I know your father can't call anymore  

He never meant to be a man of war 
But we found freedom what will you do now Bury the burden baby make us proud  

I lost my city in the light of day 
Thick smoke 
Helicopter blades 
Why would I bother to remember when Our people baby die and live again  

Look at this one 
I want you to see 
Fashion was high 
My hair was so long 
This was maybe '73 
You know I have been adored by good and kind men They sent their love with poetry 
By day I gave grand speeches 
At night, like you 
We danced to be free  

I lost my city 
In the prime of my time Mud 
Silk 
And the dust of life  

I was a diamond of the embassy 
It doesn't matter what I meant to be 
Girl you come from the fortunate ones 
Gold 
Sky 
And a first born son 
We don't have words for the way you have grown We'll always feed you 
You can always come home  

Why would a million dare sink in the sea?  

I don't want to say anymore But I have been here before I don't want to say anymore Find what you need  

I don't want to say anymore But I have been here before I have earned this sorrow Mine to keep  

I lost my city in the light of day 
Thick smoke 
Helicopter blades 
Why would I bother to remember when Our people baby die and live again  

I lost my city in the light of day 
Thick smoke 
Helicopter blades 
Heaven and earth I've never moved so fast You'll never know the fear your mama has I know your father can't call anymore  

He never meant to be a man of war 
But we found freedom what will you do now Bury the burden baby make us proud

The first and only time I’ve been to visit Vietnam was in 2015. My mom hadn’t been back in forty-three years. And it was so intense to witness her engage with it and what she chose to remember and what she chose to not remember. It took me months before I even thought about it, coming back. And it took me that time, those years of processing it, to better understand the legacy of war and how people choose to proceed. 

And I’ll say that my family—I’ve always been struck by how joyful everyone is and really light, my mom and her siblings, everyone who, over the years have made their way to the States, but have definitely lived and survived the war. They have this remarkable capacity to just be fully present and alive and happy, happier than I can be, and lighter than I have been. 

And with my mom, I think it's just this decision, to leave what is no longer useful, to choose not to take it with you. And it made me reconsider what memory is for.  

And Daniel, that’s what you were saying. You know, and I think we’ve all touched upon it, sort of the accuracy or inaccuracy of memory at a certain point is not relevant. It’s: What do we need memory for? Is it a safe harbor? Is it an indictment? Is it to remind yourself never to do something again? It’s useful to me to let go of the idea of maybe a fundamentally unsound documentation of time. And I think memory now is this decision to not suffer anymore. 

That’s what I’ve learned from my mom and my family. There are lyrics—“Why would I choose to remember?” It’s true. You feel as someone who doesn’t have that immediate connection to war: how insensitive is it, or how useful is it that I ask questions? What do I need to know from it that they don’t want to remember? And what kind of position do you put someone in when they’re surviving in a way that you’ve never had to? And so that’s my application of time and memory now for my own life and as I move forward,  

As a songwriter—I’m sure you guys have this too—you’re kind of confronted with your catalog. And at a certain point I realized everything captured so much pain and it had to, but now I’m done. In moving forward, what am I trying to capture? As a performer, what is the energy I want to create in my live shows? It’s such a symbiotic relationship, which is what Daniel was just talking about.  Like writers, they don't know what they wrote cause, you need that reflection. I'm a performer. I don’t know what I'm doing without an audience.  If I didn’t—if that didn't matter to me, I wouldn't tour, I wouldn't perform.  

So the exchange, the creation of that energy—people pay money and I'm there and we enter into a contract and this symbiotic relationship where I feel a responsibility to make sure that whatever energy and atmosphere I create is something that I would want to be immersed in. Because when they enter that space with you, they’re trusting you. I want them to trust me and I want to take you somewhere, but where is it that I want to take you? Not just to pain. I want to take you beyond that because I want to go there. I’m done with just pain. 

And then also, oh, with time, yeah, the, time is, time is so interesting to me in a more immediate sense. As a musician, there’s a ton of collaboration. And when you improvise with someone, you have to have an aligned sense of time in one way. But then basically you all agree to meet at different points, but how you get there is your own business, which I think is really cool.