Between Flesh and Dirt

Abstract

Houston’s rap genre, chop and screw, focuses on the distortion of sound and voice; here, not only is the original song distorted, but the listener requires a slow listening practice to hear what could not hear before. I liken the methodological openings of a distortive tempo like chop and screw to the speculative openings needed of Texas’ archives of enslavement. Distortion, as a tool of Black archival practice, is also called upon by Sylvia Wynter who writes that “The Europeans usedwriting” to establish hegemonic authority. It was the privilege of legibility through a pen, writing, and creation of and dependence on the archival record that overwrote African diasporic knowledge production countering what is known, materialized, and recorded of the enslavement era. Rather, from the emergence of Black cultural spaces, the enslaved could articulate themselves in theworld, in community and in nature thus creating their own ongoing record of events. Here, these (il)legible spaces broke ground to disrupt this white hegemonic dependency on an archive as the sole proprietor of legitimate knowledge on enslavement. Archival distortion allows for speculative play in the illegible, and sometimes non-sensical, remnants of Afro-Texan women’s memory of living under enslavement. This text, thus, turns to an archive made of dirt. Building from Black Texan sonic legacies and, what I take up as a methodological intentionality behind chop and screw, I offer the slow ponderings of my dive into the difficult ways of preserving memory Afro-Texan women integrated within, alongside, and beyond the FWP archive. Afro-Texans, specifically formerly enslavedwomen, slowlymaking historical record of their enslavement illegible, or difficult to engage linearly. In other words, the FWP was not the “text [onto] which [their] social relations [we]re inscribed.” Taking rather literally Wynter’s turn to “grounds,” I, too, came to focus in on the important role of Texas dirt as an archive used to hold material and immaterial record of Afro-Texan histories. Dirt made portions of Afro-Texan women’s narratives illegible under the consumptive and dehumanizing nature of FWP archiving and plantation era violences seeped into its record. Simultaneously, dirt transformed what would have been archival analysis of relations occurring between Black flesh and Texan plantation dirt—an obscure relation where one is not too distinct from the other. It is dirt that pointed this text towards the consideration that perhaps the true archives of enslavement we study and hope to engage require a strangeness in response. Turning to the dirt of the Black South nods to its epistemological oddities that not only blur flesh and dirt through its consumption, but as an archive offers a space of fabulation where intimacy from it—what Yaeger describes as “flesheating, dirt-eating kindredness... of the hardbitten everyday”—may offer a cloudy complexity to how archival terror at the hands of early twentieth-century archivy was written and what Black archival praxes of escape and storytelling form.