Signal, noise, and presencing Blackness

88 anguage, for the playwright andperformer Aleshea Harris, is medium and character at once. Her plays perform themselves visually on the page long before they reach the stage; dialogue leaps across margins, changing size and typeface the way a human voice might shift in volume or tone. As they reckon with racism and misogyny, centering Black characters and underrepresented geographies, the plays shine a light on what is often overlooked—about both people and the words by which they understand each other. In August, Harris spoke with her mentor, the poet and librettist Douglas Kearney, whose typographically conversation Aleshea Harris and Douglas Kearney Signal, noise, and presencing Blackness L experimental poetry collections have earned him honors from the Whiting Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, over the phone from her home in Los Angeles. (Kearney was in Rondo, the neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he lives.) Their conversation touched on translating the ineffable, contending with anti-Blackness, and the complex realities of anger and vulnerability. —the editors douglas kearney You and your work have been in spaces with varying degrees of support and varying degrees of resistance to what you were doing. Would you care to talk about how you’ve navigated some of that? aleshea harris Sometimes I still feel bound by resistance, external or self-imposed, to what I want to do. For example, with Is God Is (2016), I had moved away from a reactive space and was really dancing in my Black radical imagination, if you will. And then, with the success of What to Send Up When It Goes Down (2018)—and this moment that we’re in, and the way that some folks are understanding anew what anti-Blackness is and how it is destructive— there’s a feeling that again I’ve been pushed into a reactive space. A space where, when people want to talk to me on a panel about What to Send Up…, it’s about anti-Blackness and about my anger around it. Recently, I was working on a play that I had a tough time with. I was trying to do some of the things I had already done, I think successfully , in What to Send Up.…So it was like, “What else do you want to do, Aleshea? Where are you now in your journey, without the noise of white racist fuckery?” I ask myself continually, “Is it a betrayal to be like, ‘Forget that—I’m not talking about that?’” Is it a betrayal of my people? Of my purpose? But we don’t exist in a vacuum. So no matter what I do, that’s coming with me, right? DOUGLAS KEARNEY | 89 90 | ALESHEA HARRIS dk Right. ah What allowed me to finish that play—literally a few days ago!— was a reminder that healing for me is in the subversion of that noise and that expectation placed on me by other folks that I’ve allowed into my head to wag their fingers at me. Anything I do— anything I do—is going to be resistance. I know my own stories. I know some of the stories in the collective. So I can gleefully in my psyche be like, “I know what the fuck y’all want, but this is what I’m doing.” That’s what I’ve landed at. I felt such a healing in that. And it’s fun, artistically and aesthetically . It’s not the same old thing. But I think this question of whether or not to speak directly to the challenges of being in the minority must come up for all artists who belong to oppressed communities. Where are you with all of this? dk I love that you launched this in a way that talked about your agency. I hear in what you’re saying both awareness and a resistance to repeating yourself without having a particular critical interest in that repetition. For you, I would see that as also being about a sort of safety. And for you—as anybody knows who’s followed your work or had a conversation with you—that kind of safety is deeply boring. If there is one thing...