visibility
2017
sound recording and accompanied essay
00:54

“I am Not Your Negro,” the film adaptation of James Baldwin’s writing, has a voiced over narration of his reading by Samuel L. Jackson. I found myself questioning whether or not the voice I heard was Baldwin’s or Jackson’s. Various video footage of Baldwin speaking at interviews as well as during debates conducted at Yale University and Oxford are included between the narrated text. It became clear that the voice I was hearing was that of James Baldwin despite vocalized by Samuel L. Jackson. There is a doubling of voice through supplementary sources of that which James Baldwin actually said and that which he had written down. There is also the element of the unsaid, the social contextual information given to the audience through a historical montage of advertisements, clips of footage from the protests at Ferguson, images of President Barack Obama, etc.

Baldwin’s voice became infiltrated through a multiplicity of sources and the inequality of his own lived experience of inequality began to give voice, and was thus given a sort of grain, through the various other visual cues included in the film. The film echoed a multitude, a mass of people plagued by the ideology of race, through voice.

This brought me to the idea of the crowd. The crowd embodies not one particular soul, but a particular inner collective conscious that is similar to, though more generally directed, than that of the individual. The individual voice, subsumed within mass chanting, is the fundamental component of a protest acoustically as it is through its multiplication that the force of the meaning is conveyed. But, the power in the protest chant resides equally in its generality. It can be directed at one individual, but more often than not in recent times, it is directed at abstract institutions and ideologies. Baldwin’s voice, reiterated through speeches as well as Samuel L. Jackson’s voice, echoed and multiplied, reverberating throughout the film despite the words spoken by another soul. And yet it is the unsaid of the film, the lived reality of institutionalized racial inequality within this country that I heard.

On December 10th, 2014 I participated in a Black Lives Matter die-in at Bobst Library at New York University. I recorded the voice of the participant collective that intermittently expressed the words “I am not invisible” throughout my time there. If the linguistic sign ‘I’ determines subjectivity within language, all those voicing their subjectivity individually with the intention of voicing as a group their subjectivity, than the ‘I’ becomes re-introduced each time as a singular though signifying the masses. ‘I’ became re-introduced each time as invisible. Thou

gh it was clear that as we lied down there on the marble inlay of the lobby we were clearly visible, the meaning of these words resounded acoustically throughout the space indefinitely. As different parts of the protesters became out of sink with one another, sonorously, the chanting echoed and then echoed again within the architectural chamber.

At the end of the recording, a few voices resonate by themselves. The singularity of the statement “I am not invisible”, though, does not represent the singular individual who uttered it. The preceding litany of voices and cacophony of “I am not invisible” declarations negate singularity. What goes without saying, an element of that which is unsaid, is the recognition of the multitude, the “we”. In this regard, as I chanted, the exteriority of my voice, my soul, became that much more apparent, streaming along with the mass of other voices declaring the oneness that was, at present, unavoidably visible. The unsaid “we”, the voice of the crowd, and the said, negating invisibility proliferating visibility, makes clear that the voice is not only space, but can dominate and take control of space through the shutting down of other voices. As we lied there in protest, NYU guards stood by, seemingly shocked and unable to consider their next actions. Students’ entry to the library was obstructed by the bodies, their studies at a halt as the voices of the protest echoed throughout the cavernous lobby and seeped through the doorways of each floor. Others began to lay down, and as more and more bodies collected in unison, their physicality became a voice amplifying the resounding, though silent, “we”.