Border Control: Performing Aural Blurring as Testimony

Abstract

Extract: Sometimes you are afraid to listen to this lady.

– Amiri Baraka

[1]Baraka’s poem, ‘Dark Lady of the Sonnets’, about Billie Holiday, is quoted in Griffin (2003: 314).

Blur comes and goes before the subject.

– Fred Moten

[2]Moten from his work Black and Blur (2017: 237).

How do the wayward testify? When their very existence is denied by the archives of history, what does it mean to listen to the testimonies of those deemed recalcitrant by structures of power? Saidiya Hartman defines ‘waywardness’ as

the avid longing for a world not ruled by master, man or police. The errant path taken by the leaderless swarm in search of a place better than here. The social poesis that sustains the dispossessed. Wayward: the unregulated movement of drifting and wandering; sojourns without a fixed destination, ambulatory possibility, interminable migrations, rush and flight, black locomotion, the everyday struggle to live free....