Shit Talk, Scat, and Mess in Fodder | Teo Rivera-Dundas
April 6, 2021
Fodder Album Cover, Fonograf Editions, 2021
Douglas Kearney’s poems, essays, and librettos begin and end with cataclysmic mess. At the level of composition and embodied performance, Kearney’s work proceeds from a space where language is already a shambles: crowded out, overloaded, and weighed down by history. Rhetorical tropes like shit talk, the pun, the code-switch, the euphemism, and the mondegreen are deployed again and again, building consistent, deliberate messes of meaning that disrupt any notion of correct speech. In Kearney’s newest release, Fodder, the performative qualities of such a language take center stage.
Recorded live in August 2019 at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center in Portland, Oregon, Fodder finds Kearney collaborating with multi-instrumentalist Val Jenty as they twist Kearney’s poems into songs, choreographed dance pieces, ambient soundscapes, and some of the most searing moments of improvised banter put to tape. Where Kearney’s pieces on paper prioritize the gestural qualities of text itself, Fodder emphasizes their intense sonic qualities. Over Jenty’s reverb-drenched percussion and cavernous synths, Kearney seethes, screams, spits, haltingly interpolates classic verses from Eazy-E with exaggerated Louis Armstrong impressions, turns the audience’s gaze toward lurking white supremacy, and takes on the affectless inflection of a body trapped in a computer and the histrionic air of a circus crier at the end of the world. Key words loop and repeat until they are transformed, half-whispered utterances recur and bite as they become suddenly intelligible, phrases are punned into oblivion. All the messy qualities of Kearney’s writing, in Fodder, take on new dimensionality and urgency. In other words, sung, Kearney’s poems do mess differently.
My impulse to orbit mess specifically stems from Kearney’s 2015 book Mess and Mess and, which, like Fodder, toggles from form to form, in this case from poetry to essay to lyric encyclopedia to theory and back. The main performative function of the text, however, seems pedagogical: as it accumulates, a sense of mess likewise builds, one that is revealed only in part, examined only as it passes, and apprehended only ever incompletely. In a culture predicated on genocide, slavery, and white supremacist violence—an ongoing, daily mess of which the functionaries of power seem never to speak—the word mess also describes a mode of speech and method of survival that emerges from such a landscape. The deployment of willfully problematic, unfinished, euphemistic, and grotesque discursive strategies create new possibilities for truth-telling, and respond in part to normative modes of speech that produce none of the truth they hold claim to.
Throughout his work at large, Kearney places particular emphasis on the pun as a strategy toward productive mess. In Mess and Mess and, he defines punning as “a mess of message where mess means confusion and excess. Pun teems meaning. It is marginalized speech due to this willful and perverse disorder.” Later in the same book, he describes it as “some prima materia of signifyin,” and links this description, via footnote, to a definition of either punning or signifying or both: “that practice of shit talk that allowed black folk (who were legally and socially shit folk) to talk shit and not just take shit without ending up in deep shit.” As both literal excrement and term of racist signification, shit slips here between functioning as ontological subject and object. As a discreet, near-tangible object, it becomes some thing that can be talked or taken, doled out or received. Yet this exchange of talking and taking is by no means symmetrical: the actual practice of taking shit describes a capacity for receiving harms that run the full range of verbal and physical abuse, from daily microaggressions to systematized racist violence, while talking shit occurs at the level of language, and always in the margins or interstices between periods of taking it.
Fodder Album Insert, “That Loud-Assed Colored Silence: Scat”, 2021
In Fodder, shit shows up primarily as scat – a pun that teems meaning. “Scat is a shitty thing to say,” Kearney writes (and sings) in “That Loud-Assed Colored Silence: Scat.” “It is shit that falls language down.” Despite this, Kearney proceeds not only to say (and repeat) the shitty thing, but himself scats over Jenty’s ominous, claustrophobic accompaniment. We begin to understand this performance as a kind of pun in motion, signaling shit (scat, pun, shit talk) as something that can be retooled or coopted against its dominant, normative purposes. Because punning allows the Black speaker to talk shit and not just take it, it likewise offers a route around the ubiquitous and deadly progression of shit (in the form of racist hailing) leading to more shit (violence). Instead, Kearney’s use of scat/shit talk leads to a messy kind of world-building in language. The violence inherent to shit – or to scat, or to the canonized performance of scat – comes with the territory. Still, Kearney manages to use it against its original purposes.
What does it mean to perform with mess – to use it – in the face of the mess in which we live? Cathy Caruth, in her book Unclaimed Experience, similarly questions what it is to speak “around a crisis that is marked, not by a simple knowledge, but by the ways it simultaneously defies and demands our witness. Such a question,” she writes, “can never be asked in a straightforward way, but must, indeed, also be spoken in a language that is always somehow literary: a language that defies, even as it claims, our understanding.” In “I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always,” Kearney (his voice a rare, arresting monotone) picks apart the word “complex,” familiarizing and defamiliarizing it until it signifies “complex as in I had me a complex,” “complex as in their reasons for needing me to have an opposite nature are complex,” and “complex as in prison industrial” all at the same time. In the ongoing and endlessly compounded crisis of anti-Black violence in the United States, the din of such meaning-making, and its attendant complexity, slips productively in and out of our understanding. We see “complex” differently, as the mess it is. When straightforward speech reveals itself to be a site of whitewashing and domination, indirect modes such as these become the urgent necessity they always were.
This is where mess begins, and the landscape through which Fodder seems to move. Kearney’s multiple plays on shit/scat/mess suggest a kind of alchemy in language (here prima materia shows up again), suggesting, as they do furtively, generative modes of overloading toxic discursive processes from the inside. New modes of interaction with the always-already toxic artifacts of a culture permanently invested in anti-Black violence are forged, revealing not only the architecture of those processes but also potential modes and forms of speaking – and therefore of thinking, therefore of being –otherwise. In Fodder, glimpses of an otherwise come into view for a messy, indirect moment, moving on before they harden into any fixed shape. Our understanding may be claimed only to be defied. The mess continues moving.
Teo Rivera-Dundas is co-founding editor of rivulet, an experimental arts journal and publishing project. He is currently a PhD student in English Literature at UCSD, and is at work on a novel circling precarity and labor.
Douglas Kearney has published six books, including the acclaimed poetry collection Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016). His seventh book, Sho, will be out in April 2021 (Wave Books). He has opened for Amiri Baraka and has shared stages with Saul Williams and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. A Whiting Writer’s and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee with residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others, Kearney teaches at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.
Val Jeanty also known as Val-Inc, is a Haitian afrofuturist, drummer, turntablist, and professor at Berklee College of Music. Jeanty is a pioneer of the electronic music subgenre called Afro- Electronica (also called “Vodou-Electro”) incorporating Haitian Vodou rhythms with digital instrumentations by synergistically combining acoustics with electronics and the archaic with the postmodern. Jeanty’s Afro-Electronica performances include The Whitney Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and internationally at The Venice Biennale in Italy. She is a Van Lier fellow and was commissioned by NYSCA for Roulette’s Intermedium Residency. Jeanty has worked with a diverse array of artist including Geri Allen, Anthony Braxton, Terri Lyne Carrington, and Francisco Mora Catlett.
Fodder was released by Fonograph Editions in 2021. Track and image courtesy of Fonograph Editions.
