DR. TSITSI JAJI | Words to sing in flight
The following is an essay by Dr. Tsitsi Jaji, the poet and curator behind the text of our Songs in Flight song cycle.
These are songs to care for our dead and make their memory a blessing as we strive to cultivate freedom in our time. Here is how the few words dedicated to these ancestors come to song: The idea of drawing poetry from what we could easily call runaway slave advertisements was daunting. In naming the database Freedom on the Move the historians who assembled it remind us these are truncated portraits of the brave men, women, teens, and children who stole their own bodies away, people who freed themselves by fleeing enslavement.
In approaching this project, I envisioned our collaborative art raising a monument to the fierce courage of those fugitives, while honoring the everyday losses of those they left behind. Choosing from the tens of thousands of advertisements was painful. It reminded me of the auction block, of picking out individuals with little understanding of their personhood. But today, these documents allow us to know their names. To know each one by name. And a little more: here are individuals of a certain height, build, age, gender. In some advertisements that is all we get, a stark reduction of real people into mere biostatistics. Their lives mattered: this is what the simplicity, the vernacular language, the clean short lines, and the folk images in some of the lyrics declare. In other advertisements details of what made a person memorable prove that even enslavers knew that the premise of chattel slavery – that people were things -- was utterly incoherent. This is obvious when we read of a man who speaks German, French, Spanish, and English…or a fiddler…or a pastry cook…or lovers risking capture as a couple…or a young woman whose enslaver knows her well enough to tell us how she wears her hair, and where to find the scar on her cheek. Phebe, the first woman I learned of when I came to the database. Say her name.
Say her name. As I was writing, the resonance between history and the present was undeniable. In the wake of the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd in 2020, a sorrowful energy linked the liberation work of our time to this archive. I sought out places and names that weighed heavy on my heart, trusting the authenticity of raw emotion. Even so, I was startled when, remembering Trayvon Martin, I found a Zimmerman in the database, and I was unsettled when a McMichael appeared not far from the Georgia county where Ahmaud was gunned down. As curator, I was blessed with the company of two brilliant poets, Crystal Simone Smith and Tyehimba Jess, who write in well-honored poetic forms– haiku sequence and sonnet. Smith vividly conjures a backstory for each freedom-seeker, lyrical and lucid. And Jess hears the mother-love in a Fisk Jubilee singer’s artistry, the alchemy of spirituals that transformed suffering into song. These are poems in chorus, for slavery is a collective human legacy, world history regardless of identity.
The Freedom on the Move database led the way. Designed so anyone may contribute by transcribing the old newsprint texts or proofreading the work of another, it summons multiple perspectives to meditate on what it means to risk all to be free. Our poems strive to preserve the memory of forgotten forebears, but rendering their stories in music lets them soar, a powerful negation of the terrible refrain of our times, “I can’t breathe.” Song is breath, and composer Shawn Okpebholo lets us revel in the rare talent and richly diverse colors in the voices of our performing artists. Our hope is that this call to liberation work resounds in each person who hears Songs of Flight.
December 29, 2022
