Tonal Drawings: the art form
by
Asili Ya Nadhiri
This work is the result of growing-up in the dialect common to the tobacco belt of southeastern North Carolina. My paternal relations were exemplar speakers and transmitters of this dialect. It was by way of them that I was baptized in the rhythms, metaphors, word usage, and word interactions that constitute this dialect—I really prefer the term language. Around the age of ten, this heavy syrupy African American dialect had already begun to churn and metamorphose inside me. And, I was beginning to feel that this language unlocked the artistic potential of English in the manner that mathematical formulae are unlocked (solved) for revelations far beyond the cognizance out of which they originated. Fifteen years later, when I began to systematically commit words to paper, I became more and more obsessed with furthering this realization by unlocking the dialect itself. Over time, it became apparent that the term poetry described only an aspect of my work: form and intellectual abbreviation. If this term (poetry) were used without qualification, I would be misleading my audience. In 1993, I began to refer to my work as “tonal drawings written in poetic form”.
What are the characteristics of this art form; how does it distinguish itself vis-à-vis other expressive forms? Professor Jerry Ward, Jr. (formerly of Tougaloo College and, presently, of Dillard University), is a very thorough commentator on Tonal Drawings; he describes this art form as follows.
Nadhiri has shared substantial portions of his “tonal drawings written in poetic form” with me since 1993. When I listened to him read from the early Humming Drummm Sung in soft pedal tones, I detected a challenging blend of the oral and the self-consciously literate streams of African American poetic tradition. Nadhiri was trying to create a new performance genre, one that integrates theme and thought (the poem) with musicality (activation of the poem in highly rhythmic renderings) and the visual (what sound and sense conjure of the reader/listener’s visual memories). . . Nadhiri’s sounds, resonating both the African American South and the Caribbean, immerse one in an awakening experience of language.
What Nadhiri brings to the foreground is a special morphological reformation of English; his handling of tense is especially important for reconfiguring our ideas about time. . . Nadhiri is not writing in Gullah but in a creative language that repeats some of the evolutionary gestures from which Gullah emerged. . . In what sense, we might ask, do languages open a vista on the deep anchoring of poetry in sound and a requisite human community?
Ultimately, language must communicate fully to serve mankind most effectively. That is, language must convey the message in its several aspects holistically. It must, therefore, be actively concerned with much more than words and syntax; language must, simultaneously, address the sensual, intellectual, and spiritual components of communication. I believe the deep southern rural African American dialects do this at a rather lofty level: They posit communication at the confluence of the sensual, intellectual, and spiritual. And, the highly participatory climate that is generated underscores the importance of another tool of the communicative process.
Several years ago, Professor Ward spoke to something that has been speaking out in my work from the beginning: staging the work in order to encourage the audience to consciously interact with the many layers present in it. Since that time, I have assembled a performance group and have begun to present my work as an ensemble in which words, music, dance, and dramatization embrace to communicate a holism. By this means, the work is (as the late Miles Davis said) “speaking for itself.”
My work is simply one of the many forms in which the eternal human soul continues to express itself. It is my work only because this manner of expression (tonal drawings) is taking form in me and is actively/passively manifesting an aspect of this soul as it passes on through me. And, I call it mine because it incorporates what I am seeing now in terms of the experience of Africans in North America: I perceive simultaneous signals promulgating within the internal/external worlds exacerbated in the evolution of enslaved Africans here in North America.
On one level I do this work because I have no choice; this seems to be the way in which I am to contribute to the well being of Allah’s creation. On the other hand, I am urged on by the desire to get this work to those African American people out of whose toilsome and bountiful lives it has come; especially, those who in the normal way of things may never hear or read my work.
Asili Ya Nadhiri
December 2003