Dirge: Black and Indigenous Hemispheric Burial, A Sound Sculpture

Abstract

Dirge:Black and Indigenous Hemispheric Burial, A Sound Sculpture Tao Leigh Goffe (bio), Aparajita Bhandari (bio), Lydia Macklin Camel (bio), Delilah Griswold (bio), Leanna Humphrey (bio), Nusaibah Khan (bio), André Nascimento (bio), Chijioke Onah (bio), Rewa Phansalkar (bio), Marsha Taichman (bio), Chloe Tsui (bio), and Hanxue Wei (bio) There must be no idle mourning. —Shirley Graham Du Bois1 Collective mourning and mass burial are uneven territories of racial grief and grievances.2 The way societies honor the dead is often as much a celebration of life as an arena for singing communal sorrow songs. The landscape architecture of burial is always fraught and racialized because the afterlife is segregated not only by different death rites and rituals but by the epistemic violence that extends past death. The minor and melancholy key of Black life and mourning is connected to that of Indigenous life and mourning across the Western Hemisphere because of colonialism. The two are not mutually exclusive scales of relation because of the crimes of stolen life and stolen land, as well as the important fact that Afro-Indigenous peoples share the history of both ongoing events.3 The theft of the body and of the land is a terrain inflected by the asymmetric valuation and formation of race as it takes shape differently globally. Connecting the disparate geographies and grounds of burial in Upstate New York, the Caribbean, and New York City and a speculative environment in the far future, I produced the sound sculpture Dirge with twelve graduate and advanced students. A hemispheric hymn for the dead, this collective dirge takes multiple forms; the central component is a twenty-seven-minute experimental film. In five acts, we feature sonic and visual interpretations of the spatial poetics [End Page 463] of Black and Indigenous mourning across the hemisphere as a celebration of the livingness of both communities. Another component of the project is a podcast; and the third part is this essay, which forms a written guide articulating the collaborative process behind coproducing Dirge. Together we explored how unmarked graves of improper burial for people of color in the Americas are structured by the violent and accelerating dynamic of racial capitalism that unevenly distributes the risk of premature death, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore tells us.4 The culmination of a Cornell University architecture seminar entitled "Black and Indigenous Metropolitan Ecologies" sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, this sound sculpture was produced as a creative offering in a time of crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic.5 What sort of monument, we asked, could be built to celebrate life amid the harrowing stakes of mass death faced by Black and Indigenous peoples across space and time in the Western Hemisphere? As a collective of scholars and practitioners, how could we listen for the deafening din of state-sanctioned suffering with the riotous joy of Afro-Indigenous coalitions across space and time? Taking together the entanglement of the dispossession of Native sovereignty (stolen land) and African enslavement (stolen life) as foundational to a potential hemispheric politics of mourning, we decided sound would be a fitting medium for a funereal poetic sculpture. Sound sculptures take many forms, but most are intermedia time-based artforms that produce a soundtrack. The sonic register takes primacy and is often nondiegetic and nonlinear in its mode of composition. Under the frame of "metropolitan ecologies," I invited students to disrupt linear timescales and the binary between the urban-rural experiences. From a Black feminist perspective, I encouraged these students (several of whom are architects) to attend to the dark blueprints of race and space across the Americas. "Dark blueprints" is a phrase that Ben Platt, a member of the Dark Laboratory, my collective on race, ecology, and creative technology, used a couple years ago. I have not been able to forget it. Through literature, historical texts, theory, and film with special attention to the architecture of cities that might not be considered cities anymore, my students and I explored cemeteries as segmented cities of the dead. Hemispherically, from Brooklyn to Teotihuacán, we centered Indigenous architectures and infrastructures rooted in knowledge practices that Europeans depended on when they arrived with the aim of conquest. Black archaeologists such...