Say It Back to Me 2021

Say it Back to Me (2015) is a work by Jamal Cyrus, Tia-Simone Gardner and Jessica Vaughn, that explores the spatial politics of Black sound as well as space in the politics of black sound. Call and response is a musical and rhetorical form in which a phrase is uttered or played by one individual and a direct “response” is issued by another. This project brings together recorded sound from a number of geo-politically saturated sites in and around Houston which include the Third and Fourth Wards, the Interstate, and Broken Obelisk (1967), a sculpture by the artist Barnett Newman. Broken Obelisk sits outside the Rothko Chapel as a monument and memorial to the assassinated Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. Woven together on this album are our captured recordings from Houston with archival radio broadcasts aired in the aftermath of King’s assassination. Also sampled here is the voice of gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, and the familiar provocative speech of Martin Luther King. Jr. himself.

We bring these materials together here in a form that pushes against the linear time of the sound track, causing strategic collisions between the past and the present that draw together questions of American citizenship, grief, and freedom. We recognize that we live deeply in and through place and yet we are always fighting with the problem of having been mis- dis- re-placeable which makes the history of African Americans in Houston and the (dis)placement of the Newman sculpture/King monument by the city of Houston a productive place to begin. What kind of dialogue, we ask might we posthumously provoke between King, Newman, and ourselves. And so, a series of calls and a series of responses was instigated. Say it back to me, as a phrase, goes beyond some call to recognize a speaker. It asks, or demands, a confirmation that you heard, comprehend, and are capable of recapitulating what I just said, a demand of confirmation that, perhaps, we rarely make as artists, one to another. The phrase, say it back to me, invokes a speaking ritual, orality and aurality, memorization and mimicry, all of which have been as important to the endurance and flourishing of black life in spaces that would rather it existed in only the most strained and captive modes under which life is nearly unlivable. Why sound, why the archive? It’s interesting at this moment and crucial to our work as artists, that we use our work to theorize what is happening around us. Why sound and the archive? Because we are living, we are the Living, among believers, philosophers, and practitioners of Black Death. Because sound is so real, even if we cannot “hear” it sensorially, we can feel it, and feeling is some marker of our aliveness, of the involuntary response of our bodies to the call of sonic vibration…Why the archive? Because it is often thought of as a violent site of static death, but it is also a site that we can query and worry, if we have the right questions. It does not contain any infallible Truth, but rather bits and pieces of our pasts that we can stitch together with the fictions of our imaginations. We have some questions, it has some answers. So perhaps we can reimagine it as space of ghosts, not dead things, but infinite human aliveness, creative immortality. This project has the opportunity to truly produce out of ephemeral ghostly objects, sounds, and stories, some kind of Black life-matter.