The year 2020 revitalized public discussion of books and reading. Once the isolation of lockdown set in, the reading lists followed, with many recommending books—Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Albert Camus's The Plague (1947)—that remain remarkably attuned to what it feels like weathering a pandemic. As most teaching and cultural institutions transitioned online, book clubs brought people together in the now widely recognizable frame of Zoom's gallery view. Then there were the lists and clubs that formed in response to news of police and vigilante violence against unarmed black people. Though Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor had been killed earlier in the year, the failure to hold anyone accountable for their deaths delayed a necessary reckoning. That arrived in May, when the release of cell-phone video of Arbery's killing and the sharing of witness videos of George Floyd's death reignited the Black Lives Matter movement and spurred what experts contend was the largest civil rights demonstration in American history (Buchanan et al.). Ibram X. Kendi's 2019 antiracist reading list suddenly became a template for similar efforts that sought to educate, inspire, and inform readers on why the phrase “I'm not racist” is “a slogan of denial” (Kendi).
Yet how deeply did these recommendations resonate?Footnote 1 Looking back over the past year, we could say a lot of reading was encouraged, and many books were ordered online, but there was little discussion of how we might read differently in the face of so much dread and suffering. The prevailing assumption was that literature could be read for its prescience or relevance, its correspondence with the now. While gratifying in some respects and useful in others, this approach tends to blunt our capacity to be surprised by what we read. By “surprised,” I mean the feeling that attends not to the small identifications we latch on to in making a text relatable but to the profound recognition of our present situation in a fictional world. I mean the feeling of resonance on levels we can barely anticipate. Surprise like this comes from a kind of reading that doesn't just hold up a mirror to our present but actively changes our perception of it.
The most surprising reading experience I had in 2020 did not begin as a conventional act of reading. It began as an act of listening. In July 2020 I sat down in front of my laptop and listened to the Philadelphia-based Wilma Theater's production of Aleshea Harris's Is God Is. The play, which debuted at New York's Soho Rep. in 2018, follows twin African American sisters, Racine and Anaia, as they avenge their mother's nearly fatal burning at the hands of their father eighteen years ago. Harris's drama does not speak of viruses, and it does not mention police. There are no white characters, well-meaning or otherwise, and there is scant sense of the environment, much less of climate disaster. Yet the Wilma's audio play allowed me to hear all these things, and more, in the course of listening. It compelled me to feel their accumulated weight.
How did it do this? I later learned that my attentive listening was in fact an open-ended reading all along. After the lockdown in Philadelphia was announced, the director, cast, and crew returned to the script to figure out how to move forward with a remote production in a time of roiling national crisis. Much of their plans for an embodied production, which entailed “big design” and “really cool costumes,” had been lost (Ijames and Adams). But rereading Is God Is allowed them to see how the resources for an audial performance were right there in Harris's words. Specifically, the way Harris arranges type on the page constitutes the drama's own dynamic enactment (“Cafe Chat”). The Wilma Theater's team discovered for themselves and then transmitted to me a timely lesson in reading. I picked up the script for myself and heard what they meant.
Published in 2017 by 3 Hole Press, Is God Is stages a hearing of characters’ efforts to reconcile past trauma with present-day anguish not only through dialogue and action but also through graphic design. In lieu of presenting the customary front matter, the script's third page announces:
The unattributed statement points to the generic hybridity of Harris's influences at the level of representation, but it also identifies how Harris transmits resonance. “Adventures in typography” names Harris's experimentation with the script form—its standardized layout, its segmented columns, its separation of dialogue from direction—in order to inscribe performance onto the page itself. It is a powerful instantiation of what I call black pagecraft, or the deployment of visual and spatial cues to create a soundscape for imaginative listening. In the published script of her play, Harris uses typographic experimentation not as a substitute for stage direction but as a guide for audial attention. This kind of attention, I propose, facilitates a more meaningful connection between reading and reckoning with a world on fire. It requires opening ourselves up to the way texts sound in their material forms. In what follows, I combine a listening to and a reading of the play to elucidate how 2020 resonates through embodied pagecraft.
Harris begins with a scenario that rings true to the experience of life under a pandemic. Racine and Anaia have been summoned from their apartment in the Northeast to a rest home in the South, where their mother is dying of an unidentified illness. The mother is simply referred to as She. In the Wilma Theater's audio play, we hear the inhale of a respirator and beeps of a monitor. She is unable to breathe on her own—a trait suggested by Harris's jagged typesetting, where spaces between and within lines mark the labor of utterance (29–30).Footnote 3 But this deathbed summons, She discloses, concerns a pain that runs deeper than her current predicament. When the twins were three years old, their father, in a fit of possessive rage, set fire to She, from whom he had been estranged. She says the girls tried to save her—an act of which they have only a dim memory but to which their bodies give scarred testament (38–39). Though She's monologue intends to bind the twins together more closely, Anaia shrinks back, lost in her own foggy recollection of the event. Her hesitation is conveyed in minute type size, as if she is struggling to make sense of the revelation in a whisper (40). Seeing this retreat, the ailing mother finds her strength and demands that Anaia and Racine kill their father as revenge (fig. 1). Hers is the voice of God, erratically yet emphatically laid out, and her will is made known in a way that confounds the twins’ subjective orientation (40–41). In the audio play, the chaos of “uh”s is echoed by the faint sound of a dog barking in another room.
A page spread from Aleshea Harris's play Is God Is.
Harris's pagecraft makes this soundscape available with the exception of the last sound effect. There is no mention of a dog in the rest home in the script, so its inclusion is a creative choice by the production team. The bark is a key element of the sonic disarray into which the twins are thrust, but it also creates its own form of resonance, one that loops into contemporary literature about black families living at the edge of humanity. Consider Joshua Bennett's deft analysis of the opening scene of Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones (2011), in which a pit bull gives birth to her litter in a display of almost violent self-dissolution: “Motherhood, as it is described here, is inextricable from the proliferation of brute force, chaos deployed in all directions. And this destruction is not at all separate from the in-breaking of life into the world but constitutive of it. There is no new birth without destruction, no life without a certain version of the world coming to a close” (151). This dog, China, does not stand in for the absent mother, Mama, so much as limn her absence, which is “felt everywhere” after Mama dies while giving birth to her third child, Junior (153). That birth hews so closely to death is an insight the dog veritably performs in Mama's wake. For Bennett, China's status as a nonhuman being holds up a mirror to the family's unreconciled feelings of anger and loss. China conducts such feelings in her very animality, her noncorrespondence with personhood. The audio play echoes Ward's representation at the precise moment when Racine and Anaia are reborn in the wake of their mother's violent demand.
Propelled by righteous anger, Racine and Anaia travel cross-country to Castaic, a rural community in northern Los Angeles County, where their father has settled with his second family: Scotch and Riley, sixteen-year-old twin brothers, and their mother, Angie. Though Harris does not have the family dog appear on stage, the words on the page assume canine ferocity when the twin sisters tangle with Angie. They call her “bitch” (83, 86–87); she hits back with “animals” (84, 87). The repetition of these fighting words escalates the conflict to the point of no return. Racine pummels Angie to death with a rock in a sock as Anaia “whimpers” off to the side (87). As terrible as the violence is, there is a surreal quality to its execution, notably when silence punctuates the combatants’ brief détentes. When Angie yells, “She should've left Him!” to the sisters, referring to their mother, the irony is that we know she has grown disillusioned with her husband and is preparing to leave him herself (85). Harris observes the suppressed truth of the statement—that it redounds on Angie—by having all three characters “speak” a pause, denoted by a dotted line (85). A similar thing happens when the sisters go undercover to catch Scotch and Riley unawares: they introduce themselves as “Twins,” a word that all four characters say at the same time, followed by another dotted line (91). Even though they do not know yet that they are related to Racine and Anaia, the brothers intuit the sisters are somehow more kin than kind. This moment of connection is fleeting, however, and the tragedy grinds on when Racine stabs Scotch. After seeing his twin perish before his eyes, Riley suffers a verbal breakdown similar in layout to the sisters’ subjection to God (fig. 2). Consumed by rage, Riley comes after Racine, calling her a “dog bitch” (109). The epithet is wielded like a weapon; it provokes Anaia into socking him in the head.
A page spread from Aleshea Harris's play Is God Is.
The complex gender and family dynamics of Harris's pagecraft align it with a black feminist tradition of typographic experimentation (Goldsby). Jacqueline Goldsby reminds me that Sonia Sanchez, for instance, deploys pagecraft not only to articulate women's self-determination in the age of Black Power but also to acknowledge black masculinity's silenced experiences of trauma and vulnerability. In her second poetry collection, We a BaddDDD People (1970), Sanchez inserts spaces to query men who conceal weakness beneath a heroic facade. In “a poem for my father,” she writes:
Though the “i” only appears in lowercase, the speaker's voice carries through this memory and holds the power of withholding over her father. His sexual drive, which is recalled by the speaker as “your pvt dungeon,” appears desperate in the face of her pauses. Sanchez is not identified as one of Harris's influences, yet resonance travels on frequencies of which we are never entirely aware. She, Sarah Webster Fabio, Toni Morrison, Harryette Mullen, Suzan-Lori Parks, Alexis Pauline Gumbs: all could be said to practice pagecraft in the ways I describe here.
The performative aspect of Harris's pagecraft reaches its climax in Racine and Anaia's showdown with their father. His rage over the murder of his sons, expressed in the phrase “Dog bitch” (117), is typographically matched by their joining forces to throttle him into nothingness (fig. 3). In the audio play, the thwups of rock on cloth turn into the squishes of rock on flesh. Their father, a character only referred to as Man, is pulverized. Racine then pours liquor over his body, strikes a match, and sets him on fire in an act of symmetrical violence for what he did to their mother. However, just after being set alight, Man manages to drag Racine into the blaze, taking her with him into death. Here Harris's pagecraft realizes its most profound force. As Racine burns alive, her dialogue stands in for the searing of the conjoined flesh of father and daughter: “b u r n in iss iss is b u r n i nn iss s ss ssss b urnin iss ss” (120). Realizing that trying to save Racine would spell her own death, Anaia shrinks back, refusing her twin and thereby separating herself from that which would consume her (121). The sibilant searing of Racine's flesh severs sibling connection through its utterance. In her final act of destruction, Racine has become not her mother's avenger but her father's child.
A page spread from Aleshea Harris's play Is God Is.
This fire in Castaic, California, burns in my ear and burns throughout the summer of 2020. Castaic was one of the many West Coast communities that experienced devastating wildfires from June through September of that year. Discrete human actions—some of them gender-reveal parties gone awry—that are magnified and fueled by conditions of global warming leave a scorched earth in their wake. But the searing of flesh, Harris's sibilance, echoes a tragic script even longer in the writing. Though Man is hardly excused for his actions, Harris aims to depict a whole family struggling under the weight of cyclical retribution. This cycle, as Hortense J. Spillers argues in her 1987 essay “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe,” is one of the enduring features of the afterlife of slavery. To the extent that enslavement “displac[ed] the Name and the Law of the Father to the territory of the Mother and Daughter” in social relations and cultural life (i.e., in the symbolic realm), “Daughters and Fathers . . . embody the double and contrastive agencies of a prescribed internecine degradation.” The wayward daughter, figured by Spillers as “Sapphire,” and the father barred from fatherhood, “her ‘Old Man,’” thus are mirror images of each other, enactments of the traumatic severance of family and personhood by property and the commodity relation. Black fathers and daughters “make doubles,” and, in their interaction, we begin to see “the socio-political order of the New World” (66, 67). Based on Spillers's account, we can understand Man and Racine's conjoining as a tragic reconciliation. It is a black feminist re-membering of a bond that has not been given a chance by our culture. In hearing it (again), I cannot help but think of all the black fathers—Kobe Bryant, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and many others—whose love for their daughters is somehow intelligible only after their lives have been cut short.
Racine's sibilance, which leans on the word “is,” inevitably brings us back to the title of the play. Before he dies, Man contends that Racine and Anaia's mother deliberately dragged them into the fire he had set. The girls were not trying to save her—they were caught up in her embrace. This revelation flips the world on its head yet again. In the final scene, as She lies on her deathbed, Anaia says she has a “baby comin” who will be named “Enica,” which is “almost Racine spelled backwards” (124). This entails the ultimate realization: God and Dog are mirror images, forward and backward. The directive to kill the father was thus not righteous or good but “cursed” from the beginning (124). In the script, Anaia is ready to strike She with the sock, but she lowers it in an apparent effort to short-circuit the cycle, to save her child from being swept up by it. The audio play cannot convey this silent act, so it delivers reverberation instead. When She says, “Iss real q u i e t now,” Anaia brings the play to a close with “Funny / I still hear noise” (125). Unsure of what that admission signifies (the recording ends on this note; the rest is silence), I am left to wonder about Anaia and Enica's fate. As I adjust to my surroundings in the present, I am given over to contemplating how the soundscape of Is God Is has amplified the “noise” of 2020 with almost striking clarity. I rewind the sounds in my head.
The resonances are unmistakable and overwhelming. How else to describe listening to She's labored breathing and thinking her days have been numbered by COVID-19? I could not escape the idea, nor the recognition that the pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on black communities, when Racine says she works at a day-care center and Anaia at a warehouse—a bit of dialogue that would identify them as essential workers (31). How else to describe listening to Angie, after Racine tries to grab her car keys, defend “her property” from being “stolen by a couple of thieves,” when it is the sisters whose childhoods have been stolen by Man (85)? One does not need a police presence in Is God Is to query why protecting property incites people's anger more than the damage done to human lives. And how else to describe listening to father and daughter's searing flesh and then hearing the lone survivor self-narrate, “’Naia lookin out like somebody could see her / without f l i n c h i n g” (122)? Harris slows the last word down so that we hear the echo of antiblack violence that subtends this story about two families torn apart from within.
Black pagecraft sets the stage not only for readings in the present tense, through what Nathaniel Mackey calls the “congeries of apprehension” facilitated by “mind's eye, mind's ear” (229), but also for future hearings, which are ultimately readings in the ear of the other. “The most important thing about the ear's difference,” writes Jacques Derrida, “is that the signature becomes effective—performed and performing—not at the moment it apparently takes place, but only later, when ears will have managed to receive the message” (50). The capacity to “receive the message” is not guaranteed, of course. It requires a reading practice open enough to allow for contingency and specific enough to activate a hearing at all. The “black” in “black pagecraft” moves along both axes, drawing on the resources of collective experience to meet the moment of history's unfolding. Which is why when the Wilma Theater had to go back to the text to figure out how to go on, they heard a script waiting to be read amid a pandemic, a movement for racial justice, and a summer of continued environmental devastation.
In its tragic key, black pagecraft lends us equipment for listening to the cumulative pain of our histories and to the present-day suffering around us.Footnote 4 It neither prescribes social action nor diagnoses social ills. In its almost interior attention to the mechanics of how the page signifies, black pagecraft resists the contextual compulsion to mean something now as demanded by reading lists and book clubs, or for that matter diversity statements and revised syllabi. In the way I have described listening to Is God Is, black pagecraft affirms literature as a resource for attunement, for a bone-deep hearing of the world as it exists, whenever that may be. Imagine the work we could do together, as scholars and teachers, if we trained our eyes to listen to black women's adventures in typography.
