the territory of a question
What do you think of when you think about questions? The upward lilt of a voice? The feeling of inquiry, the urgency of needing to know? I’ve been thinking a lot about questions lately. In a recent newsletter, Jessica Dore wrote of something her narrative therapy instructor said, that “when you ask a question you’re defining a territory.” This makes sense to me intuitively, that the kinds of questions you ask shape what can exist in the answers. There are times I’ve been asked questions in a tone of unwarranted accusation, and my body leapt to defensiveness before any words were formed. There are things I’ve been asked that I desperately darted from, concealing my avoidance with language, because I couldn’t envision a world where I could respond safely and fully. There are questions I’ve held under my tongue until I was ready to return to them. And there are people who have asked me questions I didn’t know were possible to say out loud.
There are entire worlds held in questions. Whole selves we can offer to each other within the space of an answer. I wonder if this is why Black people have passed down traditions of call and response, because it’s a form of witnessing, a way of holding ourselves together. Call and response has a rich history in the vocal practices of the Black church, where greetings, prayers, and testimonies are collaborations between performer and audience. I didn’t grow up in the Black church, but its legacies have shaped what I understand about being part of a collective. Like many Black people, I’ve sat in countless events where the speaker opened with a robust “good morning,” was met with a lackluster response, then scolded the audience into answering louder, with passion. Call and response is the chant that opened every Soul Circus performance I went to as a child: “When I say big top, you say circus!” Even as I try to relay these experiences, I find myself struggling to translate them into written words. Italics and quotation marks don’t really capture the feeling of being part of a crowd held together in response, hyping a speaker or performer up in the way only we can do, energized by each echoing refrain we send out into the space.
There are so many forms of questioning we are subjected to every day. The questions asked by bosses about work completed and hours logged, the sterile language of state questionnaires like healthcare forms and license applications. Today I went to an auto show with my partner, and we each had to fill out a digital form before we test rode an electronic car. Answering the questions about car ownership and demographics was a mindless and irritating task. When it was my turn, I tried to breeze through my form even faster than they had, answering zero minors, not a Toyota owner, most likely to lease in 12+ months. We’re so used to being turned into data. I guess I want to ask better questions.
I’ve been attending a weekly writing/playing space led by Ica Sadagat (can’t recommend their School of Motion and Text enough). Today, as on other days, Ica asked a series of questions we wrote responses to before creating a shared list of answers. Like I so often do when writing with Ica’s guidance, I felt myself invited back into the flesh, gently pulled into a space of sensuousness, the opposite of resolution. Their questions beckoned me to start writing poems (?) I’ll keep working with, but I wanted to share some of them here, along with Ica’s questions, in the spirit of a sensuousness that’s free enough to stumble and revise in public.
What do you put in your mouth?
I put your sweetness in my mouth and hold it there, problematic and luminous. I put your fingers in my mouth, searching hungrily for grease and metal. I put myself in my mouth and say forgive me, I named my birthmarks after berries so long ago.
What do you put in your mouth?
I put my sauce there till I’m ready to coat, to consommé, to crisis. I put my beads there till my braids are long enough to jingle. I put my hands, my perilous hands, and tell them not to move until I say the word.
Where is your hunger?
In the soil. I buried it so long ago and I’m too tired to dig. Dregs, dream. It’s all the same to me.
How do you taste?
With my long hare ears, tuned as always to the storm, the weed’s tumble, tongue tantric with the grim light. I taste with the buds I lost to the peppers, the petals they shed, the parts of my tongue conscripted for war.
Thank you, as always, for thinking with me here. I wanted to offer you some questions for reflection, perhaps for answering, if they shape a world you can inhabit:
What is a question you wished you were asked?
What’s the last question that surprised you?
What do you ask when you want to see if intimacy is possible?
Is there a question you’ll never answer honestly?
Where does your most luscious question live?
How have you been taught to ask and answer? How do your people do these things?
Lastly, I’ll leave with you with an embodied call and response that’s been giving me life: this hustle dance duet with artists Peter Rodriguez and Abdiel Jacobson.