i.

Vipassana, translated roughly as “insight,” is a long-developed meditation technique of observation — observing the movement and sensations of the body on a molecular level. Ideally, meditators sit in complete stillness, breathe a natural, unforced breath, and feel the atomic choreography within — sensations of pleasure and pain as they arise and pass away. This practice is meant to enlighten a person experientially unto impermanence. 

One parable I’ve heard while studying Vipassana is one of a parent watching a venomous snake slither toward their curious child. Just because the parent meditates does not imply that they simply observe the child being bitten. Meditation does not constitute inactivity. When action against something is needed, the meditator moves consciously and with compassion to reduce potential harm. The practice of observation — that is, observing what is happening without reaction or judgement — does not mean (as it’s been said) that meditators are indolent or allow themselves to be “walked all over.” In fact, the morals and merits found through meditation inevitably inspire great action. Recall, if you can, Thich Quang Duc, the monk who burned himself alive in protest of the Vietnam War. Meditation does not mean that you don’t move to save your child from the snake — it means you move with awareness and fight accordingly. 

fahima ife’s Maroon Choreography embodies this sentiment. 

I first sat down with this debut book outside a cafe in New Orleans, the same city where parts of the book were written. Whirs of slow traffic and low chatter filled the street corner. I was maybe ten pages in when this quiet was swallowed by a marching band from a neighborhood school. Brass and drums rumbled down the street, enlivening the whole intersection; then they rounded the corner opposite the cafe and kept moving, volume tapering off. 

New Orleans is known, of course, for its music, for Mardi Gras, for storms, floods, festivals, huge parties — even crime. Chaos, energy, creativity. But, perhaps, what is lesser known is that this town contains a peculiar stillness. The cafe where I sat, opened in the mid ’90s, has long been a refuge of tranquility. The “hangover of bohemia,” as I’ve heard it called, is a place to waste entire days reading, resting, philosophizing with others over cups of weak coffee. No booze allowed. New Orleans moves, walks, and drives slower; everything starts late. Residents relax on their porches or stoops for hours, just observing the world go by, whether it’s a brass band or brood of chickens. It’s a city of (absurd) balance. 

As I continued reading, I picked up on the book’s own equilibrium: an acrobatic poetics alongside pneumatic pause, density within spaciousness, words and the berth between the words, action and breath. The book was a balancing act: simultaneously studying and teaching, sitting and dancing, breathing and fighting. 

Through ife’s densely poetic and philosophical prefatory note, the reader learns of the book’s becoming, of the “feral spirit of study,” and then “slips inside” the choreography to come. It moves in sequences. First, in what is called “recrudescence,” we find ourselves floating in the seductive, chthonic, cosmic inception of life (or the “afterlife”) through “night’s moist opening”— this sort of (re)birth, “when anamnesis / and nothing / drifts”, where “what heat / we were hinged as // was always with us”, a “blackness” that “glistens” and begins anew. This sequence parallels, synesthetically, the similar twinkly, ghostly, emergent structure to what jazz violinist Michael White has done with his album Pneuma. It too is sequential — and (re)born from nothing-space in “a glint of silver slivers,” the notes, like ife’s brief lines, dangling… then pulling you through a dynamic, sometimes tense, voyage.

The second sequence, “porous aftermath,” begins with the image of seven individuals with “tear-stained cheeks and aching backs their / sounding feet ruined from / rigid cane.” Who they are we aren’t quite sure, but they’re refusing, breaking form, escaping “between plantation and fecund / swamp” “at midnight at thieving / hour they are drifting / on bruised legs // and nearly failed lungs.” These seven, possibly a family, possibly an apparition, a figure, exist “between plantation memory and cosmic impulse.” “porous aftermath” is written in tercets of disparate length and drags across the page in 33 sinuous parts, ending notably on the word “sugar.”

“nocturnal work,” the third sequence, opens with a list of acknowledgments, a “with” which pays homage to the poets and writers who helped generate the coming work. All 22 poems have their own titles. Some are straightforward, like “post-acid” or “means of evasion,” while others are more provocative, like “the blood of a new place drank in their faces as a new moon” or “anamnesis, amanuensis,” which is a poem on its own, but in the context of Blackness and written history, is another altogether (that which is lived and remembered versus what’s been dictated through textbooks). “nocturnal work” jumps from what seems like more personal experience — from love, intimacy, identity — to visions of the poet’s grandmother, Levada Harris, “a woman who could not read or write in her time here but who continues reading and writing through me.”

The final sequence, “maroon choreography,” is a formless lyrical essay on form. It begins zoomed-out on Black social life, black study, starting with the “collective ache” that is the dearth of sovereignty. It tells (more personally than the prefatory note) of the poet’s intellectual and fugitive practice:

i began to think of (black) study and to study blackness in terms of breath, as in how the wind moves inside and outside the body, what air gives us. …i began to understand the whole project of enslavement (also writing, also language, also money) and its afterlives, created a series of errant portals, a series of openings, a series of exits to exist outside. in the quiet, i sat and breathed in the sentient energy of all those former bodies (those temporary flesh realities) fleeing the ephemerality of want. 

And slowly it begins to zoom in, to wiggle, to ascend, to speak of things and locations in Louisiana, of methods, movements, dancing at midnight, of Wayne McGregor, Alice Coltrane, Hiroshi Yoshimura, and the “cross-pollination” of it all, of us all, as one humanity.

In this breath of cross-pollination, what follows these four sequences is what ife calls an “errant coda,” a bibliographic composite: an homage to the musical, artistic, intellectual, and poetic works throughout time that helped to call Maroon Choreography from “the depths”. This sequence is probably the most unique because you don’t commonly find, in contemporary poetry, praise for antecedents and no litany of edifying artists and their work(s), in and as the work itself. This coda is printed in a multidirectional and progressively overlapping manner, giving a body to a lattice of spirits.

And finally, there is the “anindex” (a word coined by Fred Moten), which, in Maroon Choreography, is a poetic index of black study that “defies alphabetical impulse.” The anindex references the muted mu concepts as they exist within the pages of this book. Mu as in Nathaniel Mackey’s wandering band of jazz artists, mu as in the nothing space of Zen Buddhism, mu as in the words whose utterance most amuses my tongue.” 

As you can see, our poet, speaker, guide, offers themself through various slants. From the armchair, on the wind, in the grass, from “the field.” We are spoken to directly, then cosmically, from webs of mycelium, from the undercommons. We’re addressed through murky temporalities, “on the other side of sugarcane,” by and through progenitors, be it the poet’s late grandmother or undocumented descendants — maroons.

ii.

Seven years were spent at work on this book. Seven years identifying and refusing the snake. In ife’s words, seven years “cauterizing my relationship with this colonial language and its obsession with documenting the world and its bodies.” Seven years in study, in practice.

Maroon Choreography exudes a well-rounded, well-into-the-wee-hours devotion to practice. It feels complete, balanced. When I finally closed the back cover (the final word, by the way, is air) I felt blanketed and put to rest. It felt simultaneously final and eternal, existing in its afterlife within me, practicing its theory, rattling softly.

“transmutate it - Practice so you can move it - Put sequins on it - Call it practice” 

Practice is a word we tend to save for certain (in)activities. Sports, dance, meditation. I’m going to baseball practice. We have dance practice later. What’s your meditation practice? But true practice permeates all aspects of social, aesthetic, devotional, emotional life. I’m changing my codependent tendencies by practicing interdependency. My poetic practice involves reading before sitting down to write. This metanoia, these commitments to personal improvement, require the “cauterization” of baggage that may be inherent or habitual, but are ultimately intrusive and obstructive. 

This could mean enduring painful conversations when improving communications skills, participating in an extremely difficult 10-day meditation course to better calm a damaged mind, or giving up power — abandoning institutions after identifying racial privileges. It’s learning to develop our thought patterns from what has perhaps been engrained, engineered, or just too “easy” not to change, and learn from, study, seek refuge in what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call the undercommons. A place, a state of mind, maybe, where social study and personal practice — specifically against public policy and normative (often colonial, capitalist) ways of living and thinking — make way for more constructive, healthy, communal avenues of living and thinking. 

This practice, it’s easy to forget, is not in the final result — some trophy or insignia or feeling — but in the work itself, in the unveiling, because the final moment is only everything that leads up to it. Likewise, in terms of meditation, we are taught that by groping for the final goal, for enlightenment, for some end result, or bliss, some ultimate relaxation, we have already failed, thus deviating from the path entirely. The path is clear. We’ve been shown where it is. Now it’s only a matter of commitment, practice — an undertaking up to no one but ourselves. And it’s not this professional-managerial adaptation of “wellness” we see in the workplace, but the personal-managerial, which doesn’t distract or gain capital. Meditation, too, is a rejection of normativity, of what is “easy,” habitual, because it (in)actively pushes against detrimental inherited systems. We find this liberation through practice. 

Moten, when speaking on musicians Joe McPhee and Pharoah Sanders, said in  conversation: 

in terms of practice — let’s call it the musical education of a saxophone player — a sort of journey towards virtuosity that maybe parallels the human journey, the journey of the human subject towards the good… studying the music is coming to grips with the fact that the music is the making of the music — it’s not the sound. The sound is the appearance which tells of the making of the music.

With our ear (eye, mind) tuned this sort of way, we find this making of all over the place. We Insist!, Max Roach’s suite from 1960, is centuries in the making. We hear it in the politic of the record, but specifically through vocalist Abbey Lincoln's screams in the Protest section of “Triptych: Prayer, Protest, Peace.” These screams are indeed the sound on the track, but they are a culmination of something exhausted and lingering. The album was composed by Max Roach and Oscar Brown Jr., but due not to the clashing of social orientation but the vessels of political expression, Brown backed out, ultimately disappointed with a number of liberties Roach took, particularly Lincoln’s minute-and-a-half threnody. Refusal is everywhere, even, at times, from within.

And just like many virtuosic jazz musicians (or Black artists at large) who have used this subversive (anti)framework to push against normativity, to push against white categorization of what is “good” or “appropriate,” ife takes this fugitive aesthetic a step further and asks: “what if the entire narrative of enslavement and settler colonialism is just echolalia?” Echolalia — a word in the book, among countless others, I did not know — is defined as: the often pathological repetition of what is said by other people as if echoing them. In my interpretation, ife is contemplating the uncommon hypothesis that our predispositions (in terms of race, age, gender, sexuality, etc.) are “reanimated through an ongoing sense of self-regard,” thus trapping us in a cycle of inherited narratives, or a “relentless pride in looking back at, of having moved through, of being connected to, history.” 

This is provocative. 

And it parallels this notion in Vipassana (and meditation at large) that there is universal human suffering which we cannot escape — and the only way to mitigate that suffering is through devotional, personal work, through meditation, through practice. And it breaks concurrent form even further by pushing back against even the most popular of Black arguments. This is not to underplay what has historically been done — and what is maintained through policy — because the snake is real, and real ugly — but there is great power in the disintegration of popular narrative. And I think that is exactly what ife is trying to do here —through the dismantling of institutions like the colony, the academy, the assembly of the self.

iii.

Throughout the book, aside from the coda, the ethereal fugitive seven, and Levada Harris, there aren’t many mentions of individual characters, entities, or even much attention on corporeal Blackness at all. There is a lineage, for sure, an aeration of ancestry that transcends time and space, title and strophe; it honors those who have come before, not through solidity, rigidness, or form, but through the spirit, through what ife calls “our mutual air.” 

In the poem dedicated to Levada Harris entitled, “more poverty interwoven with equal happiness,” we are reminded of the joyous resilience of Black social life despite enforced, continuous privation. In the title, yes, but also in the subjects’ valor from “a rented room / made of metal and want / more want than metal” whose “lightless light became a swaddle” “ascending the mountains / like a new moon’s beams,” “and / though / there was / no money / the joy / it grew / as air / and / {   }.” 

It’s very telling of Black history and technologies, of movement, different types of movements, that when the susurration of white supremacy is repeated, its refusal.— embodied by subversive acts and art, communion, love, resilience, education, and suitable aggression — is the strongest fight against it. It’s telling because love runs rampant despite severe violations of conduct. And how is that? Why is that so? This is what S. N. Goenka, a teacher of Vipassana, has called “pure love,” this unconditional, everlasting love for oneself that then radiates outwards to others, like a “signal between spore and star matter.” ife’s criticisms, theories, imagery, and movements are brought on (and hang on) as a result of this pure love. 

As noted, love extends back through time and space — amidst this pneumatic swirl of spirituality by way of the coda and the carrying of their grandmother — and is a sign of ife’s (and our) tendency towards reverence. “i became fixated on tracing how the transcendent ones — living and dead — show up to help us, those of us still cast on earth and in the ground, to move away and move outside this simulation as it holds us,” ife writes.

In the early, warm months of last year, fahima and I were walking through what the poet had called the “wild” part of New Orleans’ own City Park. After a sweaty, rejuvenating walk, there by the water, they asked me, “who from your past do you call on in moments of creativity?” I had never been asked this. After some thought, I told them I felt a strong connection to my ancestor Elijah, a journalist and editor of The Observer, an abolitionist newspaper, who was martyred by the snake in the 1800’s. On the surface, I feel a connection to him as a writer and publisher — but on a deeper level, I feel this line of connection because everything I’ve read about him, his character, his practice, what he stood for (freedom of speech in a time where the mere mention of abolition could be [and was] fatal), and his refusal of the young nation’s form, has persisted, in different ways, through descendants, down the line.

I thought about the way Maroon Choreography practices this line. Lines of ancestry, lines of poetry, the continual line of the breath — these lines that, if we tug on them (or just cradle them) long enough, can situate us in a state that defies space-time, a state in the now that breaks the insanely tightened form we’re all subject to, the default human form that is against this very moment, that is distracted, distraught, distressed, a state that when it’s realized, truly experienced, transcends us into the mu, steals us away from the agitation of the self, of the institution — beyond form, “not bound not resolving.”

In the second sequence, “porous aftermath,” we find full pages devoted to this not —  “not blue / not sugar overdose / not cane sick // not flesh.” It’s this not-ness, this not doing, this not boxing in of, this breaking free, refusal of category, system, prison, plantation, this fugitivity; math, as in strict formula, a form, a binary, and then the afterlife, the (t)hereafter, the post math, breaking of math, of form, the shattering of formulas, thus holed (porous) and then held; this line, the breath, lineage; this refusal, the fugitive; this practice, the “tongue dance to move without form.” Maroon Choreography breaks predetermined form far beyond mere poetics. 

In their words:

the bodies, the forms… emerged through deeply embodied, sensory, playful (meta-auditory) engagements with various works, with putting language to work, with forcing language against itself, with breaking language — breathing life back into it, locating an interior ambience. more than burrowing in, or jumping on, or following in the sound steps of those who came before me, i was (and remain) interested in the rhythm of enacting (queer)black radical traditions of breaking form and from, of making new forms derived from those prior fugitive movements undocumented as the wind.

In The Undercommons, Moten writes “Form is not the eradication of the informal. Form is what emerges from the informal.” Anthony Reed says that Black literature, especially Black experimental writing, is a medium that, using Cheryl Wall’s phrase, “worries the line.” Maroon Choreography does just that. It’s a radical work that emerges from centuries of the informal, from the pneumatic symphony of all of us, but specifically of Blackness, “in the slickness of joy,” and takes to the snake with great force. ife proposes questions that are rarely asked, perspectives refusing popular thought. They invite us to sit with them, to float, ascend, transcend, practice, to move through something not written by the choreography of coloniality — and to breathe “in the upper air unseen.”