The Ethnomusicologist, An Empathetic Earth Creature?
Photo: @greg_rosenke
Shapeshifters Cover, Aimee Meredith Cox. Illustration: Jamea Richmond Edwards, Power as Actualization.
Here I am sitting in mossy green chair. In her cozy office, swallowing dry air, my stomach thumping in fear. I am working up the courage to tell my professor I need an extension for my write up on Aimee Cox’s Shapeshifters. Our past discussions weigh heavy on me as the only Black person in that classroom, in our whole Area. Unlike my non-Black peers, I couldn’t leave the subject matter at the thick white plastic table where we would convene, bathed in the brightness of moldy fluorescent light fixtures. On their computers they scroll through FB timelines of puppies and nonsense memes about Western classical music, but I have to reserve my rage. I am busy holding emotional space for a fellow Black grad student to process her professor forgetting to show up to her lecture recital. These kinds of neglect and micro-aggressions silently pass by in their day to day. Yet their disgust, their shock at ethnographic depictions of violence and discrimination haunting Black women and men musicians are heard loud and clear in class. I choose to push back with my limited vocabulary, articulating the peculiarity I felt in that space and other times I choose to silently endure. All this energy is stored in my body, I was supposed to be writing the night before our meeting but my body had other plans for release. My chest heaved, grasping for breaths that led to short endings and nervous shaking in my hands. Pacing back and forth in my living room, warmly lit by Christmas lights, I had a panic attack after a month of reading scholarship based in Black trauma in this seminar. These sensations were the beginnings of my racial battle fatigue (Yes, it’s a real condition. And yes, it effects Black women).
Photo: Christian Burton
And there are no pedagogical structures in place for me to process the trauma of that February. No restorative instructional frameworks are built into this course calendar, no chance to counteract the living hell of a Black History Month where most students and professors at my University were concerned with white Parkland students’ protest. It was my first BHM as a graduate student in a P.W.I., in an Musicology Area comprised of a majority of White women, two-mixed race women, a handful of white men, and two international women students. So there wasn’t much time for me relay all this to my professor before the visiting scholar lecture that was being held on the other side of the University. Tomie Hahn was sharing something special with us. We walked to a place on campus called the Globe, a hub for international students and D&I efforts, our path is lit by the hot Florida sun, as two ethnomusicologists of different gendered and racial realities. I told her I couldn’t stay long, because I wanted to support my friend determined to show up for her second recital. As we got to the street facing the Globe, I managed to the get words out. “I had a panic attack after our discussion about Shapeshifters.” My professor looked worried replying, “Oh shit, Danielle.”
We sat next to each other, pomp and circumstance procedures follow, introductions are made. Dr. Hahn wants to do an experiment, for us to feel the sounds our bodies make when we vibrate together. Taking up her large colorful elastic bands, she uses one to demonstrate the process with another professor, a former classmate. It proved to be an interesting exercise because they couldn’t be more different physically. He is tall, over six feet, bald, blue eyed, white and male. She is short-statured, Asian and female, with streaks of wise white tresses framing her long brown hair. We see them a few feet apart looking away from each other connected by a band of rubber. And we laugh at how easily she takes command of what he hears, recognizing his confusion and surprise of the sonic sensations in real time. These are instructions.
One person moves the band using their hands and arms while the other person stands receiving vibrational messages. Now it is our turn to try. My professor asks if I want to be her experiment partner.
So here we are. Our backs facing each other with a few feet between us. We enter the elastic bubble band and she’s a bit taller than me. Our teal orb is lopsided. Then Dr. Hanh invites us to tune in to our partners by quieting the noise of our individual bodies. We closed our eyes taking a few breaths together and the process of becoming one is complete. Something strange happened. I felt rhythmic thumps, at first they are quiet. As my breath grew deeper, the vibrations sound louder. I recognized unmistakable patterns of a heart, one I know it is beating blood out to internal organs that are not mine. And there it was, empathy.
Photo: @cristian newman
How human we were in that moment together, as different as we were racially and gender-wise, as traumatized as I was as by her course design, as her student. It all melted away. Thumping and jumping, I wondered if she could feel the beat of mine too. She went first, I stood still listening with all my body, feeling the intensity of the sounds my professor sent like waves to my center of my chest. They radiate down my back, clinking through my spine, speeding out to my legs. I listen. I listen and listen to the sounds between her world and me.
Now it is my turn. I start out simple. Pushing the elastic away from my body. I chart out constellations using the palms of my hands, my arms twist to extend this rubber which bounds me to her. The band is under my foot and now I’m a bass player kneeling overs , sliding my hands down a plastic fingerboard of my own making. My left hand is plucking along the string, my fingers hold it taut varying its lengths, but the band isn’t vibrating like it’s supposed to. It wouldn’t stretch like I know it should. Twelve years a violist, I know intimately how a synthetic string should move and bounce. I thought to myself, “That’s odd. Why can’t I will this pliable rubber beyond this point?” Dr. Hanh floated by the two of us, two ethnomusicologists lost in orbit in the Globe’s gray conference room. It was nearly silent, the only sounds audible to one’s ears were bodies shifting their weight to their partners. I heard Tomie whisper a gentle reminder to my professor to remain upright. Although she was standing her back was uncomfortably curving towards me, shrinking the band as I knelt away from her. Ah! So the fullness of the vibrations I doled out were not felt all this time. What a waste.
I think about this experience a lot. This moment captured the dynamic between this professor and I, how we failed to understand each other beyond our individual intentions. It reminds me to slow down and breathe when I am experiencing micro-aggressions and of the power I have by letting them roll down my back as an act of self-preservation. I’ve become really good at noticing how often my non-Black professors contort their bodies, their minds and actions in response to incidents of racism and classroom violence. They often overextend theirselves only to mishear me when I voice my experience. When our tears flow simultaneously in their offices, my professors misconstrue these moments as emotional connection, when really its a honest and eery post-racial overcorrection. Every intention I have of standing up for myself flies out the window when white women, and men, professors’ eyes begin to well. When I am unclear about the path discussions like this will follow, I would swallow some of the bite I anticipate in my words as a trauma response. Black people have been doing this for ages, and in the academic setting it shows up decontextualized in this way. These educators don’t mean to invalidate me, to cause such pain which contributes to the death of my spirit. I imagine it must be quite difficult for non-Black instructors to hold tones of deep anti-Blackness and racist histories in their bodies, sounding out in subtle ways knowing they never intend for timbres of that type to resonate. But these things do happen. I’m getting better at fine-tuning my responses to them in the moment, contextualizing my realities courageously no matter how jarring the dissonance.
