Black women speak with each other in discourse and this book project through modes of call-and-response that affirm, disagree with, and elaborate on each other’s work. In her study on Black women’s caring and accountability, Marsha Houston notes that Black women’s communication with each other across generations and within communities operates on a level with which truth can be found in many voices and held all at once. To speak in a circle across time and space is an apt metaphor that includes the concept of nonlinear literary traditions, and for the purposes of this study, the time relative to knowledge production itself and the evidence thereof.

< Feelin

“Glossolalia” >

In this experiment, I speak in tongues, transcribe it, and see if Google’s translation software could decipher meaning. It did not, and in some sense, it did. It deciphered a meaning in my revisiting its translations. More meaning than I could cognate with the text of the tongues itself. The gift of tongues is not about meaning, but experience. I cannot translate the totality of that experience for you. But through the practice of poetry and the technology of video, I can offer its remnants in the video…

It is in honor of this circular tradition that I put Black women artists in conversation with each other in this project.