The Ineffable: A Narrative on Sound, Language, and Life
Obenewaa Frimpomaa
→EFS 2029
Redefining Writing Essay Contest Runner-Up Obenewaa Frimpomaa’s “The Ineffable: A Narrative on Sound, Language, and Life,” is an inviting persuasion, a warm manifesto. Through a soft, entrancing voice, Obenewaa builds a call for language out loud, arguing for song as a fuller form of expression. The essay itself plays with sound, reveling in the tangible experiences of spoken words and sprinkling in moments of repetition and rhyme that replicate the musicality being explored. The judges and I enjoyed dipping into Obenewaa’s memories and engaging in physical word play along with the text.—Meredith Barrett
Language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. … Its force, its ferocity, is in its reach toward the ineffable. … Whether through the choice word or the chosen silence, “unmolested” language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction.—Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize Lecture, 1993
As a young girl, I embodied this “reach toward the ineffable” that Toni Morrison speaks of. This force, this ferocity bound within a child, is quite the sight. The spirit of youth is saccharine and malleable as toffee; excitement plumes from its dreams. Mumma would tell me how her mother always heard me singing as they spoke on the phone. Grandma called me “sing-sing,” and I beamed in laughter at this sound. “Sing-sing,” how marvellous it was to hear them say. The bounce of the “ng” made me giggle, and I would often entertain myself with the feeling on the sides of my cheeks, fiddling with the sound like bubble gum. I don’t believe I called the thing I always found myself doing with my mouth singing. They weren’t exactly words. No, they were sounds, noises, formless things that stumbled from my lips, things I seemed to want to preserve within the body itself.
This early memory became the starting point of my inquiry into the ways in which we ought to keep language “unmolested.” I’ve come to identify sound as the state where language can be the most unbound and the most preserved. It resists containment in the way that the written word could not. I’ve found sound to be a kind of body that gives life to the lyric and the poem. It awakens its dormant potential for sound to be free in its purest form. This shift is where I bear and wield the weight of my stories, a testament to the human experience, the story of life.
It was intuitive, natural. I was constantly playing with my mouth, making sounds, tossing them against my tongue, along my throat. I fell in love with the feeling of sound vibrating inside of me, feeling the rims of my cheeks and my forehead, my toes lifting. Humming was not a pastime; it was the suspension of time itself, where the push of air from lips became free and unbound. I was entertained by the way consonants and vowels were unrestrained in my mouth, teasing through them, having them dance. I understand Morrison’s “reach” as my affinity for keeping sound, life, the ineffable inside of myself. This process informs my ways of being, thinking, and living, my language.
Even as my vocabulary grew, I had a fascination with the music in every word. “Soft” had a different way of playing the “s” sound—quieter, slower, simpler, hushed even further by the hollow, open “o” vowel, and sweeter too, lighter, even weightless with the caress of the “fft.” And, “hum,” the most wonderful sound to hear and feel. The vulnerable human breath of the swift “h” bleeding into the low and swaying “u” vowel, deep and abounding within my cheeks, and the sweetest, sweetest “mm” sound that is time itself moving and moving and moving ammber, sommber: I am succumbed. This way of experiencing sound became my “surge towards knowledge.”
Sound-making became the ineffable breathing inside me, pure, young, and full. The body takes in breath and breathes out sound; the body surges toward life, knowledge, and breathes out sound, wonder, and an essence of living. It was just like Pilate, a character in Toni Morrison’s novel, Song of Solomon. Morrison writes, “when she was neither singing nor talking, her face was animated by her constantly moving lips. She chewed things.” The same sensations of vowels and consonants are ignited in contact with breath and sound. And yet, these were not formless things to entertain a young, spirited girl; they felt raw, evidence of the realness of living, where the body can only just release. As I traced the contours of each melody of vowels and texture of consonants, I found more than sounds; I found in them emotions. I found
the embodiment of their physicality and their
emotional weight. However, when the voice
presses up against the air, cracks, and is finally exhaled, something is held in tension more than feeling or emotion.
It was only when I was reintroduced to Maya Angelou that I began to see how the tension in the presence and absence of sound informs the “reach” towards knowing myself. In an interview, Maya Angelou tells the story of how she silenced herself for six years on account of trauma, violence, and fear. Instead of speaking, she found herself in libraries, in books that spoke for her. A woman in her town, Mrs. Flowers, would come to her and read poetry to Angelou, which she adored and found comfort in. But one day Angelou remembers Mrs. Flowers telling her that she, Angelou, did not love poetry. She would never love poetry unless she spoke it. “Until you feel it come across your tongue, over your teeth, through your lips, you will never love poetry. Never,” Mrs. Flowers told her. I found in those words a meaning far deeper than I could conceptualise. I found in those words, more than those sounds, a space of reckoning. Young Angelou only understood the power of language as destructive; however, through poetry, she opens up to the high kinetic energy of language as a restorative power she can wield. With an awareness of sound, the written word is no longer stagnant, but indeed surging within histories and memories undefined. I found in her a sound, an emotion, and more, a story, a kind of internal healing through speaking. It was this harmony of ideas that became the summit of my romance with language.
I began to write poetry. I began to write songs. And the two practices were indistinguishable, as they had always been in my mind. The spoken living word was the spoken sung word. Both are held in the mouth, and both are released from the mouth, kinds of processing. In this space is a practice bent towards rhythm and metaphor. I found the origin of the lyric in the presence of the lyre in musical history, intrinsic to storytelling. Echoing Angelou’s sentiments, the written word is not separate from the spoken word. These were crafted with embodiment in mind, where all aspects of the lived experience converge in expression. Sound-making and storytelling are becoming symptoms of one another, moving into each other’s worlds seamlessly within my practice.
Within the object of a lyric, there is not only an image or an emotion, but also a story. Each glance, each physical touch with the sound evokes not only the sensual details or non-details of an image, but also a kind of storytelling. It is no longer something lost within the mind; the song in its physicality and materiality beckons a conversation to be had, something to be connected with and touched with others, something that can be passed on. My relationship with the song being a vessel evokes passage, evokes storytelling, and evokes emotion. In this way, the song became the body that was moving through the memory of the sense of something from the past, moving, emoting, and wielding energy, power, and connection.
In this same vein, Audre Lorde, in her literary essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” discusses the ways poetry acts as a kind of vessel of light—a lively source that reveals the same emotions, memories, and stories we carry within us. She says, “It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realised. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.” I find the magic to be the doing and undoing of formless sound within me, and this act of writing has now become not a way to contain the magic, but a surge to encounter it, see it, and consume it in its new density. I can feel an overwhelming sense as I watch the rain, and I say in my mind, Oh, look how the rain falls. I find my heart aches still, moans, but it is tightened somehow in this nameless stage. But when I sing with my sister, “oh, how the rain falls” in two bitter, low-hanging notes in dinumendo A minor, lingering on “aw” vowel—look how it releases us. We keep the essence of that feeling “unmolested,” but now we have encountered it, experienced it in that magic density. It is now illuminated.
Singing becomes a process of opening up oneself in awareness, vulnerability, and authenticity. It is the illuminating thing: the presence of life. If the song is something from my light which I have borne and my own breath brings it forth to walk and live and touch hearts, then that is a kind of presence of my life. The swelling as well as tension that was within my throat is now there, opened to be taken on not by the ear but by the heart. And yet, there are ways that my mouth can mangle meaning into sound just as forcefully as the ways their mouth can mangle meaning out of mine.
This realization leads me to a kind of complication within Morrison’s statement that confronts my own romanticizing of language. I do not believe Morrison condones the singular understanding of language as a destructive force, but I do believe she acknowledges a reality of a system that was created to be, in fact, bound. In many ways, I have often found myself in a space of self-binding and self-silencing as Angelou describes. In my efforts to reach and surge towards a deeper understanding of myself, I have broken, cracked, and even restrained my own magic on account of dissonance—a formless thing that threatened to form my sound, contain it. Where at one moment, I felt free to embrace the illuminating thing, I was conflicted by an undertone that told me such things were not meant to be seen. In the words of Carolyn M. Rodgers, in her poem “Breakthrough,” “the trouble / is I tell you, how can I / sound just like and only my self / and then you dig it if I could?” It felt strange to wonder what my sound was supposed to sound like, and I often felt like I erred on the wrong side. What was the right side?
There is in these words a constancy of self-consciousness that choked my adolescence. In trying, on account of the dissonance, to fit, mangle, force some kind of distortion of my sound into the essence of my life, there came destruction. The destruction and limitation of language itself to encompass the entirety of my ineffable, my life. The awareness shifts from the body that inhabits the sound to the body that wields it. It seems I have misunderstood the kind of power the latter truly holds over the former. This was the tension: my freedom in opening and my proclivity to closing on account of fear.
In her essay “Uses of the Erotic,” Lorde says, “We [women] have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings … The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us so docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined.” There is a fear that festers from that which cannot be defined, contained, or fully understood. There is fear in the force and ferocity that the spirit of a young black girl carries—a fear coming from herself. The strange dissonance that insists she ought to live up to a kind of life that is not hers. When I mangle my sound-making to be contained by that dissonance, I destroy its authenticity, I destroy what I know is true of myself.
I realise and respect the beauty that many things cannot be contained. To see myself as a kind of vessel constantly resonating became the sweetest satisfaction. I’m unsure whether it was the memory of “sing-sing,” the waves of happy tears in choir and theatre, or the long afternoons I would spend practicing longhand lyrics in a composition notebook in the warmth of July—but I was reminded of what it was to let language be and be with it. What it was was to simply linger, dwell in, and be filled and release fully formless things, to brush against them and share the stories they hold. When language takes on sound, it moves from fixed meanings to flexible, malleable meanings. When I sing, I use sound-making, image making, and storytelling, each addition becoming a more true way not to contain but to embody, to fully experience. The lyric doesn’t seek to be contained, but to be sustained, to swell in a living, moving feeling thing, to stay a while, and then be released in breath.
The body is the keeper of language and so the keeper of life. The burden of the writer is in the ways she operates within that power to shape language into its own body. When I see the power imbalance within the absence and presence of sound in space, I expose what manipulates the sound, what captures it, what silences it, and what opens up the space for it to resound. My creative processes within language and its modes of melody and inflection are ways I understand how I present myself in the world and how the world presents itself to me. We see one another when we speak, when we sing, and when we create, and it is not held finitely by constructs that restrict our range of motion. A flexible language is tethered to sound, I’ve found, and it is my way of unhobbling and freeing myself to reach toward something sweet and light as humming.
Obenewaa Frimpomaa is dreaming of the resonant, luminous, and dear.