Samra Mayanja
Samra Mayanja is an artist with poetics at the centre of her processes. Mayanja predominantly make performances and films as well as writing. Her films are an effort to acknowledge, collect and archive accessible, decentralised and dislocated images of Black people and their environments – in an effort to commune disparate voices.
Mayanja’s performance practise explores how to generate collectively around and beyond what’s unconceived, lost, discarded, destroyed or arrives in tatters. The artist regularly holds space for contemplation and the creation of experimental reflexive processes with/for others – sometimes through movement work and other times through the creation of sound.
[Image: Samra Mayanja, still from ‘scripted for a wayward narrator’ 2020]
@samramayanja
Lately I have two voices in my head. The one that I think is my own and the other is my sisters’ handwriting.
As I got to the end of the sentence “If I told you…”, I hesitated and dreamt of swimming upwards up rain droplets, vines, lines, life lines, charge, frequency, something beginning with lullaby.
My sister, who’s handwriting I often talk to myself in, had tried to teach me how to swim by teaching me a song. Foolishly I thought it was the song that kept you afloat and almost drowned several times. So much so that she won’t talk to me about water.
Now I’m convinced that I could breathe under water if I tried just one more time.
Unfortunately I’ve learned to be scared of water unless it’s vertical streams leading to the clouds, which is the only place I want to be. Specifically this place my sister describes.
You take a pin and prick a hole in the cloud when you get there. Then you slip through the hole, where its apparently silent and the people don’t bother you. When she told me about her hiding place I stopped searching for silence and the thought of it really soothed my mind, soothed me good. What soothes me is not the silence, because I don’t believe that it exists, but the whistling sound as the outside slips through the pin prick and into the cloud. And even if the whistle fills the cloud, I know that we won’t drown there.
I want to be clear from the start that this story is about juggling a hovering dead body and keeping it afloat with pipes of breath. So here we go…
I keep hearing that ‘breath’ is dangerous, the word ‘breath’ is dangerous. Or is it ‘breathe’? Remind me to check that out in the morning. But regardless of the technicalities, it’s no harm to a dead man who died of broken lungs, or was it tapping the lungs…or full lungs…or erm his breath hid and then couldn’t find it’s way back out - so it was stuck?
Playing hide and seek with his shadow breath. Anyways, he died of something - but the bit that I do remember and the bit that I think about is how his body was floating just above our brows for several days as we argued about where he’d be buried.
The whispers in the changing wind is what kept him floating and by whispers I mean tumbling releases of breath. Kept him afloat until there was a grave somewhere for him. Now the trouble with displaced people is where to bury them, where do you bury those that will meet nobody they know in the soil.#
Alone alone alone. Perhaps they’ll have visitors but only the dead they know can know the dead they know. So what are we doing, so what do we do then?
People stayed on the phone to tell me they were juggling him, hoping he’d take himself to wherever it is that he wanted go, until well - everything’s until…
until the chiming starts and we saw a stranger smoking from the balcony, the light that hit the shadows that hit my cup and when I looked back his eyes were closed but I knew they were looking into me and I saw everything he knew - from beneath the soil.
One lady on the phone asked me once “do you have any ancestors here?”
I laughed at that bitch and belted “who doesn’t?”
oh, so, they left me running one night
knowing something I didn’t and that my breath was short that night.
and when I turned away from them I heard them muttering as though they were close
and when I looked once again, they were silent.
I forgot to mention there are no street lights at night, so everyone knows each other by the way they call the others name.
so when I shouted “family” and they stayed silent I knew that it was because they had decided to flee, but didn’t want to take me.
I started digging my own foundations where they’d left me, rather than step back several long strides into an empty house.
Then I felt shuffles, shuffling feet and shuffling hands and shuffling ground beneath me.
remember that there are no street lights here and it’s still night.
As the shuffles grew louder, more pronounced, fizzy even, surging out and reaching through my body
I realised that dents of light were dusting the floor and that they hadn’t left me but the whole world was warming up to dance in our compound. Circles with infinite rings, dancing into and around each other.
With only the soil as our witness - whose chest we beat until it was red.
We kept dancing, dancing for darkness, dancing deep into the soil and dancing so that no one would be alone at the worlds end.
Samra has been researching our PHOTOS and EPHEMERA collection. For more information about accessing Black Cultural Archives collections, please visit blackculturalarchives.org/collections