“Quid, Si Comantur?”: Pic(k/t)ing out Entangled Epistemologies of Ex(cess) in (Em)bodied Techne
~in which, a hairy explanation for the “unfunded”, liner notes for the BCAD production of Iphigenia in Aulis, and musing on our potential for chromatic classical futurisms
PRELUDE: Haley, Ashby, Greenwood
or, On Becoming Unfunded
I’m sorry if this planet that I’m living on is quizzical
My lyrical ambitions sometimes don’t ring a bell
I’m sorry if my visual don’t line up with my feelings
And my physical exhibit doesn’t represent me well
I’m sorry that I’m curious, delirious, and I don’t take life serious:
I mirror the life of a millionaire.
I’m sorry if I’m talking shit, but I really do mean well…
— Solange, “God Given Name”, Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams
First, allow me to introduce myself.
My name is Vanessa Stovall. I’ve lied and told tall tales my entire life. I’ve played the harp since I was 10. I’ve been reading Homer, Sappho, and Ovid since middle school. I’ve studied Latin since high school. I’ve studied Greek since undergrad. I’ve played the lyre since 2019. Most of my creative extracurriculars go towards theatre and writing novels. I am a playwright, composer, and stage performer. When the opportunity arises, I love dabbling in the glass arts. Due in small part to being raised in the Mennonite church, I have a trio of beliefs I keep identifying as: abolitionist anti-capitalist afrofuturist.
When it comes to antiquity I study mythology. My main interests in understanding why it is we’re on this earth is through understanding our belief systems. Especially lies, myths, fables, tall tales, and the things that folks dismiss from the categories of “truth”. I’m interested in these areas because that’s where I think I personally understand folks the best, where I can meet them where they’re at.
I think you can study a lot of micro-macro societal issues through mythology, because I believe that myths are one of the main ways we as a species encode information to one another. Haven’t some of your best teachers (or at least, the ones most sticky to your memory) been storytellers of some sort or another?
I was trying to think through a framework to study myth when I was applying for my PhD at Columbia, mostly built off of the research that I’d done in my MA as well as a lot of the research I did in Harlem alongside my masters— mostly through acquainting myself with a lot of the more recent publications on performance, genre, sexuality, gender, and incarceration in Black studies and building community among jazz musicians across the city. I knew music had to be a key part of it as I’d recently taken up the lyre, and most likely theater as well since I couldn’t seem to stay away from it no matter how hard I tried. And through studying more contemporary Black classicisms, I knew reception had to be included in there as well.
But mostly what motivated me was wanting to see more folks like me, especially other queer Black women. That was an epistemological framework that I wanted to work from. And it took me meeting other Black women for the first time in the field in 2020 for it to finally click for me.
First it was Shelley Haley at the Eos Africana SCS 2020 panel on “Black Classicisms in the Visual Arts”. Then it was Solange Ashby in February when she came to give a talk at Barnard on the dancers of Hathor. And finally, the night before my PhD interviews, Emily Greenwood gave a talk at Columbia on Aristotle’s rhetoric around slavery.
I first got the idea sometime between hearing Ashby and Greenwood speak, but it wasn’t until the morning of my PhD interviews that I definitively decided and started outlining a few different frameworks. Something in that “1–2–3…” pattern of Black female scholars of antiquity…
I wanted to study myth, music…and hair.
MOVEMENT I: HAIR (Textures, Braids, Extensions)
or, Curating Playlists
It pleased Medusa, when snakes laid close against her neck; in the way that women dress their hair, the vipers hang loose over her back but rear erect over her brow in front; and their poison wells out when the tresses are combed. These snakes are the only part of ill-fated Medusa that all men may look upon and live.
— Lucan, Civil War, IX.624–637
“Good” hair has no body
in this country; like trained ivy,
it hangs and shines. Mine comes outin clusters. Is there such
a thing as a warning?
— Rita Dove, “Protection”, Mother Love
“…it is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo. It is humiliating because it reduces a politics of liberation to a politics of fashion; it is humbling because such encounters with the younger generation demonstrate the fragility and mutability of historical images, particularly those associated with African American history. This encounter with the young man who identified me as “the Afro” reminded me of a recent article in the New York Times Magazine that listed me as one of the fifty most influential fashion (read: hairstyle) trendsetters over the last century. I continue to find it ironic that the popularity of the Afro is attributed to me because, in actuality, I was emulating a whole host of women — both public figures and women I encountered in my daily life when I began to wear my hair natural in the late sixties.”
— Angela Davis, “Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia” (various emphasis mine)
I used to braid crowns…
— Sappho Fragment 125
nappy-kinks
— Telesilla Fragment 723
— —
So to put things mildly, the hair of it all didn’t go over the best. But I also want to acknowledge that that was my bad — it wasn’t until one of the newer professors of the department asked a clarifying question to try and grasp what I was talking about that I realized where I’d gone incredibly wrong.
He asked about whether braiding was a methodology rather than an epistemology and it was in the middle of me explaining how they were both that I realized my error: each professor I talked to lacked the embodied knowledge to understand exactly what I was explaining. And mostly because of hair type.
~a brief history in racial pseudo-science~
The terms leiotrichous and ulotrichous come out of early 19th century French naturalist Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint Vincent’s coinage. Bory (as he’s known in his taxonomy abbreviation) was not a formal classicist, though he was one of the scientists sent on the Morea expedition and spent a time in Greece afterwards. But it is not his classicisms that interest me, but rather the two Greek-rooted words he classify the human race(s): smooth (straight) hair and wooly (kinky) hair — all 15 human races (a staunch polygenist, this one) could be divided between those two categories.
History with racial taxonomy aside — I actually quite like ulotrichous, and thanks to being a classicist I know that I can re-root the ways I use it outside of racial science and recover it for my own classicisms by way of Telesilla: her little fragment οὐλοκίκιννε oulokikinne “nappy-kinks” allows my mind to bypass Bory and seek a deeper connection with the word to an ancient poet whose fragments rarely get their due.
It’s from Telesilla that I received the first node around hair that I wanted to study: Textures. From Sappho’s use of pleikein “to braid, weave, twine, twist” for hair ornamentation and tall tales that gave me the second node: Braids. I also find it interesting that the striking plectrum that kataplekein “downbraids” and anaplekein “upbraids” a lyre is most often in the contemporary called a pic(k), which is also the most common comb Black folks use for their hair.
The third node, Extensions, hops from Greece to Rome, and actually goes back to my Latin high school days. The first time I became aware of how much hair seemed to matter to ancient societies was in third year Latin when we were reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses for the first time. In the first transformation of the epic, when Daphne turns into a laurel tree in an attempt to escape the predatory advances of the god Apollo, the latter says of her hair when he spies her in a bush:
“…spectat inornatos collo pendere capillos
et “quid, si comantur?” ait…”He peeps her natural hair hanging down her neck and says “what…if it were laid?”
— Apollo staring at Daphne, Ovid’s Met. 1.497–8 (translation my own, specifically centered in Black hair cultures, while also trying to maintain a level of corniness because…I mean, it’s Ovid)
This hair is inevitably the driving focus of the myth — it is an explanation for why Apollo wreathes himself with laurel leaves. By presenting him first as a critic of Daphne’s hair (and how it represents her status to him as an object of his desire) and then concluding the myth with him vowing to intertwine his “hair, lyre, and quiver” with her transformed hair (not to mention the countless mortals who will do the same worshipping Apollo), I can’t help but wonder at the role of hair extensions in Roman society.
Plenty of practical research on this has been done already by Janet Stephens, but I also note that she primarily uses leiotrichous or kumatrichous (wavy-haired) models to depict her recreations of elite Roman hairstyles.
Braided textured hair clearly mattered to the ancient world if the iconography from Rome and Egypt alone are enough to go by:
And folks in the contemporary with textured hair see familiar patterns in antiquity and are able to speak to it in ways that resonate with others:
The fact that mainstream media has paid more attention to the struggles and triumphs that Black women face regarding their hair in the past few years has seen a broader engagement around Black hair in general. Even John Oliver did a segment on it, which is usually an indicator that liberals are starting to feel guilty:
But I want to bring that knowledge around hair cultures to the table while deepening my understanding with other Black folks in the reading of ancient hair cultures. I especially want to root it in the texts that I read around myth and music, because that’s where I keep finding interesting uses of hair. And I have to wonder what hair cultures classicists have truly engaged in to study and discuss ancient hair. Stephens showed some of this bias with her research, but I want to take it further and so I’m thrilled that in the past year I’ve met several Black women and non-binary classicists who feel the same and that we’ve been able to start discussing things.
I also take heart from a lot of the research done recently in understanding the role weaving plays in ancient musical texts. I’m particularly moved by the research of Giovanni Fanfanni and the scholars at the Penelope Project. I’ve leant a lot on weaving terminology in my early studies, but I want to specifically look at ones related to the head — a type of weaving that you feel, that quite literally pulls all of the strands across your brain back and forth into different sorts of intricate patterns.
Look I know — it’s a bit out there, but it’s also genuinely not the part of my PhD interviews where I thought I’d get into a sticky situation with my professors (that’s the next section).
Yet I know that this was the part that professors were most ambivalent about — which was wild to me because it was the part of my research that seemed most likely to engage other Black folks and I’d just come off of a year and a half of hearing my professors talk about how the field needed to change and do something different.
I thought it’d be right up their alley, but I guess I was wrong.
MOVEMENT II: MUSIC (Composition, Performance, Choreography)
or, Composing Soundtracks
But Artemis swore the great oath of the gods:
By your head! forever virgin shall I be
]untamed on solitary mountains
]Come, nod yes to this for my sake!
So she spoke. Then the father of blessed gods nodded yes.
Virgin deershooter wild one the gods
call her as her name.
]Eros comes nowhere near her.
— Sappho 44Aa (Anne Carson translation)
How are you going to greet your wife when she’s standing at your door?
When she comes to claim your heart, your life, your body — then still wants more?
Will she find you bearing flowers? Will you greet her with a knife?
Tell me how — how will you meet your wife?
— Jason Webley, “Meet Your Bride”
Because of her beauty] Agamemnon, [lord of men,] married
Tyndareus’] daughter, dark-eyed [Clytemestra;
she [bore beautiful-ankled Iphimede] in the halls
and Electra who contended in beauty with the immortal goddesses.
The well-greaved Achaeans sacrificed Iphimede
on the altar of [golden-spindled] noisy [Artemis],
on the day [when they were sailing on boats to] Troy,
to wreak] vengeance for the [beautiful-]ankled Argive woman —
a phantom: [herself, the deer-shooting] Arrow-shooter
had very easily saved, and lovely [ambrosia
she dripped onto her head, [so that her] flesh would be
steadfast forever, and she made her immortal [and ageless all her] days.
Now the tribes of human beings [on the] earth call her
Artemis by the Road, [temple servant of the glorious] Arrow-shooter.
— Hesiod, Catalogue of Women XIX.13–26 (Loebs translation)
I was a heavy heart to carry
My beloved was weighed down
My arms around his neck
My fingers laced a crown.
— Florence + the Machine, “Heavy in Your Arms”
But you will the Argives crown, wreathing the lovely tresses of your hair, like a dappled mountain brought from some rocky cave, or a heifer undefiled, and staining with blood your human throat. You were never reared among the piping and whistling of heardsmen, but at your mother’s side, to be decked as the bride of a son of Inachus.
— Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis 1080–9 (translated by Helene Foley’s Euripides class for the 2021 Barnard Columbia Ancient Drama production of Iphigenia in Aulis under the direction of Elizabeth McNamara)
— —
It was deeply ironic to me that the Columbia professors seemed wary of my hairy pitch because I was wary of their utter lack of musical knowledge.
I was wary because one of my peers who graduated with a PhD focusing on ancient music knew next to nothing about ancient music. I realized this first being a chorus member in his Barnard Columbia Ancient Drama production and watching him not being willing to admit that he couldn’t play piano when he was trying to teach us music that one of his colleagues composed (the second choreographer had to take over music rehearsals). This was later confirmed by how he would dodge a lot of (both pointed and broadly general) questions about music that I would ask him directly. I thought I was just being paranoid until several other colleagues who were musicians confirmed that his knowledge was scant at best (identifying thirds as fourths at a talk? Just embarrassing dude…) and much more in the ~aesthetic realm.
I didn’t understand it until I kept hearing the same thing from countless classics professors:
“Well Vanessa…clearly you know more about music than I do.”
Isn’t that embarrassing? More than one professor who said that to me has published on ancient music as a topic and it astounds me how little you can know about a subject and still make a whole career out of it. But furthermore so much of the poetry we study was set to music — just because we don’t have the means to reconstruct it in its entirety doesn’t mean that classicists should ignore or overlook the fact that we’re studying music.
This was hammered home for me during my interviews on the final day when I asked one of the leading professors in the program why he specifically thought that I would be a good fit for Columbia (as I had been invited after all). He told me that it was a conversation we had had about music after a colloquium and he’d liked something that I’d said about Homer.
My stomach sunk as I remembered that conversation, because the professor had come up to me and asked me if I really thought that the Iliad and Odyssey were performed to music. I’d mostly laughed it off before realizing he was serious, and then I went in on all the obvious ways that the epics seemed like performance pieces — tying in both philological examples especially around repetition, but also speaking to the embodied experience one has when reciting it to a rhythm, and how speaking or singing along to an instrument has a specific kind of feel and the different ways you can experience that when engaging with Homeric epic.
The entire time I was talking, I kept making asides to the other student so that we could do an ancient music tag-team answer for the professor, but he just stood there as he always would, blinking at me and smiling quizzically.
There was no moment more disappointing in my interviews than realizing that that had been a standout moment for why a professor thought I should join his department. For me it was a moment when I clearly had to educate two people on music who knew less than me, when one was about to hand an ancient music PhD to the other.
By the end of that week I was deeply ambivalent about the type of research I could do at Columbia, whether or not I could actually be pushed and supported, or if aesthetes who liked how things sounded would cause me to mirror their behavior and languish into little topics that I knew nothing about. This was further emphasized by the fact that that department has one of the most brilliant scholars of ancient music, whose research I’m convinced will revolutionize the study of choral lyric — despite everything I said about Columbia, I will always champion Anna Conser and her research.
My relationship with Columbia probably would have ended there with them rejecting me but…
If there’s one thing I can’t really be ambivalent about, it’s an undergraduate who needs help.
Elizabeth McNamara reached out to me last summer about the music for the 2021 BCAD production. The 2020 production of Andromache was canceled due to COVID, and I was still reeling from the double punch of that and not being in a PhD program (not to mention…well everything that happened last summer) when Elizabeth reached out about doing Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis as a digital production. I’d known Elizabeth from when we’d been in Herakles together, but I also knew that she was a vanguard of BCAD — having been in productions since she was 16 and waiting all this time to finally direct…only to do so in a pandemic.
And when it comes to my interests around myth and music, there are three modes of engagement that I was most interested in: composition, performance, and choreography. What better place to study that than with a chorus?
The chorus of Iphigenia in Aulis are young newlywed women who come to Aulis to gawk at the Achaean army, and end up as accomplices in Agamemnon’s plot to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis so that the army can sail to Troy. The chorus goes from singing the myths of Helen (Parados and Stasimon 1 — as they themselves are potential Helens, on the brink of potentially betraying their husbands for the Achaean soldiers) to myths around Achilles (Parados and Stasimon 3 — as the potential savior of the plot as well as an object of their desire) to solely Iphigenia by the end (the end of Stasimon 3 and the choral Exodus — as they come to terms with the fact that Iphigenia should be one of them — an almost newlywed to Achilles — but never will be due to Artemis).
The first thing I noticed picking through the songs? Hair.
In the interest of keeping things short, I’m only going to talk about one of the choral odes to illustrate why I’m so interested in the intersections of hair, music, and mythology. In the second stasimon, the chorus sings a prophecy of the Trojan War to come: the fleet will come to Troy where the prophetess Cassandra lives, they will circle and attack the city, and the women of Troy will set down their weaving to wonder who will come and abduct them.
Of Cassandra, they sing:
τὰν Κασσάνδραν ἵν᾿ ἀκούω | [tan Kassandran hin’ akouo]
ῥίπτειν ξανθοὺς πλοκάμους | [rhiptein xanthous plokamous]
χλωροκόμῳ στεφάνῳ δάφνας | [chlorokomoi stephanoi daphnas]
κοσμηθεῖσαν, ὅταν θεοῦ | [kosmetheisan, hotan theou]
μαντόσυνοι πνεύσωσ᾿ ἀνάγκαι. | [mantosunoi pneusos’ anagkai.]…where famed Cassandra, I am told, whenever the god’s resistless prophecies inspire her, wildly tosses her golden tresses, wreathed with crown of verdant bay.
— Euripides, IA 757–61 (trans. Elizabeth McNamara)
I was particularly interested in this passage because of its attention to hair — the way that Cassandra shakes her hair back and forth (perhaps we can glean something of the choreography of the chorus from this chorus in this moment? Could they have been shaking their hair back in forth in a similar manner to what they’re singing about?), the attention to how she’s “made up” (kosmetheisan) with laurel (daphnas), and especially how this hair becomes the focus of the violence that they are predicting the Trojan women will face.
And while Ovid’s Metamorphoses comes centuries after Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, I definitely had an Ovidian lens on when reading about the way Cassandra was styled by the god when under his influence (especially a song ending on the anxieties of sexual violence). This was furthered by the fact that the original Iphigenia in Aulis was produced alongside the Bacchae, where Dionysus literally becomes a “hairdresser” for his cousin Pentheus (Bac. 934) to adorn him for his upcoming demise.
Because of this attention to hair, I decided to try and braid a canon into the first half of the epode of Stasimon 2 (in our production we cut the antistrophe) of the chorus’ voices while having the harp take over as the main melody as a nod to Apollo.
Πέργαμον δὲ Φρυγῶν πόλιν | [Chorus 1]
λαΐνους περὶ πύργους | [Chorus 2]
κυκλώσας Ἄρει φονίῳ | [Chorus 3]
λαιμοτόμου κεφαλᾶς | [Chorus 1]
σπάσας Πάριν Ἀτρεΐδας | [Chorus 2]
πέρσας κατάκρας πόλιν, | [Chorus 3]
θήσει κόρας πολυκλαύτους | [Chorus 1]
δάμαρτά τε Πριάμου. | [Chorus 2]
ἁ δὲ Διὸς Ἑλένα κόρα | [Chorus 3]
πολύκλαυτος ἑδεῖται | [Chorus 1]
πόσιν προλιποῦσα. | [Chorus 2]
I even composed each group’s phrases separately, trying to give more texture to each duet so that there could be more variance that the audience’s ears would pick up. I definitely made some mistakes pulling it together and it was probably one of the more difficult parts of the entire score for me to render into an actual track. But I found it a useful way to also break up the Greek for the chorus to record (not to mention giving me shorter snippets, which are much easier to redo than singing full strophes and antistrophes to a metronome).
I was also interested in playing with how a canon can braid and weave into music because the second half of the epode switches to the perspective of the gilded Lydian and Phrygian women that the chorus are imagining:
μήτ᾽ἐμοὶ μήτ᾽ἐμοῖσι τέκνων τέκνοις | [met’emoi met’emoisi teknon teknois]
ἐλπὶς ἅδε ποτ᾽ἔλθοι, | [elpis hade pot’elthoi]
οἵαν αἱ πολύχρυσοι | [hoian hai poluchrusoi]
Λυδαὶ καὶ Φρυγῶν ἄλοχοι | [Ludai kai Phrugon alochoi]
στήσουσι παρ᾽ἱστοῖς | [stesousi par’histois]
μυθεῦσαι τάδ᾽ἐς ἀλλήλας: | [mutheusai tad’es allelas]
Τίς ἄρα μ᾽εὐπλοκάμου κόμας |[Tis ara m’euplokamou komas]
ῥῦμα δακρυόεν τανύσας | [rhuma dakruoen tanusas]
πατρίδος ὀλλυμένας ἀπολωτιεῖ; |[patridos ollumenas apolotiei]Oh never may there appear to me or to my children’s children the prospect which the wealthy Lydian women and Phrygia’s brides will have, as at their looms they hold converse: “Say who will pluck this fair blossom from her ruined country, tightening his grasp on lovely tresses till the tears flow?”
— IA 784–92 (trans. Elizabeth McNamara)
The chorus’ Trojan counterparts stand at their looms speaking in an authoritative way (mutheusai) about their anxieties about the violence they’ll face on Helen’s behalf. In our production we ended the song at apolotiei, and I was originally sad to lose the rest of the epode — the Trojan women go on to even call into question the tale of Leda and Zeus disguised as a swan — but I came to be glad that we were ending on a verb of women being plucked away that homophonically sounds very similar to Apollo. I asked the chorus to really stress the apolo- in the verb to call back to the god’s influence.
I was also drawn to this song because the play is driven by the actions of Apollo’s sister, Artemis. One of the earliest conversations that Elizabeth and I had when we were trying to envision what a production like this could actually look like, I asked her about the gods haunting the play. Artemis was definitely a main one, but Aphrodite shows up quite a bit too (perhaps a callback to the conflict between the two in Euripides’ Hippolytus?), and there seems to be a fine line between Eros and Eris that Euripides seems to be exploiting from the prologue (75) to the parados (183) to the first stasimon (585–7). Elizabeth decide to add a physical Artemis to the production as a non-speaking roll to haunt over the actions of the characters.
Where I find the connection between Apollo and Artemis interesting for this particular play is that Iphigenia asks the chorus in the end to strike up a paean for Artemis (συνεπαείδετ᾽ Ἄρτεμιν [sunepaeidet’Artemin] 1491), which is a song that usually only men sing and is traditionally performed for Apollo. This reorienting of the paean to Artemis for the purposes of Iphigenia’s self-sacrifice also echoes our earliest extant stage version of this myth: the portrayal of Iphigenia in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. The chorus sings of her sacrifice (not consensual this time, they bridle her mouth to keep her from protesting) and how her eyes begged the Achaeans to remember the nights in her father’s halls when she would sing paeans for them (Ag. 246–7).
Simply put? There are so many nuances to pick out when you’re working with ancient myth and music, and I find hair quite a useful thread (pun intended) to study, especially when looking at musical mythology.
But also, being a part of a digital production made me realize how many different ways that Greek tragedy gets utilized off the stage.
One of the first things I did in preparation for the production was go through other BCAD productions to get a feel about how all these elements could come together, particularly ones that Rachel Herzog, our choreographer, and Anna Conser, our assistant director, had worked on in the past (most notably Ion, Trachiniae, and Herakles).
Having so many of them uploaded to YouTube was deeply help to help me visualize how so many different aesthetics from the production team could all pull together to make a solid final project. But I was also mindful of the fact that for the first time, we were doing a filmed version of a play, so naturally I also turned to the film adaptation of Iphigenia.
I also came to realize that Iphigenia’s popped up more than once on screen, but had a tendency to be in the horror genre. The most direct (and it’s still fairly metaphorical) interpretation of the myth I’ve found is in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
Lanthimos has definitely played around with some interesting classicisms, most notably Ovid’s Metamorphoses in his black comedy The Lobster.
Iphigenia also is mentioned briefly in Ari Aster’s 2018 horror film Hereditary, when one of the main characters is reading both Iphigenia in Aulis and Sophocles’ Trachiniae in his high school English class, the sacrifice of Iphigenia and the obliviousness of Herakles both being themes to highlight the experience of all the characters in the film.
Furthermore, there were definitely some interesting aesthetic parallels between Aster’s 2019 film, Midsommar, and the styling of our leading lady, as Elizabeth Heintges herself noted on her Twitter:
Finally, as the production was debuting, I realized that I was reminded of yet ANOTHER horror director while I was watching the premier — 2019’s The Lighthouse, directed by Roger Eggers.
I loved the arthouse feel that our production ended up taking on, and I was glad my music had shifted to reflect it. After listening to the soundscapes of Herzog’s Ion, I ended up watching Philip Glass’ operatic version of Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast quite a bit to create a more dreamy and impressionistic feel to the earlier songs in the play. One of my favorite elements of that film is the eerie statue of Diana that causes a most-curious metamorphosis at the end of the film. I loved the juxtaposition of our Artemis, who it was decided would not transform Iphigenia in the end of our production.
Before working on Iphigenia in Aulis, I’d already begun to have some thoughts about better integrating the horror genre with Greek mythology more generally — mostly in the form of Twitter threads; one on analyzing parallels between the Odyssey and Jordan Peele’s 2017 Get Out, one looking at katabasis and Euripidean choral lyrics with the same director’s 2018 Us — but now I think I want to focus more specifically on the relationship between the horror film genre and tragedy.
Plus I’m going to have plenty of time to — upon finishing the score for Iphigenia in Aulis I decided to actually put my money where my mouth is when it comes to ancient music. If I feel so strongly about it, shouldn’t I be doing more towards it?
And if I’m not going to get a PhD…why not spend the next six years writing soundtracks for every single one of Euripides’ extant plays?
MOVEMENT III: SYNAESTHETICS (Cosmetics, Hauntology, Alternate Colorisms)
or, Conducting Symphonies
I took the stars from my eyes and then I made a map
I knew that somehow I would find my way back
And I heard your heart beating — you were in the darkness too
So I stayed in the darkness with you.
— Florence + the Machine, “Cosmic Love”
A band of skeletons are playing — don’t act like you don’t know the tune
Your part is echoed in the path of every dead leaf blowing past
against a counterpoint reflected off the moon.
There is a banquet at the table — exotic cheese wines and cakes
And everyone of us is damned until we start to understand
That living is to gorge ourselves at our own wakes.
— Jason Webley, “Dance While the Sky Crashes Down”
In her eyes we see the tiny white snowcaps of mountains
The purple glow of distant stars
The blue shine of black metal
Red rose petals falling slowly through the sunny air
Orange clouds, pink moons on the tongue of the sun
Who knew heaven could kiss just like this?
— Janelle Monae, “Dorothy Dandridge Eyes”
Varicolored be Earth in her crowns mingled with all manner of shades
— Sappho Fragments 168c, 152 (remix my own)
— —
To start things off — I actually had no idea what to call this section for the longest time. For a while it was Aesthetics, then it was Extensions (for a hot second it was (n)extensions) then I tried a weird mash-up of the two, thinking through like…extension aesthetics? Aesthetic extensions? For two weeks it was Interdisciplines, but nothing really seemed to fit until I finally dealt with my issues with aesthetics.
Simply put, I have issues with Plato and Aristotle, so I’m deeply greatful to Brooke Holmes for throwing me her copy of James Porter’s The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience, which really helped to bring together the ways I wished to do research.
And so I finally settled on Synaesthetics (though I honestly may again change it one day) as a catch-all for the way music, hair, and myth play with the senses and experience. There are three fairly different ways that I would like to engage:
Hauntology — I hinted at this one a bit when talking about Iphigenia because Derrida’s concept is highly useful for music. I first came across it doing research on afrofuturism in music, but realized how much economy that concept has for classicists. Because in the end, aren’t we just hauntologists? Don’t we constantly encourage those spirits from the past to come forth?
Cosmetics — from the Greek kosmos, which also has so much economy when thinking through just how made up everything is — and how everything has a make-up. I was originally thinking it through as a good lense to talk about race in antiquity (of course race is made up, so how can we understand that make up in antiquity, the ways they make up and construct identity for themselves?) but now I’m convinced that it’s a good lense for talking about any aspect of identity, ancient and contemporary.
Alternate Colorisms — this one is for folks who experience colorism. Because I think we need to find ways of talking about colorism in antiquity and the different ways that can emerge across the senses (hence the alternate). And I say “we” because as a light skinned Black woman who actively benefits from colorism on a regular basis, I cannot be someone leading the charge on this. I’m deeply grateful to my fellow Black and SE Asian colleagues who do have more experience who’ve been willing to speak to me on the matter. But I need to be clear on this one — Alternate Colorisms should not become a concept that folks whitewash to talk about various forms of chromatic difference in antiquity. This is a type of embodied knowledge, and white folks have no experience of colorism so…please believe that if you’re a scholar who wants to use colorism because of ~aesthetics, I will show up to every single one of your talks and grill you on your use of that term.
But also, white classicists, please, run cosmetics and hauntology into the ground — I think they’re both super helpful for our field at this particular point in history. I think they’re helpful both towards identity but also genre. I don’t mean to harp too much on the horror point of it all — but given the inroads that have been taken towards understanding science fiction and fantasy alongside ancient myth, I really hope that horror also gets its due.
On the point of the horror film genre, I would like to bring things back to the final night of my PhD interviews, when Dan-el Padilla Peralta gave his talk on the “Haunted House of Classics”. I walked into that talk with my question already fully-formed, but I pivoted at the last moment. Simply put, my question was wanting to challenge Peralta out of his afropessimist diagnostic of the field and into figuring out some sort of afrofuturist praxis — why did Black folks have to stand stationary in a haunted house where our life force was being sucked out of us? To continue the vampire metaphor and give us some actual agency, couldn’t we instead shove that vampire outside of the house and into the sunlight, melanating the classics through afrofuturism?. But as I looked around the audience, I realized that maybe that was a question that couldn’t be answered that evening. Maybe that was the question that Black classicists were going to have to answer for ourselves this decade.
Black classicists have to consider the deep past where we do our intellectual work, the contemporary in which our bodies do that work, and the future to ensure that we can even exist in our work. It’s not easy, and probably why I have such a persnickety habit of breaking everything up into triptychs. Hair-Music-Synaesthetics is the way that I’ve broken up ancient myth into a triptych for myself.
But as I said in the prelude, I was looking for community, and I found it. Since the start of the pandemic, many Black scholars across disciplines relating to antiquity have been able to come together and form our own little collective. So if you’re Black and work or research around antiquity and would like to join the Afro-Ancientists, shoot me a message. There are over 20 of us now, and we’ve been having some great conversations. Our only rule: no tenureds allowed, sorry professors, but y’all have the security.
I also created this journal, Corona Borealis, at a time when I had no future in the field, a pandemic was mounting, and I had to leave NYC to live with my parents for the first time since I was a teenager. Over the past year it’s helped me think through and develop a lot of my ideas and art styles, but I don’t just want it to be for me. I realized that when I hosted Jermaine Bryant’s piece on Ovid and hip-hop that CB could become so much more, only encouraged by the retirement of Eidolon and the Antigone Journal being chill with platforming eugenicists.
It’s been true for months, but I figure I should probably state it outright: Corona Borealis is open for submissions.
I’m still figuring things out and I feel like many other young scholars are too. If anyone would like a space to figure things out without judgment (there are boundaries, but not judgement), then I would be more than happy to host folks because in the words of Willow Smith:
We’ve got so much work to do. And we’ve got so much love to give.
Because when it all comes down to it? I’m a queer afrofuturist anti-capitalist abolitionist who is convinced that listening to antiquity is one of the many methods we need to use to spark revolution in my country (and, given how pervasive our capitalist belief system is, potentially the world) in the coming decades. It’s kind of a wild thing to believe — again, why studying belief systems sustains having a hold on me.
Because what better place to start than said belief systems?
Don’t be mad that you can’t sing along
Just be glad you have the whole wide world.
— Solange, “F.U.B.U.”, A Seat at the Table
“Me and you was friends, but to them? We the opposite.
The same mistake: I’m in jail — you on top of shit.
You livin’ life, while I’m walking ‘round moppin’ shit.
Tech kid, backpack, now you a college kid.
All I wanted was to break the rules like you.
All I wanted was someone to love me too.
But no matter where it was, I always stood out:
Black Waldo dancin’ with the thick brows.
We was both running naked at the luau.
We was both on shrooms prayin’ facedown, waist down —
‘Member when they told you I was too Black for ya?
And now my Black poppin’ like a bra strap on ya?
I was kicked out — said I’m “too loud”
Kicked out — said I’m “too proud”
But all I really ever felt was stressed out:
Kinda like my Afro when it’s pressed out.”
— Janelle Monae, “Crazy Classic Life”, Dirty Computer (2018)
