Vusumzi Nkomo
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO ANTAGONIZE ARCHITECTURE? To have things spring up to fight you, grab you by the collar and beat you up mercilessly? What is it about your presence that animate things’ insatiable appetite and desires for your flesh, and desires to be nourished by your flesh? To want to literally eat you up? What does it mean to “magnetize”1 all this violence for no apparent reason? What makes you so openly vulnerable and available to be violated and accumulated endlessly? Why does it seem like seemingly inanimate things like architecture, like landscape, like space, like geography, tend to actively define themselves in opposition to you?
If Unathi Slasha’s world-making talents in Jah Hills2 are anything to go by, the prelogical & pervasive violences that constitute anti-blackness permeated this and Other worlds, and more horrifically, their prejudicial and discriminatory practices are a drop in the ocean of violence when one takes into account the frightening performances of Bhakubha’s ‘built’/material environment against the body. Something else, something scarier, is at stake.
The terror of rituals
In their essay, “Performance Geography: Making Space in Jeremy Love’s Bayou”3, Hershini Bhana Young invites us to a critical analysis of the genre that is “performance geography” whose central vocation is the interrogation of performances enacted on racist (and dominant) geographies and “landscapes haunted by plantation slavery”. Young, by way of Sonjah Stanley Niaah, argues that space, which is to say geography, in Love’s novel cannot be reduced to a mere template upon which the drama of slave narratives comes to life, stressing the inseparability of the narrative’s development and meaning from the landscape’s active “participation” in the novel, and its role in the reproduction of anti-black terror. To pen it otherwise, geography comes alive, animating the story and engaging in acts, or rather rituals, that are parasitic to Black people and our desires to remake space.
My appropriation (and inversion) of Sonjah Stanley Niaah’s use of the concept performance geography4 is an attempt to explore the geography and terrifying architecture in Slasha’s Jah Hills. I’m interested then in the grotesque and ritualised performative violences of geography and architecture constructed by Slasha, to think about, or more succinctly, to complicate how we make sense not of what we do to the built/material environment, but how we seem to invite the violence of the built/material environment; to be at the mercy and subjected to the violent whims of an aggressive geography’s gratuitous performances.
A strange geography
The process of dehumanizing-thingifying-zombiefying-sporhofying an “un-ngceked-ed” Jah Hills is set in motion, or worse, dramatically accelerated, when he is plunged into a “container made of flesh” dripping gore, mucus and slime. Here, architecture’s operational logics mark a kind of containment. This terrifying architecture assaults the senses of this Xhosa initiate (now a confused captive of Bhakubha) senselessly beyond rationality, beyond his sense of reality, without even trying too hard.
This space, this House (Red House) of slaughter that could easily pass as “brothel or butchery”, epitomizes what I call “abattoir aesthetics”5 with a fetish for fresh flesh. It is not only the description of the material of this geography that draws me closer to this work but what it does, unprovoked, as it “cracks” open, the ground growing lips that, agape, swallow sudden excreted vomit, continuously creeping a shit-scared Jah Hills, or how the “opening sucks, swallows me only to spew me out”. (Shit is wild: even floating “cracked clouds” embody surveillance tactics tracking him as he moves, as a spectral and tropospheric extension of the violence of the geography and its architecture. Shit is wild: in an act that completes his experience of upsetting the antagonistic ecological system of the land, the sky shoots a nail into his head).
In Bhakubha, piled-up dead bodies form hills giving the geography a genocidal edge; the land of “dead things”. More deadening is the sound of the place; a disturbing and debilitating sonic violence weaponised against his presence which is both nuisance and object of desire. Drilling sounds native to Bhakubha rupture his eardrums, The Witch’s bassy voice violates him with impunity, and laughter from the black roof ravaging his budding manhood, to jubilant skeletons excited by a “roaring sky” or godknowswhat.
Bhakuba is a built-hold with no recuperative capacity. It is built-environment that overwhelms, it’s harsh, wrenching and confrontational nature destabilises conventional ways of theorizing about architecture, space and geography. Additionally, Slasha deploys the [black] grotesque, if we are to borrow from Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman’s generative musings, “as an expressive mode that undermines the prevailing social order”6, in productive ways that critiques and indict the world, and thereby pitting Jah Hills against the world.
REFERENCES:
I use the word in the same sense as Frank Wilderson III (2003) in The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal, published by Social Justice/Global Options.
Slasha, U. 2017. Jah Hills. Black Ghost Press.
Young, H.B. 2015. Performance Geography: Making Space in Jeremy Love’s Bayou. Rutgers University Press.
Niaah, S. S. 2008. Performance Geographies from Slave Ship to Ghetto. Sage Publications
Nkomo, V. 2021. Encounter. [in review] [online] Available here: https://www.in-review.net/vusumzi-nkomo
Abdur-Rahman, A. 2017. Black Grotesquerie. Oxford University Press.