After the Party. Joshua Chambers-Letson

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      Nina Simone and the Work of Minoritarian Performance

      Side A: Emancipation

      I made you a mix tape, but in truth, it’s not a mix tape. In the twenty-first century, we have its less affectively charged, immaterial digital descendent: the playlist. It’s hard to describe the pleasures that came with a tape that a friend had carefully DJ’d and dubbed for you. Analogue technology could make big feelings happen. Truthfully, the mixtape is an anachronistic metaphor because this is a Nina Simone mixtape and at the time Simone produced these recordings, the mixtape didn’t exist. I’ll tell you why I’m playing out this anachronism later, but for now let’s just pretend that’s what this is. Slip on your headphones and slip back to April 7, 1968—three days after the assassination of Dr. King. This is the beginning of our Nina Simone mixtape. I made it for you. I hope that it can provide some kind of something. Something. Whatever it is that you need tonight.

      Track 1. “Sunday in Savannah”

      Press the play button and listen to the applause of the audience competing with her hands as they stretch across the keyboard with a displaceable attentiveness to the sound. Her piano doesn’t so much accompany her monologue as it meanders purposefully beside and beneath it. We’re listening to a cut from the extended version of Simone’s 1968 album, ’Nuff Said!, consisting mainly of recordings from a performance at the Westbury Music Fair in Jericho, New York, on April 7, 1968. Introducing the song “Sunday in Savannah,” she speaks in earnest, not singing; but in earnest she is singing in the way that she speaks:

      We’re glad to see you. And happily surprised that so many of you. We really didn’t expect anybody tonight. And you know whyyyyyy. Everybody knows everything. Everything is everything. Everything is everything. You know why. But we’re glad that you’ve come. To see us. And hope that we can provide. Some kind of something. For you. This evening. This particular evening. This Sunday evening. At this particular time in 1968. We hope that we can give you something. Something. Whatever it is that you need tonight.1

      It’s hard to translate into language what it does to you to listen to her voice as she sings her way across these spoken passages. How the voice glides up the word “why” and meanders in the spaces between “everyone” and “everything.” Her cadence and the repetitive recitations of “something,” “everything,” “why,” and “particular” are like a steady drumbeat drawing the ear toward something and somewhere, without giving away the what or where. All these pauses and breaks, giving the listener a second to breathe, think, and ask the following: What kind of something?

      On this particular evening in 1968 something was missing. Some kind of something. And not just something: someone. Three days earlier, on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel, a shot rang out and a great hope died. She doesn’t have to say it because it’s already been said. Everybody knows everything. Everything is everything. But still, she insists on the fragmenting singularity and incommensurable particularity of the moment (the parts of the performance that will disappear and withdraw from presence). “This evening,” she says, before looping back to emphasize the singularity of “this particular evening,” before looping back to draw us into “this Sunday evening,” before looping back to “this particular time in 1968.” And then the offer of a gift she can’t but fail to give: “We hope that we can give you something.” What thing? Something that is everything and so nothing and can’t be named but has to be named because we need it. Something for which we could use the word “freedom,” but knowing that every word imaginable is insufficient to name that thing (whatever it is), let’s settle instead on the capaciousness of something. Some kind of something. Whatever it is that you need tonight.

      Simone was many things: a brilliant recording artist, a classically trained pianist, a formal iconoclast, an A-list celebrity, an intellectual, a freedom fighter, a black woman, a mother, and a theorist and practitioner of black freedom. She was a performer, which is to say that performance was her job. She toured extensively, recorded prolifically, and this labor took a toll. But as Daphne Brooks, Shana Redmond, Salamishah Tillet, Amber Musser, and Malik Gaines have all variously taught us, Simone put performance to work to effect an insurgent black feminist disorganization and reorganization of the limits and conditions cast upon her body in order to conjure into being something else, something new.2 It was through performance that Simone appropriated the limited materials proffered by a limiting world to improvise new lines of flight, carrying her listener toward something like black freedom. Some kind of something. Whatever it is that you need tonight.

      Track 2. “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”

      Press play and listen as she improvises on the theme of freedom. An interviewer asks her, “What’s free to you?” She responds by telling a story about the work of minoritarian performance. Freedom, she explains, is a sense. It’s a feeling that exceeds and refuses containment by language: “It’s just a feeling. It’s just a feeling. It’s like how do you tell somebody how it feels to be in love? How are you going to tell anybody who has not been in love how it feels to be in love? You cannot do it to save your life. You can describe things, but you can’t tell them. But you know it when it happens. That’s what I mean by free. I’ve had a couple of times on stage when I really felt free. And that’s something else. That’s really something else.”3 It’s just a feeling because “words don’t go there,” to quote Fred Moten quoting Charles Lloyd: Language is inadequate to the task of communicating that which is incommunicable.4 You can describe things, but you can’t tell them. Freedom as just a feeling is fugitive from linguistic capture. In this way, it’s not unlike sound. “On the one hand,” writes Moten, “‘words don’t go there’ marks the inadequacy of verbal representation of sound while at the same time signaling the excessive, out-from the-outside motion and force with which sound infuses the verbal. Words don’t go there; words go past there.”5 Freedom as just a feeling, like sound, infuses the body with an out-from the-outside motion and force that resonates across, through, and beyond the body. Simone’s music bodies forth the going past and going beyond the “what should be” of freedom’s horizon.

      Freedom, for Simone, is “really something else.” A few years earlier, in 1964, when Ernst Bloch and Theodore Adorno gave a joint account of the material, revolutionary, and world-making capacities of utopian aesthetics, they too stumbled upon some kind of something. As Bloch remarked to his friend “Teddy,” while imagining the horizon of communist society:

      Thus, now, if a world were to emerge that is hindered for apparent reasons, but that is entirely possible, one could say, it is astonishing that it is not—if such a world, in which hunger and immediate wants were eliminated, entirely in contrast to death, if this world would finally just “be allowed to breathe” and were set free, there would not only be platitudes that would come out at the end and gray prose and a complete lack of prospects and perspectives in regard to existence here and over there, but there would also be freedom from earning instead of freedom to earn, and this would provide some space for such richly prospective doubt, and the decisive incentive toward utopia that is the meaning of Brecht’s short sentence, “Something’s missing.” This sentence, which is in Mahoganny, is one of the most profound sentences that Brecht ever wrote, and it is in two words. What is this “something”?6

      For Bloch, utopian longing—wishing, hoping, and dreaming of and for something better than this—is that which allows us to survive and sustain in the face of negation and deprivation. To know that “something’s missing”