Dathini Mzayiya : the sound of the mark as it comes into being - a new short article I wrote on the groundbreaking asemic / visual poetry of South African artist-poet Mzayiya and his musidrawology. On the brilliant journal Herri, also based in SA https://herri.org.za/10/steven-j-fowler/
an excerpt “As long as humans have been making marks that echo writing, and the miraculous instinct we have to write and record in language, they have been doing the same with the sound of language. So from scribbles and doodles, and primal scripts, to pictograms, ideograms, logograms, to structuralist explorations and alphabets we don’t understand to lost languages, and hoaxes, we also can trace the mutterings, utterances, diddlage, scatting, chanting and other abstract non-song, non-speaking vocal expressions of human beings. There is then, a distinct poetic artistic tradition from the dawn of human culture which engages the non-linguistic but language-evoking in both marks and sound. What is the profundity then of a work that engages both?
In the written artworks of Dathini Mzayiya we encounter work of the mark that remembers the sound of that mark. It takes us into every scratch we have made on paper, even every strike our fingers have made on keys. It brings us to the sound of chalk on a board, quill on parchment, or stone on stone. Of the rhythmic incidents of writing, of the sonic consequence of our desire to make our words. Its brilliance lies in its individuality, its particularity, offering us such timeless universality. It reminds us we need not be in service to the word in order to write, and beyond that, there is another potential – that we might listen beyond the word, as it comes into being.”
