Reviewed by Diane R. Wiener
Content Warning: racism, slavery, ableism
Jjjjjerome Ellis’s masterpiece, Aster of Ceremonies, takes up the mantle of their debut book and album, The Clearing, to bring readers into deep and direct conversation with necessarily and vividly anti-racist, anti-ableist musics. However, this newer book does not just “extend” or “expand” from previous work. Aster of Ceremonies presents readers with heteroglossic poems, chants, hymns, essays, and other Disability narratives, each uttered deliberately dysfluently—as well as with and without clefs, staffs, and time signatures—and all inflected thickly while interstitially by and with heritage, presentism, futurism, and—of course—Asters. As Ellis remarks, “This book is traversed and inhabited by a music. Some signs of that music’s presence appear in this book, like the tracks of an animal” (p. 5).
Asters and other Plants (capitalized by Ellis to show proper respect) are teachers. Ellis asked and asks themself—and, in turn, asks us—to consider what happens in “bringing…two archives into contact: ‘runaway slave’ advertisements concerning dysfluent Ancestors and The Flora of North America.” Ellis explains that they use these “scare quotes” referencing Ancestors who “ran away,” and are thereby described as “runaway,” “to trouble the apparent simplicity of the language used to describe what these enslaved folks were doing, what kinds of movement they were practicing” (p. 2).
Expressing gratitude to historian Saidiya Hartman, with whom Ellis studied. Ellis expresses how, when considering “‘runaway slave’ advertisements,” Ellis “take[s] seriously her attention to the extremely fraught nature of this archive, and other archives of slavery.” Ellis notes, “Her reflections in her book Scenes of Subjection speak to what’s happening in Aster of Ceremonies: ‘[T]he documents, fragments, and accounts considered here, although claimed for purposes contrary to those for which they were gathered, nonetheless remain entangled within the politics of domination’” (p. 2). Ellis goes on to say that Ellis “wrestled with how to refer to the enslaved” because Ellis “[doesn’t] want to erase the reality of their enslavement. At the same time, I seek a word that carries respect and honor, and which encompasses more than the fact of their enslavement” (p. 3). Ancestors (or enslaved Ancestors) is the term chosen, Ellis explains, “Yet these terms feel complicated to me too” (p. 3).
As the Milkweed book description summarizes, “Through the grateful invocation of ancestors—Hannah, Mariah, Kit, Jan, and others—and their songs, [Ellis] rewrites history, creating a world that blooms backwards, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to continue to take, their freedom.”
The book is divided into five sections. The first includes six poems, continuations of some of the work that appears in The Clearing as well as in the publication, The Offing. Parts II and IV are essays. Parts III and V are various musical movements (including sections of a hymn, “Benediction”). Instinctively, I began reading the book “out of sequence.” I felt validated when I “went back” and discovered Ellis’s humorous, honest comment: “Please feel free to read this book however you’d like. Front to back, back to front, tiddlywink-ing from page to page, slowly, quickly, not at all, forgotten at a friend’s” (p. 5).
In the essay, “Liturgy of the Name” (Part II of the book, which I read both first and by way of “tiddlywink-ing”), sociolinguistics, mysticism, intersectional cultural logics, past and recent politics, and being “tilted” fuse and separate, finding new meanings and expanding in personal pathways. Ellis describes the powers that accompany an “unpronounceable” name of a Jewish God, joining immanence and transcendence when Ellis asserts, “My name, in the time when I cannot utter it, maps the space within me. In an instant the Stutter shuttles me from the present—the barber just asked me my name, my voice fluttering in my throat, struggling not to tremble as the razor presses on my temples—to an ancient place of breath, name, silence, time, creation.” (p. 23) Reading these words, I found and find myself on an associative journey with many questions. I want to be and I am in the present tense.
I have often been frustrated by how the “unpronounceable” name of a Jewish God is mistranslated and/or mistransliterated. While appreciating Ellis’s reflections on Gershom Sholem’s astute Kabbalistic studies (immediately before the passage quoted above), I am reminded of Sholem’s long friendship with philosopher, critical theorist, and bricoleur, Walter Benjamin, and Benjamin’s devotion to and fascination with the “angel of history,” in turn taken up famously by “poet of witness,” Carolyn Forché. James Baldwin is opening the windows in Ellis’s essay’s rooms, it seems to me, as is the historian and philosopher Mircea Eliade (among so many other interlocutors; yet, Ellis the poet-musicologist is communicating with us via soliloquy or as a soloist as well).
The veil lifts. There is something sacred, otherworldly, and immediate happening all-at-once in or via the capitalized “the Stutter” that exists within and thus is a part of the poet-musicologist, Ellis. And, somehow, “the Stutter” has its own character or contains an aspect of autonomy, continuance, and selfhood. Put differently, [the] “Stutter” seems in a way to be its own being or to have its own legacies while not being or becoming wholly externalized from Ellis.
Referencing and thanking Hortense Spillers and Eugene Genovese in the book’s introduction, Ellis underscores the ways in which Ellis is “trying to follow Spillers’ mandate to hear slavery’s stutter (or slaveries’ stutters…),” since, as Spillers asserts (quoted by Ellis), “there cannot have been a monolithic formation called ‘slavery,’ but, rather, several versions of slavery, both simultaneous and successive.” (p. 6)
Ellis goes on to ask, “Is stuttering fugitive speech?” (p. 6) Since stuttering can clearly be understood or interpreted as fugitive speech, and because there is abundant evidence (including by way of the many “runaway slave” advertisements Ellis read and studied—while being in company with Plant narratives) that there were enslaved Ancestors who “stuttered, stammered, or spoke with speech impediments (sometimes referred to as ‘stoppages’ in speech)” (p. 3), it seems that by invoking what “the Stutter” does—“shuttles me from the present”—Ellis is answering their own question, with a bold YES, while invoking and honoring the presence of the Ancestors.
The references to “my temples,” and “the razor” upon them—with dangerous proximity and pressure—are more than double entendres to be noticed and disentangled. Ellis’s language is splendidly and unwaveringly symphonic. I have to remind myself that this is not “technically” a part of the book that includes staffs, clefs, and notes. Yet, it does. (And will soon, “technically,” too…”like the tracks of an animal.”)
“Whenever I approach a moment when I may need to introduce myself,” Ellis continues (in “Liturgy of the Name,” making the titular assertion), “a liturgy begins.” Ellis’s name is unpronounceable, yet it is pronounced as it is pronounced. The “liturgy” includes a kind of readiness that cannot be made ready, “my spirit already inhaling the incense of anticipation. How do I prepare?” We learn that “A vector of attention and tension stretches out within me like a taut violin string ready to vibrate.” (p. 23) Was this string also a serpent in its own eden? (but, here, not wrongly accused) I want to ask Ellis.
The next page of the book gives the first instance of a musical composition. In this example, we are presented with several bars of treble and bass notation, in 4/4 time, including Latin lyrics, introduced by these words: “For the past five years I’ve been setting the following text to music, to different melodies.” (p. 24) We learn immediately thereafter that this “text comes from St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate translation of Psalm 42, verse 2 in the Tanakh (also known as the Hebrew Bible). I love the way this verse encompasses wild animals, desire, thirst, water, and god: all things that help me understand my stutter.” A paragraph break, then Ellis says, “When the door of my vocal cords closes, another opens.” (p. 25).
Throughout the book, there are abundant references to the Ellis’s vocal cords, myriad musical chords, and the profound presence of family. As described throughout this book review, legacies strongly influence and impact Ellis’s understanding of worlds and Ellis’s place and voicedness within them, emboldened by the necessity of questioning, critiquing, wondering, and wandering, while creating a home inside oneself. Strong communication is present from Ellis’s parents and best friend-and-wife. The Ancestors’ voices and their continuous reverberations make multiple appearances, as noted.
Ellis was “raised by Jamaican and Grenadan immigrants in Tidewater, Virginia, where I live with my wife” (p. 1). This statement is part of a loving, assertive, and purposeful introduction, including how and why the text is an invitation, intended to be “a series of offerings, traces of practices I’ve been engaged in for years” (p. 2). From the very beginning of the book, Ellis speaks directly to their readers. Ellis brings into immediate focus what I interpret as their Crip intentions when they state: “To any readers of this work who stutter, stammer, or otherwise speak dysfluently: I celebrate and honor your speech” (p. 1). Dysfluently speaking kin have primacy; others are welcome to read and appreciate the work, as well.
The book is available in an audio format, read by Ellis. While I have not yet accessed the book in this format, I am curious how Ellis denotes the font color shifts since all the Plant references are in a vibrant magenta while the rest of the text is in black. I also wonder how the music is included and described in the audio version. To call the book “interdisciplinary” feels problematic and too limiting, but it is surely multiplicitous and clearly committed to accessibility.
Aster of Ceremonies commences with an image description of its beautiful cover followed by an explanation of the book’s title and further descriptions—with eight detailed footnotes, including embedded quotations and citations concerning various subjects of importance, among them Black performativity and resistance, creation and production, “disabled or non-normative speech,” “nonhuman kin” as family, liberation, and gratitude expressed for the author’s wife and others. Toward the book’s conclusion, an image description of the author’s photo accompanies the photo.
Hearkening to while disrupting eighteenth and nineteenth century texts “like” the ones brought into fraught while profound “conversation” throughout the book, what I have referred to above as the further descriptions after the title are far more than a secondary title, would not be adequately described as an also-known-as, and are certainly not merely a subtitle. These words read as follows: “Some Notes Performed toward a Ceremony, containing several Movements of a Hymn—or a Black, Dysfluent Chant—and an Essay for a Liturgy of the Name, Offered in Devotion to Our Kin; in other words, Some Pages of a Reverence Book Awaiting to be Gathered and Sung with other Quires.”
Footnote 8 advises, “Quires are groups of pages gathered to form a bound book.” What I “hear” in and feel from this eighth footnote, as inside and through the entire book, with its meta-movements, parts, and stanzas, is an insistence and a welcome to join in the further creation of the “other Quires.” It is Awaited, this Gathering to be Sung in perpetuity and Reverently. This work must and shall be Chanted Dysfluently. With, for, and to the Plants. Led by the Black Disabled Quires’ creators and the Ancestors.
Title: Aster of Ceremonies
Author: JJJJJerome Ellis
Publisher: Milkweed Editions (Multiverse Series)
Year: 2023
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About the Reviewer
Diane R. Wiener (she/they) became Editor-in-Chief of Wordgathering in January 2020. The author of The Golem Verses (Nine Mile Press, 2018), Flashes & Specks (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and The Golem Returns (swallow::tale press, 2022), Diane’s poems also appear in Nine Mile Magazine, Wordgathering, Tammy, Queerly, The South Carolina Review, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, Diagrams Sketched on the Wind, Jason’s Connection, the Kalonopia Collective’s 2021 Disability Pride Anthology, eMerge, and elsewhere. Diane’s creative nonfiction appears in Stone Canoe, Mollyhouse, The Abstract Elephant Magazine, Pop the Culture Pill, and eMerge. Her flash fiction appears in Ordinary Madness; short fiction is published in A Coup of Owls. Diane served as Nine Mile Literary Magazine’s Assistant Editor after being Guest Editor for the Fall 2019 Special Double Issue on Neurodivergent, Disability, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poetics. She has published widely on Disability, education, accessibility, equity, and empowerment, among other subjects. A proud Neuroqueer, Mad, Crip, Genderqueer, Ashkenazi Jewish Hylozoist Nerd, Diane is honored to serve in the nonprofit sector. You can visit Diane online at: https://dianerwiener.com.