Lessons on Keeping Spry

Lesson 1: Weigh Your Words

In “Systems of silence,” Spry (2008) writes “I have come to believe that whether or not I believe in language, language will represent me, others, culture, based on its collective will, a will composed by those in various kinds of power at the moment of utterance” (pp. 343–344). Words build repertoires; they are all around us. Like paradigms and logic, they seep into pores and make home in bodies. Words contour movement—its volume, even the how of one’s volume. Taking cue from her description of agency as, “the capacity of the agent (in this case, an individual) to tell her story of an event” (p. 58), thoughtful deliberation about the words we use to name our conditions. And consider how words like “accuser,” survivor, and truth teller index differently in bodies (see Spry, 2011). There are many small (in time) and monumental (in meaning) moments with Tami Spry where I left nourished. Most recently, it was a conversation in 2023 at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI). Through sustained eye contact, deep listening about transition, and traversing professional quagmires, we held space for each other’s presence. Between the sunshine and heat, a closing hug, she translated what felt like a jumbled set of intentions, yearnings, and lamentations into sentences infused with the care, interconnection, and possibility. Following our closing hug, the weight and way in making of (her) words remained.

We must take seriously that words become choreography to/in/for corporeal bodies, intellectual bodies, bodies of futurity, and bodies of knowing. We must mind our words as they summon dis/embodied embodiments, displaced embodiments, muted bodies, embodied freedom practices, collective, collaborative, and co-mingling embodiments. And because language and body are co-constitutive, we ought to mind our words to mind our body’s reservoir for stewarding spirit.

Lesson 2: Loose Your Body

To loose, according to Merriam Webster, is to free from restraint. Loosing is an act that requires a will to unknow the so-called self, body, other, repeatedly for the sake of relation and (re)orientation to new ways and worlds (see Ahmed, 2006). And because “The performing body offers a thick description of an individual’s engagement with cultural codes and expectations”, (Spry, 2003, p. 170) loosing demands surrender.

When I met Dr. Tami Spry, respectfully, I was approaching a metaphorical river in my life, as Jimmy Cliff sang in 1970 and June Jordan would describe in 1981. I was wading in a “crossing,” as M. Jacqui Alexander (2006) describes, that lured me into raging waters. While wrestling with connecting parts of me I’d tucked away—the performer, the poet, the artist—neatly in a closet, I met then Dr. Spry (now same + Tami + interlocutor + “dear friend”) in texture, tone, in spirit, on paper. From the page, she spoke to me, whispered into the echoes of my closet where the dancer sat looking between floor boards and flexed feet, wondering what kind of sound could be made from the stomp scream I yearned to make, or the spewing of feelings incited from an arched back and resolution to rupture the ground beneath me, and descend into my body. Arms out, heart open, calling forth an always in-the-making repertoire, Tami invited me to the stage.

Attending Tami’s workshop at the 2010 ICQI prompted me to see borders like those constructed between paper-stage/self-other/then-now. And because the body archives and is a repository, it is also “an ancient scroll upon which is written the stories of one’s movement through the world” (Spry, 1997, p. 362). I learned from Tami, we need to loosen the body because in doing so, we unhinge from time, from capitalist heteropatriarchal notions of truth that craves our self-abnegation, from an unreal absolute meaning of materiality, and allow in imagination—an activation of flesh.

Coda

I am unable to articulate in word all the lessons gifted to me by Tami. Perhaps that’s the point and a testament to how she now lives in me. Thank you Dr. Spry for the invitation turned incantation to body-paper-stage futures, made from skins and tattoos carrying memory. Thank you, Tami, for the encouragement to join in on body work, paper productions, and staged movements. Both her invitation and methodological approach is a love poiesis because “it’s always been about bodies, hiding, desiring, repudiating, erasing, violating, abjecting, objecting” (Spry, 2016, p. 11) and creating dreamscapes from moments of drowning in, from, with. Thank you, Dear Friend, for inhabiting me.

To move in the world a queer Blackgurlwoman called to auto/ethnography is to be called to practice my self-determination in public, in writing, on stages where risks are real and few present look like me. To own my queer Blackgurlwoman sensibility and answer the call to be a walking practice of vulnerability, and publish about it, is to say the least an unforeseeable path, an inconvenient vocation, and a daunting endeavor. Here, I must remember that my rhythm like my voice and my love is poly.

A jazz record played during a rainstorm at a pitch that requires a keen ear; Dr. Professor Tami Spry is always open hearted, reaching for relation, and urging us to move toward the we of a place, the we of our pain, the we of our grief, the we of recognition, the we of the garden growing with or without our attention. A warm, curious heart and a hand—literal or figurative—always reaching toward the we of a phenomenon, the we of the culprit, the we of the possible, the we of our latest nightmare, the we that will save us, if we, see us, in connection; if we choose to see us we, in mutual observation of each other/our selves/bodies/society.

Our meeting, student-to-paper and then in physical space proved to be a necessary recipe in my becoming more open hearted, more me, more able to own the cultures embroidered in my muscle memory and oozing out each time I dare to know what I used to pretend to not know about the interlocked reality of me-other-us. An eye toward the shifting capacity of embracing the instability of identity and the variety of we operating in and across each of us, she maintains a commitment to the we that will save us. The we that owns the truth about the contrived benefits of making an “other.” Surely, this we will keep us spry, in intentional relation, and here, still. Thank you.