Genre-hopping poet, musician, filmmaker Saul Williams expands the possibilities of sound and words at the Chan Centre
Fresh off the triumph of Neptune Frost, the artist wrestles with defining Afrofuturism
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The Chan Centre for the Performing Arts presents Black Futures: Saul Williams, Moor Mother, and Irreversible Entanglements, on February 25. Neptune Frost screens at The Cinematheque at 7 pm on February 23
SAUL WILLIAMS IS NOT an admirer of adjectives, although he understands why promoters and arts journalists need to use them. Still, what kind of shorthand can encompass an artist whose life has been devoted to escaping easy categorization? From singing in the choir at school to penning a soon-to-be-published graphic novel, Williams has never let style or genre confine his imagination. Until recently, he has perhaps been best known as a poet, but acting is his first love, and he’s also written screenplays, made hip-hop records, and crafted electronic music. His latest major endeavour, the dark and wonderful feature film Neptune Frost, marks him as a director to watch, along with his creative collaborator and life partner Anisia Uzeyman.
So it’s understandable that he both chafes under and laughs at the marketing decision to bill his upcoming appearance at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts—on a Black Futures bill with the incendiary political poet Moor Mother and the virtuosic musicians of Irreversible Entanglements—as an exploration of “Afrofuturist currents”.
“The terminology that they put around this show are not terms or words that I chose to describe what I would be doing,” he points out in a Zoom interview from the Sundance festival, where his film debut, Slam, is enjoying a 25th-anniversary screening. “I personally find it kind of humorous that there’s always descriptors for my poetry-music performances, and they are seldom chosen by me. Like, I didn’t identify as a slam poet, and if they now want to list me as an Afrofuturist poet… These are not things that I have ever paid any attention to when I’m actually in the creative process.”
Williams doesn’t take issue, however, with the idea that all of his work conveys a sense of expansive possibilities. Although he is understandably wary of predicting what will happen at the Chan, some of which will be entirely improvised, he notes that his mandate definitely allows for the unexpected.
“I think that’s exactly what Moor Mother and her band and musical endeavours and poetry represent as well—the expansive possibilities of where we might go with sound and where we might go with words,” he explains. “Where we might go with the performance experiments. And so this is a night that is already a charged event by having us share the stage. It’s something we’ve done before, and every time that we’ve done it before we’ve come out on the other side like ‘Wow! Okay!’ So I think for the audience it certainly is something that’s exciting, because as performers and collaborators there’s a lot of excitement just in the charge of that connection.”
Before we get further into the details, however, Williams suggests that I need to do something that I haven’t: watch Neptune Frost. So we cut the interview short, and I do. And then I watch it again.
A week later we reconvene, this time on the phone. Having recovered from the Sundance experience, Williams now sounds more relaxed—and I’m definitely more clued in. For one thing, Neptune Frost shows why the Afrofuturist tag is at least partially justifiable. Set in the near future, it opens in the coltan mines of Burundi, where the mineral that powers the world’s microprocessors is extracted by slave labour, and ends in Digitaria, a utopian commune of miners and hackers working to overthrow the ignorance that allows the few to grow rich from the sweat of the many.
In our initial conversation, Williams had defined Afrofuturism as “the possibility of a future imagined away from or beyond or not in reaction to the white gaze”, and Neptune Frost is certainly that, having been shot in Rwanda with an all-black cast of African actors and a majority-black crew. The white gaze—or the colonial gaze, or the capitalist gaze—only intrudes towards the end, when… Well, we’ll let that be a surprise.
The film is also as celebratory as it is serious. True to the philosophy espoused by cultural pioneers Sun Ra and George Clinton, it’s about the power of community and more particularly about the power of intentional community: what can be achieved when the oppressed and the dispossessed come together with a common purpose. It’s also worth noting that Digitaria only powers up when the film’s central characters embrace their true nature: not as despised orphans or lowly coltan miners, but as magical beings of transformative beauty and gender-fluid charisma, buoyed up by music and love.
“There’s a lot of thought that went into this film surrounding the idea of power,” explains Williams, who self-identifies as queer. “Ironically, coltan—the precious mineral that they’re mining—distributes power through small circuit boards. And so once I’d learned that, I always thought of this film as a metaphor surrounding the question of the distribution of power. So, yes, how are we empowered by stepping into ourselves as individuals? And it is a coming-of-age story, for sure, but also what powers capitalism? What powers imperialist ideology? What powers the world as we know it, and what are we missing as we explore those questions of power?”
Some of those questions will undoubtedly be woven into the Chan show, as will the revolutionary, anti-hierarchical ethos that Neptune Frost embodies. The presence of singer Kyle Kidd and dancer Vitche-Boul Ra will further enrich the mix by sharing focus with the night’s nominal stars. But, fresh off his film’s triumph, there’s also a chance that Williams will also explore one of the most basic art forms at his fingertips: one man, one voice, one message.
“Right now, I am extremely interested in and moved by the rawness of poetry itself,” he says. “I think that poetry is a multimedia experience in and of itself.
“One of the most exciting poetry readings I ever had was in London in the late 1990s,” Williams continues. “It was in a theatre that was in complete and utter darkness, and that was the whole thing: a poetry reading in the dark. And it was psychedelic! So, right now, in terms of what’s coming in the performance, what I’ve been focused on is really just how important a role poetry has played in my life, and I’m excited for the opportunity to share poems. If it’s more than that, we’ll see!”
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