I am an island and I take comfort: Asiya Wadud Collaborates with the From Text to Speech Robot

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An excerpt from the transcript of “I am an island”:

say it: how to get over

I feel everything

like a splinter

the

crater

the gape

the fissure

the island

 

I was a little chamberpot

I generated comportment

I was always seeking out

aseptic rooms

one for each of us

and one communal

each had their own window

the window looked out to anything

I mean the window looked out to

the sea

I mean the window was devoid of meaning

 

I grew up loving island

sloped my attention toward them

saw all around me ocean

saw in my dreams dolphins

they were so very very resonate

made me want to ride them

made me want to be young

and

animal?

made me want to touch a seabed

are you more taciturn or tactile

ocean or little creek bed

don’t worry I

didn’t mean to imply

that you couldn’t be anything

you wanted

 

didn’t mean to imply

that you couldn’t be everything

you wanted

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An excerpt from the transcript of “I take comfort”:

I take comfort in my languages.

take comfort in my languages.

take comfort in every single word

I know that I know. Take comfort in the worlds I know.

 

I am comforted by shadows.

as long as they are muted.

I take comfort in shadows.

I am no longer scared.

 

I am a clock that waits for every hour

I am a clock that awaits every hour

I am a clock that waits for every hour.

and the hours they all come.

 

I am comforted on sundays.

comforted on sundays

I am comforted on sundays.

I comfort the end of the week.

some say it’s the start.

 

I would call myself an ocean.

I am comforted by the names you

gave me. I take comfort in knowing

that I can change my name.

 

I am a heaving heap of Sundays.

Take comfort in every Sunday.

Take comfort in my sister’s small ears.

take comfort in my language.

 

I take comfort in eye contact.

comfort in my red lips.

comfort in crab cake.

comfort in crushed velvet.

 

I contort on Sundays.

it finally gets comfortable.

I am comfortable mostly

when I am sure about

the hour.

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“I am an island” and “I take comfort” are both part of a larger project, I AM AN ISLAND, that I started a few summers ago. All my work emerges from a space where I am thinking about enclosure, archipelagos and islands of retreat and this project is another way to think about these themes.

These two pieces are trying to contend with isolation, with distance, with what a fixed border obscures. No proximity can disrupt what a fixed border obstructs or makes invisible. If you peel back the fixed border, another world can radiate. But sometimes it is not within our ability to see that other world. 

An archipelago is a group of islands connected by their proximal distance. By their nature of being an archipelago, they acknowledge a unity and perhaps a reliance on one another. But, what if the individual islands within the archipelago forget they exist in relation to other islands? What if they double down on their island-ness and take their island enclosure to its natural limits? How do landforms enact reliance on one another? How do humans do it? These pieces are trying to think through these questions. 

With these pieces, I was also interested in the small slippages of language that happen when writing. Sometimes when I am tired and writing, these slips start to brim— long becomes lounge; sway becomes sweigh; on becomes won, won becomes wan—  and on and on. If I settle into these slippages, eventually another voice emerges, a parallel practice and parallel voice. It is my own, but also has an immediate distance because of how the equivocations come to rest — their density creates something new. 

I wanted to think about these questions of enclosure, reliance, distance, and need with a robot because robots are meant to be aseptic: they know. They do not feel. They are objective and even-handed— we don’t often think of them as embodying a tenderness. 

When I need the distance, writing with a robot helps me to find a new way into a piece. It also grants a different kind of disclosure. As I type the words into the text box on www.fromtexttospeech.com and immediately play back the words, it increasingly feels like the robot is singularly composing the piece. The robot takes on a life in the writing.

I tried a number of different text-to-speech programs before I settled on this one for I am an island and I take comfort. I’ve used different programs for other pieces in this larger I AM AN ISLAND project, like Natural Reader and TTS Reader. But, I liked the particular cadence of the robot in From Text To Speech. There are some words that the robot has to ‘use effort’ to pronounce. She can’t get all the words and I liked this idea that she is trying her best.

— Asiya Wadud

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Asiya Wadud is the author of Crosslight for Youngbird, day pulls down the sky/ a filament in gold leaf (written collaboratively with Okwui Okpokwasili), Syncope, and the forthcoming No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body. Asiya is a 2019-2020 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council artist-in-residence and a 2020 Danspace Project PLATFORM writer-in-residence. Recent work appears in e-flux journal, BOMB Magazine, Social Text Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School.