Magic Banjo [resounding Anawana Haloba]

A single object – a banjo purchased as the writer’s birthday present to herself – activates worlds of poetic-theoretical associations in beside/gerllaw’s tenderly crafted fourth instalment. Building from the sound installations staged by in Aberystwyth and Cardiff for Artes Mundi 11 – which are underpinned by the artist’s long-term exploration of the politics and poetics of objects in post-independence Zambia – ‘Magic Banjo’ calls on its reader to question assumptions about how the sonic world is produced, how we receive its sounds in our bodies, and how their waves attain meaning. Paying particular attention to relations between humanand non-human spheres – and the collapsing of their inherited hierarchies – Kandace Siobhan Walker’s essay ingeniously weaves philosophical, lyric,narrative and intimately personal forms to take us someplace entirely new: this sound means this sound means soon I will be home.

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