Fabra-cating Meanings
“. . . We’ll manage. I’ll master your language. And in the meantime, I’ll create my own.” Tricky

 Years before my birth,my mother taught Spanish in a junior high school. When I was a child, my parents often spoke to me in Spanish: Vamos a comer. Es la hora de salir. Adios y cierra la puerta. A phrase here, a song lyric there. When my parents wanted me to bring them something, they would say to me: Fabra, Mendi.
Fabra, fabra, fabra. This command was accompanied by a gesture, beckoning me to them. As I grew older, my mother stopped repeating 'fabra' because she knew I understood her. My father, however, because he loves to speak other languages with his own rhythms and gestures, continues to say it this way.
   I was almost an adult (and almost fluent in Spanish) before I realized that 'fabra' was not a Spanish word. One day I asked my father, Is traer an irregular verb? I knew 'traer' was 'to bring' in Spanish. But I (thought I) also knew 'fabra' was a command for 'bring'. Was this an alternate command form or was it a synonym?
And, if a synonym, what was the infinitive? How did one conjugate it? When I explained this confusion, my father fell over himself with laughter. 'Fabra' isn't
Spanish, Mendi, it's Twi!
   My parents, you see, also sometimes spoke to me in Twi, a few phrases of which they had picked up in Ghana in the late 60s and early 70s. I had learned some of it around the house: me ko, wo ho te sen, obruni . . . Usually I knew which language was being spoken by the context: by the stories which had been repeated in front of me, by other words in proximity, by the sounds of the words. Because I grew up hearing English and bits of Spanish and Twi around the house, however, I was never really conscious of how I distinguished one set of words or phrases from the next until this moment. This one incident called into question everything I thought I knew about the words I spoke or understood. How did I know what I knew? If I knew what a word meant, what difference did the context for that word make? What did my getting the language wrong mean for my ability to hear what its speakers were saying to me?
 

In the summer of 1993, Keith and I decided to compose an opera with extended speech, drawing on a hip-hop aesthetic. That fall, I went to Santiago de los
Caballeros in the Dominican Republic to study Spanish and Hispanophone Afro-Caribbean Literature at Pontificia Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra. I already
understood Spanish well enough to communicate, but wanted to know more about how we spoke European languages. I wanted to see if I could figure out more
about my own use of English through my Dominican counterparts' use of Spanish.
   I have to say that I did get some of what I came for in that regard. I met people who sounded their language in such a familiar way that I forgot it wasn't mine. I
learned to translate not only vocabulary, but also gesture, texture, and tone. For me, being able to communicate with other Africans in the Americas across our
European tongues was a way of disrupting the legacy of slavery that separated us. Something as simple as understanding became one more crack in the system.
When Keith and I began to compose the speculative side of The Sour Thunder years later, we wanted to give voice to these possibilities in language, but we also
wanted to think through the difficulty of the process. In composition, we created an opportunity for ourselves to think through the idea of language as a technology
that is crafted to the needs of the speakers with the most power. We invented Sesom, a character from a world where the beings communicated primarily through
scent, and created her as a devalued member of her society. What would happen, we wondered, if Sesom communicated with marginalized speakers of another
language who were trying to speak her language? How would their interactions enrich and/or threaten either world?
 

As net artists, the Internet is for us a way for us to be in dialogue with people who are not in our physical space and to comment on how our black presence is engaged or ignored on the net or in physical spaces. Because of our medium, the idea of 'the hacker' proves a fruitful metaphor through which to think about our presence. Hacking brings into view so many of the questions about authorization, proper behavior, the flow of power, and the security of the status quo that surround our artistic and every day statements.
   For us, the idea of hacking is not simply about computer systems. It is also about other codes, languages, systems that can be broken into or apart. Hacking is a subversive kind of translation, a transgressive kind of understanding what is denied us, and a way of speaking. Net.art is just one language we speak. We cut through it when we speak our perspectives and judgments. But as with any language, it also speaks through us, cutting through our intentions and ways of doing things. As a result, we have used this space to think through the problem of language and power and asked others to join us.
   We approached a few black artists whose works reflect a breaking of codes to think through the notion of hacking as a metaphor for their speech or writing. Some of them provided new writing in response to our question. Others allowed us to present work they had previously written here or to sample from it. The responses ranged from reflections on the ways in which black writers and speakers use language to enactments of a disruptive poetic to interventions in theoretical stances-sometimes within one piece. The appearance of these statements here is a reconfiguring of meaning because sometimes my sampling of an older text or one text's proximity to another shifts the weight of what is often the primary context for the writing to the subtext. It occurs to me now that mixing these writers is yet another way in which I speak my own language, context, and identity.

When I think back on my misreading of 'fabra' as a Spanish word, I can hear now that my mistake isn't solely about a misreading of context clues. It has as much to do with the way the sound of that Twi word lends itself to incorporation into a Latinate sound system. The joy and shame I experienced in learning more about my usage of this one word is perhaps present whenever I speak or write. I invented the verb "fabra-cating" to highlight my relationship to the codes I break or utilize in speaking and writing, but also in listening or reading. When I say I am fabra-cating meaning, I mean to suggest that I am fabricating meaning, of course. However, I also mean to allow all the meanings in the language I use to resonate, to speak in all the directions in which they point. To fabra-cate meaning is to make up meaning (to be unafraid of my own fictions), to build meaning (to construct a practice of interpretation), and to bring it. In bending languages this way and that, we bring it through the web of codes we negotiate and we bring it in to where we think and listen.
 

Mendi Lewis Obadike