Read on Mousse

Let’s begin with “Instructions Before Stuttering” (2023), a poem by JJJJJerome Ellis:

Tread where the name has prepared
A full name full of desire
Clay like plenty
Love is sensitive
In the space of crying
The name goes ahead
To prepare you
Grasp the vessel
With both hands and
Walk slow
A road of red clover
Opens—¹

I don’t read this as a corrective. It’s not an invitation to empathy, nor is it a phenomenological exercise. That much is clear. JJJJJerome is a proud stutterer. They instruct in a way that neither seeks rehabilitation nor folds into the social model of disability—or stands against it. The poem does not hinge on resistance. It does move, though. From beginning to end. But it does so unrushed. 

Consider their imperative verbs—tread, grasp, walk slow. They command and yet they don’t, exuding a meditative delay that’s built in, as if they already exist in that open space ahead, past the clovers, waiting. JJJJJerome is there, name and all.

And this line: The name goes ahead. I keep returning to it. How that intransitive verb—goes—acts on nothing, requires no object, remains open to the name’s desires. I can say the same for tread—how it describes an action occurring somewhere rather than being done to something. We are the ones treading. The ones trying to locate where ahead lies, what this ahead is that JJJJJerome has prepared. Let’s go, then.

If ahead is this page, then let’s begin again with this: What does it mean to encounter JJJJJerome Ellis’s name as a name? What does it mean to follow its moves, to see it go forth? 

JJJJJerome is the way the Grenadian Jamaican-American composer, poet, and performer offers their name. I say “offers” deliberately, resisting the temptation to say writes, because writing suggests a kind of resolution, a closure embedded in our systems of linguistic efficiency that transforms names into mere endpoints, administrative coordinates. But what if a name, JJJJJerome’s name, is not something that simply exists to be read, but something that happens? Something that hovers, hesitates, insists on its own arrival again and again? I’ve been thinking about this twinned impulse—to read, to move—and how it manifests not just in JJJJJerome’s name but in the proliferation of meditations on that name across their books, music compositions, and, most crucially, their stutter. The stutter becomes that portal into the clearing, that space of possibility that JJJJJerome invites us to “simply be inside.”² It’s not just a threshold to cross but a space to inhabit, where the name itself teaches us how to dwell in hesitation.

Such a reading suggests we regard how JJJJJerome moves through space and time, where each medium—music, performance, writing, video, and photography—becomes a site where finality unravels, where permanence gives way to perpetual recomposing. A lot of that comes down to JJJJJerome’s ongoing book projects—The Clearing (2021), Asters of Ceremonies (2023)—how they operate not as contained objects but as generative vessels, “clearings,” as JJJJJerome puts it, where language and thought refuse to settle, stuttering towards the amorphous ahead. Excerpts of these texts migrate into performance, become sound, inhabiting that “space of ceremony” where “pink instruments [are] ready in the still air.” Could these pink instruments be the larynx, that primary instrument of vocalization, waiting in suspension? Or is it the asters, releasing pollen into that same still air as the voice box hesitates in that same “space of ceremony,” where delays and breaks in coordination become not interruptions but possibilities? But to call JJJJJerome’s books records of research would miss their deeper operation: they are scores of remembrances in the most radical sense, hybrid forms where memoir, poetry, and musical notation collide and recombine, creating conditions for what has not yet been articulated, what remains to be gathered. Their 2024 performances at spaces like Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, London, and The Kitchen, New York, become clearings where their name, like their work, enacts this same practice of dwelling in hesitation. In these moments of regard, JJJJJerome’s voice itself poised between breath and utterance—a stutterance—asks us to consider: What happens when documentation becomes an invitation to future iterations, when the archive transforms into a score for what’s yet to come?³

If this type of futuring happens with and for others, then JJJJJerome’s stutter moves toward what poet and philosopher Fred Moten calls “the unthinkable is a tone.”⁴ But the unthinkable isn’t just a single note stuttering in isolation—it’s an ensemble, a resonance formed through accumulation, through what moves across people, bodies, and time. And if this ensemble has a threshold, if it has a point of entry and departure, I would argue that it doesn’t begin or end with the books JJJJJerome has written, but with their very name—JJJJJerome. They have said, “I have an ongoing practice of spelling my name JJJJJerome Ellis. I do this because the word I stutter on most frequently is my name.” That ongoingness matters. This name is more than an identifier; it’s a site of articulation, an arrangement of sound that must be gathered before it can be released. To spell it out in public as JJJJJerome is to refuse the collapse of the stutter into something incidental, accidental, or unwanted. It’s to insist that the stutter itself has form—that it isn’t just an interruption but a structure, an offering, an event worthy of ceremonies. Indeed, JJJJerome gathers the stutter, makes it tangible, stretches its form—JJJJJ—while freeing it from, and finding it within, the constraints of time, typography, or tongue alone. In this gathering, the name ceases to be just something to be pronounced; it becomes something to be performed, something kinetic, something felt. This is what Moten meant by the unthinkable as a tone—a sound not fully contained within language but one that assembles itself and others in its wake.

This act of gathering isn’t just about freeing the stutter. It frees the name. It frees the one who speaks it. In Aster of Ceremonies, there’s a hymn where JJJJJerome sings, “my stammers free me from my name.”⁵ Earlier in the book, they write, “for most of my life I named my stutter Burden, Curse, Disorder, Issue, Problem.”⁶ Over time, though, the name changes. The stutter, once something to be worked around or mastered, renamed itself as Vessel—one name among many. But even before the renaming, the name and the stutter had already fused into a single condition, an emotional sequela that left them both “rooted in shame, anger, and despair.”⁷ How could it not? If the name itself is something they have to articulate through the stutter, then freedom from one has always been tangled up with freedom from the other. At some point, that struggle unravels—not into resolution, but into practice, repetition, return, accumulation. Alexis Pauline Gumbs stewards this gathering as a freeing vehicle, suggesting, “if you don’t gather them all you will never be free.”⁸ JJJJJerome is aware, then, that a name is not just something to be said but something to be assembled, carried forward, made whole in its unfolding and renaming. As they’ve said, naming and renaming is devotional work that begins well before the name is even uttered. I can see how freedom from their name is pained until it isn’t, until the name is no longer just something to be pronounced but something to be performed. Until there is pleasure in the practice of JJJJJerome.

In “Liturgy of the Name,” JJJJJerome shares: “When someone asks you your name, we take your name as an offering.”⁹ Not an inscription, not a declaration, but an offering—a gesture as much about reception as it is about articulation. In other words, a name is something that emerges in its saying, in its performance. To say that JJJJJerome offers their name, then, is more faithful to what is unfolding here, on the page, not just because it aligns with JJJJJerome’s own thinking, but because it reflects my/our own act of worship, a response to the liturgical parameters they have set.

So if a name is an offering, what does it mean to receive it? To take it in, to hear it, to let it move through you before meaning even takes shape? To encounter it on the page and feel the eyes and mouth hesitate, recalibrate, adjust to a different kind of time? This is the “poetics of trembling” made real, made concrete—not a metaphor, but something felt at the level of breath, of muscle memory.¹⁰ Maybe the j’s are there for this reason. Not just to remind us that a name is never simply known, but to show us that a name is something we meet, something we learn to follow.

JJJJJerome might call these j’s “traces of practices” in the annunciation of a name. Which means JJJJJerome is not just a word indicative of a name, but a series of actions—phonetic, typographic, conceptual. The five j’s in JJJJJerome don’t sit still on the page; they shift the way reading happens. I see a puzzle that refuses to resolve into one. They line up almost like an acrostic, almost a game, but not quite. Because unlike a game, unlike a puzzle, we are not dealing with a set of arbitrary signs or instructions. We know the person on the other side.

That’s not always the case, though, for JJJJJerome. I’m reading and listening to The Clearing, an essay-turned-book-turned-album that lets us in on how the singularity of the stutter is really symptomatic of the social. I keep returning to a sequence of exchanges during a phone call between JJJJJerome and a bookseller at Barnes & Noble. The call follows an expected architecture: query, response, transaction. But then the stutter introduces another temporality altogether. The line goes quiet. The bookseller waits for JJJJJerome to name the book they’re inquiring about. Still quiet. JJJJJerome is caught in a glottal block, and their stutter begets a silence that’s now in dialogue with itself.

JJJJJerome’s vocal cords at rest (left) and while speaking fluently (right). Video still from fibreoptic laryngoscopy.

I’m intrigued by how a glottal block can transform a phone call into pure potential—neither speech nor silence exactly, but something that exposes how deeply we’ve internalized expectations of smooth exchange. The bookseller hangs up, assuming the call has dropped. But JJJJJerome is still trembling, their voice box navigating the drop alone, hoping the bookseller will walk slower next time and open themselves up to the unknown. This is where JJJJJerome’s “Instructions Before Stuttering” must be more than a literary offering. Without these instructions spelled out in our daily encounters, the limits of the page become increasingly apparent, and we’re left with hung-up calls and foreclosed possibilities.

The metaphorical becomes visceral in the laryngoscopic image of JJJJJerome’s vocal cords during a glottal block—a slice of negative space carved out of flesh, surrounded by straining tissue. This pictured gap isn’t just anatomical; it’s a material archive of trembling, documenting the body’s quivering relationship to speech and silence. What strikes me is how this opening, this potential for rupture, must eventually yield to the demands of fluent speech. Or must it?

What if we took up Moten’s concept of “an annulus,” a ringlike structure, to make sense of the fleshy larynx muscles where sound is held but not yet released?¹¹ For Moten, the annulus he invokes suggests a looping temporality—ritual as an ongoing, self-sustaining structure that accommodates moments of rupture or stultification. If speech is durative, structured by the endlessly repeated expectation of conversational flow, then dysfluent speech constitutes an interruption, a break that fractures the ritualized continuity of speech. But rather than simply negating time, these breaks create an alternative temporal structure—one in which the non-ritual emerges within ritual itself. In this sense, the anatomy of the voice, particularly the glottal stops and blockages in a stutter, functions as an annular form, both durative and disjunctive, simultaneously upholding and disrupting the flow of language. JJJJJerome explores this terrain by questioning dysfluency as a form of Black enfleshment—one that resists the demand for smooth articulation and, in doing so, opens up a space where the ritual of speech collides with the refusal of its expected linearity. Within the stutter, the annulus of speech thickens. Ritual and non-ritual coalesce, forming a vocal time that is at once constrained and radically open.

If we move with Moten and JJJJJerome, the incomplete closure during a glottal block becomes not a failure but a paradoxical space—a ring that never quite seals, creating a suspended articulation that resists punctuality’s ceremonial demands. When phonation gets going, the tissue relaxes, the path reappears, the voice box closes, and something is lost in that return to smoothness. It’s as if during these glottal blocks, the body momentarily stages its own revolt against the protocols of seamless communication, only to be reabsorbed into the flow of expected exchange. The images of JJJJJerome’s larynx haunt me precisely because they capture what usually escapes documentation: the moment when the body holds space for its own refusal.

Reading JJJJJerome’s work, even encountering their name, produces in me a peculiar shame. I used to stutter—that phrase itself carries a weight, suggesting some kind of crossing, a betrayal through fluency that others haven’t managed or chosen. The linguistics of the letter j live in my body like muscle memory: the vocal cords’ vibration (voiced), the tongue meeting the ridged palate (postalveolar) just behind the teeth, the initial stoppage and release of air (affricate). I know these terms—voiced postalveolar affricate—because speech therapy gave me this clinical vocabulary, this way of abstracting the embodied, lived experiences of stutterers into teachable units.

I find myself wondering how JJJJJerome might read my position in relation to their critiques of Moten and Craig Dworkin in The Clearing. But something strange happens as I’m reading JJJJJerome’s essay that complicates any neat narrative of overcoming. JJJJJerome recounts Bernie Mac performing his stuttering nephew. In describing the joke, JJJJJerome writes “and says ‘uh’ four times,” and my body responds before consciousness can intervene. I’m speaking the “uh” four times, the visual text triggering sonic memory, as if dysfluency never really leaves but rather dwells in a kind of suspended animation, waiting in that epizeuxis space where phonemes repeat, gather force, and sometimes mouth a sound, perhaps an ostinato. The stutter, it seems, isn’t something one simply leaves behind, but rather a mode of relating that persists, haunting even the most apparently fluent speech.

As I write this, about JJJJJerome, fires canvas Los Angeles, cloaking the city in a grim kind of absolution—a haunting, hellscape where the flames quell the evil that seems to settle here like smog. Strands of Igbo thought believe the smoke of burnt palms casts out spirits into the ether, dissolving the weight of the flora into spectral séance with biome. Here, in Los Angeles, the sky rises, not with deliverance but as a macabre benediction, a solemn mark of something ending, perhaps beginning. It’s as if the prophet Isaiah’s words in the forty-second chapter have leapt from the page: “When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.” These fires consuming Los Angeles remind me of another kind of clearing—not JJJJJerome’s generative vessel but something more ambivalent, where palm trees imported to signify paradise burn like biblical prophecy. I find myself returning to JJJJJerome’s voice through my speakers, their stutter creating what Isaiah called “a hiding place from the wind, a covert from the tempest.” The irony doesn’t escape me: that in this moment of environmental catastrophe, of displaced ecologies burning, I find shelter in displaced speech, in the very hesitations that JJJJJerome’s mother once sought to heal by encouraging them to recite Isaiah 32:4—“the tongue of the stammerers shall be ready to speak plainly.”

But JJJJJerome offers a different kind of healing in Aster of Ceremonies, where their benedictions honor both plants and enslaved elders who stuttered their way to freedom. These were people who had to shed their masters’ names, who found their own clearings not through speech therapy but through flight. These elders ran through fields of little bluestem, darted behind thickets of running oak, their steps muffled by the soft underlayer of Virginia chain fern. They waded through swamps thick with pond cypress and tangled with Spanish moss, moving unseen beneath the broad-leafed canopy of bigleaf magnolias and live oaks. What blessings did they utter after getting free from their masters’ names? I think about them now, these plants and marauding ancestors, as non-native palms burn along Los Angeles streets—these trees that were never meant to be here, planted to perform a fantasy of paradise. What kind of clearing is this? What benedictions might we utter for all forms of displacement—of people, of plants, of speech itself? Perhaps JJJJJerome’s practice shows us how: not through smooth articulation but through attention to what trembles, what hesitates, what refuses to settle into the expected rhythms of either language or landscape.

Originally published in Mousse 91.

Notes

1. JJJJJerome Ellis, “Instructions Before Stuttering,” 2023, available at https://poets.org/poem/instructions-stuttering. ↩︎
2. JJJJJerome Ellis, “The Clearing: Music, Dysfluency, Blackness, and Time,” originally published in Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, 5, no. 2, 2020, 215–33. Available at https://bakonline.org/en/research+publications/prospections/the+clearing+music+dysfluency+blackness+and+time. ↩︎
3. I’m drawing from J.A. Lindon’s work in the 1970s, alongside more recent thinking on stutterance—or the “stammered utterance”—as a break, a hesitant “speech act that disrupts the smooth flow of language, culture, ideology, and all normalizing discourse” that seeks to contain it. See Daniel Martin, “Stuttering in the Victorian Period,” Victorian Review, May 8, 2015. Available at https://victorianreview.org/?p=1303; and J. A. Lindon, “Stutterances,” Word Ways 5, no. 3 (1972): 146. ↩︎
4. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 57. ↩︎
5. JJJJJerome Ellis, Aster of Ceremonies (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2023), epub. ↩︎
6. Ellis, Aster of Ceremonies, epub. ↩︎
7. Ellis, Aster of Ceremonies, epub. ↩︎
8. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Dub: Finding Ceremony (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 8. Quoted in Ellis, Aster of Ceremonies, epub. ↩︎
9. JJJJJerome Ellis, “Liturgy of the Name,” BOMB, October 10, 2023, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2023/10/10/ liturgy-of-the-name. ↩︎
10. There’s a lovely throughline between JJJJJerome’s “Instructions Before Stuttering” and Édouard Glissant’s tremblement, or “trembling thinking,” namely the way both grant permission to wander, to place one’s body about in space, searching, grasping, coming into contact with people. In “Benediction” from their book Asters of Ceremonies (2023), JJJJJerome pairs this wandering with histories of slavery, seeking to hear “slaveries’ stutters” via the Ancestors. JJJJJerome beckons their grandmothers to hold them, to guide them, to “learn” them “into new wandering.” See Édouard Glissant and Hans Ulrich Obrist, “‘The Earth Is Trembling’: Édouard Glissant in Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist,” 032c, December 20, 2021, https://032c.com/magazine/edouard-glissant-and-hans-ulrich-obrist; Ellis, Aster of Ceremonies, epub. ↩︎
11. Moten, In the Break, 49. ↩︎