Experimental musician and acclaimed spoken word artist Camae Ayewa had a prolific 2020, being involved in several projects including the free jazz project, Irreversible Entanglements, and a few projects under her spoken word alias Moor Mother, including the solo album Circuit City, her punk-inspired True Opera album with producer Mental Jewelry and her collaboration with rapper billy woods.
“Zami'” is Moor Mother’s first release in 2021 and since announcing that she has signed to ANTI-. The short but powerfully ominous tune gets its name from Audre Lorde’s 1982 book,
Ayewa expands upon the song’s motivations: “Zami” speaks to a number of different themes. Using the lenses of Black Quantum Futurism, the lyrics speak to Time and Space, injustice, racism, erasure of African identity. “Zami” speaks of agency and something beyond freedom. It speaks of another future. It speaks about connections free from the stains of colonialism. It speaks about the expansive temporalities of Afro Diasporan people around the world.”
Black Quantum Futurism refers to the collective Ayewa co-founded with Rasheedah Phillips, dedicated to “a new approach to living and experiencing reality by way of the manipulation of space-time in order to see into possible futures, and/or collapse space-time into a desired future in order to bring about that future’s reality. This vision and practice derives its facets, tenets, and qualities from quantum physics and Black/African cultural traditions of consciousness, time, and space.”
Through various artistic expressions, the collective seeks to “explore personal, cultural, familial, and communal cycles of experience, and solutions for transforming negative cycles into positive ones using artistic and wholistic methods of healing.”