Deep Life Reflections: Friday Five
Issue 99 - Voices
Welcome to Issue 99 of Deep Life Reflections.
I want to start with a thank you for the messages I received after last week’s newsletter. Writing about the passing of my mum, Jane, was difficult, but I was grateful for the opportunity to reflect and for the kindness from so many of you. Thank you 🙏🏻
This week, I return to the usual rhythm: what I’ve read, what I’ve watched, and what I’ve been thinking about. Plus a notable quote and question for you to consider.
What do we hear, and whose voice is speaking? This week, we explore the power of sound, memory, and perspective through James, the latest novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Percival Everett, and 32 Sounds, an award-winning, immersive documentary that invites us to listen more deeply.
Press play now and join me as we explore this week’s Friday Five.
1. What I’m Reading
James. By Percival Everett.
“The easy telling is this is a revisiting of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain,” says Pulitzer Prize finalist Percival Everett, reflecting on his novel James. “But that’s not quite correct. [Instead], it’s finally an opportunity for Jim to be present in this story.”
For those unfamiliar, Jim—an adult with a wife and children—is the runaway slave in Twain’s 1884 classic of American literature. But in James, Everett doesn’t just retell Twain’s novel from a different perspective—he interrogates, reclaims, and reshapes it. It’s the same journey, but the terrain has changed.
Everett shifts the focus from Huck to Jim—renamed James—and in doing so, exposes how Twain’s novel, despite its anti-slavery stance, relied on a minstrel-show façade for its most famous Black character. The most obvious way Everett subverts and reclaims the original story is the central idea that “Jim” is a performance. An act. A disguise to keep him safe. If Huckleberry Finn is a novel about one boy’s moral awakening, James is about survival in a brutal world where performance is the difference between life and death.
We quickly learn James doesn’t speak in the broken, submissive slave dialect Twain gave Jim—at least, not when he doesn’t have to. Among his own people, he is articulate, thoughtful, and intelligent—speaking and writing in correct, formal English. James has a head full of books; he converses with Voltaire and John Locke. He has agency. This is not Twain’s Jim who is superstitious, childishly simple, and loyal, existing simply to give Huck an opportunity to display his moral growth and learning.
In the presence of white characters, James adopts the role expected of him, slipping into the exaggerated dialect and deference that keeps him safe—the Jim of Twain’s world. It’s an ingenious conceit by Everett. As critic Marcel Theroux writes, “The South, as we see it through James’s eyes, is a Truman Show for white people, in which the black cast is careful not to break character… performing a version of blackness that’s designed to make them appear non-threatening.” As James reminds his children during a lesson on the correct forms of incorrect speech, “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us.”
James follows the basic structure of Twain’s novel: Huck and James escape, drifting down the Mississippi on a raft, encountering conmen, dangers, and absurdities along the way. But unlike Twain’s version, where Jim doesn’t possess knowledge related to irony, self-interest, and retribution, Everett’s James does. His fear and repressed anger are given an edge by his comedic detachment. Nowhere is this clearer than when James is forced to join a traveling minstrel show. He reflects on this absurdity in one of his many dark and ironic inner monologues:
“We are twelve men pretending to be Black men, all are white, except one who actually is a Black man pretending to be a white man pretending to be a Black man.”
By the time James reaches its conclusion, the tone has shifted from satire to something more furious. There is no magical reconciliation, no neat resolution. James is a man who knows the world in which he lives.
The cost is colossal, but the reward is everything—his dignity, his voice, his right to tell his own story.
2. What I’m Watching
32 Sounds. Documentary by Sam Green.
There’s a moment in 32 Sounds where one of the film’s contributors—a specialist in electronics and sound—listens to a recording of himself at 11 years old. As a child, he recorded a message to his future self on an old tape deck. Decades later, his younger voice asks him, ‘I hope you have made my dreams come true. I hope you are still the same.’ It’s a deeply affecting moment, inviting us to do the same—to imagine ourselves speaking across time. That’s the power of sound—it memorialises people, like a photograph. A moment frozen in time, preserved forever.
Directed by Sam Green, 32 Sounds is a 2022 award-winning documentary that is part immersive experience and part philosophical inquiry into the nature of sound and memory. At the start, Green asks us to listen through a set of headphones to get the full spatial experience of sound. As I was on a flight, I was already set.
The film is structured around 32 distinct sonic moments—each one an exploration of how sound shapes us, how we experience it, and how it lingers long after the moment has passed. We start—symbolically—with the sound of the womb, the first noises we ever feel and hear, connecting us to the world in our first fragile, vulnerable state. It sets the stage for the core message of the film: that sound is more than background noise—it is history, identity, and presence.
One of the film’s most moving threads is the way sound is tied to memory. A song that takes you back to a moment in childhood. The sound of someone’s laughter—once so familiar, now a ghost of its former self. A 90-year-old World War II veteran reflects on the comfort of hearing the fog horns of San Francisco Bay. Despite being an almost empty sound, the fog horns provide solace to him—a reminder that the oceans are moving, that people are moving. Going places.
And then there’s the question of voice. Not just the voices we hear, but the one we carry within ourselves. The film touches on the work of experimental musician Annea Lockwood, who recorded the world beneath the river surface as well as the voices of people before they died—not just for posterity, but to preserve something uniquely theirs. What happens when a voice is lost? What lingers when it’s gone? Lockwood suggests a paradoxical thought:
“Everything changes and nothing is lost.”
Sounds tether us to the past. They are portals, reminding us who we were, and, sometimes, who we still are.
The film is also aware enough to speak to those who can’t hear. It doesn’t treat deafness as an absence but as a different way of experiencing the world. For those who are unable to hear, sound isn’t something they lack—it’s something they perceive differently. They don’t experience sound as noise or vibration alone, but as meaning, as presence, as something that carries relevance.
32 Sounds acknowledges that listening isn’t just about hearing—it’s about attention, connection, and the ways we tune into the world around us. Every sound is out there, no matter how small. We just need to learn how to listen.
32 Sounds is a powerful, meditative film that makes you aware of your own voice—not just in the way it sounds but what it means. How it exists in the world today and how it might one day fade.
Sound is life. Sound is memory. Sound is connection. And in a world filled with noise, the most important sound might just be your own.
3. What I’m Contemplating
Both James and 32 Sounds are, in their own ways, about whose voice gets heard and how we listen.
James takes a familiar, much-loved story and shifts the perspective, forcing us to reconsider the narrative we thought we knew. 32 Sounds explores sound, memory, and the way we experience the world through listening. It reminds us that sound shapes perception—often in ways we don’t even notice.
Both works raise a fundamental question: Who gets to speak, and who is listening? After all, perspective is shaped by what we choose to hear.
Thinking about voice, memory, loss, and sound, I found myself reflecting—with both humour and sadness—on the tape deck recordings I made as a child, much like the one in 32 Sounds. I made one when I was six or seven, back when we lived in the Scottish countryside near several farms.
Every so often, the farmer would walk his herd—about 100 cows—past our house into a nearby field. But one day, they took a detour, wandering into our driveway and exploring our garden!
My recording turned into a live news report—until fear took over, and I burst into tears. Then my mum’s calm voice came on the tape, reassuring me that there was no danger—that the cows meant no harm.
I wish I still had that tape. But it’s long gone—only a memory now, carried across decades.
Maybe that quote from Annea Lockwood is pretty apt after all:
“Everything changes and nothing is lost.”
4. A Quote to note
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
- William Faulkner
5. A Question for you
What’s a sound you haven’t noticed in a while—but might miss if it were gone?
Thanks for reading and being part of the Deep Life Journey community. If you have any reflections on this issue, please leave a comment. Have a great weekend.
James
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