The Poetics of Difference

Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780252052897
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the Modern Language Association (MLA)'s William Sanders Scarborough Prize

From Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Bessie Head, to Zanele Muholi, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Missy Elliott, Black women writers and artists across the African Diaspora have developed nuanced and complex creative forms. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ventures into the unexplored spaces of black women's queer creative theorizing to learn its languages and read the textures of its forms. Moving beyond fixed notions, Sullivan points to a space of queer imagination where black women invent new languages, spaces, and genres to speak the many names of difference. Black women's literary cultures have long theorized the complexities surrounding nation and class, the indeterminacy of gender and race, and the multiple meanings of sexuality. Yet their ideas and work remain obscure in the face of indifference from Western scholarship.

Innovative and timely, The Poetics of Difference illuminates understudied queer contours of black women's writing.

chapter one

Biomythic Times

Voice, Genre, and the Invention of Black/Queer History

In those years my life had become increasingly a bridge and field of women. Zami. Zami. A Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers. We carry our traditions with us. Buying boxes of Red Cross Salt and a fresh corn straw broom for my new apartment … new job, new house, new living the old in a new way. Recreating in words the women who helped give me substance.

—Audre Lorde, Zami

In Audre Lorde’s hybrid autobiographical text, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1987), the term “Zami” serves three key functions. As a “new spelling” of Lorde’s name, it is an act of self-definition in which Lorde stakes linguistic claim over her identity. Later in the text, we learn that “Zami” is a Carriacou (the language of Lorde’s mother’s homeland) plural noun naming women’s same-sex labor, affection, and desire, offering linguistic proof of queer historical presences in her mother’s homeland. Finally, it is the titular marker for Lorde’s genre invention, the “biomythography” through which Lorde tells a partially fictionalized, multi-genre, intertextual narrative of her coming-of-age as a black queer woman, and of her many-tiered search for self and belonging. By invoking these three simultaneous functions of “Zami” (as self-naming, as genre, and as proof of a black queer history), Lorde retools the term to link processes of self-definition, genre innovation, historical self-location, and coming-of-age.¹ “Zami” thus serves not only as a “new spelling” of Lorde’s name, but a new way of writing black queer processes of being, belonging, and becoming. It names the creative act through which Lorde joins personal and collective histories to make space for black queer women’s futurity.

As both a literary text and a genre-building concept, Zami illuminates the role of the nuantial in literary evocations of black/queer temporality. Engaging Lorde’s biomythics in Zami demonstrates the contours and functions of black queer feminist reading strategy and offers a useful interpretive frame for reading difference in other genre-subversive texts. Lorde’s particular “recreating” of personal and collective black/queer histories in the text also links to key black/ queer historiographic methods crucial to several queer Afrodiasporic texts. As in several black/queer diasporic texts, in Zami the text itself is the method; the biomythography serves as both an example of the historiographies black/queer experience necessitates and an interpretive frame for reading black/queer stories.

This chapter explores the interplay of formal invention, history, and black queer womanhood in Afrodiasporic women’s literary culture. Lorde’s imperative to “liv[e] the old in a new way” queers perspectives on history common to many Afrodiasporic cultures and critical traditions, including, for example, the axiom that “you have to know where you come from to know where you’re going.”² Lorde questions the viability of empirical distinctions between past, present, and future, and instead suggests a fluidity and interdependence among these and other timespaces. By linking images of her imagined Grenadian homeland to her climactic definition of “Zami” as a term for specifically same-sex modes of belonging, sexual relationality, and selfhood, Lorde positions queerness as central among the “traditions” that diaspora people must carry with them as they create new futures and redefines “tradition[al]” valuations of the past on her own queer terms (Zami 26). It is not only her ethnic or personal history (“where she comes from”) that Lorde must “know” in order to move into her future; she must also create evidence of a shared cultural past textured by the nuantial interstices of gender and sexual difference—a black/queer/woman diasporic history—and carry that evidence with her if she is to survive. Queering history in Zami, Lorde uses her poetics of difference to create what I term a biomythic historiography—a creative reimagining of historical narrative and historicity that asserts black queer presence by creating and documenting black queer pasts, with the specific aim of affirming and enabling black queer futures. Biomythic historiography upsets normative models of historiography—which most contemporary Western thought frames as animated by teleology, linearity, and a hegemonic focus on verifiable event. It also offers new models of historicity that emphasize the simultaneity and mutual constitution of timespaces and the creative manipulation of those timespaces as crucial for black/queer being. In this sense, the creative construction of these histories by black queer women writers is, in itself, a radical act. As Matt Richardson points out, “to claim such an assemblage of creative interpretations of the self is also dangerous in its dizzying audacity and flagrant noncompliance with the terms of our dehumanization” (The Queer Limit of Black Memory 9).

This “flagrant noncompliance” with dominant narratives of black queer life requires similarly spectacular departures from standard narrative form, genre, and temporality. Lorde and other black/queer writers destabilize readerly expectations—particularly of narrative voice and narrative time—in order to convey the multisubjectivity and multidirectionality of black/queer historical narrative. As Michelle Wright notes in Physics of Blackness, understanding the meanings of blackness requires attention to “the phenomenology of blackness—that is, when and where it is being imagined, defined, and performed” (3). Wright argues that we look to nonlinear “epiphenomenal time” as the constant “‘now’ through which the past, present, and future are always interpreted” without direct causal relation to stable pasts. In this disengagement from linear time, blackness’s meanings shift and expand according to how they are expressed and read, and ‘in what locations, both figurative and literal’” (ibid.). Yet as the example of Zami suggests, these multi-temporal iterations of blackness are not only “figurative and literal” but also literary. Just as Lorde’s biomythographic narrator creates a timespace in which she can “new liv[e] the old in a new way,” centering her queerness and multiple other differences in her vision of black/ queer diasporic history, so do several other queer writers of the African diaspora intervene in epiphenomenal time specifically to invent black/queer histories. I use the term “black/queer history” here to signal the mutual and multidirectional imbrication of “black” and “queer” historical narratives, and to reference the subversive creative practices by which black queer writers and artists (re)create those intersecting histories by centering the nuantial in their poetics. For many queer writers of the African diaspora, blackness and queerness are not separate identificatory markers; rather, they are contiguous signifiers of a difference that defines temporal and social experience. In their worlds, there cannot be black history without several forms of queerness, and there cannot be black queer survival without several concurrent black histories.

As Zami shows, biomythic historiography functions as a heterogeneous praxis that destabilizes dominant expectations of both the genres in which histories are constructed and the subjects whose stories are told. Just as Lorde’s text uses several poetic, narrative, and temporal forms to chart a shared nuantial history of black/queer life, the coming-of-age fictions of Trinbagonian Canadian writer Dionne Brand and Cuban American writer Achy Obejas demonstrate how biomythic historiographies incorporate elements of documented history, personal narrative, shared communal lore, and individual erotic fantasy in reimagining individual and collective queer pasts. They enact upon the archive the function of Hortense Spillers’s model of the interstice, writing the “missing words” of black/queer presence on accepted historical narratives (“Interstices” 156). They thus activate the queer potential of the “silence in the archive” of black history’s traumas which, as Saidiya Hartman notes, elides the contradictions and complexities of black women’s experiences of diasporic life (“Venus in Two Acts” 4). Hartman’s vision of the archive provides important language for how this silence becomes creative practice: by “Listening to the unsaid, translating misconstrued words, and refashioning disfigured lives,” these writers (and often characters themselves) create histories that situate both individual and collective in temporal scapes that endure into futurity (3). Lorde’s choice not to include the prefix “auto” in the genre designation of the “biomythography”—and her decision to code the imagined elements of the story in the context of “myth” rather than “fiction”—point to the collective and intergenerational resonances that make up the scope of Zami, even as the term also serves as “a new spelling” of the author’s own name.

The genre of the “biomythography” taps the epic temporal resonances of mythology while also leaving open the possibility of narrative distance and depersonalization inherent in the biographic form. It thus traverses timespaces, bringing the present in constant contact with past and future, and uses the ostensibly individual voice of the narrator to speak in and from multiple modes and perspectives, as do several polyvocal diasporic oral traditions of mythology. Like Zami, black women’s biomythic historiographies are as much “biographies” of partly invented historical black/queer communities as they are individual stories of coming-of-age and survival. These historiographies are valuable precisely because they are partly imagined, even as their sustaining effects are urgently real.

The biomythographic works of Lorde, Obejas, and Brand are part of a rich, underexplored lineage of poetic innovation and historiographic fantasy in queer diasporic literary culture. There is a significant and underexplored archive of queer texts of the African diaspora that use multiplicities of voice and genre to render black/queer histories that highlight the multiplicity of black/queer subjects by disturbing distinctions between self and other and between present and the past. These include: African American critic, memoirist, and science fiction writer Samuel Delany’s memoir, The Motion of Light in Water (1988); African American fiction writer and critic Randall Kenan’s short story collection, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992); Afro-German fiction writer Olumide Popoola’s novella, This Is Not about Sadness (2010); African American poet Kamilah Aisha Moon’s biomythographic poetry collection, She Has a Name (2014); African American novelist and poet Sapphire’s, Push (1996); Jamaican novelist Michelle Cliff’s, No Telephone to Heaven (1986); African American filmmaker Isaac Julien’s iconic Looking for Langston (1989); and Liberian American screenwriter and video artist Cheryl Dunye’s film, The Watermelon Woman (1996). These authors and texts lay a foundation for what Essex Hemphill calls a black queer “language … esthetic,” tuned specifically for expressing shared black queer experience stricken from dominant social narratives (Brother to Brother xxiv). Historiography, for these authors, is not an effort to retrieve or document the past, but a self-conscious and explicit act of creativity. They reveal historiography as a creative, processual invention of lineages, ancestors, kinship tales, and personal narratives through which the present is sustained and the future is made possible.

Biomythic historiographies engage the poetics of the nuantial in two key ways: (1) they construct black/queer ancestral lineages through acts of vocal subversion and imaginative temporality and (2) they develop heterogeneous point-of-view strategies to disturb normative, genre-specific constructions of narrative time and subjectivity. I begin with an examination of Trinbagonian Canadian lesbian poet and novelist Dionne Brand’s novel In Another Place, Not Here (1996) and her long poem, Ossuaries (2010), in which Brand’s narrators and speakers subvert the formal conventions of the realist social novel to chart what I term “genealogies of singularity”—black/queer ancestries created by imagining figures of both historical and folkloric pasts in terms of their relationships to multiple difference and by creating erotic and political identificatory links with those figures.

I then turn to Cuban American journalist, poet, novelist, and translator Achy Obejas’s novel Memory Mambo (1996), an Afrolatina lesbian coming-of-age story characterized by what I term “syndetic bildung”—a fictional device in which coming-of-age trajectories require heteroglossic narrative structures and intimate engagements with imagined pasts. Syndetic bildung subverts white, Western bildungsroman ideals of individualism and static futurity and replaces them with the objective of mutual identification through a black/queer difference located in the past. In Brand’s work, biomythic historiography occurs as black/queer historiography, in which the interstices of self-identified blackness and queerness allow and demand new poetic historiographic praxis for Brand’s women protagonists. In Obejas’s novel, this biomythic praxis takes the form of queer Afrolatina historiography, a term I use to acknowledge the specific dynamics of blackness in Latinx Afrodiasporic communities, and the particular ways in which race is contested within Obejas’s text. In both historiographic structures, it is the effort to create and identify through the past that propels black/queer narratives forward.

These historiographies highlight the queer and feminist possibilities of futurity in Afrodiasporic literature, and challenge the turn in queer studies to antisocial and anti-futurist discourses, in which queer subjectivity is thought to be defined and made meaningful by its oppositional relation to social connectedness and futurity.³ White twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of queer identity and temporality such as those offered by Julia Kristeva (1982), Leo Bersani (1985), Michael Warner (1999), Lee Edelman (2004), Heather Love (2007), and others have examined the usefulness of abjection, stigma, and anti-futurism for constructing radical queer identifications. Edelman’s theory of abject anti-futurism meets a particularly direct challenge in Brand’s work. Edelman critiques what he terms “reproductive futurism,” through which (Western) social discourses seek to obscure queerness by positioning heterosexual reproduction as the arbiter of personhood. To reject this schema, Edelman suggests that queer subjects must embrace an “ascription of negativity” in which “the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form.” Edelman places his model of queer abjection in direct opposition with crucial black feminist discourses of hope and survival, arguing that one major responsibility of contemporary queerness is “to refuse the insistence of hope itself as affirmation” (No Future 4).⁴

For queer people in the African diaspora, I argue that abjection only functions as a valuable political frame when it is deployed, as in Darieck Scott’s usage, as a way of articulating the psychic and social impacts of racism, homophobia, and other systems of hegemonic normativity on black queer subjects (15).⁵ In Kristeva’s foundational definition of the term, abjection might potentially signal the “loathing” and “radical … exclu[sions]” visited on black queer identities for its refusal to “respect borders, positions, rules” (Powers of Horror 2, 4). Yet identification through retrospective “abjection” fails to account for black women’s and black queer people’s historical efforts against oppression, as it denies the energy, hope, and visioning required simply to endure in a world in which, as Lorde famously puts it, “we were never meant to survive” (The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde). In suggesting that queer theory and queer subjects align their radical ideologies against futurity, this scholarship denies the persistence and violence of racism, sexism, classism, and other hegemonic structures that queer Afrodiasporic women subjects constantly face, and through which they must continually engage the past, present, and future.

In inventing history to make black queer women’s continuance possible, Lorde’s, Brand’s, and Obejas’s work demands answers to the questions recent queer discourses of anti-futurism bury in rhetoric: Who has the luxury of valuing abjection? Who can afford not to dream of the future? Their work positions the affective registers of gay shame as inextricable from the political imperatives of black pride and black feminist survival, troubling logics that look to abject sites of “the past” as a haven for identities barred from normative ideas of “the future” by dismantling distinctions between the two.⁶

Reading the works of Lorde, Brand, and Obejas through the technologies of a nuantial black/queer feminist poetics highlights these writers’ efforts to create the impossible futures that much of white queer studies dismisses. Their narrators and speakers issue a vehement challenge to anti-futurist logics, locating them within the strain of “single-issue” thinking that black feminism has historically worked to dismantle. Invoking black feminist imperatives of radical self-recovery, they reject the “ascription of negativity” that Edelman celebrates, in which “the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form” (4, 5). Further, approaching time from nonlinear Afrodiasporic frameworks, these writers refuse to reject the future as “mere repetition … just as lethal as the past” or to eschew narrative histories in which the “dream of self-realization” occurs through “the impossible place of an Imaginary past” (31, 10). By unsettling distinctions between past, present, and future for the purposes of black/queer hope and affirmation, Lorde, Brand, and Obejas reject white anti-futurist models of queerness th...