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.
âAudre Lorde, Zami
In Audre Lordeâs hybrid autobiographical text, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1987), the term âZamiâ serves three key functions. As a ânew spellingâ of Lordeâs name, it is an act of self-definition in which Lorde stakes linguistic claim over her identity. Later in the text, we learn that âZamiâ is a Carriacou (the language of Lordeâs motherâs homeland) plural noun naming womenâs same-sex labor, affection, and desire, offering linguistic proof of queer historical presences in her motherâs homeland. Finally, it is the titular marker for Lordeâs genre invention, the âbiomythographyâ 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 âZamiâ (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 âZamiâ thus serves not only as a ânew spellingâ of Lordeâs 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 womenâs 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 Lordeâs 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. Lordeâs particular ârecreatingâ 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 womenâs literary culture. Lordeâs imperative to âliv[e] the old in a new wayâ queers perspectives on history common to many Afrodiasporic cultures and critical traditions, including, for example, the axiom that âyou have to know where you come from to know where youâre going.â2 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 âZamiâ as a term for specifically same-sex modes of belonging, sexual relationality, and selfhood, Lorde positions queerness as central among the âtraditionsâ that diaspora people must carry with them as they create new futures and redefines âtradition[al]â valuations of the past on her own queer terms (Zami 26). It is not only her ethnic or personal history (âwhere she comes fromâ) that Lorde must âknowâ 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 differenceâa black/queer/woman diasporic historyâand 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 historiographyâa 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 historiographyâwhich 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, âto 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 dehumanizationâ (The Queer Limit of Black Memory 9).
This âflagrant noncomplianceâ 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 expectationsâparticularly of narrative voice and narrative timeâin 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 âthe phenomenology of blacknessâthat is, when and where it is being imagined, defined, and performedâ (3). Wright argues that we look to nonlinear âepiphenomenal timeâ as the constant âânowâ through which the past, present, and future are always interpretedâ without direct causal relation to stable pasts. In this disengagement from linear time, blacknessâs meanings shift and expand according to how they are expressed and read, and âin what locations, both figurative and literalââ (ibid.). Yet as the example of Zami suggests, these multi-temporal iterations of blackness are not only âfigurative and literalâ but also literary. Just as Lordeâs biomythographic narrator creates a timespace in which she can ânew liv[e] the old in a new way,â 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 âblack/queer historyâ here to signal the mutual and multidirectional imbrication of âblackâ and âqueerâ 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 Lordeâs 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 Spillersâs model of the interstice, writing the âmissing wordsâ of black/queer presence on accepted historical narratives (âIntersticesâ 156). They thus activate the queer potential of the âsilence in the archiveâ of black historyâs traumas which, as Saidiya Hartman notes, elides the contradictions and complexities of black womenâs experiences of diasporic life (âVenus in Two Actsâ 4). Hartmanâs vision of the archive provides important language for how this silence becomes creative practice: by âListening to the unsaid, translating misconstrued words, and refashioning disfigured lives,â these writers (and often characters themselves) create histories that situate both individual and collective in temporal scapes that endure into futurity (3). Lordeâs choice not to include the prefix âautoâ in the genre designation of the âbiomythographyââand her decision to code the imagined elements of the story in the context of âmythâ rather than âfictionââpoint to the collective and intergenerational resonances that make up the scope of Zami, even as the term also serves as âa new spellingâ of the authorâs own name.
The genre of the âbiomythographyâ 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 womenâs biomythic historiographies are as much âbiographiesâ 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 Delanyâs memoir, The Motion of Light in Water (1988); African American fiction writer and critic Randall Kenanâs short story collection, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992); Afro-German fiction writer Olumide Popoolaâs novella, This Is Not about Sadness (2010); African American poet Kamilah Aisha Moonâs biomythographic poetry collection, She Has a Name (2014); African American novelist and poet Sapphireâs, Push (1996); Jamaican novelist Michelle Cliffâs, No Telephone to Heaven (1986); African American filmmaker Isaac Julienâs iconic Looking for Langston (1989); and Liberian American screenwriter and video artist Cheryl Dunyeâs film, The Watermelon Woman (1996). These authors and texts lay a foundation for what Essex Hemphill calls a black queer âlanguage ⊠esthetic,â 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 Brandâs novel In Another Place, Not Here (1996) and her long poem, Ossuaries (2010), in which Brandâs narrators and speakers subvert the formal conventions of the realist social novel to chart what I term âgenealogies of singularityââblack/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 Obejasâs novel Memory Mambo (1996), an Afrolatina lesbian coming-of-age story characterized by what I term âsyndetic bildungââa 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 Brandâs 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 Brandâs women protagonists. In Obejasâs 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 Obejasâs 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. Edelmanâs theory of abject anti-futurism meets a particularly direct challenge in Brandâs work. Edelman critiques what he terms âreproductive futurism,â 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 âascription of negativityâ in which âthe queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form.â 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 âto refuse the insistence of hope itself as affirmationâ (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 Scottâs 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 Kristevaâs foundational definition of the term, abjection might potentially signal the âloathingâ and âradical ⊠exclu[sions]â visited on black queer identities for its refusal to ârespect borders, positions, rulesâ (Powers of Horror 2, 4). Yet identification through retrospective âabjectionâ fails to account for black womenâs and black queer peopleâs 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, âwe were never meant to surviveâ (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 womenâs continuance possible, Lordeâs, Brandâs, and Obejasâs 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 âthe pastâ as a haven for identities barred from normative ideas of âthe futureâ 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 writersâ 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 âsingle-issueâ thinking that black feminism has historically worked to dismantle. Invoking black feminist imperatives of radical self-recovery, they reject the âascription of negativityâ that Edelman celebrates, in which âthe queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or formâ (4, 5). Further, approaching time from nonlinear Afrodiasporic frameworks, these writers refuse to reject the future as âmere repetition ⊠just as lethal as the pastâ or to eschew narrative histories in which the âdream of self-realizationâ occurs through âthe impossible place of an Imaginary pastâ (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...