Cruising the Black Maze

I cruise a black maze.
—Essex Hemphill

The “emergence” of black gay men in the academy was marked by a curious confession: I have a white lover or I have sex with white men, as though intellectual legibility within a predominantly white academy was predicated on a desire “for whiteness.” (See foundational work by Isaac Julien, Darieck Scott, Reginald Shepherd, Melvin Dixon, Phillip Brian Harper, Robert Reid-Pharr, Samuel Delany. I take desire for whiteness from Langston Hughes.) Desiring white bodies was deemed “transgressive,” evidence that black gay men had moved “beyond race,” which is to say, beyond “racial resentment,” that dangerous legacy from the 1970s, and could safely participate in queer studies. Black gay intellectuals demonstrated their cosmopolitanism, their participation in global circuits of feeling beyond the resentments of nation-feeling and nation-history, by confessing their still-transgressive desires for white flesh.

It seemed, from a certain perspective, that one needed to articulate this desire to join the small group of black queer intellectuals. To admit one’s desire for another black queer did not merit academic scrutiny. Thus, a too-polite academy enamored with transgression across color lines—and dedicated to maintaining those color lines by naming movement across as simultaneously transgressive and liberatory (see Robert Reid-Pharr on this)—rendered black-on-black queerness invisible, illegible, un-queer, even as the interracial acquired the paradoxical status of normatively queer, that is, legibly queer.
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I wanted to give you
my sweet man pussy,
but you grunted me away
and all other Black men
who tried to be near you.
Our beautiful nigga lips and limbs
stirred no desire in you.
Instead you chose blonde,
milk-toned creatures to bed.
But you were still one of us,
dark like us, despised like us.—Essex Hemphill
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There is something embarrassing about the claims I have made, something that feels “unreconstructed.” As though I’m stuck in a polyester groove. Resurrecting old resentments. To think about the intra-racial, to use “intra” to compete with or complicate a focus on the “inter,” feels Shameful.

Black-on-black queerness is much too banal or uninteresting. Against Joseph Beam’s claim that black men loving black men is a revolutionary act, the queer academy has yawned, deemed interest in black-on-black love as too voyeuristic (we are too polite) or simply not interesting because (and here I get mean) black queer men are only interesting when they profess their desire for whiteness as good post-racial subjects.
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I’m writing an essay on Essex Hemphill. In doing so, I am returning to the wave of scholarship I read in the 1990s by black gay scholars, to questions that have been rudely simmering, to the particular and peculiar ways black queerness becomes “interesting” as a post-racial formation, rarely as an intra-racial scene. To be fair, the inter-racial is more regulated, more monitored, as Nayan Shah’s work demonstrates. Black-on-black love is interesting when it transgresses a normative claim about black deviance. Yet the transgression of normativity against deviance becomes tricky for the black queer who wants to name something “revolutionary.”

My sentences are snarling.
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I’m writing an essay on Essex Hemphill and wondering about what it means to write an essay on him. In a future project, I argue that he bridges black arts affect with black gay feeling, a clumsy formulation, but rooting his work in the 1970s yields a richer picture than queer deracination provides.

Yet, I offer an incomplete story.

A fuller story would note the many discussions about black-on-black love that were taking place in non-academic spaces, on email lists where terms such as same-gender loving (SGL) marked points of departure for POC. As a latecomer and sometime participant in some of these discussions, I learned to cherish the fecundity of these discussions, to note the worlds they were building, the possibilities they created for thinking and acting, even as I mourned their absence from the academic spaces I wanted to occupy.
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When I started writing this post, a day ago, the first few paragraphs came easily, fueled by the urgency I always feel when I read Hemphill. I wanted to tell a story about queerness and race, to nag.

As always, the urgency of the moment comes up against the habit of training. Writing creates a space for thinking—I think most effectively when I write. Writing also creates a space where “nuance” shades so easily into cowardice. Where the question of “what will those with power over me think?” meets “do I dare risk sounding retrograde?” and, worse, “do I dare risk sounding stupid?”

Thus, the genre of the endlessly qualified essay, the overly diluted claim, the overly specialized argument that moves from focusing on the world to counting commas. My first inclination is to revise the previous sentence, to make it more “nuanced,” which is to say, to blunt its edge.

We are, let me qualify that, I am not much given to “ass-splitting truth,” much as I love Hemphill. Habit. Fear. Anxiety. Careerism. These all-too-real facets of existence. Compounded, also, by a finely tuned ear for what is expected and what I am not ready to give—anger, rage, outrage, answers, solutions, absolution, emotional labor. (An unwritable essay muses on the affective labor of black academics.)

I wonder whether “writing on Hemphill” consists of endlessly qualifying him, turning him into a cup of tea brewed from a thrice-used teabag.

Is it a new language we must learn?
Is it a miracle sign that foretells of us
speaking in tongues and finally understanding?
These are the elusive questions that foil me.

And also, always, the problem of desire in Hemphill:

I want to court outside the race,
outside the class, outside the attitudes —
but love is a dangerous word
in this small town.
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A note:

The original cover of Ceremonies, the 1992 Plume edition, features two black men on the cover, Hemphill and another man standing in shadow behind him. The most recent edition, the 2000 Cleis Press version, features a beautifully sculpted model standing alone. I don’t have my copy handy, so I don’t know whether the model is identified.

Between 1992 and 2000, queer studies had emerged as a “force” that included a number of black queer men among its numbers. It had also foregrounded deracination as the price black queers had to pay to participate in the queer academy.

These are coincidences.

Signs taken for wonders.

On the Unrecognizable

If one has been following news in higher education, one has noted discussions about “lectures”: good or bad, useful or not useful, boring or interesting. The topic is polarizing, so it seems. On the one side, those “lazy” students who want to be “entertained.” On the other, the “earnest” teachers who “must lecture” to “impart knowledge,” because they have “prepared powerpoints.” And, anyway, today’s students need to work on their “attention spans” and teaching is not “entertaining.” And so on.

I read these accounts with a slight frown. That becomes more pronounced.

I learned how to listen to lectures in my junior and senior years as an undergrad. A skill I refined as a grad student. I had to learn how to listen to a lecture: it was not something that came easily. I think this is important: while many instructors need to learn how to lecture, students also need to be taught how to listen to lectures.

I find most lectures (and lecturers) boring. I pass notes. Play on my iPad. Write poetry. Google. And only look up when certain key words are mentioned: food, sex, Africa, family, women, men, gender, food, and sex. Occasionally, I catch a preposition. I have never understood why pedagogy needs to be boring. I have never understood why listening to a boring lecture is supposed to enrich my life or how. I don’t really buy that being bored is “good for me.” And I am quite aware that I have probably missed very many profound things in the world because I did not have the patience to be bored. I’m willing to pay this price.

Simply, I side with students who complain lectures are boring.

But this, I add, is because I’m in a discipline that allows me not to lecture. I do not like lecturing. I am not good at it. Like any other person with an advanced degree, I can talk at people for a good length of time, and I can even perform an entertaining conference paper—I actually take great pride in performing conference papers; I have a method. I perform lectures, when I must, for my peers, that is, for people who have been trained to sit through lectures. Rarely, if ever, for undergraduates. Every time I talk for more than 6 minutes in a classroom, I feel the irresistible urge to apologize.

But this, I emphasize, is because I’m in a discipline that allows me not to lecture. And so much as I pay attention to debates on the merits (or not) of lectures, I don’t recognize myself in them. Which is not to say that folks in English do not lecture. Of course they do. And many very successfully.

Regrettably, we use “lectures” to include all forms of pedagogy, which is a problem. (I sidestep the question of what percentage of university instructors and disciplines favor lectures.) The distracted student will be distracted, whether sitting in a large lecture hall of 300 students or in a seminar room of 12. I have taught this student and I have been this student. The student who finds everything boring will still find everything boring, no matter how many group work exercises, trips to exotic museums, or visits to candy factories the instructor plans. One of my favorite teachers had us stand on desks while we were reading Gertrude Stein! It was amazing! Not so much for those who already hated Stein. (Why would anyone hate Stein?)

Being a student requires committing to be interested. And this is something that very real economic, social, and cultural pressures cannot force. I feel bad for the many students who are forced to attend classes they don’t like to be certified as workers, rarely as thinkers. Our rhetoric about the “value” of being curious and asking big questions is rarely matched by our attention to comma splices and sentence fragments—I’m not against writing well, but we in English can focus on small, petty elements in ways that do not matter. An attention to detail matters, but that detail should itself matter. I’m not a fan of the idea that education is like cod liver oil—good for you.

I’m committed to the idea that education cultivates and sustains interest. Sometimes, that interest will emerge from a deep cultural or political commitment: the raced, classed, gendered, religious student whose areas of focus draw from that background. The pre-med major, for instance, who focuses on research based on her particular geo-history—the African student in the U.S. who studies jiggers, for instance, or Kwashiorkor. Sometimes interest springs from a commitment to deracination—I ran as far as I could from African literature for a very long time into the welcome texts of Frank O’Hara and Jack Spicer and Susan Howe. Not the Russians. Never the Russians. They are too Kenyan for my taste. Of course, our histories have ways of catching up with us and after many years of drinking coffee, I am now back to black tea. But interest also has rhythms—it waxes and wanes, and expecting students to read a 600-page novel over spring break is simply cruel. Assign a ten-line poem. At least you can read it in class several times when you get back to school. And you can avoid being mad at each other.

While I’m happy and ready to defend “what we do,” I’m less willing to defend our habits, what Kenneth Burke described as “trained incapacity.” Those who say lectures have worked for the past x years and so should be respected as methods of delivery worry me; not because they don’t have a point—they very well might. But because any defense of the present that begins from “if it worked in the past” seems determined to disengage from the present. Our now can never be our then, even though, as Stein teaches in “Composition as Explanation,” we are more comfortable in our then than we are in our now.

Weaving

A good memory: in the 1980s, Kenyan women had discovered European and North American hunger for ciondos. Women would buy ciondos, pack them in suitcases, travel to Europe and North America, and raise school fees. In my imagination, the streets of New York smelled like freshly-woven, brightly colored sisal. I would accompany my mother to Kariorkor market, where I’d watch women sitting next to each other, chatting, sharing space, and weaving. Weaving was a communal practice with expansive geographies. Aesthetic labor in a global economy—with all the possible meanings one can attach to economy.

It’s a good memory because it makes my fingers tingle with the remembered texture of sisal as it takes form; my nose itch with the abundance of ciondos; my pleasure centers light up with the excitement of going to the airport to pick up my mother, who always remembered to pick up a box of Quality Street chocolates at duty free, as a dutiful mother should.

Multiple failed attempts at weaving a kiondo have taught me to respect the skill and patience and dedication and craft of weavers, almost always women, and always women in my memory.
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If you have been reading Kenyan women over the past few months, you might have noticed the following:

Weaving with zinduko, Hearth Mother, Akitelekmboya’s blog.

Woven alongside M. Mwangola News to Note: Loud Enough to Hear Ourselves and continuing the “Women in Leadership” conversation with Margaretta Wa Gacheru

In conversation with: Wambui Mwangi, Betty Muragori, Phyllis Muthoni, Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg, Ngwatilo Mayiwoo, Margaretta wa Gacheru and Jean Thevenet

Weaving alongside Dr. Mshai Mwangola News to Note, Jean Thévenet A Knotted Weave and Phyllis Muthoni The Words We Use. And for those warriors of memory like Dr. Wambui Mwangi (Laboratories Have Advanced) but especially for all of us who are befuddled by the simplest of things.

Weaving from Kenya and Australia and France and South Africa, along and across geographies that have yet to be named, geographies whose names are being woven into being.
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If our metaphors accent us, root us, find us, discover us, then weaving places my “r”s and “l”s. Simply it names how I envision and practice aesthetic and academic labor. To weave is to imagine into being, to labor at being, and being collective.
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Kenyan women are continuing to weave.

In poems and photographs, fiction and creative non-fiction, anecdote and memoir, journalism and critical prose. Kenyan women are weaving.

Don’t take my word for it.

Read them, see them, experience them weaving.

http://hearthmother.blogspot.com/

http://akitelekmboya.wordpress.com/

http://lutivini.blogspot.com/

http://kuumira.tumblr.com/

http://madkenyanwoman.blogspot.com/

http://mbio-za-ukingoni.blogspot.com/

http://zinduko.tumblr.com/

And to the many others whose words and images and worlds I have yet to encounter.

Thank you for creating new possibilities for how we can inhabit and re-make the world.

Touching at Four Airports

When we touch, our bones clatter and clang,
This new music the only song we sing.
—Melvin Dixon, “Just Us, at Home”

Taboo dominates Nairobi. Security guards still believe in the sacredness of bodies, avoid touching other Kenyans, touch foreign-passport holders reluctantly. Amsterdam, famed for public sex, touches everyone. Touch feels less offensive, as though the breaking of all rules justifies rule breaking. Our bodies do not belong to us. Touch happens in Dubai, as it happens everywhere, but rarely, if ever, with a public audience. But Dubai is so busy that I may have missed public touching. In the U.S. touch is ritually uneven—a pat down here, a caress there, a grope elsewhere. Always in public. The place that created personal space struggles with how to breach it, reaches for suspicious bodies—the foreign, the domestic, the brown, the white, the old, the young—all those gazed upon by security cameras.
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My title derives from Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling and Lisa Lowe’s “The Intimacy of Four Continents.” My banal observation: airport surveillance is a metonym for global practices of surveillance. I write this not with the sense that it is new or unexpected. Indeed, as a claim, it exists, more properly, in the register as the claim that a typical English sonnet contains fourteen lines.

Yet, I want to argue for the value of the banal observation. It is, after all, in the quotidian that ideology inheres most powerfully. And ideology labors relentlessly to render the banal observation forgettable.

From J.K. Rowling I continue to lean the value of “Constant Vigilance!”
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Touch, following Fanon, gives us back to ourselves, and it is that we cannot do without:

Locked in this suffocating reification, I appealed to the Other so that his liberating gaze, gliding over my body suddenly smoothed of rough edges, would give me back the lightness of being I thought I had lost and taking me out of the world put me back in the world.

Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?

One might ask what is being given back as one is touched across space and time by indifferent borders and border-crossings that enflesh us. How are we being bodied, to invoke Beyoncé? And to what ends? What might it mean to accept touch as, variously, taboo, sacred, indifferent, purposive, inimical, ordinary, and extraordinary? What expectations can be attached to touch?

And what happens to touching after touching?
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Touching, as an adjective, refers to something that breaks a certain wall or that finds emotional resonance despite or because of its conventionality. One is touched, to borrow from Sara Ahmed, by what one anticipates to be touching. To claim that what is touching is convention-bound is to register the labor of genre as a strategy to manage affect, a lesson I learn from Lauren Berlant.

From Raymond Williams I learned to think of feeling’s materiality: shifts in material conditions effect shifts in feeling.

What, to get to my question, is touching after touching?
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In prior thinking, I have reached for the callus as a figure for the ongoing labor of feeling—to register not unfeeling, but the habit of feeling. Calluses make feeling easier, ritual. This is, I want to say, the U.S. ritual of affirming “love.” “I love you,” which I once found lacking in African contexts, until I wondered at the demand for the claim, about its ritual affirmation, as though the practice of love depended on it being habitual.

That’s not quite right.

I want to suggest something about how we can no longer use touching to describe emotional attachment—I wanted to write intensity—about how being touched has done something to touching.

What, to repeat a question, is touching after touching?
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I want to return to Fanon’s optimism that one can “touch” the other, that “touch” exists beyond the violence of the “gaze.”

If, as I have suggested, we might now be able to think of love as Fanon could not, we are also in a position where Fanon’s optimism about touch may no longer be possible. Touch subjects differently, produces our bodies differently, to defamiliarize the other, as Fanon hoped, but in the service of surveillance, which is to say, in a way he could not have anticipated.

If touch today moves us beyond being “other,” that is because we are made familiar as sets of data, as our movements, our conversations, our hopes, our dreams. We are given back to ourselves, via touch, as that which is touched and touchable. But this is not the touching beyond the violence of the subject-abrading gaze. And it might be that we have lost the possibility of a touch beyond the gaze, as touch and gaze conflate to produce us as data-subjects, known and knowable habits and practices.
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We have not lost touch or touching; that is not what I am suggesting. Instead, I am suggesting that both touch and touching have acquired additional layers of meaning, become less “knowable.” Which is not to suggest that they were ever simple.

It would be easy to say that what I am attempting here is to think “beyond” touch and touching, to render them more impossible to understand in a simple way, were it not that I would have to falsify a prior simplicity. It would also be easy to say that I am arguing against touch and touching, seeing act and affect as complicit within an already suspect sentimental economy. In this scenario, I would be devaluing the already devalued. Or, refusing to believe in the possibilities of that which we cannot do without. Giving in, that is, to the cynical promise of despair. It would also be easy to say that a non-linear meditation on touch and touching believes (too much) in the promise of form to evade the logic of data sets: I have no argument that can be readily summarized. But that would be to suggest that data sets, those technologies for managing bio-power, work with simple formulations—and that seems like a silly assumption.

So much for silly assumptions.
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More properly, I am grasping for something whose significance I do not yet know, a barely felt idea about what it means to inhabit the now as a feeling, which is to say touched, subject.

Here’s Sedgwick:

Even more immediately than other perceptual systems, it seems, the sense of touch makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity; to touch is always already to reach out, to fondle, to heft, to tap, or to enfold, and always also to understand other people or natural forces as having effectually done so before oneself, if only in the making of the textured object.

What might it mean to think of our newly textured bodies, abraded by the logic of touch and touching?
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And to articulate where I am now, I borrow, again, from Sedgwick:

In writing this [post[ I’ve continually feel pressed against the limits of my stupidity.

“What We Have Now”

If a certain kind of queer theory, emanating primarily from the English departments of elite universities, is dead, we need not mourn. What we have now is a plenitude of promiscuous engagements across disciplinary and institutional boundaries now remaking fields and politics in ways the queer theory of 10 years ago could not have imagined.—Lisa Duggan

During a recent encounter, shall we call it queer, I mused about the anxiety expressed by a recent book about the “state” of queer theory: it was, this book claimed, in need of “revival.” Coincidentally, this book’s leading chapter focused on Frankenstein. What, I wondered, was this object that needed to be revived? I am, I must confess, not a student of Shelley’s novel. I am more familiar with its multiple adaptations or, more precisely, mutations. More in tune with what “it’s supposed to be about” than “what it’s about.”

From the rough assemblage in my head, Frankenstein is about rough assemblage: the putting together of available parts to create something not-quite-new. This version owes more to Disney than Shelley, but I want to use it irresponsibly to ask about the “new” of queer theory and politics, the territories of reach and grasp and gaze, what feels, increasingly, less like transfer and contagion and more Eliotian, a gathering of “fragments” to “shore” against “ruin.”

Where Duggan’s privileged metaphor is “promiscuity,” a metaphor I like very much, I would amend that to read velvet rope promiscuity: guaranteed by bouncers who are always on the lookout for the “new,” the “fashionable,” the “interesting,” the “trendy,” and the “retro.” One envisions a 70s club filled with trend-spotters, or whatever the term is now. Curiously much recent work in queer studies focuses on the 70s.

It is, perhaps, that I am genuinely wary of “the new.” And I am even more wary of how the “new” is enfolded into a project of “newness.” Melvin Dixon haunts me: “You, then, are charged by the possibility of your good health, by the broadness of your vision, to remember us.” What is the memory-work of the “new”?

A lesson from the past.

Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark represents the most significant engagement with the possibilities of poststructuralism (as claim, as method, as ambition, as strategy) in African American studies. How, Morrison asked, could one speak of the Africanist presence in texts that appeared indifferent to race, that featured no black subjects? How, in other words, could the normatively raced subject of literary studies—still white, still male—be embedded within the logic and practice of race from which he benefits by fading into the background, as, to invoke Derrida, the center that is both inside and outside of “structure”?

I invoke Morrison’s use of poststructuralism to counter less responsible uses of it around race. While Morrison was teaching us to attend to the ethical and political possibilities of poststructuralism for race-based labor, which is all labor, other very smart critics were intent on proving that race “did not exist,” that the opposition between white and black was a “fiction,” and this potentially interesting move meant that the critics did not have to think about blackness at all: for to deconstruct the opposition between black and white, or to perform an operation designated as that, left us with a racelessness that defaulted to whiteness. Thus, one read articles “against race” that were conveniently blinded by their own “race,” convinced, somehow, that “racelessness” had no ideological value. One witnessed the return of universal man, celebrated as man beyond race.

Interested in poststructuralism, indebted to it, I struggled against what I intuited as the rightness of minority critics who warned against its dangers: the system we inhabit, they said, will do its best to erase us. I thought, then, that cracks and crevices would provide enough space. That sneaking into a party through the service entrance still allowed one to smell the staleness of expensive colognes. That this was enough. That saturating my clothing with the smell of stale cigarettes would prove belonging. Or attempt it.
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The most recent issue of GLQ announces a certain arrival: Black/Queer/Diaspora. We are back to slashes. And platform shoes. Jaffari Allen provides a lovely introduction, a mapping of fields, an invitation to think along with. A bad-mannered guest, I pause at endnotes.

Despite our best efforts [to solicit work from non-U.S.-based contributors] logistics, language, limited networks, and disparate measures of “quality” and “appropriateness” across different types of borders, as well as limitations of space and time (of would-be participants and of this publication) all proved formidable [obstacles].

One reads this nodding and wondering about the thick realities of “queer time,” “queer materialities,” “queer forms,” even “queer failure.” About the boundaries of our legibilities, our capacities, our incapacities. Our still-limited idioms. The discipline of “quality” and “appropriateness.”

Would it be queer to risk illegibility? Or is that beyond the possible? And, how strange that an issue on black/queer/diaspora dares not to risk the illegibility of blackness: black ink on a blackboard.

I ask for the impossible. Forgive my desire. My appetite has yet to master the right idioms.
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And still I wonder about the extravagance of our claims, our claims to newness.

I learned to think queerly from Melvin Dixon, Audre Lorde, Assotto Saint, Amos Tutuola. And I want to stay with them for a while. Just a little longer. I am not yet “over” them.

The black unicorn is restless
the black unicorn is unrelenting
the black unicorn is not
free.—Audre Lorde, “The Black Unicorn”
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In an early issue of GLQ, Lee Edelman proclaimed that queer studies could never be “home,” arguing,

Opening spaces, reclaiming them, may be central to the enterprise of queer theory as it proliferates, but defining a space or a state of our own, insisting that we recognize and collectively accede to some common territorial boundaries, this is a fantasy, though enabling for some, that is profoundly dangerous in its reproduction of the exclusion—and of the motivating logic of exclusion—on which the heterosexual colonization of social reality is predicated.

Edelman reminds me that queer studies has always been possibility—a space for dreaming and visioning, that it never coalesced into a body that now needs reviving having become moribund, in one version, or an expansive colonizing force, claiming more fields and disciplines, in another.

And, perhaps, I register unease about reach and grasp, about the uses of “promiscuity” to describe queer labor, especially as people of color now populate the fields where that labor takes place. Fanon continues to warn me about the spectacle of black labor and pleasure.

And because the queer theory I learned is so ten years ago, I want to suggest that its imagination was more expansive than we might now allow, that if, to use Adrienne Rich’s terms, it “had not imagined us” in our particular fleshly incarnations, it had imagined. Beyond reach, and grasp, and gaze.
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Beyond reach and grasp and gaze because I’m itchy about “what we have now,” the language of reach and grasp and gaze, the language of ownership (collective?), the language of accumulation, the library of orgies.

Stubbornly, 20 years after it fell out of fashion, I continue to question “we” and “our,” even as I use them, because I continue to find myself un-welcomed on page 27, or chapter 5, or on footnote 33, when a particular claim is staged. Invitations are endlessly rescinded in this “our” queer world.

At the end of heavy breathing
the dream deferred
is in a museum
under glass and guard.
It costs five dollars
to see it on display.—Essex Hemphill
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I register, here, what feels like a non-specific allergic reaction. I am itchy and red-eyed and sniffling, trying to figure out how the air in the service entrance can be so radically different from that in the grand parlor. Worrying about my still-naïve belief that the faint scent of stale smoke will be enough of a disguise.