GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

"Black/Queer/Diaspora," special issue edited by Jafari Sinclaire Allen.

GLQ 18.2–3 (2012).

Dear Jafari,

So wonderful to hear your voice coming through the car yesterday. Since we never catch each other by phone more than twice a year, what a gift to write this together—because it means we had to find time to call! And because the only time I had was driving with Matt to pick up my diva-esque daughter, your goddaughter, Matt got to be in on the call too. (He wanted me to remind you of his undying devotion. Very insistent on that phrase.) You're endlessly missed in Austin, you know, and sometimes when I'm having a bad day I fantasize: what beautiful thing is Jafari wearing today, that makes the world a better place just by existing?

When Marcia and Jennifer generously asked us to think about the impact of "Black/Queer/Diaspora," I plucked my copy off the shelf for things most crucial to writing Ezili's Mirrors. But I never got past the table of contents. I ran my eyes down authors' names stacked in bold—Jafari, Omise'eke, Lyndon, Xavier, Vanessa, Ana, Matt—knowing I should be thinking about us as a scholarly field but thinking about us as friends. About searching for roti and gay clubs with you, Xavier, and Matt in London, at the conference where Matt presented work that made it into GLQ and Xavier shocked folks with descriptions of gay sex. About CSA in Curaçao, where Lyndon introduced me to Vanessa and I first got to hear the paper that became her article and we sat by the pool proclaiming black femme Pisces solidarity.

In other words, all I could think about is the ways "Black/Queer/Diaspora" came out of and built so many personal/professional relationships that have made this generation of black queer scholarship possible. [End Page 107]

Because I never made it past the contents before our call, you had to remind me how the introduction evokes this scholarly practice of black queer friendship, kinship, and love. "For black queers, survival has always been about finding ways to connect some of what is disconnected, to embody and re-member," you wrote. "The conventions of our guild—steeped in cool reason—avoid love as a movida. It is nevertheless evident in the works featured here and in the passion-filled (not easy, uncomplicated, or necessarily romantic) relationships between many individuals who do this work" (Allen 2012). This passage is marked by Matt's handwritten note "Love as a methodology," framed by flowery, vèvè-esque arrows.

Maybe you remember it differently. But I remember April 2009, when you convened the Black/Queer/Diaspora Work(ing) Group at Yale, as a time when the world felt full of promise. I was four months pregnant with Baia. Obama was just inaugurated. Young black queer scholars were being hired at prestigious institutions—Yale, UT—and many of us would soon be tenured. But as I write in early 2018 it feels like this promise has crumbled. I've had four miscarriages. Trump blustered into another year of transphobic, xenophobic, antiblack madness. Academic institutions haven't been able to force black queer faculty out, but under-value and undermined us in ways we never foresaw. Why was Yale hemorrhaging black queer faculty by the time Baia started kindergarten? Why did UT just promote a professor whose work attacks queer families while those of us who live in them remain underpaid? Why does a next generation of black queer scholarship feel less possible now than ten years ago, and why have some in our field attacked friends when we have common enemies to fight?

It's impossible to look back on "Black/Queer/Diaspora" without sinking into how much I love the people in it. But it's equally impossible to read our names, think our stories together without mourning the ways black queer love has failed to make change in the academy. I look back and ask myself, what did we do wrong? Did our thirst for queer sociality lead us to underestimate institutions' racism, misogynoir, queerphobia? Don't forget, I'm a Pisces: I have to learn over and over again how the search for love makes us vulnerable.

Maybe you're thinking: Omise'eke, you're a black lesbian writing a love letter to a black gay man to publish in GLQ. You're not afraid of vulnerability and you haven't given up on black queer love! Of course, of course I haven't. Black queer love has failed this generation in academe, but it's also the only thing that's worked for us. I'm not still in this profession for my health. I'm here because you, Lyndon, Xavier, Vanessa, Ana, Matt, and so many others are here too, and I love seeing our black queer impossibility reflected in your disco balls and black sands. Remember Barbara: "What I write and how I write is done in order to save my [End Page 108] own life. And I mean that literally. For me, literature is a way of knowing that I am not hallucinating, that whatever I feel/know is. It is an affirmation that sensuality is intelligence, that sensual language is language that makes sense" (Christian 1988). You, Jafari, and our writerly black queer sistren and brethren are that affirmation—that push toward remaking the world—that feels, tastes, moves like survival to me.

You mentioned Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, so I rushed to buy it. I thought of us when Pat wrote: "Too often in the past, I have put letter writing off, because I thought whatever free time I had had to go to those survival things and if any energy left over would go to writing. However, it does occur to me that letter writing is both a survival thing and writing, plus it is so important to me to continue our conversation" (Enszer 2018). It's painful to read this knowing neither sender nor receiver did survive cancer. But because Pat took time to write Audre, this book now sits beside me as a map for what black queer sociality can—and can't—do. Right now, I want to take you really seriously and imagine: what if we take these letters as a model for what black/queer/diaspora scholarship does now? How can we care about black queerness in ways that are concrete, embodied, personal, sustainable? How might the tools we've relegated to the last century—tools we thought we could put away in the post–civil rights, post-Stonewall era—serve us in this moment?

Sister love,

Omi

Oh, Sister Love!

I am grateful to Marcia and Jennifer for inviting this conversation. Perhaps these love letters will inaugurate another way to mine our pasts and current feelings, for what is usable and sustaining. Let our letters be the beginning of starting the dance, again—a recursive "(re-)situat(ing) of our work through conjunctural moments" (Allen 2012: 214). Your words are always inspiring to me. On time, especially when I feel out of time. Thiefing Sugar (Tinsley 2010) came out one year before ¡Venceremos? (Allen 2011). "Black Atlantic/Queer Atlantic" provided a framework for us to begin our conversations in 2009. Last year I read galleys of Ezili's Mirrors (Tinsley 2018), breathless and awed, while my own second monograph awaited my courage to turn it in.

Yes! The letters between Pat and Audre are striking in their daily struggles—making a living and doing the work: illnesses, romances, children, shady editors, and Audre's too-familiar drama in academe—but also the sometimes very long intervals between. They remind me that I have to do better. Moving to Miami [End Page 109] was supposed to be about "reclaiming my time." Still, I find there is much work to do, everywhere. And, as I keep rediscovering, not all of this work is "my work." You asked "what happened …?": certainly, some of what we set out to do is somewhere buried under somebody else's agenda. While many of us get worn down by marginal employment in academe's precariat, for those of us situated in the Master's house of the tenured professoriat, it is administrivia that threatens to take us out.

In any case, what is on my heart most urgently, is to say I am so sorry that I was not there to lift your spirits or hold your hand through much of the pain you have endured—even with a note or a phone call. Matt's letter is coming, presently.

We have learned that while our love is not enough, it is what allows (some of) us to survive. Essex Hemphill wrote, "Counting t-cells on the shores of cyberspace, my blessing is this: I do not stand alone, bewildered and scared" (Frilot et al. 1995). He doesn't aver that there is nothing to cause fear or bewilderment. The facts and vulnerabilities are clear. Rather, not standing alone—even perhaps virtually, is the grace. "Black/Queer/Diaspora" emerged from relationships and could not be sustained without them—from pitching the idea to Ann, to the grace of all of you showing up—sanctifying that Anthropology conference room one semester after I had arrived at Yale from UT. Faculty meetings in that room provided an often violent but also invaluable education. But when I convened my classes there—smudged with incense—it is our engagement that I tried to model. Friends, we had come to work. It's a queer, Black thing that we find each other and convene in institutional spaces that (re)shape and sometimes mangle us, but as Christina reminds us, "We are not only known to ourselves and to each other through and by that force" (Sharpe 2016).

Rereading the introduction—written at one "current conjuncture" that has given way to another—I am struck at how unsettled we are. Deterritorialized. Some in generative ways, and in others, merely perhaps without portfolio. Ezili's Mirrors provides a beautiful model toward understanding and inhabiting unsettled and generatively deterritorialized space-time. I too have responded with the unsettled—traipsing very Black and queerly across continents and themes, renarrativizing the idea of Black/queer in clips, cases, vignettes, and memories. I am trying to offer an accounting of Black/queer habits of mind in There's a Disco Ball between Us (Allen forthcoming). Isn't this how we build a future for Baia, Georgia Mae, and our students? A palimpsestic "litany toward survival." Now, thriving is another question. What must we do? Who must we be, inside, for ourselves and to one another, to really win? [End Page 110]

You invoke mourning. Is my private-public feeling mourning? Is it tabanca, or lovelorn? I'm hearing "Earth Wind & Fire" and Paul Gilroy in stereo: "After the Love Is Gone." My references are old (classic!). I know the insistence on (R&B) love seems hokey to many. Still, I believe that with everything that is wrong, "Every night/somethin' right/Would invite us to/begin the dance" (Earth, Wind & Fire 2014). Don't we have to continue to dance? Beginning again (and again … certainly). Sometimes less or more elegant or funky, but dance. I do not want to be misunderstood here, especially because I think some may mistake our love ethic and the insistence on Black/queer sociality in our issue as a description of a club of folks who cosign and adhere to the same politics. We know that's far from the truth. Agreement is not sine qua non of love. Nor is proximity, really. It is our willingness to begin again, even when "something happen(s) … '—violence, loss, forgetting, for example—' … along the way" (ibid.).

The introduction to the issue ends: "Here, the threads of our mourning clothes are laid down/bare" (Allen 2012: 237). I don't remember writing this, but it is there. Perhaps it is a love note from then, to us now. If we take off our mourning clothes, what do we put on? The bareness of our vulnerability? The beauty of our multihued Black flesh (that dances … here in this place) (Morrison 2016)? I look forward to meeting y'all in the clearing to find out, Sister-

-Love,

Jafari

Jafari,

I should let this end with your beautiful words, but this addendum comes because you've finally asked a question I have an answer to—via Beyoncé, of course. I stumbled on this from Lemonade stylist Marni Senofonte while reading about costumes for "Freedom": "When we started we were thinking about ante-bellum South, and Bey was talking about going back to these plantations," she explains. "There was a question of, 'Do we do authentic vintage or is it about wearing couture on these plantations?' And I was like, 'It's about wearing couture on these plantations!' You have fifty amazing women in there and Bey was in couture Givenchy up in the tree. It's a juxtaposition of what historically black women on a plantation were" (quoted in Carlos 2016). We still on plantations, brother, but I know we can both rock the hell out of a Givenchy dress. [End Page 111]