Black Writers Matter

by Whitney French

  Miscegenation Blues, published in 1994, brought together the voices of mixed-race women and was another first in North America. In naming the anthology, the editor, Carol Camper, asserts both her activism and her rejection of the white mainstream connotations of the word ‘miscegenation.’ The anthology Some Black Women: Profiles of Black Women in Canada was not cutting edge by some feminist standards, but was important because it documented Black women’s individual achievements as well as their collective ones, and provided hitherto lacking histories of early Black women’s clubs, Black churches, and Black landmarks. The books featured profiles of dedicated Black women who have contributed to Canada. Many of the women were unknown and unsung heroes; others were well-known figures in the mainstream straight Black community.

  But Where Are You From? Stories of Identity and Assimilation in Canada brought together thirty women from across Canada to discuss, debate, challenge, and respond to this unfortunately very common question. The editor, Hazelle Palmer, the daughter of Caribbean immigrants, was born in London, England, and immigrated to Canada as a child. This was a question she herself was asked many times, although she has no discernable Caribbean or English accent. The book moves the discussion of identity and belonging forward.

  Afrika Solo, by Djanet Sears, was the first play Sister Vision published. Traditionally, publishers are extremely cautious about publishing poetry and plays because they do not sell well. But because we as publishers had also signed up to take risks, we welcomed the script.

  This one-woman play chronicles a young Black woman’s voyage of self-discovery. The protagonist heads off for Afrika after her best friend tells her, “Go back to where you come from.” In the playwright’s words, “I was born in Britain but did not belong. Where in fact did I belong? I am a naturalized citizen of Canada. What do I answer when people constantly ask me where I’m from? The Caribbean? Even though I have never lived there? Which of my parents’ countries should I choose?”

  Sister Vision began in dangerous times. We gained some ground but we still have a way to go to fill that hunger. I look forward to other Black women and women of colour picking up the baton and carrying us forward in publishing.

  When I look back on the years at Sister Vision, at the time I lived and breathed publishing, I am astounded by the volume of books we put out. But even more so, nearly twenty years have passed since we shut our doors and our books are still relevant. Imagine if we were still publishing? We were way ahead of our time.

  Becoming Poetry

  Queer Blackness as the Full Absorption of Light

  — Sapphire Woods —

  By the end of my senior undergraduate year, I had come into my queerness first and my Blackness second. I was infatuated with Jeanette Winterson because she was the first queer female author I had read that felt familiar to my growing consciousness. Her book, The Stone Gods, talked about space and futurism and that, somewhere in between nothing and everything, was the promise of dark matter; blackness—the full absorption of light. In the perceived light years it had taken me to come to this awakening, I thought I had caught a glimpse of myself. I was connecting Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of rhizomatic ways of being—nonlinear, sporadic, manifesting (1987). Together with Winterson, I was forming a deeper, clearer image of myself before my very eyes.

  And it was good.

  Until I read Adrienne Rich. And then I read an interview Rich had with Audre Lorde. Then I read Audre Lorde, and bell hooks, and started reading A Bridge Called My Back by Cherrìe Morraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, and read and read. I was no longer shadowed by the dark side of the moon but basked fully in its illumination where histories and stories did not just allude to but belonged to my reality as a Black lesbian. I was falling upwards into a skyless world where white women were teaching me that love, although in secret, could bloom. At one time, the Winterson texts modelled women who met under guises and darkness. These women’s lives were as much a secret to themselves as they were to the gazes of surveillance and fear of punishment they passed under. Simultaneously, bell hooks became a grounding source in reconnecting me to a source of self-loving light that I could not find in isolation.

  I first came out to myself in Edmonton. Alberta summer days can be beautiful, but the light merely fringed the perimeter of a creeping darkness that began to burgeon as depression. On numerous dusks I would visit The End of the World—a storey-high elevated sidewalk along the Saskatchewan River that dropped off suddenly into space.

  Before the sun began its descent, I would stand close to the edge and look up at the endless Alberta clouds and imagine what freedom would look like. Did freedom look like a slow revolution, noted in the way the clouds blew with the sky’s convection currents? Did it look like the End of the World—a solitary sudden drop into the space below and into fast moving water? Or did freedom look like the precipice before the End?

  Was freedom both space, but past the clouds, and among clusters of stars? Night without sleep became the plane where I imagined possibilities open to me. If I chose to take after the white women in the stories I read, and absorbed the darkness of depression, I would never know what was past the weight of nothingness. I remember reading A Bridge Called My Back and sewed Gloria Anzaldua’s question like a life jacket to the inside of my chest: “¿Qué hacer de aquí y cómo? What to do from here and how?” Anzaldúa asks whether or not women of colour are tired of suffering and if we want to come out of the shadows of our silences and pain. I remember the piercing light that blazed from that question. No answer, no promise, but a possibility of light that made me choose to not leave myself in order to find life, but instead, go into the depths of myself to see what could be created.

  The life I was building with my first same-sex partner was indeed a star, one that burst into an entire, whole world. Although this planet was full of life, we still combated isolation like the gravity of a black hole. Before C (my first partner, of West-Indian descent) and I moved in together, we lived in a dormitory at our conservative, Christian university. I remember a time when both of us were working, trying to save money to move off campus. It was after another ten-hour day, while I was showering, when C answered a bang on the door. It was the dorm deans, who thought that they smelled weed and assumed it would definitely be us. I was called out of the shower, where I was washing my hair, so they could search our room. We stood frozen, under surveillance, under scrutiny. We stood, my hands up, protecting the appearance of my hair rather than my body—all of my dignity up for examination. When they left, they left with nothing. My heart was in my throat and there was a sense of urgency to move.

  After that summer, we did move. By chance, C and I found an apartment loft above a house off campus. Within this space we made a home. The hyper-visibility of both my queerness and Blackness contesting with the fight against my erasure. This began the catalyst in my search for Black and of-colour women writers. I was ravenous to find someone who understood the transformation, the alchemy, of what it is to come into one’s queer Blackness. I had already chosen to live once, so I rose to the responsibility of living, namely as a Black, queer woman. In the midst of isolation, I replayed bell hooks in my mind like a mantra: “In the face of barriers we still have the capacity to invent our lives, to shape our destinies in ways that maximize our well-being” (2000, 57).

  Under this charge, I started to reframe the orbit of my senior undergrad paper. The stories of women loving women written by white writers did not reflect the life that I was forming for myself out of nothing. I was reading hooks and Lorde, who had literally saved my life—who had already lived lives of transformation in the midst of erasure and the violence of imposed isolation. They taught me that, in my depression, I could mine light from the changes that were happening within me. Lorde anticipated that, under the simultaneous scrutiny and erasure of my existence, I could “learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, [and] those fears which r
ule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us” (36). My fear was becoming the sad, white women in the Winterson stories. I wanted to become something of the light that was keeping me alive. I was using my literary ancestors and guides to explore both my queerness and Blackness and to resist imposed deaths.

  While I read and organized these thoughts, I was also met with the injustice of the hidden canon of my history; classics that informed the origins of my thoughts on how I could come to be loved, seen, resist, and survive. Before the end of the winter semester, I approached my supervisor in all the splendour of my ancestry and proposed that I used Lorde, Morraga, and hooks as the foundation of my arguments. I wanted to write using only women of colour that supported my thoughts, who knew me before I was even born.

  My supervisor told me I was too late.

  My senior paper was due too soon to change my framework, my foundation. Sitting in the supervisor’s office with those books in my hands, I was furious. My heart was breaking. I had been betrayed. I was afforded the academic exploration of queerness as something edgy and useful to make my department relevant. But under the refracted Whiteness of the queer rainbow, my Blackness was omitted. A semester later, under the weight of invisibility, I presented my senior undergrad paper half-heartedly, with pats on the back for using postcolonial theory.

  With the degree I proclaimed myself a self-taught colonizer of my own mind.

  My identity, separated, was conquered at the hands of white minds and experiences sitting nostalgic in the face of suffering. I was complicit in the destruction and dissemination of the resource-rich territories that I was just beginning to cultivate. I, colonizer, did not know that these Black lesbian writers existed before I discovered them, and so I felt that I had lost out on the gift of humanity that I could receive.

  Again, I could feel myself fragmenting. I had done the work of reconciling queerness and Blackness in myself. I had withstood extreme isolation and become my own light. I was trying to show that both queerness and Blackness were the fundamental elements of life made after death. For a moment, I thought that my reality—post Lorde, hooks, and Moraga—would be emancipatory. After two years of silencing and imposed isolation, I would look at this paper that spoke my truth with confidence. This paper would recognize the history of queer, Black female erasure. But there was no postcolonialism. These histories I still carried in my body, in my relationships, in the ways that I love, and in the ways that I create life for myself. The texts and words that had kept me alive would only do just that in this moment.

  Although there is no postcolonialism, it was Donna Kate Rushin who commanded: “Stretch or drown/Evolve or die” (1981, xxii). There was still the responsibility of reconstructing the forced fragmentations into constellations—decolonizing my mind and reconciling what parts had been used with the pieces discarded sans request. I chose to live the truth of possibility—the possibility of reconciliation, the possibility of myself with myself. “We awakened our gods and we left them there, because we never needed gods again” (Sharpe 2016, 17). In the face of dead, white gods and erasure, I found god—not outside of myself, not at the precipice of another new beginning, but in myself. And I loved her, fiercely.

  In the end, we did resist erasure. Without announcement or fanfare, C and I moved, in mourning of not ever being held safely or guided with healing hands. When we moved, we moved the perspective of what was possible for ourselves and all who took a taste of our magick. There was no coming out, no acknowledgement of the work we were doing, just the deafening silence of our wake.

  I remember, on a cool autumn evening C and I went for a walk and I brought the rose quartz I had been keeping under my pillow from the past summer. I frantically needed to call in love for myself. The rainbow of refracted white queerness was not enuf. Being in rural Alberta, there were no queers of colour to guide me through the passage I was moving through. I had considered suicide but could not dash the possibility of futurity. The rose quartz had all my love and loss wrapped up inside of it. Somehow, in the waters of rage and pain, I had surfaced, if momentarily, to find love that pushed me forward and celebrated the life I had grown into. On our walk together, C and I buried the rose quartz beneath the newly planted trees that lined the path towards the campus’s church. We laughed, considering the possibility of our love, manifesting, rising from the earth and terrorizing all those who crossed this path.

  In a way, our love did manifest and made waves for ourselves and the entire microcosm we lived in with our intention-filled movement. These waves, or wakes, as Christina Sharpe defines them, “allow those among the living to mourn the passing of the dead through ritual.…But wakes are also…the disturbance caused by a body swimming, or one that is moved, in water; the air currents behind a body in flight” (2016, pp). Instead of taking cues from the white, queer women in Winterson’s books, who were left broken, mourning, and lost, I decided to wake and rise.

  Together, C and I, we inspired shifts in perspective and, apart, we thrived in our areas of study and expanded our goals and dreams. If, at any time, you as a Black, queer woman are the only one who knows the legitimacy and alchemy of your worth, let it be so. I am Black, I define my life as a woman, I recreate and nurture love between women, and I create and birth possibility and new worlds within what is dead and dying. The poetry of my Black existence is in resistance to colonial, white nihilism and defeatism canonized as education. The poetry of my Black, queer existence is resistant; it stands and moves as a living monument of Black, queer waking and dream-making. Where a wake encompasses mourning, a wake is also movement, it is energy enough to generate the quality of light I need in order to pursue my own magick.

  In adjusting the quality of light by which to view my own queer Blackness for myself, I became light. In the passing of old lives came the movement of new possibility—I was, and am, becoming poetry.

  References

  Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  hooks, b. 2000. All About Love. New York: HarperCollins.

  Moraga, C., and G.E. Anzaldúa, eds. 1981. The Bridge Called My Back. London: Persephone Press.

  Rushin, D. 1981. “The Bridge Poem.” In The Bridge Called My Back, edited by C. Moraga and G.E. Anzaldúa. London: Persephone Press.

  Shange, N. 1975. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf. New York: Simon & Schuster.

  Sharpe, C. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, nc: Duke University Press.

  Winterson, J. 2007. The Stone Gods. London: Hamish Hamilton.

  Memorialty

  — Christelle Saint-Julien —

  Originally published on the blog Le Shindig

  A friend lent a book to me, insisting vividly that I read it. Ongoingness, The End of a Diary, by Sarah Manguso is a personal essay on the course of a diary that was kept through her life. You could call it a memoir as well. “I couldn’t face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened,”(2015, 3) the author recounts.

  This friend had spotted a tendency of mine that I never had before: a propensity to document every aspect of my life that I, randomly, judge worthy of retaining. I would not know exactly what and why; it is an analysis that would require the documenting of my documentation process. My approach is not a neat one, it goes from visual notes to writing, book notes to screens—as long as it is somewhere. Odd thing is, I rarely revisit my personal archive, as if the gesture itself was more of a mechanism of habit, a compulsion. This penchant I have for recollection makes me estranged from the concept of ephemerality. I could never understand the appeal of Snapchat, Instagram stories, a Buddha board, or even performance art.

  “I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened,” Manguso recounts. Just like her, I am terrified of what I cannot remember, similarly to how I continuously mispla
ce the daily objects of my life and genuinely forget to call someone back or bring something I was supposed to get. But I would remember what someone said that day, or how it made me feel a decade ago, or where I was when it happened. This selective memory is my shield, as well as my pride—I can defend and justify myself really well through confusion or I can easily put things into perspective. But the weight of such a memory makes it difficult for me to compartmentalize. Too much information weighs on effectiveness.

  The memory of the oldest person I am close to, a life full of lives and experiences I cannot even fathom, is a story observed in real time. My dad, who was born in the forties, never speaks about the past, except when asked to. It is as if nothing that took place was memorable, in the naive sense of the word, as if joy and good times were always around the corner despite the greatest difficulties. As clueless as he can be about the course of things, he never seemed fazed by anything he did not know.

  I believe that my father’s brain was wired to strictly remember the important stuff. In his case that means places (he drove a taxi for over thirty years and never used a gps) and people (his family and friends he made over a long life spent in several countries), which seems enough in a context of survival. Modernity never touched him. atm machines were never his friends, he never learned how to use a computer, he does not know what Apple products are (despite the fact that I even worked for that company for years), he doesn’t know what Facebook implies—and that is just fine. I myself encouraged this behaviour, admiring how simple it makes life. As intense as everything always is for me, all seems surrounded by calm and kindness around him.

  We always yearn for what we cannot have.