Racism and Sexism Questions

Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage

Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 14, Number 2-3, 2008, pp. 191-215 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

[ Access provided at 13 Dec 2020 19:28 GMT from Penn State Univ Libraries ]

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241316

Black atlantic, Queer atlantic Queer imaginings of the Middle Passage

Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley

Ships were the living means by which the points within that Atlantic

world were joined. They were mobile elements that stood for the

shifting spaces in between the fixed places that they connected. . . .

For all these reasons, the ship is the first of the novel chronotypes

pre supposed by my attempts to rethink modernity versus the history

of the black Atlantic.

— Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic

Water is the first thing in my imagination. Over the reaches of the

eyes at Guaya when I was a little girl, I knew that there was still

more water. All beginning in water, all ending in water. Turquoise,

aquamarine, deep green, deep blue, ink blue, navy, blue-black

cerulean water. . . . Water is the first thing in my memory. The sea

sounded like a thousand secrets, all whispered at the same time. In

the daytime it was indistinguishable to me from air. . . . The same

substance that carried voices or smells, music or emotion.

— Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

And water, ocean water is the first thing in the unstable confluence of race, nationality, sexuality, and gender I want to imagine here. This wateriness is meta-

phor, and history too. The brown-skinned, fluid-bodied experiences now called

blackness and queerness surfaced in intercontinental, maritime contacts hundreds

of years ago: in the seventeenth century, in the Atlantic Ocean. You see, the black

Atlantic has always been the queer Atlantic. What Paul Gilroy never told us is

how queer relationships were forged on merchant and pirate ships, where Europe-

GLQ 14:2 – 3

DOI 10.1215/10642684-2007-030

© 2008 by Duke University Press

192 GlQ: a JOurnal OF leSBian and GaY StudieS

ans and Africans slept with fellow — and I mean same-sex — sailors. And, more

powerfully and silently, how queer relationships emerged in the holds of slave

ships that crossed between West Africa and the Caribbean archipelago. I began

to learn this black Atlantic when I was studying relationships between women in

Suriname and delved into the etymology of the word mati. This is the word Creole

women use for their female lovers: figuratively mi mati is “my girl,” but literally it

means mate, as in shipmate — she who survived the Middle Passage with me. Sed-

imented layers of experience lodge in this small word. During the Middle Passage,

as colonial chronicles, oral tradition, and anthropological studies tell us, captive

African women created erotic bonds with other women in the sex-segregated holds,

and captive African men created bonds with other men. In so doing, they resisted

the commodification of their bought and sold bodies by feeling and feeling for their

co-occupants on these ships.

I evoke this history now not to claim the slave ship as the origin of the

black queer Atlantic. The ocean obscures all origins, and neither ship nor Atlantic

can be a place of origin. Not of blackness, though perhaps Africans first became

negros and negers during involuntary sea transport; not of queerness, though per-

haps some Africans were first intimate with same-sex shipmates then. Instead, in

relationship to blackness, queerness, and black queerness, the Atlantic is the site

of what the anthropologist Kale Fajardo calls “crosscurrents.”

Oceans and seas are important sites for differently situated people. Indig-

enous Peoples, fisherpeople, seafarers, sailors, tourists, workers, and ath-

letes. Oceans and seas are sites of inequality and exploitation — resource

extraction, pollution, militarization, atomic testing, and genocide. At the

same time, oceans and seas are sites of beauty and pleasure — solitude,

sensuality, desire, and resistance. Oceanic and maritime realms are

also spaces of transnational and diasporic communities, heterogeneous

trajectories of globalizations, and other racial, gender, class, and sexual

formations.1

Conceptualizing the complex possibilities and power dynamics of the maritime,

Fajardo posits the necessity of thinking through transoceanic crosscurrents. These

are theoretical and ethnographic borderlands at sea, where elements or currents

of historical, conceptual, and embodied maritime experience come together to

transform racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized selves. The queer black

Atlantic I discuss here navigates these crosscurrents as it brings together enslaved

and African, brutality and desire, genocide and resistance. Here, fluidity is not an

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Bl ack atl antic, Queer atl antic 193

easy metaphor for queer and racially hybrid identities but for concrete, painful,

and liberatory experience. It is the kind of queer of color space that Roderick Fer-

guson calls for in Aberrations in Black, one that reflects the materiality of black

queer experience while refusing its transparency.2

If the black queer Atlantic brings together such long-flowing history, why

is black queer studies situated as a dazzlingly new “discovery” in academia — a

hybrid, mermaidlike imagination that has yet to find its land legs? In the last five

years, black queer and queer of color critiques have navigated innovative direc-

tions in African diaspora studies as scholars like Ferguson and E. Patrick Johnson

push the discipline to map intersections between racialized and sexualized bod-

ies. Unfortunately, Eurocentric queer theorists and heterocentric race theorists

have engaged their discourses of resistant black queerness as a new fashion —

a glitzy, postmodern invention borrowed and adapted from Euro-American queer

theory. In contrast, as interventions like the New-York Historical Society’s exhibit

Slavery in New York demonstrate, the Middle Passage and slave experience con-

tinue to be evoked as authentic originary sites of African diaspora identities and

discourses.3 This stark split between the “newest” and “oldest” sites of blackness

reflects larger political trends that polarize queer versus diasporic and immigrant

issues by moralizing and domesticating sexuality as an undermining of tradition,

on the one hand, while racializing and publicizing global southern diasporas as

threats to the integrity of a nation of (fictively) European immigrants, on the other.

My discussion here proposes to intervene in this polarization by bridging imagina-

tions of the “choice” of black queerness and the forced migration of the Middle

Passage. What would it mean for both queer and African diaspora studies to take

seriously the possibility that, as forcefully as the Atlantic and Caribbean flow

together, so too do the turbulent fluidities of blackness and queerness? What new

geography — or as Fajardo proposes, oceanography — of sexual, gendered, trans-

national, and racial identities might emerge through reading for black queer his-

tory and theory in the traumatic dislocation of the Middle Passage?4

In what follows, I explore such queer black Atlantic oceanographies by

comparing two narrative spaces. One is a site where an imagination of this Atlan-

tic struggles to emerge: in academic theorizing, specifically in water metaphors

of African diaspora and queer theory. The second is a site where such imagina-

tions emerge through struggle: in Caribbean creative writing, specifically in Ana-

Maurine Lara’s tale of queer migration in Erzulie’s Skirt (2006) and Dionne Brand’s

reflections on the Middle Passage in A Map to the Door of No Return (2001). I

turn to these literary texts as a queer, unconventional, and imaginative archive

of the black Atlantic.5 And the literary texts turn to ocean waters themselves as

an archive, an ever-present, ever-reformulating record of the unimaginable. Lara

and Brand plumb the archival ocean materially, as space that churns with physi-

cal remnants, dis(re)membered bodies of the Middle Passage, and they plumb it

metaphorically, as opaque space to convey the drowned, disremembered, ebbing

and flowing histories of violence and healing in the African diaspora. “Water over-

flows with memory,” writes M. Jacqui Alexander, delving into the Middle Passage

in Pedagogies of Crossing. “Emotional memory. Bodily memory. Sacred memory.”6

Developing a black feminist epistemology to uncover submerged histories —

particularly those stories of Africans’ forced ocean crossings that traditional his-

toriography cannot validate — Alexander eloquently argues that searchers must

explore outside narrow conceptions of the “factual” to get there. Such explorations

would involve muddying divisions between documented and intuited, material and

metaphoric, past and present so that “who is remembered — and how — is contin-

ually being transformed through a web of interpretive systems . . . collapsing, ulti-

mately, the demarcation of the prescriptive past, present, and future of linear time.”7

While Alexander searches out such crossings in Afro-Atlantic ceremony, Lara

and Brand explore similarly fluid embodied-imaginary, historical-contemporary

spaces through the literal and figurative passages of their historical fictions. The

subaltern can speak in submarine space, but it is hard to hear her or his underwa-

ter voice, whispering (as Brand writes) a thousand secrets that at once wash closer

and remain opaque, resisting closure.

I, and my lesbian sisters and gay brothers . . . are not a new

fashion. . . . We return to the sea and the shores and once upon a

time, which transposes into this time, which it always was. . . . the

past simultaneously forever embedded in the present, in the pain and

inevitable horrors confronted by conscientious unblinking memory,

in the tragedies and occasional triumphs of history always raveled by

so much needless suffering, by the unbearable human misery that

we must not, for our collective sakes and the continued growth of this

body we call “humanity,” ever be denied.

— Thomas Glave, Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent

In the past fifteen years postcolonial studies effected sea changes in scholarly

images of the global south, smashing and wearing away essentialist conceptions of

race and nationality with the insistent pounding force of ocean waters. Rigorously

theorizing identities that have always already been in flux and rethinking black

“insularity” from England and Manhattan to Martinique and Cuba, imaginative

194 GlQ: a JOurnal OF leSBian and GaY StudieS

Bl ack atl antic, Queer atl antic 195

captains of Atlantic and Caribbean studies have called prominently on oceanic

metaphors. Their conceptual geographies figure oceans and seas as a presence

that is history, a history that is present. In the watershed The Black Atlantic, Gil-

roy evokes the Atlantic as the trope through which he imagines the emergence of

black modernities. A past of Atlantic crossings underpins his engagement with

contemporary multiracial Britain, where the black in the Union Jack is no novelty

introduced by recent immigrants but a continuation of centuries of transoceanic

interchanges. Calling on the ship as the first image of this black Atlantic, Gilroy

begins by stipulating that ships and oceans are not merely abstract figures but

“cultural and political units” that “refer us back to the middle passage, to the half-

remembered micro politics of the slave trade.”8 He underscores that seminal Afri-

can diaspora figures like Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Robert Wedder-

burn, and Crispus Attucks worked with and as sailors (why omit Harriet Jacobs,

Mary Seacole, and other sailing women?), and notes that the physical mobility

enabled by the ocean was fundamental to their intellectual motility. Yet while many

of these masculine sailor-intellectuals resurface in Gilroy’s later discussions, the

history of their sea voyages does not. Both ships and the Atlantic itself — as con-

crete maritime space rather than conceptual principle for remapping blackness —

drop out of his text immediately after this paragraph. Neither the Middle Passage

nor the Atlantic appear in the index, remaining phantom metaphors rather than

concrete historical presences. Gilroy’s ghost ships and dark waters traverse five

memorable pages of his introduction, then slip into nowhereness.

In the equally influential The Repeating Island, Antonio Benítez-Rojo

navigates contemporary Caribbean identity through a postmodern theorization of

the sea as the ultimate space of diffusion, a watery body whose history continually

splashes into the present. The “geographic accident” of the Antilles — situated

where Atlantic meets Caribbean and migrants from Africa, Europe, Asia, and

the Americas cross and converge — beats out the rhythm of repeating histories,

repeating islands. Mining the metaphoric possibilities of the sea, Benítez-Rojo

finds that it

gives the entire area, including its continental foci, the character of an

archipelago, that is, a discontinuous conjunction (of what?): unstable con-

densations, turbulences, whirlpools, claps of bubbles, frayed seaweed,

sunken galleons, crashing breakers, flying fish, seagull squawks, down-

pours, nighttime phosphorescences, eddies and pools, uncertain voyages

of signification.9

Ocean and sea remain at once insistently present and insistently abstracted as

he flourishingly, intriguingly bypasses “real” migrant trajectories to chart figura-

tive marine confluences, alternative trajectories of globalization that pass through

Caribbean history to connect “the Niger with the Mississippi, the China Sea with

the Orinoco, the Parthenon with a fried food stand in an alley in Paramaribo.”

Spiraling maps where the pre-, trans-, and postnational intersect, Benítez-Rojo’s

voyages are shipless crossings where “the peoples of the sea, or better, the Peo-

ples of the Sea proliferate incessantly while differentiating themselves from one

another, traveling together toward the infinite.”10

Appearing and disappearing as briefly as the ship, sexuality also surfaces

in Gilroy’s concluding discussion of music in the black Atlantic. But here again,

sexuality (like seafaring) is not so much an embodied experience as a metaphor.

Sex, it turns out, is almost as omnipresent in black Atlantic storytelling as salt

water on an island. Initially, Gilroy places narratives of sexuality in competition

with histories of race, as he notes that “conflictual representation of sexuality has

vied with the discourse of racial emancipation to constitute the inner core of black

expressive cultures.”11 But later, tension between these two melts away as Gilroy

concludes that, actually, talking about sex is another way to talk about race. Black

love stories in popular songs and elsewhere, he writes, are “narratives of love and

loss [that] transcode other forms of yearning and mourning associated with histo-

ries of dispersal and exile.”12 Sex is not about sex, then; it is about pain. While the

Atlantic — rather than remain primarily a site of diasporic trauma — is optimisti-

cally metaphorized as space that expands the horizons of black consciousness, sex

is pessimistically metaphorized as a sorrow song that never yields deep pleasure.

Gilroy’s black Atlantic seems equally resistant to victimizing and sexualizing its

mariners, as if both impulses were too much part of colonial discourse to warrant

sustained attention.

If Gilroy’s Atlantic is frigid, Benítez-Rojo’s Caribbean overflows with

hyperfeeling female sexuality. Recentering the resistantly nonphallic Peoples of

the Sea, Benítez-Rojo foregrounds a vaginalized Caribbean as he proclaims:

The Atlantic is today the Atlantic (the navel of capitalism) because Europe,

in its mercantilist laboratory, conceived of the project of inseminating the

Caribbean womb with the blood of Africa; the Atlantic is today the Atlan-

tic . . . because it is the painfully delivered child of the Caribbean, whose

vagina was stretched between continental clamps. . . . After the blood

and salt water spurts, quickly sew up torn flesh and apply the antiseptic

tinctures, the gauze and surgical plaster; then the febrile wait through the

forming of a scar: suppurating, always suppurating.13

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Bl ack atl antic, Queer atl antic 197

Here sexual violence and painful reproduction are simultaneously abstracted and

reinscribed in regional imaginations; projected onto the water by which Caribbean

women arrived in the archipelago, they conceive a disturbing image that spreads

women’s metaphoric legs in unsettling ways. Yet the suppurating wound can heal,

almost magically. A few pages later, the vaginal sea opens into a metaphor for lib-

eratory pleasure and pleasurable liberation as Benítez-Rojo imagines the region’s

femininity as “its flux, its diffuse sensuality, its generative force, its capacity to

nourish and conserve (juices, spring, pollen, rain, seed, shoot, ritual sacrifice).”14

Bleeding, orgasming, or both, Benítez-Rojo’s cunnic Caribbean overexposes the

sexualized bodies that Gilroy denies. Like the sea, the space between women’s

legs is at once insistently present and insistently ethereal; like the sea, the space

between women’s legs becomes a metaphor to mine.

These tropes of the black Atlantic, of Peoples of the Sea, do call to me as

powerful enunciations of crosscurrents of African diaspora identity, and I evoke

them in respect and solidarity. And yet as Gilroy, Benítez-Rojo, Edouard Glis-

sant, and others call on maritime metaphors without maritime histories and evoke

sexualized bodies as figures rather than experiences, their writing out of material-

ity stops short of the most radical potential of such oceanic imaginations.15 There

are other Atlantic and Caribbean histories that these scholars could have evoked

to make sense of the present, other material details of maritime crossings they

could have drawn on to make their metaphors richer conceptual tools. As Africans

became diasporic, Atlantic and Caribbean, sex and sexuality did not only impact

imaginations; they impacted bodies. Not at all an opening to infinite possibilities,

the sea was initially a site of painful fluidities for many Africans. The first sight

of the ocean was often a vision of fear, as Equiano remembers when slave traders

marched him to the coast:

I was beyond measure astonished at this, as I had never before seen any

water larger than a pond or a rivulet, and my surprise was mingled with no

small fear. . . . The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the

coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and

waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon

converted to terror.16

Once loaded onto the slave ships, Africans became fluid bodies under the force

of brutality. Tightly or loosely packed in sex-segregated holds — men chained

together at the ankles while women were sometimes left unchained — surrounded

by churning, unseen waters, these brutalized bodies themselves became liquid,

oozing. Ship’s surgeon Alexander Falconbridge records days when “wet and blow-

ing weather having occasioned the portholes to be shut and the grating to be cov-

ered, fluxes and fevers among the negroes ensued. . . . The deck was so covered

with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of

the flux, that it resembled a slaughterhouse.”17 Lara adds to this imagination in

a character’s vision of a slave ship: “Women’s menstrual blood stained the floor

around her, pus crusting at the edges of the chattel wounds. . . . She could feel

her body rise in a wave of urine and blood, the stench so wretched as to make her

choke on her own breath.”18 On this Atlantic, then, black body waters, corporeal

effluvia, and the stains of gendered and reproductive bodies were among the first

sites of colonization.

But this bloody Atlantic was also the site of collaboration and resistance.

In the early eighteenth century, ship captains like John Newton and James Barbot

repeatedly record with horror how despite such conditions slaves conspired to

rebel against captors. At the same time, unnamed rebellions took place not in

violent but in erotic resistance, in interpersonal relationships enslaved Africans

formed with those imprisoned and oozing beside them. Sally and Richard Price’s

research on Saramacca maroons documents mati as “a highly charged volitional

relationship . . . that dates back to the Middle Passage — matis were originally

‘shipmates,’ those who had survived the journey out from Africa together . . . those

who had experienced the trauma of enslavement and transport together.”19 Colo-

nial chronicles suggest that shipmate relationships were prominent in other parts

of the Caribbean as well. Médéric Moreau de Saint-Méry reports mati-like part-

nerships between enslaved women in prerevolutionary Haiti in his Description . . .

de l’Isle Saint Domingue (1797), and in The History . . . of the British West-Indies

(1794) Bryan Edwards remarks: “This is a striking circumstance; the term ship-

mate is understood among [West Indian slaves] as signifying a relationship of the

most endearing nature; perhaps as recalling the time when the sufferers were cut

off together from their common country and kindred, and awakening reciprocal

sympathy from the remembrance of mutual affliction.”20 Expanding these observa-

tions, the anthropologist Gloria Wekker notes the significance of bonds between

shipmates throughout the Afro-Atlantic:

In different parts of the Diaspora the relationship between people who

came over to the “New” World on the same ship remained a peculiarity of

this experience. The Brazilian “malungo,” the Trinidadian “malongue,”

the Haitian “batiment” and the Surinamese “sippi” and “mati” are all

examples of this special, non-biological bond between two people of the

same sex.21

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Bl ack atl antic, Queer atl antic 199

As fragmentarily recorded here, the emergence of intense shipmate relationships

in the water-rocked, no-person’s-land of slave holds created a black Atlantic same-

sex eroticism: a feeling of, feeling for the kidnapped that asserted the sentience of

the bodies that slavers attempted to transform into brute matter.

This Atlantic and these erotic relationships are neither metaphors nor

sources of disempowerment. Instead, they are one way that fluid black bodies

refused to accept that the liquidation of their social selves — the colonization of

oceanic and body waters — meant the liquidation of their sentient selves. Some

mati and malungo were probably sexual connections, others not. Yet regardless

of whether intimate sexual contact took place between enslaved Africans in the

Atlantic or after landing, relationships between shipmates read as queer relation-

ships. Queer not in the sense of a “gay” or same-sex loving identity waiting to be

excavated from the ocean floor but as a praxis of resistance. Queer in the sense of

marking disruption to the violence of normative order and powerfully so: connect-

ing in ways that commodified flesh was never supposed to, loving your own kind

when your kind was supposed to cease to exist, forging interpersonal connections

that counteract imperial desires for Africans’ living deaths. Reading for shipmates

does not offer to clarify, to tell a documentable story of Atlantic, Caribbean, immi-

grant, or “gay” pasts. Instead it disrupts provocatively. Fomented in Atlantic cross-

currents, black queerness itself becomes a crosscurrent through which to view

hybrid, resistant subjectivities — opaquely, not transparently. Perhaps, as Brand

writes, black queers really have no ancestry except the black water.22 But diving

into this water stands to transform African diaspora scholarship in ways as sur-

prising as Equiano’s first glimpse of the sea.

Lara’s debut novel, Erzulie’s Skirt, collects gear to take this dive. Like

Gilroy and Benítez-Rojo, Lara imagines how the history of the Middle Passage

overflows into Atlantic and Caribbean presents; like Edwards or Moreau de St.

Méry, she traces a self-consciously fragmented history of the relationships forged

in diaspora’s cauldrons. But she does so with a difference, queerly. The novel nar-

rates the travels of two women lovers, Haitian Miriam and Dominican Micaela,

who meet in Santo Domingo and disastrously attempt to immigrate to Puerto Rico

on a yola crossing the Mona Strait. Water that defies abstract, passively feminized

figuration, the shark-infested Mona passage is an active seismic area rocked by

enormous waves that tens of thousands of immigrants confront each year in small

wooden boats. Dominican maritime migration to Puerto Rico fosters ever-growing

informal businesses, headed by organizers and captains who overcrowd fishing

boat – sized crafts with hundreds of people desperate for economic opportunities

in the global northern territory across the strait. Ten thousand Dominicans arrive

200 GlQ: a JOurnal OF leSBian and GaY StudieS

in Puerto Rico by yola each year; many others die in the process. Because of

the earthquake-rocked roughness of the waters and the tight packing of boats,

migrants routinely perish when yolas capsize, passengers are thrown out to lighten

loads, or unexpectedly long trips lead to dehydration or starvation.23 For Lara

these hellish conditions constitute a contemporary Middle Passage whose stories

are drowned out, and her novel’s inspiration arises from this. “My own connec-

tion to this story — it’s deep and personal,” she states in an interview with Naomi

Wood. “Slavery and the trafficking of people . . . are still very real circumstances

for many Dominicans today. . . . I did not make the journey across the water from

the D.R. to Puerto Rico. I know many people who have tried — and never made it.

Or were turned back.”24

Never evaporating metaphors, turbulent marine waters are an overwhelm-

ing physical presence in her novel. They spill into the yola and threaten to sink it;

bluely reflect the sun’s glare until heat almost drives raftgoers mad; crust thirsty,

cracked lips with salt; instantly swallow those who fall overboard; and make terri-

fied passengers urinate on themselves at the sight of bodies sinking. As it describes

this dangerous passage, Erzulie’s Skirt navigates an oceanic crosscurrent: the

Mona Strait is where the Atlantic and Caribbean come violently together. The

raft crossing also opens a temporal crosscurrent: Lara thematizes the repeating

history of the Middle Passage through ancestral memories of transit from Africa

that surface in Micaela’s yolaboard dreams. As they survive rafts, plantations, and

coerced sex work together, Miriam and Micaela become not only lovers but literal

and figurative shipmates. “How I have loved this woman,” Miriam thinks to herself

near the end of the novel. “This woman who has helped me through the darkest

hours. . . . The tenderness between them had helped them survive their slavery.”25

This survival of twentieth-century captivity is framed and given meaning by its

connection to a history of transoceanic slavers. Lara imagines the choppy surface

of the Mona Strait as a window through which the “other side of the water” — the

liminal space where ancestors and spirits reside in Vodoun cosmology — touches

the realm of the living, mirroring the protagonists’ journey from the bottom of the

ocean and through the lens of Micaela’s psychic visions.

As Miriam and Micaela wait to board the yola in Santo Domingo, the sea

before them is the kind of memory Alexander imagines: frightening and promis-

ing, past and future, physical and psychic. The water speaks to Micaela:

Micaela looked out at the ocean, at the churning waters at her feet, closing

her eyes to the cool night air. La Mar had always been there. She knew

from dreams that it was from there that she had arisen. That sometime

Bl ack atl antic, Queer atl antic 201

long ago she had entered her waters and emerged on this side, whole and

broken. That somewhere in her depths was the key to her death and to her

living. As Micaela prayed, La Mar appeared before her dressed in silver

and jewels and the rosy shells of lambí. She lit up the sky so that even the

moon hid behind Her brilliance. She came and She sang to Micaela about

everything: the mètros, the vêvés, the children, the hunger of suffering, the

distance between her land and her destiny. She pulled Micaela from the

hungry depths of exhaustion and gave her food, sweet water and love. Her

sweet voice sang through the waves:

Hubo un lugar donde los dos desaparecieron

Donde susurraban los secretos de su deseo

Se miraban a través de la oscuridad

Se admiraban y en silencio se decían:

Amor te quiero

Sabes que te deseo

Amor nos iremos de aquí un día

La pesadilla que nos ata desaparecerá

La Mar told her of a place where two people lay with irons on their ankles.

They gazed at each other across the darkness, despite the darkness, and

their eyes shone like the stars. In the unending blackness that covered

them, that suffocated them, they spoke: “Amor, I long for your kisses, your

arms around me, along my hips. Amor, I love you.” All this they whis-

pered without moving their lips, in languages that escaped the trappings

of sound.26

La Mar is the black Atlantic in iridescent lambí (conch), embodied and

queer. This figure that eclipses moon and stars and brings women sweet water and

love is the novel’s most eroticized character — a material body who whispers in

Micaela’s ear, whose waters she enters, whose depths she longs to explore, whose

sexuality is neither overexposed nor hidden. I see her as an image of the queer

black Atlantic not primarily because she arouses the sensuality of another femi-

nine character, though, nor even because her appearance to Micaela performs a

femme desire that needs no masculinist gaze (à la Benítez-Rojo) to validate its

apparition. Instead La Mar’s queerness churns silverly in her overflow, in the sea-

like capacity to desire beyond the brutality of history, nationality, enslavement,

and immigration that she models for drowned shipmates and endangered yola-

mates. Neither disembodied metaphor nor oozing wound, her fluid desire becomes

202 GlQ: a JOurnal OF leSBian and GaY StudieS

a resistant, creative praxis that, as Brand describes diasporic art, experiments

with being “celebratory, even with the horrible,” flowing together unexpected

erotic linkages even, especially, in spaces of global violence and inequity.27 No

matter what devastation she traverses La Mar keeps desiring, and this is the queer

feeling that metaphorically and materially connects her to African diaspora immi-

grants past and present.

La Mar as she appears here is not only a mirror for black Atlantic queer-

ness; she is a black Atlantic that mirrors queerly. Her song creates figures of

comparison where terms are not equated but rather diffracted and recomposed,

reflected in a broken mirror whose fractures are part of their meaning-creation.

Let me point to two examples of “mis-mirrored” terms in this passage: languages

(Spanish/English) and couples (yolabound/shipwrecked). In the second paragraph

a centered, italicized Spanish-language poem — whose distinct visual arrange-

ment recalls the vêvés (figures drawn on the ground in Voudoun ceremonies) that

La Mar sings of — interrupts standard English prose; although the next paragraph

offers an indirect, still bilingual translation (“Amor, I long for your kisses”), this

translation remains notably inexact. Amplifying this chain of repetition with dif-

ference, the words of the poem are then revealed to be “really” spoken in the

drowned slaves’ unrepresentable “languages that escaped the trappings of sound”:

instead of speaking two languages that mirror each other, La Mar’s song contains

three intertwined yet unequatable lenguas, proliferating and connecting across

difference with each translation. Similarly, the star-eyed lovers at the bottom of the

sea — those thrown overboard during the Middle Passage without their presence

being definitively liquidated — do “twin” sea-crossing lovers Miriam and Micaela,

but also do not. Miriam and Micaela remain on the waters’ surface while the iron-

clad lovers remain submerged and the love of the former helps them stay afloat

while the amor of the latter comforts them in their sinking. The present repeats

the past with a difference, and the spectacular figure of La Mar that joins them

appears as the surplus — the overflow, the temporal and cultural gap that cannot

be dissolved by their connection.

La Mar whispers this in our ears, too: in queer diasporic imagining, the

gap — the material difference — always matters and must be part of any figuration

that makes meaningful connection possible. The maritime metaphors of Gilroy

and Benítez-Rojo move toward a kind of closure, the Atlantic transmuting into a

horizon of hybridity and the cunnic Caribbean healing orgasmically in order to

become the vehicles these authors desire for diasporic and regional identities. Yet

such closure is made possible only by washing over important materialities and

multiplicities in visions of diaspora and region. La Mar’s unclosable, untranslat-

Bl ack atl antic, Queer atl antic 203

able language of beauty and pain churns differently, crossing instead in turbulent,

excessive currents of diffracting meanings. As Micaela floats literally suspended

in water between Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, La Mar’s queer mir-

roring provides a medium for conceiving what it means for diasporic Africans to

emerge from her waters “whole and broken”: brutalized and feeling, connected to

the past and separate from it, divided from other diasporic migrants and linked

to them. To think the black queer Atlantic, not only must its metaphors be mate-

rially informed; they must be internally discontinuous, allowing for differences

and inequalities between situated subjects that are always already part of both

diaspora and queerness. They must creatively figure what Rinaldo Walcott imag-

ines as “a rethinking of community that might allow for different ways of coher-

ing into some form of recognizable political entity . . . [where] we must confront

singularities without the willed effort to make them cohere into oneness; we must

struggle to make a community of singularities.”28 The black Atlantic is not just

any ocean, and what is queer about its fluid amor is that it is always churning,

always different even from itself.

And larger and larger and ever larger than me, O sea: water: waves

and foam. . . . How the sea would take I and wrap I deep in it. How

it would drown I, mash I up, wash I into bits. . . . And so I does say

now that I know the sea this same sea like I does know the back of me

hand, says I: these currents, these waves, these foams. . . . Let this

sea not take I, but let it talk to I. Let it sing. The sea, the sea. Yes,

water. Waves. Wetness, poundsurf, that I does love.

— Thomas Glave, Words to Our Now

And in the last fifteen years queer theory has harnessed the repetitive, unpre-

dictable energy of currents, waves, and foam to smash and wash into bits many

I’s — from the gendered self to the sexed body, from heterocentric feminist speech

to homonormative gay discourse. In this field where groundlessness is celebrated,

writers also explicitly or implicitly rely on metaphors of fluidity, which provide

an undercurrent for expanding formulations of gender and sexual mobility. Judith

Butler’s praise of the resistant power of drag’s fluid genders and sexualities in

the pivotal Gender Trouble is echoed by many a queer theoretical text: “Perpet-

ual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to

resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic

culture and its critics of the right to claim naturalized or essentialist gender iden-

tities.”29 This proliferation multiplies the genders and sexualities explored by

204 GlQ: a JOurnal OF leSBian and GaY StudieS

queer theory beyond women and men, gay and straight. They soon include, as Eve

Sedgwick puts it, “pushy femmes, radical faeries, fantasists, drags, clones, leather

folk, ladies in tuxedoes, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bull-

daggers, divas, Snap! queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties,

wannabes.”30 No deviant is a desert isle here, but part of an archipelago rushed

together by a common sea of queerness.

Does this queer sea have a color, though? As the cascading, un-color-coded

sentences of Butler and Sedgwick suggest, in the early 1990s prominent queer the-

orists denaturalized conventional gender and sexuality while renaturalizing global

northernness and unmarked whiteness, initially unreferenced as if they were as

neutral as fresh water. In both theorists’ early genderscapes, the bodies and selves

rendered fluid are first and foremost gendered and sexualized, only faintly marked

by other locations — only secondarily racialized, nationalized, classed. When

Butler acknowledges that codes of (presumably white) racial purity undergird the

gender norms disturbed in her initial consideration of “fluidity of identities,” she

does so belatedly and between parentheses (as part of a long list of clarifications

to her discussion of drag in the 1999 preface to Gender Trouble).31 Sedgwick’s

list, somewhat differently, momentarily parts the waves of queer theory’s uncom-

mented whiteness as race fades in subtly with the African American – associated

terms bulldagger and Snap! queen. Not only is this faint racialization limited to

the black-white landscape of the contemporary global north, keeping terms like

mahu, mati, tomboy, tongzhi unlistable, but the particularities of this possible

racialization remain as unspecified as the color of the leather favored by “leather

folk” or the jacket cut of the “ladies in tuxedoes.” The list’s sheer heterogeneity

sweeps the bulldagger’s racial particularities into the same washing currents as

the butch bottom’s sexual particularities.

These queer theorists are innovative, rigorous scholars whose work

focuses on a predominantly white global north but who do — often in introduc-

tions — acknowledge how racialization intersects the construction and deconstruc-

tion of ossified genders and sexualities. Shortly after her list in Tendencies’ intro-

duction, Sedgwick contends that “a lot of the most exciting recent work around

‘queer’ spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under

gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial national-

ity criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing dis-

courses.”32 This is not her work in a text that goes on to deftly engage Jane Aus-

ten and Sigmund Freud, but she does gesture toward the importance of “other”

scholars taking it up. Similarly, in the preface to the tenth anniversary edition of

Gender Trouble, Butler remarks that “racial presumptions invariably underwrite

Bl ack atl antic, Queer atl antic 205

the discourse on gender in ways that need to be made explicit” and concedes that

if she rewrote the book she would include a discussion of racialized sexuality. In

thinking through performativity and race, she suggests that “the question to ask

is not whether the theory of performativity is transposable onto race, but what

happens to the theory when it tries to come to grips with race.”33 But of course

there is not just one question to ask of the meeting point between Butler’s theory

and race, and those I would pose would be different still. Namely, what happens

when queer theories start with explicit formulations of racialized sexuality and

sexualized race, rather than add them in after theories like performativity have

already been elaborated? How does this change in point of departure change the

tidal pattern of queer theory? How might it shift the field’s dominant metaphors,

decentering performativity’s stages and unearthing other topoi?

“Metaphors lose their metaphoricity as they congeal through time into

concepts,” Butler aptly remarks in this preface. And in a rare autobiographical

moment, the short text offers one image of literal liquidity that informs the meta-

phoric fluidity (threatening to congeal into a concept) in this foundational text of

queer theory. Just after her discussion of performativity, Butler provides an insight

into the literal starting place for Gender Trouble. Explaining how her involvement

in lesbian and gay politics on the East Coast of the United States informed her

writing of this academic text, she recounts: “At the same time that I was ensconced

in the academy, I was also living a life outside those walls, and though Gender

Trouble is an academic book, it began, for me, with a crossing-over, sitting on

Rehoboth Beach, wondering whether I could link the different sides of my life.”34

Meaning “place for all,” Rehoboth is an Atlantic resort town that boasts beauti-

ful, Caribbean – bright white sand beaches and has become one of the Northeast’s

premier gay and lesbian summer getaways. As Butler suggests, it is situated at a

crosscurrent: “Water, water everywhere. . . . Bounded on the east by the mighty

Atlantic Ocean, and on the west by Rehoboth Bay and Indian River Bay,” gushes

a promotional Web site.35 This crosscurrent has a black Atlantic history, from

the eighteenth-century docking of slave ships in Delaware’s harbors to a maritime

version of the underground railroad that passed through the state’s waters in the

nineteenth century. But by the late twentieth century that history had been largely

washed out of sight. Over 98 percent of the city’s population is now white and,

as Alexs Pate’s West of Rehoboth depicts, people of color remain semi-invisible,

concentrated in segregated neighborhoods.36 So when Butler sits at the “crossing-

over” of Rehoboth Beach, the difference that prominently marked its shores would

be that of sexuality — the beach-combing gay and lesbian tourists who make the

resort what it is, a site of play and mobility for sexual rather than racial “others.”

206 GlQ: a JOurnal OF leSBian and GaY StudieS

Now, if this is where one of queer theory’s most influential texts emerged

and a site that (Butler suggests) has metaphoric valences, I want to extend that

metaphor by saying: frequently, prominent queer theorists continue to work from

Rehoboth Beach. This is an important place from which to work, certainly, a site

steeped in possibilities for meaningful confluences between thinking sexuality

and thinking race. But theorists have a tendency to wait (figuratively) for queers of

color to arrive on Rehoboth’s shores in the hopes that they will join the sexuality-

centered signifying games already set up . . . in the hopes they will take up

theories of performativity and rework them through race, for example. And they

wait rather than seriously engage how some of queer theory’s fundamental prem-

ises — including its emphasis on abstract rather than concrete crossings-over, its

references to places like Rehoboth without engagement with their geographic and

cultural specificity — need to change in order to make possible deeply productive

meetings between sexuality and race. That is, they welcome the appearance of

queer of color scholarship without rigorously confronting the exclusionary prac-

tices that marginalize queer global southern experiences. To become an expan-

sively decolonizing practice, queer theory must adjust its vision to see what has

been submerged in the process of unmarking whiteness and global northernness:

the black Atlantic, New England Bay, and Indian River of queer crossings-over,

the intersecting beach topoi of slavery and liberation, coerced work and unconven-

tional play, unmarked whiteness and invisible blackness, flesh exposed for vaca-

tion and for auction. Rehoboth’s layered present and past exemplifies the need to

engage specific, situated histories and the difference they make. Water is only

literally transparent, and the imagination of fluidity inspired by the Rehoboth or

the San Francisco bays may not be the same as that inspired by the southern

Atlantic or the eastern Caribbean. Nor may its metaphorics be as playful as waves

of punk bands, snap! queens, butch bottoms. . . . Just as travel does not offer

the same image of freedom to the gay undocumented immigrant that it does to

the queer cosmopolitan, conceptualizations of the fluid change when we approach

islands where the sea simultaneously carries the violent history of the Middle Pas-

sage, a present of yolas and tourist cruises, and a possible future of interisland

connections.

Also composed at the turn of the century, Brand’s Map to the Door of No

Return charts space to explore these complexities. The thirty-year literary career

of this Trinidadian-born, Toronto-resident poet, novelist, essayist, filmmaker, and

activist narrates continual migration among Atlantic and Caribbean seascapes,

crossings-over that connect sites like Delaware’s Rehoboth or Toronto’s Bathurst to

Cuba’s Santiago and Trinidad’s Blanchisseuse. The chief landing points of her work

Bl ack atl antic, Queer atl antic 207

transmigrate between Grenada, then Trinidad, now Ontario. Brand’s writing in the

1980s is propelled, haunted by her vision of the Grenadan shore stormed by U.S.

troops in 1983, walking distance from the office where she worked as an informa-

tion officer for the People’s Development Agency under the New Jewel government.

Her work returns again and again to waters that absorbed the bloodshed of this

invasion, combing Caribbean beaches to attempt to put many sides of her political

life together: tidal scenes of revolutionary hope, invasion, betrayal, death, eroti-

cism, and possibility. These last wash in prominently when, in 1990 — the same

year that Gender Trouble and Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet revolutionized

sexuality studies — Brand publishes No Language Is Neutral. This award-winning

collection of poems is heralded by Michelle Cliff as the first anglophone Caribbean

text to explore fully love between women in a West Indian setting, the black queer

Atlantic of Trinidad’s north coast. 37 But, resistant to being caught in the nostalgia

of a return to her native land, by the late 1990s Brand’s geographic and thematic

focus moves yet again to the shores of Lake Ontario, where she now lives in the

sea of West Indian and other diasporics that has become Toronto. This northern

migration further complicates the crossed currents she witnesses, as the Canada

cycle reflects gathering discomfort with writing from any identity — whether revo-

lutionary, activist, black, lesbian, or otherwise. As she explains in an interview,

“The book is a map . . . [to] a new kind of identity and existence” that challenges

isolated, nationally or otherwise bounded constructions of racial, ethnic, gender,

and sexual identity. Its trajectory answers her post-Grenada, post-homeland ques-

tion: “So now, who am I? I really want to think about that. My objections lie with

the people who hang onto what they call identities for the most awful reasons, and

those are the reasons of exclusion. I’m trying to be very careful how I say it. I don’t

want to say that we don’t have a history, but what we hold onto has to be part of a

much larger terrain.”38

As it explores this terrain, her Map does not emerge as a text as immedi-

ately given to queer reading as either Gender Trouble or No Language Is Neutral.

Yet its oceanography queers many crossings-over, and indeed Brand once gener-

ously thanked me for reading “that book that way.”39 Instead of foregrounding

fluxes of gender or sexuality this work rushes into larger bodies, larger openings.

The text is a tactile, shifting oceanography of African diaspora experience imag-

ined at an unremitting intersection between maritime materialities and metaphors.

This intersection is physically dominated by the Atlantic Ocean and the Carib-

bean Sea, those waters from which blacks emerge whole and broken, and psychi-

cally dominated by the Door of No Return, the “real, imaginary, and imagined”

portal through which Africans left the continent in slave ships’ holds.40 Brand’s

208 GlQ: a JOurnal OF leSBian and GaY StudieS

Map through the “sea in between” is fluidly genred writing that moves between

childhood memories and family stories, ships’ logs and colonial maritime chroni-

cles, and contemporary echoes of the slave trade in the conflux of immigrants from

the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and Africa that form their own human

sea in Toronto.41 Its creative project is one Brand identifies as always underway

in diaspora: to record disruptions that continue on the other side of the door and

“reclaim the black body from that domesticated, captive, open space” it has

become.42 This project is fundamentally queer, in a black Atlantic, crosscurrents

way. Rather than eroticize individual bodies, it offers what Chela Sandoval calls

a “social erotics”: a compass that traces historical linkages that were never sup-

posed to be visible, remembers connections that counteract imperial desires for

global southern disaggregation, and puts together the fragmented experiences of

those whose lives, as Butler writes, were never supposed to “qualify as the ‘human’

and the ‘livable.’ ”43

Like the texts of Butler and Sedgwick, Brand’s work also generates lists

that crash onto her pages like waves — but join unexpected terms in concatena-

tions that recall the chains of slave ships more than those of sexual play. Toward

the end of her Map, Brand imagines the continued haunting of the black Atlan-

tic by those literally and figuratively drowned in the Middle Passage, those she

calls the marooned of the diaspora. For these marooned she writes a ruttier: which

is, she explains, “a long poem containing navigational instructions which sailors

learned by heart . . . the routes and tides, the stars and maybe the taste and fla-

vour of the waters, the coolness, the saltiness; all for finding one’s way at sea.”44

Reconfiguring these colonial maritime lists, her ruttier traces how misdirections

become the way for diasporic Africans — always painfully, always partially. She

describes the marooned as unsexed, irreducibly opaque figures who at once refuse

to stay submerged and refuse to appear in clearly recognizable bodies. Like many

ghosts, their bodies seemed waterlogged, distorted beyond naturalizable gender

and other identities:

Desolation castaway, abandoned in the world. They was, is, wandered,

wanders as spirits who dead cut, banished, seclude, refuse, shut the door,

derelict, relinquished, apart. . . . And it doesn’t matter where in the world,

this spirit is no citizen, is no national, no one who is christened, no sex,

this spirit is washed of all this lading, bag and baggage, jhaji bundle, geor-

gie bindle, lock stock, knapsack, and barrel, and only holds its own weight

which is nothing, which is memoryless and tough with remembrances,

heavy with lightness, aching with grins.45

Bl ack atl antic, Queer atl antic 209

“This spirit . . . is no sex”; this spirit is a singular, plural, and genderless they

that “was, is,” in a grammatical unmarking that parallels the absence of gender in

Creole third-person pronouns. This genderlessness is perhaps an ocean reflection

of the negative equality of sexes experienced in plantation labor that brutalized

men and women without discrimination — a gender queerness that calls into ques-

tion facile linkages between gender trouble and liberation.

But more than this, the fluid identities of Brand’s black queer Atlantic

simultaneously efface gender and nationality, ethnicity, citizenship, religion, their

maroons “no citizen, no national, no one christened, no sex.” This is a lyric litany

of negatives whose rhythmic, sonoric, and conceptual linkages speak a cross-

current of dissolved and reconfigured black selfhoods . . . a tide where woman-

hood, economic status, motherhood, Yorubaness, (for example) are all disrupted

from previous significations at the same time — black queer time. This kind of

ongoing, multiple black Atlantic resignification is thematized and performed

through these lists where words jostle against each other unexpectedly, break-

ing open and reconfiguring meanings. The conventional baggage of language is

shuffled and shed as the spirit is washed of “bag and baggage, jhaji bundle, geor-

gie bindle, lock stock, knapsack, and barrel.” At the end of this washing, maroons’

sexless and otherwise unmarked bodies emerge as the legacy of geographically

and historically specific waters, the Atlantic of the Middle Passage. Their brown

bodies are gender fluid not because they choose parodic proliferations but because

they have been “washed of all this lading, bag and baggage” by a social liquida-

tion that is not the willful or playful fluidity of Butler’s drag queens and Sedg-

wick’s butch bottoms. I am compelled by Butler’s growing insistence, from the

1999 preface to Gender Trouble to the engaging Undoing Gender, that gender

theory should address more material concerns — issues of survival for the trans-

gendered and others whose “unintelligible” bodies threaten their very lives.46 But

Brand’s embodied images of the black queer Atlantic remind us that such survival

is not a concern that can be reduced to the present, that black gender queers are

always already surviving a past of multiple, intersecting violences. The specificity

of these waters, these images, this literary language is at once a map to the door of

no return and a map to a black queer alternative to canonical gender theory.

Yet the route of un-Return is not only one of violence; it is also one of queer

erotics. Just before the ruttier for the marooned, Brand includes another kind of

ruttier titled “Arriving at Desire.” But just as Brand’s ruttier for the marooned

never goes in expected directions, the desire she charts here never becomes sex-

ual or even interpersonal. After a description of childhood reading experiences

210 GlQ: a JOurnal OF leSBian and GaY StudieS

that introduced her to desires both political and erotic, the narrator recounts how

she came to write her novel At the Full and Change of the Moon. Like Butler on

Rehoboth Beach, Brand conceived her text at a crossing-over between land and

water, between experience of the real and vision of the (im)possible. Her inspi-

ration came while contemplating maritime artifacts in a Port of Spain museum

overlooking the sea, and her converging descriptions of the museum’s inside and

outside become the Map’s most erotic description:

As you crest the hill, there is the ocean, the Atlantic, and there a fresh

wide breeze relieving the deep flush of heat. From atop this hill you can

see over the whole town. Huge black cannons overlook the ocean, the har-

bour, and the town’s perimeter. If you look right, if your eyes could round

the point, you would see the Atlantic and the Caribbean in a wet blue

embrace. If you come here at night you will surprise lovers, naked or cloth-

ing askew, groping hurriedly or dangerously languorous, draped against

the black gleaming cannons of George III.47

Before we ever come to these lovers, Brand at once gestures toward and leaves

opaque two queer desires: the Atlantic’s desire for the Caribbean it meets in a wet

blue embrace, and the narrator’s desire for the ocean she describes so erotically.

This desire is queerly gendered, since ocean, sea, and Brand — rolling and writ-

ing in opposition to the black cannons — would all normatively be feminized. It is

also queer in a black Atlantic way, since it ascribes feeling to bodies — of water

and of African females — that, in colonizers’ and slave traders’ maps of the world,

were never supposed to feel. The queerness of this sensuality is the drive Brand

describes two paragraphs earlier: the diasporic search to “put the senses back

together again,” a sensual re-membering that George III’s cannons, the policing of

sea and of diasporic bodies, cannot stop.48

What puts together Atlantic and Caribbean, viewers and lovers in this pas-

sage is another list, a string of conditionals: “If you look . . . if your eyes could

round . . . you would see. . . . If you come . . . you will surprise.” Like the ruttier’s

litany of negatives, this conjunction of if . . . would, if . . . will traces some com-

plexities of the black queer time the Map moves through. The embrace of Atlantic

and Caribbean, of lovers in front of cannons, is not written as a present reality

that narrator or readers can see but as past and future possibilities they could

see if and when their consciousness and body move creatively to “find one’s way

at sea,” to arrive at a desire — for sentient pasts, livable futures — to which there

are no ready maps. This desire promises to emerge at a site of oceanographic and

Bl ack atl antic, Queer atl antic 211

historical uncertainty and violence that the reader’s eyes cannot quite reach (“if

your eyes could round the point” you would see it, but can they?): the harbor where

Atlantic meets Caribbean, where ships docked after a Middle Passage that did

not end. Neither Atlantic nor Caribbean yet both, this unseen site is one where

diaspora’s radical blurring can also harbor new routes to being, routes neither

shielded nor boxed in by doors of hegemonic space, time, and identity. It is the

space for rewiring the senses that Alexander calls for, a crossroads/crosscurrents

of “expansive memory refusing to be housed in any single place, bound by the

limits of time, enclosed within the outlines of a map, encased in the physicality of

the body, or imprisoned as exhibit in a museum.”49

One of Butler’s important observations in Gender Trouble is that all sub-

jects put together fictionally solid subjectivities from fluid, unstable experiences,

and Brand’s Map supports this idea. Earlier in the text she observes, “There are

ways of constructing the world — that is, of putting it together each morning, what

it should look like piece by piece. . . . Before that everything is liquid, ubiquitous

and mute. We accumulate information over our lives which bring various things

into solidity, into view.”50 What proves innovative in Brand’s black queer Atlan-

tic liquidity is how insistently she weaves these explorations of figurative fluidity

together with poignant material engagements with the waters that shape raced,

nationalized, classed, gendered, and sexualized selves in different moments and

sites of diaspora. Understanding the particularity of the liquids that we put together

daily is the project of A Map to the Door of No Return, a project that allows the

marooned of the diaspora another kind of queer coupling: the possibility of putting

the world together and putting the senses back together at the same time. As Wek-

ker writes of her search for stories of women’s sexuality in the African diaspora,

finding these stories involves collecting the curving, chipped, conch shell – like

“pieces of [black women’s] conceptions of being human” that have been dispersed

in the waters of forced transatlantic migrations and that individuals and commu-

nities rearrange in creatively transculturated ways.51 The key to making black

queer sense of such self-pieces is not turning to race-, class-, or geographically

unmarked models of sexuality and humanity — based in the European Enlighten-

ment philosophy that justified slavery in the first place — but tracing as carefully

as possible the particular, specific, always marked contours, the contested beach-

scapes of African diaspora histories of gender and sexuality. So in the black queer

time and place of the door of no return, fluid desire is neither purely metaphor

nor purely luxury. Instead — like the blue embrace of two bodies of water — its

connections and crosscurrents look to speak through and beyond the washed lad-

212 GlQ: a JOurnal OF leSBian and GaY StudieS

ing, the multiply effaced identities of the Middle Passage. Finally, Brand’s ruttiers

chart how the marooned come to sail as maroons, continually stealing back the

space where they live.

this is my ocean, but it is speaking

another language, since its accent changes around

different islands

— Derek Walcott, Midsummer

The ocean does speak many languages, and I am only a novice linguist. So I have

tried to present academic writing that is fluid, that in some way explores what it

would mean to perform the oceanness that it thematizes. I have tried to broach

more whispered secrets than I could draw out and raise more questions than can

be answered, to pick apart metaphors, put them together without closure. At this

point, then, I do not want to conclude or pretend to. Instead, I want to end with

thoughts on some of the challenges that the Atlantic offers the border waters of

African diaspora, queer, and queer African diaspora studies.

The long-navigated Atlantic tells us that, like Brand’s resurrection of the

marooned, queer Africana studies must explore what it means to conceive our field

historically and materially. Like Lara and Brand, as we navigate the postmodern

we must look for the fissures that show how the anti- and ante-modern continue to

configure black queer broken-and-wholeness. At the same time, the meaningfully

multiblued Atlantic tells us that we must continue to navigate our field metaphori-

cally. As Frantz Fanon contended in The Wretched of the Earth, metaphors provide

conceptual bridges between the lived and the possible that use language queerly

to map other roads of becoming. My point is never that we should strip theory of

watery metaphors but that we should return to the materiality of water to make

its metaphors mean more complexly, shaking off settling into frozen figures. The

territory-less Atlantic also tells us that, like the song between Micaela and la Mar,

black queer studies must speak transnationally. When black becomes only Afri-

can American, black queer theory becomes insular; as the crosscurrents between

Atlantic and Caribbean, Atlantic and Mediterranean, Atlantic and Indian Ocean

are richest in marine life, so they will be richest in depth of theorizing.52 Most

simply, our challenge is to be like the ocean: spreading outward, running through

bays and fingers, while remaining heavy, stinging, a force against our hands.

Bl ack atl antic, Queer atl antic 213

notes

1. Kale Fajardo, “Filipino Cross Currents: Histories of Filipino Seafaring — Asia and

the Americas” (address, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, February 14, 2005).

2. See Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Min-

neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 4 – 10.

3. “Slavery in New York,” New-York Historical Society, October 7, 2005 – March 26,

2006.

4. See Fajardo’s forthcoming manuscript, “Filipino Cross Currents: Oceanographies of

Seafaring and Masculinities in the Global Economy.”

5. On the importance of reimagining what constitutes an archive in queer studies, see

Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place (New York: New York University

Press, 2005), 169 – 74.

6. M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Poli-

tics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 290.

7. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 292.

8. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993),

17.

9. Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Per-

spective (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 2.

10. Benítez-Rojo, Repeating Island, 16.

11. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 83.

12. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 201.

13. Benítez-Rojo, Repeating Island, 5.

14. Benítez-Rojo, Repeating Island, 29.

15. A number of recent studies have reworked the concept and space of the black Atlantic

to take class and materiality into serious consideration. These include the creative,

groundbreaking work of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many-Headed

Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2001) and

Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy

of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). These imaginative material-

ist revisions, however — particularly the insistent heterosexualizing of romance (even

among pirates!) in The Many-Headed Hydra — still continue some of the unqueered

sexual politics of their predecessors.

16. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, in The

Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1987), 32.

17. Quoted in Charles Johnson and Patricia Smith, Africans in America: America’s Jour-

ney through Slavery (New York: Harcourt, 1998), 72.

18. Ana-Maurine Lara, Erzulie’s Skirt (Washington, DC: Red Bone, 2006), 173.

19. Sally Price and Richard Price, Two Evenings in Saramaka (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1991), 3, 396, 207.

214 GlQ: a JOurnal OF leSBian and GaY StudieS

20. Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies, vol.

2 (1794; rpt. New York: AMS, 1966), 94. See also Médéric Moreau de Saint-Méry,

Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie fran-

çaise de l’ isle Saint Domingue, 3 vols., ed. Blanche Maurel and Etienne Taillemite

(1797; rpt. Paris: Société de l’histoire des colonies françaises, 1958), 1:77.

21. Gloria Wekker, Ik ben een gouden munt (Amsterdam: Feministische Uitgeverij VITA,

1994), 145, translation mine. The original Dutch reads: “In verschillende delen van

de Diaspora de relatie tussen mensen die op hetzelfde ship naar de ‘Nieuwe’ Wereld

overgekomen waren, een bijzondere bleef. Het Braziliaanse ‘malungo,’ het Trinidadi-

aanse ‘malongue,’ het Haitiaanse ‘batiment’ an het Surinaamse ‘sippi’ en ‘mati’ zijn

allemaal voorbeelden van die speciale, niet-biologische, symbolische band tussen

twee mensen van dezelfde sekse.”

22. Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Double-

day Canada, 2001), 61.

23. These details of Dominican migration to Puerto Rico have been reported widely in

the press. For a sampling of such reportage, see the Puerto Rico Herald’s collection of

articles at puertorico-herald.org/issues/2004/vol8n07/DesperIslHop.html (accessed

February 8, 2008).

24. Ana Lara, unpublished interview by Naomi Wood, October 2006.

25. Lara, Erzulie’s Skirt, 233.

26. Lara, Erzulie’s Skirt, 159 – 60. I choose not to translate the poem into English to main-

tain the opacity of the Spanish in the original. An indirect translation is contained in

the following paragraph, as I discuss.

27. Dionne Brand, What We All Long For (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2005), 309.

28. Rinaldo Walcott, “Outside in Black Studies: Reading from a Queer Place in the

Diaspora,” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and

Mae G. Henderson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 93.

29. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1999), 176.

30. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 8.

31. Butler, Gender Trouble, xvi.

32. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 8 – 9.

33. Butler, Gender Trouble, xvi.

34. Butler, Gender Trouble, xvi – xvii.

35. See Rehoboth’s official promotional Web site, www.rehoboth.com/beaches.asp.

36. See Alexs Pate, West of Rehoboth (New York: William Morrow, 2001).

37. See Michelle Cliff with Judith Raiskin, “The Art of History: An Interview with

Michelle Cliff,” Kenyon Review 15 (Winter 1993): 69. While there are many other

texts that undertake representations of female same-sex eroticism in the Caribbean

before Brand’s, including the work of Eliot Bliss, Ida Faubert, Mayotte Capécia,

Michèle Lacrosil, Nadine Magloire, and Astrid Roemer, No Language Is Neutral does

become a “breakout” queer text in the anglophone Caribbean.

Bl ack atl antic, Queer atl antic 215

38. Maya Mavjee, “Opening the Door: An Interview with Dionne Brand,” Read Magazine,

March 28, 2003, www.randomhouse.ca/readmag/page28.htm.

39. Dionne Brand, personal communication, Toronto, October 20, 2006, after hearing a

paper in which I presented this reading of A Map to the Door of No Return.

40. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 19.

41. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 20.

42. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 43.

43. See Chela Sandoval, Methodologies of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Min-

nesota Press, 2000); Butler, Gender Trouble, xxvii.

44. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 212.

45. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 213.

46. See Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004).

47. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 197.

48. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 195.

49. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 288.

50. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 141.

51. See Gloria Wekker, The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-

Surinamese Diaspora (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 215.

52. I am inspired here by Rachel Carson’s classic The Sea around Us, which explains:

“Wherever two currents meet . . . there are zones of turbulence and unrest. . . . At

such places the richness and abundance of marine life reveals itself most strikingly”

(The Sea around Us [New York: Mentor, 1950], 50).