Bettina Aptheker: "Black Lesbians & Radical Politics", March 28, 2009
Paper presented at a Conference on Black Women and the Radical Tradition, CUNY Graduate Center, March 28, 2009, Sponsored by the Brooklyn College Graduate Center for Worker Education.
Please do not further reprint this paper without permission from the author. Contact: bettinaf@ucsc.edu
[Summary]
I propose to examine in a reflective and exploratory way the particular contributions of Black lesbians to the Black power and Black feminist movements, in an effort overcome the invisibility and marginalization of Black lesbians in African American women’s history, and especially in its radical traditions.
There are two main themes. The first is that Black lesbians by the mid-1970s had articulated an understanding of interlocking systems of domination and oppression examining the ways in which race, class, gender, and sexuality were shaped by and themselves shaped a historical and political trajectory of subjugation. Likewise, Black lesbians developed a politics of resistance based upon those understandings.
Second, and derived from this politics, Black lesbians articulated theories of difference in new and nuanced ways, evidenced in their writings and cultural practices. In short, Black lesbians struggled to create a space for themselves through a productive and creative “friction,” that saw in their material conditions and political location a way to articulate a Black feminist and lesbian (or queer) consciousness for productive radical engagement.
I will particularly examine the Combahee River Collective Statement (1974), and writings by Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, and Cheryl Clarke. Finally, within this context I will examine the impact of the publication of This Bridge Called My Back (1981) and the ways in which Black feminist lesbians articulated a coalition politics for radical change and a transnational Africana vision. There are many other outstanding Black lesbian writers, artists, etc. (e,g, Jewell Gomez and Michelle Cliff), whose works are not included here because there was not time to do more in a relatively brief presentation.
[Introduction]
In her preface to the critical anthology on Black Queer Studies (Duke University Press, 2005) Sharon P. Holland observed the significance of a conference on that subject at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in April 2000 and the many discoveries of African American lesbian and gay artists, writers, activists and scholars “tucked away in the Harlem Renaissance, embedded in second-wave feminism, and nestled at the heart of the civil rights struggle. The more we saw, the more we understood ourselves as backbone rather than anomaly; as producing the very friction for ‘culture’ to survive.'”
I have proposed this paper as a way of enhancing our understanding of Black women’s radical traditions. Black lesbians are an essential part of this history, not as tokens to be tolerated but as major contributors to its theoretical and activist contours. The Black lesbian and queer history has a long tradition of engagement in radical politics and cutting edge cultural innovation.
Barbara Smith, for example, a Black-lesbian feminist writer and literary critic, calls for a revisionist history of the Harlem Renaissance, and with good reason. In an essay on “African American Lesbian and Gay History” she notes how many of its leading writers were gay, bisexual, or lesbian and asks: “What does it mean that the major outpouring of Black literature, art and cultural consciousness in this century prior to the Black Arts Movement of the sixties and seventies was significantly shaped by Blacks who were not heterosexual?” And, she goes on, “How would those who celebrate this period for its major intellectual and artistic achievements view it if they fully realized how much it was a queer production?” (The Truth that Never Hurts, Writings on Race, Gender and Freedom.Rtugers University Press, 1998, p. 86).
Although it is not yet the full-length critical engagement that Smith proposes, a significant section of the anthology Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual African American Fiction (edited by Devon W. Carbado, Dwight A. McBride, and Donald Weise. Cleis Press, 2002) is devoted to the Harlem Renaissance. Brief, carefully drawn biographies of leading Renaissance figures who were gay, lesbian or bisexual introduce excerpts from some of their major writings, and include Alice Dunbar Nelson, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, Countee Cullen, and Angelina Weld Grimke.
In 2007 Gary Holcomb published his critical study of Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance adding to our list of queer luminaries.
Similarly, we may consider the significance of the lesbian identity claimed by Lorraine Hansberry. In a recent essay in American Quarterly (December 2008) titled “To Be(come) Young, Gay, and Black: Lorraine Hansberry’s Existential Routes to Anticolonialism,” Cheryl Higashida situates Hansberry precisely within a radical, Marxist, anti-imperialist and Pan-African milieu in the early 1950s as she worked at the offices of the Council of African Affairs. Hansberry studied and worked with W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Louis Burnham, Alice Childress, and Shirley Graham Du Bois.
Deeply creative and intellectually so alive, Hansberry was, in Higashida’s words, “strongly influenced by the existentialist feminism of Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, which, she thought might “very well be the most important work of this century.” She devoted “months of study” to it and wrote about it. Hansberry found its analysis of lesbianism particularly helpful, especially in challenging the dominant paradigm of the times that saw only tragedy in lesbian existence.
Posthumously, Hansberry’s former husband, Robert Nemiroff affirmed that Hansberry’s lesbianism “ was not a peripheral or casual part of her life but contributed significantly on many levels to the sensitivity and complexity of her view of human beings and of the world.” (p. 905) Shortly after her separation from her husband in 1957 Hansberry wrote two letters to The Ladder, the first nationally distributed lesbian publication. Published anonymously Hansberry affirmed how glad she was that The Ladder existed, and suggested that such a publication could help to show “that homosexual persecution and condemnation against gays and lesbians has its roots not only in social ignorance, but a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma.” When these letters were published Hansberry came out as a lesbian privately to friends.
Likewise, we may consider the outpouring of major blues singers and musicians like Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, Ida Cox, and Gladys Bentley who were lesbian or bisexual. Angela Davis offers an analysis of their nonconformity to “the norms defining orthodox female behavior” linking issues of sexuality to women’s independence, which is why, she writes “they were revered by both men and women in black working-class communities.” She goes on to write that “Ida Cox’s ‘Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues’ became the most famous portrait of the nonconforming, independent women, and her ‘wild woman’ has become virtually synonymous with the blues queen herself.” And, Davis continues, “ ‘Prove It on Me Blues,’ composed by Gertrude Rainey, portrays just such a ‘wild woman’ who affirms her independence from the orthodox norms of womanhood by boldly flaunting her lesbianism.” Indeed, as Davis concludes, “Rainey’s sexual involvement with women was no secret among her colleagues and her audiences.” (Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Pantheon, 1998, pp. 38-39).
Barbara Smith’s call for a revisionist engagement with the Harlem Renaissance, Holcomb’s study of Claude McKay, Higashida’s reading of Lorraine Hansberry, Davis’ appraisal of the blues singers combined to have a kind of kaleidoscopic affect on my understanding of Black women’s history. It was very similar to what happened when I read an essay by Adrienne Rich on Emily Dickinson, or when I read Blanche Weisen Cooks’s biography of Eleanor Roosevelt. Rich proposed an alternate, lesbian reading of Dickinson’s desires. And Cook established beyond all reasonable doubt that Eleanor Roosevelt had been lovers with the journalist Lorena Hickok for many, many years.
Nevertheless, claims about the gay and lesbian identity of all of these people remain, even today, hidden, intensely controversial, and/or dismissed as an insignificant aspect of their lives. This speaks to the enormity of the political and cultural opposition to the existence of a gay and lesbian reality in American life; and, at the same time and paradoxically, it also demonstrates the contributions of gay and lesbian peoples to movements for the radical transformation of society.
The connection that Angela Davis makes between lesbian identity and women’s independence is, I think, key to understanding both the fierce opposition to and, often, overt hatred of gay and lesbian peoples. Independence implies equality in the deepest sense of that word’s meaning, and I would argue that the hatred of gay men is precisely embedded in a misogyny that extends its hatred of independent women to those men who would appear to challenge conventional, patriarchal definitions of masculinity.
For us as radical activists and scholars it is also important to understand the extent to which a religious injunction against homosexuality is wielded by the Christian Right to mobilize so many people, and not only against gay rights.
The passage of Proposition 8 in California prohibiting gay marriage in November 2008 is very much the same as the prohibition against interracial marriage a few decades ago. This homophobic crusade then becomes a jackhammer with which to pound Left and progressive agendas in general. The extent of the persecution and the pervasiveness of penalties that may be exacted against gays and lesbians from loss of jobs to loss of children keep hundreds of thousands of people in our own country closeted and many deeply fearful, despite the enormity of the legal challenges that have been mounted in recent years, and the visibility of the gay movement.
In exploring Black lesbians and feminist politics in the context of a Black radical tradition I propose to begin an exploration of the deep connections to and contributions of Black lesbians to both in the 1970s and 1980s.
[Combahee River Collective]
To my knowledge the first clear theoretical articulation of what we now call intersecting systems of domination that included a combined analysis of race, class, gender and sexuality was made by the Combahee River Collective and was first published in Zillah Eisenstein’s edited book, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism published in 1978 (Monthly Review Press). The Statement was first released by the Collective in 1977. The Collective was largely lesbian, and the principle author of this “Black Feminist Statement” was Barbara Smith. It was based on five years of grass roots organizing in the Black community in Boston. Taking their name from the guerrilla action led by Harriet Tubman during the Civil War at the Combahee River in Alabama, the opening paragraph read, in part: “The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.” (p. 362).
These women of the Combahee River Collective stood at a crossroads, their own lives reflecting precisely the oppressions they named, one inseparable from the other. While members had been at the 1973 founding conference of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) and celebrated its work, they were also disappointed that working class and lesbian women were not more centrally placed on its agenda. Many of the women in Combahee also had been active in the civil rights and Black power movements and in and around the Black Panther Party. Here too they were critical both of the sexism of Black men within those movements, and the homophobia that left no space for the complex dynamics of the oppressions they experienced. Likewise, in general, they found the white, male-dominated New Left ignorant of the extent to which racism permeated and defined the United States, and the grinding class oppression and poverty in which working class women lived. This New Left also largely marginalized lesbian and gay issues at best and ridiculed them at worst. While there were elements of a radical feminist consciousness within the women’s movement, and strong lesbian voices, its white participants too remained largely ignorant of racism, and the mainstream women’s movement in its earliest days was unsympathetic and hostile to the particular oppressions to which lesbians were subjected. The consciousness of an interlocking system of oppression was an analysis borne of the actual material conditions of these women’s lives. They sought then to develop a feminist politics that was antiracist, class conscious, anticolonial, antisexist, and pro-gay.
A lesbian sensibility infused their writing and their organizing. “Our politics,” they wrote “sprang from the shared belief that black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not an adjunct to somebody else’s . . . . We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation is us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community . . . .” (p. 364-65)
The Combahee River Collective statement declared: “We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy . . . . “ Expressing essential agreement with Marx’s theory “as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed” they argued that it must be further expanded “for us to understand our specific economic situation as black women.” Here they were cognizant of the special exploitation of Black women’s labor at the bottom of the economic pyramid of production and reproduction as domestic workers, service workers, and poorly paid clerical, industrial, agricultural, cannery, laundry and janitorial workers, (to mark the major occupational categories from Black women). However, they also argued that in addition, the political contribution they had already made was the “expansion of the feminist principle that the personal is political.” (P. 366) This enabled an understanding of the sexual exploitation of Black women, and the violent and/or oppressive situations Black women might well face in their families, in their communities and from the police. And the more personal reflections likewise allowed for a political analysis of homophobia as an instrument of patriarchy. The Combahee women concluded this section of their statement by maintaining that “No one before has ever examined the multilayered texture of black women’s lives.” (p. 366) And they understood very clearly that “If black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression.” (p. 368)
In practical terms hundreds of women in and around the Combahee River Collective participated in lesbian politics, sterilization abuse and abortion rights work, Third World International Women’s Day activities, and support activity for the trials of Dr. Kenneth Edelin, Joan Little and Inez Garcia. In addition they did work on battered women, rape, and healthcare. (369-370) They successfully sought alliance and coalition with whoever would work with them. They asserted their belief in “a collective process and nonhierarchical distribution of power within our own group and in our vision of a revolutionary society.” Their Statement concluded: “As black feminists and lesbians we know that we have a very definite revolutionary task to perform and we are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle before us.” (p. 372)
This was an extraordinary statement by women of extraordinary courage, stamina and revolutionary commitment. It speaks to a clarity of vision more apparent, perhaps, in retrospect than it was in that moment. And it suggests at the very least the imperative that Black lesbian politics and perspectives be taken seriously as an integral part of any historical or theoretical exploration of the lives of Black women.
[Audre Lorde]
Undoubtedly the most influential Black lesbian feminist writer in the late Twentieth Century was Audre Lorde. She was raised in New York City in a working class West Indian family, and graduated from Columbia University in 1961. Following graduation she worked as a public librarian, and then in 1968 she received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts and took up a position as poet in residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. That same year her first book of poetry was published, and within a decade she had published several more including From a Land Where Other People Live (1973) that was nominated for a National Book Award, followed by her most celebrated book of poetry, Black Unicorn (1978).
She was often fierce in her encounters with people, announcing herself to be “a Black/Lesbian/feminist/mother/warrior,” doing her work in the world and wondering if you were doing yours. As Barbara Smith once quipped, she was glad she could always respond in the affirmative to that question! Lorde consistently combined a class and race consciousness with a lesbian sensibility, and a forceful analysis of misogyny. She was anti-imperialist to the core, and a forceful, eloquent defender of the Black peoples of South Africa in their struggle against apartheid. This struggle is especially poignant in her book of poems, Our Dead Behind Us. In 1980 she published The Cancer Journals that is, perhaps, the first time a woman of any race wrote an autobiographical account of her struggle with breast cancer. The book is breathtaking for the breaking of yet another silence, for the description of inner terror, and for the compassion it extends. Audre Lorde was the first woman ever named as Poet Laureate of the State of New York in 1991.
The cover of Our Dead Behind Us is “a snapshot of the last Dahomean Amazons,” according to literary critic Gloria Akasha Hull, “three old Black women in draped clothes,” superimposed upon a sea of dark and passionate South Africans at a protest demonstration. This image,” Hull continues, “projects Lorde’s membership in a community of struggle which stretches from ancient to modern times.” (Gloria T. Hull, “Living on the Line: Audre Lorde and Our Dead Behind Us.” In Cheryl A. Wall, ed. Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. Rutgers U Press, 1989, 150-172).
The final poem in this collection is “The Call” and it both re-calls and summons Aido Hwedo, the Rainbow Serpent who is a representation of all ancient African divinities. Please listen to the power of Lorde’s words:
Holy ghost woman
stolen out of your name
Rainbow Serpent
whose faces have been forgotten
Mother loosen my tongue or adorn me
with a lighter burden
Aido Hwedo is coming.
On worn kitchen stools and tables
we are piecing our weapons together
scraps of different histories
do not let us shatter
any altar
. . .
I have written your names on my cheekbone
dreamed your eyes
flesh my epiphany
most ancient goddess hear me
enter
I have not forgotten your worship
nor my sisters
nor the sons of my daughters
my children watch for your print
in their labors
and they say Aido Hwedo is coming.
(Our Dead Behind Us. Poems. Audre Lorde. Norton, 1986. Pp. 73 – 75)
It was typical of Lorde’s vision to host African images, heroines, and spirits while at the same time invoking powerful images of African American women in the dailiness of their lives, and in the promise of struggle and redemption. Poems motivated by a fierce love and fierce wounds, images contesting with each other, and always underneath it all the drum beat of struggle, and the hope for a radical social transformation.
Lorde was also explicit about lesbian sexuality. Significant here is that in the early 1970s she invoked images of erotic passion different from the lesbian pulp fiction of the 1950s and the staple voyeuristic lesbian scenes in so many pornographic films. “Love Poem,” for example, begins:
Speak earth and bless me with what is richest
make sky flow honey out of my hips
rigid as mountains
spread over a valley
carved out of the mouth of rain.
And I knew when I entered her I was
high wind in her forests hollow
fingers whispering sound
honey flowed
from the split cup
Impaled on a lance of tongues . . .
(Audre Lorde, Chosen Poems, Old and New. Norton, 1982, p. 77)
In 1982 Lorde published a remarkable fictionalized memoir, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. It is subtitled a “biomythology” as Lorde created a new word to signal a new way of writing. Zami is a West Indian name for women who work together as friends and lovers. The book is very rare for its detailed description of lesbian life in New York City in the 1950s, and the richness and complexity of Black culture, and the ways in which it describes internalized homophobia, recriminations, discriminations, working class life, factory jobs, and struggles for survival. It is also filled with sex, humor, and the escapades of a young, vigorous, restless, courageous and brilliant woman searching for a life of transcendent meaning in a bleak landscape.
Lorde’s collection of essays Sister/Outsider (Crossing Press, 1984) contains some of her most important theoretical feminist work, among these are, for example, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” “Uses of the Erotic, The Erotic as Power,” “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” and “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred and Anger.”
Each of these essays is relentless in its challenges to conventional thinking. For example, she issues this challenge to academic feminists, white feminists, mainstream feminists: “Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish.”
In “Eye to Eye,” she challenges the anger in herself and the divisions between Black women: “I know the anger that lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be angry than to hurt. Anger is what I do best. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other. As Black women, we have shared so many similar experiences. Why doesn’t this commonality bring us closer together instead of setting us at each other’s throats with weapons well-honed by familiarity?” (p. 153)
For Lorde poetry was never a luxury; it was the breath of her life. Through poetry, she wrote, “we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where our true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes. . . . I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience . . . For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence . . . As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas.” (p. 37)
Lorde was constantly about the business of daring, of imagining, of seeking to break down differences, and the fear of differences, first and foremost among Black women, and within the Black community, and then between women more generally. I think she was not an easy person to be with. From the biographies we have and from those who knew her, we can conclude, I think, that Lorde was fiercely loved, and sometimes feared and avoided. I don’t think she ever succeeded in containing the rage and healing the deeper of her wounds. And yet it is also absolutely true to say that her work has inspired generations of Black feminist, lesbian and gay poets like Pat Parker and Cheryl Clarke, and Essex Hemphill and scholars like Jacqui Alexander. The quality of the work draws us into the historical moments at which it was created. There can be no doubt whatsoever that Lorde is one of those “frictions” to which Sharon P. Holland was referring in her assessment of the centrality of queer productions to cultural survival and a radical feminist politics. Lorde is also essential in understanding profoundly radical, paradigm-breaking thinking, ways of making connections between, for example, an African spiritual legacy and Africana history, the possibility of daily struggle and the desire to love and be loved as a source of revolutionary potential.
[Cheryl Clarke]
Cheryl Clarke is another of the poets and essayists who began her work in the flowering of Black lesbian feminist visibility in the 1970s. She continues her work today as the director of Diverse Community Affairs and LGBT Concerns at Rutgers University. Her poetry especially speaks to the experiences of Black women and girls, and is explicit as well about lesbian desire often invoking a historical subtext of suppression and resistance. In her 1982 Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black women (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Sister Books) she wrote “Of Althea and Flaxie,” (p. 15) beginning this way:
In 1943 Althea was a welder
very dark
very butch
and very proud
loved to cook, sew, and drive a car
and did not care who knew she kept company with a woman
who met her every day after work
in a tight dress and high heels
light-skinned and high cheekboned
who loved to shoot, fish, play poker
and did not give a damn who knew her ‘man’ was a woman.
And this poem in the same collection, “the moon in cancer”, thrilling to her sweetie with this lovely echo of the blues in its last verse:
And me loudly singing to the crescent moon
of her hidden circumference,
and boldly changing nouns and pronouns
for her
so she could hear the wisdom
of some old womansung advice:
‘girls, if you got a good woman
better keep her by your side.
said, if you got a good woman
better keep her by your side.
cause if she flag this train
I’m sure gonna let her ride.’
The poems are off set with pen and ink drawings by “Gaia” and add a playful, haunting or aching visual dimension to each.
I remember Audre Lorde once saying, “the first thing a minority must do is make itself visible to itself.” And I remember the words of the British socialist feminist Sheila Rowbotham writing about Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (Penguin, 1973) in the early 1970s: “In order to create an alternative an oppressed group must at once shatter the self-reflecting world which encircles it and, at the same time, project its own image onto history. In order to discover its own identity as distinct from that of the oppressor it has to become visible to itself.” (p. 21) And I have added to Lorde and Rowbotham the thought that for a despised minority to become visible to itself in a loving and wholesome way, is, paraphrasing Alice Walker, “a revolutionary act.”
One of the most distinctive contributions of Black lesbians to both feminist politics and the Black lesbian tradition in making the personal political, as the Combahee women insisted, has been to articulate the political significance of this self love, a necessity grounded in the very conditions of furious indictment that lesbian existence so often invokes.
More recently Cheryl Clarke has published a very important series of critical essays in her book, “After Mecca” Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (Rutgers, 2005) in which she offers a blistering critique of the currency of homophobia in the Black Arts movements of the 1960s and 1970s, in which those who were lesbian or gay were excluded from the circle of blackness, and often in the harshest possible way.
Clarke writes, “Another tactic . . . was to divide the audience by articulating what blackness is not, conversely identifying who can be a member. Clearly, homosexuals, especially male homosexuals, had only counterrevolutionary currency and had to be eradicated in order to masculinize the “race.” However, Clarke observes, this attack had a paradoxical affect in that it “razed the canonical fortress and cleared the way for a multicultural generation of ‘guerillas’ particularly feminists, gays, and lesbians in the 1980s.” (pp. 58, 59)
One thinks about the absurdity of a homophobic canon that would have excluded Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry, and some did actually and explicitly renounce James Baldwin. (p. 50). As Clarke goes onto show, it was not simply a homophobic agenda that drove these attacks, but an anti-feminist one as well, especially when Black men were called to account for misogyny.
In this context the announced, defiant lesbian, feminist, identities of Lorde, Cheryl Clarke, and Pat Parker among many others, take on a particular poignancy of courage.
By the early 1980s Nikki Giovanni was softening her previous renunciation of gayness as Clarke illustrates, (p. 123) while “political poet, June Jordan, in [her poem] ‘Metarhetoric,’ discards such weighty political subjects as ‘Homophobia/racism/self-definition/revolutionary struggle’ for a ‘public discussion’ of ‘our love.’ (p. 123)
By the mid-1970s Ntozake Shange had created her stunning choreopoem, "for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf ". Shange’s work, Clarke writes, “dramatizes/performs community and insists to its audience upon a solidarity around the particularity of rape as a hallmark of women’s oppression.” (p. 106). Shange’s work called Black men to account for their misogyny while ending with a powerful invocation of love with, Clarke writes, “the warrior shout of black feminism: ‘I found god in myself / & i loved her/ i loved her fiercely.' (p. 119) I remember the first time I saw for colored girls . . .performed. I was emotionally drained and psychically uplifted and I could hardly stand up at the end of the performance. In its feminist soul it spoke to all women both insisting upon the specificity of racism while simultaneously transcending racial experiences with the clarity and courage of its breaking of every woman’s silences."
The publication of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple in 1982 also invoked these transcendent qualities. Walker placed her heroine Celie in the most extreme of oppressions precisely combining everything in those interlocking systems of domination: southern racism and poverty, sexism, and child sexual abuse. The instrument for Celie’s healing is an explicitly lesbian love. The lover is Shug Avery, that sassy, brazen, sexually outrageous, dancing, clucked about, and cast-out woman. This is a brilliant casting, and so layered in its meanings, steeped in the history of African American women’s sexuality, from the aspersions cast by a white racist system, to the ‘wild women’ of the blues. It needs also to be noted that at the end of the book there is a kind of reconciliation with the abuser, Mr. X, which was, I think unfortunately, omitted from the film version.
By the 1980s, then, there was a proliferation of Black lesbian feminist writings, art, poetry, and theoretical work providing for a continuing and incisive intervention in both Black radical and feminist politics. I have not begun to do justice to the outpouring from writers like Jewell Gomez, Michelle Cliff, Gloria Akasha Hull, Becky Birtha, Rosa Guy, Donna Allegra, Alexis De Veaux, Evelyn C. White, to mention only some of those who gave life to this movement. I can remember the time I read Rosa Guy’s 1976 novel Ruby, the first young adult fiction to ever feature a lesbian love affair and how my heart leapt for joy.
[This Bridge Called My Back]
Within this cascade of lesbian writings the publication of This Bridge Called My Back, Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, was decisive in generating a new sense of direction and coalition among radical, feminist, lesbian women of color.
Preeminent novelist and filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara wrote the Foreword: “Quite frankly,” she wrote, "This Bridge needs no Foreword. It is the Afterword that’ll count. The coalitions of women determined to be a danger to our enemies, as June Jordan would put it. The will to be dangerous . . . . And the contracts we creative combatants will make to mutually care and cure each other into wholesomeness. And blue-rpints we will draw up of the new order we will make manifest. And the personal unction we will discover in the mirror, in the dreams, or on the path across This Bridge. The work: To make revolution irresistible.” (p.xlii, 2001 edition).
In an essay “Remembering This Bridge Called My Back” the Afro-Caribbean feminist scholar Jacqui Alexander, tells us that by the mid-1980s twenty thousand people had read [the book] and shared it with at least another twenty thousand of their friends, I had only begun the journey, and then only in text. For me,” Alexander writes,” Bridge was both anchor and promise in that I began to frame a lesbian feminist woman of color consciousness and, at the same time, move my living in a way that would provide the moorings for that consciousness.” The book gave her “permission to write, to speak in tongues.” ( Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred, Duke, 2005, pp. 259-60)
Of great significance in This Bridge was that through a lesbian feminist initiative writings by radical women of color from different races were brought together in one place, with Chicana, Latina, African American, Native American and Asian American women represented. The book exemplified a vision of coalition in which the experiences, priorities and theorizing of women of color were the centerpiece of reflection and articulation. It was this practice of coalition that produced a new level of anti-colonial and anti-racist organizing and understanding. In doing this, Alexander theorized, “We would need to learn to make peace with contradiction and paradox, to see its operation in the uneven structures of our own lives, to learn to sense, taste, and understand paradox as the motor of things which is what Marxian philosophy and the metaphysics of spiritual thought systems have in common: dialectics of struggle. Paradoxes of the Divine.” (p. 266).
At the heart of This Bridge is a process for healing the wounds of multiple internalized oppressions and opening the heart to the generosity of sharing that the book exemplified. It was putting into practice apprehending the meaning of the interlocking systems of domination in the Combahee statement and deepening Lorde’s repeated insight that difference could be an incitement to unity rather than an inexorable oppositional divide in which one form of oppression had to trump another : “It is not our differences which separate women,” Lorde wrote in her essay on “Age, Race, Class, and Sex,” “but our reluctance to recognize those differences and to deal effectively with the distortions which have resulted from the ignoring and misnaming of those differences.” (Sister/Outsider, p. 122.)
The publication of This Bridge was a kind of lesbian feminist women of color miracle that revolutionized the ways in which we saw connections between class and colonialism, homophobia and racism, misogyny and violence, all together in new, varied, and liberating ways. I see the excitement of my students now more than twenty years later as they discover This Bridge and embrace it with their own generation’s insights and struggles. This is what Jacqui Alexander called “an archeology of living memory” (p. 278) that allows us to see where we were, what could not be contained or known in This Bridge at the time, but the process of which allows us to renew and refresh ourselves.
In an essay on “Transnationalism, Sexuality, and the State: Modernity’s Traditions at the Height of Empire,” (Pedagogies of Crossing, pp. 181 ff) Jacqui Alexander provides one of the first theoretical occasions in which I have read an integrated, feminist analysis of the significance of heterosexuality, one may more rightly say here, compulsory heterosexuality in colonial, neocolonial and neo-imperialist formations. In particular, Alexander is interested in showing us the investment of the capitalist-colonial-imperial state in compelling heterosexuality as a way of normalizing itself (one may even say here naturalizing itself). She demonstrates in several diverse case studies the ways in which state-formations not only assume heterosexuality but enforce it as an indispensable condition of citizenship.
Early in her essay there is a horrific moment of Spanish colonization of the Americas in 1513 “in which,” Alexander writes, “the invading army of Balboa massacred over forty Indian ‘cross-dressers’ and fed them to the dogs. . . .” (p. 183). She then takes us on a journey through the Anglo-phone Caribbean with particular attention to Trinidad and Tobago, and the Bahamas in order to show the ways in which a specific class took hold of “the state apparatus [and] mobilized at the moment of organized anticolonial struggle in the 1950s and 1960s.” (p. 182)
It is not my intention here to rehearse or critically analyze the complex arguments that Alexander mounts. I am interested, for the purposes of this paper, to simply observe the constellation of interlocking systems of domination that she deploys, in which heterosexuality is at the nexus of imperial design. This is not at the expense of class analysis or racist strategies, but is a way of helping us to understand the kinds of coalitions that must be developed. Taking us beyond This Bridge of the 1980s these coalitions must be transnational in character and anchored in a unity of analytic coherence in which the queer is neither dismissed as axiomatic or tolerated in a liberal gesture, but theoretically and politically integral to an understanding of the dynamics of oppressive regiments.
In this paper I have only begun to scratch at the surface of the radical contributions made by African Americans of lesbian persuasion and feminist consciousness.
In March 1995 a conference was held in this exact location (The CUNY Graduate Center) in which we are meeting today. That conference was called “Black Nations/Queer Nations?” It was a gathering of queer folk who came from as far away as South Africa and London, from the Caribbean, and Canada and from all over the United States. In thoughtful discussions and critical papers participants made everything a problematic: black, queer, nation, nationalism. As activist/scholars they explored the dimensions class and female and colonial exploitation, of colonial and homophobic violence, of racism in its myriad forms, of spirituality and politics, hatred and healing, self-determination and the limits of nationalism, constructions of masculinity, emasculation, and misogyny, and finally, the redemptive power of love.
“We love in circles,” wrote the poet Gloria (Akasha) Hull. “We love in circles/passing it on . . ./all the strength/the knowledge of honeyed yams and dirty rice/caring – fragile and constant/connections/how to write a story/how to live our story/how to make our lives:/one dazzling orb” (Healing Heart, Poems by Gloria T. Hull. Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1989, p. 51)
