Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture

3 (Not) Loving Her: A Locus of Contradictions

3 (Not) Loving Her A Locus of Contradictions Blackness [is] that reclaiming of culture, that will to revolution ; embracing the remarkable and violated past, the very tenuous present, and the unpromised future as an African in diaspora, an ex-slave, lesbian, poet. —Cheryl Clarke So, Afrekete is . . . and Afrekete ain’t. —Catherine McKinley, Introduction, Afrekete T he introduction to Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing (1995) highlights the importance of race in the lives of black lesbians. The editors, Catherine E. McKinley and L. Joyce DeLaney, define Afrekete as “a perfect creation of the Black lesbian feminist imagination.”1 The term alludes to a character in Audre Lorde’s autobiographical novel, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982). In Zami, Afrekete, a young black lesbian from the South who is new to the NewYork social scene, helps Lorde heal from the breakup with her white partner. Afrekete is important in Zami as a narrative device used by Lorde to claim a specifically black lesbian identity. The character Afrekete demonstrates that inherent and native lesbianism is also the domain of black women, hence rejecting the homophobic logic which renders same-sex desire “white” (a matter I discuss at great length in chapter 1). At stake in Afrekete’s title is a similar claiming of the black lesbian space. Underlying “Afrekete” in her multiple manifestations (in Lorde’s novel as character, in the anthology as title) is the notion of black-on-black lesbian love and a need to naturalize black lesbian identity. 1DUNNING_pages.indd 61 3/13/09 11:03:43 AM 62 Queer in Black and White The particular rhetorical strategy used by the editors of Afrekete, evidenced by the second epigraph above, references Marlon Riggs’s film Black Is/Black Ain’t (1994), whose title, of course, is itself a quote from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). It is no coincidence that Riggs uses Ellison’s language to rethink blackness as a category since during the 1960s Ellison came under attack by black nationalists in much the same way writers like Baldwin were maligned for representing same-sex desire. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out in his essay “The Black Man’s Burden,” “James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison were victims of the Black Arts movement of the 1960’s, the former for his sexuality, the latter for his insistence upon individualism.”2 It seems apt, then, that Riggs would invoke Ellisonian individualism to rebut the idea of a universalizing, essential blackness. Riggs’s film complicates notions of black identity along class, color, and sexual lines. It rejects an essential blackness, offering the metaphor of gumbo—a diverse pot of deliciousness—to map the diversity of blackness. In Invisible Man, the line “black is and black ain’t” is spoken by a preacher in a marijuana-induced dream sequence experienced by the protagonist. The phrase accurately performs the theoretical position of blackness. As Jennifer DeVere Brody astutely notes in her essay “The Blackness of Blackness . . . Reading the Typography of Invisible Man”: The embodied experience is played out against a series of always already inscribed notions of what blackness “is” and “ain’t” and of our expectations of its overdetermined value. That blackness is invisible—is tied to the ocular—is the premise that Ellison’s famous novel at once seeks to acknowledge and undo through its complicated rendering of scenes that stage and restage formative moments of blackness in American culture.3 Therefore, we might always understand allusions to Invisible Man’s “is/ain’t” construction as signaling a “formative moment” in relation to identity. The rhetorical work done by “black is” plays on the idea of the “fact” of blackness, while “black ain’t” indicates the constructed nature of race and the mutability of any designation related to it.4 It speaks to the paradox of race confronted in Ellison’s novel—that blackness is so hypervisual (it is all anyone sees who looks at the protagonist) that it renders one invisible (they cannot see him, he is invisible as an 1DUNNING_pages.indd 62 3/13/09 11:03:44 AM (Not) Loving Her 63 individual). The second half of the phrase does not undo the first by emptying blackness of all indicative power. Instead, the phrase functions to reify blackness as heterogeneous and diverse. So when the editors of Afrekete deploy the phrase, they perform a double racial claiming : first, by referencing...