Fire and Ink: Toward a Quest for Language, History, and a Moral Imagination

I might stand here before you tonight at this historic conference and invoke, by way of paraphrase, the well-wrought words of our departed sister/mother Audre Lorde: that, like some of you, I am a black gay writer doing my very best to do my work, come to tell you that I know many of you are doing yours—that work, its urgency and necessity, that has at last brought us here, in each other's company, together. I could tell you how, over these long yet short years since Audre's passing—ten years this year—I have longed, viscerally, for the sheer force of her powerful voice speaking out loud, once more, among us; my longing the yearning one feels for a mother whom one can scarcely believe is physically gone, a sacred chord inexplicably absent. Longing for that voice that, each day, without fail, fearlessly impelled so many of us toward all the struggles and demands awaiting us, writing and the critical task of bearing conscientious witness among them. That voice, now slightly more distant yet echoing. Echoing without end, and within. I could tell you how I still long for Audre to admonish me again that my silence will never protect me, as, in this cyclops that we call "America," I also dream of finally placing my ring on Essex Hemphill's cock, where it belongs (Hemphill 184). Let Assotto Saint again regale me with his Spells of a Voodoo Doll, as June Jordan electrifies me into unflinching memory with her "Poem About My Rights." Let Marlon Riggs untie my tongue once more and jolt me toward new, discovering language and feeling with his poetry, as Pat Parker demands to know where I will be when they come (Parker 74), as they have come before and, be assured, will again: come with their jingoism and nationalist flags, come with their freshly laundered sheets and smoldering crosses; come with their anti-affirmative action shouts, their forty-one (or fifty, or one hundred) bullets, and their assaults against people perceived to be from "the Middle East"—wherever that is—and against people who closely resemble all of us; who are and always have been, at the day's end and the long night's beginning, us. All of us, in continual quest of language that honors, testifies to, inscribes experiences dishonored and distorted, when they are mentioned at all, by official histories; experiences subverted and perverted by media circuses whose pundits, claiming knowledge and ownership of "the truth," tenaciously dissemble as actual thinkers. I could share all these thoughts with you and more, but I already know, having watched closely your faces over these past days and tonight, that you have long pondered them; that, toward the shaping of our narratives, the growing body of which provides new meaning and amplitude to the term "modern art," we have all long considered them. It is that common knowledge, of course, that affords us the grand privilege of easy comfort in each other's company here. For if, as African-descended people and artists, we've achieved anything—and we have, make no mistake, scaled heights beyond reckoning in the 137 years since 1865—we have certainly, as this conference attests, achieved a superlative beginning toward the dream of a common language, to borrow Adrienne Rich's encapsulating title.

It is entirely appropriate that this conference uses in its title the words "fire" and "ink." For in casting even only a glance back at our history—a history which, countenanced or not, accepted within ourselves or not, deeply informs the languages we seek to construct in the narrative architectures we assay today—we remember how, throughout every epoch of that history, both fire and ink were used against us, often with horrifying consequences, but also on our behalf. Fire reduced untold numbers of us to ashes as we dangled from sturdy trees...