Building the Worlds of Our Dreams: Black Girlhood and Quare Narratives in African American Literature

On the one hand, my grandmother uses “quare” to denote something or someone who is odd, irregular, or slightly off-kilter— definitions in keeping with traditional understandings and uses of “queer.” On the other hand, she also deploys “quare” to connote something excessive—something that might philosophically translate into an excess of discursive and epistemological meanings grounded in African American cultural rituals and lived experience.

—E. Patrick Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother”

Black girlhood is inherently quare. It is, as E. Patrick Johnson argues, “something excessive” because it extends beyond the foundations of Black cultural experiences. It is to physically inhabit one experience while thinking of being in another, as many of the characters I discuss in this essay do. It is to represent multiple identities and ways of existence. As Jacqueline Woodson makes clear in Brown Girl Dreaming, dreams are also ways that Black girls move away from visions of Black girlhood that have been created for them and toward transformative justice, through dreams of freedom and imagining different pathways.

What is definitely “queer” in white patriarchal culture and perhaps “off-kilter” (to return to Johnson) even in Black culture is only a part of the representation of Black girl quareness. Quare encompasses the whole being (or being whole) while the individual self (or who society imagines or demands that Black girls be) remains just a part. Quare narratives are narratives beyond the ordinary. They are narratives that can be found in stories told to children but that resist the boundaries of “simple” childhood. They are stories that move us from southern to northern spaces and even to outer space. They are stories that transcend history and move through generations.

Black girls dream of different ways of being, of existing, and these dreams are represented in a literary canon of Black women writers. There are Isie Watts and Janie Crawford of Zora Neale Hurston’s imagination, who want to travel the world and escape bounds of girlhood and domesticity. There is Toni Morrison’s Nel Wright, who sees a future beyond her mother’s domination, and Pecola Breedlove, whose eyes finally become blue enough (if only in her own mind) to escape what she has seen. There is Sapphire’s Claireece “Precious” Jones, who dreams herself more than an illiterate teenage mother and incest victim. Other little girls are made of “sugar and spice and everything nice.” Black girls, however, can contain dark secrets. They are expected to grow into roles of parent and care-giver beyond their childhood too fast. There is no surprise when they do. They are lost and unwanted, trapped in systems of social welfare and foster care. But they are also representatives of Afro-futuristic visions of Black girlhood, of the “quare” routes and pathways of existence.

These pathways are invoked by Ntozake Shange imploring, “somebody, anybody, [to] sing a black girl’s song,” to “bring her out / to know herself / to know you . . . she’s been dead so long / closed in silence so long / she doesn’t know the sound / of her own voice / her infinite beauty” (4). They are shaped in Nikki Giovanni’s poetic representations in Spin a Soft Black Song of shared “desire to plant a masthead for doves . . . To spin a soft Black song . . . To waltz with the children . . . To the mountains of our dreams” (vi). In these stories, poems, and narrative spaces, imagined dreams of black girlhood are realized.

Giovanni wrote for “yvonne,” who “stood there unsmiling / with col-lard greens / and sensible shoes / on her way to becoming a good Black woman,” but she also wrote “barbara poems,” that “are round / and soft / with explosives inside.” Put together, these poems documented traditional pathways to grow into a “good Black woman,” but also suggested that typical senses and sensibilities are not the only paths to finding one’s way in the world. Shange’s desire for a “black girl’s song” becomes an imperative that Giovanni takes up as she sings several...