Difficult Diasporas. Samantha Pinto

into the fold “adds” women to the genealogy of the black political by shifting the criteria of what constitutes the political as an intellectual category and through reckoning with the power and complexity of iconographic identification through differential history and geography. Black music coming to Kay cannot follow a public or racially communal pattern of receiving; there are no dancehalls or radio stations to transmit or render coherent Kay’s queer desires in listening to Smith. Kay’s claiming Smith as “hero” maintains an alignment between her and someone like Nelson Mandela, breaking down the opposition between public and private, day and night work, and between identifications with race and those with gender and sexuality.

      Aligning Smith as a “hero”—national or Pan-African—also displaces an even split between public and private spheres of influence. Rather than being publicly and collectively experienced, the blues and recognizably “black” culture privately circulate to Kay through her white home:

      My best friend, Gillian Innes, loved Bessie Smith. We spent many hours in Gillian’s bedroom, imitating Bessie Smith and Pearl Bailey. Various objects served as microphones from hairbrushes to wooden spoons. At the age of twelve singing . . . was a way of expressing our wild emotions for each other. . . . I could barely breathe. The air in her box bedroom was thick with secrets. The door firmly shut. Our own private performance. (1997, 79)

      Here, the objects of daily life (a hairbrush, wooden spoons) need to be imaginatively transformed in order to express “wild emotions” or to connect body and desire to everyday life. Such is the importance of the Smith record as everyday object in Kay’s narrative, repeatable and accessible even as it opens up the possibilities of nonlocal discourses of race and sexuality.¹⁴ In Kay’s configuration, the private is neither metaphor for nor escape from the public and political but something that is constitutive of the public and the political itself. For Kay, these surprising correspondences, rather than so expansive as to empty out the specificity of “diaspora,” play out in an incredibly contained space that performs the difficulty of constraining black identity through identification with urban centers of (im)migration. Mimicry, here, also becomes a way of accessing and narrating a desire outside of recognizable or popularly circulated black culture.¹⁵ But Kay reimagines outsiderness as literally and conceptually inside, again making gender and sexuality the constitutive core of the Black Atlantic.

      Returning here to Kay’s opening poem “The Red Graveyard,” I argue that Bessie Smith subverts privileged diasporic routes through a private genealogy of being “passed down” rather than the public reception of black cultural production, with Kay asking rhetorically of her white parents, “Did they play anyone else ever?” (1997, 7). Neither the pubic nor the private can be assumed to be homogeneous racial spaces for Kay’s diaspora. It is this private reception, a reception that happens via a familial “passing down,” that Kay identifies as racially—and sexually—meaningful. Her project attempts a queer genealogy beginning with Ma Rainey, who “was also a lesbian” (36), according to the bold-voiced narrator, as well as imagines a network of black queer women—including Rainey, Smith, Ethel Waters, and a host of chorus girls and dancers at the center of twenties and thirties black diaspora cultural production.¹⁶ This queer family tree for black culture, and the Harlem Renaissance period in particular, becomes difficult to fit squarely into legible racial and political discourse. Reconstructed through the text as a site of pleasurable exchange, Bessie Smith reorders the genealogy of black culture and black reception and redesigns a “passing down” that could include the trauma of black diasporic history as well as the silenced desires of black feminist/queer culture and public discourse. Kay’s choice to maintain the ideological and aesthetic quandaries of black diaspora identification in their messy interconnectedness reframes our own intellectual practices, as well as models of social, aesthetic, and intellectual engagement drawn from the practice of classic blueswomen singers such as Smith.

      Accessing “home” as a site of disruptions within continuity, the foreign within the familiar, Kay’s work represents an impulse to bring discussions of the exterior “world” and the interiority of black subject formation together through black cultural and aesthetic productions.¹⁷ With only partial access to documented history, Kay’s text also imagines a certain portability, like the “jar of Harlem night air,” to imaginative, interior space, the kind of transnational “flow” usually accorded only to cultural products and political ideas themselves.¹⁸ In other words, I read Kay not as attempting to find the biographical and historical “truth” behind or beyond the icon Smith but as finding in the icon itself a depth of meanings and identifications—an interior but still nonessentialist “life” of queer, black intellectual purpose. Kay does not just mark her desire to “be” Bessie but to watch her, to want her, to claim her into her “home”:

      I remember taking the album off him [Kay’s father] and pouring over it, examining it for every detail. Her image on the cover captivated me. She looked so familiar. She looked like somebody I already knew in my heart of hearts. I stared at the image of her, trying to recall who it was she reminded me of . . . . I put her down and I picked her up. I stroked her proud, defiant cheeks. I ran my fingers across her angry eyebrows. I soothed her. Sometimes I felt shy staring at her, as if she was somehow able to see me looking. . . . I would never forget her. (1997, 9–10)

      The romantic, earnest identification with Smith and her blackness is persistently undergirded by the frame of uneasy reception—complications of desire, of race, of historical time, of capital product, and of national allegiance for a young girl who is the only black person in her entire town. Containing both a feeling of knowing “familiar[ity]” and of voyeuristic “captivat[ion],” Kay’s text reads Smith as an icon and as a body seriously—intimately linking “seeing” her as a desirous encounter with another vision of a black woman in Kay’s resolutely white surroundings, as well as with the sexually “captivating” draw of Bessie’s photographic performance on the album cover. Such an incorporation of black music as cultural product into a private discourse of racial and sexual identification challenges any privileging of immediate and live performances. Considering the inaccessibility of live performance for marginal subjects to experience black music, Bessie Smith recasts the role of cultural artifacts as meaningful in recovering a lost time of black history—a recovery project at the heart of the explosion of diaspora studies. While there is danger in the fetishization of blackness as a mere series of images without depth, Kay’s text explores how identification with an image can also be valuable in reframing historical “blackness” itself as a legible field.

      Of course, the imagined identification between Kay and Smith is also nostalgic—both for Kay’s childhood attachment to Smith and for the romance of blues ideology itself. Bessie is “proud,” “defiant,” and “angry” to Kay’s “shy” subject. The album acts as a type of souvenir of blackness for the text, standing in for the “recognizable” experience of blackness that Kay as an isolated black subject cannot access or approximate. As such, it represents the “extraordinary” experience of that margin as well as the ordinariness or ubiquity of black culture itself, circulated as widely as nineteen-sixties Scotland (Stewart 1984, 135). The experience of the album as an object of desire is almost comic in its excess in Bessie Smith, where Kay’s speaker can “put her down” and “pick her up” in the name of race memory—to be “captivated,” “reminded,” “already kn[own],” and “never forg[otten].” If, as Susan Stewart has suggested, the souvenir is a product embodying both “distance and intimacy” (1984, 137), the album as cultural experience and cultural artifact embodies these contradictions of diaspora as a concept that imagines close connection across unfathomable large-scale terrain. But instead of placing “lived” experience with “the nostalgic myth of contact and presence [through] the memory of the object,” there is only the experience of a myth, and the object/souvenir, to begin with (ibid., 133). Bessie Smith engages in the cultural souvenirs of the public domain—publicity photographs, album covers, birth certificates, headstones, as well as icons such as Nelson Mandela—precisely to call attention to a lack of “live” connection to blackness, as well as to call or conjure up some version of that connection. Rather than a referent to a single experience, the album as diasporic souvenir connotes complex cultural memory, not just taking on the “two sides” of Bessie