Difficult Diasporas. Samantha Pinto

productivity—in particular, the “day work” of “night work,” or the recording of blues records themselves. In the middle of Bessie Smith comes a chapter titled “Wax,” which focuses on the making of blues songs as well as blueswomen as black cultural icons. Jackie Kay lets us know early that “the first blues recording was an accident,” even as she documents the racial-sexual exploitation that accompanied subsequent industry decisions regarding the genre (1997, 63). Like the souvenir that wraps both the intimacy and distance of diaspora, “time,” even more than space, can signify both linearity and interruption.²³ This timing holds the orderly and disorderly as well as the continuity and breaks mapped earlier in thinking about Kay’s unusual relationship to location and specific diaspora cultures.²⁴

      This scale extends to models of constantly moving, “migratory subjects,” which threaten to keep diaspora constantly on the move, the haunt but never the territory of established critical practices.²⁵ Thinking qualitatively about time’s relationship to diaspora suggests a new and refocused, if still capacious, organizing system for diaspora studies. “Time” can serve as a differential category in our analysis of the black diaspora’s cultural flows, with its modes of tracking and structuring rhythms, as well as being able to hold the long-term and the immediate. Time is a measurement, a way of gauging the expense and profit of history and culture. If the imaginary takes on propertied significance for Kay’s positioning of surprising diasporic connections, then time offers us a system, not just a haunt, to speak critically about their significance. As Judith Halberstam has cogently argued, “queer uses of time and space” (2005, 1) are more than just the tracks of discrete and recognizable identities; they are also reorderings of normative genealogies, those of “reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” (6), that produce “counterpublics” hewed to the geographies of unruly and nonnormative desire. Gender, sexual, and formal variety thus meaningfully changes the way we conceive of the timing of the contemporary black diaspora and, in turn, transforms diaspora as an analytical and critical category usually based on normative geography. Kay, though, does not present a world or time in opposition to these orders but in proximity to them—as race also and always disturbs geographic and intimate routes.

      As “Wax” and my focus on timing suggests, music embodies this subtle shift, offering complete yet portable objects that are meant to invoke a range of affective responses. Bessie Smith violates “time and place” just as surely as Kay’s own engagement with the black diaspora does, offering up mobility, with musicality offering a flexible construction of identity for the performer and the audience alike (Frith 1996, 108–9). Speaking of Kay’s “textual journey” with Bessie Smith in a larger article about Trumpet, critic Carla Rodríguez González argues that Kay employs “biographical improvisation” akin to jazz performance, “adopting” Smith to “mark the continuity of a cultural line where conscious identification becomes a powerful instrument to subvert traditional identities” (2007, 89).²⁶ The larger question looms of how we are to chart, preserve, or even create narratives of these new and difficult diasporas. If these forms are circulating outside of Harlem’s scope, can we imagine a looser archive, one not so tightly bound to a live and exact time and space? Kay finds just that in her constant use of an imaginary black cultural past not completely wed to historical or national correspondences. The “jar of Harlem night air” that emblematizes Bessie Smith’s legacy, the container for the floating remains of these tales, can, like music, maintain diasporic connections as material and as itinerant as the traveling done by Harlem artists and intellectuals themselves.

      The text’s focus on place and travel in the blues seems to argue against a direct correspondence, hence why Kay qualifies the identification as an approximation. Even as Trixie Smith’s opening lyric to this book suggests a “real” gendered split, the music as object is always already straying, imaginatively taking Kay to a set of narrative locations that are not immediately or locally “real”:

      The names of the blues songs transported me places, created scenes and visions. . . . Each name was enough to make up a story. That’s what I liked about the blues, they told stories. The opposite of fairytales; these were grimy, real, appalling tragedies. There were people dying in the blues; people coming back to haunt the people who were living in the blues; there were bad men in the blues; there were wild women in the blues. People traveled places, or wished they were someplace else in the blues. Could I be a St. Louis Gal? Or could I be Tillie? Might Chicago be a place I would go when I grew up? (1997, 10)

      Kay immediately links blues to a sort of imagining of a future but also to an imagining of the possibilities of identification with other people (“Could I be Tillie?”), where, again, the blues blur the boundaries of “real” space and bodies. Likewise, the passage also suggests that what is important is not just “real traveling” but also the desire to imagine otherwise and other worlds. What draws the speaker to the blues is the ability to imaginatively travel, and what draws Kay to Bessie as an adult is to imaginatively re-create a queer history of black international practice and identification. In talking about Bessie’s performance, Kay’s “I” says, “When she sings on stage, part of her is travelling, reaching back into every hurt that’s ever happened” (43). Again, Kay has Smith reordering time in her performance—the time of herself and the time of her audience—linking the reader/listener not just to the ineffable pain of slavery and colonialism but to nonchronological queer and feminist desires and losses.

      Throughout Bessie Smith, “timing” is repeatedly named as Smith’s performative gift and is coupled with the narrative’s insistence on the “prophetic” (1997, 48) nature of Smith’s lyrical and biographical “promiscuity” (80); it can also be identified as the province of critical diasporic reception. Kay imaginatively renegotiates the circulation of Black Atlantic culture in the following scene between Bessie and Ruby:

      But when I’m in the corridor, I hear her start up again, softly, this time singing, “St Louis Gal, Look what you done, done,” and I go back in and she’s wearing my dress and she’s dancing, swaying side to side like I do. I go up to her and I hold her hips and she takes me into her dance and I kiss her. It’s the first time I have ever kissed her. I don’t think I have ever had a kiss like it in my life. We lost all time in that kiss. We was dreaming, slow and soft. Her lips full and wet, moving with me, tracing my lips, finding my tongue. It was all so slow, so slow. We could have become something else in that kiss. I forgot the room, and where I was. I closed my eyes. I don’t usually close my eyes, but the one time I ever kissed Ruby Walker, I closed my eyes. It was like kissing myself. (86)

      Here, it is the musical performance rather than the visual that conjures up a sexual encounter (Bessie returns when she hears Ruby sing her song after Bessie pulls her hair). Hooked by the song, Kay’s Bessie recognizes Ruby within a “lost time,” a reordering, in which queer desire between black women becomes out of time, much as Kay’s own forced reimagining of an exchange between the two women has to occur out of “real” or documentable time. This is akin to the future-time of the found trunk, when Smith’s recording of a “lesbian” blues song “will outsell anyone else’s, including kd lang” (58). Queer desire, rendered unrecordable, unwritable, unmemorable, and unremarkable within mainstream narratives of diaspora, travels piecemeal across Kay’s text, intersecting with an insistent and competing narrative desire to see the self as a familiar subject. Here is both the trauma and pleasure of recovery projects, in which exploitation and iconography afford an uneasy mobility for Smith’s marginal, innovative version of the feminist diasporic subject and Kay’s queering of that subject.

      Blues, for Kay’s text, are communicating something perhaps different to the audience other than just a straight read of the lyrics, and that difference, too, is about a future time: “Her blues were like secrets, or shocking bits of news” (Kay, “The Right Season,” in Other Lovers [1993], 11). Here, Kay is arguing for a different mode of circulation in which that secret desire itself gets transmitted through the music to the listener, out of joint with the received meaning. This listening does not so much collapse difference as it expands the possibilities for conceiving legible diaspora experience of gender and sexuality beyond direct lyrical reference. Queer time is conjured as a musical, nonliteral mixing, as Bessie’s song transmits desire across subjects as a pliable and