Difficult Diasporas. Samantha Pinto

the idea of queer exchanges of diaspora experience by foregrounding a reordering of time. She identifies Bessie Smith as a queer icon not just in her profile but also in her poetry series on Smith in Other Lovers: “a woman’s memory paced centuries, / down and down, a blue song in the beat of her heart” (“Even the Trees” [1993], 9). The circulation not just of musical objects but also of songs and myths of performances, interactions, and exchanges becomes historical and deeply personal regarding racial difference. The poem concludes, “Everything that’s happened once could happen again” (9). The queer time which Kay maps is repetitive and returning, “pacing” time as well as constantly questioning the way that reception happens and is forgotten and is picked up again, precisely because of the research and back work that Kay has to do to remap Smith’s networks of desire.

      What draws Kay’s text to the blues is their ability to imaginatively travel while also tracing alternate genealogies for diaspora, linking the reader and listener to the documented history of slavery and colonialism as well as the silences and desires created and sustained culturally through repeated aesthetic performances. Kay imagines black diaspora’s aesthetic relationship to time through Smith’s performative style:

      She knows the timing. She’s got the timing just right. Doesn’t need to articulate it or even to think about it. It’s all in the length of her pause. It’s the way she hangs on to those notes when they are gone. . . . She is full of longing, full of trouble, restless, wandering up and down the long arms of the clock. When she sings on stage, part of her is travelling, reaching back into every hurt that’s ever happened. (1997, 43)

      Like the jar of Harlem night air, Smith’s voice and her subjectivity (“She is full”), as signs, are “full of” the stuff of the blues—equal parts “longing” and “trouble,” desire and conflict. Smith is now located not just on the space of the “stage” but inside the “clock,” pacing time itself. Aesthetic practice and product, for Kay, is what “travels,” not just across space but through time, speaking to a range of desires never imagined by more traditional definitions of black diaspora identity.

      Returning to the lyric which opens this chapter, Kay wonders in print at the literal meaning of the abstract “world” and “jug” metaphor, eventually settling on the unsettled aesthetic meaning of the blues, perpetually “open to interpretation” for Kay (1997, 49). But the complicated legacy of the blues rides on more than just a temporal and textual openness. Their timing is instead participatory and contingent on that participation: “They let you enter with your imagination and participate in the conflict” (119). More than just time traveling to the past and back, Kay imagines diasporic reception as the hang, the pause, the repetition of lyrics in a single song, again and again—the repeat of the same route but also of the form of the cultural artifact that can be passed and repeated at will, like Smith’s record in Kay’s childhood home.

      The politics of Bessie Smith, as both a sign and practitioner of diaspora studies in Kay’s formulation, are as much past as future oriented. Locke’s own formulation of Harlem as “prophetic” suggests that the future is never far from the surface of many of our formulations of race, gender, and diaspora politics, building “temples for tomorrow,” establishing ritual and repetition for a time that has yet to come.²⁷ “Futurity” is a principal construction of diaspora and its imaginative possibilities in the critical work of the feminist aesthetics outlined earlier. In addition to the persistent and thoughtful examination of the past, Kay’s text consistently imagines a world of meaning beyond historical and national time and even beyond death. It is in this time, finally, that the significance of the jar as a different kind of signifier for diaspora circulation comes into its own, specific power. As you will recall, Kay evokes the jar as one in a long list of significant artifacts that she imagines populating that lost “trunk” of Bessie Smith’s personal and professional effects. As one possibility among many, including documentary and material evidence such as photographs, diaries, and even fashion, the jar stands out as a strictly romantic gesture; its very impossibility as a proper vessel of preservation is in fact what characterizes it as noteworthy. In its failure to actually contain “Harlem” as a historical moment, the “jar of Harlem night air” still seeks to give shape to the imaginary legacy of Harlem’s night work. For Bessie Smith, the “world” is no doubt an enormous, impersonal reference. The jar, though, occupies the space of the everyday. It stands as delicate and, compared to the weight of “the jug,” suggests an intimacy between the critical world and the unpredictable resonances of cultural production that history alone cannot account for in total. Both typical and prophetic, ordinary and exceptional, the jar allows experience at the margins of the black diaspora to be transported across surprising times and spaces. The “stopper”—here the lid—keys us into uneven practices of use, the aesthetic and intellectual choices we make (and that have been made for us) of when and how much to dispense the imaginary properties of gender and sexual “difference” when confronting the black diaspora.

      This critical timing is more than just representative, more than letting women’s, working-class, and queer voices into our construction of black transnationalism from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It fundamentally alters our conception of intellectual practice and genealogy through its difference, its chronology. Kay, with her aneċal relationship to world history and through her private circulation and reception of black cultures, offers a differential time scale against the epic historicity of public discourse. Containing not just surprising geographic movement but a disturbed chronology of black reception, Kay’s profile suggests a repetitive, looped version of diaspora in the form of “wax”—in the traveling objects, images, and sounds of Bessie Smith that become unaccounted for in archives. These gendered traces are more than exceptional, as they permeate the interior of cultural life more than perhaps any other intellectual form. There they threaten to linger in the space of the private, on a turntable or moved from house to house. This is a difficult diaspora, one that asks us to rethink our scale of significance and our lingering attachments to origin and traceability. But the tradeoff does not have to lose specificity as much as it critically asks us for more of it. To read Jackie Kay’s Bessie Smith as a diasporic intellectual profile, a document that characterizes queer and feminist politics at its center rather than its margin, is to recognize that diaspora is more radical, and more tenacious, than we ever thought it could be.

      The timing of Kay and Smith’s jar contains the possibility to alter the past and future locations of diaspora studies’ known world. In the next chapter, I examine what happens when two poets consider the “known” world of black women, and black women’s bodies, as objects of study in the contemporary diaspora—riffing on C. L. R. James and following Jackie Kay’s work, they try to find a future in the past. What else can be said of the narratives of overexposure and exploitation of these bodies of history? Should they only be considered casualties of cosmopolitanism based on their tragic trajectories, or can the spare but exacting genre of the contemporary lyric give their circulations new meaning, as Jackie Kay repurposes Bessie Smith?

      2. It’s Lonely at the Bottom: Elizabeth Alexander, Deborah Richards, and the Cosmopolitan Poetics of the Black Body

      She never went into battle armed like the rest, but received the bullets of the enemy that were aimed at her, and returned them with fatal effect, in a manner of which decency forbids a nearer description.

      —Herbert Thomas, Untrodden Jamaica (1890)

      I longed for lovers or children or

      invented dreams to fill the hollow

      sleepless nights

      (the pumpkin seeds that overnight bore

      fruit to feed us was one, the bullets

      that I caught between mi legs and threw

      back at the enemy was another)

      —Honor Ford-Smith, “A Message from Ni” (1996)

      Jamaica’s mythic folkhero Nanny of the Maroons—famed for a story of catching colonial bullets in her bottom and, as described in the first epigraph, returning that fire—stands as a contemporary postcolonial and national hero through this fabulist, if indecent, narrative. The fantastic nature of her story