Episode 5 and 6 of Pose form a mini-arc that focuses on death and home. In episode 5, Blanca’s bio-mother dies and in episode 6, Pray Tell’s lover, Costas, dies. When I saw episode 5, I wondered why Blanca’s mother’s death was the first death featured on the show. I needed episode 6 to see what Pose was saying about attachment and grief, public and private mourning. Episode 5 opens in 1982, with Blanca participating in her first ball. The emcee notes her unflattering appearance–“it looks like Cinderella came to the ball after midnight”—and asks, “Where is your mother? Whose child is this?” Blanca responds, “I don’t have a mother or a father.”  Electra adopts Blanca after the ball. “You’re coming home with mother.” “Wait, you wanna be my mother?” “I am your mother.” Motherhood is marked by choice and… Read More...

KBURD: Short for "K but u rong doe". Used when you know arguing is pointless but you need them to know they're still wrong. —Urban Dictionary You taught me language; and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language! —Caliban, The Tempest Stories of identity are never static, monolithic, or politically innocent. —Lisa Duggan, “The Trials of Alice Mitchell 1. Perhaps we are not discussing the same thing. In brief, Avital Ronell, a “world-renowned female professor of German and Comparative Literature at New York University, was found responsible for sexually harassing a male former graduate student.” We start from here. Avital Ronell  has been identified as a lesbian. I say “has been identified,” as I do not know her. But those who claim to know her identify her as… Read More...

Of the many ways to narrate the emergence of queer studies, I most like Tim Dean’s claim that Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” is the foundational work in the U.S. academy. Rubin trained as an anthropologist. I will return to this. Dean’s claim rethinks the more familiar, popular claim that queer studies emerged (and was nourished) in literature (Eve Sedgwick, Michael Moon, Alan Sinfeld, Jonathan Dollimore, Lee Edelman, Diana Fuss) and philosophy (Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Michel Foucault). I still think we need an account of why such work was possible within those spaces—something about the kinds of speculative experiments possible. Though, I note, that most of those now acclaimed as founding queer studies wrote their works as tenured faculty: these were second and third books. (As a fun exercise, track… Read More...

On Twitter, Mariame Kaba posts a quotation from Elizabeth Povinelli: “Not this” makes a difference even if it does not immediately produce a propositional otherwise. —Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment  Povinelli is responding to the formulation, “if not this, then what?” Especially to that demand: then what? I do not yet know how to think about this demand for replacements, especially when harmful systems and practices are involved. “Not this” does not need a replacement when “this” names harmful and unhumaning practices and institutions. I would like to take Povinelli’s “not this” in a different direction, away from “solutions” and “alternatives” and “replacements” and “remedies,” and toward proliferation and intensification. During a recent panel at Barnard, Ruth Wilson Gilmore said,  What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, in experiments and possibilities. I think she wanted to… Read More...

On 10 June 2018, the 13-member team of Enkare Review, a literary journal, published a statement detailing a pattern of patriarchal abuse of power by a former member of the team, Troy Onyango. This statement comes at a historical moment when abuses of patriarchal power are being detailed. Also at a moment when the system of patriarchy is protecting the men named as abusers. (Yes, I know it’s redundant to write “patriarchal abuse of power,” but I fear we’ve forgotten the feminist critique that terms like “patriarchy” and “patriarchal power” carry.) The statement was published on Brittle Paper and, on that space, something very familiar happened. Here’s the Brittle Paper stance: I paused over that first clause: "The literary space in Africa is one still developing." The development imaginary strikes again. Why frame the events at Enkare through "development"? Is the claim that the… Read More...

Now we think as we fuck this nut might kill us. —Essex Hemphill, "Now We Think" For a range of reasons—taste, aptitude, exposure, politics—my academic work has focused on the period from 1885 to 1940. It is where I feel most at home and, honestly, I prefer working on dead people. A recent invitation from a mentor—I accept very few invitations—spurred me to think of how I would approach the 1980s and early 1990s, from the moment when AIDS emerged in the U.S. to the moment when an effective treatment regimen was identified in 1996, roughly, from 1981 to 1995. I returned to some familiar thinkers and terms: Douglas Crimp, promiscuity in an epidemic; Paula Treichler, AIDS as an epidemic of signification; Leo Bersani, the rectum as a grave; Cindy Patton, sex and germs; Samuel Delany, the tale of plague… Read More...

I wanted to stay in the wake to sound an ordinary note of care.—Christina Sharpe, In the Wake And while “we are constituted through and by continued vulnerability to this overwhelming force, we are not only known to ourselves and to each other by that force.”—Christina Sharpe, In the Wake Care pays attention to how we are known to ourselves and to each other. Care lingers at the ordinary: notices it, names it, creates it, inhabits it, pursues it, practices it. There might be something theoretically uninteresting about care. It is feminized work, so devalued. It is also, frequently, tedious, repetitive, unglamorous work: feeding the vulnerable, cleaning up shit and puke, washing bedpans, changing nappies, cooking, cleaning, medicating. Repeat. And repeat. Erotic vomiting sounds more theoretically interesting than regular, repeated vomiting. Or diarrhea. I am not the first to ask… Read More...

a note: Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself — a Black woman warrior poet doing my work — come to ask you, are you doing yours? —Audre Lorde,  "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action" I have been confused by multiple claims about "doing the work." Those making those claims seem so sure about the work. So sure that I have tended to refrain from asking what the work is. I am asking. What is the work? What is the relation between my work and your work? What is the relation between my work and the work? What is the relation between your work and the work? What is the relation among my work, your work, and the work? I am asking. Read More...

In my practice in Poetry I have tried to produce a grammar in which Black existence might be the thought and not the unthought; might be. —Dionne Brand, “An Ars Poetica From the Blue Clerk” So we are here in the weather, here in the singularity. Here there is disaster and possibility. And while “we are constituted through and by continued vulnerability to this overwhelming force, we are not only known to ourselves and to each other by that force.” —Christina Sharpe, In The Wake: On Blackness and Being Sometimes I take Audre Lorde’s poetry books from my shelf and put them nearby. I move with them from room to room, needing their presence. I rarely open them. I simply need them close to me. Sometimes I imagine that something radiates from them, a sense of a life being lived,… Read More...

i. As always, because Wambui Mwangi teaches me, I start from where I am. A sister with asthma. An inhaler. 6 years separate us. I am spared the worst of her struggles. Was I 11 when my father’s lung collapsed? A doctor, he taught me how to administer a modified form of CPR, so he could breathe. An oxygen tank became part of the furniture. My mother installed a bell—an annoying bird—that he’d press when he couldn’t breathe. When I needed to turn on the oxygen tank. Bell. Tank. Breath. Bell. Tank. Breath. Bell. Tank. Breath. A voice struggling to say oxygen, saying air, because it’s shorter. air air air the breath to say, “I can’t breathe.” ii. air: Air is an object held in common, an object that we come to know through a collective participation within it as… Read More...

Something Like an Introduction: I tend to think with and through keywords, terms that recur in a writer's body of work and words that appear rarely, even once. I am interested in mapping how words accumulate and remain isolated. I have been trying to think with Audre Lorde's work, to identify certain keywords. Difference is one, survival is another. Related to those is distortion. And the erotic. Sustained thinking begins with creating an archive, gathering material with which to think. Writers often hide this gathering, as we are supposed to make public our engagement with texts and objects and situations in a digested form. To the extent that I can, I want to make the act of gathering as public as possible. That might do some work. * Difference As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings… Read More...

What are the words you do not yet have? —Audre Lorde No. Can’t write it out. Not now. —Samuel Delany Richard Bruce Nugent was the most famous . . . of the Harlem Renaissance. He wrote “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” considered the first . . . of the Harlem Renaissance. The story opens, He wanted to do something. . . to write or draw . . . or something . . . but it was so comfortable just to lay there on the bed . . . his shoes off . . . and think . . . think of everything . . . short disconnected thoughts . . . to wonder . . . to remember . . . to think and smoke . . . why wasn’t he worried that he had no money . . . he… Read More...

something like an introduction: This record is incomplete. It is missing deleted emails that shaped these ideas; the bibliography of documents--academic articles, development plans (especially Vision 2030), state policies and laws, newspaper articles, art for development projects, and the many people I subtweeted--that subtend this thinking. Let me supply a few guiding notes. Kenya enters independence alongside and through the development imaginary. I quote myself: On October 3, 1963, Kenya’s then Minister of Justice, Tom Mboya, delivered a speech, “The Future of Kenya.” Anticipating independence, Mboya argued, “We are quite convinced that if independence is going to mean anything, it must bring with it tangible, material improvement for all our people. It must bring with it the removal gradually, and we hope speedily, of poverty and the improvement in the health and educational services throughout the country.” Mboya’s focus on… Read More...

I am writing this—I am starting this writing—while sitting in the International Lounge of the hospital. It’s business comfortable, and it reminds me of the international students’ office in which I spent much of my undergrad—an assortment of flags, accents, body vernaculars, anxieties, hopes. Official translators help patients navigate hospital bureaucracy, trying to translate the most difficult of sentences—it’s terminal, you have months left, prepare yourself, it will take a long time, you will need to be on medication for the rest of your life, your loved one will need care forever—into feeling and understanding. Translation is this impossible necessity. * Translation is at the heart of Safia Elhillo’s Asmarani, a work that moves between how words are written and how words sound, as in the first poem, “Vocabulary”: * * Translation is also the relationship between script and knowledge—I… Read More...

Since I’m remembering this, or making it up, there is only darkness; our bodies speaking. Eat, your pelvis tells me. I eat—savoring your aftertaste: tart but sweet, the inside of a cheek, cured meat, a local delicacy. --“In Defense of Darkness” I come to this erotic image in at least three ways. First, thinking about the tradition of the blazon in poetry (as dismembered flesh and heraldic marking, as Lili Loofbourow reminds me), and the broader trope of men consuming women. Second, as a stubborn, fighting-for-survival, working-through-disidentification queer undergrad (a residual self) who insisted that the absence of obvious gendered designations created a queer opening. Today, having learned from trans activists and thinkers, I would say that even the appearance of standard gendered pronouns creates queer openings. Finally, I’d juxtapose this image alongside Nyachiro Lydia Kasese’s poems to ask how… Read More...

Nyachiro Lydia Kasese’s Paper Dolls is filled with scenes of smoking, which are also scenes of gendering, degendering, and engendering. These scenes are often breezy, I met a boy once in Dodoma who asked me, “Why do you smoke? Are you addicted?” I met another boy at a bus stand who told me, “I like girls who smoke, do you want to go out with me?” (“Ancient”) If you’re familiar with histories of modern women, you’ll recognise this image of the young smoking woman: across multiple geohistories, she incarnates modernity. In the opening lines to the poem, she is policed in the name of manners (“good women don’t smoke”), health (“women who care about their health don’t smoke”), and appetite (“women who know how to control themselves don’t get addictions”). These very same absences mark the modern woman as available… Read More...