Difficult Diasporas. Samantha Pinto
intellectual significance of the space of early Harlem nightclubs, even at the time, many African American intellectuals “saw the Negro Vogue, with its tendency toward black sensuousness, exhibitionism, primitivism, and sensationalism, as a distraction from, or worse, an impediment to their vision of the renaissance” (2009, 3). Though contemporary critics may not explicitly mimic this middle-class value system of respectability, the continuing intellectual gap points not just to the difficulties of translating gender, class, and genre into the textual analysis that critics work from but also to our static conception of “conscious” political thought and black intellectualism as a whole.
While, as aesthetic practices, cultural performances (and performers such as Smith) have been represented on the field of diaspora, they are often only references, subjects or songs that do the direct work of traveling but not the more substantial critical work of defining diaspora (as opposed to, as well, novel and narrative formations of diaspora of the time such as in Claude McKay’s work). In theorizing the blues, it is key to consider how we think of intellectual traveling as distinct from generic and performative traveling (touring) as “work.” Like the attempt to render Harlem as the portable essence suggested by Kay’s jar, the romanticization of blues traveling becomes reified, located in Harlem but exportable in conceptual work. Kay strategically uses this affective register of “the embodied practices of black performance and spectatorship” to imagine not an essence but a series of excessive connections that constitute diaspora through the specter of incommensurable difference (Vogel 2009, 6).
Written in 1997 as part of what was called the “Q series” of queer biographies of prominent cultural figures, Kay’s profile engages those romantic and celebratory modes mentioned earlier in its construction of Smith as an icon.7 But Kay’s text does not start in Harlem, nor anywhere near a “center” of black culture. Formally, it begins with a poem from Kay’s sequence on Smith in 1993’s Other Lovers, “The Red Graveyard.” The poem begins and ends with a four-line, standard blues refrain on Bessie Smith’s haunting transatlantic cultural presence. But this frame, like Harlem, contains a surprisingly memoirish center. The substance of the five contained stanzas is the narrator’s personal experience of the blues, of listening to Bessie Smith. At its center lies a stanza ruminating not on Smith’s voice but on Kay’s mother’s Scottish lilt. The description is comprehensive, another catalogue like Locke’s, and the longest stanza of the poem:
My mother’s voice. What was it like?
A flat stone for skitting. An old rock.
Long long grass. Asphalt. Wind. Hail.
Cotton. Linen. Salt. Treacle.
I think it was a peach.
I heard it down to the ribbed stone. (1997, 7)
Is this the voice of the blues? we are forced to ask. The description introduces a recognition of radical difference contained within familiar structure. The sharp, consonant texture of each distinct word for the mother’s voice pushes against the lolling resonance of the speaker’s own action in engaging in Bessie Smith’s black image: “I pick up the record cover. And now. This is slow motion. / My hand swoops, glides, swoops again” (8). Before we learn from the narrative that Kay is the queer, black, adopted daughter of white, Scottish parents in nineteen-sixties Scotland, before we necessarily imbue this scene with biographical authority, Kay introduces us to the difficulties of reading diaspora, not the least of which are the operations of memory, desire, culture, familiarity, and genealogy and their relationship(s) to the construction, recognition, and maintenance of racial identity.8
Structurally, the book also troubles easy organization. The book’s cover promises biography, yet we are confronted by autobiography, as well as fictional prose, editorial commentary, and nonlinear organization. And Kay’s formal and conceptual gestures toward an alternate model of black transnationalism extend to the realm of reception, as well. Bessie Smith begins not with a story of black tradition, a link through the black community to the individual or a cultural heritage indigenous to nation or region. Instead, Kay begins her profile of black American blues performer Bessie Smith with her own anomalous location (1997, 9). Her genealogy itself disrupts any stable conception of a black public sphere; here, there is no urban black community from which to draw culture. Instead, the “house of the blues” turns out to be both nationally and racially “outside” such a conception (9). Not “the most likely place to be introduced to the blues,” Kay’s location forces her to foreground her difference in a very specific, localized world, where contact with black culture is always already mediated by a white context—the home of her white, Scottish parents (9). As an un-“likely place” for the exchange of black music, Kay’s textual home recognizes racially and geographically surprising encounters as meaningful and productive to black subjectivity, even and especially for subjects found at the margins of the Black Atlantic.
Taking up the position of blues figures as icons and/or heroes through the medium of transnationalism links back to the romantic narrative of blues traveling, one that matches the “romance” of corresponding diasporas without a call to authenticity.9 What Kay does differently is to spin that seduction outward, toward surprising sites of identification: “I did not think that Bessie Smith only belonged to African Americans or that Nelson Mandela belonged to South Africans. I could not think like that because I knew then of no black Scottish heroes that I could claim for my own. I reached out and claimed Bessie” (1997, 15). Bessie Smith does a kind of iconic diaspora traveling which Kay does not perform physically, instead constructing a mobile identification that is self-consciously nonessentialist even in its romantic call to agency.10 This call, too, imagines links beyond the literal travel of bodies and bodies of text, linking political, cultural, and intellectual capital to an imaginative diaspora constructed through idiosyncratic experiences of race, nationality, sexuality, and gender. Kay’s bringing of Bessie Smith into a national as well as racial and queer “family”11 instead imagines routes of identification in scattered histories, as well as specifically queered roots where bloodlines and national boundaries, though clearly delineated and incredibly present, cannot dictate alliances made across such borders (much like the plot of Trumpet).12 Kay’s claiming of Smith as icon, hero, and signifier crosses desire with location, blackness with sexual subjectivity, national belonging with transhistorical imaginative traveling. In other words, Kay instead constructs an imaginative exchange sought out precisely because of the challenges of physical space. The black feminist subject “could not think like that”—within the limits of national-racial borders—because she would erase her own contingent subjectivity.13
That complex subject formation is sometimes lost in the reinstituted split of the “day” and “night” work of intellectual practice and aesthetic culture. Kay reimagines Smith and other cultural performers into the same space as political leaders, public figures unquestionably linked to the politics of blackness, and vice versa; she posits public politics as aesthetic culture by including political figures in the company of artistic icons:
I force myself to imagine her real death. . . . It is a peculiar way of getting even closer to her. It is a strange thing to do. Somehow the death of the famous activates the popular imagination. The deaths of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Billie Holiday, Bob Marley are all epic, grand scale deaths. . . . The life of every true hero is bent on ending in tragedy. Heroes can’t help themselves. (1997, 140)
Kay’s romantic strain pulls her to a conceptual space not unlike Harlem, a space where day and night workers mingle in “the popular imagination,” or what Kay herself calls “fantasy relationships” (Jaggi and Dyer 1999, 55). Rescaling Holiday, Marley, and Smith as icons in the political company of King and Malcolm X also reshapes the scope of how we read black culture as a (celebrity) system. The “epic” and classical frame that Kay places on Smith et al. is in “Shakespearean dimensions,” the space worthy of not just political attention but critical and analytic seriousness, a scale of black cultural production worthy of the most sustained study and significance (ibid., 54).
In a representative sense, black political heroes famous enough to circulate for Kay were men—Mandela, Malcolm X, King. Kay’s effect in upsetting distinctions between imported entertainment icons and political