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Оглавление1. The World and the “Jar”: Jackie Kay and the Feminist Locations of the African Diaspora
A letter full of curses, again in Bessie’s handwriting to the manager of the 91 Club in Atlanta. An original record of “Downhearted Blues.” A reject selection of the songs that were never released. A giant pot of chicken stew still steaming, its lid tilted to the side. A photograph of Ethel Waters; underneath the sophisticated image Bessie has written: “Northern bitch. Long goody. Sweet Mama String Bean. 1922.” . . . A jar of Harlem night air.
—Jackie Kay, Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith’s first hit, 1923’s “Downhearted Blues,” tells a familiar blues story of love and loss using the strange and fantastic metaphor of “the world,” “a jug,” and “the stopper”: “Got the world in a jug, the stopper’s in my hand / Got the world in a jug, the stopper’s in my hand / Going to hold it, baby, till you come under my command.” These objects form a complex relationship to one another: on the surface, the lyrics are another performance of a popular heterosexual romance imperative; of course, as has been well documented, blues songs’ engagement with “love” often exposes decidedly unpopular narratives of power and loss. In “Downhearted Blues,” the world is both trouble and possibility, the jug is limited from inside and outside, and the stopper represents control as well as the inability to act. As an image of cultural and self-containment, the verse haunts with its suggestion of the capacity and agency of black subjectivity, the ordinariness of a jug holding the extraordinary body of the world.
Ralph Ellison uses a similar conceit in his 1964 essay analyzing the legacy of Richard Wright and of mainstream critical reception of black literature, “The World and the Jug”: “But if we are in a jug it is transparent, not opaque, and one is allowed not only to see outside but to read what is going on out there” (1995, 116). For him, the jug of public intellectual and artistic discourse limits how black writing (and black subjects) are held by the outside world to reflections of a particular form of tragic realism. But Ellison is also concerned with how the black imaginary contained inside of this jug is similarly shaped by the devaluing of a variety of black aesthetic practices and influences by “sociology-oriented critics” (108). Ellison’s use of the popular lyric as the metaphor he borrows for his title connects the articulation of romantic desire in a classic blueswoman’s song to the stifling insistence on social realism as the model for reading black expression and discourse. In this chapter, I take Ellison’s titular gesture seriously in order to ask what the metaphorical work of gender, desire, and cultural form might have to offer in reframing the location of Black Atlantic discourse through the reordered spaces and temporalities of Jackie Kay’s work on Bessie Smith.
This chapter engages Bessie Smith, poet and novelist Jackie Kay’s 1997 book-length profile of the blues singer, to begin to address this question, first and foremost by performing a literal gloss of the “world”; I examine how Smith’s and Ellison’s articulation of the paradoxes of power and black subjectivity relate to Kay’s decidedly broad geographical and historical spread—nineteen-sixties Scotland, early twentieth-century American South, nineteen-twenties Harlem, contemporary England. This immense and surprising “world” of the black diaspora interacts with the portability of the “jar”—Kay’s version of Smith and Ellison’s jug—as a reference to the quotidian, yet no less fantastic, spheres of gender and sexual desire that also thread through black aesthetic practice and cultural expression. Like Kay’s critically acclaimed novel Trumpet, Bessie Smith trades in the intersections of popular performance, Black British identity away from the metropole, and queer desire. Kay links the popular circulation of black subjectivity to the sphere of high formal literacy through her experimental form in the biography (made up of aneċal evidence, fictional scenarios, and autobiographical reflection rendered in various typefaces within each chapter). Kay’s revaluation of Bessie Smith’s and her own relationship to “the world” of the black diaspora through her text exposes the overlaps and incommensurabilities found in various circulating models of black women’s identity in Ellison’s sense of the juglike lens of critical discourse.
Reading Kay’s text as a model of the necessarily uneven transmissions that characterize the Black Atlantic lays the historical and intellectual groundwork for locating gender and sexuality within critical formulations of diaspora studies. This chapter traces how critical work on the black diaspora has frequently separated out popular cultural and performative work from self-consciously intellectual and political labor. Bessie Smith, I argue, repositions the integral and interruptive presence of black women’s popular performances within the genealogy of diaspora studies as an intellectual project. Kay’s text takes on the specific role of difference—sexual, gendered, geographic, and racial—within Smith’s work as a critique of totalizing narratives of blackness. In doing so, the text relocates the center of Black Atlantic discourse away from the metropolitan and toward a private genealogy of reception, one that finds that desire, race, and identification are much more slippery to define across the vast temporal and spatial variety of the black diaspora. As Katherine McKittrick argues in Demonic Grounds, looking at the nexus of race and geography can “make visible social lives which are often displaced, rendered ungeographic” (2006, x). Pushing this politics of location further, I argue that Kay’s text imagines a methodology for diaspora that traces the circulation of black cultural commodities, rather than the literal travel by black subjects, as a way to incorporate into the field a sustained engagement with difference. The violations of time, space, and subjectivity that Kay’s text foregrounds shift how we keep track of the critical locations of the Black Atlantic as a bounded historical moment with a legible intellectual past. Instead, Kay’s work challenges us to perform feminist revisions of diaspora and its critical futures through her geographic, historical, gendered, and queered interruptions of the recognizable routes of the black diaspora. This chapter suggests that these expansive modes of discursive circulation that characterize the black diaspora can also be innovative circuits for critically reading black women’s aesthetic performances and the feminist desires that connect and ground them to intellectual practice.
Night and Day
It was in New York, February, 1923. Bessie and Jack were staying in Jack’s mother’s house on 132nd Street between Fifth and Lenox Avenues. Above 132nd Street was a Harlem full of black people.
—Jackie Kay, Bessie Smith
In a text that travels incessantly—from Chattanooga to Mississippi, from Philadelphia to Glasgow, from the US North to the South, from the nineteen-twenties to the nineteen-nineties, from autobiography to biographical fiction—Jackie Kay’s profile Bessie Smith spends very little time in or on Harlem. As the historical center of contemporary African American and black diaspora critical studies, and as the black aesthetic benchmark of the twentieth century, Harlem is more often than not the center of inquiry into the relationship between black literary expression and the diasporic circulation of blackness. It is, at the very least, the cultural and ideological ground where there is “sense that certain venues are more authentic than others” from which other critical territories radiate (Procter 2003, 2).
Harlem is also a resurgent area of critical interest in the past twenty years for diaspora theory, a site of renegotiating the nationalist flow of African American studies after Paul Gilroy’s groundbreaking The Black Atlantic.1 The brief moments in Bessie Smith spent in this hub of black culture in the nineteen-twenties are usually related to the recording industry, as in the epigraph to this section, where Bessie is staying in Harlem to cut a record. No exception is the “jar of Harlem night air,” an item on a lengthy, three-page list imagined by Kay to populate a mythic trunk of Bessie-related materials compiled by her family and friends that “disappeared” in the nineteen-fifties, long after Smith’s death—an inventory that will figure heavily in my later analysis of the politics of diaspora circulation. The two very differently located references occupy familiar ideological spaces in theories of Harlem’s influence: Harlem as the practical and capital center of black artistic production and Harlem as the locale of the black imagination, the generative force of black diasporic performances across the twentieth century and in the critical discourse of African American studies.2 The “jar,” as opposed to the weight of Smith and Ellison’s “jug,” is a moment of textual whimsy and license on Kay’s part. “A Harlem full of black people” is a concrete, historical mark, a location “full of” racial significance and signification. While the latter has obvious implications for this chapter’s concern with the consequences of gender and class in the way we conceive of the “space” of the black diaspora, this section also takes up Harlem’s more ethereal strains that circulate with a difference in Kay’s work, as well as the way we, as critics, imagine the possibilities and portability of black diasporic connections beyond social realism or romantic fetishization.
Claiming a center for black artistic production has practical and symbolic import for Harlem Renaissance intellectuals of the nineteen-twenties. Harlem in a jar, then, is a distillation that both carries and contains the ideological and aesthetic freight of “The New Negro,” Alain Locke’s foundational Harlem Renaissance essay:
Here in Manhattan is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life. It has attracted the African, the West Indian, the Negro American; has brought together the Negro of the North and the Negro of the South; the man from the city and the man from the town and village; the peasant, the student, the business man, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast. . . . So what began in terms of segregation becomes more and more, as its elements mix and react, the laboratory of a great race-welding. . . . In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is—or promises at least to be—a race capital. ([1925] 1992, 7)
Here, Locke is doing the intellectual work of making Harlem a racial symbol, “full of” blackness of a particular kind. Trying to contain Harlem is difficult business, with rhetorical strategies that claim exceptionality and representativeness at the same time. Harlem as a site is an “instance,” a “first” of potentially many, or later, a “promise” of the future. As example or model, Locke’s Harlem wants to be accessible, a representative of pending communities and “New Negro” subjects around the world—a race capital, not the only one. But it is also exceptional—the “largest,” the experimental site of New Negro formation, the laboratory. As both template and a break from the mold, Locke’s work to rhetorically produce and locate Harlem as “race capital” also hails a certain elemental population as representative group. He relies on the word “man” four times in his exhaustive catalogue of Harlem’s new migrant population. It is certainly not new to point out the masculine-humanist subject that sits at the center of discursive production of the Harlem Renaissance, nor the practical reverberations of who literally can move through the “race capital” with ease in the nineteen-twenties. An extension of the masculinized citizen of this emerging Harlem is the site of Harlem itself, its ideological capital or currency that travels, taking on this gendered property.
My concern with the gendering of intellectual space here is partially because the energy of nineteen-twenties Harlem, the night air in a jar referenced in Kay’s imagined catalogue, is distinctly about a different set of aesthetic and popular practices—the “nightlife” of Harlem, its clubs and balls and scenes. This “night work” of Harlem is its romantic currency, more what we think of as the substance of Kay’s jar and Smith’s lyrics and as opposed to the “day work” of intellectually drawing on what is kept in that jar. In other words, Locke’s “Harlem” is the critical work that certifies intellectual and historical significance. But what circulates most prominently as the popular “idea” of Harlem, its source rather than its ideological product or theory, is its nighttime identity, its jazz, blues, and sexualized culture.
As the center through which the black diaspora is thought or constructed (even if it is to decenter), the day work of intellectual and literary production and the night work of performance are also sold as separately gendered spheres; the famous founding fathers of early black thought are, overwhelmingly, “fathers,” including Locke, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Senghor, whereas essayist and author Jessie Fauset is considered a “midwife” and Zora Neale Hurston an exuberant outlier.3 The night work becomes the root and inspiration for internationalism, the performative call that allows the traveling intellectual and political project of black solidarity. Black women performers such as Bessie Smith and Josephine Baker, as the most visible signs and stars of said call, are not easily incorporated into the production of intellectual responses that we locate as the work of the black diaspora—anthologies, print culture, and even reprinted literature.
In a more contemporary moment, developments in US black feminist theory around women’s performances4 came at a time when a new subfield, that of diaspora studies, had also been emerging out of African American and postcolonial studies.5 Locke’s gauntlet, his gesture toward the cosmopolitan makeup of Harlem as location and symbol, is one that galvanizes the three major categories of time—the past (“the first concentration in history”), the present (“Negro life is seizing”), and the future (Harlem “promises to be” the center of New Negro citizenship). His challenge to this “new” field, then, is a mark of the complicated temporal territory that emerging critical discourse must occupy. Looking not just across the present cultural world but to its history and potential, Locke’s challenge has been taken up by critics such as Brent Edwards, who challenges this gendered omission in suggesting that “a nascent feminism” and feminist intellectual project was at the center of black internationalism’s discursive and practical formation. Edwards’s suggestion of a systemic approach to diaspora through feminist thought is one that potentially considers the gendered “practice” of diaspora criticism beyond mere representation of women. I come again to Harlem, and to Bessie Smith, as a possible model for the kind of day and night work that black diaspora studies can account for and model through a feminism that is in fact embedded in a set of practices not fully recognized as intellectual work.
Returning to Bessie Smith’s significance to the intellectual projects of Ellison and Kay, where can we locate her work in the context of diaspora’s intellectual routes? While black women entertainers such as Josephine Baker have been taken up as signs and even subjects of twenties and thirties black cosmopolitanism, they are rarely considered authors, or founders in the vein of Césaire or Senghor or Du Bois, of intellectual and political discourse.6 As Shane Vogel argues in his analysis of the political and 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 leaders is not just to integrate the two kinds of discourse associated with blackness—aesthetic and political—but to make visible a transatlantic subjectivity centered on questions of gender and sexuality. Bringing Smith or even Holiday 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 Smith (the front and back of the album cover) but “transport[ing]” Kay “places, creating scenes and visions” of a variety of unreal and locatable spaces in the black cultural imaginary from “The Haunted House Blues” to being a “St. Louis Gal” (Kay 1997, 10).
The scene of identification imagines Kay’s close, intimate contact with the image of Smith as having the ability to violate and transform the borders of historical, national, racial, sexual, and geographic space, all within the interiority of a private home. The souvenir as metaphor for the experience of the black diaspora, then, also embodies the constant “failure” of the object to add up, to fill up or complete the experience of blackness. Instead, Kay narrates the repetitive contact between the subject of the black diaspora and her thwarted desire for a more coherent understanding of her diasporic belonging and marginalization at the same time. Kay “desire[s] souvenirs of events that are repeatable,” against Stewart’s reading (1984, 135), in that the trauma of black transatlantic history embodies exceptional pain and the repetitive infliction of that pain.19 In other words, Kay fetishizes Smith as a souvenir as much for her exceptionalism as for her representativeness. Kay’s engagement with the souvenirs of diasporic legacy posits the simultaneous distance and intimacy of that recurring memory and the aesthetic responses to it that have made up modern black cultural production.
To close this consideration of new pathways of diasporic cultural flows, I now return to Harlem as site and as “nostalgic myth” (Stewart 1984, 133). Late in Bessie Smith, Kay reimagines “gossip” surrounding Smith’s exploits, in her chapter “Tales of the Empress.” In particular, she re-creates the scene of a 1928 party hosted by Carl van Vechten, noted Harlem Renaissance patron and a member of the white cultural elite. Kay’s mode, as usual, is fierce identification with Smith herself:
Heard tell about 1928. The Empress arrives with Porter Grainger, the composer of her current show, Mississippi Days, dressed up to the nines in ermine and dripping with jewels. Right aways she realizes she is on alien territory. There’s a whole sea of white faces staring at her and the polite white handshake of van Vechten is no comfort. She is out of her depth, and she sure as hell is not going to drown. Whenever the Empress is out of her own territory, she defends herself with her own aggression. (1997, 104)
The “tale” goes on to tell of Smith knocking down van Vechten’s white wife after a patronizing request for a good-bye kiss from the blues singer. In another text, and even in the context of Kay’s no-fault portrait of Smith, this episode would seem par for the course—celebrating a blueswoman’s bawdiness, her “difference” from white culture and codes of behavior, her rebellion against even the subtle racial and gendered limits of dominant culture. The portrait of Smith is of the resisting-victim variety—certainly not a new form for black literature. But couched as it is in Kay’s own location as the only black face among a sea of white ones, including her parents, in a nation that is “alien territory” for easily recognizable blackness, this aneċe potentially tells a different story of the locations of blackness. Kay longs for black identifications and familiarity within the confines of her immediate, white-identified space. Her textual persona does not revolt but rather locates a space in her parents’ house, in her best friend’s box bedroom, to experience blackness differently. Smith’s reaction may be an act of displaced desire, but it is also Kay’s suggestion of the limits even of recognizably black and white experience, the limits of a small apartment in a city and time “full of” blackness.
The box bedroom and the grand arc of imaginary diaspora geographies suggested in this section begin to expand the ways we might think of space and location in the frame of the black diaspora. The transurban centers that define Black Atlantic exchange—Harlem, London, Paris, Port-au-Prince, and so on—remain key destinations but are decentered as sources in Kay’s profile and as the most meaningful sites of production.20 But Kay also refuses a retreat to “the local” as characterized by antimodern, romanticized representations of the folk in African American criticism, on the one hand, or the homogeneous indigeneity of the developing world in the case of some transnational feminist constructions. Instead, Bessie Smith asks, “What does a girl from Bishopbriggs near Glasgow know about Chattanooga?” (1997, 17) and assumes a collection of circulating objects of “research,” a popular culture archive, if you will, of songs, an atlas, a biography of Billie Holiday, a bottle of Coca-Cola, that informs that exchange (17–19). Her invocation of sources is, as nonfiction goes, uneven at best; but it is not a thoroughness that Kay is after but an ethereal itinerary, with pins stuck in the places—past, present, and future—that diaspora routes might travel, even unexpectedly.
Kay’s structural project in Bessie Smith destabilizes Harlem as the center of a map of black culture, aesthetics, and intellectual practice but more importantly reimagines what it (could) mean to evoke diaspora as a method and as an analytical category founded on the notion of mass migration of peoples from one place to another. On a critical scale, diaspora studies has privileged travel as perhaps the defining characteristic of subaltern subjectivity, of the postnational, postcolonial condition. If space is usually centered in such discourses in terms of geography and borders, Kay takes up the mobile object as center instead—not just the live body but also the image, the circulation which extends past that body but is no less material than Harlem itself or Kay’s metaphorical jar. The key to such alternate figurations of objects and difference lies partially in Fred Moten’s provocative statement that “the history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist” (2003, 1). Whether it is the found album or the recovered stories of Bessie Smith as cultural icon, Kay’s text emphasizes the possibility of the object in resisting master narratives of meaning and capitalist value (ibid., 9–10). The key to alternate readings lies in the object’s frame. For Kay, the trope of the unusual frame, or the black cultural object showing up in a variety of racially coded locations, including her own text, points not to the resistant object itself as much as how its frame takes both Kay and the reader out of the assumed circuits of African diaspora circulation.
First and foremost, Kay’s unusual frame is Black British, or Scottish, to be exact, in comparison to the (African) American South. Claiming only the refrain from a popular song as reference, Kay vividly imagines a fairly stock vision/version of the South. Touching the atlas, her narrator starts with negation: “Well, it wasn’t like Glasgow. It wouldn’t be like anywhere I had been” (1997, 16). Blackness, for Kay’s exceptional Scottish black diaspora experience, is a series of external, Americanized references—a cinematic Western, an atlas, a series of song lyrics. That blackness registers as paradigmatically American, rooted in the folk of the South at the cusp of the great migration, is not surprising given the late-capital centrality of that narrative’s dispersal in cultural flows. It is also not surprising for the Black British context, in which “black” as an identity and a community struggles to find visibility in the multicultural state—a difficulty most famously reported by Gilroy’s infamous title, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack” (1991). The cultural production of Black British citizens, who do not discursively figure in the national imaginary, signals not just to nostalgic home communities but to global connections to the most powerfully identified community of black creative and intellectual production, African American culture.
But even as large portions of Bessie Smith traffic in this seemingly one-way global economy, Kay’s text interrupts the process by figuring American blacks as curious and creative about places outside of that “river” of American black folk culture. Kay constructs this through imagined contact with the aforementioned lost trunk, negotiated through Smith’s sisters: “Before they died, Tillie and Viola sent it on a ship headed for Scotland. They had seen pictures of Scotland and liked the look of the country, those big goddam mountains” (1997, 57). Shipping the archive away from recognizable blackness, Kay imagines that infamous trunk filled with three and a half pages’ worth of black commodity culture, from “Ma Rainey’s gold fillings” to a Cadillac steering wheel to documentation of death and marriage (60). The search for black history is material and embodied (baby teeth) as much as it is ephemeral (the air in the jar)—and the inorganic sits next to the natural, much as the radical break of emigration leaves Black British identity uneasily and unevenly in proximity to British colonial ideology. Kay’s injection of Scotland into the imaginary of the black South, the reverse route, and her desire to locate the archive of the blues outside of the major ports of the Black Atlantic, is also her bid to map black international and intellectual practice, as well as history, as an unpredictable geography, where the territory of black women’s imaginary practices creates material futures unaccounted for in the obsessive focus on official documents of print and state culture.
Kay does not recenter the margin as much as she converts location into an object—the transurban commodity of the black site becomes mobile, a cite and a cipher.21 Less invocation than circulation, these objects do not stand in for but are the black diaspora—counted along with the archive, print culture, and the lingering effects of the past. Alongside this are the affective resonances of these diaspora objects and their surprising present meanings—hurtling even sooner toward unsettling and unpredictable future uses. Kay’s text makes use of the past not just for the present but for the radical potentiality of diaspora circulation and (dis)connection—tracing what gets “lost,” not to be lamented but to be made up wholesale, again. Diaspora is made to awkwardly fit into a future that it never imagined as its domain, in order to highlight the disjuncture that characterizes black experiences of modernity and of diaspora. Incommensurable loss and incompatible knowledges are the base of Kay’s black world, where even when “found,” the “lost” blackness does not come from or mean what it should. This occurs even as Bessie Smith tries to break Bessie-as-icon’s story, into the queer time and space of even those black objects we may read as clear, contextualized, familiar—the blues, for instance. Diaspora, despite the text’s longing for recognizable narrative and troping, is far stranger to account for than its historically and geographically bounded disciplinary arguments entail. Kay bleeds genres, blending history into myth, authenticity into self-conscious construction, pattern into innovation, imagination into tradition. Within the limits of who and what we might recognize as “Bessie Smith,” Kay finds room for the world and the jar, the universal and the particular, difference and detail.
Kay’s text sees and seeks difference within the diaspora because of that drive toward definition, toward the object of “knowing” Bessie Smith, the blues, or the Black Atlantic. That play between lost and found is the play between desire and innovation. Out of a wish to belong to, or to speak to, community also comes a desire for distinction, or rather a claim to it. Smith is representative and exceptional, as is Kay’s approach. Glasgow, Harlem, Chattanooga—they are jars and worlds each, available in their material and historical specificity as well as their more portable, metaphoric resonances. Bessie Smith suggests that what is lost in diaspora scholarship that attempts to lock down, intentionally or not, more singular strains/routes of blackness is a sense of the necessary simultaneity of the world and the jar, of how even radical specificity can translate and transport to the unpredictable time of critical futures.
The order of the things in Kay/Smith’s imaginary trunk, then, is the order of diaspora—which is still, for Kay, the order of location. In the economy of travel, the thing is always already a souvenir, a memory/metonym of the Other. In the economy of emigration, the thing is either reminder or imperial commodity, the play between local and global. Both are locked in the thinking of late capital, in which history is marked by the consumption of metonymic things and their transport. For Kay, this logic of enchantment/disenchantment both holds firm and is violated by turning travel and emigratory space into the contact with and scope of what Lizabeth Paravasini-Gebert calls “transit”—evoking less definite yet more repetitive routes to the diasporic practices of black women subjects.22 This circulation suggests a different order, timing, and geography of distribution, in Kay’s text, so that Bessie Smith as historical figure can travel from tent shows to Harlem to Mississippi to Chattanooga (“down and out” to “down” and “out”), while her aneċal and iconic presence registers her in publicly and privately consumed objects, here collected from the geography of Glasgow to the print-culture artifact of a British queer profiles series. While Kay may still rely on the trope of haunting that seems to follow black women subjects, her form and structure insists on location and material—Chattanooga, trunks, wax—the constant transit between “lost” and “found” object, between the archive and the imaginary, public and private space, and the relationship between object and context, or, for Kay’s text, object and collection that redefines diaspora.
Bessie Smith, as print-culture document, projects itself into the act of collection, even as it stands as one profile in a series of queer recoveries of creative icons, from David Hockney to Benjamin Britten. Kay’s “Outline,” as the series is titled, of Smith’s queer history takes travel and more particularly transit as its structure in an attempt to collect the disparate references and evidence of black women’s subjective and sexual desires, many of which cannot register without the intellectual weight of archival narratives to infuse them with singular meaning. Kay’s focus on travel in her profile of Bessie Smith, indeed, has much to do with this traveling desire for identification and black women’s particular inability to locate a documented home in diaspora studies and late-capital discourse: “Even later in her life when she could have afforded not to travel all over the place, she continued to do so” (1997, 30). Kay goes on to label Bessie a “travel addict,” claiming that her compulsively touring was not just out of a romanticization of live performance (which is frequently coupled with a reviling of the recorded commodity, impossible for Kay as it is her only available narrative record and “encounter” with Smith) but because of the ability to act out queer desire outside of the constructs of domestic geography. Kay ultimately sees the reperformance and recirculation of Bessie Smith’s music—as well as the performer’s iconography in the form of stories which the speaker resituates to literally create a system of exchanges—as a process of traveling queerness, or what queer theorist José Muñoz might call an act of “world-making” (1999, 195). These worlds stand in excess of the question of capital, of what Smith, or Kay, “could,” conditionally tensed, “afford.” Jackie Kay identifies Bessie Smith as creating her own world, a network or genealogy of queer black women, but it is through the mark of performance that this network becomes visible and articulated, as well as how it “transports” to other imaginary and material worlds. Recorded performance, in object form, makes visible (both in myth and text) a world for Kay, even if she has to reconstruct that text in order to “see.” Her goal is a traveling reception that establishes a collectivity of racial identity through what is unspeakable, and unspeakably different, in the cultures of the Black Atlantic, rather than through similarity or authenticity.
Travel itself, then, is different for black women’s intellectual and performative practices in the diaspora. It is, as a model, a fabulous, and fabulist, performance of the diasporic subject. Like the world and the jar, or the global and the local, it is the relationship between paradigmatic African American and even Black Atlantic subjectivity (in the bluesman and the sailor) and that of black women that is at stake:
The image of the blueswoman is the exact opposite of the bluesmen. There they are in all their splendour and finery, their feathers and ostrich plumes and pearls, theatrical smiles, theatrical shawls, dressed up to the nines and singing about the jailhouse. The blueswomen are never seen wearing white vests or poor dresses, sitting on a porch in some small Southern town. No, they are right out there on that big stage, prima donnas, their get-ups more lavish than a transvestite’s, barrelhousing, shouting, strutting their stuff. They are all theatre. . . . It is all there in the blues: believable and theatrical at the same time. The opposite of social realism. Realism with a string of pearls thrown in. (1997, 64)
Like the day and night work of Harlem, genre does not lose its significance in circulation, critical or otherwise. This passage from “Wax” points back to the paradox of serious diaspora work, of wanting “authentic” documentation to bolster ideological worlds, passing up the jars that do not match up with our sense of authentic black experience—in content or in (corporeal) form. Whether it is the heaviness of the trunk or the shallow groove of wax, the record of diaspora studies is lost and found in any number of locations off the map of either “Bessie’s blues tour,” as documented in the text’s appendix, or the typical routes of the Black Atlantic. Black women’s innovative writing and intellectual practice is the territory of diaspora, “social realism” and visionary romance imagined “at the same time.”
Keeping Queer Time
Harlem, I grant you, isn’t typical—but it is significant, it is prophetic.
—Alain Locke, “The New Negro”
Both accidental and calculated, timing is everything in considering the blues. As the world and the jug, the possibilities and limits of Harlem as a geographic and ideological space, shift over time and space, black diaspora studies has been eager to map their transit, through and outside of Harlem as a vexed site of critical 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 extraverbal exchange, available for a recombinant taking up rather than retaining a static value in the public culture market.
Kay plays with 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?
