black. queer. womxn.
manifesto health. depression survival girl warmth Tenderness. Complete*
It is with inspiration by Audre Lorde’s audacious claim to agency in crafting a narrative that explored the instability of truth, temporality of memory, and presentations of the self that we take on this project. We are creating this film as a means to tell a story—our stories. We are queer figures– Sabea and I. We are black womxn. We both arrived in our different spaces by vocalizing a story that will create space. We are owning these stories in order to name that we, in fact, are not normal. We are queer. From our family structures, to bodies, to sexuality, to vernacular, and more. We complicate, undermine, and destabilize the binary. We will be exploring our understandings of our queer(ly) intersectional subjectivities and relations through the frameworks of Somerville, Sedgwick, Cohen, and Gandhi. The scenes we will be creating will be under the guidance of the following lexical plateaus: warmth, survival, complete*, tenderness, girl, and health. We will be incorporating music and poetry by artists who continue to push against the confines of a theologically binary understanding of selfhood, along with our own poems and voices. We will expose what we have been learning to protect and embrace the vulnerabilities of our queerness. In naming the different parts of ourselves we are speaking affective community into existence and creating an applicable queer politic for ourselves.
health. depression.
i just jerked up. my heart is racing now. i was falling. everything was white and blue. crisp. but i felt my body going completely backward. i had nothing to hold on to. no one was there. but me. everything was so clean. so white. and then i fell. and now my heart is racing. i thought i was still dreaming for a second. shit i probably still am. quiet my mind please i think I’m going crazy. is this a panic attack quiet my mind please i need help help me no one understands I’m so alone When I was a little girl I spent a lot of time in the bathroom. I cried there a lot. I hated everything about myself. I thought that I was so weird. I would try to manipulate my hair and stare at my face until it felt pretty. It never did. If anything I was just another ugly black girl with nothing to offer. Nothing to do. Nothing to say. Nowhere to go. No one to turn to. Nothing to dream about. No room for growth. No room for happiness. No room for peace. Just a body. i want to go to the beach feel the ocean feel something bigger than this i want to dance
survival
As I rub my mother’s back I wait and pray That I will not feel her breathing shallow Or her hot tears Rolling down my forearms A baptism of salty broken silence I am reborn With a little less Each time I am afraid that one day There will not be enough of me Left to encompass her To suffocate the flames Of a fire that reignites itself On the whim of a whisper of breeze
Evans and Allen engage with Ghandi’s question of “what might a queering of community, kinship, sociality, and association entail?” Their first answer is to present themselves as who they are naturally as an act of agency, as an act of freedom. Their invocation of Nina Simone’s musing on the inability to articulate freedom provides context to the ways that Evans and Allen visually encounter each other together yet separately as they look inward. The choice to have Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam” in conversation with Simone’s is also a testament to the imagery of searching for answers in solitude yet within community, especially in the ways that West’s “I’m tryna keep my faith, but I’m looking for more” echoes through Simone’s “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear… I mean, really, no fear. If I could have that half of my life… no fear” even after it has stopped playing.
Evans and Allen also saturate scenes with Ghandi’s “nineteenth-century homosexual” via the intensifying of natural greens, browns, greys, and blues: “liberated from the dull monochrome of sexual dimorphism, this constitutively doubled and hybrid intermediary was endowed with variegated sympathies and desires.” “His asceticism” tinges the spoken word pieces as Evans and Allen struggling push against the self-denial they have learned as an oppressive second nature while not wanting to give up the aspects that “likewise equipped him for the complex affiliative demands of friendship.” Evans and Allen attempt to situate the audience in the “nonnormative and marginal position” that Cohen considers as the source truly progressive and transformative work. They don’t present themselves as “punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens” but that is part of the disruption; there are aspects of their marginalizations are both invisible and tangible. The juxtaposition of scenes that evoke feelings of surveillance with their decontextualized voices present the instability of legible identity.
The temporary scene reversals also allow the discourse of queerness as inversion to engage with ideas that index various queerings of space and time, such as disruption, instability, and temporal shift. The shift between girl and warmth is sudden and acts as a nod to the disallowance of access to innocence and imposed sexuality on the bodies of Black womxn. Here is where Evans and Allen engage with Sedgwick's claim that, “one’s sexual identity… more often describes a complex ideological position, into which one is interpellated based partly on the culture’s mapping of bodies and desires and partly on one's response to that interpellation.” The clumsy youthful encounter explored in the spoken word, the bold lyrics of The Internet’s “Get Away,” and the imagery of slow and surveilled exploration and distance, engage in a way that highlights the complexity and ambiguity of desire and the ways in which the desire Black womxn is scripted and policed. Evans and Allen present, in this scene, the reality that “there is no strict relationship between one’s sexual desire or behavior and one’s sexual identity, although the two are closely intertwined.”
Evans and Allen seem to attempt subversion of “the limits of a lesbian and gay political agenda based on a civil rights strategy, where assimilation into, and replication of, dominant institutions are the goals” by presenting the ways in which their identities have been made to be especially queer because of the physical spaces in which they navigate. To exist in a body that has been labeled queer and to thrive in spaces that are meant for the normative is in itself transformative of the spaces they inhabit. To engage with concepts of mental health, sexuality, softness, wholeness, and childhood as people who these concepts are continually denied the right to express ownership to, is queer.
-Sabea Evans
girl.
I remember this one time, I was riding in the church van with my great-grandmother and her church friends. It was like any other Sunday. The service ended around 2pm. Earlier that week, I remember my grandmother hurting herself. she was doing some housework. I think she was gardening or doing something in the shed. but she had a scar.. or maybe it was a bruise. In the van her friend noticed. And looked at her with worry. She asked. and my great-grandmother with all the beauty, life, and magic she could ever show, laughed and said, “Aint nothing like when my old husband used to beat me� They roared in laughter and I looked out the window. Numb. Not understanding a thing and worse not knowing how to feel about the small piece of great-grandmother’s life that I had just stolen. I now know and understand that that woman could never be harmed or touched. Her soul and vibrancy is her armor. Her spirit not only grounds her but it also fights the battles that most women can not endure. She birthed nine children. Seven girls. And two boys. She just turned a young 92. All of her children are still alive. She is our matriarch. She is our queen. She is the root of my growth, of my life.
warmth.
When you kissed my too-dry lips on our mini-mountain in the middle of central park, I fought hard to keep my eyes shut. To allow my imagination to caress the heat from your cheeks, matching the rhythm of your taste buds, pretending I couldn’t feel your hungry teeth or the diffused bomb in the bottom of my chest. My lips fought to find balance
slipping in and out of your pout you call me a natural as I wipe the taste of her name from the corners of my mouth and give you my laugh because I did not know what to do with hands that wanted to be held.
I give you that I am green and you return a deep red that I did not know I craved until I watched the sun fall between the bones of an insomniac.
As much as this film presents itself as work that explores the definitions of queer theory and politics, it also functions as a source of self discovery. In spirit of Somerville’s Queering the Color Line, Sabea and I set out to tell a story and name the intricate and precise realities that contribute to being black women. The insertion of the word queer in between black and womxn was intentional. This move allotted a space where we could use poetry, photography, music and video to explore exactly what queer means. Given the combination of the various mediums, we were able to explore themes of sexuality, mental health, coming of age, family, time, love, blackness, and womanhood. With this said, I will use this analysis to focus on how the functions of nature contribute to a successful exploration of the intersections of queerness, blackness, and womanhood.
Both Sabea and I are from the city. Sabea’s from the Bronx and I’m from Newark. We grew up in fast paced environments, where tan concrete and over pouring of homes, stores, and buildings mute the greenery. There are parks where you would find pickup basketball games and children playing. However, given the speed and need to keeping pushing forward on to the next bus, obligation, or day, one would find it difficult to really take a pause. Even though we both identify as city girls and love where we come from, we did make the decision to leave.
In many biographies and account of prominent queer figures ranging from, James Baldwin and Bill T. Jones, there is a narrative of leaving and escaping in order to discover and understand. In this film, nature mirrors that escape and plays an interesting role in this dynamic. We walked the Nature Trail on campus, and paused at points that resonated with the soundtrack, poems, and present mood. Through the speed alterations and deep attention to color, one can see that both me and Sabea were able to uncover the layers of our stories and identities in order to achieve some level of truth. The various scenes of just standing, sitting, walking, and being in nature communicates a level of vulnerability. From here, the space to both deconstruct these loaded terms, but also rebuild and bring their complexities to light was created.
In short, this film was liberatory. Watching the end result, surpassed the confines of theory. I could read the queer theories of Somerville and Sedwgick. But I could also feel the truth and honesty that was portrayed in the personal narratives and memoirs of writers like Audre Lorde and Rebecca Walker. To be able to use our personal experiences and insights was a risk. However, as Nina Simone defines in the opening scenes of the film, freedom is no fear. And through the planning, filming, editing, revising, and publishing of black. queer. womxn. Sabea and I were able to achieve a snippet of this liberation.
-Alliyah Allen
Tenderness.
how do you express trauma!? — you create dreams. - what shapes the way that action unfolds? dreams dream I’ve been dreaming for too long. when the sun comes out it feels like one. i don’t really have track of time. or a hold on my body but i float and i don’t have control. its scary but safe. don’t go into that place, stay on track. stay here. dream - agency - time lived experiences…. versus these narratives. differences between morality and complexity Diana taylor - sensitive archive? (that was earlier in the semester.. gotta check that reading) how do we come to know ourselves? the kitchen table how do you see an archive? manhood v. masculinity : place of entering new space ‘locating into a place — like a hood i can’t focus i can’t focus i am not articulate i can’t focus tenderness. love. love. tenderness.
Complete*
Be who you are and will be learn to cherish that boisterous Black Angel that drives you up one day and down another protecting the place where your power rises running like hot blood from the same source as your pain. When you are hungry learn to eat whatever sustains you until morning but do not be misled by details simply because you live them. Do not let your head deny your hands any memory of what passes through them nor your eyes nor your heart everything can be used except what is wasteful (you will need to remember this when you are accused of destruction). Even when they are dangerous examine the heart of those machines which you hate before you discard them but do not mourn their lack of power lest you be condemned to relive them. If you do not learn to hate you will never be lonely enough to love easily nor will you always be brave although it does not grow any easier.
Do not pretend to convenient beliefs even when they ate righteous you will never be able to defend your city while shouting Remember our sun is not the most noteworthy star only the nearest. Respect whatever pain you bring back from your dreaming but do not look for new gods in the sea nor in any part of a rainbow. Each time you love love as deeply as if it were forever only nothing is eternal. Speak proudly to your children where ever you may find them tell them you are the offspring of slaves and your mother was a princess in darkness.
created by sabea evans and alliyah allen may 11, 2017