Even though the finger-snapping Beat Generation too-cool-for-school lingo sounded a lot like the way jazz musicians would rap to each other uptown, history continues to insist that it was invented by cool clever white men like Elvis. As impossible as the existence of black Beat poets, the likes of Bob Kaufman. The narratives I wanted to represent at that time were, to most folks, so unlikely as to be scarcely possible. We were too queer, too light, or too out there to be truly black.
Some of us even struggled with the moniker “African American,” not only because it seemed to exclude nuances of our identity, but because many of these self-described “African Americans” excluded us. Folks who, as Lorde put it in Zami, “felt more comfortable at the extremes.” I’d left the States, to study, for love, but the driving primary impulse that made me stay was to do the work that is, to find and somehow document what I would have then called “other freaks like me” outside of the Amerikan bubble. When I picked up Audre Lorde’s “biomythography,” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, for the first time, I was already living the narrative that would later be fodder for the first drafts of Skye Papers, a novel that I wouldn’t begin writing until I had been based in Europe for some years. We were different.–Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name My nipple piercing, which I’d gotten days after Lorde’s death in symbolic dedication to doing the work, was still healing.īeing women together was not enough. I’d moved in not so long after her passing. The woman who took the picture was Audre Lorde’s daughter, and the room I was renting had been her mother’s, still full of the beads Lorde would fashion into necklaces and bracelets when she was in town. She was documenting a historical happening, a portrait that spoke a truth about a specific time in history. However, what I would come to understand more deeply, as time went on, was that my roommate was documenting a moment that held many layers of rare archive it was about more than simply our love story. This romance, similar to a few special others, would come to mark a significant chapter in my life. My roommate at the time said that the photo was to remind us of the love we share during the rough times to come. It had been a particularly passionate lovemaking session our shouted pleasures shook the windows and reverberated out into the summer air glazing the streets of Washington Heights, New York. She laughed when the click of her camera caused us to look up, startled and slightly embarrassed. The one my roommate took that time she snuck in, freezing into eternity the moment my lover and I lay intertwined in postcoital glow. I think it’s the one photo that might have survived the bonfire.
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