are starting to say now, “Africa is the frontier.”
“Africa will decide our future.”
I saw a similar but a different story in South Africa, a still burgeoning
and powerful queer and feminist community,
Innovation, business, art, and ideas that sprung up and bloomed after apartheid
I knew again Africa was the beginning and will be the end, alpha and omega.
After years of being crushed, colonized, raped, ravaged, and
pillaged by dictatorships, superpowers, colonialism, and tribal wars,
Africa is rising.
I saw it with my own eyes.
Five years ago I was hospitalized at NYU for about five days.
I had a series of kidney infections which some doctors were denying.
Only one believed me and treated me accordingly with proper antibiotics.
He was South Asian, he had trained at Mass General in Boston, where I’m from.
He was sitting on my bed in the penthouse since I had great insurance—people who are on death’s door don’t even get those kinds of rooms. It overlooked New York City.
I only had one other visitor, a white girl from my art therapy group, and the doctor.
After many years of strife and illness I was in an emotional wilderness
but I was talking to the doctor about books and writing and my travels in Africa.
I said, “It’s the frontier.”
He said, “Yes. I think China knows that and it’s why they’ve invested so heavily there.”
A second instance when I detailed my vision about Africa as the future—
It was sometime after I’d left Ghana. I was serving on an artist grant panel in New York and artists from Europe were being considered but African artists, specifically one from Nigeria, was dismissed as being too far away.
I went home that night and prepared a speech to deliver to the committee.
I practiced in the mirror for the next day.
In one line I said, “It is time for us to consider African artists.” My voice was trembling.
I was the one Black person on the panel, the one who represented diversity.
A lot was at stake. I don’t remember the outcome but the person in me who had been to Ghana knew that it should never not be discussed,
that it should not be considered the dark unknown foreign continent ever again.
I’m sure my identity would have changed even more if I had stayed in Ghana.
I got involved with a young African man and saw a tiny bit of Africa through his eyes.
To be sure there’s a mask he wore, one that’s worn for Americans/Black Americans
so that the ways and secrets of their culture are hidden, but through traveling with him
and experiencing some things through his eyes, Africa got into my bones
like the souls of all those slaves jailed and buried at Cape Coast and Elmina Castle.
Maybe it was like in a movie where ghosts have a message for the living.
They spoke to me and I carried their message forward.
This new awareness I had of Africa made its way into my lesson plans and my stories.
Ten years ago it was still uncommon in academia outside of African Studies to acknowledge Africa but as a Professor I brought it up in many lessons whether I was teaching Communications, Writing, or Solo Performance.
I think in small ways I was able to enact change.
Like the Black nurse from Nigeria who had no interest in Nigeria.
I ran into her years later and she said, “Because of you I took my daughters home to Nigeria. I learned the importance of knowing where I come from.”
She might have been part of the team of Black nurses I took to the African burial ground in downtown Manhattan/steps from the 9/11 Museum.
One woman immediately got the spirit and started to cry-laugh,
another wrote of how the bones of African slaves spoke to her.
In another class a young Black woman from Sierra Leone talked about how
her family fled the Civil War and her mother saw a neighbor’s decapitated head
posted on a fence by soldiers as a warning sign.
In another scenario two boys in a city school who were both from Africa
bonded together and created a presentation on Africa.
They were proud and I knew it was because I gave them safe space.
There was one mixed-race young man in another class whose family fled Uganda.
He came out as gay in my class and said, “In my country I could be killed for who I am.”
Even though he was often absent and didn’t receive a good grade
He knew I was a writer and when leaving said, “Please publish your stories, Miss.”
Africa changed my creative work and poems.
I can never not think of Cape Coast
I can never not stop wanting to go
to visit
to see
to remember
to bathe at Cape Coast
or ride fishing boats at Elmina
or wander along beaches of Benin
Or go to South Africa and stare at the beauty of Table Mountain
and its twelve apostles and the role the landscape played in
inspiring prisoners on Robben Island to end apartheid
All of this to say, I am by no means an expert but last month
I volunteered at a gallery where thousands of visual artists donate
their work to a fair once a year.
Every year at the very end I notice the works and images of Black people remain.
It’s not conscious but all the work by white artists is coveted and purchased.
This year a giant sculpture of a brown vagina with hair remained.
I immediately purchased it, and loved it.
I picked it up and said to myself, “I must have this piece.”
“It would be wrong to leave it here.”
I got home and opened the box and there was a note from a proud African artist living in Brooklyn.
She said to the unknown purchaser, “Africa is rising.”
I imagine somewhere in this story, in my journeys, is a metaphor for me.
I, too, like Africa, am rising.
BORN FREES
I used to always write about Assotto Saint
Slamming his hand down on the pulpit at Donald Woods’s funeral
when it was common to hide the cause of death of
young men who’d died from AIDS
if they were buried at all and weren’t abandoned
Someone told me about a thin boy
thin with fear and death
played piano for the choir
no one touched him
or talked about it
I know in my mother’s family
her mother’s sister said a parasite
had killed her son when he died suddenly
But I remember once him coming out of a gay bar in Boston
all the white boys said, “How do you know her?”
I don’t know if he or I said cousin
I’m his cousin
He made me promise not to tell anyone in the family
I’d seen him there
So when they said parasite I knew something didn’t ring true
His mother, a seemingly healthy woman, died shortly after that
but I always felt their deaths were related
His mother either from the lies or repression
or a broken heart
having lost her young son
And I know everyone blames Jussie Smollett for his lies and staged attack
but it makes me think there was something very toxic going on
that he didn’t feel he could talk to someone
Either that he was covering up
an a
ddiction or a hookup.
Watching Assotto stand up at Donald’s funeral and tell the truth
goes down in history as one of the bravest moments I’d ever witnessed
Either that or Audre Lorde spreading open the arms of her dashiki
the bravest woman we’d all witnessed
telling a crowded room of followers,
“I began on this journey as a coward.”
That or seeing a friend at the height of the AIDS era
at a bar his face covered in purple welts
refusing to hide
going out in public
That or Donald Woods being feeble
barely able to walk
accepting an award as a director of AIDS films
Or an ex-lover on a beach taking off her top
and refusing to hide her mastectomy scar
Or when Danitra Vance performed at The Public Theater
and danced naked revealing her mastectomy scars
and Audre refusing to wear a prosthesis
Or when Zakes Mokae in Master Harold and the Boys in the first Broadway play
that a cousin took me to
said to his white master, “Have you ever seen a Black man’s ass?”
and pulled down his pants and revealed himself to the audience
I was sixteen years old
Or seeing my mother beaten religiously
and still go out to work as if it hadn’t happened at all
Or even me surviving so many
incredible tests
Once when I was talking to a doctor, I doubted my strength
He looked at me incredulously and said, “You are strong.”
Another doctor looked at me
my suffering
And asked, “Isn’t anyone there for you?”
And another said, “You deserve to be taken care of.”
Today once more I am nursing my broken heart
Caused by someone who betrayed
was not honest
That and attending an event and asking white people to give up
their seats to Black people who couldn’t sit down
And seeing social justice in action
Yes I often think of Assotto for the important place
he resides in my history
But today I am examining his tactics
pulling the tools off the shelf
dusting off the weaponry
in an exhibit
because today I need to use what he taught me.
Today I feel that puff of rage
That continuous assault
And I want to stand up and testify
though I, too, haven’t been asked
I want to interrupt all the proceedings
all the places Black lesbians
have been erased
and silenced
Like looking down at a manuscript
seeing that they asked a young white woman to write about
Black queer history
when it’s been my area of expertise
forever
Or only attributing ’80s and ’90s AIDS activism
To ACT UP
I want the point of outrage now to not only the historicizing of AIDS
But the fact that women and Black lesbians
have been erased from the dialogue
When there were so many organizations like GMAD
Other Countries ADODI
Men of All Colors Together
Salsa Soul/AAlUSC
Las Buenas Amigas
and more
Or asking where are all the Black lesbians on Pose
because certainly they were on the piers and part of that history
And why are white men constantly at the helm
to tell our stories
And why don’t white queers recognize this
That and seeing panel after panel being organized on history and art
all things important to the world and no one thinking or noticing
it might be important to have a Black lesbian present
Just like they kicked Stormé out of
the Stonewall narrative.
And what about the people who weren’t on the streets
but in jobs
fighting the system
The dykes and queers meeting each other forming community
and connections and families
and love
Just like in South Africa where they prevented intermingling
but ways were found
And each time we touched or loved
found each other in darkness and light
It was resistance
Each time we told each other you’re beautiful
You’re not wrong
It was resistance
When we stood up to the parents and families
and courts and those that shunned us
It was resistance
Wore what we really wanted
It was resistance
Yelled at doctors and drug professionals
It was resistance
Every time we wrote and read poems
It was resistance
Every time some queer kid
stays alive because they saw us
read us
discovered the archive
We’ve won
Every war is fought on our bodies
And one day after the gender racial
sexual orientation wars are over
in America
there will be a new generation
just like in South Africa called
the Born Frees.
A NEW STORY
I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN from the start there’d be trouble when we were listening to a song, she started to twerk and said, “I’ll be Rhianna and you be Drake.”
“Drake?! I’m never Drake. Drake doesn’t do anything he just stands there and folds his arms!” I said it was telling that she saw herself as the star and me her back-up dancer. It was a way of rendering me invisible but maybe I don’t need to say that. I want to write a story about being trapped in a story.
I see myself as a mime, one you see outdoors with the sad white painted face appearing with hands to scale a wall or like they are trapped in a box somehow. Someone asks, “What’s wrong?” and the mime turns to a sign: “Help I’m trapped in a story.”
Sometimes it’s my own story that I repeat over and over my patterns, my past, my getting involved with people who render me invisible, people who make me part of their background, and it doesn’t quite matter what my story is, but the purpose of this is my frustration with myself at repeating my own story, how many times I peer outside of the box to see there’s a new story, possibly a new beginning, freedom but I’m trapped in my own story. I see it in their eyes when they are talking to me, and it’s a story but very rarely is it my story. It’s their story. It’s inaccurate and they become enraged at me for the story they’ve told themselves about me, and I see them kicking and punching at the ghost they’ve created, the monster in their story.
And it’s my dream that if this were a movie or a music video or something one day I’ll get a speaking part. One day, I’ll be able to participate in my own story or the one that’s told about me.
One day I’ll have a conversation
or someone will stop to have a conversation with me
not the person they’ve made
but the person I am
and I’ll get to live outside the box
And all those untold stories in me
all those bruises
all those suppressions
lack of being able to participate
have landed in my belly
and turned to rot
and it’s always so small and confining and I can’t get away because it’s their story and it’s like a noose around my neck pulled tight my feet dangling in air.
I’m liking some of the preachers these days
where they p
osit the possibility of a new world
one lived in spirit
Not living in the constant matrix
of fear, doubt, lack, limitation, not-enoughness
Like a ping pong back and forth
greed envy
our daily bread.
I don’t want to leave you there so I am creating a new mantra for myself.
Say it with me:
I am going to write a new story.
I am going to write a new story.
MARKED SAFE
FOR STONEWALL 50
I want to thank the maestro Tim Gunn,
Heidi Klum, also every episode of Project Runway and Runway All-Stars,
Every gay and lesbian contestant that ever sewed, stitched sequins to dresses
or pantaloons
every queer who ever threw a tantrum, walked out and came back to win.
Thank you to the Jersey and Atlanta Housewives and spin-offs
To all their queer queen besties
I want to thank RuPaul and every queen on every episode of Drag Race
Also, that dollar store cashier I ran into with my mother in small-town Massachusetts
who actually thought I was RuPaul and kept calling me, “Miss Honey.”
Thank you, Oprah, her close friend designer Nate Berkus.
I extend condolences to the lover he lost when the tsunami hit Sri Lanka.
I also want to thank Walmart and the trans person who worked
behind the register when my mother worked there as a greeter.
When eventually she was fired for wearing women’s clothes,
to my shock, my mother said, “That’s unjust and I think it’s discrimination.”
I want to thank that person wherever they are.
I want to thank that mixed-race lesbian Josie on Top Chef
I want to thank every LGBTQIA person on every show that my mother
watched religiously, because each and every one of them
in one way or another
prepared my mother at eighty-four years old for the queer art catalogue I was a part of
that I brought home to show her called Cast of Characters.
Holding my breath, I handed it to her, asked her to guess of all the images
which was mine.
She saw the word queer first, “Why do you call yourselves that? That’s
like saying you’re Niggers.”
I tried to explain the concept of reclaiming language used against us.
My mother refused to listen.
She thumbed through the images, eyes wide with wonder.
She knows I don’t usually show her stuff for many reasons.