Matt Brim
In the church I come from—which is not at all the same church to which white Americans belong—we were counselled, from time to time, to do our first works over again. . . . To do your first works over again means to reexamine everything. Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.
—James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket (1985)
Primer, n.
2. a. An elementary school-book for teaching children to read.
b. fig. Something which serves as a first means of instruction.
c. A small introductory book on any subject.
—Oxford English Dictionary
This is an essay about remediation, about learning what we should have already learned: to read black queer literature. It is an essay about a classroom experience of learning to read again, of collectively coming to terms with the enforced illiteracies and educational impoverishments that make minority pedagogies of rereading urgent. And this is an essay about a collection of stories and novellas—John Keene’s 2015 Counternarratives—that both exposes this state of black queer illiteracy and functions as a primer for addressing it. My opening claim is that Counternarratives is a black queer reader, a book that helps us to “do our first works”—of reading, of teaching—over again. My opening invocation of James Baldwin, a crucial touchstone for Keene, helps me to err on the side of the literal in nominating Counternarratives as a black queer reader, for the collection teaches us to revisit some of our first work with language—making sense of the world through story—and thereby to reexamine ourselves as readers. Enacting a fugitive pedagogy, a practice of education that has at once been banished from normative instruction and at the same time flees from its constraints,1 Keene puts counternarrative in the service of black queer literacies.
The “we” above is important. It assumes a general illiteracy and therefore advocates for widespread reform. I do not come to that position theoretically but rather through my experience teaching black queer literature at the College of Staten Island (CSI) in the City University of New York system and, previously, at an elite private college and at a flagship state university. No matter the institution, higher education does little to teach its charges black queer literature or literacies.2 And if the students at CUNY, one of the most diverse educational systems in the country, have not been guided toward fluency in reading black queer texts; if my classes have had what we described to ourselves as black queer “illiteracy feelings,” then the problem is not simply ours. In response to this epistemological crisis, black queer remedial reading should be understood as a general educational requirement.
All of the texts in my “Black Gay Male Literature” course in the spring of 2017 exposed this educational shortcoming, as had numerous works in other classes I have taught at CSI, including “The Lesbian Novel,” “Queer Studies,” “Writing HIV/AIDS,” and “The LGBTQ Short Story.”3 Counternarratives, however, offers a flashpoint for illuminating and addressing the systemic failure to teach black queer reading practices, for it conducts a radical formal experiment in crafting literacies of black human being in the New World. Literacies of black human being can be understood as a set of abilities, taught to us by narrative or, rather, counternarrative, for comprehending what has been made an obscured and often unreadable intersection: black human. And in Keene, always, black queer human. That Keene situates his experiment explicitly in the “New World,” beginning in 1613 and ending in the near futural twenty-first century, speaks to the “firstness” of the work he does over again and to the historical and geographical distances he is willing to travel to do it. Spanning four centuries, Keene’s counternarratives formally encode black literacy practices that open out onto a capacious understanding of black meaning and worldmaking. Central to this embodied and learned black epistemological project, queerness becomes part of the very syntax, the organizational principle, for making black people meaningful. Counternarrative’s service to blackness therefore contributes to the larger project of queer of color writers “to know and be known,” with special attention to the ways black bodily experiences and black intellectualism inform the creation of and access to knowledge.4
A reader, also called a primer, is typically understood as a text of first instruction. As primers go, Counternarratives is therefore unrecognizable. I should say this up front: in ways that are immediately obvious, Counternarratives is a difficult read. Fundamental matters of character, setting, and plot are only circuitously revealed, and even then textual questions are not easily answered without a rudimentary knowledge of Portuguese, of the history of the African slave trade in South America and the Caribbean, and of global black intellectual and creative culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My class was not familiar with the people and places that Keene, who is also a translator of Portuguese, French, and Italian, writes about, from Mannahatta and Juan Rodriguez to the quilombos of colonial Brazil to the Catskill creek where musician Robert Cole committed suicide in 1911. The narratives follow an exacting and indeed overwhelming chronology as dates abound and genealogies meticulously unfold. My class Googled furiously as we read. Who was Miss La La? Mário de Andrade? When was the Counterreformation? Was there really a United States Army Balloon Corps? Even the table of contents, which one would expect to serve as a key or legend for the thirteen stories that follow, defamiliarizes in its formal innovation. On the one hand, its shape suggests a highly intentional ordering and collection of its constitutive stories. While the titles of the first story and the final seven stories are very short (usually one or two words), the second, third, fourth, and fifth stories obey an entirely different titular logic. They are far longer and more convoluted:
On Brazil, or Dénouement: The Londônias-Figueiras
An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
A Letter on the Trials of the Counterreformation in New Lisbon
Gloss, or The Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows5
As one of my students pointed out, with these longer titles stretched wide across the top of the page, the table of contents forms the shape of a cross. Or a bird in flight. Or a totem figure, possibly androcentric. And while a cross makes sense thematically given the presence of Catholicism in the collection, any organizing principle revealed by this shape is at least in part undone when, unannounced by the table of contents, Keene divides the body of the collection into three uneven parts: I. COUNTERNARRATIVES, II. ENCOUNTERNARRATIVES, III. COUNTERNARRATIVE (this last comprising of a single, nonlinear, apocalyptic story, “The Lions”). As form breaks proliferate, Counternarratives seems intent on actively reimagining what is possible when writing and collecting short fiction together. Though Keene distributes maps throughout the text, they are too small to read. If the promise of a map is to orient, Keene’s maps (as well as his musical and literary allusions, his epigraphs, his typography) break that promise and instead become tools of defamiliarization.
The somewhat familiar kind of readerly problem posed by historical fiction (as exemplified by my class’s questions and the strange allusions in the long chapter titles) was compounded because we couldn’t recognize Keene’s black queer historiographic method. He doesn’t, for instance, simply rewrite history, though putting narrative in the service of black queer literacies means, in part, telling stories about black people that have been suppressed or untold as a condition of colonial rule and therefore as a condition of that master fiction, the Historical Record. Keene’s work of countering narrative goes further, undermining ideological assumptions of Western narrative: not just that the whole story has been or can be told, or that extant stories cohere into a grand teleological narrative, but that we already know how to read stories both told and untold. In fact, Counternarratives suggests that the stories we know how to read actively proscribe our ability to read otherwise. Ultimately, the black queer historiography of Counternarratives—its story-making method—teaches us to read fiction that does not depend narratologically on an underlying storytelling principle of antiblackness and antiqueerness. If Counternarratives is formally original even to the point of disorientation, and indeed reviews of Keene’s collection frequently position it as unique, “unlike anything I’ve read before,” it is necessary to grapple with the context of that disorientation and its pedagogical implications. Only in the face of the widespread inability to read and teach narratives working in the service of blackness must Keene craft stories of such formal innovation so as to work the disorientations experienced in the absence of antiblack narrativity into counternarrative.6 One of the lasting lessons of the primer for my class was that our educations have not taught us to read for, toward, in the service of queer blackness.7
If counternarratives put narrative in the service of blackness by writing black and racialized nonhistories back into the historical record, they also do so by countering some of the West’s most familiar stories, revealing them to have often been told in the quiet service of whiteness. Counternarratives thereby show whiteness to have been a structuring concern of narrative in the Americas since the sixteenth century.8 Keene tells readers something about the white stories we’ve been taught, something those stories have hidden in order to be told, something we have helped to hide by retelling and embedding them in the American literary canon.
Put in the service of blackness, counternarrative whiteness is not allowed simply to be. This does not mean that all of the white characters in the collection are “bad,” as though telling the story of white traumatization of black bodies could be sufficient for rendering blackness intelligible. It means, to the contrary, that whether white characters are foregrounded, backgrounded, or absent from these stories, whiteness is made visible and thus newly intelligible, given narrative meaning and narrative consequences, and that the very connection between white legibility and white meaning is made from the perspective of the most skilled interpreters, those characters with the most urgent need of expertise in seeing and making meaning out of whiteness: characters who know the mundane banality and life-saving urgency of black literacies.
Arguably, Keene puts counternarrative whiteness in the service of blackness most powerfully in “Rivers,” a story that accomplishes a breathtaking reorientation of perspective. This story, placed at the center of the collection’s thirteen stories, marks the moment in Counternarratives when my students literally gasped. “Rivers,” one student commented, was the story that the first six stories made possible to tell. The crucial epiphanic moment in “Rivers,” discussed below, therefore becomes a meta-epiphanic moment mid-collection, a moment where the unfamiliar fictions of the historical, geopolitical, and linguistic pasts of those earlier stories with long and confusing titles and plotlines meet the familiar fictional near-present in a renarration of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, told from the perspective of Jim.
Typical of the genre of short fiction, “Rivers” ends with an epiphanic moment that opens out onto dramatic interpretive possibilities. The pretext for Jim’s recollection, quoted at length below, is an interview about his service in the Civil War with a reporter who, standing in the place of the adoring American reader, would rather hear about “the time you and that little boy . . .” (219). Instead of that famous story, Jim, who as a free man has renamed himself James Alton Rivers, offers an untold one about the war:
. . . [C]reeping forward like a panther I saw it, that face I could have identified if blind in both eyes, him, in profile, the agate eyes in a squint, that sandy ring of beard collaring the gaunt cheeks, the soiled gray jacket half open and hanging around the sun-reddened throat, him crouching reloading his gun, quickly glancing up and around him so as not to miss anything. . . . [A]nd I looked up and he still had not seen me, this face he could have drawn in his sleep, these eyes that had watched his and watched over his, this elder who had been like a brother, a keeper, a second father. . . . [I] raised my gun, bringing it to my eye the target his hands which were moving quickly with his own gun propped against his shoulder, over his heart, and I steadied the barrel, my finger on the trigger, which is when our gazes finally met, I am going to tell the reporter, and then we can discuss that whole story of the trip down the river with that boy, his gun aimed at me now, other faces behind his now, all of them assuming the contours, the lean, determined hardness of his face, that face, there were a hundred of that face, those faces, burnt, determined, hard and thinking only of their own disappearing universe, not ours, which was when the cry broke across the rippling grass, and the gun, the guns, went off. (235–36)
In the black queer counternarrative, Jim Rivers is something of a swindler and sexual libertine, not the Uncle Tom figure of Twain’s novel. Using Roderick Ferguson’s queer of color framework in Aberrations in Black, Jim reads as a model of black nonheteronormativity, a model of queer blackness.9 More importantly, in the counternarrative queer black Jim does not try to protect Huck. He shoots him. And it seems, given that Jim narrates “Rivers,” that when “the guns” went off Jim’s bullet found its target, since Huck’s clearly did not. More importantly, the counternarrative does not just kill Huck. It de-individualizes him. Huck’s story changes from the prototypical narrative of an American boy’s ambivalent entry into manhood to a dangerously typical narrative in which the decision to fight and kill for slavery and racial supremacy makes all Confederate white men into the same character, each assuming Huck’s face. What, I asked my class, do we make of all those faces, all those soldier Hucks?
Initially, the class of thirty-five—only three of whom, myself included, shared Huck’s white male face10—fell into the trap that black queer illiteracy sets for us. We read Keene as humanizing the Confederate soldiers by making their faces into mirrors of Huck’s, the flawed, redeemable man-boy. Perhaps Jim sympathizes with them all or wishes it were possible to save them? But as Huck’s face becomes imaginable as the face of the South, the counternarrative inverts this interpretation, revealing that we have used a strategic prowhite literacy to misread the boy protagonist by mishumanizing him. Huck is but one racist in the monstrous horde that wears his same face. Indeed, this is what he has always been. We have been willfully misreading that face as universal rather than as capable of “thinking only of [its] own disappearing universe.” If Jim is to be real, the thing to be done with Huck has always been to kill him.
This counternarrative epiphany raises an important philosophical point, an ethical point, about our relationship as readers to narratives not countered. “Rivers” sets the stakes of its own absence and the absence of Counternarratives, the stakes of Huckleberry Finn existing alone in the world. In the absence of counternarratives, we can easily humanize Huck and dehumanize Jim by attributing to him superhuman sympathy rather than the human choice to kill. For those who love to read, including the room full of English majors with whom I read Counternarratives, to the extent that this new awareness causes us to revisit our literary love objects and our affect-laden histories of reading, the radical confrontation of racialized reading practices occasioned by encountering Counternarratives may well rise to the level of reading crisis. And liberation.
Counternarratives thus raises questions that seem at once remedial, as a typical primer does, and philosophical, as a typical primer does not: How do I read this book? What kind of book is this? What have I been reading? How have I been reading it? What does it mean to read as I have been reading? And what explains the informed illiteracy—or the ignorances created by dominant knowledge practices—at the intersection of black queer human that makes a black queer reader necessary in the first place?
Why should “black queer human” fail to signify and thus need to be made readable by a book like Counternarratives? Robert Reid-Pharr’s critique of humanism in Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique (2016) offers a partial explanation. Reid-Pharr argues that “[t]he Western philosophical traditions to which we have all been forced to pay obeisance represent not vessels of truth per se, but instead the quite specific discursive protocols and institutional procedures by which examination and discussion of human being has been delimited” (9). The “human” in humanism turns out to be not the expansive figure championed by “complex rhetorics of pluralism” but instead a narrow and filtered fellow, a mechanism of shrunken possibilities for thought. With “murky” inclusive language practices supplanting analyses of structural exclusions, “‘the black’ can be imagined much more simply and comfortably than he can be addressed” (7). To address “the black” in and through fiction would be to put literature in the service of blackness as part of a fugitive epistemological project that resists both exclusion from humanism and the general impoverishments produced by humanism’s crude tools for thought.
Reid-Pharr reanimates protocols for knowledge-making that center the experiences of black human being. Helpfully for my present chapter, his study calls for the invigoration of “the African American Spanish archive” (11), a project I take to be near the heart of Keene’s book as well. Tracing “rhetorics of flesh,” a kind of embodied literacy that has been used by black people to “access alternatives to the most vulgar of the humanist protocols” (11), Reid-Pharr reveals “not only enslaved persons’ awareness of their presumed status as chattel but also and quite importantly their resistance to this status, their self-conscious articulation of counternarratives of human subjectivity in which enslaved and colonized persons might be understood as both historical actors and proper subjects of philosophy” (9). Using the word “counternarratives” for a second time in his introduction, Reid-Pharr takes pains to “remind readers of some naughty truths. Slavery and colonization . . . produced any number of (un)bounded, (un)authorized counternarratives in which the many contradictions of racialism and capitalism were made patently visible” (12). Mikko Tuhkanen (2017) in his review essay of Archives of Flesh homes in on Reid-Pharr’s sustained critical practice of undoing ideologies of race, describing his intellectual project as “vulgarizing modernity.” Reid-Pharr’s vulgarizing method extends to bounded sexual identities and nomenclatures associated with modern knowledge production in the West that operate as markers not only of erotic imprecision but of the antiblack epistemological violence that co-creates them.
Like Archives of Flesh, Counternarratives indicts humanist philosophies as too thin to narrativize black intellectualism in the New World. It does so by providing a virtual catalog of fugitive epistemologies that emerge from the lived experience of black people under conditions of slavery, colonial expansion, and, in the U.S. context, “emancipation.” Keene is ingenious in the number of ways he writes embodied black philosophies into Counternarratives. Real-life philosophers appear in several stories, and Keene boldly philosophizes via characters who are not philosophers by training. In “Our Lady of the Sorrows,” the slave girl Carmel briefly considers her skills of divination in a moment of fugitive philosophizing: “In terms of my own will and gifts, . . . I had not yet developed a theory of knowledge by which to understand them. Or rather perhaps I had, but lacked a language to characterize and describe them. It struck me that the spells and the drawings themselves might be a language, but this seemed so exploratory and fantastic, that I set aside further consideration of it, and instead reflected, when the thought struck me, on the process of my experience and practice of those episodes” (145–46). Carmel understands her gifts as potentially having epistemological implications, but she defers exploration of a theory of knowledge and instead turns back to and invests value in the everyday phenomenological experience and practice of her supernatural gifts. Yet elsewhere, a black slave’s repeated escapes from captivity represent the unrelenting, embodied articulation of a freedom that is simultaneously rendered illegible in political philosophy’s classic terms of “the social order.” Similarly, archival materials reproduced in close proximity (an advertisement for a runaway slave followed several pages later by an inset of the Declaration of Independence) suggest a fundamental incommensurability, in this instance between slave and man, at the heart of Western humanist philosophy.
Yet Keene does not simply jettison Western thought and replace it with an idealized, non-Western black thought. The fugitive epistemologies created in Counternarratives form not by rejecting Enlightenment philosophy wholesale but by engaging it. Philosophical ruminations on themes such as duty and freedom thus emerge from within black experiences of New World slavery and clearly in conversation with liberal rhetorics that shape it: “Under the circumstances, are there any benefits to dedication, devotion, honor—responsibility?” (90). And later, “Within the context shaped by a musket barrel, is there any ethical responsibility besides silence, resistance, and cunning?” (105). “Persons and Places” explicitly reminds readers of the long tradition of African American and Spanish American philosophical interanimation rather than isolation. The story is structured temporally, hinged on a moment, though that moment is only a fleeting one as Keene pairs black philosopher and future leader in Harlem Renaissance intellectual and artistic circles, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the American-educated Spaniard, George Santayana. These thinkers, with their overlapping but misaligned orbits, later morph into a more convivial interracial couple in “Blues,” which extends the story of a moment glimpsed between Du Bois and Santayana into the story of an evening shared by self-described “poet low-rate” Langston Hughes, a virtual philosopher of black working classes, and Mexican poet and playwright Xavier Villaurrutia. Julian Lucas notes that this story is “a fantasy spun from the slenderest evidence: [Villaurrutia’s] dedication of an erotic poem to Hughes and the knowledge that their time in New York and Mexico City overlapped” (2017). A half-longing, half-suspicious instant of eye-catching between black and brown (or, to use Reid-Pharr’s preferred term, “off-white”) men in “Persons and Places” becomes in the “Blues” counternarrative an evening of dinner then sex that indexes a fleeting genealogy of embodied homoerotic black intellectualism and cultural production in the West.
Resonating with Reid-Pharr’s posthumanist philosophical intervention, Keene invents a counternarrative method of making queer black experience into vital knowledge. But if, as Reid-Pharr suggests, the protocols of black human being have not yet been fully collected and made legible as archives of flesh, it stands to reason that the work of counternarrative method will not be instantly recognizable either. Keene’s counternarrative work must be shared and shouldered by what Reid-Pharr calls “the wide-awake reader” (2016, 11) of the new archives. I have framed that intersection where counternarrative invention and wide-awake reading practices resist traditional humanist (il)literacies as a site of pedagogy. And if introducing any work of literature into the classroom for the first time can feel like equal parts voyage out and con job, Counternarratives seems even more urgently to raise the pedagogical question: How do I teach this unrecognizable, highly original collection? I suggest that the book’s uncommon originality can be understood as the very basis for its common value as a pedagogical text, for as a boundary object for black queer literacies it teaches new and indispensable ways of reading. In other words, we all should do the work of becoming wide-awake readers. Though not “an elementary school-book for teaching children to read,” Counternarratives enters the pedagogical gap created by standard white and straight reading practices in order to teach readers to counterread both black narratives and the white racialized stories that have overwritten them. By framing Counternarratives as a black queer reader, I hope to stage an unsettling pedagogical confrontation between readers’ current presumptions about their own literacies and Counternarratives’ unintelligibility.
My attention to the pedagogical implications of Counternarratives as a black queer reader and my discussion of the particular pedagogical scene in which I first taught the book play to my personal and scholarly interest in thinking about queer pedagogy as it intersects with minority race and class formations. But I am also pointed in that direction by a special characteristic of Counternarratives: it thematizes fugitive pedagogies. Secret educations and upstart knowledge practices help to structure this book. Slaves are polyglots, linguistic savants, self-educated readers. They invent sign languages and teach them to others, including their masters. In fact, roles of the learned Provost and the illiterate slave are reversed in Keene’s counternarratives, and powers of mind do not exist under pale heads alone. Queer black and brown readers, writers, and scholars animate this text, appearing as characters within individual narratives and as authors of Keene’s eclectic epigraphs. In short, the collection is explicitly concerned with black learning, fugitive study, and embodied epistemological struggle. My treatment of the book as a black queer reader attempts to gather together the various pedagogical moments of the text and then name the sum of the work they ask the reader to do: read in the service of black knowledge practices, including black thought, teaching, intellectualism, and genius.
The opening story offers a fitting preview of the fugitive pedagogical work of the entire collection in that it enacts a reading practice of entering language anew. Inverting official narratives of colonial exploration and expansion, “Mannahatta” tells the story of Jan/Juan Rodriguez, who in 1613 became the first documented non-native American to live on what is today called Manhattan Island in New York City. Rodriquez, born in one of the Caribbean’s oldest cities, Santo Domingo, was part African and part Lusitanian/Portuguese. As told by Keene, Rodriguez’s story not only subverts a specifically racialized history of “firsts” by making the first American immigrant black—and what an impact this simple detail could have on thinking about U.S. immigration today. It also reconceptualizes the logic of settler encounters with first people, in this case the Lenape, who were the original inhabitants of Manhattan Island. The Lenape envoy who serves as Rodriguez’s primary contact “had, through gestures, his stories, later meals and the voices that spoke through fire and smoke, opened a portal onto his world. Jan knew for his own sake, his survival, he must remember it. . . . [H]e could see another window inside that earlier one, beckoning. He would study it as he had been studying each tree, each bush, each bank of flowers here and wherever on this island he had set foot. He would understand that window, climb through it” (4–5). Rodriguez the settler refuses the role of colonial explorer. He plans, rather, to desert the Dutch colonizer’s ship on which he serves as translator for trading with the Lenape. Rodriquez thus allows Keene to conceive of multiple modes of translation happening parallel to imperialist language practices. Rodriguez will not use his linguistic talents to extract value from the first people. They have offered language as a portal, a series of portals, through which he might pass and, so passing, perhaps commune. The metaphor of passing through windows, of being swallowed up into the language of another, replaces colonial metaphors of contact, spread, and influence.11
Counternarratives further upends colonial narrative practices by thematizing the methods by which fugitive narratives are produced by technologies that range from the mechanical to the fantastical. How stories come to be told is of paramount importance, and in Keene’s experiment in black literacies knowing how to read means knowing the history of a story’s emergence. Keene inscribes the mechanisms of communication into his fine-tuned histories, richly detailing how narratives are recorded, transcribed, transmitted, handled, received, revealed, and read. Literacy technologies enable black resistance and produce black human being.
In “Counterreformation,” the fugitive cipher symbolizes the power of counternarrative technology to invert worlds. Using the colonizer’s own technology of encoded communication—a letter hidden within the binding of a book—the black fugitive writes not just in the language of the Portuguese colonizer but in the secret language practice of the colonizer. And it is via that secret language practice, moreover, that he readdresses the colonizer, personified here as a regional leader of the Catholic Counterrformation, in epistolary form. The letter, dated June 1630, begins:
DOM FRANCISCO,
I write you in the expectation that you will soon discover this missive, concealed, as you regularly instructed the members of the professed house in Olinda, during the period that you led it, within the binding of this book that has been sent to you and which you, having discovered the letter, have just set down. . . . The most valuable of all, however, is this written missive, as you will certainly soon agree. As you also shall see, you will gain full access to it only by the application of another trick you conveyed to those in your care, underlining how well your lessons took root, like cuttings, even in the distant fields. Thus the special care I have taken. If you should see fit, do let the lit candlewick linger upon this document once you have read it, as that would be in the utmost order, though it is of no matter to me, for it should be declared that I am beyond the reach of those laws, earthly or divine, that would condemn you, on the very fact of possession of the written account I shall shortly begin. (45–46)
Dom Francisco, located at the seat of knowledge, is here confronted by his multiple ignorances. Who is the author? How does he know the priests’ tricks for secreting missives? Though we soon learn that “[t]his letter sails to you, in its clever guise, out of an abiding desire to convey to you the truth of what occurred at [the outpost monastery in] ALAGOAS” (47), the unknown author begins with a rumination on the technology by which that ignorance is presently being exposed.
Exhibition of detailed knowledge of a technique for encoding story soon gives way to the story itself, “that series of events, unforeseeable at least to some of those who lived them, that inverted worlds” (47). As events build to the climactic inversion of worlds, the “civilized” priests who run the monastery in colonial Brazil and who are the local caretakers of the Catholic Counterreformation are revealed to be the rapists and torturers of the “uncivilized” African slaves, who themselves stand accused of all manner of sexual perversion and sodomitic abomination. The inversion of the civilized/uncivilized binary is personified in the narrator, who ultimately reveals himself as N’Golo BURUNBANA Zumbi, one of the former African slaves at the monastery at Alagoas. Because Burunbana, a Jinbada spirit worker, is “such a one who is both” (80), who sometimes appears male and sometimes female and whom “[s]ometimes the spirits fill and mount . . . as one and the other” (80), he offers an easy target for the priests’ accusations of defiling the monastic order through the performance of lasciviousness acts and diabolical rituals. Yet, in Burunbana’s gender multiplicity, his status as “such a one who is both,” we see the collapse of the distinction between his role as narrator and vessel for knowledge. He calls himself his people’s “instrument, their conduit and gift” (83). Burunbana has the ability to counternarrate his own story, to manipulate the communications technology and thereby invert the function of the colonizer’s cipher to serve his own purposes. He explicitly stakes out his own narrative position: “I ask only that you understand given all that has transpired since you last spoke face to face with any of those at that now accursed house, that some who have been condemned to the most foul contumely do reside, nevertheless, in Truth, and so this missive proceeds from that strange and splendid position” (48, emphasis mine). In this expanded system of black literacy, fugitive Truth narrative stands not on the periphery of knowledge or in simple opposition to it or even outside of it altogether but rather at its fullest point of saturation. Burunbana knows, for example, that the new Provost of the monastery, Juaquim D’Azevedo, also goes by a false name, one that hides his Jewish identity and his true intentions, the secret education of Jewish boys in the town whose families are also passing as Roman Catholics. Fugitive literacies intersect as, reading future and past, Burunbana oversees D’Azevedo’s escape from the monastery so that he can return to the practice of his faithful pedagogy.
When Burunbana reveals his identity to Dom Francisco at the letter’s close, he does so with an impossible reference: “for as my sister will write in the distant future, ‘it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive’” (83). Burunbana speaks Truth here with the words of Audre Lorde, black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet, whose lines from “A Litany for Survival” are pulled back in time from the twentieth century to the early seventeenth century. Keene’s reference to Lorde reiterates the earlier message that the “strange and splendid position” from which Burunbana counternarrates his story is not only black but also queer—and also literary. Through Counternarratives, queerness becomes part of the textual fabric of the emergent black meaning-making project. Lorde’s poem also enables Keene to set the stakes of this short story by linking the word to survival. The fugitive narrative is always also a story of its own survival. Black queer story is never, simply, there.
How does a black queer story make its way into being and then survive? My class had been thinking about that question a good deal throughout the semester as we read or viewed other works by black gay men. A narrative does not survive without readers who can make sense of it. And to make sense of black queer literature, as Keene’s fantastic use of Lorde attests, one needs other works of black queer literature.
By contextualizing Keene’s book, which my class read at the end of the semester, within a black queer literary tradition, we were able to rearticulate our “illiteracy feelings,” those affective experience of not being “wide-awake” readers with which Counternarratives forces a pedagogical confrontation. Following Sharon Holland, I have elsewhere explored the utility of using “tradition” as a framework for understanding gay, same-gender-loving, and queer black men’s writing.12 Here, I do not argue that this is the only or even the best way to contextualize Keene’s collection, but I do want to suggest that positioning it this way enabled my class to key into particular black queer reading practices. We were familiar, for example, with what Valerie Traub calls the opacity or obstinacy of sexual knowledge,13 having made the name of our course, “Black Gay Male Literature,” into an obstacle that could be productively used for rethinking racialized and sexualized epistemological standpoints. Black queer naming practices had been a steady source of debate in the course (Tongues Untied [1989] and the short documentary Passing [2015]), as had encoded writing strategies (Harlem Renaissance poetry); the contestations around masculinity and same-sex desire (Moonlight [2016]); the power of white, middle-class hetero- and homonormativity to put brown and gender nonconforming bodies at lethal risk (Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room); and the need to create life-giving historiographies of queer black lived experience (Looking for Langston [Julien et al. 1989]).
Following Traub, the sex/ “sex” we saw in Counternarratives stood in often ambiguous but productive relation to the sexual knowledge we had produced earlier in the course. Keene sets many of his counternarratives prior to the development of late nineteenth-century sexual and racial taxonomies. A bachelor plantation owner lounges between the thighs of his seated Haitian slave, who elsewhere in the story “moved through the house as if it were his” (98). Near the end of a long list of items found in the master’s trunk, Keene—without explanatory comment—places a “large carved and polished rosewood implement, like an arm-length squash, that smelled vaguely of the outhouse” (94). A young white mistress mistakes her slave’s dutifulness for devotion and, instrumentalizing her property, “would practice her affections” upon the slave. A black man in the service of a Union engineer during the Civil War flies an army hot air balloon from Washington, DC, back to his black male sweetheart in Philadelphia. The fetishized queer black female body, object not only of the common white male gaze but of the intertwining categorical compulsions of scientific racism and sexology in fin-de-siècle Western Europe, is pushed higher up her acrobat’s rope (represented by a slim vertical line of text) as much by the stares as by the voices of the men in the carnival audience below. The perspective will be reversed at the story’s close by another vertical line of text. This time “Miss La La,” whose real name was Anna Olga Albertine Brown, stares down the rope, fixing her eyes on the artist frantically sketching her, “Degas, le blanc, down there” (247).14
In all of these textual instances and many others, my class saw imperfect analogs to many of the sexual/racial issues we had been discussing all semester. But one particular relationship between Counternarratives and another work of black gay male literature enabled us to shake off our illiteracy feelings and instead position ourselves as competent black queer readers. Earlier in the semester we had read large portions of the collection Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (2007). Conceived by Joseph Beam, completed by editor Essex Hemphill, and originally published by Alyson Publications in 1991, the book represented the flourishing of writing by same-gender-loving black men in the 1980s and 1990s. Like Beam and later Hemphill, and like significant portions of their black gay male readership, many of the writers in Brother to Brother died of AIDS. The book fell out of print. To imagine the absence of Brother to Brother was a powerful exercise for many of my students in recognizing AIDS as a tool of un-knowledge, an intentional obfuscation that made black gay male sex resistant to understanding.15
The survival of this collection of black queer narratives, poems, and essays was not guaranteed. But Lisa C. Moore, who founded Redbone Press in 1997, recognized the immense value of the collection to queer black literacies and lives, and she reprinted the volume in 2007. Moore visited our class at CSI to tell the story of how the new edition came into being, of the challenges of securing permissions when authors have died, of the struggle to find next of kin when some families have abandoned their queer children. She told of locating men who had stopped writing or not, moved or stayed, lived in one way or another. Some of Brother to Brother’s authors were easy to find. John Keene was one of them.
Keene comes out of a history of writing by black queers where survival was not guaranteed and, as Lorde attests, not intended. His presence in Brother to Brother cemented for my class the connection between Keene’s work in Counternarratives and Moore’s work at Redbone Press. Their projects are bound together by a shared knowledge that black queer stories are not meant to survive and cannot survive if we do not put the books in each other’s hands and begin teaching ourselves and others, once more, to read.
1 First published by the Feminist Press in 1982 and republished in 2015, the document that best theorizes and operationalizes fugitive pedagogy continues to be All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith.
2 I use the term “literacy” in its general sense, “the ability to read and write.”
3 Implicitly I recognize the incredible burden shouldered by those educators, especially queer people of color, who teach queer black literacies at sites across the curriculum, for they teach against the active presence of antiblack, antiqueer educational histories and student preparations.
4 Ernesto Martinez suggests that queer of color writers have had “a recurring preoccupation with intelligibility, . . . a concern with the everyday labor of making sense of oneself and of making sense to others in contexts of intense ideological violence and interpersonal conflict” (2012, 13; emphasis in original).
5 This last title, it turns out, is an abbreviated—or rather, aborted—form of an even longer title that appears on the first page of the story itself: “Gloss on a History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic, 1790–1825; or The Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows.” The reason for this discrepancy emerges formally on the second page of the “gloss,” or superficial, historical narrative that opens “the” story, when the reader is redirected by way of a footnote to the “strange” story beneath. The footnote, extending for the next seventy-two pages, becomes the true story.
6 Aida Levy-Hussen, in How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation (2016), offers another model for disrupting normative practices for reading African American literature and, in particular, slave narratives.
7 In their 2017 collection Who Writes for Black Children?: African American Children’s Literature before 1900, editors Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane pose a related set of questions about blackness, reading, and the white supremacist historical record.
8 The connection between white need and story has been most convincingly articulated by Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992).
9 Jim and Huck have a longstanding critical association with nonheteronormativity, beginning with Leslie Fiedler’s influential 1948 essay, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!”
10 The counterreaders in this class, like most of my classes at CSI, were brown and black and ethnic white, mostly women and gender nonconforming, mostly working class or working poor, many first-generation and immigrant, all commuter students taking a three-and-a-half-hour night class, often coming from work earlier in the day.
11 Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s consideration of philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s notion of “the poetic” is apt in this regard (2014, 240–41).
12 See Sharon Patricia Holland’s Raising the Dead (2000, ch. 4), and my James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination (2014, ch. 1).
13 In Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, Traub argues that the epistemological value of sex, especially over time, lies precisely in its inscrutability: “[T]he opacities of eroticism—not just those aspects of sex that exceed our grasp, but those that manifest themselves as the unthought—can serve as a productive analytical resource. . . . [T]hese structures of occultation and unintelligibility are also the source of our ability to apprehend and analyze them” (2016, 4).
14 For more on Degas’s gaze, see “The Modern Woman Explores the Male Gaze,” by Robin Laurence (2010). For more on scientific racism and the construction of homosexuality, see Siobhan Somerville (2000). For more on the objectification of female carnival performers, see Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (1997).
15 Martin Duberman, in his 2014 dual biography of Michael Callen and Essex Hemphill, notes that “[t]elling Essex Hemphill’s story proved more difficult” in part because “Essex’s temperament was considerably more guarded than Mike’s” but also because of the paucity of material he left behind (2014, 10). Such absences in the black gay archival record are a result of the same racist, homophobic, and classist sociocultural conditions that create AIDS as a “tool of un-knowledge.”
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Baldwin, James. 1985. The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985. New York: St. Martin’s.
Brim, Matt. 2014. James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Capshaw, Katharine, and Anna Mae Duane. 2017. Who Writes for Black Children?: African American Children’s Literature before 1900. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Duberman, Martin. 2014. Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS. New York: New Press.
Fiedler, Leslie. 1948. “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” Partisan Review (June).
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 1997. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. 2014. “Nobody Mean More: Black Feminist Pedagogy and Solidarity.” In The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, edited by Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, 237–59. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hemphill, Essex, ed. (1991) 2007. Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. Washington, DC: RedBone Press.
Holland, Sharon Patricia. 2000. Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. 2015. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. 2nd ed. New York: Feminist Press.
Julien, Isaac, Nadine Marsh-Edwards, Essex Hemphill, and Bruce Nugent. 1989. Looking for Langston: A Meditation on Langston Hughes (1902–1967) and the Harlem Renaissance. London: Sankofa Film & Video.
Keene, John. 2015. Counternarratives. New York: New Directions.
Laurence, Robin. 2010. “The Modern Woman Explores the Male Gaze.” Straight, June 7, 2010. www.straight.com/.
Levy-Hussen, Aida. 2016. How to Read African American Literature: Post–Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation. New York: New York University Press.
Lucas, Julian. 2017. “Epic Stories That Expand the Universal Family Plot.” New York Times, September 1. www.nytimes.com/.
Martinez, Ernesto. 2012. On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Moonlight. 2016. Dir. by Barry Jenkins. New York: A24.
Morrison, Toni. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Passing—Profiling the Lives of Young Transmen of Color. 2015. Dir. by Lucah Rosenberg Lee and J. Mitchell Reed. San Francisco: Frameline.
Reid-Pharr, Robert. 2016. Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique. New York: NYU Press.
Tongues Untied. 1989. Dir. by Marlon Riggs. San Francisco: Frameline.
Somerville, Siobhan. 2000. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Traub, Valerie. 2016. Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Tuhkanen, Mikko. 2017. Review of Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique, by Robert Reid-Pharr. In American Literary History Online Review Series XI, June 13. http://academic.oup.com/.