The Map Where We Meet and Other Queer-Quare Stories
An Essay-as-Performance Set to a Double-Bass Score
Text and Script by Rommi Smith, 2016, 2017, 2018
Original Music Composition by Jenni Molloy, 2017
Contextual Note
This essay-as-performance1 develops out of what I am calling a “practice-steeped” doctoral research process, from which I emerge as a doctor of philosophy, via research within English and theater. To “steep,” meaning to infuse, or to imbue something with a specific quality or energy: this kind of practice-led research can only exist because it is immersed within (and has had time to absorb) the long-held practice within which it is situated.
My desire is to queer canonical academic method and convey research findings in ways that challenge traditional, accepted modes of presentation because I aspire to expand the essay’s capacities within an arts context. Inspired by the shifting, eclectic queernesses of the Black women blues and jazz musicians whom my research profiles, I employ a shifting cast of methods on the research stage: the lecture-as-performance, the lecture-as-protest-march performed on the stroke of midnight (in reference to Thelonious Monk’s “’Round Midnight” (1952) and now the essay-as-performance. It seems entirely logical that an essay written by a practice-steeped researcher and evolutionary of an arts-led, process-driven, scholarly study can reflect both the researcher’s art form and process. This essay observes academic citation and referencing protocols, just as the work of Black queer scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs does. Spill (2016), Gumbs’s brilliant genre-queer scholarly study, was an affirmative discovery for me just after I had written this chapter. In short, this essay queers the artificial and limiting binary between creative and critical, in order to reflect and delight in the dialectical practice-steeped process, via an essay that can only have arisen from this kind of process.
As I am a playwright and performer of text, my creative psyche is steeped in the conventions of playscript (complete with tech notes for a lighting designer). Thus, as a theater-maker I see the academic presentation for what it is: a script-in-hand performance of a monologue. I posit to the academic-unconscious that scholars (and, especially, arts-led scholars) presenting papers before a live audience are, in essence, delivering critical soliloquies; that the academic script is—even pedestrianly—performative. All scholars use sometimes muted, sometimes explicit, performative gestures: eye contact, muscle memory, vocality, pause, emphasis, and ad-libbed interjections, which, arguably, constitute improvisation. Scholarly text (just like creative text) is not just a vehicle for information but the conveyance of opinion, affect, and argument; similarly, the intention is to engage the audience within the world of a perspective in order to persuade, or generate understanding.
I present this essay in the form of multivoice dialogue. The aim is to decenter normative codes of academic presentation by facilitating multiple distinct (yet interlinked) speakers, each conveying a different facet or register of practitioner-thought. Singularly narrated modes of academic presentation are, arguably, canonical, privileging a didactic flow of knowledge (scholar to audience) and thus compounding traditional hierarchies of power. It is intended that class members (or a selection of class members) perform the script, collaboratively, for I posit that embodied knowledge (experiential learning born of participation, activity, and collective action) is realized in the body in a potentially more holistic way than text for which the body is purely recipient.
Further, in terms of textuality, the multivoice script is an attempt to depict praxis in action. The relationality between thought/experience and theoretical articulation has inspired the script’s range of voices: internal (thought) and external (articulations). It seems logical that thought takes the form of poetry—the form I consider the most intimate and tender of all registers, the one I associate most explicitly with feeling and experience. I depict a rhizomatic, creative, multiple consciousness. Such a concept riffs off and reframes W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness. For Du Bois, the term described a mode of hyperawareness manifesting in heightened self-surveillance, one impact of coping with discrimination. I seek to reframe the “two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” (Du Bois 1994) by exploring not only the concept of “selves” as a rich vantage point for creativity but (in reference to my wider research inquiry) the idea that creativity is one of many strategic responses to trauma. Indeed, jazz and blues constitute two of the ingenious responses by Black Africans—displaced by slavery, or Maafa—to trauma. Further, jazz and blues evidence the transformative power of utilizing creativity as a mode of agency.
Thus, multiple consciousness is a place of dialogue and self-expression. In the realm of the imaginary the scholar-artist’s cast of selves (researcher, practitioner, collaborator, writer, poet, lighting technician, performer, etc.) are in conversation and flux. My desire is to convey a practice-steeped research-state of perpetual wake and dream, giving rise to a dialectic of poetry and theory, which aims to “challenge the schism in the Western intellectual tradition between theory and practice and to valorize what I shall call ‘praxis’” (Nelson 2013, 5). Multiple consciousness resonates with my own intersectional identities (Crenshaw 1989). My positionality as a working-class, queer, woman of mixed heritage (I have a white English mother and a Black Nigerian father) is reflected in my nonbinaried, fluid choices in research methods. This is an approach I consider “intersectionality-as-artistic-method.” I’m a writer whose collaborative practice has (for the last twenty-five years) been to fuse written, spoken, and sung word with other art forms and, especially, improvised jazz. Further, my methodological stance is a statement against the isolationist “policies” upon which prejudice thrives—both within and outside of the academy. Conservative notions (perhaps, fictions) that demand neat (and, it is implied, pure) methodological binaries and singular modes of presentation are oppressive to an imaginative process. If all the doors were open in the House of Methodology, then one method could intersect with another leading to blurrings and queerings and, of course then, to new possibilities. One delight of queering method is that, surreptitiously, a method can appear to be one thing and then another: this is what Ezra Berkley Nepon calls “Dazzle Camouflage,” a reference to “the way that . . . non-conforming people can use [methods] to create awe and excitement, distracting from potential attack” (Nepon 2016, 9). The desire is to dazzle and disorientate in order to orientate: Is this a lecture or play? Is this an essay or poem? Is this a song or political speech? How many ways are there to articulate one’s practice inside the academy?
NB: This essay-script is intended to be read aloud. A different group member takes each of the performative roles in the essay cast list. There are several “researcher thoughts” and “researcher articulations”—each different number is a distinct role for one performer.
Tech Notes: Lighting Information
This essay-as-performance utilizes three states of illumination as method:
LX12—Blue Wash: Tuning into Queer-Quare3 Frequencies
LX2—Spotlight: Divining the Ghost-Document and Redaction-as-Revelation
LX3—Follow Spot: Rewriting-the-Record and Lecture-Keepsake
A slash (/) denotes an overlapping of thought and articulation, reflective of the different parts of the self in conversation with one another during the creative process.
LX1—Blue Wash: Tuning into Queer-Quare Frequencies
SX Cue Bass Track: 1
RESEARCHER THOUGHT 1: Dim lights to blue. Trace your finger the archive’s length. The frequency between now and then is spirit-thin; the place they intersect queers spatial dimensions. Listen. You’re tuning in to what you see and sense for pitch. What’s clear? The past is palimpsest behind the present-tense/.
Embodied Empiricism
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 1: At fourteen, I began tuning in to some of the great historical, Black jazz and blues women: Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday. I learned that the journey to school was the length of six Billie Holiday songs on a Walkman. It was a journey that took me past a café frequented by skinheads, members of the National Front—a white supremacist organization prevalent in the U.K. in the 1970s and 1980s. A sardonic maths teacher remarked:
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 2: “If you worked for your maths exam as hard as you listen to Billie Holiday, you’d get an A!”
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 1: I scraped a C.
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 2: My practice-steeped, transdisciplinary, auto-ethnographic doctoral research inquiry concerns re-presenting African American jazz and blues women as agents of social change and protagonists of twentieth- and twenty-first-century civil rights movements. As part of this project, I’m interrogating heteronormative representations of historic Black jazz and blues women, using both performance and poetics as tools. Further, I examine the impact of their body of auditory and visual performances upon the corporeal materiality of contemporary artists and scholars, evidencing the interplay between listening and constructions of selfhood, ontologies, and embodied or empirical knowledge.
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 1: What is pertinent now (from the positionality of being an academic researcher) is that at a pivotal time in the awakening of my own queer consciousness, I began—subconsciously—tuning into the frequencies of historical Black, queer-quare, jazz and blues women . . .
Tuning In
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 2: Tuning in is at once a serendipitous, yet strategic method that animates discussion regarding social relations, specifically in a context of marginalization and misrepresentation. Marginalized narratives are subject to white noise (Stoever-Ackerman 2010). Channeling W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of the “visual color line” (1994), Stoever-Ackerman defines white noise as the Sonic Color Line: a hegemonic, sub-aural frequency reflective of societal power dynamics, deciding what and whom is heard (Stoever-Ackerman 2010). Tuning in is a sonic, affective counter to white noise, providing a means by which one accesses both external and internal registers of pitch as survival strategy. One follows hunch, clue, intuition, and sensation (the key hallmarks of trace evidence) in search of the substance of soundwave and story (Hannula, Suoranta, and Vaden 2014; Harper 2005; Kershaw and Nicholson 2011; Muñoz 1996; Walker 1989). One might not quite understand one is tuning in (or, indeed, needed to tune in at a particular point in time), but one does by reflecting in the river of hindsight.
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 1: Several leading Black jazz and blues women, from Ma Rainey to Big Mama Thornton, Nina Simone to Josephine Baker, Billie Holiday to Bessie Smith—were queer-quare women. They either had romantic relationships with other women or challenged gender binaries and, in some instances, did both (Baker and Chase 1993; Blackburn 2006; Davis 1999; Lieb 1981; Light 2016; Sporke 2014). For example, Ma Rainey wrote and recorded “Prove It on Me Blues” in 1928. The song’s female singer-narrator tells us that she flirts with women, “wear[s] a collar and a tie”—and unashamedly expresses her butch identity:
. . . I went out last night with a crowd of my friends,
it must’ve been women, ’cause I don’t like no men.
Wear my clothes just like a fan,
talk to the gals just like any old man,
’cause they say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me,
sure got to prove it on me. (Rainey 1928)
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 2: On stage, through the mask of character, Rainey celebrated her own desires for other women. Rainey’s live and recorded performances are premonitory of several of the “Seven Demands”4 of the Women’s Liberation Movement (1970–1978). From the right to financial independence to a woman’s right to define her own sexuality, Rainey’s performances were assertions the WLM wouldn’t articulate for five further decades (Davis 1999, 40). Yet, victimology stereotypes have dominated historical representations of Black blues and jazz women. These stereotypes intertwine with heteronormativity, producing images of downtrodden women in codependent relationships with men.
However, in both domestic and public contexts Black queer-quare women were performing resistance. They performed civil rights in lyrics, as well as in recorded, live, and off-stage performances. By virtue of their lives as successful working musicians, Rainey and others articulated their political demands through the blues. In doing so, they disrupted sociocultural expectations regarding the status of working-class Black women. They sang sonic frequencies I term “blue-lines.” Blue-lines aren’t only overt political messages, but a form of what poet-scholar Fred Moten calls “an abundance that accrues especially at moments . . . when things sound ‘edgy maybe garbled at points,’ when ‘ears literally burn with what the words don’t manage to say’” (Moten 2003, 122).
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 1: Each of these women sang blue-lines into being; composing them from the pitch of moonlight, the color of change and the refrain of stars hung on staves of infinite possibility called night. Blue-lines constitute the blues beneath our feet: a political guide. Their reverberations and manifestations can be found within, for instance, the second wave of the official feminist movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Pride march.
In planting blue-lines in the earth (as sonic undertone), historical Black blues and jazz women were not only forerunners of later social movements but guides for queer-quare, working-class, mixed-heritage girls walking home alone from school down the long road of prejudice. By tuning into these musicians, at fourteen I accessed a cultural and political score that not only became my companion as I navigated the terrain of early adulthood but also served to (sonically) orientate me (Ahmed 2006). Sound came before sight: audibility fueling my own visibility.
LX2—Spotlight: Divining the Ghost-Document and Redaction-as-Revelation
SX Cue Bass Track: 2 (slow fade in)
RESEARCHER THOUGHT 2:Shine a light in this direction (where spatiality confers with ink and time), then see how the past might leave behind more than a clue, or trace: queer Black marks upon the straight White page . . .
The Ghost-Document
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 3: My inquiry is concerned with invisible presences. It celebrates women whose voices are archived on vinyl wax, the medium through which they sing to us in the present tense. I come from a line of women who “sense things”: a mother, an aunt, and a cousin who receive spiritual messages. Those attuned to the presence of the “invisible” are mediums, “channelers” of spirits. Our role is a duty of convincing often-disbelieving audiences of contested presences. The academic engaged in resurrecting repressed knowledge is like the medium: we speak to (and narrate) the ghost—the thing that is culturally, or intellectually, invisible. We facilitate the revenant’s comeback, evidencing where it has been—declaring the significance of what it has to sing.
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 4: The ghost-document is the invisible presence inside the archive: the visceral document, perceptible to the gut; suggested by the intersection of two, or more, literal documents, for example: a diary, a notebook, a letter, a recording, a photograph, a newspaper article, a drawing. At the nexus between literal documents, the ghost-document is felt, sensed to be there; its existence, conjecture-as-explanation for the connection between physical documents. In poetic terms, the nexus or crossroads is metaphor. Adrienne Rich beautifully summarizes metaphor as “the crossing of trajectories of two (or more) elements that might have not otherwise known simultaneity. When this happens a piece of the universe is revealed as if for the first time” (1995, 8). The ghost-document resonates with Phillip Brian Harper’s “speculative rumination” (2005, 108); it is politically and historically charged, precisely because it is both a demand that the unseen is acknowledged—and a response to disappearance.
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 3: Hélène Cixous posits that the craft of writing is a response to the experience of disappearance (qtd. in Sellers 2003, xxvi). Thus, writing is a method of rejecting invisibility; a protest statement against denial and absence; a witness statement of existence: I mark the paper, therefore, I’m here my dear oppressor. Listening, too, in a queer-quare (and intersectionally queer-quare) context, is linked to the experience of disappearance. Listening, or tuning in, is a method of protesting erasure. Tuning in requires that one rejects silencing, affirming existence. By tuning in, one listens not just to literal sound but to metaphorical sound: to the spaces in between, the unsaid that whispers in the gaps within the dominant archive. Such listening requires tuning into the submerged, suppressed, or distorted narrative held beneath the surface of history’s hegemonic waters (Rich 2017).
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 4: The poet is, metaphorically, a diviner (Heaney 1980). We follow the desire to name what is felt or sensed (Lorde 1984, 37). We name what we find in order to realize it, in order to make visible and testify to a presence. The writer is a conduit, a medium sensing the liquid shape of a narrative body; by tuning into the past tense, the writer becomes a resurrection technician.
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 3: Yet, dominant knowledge accuses the ghost-document of lacking the rigor of which it is assured. Taking no account that “archives of queerness are makeshift and randomly organized, due to the restraints historically shackled upon minoritarian cultural workers” (Muñoz 1996, 6–7), demands are issued for stability, promise, and certitude—the very things that the ghost-document, inherently, cannot be. Indeed, dominant knowledge misconstrues the ghost-document’s positionality: to queer what knowledge is or can be. A composite of sensation, ambivalence, whisper, rumor, and trace, the ghost-document is real by virtue of being apparitional and manifesting in many guises.
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 4: In Performing the Archive, Simone Osthoff writes, “Artists’ reflections of representation, vision, and the invisible often alter the conventional boundaries of fiction and non-fiction” (Osthoff 2009, 11). The ghost-document is the invisible, the vision that alters the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. The knowledge of the existence of the ghost-document (resurrected from the dead and made flesh by the writer) is a reparative narrative: a narrative that repairs absence. To write the ghost-document is to contribute to the queer-quare imagination. So, how can we, as writers, realize ghost-documents within the archive?
Redaction-as-Revelation
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 3: Historically, redaction is an archival technique whereby parts of the original meaning of a text are “blacked out” or concealed, often to protect information deemed a risk to institutional, or national security. Blackout poetry was made popular by writer Austin Kleon (2010). With a blackout poem, the poet utilizes redaction not only as a tool for achieving poetic compression but as a device to subvert newspaper articles.
Christina Sharpe (2016) identifies Black redaction’s utilization by artists in service of what she terms “wake work” (113): work alive to, and keeping vigil for, Maafa’s ever-present-tense trace upon the contemporary. In solidarity with Sharpe’s ethos, I utilize redaction as a means of generating queer-quare readings of archival documents: opening up printed texts to multiple alternative readings and, at the same time, releasing them from “Compulsory Heterosexuality and [Queer-Quare] [in]Existence” (Rich 1994).
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 4: Marginalization’s adjective accomplice is immateriality. However, in my research I welcome the spiritual manifestation of the word (in its philosophical coat), an ethereal, ever-present force of transformation inside the intellectual house of debate.
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 3: In utilizing midnight’s sable-ink upon the moon-pale page to divine possible meanings (perhaps potential, unconscious desires) within a document, redaction becomes a method not of obfuscation but of revelation. Therefore, I propose a methodological term: “redaction-as-revelation.” This method functions via paradox: by “blacking out” text, its aim is not to hide or delete (with all the word’s ominous overtones in a context of oppression) but to rejoice in the transformative powers of the substance, or body of blackness, and its encounter with the white page. With redaction-as-revelation, black ink is protagonist “fleshing out” queer-quare narrative space within historical consciousness.
Billie Holiday and Tallulah Bankhead
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 5:
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 4: In January 1949, charged with opium possession, Billie Holiday, known as Lady Day (who, in March 1948 was released from prison after serving time for narcotics offenses), was suicidal, fearful of another prison sentence. The actor Tallulah Bankhead (Holiday’s friend and purported sometime-lover) not only arranged and paid for the services of a psychiatrist for her, but she wrote to J. Edgar Hoover (then director of the F.B.I. and a family friend)5 in an attempt to ensure Lady Day’s continued liberty (Blackburn 2006, 137):
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 3: I read Tallulah Bankhead’s letter and sense another document behind it: the ghost-document. The ghost-document offers interpretations of Bankhead’s motivation. Hoover is a man of status and power. For a woman who states in her letter she has met Holiday “but twice in my life,” Bankhead appears to be going to a lot of trouble (evidencing affection, loyalty, and the emotional and professional risks she is prepared to take) for Holiday. Bankhead, appealing not only to Hoover’s egotism but to his prejudices, deploys complex, yet strategically placed paternalistic imagery designed to denote collusion with—and thus deference to—Hoover, renowned for his Southern, White, racist beliefs. Infantilizing Holiday (whom she describes as “a child at heart”), she deifies Hoover, writing: “as my Negro mammy used to say, ‘When you pray, you pray to God don’t you?’” In writing to Hoover, Bankhead accesses the highest echelons of American political power in pursuit of mercy for Lady Day.
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 4: My hunch that there is another story to Bankhead’s letter leads me to biographer Julia Blackburn’s book, With Billie (2006). The book contains a series of interviews with people who knew and worked with Holiday. Detroit Red (a dancer-friend of Holiday’s) states that Tallulah Bankhead was a lesbian, though Bankhead self-referred as “ambisextrous” (Stern and McKellen 2009, 39). Blackburn considers the trace evidence of Billie and Tallulah’s romantic relationship describing how “for several months Tallulah followed [Billie] wherever she could” (2006, 136), sitting on the front row every night of Billie’s performances at the Strand Theatre in 1948. Jose Esteban Muñoz theorizes:
Queerness is often transmitted covertly. . . . [L]eaving too much of a trace has often meant that the queer subject has left herself open for attack. Instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has instead existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances . . . , while evaporating at the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility. (Muñoz 1996, 6; emphasis mine).
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 3: “Queer possibility” is the love notes, the pillow talk, the “speech d’amour” between Bankhead and Holiday. By utilizing redaction-as-revelation, I can reveal the possibility of Bankhead’s hidden “love note” to Billie, in order to provide a potential version of their story.
SX Cue Bass Track: 3 (fade low)
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 5:
Dear Billie
I tremble when I think . . .
Me: twice the passion for knowing;
a child at heart whose troubles have made her, herself.
You: the law to lighten her burden.
Bless you.
(Smith 2016)
SX Cue Bass Track: 3 (fade out)
LX3: Follow-Spot—Rewriting-the-Record and Lecture-Keepsake
SX Cue Bass Track: 3 (fade in)
DESIGNER PROVOCATION 1:What do you want the audience to take away with them?
RESEARCHER THOUGHT 3:You know that feeling, when what you’re left with is a fragment of the story and when you touch it it’s like a little follow-spot of light (just as a Midnight Special illuminates the dark)—and it reminds you (like an alibi), just what you witnessed? That feeling [pause], that feeling, yes—
Rewriting the Record
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 6: During an attic clear-out, I rediscover a business card printed onto old vinyl. In the same time frame, director Juliet Ellis suggests I punctuate the lecture-as-performance with moments of vinyl played on a small, midnight-blue, portable Crossley record player. I reflect: matrix numbers are the ghost-script at the heart of vinyl. Dedications, dreams, or plain numeric code are marked on the “dead wax” at the center of each Black sound world; each compressed articulation a coded message, hidden. To read the code, the record has to be held to the light and deciphered. Matrix codes resonate, conceptually, with queer-quare methods and their fruit: queer-quare narratives. Thus, vinyl becomes inspiration for Mat Lazenby’s design of a lecture-keepsake. The keepsake encourages audience contemplation and research, post-performance/.6
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 7: The word “record” comes from the Latin, meaning “to pass through the heart again.” The persistent, official “stuck record” of Billie Holiday’s narrative body spins on the turntable of history, the pathological needle passing again and again through its heart. Each time the dominant, hegemonic “A side” of Holiday’s narrative body sings, the needle is passing through the Black vinyl moon and she dies her socially constructed “pathography” of a death. Pathography is the clinical term meaning to write about illness. Joyce Carol Oates uses the word to mean a “diseased biography” (qtd. in Couser 2006, 162). A diseased biography is a psychopathologic study of its namesake’s negative behavior, at the expense of profiling their accolades and achievements.
SX Cue Vinyl: Billie Holiday’s recording of “Strange Fruit”
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 8: The heteronormative image of Holiday portrays a Black woman dependent upon white, heterosexual, male insight; a political ingénue; an intellectual subordinate, coerced by white men into singing her most famous song, “Strange Fruit,” because she was unable to comprehend its lyrics. Two sources illustrate this: in “Strange Record,” a Time magazine article dated 12 June 1939 (cited in Margolick 2000,n.p.), Billie Holiday is described thus:
Billie Holiday is a roly-poly coloured woman with a hump in her voice. . . . [S]he does not care enough about her figure to watch her diet, but she loves to sing. . . . One number . . . she particularly wanted on wax. Called Strange Fruit . . . its lyric was a poetic description of a lynching’s terrible finale. Billie liked its dirge-like Blues melody but was not so much interested in the song’s social content.
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 7: In Soul Music, Strange Fruit, a 2013 documentary for BBC Radio 4, the paternalistic stereotype is repeated:
According to Barney Josephson [the owner of Café Society], she didn’t really get the song, it didn’t really sink in . . . but she . . . agreed to sing it, because he wanted her to sing it. Before long, she fully embraced the song and everything it represented, and she took it extremely seriously.
SX Cue Vinyl: fade down “Strange Fruit”
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 6: How can we play the unheard (or underheard) B-side of Holiday’s narrative? How can we change the record, so that a different music can be heard?
SX Cue Vinyl: Billie Holiday’s “Summertime”
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 8: Holiday, a Black, working-class, queer-quare woman, is the teacher of presidents. President Barack Obama wrote:
Behind me, Billie was on her last song. I picked up the refrain, humming a few bars. Her voice sounded different to me now. Beneath the layers of hurt, beneath the ragged laughter, I heard a willingness to endure. Endure—and make music that wasn’t there before. (2008, 212)
SX Cue Vinyl: “Summertime” (slow fade)
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 6: Lady Day beguiled the ear of the forty-fourth president; she sang him the melody (not for a song called “Pathography” but) for a tune called “Endurance.”
SX Cue Vinyl: Bessie Smith’s “On Revival Day”
This singing of courage, these notes of resistance sung by the singer, are heard by the listener across the staves of the decades.
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 8: In 1961, James Baldwin spoke of the time he arrived in the Swiss mountains, with two Bessie Smith records and a typewriter. Baldwin, struggling to finish his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, said:
I finally realized that one of the reasons that I couldn’t finish this novel was that I was . . . ashamed of the Blues . . . , of Jazz . . . , all of these stereotypes . . . the country inflicts on Negroes, that . . . we all do nothing but sing the Blues. . . . [A]s far removed from Harlem as anything you can imagine, with Bessie Smith and me . . . I began. In this isolation, I managed to finish the book. . . . I played Bessie every day. . . . I corrected things according to what I was able to hear when Bessie sang. (2014, 4)
SX CUE Vinyl: fade after Bessie Smith sings: “Lordy, Lordy”
Lecture-Keepsake
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 9: Bessie Smith, the soundtrack to the imagination of struggling novelists, each one, just like an audience, carrying a fragment of the record home through the uncertainty of darkness. Each fragment designed to be a follow-spot of light which illuminates a research-journey: past eureka-moment-Post-it-notes; doodle-maps of daydream-thoughts; notebook lists of things to say; the Day-Glo-colored research facts in photocopied articles; the piles of books (the ones to love, the ones to leave); magazines (best lines and quotes torn out for their pertinence); and must-be characters with ballpoint veins, who sleep between the blue-feint lines (between the margin and the spine), who always whisper loudest when they think that thought’s abandoned them. Peter Turchi writes:
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 10: “To ask for a map is to say: ‘tell me a story’” (2004, 11).
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 9: But to rewrite the map is to rewrite the record. The record is a witness: a witness is a measurement of a distance in space, or time. Look what happens when we meet on the journey of change, the record our witness, which acts as a measurement of the distance between where we are now—and how far we have come.
SX Cue Vinyl: Ma Rainey’s “Prove It on Me Blues.” We hear the first verse of the song, then
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 6 sings, or hums along, then:
LX3: fade out in time with song fade.
Fin.
Post-Script
SX Cue Bass Track: 4
Citation-as-Poetry
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 11: Within a linguistic universe, the poet and the scholar share a skill and a challenge: to distil large-scale paradigms, complex concepts, or experiences into elegant, striking, memorable language. As an artist-scholar engaged in practice-steeped inquiry, I’ve been reflecting upon how I can synthesize both of those roles; the result is citation-as-poetry: an expression of the journey of engagement with key academic ideas, using poetry.
RESEARCHER ARTICULATION 12: My practice-based process sets its compass toward justice. It traverses what Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology observes as the “spatiality of . . . desire” (2006, 1). It follows the “trace, the glimmer[s] . . . and specks” of Jose Esteban Muñoz’s “Ephemera as Evidence” (1996, 10) in search of the river of what Marina Abramovic terms “Liquid Knowledge” (2016, paragraph 10). Upstream, it finds Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow state (2002) and there—via Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings (2003)—it enters the landscape of Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic thinking (2011); here, it tunes into Audre Lorde’s “concert of voices” (1980, 31) and sings a queer pitch of Fred Moten’s Blackness and sonic resistance (2003).
Acknowledgments
Big thanks to: 125th and Midnight—electric presences who have touched this research process: Juliet Ellis (director and filmmaker); Jason Hird (dramaturg); Jenni Molloy (composer and musician); Mat Lazenby (designer); Professor Ros Steen (vocal director); Hazel Holder (dialect coach); Tenzin Haarhaus (studio engineer, U.K.); Marie Millward (equipment, U.K.); Matthew Elliott (technician, U.K.); Brad Burgess (technician, U.S.); Ruth Steinberg (project runner, U.K.); Terry Simpson (project runner, U.K.) and Lynette Willoughby (artists’ bookmaker, U.K.). Special thanks to Jason Hird, who so generously worked as dramaturg during the process of developing this piece.
The Archives Libraries and Museums Conference (ALMS), 2016
Matt Brim, Associate Professor of Queer Studies, College of Staten Island, CUNY
CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at CUNY
Sean Edgecomb, Assistant Professor of Theater in the Department of Performing and Creative Arts at the College of Staten Island, CUNY
Matthew Elliot, Doctoral Researcher, Leeds University, England
Amin Ghaziani, Associate Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Sexuality and Urban Studies, University of British Columbia
J.H. and N.H.
The Harris Family
Mike Love
Jan Pimblett, Principal Development Officer, London Metropolitan Archives and co-organizer of ALMS, 2016
Maggie Pearson
Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, Leeds University, England
Library staff, Graduate Center, CUNY
Lynda Plummer
Jeremy Poynting, Managing Editor, Peepal Tree Press, England
Donald Springett
Ros Steen, Professor Emerita, the Royal Conservatoire, Scotland
Frank Hentschker and the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, New York
Jane Taylor, Andrew W. Mellon Chair of Aesthetic Theory and Material, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa
Polly Thistlethwaite, Professor and Chief Librarian, Graduate Center Library, CUNY
Fiona Williams, O.B.E., Emeritus Professor of Social Policy, Leeds University
Evie Wilson-Lingbloom
Notes
1 This essay-as-performance is intended to be read out loud. It began as a twenty-minute lecture-as-performance, set to a double-bass score; a collaboration with director, actor, and filmmaker Juliet Ellis and musician and composer Jenni Molloy. The lecture was given at the Bishopsgate Institute, London, for “Without Borders: The Archives Libraries and Museums LGBTQ+ Conference,” ALMS, 2016. At the invitation of the City University of New York’s CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies, Graduate Center Library and Graduate Center PhD Theater Program, the lecture was developed into an hour-long solo piece in partnership with my company of collaborator-makers, 125th and Midnight. The lecture text (both spoken and sung) is fused with music and film: rommi-smith.co.uk/the-map-where-we-meet/.
2 LX and SX are lighting and sound codes, respectively; part of the lighting “plot” within a theater technician’s performance-script. As a poet and narrativist, I’m fascinated by metaphors within theatrical terms such as state, or plot. I employ such terms with narrative and political connotations in mind. Here, the lighting plot (with plot’s double-meaning of story) is utilized to politically illuminate hidden queer stories.
3Quare is a reference to the work of E. Patrick Johnson, who employs this vernacular term to describe “nonnormative sexuality” (Johnson 2005, 124). I’m exploring use of the hyphenated term queer-quare to acknowledge the political use of quare by (among others) Black, Irish, and working-class scholars, but also to reference queer—to which quare is a response. In an essay that explores multiplicities of the self, I propose the working-dualism queer-quare as a term capable of holding the differences, choices (and also tensions and contradictions) within debates concerning self-definition.
4 Between 1970 and 1978, attendees at eight Women’s Liberation Movement conferences produced the “Seven Demands,” a working manifesto aimed at women’s liberation.
6 The lecture-keepsake was placed in a midnight-black envelope, which was sealed and marked with the words: “do not open, yet” and placed under each theater seat. Keepsakes were intended to be cut from vintage vinyl. However, production investigations revealed the cutting method would release chlorine gas. Alternative cutting options proved vastly expensive for production budgets, so a high-quality card version was produced. Each piece of record contains a research provocation: a “clue” in the form of a stanza from a redaction-as-revelation poem. A purpose-built webpage (only accessible by those who were at the lecture and have “a piece of the record”) reveals the full redaction-as-revelation poem I created especially for the lecture-as-performance. The inclusion of my business card in the keepsake envelope was designed as a prompt for feedback and dialogue.
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