Kay identifies Bessie Smith as creating her own world, a network or genealogy of queer black women, but it is through the mark of performance that this network becomes visible and articulated, as well as how it “transports” to other imaginary and material worlds. Recorded performance, in object form, makes visible (both in myth and text) a world for Kay, even if she has to reconstruct that text in order to “see.” Her goal is a traveling reception that establishes a collectivity of racial identity through what is unspeakable, and unspeakably different, in the cultures of the Black Atlantic, rather than through similarity or authenticity.
Travel itself, then, is different for black women’s intellectual and performative practices in the diaspora. It is, as a model, a fabulous, and fabulist, performance of the diasporic subject. Like the world and the jar, or the global and the local, it is the relationship between paradigmatic African American and even Black Atlantic subjectivity (in the bluesman and the sailor) and that of black women that is at stake:
The image of the blueswoman is the exact opposite of the bluesmen. There they are in all their splendour and finery, their feathers and ostrich plumes and pearls, theatrical smiles, theatrical shawls, dressed up to the nines and singing about the jailhouse. The blueswomen are never seen wearing white vests or poor dresses, sitting on a porch in some small Southern town. No, they are right out there on that big stage, prima donnas, their get-ups more lavish than a transvestite’s, barrelhousing, shouting, strutting their stuff. They are all theatre. . . . It is all there in the blues: believable and theatrical at the same time. The opposite of social realism. Realism with a string of pearls thrown in. (1997, 64)
Like the day and night work of Harlem, genre does not lose its significance in circulation, critical or otherwise. This passage from “Wax” points back to the paradox of serious diaspora work, of wanting “authentic” documentation to bolster ideological worlds, passing up the jars that do not match up with our sense of authentic black experience—in content or in (corporeal) form. Whether it is the heaviness of the trunk or the shallow groove of wax, the record of diaspora studies is lost and found in any number of locations off the map of either “Bessie’s blues tour,” as documented in the text’s appendix, or the typical routes of the Black Atlantic. Black women’s innovative writing and intellectual practice is the territory of diaspora, “social realism” and visionary romance imagined “at the same time.”
Keeping Queer Time
Harlem, I grant you, isn’t typical—but it is significant, it is prophetic.
—Alain Locke, “The New Negro”
Both accidental and calculated, timing is everything in considering the blues. As the world and the jug, the possibilities and limits of Harlem as a geographic and ideological space, shift over time and space, black diaspora studies has been eager to map their transit, through and outside of Harlem as a vexed site of critical productivity—in particular, the “day work” of “night work,” or the recording of blues records themselves. In the middle of Bessie Smith comes a chapter titled “Wax,” which focuses on the making of blues songs as well as blueswomen as black cultural icons. Jackie Kay lets us know early that “the first blues recording was an accident,” even as she documents the racial-sexual exploitation that accompanied subsequent industry decisions regarding the genre (1997, 63). Like the souvenir that wraps both the intimacy and distance of diaspora, “time,” even more than space, can signify both linearity and interruption.23 This timing holds the orderly and disorderly as well as the continuity and breaks mapped earlier in thinking about Kay’s unusual relationship to location and specific diaspora cultures.24
This scale extends to models of constantly moving, “migratory subjects,” which threaten to keep diaspora constantly on the move, the haunt but never the territory of established critical practices.25 Thinking qualitatively about time’s relationship to diaspora suggests a new and refocused, if still capacious, organizing system for diaspora studies. “Time” can serve as a differential category in our analysis of the black diaspora’s cultural flows, with its modes of tracking and structuring rhythms, as well as being able to hold the long-term and the immediate. Time is a measurement, a way of gauging the expense and profit of history and culture. If the imaginary takes on propertied significance for Kay’s positioning of surprising diasporic connections, then time offers us a system, not just a haunt, to speak critically about their significance. As Judith Halberstam has cogently argued, “queer uses of time and space” (2005, 1) are more than just the tracks of discrete and recognizable identities; they are also reorderings of normative genealogies, those of “reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” (6), that produce “counterpublics” hewed to the geographies of unruly and nonnormative desire. Gender, sexual, and formal variety thus meaningfully changes the way we conceive of the timing of the contemporary black diaspora and, in turn, transforms diaspora as an analytical and critical category usually based on normative geography. Kay, though, does not present a world or time in opposition to these orders but in proximity to them—as race also and always disturbs geographic and intimate routes.
As “Wax” and my focus on timing suggests, music embodies this subtle shift, offering complete yet portable objects that are meant to invoke a range of affective responses. Bessie Smith violates “time and place” just as surely as Kay’s own engagement with the black diaspora does, offering up mobility, with musicality offering a flexible construction of identity for the performer and the audience alike (Frith 1996, 108–9). Speaking of Kay’s “textual journey” with Bessie Smith in a larger article about Trumpet, critic Carla Rodríguez González argues that Kay employs “biographical improvisation” akin to jazz performance, “adopting” Smith to “mark the continuity of a cultural line where conscious identification becomes a powerful instrument to subvert traditional identities” (2007, 89).26 The larger question looms of how we are to chart, preserve, or even create narratives of these new and difficult diasporas. If these forms are circulating outside of Harlem’s scope, can we imagine a looser archive, one not so tightly bound to a live and exact time and space? Kay finds just that in her constant use of an imaginary black cultural past not completely wed to historical or national correspondences. The “jar of Harlem night air” that emblematizes Bessie Smith’s legacy, the container for the floating remains of these tales, can, like music, maintain diasporic connections as material and as itinerant as the traveling done by Harlem artists and intellectuals themselves.
The text’s focus on place and travel in the blues seems to argue against a direct correspondence, hence why Kay qualifies the identification as an approximation. Even as Trixie Smith’s opening lyric to this book suggests a “real” gendered split, the music as object is always already straying, imaginatively taking Kay to a set of narrative locations that are not immediately or locally “real”:
The names of the blues songs transported me places, created scenes and visions. . . . Each name was enough to make up a story. That’s what I liked about the blues, they told stories. The opposite of fairytales; these were grimy, real, appalling tragedies. There were people dying in the blues; people coming back to haunt the people who were living in the blues; there were bad men in the blues; there were wild women in the blues. People traveled places, or wished they were someplace else in the blues. Could I be a St. Louis Gal? Or could I be Tillie? Might Chicago be a place I would go when I grew up? (1997, 10)
Kay immediately links blues to a sort of imagining of a future but also to an imagining of the possibilities of identification with other people (“Could I be Tillie?”), where, again, the blues blur the boundaries of “real” space and bodies. Likewise, the passage also suggests that what is important is not just “real traveling” but also the desire to imagine otherwise and other worlds. What draws the speaker to the blues is the ability to imaginatively travel, and what draws Kay to Bessie as an adult is to imaginatively re-create a queer history of black international practice and identification. In talking about Bessie’s performance, Kay’s “I” says, “When she sings on stage, part of her is travelling,
