slavery and colonialism but to nonchronological queer and feminist desires and losses.
Throughout Bessie Smith, “timing” is repeatedly named as Smith’s performative gift and is coupled with the narrative’s insistence on the “prophetic” (1997, 48) nature of Smith’s lyrical and biographical “promiscuity” (80); it can also be identified as the province of critical diasporic reception. Kay imaginatively renegotiates the circulation of Black Atlantic culture in the following scene between Bessie and Ruby:
But when I’m in the corridor, I hear her start up again, softly, this time singing, “St Louis Gal, Look what you done, done,” and I go back in and she’s wearing my dress and she’s dancing, swaying side to side like I do. I go up to her and I hold her hips and she takes me into her dance and I kiss her. It’s the first time I have ever kissed her. I don’t think I have ever had a kiss like it in my life. We lost all time in that kiss. We was dreaming, slow and soft. Her lips full and wet, moving with me, tracing my lips, finding my tongue. It was all so slow, so slow. We could have become something else in that kiss. I forgot the room, and where I was. I closed my eyes. I don’t usually close my eyes, but the one time I ever kissed Ruby Walker, I closed my eyes. It was like kissing myself. (86)
Here, it is the musical performance rather than the visual that conjures up a sexual encounter (Bessie returns when she hears Ruby sing her song after Bessie pulls her hair). Hooked by the song, Kay’s Bessie recognizes Ruby within a “lost time,” a reordering, in which queer desire between black women becomes out of time, much as Kay’s own forced reimagining of an exchange between the two women has to occur out of “real” or documentable time. This is akin to the future-time of the found trunk, when Smith’s recording of a “lesbian” blues song “will outsell anyone else’s, including kd lang” (58). Queer desire, rendered unrecordable, unwritable, unmemorable, and unremarkable within mainstream narratives of diaspora, travels piecemeal across Kay’s text, intersecting with an insistent and competing narrative desire to see the self as a familiar subject. Here is both the trauma and pleasure of recovery projects, in which exploitation and iconography afford an uneasy mobility for Smith’s marginal, innovative version of the feminist diasporic subject and Kay’s queering of that subject.
Blues, for Kay’s text, are communicating something perhaps different to the audience other than just a straight read of the lyrics, and that difference, too, is about a future time: “Her blues were like secrets, or shocking bits of news” (Kay, “The Right Season,” in Other Lovers [1993], 11). Here, Kay is arguing for a different mode of circulation in which that secret desire itself gets transmitted through the music to the listener, out of joint with the received meaning. This listening does not so much collapse difference as it expands the possibilities for conceiving legible diaspora experience of gender and sexuality beyond direct lyrical reference. Queer time is conjured as a musical, nonliteral mixing, as Bessie’s song transmits desire across subjects as a pliable and extraverbal exchange, available for a recombinant taking up rather than retaining a static value in the public culture market.
Kay plays with the idea of queer exchanges of diaspora experience by foregrounding a reordering of time. She identifies Bessie Smith as a queer icon not just in her profile but also in her poetry series on Smith in Other Lovers: “a woman’s memory paced centuries, / down and down, a blue song in the beat of her heart” (“Even the Trees” [1993], 9). The circulation not just of musical objects but also of songs and myths of performances, interactions, and exchanges becomes historical and deeply personal regarding racial difference. The poem concludes, “Everything that’s happened once could happen again” (9). The queer time which Kay maps is repetitive and returning, “pacing” time as well as constantly questioning the way that reception happens and is forgotten and is picked up again, precisely because of the research and back work that Kay has to do to remap Smith’s networks of desire.
What draws Kay’s text to the blues is their ability to imaginatively travel while also tracing alternate genealogies for diaspora, linking the reader and listener to the documented history of slavery and colonialism as well as the silences and desires created and sustained culturally through repeated aesthetic performances. Kay imagines black diaspora’s aesthetic relationship to time through Smith’s performative style:
She knows the timing. She’s got the timing just right. Doesn’t need to articulate it or even to think about it. It’s all in the length of her pause. It’s the way she hangs on to those notes when they are gone. . . . She is full of longing, full of trouble, restless, wandering up and down the long arms of the clock. When she sings on stage, part of her is travelling, reaching back into every hurt that’s ever happened. (1997, 43)
Like the jar of Harlem night air, Smith’s voice and her subjectivity (“She is full”), as signs, are “full of” the stuff of the blues—equal parts “longing” and “trouble,” desire and conflict. Smith is now located not just on the space of the “stage” but inside the “clock,” pacing time itself. Aesthetic practice and product, for Kay, is what “travels,” not just across space but through time, speaking to a range of desires never imagined by more traditional definitions of black diaspora identity.
Returning to the lyric which opens this chapter, Kay wonders in print at the literal meaning of the abstract “world” and “jug” metaphor, eventually settling on the unsettled aesthetic meaning of the blues, perpetually “open to interpretation” for Kay (1997, 49). But the complicated legacy of the blues rides on more than just a temporal and textual openness. Their timing is instead participatory and contingent on that participation: “They let you enter with your imagination and participate in the conflict” (119). More than just time traveling to the past and back, Kay imagines diasporic reception as the hang, the pause, the repetition of lyrics in a single song, again and again—the repeat of the same route but also of the form of the cultural artifact that can be passed and repeated at will, like Smith’s record in Kay’s childhood home.
The politics of Bessie Smith, as both a sign and practitioner of diaspora studies in Kay’s formulation, are as much past as future oriented. Locke’s own formulation of Harlem as “prophetic” suggests that the future is never far from the surface of many of our formulations of race, gender, and diaspora politics, building “temples for tomorrow,” establishing ritual and repetition for a time that has yet to come.27 “Futurity” is a principal construction of diaspora and its imaginative possibilities in the critical work of the feminist aesthetics outlined earlier. In addition to the persistent and thoughtful examination of the past, Kay’s text consistently imagines a world of meaning beyond historical and national time and even beyond death. It is in this time, finally, that the significance of the jar as a different kind of signifier for diaspora circulation comes into its own, specific power. As you will recall, Kay evokes the jar as one in a long list of significant artifacts that she imagines populating that lost “trunk” of Bessie Smith’s personal and professional effects. As one possibility among many, including documentary and material evidence such as photographs, diaries, and even fashion, the jar stands out as a strictly romantic gesture; its very impossibility as a proper vessel of preservation is in fact what characterizes it as noteworthy. In its failure to actually contain “Harlem” as a historical moment, the “jar of Harlem night air” still seeks to give shape to the imaginary legacy of Harlem’s night work. For Bessie Smith, the “world” is no doubt an enormous, impersonal reference. The jar, though, occupies the space of the everyday. It stands as delicate and, compared to the weight of “the jug,” suggests an intimacy between the critical world and the unpredictable resonances of cultural production that history alone cannot account for in total. Both typical and prophetic, ordinary and exceptional, the jar allows experience at the margins of the black diaspora to be transported across surprising times and spaces. The “stopper”—here the lid—keys us into uneven practices of use, the aesthetic and intellectual choices we make (and that have been made for us) of when and how much to dispense the imaginary properties of gender and sexual “difference” when confronting the black diaspora.
This
