of black transnationalism from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It fundamentally alters our conception of intellectual practice and genealogy through its difference, its chronology. Kay, with her aneċal relationship to world history and through her private circulation and reception of black cultures, offers a differential time scale against the epic historicity of public discourse. Containing not just surprising geographic movement but a disturbed chronology of black reception, Kay’s profile suggests a repetitive, looped version of diaspora in the form of “wax”—in the traveling objects, images, and sounds of Bessie Smith that become unaccounted for in archives. These gendered traces are more than exceptional, as they permeate the interior of cultural life more than perhaps any other intellectual form. There they threaten to linger in the space of the private, on a turntable or moved from house to house. This is a difficult diaspora, one that asks us to rethink our scale of significance and our lingering attachments to origin and traceability. But the tradeoff does not have to lose specificity as much as it critically asks us for more of it. To read Jackie Kay’s Bessie Smith as a diasporic intellectual profile, a document that characterizes queer and feminist politics at its center rather than its margin, is to recognize that diaspora is more radical, and more tenacious, than we ever thought it could be.
The timing of Kay and Smith’s jar contains the possibility to alter the past and future locations of diaspora studies’ known world. In the next chapter, I examine what happens when two poets consider the “known” world of black women, and black women’s bodies, as objects of study in the contemporary diaspora—riffing on C. L. R. James and following Jackie Kay’s work, they try to find a future in the past. What else can be said of the narratives of overexposure and exploitation of these bodies of history? Should they only be considered casualties of cosmopolitanism based on their tragic trajectories, or can the spare but exacting genre of the contemporary lyric give their circulations new meaning, as Jackie Kay repurposes Bessie Smith?
2. It’s Lonely at the Bottom: Elizabeth Alexander, Deborah Richards, and the Cosmopolitan Poetics of the Black Body
She never went into battle armed like the rest, but received the bullets of the enemy that were aimed at her, and returned them with fatal effect, in a manner of which decency forbids a nearer description.
—Herbert Thomas, Untrodden Jamaica (1890)
I longed for lovers or children or
invented dreams to fill the hollow
sleepless nights
(the pumpkin seeds that overnight bore
fruit to feed us was one, the bullets
that I caught between mi legs and threw
back at the enemy was another)
—Honor Ford-Smith, “A Message from Ni” (1996)
Jamaica’s mythic folkhero Nanny of the Maroons—famed for a story of catching colonial bullets in her bottom and, as described in the first epigraph, returning that fire—stands as a contemporary postcolonial and national hero through this fabulist, if indecent, narrative. The fantastic nature of her story lies in the apparent ridiculousness of its site, its centering on the magical bottom of Nanny. Nanny’s “notorious” bottom produces her as a public and political icon, allowing her to enter into the discourse of local, official, and transnational histories.1 This chapter argues that this material and narrative bottom has come to embody the range of possibilities for black women as cultural figures and producers, even as it accents the necessary limits of that range of representation; as one of the few visible woman “heroes” of the postcolonial struggle, Nanny’s historic success points to the presence of multiple diasporic failures to consider black women as political agents, particularly apart from their spectacularized bodies and sexuality. Like Jackie Kay’s recasting of Bessie Smith—the heir apparent to Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom2—Honor Ford-Smith represents Nanny’s body as both hopelessly in the “past” and constantly signaling toward “a future / I could not vision” (1996, 15). The “bottom” stands, then, as a familiar place for the discourse of and on black women’s representation. But as populated as it is, it remains an isolating and even exceptional experience to reference, beyond “nearer description,” in Jamaican constable-turned-travel-writer Herbert Thomas’s 1890 words.
This double signification of physical bottoms acts as the sign of both success and excess for black women’s cultural significance, the vehicle by which black women as icons are made visible and rendered fantastic and tragic simultaneously in the lineage of Western representation. In what Difficult Diasporas attempts to theorize, lament for the loss of “real,” and hence “ideal,” models for uplift and respectability across the black diaspora are telling, if limited, scripts to entertain the function of black women’s sexuality in popular historical discourse. Starting at the “bottom” can do more than account for exploitation or its converse celebration—of bodies or of the capital gains and losses that the bottom may mark. The previous chapter explored queer and feminist displacements of diaspora genealogies of location through mixed generic form. This chapter explores the complex relationship between the longing for nonexploitative historical visibility of black women’s bodies and the poetics of diaspora representation—and critical reception of that representation—that codes race and gender into their corporeal presences. These competing but interrelated desires demand, in the work of contemporary poets Elizabeth Alexander and Deborah Richards, the invention of aesthetic practices that can account for both impulses. Their work employs a poetics of the body, strategies of reference which explore the “bottom” as a rich if dangerous terrain for remembering black women’s public cultural histories, whether it is in a repurposed modernist tradition of interior monologue in the voice of Saartjie Baartman, a.k.a. the Venus Hottentot, or in a series of long poems using the nonnarrative structure of tables, text boxes, and quotations as references to black cinema star Dorothy Dandridge.
Through an innovative poetics of representation, and of referencing the “unseemly” bodies of black women’s representative and performative histories, Alexander’s and Richards’s texts disrupt the epistemological practices that have grounded mainstream critical discourse about black culture and history in the latter half of the twentieth century. The bottom, as both the flesh (the material locus of nineteenth-century racial and gendered difference)3 and taboo (the reference itself unspeakable or outside recognizable social limits and cultural imagination), acts as the most compelling organizing cite for Alexander and Richards to negotiate the form and the content of black women’s cultural (dis)appearances from both official and unofficial memory. In the breadth of their work, they reference bottoms to signify both range and limitation, the examples of the exceptions to the “rules” of racialized and gendered representation across the transhistorical diaspora. Poetic form, with its currency in signifying interiority and moving away from sites of narrative history, allows them to navigate this difficult territory without merely falling into the teleology of the bottom.
This chapter uses the metaphor of the bottom to reference three levels of critical engagement: first, the emphasis on black women’s bodies and sexuality as the central site of their subject formation in Western modernity; second, the narrative of black experience which takes as its poles exploitation and respectability, or exploitation and resistance, as the clear and opposing options for reading these public histories; and third, the critical discourse which relegates certain black women writers, particularly those deemed “formally innovative” within a postmodern framework, to the margins of visibility and, as such, the margins of “authentic” black culture. In Alexander’s and Richards’s differently accessible poetics, one of modernist legibility and one of radical literacy, the two writers engage the “bottoms” of the Black Atlantic, its uneven historical borders and interdisciplinary methodologies, not to mention its complex geographic routes. Referencing the persistent global circulation of these bottom-dwelling contexts offers, in the work of these contemporary authors,
