Queering the Narrative

A Testimony

Image | Getty

Queering the Narrative is a workshop I co-created with The Free Black Women’s Library and facilitated on August 21, 2022 for the Library’s Black August community engagement series. It was the first workshop that I designed; around books that have influenced my writing practice and books that offer insight into the writer’s point of view on the page.  These books are radical in content but also wildly inventive in form. All the authors in many ways live and have lived queer lives, all the authors are Black, and at odds with the state of precarity we all live in. It was roughly two and half hours long, there were about ten participants, ranging in age from 16 to their 40s. Below are the flyers. 

Images | The Free Black Women’s Library

I want to keep on with the theme of acknowledging wins, and in this case for me, milestones. What I am learning about myself, especially in this nascent time of my life as a working writer is that I am changing and transforming to become more of myself.  However, my emotional expectations are very different than what I experience. I share more below about this internal tension.  

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As I merged into the expressway lane marked “Brooklyn/Staten Island,” I had to calm myself- the anxiety of being late overtook my mind.  The time on my phone’s GPS revealed that my tardiness would be less dramatic than I feared, only five minutes.  Being late to things, has been such a struggle for me, for what feels like my entire life.   The worry of being too early; feeling like I’ll awkwardly take up space. The desire to arrive at just the right time, not to spend so much time at a place – not having to expend so much energy.  Especially for places unfamiliar, the unknown has a way of slowing me down.

I guess I am being who I want to be while remaining who I am.

I slid my car onto the side of the street of the reading room, aligning the front bumper of my sensible black crossover hatchback with the green metal perforated sign post indicting alternate side of the street parking. The wheels crush paper bags, plastic bottles and crunching leaves that survived their fall, winter, spring and now this summer. When I exited the car onto the familiar Bed Stuy street, I walked into an experiment.  One that I never imagined for my life.

I don’t want to call myself a teacher, rather I will say I’m a facilitator.

The trouble with that word teacher, for me is the implication of being perceived.  It is beyond what someone might see and think of me from just a brief or peripheral encounter. With a title of teacher, there come expectations. Perhaps mastery? Or thoughtfulness? Maybe confidence? My mind, with all its self-conscious analyzing gets overwhelmed with all the possibilities of how I am understood. This is so much easier behind a screen, or on the page. Facilitator feels at once more pronounced and distanced. I believe that word leaves room for less focus on who’s presenting and more emphasis on the material. But what then…if I am the one who has developed the materials?  Mostly, and on that day especially, I was clouded.  My sight, my intuition, my instincts and charisma drowning in fatigue.

It seemed like a good idea to book a flight that would bring me into town the morning of an event. 

The part of me that is showing up less and less in my life is the part of me that make it easy for me NOT to show up. As a girl, I hated waking up early in the morning to go to school. With the hindsight of a couple of decades, I know now that I did not want to go to my Greenwich Village elementary school because it was hard being one of four girls in my grade, out of perhaps a dozen in the entire school, who looked like me. At that time, I didn’t understand fully the consequences of my childhood body. This lifetime of complexion on a human with single-digit years of living. So many subtle, internalized and some outright in-your-face violences that framed a youth without language to describe or recognize what was happening.

So, every morning there would be a struggle with my mother to get me out of bed. Mommie, who was probably one of a handful in her department, out of perhaps a dozen in the entire division, who looked like her. Same for the days Daddy took to me school too. Same scarcity of Blackness where he spent his days. The push and pull. Get up Jeanette. Warm tights on my bedroom’s radiator on cold mornings. Freshly squeezed OJ from the Parisian bakery by the bus stop on warming mornings. That part of me, the part that opted out, as resistance, was made then, cultivated in my cartooned sheets – protecting me from world that cared only to judge, ostracize, and alienate me. But it’s that part of me that likely booked my flight from San Francisco. I think in my subconscious I was hoping to face travel delays. I did not. I also did not sleep on that redeye flight back east – and thus overslept in my bed in West Harlem – 4.5 miles from my destination but anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and 30 minutes aways. 

I guess I am being who I want to be while remaining who I am.

I want to be more organized, I say.  I want to have my shit together, I think. I believe that I am a mess. This is not wrong, but this is not the whole view. Laughter brings me back down to earth – in my moments of unrelenting self-criticism, I have to stop taking myself so seriously. I am only human, and I’m kind enough, and on time enough, and I look good enough, and I guess I know enough to get me through one scenario to the next.  The thing is, when I walked into that room – not a one person gave a damn about my five minutes. No one seemed to be concerned with the wrinkles on my dress, or the fact that I didn’t flat iron my hair or that I didn’t have any printed handouts (which I loathe anyway). The wall of books, arranged by genre, then author, stacked horizontally, and vertically into built-in bookcases grounded me with their sweet earthen smell.  The pages are why I’m here. 

I don’t want to call myself a teacher, rather I will say I’m a facilitator.

My favorite teachers were sort of like demigods to me. There was Ms. Ryan in high school, my thin white, blue jeans and black knit sweater wearing English teacher who lived in the East Village (like me). She baked for her students, invited us to her house, gave me books by Barbera Kingsolver, and checked my back for bruises after I shared my run-in with an aggressive almost boyfriend. Her wisdom was undeniably a part of her like the strands of hair on her short brown bob. Wendy, my first grad school professor, who I met and talked to through screen for a year, who gave me Cusk, Borges, who reframed Octavia E Butler and Hartman for me. She made us a playlist, kept in touch and made eye contact through her glasses whenever giving remarks.  With every rambling word that seemed to fall out of my mouth, I kept thinking, how can I be like them? I don’t know enough.

As a community organizer, working for pennies in an office that used to be a bookstore owned by a Black woman on Avenue B in the 1990s—I would happily facilitate. Every time, I would set up butcher paper on an easel, grab markers and try my best to write in all cap block letters—I never cared that I might know less than.I cared to learn, to catch up to meet and to be met where I was. That seems easier, lower stakes, more collaborative. The part of me who plays it small for fear of somehow becoming undone has only just revealed herself. She whispered facilitate into my ears and somehow it kept coming out my lips when friends would ask about the workshop.

I guess I am being who I want to be while remaining who I am.

My white shirt dress kept me cool as I cycled through my notes. The laptop warmed on top of the boldly printed tablecloth on the folding tables. Five, then six, then seven, then eight then two more brown femme faces made their ways around that table. First we passed around Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir, by Akaeke Emezi – their letter – the spell. I want to talk goals, visioning, habits. All the things I wish for myself.  Next, we fingered through books, we broke off into groups. June Jordan for group one.  Civil Wars.  Group Two: Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah’s The Sex Lives of African Women. Group three, my group, reads aloud and discusses People Who Led to My Plays by Adrienne Kennedy.  I’m steady thinking they can tell I’m unprepared.  They know I don’t know what I’m talking about.  I am making meaning out of their looks into my eyes. Projection is easy that way. Who am I to say I know what the hell I’m talking about. Did my teachers want this level of approval? Did my facilitators not care?

I don’t want to call myself a teacher, rather I will say I’m a facilitator.

We go on for two hours. They, these brown femme faces have furrowed brows and cramped hands from writing. Queering the Narrative is the name I give to this workshop. Really, I want them to know Queer means free. Queer means to know what is expected, what is allowed, to know your assigned limits, and to still imagine otherwise.  Queer is more than AND inclusive of who you love. It is how you see. It is how you feel. It is dangerous in its limitlessness. This is what I want to facilitate. Cannot teach Queering as Liberation. Someone else might could. Maybe me one day.

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Note: I’m still on my relaxing vacation vibes and schedule, thank you for all the new subscribers, your likes, comments and subscriptions are very important to what I’m tryna do here on Tiny Violences.  Thank you to my loyal readers, I hope you’re enjoying your summer and reading some good writing, I know I am. Please feel free to click the links to the books mentioned above, you can buy them through the Free Black Women’s Library Bookshop storefront.  Also leave me a 📚 emoji or let me know your summer reading in the comments.