A Few Thoughts On Intimacies

This piece was delivered as the keynote address for Kweli Journal’s Summer Literary Festival. The theme of this festival is Intimacies. You can sign up for more talks and workshops here.

When I first started writing seriously, over ten years ago now, I got a note on my manuscript that has stayed with me for a long time. I’d written the first pages of what would become my first novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman. We Love You Charlie Freeman is a book about a Black family from Boston, in the early 1990s, who move from their Black neighborhood to a nearly all white town in the Berkshires, where they are taking part in an experiment raising a chimpanzee and teaching him sign language. It is a novel, in part, about the history of scientific racism in the United States, the ways history impresses itself on our present day lives and the particular claustrophobia of being a Black girl in self-proclaimed liberal white spaces.

It is, in short, about a lot. A lot of ideas that I spent a lot of time furiously writing down on every stray scrap of paper I could find, stuffing them all down into the bottom of whatever tote bag I happened  to be carrying at the moment, thrilled with my own audacity. I knew the novel wasn’t for everyone, but I was in love with the ideas that were coming, the questions, and writing down all the things that, at that moment in 2009 America, felt unsayable, was one of the most exhilarating things I’d ever known.

So imagine my surprise when I sat down for a one on one with my writing workshop leader. He liked the novel's ideas. He seemed as excited about their daring as I was. But he said, with a full grin, in his deep Australian accent that I will not attempt here, “Nobody in this story feels anything. There’s no emotion on the page.”

I was aghast. How dare he? How dare this white man? This was a novel about ideas. Who had to actually feel anything?

But I was nothing if not ambitious. Once I got over myself, I sat down and tracked how  many emotions I had actually written on to the page. There were nearly none. Mostly, my characters were annoyed.

I did not understand it then, had not made the connection that my character’s inability to reveal emotional intimacy was deeply entwined with my own personal struggles with emotional compartmentalization. When I was writing those emotionless pages, I was 26 years old. I did not know how to say it then--the novel project was part of the way of trying to figure out how to say it--but living in my body as a dark skinned Black girl and woman for the previous 25 years had been an exercise in training myself to divorce my body from my emotions. Part of it was family history--I grew up in a family that prized the intellectual, that sparred and teased and quipped but very rarely discussed personal emotions in detail. Part of it was socialization--I went to all white schools in nominally liberal spaces--places where I could go months without talking and no one would notice, but where the adjectives classmates used the most to describe me were “intimidating” and “regal”--both of those so laughably far from my own interior life that I learned to take it for granted that my emotions would always be illegible to the wider world. 

So I gave up on even the prospect of emotional intimacy--of knowing myself and my emotions on a deep level or ever, heaven forbid, sharing them with another person.

But fiction is an art form that necessitates, at a certain point, an engagement with emotion. Even the headiest novels have to have an emotional pulse, no matter how faint or irregular, or else the project falls apart, becomes didactic, essayistic, flat on the page. I did not know it then, but I’d picked an art form that, if you enter into it determined to maintain emotional compartmentalization, will very quickly either destroy your sense of self or your art or both.

Compartmentalization, this confusing approach to knowing and understanding intimacy is baked into the project of Black womanhood. If you do not know, I ground most of how I approach the world and myself in history. When I was thinking about how to formulate this keynote for this conference, for this worthy theme of “Intimacies”, I went looking for the histories that could tell us something more about all of this. And I found the excellent book Wicked Flesh: Black woman, Intimacy and Freedom in the Atlantic World by Jessica Marie Johnson, published this past year. I think it best gets to what I am trying to say above, in another way.

Johnson’s work is primarily concerned with the Black women in Louisiana and Senegal in the 18th century who secured a kind of freedom for themselves and their children through the machinations of intimacy. 

Johnson writes, “In a unique position to claim their own labor, free African women and women of African descent negotiated, challenged and appropriated categories of difference. They engaged in and were forced to engage in intimate relations across gender and race, with individuals enslaved and free. They established families beyond biological kin and across race and status...Intimacy and kinship became key strategies in their bid for freedom and were central to how and what freedom looked like on a quotidian--or everyday--basis.” 

She continues, “(They) endowed free status with meaning through an active, aggressive and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practice.” In the world of Atlantic slavery that would go on to influence the experience of Black life across the Americas, Johnson notes that “Intimate acts mated with edicts, codes and imperial jurisprudence to produce bodies of law like the 1685 Code Noir, the first comprehensive slave code written int he Americas. The Code Noir and edicst liek it established partus sequitur ventrem, meaning that the slave or free status of the child would follow that of the womb, harnessing reproducing bodies to the expansions of slavery. Slave Owners and imperial authorities reinforced slave codes with martial force, using shackles, whips, and arms forged and wielded by white and black laborers at the command of imperial officials to maintain and reproduce slave status. Free status also required the wombs and labor of black women and would be no less intimate or violent. Free status manifested in the interstices of manumission laws preoccupied with sex between Eurpoean men and African women...Free status, manumission and legalistic escapes from bondage did not free black women from these representation or protect them from the predations of mean (and women) who wielded them. Freedom gained definition when and as African women and women of African descent pushed back against their own enslavement and subject position...African women and women of African decent who survived the horrific crossing continued to turn to what was available--intimate and kinship ties--practicing freedom even when they could not call themselves free.,,they demanded freedom as a project of ecstatic black humanity in the face of abject subjection and against slavery as social death.”(1-3)

Let’s sit with this for a moment. For me, Johnson’s research points to how my sense of freedom as a Black woman is inherently tied to this sense of intimacy--the intimacy necessary to make ties with the white enslavers who would, through sexual or social bonds, come to see you as worthy of manumission. That is a kind of intimacy that, by definition, cultivates a lack of emotional honesty and a rise of emotional compartmentalization in order to survive.That is the legacy we are dealing with as descendants of the world that enslavers and slaves made. Our very wombs determined the status of freedom for our offspring. It is a bloody, awful mess that has taken, will continue to take, generations to separate out. 

I think this is all most clear in a text that is the foremother of any of us who writes on the intimacies of Black womanhood--Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. If you are unfamiliar with the title, a brief synopsis. The abolitionist and activist Harriet Jacobs, writing under a pseudonym, detailed her childhood and adolescence in slavery, the abuse and sexual harassment and stalking she endured from her white male enslaver, and the lengths she eventually went to escape him, which necessitated her hiding in a cramped, incredibly small crawl space in her grandmother’s attic for seven years before escaping slavery. The crawl space necessitated her lying on her side for hours at a time. While in it, she could hear her children playing in the floors below, though she could never see or interact with them. She only came out briefly, at night, to stretch and eat. Her time in the crawl space meant she had significant health problems for the rest of her life. 

Jacob’s memoir is remarkable for a number of reasons, but mostly it is because it is one of the first attempts in literature to truthfully assess and mark the interiority of a Black woman, in all its complexities. I first read it when I was in high school--I was lucky enough, in that blindingly white space, to have a Black literature teacher. She was the visual artist Layalh Ali, though she’d just begun showing paintings. She ran two courses--The South in Fiction and Film and The City in Fiction and Film--that shaped my thinking in ways I am still discovering. When I read the book in her class, we felt up against the uncomfortable parts of the story--Jacobs explicit descriptions of the sexual harassment she endured, as well as her admission that she entered into what is clearly a semi consensual (and I emphasize semi) sexual and romantic relationship with another white men, by whom she had two children, even as she was being sexually harassed by the man who owned her.

In Laylah’s class, this was presented as a matter of fact, and we talked about this as part of Jacob's life. A few years later, in college, I read Jacobs again in a class taught by a white male professor with mostly white students and found, to my shock, that the whole class hated the book. They found Jacobs profoundly unsympathetic--I recall a white girl in class, with a sneer on her face, questioning Jacob’s “decision” to sleep with another white man. They wondered if, because she admitted to that intimacy, she had made everything else up. It seemed impossible for them to reconcile the negotiations of intimacy inherent in Black womanhood and they were proudly, squarely uninterested in trying. 

I was shook. I didn’t, then, have the words to explain what was so disturbing. I only filed it away as information--to tell the whole truth about the painful negotiations of Black women’s intimacies meant certain rejection and doubt. Another person, maybe, would find this depressing. I, as an artist at least, eventually found it freeing. People don’t pay close attention, generally, to things that disgust them. Finally, it seemed, there was a way out of the intense, always wrong scrutinization that whiteness has for Black girls and women. Revolt them by telling the truth of your interiority. In their turning away and recrimination, you could be free. 

I’m going to read the passage of Jacobs explaining her semi consensual relationship with the white man, because I think it says so much. It is a craft class on how to write emotion on to the page. And it’s an acknowledgement that many who are not Black women actively do not want to hear or imagine our interiorities. 

Jacobs writes, “It seems less degrading to give one's self, than to submit to compulsion. There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment.” I love the frankness of that, the truth of it, the emotional honesty. 

The cramped crawl space where Jacobs hid she called her “loophole of retreat”. A curious phrase, one that speaks to the liberation that can come from turning inward as a subjected person. When the entire social, emotional, carceral and religious and philosophical structure of a morally bankrupt institution like slavery and white supremacy is predicated on the lie that you, as a Black woman, have no interiority worth respecting, it is an act of liberation to turn inward, to chart one’s own mind, to sink into oneself. Michelle Burnham has outlined as such in her famous essay on Jacobs titled “The Loophole of Retreat '' and, more recently, Simone Leigh has organized an entire body of scholarship around this with her recent exhibition at the Guggenheim. What Jacobs offers those of us who write and think about art is the assurance that our singular intimacy with ourselves is a profoundly radical act.

But. And here is a very big but. As I was sitting down to write this keynote for you yesterday, I was reading the morning news on twitter and, as happens increasingly, meant with the certainty of our imminent collapse. The particular pieces of news that suggested this were the report that all the wild salmon in California’s rivers are projected to die because of our current heat wave and the news that far right white supremacists are infiltrating public library boards in order to dismantle the institutions and stop the acquiring of books by Black authors.

In the face of all that, what do we do with the poetics of intimacy, that space that in our not so distant past provided a kind of freedom, however compromised? I have to first remind myself that the dream of an apocalypse is a false one, that the world has ended many times, for many peoples--by definition, the enslaved women from whom I am descended lived through an apocalypse. I am faced with one of our making.

So I look to one more scholar, to Donna Harraway and her recent book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. In this, Harraway writes that  “We—all of us on Terra—live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response. Mixed-up times are overflowing with both pain and joy—with vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy, with unnecessary killing of ongoingness but also with necessary resurgence. The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”

In the apocalypse that we currently live in, how will our relationship to intimacy help us to survive? Harraway, too, here, has a suggestion. “Kin is a wild category that all sorts of people do their best to domesticate. Making kin as oddkin rather than, or at least in addition to, godkin and genealogical and biogenetic family troubles important matters, like to whom one is actually responsible. Who lives and who dies, and how, in this kinship rather than that one? What shape is this kinship, where and whom do its lines connect and disconnect, and so what? What must be cut and what must be tied if multispecies flourishing on earth, including human and other-than-human beings in kinship, are to have a chance?”

If this space of intimacy and other intimacies like it are part of our survival, what does that mean, then, for us as artists? What do we owe our audiences and ourselves in relationship to intimacy?

I am not sure there is a definitive answer. I think you are brought together in this conference over the next six weeks to come up with many. I can only encourage you, as an artist, to commit to radical emotional honesty and to the transformation possible, as I hope I have shown you in this talk, in the spaces of intimacy, even in an intimacy warped by the structures of this grubby, dying world.