Kay does not recenter the margin as much as she converts location into an object—the transurban commodity of the black site becomes mobile, a cite and a cipher.21 Less invocation than circulation, these objects do not stand in for but are the black diaspora—counted along with the archive, print culture, and the lingering effects of the past. Alongside this are the affective resonances of these diaspora objects and their surprising present meanings—hurtling even sooner toward unsettling and unpredictable future uses. Kay’s text makes use of the past not just for the present but for the radical potentiality of diaspora circulation and (dis)connection—tracing what gets “lost,” not to be lamented but to be made up wholesale, again. Diaspora is made to awkwardly fit into a future that it never imagined as its domain, in order to highlight the disjuncture that characterizes black experiences of modernity and of diaspora. Incommensurable loss and incompatible knowledges are the base of Kay’s black world, where even when “found,” the “lost” blackness does not come from or mean what it should. This occurs even as Bessie Smith tries to break Bessie-as-icon’s story, into the queer time and space of even those black objects we may read as clear, contextualized, familiar—the blues, for instance. Diaspora, despite the text’s longing for recognizable narrative and troping, is far stranger to account for than its historically and geographically bounded disciplinary arguments entail. Kay bleeds genres, blending history into myth, authenticity into self-conscious construction, pattern into innovation, imagination into tradition. Within the limits of who and what we might recognize as “Bessie Smith,” Kay finds room for the world and the jar, the universal and the particular, difference and detail.
Kay’s text sees and seeks difference within the diaspora because of that drive toward definition, toward the object of “knowing” Bessie Smith, the blues, or the Black Atlantic. That play between lost and found is the play between desire and innovation. Out of a wish to belong to, or to speak to, community also comes a desire for distinction, or rather a claim to it. Smith is representative and exceptional, as is Kay’s approach. Glasgow, Harlem, Chattanooga—they are jars and worlds each, available in their material and historical specificity as well as their more portable, metaphoric resonances. Bessie Smith suggests that what is lost in diaspora scholarship that attempts to lock down, intentionally or not, more singular strains/routes of blackness is a sense of the necessary simultaneity of the world and the jar, of how even radical specificity can translate and transport to the unpredictable time of critical futures.
The order of the things in Kay/Smith’s imaginary trunk, then, is the order of diaspora—which is still, for Kay, the order of location. In the economy of travel, the thing is always already a souvenir, a memory/metonym of the Other. In the economy of emigration, the thing is either reminder or imperial commodity, the play between local and global. Both are locked in the thinking of late capital, in which history is marked by the consumption of metonymic things and their transport. For Kay, this logic of enchantment/disenchantment both holds firm and is violated by turning travel and emigratory space into the contact with and scope of what Lizabeth Paravasini-Gebert calls “transit”—evoking less definite yet more repetitive routes to the diasporic practices of black women subjects.22 This circulation suggests a different order, timing, and geography of distribution, in Kay’s text, so that Bessie Smith as historical figure can travel from tent shows to Harlem to Mississippi to Chattanooga (“down and out” to “down” and “out”), while her aneċal and iconic presence registers her in publicly and privately consumed objects, here collected from the geography of Glasgow to the print-culture artifact of a British queer profiles series. While Kay may still rely on the trope of haunting that seems to follow black women subjects, her form and structure insists on location and material—Chattanooga, trunks, wax—the constant transit between “lost” and “found” object, between the archive and the imaginary, public and private space, and the relationship between object and context, or, for Kay’s text, object and collection that redefines diaspora.
Bessie Smith, as print-culture document, projects itself into the act of collection, even as it stands as one profile in a series of queer recoveries of creative icons, from David Hockney to Benjamin Britten. Kay’s “Outline,” as the series is titled, of Smith’s queer history takes travel and more particularly transit as its structure in an attempt to collect the disparate references and evidence of black women’s subjective and sexual desires, many of which cannot register without the intellectual weight of archival narratives to infuse them with singular meaning. Kay’s focus on travel in her profile of Bessie Smith, indeed, has much to do with this traveling desire for identification and black women’s particular inability to locate a documented home in diaspora studies and late-capital discourse: “Even later in her life when she could have afforded not to travel all over the place, she continued to do so” (1997, 30). Kay goes on to label Bessie a “travel addict,” claiming that her compulsively touring was not just out of a romanticization of live performance (which is frequently coupled with a reviling of the recorded commodity, impossible for Kay as it is her only available narrative record and “encounter” with Smith) but because of the ability to act out queer desire outside of the constructs of domestic geography. Kay ultimately sees the reperformance and recirculation of Bessie Smith’s music—as well as the performer’s iconography in the form of stories which the speaker resituates to literally create a system of exchanges—as a process of traveling queerness, or what queer theorist José Muñoz might call an act of “world-making” (1999, 195). These worlds stand in excess of the question of capital, of what Smith, or Kay, “could,” conditionally tensed, “afford.” Jackie 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