“A Story to these Rendezvous”: Cheryl Clarke, Combahee, and the Poetics of Black Queer Trouble*
Collage of Cheryl Clarke by Jaimee Swift.
In this latest installment celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Combahee River Collective, Black queer feminist artist-scholar Mecca Jamilah Sullivan explores the power of Black queer feminist language-making, visions, and possibilities through the work and words of Combahee and Black lesbian feminist, poet, and scholar, Cheryl Clarke.
“[We] see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking…Even our Black women’s style of talking/testifying in Black language about what we have experienced has a resonance that is both cultural and political.”
“The two of them are obviously close and not often together. They give the impression of stolen moments, hidden lives. There is a story to these rendezvous. The low tones…. Who knows what they say to one another. They talk very little. It’s their way, to be with one another in whatever way they want to be. And all that’s good to be is not necessarily good to talk.”
“I learned early that love (read sex) was something I had best not mess with. My father secretly advised me not to get married: ‘You see how much trouble it can cause.’ The it was not marriage but sex.”
*Writer’s Note: I am grateful to Darnell L. Moore, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Steven Fullwood, and the participants in the “Cheryl Clarke: A Future Retrospective” symposium at Rutgers University (October 13, 2013), and the “Writing Across Genres: Black Women Writers” Symposium at the University of Pennsylvania on (February 21, 2020), where I first presented versions of this essay.
When I imagine the women of the Combahee River Collective, gathered in kitchens and living rooms in the Collective’s early years, sharing books and food and political vision, making plans, working it out, I imagine questions about the politics of Black women’s voicing and the poetic contours of Black queer and lesbian life lighting the air between them. Writing in 1977, Combahee co-founder Barbara Smith begins her field-defining essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” by naming this search for language: “I don’t know where to begin. Long before I tried to write this I realized that I was attempting something unprecedented, something dangerous, merely by writing about Black women writers from a feminist perspective and about lesbian writers from any perspective at all” (20). This dangerous writing, this disallowed naming of the Black woman self, is the project of the Combahee River Collective, and of so many of the Collective’s contemporaries and comrades. The works of Barbara Smith, Demita Frazier, Beverly Smith, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Gloria Akasha Hull, Audre Lorde, and Cheryl Clarke not only mark the development of Black feminism as we know it; they also chart the expansiveness of Black women’s writing itself. As scholars, poets, teachers, activists, and theorists, these women worked across multiple genres and discursive spaces, forging practices of political imagination that make our current visions of Black queer and feminist life possible.
I come to the question of Black queer feminist language-making as an artist-scholar, for whom critical inquiry and creative expression are inseparable. I approach Black feminist intellectual life through both literary theory and fiction writing together, an approach that often seems to stretch the bounds of the academic disciplines I engage as a professor of literature. A short walk down many University English department hallways likely reveals the setup: academic scholarship over here, creative writing over there. And yet, walking these same halls as a Black queer feminist artist-scholar has shown me over and over that the distinctions between “poet” and “scholar,” “artist,” and “theorist,” are institutional, not intellectual. And none of these delineations have served our work or our lives particularly well; our work expands and gains power when we can speak multiple languages at once.
“As scholars, poets, teachers, activists, and theorists, these women worked across multiple genres and discursive spaces, forging practices of political imagination that make our current visions of Black queer and feminist life possible.”
These are lessons I have learned from the Combahee River Collective, and from the group of Black woman rabble rousers, magic makers, and visionaries whose creative imaginations dreamed what we now call “Black feminism” into being, and whose real, hard, get-it-done labor has brought Black feminist writing to our schools, our bookshelves, our hands.
Combahee’s famous call, in their foundational 1977 Black Feminist Statement, for “the development of an integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking” breaks ground on many levels: it prefigures visions of what we now think of as “intersectionality,” the term legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coins in 1989 to describe the inextricable impacts of racial and gender oppression on Black women. Yet, when we read the Statement for its poetry as well as its critique, we see that the “interlocking” systems of oppression Combahee names must contend with another nexus of power, borne of Black feminist imagination, language, and intellectual life.
This is the “integrated analysis and practice” that pins down the other end of this pivotal clause and breathes at the center of Black feminist work. This is the latticed framework of Black feminist thought, expression, and political action—the power Combahee finds not only in our activism and organizing, but also in our ways of thinking and reading, in our “Black women’s styles of talking/testifying,” and in the varied forms of our creative and intellectual lives. As a writer-scholar, this moment in the Statement sings to me. An integrated analysis and practice—a joining of idea and action, of thinking and doing, bringing together the intellectual labor of critical reflection and the creative work of making something new.
“...as Clarke and Combahee teach us, Black feminist erotic life is always dangerous. Any Black woman, then, who has the audacity to be out and queer and to write about it, publicly, in print, for decades, across genres and millennia? She is bound to be trouble.”
For me, the Combahee River Collective’s creative-theoretical poetics, brings to mind the questions that set the rhythms of so much Black queer feminist literature: What are the politics of Black women’s voicing? What are the political contours of our intimate and erotic lives? What language do we have for the power of our articulation, when we take “articulation” in its fullest senses—both as self-expression and as acts of joining? And, if we don’t have the language, how do we make it?
When I think of these questions, I think of Black queer trouble. And then I think of the work of Cheryl Clarke. A comrade and contemporary of Combahee’s founding members-- and a self-professed “Black queer troublemaker”-- Clarke riffs on fellow artist-scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs’'s vision of critical “trouble-making,” (Cheryl Clarke, “Queer Black Trouble: In Life, Literature, and the Age of Obama”). Clarke asks: “Can I, as a Black queer troublemaker and feminist too, operationalize revolution and/or progressive agendas?... Can I trouble my communities of color enough to counter their homophobia and sexism and Black straight respectability?... Can I sustain the trouble?” (Queer Then & Now, 222-223). Clarke’s question—how can we sustain Black queer trouble?—is rich with the layered nuance of difference. In a cultural and historical landscape shaped by classist, racist, and homophobic standards of normalcy and morality, as Clarke and Combahee teach us, Black feminist erotic life is always dangerous. Any Black woman, then, who has the audacity to be out and queer and to write about it, publicly, in print, for decades, across genres and millennia? She is bound to be trouble.
In her literary troublemaking, Clarke stands as a crucial possibility model for Black queer and feminist artist-scholars like myself, and an emblem of what a creative approach to Combahee’s “integrated analysis and practice” can yield. As the author of eight foundational poetry collections, numerous critical essays, and the pathbreaking critical study After Mecca: Women Poet and the Black Arts Movement, Clarke’s work shows how, for Black queer writers working between, across, and against the limits of academic discipline and literary genre, the act of writing itself is trouble. Cheryl’s poetry and essays have stretched the definition of “trouble” to the limits of its various conjugations: trouble as verb, trouble as noun, trouble as queer creative praxis. Like Combahee’s vision of Black feminism, Clarke brings together analysis and action—critical reflection and creative production—in acts of interruptive poetics that unsettle numerous discourses and break several genres’ defining lines.
Clarke’s work troubles conversations on Blackness, feminism, literature, and even Black lesbian feminist politics with what she calls an “apprehensive, open, resistant, rebellious, nappy girl… bad[ness],” pushing our reading forward in ever sharper, ever queerer critical directions (“Black Women on Black Women Writers: Conversations and Questions,” Conditions: Nine, 89). It is this spirit of Black girl troubling that animates her reflections on the Combahee River Collective statement in her 1999 essay “Transferences and Confluences: The Impact of the Black Arts Movement on the Literacies of Black Lesbian Feminism,” in which she questions what she sees as the absence of explicit, sustained references to homophobia and heterosexism in that iconic text (The Days of Good Looks, 345).
This will to trouble Black feminist discourse also propels her 1982 critique of the foundational anthology All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (of which, as she puts it, “I want more fiction and poetry”), and her broader critique of the “total omission of anything about lesbians” in 1980s Black and white feminist cultures (“Black Women on Black Women Writers: Conversations and Questions” Conditions: Nine, 95, 97). In addition to this radical troubling, Clarke also explores the many threats against and troubles of Black lesbian loving and humanity in a heterosexist society—the impossible histories, the squelched connections, the inarticulable attachments and choked separations that define Black queer women’s life in a world which, as she puts it, “ain’t no place to love a woman” (The Days of Good Looks, 234).
“Clarke’s work troubles conversations on Blackness, feminism, literature, and even Black lesbian feminist politics with what she calls an “apprehensive, open, resistant, rebellious, nappy girl… bad[ness],” pushing our reading forward in ever sharper, ever queerer critical directions.”
Yet reading Clarke’s work through the prism of Combahee’s “integrated analysis and practice” highlights the ways in which, in addition to troubling discourse, chronicling the troubles of Black queer humanities, and handling the troublesome fallouts of Black queer women’s speech, Cheryl Clarke also makes trouble as a matter of queer creative production. Clarke’s work constructs Black queer trouble as an aesthetic, and incorporates it into her creative practice. In using the “low tones” and “hidden spaces” of various forms of poetry to tell the unspeakable, dangerous, troublesome “stories” of Black queer sexuality, she creates a poetics that bends the lines between poetry and fiction, between narrative and lyric, and queers the constraints of English literature’s most revered poetic forms (Clarke, “journal entry: sisters” in Living as a Lesbian).
One of my favorite poems of Cheryl’s is “Committed Sex,” in which she critiques major political actions of the 1980s and 1990s from anti-pornography legislation in the US to South African Apartheid, positioning queer sexual expression as a literary foil for and a radical tool against political suppression, and thus presenting the struggle for queer liberation as an anti-colonial fight. We can read the poem as a queering of the pantoum, a form in which interwoven quatrains emphasize both continuity of sound and shifting of meaning by echoing rhyming sounds across stanzas, but also repeating alternating lines in full to show their changed meanings in new contexts. Clarke’s pantoum reads:
Bump the Supreme Court and Edwin Meese.
I’ll read anything, do anything to be sexually aroused
I’ll be a lesbian, queer, whore, a sleaze
and it won't be a peep show that I ain’t caroused.
Steal a camcorder, make my own videos to be sexually aroused
to get my mind off star wars and other wars
and it won’t be a massage parlor I ain’t caroused
to dance with my own kind, to flash my ass to the stars.
To get my mind off CIAs, contras, and other wars
in Beirut, Belfast, Sharpeville, Philly
to sleep with my own kind naked under the stars
to pose in a harness, to kiss her pussy[…]
Like a wild maroon, like a two-faced mammy
down with Supreme Courts and Edwin Meeses
we’ll fuck, suck any genital we fancy
we’ll be lesbians, queers, whores, sleazes.
(Cheryl Clarke, Experimental Love: Poetry, 42-43)
Here, Clarke positions queer pleasure and anti-normative sexual practices as strategies of political subversion. Public sex, lesbian pornography, toy play, and a range of other sex acts offer the speaker psychic escape from cultural wars around sexual expression in the U.S. and a strategy for collective resistance against “other wars” of economic and political violence including the Lebanese Civil War and the mortal force of the British Royal Army in Northern Ireland’s thirty-year fight for independence (known as “The Troubles.”) In its rhyme pattern, “Committed Sex” follows the Pantoum’s structure, well, committedly. But where the pantoum calls for repetition of full lines, Cheryl gives us only the repetition of key phrases: “sexually aroused,” “ain’t caroused,” “other wars,” “asses,” again, “asses,” “her pussy” and “for all time.” In fact, the only line that is repeated in full is the line that tells the story of the speaker’s commitment to queer identity and desire. “I’ll be a lesbian, queer, whore a sleaze.” Reconfigured, this becomes the poem’s last line: “we’ll be lesbians, queers, whores, sleazes.” Pluralizing the line, Clarke further queers the pantoum form, opening the poem’s anticolonial erotic politics to the unnamed multitude of Clarke’s readers.
“In her creative praxis of troublemaking, Cheryl Clarke calls for what she names a “conscious lesbian aesthetic,” in which Black women writers—queer, lesbian, and not—might “deal directly with sexual love between women, and take it out of the subliminal realm of imagination.”
In her creative praxis of troublemaking, Cheryl Clarke calls for what she names a “conscious lesbian aesthetic,” in which Black women writers—queer, lesbian, and not—might “deal directly with sexual love between women, and take it out of the subliminal realm of imagination. “I, frankly,” she says, “am tired of teasing it out of their imagery” (“Black, Brave and Woman Too,” in The Days of Good Looks, 57). This, then, is a crucial task of the poet in Clarke’s Black queer feminist vision: to do the critical political work of naming queer desire as a matter of creative practice. Clarke’s lesbian aesthetic describes not only an explicitly queer approach to the craft of poem-making, but also a practice of cross-genre engagement that centers lesbian erotics.
For Clarke, this aesthetic is not simply an aim of lesbian poetry, but also a quality of the best lesbian scholarship—for example, essays by Barbara Smith, Lorraine Bethel, and Gloria Hull, whose contributions to But Some of Us Are Brave Clarke finds to be “the best essays in the book, primarily because they have integrated the black lesbian aesthetic into their study of Black Women’s literature” (56). Clarke’s own work exemplifies the reach of this lesbian aesthetic’s cross-genre reach; in poems like “Committed Sex” and essays like “Black, Brave and Woman Too,” (among numerous others), she shows us how, to be a writer of queer sex, intimacy, and desire is to step over lines of discourse and genre. Throughout her oeuvre, she demonstrates how this genre subversion is, itself, part of a queer feminist style.
That Clarke issues the challenge of developing a lesbian aesthetic primarily to important Black women fiction writers is not coincidental. When Clarke calls on “some of the present-day non-lesbian black women writers whom we so admire and write about” to “take the risk of incorporating a conscious lesbian aesthetic in their fiction,” Clarke speaks as both queer poet and literary critic, demanding language for the same-sex erotics that form the quiet core of many Black women’s novels of the 20th century. (Here, we can think of Smith’s crucial reading of the intimacy between Sula and Nel in Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel Sula, which she forwards in “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.”) As a poet who describes her forays into prose fiction as “futile exercises,” Cheryl has an uncanny interest in stories (“Saying the Least Said, Telling the Least Told,” in The Days of Good Looks, 134). Her Black queer aesthetic is one in which the poem and the story occupy the same voice and breadth, and share equally in the expression of Black lesbian and queer “living.” As much as the “low notes” of Black queer women’s voices matter in Clarke’s poetry, so do our narratives: the rich interiority of our characters, the fullness of our sentences, the conflicts, compulsions, and sequences of events that make the plotlines of Black queer lives.
Cheryl’s tendency to queer poetic form with story is clear throughout her oeuvre. Her 1989 collection, Humid Pitch: Narrative Poetry, riffs on the form of the epic (among other forms) to tell fully-plotted stories of queer women loving, living, surviving, and hurting. Likewise, her 1993 collection, Experimental Love, not only meditates on the tentative and experimental qualities of our loving, but also experiments on the prose poem form, mining its potential for telling stories of disallowed desire, sex, and exchange. For example, in the seventh poem in the collection’s Prose Poems series, “Testimony,” Clarke’s speaker tells the story of “the good wife who will die quietly. Mysterious, sexy, charming obedient. Then the needle. Ecstasy of fantasy. Even the veins in my neck. Selling myself. Jail. Positive and six months to live Runaway. The good wife who wanted to experience feelings… My 14k Miraculous Medal for the pipe. And reckless fucking. Dangerous blood and cum” (Experimental Love, 19).
“For me, as a Black queer feminist artist-scholar—and as a fiction writer myself—this is a revelation. When I read Cheryl’s description of her flirtations with fiction as “exercises in futility” I am heartened, not only because of the deep, resounding recognition I feel of that sense that a particular literary form simply will not fit, but because Cheryl’s work shows that the fit doesn’t matter.”
Watching these images unfurl in complete and incomplete sentences across the full length of the page, watching them spill down the page in paragraph after paragraph, the reader is called to make herself aware of the story in the poem… the characters, the places, the carefully plotted sequences of events that make up Black queer women’s stories, our troubles, our lives.
Clarke’s queer aesthetic of poetic storytelling is part of a tradition of queer poetic irreverence that includes Audre Lorde’s genre-crossing Biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and Gloria Anzaldúa’s “autohistoria-teoría,” Borderlands/La Frontera, and extends to 21st-century works like Ana Maurine Lara’s multivocal novel Erzulie’s Skirt, Kamilah Aisha Moon’s biomythographic poetry collection She Has A Name,, and many other writers who queer form and genre to make their feminist critiques. Clarke herself indeed “sustains” her troublemaking continuously, extending this tradition forward in her 2024 collection, Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems, which highlights the place of multi-textuality, hybridity, and critical bending of form in her poetry. And yet, we see this queer troubling of genre in Clarke’s critical essays, too. The essay quoted in the epigraph above, “The Everyday Life of Black Lesbian Sexuality” (in which Clarke’s father warns his lesbian daughter of the “trouble” of sex), is emblematic of this kind of explicit multi-genre approach. Like this long lineage of multi-textual feminist works, the essay contains song lyrics, poems–including a poetic rendering of a runaway slave bulletin, and more—all in the space of a nine-page personal essay in which she explores the meanings of Black lesbian sexuality in her work by examining what she calls “the fiction of [her] poems” (The Days of Good Looks, 230).
For me, as a Black queer feminist artist-scholar—and as a fiction writer myself—this is a revelation. When I read Cheryl’s description of her flirtations with fiction as “exercises in futility” I am heartened, not only because of the deep, resounding recognition I feel of that sense that a particular literary form simply will not fit, but because Cheryl’s work shows that the fit doesn’t matter. The enterprise of acquiescing to the rules of any genre—like yielding to a father’s mandate not to love, or to a society’s dictum to stay silent and small—those are the seats of futility. Cheryl’s work, like the work of the Combahee River Collective itself, shows us that the strictures of form, like the genre-defining line, the sexual binary, and the rubrics of power that attempt to unwrite Black queer lives—all these are there, waiting to be broken by what Clarke calls our Black women “bad[ness].” They are resource and language for our queer poetics of trouble, scraps to be cobbled together and torn apart, reconfigured till our hearts’ and bodies’ and imaginations’ content, critically examined and creatively rebuilt, so we see just what our trouble can make.
Works Cited
Clarke, Cheryl. Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2024.
_____“Black, Brave and Woman Too,” in The Days of Good Looks: The Prose and Poetry of Cheryl Clarke, 1980-2005. New York: Caroll & Graf, 2006.
_____ “Committed Sex,” in Experimental Love: Poetry. New York: Firebrand Books, 1993.
_____ “journal entry: sisters,” in Living as a Lesbian. (1986). A Midsummer Night's Press, 2014.
_____ “Queer Black Trouble: In Life, Literature, and the Age of Obama,” in Debanuj Dasgupta, Joseph L.V. Donica, and Margot Weiss eds. Queer Then and Now, Queer Then and Now: The David R. Kessler Lectures, 2002–2020. New York, The Feminist Press, 2023.
_____ “Saying the Least Said, Telling the Least Told,” in The Days of Good Looks: The Prose and Poetry of Cheryl Clarke, 1980 to 2005. New York, USA: Carroll & Graf, 2006.
_____“The Everyday Life of Black Lesbian Sexuality,” in The Days of Good Looks: The Prose and Poetry of Cheryl Clarke, 1980 to 2005. New York, USA: Carroll & Graf, 2006.
_____ “Testimony,” in Experimental Love: Poetry. New York: Firebrand Books, 1993.
Combahee River Collective. “Combahee River Collective Statement.” In Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith, 272-282. New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University
of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139-168.
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. “‘To Be A Problem’: Outcast Subjectivity and Black Literary Production” http://tobeaproblem.wordpress.com/syllabus/
Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1982.
Moon, Kamilah Aisha. She Has a Name. New York: Four Way Books, 2013.
Smith, Barbara. “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” The Radical Teacher 7 (March 1978), p.20-27.
Sullivan, Mecca Jamilah. The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora. University of Illinois Press, 2021.