Image of Black lesbian feminist-scholar Briona Simone Jones. Photo courtesy of Briona Simone Jones.

By Karla Mendez

Briona Simone Jones interrogates the fortitude, power, and futurity of the Black lesbian literary tradition in her new anthology, Mouths of Rain.

In 1995, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, edited by pioneering Black feminist-scholar Beverly Guy-Sheftall, was published. Words of Fire was the first major anthology to trace the progress of Black feminist thought. It centers the words of Black women and their writings about racism, sexism, and classism.

Twenty-six years later, Black lesbian feminist Briona Simone Jones edited a companion anthology focusing on the intellectual, cultural, and political productions of Black lesbians. Her book, Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought, published by The New Press, explores writings by Black lesbians who interrogated multifarious aspects of love, the erotic, community building, resisting erasure and ostracization, and more.

Jones, who is from Rochester, New York, and of Jamaican and African-American descent, is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut.

Black Women Radicals contributing writer Karla Mendez spoke with Jones about what inspired her to edit Mouths of Rain; her thoughts on the power of the Black lesbian literary tradition; and what a Black Woman Radical means to her.

Karla Mendez (KM): What inspired you to edit Mouths of Rain?

Briona Simone Jones (BSJ): This is probably the question that I’ve received the most. I paid attention to the word you used, which was ‘inspire.’ I was really thinking of my pedagogical inspirations, so how I manifest as a teacher in a classroom space. I think my teaching experience inspired me to construct the book. My experience as a Black feminist in predominantly white spaces inspired me, as well. Most of all, Black lesbians I’ve encountered in my daily life inspired me to create Mouths of Rain. I grew up in Rochester, New York, and there were no examples of Black lesbians or Black women who might have been masculine-of-center thriving or surviving in the space. In a lot of ways, books became a portal for me to understand who I was, and a way to describe my experiences and even relate to the world around me.

“My experience as a Black feminist in mainly white spaces inspired me. Most of all, Black lesbians I’ve encountered in my daily life inspired me to create Mouths of Rain.”

When I thought about Mouths of Rain, I knew I wanted a person from my neighborhood to be able to come across the book and place themselves within a particular kind of history. Black lesbian communities are my greatest inspiration. Being raised Baptist and being immersed in a Black Christian experience distanced me in my early years from identifying as something other than Black. I think that’s still the case—in terms of how religion or orthodox ways of living permeate Black communities, as well as other communities. I wanted to connect with women, young girls, men, folks who are in transition or desire to move beyond a single identity or having a single embodiment. As it pertains to the title of the book, one of the things that drove me to title it Mouths of Rain was a poem I had been introduced to titled “Love Poem” by Audre Lorde.

My archival research was central to the formation of the anthology. When you go to a press with an idea, they want to know what is edgy and new about the idea you have. I conducted a lot of archival research in the summer of 2018. One of the places I visited was Audre Lorde’s papers at Spelman College. What I realized after I left the archives was that all of Audre Lorde’s first drafts are usually written on blue paper. I didn’t know that to be the case until I was researching the work of Anita Cornwell. Anita Cornwell has an interview with Audre Lorde and in that interview, she talks about her writing process. Rewind to when I first saw that poem on blue paper, I didn’t know that the color had particular significance; it was both interesting and illuminating to access Lorde’s writing process.

“Learning the history of Love Poem, finding this particular draft, and seeing how Lorde wrote ‘mouth of rain’ also motivated me to think about the book as an archive or as a particular thing that refuses to be silenced.”

Lorde was a writer published by a major Black arts press in 1973, Broadside Press, run by Dudley Randall. Randall said this particular poem [Love Poem] needed to be removed from the collection because it insinuated that Lorde was having a sexual relationship with a woman. As I was deciding how to title the book, I was thinking about how patriarchy has excised difference from history. I was also thinking of this particular anthology being a companion to Words of Fire [edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall]. I wanted to come up with a name that would flow nicely as a sister companion to Words of Fire, but I also wanted it to be politically charged. Rain, for many reasons, is sacred and spiritual. But the rain has many different facets. It can sustain, it can provide, it can destroy.

Learning the history of “Love Poem”, finding this particular draft, and seeing how Lorde wrote ‘mouth of rain’ also motivated me to think about the book as an archive or as a particular thing that refused to be silenced. Randall decided not to publish the poem in From a Land Where Other People Live, but Ms. Magazine published it when Lorde was an English professor at John Jay College. At the time, there were rumors she was a lesbian and to confront the whispers head-on, she tacked the poem to her office door. I was thinking about how these politically charged words are our sustenance, and how these words are not only a love poem but also an archive of difference.

KM: What was it like collecting work from writers like Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Barbara Smith, and Pauli Murray? How did you decide which pieces to include?

Briona Simone Jones signing copies of Mouths of Rain. Photo courtesy of Briona Simone Jones.

BSJ: All of the sections or chapters were derived in different ways. One of the things I wanted to focus on was genres. Mouths of Rain, for me, exists within a particular lineage: meaning, I am not doing something new. I am continuing the work of Toni Cade Bambara; Lisa C. Moore, who wrote Does Your Mama Know; or Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing [edited by Catherine E. McKinley & L. Joyce DeLaney] and Words of Fire. I view Mouths of Rain as a companion to Words to Fire, and it is sold as a companion to it. I didn’t want to repeat or make invisible the work that had already been done. One of the politically charged sections, for me, in Words of Fire is chapter four, titled “Beyond the Margins: Black Women Claiming Feminism.” When I was creating Mouths of Rain, I knew that folks would probably read the Combahee River Collective, located in that chapter of Words of Fire. The epigraphs I selected for Mouths of Rain, that open up each chapter, should serve as guideposts for engagement.

When I was thinking about genre, I remembered that Beverly [Guy-Sheftall] mentioned she wished she could have included a more mixed genre in Words of Fire. As I was working on Mouths of Rain, I wanted to think about both genre and genealogy. Not only in a linear way, in terms of who came first, but also how these voices had been related to each other. For example, I think that Alice Dunbar-Nelson or Angelina Weld Grimké are considered Black lesbian foremothers. Audre Lorde mentions this in I Am Your Sister and Cheryl Clarke mentions it throughout her work. I knew Grimke and Dunbar-Nelson’s work needed to be at the beginning of the text. I wanted folks to understand that Black lesbianism or love between Black women is not a new phenomenon. It predates all of our existence.

“I wanted folks to understand that Black lesbianism or love between Black women is not a new phenomenon. It predates all of our existence.”

In literature, when folks were unable to publish, where and how did Black lesbians take shape or appear? I noticed they were emerging in sound. I included Lucille Bogan’s “B.D. Women’s Blues” in the anthology because this evidences an early formation or articulation of Black lesbian masculinity. Also, B.D. Woman’s Blues is connected to Cathy J. Cohen’s work with “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens,” through the image of the bulldagger. Ma Rainey’s “Prove It On Me Blues” is another example of how Black women articulated these Black lesbian embodiments or ways of being even when we were unable to capture it in publishing; as the relationship with publishing has always been fraught with danger. Another example of this would be the work of Akasha (Gloria) T. Hull. I included an excerpt from her book, Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance, because I feel like that particular book is one of the first examinations of queer life in the Harlem Rennaisance. I wanted people to understand that if you read this poem by Grimké in the first chapter of Mouths of Rain, you can read the work of Hull to further understand the poetic contours of Grimké’s work.

The anthology was not created in a linear way. I sat with the work for many years. “Can It Be” by Alice Walker is one of the central reasons the anthology came to fruition. This poem also shaped the first part of the anthology titled, “Uses of the Erotic.” I wanted to let people know that the erotic is not divorced from sexual intimacy, and I wanted to foreground Black lesbian thought in the erotic. The erotic is derived from Black lesbian thought. I was thinking about the lineage of Walker’s work and how oftentimes, the relationship between Celie and Shug is not understood as a queer formation. I think some folks read Celie as naive. For me, when I teach The Color Purple or reflect on the moment when Celie and Shug kiss, I think that is one of the few moments Celie engages in a particular kind of autonomy.

With The Color Purple being published in 1982 and then the publication of In Search of Our Mother’s Garden in 1983, where “Womanism” is defined as a queer or Black lesbian formation, we have ocular proof of Alice Walker embodying a particular kind of queerness that has been excised from her identity. For me, it was important to include her poem in the chapter, “Uses of the Erotic,” and for people to understand that the first articulations or representations of Walker’s work were speaking of Black queerness or even Black lesbianism. When I came upon “Can It Be” during my archival research, I knew this poem needed to be centered in that section. I also wanted to pay homage to the Black lesbians who published during the 1970s and 1980s, including Anita Cornwell, Audre Lorde, Cheryl Clarke, doris davenport, and Jewelle Gomez. After the Combahee River Collective was formed in 1974, there was a proliferation of literature produced by Black lesbians who radicalized Black feminism, Mouths of Rain endeavors to bring that moment to bear.

KM: In “I Am Your Sister”, Audre Lorde discusses homophobia present amongst Black women that sometimes keeps them from uniting and organizing. She mentions it as another instance of the divide and conquer routine (Jones, p. 203). Do you foresee a time when Black women can unite, organize, and celebrate their differences?

BSJ: Audre Lorde brings up a few pertinent things in the essay, “I am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities,” that I’m still bringing to language. When I was rereading this essay, I was thinking about how patriarchy has created these chasms between Black women. I think of the optics of what it means to celebrate differences. I feel that in the public sphere, there are these representations of tolerance. What I’m invested in is the quotidian, the everyday. In our everyday practices, how do we treat Black queer folks and Black trans folks? I don’t think it’s a Black women’s issue as much as it’s a Black community issue. Audre Lorde is very clear in the essay that we don’t have to become each other to fight towards liberation. When it comes to queerness, I think folks almost believe that they have to become queer or be queer to accept that it exists and to build coalitions across difference.

With the anthology, in the opening pages, I highlight the deaths of four Black lesbians who were brutally murdered between 2017 and 2018. One of the Black women was hanged in her home in upstate New York by two Black men, and that hit home for me because I grew up in upstate New York. When I think of the optics of representation, I’m constantly reminded of these deaths. Until our everyday engagement with each other is imbued in grace and compassion, I’m not sure what real organizing will look like because the interpersonal matters even after organizing. I think it’s unfortunate that Black lesbianism is such a threat to patriarchy that even Black women find themselves more wedded to patriarchy than in community with Black lesbians and Black trans women. I think patriarchy has these affordances, such as protection, wealth, and acceptance, and people want to cash in on that kind of access. We have to dismantle and disavow patriarchy to think about what love in the future will look like. Because ultimately, that’s what it’s about—someone loving themselves enough to know why another person may love themselves in the way they do. I think patriarchy works to dismember and divide, and until we change our metric, I don’t know what a celebration of difference looks like.

“I feel that in the public sphere, there are these representations of tolerance. What I’m invested in is the quotidian, the everyday. In our everyday practices, how do we treat Black queer folks and Black trans folks?”

KM: Do you see Mouths of Rain as a form of activism? What do you hope people take away from reading it?

BSJ: When you asked me this question, I looked up activism, and it’s defined as the policy or action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change. When it comes to Black books, especially Black anthologies, these texts evidence knowledge production by Black people, and these books also indicate how we have been kept on the periphery of participation in knowledge production. I believe Mouths of Rain is a kind of material or archive that is invested in political or social change. But I also wonder, is the opposite of activism, rest? If so, I’m hoping that the book meets people in their place of rest, too. I don’t like that sometimes the things that Black people create always have to be politically charged to have resonance or value. That’s why I began with “Uses of the Erotic,” to describe the contours of pleasure and mutuality.

Maybe there’s a bifurcated approach to the book. In one regard, I want it to be a text that you can rest with, but I also know that it is politically charged. The folks included in the anthology were speaking from a particular identity politic that is invested in the future, invested in liberation. So, of course, it is politically charged, but I also want it to be a book you can pick up when you don’t have to fight against a particular structure—a book to support you in your place of peace.

KM: What does a Black Woman Radical mean to you?

BSJ: For me, to be a Black Woman Radical is to exist within a portal or a particular genealogy of Black women who attempted the heretical. To be radical is for a person to decide that whatever the status quo might be, if that is not something they align with, they have the ability to create their own languages and practices.

For more information about Mouths of Rain and to purchase the anthology, please visit here. You can follow Briona Simone Jones on Twitter at @brionasimone.

About the author:

Karla Mendez (she/her/hers) is currently an undergraduate student at the University of Central Florida, pursuing a major in Interdisciplinary Studies and a double minor in Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies. She holds a certificate in Feminism and Social Justice from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has just completed an internship with the United Nations Association. In addition to being a student, she is a freelance writer. Karla is of Puerto Rican and Dominican descent, she recognizes the importance of intersectionality in feminism, and as such, her research and writing focus on the intersection of race, gender, class, and politics.

With her writing and research, she wants to introduce people to historical figures who paved the way for change while bringing awareness to how discrimination and oppression can affect people differently. She will continue to explore her research as she begins graduate school next year to pursue a Master’s in Women’s Studies and American Studies. When she isn’t studying or reading for school, she enjoys reading for fun, watching old movies, and spending time with her family. You can follow her on Instagram.

Celebrating the Power of the Black Lesbian Literary Tradition: A Conversation with Briona Simone Jones