Last week, I fantasized about a world in which Michelle Rodriguez could be the queer hero of Avatar. Since it isn’t likely that a mainstream Hollywood action flick will feature a queer woman of color in the “hero” role anytime soon (yes, I’m reclaiming and de-gendering that word), where do we ??? women and transgender people of color ??? find ourselves reflected?
In our own work, of course. Our own images. In the films, novels, and poetry of queers of color, we see our faces shimmering back at us.
But not just our faces. Our whole and broken bodies. Our rage. Our heartbreak.
Hollywood’s blowing-up-the-bad-guys-and-saving-the-world hero is one thing. Real-life hero is something else entirely. The poems by queer women of color, poems of strength and courage and generally kick-ass attitudes, are also poems that move through ??? and sometimes remain in ??? deep anger and pain.
I return to the poets I discovered when I was first coming out ??? those first true reflections I saw. Their familiar words delineate the difficulties. “We were never meant to survive,” Audre Lorde says, and June Jordan incants:
I am the history of rape
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of
my self
I am the history of battery of assault“
(from “Poem About My Rights”)
The contemporary poems I seek out split/spit language and form in new ways, but concern themselves still with the struggles Lorde and Jordan wrote of. Dawn Lundy Martin writes raced and gendered bodies marked by trauma. Her poems demand clarity: sight, heart, text.
Four: I/M/A/G/E
Tell me–I am telling you–the scent of your coming down, breath already at my belly button, easing. Or, the black room of terror that you half-recall, half-invent. Tell me of the exact moment you slashed through your surprisingly tough skin with a pocket knife and how it felt like rain. I want to tell you about the splitting, of a female body–how I squeezed into it–fitting barely, of the texture of melancholy, of a sycophantic love, draw a flicker for you, let you enter as if entering me.
(from “Negrotizing in Five or How to Write a Black Poem”)
Centuries of repression/oppression/colonization have left us scarred. Too often, we take it out on each other: “Loving you is like living in the war years,” writes Cheri Moraga.
I have certainly felt the pain that queer woman of color inflict upon each other, and I need the poems “for the crazywoman / who knows who she is, / yet doubts” as well as poems “for the crazywoman / who rides around chinatown on her motorbike.” (Kitty Tsui, “Para Todas Crazywomen, Este Poema”)
Duriel E. Harris smashes and reconstructs love/language/poetry/the body. Her Phaneric Displays mask in order to tell truth. Her “Song to the Lover,” describes a love that manifests in violence, full of “tender fist kisses.” It ends:
O the power of the word-fist.
We need not speak this way.
The body gives first knowledge of war
in the cell. We are
more than the body.
We are poets.
We sing also of the soul
These poems, marked with struggle and survival, ask: how do we live and love well when the weapons that we carry deep in the pit of our bodies can wound so deeply? To turn the blade away. Isn’t that the end, the heroic action that we need?
The hero of Ching-In Chen’s The Heart’s Traffic, Xiaomei, fights, is hurt and hurts in return. But all along she weaves a net of words that continually shift to catch, move to transform ghost into firefly, girl into tiger.
I milk the sap. I brew the ailing tea. I boil. I secret my girl. I pocket my bitter
vegetable, like my cheek. I spark I rim I glow I fire Ants walk up and
down my spine. What if digestion? I am of the frozen.
(from “[3.Girl]”)
Truth is –
We need our own bodies back. And we need poems that gather and mirror and ??? yes ??? help us heal.
you bring out the queer in me
the dyke in me
the brave beautiful butch in me
voracious femme in me
(Maiana Minahal, “You Bring out the Filipina in Me”)