*Presentation delivered at the 15th Annual Lemon Project Spring Symposium

In the background of this underground scene,
the Jungle Brothers give voice to my scheme
over snares: Jimmy and Jane behind the bush.
It’s the smell of fried plantains and Kush;
dreads, dashikis, twists, the bushes;
talk of when the revolution comes that
makes me feel like I’m on a sacrilegious creep—
trying to peep a brother out and tell him my urge
to check him.

Him—
twisted at the crown; red, green, and yellow around his waist.
He’s the one who always smells of earth and oils
and I’m spoiled by the props he gives me for everything,
tonight, I feel like I’m not. But I unbraid my ‘fro for this occasion;
didn’t require much persuading: “Hey, sister, let’s build tonight—
hit my boy’s set. His cipher’s always tight and maybe this time
you can even drop a line because I know you have too much to say
to act all shy.”

Folks piggyback on the lines of the poet before them.
We sit cross-legged in a circle on pillows and it’s my go.
I wanna be revolutionary—tell him the revolution is love
in a world where god is contraband and shorty wanna be a thug.
But I’m not sure if that’s gonna be enough for him to turn on me
with new eyes; see beyond my love for the Youth, the Cause, the People.

Plan b:
wax poetic on the Black Aesthetic that says my art should be useful.
Breathe:
the revolution is love.

With my eyes closed to ignore my worries that maybe
this is counterrevolutionary, I give in to the spin and build with him.

This poem is titled Behind the Bush after the rap by the Jungle Brothers. The Jungle Brothers are members of the Native Tongues clique that includes fellow artists Queen Latifah, De La Soul, and Rock and Roll Hall of Famers A Tribe Called Quest. These groups are part of the so-called conscious age of hip hop of the late eighties and early nineties that focused on social issues and providing both political commentary and uplifting messages for a decidedly Black audience.

*A note: the working definition of Black throughout this presentation will be African-descended people who became part of the American project through the slave trade. While I expect there are similarities in the experiences of African-descended people throughout diaspora, that scope of knowledge is beyond my own research and importantly, though often conflated as such is not the master narrative of Blackness.

When I wrote the poem in my early twenties, it was how I imagined life-partnering through the lens of the Black Arts Movement as I understood it. So, it was Relationship Goals.

In is his 1968 essay, The Black Arts Movement, dramatist Larry Neal explains the BAM aesthetic as being the “concrete expression” of the “Black Power concept.” He writes that “The Black Arts Movement believes that your ethics and your aesthetics are one.” In this poem, the speaker who shares much in common with me as the writer, expects to meet a partner equally committed and certainly understanding of her own ethics praxis which dictates that every facet of her being from the afro style of her hair to her professional and creative commitments as an educator and poet are aligned to The Cause. This praxis includes her goals for romantic partnering which she calls building, as in nation-building. Nation-building is rhetoric from the adjacent Black Power Movement’s ideals of self-determination by building strong Black families which are foundational to strong Black communities.  

Black people’s romantic lives cannot be divorced from the construction of their communal and individual identity in the American project when they are initially codified as non-persons. In 1662 the Virginia colony passes the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem meaning the offspring follows the womb. This not only codifies the status of Black female people and their offspring as property—importantly, as not human, it effectively denies both Black female and Black male persons the protection that humanity affords. Uniquely for Black female persons the doctrine accommodates their sexual and reproductive exploitation and commodification.

To this day constructions of Black female personhood center on labor and sex. Yet, like the speaker in this poem, Black women consistently and courageously practice intimacy that does not reduce it to sexual labor. Their intimacy practices are arguably some of the most radical and yet often quotidian acts of resistance.

These quotidian yet–I contend–radical acts of intimacy are what my recent collection of poetry What We’ve Become considers. Behind the Bush predates and therefore does not appear in the collection; however, the poem is an origin story of sorts representing when I began to understand, like the speaker, intimacy as potentially liberatory. My research question wonders what does freedom look like and what role does intimacy play in it? A kind of what’s love got to do with it question. The speaker posits the revolution is love—love for the People and their Cause.

Though this poem relies on the romantic version of intimacy, for the collection intimacy is not limited to its romantic expression; rather it considers any context in which one can be soft; that is, without the compartmentalization that oppressive systems require. Race, gender, social status, age, health status—all facets of identity but never the whole of it. Yet oppression expects that we exist in these silos. Compartmentalized, the silos dictate our movement through time and space in rigid, and frankly disembodied, ways. In keeping with the mechanism of oppression, this disembodiment is disempowering and disarming; the latter being the singular goal of oppression. To disarm a population is to maintain the power of the oppressor.

When I imagine this work, I imagine that what it means to be free is the agency to be a fully realized self which is where intimacy happens and therefore makes intimacy a liberatory context. And here I should add that fully realized self is not necessarily a flawless one and that appears in the work too. This project makes a case that Black survival of the American project necessitates intentional practices of intimacy.

Oppressors intervene and exploit every aspect of the lives of the people they oppress. Well documented and described in the history of American slavery is the physical exploitation of Black enslaved people; as laborers and for Black women uniquely and additionally as reproductive laborers. (I don’t list sexual labor here as unique to Black women because Black men, women, and children are subjected to it and act as tools of the sadists).

In one of the collection’s poems called “The Science of Sidewalks” the speaker describes intentional intimacy practice by praising the sidewalk in front of their childhood home. The sidewalk is broken with its “wayward rallies of knee peeling crumbs” yet is able to shelter a tree root. The speaker compares this duality to how  “we”—assumed to be their beloveds—“gather our broken, lay warm cover to protect them.” All of the wounded or flawed in the poem are held lovingly.

In another poem, “Kwansaba In Which You Stay,” the impetus is the same but for lovers.

The speaker describes themself as a less-than-ideal lover—this admission is as important as the fact that their partner chooses to stay in community with them fully realizing this inadequacy. There is healing in this choice: the speaker has been wounded and subsequently mishandled by “curious healers.”  The partner is headstrong and even playful in their communion. So the speaker praises the partner who stomps “clumsily” through their “thin wet.” The intimate relationship despite what might otherwise divorce them from it, heals the speaker of “what once was.”

In both poems, the intimacy with a flawed subject, a revolutionary act, is intentional and ultimately healing. The poems’ form further reinforces a revolutionary notion of intimacy straight out of BAM. A praise poem, the kwansaba consists of seven lines, seven words per line, and no single word in the poem exceeds seven letters. Created in 1995 by Black Arts poet Eugene B. Redmond the kwansaba is inspired by the seven-day Kwanzaa holiday borne of the “cultural revolution in art and ideas” of BAM which emphasizes that Black art is its own aesthetic and not simply a rejection or reordering of the dominant culture’s ethics and aesthetics.

This matters in the context of so-called Black love which necessarily invents itself against the backdrop of legal and extra-legal exploitation of Black people that could reasonably disrupt intimacy except that Black people make choices similar to the subjects in the aforementioned poems. Often, but not always at the helm of these decisions are Black women—lovers, mothers, and otherwise. In “Benediction” a mother “buries her second son/after taking him from some unholy place in the secret of night” implicating a lynching has taken place. The speaker compares this mother’s dedication to their own dedication to an unspecific you that could as easily be a lover as a divinity. The beloved is enigmatic; compared to the scent of rain “never quite captured in incense and candles bearing its name” and “the 23^rd Psalm sung over a nyabinghi drum,” the beloved is “invoked without trying.” Eventually, the speaker concludes: “You are the pink of my palm and I need you as much” reaffirming the utility of intimacy. By juxtaposing the speaker’s experience of intimacy with a grieving yet dedicated mother who “moves steadily through years on top of more years of life believing in god” we are reminded for Black people intimacy is not painless and is one of the most profound yet mundane aspects of our lives. We also become acquainted with the esoteric aspect of intimacy in the god of liberation who appears here and elsewhere in the collection such as “The Spirit” in which sexual intimacy is compared to the heightened experience of spiritual ecstasy known in Black religious vernacular as “catching the spirit.” The speaker describes the moment as “close to god as birth, death, & you.”

In another quotidian performance of intimacy, daughters give care for a reluctantly aging father who “refuses creamed corn” and “the rail edging the ramp.” Even though the subject in the poem “After Years of Daughters” “exhausts himself by existing,” the girls patiently “let him be.” Which is what intimacy provides: the freedom to be a fully realized self that oppressive structures necessarily deny.

This is freedom. And by permitting ourselves intimacy we can have it. If I were to return to the young speaker in Behind the Bush, I would remind her that throughout our darkest episodes, love is still being made, mamas still preen over their babies, communion with ourselves, the divine, each other has consistently been our healing and our way forward. There is no revolution to which the young speaker aspires; no liberation without it. So young lady, I would say: go get your man! The revolution is love.