CONQUERING DIVISIONS (For my dear friend Claudine O’Leary, and to all my fellow afrocentrics who love me as I love them) I am proud to be a regular contributor to a superior journal entitled “Rain And Thunder: A Radical Feminist Journal of Discussion and Activism”. Claudine O’Leary is my dear friend, fellow warrior, and editor of that outstanding journal. (For more information, contact Rain and Thunder c/o P. O. Box 813, Northampton, MA, 01061). In a recent column, which also appears in her special zine: Suicidal Ideations: Writing and Art by Wimmin on Suicide, Claudine recently penned a magnificent moving, and simultaneously sincere tribute to both her eternal soulmate, Terri Lotz, and to her new friend Jonna. Claudia wrote: “We can only go so far with our struggles alone...it is in community and through love and connection with someone else that we can go deeper...” As always, I share Claudine’s passions and pains. We share missions as activists, lesbians, and comrades who have both lost wimmin we adore to suicide. [My friend Terri Jewell's death was reported as a suicide.
But I will always believe it was a murder. For more regarding her "suicide", see my column on Terri Jewell herein.] Unlike Claudine, I do not share the special grief of losing a lover to suicide. But, I have recently severed all ties with an emotionally abusive lover of three years, which required an intensely painful emotional divorce. The virtual death of my ex was mandatory to embrace my own life, and welcome my own new soulmate into my life and heart.. However, there is a kind of emotional death which I must die repeatedly. Being an afrocentric lesbian requires that I walk a constant tight rope among the types of persons I prefer to allow inside my social space. Inevitably, many who embrace Africa will always embrace its sexism as tradition (See columns on Gays in Africa and Female Genital Mutilation herein.) Gaybashing is intensified by sexism in any culture. Gay men are despised for being womanly. And gay women are despised for daring to be manly. Not just physically and sexually. Primarily, it is a political and financial problem. Brothers who revere polygamy can never accept that two wives may enjoy each other more than they enjoy being in stables/harems. Brothers who adhere to the sexist edict that “The only position for a woman in The Revolution is prone”, truly loathe the control of both our posture and our revolutionary roles which lesbians demand. And, so many sisters gaybash simply in order to please and obey the brothers. Most brothers just do not know how to relate to a woman unless she is a lover/mother/chef/maid. All of the above vex my spirit in ways that make me feel more alienated than I can describe. They are salt upon a gaping wound fashioned by the knowledge that those like me will always be too black for most of the gays, and too gay for most of the blacks. I am not a tangerine. No one can truly love me by sections. I must be embraced in my entirety. I defiantly adore being African and lesbian simultaneously. And, I will do so eternally. I will continue to ignore those Pseudo-Africans who dare say to me: “I accept you as a radical, but not as a liberal... I accept you as a lesbian, but not as someone who refuses to get down with me and my wives...I accept you as an activist, but not as an intellectual...I accept only you and your lover but not the rest of those European-disease infected homos etc....” As the legendary sister warrior poet Pat Parker wrote, “I seek a revolution that I can bring ALL of my selves to”. How can I combat racism but allow black racists to slander my homosexual nature as a “European defect”? How can I combat sexism and not defend my gay brothers against other brothers who accept lesbians only as challenging sexual obsessions? Likewise, how often can I evade answering my righteously segregated gay afrocentrics when they ask: “Why do you torture yourself so by taking so much flak from these twisted black fools? Why do you care so much about so many people who hate you? Why do you keep fighting the same wars?” It is because I am a true African that I love ALL Africans across ALL boundaries. As Claudine stated, I endure this venom because I need this community to go deeper into that place where true African spirits are not divided by something so trivial as sexual preference. For every fool I slay or ignore, there are far more brothers and sisters I revere and adore.There are millions of Africans who know that our real enemies do not care who we sleep with. As long as we sleep forever. And I refuse to allow a few sleepwalking gaybashers, to prevent me from marching with the warriors I need. Some Africans will never be my allies. But I will never allow kufi-clad klansmen and their village “Stepford”-wives to keep me away from my beautiful black brothers and sisters.
All Africans are not in my tribe. Yet, my tribe is full of warriors. And we will win all of the wars. Internal and external. Sexual and political. Spiritual and emotional. One God. One Love. One Revolution.