1988: Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman
BY beloved suruae ibiene
tracy chapman and the black lesbian playbook
The first time I hear Tracy Chapman’s symphonic and heartfelt vocals, I’m barely eight years old and on holiday visiting one of my aunties. She’s not married, she has no kids and she gives me a pedicure, gently pulling at my cuticles and rubbing lavender scented oil into my feet while Tracy goes belting on about the uselessness of words when brushed up against the tension of desire. Everything I desire at that age finds its origins in my family and the satisfaction of our togetherness. I am an only child whose mother passed from childbirth, motherless from first breath, but sheltered under a fortune of aunties and their teeth sucking, and unrepentant self-gratification quickly becomes the language I anchor my own becomings in. They speak and people listen to their words like god-given ordinances, and though I don’t know anything about language as a kid, I know that's the one I want to speak: the self-possessed one. Naturally, I start calling myself a lesbian around the same time I get my first menstrual cycle and purely in response to my first crush: I’m in middle school and everyone thinks the girl who sits next to me in Science is fast only because she’s Mexican and pretty and says her own name with the same benevolence of a call to prayer. Even though my dad and I are newly baptized and converted Mormons, and I’m supposed to be focusing on my education because we left the kilishi and suya spice of Nigeria so I would have an American education, I fall madly in love with her. Every time she reapplies her cherry scented lip gloss I think I’m dying but it’s just my heart racing full on Kentucky Derby style. The girl who sits next to me in Science is the first person I want to protect who I have no kinship ties to already; the first one I want to claim as kin and catch on my tongue, slowly roping into the safe hollow of my mouth. When I look at her all I can think is, “Baby, Can I Hold You?”
When I claimed Tracy Chapman as my Black lesbian fairy-godmother I was fourteen and mostly fantasized about kissing people in novels. I was flush with the urgency of adolescence, flush with feeling simultaneously trapped and invisibilized within my own yearnings and she appeared to me fully legible in her claim of not just herself, but her desires; impassioned, playful and threaded with gritty community conscious nuance. It didn’t hurt that we shared a zodiac sign, born three days apart at the end of march. As a teenager her music was a potent balm after my father and I immigrated, a lifeline and tether to my childhood comfort which the secrets and humiliations of being West African and undocumented in Virginia had swallowed up whole. Her eponymous album was the usual soundtrack of my mornings, and distinctly outlined the valiant and loving principles for mutual reliance within her personal desires for herself, her community, and her surrounding world, which she claimed candidly through her concern. I love from an inherently feminine place regardless of the gender of the person I bind my affection and protection to. I’m a lesbian who might date butches or cis men or gender variant people and trans or other non-binary, queer folk. The constant progress of language might call that pansexual but I root myself in patterns of Black lesbianism ethos that values, prioritizes and centralizes marginalized feminized experience. My desire is womanist. From listening to Tracy Chapman I put articulation to the governing politics of my desire, that I am drawn to people who can love from their tailbone, people who are engaged with their softness, with the parts of their identities which our male white supremacist world has subjugated and denigrated. I am drawn to people who know they have done wrong things, that they too walk with monsters. That they have been a monster in someone's nightmare. I am drawn to people who don't expect themselves to be good all the time, people for whom sometimes sorry is the only language they know because they can’t find the right words.
In my devotion to this album I realize I am refining the impact I want my care to bring to people, what my tenets of satisfying relationship are. I listen to it now, informed with some experience of the strife for lust and love, remembering the promises I made to former lovers and the conviction to protect in her words makes me want to beat my breast till a new heart grows beside the old one, fully equipped to hold what loving can compel from us. In my own Black lesbianism I often feel overcome not just with what I want, but by how much what I want and what I’m willing to sacrifice of myself to earn it. And there is so much damn sacrifice in this album. Laid out in under 45 minutes are a young woman’s contemplations on family obligation, wanderlust, social degradation, etc. Regardless of how conflicted she is in her lyrics by the full force of what she not only craves, but needs from the world to be fully actualized in her own right. The record begins with, “Talkin’ Bout A Revolution,” and ends with, “For You” — distinctly different moods but both very impassioned declarations. “Talkin ‘Bout A Revolution” is all angst and political frustration, a litany of what she wants from the late 80’s world ravaged by stigmatization and mass death of HIV/AIDS in the gay community, the Challenger explosion, and of course, good ol’ Reaganomics choking out the lifelines of poor Black and Brown communities, communities she, no doubt, strove and struggled alongside in her own coming of age in Cleveland. “For You” is a mournful, reverent ballad with a more directly intimate and raw voice.
Along my habitually hopeful forays into queer dating, when I feel lost by the evolving politics of dating and the haunting chorus of potential suitors “LOOKING FOR SOMETHING CASUAL,” I find myself returning to the grooving drawl of resonant cartography of this album. I listen to “For My Lover” leaning on it as a compass in my commitment to devote my directions to surrendering to the struggle of enriching love, wholesome and challenging and foremost willing to make commitments. Never mind that “casual” during a pandemic sounds really strange, but I struggle to understand how casualness and queerness go hand in hand. There is an implicit shame of caring about people and investing in their futures in the lessons America enforces. Entitlement to people’s bodies is the fabric of American desire — it’s okay to offer harsh criticism and judgment of someone’s body, but bodies are not to be explored beyond how they can be subjugated and marked as sites of shame or conquest. Bodies are only explored as landmarks of our own gain. Queerness, when it really honors what it means to queer lifestyles of destructive individualism, mirrors the ecosystems of the natural world. Queer love is sustained by ecosystems of care and exists as its own ecosystem of care, shapeshifting what our commitments to each other can embody. The dissonance between my queerness and mainstream ideas of queer people is more than typical and something I have grown to find comforting, mostly because it has the simultaneous effect of confirming my existence as a lesbian stereotype. I might not exist as a trans person to other people and rarely do I exist as a womxn to my myself, but as a lesbian I can always be seen in my urgent craving for relationships that have depths of intimacy. U-haul or bust!
Most people hear Tracy Chapman and think of the timeless vibe and melody of “Fast Car,” which is undeniably something you could listen to in any decade and easily get swept up in, remembering what it feels like to be caught at the crossroads of love and family. When I think of Tracy Chapman and I think of my aunt who painted my toenails with such attentive care. I think of what she wanted out of her life as a teenager and how she grew up in post-colonial Nigeria socialized to put effort and validity into caring for men. When I spent holidays with her I used to snoop through her cabinets and dressers, running my fingers over the glass bowls of her perfume bottles and trying on her wigs. The glamor she made of herself is a cornerstone tenet of my lesbianism: flaunting desirability without the promise attainability. She would stop the record player just to replay “Baby, Can I Hold You.” If that isn’t lesbian angst, I don’t know what is. In fact just off of lyrics, “Baby, Can I Hold You” is more my speed as a simp-prone-femme. Something in me deeply identifies with feeling apologetic while also extending love and craving affection. I was raised in intricately sheltered southern migrant communities — specifically undocumented Latinx and Black migrant communties — where I always had defacto responsibilities of adult caregiving, maintaining the home and keeping secrets that meant the difference between life or death. I love people best when I can take care of them without being shamed for wanting to yield care. Maybe you can’t see my lesbianism in a glance, but it is embedded into and governs my values. After much failed flirtations and expressions of desire, I isolate one of the core longings of my lesbianism with a spiritual desire to restore the kinship between me and other Black feminized people. There is a thumbnail from a Viola Davis interview I keep in my Favorites album on my phone. Viola says with firm conviction: “Friendship is important to me.” In my short twenty and handful years on this planet I have weathered enough friendship breakups to understand that friendship is its own governing belief system for how we cherish existence.
I deeply conflate friendship with religion; if we’ll think of religion as a practice of discipline towards something we trust, something we stake our growth in, then friendship is my governing religion. This spring when I found a first pressing vinyl of the eponymous album at my local record store, I told the owner, who I’d befriended in my regular trawls through his shop, to hide it for me. I returned a couple weeks later with one of my best friends who serendipitously lives on a block in Bed-Stuy marked by the unofficial beautification committee with different Tracy Chapman quotes, practically vibrating out of my body as the owner rang it up and slid it into a brown paper sleeve. When said friend had asked what I wanted for my birthday, I’d explicitly said Tracy Chapman and there we were, days before my birthday, making my wish come true in real time. That has been my experience in the magic of friendship, a vested interest in making each other's dreams come true. I am regularly impressed beyond belief by the attention of my friends, by how they celebrate and honor the things they know about me. Part of why I am roguishly undateable is I refuse to date people I wouldn’t feel confident telling my closest friends about or, at the very least, date someone I am not endeared with in a friendly manner. I refuse to date people who don’t make me feel that giddy excitement of, “I can’t wait to tell someone about this! I need to tell my homegirls about this!” No matter the sexual chemistry or charisma, I know I won’t enjoy sitting in your fast car, whoever you are, if I don’t even wanna tell my friends I was in your fast car. By virtue of my Black lesbianism being rooted in my community ties I value being able to have a partner I know my homies will also deeply be enriched by.
from legacies of mothering sprung beloved suruae ibiene – a mutable timeline
beloved is a Black Third World Indigen — sister of the yam, plantain and gorgon
beloved breaks upon shores of understanding buoyed by migranthood and storytelling-earthseed taking root
beloved’s work has taken several forms: cultural criticism, creative writing, arts education, etcetera but is most notable in friendships -to make meanings known and unknown
beloved is sustained by anthems of prayer, lush and forgiving silence and the revel of nature -toil the blood, reap the land
beloved’s words can be found in several publications including Plantin Mag, The Unplug Collective, Crossin’ Borders Mag, Hooligan Mag and redacted — a mouth is the safest place I know
beloved’s craft is informed by everything the body endures, wombs, and transforms -if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
beloved is rooting for everybody Black -fullstop.