Finding Flow

luz: Reflecting on your query, Ezra, the first thing that came to mind was the idea of time moving in a spiral — a “time spiral.” That concept emerged while developing a module on the history of Indigenous feminisms for an Indigenous Feminist Organizing School curriculum, which came out of a larger series of Feminist Organizing Schools, developed by Grassroots Global Justice and other activist partners. Our small history committee became frustrated when the response to our first rough draft was, “Well, what you’re saying is good, but we really want to make sure you hit these points.” We were directed to a feminist timeline marking milestones in the histories of mainstream (US) feminism, with the addition of work done by Black feminists, and later other women of color — but Native women were not yet on that timeline. And we were like, “Oh, but that’s not our timeline. That’s not the same timeline.” Simone Senogles (Anishinaabe) was my primary writing partner — and dreaming partner and remembering partner on this project. Simone suggested that a time “line” was not an accurate nor useful description of our lived realities across generations, which might be better described as a “time spiral.”

Once we shifted from a two dimensional “line” to time spiraling through history, the conversation generated when we came together for the first IFOS was dynamic, it was alive. To speak of a time spiral validated very real lived experiences. And so we pass by the same energetics in the same realities, maybe with some change, maybe not, as we move forward and backward. And a spiral works for me thinking about time as not static. Time is not static, and we can spend time with our ancestors and therefore be connected to our past as well as vision for the future and look forward to being a good ancestor when it’s our time.

That’s been on my mind a lot, the idea of a time spiral, and trying to articulate what that looks like, and asking how does that manifest within a group, in a workshop, in larger discussions. In terms of my writing, my research centers on the women in the Caribbean at the time that Columbus got there and began ransacking. So I’ve had to read the chronicles, what all those original dudes writing at the end of the fifteenth century and into the early sixteenth century were trying to sell to their royal and wealthy sponsors, and I’ve been looking at what they were interpreting about the lives of the societies they first met in the Caribbean, and that reading is looking through their lens. And it’s amazing how bad interpretations get. Sometimes this is acknowledged. There are current scholars, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, well Pané didn’t know the language of the people whose culture he was recording,” but then they go ahead and base entire histories on an unreliable narrator. I’m like, if that’s not actually what they said, why would you build on that? We have to go closer, spiral in… You know that expression, “reading between the lines” which is useful, but what came to me this morning with your question about time was “unwriting history.”

And to me that runs parallel with decolonizing our minds. How often in my daily life do I think about something, or act on something, and then I realize, oh no, that’s not Luz, that’s a colonizer up in my mind, another layer that has to come off. I spend a lot of my time researching the fifteenth century and then bringing myself to the present and understanding that so many things that we experience today began there, in the Caribbean. I think of it as the ombligo, the belly button of the Americas, where this first thing, first invasion happened. I think of moving around in time and try to not listen to the historians and the anthropologists and the archeologists. Some of their information is useful, but some of it is actually made up. 

How many anthropology books say, “maybe,” “probably,” or “well, it’s possible that…” I’m like, you have a doctorate so you can do this, right? You can publish this book and head the anthropology department, but you actually don’t know what happened because your foundation is faulty, in error. And nobody pays attention to women. If you look at academic books about the Caribbean of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and you go to the index and you look up woman, sister, mother, daughter, grandmother — there are whole lives missing. Half the world is missing. The chroniclers of Colón’s voyages, of those first years when the cristianos were coming here to conquer, enslave, and exploit rich resources, they weren’t interested in the lives of women. They didn’t ask or record the tasks and activities that women did, the roles that women played in society. It’s not there because they weren’t looking at women in society, and women weren’t talking to them. Women were very often hiding from those same people.

Eli: I think so much about how to use a combination of the colonial histories with oral history and imagination to fill in the absences. Working on my book Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure, I read all of this eugenics history and of course Carrie Buck (the poor white woman at the center of Buck v. Bell, the 1927 SCOTUS case, which declared state sterilization laws constitutional) kept coming up. In the colonizers’ histories, Carrie Buck became a marker for the Supreme Court case rather than an actual person. And in my fury at the ways that she became nothing but a symbol, I started using imagination to fill in the gaps and absences while also acknowledging the limitations of my imagination as a white trans-masculine, non-binary disabled person who’s college educated. In this practice of dreaming and imagining, I need to always stay aware of how my imagination of the past-present-future is shaped by who I am. How can I use imagination to fill in the erasures? Reading between the lines, reading against the grain, I so often follow Saidiya Hartman’s lead. Her work has taught me so much about how to read gaps, absences, and erasures. One of my ongoing questions is: what’s the role of imagination in doing this work around erasures and how can we use imagination in radically ethical ways that lead us toward liberation rather than appropriation?

Tourmaline: Yeah, I feel a deep resonance with what both of you are saying. And with the imagination piece, Saidiya Hartman’s essay “Venus in Two Acts” was so influential when I was writing Happy Birthday, Marsha! with my dear friend Sasha Wortzel. This was a decade ago: we made a short film, Happy Birthday, Marsha!, in 2015, but we were writing for a few years before that, and that essay about imagination and critical fabulation really underpinned the writing process. Especially because for a while the teachings and histories of Marsha were so beautifully contradictory.

There was a story that Marsha P. Johnson’s birthday took place on Stonewall and she had a party, no one came and then she went to Stonewall and then Stonewall happened. And so we were like, okay, let’s name this “Happy Birthday, Marsha.” We were doing archival work knowing the violence of the archive and imagining or receiving the message to the best we were able to receive it, right? And that’s always changing and expanding. That was our goal. In that process we found Marsha’s birth certificate, which was August 24th, 1945. There was a huge revelation that Marsha was a Virgo, not a Cancer, and that her birthday wasn’t on the same day as Stonewall. We were like what an interesting thing, but we’re going to still name it this because so much of who Marsha understood herself to be was birthed, created, and launched in that moment. Let’s continue the imagination and the contradiction that’s part of it.

In the process of the biography, there’s this interview with Eric Marcus that’s widely quoted where Marsha’s like, “I didn’t get to Stonewall till later because Stonewall was on my birthday. It was in August, but for some reason they moved the date to June and maybe they did that for the students so they’d be able to celebrate it.” It was just this beautiful way of feeling time. The accordion effect that Eli Clare is talking about; Marsha’s receiving time in a very particular way. And in this other moment she’s in this interview and she is talking about how she got lost in Stonewall and she’s like, “I got lost in Stonewall in 1973.” And then she’s like, “No, no, 1979, wait no, 1969. I got lost in the music. I got lost in the Stonewall, I got lost in the music, and I haven’t got out and I’m still lost in the music.” And so this swirl of time is so much of the beauty of so many of our communities and the malleability and the moving the date: “Actually it was my birthday, Stonewall. They changed the date. I didn’t change it. It was on my birthday in August.”

I wrote Marsha’s biography with our contradictions in mind and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s insistence that we love our mad queens and Leah’s incredible poem about Marsha and what shapes our memory. And also going back to Happy Birthday, Marsha!, there was a reason why we thought it was her birthday; it’s because she said it was her birthday and she was moving with these profound multiplicities of understanding time. That was the thing that made me think about imagination and the archive and the past and also the accordion of it all.

Eli: Totally. I love that your reading doesn’t analyze Marsha’s words through a diagnostic lens, that you don’t turn her interview into a symptom of something pathological. So many biographies read that kind of archival evidence — “evidence,” not my word — through diagnosis, which does so much violence. It feels directly violent to me when people’s words and lived experiences are read primarily through diagnostic lenses, and the archive becomes a record of symptoms that lead toward the declaration of diagnoses. What a gift that your reading of the archive doesn’t even entertain diagnosis. Diagnosis doesn’t even exist in the universe of your reading. Thank you so much for that.

Tourmaline: Well, the work is so deeply informed by me receiving so much care and study through when we first rendezvoused almost twenty years ago. It was at the Disability Justice Collective that I was being so shaped by and wanting to also usher forth. And then also Rights for Imprisoned People with Psychiatric Disabilities was the other group. It was when I was with Critical Resistance working around this big coalition and then also writing with “In Solidarity.” All of that really led to finding a way to write this book in a way that to me is just so reflective of Marsha and our community.

luz: When I think of that timeframe, what year was Stonewall again?

Tourmaline: ’69.

luz: So ’69, I was a twelve-year-old running the streets of New York, in some good ways and some not so good ways. When I think about that time, the world was very different. And so I think of, as you described, this accordion and things that I’ve read in the past about Marsha and about the other now-named “queer” people of color. And they’re not thought of as coming out of the Black revolutionary movements, even when their communities and families were very wrapped up in what was happening at that time. And whether or not they can be out as queer or trans at home… the word “trans” was used differently in 1969. There were so many silences, particularly if you were politically active. 

As I was growing in my teenagehood, it wasn’t okay to be out at all, particularly if you were involved in social change movements at the time, which were very patriarchal, very misogynistic, no place at all for queer people of any stripe, a lot of violence. And interestingly, a lot of macho culture that came from guys having been in the military, coming home from Vietnam and what that experience was, or being conscientious objectors. 

When I was 19 and came out and was with my partner who was Chinese, we laughed that in the Castro in San Francisco, we could walk down the street holding hands, but as soon as we went to the Mission, which was largely Mexican-American and Central American at that time, we had to stop holding hands. And when we walked over to Chinatown, again, we couldn’t hold hands. I was involved in this theater project, where people were celebrating the Puerto Rican nationalist, Lolita Lebrón, and so in the troupe were people coming from a particular politics — and it was kind of don’t ask, don’t tell. “Oh, Luz shows up with this woman; she must be her roommate.”