Living as a Lesbian

By Sinister Wisdom

Living as a Lesbian is Cheryl Clarke’s paean to lesbian life. Filled with sounds from her childhood in Washington, DC, the riffs of jazz musicians, and bluesy incantations, Living as a Lesbian sings like a marimba, whispering “i am, i am in love with you.”
Living as a Lesbian chronicles Clarke’s years of literary and political activism with anger, passion, and determination. Clarke mourns the death of Kimako Baraka (“sister of famous artist brother”), celebrates the life of Indira Gandhi, and chronicles all kinds of disasters—natural and human-made. The world is large in Living as a Lesbian but also personal and intimate. These poems are closely observed and finely wrought, with Clarke’s characteristic charm and wit shining throughout.

In 1986, Living as a Lesbian captured the vitality and volatility of the lesbian world; today, in a world both changed and unchanged, Clarke’s poems continue to illuminate our lives and make new meanings for Living as a Lesbian.

Co-published by A Midsummer Night’s Press and Sinister Wisdom, the Sapphic Classics Series publishes reprint editions of iconic works of lesbian poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sinister Wisdom
• Release date: Jun 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781944981112

Sinister Wisdom

Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary & art journal that publishes four issues each year. Publishing since 1976, Sinister Wisdom works to create a multicultural, multi-class lesbian space. Sinister Wisdom seeks to open, consider and advance the exploration of lesbian community issues. Sinister Wisdom recognizes the power of language to reflect our diverse experiences and to enhance our ability to develop critical judgment as lesbians evaluating our community and our world.

Book preview

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Living as a Lesbian

by Cheryl Clake

Copyright © 1986, 2014 by Cheryl Clarke.

All rights reserved.

A Midsummer Night’s Press

16 West 36th Street

2nd Floor

New York, NY 10018

[e-mail]

www.amidsummernightspress.com

Sinister Wisdom, Inc.

P.O. Box 3252

Berkeley, CA 94703

[e-mail]

www.sinisterwisdom.org

Designed by SnoWar (Nieves Guerra).

Cover photo © Alexis Jenkins. Used with permission.

Proofreader: Joanna Cattonar

First edition, January 2014

ISBN-13: 978-1-938334-06-1

Simultaneously published as Sinister Wisdom 91, ISSN: 0196-1853.

Printed in the U.S. on recycled paper.

dedicated to all the fat or skinny,

black or yella, grinning or toothless

madonnas — live or dead

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Preface:

Time Capsule to the Unforgettable

Dear Reader,

I am a black feminist retrogeek. This means that I sift through archives, basements and library sales for words and paper touched and crafted by black feminist writers. I lust for their dust and I track them across time. This is how I came to read many bold, hilarious and sincere letters from Cheryl Clarke to other black feminist literary figures. Many of the letters I found were written on crooked stationery promoting Clarke’s first self-published book: Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women. Cheryl was not thinking of my archive-digging generation and me as an audience for those letters at the time. But she used the form of the letter as rigorously as she used the form of the poem. She used those letters to challenge, to clarify, to gush, and to commiserate, and often to thank people for their work. Audre Lorde kept the letters. June Jordan kept the letters. Those letters, in the boxes and archives and basements of black feminists all over the United States, are a companion archive to Cheryl’s own published work and black feminist literary work in the twentieth century in general. I am moved in this preface to the new edition of Living as a Lesbian to follow Cheryl and use the intimate form of the letter to do important contextualizing literary work. I know this will make you feel like an eavesdropper, an interloper, almost like a geeking out retronerd researcher yourself. And you should. Because you are holding history in your hands. You are reading a too-long out of print classic that might not have survived but did. A crucial archive for our present moment and an ongoing act of love.

Dear Cheryl,

God. How you make everything ours. Drawing even the contested word lesbian right into the root of us with blues woman riffs and oceans crossed. How you make the angriest moments of our lust into political legacy to grow from. How you make us possible, those of us who would live without permission and still not asking for it. To write about a lesbian breakup this way

The African’s first shock at her severance

from a familiar piece of earth

and an ocean of grief

are what I am feeling this day (triumph 108)

is more validating than I can say. The oceans we cross for each other. The repeating shock of our depth.

I am writing you this letter because I think somehow you might not know what you have done. Some months ago you called me and asked me to write this preface. If I might be interested. If I had the time. And if by chance I didn’t have a copy of the book itself, you could send me one if I gave you my address. I had to stage a facebook intervention that day, photos of your book next to my face. Bright and blue-lined, just like me. How could you think I was living without this book? None of us are. You wrote us with this book. You built this uneasy breathable space where I am gasping. By the time I was born you had already drafted most of these poems. By the time I could read and write my own name you were revising them. Do you know what it means to be born in a world where Living as a Lesbian is a black alive thing, bold and in print? How could you think I was living without it?

It is like this. You mined the blues, claimed the blues as your unrespectable inheritance with these poems and reggae and slave songs too, because to be a black woman loving black women in capitalism is an ocean-deep thing, is a far-to-cross thing, is still too often an unsurvivable thing, a blue thing, but you make it a shore.

Drawing words out of the dirty delicious mouths of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday and making villanelles you blueprint home our supervillain selves. Do you know it? Where were you the first time you heard the blues? Did someone play you a record? Sing for you live? I inherited my copy of Living as Lesbian from the late and legendary black lesbian-feminist Bostonian scholar Elizabeth Amelia Hadley. You signed it to her in 1992. Her daughter, my sister comrade Malika Hadely-Freydberg gifted your book and several other classics to me as a contribution to a black feminist library I built in my home as a resource for my community. But even before I read Living as a Lesbian I was living inside it. Maybe like you and those blues women? Did you recognize yourself as soon as you heard them?

I don’t know what reprinting this book is about for you, but for me it is about recognition. That black queers my age will read these words and recognize their drama and their dreams. That black queer literary critics will see the through line from this work to the fiercely political intimacy of Letta Neely’s Here and R. Erica Doyle’s Proxy and brave poems that I have yet to write. Recognition that who we are can never be swept into the mainstream. We are still crossing the ocean. Or moving deep through Kittatinny Tunnel. Hitting places made holy by the abandon with which we lust for them. …that holy place you let me hit is sanctified by how willing we are to sacrifice the clean straight world to get there, our persistence and endurance to always "practice a