To Those That Say They Love Me

Dearly beloved,

We are gathered here today to understand the difference between whatever the hell so many people offer up to me and what actual love consists of. So hear me now, and hear me loud: REAL BLACK LOVE IS QUEER. The constructs and confines of modern day sexuality and gender identity aside, black love is fundamentally queer. If it isn’t, it isn’t black love, and if it isn’t black love, it isn’t love. If there is not space for me, as I am, in your love ethic, it is not good enough. Try again.

Real black love is queer. What, then, is to be said for you all reading this letter who might not be? Are heterosexual and/or cisgender people simply condemned to a limited, lesser love because of their privileged positionality? This question posits a number of definitional assumptions, namely that strict categories of beings – case in point: heterosexual, queer, and cisgender – are effective tools in understanding the lived experiences of people. Further, it assumes a definition of queer that is exclusively LGBT+, and while that is how the word is used colloquially and, in many contexts, academically today, I would argue that queerness is fundamentally a process of othering that may not even extend to all LGBT+ people.

In the preface to her book, Terrorist Assemblages Homonationalism in Queer Times, Jasbir Puar describes queerness as “a process of racialization [that] informs the very distinctions between life and death, wealth and poverty, health and illness, fertility and morbidity, security and insecurity, living and dying.”[1] In this sense, racialization is the process that understands a particular sect of humans as having traits that make them innately foreign compared to a more dominant sect of humanity. As processes of racialization, queerness and blackness are similar in that they designate a functional other, an other that becomes the brunt of greater society. The creation of blackness as a racial category marked the creation of a particular iteration of systemic queering, and to be queered is to have boundaries of life and death perpetually blurred and redefined by and for the benefit of dominant society. It is to endure processes of natal alienation, to be pathologized as inhuman, and to be materially estranged and discarded as a result.

The love I aspire to extends within this estrangement to those outside of the politics of desire conventional, so-called ‘love’ ascribes to. In “Uses of the Erotic”, Audrey Lorde’s concept of the erotic, a love energy, is of the same extension. She explains, that the erotic as conceived by dominant society has been constrained in such a way that allows oppression and lovelessness to thrive. She says, “In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort [the erotic] within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.”[2] Accordingly, any love inaccessible to queered people is a result of this distortion. She continues, “The erotic has been misnamed… It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation.”[3]With this statement, Lorde implores us all to consider the ways in which various processes of oppression have distorted our understanding of love and our inner sense of the erotic.

Dear world, if your ‘love’ is conditioned to certain bodies conforming to a, more often than not, oppressive gender presentation and power dynamic, then I don’t want anything to do with it. The only love I will recognize is that which extends particularly to my queerness, not in spite of it. The only love I will accept from you is love that is queer, a love that at the bare minimum nurtures and appreciates people by virtue of who they are, regardless of superficial societal designations of who is and isn’t deserving of it.

Real love is queer. Did I stutter? Are you confused? So am I. I’m confused as to why so much of the so-called love available to me is so limited in scope. Too often people claiming to love me are weaponizing it as an affirmation of my conformity. How can members of my family look me in the face, tell me they love me, but don’t speak to me outside of reprimand and commandment? How can a partner tell me they love me, but refuse to recognize any pain they might have caused me? How can people say they love and appreciate black women, when they only mean light skinned, cis-gender black women with the ‘good hair’ in hyper-feminine gender presentation? How can you speak of ‘loving’ the mind and the intellect but not extending that love to pure flesh? Or vice versa? People say love when they mean something else entirely too conditional, too limited, and too oppressive to compare to the powerful life-force that love actually is.

Lorde relays this sentiment of love as lifeforce: “When I speak of the erotic, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.”[4] According to Lorde, love is a creative, imaginative energy that allows for self-knowledge and self-sustenance. It is a lifeforce in that is allows you to create and to follow your passions. It allows you to know yourself completely, so you can love yourself completely, and share that love with someone else. If your love allows you to abandon the creations and transformations you’ve brought into this world – your offspring, but maybe even your creative gifts, passions, talents, and dreams – is it not clear that your love also abandons a vital part of yourself? How can you expect to love me?

As life-force, love is a powerful source of energy. In The Womanist Idea, Layli Maparyan affirms the power of real love, explaining its capacity to incite tangible societal change: “…love is an invisible vibrational phenomenon of great power. [It] can be thought of as a higher octave energy that can be felt [and] is effective in the literal sense of the world.”[5]

Accordingly, love is a powerful because it is transformative. If, as an individual living alongside systems of oppression, you are not changed, fundamentally transformed, in your love practices, than it is not accessing the powerful source energy that Lorde and Maparyan theorize. To all that say they love me I ask, do you love yourself? Do you at least have an ideal of what that would mean for you, an ideal constructed independently of the oppression of other persons?

Dear mother, I know you’ll take this message the hardest. I’ll start by saying you’ve taught me so much more than I even realize in love and in life in general, and you’ve always emphasized the importance of your vision of black love and self-love. You taught me to love my mind and my intellect, and even though it was an expense of my flesh, I understand the power of my mind in ways that are invaluable. You taught me to learn to emote independently, and although you never taught me how to connect to others, or how to really deal with my emotions, without that skill, I wouldn’t be as capable of solid, unwavering concentration and dedication as I am.

But I know your love, mommy. I know your love has and will continue to mutilate me more than anything else. I see it in the mirror, in the way I see my worth and beauty. I can hear it in my caught, shrinking speech and in the awkward, hyper-deliberate, hyper-awareness I’ve developed from walking on egg shell all my life. I see it in my inability to connect to people – it’s just not something I’m used to doing – and in the difficultly I have with trusting people. See mother, your ‘love’ shoves through me like a runaway train, encroaching on everything, leaving nothing undisturbed. My inner sense of the erotic is something I’m struggling to grasp onto, and I’m struggling to escape the numbness I’ve grown accustomed to. Most of all I see it in my sisters, the one whose insecurities impede on her well-being. I desperately wish she knew me enough to reach out for guidance. I see it in the one whose wounds cut too deep. I’m all she has to clean the blood that’s on your hands, Mommy. I also see it in my brother, who calls me in the middle of the night to calm his panic attacks after having thought himself into a tizzy about ways to be good enough for you. Even Mr. Carlos, who can’t escape the emotional wreckage he helped inflict upon you in the first place. I know your love only extends to the parts of me that are appropriate and obedient and convenient for you to ‘love’. I know you don’t love me fully, and when you can’t love me fully, you can’t love me at all.

At the same time, mommy, the love you offer is a radical departure from that which was given to you. You never threw a fork at the bottom of my foot, never knocked the wind out of me, never punched me in the head, and never really inflicted corporeal punishment on me often. You’d never call me the things your mother called you for offenses (if we can consider having male friends an offense) much less than what I’ve done. It takes so much self-work to learn and grow from abuse. The anonymous letter “Daddy” in Soulfires demonstrates this well. Having reflected on unthinkable abuses at the hands of his father, the writer says:

“You are with me in ways that I do not care to acknowledge. The two people who I have genuinely loathed in my life.. have replicated to a tee the traits in you which I abhor most… I recognize the suggestions and declarations of their presence and yours often enough and, deny as I might, these deceits always call out your name. They tell me that I cannot run away from you. Worse, I do not want to become what I fear in you.”[6]

The anonymous author contends with the everlasting influence his father has and will have on the way that he forms relationships, and the types of relationships he seek out in the first place. Mommy, I want you to think about how you might have inherited the ways you relate to, and the ways you sustain relationships us from your mother. How might you be continuing a cycle of emotional abuse in our family, even in lieu of physical abuse? I’m grateful and proud to know that you have broken so many cycles in your life. But just as you barely talk to you mother, because she brings toxic energy into your life, sometimes I just can’t talk to you.

This point in my life especially has me caught between being a daughter and being a self.

Mommy, if you loved me and if you loved us in the way we deserved, there would be no contradiction there. “Whenever I find myself, to remind myself wanting to tell a lie or put someone down, I try to catch myself, to remind myself of broad human genius.”[7] This recognition of broad human genius and an acceptance of our humanity in all its iterations, is what we need from you, Mommy. Know that it is possible to end the toxic cycles that have yet to be broken. The love that mutilates you so is nothing like that which once surged through you, and the self-work you have to have done cannot be ignored. Even though it’s not enough, it cannot be completely devalued in the way that I often do. That is a lesson I must learn.

Speaking of lessons I must learn; dear self, don’t think this message does not extends to you. Your love is not pure simply by virtue of your race, your gender identity, or your sexual preferences, though it gives you a positionality most apt to accessing real love. We know you have not always embraced your queries. This lack of self-acceptance has manifest in so many ways, from compulsory heterosexuality to your tendency to project your gender dysphoria outwardly, in the form of romantic attraction to people you would rather appear as in this world.

I am not sure that you have ever loved yourself in the way you deserve. I can’t recall anyone else ever loving you in the way you deserve either. Not friends, family, or even romantic partners. When in that position, I know it’s scary to think that you’ll never be loved in the way you need to be love. It is terrifying to think that love is something you’ll forever go without, and part of this fear comes from the fact that you don’t really love yourself yet. Like, really love yourself, in the way that you deserve. As you try to express and learn more about yourself in this burgeoning independence, you are having to come to terms with that realization. Growing into adulthood means caring for yourself and showing up in the world in a way that is impossible without self-love. Revisiting Audre Lorde and her concept of the erotic, you know that self-love means self-connection. It means a greater understanding of the excellence your being aspires to, as an unrelenting necessity to achieve that excellence. Lorde writes:

“…when we being to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions […] then we begin to be responsible to ourselves. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society.”[8]

Layli Maparyan offers a list of practices you can enact to make sure you are caring for yourself properly so that you can loving yourself and others properly. It includes everything you already know you need to do; the question is if you will take the initiative to enact them. Can you drink sufficient water, eat healthy food, obtain quality sleep, maintain only loving relationships, mediate regularly, and visualize yourself thriving in optimal conditions?[9]You know that if you don’t the world will destroy you, but without self-love you won’t have the strength to resist annihilation. You will stress and worry and hyperventilate yourself into a heart attack and into an early grave without it. The mechanisms of this world want to see you discarded, disregarded, and completely destroyed because your self-love has the potential to bring its annihilation. If you can’t love yourself, the mechanisms that want to see you and those like you eradicated will win.

To everyone one who will tell me they love me, just because you find me attractive or intelligent, does not mean you love me. Just because you’re nice, doesn’t mean you are loving to me. Just because we are in close proximity to one another, just because you buy me things, and just because we are intimate, does not mean you are loving me the way I deserve to be loved. Self, if you love yourself, you will settle for nothing less than what you deserve.

With Love,

Mo Wisdom

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[1] Jasbir K. Puar, “Preface: Tactics, Strategies, Logistics” in Terrorist Assemblages Homonationalism in Queer Times, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) xi. [2] Audrey Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, in Sister Outside: Essays & Speeches, (Crossing Press: 1984), 53. [3] Lorde, 54 [4] Audrey Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic”, 55. [5] Layli Maparyan, “Womanist Worldview/Womanism as a Spiritual Movement” in The Womanist Idea, (Routledge: New York, 2012), 49. [6] “Anonymous, “Daddy” in Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and, eds. Daniel J. Wideman and Rohan B. Preston, 250. [7] Ibid. [8] Lorde, 58. [9]Layli Maparyan, “Womanist Worldview/Womanism as a Spiritual Movement” in The Womanist Idea, 54.