ABSTRACT
To rethink becoming a Black lesbian writer and reader of Black women writers provokes feelings of pleasure and trepidation. To reflect on any one of the three subversive identities-lesbian, Black, poet-that fill my work and days is to reflect on the expectation I place on the writing and the writer to be useful. Black and lesbian have always been bolder identities for me, threatening always to subsume the poet. I dreamed of writing years before I was sleeping/being with women, years before I craved literacy of my blackness. Blackness-my own and others’— contextualizes the dangerous parts of myself, gives them voice and visibility. I do not give up Black for “African-American.” I remain connected to what the term signifies for me as a participant in the late 1960s Black consciousness movement in the USA. Blackness-that reclaiming of culture, that will to revolution; embracing the remarkable and violated past, the very tenuous present, and the unpromised future as an African in diaspora, an ex-slave, lesbian, poet.
