I

Paris, 2012. I stood trance like in front of her. Portrait d’une négresse (1800) painted by Marie-Guillemine Benoist. Portrait of a Negress. I had seen her digital likeness across my screens on nights spent scrolling through the dusky blue of Tumblr back in its golden hour. It was something altogether different to see her in person. Just hours prior, at the D’Orsay, I stood equally transfixed, alone in the palatial sterility with The Origin of the World (1866), staring myself away into the seafoam gulf of white pussy. Whose world?

Alone in the unguarded room in the Louvre, I was free to approach her, to read like palms the strokes that authored her diffuse gaze, the pucker of her third eye resting above a bunched ivory sheath. For the first time, a black breast not there to succour a wailing white brood or some wretched white man searching for cleaner milk than his karma could purchase. The Negress was before me realer than I had been before myself. Through her gold hoop, the blank beige background and the foreground of her skin are together in Manichean repose. A loophole of retreat. Her shoulder, tucked in protection against her form, cannot be registered as a part of her silhouette; her neck elongating into a gently curved hunch against a blue shawl, a time-worn Prussian blue that one might imagine once shone in ultramarine like the shawl of the Virgin. She is in the image of the Black Madonna.

France has more Black Madonnas than any other nation. Like the sitter in Portrait d’une négresse, the question of origins is at issue. While there are Black Madonnas in Christian traditions wherein figures of Christendom are envisioned as African, the Black Madonna prevalent in Europe is the subject of some historical disquiet. Her blackness is not easily negotiated with conceptions of race that shift between centuries and nations. Her sable hue has been claimed by some historians to be merely a marker of time, the influence of candle smoke, for instance, marking her the colour of the rituals of worship. Ironically, Black Madonnas derive some of their authenticity from their blackness, being that it in many cases signifies their age. Before the woman in the portrait, I envisioned myself as having become contiguous with her elegance, her stillness, as having acquired something approaching the consecrated eminence of a Black Madonna. Perhaps our mingling could redeem this woman, relieve her of the bondage of the conspicuous gaze of her white woman painter, no doubt conflating her own female sufferings with the double bind of blackness and womanhood. Perhaps this was something I could achieve through perfect stillness. Hortense Spillers notes that in the process of the instantiation of racial capitalism and the racial hierarchies of the post-Enlightenment period, the slave was rendered as “the essence of stillness,” in the category not merely of the other but of what is outside of time.

Immobilised by the anthropological impulse of empire. Made permeable, this stillness becomes the museum, where modernity goes to stop dancing. I had taken the skywise Atlantic journey in the reverse to return to some strange stillness. Mobilised by desire toward the desire for immobility.

I had come to Paris not unaware of its history as the land that endowed Black American soldiers with some dignity to return home to demand their rights. The land of Fanon’s interpellation, where his desire to attain the world was drawn from him as he found himself “an object in the midst of other objects.”
The side of the Atlantic where Richard Wright and his spiritual successor fought over the protest novel, where Black men were left in a conditional peace to write the people’s polemics. For the French during the early twentieth century, the African, the black person, had become a libidinal “well of fantasies.”

A resource whose imaginative influence cannot be overstated. Even now, those considered to be the most influential and prominent members of the African American literary tradition, particularly of the Harlem Renaissance, are those who spent some of the more prolific years of their lives and careers in Paris. The Countee Cullens eclipse the Jessie Fausets. The Alain Lockes eclipse the Gwendolyn Bennets. The closing scene in Claude McKay’s plotless, homosocial romp Banjo announces an exile: “a woman is a conjunction,” says the title character as he attempts to convince his friend to skip town with him.

Taken grammatically, this is to say that a woman coordinates meaning, but does not generate her own.

In my stillness, I searched her for clauses.

II

Moscow, 1976. Sister Outsider opens with a little discussed essay, “Notes from a Trip to Russia,” and “Notes” begins with and ends with dreams. In the dream she chooses to recount, Lorde imagines herself making love to a woman behind a stack of clothes in a Moscow department store. The love object, it turns out, is sick, and when Lorde goes to ensure she be cared for, Lorde is surprised to learn that the necessary kidney and brain scans will be issued as soon as needed. There is a cartographic epiphany at this particular coordinate of the dream. Lorde realises that she is in Russia and that medical care is free.

Lorde’s published diary entries recall at mythic scale her trip to the USSR for the Union of Soviet Writers-sponsored African Asian Writers Conference, locating Lorde, after the likes of Margaret Glasgow, McKay, and Langston Hughes, within an oft-forgotten but nonnegligible African American tradition of USSR travellogues. I always wonder about the process of deciding which essay in a collection to place at its opening. In a text that binds most of Lorde’s most critical contributions to feminist and queer theory, we must first not only leave the United States, but also leave the world. Go into a dream with her. Lorde dreams like many Black Americans before her that socialism might be the cipher for survival, for liberation. Through dreams that are desires, Russia is represented mythically, steeples are “joyful promises” or “fairy palaces.”

In moments she is puckeringly romantic, sentimental, saccharine, lyrical.

But for Lorde, dreams of lovemaking and living under socialism do not stand in as irrational spectres of real, material experience. In her disclosure, it is travel and movement itself that serve as a metaphor for her dreaming. In the nexus between travelling and dreaming, Lorde wanders, theorised by Sarah Jane Cervenak as a method of philosophical performance, expressing the illegibility of experience, of “drifts,” and dreams.

Both an internal and external experience, wandering “sustains an unavailable landscape of philosophical desire.”

In her proverbial quintessence as a woman on the outside, of her own nation, on the outside even of the solidarities in whose name this conference had been called, Lorde alchemises her alienation to generate an inner landscape where her critical observations and dreams of solidarity might go to wander. Though Lorde’s travellogue, in typical fashion, catalogues her movement across cities, her encounters with locals, and her impressions of social and political life through the eyes of a stranger in a strange land, the piece is only made porous, only made permeable, through mostly undisclosed dreams. Baring the belly flesh of nondisclosure, Lorde’s lyric weakens the supposed opposition between the privacy of the dreaming mind and the publicness of our social conditions, between the interior and exterior landscapes of our collective being.

Kevin Quashie notes in “Black Lyric Privacy” that “We might think of the lyric as a theater of subjective consciousness, a text of feeling that marries interior and exterior.”
Here, the mediating form of Lorde’s wandering is the epistle, the disclosure of her inner experience with an outer world to an outer world. The epistle is the form par excellence of intimation, that which I see as the method of subtle reveal that discloses and abstracts subjective experience. A negotiation between inner space and outer space. A potential space of a radical stillness. What is often identified in Lorde as an autotheoretical approach can be thought of as the performative practice of intimation, where revelations are ambiguated.

Lorde has become vaunted. She has become tote-baggified. And she is writing, here, in a genre that is unwrestable from colonial adventure narratives, having come herself from one of the most powerful capitalist empires. I wonder, as I read and reread, what reliable distinctions can be made between emissaries of transnational solidarity and what Cervenak calls “emissaries of imperialism.”
How to see the other without immobilising the other in an eternal stillness, where potential space can easily calcify into prescriptive space?

“It will take a while and a lot of dreams,” Lorde notes in the close of the account, to “metabolize” her experiences in the USSR.
Lorde does cast some doubt on her own veiled hope that the Russia of 1976 was classless or egalitarian, though muses on its advancement beyond what she calls a “breadconcern level,” a plane of sustenance Black Americans had yet to reach.

In the psychic metabolism of Lorde’s prose, dreams and bread interchangeably enunciate the necessary terms of liberation.

Said the sister on the outside, “We have internal desires but outside controls.”

III

Santa Barbara, 2020. The week before lockdown. Shopping vintage at The Blue Door. I came across a lithograph of echoing squares in shades of coal, slate, dusk, and sand, creating the effect of falling in or being pushed out of a horizon. Sixteen hundred dollars of something that could only be left behind. But it stayed with my mind. There, with it, was none of the performance of contemplation that the museum stages. Only a kind of mothy gazing at the retreating and advancing lines, the very movement with which I was propelled into a graduate career in the same city. I wanted to live where it lived, to be pushed out of its horizon as placenta.

A year after the encounter I had begun my first quarter, found a place, and every day was staring at the blank space above my couch. Its emptiness made me furious, but not nearly as furious as the notion of filling it with something unremarkable, unmoving, sharing with me none of my own history. I think again of the lithograph, by French-Hungarian artist Victor Vasarely according to my Google reverse-image search of the grainy iPhone picture I took as a souvenir. One of the leading artists of the 1950s–1960s Optical Art, or Op Art, movement. Some of the characteristic elements of the style: patterns that instigate the sensation of movement – flashing, vibrating, swelling, and retreat. The style has the particular effect of creating nauseatingly lasting afterimages. Looking back on many of the prominent works of this perceptual art form now invokes early Microsoft Windows screensavers or the psychedelic aural gyrations of the nineties-era Windows media player. One may retreat from the optical to elicit its movement. I advanced. But the specific lithograph in question cannot be found online, not even its likeness.

Santa Barbara, 2022. After two years’ longing, I turned, as one does, to Etsy. I found a woman named Oksana, living in Russia. For years it seemed, Oksana has been taking classic works of European painters and rendering them in the Op Art style. Caravaggio. Vermeer. Rodin. David with the Head of Goliath (1610) by her hand had become like the whirlpools of fingertip flesh, churning the chiaroscuro so that it resembled a pregnant storm cloud. If a commission in this style was possible, and her renderings convinced me that this was a possibility, then ten years out from my moment of stillness with the subject, the Negress, in Benoist’s portrait, we would reconvene in my living room. Above the rose Chesterfield, in a space where light, dust, and movement might extend her form outside the portrait’s frame. I was interested in a representational liberation. Oksana, my would-be confederate.

I felt a kind of love for Oksana for having lived out a recent past that culminated in these little manipulations of history. But more simply for having the same thing on her mind. I pictured her searched by the light of a huge Venetian window, feet akimbo, acrylics splayed and all, and in doing so became a guileless beast like every male artist that ever trained his consciousness on a woman stranger. Oksana in Moscow, oil on canvas. Taylor in Santa Barbara, mixed media. I sent her a direct message asking if she would accept a commission in the style of her renditions of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665) and Bouguereau’s Dante and Virgil (1850). Same day: She could take a shot at the painting. She had given up on the precious fusions because not many people had purchased them. She assured me it would take some time. A few days later, after I invoked the painting of the Negress and some potential colours for the reproduction, Oksana issued a “funny fact.” She had tried to work with the piece before in this style, but the inspiration did not come. This was a chance for her to woo it back. Fate, she called it. From the Latin fātum, “that which has been spoken.” Kismet, I called in response. From the Arabic qasama, “to divide.”

Draft one privileged the face over the body, the Negress’s face both detailed and obscured by gestures of ochre and Persian green. We discoursed, traded edits, and went into the piece again. Draft two, what would be the living final attempt, obscures the subject up close and reveals her at a distance. I worried about having to walk away from the Negress in order to see her. Oksana “fell in love” with the original while working on it, though she was unsure about the thickness of the distorting lines rippling against the sitter’s form. The effect of the orange and green creates a sort of sepia tone in this version. The allegory of French independence is lost in this coloration, while greater definition of the hues of the sitter’s skin is found. We fretted together about losing the richness of the fabrics and the damp sprawl of her gaze.

Our worries settled as sediment in the chat. A few weeks went by before her page was no longer accessible. I stirred our discourse anyway, hoping for a sign of life. “Freaked out by the war. From Ukraine. Unable to continue working on the painting now as I am completely morally crushed.” Followed by a link to the most recent, and final, draft. These DMs remain, for me, the only evidence of our collaboration. A space that contains potential, but admits nothing of a person for whom the same space has been closed. If the DM is the modern epistle, its susceptibility to intercession only then pierced my consciousness with the force of something approximating truth.

To Lorde, Moscow seemed a lot like New York. She comes to learn that they differ on the matter of foundation. Whereas New York is built on bedrock, during Stalin’s time Moscow’s earth was sunken in with material brought from the Ukraine. Strange, per Lorde. The city appeared to her to be standing “on human will.”1

IV

When Lorde asks her guide about the legality of homosexuality in the USSR, the host responds laconically that there is no official position on the issue, because it is not “a public matter.”2 Lorde seems to close off the subject as a conversation piece after this inquiry, which leads into the conclusion of the diary entries. However, the scene that follows opens the space of desire foreclosed by the guide’s brevity. As Lorde sits in one of the conference meetings she is in Russia to attend, she listens unflinchingly to the words of Toni, a Chukchi3 woman, who speaks of hope in the face of the mounting disappearance of her people, of whom only fourteen thousand remained. Lorde narrates her affinity for Toni, pitching her attention across the room as if across the Bering Strait. Seeing in the struggle of Toni’s people a struggle she knows all too intimately, she feels as though the two of them alone “shared that knowledge and that threat.”4 Something about Toni being from the Northern outskirts of Russia, something about the distance her presence implies draws Lorde in. After her talk, Toni comes to sit with Lorde, remarking through her interpreter that she had been searching for Lorde’s eyes in the crowd, that she felt she had been speaking directly to Lorde’s heart. Toni tells Lorde how beautiful she is. She moves closer. They hold hands for the remainder of the evening. Lorde is kissed as the interpreters look on smirkingly.

This was both a private and public matter. Like overhearing a telephone call, any of the other guests that only spoke Russian or English would experience, in all their publicness, the love words traded by only one of the women. Some might have been able to understand both. But none, including the lovers and interpreters, in the interaction could possibly disclose the full experience, as this flirtation was a collective effort. A connection both mediated and direct, distantly longing and passionately proximal. Lorde writes, just before they part, that she and Toni had “connected somewhere in the middle of the Aleutians.”5 The imprecision of their congress, its mediation, its givenness to being transported, reveals and conceals a negotiation between inner and outer landscapes. Just as Lorde opens the telling by intimating a sketch of a dream, that porousness reappears at the end of the telling, wherein landscapes of desires open themselves up in moments where the publicness or privateness of affections becomes impossible to discern.

Wandering, according to Cervenak, resists the borders of textuality, and at the same time is some “mutant form” of it.6 Lorde’s epistle wanders as Lorde wanders, intimates as Lorde intimates. Into the Tashkent markets for grapes. Into the living rooms of mothers who also long for peace. Into lovemaking on the black magma of the Aleutian archipelago. Off of the page and back into her dreams, where we cannot follow.

V

The Free Negress Elisabeth was originally published in 2000, roughly twenty years before Portrait d’une négresse was renamed for the enslaved woman the painting depicts, Madeleine.7 The novel, written by Surinamese author Cynthia McLeod, was released after over a decade of personal research. What McLeod hoped to do was give a name and a telling to the life of a woman named Elisabeth Samson, a wealthy Black woman who was known by her name in Suriname, but whose existence was scarcely recorded in the national archive. Samson is a marvel according to our limited knowledge of daily life in the colonies and on the plantations, not merely due to her wealth, but due to the fact that she was born free and, herself, owned human beings as slaves. What is the resonance between Madeleine, an enslaved woman, and Elisabeth, a wealthy slaver? The resonance is one invoked by McLeod, and perhaps her publisher, as Madeleine’s portrait is featured on the novel’s cover.

When this novel originally passed hands between some friends, the power of the association arrested us. Not knowing of the recent discovery that the woman sitting in Benoist’s painting was an enslaved woman named Madeleine, likely brought to France from Guadeloupe, we joined in the centuries of fabulation that had been accruing on her form. We imagined that she was not the Negress, not Madeleine, but Elisabeth. This shared fabulation very nearly crushed our love for her. That instead of an enslaved woman briefly captured in all of her flesh-bound beauty, this was a woman who had profited from the traffic in human bodies. She was on the other side of the whip. This was not my Black Madonna. McLeod’s tenor is opposite. Her monumental uncovering of Samson’s life is laced with a celebratory glee. Samson is a marvel for McLeod. For us, she was a defector.

When Portrait d’une négresse was first exhibited, one critic, Jean Baptiste Boutard, referred to it as horrific, as noirceur, a black stain.8 I thought my own gaze exalting, as if I could rescue a woman with my eyes. Our discovery of Samson briefly restored the stain. I can envision the image of the painting falling from its place on that wall, toppled by its needy onlookers. McLeod was a huge success, travelling all the way to the Hague to recover enough documentation to put together the story of a woman who managed to live what many would consider a dignified life under slavery. If Samson was rare, it was not merely because she managed to make a fortune before the age of even thirty, it is because she is the rare black female colonial subject of the eighteenth century whose life can be even partly culled from colonial archives. In “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman grapples with the narrative quandary of telling stories about what we cannot know – “impossible stories.”9 At the heart of telling impossible stories, stories that seek to scrawl notes in history’s folios, is the volatility of the subjunctive. History is suffused with desires for the stories we want to hear, for total knowing, for a kind of existential punctuation that is never available in life. If archives attempt to approach the other and the lands of the other empirically, desperately hoping that figures will erase names, then travellogues approach them subjunctively, with the palpable desire to enclose and disclose the other in complete knowing.

The Negress named Madeleine is not Elisabeth Samson. Her true name is somewhere private.

VI

Saucy golden onion steeples and “Thanksgiving-turned” trees under a pumpkin sky.10 In Russia, Lorde proclaims, “everything is seen in terms of food.”11 The phrase hand to mouth accumulates meaning here, the space between one’s hands and one’s mouth being, in Lorde, a sort of labour time. All other tasks are measured by how much food one’s hands can produce, all other values measured out in hand-to-mouth time. In the potential space of Lorde’s epistle, food, the body, land, and architecture are amorphously continuous. The way in a dream sometimes a child might be fattened for eating, an altar might gnash and beg, a familiar presence with no face might become a door, the food, bodies, and buildings of Russia are rendered impressionistically. In one moment, Lorde describes an act of translation by a Russian waiter, wherein Lorde is able, despite speaking no Russian herself, to order a bountiful meal made up of lemon piquant fish soup, mackerel, sturgeon, bread, tea, and white wine. What Lorde’s Russian phrasebook permitted by way of speech surely would pale against her recollective prose, relating the meal as delicious, delicate, rich. Describing it with all the fervour and besotted blush of a bustling imperial banquet, despite her having been alone with only a waiter who was tasked with “deciphering” her desires.

When her guides take her to the cities of Tashkent and Samarkand in Uzbekistan, Lorde marvels at the local industry. Between luscious descriptions of the Uzbeki landscape and architecture, Lorde remarks on the incredible capacity of Russians and Asians to work together in not an industrial land, but, for Lorde, an industrious one. Here, seeming racial harmony begetting a cooperative industriousness appears to draw Lorde toward the USSR’s experiment. It is in her encounters with the “descendants of Ghengis Khan,” though, that both Lorde’s desires and her misgivings about the viability of the USSR as a political and social model swell into and out of the prose.12 One can hardly deny the aura of orientalism surrounding Lorde’s recollection of Uzbekistan, always there together with her incisive attention to what might naturally fall outside of her critical vantage. In moments, Lorde’s prose gilds the Uzbeki people in gold, noting them as warmer and more passionate than the Slavs. Covered in salt and once called the “Hungry Dessert,” the land between Tashkent and Samarkand in Lorde’s rendering ascends to a biblical scale: “The feeling of a dessert having been reclaimed and bearing huge fruit is constant. Later on, as we headed on south after the great feast, we stopped at an oasis, and I picked some flowers.”13 Tasting salt in the flowers, Lorde remarks that “it was as if the earth itself was still…pouring salt into its products.” In this median, industry exceeds the people’s hands and is attributed to the land itself.

The edible as the embodied is the crux upon which Lorde’s vacillations between valorising and critiquing the USSR are articulated most completely, as well as where she performs some of her most striking intimations. In a village of roses on a collective farm, Lorde is hosted by a woman like herself, one with several children. A woman whom she believes, despite their differing nations, shares her hunger, her same desires, a woman who also wanted nothing more or less than the right of all children to live peacefully on earth, to “somehow make fruitful the power of their own hands.”14 If, as Quashie notes, “the lyric dramatizes a scale of feeling,” Lorde’s lyrical recourse to this idiom inflates to the level of myth her desire for transnational solidarity.15 In Lorde’s prose, solidarity is sought at every port of human sense. Speaking English to her host’s Russian through the translator, Lorde muses that she “felt very strongly that [their] hearts spoke the same tongue.”16 Perhaps something about the mediated nature of the conversation forced reliance on the senses and recourse to the organs as the realms of that which is felt deeply but evades direct speech. In Lorde’s myth, desire is spoken by the heart. Here, Lorde performs what Lata Mani, in Myriad Intimacies, describes as the relational grammar of polyexistence.17 Achieved by a metaphor that directs shared speech not out, as authoritatively universal, but into the body, toward the heart as both deeply personal and profoundly relational. Lorde conveys a logic of interiority that mirrors the form of the epistle. Despite the gestural implications of Lorde’s embodied metaphors, the dialogue these women share is excluded. This same choice does not hold for the rest of the piece, which narrates various conversations between Lorde and her travel companions and translators. It is here in Lorde’s fantasy of polyphony that a potential space, a space exceeding essentialism and containing a vision of relationality, emerges by way of a silence. Hearts with tongues, fruitful hands, the bridesmaid’s little finger grapes that give the impression that they exist by will.

We have internal desires but outside controls.

VII

London, 2020. In a foreword to her short book of essays, Intimations, Zadie Smith describes turning to Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations for some guidance. She notes that though the book did not succeed at making her a Stoic, nor did it assuage the anguish of living through a global crisis, Smith did cull from it “two invaluable intimations”: that “talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.”18 Smith conflates speech with writing, privacy with publicness. This at a time when the quotidian joy of people watching, of overhearing, had ceased. When social life had been banished within what seemed like days into the neglected corners of our homes. To talk was to write, and to write was to be heard.

In contemporary use, intimate refers to that which is private and to be made inaccessible to the public. Sometimes, intimates refer to genitalia or the garments that cover genitals. It is what is close to and of the body, all its folds, appendages, all its fluids. That is, intimate in its noun form. In its verb form, intimate means to make an implication, to hint, to suggest. A minor provocation that stays as close to the body as speech can, in whispers, in private correspondence, in gesture. Common use obscures a parallel history of usage. A history in which intimate, in its verb form, was used to refer not only to indirect speech but also to formal declarations of war. Placing intimation on an axis between that what is private and close to the body and what is public and compels the collective body. This is the seeming paradox that Smith distils in her foreword, and the one that gives energy and movement to the epistle as a form. But the multimodality of intimation is not a paradox. It is not incommensurable within itself. Rather, intimations are relationality in motion. They generate suspicion around the fictive opposition of public and private, of inside and outside, of subject and object. As Lata Mani writes in Myriad Intimacies, “our conceptual categories and linguistic conventions attempt to contain the near-infinite pluralities in which we exist.”19 The epistle creates a space that is not inside experience or outside it, but a space of dreams, of contemplations, space where potential may emanate like the aureola surrounding the face of the Madonna.

Lorde stood baking, a raisin in the Samarkand sun outside of a porcelain factory, musing on the apparent indifference of her travel companions to the oppression faced by Black people of the United States. In the posture of the weary traveller, Lorde intimates one of the few pointed remarks of suspicion that dapple the diary, that the Soviet people are a people “who can not yet afford to be honest.”20 But certainly myths can never afford to be honest. Nor dreams.

1 Audre Lorde. Sister Outsider (New York: Crossing Press, 1984):19.

2 Lorde, 32.

3 Lorde refers to Toni as “Chukwo.” Altered here in keeping with traditional spelling.

4 Lorde, 32.

5 Lorde, 33.

6 Cervenak, 3.

7 McLeod, Cynthia. The Free Negress Elisabeth. Arcadia, 2008.

8 James Smalls, “Slavery is a Woman: ‘Race,’ Gender, and Visuality in Marie Benoist’s Portrait d’une négresse (1800),” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 3, no. 1 (2004).

9 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” small axe 26, (2008): 10.

10 Lorde, 15.

11 Lorde, 15.

12 Lorde, 22.

13 Lorde, 25.

14 Lorde, 26.

15 Quashie, 58.

16 Lorde, 26.

17 Lata Mani, Myriad Intimacies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 11.

18 Zadie Smith, Intimations (New York: Penguin, 2020).

19 Mani, 18.

20 Lorde, 28.