Front matter

Queer Roots for the Diaspora Ghosts in the Family Tree

Introduction 1 1. Looking for Roots among the Mangroves 41 2. Queer Roots in Africa 77 Scandals and Lies: The Truth about Roots 122 From Roots That Uproot to Queer Diasporas 155 oy + CS

6. Booger Hollar and Other Queer Sites: Ghosts in the Family Tree 244

NOTES 287 WORKS CITED 301

Introduction

You know, honey, us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come round in queer ways.

—Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“To be rooted,” wrote Simone Weil, “is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul” (43). Why this “need for roots”? How does knowing where we come from help us know who we are? If identity is rooted (and I increasingly think that it must be), what does the notion of roots tell us about identity? Roots, after all, are planted—they nourish and provide sustenance. They define the affective attachment to a geographic site of origins as organic and biological. Isearch for my roots, then, as I search for myself. As a comparative study in queer diaspora studies, Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the Family Tree takes as its primary object of study this desire for rooted identity—a desire to find and become one with one’s roots—as well as the problems that inevitably arise when one sets out on such a journey. Queer Roots is thus about a certain obsession with beginnings and origins and the impossibility of returning to those origins with any certainty, or of knowing that the beginnings one has returned to are the true beginnings and not just the product of the fiction making that is the telling of the story of that return. It is a book about the writtenness of roots, the impossibility of roots, and the importance of recognizing both.

As a way of understanding identity, rootedness has increasingly been subjected to acerbic critiques, both political and theoretical. Politically, roots narratives have been criticized for attempting to police identity through a politics of purity that uses roots to exclude anyone who does not share them. Theoretically, a critique of essentialism has led to a suspicion of essence and origins regardless of their political implications. My argument is that, in spite of these conceptual debates around the concept of roots, ultimately the desire for roots contains the “roots” of its own deconstruction. To demonstrate this point, I carry out my own search for alternative roots that offer models of collective identity that are heterogeneous instead of homogeneous, acknowledge their own fictionality, and deploy family trees haunted by the queer others that patrilineal genealogy seems to marginalize. Frequently, therefore, these alternative roots narratives welcome sexual diversity, acknowledge that even a single collective identity can be rooted in multiple ways, and challenge the patrilineal lines of descent implied by roots, in part by disrupting the linear storytelling that constitutes identity. These roots narratives thereby recognize the dangers of their desires, highlight their queerness, and turn this queerness against the dangers in order to disarm them, but not totally.

I may very well know that my roots have never existed except inasmuch as I “return” to them (1.e., write and create them) through autobiographical acts, but just the same I set out on this return as if they were already there. In this study, therefore, the expression “queer roots” constitutes a description of my object of study (roots that are queer), of my methodology (the queering of roots as a critical practice), and of its political implications (roots that queer also resist the normative, homogenizing imperatives of rooted identity). Yet, whereas the critical practice of queering is primarily a deconstructivist one here, Queer Roots far from engages in a simple undoing of paradigms of rooted identity; it also contributes to our understanding of the ethical implications and political possibilities of queering as a critical practice. Throughout this study I therefore use queer flexibly, not only as a noun or adjective but also as a verb. Such usage allows me to take advantage of the full potential the term has come to represent in LGBTQ studies, as well as to enrich it. My definition of queer also gradually emerges from the multiple readings that make up this study.

The implications of queering roots become especially clear when one situates roots narratives in the context of the diaspora in which they are produced. Though inspired by my previous research on North Afri-

Hayes, Jarrod. Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts In the Family Tree. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.8781040 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor can literature, the study that follows marks a widening of interest into other regions of French and Francophone studies, such as the Caribbean and West and Central Africa, as well as into African and American cultures in English. This comparatist, interdisciplinary study thus brings Francophone studies into dialogue with the fields of history, anthropology, film studies, and music. Indeed, the narratives examined herein simultaneously assert and question rooted identities within a number of diasporas—African, Jewish, and Armenian—and this book explores the intersections among them. Without attempting to be encyclopedic, including these varied diasporas and their different configurations changes the stakes of their “queer roots” by theorizing strategies for queering roots that can transcend the specificity of any given diaspora. If there can be no roots without diaspora, and likewise no diaspora without roots, queering roots or diaspora must occur somewhere in the dialogic relation between the two.

Queering Roots

Several interrelated paradoxes have emerged through which I organize my principle thoughts on roots narratives. The first paradox is political: whereas a return to roots attempts to remedy the alienation resulting from a historical uprooting, an assertion of roots can just as easily justify authority and oppression by excluding those considered not to share them. The second is narrative: whereas roots narratives claim merely to discover an origin that preexists the search for and so-called discovery of roots, the telling of the story is actually what creates the origins and, indeed, the identity rooted in them. The third is sexual: whereas roots narratives frequently rely on a patrilineal family tree structured by heterosexual marriage and reproduction and would therefore seem to exclude queerness, African and Caribbean writers, among others, frequently find a diversity of sexual practices and identifications upon returning to their roots. While the queer of my title might seem to apply most directly to this third, sexual paradox, I argue that the queerness of roots might be most productively theorized in the interconnectedness of all three paradoxes and the way they reinforce one another.

In the early 1990s, I once saw a t-shirt that read, “The family tree stops with me.” With this slogan, the wearer performed a coming out, albeit a coded one. Rendered intelligible by the frequent opposition between queerness and family, and in particular between queerness and the het-

Hayes, Jarrod. Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts In the Family Tree. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.8781 040 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor erosexual descent visualized as the family tree, this t-shirt might be read as resisting the very kinship that structures narratives of return to the roots of identity. Conversely, the notion of roots has allowed a number of lesbian and gay writers to establish a connection to their “forebears” “hidden from history” (cf. Duberman et al.). What would a queer family tree look like? What would a study of roots tell us about queer identities? A particular tree common in tropical regions and Caribbean and African literatures usefully visualizes the queerness of roots as understood through the interrelatedness of the three paradoxes of roots narratives: the mangrove. In a mangrove swamp, the roots of many trees are interconnected, and roots do not necessarily precede the tree; indeed, it is often impossible to discern which roots belong to which trees. If the mangrove can send down new roots from its branches, and new branches from its roots, its roots are connected in a network that might be described as rhizomatic (mangroves belong to the genus Rhizophora, after all).

Since any given mangrove tree can have an unlimited number of roots, a genealogy structured like a mangrove can offer roots without asserting any single one as an absolute origin that would justify a monopoly over the definition of identity. The diverse imagined community resulting from the model of the mangrove swamp can then safeguard against the danger of deploying roots to disempower rather than empower as the multiple roots of the mangrove ground a collective identity that is heterogeneous rather than homogeneous. In addition, since origins are indistinguishable from effects in the mangrove swamp, stories structured along the lines of its tangled roots disrupt the linear, cause-and-effect structure of paradigmatic roots narratives, as well as the distinction between beginning and end, thereby making it just as likely that roots are the result of storytelling as its preexisting impetus. Finally, as we shall see in the examples examined in chapter 1, by allowing multiple roots, mangrove narratives also open up the family tree to “unauthorized” models of descent and, therefore, nonnormative sexualities.

Ina US context, the most familiar roots narrative is undoubtedly Alex Haley’s 1976 novel Roots. Amazingly, Haley was able to trace his family tree back to Africa from the traces of oral history that his family had retained in spite of centuries of uprootedness and slavery. This unparalleled example of cultural memory obviously struck a chord; when Roots was broadcast as a miniseries in 1977, seven of its ten episodes became the most-watched shows in television history at the time. Haley also set off a genealogical fervor, as almost everyone, or so it seemed, began look-

Hayes, Jarrod. Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts In the Family Tree. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.8781040 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor ing for his or her roots. The impact of this work, which traced the roots of an African American family back to Africa, can still be felt today, as is attested by the popular interest in genealogy. That this interest continues to this very day is evidenced by the British television series Who Do You Think You Are?, which has inspired versions in the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Czech Republic, and France. After three seasons on NBC between 2010 and 2012, the American version was picked up by TLC, which continued to produce new seasons at least through 2015.

Although the NBC and TLC series may have a wider audience, in part because it focuses on celebrities who are frequently white, a more direct descendent of Haley’s Roots was the PBS special African American Lives, hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. The 2006 DVD release of the special that was the fourth series in this project, Finding Oprah’s Roots: Finding Your Own, succinctly expresses the desire for a rooted identity on the back cover: “When Alex Haley published his bestselling novel Roots in the mid- 1970s it raised the hopes of many African Americans that one day they too could trace their own roots back to Africa. Today, dramatic developments in genealogical research techniques and breakthroughs in DNA analysis are making that dream a reality.” Oprah Winfrey also appears as early as the first series, in which we see her tearing up upon discovering a slave ancestor. This visceral connection with the past, with ancestors in her family tree, is strengthened upon the discovery of a match between her mitochondrial DNA and the Kpelle “tribe” in Liberia, after which she states, “Alex Haley is somewhere doing a high-five.”

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Oprah’s return is that it was facilitated by a scholar as anti-essentialist as Gates. Yet Gates, who retraces his own roots along with Oprah’s, discovers not only that his DNA admixture is half European, half African but also that his mitochondrial DNA is most certainly European. In a humorous scene, he reveals what he calls a “big surprise for me, Captain Black Man himself,” and jokes, “I’m going to have to give up my job as chairman of the Department of African American Studies.” “I’m heart-broken,” he admits, still laughing, explaining that he undertook the project expressly to find his own African roots. Yet, if he can admit that “[flamily history is as much about process as about destination,” has he not found African roots in a way? If Haley could assert, “My own ancestors’ [sic] would automatically also be a symbolic saga of all Africandescent people—who are without exception the seeds of someone like Kunta who was born and grew up in some black African village, some-

Hayes, Jarrod. Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts In the Family Tree. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.8781 040. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor one who was captured and chained down in one of those slave ships that sailed them across the same ocean, into some succession of plantations, and since then a struggle for freedom” (Roots 722), does Gates not share Oprah’s roots by writing and reading them?

The kind of return that Oprah realizes but remains elusive for Gates is literalized in Roots when Haley not only finds his roots but also becomes one with them. During his physical return to Africa at the end of Roots, as Haley approaches Juffure, Gambia, he writes, “I felt queasily, uncomfortably alien” (716). This alienation, however, is repaired after a griot tells the story of Kunta Kinte, Haley’s “farthest-back” African forebear (704): “Later the men of Juffure took me into their mosque built of bamboo and thatch, and they prayed around me in Arabic. . . . Later the crux of their prayer was translated for me: ‘Praise be to Allah for the one long lost from us whom Allah has returned’” (720). Villagers of all ages even exclaim, “Meester Kinte!” (722), thereby authenticating Haley’s reconstituted genealogy (at least in his perception) and establishing an unbroken link between them and him. The entire experience is one of transcendence for him: “There is an expression called ‘the peak experience’—that which emotionally, nothing in your life ever transcends. I’ve had mine, that first day in the back country of black West Africa” (717). Haley reconnects, here, much as Oprah would do decades later, with a time of collective plenitude and jouissance. Likewise, by recovering a similarly lost past, all roots narratives idealize a time when the community’s home was supposedly located where its roots are planted. When individuals find their roots, they live in harmony—with themselves, with each other, and with their past—indeed, in the complete presence of the essence of their identity. Returning to one’s roots after a long exile is to reconnect with that essence, bring it back from the past, and make it present again. When I find my roots, I find a certain truth about myself.

Part of what constitutes this “truth,” however, is that it can be shared. As Haley points out in the passage quoted above, his reconstituted family tree structures a “saga” with collective implications that are underscored by his subtitle: The Saga of an American Family. Family in this context includes not only living relatives and all the ancestors with whom Haley manages to connect but also, figuratively, all those who collectively share similar family histories. Haley’s roots thus represent, metonymically, those of all African Americans who also share a history tout court. Indeed, the title suggests that all Americans, regardless of race, share his story in one way or another. This assertion of collective memory

Hayes, Jarrod. Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts In the Family Tree. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.8781 040. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor thereby constitutes an act of community building or, to allude to Benedict Anderson’s expression, community imagining, one that responds to racism by revalorizing and even glorifying the African origins that are denigrated by the discourses that accompany and justify forced migration.! Such a response is based on the premise that searching for and then finding one’s roots can cure uprootedness and the resulting alienation by retracing the steps of the initial uprooting: capture, enslavement, and transport across the Middle Passage. In their very structure, therefore, roots narratives reverse the trajectory of uprooting and, we could say, undo it. Yet the disconnectedness that roots narratives purport to cure is synchronic as well as diachronic; it afflicts not only the relation between individuals of a diaspora and their past but also the relations among individuals at any given time within this diaspora. While the cause of uprootedness is historical, in other words, its cure is all about the present (about the branches, one could say).

If another way of understanding this cure is as a recovery of a lost truth, being disconnected from one’s roots results in a number of falsehoods: a false understanding (a misunderstanding) of the past resulting in a false (or alienated) identity. Correcting such falsehoods would thus require not only finding the truth but also telling it, a claim Haley devoted no small effort toward asserting. The term he used to describe Roots was faction; although he admitted having invented the details of narration and dialogue, he maintained that the basic outline and main events of his story were based on true facts. This truth claim of Roots is inscribed within the novel itself, as a part of its ending.” Most people, at least at first, believed that Haley not only had found a kind of truth but also was telling the truth. In spite of such claims, however, not everyone jumped on the bandwagon; a group of critics gradually emerged who began digging around for possible errors. As a result, and as chapter 3 elaborates, no potential factual basis for Roots has remained unchallenged. Though accused of telling lies by some, however, Haley has been defended by others as telling the truth even as they acknowledge the validity of the accusations they are defending him against. In other words, even if all the accusations are true, Roots still tells a kind of “truth” about roots.

Uprootings

In contrast to Haley’s detractors, and perhaps even his defenders, I would suggest that it is important to consider the accusations along with

Hayes, Jarrod. Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts In the Family Tree. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.8781 040. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor the defense; the former are important not because they help us get to the “truth” about Roots but because they tell us something about the nature of roots. Through them, we can understand how, to a certain extent, roots are always inventions or fictions. Although Haley always denied the lies he was accused of telling, there is a way in which the text of Roots acknowledges a different kind of fabrication. For Haley’s novel actually consists of {wo parallel narratives, both of which take the form of trajectories or journeys. The first begins in Africa and is the story of Kunta Kinte and his descendants, a story whose structure could be visualized as a family tree. This trajectory is that of the Middle Passage, of the enslavement of a Mandinka man and his forcible removal from African soil to be transported to America. This narrative is one of an uprooting, and, at the allegorical level, Kunta Kinte’s story is the history of the African diaspora in the New World. This narrative begins in the past and ends in the present, in America. In contrast, the second narrative proceeds in the opposite direction, both geographically and temporally. It begins in America and is the story of retracing the family tree and telling Kunta Kinte’s story; it is the story of the writing of Roots. Its trajectory is one of a return—to Africa, Haley’s African roots, and the site of the first story’s beginning. The second story is one of a quest for, then discovery of, roots; it is the story of a rerooting through the writing of a narrative. At the allegorical level, this story is that of a collective African American identity. In this second narrative, then, origins are an end not a beginning; they are the result of the search (or the story of the search), not its starting point or cause. In its very narrative structure, therefore, Haley’s Roots acknowledges its own fictionality and reveals the narrative paradox that identity is a story that links a subject to his or her identification by creating its origin in this way.

Understanding roots in this way, however, implies that there can be no rerooting without an initial uprooting and that looking for one’s roots presumes that they were somehow lost. Why else would they need to be found, and if they must be lost before they can be found, can roots even make sense outside of diaspora (or the cultural disruption produced by colonialism)? Bringing about rootedness (as opposed to desiring roots as a project or goal), then, would entail the death of diaspora, and if there can be no roots without diaspora, rerooting runs the risk of carrying out an uprooting as well. There have certainly been entire movements based on the promise of rerooting as a political and/or cultural solution to racism, forced migration, and colonial alienation. Such movements include the Back to Africa movement as well as the Rastafari movement

Hayes, Jarrod. Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts In the Family Tree. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.8781 040. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and other forms of Afrocentrism or Afrocentricity. Afrocentrism has been frequently criticized and sometimes ridiculed, often perhaps prematurely so, since if there can be no roots without diaspora there can likewise be no diaspora without roots. Afrocentrism’s parallel in Francophone Africa and its American and European diaspora, Négritude, associated with writers such as Aimé Césaire from Martinique, Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal, and Léon-Gontran Damas from Guyane, countered the colonial denigration of everything African by espousing a return to African civilization and values and valorizing a “Black soul” or essence. Négritude has withstood an ongoing critique for over half a century now (which itself suggests that what the critiques denigrate must be more powerful than they would let on).

A common denominator among critiques of Négritude is an argument (or one of a number of related arguments) that can be boiled down to the second, political paradox of roots narratives. In spite of the stated intention of countering the racializing mythmaking of colonial discourse, many roots-based paradigms simply reverse the values of racial oppositions and thereby attribute a positive valence to the stereotypes deployed in racial othering and racist violence. In other words, they might contribute as much to the “structures of violence” that accompany uprooting as to the cure for that uprooting; racial difference (the key product of racist discourse) remains firmly rooted.” But does this critique mean that one might simply reject notions of rooted identity? The answer to this question, much diasporic literature suggests, depends on the way one narrates the relation between roots and diaspora. One might say, in fact, that the answer lies in the realization that roots are a story, a narrative process, and not an end. And since ends are intimately connected with origins, the realization that roots are not an end entails a simultaneous realization that they are not an origin that has been there from the beginning. The narrative and the political paradoxes are thus intertwined to such an extent that acknowledging the narrative paradox can also have the political benefit of disarming the potential of roots narratives to justify domination and oppression.

Yet, regardless of how Haley’s bidirectional narrative structure acknowledges the fact that Roots creates roots as opposed to returning to preexisting ones, it might still be said to naturalize another kind of origin, the one resulting from procreation. While Roots reveals the writtenness of African roots, the roots of a family tree that reconnects an uprooted people to their origins are still firmly planted in heterosexual reproduction. In other words, in the face of dispersion, Roots uses family

Hayes, Jarrod. Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts In the Family Tree. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.8781040 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor history to provide the continuity that connects African Americans to one another as a kind of family. This cohesion, however, relies on a model of kinship that excludes alternative forms of affiliation and descent. And while this exclusion remains implicit in Haley’s version of African roots, it has become an explicit aspect of a certain trend in both pan-African nationalism and US black nationalism, a trend that claims that homosexuality is a white disease imposed on black peoples by colonialism and/or slavery. In other words, according to this position, homosexuality cannot have African roots. Such a notion of roots disconnects gay African Americans and both Africans and African Americans engaging in any sort of same-sex desire from any African past or tradition. It uproots them, in short, and in so doing excludes questions of gender and sexuality from the concerns of antiracist movements and national liberation struggles. Furthermore, by denying the blackness or Africanness of same-sex eroticism, desires, and sexual acts, it also reinforces sexual and gender hierarchies (themselves often imposed by colonialism as opposed to constituting a part of a so-called African tradition). Unlike Haley, then, this political deployment of roots denies that it invents the roots it claims to be founded on, thereby grounding a masculinist vision of black liberation and actively shutting out demands that often question dominant articulations of the roots of identity within these movements.

If this exclusionary practice were limited to the discourses of resistance movements, it might raise less concern. Resistance movements, however, are such because of their opposition to regimes in power. They therefore usually seek to transform or even overturn the regimes they oppose, and they occasionally realize their goals. And it is at the moment of success, of coming to power, that a previously empowering move can become the basis of a new (or perhaps not so new) form of power (see Chambers, Room xii). Furthermore, it is not only through sexuality that the empowering potential of roots can be converted into a tool of oppression, exclusion, and marginalization; African and Caribbean dictators such as Francois Duvalier (in Haiti) and Mobutu Sese Seko (in what was, at the time, Zaire) used concepts such as noirisme and the return to a black essence or African authenticity to consolidate their power and maintain their totalitarian regimes by policing racial and/or national identity, as well as through political marginalization and even physical violence. Many African and Caribbean writers, fully aware of the danger of this kind of exclusion, have, in contrast, sought ways to harness the empowering potential of roots without increasing the danger of their deployment to reinforce the very oppression one seeks to resist.

Introduction + 11 Rerootings, Reroutings

From the late 1970s through the early 1990s, Francophone Caribbean writers, in particular, found a solution to this double bind in the image of the mangrove, which offers an alternative to rooting Caribbean identity in African origins by rerouting its roots to places along the migrations that have led to the Caribbean. During approximately the same period, Martiniquan writer Edouard Glissant began to articulate a more abstract theoretical notion that would play a role similar to that of the concrete image of the mangrove. In Caribbean Discourse (1981), he first proposed a model of rhizomatic identity inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Glissant elaborates further on this concept in Poetics of Relation (1990), in which, perhaps in part because this theorization was beginning to resonate with more frequent uses of the mangrove in Francophone Caribbean fiction, the rhizomatic finds its most succinct and quotable elaboration: “The root is unique, a stock taking all upon itself and killing all around it. . .. [T]he rhizome [is] an enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently. The notion of the rhizome maintains, therefore, the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root” (11). Whereas the single root would be totalitarian in its prescription, even legislation, of a homogeneous identity, like the roots of the mangrove, rhizomes offer a multiplicity of roots that defines Caribbean identity as heterogeneous and acknowledges the many métissages that have resulted in Caribbean identities. For Glissant, therefore, rhizomes represent one way around the political paradox of roots. Glissant’s concept of rhizomes carries additional implications of movement, which he considers in relation to the concept of nomadism à la Deleuze and Guattari. In Glissant’s writing, nomadic errance (“wandering,” often translated as “errantry”), as opposed to exile, can thus be enracinée (rooted), and leaving home need not entail a deracinated identity. According to this model, one may still take along one’s roots when one chooses or is forced to leave “home,” when one is separated from the land where one’s roots are planted. In spite of the fact that Glissant’s notion of the rhizomatic was inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, his version not only is attached to a specific geocultural context— the Caribbean—but also allows for an identity rooted in that place. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Glissant rejects the root; unlike them, he keeps rootedness. Like their abstract nomads, his Caribbean subject is on the move. It is nonetheless a subject and not a schizo, though both

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Queer Roots for the Diaspora

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Queer Roots for the Diaspora

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Introduction

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