Lákíríboto, or the Hardship and Happiness of Being Queer

Queer is a whole way of life.

The more I go into it, the more I feel persuaded that queerness is pervasive and totalizing. It is accidentally or willingly reflected in one’s creative work but not necessarily. Rather, creativity is a side effect, something connected to the sudden discovery that you can breathe freely as soon as you stop feeling wrong, marginal, in need of some sort of healing, other.

Othering is very bad.

As a critical and cultural attitude, othering belongs to the west and it tends to make any non-normative identity into a monster (Giuliani 2021): not simply different, but alien to the human world.

When labeled as such, people easily think that you are a danger to the community.

There was a time, sadly enough, when queer (more specifically, male homosexual) people were accused of being a danger: they were “spreading” a virus. Therefore, they were kept at a distance. They were expected to stay away from other people.

Because they were not “normal”.

They still are not.

Not normal, I mean, in the sense that Derek Jarman’s mother thought that her kids were not normal. When Lance Jarman complained that their son and daughter were always messing around and wondered why they could not be like the others, their mother answered: “Thank heavens our children are not normal, they are so much more interesting than their friends.” (Jarman 1997, 122) Derek grew up as an extremely interesting artist, explicitly queer (and loving it) and openly HIV-positive from 1986 onward. He must have learnt in his bones what it means to be isolated, if in 1992 he writes, “My mouth is open but my body is in prison” (1992, 124). And in the same, highly committed book, at a certain point, he is even more explicit when he writes, “The Allies after they `liberated' the concentration camps put us back in civil prisons to serve our sentences for our Queer `crimes'. The concentration camps were invented in the minds of the inquisition and will never be understood unless they are seen as the centre of a Christian tradition. Those of us who are HIV+ are in another kind of concentration camp” (1992, 103).

Concentration camps for queer people: according to some, a jolly good idea.

Lindsay Drager, in her beautiful and poetic The Archive of Alternate Endings, tells a fictional story about a real-life woman, Ruth Coker Burks, who willingly decided to take care of men deserted by their families while dying of AIDS-related infections. The ones left unclaimed by their parents were buried  in a small cemetery just behind her house. This real story is largely untold and it finds its place in Drager’s novel. It feels so good that it resembles a fairy tale: “Once upon a time, for a group of men who loved men at the end of the worst century, the witch gave them care, affection and a place to rest. And the men lay quiet ever after” (2019, 89).

There are plenty of queer families in Drager’s novel. They are not “normal”, but why be normal when you could be happy?

According to the “normal” people, which include Jeanette Winterson’s foster mother, it should be the other way around (Winterson 2012). And “normal” is the woman accepting her role, being what a man wants her to be. “When her lover had loved her she'd been beautiful – writes Joyce Carol Oates in Black Water. -When she'd been beautiful her lover had loved her. It was a simple proposition, a seemingly tautological proposition, yet it resisted full comprehension.” (1992, 98)

Those unable to understand and accept this simple tautological proposition are Lákíríboto. In Yoruba, it means literally a woman who cannot be mounted or controlled. I came to learn it from Ayodele Olofintuade (she/they), a non-binary Nigerian black feminist, “famous” – as she writes in her agency website  – “for her ability to create chaos by merely existing.” She also normally wears colorful socks with any dress, and she cherishes her semi-wild cats and totally wild (but happy) kids. In her independently published novel Lákíríboto Chronicles. A Brief History of Badly Behaved Women, Olofintuade focuses on four “badly behaved women” who are not normal in different ways. I guess she is also describing her inability to fit in, including her tendency to be not exactly welcome at “normal” social  events:  “The last time she attended a Literary Festival she managed to spill water down an older author’s dress […]”. By the way this is normally what I do whenever I get invited to important meetings, and the spilled liquid is not always water.

And about water: badly behaved women love water, and they tend to imagine a queer world in the depth of the ocean. This is the case with Rivers Solomon, “half woman, half boy, part beast, and a refugee of the Trans Atlantic slave trade”. Not a she, not a he, maybe a they, for sure a “fae”, Solomon is an exile living on an island in the Eurasian continent: no home is wanted for faer besides the kinship fae belongs to.  Rivers Solomon’s novel The Deep (2019) goes literally back to water, rememorizing the Middle Passage and the moment when Black women in labor were thrown overboard and supposedly gave birth to amphibian children surviving as a new race endowed with incredible powers: definitely queer organisms living in kinship.

Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs – a “Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings” – chooses to go into the same direction and to dive into the ocean of untold Black memories when she writes Undrowned. Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2020). There, in her preface, she states, “And if the scale of breathing is collective, beyond species and sentience, so is the impact of drowning. The massive drowning yet unfinished where the distance of the ocean meant that people could become property, that life could be for sale” (2020, 1).

As a queer Black person, Gumbs looks at species other than the human one, and there she finds restitution.

She (and the others) swims towards happiness.

Drager, Lindsey. 2019. The Archive of Alternate Endings. First edition. Ann Arbor, MI: Dzanc Books.

Giuliani, Gaia. 2021. Monsters, Catastrophes and the Anthropocene: A Postcolonial Critique. Routledge environmental humanities. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge.

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. 2020. Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. Emergent Strategy Series, No. 2. Chico, CA, USA Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press.

Jarman, Derek. 1992. At Your Own Risk: A Saint’s Testament. London: Hutchinson.

———. 1997. Kicking the Pricks. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press.

Oates, Joyce Carol. 1992. Black Water. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Winterson, Jeanette. 2012. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? London: Vintage Books.

Foto di Mario De Carolis “Echo Project”