Not y’all fighting over Cowboy Carter
It’s 0:00 PST (Midnight), March 25th, and there’s a Full Moon in Libra
Dearest Faguettes,
Shortly after I turned ten, my father and mother took me from California and dragged me through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Texas, Texas again, Louisana, Mississippi, and finally, Georgia. On this cross-country road trip, we visited aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived along the Bible Belt. While I experienced my first snow in Jersey, I remember my second in Houston. Our Christmas vacation ran nostalgically to mind while playing “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages.” My Southern family was Afro-centrism personified, even gifted me my first children’s book Afro-Bets ABC Book. A was for afro, B was for don’t-remember, and C was for collards. But I digress, barely.
Maybe if the book were written now the B would stand for Beyoncé.
Insert shrugging shoulders emoji.
I had mixed feelings when I peeped the cover of her yet-to-be-released album. Cowboy Carter is gorgeous, Southern, and surprisingly patriotic. Author Anne Carson came running to mind because all art, at least to me, is erotic. Carson conceived of the erotic as a triangulation that consists of the lover, beloved, and the space in between them. Without the space in between them, the lover and beloved would collide annihilating one another.
“African-American” reflects Carson’s triangulation: the first word, the second word, and the hyphen. A strange punctuation mark, the hyphen connects, divides, and compounds everything it touches. Here, you can’t have one word without the other. And I think the same is true of Beyoncé concerning her Southern roots and national identity. She is Black and American, a living breathing opposition. Her mistreatment at the Country Music Awards exemplifies the metaphorical hyphen that disrupts and beautifies her life-work. Cowboy Carter seems deliciously petty, less a reclamation and more a reckoning.
Hypenated opposition (possibly shorthand for identification and disidentification) renders both beauty and horror it seems.
How are we to cope?
Write.
It’s the American flag for me. In the year of our Lord 2024, Ol’ Glory is synonymous with white nationalism, neo-nazis, and the Alt-Right. When George Floyd’s murder was staring everyone in the face, the nation cried “All lives matter” and they flew their flag with pride. So please, explain the “Formation” to “America Has a Problem” to Cowboy Carter pipeline. I don’t understand. And I sincerely want to.
Israelis chant “You can’t break my soul” while bombing Palestinians off the face of the Earth. And Americans are handing them the bombs. As the U.S. President bankrolls this genocide, the world continues to turn and my heart breaks. How can I——a descendant of enslaved Africans——scroll past pictures and videos of a devastated Gaza, stop, and happily like Beyoncé on horseback holding the American flag? Make it make sense, friend.
Like Sharok, the gay Iranian-American sex worker, I would have preferred the doctored image above. Red, black, and green. That’s what the Black Liberation and Palestinian flags share in common. Our movements aren’t so dissimilar: red-blood-swords, black-skin-battles, green-home-land. What powerful triangulations.
White is present in both the American and Palestinian flags too——purity for us, the deeds of the people for them. I trust the Palestinians aren’t looking favorably at the Land of the Free. I don’t blame them. No one is above reproach———not even Beyoncé.
Sincerely,
E.Y.
P.S. I have heard chitter-chatter of controversy regarding director Jonathan Glazer’s speech at The Oscars. Later, I will flesh out my thoughts into a shortish essay on his film A Zone of Interest. But, in the meantime, I would like to leave you with this: moral superiority weakens your sensitivity to suffering, makes you complicit in its unending practice, even as suffering puts on its many colorful masks and plays in your face.
Endangered Bookslut Sighted in Their Natural Habitat:
While sipping cider at a dingy little bar, I finished Margery Kemp by Robert Glück. “Margery still loved the strength of words but she had no world to use them on” is a mirror. I see so much of myself in her. Credited with writing the first autobiographical work in English, Kemp travels to European holy sites erotically devoted to her Lord and Savior. Glück was a confusing pleasure to read. I slowly returned to a state of abject devotion asking myself worthwhile questions. Did my relationship with consented subjugation begin and end with Christianity? Yes. Did it start up again with queer eroticism? Yes. Like Kemp, I am a failed saint longing to disappear and reappear in something bigger than myself.
Books with Pictures, Books with Words, and Books that Caught My Wild Attention:
Notes: Fatimah Asghar first came on my radar after reading When We Were Sisters. Her prose was so captivating and freeing that I had to turn to her poetry. I’m so glad that I did. Her poem, “If They Should Come For Us,” is as mournful as it is hopeful. Please lend it your full attention.
If They Should Come For Us
by Fatimah Asghar
these are my people & I find
them on the street & shadow
through any wild all wild
my people my people
a dance of strangers in my blood
the old woman’s sari dissolving to wind
bindi a new moon on her forehead
I claim her my kin & sew
the star of her to my breast
the toddler dangling from stroller
hair a fountain of dandelion seed
at the bakery I claim them too
the sikh uncle at the airport
who apologizes for the pat
down the muslim man who abandons
his car at the traffic light drops
to his knees at the call of the azan
& the muslim man who sips
good whiskey at the start of maghrib
the lone khala at the park
pairing her kurta with crocs
my people my people I can’t be lost
when I see you my compass
is brown & gold & blood
my compass a muslim teenager
snapback & high-tops gracing
the subway platform
mashallah I claim them all
my country is made
in my people’s image
if they come for you they
come for me too in the dead
of winter a flock of
aunties step out on the sand
their dupattas turn to ocean
a colony of uncles grind their palms
& a thousand jasmines bell the air
my people I follow you like constellations
we hear the glass smashing the street
& the nights opening their dark
our names this country’s wood
for the fire my people my people
the long years we’ve survived the long
years yet to come I see you map
my sky the light your lantern long
ahead & I follow I follow