Mourning in America

On the second page of her new book, Funeral Diva (City Lights, 2020), the poet Pamela Sneed approaches the late novelist Toni Morrison. Like, literally approaches her. Sneed is hanging out on the Upper West Side with her fellow New School student and friend, Michael, a “blond Irish Catholic punk rocker from Boston,” when she sees Morrison and June Jordan sitting in a café. She gets close enough to say, “I love your work, Ms. Morrison.” It is the early 1980s, an era in which what Professor Farah Jasmine Griffin calls “the black women’s literary renaissance” is in full swing.

The rest of this first part of Funeral Diva, a 28-page section titled “History,” continues in this big-eyed manner. Sneed approaches things and brings them closer, namely cultural objects: Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise,” Peter Jackson’s adaptation of King Kong (2005), Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much,” Patti Labelle’s “You Are My Friend,” the miniseries Roots, the film What’s Love Got to Do With It (1993), the song “The Girl From Ipanema,” Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad (2016), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and and and.

The reading list is circuitous, unfolding.

So is the list of people Sneed approaches, albeit with more complications. Consider the book’s opening lines: “Uncle Vernon was cool, tall, hazel-eyed and brown-skinned. He dressed in the latest fashions and wore leather long after the 1960s.” Sneed often introduces people with such physical sketches throughout the book. She describes the mother of Shaun Lyle (not a “real boyfriend”) as “also beautiful, a white porcelain-colored Black woman with the elegance and chiseled features of an Egyptian Nefertiti.” And then there’s Cheryl, with whom Sneed has an intense romantic relationship. The gulf between them is described in visible terms: “Cheryl was short, light brown, stocky, athletic and middle class. I was tall, elegant, working class from the suburbs.”

But back to Shaun. Sneed writes of their first encounter:

The first time I spotted him he stood outside on the top steps of my school. He wore a fashionable brown tweed tailored suit, which was uncustomary and sophisticated for a student in our small town. His face was turned away in profile smoking a cigarette. He resembled the Romans or a Greek God, a bronzed statue you’d see turning pages of an ancient history book, face turned away in profile with a sharp European nose, only Shaun was Black, mixed race, with caramel skin, hazel eyes, and hair a mosh of soft brown ringlets.

Shaun’s sexy racial ambiguity is further accentuated by the comma between Black and mixed race. Can he be both? Focusing on seeing race in this way, Sneed dances around how the multiracial rainbow fantasy so prevalent in the 1980s is not quite past but still gasping for air in 21st-century anti-Black America.

It’s important to note that these shorthand descriptions are all firsts—fresh, innocent, inexperienced—not simply the first time Sneed sees Shaun but also the first time readers encounter him (or Cheryl, for that matter). When we operate in good faith (we don’t always), we describe people’s outsides because we are trying to tune into their insides. We find people beautiful, and we want to know them. This disjunction between what we think we see and what we think we don’t reveals how subjective and objective statements share more than the divide between the humanities and the sciences would have us believe. And then there’s the true subject of this book, the character Sneed has repeatedly tried to approach throughout her career: herself.

After all, memoir—or at least memoirist shards—has been a thread in Sneed’s work for decades, perhaps most directly in her book Sweet Dreams (2018). (In Funeral Diva, she cites an unpublished memoir, My Soul Went With her, titled after Winnie Mandela’s Part of My Soul Went With Him). Funeral Diva is a coming-of-age story as well as a catalog of desires, of humor, of a buoyant yet unstable I, and of Sneed’s ideas and memories along the route. “Writing…was the only reason I had to live,” she declares of her early years. The book is also about violence in the United States today: AIDS, the stereotypes around Africa, “the Orlando shooting,” the memory of Eric Garner, Standing Rock, the racist medical-industrial complex, and what Black cultural production has to do with all of that. Here, Beyoncé and Black Panther are more insidious than revolutionary. 

Funeral Diva contains 33 numbered sections, some written as prose, some as poems, some as prose that breaks out into poetry, as a diva might break into song mid-conversation. Yes, you could easily flip through and read a section on its own, and it would stand on its own, but Funeral Diva demands to be read from start to finish. Whatever its unruliness and defiance of genre, it remains a cohesive work of art.

Sneed earned a B.A. from Eugene Lang College at The New School and an M.F.A. in new media art and performance from Long Island University and is no stranger to an art practice that necessarily transitions between modes. For decades, she has approached her work in multifaceted ways, as a performer, a poet, and a professor toggling between various art and literary scenes. She is also a visual artist. The cover of Funeral Diva is Sneed’s own painted self-portrait, further dramatizing the multi-formal aspects of this project. And then there’s her stint as a host of Dyke TV, a program broadcast from New York City between 1993 and 2005, which was what it sounds like. (Guests included Watermelon Woman filmmaker Cheryl Dunye and rock singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco). More recently, she has been working on A Tribute to Big Mama Thornton, a musical cabaret performance that recasts the iconic blues singer in queer and rock-and-roll history. The premiere was postponed because of COVID-19.  

Sneed’s literary output has been similarly multifarious. Her debut collection, Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery (1998), chronicles queer sex and love under trauma, oppression, and homophobia. Critics might still invoke anger to describe the book’s Black feminist critique, as embodied by the poem “Jealousy”:

Nothing prepared me
for the way she smiled at you …
 
In a totally unfeministic fantasy
I want to rip her apart
piece
             by
                         piece

Or, more presciently, in “Eyes on the Prize”:

And I hear white laughter gurgling
from courtrooms
when they say you’re free
to kill niggers wherever you like
Do you hear me?
 
 
You are free.

That debut collection’s title—the imperative demand to imagine—reflects Sneed’s associative and affective imaginary, in which anger is a mode of reading: “black fumes / excuse me / fuming blacks.” A somber, reflective political anger is certainly evident, as seen even in the book’s cover photo: Sneed barefoot in an elegant squat, eyes averted, an allusion perhaps to the project’s aesthetically ephemeral origins. In 1995, Sneed performed a work of the same title, recorded at Manbites Dog Theater in Durham, North Carolina. There, from the jump, with her hands gesticulating and her voice straining, she dumps a garbage pail. The anger is contained in a black box but spirals outward, referencing in the first few minutes Audre Lorde, Assata Shakur, and Harriet Tubman, conjuring a chilling vision of a coerced freedom that is ever present today.

In 2018, Belladonna* published the 48-page Sweet Dreams, which, in autobiographical prose, sheds light on Sneed’s life in New York City as a “6ft 2½inches dark Black Lesbian with a shaved head.” The title alludes to Annie Lennox and her eponymous song with the Eurythmics: “Sweet dreams are made of this / Who am I to disagree?” As Sneed writes

Pop-star Annie Lennox had just released the song Sweet Dreams Are Made of This. There was a huge life-sized poster of her album cover at the bus stop near our house. Her hair was cropped, dyed orange/fire engine red. She wore red lipstick in contrast to pale skin. She wore a pinstriped men’s suit. In today’s terms she’d be a drag king or cross-dresser. She held a pointer as if in school and a teacher. Again, it was the early ’80s and there was freedom in her style. It was radical then to see a woman on a bus stop in Boston publicly dressed as a man as much as it was seeing a Black woman with a shaved head. It was this pop star, these moments, and all of these people who paved the way for me to leave Boston and transfer from Northeastern. I knew I’d wanted to write, and I’d heard about a school in the West Village.

With this slightly longer view of the role physical description plays in Sneed’s work, we see more clearly that things are not always what they seem. Lennox, who has been famously “mistaken” for a lesbian, is not shut out from lesbian iconicity.

After Funeral Diva’s opening longer pieces—“History,” “Ila,” and “Funeral Diva,” which take up almost the first half of the book and each of which includes a curious italicized epilogue—the rest of the collection is filled with shorter poems that delve into the contemporary moment (gentrification, teaching, Trump) as it is entangled with Sneed’s personal life, her childhood, and the traumas thereof. In “Twizzlers,” she writes

Size color class I was never allowed to be little
by little I mean innocent
by little I mean allowed to play
make mistakes
If anything occurred in whatever setting
I was always blamed
I was mistaken constantly for being older than I was
At six when my stepmother came she refused to
allow me time alone with my father
If a moment occurred she asked
What were you doing with him?
As if I at six were molesting my father

Though present throughout the book, it is in “Funeral Diva,” the eponymous 24-page poem, that the 1980s emerges as a distinct era, the AIDS era. “Funeral Diva” begins

During the ’80s, that seemingly idyllic time when
men men girls girls
I was part of a Black lesbian and gay movement.

For Sneed, the sedimented narrative of the 1980s—state-sanctioned urban destruction, disease, neglect, the dismantling of the welfare state, the rise of MTV and power suits—requires this kind of mishmash, hodgepodge form. The story of that decade has been told a million times through acronymic shorthand that emerged only as aftermath. As in

we were oblivious and unprepared when in the mid-’80s
a devastating and unexplained phenomena struck, eventually called
    AIDS

AIDS gets its own line and an indent: it stands alone, precise and exacting. Yet AIDS, for Sneed, also offers comparative method, as she brings in many more social and political conditions to help flesh out her experience of the crisis, which, despite the availability of drugs for some, has still not ended. Consider this:

Like the recent Black populous of Katrina and Haiti
through hurricanes and earthquakes
saw pillars, foundations, and platforms they’d built washed away
but in our generation it was young Black men who like babies
or children had just begun to articulate, voice thoughts, ideas and
  desires
that never in the world’s history been spoken,
dying as soon as, moments of, or seconds after
pressing pen to paper.

Or, later:

Like that South African boy, Margaret Garner, the subjects of
    Victor Frankl’s essays
about the Holocaust and others, some of us in the AIDS crisis
did terrible things to survive.

The word like begins many lines in this poem and is nestled in the middle of many more. Though comparison enforces an unacknowledged violence by assuming equality and is still unsettling here, Sneed reminds us that similes bring together two similar but not identical things.

One could say the 1980s themselves were a kind of funeral diva. Caring for the dead and dying required—as it still does—the tender-heartedness at the core of Sneed’s style. But funeral, for her, is no metaphor. She writes

Because of my stature, writing, outlandish outfits, and flair for the
dramatic
I became a known and requested presence operating throughout the
   crisis
as an unofficially titled, “funeral diva,” called for
at memorials, readings, wakes and funerals to speak
give testimony and credence to men’s lives

Operating is a trenchant word, not only because of the medical-industrial complex to which it belongs—and the neglect inflicted disproportionally against sick Black people—but also because it gives a sense of the grandeur of this invitation, the impossibility of the funeral diva’s task. Sneed funeral diva-ed for friends and also for people she hardly knew.

Funeral diva work is a kind of care work. While dying of AIDS and working at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), her friend Craig wrote, “Who will care for our caretakers?” Craig highlighted the gendered and racialized labor of the laborers. Later, in “Twizzlers,” Sneed positions herself as the caretaker in romantic relationships:

I was their mother caretaker
the one with all responsibility

Sneed never got to be a child. “Even my era did not allow me to be little / innocent / A threat if I spoke up,” she writes.

Funeral Diva’s tone moves like its title: one minute, there’s a diva in the room and the next, the room is hosting a funeral. One minute: intense death, illness, and suffering; the next: euphoria sung by Edith Piaf, an insistence that “Je Ne Regrette Rien.” Experience tells us it’s the same minute.

Who would have imagined that the 1980s would ever come back to haunt us? All we wanted, at the time, was for the constant threat of death to be over. By we, Sneed means Black women but also others, a complex and shifting cast:

I moan complain
How the AIDS narrative only belongs to men
They never ask women
Black women
As if AIDS didn’t happen to us
Our fathers brothers sons nephews
Cousins acquaintances
The black gay boys in the choir
became our disappeared

Funeral Diva grieves both the end and the continuation of the ills of the 1980s as well as the entangled persistence of pandemics. Sneed grieves the lives lost to HIV/AIDS and, now, to COVID-19. The last poem, “Why I Cling to Flowers,” is explicitly about the latter:

They say the pandemic most affects black people migrant workers
     and poor brown people globally, the aged and those with
     underlying conditions
And your friends are still dying from AIDS even when you thought
     hoped and prayed the worst was over

With a peculiar rose-that-grew-from-concrete energy, Sneed’s last words, after approaching and approaching, now aim toward rapprochement: “There are also other possibilities / We can heal.”