Black/Queer Rhizomatics

Train Up a Child in the Way Ze Should Grow ...

JAFARI S. ALLEN

For All of Them

WELL CHILD, I WILL TELL YOU: Audre Lorde never promised you a rose garden. Or a crystal stair swept clean of tacks, with no boards torn up, or places where there ain't been no carpet on the floor/bare. Rather, she and others have bequeathed a this or that which promises only continued devastation and certain destruction, on one hand, or possibilities — speech, visibility (if not yet recognition), articulation, home-making, joy, love, for example — on the other, which must be worked for, and for which there are no guarantees. As enticement toward protracted struggle, Lorde offers the following:

    ... If we win
    there is no telling.
    we seek beyond history
    for a new and more possible meeting.

Far from a rose garden, this meditation, toward a critical pedagogical agenda, assays a renarrativization of and for Black studies — finding rhizomes rather than "roots." And, indeed, as always, routes — in and out of families, discourses, and movements. Finding nourishment, as water lilies do, in deep dark muck. Persistent like bamboo and other creeping grasses. Rare and delicate like orchids. Here I want to propose a Black/queer rhizomatic agencement — including literatures, politics, and methodologies — as well as demonstrate a Black/queer rhizomatic way of seeing and saying. In nature, rhizomes arise from underground or underwater connections/roots/routes that are neither limited to one place nor destined to go in only one direction. The rhizomatic thus represents a queer temporality and sociality that is processual — not teleological or "narrativized in advance." A rhizomatic conceptualization of relations, space, and time. This temporality is one of time collapsed or at least reconfigured — not "straight time," in which, for example, what is putatively most important happens in the daytime, or in which one "grows out of" same-sex "play" or finally "settles down" into heteronormative or homonormative sociality. In this time, one can project imaginations into the future and cut into the past — all in the pursuit of an elaborated litany for thriving. In this space, desires and socialities claim family and children not merely from biological or legal means but also by a process of nurture and nourishment. In some respects, Audre Lorde has already given us this utopic vision of work, love, and struggle:

    looking inward and outward
    at once before and after
    seeking a now that can breed
    futures
    like bread in our children's mouths
    so their dreams will not reflect
    the death of ours

Here I take inspiration not only from Hughes and Lorde but also from French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of the rhizome — including and beyond tradition and history: creative, promiscuous, underground or underwater, multiple, and sometimes contradictory — to propose Black/queer rhizomatics. The rhizome (from the Greek for "mass of roots") is the mode of propagation and sustenance for plants as diverse as the lotus, bamboo, bunch grasses, ginger, irises, and orchids. Digging up a clump of bamboo from its so-called roots will not mean that the bamboo will not grow at that site. Deracinated never. The lotus flower seems to appear out of nowhere "without roots" but gains nutrients and information buried deeply in its dark, watery grove. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari encourage us to "form rhizomes and not roots, never plant! Don't sow, forage! Be neither a One nor a Many, but multiplicities! Form a line, never a point! ... and let your loves be like the wasp and the orchid. As they sing of old man river:

    He don't plant taters
    Don't plant cotton
    Them that plants them is soon
    forgotten
    But old man river he just keeps rollin'
    along."

If that ain't "quare," I don't know what is! With varying intensities, Black diaspora scholars have already followed the seductive pull of Deleuze and Guattari's nomadic rhizomatic model of analysis — notably, including Paul Gilroy and Édouard Glissant. They were each, of course, searching for new ways to engage age-old experiences of forced, coerced, and free movement; connection; and difficult, materially consequential origin stories (if not "origins") in the context of modernity. Glissant held that "rhizomatic thought is the principle behind ... poetics of relations, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the other." As J. Lorand Matory reminds us, Gilroy too flirted with the notion of the rhizome/rhizomatic in Black...