I wanted to engage the past […] If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery […] I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.

-Hartman, Lose Your Mother

I always knew I would write this project. I was in my first year when I applied to the VeVe E. Clark Scholars Institute. My statement of purpose was about me wanting to learn more about Black lesbian history. I was hungry, hungry for a sense of existence. Growing up, I was a historian of everything. Basketball, 90’s R&B, Harriet Tubman, I even won an award in High school for being in the 98th percentile statewide for US History. In middle school, I was outed in my suburban learning environment by the first girl I loved. I was the lone Black lesbian little girl. I used the public library as my sanctuary after school when all my friends distanced themselves from me. I dived into LGBT history to affirm my own identity as a young lesbian woman. In high school, in the middle of experiencing gentrification in Oakland, I was exposed to the Black Panther Party and got deeper into Black Power history. However, there was no intersections for all my interest and identities. I had to read them separately to make sense of it all. The negated also negated. I had a craving for history, and I don’t know why. Maybe I felt I had lived here on Earth before, I often have Deja Vu. History was a way to tap into past lives.

My first year I applied to Clark Scholars and was accepted because of the affirmation to pursue research about black lesbian history. I am forever thankful for that moment. African American Studies thank you for affirming my work always. Dr. VeVe E. Clark, thank you for resisting for me. Marasa Consciousness. Dr. Clark, I felt your spirit in me the whole time. Your love for the knowledge of diaspora, helped me understand it is not just about the United States, that Blackness is a global and spiritual phenomena. The fight for knowledge is not a struggle in vain. Knowledge is a practice of expansion. Thank you.

Thank you to Lashonda King for cutting all my hair off. November 1, 2013 is when I did the big chop and became confident to present myself as the Gender Non-Conforming individual I was. I was learning about my gender identity. Loving myself as a Black woman, but also Trans*identified. It was a year of discovery of self, a hunger to be comfortable with myself and I did.

On the night of May 2, 2014, my life forever changed. I saw red and blue lights surround me, eight cop cars, and saw my friend tackled and choked by 3 male officers. She was me and I was her. I stood there helpless, in front of me was the seizure of a black body, because of perceived deviancy. I thought I was safe to exist here. They brutalized her. All these armed men with their guns, and all I had was my voice and my iPhone to record. It was a moment I knew racial terrorism was an occupation of the soul and constant anxiety that these larger systems play Russian Roulette on your life. After that moment, we turned it into a hashtag. I was traumatized, but I was forced to be an advocate. So much pressure to turn it into an NAACP moment. Get the ACLU involved. I understood at that moment, everyone is aware of the problem, but no one knows how to heal. We were hurt, and the invisibility of the Black lesbian woman is perpetuated. That moment was about a black woman, who looked like a black man, confuse the logics of the police, the state and as a consequence she was brutalized. They misgendered her, her defiance was supposed to be punished. This was the afterlife of slavery. That night I was punished, we were punished for confusing the police. They brutalized her like a man. Black people are genderless beings subjugated by the system.

It took me a while to come back from that moment. I had interned at the Oakland Housing Authority that summer, only a few weeks after. I had won a prestigious policy fellowship with the Roosevelt Institute. My first research gig to evaluate the impacts of gentrification and the outcomes for jobs. Before May 2, I was a firm believer in civic engagement, but now I was traumatized. I had no language for the fear I had being Out in the Night. I was looking at the world with so much animosity, critiquing the structures. Critiquing why we have the projects in West Oakland, but Audi’s and Mini Coopers parked across the street? Mixed Income Housing, they say, but I saw a forcible removal. Everyday, one by one, people taken by the police. Removing Black bodies via the carceral state. This is how they get their new hip neighborhoods. I was convinced I was in the matrix.

August 9, 2014. I had just gotten back from New York. I was at a Public Policy conference where students talked about race like it was simply about implementing some diversity trainings. Not invested in change, but just a reform of systems that profited from slavery. I got off the plane and heard of Michael Brown lying in the street for three and a half hours. His body abandoned by his murderer- Officer Darren Wilson. I froze. His crime: Jaywalking. The same “crime” that led to my friend being brutalized that night in Berkeley for Jaywalking. I thought That could have been me, that could have been her, that could have been us.

Ferguson is rising, but I felt I was sinking. So isolated and alone in my paranoia. The tentative diagnosis was schizoaffective disorder. I stopped going to therapy. A 5150 was edging. The black lesbian body. My body had became the reason of hypervisibility, vulnerability for violence. I was paranoid. Every cop car I saw, was an exchange of fear.

Black Student Union protested, I didn’t know how to engage. I just wanted to run away. And I did. I applied for a study abroad exchange to South Africa. The opportunity just came and I took it. It was an opportunity for me to leave and engage in a new space. That’s what I thought simply it was. I had a hunger to leave, to go Back to Africa. This afterlife of slavery was suffocation. I needed to leave. My last name was Lynch and I was uncovering my family history in Mississippi- I had to leave, before I was swallowed by the screams of ancestors.

I use the epilogue as a way for you to understand my mania. This project is a meditation on how I found apart of me in Azania, the land of free people, that I am forever indebted to.

I arrived in Cape Town, South Africa July 10, 2015. Nothing was the same. I found love, I found rage, I unearthed pain. I was there during the #FeesMustFall movement. I was introduced to a deep politic of decolonization. Rhodes Must Fall. Down with whiteness. My comrades were fighting to take their country back from white monopoly capital, and at the same time my lesbian sisters were trying to find a way to survive. I found myself again in a space where we fight for Black self-determination, but the Black lesbian body must remain in isolation. I learned from woman there that you do not have to remain in isolation, your politic is the main discourse. That movement was led by poor Black Queer and Trans women. I love Simeme Mthembu, Kealeboga Mase Ramaru, Sandile Ndelu, Nyla Ross, Duduzile Ndlovu, Refentše Ramatlhodi‎, Khanya Xobongo, Qondiswa James, Zola Shokane, Lindiwe Dlamini, Princess Malebye, Linda Mkhize, Alex Hotz, Mmetja Mahlabela, Yonela Makoba and Nomaliqhwa Hadebe for teaching me about what it means to be a righteous Black woman.

Lindiwe and Thabo Tshelane were my comrades, as we started Injabulo: Anti-Bullying project. It was those learners that reminded me about the darkness and the light of being. That there is a haunting that exist and a diasporic dispossession that remains, and even when we are children these consciousness are cultivated. I remember going to Thandokhulu High School for the first time and talking to these students. We wrote poetry and confessed our deepest secrets. I healed with these youth, and I am forever grateful.

I left December 17, 2015. I left, but not forever. I returned the next summer, this time more intentional to go into the archives and uncover such a hidden history of South Africa. In the archives, I was teleported between so many destinations. The black woman is not bound to a time or place. I time travel. I found the Black lesbian body in the archives. I had to read against the grain, the Black lesbian body. We have always existed. I will always return to Azania, to get free, but to also address the contradictions. We welcome the opposition of the world, because we are determined to see the battle through. Africa’s battle-cry is not yet heard (Garvey).

I found Zanele Muholi in my second year, she was the reason I came to South Africa to push the boundaries on the limits of my existence, and she has remained in my imagination all the way into this thesis. I want to thank her, for her fearlessness. I have grown through these images, a Sense of Self has be restored through her freedom to document. Document the trauma of being a Black lesbian in these times. I know the burden is heavy on Zanele as a Black artist, but she relates to the diaspora through intimacy.

I have loved across the oceans, so many people in Azania have my heart, for I wish I can return. I will return to you and for you, and next time with a promise of liberation. This country deserves to be free, it’s been a long time coming and Azania will emerge.

Thank you for reading this thesis, and seeing the start of a long theoretical meditation for what my purpose in life is.

“Part of the lesbian consciousness is an absolute recognition of the erotic within our lives and, taking that a step further, dealing with the erotic not only in sexual terms. . . .

While Black sisters don’t like to hear this, I would have to say that all Black women are lesbians because we were raised in the remnants of a basically matriarchal society no matter how oppressed we may have been by patriarchy. We’re all dykes, including our mommas. Let’s really start getting past the shibboleths and taboos. They don’t really matter. Being able to recognize that the function of poetry or any art is to ennoble and empower us in a way that’s not separate from our living, that belief is African in origin.”

-Audre Lorde; Hammond, Karla. “An Interview with Audre Lorde.” American Poetry Review March/April 1980: 18-21.

Lesbian is not a sexual orientation, it is an analytic. It cannot be co-opted, because it is the source of emancipatory desire. How we relate to each other has been distorted, because of the hypersexualiztion, exploitation and degradation of the black body. A lesbian consciousness brings us back home. Lesbian is safety, lesbian is outside the gaze of whiteness. Lesbian is a restoration of intimacy. This is for the lesbians who are single mothers, asexual, who sleep with men, who are trans*men, who expand the limits. This thesis is indebted to Lorde, to Muholi, to VeVe Clark, to June Jordan, Barbara Christian, and all the black women who resist to be boxed in. Who give back. Who love back, who fight back. The Black Lesbian is God.

Amandla.