World Is Crowded, Monte
In Memory of Monte Qarlo, the heartbeat of Atlanta’s queer art scene.
I spoke with you a week before I got the news. Rain poured in the background of my window, my life as we spoke. A short but electric phone call, you were running around the city like always. Your voice always so low, a smooth growl, a hum and hymn that stretches its arms skyward when it sings. You had an ongoing joke, that I should work in phone sex because of my own low voice, but truly the profession was made for you.
I miss Atlanta so much.
“We miss you too, baby,” you comforted me.
When are you coming to visit me?
“Girl, when are you coming back to Atlanta?”
The last time I saw you was a week before I moved from Atlanta. Outside of a drag show at a small bar on Edgewood, we smoked and talked about the last look I saw you in: long blonde hair, a skintight silver metallic leotard with heels that made you seven feet tall, and a big ass Toyota emblem — swiped from the hood of a car hung — around your neck. We spoke about the future, and memories served only as places from which to spring towards things anew; the future of our art, the future our movements, the future of our love, the future of our dreams. You spoke with passion, with your ever-present and familiar artistic conviction, teetering between what you can do and what you will do, and most importantly what you felt you had to do with your art. I was so inspired by this last in-person conversation, I went home and bore poetry.
It is hard to place you and your art as separate entities because you lived your life as a kind of breathing, bleeding, moving artwork. You were color, and you were canvas. You sang, and you were song. You performed, but life was your stage and you never stepped out of performance — performance was your lifeblood and fashion a weapon of survival. The world at times didn’t understand what you wanted to do with your art, what you wanted to be, what you would have been and the heights you were beginning to climb. And you loved that; you thrived off an appreciative confusion, the complex affirmations it carried with it.
You hated when I would dream too much — always taught me to do more than I dream, something I’m still working on. The last time I spoke with you on the phone, I was near tears because I missed our coffee dates at Ebrik, and the queer community you mothered and welcomed me into, and the cute little raps we’d come up with but never recorded. I told you about the multitude of ways I missed Atlanta, how much the southern air inspired me to create art much more than this place I’m currently at. I was dreaming aloud to you, with no material or plan of action behind it, and you said “bitch, we’re done talking about what we wanna do. Let’s talk about the future, what we’re gonna do. Fuck dreaming, we’re doing.” And after that phone call, I created, starting a new photo series.
I’ve seen others describe you, lovingly, as an “enigma.” To me, however, enigma doesn’t quite come close to encompassing who you were, how you will be remembered. An enigmatic person enshrines mystery and keeps everyone around them questioning, wanting more; traits which surely were present with Monte. However beyond that, you had a way of making sure that everyone who came in contact with you — everyone who held a short conversation, or who watched you perform, or who spent an hour in the car with you, or who say with you in the corner of the room at a party quietly speaking the entire night — knew you, and knew you well. In this sense, you weren’t enigmatic, puzzling, mysterious, or any other synonym of the word. You were simply the realest bitch most people have ever me, and that could be hard for folks to put into words, but they felt it. You left impressions that were not just in thought or theory, but that were material, and felt, and real, and evergreen in their impact.
I miss you, and have turned towards poetry and prose to express that. I am hundreds of miles away from my grounding space, Atlanta, and have mourned alone, quietly, in distance, without the community you built. But I feel your presence. I feel your heat and your cold. Your birthday was last week, and as I sat late that night watching Beasts of the Southern Wild, I began to weep at the same scene that I always do, but this time for a different reason. As Hushpuppy, in her child’s mind, tries to come to terms with her father’s decaying health, she tells him “Don’t be saying things about dying” in what may be the most intense scene in the film, before tearfully reminding him, “no crying.” I felt, for brief moment, that Hushpuppy was speaking to me with tears in her big eyes. I thought she was telling me, “no crying,” and not to speak of death, because none of us who create art never really die, our legacies live on forever. Our memories are sustained in the works we leave behind. Our faces are etched into the hearts of those we smiled at. Our words stay with those we gave them to. And so with you, Monte, we ain’t saying nothing about dying because you’ll live forever.
The ocean took you from us, your life a libation to your own godliness, Oshun in your bones. The world is crowded and your soul just wanted its chance away from the bustle. That’s poetry in itself; a stanza I may not understand at the moment, but love you for. In heaven rests the ancestors who we lost to middle passages, whose bodies were thrown overboard between shores and shackles, where the soul speaks through roses and rain and the faint scent of lemongrass, and you are where you belong, toasting to yourself and fashioning egungun costumes to show Allah. You are where everything this crowded world could never handle folds into you, just like the art you created. Rest forever with the ancestors, Monte.
[i own none of the images used in this piece and most were pulled from Monte’s Instagram]
