I like to listen to my three-year-old kid tell stories. We can be chilling and playing with his current rotation of toys when a story begins to form about the ducks, cars, dogs, and in comes Hulk. (Homie is a huge Marvel fan, thanks to his parents). Or we can be riding in the car, and homie is looking out the window gazing at the trees, trucks, and train tracks while repeatedly telling us to “wook, wook” (look, look) when a story about a Yeti and Frankenstein emerges from his unbounded imagination.
Storying and storytelling are a part of our Black queer culture and community (Hale, 1998; McKinley-Portee, 2017). Oral storytellers are generational historians retelling and reliving the joys, survival, and pains that accumulated to bring us here. No one taught my three-year-old toddler “how to tell stories” or where to draw from. Storying (Banks-Wallace, 2002) and drawing from his expansive, without boundaries imagination are part of who he is right now.
Three years ago, when I started my doctoral program, I didn’t see or label myself as a storyteller. I had just left the classroom and was already conditioned to filter my narrative through comfortable and sensible lenses for everyone. Thankfully my advisor and chair introduced me to Audre Lorde, Pauli Murray, and a community of queer Black feminists who drew from and relied on their stories and lived experiences to create spaces where they could thrive. Lorde and Murray especially inspire and challenge me to (re)member the stories I’ve pushed to the side and been asked to forget because these narratives add to our collective ancestral wisdom of navigating life on this Earth and other multidimensional planes (Dillard, 2021).
“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?” — Audre Lorde
And when it came time to research, read, and write my dissertation, I knew storying and storytelling had to be the foundation upon which everything was built. With the wisdom and creativity of our queer Black ancestors and my dissertation committee, it was time to present the first three chapters of my dissertation. I spent two weeks planning, outlining, and curating my dissertation proposal presentation to weave together and invoke a story of home and why queer Black spaces are essential.
But can we take a moment to navigate the multiverse to understand how I got to this point?
When I was in the first grade, I’d spent some time in foster care because the medical system thought my parents abused me. They didn’t physically, but that’s another story. So while I was in foster care, I lived with a two-parent, two-kids Black family, and they were alright. I was put in their home about a month before the winter/Christmas holiday. During the church Christmas play, my parents had permission to visit me for the first time since the incident. My parents came and gifted me with a green and red plaid stuffed reindeer. The stuffed animal had a black bow on one of the antlers, black faux leather shoes with buckles, and a thin red sewn-on smile. I loved this stuffed animal so much and named him Mr. Rudolph. I didn’t stay with that foster family for a long time, and I can’t remember or recall a lot of my time there. But, the thoughts that do remain in my foggy memory are the nights I slept alone in a room with a single night light clinging to Mr. Rudolph.
I carried Mr. Rudolph everywhere for the next twenty or so years of my life. My cousins, brother, and childhood friends constantly asked me why I named him Mr. Rudolph when he had on a bow. I said boys could wear bows too. When the threads loosened and his stuffing became exposed, my sister n law patched him back up. When his left dull yellow eye started to hang from the weak decade-old glue, I got some Elmers and put it right back on there. When I started undergrad out of state, Mr. Rudolph was there. When I moved back to Texas after undergrad, Mr. Rudolph was there. When I vanished into a blacker than the country with no streetlights pit, Mr. Rudolph was there. He may have been chilling in the closet or lying beside the bed, but he was there. When light peaked at the end of the tunnel, Mr. Rudolph was there and trying to hold his frame together. When I was abruptly shoved from the closet and given a new queered language, Mr. Rudolph was there. I then had the vocabulary and awareness to understand who Mr. Rudolph was. He was the trans celestial mate that traveled with me through every low, higher valley, river, plateau, and mountain top. Mr. Rudolph knew who I was before I could even begin to grasp the gender variance evolving within me. This may seem childish, but he is one of the realist things I’ve ever held onto and who has seen me without any and all my masks.
Today, I identify as a Black genderqueer person, but that could change tomorrow because gender and sexuality are so expansive and too much to be contained by a limited vocabulary. As Lorde said, what are the words that you have not shared? Sharing our narratives, publicly or privately, are central to sustaining and freedom dreaming queered Black futures (Love, 2019). My story origins reside on the SW side of Houston, Texas, with a Nigerian father and american* mother. I often created and sustained fantasies to distract me from my reality. Those practices are still present and have grown to be offered through a queered Black lens.
Academic spaces have a long and sustained history of being oppressive, but journeying through a doctoral degree has given me the time and space to unpack, learn, and share my story. And it’s mainly due to a community of Black professors and a lot of reading.
I wonder what the three-year-old toddler’s origin story will be. But, until then, he has all the space on this Earthly plane and the next to conjure, imagine, and draw from his Afrofuturist ancestors to share stories (Harris, 2020).
I attended a virtual speculative workshop a few weeks ago and was presented with these questions by Dr. Stephanie Toliver that I now leave with you:
- What are your story origins?
- What does your story mean to you?
- Who taught you how to story?
- When did you first begin to tell stories?
- What does storying mean to your family/community?
*As a Black, queer person living in this country, I recognize the inherent oppression of racism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism, and transphobia that is maintained by dominant societal structures. Therefore, I don’t follow standard grammar rules of capitalizing america/n and reduce its oppressive power and structure.
References
Banks-Wallace, J. (2002). Talk that Talk: Storytelling and Analysis Rooted in African American Oral Tradition. Qualitative Health Research, 12(3), 410–426. https://doi.org/10.1177/104973202129119892
Dillard, C. (2021). The Spirit of Our Work: Black Women Teachers (Re)member. Beacon Press.
Hale, T. A. (1998). A job description for griots. In Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music. Indiana University Press.
Harris, F. L. (2020). “Tell me the story of home”: Afrofuturism, Eric Killmonger, and Black American malaise. Review of Communication, 20(3), 278–285. https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2020.1778069
Love, B. (2019). We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Beacon Press.
McKinley-Portee, C. (2017). Queering The Future: Examining Queer Identity In Afrofuturism. Theses. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/theses/2176
Toliver, S. R. (2021). Recovering Black Storytelling in Qualitative Research (1st edition). Routledge.
This blog post is part of the #31DaysIBPOC Blog Series, a month-long movement to feature the voices of indigenous and teachers of color as writers and scholars. Please CLICK HERE to read yesterday’s blog post by Christopher Brown (and be sure to check out the link at the end of each post to catch up on the rest of the blog series).
