"In the Glad Flesh of My Fear": Corporeal Inscriptions in Richard Bruce Nugent's Geisha Man
2006; Saint Louis University; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1945-6182
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American and Latino Studies
ResumoBut his whisper made me think of another man--a man who had struck me in face with hard palm and knuckles of his hand. A man who had left taste of blood on my lips. A man who had never spoken to me since, and whom I had only seen once again. Gale is a beautiful name: that expression had grown to be remembering of man. And my mother named me Gale. One couldn't think such thoughts. But my father was American. He left us before I was born. My mother named me after him. Gale is a beautiful name.--Kondo Gale, in Nugent, Geisha Man (1) 99 These silent figures, like materialized vectors in a field of force, are curiously silent in sense that incest fiction, even written by women, never, as far as I know, establishes agency of incestuous act inside female character.--Spillers 235 Nigerratti Manor is defunct; its ilk lost to drink, tuberculosis, and, for lucky ones, old age. Now Harlem Renaissance legend, 267 West 136th Street--the artistic haven of Wallace Thurman and Richard Bruce Nugent--was once site where two writers plotted out meander of journal Fire!!, which, according to Nugent, was thrown together like European small magazines, in Wally's bedroom (Hutson). Alongside Thurman's subway bathroom scandal, both men's marred marriages, and hushed-over white lovers, these two artists created their identities in what Nugent called the beyondness of (2) Beyondness is an apt descriptor for Nugent's literary work. The intent of Fire!! was, in Nugent's words, to hell out of them and Nugent's own contribution, now famous, ground-breaking story Smoke Lilies and Jade (1926), with its experimental style and explicit homoeroticism, intentionally moved against New Negro movement's concern with respectability (Hutson). Growing up in Washington, DC, and then taken as a teen by New York and its men, Nugent was first published in Alain Locke's 1925 New Negro; his story Sahdji helped define New Negro aestheticism, albeit with a less queer and modernist slant than later work. By 1929, when he traveled to London with Porgy and Bess, Nugent was an emerging literary talent and fixture in cultural affairs of Harlem. Despite sporadic and sparse publication, Nugent continued throughout his life to write and produce visual work--drawings and paintings of reinterpreted Biblical stories, portraits of friends, and modernist rifts, many now available to a new, purportedly more sexually sophisticated generation of viewers. His renderings, like ultra-hip, unruffled Harlem sophisticate (Fig. 1), expand iconography of modernism. His creations were largely ignored until scholar-activists looked to Nugent for recollections of New Negro Renaissance and as an uncommon voice of black gayness in early 20th century. Joseph Beam in particular sought out Nugent for his testimony to black gay men, In Life. Nugent's lifelong experiment with identity and aesthetics ended with his death in 1987; increasingly his unpublished works, unfamiliar images, and cultural contributions have begun to find appreciative audiences and worthy critical attention. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Many of Nugent's unpublished writings provide glimpses into more exlicit regions of sexuality. While there seems little in way of gay desire that is left in artistic projects to shock contemporary reader, proudly blase, same-sex incest is one of few topics still likely to generate discomfort's cough, averted eye. Nugent's unpublished novel Geisha Man, written alongside Smoke, Lilies, and Jade and excerpted in Thomas H. Wirth's indispensable Gay Rebel of Harlem Renaissance, retains a cultural boldness in its uncoded exploration of lust between father and son. The modernist text's exploration of cross-dressing, public sex, and gay desire, including incest taboo, rescripts Freud and delineates contours of what might be called a decadent, black, gay aesthetic. …
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