Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought
Edited by Briona Simone Jones
Reviewed by M Shelly Conner
The New Press, 2021

Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought, edited by Briona Simone Jones, announces itself as continuing discourse pioneered and advanced in Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s 1995 seminal text Words of Fire. From its opening dedication to victims of #SayHerName to the closing epigraph quote by Lorraine Hansberry, this collection centers on the intersections of Black queer womanhood and the myriad of nuanced experiences it entails.

In its foreword, writer, activist, and educator Cheryl Clarke places Mouths of Rain alongside such classics as The Black Woman: An Anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, and others, tracing a rich lineage of sociopolitical literary conversations about the lived experiences of Black queer womenfolk. Clarke refers to the collection as a “florilegium,” a term with Latin roots meaning a gathering of flowers and a collection of fine extracts. And so it is with Mouths of Rain serving as a genus of Black lesbian thought organized into five subcategories: “Uses of the Erotic,” “Interlocking Oppressions and Identity Politics,” Coming Out and Stepping Into,” “The Sacred,” and “Radical Futurities.”

This florilegium understands the foundational connection between Black women, in general, and Black queer women, in particular, to nature and its elements, as in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s opening essay “Mouths of Rain: Be Opened.” Gumbs uses an anecdote of her Anguillan grandmother—believed to have the power to control rain—to ruminate on Harriet Tubman’s Combahee River Raid during a powerful storm and contemporize this relationship with the query: “What does it mean for us…to claim an intimate relationship with rain at a time of climate change…?”

Similarly, Mouths of Rain traces a lineage from early twentieth-century Black lesbian writers such as Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson and Angelina Weld Grimké to pioneering Black womanist writers Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, connecting them to their most contemporary literary descendants. Within its pages, Dunbar-Nelson’s 1921 poem “You! Inez!” communes with JP Howard’s 2020 poem “aubade, in pieces, for my ex-lovers.”

As much musical composition as literary, blueswomen Ma Rainey and Lucille Clifton’s same-gender-loving tunes establish a temporal landscape for later examinations of ratchet binaries, hip-hop and bounce in Bettina Love’s “A Ratchet Lens: Black Queer Youth, Agency, Hip Hop, and the Black Ratchet Imagination.”

Jones writes in the introduction that “our love stories have been buried underneath our activism.” Mouths of Rain then seeks to re-center the love in our stories without excising the activism or the need for the activism—events that disrupt the love in our stories. This is exemplified in Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s “Wolfpack,” a love letter to the New Jersey Four from her collection Blue Talk and Love, and Sharon Bridgeforth’s excerpt from “love conjure/blues.” Like the titles of these two works, Mouths of Rain explores the relation between love, feelings (blue), and the ways in which we speak or conjure it as sacred practice.

Mouths of Rain takes flight and departs from its predecessors in its Radical Futurities section. Clarke quotes Toni Cade Bambara’s foreword in This Bridge Called My Back to remark, “It is the Afterward that’ll count.” Radical Futurities is a crucial section that allows Savannah Shange’s “Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches” (a contemporary callback to Cathy J. Cohen’s “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens”) to imagine a future informed by the collective labor of generations of Black queer women serving as “vessels of repetition with a difference, teaching each other how to be with and for ourselves.” In that way, creating “lived models of queerness.” While Cohen’s contribution to the collection, “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics,” traces the beginnings of her work in Black queer studies, which would inspire Shange and many others in and beyond Mouths of Rain to serve as such “lived models of queerness that linked our experiences across geography, gender, and generation.”

Susana Morris’s “More Than Human: Black Feminisms of the Future in Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories” places The Gilda Stories in conversation with “other examples of Afrofuturist cultural production such as Octavia Butler’s writing and Janelle Monáe’s music,” carving out discursive space that allows us to re-examine movements like Afrofuturism through a Black queer womanist lens.

The florilegium’s five guideposts begin with the Uses of the Erotic as a vital resource within us. We can use the erotic to transport Love—our essential core energy. Who we are, and the oppressions we face based on who we are is the basis for the Interlocking Oppressions and Identity Politics section. Once we emerge or Come Out from this burden, we can then Step Into our strongest version of our Sacred self, recognized as divine in itself and its connections to all others. Only then can we imagine and create the Radical Futures that complete the cycle or at least see ourselves transcending survival mode into thriving mode.

Jones writes in the introduction that “A plurality of being is what Black lesbians offer to the world, and this plurality lends itself to full recognition of an integrated analysis.” In this way, Mouths of Rain serves as a universal guide for realizing one’s greatest potential. Moreover, by centering Black lesbian experience, Mouths of Rain offers a more realistic and useful proxy for critiquing systems of oppression than mainstream media, film, and literary representations—industries that decontextualize capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and heterosexism for non-marginalized avatars to play out their oppression fantasies. As such, it is both an invaluable collection of and contribution to Black lesbian thought and literary production.

M Shelly Conner is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas. Her multi-genre writings examine culture through a dapperqueer womanist lens and include publications in Crisis Magazine, the A.V. Club, NBC News, and the Grio. Her debut novel everyman is currently available in hard cover, ebook, and audiobook. Shelly is repped by Beth Marshea at Ladderbird Agency.