Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

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Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman

I enter every book I read hoping that it will in some way change me. And most of them usually do change me. But the experience of reading Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments was something else entirely. A work of critical fabulation, the book opened new eyes within me, slaked thirsts I only realized I had through the process of reading, and awakened new ones. It helped me think about race, gender, class, performativity, rebellion, and revolution in new ways. It taught me about how history, theory, prose, and poetry might be written, how ekphrasis and research might be able to make one feel.

Hartman draws on extensive sources to construct the pieces that make up Wayward Lives. These sources include archival materials—photographs, police reports, social workers’ records, newspaper articles, the logs of correctional facilities—as well as novels, collections of letters, memoirs, and works of history, queer theory, critical race theory, and beyond. From these manifold elements, this chorus of voices, Hartman alchemizes, amplifies, and creates something at once new and old, a circular crucible which honors a lineage of Black queer and women rebels, reveals and investigates histories obscured by white supremacist, misogynistic, heteronormative people and power structures, and imagines new possibilities for how the past can compel us toward future creation.

On a piece by piece level, this can look like biographical essays deeply narrating the lives of early 20th century Black women and queers, many of whom were institutionalized or imprisoned for living free. It can look like piercing prose poems reminiscent of Evie Shockley or Harryette Mullen’s works, deconstructing phrases such as “A Manual for General Housework” or “Wayward: A Short Entry on the Possible.” It can look like critical passages bridging historical eras to ruminate on how laws, racism, and political movements—and the entanglement of all three—have led to the imprisonment, impoverishment, and devaluing of Black women and queers. It can look like essays taking one almost inside the minds of, for example: theorist W.E.B du Bois; a white, lesbian tenement house landlord named Helen Parrish who fancies herself a reformer; Mabel Hampton, a Black lady lover and sometimes-stud who always loved performing and aspired to the opera; Esther Brown, who hated work, “...had nearly perfected the art of surviving without having to scrape and bow” (233), who “longed for another world” (235) before being entrapped by a vagrancy statute and imprisoned; and many others. It can look like passages deeply investigating the frames and beyond-the-frames context of exploitative photographs taken of Black girls by White men. These are only some examples.

The book is better read than described, as no summary could capture the craft and power of what Hartman has created. Far more than a “book of essays” or even a work of theory, this is a spell, outcry, and fiercely blossoming question. The book resonates like a bell, resounds and repeats like history, and roils with the rage and imaginative lightning of an oppressed and resilient collective of Black women and queers.