Cover Image: Lucy Jane, Martinique 2022
Image courtesy of the poet

Entrée to Black Paris last welcomed Dr. Roseline Armange (aka Lucy Jane) to the blog in October 2021, when we published her poem entitled "How Can You Rise Higher." Dr. Armange is currently working on a collection of poetry entitled Queering My Caribbeanness, an autobiographical body of art that explores Black queerness in the French Caribbean. She describes it as "embodying love and light as authentic truth" and considers it a "consecrated act of social change." This summer, we are pleased to publish a three-part sequentia (sequence) from the collection called "Navigating the Binaries." Find Sequentia 1 below.

Navigating the Binaries: Sequentia 1:3

Zami

An encounter

Zami - A tribe

Zami - Ancestral tribe

Zami - Unspoken history

Zami - 21st Century

Where are we now?

Zami - a word of queering Caribbean liberation

Zami - a word of queering Caribbean revolution

Zami - a word of queering Caribbean evolution

Zami - Encountering Queerness.

Zami - Meeting with sista-hood, sista-blood

Zami - Caribbean racines (Roots)

Zami - No need to voice

Zami - A gut feeling

Zami - A sensation

Zami - An impression

Zami - Queering new tribes

Zami - Conscription of multitudes

Zami - Conscription of similitude

Zami - Conscription of sufferings

Zami

Zami

Zami

Understanding a voice melting in historical denial

Violence of a religious comptine (Nursery rhyme)

Giving right to beat

Giving right to ignore

Giving right to denial

Giving right to psychological suffering

Does her soul and mind-matter of “Sa lé moun lan kè di”? (What will people say?)

“Sa yo kè di?” (What will they say?)

Queering the status quo

Of a sexual fluidity

In discordance with the laws

Queering my dissidence

Queering my blackness

Queering my Caribbeanness

Queering my Martinicanness

Queering my Sexuality

Queering my speech on a fence

A rainbow fence

Sharpening my tongue

Vocalizing more

Expressing more

Being more

Love

Noire Love

Fanm Caribéen adan Zami  (Caribbean woman loving woman).

Zami - a strange zone for the heteronormative Man.

Zami - a strange disruption of an established gentrified order

Gentrifying sexuality

Gendering myths and religious curse

Zami - a rebuke of the Laws

Zami - the mercy of the Command

Zami - an racin Lanmou (the roots of love)

Zami - a grace of God

Zami - a gift of God

From Joan of Arc to Saint Augustine

A fame of Love

A grace of Love

Zami

Restoring the psyche

Embracing God’s love

One Love

A justice in Black divine

A justice in the Caribbean divine

24 juillet 2021, 3:03 AM, Paris

“My day encountering life, people, tribe, queerness, Caribbeanness, love, joy, creativity, art, passion, and something yet to become, yet to Bi. La noire, Sophie, her hips, smile, presence and artistic voice, concert and queerness discussion”

 ~ Lucy Jane

24 juillet 2022, 9:22 PM, Carbet

“Queering the grace of Love

Queering the grace of Love in Caribbean Folklore

A full circle of Love acceptance

Amazing Grace

Amazing Gift 

Amazing Love”

 ~ Lucy Jane

Lucy Jane, Martinique 2022
Image courtesy of the poet