Back in the 1980s in a country consumed with the struggle against apartheid, I found a book right at the back of a section on feminist literary criticism, entitled Epistemology of the Closet.
I opened the book and began reading about something I had always known but never seen described before: hidden same-sex desire in literature. That men talk to men, connect with men, hunger after and struggle with, and enduringly love other men in the most heterosexual of novels and poems. Here was a queer but apparently heterosexual woman talking about having a queer eye for the straight guys, smashing through the old labels and boundaries and turning Proust on his head.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, trailburner and queer academic and artist, taught me to read defiant desire into the text, to discover flagrant otherness already there and waiting for me to notice. By the time I read Tendencies, I knew she was batling breast cancer with courage and gaiety. I read something about her living each day with a ‘teaspoonful of energy’ and thought of her often.
And now she is dead. A close friend comments:
“According to The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying — which Evie did a seminar on, at Duke — she will be in the Bardo of Becoming for 40 days after the cessation of respiration. According to her belief, thoughts and prayers of the living will steady her soul as she passes through the bardos to the next life. And there _will_ be a next life.”
Hamba kahle Eve, go bravely and with steady step. Thank you for sharing the vision.
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