by Claire Chambers
In her provocative, genre-defying book, Funeral Diva (2020), Pamela Sneed declares her intention to write ‘a story about being trapped in a story’. This is Sneed’s metafictional idea that main storylines can fail to capture the full reality. To counter dominant narratives, the author creates a turbulent churn of memoir, poetry, essays, criticism, and commentary about marginalized identities. She includes a prose poem entitled ‘A New Story’ which closes with the hopeful resolution: ‘I am going to write a new story’. Funeral Diva seems to belong to an entirely fresh genre, making readers wonder whether there are other ways to tell stories that haven’t yet been thought of.
To push back against received ideas regarding gay liberation and the AIDS crisis, Sneed highlights whose voices are often left out. She brings together the personal and political, recent history and the contemporary, to explore HIV/AIDS, health inequalities, racial injustice, and the broader struggles of being African American in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. At the heart of Sneed’s narrative is a critical examination of stories – who tells them, how they are told, and the power relations that shape them.
Funeral Diva wasn’t released until late 2020, emerging out of at least ‘fifteen years’ of quiet germination. The volume’s completion was tied to trips Sneed made to Ghana and South Africa, which proved pivotal to her thinking. Also ‘pushing [her] across the finish line’ was the resurfacing of trauma during the Covid-19 pandemic, which echoed the devastation of the AIDS crisis.
At the collection’s core is its titular free verse poem, ‘Funeral Diva’. This stands out as a centrepiece, while still contributing to the broader tropes of care, memory, and testimony explored throughout the work.
The poem opens replete with youthful optimism, enthusiasm for radical art, and the fluidity of sexual play. The poetic persona describes becoming the ‘sister’ to a group of gay brothers who are members of the Other Countries literary collective. Together these non-biological siblings find their voice. Sneed recounts that her work required her to speak, going on to proclaim: ‘And speak I did’. This facility with words means that when AIDS strikes the group – just as Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti Earthquake would hit a later generation – Sneed has to put her speechifying to sombre use as the ‘funeral diva’ of the title. It is incumbent on her to construct truthful elegies for the fallen, to ‘make sense of senseless tragedy’. Ultimately, pandemic writers have to steer a path through absurdity and meaning-making, silence and language, mourning for death and celebration of life in order to shape narratives of resilience and resistance.
After recapitulating some of her epitaphic anecdotes about friends who died of AIDS, Sneed moves into confessional mode. She explains that for one of the closest members of her chosen family, Don Reid, she found herself so ‘grief soaked and waterlogged’ that she couldn’t go to the dying man’s bedside when he asked for her. For another Donald she is even closer to, the filmmaker and poet Donald Woods, she attends but does not speak at the funeral. When Woods’s Christian family try to hush up his sexuality, a fellow gay artist sashays down the aisle and defiantly proclaims, ‘He died of AIDS’. Sneed leaps to her feet in agreement. Although she stays silent, she stands with those opposing erasure of queer desire. Even as she does so, Sneed feels a sense of kinship with Donald’s conservative sister, as they both loved the dead man. This stanza is a quiet but resonant moment of resistance, in which the poet finds her voice without speech. Sometimes just being present as a witness is its own form of activism.
Funeral Diva engages with a history that is not just about the past but also deeply concerned with the present and future. It is necessary but insufficient to acknowledge what has already happened; we have to work towards a future that is more just and equitable. That starts with each of us, and with listening and being open to different perspectives. Whose voices are we missing in mainstream pandemic narratives and what can we do to seek out those voices?
In relation to today and tomorrow, there is a third Donald who casts a shadow across other poems in the collection: President Trump. At first, like Voldemort, he isn’t named. However, Sneed goes on to call him a ‘demagogue’, an ‘actor’, and a ‘hustler’ who has pulled off a ‘heist’. As much as she despises Trump and everything he stands for, Sneed recognizes that he did not emerge from a vacuum. Instead, America’s vaunted democracy has only been safe for some segments of the population. Meanwhile others have faced segregation or seen their children taken away at border checkpoints and put in detention centres.
By questioning why white men are ‘constantly at the helm to tell our stories’ and how, consequently, many people think ‘the AIDS narrative only belongs to men’, Sneed challenges readers to consider the social structures that dictate whose voices are amplified and whose are silenced. In LGBT+ and AIDS histories, the stories of suppressed communities – particularly women and people of colour – have been overshadowed.
One of the most striking examples that she presents is that of Stormé DeLarverie and the Stonewall Uprising. Sneed, in her poem ‘Born Frees’, describes
seeing panel after panel being organized on history and art
all things important to the world
and no one thinking or noticing it might be important to have a Black lesbian present
Just like they kicked Stormé out of the Stonewall narrative.
When the Stonewall uprising is discussed, this tends to be with white men like Harvey Milk at front and centre. DeLarverie was a key figure in the 1969 protests, yet her contributions have been
overshadowed or underrepresented in retellings of the event. A biracial, butch lesbian, DeLarverie confirmed in 2008 that she had been one of the first to confront police brutality on the night of the riots. This act of defiance was a catalyst for the larger rebellion that followed. However, despite her significant role, Stonewall gets remembered via supposedly emblematic white, cisgender gay men activists. In ‘Marked Safe’, Sneed celebrates Stonewall’s fifty-year anniversary and all the queer pioneers who made it possible for her and her friends to feel more secure in her sexuality by 2019.
Even so, threaded through several poems is recognition of the sidelining of those activist women, people of colour, and/or transgender people campaigning alongside the heralded white men. Sneed raises the question of who decides which narratives are deemed worthy of canonization. There is a hidden history waiting to be unearthed, and the poet marks out the archaeological site ready for digging.
Funeral Diva’s evocations of how the well-worn story of AIDS leaves out many people find resonance in Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993 (2021). The last time I wrote about HIV/AIDS for 3QD, a helpful commenter with the username Dedangelo recommended that I read this book. She said that Schulman’s nonfiction book, published in 2021, offers a comprehensive history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Known as ACT UP, this activist group played an important role in the fight against AIDS. Schulman’s recounting of ACT UP’s history is significant not only for its detailed exploration of the group’s activism but also for its commitment to challenging the hegemonic narratives that have spotlit white gay men as the primary protagonists in the story of AIDS activism.
Schulman’s critique of the ‘single story’ about AIDS – the narrative that portrays AIDS as primarily affecting white gay men, to the exclusion of women, people of colour, and other marginalized groups – tessellates productively with Sneed’s exploration of storytelling in Funeral Diva. Schulman’s work, much like Sneed’s, is concerned with the dangers of a single story. This is a concept that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie famously discussed in a TEDTalk dealing with representations of Nigeria and the African continent more broadly. Adichie’s argument – that reducing a complex narrative to a monolithic tale can erase the diversity of experiences and lead to dangerous stereotypes – applies equally to the public health context in which Schulman and Sneed are writing.
Schulman’s Let the Record Show is an essential text for understanding the intersectionality of the AIDS crisis. While the narrative of the white gay male as the heroic activist has dominated much of the public discourse, Schulman’s work showcases the diverse nature of AIDS politics. ACT UP was not a monolithic group but rather a coalition of individuals from various backgrounds – lesbians, heterosexual women, Latinx, African Americans, straight, bisexual, gay, and trans individuals – who came together to fight against a common enemy: the neglect and stigmatization of those living with HIV/AIDS.
Yet, as Schulman shows, internalized racism and sexism, along with external social structures, frequently sidelined the contributions of women and people of colour within the movement. The neglect of the needs and perspectives of minoritized groups within the AIDS crisis has had real-world impact. Drug trials were often designed with a very specific average patient in mind: a white middle-class man. Women, children who got HIV through vertical transmission from the mother, racialized people, and those struggling with addiction found themselves left behind when it came to treatment. Narratives and stories aren’t just abstract ideas, but have material consequences for people.
The split in ACT UP in 1990, which led to the formation of the Treatment Action Group, marked a turning point for the grassroots organization. Its bifurcation foregrounds the tensions and divisions that can arise even within groups supposedly ‘united in anger’ for a common cause. Despite the infighting, ACT UP was effective in using innovative tactics, such as mass die-ins, political funerals, and other performative protests, to draw attention to the AIDS crisis and demand action from institutions like Big Pharma, the Catholic Church, and the US government.
Both authors are deeply invested in broadening the narrative around HIV/AIDS and underscoring the contributions of overlooked communities. Yet Sneed refuses merely to critique the single story; she actively tries to change it. She goes further than Schulman in not only highlighting ‘the fact that women and Black lesbians have been erased from the dialogue’ of ACT UP, but also showing that ‘there were so many organizations like GMAD | Other Countries ADODI | Men of All Colors Together | Salsa Soul/AAIUSC | Las Buenas Amigas | and more’. By emphasizing often forgotten groups, Sneed expands the narrative of activism to include a more diverse spectrum of voices within the LGBTQ+ community. Others were integral to this movement, but their ideas haven’t been disseminated as widely. Her mission is to gain recognition for the range of experiences within AIDS campaigning.
This is where Sneed goes beyond just talking about how different parts of our identities like race, gender, and sexual orientation, overlap and come together in various assemblages. She also shows readers how catastrophes and socially unjust responses are interconnected like threads in embroidery. Sneed’s book is particularly notable for its exploration of the intersectionality of disaster – a concept that has become increasingly relevant in contemporary discussions of public health, social justice, and environmental calamities.
Pandemic writing often reveals just such an encounter, where health crises get tangled up with what we might call pre-existing conditions. These co-morbidities include, but are not limited to, migration, prejudice, police brutality, structural inequality, and racial profiling. The poet herself uses virological language, talking of the ‘growing epidemics of cancer, rape, police violence, domestic violence, mass incarceration, depression’.
Her pluralistic strategy reflects the broader impact of slavery and its legacies, (neo)colonialism, and misogyny. Specifically, Sneed deploys the medical idea of a ‘wound’ or ‘scar’ inflicted on African Americans. Representing injuries to the psyche through visible physical markings is an incisive metaphor for the lasting trauma that systemic oppression inflicts. This is a trauma that continues to be felt down the generations, as systems of power create deep and lasting wounds.
In this context, the critical gaze broadens outwards from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s identity-focused intersectional feminism. It telescopes into a wider understanding of how various social injustices and ecological crises converge, intensifying their impact on minoritized communities.
Funeral Diva is rich in its depictions of entwinements, as Sneed’s narrative encompasses a wide range of experiences. For instance, she describes visiting the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, a former slave trading post, and the horrendous history etched within its dungeons. While in Ghana, Hurricane Katrina causes untold damage in New Orleans. Sneed watches the TV footage with horror, seeing a young woman struggling for breath amid ‘a tidal wave of water’.
Later, we are given access to her musings on the murders of ‘Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till, Mike Brown, Sandra Bland’ by serving police officers. These are stark examples of police violence that expose the ongoing potency of institutional racism. It is as if she is drawing a direct line from historical injustices to the present day, showing readers how old wounds continue to cause agonizing pain.
In the prose poem ‘I Can’t Breathe’, the poetic speaker says she knows she should put the deaths of two friends from AIDS and Covid respectively ‘under separate files’ because of their ‘different circumstances’. Rather than compartmentalizing, Sneed makes explicit her intersectional approach. She connects the uncaring attitude of medical professionals towards Black people in the two pandemics. Not only that, but at the poem’s end she brings in police brutality, hinting at a link between the phrase ‘I can’t breathe’ uttered by Eric Garner and George Floyd and the gasping for air of Katrina survivors and Covid sufferers. Apparent boundaries between different kinds of oppression are in fact porous.
Sneed does not shy away from connecting these big issues to disclosures about her own life and what her community went through. Also included in Funeral Diva are Sneed’s explorations of the personal injuries of not knowing her biological mother, her adopted parents divorcing and abandonment from the mother, abuse from her homophobic father, neglect from her stepmother, and the eventual deaths of her elders from cancer and other afflictions. Such difficulties and tragedies are part of the fabric of everyday life, and she is not hesitant to interlace them with seismic histories.
Several incidents overspill the borders of particular pieces within the book and reappear in others. These include but are not limited to the trip to Cape Coast Castle, Hurricane Katrina, and the funeral of Donald Woods. Similarly, Sneed has no respect for conceptual frontiers, rejecting a treatment of the personal and political as separate or isolated. ‘I have reasons’, she tells one naysayer, ‘for talking about race and gender in the interpersonal’. She also effortlessly crosses national borders, taking in global contexts from Benazir Bhutto’s bloodsoaked return to Pakistan to Nelson Mandela’s eventual release from prison after years of confinement. Various problems are deeply interwoven, illustrating how the legacy of colonialism, racism, and systemic inequality continues to shape the lives of subjugated individuals.
One of the most powerful aspects of Sneed’s book is its ability to upend the sense of being ‘trapped in a story’. Dominant discourses confine the discriminated against and dispossessed just as Bhutto’s exile and Mandela’s time on Robben Island made them captives. Sneed’s writing challenges well-worn narratives through nonconformity with traditional genres or storytelling conventions, and by juxtaposing pluralist references to disparate texts, not unlike the ‘collages’ she creates for a relaxing hobby. Funeral Diva’s refusal to be pinned down or categorized is a form of dispute, a way of asserting agency over the stories that are told about people with AIDS and African American lesbian women.
In terms of the intertextual collage, Sneed refers to literary figures such as Franz Kafka, Toni Morrison, and Octavia Butler, and outspoken thinkers like Audre Lorde and bell hooks. She does not stop with writing, but also pays tribute to pop art icons like musicians Luther Vandross, Tina Turner, and Prince, as well as fine artists ‘who dropped acid’ or set to work ‘activating the space’. The mix of so-called high and low art continues, with AIDS writing by poet Roy Gonsalves, novelist Sapphire, and others sharing space with reality television, science fiction, and films such as King Kong and Black Panther.
This deliberately eclectic canvas suggests that cultural consumers, especially in downtrodden communities, do not discriminate between different forms of culture. The intermixture also relates to anti-discrimination politics more broadly, agency and the agential, and how stories are imparted to audiences. Indeed, Sneed writes of ‘pulling the tools off the shelf | dusting off the weaponry’, whereby books are positioned as implements for pulling down the master’s house (to reference one of her primary influences, Audre Lorde) — or even as artillery in a war.
Sneed queers the hackneyed war metaphor of disease elsewhere too, imagining herself as a ‘soldier’ returning to the battlefield for Donald Woods’s ‘body parts | and bringing him home’. Her fellow activists are also positioned as ‘soldiers’ suffering from ‘battle fatigue’. As with war crimes, the poet thinks that tribunals should hold accountable those responsible for the abysmal response to AIDS in the United States of America. Sneed’s writing across borders between subjectivity and disasters reveals the interconnectedness of trauma across diverse historical contexts. History is written by those in power who control the narrative, but Sneed is reclaiming that power one story and poem at a time.
In addition to listing and discussing her voracious cultural consumption, at intervals she also provides a doleful roll call of the names of less well-known individuals who were struck down in the AIDS pandemic: ‘Don Reid, | Rory Buchanan, | Craig Harris, | David Frechette, | Essex Hemphill’. Like Yeats, writing ‘Easter 1916’ during the 1918 flu pandemic, she takes it as her ‘part | to murmur name upon name’. Elsewhere she provides only first names, including
James
Nina
Bayard
Miriam
June […]
Audre
These usually ‘Unnamed’ artists are, she says, ‘Always | Uprising’, as she plays with words to activate the usual insurrectionary noun as a continuous verb. The mosaic of diverse cultural references is part of Sneed’s commitment to honouring unsung individuals while situating particular lives within a panoramic historical and artistic landscape. It is a moving act of remembrance and a reminder that behind the statistics these were real lives lost to disease. Sneed laments, ‘I saw plague and cancer decimate my people’ and creates panegyrics so those people are remembered.
Amid her memorialization of those ‘felled’ by illness, Sneed zooms out to also encompass the Holocaust, slavery, apartheid, plane crashes, school shootings, and the early 1990s rebellion following the beating of Rodney King by a policeman.
The friends and lovers of those ‘little boys with baby faces and death sentences’ have seen things ‘that no human being or citizen should’. Sneed calls the AIDS dead ‘our disappeared’, thus equating her own trauma with that of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo who protested disappearances under the military dictatorship in Argentina, and with the ‘friends and supporters of [Salvador] Allende’ who were persecuted after the 1973 Chilean coup. Keeping the Madres in mind, a harrowing question is posed to Sneed and others by the dying poet-activist Craig Harris, ‘Who will care for our caretakers?’. This strikes a deep chord when it is recounted in ‘History’. Through polyptoton, a rhetorical device that repeats the root of a word with different inflections or forms, Harris’s question gains texture. The repetition of ‘care’ within ‘caretakers’ draws attention both to care work and the people who perform it. The linguistic echo stresses the perpetual nature and ‘invisibility’ of caring and emotional labour. Sneed reveals the weight of both caregiving and bearing witness to suffering, burdens which become especially heavy at times of crisis.
In sum, Pamela Sneed’s Funeral Diva is a vital intervention into ongoing debates on storytelling, marginalization, and the intersectionality of disaster. By exploring the connections between various forms of oppression and dissent, Sneed dares us to rethink the stories we consume and to seek out silenced voices. In doing so, she not only reclaims her own narrative but also clears ground for a more inclusive understanding of the intersectional disasters that shape our world.
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