In 2002, singer-songwriter Tweet released her debut Southern Hummingbird, and we rode all summer to that smoky album, speakers blaring, windows cracked to let the heat from the cackling passersby pour in. This was our pleasure: driving like we had nowhere to be. Momma swaying in the front seat, unburdened from mothering. No dishes to wash. No dinners to prep. No pencil skirts needing pressing. Instead, us six looped through Little Five Points, lifted in the belly of my cousin’s bass-boosted Lincoln, while my Momma sang, pouring out a grief I wasn’t grown enough to know.
Few of Black women’s joys embody without the shadow of grief behind them. The shape of what we want too often looks like what we’ve been forced to be without. The grief of our loss, our losing, haunts us always. Perhaps that’s what struck us about Southern Hummingbird, its slow-burn melodies sweltering a familiar fire in our chests. Tweet wanted what we all wanted: the chance to get to know ourselves.
If you do not know Southern Hummingbird, you might know its lead single “Oops (Oh My).” Peaking at number seven on the Billboard Hot 100, “Oops (Oh My)” was the first song I’d ever heard about female masturbation. The single emerged on the heels of powerhouse women centering Black women’s sexual subjectivity in their music: Lil’ Kim’s The Notorious K.I.M., Trina’s Da Baddest Bitch, Khia—whose single “My Neck, My Back (Lick It),” became our summer sound off, tween girls pussy poppin’ at the public pool, screaming about oral at the top of our lungs.
But Tweet hit different. As an R&B artist, Tweet offered us a truth definitive of its genre. “Oops (Oh My)” was an offering of our greatest love sounds, the soundtrack of Black women’s want.
And what a soundtrack it was. Bridging the gap between reggae and Timbaland’s syncopated signature, “Oops (Oh My)” brought a winding rhythm to her voice. Pouring over the production Southern as molasses, Tweet lulled you into something so hypnotic you couldn’t help but grind, thin hips sitting on rhythm’s shift, while she sang, “I was looking so good, I had to touch myself.”
In a 2016 interview with Bustle magazine, more than a decade after the song’s initial release, Tweet corrected the record, said that the song was never about masturbation but “self-love.” Motivated by an episode of Oprah, where the doctor encouraged the audience to look at themselves naked in the mirror, Tweet allowed that experience to inspire “Oops (Oh My).”
“That’s what the song was about—” Tweet explains, “getting naked and just loving what you saw.”
The rub is that there is no difference between self-love and sex for Black women.
Our bodies and their proximity to anything they might want—is, have been, and always will be sexual. Black people are the ultimate terror for white people, and the threat of Black women’s sexual potential doubles that terror.
To understand this, you must understand that since the first time Black women were treated as private property, sex meant ownership. Sexual intercourse, and especially sexual violence, was a tool the enslaver could and did leverage against the enslaved to keep them “owned.” But also profitable—the entire institution of slavery grown in the wombs of our birthing people, enshrined in our law—partus sequitur ventrem, or “the law of the mother,” a legal doctrine which meant that a Black child’s legal status—whether enslaved or unchained—depended on the status of his mother, which means that sex was the foundation of our own subjugation, and it was profitable—
until it wasn’t. Until the threat of our sexual subjectivity was a monstrous feminine, a power white people had hoped to tame, so reached recklessly into the pocket of our wombs, raised within them the monsters of their imagination, then feared one day those monsters would replace them, and in response to this fear, constructed new narratives of power, piecemealed Black women between the polar pull of archetypes like the Jezebel or the Mammy, which is another way of saying white people sectioned Black women by their relationship to hunger, made us the masters of our own subjugation, claimed that we wanted it—to be owned—and when that story couldn’t hold us in their reins, claimed they had to save us from ourselves, forced sterilization into our communities, tried to break apart our families, tried to stake new claim on the power of us.
Black women’s bodies are so terrorized by the ghosts of our American past that we are, at once, the haunted and the haunting. When I try to write about my body and its proximity to desire—sexual or otherwise—these are the ghosts that I’m confronting. Desire is an artist’s crisis. After all, what is art if not the expression of a desire unfulfilled? But writing is never about constructing the world as we see it but constructing the world as we hope it could be. I want to believe that Tweet feels the same.
Tweet’s “Oops (Oh My)” stands out for its unique departure from the other songs making up her album. Exploring the full range of (heterosexual) love, Tweet’s album dips through joy and sorrow, swinging from poppy dance anthems to the guitar-thrumming blues; and in nearly every song across Southern Hummingbird, Tweet’s persona yearns for the kind of self-completing love only the opposite sex can bring. But “Oops (Oh My)” departs from that narrative; abandoning the male lover in its first verse, the speaker of “Oops (Oh My)” is wholly and unabashedly enamored with herself; it is a self-love (sexual or otherwise) just selfish enough to be impermissible to Black women.
I’m saying, I kind of understand why Tweet wanted to reframe that song.
I suspect Tweet, like almost every Black woman I know, was raised to be respectable. Respectability politics is a discourse adopted, primarily by Black women, to challenge the “dangerous stereotypes of promiscuous, ‘uncouth’ African Americans that white people used to justify [our] lynching, rape, and segregation.”[i] The perceived ills of sexual promiscuity is not an individual failing in the Black community, but potential confirmation of a communal one; it is the weight of that diasporic responsibility that becomes the first obstacle Black women have to overcome to be ourselves.
It is this obstacle that I encounter each time I try to write about sex; it is this obstacle that Tweet no doubt encountered in the decade following her album’s release, what might have motivated her to rebrand her song after all that time, what might have motivated her to use that same interview to come out as a celibate Christian waiting for the man God had for her. The expression of Black women’s love—sexual or otherwise—can never serve just us.
In her first book of criticism, Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson argues that the obstacle is crucial to desire because it is the obstacle that keeps desire possible. If we achieve what we want, she argues, we wouldn’t want it anymore. In this way, eros is always the expression of what we can never have, and it is this truth, Anne Carson argues, that makes desire a triangle. “For, where eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components—lover, beloved, and that which comes between them” (16).
Triangulating black women’s desire often means that the lover is the obstacle; after all, for Black women, the history of our bodies is the first trial to achieving our greatest hopes. Tweet pines across her album against men who cheat, men who dodge commitment, men who refuse to return her her heart, and at the root of that deep and familiar sorrow is us. As Black women, we are the commodity that nobody has wanted; there’s a history in that.
But what is the role of history to desire? We are, each of us, an entanglement of history; every version of ourselves—past, present, and future—an embodiment of time in us.
When I first started writing the poems that would become The Book of Alice, I imagined it as an attempt to resurrect my grandmother, to hold the conversations we couldn’t have while she was alive. As I sat with her persona, I realized that to tell my grandmother’s story I had to sit with the shape of her desires, too. I had to recognize how much her desires looked like mine, across the supposed barriers of time, and I had to understand why that inheritance existed. I had to understand that truly little had changed about how bodies like mine could occupy the world.
One of my favorite poems to read from The Book of Alice is “I Can’t Write About the Ocean Without It Being About Slavery.” It is, intentionally, deviant in its opening, the title acting as a lead-in to the first irreverent line, “but what if I want to fuck the ocean?” The poem, non-sensical and decadent, was a response to an African American literature course on the middle passage; we spent the semester reading works by Gloria Naylor, Edwidge Danticat, and Nalo Hopkinson, wrestling with the ways these writers explored the intimate but sometimes volatile relationship Black folks had with our oceanic history, and maybe I wrote the poem because I didn’t want the weight of that history to be a burden that Black women carried alone, but I also think I was trying to articulate something that I knew but didn’t have the words for yet. Something I would experience while walking with my white friends in the park, for instance, when we’d come across a clearing and a large tree, and they’d stop to marvel, but I couldn’t help wondering how many ghosts that tree had tangled in its leaves. I am still sometimes ashamed that there are moments where I can’t be present without thinking about the past. But I am learning how to triangulate my body through its proximity, recognizing that the nearness of me to any landscape could transform that space into something supernatural, hostile; I was understanding that, as a Black woman, history might live in me more than it lives in others.
When my editor told me to cut “I Can’t Write About the Ocean,” it hurt me. I trusted her judgement; she knew exactly what I wanted the manuscript to be, sometimes better than I knew myself, and I respected her for that caretaking.
She was concerned that the voice of the poem didn’t fit the manuscript; I was confused about this. The poem was, to me, a natural culmination of all that the book had been working toward; it acknowledged the past in proximity to my body, spoke to how few instances afforded me the space to define myself. Out of an entire book of poems, “I Can’t Write About the Ocean” felt the most important because it was the one space I allowed myself to make my desires known; more than any other poem in the book, that poem expressed exactly what I wanted.
So, it was hard not to take the suggestion to cut the poem personally; it was hard not to believe that, in the whole of this project, the odd man out was me.
I tried to convince myself to let the poem go; I reminded myself, more than once, that the removal of the poem from the manuscript didn’t mean the removal of the poem’s existence. But to be honest, getting rid of the poem was never what I wanted.
In a long line of white workshops trying to convince me to erase myself from my work, I had learned that being a Black woman in creative writing meant that I would have to fight for myself. That as a Black writer, I was expected to translate my Blackness for white audiences, to make myself digestible and safe, because white readers needed to be taught how to read me, and they expected my writing to be productive in that learning. White readers want my writing to save them from themselves.
So, when my editor asked me to cut the poem, I was worried—not just about the poem but the entire manuscript. I wondered, did The Book of Alice play it too safe? In my attempt to create a book bigger than the expectations white people have for Black art, did I make it too easy for my white readers to erase me out of my book? I know that wasn’t my editor’s intention; she wanted what was best for the book. But desire is not just about what we want; it is a crash point, a crisis, the intersection of who we are colliding against who we want to be, which means that every desire—sexual or otherwise—is self-love, or at least self-obsessed enough to believe we can overcome our histories.
Maybe it’s that selfishness that compels me toward my own desires—to reach back to the early aughts, to find the woman Tweet used to be, a Black woman living on faith, not in God alone but who she knew she could be, the she she imagined against everyone and everything, and in this fantasy Tweet and I are circling the aisles of an adult store, swinging through the white-bright rows easy as hummingbirds, our voices chirping, we giggle past the neon dildos, the discreetly boxed jack rabbits, the tubular bottles of temperature control lube, and we know we shouldn’t be here, but in the fantasy that is my fantasy, we exist somewhere beyond time, beyond the long-armed reach of respectable which tries but fails to yoke us, so that when Tweet glides her hand over the glossy box of a Hitachi wand, asks, with a devilish grin, “Should I?” she doesn’t wait for an answer. She does whatever she wants.
[i] “Gatekeeping and Remaking: The Politics of Respectability in African American Women’s History and Black Feminism.” Contemporary Women’s Issues Database, 01 Mar. 2003. ProQuest, https://proxying.lib.ncsu.edu/index.php?url=https://www.proquest.com/magazines/gatekeeping-remaking-politics-respectability/docview/1977869748/se-2.
Dr. Diamond Forde is the author of two poetry collections, The Book of Alice (Scribner, 2026), winner of the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin award, and Mother Body (Saturnalia Books, 2021) a 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery award finalist. Forde has received a Doctorate in Creative Writing from Florida State University, an MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Alabama, and a Bachelors in English at the University of West Georgia. Her work has received recognition in the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, in Great River Review’s Pink Poetry Prize, and has earned her a Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellowship. You can find Forde’s work in Poetry Magazine, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Obsidian, and elsewhere. Forde serves as the Interviews Editor with Honey Literary, as an assistant professor at North Carolina State University, and as an avid lover of fish and grits. Find out more at her website: www.diamondforde.com
