My Pisces Heart
Jennifer Neal always led a very mobile life and in her memoir My Pisces Heart she shares what it was like to live on four different continents as a Black queer woman. She frames her experiences with the term Blaxit (Black exit) and the question, what would happen, if Black people left racist societies behind and went elsewhere? This question, she emphasizes, is not new; numerous historical figures like Frederick Douglass or Audre Lorde embarked on similar journeys. Travel narratives or texts about immigration by BIPOC show that oppression is a global phenomenon and that encounters in other countries can broaden one’s perspective on one’s own struggles and their interconnections. Neal builds on this in a unique and nuanced way, highlighting that mobility is often about safety and survival.
Neal combines personal anecdotes about everyday challenges and joys in the US, Japan, Australia and Germany with well-researched chapters about Black history, racism and resistance, with a bit of astrology thrown in for good measure. Since I’m less familiar with the Japanese context, I learned the most in these chapters. Neal taught English in Kudamatsu for a year, where she was gifted skin-lightening creams and (falsely) attributed similarities to the only other Black person her students seemed to know: Beyoncé. Yet a Black samurai lived in Japan as early as the 15th century and Neal traces Yasuke’s story. She also takes a critical look at W.E.B. Du Bois’ body of work, his argument for the Talented Tenth (which the characters in Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois also discuss in depth) and his problematic attitude towards Japan’s colonial endeavours. In relation to the USA, Neal discusses the Great Migration, researches her family’s history and shares the joys of her international restaurant club in Chicago. In Australia, she looks at the history of oppression and resistance of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, visits the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra and explores the racism she experiences with her partner and his family and in friendships in Melbourne. Berlin is the place, where she lives right now, where she is trying to follow her grandpa’s advice: to be happy. In Berlin, she sometimes runs into neo-Nazis, but she also encountered the rich history of the Black German feminist movement.
My Pisces Heart offers a noteworthy perspective on global travel. Reading it made me think of Johny Pitt’s Afropean, although it is about a backpacking trip through Europe and not about building a life on different continents. While Pitts searches for Black Europe, Neal looks at different aspects of Black history around the world. But both of them represent a growing number of books that emphasise, as Neal puts it, Black people’s entitlement to go on such expeditions of self-discovery.
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