Funeral Diva: a review by Sanina L. Clark
by Sanina L. Clark
Racism, misogynoir, orphanhood, the AIDS crisis, art, education, travel, the 2016 election, COVID-19. Sneed unflinchingly takes readers through the grief, love and lessons she’s experienced in life. Heart wrenching and achingly honest, this memoir of verse and personal essays eloquently paints the picture of life as a Black lesbian artist coming to terms with never ending loss. A master of her craft, Sneed beautifully memorializes a community ravaged by medical homophobia and death while aptly demanding justice for the constant and various assaults on queer Black bodies. Be it through slavery, disease, the war on drugs or police brutality, the onslaught of violence enacted against Black and brown people is unfiltered in her writing. Sneed’s resilience and power reverberate through the pages, infecting readers with unyielding senses of urgency, advocacy and hope.
One week. That’s how long it took me to read Pamela Sneed’s Funeral Diva. It took me one whole week, seven days, to read 148 pages. I assumed it would be a quick read simply because of the page count, but I was incredibly wrong.
By the thirteenth page I was already silently sobbing. With a hand over my heart and tears flowing freely down my face, I read, over and over, Sneed’s first trip to Ghana, to Cape Coast Castle, to The Door of No Return. As her words passed before my eyes I imagined that I was her, that I was there, anointing myself with the waters from the bank, fingers trailing along the marks in the walls where my ancestors tried to claw their way out of dungeons angry and afraid. As she recounted her naming ceremony I imagined what my own would be like. I imagined the arms of a village around me telling me I was home.
I placed the book down and held my head in my hands, still weeping because I realized I wanted--needed--to feel that. I needed to finally feel like my soul had come full circle. I Facetimed my aunt and told her, “You need to read this book.” Only thirteen pages in and I was already recommending it to someone. Thirteen pages and I already felt as if something shifted in me. I have a new plan. Whenever this Pandora’s Box is over, I will go to Ghana. I have no idea if that’s really where my ancestors were stolen from, but as a highly spiritual person I trust that I will know when I get there. When, not if, because I will go. I need to go. I need to feel if they’re there.
I felt Sneed’s bottomless grief as she walked me through the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis.
It was hours before I picked the book back up and finished the chapter and it took me six more days to pick the book up again and read it in its entirety.
Never before have I cried my way through a book.
With every word, line, punctuation, I felt Sneed’s bottomless grief as she walked me through the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. I’m only almost twenty-seven, so I don’t know what it’s like to watch my entire community literally die around me. I don’t know how it feels to attend funeral after funeral, and bury friend after friend and have to wonder who is going to be next. I don’t know what it’s like to lose so many people in my chosen family to a disease, failed health care system, and government that only wants to see us dead anyway. I don’t know what these things are like because I am fortunate enough to be alive in a time when HIV is not the death sentence it once was.
I don’t know, first hand, what that is like. I’m even fortunate enough to not know anyone personally who has passed due to COVID. But Sneed helped me imagine… and that was enough. With every person she memorialized, I imagined that those were the names and faces of my people. I now know that I am not emotionally or mentally equipped to make it through a loss of that magnitude. A loss that, seemingly, has no end.
My deepest fear is to live long enough to watch everyone I love die. It wasn’t just deep empathy that I was feeling while reading. It was also absolute terror. Sneed has survived my greatest nightmare.
But she has also lived to reach my greatest dreams.
An educator, artist and activist, Sneed’s words uplifted me as much as they brought me great sorrow. I felt hope on the same pages I felt despair. Love from the same lines that fueled hate. In the same moments I felt I couldn’t possibly withstand her loss, I also knew I had to. Mentors who I will never know did not die so I could give up. Even if it’s out of spite for the institutions that want me dead, I must keep going because staying alive is the only way I will be able to prove to them that queer, Black bodies are capable of amazing things. I cannot afford to succumb to my pain because someone, somewhere is in need of my education, my art, my activism. The way Sneed was in need of Audre Lorde’s. The way I am in need of Sneed’s.
“Silence will not protect you / In this great dragon called America / that attempts to wipe us out / and its machinery that attempts to grind us / into dust / It is better to speak knowing we were never meant to survive
But survive we will. Even in death, those lost to HIV/AIDS, to hate crimes, to war, to famine, to slavery survive because we remember them. Even if we don’t have their names or faces, we remember. They survive in our teachings, stories, poems and plays. They survive in the tears we unknowingly shed in our sleep. In the food we can season with our eyes closed. In the rhythm that flows freely through our marrow. They survive in our walks, laughs, art, music and writings. They survive in the way we protect each other. They survive in our self-love.
Death is inevitable. We each face endless deaths throughout our lives because death is change. To change is to die and be reborn over and over until our final physical death. But dying is not equivalent to being forgotten. No matter how hard they try, they can never make us forget one another. There will always be someone to memorialize us. There will always be someone who remembers.
Pamela Sneed remembers.
Sanina L. Clark is the editor of Out of Salem by Hal Schrieve (longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature) and All City by Alex DiFrancesco (2020 Ohioana Book Awards Finalist in Fiction). Though they have worked on various kinds of books, they prioritize acquiring texts written by or about people who are queer, trans, women, or POC. They have worked with authors like Chavisa Woods, Khary Lazarre-White, and Luis J. Rodriguez. Their bookcase is filled with YA, fantasy, sci-fi, mystery, horror, plays and queer literature. Clark is also involved in performance art and cosplay and can often be found purchasing large quantities of fake blood and tulle. They’re addicted to ramen, cat photos, tea, and Doctor Who paraphernalia. A perfect day to Clark involves lots of green tea while relaxing with a good book or anime and cuddling a cat. They really love cats.
Funeral Diva
by Pamela Sneed
City Lights, 148p
$16.95