By Michele Karlsberg–
The collected works of landmark LGBTQ cultural figure Assotto Saint (1957–1994) are out now! Assotto Saint’s Sacred Spells: Collected Works is a remarkable volume that brings together an expansive range of the late Haitian-born American poet and performance artist’s work.
Saint’s poems, plays, essays, and short stories are gathered for the first time in a volume, edited by me, in the context of the Black gay cultural arts and AIDS movement of the 1980s and 1990s.
Saint braids music and incantation, his Haitian heritage and activism, to craft a tapestry that celebrates life in the face of death. His work insists on truth, while never forgetting love and the erotic, as he rages against the silencing of Black gay voices and those suffering from HIV/AIDS. His life and work speak with an urgency and example that are as timely today as when he lived.
Born Yves François Lubin in Haiti in 1957, Saint moved to New York City in 1970. As part of his rich and varied career he edited two anthologies of gay Black poets in the early 1990s. In addition, he also wrote and produced several theater pieces, including Risin to the Love We Need and New Love Song. Saint was the founder and artistic director of the Metamorphosis Theater. He was also the lead singer of the rock band Xotica. He died of HIV-related illness in 1994.
The interdisciplinary writer, performer, and central figure in the Black gay cultural arts and AIDS movements was influential to contemporary writers such as Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, and Melvin Dixon. Sacred Spells is Saint’s crucial legacy: five hundred incandescent pages of painful yet inspired lyric writing that exemplify the visceral, spiritual dimensions of an artistic practice that’s integral to Black and LGBTQ activist movements.
San Francisco Bay Times fellow columnist and acclaimed author and playwright Jewelle Gomez said, “Assotto Saint swept in, like Dorothy Dandridge if she’d been allowed to play Cleopatra: tall, regal, perfectly made up, moving as if on a Milan runway with an authority unlike any poet I’d ever seen. When Assotto spoke, it was like French silk fabric snapped out over you.”
Actor and singer André De Shields said, about Saint: “The road before us looms as an infernal horizon, then metamorphoses and appears as the cyclical Phoenix at the crossroads of life, an intersection of evolution and revolution, where we—baptized in the righteous anger of the Haitian Saint Assotto—forgive and heal in the knowledge that none of us is a cosmic orphan.”
Novelist and playwright Sarah Schulman added, “Assotto was a man who created community … . And the fragmented nature of this volume accurately reminds us of the brilliance and courage cut short. [It is] a necessary addition that speaks directly to our world.”
For more information on Assotto Saint: https://tinyurl.com/ms92z47j
Michele Karlsberg Marketing and Management specializes in publicity for the LGBTQ+ community. This year, Karlsberg celebrates 34 years of successful marketing campaigns. For more information: https://www.michelekarlsberg.com
Words
Published on November 2, 2023
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