Those African persons in Middle Passage were literally

suspended in the oceanic these captive persons, without

names that their captors would recognize, were in
movement across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere
at all. Inasmuch as, on any given day, we might imagine, the
captive personality did not know where s/he was, we could
say that they were the culturally unmade, thrown in the
midst of a figurative darkness that exposed their destinies
to an unknown course.
-Hortense Spillers, Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe: An
American Grammar Book

Frank Ocean is no longer here. Or there. Or anywhere his

name is being written about. Perhaps he never was in the
first place.
Hundreds of articles, thousands of words, millions of hits,
shares, and retweets try to locate him, yet all acts bury him
further. Each attempt to understand Frank Oceans will
performs in direct contradiction to the intent of the authors
what Hortense Spillers calls a theft of the body that
severs the captive body from its motive will Each
attempt to clothe him with a new name strips him naked and
reveals the general powerlessness of the black body.
Black thought even when it opens up space for critical
inquiry always feeds the screaming vacuum that devours
our ability to name ourselves. Franks tumblr post heard
round the world seems to be no different. A post without a
title, directed to no one specifically, describes his first
unrequited love. This post was meant to be included with his
first album as an attempt to name himself. A carefully
written piece, Frank makes no attempt to label himself or the
love he felt for this man. In spite of this, the discourse that
has proceeded has done nothing but apply labels. Frank is
the courageous confessor, the new Elton John,
candidate for man of the year, gay rights advocate,

the first queer rapper and my personal favorite:

the god particle. It would seem the screenshot of a
narrative Frank wrote on Textedit has given mass to what
matters today.
Yet of all the labels that have engulfed Frank, none has been
more prevalent and dangerous than calling his narrative
universal. Much of the initial coverage can be summed up by
two conclusions: either Frank has written a beautiful story
about unrequited love that everyone has experienced or
everyone can respect and should congratulate his courage.
The universality of his narrative can, at least partially, be
attributed to the national media coverage of Anderson
Cooper coming out only a few days before. Fitting into this
news cycle, the stories were fused into a general narrative
on how our society is growing more tolerant and accepting.
His post was also the perfect package, for it discussed love,
not sex. Much like slave narratives that pulled a veil over
proceedings too terrible to relate, sex and sexuality seem
to be purposefully absent in Franks post. One of the first
articles I read on this topic commented it was happy to read
a coming out story that stayed above the groin. While
the writer is a noted queer journalist, it brings up an
interesting tension about the silences necessary for ones
point to be properly received. The only way universal
acceptance can be gathered is through a disavowal of the
monstrosity of queer, black sexuality.
This discourse on his universality obfuscates what truly
separates Anderson and Frank. There is the obvious matter
of class. Frank Ocean fled New Orleans when Hurricane
Katrina hit while Anderson Cooper reported on the matter. In
Frank Oceans words, Andersons spoon has fed him good.
Yet beyond this, there remains another dimension. Even if
many consider Anderson Cooper sexy, he is in control of
his sexuality at least to an extent incomparable to Frank
Ocean. There were rumors about Andersons sexuality for
years, yet he was able to ignore them and come out on his
own schedule. Frank Ocean released his tumblr post as an
attempt to get out ahead of slight rumors about his sexuality

that could have overtaken the hype around his album. Frank
chose to release his story early in the same way a person
chooses to run for their life if a rabid animal is chasing them.
What is interesting about the post is that Frank began it with
the phrase [h]uman beings spinning on blackness as a way
to describe a universal feeling of wanting to belong. What
or better yet, who is the blackness human beings spin
around? Franks line brings to mind the images of storms we
get from radars where the high-pressure clouds swirl around
a black dot in the middle. The typhoon of humanity spirals
around the phobic object of the black. Frank is one of the
many bodies at the center from which the storm gathers its
energy, its life-force. In this lies the difference between
Anderson and Frank. Andersons body is not a powerless
object to be pornotroped, but Frank never owned his body
or his story in the first place, let alone his sexuality. His
tumblr post was courageous in that it threw him further into
the storm, but from day oneindeed, from the time of the
Middle Passage to the presentFranks body was always
already open to the wanton gaze of white society.
The other equally troubling discourse is to frame
Frank Ocean as a radical musician resisting the black commu
nitys
affirmation of hyper-masculinity and homophobia.
Hip hop and the black community writ large are seen by
many as the last refuge for open homophobia in the media.
The very first section of his Wikipedia page reads, Ocean
was one of the first major hip hop artists to announce that he
had a same-sex relationship, significant because the industry
is known for its heteronormativity. So the story goes: Frank
was braver than Anderson Cooper because he came out
within the black/hip hop community that despises gay men
more than non-black folk. On the flip side, black people get
to prove their progression towards enlightenment by
acknowledging and accepting Frank Ocean within the public
theatre of political correctness. Through Frank, the nation
gets to undergo a group session of therapy and catharsis.
Tensions are eased and we can congratulate ourselves for a

job well done, all within one news cycle.

There is merit to the claim that Franks music is more
sensitive and openly emotional than the majority of maledriven popular music. Frank Oceans ability to affirm his own
vulnerability in the face of certain pain is a major aspect of
what makes his music powerful. The emotional center of his
mixtape nostalgia, ULTRA was the song There Will Be
Tears that expressed his unresolved feelings towards the
absence of his father. Detailing the difference between him
and other boys who were missing their father, Frank sang,
My friend said it wasnt so bad/ you cant miss what you
aint had/ Well I can/ Im sad. His friend represses the pain,
while Frank wallows in the contradictions of simultaneously
hating, yet desiring ones father. To fill in this void both
literal and mimetic Frank has affirmed the centrality of his
mother. On the last song of his recently released album
Channel Orange, Frank sings, I remember when all I had
was my mother/ she didnt compromise/ she could
recognize/ our daughters and our sons are just candles to
the sun.
As Hortense Spillers wrote in Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe,
Frank has been touched, therefore, by the mother This
has to do with more than simply the actual absence of his
father. The violence that robbed Frank of his ability to name
himself and own his sexuality also denies him, and all black
men, the authority of the Father and his law. Recognizing
the severity of the rift the Middle Passage caused on our
subjectivities, Spillers has proposed two choices for black
men: either we can disavow our inability to enact the
Fathers law or we can perform the radical action of saying
yes to the female within. This is where Franks music
can be said to be radical, the potential he has to affirm the
heritage of the mother and, perhaps, actually affirm the
female within himself.
Yet, buried underneath the hype of Frank as humanitarian
singer of the year is a silence about what the female means
to him. While Frank is known for his storytelling, he has yet

to tell the story of his mother. His mother is only referenced

as a strong figure that sacrificed for him. This is certainly a
nice sentiment, but it remains a caricature of a woman who
has feelings and desires outside of her child. There is no
equivalent to Dear Momma (2pacs song to his mother) in
his corpus. While Frank sings praises for his mother in the
background of the ending track, in the foreground a woman
affectionately tells Frank he is special. Franks voice is
distorted, unemotional, and does little else than chuckle
knowingly. After she speaks, he leaves behind the car and
her without a word. The link between his mother and this
woman remains unspoken, but clear: their place within his
imagination is dependent on them taking care of and
affirming him. This is not an indictment of Frank Oceans
real interactions with women, instead this about the space
women occupy in his imagination. Within much of his music,
the female is an object used to buttress his sense of
manhood that had been radically ungendered through the
Middle Passage and beyond.
This song is not isolated. In fact, in all the songs Frank writes
about women, none of the women have been much more
than drug-pushers, whores, or heartbreakers. The palpability
of his music rests on a well-played tension between an
affirmation of love and a negation of the female. In the
background of the aforementioned ending track, Frank sings,
he wrapped the whole wide world in a wedding band/ then
put the whole wide world in her hands/ she got the whole
wide world in her hands/ he got the whole wide world in his
hands. She only owns that which he gave to her and even
then he still possesses it. Continuing this pattern, Frank
demotes Cleopatra from ruler of an empire to a passive
prostitute in the song Pyramids. As Cleopatra pleasures
Frank, he sings, The way you say my name makes me feel
like/ Im that nigga/ even though Im unemployed. Frank
does not have the ability to enact the fathers law because
he is an unemployednigga, yet the black female body
becomes a symbolic object to achieve the illusion of not to
be confused with the actual achievement of such a power.

In another song, entitled Pink Matter, someone asks Frank,

What is your woman/ is she just a container for the child/
that soft pink matter. Franks reply is, fall into you/ My
god, she is giving me pleasure. Andre 3000, who features
on the song, replies, frankly when that oceans so good/
make her swab the wood. Andre 3000, like Frank Ocean,
was the center of rumors of possible homosexuality. Many
people hinted that Andre would be the first rapper to come
out. While Andre and Frank share the experience of being
made legible through pejoratives and ill-suited labels within
a field of homophobia and anti-blackness, their performative
bonding happens through the medium of the black female
instead. The black female body becomes the prosthetic the
elastic object to assemble the illusion of patriarchal bonds
between bodies denied such a position. Thus, if Cleopatra is
nothing but a lady of the evening working overtime in the
pyramids in Franks imagination, what room is there for
saying yes to the monstrosity of Sapphire, the female that
can name? It seems the proposition Spillers gave to black
men remains little more than potential disavowed within
Franks music.
Within the ever-growing tide of thought-pieces and hype,
every attempt to bring Frank ashore drowns him further:
every recovery is simply an act of re-covering his being.
Every attempt to name entombs him in the paradigm. Is he a
courageous artist of revolution or an image that allows us to
exorcise our demons without exercising any real change to
the structures of domination?
Who Frank Ocean is will not be found here either, but
contrary to the popular sentiment, Frank Ocean is a not a
revolutionary, yet. A unique, sensitive songwriter perhaps,
but he is far from James Baldwin or even Meshell
NdegeOcello. The ability to say yes to Frank Ocean does not
signify an ability to say yes to the female within or without
for that matter. Americas desire for and identification with
Frank Ocean revolves around the horror of touching the
monstrosity of Franks (black) sexuality in a dynamic, selfsustaining motion. In order to connect with the structure of

feeling and desire unleashed on his body, Franks actions

and writing must be nimble. He is walking a very fine line
and his success depends on his skill to be more Prospero and
less Caliban; to dazzle, but not disgust. Within this
contradiction is the sweet spot every black pop star
perhaps every black person hopes to reside in.
Yet, such a point of immunity and self-possession is
unattainable because we are the blackness humanity spins
around. The blistering winds of desire and love can quickly
turn into the thunder and lightning of revulsion and hatred.
Either way, Frank is performing in the middle of a storm
spinning around his black body. His ability to wallow in the
inherent contradictions between his blackness and his desire
to be seen, touched, heard, paid attention to is what will
determine how long he can survive. And it is with this in
mind that the sentence that ends his tumblr post is the
closest he has come to prophecy: I feel like a free man. If I
listen closely I can hear the sky falling too.