Transcript - "Black Trans Intimacies: On Building Futures in the Present"
October 29, 2020 -- Radical Kinship Series
Listen to "Black Trans Intimacies: On Building Futures in the Present".
LETI VOLPP: Good afternoon, and welcome to our event, “Black Trans Intimacies, on Building Futures in The Present”.
Let me begin with a land acknowledgment.
We take a moment to recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of Huchiun the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and other familial descendants of the Verona Band. We recognize that every member
of the Berkeley community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land since the institution's founding in 1868. Consistent with our values of community and diversity, we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the university's relationship to Native peoples. By offering this land acknowledgment, we affirm indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the University of California, Berkeley more accountable to the needs of American, Indian, and Indigenous peoples.
My name is Leti Volpp and I'm the Director of the Center for Race and Gender here at UC Berkeley. We're thrilled you can be with us for today's exciting event.
Before I thank our co-sponsors and introduce the moderator and curator of today's event, which is the second in the Radical Kinship Series, let me just mention two
election-related events you may find of interest. Tomorrow at 3:00 PM, “Critical Race Theory and the Election” co-sponsored with the Center on Race, Sexuality, and Culture and UCLA's Critical Race Studies Program.And November 12 at 4:00 PM, “Election 2020 Roundup” with different Berkeley experts. You can find more information about each event on the website.
Let me thank the generous co-sponsors who made today's event possible,
African-American Studies,the Gender Equity Resource Center, the Othering and Belonging Institute's Diversity and Health Disparities Cluster, the Othering Belonging Institute's LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster. Thank you so much for you support of this important work.
So now without further ado, let me introduce the fabulous organizer of the radical kinship series and moderator of today's event, Alan Pelaez Lopez.
Alan is an Afro Zapoteca, artist and scholar from Oaxaca, Mexico.They are the author of “Intergalactic travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien”, published by The Operating System 2020, which was a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award, as well as “To love and mourn in the age of displacement, published by Nomadic Press, 2020.
Thank you, and I will now turn it over to Alan.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you, Leti. Hi, everybody.Thank you for joining us today
for our Black Trans Intimacies roundtable. I'm so excited because Dora, SA, and Micky are people who I have wanted to be in a room with for some time. And ideally this would have happened, we would have come together and just been in-person.
But the digital space has important, particularly for those of us who are migrants, for those of us who have disabilities, for those of us who are always just like conjuring worlds otherwise through social media and art.
And I'm going to be reading a little bit of their bio, so wanted to give you all some context on why this? Why now? And part of it is because I'm tired and part of that
tiredness that I feel is the fact that everyone is asking, what can we do? What can we do? But nobody's actually listening, nobody's doing the work of looking at what Black trans and gender non-conforming people have been saying for decades, for centuries. And instead of thinking through the end of things, I wanted to incubate a space where we could actually think through intimacy, through futures, and through what we are doing right now that is informing how we care for each other.
So I'll leave it at that, but I'm going to read the bios of our three phenomenal speakers, and then they're going to do an art share, and then we'll have a conversation.
So we have up on the dock Micky, who is a Black trans femme using cultural organizing to make liberation irresistible. Micky descends from the first three Black elders from Southwest Georgia, where they spent their childhood summers. As a young person, Micky's political awakening was grown through Black drag queens, Black queer men living with HIV, and Black women on the frontlines of reproductive justice. In 2015, Micky B. co-founded “Southern Fried Queer Pride”, a queer art festival turned art education nonprofit. Through SFQP Micky explores the nuanced intersections of queer performance and organized resistance, and they currently serve as a national organizer at the Transgender Law Center.
We also have Dr. Dora Santana, who is a Black trans Brazilian, warrior, scholar, activist, artist, storyteller of experiences, bodied in language and flesh. She holds a PhD in African and African Diaspora Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and is currently an assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She is one of the founders of the Brazilian forum of Black Trans People. Her 2019 article, "Mais Viva" reassembling transness, Blackness, and feminism gave birth to this panel particularly her question quote, "How do we imagine possibilities of livable lives of freedom, well-being, and transformative change as we resist death?" End quote.
And our third speaker is Dr. SA Smythe, who is a poet, translator, and scholar working as an assistant professor in the department of Gender Studies and African-American studies at the University of California Los Angeles. Smythe organizes with QTBIPOC feminist and abolitionists writing collectives between New York City, the Bay Area, London, Berlin, and Los Angeles. And with a California-wide abolition university collective cops off campus Smythe meditations of Black genders loss, belonging, and abhorrence manifest most clearly in their poetry, which they performed in English, Italian, and Spanish.
So if you have not noticed, we have an incredible round of speakers for the next 45 minutes. And I wanted to start off by asking each of you if you would be open to sharing maybe some of your art for five minutes and just speaking about it before we get into a conversation. So that everybody knows what it is that you do.
And want to see, Micky, if you want to go first?
MICKY BRADFORD: I would be happy to. I'm so happy to be a part of this. I am just so overjoyed honestly to have this space. Yeah, a pandemic is not going to stop us from having some Black trans joy tonight. So let's do it.
OK, so don't look at the rest of my tabs please, but we're just going to concentrate on this poem. I wrote this letter in 2017 originally for Trans Day of Visibility, which some folks may know, is celebrated as a counterpoint to Trans Day of Remembrance where we typically are remembering folks who we've lost to anti-trans violence. And conversely on Trans Day of Visibility we are celebrating the visibility the courage that trans people have shown. And so I wanted to write this letter addressed to Black, indigenous, and undocumented trans femmes, non-binary trans femmes, inclusive of trans women who are in the south.
And I'll just go ahead and read this.
We are the Legendary Children
below the Mason-Dixon line.
Banished and famished
to each other,
we are both "home
and love," left dead
on some unnamed
country roads, clearly,
our powers of transformation,
our gifts, our threat.
We are the children of
Matriarchs and hustlers,
who organize sanctuaries for
the migrant and the poor.
And though isolated, we
have never been alone.
We move with the spirits of
every slain sister, brother,
sibling from pre-colonial
warrior healers
to voguing queens in ball gowns,
young ancestors, the kids.
We must embody their legacies
urgently and fiercely.
Our destiny has always been
to abolish borders, binaries,
cages, comfort, from inside
the jails and the shelters,
from atop Appalachia to the
depths of the Mississippi Delta.
In dark times,
listen closely, hear
the kids say, "The shade
is we been targets.
Visible or not, passing or not."
But "The gag is we
are still here."
embody their legacies
urgently and fiercely.
Southern trans
resistance is beautiful.
As I said, I wrote this in 2017 for Trans Day of Visibility and the title "LSS" comes
from the procession that starts most mainstream ballroom events by honoring the pioneers of the scene, so the house mothers, the house fathers, those who
have been recognized as legendary as icons, they make a short of statement walk showing off the categories that they have dominated and pioneered. And I learned this when I attended the balls when I was younger during the short time that I was a part of the pioneering house of UltraOmni founded by Kevin Omni in New York, then stewarded on the West Coast and now in Atlanta where I'm based by Victor UltraOmni.
And I returned to this letter occasionally to remind myself that Black trans people are intimate with death. We are too often only spoken of upon death. Some of us wish for our own deaths and yet we strive to be remembered beyond death. As long as I've known myself, my spirit, my body, to be Black, to be transgender I have known death. When I came out to my parents, they asked about the statistics of me dying. And when I came into the Black trans community I knew intimacy through the connections I made with trans elders who talked about all of the deaths that they had survived. I knew intimacy through the language of ballroom community and I knew it through the medium of performance and voguing.
And the last thing I think I'll say about this is that my art forms have evolved over time. I've been a writer, I've been a performance artist, drag queen, a voguer, and now I am in a film making fellowship with the House of Pinnacles. The House of Pinnacles is a film training program for Black trans youth started by a Black trans Jamaican immigrant, Joie Lou Shakur. And we're training folks to tell their stories about what it means to be at the intersection of being Black and trans.
And so I just wanted to read this because it'll be included in our graduation film, which folks will be able to see on the House of Pentacles website at the end of December.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you so much for sharing that, Micky.
One of the things that I really respect and admire about you is your art. I think that my first entry point into your work was in March of 2016 when you were voguing at the governor's mansion in North Carolina while surrounded by the police. And that act of that commitment to joy, that commitment to a Black livelihood I think really showed other Black trans and non-binary peoples that we were going to be there in the future. And that it wasn't just an idea, but a material possibility.
So thank you for those words, again.
MICKY BRADFORD: That's right.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you.
And I wonder, Dora, if you want to share some of your art?
DORA SANTANA: OK, thank you for holding the space here. I'm so, so excited to be here holding space with you all. And thank you, Micky, for sharing.
It was really powerful. So I was actually creating a poem out of the invitation of for this event. So it was generative because I wanted to talk about different aspects of the work that I've been doing, which has been performance, but also visual art, the watercolor, and also academic or other forms of writing.
So I've had a performance called Black trans daughterhood that was when it was an artist in residence that I'll go. And I always think about--
I think Micky also talked about that, about I think trans childhood and what it is to talk to the children across time, our own children as being the future of our own children, but also the children that are now, and also the children that we imagine in the future. So this is the combination of that Black trans daughterhood.
I'm a daughter of a Black mother who was a maid, in which is the reality of many Black women in the north of Brazil. And I wanted to think about the knowledge of the children of Black maids here. We refer a lot from the knowledge that comes from the kitchen table in Brazil, we refer a lot from the knowledge that comes from the back door, that is the door that usually is this portal for us to elaborate knowledge.
So this is also inspired by a talk given by Hortense Spillers on proximity. And the talk that she has called Shades of Intimacy Women in the Time of Revolution. And there was part of the talk that she says close proximity and constant contact does not guarantee an intimacy in the social order.
So that really made me think of how to express that through this poem.So this poem is called "Proximity, Intimacy,and Togetherness."
The masters.
They woke up in the same house
and they did not know her.
They woke up in the same
house, ate her food,
but they did not know
the taste of her dreams.
They woke up and told
her child to be quiet,
but they didn't know
the sound of her anger.
They woke up and told her
to be awake as if they
didn't know she needed a sleep.
The Mother.
She woke up under the same sheets,
but she didn't know her child
tied it into illicit dresses
around her waist.
She woke up in the
same house, but they
didn't know the smells of the
house she longed for her own. For herself.
She woke up in the same house,
but they didn't know her
waking up was her rebellion.
The Lover.
He woke up in the same bed,
but he didn't know the
texture of her heart.
He woke up in the same bed,
but she wouldn't wake up again.
He woke up in the
same bed, but he
didn't know the actions to
I love myself and I love you.
The Child.
He woke up in the same house,
but they didn't
know it was a her.
She woke up in the
same house, but they
pretended she was not there.
She woke up in the same house and they
didn't know her imagination
was her playground.
She woke up in the same house, but she didn't know she would
come from the future to hold her own hand.
They all knew the
closeness of distance.
In my attempt to
get closer I asked,
“Mama, what did you do when
your eyes were heavier
than the world
outside of your body?”
“You wake up my
child, you wake up.”
So yeah, I think I want to leave there so we can come back to it, but I really appreciate this space.
Thank you.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you so much for sharing that. And writing that for this event, I'm so excited to get into talking about that conjuring that you're doing.
And I'll wait that for the second portion, but for now, SA, would you like to do some art share?
SA SMYTHE: Yes, thank you. Thank you so much, Micky and Dora, for those beautiful offerings. I'm going to just read.
I realize I ought to have screen share, but because I'm a Luddite I didn't check that in advance. So I'm just going to drop that in there.
Thank you, Micky, it was really beautiful to also follow along with how it was on the page.
So these are the two things I'll be reading one is a poem from my book, “Proclivity, about Black Trans Embodiment and Migration”. My own family's history of migration.
And then this other poem for Trans Day of Resilience, which was an offering to think about ancestry and our futures.
The first poem I wrote recently in quarantine based off of memes that I kept seeing that I was really annoyed by called choose your quarantine house. Do you all know it? I mean, obviously only the panelists will nod. But basically it was there's probably still like on Twitter somewhere, but basically different houses of like, which house would you want to be in during the quarantine?
Which first of all presumes that folks have houses to be in or like this relationship to being housed or unhoused in this economy and also coercively putting people in relation to each other because the joke was these three terrible people and then one person who you might want to be with who's worth the risk of being with these unsafe usually white cis men. So anyway that's what this is based off of. Long story short, they're all the same house. So I've ruined the poem, but I'm going to read that.
And yeah, I'm just going to stop.
Also it's really hot here climate change is real.
So let's say it's performance, but I'm also really warm.
So.
Choose your quarantine house.
One.
Under the dog sitting pretty
on the patch of hardwood floor
where confession and
callousness meet.
You pour gin into
someone else's morning,
a series of slight disclosures
for a chaser idly humming along
to Prince's acoustic version
of, Mary don't you weep?
Trying hard not to think
about death, yours or his.
What's the use?
You already know you're going
to die in this country you never
manage to live in not once.
The how doesn't matter.
A daughter of the dusk
threads encouragement
through the screen door.
Some Latino twink you met
once at a house party DMs
thinking of you with a kiss,
a white woman you haven't had
a real conversation
with maybe ever,
but certainly not since moving
in texts hoping you're well,
and Venmos $40 with emojis of
a Martini and two pink hearts.
This is how another Black
trans person was killed today.
Bile rises to your throat,
rests there, you thank them
all for their hopes.
Two.
You in not really
a house so much as a
ditch that you've been digging
by hand since you were 12.
It's hard work
because it fills back
in each year, the blood
from your ragged nails
forged chase pools from
your tiny resentments
and all of your love languages.
Chomping at the bit for an
externally appointed piece
at the memories of
everything you suddenly miss.
Slow hands, people
watching, people
wanting, being both too
big for your britches
and too small to be left alone,
first Fridays, food festivals,
getting dressed up,
getting undressed, then
getting texts about
the event that you
were supposed to be at replying
from under your covers.
“Sorry to miss it,
maybe next time.”
Let's do lunches and meaning it.
Swapping pure cheese
disguised as casual interest,
walking near the beach, but
never on it, sitting in traffic
for an hour in the parking
lot they call the 405 in time
to nab the best spot in the
corner of your favorite bar
downtown, back to the wall
always just to pull out a book
and bury your nose in it,
except to the bartender
for the usual with a soppy grin.
The smile fades knowing the
usual is how we got here.
Three.
Oh, here we go.
It's you and the
relentless retrograde,
and the Sturm and Drang,
and the Meyer's hand
soap, and the disingenuous
moon, and the rising signs,
and the sirens, and the pack of
camels, and the Refresh button,
and the group chats with
your miserable friends,
and your when this
is over friends,
and your sometimes it be like
that friends, and your bread
breaking friends,
and your it must
be easy for an introvert
friends and your ellipses.
Then nothing sent
an iMessage friends
who must also feel the
loneliness drive deeper
with every notification and so
they're sparing you from that.
It's you and the body pillow wrapped
up in each other's bullshit
wondering why a Black body
needs a body pillow when
the news says that the Black
body is as excessive as it is,
that it can't feel a thing.
You, just blessed
enough to be stressed,
highly favored by
your anxieties.
You and the same heartache,
and mood disorders, and sirens,
and the flames on the
horizon, and sirens,
and the disinfecting wipes,
and the same sexual hang ups,
same crick in
your neck, waking up
with your self-same jaw fixed
to make that same Richter
shriek and the same
bathrobe as before all this,
holding your breath
day in and day in,
and even the day wouldn't dare
go out at a time like this.
Not with the neighbors
peering through their curtains
just so, not without the cameras
on surely, not while you're
asleep, not when the
day heard that there
was someone or something
at the door taking breaths,
they're just
breathtaking out there,
not while you're praying to
choose which way you go out.
You exhale once the cigarette
smokes pile up in your lungs
and turn to see the greens with
the nerve, the fucking gall
to thrive out on the
balcony like that.
Life breaching the dirt tippling
out from the raised beds,
pressing themselves against
and over the balustrades.
Nothing is really
wrong with that.
You're just so sick of it.
Four.
You and the complete
and total understanding
of how hard it would to
be a single being even
if you consented to it.
At first you weren't sure
if the sounds were coming
from the vinyls or the
Meager islands on your chest,
but now there's no denying it.
It's not Mary, proud
and sorrowful Mary
who against all odds still
knows how to follow directions.
It's just watching your hands
again, doing all the weeping.
I didn't time check that should have been three and a bit minutes. Do I have time to
read the next one? Thanks, Alan.
OK, so this was for a Trans Day of Resilience or also Trans Day of Remembrance.
And I like to think about it as resilience because we no binaries, so there's no need to have a day of remembering and a day of visibility as though they're not one and the same thing as though trans people, Black trans people, indigenous trans people are not always already constantly remembering through visibility that is never always our own.
So this poem is an offering.
Stop me if you've heard this
one before so that I can tell it
again and savor it.
I am here, yet they
think of me as a relic.
Not forgotten, but unglorified.
A rough beast with the hashtag
accent of defeat, a weak heart,
and a Bethlehem slouch.
I often find myself both
sought after and shunned,
unable to speak my
own name if I wanted.
Eternally emptied made to mourn
the loss of any meaning I might
yet make like a silence
clap of thunder,
technicolor turned to ashes.
It seems that so many I've loved
have wanted me dead ground down
into the ancestral mosaic
of past and present gods.
Earthly siblings,
sweet apparitions,
can we sanctify
ourselves into new life?
I cannot warn the others
of the coming storm alone,
cannot take shelter from
storms already here, and look,
just look, everywhere blood
clings to the leaves soot gnaws
at the lungs.
There is no water for miles
and soon all you can say is,
well, we should have
listened for the thunder.
So I was not the first to
dream another world, to claim
the teeming darkness
of the ocean
floor stories I would
never fully know.
With this, I exalt myself,
shapeshift into my harbinger
Skin.
We have always been on the move,
live, and wild, and dangerous,
we grow new lungs spread
our palms across the dirt
and tend to new leaves.
But I can never
forget the body that
came, before acidic
grief dries out
along the cracks
in this new flesh.
Phantom bruises from the hush
up the clap and tiff color.
I define myself, as a Shomari
a messenger with an offering
that you may call me “Rainbow Serpent”,
sibling, lover,
or freedom traveler,
That in case language
doesn't express
desire, but hides it
you must remember to reach
only for the neither thing
to be righteously
unashamed of this grief
until the otherwise comes.
Until that time we may name
ourselves whole if not wholly
and stop eulogizing the project
of living long enough to see
that it is yet to come.
And so can never die.
Thank you.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you, thank you, Micky, Dora, and SA. For those of you who are watching, I think that you can only see one person at a time, but the panelists we can all see each other. And we were snapping and clapping for each other behind the scenes.
SA, I was so happy to hear you read an offering because I actually was going to bring it up during this panel, particularly because in an offering you tell us to be unashamed of grief. And I think that when we're thinking about intimacy.
I think that, Micky, when you started today's art share you talk about the intimacy with death and meeting intimacy with trans elders and throug the ballroom scene right.
And I think that both of those elders and the ballroom scene both of those bring an abundance of love, but also sometimes an abundance of grief.
And Dora, you also in a sense bringing in this grief when for you intimacy becomes this traveling across time, and space, and you go back to yourself to hold your hand as a child intimacy in that moment.
And there's also some grief and the fact that people have to do that. And the fact that care was denied from us. So we have to as adults go back to our younger selves and offer that care.
And with that, I wanted to ask the three of you as we gather today, we don't only gather as Black folk who are also trans or non-binary, but we're also in a global pandemic. And we all also come from a migrant experience of different sorts and I'm wondering, how are you are each of you reimagining intimacy with yourself, your communities in the US, and maybe those who are abroad, if applicable?
And then whoever wants to start first.
[SILENCE]
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Or maybe you can respond to what ya’ll have just said.
[SILENCE]
SA SMYTHE: I'm going to start.
Thank you so much for that question, Alan.
I think I'm only going to answer the-- so the first part is the part that I have been leaning into a lot more.
I moved to answer first because I see that you're also framed by life, you're
framed by plants right now and I have gotten into plants in such a major way in a way that's reminding me-- it's so cliche because it's like, oh, I should water myself or nourish
myself while I am producing this timetable to water these plants, especially the fickle ones, it's too hot here for me and some of the plants. So we're communing with one another and working it out in that way.
And so that, for me, there's like a tenderness and intimacy that I mean, the poem is it's a poem,but the part that I had a true sentiment in thinking about during the start of the pandemic was dying in a country that I never wanted to live in as a concept waking up in the wake of lockdown and not having money to leave. And then when I did put something together airports were all closed, and so I had to make peace with being here with not the community that I wish that I had cultivated in time and to really reflect on what the right time, or the right people, or the right things to do would be.
So yeah, that's my partial answer.
DORA SANTANA: OK, I think I'll go. Can I go second?
OK, so I want to unpack a little bit what I'm understanding in feeling as intimacy because it's related to being able to be vulnerable, but also it is really related to trust as well.
And so they're in this time to have folks outside in Brazil and other parts and really to be able to trust under very unstable circumstances, it's very hard to do that.
But also when I talk to in the poem about how being together we're invisible or being the same space is not necessarily the space of intimacy, but of closeness or proximity because when people think a lot about being the lockdown people are like, oh, I don't see people or I'm not close to them and all this stuff.
But at the same time, were we more intimate when we are seen or close to each other? Are we being actually intimate in ways that reveal how the closeness was not synonymous of intimacy because we are so vulnerable now?
And because people are in crisis in different, especially emotionally I've been checking in, especially if my mother was in Brazil and to come to trust in myself that I'm going to be able to support from here the way I can, including financially being now in a situation of privilege as a professor. But also I think talking about the history of this math was saying being the precarious situation in this country not really knowing if you stay and then you're compulsory staying because of this.
So it's very hard to think that this moment in order to be intimate you need to be vulnerable in order to be vulnerable, you need to be confident in yourself and other people so that trust can get through it.
And that the proximity and the distance tells us that certain moments, yes, that there is this possibility of intimacy that is facilitated by closeness and other ways of experiencing that is not just the visual, but the tactile, the smells, other things.
But at the same time to say that in order for us to really survive and being supported with each other, we need to be that space of opening up in ways that we were not also forced before or faced with.
So for me, it is a moment really to think I think personally intimately in terms of kinship of how to think really about this visiting traumas that come and go, and they really flare during this time.
And in other to-- how do we do this in those relations? Or how do we create a collective form of intimacy as justice for us, especially Black trans people when the cycle is always traumatic? And there can be no form of trust and confidence in someone else if you're always in defense mode because of the cycles in histories of traumas that we've had.
So I think it is a way of thinking there's different levels of other aspects in how we create the systemically so that we can get to intimacy because other things need also to be in place.
Yeah.
MICKY BRADFORD: Yeah, and as you were both speaking things were coming to mind.
I just think so much about the intersections of the houses that we are born to, that we grow up in.
In Dora's poem that you can grow up in this house full of all these familial systems that are designed to protect you, nurture you, and still have your gender be uneligible. And you can also be in this space where you are in the case of what you were offering SA just having this weird moment where folks are talking about a privilege of choosing a house that they want to be in.
And I think what they're really talking about is also just the spaces that we choose to be a part of and I think that for me, I very much wanted to move out of the house that I was in figuratively and literally and be in these homes of political growth, political homes that would grow me, grow my education, grow my skills, and organizing, and movement building,and connecting the things that I was going through personally with the things that people in Selma, Alabama were going through and people in Jackson, Mississippi and people all over the world were going through through a shared language.
And then I just think about the houses that we're trying to build for ourselves in ourselves like the part where you mentioned Oshumare, SA, and that really came to me because of somebody who had to run away from a very Judeo-Christian Baptist background to find a spiritual house that affirmed my gender, affirmed my sexuality, affirmed all of the things that I knew myself to be.
I knew myself to be a goddess, duh, but I needed a place that affirmed that for me. I needed a house that had that structure already built into it and had been built from an ancient foundation that I could trust that I could find myself in.
And so I'm just thinking a lot about the ways in which we run around from this house to that house, trying to build this house, and then we try to go to that house that someone else built. And so much of it is about trying to find intimacy, trying to find safety, trying to find ourselves.
And I think that that probably just sat with me a lot because I was born in Germany in Nuremberg. My father was in the Army at the time and the hospital that I was born in no longer exists it was torn down. And so that made it hard for me to try to figure out updating my birth certificates and things to reflect my gender identity.
But I've always just thought about, wow, I wonder what it would have been like to return to that spot, return to those places that I used to live in. We were also stationed at one point in Seoul, South Korea and the only thing that I ever really remember about that place was that Christmas was different. There were no angels, there were no Jesus, none of that, no Santa Claus. It was just about the presents, and the lights, and I love that as a child obviously. And now I know why I loved it because it had a removal of all of the dogmas and things that were keeping me from being my truest self.
Yeah, just reflecting on that.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you.I think that I'm going to chime in pretend to be one of the panelists.
I think that as I hear the three of you I'm thinking a lot about how intimacy is sometimes foreclosed because of how we understand citizenship and belonging. I think that the citizen in the US is that person that get afforded protection and then as people who-- blackness is an abstract citizenship. Yeah, Black people can be citizens in the US, but they're never going to be protected, especially it's been very obvious and during the pandemic it becomes even more obvious the way in which Black folk are neglected at the level of the medical industrial complex
and thinking about the, Dora, you're talking about how we need trust, but how can we trust if we're always on the defense? I think it's also because the structures of protection that we were taught, they all depend on the nation state and they all depend on advancing these other institutions of power.
And Black trans folk undo all the institutions of power because it's like we're contesting white supremacy, we're contesting heterosexuality, contesting gender, and the ways in which-- I think that for me like when I try to reimagine intimacy is, how can I exist outside of a framework of citizenship and belonging that depends on the nation?
And that's where Black trans migrants come into the picture. I feel that Black trans migrants have really been crucial to how we understand being there for each other because a lot of Black trans migrants say they can't be there for their people in their countries of birth because they have been forced to move. And yet, again, they find ways to connect without physically being present in those countries.
And I see that with the three of you constantly in your art practice, in your academic practice, and in your community organizing practice. And I want to ask you, what do you think is needed for intimacy to be abundant right now and not scarce? What is needed right now for all of us to have access to intimacy and the Radical Black Trans future?
DORA SANTANA: So I'm going to-- so the conversation that I was having between the performance piece and also Spiller was when Spiller says that in order to have intimacy, you would have to be reborn and be able to name yourself and worn off patch.
And it's very hard to have intimacy when we are not entitled to our own bodies. And so I think that when you're talking in terms of when I think about that also being a migrant Black trans person, there is a compulsory touch that does allow me to have this ownership of my own body because then you have to have those invasive paddings and in TSA, it has to really like see in verify your gender, and you have-- or police approach. And also, again, so there is always this incapacity of having intimacy in terms of deciding who talks about, who you're allowed to get closer or to experience that when you have all these other imposed forms of touch that now we can warn off because of the ways that those systems work.
So a future in which thinking about dismantling the prison complex in dismantle I.C.E. and all these other things that impose compulsory touch, and investigation, and incarceration on one's body.I think has a lot to do with the capacity for us to decide who gets closer to our bodies and who is able to touch us to interfere in ways to touch our bodies, to touch our spirit to touch our imagination, to touch our feelings I think.
And so we have a culture in which liberation means the liberation of all these unwanted touches and all these levels of our beings. I don't think we are really seeing that possibility.
You're doing that, but in micro, and different ways that we can. But I would like to think of that in ways that are also tied to this dismantling these other forms so we are able to have those decisions.
MICKY BRADFORD: Yeah, I'll just piggyback off of that. We just can't exist in the ways that we would like to exist because of all of the structures that are set up to disconnect us from our bodies, disconnect us from each other, disconnect us from the land that we're on right, and the history of that land.
And one thing that I think makes these intimacies more possible between Black trans folks in particular are the ways in which we are reclaiming our media.
And for some reason, oh gosh, I'm probably going to regret this, but for some reason I'm thinking about Lovecraft Country and the--
yeah, OK, other folks are nodding so I'll keep going.I'm thinking about the episode with Hippolyta and this extra dimensional Afrolicious being that's appearing before her, before this Black woman who was in the 1950s and saying name yourself, name yourself as a part of whatever culture, name yourself as a part of whatever era, name yourself, take that assertiveness to name, who you are and your legacies, and what you can do.
And think that we are just now beginning to feel like we can name ourselves in Black trans communities, we are just beginning to be able to name who we are, what our legacies are, and what our futures could be if we were allowed to know these intimacies with our bodies that are not intervened on by the state TSA, the DMV, whoever.
[SIGH]
And I think that some of those things are just only possible through our media that we're putting out there. So that's why I'm so excited about House of Pentacles and groups like them, and Black Trans Media in New York City, and Gap Youth Media because they are literally like giving filmmaking and media making tools to Black trans young people and saying this is how you're going to name yourself, you're going to figure it the fuck out on your own. Here's a camera, go do it.
And Black trans folks are killing it. And I think that we also have seen that in the ballroom scene and the ways that Black trans people have really created these
categories to show off actually I can give you cisgender, and I can give you trans, I can give you whatever the fuck you want because I am all these things. And like what? Come on now.
I want to see us take it to the next level just in the same way that Dora was saying we're not there yet, but we there are micro ways in which we are naming these things and taking the tools that we need to show.
SA SMYTHE: I love you all very much.I want to have a talk.No one else is here,it's the four of us.I want to talk about the real possibilities of the question that Alan has asked us because there's nothing, no terms and conditions that apply to us taking linear, which is to say white, which is to say Western cis-heteropatriarchal time seriously and for granted.
So when I'm hearing, Dora, I feel like that's like underneath and in between the words of what Santana and Micky are saying in terms of we're both not there yet, but on whose terms and time?
When I say I want to talk to us it's because I don't-- obviously, it's being recorded so hello, and there's a whole audience.
But I really relish the opportunity to talk to Black trans folk about time and about what our time is and when it is because it's not like a both and sustained contradiction until the situation about we have always been here or we have taken on other names. We have absolutely known ourselves and we continue to do.
And so I struggle to reconcile that fact, that truth with there's more to go. Does that make sense? I really struggle with it in terms of by whose metric? And this obviously is simultaneously honoring, especially to, Micky, I really love this offering too about focusing on Black trans youth and saying the reins are yours. How are we then thinking through that reality with the fact that we have been here before?
And so I want to-- that's something that's I guess like a question back at Alan's question for us. And then I want to do like a nerdy like etymology thing, which again, colonial education. So shout out to Catholic school and Latin.I think actually when we're talking about intimacy and I want to name maybe the different kinds of it because thinking about touch and what Dr. Santana also brought in for us to think about in terms of the way our bodies are surveilled regulated, constricted in the quarantine house, which is the real gag of gender of colonial gender, which itself is redundant and anti-Black.
But I also want to talk about the etymology of intimacy, which is to say it's like what? 17th century, 18th century meaning in Latin before that for a Millennium meaning to be known and to be known formally.
So I ask, again, then when we talk about Black trans intimacy and Black trans future whether or not we can and how then do we actually resist things like linear time, so think about a Black trans future. How do we resist colonial gender formations? So think about Black trans intimacy, and what is possible, and whose body is over here versus over there, and what really is the space in between those things. And I learned that ancestrally I think about that in an embodied way from Costa Rican Bribri father's side of the family, my Jamaican mother's side of the family, and how through refashioning, reshaping, thinking through things like being a fugitive subject in a colonial state of mind, which is not different than how I experience my state of mind and my livelihood today and that of my people or people that I acclaim and claim me back.
I don't know if I'm making sense, I feel like both really passionate and like simultaneously unclear on the shit. But what if our future is not a tomorrow, or a next year, or a right in a Millennium, or in a generation in this reproductive way, but here, and now, and a then?
So then Riley Snorton has talked about the then of our gender. We think about what my other love, Ashon Crawley, has talked about of the aesthetics of otherwise possibility for Black people. And that doesn't have to happen with any forward or backward orientation because as we and continue historically, ancestrally, and in whatever we're trying to call a present of Black trans life, we have actually been here before. We are actually creating intimacy in what Micky is talking about in terms of the art and artistry in what Dora is talking about in terms of kinship structure and formation and the proximity of that and really knowing oneself.
Yeah, those are the things that I wanted to make sure are named alongside of these questions because then the answer is ain't no thing that'll help us actualize Black trans features because they're already actualizing now. We just need to don't keep remembering that towards the resilience that we actually already and ancestrally know.
And so it's really a project of recovery, as opposed to one of future orientation.
ALAN PELEAZ LOPEZ: Thank you so much for gesturing us towards recovery and doing that genealogy of intimacy as to be known. And as you were speaking the first person that came to mind I think Dr. Santana and Micky know her as Guajira La Bella.
Guajira is a Black migrant from Somalia and she talks publicly about the first time she met her transness was in a village tree in Somalia where she would go to the village tree ever since she had a sense of memory to pray for a different body and the ways in which her grandmother was like, oh, yeah, just go to the village tree and you will get hips, you will the village tree will do whatever you need you need if you're in relationship to it.
And I think that when you're re-orienting us to the future as the one that we are living in and recovery I'm seeing a lot of, what are some of the Black Indigenous epistemologies that have been silenced in the archive?
And yeah, so I wonder if Micky or Dr. Santana you want to respond to the proposition.
MICKY BRADFORD: Are you itching for it, Dora?
DORA SANTANA: Do you want me to go? I can't go where I don't--
MICKY BRADFORD: Go ahead. I'm still getting my thoughts together. Go ahead.
DORA SANTANA: I think we all are in this conversation of us. Yeah, no, the passion and
construction as you're doing it because whenever I look at these videos later I'm like that was interesting and I think a lot.
For example, Jake Alexander's work about the simultaneity that we're thinking about temporality, but as or embodiment as simultaneous energies.
And so when I was in my poem talked about the girl that didn't know that she would come back from the future to hold her own hand is, for me, this simultaneity that we care within ourselves and everything we write.
What you wrote, Micky, is for the different kids of different times, the kids that we are and we hold within ourselves and in how we are always doing this, speaking this same language, this underlying understanding that we're talking about simultaneous things and that we are disembodied things that we actually we in ways that are not very linear because we know it through a form of energy formation that is ancestral, but because of that it travels and it leaves I think since you're talking about Lovecraft Country it leaves those kinds of signs as time, you knowI think, clues that we can go back and forth and decode it.
Some people talk-- I think that, for example, the Sankofa of the ironwork of people who
were enslaved where I come from are these kinds of DiVinci codes that people think they'd have to crack, that they knew like when we were here in the future it was like, oh, that's a Sankofa, they just it throughout Latin America.
And here in Brooklyn, for example, it's like, oh, that's the same thing. So I think this way of understanding production of messages of the simultaneity of time is this underlying knowledge that say we are already doing things understanding that there is a simultaneity that there will be read through different forms of time.
And to be a Black trans person in the world is this threat because it's embodied this simultaneity as we live in this time that does that embodies so little. And I think that's why is is such a threat to have our existence as witnessing of how we live within various simultaneous living in a time of linearity or erasing people in Black trans people through murdering by erasing or getting rid of the possibility of witnessing, what does it mean to have simultaneity living in linearity?
So what is it? So why do a murder of Black trans woman? Because she's asking you to understand the simultaneity and the possibilities of a loving intimacy can be beyond these understanding of gender and beyond this understanding patriarchal embodiment of only anger is the only possible feeling that masculinity, for example, can have. You're asking all these things that are things that we are now asking here.
But for people, they think it is linearity, oh,it takes a long time, it doesn't. And I'm here asking, I'm thinking it invited this possibility, why can't you be in the future now with me? Why can't you do that?
In our call for intimacies is this disrupting time and say we are already trying to do this for a long time in this linear time.
Well, let's say I don't know how this is going to sound later either.
SA SMYTHE: Listen, I will never listen back to this, never mind, sorry.
I wanted to say this is what Micky was like that's then that becomes one of the answers, which is also why I'm so glad that Alan has like curated us together because it is a question of art and the Black trans literary or poetic imagination that's specifically the site for possibility, and shifting tenses, and being disruptive. It's the death drop of literature in a way.
And so I really appreciate Micky foregrounding those other kinds of artistic practices too.
MICKY BRADFORD: And I love you, Alan, I love you so much. I really wish we had more time because the way that my brain works, I'm just like, oh, here's this thing from like 10 minutes ago.
But now I'm thinking about how I'm here in 2020. I am trying to see myself as a Black trans femme through this colonial lens and trying to reread myself back onto histories that were before colonization. And I'm just thinking about the reasons why I gravitate so much towards the spirituality of Ifa and why this particular Yoruba spirituality speaks to me.
And I've been thinking a lot about how we understand ourselves to be non-binary and how weird that language is because it's just saying that we're not binary, it's not naming itself as anything other than just I am not of these two things.
And I think a lot about that and I'm just like, what is the other? What is the word we're searching for to actually claim what we are? What is the word we're searching for? What is the divinity that I'm trying to search for? And I keep trying to find it in the parables or the patakis then Ifa, where there's one about Oshun and she's protecting these two children who that-- yes, OK, yes SA. See now you messed up my train of thought.
There's a pataki about Oshun and how she's protecting these two children by the river. And by protecting them she performs this gender affirmative surgery for them to protect them from these hunters.
And a lot of folks will read into that and read into that as a trans affirming parable in Ifa. And other folks will say, no, it's not about transness, it's not about anything like LGBTQ, you're reading too far into it.
I just think that we are just in this place still and I'm going to go back to saying that we are still trying to figure out how to name ourselves, and how to name ourselves both in the past and in the future, and presently in all of these different ways. And the word non-binary is not sufficient enough, the word trans is not sufficient enough,
Black is not even really sufficient enough anymore, I'm just thinking a lot about that.
And that gives me more time to talk about it.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Yeah, I think we may have maybe three more minutes to respond.
SA, seem like you want to say something.
SA SMYTHE: I'm still wanting to say something. Alan, don't enable it.
I do want to say what we may to be true.
We hear that language always fails us, but we also don't have to afford it much like thinking about linear time white, Western hegemonic time.
Look, let me take 30 seconds and say there's this podcast called” The Read”. On that podcast Christos loves to say “Words mean things”. And words mean things, but part of the disruption that Dora Santana was talking about is the disruption of Black trans people. So who says it means who and when? Who says when it means or what it means? I say that too as a Black trans nonbinary person, but for me, the meaning is mine to imbue and to ancestrally hold. And I'm actually actively thinking otherwise to Western colonial gender model where you have male, female, and non-binary somehow in the middle, but rather the marker gesturing us towards the disruptive possibility of Black genders in the wake of a colonial system that has been oppressing us for millennia.
So it's a question. I want to keep--I love that we're having this conversation and again, I really want like more and more Black trans folk to have it because I agree with Micky too that it's not sufficient. It's not sufficient because this world we're in is insufficient, but fundamentally another world is possible and it's actually happening elsewhere, it's happening not in a foreword. Anyway, I'm super down with what Micky is saying.
Thank you.
DORA SANTANA: I think also about the invitations. To come to the future with me now, meaning just to get closer you don't have to name the closeness.
You know. This is the language, to get closer to me is the language that I need.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you.
Oh my gosh, I just wish that we could keep talking for forever. Oh, just hearing the three of you talking about the future now and then like the form of linguistic oppression that we're under, it also brings me back to,I might mispronounce theirname, but Akwaeke Emezi, they wrote Freshwater and PET. I think that in the end of Freshwater, they say something along the lines of the difficulty of knowing that you're not human, but still being contained in a human body.
And I think that that's a lot of the future in the present right of this idea that as somebody who is Black trans. We have an excess of vision and we have an excess understanding of how time geography works, like the parameters of Western society just can hold us and that's why we are targeted. We're not targeted because of gender, we're targeted because of the axis of vision that we have for the world for the future.
And reorienting the way that imagination and envisioning is the target, and then gender, and race, and these other formulations is what we are naming right now. But at the core is like our commitment to be alive and to insist other ways of knowing and to what is becoming like a failed future in a sense.
I don't know if I'm making sense. But it is a 5:14.
Thank you so much, Micky, SA, and Dora for joining us today. I feel like I'm going to be thinking about this conversation for the rest of the day.
And thank you for those of you who are viewing. I hope that y'all were able to witness with us and I can't wait for more collaborations.
Thank you, again, this was the Radical Kinship Series at the Center for Race and Gender. And we'll see you soon. Do y'all want to say anything before we leave?
MICKY BRADFORD: I just want to say thank you, Alan.
DORA SANTANA: Yes, thank you.
SA SMYTHE: Beautiful, thank you.