Every day, trans femmes are told that we are unnatural. That we don’t belong in this world. Governments and people target us to tear down our bodies and spirits, to remove us from this world.
What we know is that trans femmes are nature itself. We have always been here, whether we’ve called ourselves trans or not. We’ve gone by many names and have played sacred roles in our communities across the world and throughout time. We are everyday heroes because we are still here. We are stewarding the movements that transform our world. Our resilience, imagination, love, and compassion is that of the natural world. We are in the trees, the wind, the stars.
Our calling to the divine, otherworldly, and the liminal spaces we live in informed how we embarked on our respective journeys for this project. How do we give a face, a name, a word to the multitudes that enhance our majestic power and beauty as trans Black, indigenous, and people of color around the world?
We understood that in their unbordered livingness, our ancestors, animal guides, spirits, god(s) or source all carry various geographies, meaning, and knowledge, gracefully loving us in our totality through whispers, light pushes, and witnessing.
This set a sparkling spiral of creative energy to flow between and through us. Our final works demonstrate our efforts to bridge the ancient, present, and future across time and space to reflect what we think is needed to support our collective imagining of another, more just and tender world.
Our intention was to capture that liminal radiance and weave it into an eternal mosaic of intersectional trans, queer, Black, and indigenous resilience. We forcefully maintain that divine love is our birthright. We know that there is so much violence that pulls us from feeling fully loved and held, and so as an artist and a writer we felt compelled to create a clear cosmic pathway that links us to our greatest strength and source of our resistance: unyielding faith in our grandeur, in our beauty, in our joy.
We offer a poem and an art piece to help provide a sanctuary, a place to sit, to recognize that we are loved by our ancestors, held by divinity, and forevermore eternal. In commemoration of the 2019 Trans Day of Remembrance and Resilience, we honor how that love sustains us in the here and now, especially as the human kin we encounter slowly catch up and respond to our everyday call for what it would mean to fully love us, too.
We hope that these bridges help us meet the long line of ancestors, the stars, the present living, and future generations in one place full of enduring love, lasting protection, and otherwise community.
At first, we came up with the idea to do something that connected the trans people that came before us and the free trans people we imagined existing in the future. It became important to us both to honor the path we were on, one that had been paved with so much of our history. Both of our processes took new shape as we began.
As the writing process began, the project as a whole became harder to do — not because of the subject, but because of the societal differences happening so violently. It was so hard to imagine a world where we’ve won, given all the death we’ve come to know for his year. But Kemi’s guidance led Vita to the idea of exploring our present in relation to how far we’ve come.
So Vita’s piece became less about how we’ve “won,” but more about how we’re winning, and honoring what it took to make it here.
As Kah’s visual piece developed, it became more about the adventure and freedom and creativity that is already a part of being trans.
Our work has the feeling of “outside the box” dreaming that’s manifested itself in our present day, not forsaking the past as forgotten, but honoring it as tribute to the magick we’ve created.
On their collaboration, the artist and poet wrote: As trans people of color, we rarely get a moment to play. To laugh. To relax. To enjoy ourselves and each other. We rarely are given relief from the constant possibility of assault. The news that swallows us all year round rings of Black trans femmes being murdered gruesomely. In our process together, we wanted to center joy: the joy of sisterhood, of relationships among trans people, and of love. Our art speaks to the deep love that carries on lineages of trans brilliance, whether our bodies are living or dead.
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Thank you for sharing the message of social justice through art!
Thank you for sharing the message of social justice through art!
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