![]() Well, you already wrote it: "taking care of myself is not an act of self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and this is an act of political war" (1988). They help me to put limits, mainly on white and cis fragility, to take care of my energy and my resources. They clean my way they provide transparency when the clouds of white / mestizo / cis morality try to make me feel guilty, responsible or insufficient for not responding from the canons of the policies of the respectability of the middle class. They are part of my daily healing ceremonies, when talking to nature, the ancestors, the orishas, asking them for guidance and protection. They helped me to reflect joyfully on the queer and trans paths of our Orishas like Yemayá Olokun enjoying the pleasure of fully existing while dancing and moving my fat-black-hairy-trans body to the beat of the Afro-Caribbean rhythms. Young Afrotransfeminist intellectuals and academics are emphasizing black genres as queer, as trans (Gossett, 2016 Snorton, 2017 Ellison, 2017). bell hooks argued that given “the persistent masculinization of black women, we should all be understood as queer and trans” and Afro-Brazilian teacher Dora Santana advocated more practice of “black trans-cis-terhood” (Tinsley, p.33). Generic meanings and uses were imposed on them according to the interests of the slavers. Hortense Spillers (1987) explained how during slavery black bodies became a territory of cultural and political manipulation. A fundamental part of exercising this muscle consisted of expanding the political meaning of the joint: survival-eroticism-spirituality for those who transcend the gender binary.Īfro-diasporic thinkers have shown us how gender is a colonialist fantasy. They are like dandelions: resilient, easy to find, difficult to remove, created by our ancestors for us. These and other non-western practices are part of submerged black queer epistemologies (Tinsley, 2018) that we are spinning diasporically. I perceived that these categories are deeply interwoven: survival-eroticism-spirituality, forming a powerful articulation, that they are an example of anti-colonial resistance technologies and they escape from Western logic (Christian, 1987) that is, from binary / cis / heterosexual logic / white. Your reflections on the political value of survival, eroticism and spirituality helped me develop a muscle of survival strategies that are always being exercised and renewed in a genocidal anti-black and anti-trans liminal space such as this border. Imagine that!įrom that moment on, I have read your work periodically, as a political and emotional survival drive, mainly in my transition processes, from a Cuban “citizen” to a migrant student on the southeast Mexican border from woman to queer person to non-binary transmasculine boy the transits between activism and the academy, continually negotiating my presence in the spaces of feminist activism in Mexico and in the Chiapas academy, which maintains the intact colonial essence of the western academy. While my coworkers discussed in the department meetings strategies for students to commit to a political project that for me is a dictatorship, I read Zami. At that time, I worked in the Department of Marxism and History at the Agrarian University of Havana, in Mayabeque. I remember reading some articles more than three times, in order to understand each sentence well. ![]() English did not stop me: I picked up an old dictionary and read both books very patiently. A queer Latina student from the Latin American School of Medicine lent me Sister Outsider and Zami more than ten years ago in Havana. I would love to tell you how I got to know your work. Maferefum for you, your ancestors, and Yemayá every day. ![]() Above all, I am the son of Olukun and listen to the waves of Yemayá every day, despite living in a valley surrounded by mountains. I am a migrant, Afro-Cuban non-binary trans-masculine boy, living very close to the Southern Border of Mexico. Right now, a pandemic is killing Black communities in the United States, and a similar fate can be seen for many of the Black and indigenous peoples in America. I am writing you from an Afro-dystopian period. ![]() The Center for the Humanities Distributaries Audre Lorde Now: Letter to Audre Lorde from the Future July 10, 2020
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