Four generations of Black Trans women (child, young adult, adult, & elder) sit together on the front steps of a burgundy home. Strong, yellow sunlight rakes in from the left side of the image illuminating the scene. Furthest left the young adult sits comfortable and reclined with one leg raised, gazing over at the pairing of older women in the center. Here, the elder sits with the adult women between her legs, bent forward as she braids her hair, her own graying locs piled into a bun on her head. While on the right of them the young child sits, legs crossed peering over the legs of the central women with excited curiosity.
We Have Never Asked Permission
By Glori Tuitt with poetry by Benji Hart
As artists — one of us a painter, the other a poet — our visions for trans liberation were united by our desire to center Blackness, and the challenge to imagine tangibly what a world post-incarceration might look, feel, taste like.
While Benji entered the project struck by and hoping to pay homage to the life of Layleen Cubilette-Polanco Xtravaganza — an Afro-Latina trans woman who died inside Rikers Island prison in June of 2019 — Glori was particularly interested in honoring Black, trans elders. She hoped to imagine aging-while-trans not as an anomaly but a right, and to capture the tension between Black trans intimacy and public defiance.
With these areas of interest in mind, we began our first collaborative discussion looking for shared imagery around which we could build our respective pieces. What we landed on was doing hair, a site that captured the themes of Black intimacy, joy, and labor outside of capitalism, and which Glori envisioned as representing multiple generations of Black, trans, femme, and gender nonconforming bodies.
Even as Benji’s poem went through intense edits — ultimately landing as a revised version of the various bits of legislation ostensibly passed in Layleen’s name by the New York City Council—the image of Black trans elders having their hair braided/retwisted by chosen community members remained a central image of Black trans life beyond both interpersonal violence and prisons.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. By downloading this art you agree the terms of this license.About the Artist:
Glori Tuitt is a New York City based painter/illustrator and Black woman of trans experience. A graduate from Purchase College with a B.F.A in Painting+Drawing, her work explores the intersections of race, religion and pop culture in relation to the identifying of self. Mining the collective history of queer representation, she sees herself as intermediary and visual translator assembling new hybrid archetypes and narratives, ultimately seeking to both humanize and deify trans existence.
@glorifice_ | glorituitt.com
Layleen’s Bill (With Revisions)
By Benji Hart with art by Glori Tuitt.
As artists — one of us a painter, the other a poet — our visions for trans liberation were united by our desire to center Blackness, and the challenge to imagine tangibly what a world post-incarceration might look, feel, taste like.
While Benji entered the project struck by and hoping to pay homage to the life of Layleen Cubilette-Polanco Xtravaganza — an Afro-Latina trans woman who died inside Rikers Island prison in June of 2019 — Glori was particularly interested in honoring Black, trans elders. She hoped to imagine aging-while-trans not as an anomaly but a right, and to capture the tension between Black trans intimacy and public defiance.
With these areas of interest in mind, we began our first collaborative discussion looking for shared imagery around which we could build our respective pieces. What we landed on was doing hair, a site the captured the themes of Black intimacy, joy, and labor outside of capitalism, and which Glori envisioned as representing multiple generations of Black, trans, femme, and gender nonconforming bodies.
Even as Benji’s poem went through intense edits — ultimately landing as a revised version of the various bits of legislation ostensibly passed in Layleen’s name by the New York City Council—the image of Black trans elders having their hair braided/retwisted by chosen community members remained a central image of Black trans life beyond both interpersonal violence and prisons.
for Layleen Cubilette-Polanco Xtravaganza
The New York City Council will pass a package of legislation,
expanding services for transgender, gender-nonconforming,
non-binary, and intersex inmates will turn out its pockets,
never sign another ransom note
All officers with trans inmates in their custody will undergo
a competency training will have their badge numbers
etched off with diamond-tipped acrylics, aquamarine
New beds will be added to the transgender housing unit
beds of wildflowers will erupt from lots that were not
vacant, just holding their breath
Counselors will be made available to all trans inmates we
are each our sister’s counsel
The Board of Correction will convene a task force will
be tasked with something useful, like beekeeping, or collecting
rainwater
Sex workers will have their cases diverted to Human Sex
Trafficking Intervention Court will spray paint the words
“we are the intervention” on the courthouse rubble
The Rikers Island compound will be replaced by a series of
smaller, borough-based facilities will slip into the rising
Atlantic, the ribs of our dead prepared to cage it
Trans elders will be held in solitary confinement for their
own safety will have their charcoal locs retwisted in
chosen hands
This legislation will take effect in the summer of 2020
we have never asked permission to sing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. By downloading this art you agree the terms of this license.About the Poet:
Benji Hart is an author, artist, and educator from Amherst, MA, living in Chicago. The writer behind the blog Radical Faggot, their commentary has been published at Teen Vogue, Them, The Advocate, and others. Their solo performance piece Dancer As Insurgent, which explores voguing as a practice of Black queer resistance, was featured at CA2M (Madrid), and the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (Chicago). Their current project, World After This One, examining the myriad ways Black art forms rely on the materials of the present to construct liberated futures, premiered at BRIC (New York), and is still in progress. They have held residencies with the Rauschenberg Foundation, the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, the Amsterdam University of the Arts, and are the recipient of the 3Arts Award in the Teaching Arts.
@radfagg | benjihart.com
A rectangular image created with ink line work and digitally colored. It holds a glimpse into a close parallel reality. We’re invited into a pond with growing water lilies by a giant tree elder, who is a transfeminine deity. She holds the hand of a new transfeminine goddexx who is walking into the pond, still in human form. Her hair is a glowing green like the lilies and speak of the type of goddess she is becoming. Awaiting in the water is a giant transmasculine father with the nonbinary child he gave birth to a year ago. The child is undefined by gender and form as the baby also has tentacles that wrap lovingly around their holy father. It’s sunset on this beautiful pond and a warm light fills the space basking everyone’s brown skin with a joyful glow.
I am a New Spirit Born from a Change in Melody
By Malachi Lily with poetry by Mia S. Willis.
I am convinced it can only be divine orchestration that brought Mia Willis (they/them) and I together as collaborators for Forward Together’s Trans Day of Resilience project. An experience of our own design, as Mia and I both recognize our holiness in our ability to shape ourselves and our realities.
As trans/nonbinary people, we create ourselves along with our art and poetry. We are the divine. Our love of mythology, passion for poetry and imagery, and a desire to push the boundaries of what it means to exist as a resilient trans/nonbinary person made us want to craft new mythologies for the black, trans experience. Rewrite our cosmic birth.
We did this together through sharing resources, and then poetry, which I used to create the imagery for this project. Though we aspire to do more in-depth narrative works in the future, what we created was deeply personal. We were influenced by the other, but also inspired by ourselves and our own tools of resilience through shapeshifting forms, manipulation of time, and collectivity in our voice.
For the execution of the final works, I allowed myself to imagine and receive visions of the trans/nonbinary deities that wanted to be present in these pieces. I gave myself some boundaries as I can get joyfully lost in the realm of possibilities. I wanted to represent a transfeminine elder, a transmasculine parent, a nonbinary child who transcends even the boundries of humankind, and a new god reflected in a transwoman who has not yet transcended her human form.
As I sketched and played, everything became luscious. The roundness of bodies, the swirling of bark, the curling of tentacles, and the softness of sunsets and leaves all create a world of trans/nonbinary resilience that is warm, expansive, and welcoming to all forms of divinity in all beings. I truly believe we cannot carry on if we do not prioritize our rest, our joy, and our unconditional love for ourselves.
The lines that I used from Mia’s poetry are “I am a completely new spirit born from a change in melody,” and “I float in a flesh that define taxonomy, erases binaries.” This reality is a melody, and we are clear notes that redirect the very flow of the song like water. This is the foundational image for my concept. Melody as a biodiverse ecosystem, one we will thrive in. This ecosystem is the place of our birth and its lushness gives us room to birth new forms. Now born, we declare who we are. We are boundless and floating. Like a newly emerged dragonfly, we delight in our existence, the gentleness of plants, and the glisten of our reflection in the water’s surface.
My hope is that people see themselves in these pieces, both in my ink that flows and grows, and in my cut paper piece that further highlights the intricacies of our beauty. Strength in our delicate tenderness. That’s the resilience I crave. One that allows us to be soft and supple and sprouting. May you see yourself and know your divinity. Know you are loved.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. By downloading this art you agree the terms of this license.About the Artist:
Malachi Lily is a Philly-based, shapeshifting, genderfluid, black poet, artist, curator, and moth. They connect to the collective unconscious via energy work, Active Imagination, mysticism, myth, magick, folklore, and fairy tales. This channeling often takes the form of poetry, illustration, curation, and the aesthetic arts. Malachi is a liminal being of race, gender, artistic practice, and existence reclaiming the spiritual body of black and brown people. Their work offers methods to break these individual barriers and reveals the symbols, archetypes, emotions, and lessons that exist in everyone as a collective consciousness to support in transformation and the remembrance of who we are.
@theholyhawkmoth
STRATIGRAPHY.
By Mia S. Willis with art by Malachi Lily.
In our initial attempts at conceptualizing trans liberation and resilience, my collaborative partner Malachi Lily (they/them) and I were stymied by the fundamental truth that the birth of trans folks (and particularly Black trans folks) defies historicization or canonization because of global colonialism and white supremacy. As a result, I, having been educated as a Classical archaeologist (an admittedly colonial subject area), suggested we approach the origination of Black transcestry as a cultural phenomenon traceable across time and space through material and symbolic remains. This lens allowed for both the poetic and visual construction of an archaized nonlinear trans mythology underpinned by Black collective memory and placemaking.
The poem’s title and formatting speak directly to this intention, as the former is a geological term used to describe the study of rock layers (strata) and layering (stratification) while the latter is modeled after the soil profile maps my team sketched while excavating the temple complex of Apollo Ietros on St. Kirik Island in Sozopol, Bulgaria.
It was of supreme importance to me that the Black word be permitted to address its body in “STRATIGRAPHY.” This is why I turned to African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a metaphorical bridge between the Black trans body and its communal experience. Too often, transness is hard lined by Black folks as rhetoric exclusive to and in the service of the white elite. This poem’s juxtaposition of objective storytelling and familiar call-and-response seeks to clarify that, to paraphrase Dominique Christina, Black words make Black worlds in the form of self-actualizing Black trans folks.
Black transness is the marriage of two embodied identities, both of which possess their own lexical subversions of the dominant culture. African American Vernacular English, then, is a tool of resilience when employed by a Black trans person; the gender neutrality of the “nigga” pronoun is, to me, evidence of the potential for Black trans liberation through the recontextualization of speech artifacts. As such, “STRATIGRAPHY.” is meant to highlight the ritual uses of the Black word (“in the beginning, there was the word. and that word was black.”) and affirm the power of that ritual to bring about a new liberated existence for Black trans bodies (“new dances for all the dust.”).
for the THEM!HOOD.
“Stratigraphy – The study of the layers (strata) of sediments, soils, and material culture at an archaeological site[.]”
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V. MODERN LAYER
and each time the boi diespour one out for ‘em.
the black word is left to the air againcrywhole hailstorms.
new kindling in every mouth /love harderthan thunder.
new dances for all the dust.all the living done together.
IV. 2013 – 2017
their fingertips cartographers of the landplay the dozens with the devil.
meet red clay in the jaw /flame deathmans be for everybody.
slate lining the ribcage /funny box run right over.
anoint altars with honest touch.
III. 2006 – 2012
throat a cavern of infinitywaterto a whale.
hair of pitch-pine smokenappy as a briar patch.
and hands content with emptinessan appetitefor every breath.
the black word became the boiayyyyyye.
II. 1995 – 2005
and so this black word spoke itself anew.aw shit.
declared itself a body / a beating fire /go off, nigga.
a burning heart /yo, that’s lit.
a brown skin etiology.
I. 1994
in the beginning there was the word.oh word?
and that word was black.ayyyyyye.
but this primordial black lacked a glyph;
a phoneme with no flesh equivalent.damn, that’s cold.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. By downloading this art you agree the terms of this license.About the Poet:
Mia S. Willis is a Black performance poet from Charlotte, North Carolina. Their work has been featured by or is forthcoming in Under the Belly of the Beast (Dissonance Press), FreezeRay, Curating Alexandria, WORDPEACE, Peculiar, Foothill, Button Poetry, and Slamfind. Mia’s poem “hecatomb.” won the 2018 Foothill Editors’ Prize, earning nominations for a Pushcart Prize and for inclusion in Best New Poets. In 2019, Mia has been named the first two-time Capturing Fire Slam Champion, a Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry, the Young Artist Fellow at Chashama’s ChaNorth residency, and a performing artist on RADAR Productions’ Sister Spit 2020 Tour. Their debut poetry collection, monster house., was the 2018 winner of the Cave Canem Foundation’s Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize and is available with Jai-Alai Books.
@poetinthehat
Digital illustration of three trans women of color against a pink background, with text “Everyday Heros” at the top. A Black trans woman in a wheelchair proudly holds a waving transgender flag, a Muslim trans woman of color in a gold hijab holds up a rose, and a Black woman holds up a sign that says: “Trans Liberation”. They are surrounded by mountains, flowers, stars, and a river flowing into a wave.
Everyday Heroes
By Shea Coco with poetry by xoài phạm.
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.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. By downloading this art you agree the terms of this license.About the Artist:
Shea Coco is a non-binary Chicanx artist. They were born and raised in Southern California. Their main focus is in Graphic Design and Illustration. Through the years they have made many different pieces and promotional art for different organizations and events. They also run and own an art magazine that helps to promote POC artists from the barrios around the world. As a hobby, they are also an avid collector of Vinyl records. From time to time, they have DJ’d many events for LGBTQ folks in the L.A. area.
@misssheacoco
Girls
By xoài phạm with art by Shea Coco.
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.
Remember when she drifted along the surface
of the ocean, hair like kelp
reflecting the surface of the sun.
The whales extending their foreheads
to graze her shoulder.
Her gaze rests on the gray cloud miles away, inching
towards her Sāmoa. A few moments later,
the sky opens with a hot downpour.
She submerges her brown head
into the Pacific, becomes ocean.
Gives baby whales wet kisses.
Peels back layers of coastline
to reveal the volcanic rock
that whispers a secret:
I'm not going anywhere.
*
She is alive. Lights flash bright red.
Then blue. What did she know
about saving lives? She was someone's
baby girl, pumpkin, angel,
love dumpling, little one.
Here she is on Atlantic Ave.,
at the house with the fig tree
that reminds her of Cameroon. The police car
that she hijacked sits idly outside,
the sirens no longer work.
She packs her powder pink duffel
with playing cards, rope, a teddy bear
named Raven, sour patch kids,
castor oil, and a red canvas notebook.
She walks past the painting on the wall
of a full-circle rainbow glittering
around a white sun. Outside the door,
is a family of maybe five hundred.
Their bellies so accustomed
to the pain of uncontrollable laughter.
*
The best part about being a trans girl
is keeping the world’s secret in your chest.
We are shards of seaglass.
You see yourself in us:
Big and wide. Spines
long enough to play with purple clouds.
In the beginning there was us.
In the end, here we are. Here I am,
made of the same stuff
as my grandmother. And her grandmother.
And the mushrooms that sprouted before her.
Lift your head, close your eyes,
do you hear yourself
breathing?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. By downloading this art you agree the terms of this license.About the Poet:
xoài phạm is a Vietnamese trans person who has a complicated relationship with womanhood. She comes from a long legacy of warriors, healers, fishers, and swimmers. Her family arrived in California as refugees after the U.S. destroyed Southeast Asian land and communities. She is a writer, thinker, and collaborative educator on issues of gender, imperialism, sex work, and intimacy. Above all, she enjoys eating fruits on the beach with her loved ones.
@xoai.pham| xoai.co
Digital illustration of a large Black trans mother deity tenderly consoling a trans youth. The deity has a halo and is wearing a hooded purple cloak with patterns of animals, plants, insects, totems and magic swirls. Her large blue hands support a glowing pink circle of healing light around the head of the trans youth. The youth has their chin raised and their eyes closed, and wears a blouse and single hoop earring. Yellow text says “Divine Love Is Our Birthright” against a starry black background.
Divine Love Is Our Birthright
By féi hernandez with poetry by SA Smythe.
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.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. By downloading this art you agree the terms of this license.About the Artist:
féi hernandez ( b. 1993 Chihuahua, México) is a trans, Inglewood-raised, formerly undocumented immigrant author of the full-length poetry collection Hood Criatura (Sundress Publications 2020). They are a 2022 Tin House Scholar and a 2021 Define American fellow. féi is currently the Board President of Gender Justice Los Angeles organizing, outreaching, and advocating for the empowerment and liberation of Trans Gender Non-Conforming BIPOC. féi is the founder of The House of Etéreo and within it, Spirit School for the Divinely Gifted, a spiritual learning space for TGNC BIPOC spiritual practitioners developing their healing abilities.
@fei.hernandez | feihernandez.com
An Offering
By SA Smythe with art by Féi Hernandez.
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.
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 a hashtagged 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 silenced 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’s no water for miles, and soon all you can say is:
Well, we should’ve listened for the thunder.
Still, I was not the first to dream another world,
To crave 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.
Lithe 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 when them did hush up the clap, thief the color.
I divine myself as Ochumaré, 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 when we may name ourselves whole, if not holy,
And stop eulogizing the project of living long enough to see
That it has yet to come, and so can never die.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. By downloading this art you agree the terms of this license.About the Poet:
SA Smythe is a Black trans nonbinary writer currently living on Tongva land, constantly scheming up new ways to get free. They are a professor of Black European studies and Black trans poetics at UCLA. As a translator, editor, and performance collaborator, SA has worked with/in six languages and organized in Black queer feminist & trans abolitionist writing collectives across various geographies. They are currently completing a book about Black belonging, Black diaspora and Italian postcolonial literature called Where Blackness Meets the Sea: On Crisis, Culture, and the Black Mediterranean as well as their first full poetry collection, after hiraeth, titled proclivity, which is about a familial history of Black migration (between Britain, Costa Rica, and Jamaica), trans nonbinary embodiment, and emancipation.
@essaysmythe | essaysmythe.com
Cut paper and collage poster with a yellow and orange background and large text that reads: “trans is freedom, is adventure, is endless!” Two people are in a small sailboat on the water, and one of them looks into the distance through a telescope. We see the head and shoulders of a large figure in the clouds, wearing a baseball cap with a Puerto Rican flag, and looking down at the sailboat. Brightly colored clouds, a sun, and a golden comet surround them.
Endless
By Kah Yangni with poetry by Vita E.
Download below or buy this poster here
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.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. By downloading this art you agree the terms of this license.About the Artist:
Kah Yangni is a screenprinter, illustrator, and muralist living in Philadelphia. They make heartfelt art about justice, queerness, and joy. Kah’s artistic mission is to heal themself and others by making art that focuses on radical optimism, and the chance we have to make the world a better place.
@kahyangni | kahyangni.com
A Dream Come True
By Vita E. with art by Kah Yanghi.
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.
We are the wildest dreams of our Transcestors come to life.
The beating of ancient drum, now transformed to the snap of fingers,
Clap of hand, spit of sickening syllables.
The full weight of bodies, spinning magick into the air,
Appearing weightless on descent, landing fiercely without effort.
Vibrant hair, bald heads, boss braids, lit wigs,
Tits out, clit, click, and dick out-hedonistic liberation.
Authenticity sourced from bloodlines of deities,
Brown skin perpetually creating euphoria,
Trans truth, Afro-tenacity.
Revolt beating in pulse with the heartbeats of Black Trans Elders,
Black Trans Futures learning and evolving the pace,
While we, the present, give and receive the lessons as we learn them.
We are the wildest dreams of our Trancestors come to life.
Warriors who refuse to let silence or submission be our melody.
We prove that shit with our feet, our canes, our wheels, our signs and our voices,
Taking the streets before ignorance finishes its evening commute.
Rattling the earth, cracking the sky in two.
Streets know Black Trans rage,
Stronger than they know the red of our blood,
Though the streets still know it well.
Now the world knows history books with our names actually in them,
Immortalized in Black ink, leaving the red behind.
Like no more being error, more like icon.
More Marsha P. to Andy Warhol,
Jennicet to Obama’s opportunism,
Miss Major to the whole country,
And your most recent Emmy winning Netflix search.
We are the wildest dreams of our Transcestors come to life.
We love ourselves out loud, we love each other.
I’ve shaken the hand of a child,
Clad in melanin, love, truth of identity and expression,
And “Black Trans Lives Matter” patched on their back.
The smiles of who no longer search for love in words kept in shadow,
Now the sunlight that makes shades of earth, stone, sand, and root grow.
Makes our love pop like our skin, like our hearts.
That love, more viral than any campaign against us.
Our agency over our minds and bodies as fluid as the waves inside us,
Sorcery beyond the range of closed minds,
Conjuring outside the realms of hate and death.
We are the wildest dreams of our Trancestors come to life.
Once deemed more target than human,
Now clapping back at presidential proportions.
Every election will know that “president” cannot exist without the T.
Neither can ancesTry, wiTchery, resisTance,
Even culTure itself owes us for the bite in its articulation.
We carry our ratchet with our Black feminist theory and unmatched aesthetic.
Holding our trauma and our dreams as armor.
Serpentine shade hand in hand with steel spirit as we Transform the world.
They have been reminded of the ways we Transcend,
Transporting between the human, and the divine.
Living beyond the lies, into our power, into our magick.
annoinTed.
immorTal.
eTernal.
We are the wildest dreams of our Trancestors come to life.
And our dreams are wilder because of it.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. By downloading this art you agree the terms of this license.About the Poet:
Originally from Cleveland, OH, Vita E. has been surrounded by the power of art since childhood. From then on, they made a pledge that they would use the art that inspired them to influence thought, change, and freedom to exist without apology. This pledge would lead to her life as a percussionist, educator, poet, vocalist, and activist. Vita’s passion as a Black Trans Femme artist has led to many milestones. She’s recently finished a summer-long role as percussionist, mentor, and vocalist for the Creede Repertory Theatre and drummer for the full-stage debut of the hip-hop musical Once Upon a Rhyme. Their response track to Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout” was included in Source Magazine’s “10 Songs Soundtracking the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.”
@vitae19892015
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