Creating Spaces of Healing for Black Freedom
Nadijah Robinson, with Amalia M. Duncan-Raphael
It is 2015. It is 2015, and at this moment in time, I can’t help but note that pain and grief are ever-present. We have not yet distilled a ritual for communal healing; we do not yet have this technology. We do not yet have the appropriate technologies to help us maintain our humanity and to protect our lives from those who seek to harm us. I never considered that in 2015 I might be living through a slow genocide.
Right now, a Black person is being killed by police or a vigilante’s racist lethal violence. I can almost be sure it is happening, and if I am wrong I am not far off. Soon, there may be a BREAKING NEWS article showing a young, black-skinned individual’s image, selfie-style or otherwise inappropriate for newsmedia. There might be gruesome video footage released. The body count will push higher. This rhythm of death and grief continues without end in sight, and I know my people are in pain. Every twenty-eight hours a Black person is killed by police officers, security guards, or vigilantes.1 Although this figure applies to American deaths, the experience of lethal anti-Black violence is a globalized experience. There is no place on Earth that does not put into practice the hate of the darkest skinned people. And in the media, we across the world see when the US denies an experimental medication to thousands of West Africans suffering and dying from Ebola and criminalizes them instead. We see when African immigrants in Israel are systematically sterilized without their consent. We learn, though from fewer sources, when the twentieth Black trans woman is killed in the US by August of 2015; this death surpassing the total count of US trans women reported murdered for all of 2014.2 Social media has for many of us become a portal to near-constant death. We are pushed into consecutive and unending periods of mourning by paying witness to the deaths and violence that our communities are subject to.
When Black lives of transgender women are not deemed grievable, this is an added layer of dehumanization that is especially visited upon the bodies of Black trans women and their communities. It is a collective loss when any Black person’s presence and life is taken from this world. It is an injustice when Black trans women live in fear for their lives. As Amalia M. Duncan-Raphael, who co-conceptualized this chapter, puts it:
The moment I decided to come out as a Transgender woman to my parents, I knew they would immediately be concerned about my safety. It wasn’t something I had to heavily Google about, it was always on my Facebook News Feed on a day to day basis. [One’s] life safety based on the colour of their skin or their gender preference isn’t something we should be concerned with. Unfortunately, I live in a world where being a Black Transgender woman puts me at risk. I was also born with Sickle Cell disease, so I knew their worry would be even more intense. I was even worried myself.
I belong to a queer and trans(-masculine) community of primarily Black and Indigenous people and people of colour in Toronto, which has been and continues to be exclusive of trans women and trans feminine people. Many have been trying to address the underlying transmisogyny in our gatherings, friendships, and community practices. Creating and facilitating spaces that centre trans women’s voices, experiences, and presence is one of the ways that I have seen us working towards being accountable to those we have excluded. Acknowledging and uplifting Black trans women’s humanity within queer and trans spaces, developing trust, and sharing in moments of grief and healing together is where I chose to focus my energy through a project called The Mourning Dress.
I myself am a Black queer cis woman, and I have privilege and relative power of my identities in relation to Black trans women. The way that I came to create The Mourning Dress, a performative object and performance in dedication to Black trans women, which featured Amalia M. Duncan-Raphael, was through what I saw as a shared experience of mourning. In the winter of 2014, in the midst of a fog of pain and grief, I felt a strong desire to create a space for healing for Black people. I knew that while Black people generally were collectively mourning for Black people who were being killed and whose murders were subsequently justified in the media, Black trans women and trans women of colour were experiencing a similar pain. Except the collectivity of their mourning was not affirmed and shared on the same scale. While we were all moving through the thickness of grief, some of our dead were deemed less grievable. I knew that we needed to begin a process of healing that gave more than empty platitudes of unity and togetherness. I knew that I personally needed to express the pain, rage, and grief in ways that would help to heal my people and myself, and in ways that would begin to build trust and intertwine the survival of Black cis and trans people.
After being invited by Suzanne Carte at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) to create an art project for Pride 2015 alongside York student organizations, I began trying to find a way to materialize this desire into a space for queer and trans Black people to mourn, centring Black trans women, amidst the self-congratulatory celebration that is Toronto Pride. In February 2015, Toronto’s Sumaya Dalmar, a young Somali trans woman, was killed in Toronto, and the news was spread by her communities through social media. I kept with me this recent murder of Sumaya Dalmar and the collective grief and outrage of her Toronto Somali and queer and trans extended family.
Working with York presented the challenge of working with many stakeholders. As a common aspect of my artistic practice, I conducted interviews to touch base with people involved in the project and make sure that the artistic outcomes would be as relevant as possible to their realities and concerns. I conducted interviews with representatives of York University’s various student and faculty groups that would have a stake in Pride at York and in Toronto more broadly. Knowing that this is a celebration and a series of events that York students primarily create for themselves, and that my presence as an invited artist is that of an outsider coming in to create an art project that would in many ways shape their experience of Pride this year, I wanted to make sure we could find common footing on which to begin. I asked many questions about the interviewees’ perceptions, desires and concerns about Pride and about queer and trans life at York University in general, and ran my initial ideas past them. I got valuable feedback from them, much of it supportive, along with the warning that many people touching on the topic of Black trans women’s deaths are more concerned by their deaths than their quality of life while living. This is true, and while I reflected on this, I came to the understanding that what I wanted to create had nothing to do with morbidly glorifying the deaths of Black trans women, and that I needed to make sure that my project did not convey that sense in the least. Furthermore, I knew that mourning is as much about honouring the dead as is it about allowing the living to process their grief. Prioritizing a process of healing is very much a practice of self and communal care. It was the feeling of collective healing that I wanted to convey and provide through this project.
That healing, to me, required a space to grieve collectively. The mourning dress, a recognizable symbol of mourning, would turn our contingent in the Pride parades and marches into a brief mourning procession, punctuated by paper rose tokens, glitter libations, and a reading of the names of trans women of colour killed in the last year. Creating a rupture in the general tone of Pride, as corporate and branded a celebration it has become, Amalia M. Duncan-Raphael wore the dress and walked in the Trans March with myself and two contingents, of trans people and cis supporters, from York University (see insert, Figures 3 and 4). As the rally came to an end and the crowd of trans people and their cis supporters began to march, I attached the long train onto Amalia, who was already wearing the rest of the mourning dress. The dress, gold and sleeveless with pleats at the waist, spread outward by a tulle petticoat underneath. A black geometric-patterned lace fell over the skirt of the dress, ending a couple of inches below the gold fabric underneath, below Amalia’s knees. I attached the long black train, which tied around Amalia’s waist and unfurled around eight feet behind her, reading at the top, in large gold metallic lettering
GOOD
MOURNING
and, at the end of the train, surrounded by red paper roses, the word
AGAIN
As I spread out the train behind her, taking up more and more space in the crowd, people moved around it. Immediately, people began taking photos and talking to each other in quieter voices. There was an emotional thickness around us, like the frequency of the crowd around us had suddenly shifted. I felt humbled, Amalia felt inspired. The air was still, full, and welling. I felt like crying. This moment extended for the duration of the march.
People began asking Amalia questions and then asking for photos. Behind us, the York students decided among themselves to protect the train, preventing people from stepping on it, and staying behind the dress, allowing Black and trans people to lead the way. Dozens of people would approach to ask questions, to vocally thank us for this presence in the march, and to give wordless gestures of thanks for the dress. We gave out red paper roses to many people who acknowledged Amalia and the dress. One person approached mid-way through the march and gave both Amalia and I a hug, expressing their gratitude for the space the dress took up in an otherwise empty-feeling march. We walked together for a while.
The Trans March in Toronto has a contentious history. Since 2009, it has been independently led and organized by trans community members, with annual attempts in recent years by Pride Toronto Inc. to sabotage and then co-opt it. This particular Trans March had Pride Toronto branding and Pride Toronto volunteers marshalling. The event had the celebratory air of having arrived, and the sense of the event’s belonging to the trans community that I had felt in previous years was not there. Generally, Pride events are overt celebrations, increasingly centring the presence of corporate sponsors, police, and other institutions that otherwise play little to no role in generating well-being in queer and trans communities. The week of festivities centres primarily around the interests and desires of moneyed white cisgender gay men, while marginalizing or tokenizing the presence of Black and Indigenous people and people of colour.3
Amalia M. Duncan-Raphael had the following to say about her participation in the project:
Wearing the dress that Nadijah Robinson designed for the Trans [March] was truly cathartic. I felt like in doing this with her I was raising awareness and bringing some attention to all of the deaths that have taken place so far. It was also something that made me proud, it gave me the courage to keep my head up and also to be strong not only for myself and those who have suffered but also the generations to come. This would be the moment in which I came to terms with who I truly am and realize my full potential. This was a project that created a memory of strength and power for me. I hope it’s something people can see and be encouraged by to respect and stand with us.
Strength and power. In my body of work I often represent sadness and a sense of hopelessness with an edge of fantastical hope and possibility. I use the raw materials of emotional distress and transform them through the alchemical process of artmaking into the more empowering feelings of potential. My work is frequently conceived during moments of intensely felt despondency. What comes to me are simple ideas, as solutions, as ways out of the low place of depression. These ideas are often improbable, fantastical, magical twists on a nonfictional story. If Black people are being terrorized by a constant sense of grief and hopelessness, my mind will propose: “What if we could perform a ritual that would heal us all?” My work then, is to make these improbable images seem tangible and real, like possibilities to consider, because as metaphors they offer more that we can use in real life than as simple fodder for fantasies.
In the context of Pride, an overarchingly bright, colourful, festive celebration, this project’s success lies in its ability to both blend and subvert. In order to contrast the triumphant tone of Pride with a simultaneously complementary visual, the dress, both sombre and celebratory, gracious and flashy, re-inserts what we as struggling communities have been feeling—grief. Black queer and trans people are in the midst of a slow genocide, and we are in desperate need of spaces that affirm this reality and let us feel the depth and weight of our loss reflected in each other. Space for grief, affirming our humanity and the full spectrum of our emotional lives, can be our technology for survival. Creating space for grief can be a new ritual we practise with each other for the purpose of healing.