finding safety

When my friend Frank, a member of the organizing team of this year’s Halifax Dyke and Trans Rally, hit up my DMs to ask if I would be interested in speaking at the Rally, I scoffed and wrote, Lol absolutely fucking not.

Then I deleted the message, though they’d likely already seen it, and instead I wrote, I’m so honoured that you asked. What would that entail? The initial fuck no came because public speaking, for me, requires the type of vulnerability that I had no desire to practice at that moment. And because, honestly speaking, I wasn’t sure that I qualified as a dyke. So I asked my friends, Am I a dyke? Am I dyke-y enough to have anything of value to say at the Rally?  

Reader, I want to explain why such a basic question is loaded for me.

Reason One: despite my penchant for man-repelling aesthetics, I tend to pass as straight; while this ‘straight passing’ has a lot more to do with other people’s judgements and perceptions, it still colours the way I move in the world in comparison to my more visibly queer, trans, and gender non-conforming counterparts. It affords me some measure of safety in Heteroland and a measure of invisibility in Queerland. I am a cis-gender femme-presenting woman who detests categories but must categorize myself I am to be honest. So perhaps it is in part because of this that my queerness has never quite been the most visible or significant aspect of my identity. For me, my queerness is not dissimilar to my birthmarks; you’d have to be close enough to me to see them—or you’d have to read my work, which, again, is not dissimilar to seeing some of the most intimate parts of me. But, back to the question, Am I a dyke? Am I dyke-y enough? While the term is, contemporarily, generally used in neutral reference to lesbians and queer femmes, its origins are grim: a homophobic slur against lesbians, masculine-of-centre, and androgynous women. As with all words, meanings change depending on the tongue that speaks them; words are malleable, and from the mouth of a homophobe “dyke” is still an insult. As with many words, “dyke” has, according to Susan Krantz, been re-appropriated as “a positive signifier to be used within the community to signify toughness and assertiveness or simply as a generic term for all lesbians.” So, I suppose, by virtue of being a queer woman, I am a dyke, and therein lies the rub. This brings us to Reason Two: Fear and Shame. I hope there is a version of me in the future who reads this essay and feels only tenderness and understanding for the version of myself that is preoccupied with Fear and Shame about the fact of my queerness. Let us begin with the Shame. For the last few years, much of my fiction and nonfiction writing and, more recently, filmmaking, has centred the theme of reconciling queerness and faith. “Queerness and faith” have been a workable oversimplification of the heart of the matter: overcoming the Shame that I’ve come to internalize around my queerness. This Shame is a problem; it relentlessly attempts to convince me that I must put up with casual carelessness (sometimes cruelty) because I deserve it on account of my queerness—which renders me a fundamentally bad person. Now let us introduce Fear: I am afraid the more I speak on my experiences as a queer person, the more I welcome a “deserved” mistreatment. Here, my Fear coincides with my Shame to nurture this emotional consequence. Reader, listen, I know this may seem like a simple case of internalized shit. I know, but where I’m from, there are real harsh consequences to being out. Real harsh. I no longer live where I’m from, I live in a different place, yet, in this place, my blackness is a strike against me; it just seems like a tad too much, to be black, queer, and a woman in a racist, queerphobic, and sexist place. My homegirl Portia calls it the “Queer African Struggle Bus,” as in “Do I really want to hop on this queer African struggle bus? In this political climate?” I am afraid, so I shirk the labels. I am afraid, so I nurse the fantasy that I will meet and fall for a cis/het Nigerian man who will marry me, and I will move back home, and I will be safe. I am afraid that the fascism will rise and rise and eat us all up. I won’t be able to hide, because I’ve already named myself as Other (or, more accurately, I’ve already been named as Other). I suppose that’s the point, having nowhere to hide, standing proud in the truth of one’s shape in the world. But, I’m not looking for Pride; I’m looking for a more honest opposite to Shame—an opposite of Loneliness, of Fear. I’m looking for safety.  

A few weeks after the Dyke and Trans Rally, I went home for a month.

Home is a place where the ability to parse out one’s identity—to negotiate and ponder the nuances of queer visibility—seems like a luxury that few can afford. I was back in the proverbial closet, but that was the least of my worries (a privilege of being cis and straight passing). My queer sexuality lay dormant, but the world kept turning. My social media feed became inundated by two geographically distinct nightmares: the increasing rates of raging fires in the Amazon rainforest and the violent wave of xenophobic attacks against immigrants in South Africa. Surely many other catastrophes were occurring simultaneously, but these are the two that crowded my screens, and it felt impossible to ignore or carry on unchanged or unbothered. Because I want safety, care, justice, peace, and just a general end to oppression for myself as a black, queer, African immigrant, and because I recognize myself to be no better or worse than anyone else (questionable, I’m likely worse than many), I must want the same for others.

Because I want safety, care, justice, peace, and just a general end to oppression for myself as a black, queer, African immigrant, and because I recognize myself to be no better or worse than anyone else […] I must want the same for others.

My politics are not separate from but rooted in my queerness. Before I dared to name my desires or even knew that there existed such a name that I could touch and to which I could belong, I read, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality [. . .] whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” I learned to situate myself in that mutuality, to implicate myself. “My self” includes my queerness. It feels reckless to desire so much from the world, to want a better world. I want to be free, I want others to be free. The personal is political, and vice versa. So many wants, such audacity. And yet, here I am writing this essay, confessing that I want it all. And so, with instructions from Frank to imagine queer futures, I wrote this for the Dyke and Trans Rally:  

Halifax Dyke and Trans Rally, July 28, 2019. Halifax, Nova Scotia.

I imagine a future in which this rally is a site for celebration, for joy. I want to start with an excerpt from the Combahee River Collective Statement, a queer black feminist organization that was active in Boston, Massachusetts from 1974 to 1980.

This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity. [. . .] We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. [. . .] If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.

Within that lens, queerness, for me, is very much about desire. A desire for safety when I chose to love, fuck, and build community with other queer people. It is also, equally, a desire for equity. Owing to the space that I occupy in the world, which is that I am a non-disabled person, somewhat educated, documented immigrant/settler. Also owing to the privilege of relative safety I acquired by immigrating here—a safety that isn’t and hasn’t been available to the Indigenous peoples of this place—my queerness must be radical. Radical as a choice that takes work, a decision to resist.

A desire for safety when I chose to love, fuck, and build community with other queer people.

My queerness has no interest in being assimilated into what bell hooks describes as “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” or Laverne Cox’s expanded “cisnormative heteronormative imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” My queerness is not content with a status quo of inclusion into homonormativity; therefore, if it doesn’t speak truth to power, it is empty. I believe in Frederick Douglass’s words on power:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

And I believe in Charlene A. Carruther’s amendment to Douglass’s statement: “Power concedes nothing without organized demand.” The thing about power is that it’s insidious; like Voldemort’s Horcruxes it takes different shapes. Just as identities intersect, power and privilege fit into the spaces between these intersections. There are the powers and privileges that white queer people can have over QTBIPOC as a result of western imperialism. The power and privilege that cis-gender people of any race can have over trans people of colour—particularly Trans Women, Trans Femmes, and Two-Spirit individuals—is a result of rampant transphobia and colonization. There is anti-Blackness that non-Black queer people can harness, anti-Indigenous racism that non-Indigenous people can leverage. There is Femme-phobia, fetishization, erasure of undocumented queer folk, disregard/indifference for refugees and asylum seekers—a plethora of ways that we harm each other. So if I am to make demands of the powers in and among our various intersecting identities, then I demand that we imagine and work to create a future where queer people get to live without fear of violence. Imagine futures where all of us get to live without the harshness of having to choose between our cultures/families and our queer identities—a world where we can exist without fear of horrendous violence or utter rejection by our faith communities. The reality is that there will always be homophobic, transphobic, racist, and misogynistic institutions, communities, and people that will prioritize profit over human beings. The reality is that we have willingly or unconsciously benefitted from these institutions, communities, and people. So here I borrow from Martine Syms’s Mundane Afrofuturism Manifesto, which demands that in our imaginings of a new world there can be “[n]o inexplicable end to racism—as dismantling white supremacy would be complex, violent, and have global impact.” Similarly, there can be no explicable end to a vast and intricate network of oppressions that we enact and that have been enacted upon us. I invite us to imagine a future, a movement towards ending oppression amongst ourselves and cleaning our side of the street as queer people, wherein we hold ourselves and each other accountable. Imagine a queer future where we treat each other with dignity and care regardless of class or desirability politics. Where we do the difficult and potentially lifelong work of unlearning our prejudices, without demanding the labour of those we harm. Imagine a future where we extend grace to each other with healthy boundaries. A world where we can make amends, reconcile, and heal. A world where community means more than shared sorrow or grievances. Where we help each other find safety and thrive. Because none of us can get free unless all of us get free.