What is exciting about AfroTrans (Les Éditions Cases Rebelles, 2021) is that it is not made particularly for academics — survival, beauty, care for self and community, and seizing the right to tell one’s story on one’s own terms are its raw, most immediate concerns. As the title indicates, this rich volume is entirely devoted to Afrodiasporic transgender experiences, but editor and contributor Michaëla Danjé specifies that it does not seek to construct a new, normative, monolithic, inalienable identity category. In fact, the Trans in AfroTrans is capacious and fluid enough to welcome transformation, transmigration, transoceanicity, and, germane to this special issue, translation. Conceived as an open space for trans artists, activists, and intellectuals from all corners of the African diaspora to constitute, bear witness to, and preserve their own archive, the volume organically stretches out like an archipelagic community with submarine ties connecting the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
Thinking critically through a vast array of theoretical and historical sources, the collection begins with a vital lexical mise au point: the prefixes trans- and cis- are dutifully illuminated, and transidentité, transition, transgenre, and non-binaire are gently introduced — not as a steady ordering system, but as notions to be interrogated, emptied and endlessly refilled with individual lived experiences. Danjé lucidly reminds the reader that these terms originate in hegemonic epistemic manipulations: “[Ce] sont des termes issus d’une pensée et d’une formalisation globalisante et impérialiste, mais nos réalités ne sont pas une invention occidentale.” She continues, “Nous ne souhaitons pas arrêter ici une définition plus précise de ‘transidentité’ dans la mesure où il existe une multitude de parcours, de transidentités, de termes pour les désigner, de façon de les penser et de les vivre” (These terms arise from imperialist, totalizing and normative modes of thinking, but our realities are not a Western creation. […] We do not seek to crystallize a more precise definition of ‘transidentité’ here, acknowledging that there are myriad journeys, transidentés, terminologies, and ways of thinking and living trans lives.) (11). This invitation to deconstruct these terms and liberate them from their imperial yoke is also a latent bid for grace toward the inherent messiness of translation as it is performed across and between spaces where decolonial processes operate on different timelines. For instance, the English transidentity is not an exact translation of the French transidentité, the term most widely used by Danjé and other contributors in AfroTrans. In English, joining morphemes in this manner can still carry a normative impetus; for instance, the US-based non-binary comedian, writer, and theorist Alok V. Menon uses the written form trans identity. Meanwhile, French readily attaches words to the prefix trans-.[1] Danjé’s reminder of where these terms emanate shifts the focus from discursivity to solidarity despite differences.
The fourteen contributors of this multimodal collection demonstrate, one text at a time, how different configurations of blackness, trans identity, and geographies uniquely shape their everyday life. As Danjé puts it in her preface, those who write these pages are experts in their “propre vécu” (“own lived experience”), and to honor the abundance and particularities of these lives, multiplicity functions as the collection’s guiding principle (12). The book resists genre classification by bringing together poems, short fictions, essays, and interviews, not in any particular order but with the unpredictability of a hip hop cipher, as Danjé describes it. With contributors residing not just in France, but also in Canada, Germany, and Reunion, and whose origins widely span the African diaspora, the collection also presents itself as a transnational and translingual utopia in the most plural, Glissantian recuperation of the term. While Utopia, as traditionally understood in the Western world, envisioned a perfect form to which civilizations could aspire, Édouard Glissant, hoping to wrest the concept from its normative impulse, imagined utopias whose functions would be to accumulate and to accommodate all measures and excesses, without any desire to reform.[2] AfroTrans foregrounds its multilingual, utopian program as early as with the first contributor, Veli Fenwar, a Reunionese artist whose first poem (the book’s very first text after the preface) blends Creole and French, and whose second poem is given in the original Creole, followed by a French translation. Lily Séjor, a Guadeloupean poet, contributes a short story in French translated into Creole (thus de-centering French), and a poem in Creole re-expressed into French (in a note Séjor explains that the French is neither a translation nor an adaptation). Kuchenga, an author and activist of Jamaican and Zimbabwean origins living in Berlin, contributes two creative non-fiction essays that explore the intersection of gender, class and cultural capital, race, religion, and nationality, originally written in English and translated into French.
Within this generic and linguistic ebullition, a broad range of topics are addressed. Sofiane-Akim Kounkou, a multitalented artist with Algerian and Congolese roots, discusses “trans parentalité” (parenting as a “transboy maman,” and the mercilessness of the medical gaze toward his black, non-binary body in a first-person essay, followed by an interview (51). Lasseindra NINJA, a choreographer and dancer from French Guyana, talks with Danjé about her encounters in the legendary New York Ballroom scene, organizing a vogue workshop in transphobic Cayenne, and her disdain for the LGBTQ movement, which not only places trans people last but also perpetuates white supremacy. Guadeloupean Michaël Brissac offers two long surrealist poems in prose, and a multi-discursive essay that blends biography, sociology, and cultural commentary to speak about family, blackness, and the somatic experience of binding one’s chest. Louïz, a Reunionese activist and cultural advocate, speaks with Danjé about music, dance, the emancipatory potential of social media, and the double-edged sword of beauty — an ambivalent criterion for the validation of transgender bodies but also a joyful means of reaching a broader audience with contests such as Miss International Queen. Kellysha Descieux writes personal essays that speak of self-love during transition as well as existing at the intersection of trans femininity and blackness and enduring oppression from various fronts, including the cisgender queer community. A poem titled “Femme Trans Noire” (“Black Trans Woman”) rounds out Descieux’s contribution with a celebration. Mon-Ink D, a Beninese writer living in France, offers two short poems, the second of which, “Danse fille de Erinle,” (“Dance, daughter of Erinle”) chants the practice of care for transgender bodies in Afrodiasporic religious traditions. Hélène Bémé provides a materialist commentary on the tyranny of beauty in a capitalistic world, and the way it disproportionately affects black trans women, pressuring them to undergo often dangerous skin whitening treatments and permanent hair removal procedures. The collection concludes on a musical note of sorts with an interview with Blxck Cxsper, an Afro-Caribbean hip hop artist and founder of Trans Trenderz, a music label that gives a home to trans musicians of the diaspora.
Together, these essays convincingly make the case for intersectionality as an analytical tool for those who might still be resistant to it. In the collection’s most scholarly contribution, “Devenir l’homme noir” (“Becoming the black man”), Joao Gabriel writes that some feminists miss the mark when they pose masculinity as the universal enemy. This essentialist thinking misreads the confluence of blackness and trans identity as the cause of black trans men’s vulnerability, when in fact, Gabriel argues, “dans un contexte occidental, c’est principalement parce qu’ils deviennent des hommes que les trans africains et afrodescendants masculins sont plongés dans une toute autre expérience de la brutalité sociale” (“In a Western context, it is precisely because they become men that African and Afrodescended trans men are caught up in a completely different experience of social brutality.” Italics in the original) (223). For him, because police brutality excessively targets Black men, trans or not, it is a form of gendered violence (226). Another contributor, Sika Lari also dreams of a future where one’s trans identity would not eclipse everything else that makes up a person; she muses, “Vous voyez: vous savez que je suis une femme trans et vous ignorez tout de moi” [1] (“You see: you know that I am a trans woman, yet you know nothing about me”) (28). Anchoring herself in an Afrodescendant lineage, Lari remarks that her heritage is black because her ancestry is black; meanwhile, her trans identity says nothing of her roots because she is not the fruit of a trans genealogy.
Danjé’s own contribution is a personal narrative interspersed with song titles, anecdotes, and what she calls “fragments” — critical meditations on historical and ethnographic texts that document fluid conceptions of gender across the African continent, Madagascar, and the black Atlantic spanning centuries. In combing through scholarship and archives, Danjé does not chase the fantasy of an idealized, genderless African past; instead, she constitutes an annotated bibliography of sorts that wrests trans identity epistemologies away from strictly Eurocentric frameworks. On the back cover, a single verse by Danjé eloquently captures the spirit of AfroTrans: “Au croisement étoilé de la négritude et de la transidentité, l’accidentelle et lumineuse poésie de nos vies lancées au monde.” (“At the starry confluence of négritude and trans identity, the accidental and luminous poetry of our lives, thrown at the world”).[2] In all, AfroTrans invites us to imagine constellations of joy: joy of being black and woman/man/or non-binary and transgender. Danjé extends this invitation unambiguously by concluding her preface with “Que la célébration commence.” (“Let the celebration begin.”)
With its jubilance, multilingual and polyphonic offerings, AfroTrans is a lesson in decolonial methodology and a study in determination and resourcefulness. Rather than bow to the pressures of a publishing market that cannot seem to break up with monolingualism and hegemonic languages, the Cases Rebelles Collective, of which Danjé is a co-founder, created its own publishing house; AfroTrans was one of its first publications. Today, Éditions Cases Rebelles continues to “donner voix à des perspectives inédites et originales, se saisir d’épisodes historiques menacés d’oubli, [et] accueillir des perspectives panafrorévolutionnaires qui sortent des sentiers battus […].” (“Give voice to original, unsung perspectives; rescue historical events from oblivion; and welcome panafrorevolutionary outlooks that get off the beaten paths […].) May Éditions Cases Rebelles, and publishing houses like it, live long and prosper. With a new slate of audacious books to be released in upcoming months, it looks like they have beautiful days ahead.
AfroTrans: Perspectives, Entretiens, Poésie. Ed. Michaëla Danjé. Les Éditions Cases Rebelles, 2021.
corine labridy is a translator and assistant professor in French and Francophone Studies in the Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on Francophone Afrofuturisms, and she is presently at work on a monograph titled Dystopia Station: Speculative Detours in the French-Caribbean Imaginary. Her translation of Martinican author Nadia Chonville’s Mon cœur bat vite (My Heart Beats Fast) was recently published by Vanderbilt University Press. She is also co-editor of Imaginaries, an H-France publication, and a co-founder of the Kwazman Vwa collective, a digital archive dedicated to elevating the voices of contemporary Caribbean authors and scholars.
[1] All translations are mine, unless otherwise specified. I thank one of my early readers for helping me reflect on these subtle differences in translation.
[2] Édouard Glissant, La Cohée du Lamentin, pp. 141-142.