None of the Above by Travis Alabanza

Author:Travis Alabanza [Drabble, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2022-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

‘This ain’t a thing we do round here, son.’

Those words still ring so clearly in my ears ten years on. It sounds like when the British colonised Africa and with it tried to take their imaginations of what gender could be. It sounds like the boasting, white, Western world saying it is a progressive and liberal haven, as it tells the story of Africa remaining as a place where transness is not only thought not to exist, but exterminated if it dares appear. The phrase sounds like queerness around gender becoming synonymous with a Western project, rather than integral to an African history as well. It sounds like my friend Shadu being kicked out of her household in Lagos as soon as she dared to wear the outfit she had always wished to, which sounds like my friend Tyreecel who sits in London still not accepting he may want to put on that lipstick because he still lives on the block, which sounds exactly like being told that something does not happen here.

I know it must, because I see it in my friends.

I know it must, because I see it in history books.

Yet despite this, it still feels like a fight to believe it.

I wonder what would happen if we allowed our imaginations to be freed from being held hostage by racism? If we could not only imagine the sounds we have been taught, but also the noises we dare only to dream? Is there a way to imagine a there that is not the here, but is bringing the shopkeeper, my auntie, my mother and the girl always on her phone with me? Is there a place that allows me to dance in all the aspects that others have said are a contradiction?

If I can imagine this place, maybe it would look like the Dagaaba tribe of Ghana and Burkina Faso, who, before European regimes, determined gender through a person’s energy and not their sexual anatomy. They did not look at parts you did not ask to have, but spoke of vibrations that allowed them to see and feel what a person may be. They spoke of male bodies emitting female energy and vice versa, and the bodies not being what the Dagaaba tribe cared about, but the energy they were emitting.

An image jolts to the front of my mind, of energies transmitting through a room, zooming past me. I cannot figure out where they are coming from, but all I can feel is exactly what they want me to know about them. No bodies in the way, just everyone focusing on the things we each choose to emit. Feminine energies, masculine energies, the mixing of both – all of them distinguishably Black.

I imagine transporting from the here of the shop, into the there of a place where my energy is celebrated and seen rather than contained. A place where we are listening to what someone is saying to us, rather than telling them who we are. There is no uttering of this not being a thing we do here, rather an embrace that welcomes me home.

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