The Problem of Travestis is Entirely Colonial: Rehearsing Fugitivity

TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH BY FELIPE GUERRA ARJONA

We end this issue with a powerful manifesto written by Mikaelah Drullard. In it, she advocates against the idea of humanizing trans people to favor the construction of a new ontology, that of the travestinegra (blacktravesti) outside of a humanity forged by colonial structures that simultaneously racialize and gender.

Every time I write, I do so with a sense of political urgency, writing for any travestinegra is a matter of urgency, writing in the ingenio, that is, from the sugar cane plantations, while the female and male masters and their heirs (owners of the human family, always cis, white, and with accumulative capacity) are in the mansion, it is precarious, urgent, and necessary; time, more than anything, in the capitalist plantation, black bodies lack time for life, or we lack time while we breathe to be exploited, we are bodies denied of writing, that is why it is urgent for many inhabitants of the borders of the heterosexual nation (see Ochy Curiel). I write to leave evidence. All of us non-humans have always cried out. The first travestinegra denied by white TERF feminists was Sojourner Truth, who asked: Ain’t I a Woman? Well, she wasn’t; she was black. I am a travesti, not a woman; we are black, not women. Being a woman is an ontology of whiteness. All of us non-humans are travestis. Travestis in that they were neither women nor men, because they were subjects denied by white humanism, we have witnessed oppression. One way of resisting the master’s language has been to use language as a machete, with the literal use of the machete and writing as an exercise in contaminating white categories. My writing-urge is an inevitable part of my doing-writing-feeling, every time I sit down to think and listen to my inner voice, I am overcome by a frenzy to say everything I have to say quickly and forcefully. For the denied subject who is never cis, even those referred to as “Palestinian, black woman, black man, indigenous woman…” time is running out, it is a trap of capitalist modernity, where the non-human-denied body is denied a prolonged livable life, but at the same time the body is a piece of labor measured in units of productive time in heterocisracial capitalism… That’s why when I write, it’s as if I knew this legacy of denunciation of the Calibans of the world, where our lives, the lives of travestinegras, transitivities, and bodies, in open conflict with the cis-regimes of oppression that enclose what is livable from what is nonviable for life, knew that our days are numbered to say everything. I always ask myself, whose lives are numbered? Which bodies have limited time? Which experiences cease to exist in this modern-westernized earthly plane derived from their non-normative disobedience in racial and sexual terms? To whom is the time we have left too short? I don’t want to leave without having said or written, I don’t want to leave with that stored in my body.