01. Maneo Mohale, The poet

“What it means for me to be Black and queer and trans or non-binary or all of these names make me legible I suppose in a western framework of gender and sexuality. But increasingly the longer that I'm here and the deeper I ask myself further and more ancestral questions about identity and sexuality and desire and kinship, the more those categories dissolve. But I cannot ignore the political reality of needing to be visible and legible to my own community (…) I know that there were poets and artists and queer people and trans people in my life that made me feel possible, because they identified themselves and lived in public ways and published obviously pursuant to all kinds of issues of safety and openness and visibility and representation. I really want to be the kind of person that makes other people feel possible. That makes other divine, beautiful, complicated, gorgeous queer young Black babies feel like they have, and can, and must carve their own space and take up their own space in the world, on the continent, in the country everywhere.”