On the occasion of my birth
"When I like men I want to be like them."- F. Scott Fitzgerald (by way of Margo Jefferson)
Writer, memoirist, and critic Margo Jefferson collects words the way I do: scrawled in notebooks and note cards, on napkins, or an old receipt or any manner of available paper nearby. I’ve been an avid collector of words since I was a wee little thing, going as far to cut out quotes from magazines, from online print out of newspaper profiles and articles, scribbled in various journals through out my life in my handwriting, and now, screenshots of words that seem to breathe into me and make me realize I’m living a shared life; connected to other humans (specifically, to other Black people) across time and generations.
In the last several years, I’ve come into a comfort in the masculinity I’ve carried with me throughout my life but never felt quite safe or entitled to exploring, as if my self weren’t mine, as if my experience of my body and my mind belonged to others and not to me.
Yesterday evening, after a good kiki session with my dear comrade Danielle, I spotted Constructing a Nervous System on her bookshelf and took it to my bed (her couch) to read a few pages.
Suddenly, it was past midnight and I was in fifty pages deep, needing more of the the contemplation and rearrangements, the self making that Jefferson has engaged in all her life. I was struck by the raw revelation of her admiration of the Black men around her, divulging that she wanted to be like them—not just because so many of her male idols were brilliant artists but because they inhabited a space of self making that was inaccessible to women of her caste, her class, and of her generation.
“When I like men I want to be like them…—I want to lose the outer qualities that give me my individuality and be like them. I don’t want the man, I want to absorb into myself all the qualities that make him attractive and leave him out.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Jefferson isn’t sure where she collected this particular quote of Fitzgerald’s but remarks in Construction a Nervous System that it ‘'must be from one of his personal journals”. It strikes me because it reminds me of a Meshell Ndegeocello quote from an interview I stumbled upon somewhere on the internet, some years ago. Unlike Jefferson, I grew up seeing that Black women could make themselves, that they could choose in the creation of self and become something altogether extraordinary.
Ndegeocello is one of my first idols, a person who embodies a particular fluidity in gender and a comfort in her masculinity I felt in myself but hadn’t seen out in my sheltered world. Like many of Jefferson’s male idols, she is also a terribly gifted musician and bandleader.
Her music has shaped my reflection of myself, allowed me to see it was possible to be Black and queer, and unashamed, and fucking brilliant, without apology. This quote has inspired body of photographic work I’ve been chipping away at for the last four years, as I attempt to coax out an icon of myself that is inviolable.
“I just try to take everything in as an experience, whether it’s gender or music. Sometimes, I feel super femmed up and very mother earthy... Sometimes, I feel like a fabulous gay boy in San Francisco... I’m able to cycle through them. Being any one thing, either in music or otherwise, has just never worked in my brain chemistry” — Meshell Ndegeocello
Much like Ndegeocello (and Jefferson), my father also introduced me to jazz and therefore seeded the sprout-ling of my unyielding and voracious consumption of music. Of Black music, specifically. I became enamored with Black craftsmanship and artistic practice through the introduction of Black classical music (my dad was the first person to introduce the phrase Black Classical Music to me, which at some point he picked up from Amiri Baraka, whose criticism I would devour nightly in the suspended reality of 2020, decades after learning of the terminology).
I’ve long sought to distinguish my place in this cultural discipleship.
With each passing year, I look in the mirror and I see that I look more and more like my father.
I am proud to share his face, down to a similar pattern of freckles dotted across our wide, button noses. When my hair is shorn and I’m wearing oversized glasses (similar to a pair he wore in the 80s) I look so much like him, it could be argued he made me all by himself. Tet koupe, a phrase used in Haitian kreyol to describe a uncanny shared likeness, as if he had cut off his own head and I spawned right out of it.
I remember him telling me via text message in 2021 on my way to the James Beard Awards, “I see all of us in your face.” I look like his mother—because he looks his mother—and I can see traces of myself in the faces of my great-grandmother and my great-great grandmother. What a profound blessing to be carrying all of my ancestors with me—in me—so proudly and with such astounding clarity, they all radiate out of my being.
As I’ve gotten older, and as my body is transformed by age, I see glimpse of my mother when I look in the mirror and it no longer frightens me: my almond shaped eyes and high cheekbones are hers, passed down from her mother and her mother’s mother. A lover recently told me, “Your body is crazy.” —my hips, my thighs, my ‘ancestral BBL’ (to quote my dear friend and fellow owner of a ancestral BBL, George) — all from my mama’s side of the family tree.
When I was young and still a victim of trying to be a “good daughter”, wearing the mantle of Golden Child—what a crushing burden, what a cruelty to the rest of the children in a family that only one of us can sit on the pedestal; a disgrace that a pedestal should even exist—I couldn’t see myself clearly outside the fictions of a self projected onto me by the unmet desires and wishes of others.
I’ve spent the last fifteen years of my life, making myself because if I hadn’t made me, I’d have fallen apart by now. “And when I make me, I’ll be paper-mache. And if I fuck me, I’ll fuck me in my own way,” screamed Brandon Boyd from the cold metal cage of my iPod, and I screamed right back with him.
As I sit at Danielle’s table in her kitchen, a few hundred feet away from where I first landed in Chicago sixteen years ago, I’m just a few days from my thirty-fifth rotation around the sun.
In a couple of hours, I’ll go pick up the keys to my new apartment.
By the time this letter hits your inbox, I will have woken up in my own bed for the first time in a month, in the first apartment I’ve chosen intentionally for myself.
I’ll look at myself in the bathroom mirror and see many generations of my family looking back at me. I’ll see myself sharing in the precious work of making myself as a Black person, as a queer person, a trans person; as a human being in the fullness of my plurality.
And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many. — Mark 5:9
I am so, so thankful to be alive. There was a long period in my life where I didn’t think I’d even see my thirties and here I am: thriving, vibrant, self-assured, full of joy. My sincerest gratitude to each of you who continue to engage with my varied artistic practice, but especially this space where I can write and be free and continue to make myself, without judgement. That is the greatest gift. I am a birthday pup today, so if you wanna send a little monetary love, that would make my tail wag happily. Venmo: @OrianaKoren / PayPal: anairo.k@pm.me Until next month, xx O
Happy belated birthday to you! I understand that feeling that is rippling through you around your birthday. Being Black, trans & alive is significant. Here's to more freedom & another beautiful journey around the sun.
Happy birthday <3 I recently saw a post on social media (I wish I saved it) about how so many little girls spend their lives thinking they are ugly and are really non-binary and look handsome like their dads. So much beauty to reclaim.