How are you doing, Udoka? Thank you so much.

How are you doing?

Oh, I'm really good. Thank you, Bandile.

It's nice to be here and to be on your podcast.

I think I had a different opinion about visibility,

which I wanted to bring to this podcast.

Yeah, sure. So I use they, them pronouns.

I sometimes go by she just because sometimes it's easier.

Certain spaces I'm in.

I work in tech sales and I'm also a creative.

So that's like my side hustle.

Like I do poetic performances and I'm a writer,

as well as just dabbling a lot of different mediums.

And I think that when it comes to visibility for me,

what that has been is that I like a journey that's been entirely on my own terms,

which is what I prefer.

Like I think that many people of African heritage,

like it's not necessarily easy always to be honest or be open about all the ways

that you're different from the people around you.

And I think that also people sometimes place too much of an onus on the traditional,

like coming out narrative.

And especially when you don't necessarily have much to fall back on,

it can be quite damaging how like queerness has come to the fore in my work

and then how I make spaces for other people.

And what I do personally in my own creative life is just like

coming through in my writing in quite a subtle way.

I'll write on queer topics.

I'll inform everything I do, but I don't think I need to necessarily shout about it

to prove something about myself, because the community,

that is what's most important to me, already know who I am.

It's almost like not making it like, oh my gosh, this is a new badge that I have.

Yeah, I've been there.

When I was young and I first moved to London,

that was not where I was at, because I would think it was the sense of

coming from a very repressed background and being like,

oh, I just want, you know, like it's so exciting to be able to express part of your identity

that you haven't been able to express before.

But there's so many ups and downs with that,

not only in terms of like how that interacts with your familiar community,

but also where you feel safe doing that.

And for the vast majority of people, it's not necessarily an easy or safe thing.

Be super open about your gender identity or sexuality.

Visibility is far less interesting to me than freedom.

And I think they're often quite distinct.

And what does freedom mean in terms of visibility?

What's the disconnection, the connection between the two?

So I was thinking about this before this call.

I think that visibility can mean a lot of things.

Visibility can mean that you're being seen,

but more often than not, it can also mean that you're being watched.

And one feels like being surveilled.

There are so many communities all around the world where like every little move

that you make is surveilled and like reported on through the whisper network of aunties.

I feel like my Indian friends and my Caribbean friends

and like all the other Africans I know like all have the similar feeling

or whenever I talk to people who are like East Asian,

like it's like the community is a big thing and what people think is really important.

Sure, you might be visible, but that visibility might come

over the restriction of your freedom and might come over like negative consequences.

Whereas freedom is freedom from those consequences

or an ability to like protect yourself from them.

And what that might mean is actually like taking saying no to certain forms of visibility

in order to more fully or to like live your life happily and comfort.

Also, when you think when you when I think of visibility,

I think that trans women have never been more visible than they are now in the UK specifically.

And that has come with a huge amount of both societal and governmental aggravation and attack.

It's not come over the increase in rights or increase in happiness or increase in safety.

I think that the exact reverse is true, even though we've always had transgender women

as part of our culture and our politics.

I was reading an article about a trans woman who appeared, I think, on Big Brother back in 2004.

And had like a documentary made about her, even though it was seen as a somewhat new thing,

like that's 20 years ago.

So it's not just a matter of like visibility means that things are getting easier.

If you're kind of being used as fodder and a cultural, it's not like visibility doesn't help you.

I mean, I remember in university, we had a conversation about leaving the tea behind.

The community felt like the movement was leaving the trans community behind in line with

International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, Biphobia, also known as IDAHOBIT.

How do you feel that freedom should be articulated now?

So the first thing I put into my head is IDAHOBIT, like every time it comes around,

I immediately think of it as being something slightly Tolkien oriented.

I'm like Hobbits.

Lord of the Rings.

Yeah, Lord of the Rings.

It's like, oh, like I just, Lord of the Rings, Hobbit starts playing in my head and I'm like,

we have to focus. It's important.

Like, I think that it's important to focus on material gains.

One book I often refer to is Against Equality, which is edited by Ryan Conrad,

and I think also who was part of a wider collective in the preamble to the Obergefell v. Hodges position in the US,

that was actually like offering critiques of marriage equality.

And one of the critiques that was offered, something that I actually agree with,

is that by focusing so much on marriage equality, which is like, yes, you know, in the wake of the AIDS crisis,

the continuing AIDS crisis, similar to COVID, the AIDS crisis isn't over and the pandemic isn't over.

But in the wake of the AIDS crisis, like you see the impact of not having marriage equality on gay queer couples

and how they were completely disenfranchised as a result when it came to looking after terminally ill partners.

That came from a particular place, but actually, like the fight for marriage equality,

at least in the US context and US and UK context, was incredibly well funded by people who

weren't necessarily coming from a position of being some of the most vulnerable people in the community.

They were often already very middle class, already mostly but not exclusively white,

weren't necessarily dealing with the asylum seeker system, for example, as LGBT people.

And it was almost like the last frontier for a lot of people that stopped them from being equal to straight people in every meaningful way.

If you're like a white cisgender man and you can pass the straight in most professional contexts

and the one thing that separates you is just, you know, able to get married once you have been married.

A lot of people kind of feel that is like the end of the gay rights movement.

And that was a great fear from the people who wrote against equality, that people would focus just on an issue,

on one issue that actually was particularly relevant to one kind of person within the community

and forget all the different ways in which LGBTQ people continue to be discriminated against and face actual violence.

And it's not saying that marriage equality is bad, it's more just saying that we need to widen the picture.

And I think for me, that freedom and being OK, like the average trans person is discriminated against in hiring processes,

they're discriminated against when it comes to finding housing, especially in big cities like London.

I'm not sure how it would be like in like in Johannesburg or in Cape Town, but I assume it's kind of similar.

When it comes to accessing health care discrimination in the UK and actually just across the West,

when it comes to people seeking asylum as a result of homophobia in their home countries,

they're asked incredibly invasive questions and they're subject to just quite like psychologically violent

and like just torturous processes and the process of trying to access safety.

Or because they don't fit with the British conception of what queerness is,

stories are questioned and they're constantly in a state of precarity.

LGBT people are more likely to be homeless.

And there's so many people I know who've experienced homelessness or had to surface up as a result of their sexuality

and their gender identity that has a multiplier effect when you multiply that over the course of a career,

over the course of like going home to university, if you are worrying about where to lay your head

or you're estranged from a family that has a massive knock on effect on what you're able to do and what you're able to achieve in life.

None of those problems have actually been solved by marriage equality.

In fact, like I think that the average cisgender straight person, maybe you're kind of like daily male reader who doesn't really know what's going on,

like people like, what rights do queer people not have?

So if you focus purely on paper and if you focus purely equality with cisgender straight people,

you actually miss so many of the areas in which queer people are still discriminated against and are still suffering.

And that's not even before you're talking about intersectionality, like LGBT people are more likely to be disabled.

So all the issues that face disabled people impact the LGBT community more heavily.

The average, like there's this ever-decreasing pool of gay bars in London, most of which aren't even accessible.

I was speaking to a friend about, oh, like I don't really encounter that many queer refugees going about my business in London.

If you're on £30 a week and to go on one trip in and out of central London costs you £7, like how are you going to come to community events?

How are you going to build a community? How are you going to participate in the community?

And then the Home Office is then judging your asylum application for safety in this country on the basis of how much you participate in community that you quite often afford to access.

So when I think of what freedom means for LGBTQ people, I think I'm less interested in marriage equality because, yeah, sure, we already have that.

And I'm not particularly interested in hate crime legislation because no one has necessarily told me how that actually helps us.

I'm way more interested in policies that actually help keep people safe and help keep people housed for the most underprivileged part of our community.

Would you say that now we should shift from institutional access to economic and more health care?

Even for me as someone who, I guess, I work in tech, I've got a salary or the professional classes, we have the protection of private health care, they have the protection of the ERGs.

And sure, we can go to we can go to bride and they're sponsored by Barclays and we can have a good time.

But there's a significant proportion of this so-called community that cannot access these spaces for whom those spaces have been made inaccessible.

And I think that we need to just be aligning our attention more with like making sure that everyone's OK before we can really start celebrating.

Yeah. So how should we now approach what should be the renewed optimism or the renewed hope of what pride can achieve?

So I think that what is giving me the most hope over the past year is seeing how queer people can organize.

So one of my favorite bars, Dalston Superstore in East London, actually unionized over the past year.

I think one of the places I've actually seen most queer people over the past six, seven months has been like Queers for Palestine protests organizing around that.

I've seen a lot of people doing some medical organizing.

So the only reason I was able to first access therapy, talk therapy is because of the Black Trans Foundation.

And people have now been trying to support the founders as they deal with their own issues with chronic health issues.

But like I think there's so much organizing and mutual aid that's happening within the community.

Sometimes it feels like they're all passing around the same £10, like especially in the Black Trans community, like trying to get people through school.

When, you know, sometimes universities also look at your immigration documents and say that you're actually like, we don't accept your fees or something ridiculous like that.

Getting people top surgery, getting people what they need, basically.

All I want Pride to look like essentially is more like Trans Pride, which happens once a year in London.

I'm not sure if this is the equivalent thing in South Africa, because it's so much more politicised.

It's so much more like narrowly focused on the need.

It's like it's like trying to make the safer space so people can like commiserate and take strength from one another in a quite negative media environment.

But also it's like it's a place for people to come together and organize and advocate for greater safety, better movements,

responses to some of the really like slanderous and quite negative pieces are coming out.

Like it just means more to be than regular pride.

And I think of the three main pride events are on my calendar.

So that's like commercial pride, which is the one that's often like, you know, you'll see lots of companies that Black Pride and trans pride.

Trans Pride is the thing that I think offers the most hope for our community moving forward.

And I think that's a model that we can like try and build on, like harnessing the rage, harnessing our love for one another and harnessing the hope.

Not to request access to spaces that having like more Black people, more queer people on the board of Lockheed Martin isn't something I can personally get excited about.

But having more people able to just go to their GP for anything and have a safe, respectful experience is something that I want.

And it's something that I can organize around.

And that's that's kind of where where I'm at.

That's what pride I think should mean to me.

And I think you've already touched on about community, not just articulating the trans needs specifically.

How did you find the community of, for example, celebrating trans pride, for example?

Well, I identify as non-binary, but I think that like when non-binary is something that I think is quite important,

it's quite important to me that it's like it feels like a relational thing.

Like I but people, people will see her me all day.

And I used to care a lot more than I do.

And now I don't really mind that much because to me, like being being on a binary, being queer is something that's like it's just like my community.

Right. Like, like people, people who know me know who I am.

And that's fine. That's cool. You know, so when it comes to like finding community, I think I'm not sure that's the first of your question, but that's where I'm taking it.

I think that's so like so there's one thing which is like it can be really difficult to find the right community for you.

I think I had I needed a couple of tries with where I found people who felt like who I felt like were able to like hold me and I was able to hold them in this kind of like really like relational,

relational and respectful way, because especially as like a person of color, like it's the thing of like her people, her people.

So like you always hear people like these like really like fraught and like painful friendship or like housing situation blow up is where people are like really touchy and really like,

but it's like not particularly a lot of grace because everyone is just is holding a lot of her that they've grown up with around our identity.

So they find like a community of like minded people who've gone through similar experiences, but they've gone through similar experiences and they're a little bit wounded.

So it can take a while to like find that community.

I will say that like the whole idea of like an LGBTQ community just doesn't feel real to me.

I'm like, what? Like I feel like I honestly feel this way.

Like I feel like the white gays are in a very different, especially white gay men, a very different kind of community to the community I'm in.

Like when I go to heaven, I really go to heaven. It's one of the biggest, maybe the biggest LGBT club or gay club in London.

I don't really go to heaven anymore. When I go there, like I'm treated like I'm a tourist.

And it's just I'm like, oh, like we aren't, you know, this is like my is not your as they say, like it's whatever.

But I think it was finding people like you like it requires a lot of patience, a lot of openness.

Like it was something I actually focused on, like I was like, I want to build more friendships with other black queer people.

So I had to like really like, you know, like take the take my time and, you know, like build relationships of trust,

relationships that weren't based on like what we look like or how cool we are, but like genuinely like seeing each other and like relating.

So that and that was lovely, but it took time and it took a lot of like trial and error.

And like on my part as well, like I had to learn how to be a good friend to people who like me had experienced had had some bad experiences.

But I'm also thinking that like for a significant proportion of our of like our community,

like especially chronically ill people, the idea of like the club as the number one space for community is not accessible.

Like, first of all, like you're charging me 20 pounds before we can cross the threshold and I'm not supposed to buy drinks.

Not all of us have a good relationship of alcohol and drugs, in fact, we're far more likely to have a bad relationship of alcohol and drugs.

Me personally, I get overwhelmed.

Like as a diversion of myself, the docker that exists in my head wants to club till 6am.

But I get there and I'm like, I want to go home.

I got gym in the morning. I want some tea.

I want to go to my plants. Like, I need to go home.

And I love the Qwerty's, like they have so much fun, but I'm like, I wish I could be one of you.

I am not part of your number. I'm sorry.

Like, so there's that.

Yeah, I think you were touching something that's quite common, I think, in the frustrations of building other queer friendships and other queer.

I think that's what my earlier question was about finding community.

It's almost like we are, we struggle alone with our own complex emotions that come with being LGBTQ,

the own complex configuration of intersectional experiences that we encompass every day.

How do we start building that openness that you experience about throwing yourself off the being bold enough to really take by the bullet as it comes, I'll say.

I'm just saying, listen, I am not going to be afraid. I want to do it my own way.

I think that also like, like, you can't do it alone, right? It's all community, right?

So like my favorite, my favorite queer event that happens on a monthly basis is literally like foraging.

Like we just go to a park, we like we like learn about mushrooms together is it's called Misery Party.

It's so much fun, like, and it's in the middle of a day on a Saturday.

Like it's a sober space as well. So like there's no pressure to do anything you want to do.

Yeah, it's just very gentle. And I think that like people have worked or like T-Boys Club.

It's a club in London that is like for trans-mask people and non-binary people.

And they often do sober nights as well, which which just seem really lovely because it's like, oh, why can't I hear poetry in the club?

Not feeling the pressure to do things that aren't aligned with who you think you are and like just finding the things that are or starting the things that are.

I hosted a big old Christmas party. I asked everyone to bring a poem with them and we shared poetry and great food.

And I like forgot to drink. Like people like brought alcohol and like I made some like mulled wine, but I was just having so much fun.

I wasn't really drinking. Most people aren't lucky enough to be born into queer families.

But you're reading, you're reading St. Bush Blues, you're reading.

I mean, hopefully you're reading. But like you're watching like something that like Ryan Murphy made and you're thinking, oh, that's what community is like.

And and if you feel like this kind of pressure to like to like emulate that when actually like it could be in your own terms.

But like I'm a bit camp, you know, I won't lie.

Like I'm a bit much like I am an extra person at the end of the day, realizing that stories are just that story.

It's like they have to be like hyper, right, because they're fun.

There's stories, but that's just that's just so many tignitaries as there are RuPaul's.

And there's just as many like I think that understanding the endless diversity and it's making peace of it and realizing that there's like

there's no such thing as being like queer enough or trans enough or gay enough.

Like you are just like enough. I'm far more likely to judge someone on, you know, like their generosity, their kindness,

like that ability to like put themselves in someone else's shoes than their ability to fit like a very narrow, like 80s,

like 80s, like industrial America archetype of queerness that isn't even relevant to my life that I don't dare.

And I think earlier you touched on about this freedom of being this freedom of trying to explore what's enough for us as a community or as individuals.

How would you say we can diversify that wide and that opportunity set to include more people who look for something like me or like you into that spectrum of benefits?

I think so much of it is on being organized, unfortunately.

One of the things that I do is alongside my church, I organize with London citizens to ask for particular things from our government,

from the mayor of London, from our councils, from NHS bodies and these like small organizations,

just by being coming together and like these becoming like broader cross London coalitions are able to cause a lot of change.

It's the same model of change that informed the work of like Martin Luther King in the 60s in America, right?

So it's like having conversations with people, with people building a consensus, agreeing on what kind of issue you want to take forward.

Getting face time of like particular leaders in your community, sustaining that pressure and those conversations over months and years,

holding people accountable, but also celebrating the small wins and moving forward and forward and forward.

That's how so many different kinds of change happen.

Alternatives have like a lot of money. And as a community, we don't necessarily have a lot of money.

So we only really have like the community building and the organizing as an option.

We're seeing more and more of that, I think, like especially around like trans health care.

We're seeing more of that around like Palestine, queer people having a really big role in organizing for Palestine and so on.

I think that it's just the reading, I think it's the reading that people think that things just happen and they don't.

It takes work and it takes like, you know, skipping Netflix for a night to like get on Zoom or to go to a community center and talk to people.

And get people to come through.

Like the number of afternoons I've taken off of work to go to like some random place in West London to talk to like some like like like an NHS trust leader

to try and get them to pay people a living wage over the course.

And that's me coming quite almost late to a process that's been going on for like two, three years.

And as a result of that process, and this is something that's like not connected to queerness at all, but it's connected to like the spirit of organizing.

Is it like eight or nine trusts in London have agreed to pay their staff a London living wage?

And there's that multiplier effect because that means that like those families, like their kids are going to be better looked after.

They're going to have better educational outcomes.

They're going to, you know, they're going to have better health care outcomes, going to be less stressed, less tired.

Right. But it takes time and it takes a coalition and it doesn't just take like, oh, this is my community because we all dress the same.

We just like the same stuff. Right. Like it's it's like a cross generational, like multi-colour coalition that is pushing for a particular outcome.

How do we then start connecting ourselves to making it different and the impact besides,

as you state, like stopping, for example, voicing out, going to these bases, talking more direct and deliberately and intentionally about what needs to be happening.

How do we find our voice within the noise that is going on globally to do that in such a way that it really makes a positive contribution?

I mean, if you look at the state of the world, everything is almost very chaotic.

How do we then find the courage to say, OK, if I do speak up in these spaces, in these small ways, how do I know that it will land?

How will I know that it's not in vain or, you know, the risk that I'm taking associated with that?

It's a good question. I think that like I was I was having a conversation with a slightly younger friend who's currently at Harvard and like seeing the encampments

and like trying to figure out what level of risk that she's personally comfortable with when it comes to like the campus protests happening across America right now.

And I don't have a good answer for it. I think everyone needs to kind of like cut their cloth according to what they want to wear in certain ways.

Sometimes we fetishize the big actions at the cost of not incrementalism, but things like things that can be like the easy to pull levers that are more easily available to us.

So like you might not need to like you might not need to chain yourself to like to a fence or to a tree before you've like gone to a council meeting

and actually spoken up about something that's going to be happening in your community. Right.

So like doing like the things that are like relatively smaller lifts first and not everyone has not everyone is built for that.

Not everyone is built to speak up like for every person that is speaking up like that is that is, you know, writing, reading, that is thinking that is publishing.

There are lots of people who have to do the work of supporting that person of editing, of of of like polls checking, of making sure that that person is fed.

It has a roof over their head. It's looked after.

Like when I think of the Civil Rights Movement, I think it's like the easiest thing that we have,

we might both have a touch point for and both have learned about.

The number of people that like that their main and major contribution to the Civil Rights Movement was making sure people were safe and fed, housed, shipping,

like driving long, long distances to get these civil rights leaders to where they needed to be.

And we will never know their names unless we like unless we have people who are people students of history and we read,

but we might not remember their names all the time because they aren't necessarily like Martin.

They aren't necessarily Angela. They aren't necessarily Malcolm, but they were important.

Doing what it is within your power is really important.

You like you like there are people who their main contribution to getting that London living wage out to more and more people in the NHS in London is giving us that giving us that

use of their buildings for free, but they still contributed. And also it's like a muscle that you flex. It's not just something that you can just get up and go.

Like if I like I love weightlifting, so I'm going to use this as a metaphor because I hate I hate every other sports metaphor.

But if I was going to be like, OK, I've woken up, I've decided to be a weightlifter.

So tomorrow I'm going to go lift 150 kilos, going to deadlift 150 kilos.

My hamstrings would snap and it served me right. You know, you have to kind of build up to that.

You can't just like immediately think you're going to like, I mean, there are some people who do who like get to a point where they just have to act.

There's so many of the issues that even that you named some of these like some of these struggles and struggles of like, you know, 75 years, you know, if it's even more than that, you have to have stamina.

You can't just you can't be a sprinter. And even if you want to be a sprinter, you can't be a sprinter immediately.

You know, take time, think, figure out what what figure out what are the like the axes of power around you and move with like sensitivity and with thoughtfulness, with like a longevity in mind.

What are some of the interconnected issues that you feel that we can rally behind from your from where you are sitting?

I will say that in the UK, like there are a couple of things that for me are top of mind.

The rights of disabled people have been eroded and are being systematically eroded over the over the past, let's say, 13 years since we've had the conservatives with some kind of power.

So the current prime minister is Richie Sunak, who was chancellor during the Covid years.

But the conservatives as a whole, like I mean, there was a recent talk about them further reducing the amount of money that disabled people get, which is not much like my my friends who are chronically ill,

are budgeting down to the pennies month by month because they have they have this so little like they are they are creating GoFundMe to get wheelchairs.

They are unable to access critical medication because of like medication shortages, unable to access like timely appointments.

I have a friend who is currently dealing with stage four cancer.

No one's even masking in hospitals anymore.

So like every time that she goes in, she's at risk of catching Covid or something of that kind of like nature.

But also, like because of the underfunding of the health care system in the UK, which is quite crazy, I could probably hear about from like.

I think in rural health care, right?

Yeah, right. Like it's like when I talk to my like to my family members in Nigeria, they're like, what?

Like, how can it be this bad? But it's gotten it has gotten this bad.

And it's because of deliberate policy making and that same environment of underfunding obviously has a knock on the back to trans people in the health care.

That's like so like alongside the like I think it was the UN special apperature for disabled people came to the UK in 2018 and said that it was almost at the point of being a human rights crisis.

And for the UN to say something, you know, it's bad because they don't like to say anything.

So like, you know, like that's that's something that's on my mind, especially someone who has my older sister as a disability.

And like when you are someone of course, like the biggest person who's affected, the most important person that is affected by this cross society application of any kind of care towards disabled people is a disabled person themselves.

When you are a carer or a family that cares for a disabled person that hasn't knocked on the back of your ability to do things.

Someone said it's an average of like nine hundred and sixty pounds extra a month that it costs to be disabled in the UK.

And disabled people are not getting that much money.

They're getting a fraction of that breakdown is like nine hundred pounds per person or per person.

Like the cost of being disabled, like the cost of taking taxis because you can't get on the bus or because like, you know, like that kind of thing.

So I think one in three people in the UK have a disability or have a disability or some kind.

That's something like we are seeing our life expectancy as a country reduce over time.

We are becoming a sicker nation.

More and more people are becoming more prone to being differently abled or being disabled, I'd say, given the environment that has been deteriorating, I mean, climate change being one of the biggest risk factors.

We're only just starting to see the effects of climate change.

I mean, it will only make us worse in terms of the disability rates.

People with learning disabilities were particularly vulnerable to dying due to Covid to the point where actually they were given do not resuscitate orders, like letters saying that by default,

some of them were told that if they were in a coma or in a fanflated due to Covid, they would have a do not resuscitate order attached to their lives because not because that they were already deeply sick.

So that was that was the case in some cases, but because like they just there was just an assumption somewhere in the hospital that that would be the case, that they shouldn't attempt to resuscitate them.

So it's it's bad.

And I think that I wanted to highlight it because I think that sometimes, as I said, it is intersectional, like a lot of queer people are affected by this.

It's important to like paint the full picture of of of organizing against.

So so in terms of that battle, what are the perpetrators that we can address it with?

So, I mean, I know, for example, there's no diversity now that's being just picking up.

It's almost as picking up as intersectionality talks now.

What would you say would be the rallying addressing and tackling the disability disservice that we all the injustice that we see now?

There's a couple of things. I think that like so much of it is policy.

The difference in the childhood that me and my sister had me like being I was I was like,

I know it's very late with ADHD, but like my sister was like, as I was seen after birth with Down syndrome.

The childhood that she had would not be possible for her now because she had that childhood during a labor era and labor was by no means perfect.

And I have so many critiques of both that era of labor of the labor party in the current era.

But just make like making it a non-negotiable as someone who was multiply marginalized.

And I think that you feel the same.

Like I think that that sense of solidarity, like also neurodivergent and like I have my own issue that I deal with.

Like I think it's so important to show solidarity of other people and to see people especially like that's going back to queerness.

Like during the pandemic, when like some of us are worrying about our like worrying about our own lives,

there's like, you know, chronically ill people or as people or families, people who like love and live with chronically ill people or people who are risky, who are at risk.

We had like we had videos of like boatloads of gays partying like it was no one's business.

But that sense of solidarity and cross community care, like people kind of idolize the AIDS crisis for this.

It wasn't always true in the AIDS crisis, but there was more like the reason that like L's at the beginning of the acronym is because even though lesbians were affected by the AIDS crisis as much as everyone else,

they really worked to care for gay men and trans women that were particularly affected by it.

So so like bringing more of that back and more of that sense of like, oh, no one's free until we're all free and no one's rights get left behind.

That was a big disappointment of Covid is that we all coalesced around caring for the vulnerable and then forgot it as soon as the clubs opened up again.

And that's we need to kind of like return to and actually like look into ourselves about and be like, oh, there are ways I felt I failed to be a good ally.

I felt I failed to send in solidarity. How can I change that? How can I fix that and get back on that?

Now, I'll tell you a thing about my own experience with COVID, you are like removed from your support structure, from your support environment.

We have a more of a youth crisis that's more prevalent.

We have a stubborn inequality, a very massive young population that is unemployed, that seeks opportunity, but is failed by the country that they are born in.

So we have an economic crisis that is acutely disproportionately affecting the youth population in South Africa.

I remember studying your institution when I was at uni and thinking, oh, my God, like the fact that Africa could have a constitution so like inclusive and so vibrant is amazing.

I mean, I remember I think I was taught about South Africa and about power growing up.

So we were like reading in a juju. I was taught about it as a complete story.

It was like it was bad. And then Nelson Mandela came and he was so forgiving of the white people.

And now everything's fine. It's the same as like, you know, in America, it's like Martin Luther King gave his I have a dream speech.

And now there's no racism or like Obama was President.

And now there's no racism. You know, it's that it's a very convenient story.

It's just a completely false one.

I think you touch on something that is quite common.

I think most people are very guilty of this, especially when allies.

There's no condition that there's a continued legacy of going on, of doing more work, that continued solidarity after the after the fact of gaining a more amount of power.

Exactly. And I think that, like, I mean, when it comes to looking at what's going on in Palestine, like there's like I saw someone say that it will take almost 100 years.

Even bombing stops or Gaza to be rebuilt based on, you know, current economic factors and so on.

And when you have an entire like psychological architecture of oppressing a particular group and then it's like you just put on the news one day and someone tells you it's different.

But you've got entire architecture still there like and like so many of the economic structures that enable that oppression are still in place and haven't shifted.

Like, like, I just don't like the mapping mapping like something like substantive change needs substantive change.

And just getting getting a slightly darker, a slightly more melanated face in the same corridor in the corridors of power.

When you've got like these old manor houses where like the servants quarters are built into the house, you might need to rebuild the house as opposed to just changing the face of the top.

It requires labor, it requires effort. And we have so many examples of where that labor, that the reparation has not been done.

So they can't be healing about recognition, about reparation.

So and about like a, you know, a sea change in the structures.

In light of these struggles, what brings you joy? How did you fall in love with word art, I'd say?

It really largely came from just enjoying reading and enjoying art.

Like I was like, I'm going to do this myself.

I feel like in a very simplistic way.

What brings me the most joy at the moment? I'm reading lots of fantasy again.

Like I'm doing the thing that I used to do when I was a child who literally lived in the library and I'm reading like a book every two days.

I don't know, I had the kind of typical thing of like being a kid that read a lot and like a 10, 15 year period where I didn't read that much.

Or I struggled because social media and distraction.

And now I'm getting back into just reading a lot again, which has been really fun, because I think that you can't be a good writer unless you read.

It's like trying to be a filmmaker by watching films.

Like it just doesn't make sense.

I'm reading lots of Discworld by Terry Pratchett, which is very, it's very British, but it's also very like whimsical and silly and funny.

It's very British.

You mentioned like a few authors.

I think what would you say were the top three books that we should start reading from and who are authored by intersectional bodies that you are feeling mostly inspired by?

So I have to talk about the book I was in.

So I co-wrote and edited a book called Global Black Narratives for the Classroom.

It's a two volume book.

And everyone on the editing team is a black woman, a non-binary person on the writing team and the editing team.

We put it together to put in classrooms to help people like teach about black history.

I'd recommend that.

Intersectional bodies.

So I feel like how I think about Freedom and Liberation, Kindred by Octavia Butler, that entire series, it's I'd put it within the realm of speculative fiction.

But it's this young girl writing her way through an apocalypse and through like an endless crisis where like society is falling apart, it's falling into violence.

And trying to start her own religion gives her and her family and her people a way out of that crisis.

Beautifully written.

And I think that's where like the whole idea of like God is change, like change is constant.

It's something that's to be embraced.

I think you need a dynamic changing faith for a dynamic changing world that also allows you to have hope.

We're in an era of endless crisis, it feels like.

It's one crisis after the other. It's overlapping crises.

It's the climate crisis, it's the pandemic, it's the economic crises, it's the crisis of supply chains, it's endless war.

Crisis of like our feelings about like gender, sexuality, all this other stuff.

But change is the constant here.

And getting used to change and knowing how to move on with it is something that I think we should all try and align ourselves with.

I think that where I situate myself as in speculative or weird fiction, to anything that's like taking something and looking at it from a slightly like non-euclidean angle.

I'm very inspired by fantasy and sci-fi, that's what I kind of grew up reading and grew up watching, watching a lot of Who growing up.

Something that I find exciting is just thinking of all the different ways I can tell a story.

Thinking of like, thinking of just like shaking a box, seeing what comes together and then taking inspiration from the random and from the strange.

Because I think that stories like that, I have some time for literary fiction, for like, you know, those big books, like the New York Times bestsellers.

But when it comes to what I enjoy writing most, it's things that like make me think and feel and just give me interesting, kooky images to work with.

I think that's where like, I think that's kind of speculative thing.

It kind of just aligns with how I see the world.

It's like we've got like, it might seem so boring and so fixed and so static.

But to paraphrase, like, Sidiya Hartman, like the pieces of the world that we want already exist within the world that we have.

And it's just a matter of putting them together differently.

So that's my approach to my writing as well.

So thank you so much for having a conversation with us and just delving into the things that we can really ready upon.

And just as a final ask, what would you say are your takeaways from this conversation today?

I think that there's so much to be gained from like trading information.

Even as we have our own struggles, like even just by knowing what other people are struggling with, like there's so much overlap despite us being in different continents.

And we can take courage from the fact that we aren't alone in dealing with the crisis.

And if we all put our thoughts and our minds and our bodies towards something, we can probably move the needle more than we expect.

What would you say your final words of inspiration to someone who is probably in that struggling boat or they want to really voice out and do something, you know, the interwovenness of our issues?

The first thing that you can do, the most basic unit of social change is a conversation.

So find someone that feels the same and talk to them.

And that will be something that might be inspiring and like nourishing for you.