Yesterday was gender-transgressive poet preacher civil rights lawyer feminist educator and firebrand Pauli Murray’s 109th birthday and now in a time where as Pauli Murray once wrote in a letter to historian Patricia Bell-Scott “my lost causes are being found,” it is also Trans Day of Remembrance, a day where we remember the transcestors that have been taken from us unjustly and too soon, where we remember the total violence of a society that polices, enforces and produces gender as not a form of life, but a constriction on all of our breathing. I am returning to my collage “Heritage” for Pauli Murray today because while the many photographs that exist of Pauli Murray challenge the gender binary and as Pauli said in an interview recording recently shared at Think Tank meeting of artists imagining the Pauli Murray Center here in Durham “you can see I am very androgynous,” Pauli Murray’s resistance of gender norms in daily life and advocacy for themselves as one of the first people to ask medical professionals for hormone replacement therapy is often discarded as a disposable “detail” in a life characterized by easier to appropriate and more acceptable “accomplishments.” Although several brilliant Black trans and queer artists of color came together last year to celebrate the re-issue of Pauli Murray’s volume of poems Dark Testament (you can watch the whole event here) , and just yesterday in honor of Pauli Murray’s birthday genderqueer prophet, artist and preacher (and love of my life) Sangodare Akinwale launched a revolutionary sermonic residency that you can support with your attention and your coins here,
at this time Black trans and gender non-conforming people are not in a place of leadership around the circulation, amplification and application of Pauli Murray’s legacy. That’s what I’m remembering today.
In my collage for Pauli Murray I have placed on Pauli’s shoulder my own middle name “Pauline.” That version of my name is actually from the small name cards that I was given by my high school to use to invite people to my graduation. Pauline is my mother’s name and it was also the name of Pauli Murray’s Aunt Pauline who played a primary role in raising Pauli when Pauli’s mother died. Pauli, whose parents honored this aunt by naming Pauli “Anna Pauline Murray” had a special connection with this Aunt and actually sacrificed a life of greater flexibility and freedom in New York City to come back to North Carolina as a young adult to care for Aunt Pauline. I feel a kinship through the fact that in a way or for a time Pauli Murray and I shared the same middle name, a connection to the women that raised us. And I also placed our name “Pauline” on Pauli’s unsmiling shoulder where one might imagine the “chip” on a shoulder of a person navigating a burden and not pretending to enjoy it. Despite the fact that Pauli, like so many non-binary, trans and gender non-conforming people before and since, chose a fluid name “Pauli” and made that name official in practice and publication there was a way that the ancestral name “Pauline” both held and haunted Pauli’s life. The person Pauli needed to be in honor of the people who raised and cared for them as a child was in some senses a badge of honor and in other senses a heavy burden. The trap of gender itself was so harmful to Pauli during their lifetime that Pauli spent time in mental institutions, a particularly scary predicament given that Pauli’s father was beaten to death by a white guard at the “Hospital for the Negro Insane” in Maryland. And from inside the walls of the mental institution Pauli advocated specifically in well annotated and argued letters to their doctors that their gender had been mis-assigned and supported those letters with some of the most cutting edge medical research of the time, in the early 1930s. Assigned gender and the assigned gendered labor that also falls on people assigned female at birth was a part of Pauli’s heritage. A part of our shared heritage, in fact. Part of the ceremony of the collage “heritage” for me was to imagine Pauli, not only being held by and holding a gendered familial name, but also using the portal of that name as I now hold it to demand another future, a transformed legacy shouldered differently by those who stand on Pauli’s shoulders. More than anything this collage says to me “remember,” reassemble this field of grace that exceeds institutions, boxes, forms, that grows as wild as fierce as Pauli’s glare. Remember. A queerer obligation that grows out these shoulders like brown wings.
I am happy to share that prints of my collage “Heritage” for Pauli Murray and 19 of my other ancestral collages are now available for online purchase in different sizes. All proceeds go to the continued work of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind.
