- So can you just talk about how you feel right now?
- I am trying to be present
here in my body
and to the people I want to talk to.
We spend so much time of our life in defense mode
that it almost becomes a comfortable place
to be in. - Mhmm.
- I believe that anger
is a tool as well. - Mhmm.
- And is a tool that, as women,
as women of color, as black women,
we really need to know how to master
and it's very easy to be mastered by it.
And so my whole life, I feel, is like perfecting
how to pick up that tool,
use it and then let it go
'cause it's only a tool.
It's not me.
- Can you talk about what your style says about you?
- As much as it is self-expression,
it's also protection.
I'm brown, I have curves, I'm small.
And so my body is always deemed less professional.
It's always deemed criminal.
I go to a department store
and I am followed around by security
while I'm being asked if they have the t-shirt in small.
Yeah, right?
So there's the thing where they assume that I work there
at the same time they assume that I'm there to steal.
There's a thing about this,
pajama scruffy looking chic that I cannot afford.
That scruffy chic is afforded
only to white women, skinny people.
And I'm light-skinned as well.
I'm always trying
to utilize my privilege in public space
where I'm with my darker-skinned family.
You know what I mean?
So if the police come,
I know that I'm the one that needs to step up
because they're going to criminalize me less.
And so when I'm getting ready to go outside,
all of that is going through my mind and
it's a lot.
It's a lot.
Yeah.
- Can you take off your hat?
- Yeah.
- Or do you want to take off your jacket 'cause you're hot?
- Yeah. - Yeah, jacket's fine.
- Can you explain your exact heritage, your exact--
- Yeah, so my father is from Bahia, Salvador in Brazil
and he's black.
And my mom is,
was from Buenos Aires.
And she was,
again, in Buenos Aires, in Argentina,
she functions as white,
she would not perform as white in Europe, right?
I was the Afro-descendant only daughter of
a single mother
who was dealing with mental health
and she committed suicide when I was five.
I was away with my godmother when it happened.
I do remember the afternoon she sent me away to my godmother
and I knew,
I knew I was never going to see her again.
- You just had an instinct?
- I just knew
and I was throwing tantrums
and I was like, "No, I don't want to go."
I was then adopted by my aunt, so her sister,
who lovingly took me in
but also she had her own trauma
related to the dying of her sister.
She was white, she is white.
And so my blackness was never something
that was considered in my healing.
And so when that happened,
it sort of got added to my lack of
guidance, my lack of actual representation,
seeing myself in friends or in family
or in TV or in ads.
I have six other brothers and sisters
who live in Minneapolis.
And so no, they're my half brothers and sisters.
And I didn't-- - Through your dad?
Through your dad? - Yeah.
And I didn't know them until February this year.
I had been in touch with them
through the internet for years,
perhaps like 10 years now.
But I never,
I had never met them physically
and that was a whole science fiction trip
because you're literally in front of somebody
who has part of you as well.
The pitch and melody of a laugh
and you're like, "Wait.
"I thought that would be cultural,
"the way that I impose my voice,
"it's linked to where I grew up
"but actually we have the same laugh.
"What is that?"
And that actually makes you think about
the ancestors that are running through us.
Being like an Afro-diasporic person
and having that destiny
where I'm literally separated from my black family.
To be able to encounter that
and to be able to forgive my father
was me remembering who I am.
- Mhmm, it's amazing.
- Yeah.
It's this thing where I would have loved
to spend two weeks with them
but I only had three days
because I had to work.
The fact that I never met my brothers and sisters
was also because I could not afford to do that trip before.
It took me 10 years to amass enough clout
to be booked in America
so I could go and meet my brothers and sisters
and talk to my father and forgive him.
And so it's really hard to stay cool
in front of that,
when you're seeing other people
white folks that can move globally
and have no barriers
and have no problems
getting to wherever place.
- Mhmm, have the privilege of traveling anywhere,
seeing anybody and staying with
whomever you want. - And healing.
Healing is definitely a privilege.
So I have footage of my father
seeing me for the first time
and he didn't know that I was going to be there.
We went to his house and he was in the bathroom
and he came out of the bathroom
and almost fell on the floor
because I was there magically.
- When was the last time you saw him?
- Last time I saw him was when I was 20.
- 10 years ago, right?
- Yeah, I had a birthday party
and so he got drunk.
And he was riotous.
He was looking for problems
and he was playing out his own trauma
of being a black man abused by society,
criminalized, being thrown in prison, et cetera, et cetera.
That comes out when you're intoxicated.
- So then you didn't talk after?
- And so I
stopped talking to him.
10 years later I was like,
"Yo, you were a dead Negro.
"You could have been dead so easily.
"And actually you survived
"and you made all of these beautiful children.
"Thank you.
"Thank you for actually being able to survive.
"That must have been so much work for you."
And when I was 18, 20,
I didn't have
a clear image
of how much work it takes to survive,
just to survive.
Not even to thrive.
Just basics.
And that doesn't take away his toxic masculinity
but it put me in a place
where I can,
I can transform it.
When my mom died and I was adopted by my aunt and my uncle,
there was this pressure of,
"You come from a sick tree,
"so you really need to watch out all of your tendencies."
- What did they mean by that?
- My mom, my aunt was constantly scared
that I would become a drug addict,
that I would become mentally unstable,
that I would get pregnant early,
that I would fail at life and in a way,
her strategy and her own pain and trauma
was to be like, "You are no victim.
"You are somebody that needs to fight
"these tendencies really hard.
"So you better go out there and fight."
And I am thankful for that
because it's definitely taken me places
but it's also been an incredibly difficult thing
to dismantle in myself.
- Can you talk about the ways
in which you heal yourself through pleasure?
- I mean, the first step is to be able to acknowledge
that you are in pain.
So often we learn to numb the pain.
We're made to,
"Keep going, yeah.
"Keep going, keep going."
Whatever.
And the first thing to recover that pleasurable
relationship to yourself,
to your body, to your soul,
is to acknowledge that whenever you're in pain,
something is wrong.
When you have a painful period you go to the doctor
and the doctor is like, "Oh, that's normal.
"Have some Ibuprofen."
That's not normal.
I do not need to numb the symptoms.
I need to go and seek for the root of this pain.
I remember being 15 and starting my sex life
but being told by the doctor,
"Oh, let me give you some pills so you don't get pregnant."
And I remember being like, "Hold on", 15,
"Hold on, so you're telling me
"I'm going to have to take a pill a day
"for the rest of my life just because I'm having sex?
"I'm not going to be depending on this pill
"to be sexually active.
"What needs to change is the way we have sex."
The ways that we are teaching sexuality
are extremely sex-repressive and heterosexual.
We are talking to children about, "Sex is bad.
"Sex is dangerous.
"You can get pregnant and you can get sick."
There's so many ways to protect yourself.
As a horny person, I was like,
"This cannot be wrong.
"This is God's gift.
"Why is there so much"--
- Shame. - Shame and fear
and guilt around this?
Birth is something that is, again,
deemed to be painful,
"You will give birth in pain."
And so there's so many things that could be done.
Like for example,
stimulating clitorally people that are giving birth
to help relax that whole channel.
We would be having people
that are also receiving sexual pleasure
to give birth.
There is ecstatic birth.
We can aspire to that.
- I was just going to ask you,
your perspective on your mom and forgiveness.
Was there anger?
Do you feel like you've come to a place
of forgiveness of that?
- My mom is still vibrating here
because she was worried about me when she died
and so it's a constant job of saying,
"It's okay, I'm okay.
"You can go, Mom.
"It's okay, you can leave.
"I love you, I forgive you.
"I'm sorry and thank you."
Any water that the body wants to shed
is blessed and should flow freely.
But I have a hard time with my tears.
I cry really only when it's literally the last,
like I'm at the bottom, bottom, bottom and I'm like,
and I sometimes wish I could cry a little bit early
just to release.
- When do you feel the most beautiful?
- What really makes me feel
ugly or not enough or too much
is the gaze.
This white supremacist,
sex-repressive,
totalitarian, colonial gaze.
And sadly,
one of the biggest successes
of this whole colonial mindset
is to make you internalize that gaze
and look at yourself with that gaze.
Take a selfie and be like,
"She looks fat, she looks this.
"She's not toned, she's not this."
What was beauty before mirrors?
The most difficult is to say I have value.
I am valid
and that value is not because of the job that I have.
It's not because of the clothes that I'm wearing.
It's not next to who am I sitting.
I have value in myself
because I'm alive and I have kept myself alive,
I have value.
And so in those moments is where I feel
the beauty of it all,
and therefore of myself.
- Why in your body,
in your skin,
in your journey,
why is it a good place to be?
- Through this body,
I get to heal.
Through this body, I get to connect
with the folks that
empower me, that I empower.
And also look at this glow!
(laughing)
I mean, yeah.
I don't know.
Sometimes it's a good place to be because it is.
You know?
It is.
- Thank you. - Thank you so much.
- That was extraordinarily amazing.
- Thank you.
- Thank you so so,
so so much. - Worth the wait.
- I think that is
such a gift
that we're together going to be able to give
to the world.
- I hope so.
- I know so.
I know so.