Daniella Fadjoh (she/they)
Are We Ready to be Held in Our Black Queer Dreams?
Black Radical Imagination Essay Contest: THIRD PRIZE
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Are we ready for the world-collapsing, possibility-seeking, and trust-falling that liberation demands of us? In her book, Unapologetic: A Black Queer and Feminist Mandate for our Movements, Charlene Carruthers asks those invested in collective liberation if we are ready to win? And I ask, just as importantly, are we ready to give in to the queerness of our Black dreams?

In our dreams, we encounter iterations of ourselves as whole beings: angry, indulgent, euphoric, terrified, and wandering. The subconscious takes over for our trauma-ridden minds and makes way for our most ancient, primal desires. For Black people, dreaming is an escape from violent realities that devastate us, to the embodied musings of what our individual and collective liberations could feel like. And for Black liberation to be realized, our dreams need to be understood as honest places of ingenuity from which our governance can fully hold our communities, if we allow them. We must see our Black queer dreams as deserving of our protection because they reflect the inherent expansiveness that Black people carry, and grounded in deep yearning, struggle and contradiction, they act as premonitions and everchanging blueprints towards liberation. 

We dream to escape a reality characterized by harm at the hands of institutions, our own communities and loved ones through articulations of anti-blackness, and envision conditions in which harms such as these are tended to and no longer replicated. Carruthers tells us that “freedom-dreaming is one of the most significant things any human can do” and for Black people, dreams are how we have summoned and maintained our humanity, while creating spaces where all of us can be held (29). To dream is as integral to Black life as is breathing. In our dreams, we imagine truer ways of loving, we are known in the ways we want to be and wander worlds where we experience care and ease, as it feels right to us. We envision (and move through) a reality antithetical to the nonsense that is white supremacy. No matter how we do so, in our sleep or wide awake, aloud or written: dreaming ignores inhibitions and follows curiosity, counter to what whiteness demands of us. And in acknowledging the range in ways Blackness exists outside the “norm”, our Black dreams are therefore inherently queer, and are capable of carrying us how we want our relationships and systems to: always allowing room for more.

After enduring an election cycle during which our ancestors’ dreams were reduced to participating in a colonial enterprise that imposes violence on Black bodies, it is imperative that for our dreams to guide us anywhere, they cannot stem from a place of lack. Instead, we must lean further into their inherent queerness and interrogate the possibilities we have not yet considered and believe them to be true. Like Carruthers, I had a lot of opportunities for growth offered to me by Black people and their visions of abundance. Black people, particularly non-men, were always my greatest examples of freedom and were always inviting me to be more myself, and live as though I am already free. Carruthers notes that her leadership is the product of the freedom-dreaming of Black feminists, prison abolitionists, queer and trans activists (59). Her words make clear that we are indebted to the people who always dreamt more for us than we considered possible, including their own existences. We cannot build towards a present for any of us, predicated in the denial that we were not held in the dreams of Black mutiply-marginalized peoples. And if our Black radical imaginations are to be effective, they must be informed by the complexities of our present, and challenged by our dreams, always believing in the unknown.

I ask the question, “are we ready to be held in our Black queer dreams?” because in understanding how our Blackness is queer and how our freedom-dreams are the basis of our radical imaginations, our ability to fall into our dreams and lean into queerness becomes how we honor ourselves and others. Our oppression works through numerous facets to keep us from being human, and our willingness to be held by and hold others in our dreams is telling of our commitment to our own humanity, and others’. 

For me, the question, “are we ready to win?”, was as a personal charge, not simply asking if I was ready to do the work necessary to overthrow oppressive systems, but if I believed in the power of my dreams, and saw myself as deserving of creating something more. Being “ready to win” means that we have enough faith in our desires to listen. But, oftentimes we restrict and ignore our dreams, inevitably denying ourselves our humanity. This question forces us to think of what we have yet to unlearn, so we can want more for ourselves, and find comfort in the destruction of our small stakeholds of power for the sake of others’ protection. Liberation will not be realized until we are willing to trust what we need and follow it - and we cannot afford to make any concessions in our imaginations before they meet the world because when we dream, it is never just for ourselves. Black trans and queer people have always been willing to hold all of us in their dreams, despite the many ways in which we have relegated them to the edges of conventional imagination. The extreme margins are the living dreamspaces for our Black radical imaginations and have been maintained by trans, queer, poor, disabled, fat and young Black folks who have prioritized their embodied pleasures and have the most practice living out their dreams under the most constraints.

In a world in crisis where our existences are stifled by colonial constructions and capitalism severs our connections to joy and intuition - we cling to our dreams. Carruthers not only gives us permission to dream throughout her book but notes dreams as essential for they are what save us time and time again. And our willingness to lean into our desires with the same trust as others will bring us closer to living in a liberated present.