Trans-Queer Ghanaian Outsider Volume I: PROXY
by Famehodiɛ Ɔkyeame
Trans-Queer Ghanaian Outsider is a protest art project that seeks to visibilize, name, and validate Trans, Non-Binary, and Gender Nonconforming Ghanaian identities. It seeks to counteract the prevailing white supremacist notion that African-ness, Blackness, and Trans-Queerness cannot exist within one congruent intersection. Such a naming is crucial for Gender Expansive Ghanaians - and Gender Expansive Folks throughout the African continent, the Americas, Europe, and the wider diaspora - who live under social, political, and cultural colonial systems that are intent on erasing us from existence. My ultimate goal with this project is to create spaces of belonging for myself and other Trans Ghanaians/Africans by reminding us that we are necessary and valid in all that we are, while naming and critiquing the impacts of white supremacy, colonization, and cis-hetero norms on the lives of Ghanaian Trans-Queer peoples.
PROXY, the first volume in this project, is a series of photographs in which foods, objects, and materials that are commonly used in Ghana are placed in various yonic and phallic arrangements.
The use of these common Ghanaian foods, cloths, and material items as a ‘proxy’ to the spectrum of (non)(multi)(trans)(a)gendered African identities serves as a satiric rebuke of the fear that transphobic/queerphobic Ghanaians have of the Trans/Queer community. That identities that are so integral, nourishing, and omnipresent within our communities are instead othered as “unusual” - and even feared to be “infectious”, as if one can “catch” being gay or trans - is at worst murderous and at best tragically ludicrous. How can one be so irrationally afraid of the source of one's own lifeblood?
The arrangements also speak to the often violent, painful, and genocidal ways that trans/gnc/enby ghanaians are forced to live next to/outside of/sideways around - ‘proxy’ to - the truths of who we are. Instead of living within and among ourselves in safety and love, societal prejudice and anti-LGBTQI legislation displace us from our own bodies, from our expansive identities, and from our kinfolk communities.
Thirdly and even most importantly, these arrangements celebrate and recall Ghanaian and Black African fluidity in ways that disorders, interrupts, blasphemes, rebels against, invalidates, and moves beyond the harmful ways in which Ghanaians (and other Afro-communities) have been taught by white supremacy to binarize our own Black Black bodies and genders. Each arrangement is birthed from the affirmation that our Ghanaian-ness and African-ness do not exist in opposition to our Expansive Fluidities; that it is actually because we are Ghanaian that we are so divinely Limitless. Each arrangement is a love letter to myself and to my siblings-of-shared-intersectional identities to revel in all we are. It is a reminder for us to hold firm in the knowledge that Ghanaian-ness, that African-ness, that Blackness, cannot exist in freedom without the underlying core of sacred expansiveness and choiceful fluidity that Trans-Queer Africans embody - and as well, that Trans-Queerness cannot exist in liberation without honoring its African-indigenous roots.
Whether we existed or not before colonialism; whether current society acknowledges us or not: we are now. We are. Divinely, powerfully, beautifully.
Community Guidelines & Asks
Kindly DO NOT take pictures or post photos of Famehodiɛ Ɔkyeame’s work without their explicit consent. This includes the art pieces in this and any other series included in this exhibit.
This work is meant to be experienced by Black and African peoples. If you are non-Black and have encountered this work without Famehodiɛ Ɔkyeame’s explicit invitation, know that this story is not for your consumption. Kindly do move on along.
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Famehodiɛ Ɔkyeame is a displaced trans, queer, and nonbinary Ghanaian creative. A child of the Akyem-Akan people, they use narrative art as a tool of protest against the colonial erasure, criminalization, othering, and pathologization of Trans Ghanaian peoples.