The Time That Remains

I: Prologue

In the favela, a singular fiction of control is visible: a necropolitics, a fiction of control of death and the process of death. A fiction that materializes in time, and depends on time for its potency. No mere daydream: it is real, like all the stories in the world, and it works in the world. 

This fiction is not an “invention” but an expression of force. This fiction can drive a process of annihilation or one of emancipation. What defines the separation are precisely the assemblages of life that we take for ourselves in the search for air, for love, for respect, for existence. 

The lifelines here make both sides of this fiction visible: life and death. 

II: The time of murders

It was here since the beginning. I don’t remember exactly when they — the murders — arrived, but I know very well that they were here long before us.

High up in the favela, black mothers collected leftover food to kill the hunger of their children. I must have been about four the day grandma happily said we had rice to eat. She had returned from the street market where she collected stinking fish heads to make a broth to accompany the rice. My mother was sick in bed and looked at grandma with relief: that day we would have food. I was sitting in the back corner of the room trying to hide the rag doll I carried everywhere.

It was in that mix of fear 
                                              (of being discovered with the doll) 
and joy 
                                              (of seeing my mother smile) 
that I heard the shot. 

The first shot was followed by a barrage of more. The deafening noise of the guns killed the joy, so only fear remained. We learned later that a dozen young black boys had been killed, once again by the police. 

Grandma was a tall, strong black woman. Every time there were shootings, she would lay us on the floor and sing praises at the top of her lungs to try to calm us down, and that day she caught me with the doll. But she just hugged me and said that everything would be fine. She knew it, she always knew it.

Grandma once said that a “faggot” had been beaten to death at the entrance to the favela just because she painted her nails.

All the girls in the house, 
my sisters and my cousins, 
started hiding their nail polish from me. 

Another time, my father arrived carrying a newspaper that showed the body of a woman who had a penis lying on the floor, naked and smeared with blood. She was killed because she liked to have long hair and “dress like a woman,” the newspaper said.

My dad rubbed the newspaper in my face and 
asked if I wanted to end up like this. 
The next day, he took me for a haircut. 

My heart pounded and I couldn’t block out the pain of my hair falling over my lap as the barber’s machine moved back and forth across my head.

I wept.

There was death everywhere. Grandma used to say that they came from the time of slavery, when big boats invaded our coast and stole lands, trafficked people from a faraway place, and brought them here. She spoke with hatred, with a hatred that only those who were hungry could express. She wanted it to change. I could feel her vibrate with the desire for transformation: she yearned for a different destiny for me. She knew that, despite everything, I was capable.

I was afraid, and they were afraid for me. They were afraid the killers would take their sweet, smart kid away just because she liked
            dolls, 
                    painted nails, 
                                and her curly hair.

III: Dying young

It all started with one finger. I died at that moment, but the truth is that I would die many more times. Often. 

An adult neighbor said everything would be fine and wanted to show me something that only girls know. He took off his clothes and masturbated in front of me. Then he stuck a finger in my anus while covering my mouth to keep me from screaming.

                                            I was 7 years old.

At ten, a man stuck his penis in me while threatening to kill me. The warm blood running down my legs is one of my most haunting memories.

                                            I cried my own death.

My friend Carol was shot in the head when she was 15. Her parents had kicked her out of their house at 10 because she told them she was a girl. She had been prostituting herself since she was 11.  

                                             We died together on the day of her death,  
                                                      and I couldn’t even bury her.  

We die young, every day. In Brazil, in the favela, transsexuality is not a crime, but being transgender is punishable by death, especially at the hands of "good men," at the hands of the "men of God."

IV: The protective shell of time

The crust over these wounds hides deep sores. This same scar tissue also makes us stronger. We will create futures with the deafening force of the desire to be, and the time will come when living will no longer be surviving. 

With our “different” bodies, we will find our way out of this labyrinth, and we will invent a time when 
                     fear
                              anguish
              solitude
                                         death 
will no longer be our companions, but remnants of a distant past.

We will sew a kind of unbreakable bond with life and untie ourselves from death. We will be the architects of a time when joy reverberates from the brightness of our souls and, in trans communion, we will rise to the limits of heaven to proclaim the fullness of our ancestors of the future. That’s the time we have left, the time that remains, and it’s here and now.

I have learned with my mother and grandmother that hate is pedagogical. I learned from these two black women who faced so much rancor, hunger, and aggression that the hardness of love is the flame of transformation. They never knew romantic love, those that we see and learn from books or films, from tales of heroes or enchanted princes in which we are always saved from the tragic fates they have invented for us. On the contrary, they showed me through fear and anger how to protect myself and also how to imagine a future where I can build structures for my healing.

V: Afterword

We won’t lose anymore. We will not accept “acceptance;” we will stand firm. We will be intolerant of hate and the governments which espouse hate. We will rise as guides of the black light that floods the world. As Jota Mombaça says: “May victory reward those who have waged war without loving it.” We were not its creators, but it is too late to abandon the fields of war created without us and in which we must fight for life.

From now on, we will be the designers of our own times.

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Fragments of Grief
Sophia-Layla Afsar

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Mehrub Moiz Awan