Roc Rochon on the Black Trans Experience
Categories: Interview
Roc Rochon
This year we asked NAB authors about what queer magic means to them, the Black trans experience, activism in 2023, and what it means to move beyond allyship. Read on below for a response by Roc Rochon, co-editor of and contributor to Deconstructing the Fitness Industrial Complex.
“…in the wake of centuries of continuous violence and importantly on-going sites of ancestral struggle and liberation—may we be able to tend to the whole story— each of our individual and collective stories.”
What message do you have for Black trans folks this year or in general?
In the words of the late cultural worker and filmmaker, Toni Cade Bambara, “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well? Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed cause wholeness is no trifling matter.”
Her emphasis on the question regarding the certainty of wanting to be well recognizes the varying experiences of trauma and suffering within society as well as the profound responsibility it takes to address and tend to those wounds. Moreover, there is an emphasis on the process of healing, such that the care work of tending to or moving towards being whole is not an abstract or passive experience that we can wait to observe happen; rather, it takes active intentional embodied work. While healing does not always happen in isolation, the historical and current political realities of noncare and structural violence (i.e., anti-Blackness, transmisogynoir, and governmental responses to COVID-19) placed on Black trans folks often have us isolated for the sake of our own health, safety, and overall well-being. A response of isolation from a threat or danger makes sense at a cellular level even when it is antithetical to our healing in other ways.
As a person who comes from Black Louisianians, collective care is something I grew up practicing and understand as a way of life. This year and going forward, in the wake of centuries of continuous violence and importantly on-going sites of ancestral struggle and liberation—may we be able to tend to the whole story—each of our individual and collective stories.
May you have anchor’s in your life to keep you rooted.
May your life be abundant and resourced.
May you be able to reach out and ask for the help you need.
May you make peace with something in your life.
May you show yourself compassion.
May you receive the care you want and need.
May you remember that rest and being is your birthright.
May you heal in all the places you need to.
May you have ease.
May you be held.
May it be, so it is. Asé.
About the Author
North Atlantic Books
North Atlantic Books (NAB) is an independent nonprofit publisher committed to a bold exploration of the relationships between mind, body, spirit, culture, and nature. Founded in Vermont in 1974 and operating in Berkeley since 1977, NAB has been at the forefront of publishing a diverse range of original books in bodywork and somatics, ecology and sustainability, health and healing, Indigenous cultures and anthropology, psychology and personal growth, social justice and engaged activism, and spirituality and liminality. NAB’s Blue Snake Books imprint is one of the largest sources of internal and historical martial-arts books in the world.
