On a Thursday night in February, 50-plus people gathered on Zoom to celebrate the launch of Dr. Kai Marshall Green’s new memoir, A Body Made Home: They Black Trans Love.
The love for Green was palpable through the screen. The launch party began with tributes to Black History Month — a speech by the late civil rights icon Rev. Jesse Jackson and a powerful rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” — as Dr. Green’s friends, colleagues, students, and comrades joined the meeting. With grace and gratitude, Dr. Green greeted the group and went over the agenda, complete with breakout rooms and interactive activities. “Ya’ll are such organizers!” one participant commented in the chat. Dr. Green then thanked his friend Je Naè for facilitating the launch with him, saying: “She teaches me to be alive and Black, and how that life is always centered in healing.”
Dr. Green often speaks in poetry. An Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Delaware, they are a a shape-shifting Black Queer Feminist nerd; an Afro-Future, freedom-dreaming, rhyme-slinging dragon slayer in search of a new world; a scholar, poet, facilitator, and filmmaker. Green’s work combines Black feminist theory, performance studies, trans studies, visual media, and activism to investigate Black queer forms of self-representation and communal methods of political mobilization.
His new book recounts his lifelong transition from “Baby Girl” to “Black Trans Man,” their current and future self. Laced through his accounts of traversing discrimination, misunderstanding, and abuse from family, society, and academia are experiments in letter writing and biomythography, continuing in the literary tradition of Audre Lorde. Through A Body Made Home, Green explores the long arc of transition as a Black queer person in America, recasting visions of home, narratives of metamorphosis, and dreams of freedom.
I was lucky enough to take a class with Dr. Green as a graduate student and recently reconnected with him to talk about this new memoir. His reverence for Black trans, queer, and feminist theory and literature is evident in the way he writes, teaches, and organizes.
Memoir “is one of the earliest genres of writing that I really fell in love with,” they tell me. “In seventh grade, when I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, that always stayed with me as like, I want to do something like this.”
A Body Made Home plays with the genre and form of the memoir. Rather than a linear exploration of his life, Green’s chapters explore significant moments, concepts, feelings, and relationships. The first third of the book is written in the third person, “more like a novel or fairy tale,” Green tells me. In these sections, Green recounts his childhood relationships, joys, and traumas through the lens of particular characters, including “Baby Girl,” “Black Mama, “Aunty G,” “Daddy,” and “Cousin X.”
The writing in this section is searingly tender and poetically dense. A sample passage:
“Black Mama still believe in love and God and Jesus and faith. Black Mama tell Baby Girl, “If you pray, your prayers can bring Daddy home. You can save him.” And Baby Girl believe that that she can save people, something she have to unbe&uncome, a savior complex. Brother 2 say, “Yo’ daddy take everything. Yo daddy take. My daddy bring gifts. Yo daddy on drugs. My daddy just a liar like normal daddies. You look just like yo daddy, like he done spit you out.” Baby Girl belly feel heavy with the weight of carrying Daddy deeds. And she hate the feeling of being made of Daddy spit since his breath always smell like stale beer. Baby Girl imagine herself a cloud of stale ale, and she don’t like it. She don’t want Daddy face on her, but everyone keep reminding her of what she carry that she got no choice over. She look in the mirror and see the face of the man who steal Christmas. She lost, don’t know how to not feel responsible for all the things Daddy do. She vow to stay by Black Mama and take care of what Daddy neglect. Baby Girl can sense, Black Mama too, come here carrying feelings, mostly people just say she crazy though, say sometimes she just lose it, and it’s not alright. They call her schizophrenic, bi-polar, a breakdown in nervousness, but Baby Girl always call her home. She always know how to find Black Mama by the distinct jingle of her keys, a chime sound that make be&coming lost not so scary anymore.”
“This whole new emotional world opened up for me in terms of my empathetic capacity for the people that I was writing about, the people who are my loved ones, my friends. I could detach in a particular way that I couldn’t with the ‘I’,” Green says of writing in the third person. “It actually allowed me to get a little bit closer and more intimate with folks and their stories, their dreams, their possible hurts, disappointments.”
Green’s writing purposefully deviates from “standard” (white) American English. “I have a particular love for Black Vernacular English. That’s kind of home to me,” Green says. “I’m speaking back to an academic system, an educational world that constantly disciplined my body via my language and thinking about how harmful that was. What does it mean to cut somebody’s tongue out, to tell them that the way you’re saying whatever it is you’re saying is not worthy?”
For Green, it was important to challenge the Western philosophical style through which academic theory is usually written. “There’s all these theoretical propositions I’m making in the book,” they say. “It’s not in a language that we would consider ‘academic theory’ but it is what Barbara Christian would call theorizing.” Black feminist scholar Barbara Christian powerfully argued that “people of color have always theorized – but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic.” Green’s book “is really invested in doing that kind of work.”
Green’s writing transitions to the first person perspective later in the memoir. “I am ready to step into my I now,“ they write in the book’s second part. Here, Green traces the forces that have shaped his adulthood, including his experiences in higher education, the evolution of his gender identity and sexuality, and his diagnosis with bipolar disorder. Green’s relationship to their body is a central theme that ties these topics together.
“What I’m really trying to reckon with in the book [is] a desire to feel safe in your body. My body is shifting and changing in a lot of ways and it’s not necessarily under my control,” they say.
A Body Made Home resists cliche disability recovery narratives and normative tropes of trans storytelling. This makes for a book that embraces process, change, and transformation — what Green refers to as “be&coming” — rather than neat resolutions. They tell me:
“Trans people force people to contend with change in ways that don’t make them feel comfortable. We want things to stay the same because it makes us feel steady and sturdy and stable. But everything’s changing. and we know that everything is changing. When you have blatant reminders of that change, it can be very very scary and it can feel destabilizing…I think change is the big overarching theme of the book and change is hard. Change is painful, especially when sometimes you don’t have control. You just have to respond to something and deal with that change. And so, yes, it is important for me to give a trans narrative that is not one that begins with ‘I was born in the wrong body.’ That doesn’t dismiss those who have that narrative. It just says ‘yes, and.’ It doesn’t make me less trans. It doesn’t make you more trans. There are differences, which just means we need to build stronger relationships because we can’t make assumptions based on our shared identities.”
Green’s work often is interested in “documenting an archive or a history of [his] life” as he’s simultaneously living it. Later in the Zoom book launch, Green shared two short experimental films that complement the book, each a meditation on transformation and the body, especially in relation to their experiences with bipolar disorder.
After each film, Zoom participants were encouraged to share thoughts and reactions to contribute to the conversation. I was particularly moved by the second video, which features a conversation between Green and their dad about a chapter of the book. The joy and pride in their father’s voice is audible; he sounds moved to be a character in the project and grateful for the opportunity to comment on his representation within it.
The intention through which Green conducts his work is clear in all these choices, from the way he leads a Zoom meeting to the way he centers his community in all levels of his art, activism, and scholarship. This love for community — what Green refers to as They Black Trans Love — is woven throughout the memoir.
A powerful exploration of the body, trauma, and transformation, A Body Made Home invites readers to love ourselves as a practice of community building, and, following Green’s example, to embrace the “perpetual be&unbecoming” in the stories of our lives.
