Read as part of CBR16 Bingo: liberate. Carlotta is coming home from prison, which is some sort of liberation and she’s trying to find her way as a trans woman in the world, seeking her own path to liberation.
I’ve written before about my beef with contemporary writing and how smarmy it’s become. Every villain has to twirl their mustache, every hero has to overcome a specific obstacle to warm the audience’s heart, everything is so boringly Manichaean. There’s little space for complexity, imperfection, growth, discovery, failure. There’s been a genuine attempt to humanize persons who have not had that luxury in mainstream literature before but the problem is that it’s gone so far in the opposite direction as to replace nuance and subtlety with cheerleading, which gives us a story that is imperfect at best and a lie at worst.
One can make the argument that trans women of color should be the ones telling the stories of trans women of color since they’ve been so silenced by big time media; a very unfortunate controversy has hung over past attempts to make a documentary about the life of Marsha P. Johnson in this regard.
James Hannaham is not trans. So authenticity is strained but what I loved about this book is how HUMAN Carlotta is. This is not a sentimentalist story, not one where Carlotta is a protagonist in a hero’s journey about being unjustly incarcerated as a Black woman, having her gender affirmed in prison, and coming home to make her way. She does indeed do all of that but not in a heroic manner: her life sucks. Prison sucks. A gentrified Fort Greene that makes her old neighborhood financially inaccessible to her sucks. And in this raw deal, she’s making her way as she can. Humanely. Imperfectly. Not trying to solve the problem of anti-trans misogynoir or be the story of every Black trans woman. Just trying to be.
And so if you’re going into this looking for a heartwarming story about someone finding their way, give it a hard pass. But if you look for a story that will really engage with character and setting, that will be real and raw, that looks at the Black trans experience not as one of heroic struggle but as one of frustrating adjustment in fits and starts, this book will satisfy. It’s a really good read because it knows its main character and doesn’t make her into someone she is not. The title truly says it all. The character goes from there.