by GABRIELLE BELLOT
Frank Benson, Juliana, 2014-2025. 3D printed rapid prototype for bronze casting, polyurethane acrylic paint, Corian base. Edition of 4 + 1 A/P PHOTO/Copyright of the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Sadie Coles HQ, London
A few months before I came out as a transgender woman, I found myself for perhaps the last time on the island of my childhood, the island I would soon feel unable to return to safely. My mother and I were driving down a winding mountain road in our Pathfinder, edging along a precipice flecked with mango trees and clusters of green bamboos that shuddered like bones, to watch a performance of our great Dominican playwright Alwin Bully’s The Ruler. A close adaptation of a Vincentian novel by G. C. H. Thomas, Ruler in Hiroona, Bully’s play was first performed in 1976 by the People’s Action Theatre, four years after the book’s publication. Now, decades later, it was being staged again, this time in Dominica’s Arawak House of Culture, as part of the annual Nature Island Literary Festival. The play, I knew, would chronicle the rise and fall of a corrupt politician, the leader of the mythical island, Hiroona. Yet what was on my mind that night were other politics, a very different rise and fall: my own. My head began to throb. The girl I had suppressed for over twenty years wanted out. I wondered for a moment if I could make it through the play without losing my mind.
The dark street outside the theater was humming with voices, bodies dim floating shapes under the orange of the streetlights and the indigo of the approaching night. A cock strutted down the uneven sidewalk, glancing at me before disappearing into the gutter behind a car’s wheel. There was excitement in the air, many of the attendees doubtless curious to see if the play would satirize our prime minister, a ruler embroiled in controversy. Through the chatter of the crowd, I chanted to myself like a witch: You are not an abomination, you can live on and Shut up, fool, you know you cannot be a woman here. On an island that, like so many other former British colonies, had inherited a legacy by which male homosexual activity is criminalized and transgenderism often swept under the rug of “biblical abomination,” I felt a sense of deep divide. Was it worth it to live as my true self even if it meant losing familial support, the privilege of leaving and returning to my home easily?
I knew, as the crowd rose to acknowledge the entrance of the president and his guards, that standing atop a mountain and shouting into the wind, I am transgender, I am a woman, I am not an abomination, I want to be accepted here, as I am, would be a cry that would fall on so many deaf ears. A cry that, when the wind carried it from village to village and house to home, would be answered with ridicule and abandonment at best and with fists and cutlasses and broken glass at worst.
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