It’s amazing the people who you come across along your life journey.
While I was tabling for a youth LGBT pride event in DC, I encountered Dane Edidi, a trans woman with an ebullient personality who is breaking barriers by being the first trans woman of color to publish a novel of fiction called Yemaya’s Daughters.
The descriptive imagery in this book is astounding, and I am positive that you will enjoy reading a sample of the first chapter. Hope you enjoy my interview with her below.
INTERVIEW WITH DANE EDIDI
1. What are some of the misconceptions people have when they meet you?
When people meet me, they see many surface forms of the identities that are interconnected to who I am. They see my transness, they see my color, they see I am a woman etc. What they hold in their hearts, minds, and experiences about those identities varies. One thing I hear a lot is many people are surprised that I speak so clearly about my feelings concerning race, colonization, slavery, privilege and gender.
2. Tell us about your book and its characters.
My book is called Yemaya’s Daughters. I am Nigerian, Cuban, and Cherokee and I practice religions not steeped in the Abrahamic Tradition. In the Lucumi spiritual tradition there is an emanation of Divinity called Yemoja. Yemaya is the Cuban name for Yemoja. She presides over Motherhood, all bodies of water. She is called the Mother of Fishes.
The main character is a Trans Priestess named Inanna born into a culture of women. She is a diviner, and a storyteller and leavers her people to venture to America. It is her mission to bring about an era of Love. Yemaya’s Daughters is about Inanna being who she is and struggling with trying to love a world that wants to erase her. It follows how her life from infancy to adulthood interweaving the tales of her sisters and Maryam (Mary the mother of Jesus), whose story reflects a revolutionary mother’s struggle to give birth to a movement.
3. Who is your audience for your book? And why did you decide to write a book that intersects African Goddesses to gender identity?
When I began writing, my primary audience were all people. I know it seems cliché, but the truth of the matter is that we all need stories like this. At the heart of this tale is a trans woman leaving a society that celebrates her and entering into a world that tells her she can’t exist. Yemaya’s Daughters was my way of taking back ownership of trans women’s stories and telling my sisters that our stories are ours: we have a right to tell them; we belonged, and we belong. I wrote this story because I need both our cis brothers and sisters, family and friends those who love us and those who think we don’t have a right to be here that before colonization we were thought of as special. We were celebrated as Divine.
4. Why did you choose to focus on goddesses?
I choose to use many different Goddesses. The main character, for example, is named Inanna. Inanna was the Great Goddess of Sumer and we have proof that she created holy vocations for LGBTQ people. Trans Priestesses were honored in her temples and often acted alongside and often interchangeably with their cis priestess sisters. This is true for many cultures that do not practice Abrhamic traditions or more correctly cultures that practice their indigenous religions. I included many Goddesses because the God’s stories (often) do not reinforce how amazing it is to be a woman. I love the feminine aspect of Deity and it is important for us to again reclaim and celebrate that truth, not just in Ethereal matters but more importantly in each other.
5. Is the gender identity portion a strong focus in your book? Do you fear that people may tokenize you based on being the first transgender of color to publish this type of book?
Womanhood is very important in Yemaya’s Daughters. I wanted to tell women’s stories, all women because we don’t have enough of them. So all of them whether they be heterosexual, bi, or lesbian have something to say and a piece of their souls to bear. Inanna may be the main character but her sisters’s stories shape her own.
I don’t think I could become the token anything and if I am, I am not doing my job. One of my missions is to open doors for others particularly trans people of color. I want to let us, and the world know that all the stories within us are valid, that our gift of writing is just that a gift and we will support one another to make sure all of our literary voices are heard. I want there to be a class that looks at the writings of women of color- all women of color. I stop a descent into tokenism by always reminding the world of the many literary voices of trans people that have yet to be heard or celebrated and in turn celebrate them and speak about them.
6. What are some exciting components of your book? Are there certain portions of your book that delve deep into metaphors or imagery?
There are so many exciting elements, some of my favorite parts are when you see the deep love between Inanna and her Priestess sisters. Also Inanna has a best friend who is a cis gender man, their connection is incredible; the genuine tenderness in those scenes are so refreshing, but I also love Maryam’s sections. She is different than the blue veil wearing dove. She is a revolution, a single mother who raises a god. I based her on the many single mothers I saw growing up in the ghetto. This Maryam is more than a vessel for a divine seed, she is a way of life.
The book takes place in many different time periods. Maryam is dealing with a colonized Nazzareth (by the Romans). Inanna although coming from a place untouched by colonization is dealing with a Colonized America when she decides to go there. There are other stories she tells of her sisters that deal with colonist Africa, etc.
It is essential for me to discuss colonization because as I speak out about violence against the trans community; I have to understand that the hatred of Trans women and the LBG community is not something indigenous people intrinsically have. It is something that was beat into us by slavery, and colonization of minds, bodies, religious selves, and lands etc. In order to undue the lie that many Africans and People of Color (around the world) now carry as truths in the form of Transphobia, Misogyny, and Homophobia we must pin point how/where we embodied the lie in the first place. We must fight by speaking to not just our own traumas but ancestor trauma as well.
7. Where do you hope to be within the next 5 years?
In five years; I want my musical Roaring which is about a trans star in the 1920s to have been playing on Broadway. I want to be married to an incredible and loving man. I want to have my work being performed all across the world. And I want to be standing in a space of love and able to see all my trans sisters and brothers are able to live long, happy, productive and prosperous lives and that the world itself will no longer allow for violence against anyone to be something we simply accept as a way of life or a rite of passage.
I want to be happy. I want to be love.
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