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Finding your identity in this world is a really tough job. But getting the world to accept that identity is even tougher. Especially, when it’s your gender identity that is in question. Kama La Mackerel had the same problem.
Kama La Mackerel, a transgender from Montreal, struggled to gain acceptance for who she was in spirit.
Kama was born in Mauritius, briefly lived in India and then migrated to Montreal, Canada. She’s a multi-talented woman, who calls herself a poet, a storyteller, a movement builder and a community organizer.
On September 27th, Kama put a picture of herself dressed in a saree that was gifted by her mother, but the Facebook post will move you to tears.
Thank you mom, for gifting me your own favourite sari, and for insisting that i wear it to my best friend’s wedding. my relationship to my family, just like my relationship to femininity, has always been a fraught one, my family having been the first site of punishment that i experienced for transgressing gender norms. these two relationships are tied in a knot that I’ve had to unravel, one alongside each other, over the years:
embroidered in these six yards of silk are the thirty years it took me to find who i am and slowly become who i was meant to be;
hidden in the deep blue of this sari are three decades of navigating rejection and acceptance, punishment and compassion, rage and forgiveness;
threaded in this fabric is a lifetime of silence and dejection, the weaving of the unspoken over my skin, the (un)wrapping of shame around my body;
embedded in this garment are the feet of a young child walking in pain, the hands of a suicidal teenager holding the pieces of a broken heart, the lungs of an insecure adult still learning how to breathe a steady rhythm…
but wrapped around my body is also the gift of peace & acceptance: an offering of love, a request for forgiveness, the recognition of souls beaming truth in the sunlight, and the possibility of re-imagining, re-creating and re-enchanting ourselves, each other and our relationships.
[IG: @kama_la_mackerel]
embroidered in these six yards of silk are the thirty years it took me to find who i am and slowly become who i was meant to be;
hidden in the deep blue of this sari are three decades of navigating rejection and acceptance, punishment and compassion, rage and forgiveness;
threaded in this fabric is a lifetime of silence and dejection, the weaving of the unspoken over my skin, the (un)wrapping of shame around my body;
embedded in this garment are the feet of a young child walking in pain, the hands of a suicidal teenager holding the pieces of a broken heart, the lungs of an insecure adult still learning how to breathe a steady rhythm…
but wrapped around my body is also the gift of peace & acceptance: an offering of love, a request for forgiveness, the recognition of souls beaming truth in the sunlight, and the possibility of re-imagining, re-creating and re-enchanting ourselves, each other and our relationships.
[IG: @kama_la_mackerel]
She finally found acceptance from the two most important people in her life, her parents.
That’s the kind of positivity we need in this world. Are we ready to accept people for who they are? Because it’s been too long they’ve been struggling all on their own.Â
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