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FIGURE 1. Mary Jones (Rowin Amone) stares into a bowl of water as Jones,
narrating over the image, recounts the story of the Flying Africans. Tourmaline,
Salacia (2019). 16 mm, digital video, sound. Frame grab.
Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York.

77
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Coming Undone Aesthetics of Brokenness

T
he dominant aesthetic form of visual artist
Aesthetics of Brokenness Tourmaline’s 2019 video installation Salacia is of
fragmentation, or what I am calling an aesthetic
in Tourmaline’s Salacia of brokenness. Salacia produces a fictionalized imag-
ining of Mary Jones (fig. 1) — a black trans sex worker
living in New York City who became infamous when
DAREN FOWLER she was arrested in 1836 for stealing the wallets of her
white, male clients. Salacia imagines Jones living  in
a black queer and trans commune in (a not named)
Seneca Village, a settlement of landowning African
Americans that was seized by the government and
turned into Central Park, before her arrest and impris-
onment in Sing Sing, represented in the film by using
a former prison on Governor’s Island.
The film mixes fictionalized 16mm film and digital
images of Jones — some are totally imagined, while
others are speculative re-­creations of known events in
Jones’s life — along with archival video images of trans
activist Sylvia Rivera. In the sequence directly follow-
ing the title card, the film shows a fictionalized scene
of Mary Jones’s queer and trans communal family as
they live and play in Seneca Village (fig. 2).1 The form
of this sequence is built through three distinct im-
ages. In the background is a muddy and well-­used
dirt road that appears frozen. At the top and bottom
of this background image, however, the film strip is
made visible, marking where this present frame once
was and where it is going next. Sitting on top of this
background are two smaller frames. In the left frame,
there are two black women talking and laughing as

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DOI 10.1215/26923874-10300486    © 2023 Daren Fowler

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This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-­NC-­ND 4.0).
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An example of the aesthetic form of Salacia where smaller frames sit on a static background. Tourmaline, Salacia (2019).
FIGURE 2.
16 mm, digital video, sound. Frame grab. Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York.

F O W L E R     Coming Undone 79
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laundry dries on a line flapping in the wind. On the
right, we see a brick home with two people sitting
on the front steps as a child moves toward the fore-
ground where two other children are laughing and
dancing around a firepit. The only sound we hear over
these images is the joyful laughter of the children,
though despite the closeness we feel with the image,
the laughter sounds as if it is blocks away — a faint
trace, the echoing remainder of their playing.
This sequence, like so many in the film, is an accu-
mulation of distinct and contrasting and yet intimately
tied images and sounds. This aesthetic form creates
a juxtaposition between contexts — in and out of the
film — that expands what can be known but more of-
ten leaves the viewer knowing that they have missed
something, forcing them to realize that there is an
excess of material, an excess of being, that will always
escape their gaze and comprehension. I term this an
aesthetic of brokenness to narrate how Salacia con-
tinually reminds the viewer that there are purposeful
but also inevitable gaps in this or any attempt at tell-
ing the story of a person and their community, and
thus by extension forcing the viewer to acknowledge
that, if something is missing, something may have
also been erased. From the outset, Tourmaline is not
covering over the artifice of narrative — both in film
and in the historical and archival. She declares the
fact of history’s narrative-­making, and acknowledges
that there is a hand piecing things together into an
overwhelming flow of images, desires, and possibili-
ties.2 As I will return to later in this essay, this diverse
collage functions as a kind of aestheticization of Said-
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iya Hartman’s critical fabulation, an archival and his-
toriographic methodology of creative imagining of
the past that gives speculative richness to those ren-
dered flat by the archival and puts pressure on the
processes by which people are made narratively and
humanly one-­dimensional by history.3
The critical fabulation of this scene arrives in the
“insurgent ground of these lives” — the lives hid-
den and forgotten in the archive and the lives of
those here now desiring after the past and future.4
This queer and trans black family, an image that
Tourmaline presents to us not as a fantasy but as a
dreamed-­of and believed past truth, may not be held
in the archive, or at least its fragments may not have
been found yet, but that does not diminish the affec-
tively and intimately known truth of it for Tourmaline
and for black transness. This fabulative aesthetic sees
filmic brokenness as building an image and a history
from what is available and from what broken pieces
remain to be used, held, and seen, and from those
felt and known through the shared experience of bro-
kenness. Brokenness, then, is a pathway to connec-
tion and relation because, as Tourmaline tells us, to
come undone is to come and be together in a shared
brokenness.5 The story and life of Jones is given an
archival and historiographic abundance not through
the archival record but by the speculative archival
labor of Tourmaline visualized in the gathering of
frames upon frames that gives a rich complexity to
Jones and the world she lives in without denying the
necessary constructedness of the image that the ar-
chive’s gaps produce. Through this aesthetic of bro-

kenness and the openness and care of its fabulation,
Salacia produces a site of radical gathering for black
transness to speak and see itself across time and
space. Tourmaline is offering an expansive encounter
of, and for, trans care.6
The choice to attach brokenness to black trans-
ness is not ignorant of the ways black transness,
particularly black trans womanhood, is continually
marked and defined as being broken under the met-
rics of white supremacy. Black trans people exist in
“states of brokenness,” writes poet Nat Raha, where
bodies are constrained and limited to the point of
being unable to speak of the reality of those states.7
The act of being and surviving as a black trans person
is treated as an attack on those who live “proper” and
“good” lives. Further still, as C. Riley Snorton and Jin
Haritaworn have demonstrated, the generational suf-
fering and violation of black trans life functions as a
necropolitics whereby the “death, in both quotidian
and spectacular forms,” of black trans people pro-
vides the energy and force for the development and
sustaining of contemporary social life.8 For Raha and
theorist Marquis Bey, the use of brokenness in relation
to black transness should be understood not as on-
tological but, instead, merely as a description of the
conditions of black trans life that need to be rebelled
against so that practices of healing, community, and
militancy may be formed and mobilized.9
In proposing a black trans aesthetic of broken-
ness, I wish to offer a different conceptualization and
use for brokenness. This is not a rejection of the con-
ditions described, nor is it a theory of negativity in
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TOURMALINE IS
OFFERING AN EXPANSIVE
ENCOUNTER OF, AND FOR,
TRANS CARE
the lineage of queer negativity or Afropessimism. I
am after a theory and practice of brokenness that is
generative for black transness, to move beyond a de-
scription of the state of the world and one that de-
sires more than another battleground in the struggle
against normativity. This essay asks: What happens
when black transness orients itself toward itself — not
as a turning away from power but as a turning toward
black transness?10 What would it mean for brokenness
to provide a methodology for black transness to be-­
with and be-­for black transness; a practice that culti-
vates sites for an active and purposeful community of
love and care for black transness?
This proposed aesthetic archival practice is an
outgrowth of Tourmaline’s preface to the 2019 reprint-
ing of Larry Mitchell’s gay manifesto fable The Fag-
gots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, where
she sees collapse and undoing not as negative condi-
tions but as practices of being-­with and being-­as the
other. She writes,
I am still here because I have also been held, in
these moments of despair. . . . I have been held by my
friends, my very own faggots, who after all this time
still let me cry and stare and slobber and scream and
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stay silent. I have come undone, and this has kept
me alive. The faggots have helped me believe that if
we are to ever make it to the next revolution it will be
through becoming undone, an undoing that touches
ourselves and touches each other and all the broken-
ness we are. The faggots remind us that to become
undone is our greatest gift to ourselves.11
WHAT WOULD IT MEAN
In this quote, Tourmaline embraces the supposed
FOR BROKENNESS wrongness of otherness, but not as an antagonism or
TO PROVIDE A counter-­identification with the normative. The broken
are turned elsewhere. To be broken is to understand
METHODOLOGY FOR that one is not whole within the orderings of the nor-
mative and that the broken do not desire that whole-
BLACK TRANSNESS TO
ness. For the broken, being in pieces means one
BE-WITH AND BE-FOR can move through and with and as others. Another’s
pieces can be used to support your pieces, and your
BLACK TRANSNESS?
pieces can support another’s. To be broken is to be-
come undone so that one can become mingled and
intertwined. Coming undone is a path to being held,
and a path to community and survival. In this way, to
come undone, to break, is not to turn away from the
normative but to turn toward those who hold you and
whom you hold. A shift in orientation and desire, it
prioritizes the communal and the other over an antag-
onism with power.
Black transness, when positioned via Tourmaline’s
“being broken,” engages a unique praxis of being
that may use the same symbols and linguistics of the
normative but with fundamentally different semantics,
rhetorics, and orientations, and thus, a different flow
of material life — a readable but also fungible being.
To become broken, Tourmaline writes, “is our great-

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est gift to ourselves. It is truly our greatest path to be-
ing response-­able — to feel our feelings authentically
makes us able to respond to the conditions around
us with an open heart.”12 To be broken, then, offers a
different theory of relation to the normative for black
transness, a conceptual space where negativity pro-
duces the ability to hold and care for another. Thus,
an aesthetic of brokenness, I will argue, is fundamen-
tally and defiantly oriented to and for black trans life
in the “fugitive hope,” as Bey proposes, of sustain-
ing trans life and cultivating “all ways in which we do
and can connect meaningfully with one another. [For]
those connections matter a great deal; those connec-
tions are the world in which we (can) live.”13 This es-
say seeks to find and build and protect those sites of
gathering and being-­with that allow black transness
to be and to love and to hold.

Mary’s Voice
The first record of Mary Jones as Mary Jones in the
archive is following her arrest in 1836, when she was
brought to her hearing still in the dress, makeup, and
accessories she was wearing when she was appre-
hended. The seeming disconnect and absurdity of
Jones, understood and described by the public as a
man in a dress, turned her into newspaper and soci-
ety fodder; the press dubbed her the “Man-­Monster”
(fig. 3). Her infamy only increased after further arrests FIGURE 3.“The Man-­Monster, Peter Sewally, alias Mary Jones.”
in the 1840s, when she gained another name,  New York, 1836. Lithograph. Harry T. Peters “America on Stone”
Lithography Collection, National Museum of American History.
“Beefsteak Pete,” which comes from the newspaper’s
scandalizing description of how Jones “deceived” the
men.14 Quoting from Snorton’s Black on Both Sides:

F O W L E R     Coming Undone 83
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“The Sun told its readership, in Latin, how Jones en-
gaged in sex acts with her clients by wearing a ‘piece
of cow [leather?] pierced and opened like a woman’s
womb . . . held up by a girdle.‘”15 As Tavia Nyong’o
notes, in the court and newspaper records, Jones is
referred to using both male and female pronouns and
with both her chosen name, Mary Jones, and her le-
gal name, Peter Sewally, which only “highlight[s] their
[Jones’s] sense of transgression” for whiteness —  an image, if broken or undone, of Jones while also
further proof of blackness’s otherness.16 Jones’s gen-
dered blackness reaffirms what Hortense Spillers has
termed the ungendering of racialization, and thus, the
unhumaning of blackness.17 The process of Jones’s
racialization by the court and press and its dependent
gendering and hyper-­and desexualization sees un-
gendering yield that which Calvin Warren describes
as a “(non)place” where the ungendered “is not
recognizable . . . within ontology.”18 Jones’s transgres-
sion of gender, as Nyong’o argues, “produced evi-
dence against the claims of abolitionists, as indexing
the social chaos that would accompany the overthrow
of slavery and racial domination.”19
The concern of this essay is, in part, how one can
ethically and meaningful tell the story of Mary Jones
rather than the story of her violation. So little of the
record regarding Jones is from her voice. And the his-
tories we have of Jones, most notably from Nyong’o
and Snorton, while rich and invaluable texts on the in-
timacies of blackness and gender, remain attached to
what is given by the archive. However, as Hartman has
taught us, the archive is shaped by what is deemed
worthy of being saved, but also what was deemed
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necessary to record in the first place. The histories
that are then built from those records are shaped by
the inevitable and deliberate gaps in what is and is
not recorded.20 Mary Jones, and the complex nuances
of her life, are not captured by the archive. All the ar-
chive holds is the violations inflicted upon her. But
how do we take those violations and produce a story
that performs Hartman’s critical fabulation and gives
holding the reality of the archive as a record and as an
institution? To begin answering this, I will turn to Tour-
maline and her history with Jones and the archive.
The story of Mary Jones, as told by Tourmaline,
arrives because Tourmaline and her sibling, Che Gos-
sett, entered the New York Public Library (NYPL) and
dug through its archival content. The archive, as insti-
tution and concept, is built on gaps — gaps of incom-
pleteness, gaps of ignorance, and gaps of access.
Tourmaline’s own experience with the NYPL was one
of navigating and surviving anti-­trans, anti-­black, and
anti-­poor assumptions, rules, and protocols before
even being able to see the holdings.21 As Hartman
tells us, “Every historian of the multitude, the dispos-
sessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is forced to
grapple with the power and authority of the archive
and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose
perspective matters, and who is endowed with the
gravity and authority of historical actor.”22 This experi-
ence and reality is what led to Tourmaline’s radical act
of laboring through the archive and its violence, to
recording and capturing the texts and images of trans
women, and releasing them to the public through her

Tumblr blog, The Spirit Was . . . , and her Vimeo page.
This is a conscious and purposeful confrontation with
the reality that who has access, and what that access
looks like, shapes history as much as what the actual
archive holds.23
In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida extends the
effects of the archive’s form on its present access to
its past realities: “The technical structure of the ar-
chiving archive also determines the structure of the
archivable content even in its very coming into ex-
istence and in its relationship to the future. The
archivization produces as much as it records the
event.”24 This shaping of the “archivable content”
is what propels Hartman’s histories of black women
during slavery and in its afterlife. The enslaved’s social
and economic position as commodity dictated what
kinds of records were kept, and thus it structures what
histories can be built from them.25 Hartman’s work
is a response to those histories narrativized through
those archival records that then only recommodify
blackness as evidence of slavery’s trauma. The inhu-
manity of the records becomes the inhumanity of the
history whereby the enslaved are visible only in their
deaths. Only court records and newspaper reporting
of Mary Jones are left in the archive. In both, the me-
dia mark her as at the bounds of the proper and thus
as evidence of black transness’s inferiority — as the
abject. There is little of Jones by Jones, except in the
passing moments she could speak in court. These re-
cords never show her naming herself as trans, for such
language did not exist at the time, and any contem-
porary equivalent might have been incriminating or
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might have validated in the eyes of the state a further
violation of her. This lack of “evidence,” as defined
by the norms of disciplines, has made many who have
written on Jones hesitant to name her and many oth-
ers in the archive as trans.
This hesitancy is made apparent in how histori-
ans and theorists come to name Jones, even those
invested in the transness of Jones. For example,
Nyong’o refers to Jones as Peter Sewally, the name
she was given at birth, and addresses her using he/
him/his pronouns. Nyong’o does this for two rea-
sons. The first acknowledges that we do not know
how Jones identified. The little knowledge we have
of Jones comes almost exclusively from court records
and the press, and she is gendered according to her
state-­recorded gender. Nyong’o’s choice of naming
follows, though with more generosity to Jones as a
trans subject, the standard practice of historical nar-
rative that avoids editorializing beyond the archival
record. More crucially, Nyong’o retains the archival
record’s gendering to emphasize how the press and
court used Jones’s performance of gender to ensure
the racialization and ungendering of blackness. Work-
ing within a similar political and theoretical frame-
work, Snorton refers to Jones as Mary Jones and uses
she/her/hers pronouns. Snorton also focuses on the
intimacy between racialization and gendering in the
story of Jones, but to articulate the ways transness
becomes formulated in both. Snorton is pointed in
not wanting to easily construct Jones as a transgen-
der historical figure — not because she is not, since
we cannot truly know, but because despite not know-
F O W L E R     Coming Undone 85
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ing how Jones would have identified, she functions
as vital trans performance at the intersections of ra-
cialization and gendering. That is, Snorton under-
stands Jones as an enactment of the fungibility and
fugitivity of gender for blackness. In part, Snorton
and Nyong’o’s turning to Jones is to better enunciate
a central thesis of black feminist thought and black
trans theory: “Blackness is gender trouble.”26
While Nyong’o and Snorton offer rich and vital
readings and histories of Jones, Tourmaline produces
a far different relationship and goal in her naming
and relation to Jones. She finds the small moments
Jones’s voice arrives in the court records, and in the
historical violence whiteness inflicted upon her, as
evidence of Jones as a black trans woman, as an an-
cestor that may be a guide for Tourmaline and others.
Tourmaline is consistent and explicit in her introduc-
tion to Salacia at the online screening for the video’s
acquisition by the Museum of Modern Art and in the
numerous interviews she has done for the film in nam-
ing Mary Jones as Mary Jones and as a black trans
woman. Tourmaline sees kinship and intimacy in Mary
Jones; she finds a narration of her own trans being in
Jones’s testimony, and even calls what happened to
Jones as an “outing.”27 Tourmaline’s naming of Jones
is an attempt to validate the historical truth of black
trans lives prior to the contemporary —  the past — a making of another world, a filmic version
a rejection of the myth that transness is a modern
invention — as well as the vitalizing energy such a
naming can produce for the present. What is distinct
about Tourmaline’s decision, compared to Nyong’o
and Snorton, is not just its forcefulness but also the
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why of it, or, rather, the who of it. Tourmaline is ori-
enting her film toward black transness. The film is un-
invested in the strictures of historical narrative and
normative archival practices. Because it is about and
for black transness, Salacia can sidestep the tension
over what the archive does and does not tell us be-
cause the archival record is so rarely concerned with
the affective and material abundance of abject life.
Transness is found and even enacted by trans people
in the archive through their use of and movement in
the archive.
Tourmaline’s archival practice prioritizes the em-
pathetic and personal, enacting her own version of
Snorton’s description of “trans”: “ ‘Trans,’ is more
about a movement with no clear origin and no point
of arrival.”28 That is, Tourmaline offers us an archival
practice of, for, and by black transness. This is a cen-
tering and orienting toward and with black transness,
whether it is to tell the stories of violence, the stories
of joy, or the stories of the mundane. Or it is, as Bey
argues, a bearing witness to how “centering black
trans women alters what qualifies as knowledge, or
what is deemed ‘the world.’ ”29 The story (the labor)
of Salacia is as much a representation of Jones as it is
a space for black trans people in the present to per-
form acts of trans visioning and dreaming on and with
of Hartman’s critical fabulation. We can see this prac-
tice enacted in the opening of the film.
Salacia opens on a small bowl with a hand lightly
touching its edge. As the camera moves up the body,
it shows the viewer the face of Mary Jones (Rowin

I SEE IN SALACIA A RADICAL AND GENERATIVE AESTHETIC
ARCHIVAL PRACTICE OF BLACK TRANSNESS THAT NOT
ONLY HOLDS THE FACT OF ARCHIVAL GAPS BUT ALSO
MAKES THOSE GAPS USEFUL AND USABLE
Amone). Throughout this camera movement, Jones,
in a voice-­over narration, quotes a refrain from Vir-
ginia Hamilton’s children’s book The People Could Fly
(1985): “They say the people could fly. Say that long
ago in Africa, some of the people knew magic. They
would walk on the air like climbing up on a gate. They
flew like blackbirds over the fields. Black shiny wings
flapping against the blue up there.” Jones’s narration,
and Hamilton’s book, recounts the myth of the Flying
Africans, a group of Africans who, on arriving in the
Americas and witnessing the horrors of slavery, took
flight and returned home.30 “Flight,” writes Michelle D.
Commander of the tale, “is transcendence over one’s
reality — an escape predicated on imagination and
the incessant longing to be free.”31 The Flying Afri-
cans offer a balm and an orientation meant to find the
transcendence of blackness and to solidify the possi-
bility and faith in freedom. Put differently, the Flying
Africans function as a kind of “freedom dreaming” for
Mary Jones.32 The material and magical story of the
past becomes a reminder as well as a guide for imag-
ining and laboring toward freedom in Jones’s present
and future.
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Aesthetically, however, the film’s opening also calls
attention to the fact of the film having been made.
While Salacia was shot, edited, and screened on
video, Tourmaline includes traces of analog filmstrip
sprockets at the edge of the film’s frame, along with
the bottom edge of another frame of the film (fig. 2).
This aesthetic choice appears to undermine the di-
egetic closedness of the film and the ability to sus-
pend disbelief and fall into the world of the film, thus
acknowledging the artifice of historical narratives. I
see this decision — one that orients the political and
aesthetic desires of the entire film — as an aesthetic
practice of critical fabulation toward a fuller and richer
envisioning of the possibility and contextuality of
their world. In Hartman’s description of the archive’s
violating record is a description of fragmentation.
The record of enslaved women that provides the im-
petus for Hartman’s theorizing of critical fabulation
exists in pieces that are found here and there. In ren-
dering this archival methodology in aesthetic form, I
see in Salacia a radical and generative aesthetic archi-
val practice of black transness that not only holds the
fact of archival gaps but also makes those gaps useful
F O W L E R     Coming Undone 87
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and usable. In making visible the film, its sprockets,
and its other frames, Tourmaline aestheticizes her
film as a piece of analog, tactile media — a piece and
fragment of material evidence of historical black
transness.
Salacia’s aesthetic practice of critical fabulation
gives generously to those the archive and history
have violated, and it does so through being present
for and with those subjects of the past. This open-
ing sequence enacts what Hartman calls “a mode of
close narration, a style which places the voice of the
narrator and character in inseparable relation, so that
the vision, language, and rhythms of the wayward
shape and arrange the text.”33 It rejects the objective
distance of the historian and embraces the generative
tension, connections, relations, and futurity that can
be found in standing with those whose story you wish
to tell.34 In making explicit the artifice of the image
while also attaching that image to the generational
folktales of black Americans, Tourmaline keeps her
own voice, the voice of Jones, and the voice of black
life in intimate, conscious, and purposeful relation. It
does so by being present for and with those subjects
of the past, rejecting the objective distance of the
historian and embracing the generative tension, con-
nections, relations, and futurity of standing with those
whose story you wish to tell.
Gathering in Brokenness
The work of brokenness I have described thus far fills
out the image through the piecing together of what
the archive deems deserving of being recorded and
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what the broken and the othered know to be held in
the gaps. This produces not an image of wholeness
or completeness, as that is only possible for those al-
lowed access to the proper status of the human and
the subject; nevertheless, it expands the image into
an overflowing abundance that bursts the limits of the
frame and history with the intimacy and entanglement
of desires of the past, the livedness in the present,
and labors for the future. The making of an image
of abundance is not just to rehistoricize the past or
demonstrate the richness of Mary Jones’s life, though
both are vital to the work of Salacia; rather, it is to be-
gin cultivating a site whereby the broken, those who
have come undone, can gather and be together for
each other. This aesthetic of brokenness and the site
of gathering it opens for black transness, as Bey calls
for, creates a space where the broken can imagine
and cultivate another world together — to enact their
dreams of the future.
Following her arrest, Mary Jones is sent to prison
at Sing Sing. When she arrives in her cell, the frame
is composed of a full moon in the background and
Jones filling the one and only frame (fig. 4). Being in
a frame within a frame within a frame, she appears
small and distant from us. On the right edge of this
smaller frame, we can also see a pulsing red-­orange
light that looks almost like a flame stretching across,
trying to burn the image or even the film itself. As
Jones collapses on her thin blanket and damp mound
of hay, she begins to cry, exhausted from her day and
terrified of her future. As she cries, a voice is heard
calling her name. The video follows the voice and
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FIGURE 4.Mary Jones (Rowin Amone) enters her cell dwarfed by the moon and the frame. Tourmaline, Salacia (2019). 16 mm, digital
video, sound. Frame grab. Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York.

cuts from the night sky to a river shoreline, the sound
of lapping waves and seagulls echoes along with the
voice, before the video dissolves into a rising sun. The
voice calls out to Mary once more as the background
changes to a barnacle-­covered dock post and, in the
center of the video, sits a new frame within a frame of
documentary footage of Sylvia Rivera, the Latina trans
activist, who, with her friend Marsha P. Johnson, was a
central figure of the queer and trans rights movement
of the 1960s and 1970s with radical organizations such
as Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR).
Unlike the crisply constructed 16mm film and dig-
ital images of Mary Jones, this is archival footage
filmed by Randy Wicker in 1992 on the West Village
Pier. Rivera was houseless and living on the pier, like
many queer and trans people before and after her.
Following the murder of Marsha P. Johnson that same
year, Rivera returned to New York City for the first
time since the late 1970s — when she left the city and
stopped her organizing work, exhausted from the
endless acts of transphobic violence of the state and
after an attempted suicide following the 1973 Gay

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FIGURE 5. Sylvia Rivera on the West Village Pier. Tourmaline, Salacia (2019). 16 mm, digital video, sound. Frame grab. Courtesy of the
artist and Chapter NY, New York.
Pride Rally in New York City where gays and lesbians
harassed and booed her as she fought to give her
speech.35 In the footage and in the voice that Jones
hears, Rivera reassures her trans sister: “You got to
keep fighting, girly” (fig. 5). Tourmaline cuts between
the filmic Jones in her cell and the video Rivera on the
pier — a linking of the material past reality of Jones
and the diegetic future reality of Rivera alongside the
present performance of Jones by the actress Rowin
Amone and the past archival speaking of Rivera.
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In this way, Tourmaline is producing an image that
moves across a multitude of aesthetic and historical
and conceptual borders, borders that are meant to be
distinct and yet become fluid under her transarchival
filmic gaze. More importantly, through her aesthetic
of brokenness and the openness and care of the tran-
sarchival fabulation, she produces a site of radical
gathering for transness to speak and see itself across
time and space. Tourmaline is offering an expan-
sive encounter of trans care, one that allows Rivera

to once more guide and propel trans possibilities; to
give Jones, even in its fiction, an image of what is one
day possible for transness; and to provide the con-
temporary life of transness the affective and material
fact of trans freedom dreaming. This is the dream of
the aesthetic of brokenness: this free and safe and
loving realm of being-­with black transness.
Further still, this transarchival gathering in Salacia
exists across Tourmaline’s filmic and archival work and
thus needs to be understood as a black trans aes-
thetic archival practice. With her film Atlantic Is a Sea
of Bones (2017), Tourmaline produces an experimen-
tal meditation on the interference of waves that forms
the rippling particularities of black trans womanhood.
Commissioned by Visual AIDS for their twenty-­eighth
annual Day With(out) Art exhibition focused on the
ongoing AIDS epidemic, Atlantic Is a Sea of Bones
aestheticizes the “energetics and violences that
shape a person’s life and social space, from the trans-
atlantic slave trade to HIV criminalization.”36 The film
opens on Egyptt Lebeija, filmed using a vertical
iPhone, looking down on the former West Village
Piers from an office building across the street. Lebeija
lived on that pier, “in a hut,” when she was unshel-
tered in the early 1990s. As she looks down on where
she used to live, she chokes up and reflects: “The
times of the Village, from Fourteenth Street to Chris-
topher Street. The memories. People should never
forget where they came from.” This footage, like Rive-
ra’s, is a documented record of a material and actual
life lived. However, it also holds the sense of imme-
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“YOU GOT TO KEEP
FIGHTING, GIRLY”
diacy assumed of phone-­captured video that has be-
come an everyday practice of contemporary life — as a
record of the mundanity of one’s day or as a record of
protest and state violence.
This pier, too, becomes a critical site of trans gath-
ering across time. As the films show, it is part of Labei-
ja’s life, it is where Sylvia Rivera was unsheltered in her
interview seen in Salacia, and it is where the body of
Marsha P. Johnson was found after the 1992 Pride Pa-
rade.37 Further still, just four miles south of the West
Village pier at the mouth of the Hudson River is where
much of Salacia was filmed: Governors Island, where
Dutch colonizers arrived in 1624, and where two years
later the Dutch West India Company brought eleven
enslaved Africans to New Amsterdam. The Hudson
River, in black trans affective and archival history, be-
comes a transtemporal and transspatial site for black
trans life — a churning flow of roiling violence and
community, death and survival, pain and joy.
The Hudson River as a site of black trans gather-
ing offers its own kind of archival accumulation dis-
tinct from the archive fever of normative desire. This
accumulation produces the sense of scale and com-
plexity at hand within this location — it does not flat-
ten like the commodity records of enslaved African
F O W L E R     Coming Undone 91
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women that reduce them to a singular repeating fig-
ure or the way annihilating repetition of trans death
erases the possibility of trans life.38 Rather, this accu-
mulation is an engagement with, and acknowledg-
ment of, the continual returns to this river across time
for blackness and transness.39 Tourmaline’s lens sees
into the Hudson River and opens a space for a
gathering — a crossing the River Jordan to a shared
freedom, as Rivera names it in the video clip included
in Salacia — that brings together the fictional and
real, the material and the abstract, the lived and the
needed. In this way, Tourmaline continues her proj-
ect of building a transarchival form, borrowing from
Nyong’o the “propositional mode of revised histories
[that] allows for the retrieval of abandoned practices
and unspoken scenarios.”40 Via Tourmaline’s imag-
inings, we see a filmic answer to Eliza Steinbock’s
question about trans embodiment: “What if trans em-
bodiment is not primarily about sex or gender, but
about experimenting with the aesthetics of corporeal-
ity in terms of efficacy and political purchase?”41
Ultimately, what I see occurring in the moment
Mary Jones and Sylvia Rivera connect, as well as
within the accumulation on the Hudson via Tour-
maline’s suturing, is a transtemporal, transarchival
touching — a gathering of bodies and affects. The
transarchival, the aesthetic of brokenness, and the
critical fabulation of black transness come together
in a “conditional temporality of ‘what could have
been.’ ”42 This black trans aesthetic enacts thought,
“where thought,” as Bey puts it, “is a hieroglyphic
and radical commitment to concerning oneself with
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the livability of life lived otherwise.”43 Like the break-
ing of time away from linearity, these transarchi-
val aesthetics rupture thought and knowledge into
practices of speculation and becoming. The mate-
rial aesthetic politics of black trans life arrives via this
thinking thought and archival giving.
Turning Toward
From Rivera’s call to survive, Jones dreams of an es-
cape back to her trans, queer, black community; she
dreams of being held and of holding. Although this
dream does not come true in the way Tourmaline
dreams it, for Jones, in this film, Rivera’s mantra and
the fugitive hope it makes imaginable does propel
Jones and prepares her to keep fighting. As the film
closes, the image is broken into pieces once more.
In the background, Jones curls up and cries as she
comes to terms with her imprisonment and the im-
possibility of escape — this is her life now, or at least,
for now. On the surface of the image, however, the
enclosed frame of the film has broken down once
more and opened a site for another emergence.
A red-­yellow light, like a flame, begins flashing out
from the right side of the frame as if it is beginning to
burn, or as if the darkness that is needed to expose
a film was being ruptured by the sudden and feared
intrusion of light. Something is breaking through the
frame, through the film, through history and time. The
closed system of the filmic diegesis is deteriorating,
allowing for something beyond its narrative to ar-
rive. On top of this collapsing and burning frame of
Mary Jones crying appears another Mary Jones, also
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FIGURE 6. Mary Jones (Rowin Amone) superimposed on herself declaring the fact of her being. Tourmaline, Salacia (2019). 16 mm,
digital video, sound. Frame grab. Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York.

played by Rowin Amone. She too is crying. As this
Jones stares down, she begins whispering, “We can
be anything we want to be” (fig. 6). She repeats this
as a chant, a mantra, a vitalizing phrase of commit-
ment and purpose. With each repetition, her eyes be-
gin moving up from the downcast defeat she began
with before eventually staring defiantly at the camera
with a force and absolutism in her voice as she re-
peats one final time, “We can be anything we want
to be.” The intrusion I referenced above is the arrival
of Jones upon the image, yes, but more importantly,
it is this mantra of creativity and survival, a voice of
defiance in the face of annihilation that is made most
radically present on the surface of the image. Like Ri-
vera’s transtemporal call to keep fighting, Jones is de-
claring the fact of herself in her present time but also
in the continual fact of her as a black trans woman
having been and continuing to be.
In this final scene of Salacia, Tourmaline explic-
itly includes Mary Jones as a history that black trans
women have, and in having her, they also have a
marker and a guide for imagining new futures from

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“WE CAN BE ANYTHING
WE WANT TO BE”
the realities of the past. The “we” Jones names is a
black trans community that is denied and violated for
the fact of being. The rupturing of the filmic diegesis
occurs as the film explicitly turns toward black trans
women and allows them to speak as they are. The
speaking of the “we” is a speaking to Jones’s future,
so that same future, our present, can listen and even
speak back to her. This gathering across time and the
archive is what pierces the film with a burning light:
the gathering of black transness with itself so that
the future can remember a denied and covered over
past, and so that the past can know that a future has
already been made possible because of, and through,
them.
This essay has desired many things from Salacia,
Tourmaline, and Mary Jones. It has hoped for a way
for black transness to find and narrate itself in the ar-
chive without threat and violence — however momen-
tary that reprieve may be — as well as a way for it to
build and fill its own archive. It has narrated practices
of intimate togetherness that supports and cares for
black transness. It has imagined transarchival sites of
gathering and creation so that black transness can
love and survive. Brokenness is a theory, aesthetics,
and politics of being-­with and being-­for so that these
radical possibilities can be felt, seen, and made. This
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gathering, this turning toward itself and away from
the view of normativity, is an antagonistic act that re-
jects the latter’s power and centrality. The normative
is dangerous and powerful, but it has no value out-
side the confines of itself. Instead, a turning toward
has nothing really to do with normativity; rather, it has
to do with whom we labor with and for; whom we are
building an active and purposeful community with;
and where we want our energy, love, desire, and com-
mitment to go. As Tourmaline tells us, “The faggots
remind us that to become undone is our greatest
gift to ourselves. It is truly our greatest path to be-
ing response-­able — to feel our feelings authentically
makes us able to respond to the conditions around
us with an open heart.”44 The pieces that come
from being marked as broken are not hindrances but
an opening, an emergence — “in moments of appar-
ent scarcity, our best defense is to respond with
abundance.”45 ■■
DAREN FOWLER is an instructor in the School of Film,
Media and Theater at Georgia State University. Their re-
search examines the aesthetic politics of trans/queer media,
art, and activism, with particular focus on the material prac-
tices of AIDS activists. Their work has appeared in The Rout-
ledge Companion to Media and Risk, liquid blackness, and
In Media Res.
Notes
1  It is unlikely that Jones lived in Seneca Village. Tourmaline is
purposefully connecting the story of Mary Jones, a black trans
woman violated by the state, and the story of Seneca Village, a
black community violated by the state.

2  Hartman, Wayward Lives, xiv – xv.
3  Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 11.
4  Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” xiv.
5  Tourmaline, preface, viii.
6  My use of “trans care” is in part informed by Hil Malatino’s
book Trans Care, where he asks “How do we care for these
ghosts that take such care of us?” Malatino’s empathetic ques-
tioning pushes us to take seriously how we connect with and
make use of those that are so vital to us as individual and collec-
tive trans/queer people (Trans Care, 7).
7  Raha, “Transfeminine Brokenness, Radical Transfeminism,” 632.
8  Snorton, Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” 66.
9  Raha, “Transfeminine Brokenness, Radical Transfeminism,” 637;
Bey, Black Trans Feminism, 5.
10  I am inspired here by the brilliant work of the liquid blackness
research group and their 2020 event and research project, “Fac-
ing the Band: Elissa Blount-­Moorhead and the (Ana)Architectures
of Community Ties” (https://liquidblackness.com/elissa-­blount-­
moorhead-­research-­project), and Michele Prettyman’s interview
with Moorhead in issue 6.1 of liquid blackness: journal of aesthet-
ics and black studies, “Doing It, Fluid: Elissa Blount Moorhead
and the Making of a Moving Image Arts Community.”
11  Tourmaline, preface, viii.
12  Tourmaline, preface, viii.
13  Bey, Black Trans Feminism, 205.
14  Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 98.
15  Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 63.
16  Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 194n75.
17  Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 68.
18  Warren, “Calling into Being,” 269.
19  Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 99.
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20  Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 5.
21  Tourmaline, “Tourmaline on Transgender Storytelling.”
22  Hartman, Wayward Lives, xiii.
23  Contemporary knowledge of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P.
Johnson cannot be solely attributed to Tourmaline, but it is hard
to overestimate her role in it. Many of the images we have of
both women are easily accessible to the public because Tour-
maline digitized parts of the archives of NYPL and assisted in
digitizing the personal archives of people like Randy Wicker, a
gay activist who was among the most visible gay people in the
United States before Stonewall with his work at the Mattachine
Society and other early gay rights groups and who eventually
began interviewing important figures in Greenwich Village as well
as filming protests and gatherings throughout the Village from
the 1960s through the early 2000s. This act of making easily ac-
cessible materials that were technically already public or public-­
adjacent demonstrates facets of the barriers and tensions within
the physical and conceptual archive for transness, as well as what
a transarchival practice can look like.
24  Derrida, Archive Fever, 17.
25  Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 10.
26  Yancy and Gossett, “Black Trans Feminist Thought.”
27  Tourmaline, “Tourmaline Introduces ‘Salacia’ (2019).”
28  Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 2.
29  Bey, Black Trans Feminism, 60.
30  Commander, Afro-­Atlantic Flight, 4.
31  Commander, Afro-­Atlantic Flight, 7.
32  The term “freedom dreaming” here arrives from two loca-
tions: first, from Robin D. G. Kelley, where freedom dreaming
is a form of purposeful thought between the present and the
past — an “effort to recover ideas.” Tourmaline also offers her
own conception of freedom dreaming as an everyday practice of
survival. “Freedom dreams,” writes Tourmaline, “are born when
we face harsh conditions not with despair, but with the deep
F O W L E R     Coming Undone 95
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knowledge that these conditions will change — that a world filled
with softness and beauty and care is not only possible, but inev-
itable” (Kelley, Freedom Dreams, xii; Tourmaline, “How to Free-
dom Dream”).
33  Hartman, Wayward Lives, xiii – xiv.
34  Hartman, Wayward Lives, xiii – xiv.
35  Brockell, “Transgender Women at Stonewall”; Rivera, inter-
view by Randy Wicker.
36  Tourmaline, “Alternate Endings, Radical Beginnings.”
37  The West Village pier is also important within the history of
gay life and HIV/AIDS. The pier is where Willie Ninja and other
voguers perform outside balls, as seen in Marlon Riggs’s Tongues
Untied (1989), as well as a site of queer sexual exchange where
gay men cruised and found each other. It is a point of encounter,
an in-­between space outside the movement of normativity and
white time for the queered other to commune. Both this and the
weight of the pier’s history with slavery, as will be discussed in the
coming paragraphs, have been memorialized and interrogated
by David Hammons’s public sculpture Day’s End, a steel frame
structure that reproduces the warehouse that used to sit on the
Hudson River at the pier.
38  Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 1 – 2.
39  See Walcott, “Black Aquatic,” for a further discussion on the
work of water and Blackness. As he writes, “The black aquatic [is]
relational even when the relational in its representation remains
unachieved or dissatisfying” (68). The black aquatic speaks to the
ambivalence with the tides for Blackness. They mark a critical site
of the movement of Black life and the enactment of Black death,
and thus is “foundationally formative of blackness” (65).
40  Nyong’o, Afro-­Fabulations, 42.
41  Steinbock, Shimmering Images, 6.
42  Hartman, Wayward Lives, 11.
43  Bey, Black Trans Feminism, 201.
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44  Tourmaline, preface, viii.
45  Tourmaline, preface, viii.
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