Black Trans Girlhood, Healing, and Transformative Justice in Akwaeke Emezi's PET

Abstract

abstract:In the fantasy/speculative fiction young adult novel PET (2019), Akwaeke Emezi's fifteen-year-old Black trans girl protagonist, Jam, disrupts the traditional sociocultural and medico-legal hindrances to Black trans girlhood's "liveness" by actively devising and participating in carefully staged scenes of intracommunal healing and transformative justice. With Jam's knowledge, history, and experience among Black people and community as a guiding light, this article argues that PET serves as a counternarrative to the erasure of Black trans girls in the Black radical tradition and inspires new narratives for Black liberation with the wisdom and experience of Black trans feminine children in mind. What Jam knows—that another way of doing justice is possible, that revolution is not a one-time event, and that care and healing after the event of prison abolition will have to be constantly rehearsed anew—is shared with the young readers of this novel.