Collage of artist Mercy Thokozane Minah. Image by Doriana Diaz.

By emerald faith and Naomi Simmons-Thorne

Mercy Thokozane Minah’s art is an ongoing project of self and communal actualization and affirmation — a rendering of the dynamic, complex, and beautiful lives that Black queer and trans folks live. To kick off the Black Trans Thought and Histories Series, Naomi Simmons-Thorne and emerald faith interviewed Mercy in March 2022 to speak about their journey as a maker.

Photo of Mercy Thokozane Minah. Courtesy of Mercy Thokozane Minah.

Mercy Thokozane Minah (they/he) is a gender-expansive, queer multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in South Africa. Their work exists across varying mediums; literary, audio-visual, theatre-based and visual. Mercy has had minimal formal training for their creative explorations; however, being an artist has been an organic part of their life since early childhood. They learned the rigor of rehearsal and performing by participating in plays, poetry, and song performances at church from as young as age 3. They continued this practice in school, where they also began exploring their storytelling and visual art. Through discipline, repetition and play, Mercy spent their childhood and teen-hood crafting a number of artistic skillsets (singing and songwriting, writing and performing stories as skits, plays, games, painting, drawing, and illustrating) that they would become estranged from in early adulthood, but returned to as they found their way back to the essence of who they truly are.

After dropping out of an unsuccessful four years in Law School, Mercy worked a series of jobs in various corporate spaces. They gradually returned to creating as their core-life practice through sporadic publication of their short stories in various anthologies, notably: Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction (MaThoko Books, Lambda 2014), Writing the Walls Down (2015), and Outside the XY: Black and Brown Queer Masculinities (2016). While working as a tele-sales rep, receptionist, and sales manager’s assistant for various companies, they developed an interest in self-marketing, which compelled them to self-publish an anthology of South African-based horror stories titled 4 (first published in 2017, and then re-published in 2018). They would write one more short story, for publishing, which would be featured in Exhale: Queer African Erotic Fiction (2021) before pausing their literary pursuits.

In 2019, Mercy embarked on their first exploration of formal training in an artistic craft by becoming a Theatre and Performance Arts student, majoring in directing and writing. They have written one play-script to date, titled “Imigqomo Yase Gomorrah”. They were in the process of staging this play just as the pandemic hit in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic caused such major disruption and interruption in the artist’s life that they were compelled to seek an immediate form of catharsis. This is what led to their return to visual art and the exploration of their most prolific and clearest body of work, their digital oil paintings.

Mercy’s distinctly vibrant depictions of intimacy between Black, gender and sexually self-determined peoples have been written, spoken about, featured and exhibited across an array of platforms, including Queeriosity Mag, Black Creatives Taking up Space, the Exist Loudly Campaign, Reclaiming Ugly’s Black Healing October, Culture Power’s WE AS OURSELVES Campaign, Re-Present Podcast, 2PeasinaPod Podcast, Dwelling: A Collection of South African Fine Art and Literature on the concept of Home, Hopes and Dreams that Sound like Yours: Stories of Queer Activism in Sub-Saharan Africa, Stellium Magazine, the Mail & Guardian, CityPress, the Paris Review, Superrare’s Black*Rare showcase (curated by Linda Dounia Rebeiz), Candylion, Black Trans Histories and Thought series (hosted by Black Women Radicals) to name a few. They have created several series of digital art which honors their reverence for gender expansive people with self-determined gender and sexual identities. They have also been commissioned over 50 times by both private individuals and activist organizations.

To Mercy, a life well lived, would be one filled with incredible stories about how they continually met, and returned to their instinct to create, with courage, curiosity, and a loyalty to their most authentic self.

Naomi Simmons-Thorne & emerald faith (NST & ef): Could you start with an introduction?

Mercy Thokozane Minah (MTM): My name is Mercy Thokozane Minah, and I am a multidisciplinary non-binary queer Black artist who lives and works in South Africa. I create across a multitude of mediums. The best way to encompass the way that I practice art is that I'm a maker — I've been making since I was a toddler. As soon as I knew how to engage art making materials I've just been making [art] the entirety of my life. My late twenties up until this point—I'm about to turn thirty—has been the second most fortifying period for my creativity. The first would've been when I was really young. As an artist, I've had a bit of a journey. It hasn't been very linear. It hasn't always been validating. I think I'm at a point now where I can sort of stay with my chest that I'm an artist and feel externally as well as internally affirmed.

NST & ef: Can you also tell us a little bit about your upbringing?

MTM: Sure. I'm a native Joburger. Johannesburg is one of the biggest metropolis cities in South Africa. It's the city that came into being because some Europeans decided that they were going to mine gold here and create South African urban life. There's a running joke amongst my immediate family. People usually ask where are your people from? Everyone has family from some rural part of the country, but we're from here. We are Johannesburg people. I don't say that with pride. I'm [not a] patriotic person. We're from the city. We moved around different parts where Black people were allowed to stay. As the country moved from white leadership to Black democratic rule, my family evolved in the same way. We started out in the flats of the inner city, and now we stay in previously Jewish suburbia, which is now Black suburbia. Oh, we're also super Christian. I grew up in the church. Both of my parents are ordained ministers. I left the church a couple of years ago, but I was heavily involved.

NST & ef: Mercy could you tell us about the different series that make up your visual art portfolio?

*rest* by Mercy Thokozane Minah. Courtesy of Mercy Thokozane Minah.

MTM: I started making this style of visual art around April or May of 2020, and the first series that I made came from just messing around on my mom's computer as a way to pass time and escape from the weirdness and stress of the very beginning of the pandemic and the hard lockdown. I was basically drawing regular interactions between Black queer and trans people — whether it was individuals or intimate engagements with partners and friends. There was the partnered section of the series, which featured couples. One of the first images from that series to go viral featured a couple doing each other's hair and then the partnering image of them cuddling in bed. I think after that series organically came into being, I started being a little bit more intentional about the types of series I wanted to create.

So once Regular was done I just toyed with different types of ideas. There was [a] very small series called Black Sofa that was basically chronicling the daily activities of a couple [for] a week. Some of the series after that were random offshoots of what I felt like creating, one being a series called Room 204, which chronicles engagements that this college student [has with] a classmate. I wanted to explore the experience of being in a place where you're newly free to be yourself and you have this space and the freedom to explore your sexual and romantic orientation. There was a series that explored erotica.

I don't know if people know this about me, but I absolutely adore Beyoncé. I did something in homage to Black is King, and after that, there were a lot of standalone paintings. People being on the beach with their lovers, people with their lovers in bed. Then I went back into making series again, I made one called The Pleasure Series, a series based on people's responses to a question like, what are their favorite songs or poems about pleasure? The last series that I made was a series that explored some of the magazine covers of our oldest contemporary magazine, which was Drum Mag, the first Black media and entertainment publication our country had.

NST & ef: How does your art exist in the orbit of your interpersonal world? Especially considering having two parents that are ordained pastors.

MTM: My world was very tiny and revolved around work, school, and church when I started working. But before that, I was able to always sneak in things that would fortify my gender and sexuality. I don't think there was ever an interruption for me— a point in time where I didn't feel like I could be myself, where I could live out loud. There was a point in time where I realized the only person who didn't know about me was literally my mom, but everyone else around me was aware, even people that I went to church with.

I was just kind of like, if it reaches her, then it reaches her. There’s always been something about me that has been determined to just be me. What was interesting about the movement towards being able to create this type of art is that there was another side of me where I was struggling to find the same type of conviction about. And that was the creative side of who I was. My queerness and transness felt very internal and subjective, something that I could fortify inside of myself.

“I draw people who look like me, who look like people that I’ve loved, who look like people that I’ve fallen out with, had friendships with, have had all kinds of community with. I draw people that I know. I draw my community. That has always been the thing that’s made the most sense to me.”

Once I found that type of fortification, I could just say, ‘I'm valid.’ I wasn't really surrounded by messaging that told me that I was valid, but something about my creativity always felt like if I didn't have some outside way of showing that it was real or showing that it mattered, then I didn't feel quite as confident about it. So I had to make the decision to actually dedicate my life to just being creative and being an artist and figuring out how to make a living from that. I went back to school to study a creative degree after initially going to law school. I get so bored when I think about that particular experience. It was so incompatible. I decided to go back to school for theatre and performance.

There was a whole world that I was enveloped in where I was surrounded by other creators. I was being taught by creatives. I also had a consistent community of fellow creative people that I could engage with who were fine arts students, music students, etc. I don't think I would've been able to step into creating with the clarity that I do in my visual art if I hadn't experienced theater school, if I hadn't stepped into a role that told me, “listen, artists exist and [being an artist is sustainable.] I think because of other things that had happened in terms of me finally coming out to the only person in my family who wasn't aware and standing my ground, it was easier to just be like, “This is the kind of art I make, and it's dope. People resonate with it.”

NST & ef: Can you tell us a little bit about how you centered on this topic of intimacy for your artwork and about the process and significance of choosing specifically dark skinned, fat, queer and trans people as your subjects.

MTM: I think the intimacy as a throughline to my visual art happened in part because of what I needed from my creativity at the time. I needed to feel compassion, I needed to feel comfort. I needed to escape from the furnace of the pandemic and the compounded grief of a life that just quickly became unrecognizable. I needed the things that were familiar to me and things that made me feel good. And, the organic place that my mind went to was just portraying Black, queer and trans people being intimate with one another. I've always sort of just been very curious about human beings on multiple planes.

*Drum Lovers* by Mercy Thokozane Minah. Courtesy of Mercy Thokozane Minah.

In a lot of my other art forms, there's a pattern of me constantly probing certain parts of our vulnerability, whether that’s survivorship or grappling with mental illness. And at the time, I felt like I hadn’t explored softness or tender intimacy as extensively through my creativity. So, it was a two-part [interest] of seeking it for myself, but also wanting to expand my exploration of people.

In terms of the figures that I draw or convey, I have never wanted to be the type of artist to create outside of what's immediately familiar to me. I draw people who look like me, who look like people that I've loved, who look like people that I've fallen out with, had friendships with, have had all kinds of community with. I draw people that I know. I draw my community. That has always been the thing that's made the most sense to me. I don't throw shade at anyone else's practice, but I just feel like most of us look how we look, so it doesn't make sense for art to not convey what's going on.

NST & ef: So how, if at all, has your art served as a process of self-making or actualization?

“We’re here and this is how we live. This is what we look like. I do think that my work contributes to people stretching their imaginations for what is possible and who gets to take up space and not be questioned about it.”

MTM: It definitely has, I think the work—sometimes your work—is what you need more than you realize. One of the first things that sort of jolted me about the work was realizing how many experiences I'd discounted for myself — understanding what it meant to be a queer and trans person to live a queer and trans life and to have that be my core culture. There's been certain points in time in my life where I haven't necessarily been surrounded by community. I've sometimes felt like, “Am I [really] who I say I am and who I know myself to be, if I'm not dating all the time or if I'm single sometimes.”

I don't always have people that I can walk down the street to who are my close queer friends. I think what the work did for me was [reflect] a wealth of memories and experiences I’ve already had, and it is the most affirming way to articulate what my lifestyle is and what my life practice or intimacy practice is. So the work has definitely been self-actualizing and showed me that I've been here this entire time, I've been possible this entire time, I've lived a lot this entire time, and I've experienced a lot of intimacy.

NST & ef: Do you see the subjects that you capture as having something to say about freedom and liberation that other people can learn from?

MTM: I've been very careful, I think, not to overstate what my work does. I have had some experience with being an organizer/activist and being a part of those spaces. I think it's very important to be careful and measured in understanding what the work looks like, what the material impact of the work is. I think my work definitely does contribute to explorations of what liberation and freedom looks like, in terms of how restricted we are in the actual world. I don't realize sometimes how imbalanced the world is in terms of how much space is given to us. So, going into this work, it was jarring sometimes to have certain conversations with people who aren't queer and people who aren't friends who would say, “This is so brave of you to like show people who are like this, you know, so explicitly, right?”

We're here and this is how we live. This is what we look like. I do think that my work contributes to people stretching their imaginations for what is possible and who gets to take up space and not be questioned about it. My work is also a documentation of people who are living those conversations to begin with. My figures are based on people who are real, who are taking up space, people who are claiming liberation for themselves despite how few options they're given to be able to do that safely.

*Ife Amor* by Mercy Thokozane Minah. Courtesy of Mercy Thokozane Minah.

NST & ef: How do African radical movements and other African/African-diaspora struggles, contemporary and historical, shape your art and worldviews?

MTM: Well, I think South Africa's an interesting mixture of different struggles at play all the time. I have been fortunate enough to be educated about the types of resistance that have taken place here, whether it's been the Black Consciousness Movement that took place in the sixties in response to apartheid or the movement of Afrocentricity that took place in a similar time as well. But also stretching out into the current time that we're in as well as like the specific Queer African Movement that has been a part of all of that this entire time, because we do have queer trailblazers who were part of various antiracism movements during apartheid that folks seem to not know because of the complicated politics of ‘wait your turn,’ “we're dealing with race now we'll deal with gender next, and then maybe sexuality.” [Queer people] have always been here and always been a part of the historical landscape of resistance and reshaping history. That is the sort of thing that I draw from, from a specifically South African context. The idea that centering ourselves as Black people who have specifically Black experiences is important, not only as a form of resistance but also as a form of documenting ourselves, honoring ourselves, revering ourselves, and allowing ourselves to exist now, in the past, and in the future.

I have engagements with activists from across the globe, whether the UK or the US, and a through-line between conversations is the global Black Lives Matter movement. I don’t say ‘Black Lives Matter’ as just a phrase or slogan. I watched it unfold — young, Black people on the front lines trying to change things and have a really poignant conversation about the significance of lives that have been rendered subhuman or insignificant for centuries. That through-line of “we deserve to be here and we deserve to be alive and safe and free” is definitely something that I try to incorporate in the work that I make.

NST & ef: Does your work receive any pushback and how would you describe the entities or forces that show resistance towards your work?

MTM: Yeah, for sure. My work does receive pushback, and for the most part, the pushback has come from individual bigots on social media. There are definitely people who message me about the figures in my work, going to the gym or eating well or telling me that there's something vulgar about queer or trans people. Trolls, I guess, is the sort of attitude that I regard them with.

I don't know that my work has experienced any sort of more structural type of resistance as far as maybe not being allowed in certain spaces or being overlooked in certain spaces. I don't know. There's certain people who feel as though if your work is excluded in a particular space because the people there are bigoted, then I have to push for my work to be accepted by those people or to be in that space. But for me, if my work solely was in the hands of people who are affirmed by it, that's perfectly fine by me. If there are spaces that my work isn't allowed to enter or isn't recognized by because the people behind it are bigoted, it's their loss. And, I prefer for my work to move safely on whatever journey it's going to be on.

NST & ef: How would you describe both the joys and how hardships of being trans and/or queer in South Africa?

*Drum Lovers on the Beach by Mercy Thokozane Minah*. Courtesy of Mercy Thokozane Minah.

MTM: So, South Africa I think is one of the few countries in Africa that explicitly has protections for queer people in the constitution. We're also miles ahead in terms of healthcare in particular ways. Our advocacy for our freedoms is able to be a lot louder than in other parts of the continent, in terms of violent state backlash. But on a societal level, this is still a very deeply, deeply patriarchal country. And, none of the freedoms that we have on an institutional level exist without continued resistance and pushback from authorities that feel as though we shouldn't exist and we shouldn't have these freedoms. Simple things. Like, the right to get married. Our marriages are civil unions, not like actual marriages. Marriage officiates are allowed to opt out of having to officiate marriages involving queer people.

There aren’t a lot of explicit laws that protect safeties for non-binary people, for example. There's this idea that we should be comfortable, happy, and grateful because the state says all of these great things about what we can do, but there's also a lot of loopholes. We still experience an egregious amount of hate crimes. It's normal to hear news about people being brutalized because of their sexuality or gender identity. It's normal to encounter that type of bigotry when you step outside of your home.

So, our safety is guaranteed on paper only, but even then whenever we are brutalized, the state pretty much does nothing about it. It's a very strange place to be queer and trans. It's a very limited, precarious freedom. I think the joys of being queer and trans have been the boundlessness of what it's like to be as a person.

NSF & ef: One of the discourses that we hear and see in the West is the notion of queer and transness being un-African. How prominent is that discourse today? How do you contend with that notion?

MTM: It's still a thing. What's really interesting though about South Africa specifically is that I don't think we have a leg to stand on when it comes to claiming anything as African and un-African because so much of who we are has been completely bastardized by Europe, apartheid, and colonialism.

“...a lot of my political molding was being shaped by cis queer Black feminist women who basically told me in no uncertain terms that there’s no room for a person whose identity centers masculinity in feminism, because you are a traitor, the way that you’re articulating your sexuality and the way that you’re moving through your life is in direct contrast to what feminism is about.”

So for me that my queerness is un-African is something that I take least seriously in this country, particular because, what is African, what are we basing that on? I don't even think we have a solid enough baseline of what our actual Africanness — the basics of what we call culture, our languages, our practices — are like. We're not having the right conversation. At the same time, I do think, as much as people are able to pull a lot of examples of what the past showed us about the possibilities of queer and trans life, and as much as I understand the validity of that, for me, the fact that I am here as a Black person, as a Black African who is queer, who is trans, and who is living an African Black queer and trans experience has enough evidence that this is a part of the African experience. This is a part of the African narrative. We are as much a part of this land as other Indigenous people here. My existence, my practice, my lived experience, every part of who I am is intrinsically African, you know?

NST & ef: What is your relationships with feminism or feminisms? Do you identify as a feminist? Why or why not? And if you do, how do you define your feminism?

MTM: I identified as a feminist for about four years between the ages of 19 and 23. That was around the time that I was stepping into having a more outward conversation about my gender identity as a masculine of center non-binary person. Around that time, a lot of my political molding was being shaped by cis queer Black feminist women who basically told me in no uncertain terms that there's no room for a person whose identity centers masculinity in feminism, because you are a traitor, the way that you're articulating your sexuality and the way that you're moving through your life is in direct contrast to what feminism is about. The alienation that I felt then was so visceral that I don't think I was ever able to find my way back to feminism, even though I understood that this was like a very close-minded, bigoted group of people who were not expansive in their imagination of what feminism can actually be, how it takes space in the world, and who it's for.

I think I'm just very particular about how I identify, whether it pertains to my internal identity as a person or my political experience. It wouldn't make sense for me to claim the term feminist, but I do think that my values around autonomy, agency, freedom, interdependency, and intersectionality are definitely in line with a lot of feminist principles. So, I'm comfortable just having a core set of values that are resistance-based, that are rooted in liberatory and radical principles, and not having a label for them for the most part.

You can follow Mercy Thokozane Minah on Twitter and Instagram at @iamafreedom.

On Art, Actualization, and Affirmation: An Interview with Mercy Thokozane Minah