Transtraterrestrial: Black Divinities and Dark Matter (Wesleyan University Press) is more than a book. Its author Sage Ni´Ja Whitson, a queer non-binary artist, works fluently across multiple forms of media. Through spare written passages and an array of photographs, Whitson’s distinct Afro-futurist voice opens yawning galaxies of Blackness. The book is an invitation to stretch one’s mind beyond rigid understandings of gender and to see Whitson´s trans identity as the key to “a portal where blackness is at its wildest expression.”
If Transtraterrestrial is a performance (and who’s to say it’s not?) then it’s helpful to think of the book as a piece of participatory theatre: reading its pages is not a passive act. Whitson urges readers to encounter Transtraterrestrial as a non-linear set of cultural artifacts, a sharp tool cutting against the white supremacy forced upon Americans (especially LGBTQ+ people and people of color) throughout everyday life, academia, and even art. While at times opaque, the book bubbles over in a circular space-time with no clear beginning or end. Temporal looping dialogues with ancestral knowledge—shadowy realms where the past continually informs the present.
The book invites readers to sit with a series of, what Whitson calls “Unarrival Experiments.” While never conclusively defined within the text itself, they imply that this set of inquiries function as a toolkit; Transtraterrestrial is a survival manual for enduring in a world that is constantly trying to kill LGBTQ+ and BIPOC folks. Whitson repeatedly grounds the reader in explorations of this survival borne from their own lived experience. The author says:
“It was not going to be enough to try and inevitably fail to ‘transform’ the politics and practices of the white box (or white theater or team or institution). The dark black necessary enough to practice unarrival and unconcealment could not be achieved by draping dense fabrics or taping over windows and exit signs. The theater spaces, as they were conceived, would simply not hold the blackness. Something had to be created from within the Unarrival universe.”
The (physical) book is non-linear and can be read in any order. Whitson fills the pages with upside down text, poems written in circles, and other textual styles where content dictates format, and format isn’t bound by convention. Readers can explore this book in any order over days, weeks, or even months. By defying our assumptions on how to read, the text itself challenges binary thinking and perception.
The book offers two primary points of entry: “The Unarrival Experiments” and “Counterproposals.” One begins on the back cover, the other on the front. Both sections lead to the middle––the book´s heart, running along its spine––before requiring the reader to flip the book over and turn it upside down. Each half acts as a portal to the other through a physical halving (or doubling) that invites sensory (dis)engagement. While Transtraterrestrial is available in e-book format, it must be wielded by hand for maximum effect. Like the different planes of the Kongo Cosmogram–a longstanding symbol of Central Africa’s Bakongo people, representing the cycles of life, death, and rebirth referenced in the text––Whitson’s literary cypher features rituals, incantations, prose, academic arguments, TV show analyses, dedications, and more, each poeticism speaking life into the next.
Both portals constitute an unraveling of performance; literary, sonic, and tactile experiments abound. Whitson’s constantly shifting forms ask readers to attend to what’s “indirectly observable, yet undeniably there”––a fluid queerness that refuses dominant ideas and aesthetics, translating and transmuting into new shapes. This is a hypervisible yet simultaneously invisible Blackness hungry to be seen in whatever form it takes, rather than through the lens of others’ demands.
This desire echoes in the language itself, which despite its seeming fixedness “refuses to become.” By transforming familiar words into a new vocabulary––Transtraterrestrial, “unarrival,” “transcestors”––Whitson queers familiar concepts, inviting readers to reconsider ideas they may already know. Through both container and content, Transtraterrestrial offers methods for working into the unknown, for discovering modes of being which reckon directly with historical and systemic violence towards people of color. The book, like Whitson´s artistic practice, becomes a ceremonial space of vulnerable inquiry.
Whitson frequently invokes their Great Grandmother Willie and coins the concept of “the sacred scientific,” both underscoring how personal heritage and lived experience function as platforms for rigorous research. When Whitson writes about their experiences with blood stasis – a concept in traditional Chinese medicine where the obstruction of blood begets illness, the ritual of moving the book through its paper body feels different, as if the reader fuels the book’s pulse, keeping its superfluid blood flowing through the pages. Accessible in spirit and piercing in intellect, Whitson paints images of a future that can only arrive to liberate society from the past once we accept the power and presence of Blackness and dark matter.
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An Afterword, from Zoe Farnsworth:
My white fingers mark the dark pages with their oils that shimmer and stand out. I wonder how much this book is for me. I’m grateful to Whitson for sharing this with the world. For letting me touch it. Transtraterrestrial makes me want to live expansively, to reach into the darkness and beyond. To refuse a static form. To grow and change across time and space. As a trans person, I desire this spiraling bounceiness between realms, which helps me see how stretched I am across different ways of being. Whiston’s claims that light is aberrant and darkness makes up the universe. By the end of the book, I remember my body’s own aberrance. We gender explosions are the ones who refuse to arrive.
Transtraterrestrial: Dark Matter and Black Divinities, Sage Ni’Ja Whitson, Wesleyan Press, 2025.
