I took my first shower. My second day in the deportation facility. I do not know how I slept, how I woke up. I can’t decide whether to call what I sleep on a hospital bed or a prison bed. Synthetic leather, hard as rock.
Those who know me know I sleep with five pillows. I don’t know why, but I surround myself with them. A self-preservation instinct, I suppose. It puts me more at ease. You know that thing people say? “Let’s put a pillow between us to not get too close”. My obsession with pillows probably comes from there too. After the sexual abuse by the man that I called brother, I started sleeping with five pillows. With the pillows I circled around myself, I tried to protect both my body and my life. Not that they actually kept me safe, but that’s a child’s mind for you…
The synthetic leather pillow is neither cold nor warm, just sticky, clammy. Industrially washed. In the bathrooms here, every forty seconds you press a button and water spurts out. There is no showerhead. I hate cold showers, because when my brothers found out I was a lubunya, they would force me into the bathroom and torture me with cold water. The shower at the deportation centre is no different. Well, the architecture is different of course, but its soul, what it makes you feel, is the same.
Most of you will know, but still, I add a note for those of you who are meeting me for the first time: I am a trans woman. My laser hair removal isn’t finished, there’s still some hair on my beard area. I remove them with a razor. I was removing them, I should say. Bringing a razor in here is forbidden, because I may try to kill myself. They are afraid the people they’ve crammed in here will kill themselves. “Stay alive, but don’t live here”. How ironic.
Anyway, they gave me a razor in here, one that is no use to anyone. Even if you were thinking about harming yourself, you couldn’t actually go through with it. It is that blunt, something between plastic and metal. For someone with coarse hair like mine, it is impossible to get anything done with it.
I take the razor to cut my hair on my face, and while scrubbing away my masculinity, a female guard watches me from behind. Making sure I don’t cut myself… She doesn’t realise that I do not want to cut myself. I want to burn this whole world down.
They are destroying our lives, burning us alive in fires they have cast, watching us rot against the smouldering walls. And they call these fires ‘international relations’, ‘migration policies’, ‘family policies’, ‘social structuring’… They have all manner of names, and the common denominator of them all is ruin. Our ruin.
From a desolate corner of Sweden, from this deportation centre in which I face the flame, I send my regards to all trans sisters who carry their own sharp razors under their tongue. To those who have learned and taught self-protection by virtue of these razors…
Damn the system that forces us to do this. Damn patriarchy, damn my family and the putrid migration policies. Damn them all! To hell with this world that keeps me on thorns in a country where I have lived all these years, where I married and built a life.
Despite all this, I thank everyone who does not leave me alone, who shows me the kindness of solidarity, who struggled for my voice to be heard!
30th May, 2026
