Now, I know that most of you who reading this have probably seen the pictures from the festival. So I won’t go into that great detail about it. If you haven’t, check out the hashtag #afropunk and start living for the fashion. It’s beyond! What I am going to talk about is how it affected me and the painful, yet joyful experience I had while there. In order to do that, we have to go back in time.

Being black means you learn a lot about compromise at an early age. Since I existed mostly in white spaces, I had to learn early, how to walk, how to talk and how to breathe in certain ways to not be too different. I was already “the black one” and I didn’t want to stick out any more than I had to.

My older brothers, did not feel the same.

They embraced their blackness and used to tease me about not being “black enough”. While I was doing everything I could to keep up with Swedish TV like “Fångarna på fortet” or pretend that I like “Pippi Långstrump”, they would be talking about Tupac, Biggie, Malcolm X and teaching me about Afro-American culture. Little did I know back then that they were doing the same as me, working hard to fit into white spaces, but it didn’t matter. In my mind, they were embracing their blackness and owned their masculinity in a way that I never could. This was something I envied.

My brothers were the talk of the neighborhood. Claudio is a classic muscle guy and an excellent football player. Andrew is one of the tallest people I know (he’s around 6.5 feet tall!) and also an excellent basketball player. Both very traditionally masculine. And then there was me. The awkward little brother who wore glasses and had no discernible talent, except for singing and dancing, which immediately gave me the stamp of “GAY!” which I believed I was not. So it was all very awkward.

I keep looking at pictures of myself from that time and all I see is someone who desperately wants to be free to breathe and not feel all this pressure to conform.

Flash forward to me standing in a field in Brooklyn, seeing all of those beautiful black faces and bodies at Afropunk and I keep thinking about young Paulo and what I would tell him of what’s to come. First of all, you really need to see it to believe it. People are expressing themselves, not just through the clothes they’re wearing, but through their hair, their accessories, their movements. Girls with multi-colored afros. Natural hair. Shaved heads. Braids on the men. Jewelry, piercings, tattoos.  It’s like being on a first date with this large group of beautiful people and they are telling you their story. This was the second day of Afropunk and I had already seen a lot of acts, like TV on the Radio, Laura Mvula, Sate, Thundercat, that were to say the least, amazing. But I was getting ready for someone. I was getting ready for Seinabo Sey.

I have to talk about Seinabo, how could I not?

So the first song started and I was transported through time and space. Caught up in her voice and glow. I always stop whatever I’m doing when I hear her voice. It’s that good.  I saw her in her beautiful black dress with the flowey shirt. Her afro blowing in the wind. Red lipstick. Smiling. I met some of my Swedish friends in the crowd halfway through her set. When I turned around to greet them, I saw it. People were gathering. They were all coming to listen and see Seinabo. She’s clearly a star and the American black community seems to know it. I cannot tell you what happened for the next 30 minutes because I believe I was in a trance of some sort.  When she started singing one of my personal favorites and also the last song for the set, “You”, I was briefly in heaven. For one, perfect moment, I was blissful, peaceful, in love, filled with anger, filled with joy, I was everything and nothing. It was beautiful! I looked into the crowd and I saw a boy with braids wearing blue overalls. And it instantly brought me back to my past.

January 2006. I am trying to get home from school. It’s snowing everywhere. All I can think about is what happened today. This was the day that I found out that my classmates have been talking behind my back. They have been questioning my gender. Thoughts are racing through my mind. Is it my hair? Is it my clothes? Is it the way  I walk? The way I talk? Dammit…I thought I was free? Maybe even cool? Guess I was wrong. I mean, I was wearing a long-sleeved blue t-shirt and my baggy black jeans. Had on my grey winter coat that I’d gotten from my brother Claudio. I thought I looked like him. Maybe with longer hair, but still like him. Or maybe…maybe I wasn’t. I mean, I tried hard to be myself, but not stray too much into the “girly” territory. Being myself just enough so that people didn’t feel uncomfortable in my presence.

I used to get my brother’s hand-me-downs and I always felt a certain sense of pride. I remember thinking that wearing Andrew’s shirts (that were always oversized) would make me look cool. Or that squeezing myself into Claudio’s jeans and wearing his grandpa hat, would somehow give me the same body as him. I mean, my brothers were stylish as fuck and knew how to present themselves to the world. I used to spend hours studying their walks, talks and most of all, their wardrobes, to maybe one day have the confidence to project the same image of myself to the world. That day in January, I found out that it hadn’t worked.

As the last notes of “You” started to fade away and I returned to the present, I realized something that should’ve been my first take-away from all of this: Fashion is a beautiful form of self-expression. And being at Afropunk gave me the opportunity to really embrace that.

Seinabo’s set finished and I started walking around again to check up on my friends and just look at people. I tried to be subtle about it, but couldn’t really make it work. I was very thankful for my camera. Then I saw them. Three black men discussing something. I saw them from behind. The colors. The hair. The tattoos. I just knew that I had to grab a picture of them. Because they stirred something in my heart. Not the fact that they were fine as hell, because let’s face it, this is Afropunk. No, my heart was stirring because I saw them being free and unapologetically black. I’ve said this before and I will say it again, representation matters.

I took the picture. Thanked them. And walked away. What was going through my mind? In all honesty, I was thinking about the food, because I could smell the jerk chicken all the way from where I was standing, but also, I remember feeling weird about what had just happened. I had literally just taken someone’s picture and I felt so weird about it. I kept thinking about my own style choices for the festival and what I was wearing at the time. I looked down on my outfit: A colorful dashiki, harem pants, black fake-vans. Braided hair, put up in a high bun.  Would I have looked like this a couple of years ago? A month ago? Probably not. But here I was, at Afropunk, surrounded by all of these lovely people.

In my earlier articles, I’ve told you about different parts of my life and what I’ve been through. The festival made me reflect a lot about myself and what I have come to understand about being black in both Sweden and America. I was always seen as the femme queen, which meant that I also tried to conform to what I believed to be masculine attire in order to fit in. This is where the festival’s fashion becomes truly important, because it dares to challenge the norm and what it means to be “manly”. Here you can be whatever and whomever you want to be. You can wear a dress, you can have blonde hair, you can wear a fur, you can wear skirts, blouses, do anything.

The rest of the festival, I saw a bunch of different acts. Angel Haze, Kamau, Skunk Anasie, Kelela was just some of the names. I also saw Janelle Monae rocking the stage and telling us the story of the first Afropunk which apparently took place on a parking lot a bunch of years ago. I remember being in the crowd with my gurl Nora, listening to her speech. I’ve seen Janelle before, but this was different, because the audience was different. Everyone was dancing in the crowd and feeling a bit extra. I mean, people were shouting for joy, a guy was half-naked and wearing a panda head, which was a sight I definitely wouldn’t see in Sweden. People were feeling it. The people that didn’t know the songs didn’t really care, because they were just enjoying themselves and I was enjoying watching all of us feeling ourselves and expressing ourselves in a way that we aren’t allowed to do in regular life.

Afropunk, as a festival is different from anything I’ve ever been to. I never knew how much I needed to see this and how it had impacted me. Because seeing all of this, being in this space, renewed me. It gave me something that I thought was missing, but was in fact always there. Confidence. Pride. Love.

-Paulo Saka