#i made it a link
Guest post by workshop participant Thel Seraphim, who you can find on twitter at @mallwizard:
There wasn’t any formal requirement that the workshop participants make grand sweeping statements about their philosophy of writing and life, but we all seeem to be doing it, so I thought I would share a short piece about the anxieties of identitarian literature. This is not exactly about the workshop but was inspired by the workshop discussion and especially conversations with Frida Fafán, Zach Ozma, & Kay Gabriel. It is cut from my digital zine, ‘… #1’ which you can find at https://gum.co/theotherellipsis, or read excerpts of on twitter @otherellipsis.
identity writing, 2
Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time reading & thinking about the flowering of black gay men’s writing in the 1980s & 90s. I find many of the concerns recognizable. There’s a sense of writing from the crisis. There’s a sense of responsibility in writing from a complex identity & a need to be true to all parts of it. There’s a sense that this identity by its very existence challenges the self-concept of liberation movements that hold themselves above critique. There’s also a sense of advancing that critique lovingly, a recognition of an expanded sense of home, & of mutual dependence.
I don’t point to this in order to draw a simple-minded analogy to my own situation, but as an antidote to the exceptionalism of trans concerns. We have something to learn from these men. & because they wrote genuinely from their position, we can learn from them. As the past recedes, their honesty & thoroughness remain a guide. I don’t know who else went that far. Of course I don’t mean to say here that this is an honesty that excludes artifice or formal invention. You can find poetry here, & experiment, analysis, ideas that feel absolutely fresh 30 years later. If one black gay man writes as effectively a black heterosexual, & another writes in a decontextualized, implicitly white frame of sexual identity, haven’t we really described two closets?
& for me? The constituent parts of my identity are very different than say Joseph Beam’s or Essex Hemphill’s, & the problems are different too. But thinking through their words & lives I find myself spontaneously organizing new responses to my situation. There’s a sense of rebuilding in the heart, & it isn’t just gender. If I can be allowed to be unguardedly optimistic, I think that trans people, & particularly trans people of color, are speaking to something that matters now, & that continues this tradition. The future will be curious. We can dare to take ourselves a bit seriously here.
Let’s talk about a few of the problems of trans writing now, without pretending to completeness.
We can characterize a lot of contemporary trans literature in its reaction to an injunction to disclose before a hostile or interrogating gaze. The trans memoir as a genre is often kicked around as an example of an absolute capitulation to that pressure. You asked for a butterfly story, so I gave you one. Perhaps I get surgery at the end. But looking beyond the genre of the memoir, which incidentally is capable of entertaining good writing & real opacity to that gaze, we find that a lot of other trans literature can also be characterized by its response to that injunction. I say “I refuse to give you what you want,” but in the course of spiting you, I limit my own expression.
For example I might cultivate bookish impersonality, at the cost of accessibility. I might cultivate a highly analytical tone, at the cost of heart. I might cultivate a counterintuitive set of influences or references, at the cost of connection to my own communities. I might cultivate a pure literary quality, write standard issue workshop fiction, at the cost of analysis, digression, & my own presence as the author. Everybody’s got an angle. It might be necessary to stay up very late together to come to the point & really find yours.
I see that injunction in writing as a person of color as well. There are obnoxious cliches of the genre. For example, establishing your connection to the ancestral homeland through food. Or grandmother. For me, maybe this is a bite of chiktay aron so, followed by an actual madeleine. Or sacrificing a bit of that connection, telling the story of being at home neither here nor there, neither black nor white, American nor foreign, inviting your your reader to draw a false equivalence between these different failures of belonging, which carry very different kinds of social necessity & coercion. Going down into that & becoming more alone. Who refused you? Who did you refuse?
This is just to say that to write honestly doesn’t mean to write artlessly or without guile, or to capitulate to that infantilizing gaze. That’s a way of falling into traps, & it’s very boring. I want to be as aware & creative as possible in my response to the pressures that deform my writing. I’ve mentioned only two here, but there are so many others.
I don’t think I can figure all of this out alone. I also don’t think I can figure this out in a single community organized by gender or sexual identity. I’m going to keep showing up, since those spaces continue to be a home, we continue to need each other. In my earlier sonnet I felt that dedication falter, but really we are stuck here together, even if we’ve only stopped in to get out of the rain.
So how to write as a trans woman while maintaining agency? I might say, flippantly, that I’m always trans but my writing reflects that only sometimes. But that’s too easy. Look, I have a lot of issues with the idea of writing from an otherwise unmarked transfeminine position. I don’t want to accept the frame of “trans literature” as it’s beginning to be institutionalized in the form of a few small presses, a few literary awards, a set of critical concerns, workshop culture, the beginnings of a canon. But I don’t want to retreat into a position that asserts the irrelevance of my transness or my ultimate disconnection from those concerns. I am writing as a trans woman, & as I do so I’d like to find out what that amounts to.
