Many transgender people turn to ‘urgent, unusual writing’ to ‘… feel seen, feel relevant’ and to express their fluidity. Could poetic forms, their ability to transcend the body, to let the ‘self’ bleed ‘beyond its periphery-animal, vegetable, mineral, textural, gestural’, embracing abjection, pushing abjection to the absolute limit, restore our dignity and selfhood? Could the gender diversity ‘repressed by transphobic abjection’ be ‘actively revitalised within imaginations and collective spaces’?
Colombian writer, novelist and poet, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, was raised in the tropics by his grandmother, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes. She ‘treated the extraordinary as something perfectly natural.’ Marquez went on to write some of Latin America’s most surreal and most lifelike works of fiction, establishing magical realism as a genre unto itself. Though famous for classics like Love In the Time Of Cholera, ‘Puppet’ is one of a few Marquez poems you might recognise:
If God would bestow on me a scrap of life, I would dress simply, I would throw myself flat under the sun, exposing not only my body but also my soul
As I got older, transition seemed ever more elusive even as I worked my way up the ladder to the most elite childhood psychiatrists. When I became a legal adult, with medical solutions like top surgery now within a stone’s throw – one bankruptcy, quarter-life crisis, one or two nipple grafts, heartbreaks and humiliations away, within tucking/taping and snipping/chopping distance – my mind opened to other realities. Magical, preposterous realities. When I eventually got top surgery, late in 2023, I realised sex could be vetoed. That male and female were contemporary genres. That I could use magic to invert and subvert myself.
‘Gender is something that enables us to recognise each other as human’ trans-feminine poet Joy Ladin says. In her experience, people have registered her humanity even in gender’s absence. Still, she grieves it. Gender confines us but shelters us too. In ‘Centrifugality’, Ladin depicts her body as a home, her soul climbing out of a window ‘to scatter itself on the wind’. And in her poem ‘Beyond Fear’, she writes ‘You fear you are less than nothing’, ‘a nameless pool of blood’.
I do. In transition, in lack of stability, I feel like substance more than subject, blood jettisoned. I turn to poets like Ladin to reinstate me. ‘Here’s the soul you thought you lost’ she writes, and waits for me to claim it. What can we queer writers bestow on each other?
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, a short story Marquez published in his collection Eyes of a Blue Dog, is a tale of entrapment, dirt, disgust and diminishment, of deep deathlike depression. The antagonists are couple Pelayo and Elisenda. On the third day of a superstorm, ‘rotten shellfish’ and asylum-seeking sea life wash ashore. Their house fills with frantic crabs and an angel tumbles from the heavens into their courtyard. On his way back from the beach, Pelayo finds the angel with ‘buzzard wings’ and ‘very few teeth in his mouth’, ‘entangled in the mud’ and can’t decide whether this ‘pitiful’ creature is holy or just a very old man who happens to be immortal. The couple, nauseated and repulsed find they don’t ‘have the heart to club him to death’. Instead, they lock him in their chicken coop and make him a ‘circus animal’. His misery quickly becomes a spectacle, ‘even the most merciful threw stones’ and pilgrims come from far and wide to abject him, the line reaching ‘beyond the horizon’. Over time, the angel stops responding and starts to sing ancient sea shanties. When he fails to entertain, or to defend his honour, instead getting ‘comfortable in his borrowed nest’, people grow bored and stop visiting. But unable to die or escape, he simply putrefies.
In A Hatred That Smiles: Kristeva’s Essay on Abjection and Intimate Racism, Daniel Tutt writes ‘Kristeva argues that man is a spiritual being only in so far as he internalizes his repulsion, his abjection … Sin remains the rock where one endures the human condition as separate. Abjection becomes a source for reconciliation. To set oneself up as evil is to abolish oneself as evil.’ Our attempts to suppress and self-loathe, our internalisation of transphobia and phobic abjection, are attempts to purify and appease – our fathers who art in heaven, our family, and colleagues. I am a very old man and I am as tired as Horn of ‘… reconciling to fear and love and hate’.
In The Weight of Breasts That Aren’t There, Kit Edington asserts that the alienation from our bodies that trans people experience should not be reduced to some ‘irresistible facet of neuroanatomy, some arbitrary goad inside’ and, instead, argues our dysphoria and disassociation are ‘relational conditions’ that ‘cannot be fully explained without an account of the social process of gendering’. The more we internalize normative gender, the more abnormal and abhorrent our bodies. At a certain point, ‘We cannot feel what they want; we assume that their desires exist, but the bodies themselves are not alive, not thrilling with desire; they are like wet, gray, crumbling paper towels.’
