NAT RAHA
Two years into the coronavirus pandemic, the deprivation facing marginalised groups – socially, culturally, and materially – is writ large. For trans, non-binary, and other gender non-conforming and queer people, especially those of us who are brown or Black, the extremities of feeling we’ve experienced in the past are resurfacing, and those of the present are stretching out. We have found ourselves separated from the physical, social spaces we’ve relied on for life and nourishment, and displaced from friends and family — sometimes from both chosen families and blood families. Some of us have spent much of our lives fighting abjection and denigration from the institutions that life is organised around — the family, healthcare, schools, etc. So to find ourselves alone or isolated, without or with the family, friends, or strangers we share our households with, and without the people or culture or company we need, has been difficult and triggering.
However, we’ve found ourselves looking for methods to hold and hold onto each other in this crisis, to find ways to support each other, to overcome separation and isolation, and to share joy, laughter, food, love, care and support, safety tips, and all the other things that aid staying alive, in spite of being apart. We’ve established mutual aid networks to provide basic necessities and information for each other’s bodies and lives. We’ve held space for self-expression, shared info and skills on transitions, published news of healthcare service changes and waiting times, supported friends and strangers to keep their fridges stocked. And as the pandemic hurtles us into 2022, we’re acutely aware of the mental health crisis facing our communities. In this context, we’ve found ways to hold space for grief, and to share the losses that we’ve experienced.
In the context of the pandemic, but also long before it, LGBTQI people have been creating and holding virtual community spaces — in fact, some of us first found each other through digital networks and social media. During the pandemic, there have been virtual club nights, parties, hangouts, game nights, film screenings, performances, and much more — so far as any of these things are possible DIY from one’s living room (or with some institutional support). Joy, desire, sorrow, and the rest get encoded and transmitted through ones and zeroes. Trans and queer subcultures have been a vibrant context for our creativity, and the focus of this context into the virtual has placed pressures on our creative practices while opening them for many who couldn’t join in person.
Across these letters, we find ways to situate our experiences, both in the context of past lived-experiences of isolation and separation from the communities, knowledge, and worlds that we need to live and thrive; and in the wider context of racial capitalism. Racial capitalism describes the systems of extraction & appropriation, enslavement and displacement of empires, corporations and nation-states pursuing profits and accumulation, a context that has transformed our planet into where we are now. This is a context of ecological harm and social violence, enacted upon life and land, affecting bodies and minds and souls (I think of these as inseparable) and histories and worlds. Racial capitalism is the gravitational force that shaped the United Kingdom, and has pulled those of us who have a history of migration to its shores — it shapes the cities we make life in. It’s from across such cities we post these words.
For some LGBTQI people, literature, especially poetry (the cheapest of the arts), has in fact held up pretty well. Poetry readings have become a staple of Zoom life. Across genres, many writers have found larger and more geographically spread audiences than we could have ever imagined. Readings straddling multiple time zones have been accompanied by talks and presentations from the vibrant new voices of trans fiction, as conversations around debut novels have got deep. The virtual worlds we’ve found ourselves in, oriented around anthologies such as We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, journals such as the trans fem aesthetics special issue of e-flux, and novels including Shola von Reinhold’s LOTE, Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby, and Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless have sown connections and friendships across oceans. Having bridged our separations, we don’t want to let this go. We’ve never let crises destroy our creativity, even if, as I describe in my letter, things now feel laden and can feel terrifying.
All of the above is part of the context for the exchange that follows, an exchange of letters between four writers, across generations and across the UK, who’ve known each other for many years. The letters dwell on some of the losses and fears that have been brought to bear upon us during the pandemic and from the wider cultural context facing trans and non-binary people in the UK, addressing why writing is so central in picking ourselves up and going forward. To share these sentiments publicly in the time of culture wars against trans people and Black and brown people, entailing regular harassment in the media of trans and cis female and non-binary intellectuals of colour, isn’t simply bravery — it’s a necessity in expressing where we are, and how we shall overcome the agents and gravities of our oppression.
These four letters shift from the prose that Sabah Choudrey, CN Lester, and I press through our pens, pencils, and keys into the classical, metrical verse of Roz Kaveney. The letters open with words from Sabah, who grapples with questions surrounding the lacunae in the archives of trans people of colour, and describes the creative urgency to write that has shaped their life. CN replies, invoking their hunger and cravings for presence and substance amid other trans bodies as part of cultural belonging, the need for ‘something I can hold in my hands now’. The fabrication of pleasure and longings for something real carry into the verse of Roz, who turns phrase and rhyme ready to fight — ‘Be constant truthful and defy,’ she encourages. In my letter, I sketch some memories of making life with these writers, and recent experiences of catching up with trans hirstories (hirstory — an alternative conception of history that emphasises the experiences of gender non-conformity and people we may describe today as trans and non-binary). I describe the weight of writing against oppression, and how we defy it to find joy.
And we begin together, across the pages of these letters, taking a moment to grieve for the harms and losses that come between transphobia, transmisogyny, homophobia, and racism, both historically and in the culture wars of the present moment. These are the forces that efface trans (of colour) existence, as Sabah describes, such that in the act of looking back, ‘we won’t see ourselves and our stories reflected’. As I detail in another essay, these forms of oppression work to actively misrepresent and misgender trans people, our lives and political practices, even when they’re penned by other LGB people.Footnote1 Furthermore, while trans-authored trans histories are more common now amid the books you’d find in a good independent bookshop, some of these histories focus narrowly on the lives of white trans people — framing trans people of colour within their Eurocentric terms, if we’re mentioned at all. It is from these absences and misrepresentations that, in these letters, we voice the longings for transformation that have shaped our lives, our communities, our bodies, and our desires. It’s these longings that drive creativity among some trans and gender non-conforming people, encouraging us to organise social and political spaces.
While Kaveney proposes that ‘There’s no tradition yet’, her position within this exchange draws out its intergenerational lineage. Roz is a trans woman elder, with much experience of the trajectory of trans life across the past five decades — through the sex wars of the eighties, to the nineties and noughties eras of multiculturalism, into the culture war of the present. Writing across fiction, poetry, and criticism as her bread and butter, Roz has also played a key role in supporting younger trans people through our lives, in person and online. With the generosity of her time, company, and support, she’s encouraged many of us to step up as the next generation of queer and transfeminist thinkers, writers, and makers.
While the virtual can and has been a lifesaver, being in a physical space with other trans, non-binary, and queer people – to be bodies together in a room – can have a profound physical effect. However, while mass culture and its economic drives encourage us to get back to normal (consumption and work!) in person, this remains impossible for many vulnerable, chronically ill, and disabled LGBTQI people. Virtual queer life has made culture more accessible, even if it doesn’t feel the same — it’s different after all. Literary spaces show us that these needn’t fall into one particular side of this supposed divide — and while physical letter writing may not be common practice among millennials and Gen Z, it does offer a generative intimacy, to work through ideas if even provisionally.
I’m not convinced by this idea of going back to normal, returning to the old way of cultural life while so many of our vulnerable, chronically ill, at-risk, and disabled friends can’t join us. I want us all to be able to breathe together, but breath is a political condition. We’ve learnt this from Black Lives Matter, seen it over and over from Ferguson to the pandemic to George Floyd. The Black Lives Matter demonstrations of summer 2020 were a pivotal moment and opportunity to come and be together – with the utmost care – to express politicised anger and grief. From such political upheavals and pivotal moments, we can plan and dream and sketch how we might bring ourselves back together.
SABAH CHOUDREY
Dear friend,
This is not the start of a letter. This is not the beginning of this publication. This is not something you haven’t heard before; you will have heard of us before. Our lives did not start in this decade nor century nor millennium. And we have always been here.
If you look back over your shoulder, how far behind can you see? To be honest, I don’t see much. Looking back over our shoulder we don’t see much. Between these pages and archives we don’t see much either, but still, we look back.
I look back for all the reasons I want to look forward. Will I be okay? Will I be safe? Will I be loved? I want the world to see me for who I am: trans, gender fluid, non-conforming … Did people like me survive? I look back to find out how we lived, to tell our tale, because I don’t want it to end with me.
We won’t see ourselves and our stories reflected, nor our true names and pronouns; we won’t see acceptance and empowerment. We have to search even for proof of our existence. There is no more solid proof than your word and mine. I think this is why I write.
At the moment when I put pen to paper, no word has yet been changed or erased. Even as I edit – single strikethrough or a scribble depending on my mood – my word is still under there. You will see mistakes and misfortunes but these are all mine to own. I have pages of notebooks, .docs, and unsent drafts that are all mine and only mine, safe corners where I put myself and leave something behind. Documenting my own existence through timelines and writing my own/his/her/their story. I never knew why I wrote, I simply wrote. From putting my feelings to thoughts to body to hand to fingers to pen to paper. Healing, hurting, processing, confessing, understanding, unlearning, forgetting, remembering, distracting, focusing, rebuilding. Writing gives me these gifts that the world will not grant our communities. By writing, I give these gifts to myself; to you.
One day I laid these gifts out on the floor at my feet and found myself standing in front of an archive of me. A rarity. Trans people of colour aren’t found in archives. If we are found we are mislabelled and forcibly lost by curators who don’t see us, hear us, or believe (in) us. If we are found we are found by others who need to see us, have heard us, and believe in us — we are found by and in each other. In the middle of it all we find each other.
This is not the start of a letter but the middle. The middle, where we land and stretch and expand. Across chronologies and paper — lined, I always hold a pen in my hand. My mum gave me the space to be creative. My dad gave me the belief that I could fill it. My trans elders, siblings, spirits, and friends gave me the words: ‘your story needs to be heard’.
Do you remember the first letter that you wrote to yourself, the letter you wrote to your true self? The first piece of you that you archived without thinking? The first part of you that you believed was real?
I started writing the stories I wanted to believe. It took me some time to realise that they had already been written, however tampered-with and hidden. Our stories are erased from his/her/their story, with many believing gender fluidity is hard to find across what we call Asia, Africa, and the Americas — if you’re even fortunate enough to have heard of gender as bender as fluidity, not only as binary or box. I was taught of gender as rigidity. But there’s so much I could have known to describe what was within me.
Outside of the English language and beyond the Western gaze we exist as khwaja sera (Pakistan), hijra (India), bakla (Philippines), kathoey (Thailand), machi (Chile and Argentina), two-spirit (Native American and First Nations), berdarche (North America), xanith (Arabian peninsula), and more; we are so many more.
Gender existed and exists around me, but my gender was something told to me and someone I was taught to be. Before I carried gender on my shoulders, trans was already inside my body. I was/am just trans. I don’t think I ever said the words. The words that are both limited and limitless. My gender just moved, the way liquid moves to fill a space. There was no start, no word, just movement. No, not a transition — there is no end either. It was (is) just a somewhere in-between somewhere else. The moving middle.
I write now to tell you I am here. And I am not alone. Sentences I have read before, affirmations we have spoken before. We learn and remember our history so we don’t repeat tragedies. If the tragedy is that we don’t remember it, what will we learn? If we can’t change our/his/her/their stories, can we change our futures?
This is not the start of a letter nor the ending. The beauty of a page is in turning it to find another. Truthfully, we don’t deserve the endings we have had. And we are far from over. Our stories continue, our journeys and writings persist. What are the letters we will continue writing? How can we make sure our stories don’t end?
CN LESTER
Dear friends,
Thank you for your beautiful letter, and for giving me the space to reflect on your words and add my own to keep this chain of communication moving. I have sat with your thoughts for several days now, trying to articulate what it is that I feel, and what I need to say.
You wrote of looking back, of wanting to look forward – but you also spoke of the middle, and it was that that caught me, because what I need right now – what, in fact, I am desperate for — is to be able to look at each other, in this moment, in this place. You wrote ‘there is no more solid proof than your word and mine’, and it made me hungry for that sensation of being seen and being held, in and through the understanding and insight of others, in a shared space of recognition and acceptance.
I don’t think it’s any one thing that has created such a sense of urgency in this feeling, but a combination of factors; aside from experiences personal to me, a pandemic is a bad time for a cultural backlash, even if intellectually we understand why they so often go together. What I do know is that I can feel a deep shift in need from what used to sustain me to what I’m craving now. I grew up sublimating my present needs and desires into plans for a better future, putting my hopes outside of myself and into an imagined reality, losing myself in the work I needed to do to get there. And trans histories are both work and pleasure, somewhere I’m used to going in order to find inspiration, courage — a sense of fellowship and also the material I can use to reach others, challenge them, bring them comfort. But right now neither of these strategies are enough to sustain me.
In order to lift my eyes up and look further I need something I can hold in my hands now. I want it for myself, and I want it for others, because this experience is by necessity made between people, not on one’s own. I want to be seen, and I want to enable other trans people to see themselves, to be a part of a larger process generating illumination, like a beam of light bouncing across and through a hall of tilted mirrors.
I want to go further than this — I want the luxury of pleasure beyond survival, for others and for myself. I don’t want the concept of a possible future, but instead the weighty, visceral reality of a beautiful present which multiplies and stretches onward. I want to enjoy the sound of trans people’s laughter, the expressions on our faces, the ways in which we look at each other. I want to share food with friends and community, to literally feed others and be fed in turn, and to dance in a place full of different bodies full of joy. I want to march with the strength of someone else’s arm in mine, and hear someone else’s words in my ears. I want a present so full – not perfect, but full – that I’m in love with its continuance.
What I don’t know is how to make these longings real, to get to that place — do you? I feel as though I’ve done it before, and should know how to do it again, but I can feel myself struggling and running low. I worry that this is a selfish question, because who isn’t struggling now? I’m not trying to pretend that my losses have been any greater (they haven’t) or my distress more important (it isn’t). This isn’t asking you to put aside your own needs, and your own burdens, to take care of mine. Instead, I hope, that maybe this could be a mutual question — not ‘me instead of you’ but ‘you and me both’. Something that could make more room for us all to be, and more joy for us to experience, the more people who asked and answered.
It scares me, to be this open and vulnerable with you all. But something being trans has taught me is how need will and must break through the barriers created by fear, even barriers so rigid and fundamental that much of the world considers them immutable truth. Right now I need other trans people more than I want to pretend that it’s possible for a person to make it alone. I can’t make a future without it.
ROZ KAVENEY
NAT RAHA
Dear friends,
It’s so good to hear from you, especially in this time. How many years since we last saw each other, or were together? Two, three, five, seven? Here we are, picking up where we left off, the familiar turning familial. Writing has always been a way to break through silence, to bridge the distances between us — the distances engendered through taking agency with our lives, and those that emerge through the pushing of capital, especially through gentrification, bulldozing the places we shared joy and life within. Your letters are deeply moving — & have made space to be vulnerable, to share, to dream and plot, to be held together in print when we can’t and don’t manage this alone.
And we’ve all been profoundly alone at times. But next to those moments of isolation, I think of the meals we’ve shared together, the kitchens we’ve cooked and danced in, traded stories across; I think too of the bars & bookshops, the public panels and recitals and readings, but really I think of those dinnertimes, all the time. I remember the tastes of roasts, the vegetable soups, the paneer, dal, and roti; but I also think about the meals we could have co-ordinated too, the festivals we didn’t get to celebrate and the parades where we weren’t side-by-side. I ponder the dreams and plans we made to create and write and play together that didn’t happen, and the performances you did make together. I think about how we spoke of past passions in books, and studied the emotion in the music we loved. Studying the names you mentioned, the people I kept stumbling into as I dove deeper into trans hirstories and archives and subcultures. The people whose words and sounds I keep seeing anew as anthologies are published, books and records reissued. I remember my pride in finding you were the author of that viral article other friends reposted. I remember the difficult arguments about liberation we had on the floor of my smallest, shortest-term home.
I write all this now because we’ve been so busy living, trying to make the art and communities and write the words we urgently need, that it’s so easy to forget what we’ve lived together. And I’m just speaking of the four of us. Beyond that, there’s the whole of trans and gender non-conforming hirstory — even that of it which is half-effaced, ignored, or gathering dust in the libraries and archives that are yet to re-open. And we – trans folks – are still catching up on those who came before us. Pulling my everyday energy from disco and house, this past week I’ve been thinking of Sylvester, mighty and so real that it seems like no-one could keep up. Sylvester’s voice glitters down the Internet and refracts its mirrors into my living room, a sonic belonging matched by fashion so astonishing it’s a challenge to really look. By the moment I’ve seen something, I’ve missed the hook of the chorus. It’s ludicrous and it’s a pleasure that holds up now after the fact — of their career, their life and death. I look with hunger, to desire and to create. I try to remember my practices to rest, recentre, and focus all these affects and energies back further and deeper into my words and worlds, to orchestrate these small pieces & moments into paragraphs and poems.
It often feels laden to write the hardest, most honest words on trans life and experience, especially those on us femmes and femmes of colour. You described as the drive of writing, ‘putting my feelings to thought to body to pen to paper’ — it’s against that I feel gravity’s pull, exerting itself across my body, all of my muscles including my brain and hands. I remember that that is oppression. It weighs most heavily when I’m working on trans and queer hirstories, delineating genderqueerness and transgression out from archives, from cisnormative histories (cistories) that either didn’t get it or are more interested in denouncing our gender deviance.
But we find methods to defy these gravities. We dust off new and old ways to push against the forces of oppression, even as the rising rents & tides & borders split us geographically from each other. We defy these gravities together, even if afar, in collectives and in real community (‘community’ often being appropriated and generalised, as a given, in the empty mouths of the mainstream). We support and facilitate the art and worlds we each want to make and make (together). I think about Lola Olufemi and Saidiya Hartman’s ideas on critical fabulation, animating herstories as we need them now and in the coming years; I place Juliet [Jacques]’s new book beside theirs on the bookcase.
You wrote about your needs for substance and pleasure — ‘something I can hold in my hands now’. Pleasure is only a luxury in a world of hoarded wealth and labour, where as Black, brown, migrant, trans, gender non-conforming, queer, disabled, and/or feminised people we have to do more work and labour to survive and make a living. In the refusal of these conditions, I live to infuse pleasure and joy into this life. And I know the conditions can force a price on us, on our pleasure and bodies, which can translate into violence and even death. Pleasure is a key part of the substance of our trans & queer worlds. I wonder if isolation is the fee I pay. I find myself tuning into the sensations of art made by women and enbys I care about deeply; I find it in the coarse rhymes of your poem about The Bell in the Rebel Dykes Art & Archive show. ‘Red smear kiss quick in mirror broken glass.’ Traces of joy on skin refracting glittering.
But joy doesn’t come alone — it’s always interconnected with other life, human, animal, fauna or flora or mineral. In my longing to be held by people, I find myself held by non-human life. I’ve been writing about the planting we’ve been doing all along, gardening for ourselves and each other. Soil in the carpet of the living room. I take your letters to the churchyard I can see from my dinner table, drink your words with tea amid the last blooms — getting set for this next winter, of discontent, spray paint and desire. Sow our words now & see what shoots from them.
With love always,
Notes
1 See Nat Raha, ‘Queer Memory in (Re)constituting the Trans Lesbian 1970s in the UK’, Queer Print in Europe, edited by Glyn Davis and Laura Guy (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming). The essay focuses on trans activism in the UK Gay Liberation Movement and emerges out of a dialogue with Roz Kaveney.