The Room in Spite Of

Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Ari Banias’s poem “The Happy” appears in the September 2016 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.

Why do you come to writing.

To talk with you, though it embarrasses me (“let me always / be embarrassed” Samuel Ace). How could this not be an outpouring, to be trans right now (“Worlds keep growing within the soul. / She doesn’t know how to bear them.” Joy Ladin); I mean, to be trans with you, not alone.

As for the room, which is after all any institutional room, the University, the Writing Conference, the Museum, the 501c3, and more, these thoughts. That a few of us are invited into this room is evidence of capitalism’s knack for smoothly incorporating us, & leveraging our bodies, lives, identities, against greater, disruptive, social and cultural transformations (that could result in, say, the end of our murders, the abolishment of prisons, the disarming of police, the beginning of our sustained well-being). I don’t want to be complicit in a narrative that uses me as proof that trans people have it “better” now. I neither want to be in a room because I’m trans, nor in spite of it. And I have some questions.

After the initial curiosity, after the spike in interest, and the appointing of a few & well-behaved, and the room’s self-satisfied inclusion points, once its attention swivels to some other corner, where are we? Are we in it together? Do I have your back, do you have mine? Has the room been made any bigger, the world any gentler, and for whom?

I want to say I don’t nod and smile but I nod & smile. In rooms I find myself alone in: is this really where I want to be? (“this tattoo says ‘i’ve been outside myself for so long i’m not allowed back in’” Manuel Arturo Abreu). Often the people are nice enough; mostly they don’t ask inappropriate questions, and for that I’m to feel relieved. Still, is it a room any of us should want to be in? (you crossed / the line / into bearded / disappearance / you know / that I would / serve the club / mortal and / corrupt” Samuel Ace). Visible, their discomfort just under the surface as they guess the pronoun for a partner they’ve never met, calculating something. Or their stumble as they say that’s a nice blouse, I mean, shirt, I mean…and I rush in, no worries. What does it cost me? (“put the cave inside another cave so no one can reach it.” Dawn Lundy Martin). What kind of vigilant do I have to be here? (“She never turns her face from you because of what you might do.” Joshua Jennifer Espinoza). Times I hurriedly scraped nail polish off at the last minute, tearing my cuticles in the process, so as not to confuse the room further, it was doing so well so far. Embarrassing to admit this small self-effacement, still, after all my no worries. Who does the room require me to be? (“Like that time I realized that for us by us was a message more seductive to them than it ever was to us. Not that us is even us at this point, as the separations between dissolve with every caustic ‘agree to terms of service.’” Juliana Huxtable). When they say it is policy, we cannot change your name in the public directory. When the look on their face says but that’s not grammatical. When I see the same shirt later in a picture I notice that, damn, it is a blouse. Then, wait, since when do I give a shit? When they say to my face, but what you’re asking people to see doesn’t exist.

Because of this and more, I’m indebted.

I think how can I not about how many of us are gone. (“When the church was closed. / & the park was being patrolled. / & I got tired of just walking around. / & I would hum songs to myself. / [The love songs of extinct birds].” Loma). And I think about how many of us are living, barred access to various heres. And again that I’m expected to be grateful. (I must love even the fox that impedes my path” Julian Talamantez Brolaski).

Feeling indebted as I do, how could this not be an outpouring. And how could it just be mine. I think no, compose yourself; be rational, scholarly. Then I think does a scholar feel nothing, does a scholar still feel nothing? (“And the word grew / While its referent slept” Joy Ladin). I don’t want to feel nothing; I come to writing to feel something (“a flight of lost pashminas is lilting free from clouds.” Ryka Aoki),

I come to it to recall I’m alive (“All these movie moments and / hand cutting wind in half dreams /come for me as if /sent by some light that wants /to watch me survive.” Joshua Jennifer Espinoza),

to register my complaint, or to register what it was like (“somewhere committees are being formed to patrol the neighborhood for trash, I throw cigarette butts on the ground to give them purpose and leave behind matter.” kari edwards),

to be rearranged (“A desire to rip the bottom out of experience – these bodies, they say, are ungovernable.” Dawn Lundy Martin), & to imagine otherwise.

My being inside the room makes nothing otherwise, for whoever is outside the room (“i feel sad and ancient for seeing a thousand years in every gesture and i get anxious / i’m living in a place where the door is mostly a big glass pane / not that you could erase a colonial gesture” Manuel Arturo Abreu), and very little different for whoever is in this room (“don’t forget that all representing is nonsense” Trish Salah). My presence, my visibility, not the result of a gentleness, doesn’t produce a gentleness (“They were built to be inhospitable.” Reina Gossett); the room has no allegiance to us (“We have sex like you have reason to believe / in getting up or an in with the man before the ambush.” Trish Salah). Nor does my presence mean my exceptional worth (“You are no one in particular.” Joy Ladin) (“Everyone is a spork” Trace Peterson). Repeatedly, I find myself called into the room as the lone trans person (“I do not know where my house is. Where is my house?” Dawn Lundy Martin). Called to be trans for the room.

When I feel so trans in the room, and alone (“despite the fact that there are trans people on television, in movies, on the cover of magazines, trans friendly jails, trans friendly military.” Reina Gossett), like some mid-century version of a sad and monstrous and inscrutable and unlovable trans subject, what is it exactly I’m feeling? My presence as commodity, as curiosity, as a fascination, and as temporary—I am prized like cut flowers are prized, bearing an expiration date, my value hinging on some intangible that can’t be pointed to. (“That she is transsexual, of course, lets them know they are women and men / enough to be at a party with a transsexual in a dress.” Trish Salah).

My body a white body an educated a class-privileged an able body solicits the comfort of the room, and is absolutely what allows my transness to ride as easily as it does when it does (“they say the ohlone were here as if / there were no more ohlone / erected a fake shellmound called it shellmound avenue / my friends dont like that  / my friends dont like that excrement” Julian Talamantez Brolaski). I’m saying now, though the saying alone can’t prevent it, I don’t want to be the one smiling in the brochure while my friends are wiped out. Don’t pave the road that leads to a fake entrance using my body, using any of my names.

What I also mean is (“I don’t need to be strong, I need for the world to stop being so fucking weak, that my sisters are being swallowed up before my eyes.” Mark Aguhar).

Impossible as this may be, I still want to imagine spaces that aren’t bounded, and to which we aren’t bound as those reduced versions of ourselves a room is temporarily curious about and so has sanctioned. To imagine possibility, to dwell in the gaps, to live out permeability, to wildly rearrange, to shut it down—this is our trans magic, what gets me, what gets me through (“It makes its own light” Reina Gossett) (“She will outlive everything you know.” Joshua Jennifer Espinoza).