Growing up, mirrors, weighing scales, and family photographs were banned, as were any other means of self-representation “without artistic intent.” Two of the only photographs of me as a child show me in a bath of dead squid, then laid out on concrete, a pair of magpie wings resting on my back. The body was a movement, something to be articulated in space, undone in time. Not looked at. Except when that looking made it strange. When the stilling of a body might, ultimately, undo it. Lend an enduring instability.
I have always felt my body as something interior that radiates. Mirrors unnerve me. I don’t know my weight. I don’t tend to look at myself. I like gestures. The slip of something felt. As it happens, words come least naturally to me—I tend to think in images, textures.
In the summer of 2014, I tore most of the muscles from my right shoulder to my lower back. After two months the injury hadn’t healed. Not even begun to. As it turned out, I would spend the next six months bedbound, medicated, unable to wash or dress myself. Doctors wouldn’t arrive at a diagnosis, and I, having exhausted the list of hospital units, would return to bed, watch flickering images on an old television set. Around the same time, for reasons I still can’t explain, I lost the ability to speak, write, or read. At first, I stuttered, then later, I simply remained silent. As for reading, I could manage a line, but any more and I would feel nauseous, something akin to a migraine.
Living for six months in a body that wouldn’t adhere to words, that balked at sentences, made me aware of the body as texture. As image and gesture. Rhythm. As varying weight.
After those months of illness, I realized I wanted to write physicality differently, that I wanted narrative to carry more materiality. The roll of something turned in the hand. To adhere to a visual or gestural logic. Something less “worded.” More photographic. More movement.
I quit academia, research, a translation career. I started over.
In my approach to writing, words, images, and objects jam against one another. I am interested in how to “speak” corporeal experience, how the body might be reimagined, or the visual arts brought to bear on questions of form and genre. I think in terms of how a narrative might be organized like a photography exhibit, how sentences might be filmic, convey movement. I want to see literature bend, break even, in its interaction with the body and the visual arts.
Writing the ailing body, finding a vocabulary for sickness that goes beyond the pathological have also been longstanding concerns. I want illness to dialogue with theology and myth, want to destabilize ideas of “normal bodily function” or “health”—whatever either of those looks like. Essentially, I want to create work in which illness might be understood, not only as negativity or lack, but as creative potential, as disturbed water from which something singular might be dredged.
I approach gender similarly in my work—watery thing, rolling at varying depth.
I have always found pronouns to be slippery, distant things. Growing up, I wrote and talked about myself in the third person masculine. My school was concerned. My mother, thank Christ, replied: “So the kid’s fucking weird, they all are. Give it time.”
I remember the evening my mother knelt down, sighed: “Lars, my love, you’ve got to start writing ‘I’ for homework.” I stood there—crew cut, boys’ clothing, boys’ toys, a boys’ bike. And my mother in front of me—a man’s shirt, man’s boots, a woman who, in her own words, was never meant to be a mother because she was queer. A woman who decided not to abort when she found she was pregnant by the man she was about to divorce for a woman; who, when she phoned the UK Lesbian and Gay Helpline in 1989, was told that if she mentioned her sexuality as a motive for divorce, she would lose child custody, her teaching job, would likely remain unemployable. This woman, who has lived in the closet her whole life, from family, friends, from me until I was eleven—she looked at me, not saying anything, both of us looking at each other. Even then, I didn’t like the direction this was going.
I remember coming home that week with the homework assignment: What I Did This Weekend. I remember trying to write it, the sentences clotting, disintegrating every time I thought them. I remember having to break them before they hit paper: He buried a cat.—I, I buried a cat.
I learned to use this “I”—to speak and write and do as if my body somehow carried within this sound. But I have never felt comfortable with an “I,” bringing any concept of “me” as a self to language. I find silence comes more naturally, physicality also. And distance. To feel oneself as “over there,” as nebulous. Within and without.
Identifying as nonbinary, my gender exists, for the most part, as something unseen, un-worded, unintelligible. Because my body is not chemically altered, not surgically rewritten, its gender goes unrecognized, reduced instead to my “essential” biological gender, as if any counter to this will always be less “real.” Somehow, gender requires corporeal inscription to be accepted. I regularly find myself trying to explain my gender in terms that will make it intelligible to another. Yet despite trying to explain how pronouns still carry somewhere in water disjointed from me. How I sense myself as movement. As lake or late-night radio. As a thing that feels weighted, finds it hard to rise, break surface. Eventually, these attempts almost always return crudely to bodily specifics, usually of erogenous zones.
I am tired of how gender is written, or not written, as is often the case. I am also tired of trans, intersex, and nonbinary persons being taken as equivalents on literary panels or at conferences.
What might gender look like if it’s written beyond the blurring of a male-female binary? If, just for once, the body is expanded beyond its periphery, is animal or vegetable, textural somehow? Gestural. The body—a thing of hard and soft, something to be warmed or cooled, wrapped in cloth.
I want to see gender written in ways that resist having to specify body parts. Likewise, I want to see genderqueer literature go beyond memoir and romance. Not because these narratives are without worth but because genderqueer literature should be just that: queer, difficult to define or catch. In my own writing, I try to create narratives in which gender fluidity might be omnipresent, almost irrelevant—a bedrock upon which everything rests. I’d like to make genderqueerness effortless somehow, write selfhood in a way that makes it simultaneously strange and relatable. Write something that might soften the hard lines we draw for ourselves. In fact, faced with a predominantly white, cisgendered, heterosexual, and male-oriented publishing model, I feel a responsibility to produce work that problematizes body norms, that attempts to write gender artfully, generously.
Similarly, I write with a view to querying boundaries of genre and form, questioning a propensity for narrative unity and closure. I believe that if gender is to be rewritten, so, too, must our norms for story. Experimental narrative cannot be seen as superfluous aesthetic exercise but must be understood as valuable literary and cultural intervention.
During the months I was ill, I kept trying to read: a new book, a short book, a chapter, a single story, a poem perhaps, then books that I’d read before, books whose openings I knew by heart—all this accompanied by exhaustion, vertigo, nausea. I would often lie still after that. Numb. The body drawing blank after blank, static thoughts graying over bedsheets.
I remember the first book I read about a year later. I read it slowly, a paragraph at a time. It was Oscar Moore’s PWA: a collection of Moore’s newspaper columns written as he was living with AIDS. Everything about that book brought something to this body. Its gentleness, its humor. Its generosity.
Since falling ill, I believe writing to be a vital act. All the more so when it comes from bodies so often marginalized or written over. I look to writing—urgent, unusual writing—as an art that can make someone feel seen, feel relevant. For just a moment, writing can prove wide enough for another to stand within. Breathe out.
I believe literature alters the texture of things—how we are, or do, or see. Personally, I read as a means of returning to the world, to myself—differently.
As for writing, there is something urgent there, to understand, to return, to move beyond. Something for this body and its movement through the world. But there is also something else—a gesture that carries.
I write for anyone who doesn’t see themself in the literature around them. For anyone who doesn’t come to the world in a conventionally worded way, as a hard gender or tidy narrative. For anyone who is dissatisfied with beginnings, middles, and endings, with connective tissue and explanations. I write with the hope that just maybe, for someone somewhere, those words might prove a salve. Something to warm the chest. Ultimately though, I hope those words might bring someone, whoever they are, back to themself—differently.
• •
6lack’s “Seasons” is proving to be a soft touchstone.
