Tag: LGBTQ

Looking back in anger: A personal reflection on World Bipolar Day

You might as well haul up
This wave’s green peak on wire
To prevent fall, or anchor the fluent air
In quartz, as crack your skull to keep
These two most perishable lovers from the touch
That will kindle angels’ envy, scorch and drop
Their fond hearts charred as any match.

Seek no stony camera-eye to fix
The passing dazzle of each face
In black and white, or put on ice
Mouth’s instant flare for future looks;
Stars shoot their petals, and suns run to seed,
However you may sweat to hold such darling wrecks
Hived like honey in your head.

—from Sylvia Plath, “Epitaph for Flower and Fire”

I have known mania, and the imagery in this poem sparks with an intensity that excites and disturbs. When I encounter the words of one of the many poets known (or thought) to share (or have shared) the same affliction, I often find an undercurrent that causes me to flinch for just a second. Not that it diminishes the beauty or power of their words in any way—it is rather an echo in the dark, a faint recognition flashing by.

Image copyright Joseph Schreiber, 2012

It is World Bipolar Day, and this is the first time I have stopped to recognize the fact. I have spoken in, and around, my own bipolar diagnosis, but I have never addressed it formally in my writing. Even now I find myself uncomfortable discussing it. On the one hand, I am fortunate. I respond well to medication. I am, to use that distasteful term, “high-functioning.” But I do harbor a deep anger toward this condition that was part of my life many years before I finally careened through a brutal month of manic psychosis and found myself committed, and ultimately diagnosed, at the age of 36. I was, in classic bipolar fashion, the last person to suspect that I had a mental illness. Even though I, and those around me, knew something was terribly wrong, the stigma and lack of understanding around mood disorders—not to mention the radically impaired insight the sufferer has when they are ill—stands as a barrier to timely intervention. And then there is the matter of actually accessing care. One almost has to crash completely—by which time it can be too late.

Between my first manic episode in 1997 and the second in 2014, I experienced more than sixteen years of stability. I transitioned, became a single male parent, built a career out of nothing, and eventually became the Program Manager at an agency dedicated to working with survivors of acquired brain injury. I loved my job. Looking back, I can now see how the last few years of that period were marked by an increasing tendency toward hypomania. With my psychiatrist’s support I cut my medication back. And then things started to fall apart at work—things beyond my control, but it fell to me to try to pull things together. Then I started to fall apart at work, until I spiraled into full blown mania. Not psychotic, but it matters little. The damage was done.

The agency I worked for, dedicated as they are to supporting clients with disabilities including co-morbid mental illnesses, treated me with distrust bordering on contempt. My only contact with them has been conducted through a workplace advocate and my insurance worker. When return to work was discussed they refused to consider any possibility that I could work there again. Almost three years later with long term disability finally at an end, they still have my personal belongings.

Nine years of employment and dedication to that job now stand as a gaping hole in my life—a life already filled with gaping holes. And that is one of the reasons I hesitate to talk about mental illness (although I have never hidden my diagnosis). What can I say? Bipolar is not my identity any more than transgender is. Both fuck up your life. Leave wounds that do not heal. Find you fumbling through mid-life with little to show for your years but a lot of things you can’t talk about. And periods of time you cannot even remember.

So this is why I find it hard to write about my experience with mental illness. There was a time, following my diagnosis, that I devoured everything I could find, just as, a year later I hunted for books on gender identity. Two pieces of a puzzle I had inhabited—the periodic mood swings and the persistent, life-long feeling that I was not the female person everyone else knew me to be—had finally fallen into place. I had two, if you wish to be specific, explanations that come neatly labelled and defined within the covers of the DSM. It was, for a while, a source of relief.

Today I rarely read any literature that deals with mental illness or gender. But I am aware, more than ever, of being doubly stigmatized. And, most painfully, within the spaces where you would expect acceptance—in the human services profession and within the queer community. Thus the anger.

And what is this anger? Grief. The deep griefs I carry, layered now with more recent bereavements. It has become, for me, an existential bitterness that plagues me, an inauthenticity that defines the way I intersect with the world.

The legacy of mental illness is this: after diagnosis I was advised not to dwell on the disease, not to talk to others with bipolar; I was not deemed “sick” enough to warrant outpatient support or psychiatric follow up. I was left, like so many others, to flounder in the dark. It would take seventeen years and a spectacular career-destroying crash before I was able to access proper psychiatric and psychological support. I am still lucky. I am stabilized. And the forced detour into what may become an early semi-retirement has afforded me a space to write.

Now I need to find a way to write my way through this weight of grief. And begin to heal.

I’ll leave the last word to Sylvia Plath, with the final (fifth) stanza of the poem quoted above:

Dawn snuffs out star’s spent wick,
Even as love’s dear fools cry evergreen,
And a languor of wax congeals the vein
No matter how fiercely lit; staunch contracts break
And recoil in the altering light: the radiant limb
Blows ash in each lover’s eye; the ardent look
Blackens flesh to bone and devours them.

—You can find out more about the International Bipolar Foundation here, and a prose poem I wrote to honour a dear friend who lost her desperate and brave battle to bipolar last year can be found here.

Thoughts on writing about Witness by Robert Rient for Minor Literature[s]

For all its sins, Twitter is still a terrific way to connect with readers, writers, translators and small publishers and, in the process, hear about books you might otherwise miss. Witness by Polish writer and psychologist, Robert Rient, is a case in point. I came to know of it by way of the translator, Frank Garrett, and was immediately intrigued by this story of a man who grew up gay and Jehovah’s Witness in Catholic Poland. I ordered the book and, as soon as it arrived, I had a quick look and immediately knew it was the type of book for which I would want to pitch a critical review.

I am intrigued by original approaches to memoir writing, that is, rrient-witnessintentional writing about ones’ own experience. In Witness, the story is carried by Luke, the writer’s younger self—the boy and young man torn between his faith community and his sexuality—and Robert, the grown man who marks his break with his past and his rebirth as a whole person, true to himself, by taking a new name and identity. Woven through these two narratives is a fascinating look inside the Jehovah’s Witness church. As someone with a dual identity history, albeit different in nature, I found a lot to admire in the telling of this story, as well as in Robert’s honesty and the powerful transformation he chooses to make to mark his move forward into a new authentic life.

My review is now live at Minor Literature[s]. Thank you to Tomoé Hill for entertaining my contribution.

Minor Literature[s] has been repairing its archive so I have reproduced my review here:

Witness by Robert Rient (trans. Frank Garrett)—Joseph Schreiber

Not yet fourteen years old, Luke Zamilski is waiting his turn to climb into a garden swimming pool set up in the middle of a large stadium. Thousands of people fill the stands. He has endured months of interrogation by the elders of his church congregation. He has memorized the precepts of his faith and the Biblical justification and ammunition afforded each one. He is ready. With his baptism, Satan will come to know of his existence, but Luke is eager and enthusiastic because he also knows that, on this day, he will be granted a clean slate. With this expurgation, he trusts that Jehovah will remove the thorn that has been working its way into his flesh through these early years of puberty.

Or maybe not.

Luke’s story begins with the dramatic retelling of a fire that destroys his family home when he is just shy of his fourth birthday. As part of the small Jehovah’s Witness community in Poland, the aid and support of fellow church members is immediate, as is the curiosity and derision of their Catholic neighbours. When the family is eventually settled into a new house, Luke is given a used briefcase in which he is to store his important papers should he ever need to escape a similar circumstance in the future. That same case will also go on to hold his precious diaries, his poetry, and eventually, he tells us, his porno mags, letters, newspapers and more. A place to contain both his documented and his hidden life. Thus, this event sets the stage for the account of a life that is destined to be doubly isolated. He is cut off from the normal social activities and celebrations of his peers by his “feline faith”, and then, as he struggles with his sexuality, he risks being denounced by his church community for falling prey to a sin thought to be worse than murder.

Witness, by Polish psychologist and writer Robert Rient, is at once an original and engaging chronicle about growing up gay, and a disturbing look deep into the manipulative and damaging environment of a religious organization that shares many similarities with other fundamentalist Christian churches, and yet is its own strange entity. However, this is not a case study or a psychological essay. It is, rather, an autobiography in three voices.

Luke carries the immediate and emotional core of the narrative. He agonizes over his inability to refrain from masturbating, and the curse of the ‘thorn’ he carries. He begs to be relieved of his affliction and prays for the imminent arrival of Armageddon, for release from worldly temptation and the corruption of Satan. He throws himself into the church, preaching and witnessing, and yet he is also drawn to the arts, to writing and drama, and eventually chooses to study in the city of Poznan after graduation from high school. There he will vacillate wildly between fanatical commitment to his faith, a desire to succeed in his studies, and a dangerous entanglement with drugs, alcohol and self-harm. Guilt and shame dog him, throughout his youth and on into early adulthood, intensified by the very real threat of disfellowship from the church, and rejection by those he knows and loves. His desperation becomes intense. At the age of sixteen, for instance, he makes the very Biblical pledge to cut off his offending appendage:

I take a knife from the kitchen. I go upstairs to the second story. I enter the bathroom, turn on the light. I drop my pants to the floor, pull down my underwear. I apply the knife to the base of my penis. Wait. I’m scared of the pain, that I’ll bleed to death. I gently drag it across the skin. It stings. It leaves a red line on the flesh. I won’t do it. I’m too weak even for that.

His first confidant is Robert, whom he ‘meets’ at the age of eleven. Somewhere between an alter-ego and an imaginary friend, Luke first summons Robert ‘out of nothing,’ a new identity to step in when the waters become too rough, someone to pick up the pen and write in his journal the thoughts and feelings that he dare not own. Robert carries the second narrative voice, looking back from the present with a certain, almost clinical, detachment at his troubled younger self, providing a grounded counter perspective. His measured tone speaks to his own hard-won peace, but a fondness and affection seep through, along with an abiding sense of loss. Although his parents will ultimately stand by him, and his older brother who also leaves the faith, the rejection of the friends and relatives who stay behind is cold, harsh and unforgiving. The cost is very real.

The third narrative, “Witnesses,” details the inner machinations of the Jehovah’s Witness enterprise—bringing to light textual materials, facts and figures, and unwrapping many of the arcane and disturbing beliefs promulgated within their organization. What is revealed is a misogynistic, sexually repressed, hierarchical system that denies celebration of holidays and birthdays, but permits limited alcohol and abortions (Armageddon is ever imminent after all), and encourages the physical discipline of children as a sign of affection. The church is widely spread across the globe and supported by vast quantities of written materials, most recognizably The Watchtower and Awake!, which are translated into a multitude of languages and distributed by members who are required to spend long hours knocking on doors and standing on street corners.

What we have then, is a memoir presented as an uncanny collaboration between the author, Robert, and Luke, the boy and young man he used to be, along with an exposé of the secretive church ‘they’ were born into. As an affectation, it would risk sounding overly theatrical, but this approach allows a much deeper, more genuine narrative to develop. In Luke’s account, supported by frequent excerpts from his diary, we hear of his youthful enthusiasm for his faith, his anguished attempts to fight his homosexuality, and his pull toward all the temptations and possibilities of a ‘worldly’ existence. By contrast, Robert’s perspective sounds at once insightful and limited. He wants to fill in the gaps, seek out the views of Luke’s former friends, and try to analyze, interpret and defend his fate. He knows how the story will end. In describing his first encounter with Luke, Robert says:

I suppose we already knew that we would meet again and that I would have to live. That he had to die. I didn’t kill him. But had he not died, I wouldn’t have been. Everything that happened to him, every torment, was convenient for me. His weakness and self-loathing were my justification and my provocation. Besides, he wanted to die. He talked about it again and again. I have evidence. I am the witness regarding this matter.

As the narrative alternates between the three voices, the mood shifts. The Witness sections are delivered with neutral authority. At times Luke’s actions are used to illustrate a point, and occasionally the reader is addressed directly, as, for example, in: ‘There exists an informal list of banned books which includes the one you’re reading.’ Both Luke and Robert speak in the first person, and refer to each other as ‘he.’ At times, when appropriate, first person plural is also employed. Luke longs for the comfort of his alternate identity most when he feels isolated and depressed, leaving Robert effectively sidelined, observing from a distance much of the time—a tone that comes through clearly in his sections, setting them apart from Luke’s. As Luke battles addiction, the loss of self-esteem, and suicidal thoughts, one can sense a growing friction between the two voices, as if Robert is slowly coming into sharper focus within their dual existence.

At the end of this powerful account of transformation and rebirth, Robert Rient emerges from the restraints of a religion that rejects his very being, and comes, over time, to accept and love himself as he is. It is his conscious disassociation that provides protection and allows him, with the support of friends and his academic training in psychology, to survive the very tumultuous break with his faith. Once the internal division is no longer required, he sheds his name and identity, along with his past, to claim a new wholeness. And in telling his story in this way, with equal respect for his past and present lives, Rient is able to capture a conflicted, painful journey with a fresh authenticity that reaches beyond the specifics to touch the universality of the experience of striving to be true to one’s self.

It is of note that Frank Garrett’s translation effectively captures the shifting tenor of the narrative, something which is essential to the success of this multilayered approach. He also includes a guide to assist with the pronunciation of the Polish names in the text, and in his afterword, he details the choices that were made with respect to language, and the challenges of accessing the original resources required to render this unique memoir into English.

Literature as Liberator: My contribution to the 2016-17 Seagull Books catalogue

Earlier this year I was invited by Naveen Kishore, the publisher of Seagull Books, to write a contribution for their 2016-2017 catalogue. Now the Seagull catalogue is never an ordinary publication. It is a lavishly illustrated volume featuring the stunning artwork of Sunandini Banerjee, and contributions from a wide range of writers, translators, and this year, a handful of humble book bloggers, myself included. When I agreed to try to put something together, Naveen sent me this year’s “Provocation”:

Soul he said. Soul as the prison of the body. Soul I asked? What about the ones who don’t believe? In soul. Or God. Or religion. The ones that understand the body for what it is. Accept its one-way journey towards the inevitable. The body as decay. Gradual ruin. Eventual crumbling. We all know this. Or those that think the ‘inner core’, or what I presume is a ‘substitute’ for the notion of ‘soul’, is actually just an ever changing, evolving, fermenting mass of literature that grows. And grows. And knows freedom. And fear. And emotion. And love. And death. And every kind of existential angst that any soul worth its weight in gold would know! What about me? I asked. Or you for that matter. We who write and read and write and continue to both read and write while our bodies grow old and tired. But the mind. The mind remains in a state of excitement. Constantly radiant. Its brilliance grows with every new thought. What if we substitute ‘literature’ for ‘soul’ in your proud statement so that it now reads ‘Literature as the prison of the body’. Thing is that this doesn’t hold. Literature cannot be a space that restricts movement. Or freedom. At least it shouldn’t be. It is meant to be a liberating presence. Like its close companion. The dark. For me the dark is important. The dark as a substitute for soul? Maybe. Darkness is essential for literature of meaning to grow and take root.

The body. The soul. Literature.

2016-11-09-17-33-54I knew immediately what I would write. I took themes that were spinning through my head, scratched out on notepads—unformed, but increasingly urgent ideas that I wanted to find a way to address in words—and placed them within the framework of an analogy I have long used to describe my experience of feeling that I did not belong in the body I was born in. This piece represents the first creative expression of the self, of my self, that I dared to offer for publication. Although I had addressed my gender-different history, my queerness, in the occasional blog post and review, I had never sought to open some of the deeper elements of being that have come to define—and trouble—my long-term experience of living in the world as a gay transgender man.

2016-11-09-17-28-08In the meantime, between writing and submitting my Seagull “response” and finally holding the published catalogue in my hands earlier this month, I published two critical pieces of writing. Your Body Will Betray You (Minor Literature[s] May 6, 2016) explores the body and being, while A Reader’s Journey Through Transition (Literary Hub October 25, 2016) takes a look at the urgency with which I attempted to read myself to a place of self understanding. I’m proud of both of these essays, but I must confess, there is a certain weariness that comes with writing so honestly about oneself, not to mention a creeping discomfort with being laid bare, as such. This is a reflection of my ongoing personal struggle with the value and efficacy of being out, and with the inevitable fatigue that comes with constantly having to come out, again and again.

If I had thought writing myself out in the world would help, I’m not sure it has. But then again, we are constantly reading and writing ourselves into being. It is a process, not an end. Like transition.

So, after a little consideration, I’m ready to reproduce my Seagull Books contribution here. Rest assured this is not an excuse not to request a copy of this amazing catalogue for yourself. A Seagull Books catalogue is a work of art and celebration of literature.

The seeds of both of my later essays are evident in the following parable, but this piece attempts to articulate my own experience of feeling “wrongly gendered.” You will note that it is not a question of outward expression—being differently gendered, as I know it, comes from inside, not from wanting to play with the toys or wear the clothing of the other “sex.”

Here, then is my contribution to the 2016-17 Seagull Catalogue, with endless gratitude to Naveen Kishore:

Literature as liberator, you suggest.

I am, I want to reply, inclined to agree.

But I would caution you that words can confine us, as readily as they can set us free. We can become entangled in meanings, lose ourselves in definitions, search in circles for explanations when all we know is that the words we hear don’t seem touch the heart of what or whom we seem to be. False trails can mislead, lead away from understanding, especially if the destination you seek is not marked on any of the maps you can find. You wander blind.

And, you speak of the transience of the body, its trajectory toward decline, deterioration and decay.

I would argue the body cannot be so easily discarded.

Let me reframe the imagery.

Accept, for the sake of argument that the body is the fragile housing of the mind and the mind is the intersection of the heart and the brain; and, as such, both are essential to the experience of being in the world. The soul then, or that spark by which we know we are alive, can be thought of as being-in-motion. And literature—the stories we tell, the stories we turn to—is an essential element of the process of understanding ourselves in the world.

We are reading and writing ourselves into being.  Always.

Let me tell you a story.

Imagine, for moment, a darkened room. The sole illumination is a candle burning against the insistent gloom.

A boy inhabits this space; it is the only space he has ever known. And he has known, for almost as long as he can remember that everyone he encounters, every person who stands at the threshold and beckons, is expecting someone else, someone he can only pretend to be. He decorates his room, he carries his candle into the corners to try to understand what secrets they might contain, he worries that his insecurities might be exposed. But, of course, it’s dark, and others tend to see only what they want to see.

As the boy grows, his room becomes a more distorted, distressing, disorienting place. He wonders what lessons he missed, why he is unable to learn to exist comfortably in this strange space.

He assumes he is at fault.

If only his candle burned brighter. If only his room was not so dark.

He continues to decorate and redecorate his room. He scours the books that line the shelves, listens to the music that fills the hollows. Somewhere, somewhere far away he senses there is an answer to his otherness but its truth escapes him. He seems to fall off the axis the wrong way. So he puts away the stories of his childhood, the ones he tried to emulate with his own tales of ordinary boys on heroic journeys to fight dragons, and tries to draw a new character, the one he is supposed to be. If he can tell this character’s story, find her voice, perhaps he can write himself into the woman everyone else anticipates, the woman everyone else sees.

But he cannot find the voice.

He puts down his pen, files the unfinished stories and poems. Or throws them away.

He goes to university. He reads more books. The unease intensifies, the books can only take him so far—he continually reaches a place where the road ends, where the bridge is washed out, where the trail fades away into the underbrush. And then he falls in love. If he can’t fix the persistent otherness, perhaps he can hide—in plain sight.

The years pass. And still his room is an alien space.

He plays by every rule he can imagine. Marriage. Children.

Until, one day, he finds a book. It’s not the answer, but it shatters something deep within, it whispers in the darkness, and the candle flickers briefly. So he reads more. He encounters words that catch him up, that lead him on. He reads more. The words, the words threaten to tear apart his world. He tries on stories; wonders if they fit, if they’ll finally help him understand the room that has, over the years, come to feel more like a prison than a body.

He longs to make his way home to a place he’s never been.

He reads more.

And at last he comes to understand that the only way to make sense of himself in the world—to touch the centre of his very own being-in-motion—is not to deny the man inside but to renovate the room. To step out of the shadows and acknowledge the person he has always been, celebrate him and let him live. The candle still burns, but the room is now bathed in natural light.

So yes, literature can illuminate the corners, crack the walls, break down the door to bring the essential being—the soul, if you like—into the light.

I know this in my bones. The story I just told you is mine.

Passion and plague: Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was by Sjón

He’d had no inkling that when the pestilence took hold Reykjavik would empty and convey the impression that nothing was happening at all; that the town would become an abandoned set that he, Máni Steinn, could envisage as the backdrop for whatever sensational plot he cared to devise, or more accurately, for the kind of sinister events that in a film would be staged in this sort of village of the damned–for those days the real stories are being acted out behind closed doors. And they are darker than a youthful mind can imagine.

moonstoneMoonstone: The Boy Who Never Was, Icelandic writer Sjón’s fourth novel to be released in translation, is set in Reykjavik in late 1918. This is fortuitous timing. A number of critical events converge over the course of a few months: the volcano Katla erupts in a dazzling display of fire and ash, the First World War comes to an end, and the small Nordic country achieves sovereignty. But the most devastating impact arrives in the form of the plague that is presently sweeping the globe–the Spanish flu.

At the centre of the tale is sixteen year-old Máni Steinn, an orphan who lives with an old woman who is, as far as he knows, the sister of his great-grandmother. He is an independent spirit. He wanders around town, services “gentlemen” for money, and spends hours in the cinema. For a queer boy with no family history, illiterate, and alienated from his peers, silent films offer an opportunity to lose himself in fantasy, intrigue, and drama. A theatrical imagination dominates his dreams, at night and during the idle hours of the day.

In general, his encounters with men are dispassionate, hurried and impersonal. But there are a few exceptions, men who show him affection and kindness, like the foreigner who, in a play on his name, christens him Moonstone. And then there is Sóla G–, a young woman from a prominent family, who is known for ridingmusidora through town on her red Indian motorcycle. She is, for Máni, an embodiment of Musidora, the French actress who stars in one of his favouritefilms, Louis Feuillade’s crime serial, The Vampires. He worships her and, fortunately for him, she secretly knows and understands the kind of boy he is.

The Spanish flu will alter everything. Despite warnings from Copenhagen, Iceland is not prepared for the speed with which the coming epidemic will spread or the toll it will take on the people and resources of Reykjavik. Once it hits the shore though, it is all that anyone can talk about. Our protagonist however, absorbs the news with a deeply romantic response:

He has a butterfly in his stomach, similar to those he experiences when he picks up a gentleman, only this time it is larger, its wingspan greater, its colour as black as the velvet ribbons on a hearse.

An uncontrollable force has been unleashed in the country; something historic is taking place in Reykjavík at the same time as it is happening in the outside world.

The silver screen has torn and a draft is blowing between the worlds.

Very rapidly, Reykjavik begins to resemble a ghost town. The cinema still draws those seeking comfort, community, and warmth until the last available musician of any description collapses and the films, now unbearably silent, cease. But by this point Máni himself has fallen ill.

Sjón invites the reader right into his hero’s illness with little warning. The images are brutal, harsh, surreal. From the explosive fiery heat of his fever, through his horrific delusions to the subsequent pain and bleeding, Máni’s cinematic imagination colours the account of his fragmented and distorted days of suffering. He is left drained and delerious:

The boy no longer has need of blood or bone, muscle or gut. He dissolves his body, turning solid into liquid, beginning from within and rinsing it all out, until it gushes out of every orifice he can find. He is a shadow that passes from man to man, and no one is complete until he has cast him.

Upon recovery, Máni is recruited to accompany the doctor and his driver, the enigmatic Sóla G–, on the grim task of calling on the sick, the dying and the dead. Men, women and children fall indiscriminately. Within a few weeks though, the pestilence burns itself out and the survivors pull themselves together and drag themselves back to life and, soon, to the cinema. Over the course of one month, ten thousand citizens have endured the ravages of the illness, and almost every family has been directly touched by loss in some way. Attention now turns to the coming celebration of Iceland’s independence, but Máni will still have one major challenge ahead.

Sjón has a light touch–an ability to spin a tale that unfolds with the spirit of a fable and feels lighter than air. He works in miniature with a sensibility that is poetic, weaving the strands of his tale with a glimmer of magic. But that does not mean his novels fail to explore topics of substance or create characters that live and breathe. The lingering impression is ephemeral, lyrical, haunting.

Moonstone is dedicated to the author’s uncle Bósi, a gay man who died of AIDS in 1993. This novella sheds light on the clandestine and dangerous lives of homosexual men at a time when a country like Iceland, which fancied itself too robust to face threat from influenza, imagined itself to be a place where such aberrant behaviour could not possibly exist. For Máni, the “boy who never was”, it was a desolate place, save for the refuge of cinema. Placing the story in 1918, allusions to the plague that would devastate the gay community in the 1980s and 90s are unavoidable. And that much more powerful.

Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was is translated by Victoria Cribb and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in North America and Sceptre in the UK. Originally published in 2013, the book won the Icelandic Literary Prize.

Personal reflections on identity, for better or worse, on Canada Day

Today, July 1, is Canada Day.

Exactly one year ago I was in Cape Town. I arrived back in the city that day at 5:30 in the morning after seventeen hours on a bus from East London. Dragging my luggage with its maple leaf ID tags I encountered many who would note the flag and say “Ah, Canada, that’s just about the perfect country, isn’t it?” Invariably I was hearing this from black or coloured South Africans and, I have to confess, at that time in my country’s recent political history I was feeling most despondent, embarrassed even, to be Canadian. For the very first time in my life.

What a difference a year makes.

canada-159585_960_720Hard to measure the shifting sands in the glass but while our Federal election last year brought home to the ruling Conservative Party the cost of divisive politics, the limits of denial and disrespect, and the risk of stoking xenophobia to sway sympathies; we now seem more and more like an island in a sea of unrest. And, I don’t pretend that we are immune to hatred, or that we don’t have a legacy of shame four “our” treatment of the First Nations on this land, but this is a huge and vastly underpopulated place so there is greater room to breathe.

At least for now.

As Canadians we also have another advantage: an identity that is relatively amorphous, ambiguous, sometimes even apologetic. A contest held in 1972 on the CBC Radio program, This Country in Morning, famously invited listeners to finish the statement: As Canadian as ________. The winning entry?

As Canadian as possible under the circumstances. And proudly so, I say.

Which leads me to wonder about identity, a question that has been troubling me of late.

There is a series of advertisements running on the television for a company that, for a fee, will analyze your DNA and tell you what your ancestry is, in percentages, no doubt with colourful pie charts to justify the cost. Perhaps you’ve seen them or something similar. You know, there is, for example, a man who always believed he was of German heritage but thanks to a little DNA sleuthing he discovers he is Scottish. He promptly trades his lederhosen for a kilt. And there are other variations but you get the drift.

How can your DNA define your cultural and ethnic identity? It might and then again it might not. Peoples migrate, borders shift, cultures evolve. An aboriginal survivor of the 60’s Scoop that literally pulled First Nations youth out of their homes and communities and deposited them in white foster homes may justifiably have a need for healing and reconnection with their heritage, but a DNA test that simply reflects possible ancestral bloodlines going back centuries or longer does not tell you who you are. Cultural and ethnic identity are complex and cannot be understood divorced from lived experience.

As I find myself, midway upon my life’s journey, to paraphrase Dante, I carry two questions of identity that, to some degree, offer an understanding of myself that reaches back into childhood and adolescence. But even if they are grounded in some understanding of a genetic/epigenetic heritage I own, the degree to which they can and do form part of my identity is troublesome. Identity is, as far as I am concerned, a choice. That is not to say it is not grounded in fact and reality at some level, but what does it mean to say “I identify”? And how is that to be differentiated from “I am”?

I have bipolar disorder (I touch on this in some of my earliest blog posts) and I was born with a pervasive sense of a gendered self that was at odds with the sex/gender that I appeared to be (I address this most explicitly here). I did not begin to understand either of these facts until I was in my mid-30’s. But they are inextricable from my experience of myself in the world, they are formative and I have no idea what it would be like to have existed without either although I have learned, with greater or lesser success, to live with each one. Both are treated, neither is cured. I have written about both, but I would be hard pressed to say that I identify as either bipolar or transgender. Would someone identify as a diabetic? Would you say you identify as brown-eyed?

I know people who do hold a mental health diagnosis or a gender identity with pride. Perhaps I did too at one time. Perhaps I still do even though I don’t want to admit it.

Recently my psychiatrist suggested, having reviewed the only records she had from my past—the report of an inpatient stay during acute psychosis almost twenty years ago, the turning point at which I finally began to unravel the fractured and unhappy state against which I had raged for several years—that she did not believe I was bipolar. That cheerful announcement set off weeks of rumination in which I replayed all of the episodes of depression and hypomania I had surfed for so many years, blaming myself for a failure to commit to any single course of study or employment. I began to appreciate how my understanding of the place I find myself at this point is contingent on having an explanation, an illness to blame. Combined with acute gender dysphoria I can assuage the sense of failure that haunts me. Justify all the paths I took or did not take.

Or, as my therapist challenged me yesterday, have I been using bipolar as an excuse to avoid grieving the losses I have experienced?

I don’t even know how to begin to grieve and the thought terrifies me. And, if I find my way through it all, perhaps I will write about it. But I do believe it may be the one path I have not yet dared to take.

Finally, what of gender? That is a topic for many essays I’m afraid. My differently gendered existence is essential to who I am, but again, it is not my identity. If forced, I “identify” as male, but prefer to understand myself simply as a man, and every time I qualify myself by appending trans* I feel reduced, dehumanized. One only has to exist within the LGBTQ community, such as it is, as a man attracted to men, to feel the full force of transphobia from within. And to have transitioned when I did, before it was fashionable and trendy to be trans, other transgender men were often exceptionally homophobic toward anyone who identified as gay. For everyone who claims to defy gender binaries there is a whole cast of characters propping them back up. I’m probably in there myself.

pride-flag-meaningSo, although I tick three out of the five basic boxes in LGBTQ, I have no Pride. But then I have no shame either. And identify? Well, here I stand I can be no other. Even if I don’t feel I belong. June is always tough for me. This month with all the difficult emotions stirred by the Orlando shootings has been especially hard.

I actually do belong to an LGBTQ community and have good friends there. My very closest friends are all queer. And yet I always feel like I am on the outside looking in. An impostor. But in what way? And who decides who belongs and who does not? Even apparently marginalized groups seem to find a way to splinter and divide.

Which brings me full circle to the angry racist, xenophobic, sexist and homophobic aggression and violence that threatens us all, at a time and in a world in which we should know better.

At least, for now, and on this day, the one thing I can say is: I identify as a proud Canadian.

The pursuit of happiness: Sergio Y. by Alexandre Vidal Porto

“If happiness is not where we are, we must chase her. She sometimes lives very far away. You must have the courage to be happy.”

When it comes to the depiction of transgender individuals in literary fiction, I will confess that I am a rather cynical customer. Lets just say I know the reality too well. So much of what I have read does not even come close to scratching the surface of what it means to be at odds with one’s own birth-assigned gender. Intentions are good and, of course, the transgender or intersex character always allows for an interesting twist but the results can be misleading, even distressingly off base. That’s why Sergio Y. by Brazilian author Alexandre Vidal Porto is such a refreshing and original read. Here is a novel that treats the subject with intelligence and compassion—quite the feat for a book in which the transgender character meets an untimely and unfortunate end before the story even gets started.

SergioThe title character, Sergio Y. is the son of a wealthy businessman in São Paolo, Brazil, and the great grandson of an Armenian immigrant who escaped the tragic fate of so many of his countrymen, including the rest of his family, when he crossed the ocean in 1915, seeking his happiness in the Americas. The narrator is Armando, a well-respected seventy year-old psychiatrist. Sergio had been referred to him for therapy at the age of seventeen, described simply as “articulate, intelligent and confused.” They meet regularly for several years. This mature young man—so handsome, wealthy and talented—intrigues Armando and yet, in spite of all of these advantages, he professes to be possessed by a deep and abiding unhappiness.

Following a visit to New York City one Christmas, Sergio informs Armando that he wishes to discontinue therapy. He has had a revelation, he says, and he believes he has found a way to be happy. Our narrator is a little disgruntled to be dismissed as such but, as the years pass, Sergio Y. fades from his mind until a chance encounter with his former patient’s mother. She reports that her son has moved to New York where he attended culinary school and is now about to open his own restaurant. Armando is surprised, but pleased by this news and the praise he is afforded for his role in helping Sergio find happiness at last. However, this boost to his ego is short lived. Armando’s world begins to crumble when he learns, quite by chance, that Sergio Y. has been murdered at his home in the West Village.

Obsessive by nature, Armando becomes haunted by the need to know more. What he discovers with the help of a private investigator is completely unexpected and sends him reeling. The murder victim is identified as Sandra Yacoubian, female. Sandra and Sergio he soon learns are, in fact, one and the same person. His young patient had found his happiness as a woman and now she was dead at the age of 23! How could he have failed to recognize that Sergio was transsexual? And, even more serious, was his failure in some way responsible for this tragic outcome?

The main source of my frustration was not having detected any hint of Sergio Y.’s transsexuality. I felt I had been duped solely and exclusively by my own incompetence. I had always though that the secret to transsexuality was not all that deep, that it revealed itself in all of the individual’s attitudes, at all times, in all the decisions he or she took, since early childhood. As far as I was concerned, the pain in the patient’s soul and their inner confusion would be so visible that one did not need to be a Freudian or Jungian psychoanalyst to make the diagnosis.

Armando’s search for answers and his personal quest for understanding lie at the heart of this book. He begins with a handful of stereotyped assumptions. He labels them, admits to them, and lays them out. In the end, as he comes to a clearer,more nuanced appreciation of the decision his patient chose to take to find happiness and the determination with which she pursued it.

The narrative tone is highly idiosyncratic, dictated by the analytical, mildly obsessive-compulsive, immodest character of Armando. Even when he begins to doubt and second-guess himself as the account progresses, he maintains the matter of fact, dry, clinical delivery of a psychiatric report. The attention to detail—his clothing choices, his tendency to note the approximate height and weight of people he encounters, even his reports of his own emotional ups and downs—all create the illusion of a sterile account. But when the careful veneer cracks from time to time, we see a moody, somewhat petulant character, prone to bursts of pride, mixed with episodes of guilt and shame. He is continually measuring himself against his own successes and failures. His internal machinations are fascinating.

Ultimately, Sergio Y. is novel that approaches the transgender experience from the inside and the outside, allowing for the comfort with names and pronouns to vary, over time and from person to person, reflecting the complexities of relationships that others, even loving family members, can have when an accepted and assumed identity is challenged. In his own journey to understand and set his mind at ease, the questions Armando raises and the answers he finds serve to create a moving and compassionate portrait of the transgender person’s conflicted internal experience and the search to find a way to be happy in the world.

Happiness may be an ideal; comfort or contentment might work as well. From my point on this same journey I would hasten to add that it can be a difficult and lonely path, but that does not mean it is not worth following. In fact, if it is the right path, there is no other. Semantics aside, this novel is an important, engaging read. It deserves to be written about and it needs to be discussed.

Sergio Y. is translated from the Portuguese by Alex Ladd and published by Europa Editions.

Beginning to find my voice: Reflections on publishing a piece of essay/memoir writing

We should only believe in our feelings, after the soul has been at rest from them; and express ourselves, not as we feel, but as we remember.
– Joseph Joubert, Pensées

Late last month I wrote about voice, about how I have recently been focusing more attention on voice; not only in literature, but as it pertains to meaning, sounds, and silences. I was, at that time, anticipating the publication of my first piece of non-review writing–not the first that I have written, there is a related piece, a parable, that will appear later this year–but rather the first to be published.

I was extremely anxious in advance of the release. I knew that I would be laying forth an aspect of my experience of being in the world that few people were aware of. I am not talking about my queer identity, that is something I have spoken of from time to time although it rarely impacts the books I chose to read and write about. I am referring to the fact that this short essay addresses my complicated relationship with my body in very bold terms.

It can be found here. (The journal that published my piece is under reconstruction so I have reproduced the essay below.)

Now that the piece is out there, granting me the necessary distance, I am extremely pleased with the results. It is raw and honest, but I feel comfortable that I have touched the heart of my experiences while maintaining a healthy and comfortable boundary. I am not a fan of confessional memoir/autobiographical fiction that tends to the revelation of excessive, unguarded intimate information. It is a delicate balance to measure vulnerability and self respect when writing about the personal details of one’s life. And, I would argue, it is essential to remember that there are limits to what we can ever really know about ourselves and if we remember that we can more honestly write from the heart.

Solitary daisyI have found that I am most comfortable leaning toward a more spare prose the closer I come to the self in my writing. I am hoping that it is a style, a voice if you like, that I can build on. But a detailed account of my life is not my goal in writing–my interest is more philosophical in nature.

I have to say that I am overwhelmed by the positive response to this piece. It is far beyond anything I could have hoped for. And I feel very excited about where I can go from here with further explorations. So much of my reading and the conversations that I’m having in the virtual sphere seem to be converging at this moment. Or perhaps I am simply in a fertile state of mind. It is not, however, an overnight phenomenon, these ideas have been growing for a long time, knocking around in awkward, unfinished form. I am grateful to everyone who has offered inspiration, support and encouragement to this point. I trust they know who they are.

May the conversations continue.

As published on Minor Literature[s], May 6, 2016.

Your Body Will Betray You — Joseph Schreiber

“From the inside out, but from which inside to which outside?”—Róbert Gál, On Wing

This is not the story of my life but the story of my living it, of my being in it.

And that’s a different story altogether.

I am, for lack of a better term, a differently gendered man. No, maybe there are better terms, more common terms—transgender, or queer, perhaps. I use these too. At least, when it’s expedient to do so or when I choose to take my place under a larger umbrella. But by their very inclusiveness, these terms are rendered senseless. Defining the self for one’s self requires an explicit ownership of the language employed. The words I embrace are mutable, evolving, even in the act of committing them to paper or speaking them aloud. Labels can only take us so far.

History is subjective. We can only know what we think we know.

And that isn’t very much at all.

This is what I do know:

I lived, for almost four decades, defined by the parameters of the body in which I was born. I recall the sensation of harbouring a fugitive being—an early social memory (at four? Five? Six?) This someone inside me was not with me, he was me. I saw him in my eyes and I wanted him gone. I wanted to be the girl my mother longed for—the one whose gender mattered solely because her first child, the sister I never knew, was stillborn.

I was not a tomboy. I did not wish to be a boy. I wanted to be the girl I confronted in the mirror, the one whose authenticity no one else questioned. I imagined that feeling female was something you learned, like tying your shoes or riding a bicycle. Yet, although I passed in the world of girls and women, this passing was a measured performance. The rules remained opaque.

The company of boys and men became a refuge—the space where my otherness was validated, where no one would ever question whether I was really female. Sexual attraction to men was a precious counterpoint to my persistent gender insecurity. Never mind that the romantic encounters between men in Mary Renault’s historical fiction held a far more desperate appeal that anything encountered in the pages of a typical boy-girl romance.  I reasoned that if I had a boyfriend, I must truly be female after all.

I married young and disappeared.

You have to understand, when I was growing up, in the 1960s and 70s in rural Canada, no one talked about ‘gender identity’ at all. And they certainly never suggested that it could differ from biological sex. Even now many choke on the concept, quote Bible and verse. My upbringing was liberal, neither fundamentalist nor homophobic, but still, my ‘out of placeness’ was my own, the faint light in the dark room. An old story, but I had no idea that there were others like me.

Self-defined gender insecurity continued to haunt me. It prescribed my path. Twice I walked away from graduate studies, turned down admission to law school, all because the more I exercised my intellect, the less energy I had to devote to maintaining the fragile equilibrium of being female in the world. I retreated to the most unequivocally female spaces I could imagine. Eventually, against my natural instincts, I decided to have children, and that was the beginning of the end—the beginning of the end of my ability to hang on to any reconciliation of my internal identity with the life I had constructed.

I fell apart.

Only in cobbling myself back together, in the aftermath of a breakdown, could I finally openly face the two fundamental notions that had driven me into mania—sexuality and gender. I realized that they were not going away, and that one could not make sense without the other.

Please note, in today’s world where trans* is appended to all manner of identities, where sexuality is no longer narrowly delineated and gender is something to defy, it may seem impossible to imagine that I could crack my head against the wall for so long before the light broke through. But mine was a different time.

I found myself in the library with a copy of Transgender Warriors and learned, for the very first time, what a few years of testosterone could do to transform the outside and fuel the inside of a female-born man. I understood, in that instant, that there was no other option. I finally had a name, a label for myself, and everything else started to fall into place.

I am not reckless. I knew there would be compromises. I knew what surgery could offer and what, at best, it could only approximate. I knew that the scalpel exacts more than its pound of flesh, that healing well is not the best revenge, and that there would be limits to the choices I would make. But none of that was on my mind as I waited for my first injection of the right hormones, the ones I had been craving, body and spirit, for so long.

That was fifteen years ago now. I was forty years old. And in puberty—even when you are old enough to know better—everything seems possible.

Today: 

On the street, I am invisible.

To see me, you would never suspect the truth of my history, the convoluted path to the dream of my genesis. Even those who do know, if they didn’t know me before, don’t ever think of me as any different from any other man.

I just am.

And yet I am not.

I am at once more, and less, than the sum of my parts.

Always have been. Always will be.

For a long time I believed that what I had rendered visible was the true me, the authentic self made flesh, but it’s not that simple. There is an inherent groundlessness, an embodied inauthenticity at play.

I am always in the process of coming into being.

The (meta)physicality of it all: 

I hold a life contained within a life—a life disjointed and hybridized, receding and resurfacing against the passage of time. That other life never leaves me, but with distance I can touch it less and less, as if it never was mine. Now it feels as if it belongs to someone else. It belongs to those who hold it in their memories—my parents, my siblings, my children—but what, if anything, does it mean to me?

It’s as if I own the inside, but not the outside, of the first forty years of my life.

So what do I have now? A more coherent existence, absolutely, but with the knowledge that a fully whole experience is not something I will ever have. My body is disfigured; not by choice or wilful design—it is simply the best I can achieve. And in the end as in the beginning, the body is only an echo of what I am, a reminder of what I have been.

You can change your face but your body will betray you.

The further I proceed, the more I realize that I will never arrive. Transition is an experience that is always in the reframing and redefining of boundaries.

Borderless, I am forever a migrant—endlessly coming into being.

Being cannot be measured.

Being cannot be reduced to the change of a marker on a passport.

On the street I am invisible.

And here lies the crux of the matter. Invisibility, once achieved, is deemed to be a mark of success. That’s what a person in transition means when they say: I pass. To pass is to be seen, without question, at one with a gender identity that feels true. And it is more than an ability to disappear in a crowd. There is an internal completeness that comes with the hormones and the pronouns and the new name—a levelling, a sense of peace.

But the body, the body is another matter. Only now, the axis of discord has shifted.

For those of us who traverse the visible lifeline from female to male, there is a sacrifice. The journey is forever written on the body, no matter how far one is able or chooses to travel. We are at once dramatically transformed and decidedly unfinished or differently designed. Scarred. I accepted that cost, assumed it would not matter.

Fifteen years on, it matters. At least, it does for me.

Don’t get me wrong. I made no mistake. This is the only path I could have taken once I found it on the map. I am infinitely happier, more settled than I might ever have imagined I could be. But if I long for anything, it’s the life I never had, the boy’s life—or any life, male or female—that might have been coherent, sex and gender, gender and sex. As much as the two are divided, the physical and the psychological, they are not separate in the living, in the experience of being. We exist as embodied minds, or if you prefer, embodied spirits, in the world.

Pre-transition, there was an internal fracturing of being. I struggled to align the outside world with the inside space I inhabited. I was an awkward misfit. Nothing made sense. Even the glam rock and punk of my teen years offered little more than a glimmer of hope before fading away. For years I fancied myself a Cartesian dualist. The ontological reality I experienced was akin to being tethered to a body that could never be a home. Over the years I began to talk about this body, to describe it as a distinct entity. I would catch myself at moments feeling like I was consciously moving my hips and propelling my legs forward, like an injured person re-learning how to walk. I floundered in pregnant form. By then I was at a complete loss.

Recognizing myself as transgender, that is, understanding that the real me was the male identity inside and learning that the outside could be modified to conform, was sufficient to see me through a divorce and launch me on my way into a new life. In the early years there was so much to look forward to, so many changes, and so much random strangeness. Puberty at forty is intense and wild and weird. For years I threw myself into work, measuring my worth by the title on my business cards, and finding validation in the sole corner of my life in which no one knew my past.

My transition was a textbook success. Or so it seemed.

I made no close friends, took no lovers, dared not risk the delicate balance of finally existing as a man in society. I sacrificed newfound authenticity for another superficial truth—one coherent with an implied history that would not threaten to expose me. The wall I had once constructed on the inside, I reconstructed on the outside.

Now I have dismantled and deconstructed it again.

But I still find myself troubled by a restless inauthenticity of being. It worries its way into the tension between my desire to blend and my need to be true to a life lived against the grain. It is looking for a voice.

On the street I am invisible.

I am. And I am not.

I am at once more, and less, than the sum of my parts.

Always have been. Always will be.

Here I am writing about my life, opening up the veins of the story without fleshing out the details. I have offered scraps and fragments, just enough to begin to frame a question, to try to begin to articulate my hybridized experience of living—then and now.

This is a sketch. That is all.

I am forever in the process of writing myself into being.

Postscript:

If the apex of manhood is to stand to pee, the nadir of manhood is to be gay and to understand that you will always arrive short-handed.

The bride stripped bare by his bachelors. Even.

 

The artist as outsider: The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

The lonely city is a pervasive phenomenon. The specific city of Olivia Laing’s new essay/memoir of the same name is New York City, but there is something about the modern city – be it the glass towered canyons of the central core or, I would argue, the uniform, ordered expanse of soulless suburbs that breeds a loneliness that can be suffocating. And surely some feel it more acutely than others, but most of us have probably, at least at some time or in some space, been troubled by the longing for contact, the need to share, and the sense that our aching neediness is conspicuous, writ large in awkward desperation. That is the experience Laing sets out to explore, by placing the inward focused isolation of being alone in a foreign city, against the works of a number of artists who, she argues, portray loneliness – capture the sensation, however bleak or beautiful – in a manner that speaks to her, during her sojourn and, in the end, perhaps help her find her way out of her darkness.

lonelyHer previous book, The Trip to Echo Spring, also set in America, was a road trip via the lives of five American authors who battled the bottle, framed against her own experiences growing up in an alcoholic household. I read it with an eye to understanding my adult son, a creative young man who is also an alcoholic. In her new work, the terrain she covers is confined, claustrophobic, but again informed by her own experience, this time of a period spent in New York following the emotionally devastating collapse of a relationship. I read The Lonely City in an urban centre less glamorous but with its own tendency to be unfriendly, at the apex, perhaps, of an extended period of crushing loneliness of my own.

Laing begins her journey through urban alienation with the suggestion, inspired by an entry in the diaries of Virginia Woolf, that there can be a transcendent quality to the experience of loneliness. She seeks to find this idea reflected in the lives and creations of a number of artists whose works draw her in and help her articulate and understand her own loneliness, in the moment, and as it exists within in the context of 21st century technology. She asks:

“What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we’re not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if we don’t find speaking easy? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty? And is technology helping with these things? Does it draw us closer together, or trap us behind screens?”

As an essayist, Laing has the ability to balance just the right measure of personal exposition and vulnerability, with an uncanny talent for bringing the lives of the individuals that fascinate her into an immediate, sensitive focus. She writes with an honest compassion and curiosity. New York City – reflected through her months of moving between rented or borrowed accommodations, patrolling the streets with a sense of acute isolation, and digging through the archives of artists in search of meaning and treasure – is exposed and stripped bare through the emotionally disenfranchised creative eye. The eyes she choses to look through include Alfred Hitchcock, Valeries Solanas, Nan Goldin, Klaus Nomi, Peter Hujar, Billie Holiday and Jean-Michel Basquiat; but four artists in particular provide perspectives she finds deeply intriguing. They are the realist painter Edward Hopper whose stark images capture the solitary urban existence with an intensity that is poignant and uncomfortable; Andy Warhol, the socially awkward artist who virtually fabricated an identity protected by silkscreen frames, cameras and tape recorders; the unknown Chicago janitor, Henry Darger, who left an extensive, often disturbing, legacy of folk art and thousand of pages of imaginative prose; and, finally, photographer, artist, writer and activist David Wojnarowicz.

Laing weaves her personal reflections with a survey of some of the essential psychological studies of the causes and expressions of loneliness; expanding on these themes against the broad canvas of the lives and artworks of the artists she examines. Her subjects, the key players and the supporting characters alike, tend to be outsiders, typically survivors of troubled childhoods – victims of neglect, rejection, even outright physical abuse. Many are queer, individuals set apart by their sexuality, most find normal conversational communication difficult, and addiction is a common demon that recurs. The art, film and writings produced by these complex individuals is, in many instances, boundary breaking, frequently disturbing, and contain, at their core an attempt to articulate the aloneness of life in the city, to portray the isolated individual within stark interior spaces (as in the haunting paintings of Edward Hopper) or to record the desolate environments where the dispossessed seek to assuage their alienation through drugs and risky anonymous sexual encounters (as in the work of Warhol, Goldin, Wojnarowicz and others). Then there is the janitor/artist Darger, a loner who created a detailed alternate universe, illustrated with playfully coloured paintings that frequently contained elements of disturbing violence enacted on children, leaving an exhaustive wealth of works that no one saw until he was forced into hospital care at the end of his life.

Each of Laing’s outsider artists is treated with an empathetic respect and is understood within a society that is perceived as antagonistic to the those who by virtue of personality, mental illness, social anxiety, gender expression or sexuality are seen as divergent from the “norm”, whatever that is. The artists who seem to hold the greatest appeal for her, as a memoirist, are those who exploit their own differences to challenge the pressures that perpetuate a mainstream conformity. Regarding Wojnarowicz she says:

“All his work was an act of resistance against this dominating force, driven by a desire to contact and inhabit a deeper, wilder mode of being. The best way he’d found to fight was to make public the truths of his own life, to create work that resisted invisibility and silence; the loneliness that comes from having your existence denied, from being written out of history, which after all belongs to the normal and not to the stigmatised.”

As Laing unwraps the nuances of her own engagement with loneliness she finds in herself a profound identification with the gay artists who were navigating the city’s streets in the years before Stonewall, or even worse, during the height of the AIDS epidemic. As the daughter of a lesbian who was outed when homophobia was still legally enforced in the UK, she was especially sensitive to the gay taunts and jeers she heard in the school yard. But the knife cut deeper in an unexpected way:

“It wasn’t just about my mother. I can see myself then, skinny and pale, dressed as a boy, completely incapable of handling the social demands of being at a girl’s school, my own sexuality and sense of gender hopelessly out of kilter with the options then on offer. If I was anything, I was a gay boy; in the wrong place, in the wrong body, in the wrong life.”

These words struck a deep chord with me. Growing up in the 1960’s and 70’s, I found myself in the same space, only more completely if you like. I was haunted by an other-worldliness, a complete sense of my lack of ability to understand, let alone communicate, with those with who apparently shared the same gender. This feeling began to escalate as I reached my mid teens. That was, incidentally, a time when I sought a sense of self-identification with the world personified by Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground and other denizens of the Factory scene. I was, without any language for myself, grasping at straws. But I would not find the words, or discover that there was a way to ameliorate the crushing sense that I was in the wrong body until I was well into my 30’s. Many years on now I would like to say that being able to exist in the world in a way that is at once socially and emotional right has rendered loneliness a less pervasive force, but, in truth, it just changes the parameters of one’s alienation. At best, I am a loner who appears outgoing, who can readily speak to a room of 100 people but stumbles awkwardly over small talk; at worst I am floored by waves of intense loneliness that break over me when I least expect it, most often when I am in public places.

I have introduced my own experience here because it leads into the curious question of the role of social media in the 21st century experience of isolation. Laing describes how, during her New York stay, she would open and close the day wandering the virtual streets and alleys of the city of Twitter. In between, even more hours could be lost to clicking, conversing, and cruising hashtags. In my loneliest periods I have fallen into the same pattern and asked myself the same questions she poses:

“What did I want? What was I looking for? What was I doing there, hour after hour? Contradictory things. I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to be stimulated. I wanted to be in contact and I wanted to retain my privacy. I wanted to click and click and click until my synapses exploded, until I was flooded with superfluity.”

The migration of our social engagement to a virtual sphere is, she argues, reflected in the gentrification of our urban communities and in the gentrification of our emotions. Happiness is assumed to be the default; difficult feelings are to be avoided, corrected, numbed. The internet can be a comfort, a necessary connection, but it is important to understand its limitations. It cannot cure loneliness. The answer lies not in another person, but within ones self. After all, a period of loneliness can be positive experience, a time of personal growth. Longing, as Laing reminds us, is a vital part of the human experience, it “does not mean that one has failed, but simply that one is alive.” I am inclined to believe she is right.

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone is published by Picador.

Other kinds of exile: The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs by Damon Galgut

“Lives are meant to be separate and apart; when the borders break and we overflow into one another, it only leads to trouble and sadness.”

Last month I had worried about easing back into reading following my recent unexpected cardiac arrest, but, in fact, August went well. September has proved much more difficult. I have picked up so many books I thought I wanted to read only to be unable to get beyond a few pages. So it is probably no surprise that I retreated to the comfort zone of re-reading a book by one of my favourite authors. I chose this book on the expectation that a new paper edition was due to be released today in Canada but from reports of the distributor being low or out of stock, the reality of actually seeing it on the shelves may be a long way out. Too bad because when you know a writer has many excellent books to his or her credit it is a shame to see only one, the latest or best known, in stock. Fortunately this title is readily available electronically.

pigsThe Beautiful Screaming of Pigs is the second full length novel by South African writer Damon Galgut. Originally released in 1991 it eventually dropped out of print and, when a new edition was issued in 2005 following the Booker shortlisting of The Good Doctor, Galgut took the opportunity to revise the book, wanting to address his longstanding feeling that the rhythms of the language sounded “discordant”. The result, for whatever it is worth, is a novel that embedded itself into my consciousness with the first reading, and proved to be even richer and more deeply affecting with the second.

Set against the backdrop of the first free elections in Namibia in 1989, 20 year-old Patrick Winter and his mother are heading to the land that he had, only a year before, been fighting for on behalf of the South African Army. That experience has clearly left him emotionally traumatized. He is dependent on Valium to sleep and cope with recurring panic attacks. For his mother the trip is an opportunity to visit her young black lover, the latest of a long string personal explorations she has flirted with since her divorce from Patrick’s father. As the story unfolds he will reflect on his childhood, the horror of his time in the army, his ambiguous feelings about his own politics, and the emerging recognition of the nature his sexuality.

The novel opens as Patrick and his mother arrive at the Afrikaner farm where she grew up and he spent many a summer vacation. His brittle grandmother fusses over his physical and mental health, cannot understand why they are heading north, and stubbornly insists on referring to Namibia as South West Africa, the name by which it was known going back to its years as a German colony. Here Patrick will begin to reveal his family background, his closeness to his mother and his alienation from his rugged, athletic, big game-hunting father and older brother.

When his brother Malcolm joins the army and is killed in a motor vehicle accident, the loss tears the fragile family apart. Patrick and his mother move out, unraveling the tightly wound expectations of marriage by which she had been bound. As she tries to reframe herself with a series of dramatic passions and obsessions, her son is placed in the awkward role of picking up the pieces behind her. So when his own obligation to the army arises, despite the sure knowledge that he is entirely unsuited for the task at hand, he enlists promptly hoping to get his two year commitment out of the way. He won’t last two years, nor will he be able to put the experience behind him.

As he awakes that first morning to a familiar noise on the farm he makes a striking observation about his state of well-being in an unforgettable passage. Outside a pig is being slaughtered:

“There is no sound on earth like the sound of a pig dying. It is a shriek that tears at the primal, unconscious mind. It is the noise of babies being abandoned, of women being taken by force, of the hinges of the world tearing loose. The screaming starts from the moment the pig is seized, as if it knows what is about to happen. The pig squeals and cries, it defecates in terror, but nothing will stop its life converging to a zero on the point of that thin metal stick.”

As a child, the spectacle of a pig being killed never failed to draw him with a fascinated horror. On this day his reaction takes on a different note:

“It was a sign of my state of mind or soul that on this particular morning the screaming of the pig sounded almost beautiful to me. It didn’t evoke violence or fear, but a train of gentle childhood memories.”

After the reverie of a walk around the farm and a hearty breakfast, Patrick and his mother head for Namibia. When they finally reach Windhoek and meet Godfrey in the township where he lives, Patrick is surprised to find that his mother’s lover is not quite what he had imagined and is, in reality, only a few years older than he is. They learn that a white activist who had been working with SWAPO (the South West African Peoples’ Organization) has just been assassinated and Godfrey must attend to details for his funeral and an election rally. This necessitates a further trip on to Swakopmund, a detour that places Patrick in a position to question his own political resolution and bravery, especially poignant in light of the fact that on the border he was engaged in fighting the very forces he is now helping Godfrey support. His mother’s enthusiasm soon wanes into boredom as, for her, the shine starts to come off her latest passion.

Woven into the account of their few days in Namibia, is Patrick’s chronicle of his experiences in the army, beginning with the early days of tedium as the young soldiers pass empty days in their tents “playing cards, writing letters, telling jokes. An old scene, as old as the first village.” Patrick is keenly aware that he does not quite fit into this world of testosterone charged energy. He is hopelessly reminded of the way he felt sidelined as his father and brother tossed a rugby ball on the lawn or boasted about their hunting conquests. He senses a brotherhood of men to which he will never belong. It is not until a young Afrikaner named Lappies arrives that he finds a kindred spirit, makes a friend, and maybe – although he doesn’t realize it at the time – falls in love. Once fighting descends on the camp and strikes with a vengeance; horror, fear and death take their toll. When Patrick’s friend is killed, his grasp on sanity begins to slip. Galgut pulls the reader right into his young narrator’s shattered mind in one of the most intense descriptions of a mental breakdown I have ever read. It happens in fits and starts. Patrick tries to hang on, stubbornly, foolishly until his condition deteriorates to the point that he finds himself hospitalized, first in Pretoria and then in Cape Town. He is discharged from the army.

In the hospital his parents visit. Their responses to their shocked and emotionally injured son are true to form. His father travels to see him Pretoria where he sits awkwardly, shifting from ”buttock to buttock” unable to find anything meaningful to say. His mother has been busy acting in a play and does not make her appearance at his bedside until he is back in Cape Town. She visits him daily and talks about herself. It is here that she will first tell him about Godfrey, hoping to impress or shock him. He has no answer but he remembers the small drama.

“At that moment a shaft of light, blued by the rain, fell on her face: like the actress she was, she turned towards it, finding her spot. Then she smiled, and the smile became a laugh: a round, silvery sound, like a coin, which fell from her throat and tinkled down onto the ground.”

Patrick’s few days in Namibia will not answer all the questions he carries into the shifting sands of the desert one year after his breakdown. But he will emerge from the visit with a sense that it is time for him to define his own sense of personal space and figure out who he is. Borders – those lines between countries defended by force, defined by politics, and blurred between people – feature throughout this novel. True to form, Galgut allows these spaces to exist for the reader to explore. He is a writer of remarkable restraint, a storyteller who matches spare tight prose with simple moments of vivid intensity. In The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs he has created a haunting, intelligent, unforgettable portrait of the relationships between people at a time of great upheaval and impending change in Southern Africa. As Namibians queue with excitement to mark their ballot toward the end of the novel, Godfrey tell Patrick that maybe someday his own country will see the same. That day will still be more than four years away.

Nothing but grey skies? One Hundred Days of Rain by Carellin Brooks

It begins abruptly with a domestic dispute, loud enough to alert the neighbour. The police are called. Our unnamed heroine is led away and will soon face a restraining order. This is Vancouver. Rain starts as her marriage ends.

“She is not fallacious enough to connect this with her circumstances. She confines herself strictly to the facts. She leaves. It rains.”

rain100What we find in One Hundred Days of Rain, the spare, reflective novel by Canadian author Carellin Brooks, is a poetic meditation on the unraveling of a relationship and the displacement of a woman and her small child in a city famous for its wet face, soaked streets, and days – no, months – of rain. The moments are ordinary: work, finding a place to live, stretching meagre resources. The dissolution of the marriage is bitter, acrimonious and manipulative. But much of the time the protagonist is numb, detached, preoccupied. The rain, in its infinite guises, stubborn ubiquity, tireless assault on the bodies and minds of the city’s inhabitants, is the central character. It has the starring role.

Rain is both vital and villainous:

“Outside the big front windows the rain has begun in earnest. This is the rain the denizens of the city know best, the rain they have cause to know. In the days before the weather began to change there would be weeks of it at a stretch. It is said of this rain that it drives people to suicide, that the sodden winter tried the hardest.”

It defines clothing and footwear:

“The skies drip, that’s all, and the relentless drip soaks silently into the land. She walks to the café to pick up her son. It’s a long walk but she won’t take the bus. Once again she is thankful for her thick soled shoes. The misery of bad shoes, ones that let the weather in, so that your feet when you peel off your squishy socks have a pale, pinched look of reproach. She hopes her son will be wearing boots.”

It becomes a distant memory when the summer brings sunshine. And then with autumn it is back:

“Collective amnesiacs who stare each autumn in unfeigned dismay, faces blank. What, this again? It’s raining? Forgetting as an act of self preservation. Nonsense, they say. It doesn’t rain like that. It can’t. There’s no way. A hundred days of rain one after the other? Certainly not. And the thing is, nobody lies, not consciously.”

As the sloppy, damp, year slides by, our heroine will move several times, balance visitation for her poor confused son between her ex-wife and the child’s father. Her relationship with M, the ex, is roughly fleshed out in a series of bitter vignettes. Other regular female lovers come and go. She seems at times to direct more emotion to the grey, unforgiving skies than to the people around her. She is on autopilot. It is almost as if the incessant rain risks drowning out her ability to make sense of what she really feels, thinks and wants in life. Perhaps it is simply granting time to start to heal.

Played out in a chorus of 99 short chapters, this novel, as a rumination on rain and a sketch of the endless end of a relationship, draws to a close, as it begins, with the first drops of rain. However there is a sense of a new beginning, however faint. The restrained third person narration has an arms length quality that is surprisingly engaging. The observations are sharp, precise, and often very funny. We don’t ever learn too much about the characters, we learn what we need to know. The fact that it is a same sex marriage that is coming apart is of little significance. Divorce is divorce. But we are invited to endure the Vancouver rain, appreciate it’s kaleidoscopic nature and, for some of us, remember why we live on the other side of the Rocky Mountains.

One Hundred Days of Rain is published by Canadian indie publisher BookThug.