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“Split It Open and Count the Seeds”

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/23289252-3545323

2328-9260

Joy Ladin,

Cultural History and Identity Formation

As the groundbreaking Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics showed, the United States is in the midst of a cultural “big bang”: trans poetry—poetry about trans identity and experience—having exploded out of what seemed to be nothing at the end of the twentieth century, is expanding and diversifying at mind-boggling speed. Through these poems, the long-silenced voices of an oppressed, repressed, suppressed, marginalized, and terrorized minority are making themselves heard, appearing in magazines, blogs, and, increasingly, bookstores, awards ceremonies, and college syllabi.But this body of poetry represents more than self- or group expression. Trans poetry is a laboratory for developing language in which to express trans identities that cannot be expressed through language based on gender-binary assumptions that everyone is only and always male or female.These trans-poetic experiments will not only transform the American literary landscape; they will, I believe, transform the ways in which we understand and express transgender identities and—because gender is a system of interdependent signifiers and assumptions—all gender identities, trans and nontrans alike.It's not surprising that poetry, particularly first-person poetry, provides such fertile ground for developing language for trans identity. It's never simple to say “I” in a poem. The poetic “I” has no body, no face, no gestures, or no tones of voice to make the self to which it refers visible, tangible, and comprehensible, which is perhaps why so many first-person poems wrestle with evanescence and often, even in the midst of ecstasy, throb with elegy and loss. Disembodied and often decontextualized, the poetic “I” points from nothing toward no one, a wishful, wistful gesture made in the hopes that others will imagine its life and flesh.Similar problems dog many trans people outside the margins of the poem. Our first-person pronouns often point toward lives and flesh that conceal, erase, or distort who we really are, or who we are becoming. But the problem of trans self-representation goes beyond mismatched lives and bodies. When trans people say “I,” we refer to selves our culture does not yet have words or conceptual apparatus to understand. Umbrella terms like transgender or genderqueer are politically and socially useful shorthand, but they encompass too many different relationships between body, psyche, personal history, and cultural categories to identify individuals: “I am transgender” means “I am something more complicated than ‘male’ or ‘female,’ though my gender identity might be male or female”; “I am genderqueer” means “I don't identify as ‘male’ or ‘female.’” When used in speaking with those unfamiliar with trans identity, these terms become even less precise: “I am transgender” brings up images of Caitlin Jenner; “I am genderqueer” connotes nothing at all.Some of us try to fill in the linguistic and social blanks by creating new, highly specific terms for gender identity.1 But most of these new words are not widely used or understood, and, as glossaries of terms for gender identities routinely warn, not only is language for gender identity “continuously changing,” but “most identity labels are dependent on personal interpretation and experience” (Trans, Genderqueer, and Queer Terms Glossary 2015). One person who says “I am X” may mean something different from another person who says “I am X”—and by next year, that term may have fallen out of use and become another artifact of the long, long history of efforts to create language to express trans identity.2A few words signifying nonbinary relationships to gender, such as transsexual, cross-dresser, and drag queen, have more or less stood the test of time. But even these words are not widely understood and are not supported by the cultural conventions—clothing, gestures, conventions, tones of voice, and so forth—that make declarations of binary-gender identity mean so much more than a statement about reproductive organs. When I say “I am a transsexual,” I'm not expressing my identity: I'm saying what, not who, I am. But if I say “I am a woman,” I am expressing only my gender identity; the word woman does not express or even acknowledge the complicated juggling of body and soul and social position that has shaped my trans identity.This problem—the lack of words, signs, and conventions to express relationships to gender that are more complex than male or female—is the defining problem of trans poetics.In the narrowest sense, trans poetics refers to the linguistic strategies used to express, represent, or otherwise make trans identity visible and meaningful in poetry; in the broadest sense, trans poetics refers to all poetic efforts to represent any forms of self or identity for which there are no conventional means of expression.3Trans-poetic strategies can be complicated, but the problems of representation they address are often quite simple, as we see in the first-person poem “Make Believe,” one of the soliloquies in Oliver Bendorf's award-winning collection, The Spectral Wilderness, in which speakers express trans identities. “Make Believe” begins, “The first time I took a razor to my face” (5). When a nontrans man says, “The first time I took a razor to my face,” he is not just referring to a moment in his life; he is using a widely recognized marker of the onset of male adolescence to signify that he was born and raised male and that he identifies as male. When Bendorf writes those words, he does so knowing that this signifier of male identity—which is as biographically factual for him as for a nontrans man—simultaneously represents and misrepresents his gender. For Bendorf, as for nontrans men, there was a first time he shaved his face, but that first time reflected the onset of a second, willed adolescence, rather than a genetically programmed rise in his testosterone level.Bendorf could easily have avoided this complication by opening the poem with a trans-specific biographical detail, such as “After my seventh shot of t,” rather than a common signifier of conventional masculinity. But Bendorf embraces the problems created by using binary-gender signifiers to represent trans identity, using trans-poetic strategies to transform them into signifiers of trans masculinity. Here, that transformation begins with the title, “Make Believe,” defined via an epigraph from Wikipedia: “Make believe generally has no rules but to stay in character.” By framing “The first time I took a razor to my face” as part of a “make believe” effort to “stay in character,” Bendorf defamiliarizes it, calling into question the gender-binary assumptions that the speaker's masculinization reflects a physical process that “naturally” expresses a “real,” rather than “make believe,” gender identity. As the title suggests, for the speaker, shaving and the beard growth that occasions it reflect efforts to “stay in character,” to make believe—to make others and oneself believe—that the speaker is male, by creating a male self to believe in:The first time I took a razor to my faceI forgot what I was made of. Havingmade believe all I could, I made believea little further, pulling the open bladearound the corner of my lips, watchinga few desolate strands fall to the sinklike soldiers in a porcelain trench,or as with invisible ink drew myselfa mustache I could get behind.Or I am made up of fanciful scrapsand small fingers, one for every timeI've ever been called Sir.Tomorrow I'll get a prescription. . . . (5–6)For the speaker of “Make Believe,” still in early transition, trans masculinity is “made up of fanciful scraps”—cobbled together from the early physical effects of testosterone (“a few desolate strands” of shaven facial hair), so tenuous that they are barely more real to the speaker than a mustache drawn in invisible ink—and a small but growing hoard of public experiences (“every time / I've ever been called Sir”) that show that his “make believe” maleness is becoming an identity others recognize.As “Make Believe” demonstrates, in The Spectral Wilderness, Bendorf is out to forge language for trans identity that absorbs but is not limited by gender-binary signifiers and assumptions, including the assumption that gender is essential—unchanging, uniform, and real. “Make Believe” presents the speaker's trans masculinity as both real and concrete—it involves shaving—but also conceptual—a wistful, wishful, willful, and deeply personal act of self-creation that wobbles in and out of focus as the speaker negotiates the physical, social, and emotional processes of becoming. Indeed, highlighting the role of imagination in trans identity is central to Bendorf's trans-poetic efforts to transfigure signifiers of conventional, binary manhood—manhood mandated by both body and socialization—into signifiers of trans masculinity.This is a risky move. Many transsexuals angrily reject the idea that our maleness or femaleness is any less essential or more complex than that of nontrans men or women, because to do so is to risk having our claims to be or even know who we are rejected. But that is precisely why trans poetry is such a crucial site for the articulation of trans identity. Unlike daily life, legislative testimony, Facebook posts, mass-media interviews, and even memoirs, poetry is a safe (because culturally marginal) space in which to explore the vulnerabilities, complexities, and contradictions of trans identities, to explore trans identities not as positions to defend but as modes of becoming and thus ways of being human.As Bendorf shows throughout The Spectral Wilderness, trans poetry and trans poetics can free us from the crippling rigidity of the defensive, before-and-after, and “I always was the man or woman I have become” tropes that we find in many memoirs and other public explications of transgender (which in these forums almost always means transsexual) identity. Written by those who have grown up in a world as hostile to as it is ignorant of trans identity, and addressed primarily to nontrans readers, these accounts draw on gender-binary conventions to portray trans identity as just as essential, unchanging, uniform, and inescapable as binary-gender identities: we are “born this way” men/women trapped in female/male bodies, and just as determined, destined, and doomed by our gender as nontrans men and women. Rather than trans poetically transfiguring gender-binary conventions, these portrayals attempt, as much as possible, to fit trans identity into their terms and assumptions, in order to claim for trans identity the cultural authority of the gender binary.As a trans-memoir writer, I can attest to both the usefulness of gender-binary conventions and the difficulty of avoiding them in describing trans identity; as a trans person who spent most of my life ashamed of and afraid to express my gender identity, I know the crucial cultural work these public portrayals of trans identity do. Without them, I, and many isolated trans people, might never have learned of gender transition, or seen trans identity portrayed as anything other than disgusting or ridiculous. But when we compare these portrayals of trans identity to that of “Make Believe,” we see the costs of limiting articulation of trans identity to gender-binary terms. No human being, trans or not, is always and only one thing, one characteristic, one identity.The Spectral Wilderness, like other milestones of trans poetics, rejects such humanity-flattening conventions, presenting trans masculinity as a process of growing that involves grief and fear and loss and ambivalence as well as triumph and exultation.As “Make Believe” demonstrates, trans poetics is defined by its ends (the creation of language for modes of self and being for which there is no language) rather than by the poetic means used to achieve those ends. While some trans poets pioneer experimental techniques to represent trans identity, many, like Bendorf, find ample means at hand in the common toolbox of contemporary American poetry. For example, the provisionality, fragility, and wistfulness of the trans masculinity portrayed in “Make Believe” are common in first-person narrative American poetry because line breaks, past-tense verbs, and reflective self-narration tend to emphasize the shifting, transitive nature of even the most heteronormative self. “Make Believe” amplifies those effects through another common American technique, breaking long sentences over multiple line and stanza breaks, so that the speaker's trans masculinity unfolds in fits and starts, one or two phrases at a time.It is not surprising that Bendorf found mainstream American poetic techniques so useful for achieving his trans-poetic ends. Since the mid-nineteenth-century experiments of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, American poets have devoted considerable energy to representing first-person speakers who don't fit (and thus can't be represented through) conventional signifiers, including, though by no means limited to, speakers whose gender defies binary conventions. For example, the gender binary offered no signifiers for the omnivorous male self, defined by identification rather than differentiation, presented by Whitman in “Song of Myself,” or for the anguished female self, so attenuated that she is “pierced” by the sight of “Daffodils,” for which Dickinson coined the term “Queen of Calvary.”Dickinson's and Whitman's modernist American successors extended their pioneering efforts to represent un- and anticonventional forms of self and identity, including, in T. S. Eliot's modernism-defining poem “The Waste Land,” presenting a speaker, Tiresias, who is explicitly trans. In the middle of the twentieth century, poetic efforts to represent conventionally unspeakable forms of self and identity became a mainstay of American poetry. So-called confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton, and Robert Lowell, and beat poets like Allen Ginsberg, presented white male and female speakers who were feeling, thinking, and doing things that had previously been beyond the poetic and cultural pale, while feminist, African-American, and Latino poets interrogated, exploded, and reimagined the forms and language of identity offered to members of marginalized and oppressed groups.4 Meanwhile, postmodernist poets such as John Ashbery began presenting self-deconstructing selves: first-person speakers who unravel as they talk, revealing the cultural codes and clichés of which they are composed.Though few of these poets followed Eliot in representing trans identities, by developing language for signifying selves and forms of identity for which there had previously been no signifiers, they were pioneering techniques that are fundamental to trans poetics. Bendorf and other contemporary poets working to represent trans identities are heirs to a 150-year-old tradition of expanding the language and conception of the self.Bendorf is well versed in this tradition, wittily mashing up techniques drawn from different eras and movements in American poetry with one another and with more trans-specific elements, such as gender theory and trans cultural references. For example, take “Split It Open Just to Count the Pieces,” a Whitman-meets-Ashbery pastiche that literally dances rings around its epigraph from Judith Butler:Split It Open Just to Count the Pieces. “One might consider that identification is always an ambivalent process.”—Judith ButlerCall me tumblefish, rip-roar, pocket of light,haberdash and milkman, velveteen and silverbreath,your bitch, your little brother, Ponderosa pine,almanac and crabshack and dandelion weed. Call mebabyface, kidege—little bird or little plane—thorn of roseand loaded gun, a pile of walnut shells. Egg whitesand sandpaper, crown of Gabriel, hand-rolled sea,call me cobblestone and half-pint, your Spanishred-brick empire. Call me panic and Orion, Pinocchioand hurricane. Call me giddyup and Tarzan, riot boyand monk, flavor-trip and soldier and departure.Call me Eiffel Tower, arrondissement, le garcon,call me the cigarette tossed near the leakof gasoline. Call me and tell me that Paris is on fireand the queens of Harlem can have their operationsand their washing machines. Call me seamless,call me sir. Call me tomorrow's inevitable sunrise. (4)True to its epigraph, the poem consists almost entirely of “identifications,” terms by which the speaker asks to be identified. But in comic contrast to Butler's orderly, affectless abstractions, “Split It Open” presents identification as neither “ambivalent” nor a “process”; the speaker leaps ecstatically from identifier to identifier, leaving each behind as soon as it is uttered. Both the form (pell-mell parataxis) and self-delighting energy owe more to Whitman's endlessly expansive self-identifications in “Song of Myself” than to Butler or other gender theorists (or, for that matter, to Herman Melville's Ishmael, who also introduces himself by saying “Call me”), while the playful presentation of self-identification, often a deadly serious matter for trans people, as a series of non sequiturs, marks Bendorf's embrace of postmodernist irreverence toward the self and his ease in enacting its signature move: presenting a first-person speaker whose self-defining rhetoric deconstructs the self that rhetoric is defining.Despite the first-person pronoun, this is not autobiography, not a personal revelation of “the process of identification,” as we see in “Make Believe.” It is unlikely that anyone actually wants us to call them all these things. Indeed, it's hard to know what it would mean to identify anyone by calling them a “pile of walnut shells” or a “flavor-trip.” Many of the speaker's self-identifications are opaque or downright silly, which makes it seem as though the poem, in postmodernist fashion, is mocking, or at least giggling at, the idea of self-identification.But the poem is more than a postmodernist exercise in showing that when we “split the self open” we find “pieces” rather than a person, and idiosyncrasy rather than identity. Postmodernist American poets and gender theorists alike have been splitting the self open and doing happy dances around the pieces since the mid-twentieth century. But splitting the self open is liberating only when one has a self to split. Many trans people, myself included, are more concerned with constructing selves that feel authentic than deconstructing selves that aren't. When you are forced to live as someone you know you aren't because there is no way to safely, intelligibly live as the person you know you are, you don't need Judith Butler to teach you that “identification is . . . an ambivalent process,” or language poetry to demonstrate the emptiness of a self constructed from cultural codes and clichés. Trans people walk that walk whether or not we learn to talk that talk.When the speaker of “Split It Open” repeatedly orders us to “call me” something that is not an effective signifier of identity, Bendorf is not just recycling postmodernist tropes. He is trans poetically repurposing them to playfully (rather than angrily or tragically) call attention to the inadequacy of the language available to express the speaker's identity, continuing a project that American poets have intermittently pursued at least since Emily Dickinson, who in 1865 presented a speaker who self-identified in the following terms:I am afraid to own a Body—I am afraid to own a Soul—Profound—precarious Property—Possession, not optional (Dickinson 1998: st. 1)In a rhetorical move often used by trans people, Dickinson's speaker identifies themselves (no gender here) by disidentifying with their “Body,” which, the speaker tells us, is not a signifier of identity, not “my body,” but “a Body,” an anxiety-inducing piece of “Property” involuntarily imposed on the speaker (“Possession, not optional”).5 This is trans poetics 101: defining identity in negative terms, by demonstrating one's disidentification with conventional identifiers.Unlike Dickinson's speaker, Bendorf's speaker is not “afraid” to be identified with something he is not. Indeed, he seems to delight in telling us to call him improbable, imponderable, or outright goofy things. But his embrace of dysfunctional identifiers suggests his disdain for available terms. Why would someone demand to be identified via a flood of incomprehensible terms if something like “Call me he” or “Call me male” or “Call me trans” or “Call me Oliver” would do?But Bendorf doesn't settle for defining trans identity through disidentification. Throughout The Spectral Wilderness, he tries out signifiers for trans identity, from the conventional (“The first time I took a razor to my face”) to the distinctly unconventional, including, in a number of poems, reaching beyond the human. In “Precipice,” for example, Bendorf writes, “My / masculinity is animal at best” (37), and it is clear, here and elsewhere, that he means “animal” literally. The speaker of “The Doctor Told Me the Shots Would Make Me Spin Silk” describes his medically facilitated transition to a spiderman rather than trans man, while in “Extremophilia” (one of a number of poems set in rural and farm life), the speaker identifies himself as “goat boy,” a term that seems to mean both one who cares for and one who shares the characteristics of goats; “goat boy” concludes his marriage proposal to “goat girl” by asking her to “make me / a better animal” rather than, as convention would have it, “a better man.”Such poems suggest that something more than disidentification and postmodern play may be at stake when “Split It Open” reaches beyond the human. I still can't make much sense of the speaker's commands to “call me . . . . Ponderosa pine, / almanac and crabshack and dandelion weed.” But when the speaker says, “Call me panic and Orion, Pinocchio / and hurricane,” the nonhuman identifiers point toward aspects of trans identity: the sense of masculinity as simultaneously archetypal (“Orion”) and cobbled together (“Pinocchio”), the vulnerability (“panic”) and world-wrecking power (“hurricane”) of gender transition.Compared to the labored, inconclusive, and distinctly ambivalent process of identification we see in “Make Believe,” which ends with the speaker waiting for others “to see me as this new soft man / and for me to begin to believe it,” “Split It Open” sounds like a trans wish-fulfillment dream, in which becoming who we are doesn't require medical treatment, social dislocation, or even performance because we become whatever we say we are as soon as we utter the magic words “Call me” (6).For decades, Kate Bornstein has urged people, trans and nontrans alike, to adopt this sort of playful, liberated, and idiosyncratic approach toward identity, to see identity not as a fortress to defend or a prison to escape but as a polymorphous pleasure garden in which we can be whomever and whatever we delight in being. “Split It Open” puts that theory into trans-poetic practice, showing us how vital, how unpredictable, how incomprehensible, how silly, how beautiful, how liberating, and how loony it would be to identify ourselves in terms of everything and anything we please, to flicker through identities as fast as frames in a film, to be as happy to be called “Eiffel Tower” as to be called “sir,” so long as we are called what we feel, at that moment, like being.Of course, wish-fulfillment dreams are just that—dreams. Many of us would find it exhausting to have to constantly reconceive and reintroduce ourselves to others. It would be hard to get dressed in the morning if our sense of self kept changing; social interactions would be drowned in cacophony if everyone was constantly shouting “Call me this” and “Call me that.” It would be exhilarating to be free to be whomever we felt like being at any given moment—but as W. H. Auden (1979: 94) notes in “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” “To be free / is often to be lonely.”Trans poetics is concerned not just with liberating us from procrustean conventions of identity that require us to deform ourselves to fit them. Deconstructing those conventions is a necessary but preliminary step toward the greater trans-poetic project of developing new ways to imagine and express identity—ways that enable us to be true to ourselves and still relate ourselves to others. As we see when we recognize the pioneering efforts of Dickinson, Whitman, and their twentieth-century successors to develop language for unconventional selves, this project goes far beyond the issues raised by transgender identities. It is a built-in problem of being social animals who are conscious of ourselves as individuals, and we—the human race—are not about to solve it any time soon. But in this respect at least, Ezra Pound (1934: 73) was right when he said that poets are “the antennae of the race.” American poets have been feeling their way toward more capacious conceptions of identity for a century and a half, and we can see those antennae twitching in the concluding lines of “Split It Open,” when the speaker says “Call me” in a completely different way:Call me and tell me that Paris is on fireand the queens of Harlem can have their operationsand their washing machines. Call me seamless,call me sir. Call me tomorrow's inevitable sunrise.“Call me and tell me” shifts from telling us how to identify the speaker as an individual to showing his sense of connection to the larger trans community signified by the reference to the documentary Paris Is Burning—a community that embraces and identifies him with people, the trans-feminine “queens of Harlem,” who have different gender identities, different problems, and, as we see in the film's interviews, very different ideas of identity than we find in this poem.In order to voice that communal connection, the speaker has to interrupt his stream of idiosyncratic self-identifications: telling us to call him “rip-roar, pocket of light, / haberdash” cannot identify him with a community, any more than telling us to call him and tell him “Paris is on fire” can identify him as an individual. But the last two lines stretch toward language that combines individuality with communal identification, balancing the individuating idiosyncrasy of “Call me seamless” against the communal conventionality of “call me sir,” before moving, in the final phrase, to an image that transcends both: “Call me tomorrow's inevitable sunrise.”“Tomorrow's inevitable sunrise” is simultaneously consistent (“inevitable”) and evanescent, a universal symbol and a unique identifier (do you know anyone else named “tomorrow's inevitable sunrise”?), a physical fact we can count on and a revelation that is always yet to come. In this image, and throughout The Spectral Wilderness, Bendorf reminds us that the purpose of trans poetics is to create not only language to express who we are but also language that spurs us to imagine what we, individually and collectively, have yet to become.