Dearest
Mehdi GÖRBÜZ an artist born in 1997 in La Louvière, Belgium. A graduate of La Cambre (Brussels) and Beaux-Arts de Paris, his multidisciplinary practice spanning sculpture, video and photography explores memory, myth and imaginaries. Jaya JACOBO Jaya Jacobo is a poet, critic, scholar and dramaturg who teaches feminist and gender studies at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. She has worked alongside travesti and transsexual women artists, scholars, and community workers in Brazil, as well as with trans, queer, and nonbinary Filipina/x/o performers from the Philippines and Filipina diaspora abroad. LI Dahlia an artist and writer working in the field of diasporic feminist poetics as it across the mediums of film, performance, and literature. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Swarthmore where she was previously a Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow
Dearest Jaya,
I wonder when was the first time you realized other women were not like you?
When did you then realize other women were like you?
I thought of you for this correspondence project, in which I wanted to center an intimate conversation about disengaging the nation and its conscription of gender, because I was so charmed and envious of a kind of tropical cosmology you live through. How does the tropical invite you to re-name what gets narrowly described as transness? I am insistent that people know I am trans, but I am also so suspicious of the exceptionalism of that word. I am equally wary of the rhetoric that “trans people have always existed” because that seems like a retrojection.
I’ve met queer men who tell me that if they had been born years later they would be transwomen. I worry saying “trans people have always existed” does a disservice to their stories. I worry the particular, difficult, and ingenious ways they have lived disappear under the relatively new terminology of “trans” or “non binary”. As a death doula, an artist, and a performance ethnographer, I am curious about what cosmologies allow them life. Anyway, tell me more of you and your tropes and tropics. What have been significant moments that have shaped those topoi? They certainly exceed and precede the nation.
XX,
Dahlia
Dear Dahlia,
I write to you in the aftermath of a typhoon over Luzon island. When I left the university in the evening after a friend’s performance at the museum, I felt no more love for the monsoon, my first since returning from England. There was a sense of vindication written all over the ashen canvas of the tropic firmament. At last, I told myself, the gift of hindsight had finally arrived within me.
The night before her performance, an artist and I took a jeep from Diliman to Maginhawa, and in between discussions on the dramaturgy of her piece, we spoke about the risks we take in the name of solidarity, especially within trans and queer creation. While we are expected to have something in common with women within our community, we also run the risk of violating the poetics of our art when we find ourselves collaborating with colleagues who, in the end, do not share the forbearance we find necessary to deserve the epiphany of a work as well as the terms of embodiment that corresponds to the composition in question.
I found myself walking to the museum from one part of the campus where my college is located. Everyone seems to have evaded the rains and so the university looked the part of desolation. And yet, through the sunken garden, I couldn’t resist but pause to marvel at the magnanimity of green…viriditas had already come to me a couple of days back in a conversation on Hildegard von Bingen with another artist who had left the country almost two years ago to live elsewhere. At that moment, in the middle of the storm, the sense of vindication was determined to have itself felt through my wet and windy promenade.
In a world where I have found myself disavowed by men and women and all the queers in between and beyond them, I was alone and yet never abandoned. There are sisters who remain committed to the difficult questions worked through all those long nights in the dark room of thought. I have you and movies in our minds, despite the loves who never return and also the ones who have yet to reveal themselves. Like that meek one you had conjured for me, haunted in the monsoon of my vindication: as woman.
Yours sincerely,
Jaya
Dearest Jaya,
You speak about intimacy with our sisters and epiphanies blocked by the desires, repudiations, and projections that obscure us. I have felt so many of those lately, most surprisingly inside my intimacies when I least expect it. A few scenes: A friend I have stayed with before and who is one of the kindest and best people has a daughter. I wonder if I’m the first trans person her daughter has really had to interact with. Her child misgenders me often and I feel a strange (transphobic? Trans wary? Are the two not similar?) distance that wounds me despite my wanting to be friendly and close. My friend would be mortified to know I felti felt this way. Her daughter certainly doesn’t get it from her parents. Is it school?
I go out with a friend and her girlfriends who are in their 20’s and am alienated, shocked, but then also not, by how un-embarassingly man -crazy/preoccupied some of them were. Straight cis people stumble into parenthood and partnership. As an intellectual and teacher I’m left to decode what doesn’t work of their lives to them and give their queer kids (and straight kids) what their parents could not. Meanwhile I so badly want a child but feel constantly alienated by forms of normative family. I worry how my possible child would get bullied or torn from me so often that I can'ti cant imagine being a mom. I have been speaking to leftist queer friends and suggested that perhaps a shared future forward for the world is for queerness to attend to its seeming antimony, desires and lives lived under the form of the normative family. I am in London looking for an archive of queer black women who may not have been able to come out because they were first pulled into being a wife, a mother, and a daughter. So much has been looted.
I think I’d like to call our exchange “Dearest,” because I feel able to declare desires to/with you that the world otherwise loots. I remember over Korean in Cubao Expo you spoke of Black Afrobrazilian sisters helping you find (or perhaps recover) different ways of being woman. I would love to hear more.
Your dearest,
Dahlia