“I hoped that by producing a history of representation that at some point trans people had made use of in different ways, some of what seems terrible or impossible about our histories might be […] made available rather than appear as something that we would rather not know.”
~Trish Salah, in interview with Oliver Fugler, Metonymy Press
Salah is a deeply intellectual poet. If you're game for a spiral down the mytho-psycho-philosophical rabbit hole, you will have a field day with this writer: she traverses the boundaries between poetry and critical theory as seamlessly and kaleidoscopically as her writing holds the spectra of identity: gender, sex/ual, racial, national, linguistic, cultural. A Professor in Gender Studies at Queen's University, Ontario, CA, she will read you under the table. The library here never closes, hunty.
If you are so inclined, do check out Salah's fabulous scholarly work on psychoanalysis, critical theory, and trans and postcolonial literature and culture. She has published in Somatechnics and Transgender Studies Quarterly, as well as contributed to several edited collections on topics ranging from transliterary psychoanalysis to Muslim and transnational feminism, social justice advocacy, activism, sex work, and the "war on terror."
As valuable as I've found her scholarship for my own academic work and teaching--and boi do I enjoy a good piece of critical-poetic genre-crossing (cue a loquacious soliloquy on the magic of Cixous and Sedgwick)--my heart beats in her poetry's fist. Why I speak of fisting will become apparent shortly (as poet Margaret Christakos wrote of Wanting in Arabic, Salah's debut poetry collection: this is "not a poetics of celibacy, I assure you"). But it's in her poetry where I feel most alive and feel my most unspeakable parts seen as through a mirror. A deliciously crystal-queer multilingual mirror.
In her poetry, Salah's intellect cuts and cradles all at once. Her poems don't capture meaning (under the lock-and-key of comprehension) but rather hold it (and us), poised on the in-between. This is the place of knowing ourselves as that thing that we are not yet; that wandering "near sleep but not in it" (as she puts it in "where skin breaks"), where our ancestral spectres enfold our present selves like mists enfold a mountain peak, and the boundaries between our selves and our differences dissipate. Salah's poetry celebrates the senses of self for which we have no words. It hosts the truth that labels in language (girl, boy, lesbian, bi, dyke, femme, butch, trans, native, foreign, daughter, parent, Lebanese) can only fingertip but never fully or lastingly encompass.
If you open up a Salah book, you'll find it swelling with spaces. She writes with language as much as with the gaps and cracks within it. A Salah poem loves a friction and a contradiction: it embodies what Medieval philosophers once called the divine "coincidence of contraries": that space where stultifying, paradoxical binaries exist in a luminous, perpetually spinning and creative cycle. In other words, here and there become a singular everywhere; male and female, rather than cancelling each other out, coincide to form more than the sum of their parts; and what seem like our darkest, unspeakable facets--the things we cannot verbalise, the things we are ashamed or afraid of, or that we simply don't know how to recognise--become essential and illuminating. Lack becomes abundance. Silence swells with matter.
Did I mention that she's been writing this stuff since before "transfeminism" became a keyword (Wanting in Arabic predates Julia Serano's Whipping Girl). If any of the troubles in her poems--whether conceptual, linguistic, or political--ever feel dated, it's because poets like Salah invented transfeminism before it was a word (like the Combahee River Collective invented intersectionality before Kimberle Crenshaw coined it as a term). Although, that said, I dare you to find a line in Salah's books that isn't timeless.
Salah's verses cannot be read linearly, as they often appear in floating pieces scattered all over the page, like a mirror in shards, at once reflecting and performing our own fragmentation. Or I should say "fragmentations," plural, because is any one of us ever just one thing? Are we not, each of us, kaleidoscopic pluralities of selves, genders, cultures, tongues, twisting, swirling, lapping, lashing, spinning like entangled wheels until we fleetingly feel safe--in an identity or sense of self that momentarily feels right, until it doesn't?
I've written my own book about the contrarian coincidences of migrant multilingualism, so you can imagine I think about this sort of thing a lot. Yet I still don't have the words to explain quite how liberating reading Salah--a Lebanese-Irish-Canadian trans lesbian, writing between languages, not transcending but wholebodily embracing, holding the trans-spectra of gendered, sexed, cultural, liminal, palpable yet ungraspable, knowable yet unspeakable experience--feels to me. When Salah writes of that way of "wanting in", where we're "mouthing all the right words & / still" we're lost, loose, unstable in our own bodies as in the language(s) we are supposed to speak, I feel so known. Her poems see and validate that strange desire to be safely slotted in a place or an identity, yet as soon as we get there, we feel trapped and need to fly--change--again. The inability to stop spinning and rest still in a pre-set definition of who we are--whom, what, or how we desire; from whom, of what, and from where we originate; of never being just one thing; of being not just one pin on the spectrum but of being the spectrum--is the queerest mood ever, and Salah's poetry is dripping in it.
So far, Salah has published two books of poetry: Wanting in Arabic (2002) and Lyric Sexology: Volume 1 (2014). Since then, she has also been publishing a steady trickle of verse/prose poems and other genre-crossing texts in various journals, like Feminist Studies, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Angelaki, among others. Listen to some readings of her poems below--a few by Salah herself, and a few by me. You will find additional readings on my Listen page in due course, so keep an eye on that if you, like me, can't (nor want to) get enough!
Listen to Salah reading from Wanting in Arabic and Lyric Sexology: Volume 1 as part of the 2014 East Bay Poetry Summit, hosted by the Manifest Reading and Workshop Series, Saturday, July 5th, 2014.
Listen to me reading:
where skin breaks
where skin breaks
your stockings are white lace from Valenciennes
i hitched through there once
and your garter belt too
that was where i first thought
"you can't hitch in to love
love is closed
like a sign, saying 'Closed'"
but you can hitch in to Valenciennes
into desire or its hook
& hitching in stockings
can teach a boy things
&
once upon a time i was--
how to miss a fist singing for a face
ditch a lift to a dead end
talk dirty about schoolboys
suck a driving man's dick
cave before tongue, stubbled lips
your man hasn't been to Valenciennes or to his knees,
doesn't notice the intricacy of the stitch,
the pains you take:
rouge smeared into nipples lips cheekbones,
your coffee burnished crimson
or again,
the faltering scents
of jasmine, licorice, rosewater
lingering behind knees
between wetted lips
& tendrilling round shoulders.
and why should he
thinks he owns you
and people are often careless of their property.
it's like breaking waves on stone
this looking for you
near sleep but not in it
i see you pealing out of
this little black rubber number
fitted like your very skin
you're in his studio, his
hand's on his cock, his
leather pants are open, his
eyes are complacent. you're
teetering on those heels, my
hands miss the arch, your tree branch spine
my eyes are not complacent--
while you dance before him, feel them
lash you, like a scourge
don't know how i got here
near sleep but not in it
wandering wild eyed and wide open
for days
months
years
looking for you
how many years?
tearing through these skins: male, female, female, male
until the body's ceased to matter
the body never does cease to matter
what finally comes to--
it's time to take you home
time to simply take you
my hands are in your hair and i know that you can feel them
your eyes are half lidded but you're nowhere near sleeping
the cock i fuck you with is ridged and lined with pearls
i'm tasting the blood beneath and the salt slick upon your skin
and where my hands have passed you already love the bruises
and where skin breaks open i'm already deep inside
are you burning love?
blushing is so slow . . .
just remember whose blood it is
spills
through slipknot bound wrists you tie with such easy grace
the kohl smear of my eyes, the blood swell to my lips
the silver rings piercing tits your fingers hook and twist
the cock you make your fist cracking my ass wet and red
and the hot dew of your breath condensing on my neck
and the hot draw of your cunt sticky cross my face
it's like that
the dream i have you
thrashing, just trashing me with kisses
barbed, with holding still
kisses
else blindfolded at my feet
it's the back and forth you like
it's the break i ask you make
June 15th, a fragment
I.
blindingly bright
waking you do not now know
even in this--
anguished beginning of fear and determination
this year of things breaking
where, in what conflagration or bruised
body posed, opposing
transecting the force of a structure,
you think, the word for it once was fascism,
when opposition composed still
the ground composing speech
or allowing
what makes sense,
so far from where you will be in a few hours, at 3 pm
waking you do not now know
in what breaking weight descending
call the baton for what it is, an intent to break you
apart, to partition a body or a movement
to make the pain particular
encompassing, exhaustively, yours
you will need to dig hard, to work to recognize
in yourself in such a moment
in the reach or range of love or rage or
in the torrent of a common frailty or
in the push came to shove of inarguable necessity
the capacity to, if not overcome, then endure
your fear, and holding it
move forward
make it to the end of the day
II. Carleton @ Jarvis
wanting to write this day,
this churning within the city,
at first all i can think of is you asking,
half joking, if it is possible to conceive a
People's Militia that is not a swift
descent into petty fascism?
I'm thinking we can have this conversation because the day feels nearly
over. we're lingering, falling nearer the back of the march,
feeling safer away from Queen's Park, past 52,
you're goofing, swaggering, butch;
I am so gonna kiss you.
i see B go by, blinking, the pepper spray mostly gone from his eyes,
K is buying water, L is in the hospital concussed--
we don't know that yet.
glancing over your shoulder, you see
the hard line of riot,
the geared up cops,
closer now than you thought
III.
joining the march midway, having slept in
having drunk too much the night before
talking about whether or not to make the march
at first it feels the same, like a hundred other demos,
the first major one of the spring, it feels like spring,
it feels like the right thing to do, it feels like cruising, it feels safe.
I've hooked up with some queer girls, anxious
they may be friends of my ex--
I'm surprised to see gas masks. I've been away, things have shifted
while i was
IV.
i am watching my lover at the demo
hanging back, keeping as safe
as her stomach will allow
moving forward, in fear for her best friend, C
who is dancing
skirting in and out of the front lines.
these lines are moving, broken but moving,
C seems fearless, today
I am watching R, confronting the cops,
who are screaming orders at her or
trying reasonably
like nice reasonable cops
to get her to back
away from the slight rise where a statue
has her back and join the others,
other protesters, just a few metres away
where the less reasonable cops are beating them with plastic shields,
with truncheons,
trying to rout them, with horses.
i am watching the horses, eight or twelve,
for some reason i cannot count, i try, repeatedly but i cannot count
their riders are pushing them to full gallop and we
are resistant, scattering; they're pushing, riving through
my love and i are on one side, with perhaps twenty, perhaps forty others,
somehow those eight or twelve riders on those eight or twelve horses
are driving us pushing us, out toward the road, into traffic.
stumbling backwards, careful not to run
i am watching someone fall to her knees to avoid the swing of a baton,
i am wondering what force that might possess,
coming from a man on a horse moving at such speed.
i am watching the horses go past.
my love says, "We should join the others.
We should be over there."
V.
even in traffic
crossing a road
should not be so difficult
with so many bodies
here though
we must also contend
with so many ways of being run down.
VI.
we leave the gardens
for the hospital.
in the gardens i do not see
the armored mass swarm
faster than you'd think.
no one does get to think,
about that; the media has already gone
to report the decisive tug and break
of fear, into action
under the header
"Violence at Queen's Park"
so that when my brother watches the news
and says to me that he cannot abide
"the violence" he is not speaking
of the provocation of the state,
the brute force of the cops,
or the forty plus reported deaths by exposure on the streets.
he is not speaking
speaking, he is,
not knowing
brilliantly blind,
his own violence
the polite complicity
of the determinedly neutral and prosperous
who brings us in to this time
where we are, all of us, called
to face and force
this uncertain work of making in breaking.
notes toward dropping out
This is where I ceased--
Not to be too obvious,
or in
mutation, or distilled, transmogrification
Beauty queens don't do so well in grad school.
Even if every body wants one
When you assume the shape, austere, assume anything.
Thing it, sister, thing itself, thing it loud to last your girl
Black Lips Cool and Quelled
In the '90s every white body wants a theory for becoming, other.
Don't let D & G fool you, nobody wants one to become other.
Even if Saturday Night at the Pyramid, BoyBar, ClitClub or
just hanging out
If you want or do become other, it will be needling
you will be false-ly accused, charged with
falsified access to a rare and dangerous
Paramilitary
designed by I, Desire
grooming rumours and splitting mythoi
like rage and glass, sick with genre
for fun fun fun
not likely.
Nobody wants to become nobody.
And authentically so, they fear.
What if y = just being
Yours sincerely
Yours truly
Yours until the very end of days
Yourself? Being, as k. would say, "an edge predicament"
? Beloved, in Kind.
There are two kinds of people in this world,
binary and
non-binary, or
Suppose we did say we were a third then that were a word for
capping it off, or anything more than
the tyranny of the couple, or
Momma and Baby and Daddy makes
moon enough and time...
There are two kinds of love in this world
Narcissistic and Anaclitic, or
Ana can't get over how dependent upon
Narcissus she's become lonesome after all these years.
Love to love you, baby, in theory
but say you do get out of this library, theory, club,
how are you gonna make it North of the Wall again?
There is a cabin in the woods, a secret way,
a drunken ruse time untravelled stolen back
So, Mummers and co . . . children, etc. . . . Arty or Sexy, etc . . .
Abandoning Incest and Deconstruction no more than your God
If you are on the moon, or off the moon?
If you are seeking a body or displaying one
run off dreaming carny, corny and carnal
Still no body wants to become no body.
Remember that when you are discovered
in all your figura
borders of the Real, surrounded
clashing arms and legs
even sleep is aching with it
while Glory bathes our moon with massacre.
Phoenicia =/= Lebanon
Phoenicia =/= Lebanon
though they occupy the same place, more or less
a) on a map? do you see
b) in my heart? to the west, the accident
c) in this poem, Phoenicia =/= Lebanon? that holds you down?
i have never been to Lebanon before i was
though i have often dreamed of Phoenicia dreaming in this world
the cedar groves, the long low galleys my father was
bazaars raucous with a thousand tongues born in Lebanon (=/= Phoenicia)
& before Lebanon was
Babylon by any other--all too Greek for me.
& though he did not die
there, in Phoenicia, or, in Lebanon
i am my father's daughter (few return from that voyage
May he rest in-- like Odysseus, from the sack of--
to die, comforted in his own bed)
who, as a small boy, intimidated at the prospect of the priesthood--
of following in my father's footsteps
until they ceased to be his--
he only made it to the seminary
before he came across the Atlantic transformed May he rest in--
in the middle passage, like the Phoenicians, perhaps
in their long low--
never to return--not without my mother & she
before him
Irish Catholic, with her own "troubles"
you can't get there from--
perhaps that's the origin of my infatuation with high heels
or better, mary janes,
eschewing the Jesuits' cassock
for convent girl plaid
what i never could figure,
my brothers had it worse & they didn't turn out
sissy boys, she-hes, homo
sexuals, or, as in my case
lipstick lesbians.
were they not raised for dodging bullets, racist dogma,
the Christian Phalange, to fight for ruined
Beirut against all odds, against Muslim, Palestinian?
after Daddy's death, precocious, they studied the way of the warrior,
or its suburban equivalent, Tae Kwon Do,
the Tae Kwon Do twins used their powers
to protect their too femme older bro'
strutting the corridors of St Pat's High,
neither a phobic bone, nor a homo
between their strapping young bodies.
so maybe it wasn't my father's plans for us
that got me so queer
maybe it was a child's premonition
of his stroke at 37
an immigrant's death of stress, a high salt diet, a foreign tongue
and, let's face it,
too many years of eighteen hour days
or perhaps it was smaller
just the way his mouth got tight about
his voice strangled and raging at
a 5 year old's inability to sleep
i'm not unsympathetic, who wouldn't
be frustrated by chronic insomnia in a child so young?
anyway, who cares why
i ended up my daddy's little girl?
i ended up my daddy's little girl didn't i?
heartbreaking, he didn't live to see the day & the boy
i was, caught dead in a crossfire in Beirut or Belfast
prostrate before my pretty Mohammed ever after
and nothing to do with Phoenicia
or Lebanon, but ex-girlfriends' and after my surgery comes
memories of a childhood, Cypress that boy's dead by any other name
where my cousins also fled you know what the dead do best is rise
Phoenix-like, again
a June War in '67
and, called
to return to Lebanon
where i have never been
my name should be Phoenicia
i'll prefer Yismine, for my aunt's sake.
for shame's sake, my French, my Arabic will mime strangers' tongues
missing my father's tongue.
the Phoenicians were the ranging traders of another world
on the news tonight shelling in this Lebanon,
a trampled marketplace
a strategic site
occupied by the French, the Americans, the Syrians, the Israelis
and Beirut is a hole in the ground through which the past comes up
(nevertheless,
my cousin Nada says,
never you mind, cuz, some of the richest people in the world
in that city. it will be beautiful and whole again,
give it five years
just you wait and see!)
i stole this poem from Robert Kroetsch
but don't feel sad about it, he wasn't
Phoenician & even at sea, even trading
in words, in the past, in love, in the middle passage
in the in between
i'm not either
but am i Lebanese?
not like that dyke comic,
do you remember her? playing coy,
Ellen? the TV lesbian?
who, coming out on Rosie O'Donnell
was either Lebanese or lesbian, on TV or off
(lesbian =/= Lebanese =/= TV)
except, perhaps, as in my case
where, sure, say it:
i am
a) Lebanese
b) lesbian
c) TV
d) all of the above
e) none of the above
so much for that