I nearly decided to begin writing this piece with a list of circumstances: those which led my writing of this piece, those which led to publishing it, and those which led to reading your book in the first place. I quickly realized it would become a list of anyone who made me a writer; anyone who taught me writing, who taught me to read; anyone who allowed me to be bookish, to enjoy school; anyone who endeavored to listen to the early rumblings of my essays. So, I canned the idea.
Instead, I write a sort-of letter to you now. Not unfitting: your book is, practically, a collection of letters, directed at, dedicated to, and acknowledging of the people who made your life a life. The people are split into three categories: Mothers, Lovers, and Others.
It feels fitting that I don’t know you. That not-knowing could be the point of all this—right?
In my estimation—and in my recent struggle to finish an MFA, willingly trudging through the racist, capitalist mire of a university—the only way to write is with another, possibly with every other. This is, if not a challenge, a discomfort to the individualist system of American society, and even to ostensibly progressive spaces. To admit the role of another in artmaking is to admit a fault, a weakness. It’s to admit that it was not singular, inspired genius which created the work, but a community effort. I spent a lot of my MFA contending with this dilemma—how to make acknowledgement and experience into a form of play in writing. How to spread the multitudes of my life across all of my work, rather than contain them in a mere acknowledgements page.
It didn’t occur to me to ignore singularity altogether until I read your book, Love and Money, Sex and Death, which outright embodies not just the communal, but the femmunal, the sprawling network of weirdo-others that make the self. (That you admit the term femmunal is one you gleaned from a meme is part and parcel of this ethics — one that accepts kindreds as they come.) Weirdos (the good kind, of course), memes, bygone lovers, theories and theorists, past selves, fictional and real people—in your book, they are alike in their power to exorcise and hold memory, to make a self, to make a world unto one.
There’s no explaining to be done here. One writes a letter to oneself from the future; one writes letters to others; this is a memory of a life. Form emerges out of details flirting together, you write, thus letting us in on the secret: write, remember, document, then watch the mold reveal itself.
The writer as a site of commune; the writer as political, religious; the writer as multiplicitously queer; the writer as memory-receptacle; the writer as bestower and bestowed. Instating the opposite of the individual requires a severance from the idea of memory as contained in the self. I don’t know what’s memory and what’s media, your narrator-self writes in one of two letters to your mother, especially when it comes to you. So I’m writing you again. Your narrator-self is openly dependent on the memories of siblings to write the story of a mother absent. Shots of an incomplete movie. I had to edit memory as I edited flesh. It goes like this now.
Memory here, as everywhere, is a gooey thing, sticky with the residue of the other. You work with this fact by intervening: One conversation is falsified. One character exists as a composite of two real people. Moments depend entirely on descriptions and recollections from a sister. Memory is made and remade as with flesh, characteristic not only, but certainly materially, of transness.
And a reader has no real choice but to accept your choices. This is the way memory, recollection, writing, goes. Memories are changed by a changed writer—one who transitions late in life, who experiences the world anew in her sixties, but also one who grows up at all. Practically every writer can level with this, though the leveling itself is part of the work, of your work. The failures of the text await a reshaped flesh, you write of manuscripts returned to only after your transition, later in life.
Awaiting the reshaped flesh. As in: the flesh, the person, the people, make the writing. They change the writing. So, writing, artmaking, living, is a project in newness, in sculpture, reshaping.
I know we don’t know each other. But can I admit something? I have a fear of publishing my work. Of being found out, changing my mind later only to have my original idea resurface. If I believed one thing before, if I wrote one thing before, how can I now write another? You write to make sense, to sort out. It’s the essayist’s praxis. How does one admit this with such ease, knowing it is, or will be, in print?
My fear is trapped, in part, in the logic I’m trying to escape. In my anxiety towards publication, I see the I as a continuous self. Not as an-other, as you repeatedly remind us in your book, borrowed from Rimbaud.
A new mantra: I is an-other. I is an-other. I is an-other.
The political enters in your work not as schlock or obligation, but as necessity. It’s a tricky thing: to not lose sight of the dead, to say your names, honor them, and yet not stop there. These pronouns do work, shift our gaze around. Anyone who occupies space in the margins will share your understanding of the political as the necessary, personal underbelly of everything — just as they enact the knowledge that memory isn’t stored within one person, but many.
I frequently return to an interview with Toni Morrison, conducted shortly after she won the Nobel Prize. It’s called “CHLOE WOFFORD Talks About TONI MORRISON” — Morrison’s birth name squared off with her pen name, the name we all know her to be.
Morrison is asked whether, when she accepted the prize, she felt triumphant. She said: “I felt a lot of ‘we’ excitement. It was as if the whole category of ‘female writer’ and ‘black writer’ had been redeemed. I felt I represented a whole world of women who either were silenced or who had never received the imprimatur of the established literary world. … It gave me license to strut.”
Later, to a question about political correctness, Morrison says, “the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.”
This question of definition, of naming; your narrator-self occupies this space, too. It’s telling that transsexuals are required to declare that we’re in possession of true being to transition, you write. Memoir, the confessed account of the true self, is demanded of us. Fuck that.
Fuck that, indeed. In your book, even in what is proximate to death, to institutional and personal trauma, there’s real joy, without which the book would feel starkly incomplete. A section dedicated to Jenny (a Lover) begins and closes in the plural subject pronoun. We eat the chocolate bar we always bring. We find a spot to sit. We make out. We kiss. We sense the heat, the vapor of bodies. We — you and the reader — traverse parties, raves, lunches and dinners, old flames, as forms of play, of fun on the page. And yet it isn’t only this, or solely this; and it isn’t only the insistence that you’ve experienced trauma or hardship, either.
There’s wisdom to be found in this play, and power, both of which relate so closely to what it means to transition late in life, how to look back at all that came before. Sometimes — often— it’s love, and joy. The femmunal.
My second impulse for writing this, after my long list of thank-yous and little mention of your book, was to catch up with you, to learn your work well so as to more accurately review this text. What I meant earlier — about not knowing you and writing to you anyway being the point — is just that even strangers make us. Even a fleeting moment, a memory unknown to us but handed down, refashioned in a home video or captured in a text conversation (or, for that matter, a meme)—these create me. It’s easy to know through your work that it’s all created you, too.
McKenzie Wark’s latest book, Love and Money, Sex and Death, is out this month from Verso Press.
