Author Archives: Sandy

Letting Go
By: Fred Daou

Part I

Anorexia has been my home for so many years. I’ve waited, honed in on my skills to let go of anorexia.

Letting go of my anorexia is akin to my getting undone by locutionary positions. “You can do it, Fred!” The personalisation of anorexia marks a break in my life: broken bones, shallow politics, ever shifting tears. I’m no longer lost. I’ve been empowered. Anorexia has not beaten me.

The masculine metaphor of “beating” is fruitless when the coroner examines my body. But I am no longer living dead. I’ve broken free from the constraints of heterosexual monogamy. I love myself. I make love to myself. My fat undulations are a mark and naming of my prowess as a trans, fat, disabled man.

Indeed, I’m not quite human. I am difficult. The difficulty of articulating my position comes, I think, from times of repression and depression. Admittedly, I’ve learnt to let go by osmosis, like an octopus whose slinky legs are cut off by a razor. I’ve bled and bled and bled, splattered against walls and ocean floors, colonies and epistemicities…I’m not quite human.

I blend academic and technical language with unintelligibilities, such as “epistemicities”. The result, I feel, is abjection, grotesque, convoluted, messy assemblages…Difficulty is articulated by my already difficult language, diction, and prose. I’ve felt shame because of my writing. Maybe I’m too repetitive. Maybe I belong somewhere else. And belonging, as discussed today, is born of hard times.

Part II

Hard times are difficult. The locutions that come out of my mouth are mired in shame. Shame and shaming are two distinct processes that sustain difficulty. Locutions tie in with difficulty when they become utterances, named. With that in mind, guilt accompanies shame and shaming. This complex of emotions speaks to the politicisation of emotions. Difficulty can be conceptualised as the locutions that are not quite there in the present. This affective disjuncture is layered by emotions, feelings, and the messy. Mess is difficult to deal with because it is about locutions, utterances, speech acts, and namings according to spatio-temporal mappings and coordinates. Locutions can be hard. They are limited.

Part III

With my blood on paper, in print and online, I try to use laypeople terms to get my point across, convey meaning. The unintelligibility of my writing reflects histories of repression, where I do not have a voice and become voiceless, unheard. Yeah I’m abject, I’m fat, I’m disabled, I’m nonbinary. I’m something else, old, Arab, ugly. I’m part of a project with pieces around metamorphosis. Sometimes I can be a beautiful butterfly, and many times I reach that point of freedom. The liberation that I purport is actually embodied and felt by my very workings, critical intersectionalities that inform me and my vision of the world and a better life. Better life is not marked by pinkwashing, inclusion, “diversity”, and other apparently trenchant modes of expression. It is in life and death that I come to the fore as a vitality awaiting dissemination and insemination. I am a flower.

Flaunting My Flaws
By: Geoff Burke

Arguing my cause
Like bleeding wounds wrapped in tight gauze

I know everything that is wrong
I even gel it into a song

Then tragically I take the turn
All possibilities will now be burned

I accept my flaws for all to see
Brandishing a defense that allows me to flee
From the brooding gloom of responsibility

No need to listen or comprehend
Always amounting to the same end

At least I was able to hold my head high
Accusations I just deny

My excuse is simple and fun
I know my faults then point the gun

So have no fear
In guilt’s direction don’t steer
and let all the others go shed a tear

The Storm
By: Marina Burke

The jaws of my flaws
keep eating me away,
bit by bit.
I never quit.

The tail of mistakes
when I fail
is dragging along the way.
Is it really that seen?
I doubt it, it is just your dream.

I am awake –
even when I break,
I am able to survive.
As you can see I am still alive.

I channel all my imperfections
into my resurrections.

Like a Phoenix,
I am burnt and reborn,
piercing sunray
through the curtains
of my storm.

The Room

By A. Das Sarkar

For the room with many doors, windows served no purpose. It was an open invitation laid bare – enter and exit me as you wish. And, so, many did.

They left behind only the echoes of their footsteps, and the halting stutter of the shuttering wooden doors. A word, a plea…stay…like a wisp of smoke, a fragment of the guest’s imagination, before the doors shut behind them once again. Leaving the room alone in the dark.

Light gave up trying to enter the room, unable to find the windows. It tried tracing along the hardened walls, caressing the impenetrable surface for a hint of a crack. It found none.

It glimpsed in for a while, when a guest opened the door, curious to converse with the room. But the light could never stay long. And it was never invited in. For the room was occupied with excitedly greeting its new guests, or grieving its next goodbye.

Stay, the room almost spoke once, with its last farewell. But the shutting of the door cut off its tongue.

Mute, it went back to the familiar darkness, whose thoughts it could read, while the laughing light searched for a window in the room with only doors. And the darkness trapped inside.

I resent you, the darkness told the room one day, unable to contain its rage.

Why? asked the room. Have I not been good company? Have I not kept you for all these years?

I cannot contain all the ghosts of your parted guests, you haven’t room enough to hold what I have become, the darkness replied.

I see no ghosts, the room challenged.

I hide them well, reminded the darkness.

To which the room had no reply.

Unable to hold the silence of the room, and its infinite ghosts, the darkness succumbed to the unbearable weight. It collapsed through the many doors. It seeped from the walls as it carved cracks along the bones of the room.

The room wailed, as its bones broke, as its skin tore, as the darkness bled from its every pore, stretched, bent and spent beyond its limits. The room crumbled to its knees, begging and pleading for the darkness to go back to their familiar past. It made empty promises to the darkness – more room to hide its unseen ghosts.

But the darkness couldn’t hear the wailing of the room, so caught up it was in its first conversation with the curious light waiting on the other side. They stood across from one another, staring each other in the eye.

I am you? whispered the darkness to the light, unsure, afraid, yet brave.

I am you, smiled the light.

I cannot keep you both in me, cried the broken, hollowed, room, It’s impossible, I can’t, I can’t….

I cannot be kept, reminded the light, I am just passing by.

If I can’t keep you with me, what will I have? the room sobbed.

The darkness gently stroked the crumpled heaving heap of a room, You cannot carry me in your bones; there are too many cracks. You can’t weave me into your skin; there are too many tears. You cannot hold me in your pores; there are too many holes. With that, the darkness turned to embrace the light.

The room watched the darkness disappear out of sight as the light swallowed it whole in one gulp. The room wept for the loss of its old familiar friend, finally crying out the word it could never before speak out loud, bared naked by its pain, Stay…please, stay….

Only one of us can be real, and for today, let it be me. With that, the light found every crack, every tear, every hole, adorning the room, and as it threaded through each crevice, it lifted the room from the rubble of its own making, at every new pass.

Until the room stood once again, on its shaky, mending legs, clothed in its new attire. Its broken wooden doors lay scattered like history, buried into the ground. Leaving in their place, only wide-open windows, all around. An open invitation laid bare – see me, if you dare.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A Done Deal 

By Chris Kerr

Today,
the chain stops rattling,

locks released,
unshackling

bags to pack,
finish wrapping

I walk the beach,
water’s lapping,

cools my feet,
enchanting.

Ghosts have fled,
done haunting,

I am free, so is she.