Posts filed under 'LGBTQI+'

The Feral Tenderness of the Margins: On Camila Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls

Bad Girls isn’t an optimistic perspective on travestis’ life but a mirror of the grotesque that we are forced to see and feel.

Bad Girls by Camila Sosa Villada, translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude, Other Press, 2022

The night belongs to the marginalized, the outcast, the exile. It is here, amidst the shadows, that Camila Sosa Villada unveils the world of the travestis of the small Argentinian city of Córdoba. The daily tragedies encoded on the bodies of her companions are the backbone of her novel Bad Girls, but so too are moments—brief as a stab—brimming with beauty in which life on the margins does not seem impossible after all.

The English translation of the Spanish original, undertaken by Kit Maude, begins with a semantic manifesto by the author on the reappropriation of the word “travesti,” a Spanish slur used in the nineties to describe people who were assigned male at birth but develop a feminine gender identity. Sosa Villada, who herself identifies that way, rejects the idea of sanitizing her existence and that of her companions with other categories such as “trans women” or “transsexuals.” On the contrary: “I reclaim the stonings and spittings, I reclaim the scorn,” she declares emphatically. To identify herself in other terms would mean to erase her life and all the baggage of living in a society capable of using violence to reassure cisheteronormativity.

Bad Girls is an autofictional story, and the author serves as our narrator, recounting the time in her twenties during which she had to do sex work to survive. The novel begins one cold night with a caravan of travestis looking for customers in Sarmiento Park when an extraordinary incident occurs: Auntie Encarna—their 178-year-old leader—saves an abandoned child from a certain death in a ditch, “like a veterinary midwife shoving her hands into a mare to pull out a foal.” The child’s symbolic birthing has a visceral impact, as are most of the author’s descriptions in the novel. Her style can be described as what the Spanish author Ramón del Valle-Inclán called esperpento (roughly equivalent to “grotesque”), which is a literary technique used to examine the systematic deformation of reality by accentuating its most atrocious attributes. Sosa Villada’s prose constantly takes us to the limits and highlights the crudest details: “To thank her, he showed the dead snake that dangled from his knees,” is how she describes an elderly man seducing a prostitute. “She reached out for it and weighed it up like an artisanal salami at a country fair.”

After saving the child, Auntie Encarna decides to keep him despite opposition of the group. It is a transgression to the most conservative values engrained in Latin American (and indeed, most Occidental) societies: the rupture of the traditional family as the chosen family of travestis become the caretakers for Twinkle in Her Eye and endure the hatred of a neighborhood willing to terrorize a loving collective to defend their idea of how society should be organized.

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Because Reading (Subtitles) Is What? Fundamental!

RuPaul’s Drag Race demands translation sensitive to global and local queer cultures.

In the twelve years since RuPaul’s Drag Race first premiered on the relatively unknown LGBTQIA+ cable channel Logo TV, the Emmy award-winning series has gained an immense global following and become one of the defining shows of our age. The reality TV show, which boasts thirteen seasons (along with six All Stars series), follows drag queens competing in a range of performance-based challenges to be crowned “America’s Next Drag Superstar.” More recently, the race has expanded overseas, with Spain becoming the latest in a series of international spinoffs, joining Thailand, the UK, Canada, Holland, and Australia/New Zealand. In its evolution from a niche talent show for US drag performers to a global cultural phenomenon, Drag Race has propelled a queer subculture from the margins to the mainstream and put drag performance in the international spotlight. In the journey to globalize the show, translation has played a key role in giving drag and LGBTQIA+ culture visibility around the world.

It is of course thanks to the subtitling and dubbing of Drag Race into multiple languages that the US original achieved global success and found audiences worldwide. For translators, capturing the nuances of the show is no small feat. Much of its entertainment relies on verbal and cultural humour, each episode packed with English-based puns, double-entendres, and innuendos that can be hard to translate. Similarly, the dialogue showcases slang terms, neologisms, and catchphrases that are deeply rooted in the drag and LGBTQIA+ culture of the US. Take “mothertuckin’,” for example. In drag culture, tucking, used here to rhyme with a certain English swearword, refers to a taping practice used by drag queens to make their genital anatomy appear more feminine. Recreating this kind of wordplay poses a challenge for translators working in a context with a less developed drag culture and associated vocabulary.

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Selfhood is a Queer Fiction: On The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei

Writing the self into being from a hodgepodge of cultural texts—that is what’s elemental to queer life

The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei, translated from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich, Columbia University Press, 2021

Dwelling on a female classmate’s romantic advances in her youth, and belatedly cognisant of her learned aversion towards all forms of intimacy, the thirty-year-old Momo realises the incongruence of the one self-guided decision she had made in her life—to become a dermal care technician: “She could just as easily have chosen a more solitary profession, like a novelist. Why did she have to choose a job reliant on intimacy?” It is the year 2100 and humanity, terrified of the ultraviolet rays seeping through the depleted ozone layer, has evacuated from land en masse to settle on the seabed. Amidst the residual trauma of the sun’s lethal rays, the dermal care trade booms and Momo climbs the profession steadily, eventually becoming the owner of Salon Canary and something of a celebrity in T City. As Momo spends her days massaging her wealthy clients with M skin—a technology that gives her access to their private lives—what she cannot shake off is the feeling that “there was at least one layer of membrane between her and the world.”

In The Membranes, Chi Ta-wei, renowned Taiwanese novelist (and past Asymptote contributor), tackles a central problem of existentialism: how do we account for the estrangement between ourselves and the world? The thrilling sci-fi classic (originally published in 1995) then proceeds to compellingly insist on exploring the question’s social dimensions, getting under the skin of its queer, inscrutable protagonist. A slim, intelligent novella that ambitiously projects a militarised and corporate new world order in the rubble of environmental collapse, Chi’s brand of world-building is equally invested in envisioning new global formations as it is in attesting to emerging sexual subjectivities. It bristles with the emancipatory energy that characterises the novels coming out of post-martial-law Taiwan. Read together with works such as Chu T’ien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man or Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile and Last Words from Montmartre, English readers can now appreciate a fuller scope of the queer efflorescence unleashed in the experimental fiction of Taiwan’s nineties and the internal heterogeneity of its cultural moment. Ari Larissa Heinrich’s translation of Chi’s award-winning work comes a quarter of a century after its Chinese publication, but contemporary readers will relish going back to the future in a work that ventriloquises our present, its conjectures at once anachronistic and prophetic. READ MORE…

Silencing Tales for Tolerance in Hungary: Wonderland Belongs to Everyone

Rather than privileging a didactic tone, these stories continue a counter-cultural tradition of social critique and championing human rights.

Meseország mindenkié (Wonderland Belongs to Everyone) is a Hungarian collection of classic fairy tales, adapted and retold with characters from minority or marginalised groups. Yet since its release in September, it has caused astonishing controversy and rebuke from far-right politicians, including MP Dóra Dúró literally destructing a copy. Such opposition is propagating intolerance and homophobia—the antithesis of the book’s inclusive and accepting values. Despite such an alarming reaction, the publisher sold out of its first print run. But the threat of censorship still looms large. In this essay, Jozefina Komporaly explores the political circumstances that have created such hostility, as well as the book’s valuable contribution to Hungarian children’s literature. 

The publication of a new volume of tales for children is usually exciting news for early readers and their families, for anyone young at heart, and for those following trends in children’s literature. It is also likely to be relevant to schools and nurseries, but it is rarely breaking news. If discussed in the media at all, it tends to belong to the realm of children’s programmes or cultural platforms. In recent weeks, however, this rule of thumb has been overturned in Hungary, where the subject of unconventional books addressed to young readers has sparked not only heated debates, but deplorable reactions from politicians and public figures.

The first time I heard about these incidents, in September 2020, was via a Facebook post alerting me to Hungarian MP Dóra Dúró tearing up the children’s book Meseország mindenkié (Wonderland Belongs to Everyone) and literally putting it through the shredder. She allegedly could not bear to see wonderland turn into a land of “the aberrant.” Dúró is a member of Mi Hazánk Mozgalom (Our Homeland Movement), a far-right satellite party of the ruling Fidesz, and news of her intervention came from her own social media presence when she boasted about destroying the book during an online press conference. According to her, “homosexual princes are not part of Hungarian culture,” and her aim was to lash out against “homosexual propaganda” that she saw as an attack against the “healthy development of children and against Hungarian culture.” The politician ended her Facebook post, hastily removed in the wake of the emergent scandal, with the invitation “to lay the foundations of the nation’s future within the context Hungarian families.” In doing so, she is perpetuating conservative notions about what constitutes a family and explicitly problematizing the relationship between nationality, patriotism, and sexual orientation.

Following Dúró’s incitement, Hungarian mass media and social platforms went into overdrive to discuss the matter, and an unprecedented number of high profile public figures took a stance against the book. Those who spoke out included numerous politicians, but also specialists in the humanities and the social sciences, such as eminent psychologist, psychiatrist, and academic Emőke Bagdy. Bagdy generated further shock waves when he also firmly condemned the publication, thus endorsing Dúró’s act. Emboldened by such support, this wave of rudimentary censorship continued with party activists boycotting public readings, displaying defamatory posters at bookshops selling the title, and with Dúró literally ripping apart another children’s book. Vagánybagoly és a harmadik Á, avagy mindenki lehet más (Cool Owl and the Third A, or Everybody Is Entitled to be Different) was published in 2019, but it ended up on the receiving end of Dúró’s rage simply because its author, Zsófia Bán, had previously delivered a speech at the opening of Budapest Pride. Judging by the nature of such interventions, it is probable that most commentators haven’t actually read either of these books. Their reactions were simply spurred by a fear of anything new, paired with ignorance and intolerance that is deeply engrained in Hungarian society and further exacerbated by the current regime in power. Homophobia, sanctioned by high-ranking politicians such as the current Speaker of the National Assembly, is on an alarming rise in present-day Hungary, and being associated with the LGBTQ+ cause is seemingly sufficient grounds for anyone to find themselves in the firing line of the so-called ‘morality police.’ In response to the controversy surrounding the book, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán notoriously declared that Hungary is tolerant to homosexuality, but “there is a red line that cannot be crossed: leave our children alone.” READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Taiwan, Serbia, and El Salvador!

This week our writers bring you the latest literary news from Taiwan, Serbia, and El Salvador! In Taiwan, renowned writer Huang Chun-ming has brought out his latest novel and Chinese novelist Yan Lianke’s new essay compilation, Hers, has just been published. In Serbia, the annual Shakespeare festival, Šekspir Festival, has begun, and the Reading Balkans 2021 programme has launched in collaboration between Goga Publishing House, PEN Centre, and others. In El Salvador, a new blog run by Nelson Alonson, Una Verdad Sin Alfabeto, and publishing house Editorial Kalina have run online debates about Salvadoran writing and diaspora literature. Read on to find out more! 

Vivian Szu-Chin Chih, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Taiwan

The autumn equinox has brought drizzling rain to cool Taiwan down from the previous summer heat. During the final quarter of 2020, while hoping our global readers will all stay safe and healthy, several literary and movie events are taking place in Taiwan. With online screenings and live discussions being streamed, it might be the best time for an easy access to Taiwan’s recent cultural events, no mater where you are.

The renowned Taiwanese novelist and playwright, Huang Chun-ming’s (黃春明, 1935-) latest novel (Hsiu-Chin, the Girl who Always Smiles,《秀琴,這個愛笑的女孩》) was just published by Unitas Magazine’s publishing house. The story centers around a village girl from northeastern Taiwan entering the film industry accidentally in the 1960s, when Taiwanese-language films were at their peak. Huang’s novella was featured in our past issue, with the translator Howard Goldblatt’s moving account of his long-term friendship with Huang. At the same time, the Chinese novelist Yan Lianke’s (閻連科, 1958-) essay compilation, Hers (Tamen,《她們》), was recently published by Rye Field Publishing Company in Taiwan, unprecedentedly featuring stories of women the novelist encountered, inside and outside of his own family. Perhaps most unorthodox is the publication from Taiwan Tongzhi (LGBTQ+) Hotline Association of their eight-year project that interviewed seventeen lesbians over fifty-five years old in Taiwan, to be published by Locus Publishing Company in October. This groundbreaking book on the life experiences of “lao-la” (「老拉」) in Taiwan, literally meaning old lesbians, is not only about their personal memories and struggles of being lesbians in the conservative Taiwanese society before the 1990s, but also a literary historical review of Taiwan’s gender equality and LGBTQ+ movements since the 1950s.

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Of Loneliness and Disillusion: Abdellah Taïa’s A Country for Dying

While each narrative voice is unique, they all share a sense of loss. [The novel] draws its strength from its haunting air of solitude.

A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, Seven Stories, 2020

A Country for Dying is more about atmosphere than plot. It is a brief, taut work that digs deep into the margins of society to demonstrate the many ways in which colonialism pollutes our notions of love and self. Over the course of three parts and six chapters, Abdellah Taïa introduces us to the inner lives of four immigrants in Paris, as they contend with their present realities, the pasts they are trying to flee, and the dreams they still hope to indulge.

Their stories read like monologues, and talk toward each other more than they ever intersect. In this they mimic the characters, who are largely confined to their individual apartments; even the city that holds them all is, in a way, isolating—a refuge that can never quite be home (as a Moroccan living in Paris, Taïa himself writes from a place of exile). Thus, while each narrative voice is unique, they all share a sense of loss. A Country for Dying draws its strength from its haunting air of solitude.

If there’s anything like a connective tissue between the stories, it is Zahira: a forty-year-old Moroccan sex worker who has moved to Paris to escape the trauma of her father’s suicide when she was a girl. She struggles with the guilt of having “abandoned” him when he fell ill and was confined to the second floor of their house. “I didn’t think my father was going to die,” she reflects, “[b]ut I accepted, just like everyone else, that I wouldn’t see him again . . . The weight of his heavy footsteps echoes in my ear.” Grief-stricken, Zahira struggles to rewrite his story and heal her pain. Much of the chapter devoted to it is written in the second person as she addresses her father directly, updating him on his family’s lives after his death; in practice, however, it feels like she is addressing the reader, telling us her story on her own terms, to great emotional effect.

There is a direct through line between Zahira’s trauma and her instinct to take care of Mojtaba, a gay Iranian exile, when she finds him collapsed on the street. Looking after him over Ramadan helps her cope with her father’s death: “He was also tender, sweet, melancholic. That was obvious immediately. Something in him was similar to me, familiar.” For a moment, the quiet intimacy that forms between them brings them the peace they so badly deserve. Their bond never ceases to feel fragile, though, and it is clear that it will not last. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Brazil, Central America, and Sweden!

This week our writers report on a stage adaption of Clarice Lispector in New York, new publications in Guatemala and El Salvador, and the Nobel Prize for Literature ceremony in Sweden. Read on to find out more!

Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil

December has already been a notable month for Brazilian literature across the globe, with Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart making its onstage (off-off-Broadway) debut in New York City. Lispector’s first novel takes on a stream-of-consciousness narration as it traces the life of its protagonist, Joana, from her middle-class childhood through an unhappy marriage—never afraid to delve into her deepest, innermost thoughts. Under the direction of Ildiko Nemeth at The New Stage Theatre Company, the stage adaptation places the brilliant language of Alison Entrekin’s 2012 translation in the hands of a highly memorable cast, supported by video projections and costume designs that are at once subtle and revealing. BroadwayWorld critic Derek McCracken praises the show’s “poetic, organic and otherworldly feel . . . [it] conjures up the mood and elements of a love story that got ghosted.” If you find yourself in New York, Near to the Wild Heart will be playing at the New Stage Performance Space until January 18, 2020—don’t miss out!

While Entrekin’s words have been making their way onto the mainstage, the well-known Australian translator has been busy sharing her latest endeavor: a new English-language translation of the classic, Grande Sertão: Veredas. Entrekin participated in the 11th International Connections Itaú Cultural event, held from December 3-4, 2019 in São Paulo, Brazil, where she delivered the last installment of a three-part translation workshop. Dozens of other writers, academics and critics—including American translator Flora Thomson-DeVeaux, Japanese translator Chika Takeda, and French translator and editor Paula Anacaona—engaged in dialogue on the role of Brazilian literature and cinema around the globe. Also among the topics discussed was the state of Brazilian and Portuguese studies at higher education institutions, as many universities shift departmental focus from national to transnational literatures. Each of the panels was recorded, and the complete series can be accessed for free online, courtesy of Itaú Cultural. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Literature seeks to rectify, repair, and pave new ground in this week's dispatches.

As James Baldwin said; “It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.” This week, our editors are reaffirming the ability of literature to overcome discrimination and unite people with a shared passion through words. In Madrid, the Woolf Pack open mic night has been celebrating womxn and LGBTQI+ writers, whilst in the Czech Republic, a workshop sparked lively discussion on modern Tibetan literature. Read on to find out more!

Paloma Reaño Hurtado, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Madrid

The Woolf Pack is an open mic night celebrated since September 2018 at Desperate Literature, a trilingual bookstore in the centre of Madrid. Everyone is invited to attend, but the mic is exclusively open to womxn (cis and trans) and LGBTQI+ identifying folk. The event echoes a similar initiative called Self-Ish, launched in Paris for the first time in May 2016.

Aiming to be a tribute to the womxn and queer writers who have overcome all kinds of obstacles to make their literature, The Woolf Pack is a homage to womxn and LGBT idols from different times and latitudes—hence the name of the event. It is, in sum, a sort of anti-macho literature night; each participant can share their own or any other author’s text, as long as it is another female/trans/nonbinary author. READ MORE…