On Pain and the Feminine Divine

Writing against silence

I am starting this monthly newsletter because connecting thoughtfully and sharing actual ideas (as opposed to cat photos and memes, which I also love) with my community feels increasingly urgent to me. We have entered into 2023 witnessing twin deaths: social media as we know it, and verifiable information as AI reshapes our algorithms (and therefore our epistemologies for, well, everything). I am combatting my own cultural and intellectual isolation by reaching out to you personally this way. I chose Substack because of the paralyzing effects of editorial gatekeeping and the pressure of professionalization on writers. I am no longer interested in the game of  ‘finding a venue’ that may or may not value, culturally or monetarily, the work of sick and disabled queer brown femmes. Digital spaces, for all of their troubles, have eradicated the need to keep waiting for an invitation. I have a lot to share, and I’m honored if you accept my offer to share it with you. I do not take it personally if it’s not for you—unsubscribe at your convenience! I am also writing in hopes that you will write back, talk to me, and share your view of the world.

I had a dramatic year of change and transition in 2022. After over a decade as a literary academic, I stepped away from public education and began working at the intersection of talent management and tech. I published my chapbook, The Relativity of Living Well, and realized that I am, among other things, writing in the tradition of poetic memoir and documentary poetry. I started teaching online workshops called CripLit4Spoonies on the theory and poetics of disability and chronic illness for sick and disabled adults. I finished Pain Baby, my first full manuscript of poetry after which this newsletter is named, and sent it out to presses (cross your fingers!). I went on a national and European press and book tour for Chelsea Manning’s ReadMe.txt as her manager. In the process, I learned the workings of book contracts, audiobook production, publicity, talk shows, photo shoots, media training, and big press interviews. I became a fellow in Shira Erlichman’s fantastic poetry program, In Surreal Life. (Poets, ask me about this!)

In my personal life, I came into an entirely new chapter in my explorations of solo queer polyamory in my mid-30’s. I became a new hockey fan by way of Letterkenny, some key friendships, and revolutionary Punjabi play-by-play sports announcer Harnarayan Singh. I have grown obsessed with the consequences of machine learning. I started doing jigsaws and crossword puzzles. I started writing seriously about television, to my old graduate mentor's delight. This year, I may be starting a video poetry podcast with a poet I deeply admire (stay tuned), learning how to play guitar, taking life drawing classes, and learning how to knit and sew. If I’m lucky, I might even quit smoking! I am excited to share these myriad and ambitious journeys with you and hope that you will, in whatever way suits you, share yours with me.

For this first issue of the newsletter, I share some personal news, cool things my friends are doing, and my thoughts about Tanaïs’ memoir, In Sensorium: Notes For My People, and the Netflix show Baby. Enjoy! May the new year, at the very least, not be quite as much of a shitshow as the last.

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Personal News

I am proudly serving as the special guest editor for Issue no. 29 of No, Dear, a poetry magazine featuring New York City poets, the theme for which is CHRONIC. Please submit! Send 1-3 pages as a .pdf or .docx to nodearmagazine@gmail.com. The deadline is February 15! 

I spoke with Rachel Krantz, author of Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy, on her excellent podcast Help Existing, about disability and chronic illness on the episode “Help Seeing Invisible Illness.” Check it out! 

My poem “Social Distance Theory” from The Relativity of Living Well will be featured as Poem-of-the-Week on Split This Rock on January 20! Stay tuned! 

SAVE THE DATE: Fellow sick and disabled poet and writer Leigh Sugar is organizing an online reading series featuring disabled poets writing in the ongoing pandemic on January 26, 8:00 PM - 9:30 PM. More details are forthcoming on IG. 

Cool Things My Friends Are Doing

My dear and wildly talented friend Shamik Bilgi, Chicago-based beatboxer, producer, sound artist, and DJ known best for his albums Ci3 and Channeling India just dropped a new remix of PACHCHE GILI, a rework of a Kannada tune from 2003, and this shit is fire. Check it!  

If you attended the book launch for The Relativity of Living Well, you may remember the gorgeous opening performance from singer-songwriter Michelle Rescigno. She is performing her work at Arlene’s Grocery in New York on January 6, and releasing her new single, “Get in Tune.” Get your tickets now! 

My friend and roommate, the talented drummer for Bellows and co-host of anime podcast The Human Instrumentality Podcast, Ian Cory, without whom this Substack would not have ever come to fruition, has his own Substack in which he documents doing drum covers of every single song he’s ever liked on Spotify. (It’s objectively insane and brilliant.) He writes analyses and musings on the songs themselves and his experience growing through them, among other things. Check out his Substack, Lamniformes Cuneiform. 

Tanaïs’ In Sensorium

Key words: feminism, divine feminine, memoir, queer, brown, poly, femme, decolonization
Content Warnings: white-supremacist capitalist hetero-patriarchy, Partition, genocide, Bangladesh Liberation War, rape

In reading In Sensorium, I imagined what it must feel like to be white. Unlike most books, it was written with the likes of me in mind. It does not culturally translate itself to prioritize the needs of a dominant reader. Winner of the 2022 Kirkus non-fiction prize, its author, Tanaïs, is a queer, brown, polyamorous, non-binary, femme, diasporic Bangladeshi and Brooklyn-based writer whose presence in my mindscape has caused everything from confusion, anger, pride, jealousy, admiration, and ultimately, profound gratitude and near-tearful celebration. (As I co-wrote with Yelizaveta Shapiro in an early academic article about Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal, when there is only one figure available to represent you, you can’t help but put unwarranted pressure on that figure to be everything you need them to be. Ultimately, you realize, they owe you nothing, and its up to you to make yourself visible. But I digress.) When I first encountered Tanaïs, they were the only other one of ‘us’ I knew of. I had heard of no other people who shared so many of my identities. Years later, there are more and more of us—queer, black and brown, accomplished, artistic, resistant to respectability, and embracing of our own sexualities on our own terms—showing the world who we are. Tanaïs is a pioneer in this regard, but has never subscribed to ideas of being ‘the first and only.’ This is a shared thread between In Sensorium and Tanaïs debut novel Bright Lines, which features queer Muslim Bangladeshi teens in Brooklyn in the early 2000’s: no matter how alone we might feel, we are always one of many, living as the descendants of the many who came before us. 

In Sensorium is a multi-modal memoir on the origins of the divine feminine in South Asia, and by extension, of Tanaïs’ selfhood. The book is organized in sections titled and described by the perfumes that Tanaïs produced for her fragrance line. “Notes” in “Notes For My People” refers both to the extraordinary research, analysis, personal narrative, and corrective calls to arms that the sections contain as much as to the “notes” of fragrances. Base Notes, Heart Notes, and Head Notes, the three sections of the book, show us how the fullness of a fragrance, with all of its power to assert identity, trigger memory, and inspire attraction, is constructed. Each ingredient is traced back to its geographical root and history, showing the way imperialism and colonialism continue to exist not only in the colonization of our bodies, but in the roots and routes of all the materials of our living. For example, they write about sandalwood: “It’s curious how sandalwood trees are parasites. They need host trees like whistling pines and acacias to draw nutrients and water from their roots. Just as royalty inflicted their rule upon the people, without their hosts, sandalwood would never survive.” These ingredients are as subject to reification and erasure as we are.

Like a fragrance, the book’s structure cannot be reduced to anything linear. The sections bleed in and out of one another in a heady spell that invite us into multiple, overlapping colonial and postcolonial histories, meditations on perfume, explorations of understanding rape, recovery, and survival, and discussions of non-monogamy and true love. Tanaïs knows exactly what they’re doing with this structure. No history or life is sequential, nor is any expression of lived experience written in clear linear progression true to the multidimensionality of sensory experience and memory. Implicitly, the prismatic structure—a sensorium—asks us to wise up. That shit, as Tanaïs makes very clear, is the stuff of colonial epistemologies that we must dismantle. Critique is not enough. We need embodiment, manifestation, and praxis. I venture to say that In Sensorium achieves this precisely through its rhizomatic spellwork. 

The book goes to dangerous places. It opens with a section addressed to an unnamed Indian lover, a man who induces in Tanaïs wild desire and longing, but a line of self-questioning about desi diasporic Indocentrism and the unacknowledged dismissal and invisibility of Muslims, Bangladeshis, and people of lower caste—Black and Dalit—in our communities. The roots of these hierarchies and wounds are ancient, and Tanaïs traces them as far back as they can. They weave these histories together with the root and power of ingredients in her fragrances, experiences in the literary world in New York, the haunting of Partition, the ethnonationalism of Modi, and the way even our deepest beloveds can cause harm due to these old cleavings between peoples. Throughout, we learn about Tanaïs’ journey building a syncretic spiritual system that threads Hinduism and Islam together to suit the needs of a brown femme life lived in a Christian white world in which people like us are not taught our own histories or faiths, sometimes at all, let alone in their own contexts. 

No Bangladeshi femme could undertake this kind of exploration without contending with the painful and recent history of the birth of Bangladesh via genocide in 1971, particularly as it relates to the prevalence of rape in the Bangladeshi collective consciousness. In the Liberation War, the Pakistani army adopted rape as a deliberate military tactic and raped between 200,000 and 400,000 Bangladeshi women. This is the conflict that prompted the codification of rape as a tactic, war crime, and human rights violation with the United Nations. The women who survived rape were celebrated as birangana, or war heroines, but were otherwise discarded by newly liberated Bangladeshi society, and the children born of the atrocities were denied citizenship to the new nation. Many of the more powerful characters in this conflict are still alive and in positions of power, making people weary in mixed desi environments about whose family members may have the blood of another’s their hands. My own obsession with the realities and specters of rape come directly from my understanding of the Bangladeshi Liberation War, in tandem with personal experiences of assault growing up brown and femme (read: dispensable) in Italy and the United States. Writing about such things is risky. It makes people uncomfortable, ruffles too many feathers. Tanaïs does not shy away. 

Tanaïs has written a life-work, a magnum opus belonging to the same feminist re-historicizing and decolonizing traditions as Gloria Anzaldùa in Borderlands/ La Frontera and her concept of writing autohistoria-teoría, Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother and the notion of fabulation, Gaiutra Bahadur in Coolie Woman in its imagining of Indian womens’ passage to the Caribbean for indentured work, and Shailja Patel’s similar tracings of Indian women in Kenya in Migritude. Tanaïs layers on the the additional dimension of an in-depth tracing how these histories knit themselves into her psychosexual development, her understanding of her own desirability to herself and in the world, and how it affects her relationships with friends and lovers. (Melissa Febos’ excellent exploration of psychosexual development under patriarchy, Girlhood, features multiple citations from interviews with Tanaïs about queer-of-color coming-of-age and femme embodiment.) They dig for the stories of the women these histories buried. The “bad women” upon whose bodies patriarchy codified its expectations across the world. The femme deities written out of power by patriarchal revisionism. Tanaïs reminds us: “Since the time of the ancients, everyone has been obsessed with the deviant femme, the bad woman—the prostitute. As a person to desire, possess, scorn, and punish.” They think about how living as their descendents in white supremacist America renders us simultaneously hypervisible and invisible, objectified, dismissed, and regarded with equal suspicion and lust. 

In Sensorium is a gift of a lifeworld offered as fundamental reference and call to both arms and greater gentleness. By resisting institutional pressures to provide linear synthesis, it offers a constellation of syncretic and almost synesthetic understandings of a reality both gorgeous and violent, answering Audre Lorde’s call to engage with the erotic, the divine feminine. They write, “Channeling the erotic is a site of liberation for all femmes who’ve been hypersexualized, criminalized, and brutalized, extracted for their nurturing and wisdom, and discarded by the patriarchy. We have spent our lives unlearning the fear of our sexuality and erotic power. Our Black and Bangla sisterhood is bound in each other’s liberation, a living practice of revolutionary Black feminist texts we have returned to over and over again in the last twenty years.” For any artist of color, this is a deeply fortifying read that does vital decolonizing work. 

However, the graciousness it offers went unrecognized by the publishing industry. Tanaïs writes about their experience at length in their Substack post, “On Writing Beyond Dominance.” Despite prize-winning acclaim, In Sensorium will not be coming out in paperback. Once the hardcover copies are sold, the book will go out of print. (The audiobook, however, lives forever.) I’m angered but unsurprised by the insult that Tanaïs has had to bear. The message is the same one black and brown femmes receive about our work and our personhood all the time: our work is simply too big, too complex, too multimodal, and too ambitious—we are unmarketable. To “succeed” as writers, we must aspire to be published by the same big five publishing houses that apply bottom-line-driven publicity models that demand that we package our work into something digestible, clear, but nonetheless “authentic” (or what reads as such to those who know nothing about us). It’s a dizzying paradox that acts to keep our stories repressed. As Arundhati Roy says, “There is no such thing as the ‘voiceless,’ only the deliberately silenced and the preferably unheard.” I cannot imagine reading this book without sharing in the identities it explores, but I recommend it to everyone for the sake of edification and personal decolonizing work. 

My black, brown, and Asian femme fam, buy this book, read it (or listen to it read by Tanaïs themself), feel it, book club it, write about it, teach it, share it with your friends, keep it circulating. Show ‘em we know how to listen to and take care of our own. NOLITE TE BASTARDES CARBORUNDORUM!

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Netflix’s Baby

Key Words: gender, patriarchy, coming-of-age, sexual norms, Italy, realism 

Content Warnings: sex trafficking, sexual exploitation of minors, small spoilers

One does not write a poetic memoir about trauma, disability, and queer life called Pain Baby (and name their Substack after it) without an ongoing interest in representations of teen girl psycho-sexual development, its exploitation, and the consequences. The sexualization of femme youth was absolutely ubiquitous in Rome where I grew up in the 90s and 2000s, and the city remains a place where the industries of weight-loss culture, cosmetic plastic surgery, and all manner of other hyper-patriarchal nonsense dominate. Despite major strides in awareness-raising about unhealthy standards and practices, the pressure on girls and women to align with unrealistic gender expectations is acute. Girls learn the power and danger of holding sexual interest for older men early and fast. The intoxication of that power is a crucial non-quantifiable element in the murky discourse around minors’ capacity to consent—an important conversation that nonetheless distracts from collective questioning of how and why patriarchal culture is so unabashedly obsessed with sexualizing young girls, and when it’s going to cut it the fuck out. (Personally, I think the hottest possible thing is the self-knowledge and confidence of adult femmes who wear and practice their sexuality however the hell they want to, and largely for themselves.) 

You may remember, likely with a warranted guffaw, the embarrassment of Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi’s “bunga-bunga” parties at which many very young women performed, and at which he illegally slept with seventeen-year-old former nightclub dancer (let that sink in for a second), Karima El Mahroug. Though prostitution is not illegal in Italy—sex work is work—sex with minors is, and there are few to no protections for adult sex workers regardless of gender. Public discourse around the problem of sex trafficking in Italy tends to focus on the vast and horrifying abuses of the Nigerian Mafia’s sex trafficking rings in southern Italy and the struggles of lower-income immigrant populations generally, rather than on the prevalence of rich, well-connected young women and their ‘consensual’ relationships with older men. We pretend as if they don’t happen.

I went to a private international American Catholic prep school in Italy (yes, I know how insane that sounds, and it was) where the likes of these young women were my classmates. There were always rumors about these girls. Thankfully, as a merely middle-class, brown immigrant, and chubby nerd, I never held the social capital in the high school pecking order to know them well, but the rumors reached me. That there was reason to assume that stories of teen girls featuring in pornos by their uncles or older boyfriends in these communities may be more than hearsay revealed itself in the “baby squillo” scandal of 2013-2014. Two teenage girls from the very wealthy Roman neighborhood of Parioli were discovered servicing many high-profile older men, including politicians, stripping the sheen of glamor and safety from their fancy lives. 

Baby, Netflix’s television show based on these events, returns our attention to the scandal and its implications. Equally fun and dead serious, the show faithfully explores the perspectives of the lives of disaffected youth with few meaningful avenues for self-actualization, drunk on their own sexual power. In Baby, the male gaze on these girls is prurient, but the camera’s is not. As viewers, we are never invited to see the girls, Chiara Altieri (Benedetta Porcaroli), the daughter of separated but cohabiting parents, one of whom is running for office, and Ludovica Storti (Alice Pagani), the daughter of a self-infantilizing and spendthrift single mother, as anything but that—young girls. The effect of the realist resistance to glamorization or heavy-handed critique is a slow and harsh dawning of the stakes at hand. The show treats Rome similarly; there is no fan service for Italophile tourism in the nauseating style of Roman Holiday. The beauty of the city is portrayed as a matter-of-fact part of the gilded nature of the lives it explores. They are the beautiful people of the beautiful city living the beautiful life (see: one of the greatest films of all time, Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza / The Great Beauty). It’s what makes the rot that lurks underneath so much more scandalous to discover. 

This aesthetic and tonal approach extends to the way Baby treats its characters. It’s part of the delightful crop of television shows rolling out over the last several years that puts its focus on the power of female friendship, taking femininity, femme-ness, and aspects of its manifestations seriously that have been previously denigrated (think about the snideness with which folks refer to romance novels, Lifetime Television, or soap operas). It commits to a tight and faithful attention to character complexity and a celebration of the love and loyalty that can bloom between young people embroiled in the sinister underbellies of otherwise privileged lives. Think of it as an Italian realist hybrid of Euphoria and Gossip Girl that treats its subjects with far greater seriousness than the latter and resists any of the stylizations that makes the former so lush. It plays a different game entirely while contributing to the crucial body of cultural production that takes seriously the particular eroticism between girlfriends who have no sexual connection, but who are reliant on one another, trusting of one another, and therefore more vulnerable to one another, than anyone else in the world. (Of course, as a queer viewer, I must admit that there are moments when I cannot help but hope that the girls become romantically involved, but that the show is more deeply invested in the romance of their friendship than giving queer fan service lends crucial integrity.) Though these girls are young, vulnerable, and subject to coercion and manipulation, we are always keenly aware that they are exercising their agency to make informed choices, no matter how ill-advised those choices might be. 

The boys of the show are no less complex or fascinating in how they navigate their challenges. Baby gives us an important counterpoint in the depiction of an older woman—a teacher at the high school, Colloidi—in a relationship with a teenage boy who is also her student. The unequal power relations there are the same, but the dangers and consequences are entirely different in this reversal. This is critical for an understanding of the kind of responsibility ascribed to the culture of men in particular while calling for accountability from all adults. Parallel with the real “baby squillo” affair, Baby sheds light on the role of parents in creating and maintaining the conditions in which two teen girls can engage in sex work at this level. Clients are often fathers, and their children are occasionally classmates. This leads to a shocking spiral of events in which what people know and don’t know is weaponized to cover everyone’s tracks (not unlike the dramas of the significantly more two-dimensional and villainous Cal and Nate Jacobs in Euphoria). Ludovica’s mother, Simonetta Loreti (Isabella Ferrari) cannot help but see the value in the money Ludovica brings home, given her tendency toward compulsive spending that leads her to use Ludovica’s tuition money to buy a puppy with her new, young boyfriend. Chiara’s parents barely see or understand anything about her despite claiming to continue living together for her sake (when clearly it’s about keeping up appearances of an idyllic family for her mother’s election campaign). She craves a secret life that allows her to have some kind of power of her own, and even if we don’t remotely share her privileged circumstances, somehow, we get why she is willing to risk so much for it.  

Baby does not neglect teen boys in its exploration of the consequences of these power relations. One of the most sympathetic characters on the show is Damiano Younes (Riccardo Mandolini), a working-class boy suddenly lifted into a new tax-bracket when his mother dies and he goes to live with his father, who happens to be the Lebanese ambassador to Italy. He is made fun of by his rich class mates as a “coatto,” a term used to denigrate folks who are lower income that carries implications of criminal nature, not dissimilar from the American term “hoodrat.” When we meet him, he is a small-time dealer of little consequence, but in a rapid turn of events in which he takes drastic actions to help protect Ludovica from rape, he is trapped by debt in far deeper criminal ranks. Unlike his peers, he is non-judgmental and deeply worried about Chiara when he discovers that she’s selling sex. Though he makes consequential mistakes himself, his sensitivity is stark against the attitudes of other boys on the show, whose moral compasses are not quite as complex. Brando de Santis (Mirko Trovato) copes with a corrupt and emotionally abusive father and his own repressed sexuality by becoming obscenely abusive to women, trans sex workers in particular, and blackmails Chiara when he learns of her work. His pain is treated with care as he finally finds the strength to live authentically and seek redemption, but is not entirely let off the hook for his previous abuses. Niccolò Rossi Govender (Lorenzo Zurzolo) is a horror of a boyfriend and lover who becomes sexually involved with his teacher, but recognizes the toxicity of his ways and attempts to redeem himself. These are all boys paying close attention to their male elders and learning who they do and do not want to become, ushering a kernel of hope on a show where there is otherwise little of it beyond the beauty of loving friendships and resilience. No one’s hands are clean, no one is exclusively a hero or a villain, no one has integrity, and everyone’s priorities come to the fore as the drama unfolds. It’s somewhat Shakespearean that way.

Needless to say, strong recommend.

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