Are You Brave Enough to Call the Body An Activism?
Are you strong enough to let go of your internalized ideation of gender, form, identity, and sexuality? Are you willing to become a provocation or become provoked by the pages of this book? Are you curious, do you have longing, are you ready to open yourself, to be the confidante we in my Trans by j/j hastain asks you to be?
Put aside for a moment any preconceived enculterated notions of the word ‘Trans’ because the use of that word here is different than historicized uses of it. Instead, let go and travel with this writer into the world of a ‘’third city” where fulfillment is based in / from / toward a fulfillment through fucking.
I am talking about fucking as “merge,” as entry into the space of the beloved. This place where the primordial particles of the corporeal coalesce into a relentless ritual, a making holy of bodies, deeply in tune with their own pleasures, needs, desires and fullness, regardless of the manifesting shape or form.
In we in my Trans it’s not just the bodies, or form or fucking, that give this book its energy. It’s the enactment of a spaciousness that allows for all possibilities as in, “this is the act of craving” and “that the force of you in me / is the only thing that will bring my body to an openness / that is capable of knowing / human joy.”
This book of poems / ceremonies / erotics and love embodies the mythos of j/j hastain’s ritual city. It is a book about suture; the way reader, writer, and other intertwine. we in my Trans contains a relentlessness in de-defining a vessel (the body) of applied pressures. Pressures that require disassembling, (“wherein you affirm that you are in me / for always”) gestation, form / formlessness and “as an image / we are / continually reborning” exist simultaneously in the erotic urge of hastain’s language.
I find power here, we in my Trans, is at once, “sensory portraiture / with its infinitely multiplying mysticisms” and also, an homage to the self discovering itself through / in another. I ache as a reader, wanting to find myself in the text, undone by words.
This is the essence of the “merge,” the coming together, in order to create an entirely new thing, “how two or more / in effort at harmony / will always make a harmonic.”
hastain is unabashed and honest about the ways sexuality / identity / gender and love become a chimera of myth and undulating text. The photos in the book are at once a punctuation and a window. There is no doubt that you are on a journey through a new type of landscape, with strange almost familiar shapes. You don’t expect to find rest in them and they serve as an extension of the text in its invocation to desire.
It’s a vulnerable subtlety to be involved in so intimate a text. At times, you may ask yourself if you are turned on, or if you’ve become a voyeur. You may ask yourself where you end and the page begins. as I did. Whatever the answer, you will sleep with this book next to your bed and wake up dreaming it.
