Writing From Life: Part III

"Writing from life is a loving act even as it is a political one."What does it mean to write inside violence? I often reflect on this question, inventing answers as I try to decipher the shifting reality of the world I live in. As a trans woman who writes about intimacy, gendered violence, and transphobia, most of my literary work is drawn directly from my life. I try to interrogate and question dominant narratives around trans women, using my culture and experiences as a way to offer other possibilities for us.I often write directly about moments of intimate violence that have happened or are currently happening to me. I’m currently revising two essays about being a trans woman. One essay focuses on my experience of being in an abusive relationship and the other is about having penetrative sex for the first time since my gender confirmation surgery. I am a female confessional writer who firmly believes “the personal is political.” Writing with the degree of honesty and intimate revelation that I do isn’t easy but I think it can be useful.Using my intimate life as source material for my writing is not an original instinct. Other writers, particularly Indigenous, racialized, and female writers, have been doing it for a long time. For many writers from marginalized communities, writing from life has been a powerful way to disrupt dominant narratives which oppress, dehumanize, and erase the lived complexities of marginalized peoples. I try to find the sore points in my writing, places where the body aches under the weight of centuries of violence.There are pitfalls to writing from life, as well. For racialized or otherwise marginalized writers, the expectation to write certain narratives which confirm the assumptions of the dominant readership is a painful one. Writing from life often feels like an obligation for marginalized writers or a barrier to telling other stories. There is also the responsibility to speak carefully when representing your community or an experience that others share with you. Mainstream literary voices are now actively dissecting these issues and continue to generate brilliant insights about representation, voice, and the writing life.

Writing is a form of prayer, a way of making the ordinary into the sacred.

Despite the ongoing discussion about writing from life, the question of writing inside violence is one that’s rarely asked. I think about this question deeply as a trans woman. We face one of the highest rates of sexual violence and murder in Canada as well as chronic discrimination in all areas of society. While other communities inhabit unique vulnerabilities, there is a particular danger inherent in being trans, especially if you do not pass for cisgender. Racialized trans women, especially visibly Indigenous and Black trans women, experience the greatest barriers and are in the most danger.Writing about being trans is risky. When a dominant portion of society believes that you don’t deserve rights or question your humanity, writing about your lived experiences is often seen as a challenge or an opportunity for attack. Even allies are prone to missteps when engaging your work. Transphobia and transmisogyny are powerful forces which extend beyond simply using the right language and results in a range of unconscious biases and behaviors. In face of this reality, I often turn to my writing as a way to speak back to the small and large violence of my daily life.For example, writing an essay about having penetrative sex for the first time since gender confirmation surgery requires me to inhabit a profound vulnerability in public. My body and sexuality becomes an object for examination, humanized only by the presence of my voice within the narrative. It pushes back on dominant narratives around trans women and opens up space for our complexities, but it does this work at the expense of my privacy and safety. I choose to do this work because I hope for a future where trans women’s bodies are not seen as medical experiments nor curiosities, but valid and real bodies worthy of intimacy.Someone has to be the first. I’ve been a lot of firsts in my writing career, something I grapple with as I continue to generate work. I’ve also been a lot of firsts in my private life, such as the intimate encounter I’m writing about. I was the first trans woman that he’d been with. He was remarkably loving with me, but underneath the intimacy and pleasure is the reality that he isn’t someone I could date. Why? Because I’m a trans woman.

Writing from inside a violence that is greater than you, a violence that shapes your every encounter and moment, a violence that is immense and often unnamable, is an act of resistance and joy.

I return to my original question of writing inside violence. Other writers who face the constant threat of violence in public spaces, like Black writers, or other Indigenous writers who must write from inside the genocide we call Canada have the same burden. Other communities beyond Black, Trans, and Indigenous navigate their particular oppressions in their writing as well, pushing back and making space. The writing we make is often strikingly powerful, not merely because it draws from our lives but because it finds nuance and resonance within complex intergenerational violences.I often look to the intense focus on technical artistry within CanLit as an extension of a kind of privilege. If your body isn’t in danger, the writing you can make is radically different than writers who are in danger. I only feel safe inside my house and my workplace. My writing reflects this anxiety, exploring the edges of the body and world I live in. Someone once critiqued my writing as “only being about my love life.” I understand the critique, but I think it misses the point.We choose what we write. I have chosen and continue to focus my attention on writing that works toward a literary liberation. Other voices are working in different areas and I uplift their work, but I focus my writing on key areas of engagement from within my life. I write in hope of transforming the violence I live with, a naive hope that some would call “cruel optimism.” Or if transforming violence isn’t possible, I want to at least make beauty out of the living.Writing from life is a way of honouring that this specific life has value. When I encounter work from people with radically different lived experiences than my own, I’m grateful for the chance to witness their living. Writing is a form of prayer, a way of making the ordinary into the sacred. Writing from life is a loving act even as it is a political one. The political and the personal are comprised of a full living that writing holds, imperfect and flawed.It’s funny to write an essay defending the idea of writing from life by using examples from my life but everyday knowledge has always felt more meaningful to me than replicating authoritative sources. I grew up on conversation as storytelling. My gookum and aunts sitting at the kitchen table, stories moving between walls and darting out open windows to reach for the distant bush. The violence you live inside is often what compels you to speak or to be silent.  I saw this in my gookum’s mouth and I haven’t forgotten it.Claiming art is a pure exercise in technical control is just another tired way to oppress bodies you don’t want, like, or value. Art is the body in a moment, the lived meeting the conception. Writing from inside a violence that is greater than you, a violence that shapes your every encounter and moment, a violence that is immense and often unnamable, is an act of resistance and joy. It’s love in action, a self loving and loving of kin, fam, and community.

To hope and align your work with liberation is a brave choice in a dangerous world.

I often champion writing as liberation, even though I rarely have access to that liberation. I call writing an act of love while reflecting on how an intimate partner would never publicly love me because of my gender. I speak about the importance of community while knowing how community has harmed me for being trans. I talk about my family while admitting that they were often abusive and damaged, knowing that I don’t speak to them anymore.This is writing inside violence, as well. Not trying to compress the world into one truth, but holding its complex myriad forms within one voice. To hope and align your work with liberation is a brave choice in a dangerous world. It may even be a futile choice but it is better to speak than be silent. To qoute Audre Lorde:

and when we speak we are afraidour words will not be heardnor welcomedbut when we are silentwe are still afraidSo it is better to speakrememberingwe were never meant to survive

I come back to these lines over and over again in my writing life. Lorde’s work is speaking to a specific experience of Blackness that I do not want to erase here, but her work is intersectional with other communities. It is a call to action for me as a writer, a woman, and as a poet. It is often used as a quote to support speaking out against violence, but I prefer to see it as a reflection of the burden of speaking from within violence. The “remembering” is the violence we live in.And the survival is witnessed and loved by the speaking.