Trans Becoming and the Failure of Language

Nine months ago, a surgeon cut into my chest to remove my breasts because this is what I had come to want and need. The road to this arrival was wending, wooded, years of observing my relationship to the image spit back at me in bathroom mirrors, screen doors at night when the lamps blush yellow, photographs in which I am looking back at my own face, my own shoulders, and suddenly, someone else’s chest. This was a distance from myself I had never before encountered—a misalignment that grew from discomfort into shame, then hurtled steadily toward a vast estrangement. In this wildness of abjection, trans poetics offered me a language upon which my future reflection could lean.

Poetry is a form that relies on—or brings about—the failure of language. Sentences will always fall short of capturing the true intricacies of our human life, our natural world. And so lyric arrives, unbridled by the laws of grammar, pressing its hooves to the measure of music. Gaston Bachelard writes, “Imagination is not… the faculty of forming images of reality; it is rather the faculty of forming images which go beyond reality, which sing reality.” Imagery, in its poetic sense, is unbridled by the laws of the real, unconcerned with replication, devoted instead to the rolling expanse of attempt. In this way, simile and metaphor stretch beyond what’s possible to bring us closer to what’s true. So too is the terrain of trans becoming—imagining one’s body outside the limits of its given lines.

I only write when alone because I need to sound out each line in order to arrive at the next. I am following the impulse of music, trusting that it will bring me to meaning.

Reading Taylor Johnson’s debut collection Inheritance invited me into the conversation of trans poetics. His lyric levitates in the lace between image and music, somehow taking form without taking shape. In his poem “Trans is Against Nostalgia,” Johnson writes, “Every day I build the boat, / my body boat, hold for the unique one, / the formless soul, the blue fire / that coaxes my being into being.” I gasped when I arrived at this opening stanza, having long been calling my body my bodyboat, having now encountered that language extended beautifully into image by someone I had never met, describing how I had felt.

Later in the poem, Johnson writes, “There is a new / language I’m learning by speaking it.” This is an image upon which I can rest so much of my journey with gender’s uncharted terrain. Aishvarya Arora, author of Mr.Time, writes “my song / only appears when it leaves me.” Both Arora and Johnson are speaking to the language of the trans body’s new becomings, its reach toward its next iteration, which, they argue, is a sonic mystery made legible only through its articulation.

The title of my debut poetry collection is HUM. In Urdu—my mother tongue—the word hum can mean both “we” and “I.” In English, it’s a gesture of sound. A gesture is a movement that emphasizes or expresses an idea, but it is not the idea itself. When we hum a tune, we are not replicating speech, but approximating sound. I only write when alone because I need to sound out each line in order to arrive at the next. I am following the impulse of music, trusting that it will bring me to meaning.

As trans people, each articulation of who we are is also an articulation of who we will no longer be.

When the surgeon asks how I want my scars to look, whether I want them to be shaped the way a man’s pecs would frame his chest, I am caught unprepared. Manhood is not the song I’ve been singing, but boyhood is a tune still humming in my head. Arora’s poem begins:

i’m not trying to be a man how

birdsong isn’t trying to be
an orchestra a murmuration isn’t
trying to be a spray

of fighter jets.

When I read these lines, the negation of my desire—the desire for the absence of breasts—is given something present against which it may recognize its own form. What once felt like me alone in a surgeon’s office becomes a we.

As trans people, each articulation of who we are is also an articulation of who we will no longer be. Rather than the rehearsed public arrival, this life of a continuous, public attempt. So too is the poet’s journey—a series of declarations, and a repetition of change. Johnson, in his poem ‘Chiaroscuro’ writes, “beautiful projection, boy in the mirror, boy in my mind. /…I want / to grow into you, and then abandon your / imprecise naming.” These lines bring me to understand that poetry itself is a kind of imprecise naming, but a naming nonetheless. Language fails to encapsulate experience, but it does not fail to create it. As I read Johnson’s work, a slow mirror rises on the page. I ride its music toward my own reflection, which appears, at first, foggy and unclear. As a poet myself, I take that smoke toward my own page, and I lean to lyric for an image in which I can be made.

“I have been made anew / like the first hour of sun / after days of rain.” These are the opening lines of the penultimate poem in HUM, titled “Trans/figuration.” My making—my trans becoming—comes not only from the surgeon’s scalpel and the barber’s clippers and my lover’s hands, but from the trans poets writing before and beside me, offering a conversation I may lift my lyric to, a music that sings my reality. The later lines of “Trans/figuration” read: “I was given a cage I have / come to see as a gift / for it is a cage I can see.” The failure of language and the narrow lines of prescribed gender are the iron bars. Poetry, these poets—fists—pulling them apart. And so the poem ends the way any life begins: “I am taking my body / beyond its shape.”

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Hum: Poems by Sanam Sheriff is available from University of Nebraska Press.