non-fiction
As I am translating Kae Tempest’s Paradise to Dutch, a play about the Greek soldier Philoctetes who got wounded in the Trojan War (as they all did, didn’t they) and then got dumped on an island by Odysseus (always him), where his wound never healed and reeked of death, I am thinking about how visceral they write, how embodied the story is, and how on earth I am going to translate this text and play the part of Philoctetes coming from a household where everything related to the body took up so much space, it became an transparent elephant in a cerebral room,
As I am being told by woman on the street that Jesus loves me, that there will be a life after this one, an eternal life without suffering, a Paradise, and that all I need to do is marry a man who is waiting for me somewhere because I am God’s queen and this is what he has in store for me,
As I am noticing her tone is changing when she tells me lesbianism will destroy me, I am trying not to laugh to not disrespect her, I take the bible she gives me, and I try to see it as a pleasant conversation, although I know she thinks I will burn in a place especially reserved for people like me,
As I am doing my make up with knowledge in both of my hands, remembering a ritual I have been creating for the past seven years, I wish I was born a man, so that I could dress femme, and people would wonder which gender I am and decide it has to be non-binary, because what else would they,
As I can’t stop thinking about the phrase from Sex Education’s Cal when Jackson tells them he doesn’t think he’s queer: “I’m afraid you’ll keep seeing me as a women” and he can neither deny nor confirm,
As I can’t stop thinking about the phrase from Sex Education’s Cal when Jackson tells them he doesn’t think he’s queer: “I’m afraid you’ll keep seeing me as a women” and he can neither deny nor confirm,
As you are fucking me in the car, in the woods, in the bed, in the kitchen, spitting in my mouth, slapping me in the face, grabbing my breasts, choking me with all sorts of body parts, making me come repeatedly, I am thinking nothing,
As I am trying to match the rhythm, the poetry and the cadence of your body, of my muscle memory and of Paradise (x2), I am thinking nothing but: in pleasure we unite.
