A Review of Kalki Subramaniam's We
are Not the Others: Reflections of a Transgender Artivist
By Basudhara Roy*
Kalki
Subramaniam
We are
Not the Others: Reflections of a Transgender Artivist
Notion
Press, 2021
ISBN
(Paperback) 978-1-63940-487-2
Pp 166 |
Price 
350
“I too stand
in the thick of the battle field
destroying stupidity
and defeating
the emasculated,
let us celebrate life,
come.”
(Kalki
Subramaniam, ‘Arise, My Precious’)
Kalki
Subramaniam’s latest collection We are Not the Others: Reflections of a Transgender Artivist published by Notion Press this
June, is a book that will leave your heart open for ever. An honest,
unapologetic, and fiery narrative of a transgender’s lived experience presented
through poetry, prose and through deeply figurative and unsettling
illustrations by the talented writer herself, here is writing that takes the
heart by storm, wreaks havoc on our complacencies, upsets the neat and futile
categories of definitions that have been drilled into us through a prolonged
process of socialization, and liberates us by the overwhelming strength of its
optimism.
Artist, activist, poet,
actor, and writer, Kalki powerfully places her transgender identity at the
centre of her rich and multifarious work. Founder of Sahodari
Foundation, an organization that works for the social, political, and economic
empowerment of transgender people in India through various creative projects,
Kalki combines art and activism with a commitment that is not just intellectual
or social but defiantly humanist. One of the most prominent voices in the
LGBTQI+ community of India, she is well-known for championing the recognition
of the legal rights of transgender people which resulted in the historic 2014 verdict
of the Supreme Court of India whereby the rights of the transgender community
as the third gender were recognized not merely as “a social or medical issue
but a human rights issue”. Widely awarded for her social work, art, film
performance, and literary contributions, Kalki continues to be an inspiration both
within the transgender community and beyond it. Her poems, as N. Elango writes
in his Foreword to the collection, are “clarion calls, not only to the
LGBT community, but for those whosoever seek to break themselves free from the
shackles and fetters snapped around them by the hegemonic conspiracy.”
Comprising
sixteen poems, some of which have been translated from the original Tamil by N.
Elango, four personal essays, and magnificent quotations and artwork, including
the actual handwritten scripts of her Tamil poems, the book takes us into an
autobiographical journey of growth, strength and faith through the trauma,
angst and painful discrimination that transgenders undergo every day in this
country. In her Author’s Notes to the collection, Kalki writes:
This book is a
bundle of so many of my emotions – joy, pain, anger, fury, distress and hope.
Through this book, I tell some parts of my story and that of the others like
me. You will hear their voices through me.
Poetry and art
give a richness to my life. They give beauty, strength and hope. They heal. I
couldn’t have survived my tormenting teenage years without them.
Signification,
one realizes, is a complex process and often, self-defeating. The complexity of
signification stems from the fact that the signified, rather than being an
objective presence in the real world, constitutes an abstracted idea of it in
our minds. Our ideas, often being entrenched by particularities such as
history, society, religion, culture and conditioning, the looming possibilities
are that a wrong, erroneous and unwarranted idea may root itself over time into
a vindictive stereotype. Around us and across the world, the negative effects
of such stereotyping are rampantly visible. Stripped of distinctive individual
virtues, identity becomes an allotted story of signification that may have no
correspondence to fact. Every human and non-human Other is the victim of just
such a process of signification whereby the assumed has offset the actual, and
ushered in practices of prejudice, discrimination, hatred and violence. When it
comes to people who identify themselves as LGBTQI+, the trauma and suffering
that pernicious narratives of signification can produce, is heightened by the
fact that there is no appeal to a common truth. The only truth about sex and
gender is that which also challenges their greatest fallacy viz. they are
binary. Nothing can be farther from biological fact. In From Transgender to
Transhuman, Martine Rothblatt writes:
…
sex in humans is a continuous variable, a complex of phenotypic and genotypic
factors as unique as one’s fingerprints. While male and female categories are
useful to group biological characteristics for medical purposes, these same
categories have socially detrimental effects when used outside the field of
medicine. Sex should really be the sum of behaviors we call gender—an
adjective, not a noun. People should explore genders. When they settle on a set
of gender behaviors, the name for that set describes their sex.
Rothblatt insists
that the resting point for gender “depends upon the same complex of mental
propensities and chance socialization that leads people to adopt one or another
career, hobby, or religion.” However, in a country like India where sex is, in
most quarters, destiny and where patriarchal thought largely reigns,
transgenders are routinely judged by society for their bodies, voices, physical
appearance, sexual choices and morality, so much so, that the ordinary
prerogatives of ordinary people everywhere in the world become for them, exclusive
privileges they must fight to earn.
In ‘If You Don’t
Mind’, the poet describes how the claim of transwomen like her to womanhood, is
continually contested by mainstream society that reserves the right to judge her
body as an anomaly, and in a blatant invasion of her privacy, to ceaselessly question
her about it. ‘Don’t Tell That to Me’
documents, in the same testing spirit of the irritable receiver, what
transgenders receive most from the world – curiosity, sympathy, stares,
whispers, questions and requests for blessings as if they were divine in their
departure from normative humanity. Kalki writes:
To you and to
the million others
I want to shout
I am made of
flesh and blood,
of fear and hope,
of joy and pain.
I am like you
I am human too.
On the terrain of
gender identity, gender affirmation for transwomen is no less traumatic. As far
as the socio-cultural binary thinking about gender goes, it is not sufficient for
a person to identify as a woman. One must also offer evidence of ‘being’ one as
per mainstream norms of body-type and behaviour. Such socio-cultural
determination of questions of ontology does grave injustice to real life by
refuting the immense variety of embodied gender experience and imposing a
blanket uniformity on the internalization and articulation of womanhood. ‘Piece
by Piece’ that examines gender identity as a process of becoming rather than de
facto being, is a poem that talks of the poet’s struggle to painstakingly
establish her claim as a woman:
I am not a woman by birth
I was born as a shattered
Rubik’s cube,
all my life I worked
step by step
to reclaim my honour.
To correct the wrongs,
I collected all of me,
my body, mind and soul
and put together in patience,
vouching with perseverance.
I endured shame and guilt,
yet I stood strong with grit.
In the
heart-wrenching poem ‘Nirvaanam’, the multi-layered issues surrounding gender –
biology, culture, policing and performance – poignantly coalesce. The
transwoman’s joy in her anklet and her ecstatic dance invite ridicule from the
moral police, “those/ who have their manhoods/ hanging about them”. The only
way for the woman here to “stand my ground/ to prove my womanhood”, is through
biology:
with tears rolling down
I remove my saree.
In this moment,
I do not want any Krishna
to save or rescue me
The act of
disrobing is transformed here into an act of agency and defiant transgression. Its
complex and potent symbolism is heightened by the mythological subtexts that it
skilfully builds, both evoking and rejecting the need of a male God to protect
the sham cultural notion of ‘honour’. The female body which has historically
borne the brunt of violence against women in society now becomes a vital site
for the empowered assertion of female identity, beyond the need of patriarchal
intervention or safeguard. This is not to say that the element of victimization
is absent here but the conscious attempt is to wrest power for the woman
against all odds.
‘Truth and Lie’
documents another painful moment of rejection, this time, in love. In a potential
bond of marriage, the poet-speaker’s revelation of her real identity as a
transwoman, spoils all her conjugal hopes:
“I told you not to out
yourself as a Transwoman.
My parents rejected you,
I need them and
can’t reject them,
so I reject you”
you spoke.
This is a culture
that, as the poem points out, punishes honesty and will forgive and even
welcome inauthenticity at the cost of maintaining its illusions intact. In her
prose pieces ‘My Perfectly Imperfect Vagina’ and ‘Will an Indian Man Ever Bring
a Trans Woman Home and Say ‘Ma, I Love Her’?, Kalki evocatively describes the
transwomen’s existential necessity to acquire the biological gift of womanhood
through sex-reassignment surgeries and society’s prejudiced rejection of them
as women despite their fierce identification as members of the female sex. In the former essay, she writes:
Women who are ‘born women’ are gifted with a perfect
vagina, they don’t have to spend a dime or a rupee to have a perfect one. But
our stories, the transwomen’s stories are entirely different. Before we did our
sex reassignment surgeries, those days whenever we looked down naked, we were
ashamed and wanted to pluck it off whatever was hanging there. We loathed it.
The essay throws
light on the various experiences of gender dysphoria and the non-seriousness of
the government in dealing with it. In poems like ‘She’ and ‘Clap Aloud’, Kalki
deconstructs the stereotyping of transgenders by establishing their clapping as
an act of empowerment and liberation from the misplaced and hypocritical values
of society – “Clap aloud/ Thirunangai/ clap aloud!/ Like a crack of thunder/
that shocks the world/ during a great rain,/ clap your hands aloud!” The
ability to have both hands free for oneself and for service to humanity becomes
a higher form of ethic than the selfish engagements of the workaday world. The
act of clapping, thus, becomes an assertion of humanity and of the superior
knowledge of identification of the self with the world.
Rothblatt states
that the “apartheid of sex” by which we are cast, from the time of our birth,
into a sex-type based on our genitals and socialized into a “sex-type-appropriate
culture called gender” is extremely detrimental to society. “Freedom of gender
is,” in her opinion, “therefore, the gateway to a freedom of form and to
an explosion of human potential. First comes the realization that we are not
limited by our gross sexual anatomy. Then comes the awakening that we are not
limited by our anatomy at all. The mind is the substance of humanity. Mind is
deeper than matter.”
Kalki, in her
writing, also strongly argues for the evaluation of humans as humans,
irrespective of gender. In her prose piece ‘A Letter to a Transgender Kid’, she
attempts to put forward a narrative of androgyny that is gloriously human:
Do remember that there is no complete man or complete
woman in this world. If anyone as such existed ever, they can never understand
the emotions of the opposite gender. In every man, there is a woman and, in
every woman, there is a man. How much of a man is a woman, and how much of a
woman is a man is what makes them. Makes us all.
Each piece of
writing in We are Not the Others: Reflections
of a Transgender Artivist deconstructs the idea of transgenders as Others by deconstructing
cultural signification and offering an insider’s account of their dreams, desires,
hopes, pain and suffering that are all too universal and all too human. Challenging
the stereotyping of signifiers, these are pieces that vehemently bring home to
us the fact that boy/girl/man/woman/first gender/second gender/third
gender are hierarchical categories that we forcefully impose upon human
experience with severe injustice and irreparable damage. It is important to
acknowledge the diversity of life, of living and of performing humanity across
bodies, genders, cultures and sexual orientations. “This book,” writes Laura Sherwood, “is essential
for all academic institutions and programs working to dismantle dominant
narratives or facilitate dialogue around gender beyond the binary.” I would
like to affirm that this is a work that must be read by everyone who wishes to
know, first-hand, of human grit,
perseverance, and the human ability to, both, fuel and transcend them
through art. Also that, once read, this is a book no reader will be able to
permanently disentangle her memory and consciousness from.
___________________________________________________________________________
*Basudhara
Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University,
Chaibasa. Drawn to diaspora, gender, and ecological studies, she is the
author of three books - Migrations of Hope (criticism) and two
collections of poems, Moon in my Teacup (Writer’s Workshop,
2019) and Stitching a Home (Red River, 2021). She
loves, rebels, writes and reviews from Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, India.
