The disappearing other

It all started with the labelling of my debut novel Akumi as a queer novel. By that time, it had already been labelled as feminist, magical realist, a mystery novel, a piece of speculative and science fiction (with a slightly ironic remark from my colleague: ‘A science what?! Have they even read it?’). Another colleague of mine, who was one of its first readers, admitted: ‘I expected something of an activist spirit, something against homophobia. But it’s not a book like that. It’s not against anything. Rather, it captures the beauty and the diversity of the world.’ I was happy to hear that, as my primary goal was to go beyond the obsolete dichotomy of the normal vs. the deviant. In other words, not to simply problematise the border between them, but to shatter it, to represent it not as an ontological but as an epistemological phenomenon.

The reception of my first novel made me think about how we categorise and label literature and what we take as the point of departure in this process. Literary scholars know that the borders between genres are somewhat loose. Thus, the categorisation of literature can be tricky, especially if we take the representation of the other and otherness as a criterion. This is exactly what happens when we label books as ‘queer’. Have you ever heard of ‘straight’ books? I bet you haven’t. Why is that? Because they don’t exist? No, we just don’t call them that. If a book is about love between a man and a woman, it’s a ‘romance’, but if it’s about love between two women, it’s a ‘lesbian novel’ or a ‘queer novel’. Being queer means being the other, since we perceive heterosexuality as universal, unlike queerness. It should be the other way around. However, to paraphrase Judith Butler, the concept of heterosexuality exists only because that of homosexuality does.[1] But we never think of the dichotomies the way they really are; instead, we see them through the lens of our hierarchical culture, which privileges the one over the other. Although it’s a good thing to have ‘queer literature’, since it means that queers do have a voice and they are represented, there’s something sad about it, too – you uphold the dichotomy and its hierarchy as prescribed by the culture.

Literature, on the other hand, has its own hierarchical model – the literary canon. Would you label Adrienne Rich’s poetry as queer? We would certainly mention her when it comes to female homoeroticism, perhaps together with Audre Lorde. However, is ‘queer’ the right word to describe their poetry? Wouldn’t we reduce the meaning of their poems to a single theme if we categorised them so? And their poetry goes beyond any single theme – it is quite diverse. But what if we can say so just because both Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde are recognised as some of the most significant poets of the past century?

Take another example: is The Death in Venice a queer story? To some extent it is, one might say. However, is queerness the first association that comes to your mind when you think of it? Or do you see it as one of the classics of German literature first and foremost? Probably, yes. And where does the queerness come from? From Plato, for sure, and from Nietzsche as well. Is Plato’s philosophy queer then? Could we consider The Symposium as a queer text? Maybe we could, but that’s not the most common interpretation of it. The Symposium is something universal for us since it’s one of the fundaments of our European culture. And queer is not universal, remember? Or... is it?

My point is that there’s something curious going on in world literature – the universalisation of queerness.

First, let’s have a look at some of the bestsellers. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller is certainly a gay novel. However, that’s not what you’ll read if you search for its descriptions or reviews. In some of them, there’s a brief mention of the debate over gay marriages as an example of the novel’s topicality, but the book itself is not labelled as queer.[2] Why is that?

The answer to this question is in the novel and it has something to do with the epistemological border discussed above. From the perspective of Patroclus, the novel’s narrator, it is heterosexuality and straight relationships that are queer.[3] His description of the sexual encounter with a woman is a good example: he characterises it as something wet and oily. It’s not necessarily unpleasant for him, but it is still very different from the undoubted desire that he feels towards Achilles. Achilles’s experience is similar to Patroclus’s: he tells Patroclus that it was wet, slippery like oil, that he didn’t like it and wanted it to be over as soon as possible.[4] In this way, Madeline Miller overturns the dichotomy and its hierarchy – she universalises queerness and represents straightness as the other.

There are other ways to shift the focus, too. For instance, to make queerness an integral part of the novel’s fictional world, that is, to make the queer storyline not the main one, but as important and touching as other storylines. The polyphony of this kind is a continuation of the postmodernist tradition: in the multiplicity of voices all of them are equal and the marginalised ones become the protagonists of the story. This is what I’ve tried to achieve in both my books, as I sincerely believe that literature is about having a diversity of voices, each of them equally sound and loud. In Akumi, the eight storylines (including those of an asexual person and a closeted lesbian) are centred on the story of a child born without sex organs. My second book is a collection of interconnected stories about female characters in the Bible. It reinterprets the biblical narratives: what destroys Sodom is a disguised hierarchy that results in disguised oppression, Mary of Magdala is bisexual and the husband of Anna the Prophetess, a priest, has a gay affair with a High Priest. Literature is a world of conditionalities, and time and space are among them. If a set of texts can determine the culture, then it’s crucial to create the alternative readings of them – subversion can trigger the reader to rethink the culture and therefore rethink and debunk its hierarchical model.

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini can also serve as an example of such kind of writing. The novel is set in 1950s Afghanistan. It has several storylines and several protagonists, and we read the same story from different perspectives. One of the storylines is that of a closeted gay and the relationship he develops with his former driver who practically becomes his life companion (I’m not naming the characters on purpose, lest I spoil the book, in case you haven’t read it yet). Does this make And the Mountains Echoed a queer novel? Not really, but at the same time, yes, it does. The thing is that the queer storyline strikes the reader unexpectedly. Moreover, it’s neither the main story nor the theme of the novel. But it certainly is an important part of it.

Something similar happens in The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li. Set in France after World War II, the novel is about the friendship of two girls, Agnès and Fabienne. The girls eventually have to part, since Agnès leaves for boarding school. However, their friendship continues. Fabienne writes letters to Agnès, one under her name and another under a boy’s name. Agnès ends up falling in love with the invented boy. This love becomes tragic since the boy is a figment of Fabienne’s imagination – he is Fabienne herself.

I’ve had an opportunity to attend the author’s reading in Iowa City this autumn. She remembered one of the critics stressing this motif in the book and exclaiming: ‘Oh, my God! Yiyun Li has written a queer novel!’ Then she added that she had never thought about the text that way, but why not? Let it be a queer novel.[5] Again, queerness is not the theme of the novel, but an important part of it.

Another way to challenge the epistemological border is to focus on the universal aspects of relationships. This is what Nicolàs Melini does in his novella El estupor de los atlantes. The novella is about a lesbian couple and depicts a toxic relationship and how it develops. The author visited Georgia as a guest of Tbilisi International Festival of Literature. Someone from the audience asked him why he had chosen to write about two women – he could have written about two men or a man and a woman, couldn’t he? He answered that the Spanish media had turned the relationship between a man and a woman into a cliché through constant focus on domestic violence. He wanted to avoid the cliché. And there would have been no way to avoid it if he had chosen to write about a straight couple. Writing about women also helped him to distance himself from the story, as he personally can never experience a lesbian relationship.

I think the emerging tendency of the literary representation of queerness is now clear – queer is not the Other anymore, it is becoming the Self.

What does contemporary Georgian literature have to offer to the world in that sense? The new generation of Georgian poets has felt the need to challenge epistemological borders, too. The poetry of Andro Dadiani, Nini Eliashvili and Lela Kurtanidze certainly has an air of innovation and is truly a part of a global literary context.

Andro Dadiani[6] transgresses the boundaries between different media. His poetry merges queerness with social and political problems. His poems are audio-visual performances, many of them with special signs that indicate the form of performance (for instance, the tempo of reading or the volume of voice or any other sounds).

Nini Eliashvili upholds the rich tradition of conventional poetry. Using the legacy of Georgian modernist poetry, among the other sources, she experiments with different forms of Georgian verse. A singular musicality characterises the female homoeroticism in her poems and makes them impressive and memorable. Each poem is like a song that you can endlessly repeat in your heart.

In contrast, Lela Kurtanidze writes in free verse only and represents the feminine as the universal. She uses the same metaphorical system to describe both straight and queer love, at the same time stressing the contrast between them. Although her poetic world is unique, that is, recognisable as hers, it’s still diverse and dynamic, constantly revolving around the tiny details which the poet has noticed and fixed in words.

To label the poetry of Andro Dadiani, Nini Eliashvili and Lela Kurtanidze as ‘queer’ would be a ‘reductionist fallacy’ of the same kind as with the rest of the books that I have discussed above.

Thus, however extreme this view might seem, the future of queerness in literature is already in its present: there will be no more queer books, as all books will be queer.

[1] Judith Butler: Imitation and Gender Insubordination. In: The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelov, Michele Aina Barale and David M. Halperin. Routledge: New York, London, 1993, p. 307–320.

[2] See the book description and reviews on the author’s official website.

[3] The word ‘queer’ simply meant ‘strange’ (with a negative connotation). This was still its sole meaning at the beginning of the 20th century. James Joyce, for example, often used ‘queer’ in the sense of ‘strange’.

[4] Madeline Miller: The Song of Achilles. Ecco Press, 2012.

[5] You can listen to Yiyun Li’s reading from The Book of Goose followed by a conversation with the author here.

[6] Andro Dadiani is a pseudonym, Andro being the part of the word ‘androgene’ and ‘Dadiani’ being a family name of Tsotne Dadiani, one of the national heroes of Georgia who showed a tremendous example of courage and solidarity. You can read about him here.