Kashif Nadim Chaudry’s “A Queers Dowry”

“I learned an important thing in the orchard that night, which was that if you do not resist the cold, but simply relax and accept it, you no longer feel the cold as discomfort. I felt giddily free and eager, as you do in dreams, when you suddenly find that you can fly, very easily, and wonder why you have never tried it before. I might have discovered other things. For example, I was hungry enough to begin to learn that hunger has its pleasures, and I was happily at ease in the dark, and in general, I could feel that I was breaking the tethers of need, one by one. But then the sheriff came.” Housekeeping 204

Does the sheriff always come? Sometimes i read this passage, from Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, and i can see my entire dissertation–everything i want to say and everything i want to ask and everything i hope to understand a little better–falling right into place. When i read this i hear J.L. Austin’s understanding of performative language, Althusser’s interpellative whistleblower, Freud, and queer theory. i am not a supertaster with food and wine, but i can’t not see the shapes of critical theory in literature and film anymore, and what guides me is the promise of subtext, of metaphor, of secrets, of change. i “misread” things, especially literature, all the time. Sometimes my slips are calculated and intentional, other times i just can’t help it because i don’t read for plot or pleasure. The fact that misreadings are even possible challenges the possibility of univocal, universal truth and authorial control, and reinforces the promise of underbellies and flip sides and constellations of meaning.

i am heartened by the resurgence of interest in Donna Haraway’s explorations of scientific discourse, western dualism, and domesticity. When i was vegan, i was amazed by how reactive people could get about what they called “fake” food, which necessarily brought to mind for me Butler’s arguments destabilizing heterosexuality as the “original,” “natural,” model for sexuality and queerness as a copy. Disturbed as i am by the parallels between sexual politics and food politics–and, because i was so deeply convinced by arguments dovetailing the two–learning to rebuild my understanding of food seemed fundamentally representative of other forms of the possible–an individual step i hoped would teach me about collective ones. In some ways, i think the playing field for the consumption of animal products is drastically different now than it was back then, especially where i live, in Brooklyn. Nonetheless, there is an uncomplicated “nature”-worship component to some strands of locavore politics that makes me uncomfortable, and i still think the vegetarian gesture can be creative and hopeful. i like the “vegetable forward” food of chefs like Ignacio Mattos (formerly of Isa), Jose Ramirez-Ruiz (Chez Jose), and Matthew Lightner (Atera)–chefs who like the challenge of not falling back on the easiness of meat as they work to redefine what a meal looks like. i think this is an act of careful reading, and if i were teaching right now i would use their work as object lessons when we read something like the Raw and the Cooked by Claude Levi Strauss or Mythologies by Roland Barthes, or even Subculture: the Meaning of Style, by Dick Hebdige.

i lived in Japan a long time ago, and i feel as nervous as ever saying things about how “in Japan, etc.”; however, in Japan, if i understood things correctly, talking about the weather is a topic for genuine conversation. i enjoyed this so much, because i think even non-poets almost always reveal something about themselves when they react to the heat or the rain or the cold or simply change, and i like listening. Counterintuitively, being really hot makes me feel clean–probably because i grew up in the tropics; perhaps for the same reason, i like being out in the rain. When i lived in Florida, getting cold sent me into a mean rage. These days, i eagerly anticipate the giganticness of deep winter, and the respite from the extreme sociality necessitated by New York summers. Talking about the weather, or the seasons, is a very easy way to allow for the fact that metaphor (and desire) is always right there at the edge of language–of what we seem to be saying. The first line of the Bell Jar, “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York,” makes the weather an actor, and the last sentence of Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss,” gives us “just weather”–what we generally like to pretend almost everything around us is–just predictable, explicable, rational phenomena. Or, as Butler paraphrases Nietzsche, “Only through a kind of forgetfulness of the tropological status of language does something like customary language take hold.” Tropological refers to tropes or figures of speech–metaphor, metonymy, synechdoche. In other words, plain prose cheats. Plain–not purple or poetic or difficult–prose cheats. It cheats because it pretends that language isn’t necessarily indebted to subtext, because it’s boring, and because it seems to exalt “face-value.” There are so many kinds of cheating, and i will never understand why something like sexual infidelity trumps willful lack of engagement with the world, with humor, with desire. Try, because not trying is also a kind of cheating–it’s just too ubiquitous–and too necessary to normative life narratives–to prosecute.