Launch Night Excerpts

Art by Priyanka Meenakshi https://www.priyankameenakshi.com/

We celebrated Project Myopia with a beautiful launch event towards the end of semester 2. It was a night of music and poetry, as well as an opportunity for some of our contributors to elaborate on their essays and ideas. Our performers touched on a wide range of serious issues: from the exclusion of racial minorities’ contribution to the canon of literature, to the oppressive nature of zero-hour contracts that prevent tutors from being able to fully engage in helping all students get ahead, let alone those from a minority background who need assistance most. We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who performed and shared their experiences, and we also have to thank everyone who attended and helped us drink the wine we provided! Project Myopia aims to bring marginalized people together and amplify their voices, and our launch felt like a perfect culmination of our semester’s work: people came together and shared their experiences of an academic world we need to change.

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Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

Ronan Karas

Edited by Karli Wessale

Art by Priyanka Meenakshi https://www.priyankameenakshi.com/

“Strange to be exiled from your own sex to borders that will never be home” (Feinberg, 19XX, pg. 11).

Leslie Feinberg’s words echo in my head. I think about how strange yet familiar the feeling is of finding a work of fiction that you relate to on such a deep and personal level. I’m a trans man and I first started transitioning two years ago, in which time I’ve searched libraries, websites, lists upon lists of queer authors and gender theorists, all in the search for an answer to a question I can’t quite put into words. I wanted to find an account of someone who felt like I did. When you’re straight and cisgender, your sexuality and gender are never called into question by the literature surrounding you, but when you’re trans or queer, your identity becomes academic. Something to be debated around a table of people who don’t identify as you do. As a friend put it: “Cis people have gender, trans people have gender identities.”

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The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination by Sarah Schulman

Corné Rijneveld

Edited by Veronica Vivi

Art by Holly Summerson http://hollysummerson.wixsite.com/arts

I was gifted Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012) for my 24th birthday. Schulman was 24 when her friends started dying. The year was 1981, and an unknown disease – ‘something to do with white blood cells’ (Schulman 59) – had begun ravaging communities of sexual outcasts in New York and San Francisco. Although we meet some of the virus’s victims, Gentrification is not a cataloguing of the dead, nor a mere homage to their wasted creative potential. Instead, the memoirs read as a lyrical, historical, and sociological thesis, albeit inspired by grief for the un-mourned, and a profound sense of injustice. Schulman argues that when tens of thousands of gay, lesbian, and bisexual New Yorkers died of Aids as a result of governmental and societal neglect, diverse neighbourhoods, and a genuinely counter-cultural art movement died with them.

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Selena

Izzy Bravo

Edited by Carolina Palacios

Art by Laila Borrie https://www.facebook.com/underthepeacocktree/

Each year in March I see a wave of young Latinas on social media expressing their love for Selena, as they share images of their Selena-inspired make-up, Selena outfits for the Selena club parties, and plans to watch Selena, the 1997 film that chronicles the short life of Selena Quintanilla. Why March? March 31 is the anniversary of Selena’s death, which occurred in 1995. And for any young Latina who grew up dancing to Selena’s “Como la Flor” in their living room, March is an important month to remember those days and the unhinged hope for a music idol. I grew up listening to Selena and have memories of my sister singing along to “Como la Flor” when it played in the radio. I can also recall trying to hide this fandom in a poor attempt to assimilate to the American culture I was learning in grade school. It was not until my first year of undergrad that I noticed it was suddenly okay to be Latino.

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Arekti Premer Golpo (Just Another Love Story) – a film by Kaushik Ganguly

Ibtisam Ahmed

Edited by Avani Udgaonkar

Art: ‘377’ by Laila Borrie https://www.facebook.com/underthepeacocktree/

Film image at https://bppostscript.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/dsc_007872.jpg

In 2009, the Delhi High Court ruled that the colonial-era anti-homosexuality law, Section 377, was unconstitutional and, therefore, void. In 2013, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the High Court does not have constitutional jurisdiction and reinstated the law. The four-year period between these judicial decisions remains the only time in the history of the former British Raj (India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, as well as Sri Lanka under British Ceylonese jurisdiction) that openly queer sexuality was not punishable by law. The 2010 release of the Bengali film, Arekti Premer Golpo (Just another Love Story), the first ever post-377 film that explores these identities, provides an interesting examination of queerness from an Indian perspective that is not palatable apologia, misconceived and prejudicial humour, or radical subversion. Rather, it explores the various ways in which queerness can be experienced in the region in an organic and personal way – and I specifically say queerness instead of LGBTQIA because the acronym does not speak to the spirit of different sexualities and genders that make the community in India so vibrant, even in its oppression.

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J’ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother) – a film by Xavier Dolan

Ananya Sen

Edited by Karli Wessale

Art by Edith Pritchett https://www.instagram.com/edithpritchett_art/

French-Canadian actor and director Xavier Dolan’s debut film, J’ai tué Ma mère (I Killed My Mother) released in 2009, when he was twenty years old. Dolan is a self-proclaimed gay actor, director, writer and costume designer. J’ai tué ma mère has won the hearts of many critics as it depicts, in a highly Bildungsroman fashion, a love-hate relationship between a teenage son and his mother. Recently, he has made a name for himself with his 2016 movie Juste la fin du monde (It’s only the End of the World). The movie won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and several other awards. While he is best known for Mommy, released in 2014, in this article, I will focus on J’ai tué ma mère and attempt to justify the need for this movie to be a part of the university syllabi.

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Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

Toby Sharpe

Edited by Vicki Madden

Art: Ottelien Huckin http://www.ottelienhuckin.co.uk/

‘Are there many little boys who think they are a

Monster? But in my case I am right…’ (Carson 12)

It is an onerous task to write about a book that you love. Harder still to write about one that so vigorously resists definition – and which seems to attack the idea that anything can have a single meaning. Anne Carson, a Macarthur ‘Genius’ who taught Greek at McGill University in Montréal, has adapted the Classical poet Stesichoros’s fragments into her own epic poem. This is perhaps the simplest way to describe a book which, in less than two-hundred pages, covers an almost absurd amount of ground –a text which offers me new interpretations each time I come back to it, and which manages to rock me, as a queer man, to my very core.

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On the Poetry of John Wieners

Dominic Hale

Edited by Avani Udgaonkar

Art by Figgy Guyver http://www.instagram.com/themineralfact/

In 2015, a new edition of John Wieners’ (1934-2002) selected poems was published by Seattle’s Wave Books in the US, and by Enitharmon Press in Europe. Supplication collects work from as far back as 1958 by one of the more inimitable, underrated, and devastating American poets of the last century, a writer who allies an almost anachronistic queer lyric abject to the hopeful projectivist experimentation of Charles Olson. Having studied at Black Mountain College and lived in Boston, New York, and San Francisco, Wieners is variously grouped with the Black Mountain, Beat and New York poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance, his writing often apparently overshadowed by better known figures such as Olson, Frank O’Hara, and Allen Ginsberg. This is a great shame. When set alongside a radical politics and praxis anathema to the neoliberal academy, and an experimentalism that repels classification, it’s evident why Wieners isn’t a widely taught writer. He ought to be, in my opinion, one of the most popular poets of the post-war period, and I’m profoundly grateful for his work’s courage, delicacy, and strength.

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Letters I Never Sent To You by Paula Varjack

Frederick Alexander

Edited by Toby Sharpe

Art: ‘Want and Need’ by Olivia Twist http://www.yesoliviatwist.com/

I would like to introduce Paula Varjack’s Letters I Never Sent To You as a text that may be used in an academic curriculum. During my undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh, I became involved with the Scottish and UK live literature performance network. Through this scene, I became aware of Varjack’s theatre work, in particular her solo performance ‘Show Me The Money,’ a piece of documentary theatre that explores the economics of artistry under austerity. I was excited for the release in 2015 of her debut collection, Letters I Never Sent To You, especially in the context of her previous work.

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Guapa by Saleem Haddad

Ralph Haddad
Editing by Toby Sharpe

Cover art by Emanuele Ragnisco

When I first read Guapa, I was taken aback by how relevant the book was to my own life. The narrative follows a queer Arab protagonist, as he navigates a day in his life in an unnamed Arab country. The opening scene sees the main character, Rasa, the morning after his grandmother – with whom he lives – catches him in bed with another man. This opening scene sets the tone for the entire narrative – themes of anxiety, self-doubt, tension, hopelessness, and shame come to dominate the story. It was the first book I read where I thought to myself: “Yes. This is it. This guy understands it.” The author, Saleem Haddad, is a self-identified queer man of various heritages – among them Lebanese, Iraqi, and Palestinian. The book itself follows the fairly conservative form of the conventional English novel; it does not claim to reinvent the wheel. It is not the most experimental work with a queer element that was published in 2016, but it is exceptional and refreshing in its content. Guapa was published originally in English under a publisher based in New York. The novel quickly received wide acclaim from contemporary Arab authors, such as Randa Jarrar, and ended up on many end-of-year lists on media platforms such as BuzzFeed and the Guardian. Haddad himself ended up on Out magazine’s one hundred most influential people of 2016.

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