Nine months earlier, a surgeon opened my chest to remove my breasts, for that was the action I had decided I needed. The path to that moment twisted through a forested span of time, years spent observing how the image reflected back at me in bathroom mirrors, through screen doors at night when lamps took on a yellow blush, in photographs where I looked at my own face, my own shoulders, and suddenly another person’s chest stood before me. It marked a distance from my own self I had never confronted—a mismatch that grew from unease into shame, then vaulted steadily toward a vast estrangement. In this wild churn of abjection, trans poetics offered me a language upon which my future reflection could lean.
Poetry is a form that relies on—or conjures—the failure of language. Sentences will forever fall short of capturing the intricate subtleties of our human life, our natural world. And so lyric emerges, liberated from the constraints of grammar, its cadence pressed to the measure of music. Gaston Bachelard remarks, “Imagination is not… the faculty of forming images of reality; it is rather the faculty of forming images which go beyond reality, which sing reality.” Imagery, in its poetic sense, ignores the strictures of the real, unconcerned with replication, devoted instead to the expansive terrain of attempt. In this way, simile and metaphor extend beyond what’s possible to draw us nearer to what’s true. So too is the terrain of trans becoming—imagining one’s body beyond the limits of its given lines.
I only write when alone because I need to sound out each line in order to arrive at the next. I am following the impulse of music, trusting that it will bring me to meaning.
Reading Taylor Johnson’s debut collection Inheritance invited me into the dialogue of trans poetics. His lyric work floats in the delicate space between image and music, somehow taking shape without becoming fixed. In his poem “Trans is Against Nostalgia,” Johnson writes, “Every day I build the boat, / my body boat, hold for the unique one, / the formless soul, the blue fire / that coaxes my being into being.” I gasped when I reached this opening stanza, having long referred to my own body as my bodyboat, only now encountering language extended beautifully into image by someone I had never met, describing exactly what I had felt.
Later in the poem, Johnson writes, “There is a new / language I’m learning by speaking it.” This is a line upon which I can lean so much of my journey through gender’s uncharted terrain. Aishvarya Arora, author of Mr.Time, writes “my song / only appears when it leaves me.” Both Arora and Johnson are speaking to the language of the trans body’s emerging becomings, its reach toward its next form, which, they argue, is a sonic mystery made legible only through its articulation.
The title of my debut poetry collection is HUM. In Urdu—my mother tongue—the word hum can signify both “we” and “I.” In English, it stands as a gesture of sound. A gesture is a movement that underscores or expresses an idea, yet it is not the idea itself. When we hum a tune, we are not reproducing speech, but approximating sound. I only write when alone because I need to sound out each line in order to arrive at the next. I am following the impulse of music, trusting that it will bring me to meaning.
As trans people, each articulation of who we are is also an articulation of who we will no longer be.
When the surgeon asks how I want my scars to look, whether I want them shaped the way a man’s pecs would frame his chest, I am caught off guard. Manhood is not the song I’ve been singing, but boyhood remains a tune still humming inside me. Arora’s poem begins:
i’m not trying to be a man how
birdsong isn’t trying to be
an orchestra a murmuration isn’t
trying to be a spray
of fighter jets.
When I read these lines, the negation of my desire—the longing for the absence of breasts—finds something present with which it can recognize its own form. What once felt like me alone in a surgeon’s office becomes a we.
As trans people, each articulation of who we are is also an articulation of who we will no longer be. Rather than the rehearsed public arrival, this life is a continuous, public striving. So too is the poet’s journey—a series of declarations, and a repetition of change. Johnson, in his poem ‘Chiaroscuro,’ writes, “beautiful projection, boy in the mirror, boy in my mind. /…I want / to grow into you, and then abandon your / imprecise naming.” These lines lead me to understand that poetry itself is a kind of imperfect naming, yet a naming nonetheless. Language may fail to capture experience, but it does not fail to generate it. As I read Johnson’s work, a slow mirror rises on the page. I ride its music toward my own reflection, which initially appears foggy and unclear. As a fellow poet, I carry that haze into my own words, leaning toward lyric for an image through which I can become.
“I have been made anew / like the first hour of sun / after days of rain.” These are the opening lines of the penultimate poem in HUM, titled “Trans/figuration.” My making—my trans becoming—emerges not only from the surgeon’s knife and the barber’s clippers and the touch of my beloved, but from the trans poets who came before and beside me, offering a conversation I may lift my lyric toward, a music that voices my reality. The later lines of “Trans/figuration” read: “I was given a cage I have / come to see as a gift / for it is a cage I can see.” The failure of language and the narrow lines of prescribed gender are the iron bars. Poetry, these poets—fists—pulling them apart. And so the poem closes in the way any life begins: “I am taking my body / beyond its shape.”
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Hum: Poems, by Sanam Sheriff is published by the University of Nebraska Press.
