it's not that deep
it's not that deep
a first-person essay by "Ponyboy" author Eliot Duncan
Hello!! PTK here! This is our third installment from Eliot Duncan, author of the upcoming novel, “Ponyboy”. You can read (and watch!) his first poem with us here and his intro interview here. Now, let’s jump to Eliot’s essay…
it’s not that deep | by Eliot Duncan
So I wrote my masters thesis on first person narrative. There were these questions to choose from. The one I chose was something about the strengths and weaknesses of first person narrative. I’ve always gravitated towards the first person, both in reading and writing. There’s an immediacy. A directness. Someone told me once that novels are studies of consciousness, and I think that’s how I see writing now. A kind of privileged swoop into the mind, the world of someone else. It goes without saying that there’s been an enormous bias on whose consciousness gets to be published, on whose ‘I’ we get to experience.
French theorist Monique Wittig physicalizes this problem. In The Lesbian Body, she slashes through the ‘Je’. She creates, ‘J/e’. The slash symbolizes a place for largely untold perspectives in literature to slip in. She does this, arguing that ‘Je’ is a placeholder that does not hold or constitute her as a subject. Using this framework, the canonical heft of literature—of stories told by the same voices of the same gender and of the same race—one can see through lines of moving aberrant identities, slashing themselves into Wittig’s ‘J/e’, carving space, making history, making themselves, for themselves in the first-person narrative.
When I think about my ‘J/e’, I think about being trans, about being bipolar, about being a gay, feminine man, being a freak, about being an addict and alcoholic in recovery. These signifiers have become less and less important to me and are mere facts of my living. What once felt like a solid, unmoveable identitarian clench has become an irrelevant shrug. My separateness is lost on me.
It wasn’t until I read Eileen Myles that I realized I could also pursue writing seriously. It wasn’t until I had the privilege of experiencing their ‘J/e’ that I got space to swivel into my own. The first person is generative, it gives permission. The identitarian signifier of transmasculine is important but, like any categorical, it can be limiting. Because there has been so little in the scope of the history of literature published by other transmasculine people, the examples that exist are packaged with the signifier of trans identity almost as if it’s more important than the work itself.
I fear this, as a writer. The notion that my identity will proceed the writing. I mean, I’m lucky to be published, and PONYBOY being situated in the trans-zeitgeist makes sense and it’s where I want to be. However, I feel a level of dissonance with that reality because I don’t think there’s anything particularly fascinating with transness. It actually feels deeply banal. I cringe at the idea that my gender could be interesting. I resist the spectacle of trans identity. Of course, there are certain obstacles I encounter but I have secure housing, support from family, healthcare, work to do, friends to see, people to fuck, poems to jot down. My experience as a trans writer does not propel me into a performative moral obligation to say or do things aligned with my identity. There is not an assumed consensus that unites all trans people. I can support the other trans people in my life by my actions, by how I show up in a room. I just have no interest in reading lines in a script that I didn’t write.
I do, of course, understand the necessity to read work by other trans people, of course, and I resound my hopes on more and more work published by trans authors. In the same breath, I, more than anything, want to be some guy over there, typing at his computer in some cafe. After years of holding tight to identity as a way to claim my own life, I now want it all to melt off of me. To wade in the multiplicity, the contradiction, the simple fact of being a person in the world. What I want to matter more than any fractal of gender is the medium I work in: language.
I don’t write this from the vantage point of someone who passes. It’s not that I am living my life without the constant reminder from the outside world that I am visibly trans. Three years on T and post top surgery, I get the she and the her almost every day from strangers. It’s not that that friction doesn’t bother me, it’s that I decided it doesn’t have to matter. I, with the help of a friend, decided to believe that strangers just mean the gay ‘she/her’ when they address me. What matters here is that I don’t hide from myself anymore. People who get it, do. A lot of people won't, and that’s fine too.
There’s this Baldwin quote, where he says something about how he used to think his pain was the thing that separated him from the world but that it’s actually the thing that connects him to all living things. That’s it for me. My slashed ‘J/e’, jotted in my notebook time and time again, feels less dire, less vicious with exclamation.
Being trans is just a human experience. One that, hopefully, will become less and less sensationalized, projected as something new, something that spurs factional opinion because, in the end, it’s just really not that deep that some people are trans and that those people also go for long walks, have breakups, drink water and write books.
🎁 “Ponyboy” Giveaway & Writing Contest:
Enter to win a FREE copy of PONYBOY! Terms and Conditions apply.
Giveaway Instructions:
Enter via the form below
You can double your chances and make another entry by following @poetrytrapperkeeper on instagram and commenting on the pinned post (“PONYBOY GIVEAWAY”) by by 10pm GMT on June 7th 2023.
Four entrants will be randomly selected on June 8th, 2023.
Writing Contest:
Comment a response on any of the ELIOT DUNCAN X POETRY TRAPPER KEEPER Substack posts OR email your response to poetrytrapperkeeper@gmail.com. This response can be a poem, reflection, anecdote, story - whatever you are moved to write!!
All entries must be received by 10pm GMT on June 7th 2023.
Eliot will choose the winner, and we’ll announce it on June 9th, 2023.
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