User Profile

When I was in my first years of high school, in the early 2000s, this book was all the rage, especially among the leftist teens from my provincial town who were trying out politics in the alter-globalisation movement. I joined a little, from the sidelines, too shy and awkward, and perhaps a bit too arrogant, to be able to feel part. With the perverse logic of the adolescence, I decided that reading such a cool book would be an uncool thing to do. Too cliché. Urgh. Twenty-plus years later, as a white tourist in India, I decided it was finally time and a good way to immerse myself a little in the country. So cliché that it is original again.

I had a lot of time to read and it kept me very good company. The story moves back and forth between the present (i.e. the 1990s) and the 1960s, when siblings Rahel and Esta were children, living with their mother Ammu, their grandma, and a host of other relatives. They childhood is a sort of creepy lost paradise: happy and tragic, dark but not as dark as the lives that await them. Gender, class and cast are grappled with in a way that felt, to me, quite useful. All the characters felt to me very believable and three-dimensional, except perhaps for Velutha, the smart, handsome, sweet Paravan-caste carpenter who is uncomfortably saint-like. I should also mention that, although the story is very sad indeed, the language is extremely playful, sometimes in a chuckle-out-loud sort of way.

*Estha had always been a quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy exactly when (the year, if not the month or day) he had stopped talking. Stopped talking altogether, that is. The fact is that there wasn't an "exactly when." It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticeable quietening. As though he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing left to say. Yet Estha's silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never noisy. It wasn't an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of estivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through the dry season, except that in Estha's case the dry season looked as though it would last forever.

Over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background of wherever he was--into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets--to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye. It usually took strangers awhile to notice him even when they were in the same room with him. It took them even longer to notice that he never spoke. Some never noticed at all.

Estha occupied very little space in the world*

I read this book in my twenties, but managed to completely erase any memory of it. It isn't just that I didn't remember the plot: I didn't even retain a vague impression of what it was like for me to read it. This time around, my mind was blown. Perhaps even more blown because I read the book before and after going to see the play that has been showing at the ITA.

I don't want to draw a point by point comparison, because that will feel like I'm dissing the play, which is a perfectly enjoyable adaptation, with some very hot dances. The main issue may be that, if one looks only at the plot, the book is a crazy over-the-top gay melodrama. But, Baldwin being Baldwin, it manages to also be a very nuanced book about masculinity, sexuality and inequalities - in the best, non-didactic possible way. The notion of 'being out' is refracted through the different characters. The wealthy older men in the book, Jacques and Guillame, can afford to be 'out', but pay a high price, despised by everyone, including David and Giovanni. They are also creepy af. Giovanni is out enough to admit he is in a desperate sort of love with David, but his courage seems to be born out of loneliness and alienation. There is nothing 'gay' about him. He despises the effeminate men preying on boys in the bars, and prefers to take refuge in his room. As a poor Italian migrant Giovanni is clearly racialised in David's eyes, not quite Black, but not white either, and class and race arguably are as much of an obstacle to this doomed love. And doomed it certainly is, relentlessly so. Every sentence is beautiful and terrible.

Despite its title, this book is only approximately 20% of lesbian novel. The rest is "high brow author reflecting on her creative process in a fictionalized interview form", which is about as bad as it sounds. To be fair to the author, the format works in as far as it forces one (i.e. me) to long for the lesbian novel bits in order to find out what happens, and also to enjoy some vicarious sex/romance. That's an interesting literary device, but not enough to sustain a book.

I have low patience for artists talking about being artists in general terms, and found the interview bits fairly pretentious and boring. This especially stood out because the author is clearly ambivalent about lesbian romance novels: I had the feeling that she wants to like them, knows that not liking them is uncool [controversial opinion: nothing wrong with disliking them, you do you Renee], but somehow cannot get pass the fact that she doesn't. So, she feels self-conscious about her romance writing, constantly wants to interject, justify, self-deprecate, let us know she knows better than that...when it's the other 80% of the book that needs some more self-awareness. Harsh, I know. The author does sound lovely though, and I hear some people enjoyed it.

In this age of aggressive queer-baiting and pink-washing, sometimes I hear that 'representation is important' and want to bang my head against the wall. Fuck representation. I really do not need a Disney princess to look like me, thank you very much. Then I come across a book like this, clearly written by a queer person for queer people because of a genuine desire to share, and I calm down. Because it is of course important to feel not-alone.

What can I say, I love A.K. Summers, I want her to be my friend and build shelves together. She is an old-style butch lady, part of an identity group that is almost disappearing. She knows it and mourns it in the book, at times perhaps coming a bit close to a 'why does gender have to be so complicated' stance, or at least a 'youth these days' stance, but she is saved but what seems like an honest sense of curiosity and openness to try and learn why fewer younger people feel able or willing to identify as masculine women, a desire I see expressed through the list of reading recommendations at the end of the book.

I also love the book's graphic style. It really has the vibe of a DIY internet strip, seeming rough and ready compared to the many recent graphic novels where every single frame could become a picture to hang on the wall, and every detail is carefully thought through.

Butch pregnancy sounds tough, but in the way many things in many lives are tough. A.K. Summers if freaked out by her body, feels lonely, is in pain, doesn't feel up to the task - all things that are surely related to her gender identity but also probably quite common, if unspoken, experiences for pregnant people? In one of the last spreads, she's giving birth and imagines herself on a jumping board, realising that whether she jumps or not, she's going fall: she no longer needs to feel she won't be able to do it, because she's in the middle of it and there is no stopping it.