recently started reading French writer Marie NDiaye's novel "My Heart Hemmed In" (the Two Lines Press english translation). i'm not finished but i'm really enjoying it. the novel begins in a nightmare where the protagonist in midlife, established in her profession as a teacher, suddenly starts to experience extreme, violent prejudice from people around her. it's never fully explicated what this prejudice is ostensibly about, although NDiaye has apparently given interviews where she relates it to France's rightward turn into increased racism during her life, which led her to emigrate from France although she's considered one of its foremost living writers. the protagonist and her husband are assaulted in the street; her husband suffers a critical injury in one of these assaults, and everyone agrees he "can't go to the hospital" because of his unspecified social difference, that the danger of abuse in the medical context is too great, so he spends the majority of the book lying in bed seeming to slowly die, but that is only the beginning of the violence. the rest of the novel so far also dissects the narrator's own relationship to France's institutions of cultural authority, snobbery, prejudice and class privilege in her life up to that point -- the people she herself has chosen to shun -- while she also navigates this almost supernatural hostility. my favorite character so far is a sex worker from the protagonist's hometown, approximately the same age as the middle-aged protagonist, who it's revealed has been chilling with the protagonist's ex-husband, set up with a laptop in the protagonist's former home office in a dragon-print negligee to do admin, financially supporting the ex-husband off her SW income. when the protagonist stops by and discovers this, the sex worker is just like "hey girl it's been so long what's up" and doesn't seem to notice or care that the protagonist is offended by her existence.
somewhat related: the UK's really going off the deep end re: transgender people in a way that terrifies me. i'm not sure whether they're exporting it here or we're experting it there, since trump on behalf of the heritage foundation prefigured this ruling by seeking to retroactively invalidate trans people's corrected IDs in the US, similarly to how the UK has just made its "gender recognition certificates" issued to trans people functionally useless. if you're here you're probably already paying attention to this somewhat but did you know that the UK's supreme court ruling is also intepreted by the administrative apparatus to functionally ban women-only organizations from including both cis and trans women and men-only organizations from accepting both cis and trans men? this means that no one the UK government claims jurisdiction over is actually fully free to make choices about associating with trans people even in their non-work, non-school, non-governmental life. the UK government is also interpreting it to mean that trans people are not just mandated to use the wrong bathroom, they are actually specifically not allowed in those bathrooms either. i still hate even talking about "bathrooms" related to transgender people because it's such a blatant psyop designed to make you associate gender nonconformity with shit and piss, middle school humiliation, and the smell of bleach, when what all queer people need most for our dignity and continued existence as a culture is unions to protect from retaliation in the workplace and rents controlled at a quarter of what they are now, those are our community's most critical issues just like other working-class people. i really think the average person anywhere in the world does not give this much of a fuck about making trans people miserable and it's representative of the failure to ensure functioning democracy to be governed by elitists without personalities who tyrannize people for gender wrongthink. one hopes this UK ruling will face some legal challenge but what kind of hope do we have for a meaningful change for the better in this busted world?
a passage from "My Heart Hemmed In" that i couldn't help imagining when i read it as a conversation between two trans people:
“Everything you’re being made to endure,” she says, “as if you were guilty, but people were forbidden to punish you and so everyone’s taking their vengeance in their own way.”
[...]
"We’re exactly like you,” I say.
“So you think,” she says, “but, oh God, you don’t understand, and I don’t know how to… You’re so different, so profoundly…excessive, but either you don’t know it or, who knows, you refuse to see it, although, once again, this isn’t exactly about you as such, and…and the disgust and hostility you inspire in some people, not me, oh not me, is something you can’t feel toward yourselves, at least not yet, and… Forgive me, this is so hard.… You have something in your face that people can’t stand to see…not on any face… and it’s something truly repugnant, not for me, no, not yet, although…that will come, perhaps [...] nothing supernatural about it, only the same spiteful revulsion that everyone’s begun to feel toward people like you and your husband, which keeps growing and growing, and well yes, it’s not easy to resist, it’s not easy at all…”
“So it’s a sort of fashion, is that what you’re trying to say?” I ask.
“No,” she answers, “it’s a rage!”
and just for fun here's a bit from The Thief's Journal by Genet, which i also haven't finished:
Like a rock in a river, pride breaks through and divides contempt, bursts it.
i'm hoping that this reads as me drawing a venn diagram rather than a parallel, because that's what i intend. we can't lift our own burden alone, so we have to help our neighbors shoulder theirs.
i love it when i discover a new author who's written several books and i get to look forward to the rest. anyways if 1 person is reading this for some reason, have a good day.