…when I come up for air

🌊                                                                                                                 

for the people below the surface trying to emerge^[i]

doing something illicit in secret with a public view^[ii]

I’ve been caught up thinking about transition, crisis, safety, surfaces, discretion, (in)visibility and making a difference.

I read etymology like I read astrology; superficially glossing over the surface of words, things and meanings, tempered with a pleasure for fantasy in trying to make sense of myself, the worlds I’ve inherited and the communities with whom I share these worlds. It’s a kind of reading while being cute, playful, ridiculous and I believe every moment of it, sometimes to a fault.

It excites me that crisis, transition, discretion and making a difference partially share root words, root meanings and/or root consequences.

To return to astrology for a hot second, my Co-Star tells me:

You want people to completely understand you, yet you also insist on protecting yourself from being seen.

And if that isn’t SUCH a MOOD.

I’ve been feeling out this transitional period of resettling in this place, this place which is different to the way I last left it. I’ve been feeling out my transition within this transitional period—not settling in this body and not settling in how this body is perceived.

Yes, Co-Star, I am protecting myself from being seen. Because being seen and feeling seen are not the same thing.

Being seen in this place is to know your surface, and how others perceive it, might not account for what lies below the surface. It is to live with and against the sticky risks of misreading and mischaracterisation.

Feeling seen is to know your surface and what lies below have been perceived without incongruence. It is to know that your movements, struggles and flailing below the surface are shining in shimmers above the surface.

Being seen can be dangerous. Feeling seen can give you life.

There’s a crisis at my surface and I’m trying not to tread water. I don’t feel safe to present in the same ways I had been before coming back. So, that kind of transitioning had to be put on hold—it had to be severed.

SHE Barbados (Sexuality, Health & Empowerment), a local activist group which supports the lives of queer femmes and trans* folks, helped me actualise a different way of living in transition. In doing something secret below the surface, they are helping me to make a difference above the surface:

Each day, you let it melt into you, you let it drop below the surface. The ripples it leaves move with the kind of slowness and subtlety that can keep you undetectable—it could hide itself in raindrops. And with each day, you feel a little bit different—it could hardly be measured except for maybe that little tingle in your nipples and a fresh clinginess from the grasp of your shirt. You feel a little bit softer and you walk with a little more rhythm—and I don’t think that’s chemical, I think you’re just happier that you could hold your own narrative again, that your drowned life could find another kind of breath below the surface. Maybe it is chemical, a pill that lets you breathe underwater.

Throughout this process while catching up with SHE, discretion has come up as something that’s complicating the work I’m doing. Discretion is invaluable to the work being done by SHE, Equals and other local queer activist groups. It is the work of making queer life possible below a sometimes hostile and breathless surface. It is the work of providing a future, surviving into a future liveable above the surface.

With discretion in mind, how do you witness, write, document and account for lives, bodies and practices that have a complicated and risky relationship to visibility and being seen? How do you talk about discreet lives discreetly? How can one feel seen without being seen? How might visual practice be drowned to speak appropriately and sensitively to life below the surface?

If you must drown, drown glamorously.

🌊

I was on a sailboat yesterday. I meant to bring my camera with me, and I did just that. What I didn’t bring was my SD card. So, with the coast only in sight and no longer beneath my feet, my camera looked back at me bluntly, “No Memory.”

I couldn’t remember with my camera so now I’m trying to remember in other ways. Unlike my camera, my memory is a little unreliable in that it likes to wander. And I like to remember fictively.

I have conversations with another loved one, Ark Ramsay, as a way of coming up for air. There’s a question I’ve been holding with them:

What does it mean to lose an island?

We’re talking about leaving, about being able to leave, about having left, about having had to leave. We’re talking about different ways queer life becomes possible, about how queer life isn’t possible for certain bodies under certain conditions. We’re talking about threads of queer life in the Caribbean always being visualised / envisioned / remembered at the edges. Queer life pushed to the horizon. Queer life at the bottom of the ocean. Queer life in the thick of cane fields. Queer life in the depths of the mangrove. Queer life buried in the gully. Queer life at the edge of the shoreline. Queer life beyond the horizon. Edges, fringes, depths, margins, elsewheres.

We’re also talking about rising sea levels, about flat islands, about memories and futures now waterlogged, now grieved.

What does it mean to lose an island

What does it mean to shatter our involvement in a world

Staying with no memory,

I’m on the sailboat again. I can’t remember all the parts of the sea I saw. I can’t really see below the surface. We’re moving too fast and I can’t read the deep. I can’t read the dark. A pattern of black and blue that can’t be registered. Can’t be remembered. Too close and yet not close enough. Gliding across the surface of things.

There’s a paper kite caught in a gust offshore. Gliding above the surface of things. It’s untethered, bobbing up and down, its tail tentacling below. It looks stuck in a loop, the ghost of a jellyfish caught in flight. Offshore and unremembered.

Jellyfish populations are ballooning in warming waters. Lionfish too.

You see a lionfish for the first time at Gibbes Beach. It’s too close to shore, too close to home, too close for comfort. You swim back in a hurry, hoping its spines won’t burst your bubble.

You remember Sara Ahmed:

Queer becomes a matter of how things appear, how they gather, how they perform, to create the edges of spaces and worlds.^[iii]

When Ark and I gather, yes, it’s like coming up for air in a world that is sometimes difficult to bear. It’s like holding a bubble between us. That air we hold between us helps us to remember that it is real. That we are real. That our worlds are real and their edges are marked by our lives.

My other friend’s promise is ringing in my ears:

“I will write you a real answer when I come up for air”

We come up for air in each other’s company, hoping to find a real answer. 

The roots of the word dysphoria point to the unbearable or that which is difficult to bear.

Jellyfish populations are ballooning in warming waters. Lionfish too.

The same can’t be said for starfish:

There is a wave of unusually warm water […] where all of the sea stars are dying off. These may impact both on starfish and on echinoderm populations in general, and a ciliate protozoan parasite (Orchitophrya stellarum) of starfish, which eats sperm and effectively emasculates male starfish, thrives at higher temperatures.^[iv]

Warmer waters and gender-queering parasites, a life unbearable for sea stars. They have been seen severing their own limbs, trying to regenerate new possibilities. Failing, it is a fatal response to dysphoria.

And Sara Ahmed, again, reminds you:

This is a choice between two different kinds of death. The task is to trace the lines for a different genealogy, one that would embrace the failure […] as the condition of possibility for another way of dwelling in the world.^[v]

No memory:

I can’t remember exactly what “queer death drive” means but if I remember how death appears in a deck of tarot cards, it always refers to change. So, to fiction my lack of memory and my lack of expertise, “queer death drive” might refer to a strange, obscene impulse towards change, at any cost and by any means necessary.

Sea stars, emasculated and wasting away—the queered resonance speaks volumes, none of which I can read.

A different kind of remembering:

A childhood friend from a different life, a young white boy marked poor by the red of his skin, finds a slimy fire-red starfish boiling in the shallows of a reef. It moves like earthworms and glows like a swollen uvula. The boy takes it home in a jar of seawater, and all I can remember is that after a couple of days, that red starfish suffocated and dissolved from being so out of place, survived only by this little red-white boy.

With each passing day in my body, I’m anticipating grief for lost selves, lost bodies, lost conditions for being and lost limbs. With each passing day in my body, I’m anticipating this grief which makes other kinds of dwelling in the world possible.

If “disorientation is unevenly distributed,” meaning that “some bodies more than others have their involvement in the world called into crisis,” and that “disorientation shatters our involvement in a world,” I need to think along with starfish living in a dysphoria of warmer waters and emasculating parasites.^[vi] I need to believe that starfish severing their limbs is a survival tactic responding to dysphoria and disorientation, even if it is a failed one.

At this moment of failure, such objects “point” somewhere else or they make what is “here” become strange.^[vii]

I need to trust that disoriented starfish are trying to trace the lines for a different genealogy, one that can embrace this failure, as a condition for possibilities for other kinds of involvement in this world. But I also need to dedicate some honest space for grief, knowing how unbearable this world can be, how dysphoric it can make us feel, that a failed survival tactic is an eclipsing of another queered life.

A wasting sea star is, then, not a sign of queer political agency. It is yet another sign of “a queered political state of the present.”^[viii]

I’m waiting for them in a carpark. They get into my car and before I move off, they hug me with a sigh of relief. It feels like they had been holding their breath since the last time we spoke. And in their touch, it feels like I had been holding my breath too. How had we learned how to hold our breath for that long?

We have a lot to talk about and I don’t know where I’m going. I’m driven to the coast and I don’t really know why. Maybe I think queer life and queer words feel more possible at the edges. So I park at the edges, so we can breathe a little better and speak a little clearer.

Disoriented, dysphoric,

we lose ground, we lose our sense of how we stand; we might even lose our standing. It is not only that queer surfaces support action, but also that the action they support involves shifting grounds, or even clearing a new ground, which allow us to tread a different path. When we tread on paths that are less trodden, which we are not sure are paths at all (is it a path, or is the grass just a little bent?), we might need even more support. The queer table would here refer to all those ways in which queers find support for their actions, including our own bodies, and the bodies of other queers.^[ix]

Here, Sara’s talking about “queer tables” and “queer surfaces” that support queer actions. I admittedly misread “queer surfaces” as a verb and not a noun; that is, to think instead about how queers surface or why queers might (re)surface. It makes a different kind of sense. 

Queers surfacing might “refer to all those ways in which queers find support for their actions, including our own bodies, and the bodies of other queers.”

Or, to put it differently, queers might surface to come up for air, to support each other’s breath, and to remember differently, in a world with no memory, in a world whose memory we might have no place in.

Author Biography

Ada M. Patterson is an artist and writer based between Barbados, London and Rotterdam. She works with masquerade, music, performance, poetry, textiles and video, considering the connections between storytelling, transformation, crisis, grief, rage, disappearance, discretion, self-defence and survival. Exhibitions include “Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s – Now” at Tate Britain, London, and “[H]erkennen Herbouwen: Wonderkamers van het Rotterdams koloniaal verleden” at Kunsthal Rotterdam. She is an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam.

Notes

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