Tag: Germany and the Germans

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Enveloped: Covers, Openings, and the Outside Chance of Queer Interiority

“Dark Horse,” indeed.

Down memory lane.  Sounds rather cozy, when you put it like that.  The kind of trip an afternoon with an old photo album on your lap can afford.  But that is not the lap I have been taking, the road I just went down and took back.  Not even a road, really, and certainly no one-way street.

I am talking real, physical travel by plane, train and automobile to meet with real people that, over the years, have become almost imaginary to me, so distant is the past I spent in their presence and so unreliable my recall of them by way of ephemera—a smattering of snapshots rather too random, selective and pixellated to seem true-to-life.  You know, recollections turned into collectibles, keepsakes of what is lost—an ersatz of essence that leaves you with a sketchy, shifting narrative and a suspicion that the storytelling is being botched by an unreliable curator remiss in handling the responsibility of keeping and making sense of a life encoded in delicate objects that are imbued with an arcane knowledge lodged in the personal reminiscences of more than one person.

Quite a spaghetti junction, that fabled memory lane.  Prosaically speaking, although that has never been my chosen mode of articulation, I recently returned from a visit to my native Germany—or the Bundesland of North Rhine-Westphalia, to be precise.  As on my previous trip the year before, I caught up with family and friends, some of whom I had not seen in over forty years.

So as not to overshadow the momentousness of that rare occasion, I did not get to witness the once-in-what’s-left-of-my-lifetime solar eclipse, the spectacle of which we let pass us by while the three of us were ensconced indoors engaged in an exchange of memories.  No ill-fitting goggles or colanders required.

Just as fittingly, the coincidence of that celestial event occurring on the eve of our remarkable reunion has been commemorated as a new beginning by one of my friends, who set up a WhatsApp group titled “Sonnenfinsternis 26,” “Sonnenfinsternis” being German for solar eclipse.  We did not miss a thing—just each other and the opportunity to make new memories, until now.

I even spent a night—the first in thirty-nine years—in my former bedroom at my mother’s house, a 1970s bungalow I first revisited, albeit briefly, in 2022.  During that reencounter, I set foot once more in the shared bathroom, virtually unchanged, where, for about a year, from May 1985 to June 1986, I photographed myself—or my body, at any rate—to image and imagine my queer identity.

A time capsule of 1970s interior design, demolished not long after my 2022 reencounter with it, the bathroom, and the poignancy of my experience of which, led me to conceive The Return of/to the Boy in the Avocado Bathtub, a narrative art project of which my current project, Enveloped, is a prequel of sorts.

Continue reading “Enveloped: Covers, Openings, and the Outside Chance of Queer Interiority”

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His Mother’s Voice

So, there I was, at my grandmother’s side—a reunion twenty-one years in the making—when the phone atop the slippery hospital bed table rang us right out of our reminiscences.  I reached over, handed Ella the receiver and, in an impulse of synesthetic kindness, turned to look out of the window, as if our ears could be as easily averted as our eyes.  Unable to listen away, I could readily deduce the identity of the caller, both from my grandmother’s tone of voice and from the nature of her greeting.  It was her daughter, my mother, on the line; and being so close to the phone made me wriggle in the chair I wished I had vacated instead of deputizing my eyes to take a hike.

I knew that, in a conciliatory gesture, grandmother would eventually pass the phone to me, and with it the onus to act polite in the absence of the kindness such an imposition was unlikely to inspire.  You see, the last word exchanged between mother and myself had been a reference to the very spot of my anatomy I was now itching to shift.

During that fateful call, the relationship terminating vocable formed part of an expletive suggesting the inconceivable meeting of the listener’s glossa and the speaker’s gluteus maximus, as if what escapes us in our often less than choice utterances did not suffice to render the propinquity of kisser and keister conspicuous.

The posterior in question had been mine, or rather the figurative proffering of same.  Thereafter, a silence lasting a quarter century, not counting the telling incommuniqués that are the occasional scratches on the surface of glossy picture postcards—those ocular proofs of our inability or unwillingness to hear out whatever say others might still be having it in them to impart.

My gut feeling was to sit still, now that the time to steal away had passed; but Oma had gone through enough, especially of late, to be made to endure such a display of filial disaffection.  So, there in the impersonality of a hospital room, I talked to my mother for the first time in what amounted to nearly half of my father’s lifetime—except that the voice I heard did not sound like the one I thought of as my mother’s.

The momentary lack of recognition bespoke our estrangement. Now, I hardly expected the phone cord to reach right down into my navel; but, as it turns out, there is nothing intrinsically umbilical about a mother’s vocal cords, either.  That I might one day struggle to match my aural memory of mother with the vocal presence of her had, barring dementia, never occurred to me before.

The regional Rhineland accent seemed far more pronounced to me who had been brought up by her speaking High German. The timbre, too, was altered.  The voice was lower now, as if to compensate for the robustness that had once been wanting in the listener, her only son, whose androgynous adolescence had called traditional definitions of manhood into question years ago.  The tone was as jovial as a pat on the back, a nudge, a kick in the ribs or some such gesture standing in for an embrace.  The sense of the words I scarcely took in, so taken aback was I by their sound.

Had I really crawled that far from my cradle no longer to know by ear the woman who bore me? What was that, triumph? A validation of selfhood? Or was it an indictment? The conceit of “mother tongue” never sounded more foreign to me.