🏳️‍⚧️🇵🇸

🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️transfag (he/him)🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️ who likes poetry and things. blanket CW for posts about abuse/trauma. I post a lot of nonfiction/memoir and fiction quotes pertaining to abuse/trauma (including erotic fiction.)

[darkcomedies]

my understanding and interpretation of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” cannot be untangled from the fact that it was originally published to follow her poem about childhood sexual abuse, “Rage”

[darkcomedies]

i just don’t think it was unintentional that these were presented flush against each other

[laciere]

"The first year of transition, Amy discovered, was about learning how much you've lied to yourself. How unreliable your own self-asssessments were and how little the sense of self from your past could be put to good use in transition. The awful part was watching what therapy called "your coping mechanisms" flame out. There was a moment in which you could catch a glimpse of how scared you'd been and the degree of pain in which you'd been living as a boy, before that pain and fear actually hit you and shredded you. The same way in which 1950s films captured men in early atomic bomb tests watching the flash and mushroom cloud rise, marveling at the Shiva-esque destruction for just a split second before the shockwave and heat sent their searing bodies flying backward, along with the camera recording those bodies, and after which nothing could be seen, only felt.

And then you developed new coping mechanics, new language, new walls to keep yourself safe. The problem with the poppers was that they made Amy too dumb to keep all that cognitive machinery going. It all ground to a halt, and instead of the new lies, she fell into direct contact with a raw fact: She was a girl in love with a girl. It was overwhelming. It was all she had ever hoped for."

Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters (2021, One World)

[laciere]

""she's not intentionally cruel. That's why I say she's just got, like, personality disorders. And she ends up hurting people, so then she's alone, which makes her lonely enough to do it even more."

Amy didn't know how much to believe. The tendency of lay queers to assign other people psychological pathologies struck her as boring and tautological: A certain person does a thing because that person is the type of person who is compelled to do that thing. No capacity for either change or responsibility or even a consideration of the why, much less the how, of a particular human. Why does the cat torture the injured mouse? Because the cat is a cat -- and so shall it be forever. Besides, rumor was, famously stoic Ricky had gotten drunk and then loudly, inconsolably, and theatrically sobbed in the corner of a Hey Queen! party the night he discovered Reese had left him to move in with a finance guy. Maybe he had to pathologize Reese into a sociopathic, manipulative, emotional mastermind in order to explain his own vulnerability to heartbreak."

Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters (2021, One World)

[laciere]

"A few years back, Reese might have thought their play extremely racy, titillating, and far beyond the sexual ken of most women -- she thought of the desire for violence in sex as some kind of resulting damage from being trans. Then, at around age twenty-three, she watched the Catherine Deneuve film, Belle de Jour, and recognized her own sexuality in the upper-crust Belle's secret desire to be mistreated and abused as a whore. Which meant that the strain of masochism that ran through her sexuality was only as racy as a fifty-year-old film that shared a marquee with romances starring Doris Day. Everything about Reese's sexuality, she realized, was banal. Sex at the edge of abuse is banal. And when it comes to gender, consent makes it all pretend, which left consensual violence lacking real value in Reese's tally of gender affirmation.

In old books she had read, Reese remembered women saying that if your husband doesn't beat you, he doesn't love you, a notion that horrified the feminist in Reese but fit with a perfect logic in one of the dark crevices of her heart. And yeah, liberal feminism -- especially the trans-hating variety -- would have a field day with her. She supposed that they would accuse her of misogyny, of being a secret man, a Trojan horse in slutty lingerie who sought to recapitulate under the guise of womanhood all the abusive tropes that they, in the second wave, had sought to put in the past. But you know what? She didn't make the rules of womanhood; like any other girl, she had inherited them. Why should the burden be on her to uphold impeccable feminist politics that barely served her? The New York Times regularly published op-eds by famous feminists who pointedly ruled her out as a woman. Let them. She'd be over here, getting knocked around, each blow a minor illustration of her place in a world that did its gendering work no matter what you called it. So yeah, Stanley, bring it on. Hit Reese. Show her what it means to be a lady."

Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters (2021, One World)

[laciere]

"The quiet dignity of saying ow anytime a man gets a little rough -- asserting that you are a woman, and thus delicate and capable of sustaining harm. A girl could be twice the size of the man -- that little ow reminds him that he is a man, she is a woman. Once, Reese's friend Catherine was walking home drunk with her boyfriend when he tried to flirt with her by pushing her into a bush. She bounced back out of that bush like an enraged wolverine: spitting, scratching, fighting. For the rest of her relationship with him, he would say, "Careful, Catherine is aggressive," and Catherine would wince, understanding her womanhood was on the line every time. A good woman, she heard in the subtext, would have stayed in the bush and cried. If only some man would push Reese into a bush, she'd know what to do."

Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters (2021, One World)

[laciere]

"As a child in Madison, Wisconsin, Reese had badly wanted a best friends, someone who was yours and you were his. Her early childhood was one of serial BFF-monogamy until sometime in mid-puberty, when the other boys around were made to know -- in some form of shunning -- that being paired as a best friend with someone so feminine pointed toward a clear and uncool faggotry. Later Reese re-narrativized the childhood urge. She hadn't wanted a charming, reliable boy for a best friend; she had wanted a charming, reliable boy for a sexual, romantic, and life companion, and simple framed that as "friend," the only word available to her. She'd found charming plenty of times, but reliable hadn't come her way. So she found a certain comfort in Stanley's possessiveness, his assumption that she was his to install in an apartment as one installs a new sink. His controlling behavior confirmed how badly he wanted her. Anyone who needed her so close, who assumed the right to know where she was at all times, whom she saw, what she wore, was someone who wasn't going away, someone who could be counted upon, not just despite her trans-ness, but for it. This time she felt she'd found reliable, if not charming.

Which is how, in accepting a fifty on the way out of a restaurant from a guy she'd been telling herself looked like a tool who bought scalped tickets to Burning Man, Reese found herself looking at an empty walk-in closet in Stanley's bedroom. It was thirty-five square feet of recessed-halogen-lit floor that amounted to all the physical space in the world over which she held complete dominion -- and even that space really belonged to Stanley. She stared at the empty hangers and thought about how she really had to get better at fighting back, because she had lost not just the upper hand in this battle of a relationship, but all her other limbs as well. As she thought such things, he pointed to a mirror he had recently hung on the back of the closet door and said, "And now, you can spend hours staring at your own reflection, like the parakeet you are.""

Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters (2021, One World)

[laciere]

"Why bother convincing clueless, gun-shy boys on OkCupid of the sexiness of a girl with a cock when there are thousands of men out there who already know it, and among whom you get to have your pick? Want a movie star? You can have one (albeit a B-lister if you're willing to satisfy a guy's curiosity about bottoming for a transsexual, otherwise a C-lister). Want a tech scion to show you his yacht? Great! The ones with powerboats are the best, guys with sailboats will make you pull random ropes, and to imagine yourself as a cool Jackie O is one aspirational self-delusion too far. Want a walking Bruce Weber photograph with washboard abs cut so deep it looks like he's constantly side-lit? Take a couple of male models and save one for later. The only thing you can't have is a decent guy who will take you home for Thanksgiving dinner, but you're not going to get that off a non-fetish site either, so at least have the good sex.

How many girls did Reese know who, to prove themselves that they could be just like every other woman, found themselves sifting through thousands of men on some straight dating site, looking for the non-horrible ones - a task even cis women find awful? And then, how many times had Reese heard about these girls who wasted hours, days, weeks, months trying to find one of the non-horrible ones who would be willing to give a trans woman a try, only to finally end up in his bedroom, standing exposed with only a stupid lacy lingerie set for armor, as he sized up the new-to-him proportions of slender hips to wider shoulders, and nervously muttered that it's not for him?

No way. That shit is way more traumatic than running into any chaser. Go to a fetish site for men who already know they want a trans girl, and select a decent one from among the many begging for you. In matters of the heart, Reese had one firm maxim: You don't get to choose who you fuck, you get to choose from among those who want to fuck you."

Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters (2021, One World)

[2headedtrout]

louise armstrong, "kiss daddy goodnight"

[laciere]

"Bearing witness, formulating the historical self, was immensely important for Holocaust survivors. To tell one's own story, to testify, is an elementary part of what I term "historical citizenship." What is of value is not only participation in the emergence of historical narratives but also in becoming visible as a citizen of history, that is, being part of history. Other forms of historical citizenship might be holding on to a name, a grave, or a memorial. This is why those who survived sought to commemorate their dead families and friends with yizkor bikher and memorial books, as they held names and stories of the murdered victims who were not able to have a grave.

People without history are dust. Those whose testimony has been made structurally impossible are treated as being without value. The narrator of a life story in our culture must always be virtuous or must repent to become virtuous. A sinner who did not repent, the other cosntructed as deviant monster, is a priori sinful, and therefore can never tell their story. A person who has been categorized as devient from the start cannot in this logic have a voice. Since the victim society marked queer victims as deviant, they are barred from being able to tell their whole story. This perspective has shaped Holocaust archives and their politics of collecting, including the decisions of what ought to be collected and what ought not. As historians we work with those sources that exist, directly imprinting on what could be remembered, told, collected, and eventually written as suitable history. The sources that exist shape our own identity, our values, and our judgments.

Emanuel Ringelblum, the great Jewish historian and archivist of the Warsaw ghetto, raised the existential question "Who will write our history?" The queer Holocaust victims have become objects of what Gayatri Spivak has called "epistemic violence." They are not able to bear witness, they are not able to have a voice, and they have been prevented from leaving behind a trace of their own choice in history. They are a people without historical citizenship.

What can we take away from this analysis of erasure in order to write a queer history of the Holocaust? First is the necessity of an archaeological approach. This method allows us to deconstruct and analyse the homophobic stories that often represent the point of departure and which can lead us to traces of the real people emerging from these statements. The resulting studies can recuperate the persons from the homophobic anecdotes. The consequent history will likely still have gaps, but it will offer a narrative more inclusive than the heteronormative master narrative of Holocaust survivors."

-- People Without History Are Dust: Queer Desire in the Holocaust by Anna Hájková (2025, University of Toronto Press)

[laciere]

(note: i'm going to post numerous excerpts of this book. the author acknowledges the existence and persecution of trans people, and it is discussed in the book.)

"Among the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of testimonies by Holocaust survivors there are next to no explicitly queer voices. There are dozens of Holocaust archives with collections of self-narrated testimonies and oral histories, and yet among these are next to no first-person testimonies of people who are willingly engaged in same-sex intimacy and spoke about it. The four known expcetions are all German Jewish men who experienced the persecution as teenagers or young men and whose testimonies exist as published memoirs. The first and best known is the Berlin resistance fighter Gad Beck (*1923). Less well-known are two young German emigrants to the Netherlands who survived their deportation to the concentration camps, Gerald Rosenstein (*1927) and Walter Guttmann (*1928). Only one lesbian, Frieda Belinfante (*1904), a "half-Jewish" Dutch resistance fighter, bore testimony. In fact, while the last thirty years have been a fruitful era for feminist Holocaust scholarship, producing much nuanced and careful work, queer women's experiences are entirely missing. Survivors talking about queer sexual violence are rare, but present.

The absence of queer voices is striking for two reasons: first, the Holocaust is a genocide that has been extensively documented in terms of oral history interviews. Second, bearing witness was for survivors a meaningful reaction to coming to terms with mass violence. There are testimonies from nearly everyone, even magicians and people in mental asylums. Even people who experienced matters long considered too traumatic to speak about, such as victims of sexual violence or parents who killed their children, have given testimony.

One can observe the omission of queer experience in the case of the USC Shoah Foundation, which runs the Visual History Archive (VHA). The VHA is the world's largest archive of oral histories and perhaps the largest collection of any witness testimonies of the Shoah. The VHA has over fifty-two thousand interviews with people who were persecuted as Jews. In addition to this collection, they also hold interviews with other victim groups: victims of Armenian and Rwandan genocides, "Righteous among Nations" (non-Jews who rescued Jews during the Holocaust), and six gay gentile men persecuted under Nazi Germany's Paragraph 175. The interviews have all been keyworded, so a researcher can use the keywords to search for specific places or themes rather than looking through hundreds of thousands of hours of oral histories. There are keywords for homosexuality, homosexual kapo, and much more - some one thousand keywords altogether. But every single instance of testimony linked to these keywords leads to statements of outright homophobia. With the exception of Gad Beck, the largest oral history archive of Jewish Holocaust survivors does not have a single voice who explicitly spoke about his or her same-sex desire.

In 2010, I realized the existence of this gap. I reached out to colleagues at the VHA to address this silence. But these conversations turned out to be difficult. The colleagues repeatedly pointed out the existence of those six interviews with gay gentile survivors. I started to understand that influential categorization, in which all persecuted homosexuals are non-Jews and all Jewish victims are heterosexual; queerness and Jewish Holocaust victims did not overlap. This categorization was so embedded that it made my point about queer Holocaust survivors incommunicable. [...]

Through my research, I was able to find out that among the interviewees were in fact Holocaust survivors who willingly engaged in queer sex as well as those who identified as gay and lesbian. It was the framing of the interview, I believe, its heteronormative framework, that prevented survivors from mentioning their same-sex experience. This is particularly unfortunate, since most VHA interviews took place between 1994 and 1999, a quarter of a century after the Stonewall riots, the decriminalization of homosexuality in Germany, and the publication of the first well-known gay survivor memoir.

A specific technique of queer erasure can be observed in the interview of Irene Miller, a "half-Jewish" lesbian Ravensbrück survivor and resistance fighter from Prague, that she gave to the Jewish Family and Children's Services. Throughout her interview, Miller tried to mention her sexual orientation and her partner. her interviewer, a man, never let her: he would change the topic or say he was interested in something else. Perhaps he did not even register what Miller was trying to say because he didn't recognize it as relevant, being fixated on a heteronormative framework. In the keywords, Miller's partner Joanne is keyworded as "other relationship." When Miller was interviewed by lesbian scholars such as Christa Schikorra, she indicated this was her sexual orientation and referred to her queer biography.

Stories such as these draw our attention to the influence of social expectations and the key role of interviewer. For queer content, the people leading the oral histories too often reacted to mentions of queer intimacy with redirecting questions that normalized homophobia. Scholars of Holocaust testimonies have focused on the boundaries of the narratable that are dictated by the social expectations of the public or the unbearable. We should also pay attention to normative expectations of the interviewers who made bearing testimony impossible, or at least very hard. Part of this normativity was the homophobia of the interviewers, the prejudice that they possibly brought in from their understanding of queer inmates as deviant figures.

The final scene in the VHA interviews was yet another factor that made narrating a queer biorgraphy difficult. At this moment, the survivor was joined by his or her spouse, children and grandchildren. This scene staged a happy ending as a familial triumph over the destruction of the Holocaust. But this framing staged success as exclusively heteronormative, making it impossible to tell a story of a happy, queer life. While this ending is specific to the VHA, it serves as a useful indicator of the impact of normativity in Holocaust oral history collections at large. The childless, unmarried homosexual survivor was by this logic a social failure and thus not fit to bear witness."

-- People Without History Are Dust: Queer Desire in the Holocaust by Anna Hájková (2025, University of Toronto Press)

[laciere]

"What does it mean to prohibit foraging, to exclude people from the land in one of the most basic ways humans have always related to it? Jumana Manna's 2022 film Foragers mixes fiction and documentary footage to highlight the answers to these questions. It follows the stories of Palestinians who have fallen afoul of their Israeli occupiers' prohibitions against the picking of the vegetable called 'akkoub and the zesty herb za'atar, incurring heavy fines when caught in the act of picking, attending court dates in which they make impassioned declarations and defend their customs, citing the necessity of feeding their children. The character of Wardeh explains that since these nature protection laws have penalized people for interfacing with the land as is their custom, the plants aren't being sufficiently taken care of. "Since you banned us," she says, "za'atar is harder to find. Za'atar needds to be trimmed, like all plants. The more it's clipped, the stronger it grows back." Another warns, "I'm waiting for this to be over so I can go back to foraging ... I'm not paying a penny ... I won't justify your law ... This law is shit, banning us from foraging food. What protected species? The land isn't yours. Neither is the plant!" The unseen interrogator lists all of his offenses, naming the years when he got in trouble. A little over a year after the film's release, and nearly four months into the genocide in Palestine, I watched in my living room as Samir, who plays himself, made a rejoined that forced the word "Yes!" from my throat: "I'll also be caught in 2050 with my children and grandchildren. I'll continue the path of my grandparents. That is my truth.""

-- Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival by Maria Pinto (2025, The University of North Carolina Press)

[laciere]

"Ötzi the Iceman knew fire, how to summon it. Ötzi, our best preserved European human mummy, discovered in the Alps in 1991, 5,000 years after his death, perhaps even knew how to carry it from place to place as a coal in his backpack, because he also knew some mycology. It's wild to me that in so many descriptions of what Ötzi had near him when he died, writers have left out the two varieties of mushroom he toted with such care. His tinder fungi, in which fire can nest during the journey from campsite to campsite, and his medicinal birch polypores, both just as mummified as he. As far as I'm concerned, these are what led homie the most gravitas. The accounts that baffle me usually make much of the bow and arrows he was in the process of making, his copper axe, his shoes insulated with grass, stuff like that. Fine, okay, the injuries to his frame do bespeak an intensely violent last few days. He probably bled out from the arrow wounds to his back, after all. And it's neat that Time took good care of his Chalcolithic UGGs. You would listen to that true crime podcast - maybe you already have., But the mushrooms! I hope that when future archaeologists find my plaid backpack still clinging to my skeleton, they are underwhelmed by my utility knife and enthralled by my polypores."

– Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival by Maria Pinto (2025, The University of North Carolina Press)

[laciere]

"As a Westerner, you may not know of the trees in your area that need fire to trigger seed release, of those among your neighbors, the deer and bears, who depend on that biodiversity engendered by flames for food and habitat. You might associate it only with destruction, with the ache in your lungs from so-called megafires. [...] But fire, like everything else, is not binary.

Disintegration. Cleansing. Coevolution with trees, plants, wood as specialty. This all sounds familiar. Fungi eat charcoal. They are among the first signs of life after a forest fire has burned and sterilized everything else. Oyster mushrooms are used to convert toxins left in the wake of a blaze into usable nutrients for other life. Fungal fruit bodies have been used to carry fire from place to place by hominids for millennia. Black truffle mycelia chemically burn the earth around the tree they've colonized as a not so subtle "fuck you" to vegetation that would crowd them out. Some activists burning police motorcycles, earth movers, cement trucks, and the like, to keep Cop City from being built, have fungi as their mascot - as we'll see. Melanin makes fungal tissue fire tolerant. Fire, as I said, is not binary. It is destructive, constructive, the thing that marked us as human, and, as we change the climate to make it hotter, drier, a thing that may mark our end.

Laetiporus sulphureus blazing from a log, orange and yellow, a common beacon in my home woods; Flammulina velutipes, literally "little flame with velvet feet," periscoping from an elm snag, antifreeze in its tissue on a chill day in November, a fungus that has been to space; Lactarius pyrogalus, literally "fire milk," whose flesh can scorch tongues, feeding and being fed by a hornbeam. What work they do - fire, fungi - what glorious work in common! To make whole worlds smolder in memory, to move and lick and lap in shadow, to fruit sudden and vivid upon alchemical request. To take oxygen, to expel carbon dioxide. Fungi and fire are kin, which means, I guess, that I am family to fire. Combustion can be seen as the ancestor of breathing. Fungi, by helping plants onto land, oxygenated the atmosphere, and animals learned to breathe that poison, their respiration a slow burn."

– Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival by Maria Pinto (2025, The University of North Carolina Press)

[laciere]

"I don't seek out Transatlantic Slave Trade or Slavery Times™ narratives -- not to tell as a writer, not to consume. They simply arrive on my plate whenever I try to learn about the movement through time of the people and things that interest me. Thank goodness I've always held those tales at a distance, or the despair might well have swallowed me like molasses. It's easy to overdose on them because they're a background process to absolutely everything here, and we see them and see them and seat them and drink them without much present-day reckoning, let alone meaningful gestures at repair. I've watched the resulting illness ravage bodies and minds. I'm impatient for us to be done with the accounting and move on to the repair. The endless accounting. The nasty lie of the official story.

But I'm Black, so the official story has never been of much use to me anyhow. If we want to survive -- those of us who have felt rootlessness without the possibility of future, who have considered suicide or done more than consider -- we have had to build alternative pasts for our futures to live in. Those stories are marginal and extralegal and anarchic and mycelial. You cannot kill them in a way that matters.

What happens when old stories teem with new futures? When I look to the likes of Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Tracy K. Smith and Fannie Lou Hamer and Minetta (see below) and Octavia Butler and Saidiya Hartman and Jamaica Kincaid and June Jordan and Fred Moten and James Baldwin - the list goes on - I see the building of our new cosmologies is well underway. The Earthbound cosmologies of water and land, steel and concrete, fire and ice. I want a fungal cosmology. I'm greedy, I want it to already exist. But the new worlds within this one already have counternarratives at their thresholds. Their building has been underway since that palm heel hit that first African drum in North America, spores scattering from the skin with each fateful slap.

Are our lineages mycelial rather than arboreal? Am I a fruiting body resulting from Spores in those sails rather than a leaf on a branch of a tree? It stands to reason, since it's the mycelium that does the true root work of a tree, family or otherwise."

– Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival by Maria Pinto (2025, The University of North Carolina Press)

[laciere]

"When I was fifteen, lonely, isolated, I ate a poisonous amount of over-the-counter sleep aid. In present-day Florida, in the neighborhood where I lived at fifteen, I pluck a vomiter parasol from a lawn of Augustine grass. I hold the mushroom up to my ear and place a call to myself at that age, on the day before I'll push twenty little pink pills from their blister packs and swallow them down with bottled sweet tea. I'm curious to ask this self-obliterative specter with my face, who haunts my memory, why she felt there was no version of the future worth chancing to meet. I know the answer, of course I know the answer, but I would like to hear it in her words (I long to hear her speak -- she had a bold way of saying things that frightens me now), and I bet she would like to be asked by someone who knows the answer, someone not asking just to prescribe more pills and not because they must know the answer or be liable.

Maybe I'm too smug in my knowledge that time will take its knee off her neck and start running away from her in every direction at once, relatively, soon. And in this possible world, where I am now, which I could give her the coordinates to, she'll want to chase after time, she'll make a game of bounding through the woods and cutting time off at the pass; she'll actually like trying to tame it. Maybe I'm too comfortable in her future, sipping tea surrounded by a riot of books in which the unofficial story, where she can star to make her home, unfolds. Even though we maybe can't relate, I want to try.

As she nears the vomiter fruit body that I've plucked in her future, which is so much like a brown and white lace umbrella it even has a runner, it tinkles out a breezy melody and drops green spores. She stops dead and cocks her head. She senses there's a moment asking to be born here that will pull her through a portal, blind her with its hospital lights, slap her to get her breathing. She picks the mushroom. She turns it in her hands, looking so interest -- like this is true appraisal, like the curiosity will take her past tomorrow -- that I know things will be all right, that she won't have to see that look on our mother's face. But she decides it's probably poison.

I'm yelling at her over the years through fungal tissue -- Look closer! Hear me! -- but she's not accepting messages from this day and age. She throws the mushroom against the side of the neighbor's house, and it reports a satisfying thwack. The next time she'll notice this species, she'll be in her thirties, with scars she doesn't try to hide anymore when she proffers a mushroom for another to inspect. She'll pick it from an Augustine grass island in the parking lot at the beach, and a man with a Weedwacker will tell her not to eat that fairy ring mushroom; it's poison."

-- Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival by Maria Pinto (2025, The University of North Carolina Press)

[laciere]

"The first time I break the casing of a Bic lady's disposable razor and press the metal into my wrist I am fifteen. "Parasuicide" is sometimes described as non-fatal self-injurious behavior with a clear intent to cause bodily harm or death. The word "clear" gets stuck in my throat. Para -- "alongside" suicide? My death travels with me. The spore of it. If I can get over the aversion to the corruption of my own flesh, it's always there, alongside. Look, I don't know why I was that impatient to see for myself whether death was inside me, whether I could dig deep enough to find this thing everyone was obsessed with and nobody talked about, but I was. Call it youth -- you stay young for as long as your curiosity is boundless. Or you stay young if you die that way. Dissociation and depression and self-harm are all supposed to be constellations of the same dysfunction, but I've cut my skin on a day of delirious happiness, and sometimes it seems to me like I want to take that happy feeling with me to some other place.

"Do you like yourself?" my mother asked once. "It doesn't seem like you do." I answered yes, though later, in my room, I turned the question over in my head until I cried.

The right question, which neither of us could have known at the time, was, "Where did you go?"

Now, on the verge of leaving my thirties, the correct questions have become, "By whose clock are you living your life?" And, "What are you and all the organisms that hold you together doing to be worthy of your freedom, to practice it every day? To know that your movements are your own?"

At the end of our conversation, I ask Araújo what species of entomopathogenic fungi, besides scale insect parasites and Cordyceps militaris, I might expect to find this far north in Vermont, which is where I am while we talk through Zoom. He tells me that Gibellula can be found here on the underside of leaves. "So just turn thousands of leaves, and you will find them."

Just keep turning leaf after leaf after leaf."

-- Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival by Maria Pinto (2025, The University of North Carolina Press)

[laciere]

"Watching The Girl with All the Gifts, I immediately pour myself into Melanie. I mentally admonish the other characters to protect her at all costs. She raises her hand with the correct answer, she's eager to please, she's the teacher's favorite, and it's hard to believe but she'll eat you alive. That's what she did to her mother while in utero. When we first meet her, she and her peers lead the lives of prisoners lying in wait, the clock their enemy. Strapped into wheelchairs, they're pushed from cell to classrom, where we grow to understand that their capacities are being tested in this school-like setting and the unlucky ones are sacrificed, one by one, to scientific experimentation. In this universe, the zombie apocalypse has come for humanity in the form of a fictionalized Ophiocordyceps that turns people into fast-moving, mindless zombies, but then makes intelligent, thoughtful zombies out of the second generation - those who eat their way out of their infected mothers. What sets this story apart is that Melanie would eat the human characters if they didn't treat their skin with scent-effacing chemical, and yet we very much wish her to survive. A little Black girl (or more than girl) with the power (realized in the end) to colonize the world.

In the second sentence of the book that the film is adapted from, it is explained that the protagonist's name, Melanie, means "'the black girl' from an ancient Greek word, but her skin is actually very fair, so she thinks maybe it's not a good name for her." She would rather be called Pandora. I wonder why the filmmakers decided to cast Sennia Nanua, who's Black, in the role. In an interview, the young actress said that though she had auditioned several times for the part, the description of the character in the book made her think that she didn't have a chance.

In the book, Melanie observes her classmates seizing the opportunity to ask about their origins, which they don't really know, when their favorite teacher is in a particularly open mood. Of her classmates (and also herself), she says, "The one thing they never learn about, really, is themselves." I like to think the filmmakers simply couldn't let that line be said by a little white girl.

One movie poster shows Melanie's character looming over a ruined post-apocalyptic landscape with a muzzle over her bloody face (she has just eaten a cat). The muzzle is reminiscent of ones enslaved Africans would be made to wear as punishment so that they couldn't eat. The first portrayal of a zombie in the West must specify it's a twist on the Haitian myth with the title White Zombie (1932). Decades later, director George Romero invented the modern zombie genre with 1968's Night of the Living Dead. Romero originally assumed the lead -- Ben, the most competent of the zombie slayers -- would be white. When Black actor Duane Jones auditioned, however, it was clear he was the right choice.

Perhaps these casting moves indicate that when a zombie story is thoughtfully told, it is also inextricable from the Black uncanny."

-- Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival by Maria Pinto (2025, The University of North Carolina Press)