“Normative gay culture is misogynistic”

2023-05-21 22:21:02

Who is Kim de l’Horizon (Ostermundigen, 1992)? In Spain we still don’t know. But anyone would know how to answer in German-speaking latitudes: she is the person (non-binary, by the way) who last year won the most prestigious literary prizes in Switzerland and Germany by publishing Blutbuch (Dumont, 2022). His work comes to us now through the translation by Ibon Zubiaur: blood book (De Conatus, 2023) is an ambitious learning novel queer about family, language and writing, polyhedral and divided into a melting pot of absolute stylistic freedom. It is not an easy text. And that’s good news: the literary quality of a radically free and diverse book was rewarded. It is much closer to the complex family study than to the pamphlet queer incendiary.

‘The fallen angel’, by Alana Portero

Further

Kim de l’Horizon and I arranged this interview in Madrid, while we were eating, before the presentation of her book at the Círculo de Bellas Artes. We supplemented it with answers that Kim drafted in German and then translated with DeepL, as the fifth part of his book is translated. Here, with mutations, the result:

you were relatively unknown before your book was awarded. It all came suddenly: mainstream, their circles, recognition. When you shaved your head live in solidarity with Iranian women at one of those handover ceremonies, there was a lot of media noise…

It was very nice to receive attention after the award, but also exhausting. I have experienced hate, but more love. There are many people who have recognized me on the street, but sometimes those who are enthusiastic about me get too close. They want to say things to me or even touch me. I felt that my body became a kind of public good thanks to the prize.

Almost as if you were at his disposal, right?

Everyone believed they had the right to have an opinion about my body, either emphatically positive or emphatically negative. As Paul B. Preciado says, trans bodies are a kind of crossroads where society stands and renegotiates its own problems and identities.

How have you felt, specifically, in that strange space of institutional celebration, something so little queer?

These official institutions, fully committed to representation, such as embassies or publishing houses, represent nation states or “literature”. In neither of them is there a non-binary organ. In Switzerland, for example, there is no legal recognition beyond what is masculine or feminine. That is why I find it very exhausting to be present in these spaces, because I have the feeling that my body cannot simply “be”, but must “be done”. It is not enough for me to “be”, I have to “do”.

In blood book there is a great reflection on postmodern literature in which the legacy of David Foster Wallace is criticized: from a rebel against the canon of his time he becomes a new “superdaddy”. This is opposed to the claim of another source: maternal genealogy. How do you fit that your book is awarded the national prizes of of the homelands: Switzerland and Germany? I said, in the presentation, that it was somehow a very German book: the relationship with historical and personal trauma, one’s own identity and the search for its origin…

It doesn’t fit at all! A State is itself a superpapi. Perhaps it is another attempt at appropriation: two States, Germany and Switzerland, are trying to reappropriate this text queer who seeks solutions to the binary man-woman and mom-dad.

I find it very exhausting to be present in spaces where there is no legal recognition beyond what is masculine or feminine, because I have the feeling that my body cannot simply “be”, but must “be done”.

It is a very important job that Ibon Zubiaur, translator into Spanish, has done. It seemed to me almost an untranslatable book.

Each language has its own eyes and ears. His own linguistic images, but also his own melodies. Communication is only one third of the content of the words and the other two thirds are non-verbal aspects: sounds, intonations… So every good translation has to find something new.

There are readers who have told me that the text stretches and breaks the Spanish language: one person told me that he had the feeling that a previously hard piece of wood was becoming flexible with my text. But it is true that many double or triple meanings of certain German words are lost. After all, the protagonist calls her mother More y to the grandmother Grossmeer. And only there are already three meanings: on the one hand, More es ocean, but also further and finally, in my dialect, madre. So mothers are oceans, they flow, and they are further of what we can know and of what they themselves may be.

In German, the protagonist is usually called simply the child. The word is grammatically neither masculine nor feminine: it is gender neutral. Together with Ibon Zubiaur, I invented a rule: the child is called the boy o the girl depending on the situation, depending on how you classify yourself at the time. when it’s with you misism, in his fantasy world, he is called the ninth. And that form of gender fluidity is not possible in German.

It is interesting how the protagonist seeks to accommodate himself to a standard model of male homosexuality that he later repudiates.

I experience most male homosexuality as very patriarchally structured. Hard, binary, macho masculinity is the indisputable ideal: femininity and effeminacy are undesirable for many gay men; I have been attacked by some gay people as a homophobe, because in my text I say that normative gay culture is misogynistic. To be out of power, you first have to try alternative identities, as gay identity was for me. But that identity is not outside the structures; reproduces a lot of violence against the feminine. My goal is not to arrive at a definitive identity, but to inhabit a fluid place.

Communication is only one third of the content of the words and the other two thirds are non-verbal aspects: sounds, intonations… So every good translation has to find something new.

A fear that I had not read much before emerges in the novel: the fear of not being good enough. woke for the younger generations. Don’t you think that young people are, on the contrary, a little more reactionary than their millennial predecessors?

We may think of the young as more woke of what they really are. But if that motivates us to be more sensitive to discrimination, I don’t think it’s bad. It is not enough to decide to be less sexist, misogynist, racist, classist, etc. In the novel, for me, it was important to draw a character that wasn’t perfect. Show that the character could have given the genre a lot of thought, and be very woke about it, but that, as for his internalized racism, he had not worked on it much yet. See that he could inadvertently reproduce a racialized desire.

In the book you recover a whole genealogy of magic and femininity. What place do witches occupy for you within the queer?

Witches, throughout history, have been accused of being in league with the devil. It was said that they had gotten sucked into it or were somehow “infected”. The devil is the shadow of modernity: the dark, the animal, the between-human-and-animal, the earthy, the dirty, the irrational, the autonomous. In Zurich, most men accused of witchcraft would today be considered queers, like werewolf accusations in northern Europe. There is something very subversive in witchcraft, just as the demonization of witches was used to create modern capitalism: the bodies of the poor and indigenous had to be dissected, the womb and the earth taken to exploit them. Today, with the climate catastrophe and the rise of post-fascism, witches’ magical herbal knowledge and their belief in the Earth as a living ecosystem offer an alternative, another belief system.

I quote, and I really like, Ursula K. Le Guin’s theory on fiction: she says that a non-patriarchal story is like a bunch of medicine. For me, the novel is a witch’s cauldron in which I can simmer my own healing soup; throw in all kinds of ingredients that would be too much for a poem. Brewing that concoction changes me and my readers, and is therefore not just mine, but a collective curation: the final text is created on reading alone.