Notes on Hands

Man-made, overdrawn, flesh cymbals. In Islamabad I faked sleep & heard my cousin & Aunty discussing my hands. “Larkay ki tarah” they said, “Built like a man’s.” I was never fated to fulfill their obligations of my body.

Why would I resist what girls ended up loving the most about me?

How I could make them bend with a mere finger.

My first freak of nature was immigrating from Pakistan to Iowa. I was the corn field’s bastard, my Mother’s English knight, every non-identifiable brown breed of accent & paperwork lack.

My mother is always in a rush. One day she cut my hair too short, zig-zagged & elliptical. I grew to love the lackluster design of her impulse. The uncles in my life always fell short to her stagger & sway. In the hospital, patients tell my mother that her hands bring them peace, as they navigate the space between life & death on the silk of her palms. I wanted to be every kind of woman that she was.  

One day I opened my palms, looked them in the eye, & realized all the angels I could touch.

The ownership of choice is an American phenomenon.

Being a Pakistani, Muslim lesbian doesn’t align well where I’m from where we have certain rules that have kept us safe. Anything outside those forms is a threat. By being other I was excommunicated from my past: The bright burgundy & orange streamers which would line the staircase, embroidered fractal decorations, the women’s churiyan, their black mehndi, their golden eyes, the smell of incense & clove in the walls. Gold is handed off to a bride when she gets married. I wonder if I will ever get my mother’s dowry. I make chai alone in my apartment & it smells like back then.

Queerness for me has always been a way to evade surveillance and, in a way, English: Its tendency to overname, overidentify, overclaim.

Ironically, my family understands my gender best: A woman in theory with the holdings & characteristics of a man. I can’t say the same about the Western society who, although breeded with the tools, strategies, textbooks, theories, literature, libraries, & institutions to study this shit, has less of an understanding of what it really means to be Queer.  Being has always mattered more than trying to prove to other people who I am. The privilege to be in this body is all I want & need. The being part of Queerness in the West is often missed in the spectacle & performance of societal acknowledgment which holds no merit except in performative diversity stunts carried about by the very institutions these communities hope to be so removed from. What I mean to say is that I wish Americans used their privilege to be the versions of themselves they really are, not as a publicity stunt. What do your hands hold besides the acknowledgment of your pronouns? Do you embody Queerness or do you enjoy just its aesthetic benefits?

Before the British occupied Pakistan from 1858 to 1947, hijras or transwomen of South Asia were highly revered in communities performing rituals of passage like birth & death. Where I’m from, Queerness has had a history before English. English, the language & the people, were unable to categorize hijras because they occupied a third space of being, which made them harder to colonize. Queerness for me has always been a way to evade surveillance and, in a way, English: Its tendency to overname, overidentify, overclaim.

People are afraid to say the word lesbian. It’s hard to be a woman loving woman. Who takes that seriously? Queerness in Madison, is a drunken excursion: A woman’s easy lips, viable enough to make boyfriends jealous. There’s a specific loneliness, a violence of single handed intimacy, that makes the body simply an object of flesh & action. Up until college all of my experiences with women were bisexuals who could close one of their eyes & turn their head sideways & take me in as a man. So I learned to fuck like one too. Girls loved that. I was a stone top. Always gave never received. I came. I verbed. My hands were useful this way. They never looked at my fingers.

When I’m with my chosen family, a group of faggots, dykes, & trannies, we are always engaged in some kind of creation. Actively competing against each other for best dressed, best writer, best bitch. This Queerness is what bends freedom’s possibilities. I met them in St. Louis, the youngest in the friend group. They had no reason to give me a chance. A closeted fourteen year old with shitty bleached hair & bisexual cosplay. They taught me without ever saying the word Queer, what it meant to exist in perpetual creation.

In my chosen family, I talk with my sister about how for a lot of people Queerness can be a prison. Being unable to accept one's own identity & desires stops people from fulfilling their own potential. Americans have the privilege of freedom yet choose not to enact it.  

Being a dyke & occupying a non-state, neither completely feminine or masculine, is the most inventive & creative space to be. To be unbarred from the limits of daily expression. To fit neither the requirements of being male or female, I simply am: Being & becoming larger than life. The body is the first page. The possibilities of Queerness extend so much past the identification of it. Why would I try to touch the dynamic state of ecstasy that exists outside of me? However, I can try to honor it. Being able to honor women has been one of the greatest blessings of my life. I have learned that feminine energy is also the field of the unknown: The infinite substance that makes becoming more possible & masculinity its witness. The body as archive. The hands as the second instrument, after the heart.

To follow desire. What an impossible demand! Just a generation ago, there was no such possibility for me to exist in this form where I come from. There was only survival. It has to mean something. To be able to transmute the stagnancy of female desire into agency & action. The thrust of the hips. The lap of the mouth. The chivalry of the hands.