Dear Senthuran, page 2
Removing a uterus is an efficient way to make sure this never happens.
I have always had a violent aversion toward reproduction, toward having a body that was marked by its reproductive potential—a uterus to carry children, full breasts to feed them with—it repulses me to even type this out. Two years after I moved to Brooklyn, I had my first surgery, a breast reduction. It was an outpatient procedure: some fat removed from my chest, some glands, some skin, nothing much. It required a letter from my therapist to prove that I was sane.
“I’ve never heard of anyone like this,” the surgeon told me. He was an old white man who had performed many surgeries on transgender patients, from breast augmentations to double mastectomies. “Male to female, female to male, fine. But this in-between thing?”
I ground my teeth into a smile and handed him the letter, along with printed images of the chest I wanted. It was one that felt right for me, one that wouldn’t move much, wouldn’t sway with pendulous wrongness or leave me gasping shallow breaths because my ribs were encased in the flattening black of a chest binder every day. I paid his office ten thousand dollars, skimmed from my student loans, and tried to reduce my anger at having to jump through such hoops. If I’d asked for an augmentation, it would’ve been fine, but wanting smaller breasts in the absence of back pain was considered ridiculous enough to require a therapist’s approval. I hate humans. During my post-op visit, the surgeon complained that he’d never had to spend as much time in consultation with a patient as he had with me. We’d spent maybe thirty minutes together over a few appointments.
My scars hypertrophied, leaving shiny brown keloids and flat glossy rivers on my chest. Sometimes, back when I thought flesh terms were the only language I could use, I’d look at them to remind myself that I was “trans enough,” because I’d chosen to modify my body. Even though dysphoria and surgery aren’t prerequisites for being trans, the scars still served as a grounding reflection of my own certainty. I wasn’t sure then what I was transitioning my body to, but I was clear that the gender I’d been raised as was inaccurate—I’d never been a woman.
After that first surgery, my depression lifted significantly. It was a connection I hadn’t made before, how that physical dysphoria was affecting my mental health, eagerly contributing to my depression—I’d survived a suicide attempt just four months before the surgery. The choice to finally modify my body felt like a big deal in large part because other people treated it that way. Their alarm was almost infectious, but I was the one who had to live in this body; I was the one who suffered in it. The reduction was simply a necessary procedure, something that helped pull me away from wanting to die, something that made living a little easier.
Still, as I contemplated my second surgery, there was a deep sense of transgression about what I was doing that I couldn’t shake, especially as a Nigerian. It was too easy to tune in to my community and hear the voices heavy with disgust, saying that what I had done was disfiguring, that God had made me one way for a reason and I had no right to say or do otherwise, that I was mutilating myself. There was an ideal that my body was supposed to conform to, and I was deviating from it by having surgery. I was rejecting it as a center and choosing something else: a world where the deviation itself was the ideal.
I chose it readily. I’ve never minded being a mutilated thing.
* * *
—
The robot was called a da Vinci.
It was delicate, precise, inserted through my navel to slice my uterus and fallopian tubes into small, unimportant pieces, which were then suctioned out of my body. The procedure had a technical name that filled my mouth—a robotic-assisted subtotal hysterectomy with a bilateral salpingectomy. I had to repeat this about seven times on the day of surgery, as nurses came in with forms clarifying that I knew what I was getting, but I didn’t mind. I’d waited years for this. It was the second time I was choosing to mutate my body into something that would fit my spiritself. In another life, I’d trained to be a surgeon myself, dissecting cadavers and cutting through layers of dermis and fascia and muscle with a #10 blade. But in this one I was twenty-eight and cold, my numb skin wrapped in a hospital gown as nurses draped me in warmed blankets. Still, anticipation rang clear chimes through me. I couldn’t wait to be wheeled out of that operating room, finally sterile.
My best friend, Alex, flew into Upstate New York for the hysterectomy. After the excision, they unfolded a cot in my hospital room while I ordered waffles from room service. When the nurses came in, they tried to get me to stand up, but the pain was a riptide dragging me under. I swayed, nearly collapsing, so they eased me back into bed and upped my pain meds. I caught my breath as Alex and I exchanged alarmed looks, their hand warm around mine.
“I didn’t think it would be this bad,” I managed to say.
“Me either,” they replied.
The nurse gave us a brief but incredulous look. “You got an entire organ removed from your body,” she pointed out. “It’s kind of a major surgery.”
I made it out of bed a few hours later, walking in slow motion around the hospital floor with my IV stand rolling beside me, my palm scraping against the walls and the nurse at my elbow. The next day, Alex drove me home to my attic apartment. Most of my early recovery was spent there, in a wingback recliner the color of wet moss. It had a wooden handle on the side that opened the back hinge and made the foothold pop up with a creaky jerk, stretching the chair out. I slept in it for a week because I had difficulty standing up or bending into narrow angles, and my bed was too close to the floor. I was full of stitches and hydrocodone, and my guts had been rearranged. It wasn’t my first mutilation, but it was one of my best.
If ọgbanje represent an overlapping of realities—a spirit who looks incredibly convincing as a human—then what does it look like for one to experience dysphoria and take surgical steps to resolve it? It was inevitable that I’d be drawn to these overlaps, since I live there, inhabiting simultaneous realities that are usually considered mutually exclusive. What can we call the dysphoria experienced by spirits who find themselves embodied in human form? Flesh dysphoria, perhaps. Nonhuman dysphoria. Spirit dysphoria. Metaphysical dysphoria. I don’t know, but it required me to modify my body to reflect the type of entity I am.
The possibility that I was an ọgbanje came to me years before I wrote Freshwater, around the time I began calling myself trans, but it took me a while to collide and connect the two worlds. I suppressed it for a few years because most of my education had been in the sciences and all of it was Westernized—it was difficult for me to consider an Igbo spiritual world to be equally if not more valid. The legacy of colonialism has always taught us that such a world isn’t real, that it is nothing but juju and superstition. When I finally accepted its validity, I revisited what that could mean for my gender.
Do ọgbanje even have a gender to begin with? Gender is, after all, such a human thing.
In flesh terms, being trans means being any gender different from the one assigned to you at birth. Whether ọgbanje are a gender themselves or without gender didn’t really matter, it still counts as a distinct category, so I didn’t consider my transition to be located within human parameters at all. Rather, the surgeries were a bridge across realities, a movement from being assigned female to assigning myself as ọgbanje—a spirit customizing its vessel to reflect its nature.
It was considerably difficult to convince a doctor to remove an uninjured organ, even though my wholeness depended on its absence, especially because that organ was reproductive and they thought I was a woman. I didn’t have a doctor’s letter for my uterus—it was too difficult to find a therapist who had experience with nonbinary trans patients—and I didn’t have money to cover the operation. But I thought perhaps I could save up for it, so I made appointments with a few gynecologists to discuss my options. I chose not to disclose my gender (or lack thereof), but instead expressed my desire for the surgery as an elective choice because I didn’t want children.
The doctors received me with resistance and thin contempt. “What if you change your mind?” they asked me, in exam room after exam room, metal and glass and white coats all blurring into a single closed door. I had a thousand comebacks, but I bit them all back because these people had what I needed: gloved hands to cut me open and toss my uterus into the bright plastic of biological waste, or wherever unwanted organs end up. The dysphoria had built a tight knot of a home in my body, since I had no idea how I was going to afford another surgery or, at this rate, even find a doctor willing to perform it. It wasn’t as severe as before my first surgery, but it was still there—a reminder so red it was almost black, showing up every month. I couldn’t live with even a chance of getting pregnant, so I tried an IUD. When they inserted it, I screamed from the pain, the excruciating wrongness of something passing through my cervix. In the months afterward, I bled too heavily, through ultra tampons and overnight pads, flooding menstrual cups. Eventually, an ultrasound showed that the IUD was out of position, so they had to remove it. It felt like my body had spat it out, a reminder that nothing short of an excision would suffice.
By then I’d left Brooklyn and moved upstate, to the attic apartment with the moss green recliner. Occasionally, I had bouts of searing pelvic pain that trapped me in bed for hours. A few weeks into my second winter there, I went to see a urogynecologist, thinking there was something wrong with my bladder. It took the entire afternoon to run tests; then he called me into his office to tell me there was an 84 percent chance I had endometriosis. “We could put you on birth control,” he suggested. I refused.
“Why not?” he asked, and just like that, the air in his office stopped moving. I could feel my nerves jangling, the familiar taste of the moment right before each and every disclosure like a sharp film over my tongue.
It’s easier when I’m alone. Today, my closest family and friends are those who understand that I’m not human. Back then, I just told them I wasn’t a woman, but some continued to think of me as one anyway. I ignored it because sometimes it’s easier to not fight, to accept the isolation of being unseen as a safe place. Those friends fell away with time. I exist separate from the inaccurate concept of gender as a binary; without the stricture of those categories, I don’t have to think about my gender, I don’t even have to pretend to be human in the first place. Alone, there’s just me, and I see myself clearly.
Speaking to other people, though, requires channeling who or what I am into language they can understand. It requires folding.
“I’m trans,” I explained to the doctor. “And I’ve had a breast reduction, so hormones would reverse that.”
He nodded while my stomach churned. “I’ve had a few trans patients,” he said. “We could do a hysterectomy, if that’s something you’d want. Your insurance would cover it.”
I stared at him, hope and disbelief numbing my hands. I’d been terrified that he was going to say something transphobic, that I’d have to deal with the violence of that tearing through my skin, a bullet I hadn’t scheduled when I showed up there that afternoon. Instead, when I left his office, I had a surgery date only two weeks away.
The robot went through my navel for the procedure, unfolding it and then tucking it back into my abdomen in a new and renovated configuration. At my post-op appointment, the doctor called the nurse over to brag about how well the wound had healed. There were only two small scars, each barely a centimeter long, at the top and bottom of my new navel.
A week or two after the surgery, I called my human mother and told her what I’d done, even though I knew she wouldn’t understand. She sighed with the resignation of a mother who has tried to stop her child before and failed. “Could you try not to cut off any more parts of your body?” she said, and I laughed so hard my stitches hurt.
A few days later I flew to her house for Christmas, attendants pushing me around both airports in a wheelchair, weak but giddy. The rest of my recovery was uneventful. After seventeen years and approximately two hundred periods, I slipped easily into my new and bloodless life.
* * *
—
There is a vivid history of mutilation with ọgbanje: a dead one can be cut and scarred to prevent it from returning undetected. Ọgbanje are a cohort—they separate from each other at birth, but return to the cohort when they die—and I like to think that there is a form of shared or generational memory within that. Being dead or mutilated are not unfamiliar things to any of us; we’re not afraid of either.
It has been grueling to remake myself each time I learn more about who or what I am—to take the steps and bear the costs that such remaking requires. Sometimes those costs are worn on my heart, like when the people I love no longer have space in their worldview for me. Other times, it’s the body that bears them, in markings and modifications. By now, I’ve come to think of mutilation as a shift from wrongness to alignment, and of scars as a form of adornment that celebrates this shift. The keloids on my chest and the small lines spilling out of my navel function as reminders—that even when it means stepping out of one reality to be swallowed by another, I continue choosing to move toward myself.
Execution | Dear Nonso
We’ve never met. This might not even be one of your many names, but I know you’re out there, several people scattered across the world, storytellers who are starting out. In this letter, I think I’m teaching, sharing, because there is no unfolding of a self without the space to do it in, without the safety that my career as a writer has given me. I don’t teach a lot of things, but I can try with this: the spell that I used to carry me from being a baby writer walking blind in faith and terror to where I am now, where I am sure and certain and strong in my work. This I know, as intimately as the wet side of my skin if it was taken off the muscle and held up, flapping like a sail looking for direction. The teaching helps me remember, helps me loop back into myself. Just remember that anyone can tell you their spells, but like most lessons, I don’t know if it will help.
So. There are these questions about how the magic moves. Is it the rites you perform, the resources you use, or does it come from something deeper inside a person? Does the spell work for people who aren’t me? I hope it does. I share it often and openly because I want it to work for others; I want it to do for them what it did for me. I think it could make so many of us safe. The magician tells me that other people can’t do what I do, and maybe I believe him a little, but that’s not the point. People can do such spectacular things if you forget to tell them it’s impossible. I want them to try.
This is a spell for storytellers—for those of us who make books or are trying to. We want the work to sustain itself, we want it to feed us and keep us safe, but sometimes it feels like we’re missing a map. How can we get to where we want to be? What is the hack, the strategy to make it happen? What words do you chant into the space between spaces, to bend your desires into reality?
Here’s what I did. I hope it helps.
* * *
—
When I started the spell, I thought about the things I wanted. After I wrote Freshwater, I wanted a book deal, I wanted to be able to write full time, and I wanted a Nigerian visual artist to design the book’s cover. A year or two later, I wanted a bungalow, a personal hairstylist, and money. I wanted to be able to afford to keep making my work. I wanted to wear my pink faux fur to my book launch, and I wanted to stunt at awards. Right now, I want a television show and I want to be entirely out of debt. As I write this, it’s the fall of 2019 and I’m lying in bed in my bungalow, planning outfits for a gala where my second book is being honored. I’ve been writing full time since 2014.
This is how I know that it doesn’t matter if you think the goals are attainable. They are. What matters is that they are impossible without the work, they cannot happen if you don’t make the work. With my spell, I drew a map of the future I wanted, then I took those defined lines and pulled them across time, dragging them into the present. Time bends very easily; you can fold it like this with little trouble. So. The spell is to make that future real, which can be done because you are not powerless, and the only thing that needs to be done in the here and now is to make the work. Or, to put it simply, all you have to do is write.
The future fans out in brilliance, powered by imagination and ego and hope and a thousand other things, but all that glory can be condensed across time into the choice to sit and write words down. It doesn’t even have to be done well—that’s what revision is for. It just has to be completed. There is such a space, a stretch of desert, between imagining something, writing it, and then finishing it. Execution is a particular discipline, something built out of corded rigor, tight and greased with sacrificial blood. There are many components to this spell: how to make the task at hand the only one that is real; how to work when you don’t want to; how to summon your want and collar it for your purposes, setting it to work.
I bribed myself with the future. I dangled the things I wanted in front of my greedy eyes, and in the flush of that desire I reminded myself that writing five hundred words right now would reel in the world I wanted. There is always something you can do right now; there is always a first step, no matter how small it is. Seeds are often tiny, and it means nothing about what they will grow up to be. You plant them anyway, and that’s what making the work is.
