palimpsestic pussy (a reflection in two movements)

Bahaar Ahsan

 

I.

cum stains on a safavieh rug
a tgirl on a 17th-century vase from herat

bodies         without
nations          nations
without          bodies
gender           without

she spends her nights in search of rhythmic embodiments of some kind of anti-imperial
transfemininity

if bottom surgery is a form of self-orientalization,
what is she to do with her broken body?

last night i was visited by the ghost of Leila Pahlavi
she told me she sometimes feels trapped too
told me she too makes collages out of clippings from fashion magazines and illustrated
manuscripts
trying to piece together a body less broken

when i asked her what it was like to wear a femininity forged from the bones and blood of your
own people,
a femininity made possible by the casualties of empire
she did not answer

it was then that i realized we shared nothing more than a proximity to death

and what could be more trivial than that?

II.

 

existing in a colonized object-world so intrusive even i am liable to be incorporated into its
theatrical machinery

my body
my body the palimpsest
my body mortified, marked, scarred with the marks of a world unable to understand it in its
entirety

حتی دستم سوخته از این گرمای سوزان

به جاش بزار آن پیوند دردناک بین تو و مامانت،آن پیوند که به خاطرش از شب تا صبح گریه می کنی. آن پیوند که کم کم روح و بدنت را شکست

i’d grown so accustomed to my double life that her offer to accommodate posed a threat to my
reality

what worlds lie beyond the imaging portal?

re-untheorized language for body parts not yet identifiable

curated chaos and the reification
of a particular notion of *my pussy*

the scholars will conspire in forging a theoretical movement towards a new kind of transsexual
aniconism

we will then know better the god for whom our broken bodies prostrate three times a day