"#morelove.
always":
Reading Smokii
Sumac's Transmasculine First Nations Poetry on and beyond Social Media
JAMES
MACKAY
queer bright
ktunaxa and proud
two spirit is a
responsibility a
relationship with
all of creation
but most of all with myself
and i'm just learning
to be kind to be
unapologetic so
please let me breathe deep
into who i am
Smokii Sumac is
a member of the ?Akisq'nuk Band of the Ktunaxa Nation as well as a citizen of
Canada, a poet whose excitable generosity of spirit shows in the dedication of
his debut collection you are enough:
poems for the end of the world (2018) to more than 125 individually named
people (some of them likely non-human). In a review essay written for Transmotion in 2017, and therefore
coterminous with the creation of that book, Sumac describes himself as follows:
I am queer, nonbinary,
transmasculine, and a poet. I am a writer, a PhD Candidate, and an instructor
of Indigenous literatures and creative writing. I am cat-dad, an auntie, an
uncle, a sibling, and a child. I am hyper-aware that even as I write this, my
experience of gender is shifting, changing, and growing. ("Two Spirit and Queer
Indigenous Resurgence" 168)
This series of
identities is given in a way that both complicates and refines Sumac's original
description of himself as Two-Spirit, and goes a long way to explaining the
joyfully expansive sense of multiplying identities that resonates throughout you are enough—which also includes
reflections on being a recovering addict and self-harmer. Sumac is clear that
Two-Spiritedness in itself is not a noun of identity so much as it is a verb of
performing responsibility, and that this responsibility is specifically decolonial.
In so doing he shares in a long lineage of Two-Spirit writing that seeks, in
Qwo-Li Driskill's phrase, "a return to and/or continuance of the complex
realities of gender and sexuality that are ever-present in both the human and
more-than-human world" (55), and which have been disrupted by the colonial
project.
There
are also some distinctions that need to be made when thinking about Sumac's
writing in such a context. Much previous scholarship on Two-Spirit voices has
concentrated, rightly, on the ways that creators such as Chrystos, Beth Brandt,
Maurice Kenny and Paula Gunn Allen primarily work to overcome erasure. Such an
attitude can be detected in the defiant title of Chrystos's first collection, Not Vanishing (1988), or when Janice
Gould describes a feeling of "being disloyal and disobedient to the patriarchal
injunction that demands our silence and invisibility," for example, just for
"speaking about lesbian love" (32). Craig Womack's novel Drowning in Fire (2001), published only twenty years ago and one of
the first full-length novels with an LGBT Native American protagonist was marketed as "groundbreaking and
provocative."
And Lisa Tatonetti, in an overview of thirty years of the journal SAIL, observes that academic criticism's
explicit engagement with queer contexts did not emerge for the first twenty
years of the journal's existence: it is only with Qwo-Li Driskill's 2004 essay
"Stolen From Our Bodies: First Nations Two-Spirits/Queers and the Journey to a
Sovereign Erotic" that "conversations about sovereignty and sexuality entwine"
(Tatonetti 154).
However, a strong focus on erasure does not quite do justice to the
current situation. Sumac is not contemporaneous with the group described above,
but is rather a part of a new generation, inheritors of decades of activism.
While homophobia, transphobia and settler erasure of Indigenous identities very
much remain active forces in 21st century Canada, Sumac and his
peers are able to access far greater resources and longer traditions of LGBTQIA+
(and particularly Two-Spirit) writing. With the sole exception of Max Wolf
Valerio, discussed by Lisa Tatonetti elsewhere in this special issue, there are
almost no literary transmasculine Indigenous forebears for him to draw upon. Yet
there are far greater resources than would have been available even a decade
previously, including historical recovery work and contemporary trans*
Indigenous groups.[3] Gwendolywn
Benaway demonstrates this in her essay "Ahkii: A Woman is a Sovereign Land" not
only by being able to discuss trans* historical personages and provide archive
photographs of trans* people, but also by noting that one of the problems she
encounters is that her interlocuters "don't want to wear the label of racist or
transphobe" (114). In other words, while people with transphobic views continue
to have powerful platforms, it is transphobia that is now increasingly seen as
a cause of shame in mainstream culture. Sumac's short career as a writer also
includes working with an entirely Indigenous publisher, Kegedonce, which had
been promoting First Nations voices for twenty five years when it accepted his
manuscript. He has also won Indigenous Voices Awards in both the inaugural year
of that crowd-funded Indigenous-only prize and the following year. All of this
makes for a better and more public support system than any Indigenous trans*
writer of even a decade previously could have enjoyed.
In
this article I explore the effects and ramifications of one specific venue for
that community. Sumac's poetic
practice is, I would argue, intimately bound up with social media. In an
interview we conducted in February 2020, he confirmed that many of the poems
from the collection were first posted to his Facebook account under the hashtag
#haikuaday and that publication had not originally been a goal (Mackay, 120).
It was only after meeting people who had enjoyed the poems that he decided to
collect them, and his publisher also approached him after becoming aware of the
poems on social media. He was also clear that social media affected the form,
stating in interview that "At one point my editor said, 'I don't know
why you have a period in some places and why in some you don't.' And I said, 'Well,
because they were all written on Facebook!'" (120). As I explain below, even
the cover of the collection is inspired by social media, being modelled on an
Instagram feed. Clearly Sumac is comfortable within digital environments, and
finds them both nurturing and sustaining. One could even argue that the social
media environment has worked its way into the very language of the book: in
creating the word cloud I explore in the final section, I discovered that the
second most common word in the book, iterated 76 times across 98 pages of
poems, is "like."[4]
There are many further ways in which spaces such as Facebook, Instagram,
YouTube and Twitter are very far from being neutral areas for self-exploration.
Designed to maximise user interaction, the better to generate data to sell to
their customers, the platforms utilise complex machine algorithms to determine
the placement of content within the feed, literally determining how many other
people will see anything self-published on the platform. The result is the
creation of millions of mini-communities, each centred on one person, in which
the platform and the individual collaborate to filter out unpleasantness. The
environment itself is characterised by, among other things, the haptic
experience of users sliding their finger across a smartphone and receiving
feedback in the form of vibration and sound alerts, the stress on "clean"
design elements in each of the major platforms, and the fact that these
platforms are available 24/7, often as an escape from boredom or stressful
situations, all of which further serve to alienate the user from everyday life
in the service of multinational corporations' mission to monetise everyday
life.
In this article, then, I intend to explore the ways that Sumac creates a
Two-Spirit transmasculine role for the 21st century within such an
environment. I begin by looking at the cultural implications of Sumac's choice
of cover images, comparing these with the choices of his trans* poet peers, and
use this as the springboard to a discussion of Sumac's use of social media
tropes, particularly hashtags, that situate his poetry as the product of a
specifically digital environment. This, I argue, is simultaneously a welcoming
space for trans* and Indigenous people to find community and develop communal
identities unaffected by physical distance, and also a space that carries
particular dangers not only for both groups, but also for creative artists, in
its flattening of affect. Finally, I look at the poet's use of natural
environments and images, and the ways that these function to balance and
indigenize a shifting and uncertain digital no-space.
Cover Story
Recent years have seen a surge in the number of poetry
collections, chapbooks and anthologies of poetry by writers who identify as
trans*. While this genre cannot be said to have become widespread enough to be
predictable, a certain sameness does seem to have crept into the covers for
trans* authors' work. In making this statement I draw on two sources: the
GoodReads list titled "Poetry collections by trans / nonbinary / genderqueer
etc. non-cis authors" (Takács 2017), which as of June 2020 contained a sampling
of 139 such collections, and the finalists for the Lambda Literary Award for
Best Transgender Poetry since 2015 ("Previous Winners"). Four major strands of cover design stand out. First,
as is common in 21st century
publishing, some collections, such as those from Julian Talamantez Brolaski,
Kari Edwards, Elijah Pearson and
Melissa Jennings, opt for simple typography as the
major visual element of their covers (Figure A). A particularly common trope
(which may also reflect general trends in poetry publishing, but seems
particularly motivated in the case of transgender authors) sees covers use abstract
or non-figurative art to suggest concepts of change (Figure B), with a
positively deleuzoguattarian visual language that emphasises rhizomatic lines
of flight (Ching-In Chen, Xandria Philips, Andrea Abi-Karam), holes (Jos
Charles, Yanyi), or maps and/as rhizomes (Ryka Aoki, Ashe Vernon & Trista
Mateer). Other covers depict the human figure, but use stylized art to situate
it as becoming or escaping, as in the examples from Gwen Benaway, Joy Ladin,
Kayleb Rae Candrilli and Max Wolf Valerio, as well as TC Tolbert and Trace
Peterson's edited collection (Figure C). This trend is developed in the last
major strain of cover art, where the poet them/him/herself is the subject
(Figure D). As can be seen from these examples from Vivek Shraya, Morgan Robyn
Collado, Pat Califia, DarkMatter, Dane Figueroa Edidi and Xemiyulu Manibusan
Tapepechul, the self-presentation is designed to highlight a singular identity
as genderqueer and/or trans*. These photographs emphasise the writer's
completeness, self-awareness and comfort under (or in defiance of) the world's
gaze, something that suggests a journey either finished or at least having
reached a way station.
FIGURE A – Typographical covers
FIGURE B – Rhizomes, holes, maps, lines of flight
FIGURE C – Abstract bodies
FIGURE D -
Portraits
you are enough: poems for the end of the
world (2018), Smokii Sumac's debut collection, clearly stands at a distance
from all four of these possible trends. As in
Morgan Robyn Collado's cover,
reprinted here, the poet becomes his own subject in a number of poses. But
where Collado's photos are staged performances of her identity as a LatinX
working-class femme, Sumac's are candid and seem like a collage of personal photographs.
Unlike almost any other trans* poet that I have been able to find, Sumac's
cover—which he confirmed in our interview he was heavily involved in
designing—does not frame the body as either in a state of becoming via
abstraction, or in a state of arrival via decisive self-presentation to the
camera. Rather, these photographs create a multi-faceted and intimate portrait,
with Sumac presenting in different shots as butch, femme, Indigenous,
white-passing, playfully queer, or serious. The flatness of the format and the
non-chronological sequencing of the images means that no identity is
privileged, with the possible exception of the first top left photograph of
Sumac wearing some particularly gorgeous "watercolor earrings" by Navajo
jeweller Meek Watchman, which clearly signify as American Indian art and hence
emphasise indigeneity.[5] Certainly
there is no sense of a journey with either definitive start point or
destination. Instead,
the interleaving of photos of landscape and natural features declares a more
definitive sense that the poet has nowhere to travel to, since he already
belongs to this Indigenous land.
Significantly for the discussion in this article, the grid of squares
pattern is also very reminiscent of the Instagram platform. Indeed, some of the
photographs show up as posts on Sumac's publicly available Instagram account.
Instagram also gives further evidence of the fact that he takes great care over
visual as well as verbal self-presentation, as the following screen shots of
artfully staged and arranged photographs attest:
Sumac, as a
millennial and digital native, is at ease with the visual grammars of the
internet, and his Instagram presence shows some familiarity with the specific
form that poetry has taken in the social media age, while the cover design
analysed above demonstrates the interpenetration of social media and poetic
presences. In itself this is not surprising: Sumac is a millennial writer,
after all, and it is almost part of the job description for a modern poet to
keep their social media game on point. However, as I indicated in the
introduction, such digital spaces are far from neutral.
Being Two-Spirit and Trans* Online
Something most cisgender people
won't know about, when they read this story, is the wealth of knowledge and
connection that the internet has given transgender people (and Indigenous
people, for that matter, and I'm sure there are many other people who face
different forms of oppression who can say the same.) (Sumac, "Just Make Me Look
Like Aquaman")
There
is a surprising lacuna concerning digital spaces in Jack Halberstam's otherwise
comprehensive discussion of gender variability, Trans* (2018). Although he thoroughly discusses issues such as the
perceived tensions between radical feminist ideology and trans* identities, the
difficulties of representing the transitioning body, and the challenges that
trans* identities throw up for concepts of family relationships, the digital
landscape is mentioned only briefly and always in dismissive asides. Indeed,
Halberstam seems to find anything to do with the internet annoying: the fact
that "today Facebook famously offers you fifty-one ways of identifying yourself
on their site" (6) comes in for some mockery, while in a chapter on the
difference between the various generations of trans* people there is a clear
resistance to pesky youngsters "increasingly discover[ing] information about
themselves online" rather than learning directly from older activists now seen
as "as potential predators [...] and viewed with suspicion" (64). This may
reflect a changing dynamic in the 21st century. Surgical and
hormonal interventions to correct and reassign gender have been available
throughout the 20th century, beginning with Karl Meir Baer's
pioneering surgery in 1906, and continuing through such cases as Alan L. Hart
and Michael Dillon, while trans* people have been recorded throughout human
history, including ceremonial or sacred third gender roles such as the Omani khanith, Indian hijira or Thai kathoey.
But as Halberstam observes:
If I had known the term
"transgender" when I was a teenager in the 1970s, I'm sure I would have grabbed
hold of it like a life jacket on rough seas, but there were no such words in my
world. Changing sex for me and for many people my age was a fantasy, a dream,
and because it had nothing to do with our realities, we had to work around this
impossibility and create a home for ourselves in bodies that were not
comfortable or right in terms of who we understood ourselves to be. (1)
Given this history, it is easy to see that the digital
interconnectedness of the 21st century has changed trans* lives in
the West out of all recognition. As opposed to having to seek out specific
locations and subcultures usually based in heavily populated urban centres (for
instance the New York ballroom scene or the Polari-speaking drag cultures of
1950's London), young trans* people are now easily able to connect with one
another across the planet, to inform themselves about gender dysphoria and
their legal rights, and to investigate multiple possible modalities of trans*
expression. In previous decades the common trope of being "born in the wrong
body" continued to reinforce a binaristic view of sex, in that the trans* body
was seen as an error of biology that could be corrected, with the surgically
altered body sent out to fulfil a destiny as a now heterosexual woman or man
(it should be understood that I am discussing public perception here, not
reality). But with the coming of the internet and its potential for building
communities of often anonymous yet like-minded people, new potentialities for
trans* figuration came into view. As one of Richard Ekins and Dave King's
informants, Janice, puts it, "It was the Internet effect: that no matter how
small a minority you belong to, you could at last find your community" (28).
Andre Cavalcante makes the point that in the digital age transgender people
have had "access to hundreds of transgender themed websites, online forums, and
chat rooms in seconds," and that as such the digital world has formed a
welcoming space for trans* people to experiment with different identities
(114). Indeed, the internet is "central to surviving and thriving" for trans*
people, Cavalcante argues, as it is often easier to work, date and just hang
out in virtual spaces, which provide space not just for big issues such as
"gender reassignment surgery and political advocacy," but also for "the
smaller, mundane issues that define everyday life such as clothes shopping"
(117; 119).
Sumac clearly participates in such digital economies. In one poem, for
instance, he describes himself as a "trans tribe grindr dream" (33), while in
another he mentions learning from the online magazine Autostraddle, while yet another mentions "Chase Ross, youtuber and
trans 101er" (36), referring to the author of a Youtube series that includes
such titles such as "Pre-packed Underwear for Trans Masc Folks (GMP) Review"
(2019). The entire poem is even dedicated to a web company, Transthetics, which
manufactures products for transmasculine men. Such positioning in virtual
spaces does not only take place in poems focussed on transition. Advocacy and
political work for First Nations and environmental causes also requires
investment in digital identities. So one poem mentions, for instance, the
hashtagged campaign for "#justiceforcolten," referring to the campaign
following the acquittal of Colten Boushie's murderer (43), while others mention
"Trying to stay offline / news i can't look away from" (52), and a morning
routine where the poet needs to "block a few people / unfollow more / politics"
(91). More significantly, the entire collection is structured into six
sections, each titled with a hashtag – "#nogoseries": "#courting";
"#theworld"; "#recovery"; "#ceremony"; "#forandafter" – suggesting a view
of the world heavily mediated by social media experience. Additional evidence
comes in the form of an essay written by Sumac in 2015 about the #IdleNoMore
movement, in which he recalls "tweeting and Facebooking the hashtag along with
thousands of people across the world," and states that "For me, Idle No More created a sense of Indigenous
community that I had never been a part of before, and it did so through social
media" (98-99).[6] Although as
I will explore later in this article Indigenous identities have a complex
relationship to the digital world, Sumac clearly has found social media to be
as nurturing a space for First Nations collaborations as it is productive for
the development of trans* identities, as he explains in the quote that begins
this section.
However, if the digital landscape in Sumac's work is generally positive
and uplifting, that does not mean that there are no challenges to negotiate.
While the studies I previously quoted held that the online community of the
1990's and early 2010's contained revolutionary potential, others argue that
the effect of social media and increased trans* visibility has been to "unqueer" trans* discourse through a
fixation on narratives of passing (Siebler 81). Kay Siebler, for example,
suggests that "Transgender bodies are discussed, displayed, and regulated much
more rigidly on the Internet than the physical bodies of others within the
queer community" (83). Some of the blame for this, Siebler suggests, can be
placed at the door of dating apps which prioritise physical description, on
chat room discourse which centres on shorthand such as A/S/L, and on companies
which seek to profit by selling products designed to assist in passing. We can
see ripples from these pressures in the four poems that finish the #courting
section of you are enough. The
section as a whole has been structured around questions of love, consent and
acceptance (particularly in the central poem "at 29 i lie naked on the beach
and think of you," to which I return below), finishing with the poem sequence "haiku
/ consent series or / #makesexgreatthefirsttime" (27-31), and its imperative to
"forget the bad sex / I want to read the good."[7]
The last sequence takes up a specifically trans* journey into sexuality, with
the first poem consisting of the speaker's first use of the app Grindr
following a name change and beginning HRT. In this interaction he is literally
reduced to a body part:
question \ \ ftm / / question
"do you have a penis or a vagina?"
question
"i love bonus hole boys" (33)
The four poems
seem to have been ordered in line with the poet's transition. In the first the
poet is a "bonus hole boy" who has his lover "slide into you" (the poem is
written in the second person). In the second he mentions purchasing a strap-on
harness as a replacement for one stolen by a previous lover, but specifically
ties it to a queer rather than trans* identity by mentioning learning how to
wear a harness from the magazine Autostraddle.
The third poem is a depiction of mutual erotic ecstasy ("we didn't even /
notice / the power was out"), while the fourth and final poem,
self-explanatorily titled "'do you want to take the Cadillac for a ride?': Or:
a love letter to Transthetics / the company that made my prosthetic dick,"
makes the speaker's pleasure in his new penis clear ("I look down // and I am
transformed" (36)).
Siebler
sees such narratives as reinscriptions of conventional ideas of gender. While
trans* visibility has increased, and there are many examples of entirely
positive representations of trans* experience in contemporary media, the
inherent reductionism of digital chatrooms feeds into a general emphasis on the
correction of the misgendered body. Siebler argues that "Today transgender
people see hormones and surgery as a way to 'pass' in a heteronormative world
that mandates a rigid gender/sex binary" (77), becoming willing and active
consumers within a capitalist model that sees trans* bodies as sites for
profit. Sumac's poem, in such a view, partakes of the fantasy that a
pharmacocapitalist product is necessary to transform and thus improve a person,
literally becoming an advertisement for a company where the owner, himself a
transman, promises that "where there's a willy, there's a way! :)" (Alix).
Chase Ross, the YouTuber Sumac mentions, is one among many who have posted
regular updates on their transition over a ten year period: such video series,
structured in part to fit the algorithmically-controlled environment of
Youtube, form a kind of spectacularisation and regulation of the ftm trans*
body.[8]
Sumac, too, confesses to having made – but not posted – a "this is my voice 1 month on T" video,
and to have spent much time on the trans* internet watching such transition
videos. Where Susan Stryker sees a potential in trans* studies to "denaturise
and dereify the terms through which we ground our own genders," the digital
world has in Siebler's reading ended up re-reifying precisely those concepts of
gender that emerged from the Enlightenment period of taxonomisation that is so
bound up with colonial and imperial thinking (63). To say this is not in any
way to invalidate trans* personhood, but it is to ask whether trans* identity
is not itself in danger of being colonised by an overly medicalised capitalist
discourse which uses marketing techniques to externalise and "solve" a specific
mode of being. If Sumac's aim in you are
enough is to find a way to a poetic identity that is not only
transmasculine but also "queer bright / ktunaxa and proud / two spirit," with
that poem's implied challenge to whitestream cultures, then this flattening of
potential represents a real danger to his project.[9]
Sumac's resistance to this discursive reductionism can be seen at the end of
"'do you want to take the Cadillac for a ride?'" where the speaker's transition
is not in fact achieved with a prosthetic, but rather with a sexual connection
to another person – "and with her, I am transformed" (38).
A similar issue might exist with the sense of "Indigenous community" that Sumac found through
social media and hashtag activism. The phrase, which also turns up a lot in
discussion of the similarly internet-boosted #NoDAPL protests, carries inherent
challenges in its singularity, given the wide diversity of Indigenous cultures
found in North America. Gerald Vizenor, for one, has warned frequently and
loudly of the dangers of collapsing all tribal identities into a single indian signifier: however, in this case
the pressure is less one created in the self-justifications of settler
societies, and more the result of a specific and ever-narrowing tendency of
digital spaces towards monoculture. As of 2020, most of the top social media
sites most visited from the Canadian region (e.g. Instagram, Twitter, or
YouTube) use some form of algorithm to rank and prioritise content, as do
commercial sites such as Amazon. (Wikipedia, the main searchable source of
algorithm-free information, has its own issues with a non-diverse editor base.)
This environment introduces an inevitable and systemic set of biases. The
racist and misogynistic potentials of Big Data processing have been
comprehensively covered by researchers such as Safiya Umoja Noble, who notes
that many "algorithmically driven data failures [...] are specific to people of
color and women" (4). But the more subtle and insidious effect of social media
is in the filtering and narrowing of experience and of the potential for expressions
of difference in communal "bubbles" defined by a high degree of social
homophily, especially in the context of a platform designed to maximize user
engagement via manipulation of dopamine release in compulsion loops (Deibert
29). In the context of First Nations cultures specifically, there is a
potential danger of a loss of cultural diversity within a heavily online group,
driven away from tribal plurality by the algorithm into a pan-Indian average of
user preferences.
There is a specific danger for Indigenous
Two-Spirit youth in the existence of highly stratified digital spaces,
moreover. This is exemplified at the start of Joshua Whitehead's novel Jonny Appleseed (2018). The eponymous
Jonny, "Two-Spirit Indigiqueer and NDN glitter princess," moves in the first
two pages from masturbating over late-night silent pirate TV showings of Queer as Folk, through listening to "Dan
Savage and Terry Miller on the internet telling me that it gets better," to hooking up on the internet via "Facebook and
cellphones [and]... chatrooms on a gaming website," to "the photo-sharing apps
and cam sites" that allow him to make money as a virtual sex worker (7-8).
While the internet has allowed him to self-actualize, it also leads to his
leaving the reserve—where he has been the subject of homophobic abuse and
assault (91-92)—and operating in a Grindr world of non-Natives that
constantly fetishize his First Nations citizenship ("everyone on that damn app
was obsessed with New Age shit like [...] hipster shamans who collect crystals
and geodes looking for an NDN to solidify their sorcery"(18)). As in Sumac's
poetry, the digital therefore becomes a space that is both appealingly
accepting and potentially threatening both to tribal autonomy and also tribal
nations' cultural integrity. How Sumac navigates this challenge from online
no-space will be the subject of the final part of this article, but for now I
want to turn to a third area in which the digital space may be said to influence
production—in this case not just to content but also to form.
The poetry of likes
The popularity of poetry on social
media, particularly Instagram, in the past decade has been unprecedented. While
popular poetry has always existed, the sales of poets who first came to
prominence via the Instagram platform have been incredibly strong, especially
in the case of previously unknown writers. The standout is Rupi Kaur, whose
collections milk and honey (2015) and
the sun and her flowers (2017) have
not left the Amazon top ten list for poetry sales since publication. Her
publisher, Andrews McMeel, has become a central player in poetry publishing,
having published collections by r h sin, Amanda Lovelace, Courtney Peppernell,
Najwa Zebian and Pierre Alex Jeanty among many others. Often these writers are
labelled "Instapoets," a term that both recognizes their emergence from the
Instagram platform and also serves to denigrate much of their writing as
instant and disposable—for this reason, the label is frequently rejected
by poets such as Lang Leav (Shah). However, there are commonalities in this
group beyond their mode of production.
Posts to the Instagram platform
depend on visual appearance for gaining likes and shares. The power of the instant
feedback loop such likes provide can be seen in the fact that Instagram
executives in 2019 felt the need to begin hiding likes on accounts based in
Canada, in a bid to protect the mental health of its users (Yurieff). As
mentioned before, such likes have a physical effect in the dispensation of
dopamine, and it seems reasonable that this would affect poetic practice,
encouraging writers to reach as wide an audience as possible by removing
complexity from their work. The Instagram feed of Tyler Knott Gregson, where he
has published over 3,000 typewritten poems and almost as many daily
calligraphed love haiku, shows the rote mechanical effect of such a practice
(this is only a short excerpt):
Gregson is unashamedly commercial, as are his fellow Instapoets r.h. sin
(Reuben Holmes) and r.m. drake (Robert Macias), the latter of whom in fact
denies that he is a poet at all. A better example of the pressure to produce
particular types of content can be seen in the Instagram feed of the Dené poet
Tenille Campbell, who Sumac name-checks as an inspiration in finding self-love
(36), and with whom Sumac collaborated on the essay "Just Make Me Look Like
Aquaman." Campbell, a photographer as well as an academic and poet, curates her
feed to alternate between images usually drawn from nature, and short poems, as
in the screengrab below:
If, crudely, the success of a poem on
Instagram can be judged by the number of people inspired to demonstrate that
they like it by clicking a heart icon below the poem, then it is very
noticeable that the longer and more complex nature poem at the top of this
selection had garnered only 403 likes by the 3rd August 2020, and
the poem at the bottom with the racial signifiers gained 749. The middle poems,
on the other hand, with their lack of specificity and superficially feminist
message, had scored 834 likes for the right-hand poem and 1,136 for the one on the
left. In other words, the more the poem fits an image of a self-empowered and
sexually autonomous woman, the more cultural capital it accrues—and,
unlike previous generations of writers, social media poets receive such
feedback in real time. As Millicent Lovelock remarks in a conference paper, à
propos Rupi Kaur:
her
frequent use of simple, direct, and unambiguous language on the subject of
trauma and healing can be understood [...] as a reproduction of a pervasive
neoliberalism which centres the self as a site of labour and ignores the
specific societal conditions which might produce trauma.
Instagram's machine learning generated algorithm prioritizes posts for
display that other users are more likely to "like," based on a complex series
of factors including who else has already liked those posts or other posts by
the same user with similar hashtags. The effect for any one writer on any one
poem is arguable at best, but the overall pressure is undeniable. And this is
not just true as regards content, but it also applies to form. Instapoets
specialize in short poems that are brief and direct, such as the haiku—at
least, the anglicized version of the haiku, which requires only attention to
syllable count and often does not pay attention to the Japanese form's requirement
for kigo or kireji—and simple free-form verses formed from one or two
sentences with little or no attention paid to metrical patterning.
Facebook,
where Sumac's poetic journey began, differs from Instagram in that there is
less of a visual element and users are mostly only broadcasting to "friends"
and followers on the site (hashtags being only a small element of Facebook
interaction), meaning a more focused audience, but the pressure towards small
word counts and direct statements exerted by the "like" function and by the
requirement to generate a poem for public consumption per day still remains.
Some of Sumac's poems certainly have the direct simplicity of Instapoetry, as
in this example:
offer
what i can
but emotional labour
takes its toll
rest now (61)
Or
this:
"we have everything we need"
when you said it that first time
it took everything to try and believe
but when i woke up today
angry that they tried to make me forget it
i think i understand
i am everything i need (67)
Claire Albrecht coins the term "therapoeia" to describe the trend of
social media poetry, driven by the pressures outlined above, towards "readymade
self-love and acceptance," particularly poetry created by millennial and Gen-Z
writers in Western societies among whom levels of anxiety and depression are at
an all-time high (Albrecht). Sumac, who devotes one of the six sections of the
book to "depression and addiction" and who has been open about his own
struggles with such conditions, certainly enters this mode many times. These
fragments are not presented as discrete poems, and this fact forces them into
dialogue with the greater complexities of identity and belonging in other poems
in the collection: nonetheless, their existence demonstrates that Sumac's
poetry is subject to some of the flattening of affect observed in Instapoetry.
While the digital environment that shaped his early poems certainly has not had
a completely deadening effect on his writing (one only needs to compare Sumac's
syllabic control to the free-form chopped-up prose of a Courtney Peppernell to
see this), certainly it makes sense to situate him within this community of
digital creatives.[10]
As with the previous discussions of
online trans* and pan-Indigenous communities, it is not my intention to
demonize social media poetry. Not only is poetry publishing globally in a rare
rude state of health following the success of the Instapoets, but the genre has
created an opening for voices who have rarely been at the forefront of English
language writing in settler cultures. Young female voices of colour from
immigrant communities are particularly strongly represented, including Rupi
Kaur (born in India), Najwa Zebian (Lebanon), and Lang Leav (Cambodia), none of
whom, crucially, centre their writing on their experience as ethnic or gender
minority subjects. As Leav pointed out to me in an email, the seemingly
unmediated level of access provided by social media has also allowed for a
generation of working class voices to be appreciated by a wide audience, where
such voices might have been either excluded or ghettoized. It might also be
observed that the "perform your truth" ethos of the new poetry (which also owes
something to slam poetry events) benefits writers like Sumac, and other trans*
poets on Instagram such as Mia Marion and Hunter Davis, in creating an audience
willing to appreciate and celebrate his identity as a queer, nonbinary,
transmasculine, Ktunaxa citizen. However it is obvious that an uncritical set of
therapeutic generalities also carries the danger of forming what Lauren Berlant
calls an "intimate public": a body of sentimental texts bound by a common
recognition of pain, which gives its readers "permission to live small but to
feel large; to live large but to want what is normal too; to be critical
without detaching from disappointing and dangerous worlds and objects of
desire" (Berlant, loc 197). Such an intimate public is "juxtapolitical" (loc
103) rather than political, usually expressing a desire to return to the
conventional—one can see how the hashtag #justiceforcolten might not
easily garner likes within the bright and happy space of Instagram in the same
way it can do on Twitter.
This is where Sumac can be clearly
differentiated from the crowd of Instapoets, for you are enough is by no means purely in the mode of therapoeia, and
it certainly does not always insist on establishing commonality. To explain, I
compare two representative poems.
The first is from Atticus, a leading Instapoet:
Don't fear, her
father said,
sometimes
the scary things
are beautiful as well
and the more beauty
you find in them
the less scary
they'll become. (loc. 737)
We are not told
who the anonymous "you" of the passage is, but there seems little from the
context to suggest that this is a specific person. Rather, as with the
omnipresent "you" in r.h. sin's poems, this is a generic female addressee given
as few markers as possible, the better to provide a blank space for the (coded
female) reader to identify with. By contrast, here is a typical excerpt from
Sumac on the same subject:
when the rest of the world grieves for a world they
think is gone,
when we've awoken to a nightmare we didn't think was
possible,
when i am afraid that i can't make it to the next
sunrise and i
don't know if the tears will ever stop,
when smiling seems like it might be
a failure.
on days like these i find strength in your
presence—
like a lighthouse on fire in a storm i
couldn't find my way out of alone.
You once told me the kitchen floor is the best place
to cry;
("there are hierarchies of grief,"
46)
Both poems deal
with finding the strength to move through difficult emotions. However Sumac's
poem is a threnody dedicated to specific people, as evinced by the precise
details that collect throughout—"your generosity flowing from fingertips
on that piano you don't play." These form a private set of symbolic images,
which cannot be fully comprehended by anyone who does not know the intimate
details of the relationships being shown. Indigenous signifiers threaded
through the poem ("i think of how you taught me to carry and take care of / the
feathers" (47)) also explain what is meant by the titular hierarchies of grief,
how the individual's grief is given context and weight by wider griefs at the loss
of "a world." Here we see how Sumac's poetry, emerging from an online space,
nonetheless avoids the weightlessness of much social media poetry by engaging
with tradition and ethnicity embodied in natural imagery in phrases such as
"[you] showed me where your little star so / strong brought down a tree so we
could be with the / water" (47). And it is to water that I want to turn in the final
section of this article, to look at the ways that Sumac uses natural spaces and
ceremonial imagery to ground his poetry even in the digital context.
Smokii on the
water
The illustration
overleaf is a word cloud made up of all the words (including poem titles and
individual poem dedications but excluding acknowledgments, section titles and
copyright information) in the collection you
are enough.[11] Such word
clouds, as Samuels and McGann have argued in their article "Deformance and
Interpretation," continue the work of traditional criticism in deforming the
text to reveal and interpret hidden codings (152).
In the words of
Amanda Heinrichs, they "suggest both an immediate, impressionistic 'grokking'
of the underlying 'data patterns' of the thing they remediate and they invite
the reader to perform the searching, delicate, sometimes-clumsy work of
meaning-making that is close reading" (408). Certainly such digital methods
seem appropriate to an author whose practice I have argued is very much bound
up with digital contexts. And indeed a list of the most common words in Sumac's
writing, in order of frequency, practically becomes a new poem in its own
right:
|
Word |
Weight |
|
now |
82 |
|
like |
76 |
|
just |
61 |
|
love |
58 |
|
time |
53 |
|
know |
52 |
|
will |
51 |
|
one |
45 |
|
can |
44 |
|
see |
41 |
|
still |
39 |
|
think |
39 |
|
enough |
33 |
|
way |
32 |
|
back |
31 |
|
First |
31 |
|
Home |
30 |
This "tabular
poem" already shows the simplicity of language in Sumac's poetry and its major
themes of desire and the (re)claiming of space as home. A look at the full
database confirms this initial impression: the vast majority of words are
common monosyllables, and the primary verbs almost all express either emotion
or introspection for personal growth ("love," "know," "think," "feel," "need,"
'breathe," "learn"). But a second word cloud, this time concentrating on nouns,
is more revealing:[12]
Many of the
most significant words of the collection, as can be clearly seen, are to do with
time and seasonality. In particular, the combination of "moon," "time," (and
time-related words such as "today," "day," "night"), "heart" and "body" show, I
believe, Sumac's investment in a cyclical temporality and in images of renewal:
one poem-fragment reads, for example, "this will be last time / the next time
we come" (20). The frequent use of "way" and other travel signifiers also show
that Sumac, a poet who is deeply invested in ideas of home, sees being "at
home" not as stasis but as a form of movement, often in the form of interior
development. Of course, these sentiments are shared widely in therapoeic social
media poetry. Take, for instance, this untitled poem by r.h. sin, though there
are an almost infinite number of possible examples:
More interesting is the prominent appearance of the word "moon". Another
excerpt from Sumac's poems demonstrates the personal symbolism behind this
word:
and so i chased the sunset driving against my instinct
back east and
south and up that big hill past the teaching lodge where i went to my
first full moon ceremony to pray for the journey this body was about to
start
While the moon
functions as a female symbol in many cultures, frequently due to a cultural
association between menstrual and lunar phases, here Sumac relates such natural
cycles to his transition to masculinity. As he puts it in his article "Just
Make Me Look Like Aquaman": "The gender binary has consumed my ability to
understand that the moon is not judging me; I am. The moon still shows her face
to me. The moon still holds me like the tides." The same article also states
that this was his only full moon ceremony, implying a potential goodbye to
femininity.
As can be seen from the second word cloud above, other words relating to
natural phenomena ("skin," "sun," "fire," "blood") are used frequently in his
writing, nowhere more so than in the "#ceremony" section, in which poems on
just the first page celebrate "the kiss of the prairie moon," "river rocks" and
"tap[ping] the snow off cedar" (85). Such use of natural imagery within a
ceremonial context serves to ground Sumac's writing in a specifically
Indigenous, land-based system of belief, and acts as a strong counter-measure
to the digital flattening effect traced above. It is also significant that in
his poems Sumac gives very few details about the actual ceremonies. This
honours the spiritual imperatives against sharing with outsiders common across
pan-Indian religions, allowing Sumac instead to discuss the spiritual and
ethical lessons learned from the land ("the mountains told me / carry knowing
in your body (92)).[13]
For a special issue primarily concerned with trans* and Two-Spirit
writing, perhaps the most significant natural symbol Sumac uses—another
word that is repeated frequently—is "water." This focus on water imagery
may reflect elements of Ktunaxa cultural understandings and/or Ktunaxa
politics, as like many First Nations the Ktunaxa government are often in
negotiation with settler authorities for de
jure and de facto access to and
use of waterways within their ancestral homelands (see, e.g., Locke and
McKinney 204). More, it should be remembered that the collection was written in
the shadow of the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, hashtagged
#noDAPL, in which the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies argued that the
proposed (and now operational) oil pipeline represented a serious threat to the
tribal nation's water supply and to waterways guaranteed under treaty, so water
was a major element of pan-Indigenous discourse at the time. However the poem "at 29 i lie naked on
the beach and think of you" (24), perhaps the most confrontational piece in the
entire collection, shows that Sumac feels he has a more direct and intimate relationship
with water. In this poem, placed within the pivotal "#courting" section and one
of the first poems in the collection with a specified title, Sumac's speaker
remembers an ex-lover ("and i saw you on instagram smiling at pride. // you,
the baby dyke / that doesn't even like going down"). The speaker undresses himself on a beach and walks to the
water, observed by a voyeuristic older man who "just sits, his erection and my
knowing / between us," a form of attention that places him in a position of
power, and in fact seemingly empowers him towards the realisation that "i am
someone you could never understand." Although the "you" of this statement is
superficially the ex-lover, it also seems to be aimed at the reader and maybe
even contains a realisation for the speaker himself, as in the next line he
enters the cold water, which absorbs his tears of loss and anger. After a
momentary dissolution into pain, the speaker is reborn—an idea that,
Sumac makes clear, is not an uncomplicated one for an adoptee ("this gasp is
like the one i took bursting forth from the womb of a woman / who wouldn't even
look at me"). The poem ends with the speaker celebrating his "ktunaxa skin,"
buoyed up by the water.
The significance of this image-memory for Sumac can be seen in the fact
that, after entering transition, he re-staged the scene of stripping off and
entering the water in a photo-essay collaboration, ""Just Make Me Look Like
Aquaman": An Essay on Seeing Myself," which appeared on the blog "tea &
bannock" in February 2020.[14] Although
the voyeuristic male gaze is absent, Sumac in the series of photographs for
this piece is again being witnessed, this time by the photographer Tenille
Campbell, and again sees a bald eagle (mizigi) flying overhead. In a
progression of images, he disrobes and eventually faces the camera. In the
accompanying text, Sumac discusses harder truths about his life that are only
glanced at in the poems of you are enough—"the
molestation at 12, the rapes at 15, 17, 21"—which clearly underscore the
elements of rage and grief in the earlier poem. As in "at 29 i lie naked on the
beach and think of you," Sumac as "Aquaman" again conveys an experience of
transcendence, but this time frames it more academically in terms of overcoming
more familiar representations of Native American peoples in mainstream culture
("Too many people still want to photograph the Indians with their own Edward
Curtis-like agenda."). A transmasculine man, his breasts clearly on display,
standing thigh-deep in the ocean with his prosthetic penis touching the water,
is nobody's "vanishing" Chief Joseph: Sumac affirms his Two-Spirited
transmasculinity as being a native product of North American Indigenous lands,
a gesture of profound survivance.
Conclusion
At the
beginning of this article, I demonstrated the ways in which Sumac's art was
founded in, and is in some ways a product of, a digital landscape, particularly
of certain social media platforms. I argued that this landscape continued to
have an effect on the finished product, and that this could be seen in the cover
imagery, the actual form and language of the poems, and in some of the ways
that Indigenous and trans* themes were approached in the poems. I gave some air
time to the arguments of Kay Siebler, who argues that a loss of queer potential
was occurring through an algorithmically driven pharmacocapitalist environment
that enforced a new form of gender normativity for young trans* people, and
extended this discussion to incorporate concerns regarding the algorithmic
manipulation of Indigenous communities online and the flattening of affect seen
in popular poetry generated for a click and like economy. I am aware of the
risk that, being as I am a white male cishet Gen-X scholar born into privileges
of class, race, sexuality and gender, my negative feelings about social media
and changing identities may simply reflect the usual generational concerns
about a changing world and young people today, but I have provided evidence
from a number of different sources to justify this investigation. As someone
who is not Ktunaxa or First Nations, and cannot bring either detailed knowledge
or experience of ceremony to bear, I have also chosen to focus on those
elements of Sumac's poetry which particularly stand out to me, which I
acknowledge may also be a by-product of my having been in the limited digital
Facebook audience for early versions of some of his poems.
What the final section of this article begins to demonstrate, however,
is the way in which Sumac's work not only embraces all of the identities to
which I referred in the introduction, but also starts to weave them into a
coherent whole. Water and moon imagery, both universals but ones that carry
particular meanings in the poet's recovered Indigenous culture, serve as
springboards to assert a selfhood that can incorporate the poet's trans*
present and future without rejecting his female past, an Indigenous futurity
that does not ignore the poet's out-adoption and upbringing, a queer sexuality
that refuses to settle into a singular label. As such, it presents the
strongest possible challenge to Siebel's contention that the multiplicity and
potentiality of queerness is challenged by contemporary normative trans*
digital cultures, or similar concerns about the homogenising effect of digital
culture on Indigenous nations. I would also contend that Sumac's writing should
make us re-evaluate the practice of more mainstream/commercial Instapoets who
have emerged from the social media bubble. The hashtag is a potent organising
principle in Sumac's collection, both in the section names and in the
#haikuaday with which it began. It should also draw our attention to the
arrangement of the poems, where it is not even entirely clear where one
discrete poem ends and another begins. As with hashtags in the digital world,
the hashtags in Sumac's work serve to restructure the poems away from being
singular units and into becoming fluid and interlinked units of a larger
discussion, removing impediments to a free flow of energy and desire across his
writing. As such, it represents a potent evolution of Indigenous writing into
the interlinked realities of a digital world.
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