Pretty: A Memoir - Hardcover

Brookins, KB

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593537149 ISBN 13: 9780593537145

Verlag: Knopf, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.

Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective—the tropes, the presumptions—Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change.  

“I should be able to define myself, but I am not. Not by any governmental or cultural body,” Brookins writes. “Every day, I negotiate the space between who I am, how I’m perceived, and what I need to unlearn. People have assumed things about me, and I can’t change that. Every day, I am assumed to be a Black American man, though my ID says ‘female,’ and my heart says neither of the sort. What does it mean—to be a girl-turned-man when you’re something else entirely?” 

Informed by KB Brookins’s personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency—whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as “other”

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

KB BROOKINS is a Black, queer, and trans writer and cultural worker from Texas. They are the author of Freedom House and How to Identify Yourself with a Wound. Brookins has poems, essays, and installation art published in Academy of American Poets, Teen Vogue, Poetry Magazine, Prizer Arts & Letters, Okayplayer, Poetry Society of America, Autostraddle, and other venues. They have earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, Equality Texas, and others.

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one

After Dionne Brand

The poet cloaks themselves in language

just to later arrive at your front door

The poet has been into the idea of mud lately—

where does it come from,

how do we track remnants of something that came

from an uppercased Something

and whine while ringing ourselves

dry? The poet has thoughts the size

of a mustard seed. Sits his ideas in our mud. Raises

up a child from the earth from whence it came,

stirs us up with the idea of tracking dirt. From dusk

to dawn, look. What do you see

in between mundane creases of shoes?

Can I breathe a penchant of insight into you

trouble-sized and ready to be loved?

The poet strips possibility bare

to count the lines on its hands.

Until I Wasn’t

Before the Texas heat could cut through bodies like glass, there was a nighttime breeze. My mother felt a rumble in her belly that sent her hurling over a toilet seat—gunks of upchuck getting stuck in her hair. Sure, she’d gotten food poisoning or a bug that upset her stomach before, but this rumble was different. It stayed often; it felt unprecedented for her still-growing, seventeen-year-old body, so she hurried to get a pregnancy box from the pharmacy that is now an apartment complex.

She took roundtrips to the bathroom, each one more sobering than the other. After peeing on three different sticks, and spending minutes anxiously twiddling thumbs on her childhood bed, two red lines stood in for the inevitable: “pregnant.” These lines were confirmation for what she already knew, but sometimes, someone or something else needs to say it. This was the end of her Black girlhood. This was the beginning of her sweet Black girl. Before she could count the days between the formation of her new self, a self forever molded by mothering, her first ultrasound appointment came. A nurse gelled her newly plump belly and pointed at a fatbacked monitor. Little lines went in and out of focus.

“It’s a girl,” the nurse said, softly. My mother smiled big, then nodded in silence. That was the first sentence of a book that describes my undoing. That was the first story someone else told for me.

At least, I’d like to think that’s how it went; the truth is, I don’t know much about my pre-life. My first thought was to start this book with some sob story about my childhood, something that made you want to tear up and keep flipping, but I don’t remember much about that either. The learning how to walk, then run, then fail, then question myself—all of it is a blur, except moments that feel like scenes you hurry to forget after watching a scary movie. Unintentionally remembering little, I think, is the scariest feature one could have within their body/mind. I must confess: I spent many years making up stories about my 0–17 existence. I wanted my childhood to seem like the kind of thing that led me to the present, so I filled in blanks, and when friends inevitably recalled their childhoods in conversation, I told 50 percent fiction. I wanted the kind of memories that people bring up in quick quips, some things that hinted at the now-grown adult I’ve become. The truth is: when somebody says “childhood,” my mind distills seventeen years down to several scenes I can count on two hands. Even then, my mind autocorrects to something else when I remember anything too painful. Half of those things I don’t care to dwell on for longer than a few minutes (unless I’m in therapy). The rest of them, I guess, I will tell you.

The mind has a way of shielding the body from what it can’t contain. Most minds don’t have equal space for trauma and logic, so the latter takes a hit big enough to keep the other things working. So know that this origin story isn’t the full one—who among us knows their life from embryo up to uttering their first cries, anyway?—but is composed of the moments too interestingly gendered to pass up, starting with Barbie.

The aforementioned teenager who birthed me out of her womb was not ready to be a mother, so after two years spent being raised by my granny, I was re-homed with loving, ill-prepared parents. The only folks I’ve ever called my parents are boomers; more religious, and much more rigid in their thinking, than a teen mom would be. My dad is a Texas-born-and-bred country boy, our extended family’s handyman, and a deacon who spent forty of his able years fixing washing machines at Sears for a living. In his free time, he did an assortment of fishing, preaching, making everyone laugh, and making dishes out of anything he could kill (squirrels, deer, you name it). My mother is his equally religious, equally Texan right hand. Much more timid and quick-witted, she drove Fort Worth Independent School District buses for work and played the piano at church for some fifty-plus years before her memory started to decline. Neither of them has, to this day, lived outside of Fort Worth’s Stop 6 neighborhood. Forty years my senior and empty nesters (both of their blood children were twenty-plus years older than me), they were more ready to parent me, as my bio-mom and grandmother knew.

They loved me in the way that anybody who was raised in the ’60s, who’d been given limited ideas of what love is, could. They loved me the way a child loves their favorite Barbie doll: enough to keep them alive, but not enough to keep them thriving. Enough to buy a child they chose to raise everything in their power but deprive them of what money couldn’t buy. As for money, fixing appliances and driving buses didn’t generate a lot of it. But man, were they rich in love for god and love for their immediate and extended families. So much so that at three, I had a box, bigger than me, full of toys.

Ever since I could walk, I undressed the Barbies my parents got for me at Walmart, Minyard, or Toys “R” Us naked to the manufactured bone. Those white, thin, blond, un-genitaled things were always splayed atop the covers of my childhood bed. While I was “playing with Barbies” age, my father loved to dress me up in these coordinated fits: dress, matching hat, matching shoes, and frilly socks. From 1997 to 2013, you would see no less than ten photos of me with dad-assembled drip and a tub of naked Barbies in multiple corners and walls of my childhood home. I took the clothes off every beige figure I could get my sticky hands on. I remember it feeling cathartic. Maybe I needed to see Barbie’s boobies to understand what a body was. At least then, someone was naked, for no discernible reason, like me. If you need an image to ground you, picture a sweet Black girl in barrettes, dresses, stockings, and sparkly shoes undressing little plastic figures meant to signify white girls. Doing this was fun as fun could be.

In the world’s mind—a world that never thought much of us Southern, working-class Black people—I may as well have been a plastic surface, naked until draped in gender. My dad dressed me like every little Black church girl in the ’90s: crisp and nun-like. But who needs clothes when everyone has already defined you? I was a girl, so I played with Barbie dolls; secretly, I played with them in my own way. How odd: a toddler who already had secrets. Though I had no language for it, I knew that my Barbies should not have been naked. But on my terms, I made Barbie into the kind of girl—a frayed, nonsensical naked figure with no genitals and a smile—that I saw myself as. I put scissors to her hair and cut it multiple lengths, too. And then we played; me and naked Barbie played every day in Barbie’s house, or on plastic-covered couches at my grandmother’s...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593537149
• ISBN 13: 9780593537145
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Knopf; https://knopfdoubleday.com; ; 3 Queen Caroline Street Hammersmith; London; W6 9PE; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland