Trans: Poems

by Hilda Raz

This elegant and moving collection of poems grew out of Hilda Raz’s experience with her son’s journey to a transgender identity. Born Sarah, now Aaron, Raz’s child has had a profound impact on her understanding of what it means to be a family, to be whole, and to know oneself. The collection moves between past and present, allowing Raz to reflect on her own childhood and on her experience with breast cancer to find ways to connect with Aaron. The journey takes us from intimacy to strangeness and back again, from denial to humor to grief and rage, but always laced with love and acceptance.

“Trans” means across, through, over, to or on the other side, and beyond. This book documents some major transformations of body, self, society, and spirit that art requires and life allows. The poems are accessible and finely wrought. They are equally testaments to Raz’s insistence on making an order out of chaos, of finding ways to create and understand and eventually accept new definitions of self and family. The physical and sensuous language of Raz’s poems, and their humanity, keep them intimately bound to the world and to the senses.

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 17, 2001

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book of poetry in an afternoon, and I have to say it didn't leave me with much. The poetry wasn't bad per se, it was very readable, but it was (in my opinion) badly organized and not really remarkable in any way. Only a few of the poems had any real emotion in them, and the issue of trans-ness was left only superficially covered, partially because this book is form a parent's perspective. The most surprising part to me is that there was only one poem in which the author questioned the trans desires of her daughter. Equally surprising is that her Judaism felt as flaccid and helpless as her, unable to provide her any guidance on the topic, any comfort, anything. The author/mother felt very passive, as if this was just something that happened to her, not anything she had a say in or an opinion on.

Though I maintain that the collection is badly organized (there are no notable transitions, logical, thematic, or otherwise between adjacent poems), there is an attempt at organization through an innovation on an unbearable cliche. This cliche (which is especially unforgivable in graduation speeches) is where the author starts things off by saying "The Oxford English Dictionary Defines ___ As:"; in our case, the author divided sections along the four main senses that "trans" takes in English (none of which are directly the "transgender"/"transexual" sense in which her daughter>son uses it). I found things quite disjointed, because we were constantly and without warning flying around in setting, sometimes taking place in the author's childhood, sometimes at various points along Sarah/Aaron's transition, and sometimes in the [present?]. This felt more gimmicky than thought out, but the first poem was a very good choice for the start. It's titled "Avoidance" and it's exactly the litany of distractions that you'd expect. But after that we have a desert of unimpressive and unremarkable poems about her childhood, and you get confused and frustrated since none of them have to do with trans-ness, whether trans-sexuality nor other types of trans[itions].

The first poem that actually felt like it was saying something of interest was "Said to Sarah, Ten", which ended with the lines:

I tell her in the dark,
when we're gone, when they're gone
under the earth, when all our names are forgotten,
this will continue, this dancing.


The rest of the first section are mostly unremarkable "logistics stories" (as Sam Hyde would call it), where the author complains about back pain and cancer treatment and such. If you come to this book expecting it to be a deep dive into transgenderism or even a mother's thoughts on the topic, you'll be mostly disappointed

The author raises an interesting parallel between breast cancer and Female-to-Male trans surgery; the issue is that the mother's surgery was a medical necessity to save her life, and the latter was... dare I say cosmetic? If we're delving into etymology (trans, etc.), then cosmetic, which derives from cosmos, the appearance [of the universe, of everything in the universe] is not an unfair term to use when describing this operation, since it is to change both how the person sees themselves, and how others see them (Aaron admits that while he was Sarah, he didn't see anything in the mirror [something to that effect]). Several times the mother/author notes the scars from the breast-removal surgery on her daughter>son, and this is bracketed with a tinge of pain on the mother's side and the apparent happiness of the new son.

The entire transition from female to male also raises the obvious linguistic issues, which her/his mother is quite interested in, being an English teacher (or professor?). The author opts to use (what I believe makes more sense, but currently is not allowed) the approach of calling the person their "deadname" when you're talking about them before the transition, and their new name after (with the appropriate pronouns for each. It seems a perverse denial of basic history to say "he" when Aaron was a female presenting/associating/etc. little girl. This, as with everything else in this collection, is only explored in somewhat glancing ways, rarely head-on or definitively.

Back to the poetry, the second section has a poem called "Footnotes" which is a list of statements which are jarring compared to what came before (for example, the first flagrant mention of "cock"). This poem was more of what I had expected (than the timid, lineated prose of the rest of the collection). One of the lines, #6, struck me ("something about the difference between becoming an ornithologist and growing wings"), because it raised the issue of desire vs. identification. For example, I may desire females, but I don't desire to be a female. Similarly, I desire God, but it is blasphemous to desire to be God. How the Jewish author of this book couldn't see that basic parallel was surprising to me, because I personally see much of the issue as a confusion of two categories that used to be [self-evidently] separate.

On a theological note, I'm trying to figure out how much the author is a "cultural Jew" vs. a "religious Jew". We have mentions of Adam, even of Eve being "of Adam", but no exploration of that, of marriage, of how her daughter-to-son is the opposite of Eve coming from Adam (Male to Female). Instead, all we get is a poem right near the end where she mentions "Shakkinah, the holy part of God that is Woman".

In the poem simply titled "Trans", the author does make an implicitly anti-capitalistic swipe at the therapists who charge a hundred dollars an hour (she cries for $10 worth of that hour), and its easy to empathize with that frustration that we feel trying to get help from these mercenaries we call therapists. This book was written back at the turn of the milennium, so both trans-ness and therapy were more tabboo than they are now, but now it has much less of a shock value to us who are inundated with both.

We are also inundated with images, whereas back then it wasn't so bad, which gives added weight to the photographing of her [newly male] son. The use of a camera to capture the new way that her now-adult child looks is striking, because cameras are amoral, merely relaying pixels (or, back then, a negative), and this seems to be the farthest that the author and most people can go today. We are scared to ever make a judgement other than mere description, or, if politically correct, some form of approval. This is about where the mother ends up in this collection, willing herself into seeing her daughter, now dressing like and breastless like a man, now with "straight shoulders, barrel chest, narrow waist, hips, muscular skin... So male." The obvious question this raises is "what about those things which you can't change with a scalpel, such as the mind? The soul? The skeletal structure? The multi-millenia-long traditions and moral codes?" But instead we take the place of God, speaking things into creation: saying and they are so.

As we near the end of the collection, some of them are cliche travel-bragging ("Letter from a Place I've Never Been", which would work well on Instagram) and at times delve into the irrelevant-because-incomprehensible ("Hello") and the irrelevant-because-fixated, such as the strange and inexplicable series of Wonder Woman poems. All of these obsessively fixated on the bracelets she wore, tying that with self-harm and perfume (people put perfume on "pulse points", so on the neck, on the wrists, etc.). The author also had her own little constellation of terms or images which cropped up repeatedly, especially feathers and Jewishness. I was surprised that the latter was neither seen by her as patriarchal and oppressive, nor was it seen as a boon and refuge. It seemed to be merely flavor, just as this collection seemed to be merely a glancing shot at what otherwise could have been an incredible exploration.

[Lisa Hase-Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilda Raz and Poetry of Transition

I was unprepared for how excited I was to read Hilda Raz’s collection, Trans and the way her clear writing made me want to jump up a write a poem. Where the narrative poems in her collection are captivating as to give the impression of a firsthand experience, the lyric poems glow with associative connections and non-linear constructions that leave the reader contemplating deeper implications. Raz has a way of constructing a fleshed out poem upon a skeletal form of essential details. That is, the extraneous and the obvious are left for the reader to supply. As a result, her poems are expansive, reaching beyond their subject matter to live and breathe outside of the context of the collection. Equally astonishing is how Hilda Raz, the person, effectively disappears from these poems leaving only a powerful elixir of emotion and quandary.

While the prominent subject of the collection is Raz’s adult child’s sex change, many other kinds of transitions are represented. These transitions are loosely organized into four parts, each of which is headed by a definition of the prefix “trans.” The first part is prefaced with Oxford English Dictionary’s first sense of trans: "With the sense across, / through, over, to or on / the other side, beyond / …from one person, / state or thing to / another.” Because each definition and senses of the prefix are only subtly different from one another, the essence of the meaning or sense must be derived from the poems contained within each respective section. The first section, for example, flirts with denial and avoidance that comes early in processing information that is difficult to accept. It is a stage that is crucial in the journey toward acceptance but also one in which many people find themselves stuck. The poems in this section reflect shock, resistance and truth seeking, all of which are present in the poem ”Drought: Teaching, Benedict, Nebraska.” Told from the perspective of Merce, this poem represents the speaker’s attempt to normalize a life-altering event by sharing stories with others who have survived equally shocking events. Merce advises her audience “don’t get too attached to any of ‘em” (1) because “you might lose them”(2). Perhaps she means her four-year old grandson, or perhaps she means any and all family members, for she next retells the extraordinary tale of the day she lost her husband. In the unmistakable tone and cadence of a Midwestern woman, Merce describes how she came home “from town, some fool party / or other, to find her husband lying on the floor / under the kitchen table.” As if this weren’t enough, Merce goes on to say that a “tornado / come right after”(7-8) causing neighbors, relatives, and friends to come running for the only storm shelter in the area, which is apparently on Merce’s place. It is not till the end of the poem that we learn the speaker “is just up from an operation” (33), which suggests the speaker is bonding with Merce over life tragedies (and confirms that this book is about more than just a sex change operation). While it isn’t explicitly stated, I feel like the speaker’s operation is a result of breast cancer (this is also suggested in the Wonder Woman poems). Both operations and scar imagery are repeated throughout the collection and seem to signify a commonality between the speaker and her post-op son.

The second part of the book considers trans as a verb and can be characterized by poems that are truth-seeking. “Teach me” goes the refrain in “Secrets,” while poems like “Heart Transplant” and “Footnotes” suggest further information gathering. “Trans,” the climax of the collection, illustrates an epiphanic moment in the speaker’s journey and occurs during a therapy session. “What do you care, she asked / at last, letting me get the good / from my hundred-dollar therapy time. / She’s still your daughter” (1-4). When the speaker retorts “Son you mean, you old biddy” (13) and begins crying “a good ten bucks worth of earth time” (14) the reader understands this indignation as a sign of acceptance. The speaker is defending her child and anyone talking about this child’s change better get it right! This defensive act is really a gesture of acceptance and a sign that the speaker has rediscovered her unconditional love for her child.

Section three is concerned with the adjectival sense of trans and is not at first obvious in its intent. The poems all address different aspects of the speakers’ experience and are concerned with recalling lost things and the cyclical nature of life. I’ve decided that this section is dealing with other ways of describing loss often associated with transition and represents the speaker coming to terms with loss. Lost sleep, lost relatives, lost jewelry, being lost, and lost identity. Gender identity in particular is the subject of the poem “Women & Men.” While most of the poem seems to explore the paths women can chose in life, the introduction of a man walking a dog in the second stanza serves as a turn that leads the poem in a different direction. When the woman kneels to pet the dog, the man says “’He would love to jump on you,’” which is a very threatening thing to say to a woman on the street. The poem concludes with the woman telling the man “I’d be afraid.” This poem epitomizes how quickly encounters between men and woman can become something unintended, even threatening, often as a result of some projection on the part of the man. The experience seems to undermine all of the poem’s previous contemplation over what a woman can be with what a woman can be reduced to.

The fourth section of the book means to address trans “With the sense of beyond, surpassing, transcending” and begins with a lovely prose poem titled “Hello” in which the speaker greets a multitude of items. It marks a moment in which a sense of acceptance has been achieved. The most interesting series of poems in this section are the four that focus on Wonder Woman as their subject. The first is a list poem, and Raz has an interesting way with lists. Unlike many others I have read, the items on her lists are often only loosely connected. In this particular list, Raz incorporates images from previous poems in the collection and uses images that will recur in the Wonder Woman series. For example, along with other aspects of Wonder Woman’s costume, her bracelets come into question repeatedly. What do they cover? Vulnerability? Perfume? Scars from a suicide attempt or self-mutilation? Legs, too, are an important recurring image: “Your legs work, don’t they? (1) (which also appears in “Tough” from the first section of the book) and “Don’t tangle your legs in a cape” (22) both from “Wonder Woman’s Rules of the Road” and “Flaunt your legs. They work, don’t they” (8) and “Your legs work, don’t they”(11), both from “Wonder Woman’s Rules of the Road – 1962”. Really, the Wonder Woman poems are inextricably connected to “Tough” and I love the way they frame the rest of the collection. I think the speaker is realizing here that she is Wonder Woman, and is discovering that that body parts do not determine gender. The absence of a breast, for example, does not remove femininity just as the presence of breasts does no instill femininity. Further, I am again reminded of abstract art when I read these poems. Like abstract art, they are bold, aggressive, and meant to trigger emotional and visceral responses in the audience. “Imagine Wonder Woman with one breast” (70). Wow.

Trans is filled with a multitude of characters: two sons, a daughter-in-law, at least one grandchild, students, neighbors, friends, and deceased relatives. As a result, it is sometimes difficult to work out which son or relative is the subject of a poem. With close reading, however, the connections become clear, and this collection is worth multiple readings.

[Jenni Welsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection is full of detail and emotion that put you in the moment (and past) with Raz. This would make a beautiful reading companion with her book What Becomes You.

[Malcolm Alexander · Rating 2 out of 5]

Am still reading it, but I'm not terribly impressed with the poems qua poems.