Marginalia - Chile

Claudia Rodríguez

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30.11.2022

#87

Through this section, monthly, we invite agents of the artistic system to share a selection of images related to their practice or current interests. Images are published daily in the header of our website and shared through our Instagram profile. At the end of the month, the complete selection of images is published together with a text that contextualizes them. Here is the selection of November 2022.

Transvestite Poetry

It is believed that what is different is grotesque and monstrous.
I have been hated so much that I have reason to write.
I have never represented hope for anyone.
I place letters together and write half-heartedly about this emptiness.
I write because I have not been the only one.
With my trasvesti friends we have been rejected because the body is sacred
and one should not play with it.
That is why I write,
for all the travestis who didn’t get to know they were alive,
for the guilt and shame of not being bodies deserving of love and died young before being happy.
They died without having written a single love letter.
*
My mom says that’s not the worst thing, the worst thing is to be illiterate and live on
dreams.
For my mother, dreaming has nothing to do with not being poor.
I dream of losing that fatal fear I have of hunger.
I am so afraid to stop dreaming that I want to forget myself in dreams.
I dream of losing myself in dreams and that this fucking fatality will be returned
to those who don’t want to let me dream.
But surely none of this is important, because surely you guys are
here to have fun.
Do you want a show?
Does the world want a show?
Could it be that Chilean society wants a show?
Does September want show?
Does the church want a show?
Could it be that the poor want a show?
That hunger, sadness, hatred want show?
Do they want a show?
Do they want me to make them laugh?
Do they want to laugh at me?
*
They say I was born dumb, hollow and stupid. It is men who
wanted me to be dumb, pretty and silly. Soft and foolish, but dumb and silly
like Marilyn, because that’s how they know how to love.
They convinced me so much that I am incapable and dumb, that I need to be told again and again that they love me, so that they can save me from foolishness.
They accuse us of being superficial, they say we were born stupid.
Of me, they say I was born dumb, hollow and crude.
But it’s the men who wanted me dumb, pretty and silly. Soft and foolish,
but dumb and silly like Marilyn, because that’s how they know how to love.
They convinced me so much that I am incapable and dumb, that I need to be told again and again that they love me, that they love me, so that they can save me from foolishness.
And I tell them with the passion they expect, call me a fool, so that they will believe that I am
dumb.
But in silence they don’t know the hatred I have for them.
*
When I say the things I say, even my travesti friends are afraid of me.
My travesti friends have an irresistible fear of me talking about our
things, it overwhelms them.
It terrifies them when I say I play cute.
That I play cute, bored of waiting for life to surprise me.
They don’t believe that a travesti can dye her hair blonde and be angry and resentful.
We travestis have been as manipulated as the image of Marilyn Monroe.
*
From a very young age I was forced by men not to forgive, to save my own
life.
Because to stop forgiving means to support myself, to provide for myself, to shelter myself.
I turned out like this because I stopped forgiving.
I learned to nourish myself with generosity, because if I survive,
more and more travesties will survive, even those crazier and more monstrous than me.
You do not know how terrifying it is to look at the rotten hatred in the eyes
of the men who reach out to us only for sex, sex that is impossible for it to be just sex, because it is revenge, the game of placing their hands on my neck and letting me
knead, seize, take over, and only for a few measly pesos, the game of suffocating
to desperately reconcile with their failures, for their deformed pichulas
that neither penetrate, nor caress, nor rub, with their insignificant beaks,
dry, with threadlike erections, swollen glands and black foreskins,
incapable of ejaculating, believing that they pay us with their inability to feel,
because they never got to feel like men, because of that blunt manhood,
unplugged, that never had a name, because they never penetrated,
never caressed, never rubbed without their tulas, because according to them, tulas should always be big and hard, and having been born truncated in this way, they are obliged to take
revenge at all costs with us, unarmed, for their debris, with the poor sissies, whom they
poor ladybugs, whom they have always said we deserve to die.
*
Absolutely, because I was born here, when I speak and write, I implicitly
tell the history of this territory.
Implicitly, infra-textually or even from denial, I describe
my grandmothers’ grandmothers and their subordination.
*
I speak of being a migrant in the same way that I speak of being born in
A world with a mountain range,
and in the same way, of the wasteland that being a travest implies,
in the narratives of those who were born here and do not name us.
Likewise, with the little importance that biographies have,
Believe it or not, when I speak of being illiterate,
I am also speaking of the fear of having a voice after
September 11, because we were also born here.
I think, believe it or not, that when I speak, I speak of my mother and
my grandmother and all the grandmothers, of their persecution and fear. Believe it or not,
being born here, made me of this color and so with the color of my skin I speak of
the mountain range.s
*
I am like that, believe it or not, those of us who were born here, in this territory,
speak unconsciously of September 11,
Believe it or not, being born here includes me, even if I am a travesti,
even if we are not named in the history of Chile, we are from here, from this
territory.
Although we are not named in the struggles of the poor, we have always
been here.
We travestis have been illiterate in the history of having been born here.

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