This is the fourth post in the Succession III: Queering the Environment series, edited by Jessica DeWitt, Estraven Lupino-Smith, and Addie Hopes. For this series, contributors were invited to explore ideas of queer rebellion as interruption and resistance.
“Would this turtle rather be dead and have its bones kept and honored, or would it rather be alive and drag its tail in the mud?” The two great officers said: “It would rather be alive and drag its tail in the mud.” Zhuangzi said: “Go away! I will drag my tail in the mud.”
– Zhuangzi1
There is a pond about a fifteen-minute walk from my apartment that is home to dozens of turtles. If you linger at the water’s edge, a few will swim up close to you, craning their necks to get a closer look as they hoist themselves up on the half-submerged rocks that line the shore.
The pond is in Morningside Park in West Harlem, New York City. Behind it, a nearly-vertical wall of gneiss—the speckled bedrock that underlays Manhattan—carves into a steep wooded hill. From the overlook above, you can see east across the island and feel the breadth of everything, like in a flying dream.
Morningside Park is a storied landscape for me. I lived across the street from the park in my second year of college, when the city was just starting to feel like home. I walked up through the park, or along its edges, nearly every day back then, making runs for cheap food or paying visits to the dorm of a person that I loved.
One afternoon, I went to the park with a friend to watch roommates and neighbors play chess. We all sat together at a picnic bench. The friend was visiting from Rhode Island and had stayed the night. It’s all kind of vague now, except that I vividly remember the warmth and light of the sun. More than a memory, it was a momentary clearing of time. A release from the press of time-as-vigilance-and-compulsion.
Seven months later, I learned that I was going to become the parent of a near-due child with the friend who had visited. In the shock of it, I vacillated, not knowing what to do. But at some point before the start of what would have been my third year, I withdrew from school and moved back home. And then the baby was born. And then I became a single parent (though really it was my own parents who did most of the parenting.) All this to say that my departure from New York was sudden, and that I never fully left in spirit. In the years after, whenever visiting the city, I always felt drawn back to the park and the streets surrounding it, where like a ghost, I could not help but retrace familiar paths.
I had a turtle back then, circa age 20, whom I had purchased from a little shop on 125th Street in Harlem. Which was a mistake. Turtles need a lot of sun, but my room faced a lightless back alley, not to mention that the apartment was always pickled in smoke. Her aquarium was cramped, and I didn’t clean the water frequently enough. She barely moved. But not having known any other turtles, I just chose to assume that this one’s torpor was a species trait.
I walk through the city now and notice so much more than I used to. I am back where I started, but differently. And it makes me wonder, where was I actually, most of the time, before?
Later, having returned to Rhode Island, I released her into the Pawtuxet River, which ran through a swampy, remnant patch of woods near my parents’ house. I had mixed feelings about it—the river was known to be contaminated thanks to the defunct Ciba-Geigy chemicals plant upstream, and I wasn’t even sure at the time if turtles could survive New England winters. On the other hand, it was clear that she didn’t belong in that miserable tank with no friends and no place other than the surface of a single rock to go. And so to the open waters she went.
When we reached the riverbank, I lowered her body gently into the water, expecting that she would hesitate before the newness of it. But instead she pushed herself off my hands with her back feet and vanished, like a flying arrow, into the algal darkness. It was as if she had become some altogether different creature. Who knew that turtles could swim like that? How did I not know?
I was a guest on the island of O’ahu for half a year with my former partner, who had grown up there. We had planned to stay for a year at least, but after a few months, everything started to feel terribly wrong between us. There were no big fights, just a wordless dying back of things.
In the final weeks of our relationship, she started seeing whales. She would gasp in wonderment every time one breached from the waters far offshore. But I couldn’t see them, no matter how I tried to orient my eyes. And so with every breach, my heart sank deeper. The ocean became a veil with another world behind it, and the veil was drawing closed between us. There was a world, and it was vibrant, but I could only see the play of winds and shadows on its surface.
It was easier with sea turtles because they drew closer to shore. When I first encountered one in the waters off the seawall near Tongg’s beach, she was so close that she nearly grazed me. They were easy to spot from across the industrial pier at Kaka’ako too, and I loved spotting them, I think because it was a salve against the failure, on my part, of ever having landed. And I admit that it gave me some hope, albeit false, that I would someday belong there.
My daughter is on her own now. And I am living in New York City again, not far from Morningside Park. I had long wanted a reason to come back, but it was starting gender transition that finally pushed me, which is to say the need for distance from people who weren’t ready to support my coming out as trans. And no less the many social ties back home that bound me (without malice overall) to a gendered performance that I could no longer sustain.
One of the first things that I noticed in being back here day-to-day is that the pond in Morningside Park is brimming with turtles. It’s weird because I don’t remember ever having seen turtles when I first lived here. Otherwise, back then, I would have commended my own turtle to the pond instead of making her schlep all the way back to Rhode Island with me. And sooner, because the pond turtles’ grace and curiosity would have given the lie to the normalcy of keeping her captive the way I had.
I walk through the city now and notice so much more than I used to. I walk farther and feel more awake to what’s around me. A Chinese crab apple tree that grows horizontally along the ground. Turkey vultures. The exquisite, ancient gneiss. The river whose Lenape name is Shatemuc, also known as the Hudson.2 The way the land undulates. The way some streets connect weirdly. The moon. I am back where I started, but differently. And it makes me wonder, where was I actually, most of the time, before?
Gender transition, for me, is a necessary rebellion against a certain kind of closure — that is, against the fore-closure of new becomings. But it’s not a matter of leaving the traces of my past life behind. Rather, as may seem paradoxical, transition has brought me back to a landscape that I had long overwritten with past conditionals, like “would I have come out as trans sooner if not for becoming a parent?” and “what if I had made different choices back then?”
I return to familiar sites to re-member myself in more-than-metaphorical ways. And in remembering, I also begin to attune to the life of those sites as if for the first time. Memory, or what Toni Morrison calls “the ruse of memory,” becomes less a store of regret than a well of stories, a warp of threads to be picked back up.3 It needn’t, nor shouldn’t, mean going back to every place in body. But it is a re-embodiment that enables me to call the ghosts of self back home.
Notes
1 Zhuangzi 莊子. Quoted in translation by Edward Shaughnessy in The Origin and Early Development of the Zhou Changes (Brill, 2022), 87.
2 Indigenous Scholars of Architecture, Planning, and Design (ISAPD), “Tour of NYC Indigenous Presence,” Urban Archive, accessed July 5, 2024, https://www.urbanarchive.org/stories/5Cyr9Lj1bki.
3 Morrison writes: “I depend heavily on the ruse of memory (and in a way it does function as a creative writer’s ruse) for two reasons. One, because it ignites some process of invention, and two, because I cannot trust the literature and the sociology of other people to help me know the truth of my own cultural sources.” In Toni Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Writing,” Thought 59, no. 235 (December 1984): 385–90, 386.
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