Protected: Transcript: An interview with Dr Nat Raha for You Are Here

Jet Moon

Morning Nat! So nice to be speaking with you.

‘Dr. Nat Raha is a poet and activist, scholar and lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at Glasgow School of Art. Her work is an experimental queer lyric, attending to the everyday of marginalised lives, hirstories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, of humans and the-more-than-human, she works through de/rematerialising sound, warmth and syntax on the page and in performance.’ And that is from that bio on the 87 Press, which have just published Nat’s poem “retributions”. Nat, I wonder if I could get you to read the bit of your poem that is in purple at the top of the page?

Nat Raha

So this is also from the coda to the poem. It begins with a quote from Françoise Vergès: “dare to dream of a peaceful life. Peaceful here does not mean pacification or appeasing, but a politics and a practice of solidarity , love and self defence”. That’s the quote.

dilate eyes on galaxies , autumn heat unbelieving carceral nights ,

we recolour the cities with visions of love, dusks,

truths in harm , warm flesh after its weaponization

can sacred image

sound so loud to quell
the violence that would follow us a

hundred orbits of the earth? or does the power we envision as living

Jet Moon

Thank you. So I listened to ‘retributions’ the recording. And at times I also read along with the text and sound because you know it’s up there online. And can we talk about the title? I don’t want to come across as simplistic but I have had many conversations about words, single words, for example, forgiveness, which for the sake of the audio, in my question that word forgiveness is crossed out, has a line through it. So trying to find ways or understanding to re-vision this word. And I’ve had a lot of conversations about restorative justice, and its relationship to prison abolition. So to me, it seems that the title retribution is very complex.

Nat Raha

Yeah, I guess, this poem…so just to kind of frame the context of the poem a little bit. It’s interesting: so when I’ve been presenting it, I’ve been…when I’ve been reading, I’ve been saying “Oh, this is a response to this painting by Sutapa Biswas “Housewives with Steak Knives (1985)”, which is currently on display as part of “Women in Revolt” at the Tate. And in the painting, it’s a depiction of a housewife as the Goddess Kali. She’s painted with dark skin, she’s holding a….I always want to say, I want to say dagger, but

it’s not correct. She’s holding a cutlass. She’s garlanded with the heads of various political figures of the 20th century. There’s like a token Empire guy, there’s Hitler and others. And she’s also holding a red flag, which has an Artemisia Gentileschi painting on it.

And so that’s why I’ve been saying, and then the whole poem is trying to intervene in this question; I think of it as a feminist intervention into this current kind of dialogue or around the Hindutva nationalism within Hinduism. So it’s this like, the Ethnonationalist form of Hinduism that is dominant in India at the moment and is represented by the BJP and Narendra Modi, the current Prime Minister. And for me, this whole question is about like: how can a feminist intervention into Hinduism or these particular feminist takes/readings of Hinduism that have existed for, you know, for decades, centuries as far as we’re aware….what work can they do to challenge the forms of violence that have become naturalised within um…they’re part of how the patriarchal violence of Hindutva, Hindu ethnonationalism, is functioning right?

And this became a question of like, the relationship between this kind of spectacular violence, which often involves like femicide, or the killing of Dalits. Like, for me personally, I was like “Oh, no, this kind of does begin in the home”. This is about performance of patriarchal violence that I’ve experienced, and I’ve seen in Hinduism as well. …The story of Kali is about divine retribution and this moment that Kali goes on a rampage, in an act of cleansing, of violence towards some kind of purity. And this is, you know, I think all of these words are loaded as well and could be interrogated like, ‘purity’ especially, and stops when she’s about to slay her husband, right. This is the moment of depiction of her, usually it’s that she’s about to kill her husband and she holds her tongue out.

So that was kind of like…it’s kind of their retributions, in terms of thinking about the title, I guess. There’s some other stuff personally, and like, I’ve been writing lots of poems that have these one-word titles, but like, it’s like, ‘retributions’, I have a book called ‘apparitions’. And ‘meditations’ is another poem I was working on. And so thinking about these processes, and these acts through this writing – you know, it’s the noun in the

plural form thinking about these moments, these…these processes, these things that might be like ways of…an ethical response to a world of harm that we find ourselves in.

And, yeah, I think for me, ‘retributions’ has kind of jumped up as the title in the period of time I was writing this poem over two or three or four months, and it came quite late in the day. And then yeah, and also just, I think, even though that’s that sits in the title, it’s kind of there in the first section of the poem, the poem is really concerned about this question of like, what is the embodied experience of harm? And how that also pertains to something that I feel… relates to the more-than-human as well…. I started seeing these correspondences between how forestry has been managed and takes place and how that relates to colonial violence and imperialism. And there’s kind of these questions around that, in there. Yeah, I don’t know if that’s a helpful response or if you have any thoughts, but yes, yeah, go for it.

Jet Moon

Because, you know, before I had pressed record, we’d started to talk about those complexities and how, to me it is, you know, I can search for solutions, and I want to make like big solutions. But um often that really is on the level of thought and process. But what I really am searching for is “how do I deal with what is immediately happening?” And what I noticed in the poem and why I chose this quote, because it talks about this, “be scared of our blesséd power”, and then it continues on from that point to talk about…to me, it’s a perception of when otherness can be both an amazing thing and then also singled out in a sense of structural oppression. And this was the complexity that I was thinking about there.

Nat Raha

Yeah, and it feels like it’s interesting. In terms of this poem, I think this relationship between the goddess figure, like Kali as a figure who’s obviously like, she has many arms and there’s this question around like how we relate to that collectively, I think and, obviously in Sutapa Biswas’s work she’s really thinking about, you know, she was

talking about how she’s very much a housewife, you know, it’s actually… it’s not the goddess, it’s a housewife, that’s what the painting is of.

And um…I was thinking a lot about the kind of collective feminist response to…because I guess when you have these extra-legal acts of violence, or femicide, or murder, you know, this is like that era of bulldozer politics in India, right, which is like,…the enemy just turns up with four bulldozers. That’s the end of the game, you know, and some paperwork. And um…I was thinking a lot about that, like how the collective response may be this way of like coming together and of building something that is…is this form of power that does…it feeds the…well, it doesn’t feed the fear, but that’s what the fear is of, you know, in terms of the fear of, like, why the harm begins in the first place. So I’m trying to think about…it’s not nec-(word unfinished)…I haven’t unpacked the cycle of this but there are these questions around like, why do the people who are d-, like hegemonic and dominant at the moment, want to like have this sense of victimisation that then pertains into reproducing acts of violence against people who are marginalised?

And so I think that’s the like, it’s like, trying to unpick some of this and be like “Okay, so…” you know? I mean I don’t think that’s just unique to this present moment because
I think that’s part of this dynamic of interpersonal harm. And I think like, especially when we think about like, survivorhood as “oh okay we’ve been harmed by people who were…you know, had a duty of care over us”. I think that’s really…in different ways, in different contexts, and not just in the family, y’know? But yeah, so I think that’s kind of in there. And I should say, you know, I think when I was writing this poem, the kind of…well the feminist revolution in Iran was taking place and I was seeing that, that had kind of emerged as I was, especially when I was working on the first edit of the text. And in September 2022 and I think also seeing, seeing that unfolding via social media and via the media as well. Again, it’s like a manifestation of this, and there are obviously questions around religion, but for me, it’s like, you know, my relationship to religion is complicated and not devout. So it’s kind of easy to be like, “Okay, this is happening in another context. This is what…this feels important, energising; something that we want to write in solidarity with…so, yeah.

Jet Moon

I feel again, we’re just like picking up on the threads where we had talked about, um, you know, these discussions, like for me that I’ve had over and over again in collectives about “oh, nonviolent direct action versus so called violent action”, or…you know, “you cannot use the master’s tools, blah, blah”, you know, all this kind of stuff where to me it just feels like it’s a constant thing. And then you mentioned also this thing of, you know, structural power adopting the victim role, which can be so baffling, and is often used to justify these extremely violent acts.

I want to just try and pull back to a question so I don’t ramble with you, you know, like myself. So um in another poem set and a recent performance, “Epistolary (on carceral islands)”, you performed what you described as “A sonically expansive, trans historical poem letter addressed to ancestors incarcerated for anti-colonial revolt”. And I think, you know, lifting this from the website, where they had described it a bit more plainly as “A performance addressing the history and development of island prisons across the globe, through the colonial project of the British Empire”, and that the piece “Considers what the rise and fall of these carceral islands can teach us about contemporary abolitionist struggles from a trans feminist perspective”…. So I wanted first of all, just to speak about the form that you’re writing with, you know, because you are moving words in a very interesting way on the page, it’s very much part of how you’re composing your work. And I’ve wanted to ask you about the, you know, breaking of form as a challenge to hierarchy, borders, knowledge.

Nat Raha

Yeah. So yeah, so I think this whole…I’m intrigued by the differences of these quotes, but it’s fine it doesn’t actually matter. So I should just talk about the performance a tiny bit, just to frame the context for anyone who hasn’t encountered this. So for the recording, this performance was co-commissioned by Edinburgh Festival and TULCA festival of visual arts in Galway 2023. The performance, yeah, it’s um it’s the actual kind of like substance of the performance involved me kind of like opening and unfolding these letters, reading them, we were thinking about…like on the one hand, I was using this kind of three channel audio setup with a mix of like live and layered and pre-

recorded elements, at least that’s in the Edinburgh performance. And there’s like, this kind of key also thinking about accessibility. So the text that I was reading and unfolding were displayed as part of performance as well.

So the visual kind of experimentation on the page, using the page expansively like writing across the page, having these line breaks and positionings of text, and like, columns of text also, using different delineations, to think about how texts that are read at the same ti-, sounded at the same time are displayed, that’s all kind of in there in the visual display of the work. For me, I think like, I usually approach…so sound, there’s something about sound and meaning making and the ordering of words and the uses of grammar which, for me, feels intuitive to disrupt and in those disruptions, I see the multiplicities of meanings emerge. So even in saying like de/rematerialising sound, it’s like, okay, these different directions of like, what’s happening to sound can emerge in thinking about it that way.

And in terms of form, an epistolary form. So there’s these multiple layers on this, I was…all of the letters were printed on…printed and packed into blue airmail envelopes, which for people who were around the 20th century know what this is, which is how, you know, we, my family received correspondence from our relatives in India, and in the 90s, in the 80s. Yeah, and the 80s and 90s. And, you know, before in the times before email and text messaging and cheap international phone calls, although, you know, sort of, yeah, that’s the easiest way to describe that.

But also thinking about this in terms of politics. So yeah, so the whole work is thinking about how, like, why prisons…why people started to build prisons on islands. I speculate that that began in Scotland, and, but I’m specifically writing about the incarceration of two of my great uncles on the Andaman Islands in the 1930s by the British Empire, who were involved in an anti-colonial revolt in in Chittagong in what is now Bangladesh in 19-, in the early 1930s. And so the text is kind of about that history and about their struggle and their involvement in the hunger strikes that took place on the islands. And so there’s multiple layers of thinking about how the poem or the poem letter can kind of like, function trans-historically, I’m writing kind of in the pres-, in a, in a

present tense from like the now to the…to the then, like these temporalities that joined. And simultaneously… and I should say, like yeah, we’ll come back to that…Simultaneously thinking about how letters were actually one of the things that were denied the prisoners on the islands, they didn’t have access to correspondence, or if they did, it was like, maybe every three months at certain times of the, you know… there are a series of struggles against a lack of having correspondence to the outside world, and that kind of opened up the possibilities of it, especially in the first part, in the earlier parts of 20th century.

And so also trying to think about the significat-, the significance of letter writing of freedom, you know, also thinking, you know, we’re thinking a little bit about our work with projects like Bent Bars as well and like how letter writing is a way to transcend prison walls to build communities inside and out like from the inside, with the outside. And yeah, I think it’s…it… yeah, there’s lots of layers in that. And I think also in the process of this work, of this piece, you know, I guess I was thinking about the trancestors as well. And there’s a…there’s a letter maybe two – something anyway sorry I can’t remember – a letter that is like addressed to Sylvia Rivera and it’s kind of thinking about, I guess, these long histories that, especially when we’ve been sitting with these trans histories around, you know, like our trancestors who were jailed repeatedly, for various ti-, over various times for various reasons for various rules that have since been consigned to the dustbin of history.

But simultaneously the history that we sit with is this continual unfolding of how we read trans history through an abolitionist lens, right, that our….and how we would describe the history of the Stonewall riot, commonly, I think in 2024 is maybe quite different from how we would have described it in 2014. And, yeah, I think this is like, part of this, like: how does abolition and how do these knowledges change? How we understand what has taken place? And what kind of politics we might want to articulate in the present now, especially when it’s like, okay, maybe we need to think about, like, what can prison abolition give to this, like different trends of transnational contexts around incarceration and violence.

Jet Moon

I just wanted to catch and, like restate the phrase “re-trans history”, because I wasn’t completely sure that it was clear. But for me, it seemed important to just, you know, capture the word, make that phrase “re-trans history” stable within our conversation,

Nat Raha 22:10
Did you say retrans or read trans or both?

Jet Moon

I said “re-trans”.

Nat Raha 22:16
We could re-trans history. Yeah, no, I mean, I think it’s good hearing.

Jet Brand 22:20
So I didn’t hear.. you said something different from what I heard!

Nat Raha 22:22
I think is actually…I’m not gonna say it’s a mishearing, because it’s a hearing. And yeah, I think it goes both ways. I said “read” as in the act of reading, but it’s also in there because in thinking about…so when I was doing the deep archive dive of like, on the Andaman penal colony, there is very clearly a trans reading of what’s happening.

And it’s maybe a… you know, it’s a trans queer reading of what’s happening, you know, around how the British were imprisoning what they thought….what they would describe…who they would describe the sodomites in the middle of the 19th century. And yeah, also thinking about how that relates to the, you know…this is at the same time that the British started imprisoning Hijra and other gender non-conforming people in India, which they did simultaneously with the imprisonment of indigenous tribes in India like that was all tied into the same law in the 1860s. And this is exactly at this moment where this form of incarceration starts to build as part of Britain’s project of empire in India to contain revolt, because there’s a big revolt in 1857. And the kinds of

ethics of policing that they adopt in the colony…of incarceration in particular, I should say, were already long denounced in the Metropole, like, 50 to 75 years previously, there have been huge debates about if these modes of imprisonment were humane or not, so it’s all kind of in there in terms of this. Yeah, and then being like, obviously, my interest is, you know, I’m looking…we’re looking for the trancestors as we’re doing this historical work. So, yeah, so it is kind of a “how do you re-trans history?” You know, because otherwise, it’s gonna be history.

Jet Moon

I think it was just my queer ears, you know, and then I was like “oh, yeah, that’s, that’s important to like, say that.”

Nat Raha

Yeah, thank you for saying that there. No, it’s good. It’s yeah.

Jet Moon

Oh, sorry. I just want to say that I’m aware that I keep smiling when you’re talking about quite serious things, and I don’t want…I just want to be clear that I feel a bit weird because what I’m actually doing is, I’m very strongly agreeing and feeling what you’re saying. And often, I can feel…get this kind of expression where I’m just like “ufft” you know, I feel it so much, I identify with that a lot and that becomes a smile. So in case you think I’m doing something …

Nat Raha

It’s, it’s… I appreciate it. I feel your energy and your response. And there’s…because yeah, ‘cus it’s also really…this performance was like a particularly challenging one to write, enact. You know, there’s a lot of trauma in the archive that I had to carry. The week of the Edinburgh performance was intense and yeah, I really…And I, you know, I spent a lot of time being I think, thinking about, yeah, okay you can go.

Jet Moon

I just want to introduce like, you are answering the questions where we’re going, but I want to just make sure that they are in the recording. So because I was, you know, gonna ask you about this way that you read, and you perform your work and how it embodies that, that liveness has evolved, and how it connects with your social politics, I feel that you’ve really covered this so well.

And then I just wanted to ask about, like, you know, like, when I’m speaking with survivor writers about writing, there’s often like this real confrontation with the fantasy of writing “oh, I’m just gonna bang out this piece of work”, you know, these ideas of perfection, brilliance, you know, versus the difficult realities, like the slog of it. And I did want to ask you, like, what your process of writing looks like, but also, what you’ve started to speak about this thing: how do you accompany yourself in writing about subjects that can be so weighty with collective and historical grief and all of it? You know, it’s…I get very overwhelmed with the vastness at times, and I wonder how…how are you doing it? You know, like, what’s the nuts and bolts? And what’s the emotional…like, how do you contain or what do you do in trying to write this?

Nat Raha 27:09
*whistles* Um, I think…so the one thing I want to like, say, upfront, because I feel like it’s..it’s the thing that it’s like, advice to other survivor writers almost on this question of like, the toll, I think, of trying to speak what has previously not been said in this way is…big. And I don’t want to say it’s like toll as in just the cost. But I don’t think this is necessarily just about writing creatively as well. I have this with academic writing, too…and other critical writing too.

To yeah, to work on things that are challenging, difficult, personal, that your body has been through. And maybe I want to say that either as like your body as we exist now in this moment, or maybe your body as you understand it ancestrally in terms of what think I was maybe struggling with when I was working on the epistolary performance. Um, yeah, but that’s, I mean, I think to work through that is also…that’s where the power comes from. And there was some elements when I was doing…when I was performing this, especially the second performance [in Galway], where I just kind of felt this flow of

like…there’s something about the embodied…my embodied presence in the performance and like, trying to literally just have a flow of that that’s a bit more playful, or… there’s also trying to…what’s the word?

It’s hard for me to describe because it’s like an embodied language. It’s like a…an expressiveness that does feel kind of like animated and playful and a bit lighter, coming from the.. as like a way of trying to release the weight of the heaviness of thinking about these historical traumas. Yeah, so that’s…that’s maybe the performance and liveness thinking about it there. And that that’s like part of how to respond to that, I think trying to respond to these weights. And yeah, ‘cus the fantasy of writing…yeah, I’d be intrigued to hear you describe that more, but yeah, you go.

Jet Moon

I guess I hear people say things like well, ‘oh, I wish I never needed to edit but I could always just be in that…those moments where I have somehow hit a writing flow and I’ve got, you know, that those odd paragraphs that just come out and look kind of like “oh, yeah!” Rather than, for me, it’s always this thing; I often like need to just try and rough something out to get anything out, and then spend a lot of time editing. And I think that that is not very romantic, whatever that word means, and it’s not very glamorous, and sometimes it’s just tough, and it’s quite, can be a bit lonely.

Nat Raha

Yeah, that’s right. The isolation of writing life is a whole other conversation, whole other trail, so I’m going to bracket that. So I write a lot by hand these days, especially writing poetry, although also I’ve been doing critical writing by hand. So…and so it’s this mix of like, there’s like the generative phase by hand but then the editing is like actually where the work comes to exist. And sometimes there’s a massive gap between those moments. And if I do…if I’m just generating, I don’t feel like I’ve written anything.

It’s only when it’s editing and being developed…and for me, like, that’s…laying the text out, putting it into the computer, printing it, working through the edits with a pencil on the printed paper, reading it aloud, often like…with, like, ‘retributions’, the poem had like

these two…had this first performance I did in September in 2022 in Cambridge, actually, which is also partly where I’m from, for my sins, um I grew up there, and I have really fraught relationship to that town. So it was also like…and I was doing this performance in the venue that I hung out in as a teenager. So it’s a very, like, interesting loaded moment to try and release this poem into. And then simultaneously like it’s a two- or three-months editing process of the text, but you’re working it out, as you’re reading it. Taking time to reflect, for me, is also really key and then being like “actually, this thing isn’t working. This thing is. This thing is missing. There’s this whole thing I wanted to say – did I even say it? Is it even there?” And that’s actually the bit I enjoy the most, because then you’re like “oh, okay”, figuring the, yeah, the text then starts to come to life.

Jet Moon

Now I’ve got a little bit of a question about that, because I also enjoy it. I don’t think it’s like the nit pickiness of editing but somehow, for me, writing is also a place that I go to. And you spoke about embodiment in reading, but also in writing, and in the kind of ancestry and I also often feel like a real sense of companionship when I have characters or, you know, people who are within my writing, I really am in relationship with them. And I’ve wondered, you know, when we had touched on loneliness, and you talked about this enjoyment, so I wanted to kind of come back to that because…for me, I think it’s quite key.

Nat Raha

Yeah. And, actually, it’s interesting because both of these texts are addressed to, you know, they have an addressee which, obviously, like, if you think about lyric, it’s like there’s an addressee for your lyric. ‘retributions’ is addressed to my friend, Nisha Ramayya and we have an ongoing correspondence. We’d written a series of letters to each other during the pandemic as part of an exercise. But…and then I was like, “nah this poem…”, I started writing this poem when I was on vacation. I was just like, you know, it’s like the postcard poem. It’s like “Hi, I’m in the forest. I’m thinking about you in the city. I’m thinking about oysters. Thinking about the coppicing”. And um yeah. And

actually I think it’s interesting to think about this question around characterisation and invocation.

So in the in the ‘epistolary (on carceral islands)’ it’s like, definitely there’s this whole question around invocation and trying to have a conversation with ancestors who passed on and who, you know, I had like fragmentary meetings with when I was younger, but being like, yeah, having another bit of awareness of this, like…the distance of migration, and also the distance of incarceration in this question, in this case, and um…thinking a little bit about what that writing can do for me and it also felt like what it also means to be trying to work through these kinds of histories and what it means to leave, to put that out there into the world. And yeah, it does feel…it does it…I think those performances, the space of the performance really felt like a space of communion. My friends were there, they were present, present in that moment.

Jet Moon

I mean, I think that’s funny, because, you know, yeah, you can do it ‘for yourself’ but the thing is that the audience is still there. We have also, you know, we have talked about this collectivism, and I was curious about writing as a practice of collectivism. Because I feel a bit of the tension between what I want to do as an individual, and yet I’m constantly also in involved in working with communities, working with groups, you know, and sometimes that’s like a tool, but I’m very questioning of this thing when you’re like “Oh, I did it for myself”. But the thing is that you’re still bringing it into the public and collective realm.

Nat Raha

Yeah, and I have another text/unwritten book that I think is really on this question of the collective because I think I really wanted to…which is….So for the recording: Jet’s been speaking a little bit about their current writing project. And I’m not gonna…that is about a collect-, about collectivity and collective organising and problems that can come out of that. And, yeah, I have…the only bit of this text, of this project that I’ve been working on, that’s my unwritten book is a text called “Solidarity & House”. And that was published a few years ago [2020] with Grand Union in Birmingham, as part of some

stuff to do with Jamie Crewe’s exhibition at Grand Union which was called ‘Solidarity & love’, ‘Love & solidarity’, these two exhibitions. And there’s something about, I just…I guess, I just, it was almost like, I just wanted to get this down. I wanted to write something about the kinds of worlds that we inhabited…it’s kind of auto-fictiony, maybe? I didn’t really know I was writing this before I really thought to start think about auto-fiction as a critical term. Yeah, so maybe for me that’s a little bit different from these other texts I’ve been writing about today…that I’ve been talking about today.

I regularly get asked around my use of a ‘we’ in my poetry, that I primarily write with the first-person plural, more than a first person singular, although both ‘retributions’ and…I mean ‘retributions’ has lots of ‘we’ in it as well. And I always…I often say that it’s like, it’s an invitation to join that ‘we’ if you see yourself within it or something. But obviously, I always have a sense of that so it…Am I think about, like, brown and black feminist diaspora? Or am I thinking about queer and trans community, worlding, life? Or some combination thereof all of this. And yeah, so maybe there’s a promise of collectivity that, and again, this is creative, right? This is about…it’s not, you know, I don’t write representative work, per se. It’s…the writing is trying to make something exist or trying to show something that has existed. And, yeah, so maybe there is always this like imagined space for the reader or the listener to be in the text in that way as well. And maybe…

Jet Moon

I mean, to some extent, you know, whether you make it or not, it exists. I’m gonna come back to a question. So, personally, you know, I’m interested in writing as a method of survival and proving our own existence, because sometimes I feel like I need to do that, you know? I don’t have anything that I can easily see that is out there. Like, you know, not necessarily representing but you know, having anything that I can be like “Oh, I believe this version of reality”, or, you know, transforming my experience. I just want to find some kind of hope, like I really do, no matter how bleak the story I want to find some way through it. So in 2022, you published an article on queer memory and in inverted commas, it says, ‘reconstitute the trans lesbian 1970s in the UK’. So the essay emerged from an intergenerational public conversation between yourself and Roz

Kaveney. And you describe the essay as a ‘reparative reading of fragments of print media, from the archives of UK gay and women’s liberation movements, addressing the contributions and memories of those who self-defined as trans lesbians…By centering the countercultural writing, along with memories of trans and non-trans women (from the 1970s, to the 2010s) reflecting on their experiences within the movements and movements of solidarity and sisterhood between women’ and saying that you’re representing a ‘liberationist vision of trans life that explicitly emerges from a feminist revolution and from lesbian separatism’.

So, again, it’s this rereading, re-presenting toward a future vision or healing stigma through visibilising survivorship is how I see it, and I wonder if, yeah, I mean…oh, okay, so thanks for the little heart sign. But you know, so that’s how I see it. And I wondered if you want to just speak about that, because we’ve come…you know, it feels like that fits within the conversation.

Nat Raha

This essay that Jet is speaking about, is published in a book called ‘Queer Print in Europe’, edited by my colleagues, Glyn Davis and Laura Guy. It’s 2022. I also put it online on my academia, you’ll find it

Jet Moon

Just a wee note, though, just don’t stress too much, because there will be research notes that go alongside, okay, so there is that existing and I probably should have said that, but we’re not going to just, yeah.

Nat Raha

I…Yeah. I think I’ve learned so much from yeah, having a…you know, it’s a thing of like when you start trying to have historical conversations with your friends over the years, which is like my relationship with Roz, like, I’ve known her for many years, is one of the first people in the trans community who I got to know when I started finding trans community in London in the mid to late noughties. And what do I want to say? Healing survivors- I think it’s this…how do we have these nuanced historical narratives?…this is

the…I guess I’m like, I’m a real geek for the detail, historical, like archive…in the historical story. I’m always like “Huh I wonder what happened in this week in September 1970, that enabled this other thing to happen? I wonder if they’re linked?” And maybe there’s no clear evidence in the historical record that they are, but I’m like, “but these happened in the same place at the same time”. So maybe we should say that, that’s important to feel through.

And I think when I was working on this essay, I didn’t…there wasn’t like a lot of writing or thinking around this. It was the whole…towards the 50th anniversary of the GLF and obviously, like Roz has been quite present in that. But it’s really easy. It doesn’t feel like there’s much trans 70s anything it’s just like “oh, there’s like some stuff in New York and then there’s Janice Raymond”. So it’s like, well, there’s gotta be some stuff in the middle to get from stuff in New York to Janice Raymond and I mean obviously there’s more to that and there’s Sandy Stone and everything, you know, there’s all the stuff that we know.

And so yeah, there’s definitely something that’s like…it’s interesting thinking about like healing and finding hope, repair… trying to think about your question, your words in this… proving our own existence, yeah. And I guess I…the sense of proof isn’t the primary thing that’s driving me but writing a survival and I think also just like the intervention of just been like “No, I think you’ll find maybe it’s more complicated than this.” And also revealing these like…like how we got from that moment, to the idea, the general idea that we have now that has…like the successful forms of like trans or queer erasure that have taken place. I’m actually really interested in mapping that stuff out and have like a, like that’s the next academic book I kind of want to try and write. Yeah, ‘cus at the start of the 70s the world is very different from how it looks by the end of the 70s. And I feel like the whole question around like, what actually happened to gay liberation and how we got to where we are now is like very prescient.

But yeah, and writing as have as a method of survival I mean…I definitely, I’ve definitely thought said to myself, at least in the past couple of years being like, you know, like, I’m being sustained by my pen, or like, poetry or…poetry in particular has been like my like

life raft. And I’m also grateful to have other poets who describe poetry as having had that function. And that’s like…that is the thing that remains when everything else feels like it could potentially disintegrate or disappear, or dematerialise.

…So going back to this essay, it’s been really interesting, because yeah, me and Roz had this public conversation in Glasgow in 2017 and so that was kind of the beginning of the research that led to this essay and trying to be like “Oh, it turns out actually that the Gay Liberation Front, like TS/TV group’ (transsexual transvestite group) like met in the same house as the, you know, they were part of the like lesbian separatist house, so meeting in the same building. Rachel Pollack was also involved, it was kind of really key in this. And I think even that is like that and the the…all of the writing that the TSTV group produced that was public, or some of the writing that they produced that was published was in the issue of Come Together – which was the GLF periodical – that was produced by lesbians. And so it’s like, this whole conversation was already completely severed by the time Come Together was collected in a book which is in I think, in the 80s, in the 1980s, my brains not totally on the dates today. You know and they already…the editors of that volume, like Aubrey Water, it’s already like, you know, the trans group are already consigned to the dustbin of history by this point, you know.

So, it then becomes like this, like, okay, so if we were there, or if there was this group…and by the ‘we’ I’m thinking of like, you know, like, Roz is like our friend, our – I don’t wanna say our mother – but like our living representative of this community who’s still here, and I’ve have learned so much about the…again, these questions around the embodied life of survivorhood of like having experienced like medical neglect, and healthcare challenges, and then also being in the context of like surviving the HIV/AIDS crisis and drug use at that time. And how all of that is written into the body and into how…and that also affects when we’re talking about like, if people are your living…if you have living history and bodies in people, the physical health of like, the body-mind, of those people is also how these memories are kept. And I feel like…as in like, you know, one of the things that I hope has been helpful is that people like myself, and like Jaye. Hudson, who’s also been working on the TS/TV group really recently, that in us trying to approach these histories, it does help unlock more of the history.

Roz talked a bit in our conversation about like memory being this,…sometimes you just… you’re able to access parts of your brain that you couldn’t access 10 years ago, which is very much about, you know, I read that as that’s very much about trauma, that’s very much about healing. I don’t want to just use that in a general sense, but it is like this part of the healing process around trauma and that maybe we can…have a role to try and do that historical healing work that can also help enable the history to exist more and it’s not just about writing, it’s also because this…this history or memory is living – and I should really you know, I usually say herstory or hirstory – but these are living in the people who are still with us so…yeah. And obviously in this time I…my…my only regret is I didn’t get to talk to Rachel Pollack about it, because she was already pretty sick by the time I reached out to her when I was writing and yeah, and has passed more recently. There’s more to be done and there’s more to be done and more to be said on all of this. And it’s just like, how do we take…make sure we have the time to try and do that, which is actually a really important

Jet Moon

The thing of remembering and having the capacity, you know, like to speak something that maybe a decade ago…I think that it can also be about context. You know, because it sounds like…that this work with elders is also giving energy and context to memory and need. Like, you know, I mean, because to have someone need to know what you have is an enormous um…you know, like, it’s a valuing of the knowledge and that we are living, you know…when you talk about this thing of the TS/TV group being in the same house, being in the same publication, and how this has been somehow drifted off, that this never…it was never existing, you know, this kind of rewriting that has been happening, this very anti- trans rewriting. So I wanted to bring in this thing that you’ve had a very long relationship with zines and DIY publishing, and your poems have been frequently published in zines. You’ve also co-edited the ‘radical transfeminism’ zine series with them, Mijke van der Drift, which included them in the issue on trans…

Nat Raha

Sorry with Mijke (pronunciation) van der Drift.

Jet Moon

Mijke – thank you. Mijke van der Drift, which included a popular mini-issue on trans reproductive justice. And from our conversations, I also just wanted to throw in like the terms auto-fiction and auto-ethnography in here alongside this zine-ing DIY publishing because I wanted to just kind of round out a little bit this idea of the building of peer-to- peer sharing and writing.

Nat Raha

Yeah. So I can speak about peer-to-peer sharing and writing. Um, I’m thinking again about this collective, the, the role that…hmm because it’s like, how zine making can create some kind of collectivity both in terms of putting together a compilation zine and putting a zine into the world having some collective that might emerge around its readership or… I’m trying to not say dissemination but the point…because I actually mean, like, the point where you take your zine and do a workshop, like somewhere else, you know, and there are people in the room who care about the subject. So you’re like, is that the collective? Or is that a community? It’s also another question, but it’s fine.

Peer-to-peer yeah, I think like, this is this is partly related to these other questions, to the previous like bit in the conversation, and I was also just having a think about this knowledge transmission, and we were talking about it maybe a little bit historically, in terms of like…so I was at a conference last week, called ‘Hands Off: On LGBT Cultural Heritage and Stewardship’. It was in Dundee. And Veronica McKenzie from Haringey Vanguard was talking a little…and like, this is a conversation that I’ve heard dozens of times, it’s nice to hear it sometimes from a generational perspective of black feminists who were active in the 80s, then being like oh, it seems like there’s this problem of like, the…those of us who come up now – so maybe the generation who are coming into political consciousness, after, say, my generation, which I would say is I came into political consciousness in the 2010s, around the Tories, around Black Lives Matter in like 2014, this kind of time. That’s where our anti racism consciousness kind of came

into, and we’re trying to understand our relationship to Britain et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And we’re in a dialogue with actors from the 70s and 80s. And, yeah, there are all these questions around why… like so how do community histories that are not institutionalised or are not part of a…you don’t learn about them in school, you don’t know about them at university…how does that…how do we like come to an understanding of what’s taken place? And like how our understanding as part of a minority group being…”Oh, what is our history in this place? Like, how do we learn that? You learn that through this intergenerational dialogue. So like zines can also be really key and powerful in that and actually, I think quite a lot of trans history has circulated in zines.

So to step away from just thinking about history, I think when we made the ‘radical transfeminism’ zine, we were really thinking about conversations that we were having between us that maybe were happening on the internet but maybe were also just happening because we’re people in a community in relation with each other. And we just wanted to try and document some of that. And I think when I sent the call out to the people who contributed, you know, it’s like “write whatever you like, send whatever you like, here’s the subject but like…”. It’s really, you know, trying to give as much editorial freedom to let people express what they want to express in this context. Because that’s also really important as well, I think like…Yeah, I’m trying to think what do I want to say? And there is still something around zine making that feels…on the one hand, it’s that degree of freedom, about expression and on the other, I think it is…what it means to be writing in a form that it circulates with maybe less scrutiny than trying to do journalism or, you know, publishing in a formal/conventional manner, like writing books or whatever.

I don’t want to say ‘whatever’, because obviously that’s what I’m doing, but in the context of like, fascism, transphobia and those things, like the radical transfeminism zine came out in 20- the big one came out in 2017. You know, we were like, “how can we do something that doesn’t open us up to potential harm?” And, obviously, like, I was also involved in some activism that was way more public at that time and had a bigger

public profile, both in terms of what we were doing, and in terms of how the right-wing press responded to what we were doing. Like, you know, there’s because a zine can circulate under the radar, it’s like…it does have that degree of…I don’t want to say safety, but it does mean that you’re not in the firing line so easily because people are not really paying attention to what you’re doing because it’s…it’s just the way it circulates, right? It’s like…it’s direct, it’s going to the people who maybe want to read it; you’re at the zine fair, there’s, you know, there’s this moment of direct communication, even between like you as somebody who’s made the zine and distributing it, or the people who are distributing it for you, and the people who are reading it.

Jet Moon

Sorry, I’m just thinking about it’s to some extent, layers of access.

Nat Raha

Yeah.

Jet Moon

You know, because it’s a different form of non-formality that people can access to write on without the need to have a certain language, but it’s also about an access in safety and an access in how, and who is speaking with each other and who is distributing that to whom.

Nat Raha

Yeah. And is that a key part of peer-to-peer process as well? To have that…And like, I’ve been thinking…actually, this is like, the interesting question between, like, talking about collectivity, and…I’ve been thinking about this a lot in terms of the book that I’m working with on but Mijke about, like, what is the difference between a community and the collective? And for me, it’s like, the collective is the direct, you know, it’s us being in a direct relation with each other and trying to do something, which might just be living, you know, it might be we’re trying to organise around a particular issue. And that a community can be more dispersed and, you know, I can be in community with people I don’t know, I don’t need to know their names. We just have to coexist together in a

space and that space can also be virtual, right? Not that you can’t have virtual classes, so community is like less direct, but maybe in thinking about peer-to-peer, it’s like: no, it does need some degree of like…or the text is maybe creating, is the thing that’s mediating between you and the other person, like the object itself – the zine itself – is mediating. Yeah and…

Jet Brand

I’m a little bit aware of time. Yeah. So I feel like I might keep you for longer than I had said. So I mean, one thing I did want to talk about was the Transgender Studies Quarterly, you know, “Embodying Autonomous Trans Healthcare in Zines” and I just want to…but I want to talk about this bridging, you know, because often I hear “I’m this…”, you know, like people “Oh I’m working in academia…or I’m doing…or I’m disrupting power, I’m working in another way that’s outside of this” and when you’re publishing this article, you know, you are bringing these things together. And I just…to me, it feels really difficult because I struggle with the academics that I meet…bounce off of this kind of thing. One world is very familiar to me and the other it’s not, that I also feel this disjuncture all the time.

Nat Raha

Yeah. So the relationship between these two things, I actually…so I wrote that essay during the first wave of the pandemic, and it was in multiple things. So the editors of that particular issue were like, really, really, really wanted me to contribute to it and I was unsure. But also knowing TSQ has this hegemonic position within trans studies, it’s this really important journal. But actually when I wrote this essay, I was just like…I don’t think I have, I tried to describe it…we came to describe it as like a report from the field, because like, I don’t think I can say anything that the zines haven’t already said, you know.

Obviously, like, I was involved in some of the conversations in the zines, but yeah, and so I was like, okay, so what can I say? Can we make some broader argument about what the function of zines can be towards trans embodiment? And which is what I guess I do in that essay, being like zines actually help us come to terms of

embodiment. Yeah, so I really felt actually, it was just like, “I don’t know, what’s the point in me trying to say, what’s already been said in the zines”. But this is the turnaround: the lifespan and visibility of zines is not a given, you know? I’ve actually been thinking about this quite a lot, ironically, in my academic context in the past couple of weeks. And like, obviously, zine archives are really important. But zines do have a shelf life that’s quite short and they have to be kept in circulation, which requires work from the zine makers or distributors. But mostly, I think after like five years of distributing the zine at most, after five years you’re a bit like “I think I’m good”, you know, you’ve probably moved on to do something else. And that’s no diss on the zines and no diss saying we shouldn’t be reading zines that are older than five years old.

Jet Brand

But also like what is the print run on a lot of these zines?

Nat Raha

Yeah, and I can only speak for myself, like the ‘radical transfeminism’ zine…. we definitely printed over 800 copies of it. And I don’t know, I think after the third or fourth print run, I just gave up counting. And then it’s a PDF as well, right. But, yeah, and that an academic article has longevity to it, which…so I’m like, actually, maybe it’s a useful document to be like “this stuff was happening at this time. And it’s still kind of out there to find, as well”. You know all of the…I think pretty much most of the zine makers of the projects that I’m speaking around, those zines still exists, maybe minus one, which is an organisation.

But um, yeah, I don’t think it’s…I want to say that I’m in a… I don’t think…that I’m in a phase of thinking, where I’m like, I don’t think it’s helpful to have a dogmatic like pro or anti, like, attitude, like, because I think it’s always in this constant negotiation around like what academia can or can’t do, what you’re able to do in those spaces, what kinds of conversations possible. And actually, part of what happened, I think, is, given the kinds of…so it’s all of these struggles, it’s like, on the one hand, the struggle for opportunities a lot of trans and queer folks faced in the 2010s I think meant that a lot of us went back to school. But also….which is also about class and opportunity, and I think

kind of has probably affected some of the arguments that we lived in that time. I think that’s shifted now. And not in a…you know, it’s not shifted in a good way because education has been marketized and commodified, and it’s really extreme.

And then simultaneously, like, actually the conversations that you had in the academy or the theory, the academic theory is behind political practices, community organising and the kinds of conversations we would maybe be having and in the community. So actually, the conversations you have in zines were more advanced than the conversations you could have through academic theory. Especially around trans stuff, because trans studies is basically not institutionalised in the UK. I went to a trans studies conference that was actually good for the first time, like two weeks ago, ‘cus the last ones have all been disasters. So it’s like and it’s 2024! (laughter). So it gives me hope. But I don’t think it means it’s easy, especially when also thinking about specifically around like questions around transmisogyny and transphobia and stuff in the academy…it’s really not easy and it’s really not good, like the landscape is improving, but it’s not been great for a really long time. So it’s not gonna get better super-fast, so….

Jet Moon

Thinking about the lag between community knowledge and the institution, I was thinking, for example, about medicine, and the ‘Patient expert’, and that the estimated lag between knowledge within patient experience and that being caught up by actual medical practice is something like 10 years reportedly.

Nat Raha

Wow, I love it. Can you send me a reference? I’d love to read more about the people who have actually tried to map that because that’s…especially when we’re talking about trans health care, I think that’s exactly the arguments we were making in the activism I was involved in, some of which is reflected in the zine that I’m talking about in that article. And being like “actually, no, we’re the experts”. Like, actually…especially when you talk about when we’re thinking about trans health care in the UK, which is this, you know, double edged sword, everyone’s like “well, you have free healthcare” but it’s like,

but basically nobody who needs it can access it, or it’s really slow. And that whole waiting is part of…is itself a form of violence that is really explicitly…

Jet Brand

The NHS also involves…its health care and torture.

Nat Raha

Yeah.

Jet Brand

‘How dare you! How dare you need this free crisis health care! We’re going to, you know treat you badly, and put you through the mill…’

Nat Raha

‘Jump through the hoops, and then maybe not even give you the healthcare that you’re after…’

Jet Brand

Maybe just retraumatise you. I’m gonna try and wrap up Nat, on this serious point. I wonder if you…we have spoken about it a little bit but I wonder if you do have some words of encouragement for survivors who wish to write or you know, whether that’s writing in private or public just, you know, the importance of writing.

Nat Raha

Make time for it, and do it. The…I think, yeah, maybe…I said this, like, I think even as an experienced writer, as somebody, you know, I’ve been like, in these spaces for like 15 years of calling myself a poet even like, you know, 15 years in, right, and still has a role that can give you something to grasp when it feels like there’s nothing else to grasp on to. And that’s, yeah, there’s a power in that that can help you get…that can help get through the things that feel really difficult and challenging.

And yeah, and that we need more. Like, as in like, this is exactly the question…exactly on the catching of the 10 year lag between, you know, the ‘Patient’, in inverted commas, experience and doctors, I think it’s similar. There’s like a massive lag in terms of like, what survivors know and like, how we experience the world, our embodied selves, like our body-minds, like our lives, like how the world can be like really challenging to or like how everyday life can be challenging, you know, all these, like…the things that we have to deal with everyday waking up.

I think continuing to get that down and out into the world is really important. And we can keep working through some of this stuff. And actually, like, it’s really not easy. It’s way easier said than done. The work isn’t ever easy. I think with any of this stuff and we all know how difficult trying to work through these things are, but maybe in that we can find some power, we can build some power. And maybe we can also find some joy or find some hope. Yeah…and that’s…yeah, I don’t really know what more I could say, but that’s what…

Jet Moon

I think that’s great. And I think you know, it’s like, well, how do we survive this 10 year gap? It’s through making this and when I talk about this thing of like proving my existence, these are…that when you say it’s something to hold on to. This is what I am constantly in need (of), because it doesn’t take me long to get separated by structural power, I just start to feel like I’m having an individual experience. And I need constantly to be reminded “No, no, this is, you know, this is an experience of… oppression.” Oppression is happening. So I feel alone, and I feel like I’m the person to blame. And I need always to be reminded because structural oppression is very isolating. So thank you.

So finally, you’re currently working on a book entitled “Trans Femme Futures: An Ethics for Trans Feminist Worlds” with Mijke. Would you like to tell me about the work coming up?

Nat Raha

Yeah um, we’re trying to finish the manuscript of the book. I would describe it as like a…it’s a book for social movement thinkers, people who care about the politics of…both of social movements and social life. Thinking about…and it’s philosophical thinking about these questions of like, what trans – I don’t want to say experience but like, the politics that comes out of our everyday lives can teach an abolitionist movement. That’s what yeah… And there are some really difficult questions in that, which we hope are not presented as difficult questions.

But even questions, you know, some of the things we talked about today around like violence, even this question of victim-survivor, and like, how useful is this polarisation? And also we try to think about the good things and the kinds of practice, like it’s very much about what kinds of practices we can…like, what we can do with our practices, or what kind of practices we bring to the world that are enriching, nourishing, supportive, solidarious.

Yeah, so that’s…and then also trying to think of a little bit about these questions of what structural or institutional power is trying to do to us or offer us at this moment, and it’s sticky and it’s not oppositional, I think, yeah…I’m not sure if this is going to be really clear in a bit but it’s very clear to me at this moment, which is like the oppositional queer politics that we had that’s defined a lot of the last eight years feels like it’s, it’s…I don’t wanna say it’s time has come, but it feels like we’re in a different moment of complexity and negotiation. So we spend a lot of time trying to think about terms that help articulate a maxim of that as well.

Jet Brand

Thank you.

Nat Raha

Yeah. And lots of stuff about health also. Yeah, that’s the…that’s the chapter where we were both a bit like okay this was, this was…that was the one we were like…the embodied toll on writing felt most pronounced. So…yeah. So more from…it’s more

of…it’s a little bit different to what we have in the zine, but I think it’s…yeah, trying to also speak to a different kind of audience maybe.

Jet Brand

I mean, survival is not abstract. I’m gonna stop.