Cuban-American poet, author, translator, and teacher
Achy Obejas↱ explains:
As a translator, mostly from Spanish to English, but not infrequently from English to Spanish, I've been pondering this issue for a while. In English, "they" solves a lot of problems, but Spanish—inherently binary—does not have a similar solution so readily available. In Spanish, gender is always marked, not just for living beings but also inanimate objects: the table is feminine, coffee is masculine. In Spain, the common vulgar word for penis is feminine; clitoris is masculine. (Explain that last one to me, please.)
Rita Indiana is a writer for whom gender is front and center in her stories, but who avoids explicitly addressing or publicly engaging with questions relating to non-binary terminology. In Tentacle, Indiana's cli-fi novel, which I translated into English, the author moves between ella and él in talking about the main character, Acilde, who is transgender, with nary a non-binary pause between. I wondered: was this a deliberate choice or was she simply doing her best under the constraints of a language that is so highly gendered? I've never gotten clarity from Indiana on this issue, so I chose to hew closely to the original.
I'll be honest, Boomerang/Bumerán wasn't originally written in a genderless format—in either language. That was an evolution that resulted from the process of curating the poems that would eventually be included, and my parallel reflections on genderless language. I wondered: what would gender-free language sound like? What would it look like on the page?
I was transparent with my editors and in all my public presentations—this is not, for the most part, my day-to-day speech. Of course, I use "they," sure, my pals and I banter about "amigues" and "todes" in Spanish. But the world, I think, is in a period of transition with language (as it always is), and there's little consistency to any of these innovations when it's late at night, the music's loud, and we're all talking at once.
Where we might land after this is anyone's guess. What I did in Boomerang/Bumerán isn't meant as a manifesto but as an experiment—one way, one voice. But who knows? On a street corner in San Salvador or La Paz, there may be a yet unknown form developing. Or, something like Polari or Lóxoro, queer crypto languages originating in London and Lima, respectively, may yet overtake all we now know and become our new, genderless lingua franca. I have no doubt that, when it comes to gender, how we speak and write now will be anachronistic, if not forgotten, in fifty years.
If the tango, or Spanish language, stands or falls with or without gender, that might say something about music, dance, and language, and suddenly we are not so far from culture, and the idea that the English language or Western culture will collapse without eternally fixed, dualistic gender assignation.
And if a sister poet somehow thinks a language survived this long just to be undone by one Cuban-American poet playing with language, that is whatever it is in artistic discourse, and a far cry from that one guy who got beaten because he followed the in-house gender instructions.
In either case, though, the question remains why a critic finds this particular criterion so important.
____________________
Notes:
Obejas, Achy. "On Gendered Language". Poetry Foundation. 11 July 2022. PoetryFoundation.org. 14 July 2022. https://bit.ly/3O9C89p