translated by Edward Gunawan
Muscle Mary
ma didn’t get mad when I told her I’m attracted to other men,
on one condition:
“most important is you don’t become the woman.”
even though I’d never felt like a real man. I fold myself in order
to fit perfectly into the checkboxes of registration forms. which requires
whomever to choose one battery pole, while surrendering oneself so diligently
to the statistical tarantula. nature, wild and feral, civilized by taxonomy and
language. to name is to create, as well as to own. in six days God
created the entire universe. simply with words.
ma claps her hands in glee. every time the bag with the logo of an international gym creeps up
these shoulders. muscle builder capsules and whey protein milk mob
to greet the Grab car. an army of body-enhancing machines surges out in unison.
like ladies-in-waiting gorging to make me manliest
out of all men. mirror, I know, you only pretend to be serious in pitching in.
bored as you have been catching me sneak
into the steam room
with a teensy-weensy towel in disarray
and exit with a heart, disheveled.
from the Bahasa Indonesian
Be Grateful
white men saving brown women from brown men.
white queers (queer men?) saving brown homosexuals from brown heterosexuals.
brown men brawl with other brown men for the attention of white men.
brown women maul other brown women for the prize of being snatched up by white men.
brown men spotlight the white men to keep competing brown men in the shadows.
brown women memorize the contents of books by white women to keep their feminism bonafide.
white men write about brown men to elbow out their fellow white men.
white women teach about brown women to keep international scholars from complaining.
white queers speak on behalf of brown queers to travel for free and sleep in five-star hotels.
brown queers who graduated abroad give speeches on behalf of all brown queers to be funded again.
middle-class brown queers hobnob with expat white queers to not break the bank.
white men, white women, and white queers together save the world from brown men and brown heterosexuals.
brown men, brown women and brown heterosexuals are still busy studying for the TOEFL
from the Bahasa Indonesian
Translator’s Note
- Italicized text denotes English words that appear in original poems.
- Commonwealth English words and expressions in original poems have been adapted into North American’s context and spellings.
- The first line of “Be Grateful” is from Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1985).
- The second line of the same poem is from Jasbir K. Puar’s “The Right to Maim” (2018).
Edward Gunawan is an Indonesian-born Chinese writer, translator, and curator and author of the chapbooks The Way Back (Foglifter Press, 2022) and Press Play (Sweet Lit, 2020). Hendri Yulius Wijaya is an Indonesian writer and researcher on gender, sexuality, cultural politics, and sustainability. The co-editor of Queer Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2022), he was invited to deliver the 2023 Tomlinson Memorial Lecture at Nottingham University in the U.K.