We’re just under two weeks out from the release of Naseem Jamnia’s The Bruising of Qilwa, a book I’m sure you’ve all been highly anticipating. Today, you’re all in luck, because we have a small taste of what’s to come with this guest post that Naseem kindly wrote for us, part of which looks at how they approached their own worldbuilding in the book. So sit yourself down, and let’s get started!
Content notes: anti-queer/anti-trans legislation, statistics on harm to queer folks
As a reader, little is more frustrating to me than queer secondary world speculative fiction that makes the story about queerness. To be clear, “issue” stories are absolutely necessary. Rather, as both a reader and a writer, I’ve reached a point where I, personally, am tired of reading real-world issues replicated in my speculative fiction. After all, if it’s speculative, why can’t we change the world?
I do not believe it is enough to see these issues on the page. Sometimes, it’s not enough to even see ourselves on the page. (This is ironic coming from me, a QTPOC who didn’t see themself in a book until they were 21). Representation of queer genders has to go beyond someone struggling to figure out where they internally and externally fit, and have violence enacted or praise heaped on them as a result. Rather, I propose writing different possibilities.
But to stretch into possibilities without understanding what they stem from—why I would seek to escape our own world—would be irresponsible, so I’d like to set the stage.
Ultimately, being queer, particularly when one’s gender is queer, is never the same thing in every and all moments. Context is everything—not just our immediate contexts, but local and national ones as well—and the climate of the last several years in the United States has changed, for many of us, our understanding of ourselves. The 2016 presidential election literally had life-or-death consequences, the current COVID-19 pandemic even more so. 375 trans people, most of them trans Black and brown women and sex workers, were murdered around the world in 2021, the deadliest year on record. At least 11 states in the U.S. have moved forward with anti-trans legislation in recent weeks.
The Trevor Project, a U.S. advocacy organization providing crisis intervention for queer youth, reports sobering statistics: for each act of violence against a queer person, that person is 2.5 times more likely to self-harm. Queer youth are 5 times more likely to attempt suicide compared to straight youth. Among transgender adults, 40% report having made a suicide attempt, and 92% made that attempt before the age of 25. These statistics are worse for the multi-marginalized.
I’m a scientist by training; when I see numbers, I dig deeper, try to understand their limitations before applying them broadly. But these and other statistics about the cycle of violence that traps the United States—starting from its settler-colonial roots—do not, I believe, overreport what is happening. Rather, these reports hide the devastating truths that lie between those numbers. They hide the ways our families—inadvertently or purposefully—reject us. They hide how our coworkers smirk as they misgender us. They hide how many times we wonder whether we belong in our own communities, whether we’re trans enough. Because ultimately, violence comes from every angle, in forms both overt and subtle, sinister and well-meaning, from people who love us as often as strangers.
Some marginalized writers, myself included, believe writing is a political act. My work, then, is an act of political resistance. Rather than directly challenging our status quo in my writing by centering it, I do so by creating worlds in which those contexts don’t exist.
What can be more political than rejecting the world we live in to create a better one?
The way I approach this in my own work is to create queernormative worlds. This means queerness is so embedded in the worldbuilding that it can no longer be called queer. I do this by normalizing queerness through the inclusion of pronoun introductions, frequent use of neopronouns (because I’m not trying to create a trinary to replace the binary), disruption of heteronormative relationships, and centering trans and nonbinary characters—all without the baggage of homophobia and transphobia in our world. For example, in my debut novella The Bruising of Qilwa (out August 9, 2022, from Tachyon Publications), the main character is an agender nonbinary trans person, their brother is a binary trans boy, their mentor’s late partner used neopronouns, and two people using she/her pronouns raise a child. All of this is so normal, the characters wouldn’t even think to question it—and would, in fact, be confused as to why anyone would question it.
Transness is a common facet of this world. People introduce themselves with their pronouns, and couples (and throuples, and larger family units) have members with all kinds of pronouns. There is no coming out because queerness is completely normalized—with such an umbrella of genders, there is no expectation of who someone else should love (or whether that love is romantic, sexual, or platonic). I’m actually planning on exploring what all this means further this year with my Otherwise fellowship—a world in which gender is fluid means I need to understand what gender means in this world.
What I find frustrating is reading other secondary worlds in which the baggage of our real world is reproduced. Why should a world in which dragons are the norm have homophobia built into it, or lack trans people? Why would people assume other people’s pronouns, thus equating bodies to gender? Why are nonbinary people unheard of? Why are binary gender roles reproduced? While I understand some people want to explore associated issues, to me, it conveys a lack of imagination to create a world from scratch and then throw in the bigotry we’re used to rather than invent something new.
Not everyone will agree with me, and that’s okay. But I hope a new wave of secondary world speculative fiction considers queernormative posibilities over heteronormative ones—and which can be inclusive elswhere, too, smashing ableism and racism and colorism and fat-antagonism and other problems besides. I hope writers create worlds that expand what could be rather than rely on what is. Speculative fiction has the potential to be revolutionary—and I absolutely believe we can get it there.
About Naseem Jamnia
Naseem Jamnia (they/them) is a Persian-Chicagoan, former scientist, and fiction MFA graduate from the University of Nevada, Reno. Their work has appeared in The Washington Post, Bitch Media, Cosmopolitan, The Rumpus, The Writer’s Chronicle, and other venues. A Lambda Literary Fellow and the inaugural Samuel R. Delany Fellow, Naseem is the managing editor at Sword & Kettle Press, and their debut novella, The Bruising of Qilwa, will be released from Tachyon Publications in 2022. Find out at more at www.naseemwrites.com or on Twitter/Instagram @jamsternazzy.
