Honeysuckle Waft and Fists: On Aurora Mattia’s “Unsex Me Here”

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Aurora Mattia’s new collection of story-shaped writing, Unsex Me Here, repeats honeysuckle like August nights do, unafraid of self-tessellation, willing to explode and exhaust itself over and over.  The book shimmers across boundaries of self and sentence, coalescing into a shifting scent-thetics of post-identity. Like a scent, this poetics is immediate, limbic and limber, evading precise legibility and capture. This is what it is to observe identity’s flickering marks on a world that would like to cage its vapor. Voluptuous excess in form and anarchistic reorderings of meaning combine to create a florid bursting-through: the quick, wily shifts of top notes and odor off of body heat’s pulsations impossible to predict, it is nonetheless memory-directed, more resonant for being less explicit.

Resting in this brambled place beyond identity requires understanding identity deeply in order to transmute it, to hold it clearly but at the tips of the fingers. The chrysalis of identity is a stage to melt and wriggle through onto the other side of something transcendent; stay too long and you’ll remain overidentified with parts-goo. Mattia’s poetics is also one of overabundance: of shuffling off and through layers, of participating deeply in the lives and sufferings of others while remaining in the shadow of their mysteries. It is a poetics of the perils of buying into identity too much as furthering the same game, rather than inventing new rules, new clauses, new curlicues. This writing is characterized by denial of easy meaning—flashes of lucid, citric wafts of meaning that fade, the stronger for being ensconced in something undefinable. “It’s difficult to translate perfume into phrases,” writes a refraction of Mattia’s voice that’s just insufflated powdered opals off of a Minoan tablet.

I see Mattia as both at a vanguard and continuing a legacy of writers who see identity as more-than, who use the substance of categorized experience to explore self in realms beyond. This is a liberatory move in Mattia’s writing in this book and The Fifth Wound, her first novel, an “autobiography as vision,” as she terms it. It is baroque and opaque, an overabundance of selves, a grafting and diffusing of identity to evade pinning. Dreams flow backward, as a way of resisting identity and imperial subjecthood: “Lacking the capacity to produce meaning, Empire loves nothing more than to rebrand magical beasts, to place their stories ‘under state protection,’ to ingest and denature the dense matter of exogenous mysticisms the better to blur its violence with the predestined innocence of a fable.”

The ten storythings in Unsex Me Here beckon from dense briars of sentences. Reading Mattia can feel like wearing a hairshirt of finely honed diamonds, or being drawn and quartered by bewitched horses, limbs then delicately stitched back to torso with golden thread. She canters between glossolalic glimmer, coffin-cut acrylics of critical theory, and Texan mesquite honey diction, as when describing, in “Ezekiel in the Snow,” an encounter between a sister and her beloved brother entreating her to slip further into his altar-ed state:

“You must ingest the powder.”

I would do no such thing. I did not want to hear the flowers speak, nor find out it was a farce. I mean I did not want a new dimension, it was too much knowing, too much for the enterprise of myself. Let me have the seasons and the sun and the unburnt and unburning blueberries. Let me have the purple Texas dust. If I allowed another dimension there would be no end to my wanting, I would eat God alive. Would steal his eyes for souvenirs. 

This overgrowth creates density. The density has deep political meaning. In her interview-manifesto “The Revelation of the Seed” in the appendix of Unsex Me Here, Mattia cites Édouard Glissant from his foundational text of resistance aesthetics, Poetics of Relation: “Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity.” This irreducibility, in Mattia’s hands, is opalescent, and its multishimmer self a brandishing.

“As for my identity,” continues Glissant, “I’ll take care of that myself.” Making identity is not a solitary hero’s quest, or the work of an autocrat; Glissant’s myself, like Mattia’s, is rasping against the porcelain fingers of the imperial core that would love nothing more than to seize another set of subjects. 

Glissant goes on to write: “It does not disturb me to accept that there are places where my identity is obscure to me, and the fact that it amazes me does not mean that I relinquish it.” This is perhaps the greatest aesthetic intuition shared by Mattia and the writers she swims with: the sitting with the discomfort, the trauma, the hallucinations, the wonder of knowing what constitutes a self. It’s discursive in the way that all communication, with its interstices, slips, moments of crystallization into temporarily stable polyhedrons of meaning, is a kind of miracle. Of Glissant, Mattia says that he points her toward a “firm, ecstatic theoretical defense of the absolute necessity of the baroque, of maximalism as a vital mode of expression, expansion—depressurization of the self.” And when the need to prove oneself to any power or external ordering of meaning has been deeply unseated, liberation can result, as when in “Celebrity Skin” a glamorous follower of hermaphrodite goddess Aphroditos explicates a theory of beauty:

“Look. All this,” said Antheia, half-turning to Hylonome, gesturing up and down her own body, “is about living the dullest days with the extravagance of a celebrity, but the absolute freedom of a woman forsaken by the gods. As if to the applause of an audience, but without any audience at all. Don’t you see?”

Aimé Césaire, in Return to My Native Land, sings also for deep language that resists kaleidoscopically:

I want to rediscover the secret of great speech and of great burning… As frenetic blood rolls on the slow current of the eye, I want to roll words like maddened horses like new children like clotted milk like curfew like traces of a temple like precious stones buried deep enough to daunt all miners. The man who couldn’t understand me couldn’t understand the roaring of a tiger.

Daunting the miners, but as loud as tigers: at a time where liberal promises of representation have come with shockingly few material protections, but with many funhouse cameras that have captured our likenesses all the better to be levied by oppressors, resisting interpretation is more pressing than ever. We don’t need a transparent understanding of the other; this is an impossibility that misdirects, unlike the impossibility of opacity, which incants. 

Mattia also seeks meaning that is “dense, irreducible.” She is unafraid of repetition, of planting images over and over, close together. Repeating is a densifier, but it is also a way of clarifying. To see the same images and words spread out across many stories and locations speaks to the ways thought, memory, and feeling shift and reform: wily. In three stories, interiors (a church, a cavern, and a circus tent) collapse into multidimensionality. In two stories, oracles—the lost brother, descended into apocryphal haze, and a seer from the cult of Aphroditos—offer the narrator substances as portals. Honeysuckle spills from dozens of sentences, and waterfalls, and opals, and acrylics (even ones made of clay in ancient Rome by a goddess-doll chaser). External and internal sight intertwine: a fairy greyhound and a selfish forefather both gaze out with “one eye half-curdled, the other already spoiled”; a sibyl’s “eyes wore little veils of their own, webs of twinkling milky filament.”

It’s courageous to repeat: the confidently doused scent, lingering in the stairwell. Mattia’s unafraid of repetition; she knows it constitutes us and forms our habitus, and that it also creates structure for other, less visible parts embedded around its scaffold—repetition as performance of self, something you wake up and enact every day. In being unafraid to work symbols and ideas over and over, she articulates a form of seeing, another rendering of four-dimensional vertices, of longing for a beloved, of a body, of a form.

Again, repetition can clarify. Repeated images rest against Mattia’s carefully tended-to brambly opacity, in a tension of meaning-making. It suggests importance and clarity, restatement. Against her vine-winding sentences and gossamer shifts from narration to hypnagogia and back again, the bright calcifications of repeated word and image create an alternate shape in spacetime against a flat two-dimensional hump of a narrative, where they mimic narrative at all. It is more like the experience of reading a mystical text like the Zohar, where images of crowns, phalluses, light, names, and divine letters form spiraled mechanisms of sense.

Mattia fosters this overgrowth in a few ways. The first is through her sentences, which are often centifolia roses so thick with petals their scent falls over itself, interrupted with bursts of simplicity alternatively acrid and clarifying, lending contrast to the rivulets of the swirling algal pit. This takes its most striking and efficacious form when tracing the experience of an interior moment, Lispector-like, as when the recently-cracked protagonist Hylonome of “Celebrity Skin” stands for the first time in front of an assemblage of fellow trans women and feels their shared holiness through time:

A single tear, sparkling in the candlelight, was the only evidence of Hylonome’s inner richness. Which, as it fell, fell into place: the final jewel in the crown of One Instant within the womb of a waterfall—then disappeared.

Mattia is writing for those who understand ongoingness of transformation, which is often those who have been between the realms, bodies sluiced and rebracketed psychologically and/or physically, and who know that true transformation carries no promise of sureness, or happiness. I said often, but it’s far from always, because “always” would make a claim to a shared quality of insight that is no guarantee: this is the genesis of tokenization, of liberation that ends with DEI. Transformation carries only itself, the fact of movement, and that the movement feels different (thicker, or more gaseous) but ultimately it is just that, a difference:

But—and wait, listen. But then I had that surgery. Because nothing was happening and so I decided to make something happen. And I found out, when we’re first forming in the womb, we all have the same genital, and that genital is a vagina. So I wondered: what would happen if I, too, returned to my underived form? Oh and it’s beautiful, I’m bewitched by my own transfiguration. But in the months before the surgery, I forgot to realize that even if I inverted my shame, it wouldn’t go away. In fact it’s stuck inside me. I gave myself a thorn in the flesh. And so I’m telling you this story: to make something happen.

The state and other insidiously narrative forces would have you believe that surgery returns an unwell trans mind to a state of happiness and contentment, of functionality, of legibility. At the imagined end of medical interventions on transness is not necessarily happiness: dysphoria often shapeshifts the closer one gets to another form. (Don’t forget that surgeries like breast enlargement for cis women are forms of gender dysphoria treatment, too.) This isn’t what liberalism wants to hear; it wants to make trans bodies grateful, functioning apparatuses of itself. And in a time when fascism is bursting through the pathetically thin plastic wrap of protections that liberals have left us with, it’s all the more important to be truly committed to the world-coiling opacities of our words. Stories make something happen when they wend alteration and refusal in the same fragrance, flower and shit together.

And so we return to honeysuckle, “rank and bursting,” one of a few flowers whose scent can’t be captured except by the delicate near-impossible process of enfleurage, a scent extraction process. It defies seizure and requires suffusion of mystic attention, changing blossoms daily on sheets of fat until deliriously saturated with its quivering rhythm of a scent. Like all the white flowers, it’s shot through with indole: the chemical compound in shit that, in fraction, creates swooning heady pleasure, no shock or contradiction to those who know that what’s revealed by an alert looking is the immanent shift between abjection and beauty, a force that, rather than occluding truth, generates it. 

Twinned also with this poetics of liberatory opacity is a poetics of artifice. Mattia: “The value of Artifice lies not only in the rejection of Truth, but in the candor of my exaggerations, the vulnerability of a grand gesture, my whole persona balanced on the narrow point of a phrase.” In another recent novel of grand transsexual profusion, Lote by Sheila von Reinhold, it is also artifice, and grifting, and devoting resplendent attention to a life of excess that forms the basis of an irreducible series of gestures toward the gorgeous as veridical, in a world where the state leverages visibility as a false inclusiveness and queers would—do—willingly give up their selves to enmesh with surveillance. Grifting is thus a highly beautiful and highly political act, a resistance to enclosure.

In Lote, grift nests within grift. The protagonist, Mathilda (among other names), lives in pursuit of her Transfixions, figures from the past who have lived lives of magnificent indulgence in the world of the senses and who have, like her, successfully slipped between pockets of society, leaving dazzlement and little in the way of mundane fact behind. Mathilda’s spiritual connection to the archives and search for traces of a history-eclipsed Black modernist poet leads her to the faceless European town of Dun and a post-postmodern art residency of practices so recondite and polos so plain that Mathilda, in her worlds of contrast, stuns its residents into bemused acceptance. She finally meets a fellow spirit of Black queerness in the town, Erskine-Lily, who, kindred with characters in Unsex Me Here, communes with flowers and finds, in the lacquering of dozens of layers of mother of pearl, a resistance, one with the power to disgust, dismay, and dispirit those who would prefer a neat alignment of selves with story: 

Of course, everyone knows the Lotus Eaters from Homer. The Book gives another account, saying when dull Odysseus looked upon all this he was horrified. He could not distinguish man from woman. They insulted his sense of goodness, this effeminate people who loved nothing more than to dine upon the lotus and decorate endlessly. To lose themselves in the holy act of adornment, which the Book calls volution.

It is a numinous truth, too, that getting closer to the self means removing the self. Shola von Reinhold says in an interview: “[This anti-temporal idea] creates the ability to talk about something without naming it—whilst very specifically talking about it. … I’m not naming it because I want other things to slip in. As soon as you name certain things, it’s harder to describe them.” This is another key site of aesthetic difference. Both Lote and Unsex Me Here are suffused with alterity, heterotopias, transness, Blackness—but more as all-feeling vapors, affect permeating words, than as didacticism. They resist immobile identity by being full of the slippages between—between names and states, between rustles of petticoat. This is necessarily multitudinous: how could a self remain static in the presence of constantly arising instants? Mattia names this as “the fatal viscosity of language.” The solution is not to seek precision, but precisions, or to view the hologram slant because it disappears head-on.

The opacity, then, is not just one of self to other, but of self to self. And it is not just protective, it is generative: “To say any more [about my attraction to certain symbols] would be a form of conjecture which might disrupt my relationship to my own mystery, which might falsely conclude my search by stabilizing it with a definition.” Mattia goes on to cite Borges: “imminence of a revelation that does not arrive, is, perhaps, the aesthetic fact.” Knowledge just out of reach produces the asymptotic force that makes the shape of the unknowing of self into the pleasurable form to allow yet more quest(ion)ing. 

Likewise, impenetrability can be a form of relating to others. In “Celebrity Skin,” the sibyl Ourania speaks to Hylonome in double-triple-meaning shades (yet somehow, brilliantly, still with the lilt of a bronze-throated mid-Atlantic-cum-Southern-accented actress). It’s reminiscent of Jos Charles’ Feeld, in which speech is also nestled between and outside of time, as if Middle English had taken the route of connection to the alders and primroses of its place of birth, instead of greedily careening around the globe:

“High-low know-me. Nowhere half-ewe calm froam?”
“Avellino,” she said, dotting her eyes with the cloth.
“Fah-errway.”
“Yes. The farthest I’ve ever been from home . . .”
“Bot wye? Symmplea fore th’ plagiar o’hour compainy?”
Hylonome shifted back and forth, as if retreating.
“I don’t know how to say it. It’s not like a story, where a hero goes on a quest . . . I guess I needed to go, just to go somewhere because nothing made sense, I’ve never made sense and . . . well, when Ana told me about you . . . I wanted to see . . . I want to see . . . if . . .”
The woman sat upright, unlatched her veil, and cast it in tinselly disarray onto the chaise.
“Tale mi, doorling.”

When we speak to others, we are coming and calming, away and erring, in companionship and in pain. In Ordinary Affects, Kathleen Stewart names this quality of feeling as a multifold temporality, that “the reeling present is composed out of heterogeneous and noncoherent singularities.” Mattia is obsessed with these reeling presents, as in “Via Crucis”:

As she spoke, my ears and eyes swarmed with silence, a silence as dense as language but without words to give it form. I needed to ask her a question, but I did not know what the question was—because if I asked a question like how do you know about the angels?, and if that question was too narrow, if it missed the point, even only slightly, her answer might stabilize the instant, and a stabilized instant is one in which we do not see anything at all except what we already know how to see.

Memory is comprised of these studs of instants; it creates the “unthinkable aura of a selfhood.” She deeply channels Clarice Lispector’s temporality, both authors’ love of the infinite instant, fractalizing. In Mattia’s stories, memory is all-important because memory is lost. When it is lost it makes way for the lacquering of self; when it comes back, it has space to become initiatic. In “Wild and Blue,” Peach and Sandy steal a drug in development, Dysphorable, which allays dysphoria, but at the cost of rebounding it multifold. Of course an overdose of it affects memory—what is it to have a body hold the moments of accumulation of gender until it is too much? Repetition is also a form of attempting to remember, and remembering that remembering is always stitching the self-quilt together with scraps of others, past others, others who seem to be outside our body, and the diaphanous organza of interspace of memory and, yes, near-rotting honeysuckle:

Sandy was a man and Peach was a woman, it was so simple. Forever they were a man and a woman, like silhouettes on a high cliff. For a moment it was as simple as “forever they were a man and a woman, like silhouettes on a high cliff.” For a moment Peach forgot her own name. She felt as glamorous as a woman with memories only of Spring, only of honeysuckles rank and bursting like declarations of love from the vines, as she strolled through the dusk and bells rang and rippled the stillness of the pond in the depths of her mind . . .

In “Ezekiel in the Snow,” the lost brother cannot remember how he came to be cocooned in mystical isolation, “chitchat[ting] with the flowers.” Fragments and shimmer of Ezekiel’s mind gradually take over the story, and it tilts into allusiveness the more he comes into his memory:

I have some memories so faint they’re nothing more than a gloom of sensations, irradiated by traces of time but not of space, or sound, or image; composed, that is, not of any one sensation in particular, but of something more total, more auroral—the haunting of my mind by an earlier version of itself.

It is a long-lashed wink that this last clause is repeated in earlier story “Valentine’s Day.”

In choosing the billowing reordering of symbols over narrative, the adularescence of affect and instants, Mattia’s poetics is lushly anarchistic. Anarchism’s stereotyped as a solely destructive force, but its fires are always in service to the verdancy of life and regrowth, vines pushing through the cracks of the concrete. Honeysuckle waft treacherous not in the way the state would make it seem, an overhung decadence, but because a redirection toward a life of pleasure that includes pain, that fullness of beauty that includes shit, is so powerful.

This thick orchestration is exegetic in and of itself: “Symbols don’t explain; they are a way of inviting the mystery of myself into a sentence. Of suggesting the possibility of another logic, within and against the forward temporal force of narrative.” Thickness pushes against preconceived ideas of time and space, which our selves are no exception to. It offers an aesthetic “web of affinities” as a way through identity by reordering its component parts that we have calcified as Self, allowing symbols to affix to new contexts.

Trans-sending identity is not about a flattening of difference: this is to operate within the logics of extraction, the logics of states. The nation-state operates under the same forces that shaped identity politics from its revolutionary origins to its bereft conclusion: a squeezed harmony of fictitious simple narrative of language, affect, belief. The great power of destabilizing identity is that it becomes dynamic, and therefore acquires flexibility and strength. Those who hold these visions and dreams open us to the possibilities of a freedom that shapeshifts around fists.