Books: For Pride II

Cantoras, The Thirty Names of Night, The Name I Call Myself

Cantoras, Caro De Robertis

I want to write a book about this book! This is the book I have waited all my life to read. This is what happens when genderqueer people write about revolution! Who is the revolution for? Who does a revolution liberate? A novel about five queer women living and fighting to exist during the time of military dictatorship - the ultimate expression of patriarchy via fascism - in Uruguay.

I first read this incandescent novel as we marked the 9th anniversary of the January 25, 2011 revolution in Egypt. I’ve long said that sexual liberation and gender liberation are essential to all revolutions, in Egypt and everywhere, and I have always said that Central and South American countries that liberated themselves from CIA-backed military dictatorships were the role models that Egypt should learn from.

And so the importance of this brilliant novel by Caro De Robertis who I had the pleasure to meet when I spoke at the Berkeley Book Festival in 2016 and who to my honour asked me to contribute to their anthology Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times, which they published as an act of resistance and defiance after Trump’s first election in 2016.

Cantoras was a winner of a Stonewall Book Award and De Robertis is the 2022 winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.

I underlined so many pages in this book! Cantoras filled me with joy, made me cry, re-energized the revolution within me. The revolution must free us all! Too often revolutions focus on the kind of change that cisgender heterosexual men want and benefit from—from the State and just for them. Too many cis men, including those who are not white, are moved only by the fight for liberation from the State. “None of us are free! This is not the time for feminism!” they say. If the State oppresses men and women, then the State, Street, and Home together oppress women and queer folk. Cis men refuse to make those connections that make them complicit in what I call the Trifecta of Patriarchy.

A feminist revolution targets patriarchy in the State, Street, and the Home because it recognizes that there is no liberation without sexual liberation, without gender liberation, without queer liberation. It states as a revolutionary statement: I own my body, not the State, not the Street, not the Home. I do.

A feminist revolution dares to imagine liberation from the militarism of the State and from its echo in the conservatism of the Street and the Home. A feminist revolution recognizes that the hardest revolution of all is the one at the Home, because all dictators go home.

And a feminist revolution disobeys all those who insist “People are not ready,” because as revolutionaries we must recognize that if our communities are ready for us, we are too late.

I recently read and loved Caro’s latest novel The Palace of Eros (which will get its own review soon. I’m out of town and don’t have my copy with me right now) and they have just published a non-fiction book, So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two Spirit People of Color. And alongside Cantoras, I recommend you read The President and the Frog, especially as we continue to mourn the death of former Uruguayan president José Mujica.