The Man Who Would Be Queen

by Hoshang Merchant

  Only a poet is forever a child.

  Letter to Behzad:

  You said to me: ‘I came to you because I felt myself a failure.’

  Do you know where I come from? Let me repeat:

  My maternal grandfather was a priest, a man of learning.

  My mother was a BA in English forty years ago in India; my paternal grandfather a medical doctor working with the English. (Hence our English surname).

  My maternal grandmother came from a family of landowners: The land was given away to Gandhi and later, communists. My paternal grandmother was a high-school graduate, a widow at twenty-five who never remarried.

  Her sister married a ‘Sir’, a man who started India’s first bank.

  My parents were sexual rebels. So are all my sisters and myself. I say this proudly though I hate people to take low advantage of us. I come from money. But I cancelled ‘class’. My father used his power to destroy us.

  My mother gave me a love of learning and honesty. From her I learnt patience in suffering and forgiveness. I studied literature to know the why of suffering. I want to live an honest life.

  Did you see me as a failure? Did you believe society’s judgement on me?

  (In spiritual life height and depth are one: I am purest at my worst suffering.)

  You came to me out of loneliness.

  Loneliness touches me. I know it. I want to erase it in another’s life.

  People are afraid of friendship. They see only obstacles.

  I jump over differences of age, nationality, language, sex, education, view of life.

  To keep me you lied about your experience. You shouldn’t have.

  You accepted me. I loved your innocence. I did not ‘spoil’ you.

  ‘There’s no “bad” if there is no mental judgment.’ Only, suddenly our friendship opened on to your secret self. I had touched you most deeply and had become your enemy …

  All the prohibitions of your society came back to you.

  Not love but this split aged you.

  I wanted you to be free of wrong teaching. Sure I was limited in my help by circumstance; sure, I took from you too. And for whatever you gave at great expense to yourself, I thank you. With you I wanted to write a new story, an impossible story of a man like me and a boy like you who love each other and do not keep other people out. (Love has nothing to do with ownership.)

  I did not learn this from books but at great pain from my own life.

  In my friendship I have not failed.

  You think of yourself as a failure because you are different from others. Love does not satisfy you. Their politics you find repulsive, so you make your own. Your times have failed you: refusing you love, freedom or knowledge. Your people have failed you: refusing you freedom from their old ideas, refusing to see the validity of your new ideas …

  Your reality as a loving being capable of thinking broadly will find satisfaction in political creation or will turn to crime.

  Boy-love is risky; you never know how the boy will turn out.

  —Symposium

  Letter to Behzad:

  The prejudiced propagandists write that love between men leads only to pain, hatred, loss, sterility, death.

  They are men who have failed with women.

  (I am thinking of Mailer.) So they kill the homosexual who is trying to live. It is fascism … In modern society biology is lost. Men loving men have come to the centre of society (as writers, artists, even politicians in the West) … In transitional societies love without responsibility is cannibalism.

  Between men the making of a friendship could be the creative act. Why can’t we be proud and simple about it?

  Until I meet someone willing to be free as me, with me, I will always feel guilt. Guilt spoils everything: living, working, love. Guilt is used as a vice to catch and hold in an unfreeable bond, not eternal love, but a jail. Get rid of guilt, get rid of bondage. This amounts to saying: get rid of your whole childhood influence, your whole rotten society. That is, we are talking politics: MAKE YOUR OWN SOCIETY, where not jealous competition but friendship and sharing are the rule …

  Fathering ghosts,

  I ran from desert to desert

  Ejected from the airplane’s shadow

  My thirst is endless

  No fountain can quench it

  Friend! Brother! I’ll bring you

  Corn from the land of Egypt,

  Even the corn I do not have,

  Egypt, Egypt! I have been thrifty

  That I might give to others some day;

  Now I am naked, lonely and poor.

  God’s growing shadow spares me not a moment;

  I shall remove this burning choker

  And leave you my thirst,

  Since I own nothing more.

  —D.M. Pettenella (Portuguese)

  Letter to Virgil:

  The truth of the matter is that people who know nothing of Western culture are teaching it for fancy salaries which buy their European vacations, fashions and homes, which in turn reinforce their right to teach ‘Western’ culture. Their American wives, smarting from the American humiliation in Iran, intrigue to keep everyone else out. Whores, every one of them. On the other hand Iranians ask me to be their ‘secretary’. That I cannot type, take dictation or handle a telephone switchboard does not deter them in the least. Actually, it is very amusing.

  Letter to Behzad:

  Do not be anxious over my new job possibility in Palestine. It is such small deaths that prepare us to leave, to give up.

  I am born in November, end of the year, winter, wisdom, experience, and death before new spring. The star in the sky when I was born was the last of the twelve stars, the two fish, one up, one down. It signifies ‘parting’ and ‘imprisonment’. Love is my prison. Death of love my rebirth. If you will review our months of friendship it was against this death I was always fighting, trying to put it off. ‘Life is given for a moment with a friend.’ Dishonest people befriend foreigners because they leave. You wanted commitment; you were honest. I have great hopes for you … When going to a future we must not look back. If we do we’ll lose what is ahead of us. I know this myself, from the last time I tried for a job in Palestine.

  There is a beautiful Greek story: a poet/god loved his wife so much he went to hell to lead her back out. But he was not to look back at her. He did and lost her …

  Behzad tells me to write out a long dream of his for him:

  He is sleeping in a golden desert with four tall green cypresses standing in a row. An emanation rises from him. He runs after it; it climbs a tree and falls into a well.

  He sleeps again in a red sweater and shorts. Breezes blow gently. Four Behzads rise out of his body and go in search of the first lost one. They return with the lost Behzad just in time, because if they hadn’t he would be dead.

  The child is a spirit wailing for its mother. He comforts it. It becomes an outline etched on his torso: the child’s mouth at his genitals, its legs descending to his thighs.

  He looks to the moon and as if through a telescope; his naked eye sees a Behzad stumbling on the moon.

  CUT

  He is stumbling in Europe. I come with mounted escorts, pick him up and take him to a skyscraper. It takes half an hour by elevator to ascend to the top of the building where my offices are. Servants bow deferentially and bring coffee. I strip and show a vagina. Behzad is shy but I remain naked before servants, sip coffee. I ask him if he needs money. He narrates the story of his automobile accident. I write out a check so that he can pay up his fines in Iran and return.

  When he returns from Iran it is still coffee time for me!

  CUT

  Iran: The picture of Khomeiny that had been put up where the Shah’s statue was, has now been pulled down. I am rushed to hospital in an ambulance and Behzad runs to my aid. Ten doctors work on my body and he thinks I’m out of danger.

  The next night he dreamed of a classic vampire-woman.

  From a letter to elder si
ster:

  America’s is a leprosy with fair hair, blue eyes, and white skin. Some Americans are insidious, behind their ‘liberal’ masks they are lepers; other blue-eyed all-American boys like David are their victims without knowing it …

  How can you ask me to change? (If being gay is what you want me to change.) It suits sisters without marital loyalties to have fag-brothers just as it delights mothers without husbands … It suited you to literally mould me in your image.

  I was burnt by you in Chicago (Paul telling me to put down ten cents for a phone call), in Israel ($30 short), in Germany (Paul screaming in the streets for my stereo you practically gifted David when I was penniless); you withheld mail from me (the Vermont Buddhists’ letter to me was never forwarded); you sent my diplomas to family in India who withheld them for a year; you took gifts from me, including gold gifted to me in my poorest days and when sending help sent driblets ($150 during the Iranian Revolution) and now $200 (‘You can repay me from your substantial Israel salary’). I charged you with duties or asked you favours because of my trust in you, which you abused …

  Why do I write you? Because by living in America you made a decision I dared not make (had the good sense not to make) and for the disadvantages of which I sympathize with you. I write you because you are, in a sense, familyless: husband or childless; even your own family does not write you …

  Life is more than rose bowers, lily ponds, cut glass, gardens planted with flowers named A to D, traffic tickets, cars, apartments, houses, European trips, running away from father, adopting and ruling over cats, orphaned girls, emotionally stunted men or fagbrothers. Life is pain and life’s work is alleviating that pain in others. If you can’t help, at least, don’t hurt.

  Letter to father:

  You write: ‘You live your life. So why shouldn’t I live mine?’ This in response for my asking news from you. What I hear you saying to me is: ‘You are the mistake of my past and I do not want to meet up with it.’ To that extent your envision is a confession of guilt, a bearing up of your responsibility and to that extent I am freed. Illness has ceased to be an absurd fate and has become instead a generalized possibility for existence.

  Second letter to sister:

  I am so ashamed of having hurt you. I want to tell you why I did it.

  I hate America: I’ll never return to live there. This much is certain. You became a symbolic ‘America’ for me to slay.

  I am a poet obsessed with experience—knowing it if for nothing other than the fulfilment of describing it, even the experience of failure. (Especially the latter in a success-crazed world.) I understand as I say in a poem: ‘What has no resale value cannot be funded.’ At the same poem’s end I talk about the ‘stone ripening to cherry 2700 years in Fukien (a press report)’. I want bankers to understand this. No interest can be paid by a poet on the time of his maturing. (Or, for that matter by any man.) It is as if society has gambled with the poet’s life and must pay him.

  That payment is approval: ‘You are a poet. Carry on.’ Poems come only from the lived, killed, life. You always approved of the end product but not the process that made it. I know approval to be creative: my approval made a small-town ‘adulteress’ into a ‘poet’.

  Sibling rivalry is planted, nurtured and made to fructify in decadent society. (‘Of course America is great. It is a result of decadence.’—Jorge Luis Borges.) It is planted by neurotic parents and its fruit is social success. It kills personal relationships in the family and creates neurotics venting themselves on anyone at random. As we mature we learn to mask envy as solicitude. Both of us do it to each other—examples are legion. (We just have to accept our own dark hearts and make them light over and over.)

  Being a very jealous person I cope with jealousy by not competing. In ten years of bar-going I never competed actively for a lover; in ten years of job-searching I never competed actively for a job against a friend. I could not hurt anybody because of a fine conscience, because of a weakness in me that cannot hurt others, nor face up to the jealousy in my own heart. I took failure upon my head rather than facing up to the need to hurt other animals in the jungle. (My overnight vegetarianism that greyed me prematurely was actually only an extreme symptom of this disease.) A very jealous competitor told me: ‘In the modern sense of an old-fashioned word you are a saint.’ I had earned my badge. ‘You are a failure in your own eyes,’ you tell me. No, I chose purposely a difficult path which few start upon, the path of ‘saint’ or ‘poet’ which by definition includes ‘sinner’ and ‘destroyer’.

  Carmela writes, ‘Gays live in society without ending up in poorhouses.’ The disease is not being gay; the disease is poetry. (‘I want to be a debauch when I live, and when I die I want to be revered as a saint.’—Fath Ali Shah Qu’ajar.) Just being gay is punishable with death in an Islamic society. Some gays succeed by acting straight—a game not worth the candle to me. Virgil respects me: ‘You did it in your life. You were mad enough.’

  This ‘madness’, ‘neuroticism’, dismissed contemptuously by father, mocked gently by Carmela, railed against and pitied alternately by you, is the very creative germ from which masochism ends and creation begins. I know myself from failure in love. We are trying CHANGE: from the destructive to the creative.

  Your judgements, even the mildest, most correct or most honest ones hurt me as you have become the parent (mother dead, father abandoned).

  Monetary help is a way of saying, ‘I am with you.’ (Hence, I accepted your share of mother’s estate and never claimed it—I’ll return it to you in all justice.)

  We have a touching need for each other. Really, there is no need to make a melodramatic hell out of this need.

  A thief makes off with $13,000 from Behzad’s father. Behzad wishes he were the thief. I see no hope for him.

  My sister writes me:

  I had the weirdest dream about you. You were leaving and the authorities confiscated all your books on grounds they were a ‘national heritage’ and locked them up in museums. So I decided to go rescue them for you. I would know which were yours because all had red leather binding. I borrowed a red sports car to camouflage the red books and went running around a strange museum to get you back your writings.

  I started typing up all my manuscripts and shipping them out one by one.

  Letter to sister:

  The dream presents a catch-22 situation much like my life. If I’m a ‘national heritage’ (a poet) people feel I need to be rescued, however once I’m rescued I am no longer a poet.

  Both Freud, in emphasizing early childhood, and Marx, in emphasizing class, stress the effect of environment upon man. Only one thing transcends environment and that is the imagination.

  ‘Communism comes through the heart. And the heart belongs to the realm of poetry.’—Voznesensky, Russian poet.

  When the ancient Persians or Hindus said ‘sacrifice’, they meant ‘creation’. Creation means a birth: of a musical being. Music, poetry are most akin to the mystic states.

  ‘A work of art, like carnal love, does not allow a fall into the mundane as long as it lasts.’

  Letter from Pritish Nandy, Indian poet:

  Some of your poems are very powerful. I like them very much. It is time these poems saw print.

  The lyric poem like life comes from nothing and goes into nothing. Thirty years: childhood, inferno, emergent living. The circle is yet incomplete.

  Tehran–Isfahan

  1979–1980

  Circle of Hell

  Palestine, Palestine

  Prologue

  This work is rewritten; the original lost, stolen or simply destroyed by a hater. Works of love also inspire hate.

  Reiynaldo Arenas, a gay writer in Castro’s Gulag rewrote his autobiography four times. Each time the prison guards destroyed it by fire the work arose, phoenix-like, from the same fires.

  Today Castro is gone; his brother Raul, rumoured to be gay by Genet, has legalised gay unions in Cuba.

  In Israel now ga
ys march in the streets accompanied by a police escort for protection against their religious Right: 1000 policemen for 500 gays; each gay with two smart ‘straight’ men to protect him!

  Changed India, too: my autobiography will be printed.

  3.00 a.m

  1 April 2008

  I

  Nablus

  1982, Tehran

  My game in Iran had played out; my love unspooled. What was to have been delight became a sacrifice. Time to leave!

  Istanbul: A teaching offer in Istanbul for $100 monthly. Can I subsist merely on a vision of those golden domes? I chose Jerusalem. A year-long wait in the Tehran Poorhouse before joining.

  The Revolutionary Guards at Meherabad Airport insulted me as I left:

  —English teacher? We don’t need any!

  I sat down in my plane-seat and wept as if something had broken within me.