from The Autobiography of the Other Lady Gaga

by Stefani J. Alvarez

translated from Filipino by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

FAUCET

“I hate to do this here, but I can’t wait until four,” Yasser said. It was still seven in the morning and our scheduled leave for work was at four in the afternoon.

We entered the washroom. As soon as the door was locked, he immediately yanked off his thawb. I took off my uniform as well. He pulled the zipper of my pants open while opening the tap to make noise as the water flows. He tilted my body so that he faces my back. He licked his palm.

A few moments later, a janitor entered the room. He unlocked the door. We heard the clinking of the key. He was about to open the washroom door when Yasser introduced himself.

“Sir, sorry. I’m sorry,” the Nepali janitor said upon learning that the son of the company’s general manager was inside.

The tap water overflowed. It went all the way outside.

“I am fixing the faucet,” Yasser said behind me.

“Sir, need help?”

“No need,” he said as if he was pulling and inserting something.

“Sir, the maya coming outside,” the janitor replied when he saw the overflow.

“Aiwa… aiwa…,” Yasser whispered to me. Then he turned off the faucet. “Kalas.”

We noticed that the janitor stepped out.

Yasser’s thawb and my uniform were soaked wet.

The temperature here in Saudi Arabia peaks at 50 degrees Celsius. It will dry eventually, I thought.

______

Notes:

“The weather in Saudi Arabia is composed of extreme aridity and heat. It is among a few numbers of countries in the world where temperatures during the summer period reaches above 120 degrees F (50 degrees C).” from Saudi Arabia Travel Guide

Maya, or sometimes moya, in broken Arabic (spoken by migrant South Asian and Filipino workers), means “water.” In Arabic, kalas means “done,” while aiwa means “yes.”

BABA

“I have been married for nine years with a 7-year old son,” he told me as I leaned on his chest. We were strangers. A general manager who is a Saudi national and a Filipino secretary in one room, lying beside each other in bed. We met at the office just this afternoon.

“I want to see the world even if this is insanity.”

I looked up after he said that. It piqued my interest. I could see his sorrow. Someone with a high-ranking, stable job in a big company, with a wife and a child, one would think he is content with his life, but here he is, found wanting.

“…while I find myself alone,” he squeezed me tighter in an embrace. I could feel the heat of his body despite the cold of the air conditioning.

“How about your wife?” I asked, pressing my naked body further against his. He deliberately locked me into his hairy chest.

“She’s very conservative and doesn’t like to go to places with so many people especially if there are males. It was her tradition. She wants only to visit and stay with her mother and sisters in the province on weekends.”

“How about your son?”

Before he could utter a word, I heard someone from outside the bedroom. “Baba! Baba!” said a voice of a child whom I could only guess is aged seven. Then the doorknob twisted open.

_____

Note: Baba is Arabic for “daddy.”

NAKED

The concrete floor is cold. There is no railing in sight. But it is even colder than inside the jail. I forced my eyes to open. Then I see them, three policemen in uniform, their nameplates in Arabic. All the letters I see are in Arabic.

“You want to go now?”

The effect of alcohol still seems strong. I feel so frail. Then, someone takes off my clothes. I am pulled up and laid on the table.

“What’s this?” they ask, pointing at the tattoos on my back. “Very nice.”

I let go and pick up my clothes. I squeeze myself into a corner. I try to stand up but my legs are numb. I can’t reach for the doorknob.

“You can go now, if you want this…”

“Don’t touch me!” But I can’t seem to cover my own nakedness.

Translator’s Note:

While it is commonplace to profess that Stefani J Alvarez echoes certain formalist elements of transgender poetry such as the averting from direct self-presentation as trans, the destabilization of an idealized version and articulation of the self, and the disobedience against generic boundaries (see poet-theorists Trish Salah, Joy Ladin, Rebekah Edwards, and Trace Peterson), this conclusion deludes that Global Majority trans writers instinctively subscribe to Anglo-American trans-poetics. Alvarez, a Filipino migrant woman-worker in the diaspora, writes in Tagalog-based Filipino and within a language-specific tradition, the dagli—a genre that propagated via vernacular periodicals in early 20th-century Philippines, as the postcolony transitioned from Spanish colonization to American occupation (see Empire’s Proxy: American Literature and US Imperialism in the Philippines, New York University Press, 2011). The dagli, with its nationalist, pastoral, didactic, or romanticist thematic (see Ang Dagling Tagalog: 1903-1936, Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2007), is a short piece which withstands Anglo-American categorisations—as it could be flash nonfiction, prose-poem, micro fiction, or all of the mentioned, or none of them—as in a love letter, an anecdote, a political treatise, a rant.

The Encyclopedia of Philippine Art (Cultural Centre of the Philippines, 1994) defines the dagli loosely as “vignettes or sketches” which could be traced back to the Tagalog pasingaw, the Binisaya pinadalagan or binirisbiris (alternatively, dinalídalí and pinadagan), and the Spanish instantanea or rafaga: “short account[s of] … spontaneous and hurried quality … [either as] an explicit expression of a man’s love for a particular woman, but at other times … highly polemical, expressing anti-American, anti-clerical themes.” Such are poles apart from the dominant Euro-American short story form advocated by Iowa Workshop-schooled (see Conchitina Cruz) and Rockefeller Foundation-funded (see Paul Nadal) Filipino writers who brought American New Criticism in our native shores in the 1960s. 

Resonant to Miriam Díaz-Diocaretz, Alvaro Járrin, Mirko Casagranda, Suneela Mubayi, and Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba, Alvarez’s creative praxis offers a framework towards the oceanic intersectional possibilities crossing translation praxis and transgender studies. Herself identifying as a báyot—a gendered identity from a lineage of indigene shaman-sovereigns in precolonial southern Philippines (see The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History)—over the Westernized transgender umbrella terminology, her œuvre calls to question the malignant tensions of foreignization-localization on genres and genders as social constructs restricted by what the North Atlantic readership recognises, a bone of contention I continually revisit as a Filipino queer translator treading in Western literary spaces.

—Alton Melvar M Dapanas