NNRM #11: Otros Valles
A review of Otros Valles (2014), by Jamie Berrout.
[...] it hits me then, as it has in few other moments, how strange and horrible my situation as trans woman is, not because anything is wrong with me (Nothing is wrong with me, I repeat to myself) but because the people and the world around me are so convinced that everything is wrong with me. They are the ones that are wrong.
This book is only discoverable as a PDF. It's full of problems. It's got some word omissions and the occasional spelling mistake. It's the greatest trans novel I've ever read.
It's hard for me to call it a novel when it is so clearly, deeply rooted in real, lived experiences. But it's not technically a memoir, either. It is a living transfemme's life, clad in a single layer of saran wrap.
This book is an act of self-immolation. It is Jamie setting herself on fire, and handing us the emission spectrometer, to analyze every single part of her existence. It's about a non-binary transfemme who looks for something in the screaming absence of anyone looking for her.
She's surrounded by family, but denied understanding. She is forever the "other", a thing to be misgendered and de-legitimized, in a family that is yet the only support she has available. There is no big trans community in the Rio Grande Valley, only dirt and despair and people who "have each other". She doesn't even get to have that.
To be trans is to have your future stolen. We are robbed at every turn of role models. There are so precious few role models, elder trans people. The unattributed successes, the - the first esports star, the voice every New Yorker knows, all invisible. I've had a doctor say to my face: "trans people don't live to become old". It didn't help that he was my uncle. I look up at the fig tree and see a maniac with shears hacking away at it.
We are your sin-eaters. There is no wrong in the world that cannot be our fault. We are a political bargaining chip so worthless even the broodmares can afford to use us. We will never be good enough to be human. Otros Valles explores what this does to a person, and how we survive on something like hope.
Berrout seems to have disappeared from the internet, and I fear for another trans voice snuffed out. I hope, for her sake, that she has found some peace and quiet. And I hope, for my own, that she does not remain silent.
This book is required reading for all transfemmes.
5/5
PDF available for free at Trans Reads, for now.
P.S. Apologies for the delay, life got busy and then I had some bad brain days.