“Blessed are the Beloved”: On Trans and Asian American Suicide

Examining various definitions of dissociation in trans studies and Asian American studies, this essay analyzes the work of Mark Aguhar and Andrew Pham to deconstruct racialized experiences of suicide and articulate the simultaneous process of becoming both grieving subject and (ag)grieved object.In particular, the author highlights the ways that trans and Asian American communities have both developed a discourse of distancebetween subjects, temporalities, and various versions of the self-to describe experiences of fractured and broken becoming.Rather than rejecting or pathologizing these descriptions, the article develops the term, "dissociative distance," to name the shifting relations produced by such narrative conventions.Turning to a number of gender transition narratives from refugee and migrant subjects, the author shifts away from psychoanalytic emphases on life and death in transition to displaced identifications of grief.Finally, the essay ends with visions from Aguhar and Pham, expanding on the relational possibilities they open up with their lives and work and the limits of relation in their deaths.There are lots of different kinds of pain.This isn't like any of them.I felt fear wash over me on Wednesday afternoon and I don't think it's left since.This isn't something that I can be angry about, this isn't something that I can fix.This isn't the kind of pain that burns bright and fast, like the pain of betrayal, heartbreak, failure, or frustration.This is numbness.I've been able to do little other than sleep and eat.Anguish is occupying my body in a way that I didn't expect.This is something I'll probably live with forever.The pain takes form in my throat and my chest from time to time.Praying helps.Even though I don't know that I believe any of it, even though I don't think of myself as a Christian, these nights of praying the Novena have helped me understand the form of my grief.Instead of inhabiting my body with aggressive quiet, the words take shape inside me in a way they never have before, they give me something to do other than stare blankly and something to say other than nothing, and the communal drone of my extended family's prayer vibrates in my gut, and the sound of the hymns access my emotions in ways I never knew possible.I wish this were the consumptive but temporary pains I'm so used to.The pain of the world not wanting you there that can quickly turn to rage and power.I don't know how to turn this pain into power yet.I don't know if I'll ever be able to do that.Maybe it will get better.I want for my brother and I to get tattoos this week.Maybe on Friday.(14 th June 2011, Mark Aguhar, Call out Queen Zine)In the passage quoted above, trans Filipinx artist, Mark Aguhar, narrates a subtle transformation from grieving subject to (ag)grieved object.Written days after her sister's suicide, Aguhar finds solace in a ritual of prayer.The "Novena," a Catholic observance, is typically practiced as a series of prayers with a request or intention.For Aguhar, the Novena redirects numbness from an "aggressive quiet" into "something to do," a process that converts her isolation into a communal sensation.The description multiplies: on the one hand, she is individuated by anguish, introduced here by a long sequence of negations at the beginning of the piece ("this isn't . . .I don't . . .this isn't . . .").