Man Alive , livre ebook

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81 pages

English

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If he is to become a man, what sort of man should Thomas Page McBee be? To find out, McBee must confront the suffering he has endured at the hands of men: the abuse he endured as a child from his father, and the violent mugging which almost killed him as an adult. Standing at the brink of the life-changing decision to transition from female to male, McBee seeks to understand these examples of flawed manhood, and reclaim his body on his own terms. Powerful, uplifting and profound, Man Alive is a story about transformation; about freedom, and love, and finding the strength to rebuild ourselves as the people we are meant to be.

Sujets

Gender studies

Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	25 mai 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781786890894
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0288€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Thomas Page McBee was the ‘masculinity expert’ for VICE and has written the columns ‘Self-Made Man’ for the Rumpus and ‘The American Man’ for Pacific Standard . His essays and reportage have appeared in the New York Times, Playboy, The Atlantic, Glamour, Salon , and BuzzFeed, where he was a regular contributor on gender issues. Man Alive won the Lambda Literary Award and was named a Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, NPR Books , and BuzzFeed. He lives in New York City, where he works as the editor of special projects at Quartz.
www.thomaspagemcbee.com @thomaspagemcbee
‘McBee’s beautifully written story is engrossing and brave, and rings with triumph’
BuzzFeed
‘A brilliant work of art. I bow down to McBee – his humility, his sense of humour, his insightfulness, his structural deftness, his ability to put into words what is often said but rarely, with such visceral clarity and beauty, communicated’
Heidi Julavits author of The Vanishers
‘A story about patience, forgiveness, kindness and bravery . . . With this book, Thomas Page McBee has done exactly what we should all strive for: to tell our stories in ways that humanise rather than sensationalise’
Lauren Morelli writer, Orange Is the New Black
‘Well aware that memory and identity rarely follow a linear path, Thomas Page McBee attempts to answer the question, “What does it really mean to be a man?” Weaving past and present to do so, the book’s journey connects violence, masculinity and forgiveness. McBee has an intelligent heart, and it beats in every sentence of this gorgeous book’
Saeed Jones author of Prelude to Bruise
‘Exquisitely written and bristling with emotion, this important book reminds us of how much vulnerability and violence inheres to any identity. A real achievement of form and narrative’
Jack Halberstam author of The Queer Art of Failure
A True Story of Violence , Forgiveness and Becoming a Man
THOMAS PAGE McBEE
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
www.canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
Copyright © 2014 by Thomas Page McBee
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in the United States by City Lights Books, City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 088 7 eISBN 978 1 78689 089 4
This is a work of non-fiction, but it relies on memory and, as such, its attendant illusions, spectres and plays of light. It is the truth as I’ve lived it. Many names have been changed .
For you, whoever you are .
Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue South Carolina
I Freeze
1 Oakland
2 Pittsburgh
3 Oakland
4 Pittsburgh
5 Oakland
6 Pittsburgh
7 Oakland
8 Pittsburgh
9 Oakland
10 Pittsburgh
11 Oakland
II Flight
12 South Carolina
13 South Carolina
14 Oakland
15 South Carolina
16 Boston
17 South Carolina
18 South Carolina
19 South Carolina
20 California
21 California
22 Oakland
III Fight
23 Oakland
24 Pittsburgh
25 Oakland
26 Oakland
27 Pittsburgh
28 Oakland
29 Oakland
IV Rites
30 Oakland
31 Tulum, Mexico
32 Oakland
33 Oakland
34 Road Trip
35 Bend, Oregon
36 Bend, Oregon
V Man Alive
37 Road Trip
38 New England
39 New England
40 New England
Acknowledgements
prologue
South Carolina
August 2010 ♦ 29 years old
What makes a man?
It’s not that I haven’t studied them: their sinew, their slang, their beautiful bristle; but before I was held at gunpoint on a cold April day, I couldn’t have told you.
A real man, a family man, the Marlboro man, man up.
The man in the mirror.
I loved that Michael Jackson song, growing up. Used to forget my girl-hips, used to sing it to my best imagination of myself.
What makes a man? The need to know led me to my father’s hometown in hot-damp South Carolina. The story starts there because that’s where I went when I could no longer afford to leave the question alone, to let it rear up every few years, when I’d had too much to drink and it was just me and my reflection and my hungry ghosts. And so I steered my rental through the swampy South with my cap pulled low. I had that teen-boy swagger, scars like smiles across my chest, and a body I was just beginning to love.
But the story also begins the night I almost died, back in April of 2010. And in 1985, when my father became a monster, and in 1990 when my mom found out he was one.
“Men,” she’d said then. And I’d learned to say it the same way, a lemon in my mouth.
In South Carolina I could smell it through my open window: alligators and secrets; the embers of Sherman’s march, the Klu Kux Klan, my father’s farm, burning. It smelled like my animal fear and the spicy deodorant I used to cover it.
Men , I thought with that old bitterness, but I already knew my body was shifting. In fact that’s why I was there.
A good man is hard to find.
The windshield blurred; the road was inky, the rain biblical. The cheap motel off the highway seemed like not such a hot idea after I passed my fifth gun-racked pick-up, but there wasn’t any turning back.
Once a body is in motion, it stays in motion. My mom’s a physicist; she told me that.
The truth is, this is a ghost story. No, this is an adventure story.
This is an adventure story about how I quit being a ghost.
I Freeze
1
Oakland
April 2010 ♦ 29 years old
Here’s what you need to know about Parker: she hummed with a magic that vibrated her long strides, her quick-wit, her dressings-down. Though softened by Southern manners, her mood could turn sharp as a knife’s edge, and it wasn’t too hard to find yourself on the sticking side of it. I’d seen her make a cat-caller wither and call a real dick of a roommate a piece of shit, repeatedly, until he just sort of disappeared, his stuff packed and gone within the month.
It was like loving a hurricane.
That night she was wound-up, the plastic bag with a new pair of shoes tossed over her shoulder. We’d spent the day in San Francisco, bumming around and seeing a play neither of us cared much for—something about three generations of women—it felt like those sorts of plays were always about three generations of women. As we left the BART station and headed to our neighborhood in Oakland, Parker outlined her issue with associating women with domesticity in the sort of hilariously acidic free-association tirade she’d go on just for kicks.
She was in her French New Wave phase, and it suited her: short hair, shirts thick with nautical stripes. She looked like Jean Seberg in Breathless , her blue eyes big as saucers. She could be merciless in her assessments, but beneath that lay a kindness so clear it was almost painful to observe. I squeezed her hand, and she startled into holding my gaze.
“What?” she asked.
I shook my head. Six years in, she knew.
Mostly, she was a smart-ass. “I have an opinion on everything,” she’d say.
“How about whales?” I’d ask.
“Love them! Key to the ecosystem; smart.”
I’d try to think of the most innocuous, boring subject. “Row houses?”
“Depressing in brick, cute in wood.”
Parker also had strong opinions about walking home so late at night, and I knew why: our friend who discovered a man under her bed, our friend who was bound to a chair during a home invasion, our friend who got punched in the face in broad daylight for no good reason.
That night was the worst kind of foggy: you could breathe it in, feel it stick. I pulled my collar up, my hat down, my hood on. We walked because we were too broke to take a cab, because we couldn’t afford to be afraid and for me that meant being fearless, and mostly because she was in a good mood and I’d convinced her to.
We started down 40th, and I ignored my twitchy heart, and walked tall. If I’d learned anything since I was a kid, it was that if I wanted my life to start, I needed to show up for it.
Foolish, maybe, but I’d peacock through a warzone before I’d admit to that twitch.
2
Pittsburgh
1990 ♦ 10 years old
“You can tell me anything,” Mom said, her eyes wide, a flush creeping up her neck. Her cursive was bubbly, effervescent, recording everything I said. 1985–1990 . The dates, she said, were for her records.
I told her, then, about Dad’s fingers in the pool, in the car on the way to her brother’s funeral, Sunday afternoons when she left for the grocery store and he parked Ellie and Scott in front of the television, when he knew no one would come for me. Ellie and Scott and I were each two years apart but it seemed we lived in three different houses then, with three different Moms and Dads, each of us in separate, abutting childhoods.
Mine was chocolate milk, science fairs, camping, and the rituals that kept Dad’s hot breath distinct from the rest of it. I sat on the floor of the closet and threw shoes at the wall. I ran like a deer through the woods behind my house. I picked one tiny thing to look forward to and fixated on it. From his bedspread I jumped into tomorrow and felt the soccer ball connect with my foot and fly, high and sweet, into the corner of the net.
There are the facts of what happened, but the story is in parts. It is still hard to capture the salty terror of the worst of it, the freeze, the split: how I lost a body, or how I conflated the two ways my body was lost to me.
I was born female, that’s a fact. I saw myself as a boy, but that made a certain kind of sense. It wasn’t until much later that the complex facts of my anatomy needled at me. Later, people would say that my manhood was always there, blueprinted in my torn-knee jeans, my He-Man castle, my short hair. Maybe that’s true, but let’s not make this the kind of story where I know all the answers.
What you need to know is that afterwards I’d read a book in my bathtub, and my little leg