{"id":41073,"date":"2022-11-01T16:40:13","date_gmt":"2022-11-01T15:40:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/?page_id=41073"},"modified":"2022-11-01T16:40:48","modified_gmt":"2022-11-01T15:40:48","slug":"sample-translation-antiboy","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/foreignrights\/authors\/valentijn-hoogenkamp\/valentijn-hoogenkamp-antiboy\/sample-translation-antiboy\/","title":{"rendered":"Sample translation – Antiboy<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Valentijn Hoogenkamp – Antiboy<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[pp 5-6]<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I COME FROM a long line of liars. My great-grandmother lied about not being Jewish when she moved to Zaandam from Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname, in 1939. My grandmother lied to the man she was married to on Aruba about returning one day, when she fled to the Netherlands with her baby. She left her other child behind, a four-year-old daughter who would later become my mother. My father lied, the time I asked him whether he and my mother loved each other and he said they didn\u2019t, they were more like friends, but that was a lie too because it\u2019s impossible for me to see his life as anything other than one big attempt to win my mother\u2019s affections. My sister Toni, when she claimed that I was the only child to feel emotions and that she didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

They are close to me when I wake up from the operation. But it\u2019s Pier and Charlotte sitting next to my bed, along with Mum. No, she isn\u2019t here, if I ever see her again I\u2019ll beat her to death with an emerald. The first time I came round, there was a woman on the other side of the curtain screaming that they\u2019d scraped her baby out of her, and my chest was numb. My mouth hung open, dribble collected in my cheek. Tubes ran right and left from my armpits to two plastic bottles filled with red liquid. I cautiously flapped my arms but barely lifted from the ground.<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019m awake,\u2019 I mumbled. [\u2026]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[pp. 44-53]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I don\u2019t believe there\u2019s a mysterious person inside me waiting to be discovered. At the same time, ever since the diagnoses a no, I don\u2019t want to just survive, something wants to reveal itself<\/em> has been increasing in volume. Nevertheless, there is still a spark of fear that I\u2019ve made this all up, because I make up characters all day long, I write down their childhood memories, their favourite colours, first relationships, their accent when they talk, how many toilets there were in the house they grew up in and whether they had to queue to use them. I\u2019ve already invented so many people that my own memories are as vague as fantasies.<\/p>\n

I feel the most like myself when I bend down to pick up fallen matches and put them back in a box into which they no longer seem to fit since being dropped.<\/p>\n

\u2018Are you going to tell people?\u2019 Slimane asks.<\/p>\n

\u2018Just Pier to start with,\u2019 I say. \u2018He\u2019s always talking about waters enlightened with simplicity and expressing life\u2019s space in all its totality.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018What?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Poetry, he quotes a lot of poetry. And he\u2019s my best friend after all.\u2019<\/p>\n

Slimane gets up to straighten his back and I get up too, taking it as a signal that we\u2019re leaving. He wraps his arms around me and smells of the same curl cream. I almost kiss his neck.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The floor is still covered with discarded clothing and torn-open bin bags. I cling onto Slimane\u2019s hug, dance around with it elatedly, until I accidentally stand on a plastic pearl necklace, releasing the pearls all over the place. I mustn\u2019t lose the clarity with which this all flows over me. Phone in hand, I let myself fall back onto the bed. Pier is away for a month for a writing assignment. Next week I\u2019m going to visit him because he says he\u2019s wasting away in the back of beyond where his residency is located. It\u2019s cold there, he\u2019s bought new tiger print slippers. I miss his little dancing feet, but not his socks lying around. I could wait until I see him again, but I haven’t felt this cheerful in a long time. First I tell Pier in my head. He\u2019s very enthusiastic, comparing me to still waters. I may not be a girl, but I can be a place in which the sky is reflected.<\/p>\n

Reassured, I call the real Pier. We talk about his book, his slippers, the haunted basement in the house he\u2019s staying in and the spaghetti he\u2019s eating for the fourth day in a row because he cooked too much. There\u2019s no logical moment in which to casually drop my news and I almost let it sink away again. We have to be brave and not only tell our exes. So I say it, I say I might be non-binary. Silence at the other end.<\/p>\n

\u2018What do you think about that?\u2019<\/p>\n

Again he starts talking about his tiger print slippers and his cold feet and I keep asking questions so that the conversation doesn\u2019t stall. Is it Spaghetti Bolognese? Yes, with minced meat. How many pages has he written today? Seven, me too, I say, about a bodybuilder who flexes his muscles and wears a pink tank top and\u2026 The memory of the mirror is still fading like a dream forgotten upon awakening.<\/p>\n

\u2018Would you please say something about it?\u2019 I ask.<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019m not angry with you,\u2019 he says and hangs up.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I AM A MONSTER beneath my skin my love has glasses but can’t see this which is why I picked him I sneak along the city\u2019s walls the babies cry in their cribs I make a claw in my mitten my love praises my skin so soft in the dark withdrawn teeth when I suck I am a monster I hide my face because nobody is looking in the bus next to me a creature of light with red hair freshly washed red hair I want that too the shower avoids me droplets fall next to me I am a monster hide my eyes the screeching of bald birds bald birds too big for my head beaks pecking into my eyes outside you can\u2019t kiss me your tongue is a worm in the tram with an arm so close that I smell another monster smaller ugly with a belly but that doesn’t make me more or less of a monster just a different monster I scratch open my scales under them hard skin I grow bigger every year never better never more or less monster once you are a monster it no longer matters whether you are more or less of a monster.<\/p>\n

\u2018\u2026aesthetically undesirable,\u2019 the plastic surgeon says.<\/p>\n

Where are you, Anti? In a windowless consulting room. The doctor with silver hair once won a reality tv show, both the audience prize and the jury prize for the best reconstruction surgery. He explains which implants I might get if I have my own breasts removed. Since the diagnosis, my breasts have been screened every year. Strange hands almost tear them from my body and press them as flat as possible between two Xray plates. A month later, the test results, still clear, nothing to be seen. But the day after the results, the malignant growth can start again and only be visible a year later on the next scan. I have just told the doctor I would rather have a flat chest.<\/p>\n

\u2018\u2026 for a young woman like yourself the belly fat option would leave a big scar and you\u2019ll want to look good in a bikini.\u2019<\/p>\n

Didn\u2019t I just say I don’t want implants? The conversation is recorded on my mobile phone. As I play it back to understand it better, I sketch the timeline on an envelope. After four minutes, the surgeon, in his pleasantly low voice, calls a chest without breast reconstruction ‘aesthetically undesirable’. After twenty minutes, I am sitting topless on his examination table and he lifts my breast with one hand and drops it again, says I have beautiful breasts and not to go for a single size smaller.<\/p>\n

As a child, the only trans women I knew of were on Jerry Springer’s talk show. They were there because their fianc\u00e9s didn\u2019t know they were trans and they had come to confess. Disgust from the fianc\u00e9es and the audience. My sympathy was always with the woman being shouted at. They were still the same person, were those men blind? In my child\u2019s mind, all trans people really wanted to have surgery. I thought that if you were afraid of doctors you couldn\u2019t be trans.<\/p>\n

\u2018My father-in-law is a cardiologist,\u2019 I say, \u2018and he has a heart himself too, but you don\u2019t have breasts.\u2019<\/p>\n

The doctor finds this amusing. \u2018Women always think that, but they only know their own breasts. I\u2019ve seen a lot more over the years.\u2019<\/p>\n

Still you will never know what it feels like to always have to be confronted with their existence. Cover them, protect them or bare them some more. When mine first appeared I spent the first year forgetting I had them, until a boy in my class intervened, saying I was no longer Fanny Flat-chest and really should start wearing a bra.<\/p>\n

\u2018They don\u2019t really feel like a part of me\u2026\u2019 During the recording you hear my voice get higher; I almost understand what I mean and am hoping for assistance. The doctor\u2019s silence, after his previous smooth answers. Finally he says that in his experience, women who don\u2019t get implants, have a harder time psychologically after the operation. He shrugs off all my questions about risks, leakage, waking up at night and no longer knowing what cold weight hangs form your chest, negligible risks that barely ever occur.<\/p>\n

Stay with it, Antiboy, focus and ask clear questions. But the conversation is full of invisible young women frolicking between us in their bikinis. By now we are talking about breasts like hairstyles, that not every hairstyle suits everyone. So I ask for photos of operations he has performed. He clicks open a slideshow showing a pared breast, the skin hanging down over the ribs like a red flap and the fatty tissue visible. He quickly puts his hand over half the screen and clicks through, past bruises and contusions. Only after many pictures is he able to he show me a pair of breasts that look like tennis balls under a sheet. I look at them and try to want them, to want them like those other women do. I\u2019ve come here with a high risk factor for cancer and the doctor\u2019s idea of consolation is to keep telling me I won\u2019t be ugly afterwards.<\/p>\n

If only I could interrupt him, say, \u2018Put on all your clothes at once. Pants and vest, shirt, tie, belt and trousers, long socks, jacket, big winter coat or better still, a down-filled ski jacket, a scarf and a fur hat and jump in the water. If everything fills with water and pulls you down, if you tread water until you can barely keep going, then you\u2019ll know how heavy my body is. I can tell you love your white coat, even if there\u2019s a little coffee stain on the collar, you love to walk along the corridor surrounded by junior doctors. If I were to force you to walk along the corridor in a scruffy tracksuit, or skinny jeans, or, and neither of us can imagine this, a flowery dress, if you had to operate in a flowery dress, wouldn\u2019t you explain to each patient, every pair of eyes, \u2018This isn\u2019t who I am\u2019?<\/p>\n

But given he is going to add his signature in the form of scars on my chest, I don\u2019t say anything and just stare fixatedly at the coffee stain on his collar. Until he explains that if I really insist on being flat, it will be such a simple operation that he will not perform it. He is over-qualified. I have to make a new appointment with another plastic surgeon and explain all over again that I don\u2019t want implants that I can\u2019t take off when I go to bed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Translated by Michele Hutchison<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Valentijn Hoogenkamp – Antiboy   [pp 5-6] \u00a0 I COME FROM a long line of liars. My great-grandmother lied about not being Jewish when she moved to Zaandam from Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname, in 1939. My grandmother lied to the man she was married to on Aruba about returning one day, when she fled…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3251,"featured_media":0,"parent":41059,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-41073","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/pages\/41073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/3251"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/pages\/41073\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/pages\/41059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}