Your Faulty Idea of This Kristang Man and All His Very Cuddlable Man Friends
Poem in English
I finally understand now, after so many years,
what you thought had been hidden away in my psyche.
Why you never understood I had no fears:
and why you thought I had a fucking personality disorder, even though that, as my therapist later reminded me thirty-three hundred times,
was literally an abuser’s beautiful and very well-crafted fantasy.
And now I know even better.
I have found the Osura Pesuasang, and everything Life-giving that it engenders.
You knew I was Kristang, and yet
you believed all of the stereotypes about what that meant.
You bought into the hype, and the tragedies of ancestors we had not met.
You bought into the wrong vibe. The sense that all we were was lascivious,
hungry servants of Slaan or Slaanesh,
able to willfully manipulate anyone into having sex
that crossed boundaries.
That in our community’s history, seems to have occasionally constituted something far worst than just never getting any, or settling for less.
You thought that by having sex with me,
somehow Fuad would become a regret.
Somehow I would let go of him,
and become your pet instead.
This is a tragedy at once ridiculous
and something I will never forget.
Because now I understand that the worst racism
comes from within.
The worst torture, like what Rocket demonstrates on-screen, so viscerally,
is to reject the appellation Raccoon, and all it insists
you should have been.
For many years, it was true that all the Kristang knew
was such horrific and terrible projection.
But I grew up aracial.
I had no affective connection to the community or to my history. No knowledge that I was so special
which is why when you tried to vibe me, and read what was hidden between the lines—
you found nothing abusive. Nothing illegal.
Not a single detail
that could be constituted savage or primal
except five years of being suicidal,
caused not by my own hand, but by a man that I had loved, in spite of
his own sad and tragic embracing of projections of fear and denial
about brown people.
You couldn’t understand how I could love in a gay Kristang manner, without anything concealed.
You couldn’t understand how I had enjoyed the bodies and companies of so many of my friends, and they mine, without having to resort to steal
their pride. Their dignity. Their capacity to make their own choices,
and to choose me every day and in every way, even though they, and I, were still trying to heal.
Their love for me. How rich. How raw.
How so tremendously real.
I was Kristang, and I also wasn’t.
You thought that by sleeping with me, you could make me desert
Fuad. And all I had built up. And all I had come to assert
as my own approach to Kristang—and what should always have been how every Eurasian stirred
to being Eurasian. To being someone heard
and loved and cherished for all four parts of who they were: mind, heart, soul
and body. Built to show the world
that that last part is the most important. The most critical.
The one that we always have most embodied:
let me repeat the word.
Most of humanity hates our bodies.
Including you.
We think they are disgusting. We think they are faulty.
But you and I, and all the beautiful men who once loved to cuddle and smell me, and hold and embrace me—
we still can be that beautiful new image and meaning
for a world that, more than ever, needs a brand new story.