Falling

on breaks, and roots

When I was (almost) seven years old, I fell out of a magnolia tree and broke my arm.

I’d been playing in the tree that grew in the side yard, along with the camellias and the day lilies, before my family went on a hike. I was pretending to be laura ingalls wilder, sitting on a thin branch on that tree, singing and swaying back and forth, when over I swung and fell, ten feet down, onto my arm. I remember being so curious about the fact I couldn’t stop crying about my arm feeling so strange. I’d never known my body could do that — continue crying about something feeling weird, even when I wanted it to stop.All of that to say, any caution I have in this life I’ve learned through running directly into something/someone, or falling into it by accident. Sometimes both.

I was lying down for a nap today and I was looking at photos of the magnolia trees I’ve taken over the past couple of weeks here on this little island off the coast of alabama. There are some truly huge trees here — some, I’d venture to say, that existed before colonization, though of course every magnolia currently alive today stretches back more than 200 million years, before humans or even bees existed, which is why their flowers are designed to be pollinated by beetles. Although, they’re not picky, I’ve seen bees getting totally covered in pollen dust in their dinner plate sized blooms.

And I remembered this story, which I’ve realized now is not just a story about me breaking my arm. It seems telling to me that I tipped over/the tree tipped me out of itself as I was inhabiting a fantasy of settler colonialism & heteropatriarchy (forgive the long words, I can’t figure out how to say that both specifically and accessibly) — the white girl who grew up a tomboy then turned into a demure woman and contributed successfully to the settler project. And then, boom. A break.

Queers sometimes like to ask each other or tell each other about “their root,” sourced of course from the movie But I’m a Cheerleader, about a girl who is sent to queer conversion camp despite her many self identifications as a straight cheerleader.¹ Turns out queer conversion camp turns her gay! Or nurtures her queerness, depending on how you look at it. At the camp, she gets asked about her root — aka the thing in her childhood that made her gay.

It’s funny to think about the magnolia tree in this lens — a queer root, like the one I landed on that broke my wrist. The place where I write from, and cook from, and make art from, and masturbate from, and fuck other people from. This isn’t like the best metaphor ever — I mean, I use my left hand too, sometimes. And also, you should maybe probably use your whole arm, and your shoulder and your whole body, really, to do all of those things.

A break makes space, sometimes where there shouldn’t be, usually where we don’t want one. Breaks are inconvenient. They take time to heal, if they heal at all. They require attention. Sometimes they cause and keep us in pain, or tension. But they also let something through that couldn’t have gotten through before, or otherwise.

Queerness, of course, isn’t some kind of word problem: if a closeted kid in a conservative Christian environment falls out of a tree and breaks their arm, how long will it take them to understand that their high school bullies were in fact correct and that they are G A Y ? I mean, the bullies were also closeted, let me be clear. Bullies usually are.

But queerness also isn’t not a word problem. Queerness is so many things. It’s present in the cracks, the breaks, in the roots. The branches, the trunk. Queerness breaks into, or can, things like the logic of settler colonialism. It can also be delightedly co-opted or adopted into them, as we know so well.

There’s no way to end this story, wrap it up, as it were. Because it continues. 200 million years, I can’t even fathom. Magnolias as elder queers — if we remember that queerness is, in many ways, just the experience of being alive, bursting out around the concrete, through the broken wrist, interrupting the neat story of taking your homonormative place in the colonial project and sending you — somewhere else. Back to the roots, maybe.

A reminder: Jen Lemen and I are running a 10 month container to untangle binaries and dream the future — we start March 11, just 2 days from now. A blip, in magnolia time, I’m sure. We made a little podcast about the origins of our work, specifically Jen telling me, I think I need to go to this little island in the middle of nowhere…and the surprising things that unfolded when we both said, yes.

with love from the thunderstorms shaping this little island,

Kali

1. All the thanks to my partner Mikayla, who loves this movie and this scene. <3