#guest post

My name is M. I was born without an arm, specifically below the elbow on my right arm. I'm a college student.

I find as an amputee, approaching and asking about other amputees is much more socially acceptable. It’s like a shared experience that people acknowledge and whatnot. It’s great seeing another amputee out and about!

My personal preference is that I don’t mind answering questions or giving insight on the amputee community. I know that this is not an idea shared by everyone and a lot of other amputees don’t like stares or questions.

I do just about everything with my left hand which means my left hand is at more risk of being overused. It’s a common thing amongst amputees, especially as they grow older. 

Some things I do to adapt is use my nub (term used to refer to the shortened limb - others, usually leg amputees, may call them stumps) and my knee and a pinch action when opening items or things people normally do with the thumb to hold this down. I do have an elbow so if I have any light bags I usually just hook it on my elbow and I can carry it without thinking about it too much. Heavier items may mean I can’t do this. I applaud using my left hand and right elbow.

I find adapting to things comes more naturally to me as I was born with my differences. I utilize a lot of other body parts to make up for a hand. I also sometimes use any walls or other surfaces to help.

For example, if I’m putting up my hair, I go against a wall and use the wall to help hold up my hair while my hand ties it into a ponytail. I have found that hair claw clips are really easy to use. I do ask my friends to help me or hold stuff occasionally and they are really nice about it!

Sometimes I have to get creative to adapt, like playing the guitar (I taped a guitar pick to my nub to strum).

I have similar adaptations for opening sodas or packaging, although sometimes I genuinely do struggle. Getting larger containers is usually tricky so I am used to asking others for help when I need it.

Since I was born an amputee, I found prosthetics difficult to use. I never liked wearing a prosthetic for an extended period of time because the effort outweighed the use. When I did wear one, it would often clonk against things because I’d forget it was there and my brain wasn’t used to calculating space or dodging with the added length. It would also be uncomfortable in casual settings, where I’d have to try to find a position that worked around the arm. 

No amputee wears their prosthetic all the time. They become uncomfortable and exhausting to use.

Advanced prosthetics such as bionic ones are much more costly as they are able to move around, at the price of having to be charged + the expense. A lot of more affordable ones are more stagnant; they usually only have a specific use. They can be made more versatile with removable attachments for various individual functions.

In general it is easier for me to adapt tasks using my body or my surroundings than with a prosthetic.

I think people are often shocked I can do pretty basic things like tie my shoe or cut paper. They're also surprised I can do more athletic things like cartwheels and handstands (which I can't do now but when I was younger I could). I can do elbow planks or one handed regular planks; although I can do a regular plank, I’m just really slanted. Pushups are more falling than the push up itself.

People also definitely do infantilize me sometimes. Sometimes I get ableism where they think I can do everything an abled person can, but sometimes I've had people think I can't do anything, even when I advocate for myself. It can be hard for people to realize they're being ableist.

Independent Establishment, on its surface, is a story about a woman in the Compact who is fully capable of taking care of herself. She runs her own restaurant, she has friends, she has partners. She lives a hedonistic life, the way that the Affini encourage her to have. And yet this is clearly, clearly not working for her. She is struggling with what has Newspeakly been dubbed 'comptop': A sophont who is not particularly inclined towards dominance or action, either as a general demeanour or at a particular moment, being somehow obligated to be, pigeonholed into the role of, or otherwise compulsorily being a top or dominant in that moment. This can be internalized, as it is for May.

There we find Viridia Mulberry, 19th Bloom, the captain of the Cymbidium, who appears to be struggling itself, as many classic HDG stories set up. It has the inverse issue, however: It must always hold itself back from immediately and overwhelmingly imposing care on everyone around it, regardless of species. The hunger present in the Compact itself to take care of everyone is embodied in Mulberry as its avatar, as is its promise to enact care on absolutely everyone, no matter what, including the Affini.

But the slow-burn romantic domestication narrative comes crashing down in what has been termed by the author the "bad ending". This story is not interested in consent when the joy or misery of a sophont is on the line. In fact I would argue it, and mulberry, has a deep and abiding anger towards it. Any prime directive you can name is bullshit, this story says; save those who are hurting. By any means necessary.

Early on in this story, I was talking with Lagnia about the craft of the story, which is something that I do because I deeply enjoy the mechanics of writing. I had pointed out that part of faer style includes a lot of comma splices. Here is the first one I found, in chapter 1 of Establishment:

He was a mess, his dusty brown hair had grown down to split ends that rested uncomfortably along his oily neck, he had a beard that desperately looked like it needed some variety of trim and a lot of specialized shampoos.

This is, semantically speaking, three sentences. "He was a mess"; "his dusty brown hair had grown down to split ends that rested uncomfortably along his oily neck"; "he had a beard that desperately looked like it needed some variety of trim and a lot of specialized shampoos". They're called comma splices because the use of a comma here sutures each thought into one longer sentence which has a bit too many things going on. Its cup runneth over.

Fae told me something that I think is key to this story. Watch for it as you read. This was an intentional technique on faer part to capture a connectivity between thoughts in a way that different sentences, reworded sentences, semicolons, and other techniques could not capture.

This sentence is, technically, wrong. But it is wrong in an expressive way.

The poet e.e. cummings (whose name is intentionally lowercase) was a master of this sort of expressive wrongness. Here is the poem i like my body when it is with your in its entirety:

i like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more. i like your body. i like what it does, i like its hows. i like to feel the spine of your body and its bones, and the trembling -firm-smooth ness and which i will again and again and again kiss, i like kissing this and that of you, i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes over parting flesh… And eyes big love-crumbs, and possibly i like the thrill of under me you so quite new

(I think this is a fitting poem for IE, for a number of reasons. But its grammatical structure is what I'm pointing out here.)

In other words, like many brilliant authors, Lagnia eschews the rules of grammar in the name of expressive joy in faer writing. If the institution of grammar does not cover a part of the human experience, both of these authors say, do something ungrammatical.

I rendered this in a similar way in my flagship story, The Place Where We Can Stop Running, by saying that the model must adjust to fit the sophont, not the other way around. The Affini bureaucracy is a vast, byzantine system, and one that does not always work for the desires of the xenosophonts within its care, but it works for their needs, reflecting this principle in two ways: Break etiquette and transgress boundaries to give someone what they require, and do not hesitate just because you aren't able to find the right paperwork to file or box to tick.

What strikes me about Establishment is the fractal, cosmic nature of this principle, and how it is reflected in every part of the story. It is reflected in Mulberry's strategy for treating May. It is reflected in the grammar of the story. It is reflected in Mulberry's general demeanour. Everywhere you go, every direction you look, the story is doing this.

And it is a humbling experience, if you allow it to be. As I was reading the story, I kept having this sense of, this is somehow off, somehow incorrect, outside the lines. And every time, this turned out to be the correct thing, whether diagetically, the correct thing for the sophonts involved, or extradiagetically, for the story.

I am wary of the use of the term 'perfect'. But Independent Establishment is flawless, because it rejects the concept of a flaw.

Its finale is one of the most dramatic leaps of faith I have ever read. Chapter 42 filled me with dread and anxiety for the characters. Chapter 43 broke me down into a sobbing, shocked mess. I watched a number of readers unable to understand what they had witnessed. Mulberry, and possibly Lagnia faerself, had clearly, clearly, gone too far. There was no way to pull back from this. We are in the abyss. We are lost. The entire story has led up to a neck-snapping twist from which there is no recovery.

…Right?

…Right?

The final puzzle piece that is necessary to understand this story is Mulberry's insistence that May Morrison retain as much of herself as possible. Every part, every part, is as sacred as every other part. There is no part of her which must be sacrificed for the greater good of her psyche. All its complexity, all its contradictions, all its humanity, must be preserved at all costs. And yet May has such a complex, and I use that word intentionally, about who she is and what she desires, that it is nearly impossible to untangle it without sacrificing something.

This is the hardest possible domestication narrative to perform well. The skeleton key versus the unpickable lock. But the Compact axiomatically guarantees happiness even for this narrative. Something very interesting happened a day or so after chapter 43 was released: Those same readers came back and said "You know what, no. I trust Mulberry." One of the scariest sophonts in the Compact, the arch-villain of HDG, the distillation of its noncon elements to such a pure refinement that one drop is enough to turn your eyes gold.

A leap of faith.

Leap, and the net will appear.

And we were right. The story did not even stick the landing, because it didn't land. It flies. It soars. It is no longer beholden to gravity; it has achieved escape velocity and has taken its rightful place among the stars.

The author Avgi Sakedopoulou, in the book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, makes the argument that the ego is an inherently controlling force, that which wants to understand, build models, fit things into boxes. This is not a bad thing, always; but it is inherently conservative, and must be periodically disrupted to expand and refine our understanding of the world. As such, things that are outside of those models and boxes and understanding cannot be experienced with the consent of the ego. That the artful transgression of limits is a necessary transformative force that imposes growth on the psyche, that gives us the ability to recontextualize our lives and find new meaning in that which we thought we already knew.

Mulberry is a master of the transgression of limits as a transformative force. It earns its bloom count on the page. No other Affini could have done what it did. And no other author could have demonstrated its themes in such a comprehensive way. The finale transgresses every boundary you can name. It violates the characters. It violates the reader. And in doing so, I would argue, it makes us better people.

HDG is an inherently queer genre. To queer, as a verb, is to complicate, to disrupt, to reject normalcy and the 'proper' order of things. Most narratives are heroic, about individualist triumph; HDG goes in the other direction, and not only says that it's okay to lose but that sometimes it's better to lose. Independent Establishment is an icon of queer literature for rejecting so many binaries, breaking so many rules and conventions, including that of the very genre it participates in.

HDG is an inherently cripped genre. It fiercely defends the right of all sophonts to care and joy and abundance, regardless of their ability to 'earn' it. And Independent Establishment is also an icon of disabled literature for its patent refusal to change its primary sophont, even when it was harming her, even in the midst of so much violation of her boundaries. It not only rejects her 'earning' her true ending but forces it on her without the first thought about her reflexive objections to it. It violates only that which is a mask; the true sophont underneath is ruthlessly accomodated, her boundaries defended violently and with extreme prejudice. She is a fireproof moth within the roaring flames, laughing as it plays among them.

Lagnia's magnum opus is not a foundational work of HDG. It is not early enough nor is it particularly suited for new readers; it is an extremely challenging read and one that requires a deep understanding of the genre's conventions and themes to fully understand. What it is instead is one of its glittering spires, standing tall in the skyline, built on what has come before and piercing the sky, a beacon of hope for those who have been fit into uncomfortable boxes and who yearn for the moment they can break out.

And in a way, it is a permission structure to do so, a model for how to make good trouble. It is a manual for bratting as praxis.

If anybody, anybody, tells you to make yourself smaller in order to make them more comfortable, defy them.

If any system of rules does not cover your truth, break them without a second's hesitation.

If you want something, grab it with both hands, and defend it with your very life.

May is a floret owned by the one of the most controlling Affini in the Compact.

May is simultaneously one of the freest sophonts in the universe, not despite this but because of it.

May we all find what she has become for ourselves.