Towards Failure
By Sreshtha Sen
To write about failure, and masquerade my constant failings this year as “progress” is a reach, I know, but humor me. In The Queer Art of Failure (which I’ve been reading this week because even during a pandemic, a doctoral dissertation and graduation are still goals we fool ourselves into working towards) Jack Halberstam says, “Failing is something queers can do and have done almost exceptionally well.” And because I am after all, a self-respecting queer, everything I do becomes an exercise in failure.
***
Three minutes after a leaf blower that goes on for what seems like two hours outside my kitchen window has made me burst into tears, my astrology app tells me “worry is what you feel when you can’t control.” I have always failed miserably at control.
Worry is mostly what I feel about my family all the time. June would have found me visiting my parents back home, applying for a visa renewal, and nodding along as my grandmother threatened to die soon if I didn’t come home sooner next time. Instead, I teach my grandmother how to use Whatsapp over the phone, telling her to hold the phone just so because I can’t see anything other than her forehead. We fail at video chat, and I end up explaining to her forehead for the next two hours why I can’t come home and don’t know when I’ll be able to. (She doesn’t understand. I fail at explaining that too.)
***
All I’ve really done this summer is sleep, check in on my friends by stalking their social media, burst into tears, read the news and cry some more, and read queer, fanfictional retellings of Pride and Prejudice. I suppose this is a failure of its own kind though I try not to dwell on it so much.
In March, the poetry workshop I was teaching had to turn into an online poetry workshop, without warning. “Times like these, we turn to poetry the most.” I forced myself to parrot to my students, and every week, without fail (or rather with immense failure), I’d try to convince myself I wasn’t lying to them. Poetry can save us. Poetry will save us. Poetry can also fail us, fail our rent, fail our income, sometimes fail our survival.
Since then, I haven’t written too much and when I have, they’ve been personal poems. I’ve watched and rewatched the first season of Killing Eve for “research” several times now to write poems in the voice of Villanelle, a psychopathic assassin and one of the leads of the show (#Fanfiction #Hurt/Comfort). There is comfort in this—who would want to be anyone but Villanelle in this world right now? White. Deadly. An ability to kill every problem that stands in her way. This way, I guess I fail at being myself, even if it’s on the page.
***
I discover Tik Tok, or think I do. “You do realize you’re the only queer whose Tik Tok algorithm suggests desi aunty life hacks and discount codes for groceries, when literally everyone else’s is an amalgamation that spells ‘are the straights okay?’ Right?” My friend Shazlie comments one day. I think I’d have failed at knowing this app too if Lille, Vera, and Summer hadn’t refused to let me. They flood my inboxes with video suggestions and tags. “Like everything,” one of them tells me. “Don’t forget to press ‘not interested’ on anything not gay.” It works. For the first time in months, I get to see Black and Brown kids happy on my screen.
Tik Tok, much like fanfiction, is a masterclass in failing. A joke falls flat, a skateboarder falls, a recording turns unexpected, Kellyanne Conway’s daughter records her mother secretly—the world is not the one we are living in and yet it is, and it is so full of possibilities even or especially when it fails.
This June, I turned 26. In September, my parents master the art of googling and somehow stumble upon a podcast where I talk about my love for Harry Potter fanfiction and the possibilities of queer stories. My queerness is undeniable out loud, and overnight, I fail at being a daughter. The entire month, I scroll through compilations of coming out videos on Tik Tok. There are hugs and flags and cakes. People 11 years younger than me tell their family they’re gay. Some of them even look like me. If I squint, their mothers could be mine except they don’t cry over the phone for weeks. No one fails here except perhaps my attempts to feel good about this.
***
I lied by the way. I have not been reading The Queer Art of Failure. I’ve tried, sure. That quote is from the third page of the book. Once, I even reached 10 pages. I have failed at reading Halberstam just like I’ve been failing at reading anything. (I guess we should count fanfiction from shady websites, almost always tagged “hurt/comfort” as anything.) In those 10 pages though, if you will tolerate my horrible paraphrasing skills, I think what Halberstam is trying to say isn’t so much as queers suck and we fail constantly, but that success as a social construct was not built with someone like me in mind. Models of success in a capitalistic world like ours remain rooted in heteronormativity (marriage, children), individualism (corporate success at the cost of another), and imperialism (a nation’s success marked by their ability to destroy others). Success is a reward that comes loaded with promises, but to be an other is to be denied certain forms of success. When we ignore these established forms and fail, we move away from expectations and promises of perfection, of success that especially right now, we definitely cannot strive towards.
“Let us instead revel in and cleave to all of our own inevitable fantastic failures, the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy,” Halberstam says. I think of how we shape our wants for our lives, how we have all so constantly and repeatedly reshaped those wants for the year this has become, how we forced ourselves to get used to certain things, and how we forced ourselves not to get used to certain other things too. Every Thursday, my students show up to our workshop, cameras turned on when they can bring themselves to, little blank boxes when they can’t, but are trying their best. We read poems that may not save us but hold us in our failings. We talk about poetry as possibility. “Dog!!” one notes on the chat, and we all turn our cameras on to look at said dog and gush. We talk about how tired everyone is and celebrate when we’re not. We fail at being an ordinary undergraduate course, I think, but for once, in the best possible way.
To write about failure, and masquerade my constant failings this year as “progress,” is a reach, I know, but I promise the only way I have learned to live through 2020 is to move towards failing. Let us fail together, spectacularly.
Photo/Lille Allen.
Sreshtha Sen is a poet from Delhi and one of the founding editors of The Shoreline Review, an online journal for and by south Asian poets. She studied Literatures in English from Delhi University and completed her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, New York. Her work can be found published or forthcoming in Bitch Media, BOAAT Journal, Hyperallergic, Hyphen Magazine, The Margins, Rumpus, and elsewhere. She was the 2017-2018 readings/workshops fellow at Poets & Writers and currently lives and teaches in Las Vegas where she’s finishing her PhD in English and poetry.
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