Contending loyalties is a marked presence in my work simply because it’s a marked presence in my life. It’s the natural conclusion of the congress, the overexposure and the crux of intersection that this project outlines. Nobody is a tabula rasa for their constituent parts but large swathes of which I do know don’t feel like that it will kill them. All of my constituencies have loyalties, gravities, and conceptual connotations that endebt me in the multitude of directions as seen depicted here, as felt as you’ve walked your way through the fragments of this network. That’s what this is.

This is the formation of identity, or at least how it work nows and for me, personally. This issue is felt perhaps most succinctly by the THREE TORTURES, in how it hurts and how I live is brought through those disjointments, these displacements. Let me explain: intersectional identity, specifically those seemingly polar identities, is about disfigurement. Various forms of partition, a homo sacer state of superposition across period, geography, concept and collective. Do you understand? I feel these questions, these tortures, burst up at the joints, not just in my body but the way each of my limbs seem to progress into a greater nervous system, a very nervous system. A constellation, a network. Am I making sense? No, let me explain:

• I feel it in being an immigrant, as someone with a deep yearning for an ephemeral homeland but being elsewhere instead.
• I feel it in knowing to be grateful for the Canadian prospect, not just as a financial blessing but as something that would accept my being gay, and to know that the country you want to be yours isn’t. It can’t be.
• Which I feel reproduced in my family, the eternal tragedy of pretending it’s fine. It is a contending loyalty to love my family so dearly but know, in between the laughter and the meals, the proximity to the end of my life.
• And choosing between the two. If I come out, am I choosing my Canadian splendour over a culture I honestly know nothing about? Why does that sentence make me so sad?
• I felt it in a deep, underlying way which I’ve only realized recently, where my being a Muslim has supplanted my opportunity to be an Indonesian, because being in a Western country is already restricting enough.
• I feel it in maintaining my faith withing the penumbras of my queerness, settled lotuslight naking me desperate for any semblance of personhood.
• In disagreeing with the LGBTQ+ community that social acceptance isn’t queer liberation, that the labelling and identity isn’t rigid nor inherent, believing instead a vehemence in praise of the case-by-case basis.
• And to understand that my foreign elements are what will isolate me from that community as well. To know that in some ways by some people I am not on the registry.
• Perhaps that’s the torture. A liminal status, an inhuman status. Not represented, not accounted for. All of my body has something to ascertain, apply to, and be argued over. Is my body mine? Or is it part of that greater thing, that very nervous system? A hurricane of action potential and pink matter, each neuronfire telling me I won’t make it.
• Felt also in my demand for living and the insistence by what seems to be the world that that isn’t true.
• I feel it in my debt for the past and my responsibility to the future.