Lucky Creatures
by Joseph Trinidad

Joseph Trinidad’s debut essay collection seems to relish its own existence, and this is a joy in which readers can share. It celebrates expression, for Trinidad can certainly write a scene – from memory, from imagination, and often from a combination of the two. The reader is treated to family meals, sex, medical encounters and superstitiously prized pets. These are not necessarily unusual topics in queer, diasporic narratives, but uniquely rendered through Trinidad’s inventive formulations and demonstrably rich inner world. Then come his mature reflections, which leave a sweet aftertaste and often bear re-reading for their savour.

I prepare my plate. I start with the thigh. I drench the rice with gravy and let it pool on my plate. I place as much as I can in my spoon. Big Girl blooms in my mouth. Here comes my favourite part: I eat and I remember that I am a person at home in the world. I smile and wipe my tears with my bloodstained T-shirt.

The collection opens with ‘How to Gut a Magnolia’, in which Trinidad, as an adult, prepares a meal with his grandmother on her farm in the Philippines. The graphic demise of a chicken in the first few pages is not just there to ward off the squeamish but to examine the mechanisms of death and to honour the resistance that life makes to it, showing that the skill of Trinidad’s insight lives in the interactions between the senses and the mind. He then plunges deep into his childhood in the Philippines and grows gradually throughout the rest of the collection, inhabiting key moments and lessons along the way: his family’s immigration to Aotearoa, his coming out and the formation of a touchingly devoted partnership, and eventually, his return to visit his first home. It is a pleasure to observe his uncertainties transform into convictions: a process of sensemaking which, like turning a live chicken into a meal, is hard-won through sacrifice and contemplation.

Tuli, the rite of circumcision just prior to puberty, presents another visceral yet somehow jocular transformation:

I was too consumed by a discomfort I didn’t know how to solve. My arms were tired from holding up my skirt, but a simple skirt-to-pepino touch was more painful than any of the interjections I had received. I was delirious. I thought of watermelons and sledgehammers, cheese graters and flesh. I was on high alert for potholes. Papa’s driving, assured and tortoise-slow, was nothing against the battle-worn state of highways in Laguna. I didn’t complain like a boy; I complained like Papa. Aggrieved and carrying a tiny headache, I felt myself turning into an old man. The tuli was working.

Trinidad’s tone is warm and curious, occasionally wry, and deeply earnest about the love that underwrites all of the wounds present in these stories. His generosity towards both the reader and the people in his life begets generosity in return. It is difficult to be so honest and so likeable, but Trinidad appears to do so with ease rather than artifice. Defiance is certainly present, but rarely harsh – while we might be cautious in dishing out moral praise for traits of the ‘model immigrant’, Trinidad is undeniably graceful in his confrontations. He showcases a capacity for empathy which at times places him quite literally in the bodies of others:

I pulled your shoulders until I heard you split open, like fabric ripping. I was inside until power, all yours, pushed me into the world. I held what remained of your suit, a hollowed body. I let the light catch your flesh.

Mama, there are creatures in your closet. They are alive, they don’t make you invincible. Like mine, they are killing you, too.

I kept telling her, Open your closet. Breathe, as if I weren’t a son who made a spectacle of our insides.

His engagement with Filipino folklore produces an intriguingly permeable barrier between what is real and not real. Most importantly, it exposes the permeable barriers between people, making somatic, emotional and psychological connections tangible. The duwende, a fickle little man who ekes out punishment via otherwise inexplicable physical malady, teaches consequence and conscientiousness. Fevered entry into the logic of Wansapanataym (a popular fantasy series which provides values education for children via encounters with magical items) triggers ‘the lonely, adult labour of insight’.

Trinidad often moves between English and Tagalog, enjoyably discombobulating for the monolinguist. One can open a translation app to fill the gaps or merely appreciate the shape of the language. Each option is a different experience: the former grants imperfect access to these interactions, and the latter gives insight into the experience of linguistic displacement. The collection also moves between forms: some ‘essays’ are letters, one is an IELTS test on a pageant stage, and there is also a FaceTime call to heaven. The variation acknowledges the different channels through which relationships are conducted and shaped nowadays, made necessary by distance and disconnection.

One of the most unforgettable essays, ‘No Eggs in the Nest’, greets the desire to have a baby, jaded by a homophobic encounter which seeks to deny the value of queer parenthood. Trinidad dreams of his body overcoming this scorn of its own accord. The dream is compellingly vivid, brought on by an ache for motherhood which is so sure and simple in its physical expression that the reader walks through the barriers of social belief and physiology to meet Trinidad’s imagination. While biological motherhood is not the only means to prove the right to a child, it certainly removes the question, and he identifies that these uncertainties are imposed internally as well as externally.

‘I wish we could have a baby,’ I said to Max.

‘It’s more difficult for us, but it’s not impossible,’ he said.

Without taking his eyes off the road, he kissed the back of my hand. It tickled, it comforted me. I rubbed his forearm, muscled and pleasantly hairy. I chose to believe him.

Then a thought.

If you don’t think you’re better than me, then why can’t I have what you have?

Our daughter was outside our bedroom window, swinging from the trees, playing tag in the dark, opening gifts I could never give her.

While each essay is arresting, strange, and beautiful in its own way, there is a real cumulative effect to the collection’s affective currents. Emotion wells up in the nooks and crannies of a life and spills over at the point of return. The collection’s closing essay, ‘Death is Just Another Country’, confronts the price of a transnational existence, and Trinidad is open about the fact that this cost is difficult to justify; that it wounds, that it requires sacrifice and leaves regrets. It is clear in his writing, however, that where hollows may form, love floods in to fill them.