COAL by Remi Graves

I first read this weeks ago. And then I read it again a week or two after that.

And I read it again today.

So, yes, what you can probably guess from that is that coal by Remi Graves and published by Monitor Books is fucking short, which it is, but it’s also fucking brilliant and absolutely bears the repeated reads, the revisits, the reconnections.

I’ve been reading a few things recently by trans men, as I have a brief section in my comedy-slash-not-comedy WIP show BALD PERSONALITY DISORDER that discusses masculinity because, as (alas) we all know, the bald head, the shaved head look, is very butch-coded. Ignoring this (in a show with BALD in the title) felt like a bit of a problem, particularly as I have several jokes about my experiences being¹ non-binary in a binary world. The only places (in my opinion) to find interesting contemporary writing about masculinity is in the work of trans men. Cismen are just continuing to re-hash The Sun Also Rises but with slightly more apologia.

Anyway.

coal came to me for this reason. And it’s a beautifully presented chapbook containing some absolutely beautiful writing, fundamentally focused on (slash responding to) a delve into historic archives looking at the records of a particular trans man of colour from the very early 20th century.

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Paul Dowling was a Black Cherokee trans man who was incarcerated in the City of London Asylum in 1905.

Remi Graves first heard about this man several years ago, but returned to ideas of him and an in-depth investigation at a more recent date, in the time of “creeping fascist heat” (p. 6). This chapbook is described as a collection of “poems and experiments” (p. 5) and that feels like a purposeful naming.

Graves is seeking to find and construct the life of a person who definitively existed, yet whose life outside of scant, bureaucratic details and evidence, was barely recorded.

What this offers, then, is multiple possibilities, not only literary ones to the experimental poetic biographer, not only as an example of historic community offered to the person who is Black and trans and alive in the same spaces as Dowling was well over a century before, but also comments on the concrete fact of trans lives in another era, and though this life may have ended with incarceration and tragedy, it does not guarantee or elude to the normalcy of this ending. Dowling’s life may have ended up recorded in this way due to potentially genuine psychiatric breakdown, but it offers clues and promises of a previously more stable life before. 

Dowling spoke about having a wife, he was not young, he did not appear to be someone who had been perrennially unhoused or unemployed: his life may have skidded outside itself at its end, but this doesn’t account for the life that came before, and the potentiality for happiness, for contentment, for stability at a prior date. Dowling was – and this is a crucial detail – arrested and initially imprisoned as a man, there was an (albeit brief) bureaucratic, official, acceptance of his identity, which (again) offers some promise. He was able to live as he chose to live, until he was strip-searched in an early 20th century “asylum”, and his chosen presentation, nomenclature, identity was able to be respected and accepted until regressive, establishment, ideas of bodily sex and supposedly irrevocable connections to gender arrived through a psychiatric medicalisation. 

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These are beautiful, varied poems, whose themes, styles and details oscillate and pirouette through the brief notes that Graves has available about Dowling’s life…

Poems and illustrations explore the items found on his person… Lines evoke extrapolations from the “patient’s” casebook… Graves imagines Dowling’s life before his incarceration and the circumstances that led to his arrest… Graves imagines, too, an eternal and unceasing Paul Dowling who lives in a library in the sky and watches Graves researching him, noting down the IP addresses of the people still living who find themselves drawn to this compelling and slightly sketched figure who exists in the archives…

It’s a document about archival research and construction, sure, but it’s also an adventure in imagination. Or, perhaps, a series of adventures, as the forms used in this chapbook are inconsistent. These are “poems and experiments”, a phrase that – to me, as a writer – I feel should (or could) be appended to so many works of literature… Graves is playing with history, playing with poetry, playing with knowledge and playing with learning.

This is the kind of writing that gives one hope for the future of literature, that reminds one (when you live an unexciting existence such as mine) that there are still interesting people living in the world making spectacular work and still finding new things to do with texts and the way they are constructed and how their foundations are built. 

Compelling narratives, yes, sketching a realised and a fictionalised version of Paul Dowling, a person whose existence evokes easy questions, hard questions, and questions who provoke curiosity from all but the most close-minded of  people.

A powerhouse of a chapbook. A real marvel.

Something of value, something of worth.

Something you should immediately order (if it hasn’t already sold out).

Highly recommended. 

See more at the publisher’s website here

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1. please read that “being” as “identifying as” if that’s what you need to do to get by. ↩︎