An opaque bisexuality.

Against transparency.

Months ago, I was hanging out with one of my friends — a PhD candidate in Princeton’s English department, because yes, I love me some academics — and, you know, just shooting the shit about my thoughts and theories on bisexuality and biphobia. She asked me if I was familiar with Édouard Glissant, a writer, poet, philosopher, and literary critic from Martinique who’s widely recognized as one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought. Specifically, she wanted to know if I’d read Glissant’s essay, “For Opacity.”

I had not. In the months since, though, I managed to score a copy of Poetics of Relation from my local library (it took a very long time to get off the wait list) and sit down to read the essay and, well, it definitely resonated with me.

In his essay — which you can read here — Glissant takes issue with the West’s obsession with transparency, which is, he argues, fundamentally reductive:

If we examine the process of “understanding” people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce.

This is, I should think, a familiar experience for most bisexuals — in particular bisexuals who exist within a society whose gender and sexuality norms have been shaped by Western values (which is, thanks to colonialism, most of the world). There is constant pressure to explain ourselves, to prove our legitimacy, to clarify if we are bi or pan actually, to defend the “two” embedded in our nomenclature in the most literal of ways (meanwhile, no one seems to expect lesbians to all hail from Greece). One cannot simply be bisexual, one must elucidate bisexuality and establish the boundaries of what it is and isn’t, one must educate in order to be accepted.

And honestly, it’s exhausting. Because personally, I don’t actually give a shit what bisexuality is or how individuals define it, to the extent the label is important to me it’s because a) it’s a stigmatized identity that I want to reclaim for political purposes and b) I want people to understand that I am unpredictable and that they shouldn’t expect some consistent pattern from me. Rather than identifying as bisexual because I want people to “understand” me better, I identify this way because I want people to realize that they cannot understand me, that bisexuality is impossible to pin down and constantly in flux, and that that is what is so beautiful about it.

Glissant, on his part, presents opacity as a potential remedy for transparency. The opaque — which Glissant defines as “that which cannot be reduced” — isn’t necessarily unknowable, but it simply does not have to be understood in order to be deemed worthy of respect. There are a few choice lines that Glissant offers about the beauty of opacity — I’m personally partial to “As far as my identity is concerned, I will take care of it myself” and “To feel in solidarity with [the other] or to build with him or to like what he does, it is not necessary for me to grasp him” — but it’s all building to the ultimate point, which is that our humanity, our citizenship, should not be hinged upon being legible. “We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone,” Glissant ultimately concludes.

I cannot express enough how badly I want that. For decades — ever since I first began to understand myself as queer — it has frustrated me that in being different I am not allowed to simply be, but expected to explain and defend myself. It’s just exhausting, this constant expectation of legibility, of proving my “validity,” simply because I operate from a different perspective, a different worldview, than the people around me. And it’s not that I don’t want to be understood: certainly, I do a lot of explaining of my inner life to people I care about. It’s that I don’t want understanding me to be a prerequisite for basic human rights.

This is, I think, part of why the old “love is love” line has always irked me so much. It argues in favor of queerness by positioning it as comparable to heterosexual love (especially insomuch as it is arguing for queerness to gain access to a suite of rights unlocked by the state recognizing your monogamous partnership rather than, you know, just abolishing marriage as a legal entity and giving people healthcare and the right to freely choose their associations at will), rather than simply allowing it to be it’s own thing, to be different. Is my love the same as a heterosexual person’s? I mean I don’t give a shit, honestly. What matters to me is that my love is beautiful and precious to me, not that it is equivalent to anyone else’s.

And I think, certainly, that we’d all be better off if we grew a little more comfortable with opacity, if we extended this courtesy to others just as we ask it for ourselves. As a cis person, it’s been a huge weight off my shoulders to accept that I don’t have to understand transness in some intimate way — that I can find someone else’s gender confusing, impenetrable, and still show them respect and fight for their rights. It is okay to not be understood! This is a big wide world full of tremendous variation and variety, to expend — to demand — transparency and legibility from all is, as Glissant notes, to reduce the world to something far sadder, far smaller, than it actually is.

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