Listen to the author reading this piece:
Self-Portraits
Did you know that silver is embedded in rock as a complex pattern of tendrils? The swirls in the water around the “self-portrait” photo of the Syrian goddess Atargatis by the artist Martine Gutierrez could be these tendrils. Coated in a lustrous silver substance, Gutierrez is lying in shallow water, on a dark surface.
Art
In “Anti-Icon: Apokalypsis,” Gutierrez, a nonbinary transwoman, uses her body as the canvas. They ask: Who should we consider a feminine icon? Along with Atargatis, Gutierrez, an American with Mayan heritage, shows sixteen other life-sized, nude, unsmiling, self-portrait photos of legends, taken in an empty swimming pool. The so-called women wear handmade materials. We see Cleopatra with a black garbage bag wig and a wire hanger armband. We see Godiva on a wooden sawhorse with long tinsel hair. What provocation. I am ready for it.
Suicide
As a bullied teenager in the 70’s, I was attached to Patti Smith’s grim song “Birdland”. A boy wants the black ship of death to join him with his dead father. I imagined a kid alone in a barren stoney landscape. Flakes of grey ash swirling. Also, I imagined wolves.
Darkness
At the time, I thought a dark song, like Patti Smith’s, represented a harsh and lonely rebellion: black boots, silver and onyx rings, heavy metal bands screaming about night marches in wars that never happened. I marched into a shadowy cavern in my mind.
Womanhood
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are a shadow. My grandmother loved her life as the wife of a RCMP officer. In my grandmother’s shrine room (the den downstairs) she had formal photos of RCMP members standing at attention in their red serge jackets. The troop of coworkers were photographed at banquets. My grandmother wore floor length gowns. I have no gowns.
While upstairs my grandmother’s living room was immaculate (only good for my girly ballet shows), she spent a lot of time down in the den. She coughed and smoked her Belvedere’s with their box so often opened that I could see the tinfoil wrap winking at me. The glass ashtrays filled up with her filters smudged by red lipstick.
Her domain was also the downstairs bathroom with its cheap fibreglass shower stall and well-lit mirrors. She had her own rigid standard of femininity and took hours dressing in matching outfits and doing her make up. My grandmother never looked me in the eye. Sometimes she seemed fake. It must have been the strain of performing womanhood. Her hair was a signature bouffant moulded into shape with a veneer of silver hair spray. Even with the relentless smoking and clouds of hairspray, she did not light herself on fire.
Secrets
We tolerate family lore. Did my grandmother speak Arabic as claimed? She grew up in an Arabic speaking home in Canada. Let my dead grandmother have that claim. Maybe. Should the old timey RCMP be venerated? Probably not.
We have family lore that my great great grandfather was a Syrian Orthodox priest. A priest who was married and had children? Or was he considered an apostate? His priesthood seems like a myth.
This is a fact: the Orthodox church keeps polishing up the weary idea that being queer is a sin and that queers must struggle to abstain from temptation. It is not lore but a fact that there has been no protection against discrimination of queer people in Syria. Syria is complicated and I do not know it. I won’t go there to explore my roots.
Perfectionism
When I was a teenager, I had to polish my mother’s quickly tarnishing sterling silverware, nestled in a wooden box with red velveteen placeholders. She treasured this box of silverware, which had pride of place in the dining room. I used Silvo and the soft cloth for spoons, knives, forks, teaspoons, even a sugar spoon with a scalloped edge. I smudged my own work.
Trauma
Silver is malleable, pleasing, beautiful, and the best reflector. However, my childhood silver fillings of the 1960’s and 1970’s ruined my teeth by expanding and cracking the teeth apart. Although silver is an excellent conductor of electricity, I received no messages.
Up the narrow gray concrete stairs I go, for new crowns, the steel brace forcing my mouth open, the hum of the grinding, and the whoosh of suction. Someone looming over me, and I feel out of control. I taste metal.
The tears will fall into my silver hair while I lie in the dentist’s chair. It is documented that I will cry and so I shall. The nurse will hand me a tissue. Is this my body?
Autonomy
These procedures remind me of late-night caesarean sections, mysterious equipment and looming figures that alienated me from myself and the birth of my children. Dental procedures even remind me of sexual violence, though those memories are down the old mine shaft, just black and white images, with no bodily memory. Still, I taste metal. I want a medal for all the autonomy that I have lost. Will I ever heal? I want to be strong—like titanium. Steel. I am only an old tin roof that blew off the shed. Nobody cares.
Violence
This is no secret. When I was a young adult, my mother told me that her dentist drugged and sexually assaulted her after convincing my trusting mother that he should fix her teeth on a Sunday evening in his office.
My mother may have performed femininity well with her skirts and jewelry. But it is no secret that she reported that silver-tongued ------. My mother is someone for me to venerate.
Depletion
My parents took me as a teenager to the mountain top Mexican mining town of Taxco, 1,700 meters up, the ornate Baroque cathedral at the high point. We walked the steep, irregular streets of dark cobblestones, past homes with red tile roofs and vines of pink bougainvillea growing over archways. The people of Taxco have mined silver since pre-Hispanic times. The silver mines are now exhausted.
Power
You can find silver down underground shafts and in caverns. Take it to the surface and crush it into powder. Add water to make a slurry and then add cyanide to the slurry to poison it. If the silver is mixed with lead, add zinc to the molten silver. Lead sinks but zinc floats. Silver floats. So, silver is revealed. Make a solar panel. Seize power and bring in the light.
Transparency
In Taxco, my mother bought me a sterling silver pendant. Embedded inside is the Aquarius symbol of two waves—the water bearer. Also embedded is the pink enamel silhouette of that woman pouring out her jug of water. I still have this tarnished pendant. The enamel is transparent. Through the woman, I see my own hand.
Icon
After something bad happened to me in Mexico as a teenager and my parents were away, I stayed in the rooming house of an adult friend from Spanish school. She went on day trip to Taxco while I slept in her bed. She showed me some dangling silver earrings that she bought although I was sick and could have imagined it. Later, still a teenager, I visited her in San Jose, California. She had a pottery wheel in her house. And plants. And cats. And an old truck. And a hippie husband. What was this place! She took me to the San Jose Observatory where I saw stars above. This friend? What an icon.
Legend
What does it mean to be an icon? A symbolic representation of ideology? Of legend? Of femininity? In the artist Gutierrez’s self portrait, the biblical Judith brazenly wields a wire hanger knife. She is barely clothed in damp raggedy tissues. She holds a plastic mannequin’s head like her vanquished foe: the general she killed to save Jerusalem. This is a story. I have no portrait of my legendary mother vanquishing her foes. But she did, also. This is not a story. What an icon.
Idolatry
Should I idolize the goddess Atargatis? I could adopt Atargatis as my talisman, with her moon power to aid me. Or Atargatis is my tempter. I can be an apostate.
What does it mean to be an icon? In the artist’s self portrait of Atargatis, this celestial being is elegant and indestructible. The water is dazzling. Her skin is gleaming sterling silver. Some believed that Atargatis, with her moon power, granted fertility. But the moon is only a mirror of the sun.
Poison
The moon is made of rocks and regolith. Perhaps a hidden silver vein. Not all silver is found as a beautiful filigree on rocks either. Sometimes silver just looks like white splotches and patches and dots on a cave wall.
Long ago, alchemists invented silver nitrate as an antiseptic. But they called it “Lunar Caustic” because they associated silver with the moon. Lunar Caustic is poisonous to bacteria. We should talk about other poisons: anti-queer words from old caves. There is no precious silver in those caves. Everything is depleted. Coat a mirror with silver. Take a long hard look at ourselves.
Proliferation
The silver swirls of the water around the artist in the self portrait of Atargatis remind me of the tendrils of silver in rock. But they could also be the tendrils and filaments of a map of the Mycelium talking in their fungal network. Fungi have 23,000 genders. Ah, to know that is healing. Let the peppered moon lichen thrive.
Gender
In all of Gutierrez’s photos, Atargatis is my favourite. It reminds me that I have stood nude under a full moon in a forest, when all the cedar tree needles had sharp sylvan edges, and every rock gleamed like mercury. The breeze blew over my body.
If an artist has clarity of vision and is unapologetically provocative about gender, and I see that gorgeous art, I am changed. My heart empties of its tarnished feminine medals and girl grey shrapnel. I have more moral lucidity and gender fluidity. I have the strength to vanquish my foes. Defeat tin gods. Somehow. Sometime.
Body
I know that vengeance is not mine. I have no weapons: not my Syrian roots, not silver feminizing jewelry I would never wear, not gowns, not silverware, not real vengeance. Nothing belongs to me but my own body. I have vitiligo: white splotches and dots of skin that lost its colour. They are silver embedded in rock— or stars. I live in my free body. I am not an icon, but I am enough to go on.
Deirdre Maultsaid (she/her) has been published in Canthius, CV2, Filling Station, Grain, Impossible Archetype, Marrow, Prairie Fire, the Puritan, Riddle Fence, untethered, White Wall Review and others. Deirdre Maultsaid is a queer writer gratefully living in Canada on unceded traditional Coast Salish Lands. More information at @deirdmault.bsky.social.
So poignant. Thank you for sharing.