Keep reading for an exclusive extract from Prishita Maheshwari-Aplin’s debut book ‘Roses for Hedone’.

WORDS PRISHITA MAHESHWARI-APLIN

PHOTO EIVIND HANSEN

THIS EXCERPT ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN ‘ROSES FOR HEDONE: ON QUEER HEDONISM AND WORLD-MAKING THROUGH PLEASURE‘ 

pragma. From the Ancient Greek root πρᾶγμα (prâgma, “a thing done, a fact”). A matured, compassionate and enduring love. This love requires patience and compromise from all parties involved, and a commitment to staying in love, not simply falling in love.

Speckled sunbeams shining through smoke-filled canopies, a world tinted momentarily pink and heavy with the familiar scent of protest. Pride flags waving in time to queer anthems, bathed in disco fireflies – reflections off sequinned ballgowns and leather armour. Witty placards and bright pink banners, spray-painted, smudged, scrawled, embroidered: “OUR KIDS WILL HAVE TRANS PARENTS”. The repetitive hum of the drums, the rousing rally of the hoots and the cheers. And the love, oh so much love. Hands held, cheeks kissed, videos posed-for, cigarettes smoked, snacks passed from hand-to-mouth – as the air fills with echoing chants: “Whose streets? Our streets!”

This, to me, is hedonism. This collective action that is rooted in authentic love, in agape, that empowers us to demand better for our communities and to enact solidarity with others. Our Pride will always be a protest first, whether embodied in the dungeon, on the dancefloor, on the canvas, or in the streets – but that doesn’t mean it can’t be saturated with pleasure in all its forms.

The ruling class would prefer us to be contained/ containable, to remain boxed up and categorisable. To limit both the expansive potentials of our physical selves and the horizons of our imaginations. To let the heavy walls close in on us – seemingly impossible to push back – and for the smallness to wear us down. To ultimately give up the fight due to exhaustion and despair. But through hedono-futurism, we can know that we don’t need to fight their fight with the master’s tools – we can find another way. We can take up the space historically and systematically denied to us. We can let our pleasure be the guiding light – as seen on a banner from the first Pride in London march in 1972 – “out of the closet and into the streets”.

Taking up this space to create untested alternate worlds is not an easy task. Everywhere we look, public access to cities is being ripped apart by developments and stability is increasingly difficult to afford; it’s no surprise that our right – and confidence – to roam, linger and lounge feels shoved in a corner and forgotten. As the heavy hand of capitalism tightens its fist around our barely surviving necks, hustle culture seeps in all the gaps and distorts the romance and transformational potential of failure into something undesirable. We can’t afford to pay our bills; the weekly shop has doubled in price; we don’t have the time to call our grandparents. Convenience is king. Indeed, the instant gratification of apps like Grindr and Tinder sings a siren song amongst a sea of detachment. There’s less chance of a let-down; no walking home alone after “time wasted” exchanging small talk in a bar or waiting around in a filthy toilet. Why would we support a grassroots club night that’s still figuring out its sound when it’s much easier to tag along to the mega-club, especially if it looks good on our social media? Sometimes, showing up through donating money, food or our time – or sacrificing personal comfort to occupy and protest – just doesn’t seem doable (or worth it, because why would we even bother if change feels impossible?).

Hedono-futurism not only shows us that pluriversal futures are possible, but also directly challenges “the tyranny of convenience”, as outlined by legal scholar Tim Wu in his 2018 essay.  Although presented to us as a route to liberation, convenience culture – especially in the ways modern technology has commodified individualism and connection – instead can become a “constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.” When we let convenience be our priority, over our other values, we become more susceptible to the whims of those who have the power and want to keep it. We give away the key to our freedoms in the name of superficial ease. We let governments and corporations constrict the fullness and complexities of our identities, relationships and imaginations. But, when our own day-to-day lives can seem so unmanageable, how do we resist buying into the “cult of convenience” – the siren call of “whatever I want, whenever and however I want it”?

“The instant gratification of apps like Grindr and Tinder sings a siren song amongst a sea of detachment”

We can resist it through activating, strengthening and enjoying the pleasure mycelia. Rather than buying into self-care that requires us to buy infinite products, when we choose instead to experience joy, rest and healing in community, we build the relationships that help us pick connection and liberation over convenience and conformity – that lighten the load so that we may choose our own adventure. Your friend may cook dinner so that you don’t have to grab a McDonald’s, or know someone who has a spare bed so you don’t have to use AirBnb. You might be able to borrow that sound system for your party rather than ordering it for next-day delivery. A DIY dyke might just pop round and fix your chest of drawers – so you can instead donate to a trans person’s healthcare fundraiser. Or you might be able to access a community mutual aid fund yourself to help pay rent – freeing up your Saturday to pick up a placard instead of another bar shift. Through these pathways, pleasure-rooted activities that are inconvenient build anti-capitalist, radical and revolutionary foundations. As Wu writes: “Sometimes struggle is a solution.”

As a community with a shorter actual or perceived life expectancy than our cis-heterosexual counterparts, it’s little surprise that we tend to live moment-to-moment. A generation of queer elders was taken from us by a negligent and biased society – we still carry within us the memory of losing everyone we loved. But it’s through practicing hedono-futurism rooted in care and solidarity that we can come to believe not only that a better future is possible, but that we’ll live long enough to see it. Writing on our defence against the rise of fascism, McKenzie Wark proposed that our vision for “the good life” is to be “found in fragments of the everyday when we live without dead time… When we glimpse another city for another life.” These are the heterotopias we model when we’re fucking, dancing, painting, feeding our friends, setting up camp in protest. These are the sites where we create longevity for our communities through practicing love as action over and over again – through pragma. Where we embody and realise the creation of queer pluriversal utopias.

Buy ‘Roses for Hedone’ here.

The post How can queer hedonism contribute to a better world? appeared first on GAY TIMES.

Prishita Maheshwari-Aplin reveals how Ocean Vuong’s critically-acclaimed debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, helped them come to terms with their queerness and “intergenerational trauma”. 

Words by Prishita Maheshwari-Aplin

“With love”, she wrote on the title page in her floral cursive.

My mum gifted me a book in 2019 with love. It was a book about love – in the different forms it can take, the purposes it can serve, and the ways in which it can hurt and heal all at once. A year before our relationship would crumble – silence haunting the vast ruins – Ocean Vuong’s words had already begun to strengthen the foundations upon which it’s since been rebuilt. I didn’t know it yet, but this book would be the one that would change me.

Through Vuong’s writing, through his vulnerability, I felt myself cradle my inner child. I let her need her mother. I cried with her as we ached in memory of lives we have not lived, yet live each day through my mother, my grandmother, my grandmother’s grandmother. And I felt all the frayed edges of my being slowly untangle and begin to mend from within.

I started reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous at a time in my life when love, to me, felt like a cage. This evolving, expanding, energy-exchange was somehow both impenetrable and claustrophobic – and I didn’t know whether I was trapped inside or longing to break in. Looking in and looking out simultaneously, I was caught between two worlds. Two lands, two nations, two cultures.

Upon moving to the UK aged nine, I had consciously rejected my Indian heritage, feeling it imperative that I fit in. But I never truly did. My many intersecting identities – whether I was aware of them at the time or not – formed a fiery pit deep in my stomach that churned with confusion and frustration; the energy pulsating, spitting acid, and pushing away everything with which it came into contact. I felt unseen, unheard, and deeply misunderstood. And while coming out as queer and finding community in London helped soothe some of the burns, there was a part of me that was still noticeably missing. 

Could I love myself as I wished I was loved by others? Or was I just as incapable? Unwilling?

In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong writes about how veal is made. How calves are “locked in boxes the size of themselves. A body-box, like a coffin, but alive, like a home.”

As a teenager, sometimes home felt like a coffin. And other times I didn’t know the meaning of home. People would tell me that home is where your heart is – where love is – and I’d begin searching with renewed vigour. But how can you find something when you’re convinced you don’t know what it looks like? What it feels like? 

I recall not knowing what it looked or felt like, but, still, I always knew that the love was there. Because, sometimes, thorns adorn a rose bush to protect the flower from being harmed. And other times you’re just a little girl giggling in her arms, identical nose scrunches like roses in the middle of our moon faces. Tissue roses that we’d painstakingly stick onto endless art projects. Labours of love.

Vuong’s book contains two stories of love. The first part is one between a mother and a son. And the second I interpret as being between an adolescent boy and his queerness; represented by a local teenager, Trevor, who Vuong has described as being a “composite” of many boys he knew growing up. These aren’t like the love stories I’d immerse myself in to escape reality as a teenager, nor a satirical commentary on love. They’re simple. Simple not as in shallow – for I swam in oceans of my tears and never touched the bottom – but as in honest; real.

Rather than escaping reality through these love stories, I found myself. On paper, Ocean Vuong and I have little in common. Aside from perhaps a shared queerness, an immigrant mother, and a supposed desire to reveal ourselves to the world through words, we’ve led vastly different lives. But such is the power of storytelling. Along with empathising with his experiences as a reader might, and revelling in his poetic artistry, I gathered the breadcrumbs I needed and fed my own soul. I found meaning in his descriptions of intergenerational and interpersonal relationships, sexual exploration, and self discovery. And, through it, I uncovered a world rich with inspiration and innovation.

Vuong once said – not in this book but as a guest on a podcast – that being queer saved his life. Well, I can unequivocally say: it also saved mine. While some consider queerness as depriving, damaging, or even a curse, I consider it infinitely expansive. Being queer has not only provided me with community and theory that allow me to better understand myself and the ways in which this understanding has long been skewed and limited by society, it has also broadened the scope of possibility. Queerness “demanded an alternative innovation” from Vuong, and I discovered that this innovation was within me all along. It just hadn’t found anywhere to feel at home. I hadn’t found anywhere to feel at home.

A year after I finished reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, I came out as non-binary in the smoking area of a gay club. I had realised that this innovation included a love for myself. A love that inspired me to believe that I deserve a safer and better world; that we all do. And that we can create it together, all the time, even merely through existing. The impossible became possible in the queer existence – the world brighter through a hopeful and transformative lens – as the words in front of me swam across vast empires of paper. Bound together like I’ll be forever bound to my heritage, to my ancestors, to my family. But, through loving myself, I was able to not only accept and love this cage, but also begin to heal from some of the accompanying intergenerational trauma. 

For it was, as I unveiled, not so much a cage as a room, lined with mirrors. All I had to do was reach out and embrace my mother’s face smiling back at me. And then I was free.

Prishita is one of three panellists taking part in the Penguin Pride 2022 Penguin Live Event. It will take place at Above The Stag, Vauxhall, 20th July 2022. 

Prishita will be joined by fellow panellists Liam Konemann and Joel Rochester to talk about the LGBTQ+ inclusive books that changed their lives, leading the audience through personal and uplifting stories of self-discovery and the unique power of reading. 

Tickets are now sold out but you can watch the live stream of the event here.

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