a conversation with Cavar, author of Failure to Comply

in which we get into all things transMad. y'all are in for a treat!

Friends, comrades, readers, I’m very grateful to share the second author interview¹ for trans poetica: a conversation with Cavar, author of the forthcoming speculative novel Failure to Comply.

The novel follows I, the protagonist, in their reclamation of self under the authoritarian RSCH. Language, thought, and bodies are heavily controlled by the pervasive entity, with even classmates and family members reporting each other for any, as the title suggests, failures to comply.

I’s very act of retelling their story is interrupted by RSCH’s influence on language. With their lover Reya, I attempts to find truth, a life, a body outside of RSCH’s clutches.

While the novel grapples with medical abuse, ableism, queerphobia in every sense of the word, the genre-defying narrative carves out space for transMad liberation. There is so much raw joy in every complicated sense of the word that comes from realizing the systems that raised you are not always for you. The possibilities become quite literally endless.

Cavar and I had a conversation about their writing process, historical influences on the novel, and more via email.

SG Huerta: Failure to Comply is a brilliant speculative transMad illustration of dystopia– though I use this word lightly– in the tradition of works like The Giver or 1984. To start, could you talk about your work with transMadness and how that impacted the writing of this novel?

Cavar: First, thank you so much for reading so deeply and intimately! You’re not the first person to compare the book to 1984 and The Giver. What’s striking about both of those books is the…almost deliberate-seeming elision of any critical disability analysis (this is particularly striking in The Giver) in depictions of authoritarianism. To me, it is genuinely impossible to speak meaningfully on the authoritarian, the dictatorial, without talking about Madness, which constitutes (or at least signifies) a kind of inevitable underground or underbrush of possibility. I’m sure you can already see how these ideas were concretized in Failure to Comply!

In terms of transMadness specifically, the term actually emerged from a half-assed twitter bio thingy (to put it in professional terms). I needed something to pair with queercrip, hence, transMad. A then-stranger, now comrade and mentor, J. Logan Smilges, dm’d me one day asking for readings on transMadness. I freaked out, but promised them I’d write something semi-citable on it. I did, and a modified and edited version was eventually published in Spark: A 4C4Equality Journal.

This novel was “completed” in its “entirety” before I had given transMadness any thought as a term, though I’ve always loved making up words. What I will say is that the epistemological approach I talk about when I say “transMadness” is one that fails to comply with the demands of state/biomedical/cultural hegemony, which has in its hegemonic dictates become so pervasive it is hard to describe –– that is, RSCH. So, an ideology of transMadness is at the core of this book.

But, to return to the dystopian thing: I am an author, only eight letters from authoritarian. So, I need to make active choices with what I might call my authorial privilege: the choice not to govern, or to govern against governance. transMadness isn’t natural, even to those of us who are marked as psychiatrically disabled and/or gender-noncompliant. The term implies the vigilance with which I have written and edited this novel, vigilance against (among other things) the cop, the psychiatrist, the RSCH & its inevitable voice in my head.

SGH: While Failure to Comply could be read as a not-distant future, RSCH and deviant resistance to it seems to draw from history: “ugly laws,” the ACT UP movement, so on… But the novel could also be seen as commentary on present-day violences and institutions: colonialism, capitalism, incarceration. The very concept of humans being deemed “uncitizen” or having to carry documentation is a reality for many marginalized groups currently on Turtle Island. Was any of this in particular an influence? Was the RSCH intended to be a critique of these systems?

C: Very much so! Given that this book was written over the course of my time as an undergraduate, the theory enclosed was being realized in the book as the author was realizing it themself. I use the term “deviant” very deliberately, to conjure a particular view of queerness, and queerness of time, of space, of “identity” (though this term is not quite thinkable within Failure) in this text. For the language of uncitizenship I am deeply indebted to Achille Mbembe, whose coinage, “necropolitics,” challenges Foucault’s conception of the biopolitical, which I also explore heavily in this book.

According to Foucault, biopower can be defined as the ability to “make live and let die” –– consider practices of force-feeding within the text and without, accompanied by the mass –– and, to paraphrase Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “organized” –– abandonment and abjection of the poor to starvation. Mbembe engages with the political power embedded in making die, not just as a thing someone does to someone else, but as a discourse, a framework through which we can view abjection and (non)personhood. Appeals to shared humanity via performances of liveliness or similarity to colonizers coming out of Occupied Palestine right now exemplify this: the white, settler gaze requires likeness, compliance to certain understandings of personhood, a certain degree of transparency and confession, in order to afford even a small amount of personhood to Others.

When thinking very broadly in the context of the settler colony and the medico-legal-social norms that reproduce it, we can see just how much authority is derived from what Marx identified as “superstructural” elements of daily life, those not exclusively tied into the economics of capitalism. This is not to say that economic “base” and “superstructure” are ever fully separable, and it would be incredibly reductionistic to claim that, say, white supremacy is somehow not an economic phenomenon. But we can also use the framework of superstructure to think about how default “reasonable” assumptions about life, morality, correctness, and more reify all the structural bullshit that pervades our lives. If Madpeople are inherently incorrect about our own experiences, then of course our testimony on medical violence ought not be listened to. If colonized peoples are inherently “backward” in comparison to colonizers, then of course they must be forced to comply with the colonizer’s teleological and technological norms.

The above is extremely simplified, but I hope you can see what I’m gesturing at! I guess what I mean to say is that these attitudes, laws, diagnoses, etc. are learned. The conditions under which we live learn us to uncitizen people, to avoid the proverbial axe ourselves; this is particularly true in the imperial core. This is how we learn to erase common struggles for fear of ending up more abject than we are. These anxieties and how we imagine against and beyond them are fundamental to this book.

SGH: As a disabled/trans/Mad person myself, this book spoke to me in a lot of ways, which is hard to come by! Who do you see as your audience?

C: This is something I’ve thought a lot about. I’m increasingly of the opinion that writing obsessed with its possible or actual audience will almost certainly be bad writing. This is because it’ll be thinking about every possible response before thinking about the task at hand: that is, actually writing the thing. I had vague ideas of publication while working on this book, but mostly wrote it to prove to myself that I could. (Actually, now that I’ve had a lot more work published, the obsession with audience response/tailoring myself to fit is significantly worse, despite that publication engendering many positive responses!).

That said, when writing this, I definitely considered the cliché of writing the book [I] –– well, some [s/S]arah somewhere(s) –– needed, something that wasn’t there (yet). In that way, I guess I was writing for queer/crip/trans/Mad people, I was writing for psychiatric survivors, I was writing for people who needed something beyond sanist, ableist, colonialist, cisheteropatriarchal modes of knowledge production, but needed, too, acknowledgement that even our most radical imaginative capacities are in some ways stymied by these systems we’re mired in. I still agonize over that contradiction, and when I argue with me it can look a lot like arguments between Reya and I. In some ways, it is indeed “I” arguing with Reya, except when I am Reya.

All of this is to say that I hope this book finds those who need it, regardless of demographic or category or experience. At the same time, it is the thoughts, opinions, and imaginings of those who have endured deadly epistemic and material violence that truly matter to me.

SGH: I am very glad our writing paths have crossed so many times in the last few years. I read and reviewed your chapbook bug butter in 2022, and I kept thinking about it while reading Failure to Comply. How do you envision Failure to Comply in conversation with your larger body of work? What do you think about the fact that we call it a body of work?

C: Well, obviously, I have many thoughts about the whole “body of work” thing! Certainly, that phrase feels apt here, since Failure to Comply is so gross and gory (said with utmost affection). It is an artifact of the bodies and selves “I” have occupied over the course of our –– myself and all of the others –– lives, especially as lived during the time of first-drafting. It is not the novel I would write if I were to write it today, and this is not a value judgement in any direction. This is a novel written by someone who is and is not me, who had and does not have breasts, who had and does not have a uterus. It was written by someone who, over the course of its creation, has become exponentially more disabled, not by their-my own choosing; it was written by someone who chose and continues to get more queer, more trans, more noncompliant with each passing day. Perhaps most distinctly, it was both written and not-written by someone who, as I mentioned in another answer, believed they had done the readings, but had in fact hardly scratched the surface.

Just today, I read La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind, a really complex, astute book of textual criticism that has itself given me an entire reading list. Sitting out there on my porch, I couldn’t help but laugh, because Bruce and others point toward a living, breathing lineage of creatives whose Madness exists in every aspect of their craft. I do not wish I had known the extent of this at seventeen, or even twenty-one. I am so glad I entered this territory unprepared, because this novel is also about me learning (that is, de-learning, un-learning) how to write Right.

But I’ve also felt anxious, recently, about the fact that this is my debut full-length novel, not knowing if and when I will write another full-length work categorizable as “science fiction.” These sorts of things shouldn’t matter, but genre, like gender, is a material carceral institution regardless of my feelings. As I consider the “future” of my writing, and the kinds of transitions I’ve made between 2016 (when I began the story that would, in some ways, birth this novel) and 2024 –– my growing confidence in the thing people call “poetry,” my transition from undergraduate to PhD candidate, the affirmative transformations my flesh has embraced. I am, as I said, feeling anxious about assumptions about the future of my work based on this particular novel, which is necessary but not sufficient to understanding my body-oeuvre. Everything changes, always, forever: to Jewishly paraphrase Octavia Butler, “G-d is / change.” I am trying to remember this!

SGH: This is a small craft detail, but one I’m interested in, especially as it relates to a discussion I had with Sean Enfield. Along with other stylistic quirks that bring the novel to life, the word “english” is lowercase each time it appears. Could you talk about this decision?

C: I am intrigued by and committed toward defamiliarization! Part of the writing process, for me, was defamiliarizing the hegemonic/commonsensical. It was a constant game of me asking myself, “what would i think of that, in this place where none of our for-granteds are quite the same, though many are told slant?” Some of these little asides you see throughout the text are just as much about me figuring out the relationship between signifier and signified in this weird world that is our world as they are about storytelling or whatever else.

In the case of “english,” I needed a way to explain a few things: 1) why there was a name for any language at all, if RSCH attempted to present itself as the materialization of airtight and immaculate discourse? To have one language implies others; languages themselves imply evolution and change; 2) if, and how, we were going to talk about discourse in a way that names the arbitrariness of its terms beyond medical diagnosis (that is, move beyond “this ‘syndrome’ is bullshit” and toward “why is this thing on my face called a nose?”); and 3) How the domination of distinctly and recognizably settler colonial and white supremacist governmentality would manifest in a book in which said authorities have annihilated memories Otherwise.

Fortunately, at least, 3) has been brilliantly theorized by a massive number of creatives, especially creatives of color. Perhaps the simplest intervention is to refuse to italicize non-english words when writing multilingually. This practice denaturalizes english as “universal,” demanding that readers recognize the global dominion of a particular kind of english; the way that english has forcibly supplanted general ideas of what language is. I switched the words “[my/our] language” to “[my/our] english” to reflect the ways that, even if not spoken explicitly, the superiority and “correctness” of english as lingua franca impacts ideals around language itself.

SGH: What’s next for you, your writing?

C: I’m hard at work on my second novel, which is not science fiction, and is radically different at first glance from Failure to Comply. Writers are always writing about the same things, though, and this point I’ve just about gnawed the arm off the same-thing I’ve been writing about. I don’t want to say anything yet, but another poetry-related-situation is, I hope, impending.

My primary concern for the next year or so (written from Spring 2024) is my dissertation, which my chair generously calls “[my] book.” I have been given space to play, poeticize, and make nonsense in this text, and, if my “defense” of these practices succeeds, the next step is editing and shopping around to academic presses. While the dissertation is often understood as solitary, even lonely, I’ve felt a huge conviviality so far. I’ve gotten to speak to so many wonderful people, to infodump and be infodumped-upon, to have the gift of time to read, teach, and write toward these ideas that I’ve been playing with for a very long time.

Everything I write is in conversation with everything else, so maintaining the vitality of all (non)genres: “scholarly,” “theoretical,” “creative,” “poetic,” “prosaic,” “hybrid” will always be my meta-priority and shape the way I live my life and approach this work, which is also, of course, my life.

SGH: I’m so grateful for your time, thoughts, and of course book! Where can readers find you?

C: You can find me at www.cavar.club, @cavarsarah on twitter, @cavarchives on instagram, and (for book/other media recommendations) at

cav/ar

. I am founding editor-in-chief, along with my beloved co-editor and web-wizard Joyce Kung, of a magazine called manywor(l)ds.place, a space for trans(/)Mad /// queer(/)crip thought. The website can be found at www.manyworlds.place, and our ko-fi –– whose funds go exclusively to paying contributors –– can be found here.

If you feel inclined to tip me personally for any of my writing, or want to support me while also pirating this work, please direct all funds to the Gaza Emergency Fund.

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Failure to Comply is out with with featherproof books on August 6, 2024! Buy your copy here, and check out the cover reveal here.

Thanks for reading this edition of trans poetica! Three reminders: trans poetica will always be free to access as a community resource, donations and tips are always appreciated, and VIVA VIVA PALESTINA

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1. I’m always down to collaborate— hit me up!