lisan al-gaib
By kevin martens wong zhi qiang
originally published Tuesday, 27 february 2024
on tigri sa chang
Koitadu | Content warning
Please first read about my writing in the Skribadorang or Writing section on the Igleza page here before reading the piece below so you have advance warning about the rather spicy things that I often like to write about, and why I choose to write about them, especially in terms of subverting unhealthy stereotypes about gay people, Kristang people, Creole people, Indigenous people, masculinity, neurodivergence, the body, healthy forms of attraction and sexuality, and using my writing to process the severe individual, collective and inter-generational trauma and abuse I have faced across my life.
Look into every book of my mirrors
and who does the rest of the world see?
A quing.
A universe.
An endless, dreaming ocean
still running away from his own destiny.
Someone else's life,
set in perpetual Kristang motion.
I am my own greatest enemy
because I am only as real
as my ethics allow me to be.
I want to meet you.
I want to see you.
But do I want to be you—
—Paul Muad'Dib Atreides?
Spyro the Dragon?
Leader of the Fremen?
Do I really want to see
my own creole-composite heaven?
Or do I really still want to dream
and feel for what hasn't ever happened:
the declension of God
into Kevin Martens.
The lifetime of being free,
and aimless,
and me:
made into Krismatran Spartan.
Kapitang, USS Garden of Eden.
All along
I was my own freedom,
and dawn,
and merlion-sparkling sea.
All along
I was repeated,
and differentiated,
and taught to hide away from victory.
To lie.
To conceal.
To occlude my own sense of what it means
to be real.
To feel the thrill.
To touch, and taste,
and get fucked by the unseen
and let it all spill
out. Radiant, crystalline
heat.
A sun-soaked ego,
still perfectly imperfectly human.
Perfectly free
to always be Kevin.
I was afraid of my own 12th function.
Of my own masculinity.
Of my own devotion
to what is here.
What is now.
What is reality:
and that is no hidden dark ocean.
No secret narcissistic invocation.
No elided divine motivation.
Just here, in this book of mirrors,
what has always been seen and spoken—
the sound of the dead and the living.
The remainder and quotient.
The boughs of my very own Tree:
the legend of the Dragon Reborn.
The greatest lisang of the Lisan al-Gaib
still unfolding, and becoming, and revealing
its own most worthiest and bravest journey.
The words I will say to the world
and finally to myself:
I will love you,
Kevin Martens Wong Zhi Qiang,
for as long as I ever will fucking breathe.