Essays

Adoptees’ curiosity around origins and the past is significant, then, not only because it may lead to unearthing information regarding their personal histories, but also because of the knowledge it generates about a larger, collective experience.

So I take it – with a caveat. I am not the Road Warrior – neither Mad Max himself, nor my mate from Caba. But I am a Road Warrior. It’s how I live and where I feel most like myself. On the road, alone, living by the sun and stars, with no waged labour or clocks in sight.

Before there were call centres, help desks, delivery bikes and Uber, before labour hire firms and all the rest started offering young people new ways of working long and hard for doubtful return, before the term ‘gig economy’ had come into being – before all that the one way to make a quick, modest dollar was to drive cabs on the night shift. It was a Sydney thing.

After writing the last three sentences, I find myself at a crossroads. Do I continue or do I pause here to ask the reader, ‘any questions?’ What does the writer do when he comes from the periphery? This question might upset some Singaporeans, who believe that Singapore is an international hub connecting important air lanes and sea routes.

Curiously, I remain me, Sreedhevi Iyer, through all of these kaleidoscopic labels. The way I see it, this need to label me – to categorise and put in a neat box – has more to do with other people’s needs than mine.

Somewhere along the way I realised that what I wanted was to make others feel witnessed. This radically altered my orientation towards the world, and the way I communicated the story of my trauma to others: what I am doing is witnessing, staring, even, slack-jawed, wide-eyed, outraged, and taking notes, and connecting dots, and asking what we are going to do about it, out here, in the world.

We have our own voices and stories – and we always have and always will – and so we continue presencing our stories and asserting our side of the colonial story, so that our abusers, personal and institutional alike, can no longer control the narrative about us.

Doing everything you can to expunge trans women from women’s sport or from being included in talking about anti-violence against women will never make women’s sport fairer, or decrease violence, or give cis-women one ounce of what they need. Divided we ensure that the real problem, the systemic underfunding and relegation of women’s health, culture and sport remains a secondary concern.

It was clear that articulation had real world benefits. Survivor testimony was being taken seriously as a form of resistance and as a tool for informing policy. It was also clear that to be read I would need to relinquish even more privacy and power.

The main counter-manoeuvre is to become the new weather god; to establish a climate in which characters who have not mattered, matter, and are safe, even if they don’t know it…