Book Two: The Letters
by Sabrina Tom
Helen G. Blake, Belfast Boy, oil on linen, 18.9 x 23.6 inches, 2021. Private collection. Courtesy of the artist.
Book Two: The Letters
SABRINA TOM | DEC 2021 | ISSUE 12
Annotated and Translated by Sabrina Axis Keawe Tom
Foreword
The first edition of The Letters of Cory began circulating the year following Cory Sou’s untimely death. It was designed and distributed by a team of graphic artists, with colorful images and collaborative fonts, a passion project that proved, though no proof was needed, the alliance, professionalism and ability of working mothers to get shit done. The Letters spread nimbly and were read around the world primarily as children's stories at bedtime. It did not matter that they were written in Chinese.
Half a century on, The Letters continue to provide the moral rationale and logistical framework for the Tatata religion, the fastest growing religion in the world, whose adherents practice gender creative nonconformity until they reach adulthood, when they choose their gender. The name began as a play on a practice popular back in the day of stating one’s preferred pronouns in social situations (in Mandarin, ta/ta/ta means he/she/they). As language became more fungible and less capitalistic, the name stuck.
Cory Sou was born in Honolulu in 2029. Cory’s mother was a professor of Future Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and Cory’s father was a revolutionary architect. When Cory was a teenager the family moved to Taiwan, where they lived for twelve years before moving back to Hawai‘i to retire. Cory remained in Taiwan, and never left the island with the lone exception of a trip to Reggio Emilia to study early childhood philosophy and education. The trip was wildly extravagant and introduced Cory to “l’immagine di uno bambino,” which, some say, planted the first seeds of the Tatata religion.
Cory was not a prophet. Nevertheless, The Letters are regarded as the seminal text for the Tatata people. That they’re also read by binary humans for pleasure speaks to their broad appeal. Cory was a casual writer, but beneath the spareness of the prose lies a quality of thought that moves through the creative, noetic, devotional and mysterious.
Haʻikū, Maui County, December 2119
Dear Children,
Every child has potential and possibilities.1 Every child is beautiful.2 Once you see that every child is beautiful you cannot value one over another, you cannot say that they should look like this, dress like this, talk like this. You cannot tell them how to be because the way they are already is enough.
Dear Children,
Your job is to play and play and play. It’s your only job.
Dear Children,
Envision a new world where being a child is normal.3 Where children have democratic rights and a voice in public discourse. Where children are seen, felt, heard—not just staying behind closed doors talking to themselves.4
_____________________________
1 “L’immagine di uno bambino” (the image of the child) is a Reggio philosophical concept which places children as competent, active, capable and critical human beings fully engaged in developing relationships with the world. Cory takes this concept further by examining the way the world judges and disregards a child’s physical image or appearance. (See below)
2 In promoting the beauty of children, Cory was laying the foundation for the use of hormone blockers. Hormone blockers halt the defining features of binary gender that appear during adolescence, such as the squaring of the jaw, widening of the hips, etc. It is taken by all Tatata children. Critics of the religion have described Tatata children as looking creepy or neutered, as if they were animals, and generally denigrating their features—the basest form of prejudice. However, understanding their appearance within the context of aesthetics moves us away from seeing Tatata children as merely or problematically agender to appreciating the synthesis and expression of an essential value of the religion.
3 Previous translations of The Letters dismissed the word normal as narrow, forgetting that during the time the Letters were written, being normal was heralded by the community as a personal choice that was a priori inclusive, both extolling and supporting difference. With language and meaning ever on the pendulum of public opinion, I've used it here in the context in which I believe Cory was writing.
4 Not without a sense of humor, Cory may well have been repudiating vagina loquens, a ribald narrative tool utilized by every author from Edmund Spenser to Eve Ensler.
Dear Children,
I’ve decided to form a counsel of mothers to represent you. The counsel will organize, provoke, make decisions, ask questions. We will foment. 5
Dear Children,
We are all poets even when we become shepherds.
Dear Children,
What did you dream about last night?
How did you help today?
Why is that important to you? 6
Dear Children,
The well-being of the group is most important. No one is well unless all of us are well.
_____________________________
5 The first person Cory approached to join the Counsel of Mothers was Anna Chung, a Hegelian scholar who, unique among the Mothers, was raised in a religious home (both of Anna’s parents were Lutheran ministers). Anna sought to resolve the conflict between faith and secularism. Anna encouraged Cory and others to think of a religious institution as no different from a community that has come together to “ennoble a governing set of norms—a shared understanding of what counts as good and just.” Anna took Cory’s ambiguous line about community, a catchall word that had become hackneyed and immolated by mainstream radicalism, and imbued it with new spirit, feeling and organizational power. This understanding of community remains the single strongest rationale for the Tatata religion.
6 Rebecca Solnit: “Perhaps I will always live in questions more than answers.” Helen Keller: “A well-educated mind will always have more questions than answers." Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “I am a person who believes in asking questions.”
Some ideas for well-being:
- Embracing oneness with sea, soil, flowers, trees.7
- Plenty of outdoor time. Inside and outside spaces model fluidity.
- Research. Learning. Together.
- Art. Exploration. Dialectic.
- Respect for debate.
- Equal value of all ideas. If there is to be any difference in value it’s in the responsibility of adults to be as creative and higher thinking as children expect and deserve for them to be.8
- The right of children to question the world of ideas around them.9
- Etc.
_____________________________
7 In the lineage of Tatata theological texts, The Letters rightly follow The Roots, the original document that tells the story of creation and lays the foundation for non-binariness. It's unknown exactly how or when Cory first read The Roots. Some say that Cory was handed a copy of the book by a Paiwan farmer during a pilgrimage to Taichung to protest China's ban on wax apple imports. Others postulate that during the pilgrimage, Cory, upon eating a wax apple, was spontaneously endowed with all knowingness of the text. This story, of course, is what most people believe.
8 The Tatata remain unwavering advocates for children's rights. Nevertheless, even as the Tatata place high value on distributed leadership among children and adults, critics assert that some problematic aspects of the Counsel of Mothers' legacy remain in the organizational structure, chief among them a reverence and preference for experienced and wizened women-by-choice leaders.
Dear Children,
They will change the world.10
_____________________________
9 A 2080 study on religion and freedom published by RAND revealed that Tatata children are among “the happiest, most secure, independent, freethinking in present day society.” The study also reported that the percentage of Tatata adults either renouncing or converting to another religion is less than .1%. The conversion rate into the Tatata religion is even lower at statistically zero. In regards to apostasy and conversion, the study concluded, the Tatata religion has been the most consistent and stable of all the world's religions. However, in recent years a splinter group calling themselves the Metatata have emerged as an alternative to traditional Tatata. Metas discourse through a charismatic, outspoken team of teenagers nicknamed the Thuns (a blending of the environmental activist Greta Thunberg and the Huns) and differ from the Tatata on two major precepts. First, they remain agender for their entire lives. They say that forcing a person to choose their gender as adults is family-normative and counter to individual rights. Metas argue that while the Counsel of Mothers rightly dismantled many deeply entrenched social norms, they didn’t go far enough on the issue of family, which Metas consider the single most limiting social construct to identity formation. Second, Metas actively seek to convert binary adults into the religion. This practice, even more than the issue of gender, has caused serious concern among the Tatata, especially the direct descendants of the Counsel of Mothers, who remain extremely skeptical that anyone raised within cisgendered economies of privilege could ever fully adhere to their belief system. The Metas accuse the Tatata of being arrogant and hypocritical to not open the religion to anyone genuinely seeking clarity.
And here’s where things get ugly. In recent years, an alarming number of Tatata children undergoing Change—their year-long process of transitioning from childhood to adulthood, agendered to gendered—have disappeared. Have they been kidnapped by the Metas? Or have they consciously converted?
10 Cory's final letter strikes a revolutionary note. Yet, for many, the call to action butts up against the question: Who are they? My mother, who translated The Roots, often described their first encounter with the book. They speak, my mother told me. For many many years I interpreted they to mean the ancestors, the prophets, the divine—the metaphysical forces underpinning every origin story throughout time. After studying Cory's Letters, I now believe my mother was activating a much more human ideal. A declaration of language—humanity's most ecstatic innovation. Empowering a singular pronoun to evaporate binaries and clarify our vision of the world as it actually is. Whether we're doing it to be political or to be kind, our bodies expand when they is spoken.
Sabrina Tom is a writer based in Venice, California. Her work has appeared in The New Orleans Review, Redivider, Hyphen, Contrary Magazine, and is anthologized in The Kartika Review and Overkill. She also co-wrote the screenplay for the short film Moving Into Sunlight.
Helen G. Blake is a painter whose practice focuses on colour; engaging with rhythm and formalism, chance and deliberation. Using a working method where process and contemplation are both allowed guide the evolution of the work, she constructs overtly hand-made paintings which record and examine colour conversations within accumulating pattern structures, embracing accidents, flaws and discrepancies within their rhythms. Blake grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and graduated with an honours degree in Visual Art from Aberystwyth University, Wales. Recent solo shows include: Recent Works, The Molesworth Gallery, Dublin (2021, 2019, 2017); Choir, Limerick Museum (2019); and New Paintings, Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast (2018). She lives and works in County Wicklow, Ireland.