In grieving memory of A.—she makes me ask, as Assia Djebar did, “this freedom, is it really mine?” 





I remember one of my best friends saying to me many years ago that the third-person pronoun is typically invoked only in one’s absence. We must have been talking about gender identity and queerness, as we tended to do in those days, with a touch of distanced curiosity. We didn’t yet know then that we were trans and non-binary—or maybe we dimly intimated it in flickers of consciousness, but we hadn’t yet found a language to articulate it to ourselves. Apropos of that moment, we were probably talking about other people, and thinking together about how the act of sharing one’s pronouns—though normalized into a perfunctory ritual in certain liberal or left-leaning circles—can in fact be quite an intimate gesture of disclosure. In one sense, by telling someone else how to refer to you, you’re entrusting them with a facet of yourself, perhaps even entrusting them with the task of caring for your wholeness in your absence. For trans and gender-nonconforming people, revealing one’s pronouns can often be an integral preliminary step in one’s journey of rediscovery—of encountering the world on renewed terms. Frequently, the shift in one’s pronouns anticipates larger, more tectonic changes that might arrive later, such as medical interventions and sartorial shifts. But before that can occur, it is important that one be seen as that which one might not yet be, but also that which one will always already have been.





Maybe, if we think about trans experience and embodiment, the pronoun can occupy a double temporality, something recursive that circles back on itself. It can at once look forward to a horizon of selfhood that has not yet materialized, and confirm something that is felt internally to be already true. The pronoun is the bridge between those two versions of the self, straddling and measuring the distance from one to the other. But perhaps even that is to put too linear and teleological a spin on the notion of transition, of passing from one state to another. Must there be a final destination if one transitions, or can one remain in mid-transition, suspended between two places? And is this unsettled indeterminacy simply a material fact about the process of transitioning? I am thinking, for instance, of hormone replacement therapy and the medication regime that one has to constantly be on; since beginning to transition, I’ve felt suspicious about the word ‘replacement’ and its implication of permanence. Some bodily changes might be irreversible, true, but I had to take these pills every day, and I would continue to do so, potentially for the rest of my life. It felt almost as if this perpetuity were a battle to render myself worthy of my pronouns, and of the gender that I desired to be seen to inhabit. I wonder if, in lieu of time, the pronoun is better framed in terms of space, as a kind of topos, opening up a plane in which a body moves or is moved, shuttled between different points.






The image that comes to my mind is that of a map. Both the map and the pronoun function to replace something else, pointing towards a reality beyond itself. This reality, while accessible in fragments, might not be open to sensuous capture in its totality. One can meander through the paths of a city, noticing the state of its apartments and warehouses, but without the map one might be disoriented—lacking the coordinates with which to position oneself in space, relative to everything else that exists in the city. At the same time, the map can never be divorced from its supplementarity; it is present, and gains meaning, only in proportion to the specific physical space that is actually there. Without the landscape, the representation would collapse into an amalgamation of lines and contours, signifying nothing, as Macbeth might say. Similarly, we often say that the pronoun is anaphoric in function, referring back to an antecedent name or phrase, and providing a convenient abbreviation for that name so it no longer has to be repeated. The pronoun leans on its noun, or its name, for support—no, for its raison d’être. And is not gender itself comparable to an urban space in which one can lose one’s way? Glimpsed only in corners, in turns of phrase and gesture, gender and its fictions are made slightly more navigable by the cartographic labour of a pronoun.






But is it always true that a third-person pronoun must be anaphoric? Linguists make a distinction between anaphoric and deictic pronouns: the former class refers back to a preceding moment in discourse, while the latter refers outward to an extralinguistic reality. Anaphora feels more delimited in its scope, its spillages containable within the closed realm of language. Deixis, on the other hand, requires the fleetingness of presence; a speaker must be there in the flesh, situated within a particular space and time, for deictic words to be legible. Karl Bühler tells us that deixis can be condensed into the three words here, now, I. Each issues a particular demand: take me as a mark of the moment, of the place, of the sender. It is easy to imagine why I and youwould be deictic in any given speech situation, since they make sense only in relation to the body from which they are produced. The referent of the Iand the you is ever-shifting, dependent on who is responsible for the utterance at any given moment. I’m not sure we can say the same of the third-person pronoun, whose body—by virtue of being the third—is absented from the directness of the encounter between the I and the you. The waters are somewhat muddied there. If I say they’re so gorgeous, I could be talking about a person strutting before me on a runway (deixis), or I could be alluding to a collection of masterful paintings at an exhibition I’m telling you about (anaphora). In both cases, the shared condition is absence. It’s this ambiguity, nonetheless, that fascinates me.



In her oblique and mystical essay “In the Oxymoronic World,” Kim Hyesoon suggests that there might be something deictic about poetry, a quality of the “now, here, and I” that she attaches to the image of a moving dot. This dot appears ungraspable in its traversal of the ether, now resolving into form, now shimmering into formlessness. It is at once infinitely small and infinitely large; no scale might be adequate to calculate its size, to pin down its elusive trajectories. Yet poetry, understood as deixis, furnishes a tool by which we can fathom some of that infinitude. For Kim, it seems that eternity collides with the ephemerality of the instant when poetry declares, I am here and now. Poetry upends the boundary between the inside and the outside, between presence and absence, apprehending within its meshes these traces of that which would otherwise escape language. The essay doesn’t mention the third-person pronoun directly, but it is implicitly there, appended to the end of the paragraph: A woman goes, passes along the windy road of language, a woman without a mother-tongue, a woman who labours in no-action—she goes. All four clauses are summed up in the anaphoric powers of that final she. The sherepeats, rhythmically, the gesture of going; the sentence begins and ends in perpetual, cyclical movement. She is observed by poetry’s I, caught between the folds of its anaphora and its deixis. Maybe she is the non-self that is required by the speaker and the listener of a poem. Poetry cannot do without the trace of she.

What is the third-person pronoun if not the non-self, more contoured in its alterity than the you? Years after that conversation with my friend, I learned that the Arabic phrase for “third-person pronoun” is ضمير غائب or literally “the conscience of the one who is absent”. Absence is woven into the third person and, indeed, into the very textures of Arabic grammar. Often, Arabic elides the subject pronoun entirely, since that information is already encoded in the conjugation of the verb. There are minute divisions, devised by the classical Arab grammarians and lexicographers, between pronouns that are “obligatorily hidden” and “optionally hidden”. From the very origin of the language’s systematisation, the play of absence and presence was on their minds—and no wonder, too, for a script whose short vowels are concealed in writing, coming to light only when voiced aloud. Effacement and invisibility here feel almost like constitutive structural principles. Thinking about the conscience of the one who is absent, then, yields questions for the labour of writing: what kind of responsibility or care arises in the place of absence? Or, as Elias Khoury asks in Children of the Ghetto, in the context of Israel’s forcible expulsion and displacement of the Palestinian people, how can the absentee write? Can they tell their story using “I”, thereby writing as though remembering? Or should they employ the third person to write in their place? What mode of writing can be adequate to the plight of the present absentee?





Another note on Arabic feels salient to mention here, at risk of making this digressive excursion more unwieldy than it already is. A pervasive feature of Arabic grammar, so common as to appear natural and to go unremarked in many cases, is the presence of the form فاعل, into which the trilateral roots of verbs can be slotted to create words that mean the one who performs that action, or the one who has that action performed to them. The second word in the phrase ضمير غائب adheres to this structure. What I find strangest about this particular grammatical construction, coming to Arabic later in life as a voluntary learner rather than as a native speaker, is its elasticity; depending on its place in a sentence’s syntax, it can function as both noun and adjective, sometimes even a quasi-verb. In his poem ضمير غائب or “Third Person” (in Robin Moger’s translation), the famous Lebanese poet Wadih Saadeh literalises the absent one in the shape of a departing man who leaves behind a disembodied, severed shadow. The shadow attempts to follow but lost its way after the lights are doused by an unspecified they. The play of presence and absence is parallel to the play of light and shadow. It seems significant to me that the eclipsing of the light is executed in the aftermath of the man’s departure, by an anonymous mass of bodies or creatures. The survival of that faint, immaterial silhouette hinges on the kindness—or the whims—of other beings. And maybe what appears as insubstantial as the shadow is essential: the Arabic ضمير is, after all, not only “conscience” but also “heart”. Embedded here is yet another parable of care.






Can we think of poetry, or the space enabled by the poetic, as a mode of writing that attempts to speak from the place of the third person—Kim Hyesoon’s non-self—regardless of what its subject might be? Rosmarie Waldrop’s prose poem “Third Person Singular,” in her collection The Nick of Time, stages these tensions, adopting the playful, philosophical idiom that readers of her work have come to cherish. The animating question—or at least one, among many—is the position that the third person can be said to occupy. Can we attribute an ontology to it? To what extent can we know something, or someone, that is absent and unable to speak for itself? Is she really a person? And if no person, what? As if deciding the matter, the next verse paragraph goes: The third person, because not a person, can respectfully address majesty as easily as annihilate you. Is she mere interval? Between presence and present? Another interstice surfaces here, as if the third person could only be accommodated in the gap between the fugitive instant of time and the solidity of matter. Many sentences in the piece literally enacts this absence by omitting their subject: Strains in vain to see … Shakes her wet head … Knows she must curb her eyes … Says it over and over … Touches the printed page … Lies down on top of the newspaper. Whether or not Waldrop intended it, I can’t help but read these fragments as somehow Arabic in sensibility and implication.





Beyond the meditative aphorisms, Waldrop’s poem also sticks in my brain because it feels like a serious attempt to grapple with the enigma of gendered difference. From start to finish, scattered through the piece are references to a child’s development and acquisition of language, a core of curiosity towards the processes by which complexities and nuances of meaning can imprint themselves in a baby’s mind. How do we, for example, develop the uncertainties of “if” and “though” or the capacity to discriminate? Fittingly, this drama of symbolic maturation is paralleled by the anonymous third person’s emergence into motherhood; across isolated mentions of sex and procreation, condensed in images of an erection and of spilled semen, the poem concludes, in its tenth verse paragraph, with her ability to take in your words and carry them to term. The final birth results in the delivery not of a child but of language. Not just any words but your words, almost as if language, having routed itself through a circuit of desire, embodiment and address, has produced the poem we now read on the page. Is it this figurative maternity, then, that forms the locus of this mysterious third person’s femininity? Never are individual body parts or sexual acts gendered, or anchored to some essentialist biology, throughout the poem; what comes to the fore are gestures of relation, means of contact. It’s here, through the fog of non-identification and immateriality that the problem of the third person presents, that I locate the threshold, the aperture to a trans poetics.



Is a topography of the third-person pronoun in all its absence and immateriality. Is a spatialisation of overlapping timelines coming to meet one another in the present. Is a map that gestures toward the ineffable moving dot of a body. Is a poem that finds itself between the closed, self-referential system of anaphora and the contextual immediacies of deixis. Is a she that is observed by poetry’s I. Is a conscience, or heart, of the absent one. Is a spirit of care for the shadow of another being. Is an interstice amid time and matter. Is a channel by which a different language can be imbibed and reborn. Is. Is. Are.