Angéline Chamberland

Alvina Chamberland's Love the World or Get Killed Trying

Reviewed by Mona Angéline

Content warning: Sexual assault; transphobia

(Noemi, 2024)

The honor of reviewing Alvina Chamberland’s autofiction was all mine this summer. Hers is a book that makes you question the world. It makes you think, really think, it makes you step out of your comfort zone and into some of the realities that shape her life and that of so many other trans women who aren't seen for who they are but for their bodies instead.

Harassment and violence

Chamberland starts her book recounting a series of sexual assaults, emphasizing that they are a recurring, almost expected part of her existence. This is a thud, a bombshell opening to a book, and it is then that I realize what kind of a privileged life I live, even though I relate to so much of her trauma, and even though I'm a woman like her.

No whimpers. No pleas. How can I stay so calm in such a predicament? I am like a stick, a stick that thinks: How can I get stiffer? I am trying to talk him out of it. How many times have I been here? I have lost count. I think to myself: Not again. In a bed, on a sofa, on the subway, in my doorway, on an avenue sidewalk; never in a city park, but once in the backroom of a shop. Again.

I am not sure why this immediately comes to mind, but I'm left thinking that Chamberland must be a prime target for victim blaming. When it's cisgender women that are affected, we are slowly learning to condemn the age-old adage “she asked for it by what she wore, by how she acted, by the way she existed”. But here, I want to instantly wrap the author into a hug and repeat, over and over, that this isn't her fault.

A man trying to rape me is nothing unusual. A few have succeeded. Many have failed. It is sick that I state it so matter-of-factly. It is sick that it is a matter of fact. I’d rather be raped than dead, yes, but I’d prefer other alternatives.

It pains me so to read these lines because there's this gaping hole in between the risks for us cisgender women and the blatant violence that's almost normalized for those of us who joined our circle after birth. I want the author to feel like one of us, without a shred of a doubt, and without a hint of confusion from society. When and how will we protect our sisters in this world that's already hard to inhabit as it is, without these added tragedies?

Vulnerable search for love

This opening definitely made me think hard. With this momentum Chamberland manages to introduce and drive home her main message—to make readers, especially those of us in the cisgender majority, experience her utter loneliness and vulnerability as she searches for love. And it seems to be exactly here that the crux of the book and the crux of the transgender experience lies: this search is immensely difficult, insurmountable almost, because of the incessant disrespect and harassment that the author receives not only in response to her search, but even just by merely existing, as a human being, in our unjust world.

I tell him I’m transgender. He’s never met one before. He is shocked: “Fuck! And I thought you were hot!”

Each encounter turns into a reaction ranging from sheer ignorance on one end of the spectrum to an onslaught of sexual harassment on the other.

I thought being trans meant that if you were a man you got someone’s vagina, and if you were a woman you got someone’s penis.” Yes, dear, this is what we call the transgender genital trade. Each trans girl must find a trans boy. Subsequently we enter the hospital together hand-in-hand and request an exchange of genitals.

Chamberland describes a whole series of men who put her second, be it in a basement, under a bridge, or in any other demeaning circumstance. If it weren't so sad, it would almost, and I say almost, be possible to laugh at the way she willingly jokes about these things, though considering how these things can come at her own expense, I'd rather not encourage anyone to go there.

I make a list of what happens to me during my 53-minute walk through the 9th arrondissiment: 3 whistles & Hey babys. 2 I love you, marry me’s. 1 How much do you cost? 1 Barbie Girl, Pamela Anderson! 1 OMG that’s a man, she tricked me, science fiction-mental illness. 1 Suck me, it’ll only take five minutes, open yr mouth wide, lemme imagine my dick touchin’ yr tonsils. 1 Tranny.

She ultimately describes this phenomenon she's exposed to with the inability of today's (and maybe especially yesterday's!) cis men to be emotionally authentic—a result largely stemming from social taboo, the pressure to be manly, and then some.

...[that] cis men give us so much sexual attention and so little, and at best fleeting, intimate affection is one of the greatest travesties and hypocrisies of today’s world, and it says so much about straight cis men’s fragility and inability to be themselves...

Utter loneliness, self-isolation

This frustration naturally results in utter loneliness for the author, and the incessant harassment concludes in her self-isolation as “a platinum blonde Rapunzel imprisoned inside the tower of perpetual bad luck”. A significant portion of the book is thus dedicated to a time when she doesn't leave her apartment and resorts to writing to us readers about it.

Reader, a forensic study of my own abyss shows that men’s silent walls have hurt me more than men’s rapes, for I never truly felt vulnerable underneath a rapist’s gyrating body. At times it is better to be treated like shit than air.

She resorts to writing about certain attractions to public figures from decades past. But in the real world, it is never the “white artsy ‘feminist’ softboys with their normal-life Natalie Portman girlfriends” that are the most openhearted and interested in her kindness. Instead, it's “drug dealers, the men who share our streets and have no comfort zone to leave” that are after the author. And so begins an everlasting cycle of love given, love searched for, but never love received, resulting in being used over and over instead.

After this shocking and thought-provoking introduction to Chamberland's life, there's a small shimmer of hope as she extracts some of the love essential to her survival from her performances onstage.

I am reminded that I can find 500 people who are fascinated by my intensity at the safe distance of a stage or page and no one to hold me after the storm subsides.

But even then, there's a gaping void left to be filled when it's all said and done, and once the fourth wall isn't in place anymore, she returns to the loneliness in her heart.

Travels

A slight departure from the theme of unanswered love constitutes a series of trips Chamberland took, some to perform onstage, and others for pleasure (or, perhaps to get away from the intensity of her struggles). But even there, it seems, she's looking for love, always, in every corner of her life, of her world, of our world.

I came here to engage in existential ventilations with the Earth, to put miles of ocean between me and my 7 heartbreaks, the 9000 times I declined a sex invite, the few “ok, fines” that only increased my lonely, the 8 no’s that didn’t stop him…

I did enjoy these travel sections—as a European American, I found myself in her various homes, the California of her childhood, the “constricting” Petaluma, the similarly constricting Sweden of her teenage years. I connected to the witty remarks about each of the cultures she experienced, especially the portrayal of the much liberal-touted Scandinavia.

Sweden is a pretty conservative country. Perhaps not in traditional terms. In my terms: It is one of the easiest countries for me to live in, and one of the hardest countries for me to have a life worth living in.

Even “Quadratisch-Praktisch-Gut” Berlin with its reputation as an LGBTQ+ haven doesn't live up to its progressive reputation.

Tranny chaser—I’ll say it again: I hate that word, but what else should I call the man who got off a moving bus in Berlin and ran 500 feet after me just to pant, “I’ve only seen your kind of girl in porn before, you want siiiiix?” I shook my head. He said, “I’m so horny, help me please.”

Unconventional thoughts

I think what really caught me off guard, though, was the witty, unapologetic writing style that makes this work stand out. Chamberland seems to find some of her unrequited love in her writing, and rightfully so. I think, in her own magic way, she manages to deeply connect with the reader. I almost get the feeling she's directing her search for love towards us, similar to her audience on stage.

Dearest booklover, I know I’ve been treating you like my therapist. Our session is complete. You’ll see. I’ll provide you with ample evidence that I’m capable of shreds of happiness and positive thinking. How dare I while the world is still so fucked up!

Writing is also the one companion that she doesn't isolate from, that one reliable friend who doesn't leave. And as such, the two of them form a symbiotic relationship that allows us to inhabit the inside of the author's head and heart for brief stretches of time and experience the vast range of emotions, anxieties, and traumas that she went through. As a trauma survivor and self-isolator, I very much related to some of these inner messages, and what courage must it have taken to write it all up, open it all up for the world to see?

In the creation of this body of work, I have not always been disciplined enough to write the proper sentences in real time.

Chamberland seems to always find some humor in the nooks and crannies of her world, even though some of these rather funny passages seem to come with a self-deprecating undertone and make me want to wrap her in a big hug instead of laughing at her expense.

There isn't really a plot that weaves through the book. You could try to make one up from the different trips she undertakes, but really, the “plot”, as it is meant to be, is a long stream of consciousness, a journey into Chamberland's soul, into the corners with her deepest pain.

The style of this book is unique—the author's daily anxieties, intermingled with past trauma, are fortified with her unwavering attempts to create happiness from the depths of her heart.

It is the gatekeeping publishers who hinder our freedom. They do not wish to put you through the chaos that lives within without a sense of solidness. They crave spacings and paragraph indentations.

I highly commend Noemi Press for publishing this unique work. For doing the unconventional, the impossible, the unsaid, the unpolished, the thing of pain, because according to the author, it allowed her “to be brutally truthful instead of falsifying a storyline that fits into an over-simplified empowering portrait”. What a wonderful testimony that doesn't cut out the raw and vulnerably honest emotions that we all tend to hide daily, yearly, forever.

Cultural (non)acceptance of trans women

I absolutely devoured Chamberland's acknowledgment section—surprisingly so because I never read these things! Here is where the core issues of her book are summarized in a factual manner, and I couldn't agree more with the author on her statements and how they put her emotional reckoning in context with the wider community.

Liberal western culture however refuses to make room for trans girls as full womenhumans with needs beyond half-lives as asexual othered third-gendered symbols of tolerance. This isolation from intimacy is at least as oppressive as being a secret sex symbol, Aphrodite After Dark. In fact, my Iranian trans friend told me that straight men from Iran would have affairs with her if they were new to Berlin, but after 5-6 years they’d stop, for they’d learned that’s not how it’s done in Germany.

I've often come to similar conclusions as the author—would allowing intimacy, empathy, and love out in the open result in more world peace and less polarized politics?

If we’re going to have any leaders, let them all be people with hyperempathy who know how to follow and would never dream of calling a person toxic. Then, at last, we’ll reach a world where we don’t need to choose between the lesser of two evils—and then some!!!

A few years back my trans woman friend heard the following words from her neighbor: You need to move because every time you walk by I get so horny, so if I see you again I need to either kill you or kill myself. I’m sorry, but what the fuck is wrong with this world?

Concluding thoughts

In a way, while reading, I asked myself where the author’s anxiety from having experienced this horrific trans abuse ends, and where the anxiety from simply being human, from needing love and not receiving it, begins. But quietly, I came to the conclusion that there's no delineation. Both things are inextricably intertwined. This is what makes this book such a masterpiece, teaching us to be empathetic of someone's full experience without the need for categorization, teaching us that the depths of humanity encompass all of it and more. I'm just in awe of and relate to the author's resilience and ability to keep fighting as her true, magic self.

Most people’s strategy for handling a world where dreams rarely come true is to begin dreaming smaller and then stop dreaming altogether. My strategy? To keep dreaming. Bigger than ever.

The book is not at all curated like so many of the usual cisgender books, things, and norms we get to see on a daily basis. It aims to disrupt, to change the status quo. It calls for attention, in a good way, attention to get attention, attention to get affection.

I suspect that the book might be too uncomfortable for some readers. It is hard to stay with the author's pain. But I think it's essential that you, the reader, finish it so that you know what the author and so many trans women go through on a daily basis.

It wouldn't be unusual to sit in confusion after reading it. You may close it relieved, and maybe you'll go do your thing to get it out of your head. But even so, you might not be able to escape because it'll follow you around, because you can't unsee the raw pain, the injustice, the love that's lost and never found, because it is real, because this struggle is in our midst, because it's time we react and soothe and heal and respect and love.

Since writing this book five and a half years ago, my life has changed dramatically. I now more or less pass as a cis woman, and it makes my daily life on the streets so much safer, though as soon as someone learns I’m trans I’m generally back to square one—othered, hypersexualized or desexualized.

It's time.

In gratitude to Noemi Press for the Advance Reader's Copy.

Mona Angéline is an unapologetically vulnerable artist, athlete, and scientist. She honors the creatively unconventional, the authentically "other". She shares her emotions because the world tends to hide theirs. She is a new writer. Her work has been accepted for publication in a number of magazines - see more here.