R E D by Chase Berggrun: Summary and Review
Note: According to the author’s website, Berggrun identifies as a trans woman and uses she/her, but the “About the Author” section of the printed book refers to the author simply as “trans” and uses they/them pronouns. As someone who uses she/her and they/them pronouns myself, I can understand and empathize with the use of both sets of pronouns, so I will refer to the author as both she/her and they/them throughout this review. If any reader here has updated information on how the author wishes to be referred, please email me to correct me at ModusOperandiee@gmail.com, and I will make this correction promptly.
R E D (referred to as RED moving forward) is a collection of erasure poems created using the original text from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In a time period that readily accepts the dehumanization and “othering” of women, a monster, a vampire, a man is offered grace by personification in Dracula. By redacting the original text, Chase Berggrun, a trans person, explores her own body dysphoria and shame at being “two” different people (who they are on the inside and the male-presenting body society sees and interacts with).
Using the text in its original order, Berggrun tells the story of a trans woman struggling to come out. The man that society sees on the outside is the monster in her story, the oppressor. The narrative is akin to the (unfortunately) typical story of women suffering intimate partner abuse, being physically and sexually abused, made to feel less-than by the male presences in their lives. The speaker in RED fights against her “abuser,” their own male-presenting body, switching, as abuse victims tend to do between accepting the abuse as truth and fighting to break free of it.
Blood and abuse, then, are used as tools in RED to humanize and legitimize the speaker’s womanhood, presumably to the non-trans female audience. There is inherent violence in being a woman, whether that bloodshed is through menstruation, the phantom “violence against women” or the male-to-female transition. This latter bloodshed not only refers to the (optional) surgical transition of becoming who someone truly is on the inside, but also to the increased likelihood of violent acts against trans women by men, once they are (according to society’s standards) female-presenting.