Soula Emmanuel: 'The environment for trans people is a strange one right now'
Soula Emmanuel, writer.
For Soula Emmanuel, a covid writing project that started as a way to ‘escape’ during lockdown became a story of transition and change that she hopes resonates with all readers.
Emmanuel, 32, is a Greek-Irish trans woman living on the east coast of Ireland. She published her first novel, Wild Geese, in March and it follows a trans woman named Phoebe living in Copenhagen who receives an unexpected visitor from home. Having started her own transition journey five years ago, Emmanuel says the writing and publishing process feels almost as vulnerable.
“That's kind of how debut novels work nowadays. You're not just launching a piece of writing you're actually launching a public persona,” she says.
“And for me as someone who's not even five years into my transition at this point, it's a lot to go through very quickly, and in some ways, yeah, it is a very vulnerable process. For me, the main way I dealt with that is to think of Wild Geese not as an act of representation — I don't see myself speaking on behalf of trans people — but rather as a way of using my own experiences as a lens to look at the wider world.”
She adds that she hopes cisgender readers can also relate to her work. “I hope people who aren't trans can read this book and see aspects of their own life and it's not just ‘this is what happens to trans people’. I hope it's something that people can relate to, even if they haven't gone through those specific experiences themselves.”
Ahead of her debut’s publication, Emmanuel tweeted about the “brief historical window” in which a trans writer can publish a novel. She says the tweet was “jokey” but notes the “environment for trans people is a strange one right now”, but Ireland is a better place than most to live as a trans person.
“There is so much about hostilities in the media. And yet there's so much kindness on the ground, so to speak. Publishing a book is one thing, but existing is maybe another. But I think trans people have existed under harsher conditions than this in the past and will continue to exist.
“I do think Ireland is an unusual case. Ireland is such a close-knit country. There isn’t a ‘divide’ between people who live in cities and people who live everywhere else that there is in other countries. The thing that took me by surprise when I came out as trans is how many Irish people already know a trans person, or they know a person who knows a trans person. So word spreads in that very Irish way. I also think part of the reason that transphobia probably hasn't taken root here in the way that it has in Britain or in America is that we understand in this country that repression doesn't work. If people are going to rage about trans people, they're going to be raging for a very long time because we're not going anywhere.”
Emmanuel says she enjoyed writing a 30-something-year-old trans character. “There's a really interesting question in this novel about ageing into the invisibility or reduced visibility of a woman over 30 and how that's a privilege for trans women. Phoebe is a single woman living alone and in some ways, you can view that as a pathetic existence, but she doesn't view it like that at all. She views it as this triumph, this success that she's had in her life. But I think about people like Brianna Ghey [violently killed in the UK] and Eden Knight [took her own life in the US],and other trans women who don't make it to the age of 30. There is that element of privilege in making it that far.”
Of course, Phoebe’s life as an Irish emigrant is another chapter in the Irish migration story, though one Emmanuel says she did not consciously set out to link with the trans experience.
“I don't think I consciously set out to have a confluence between the trans story and the emigration story, but that's kind of how it worked out. And it is interesting, I suppose the fluidity of Irish identity and the way that Irishness manifests itself everywhere and how Irish people will find each other abroad is very interesting. It's slightly queer coded in that way, that we are this minority that exists and have our own little way of talking to one another and are finding one another. It is interesting to frame it in those terms.”
Speaking about Wild Geese’s protagonist, Emmanuel says Phoebe is a “heightened representation of a particular kind of educated white trans woman who is maybe not accustomed to being seen as an object within society, has only just started transitioning and is dealing with that level of scrutiny and that level of change”. Meanwhile, her visitor, Grace, is “extroverted” and “slightly chaotic”, a conscious move distancing, Emmanuel says, from “a particular kind of introverted, bookish sad girl type of character” found in many contemporary novels. Phoebe and Grace reaching their thirties with different life experiences is a topic Emmanuel finds fascinating.
“I feel like it's something that isn't explored enough in literature: a character who's able to use her wits to get by when she was younger, and is finding as she gets older that she's not able to do that as much anymore. I think it creates a creative tension between these two characters because there's a sense of one character building something and another character maybe coming apart in a certain way as the book goes on.”
- Wild Geese is out now. Soula Emmanuel will discuss her novel as part of West Cork Literary Festival, at Bantry Library on Friday, July 14, at 1pm
