122 Chapter 7 MALE - UNLESS OTHERWISE INDICATED Ramsey Nasr Translated by David Colmer 1. Gender1 Maybe it’s no big deal, that’s possible. Maybe I’ve just got oversensitive. Born at a time when everything was less ripe, less woke, and grown too old for words. In our day you could choose: three genders. It wasn’t ideal, but you got to decide if you were male/female/neither nor. The start of versatility. Dutch got you there, if you let it. Time was male. Space, female. Ground (m) chose a different gender from earth (f). There was a semblance of chaos, but the randomness made so much good. Yes, that was its essential beauty.2 The rules allowed for pleasant twists. Like girl3 being neuter, an it – not a she. If you really wanted to be an exception, you could. Grammar, a safety net that stretched from mouth to mouth. Maybe I’m too old for this poem, a forgotten ghost in open-minded times. Freed forever now from pigeonholes, we all assert ourselves as equals. But what is reality and what is show? 1 This poem is specifically about gender and the changing use of gender in Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands. 2 The original Dutch terms in this stanza are tijd, ruimte, grond and aarde respectively. 3 Meisje.
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