“I wanted something that rocks, something intense, with hot sex and gang violence and maybe zombies and full of magic,” announces the unnamed narrator of Magnificent and dangerous women, novel by trans multidisciplinary artist Kai Cheng Thom. And, with even more fantastic elements, she will keep her promises as she takes us into this fabulous hybrid tale with magical realism where, between a letter to her sister Clémence and a love poem to her penknife taken from her notebook , she will go in search of her own self.
Teenage girl of Chinese origin, the one who calls herself a “dangerous girl” and “queen of escape” begins to tell how she left her family in La Morose and found herself on the Rue des Miracles where she was taken in ” the most ardent and powerful women ”of The City of Ashes and Lights.
“According to legend,” my new friend Kimaya tells me, “the Street was created over seventy years ago, when a woman was beaten to death by a potential client in front of a dozen passive witnesses. “
The young girl, whose sexual partner is a ghost friend, will also learn there that she is fish : “ Fish means that I am short and hairless with fragile bones. It means that people will look at me and won’t know that I’m a trans girl, that danger and lies and emptiness run, electric, under my skin. “
Besides Kimaya, a mother figure, we find Rapunzelle who blocks the sunlight, Valaria the Goddess of War, Lucretia the Princess, Alzena the Witch and Soraya, whose murder will be at the origin of a bloody revolution of trans women. Strengthened by the teachings of her father and the killer bees that roar in her blood, the young girl will become a formidable warrior.
An initiatory urban tale populated by wonderful characters, Magnificent and dangerous women reports in a dazzling language and with an uninhibited imagination of the difficulties of trans women, of the danger that threatens them on every street corner, of the prejudices that they will have to fight all their lives. Evoking in turn the raw poetry of Josée Yvon, the cruelty of the characters of Michel Tremblay, the flamboyance of the drag queens of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the outrageous violence of Quentin Tarantino’s cinema, the universe that Kai Cheng Thom portrays reflects a fierce desire to give a voice to those whose life course has nothing to do with that of Caitlyn Jenner, those whose destiny does not is not that of a watered-down fairy tale that the media want to convey. There is no Disney-style happy ending here!
In this regard, we salute the work of Kama La Mackerel, translator specializing in the works of Canadian trans women. By his way of using inclusive language and giving a second life to expressions in order to do justice to the original text, he not only shows great sensitivity, but also testifies to the evolution of the language, of customs. and society.