Sarah Swaghammer, English + Biochemistry Minor, Class of ’22
Brief Summary: The hegemony of colonial thought is a constant process of enforcing systems of inferiority and policing of difference. As this hegemony often occurs directly through the mapping of a location and certain designation, this paper examines how the queerness portrayed in Bryan Washington’s Lot challenges these colonial ideas.
In his recent short story collection Lot, Bryan Washington unpacks the complex realities of life in Houston for people of color, revealing what the New York Times review calls a “vibrant, polyglot American city” (Garner). His stories weave a spider’s web between some of Houston’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods to tell rich stories of poor communities of color, while also building a longer-form account of the life of a boy and his family living in the East End neighborhood. This story arc, combined with the snapshots of other lives gained through each of Lot’s vignettes, brings forth a vision of Houston that is not only vibrant but also groundbreaking in its unconventional conceptualization of space, place, and personhood. Indeed, Bryan Washington’s Lot opens the door to a better understanding of Houston through narrative while also functioning as theory in itself, criticizing current frameworks and proposing new, decolonial futures that leave them behind. Drawing from ideas of queer space and relational place-making, Bryan Washington utilizes queerness to challenge colonial conventions of space and self and instead posit a new map of Houston. Formed through exploration, experience, and relationship, this new map of place and personhood investigates the liberating potential of queer, outside-oriented vision of space and plants the seeds of decolonial knowledge from which new becomings can emerge.
Colonialist ideas of identity and space emerge from frameworks designed to maintain status quo hierarchies of power that feed off of complexes of inferiority. John D. Márquez, reflecting on the work of Edward Said, writes that “[t]he sovereignty of modern social formations or nation-states require[s] the creation, categorization, and policing of difference” (Marquez, 16). In the introduction to his complex and controversial book Orientalism, Said demonstrates that the titular orientalism, a form of “categorization [a]nd policing of difference,” exists as “a system of knowledge” that becomes “an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness” (Said, 6). Here, Said speaks specifically on the relation between East and West in the colonial consciousness, explaining that a Western (colonialist) understanding of “the Orient” arises from the production of an “ism”: a “grid[ded]” view of the East through which its cultures and people can be reduced, boxed in, and compartmentalized. This work of “boxing in” the identities of the subaltern functions to maintain colonial hierarchies of power, effectively keeping anyone occupying the position of “other” or “outsider” from gaining agency. Thus, Said demonstrates the fundamental ties between coloniality and Western understandings of personhood and power.
Colonial “categorization [a]nd policing of difference” is demonstrated in Lot, as Washington’s principal narrator struggles to explore his sexuality and identity while also navigating the expectations and pressures of his own community. Lot makes no attempt to soften the realities of homophobia. Instead, Washington portrays his queer characters and their struggles honestly and in doing so, highlights the toxicity of colonially oriented ideas of identity and selfhood. In “Wayside,” the narrator develops a tense and delicate connection with Rick, a “pato” (a Spanish slur against gay men) who deals drugs with the narrator’s brother Javi (Washington, 65). At the end of the story, Rick is shot and killed, a turn of events that comes as a brutal shock to readers but which, for Javi, is not surprising at all: “this [i]s what happen[s] to fags,” he informs his brother (Washington, 69). At first glance, Rick’s unexpected death emphasizes the brutality, violence, and danger that Javi and his brother face living in the East End. Upon closer examination, however, Rick’s devastating fate illustrates a different danger altogether: that of opposing colonialist thought. As both a queer man and a drug dealer, Rick blurs the lines of masculinity and heterosexuality typically associated with crime: he is disrupting the gridlines that, from a colonial standpoint, aim to define, explain, and reduce the drug dealers of the East End to marginalizable stereotypes. Trapped in a grid that seems to have no way to reconcile or understand “fags” like him, Rick must follow an alternative trajectory: one that ultimately costs him his life. Through this story, Washington seems to warn his readers that in a system dictated by colonialist understandings of identity, difference that cannot be policed must be destroyed. Later, when the narrator recalls his brother telling him that “the only thing worse than a junkie father [i]s a faggot son,” the colonial ideologies at the root of Javi’s proclamations become even more clear (Washington, 92). Although the “junkie father” is far from ideal, he does not challenge toxic male conceptions of personal identity. Instead, his aggression and absence can be seen as warped versions of “normal” fatherly behaviors that, while harmful, do not contradict norms of hypermasculinity. In contrast, the utter obscenity of the “faggot son” emerges precisely from his failure to conform to established grids of identity that define men, and particularly men of color, by (often toxic) masculine standards. Ultimately, Javi’s words are frightening; they demonstrate the constant threat of colonial attitudes to marginalize, shame, and even snuff out disruptive identities such as queerness that do not fit into established “grids” of personhood.
These dangerously reductive conceptions of “othered” identities have clear ties to colonial understandings of physical spaces, as can be understood through Campbell’s exploration of the map as a device used to exert power over space. As Campbell writes, the “controlling device of mapmaking” is its “framing,” or “taking the complex, multiple nature of the world and translating it into another language and then containing and limiting it within a gridded space” (Campbell, 11). Thinking back to Said’s exploration of colonial understandings of the other through reductive, boxed-in visions of identity, it becomes clear that maps themselves function as devices of “control” that aim to take the complexities of space itself and reduce them to a series of “grid[s]”. In other words, just as colonialist thought reduces and compartmentalizes the experience of the individual, so too do maps attempt to flatten the diversities of the physical world in order to create a digestible rendition of space. Just as disruption and difference is destroyed when it fails to conform to grids of identity, marginalized spaces may also experience elimination if they do not fit into the prescribed delineations of the world that the map lays out. With this comparison in mind, the individual themselves becomes a map. Indeed, Márqez describes “racial, ethnic, and… national” markers of identity as “boundaries” that have been erected as mechanisms of control by “the state and its legal apparatuses”: as if individuals and groups are landscapes that are being constantly boxed in, gridded, and mapped by colonial thought (Marquez, 16). Thus, a connection between self and space can begin to be conceptualized: in a colonialist system, individuals become geographies to be tamed and structured through mapping.
In Lot, the geography and mapping of selfhood takes on new, more hopeful dimensions, as Washington’s spotlighting of marginalized faces and places produces an alternative theory on identity: one that attempts not to totally destroy or escape the work of colonial systems, but rather to investigate what could happen if we unfolded the forgotten spaces within these pre-existent understandings of the world. To begin to explore this, one must recall the theories of Deleuze, who often delves into the meanings and implications of the “segmentation of social space” into “horizontals and verticals”. In doing so, however, he also notes that such gridding also inherently reveals the possibility for “diagonals,” or “other spaces”: such spaces, he believes, represent “zones of indistinction from which becomings may arise” (Campbell, 8). In a way, as a city that literally lacks zoning laws, Houston exists as a massive amalgamation of “zones of indistinction”; many thinkers and writers have echoed this sentiment in their perplexed attempts to reconcile Houston with their vision of the prototypical “city”. Already, Houston seems to be challenging the normative understandings of space and place that have thus far been discussed. Working from this context, Lot unfolds Houston’s marginalized space and the conceptions of “becoming” it creates.
While colonial productions of space create gridded maps, Campbell’s understanding of “other spaces… suggest[s] the intersections of many tangled lines”: an idea that Washington fully embraces, drawing from concepts of black geography to produce new visions of old spaces (Campbell, 8). As scholars Allen, Lawhon, and Pierce find, black geographies “encourage scholars to focus on black life and agency within and despite white supremacy” (Allen, 1004). Similarly in Lot’s Houston, the “other spaces” within landscapes shaped by “supremacy” take center stage, exposing readers to facets of Houston life and culture of which “few outsiders are aware,” according to the novel’s New York Times review (Garner). The “tangled” city created by Washington’s stories in these “outsider” spaces is brimming with desire, love, suffering, and strife: neighbors hailing from different countries have affairs and are killed for it; immigrants try to start new lives but eventually disappear; a mother dances with a stranger while at a farmers market with her son before returning home to a husband who is having an affair. As readers roam the city along with Washington’s characters, they become immersed in a world of “black [and brown] life” that is, at first glance, hidden away in a landscape of whiteness and wealth. In this context, it almost seems as if the stories of individuals and communities become themselves “tangled lines” on a new sort of map, embarking on journeys across the map of Houston and “instersect[ing]” in ways that are not predetermined by colonial expectation, but instead driven by something else entirely: a desire for connection and community (Campbell, 8). In short, Washington challenges colonial “grid[dings]” of space and identity by not just acknowledging Houston’s “diagonal” spaces, but instead defining Houston by them. As relationships blossom within these diagonals, Washington embraces what Campbell describes as “mutating multiplicity”: the dynamic, diverse, and ever-changing realities of place that can never be captured on a traditional map. In this way, Washington may begin to “ope[n] up and scrutinize[e] established ideologies and… canonical practices” (Campbell, 14), prompting new considerations of place and personhood that plant the seeds of decolonial knowledge.
While Lot’s framing certainly presents a challenge to colonial ideas of space and identity, the core of Washington’s decolonial knowledge lies in his explorations of queer space and experience. In Lot’s through-line narrative of a queer, mixed-race boy’s youth and coming of age, the details of Washington’s new map of Houston emerge, drawing from queer and black theories of place. Black geography studies affirm that the work of “place-making” is not solely up to colonial powers. In fact, all of us can and do “‘make’ place through networked political and social relations” in a process known as relational place-making: a concept that “intertwines the social production of place and the social production of identity” (1010). In Lot, this can be accessed through the participation in and creation of queer spaces, which Judith Halberstam defines as “the place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage” as well as “the new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer conterpublics” (6). Interestingly, in the category of “queer people,” Halberstam includes not only non-heterosexuals, but also “rent boys, sex workers, homeless people, drug dealers, and the unemployed”: many of whom can be found in the stories of Lot (Halberstam, 10). Scraping by in gentrifying neighborhoods and often working illicit jobs to make ends meet, Washington’s characters live “during the hours when others sleep and in the spaces (physical, metaphysical, and economic) that others have abandoned”: in other words, “outside the organizations of time and space that have been established for the purposes of protecting the rich few from everyone else” (Halberstam, 10). In Lot, however, these figures are not relegated to the sidelines of the narrative. Instead, the “abandoned” spaces they inhabit are thrust to center stage, and Washington transforms his “queer” figures into the narrators and agents of their own stories and the story of Houston. In doing so, Lot reshapes spaces outside normative “physical, metaphysical, and economic” spheres into sites of love, life, pain, and death: spaces of abundance, both good and bad. Thus, through queer experience and existence in Lot, Washington’s characters participate in relational place-making grounded in queer notions of self and space.
On the individual level, through the central narrator’s journey of self-discovery and sexual exploration, queerness takes on further dimension as a form of hybrid subjectivity that can liberate notions of the self from colonially imposed restrictions. Decolonial knowledge, as Márquez describes it, exists as “a system of representation” that responds “to Fanon’s driving question of ‘In reality, who am I?’ – a question that derives from the alienating effects of settler-colonial formations” (Márquez, 18). This idea finally shifts focus towards the thoughts and feelings of those suffering under colonial restrictions of the self. For those who possess “disruptive” identities (Rick, for instance), the weight of society’s “grids” and the pressures to fit into them likely prompt intense feelings of confusion, conflict, and placelessness. Through our narrator’s queer coming-of-age, Washington addresses this struggle and proposes an answer to it that embraces hybridity and thus challenges colonial efforts to reduce and categorize the “other”. Márquez explains that conceptions of hybridity have the “potential to disrupt such categorization and/or colonial assemblage” through their reflection of “a politics of self-determination” that contradicts colonial categorizations (Márquez, 16). Although the “hybridity” of Márquez’s work is focused on the blending of black and brown identity through shared experience, the concept can also be applied to the “intersection of tangled lines” represented by Lot’s narrator’s contention with his heritage and culture in addition to his sexuality. Significantly, these ideas of hybridity and intersectionality also relate back to concepts of physical space, as Pierce and Martin affirm place as something “inherently plural and hybrid” (Pierce, 1009). Thus, in embracing hybridity in our identity and surroundings, we can take control of the mapping of self and affirm personal identity while also rejecting colonial scripts and unsettling normative structures that allow their continued reproduction.
In the chapter “Navigation,” Washington unpacks the hybrid relationship between the narrator’s sexuality and other facets of his identity through his delineation of the relationship between the narrator and a “whiteboy,” who he meets at work and soon begins tutoring in Spanish for money. Soon after the tutoring lessons start, a different sort of exchange also begins, as the narrator notes that “we’d always, always, always, always end up in bed”. As they “moved from greetings to goodbyes,” the narrator recalls that “I told him about my father… about my brother in the ground… about Ma and I, stuck in the East End, scrambling to keep everything together” (Washington, 137). This reveals an important, cyclical relationship between queerness and identity for the narrator. He only met the “whiteboy” because he needed to work; he only accepted the tutoring offer to make some extra money on the side; they only grew close because of his knowledge of Spanish from his childhood. Thus, important aspects of the narrator’s identity form the foundations of his queer experience, and his queer experience in turn forms a basis for the revelation of many personal, difficult truths, as he bares his soul in the whiteboy’s bed. As he introduces this cycle of exploration and admission, Washington positions queer intimacy as a mechanism through which sufferings imposed by dominant systems of power can be discussed.
Lot’s first story “Lockwood” further explores this cycle between queer intimacy and suffering; here, Washington establishes the potential of queerness as a source of relational place-making power. This short tale recounts the narrator’s fleeting relationship with his next-door neighbor Roberto. A recent immigrant from Mexico, Roberto struggles with extreme poverty alongside the rest of his family, and the story ends with their disappearance from the neighborhood. The day before this happens, however, the narrator describes Roberto “show[ing] me this crease on his palms.” “[H]e didn’t tell me he was disappearing,” the narrator continues, “[h]e just felt my chin… then he cupped his hands between us, asked if I’d found the milagro in mine” (Washington, 5). The discovery of the “milagro,” or miracle, between them frames queer experience and intimacy as a powerful form of liberation from suffering. Although displaced from his home in the East End, Roberto creates a new sense of place through the “milagro” he shares with the narrator and the queer experience that it represents.
In Lot’s final story, “Elgin,” the place-making potential of queerness reveals itself in full force as Washington introduces the hopeful promise of a queer, decolonial future. Working at the Castillo, the narrator meets Miguel, a “pato” whose family came to Houston from Guatemala for his sick sister and, after her death, got “stuck on this side of the gulf” (Washington, 195). Their friendship blossoms through late-night conversations at the restaurant, as they bond over their mutual feelings of entrapment in “this fucking fishbowl city” while Miguel saves up to send his parents back home (Washington, 201). When his family finally does leave, Miguel is in anguish; he reveals that although “[t]hey asked me to come too” and he “had the money” to do it, he chose to stay. The narrator comforts him in the turmoil that follows – “[y]ou still have the cash… you can probably leave tomorrow” – yet somehow, he “know[s] that’s not why” Miguel decides to remain (Washington, 211). The specifics of this “why” are never explicitly revealed to readers, but the pieces of Miguel’s reasoning (and the narrator’s own) for remaining in a city that has caused them so much pain assemble as the story continues: soon after Miguel has his crisis, he and the narrator have sex for the first time. It is a vocal process for both of them, as “I’m telling him to stop, to leave, to get the fuck out of here, and he’s telling me the same, to go, don’t come back, and then the words start blending together, and we’re saying it in chorus, stop, stop, stop, go on, get out, be gone” (Washington, 218). Both feeling somehow rooted in Houston even after their families have left, Miguel and the narrator’s shared sexual experience occurs in an outburst not only of physical sensation and pleasure but also of deeply rooted strife concerning space and movement through it: they both feel trapped in the grids and the city that have defined their lives. By embracing their shared attraction, however, they are finally breaking out of colonial understandings of self that have relegated queerness to diagonals and “other spaces”: their moment of shared intimacy becomes itself an escape. Indeed, their words and connection unfold and occupy previously marginalized spaces for the first time without anxiety or fear, as Miguel and the narrator finally begin to “get the fuck out” of the structures that have restricted them for so long.
The new notions of space and personhood prompted by their relationship are furthered when Miguel, out of nowhere, calls the narrator by his name: “Nic…Nicolás,” he prompts, to which the narrator responds “[t]hat’s my fucking name” (Washington, 220). The concept of naming has always been important to determinations of identity, selfhood, and place. The only other time in Lot that the narrator brings up the idea of names is in “Navigation,” when his whiteboy “asked for my name… and when he couldn’t pronounce it [he] gave me a new one” (Washington, 134). Later, though, after his Spanish has improved, “he sa[ys] my name, my actual name,” shocking the narrator into speechlessness (Washington, 140). This exchange and the lack of other mentions of naming in Lot highlight the narrator’s reluctance to relinquish this part of himself to the violent manipulations of colonial minds; if he shares it, he knows that the world will flatten his name’s complexity, giving him a “new one” that isn’t quite right but which more easily fits into a digestible vision of his culture and self, just as the whiteboy does. His name is guarded even from his story’s audience until a few pages from the end of the novel, when we learn Nicolás’s name for the first time and, suddenly, see him as himself. After such extended buildup and restraint on Washington’s part, this revelation is breathtakingly intimate. Fortunately, Miguel, unlike the whiteboy in “Navigation,” makes no attempt to change Nicolàs’s name except to shorten it to “Nic” as an endearment. In naming Nicolàs through Miguel, Washington highlights the importance of Nic’s queer experience to his journey of discovery, transformation, and becoming: a journey that finally begins to liberate his sense of self from oppressive colonial frameworks.
As the story and the book conclude, Miguel and Nicolás explore the hopeful potential of a queer future they share in a space created through their intimacy. In bed, after sex, Miguel asks the narrator “[w]hat if you stayed,” a bold and somewhat surprising question given their shared feelings of entrapment in Houston. “[Y]ou could leave, he said… Pero you don’t have to, said Miguel. We could try, said Miguel. I want you to think about it, said Miguel. I want you to think about what could happen. Because I think it could, he said” (Washington, 221). The repetition of “he said” here highlights the surreal nature of this exchange for Nicolás; it is almost as if he must continuously remind himself that Miguel is, in fact, saying these things: that he is not imagining the conversation. In the context of the novel, this response makes some sense. Nic has never been in control of his surroundings: he has been trapped by conditions, systems, and grids that seem immovable and unchangeable. But maybe, Miguel seems to say, these systems do not need to be escaped: they need to be rewritten, unfolded from the “zones of indistinction” that they must, by nature, contain. By positing “what could happen,” Miguel and Nicolás imagine together for the first time a queer future, a liberated future, in which they decide the meanings of their own lives.
In the novel’s final pages, Nicolás leaves Miguel in his bed and drives to Galveston to clear his head. Out on the beach, he reflects on his life, his family, and his experiences, and the novel concludes as he says “I wonder how anyone ever gets away from all that. I used to think that you could” (Washington, 222). With this statement, Nic demonstrates that perhaps his desire to escape the structures that have defined and restricted his life – to “get away from all that” – may have never been realistic. Instead, he begins to consider another path to freedom: this time through his relationship with Miguel. A few lines earlier, Nicolás thinks that maybe “I’m getting a little closer. Close enough to trust him and just give it a go” (Washington, 222). Once again, this statement melds concepts of place and identity, as the narrator seems to be running towards something, trying to get “closer” to a future and a self that will let him be at peace: an idea, in turn, that is deeply connected to his sense of “trust” in his lover.
As Lot concludes, many details are left unaddressed about the narrator’s future plans. By leaving these questions open-ended, however, Washington makes room for a future to be written for Nicolás, by Nicolás: finally, control over his story and home rests in his own hands. This ending seems fitting for a novel that has always aimed to give space for the “othered” to share their stories. Ultimately, Washington’s Lot is not only a beautiful amalgamation of individual stories, but also a provocative investigation of how these stories converge and diverge to create new notions of space, place, and self. As Nicolás grows up, struggling to contend with his queer identity and familiar roots, so too do the other characters in Lot, each grappling with their own form of queer hybridity. Readers also struggle to contend with these concepts, particularly Houstonians, as we consider our own place in the Houston that Washington has created. As readers navigate the complexities of Lot’s Houston, colonial maps of self and space are challenged and new ideas emerge in their place: ideas that do not attempt to destroy current systems, but instead that embrace the forgotten spaces within them in ways that can help us progress towards a more liberated future. As Washington emphasizes the power of relationships to create place in ways that unfold marginalized space and bring new life and liberation to people typically relegated to the sidelines, Lot proposes a future in which our understandings of ourselves and our place in the world are expanded into new, decolonial dimensions.
Works Cited
Allen, Douglas, Mary Lawhon, and Joseph Pierce. “Placing race: On the resonance of place with black geographies.” Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 43 no. 6, 2019, pp. 1001-1019.
Campbell, Neil. The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age. University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
Garner, Dwight. “‘Lot’ Offers a Fictional Look at a Vibrant, Polyglot American City.” The New York Times, 18 March 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/books/review-lot-bryan-washington.html.
Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York University Press, 2005.
Márquez, John D. Black-Brown Solidarity: Racial Politics in the New Gulf South. University of Texas Press, 2014.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Random House, 1978.
Washington, Bryan. Lot. New York, Riverhead Books, 2019.
