“He accidentally left-swiped him
The nice guy who super-liked him
Now there’s no cure in sight
Except play Pasoori all night—
The algorithm has psyched him.”

– Limerick for a Tragedy, Akhil Katyal, 2022.

Akhil Katyal’s limerick presents an everyday tragic scene in a way that is both comforting and disquieting. On the one hand, the poem suggests that others, too, are “psyched” by the “algorithm” of romance: the difficulty of grasping love or fulfilling desire affects us all. The missed opportunity for a match, whether on Tinder or in real life, would indeed leave many with “no cure.” On the other hand, this consolation is harsh because it mercilessly exposes the failure of romantic unions, insisting on the inevitability of mistakes, misreadings, and missed opportunities that undermine the promise of romantic fulfilment. Whether it’s an accidental left-swipe, a slip-up that unattractively reveals too much, an exaggerated expectation from one party, or the awkward, unequal expressions of desire in a sexual equation, the fantasy of romance, this poem seems to imply, is bound to fail at some point. Offering a soft cushion to those who often feel heartbreak and then sneakily snatching it away, this poem has a peculiar affect – one that is both hard-hitting and tongue-in-cheek. This investment in holding onto the troubling aspects of thwarted desire in all its triviality is an instance of what we can call a queer art of longing.

Katyal’s poem represents such a queer art of longing not simply because it talks about men desiring other men. Rather, the poem’s rhythmic consistency, even as it voices a moment of romantic discrepancy, demonstrates an aesthetic interest in what doesn’t work perfectly or doesn’t align together. Such aesthetics, to use an older idiom, queers the pitch of love as we know it. This aesthetic practice is akin to the “Queer Art of Failure,” identified by Jack Halberstam. In his book of the same title, Halberstam notices how queers are often deemed failures in relation to the standards of socio-cultural success. Instead of marginalising failure the way dominant society does, Halberstam champions failure as a political practice that offers alternative possibilities of living and questions the hegemonic ideals of success. Like failure, longing is not interested in happy endings – whether of straight or non-heterosexual relations. It doesn’t stake its claim on love as a standard of success and a badge of honour. It doesn’t enable one to pat oneself on the back and turn a blind eye to other people. Neither does such longing offer a clear political practice – it cannot be “successfully” wielded to make direct change. Rather, longing has the potential to change our perspectives, not because it can be controlled and used, but because it points to what is unattainable and thus what cannot be assimilated in the world at that moment.

The queer art of longing thus names an outlook that pays attention to the way desire slips outside our control and leads us down a path that may be at odds with the consensus or the norm. It speaks to the foibles of sexuality, highlighting our tendency to act in ways that do not coincide with what may be acceptable, normative ways of living, even if it simply amounts to spending an extra hour longingly listening to love songs. In its ability to take time away from productive desire, it can sometimes violently disrupt settled and scheduled ways of living. One recalls, in this instance, what Sappho says of sexuality: “Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up…” The experiences of what’s “impossible to fight off” are ubiquitous and yet shameful to admit in a culture that rewards self-control and fulfilment. But what would happen if we befriend, rather than ignore, this “creature” that troubles us?

While no one demographic or identity is singularly being driven by this disruptive force of Eros, it seems that sexual minorities are often associated with such longing. This is not simply because queers have no choice but to “turn inward and yearn” when faced with an unaccepting world. Rather, queers have often been accused of reading too much into moments of intimacy in a world that demands lesser, more obvious, and certain forms of sexuality. Such excessive reading betokens a longing for something more: whether it be obsessing a bit too long over a glance by an acquaintance or simply pondering the possibility of a different life, these acts of fantasising open different possibilities of imagining the world and its objects outside its most predictable, realistic, and pragmatic formulations. To be sure, longing may well petrify action and keep people in place. However, its continuous insistence against what is acceptable nonetheless has the potential to disrupt the mainstream insistence on belonging – to a relationship, to a people, a society, or a nation – and make room for what fails to find love, both within and outside ourselves.

In fact, the song referenced by Katyal’s poem, “Pasoori,” holds onto longing across a people and nation even more than the former. Sung by Ali Sethi and Shae Gill, the song, born out of the former’s memory of travelling to India, speaks of a longing that shows little respect for settlement. Alongside the oft-commented transnational setting of the song, “Pasoori” also plays with sexual and gendered borders in interesting ways. Framed as a story in which a woman longs for a man whom she is forbidden to meet, the song is a story of an erotic exchange wherein Sethi plays the woman speaking to a man s/he desires. This tendency to speak as a woman even as the singer identifies as a man is common in Sufi poetry and music, as exemplified by Kailash Kher’s classic “Teri Deewani” and its chorus, “Tune kya kar dala/ mar gayi mein, mit gayi mein./ Ho ho ji, haan haan ji,/ Ho gayi mein,/ teri deewani, teri deewani,” in which Kher uses feminine verb-forms to refer to himself in love. Occupying the same terrain of longing, Sethi proclaims: “Mere dhol judaiyaan di tenu khabar kiwein hove/ Aa jaave dil tera poora vi na hove,” which the official music video poignantly translates as “My love, how can you know what happens when we part?/ I hope you fall in love, I hope it breaks your heart.” Rather than asking her beloved to return to her, the abandoned subject desires her beloved to suffer the pain of a broken heart. In this case, the love song does not thrive on a narrative of sexual harmony wherein two lovers complete each other (the Punjabi for the second line literally translates to: I hope your heart never completes). Rather, and perhaps more perversely, “Pasoori” is based on a craving for collective brokenness where both the subject and object of desire break into each other in a mutual entanglement of incompleteness. It is this mutual longing that enables the lover and the beloved to move across the borders that separate them. As opposed to holding out love as a universal unifier, then, “Pasoori” delves into a longing that marks us all, a longing that attests to our inability to fully submit to the borders placed on us.

Such an ode to longing may seem particularly odd at a time when the marketable ideals of coupledom – like the fantasy of the “power couple” – gain more and more prominence. We are being trained to capitalise on romantic triumph and thus repress longings that aren’t fulfillable and fantasies that seem unbearable. Despite being resolutely unindustrious, then, the queer art of longing allows us to work with the everyday desires that don’t find satiation. It asks us to notice – rather than reject – the moments when jealousy overwhelms us, when the unruly desires of mind take yet another flight of fantasy and attach us to an object of desire that seems impossible to attain, when we find delight in being misrecognised, or when we find ourselves out-of-place from a familiar group. It holds on to the experience of queerness that entails this encounter with fantasy: not simply the reveries of the mind, but the disruption of the everyday mechanisms of life. In its propensity to annoy, interrupt, and unsettle what we desire, even in the moments we desire, such a queer art of longing brings us face-to-face with what we recoil from and thus brings us closer to the otherness we try to avoid.

References:

Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press.

Sappho. (Undated). In If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Translated by Anne Carson. Vintage Books, 2003.

Cover Image: Photo by Todd Diemer on Unsplash