Salmacis

Publishing as an industry is obsessed with new – books yet to come out… but what about the brilliant books that have already been published? Each month we spotlight a different author whose book was published more than a year ago, which you might be yet to meet… This month we hear from Elizabeth Train-Brown about the brilliant Salmacis…

Shuffling the Shelves: Salmacis by Elizabeth Train-Brown

Salmacis came from a fascination with Greek myth – both as a religion and an ancient history. These are just a few of the stories that inspired some of the poems in this collection.

Daphne and Apollo, ‘daphne’

The god Apollo one day saw Daphne, daughter of a river god, and was instantly besotted. He chased her down, begging her to stop running, while she fled, desperate to remain single and among the woods. Eros (Cupid) gets involved by giving Apollo wings and holding on to Daphne’s shoulders to slow her, but Daphne keeps running, now battling two gods. She just manages to reach her father’s waters but she’s exhausted so she uses her last breath to beg her father to help her – by destroying her. Daphne is turned into the laurel tree. Yet, even in this form, she is touched by Apollo, who feels her heartbeat in the tree’s trunk. He tries to kiss the bark, but even the wood shrinks from him, and he declares that she will be ‘treasured for ever as my now precious tree.’ He wears her leaves in his hair, hews her wood for his bow, adorns royalty with a crown of her branches. Finally, Apollo uses his powers to render the laurel eternally youthful and beautiful, an evergreen tree.

My ‘daphne’ is inspired by Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘small’, born of this lifelong possession that female and feminine bodies experience right into the grave, of a body trying to escape itself, of being rediscovered again and again. Even after Daphne shrinks down down down to detritus and disappears in a tree, she fears being unburied and put back together – ‘don’t point them to this coffin.’

The Birth of Aphrodite, ‘you pray your way and i’ll pray mine’

Ouranos and Gaia were among the first primordial beings in the beginning of the world, according to Greek legend. But when their son, Kronos, seeks to overthrow his father, Gaia gives him a stone sickle which he uses to castrate Ouranos and throw his testes into the Mediterranean Sea, where they cause the waters to foam. From them emerges Aphrodite, goddess of beauty and love.

Reimagining her origins, inspired by gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia (the universal sensation of feeling not quite right in your own body, for whatever reason; often experienced by Trans+ people), ‘all i can think is that aphrodite / was born from the severed penis of a god / – so what would come of my tits?’

The Ferrier of the Styx, ‘have you ever faked your own death and run away with a ferrier?’

Charon is a ferrier of the Greek underworld who ferries the dead across the River Styx. He was eternally bound to his role, silently demanding the fare of one coin that must have been buried with the passenger upon their death. Those who could not pay would be refused service and forced to wander the shores for a century. Described by Virgil in the Aeneid as a ‘sordid god […] uncombed, unclean; / His eyes, like hollow furnaces on fire.’

‘have you ever faked your own death’ reimagines Charon as a feminine ghost haunting the narrator’s home, appearing where she least expects her, ‘whispering her name like a hymn / like sin’, the not-so-physical embodiment of a person’s gender identity, or a self that was or a self that might be. I adore the idea that we are all for ever on one long journey that never really ends and that facets of ourselves are our ferriers across those rivers.

Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, salmacis

The title of the collection is taken from the tale of Salmacis, a lake nymph who one day spies Hermaphroditus (a young man, son of gods Hermes and Aphrodite). Instantly besotted, Salmacis tries to win his heart, and when she can’t do that, she drags him into her lake and begs the gods to let them be them together. For better or for worse, the gods listen. They entwine the two into one being, both female and male.

One of the earliest records of intersex people in story, this tale is 2,000 years old and is where the term hermaphrodite comes from – a word that has fallen out of common use but which blends the masculine god Hermes, protector of wanderers and outcasts, with the feminine god Aphrodite, patron of beauty and love.

On the surface, it can feel overwhelmingly negative or predatory or disillusionary. What I hoped to do with Salmacis: Becoming Not Quite a Woman is prove the depth within this origin tale (and within the Trans+ experience), exploring my relationship with gender as an AFAB non-binary person and the stories of others who hail from all corners of our beautiful Trans+ umbrella. As origin stories go, I love that Salmacis and Hermaphroditus hold so much complexity of the Trans+ experience that all of us can find something to relate to.