The Fairies Sing Each to Each: An Interview with Xuan Nguyen
The Fairies Sing Each to Each: a musical about the monstrous and the divine is a lyricbook / stageplay / poetry collection hybrid written by FEYXUAN || Xuan Nguyen about Amadeus Vu, a man who will become Empress of Heaven, and Severin Lacandola, a man — more or less — who falls in love with that monster. TFSETE explores disability, trauma, and transness, though it seeks to subvert the way that popular narratives of disability/trauma/transness often center dominant groups as their audience. Instead, TFSETE centers disabled, traumatized, and transgender individuals who know something about what it is like to be a monster, and something of what it is like to be divine through a narrative overflowing with ethereal language and the dancing meter of the fey.
What drives your creative process?
I create with such obsessive fervor you’d think I’d die if I didn’t do it. And I would. I make art like my life depends on it, which it does. There’s a lot of reasons for this, but they’re a lot of reasons most people don’t have.
When you’re disabled, your world becomes very narrow. I am largely bedbound. The longest I’ll stand in a day at a time is about 15–20min — to make a fancy syrup for my coffee or to shower. If I try to push myself to stand for something like an hour to make a Thai curry, I can do it, but my body will be wrecked for the entire day and sometimes days after that.
Even if I wasn’t too weak to stand, one of my medications makes me medically heat intolerant, so going out in anything above 70–75°F heat makes me feel extremely ill. I am lucky enough to live in Michigan, so my MELT DANGER ZONE only happens for about five months. (I’ll take that over all twelve.)
All’s this is to say, I can no longer interact with the outside world.
So my world becomes my house. My bed. It is a very comfortable bed, but a gilded cage is still a cage.
My physical condition alone drives me to seek other worlds. But I am also schizo and DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder).
My schizophrenia gives me something called atemporality, which means I can’t experience time in the way most people do. It’s really hard to explain, but it has to do with how memories are (or are not) organized in my brain. The clinical term is “disorganized thought.” I effectively have no sense of permanence because memories that happened yesterday are equidistant to memories that happened two years ago are equidistant to memories that happened ten years ago.
And my DID disrupts my permanence and stability of identity due to the person I am, L at the moment, switching out with M or C. I have selective amnesia after switching out. I don’t know what I don’t remember, I only know that the only thing I’m sure to remember is my creative work.
In this way, my art provides me with a way to keep time. It also gives me “a home to live in” because my parents are better nurses than they’ve ever been parents, who do not even know I’m getting THE FAIRIES SING EACH TO EACH published and honestly do not care outside of what it will do for my resume. And I can never leave my family because I am too disabled. I’m not even really well enough to leave my bed.
A gilded cage is comfortable, but it is never home.
What inspired you to choose the unusual form of stageplay / lyricbook / chapbook for THE FAIRIES SING?
Is it strange to say that unusual forms come easier to me? Probably not, considering the schizophrenia, haha. The stageplay format that “ties” the lyricbook together was a matter of last minute formatting after almost everyone that had read it said, completely independent of one another, that it read like a stageplay.
The core of TFSETE is actually a narrative poetry novella, finished and submitted (wish me luck!) but not accepted for publication as of yet. That novella has a companion poetry collection, about 50 pages, which much of the stageplay was derived from. I selected individual stanzas for choruses and verses, you can see the preservation of white space where they appear in the lyricbook.
I make music as well, and I wanted to make a TFSETE album, so I adapted some of the poems into songs, and the songs into a stageplay. I finished an Amadeus Vu (the protagonist of TFSETE) EP called WEAK&DIVINE that will be released with Grimalkin in 2021, which uses the Amadeus-centric songs from the lyricbook. As of this moment, that EP will be a double release with another Amadeus EP titled THE GODS NEVER LET THE ALREADY-DEAD WIN, a kind of Side A / Side B thing for the lathe. It will probably be some time yet before I feel ready to take on an adaptation of the full lyricbook.
It’s hard to talk about TFSETE (the stageplay) without talking about everything else that it is. I want to say, though, that my own musical adaptations of TFSETE are far from Canonical.
What do you mean that your — the author’s! — adaptations aren’t Canon?
I mean that, as a stageplay, I don’t want people to be trying to create what they think is My Design. I don’t want them to try and divine what my intention or vision is for TFSETE. I want them to bring themselves into it. What’s really important to me is to preserve the ambiguity and invite directors and actors to play in that space where there are many truths, and the presence of one does not preclude the existence of another.
No one is going to understand TFSETE like I do. And I don’t want anyone to try. When people read it or if anyone ever puts on a performance of it, I want people to ask themselves, “What am I feeling? What does this mean to me?” not “What did the author intend with this? What’s the author’s message?”
The only message I’ll ever say that I wanted to convey is the complexity of trauma, disability, and transness. I am certain there will be people who go, “Amadeus kills people! He’s evil! Bad representation!” without exploring the symbolic act of killing and consuming his victims as a divine exchange of power, which he desperately seeks as a disabled, traumatized man who refuses the narrative of THE HELPLESS VICTIM. He yet manages to refuse the narrative of HEARTLESS VILLAIN as someone who feels deeply about Severin and wants deeply to be divine as a symbolic mechanism of seizing the narrative of his trauma.
I don’t want people to think this is the Only way you can read TFSETE. But I can only hope people can see the complexity in the representation of trauma and refuse the instinct to dichotomize and oversimplify.
Xuan Nguyen is a disabled and transgender writer and artist who does music as FEYXUAN. They focus on the intersections between transgender identity, divinity + monstrosity, and stigmatized mental and physical health. Their work has appeared in Prismatica Magazine, Rogue Agent, and beestung. In addition to THE FAIRIES SING EACH TO EACH (EST 2020, Flower Press), they also have written LUNG, CROWN, AND STAR (Dec 2020, Lazy Adventurer). They can be reached through their website at feyxuan.com.
