Course:In Conflict (Owen Pallett album)
In Conflict is a 2014 album by Canadian violinist and songwriter Owen Pallett.
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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I’ll never have any children:
I’ll bear them and eat them, my children
I’m gonna change my body
In the light and the shadow of suspicion
I am no longer afraid
The truth doesn’t terrify us, terrify us
– "I Am Not Afraid"
When I was 17, and then 18 and 19, and really all the way up until I was about 22 years old, being trans did not feel good most of the time. Or I, a trans person, did not feel good generally. Either interpretation is valid.
Those were also landmark years for representation: suddenly, as I was leaving high school, trans people became visible in an ostensibly positive way. Although I had watched out trans people, including kids, be subject to derision and ignorance by the people and institutions around them for my entire adolescence, I was suddenly being told that it was actually OK and good for me to come out, be out, and share exactly how I felt with the world. I didn’t trust it. But that put me in a difficult spot as an artist who wanted to explore queerness on my own terms.
I heard the Owen Pallett song “I Am Not Afraid” during one of my first weeks of college. I looped it over and over. Despite the title, it’s a frightening song: it feels like dizzying height, a moment of disintegration and realization at the same time. The song is about having a complex relationship to gender in a way that is not really celebratory or even legible. Pallett wasn’t using they/them pronouns when the album came out; when they were asked in interviews about In Conflict’s themes of gender, their answers were often evasive. The clearest answer they gave, to NPR, was that the album was about “being unable to give up one thing to be something else that you'd want.” In Conflict is the first queer art that truly comforted me during those ages, precisely because it wasn’t comforting: “It don’t get better, the hunger / Even back in his arms, the water / Will get higher the faster you run,” Pallett sings on “The Secret Seven.” (Content warning: This specific song is about Tyler Clementi, a student who died by suicide after his classmates bullied him for being gay.)
This album felt like queer art made for queer people: harrowing and ambiguous, but still undeniably political. It was the kind of art I wanted to make. What I needed from art was actually not to see myself or be seen; I needed something else. On In Conflict, the sense that someone was telling me the truth made me want to continue.
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