Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground: Not Dostoevsky, but Lubunlar 

By The New Yorker Lubun

In my freshman year at a college in New York, the first time my sophomore friend spoke to me in fluent Lubunca, I was in pure shock. 

It was perfectly integrated into our native language, just that some semiotics and identifiers were purposefully—I don’t want to say concealed, but in a way—ciphered. From the rest of his sentence, it was obvious what these locked-away words signified, but I was curious, more than curious. 

I learned that I had just encountered the queer, underground-borne language of the cultural mosaic that is the city of İ. He obviously understood me deeply and was waiting to see whether I would reciprocate, with a language that I couldn’t yet translate with my bounded, narrow dictionary. 

However, it felt like I had known Lubunca all through my life; but instead of speaking it, I enacted it through my embodiment, everything that constitutes my life and what I stood for. As activist-linguist Lilith Bayrakci articulates, Lubunca is the “anti-language” for the “anti-society.” It’s for people who have been legally barred from experiencing love, connection, and purpose. It is the epitome of leveraging the power of language to not only subvert but to outright construct the alternative, the “what-if?” Standing as a direct antithesis to the hegemonic and patriarchal agendas, the “trans woman sex worker is at the top in Lubunya [the homeland of Lubuns, ones who are fluent, from birth or learned, in Lubunca] communities.”

As I slowly learned the key words of the sacred language, I realized how the alteration of language is a literal key to unlocking a brand-new world, one where no one has to be ridiculed, and the weirder, braver, and more audacious, the better. Who knew it was only through breaking the barrier of the power structures that promulgate themselves through the very ways in which we think that one could even fathom, envision—not hallucinate—a mirage? Who knew that one could talk about Laços (“straight-passing” hot men) and their sex appeal right in front of their very eyes, and no one bats an eye? I, and probably you as well, hadn’t. 

But more—maybe even most—importantly, Lubunca is not merely a language of survival and persistence, or just a slang, but an ornament of activism, of grit and demands for “positive discrimination.” So, as I am writing, speaking to you, please think, diagnose yourself, your language. Meditate on how the very product of the mechanism that has been fed to us throughout our lives is faulty, poisoned, deficient, a low birth, a feeble attempt at keeping us complicit, ignorant. 

Now, don’t you dare be scared, because if you truly want to live both your life and our collective lives as humans to the fullest, without any more fears, this is the exact time to let go of them. And after that, be playful, like a child who just learned how to spell. Play with your words, with your worldview, and with what you knew all your life, just like how Lubunca was born from the lingual permutations of the frisky clash of “Romani, Armenian, Arabic, and Greek words” in the neighborhood of Ş. of İ. 

Create your own new dialect, a form of communication and consequently connection—bodily, spiritually, semiotically, or even emotionally—and recruit your people; become many. Speak about your desires, what you want now and what in the future, and when the time is right, spread your language, your art. You will be surprised to see how many people, like me, when I first encountered Lubunca, will be trans-fixed by you and your people’s genius, and the seeds of your mission, your mirage, will be spread. The mirage that you cannot even make sense of in the middle of a desolate, bone-dry desert will be made a reality. 

And, on the other side, I will be there waiting for you, loving you through my words: “seni çok özledim, kevaşe!” [I’ve missed you so much, slut!]