{"id":1138,"date":"2024-02-26T14:15:58","date_gmt":"2024-02-26T19:15:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/?p=1138"},"modified":"2025-02-22T09:27:21","modified_gmt":"2025-02-22T14:27:21","slug":"a-forcerant-my-descent-into-muskmelon-muskrat-madness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/a-forcerant-my-descent-into-muskmelon-muskrat-madness\/","title":{"rendered":"Personal Essay: A Forcerant No. 4"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My Descent Into Muskmelon\/Muskrat Madness<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our favorite game is Muskmelon or Muskrat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think of anything in the world, then ask:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is it closer to a muskmelon, or a muskrat?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                    \u2013\u2013Henry Goldkamp<\/a>, \u201cForcemeat,\u201d Mid-American Review, issue 42.1<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s it. That\u2019s the game that \u201cForcemeat\u201d is built around. Before adapting this poem into a full-blown board game, I liked it just fine. Even while playing it, I had no idea how drastically this remix would change my experience with the poem. Expanding on it gave me the vocabulary to articulate facets of my identity which I assumed would go unexplained to my family for the rest of my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cForcemeat\u201d was about\u2013\u2013as I initially read it\u2013\u2013a normalizing system of logic trying to draw sense out of personal and global catastrophe. (Don\u2019t get me wrong, I promise it\u2019s also a lot of fun.) At points, there\u2019s an absurdist disconnect to the dialogue between the two speakers that reminded me of Waiting for Godot<\/em> (which is to say I\u2019ve read only one piece of absurdist literature.) It wasn\u2019t my favorite in Issue 42.1, (that would be \u201cBone Town\u201d by Angie Macri,) but it was <\/em>the favorite of our hard-working (one could say over<\/em>worked) Poetry Editor. As a Christmas gift for them, I turned the poem into a structured board game for the MAR staff to play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Obviously, one need only read the opening three lines of the poem to be able to play informally in pairs. It\u2019s as simple as \u201cI Spy\u201d and makes an even better road trip game. When playing in this format, though, one\u2019s decisions go unanalyzed. Each player independently develops their own concept of the melon\/rat binary using the fodder their partner supplies. This mimics what we see between the two speakers of \u201cForcemeat,\u201d who have already established their own codes which (especially if you haven\u2019t been thinking about it for six goddamn months) seem alien and inaccessible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our adaptation requires much more intentional analysis\u2013\u2013or at least prediction. Players advance on the game board by voting in the majority on increasingly less and less melon\/rat-like concepts, within a matter of 5 seconds. The first player to reach the end of the board wins. (Check out the companion post<\/a> for the full rules and PDFs for the game.) We surprised the 30-strong MAR staff by bringing it to a meeting at the end of last semester.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had no idea that making the game a communal affair would make it feel so \u2026 vulnerable? As our Poetry Editor puts it, voting publicly feels like \u201cbaring your soul\u201d \u2013\u2013despite the silliness. Not only do you flounder to quickly draw out increasingly unsubstantiated connections between the given concept and a rat or melon, but it is now something you can get \u201cright\u201d or \u201cwrong.\u201d Your mind is on full display with each vote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At least, it felt that way. When players landed on red \u201cdebate\u201d squares and were forced to justify the melocity or ratitude of that round\u2019s concept, one found that their \u201callies\u201d share their verdict for completely different reasons. (Example: My friend and I agreed that \u201cbutterfly\u201d is a muskmelon. While I thought of the sugary nectar butterflies collect, though, they connected the melon\u2019s rind to the butterfly\u2019s cocoon.) Even one’s opponents used their <\/em>same reasoning to draw the opposite conclusions. (Example: I thought \u201cstiletto\u201d was a muskrat due to the muskrat\u2019s sharp teeth, but the Poetry Editor thought about the shoe\u2019s sharp heel piercing a melon.) The rules players developed for both categories only grew more abstracted from the physical reality of fruit and Rodentia as we progressed. A huge part of the game (if you played to win) was predicting where those rules were leading your colleagues, but when it was time for a debate, everyone was reminded of how wildly different their perceptions were from everyone else\u2019s. A sense of isolation settled on the room as each player realized that they were the only one correctly interpreting the energies of melons and rats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This sensation of simultaneous exposure and disconnect enhanced the absurdist feeling I got from the original poem. It drew my attention to the places where the speakers of \u201cForcemeat\u201d miscommunicate and disagree\u2013\u2013it put more emphasis on the end, where the roadkill incident drives a wedge between them. While playing\u2013\u2013and now, while reading\u2013\u2013I felt a push and pull of intimacy and isolation. It echoes what it\u2019s like to share an experience with someone and find that you had wildly different perceptions of it. I didn\u2019t see any of this in the poem before the board game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This brings me to my main reason for being obsessed with the \u201cForcemeat\u201d cinematic universe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Imagine living in a world where everything is viewed through the lens of this binary: muskmelons versus muskrats. This binary has a largely unspoken ruleset that eludes you, although it seems that everyone around you parsed it quickly and easily. Yet as you discuss this with others, their interpretations prove to be inconsistent with those of your other peers and even internally<\/em>inconsistent. Despite this, everything\u2013\u2013even YOU\u2013\u2013can be cleanly categorized this way. You are deemed muskmelon. Your given name indicates this. On your birthday, you receive muskmelon gifts. You\u2019re expected to wear muskmelon clothes, watch muskmelon shows, pursue muskmelon interests. Every single person who sees you looks at your body to judge: muskmelon or muskrat? They treat you, speak to you differently based on that judgment. Even if you\u2019re hard to sort. Especially <\/em>if you\u2019re hard to sort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You feel utterly alienated by this system. The emphasis put on it and the rules that govern it feel absurd, pointless, and limiting. It’s not even that you resent melon life or yearn for rat life. You just want your life to be a muskmelon and muskrat buffet. You don’t want to choose based on that arbitrary status, but rather your own preferences. But alas, when a human is born, the first words it hears are \u201cit\u2019s a melon!\u201d or \u201cit\u2019s a rat!\u201d Whichever they are judged as defines the rest of their life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, the plot twist here is that I feel much more like a muskrat on the melon\/rat binary than I do like either a man or a woman on the gender binary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Playing \u201cForcemeat\u201d deeply spoke to me as a nonbinary person, particularly as a nonbinary person on the autism spectrum. As a kid, social norms didn’t (and still don’t) come easy to me, including the gender ones. (Examples: Women wear makeup. Men don\u2019t cry. Women should be skinny, men muscular. What the hell are you talking about?!) Some will offer evolutionary explanations for such classifications, but I would counter that the way our pre-civilization ancestors survived shouldn’t have such a strong bearing on how we live today. Furthermore, our understanding of our evolutionary past keeps evolving (such as with the men = hunter, women = gatherer myth<\/a>.) Some cite biochemical reasons for their way of sorting, but in many cases, even when they are scientifically sound, one could argue with similar reasons for the inverse expectations. (If testosterone grants men social leniency to be more expressive of frustration and anger, why does menstruation not call for a similar grace?) The foundation of many of these hyperspecific categorizations are a stretch, much like the reasoning one comes up with when playing “Forcemeat”. They latch onto something like assumptions based on shaky conclusions drawn from a cultural myth of a bygone era, which itself was a departure from the previous assumption of blah blah blah blah blah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is all to say that engaging with this silly poem not only resonated with my experience but helped me put into words what makes me so averse, both personally and intellectually, to the gender binary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now everyone else, stop reading for a bit. This next part is just for my mom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013\u2013<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hi, Mom!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was sort of planning on this being an open secret for the rest of my life. Had Outlook not added my email signature\u2013\u2013with my changed name and pronouns\u2013\u2013to that message I sent you a while ago, I was going to try keeping it a closed secret. Well, as closed as I could keep it after sharing very vocally with my middle school classmates my hope that puberty would grant me hairy arms and a beard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been so scared about trying to explain this to any of my family, not because I\u2019m scared of being disowned\u2013\u2013I know your love is unconditional\u2013\u2013but because I freeze when I even try to think of how I would articulate what it means to consider oneself \u201cnonbinary\u201d to you. I hate arguing and I hate conflict, even in the form of the most sophisticated and gentlemanly debate. I would shatter into a million pieces if any of you responded by starting with so much as the word \u201cBut.\u201d That\u2019s caused me to let a gap grow between us. But now, analyzing this poem has given me the words to explain it, and I\u2019m no longer afraid of that conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe you\u2019re thinking, why not live with the \u201cmuskmelon\u201d label and do whatever I feel like anyways? You yourself were a tomboy (or tomrat, if we\u2019re speaking metaphorically.) In some ways you grew up to be a thomaswoman. In fact, my own upbringing didn\u2019t pigeonhole me into a strict definition of womanhood as readers might assume, given the little \u201cTwilight Zone\u201d episode they just read. What makes me so sure I haven\u2019t been a muskrattish muskmelon, or a boyish girl, or a masculine woman? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a practical, everyday level, I feel so much more comfortable with myself outside the labels of female\/male, labels which feel as irrelevant to how I carry myself as the labels muskmelon\/muskrat do to most people on earth. Being referred to with she\/her pronouns felt like wearing a really uncomfortable sweater that irritates my skin, a fashion choice which is liable to make me 54% grumpier on any given day. I physically <\/em>felt better when I came out to my friends and colleagues as Jamie Manias, when I wasn\u2019t referred to as a muskmelon <\/em>all the fuckin\u2019 time, when people knew that they\u2019d likely misinterpret me if they looked at me through the paradigm of man- or womanhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a touchy-feely \u201cwho am I\u201d level, \u201cmelon\u201d or \u201cwoman\u201d being the core descriptor of me as a person\u2013\u2013the noun onto which every other aspect of myself is an adjective piled on\u2013\u2013does not feel accurate at all. To be considered a masculine woman is still to be considered, grammatically and socially, a woman above anything else. More than that, it is to be considered a woman who is bad at being a woman, according to the rules of the mutually exclusive binary. Like being a cold pot of coffee or a shy public speaker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe you\u2019re thinking that the way people see me won\u2019t be affected at all by my coming out, that they\u2019ll always see me as a woman. That it\u2019s practically impossible for anyone to mentally accept someone as \u201cin-between\u201d or \u201cneither.\u201d That this binary\u2013\u2013even if it is as silly as a binary of melons and rats\u2013\u2013can\u2019t really be set aside by anyone. That could be true, especially of me. (It\u2019s hard to divorce a pronoun like \u201cshe\u201d from a rack like mine.) But even if the only thing that\u2019s changed is the way people refer to me, that still makes me feel more at home in my own skin. That was a rare feeling for me before realizing this about myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyways, give Morty and Bella lots of pets for me. Keep the pool table ready, I\u2019ll see you over Spring Break.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With much love,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jamie Manias.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013\u2013<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I often fear that I neglect my duty to this burning, burning world by wasting my time and talent on writing poetry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But before playing \u201cForcemeat,\u201d I was planning on never having this conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was terrified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought I could never clearly communicate my internal experience to anyone not already well-versed in gender-ology. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe I can\u2019t. Maybe I can\u2019t communicate it to anyone<\/em>. But that\u2019s not the point. The point is that even if nobody understands me any better, even if the writer of \u201cForcemeat\u201d is appalled by my interpretation (hi Henry!), even if I\u2019m banished from the academy for my mad science of grafting a board game to a living poem, no matter what, I found a way to explain myself to myself<\/em> here. And if a poem can give that to someone, maybe I\u2019m not wasting my time as a poet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013\u2013Jamie Manias (they\/them), Mid-American Review<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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