Anthony Oliveira

Like the bible, Dayspring is poetic and very queer. It's viscerally incarnate, and about love. As someone else whose childhood was firmly Catholicised it was so familiar and so sad—I was brought right back to the rooms in which I argued with my catechism and CCD teachers, and personally, lost my faith. There are still some so beautiful things that I miss—the messages I always felt I was reading opposite of everyone else—and somehow this book contains all of them. It doesn't ignore all the things about religion that are anathema to faith and love, but here at least love is stronger. This one will stay with me a while.… (mere)

Happy Easter! So, this is an ambitious book. And I don't think I'll be able to fully capture the great extent the author has explored same-sex desire and Christianity, but I will try. Bear with me.

Dayspring is not so much a novel as a loose collection of free verse, Biblical passages, and poetry by Christian authors of the past millennia put together as a meditation on the naturalness of same-sex desire and the religion. Much is noted for you, but most is not: it's up to the reader to disentangle what is a reworked passage of Kings, what is a phrase from a John Milton poem, and what is the author's own words. More than an author, Oliveira is a collage artist: much like musicians sampling a beat, the author retools the works of two millennia of Christian thought on the erotics of Christ into a contemporary understanding, adding his own lyrics to the greater sampling he has pulled from the pits.

The book follows the point of view of "John the Beloved," the beloved disciple of Christ, as he grapples with the intensity (dare I say, sometimes abusiveness) of his connection with Jesus while knowing how his loved one's story will always end. A bit like Achilles and Patroclus, with some interesting HIV/AIDS vibes, John narrates the story of Jesus, complete with twenty-something disciples, single-mother Mary, and vivacious Mary Magdalene.

The experience felt a bit like archeology. I was raised quite religiously in the "Evangelical" Pentecostal church and would attend Mass with my grandma in the summer. I learned a lot of the Bible, but not nearly enough to keep quite up with this. I spent the first half pretty intensely glossing it: beyond the usual canon, Oliveira makes use of Apocrypha, texts from the Koran, and later Medieval tradition to draw the greatest amount of material on the life of Christ as he can. For obvious reasons, much of the first half works in the story of David and Johnathan, with the Gospels coming in heavy as the story of Jesus' preaching begins.

One of the most coherent uses of Christian texts is the plethora of Beguine and "Free Spirit" thinkers. All of the big ones (Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, Sister Catherine Treatise) make an appearance, and when paired with poetry from the "mainstream" work Juan de la Cruz, make a cogent argument for the ridiculousness of the former's prosecution. In these, Oliveira highlights the eroticism and emotional intensity of the potential relationship with Christ.

The story is also far from linear. Weaving in and out of Biblical towns set-dressed with contemporary objects, slang, and scenarios, the author has done what Christians have done since the beginning of time—place them in a time and place that allows us to relate to these figures as closely as humanly possible. It took a little for me to buy into it, but with 400 pages to play in, I quickly figured out how to wrestle with it. Just as desire is timeless, so is God—and just as he is omnipresent—so is time.

There's far, far too much to go into detail with everything that this book plays with. I recommend glossing as I did to some extent, but make sure to watch out for obvious reworks of the Gospels, the Old Testament histories, and Revelations. So much Revelations. The author absolutely soaks his prose in Biblical imagery, often taking phrases, sentences, and whole pages into it. It's tangled and beautiful, but a tiny bit the reason why I could not rate this 5 stars. With so much taken from other sources, much of the construction of this is simply other people's work. That's fine. I think Oliveira is a talented writer and obviously an extremely talented synthesizer, but I could not in good conscience pretend that he is the sole progenitor of the entirety of this work.

Being a person of even some faith in God while being queer is often more a headache than it's worth. Most people think you're secretly self-hating or delusional, and maybe we are, but my relationship with God and religion will always be a warm place in my heart I can call to when at my lowest. It's no surprise that many try to disavow as much of their past as they can, so this work was a wonderful, wonderful read over Holy Week, and I'm grateful for it.… (mere)