Dossier: “The Future of Threat is Forever”: Canadian Apocalyptic Fiction
To Be a Starfish: Identity and Community in Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu and Vivek Shraya’s I’m Afraid of Men
By Nadyne Kuhn
In 1996, the band Antony and the Johnsons released a song titled “Cripple and the Starfish.” This song inspired Eva Hayward to write a chapter in Queering the Non/Human titled “Lessons from a Starfish,” in which she described the link between a starfish’s regeneration and transgender people’s transformation: “… I wondered if starfish…, or more properly ‘sea stars’, might provide some prefixal lessons or guides through language, metaphor and other tropological terrains. Do some starfish not re-generate themselves from injury?” (Hayward 251).
Larissa Lai, in The Tiger Flu, and Vivek Shraya, in I’m Afraid of Men, deconstruct and heal both identity and community through the symbolic use of the starfish.
The Regenerative Body
Eva Hayward writes that “trans, a prefix weighted with across, beyond, through… does the now-familiar work of suggesting the unclassifiable” (253). In The Tiger Flu, Larissa Lai presents Peristrophe Halliana, a cloned character with literal starfish-like regenerative qualities, who earns the title because of her innate ability to regrow body parts: “Auntie Radix already took Peristrophe Halliana’s liver a week ago, and one of her kidneys four weeks before that. Auntie Radix says that is the duty and nature of a starfish to give” (18). Peristrophe not only defies bodily limitations but also challenges what it means to be a woman and to be human. Therefore, Lai subverts categorizations by presenting Peristrophe Halliana’s body as “unclassifiable,” and often transforming through her willing anatomical donation and regeneration (Hayward 253). By doing so, Lai’s narrative introduces an apocalyptic theme not only of endings but also of the possibility of new beginnings by presenting a new human.
The Grist Sisterhood, a community of cloned women, further suggests starfish qualities. According to Hayward, “some species of starfish also reproduce asexually by fission, often with part of an arm becoming detached and eventually developing into an independent individual sea star” (258). Lai’s decision to present doublers, Grist sisters who bear children, as reproducing via parthenogenesis continues to propel the deconstruction of identities while proposing a new future for women by creating the opportunity to live in a world without the need for men. Furthermore, labour is another form of transformation, with a part of the pregnant person “detach[ing]” from their body, in a manner similar to a starfish (Hayward 258). The character Corydalis is a doubler within the Grist community and goes into labour:
The little sister slips out of her holy hole covered in blood and womb snot. One section of umbilical cord attaches to the belly button, but another section branches back into Corydalis… I snip the umbilical cord at each of the seven branches and tie the knots for their little belly buttons. (94–95)
From this birth, we see Corydalis transform into a doubler, emerging from her seven “independent individual sea star[s]” (Hayward 258). Given that Corydalis’ labour occurs immediately after an attack on the Grist sisterhood, Lai presents the apocalyptic idea of loss and rebirth by suggesting the possibility of a renewed sisterhood, beginning with the seven babies. The memory of their lives will endure as long as there are survivors.
Regeneration Through Transition
Hayward’s starfish regeneration theory is particularly applicable to Vivek Shraya’s memoir I’m Afraid of Men, as illustrated by the question: “Do some starfish not regenerate themselves from injury?” (251). Shraya’s descriptions of her daily life as a transgender woman are often cruel; however, there are brief moments when she allows herself to feel happiness about her transition:
… I’d come out as trans just five months earlier and was also named a grand marshal. Wearing a pale peach dress with a matching lip and bindi, I march down some of Toronto’s busiest streets… I experience an unusual and magnificent shift in my body. For a brief thirty minutes, I am released from fear. I forget about men.” (41)
The choice of the word “shift” is important here (Shraya 41). Hayward writes that “classification is evaded for something more ‘transformative’, something ‘that starts in one place and ends in another place’” (253). Shraya begins in fear (“starts in one place”) and transitions to happiness (“ends in another place”), and though it is a quick “shift,” Shraya regenerates (Hayward 253). Living authentically and happily gives Shraya a moment of freedom from the oppressive patriarchal system that polices women’s identities and femininity. Considering that the root of apocalyptic literature is to reveal, Shraya exposes the injustices against transgender women of colour. However, it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that the “shift” can also move from happiness to fear (Shraya 41). As Alok Vaid-Menon states in Beyond the Gender Binary, “they tell us to ‘be ourselves’, but if you listen closely, there’s more to that sentence: ‘… until you make them uncomfortable’” (9). Trans people continually regenerate like a starfish after injury as a means of survival. They have to remain in flux.
Community as Both Injury and Healing
Eva Hayward wrote that “…the starfish [is] being chewed on an economy of excess, carnality, materiality and indexicality” (259). In Lai’s novel The Tiger Flu, capitalist greed infects the Grist sisterhood, creating ripple effects of the complexities of being part of a community:
Peristrophe Halliana and I have seen the new monsoons only nineteen times each. We are barely old enough to do what we do. Auntie Radix has been drenched by the rains forty-eight times. It should be her job to sacrifice for us, not the other way round. (Lai 18)
A straightforward intersectional analysis would note the ages that add a layer of complexity to Kirilow’s criticism. According to Audre Lorde’s essay “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” ageism is one of the differences that creates an “insurmountable barrier” (2). Ageism is evident in both Kirilow’s criticism of Auntie Radix’s privilege and in the overuse of Auntie Radix in childbearing. Despite living in a world where the patriarchy is weakened and in an isolated community, there are still remnants of its influence, such as capitalistic tendencies. Both Auntie Radix and Peristrophe are victims within their own community: Auntie Radix is taking advantage of Peristrophe’s starfish qualities, and the community itself is taking advantage of Auntie Radix being the last doubler. Both women are being used excessively and treated as commodities, even though it is for the good of the community.
On the other hand, the community can also be healing. Lai illustrates this in the birth scene, where Kirilow helps Corydalis through labour, and when all three women nurse the litter of babies. The scene becomes a moment of collective care: “I’m washed in family love as the three of us nurse together” (Lai 95). The intricacies of the Grist sisterhood play with the starfish metaphor: they are at once “injured,” with the capitalist excess embodied by Peristrophe and Auntie Radix, and “regenerating” themselves through the love the sisters have for each other (Hayward 251). The literal Grist sisterhood can also be seen as a starfish, with the destroyed community as the body and Kirilow, Bombyx Mori, and Corydalis as detached arms that will eventually form a new “independent individual sea star,” i.e., a community (Hayward 258).
Similarly, as with Lai’s Grist sisters in their supposedly utopian community, in Shraya’s I’m Afraid of Men, the patriarchy pervades even the safest of spaces. Shraya describes an incident that occurred in a gay bar:
I recall a memory from the gay bar in Edmonton almost a decade earlier, when a cute boy had squeezed my nipple as he passed me on the stairs. I remember my best friend and me celebrating this moment as victory. Years later, this “validation” doesn’t have the same lustre. I stay for a few more songs before I say my goodbyes and leave the bar, alone. (33)
Her body is treated as a commodity in what should be an inclusive and safe space. Hayward notes that “… transformation is a means of ‘addressing a hurt, and of moving through that hurt’” (250). Transformation does not have to be a literal cut; Shraya instead shows a shift in her view of the experience. Vaid-Menon states, “pain does not have to be visible to be real, and violence does not have to be physical to be serious” (42). For example, severing ties with a community is a kind of cut that allows a person to grow independently and find another community, which can be healing. Finally, Vivek Shraya’s memoir itself symbolizes the starfish because not only is she reaching out to a new community through her writing and, hopefully, healing in the process, but she is also giving a part of herself to the world. The book itself thus becomes its own “independent individual sea star” (Hayward 258).
Conclusion
Apocalyptic literature allows authors to interrogate established structures and, through the symbolism of the starfish, to challenge dominant narratives about identity and community. In an interview with Jennifer Estévez Yanes and Sheila Hernández González, Larissa Lai stated:
There are many stories told about our death and destruction in which we are disposable and incidental to the main narrative… So I feel that, politically, it is important to show our survival, to show that we have continued, to show that we are the protagonists of our own stories. (155)
It is important to have stories that centre diverse voices, so that oppressive systems can be criticized. Both Vivek Shraya and Larissa Lai show the necessity of ending the patriarchy and its limiting categorizations of identity. By using the starfish’s ability to regenerate, we can see that it is a cyclical transformation that can also allude to the transfer of memory. Cultural memory persists because there are always survivors, such as the starfish’s limbs that continue to reproduce. And just like the starfish regenerating its limbs, isn’t the Apocalypse really just another transformation?
Works Cited
- Antony and the Johnsons, “Cripple and the Starfish.” God Shave the Queen!, Never Records, 1996, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2IOHGlXMv4
- Hayward, Eva. “Lessons from a Starfish.” Queering the Non/Human, editors Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird, Ashgate Publishing Company, 2008, pp. 249–263, https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/2022-03-02_621f861792f2e_noreen-giffney-queering-the-nonhuman.pdf#page=278
- Lai, Larissa. The Tiger Flu. Fifth Printing. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2024 [2018].
- Lorde, Audre. “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”. Sister Outsider Crossing Press, 1984, https://www.roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu/devdev/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/AudreLorde-Writings3.pdf
- Shraya, Vivek. I’m Afraid of Men. Penguin Books, 2018.
- Vaid-Menon, Alok. Beyond The Gender Binary. Penguin Workshop, 2020.
- Yanes, Jennifer Estévez and Sheila Hernández González. “Hope, but also Danger”: A Conversation with Larissa Lai on not Going Back and the ‘Re’ of Recuperation. Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies, vol 13, 2024, pp. 143–157, https://doi.org/10.14201/candb.v13i143-157.
Notice biographique
Nadyne Kuhn
Nadyne Kuhn (elle) est une autrice et actrice qui a joué dans de nombreuses productions du Hubcity Theatre, notamment récemment dans le rôle d’Adriana dans The Comedy of Errors de Shakespeare in the Park. Elle a désormais décidé de réorienter sa carrière et entamera à l’automne 2026 une maîtrise en…
Nadyne Kuhn (elle) est une autrice et actrice qui a joué dans de nombreuses productions du Hubcity Theatre, notamment récemment dans le rôle d’Adriana dans The Comedy of Errors de Shakespeare in the Park. Elle a désormais décidé de réorienter sa carrière et entamera à l’automne 2026 une maîtrise en littérature canadienne comparée à l’Université de Moncton.
Pour citer cet article :
