Barrelhouse Reviews: Failure to Comply by [sarah] Cavar

Reviewed by mk zariel

Featherproof Books / August 2024 / 280 pp

In a future dystopia, health is treated as a measure of moral perfection. Citizens’ weights are measured on the daily, their every decision is monitored, and trans and disabled individuals are punished for “deviance.” An all-powerful coordinating body–RSCH, an acronym that is never explained–determines every citizen’s physical decisions, from their gender identity to their food choices, and dissent is punished by exile and forced memory loss. When a young person comes out as nonbinary, they can only communicate their pronouns to the people they trust most or else risk severe state repression. Citizenship is everything, whereas autonomy is nothing.

This hellscape is a product of trans author, editor, and anarchist [sarah] Cavar’s imagination. In their debut poetic novel Failure To Comply, they interrogate the connections between trans becoming, morphological freedom, hegemonic state power, and beauty standards surrounding health. 

The novel opens with the narrator’s depiction of separation from their nonbinary lover Reya and impending state repression: “the long necked axe struck me clean of my most beloved memories. Had my beloved been here with me, they could not have helped. There are things, I learn, that they cannot do.” Cavar depicts an environment of intense physical control–characters are physically tortured due to differences in their weight, desires to change their bodies, physical intersex characteristics, and variable consumption of food (which, by the way, is entirely uniform and controlled by RSCH). Even the feeling of dysphoria is considered transgressive.

While Failure To Comply is, on its face, commentary on state repression of embodiment, it also has a subtler message: resisting capitalist commodification. Under RSCH, every physical need, from hunger to the desire for gender transition, is answered by a product of some kind. For example, the characters’ only experience of food involves their meal-replacement shakes, which they are forced to drink regardless of their sensory needs, and the solid food that some eat, only to face punishment for the slight increase in their weight. Gender is similarly scrutinized and made palatable, with a slew of paperwork explaining each character’s physical sex–yet both protagonists, being trans, are perceived as deviant. Despite the repression they face, they find more freedom in their genders than any character who can be defined or explained away. Echoing the queercore adage that butch and trans bodies are the only reality that cannot be made into a product, Reya and the narrator feel both freedom and upsetting nonconformity, as no state-sanctioned commodity can quickly resolve their desires.

Throughout the novel, the nameless main character faces persecution by RSCH for their transhuman body, memories that are decidedly not state-sanctioned, and queer desire for Reya. When RSCH kidnaps them, the narrative becomes poetically disjointed, moving between multiple timeframes as they slowly lose their forbidden memories and identity, all the while fighting to maintain some semblance of identity and conflictuality. Lacking a strictly linear plot, Failure To Comply reads more like a collection of boldly queer prose-poetry than a traditional novel. As the protagonist’s mind breaks down, so too does the language. Cavar uses the space of the page creatively; when RSCH makes a proclamation the font is larger and bolder than the rest of the text, requiring the reader to physically turn the book in order to understand. Similarly, as the state repression intensifies, the spacing between words becomes irregular and arrhythmic–mirroring the uncertainty and derealization to which oppression so often leads. 

By the end of Failure To Comply, as RSCH captures the narrator and they lose all contact with Reya, the imagery shifts from technological and artificial to symbolic and primal. In their last autonomous memory, they have a vision of what could have been, a sentient “green beyond” of trans becoming and possibility, before the words start to break up and they become unconscious. 

I read all 280 pages of Failure To Comply in one sitting on the way home from a queer+trans anarchist convergence, and while rapt in Cavar’s joyously disordered and glitched form of poetry, I couldn’t help but wonder what the tragic ending of the text meant in a political context. In today’s queer liberationist milieu, an “anarchism of despair” is a frequent talking point in podcasts and communiques, speakers frequently cite nihilist manifestoes such as Blessed Is The Flame, and rather than discussing the tactics of traditional organizing, we pontificate over egoism, futureless negation, and the collapse of linear time, all in the comments section. Rather than using the language of oppression, we frame transness as inherently conflictual, hoping to find some meaning in societal harms. We find comfort in the “beyond” of organizing without an idealized future and instead centering desire. Rather than drawing hope from the idea that anarchy could work on a large scale, we instead find meaning in the inherent unresolvable anarchy of our own lived experiences.

In some readings, this text is pessimistic, symbolically portraying trans people as well-intentioned but impractical dreamers who prefer poetic and synaesthetic imagery to reality. However, given the apocalyptic repression that our community faces in the real world–ecocidal governments and corporations, legislation that threatens our fundamental right to our bodies, the ever-present threat of hateful violence–I prefer to see Cavar’s nameless deviant protagonist as a symbol of resistance, holding on to their desires even as their mind decays under the pressure of the state. Rather than performatively giving up hope and resigning themself to oppression, this character instead evokes today’s foundational anarcho-nihilist idea that in circumstances of oppression, one must center the inherent joy of negating control. Failure To Comply is not revolutionary or utopian, but it is also not a cautionary tale. Instead, it is a manifesto of trans resilience, of choosing to live in an ungoverned body knowing the repression it entails, of poetry and intentional chaos, of willful conflict with the state. Without any concessions to a utopian future, [sarah] Cavar faces authoritarianism head-on, and in doing so, articulates a boldly anti-repression form of queer anarchy.

mk zariel (it/its) is a transmasculine poet, theater artist, & insurrectionary anarchist. it is fueled by folk-punk, Emma Goldman, and existential dread. it can be found online at https://linktr.ee/mkzariel, creating conflictually queer-anarchic spaces, and being mildly feral in the great lakes region. it is kinda gay ngl.