ALOK contains multitudes. The non-binary comedian, poet, writer, speaker, actor, social media star, and a hundred other things defies easy descriptions of what they do—and that’s the point. 

To them, after all, genres or mediums are limiting. “People are hungering for honesty. And what's honest is that humans are complex and contradictory,” they say. “To be human is to live outside of easy categorization.” If we’re already throwing out the gender binary, after all, what other structures can we chuck?

Ahead of their show at the Chan Centre as part of this year’s Indian Summer Festival, ALOK found some time in between tour stops for a Q&A—about beauty, book reports, and being a water sign. 

Happy Pride month! How has your tour been going? 

Exhilarating. Life-changing. Having the time of my life. 

You’ve worn a lot of different artistic hats, and performance—and humour—has long been part of your work. How did you make the leap into more explicitly doing comedy?

Since 2017, comedy has been an integral ingredient to my shows. I used to improvise comedic bits between poems on stage. And soon—I found myself having the most fun doing the comedy parts. So it felt less like a leap, and more like a chortle. I just wanted to have a good time. 

Maybe another way of thinking about it is: How did I get to a place where I wanted to have a good time? For a long time, I didn't think that was possible for someone like me. When I look at some of my older writing it's evident to me that I believed that living a gender non-conforming life meant that I was doomed to a life of misery and loneliness. But through my (ongoing) healing journey I realized that the only point of activation I had to describe my gender non-conformity was through cis people's anxieties and projections about it, not my lived reality. 

During quarantine, I realized that being gender non-conforming had allowed me to find such spectacular community, such abundant friendships, such humour and zest for life. In other words, I began to recognize gender non-conformity not as an impediment to happiness, but one of my primary vehicles toward it. In that way my comedy came from a place of celebration, of triumph! I'm having fun being here, as me!

Does trying to divide your work into different mediums or genres make sense to you, or is it all part of one greater thing?

All I'm doing is becoming. Becoming is a river. And every attempted fistful of water from a river reveals that more is lost than gained. So too with a category, or a genre: I find that they conceal more than they reveal. What is so spectacular about art is it initiates ways of being that we don't have language for yet, sensations that we didn't know were possible yet. Why must we confine it? 

Being able to label art as “drama” or “comedy”, “scripted” or “reality”, makes it easier to package and sell. But my hope is that our reliance on these categories continues to wane. When we look at some of the most poignant and impactful art that's been made in the past few years it's often that which defies genre. People are hungering for honesty. And what's honest is that humans are complex and contradictory. To be human is to live outside of easy categorization. 

Comedy has long been an unwelcoming scene to marginalized folks, even as it continues to improve. Did the “comedian” label come with any connotations you weren’t expecting? 

Absolutely. In the show, I talk about how many cisgender women are furious when trans people use the word “woman” to describe ourselves, but men are outraged when we use the word “comedian”.

For so long, transfeminine people have only belonged in comedy as the butt of the joke. Now that we are the ones telling jokes, it really irritates so many men. There's this sense of: "The gall of these people to think they are funny!" And I'm like: "Sorry—weren't you guys the ones laughing at me for the past 30 years?" This tension: being seen as funny for what we look like, not what we're saying, is something I like exploring in my work. Not just in terms of the jokes I'm writing, but also how I show up on stage as a performer. 

In comedy, there's this idea that we shouldn't care about our aesthetics, that we should just show up on stage in the most simple outfit (as if simplicity is not also an aesthetic). Comedy clubs are not really known for their backstage lighting to do makeup, that's for sure! But for me fashion and beauty are extensions of the humor—some of my jokes are landed precisely through the blinking of an eyelash.

How much of your public persona, onstage or on social media, is separate from your interiority? Is there a struggle in giving constant, large-scale vulnerability when that is what people have come to expect or love?

Listen, I'm a water sign: vulnerability and oversharing are always going to be a part of my work. I've been in this business—by which I mean sharing my pain with strangers—for a while now. And one thing that I've become more concerned with is the disproportionate, almost fetishistic consumption of trans pain. And yes, pain is a component of our lives, but it's not constitutional to them.

Liberal audiences are more comfortable with the idea of transfeminine people like me suffering than thriving. There's this deep commitment to pity and charity: “Oh! Life is so hard for you, here I am here to support you, to rescue you. I'm not like other people, because I'm here to… rescue you.” It's about a particular performance of being progressive, being “different.” But when I'm on stage making jokes that challenge that frame—that say that, “Hey this brown, transfeminine life is actually… pretty awesome! I'm doing fine!” That challenges some audiences, confronts them. 

There's this way that transfeminine life is only appreciated when we are tragic or triumphant: buried in the underground or exalted in the heavens. What I'm trying to do with my comedy is to assert the fleshy, basic, ordinary nature of transfeminine life. To say that we are here, alongside you, now. Not just in the past or the future, but here. That we deserve to be just as insufferable, just as mundane, just as human as you.

Your show in Vancouver is part of the Indian Summer Festival. This year’s theme is Paradox: “the beauty of contradictions… the dualities that shape our existence… a celebration of the interconnectedness of our seemingly disparate realities.” How does this resonate with you?

I love that. Truth is most often paradoxical and this is a realization held by many non-Western philosophical traditions. It's a meaningful practice of recognizing South Asian immigrant contributions not just to the economy, but to philosophy.

Your Vancouver event includes a Q&A, and you’re always on podcasts and giving interviews. What is gained from dialogue that is different from monologue?

Dialogue is an art form. What I say, how I say it, fundamentally shifts with the presence of the person across me because I have to immediately contend with how my words land in the face of someone else. To find ourselves, we have to find the right people to be in dialogue with. When I'm speaking to someone else I learn so much about me. In this way I have always believed that we need one another in order to get free.

Is there a special significance to performing your trans art at South Asian or diaspora events; and how does that compare to your feelings about performing at explicitly queer events?

One of the benefits of touring all across the world over more than a decade is that I've learned that most of our assumptions about what a “queer” or “South Asian” or even, like, “Scandinavian” audience is are usually misguided. Rather than a sexual orientation or a region, the frame of unit that often makes the most sense to me is: the room. 

Who is in the room that night? Where are they at in their days, their lives? What's going on in the world outside that room, that night? And that's what's so thrilling about being a comic—I truly never know what I'm going to get. Some rooms are so much warmer than I ever imagined. And some—far more obstinate. You just have to adapt accordingly. Even if you're doing the same show over the span of years, no night is the same. 

I have long loved your book reports on Instagram. Why is it important to share and disseminate knowledge?  

Thank you! I started that project because I was concerned with how so much important history, knowledge that could help people make sense of why the world is the way it is, was being gatekept in universities. It's not simply that people are “ignorant,” it's that there are systems at place which have organized people into ignorance—deliberately made information inaccessible from the masses as a way to maintain the status quo. In my own life, having access to scholarship has fundamentally changed me, made me feel so much more conviction and purpose. Like I'm part of something greater than myself. I wanted to share that joy, that sense of rootedness with as many people as possible. Learning is what makes living so exciting. 

How does radical kindness help us to dismantle the harmful constructs of the world?

I grew up in a world that taught me that shame was the only tool for transformation. But shame didn't help me bloom into the fullest and freest version of myself. I came to my transness from other ways: curiosity, compassion, wonder. I have noticed the way that compassion has helped me transform—to go from hating myself and wanting to die, to being so ecstatic about being alive. This transformation gives me so much hope. 

Because I have changed, so too, can the world. Because what is the world but islands of I's? I don't know if compassion will lead us to freedom, but I know coercion won't. So why not try something else? 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

An Evening with ALOK 

When: July 6, 8pm 

Where: Chan Centre for the Performing Arts

Admission: From $39, available here