Sometimes I Feel Heterosexual, Sometimes Lesbian

The idea isn’t entirely new, but it lends itself to a broader, more global view of all things human. Three years ago, Sabrina Imbler and her book “As Far as the Light Reaches: The Creatures of the Deep Sea and What They Tell Me About Life.” The question at the time was what sea creatures have to do with queer life, with racism, with body culture and the cult of thinness, with sexism? To answer Imbler: nothing and yet everything.

And how does Nikki Dekker answer the question in her debut novel Tieftiefblau? Because in her work too, stories about flatfish, guppies, seals, sperm whales and many other sea beings mingle with the fundamental questions of what it means to be human, of sexuality, and of all that we not without justification call relationship knots. Wherever love and desire are at stake and questions of identity intrude, interpersonal life tends to become—quite literally—complicated. And so Dekker asks:

What does it take to become who you are? […] I believe that the “why” question seeks a different kind of knowledge, the validation of the self. The knowledge that you are not alone. That you can recognize yourself in something. In a mirror, in a surface of water.

Only the novel doesn’t stop at the reflective surface. The author, stepping out from the narrator’s first-person perspective, dives deep into the emotional landscapes of people, synchronizing them with the sea worlds and the peculiarities of their inhabitants. They can feel strange and odd to us, but a critical self-reflection shows that humans are rarely less strange. And the insights are sometimes substantial, and equally surprising.

Struggles with the Label “Bisexual”

The debut novel Tieftiefblau, now translated from Dutch and published by Residenz Verlag, had already appeared in the Netherlands in 2022, where the 1989-born Amersfoort native Nikki Dekker lives and works. It was preceded by an essay- and poetry collection, followed in 2024 by “Graafdier,” in which Dekker delves into the ground beneath our feet, effectively digging a tunnel through the Dutch landscapes and encountering not only moles but a good deal of submerged history.

Hard to say exactly how autofiction sits within this novel. What we have is a first-person narrator who sleeps with women and men and still has trouble with the label “bisexual,” collecting a lot of episodes from her still-young life. Flashbacks to childhood and school days weave with the present in a constant back-and-forth. The chapters are titled, for instance, “Mermaid,” “Flatfish,” “Kraken,” “Clownfish,” “Seahorse,” or “Sperm Whale,” but also “Swim Class” or simply “Water.”

As with Imbler, the question remains how all of this connects to the narrator’s self-search. Sometimes the worlds and observations sit side by side in near-silence, but then there are narratives with clear, almost simple messages. For instance, in the “Mermaid” section, the narrator tells her friend Vicky she has professed her love four times and was met only with the curt reply that she would not feel the same, and whether she is sure that it isn’t simply self-indulgence. The mermaid serves as an apt parable here: wanting what one cannot have. But really, Dekker says, it isn’t about love so much as recognition.

“Why do you have to sleep with all these people?”

Early on, the narrator bears the label “lesbian.” But she knows this much more precisely, for she also finds men attractive. She also faces the classic prejudice: “You have no criteria for sexual partners; your door is always open.”

Still, the question persists: “Why do you have to sleep with all these people?” The fact that the sex theme is addressed in the chapter dedicated to the jellyfish likely has to do with the fascination with this creature’s mutability. In danger, they can retreat, as if a butterfly were squeezed back into a cocoon.

Ultimately, the sober insight about sex follows: “It basically always comes down to the same thing. Bodies rubbing against each other. Hands and mouths. With some you have to bypass semen, with others the tampon string, but that’s about all there is, really, not much more.”

Astonishing stories, close to life

On the beach, the narrator and her friend Rosa collect seashells washed up by the sea. In nightlife, the men she collects for her archive of experiences must be good at kissing. The verdict: “Finally I’m living the life I imagined. I’m getting what I want, and I’m popular, refined, independent, without emotion.”

As openly as the narrator lives her life in search of herself, so openly does this novel present itself in its narrative form—like the author tipped an overfull index card box of stories into the book, with stories that alternately align with the sea or with life and share a common meaning, overlap and complement one another. And then there are stories that run side by side without a relationship, where the art of combination fails.

It’s remarkable that this doesn’t hamper the reading pleasure. Why should it? For Dekker knows how to surprise with new stories and experiences at every turn. She remains entertaining even when things take a serious turn. The book is held together, so to speak, by its closeness to life, whether in water or on land. And the answer to the question of why she sleeps with all those people is given on page 267:

Perhaps my sexual desire has simply been split into two, and that’s why “bisexual” is such a problematic word. It implies a wholeness I have never felt. I feel occasionally heterosexual, occasionally lesbian.