Queering the Prophet, On Jonah, and Other Activists Edited by L. J. M. Claassens, S. V. Davidson, C van der Walt, A Thyssen

This is at times a mystifying collection of essays – these are academics soaked in Queer theory talking primarily to other academics equally soaked in theory and I felt much of it went over my head.

Some of the thinking about “queer” as a category pushed my thinking, it is not just about sexuality or gender identity – to be coded as “queer” can include most instances of othering.

In Rhiannon Graybill’s essay around consent they quote Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha “I want to venture: What if some things aren’t fixable?What if some things really never will be the same – and that might not be great, but it might be okay?… What if some trauma wounds really never will go away – and we still might have great lives?” It feels that often there is a desire today to try and magic away trauma - that to live with your wounds is to be limited to being “victim” - but the resurrected Christ still had wounds – death was conquered but the wounds were carried. Is it glib to say that you can only be a survivor if you acknowledge the experiences you have survived.

Steed Vernyl Davidson offers the insight that “queerness serves as a useful tool in the politics of freedom precisely because social ordering benefits from difference” - which I read as saying when you get your elbows out and make a bit of new ground to be you it should not be a selfish act – in that clearing others will find the light to shine to.

In the second half of the collection the writers turned from the text of Jonah more to their own contexts, and this was enriching as for many of them that context is South Africa and the insights springing from that nation’s complex past contrast with our own. Some things familiar some in sharp relief to me.

Life History by William Ward Butler

https://ghostcitypress.com/ (although I doesn't list UK shipping on the website if you ask them nicely on Instagram they will send you a copy!)

William Ward Butler’s poem in issue 13 of Fourteen Poems was so brilliant that I had to get hold of this pamphlet – it arrived mid-morning one Saturday and I abandoned what I was doing and had consumed it before lunch.

The first poem, Evening, concludes “… | When the mice look up to an owl descending upon them, | why wouldn’t they think it’s the face of God?” wow – I don’t know where to put myself in response to that question.

I found Leave Me such a complex poem – what does “Leave Me” mean – the line “… Leave me | in the morning, in bed...” might be just a request for a lie in, but it feels more “… Leave me | with something to talk about with | my therapist...” is talking about something more – this is a poem about goodbye?

Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis is powerful and uncomfortable

“… | If there is an almighty voyeur above us, if they could end suffering | at a moment’s notice, what does it mean that an amoral company did it | first? | … “

I also tagged

Family History

Bird Away – for its rage

Reading Cavafy by Candlelight

Stupid Ocean

The Queer Arab Glossary Edited by Marwan Kaabour

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers      

Kaabour provides us with a wittily important insight in the richness of queer lives beyond the confines of White Western stereotypes.

Haitham Haddad’s illustrations play with the literal meanings of the words and phrases used to describe queer people – some of the words are harsh but these illustrations are a playful act of reclaiming identity.

That there are so many words for queer people is a testament to the fact that queer people have always been a part of every culture – but this is not a naïve utopia, that most of the words are either about effeminate men or masculine women – often words/slurs used about them – as Sophie Chamas reflects in one of the accompanying essays “this glossary, largely documents the language through which queer Arabs are linguistically fashioned and re-fashioned into deviants by society at large” - but within that mix there are words of self-identification as Sophie Chamas continues it “allows queer Arabs to refuse the injunction to be either queer of Arab… It is a reminder that archives need not be authorised… they can be felt, be swallowed, be spat back out, and that language and people can be a home when place is unwelcoming.”

Mejdulene Bernard Shomali offers the insight that “language will always be insufficient to narrate the intimacies of our lives. Language hints, hovers, and caresses but it does not complete of capture … Even if we redress biased absences … there would still be more: more feeling, more flesh, more experience, more subject than the language can bear. This failure of language for me is not exclusively a failure. I am drawn to what cannot be named.”

Finally I will mention Nisrine Chaer who points to out that among the many challenges LGBT+ refugees encounter there is one of language, as the categories of Western identity are taken to be universal but they are in fact cultural products – an individual’s identity isn’t but the ways in which it is framed are – in moving cultural contexts you lose the frames of reference to give meaning to your own identity.

Poetry Unbound edited by Pádraig Ó Tuama

https://onbeing.org/series/poetry-unbound/

This book was born out of the podcast of the same name, it is a collection of 50 brilliant poems, but the delight is the commentary Pádraig provides, he opens up the poems, with a gentleness that never risks overwhelming the poets own voice, but just gives you the hints and nudges you need to encounter the true richness of the work.

Of the poems I tagged the following…

Book of Genesis by Ken Miller

Phase One by Dilruba Ahmed

Kulila by Ali Cobby Eckermann

How Prayer Works by Kaveh Akbar

Man and Boy by Patience Agbabi

The Place Where We Are Right by Yahuda Amichai (Tr. Stephen Mitchell)

What You Missed that Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade by Brad Aaron Modlin

in large part for Pádraig’s comment on it “This could have been a comfortless poem, but somehow it’s the opposite. It’s the genius of Brad Aaron Modlin to create a poem about feeling left out that somehow makes you feel seen. He felt alone in moments throughout his life, and whilst his isolations aren’t my isolations, somehow thise poem turns – with great respect – to isolations everywhere.”

Living in the Past by Joy Ladin

In Wolf’s Skin by Titilayo Farukuoye

https://stewedrhubarb.org/ 

Having heard Titilayo read their powerful Free Bleed from Fourteen Poems issue 14 I had to get this pamphlet – it is amazing.

One poem from it …

The Body Is Not An Apology

after Sonya Renee Taylor

And yet I apologise.

I step outward

step back     ward

                    duck

                             lean away.

Slide

     pull in my belly

pull in from behind

                               step on my toes

                    duck again

My body is not an apology

and yet

     It’s the only thing

I’ve taught it to do.

& Change Issue 6

www.Andchangepoetry.com

From this issue I tagged these two poems…

Grant Chemidlin’s I Hear the Shower Shutting Off

after D.A. Powell

Jotting down my last thought

before this world ends,

by which I mean

before you come in here completely

naked.

My angel, fallen

keep searching for those lost wings

inside me.

I hope

you never find them.

Each time you come

the world ends,

by which I mean

begins.

A sudden bursting.

Mark Ward’s In the Air

I make you come without either of us

touching your dick. And the awe in your face.

We are surrounded by fog. You drove us

up the mountains, beyond where lovers park.

I’d got out to take a piss and couldn’t

see in front of me: not fog, but thick clouds -

a Super Mario level where the world

theoretically exists below us

but only if you fall. A car crept by.

It just missed hitting us. It doesn’t

realise we are here. You have never been

as relaxed as this. Our hard breathing slows,

softens. Shall we go? I nod and you drive

thought the clouds, my face pressed to the windscreen.

He Wants by Alison Moore

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This might contain some spoilers…

Once again Alison Moore unsettles us in the ordinariness to this tale. 

Lewis, his Father Lawrence, his Daughter Ruth, and Grandchild ‘the Boy’ share the multi-generational tale. It is a tale filled with regret, although exactly what that regret relates to remains ambiguous.

Lawrence is in a nursing home, living with confusion. Lewis seems to be struggling too, living without a purpose, shrinking into himself.

And then a childhood friend returns, Sydney, memories return, often uncomfortably – Lewis had a crush on Sydney, and maybe the feeling was mutual.

We watched the film Moffie while I was reading He Wants, and the shame Nicholas holds in that film is the same shame that Lewis holds – despite their radically different contexts.

Lewis and Sydney appear not to have crossed a threshold when they were young, but there is an intimate encounter when they meet again in old age – however on Sydney’s part it is policed as a one off. Nicholas gets one brief kiss, and then rejection when they are reunited after military service is over. These are honest rather than ‘Hollywood’ endings.

Perhaps the most radical thing about Moore’s writing is its focus on middle age – to pay real attention to those at or beyond the point of retirement is a rare thing.