a f carbajal (he/they) is a queer, non-binary Spanish writer and lecturer living in England. They are Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton, where they teach English Literature and Creative Writing while currently researching the concept of trans*versality. Their work explores issues of self-embodiment and self-expression with wry and aesthetically playful lyricism – and a generous dose of camp. They live on the border between Yorkshire and Lancashire with their civil partner, their son, three cats, a whippet, and around two dozen goldfish.
sing(e) me
I wanted to sound
like
Julie
Andrews and
Emma
Thompson
(Sigh no more
ladies
Sigh no more
In every job that
must get done
there can be an
element
of
fun)
I want to write
like
a
u
d
r
e
l
o
r
d
e
when she
says
Zami
I want to play
like
Maria João
Pires
when she
caresses
Schumann’s
Kinderszenen
I want to hide
my maleness
like a thing
of
yesterday
and find in
the
fem-
-liness
of
my voice
and my
dainty
hands
a way to
my
fragile
self
and to be
proud of
my
fragility
for soft things
deserve to
be loved
to be handled
with care
I am neither
man nor
woman and
I can live with
that—
if you’ll just give
me
Green Gables
and let me
push my
boat down the
river
and let me be
picked up by
Jonathan
Crombie
even if he’s
dead
His sweet mouth
will speak truths
to me and
sing(e) me on the
lips
and then he’ll
grab my furry
buttocks and
tell me it’s
okay
Spit-
spot
My poem “sing(e) me” poured out of me after spotting the call for submissions for the seminal issue of Queer Aesthetics. I saw the call and thought: “This is a place I can call home.” So I set my fingertips to my keyboard, and the rest is theirstory. (Cue in facepalm emoji.)
That makes it sounds easy, doesn’t it? As though poetry existed within us, immanent, or innate; as if the poetic tap can simply be turned on and off at will. When it comes to writing poetry that deals with one’s queer identity and desires, sometimes the muse — as elusive as they can be — can awaken from their slumber and crack the whip. This is what happened when writing “sing(e) me”: it’s a highly personal poem that came out in a torrent, without a filter, without any thoughts given to an implied reader, the publishing industry, or the inner censoring voice most queer writers are familiar with as we try to preempt cishet responses to our work. The reason why my creative process felt so free is that I was aware, as I set out to write my poem, that Queer Aesthetics was a place where my enby voice wouldn’t be diluted; where it wouldn’t be expected to fit within pre-ordained narratives of queer selfhood, including — perhaps even most crucially — popular ideas about non-binary identity. I felt this was a place where my queer voice would be taken seriously, not despite but because of the flamboyance and quirkiness of my poetic expression.
The seeds of “sing(e) me” are the women — mostly cis but some of them queer — who inspired me as a child and young person growing up, long before I confronted my enbyness, beginning with Julie Andrews and Emma Thompson: two English actors whose unconventional femininity and plummy accents influenced me as a bookish Spaniard learning English as a second language. Aged ten, I became obsessed with Disney’s Mary Poppins. (My father was a clerk in a bank and often got home in the foulest of moods, which made me automatically relate to the Banks children. By the way, please say gay, loud and clear!) To me, Mary Poppins was a symbol of no-nonsense nonsense, of poker-faced mischief in the face of discipline and drabness. What might have first attracted me and has kept me in thrall of both Mary Poppins and Julie Andrews were not so much the magic, the flying umbrella, or the ability to pop into chalk pictures: it was their ambiguous sexuality and unconventional femininity. (Let’s not get into Andrews’ mellifluous voice or we’ll be here for hours.) Come to think of it: Mary Poppins could be aro and ace. She doesn’t get it on with Bert; she doesn’t get it on with Mrs Banks. She watches from the clouds, using her subtle machinations to influence the proceedings; and there is something tantalisingly queer about her enigmatic personality.
In turn, Emma Thompson — whose persona in the Ellen Degeneres TV series turns out to be American and has allegedly learnt her English accent from watching Julie Andrews films — struck me as a feminist critic of a world dominated by straight men. Her Beatrice in Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, whose lines you can hear in my poem, sparkles with wit. In addition, Thompson’s androgynous gender expression in the obscure Richard Curtis comedy The Tall Guy captivated me in my young adulthood, including the hilarious and provocative scene in which she has raucous sex with pre-Jurassic Park Jeff Goldblum and destroys her bedroom at the same time. I wanted to be like Andrews’ and Thompson’s characters: confident, sharp, and, as it turns out, also ambiguous in terms of gender expression.
As the poem proceeds, figures who have come to inspire me in adulthood mingle with my childhood inspirations as a queer child. The work of Audre Lorde, particularly her biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, which somehow eluded me until I was in my late 30s, was a revelation to me. While, as a white non-binary person from a former — and in some ways still ongoing — imperial nation such as Spain, I couldn’t possibly claim any ownership over The Lorde’s Work, I still kowtow to Lorde’s electrifying exploration of her early life, and in particular of her gender ambiguities. Unable to assimilate into either the butch or femme paradigms of mid-twentieth-century lesbianism, Lorde’s persona in Zami exists in a limbo of gender-non-conformity, as a precursor of non-binary identity. I am a queer and postcolonial scholar as well as a creative writer, and the homoerotic matrilineal community of Carriacou mythologized in Zami struck me as a hopeful rejection of Western and Global-Northern configurations of queer identity. “sing(e) me” says I want to write like Audre Lorde. I can keep wishing until I draw my last breath — and probably even beyond — but let’s thank the Lorde for all she generously gave us of herself.
Now, a confession: I have a crush on Maria João Pires, the Portuguese pianist, who also happens to be a lesbian. Her beauty is far from skin-deep and resides, in large measure, in her seductive musicality, which is arrestingly moving. She’s my favourite classical pianist, and nobody plays Robert Schumann’s set of piano pieces, Kinderszenen (“scenes from childhood”), the way she does, including my favourite piece for solo piano: “Träumerei” (translated as “dreaming” or “reverie”), which perfectly encapsulates the melancholy dreaminess of childhood. In “sing(e) me”, I state I wish I could play the piano the way Pires plays Schumann. There is something in Pires’ queer feminine sensibility that touches me deeply and that, like the best music, is impossible to render fully into words.
The last section of “sing(e) me” connects childhood with adulthood, and with one of my enduring obsessions, namely Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables books and the Kevin Sullivan TV miniseries from the 1980s, which was my first point of contact with Montgomery’s world. Looking back, I always identified with the bookish and boisterous Anne. Somewhere in my dreamscape, Anne Shirley and her bosom friend Diana Barry actually became an item — in fact, they doin the queer novel I am currently writing, Troubadour, in which Dee runs away from her family to be with her soulmate Ana. There is something proto-queer in the intimate and passionate friendship between these two Canadian girls. Although, like the “canon” Anne, my erotic imagination was more explicitly drawn towards Gilbert Blythe, played in Sullivan’s TV adaptation by Jonathan Crombie. After his untimely death, Crombie was outed by his sister during his funeral. Tragically, he lived his entire life in the closet, possibly in fear of the still remarkably heteronormative film and television industries, yet looking back on his star-making performance in the Anne series, there is something teasingly queer about his sensitive masculinity which must have drawn me in as a young person, and which continues to inspire me. My poetic persona in “sing(e) me” wishes Crombie could love me as a stand-in for Anne Shirley with a body assigned male at birth. It is in this state of gender fluidity, insolubly placed between masculinity and femininity, that the poem races towards its conclusion.
In addition to this prolific smattering of cultural references, my poem also celebrates my fragility. Yes, I am soft. I am hopelessly romantic. My heart and self-esteem are easily bruised. I live with gender dysphoria almost every day of my life. (Who am I? What am I? Am I really who I think I am?) This is the burden of those of us trying to exist outside the gender binary. The neoliberal capitalist world we inhabit places an incredible amount of value on strength and resilience, to the detriment of those of us who are trying to learn to live with our fragility. The formal dimensions of my poem attempt to reflect this fragility: the lines are conspicuously short; the syntax is broken up by a profusion of enjambements, to the point the poem becomes like a finely spun thread running along the centre of the page. This is a deliberate aesthetic choice meant to mirror the poem’s theme. This poem is painfully thin — it’s fragile. But I hope there is also a form of resistance within this vision of queerness: that the poem also proves we can be stretchy and slight, like a steel guitar string. In the end, we must get on with things; we must learn to live with ourselves; and so Mary Poppins’ favourite motto closes the poem, in the form of a call to action to all of of us queers: “Spit-/spot!”