Interview by Zoë Brigley
I kept thinking of the block of marble – tall and narrow, I imagined – the Charioteer of Motya was carved out of... My voice, its pace, was then guided by this tall and narrow form
Marble Bf
But a Greek would never think of a charioteer like this.
– Historian Dr Michael Scott on the Charioteer of Motya
Hip cocked out sassily, muscular body a long, sensual S. Hand pressed ever so lightly into uncannily soft flesh. No hero’s nakedness for you. Sleeveless, rippled-sand chiton clings with the sweat, the effort of the race you won. Sheer fabric teases, suggests you’re hung, your cock unlike the reserved slugs of other, sober ancients whose toned, no-nonsense nudity embodies the manly ideals of the polis. Your snail-shell curls are archaic, but I’ve seen your pouting lips on stern-browed models in Italian fashion spreads. I’ve seen your puffed-out chest strapped in a leather harness, as you dance in a Vauxhall club, dilated eyes looking at no one and everyone at once. The fierce clashing rocks of your buttocks belong to the ballet dancer I slept with once, my disbelieving hands exploring his range of muscle that one delicate dawn. Marble lad, you’re camp. Sexy. Mysterious. You can’t be a charioteer, a rich man’s lackey. Maybe you’re the sun god, clocking out after a long day’s ride on your blazing, risky chariot. Or perhaps you are some tyrant’s trade, great on the lyre, skilled at reciting all the big Homeric hits – a rent boy put in this get-up for a kink. Sculpted by the best Greek hand money could buy, you’re an extravagance, a folly, a sybaritic joke. I know my ancestors, their eyes would see offence in you standing on a pedestal in the agora in your cocksure go-go dancer’s pose, dressed like a woman, well-endowed. I think of you often, marble boy. I too have stood on the margin of what it means to be Greek, to be a man. I have tasted dirt because of it. I travelled far to find you, charioteer, on this salt speck of an islet on the tip of Sicily’s tongue. This place that isn’t Greece anymore, is nowhere near home. If you opened your mouth, what strange idiom would come out? If you tried to explain how you got here, I wouldn’t understand. I open my mouth, hobbled Greek comes out, the vocab of a gangly, closeted teen. Hunk, you’re an odd one among your peers. You survived because you were trash. Your bashed face, the pockmarks on your torso, betray your ending: being dragged through the city to be dumped as wall-fill because shameless beauty often ends like this. Unquarried you were safe, lying deep for millions of years in the pale marble seam no one yet had called flawless. I too was safe when still unqueried, so awkwardly, by others. Love, you slept buried in your bed of sun-baked clay until the bristled kiss of the archaeologist’s brush woke you. Now, in the spotlight of this dusty museum hall, cracked screens zoom in, hashtag you #masterpiece #excellence #bodyperfection … Marble boyfriend, I recognise you for the curious, unbelonging thing you truly are – masc, fem, Hellenic, foreign, Greekling, made like me.
First, tell us more about the intriguing epigraph of this poem
The epigraph is from a BBC programme – called, I think, ‘Who Were the Greeks?’ – presented by Dr Michael Scott, professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick. I wanted the epigraph to introduce right away the notion that though the Charioteer of Motya, the statue the poem is addressed to, appears at first to be a typical Greek statue from classical antiquity – naturalistically sculpted, celebrating a young athlete’s body and prowess – it actually breaks so many rules on classical Greek sculpture. For example, the statue is thought to represent a charioteer, who – as Dr Scott put it in his documentary – was ‘a rich man’s lackey,’ not meant to be depicted as a hero: the winner’s laurel crown would actually be given to the owner of the horses that won a chariot race. But the Charioteer of Motya is shown in a confident, exulted winner’s pose, full of bravado and a whiff of arrogance. In comparison, the Charioteer of Delphi, a bronze statue that’s much more known and celebrated in Greece than its Motya counterpart, was cast in a more formal, rather demure, pose. Also, there’s no hint of his body’s shape underneath the outfit he wears, which is certainly not the case with the Charioteer of Motya.
This is a long poem using a short line. What made you think that this would be a good form to write about the ‘marble bf’?
I began writing ‘Marble bf’ as part of a Poetry School class led by Seán Hewitt, to whom, by the way, the poem is dedicated. We were drawing inspiration from nature, and before I turned my attention to the Charioteer of Motya, I thought about marble as material: how all the marble statues we admire from ancient Greece were, for millions of years, part of nature – that they’ve only been in the shape of a statue for a miniscule fraction of that piece of marble’s existence. I kept thinking of the block of marble – tall and narrow, I imagined – the Charioteer of Motya was carved out of, which in my mind also represented that moment of transition between the statue being part of nature and a piece of art. My voice, its pace, was then guided by this tall and narrow form. I also wanted the different line lengths to suggest the contours of the charioteer’s body. And as I wrote it, I realised that ‘Marble bf’ was becoming a poem through which I was exploring all the key themes in my work: queerness, Greekness, uprootedness. I began thinking of it as the poem I’d like to position right in the middle – be the ‘spine’ – of the collection I’m working on. I think that the poem’s long and narrow form adds to that ‘spinal’ feel.
I really enjoyed the intriguing turns of thought in this poem: first contemplating the statue/bf, then contemplating what it is to be Greek, and finally to the journey the statue/bf/the speaker have made. In a way, this poem fits into a tradition of poems that contemplate marbles or artefacts from antiquity, but this one is inflected by queer culture: ‘I’ve seen / your puffed-out chest strapped / in a leather harness, as you dance / in a Vauxhall club.’ I wonder if you have any responses to any of this?
I was drawn to, and still am obsessed with, the Charioteer of Motya because, as I mentioned in my first answer, the statue is a rulebreaker, an outsider. For example, it’s on view in a small museum on Motya, a tiny island off the western coast of Sicily – nowhere near modern-day Greece. And despite being its star attraction, the statue’s an outlier within this museum: Motya was a Carthaginian town, in competition with Sicily’s Greek colonies, and most of the exhibits reflect its Punic history. No one knows whether the Charioteer of Motya was looted from a Greek colony in southern Italy or, as one theory suggests, made in Motya itself, commissioned by a rich Carthaginian but sculpted by a Greek. Some say it could in fact be the statue of a Punic god. This uncertainty, which allowed me to imagine different narratives for it, makes the Charioteer of Motya even more appealing to me.
Most importantly, I wanted to introduce the Charioteer of Motya to my own world, make him part of my queer experience: the freedom I felt in my twenties in the gay clubs of London, in bed with men – so removed from my closeted Athenian adolescence. It made me feel like a queer Pygmalion, and I can’t think of another ancient statue, especially from mainland Greece, transgressive enough to inspire this.
Equally, the trip I made to see the Charioteer of Motya during a visit to Sicily in July 2016 – just a couple of weeks after the Brexit referendum, which challenged my sense of belonging, not just in England, my adoptive country, but generally – was important to me. I’d missed the chance to see the statue when it was loaned to the British Museum as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, because, at the time, I was going through a terrible depression, partly caused by the fallout with my parents after I came out to them. Making it to Motya to see the charioteer – quite a trek if, like me, you can’t drive – felt symbolic of my recovery, my being a confident, out queer Greek.