Photo credit: Lucia Dicksen Photography | Interview by Zoë Brigley
“Language is culture, history, social practice, politics, everything. It is both a product and source of all those things, and its loss is all the greater for it”
Growing Up Queer — A Zuihitsu
According to NASA, the Hubble telescope shows and tells my birthday as the sharpest image ever taken. The arms of the grand design are filled with young, bluish, hot stars. I heard that the birth of new stars turns a galaxy pink, and my family thought I was going to be a girl. They were so certain that they had to rush around for my names. I never got the Manx middle name of my brothers, like Grenaby, the farm where our father was born, and Douglas where three of his children were. They picked it because my brother Paul wanted to call me Richard, and did, but only for twenty-four years. When I was five or six, we met an estranged auntie at Christmas, she gave us two blue presents for my elder brothers and two pink ones for my sister and the other one she thought was a girl. Everyone laughed. Well, I say everyone. There was a dog in the room. Ocean Vuong wrote, If you must know anything, know that you were born because no-one else was coming. The ship rocked as you swelled inside me: love’s echo hardening into a boy. Sometimes I feel like an ampersand. Franklin D Roosevelt wore a dress aged two-and-a-half with a hat, marabou feather and shoulder-length hair. Before the nineteenth century, it was common for boys and girls to wear the same attire until they were six years old. Eighty years later, that was taboo. Fifty years earlier, boys wore pink. In the nineties, lads in pink T-shirts were a sure sign — but now we can only tell by where their eyes linger. Neil Bartlett wrote, He was worn out, worn out with his own personal brand of window shopping; all that staring and never buying anything. I wandered with fear and excitement when I circled department stores as a teenager — passing the same male posters, the same shop-boys, that compelling fellow customer, maybe older — pausing slightly in my stride wondering whether I’d be caught for the shirt I was lifting. Richard Scott reminds us, people say shit like it gets better but what they mean is there’ll always be haters only you’ll be older This beautiful galaxy is tilted at an oblique angle onto our line of sight, giving us a birds-eye-view of the black hole, which is fifteen times the mass of our own. The Milky Bar Kid was a dream come true — the boy who can’t go wrong. The comfort of creamy chocolate and my own cowboy suit — watching tv with Dad, and shooting caps like John Wayne. James Baldwin said, It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you Years later, I discovered John Wayne was really named Marion and called Midnight Cowboy a story about two fags. In hindsight, I should have known when I was seven years old that I didn’t want to buy the underpants and swimwear in my mother’s mail order catalogue. At six, I was handed down my five-year-older brother’s swimming trunks. Like a hermit crab, it would have been preferable to hang out on the beach until approached by a bigger boy — whose fitting was constrained rather than floppy — and we could have swapped our trunks. Instead Paul, and our brother David, chased me and pulled down my over-large green trunks, considering this a great sport with a splash of comedy. So, I smashed Paul over the head with my yellow plastic spade, and it went red at the end. I jumped into a deep sand pit and kept digging. It took me forty years to climb out.
NOTE: the original version of this poem is formatted in a way that cannot be supported on our website. You can see the original formatting here:
I haven’t seen too many examples of the Zuihitsu. Could you tell us a bit more about the form, and what inspired you to write one?
随筆 (Zuihitsu) is an ancient Japanese form – the two Kanji literally meaning “at will” and “pen”. It is probably best known from the film The Pillow Book about a text written a millennium ago by Sei Shonagon – the film owing its name to the fact that the author made a pillow of the pile of notebooks that she wrote.
Zuihitsu defies precise definition, being a heterogenous form that has been described as “a volcano wrapped in a cloud” and also a “running brush” shifting and moving like wind through its subject. I wonder whether it is a hybrid egg or a hybrid chicken, but it is a prose poem without actually being one as it often uses quotes from other works. It’s also a short story but it isn’t because it doesn’t have a beginning, middle and end. Neither is it an essay even if it possess many of its characteristics –– without an argument, proposition or conclusion.
It is a genre encouraging personal contemplation and was introduced to me by Mary Jean Chan on an Arvon Queer Writing course. They shared Ching-in Chen’s ‘Queer Poetry: a zuihitsu’ and also Jay Barnard’s ‘Manifesto: Stranger in the archives’ published by The Poetry Society.
I loved the idea of exploring growing up queer in a non-linear way, journeying through the space of the subject and – reutilising a Jack Underwood analogy – circling event horizons and avoiding naming or disappearing in black holes. I’m perhaps too used to chronological narrative, so forgetting that was liberating, as was resisting the temptation to re-order it afterwards! The genre is also not memoir, so isn’t all encompassing, which now makes me realise I need to rename the poem ‘Being Young & Queer – A Zuihitsu’ rather than ‘Growing Up Queer…’
You reference some important queer writers in your poem like Ocean Vuong and James Baldwin. How important is it for you as a writer to find queer ancestors in the literary world? For the speaker in the poem, do these writers represent a knowledge of the world and how to thrive when growing up queer?
Queer ancestors are vital for me, and yes, ‘a knowledge of the world’ is key to that, as is their openness and vitality for exploration – the first three on my list would be James Baldwin, Derek Jarman and Wilfred Owen. There are obviously many more including perhaps lesser known ones such as Virgilio Piñera and Tim Dlugos. Discovering those writers who, by today’s definitions, would be described as queer is also vitally important as it shifts the whole fulcrum of how I see my own queerness and validity – if only I’d known “that” about Hadrian, Owen, Auden, Shakespeare et al when I was taught about them at school or danced on his wall. I’d also say that it is vital to find those of our own generation – my top two being Neil Bartlett and Joelle Taylor. The likes of Ocean Vuong are of a younger generation that I equally find critical to understand both their different experiences and modes of expression – I find them and their huge numbers hugely inspirational, albeit tinged with sadness in how little has changed at the deep personal level of growing up queer.
You reference Manx language and culture in this poem, and from reading your poems, I gather that it is an important part of your poetic practice to explore this. Could you tell us a bit more about it?
This is a whole essay or interview in its own right, so I’ll try and be succinct! My latest pamphlet, The Whole Island, from Valley Press does exactly that and I’m so grateful to Anthony Anaxagorou for encouraging this exploration during and since my debut pamphlet, Throatbone. I’m inspired by his explorations of his Cypriot heritage. With the Isle of Man there is so much richness to explore in Manx folklore, wildlife, landscape and culture – as well as experience that happens to have occurred in that place. Being an island is in itself an extended metaphor but also exploring its history (like its multiple colonisation, slave trade ship captains, transportation of Manx prisoners, internment camps, etc.) contain so many resonances with contemporary preoccupations and priorities.
Talking of queerness, ancestors and Manx culture, I wanted to document this in Isle of Sin (from Polari Press) by giving an account of Queer Manx History prior to the partial legalisation of sex between men in 1992 – as well as pay tribute to Dursley McLinden (1965-1994) who died of AIDS-related illness and was an inspiration for Olly Alexander’s character in the Channel 4 drama, It’s A Sin.
In terms of Manx Gaelic and dialect, for me language is culture, history, social practice, politics, everything. It is both a product and source of all those things, and its loss is all the greater for it. As with other languages, there are words that can’t be translated directly into English, or even have a different meaning if done so literally, so there is so much ‘loaded into’ using Manx Gaelic within my work.
Simon Maddrell
Simon Maddrell (he/they) is a queer Manx writer, editor and performer living in Brighton & Hove. Simon’s debut chapbook, Throatbone, was published by UnCollected Press, MA in 2020. Queerfella, jointly-won The Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition 2020. His 2023 pamphlets are Isle of Sin from Polari Press and The Whole Island from Valley Press.
You can follow him on Twitter @QueerManxPoet, on Instagram @simonmaddrell, visit his website https://instabio.cc/simonmaddrell and buy his work at https://simonmaddrell.sumupstore.com