Queering Sonnets: Sexuality and Transnational Identity in the Poetry of Patience Agbabi

Abstract

The emergence of queer diaspora studies has demanded increasing attention to the ways in which women writers have challenged the heterocentrism of dominant conceptions of diaspora. The theoretical intersection of queer studies with diaspora and black studies in relatively recent years has produced a vital reassessment of the black studies project. In the attempt to reconceptualize black queer and black diaspora, Rinaldo Walcott, in particular, has stressed the importance of a broader geographical and comparative framework, and offered crucial insights into the spatial redefinition of queer studies. Walcott's new black queer theory provides a particularly useful framework in this article to analyse the poetic work of Patience Agbabi in Transformatrix (2000) and Bloodshot Monochrome (2008) as queer poetic praxis. A British poet of Nigerian ancestry, Agbabi combines her experience as a spoken-word artist and performer with her literary background as an Oxford-educated poet. Straddling the British lyric tradition and performance poetry, her work explores the sonnet form while revealing the complexities of gender and sexuality. This article agues that, as she steps beyond safe boundaries of literary conventions in a creative interplay of formal constraint and experimentation, Agbabi queers the sonnet form, destabilizing normative gay, lesbian, black, men's and women's identities.

Keywords:

• Patience Agbabi
• poetry
• performance
• diaspora studies
• black queer theory

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹As Gopinath has argued: ‘The concept of queer diaspora enables simultaneous critique of heterosexuality and the national form while exploding the binary between nation and diaspora, heterosexuality and homosexuality, origin and copy’ (Gopinath 2005: 11).

²Butler has similarly welcomed the term ‘queer’ as a site of collective contestation that could assert political demands and activism. She has argued that ‘the genealogical critique of the queer subject will be central to queer politics to the extent that it constitutes a self-critical dimension within activism, a persistent reminder to take the time to consider the exclusionary force of one of activism's most treasured contemporary premises’ (Butler 2011: 173).

³A case in point is Johnson's formulation of ‘quare’, which suggests the need ‘to devise a strategy for theorizing a racialized sexuality’ (Johnson 2001: 3). Looking for a definition of identity which is ‘closer to home’, Johnson rearticulates race, place and affect by utilizing ‘quare’, the African American vernacular for ‘queer’.

⁴Agbabi has been praised for her ‘blazing talent for having written poems of bold sexuality, stylistic finesse and insight into the “underbelly” of popular culture’ (Ramey 2009: 317).

⁵A similar use of this notion can be found in Warren Crichlow's analysis of Isaac Julien's 2006 True North, in which he describes the artist's installation as ‘a theoretically grounded form of querying or “queering” meant as intervention and problematization of didactic cultural politics and nationalist or nativist ideologies’ (Crichlow 2006: 39).

⁶In a similar vein, the body in her poetry is always the ambiguous signifier of pleasure as well as pain. Celebrated as the battlefield of representation through tattoos or as the bearer of metaphorical bruises and excoriations, the body is often represented by Agbabi through a sadomasochistic dynamics of pleasurable pain.