“The Sand and the Oyster”: A Study of Queer love in the poems of Carol Ann Duffy

Abstract

The idea of “queer” signals a social resistance to the common notion of “heteronormativity”. Queer studies seriously question the mainstream “sex hierarchy”. Carol Ann Duffy, a Scottish poet and playwright, is the first self-declared lesbian poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. Duffy’s poems focus on “people of the margins of society who harbour resentments and grudges against the world.” Her poems, such as “Girl Talking” and “Standing Female Nude,” address the experiences of pain and suffering and the process of overcoming them nonchalantly.

This paper explores the peculiarity and strangeness in standard social norms of gender and sexual identity. Duffy’s poems reflect a solid feminist stance and an assertive stance against cultural appropriation. She can be classified as a ‘lesbian feminist’, advocating for social rights, gender rights, and body politics. Duffy’s poems reflect a sense of multiplicity, openness, contradiction, and contention, making her poems different from those of her contemporaries. Queerness encompasses numerous strategies, all of which carry the charge of multiplicity, openness, contradiction, and contention. Duffy’s mother-daughter relationship is emphasized, as it creates the sexual identity of a woman through her love for her mother. Duffy’s poems express the ecstatic bond that queer love can only express. 

[Keywords: Queer, lesbian, feminist, multiplicity]

The word “Queer” has German origin. It is derived from the word ‘quer’, which means ‘oblique, perverse’. Nevertheless, the sense of ‘homosexuality’ attached to queer can be found for the first time in 1922. Gradually, “Queer studies” has become a part of an academic discipline since 1994. Eric Partridge’s ‘A Dictionary of Slang’ also tries to highlight the basic features of colloquial English. It was around 1894 that the word “queer” came into prominence in the social, cultural and academic life of England. The first recorded written instance of “queer” in 1894 was found with some serious charges lodged by John Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry. John Douglas publicly announced and declared the “gay relationship” of his son with Oscar Wilde. John Douglas was immediately successful in proving Wilde guilty of a heinous social crime, and he made it possible to put Wilde behind bars, ruining his personal life and academic career. 

Queer Studies, a poststructuralist thought and notion, primarily deals with a “radical approach to gender and sexuality”. The matrix of ideas connected to it avoids conventions and goes beyond the limits of everyday discourse. The range of this academic discipline encompasses what is unusual, bizarre, and incongruous in social and cultural relationships. The peculiarity and strangeness in standard social norms of gender and sexual identity are the basic features of Queer Studies. The word “Queer”, being an umbrella term, embraces ideas like lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities. The use of ‘queer’, according to J.A.Cuddon, “follows the reappropriation of the pejorative term for homosexuals by gay activists during the AIDS crisis of the mid-to-late 1980s. Many (but by no means all) queer theorists are gay and lesbian. However, queerness has come to be associated with all non-normative gendered and sexual experiences, including bisexuality, polyamory, and transgenderism”. 

A close reading of queer texts helps the readers to understand social constructions and cultural power relations. It talks a lot about community behaviour, sexual orientations, and the way “desire” plays a significant role in society. Lee Edelman rightly points out in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive: “Queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one”. The idea of “queer” necessarily signals a social resistance to the common notion of “heteronormativity”. Michael Warner, the thinker behind the term heteronormativity, makes his ideas clear by saying that “every person who comes to a queer self-understanding knows in one way or another that her stigmatization is integrated with gender... more or less articulately to challenge the common understanding of what gender difference means”. “Queer studies” seriously questions the mainstream “sex hierarchy” and the standard practices of “good sex” and “bad sex”.

Bold and outspoken Scottish poet and playwright Carol Ann Duffy and her poems are the topics of discussion for this paper. Carol Ann Duffy, who assumed the position of poet Laureate of the United Kingdom on May 1st, 2009, and is still in the position, is the first self-declared lesbian poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. Being a poet of “post-war England”, Duffy has tried to encapsulate human emotions and desires in a new pattern and texture. An active lesbian activist, Carol Ann Duffy, leaves no stone unturned to promote the idea of homogeneity. The voice in Duffy is daring, often full of debates, but is never violent. Duffy’s words help readers to read the world in a new frame, in a different landscape, and at a different angle, axis, and lens. 

“In the voices of the urban disaffected”, as reviewed in the Economist, Carol Ann Duffy primarily focuses on the “people of the margins of society who harbour resentments and grudges against the world”. It is an interesting fact that the early poems of Carol Ann Duffy do in no way exhibit her tendency for homosexuality. It was her 1993 collection Mean Time, and the following year came Selected Poems, which began to show her knack for homosexual love. 

They were in a coy near the swing. It’s like
a field. Sometimes we planted melons, spinach,
marrow, and there was a well. She sat on the swing.
They pushed her till she shouted Stop the swing
then she was sick. Tasleen told them to find
help. She made blood beneath the mango tree.

‘Girl Talking’, Standing Female Nude

The voice of Carol Ann Duffy is always undaunted. The lines mentioned above from the poem ‘Girl Talking’ from the collection Standing Female Nude consolidate the experiences of pain and suffering and the process of overcoming them all nonchalantly. The brutalities in life to a young girl may come at any moment without giving the slightest of hints. Irrespective of countries and customs, every woman’s persona matures in the course of these unexpected shocks. The opening lines of ‘Girl Talking’ address the common threats to body and mind that every woman undergoes.   

On our Eid day my cousin was sent to
the village. Something happened. We think it was pain.
She gave wheat to the miller and the miller
gave her flour. Afterwards it did not hurt,
so for a while she made chapatis. 

‘Girl Talking’, Standing Female Nude

The presentation of “love” in the poems of Carol Ann Duffy is always different. She has an assertive opinion against ‘cultural appropriation’. In her, there is always a solid feminist stance. She can very well be categorized as a ‘lesbian feminist’. In the article ‘British Lesbian Poetics: A Brief Exploration’, Liz Yorke remarks: “I found a great deal of information on American Lesbian poets, but a paucity on British…” The necessity of this lesbian position is well illustrated in the same article as Liz Yorke refers to Emma Perez and her essay ‘Irigaray’s Female Symbolic in the Making of a Chicana Lesbian Sitios y Lenguas (Sites and Discourses)’. Perez contends that “If we do not identify ourselves as Chicanas, lesbians, third world people, or simply women, then we commit social and political suicide. Without our identities, we become homogenized and censored.” Here comes the point of re-reading Carol Ann Duffy as she raises the fundamental questions of being a lesbian poet and tries to overcome the standard boundaries set by authority and cultural hegemony. In this context, it would be apposite to mention the name of the first ‘gay woman’ poet, playwright and novelist in British cultural and public life, Maureen Duffy. Maureen Duffy is a tireless activist for gay rights and animal rights. Like Carol Ann, Maureen Duffy has also advocated for social rights and has spoken boldly for gender rights and body politics: 

…Some breasts are erectile
you say. It may be.
I can only speak of those
that are sleepy
heavy with pale dreams…

‘For Madame Chatte’, Evesong 

In the article “Making Queer New Things”: Queer Identities in the Life and Dramaturgy of Susan Glaspell”, Cheryl Black has quoted Jill Dolan’s concept of “queerness”:

Queerness has come to encompass numerous strategies, all of which carry the charge of multiplicity, openness, contradiction, contention…To be queer is not who you are, it’s what you do, it’s your relation to dominant power, and your relation to marginality, as a place of empowerment. “Queer” opens spaces for people who embrace all manner of sexual practices and identities…( Dolan)

This well-illustrated definition of “queer” encloses all the essential features that this genre deals with. An intensive reading of the poems by Carol Ann Duffy reflects a sense of “multiplicity”, as well as the ideas of “openness” and “contradiction”. The novelty and uniqueness of a human being are the essential ingredients that make Duffy’s poems different from those of her contemporaries. Duffy is very much conscious of her identity as a poet and, at the same, of her ‘lesbian’ identity. In both cases, these two identities are the two razor-sharp edges that she had experienced in her own life.  

According to Lucy Irigary, there is a deep sense of love and affection for a daughter for her mother. Lesbian theorists have found a profound sense of attachment in the mother, daughter, and sister relationships. In the article ‘British Lesbian Poetic,’ Liz Yorke mentions Lucy Irigary to stress the mother-daughter relationship. Also, she shows that the sexual identity of a woman is created through her love for her mother. The singularity as a woman is best celebrated through the closeness of the “woman’s body”. The sense of a “body” is more vibrant and robust in the case of a woman than a man. When a girl grows up, her mother plays a pivotal role in creating this sense of the “body”. By virtue of this close association concerning the “body”, the “mother-daughter” relationship is closer than the “father-son” relationship. Similarly, a sister comes very close to her sister, the way a brother comes to his other brother.

A poem by Carol Ann Duffy can prove the ecstatic bond that queer love can only express. Queerness in Duffy comes in manifold ways. In the poem ‘Alphabet for Auden’, an obvious utterance for queer love is easily understandable:

I love, you love, so does he -
long live English poetry.
Four o’clock is time for tea,
I’ll be mother, who’ll be me?

‘Alphabet for Auden’

By virtue of the practice and ritual, a lesbian is an ‘other’ woman. She celebrates the air of freedom within and outside of her periphery. The essence of protest and an unfathomable strong voice on the part of a lesbian activist are the key features that make her different from the rest of her fellow thinkers and practitioners. The spirit of subversion is significantly marked in the poems of Carol Ann Duffy.

hours and wishes and trysts
less than the shadows of clouds on grass,
ghosts that did dance, did dance…

and those who would gladly die for love lang deid-
a skull for a bonnie head-
and love itself a metaphor, rose, red.

‘Sung’

Carol Ann Duffy’s 2005 collection of poetry, Rapture, is commonly believed to be about her relationship with her fellow lesbian poet, Jackie Kay. Robin Seiler-Garman’s thesis “Lesbian Love-Sonnets: Adrienne Rich and Carol Ann Duffy” refers to Deryn Rees-Jones’s views on Duffy’s poems on queer love. According to Deryn Rees, Duffy’s love poems “explore new ways of negotiating the relationship between the subject and the object of desire”. Unlike her other collection of poems, Twenty-One Love Poems, where the narrator’s love is explicitly addressed to women, in the case of the latter, the gender of the addressee is unknown and mysterious. Deryn Rees emphasizes that Catherine Lanone thoroughly examines the “queer love” in Carol Ann Duffy. Lanone believes that “instead of merely challenging the tradition of male poetry, Duffy chooses to appropriate it quietly”. In Rapture, Duffy has presented the “subversion of gendered dynamics”. 

The poem ‘Rapture’ by Carol Ann Duffy is a beautiful and vivid expression of same-sex love. It paints a picture of a love that is pure, intense, and deeply felt. The poem has often been praised for its ability to capture the essence of eroticism in a same-sex relationship. It describes the beloved as a “touchable dream,” a phrase that conveys both the physical and emotional elements of love. Through its use of powerful imagery and sensual language, ‘Rapture’ highlights the beauty and complexity of same-sex love, making it a powerful and essential piece of literature. Some of the lines from the poem that stand out in this regard are sure to spark engaging discussions.

… It seems nothing will shift
the pattern of our days, alter the rhyme
we make with loss to assonance with bliss. 
Then love comes, like a sudden flight of bird
from earth to heaven after rain. Your kiss,
recalled, unstrings, like pearls, this chain of words.

‘Rapture’

Robin Seiler-Garman has also cited Eleanor Porter’s criticism of Carol Ann Duffy’s poems: “Duffy’s love poems disrupt the hierarchy of speaker and object, intellectual versus physical sense”. The gravity of this “physical sense” can also be perceived in the poem “Warming Her Pearls”. A poem of love and attachment, ‘Warming Her Pearls’, narrates the speaker’s higher sense of being in the company of his female partner.

Carol Ann Duffy not only preaches but also practices a ‘gay’ identity at the same time. Jane Dowson, in her book Carol Ann Duffy: Poet for Our Times, referred to an incident in 1999 in which Duffy’s sexual identity had been questioned, and rumours were there that Tony Blair, the then Prime Minister, thought that “her sexuality would disqualify her”. 

It is interesting to note that Duffy writes in a tone in which sexual orientation is usually “open”. Poems like ‘From Mrs Tiresias’ are heavily laden with same-sex love relationships. The poem begins with some brilliant lines: “All I know is this: he went out for his walk a man/ and came home female”. Moreover, “lesbian eroticism” comes at its height in the poem ‘The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High’: “The women teachers of England slept in their beds/ Their shrewd or wise or sensible heads safe vessels/ For Othello’s jealousy, the Wife of Bath’s warm laugh…”

Duffy is a modern mythmaker. She breaks the tradition with the help of her linguistic weapons. She re-creates and continuously assimilates social norms and taboos to make a larger frame in which she thrusts her characters from a different angle and dimension. It was no other than Peter Forbes who coined the term “Duffyesque” to identify a unique presentation that is Duffy’s own. To quote Jane Dowson, ‘“ Duffy’s unique crafting of emotional truth into literary forms that are woven from colloquial speech patterns, disruptive syntax, de-familiarizing symbols, and captivating sound effects constitute the ‘poetic independence’”.

In the queer love poems of Carol Ann Duffy, there is always an enormous force and power. Duffy is very energetic in every possible way. In respect to “tradition” and the historicization of the “past” and the “present”, Duffy is often compared to Larkin by the critics. Justin Quinn is of the opinion that a reading of Duffy makes the readers feel that “Duffy is the latest exponent of the tradition which in the twentieth century goes from Hardy to Thomas to Larkin.” Duffy, however, is in no way finding any point of parallelism between her writings and Larkin. Dowson mentions in her book the reply Duffy gave with an inimitable wit and seriousness: “‘ As anyone who has the slightest knowledge of my work knows, I have little in common with Larkin, who was tall, taciturn and thin-on-top, and unlike him, I laugh, nay, sneer, in the face of death. I will concede one point: we are both lesbian poets’”. 

Gerard Loughlin has shared some valuable views on the idea of “queer” while writing ‘Introduction’ for the edited volume Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body. Gerard directly pinpoints that the word “queer” immediately evokes a sense of strangeness. A “queer” is something which is “odd”; “the thing that does not fit in”. Along with being strange, Gerard thinks, categorizing someone as “queer” is also an “insult”. Gerard quotes Eribon, “The insult lets me know that I am not like others, not normal. I am queer: strange, bizarre, sick, abnormal”. It is a common threat addressed towards both the “gay men” and the “lesbian women”, indicating their “social and psychological vulnerability”. 

If this discussion of “queer” is one side of the coin, then obviously the other side would not be less attractive. The recent usage of “queer”, according to Loughlin, is the “insult turned”. Unlike the previous concept of being in the margins, queer, in its latest periphery of social acceptance, specifies a “sign of pride”. It brings to light a sense of centrality in the society in general. The idea of queer is “disavowed but necessary for a heterosexual normalcy that defines itself in terms of what it rejects”. 

A similar sense of revolt is also seen in the poems of Carol Ann Duffy. Her poems are the emblems of protests. She regains power through rejection. Duffy’s ideas and visions get rejuvenated through rejection. She boldly celebrates “lesbianism” and is proud of her identity. The speaker in the poem “Selling Manhattan” visualizes a new world, a new earth she has never experienced before. It becomes clear to the speaker that the true meaning of life is now more apparent to her: “But today I hear again and plainly see”. The state of being “drunk” is now getting away from her. The sentences become almost prophetic when the speaker utters the following sentences: 

Trust your dreams. No good will come of this.
My heart is on the ground, as when my loved one
fell back into my arms and died. I have learned
the solemn laws of joy and sorrow, in the distance
between morning’s frost and firefly’s flash at night. 

‘Selling Manhattan’

Works Cited:

Black, Cheryl. “Making Queer New Things’: Queer Identities in the Life and Dramaturgy of Susan Glaspell”, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Vol. XX, No. 1: Fall 2005, p. 49-64.

Dowson, Jane. Carol Ann Duffy: Poets for Our Times. UK:Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Print.

Duffy, Carol Ann. Standing Female Nude. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1998.Print.

Loughlin, Gerard,ed. Queer Theory: Rethinking the Western Body.UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd,2007.Print.

Yorke, Liz. “British Lesbian Poetics: A Brief Exploration”, Feminist Review, No. 62: Contemporary Women Poets (Summer, 1999), p. 78-90. 

* Sabuj Sarkar is currently working as an Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Gour Banga, Malda.