I’m approaching ‘belonging’ from specifically an asexual, aromantic point of view.
If these are unfamiliar terms, AVEN and AUREA have you covered. There’s also some great stuff on alternative relationship models on there, but I’m hoping I don’t have to go there to sell on you on the idea that we can draw meaning and belonging from relationships that aren’t sexual or romantic.
That’s my project here, anyway; the main thing I want to explore through this residency. In this post, I’ll be examining works by other poets, before tackling the question with my own poetry later on.
I started by exploring two great anthologies: He, She, They, Us and 100 Queer Poems. There was a great deal of wonderful queer belonging in these pages, but precious little of the kind I was looking for. The closest I came with these collections was domesticity, which was a strong, nourishing theme in these collections. Erica Gillingham’s Mango Kiss, Mícheál McCann’s Immanence and Kae Tempest’s We Bought New Sheets stood out to me especially. Here’s the final stanza from that last one, to give you an idea of what I mean:
Night buzzes around us
we shake it till it billows then snap it
tight,
pull its edges and fold it under
like a pair of real adults.
– Kae Tempest, We Bought New Sheets
There’s something very comforting there, isn’t there? Which I think has a lot to do with the promise that comes with this domestic ritual, just as Mango Kiss draws on the comfort of an idyllic morning making breakfast together.
Hobe Ndaba’s School Bell Ring conveys this most directly, I think:
song of twilight
side by side we walk
sweet silence before the end
I look to you
You look to me
the promise of tomorrow
– Hobe Ndaba, School Bell Ring
The promise of tomorrow. Now there’s belonging, the feeling of security in a relationship. I think this might be it.
Or at least, part of it. When I was brushing up on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in part one , I stumbled across Kelly-Ann Allen’s Psychology of Belonging. Allen posits that people a) need constant, positive, personal interactions with other people, and b) to know that the bond is stable, mutual and will continue.
That sounds a lot like what we’re looking for, doesn’t it? Maybe the Dungeons and Dragons comment in the last post wasn’t a joke after all.
There’s something about Immanence too, the poem by Mícheál McCann and the concept too. The poem (in its more literal sense) is about the intimacy of two people sharing a donut in a café. The word itself means to be entirely within something, in contrast to transcendence, which is to be above or beyond something.
I don’t claim to understand the theological applications, but I do think this is a useful idea. I think belonging is an immanent feeling, not a transcendent one, which might be why so many of the poems that spoke to me of belonging were grounded in sensory detail; like the snap tight of the bedsheets in our first example. These poems are vignettes, in the sense that they are in-the-moment and in-the-world as well.
Let’s put a pin in that. I definitely want to revisit this kind of intimacy in my final part through my own poetry. These examples of domestic love and immanent belonging might be within the framework of sexual and/or romantic relationships, but there’s nothing exclusive about that. It feels intuitively true that friendships and family relationships can support ‘immanent feelings’ too, which is something I’m interested in exploring!
But before we move on – what about community? I’ve buried the lead a bit, because there are two queer poems that relate to this topic which are among my favourite works; Mars O’Shea’s Werewolf Manifesto and the title poem from Ross McFarlane’s Life Goals of the Millennials: or the Commune Manifesto. Surely a coincidence that they both have ‘manifesto’ in the name.
I wholeheartedly recommend you experience both for yourself, but here’s a sample from each:
“Come, you hunters, bring your silver to the wolf den.
I will make a meal of your attempts to harm us.
will melt down your blades
And cast them anew, as jewellery,
To shower over my friends and lovers.”
With love, and rage.
The Werewolf International.
– Mars O’Shea, The Werewolf Manifesto
“Are you saving up for a deposit?
You know you’re wasting money when you rent?
Why won’t you own a home by twenty-four?
[…]
In my home,
my friends become a part of me.
In our home,
not one of us will act as judge.
In our home,
we are nothing but this fucking love.
In all honesty –
I just want to feel at home in a place where I don’t feel alone.
So fuck a whole ocean, I’ll take the stone’s throw.
Fuck the doom and the gloom,
even more a stylish two-bedroom.
I’m crawling out of this costume.
I’ll catch you at the commune.
– Ross McFarlane, Life Goals of the Millennials: or the Commune Manifesto
That’s the good stuff right there.
I don’t plan to go on a political sidebar (you can probably guess my politics anyway), but it’s apparent these poems create a more political kind of belonging than we’ve looked at so far.
Insofar as these two poems do the work of the manifesto (distinct from the other functions they have as poems), they’re manifestos that I find persuasive. They describe communities, movements and futures in which I feel like a have a place.
This is in part because they speak to my values, and in part because they describe and demand a world less ideologically and economically hostile to queerness and platonic love. In that way, for me at least, they create a feeling of belonging. Your own milage will vary, but I hope you can still see the mechanisms at work here.
Less ‘immanent’, perhaps more transcendent, still heavy with that ‘promise of tomorrow’. Less grounded in sensory detail too, although I’m not sure if that’s an inherent difference. Either way, some common features have emerged. We’ve found a few new threads I’m interested in pulling further; the immanent, the communal and the promise of tomorrow.
I’ll leave you with one last example which is outside my own experience, but which I think might contain a germ of each of those:
Turning to a friend and agreeing that there’s something really queer about iced coffee, isn’t really about iced coffee at all. It’s about feeling at home. It’s finding pieces of ourselves in silly things because for so long, we didn’t even get silly things. And, that’s the *thing* that struck me most about bisexual culture. We’re always straddling two worlds. And, for most, we have to make our own home, in between. Preferably, a home, with iced coffee.
– Charlotte Moore, Iced Coffee
>PART THREE – Performing Belonging – Queer Belonging & Place – Freya Cook
