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.