I am no man
by Kasandra Ferguson
Image by Rodolfo Clix for Pexels
TW: Queerphobia
'All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. [...] I can ride and wield a blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.'
'What do you fear, lady?' he asked.
'A cage,' she said.
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (book, 1954)
My dad got hit by a train when he was eighteen or so. His car stalled on the tracks. The age fluctuates slightly depending on when he tells the story, but it was that fundamental time, the cusp of adulthood where everyone is either full of anticipation or hates themselves or both. His own father had just died of a brain tumour, and he doesn’t remember exactly when that happened either, but there is an acute and unspoken air of guilt about him when he recounts it. His father hadn’t believed in God, and neither had he before the crash. There wasn’t a scratch on him.
All of his scars are self-inflicted from housework and yard work done without protective gear or caution; nails and wood and shattered porcelain—and, once, a mandolin from the kitchen whilst slicing potatoes—have all taken their bits of flesh. My mom doesn’t understand the disregard.
On a particularly difficult night with a recent ex-boyfriend, we were on a bus back from the airport, slumping painfully into the Dublin city centre. An unsettled man around thirty was drunk or strung out and haranguing another peculiar lad in a Liverpool jersey, threatening him and eventually calling him a fag. Packed like mass-farmed chickens into the upper level, which always makes me sick anyway, I made to stand up, but my boyfriend placed a hand on me and told me to leave it. I chewed on my tongue in claustrophobic silence and resisted any further touches as a golf tournament streamed on his phone. The sensation was juvenile, keen and crushing, the feeling of wringing hands through the beratement of a parent. My parents would’ve stayed silent then, too.
When we were finally released onto the misty sidewalk on O’Connell Street, I stomped all the way to our second bus stop near Trinity. My boyfriend deigned to inquire what was wrong, and I told him he shouldn’t have stopped me, that it made me sick to stay quiet, that it made me more sick to watch everyone do the same. He hemmed and hawed that there was nothing to be done, no changes we could’ve pressed upon the stranger. I disagreed with him on every fundamental level, but there was an itching in my skin, an instinct to inflict and receive violence. Maybe I had only stopped because I knew, from the vitriol of the man, that he wouldn’t pause to hit me; his rage would turn instantly to my boyfriend, and this made me angrier.
‘I’m not afraid—I should’ve said something. That was fucking disgusting.’
‘What would be the point?’ He was struggling to reign in his rising tone, trying to avoid drawing the attention of late-night pedestrians. I have no regard for viewers anymore. ‘What could you have done?’
‘It doesn’t matter if it had accomplished anything! It’s about having some fucking integrity! If you believe something, you should act on it. Otherwise you’re just full of shit.’
He jerked his coat more tightly around his body, resisting the mid-Spring chill. ‘Or maybe not everyone is as eager as you to get hurt.’
*
I can’t remember what my childhood bedroom door looked like. It’s the new pseudo-psychological, ‘in my healing era’ trend. Picture the door, imagine opening it, entering, and sitting down for a conversation with your young self.
I don’t remember if it was white or an unpainted, stained wood. I don’t remember if we got a new handle or left the old, chintzy brass-coloured ones on, remnants of the outdated pre-renovation decor. I do remember the closet: a wide, open cove that my mother and I painted, inhabiting it with a large, blossoming tree. After nearly a decade sharing a bed with my younger sister, I wanted space, so we built a bed into the wall at the level of my head with a sturdy white ladder. There were no doors, no curtains, just me in my little mattress on display with a couple of drawers holding my books by my pillow, and it didn’t dawn on me until adulthood that I had literally spent my adolescence in the closet. My sense of humour was latent and delayed.
We ended up living in my mom’s childhood home, so I guess she never had to recall the look and feel of her bedroom door. She saw, remembered gently, and promptly replaced it with a newer, cleaner modern door. Once—I don’t remember when—my father drove our family past the street he used to live on when growing up in Cleveland, as he often did on our trips up north to visit his mother in her newer apartment, the one that smells like artificial vanilla and dusty carpets. A strange look passed over his face. Someone had torn the house down; all that was left was an empty patch of grass.
*
My siblings and I will throw ourselves into anything: a fight, a drink, a bet. We find ways to hurt ourselves without making noise, without eliciting sympathy. I remember us inaccurately, suspended in youthful memories like the yolk in an eggshell not yet cracked and spilled, buoyant beside each other forever. Backs straight, arms flexed, smiling, so strong and ready—even me, half-naked, smooth toddler skin and nipples young enough for people to not care that I liked to run around in loose shorts and nothing else, like my brothers. Just dirty feet and tangled hair and my little potbelly.
I could never pick her up, kiss her forehead. She would buck and kick at the suffocation. I was a tough thing, not allowed to be a boy, not content being a girl. All of my pleasant memories have to be smoothed out and conglomerated into a floating, impenetrable mass. Lake Small in the south, where we resided until I was seven, was coated with moss in the summer that made us ick and squeal, and it inexplicably lives down the lane from the creek several states away where I’d hunt snakes, nearly ankle-deep in muck. I just wanted to hold them, not hurt them. Cattails would bob down in the breeze to tap the crown of my head as I walked, like a long, reversed game of duck duck goose, and the cicadas would be digging out of the ground in a cacophony of nasal, buzzing shrieks.
Other things are singular and stuck, painfully unchanged. My older brother is held aloft above a wheelbarrow he’d been thrown at in a fit of rage; he crashes, bounces upwards; he hangs from nothing, limbs splayed, like a stage performer frozen mid-stunt. We all stand around a fire in an unsupervised backyard in the countryside observing a large rock we’d placed in its centre. It whines at the heat, softly at first, then louder, squealing, and explodes. A shattered piece wings into me, but my younger brother takes the brunt, suffering a white-hot little meteor to the neck. He screams. The boys are playing with airsoft guns, cursing and laughing their way through battle in the alleyway, and I pass by unarmed. One of them looks at me and can’t help but take a shot. The pellet leaves a large, bloody divet in the skin that takes years to fully fade. My sister is in the dining room, wailing unhinged and unhindered that our grandfather’s death was her fault for not visiting and doting on him more, even though she’d been his favourite and closest companion. Maybe because she had been. I am sitting in a high school bathroom, quiet in one of the stalls, with my eyes locked on the inside of the clean, grey door. We did not go to the type of school that suffered bathroom graffiti. The skin of my cheek is still stinging from where my years-long crush cracked the back of his hand, too caught up in a joke to stop the instinct to swing his arm. We liked to play at combativeness. The context used to matter to me more than it does now.
My siblings and I could never live together. We’ve had enough of it. Our personalities clash beyond comparison, beyond relief, in the way only distance can sweeten and remedy. My mom has remarked that, more than once, she’s been told by other kids’ mothers that if they hadn’t known our last names, they would never assume we’re siblings. We’re so different that we occupy separate worlds, in their brains, but this is short-sighted. We’re five fingers on the same hand, all curled into a fist. I am not sure if my parents are the muscle and sinew of the hand, the inertia in the arm thrown to strike, or the intention.
People don’t often talk about siblings, don’t write about it. Other than heartstring-pulling movies about funerals or Christmas or the guilt-ridden tales of what it is to be the sibling of a chronically ill child, how often do you see them? This is why young adult protagonists are often only children with dead or absent parents: it’s an easier bite to chew. The text of a parent is translated across children, communicating the same message tweaked to suit the structure of another language, another media form. Siblings are distracting and complicated and people are naturally self-absorbed. It’s hard to write and hard to read. Make the same person but not.
Many people have assumed that my brothers inherited the qualities of my father due merely to their tempers and proclivity for arguing, and beyond that by being men. Grandfather to father to son, et cetera. Men are allowed the significance of a bloodline. Intergenerational trauma is, in my experience, often analysed with an automatic alignment of gender: fathers to sons and mothers to daughters. The latter relationship can be seen as fraught, feral, feminine. Maybe we feel that what each gender suffers is too distinctive for those qualities to cross. Anyone who really knows my family, though, I think would see that my sister and I are most similar to my dad. Or I might just feel that way because I tried so long to not be like him that I’m only realising now that we’re painfully similar. My dad sees us as his darling girls and has resisted our thornier qualities. I don’t think he likes seeing a reflection of himself, particularly cast onto the form of a woman. My sister inherited his rage; I inherited his restlessness. Despite our best efforts, I imagine this will remain the case.
*
Lord of the Rings is me and my dad’s thing. It’s technically a family thing, and my siblings may disagree, but it soothes me to think we have a particular bond with it and over it. Production for the films started the year of my birth. Watching it, even during the peaceful moments, I am constantly on the brink of tears, seemingly for no reason at all. Kingsfoil? Nice crispy bacon? It’s a little tight across the chest? Any of it, all of it.
These are movie references, as I’ve never actually completed the books. My dad has one-upped me in my own field of literature. But I watch the extended editions every year because that is what my dad played annually back in the noughties, and it never disappoints. Éowyn was my obvious idol, and to this day I get filled with hot, pulsing anger at anyone who talks or causes commotion during her I am no man line. The grasping, the wanting, the rage, the steel—it embodied something in my childhood I couldn’t yet articulate and still mostly can’t. It would all be useless waxing in comparison. My brothers couldn’t understand it. They were never kept so near to home, minded and held close and monitored the way my sister and I were. I spent a significant amount of time back home after college and during the pandemic, then flew away as soon as I could, thousands of miles in any direction that would take me. I had to prove that I could do it.
J.R.R. Tolkien was no major champion of women (there are only three notable female characters in the whole series, none of whom speak to each other) and the employment of a woman as the slayer of the Witch-king of Angmar is primarily a Shakespearean gotcha, a clever way to conquer the magical armour claiming this massively powerful villain could be killed by ‘no man.’ Tolkien describes her big moment in his grandiose manner (I actually read this part), making her out to be a beautiful terror, something that would’ve been very unconventional for the time; nevertheless, it didn’t feel kind or sympathetic. It could’ve been my own assumptions, but the portrayal of a woman later regarded as a feminist icon didn’t feel loving—just coincidental. Or maybe it is a type of love I don’t understand. She is a bitter character, reworked as sympathetic and hopeful—if outspoken and a little self-absorbed, at times—for the films. Tolkien didn’t know a freckled little girl in the Midwest would be struck and irreparably haunted by the concept of the character.
My dad’s habit, the thing that makes the rest of the family cluck our tongues and cast our eyes to the ceiling, is that he can’t help but point out where the films differ from the books. He’s done it so often that we can even pick out the moments where he’ll say, vodka cranberry in hand, ‘Actually, in the books…’ Haldir and the elves appearing by surprise to provide aid at the Battle of Helm’s Deep, a gruelling conflict where the heroes’ human forces are overwhelmingly outnumbered, didn’t occur in the books, and my dad will die on the hill that is his argument that elven reinforcements cheapened the main heroes’ victory. He gets a little miffed now at our teasing, and the volume of that emotion is dialled down or up depending on how many vodka cranberries he’s had, but it’s all in good fun.
He used to read the books under the covers as a child, long after his mother had told him to go to sleep. He tells me how he gasped aloud when Gandalf was revealed to be alive in The Two Towers, and again when it is revealed to be Éowyn on the battlefields in The Return of the King, having disguised herself as a man to be allowed to fight. I’m not sure entirely what he feels was lost or added to the story in its transition from text to film. What was changed? Why? Was it done with any intention at all? What were the consequences?
Just him, tucked in the dark with a flashlight in a room that doesn’t exist anymore. He’s clung to the sensation as I have. He’s the one in my life who understands what it is to feel like you’re running from something, like you may be bound and caged by your home at any time—he is the cause of and the cure for it. He escaped his poverty, his memory of an abusive father, his fear of spending his life in a mire of mediocrity. I should feel more spiteful, maybe—it is his own stifling sexism that first instilled in me a spitting, furious sense of feminism. Instead, I feel we are too similar to ignore. I have always been trying to escape something intangible. I am one of five children and, thus far, the only one who has put significant distance between myself and the place my parents live. Lord of the Rings occupies more space in my mind than my own childhood. I remember the elvish script on the entrance to the Mines of Moria better than my bedroom door.
In the books, after slaying the Witch-king, Éowyn is overcome with injury and a strange illness upon the battlefield and falls unconscious, believed dead. Her companion, Merry, crawls to King Theoden, the noble leader of men that the Witch-king had actually been trying to kill. He is Éowyn’s uncle, technically, but is truly her father figure. Merry comforts him in his dying moments, hiding the supposed truth of his niece’s death from him.
In the movie, this is changed: Éowyn crawls to her not-father’s side and strokes his hair as he looks at her in disbelief. He had thought himself to be saved from a gruesome murder by one of the men. He tells her he is dying, and she says she’ll save him. She cannot. Theoden dies, and she collapses next to him. Her brother, an exalted warrior, finds them both and grievously assumes that she’s fallen, a woman struck down in a place he’d claimed was the realm of men: parallel.
*
I’m sitting in the leftmost chair of the living room, next to the water pipe that runs along a wall covered in faux brick wall panelling, and it is daytime. My dad is holding a few pieces of paper. He seems excited but unsettled and tries to pass off both by handing them to my mom with an affected nonchalance. It’s a letter his dad wrote to him and his siblings before he died. His sister found it in her old things, and he doesn’t recall ever having read it before.
My mom asks if I want to see it, and I do. My legs are curled up beneath me, my grasp uncertain. I look at the first sentence and instantly recognise the script. I have never seen remnants of my late grandfather other than a single photo in passing. There is no job, no art, no production to remember him by, and certainly no writing. My dad must feel the same. He and his father never would’ve shared a passion or bonding activity or any touching correspondence—the death came before my dad could have the reason or desire or distance to exchange letters. Even the idea of watching his father write a check can be mostly laughed off by the fact that they never had any money.
Speaking the same way as a parent is to be expected, using the same self-conscious irony and turn of phrase that are passed down as surely as brown eyes or a severe hairline. The speech patterns from one’s youth are nearly impossible to expunge. My dad and I have spent significantly more time together than he and his father would’ve, but we don’t look alike the same way they did, and due to this and the difference in gender, it isn’t always readily apparent what unites us. Like the adaptation of text to film, I sometimes struggle to identify what has been lost in the translation of my grandfather to my dad to myself. In the same way that I feared becoming my dad when I was younger, I know he was ten times more terrified of becoming his. Does he feel he’s done enough to become something new, to not fall victim to the same mistakes? The letter is not as yellowed as I would’ve expected; it is well-kept. I realise he and my dad have the exact same handwriting.
Kasandra Ferguson (she/her) is an American writer working at a publishing house in Dublin. Her poetry has appeared in ROPES, Celestite Poetry, Typishly, dadakuku, and Fat Éire; her essays in Tolka and Write or Die Magazine; and her short fiction in an anthology by Sans. PRESS.
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