Patriarchal Resistance within Queer Fatherhood

In Nimrods: A Fake-punk Self-hurt Anti-memoir, Kawika Guillermo candidly explores the absurdities of his life through poetry. Using a raw, hybrid prose-poetic style, Guillermo reflects upon life as father and recounts his chaotic mixed-race upbringing, the impact of his uncle’s death from HIV, his parents’ divorce, and his troubled relationship with his father, as well as how this past affects him as a new, queer father.

Nimrods starts with a versified passage by Judith Butler that explores the concept of paternal law, a structure of authority and power which is typically seen as absolute and “deterministic”:

the paternal law ought
to be understood not
as a deterministic divine will
but
as a perpetual bumbler
preparing the ground
for the insurrection against him (2)

Butler suggests that these structures should not be seen as absolute. Throughout Guillermo’s poems, the paternal law is portrayed as flawed and imperfect, as constantly making mistakes, which sets the stage for the author’s challenges to and uprisings against it.

In the first poem, “Nice Guys Read This Last,” the reader immediately explores the intimate challenges and emotional toll of fatherhood. The author wakes to the sound of their son, whose cries are described as “bleating / more goat than child” (5). This imagery suggests a primal, almost animalistic response to the child’s need, emphasising the raw and intense nature of parenthood. “[T]he calf’s ear / piercing whine” indicates the relentless and high-pitched cries of the child (5). The first poem starts the entire book off with the vulnerability of the author’s own expression of fatherhood, which turns out, in the following poems, to be a stark contrast to the author’s own father and upbringing. The book succeeds at encapsulating the ever-present past that lives in a parent’s mind about their own upbringing and how they will raise their children:

cause my child is a boy he is more likely to take after his father and take
and take but never take an affirmative step to deal with his own shit like
being the mixed-race straight-presenting white-passing all-perpetrating
son of an eye-rolling

wmaf (6)

In the first poem, Guillermo recounts the moment he learned he was becoming a father and his hopes for a girl. The trauma of Guillermo’s childhood comes out as he reflects on the responsibility of raising a boy. Guillermo’s father is depicted as a blue-eyed, do-no-wrong, white male who lives in a rigidly Christian society; he loves the wholesome Jimmy Buffett and the less savoury Donald Trump. While the father is clueless to his own privilege and the persistent harm his religious family causes towards Guillermo’s mother, Guillermo, and his mixed blood siblings, Guillermo also shares the realities of his father’s life. A member of the working class, his father experienced depression and grief in the wake of his brother’s death due to HIV and the silence his religious family upheld because of it. From this traumatic event, his father developed alcoholism and suicidal ideation, which lurk beneath the surface of righteous, patriarchal American morality in his family.

The two sides of Guillermo’s father highlight the performativity and pervasiveness of repressive white heterosexual normativity that many loved ones validate repeatedly in Guillermo’s poems. In the exchanges where someone defends Guillermo’s father because of his outward appearance and surface-level relatability while ignoring the deeper issues there, one wonders how can something so ugly like white supremacy be what we ordain as just:

you ask for proof

we give you truth

you find new friends

to believe your myths (56)

Baby Blue, as the father is known to some, symbolizes white-supremacist mythology in America and the dependence its participants have on a pantheon of figures, including the white Christ and Trump. Guillermo also takes a shot at Canadian culture and the blind eye most Canadians turned when Justin Trudeau was exposed in brown-face, which shows that Blue’s casually cruel racism is not exclusive to America.

As a current professor, Guillermo reflects upon his own tokenization and internalized racism in society and academia: “the academy has taught me to isolate the past into weapons of my / own making” (10). Guillermo speaks to being perceived as more aggressive, undesirable, and unloved due to being brown, but also mentions when he has been complacent, when he has not challenged systemic racism in various instances of his life. While a lot of these poems are intense and are difficult to read, they serve as reflections of the world Guillermo’s son will live in, one that repeatedly centres whiteness.

In the collection’s midsection, an epigraph from Laura Marks delves into the dynamics of power and submission:

The image
of a man being
vanquished
a man giving
into pleasure
and to being
done is exciting
for me (89)

The poem suggests a man surrendering to pleasure and allowing himself to be acted upon, which contrasts traditional notions of masculine dominance and control. The speaker reveals their personal excitement at and attraction to this reversal of roles, finding empowerment in seeing a man submit to and experience pleasure.

The midsection is structured biblically to dissect the behaviours of the father’s infidelity, alcoholism, and grief in prose, and his character is denoted as the FATHER. Though the voice of the prose sounds righteous at times, in giving into his pleasures, the FATHER loses many parts of himself. To the left and right margins span poems in response to the prose, often poking holes in the heterosexual nonsense the FATHER finds pleasure in. The poetry serves as a fresh, queer lens on the transgressions of the FATHER and how Othered one would feel witnessing all of this as a queer child, especially in the curiosity Guillermo displays for his late uncle. In the footnotes, a memoir voice is used to make sense of all these memories and bridge the two aforementioned voices. Having three voices speak at the same time causes this midsection to be discordant in many parts, but its experimental form so deeply reflects how thought and memory are not linear or tidy. Guillermo’s masterful writing shows that there are multiple stories intersecting: an emotional voice, a reflective voice, and one that tries to empathise with the others in almost theatrical ways.

The ending excerpt begins with a quotation by Anne Lowenhaupt Tsing, who reflects on the concept of progress and how it structures our perception of time:

progress is a forward march
drawing other kinds of time
into its rhythms

without that driving beat
we might notice other
temporal patterns (178)

Progress is often perceived as a continuous advancement. But in moving away from simply moving on, we might become aware of different, perhaps more varied and complex, ways of experiencing time. Guillermo’s final poems challenge the reader to reconsider the dominant narrative of progress and to recognize the buried moments that have been overshadowed by life’s relentless march forward.

The calibre of Guillermo’s craft, his raw emotional vulnerability, and the final line are worth the emotional journey that Nimrods takes you on. There is no neat and tidy ending. In his closing lines, Guillermo offers a powerful exchange between present and past lives, previous and current patriarchs: forgiveness and forgetfulness in the admission of the author’s and father’s truths and living memories.