Adira. That’s slang in Lebanese queer culture for someone who is confident and powerful. And it’s also the name of the first Arab drag festival. Ever. As far as I know! It was beautiful, it was fun, and as mad as I expected (and hoped for). It got me thinking…we’re in June, that’s Pride Month, remembering the riots at the famous gay bar Stonewall Inn on 28 June 1969 when New York police raided the place under the well-trodden pretence of investigating for illegal selling of alcohol without licence, but actually arresting people for the then-criminal offence of homosexuality (it took another eleven years to legalise it in 1980, by the way). Police raids were an all-too-common occurrence at gay bars in the Village, but this time, patrons of the Stonewall Inn fought back: five days of uprising ensued, changing the future of the gay rights movement in the US forever. The resistance galvanised gay liberation, mobilising activists and organisations, and putting pressure on politicians to decriminalise homosexuality. It also increased visibility of gay culture in the mainstream – from the closet to the cinema screen. Yet the journey remains a long one.
As I was enjoying the drag queens from North-Africa and the Middle East perform and compete (fiercely!) for best costume-cum-attitude, my thoughts wandered, as they do, to punctuation…and I remembered a famous double-edged remark by the late American author Kurt Vonnegut, offering writing advice: “First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” Oh, plenty to tease apart here, I mused, as a very saucy Brigitte-Bardot-in leopard-print queen called Jafar attempted to flirt her contender out of the competition, a tall regal Amazon, dropped out of The Fifth Element film.
Transvestite, that’s drag, basically. Although drag is much more (it’s an art form, for one), but at the basis of both is dressing according to a code influenced by what large parts of society see as “female” or “male”. I’m tiptoeing around writing “men dress up as women, women dress up as men”, yet perhaps it’s okay to cut to the chase a little for the sake of the argument. Hermaphroditism means intersex: when the genitalia, gonads (testicles/ovaries), and chromosome pattern of a person or animal cannot be clearly assigned as male or female, either at birth or during puberty.
So, Vonnegut claims the semicolon is both in drag (dressing as the opposite gender), and neither male nor female. A kind of double crossing, creating maximum ambiguity, or rather, he suggests, cancelling out any gender belonging at all. The mark becomes “nothing”. Its lack of clarity results in exerting no effect whatsoever on the sentence, merely flaunting language training gained in higher education. The semicolon is showy-offy. Pretentious. Unnecessary. Deficient. Core-less. It slips out of definitions. It refuses straight answers. Queer culture hostility anyone?
What might be the relationship between queerness and punctuation, I wondered as a performer from Tunisia took the stage to thunderous applause, tinkling belly dance girdles wrapped around her. What are the attitudes around both nursed by haters, and why such vehement anger? And what’s the power of queerness and punctuation to challenge the status quo? Also, was Kurt Vonnegut a backward bigot, or was there more to his provocation than meets the eye? Let me relieve you right now: Vonnegut is offering some questionable humorous writing advice in that piece, so we should probably not take him too seriously. And yet, he’s putting his finger on a curious intersection between punctuation and perceived “deviance” (of rules, grammatical, sexual, and otherwise) that’s worth exploring. Yalla, let’s go semicolon!
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The semicolon: a very brief history
There are unnecessary inventions (such as a cat brush that you can stick in your mouth to brush-lick your cat like Angela from The Office), and there are necessary inventions – such as the semicolon. At least, that’s what its inventors thought over 500 years ago when they suggested a dot in the centre of the line, perched above a comma at the bottom. Two great men of letters gave birth jointly to the punctuation mark in a 1496 account of a hike up Mount Etna in Sicily, written by scholar and churchman Cardinal Pietro Bembo, and published by the Venitian superstar of printers, Aldo Manuzio. Aldo was obsessed with making the page of a book look elegant: he single-handedly invented italics, helped develop the typeface that would become Times New Roman, pocket-size books, carve Greek type to be able to circulate ancient Greek texts, find and print works by Aristotle that would be instrumental for Renaissance thought, and replace the slash-comma (called virgule, looking like so / ) with the curly-comma we use today. Plus, of course, the semicolon. What’s its purpose? More nuanced pausing.
Within the very short space of 200-250 years, writers of the Renaissance gave us a remarkable number of four new punctuation marks while also adapting and tinkering with existing ones, offering us their current looks. The exclamation mark, parentheses, semicolon, and points of suspense were completely new; the quotation marks, dash, apostrophe, and hyphen received their looks and usage of today, although they had been around in some form or another earlier. That’s a lot of concern with the minutiae of text! Renaissance writers were chasing perfect expression, powerful eloquence in their quest of embodying a master-orator: someone who persuades with his words, chaining listeners (or readers) to his mouth through the golden chains of poised words. Everything was about rhythm, how you place your well-chosen words, so punctuation helped orchestrate the sound of sentences. It visually signalled elegant structure, and it indicated breath, pause, and tone. I would also argue Renaissance punctuation experts knew how dots and dashes tell tales of the movement of the mind, but that’s for another newsletter…
Writers gave punctuation the heavy task of transmitting this crafted word-music. Points of suspense would suggest the trailing off of the voice…hesitation, doubt, insinuation even… Parentheses encased extra words and were to be read in a lower and faster voice. And the semicolon, that’s a pause more subtle than the fullstop and the comma. The rule? There is no rule! And that is precisely what’s making people nervous and downright mad. Hear me out.
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How to semicolon.
Let’s look at the name: in English, the mark ; is called semicolon. That would suggest half a colon. A pause between a colon ( : ) and a comma ( , ). What that pause would be like, I don’t know, because the colon and comma work differently in the sentence (considering today’s conventions anyway). But the inference makes sense, because the dot of the ; is floating in the centre of the line, reminiscent of the two dots of the colon. The word “semicolon” entered English in the sixteenth or seventeenth century (I’m still in the process of reconstructing its history, and this post is not about the origins of the semicolon but about queer punctuation!). English grammars of the time tend consistently to describe the ; as half-way between : and , but Continental European languages tell a different story. The semicolon’s Italian name is punto e virgola, full stop and comma. The same in French (point-virgule). The same in German (Strich-Punkt, although it is Semikolon today). Same in Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Persian.
Now, those languages also call the colon “double point” (as did English for a while, namely “two pricks”, prick because you prick the paper with your quill when you make a dot), so it may be that they, too, conceive of the semicolon as midway between colon and comma. But I don’t think so. I think, a pure hunch, that English misunderstood the assignment: the semicolon, really, is a pause between a full stop and a comma. In the unlikely case someone quarrels with you on that, quote me! In the end, it doesn’t really matter what we call it or which parent marks it combines, the main point is that the semicolon is a mongrel, and that’s what riles people up: it’s neither full stop/colon nor comma, neither man nor woman. It’s a mermaid, top-half human, bottom-half fish. It’s both, and in that (they think?) neither or nothing at all. Or something totally different? A new merged creature? Itself without need for labels? Before we continue thinking about this, let’s consider usage.
Okay, let’s agree ; expresses a pause between the finality of a full stop and the little breather of a comma. How do we use it? That’s the real nut we need to crack. A word upfront: there’s no nut and there’s no cracking. That’s precisely the point. And that’s precisely where queerness (broadly speaking) comes in. The semicolon is somewhat undefinable and slides into whichever position you want it to. Don’t believe the grammar guides on this one, there is no hard-and-fast rule for semicolon use. Yes, most of the time writers put ; between complete clauses (sentence parts with a subject and verb) which could stand on their own as sentences, but which somehow seem too connected to plant the wall of a full stop between them. And here we’re already in the thick of it: the stress is on could and somehow and seem.
The semicolon is subjective (like most of punctuation! In English anyway, and other languages that don’t just slavishly follow grammar in their punctuation.). Some people separate items on a list with them; some people construct parallel sentences like so in order to emphasise syntactic scaffolding while also freeing up breath and mental pauses of readers to linger but not fall on the full stop; to float across the comma-dot; to dwell but keep on going. The semicolon is a dreamy kind of mark for meandering minds. Those looking for nuance. Exploration. Plunging into the flow of thought and word without the absolute need for the clear-cut precision of machine-gun bullets. Of full stops. Of pricking periods.
Subtlety. Ambiguity. This-and-that-ness. Pause for thought. That’s exactly why Bembo and Manuzio invented the semicolon, and what the Renaissance revered as social, ethical, and intellectual values. Remember that the master rhetorician was the ideal man at the time, so schools and universities would encourage students to argue for all and any kind of side of a case, creating flexible minds that read between the lines, acutely alive to a kaleidoscope of motivations. Remember, too, that genders were segregated more than today, and homosocial love and its expression was common and encouraged. And then, remember, also, that entertainment laws restricted female theatreplayers in many places, leading male actors to dress up as women on stage. Unlike today, perhaps, the Renaissance was more comfortable with the blurring of boundaries of all sorts: appearance, gender, sexuality, mind, writing, punctuation. Our nervousness around such haze is really not the problem of the semicolon at all. It is our problem.
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Attitudes to punctuation tell tales about attitudes to sexuality.
It’s us who have a problem with a man dressing up as a woman, or the other way around. It’s us who have a problem with bisexuality. It’s us who have a problem with the semicolon’s staunch refusal to choose a category, and doing that in an unapologetic way. The semicolon and a certain kind of exuberant visible queer culture show the middle finger to the boxed thinking of the establishment. They challenge the status quo, poking holes into neat definitions, and putting a spotlight on the porous nature of text and sexuality. When we punctuate the way we want, when we live the way we want, not only tolerating ambiguity, but positively revelling in it, we’re subverting authorities. Standard forms hate having their capitalist squares busted.
It makes sense, then, that flak against the semicolon has its origins in the last 100 years or so, going hand in hand with a suspicion towards the powers of punctuation as well as sexuality and gender expressions perceived as enemies of a straight binary norm. Systems of economy, politics, and society need us to fit in order to fulfil our purpose as cogs in the clockwork. Any “deviance” threatens the smooth accumulation of wealth for the few. Any deviance is effeminate…
And if you’re conquering the American West (and the world), writing like a woman is a big no-no, of course: punctuation-hater Cormac McCarthy called semicolons ‘weird little marks’; Edward Abbey described them as ‘a storm of flyshit on the typescript’; journalist Ben MacIntyre attests that writers like ‘Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon’, concluding ‘real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons.’ Every sentence should be chiselled. No frilly extras!
French literary theorist Hélène Cixous understands such supposedly logical linear onslaught of a style ‘phallocentric’. Instead of imitating male qualities of writing, she encourages women to write (with/through) their bodies, connecting anatomy, sexuality, and style: because women, Cixous claims, can feel erotic pleasure at more places on the body, diffusing erogenous zones, their thought and writing style transcends sequence, pointing into all sorts of directions, all at the same time. Ecriture féminine is mobile, moving across the page in sudden turns and changes of direction. Which punctuation mark could enable such exuberant fireworks better than the semicolon?
Cixous’s écriture féminine stems from a 1975 essay, and it’s perhaps no surprise that, only a year before, lesbian feminist Andrea Dworkin appended the ‘Afterword: The Great Punctuation Typography Struggle’ to her seminal work Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality. Like Cixous, Dworking connects text with gender and sexuality, homing in on punctuation: apostrophes and friends, however, become servants to the status quo (patriarchy) in her analysis of regulating the looks of a page.
my publisher, in his corporate wisdom, filled the pages with garbage: standard punctuation, he knew his purposes; he knew what was necessary, our purposes differed: mine, to achieve clarity; his, to sell books.
Curiously, Dworkin aptly wields the semicolon to highlight the parallel sentence structure of ‘he knew…; he knew’, and especially ‘mine, to achieve clarity; his, to sell books’: the semicolons deftly pit the spokesperson of capitalism against the free-wheeling artist. Dworkin’s individual punctuation choices, she insists, support not only clarity, but also liberate the reader to roam around her texts like wild things. Like free agents. ‘how the printed work appears on the page’, she says, ‘where to breathe, where to rest, punctuation’ – all this is pushing the reader into a straightjacket of someone else’s preference. Dworkin holds herself accountable, alleging she ‘overorchestrated’, adding ‘I forced you to breathe where I do, instead of letting you discover your own natural breath.’
It’s hard not to quote every sentence of Dworkin’s afterword — it’s just so good — but here’s another one:
standard forms are imposed in dress, behavior, sexual relation, punctuation. standard forms are imposed on consciousness and behavior—on knowing and expressing.
Such standard forms, or conventions we all implicitly agree to (or are made to agree to), imprison us subliminally, so much so that the authorities don’t even need to police us: we police each other, criticising, belittling, judging, excluding, and persecuting anyone and anything that dares drop off the beaten path and have the gall to claim authenticity. In that sense, punctuation is not so much the issue, but its standardisation used as a measurement of supposed (ab)normality and as a tool for control and oppression. In her writing, Dworkin herself shows how punctuation can act as a sneakily powerful way of subverting authorities when it’s employed subjectively. She bluntly admits that she is ‘an anarchist’: ‘I advocate revolution, and when people ask me what can we do that’s practical, I say, weakly, weaken the fabric of the system wherever you can, make possible the increase of freedom, all kinds. When I write I try to extend the possibilities of expression.’
Punctuation does just that: it extends the possibilities of expression once we shake off internalised assumptions about right or wrong. Internalised binaries. My publisher as well as many interviewers from all kinds of languages and media outlets picked me up on the (to them) paradox in my book on the exclamation mark: in one chapter, I’m saying the ! has acquired an online following among angry shouting men (textual dick anyone?); in another chapter, I’m describing how women do indeed use more exclamation marks, and with the purpose of warmth and friendliness. So, what is it then?! Sorry, but not sorry: it’s both. This and that. At the same time. Deal with it!
The semicolon is also this and that, as is queer culture, free and unfettered, effacing illusions of boundaries and notions of propriety derived from the same. Eat it, Vonnegut! But let me put in a good word for him at the end: he was, of course, not serious. The warning against punctuation in drag opens up a long chapter of slightly bonkers claims about literature in his motley 2006 essay collection Man Without a Country. His verdict on ; precedes a cheeky address to the reader: ‘And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I’m kidding’. A grumpy old deadpan author, forever pulling the rug from under our feet.
Here's your permission to sprinkle your writing with as many semicolons as possible. Let your punctuation weaken the fabric of the system with every email and every social media post. Make it a soirée of syntactic rebellion; dabble in defiant debauchery; revel in the riot of rhythms of your own choosing. Enough alliteration already? Just write. Anyway you like. That is the surest way of weakening the treacherous net of rules entangling us in judgement and prejudice without basis in reality. Be confident and powerful in your semicolons and any other punctuation you want to use. Adira.