Poem of the week: Is Your Country a He Or a She in Your Mouth by Patricia Lockwood

Patricia Lockwood’s poem Is Your Country a He or a She in Your Mouth? removes country from the map and puts it inside the body.

The title doesn’t ask whether a country is male or female. It asks what the country becomes in your mouth. The mouth pronounces the nation and gives it a pronoun, but it also tastes, desires and consumes. Before the poem has properly begun, nationality has become linguistic, erotic and digestive.

The country created by grammar

The speaker thinks her country is a man because she loves men. Lockwood then invents a sexual taxonomy out of patriotic vocabulary: fatherlandsexuals, motherlandsexuals and, eventually, homelandsexuals.

The joke has teeth. Nationalism already uses the language of sex and family. The nation is mother, father, ancestral soil. Citizens are her sons and daughters. Borders must be defended against penetration. Territory can be violated, possessed and inherited. Lockwood turns up the volume on the libido already humming inside patriotic speech.

The invented identities also expose the policing of belonging. The motherlandsexuals have been sailed away, and then the official story says they were never there. First exile, then erasure. The state doesn’t merely remove the unwanted person; it edits the memory of their existence.

When the family bedroom becomes a map

The speaker is fourteen when she walks into her mother’s bedroom. The mother’s body becomes indistinguishable from the motherland and the father’s from the fatherland. Their borders match apart from a capitalised “Area” belonging to the father.

That bureaucratic word is obscene at the same time. A penis becomes disputed territory, an enclave, a geopolitical protrusion. Sex becomes annexation. The language of maps tries to describe a scene for which the fourteen-year-old has no settled vocabulary.

The scare quotes around the father “loving her” from behind matter. They prevent the scene settling into a comfortable story about parental intimacy. Is this love, sex, possession, domination, or a child’s shocked interpretation? The poem lets those meanings crowd against the same border.

Then the speaker becomes geographical too. Her body has a valley, a coast and a population with grotesque appetites. She is no longer an observer standing outside the motherland and fatherland. She has provinces and citizens of her own. The geopolitical metaphor has colonised her perception.

The tornado and the animal

A tornado arrives as an engine of confusion. The mother sees a cow; the father sees a bull. Each parent sees the animal that confirms the sexual geography they inhabit. The speaker sees one animal chewing their separate countries into a single cud.

The animal is doing what the poem does: chewing categories until they become hard to separate—male and female, mother and nation, father and nation, sex and violence, child and country, one body and a population.

The syntax behaves like the tornado. Clauses rush past on commas, gathering animals, borders, ferries, citizens and pieces of hawk. We don’t get the clean stopping points that would let us return everything to its proper compartment.

The accent inside refusal

The speaker cries, “I hate these country!” The grammar is wrong, but the parents’ eyes shine because she is speaking with the accent of the homeland. She becomes a homelandsexual at the moment she expresses hatred in the family’s native grammar.

That catches something true about inheritance. Belonging doesn’t necessarily mean affection or agreement. Sometimes we discover how deeply a family or place inhabits us through the particular shape of our resistance. The accent survives inside the refusal. You can reject the country and still hear it speaking through your mouth.

I’ve been thinking about this through another borrowed line: I know not “should.” Every should arrives carrying someone else’s metaphysics; every language of refusal may also carry someone else’s accent. We don’t step outside inheritance merely by opposing it. The old script may still be organising the sentence in which we announce our escape.

Boarding herself

Then comes the turn I find most moving: the speaker is “boarding myself already.” She doesn’t simply board a ship. She becomes the vessel she is boarding.

The earlier self was a territory being defined by other people: motherland, fatherland, valley, coast, reproductive promise. Now she becomes mobile geography—a ferry packed with citizens. She recedes from the parents’ coasts while carrying an entire population inside her.

This isn’t the clean autonomy of the self-made individual. She doesn’t sail away empty. Her people come with her. They wave hello and goodbye at once. At night they continue eating hawk, the traditional dish of the new country.

That detail prevents the ending becoming a simple liberation story. The floating heart-land carries its inherited appetites. The speaker escapes the fixed map, but not everything the map put inside her. Violence, hunger, language, family and custom have boarded too.

The final hyphen opens heartland and remakes it. The old heartland was fixed soil, inherited identity, weather, and mother and father locked inside their national-sexual drama. The new heart-land floats. It has no permanent border. It is populated, contradictory and capable of movement.

Not a homeland received from the parents. A moving country made through the difficult act of carrying oneself away.

One way to map the poem is:

country as pronoun → country as parental body → self as occupied territory → self as vessel

At first the speaker asks what gender the inherited country has. By the end, she has become a country of her own—but not a solitary or purified one. She is crowded with citizens, customs and old hungers.

That is what stays with me. The poem refuses the fantasy that we can simply escape the motherland and fatherland, declare sovereignty and begin again untouched. We leave carrying a population.

How do I become a country of my own without pretending no one else lives inside me?

Lockwood doesn’t offer a border. She gives us a vessel.

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Is Your Country a He Or a She in Your Mouth

Mine is a man I think, I love men, they call me
a fatherlandsexual, all the motherlandsexuals
have been sailed away, and there were never
any here in the first place, they tell us. Myself
I have never seen a mountain, myself I have
never seen a valley, especially not my own,
I am afraid of the people who live there,
who eat hawk and wild rice from my pelvic
bone. Oh no, I am fourteen, I have walked
into my motherland’s bedroom, her body
is indistinguishable from the fatherland
who is ‘loving her’ from behind, so close
their borders match up, except for a notable
Area belonging to the fatherland. I am drawn
to the motherland’s lurid sunsets, I am reaching
my fingers to warm them, the people in my
valley are scooping hawk like crazy, I can no
longer tell which country is which, salt air off
both their coasts, so gross, where is a good nice gulp
of Midwestern pre-tornado? The tornado above me
has sucked up a Cow, the motherland declares,
the tornado above him has sucked up a Bull,
she says pointing to the fatherland. But the cow
is clearly a single cow, chewing a single cud
of country, chewing their countries into one,
and ‘I hate these country!’ I scream, and
their eyes shine with rain and fog, because
at last I am using the accent of the homeland,
at last I am a homelandsexual and I will never
go away from them, there will one day be two
of you too they say, but I am boarding myself
already, I recede from their coasts like a Superferry
packed stem to stern with citizens, all waving hellos
and goodbyes, and at night all my people go below
and gorge themselves with hunks of hawk,
the traditional dish of the new floating heartland. *

📙 Is Your Country a He Or a She in Your Mouth appears in Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals