In 1976, my father sat the family down on a brown and yellow rug—an island of memory which I have known and not known my whole life—to tell us we were moving from Philadelphia to England. Too young to understand, I simply followed my parents and older sisters on a long overnight flight, through an endless customs line, and into a fully furnished life, 3335 miles from what I understood as home.
That same year, I started at St. Hilda’s, an all-English school for girls in Hertfordshire, a small town about 40 minutes outside of London. Required to wear an ill-fitting scratchy brown uniform and sturdy corrective shoes, I felt uncomfortable every day. Most of my classmates had never met an American, so they were instantly fascinated. However, the attention quickly changed to ridicule. The girls taunted me to “say something…say something” and when I did, they would mercilessly laugh, saying what I had just said in their “American” accents.
Just a year later, Queen released “We Are the Champions” and the B-side “We Will Rock You,” which catapulted them to meteoric success. Those two songs could be heard at every soccer match, local pub, and radio station throughout England. I remember when “We Are the Champions” came on the radio, my older sisters cranked it. At the time, I had no idea why I loved the song so much. I just knew that I had memorized every word, and that something about the song made me feel differently than my constrictive uniform and sturdy shoes.
As a kid, I remember watching the original video for “We Are the Champions.” A long way from St. Peter’s Church of England School—where Farrokh Bulsara was teased for his prominent front teeth and shamed into “Bucky”—Freddie Mercury shows no self-consciousness. Strutting, waving, and twirling his signature stand-mounted microphone, he wears a skin-tight one-half black and one-half white, footed leotard with a large U cut out in the front. His dark curly chest hair explodes out of it. His hair is coiffed into a perfect mullet. Neatly confined to a runway stage, Mercury performs for throngs of fans who chant, sway, raise their fists, and sing along. His performance, teetering on the edge of chaos, is sexy, exuding a feeling of transgressive boundarylessness. To me, Mercury felt unafraid of the fans’ adoration. Watching him made me feel vast and expansive.
In 1981, my family returned to the United States. Still not quite old enough to know what was happening to me, I landed in St. Louis, Missouri at another school for girls. Not surprisingly, I was mocked here, too. The girls mimicked my “British” accent and implored me to “say something…say something.” By now, I had learned how to lean into the attention, while protecting myself. I was no longer the subject of ridicule but rather the hilarious “new girl” who made everyone laugh.
I was an island. John Donne’s poem “No Man Is an Island” begins, “No man is an island / entire of itself; / Every man is a piece of the continent, /A part of the main.” With every move, I had a harder time understanding what it meant to be a “piece of continent.” With every new location and new school, I reinvented myself. People adored me because I was the oddity, the different attraction, scathingly funny and with stunningly cool. Well-versed in protecting myself from more ridicule, I fueled the mystery. I used British words and scoffed when people did not understand me. I hid behind an “entire of itself” attitude, which helped to fuel years of thoughtless and careless behavior. Finally, I convinced myself that because I was an island, nothing and nobody mattered. It was a beautiful well-constructed wall, protecting me from being who I truly was, a desperately lonely kid who loved to escape into reading and writing.
By 1985, I had moved again and was allowed to go to public high school. “We Are the World” was recorded in January, and by July, Bob Geldof, the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, and Midge Ure of Ultravox had produced Live Aid. Both were musical charity events that raised more than 180 million dollars for famine relief in Ethiopia. At fourteen, I started to realize that the world was bigger than what I had carefully constructed, rounder than the rug of my childhood memory.
Live Aid was a momentous high school memory. Held simultaneously at Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, it highlighted hundreds of bands, including the reunions of some of my favorite bands like The Who, Black Sabbath, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Despite major criticism for touring in South Africa during a British embargo against apartheid, Queen was scheduled to play in the evening at Wembley Stadium.
I remember at 6:41 pm on July 13, 1985, when Freddie Mercury, dressed in tight white jeans, a white tank top, a black studded belt, and an upper bicep bracelet, sat down at the piano.
Like in the 1977 “We Are the Champions” video, Mercury’s chest hair erupts over the edge of his tank top, but this look is simpler, more pared down. His hair, clearly thinning, is slicked back, and his face fills the camera’s frame. When he begins playing “We Are the Champions,” he’s profusely sweating and spitting the words into the mic. Before the chorus, the camera pans into a sea of over 72,000 people swaying in unison.
It is in the next moment, when Freddie Mercury tipped his head back and sang, “We are the champions of the world”— his voice lingering and lounging the word “world” for over six seconds—I heard the keening of so many hurts. Though his vibrato was a bit reckless and out of control, Mercury’s borderless “world” held over 1.9 billion people, including me.
I remember losing my breath. That same expansive feeling of when I was seven returned. I was free. Held in a note of patience and forgiveness not of ridicule or shame. Somehow that one note encapsulated my whole life—living in the ever-expanding liminal space between arrival and departure. Between the knock at the door and the answer. In bottomless possibility. That one “world” was a space where I could be fully me—a lonely reader and writer—who felt part “a part of the main.”
Many years later, I was in a crowded elevator with other writers, joking about our poetry-writing professor who seemingly did not want us to think of ourselves as “real writers.” In my mid-twenties, I joked with the older, more experienced writers and felt like a part of the group until right before we exited the elevator, a fellow writer shot me a look of disgust.
Then, without warning, she mockingly asked, “Hey, where’d you get that private girls’ school accent, anyway?” Taken aback and momentarily embarrassed, I knew I could shoot back a snarky, biting quip that would make everyone laugh at her. But that wasn’t what I wanted in that moment. Maybe I was becoming better equipped to be mocked and shamed. Maybe I had learned that being myself meant being truthful.
I simply replied, “Private girls’ school.” I walked off the elevator, not feeling triumphant or like I had busted her; I felt good that I had owned this part of my identity.
She laughed at me, “That’s what I thought.”
Recently, I found out that Freddie Mercury admitted that he was “riddled with scars.” I wasn’t surprised. Being human is hard. It means that in not being “entire of itself,” we are part of an expansive, breathable world in which we are sometimes mocked, teased, ridiculed, and even worse discriminated against for the parts of ourselves that we cannot change.
Jenny Burkholder is a poet and writer living and working in Pennsylvania. The former Montgomery County Poet Laureate, she is the author of a chapbook of poems, Repaired (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Her poems and creative nonfiction have appeared in North American Review, 2RiverView, So to Speak, Epiphany, and The Healing Muse, among others. She is the co-host of OVERexpressed & OUT, a podcast that amplifies the voices of Philadelphia-area, modern-day pioneers—women transforming their communities from the inside. Her work can be found at overexpressed.net.