Extract — ‘A Jigsaw of Broken Things’ winner of the 2023 Landfall Essay Competition
By Siobhan Harvey
Author:
Siobhan Harvey
Editor:
Lynley Edmeades
Publisher:
Landfall
ISBN:
9781990048647
Date published:
27 November 2023
Format:
Paperback
RRP:
$30
Protection for queer communities and their rights lies at the heart of this year’s Landfall Essay Competition winning essay, ‘A Jigsaw of Broken Things’ by Siobhan Harvey. Powerful and unflinching, Harvey uses her memories like stepping stones as she examines the violence and prejudices that repress queer communities worldwide.
‘The essay interlaces my personal experience of questioning my identity in the 1980s – and the parental, societal and political ostracism that resulted – with a contemporary consideration of how, in many ways in many countries around the world, despite supposed progress since the second half of the 20th century, queer people continue to be the targets of social and political exclusion, bigotry and prohibition.’‘As someone who came out at a time of unadulterated political, cultural, psychological, and physical brutality, revulsion and spite against queer people, I had to write against the rejuvenation of hardcore opposition to and oppression against the community still; I felt a duty to do so.’
A Jigsaw of Broken Things
Memory is set up to use the past to imagine the future—Daniel Schacter
one, part of a larger puzzle
Let me piece this together, scattered as it is across the lifespan of my memory. As if, little by little, I can make it into something complete. Even though, quite often, my memories seem like an array of singular parts. Irregular fragments belonging to a brainteaser: some with holes in them, some with loops, some one-sided, some double-edged.
A cruel exchange between those supposedly related to one another; the random discovery of something meaningful in a difficult place; an intolerant dogma linked to a loner’s fractured sense of identity; an image of broken learning; a severed relationship; a final failure to connect: this and that, replicated over and over again. Apparently disconnected. Or apparently not.
&
two, irregular
I was 16 years old when my father told me no one would ever love me.
‘No one will ever love you,’ he said. Offered with that deep delivery of his, as if something belonging to darkness—or something coupled to it, like a night terror—was trapped in his throat.
Trapped in my memory also, the day I came out.
That’s all it took for the room in which we stood to narrow like his eyes.
This, too, I recall: the day he gave oxygen to his words, a dry heat scorched the air, the room tightening so much, I felt the breath leave my body, and everything about me seemed myopic in that place I blindly thought of as home. While my mother sat in a chair nearby, watching me and my constriction with the same indifference she devoted to episodes of Dynasty.
Pained, I knew my father laid bare his feelings about love and me because he passionately believed that I needed to be rescued from a future in which I’d be unloved. By others. By him.
&
three, a hole
A scatter of articles lies before me. ‘Oslo shooting near gay bar investigated as terrorism, as Pride parade cancelled.’1 ‘Colorado gay club shooting suspect charged with hate crime.’2 ‘Italian government tells Milan to stop registering same-sex couples’children.’3 ‘Ugandan MPs pass bill imposing death penalty for homosexuality.’4 ‘To change your official gender in Poland you have to sue your parents.’5 ‘Spike in online hate towards trans community after Posie Parker visit.’6
Reading them in the lonely, tight space of my studio, I’m puzzled. I want to tell them they don’t belong here; they belong elsewhere, to an unforgiving past. A past four decades or more old when, cookie-cutter-like, prejudice against LGBTQi+ people was institutionalised. A time when governments and laws openly discriminated against us. A time when police, business, health, education and housing secretly did the same. An era when the shame associated with being gay, lesbian, bi and trans turned family members against one another. An era when non-heteronormative people carrying on with their everyday lives were subjected to intentional acts of spite.
Of course, those of us who experienced such discrimination remember it clearly, which is to say, we remember it deeply, painfully. Which is also to say, perhaps naively, we thought it just that: pained recollections lost, thankfully, to a bygone age.
But these articles say otherwise. Here is proof, they remind me, that the harm of the past has resurfaced, as if an old game, believed to be gathering dust in the closet, has been rediscovered and is being replayed.
In these snippets of reportage, I also find people who’ve forgotten how to love—forgotten how to remember those instances of hate first encoded four decades or more ago in the minds of those who endured them. Like me.
&
four, a loop
This memory is a cul-de-sac, a dead end attached to the network of streets where I live. A busy, small town that changes when the main employer, the meatworks, closes. Suddenly, most of the working population, including my father, is made redundant.
What remains of this memory after that?
As redundancy payments dwindle, as an increasing number of shops and small businesses fail, it becomes harder for residents to keep up appearances. Yet in the emptiness of the days, weeks and months afterwards, for those once devoted to dispatching and disassembling a carcass, appearances are all that’s left. A fine cut to fret over.
That’s why I remember my mother cleaning her house every day, disinfecting its floors, sanitising its surfaces and buffing its windows to a blinding sheen. Whether by example, desperation or misplaced belief, she wages war against contamination, convinced it will absolve her and her household from stain. All so the neighbours can see how spotless she is. All so they can’t defile her or her dwelling with their cold-shouldering shame.
Or can they?
In that world of myopia, my memory evokes how, in a time and place of redundancy, it isn’t only the fear of being outcast by those we live closest to that plagues my parents. It’s more encompassing and introspective than this. The creed of appearance is absolute. It creates a fear of association in all residents, placing them at risk of tainting others and, by association, being tainted themselves. All it takes is for an individual, child or adult, to exhibit behaviour neighbours deem inappropriate, and not just the miscreant but also their family face ostracism.
For my parents, this means that the fear of rejection by their neighbours is also the fear of contamination by me.
&
five, an edge
In reviewing articles on contemporary acts of hate against queer people, I find myself wondering if my attention has been elsewhere. I’ve been so focused on the progress LGBTQi+ people have made in recent decades through same-sex marriage legislation, parenting and adoption rights, anti-discrimination laws, legal recognition of affirmed gender, gender-affirming healthcare and so forth, that I’ve overlooked how others have been working secretly against this. So, now we’ve reached a point in history where measures giving legislative and social equality to the rainbow community are being eroded and erased.
That’s what headlines like ‘Ugandan MPs pass bill imposing death penalty for homosexuality’ and ‘Italian government tells Milan to stop registering same-sex couples’ children’ seem to reveal. For in the hostility that links them and others together, I find not just a compliment to the bigotry that appears in many of my memories but also a testament to how fragile the legacy of our misfortune is, how easily it can be unremembered.
Suddenly, I realise that this isn’t only a fight between political forces, the progressive versus the conservative, with gender identity as their battleground. No, it’s also a conflict over memory: its evidence and erasure; how, often, it supports us and how, sometimes, it lets us down.
Read Siobhan Harvey’s winning essay ‘A Jigsaw of Broken Things,’ in full in Landfall 246: Spring 2023, edited by Lynley Edmeades.
Jessie Yeung, Mayumi Maruyama, James Frater, Niamh Kennedy, Sarah Diab and Li-Lian Ahlskog Hou, ‘Oslo shooting near gay bar investigated as terrorism, as Pride parade cancelled’. CNN, 24 June 2022.https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/24/europe/norway-oslo-gay-bar-shooting- intl-hnk/index.html
Colleen Slevin, ‘Colorado gay club shooting suspect charged with hate crime’. Stuff, 7 December2022.https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/us-canada/300758659/colorado-gay-club-shooting-suspect- charged-with-hate-crimes
Federico Maccioni, ‘Italian government tells Milan to stop registering same-sex couples’ children’. Reuters, 15 March 2023. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/italian-government-tells-milan- stop-registering-same-sex-couples-children-2023-03-14/
Samuel Okiror, ‘Ugandan MPs pass bill imposing death penalty for homosexuality’. The Guardian, 21 March 2023). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/21/ugandan-mps-pass-bill- imposing-death-penalty-homosexuality
Anna Gmiterek-Zablocka, ‘To change your official gender in Poland you have to sue your parents’. Notes from Poland,31 March 23. https://notesfrompoland.com/2023/03/31/to-change-your-official- gender-in-poland-you-have-to-sue-your-parents-causing-trauma-for-trans-people/
Hamish Cardwell, ‘Spike in online hate towards trans community after Posie Parker visit’. RNZ, 4 April 2023. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/487306/spike-in-online-hate-toward-trans- community-after-posie-parker-visit-researchers
