Margins and Murmurations
Page 1
Margins and Murmurations
Otter Lieffe
Second ebook edition
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 Otter Lieffe
Second ebook edition published 2021
Berlin, Germany
978-3-949349-03-4
Cover design: Yone Liau and Zoe Langer
Editor: Liv Mammone
www.otterlieffe.com
All rights reserved in all media. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
This is for the trans women who doubt ourselves, who internalise the lies we're force-fed every day, who once in a while need a break from the fight to be reminded just how true we really are.
This is for the femmes who are chronically reduced, called superficial and shallow and traitorous and reformist and artificial and fake and less good. We run the fucking world, never forget that.
This is for the sexual queers, the bisexuals and lesbians and gays and pansexuals and kinksters and the great swathe of society who do things differently or not at all. Our sex is beautiful and powerful, respect it and use it well.
This is for the hard-working women working five jobs or magically stretching benefits to the end of the week and spending every day trying to answer the impossible question of how much more we can give before we collapse.
This is for the forest, burned and murdered. For the sea and the sky and the herbs. This is for the clouds of starlings who might still return if we just let them.
This is for us.
Author preface
I never saw this coming.
I’ve imagined all kinds of things for my life, but writing a novel? Out of the question.
Sitting and dreaming for eighteen months has brought me a world of self-questioning. I'm an activist—and the world is burning—how can I justify so much time on a single, uncertain project? I grew up working class, and still mostly just scrape by week to week—how could I allow myself to waste all this productive energy, on what? Art? I could have invested these thousands of hours into working to pay the bills and supporting myself, or into mobilising, organising, building something radical in this world so desperate for better things.
But I didn't, I wrote a novel. As I breathed life into it for a year and a half, I found myself guiltlessly enjoying the extravagant use of time—the meetings, consultations and redrafts, the eighty hour weeks of crowdfunding and learning social media and typography, the sleepless nights spent listening to my characters' voices chatting and arguing with each other in my head.
What could possibly inspire such decadence?
On the one hand, I realised I needed Margins to exist, that unless there was finally a book in the world with characters who reminded me of myself—trans women, femmes, sex workers, trauma survivors and working class activists—then I would surely suffocate and drown in this ocean of misrepresentative bullshit. On the other hand, I couldn’t do anything else. A decade, and a lifetime, of activism and burnout and recovery and collapse had brought me to the point where the best thing, the only thing, I could do in this world was to tell these stories. Nothing else would have worked anyway.
I release this little novel out into the world and wish it well. At the very best, perhaps, it will become a tool to fight oppressions, double standards and hierarchies and bring some tiny piece of inspiration and new energy to our resistance movements. At the very least, it will provide a few distracting hours of escape and entertainment for my loved ones. Because we all need that sometimes.
A word on (mis) representation.
As a trans woman (not to mention a working class, femme, non-cis-passing, trans woman) I know all too well what oppressive portrayal can look like. As transness of any kind has been systematically and strategically erased in our culture, seeing myself reflected in the media is something so rare it almost doesn't exist. When it does happen, the cis authors, actors, and artists who portray us, win awards, fame and cold, hard millions for their brave attempts at speaking on our behalf. Tokenism in a word, co-optation in another.
This story instead, in its exploration of exclusion, intimacy and power, centres the kinds of characters who are quietly doing the real work and fighting the big fights: those who rarely get a voice, people who look a lot like me and my friends. This novel portrays a resistance movement that is strengthened by its diversity—and I use that term without shame, intentionally reclaiming it from those opportunistic, capitalist thieves who stole our word, diluted it and turned it into a commercial product.
With so many different kinds of characters, invariably I will have fallen into these same traps of erasure or utilisation along the way. There are characters in this novel who represent many real-world identities and experiences and oppressions that I simply don't have.
As a person who knows and hates erasure, who knows, and hates tokenism, I worked hardest on this part of my writing so this book could become as good as it can be. But all the consultation, research and deliberation won't hide the fact that my writing a character who is a person of colour, or lesbian, or deaf, I—as a person who isn't any of these things—will have made mistakes. And when I write a character who is trans or femme or a sex worker, I certainly don’t speak for all of us who are. Only Hollywood believes in such offensive generalisations.
It's an unfortunate truth that the privileges that defines some parts of my experiences are still there in the acts I take in this world. That's simply what it looks like for a person to grow up in an industrial civilisation built on double standards and exploitation. Declaring myself an 'activist' or an 'oppressed minority' won't magically make those things go away. And saying 'but I'm x, I can't be racist/homophobic/cissexist/ableist…’ has never worked for anyone. It's inconvenient and I wish things were different, but I don’t believe in wishful thinking, I believe in change.
I learn, I work hard and I do what I can to deconstruct privilege and face double standards wherever I find them, but invariably I'll fuck up along the way. At least in this one epic act of dear love and hard labour, I can say that I've done my best.
The Future.
Since I started writing this novel, I’ve been amazed—and terrified—by how much of it is already coming true. A splintering Europe, the rise of authoritarian corporate states in the West, the backlash against us so-called minorities.
For a very long time, we trans women, were promised a great turning point in representation, visibility, rights and respect. But I never bought it. We are too convenient as scapegoats and besides intersectionality doesn’t work that way. Privilege and power has never, ever, been given up without a fight.
I don’t believe much in hope as a tool of change, but if the events of this novel keep manifesting themselves in reality, please let’s ensure that the positive undercurrent—a powerful intergenerational resistance movement, strengthened by its diversity—also comes to pass. The world has never needed it more.
Preface to the new ebook edition
Things change quickly. I know this, but somehow life still finds a way to surprise me.
In Margins and Murmurations, I wrote of authoritarian European states, of economic crises of the 2020s, of queer and trans communities being scapegoated. This new edition is being released during a global pandemic, during a time when Hungary temporarily became a de facto European dictatorship.
Using the new powers granted to him, ostensibly to control Covid-19, the president illegalised gender transition and most of the transgender population within a day of seizing the new powers. By this spring, a third of Poland had declared itself an official LGBT-free zone, nearly a hundred municipal or local governments proclaiming themselves to be “free from LGBTI ideology”.
Let’s not pretend that other places in Europe are better; I have no patience for homo-nationalism. This year there has been an epidemic of violence against trans women in Berlin, the city I call home these days. Trans women and others have been beaten, hospitalised, gassed, and set on fire on public transport. In Berlin, the Queer Capital of Europe. Or whatever its brand is these days. TERFs are stronger than ever in the UK. Sex workers are being massacred in France as sex work laws become ever more repressive. The expansion of prisons, racism, and poverty seems relentless.
The idea that ‘things are getting better’ feels distant right now, when marginalised communities are being further oppressed during times of crisis. Working-class, disabled, and BIPOC communities will be feeling the effects of this pandemic for a very long time to come. Not to mention climate change. Not to mention ecological collapse.
But as crushing as daily despair can be, I am uplifted by the incredible solidarity I see people showing each other in these times of endless crisis. Hope is a big word, but these beautiful manifestations of care continue to inspire me to keep writing, and to keep dreaming of something better for all of us. As life sometimes feels like it’s spiralling out of control, I can honestly say that my desire for lasting change has never been stronger.
Kes Otter Lieffe, July 2020
As with any story, especially a political one, this novel contains scenes and subjects that might be difficult or triggering for some people. Please take care of yourself while reading and get support if you need it.
To those who have been with me on this great adventure
with advice and help of all kinds:
Anna, Cathou, Jay, Lisa, Natalie, Nicole, Pi Jem and Torrey.
To my wonderful beta readers:
Fran, Mole, Robin and Susan.
To everyone who supported the crowdfunding and helped make this project an economic possibility.
To Yone, for her beautiful cover design and to Zoe for up-dating it.
To Liv, for being the best editor I could have hoped for.
To Ayelet, for all the amazing guidance and support.
To Anja, for getting me through it all.
Thank you, we did this.
Some scenes in this novel are inspired by the important research of Tourmaline and Susan Stryker. I am so grateful for their work.
1. Struggle
Chapter one
The old woman's body felt alive from the run. Her strong legs burned as they carried her along the uneven riverbank. At seventy-four years old, she knew she should be slowing down, should be curled up in front of the fire, but today as she left her home on the river, climbed over an ancient stile and pushed her way through a thick field of bracken, Ash felt younger than ever.
The sun was close to setting but the air was still as hot as midday. After a relentless summer, the land was bone dry—she couldn't even remember the taste of rain.
Leaning against a fence to catch her breath, she offered some water from her bottle to the land and took a sip herself. Despite the drought, there was an explosion of plant growth all around her: a thick green mat of bracken and nettles filled the valley and young birch trees pushed up towards the light, their delicate branches drooping with the lavender blooms of morning glories.
“It's so beautiful here,” Ash said to no-one in particular.
A passing crow flying out from the distant forest answered her from above.
Hard to imagine that all of this was corn. Nothing but toxic monoculture as far as I could walk.
She took a deep breath of warm air, thick with pollen. The land itself seemed to buzz with the hum of bees and crickets. Life is coming back though. Despite everything they did to us.
Ash unzipped her backpack and crouched down to collect some nettle tips for dinner, smiling a little as they stung her. At her age, she figured she'd be riddled with arthritis by now if it wasn't for her daily cup of nettle tea and her regular brush against their stinging leaves. Soon her dark, wrinkled fingers prickled all over with the familiar burn of histamine. When she had collected enough, Ash put her hands together intending to thank the nettles for their sacrifice, but as she did so, a bang rang out from the forest.
She jumped to her feet and yelped in surprise, her heart pounding in her chest.
Gunshots. And they're getting closer every day. But Ash knew there was nothing she could do about it. I've swallowed enough tear gas for this lifetime.
She scratched the stubble on her chin thoughtfully, looked up and stretched her hand out in front of her. Only four finger tips separated the setting sun and the forest ahead of her. About an hour or so until dark. I should get moving.
She slipped her pack on again and, pushing through the abundant plant life, she continued her journey to the forest. It was normally an hour's journey from Ash's little river boat to Pinar's place, the beautiful cabin they had built together at the edge of the woods. In this heat, it would take her almost two and she'd be lucky to get there before nightfall.
Having no way to contact each other, their visits were always unplanned, always unexpected, and yet somehow Ash and Pinar had never missed each other in the five years since they came to this land. Ash knew that when she arrived, the kettle would already be boiling or a pot of soup would have just been taken off the fire in anticipation. It was as if somehow, when one of them left their home, the forest and the river themselves passed on the message and beckoned the other to stay in theirs, to leave the firewood collecting to later, to just sit and wait.
Ash disappeared into the high undergrowth, walking along a narrow path of stomped-down plants they both maintained just by hiking back and forth every few days. Her back was wet with sweat and brambles scratched her arms, but she loved this walk and hummed quietly to herself.
It was almost completely dark when the path suddenly opened out and beyond her in the forest she could hear a kettle whistling.
Not a minute too soon.
As she turned the corner, she saw Pinar, sitting outside her home surrounded by candles, her green eyes glistening in the light.
As gorgeous as ever, Ash noticed.
Pinar was only fifteen years her junior, but despite all that they had been through together, her friend seemed to radiate with youth. She wore an elegant blue dress that night and her long hair cascaded over dark, bare shoulders. She stood and smiled as Ash arrived.
“I had a feeling you might turn up today.”
Pinar waved at a candlelit wooden table and chairs laid out under an old oak.
“I'll just get the kettle. Make yourself at home.”
She disappeared inside the little cabin and Ash could hear her busying around in the kitchen. Within a minute, she returned with a tray full of homemade snacks, a steaming teapot and a pitcher of water.
“Here we go, I made the blackberry cookies you like.” Pinar bent to put the tray down on the table, stood up and turned to give her friend a hug.
But Ash was gone.
Her body stood just where Pinar had left her moments ago, but the brown-green eyes that stared back at her were completely vacant.
“Ash?” she asked, but there was no response. Her friend's breath was shallow, her olive skin, cold and clammy to the touch. She was there, but she wasn't.
“Where are you now, darling?” asked Pinar, picking up a blanket and calmly putting it over her friend's shoulders. She wasn't worried. She was used to this.
Ash was somewhere else—in another place and another time. More a traumatic flashback than a daydream and still much more than that, Pinar knew she was visiting, or revisiting her own life.
Chapter two
Ash saw herself running.
She stood in the middle of a road, soaked by a thick blanket of fog that hugged the asphalt. It was a cold, wet night and in the distance, she saw herself, younger in a long black dress, hand in hand with Pinar, running towards the open gates of the City.
Fuck, not again.
It was five years earlier and Ash remembered every painful detail.
A line of uniformed State troopers ran close behind, shouting and firing their guns into the air as they charged forward. The streets were lined with angry crowds who yelled and threw bottles and bags of rubbish at the two women as they passed.
“Get out of our city, perverts!” they shouted and even from that distance, Ash could see herself crying as she stumbled on a crack in the pavement. Pinar pulled her up and they ran on, towards the gate. My god. How we ran.
Standing unseen in the middle of the road, Ash knew there was nothing she could do here. She could barely breathe and her body was racked with shivers, from the cold or fear, she couldn't tell which. She wished desperately, with every taut muscle in her body, to escape this cycle, to stop reliving this trauma. But she had no control. She never did.
She saw that the troops had stopped running and her younger self and Pinar were nowhere to be seen. They had escaped the City, had fled into the darkness of the forest. The massive gates began to swing closed and the troops, and the people, whooped and yelled in victory.