Rebellious Mourning

FRAGMENTS TOWARD A WHOLE KEVIN YUEN KIT LO The small, abandoned schoolhouse held a library in the back with books piled upon books, about plants and birds, philosophy and math, ancient Greek tragedies, poetry, and the history of North America. In the front, there was a freezer that stored frozen meat, chicken, and boxes of popsicles, Freezies. An old rotary telephone sat on a small desk next to a surprisingly slim and weathered regional directory of phone numbers. It was the last trace of civilization before the long, swooping climb up the mountain to the octagonal log cabin. As rumor had it, the schoolhouse was burned to the ground by a mob of angry locals, and the cabin overgrown. If those trees could talk, what would they say? Because I wasn’t the only one, the first, or the last, as special as I may have felt then—being from the big city, having friends who were girls. I was even “cool” compared to the other boys. But in those woods, I felt like I was special, the only one. He made sure of it. One evening after dinner, over a decade and a half later, my dad casually mentioned his reason for sending me to Cape Breton, for sending me to Don’s school. My brother, a teenager at the time, an immigrant’s first son, was having a hard time at school, thrashing about for his identity among his peers. My grades were good; head buried in books, and I seemed well adjusted enough. My parents thought it might be OK to send me away for the year, to focus their energies on my brother and his rebellion. I had loved the summer camp. It was fun, and I wanted to go. A year in the woods might do my frail young body some good. * Hi Cindy, So nice to hear from you, and thanks for inviting me to collaborate on this anthology. I don’t think I ever told you, it’s something I’ve held pretty close over the years, but I was sexually abused as a kid from the ages of around ten to fourteen at a summer camp and alternative school in rural Nova Scotia. As a teenager, I did my best to block out the experience, but obviously it did fuck me up, and comes back to haunt me even today. At a talk I gave recently about my graphic design practice and activist work, at the end of a lengthy Q&A, I was asked a pretty typical question about my sources of inspiration, what drives me to do the work I do, and so on, and I responded, almost unconsciously, that it was born out of trauma, out of necessity. I wasn’t trying to be dramatic or deep. It just kinda came out. I was quite tired by that point, and I don’t really know what I meant by that answer, but I’d like to explore it, and explore it publicly. It feels like it’s about damn time. Love and Solidarity, Kevin * The veracity of my memories is questionable. It was a long time ago, and I was just a kid. I can’t recall or describe any of the specific pain I may have felt then. Or any desires. The word I used most often was betrayal, and the phrase “he was like a father to me.” But I mostly repeated these words only to myself, until I actually believed them. No one else knew anything. We were all just trying to get by, black-clad teenage smokers; we were all hurting, runaways and cast-offs, self-harming in the most creative ways. I was playing arcade games downtown, Street Fighter II. How old was I? The man kept feeding me quarters as he watched me play. Enthralled by the free games, I didn’t even notice him standing behind me, slowly touching me, rubbing me, until I nearly came in my pants. I pulled away and hurriedly stumbled out of the arcade, bitterly ashamed. I didn’t look back, though; it was only a ghost, an echo from those woods. Adolescence in essence is all about trust. This obscure lyrical fragment, as self-evident as it seems, has always hit home. The broken trust—of others, adults, white men, teachers, cops, of authority of any kind, of those you hold dear, those you let in close, but especially of your own mind and body, which were now clearly two separate, irreconcilable things. Or are these merely the clichés I’ve learned since then? Notions such as the “loss of childhood,” the inability to maintain healthy relationships, fear of intimacy, low self-confidence, and the dislike of gym class and team sports.... Didn’t we all feel these things? Isn’t such fragmentation and alienation simply what late capitalism sows in us? The “sensitive ones” at least. Isn’t it why we all ended up here, hanging out in the margins, trying to rebuild that trust by scheming together, creating the relationships that we simply couldn’t “out there”? How do you disentangle these things? In truth, I never really understood my experience as the most terrible thing. I wasn’t physically harmed, and I never lacked for much during my childhood. My abuse was simply part of the fabric of who I was, an invisible prop that gave me an excuse for my weaknesses and insecurities, a straw man for my undirected anger. Almost thirty years on, it’s still not the most terrible thing, but it is still a thing. In my relationships, in my fragmented memory and sense of self. How does one move on from this, how does one heal, especially when no one else knows? A secret that is allowed to fester. We were awarded points for spotting and naming animals, and the rarer the animal, the more points we got. Deer, red-tailed hawks, bald eagles, moose, foxes, coyotes, and bears. No one ever saw a bear, though. The points were then tallied up and converted into dollars we could spend at the gift shop in the national park. I loved that gift shop, and camping in that park. One summer I made enough points to buy an illustrated hardcover book listing the traditional indigenous healing plants and methods of the region. It was the best. On a small mattress set in the corner of the second floor of the cabin, carefully walled off by books, Don changes the script. I was used to him jacking me off by then, anticipating it with confused excitement and fear. It’s amazing how he could find the time and space to do these things, with the gaggle of kids running around, hanging on his every word, his every gesture. Often, Lorna, his wife the academic, wasn’t too far off either, reading and writing in silence. She held her wisdom in silences. This time he presses up behind me under the thin summer sheets. The mattress is thin, too, and the floorboards are set wide enough apart to drop quarters through, so we have to be quiet. This much I know. As he strokes me, I start to feel the insistent push of his cock between my ass, but it takes me a moment to figure out what’s happening. The girth and rigidity and heat are foreign to me. I still don’t understand how there are all these parts that make up a body, and that they can grow and change. It’s just a body. It’s just me. The rhythmic pushing lasts for what seems like an eternity. I’m not sure what he’s looking for. But my body doesn’t let him in; my body is too small, too tight. Finally, frustrated, Don flips himself over and places his mouth around my tiny, sprung-up cock. That wall of books held a small treasure, a book of photos of Brooke Shields from The Blue Lagoon. In quiet times, when the other boys were outside playing, I would go upstairs and hide in the corner to flip through it with one hand, while touching myself with the other. I memorized those images; she became a goddess to me, her imagined smooth skin a surrogate for his rough fingers and lips. In 2010, I was rediscovering my activism after a long and difficult relationship had failed. At a boycott, divestment, and sanctions panel, Areej Ja’fari, a young Palestinian activist from the Palestine Freedom Project, recounted her story. I have little recollection of what she said, but the feeling her words evoked, the visceral anger and sadness, straddling the line between hope and hopelessness, is easy to identify. Her words brought me to the edge of tears. As I left the conference, I dutifully picked up all the flyers and pamphlets for all the events and projects I planned to soon engage in. But walking home that night, I didn’t think of Palestine at all. I was busy asking myself, “What connection do I have to this faraway land and its people, its suffering?” It’s the kind of question that critics ask of young activists all the time. “Why do I care? Do I even care?” Or was I just desperately trying to get at that feeling, the sadness that might pierce the numbness, the validated anger, the promise of catharsis? Palestine, a Godspeed song, or crushing cigarettes out on my arm—did they all serve the same selfish end? An addict, hoping that someone else’s tears might loose my own.

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