Can We Call This Home?
by Ju Bavyka
‘... a rusty sign reads ‘HERE’ in pink letters, and its interior is visible through the wide doorway; it is apparently made of pure mirror, and therefore reflects pure secrets. Can I have a peek inside, I say, and then when I do, I realise: all the while I’d been thinking I was here, whereas actually I was there.’¹
0. Origin
I am in the house that my parents built. The house is tiny, each room no larger than three-by-three metres. My mother says it was badly designed by my grandfather. I can hear the resentment in her voice as she says it.
When my parents married in their early twenties, their parents (my grandparents) put some money together and bought an old house for them—on the same street where my father had grown up. Just a hand’s reach away (rukoi podat). Always there if needed. New cycle in life for a new generation. A re-beginning or continuity? Choice or obedience? It was the normal progression of things.
They were not landlords. Technically, only the old house belonged to the new couple, while the land belonged to the communist state, and what the state owned belonged to everyone. Always there if needed. Technically. They were not landlords. It was the normal progression of things. Just a hand’s reach away (rukoi podat).
The old house had a lot of issues including bed bugs and was demolished after two years and a new one was built. My mother used to say it was badly designed by my grandfather. I grew up in a house that my parents built. The house was tiny, each room no larger than three-by-three metres. I can still hear the resentment in her voice.
1. Mirror
Two mirrors in the house. Each of them placed in an area dedicated to certain daily practices and rituals.
One square, medium-sized mirror is placed on a chest of drawers in the front room next to the entrance door. Depending on the size of body, you might see from your upper body down to knee level.
A radio hangs on the wall on the right side of the mirror and serves my parents from Monday to Friday as an alarm clock. Every morning at 6am the state radio station starts its transmission, beginning with the anthem of the USSR and continuing with the latest news. Usually, it is my father’s job to get up, walk through the living room into the small front room and turn down the volume, catching himself in the mirror before stepping into a day of work.
The position of this mirror in the house marks in a subtle way the territory between the little private and the big public, stitching them together, mirroring them into each other. Still in the house, the mirror is the last stage of preparation before entering the sphere of the street. So, the mirror is, in a way, also put into a productive mode, producing and reproducing normative imagery.
At the bottom of the mirror, lined up in an elegant row, is my mother’s collection of cosmetics: small bottles of perfume, lipsticks and an eyeliner. Underneath the mirror, the drawers hold a random and mysterious collection of items that have found their way there over the years, like my mother’s braid that she cut off at some point after my parents’ marriage. I liked to spend time there as a child.
Although there is a lot of festivity associated with this mirror, it is a purposeful object, like many other things in a land of dialectical materialism. But it is also a powerful one in a land that denies psyche and prefers, instead, soul. It’s an opening into the void of the inexplicable, the non-linear, the scared, magical multiple self. It’s a leaky object too, bringing back some of the oldest superstitions.
Look in the mirror before you leave for good luck. If you forget something and must return, look in the mirror again—old beliefs would teach you. The mirror seems to be a vessel able to catch angry ghosts, a protection screen between you and the unknown, potentially dangerous world. After all, it is an object that reveals contradictions.
As a child I am terrified of people with makeup. I don’t yet understand the purpose. One day, my mother comes home from work later than usual. It’s the eighth of March—International Women’s Day. Early that morning she put on some eyeliner at the front mirror. Now she is washing it off at the other mirror.
A few years later I can’t resist the temptation to use my mother’s lipstick and stare at myself, paralysed. My red mouth is smiling back at me so loudly and terrifyingly and all I can think about is that if someone sees me right now, they will immediately know that I am not a girl. The lipstick made it just so obvious. I won’t dare to do it again for many years.
The second mirror, much smaller, is attached to the water tank above the wash basin. It is used for hygiene procedures and daily by my father for shaving. He used to shave twice a day when he was young because his facial hair would grow so quickly. The sound of the razor on his skin is forever stuck in my memory.
The mirror is so small that you can only partially see your face. It has dried flecks of soap on its surface and so my teenage face looks back at me through the drops. If you shaved your face once, regardless of your assigned sex, so the common understanding went, your facial hair would start growing. And so even to attempt this would bring an imminent danger of coming out as trans. I spent a decent amount of time thinking about which part of my face would be the least visible one. That said, it wouldn’t stop me or any of my girlfriends from shaving the hair on our legs and armpits as soon as it became inappropriate.
There is also a third mirror, only in my possession. It’s small and round and it stays in my room that is behind the kitchen, where I arrive after walking past the other two. Because this mirror doesn’t serve the public, sometimes other things appear in it.
Both shared mirrors passively hold my desires until one day in their reflections I discover the liberation of imagination.
2. Reflection
At this stage, this story could go in a few different directions. It already has an autobiographical character, an authentic voice. Drafted with the charming minimalist language of realism, it is about to head somewhere very predictable. The story of the not-yet-in-existence, barely approaching, but already suffocating, young queer identity living within the heteronormative boundaries of a totalitarian state is convenient for the context in which it could potentially land, and so painfully true for how it was—stiff and choiceless.
Continuing a grim atmosphere of hopelessness and loneliness, the story could progress by building up the narrative of an individual survivor, a queer hero, liberated by immigration to Germany to finally find—years later—their authentic self in Sydney. The created image would satisfy certain desires and mirror—support—the standard story we know: ‘as a child I always felt like a boy, or never felt like a girl, and then I tried to be a lesbian, but the issue wasn’t sexual orientation—it was gender, specifically, “true gender”, which could now be claimed through transitioning.’²
The transition and admission of being ‘born this way’ could mean being welcomed back into the old house, upgraded with new and colourful wallpaper and a bigger, accommodating mirror.
To slowly disappear again into the wallpaper.
I would like to challenge the choiceless narrative and introduce you to the figure of choice inspired by Masha Gessen’s reflections on choice in their essay, ‘To Be, or Not to Be’. ‘Choice is a great burden. The call to invent one’s life, and to do it continuously, can sound unendurable.’³
3. Glimpses
Since coming out as non-binary, I frequently travel back to my childhood and early teenage years to turn the compost of my memories and make slight adjustments to the image in the mirrors. Sometimes this releases toxic gases and almost makes me reel, but I find this process, overall, quite productive and transformative. I go there to support my young self and to recover some of their desires and fantasies.
Initially, I am looking for a place and time when I or the ‘real authentic queer me’ was born. I am tireless in my search for evidence. How can I imagine something that wasn’t visible or there at all? Being born this way is a convenient explanation. I go through slides in my head. I see myself in my parents’ home at the golden hour of 3pm when no one is around. I would open my eyes and see a strange figure appearing, looking like so and so, and when I looked away they would transform into something else. Appearing at 3pm and disappearing at 5pm. I use my older brother’s clothes, and sometimes a broom as a guitar. We have three music channels—MTV, VIVA and MuzOBOZ—that are the core of my life. Over the years, the repertoire grows and the stories become more complex. At first the logic is simple—there is me and then there is the rest of the world.
But don’t all desires have also a material basis? The wild rollercoaster ride that was the dissolution of the Soviet Union brought liberties and challenges. While my country is transitioning from communism to capitalism, I am transitioning with it—subtle, barely noticeable changes, still deeply closeted. We are all transitioning. My parents to landlords (through enforced privatisation) and to unpaid workers of a dead system. The things and objects that infiltrate my newborn country help me: second-hand clothes arrive in cardboard boxes from relatives who have already emigrated to Germany. The boxes have a particular smell made of a mix of bubblegum and old clothes. At this time, everyone is dressed by the market, where in endless stalls, row after row, the same clothes are sold, brought from Turkey and later from China. Most of the women’s clothes are extremely feminised. I am furious. Just a few years after getting rid of school uniforms, everyone wants to look exactly the same. The question is more about who can afford it.
I am almost 15—a slow and painful time for me. My body is changing, but not quick enough. I think I am stuck forever in this state of in-betweenness. My mother is busy making ends meet. She is inventing new recipes with half of the intended ingredients and sells the car parts that she is paid with as a bookkeeper. There is a new wave of vegetarian dishes that comes out of this impoverished era. I am inventing my own clothes, starting with my first bra as a matter of necessity and continuing with multiple other things like a beret and a vest made out of a leather coat that I pull from one of the boxes. These are the first choices that I make out of choicelessness.
I have no idea who I am, nor do I have any language for who I might become, but I sense the small window of opportunity. Glimpses of hybridity are everywhere, and for a moment it isn’t a bad thing. I am undergoing messy and brave relationships with what is available. Practising queer desires is some sort of collaboration and knowledge of myself comes out of these alliances and relationships. It is not just me and the world, it is me in the world and the world in me, interconnected.
Later, the sudden appearance of queer existences in post-Soviet 90s society would be explained as having been imported from the West. Simply because there were no queers in the Soviet Union they must have come from somewhere else. The connection between homosexuality, the more-used term, and the West, is going to be cemented forever in people’s minds. The sense of freedom will disappear soon again.
4. Faith
We didn’t have a choice, my parents would repeat on several occasions when thinking about their life during Soviet times. Most of the time it seemed there was not much to choose from; at points choices were difficult to make. More often, they were exposed to a situation where it was almost impossible to make a good choice. Like my father being offered a flat, but the offer meaning he would need to do back-breaking hard work for years. And so they said no, but would regret it afterwards. Like my mother being offered a wardrobe at her workplace that ended up with somebody else because she wasn’t quick enough with her decision. In the 70s, to get anything—including food, furniture and clothes—was like winning a lottery. Making choices always presented itself, and was presented to us children, as a painful experience.
One of the most fascinating stories about choice that was retold every year in late March was about how the decision of my birth was made. My mother didn’t want to have a second child and faced a difficult decision when she found out she was pregnant. Her good friend (later my godmother), trying to convince her to keep the baby, suggested she consider it in case it was a girl. Ultrasounds weren’t a thing in 1981. My mother, generally—as a bookkeeper—a master of logic and numbers, after giving it some thought, went to see an older woman at the end of the street to be told that I (just a weeks-old foetus) was going to be a girl. And so, I was welcomed into this world. But how do I deal with the fact that, while it represents a rare, successful choice story in my family, my own choice to change and potentially keep on changing would not be perceived as such.
Some of my family’s choices are easier to retrace than others, as they haven’t been overly discussed or reflected upon. By and large, my family’s archive of choices includes those made out of need (for example, migration to avoid hunger) or out of the absence of choice altogether (forced displacement).
I am thinking about how the tradition of making choices, or internalised amnesia about making choices, is passed on from generation to generation. Do other families reflect on the choices they have made? Do they understand the history of choices in their families?
In the end, the decision to emigrate was about my life choices, or more precisely my parents’ understanding of who I should not be. ‘You will end up working at the market’ was a metaphor indicating the kind of dead end I would reach in my life if we stayed. This is how my parents justified our move. We packed our two suitcases in 1999 to first cross a border to Russia to then take a flight to Germany.
5. Loneliness
After a migration, there is a short period of time when people stay incredibly open to new things. They have made the difficult choice to change their life, to leave everything dear and familiar behind, and in this very vulnerable moment there is the humble hope that the same level of openness and curiosity awaits on the other side of their journey. They look with bated breath into that mirror next to the entrance door, waiting to be welcomed.
This temporary, dreamy state encapsulates endless fantasies and desires, but passes quickly. Like a haze, it dissipates completely after one or two years. Fantasies are recognised as illusions and are given up or pushed into the future, kept for better times. For many it means accepting badly paid jobs, like shift work, on top of the task of fitting in, to be eventually ready to take the place you have been assigned. The initial image of a new, capable and desired self can get stuck in ongoing self-conflict and growing toxic feelings of not being enough.
On my entry to Germany, I am given an orange jumper from the Red Cross and prescribed a new identity as a Russian German—the ethnic minority that my mother belongs to. In a most loveless, bureaucratic process, the identity is assigned to me like my gender years ago and comes with a package of certain expectations. In a processing centre, I observe people around me giving up their names and having new names assigned, like Waldemar instead of Vladimir and Eugen instead of Evgeniy, as a welcoming gesture. My new community.
Masha Gessen writes about the experience of going to their first gay dance at the age of 15, experiencing the feeling of being surrounded by community and thinking, this is who I could be.
When I enter the new realms of my migrant life, the institutions have a pretty good idea about what I should be and not who I could be. More than this, they seem to believe they know who I was before, and feel that I should believe it too. In the mirror shown to me, I see a straightforward story about getting a practical job, building a family and happily integrating into my new life. Their paternalistic approach reminds me of my grandfather designing my parents’ home. The lack of fantasy shown by our hosts creates a dull feeling in me.
The following years, looked at from a distance, are the loneliest of my life. I enrol at the art school, which feels like a good temporary solution and helps me to postpone any definitive decision about who I should be. While my cousins (after a period of frequenting wild Russian discos) are busy building families and homes, I spend my twenties at the art school considering my choices and not being able to choose. While my relatives and some friends are taking a distance from their previous lives and preserving forever a romantic image of what they left, I distance myself from the image of me as an immigrant living life as part of a diaspora—from the image in the mirror that is supposed to be me.
Sometimes I feel like my mother’s detached braid in the chest of drawers underneath the mirror. I wish I didn’t have to give up parts of me to see who I could be.
For many of my countrypeople—other Russian Germans—Germany was, if not the destiny, then at least the destination. From A to B, bad to good, final and forever. Why would you and how could you allow yourself to go on moving? Australia: why, how, so far away? Again, to start from zero. The hard work of learning a new language.
It is true that in binary thinking, to choose one thing automatically means choosing against another, not despite that thing or out of a desire to experience both. One thing must be devalued to make space for another.
‘Immigrants make a choice. The valor is not in remaining at risk for catching a bullet but in making the choice to avoid it. In the Soviet Union, most dissidents believed that if one were faced with the impossible choice between leaving the country and going to prison, one ought to choose exile. Less dramatically, the valor is in being able to experience your move less as an escape and more as an adventure. It is in serving as living reminders of the choicefulness of life—something that immigrants and most trans people do, whether their personal narratives are ones of choice or not.’⁴
6. Inclusion
My partner and I found this apartment quickly. Same neighbourhood as before. Next to a park. The description said one of the bedrooms has a big built-in—the kind with a mirror, as we discovered during the inspection. Kind of strange and kind of a standard thing. We said ‘okay’ and signed the papers. The most remarked upon aspect of having a mirror in the bedroom is the potential it offers for seeing yourself having sex. I am short-sighted and practically blind, and it never bothered me on that occasion.
It was fine in the beginning; there was enough distraction. During a harsh lockdown in 2021 due to Covid, I had to spend three months on my own. The surveillance of the mirror felt more acute when in conjunction with the surveillance of the laptop screen those days. I started paying more attention. You are always present: all your looks, all your moods, all your little playful moments and all your frustrations. Your morning hair, you, sitting on the edge of your bed, putting a sock on, your body quickly revealed before a shower, rushing in winter. Always monitoring. Belly is growing or getting smaller. Is this me at all?
I developed a series of funny embrace the way I am dances. Moving my body in front of the mirror, performing this or that funny dance. Getting ready for work in the morning. All-staff meetings where we are supposed to form closer connections by telling each other stories and revealing bits and pieces of private life. Here our identities are at work and we are all supposed to find common ground, but it’s also about the art hanging in the background, pets, funny jokes and who prefers to blur their backgrounds.
I am out and ‘included’. I am no longer trapped outside of my childhood mirrors and should be able to see myself and feel being seen. But I get overpowered and lost in this apparently generous, new home. For years my modus operandi has meant being aware of gendered boundaries, from which I developed my techniques for living. A queer identity was not a well-defined figure with a rainbow flag, but a collection of features and characteristics: gait, physique, hand movement, hair, soft or rough parts of the face, voice, and of course clothes. That figure would appear and disappear leaving a negative space with blurry edges, allowing it to be a destabilising force, whether or not by choice. The deviation was noticeable and the border crossing was noted, which meant that the performance of queer desire was possible. But the fear of otherness has another face, another form, here. The all-consuming mirror gifts you an illusion of being inside. Being normalised (born this way) means to play a part, while remaining precarious, while remaining at that mirror next to the entrance door. The feeling of being in and out simultaneously comes with a series of micro isolations within a big isolation. Just put a little bit more effort in and you will manage to come inside.
7. Choose to change
During lockdown, we talk a lot about being in a bubble, what the bubble is, what it means, and that we only see what surrounds us. But for many it is a relief of sorts. Not having to travel any more, to cross borders; to be able to focus on life, not to have to change too much. That is, of course, a narrative that doesn’t include people who are stuck in Australia for multiple other reasons, many of whom are in precarious positions and separated from their families. These are marginalised stories that vanish from the news as soon as the borders open. But are they open? And to whom?
In July, I return to Germany to visit my family and friends. I start to write this text, which responds to the theme of ‘mirror’, before I fly over. My initial idea is to focus on the physical object, or in my case on multiple mirrors that I have encountered and lived with in my life. From a short, sweet and painful memory of my childhood home, my text grows and changes into something bigger and more complex as I travel and it travels with me. I keep writing and adding more and more detail. The subject is slippery; I constantly end up in places that I wasn’t expecting to be in, and it seems impossible to finish it. Until I understand that I never will.
Since I left Germany seven years ago—disappeared, in a way—multiple strong, critical, first- and second-generation immigrant voices have emerged, also queer, and also in the post-Soviet migrant community.
They are rejecting the old mirror with the peeling frame that keeps on showing up in the places and institutions they enter and as they renegotiate their positions within society. At the same time, they are trying to have a dialogue with their parents. ‘We migrated because of you’ is a common phrase that the children of migrants hear. What was destined to create a lasting bond also creates a burden, and somehow draws an invisible line between generations based on an inability to discuss the real desires behind choices made, and to really connect.
Just like the society that they once entered couldn’t imagine them being something other than cheap labour and reproductive force, our parents also struggle to imagine what kind of lifestyle their queer children could have outside of the usual dogma. Just like they were not permitted to imagine themselves as other than they should be, they are not able to imagine their children as someone else. There is helplessness on both sides and unfulfilled expectations, together with a disconnection from parents’ life choices and a deep desire to understand the forces driving their parents’ emigration—besides the obvious fact of no choice.
I can’t get rid of a feeling that choicelessness as a permanent state of being was projected onto multiple generations, creating from it strong bonds and a sense of commonality. At the same time, I have observed how someone else’s desire to change the trajectory of their life, to act out of norm, is frightening and perceived with suspicion.
But not having a choice doesn’t quite work for us queer migrant folks anymore.
8. Specular acknowledgements
There were a few important encounters that allowed me to write this text. One of them was with Juri Wassenmüller, who gave me Masha Gessen’s book on exile the night before I left Berlin. We met at the PostOst Kongress, where a bunch of people with cultural connections to the former European East were trying to figure out what if anything connects us, and to imagine something beyond the usual migrant identity concepts. I also, like Juri, have an image of Masha Gessen on the wall above my desk now. ‘My gender is that photo of Masha Gessen lying on a couch, smoking languidly, giving you a look of intense expectation: Now what?’ writes Jen Silverman in their essay for the Paris Review.⁵ This is the shared queer hero narrative that I am subscribing to at the moment.
Another important encounter was with Masha Beketova, who I also met at the PostOst Kongress. Masha brought in the much-needed topic of care and being gentle to ourselves and made me think intensively about my own feelings of extreme loneliness when I was living in Germany in my twenties.
Gessen’s essay has been my companion while writing this text; as I observed them moving across memories, countries and bodies, back and forward, so did I. On the contrary, ‘settling’ as a major part of the colonial narrative in this country is reproduced everywhere, including in the ways that migrants and queer people are absorbed and accepted because they were ‘born this way’. It’s when you keep changing and moving around and not settling that things become problematic.
Coming back from my travels, I try to settle back into my routine. A week later, something strange happens. For a few days, I feel dizzy and struggle with my balance. My GP suspects it’s vertigo. Something happened that made the little crystals in my ears move. They refused to settle back in. Or did they simply fail? 🪞
Works Cited
Füsun Onur: Through the Looking Glass, edited by İlkay Baliç. (Istanbul: Arter, 2014), 60.
Masha Gessen, “To Be, or Not to Be”, The New York Review, 2018.
Gessen.
Gessen.
Jen Silverman, “My Gender Is Masha Gessen”, The Paris Review, 2021.
Ju Bavyka is an artist and writer living in Sydney on the unceded lands of the Gadigal and Wangal peoples. Their writing has been published in Cp 20 (Yellow George/Schmick Projects, 2021), un Magazine 15.2 (2021) and Runway Journal (2022), a result of their participation in the firstdraft Writers Program in 2021. Ju recently self-published the poetry collection the moment you realise what you don’t have to be (2022). They have cultural ties to Kazakhstan and Germany and are a member of artist- and non-artist-run space Frontyard Projects in Marrickville, Sydney.