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.’
Harvey says Aotearoa isn’t immune to the recent influx of prohibition that queer people worldwide are experiencing, and she calls for New Zealanders to not be complacent in our vigilance towards violence and prejudice against queer communities.
‘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.’
Siobhan Harvey
Harvey was also driven to write the essay for her son and his generation who live in a world where ‘the beautiful diaspora of identity’ has widened, yet they still face the ‘brutal battleground, in which the identities that they claim are not just under assault from hardline politicians and social commentators, but have been turned into the aegis of radicalism, including homicides, massacres and state-endorsed execution.’
‘I wrote “A Jigsaw of Broken Things” to protect my son from becoming a victim of that. On a social conscience level as a writer, I want to protect everyone who is queer from becoming a victim.’
‘It’s less a message than a provocation and call for change. As someone who has experienced and continues to live with some of the most damaging consequences of bigotry against queer people (for there are fewer more destructive outcomes of intolerance than prolonged rejection by one’s parents and birthplace), I know that the status of queer people in society must change for their betterment.’
In her judge’s report, Landfall editor Lynley Edmeades writes that Harvey’s essay is a ‘beautifully crafted and timely comment on prejudice against the LGBTQIA+ community.’
‘Harvey holds this contemporary issue in view while also weaving in her own story, one ultimately fraught with a failure to be accepted into her family because of the “contamination” inherent to her “unlovable” self. The essay picks apart the fragments of memory, experience, and pain that make up a life like this, and performs the same kind of failure that lies behind the painfully reductive attempt to pick up the pieces.’
Second place was awarded to Tīhema Baker for his essay, ‘New Zealander of the Year’. Highly commended were Liz Breslin for ‘She stuck to the wheel well’, Hannah August for ‘I am here to tell you that someone was’, Pennie Hunt with ‘Ghost House’ and Jillian Sullivan with ‘Because I’m reading Cendra’.
Siobhan’s winning essay, ‘A Jigsaw of Broken Things,’ and the full judge’s report are published in Landfall 246: Spring 2023, edited by Lynley Edmeades.
You can read an extract from Siobhan’s winning essay ‘A Jigsaw of Broken Things’ on Kete Books. Click here to read. 
ENDS
Find out more at oup.nz/2023-landfall-essay-winner
Find out more about Landfall 246 at oup.nz/landfall246
Additional information
Siobhan Harvey is the author of eight books, including Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award winning Cloudboy (OUP, 2014) and co-editor of the bestselling Essential New Zealand Poems (Godwit, 2014). Her poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction have featured in prominent international journals and numerous international and local anthologies, including Arcadian Rustbelt: Poets emerging 1980–1995 (forthcoming) and Feminist Divine: Voices of power and invisibility (Cyren US, 2020). She has won and been shortlisted for a number of poetry competitions, and the Poetry Archive (UK) holds a ‘Poet’s Page’ devoted to her work. Harvey is a lecturer in creative writing at AUT.
Landfall is Aotearoa’s foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. Published twice a year, each volume showcases two full-colour art portfolios and brims with vital new fiction, poetry, cultural commentary, reviews, and biographical and critical essays. Editor Lynley Edmeades brings together a range of voices and perspectives, from established practitioners to emerging voices. The result is an exciting anthology that has its finger on the pulse of innovation and creativity in Aotearoa today. Landfall also runs two annual essay writing competitions, the Landfall Young Writers’ Essay Competition and the Landfall Essay Competition. Find out more about Landfall here.
