21 minute read
Migrancy and belonging: CB Mako
THE WAY
Migrants don’t have the easily categorisable journeys that stereotypes suggest, and this author has had to forge their own path – physically and emotionally.
FORWARD
Words: CB MAKO Images: JENN BRISSON
IMAGINE A SLOW-MOVING, three-wheeled
cargo bike. It’s like a tricycle but with a large box in the front. The cargo bike’s box is made of the sturdiest wood, able to carry two kids or a full-grown adult – and is coated with shiny red paint. Two 24-inch wheels support the wooden box, and a similar third wheel supports the slow, pedalling cyclist. This particular cargo bike is called The Christiania and was created and built in Denmark.
Next, imagine the cyclist of this cargo bike is a person of colour with brown, sunburnt skin. They are a chubby person, barely 150cm tall, with Asian features, and they are wearing a helmet, which looks like a wide-brimmed hat used by the diggers in the First World War, the rim curled on one side to hold a high-definition cylindrical camera and a similarly shaped LED light.
This cargo bike moves very slowly on narrow, suburban streets. Other vehicles overtake the slow cyclist, with loud shouts of “Get off the road!” or “Go back to China!”
When cubbie moves onto the footpath, to safer cycling – in the blatant absence of bicycle infrastructure in the west side of Naarm, the stolen lands of the Boon Wurrung and the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation – pedestrians also shout at cubbie for being a “reckless parent” and to “Get off the footpath!”
They are judged by what people easily see: skin colour. Race. However, people don’t see that cubbie and their child are non-binary and disabled people of colour. All cubbie wants is for the world to #StopAsianHate during the global pandemic.
ON ANOTHER CYCLING TRIP, cubbie
parks their cargo bike in the gentrified suburb of Seddon. A white man on a two-wheeled bicycle with a child in the rear seat moves out of the parking spot in front of cubbie’s cargo bike.
His child asks, “Dad, what’s that?” while pointing at cubbie’s cargo bike.
The parent looks at the cargo bike and then looks at the person of colour. With a smirk, he tells his offspring, “It’s a tuk-tuk,” as he prepares to wheel out of the bike rack.
“It’s not a tuk-tuk!” cubbie blurts out, annoyed. They are surprised by their own boldness; cubbie usually doesn’t speak out. Perhaps it is the summer heat. Perhaps cubbie is hangry and eager to refuel with a decadent cup of coffee at the nearby cafe. Whatever it is, cubbie clarifies: “It’s a cargo bike.”
The father of the boy shrugs sheepishly and pedals away with his kid strapped firmly into the rear seat.
Once they leave, cubbie sits at the outdoor seating of their favourite cafe, confusion filling their head. Briskly pulling out their mobile, cubbie searches the internet: “What is a tuk-tuk?”
When the images of tuk-tuks come up, cubbie realises what they are. They were called trisikels in Manila.
“I should’ve mentioned that my cargo bike is made in Europe,” cubbie grumbles between sips of soy latte.
As cubbie finishes their coffee, they wonder if the white man reduced them to a single story.
According to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2009 TED talk, ‘The Danger of a Single Story’: “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete… The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasises how we are different rather than how we are similar.”
This is even apparent in the cycling community, which needs to adapt to the rapidly growing Australian population and become more inclusive.
AT A COMMUNITY PROTEST in West
Footscray to improve bicycling infrastructure in the west of Melbourne, after Melbourne’s third ‘circuit breaker’ Covid-19 lockdown in February 2021, cubbie is among a few people of colour and one of only two cyclists with three wheels.
Uncomfortable among the sea of white cyclists, cubbie suddenly feels overwhelmed and overstimulated after the prolonged lockdown. Signalling the organiser, cubbie leaves the protest rally and goes straight to a cafe that they consider to be a safe space for people of colour. Aptly, the cafe is called Migrant Coffee.
WHEN CUBBIE WAS THREE years old, they
had to cross a very tall pedestrian bridge to get home. At the foot of the staircase, cubbie refused to climb the steep stairs. Their mother refused to carry cubbie.
What their mother didn’t know was that cubbie couldn’t see the steps. Despite cubbie’s pleas and cries to be carried, cubbie’s mother flatly refused and promised retribution for cubbie’s indignant and embarrassing display of emotion.
Sobbing, cubbie stuck their sweaty palms towards the concrete stairs’ side wall – they were too small to reach the railing. Then they sat on each filthy step, trying to feel with the tip of their shoes where the next step would be, as their tiny hand continued to scrape the grey wall of the concrete stairs.
Eventually, their parents found out that cubbie needed glasses. Their lenses were as thick as the bottom of a glass bottle.
Older students ridiculed the only kindergarten student with glasses. Every recess, older students hollered “Hey Lola! You’re a grandma!”, which echoed around the quadrangle space where students loitered with their snack boxes. cubbie was barely five years old, yet the taunts called them an old grandmother. The shaming was as old as time; ableism in a country that had been colonised for 500 years, where only the fit and able-bodied survived to become slaves to Spanish sugar barons in the southern islands of the Philippines.
OWNING A THREE-WHEELED cargo
bike became cubbie’s first rebellion. It pushed people’s buttons, annoying both the motorists and the lycra-clad cycling community on social media.
Empowered, cubbie wondered what else they could question among mainstream narratives. As Cathy Park Hong writes in Minor Feelings, the invisible hegemony of whiteness is unchallenged.
Surely cubbie was not a part of the single story – the model migrant following the migrant creed1 who, like other Filipino migrants, is a carpenter ant of the service industry2 and prefers to assimilate3 .
WHEN CUBBIE WAS in Year 6, after an era of dictatorship under Ferdinand Marcos, their Social Studies teacher encouraged students to read the new broadsheet newspapers, which were popping up like daisies thanks to the new freedom of the press.
Instead of reading the headlines, cubbie pulled out the Lifestyle section and went straight to the comics page. However, there was one Lifestyle columnist that piqued cubbie’s curiosity. Looking back, cubbie wished they kept a particular column by Jaime Licauco, hoping they didn’t imagine it all this time. But this column stood the test of time, and seemed secretly buried in cubbie’s frayed brambles of memory. Licauco wrote something about symmetry and about when two souls fused in one body. cubbie is completely asymmetrical from head to toe. From their eyebrows, ears, eyes, lips and chin down to their knees, feet and toes. Each pair of asymmetrical body parts can be explained, of course. cubbie had eye surgery when they were seven years old. Under full anaesthesia, doctors took out multiple styes under cubbie’s eyelids. At 12, cubbie scraped their knee when they persistently learnt how to ride a two-wheeled bicycle and ended up with a deep gash that took months to heal.
In Manila, this asymmetry had a different name. By the time cubbie was a university student, furtive words floated in the air: cubbie, a babaeng bakla – a girl who looked like a boy who looked like a girl.
The beautiful mestizas4 in the prestigious and extremely expensive university cubbie attended – thanks to cubbie’s music scholarship and, as the only violist available, being sorely needed to form a string quartet for the university orchestra – thought cubbie was a
1 Gabrielle Chan, ‘Race and the Golden Age’, Meanjin, Summer 2017. 2 Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings, Profile Books, 2020. 3 Pilar Mitchell, ‘Why Filipino Food Isn’t More Mainstream in Australia’, SBS Food, 31 May 2021. 4 Mestizas in the Philippines is a feminine name to refer to people born from mixed marriages between the Spaniards and the local native people. Mestizas were easily identified because of dominant fairer skin and European features. babaeng bakla.
Moreso, when every person assigned female at birth (AFAB) was required to wear make-up from hired Avon Lady make-up artists for the annual concert, the highborn mestizas would snicker behind cubbie’s back. cubbie’s regular haircuts were at their favourite barbershop. Sporting a buzz cut, unladylike and brash, loud and unstable, cubbie spoke directly without filter.
Eventually, this brazen behaviour was brutally beaten out of cubbie in some form of abuse or another – at home, school and in the workplace – but no-one realised that that cubbie was already showing signs of autism.
The abuse continues to this very day under patriarchal structures, in their very own household. The coercive controller expects cubbie to be the quiet, little Asian.
BY 2017, CUBBIE REALISED it was finally
safe to come out as non-binary, while raising two AFAB children as non-binary, too. Their children have a choice – a choice cubbie never had under traditional, religious and strict binary structures.
And unlike migrants who continue to stay within migrant communities, cubbie burnt bridges (an autistic trait) by not following first-generation migrant religious expectations. The migrant community wanted cubbie to follow the norm – go to church, buy a house, have multiple cars parked in the giant garage and have healthy, beautiful children with top grades in school – because Asian? Duh.
But cubbie is not your single story. cubbie forged their own path. And in this journey, in a new home, in a different colonised land, cubbie is a non-binary parent with late-diagnosis Level 1 autism spectrum disorder or Asperger’s syndrome. cubbie is hard of hearing and wears hearing devices in crowded venues and public places. And, finally, cubbie pedals slowly in a threewheeled cargo bike.
CB MAKO is a founding member of the Disabled QBIPOC Collective and is one of the contributors of the Growing Up Disabled in Australia anthology. Winner of the Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers Competition, shortlisted for the Overland Fair Australia Prize and longlisted for the inaugural Liminal Fiction Prize, cubbie is also a contributor to Liminal’s Collisions: Fictions of the Future anthology.
WORSHIP
Q&A with FRENCHIE HOLIDAY
‘Moonage Daydream’
The Huxleys’ Places of Worship photographs explore the fading magic of supernatural worlds in which performance and visual artists Will and Garrett Huxley cast themselves as exquisite outsiders. As queer people growing up in suburban homogenous places, The Huxleys felt isolated, alone and different. Their photographs express a sense of safety in isolation – the natural world is non-judgemental, beautiful and precious, and it needs protection. These photographs invite the viewer to find a similar beauty in explosively queer bodies, yearning for difference to be marvelled at and worshipped.
‘Vulnicura’
FRENCHIE HOLIDAY. I have a weakness for sequins, and the two of you have inspired me as a queer creative. Where did you find inspiration growing up in suburbia, at a time when there weren’t many openly queer artists being celebrated in pop culture?
WILL HUXLEY & GARRETT
HUXLEY. Growing up queer in the ’80s and ’90s, in the suburbs of Perth and the Gold Coast, we had no-one in our worlds that was visibly queer. We accessed this world through art, magazines, film and music. There was so little queer representation that you really had your work cut out for you trying to find it.
Discovering John Waters films starring Divine was like finding a whole new language, which only you had spoken up until that point. Artists like Leigh Bowery, Keith Haring, and Robert Mapplethorpe often appeared in magazines i-D or The Face. The queer visibility of their creative work saved us. Pop stars like Boy George, Pete Burns, Sylvester, Marilyn (a British gender-non-conforming singer), Annie Lennox and Grace Jones were blurring the boundaries of gender stereotypes – they were like beacons for us, showing us the way out. Glimpsing clips of Prince and David Bowie on late nights on Rage and Countdown gave us a future to dream of where you could find people who seemed just like you.
FH. Humour is a large part of your work and performance. Did you find it hard to have people take your art seriously because it was also humorous?
WH & GH. We often say we are scared of being taken seriously. We always have to make ourselves laugh first; that’s how we know it’s working. Our humour is often surreal or absurd, and we love coming up with new and ridiculous ideas, looks or costumes to achieve – the more impractical the better.
Humour is a great way to invite people in, and once they are engaged, they will hopefully see the other layers in the work.
I think that some people think what we do is frivolous or just camp, and that’s okay, too. You really can’t control your art once it’s out there. Growing up being bullied or hassled taught us that
‘Distress Signal’
if you could make someone laugh it was like an instant way to defuse conflict; it helped us survive. And we don’t believe that the art world has to be so serious – it needs to bring in joy and magic. Humour is such an important part of that. Laughing at yourself is essential.
We know better than anyone else how silly we can look. The only thing for us to do is to take silliness as seriously as possible.
FH. When I’m conceptualising a film or photo, my most unique ideas are inspired by the unexpected, like the odd things I spot throughout my day. Do you recall the strangest or even funniest place you’ve found inspiration from?
WH & GH. One of our favourite sources of inspiration is drawing. We’re both terrible drawers but we give it a go anyway. Our sketches of costumes are very childlike and basic. We get such a thrill out of seeing the initial idea on paper compared to the fully realised work. We call it ‘from page to stage’.
We often take inspiration from nature – things like flowers, extreme birds, sea creatures. The colours and details of the natural world are endlessly inspiring.
Sometimes our work is inspired by anger at the world.
When Donald Trump was inaugurated we were so disgusted, particularly at his language and treatment of women. We decided to create our work Born to Be Alive, a giant 4m inflatable vulva – a part of the body that we worship and are born from. It was a celebration and tribute to the joy of women, femmes and feminine energy.
When the postal survey on marriage equality happened, we were so saddened and disgusted that our lives were open to such unnecessary scrutiny that we created a performance dedicated to all the NO voters. We performed a choral version of ‘O Fortuna’ from Carmina Burana and changed the lyrics to ‘fuck you’. We performed it at a charity event for Minus18, which is a beautiful charity for young LGBTQIA+ people. The crowd loved it and were singing along in solidarity. It was such a powerful and fun way to channel that hurt.
When the tragic bushfires happened at the end of 2019, we were traumatised at the loss of the native flora and fauna.
We designed disco koala costumes and matching babies. We used them initially to perform at a charity event raising money for WIRES wildlife.
FH. Your costume art is spectacularly wacky and magical! Does that spill into the spaces that you call home?
WH & GH. Our home resembles part library, thrift shop, garden centre and art gallery.
We surround ourselves with everything we love and that which inspires us. Like everything we do, it’s the opposite of minimalism. Somewhere within the overcrowded chaos there is room for two humans and some animals.
We love the quote from Vivienne Westwood, who once said, “minimalism is for those without taste”.
We love to live alongside art as it is a constant source of inspiration and joy. There is actually very little room to even cook in our house as most surfaces are used to display our evergrowing collection of art and plant life.
FH. When I think of home, I think of it as a feeling of security and safe space. What does home mean to you?
WH & GH. As queer people, home is often a complex place and there have been times when your actual home doesn’t feel like the most welcoming or safe space.
We have created a queer wonderland through our art and creativity. And we surround ourselves with people and things that bring us comfort and joy, and that is home for us. The creative space is home.
FH. Having found your creative calling and being established artists, especially here in Melbourne, how does it feel returning to your hometown/s and how are your performances and art perceived?
WH & GH. We both moved to Melbourne years ago (Garrett 23 years ago, and Will 19 years ago) from environments and times that were often homophobic.
We were nervous about some of our first gigs leading us back to our hometowns, but thankfully attitudes have changed for the better.
We were walking down a street in the Gold Coast – where in the past we would get heckled and called “poof” on a daily basis – and were stopped by a very normal-looking young man who said he loved our outfits.
‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’
‘Melting Moments’
We now love going to smaller towns or places that may not be used to people like us – it’s where the most change can happen. We often say the most important work is going places where people may not want to see you! That’s where you can try to change opinions and attitudes.
FH. Your series Places of Worship featured some intriguing rural locations. What were your connections to the specific locations and what were their importance to the series?
WH & GH. The rural locations were chosen in relation to where we thought the costumes may have been in their natural habitat. We wanted a sense of isolation, away from humanity. It helped create new worlds within the series. We wanted to select locations that spoke to the costumes and makeup and demonstrated our physical connection to those places. Nature is so important to us, and we wanted to connect to the rare beauty of these places with the way we looked.
FH. When shooting these locations, did you visit them simply as visitors or did you feel a sense of connection to the land?
WH & GH. Visiting these places, we felt a really strong connection to the environments we were in.
On each shoot we would have five minutes of silence where we would record the natural sounds of the place. We would listen and dream of the magic and story of that environment. We used these sounds to create a vinyl album that corresponds with the imagery in the series.
If we encountered people in the environments, we would always try to connect with them, and often they were rather taken aback by our physicality! I think it was a pretty rare and special occurrence.
FH. I read the title Places of Worship as looking after our environment, accepting it as it is and nurturing it. Does it have a parallel meaning about marvelling at differences, androgyny and queer identity? What does the title mean to each of you?
WH & GH. Places of Worship is about the importance of looking after our environment and having the same reverence for it that some people have
for religion or business. It is also about accepting nature as it is. Nature is so complex – it’s beyond the boundaries and binaries that we have created for ourselves, and there is freedom in that. Freedom is what we are seeking through our work and lives as queer people – a respite from this world we grew up in – and nature can give us that. We consider ourselves a part of nature. We sometimes remark that in nature it is often the most flamboyant, colourful and rare things that are praised and celebrated. But as young queer boys growing up, all those things were seen as weaknesses. We were told to hide the brightest, most outrageous parts of ourselves. And with this series we are inviting people to see the same reverence and beauty marvelled at in nature in explosively queer bodies.
FH. How did it feel to express your sexuality, art and queerness in these locations?
WH & GH. As unnatural as we look in society, it felt normal to look that way in these natural environments. We felt a part of nature rather than against it. Like a flamingo, nudibranch, snowflake or a cow.
Nature is unjudgemental and perfect, and we felt a real sense of freedom. We work alone so on most of the shoots it was just the two of us. It’s only when other people come around that you start to feel self-conscious.
FH. Are androgynist, sexual and loud costumes accompanied with humour in your art a way for you to remedy prejudice to queer identity and the fear of difference? If so, could you tell us a bit about how?
WH & GH. I think we are so visibly queer because of what was denied to us earlier in life. When you get bullied and harassed every day, and are told that being queer or gay is bad, you are either destroyed by it or you become so queer that you become your own superhero. When you haven’t had something, like queer rights, you don’t take it for granted once you get it. There’s a feeling that it could be taken away from you again. We saw it happen to Russia in 2013. So queer visibility is so important to us – it’s carrying the torch from our brave predecessors and also passing it on to the new generation. Visibility is so important.
‘Stallac-Fright’
We will always share our love and our queer story as you never know who is listening and who you might help.
FH. Since becoming The Huxleys, how has your work evolved and where do you see it going?
WH & GH. Our artistic union and becoming The Huxleys has been a natural evolution of our love and creativity. We have taught each other things and pushed each other to take things further than we ever dreamed. We often say too much is never enough! Garrett is naturally more introverted and shy, so creating together has helped him explore a more outrageous side and push through personal boundaries. We believe in each other and don’t have anyone to tell us “No”.
We don’t really know where it’s going other than bigger wigs, higher shoes and lots of queer love. Our two dreams are to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale or Eurovision – happy to take either!
We are just happy to be able to make a living as artists in this country. It has been a long struggle to financially survive in a country that doesn’t value the arts nearly as much as it should. We’ve done a lot of bad jobs over our time to get to the stage where we can practise our art full-time!
FH. You’re both performers, designers, makers, photographers, singers and filmmakers. Are there any other avenues you’ve both wanted to explore? What’s next for The Huxleys?
WH & GH. We’d like to go holographic so when we’re older we could send out holograms to work and dance. We would love to perform with Grace Jones one day! We would love to make a whole disco album, too.
FRENCHIE HOLIDAY is a photographer, illustrator and stylist whose work can be described as a vintage euphoric dream with a touch of drunken surrealism. Frenchie’s work is experimental – no outlet of expression is out of bounds, which sees her occasionally use performance, animation or film in her work.
‘Supernature’
‘Pink Noise’
THE HUXLEYS – WILL AND GARRETT HUXLEY – are Melbourne-based collaborative performance and visual artists. With a visual assault of sparkle, surrealism and the absurd, The Huxleys saturate their practice with a glamorous, androgynous freedom, aiming to bring escapism and magic to everyday life. The Huxleys have performed, exhibited and participated in numerous exhibitions and events in Australia, and internationally in London, Berlin, Moscow and Hong Kong. They are represented for fine art by Murray White Room.
