Identity in Sylvestus

CW: sexual assault, abuse, trauma.

This post contains unmarked spoilers for both volumes of Sylvestus. 

 

This is a post I've thought about for a long time, including many drafts and plans done on bus journeys and sleepless nights. I never wrote anything down, though; as I've explained before, how I want to say things evolves so continually that it would have been pointless and left me frustrated, and I knew I couldn't publish any thoughts on it until Sylv Vol II had both been published, and had been out long enough that I had a small chance of getting two or three readers who had already finished it and wouldn't find the contents spoiled. However, in the few months since that deadline actually passed... I find that my desire and inspiration to actually talk about it is nowhere near what it was. Maybe the pertinence has passed; maybe the brain-space I'm in is so removed from when it's at the top of my mind that I can no longer summon the words; maybe the theory of something I knew wouldn't see the light of day was a lot less intimidating than the practice of writing something that definitely will.

It's not the only reason this blog has been quiet for the past few months, but it's one of them, for sure. So, this post is about identity in Sylvestus, obviously, and... other stuff.

Here goes.

Superficially, I've talked about gender identity in Sylvestus before. That was just over a year ago now, and it's worth noting that at the time, I was out as a non-binary queer person. A few months later, I accepted myself as a gay trans man, though it took until recently to fully come out as such and begin transitioning.

I described in the above-linked post the view on gender in ancient Rome that based identity upon sexual acts. Now, we have gender identity (what the person feels), gender presentation (what the person shows to the world), gender role (what societal expectation the person fulfills), and all of those separate to sexual identity, romantic identity, sexual preference, and now the internet is getting very big on the politics of position and kink intertwined with all of those...

But back then, it was both simpler and, to us, more obtuse: men penetrated, women received. They may not have had acceptance for and understanding around "trans" people insofar as we would recognise it today, but that isn't to say that trans identities didn't exist in some form.

This isn't another essay about Sylv's gender identity, though. I think I talked around that as much as I can in that previous post. But what I couldn't expand upon then because of the whole spoileroonies thing was the whole "Sylv's gender and sexuality are both intertwined and linked to his trauma" part - specifically, the nature of the trauma.

 

I said to my friend after she beta-read the first draft of Vol II that I was amazed no-one had ever asked me, after reading Vol I, why Sylv was The Way He Was around sex, and what the trauma flashbacks and night terrors were about. I wish we had been talking face-to-face, because I want to say "she looked at me perplexed", but unfortunately this was a text-based conversation happening in the middle of a pandemic, so I can only say what her written reply was, and not the tone with which it was intended.

She replied: "It was always clear what was happening to me, so I didn't want to ask more questions".

Just like that, I was fully knocked down. It's so hard to gauge whether things are too explicit or too unclear or the perfect amount of subtle, and all this time I had bemoaned the fact that I wasn't sure which it was but didn't want to ask anyone who'd read Vol I about it in case it drew their attention to something they had previously disregarded and spoiled the Vol II twist. But, to be fair... it was never about a twist. It's not even really a reveal - more of a confirmation. The only thing that she was surprised about who was who was committing the abuse.

Yeah, it feels good to finally be able to talk about it explicitly.

Throughout Vol I, Sylv has night terrors that involve having something shoved down his throat, being pushed to the floor, being struck and pressed down upon. They are no more explicit than that, made of shadows and metaphor, a bear that turns into a faceless man and a wine bottle that turns into a "hot choking weight" before he wakes with a scream. He is guarded because he does not trust anyone, including both himself and the reader, similar to how we get no real insight into his inner workings.

In Vol II, Sylv is much more open. He reveals a lot more about how he thinks and why he does things; the only time he hides his plans is when he is again doing something he is ashamed of or troubled by, like Pulex's trial. And even then he later looks back on it and reveals all in a demonstration of introspection that did not exist a few months prior. This is a good narrative tool, but also an intentional shift in tone for the reader and their closeness to Sylv. And, consequently, his night terrors become more explicit as well. He reveals actual truths to Pulex and Lavi after lying throughout Vol I even to the reader - and as we know him, so do other characters; Velleius and Scaurus deduce some aspect of his personal history after the trial even when he thought he was being as impenetrable and clever as ever. He is opening up as, for the first time in his life, he both comes to trust people, and is made vulnerable by his connection to Nahvo'que.

And for a lot of stories, that slight opening up would be enough. But for Sylv, it wasn't.

It had to be explicit, and the scene - the flashback in the temple of Nahvo'que where he takes Lavi into his past and vice versa - gave me more trouble than any other scene in either novel, even more so than Lavi's death.

Ever since I first started writing Sylvestus, I knew there had to be that kind of reveal, that kind of openness. Everything was obscure and shadowy because Sylv had not accepted what had happened, and he needed to.

Those early drafts - written maybe five years ago now - were brutal and explicit. I was bound by the age-old adage of "show don't tell"; for Sylv to accept what had happened, the reader had to be as uncomfortable as him, we had to see and hear and smell every detail, taste what he tasted, feel what he felt, it had to be awful and sickening.

And it was triggering as f*ck, and it sucked.

I've said before that Sylv shaped who I was in the six years that I wrote him, and that what I went through shaped his story. That first draft of one long novel that I later broke into two and re-wrote, I was a late teen recovering from some impressive childhood trauma... and going through some more. I was brutal inside, trying to write a story about accepting what had happened to you while I was still going through things I wouldn't accept for years more.

And about a year after I wrote that first version, while I was crawling my way through the first proper draft of Vol I, I was raped.

I had already "lost" Sylv, and this pulled me further from him. It had happened in a way I thought he would not approve of. I imagined him mocking me, cold and ruthless, for what I had let happen. He was the voice of my own shame, an echo of things my rapist's friends, my housemates, my family, had said to me.

I went through a lot of sh*t in that year I don't want to talk about here. Parts of it I think I'm still not allowed to talk about. I keep typing sentences to try and summarise it in a way that both demonstrates the horror and doesn't get me sued for libel and then backspacing them and staring off into the distance for a while.

The story of that year, I guess, is Pulex's, not Sylv's. Sylv says the things to him that I wish someone had said to me. That I had to say to myself.

There were small victories, but mostly, like Sylv, I did not get justice. Like Sylv, I walked away from a battle it was impossible for me to win. It felt like it must have for Sylv, running, shaking, into the night, concealed under a cover of darkness, the coward's way out, wishing I had the courage to do a Pulex and stand up there in court and declare it - but in truth, I know now and knew then that it would not lead to a miracle of justice, a happy ending. There was no Sylv to convince the judge, no Velleius to sway the public opinion, no Scaurus to make the arrest against his better judgement.

But I did not need to, because I had already done my Pulex. And I had had my Sylv.

I had stood up on stage and, to an audience of friends and strangers, performed a piece of prose about it I had written called Hell Hath No Fury. There is a recording of it, but I am not ready to show it to the world. I don't think I ever will be. I'm not even sure, again, that I'm allowed.

Sylv told Pulex that he had to stand with his own feet, breathe with his own lungs, speak with his own voice, and that was what I did. But it was not just that moment. It was the campaigning before to be allowed to even perform, the viciously polite emails exchanged with people who had once upon a time promised to fight for me now covering their own asses as we bickered about drafts of the piece and details I could and couldn't say, the friends I sobbed onto or watched movies and ate pizza with afterwards to gather the strength to go on with it. It was the ones who did fight for me, who argued behind closed doors without ever expecting me to find out they had done so, who wrote emails, who cut off contact with people who had spoken against me for no other reason than knowing it was right, who told me things I would later tell the audience in a second piece, performed with two other survivors, called The Things They Said to Me.

And it was worth it, because my counsellor told me, a week later, something she shouldn't have. She told me that another survivor had come forward since attending that performance to make their own testimony, claiming that my performance had inspired them. Further, the entire performance, and all of the amazing powerful people who told their stories that night, raised money for Swansea Women's Aid.

And if nothing else did, that alone made every inch of the battle worthwhile.

I found Sylv on that stage, and in the lead-up to it. And I've kept him with me since. It was the self-acceptance after that made me realise that he would never have hated, judged, or mocked me for what I went through.

The original Sylv did not care for Pulex at all. It was ambiguous, but it was implied that he only used Pulex for his plans, and did allow him - even drive him - to commit suicide afterwards. But in this version, I knew that was not right. Sylv cherished this child he saw himself in. He did not disapprove because he had been drunk, or because he had been attracted to his rapist, or because he considered Pulex's trauma lesser than his own. Sylv still manipulates Pulex and his life in canon, because he is not a good person, but he does care for him, more than he admits or anticipates. This is the way I have hinted at, so many times before, that Sylv shaped me and yet what I went through shaped Sylv.

I have a jaguar skull tattooed on my hip from around that time. It is not meant to be the Vol I cover, despite the inevitable visual comparison, but it is, without a doubt, a little bit of Lavi, a little bit of Sylv. Its meaning is refusal to be polite, a jagged-toothed agreement to never hesitate to rock the boat, to capsize it when necessary, to be teeth and claws when needed. I have another tattoo from a year after that reminding me to put away the fangs and be vulnerable sometimes.

But there's one last way - okay, so very many, but the last one of this post - that Sylv and I's influence on each other affected the novels you have today.

Let's go back to that scene. I'm not going to copy-paste a section into this post; if you want to read it again to remind yourself, it's chapter 40 (XL in Roman numerals) of Vol II. Like I said, the original was brutal and harsh and explicit because at the time, both as a person and a writer, that was the only way I could think to be shocking in a reveal of something that had already been shown more obliquely several times before.

But I knew going into it this time around that I had been looking at it completely wrong.

Sylv trusts the reader and he trusts Lavi and he needs to acknowledge what happened. So that doesn't mean that any of them need to be shown what happened.

Quite simply, for the first time in his life, Sylv needed to tell someone what happened. "Show don't tell" isn't an all-encompassing rule. For this, it was simple: Sylv needed to tell.

I had written and re-written and memorised and practised that performance of Hell Hath No Fury, I had carefully placed pauses, choreographed clenching fists and a furrowing brow, because I know how to perform, I know how to take words on a page and make them into something powerful. But the actual performance was so much more raw and hurried than I could have anticipated. Watching the video, I don't even remember it.

Except for the moment I actually said... it.

The layout of the piece was this: I described experiences from growing up, I described how society and teachers and peers and doctors reacted to them, and throughout it I built to how that informed how I had reacted...

"When I was r-"

And I hit a wall.

I can see it again, watching the video, feel that jolt in my chest. I had been powering my way through, barely holding it together, racing along the line between "too much of a practised performance with not enough raw emotion" and "too much hysterical emotion with not enough rational calm behind it", and then I hit that word, and I crashed to a halt.

Because I couldn't say it.

I had mumbled what had happened to people while I was drunk, implied my way around it with family members, called it "sexual assault" and "the incident last year" sitting stiff-backed in front of university staff, metaphored around it in poems... but I had scarcely said the word before. And now, in front of a faceless audience filled with just too many faces I did recognise...

"When I was-" I tried again. I choked softly, physically jolting forward as I hit the wall a second time. The darkness began to swarm, a crescendo in my ears, like buzzing insects and an orchestra of out-of-tune string instruments all swelling and pressing in around me. I could see my friends in the wings off the stage, reaching out, gesturing to me to come back, to give up, to walk off and look after myself first.

"When I was- when I was ra-" I gasped for air, feeling the hand over my mouth like moths filling my throat, the soft "sshhh" like the shushing of wings, the weight on my hips like a tiger pressing against me.

"When I was raped-"

And I was through. In reality, I rushed through again, found my stride, continued with a shake in my voice and a clenching fist that had not been choreographed. But inside, I was gasping for air, and it was light and still and quiet.

I don't need to explain how directly that translates into what appears in that chapter, and much of Sylvestus before and after.

When he says it for the first time, when he finally acknowledges it, when he tells someone, when he admits it to himself, all of it goes quiet. And it doesn't mean that the happy ending starts now, it doesn't mean he's magically cured of his trauma, it doesn't right the wrongs of all the years, but it's the first step.

I remain proud of that piece of writing like no other.

People can get so accusatory around representation in media at the moment. Yeah, Disney does need to try a lot harder, but that doesn't mean that every indie book needs to be filled with every single identity of queer and PoC and disabled - but yes, I still get insecure about Sylv as the main character of my novel. He is so intentionally a subversion of "masculine soldier protagonist in historical fantasy" - ace, traumatised, chubby, short, autistic - but it's like every time I describe the book to someone in the creative communities I'm on the fringe of, I have to start with those things, rather than letting them be a natural part of the story as they read it. No-one wants to read Yet Another Story About a Straight White Man, but maybe, just maybe, a story isn't automatically sh*t just because it doesn't feature enough of whatever identity is the buzzword of Twitter this week.

Sylv's identity is complicated because mine is complicated. I am not trans because I was raped, but my discomfort and dysphoria around gender and sex cannot be untangled from what I experienced, because every source of strength and comfort I could seek in media about my experiences - music, movies, art, poems - is about women being abused by men. I was driven away from male recovery spaces by cisgender survivors because they did not consider me valid, verbally abused for daring to have a vagina when I was raped, and yet equally, constantly misgendered in and driven away from female recovery spaces. There are a lot of songs on Sylv's playlist by women about their trauma and how they reclaimed their identity and bodies, because there aren't many at all by or about men - and those songs and how I wrote and formed him as I listened had a huge influence on how I perceive him and his story. In Sylv's world, his understanding of his gender and sexuality cannot be untangled from that core Roman tenet of men penetrate, women receive.

Sylv's story and Sylv's identity is about being trans and being male and being sexually assaulted and dealing with all of that while you have a whole lot else going on in your life. I don't need to justify why he isn't a woman or pansexual or "more explicitly" non-binary.

It wasn't the story I set out to write. It wasn't the plan all those years ago. It's not the secret message behind the book. But it is true. Sylv will always be there, a part of me. A part of my identity.

I guess that's all I had to get off my chest about it.