#paralympics haiku

[thetwoguineabook]

@sunnydisposish thank you so much for the awesome feedback and great questions- hope you don’t mind me responding in a new post.

I’m so in love with Blackbird I don’t even know where to begin: the beautiful writing, the impressive historical accuracy and evocative world-building, the poignant storyline and entirely novel yet still somehow in-character arcs for Victor and Yuuri, the thought-provoking questions about politics, ideology, identity, and personal responsibility so skillfully woven into the love story at its center, and last but not least, your merciless puncturing of the British imperialist/colonialist/racist mindset (especially appreciated by this former subject who grew up in what was then still a British colony).

Thank you! It was definitely interesting to me to explore, even at a slight remove as both POV characters were decidedly non-British, the very weird situation of British politics in the immediate post-war era. WW2 was really the last death knell for Britain as the big imperial power on the world stage, but frankly we as a country still haven’t come to terms with that (cf. half the electorate seriously believing that we won’t be questing paddle-less for where Shit Creek rises in the Mountains of Oh God Why without the rest of the EU). The Attlee government was, in my humble but correct opinion, the best and most socially revolutionary government we ever had, but at the same time as we were creating the NHS and nationalising industries, we were also desperately trying to develop nuclear weapons and pissing and moaning about whether countries we’d been stamping on for centuries were ~really ready~ to see the back of us. It was a truly absurd time period.

Another reason I love it is that it’s so rewarding to re-read, because each time through I notice more little details sprinkled throughout the text, like easter eggs waiting to be discovered. For example, in ch. 4 you slip in a casual mention of a drunken assignation Yuuri once had with some guy from Cambridge named “Guy” who professed to be a Communist, then in the very next section you have Georgi complaining to Victor about one of the agents he’s handling who goes by the name of “Hicks,” which is none other than the code name for Guy Burgess. :) 

Fun fact: I have a whole document in the notes section in Scrivener entitled ‘Yuuri’s ex-boyfriends’. He was... not very nice to a lot of them, lol. Once it occurred to me that, although Burgess would have come down from Cambridge before Yuuri went to Oxford, they could still very well have met (and drunk inordinate amounts of booze together) at the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, I just couldn’t resist.

Also in ch. 4, you describe one of the musicians who had performed Shostakovich’s Symphony #7 during the Leningrad siege as “a short woman with long, pale hair and a hunger-pinched face who nevertheless stared into the camera with the piercing gaze of a soldier, a clarinet clutched in her hands like a rifle” – that has got to be an image of Yura’s mother, right?

Yes! That is none other than Yulia Plisetskaya, classical musician and denouncer of Yuri’s shitty dad. I am slightly intimidated by the prospect of writing it because the situation in Leningrad was so incredibly awful, but one of my planned side stories is about the Plisetskys and the Babichevs during the siege, and particularly about that August 1942 performance of the Shostakovich symphony and Yuri beginning to repair his incredibly fucked-up relationship with her.

Oh, and she’s a clarinettist for a reason ;)

In ch. 6, when Yuuri is told he is being reassigned to Korea, there’s a mention of the new British Consul-General to Korea, Sir Vyvyan Holt, and Yuuri’s boss reassures him that “Holt is… well he’s a lot of things, but he’s not an idiot. He’ll evacuate British diplomats if - when there’s a declaration of war.” So of course, when I googled Holt’s name, I learned that not only was he a real person, but when the Korean war broke out, Holt mistakenly thought he would be protected by his diplomatic immunity, and instead of evacuating everyone when he had the chance, he and his staff ended up being detained by the North Koreans, then forced on a death march to the far north of the peninsula where they were kept captive for several years. Oh the irony. If Yuuri had accepted the assignment, he would have suffered even more at the hands of the North Koreans once they realized he was Japanese, even without knowing he was a spy. (Shudder.)

Yeah that was some thick ladling of irony there, lol. Although perhaps Yuuri would at least have got on with Holt, since one of the ‘many things’ he was at least rumoured to be was gay. And the story of what happened to the actual MI6 officer who was undercover in Holt’s office when the war broke out is... well, interesting to say the least. I’ve got an historical notes post about it that just needs to be finished up.

You’ve thought out everything so thoroughly (down to Victor’s nom de guerre, Stefan Rittberger, and the figure skating jump known as the Rittberger loop) that I have to ask whether there’s a special meaning or symbolism behind your choice of “blackbird” as the title of the story. I mean, the first association that occurred to me, especially given your nom de plume of sixpences, was the children’s rhyme “Sing a song of sixpence / a pocketful of rye. / Four and twenty blackbirds / baked in a pie.” But some light googling turned up a plethora of meanings for “blackbird,” including: a symbol of freedom, a connotation of vigilance, shyness and insecurity, secrets and mystery, etc., any and all of which could fit. Then there are the well-known songs Bye-Bye Blackbird (which had a “cameo” in ch. 5) and the Beatles’ Blackbird (the lyrics for which also fit the story), and one of my favorite poems, the haiku-inspired “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens, which is so protean and capacious in its meanings that it could definitely fit. Finally, that redoubtable (and dubious) authority urbandictionary.com gives the following meanings (inter alia) for blackbird: 1. The act of leaving a group of people, especially a social event (i.e. business party), without saying goodbye to anyone and without anyone detecting your escape. 2. Someone who acts happy in public but is an emotional wreck in private. Someone who doesn’t advertise their depression.

Well for starters, the Stefan Rittberger alias followed the same pattern as every other original character in the fic- they are all named after figure skaters from their respective countries of origin (generally speaking with forenames and surnames from different individuals). The only exception was the Jamaican jazz band leader Nigel Harriott- the only male Jamaican figure skater whose name I could turn up was Paralympic skater Nigel Davis, so I gave him the surname of a real Jamaican jazz musician who emigrated to the UK in this period.

As for the origins of ‘Blackbird’... well, for starters, the nursery rhyme connection only occurred to me quite a way into writing the fic, haha. ‘sixpences’ originated as a reference to Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, one of my favourite novels, and as a way to reference the various notions of luck associated with the old silver sixpence coins, and also because when I picked the name six or seven years ago the Livejournal username ‘sixpence’ in the singular was already taken!

I knew from the very first vague ideas I had about the fic that this was primarily a story about Victor- his character arc, specifically getting him to the point where he would joyfully betray his country for love, was the very first thing I knew I wanted to write about, before I was even sure it was going to be an historical AU! When you get right down to it, this is a fic about that scene where Victor’s standing on the Barcelona seafront, looking out over the Mediterranean, and admiring his engagement ring- it’s a story about what Victor is not only willing, but entirely happy to do for Yuuri.

Once I knew I wanted it to be a spy story I started doing the 100% most fun spy story thing and making up everyone’s ridiculous codenames. My initial idea for Yuuri was to use something piglet-related, for obvious reasons, but that both felt a bit too mean and also not like something Minako specifically would think to call him. I wanted to give him a name that evoked the kind of figure he cuts at the start of the story- small, unassuming, lonely, but with something very deep going on beneath the surface, the same way one flighty little bird can nevertheless produce the most beautiful song. It also fitted nicely in terms of a metaphor for what he was doing in Berlin- Japan is of course ‘the land of the rising sun’, and he was ‘singing’ information to the Allies from inside their command structure.

There is a minor bird motif throughout the fic- with maybe one or two exceptions, any time a bird is mentioned in scenery description, you’ll find it’s a dark-coloured one. It wouldn’t have made the cut as an epigraph since it’s from 2005, but this from ‘Rapture’, which is one of my favourite Carol Ann Duffy poems, was very much in my mind in planning out the shape of the plot:

How does it happen that our lives can drift far from our selves, while we stay trapped in time, queueing for death? It seems nothing will shift the pattern of our days, alter the rhyme we make with loss to assonance with bliss. Then love comes, like a sudden flight of birds from earth to heaven after rain. Your kiss, recalled, unstrings, like pearls, this chain of words. Huge skies connect us, joining here to there. Desire and passion on the thinking air.

So birds recur as a symbol of independence, of thinking and acting freely even under dire and constricting circumstances, and Yuuri specifically is codenamed after a bird. It only felt natural that the story of how Victor Nikiforov, Soviet patriot and enormously valuable and accomplished spy (indeed, modelled after a man dubbed ‘the most formidable spy in history’), came to throw away his career and his country, to choose love and the freedom to live as he wanted, should share Yuuri’s name.

Sorry to be such a nerd – I’m probably overthinking all of this – and for sending you such an interminable ask (which would have overflowed the tumblr ask box 10 times over), but I would love to know the meaning behind the title.

Look, I just wrote a 100k historical spy novel about characters from a sports anime. I am the biggest nerd. And I really had a great time answering your questions, so thank you again!