JL Bogenschneider
My Secession
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O, Newdonia!
On the thirty-first of December, in no particular year but one, my father announced the independence of our household from the nation. This came as the result of a referendum in which the entire adult population of our home held universal suffrage, which is to say my parents. There was my older sister of course, but she was no longer resident and the electoral system didn’t permit votes from overseas. The rest of the populace comprised me and my younger brother, and we were too young to vote. Our home was islandly detached by a series of alleyways and avenues from our neighbours, so the borders were already in place, they were just required to be defined as such. Turnout for the referendum was one hundred percent and overwhelmingly in favour of independence, although I suspect my mother’s vote was cast to avoid confrontation with my father. Balloting commenced at 0700 and the polls closed at 2330. The votes were tallied by 2345, with the double-count coming in moments later. My father made the final words of his victory speech coincide with the midnight chimes (it’d been decided that we’d stick with Standard Time for convenience), my brother and I were permitted a dash of champagne in our mugs in order to toast the occasion, and at 0000 hours, on the first day of the new year, we became an independent state – Newdonia.
I’m relating all this to you in a matter-of-fact way because that’s how it was. Ordinary and workaday, perhaps because in the months preceding it, we’d been subject to propaganda at the breakfast table for months, only hearing of independence in terms of how desirable it was and the benefits it would bring: autonomy, self-determination and the right to live in the right sort of way. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust my father – I did – but the word he used: secession. I looked it up. It was vivid and clear in a way that his confusing and circular arguments weren’t: secession would require us to part from the rest of the world, which was a thing I actually liked.
We would, over time, begin to enjoy and understand true freedom and sovereignty, this latter quality being the greatest thing a nation could achieve.
My father assured us that, although our independence was total, there’d be a number of treaties that would allow us to co-exist alongside our neighbours without obstacle. He’d negotiated a suspension of the usual restrictions at the common border’s exits, which we understood to mean the front door and the back-yard gate, although this privilege was not extended to citizens of the Outer Nation (previously known to us as Outside) and all the places found in that zone. Nothing day-to-day would change, he promised, but we would, over time, begin to enjoy and understand true freedom and sovereignty, this latter quality being the greatest thing – he frequently declaimed – a nation could achieve.
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It’s been suggested that my father was insane during this period, but that seems like a big word for how things were. It’s true that there were times when his attentions were diverted, as though he’d gone elsewhere, but I don’t know. I think we can all go elsewhere at times and not always in concordance with our will. (During the same period I became obsessed with the phenomenology of things: why my mother cared for the smell of tulips, or my brother’s freshly washed hair, but not the plastiscent of the melamine countertop; why my father admired the shape of certain weather presenters on TV, but not the sultry bulge of the overworked refrigerator.) I’ve been told that I often disappear into myself and, although I can’t account for my time away, I never return in a state of distress or dishevelment, but one of wonder. If that’s insanity we should all be so lucky.
But in those early days of the new nation our father was industrious. He designed and hand-made a flag – our mother was impressed – and composed a national anthem, which we had to sing every morning. (I won’t go into the details, but it was called O, Newdonia!, which illustrates as much as you need to know about my father’s originality in a number of respects.) He came up with a list of National Traits that we all had to swear by (they weren’t much more than a secularised Ten Commandments) and even wrote a history of Newdonia, which over time simply became his memoirs and thus was entirely subjective, although it remains the only primary source on the subject and so retains some documentary value.
We were less enthused about the project. Although we had freedom of movement, it was subject to the presentation of the correct documents at the border and the granting of the appropriate visas. I once spent an evening loitering on the front porch, already late for a date, while he printed and laminated another travel permit to replace the one I’d lost. Needless to say the date didn’t turn out so well. Friends and family stopped visiting, and after a while, our father preferred us to remain on home soil whenever possible. He set us to mapping the territory of Newdonia and inventorying its resources; these activities forming part of a home-schooled national curriculum, until our mother won a small victory and convinced him that our educational needs outweighed his own abilities. He rationalised this by considering us internationally schooled and we were routinely referred to as ‘Newdweebians’ in the classroom, where even the exchange students – glad to no longer be subjects of derision – partook in the mocking of us. At one point our father considered a complaint to the board of governors, but – we later found out – my mother convinced him the matter was not racism, as he would have it, only micro-xenophobia, which was not something covered by the school’s charter.
Our father went so far as to create and issue his own currency – the Newdonian Krone – using his metal press and suspicious, cabalistic, quantitatively eased economic mechanisms. I should point out that our father was unemployed during much – but not all – of this time and that one source of his disgruntledness sprang from the obstacles he faced in finding reliable work as a ‘foreign labourer’, something about which our mother advised we not probe further.
But just like in Monopoly, or in the case of Osterlies crossing the fallen Berlin Wall, we were issued with a generous introductory amount in differentiated denominations. It was unclear as to what our father expected us to spend this on. Given its uselessness in the Outer Nation it became something we used to extract favours, promises or even foreign (i.e. actual) currency from him. Often, we would barter between ourselves, swapping chores and bribing each other, with the recipient able to affect more transactions with our father, the result being that he ended up with the entire currency reserves of Newdonia, but nothing on which to spend it. Loathe to waste anything, regardless of its null-value, he established a museum to Newdonia in the shed at the bottom of the garden, where artefacts pertaining to the nation might be viewed. Initially there was an entry fee of 2NEk, but this was subsequently waived in the cultural interests of the nation. Our father even created a section devoted to the National Arts: a wall upon which were mounted and framed drawings from our childhood. Our mother – who hasn’t been spoken of much, at her request – bore all this remarkably well; her only goal was to live as quiet and unmolested a life as possible. In this I believe her to have been successful.
One thing our father remained consistent about was communication with my older sister, who had emigrated the previous year under a cloud never fully explained or wholly dismissed. She used to send letters and postcards, and would sometimes call, but with the founding of Newdonia these communiqués were intercepted by our father; our emails and phones monitored. I should be clear that our father, while controlling in the respects outlined, was never abusive, only became increasingly unsettled over time, and it showed in odd ways, like his desire for independence. I myself would experience something comparable to this unsettlement many years later, in scope, if not in detail, and which helped me to understand much of his drive and motivations, although by then it was too late to let him know.
At the height of its powers Newdonia comprised the Inner Territory, plus a number of other, smaller lands; local allotments bought up by our father on which to grow fresh fruit and vegetables for the nation. These non-contiguous states were rarely visited by us, although when we did go, we were forced to endure a pantomimic customs routine wherein our father would check our persons for contraband (unidentified, never found) then stamp our passports with the official seal of Newdonia: a man standing by a house azure and which was drawn by my brother.
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My Secession
I left Newdonia on the morning of my seventeenth birthday, taking advantage of a temporary transit visa issued to allow me to pick up the most recent harvest. All exits were subject to stringent checks on luggage and our person: when I left the house, I carried the bag in which the crops went, a small bundle of foreign currency and my sister’s address in the Outer Nation, tucked discretely into a sock. I called home as soon as I was with her and stood firm; unwavering, even when my father pleaded with me to consider what my defection would do to Newdonia’s image abroad.
During my secession a number of things occurred, most of which don’t need to be discussed here, but some of which would count as formative experiences. Not life-defining or epiphanic, but there all the same, although what I remember most of all was an evening sat in front of the TV with my sister – who was not the same person I remembered – struggling to articulate a feeling: the idea that family was forever and yet could not always be relied upon to be there; that sisters would always be sisters and yet it was possible for them to feel like strangers; that parents – strange creatures – could operate in ways that appeared counterintuitive to their children’s needs and yet be motivated by nothing else but love. These half-understood dichotomies played a part in my later decision to return, although it’s true I was homesick too.
The ways in which the individuals in a family unit relate to one another are shadowy and unclear.
I returned to Newdonia a few months later, after my father had come to realise the shortcomings of having only one person (i.e. himself) in charge of law and order, and found it necessary to request cross-border authority cooperation (i.e. the police) in locating me. That he’d insisted on referring to me as an illegal immigrant in the Outer Nation didn’t help his case, and when the police attended my sister’s address, they assessed me to be safe, before giving my father a warning for wasting their time.
In the aftermath of my return from self-imposed exile, I found my father had gone so far in the interim as to alter the official population of Newdonia from four to three. In response, I carried out a number of acts of civil disobedience, such as defacing the currency exhibition in the Museum of Newdonia so that my father’s head – featured on all notes – sprouted a penis, and leaving the back-garden gate unlocked, the borders unsecured. When my actions were discovered, our father couldn’t bring himself to issue any formal charges, but simply looked at me as though I had disappointed him, which I had. He destroyed the vandalised exhibits and replaced them with newly issued notes. I made amends by donating what little Krone I had left to the museum and for a while things were well between us.
Over time, the influence that independence had on us became less, as the project became more of a hobby. Our father grew lax about the frequency and duration of morning allegiance and sometimes asked us to pick up certain items from the Outer Nation stores that he wasn’t able to easily grow – if at all – in the allotment. On these occasions he’d mumble something about cross-border trade being important. Then there came a day when my brother left the house to go to school and our father didn’t make him go through any border checks. He sat at the kitchen table, dismantling a boiled egg and going over the museum’s visitor data for the previous month. The world stopped, but only briefly, as my brother took the advantage and ran. Our father’s only response was to look up at the door as it slammed shut. His gaze hung there for a few moments – an impossible length of time – before returning to his figures. My mother and I looked at each other. Shortly after, when I left, I did it slowly, but without looking back.
After a time there was little left in our home to suggest we had once been an independent nation. No formal announcement was made and no one wanted to ask, but we assumed the borders had been re-opened and that reunification had occurred on some unmarked date. My brother found a specially minted coin that’d been issued to commemorate the first anniversary of Newdonia (I’d long since traded mine in) and presented it to our father on his birthday. He petted my brother on the head – a risky move, because my brother was at an age where head-petting was a young boy’s game, but he got away with it all the same – slipped the coin into his pocket and went back to reading the paper. The old ways returned and we got on with the business of living. Occasionally he would whistle the tune to O, Newdonia!, but only in the way some people’s mothers whistle Daisy Bell, or their own fathers, Colonel Bogey: idly, and in a distracted way.
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The ways in which the individuals in a family unit relate to one another – even now, when I speak as a parent myself – are shadowy and unclear. No instructions exist; there is no guidance or manifesto and no treaty or constitution can be referred to in the event of relationship breakdown. Some families, perhaps, are able to navigate their way through the murk to communicate directly, free – or at least relatively so – of jealousy and competition, intrigue and mis-speak, ambivalence or bivalence as regards love, but for the most part kin-units exist in states of uncertainty and confusion; fugues of unknowingness and misunderstanding. It took years – time, distance and eventually death – before I even approached a comprehension of my father, and of course, in lieu of any verification on his part, it could only ever be speculation. Still, and but so, I tried. (Being also the title of our father’s memoirs.)
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JL Bogenschneider’s work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, The Mechanics’ Institute Review, PANK and Ambit. Their chapbook, Fears For The Near Future, was published in 2018 by Neon Books under the name C. S. Mierscheid. In 2021 they were invited to join the London Library’s Emerging Writers Programme. In 2023 they were awarded Society of Authors funding towards a formally innovative murder-mystery novella. In 2024 they were shortlisted for the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize and the Writers & Artists’ Working Class Writers’ Prize. They are currently seeking a publisher for a collection of fiction and working on a novel about televangelism and the religious right.
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