May 31, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Liel (she/they) is a writer, trainer, Psychologist (Provisional) and a disability and justice advocate based in Naarm. Her work is published in ABC Arts, MamaMia, the anthology We’ve Got This published by Black Inc. and Scribe UK, and Hireup, amongst others. Liel was the 2022 editor of Writing Place magazine, and is the creator and host of the (Un)marginalised podcast. She not-so-secretly enjoys singing along to the Frozen soundtrack with her kids, and is somewhat fixated on parenting related humour. Find out more about Liel’s work on her website and follow her attempts to keep up with social media via @LielKBridgford.
Marble Track
I slice a piece of me out and quickly amend the rest, the icing dropping around my layers in the heat of the moment. Presenting myself on an ornamented plate to another, pushing away that piece alongside the feeling of Other.
I taught myself to push things down so well that at times nobody can tell it is happening, myself included. I can even laugh at jokes that the whole of me doesn’t find funny, because that part of being a person doesn’t go together with the rest. It is too complicated, and my father warned a boyfriend once that I like to take the hard way forward.
What neither of them understood, nor ever will truly understand, is that I cannot fit into the easy way. The path they are describing has been created for perfectly made creatures. This path is like the present that someone who doesn’t have children bought my eldest: a narrow and precise marble track. But I am not a marble, more like a kubebah, a word that in my first language means a fat, uneven, hand-made ball-like mass. A kubebah can easily disintegrate, especially upon throwing at something, or someone.
Lots of people are like marbles, and they travel round the track effortlessly, at times carelessly. I have never got on track, not because of lack of desire or the stubbornness my father refers to, nor due to lack of effort. I have laboured to become a marble using any weapon or tool at my disposal: controlling my food intake and energy usage, censoring my language, hiding parts of my physical body, accentuating others, surrounding myself with marbles, acting like I am one. I followed the direction of this track for years, looking up at it like an elevated rail and wondering what people travelling up there were feeling.
I spent the better parts of my life wishing I was somebody else, more marble-like, more perfect or right. And each time I looked up, the shame inside me grew. That shame became so large that it stopped being distinguishable from me, it had invaded all my organs and crawled up from the pit of my stomach all the way up and around my throat.
The best decision I made was to throw myself against some things, and watch me and the shame fall apart just enough so I could see it. It had a dark purple colour not dissimilar to my open flesh, and distinguishable only by its pace. It moved and grew quickly in front of my eyes when we were both splattered on the floor.
Then with the help of fellow kubebahs I collected myself, and left the shame behind. Without my flesh, and in the sunlight, it dries up. When I moved away from the shadow of the marble path and into the open air and sun of my endless possibilities, I set myself free.
People still look down at me sometimes and ask why I am not up there where they are, but now I am moving through my own path, and unlike a marble track, it only goes upwards.
Every day I do a little less cutting out, and serve more of myself to the world as I am: the disabled me, the gender non-conforming me, the immigrant me, the atheist me, the culturally Jewish me, the politically radical me, the dreamer me, the parent me. I am a proud kubebah.
May 5, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Javeria Hasnain is a Pakistani poet and writer, a Fulbright scholar, and an MFA student at The New School, NY. Her prose and poetry have appeared/is forthcoming in Poet Lore, The Margins, Isele, and elsewhere. She was a runner-up for the 2022 The Bird in Your Hands prize and an honorable mention in the 2022 Penrose Poetry Prize. She currently works at Cave Canem and reads poetry for Alice James Books. She has received support from Tin House Workshops, The Kenyon Review, Sundress, and International Writing Program.
BRIDE
Every evening in Ramzan, alone in my Bed-Stuy apartment kitchen, I pick three bananas, an apple, a peach, and an orange. I slice the bananas, dice the apple and peach, mix them in a small tupperware that belonged to the previous tenant. I punch a hole in the orange and squeeze its juice directly into the fruit mix. I let loose in the melodic tunes of Sabri brothers’ Tajdar-e-haram—grip the orange harder as it creates more holes, filling my palms with pulp that drips, drop by drop, into the mix. I don’t care for the seeds or the grime that infiltrates my otherwise purified delicacy.
Every evening during this small ritual, I think of Mama, my aunt, the eldest of all seven siblings who cooked the best food. No one could return from her home hungry or underwhelmed. Every Ramzan, she called everyone at least once for iftar. I have the most vivid memory of her making fruit chaat, squeezing the orange into the fruit mix with naked hands, grime mixing with pulp. She didn’t care for the seeds either.
I was an unhappy child and only I knew that. I was embarrassed by my father’s hiroof van and preferred going and coming back with other friends in their regular-roofed cars. I was embarrassed by my small home and never invited any of my friends over. So whenever I saw Mama, I fixated on things she lacked, which were (to my defense) abundant. What was more surprising to me was that she never did.
She had a love-marriage at 25 to a Navy Captain. She recalled with an arrogance peculiar to her how all the neighborhood girls and her cousins, even her aunts, were extremely jealous of her. Owing to the long stretches of work in the Navy, her husband used to be away for weeks, sometimes, even months. He left for work one day, and never returned. She never married again.
After my nana passed away, she kept shifting to various apartments, never living in any one for more than a year, tagging her brother that she cared for along as well. At one point during this five-year-long cruise, maybe in the third year, she stopped unpacking most of the stuff. Cupboards were replaced by cartons and beds by air mattresses. Whatever little room for furniture the apartment provided remained empty. Her dark circles had deepened further and light-spots occurred unevenly on her face, probably because of smearing very old, often expired, make-up products that she bought from the local Sunday bazaar.
She was keen about appearing pretty. She always dressed nicely and scolded my mother and khala when they didn’t. Several times she handed me or my sister, whoever was nearer, a hair plucker (a staple of her make-up bag) to clean out her chin or upper lip or the middle part of the eyebrow, just above her nose. Oh, she absolutely loved her nose! She wore a little pea-sized gold nose ring shaped like a flower. It was a joy to watch her put on make-up before leaving for the office. Dressed in a lilac & pink Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) uniform, hair tied in a tight bun secured with a black net, black pumps with heels—she looked exquisite. After she left, the smell of her make-up and perfume lingered around the apartment for hours.
Mama—that’s how every kid in my family addressed my aunt—worked at PIA as a Boarding Officer at Jinnah International airport in Karachi. She received a discount coupon book for the airport McDonald’s and the breakfast lounge at the start of every month, which she spent all on her siblings and their children. Almost every weekend, we gathered at her place and went to the bus-stop to wait for the 4K bus. It was a thrilling adventure. I always felt anxious that somebody would be left behind in the bus because they were not vigilant and the bus only paused for three seconds at a stop before it sped up again. The drivers do not care about anyone. Karachi bus-riding is a high-stakes game, everyone is looking out for only themselves. If you are not fast enough, you will end up at Saddar even though you journeyed out for Nazimabad. Although, when she had money, we took a taxi. Amma usually offered to pay the taxi fare, “bachhon ko taxi mein le jao,” a gesture we all anticipated, and welcomed when it came, including Mama. After all, the taxi took us all the way to McDonald’s, whereas, the nearest bus-stop to the airport was a good 15 minute walk away.
My cousins and I spent many weekends at her apartment, nights sleeping like sardines on separate mattresses joined together. She woke up early in the morning to pray fajr, and immediately afterwards, switched on the TV to 9XM, the Bollywood music channel, still sitting, cross-legged on her prayer mat, her fingers rolling one bead after the other of the tasbih. We woke up, one by one, irritated at the noise getting louder, the sun shining directly on our skin, piercing the eyes. When we protested she closed the curtains and turned off the TV so we could sleep in peace, she laughed. Then she said, “if you go back to sleep, no parathas for you.” And none of us were stupid enough to say no to her parathas.
Mama was the only one interested in our teenage love lives, and the only one we weren’t scared to tell them to. On weekends with her, we stayed up through the night talking about the people we had a crush on and stalking them on Facebook. In return, Mama told us about hers. She was so nonchalant about the men—like those heroines you see in Bollywood films. Too cool for the boys. Casual and unbothered, and secretly playing hard to get. I could still sense some sadness in how she talked, so dissociated from herself, as if recounting a story from a past life, or of another person. She never told us about her husband or her marriage. And we knew better than to ask.
As I was growing up, my relatives, including distant cousins, started saying I resembled Mama. One of my aunts used to say I looked more like Mama than my own amma. The same round face, a delicate nose piercing, the penchant to appear beautiful. I got offended at such comments, even though I knew they were true.
In the summer of 2015, she announced she could no longer live in Karachi. She told my mother and khala that she was bored. We had also grown older and busier with studies taking priority, and didn’t visit her as often. Her friends had also moved to other cities and countries. “Moreover,” she said, “there are financial issues. And I am tired of having to move houses every year.”
A month later, she took my mamu, the brother she cared for, and moved to Rawalpindi. Her office relocated to the Benazir Bhutto International Airport in Islamabad. She said the pay was better and she had two friends living with their families in the same apartment building. Her other brothers weren’t happy with her decision and persuaded her to come back. When she remained firm on her decision, they distanced themselves from her.
Mama often called my mother to tell her about the weather in Islamabad or its tasteless food and ask what she had made for lunch. She occasionally messaged me to ask about the meaning of a difficult English word or phrase, to which I always responded only hours later, with an irritation peculiar to teenagers. She often said she missed us, but she was building a life for herself. She missed us but she did not want to come back.
Early in 2016, Mama called to tell amma about a man she recently reconnected with. They had been friends for a long time who lost contact with each other due to adulthood and distance, both physical and otherwise. He was a veterinarian, divorced, and had two kids; a boy who was seven and a girl who was 15. Mama had developed a good relationship with her son, who now also called her “Mama.” Mama said he reminded her of me: the boy also loved reading and writing stories and topped his classes.
On December 29 2016, I woke up to a loud scream. In the dining room, baba was holding amma’s one hand, while she cried holding a phone to her ear with the other. He asked me to switch on the TV in the next room. The little red ticker in the bottom of the news channel read one after another: “a hotel in Islamabad burned down,” “one casualty known,” “the body identified to be of a PIA employee.”
We were later told the fire erupted around 4am and that Mama died of suffocation from the resulting smoke. All the other guests had fled the building. A man who was staying in the next room told us they knocked at her door repeatedly to wake her up and help her escape. When they finally reached the room, they found her on the bathroom floor passed out.
On New Year’s Eve, one of Mama’s brothers and his wife flew to Islamabad to bring back Mama’s body. She was brought back to Karachi, to one of her brothers’ homes. It was time to look at her and say goodbye. She looked so beautiful. Draped in the simplest white. She would have never liked it. I imagined her saying, “White is so boring! Bury me in red.” But of course she never said it. We never talked about death. We actually didn’t talk much at all. She never even told us about her navy husband. She never told us why she didn’t marry all these years. I never asked. I always thought I would have enough time to talk to her once I’m older.
The day she was leaving for Islamabad, amma, I, and my sister had gone to drop her at the airport. There was still some time left in her flight, so she took us to McDonald’s to spend the last few coupons she still had. My sister and I bought Oreo McFlurries and amma and Mama bought soft serve vanilla. She looked at me while slurping her cone, her eyes glassy as if brewing tears, and kept looking for what seemed like a long time, her lips quaking steadily. She cried all the way walking to her terminal.
Now, when she lay so still, all I wanted was to hear her laugh. I gawked at her as if drawing her inside my mind. I thought if I gazed at her long enough, I may always remember her face—round, high cheekbones, a protruding chin. Her lips, small and pink, like a baby’s. Her petite nose that she was extremely proud of, “Hum Nagpur waalon ki naak sabse achi hoti hai.” Every inch of her crystalline—no spots, no burns.
All of us who have left homes, families, countries—willingly or reluctantly—know it is devastating. Also liberating. I could not understand why I began thinking so much about Mama’s life as I was starting my own, in a new country, two oceans away from that of my birth. I understand now. We had more in common than we cared for. We both wanted to make something of our lives.
On phone calls with amma, I hold back telling her how much I miss her. It’s true that I miss her. It is also true I do not want to go back. Now whenever I am flaneuring in the streets of Manhattan, kissing men I do not intend to kiss a second time, dancing to cheap Bollywood songs in bars, I feel her in myself and it makes me happy. This feeling comes after years of feeling myself in her, and being angry and sad because of it.
Throughout Mama’s funeral processions, my amma and khala were told of how Mama was a shaheed. And martyrs never die.
I continue to bear witness to her life. In my dreams, she is always dressed as a bride.
April 24, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mohamed Irba / محمد (he/him/هو) is an Omani Lebanese cis man who came to Australia in 2007 at sixteen to study and stayed for safety. He is an active member of his communities and continues to explore the meaning of belonging in everyday life and the intersections of his identity as a Queer Arab person living with HIV.
Taaf طاف
I was 16 years old when I landed in Melbourne airport on a cold winter morning. I came to study but stayed for safety.
My new guardian was waiting to pick me up. “Your English is really good!” she said. I will never forget her surprise and relief that I could speak. I was bewildered by that as most people spoke English where I came from, and sometimes English would be the third or fourth language. It was more than a statement. It came with a history of society that looked at me as uncivilised and barbaric. I also had not experienced winter before and could not stop shivering.
I wish I could hold my younger self now. I know he would never believe we could be writing a story like this one; telling my story to help others. I would not change any of my life experiences but I need to stop burying them deep inside where I cannot even remember them. If I do not speak of it, there can be no healing and I want to make sure my lessons are passed on to those who face similar challenges.
From the beginning, I had the responsibilities of the eldest son to carry. My culture puts so much pressure on the eldest son to be successful, study, get a well regarded job, marry and have many children. The parents are often called “Abu” and “Om” (name of eldest son) and it is very shameful if their son is not successful. These responsibilities meant additonal pressure. I was not “worldly” but I knew I was different and had to escape. I was the darkest out of my siblings and I was reminded of it daily. My mother tried to scrub the black out of me every day as a child. It did not work. If she knew about my difference, no doubt she would have tried to scrub that out too. Words like “queer” and “gay” were not in my vocabulary. Though it would be years before I learned, somehow I embodied them. In the sense of defiance, standing out, being strange and different. The words I did have were “haram”, “deviant”, and “pervert”.
I had so many questions for my parents and the answer was always, “We do not talk about these things, do not ask again,” with fear in their eyes. I knew that my urges were seen as sinful, so I pushed and pushed until I could not feel them, but there was no end to the racism and colourism I experienced and saw. No end to consumerism and obsession with material things, money and brands. I hated the focus on class and family origins that were so rooted in the culture, and convinced myself I did not belong in my desert home.
There was a fairy-tale across the sea, and I pointed to it: freedom of speech, democracy, minimum wage, queerness, dressing as you please, everything you could want.
Or so I thought, until I found my way here. Initially things were good, I loved the public transport and uncensored internet. Having access to all the knowledge I wanted and porn could not have come at a better time! I surfed websites such as gaydar.com, manjam, and manhunt and indulged the urge I couldn’t even name. It was like opening a big bucket of Maltesers and not being able to stop (which also happens). Despite the pleasure, these experiences still brought on extreme guilt. All the Islamic teachings from my parents and school did not suddenly go away. I felt like the worst person, that I was going to hell for sure. As my Islamic studies teacher taught me: “The fires of hell never stop and you will be tortured by their flames up until the brink of death only to be brought back again and go through the whole experience once more and more and more.”
Yet this did not stop me, and I fell for every (white) boy under the sun. What I did not know is that chasing these fruits would bring so much sorrow. Using these hook-up apps and websites muddied my understanding of what I was feeling, and of love itself. What I wanted more than anything was validation, but for every gratifying reply to my messages, there were hundreds of others that went ignored or blocked. Sex became my new hobby. I never had hobbies growing up as studying was my only purpose. I was to become the successful first born son that would make my parents proud and that was drilled into me before I was even ten. But sex was so much fun. I kept a record of them all—43 in the first 30 days I would proudly boast! I did it with everyone: old, young, educated, rich, poor, but especially white as that is what I was taught counted as “beautiful”. It took 10 years to unlearn this toxic and damaging racism, a product of how I was brought up, a product of white supremacist ideology.
Yet before I could unlearn the racism that plagued me, I practised it. I experienced it. Words like “sand monkey”, “N*****”, “curry muncher” (yes, I got the pleasure of receiving slurs for Arabs and South Asians too), “terrorist”, “takeaway”, and many more micro-aggressions. “What natio are you?” was the most common response I got. Brown skin stopped the white gaze at its place and resulted in a block. And still, I wanted their validation. I wanted a white prince to fulfil all my dreams and I would do anything for them. I was stereotyped, humiliated, and fetishized, yet I played along and laughed. The validation was too strong and I had nothing to fall back on anyway.
I wanted to fit in. I wanted it all. I remember going to my first gay bar called “the X-change” in Melbourne, the energy and excitement. I stared at every person without a shirt on kissing another, or more. I stared at a freedom I’d never imagined. I had fun, took on the Australian culture of over-drinking, danced, partied and met many temporary friends. “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga and “What’s my name?” by Rihanna were on repeat as I washed away the past with binge drinking and blacking out.
At some point, I developed my own way of “coming out”. In order not to be discovered by family and friends back home, I did not talk to them. I deleted them all from social media so as not to accidentally be tagged in a “gay” photo. I wanted it all but would not risk it all. Time to make new friends, I said. No time for homophobia. And by homophobia I meant my own culture. I did everything I could to block it off. Like it never existed. This is Australia. I stopped using my mother tongue, and wouldn’t use it consistently for at least ten years, until I even started to lose confidence speaking it. There are displacements forced upon us, and there are displacements we put upon ourselves. What I really needed was real friendship. But it would take another few years to realise that.
My obsession with sex translated to what I thought was love and that was the beginning of many important life lessons. Relationships certainly started off strong and I insisted on moving in quickly even though I did not really know these men. I was seeking validation and safety in the wrong places again. The amount of emotional abuse I took on was compounding on my lack of self-worth and co-dependence. When I got my permanent residency through a de-facto relationship, his friends judged me and openly joked that I was an “overseas bride”. It reminded me of the white woman at the airport, the condescension. The way she spoke to me back on the first day I landed was that of an exotic being that she could not understand. The way they spoke to me now felt the same, as someone othered. I am not an Aussie and would never be, even as a resident. even as a citizen. I laughed it off as I have before. I knew it was wrong but I was so madly in love. Nine years later at the age of twenty seven, I finally ended the fairy-tale and saw reality.
Nothing prepared me for the disillusionment, the sense of rootlessness, the loss of identity, survivor’s guilt, the helplessness when things go wrong. I was so alone and yet did not know it. Sex did not equal friendship. Sex did not equal love. Sex did not equal validation. White Patriarchal Supremacy is in place and I will never gain its approval, which I no longer want, nor its validation, which I do not need.
I think many of us seek to escape to the West for the fantasy of safety and freedom. We all have our own personal journeys and this is mine. Lately, I have started reconnecting with my culture through language, books, food, music, films, and visits where possible. Finding other Queer Displaced people to connect with has been magical to me. I have also started helping others still in the homeland through online support groups who provide advice and information. Activism is extremely difficult and dangerous as it can result in arrest and prison sentence, but small actions like providing support through the knowledge gained here or the people on the ground providing safe spaces and social connections can help. This is very important to me—through it I’ve regained a sense of my own identity and purpose.
I am still not exactly sure what belonging means. This is my home now and a home should function as a safe haven for its occupants. I like to think I can still bring my culture to it. I do not have to assimilate in a way that erases me but rather, belong in a way that I can be proud of. With a long road ahead to acknowledging the history of this land and oppression facing First Nations peoples, I am grateful to be here. I am reminded of this not only by First Nations peoples but by others whose ancestors laid claim to the land. The colonial oppression continues here and overseas with our homelands continuing to suffer daily whether it is from real warfare or intergenerational and systemic damage caused by colonisation. We need to acknowledge as displaced people here that we are benefiting from stolen lands and colonisation, and that moving forward any progress has to benefit the First Nations peoples of this land and not come at their expense.
I do not want to beg or claim a space where others are in power and I am not. We are already here. We are to be acknowledged as part of the conversation and more importantly as active members of decision making.
There is freedom in being here and much to gain, but also loss. Loss does not go away easily. You do not have to disassociate from your cultures to belong. It’s a harder road but worth taking. Our existence is resistance, but we deserve more than to be seen only in opposition: we can and we will thrive.
I want to stand tall in front of you, I am a voice for others like me everywhere I go, and a changemaker. Speaking up is something I have struggled with as I sought to fit in and not cause waves. I am not afraid anymore; I look to the ocean which is not afraid of land, not afraid of itself. Waves that are powerful in unity and move where the sea goes. Waves that heal.
Note:
Taaf طاف: A word used in Khaleeji Arabic meaning to float but also as a means to brush someone off and not give them attention.
February 11, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Maki Morita (she/they) is a Japanese-Australian writer and performance maker on unceded Wurundjeri country. Recent projects include dance piece (live art, Labour Lexica exhibition, Linden New Art, 2022) and Trash Pop Butterflies, Dance Dance Paradise (fortyfivedownstairs 2022, Theatre Works 2023). She is a 2022 Wheeler Centre Playwright Hot Desk Fellow and has appeared in events including National Young Writers Festival, Feminist Book Week and Yardstick.
SUBURBAN QUEERNESS / THE ANOMALY OF DANDELIONS
Threaded through primrose suburbs are the anomaly of dandelions, soon to be tucked away. As I child I thought dandelions were beautiful, and my parents would say Good! Pick those dandelions, we don’t want them in our backyard. I liked arranging their sunny halos over a vase, in my bedroom, in a similar fashion to roses or tulips.
There’s nothing new about sweeping together (fairy)dust and stashing it away. After all there are hoarders, stamp collectors, and the like. My favourite thing is paper — I collect wrapping paper, tissue paper, clothing labels made with nice paper, magazine cut-outs, postcards… which mostly go unused. My mother would always say Why are you keeping these piles of rubbish! But to me they are not rubbish; they are keepsakes.
The thing is my mother also kept ‘rubbish’. She would carefully cut out shoeboxes to make draw dividers. Tissue boxes became pencil holders. There was the big plastic bag full of smaller plastic bags in our kitchen, because as most Asian mums will tell you, Plastic bags can be re-used for anything. However, the function and order of these refurbished items rendered them ‘acceptable’. For some, fading into the façade of white bread suburbia is a lifelong endeavour.
For others, there is room to question this penchant for order. We can afford to peer into twists and gaps, to crawl into dark corners. In searching for lost glitter and stranger forms of beauty, we seek to embrace disfunction. Whether we realise it or not. Why marry for security? Why mow the lawn? Why have sex for procreation? Why not wear a funny hat?
And like this, we may become an anomaly in the way of dandelions.
*
While anomalies coexist with suburbia, there are penalties for overgrowth. Take the case of a lone share house on a straight (in both senses of the word) tree-lined street, identifiable by its quintessential front-porch couch (with holes, slightly lopsided). This outlandish artefact teeters in the kind of place where white women wear lululemon leggings and overpriced t-shirts bearing slogans like ‘fitness gangster’. Where a war of attrition begins by occupying a resident’s regular parking spot. God knows why we lived there.
Over many months of neglect, our section of the nature strip climbed above those of our neighbours. A woman once walked past and began tearing out the stalks with her bare hands. The anger this small patch of knee-high grass caused in her was initially amusing, then slightly alarming. She threw fistfuls of it onto the pavement, to little avail, then stalked off muttering annoyances.
With overgrowth comes visibility, and with visibility comes the pressure to either admit to noncompliance or trim it away. As an adult, embracing this visibility is akin to queer puberty — the protracted youth and delayed hooliganism that comes with comfortably fitting into your skin a beat (or two) after adolescence. In this sense, there is a certain freedom to leaving bushy sprawls rather than manicuring neat hedges.
Like dandelion wreaths, the throwaway remnants of suburban maintenance can be weaved into something new. While delicate and ephemeral, they may gather again and again over time, like the joy of coming together in the queer underground. The act of shimmering bright comes with the threat of being uprooted. Yet it is precisely this daring act that can allow for the birth of reverie, of a dreamlike space crafted by collective outlandishness.
*
Towards the end of its life, the dandelion turns to seed, and at this late stage it acquires a strange usefulness: wishful thinking. What was once an enemy of the suburban lawn becomes a novel means of articulating desire. Children are encouraged to blow the aged dandelion’s wispy seedlings into the sky. To close your eyes and make a wish. This way we learn about ambition, hope, everyday magic. And so the possibility of something different is instilled in the fantasy of youth. Within the rigid outlines of suburban lawns, clouds of lust are sent floating upwards.
Ironically, this human act assists with spreading seeds so that more young dandelions can grow, who will then be treated as pests by much of the human population. That is, unless they survive gardening days and careless shoe tramples to make it till old age. Why is it that this object of otherness requires the passing of time to prove its unique worth? Or is it precisely the unwantedness of dandelions that make them a suitable thing to send scattering with a mere breath, on which to attach our runaway desires?
Our relationship with magical thinking in many ways defines suburban queerness. The experience of growing up while dreaming of something seemingly distant. A lingering sense of being an anomaly, and looking for the right place to sprout petals. This continuous search keeps us in a state of permanent adolescence, always wishing, defying, and sprawling over, to the great disgruntlement of some.
October 31, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments
Brooke Maddison is a writer and editor working on unceded Turrbal and Yuggera land. She is completing a Masters of Writing, Editing and Publishing at the University of Queensland and is the founder and co-editor of Crackle (Corella Press, 2021), the university’s anthology of creative writing. Her work has been published by Kill Your Darlings, Antithesis and Spineless Wonders, among others. She has a mentorship with University of Queensland Press and is a 2022 recipient of The Next Chapter fellowship.
Notes on Loss
My husband went out to our boxed-in garden so that he could take a call from his sister. She was going under: still a child herself, not able to care for her baby son. Too many other things were pulling at the edges of her attention. She was tangled within the net of a gang and had been placed in an emergency mother and baby residential unit so she could be assessed on her parenting ability. She was 16 years old.
I watched as my husband paced across the thin patch of grass that I had been trying desperately to grow. The bass-heavy drone from the ramshackle Carnival speakers rumbled in the distance. I wandered outside so that I could listen to what was being said.
The sun beat down. A welcome long-weekend reprieve at the end of another disappointing London summer. My husband’s face was tense as he told his sister it was a bad idea to try and head to the Notting Hill Carnival with her seven-month-old baby. An even worse idea to leave him with the neighbours.
The air throbbed, thick with smoke from the jerk chicken stalls. There was a palpable thrill of anticipation on the breeze. Our friends would be arriving soon, and we too would be following the masses on foot towards the epicentre of the carnival. Somewhere on the street a glass bottle smashed. Snatches of conversation floated out of open windows, little portals into stranger’s lives.
‘I’m on road already, bruv.’
‘Nah fam, don’t come at me like that—’
‘I beg you grab me a bottle of Appleton, sis.’
‘She was well vexed. And then—’
‘Tune! Turn it up.’
The plastic chair cooled the back of my legs as I perched under the lone tree in our garden. I stretched, accidently kicking over an empty can of baked beans that had morphed into an ashtray. I used a hand to shelter my eyes from the glare. It was hard to make out the subtext of what my sister-in-law was saying over the phone, but it sounded serious. When she was pregnant, she had held her body differently, walking upright with loaded pride instead of her usual teenage swag. Now it seemed like she was going to fail her parenting assessment.
Was I ready for this?
To take on someone else’s story, to be pinned to this place forever? Tied to this country, this man and to his disintegrating family?
***
I read over my son’s adoption reports and the forms filled out by social workers in an attempt to piece together his story. So much was left behind. The section on ethnicity says simply: Black, Zimbabwean. But there is no such thing. Zimbabwean is a nationality, not an ethnicity. On his biological mother’s side my son is Ndebele, an ethnic minority more closely related to South Africa’s Zulus in language and culture than to the majority Shona people of Zimbabwe. The identity of his biological father is unknown, a blank space on both his original birth certificate and his adoption file. If he had been adopted by another family, which was an absolute possibility, even what little was known about his ethnic and cultural background would have been lost, omitted from his story forever.
***
A year before he was mine, I watched as my sister-in-law carted her baby out of the family home and sat at the nearest bus stop. She had no intention of going anywhere—didn’t have any money, her phone, or a bus pass—but her parents were seemingly powerless to stop her from sitting at a bus stop on a cold winter night with her baby. She was like an unmoored ship, crashing from one shore to the next.
From the confines of the sitting room I saw her balancing the baby on her lap, bracing herself against the chill. The night air bit at our faces when we stepped outside to coax her back in. I wondered what was going through her mind. Was she was waiting for a new story to appear, so that she could grab a hold of it and use it to yank herself free from her own life?
Before I could ask her, her parents called the police. Eight officers escorted her back inside, and without much fuss she was out of the cold and back within the walls of the family home. But she never did manage to find a clear path through the mess of her story. When I look back at photographs from that time I see that my son’s eyes look haunted.
***
In the jumble of my son’s adoption files I find the letters that I wrote to the judge presiding over the case in the family court:
Sunday the 13th of October 2013
To the Honourable Judge,
We are writing this letter to you as we have concerns for the welfare of our nephew, M.
M has been in foster care for almost a year. As he nears his second birthday the local authority still does not have a clear care plan or position regarding his long-term care.
We write this with M’s best interests at heart. We feel that he needs a secure, stable, and loving environment in which to grow and that we are the ones best able to give this to him.
The letters were written when it seemed likely that the adoption would not proceed. We had already completed an in-depth assessment and been through an intensive one-week introductions period, where we tried to transition from being periphery family members to primary carers. Each day we spent an increasing amount of time with him, firstly at his foster carer’s house, then out in the community or back at our flat. The first time I tried to put him down for a nap he screamed so much that I lay down with him in my bed, but he continued to cry and wouldn’t settle. The second time I walked the long way home from the train station, hoping he would fall asleep in his stroller. He did but woke when we got to the flat. I left him to scream himself to sleep, with the bedroom door shut, just like his foster carers told me to.
After the intensity of the introductions week we were presented to a panel of experts so that we could be matched to our nephew for the adoption to proceed. We were turned down at that initial panel, as the basic paperwork requirements had not been met by the local authority handling the case. He had already been in foster care for over a year. We had been through months of home visits by at least five different social workers, completed the police and medical checks, provided references and financial statements. We had taken time off work and spent every weekend crossing the expanse of London on a train to spend time with him.
As I look back over my frantic letter to the judge, written ten days after we were rejected at the panel, I’m reminded of the names of the social workers involved and the events that seemed to loom over those days.
***
When my son finally came to live with us, 15 months after he went into foster care, we were given two pages of notes.
These are the things they told us were necessary:
An afro comb,
Plantain (not a Zimbabwean food),
To use the same washing detergent as his foster carers (so his clothes and bedsheets would smell familiar to him),
A bottle at bedtime and another at midnight,
Peppa Pig on television when he woke up at five am,
Ready Brek oats every morning at seven.
Things they didn’t tell us (not a comprehensive list by any means):
He would sometimes wake up in rages so bad that he didn’t recognise where he was or who he was with,
That he would call all Black women mama (on the bus, at the playground, even the social workers who came to check on us),
That he didn’t like to be held when he went to sleep,
That you really can’t sum up a human being with two pages of notes,
That the tremendous love I felt towards him would sometimes masquerade as shame and guilt.
***
In the years after the adoption is finalised the trauma spools out into other areas of my life. There are times when it gathers and pools like blood on a hard wood floor. I don’t want to see it but can’t look away. The trauma feels like a barrier that no one, least of all me, can get past.
Almost three years after the adoption we move to Australia as a family of three. I let the process of applying for migration visas for my son and my partner consume me and I spend a whole summer scanning statutory declarations, photographs, bills, and tenancy agreements as my son naps. Picking up our lives and moving them to Australia is more difficult than we imagined. My marriage falters and dies in a sudden explosion. It is over quickly but the shame of failure remains, especially when I think about the enduring losses for my son, who now must face seismic loss and trauma once again. The night my son finds out that his dad is leaving I watch as sobs wrack his little body with deep noiseless spasms. I fold his form into me, and we lie together in bed, united in grief.
I read books on adoption and attachment, learning that trauma can manifest in unusual sleep patterns like sleep disruption, nightmares, or the need for too much sleep. I think back to those early years, and how he always seemed to need sleep, more and more of it, and I wonder if that was his way of trying to sleep away the trauma and pain. At age nine he still sleeps in my bed, with one foot touching me, always seeking reassurance that I am there, that I won’t leave him.
He struggles to read and write, the narrative thread that should run through his neural pathways have been disrupted. Teachers remark on the stark disparity between his vocabulary, vivid imagination, and the jumble of letters that he manages to write down. I take him to be screened for dyslexia, and it seems to be that it’s all bound by trauma.
The missing stories, the learning difficulties; how much does this change the way he makes sense of the world? When he can’t begin to understand how to read, write or process language? Does he feel like the absence of story leaves him adrift in the world? Without the geography of a story, I wonder how he can even begin to make sense of himself. Which way is it—has the trauma robbed him of an ability to process information or does his inability to read and write stop him from making sense of the past?
***
What I know now: we will always carry this trauma with us in our bodies. Stuck to our bones, nestled between our organs, and concealed in our veins. Adoption is a kind of exile, a loss so deep that it reverberates through families forever. My son must feel a kind of ever-present and eternal absence, similar to what immigrants and refugees experience. I picture his loss folding in on him in layers: he has lost his birth parents and extended family, his home, his foster carers, his cultural heritage, language, and history. He has lost the stories that should have been his birthright.
One day I overhear my son and his best friend talking about his biological mum. The two of them are crouched closely together, eating ice blocks which drip onto the smooth wooden floor. His friend wants to know, was she a good mum like Brooke? My son uses his hands to indicate. So-so. And then: not really. But really, there is so much that he can’t remember. I don’t know whether to be grateful for this or not.
Under all of this is something deeper, and our relationship remains tenuous for him. Sure, it is deep and constant and full of love, all of those things. But in the pit of his stomach is the fear that I could be taken from him at any moment. This is after all what has happened to him throughout his life, he is no stranger to losing people. Sometimes he can verbalise his fears: I can’t get myself to trust myself. And he tells me that during the night, when he is in my bed and I’m working at the kitchen table in the next room or having a shower, that he imagines that someone will break into our house and something terrible will happen to me. He tells me that if this happens he will run to his best friend’s house, in the middle of the night, to get help. To get there would involve him running through his darkened school and crossing several roads. I make a note to teach him how to use the emergency call function on my phone.
The strongest link I have with my son will always be based on narrative, not genetics. We are a family because it was written so. Because of child protection reports, the issuing of a new birth certificate and a chain of emails that crisscrossed between a network of social workers. I even wrote my name into his by interweaving my surname into his birth name.
I could say that I wish it hadn’t happened this way. That I wish my son hadn’t experienced the trauma of separation, multiple times over. That I wish that I had stayed married and that we still lived in that little flat in Northwest London with the yellow bedroom that opened out onto the garden. I can wish for all of this, but that’s not the way it happened.
So much was lost, but there are other stories waiting for us. Adoption and parenthood are layered in complex narratives, stories that are moored in culture, tradition, language, and memory that have been piled on top of one another, melted and merged for thousands of years until we end up here. Our relationship is the story that binds us.
And with the story comes meaning. The narrative creates order, gives structure to the events that shattered lives along the way. I might not get this version of the story right, but that is not the point. There is plurality here. Who did what to who, who remembers what, even who owns whom. There are so many disparate parts of this story, of any story. Blurred memories, faded photographs, forgotten conversations, personal mythologies that place blame at the feet of everyone else. Would my now ex-husband remember that fateful phone call in our garden in London? I fantasise about picking up the phone and asking him but realise it’s not important.
I still find myself questioning whether this narrative enough. It seems like such a fragile thread on which to hang a family, a life. But writing this story is a kind of alchemy: it carries with it the power to transform. I write to give the story space, to let it breathe. I write to let it out of my body, my mind, and into the light. I let it vibrate through us as a living, breathing thing. I do my best to remember it all, the story of me and him. And as I write I find that he is at the centre of my story, and that I am at the centre of his.
***
I write my way back to the beginning of us, to the start of you and me. I write back to when you were first imagined, just a faint glimmer in your birth mother’s eye. I write myself to you, stitching our past and future together at the seams, wrapping you tightly in our memories so that you will never forget. I hold you in our story, I cover you with it and all the while I am telling you: you are loved, you are mine, you are the story.
December 16, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sushma Joshi is a writer and filmmaker from Nepal. She has written two books of short stories. “The End of the World” was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. She has a BA in international relations from Brown University and an MA in English Literature from Middlebury College (USA) She is currently working on a Ph.D on environmental governance at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at Otago University, New Zealand.
This essay was written in 2018 and reflects some of the damaging environmental impacts of Nepal’s communist rule, before KP Oli’s administration and before the Nepali Congress took power. A sudden surge in car imports have exacerbated the situation even further since this essay was written four years ago.
No place like home
A few days ago, I went out to do my vegetable shopping at 4 pm, as I do every evening. Our neighborhood is called Handigaun, and it is known as the oldest settlement in the Kathmandu Valley. The ancient peepul tree at the end of the road has a Radha-Krishna temple nestled inside its roots. Nobody has been keeping track of how long the roots have grown around this small sanctum sanctorum for hundreds of years.
According to architect and cultural heritage conservationist Sudharshan Tiwari (full disclosure: he is an uncle by relation), Handigau was the ancient capital of Nepal during the reign of the Verma, Gupta and Licchavi Kings until 8th Century AD. This area later fell into obscurity with the rise of three kingdoms in Kathmandu, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur. Just down the road and down some small steps is the Satya-Narayan Mandir, where an Italian archaeological team came and excavated during 1984; the archaeologists found ancient statues and artifacts that go back to Licchavi times. I remember seeing graceful human-sized statues displayed in the square in front of the Saraswoti temple. The memory stayed with me, although I couldn’t remember much beyond the grace and style. I thought of the figure as a Buddha.
I have grown up knowing that Handigaun hides many secrets: somewhere deep inside the depths of this now squalid settlement is buried the remains of the renowned palace complexes of the Licchacvi Era, called Kailashkut Bhavan. Licchavi King Angshuverma constructed this palace after he ascended the throne in 598 AD. Chinese traveler and monk Xuanzang mentions this fabled structure in his writings: Kailashkut Bhawan had three adjoining buildings, known as Indragriha (Indra’s home), Managriha (Mana’s home) and Kailashkut (the mythical residence of Shiva and Parvati.) According to Zuangzang, a thousand people could be accommodated in the top floor of this building. Kailashkut was a giant palatial structure known for its artistic glory.
A few minutes down from our house is an open plaza where vendors set up wooden tables and sell fresh vegetables each evening. Tiny temples surround the plaza: the Bhimsenthan has a statue of Bhimsen, the strongest and most powerful of the Pandava brothers from the epic Mahabaharata, holding a club. It is tiny and exquisite, a small shrine with four wooden pillars standing in the middle of the crossroads. A new Dakshinkali temple with a yellow roof houses a shiny statue. Rajan, an energetic community figure, conducts daily pujas, organizes the vegetable vendors into the packed plaza, and adjudicates their disputes and violent brawls. For this service, without which the public square would be in chaos and unused due to conflicts regarding occupancy, he charges Rs.30 per day from each vendor.
Across the road is the Sankata complex, a strip of anaconic statues on the ground venerating the goddess Sankata, whose dasha or planetary ruling period is often the most feared and most soul-searingly difficult in the Hindu mindscape. In the jyotish astrological timeline, the yogini dasha (dasha is a time period ruled by a specific planet) has eight dashas. The eight year long dasha of Sankata, ruled by Rahu, brings with it the most upheaval, turmoil and downright catastrophe. Little Jyapu children take their drums and pipes and circumbulate this complex faithfully at each jatra festival to appease the fearsome goddess. It is a landscape mapped out by the architecture of belief and the rhythm of festivals, designed to be walked by old and young alike.
And yet, as I walked out that evening to try and do that most mundane of errands—
vegetable shopping—what I felt was an overwhelming sense of being swamped and trodden over. All around me were dozens of motorcycles, tooting their horns, swerving to get by, buzzing like angry hornets. I had to step aside, with my back to the walls, because otherwise they would have driven over me. I couldn’t cross the road to enter the market. I watched helplessly as the cars and motorcycles swarmed around me in this historic space, indifferent to my presence as a local resident, indifferent to my rights as a pedestrian. In their minds, getting home by the quickest route was more important than assuaging the grief of a local whose values and memories had become irrelevant, in this petroleum fueled internal combustion world.
As the evening traffic jam overwhelmed my neighborhood, bumper to bumper like an American highway, I stood behind and thought: What are they doing? How could they not see the historic significance of this space, and realize that this should be a pedestrian area where people walked places? How did the politicians imagine the world would sort itself out if thousands of these vehicles were added each year to this tiny valley, with no regulation to keep them in check?
As a pedestrian without a vehicle, I have no say in this republic of might. With an ankle injured during the 2015 earthquake, I have mobility problems. The slightest depression or uneven ground can make me stumble, but Kathmandu’s roads are never well built or well maintained in the current regime. The roads, it seems have gotten worse, rather than better. I try to maneuver over a non-existent sidewalk and kerb, holding onto an electric pole. A slight swelling of concrete indicates that one road has ended and is forking into another. The concrete has been slapped on by contractors from construction syndicates whose main goal had been to bid the lowest rates and get the contract, which they will split with their contacts inside the Department of Transport and inside political parties. The most famous of these is Shailung Construction, known to be owned by the landlord of Prachanda. Prachanda is one of the controversial leaders of the Maoist Revolution. The company has come under heavy media scrutiny for monopolizing dozens of government construction contracts while delivering very little infrastructure in return. Despite repeated reportage in the press about non-delivery or delivery of ill-constructed, dangerous structures, the company continues to get new contracts.
***
The traffic crushes the life out of the vegetable market, the neighborhood, the butcher, the dairy, and the sweetshop. At times, drivers hit children and dogs. The young woman who comes to help my mother clean was very upset this morning—a motorcycle, she said, dragged her six-year old on the way back from school, as he was holding her hand and skipping along. The hospital told her to bring him back for an ECG if he vomited. At night, she said, he got up and she thought perhaps he had vomited, but she wasn’t sure. The man who’d hit her child thankfully drove them immediately to the hospital. ‘My child is the same age, I have to make sure he’s fine,’ he said. Cruelty and compassion live side by side on the same streets.
My dog has a paw with a misshapen break in the middle of her leg—she was a street dog I rescued from the shelter, and during winters when it gets cold her bouncy step turns into a limp. It is not hard to guess where her injury came from: most likely a speeding motorcycle. While I was recovering from fractures I sustained during the 2015 earthquake, I would go to the physiotherapy room at Grande Hospital. During one of the sessions, I heard a physiotherapist share a story—he had been taking a midnight ride in his Enfield when he heard a ‘Splat!’ sound. ‘I look down and this dog had been totally smashed on the ground,’ he said in a casual, conversational tone. There was no indication in his story that he stopped to help the injured dog. He simply sped on his way. As I listened to the nice, kind-looking man who has been helping people diligently to get up on their feet after strokes and accidents, I can’t help but wonder at how such cruelty can exist side by side with such compassion. How could he spend his life healing people, spending all his time trying to get them up on their feet again after painful operations, while at the same time talk so casually about smashing up a dog with no acknowledgement of guilt or pain? Are we, as a human species, perhaps so anthropocentric we can’t feel the pain of animals other than our own species?
There are too many motorcycles in the Kathmandu Valley, all being driven at high speeds, responsible for many injuries of children, elderly people and dogs every single day. And yet there is no move to ban these vehicles. Politicians are indifferent to anything but taxes, which they pocket without transparency or accountability. There are no regulations to limit these vehicles in historic areas, or crowded pedestrian areas, because each motorcycle brings in tax. A taxi-driver listed for me the taxes he paid each year: Rs.16, 000 for annual tax; Rs.4000/each three months as road tax; Rs.1800 per year as municipal tax; Rs.1200 a year for navikaran fee; Rs.600 to recalculate the taxi meter’s fare, Rs.300 for meter navikaran. Another taxi-driver gave me a list of seven different taxes and insurance that he pays. Vehicles are profitable milking cows, and politicians don’t want this income source to stop. Profit dictates policy, what little there is of it. The political elites in power in Nepal used to run extortion operations in the People’s War. Now they tax people. It’s the same process, except back in the day it was illegal and now it’s done through the auspices of democracy. There seems to be no law—moral or ethical—that stops the politicians from allowing emission-spewing vehicles to pile up in this tiny valley. Nothing else, the air pollution, the rise of respiratory diseases, the chaos from vehicles parked randomly all over public space and speeding, hitting and disabling people — none of this matters.
It wasn’t always like this. The lane outside my house was a modest width—wide enough for water tankers and ambulances, not wide enough for hundreds of speeding motorcycles. The old brick walls, gently eroding rusty-orange, were high and covered with green moss. There was an overgrown stand of bamboo at the lane’s end. Trees covered the entire lane from one end to the other. Jacaranda trees that my grandfather had planted in the middle part of the twentieth century shaded my garden. I did not notice the slow erosion of the land in front of me as the houses built, and built, over what was once a large lake. The lake had been buried by real estate speculators and sold at some point in my childhood. I don’t remember when it happened; only that one day the lotus-covered lake beyond our house was gone.
The gas seller came by a week ago, and he said: ‘We used to run through the lane we thought a seven-headed naga lived in that lake. We were so afraid. And now people have built massive buildings. Nothing happened to them in the earthquake either.’
We look at each other, as if we can’t believe the naga would let these new people just go like this, without wreaking wrath on them. Building on lake bottoms has been discouraged because the mud liquefies and the bottom falls out during an earthquake, we’d always thought. Yet here was this set of giant buildings, with a new one being built at the speed of light by a young man who’s inherited his grandfather’s land and who seems indifferent to our concerns about seismic stability. Perhaps he did not know about the lake, or the seven-headed naga that could one day wreak his vengeance onto his investment.
Kathmandu had been a city full of beautiful ponds and lakes. Even the Dakshinkali temple and ward office of Handigaon had been build on a lotus pond that had been filled in. A well-connected man during the Panchayat era had decided to fill the pond and sell it. And that’s how the public ponds of Kathmandu vanished from the Eighties to now, one by one.
The leafy fans of the jacaranda leaves shaded my house from the outside world. I had only a dim idea of how it was changing outside. Then change came at the speed of light. The decade long People’s War, started in 1996, was followed by a ceasefire in 2006, then a comprehensive peace agreement. The rebels extorting people and making them flee from their ancestral villages were suddenly in power in Kathmandu, put there by the UN Mission to Nepal, which had brokered a peace agreement between the conflicting parties. Within a few short years, Baburam Bhattarai, architect of revolution and urban planner trained in JNU, was out there with his bulldozers smashing through the old streets of Kathmandu. This urban restructuring was going to be his magnum opus. A young man who lived at the end of our lane thought the pedestrian footpath in front of his house wasn’t grand enough. He had Maoist connections, people said. So in 2012 the bulldozers came by, relentlessly destroying the old growth trees in our lane. Jacaranda, bottlebrush, golden oaks, eucalyptus, trees whose names I did not know, they all fell, one by one. Hundred-year-old trees were gone within days. I think we lost three dozen trees in this fateful moment.
The bulldozer came by and kept hitting my jacaranda over and over, because the old tree refused to give way. It was a painful fight, with the tree groaning and screeching for days. Eventually the bulldozer won. The tree was cut to the nub, but it was still alive a year later, sprouting green fronds. Secretly I hoped the roots had survived and would sprout again. Sadly it was not to be—some person came by and chopped the last remaining bit of it for firewood one winter day during the Indian blockade three years later, leaving only emptiness behind. I screamed at the bulldozer driver. He bashed in my wall in revenge. You can still see the depression where he hit my bricks and caused damage. Our little corner of Kathmandu was now no longer a green and mossy sanctuary where children walked to school and breathed fresh air. It was filled with piston-firing Enfield motorcycles, roaring by at all times of the day and night. A motorbike called Crossfire, which made explosive gunshot like sounds, could be heard speeding by at night. I learnt from taxidrivers that the reason for the excruciatingly loud decibels was tampering with the Mobil oil, which was mixed with chemicals to make an extra loud sound. Expensive SUVs worth millions of rupees and battered water tankers filled with water tanks soon piled up outside, using the once green space as a parking lot. When once we used to have sweet-smelling eucalyptus, we now have the smell of diesel exhaust.
I look at the mark the bulldozer made bashing into my wall, the depression caved in, and see it as the mark of the government which couldn’t stand the outrage of an ordinary citizen beset by the oppressive illusion of democracy. Because this was no democratic process—this was a man drunk with his own ideology and power who’d relentlessly destroyed neighborhoods and homes, just as he’d destroyed the lives of people in the People’s War. But there was to be no accountability, because peace was all that mattered. We were not to make a commotion but to accept this is how things were going to be in our hometown, from now on.
In Lazimpat, a leafy neighborhood close to the former royal palace, they uprooted the shady green trees again, slapping on the concrete and making the road so wide it’s impossible to cross it now. The vehicles do not stop these days—it’s a wide highway of speeding motorcycles. In 2014, I was working to write a TV script in an office in Lazimpat. A colleague confided in me that he’s started the process to immigrate to Canada. ‘I am leaving Kathmandu for two reasons,’ he said. ‘First, I want my children to be able to breathe clean air. And secondly I want them to be able to cross the road. This is the only reason I want to immigrate to Canada.’
We will never see trees as big as my grandfather’s turn of the century trees in Kathmandu in my lifetime. Once you cut a tree that old, it’s gone. But there was a more sinister side effect. In the springtime, I could see women desperately running water pumps for hours. When I asked them if the water was coming, they’d shake their heads: ‘Only a trickle.’ As the trees were destroyed, so was the water table which fell many feet below. I see women running up to the tankers that provide free water in a frenzy, and sometimes there is a fight as people jostle to fill their plastic canisters. I’m terrified my water pump is going to break and I won’t have water, just like the time after the earthquake when I had my period and diarrhoea and would wake up and hobble with a crutch to go to my parents’ bathroom—only to find my sister-in-law had latched the door on the other side. My father ignored my pleas. He thought that old and dilapidated pump, which no longer worked, was enough for my needs. As the water table had dried up, we’d run it for hours and not a drop of water would come up. Fortunately I had enough savings to buy a new pump, which cost eight hundred US dollars. For many in Kathmandu, this is a luxury beyond reach.
I meet my neighbor Poppy who tells me her neighbor, the judge’s wife, can’t stand the leaf fall from her tree. They threaten her because some leaves have drifted into their yard. ‘At one point, they came over and set fire to the tree,’ she told me, her eyes full of tears. ‘Who would do such a thing to a tree? They want everything neat and clean.’ In modern developed minds, the ability to cover every inch of ground with concrete is regarded as a sign of gentrification and upward mobility.
In a few years, perhaps a decade or so, we’ll no longer have water in Kathmandu. If the Maoist ideal is to surround and capture the city, they did this excellently by killing trees. The first thing an enemy does when attacking a fortressed space is to attack the water source. The dhungay dhara, or stone spouts built by ancient inhabitants of the Kathmandu Valley are a closely guarded secret—only a select handful of tantrics know their sources. The reason for the secrecy was practical—if enemies attacked the city, the first thing they did was disable the water system, so it was imperative to keep its workings subterranean and hidden. In the early 21st century, Maoists attacked Kathmandu and its water sources with great success. Once you deprive the “feudals” of water, they can no longer live in the city. The feudals are flushed out from water starvation, while the Maoists party onwards with bottled water and alcohol. But the donors who love the romance of revolution, even though they personally would never want to live through one, have installed these regimes, and we must make the most of it. Anybody who opposes this way of being is feudal, anti-democratic. Home no longer feels like home, as the relentless march of the feudal, secular Democratic regime’s progress piles up, destroying historic neighborhoods and cultural artifacts, century old trees and water tables, street dogs and children.
And it is in these moments of despair, when I look at the grey sunset and wonder whether Kathmandu will be inhabitable in 10, 20, 30 years time, that I see the planet’s future. We are all captured in this planet with people like the Maoists, who put forward the ideal of modern progress as the only way forward.
The insect population has plunged 80 times in the past thirty years, and with it has gone all the birds that used to subsist on insects. ‘The insect apocalypse is here,’ the New York Times proclaimed on 27 November 2018, in an article with the same title.
One day I saw bugs had eaten my ferns, and posted a photo of it on Twitter: ‘Some naughty bug has munched through my million year old angiosperm.’ The post was partly in jest, but partly I was drawing attention to the millennia old continuum of life, which respected the rights of the bug to munch through this plant. That is how life has always continued, with one life form depending upon another. The bug would die, and its body would fertilize the earth on which the fern grew. That is always how it has been. Before the humans came along, and started to spray organophosphates that destroyed the insects’ neurological system. They started to paralyze the cockroaches, and with it, also the humans. The insidious diseases we cannot name or identify all go back to these poisons we think will kill pests but end up killing us as well, because we are tied by the indivisible thread of life. The cancers, the dementia, the Alzheimer’s, the Parkinson. The dreadful wasting diseases to which there is no cure. All of which afflict people in developed countries in such greater proportion than in developing countries far from these neurotoxins and endocrine disrupters. But now it is hard to find any pristine place on the planet. The farthest reaches of Greenland is filling up with plastic, even though the people living there are so few in number they could not have possibly tossed that many plastic objects in their ice-clear drinking water. It is all coming from elsewhere.
Robert MacFarlane, a British nature writer, wrote a book called “The Lost Words.” In it, he tries to reconjure back the words which described the natural world, now being lost to this hypercapitalist, technological era. Oxford’s Junior Dictionary decided to take out fifty nature words like acorn, buttercup and conker and replace it with tech words like analogue, broadband and cut and paste. Celebrity replaced magpie and newt. This is a reflection of how our world has evolved—one ruled by the four square borders of a computer screen, and not the sounds and sights of nature. MacFarlane, along with a group of other writers, wrote a letter of protest which became a rallying cry against this literary erasure. As writers, we must all try to find our own ways of protesting this slow erasure of the natural world from our own locations and vantage points.
People have named this age the anthropocene—the age where humans influence climate and environment to such an extent they end up becoming its defining, dominant force. We are the apex predator of our own species. But the coinage of the word eromocene, by philosopher and biologist EO Wilson, captures our future with more eerie specificity: a time and place where insects die off, taking with them birds, animals and the entire chain of living beings with them. The eromocene is the age of loneliness, where the sounds and sights of all living creatures are silenced by our ecocidal ethos. Like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which pushed the world to understand the consequences of DDT on living beings, activists, writers, Nobel Prize winners and children from all over are now pushing us to face the unavoidable consequences of the sum of all human actions—from fossil fuel to plastics, from pesticides to chemical fertilizers, from our coltan-containing computers to our cobalt and tungsten containing cell phones, all destroying and silencing the web of life.
When will we stop thinking homo sapiens and their ability to use their hands and brains is the supreme intelligence that exists on this planet, and start thinking about ethics and morality in our use of lethal human inventions, science and technology? When will the shift occur, when humans understand that they are not god’s gift to planet earth, but her worst enemy? Until then, we have to live in this apocalyptic space—our mother earth, our planet—where despite the degradations, there is nowhere else to go but back home.
As if to echo this loss of nature, I also had the half-remembered vision of the statue excavated from Handigaon’s Satya Narayan Mandir reoccur in my memories. What was that statue? Where did it go? How do the layers of histories get erased by the plundering hand of time?
Writer William Dalrymple, who has been researching the spread of Hinduism to South East Asia, recently wrote in a tweet: ‘In 802, two years after Charlemagne declared the birth of the Holy Roman Empire on Christmas day in St. Peters, on the remote hilltop of Phnom Kulen, the young Khmer Prince Jayavarman II was declared chakravartin of what would become the great Empire of Angkor.’
The name “Jayavarman” struck a chord. “Varman” sounds like the suffixes in the names of the kings of Kathmandu Valley of the pre-modern past. So I looked it up. And lo and behold, the article that surfaced said a statue had been dug up from Maligaon, a five minute walk from my house, in 1992, and a Brahmi script said it was of a King Jayavarman. Brahmi and Sanskrit scripts on the pedestal dates the statue to 185 AD, making it the earliest known historical epigraphic record of the Kathmandu Valley.
I looked at the photograph in the article—and realized I had found my lost statue. I recognized the way the clothing was wrapped around his body, the Grecian similarities to style. The lost statue was not of a Buddha but of a Shaivite king.
Figure of King Jayavarma, A.D 185 (Mishra, 2000)
Dalrymple mentions that Jayavarman II of Cambodia was a passionate Shaivite. Could it be that the Jayavarman of my neighborhood and the Jayavarman of Angkor were related? Could the latter have descended from the former, 600 years later? Shiva continues to be worshipped in Nepal in all his forms, but his most loved incarnations is Pashupati, the peaceful, loving lord of the animals, and Bhairav, his angriest and most destructive form. As I walk down the narrow alleys of Handigaon, now so full of motorcars and motorcycles as to be almost unwalkable, it occurs to me that this neighborhood where I grew up in, which to most people is only perceived of as a poor, broken down neighborhood to be raced through impatiently, may have been the kingdom from where Shaivite Hinduism spread out throughout South-East Asia. Somewhere from the dusty cobwebs of time, a connection was made and came to life again, sparking a light on what was once lost and dead.
Perhaps in the same way the seeds of life of our mother earth can once again come to life, evoking secrets from the womb of the planet, weaving the threads of knowledge together, bringing together the pieces of what we once thought was shattered and broken. Perhaps the ecological wisdom of our ancestors, which saw divinity in mountains and rivers, rock and water, animate and inanimate forms, can once again spread throughout the lands, in all its glorious incarnations.
References
Antonini, Chiara Silvi, and Giovani Veradi. “Excavation in the Kathmandu Valley.” Ancient Nepal 89, 1985, pp. 17-36.
Carson, Rachel. Silent spring. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002.
Jarvis, Brooke. “The Insect Apocalypse is here.” The New York Times, November 27, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html
Kharel, Samir, “Locals plead for Handigaun preservation.” Kathmandu Post, April 6, 2013.
Mishra, Tara Nanda. “Dated figure of King Jayavarma, the tradition of figure making and the historical importance of this discovery.” Ancient Nepal 146, 2000, pp. 1-23. http://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/journals/ancientnepal/pdf/ancient_nepal_146_01.pdf
Tiwari, Sudarshan Raj. The Brick and the Bull: An Account of Handigaun, the Ancient Capital of Nepal. Himal Books, 2002.
“‘Nowhere to go’ on the frontlines of climate change.” The New Humanitarian, December 13, 2018. https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature/2018/12/13/nowhere-go-front-lines-climate-change
Dalrymple, William [@DalrympleWill] “In 802, two years after Charlemagne declared the birth of the Holy Roman Empire on Christmas day in St. Peters, on the remote hilltop of Phnom Kulen, the young Khmer Prince Jayavarman II was declared chakravartin of what would become the great Empire of Angkor.” Twitter, December 14, 2021. https://twitter.com/DalrympleWill/status/1470383978851057664
June 5, 2020 / mascara / 0 Comments
Luke Fischer is the author of the poetry collections Paths of Flight (Black Pepper, 2013) and A Personal History of Vision (UWAP, 2017), the monograph The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the “New Poems” (Bloomsbury, 2015), and the book of bedtime stories The Blue Forest (Lindisfarne Books, 2015). He recently co-edited the volume of essays Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus”: Philosophical and Critical Perspectives (Oxford University Press).
I am currently living in Tübingen, Germany, and these reflections on the coronavirus crisis have been shaped by the situation in Europe and considerations of the overarching similarities between the way in which numerous countries worldwide have been responding to the crisis. Although they are now being eased, the lockdowns in Germany have, in many respects, been more restrictive than in Australia, but not as severe as in Italy or France. Wherever one investigates, there are many gray areas and uncertainties around Covid-19, yet much of the public discourse has tended to reiterate one narrative. This essay is an attempt to ask and open up some vital questions.
––Luke Fischer, 16 May 2020
If an alien arrived on the earth sometime in April 2020 and, being already fluent in a number of languages, familiarised himself with the latest reports and news, he could be forgiven for coming to some of the following conclusions.
Human beings were virtually immortal creatures until a deadly new virus––Covid-19––spread across the world and became the greatest threat to human existence. This surmise would be confirmed by his first conversations with other human beings at a respectable distance of 1.5 metres.
After reading some history books on the twentieth and twenty-first century, and a little Sartre, he might identify a glaring example of bad faith. Western humanity claims to cherish democracy, which it almost believes in like a religion, but actually homo sapiens have very little trust in their fellow human beings acting responsibly out of their own freedom. Excluding Sweden and a few other countries, the majority of citizens around the world have welcomed the declarations of a state of emergency, the formation of governments with executive or authoritarian powers, a massive restriction of basic rights, extended forms of surveillance, and the deployment of police to protect them from the dangers of sitting on a bench. At present they are sequestered in their homes and passively await the next verdicts of politicians, CEOs, and a select group of experts as to what they are allowed and not allowed to do.
This alien meets a few individuals who question the official narrative and one has an especial liking for epidemiology and statistics; he paraphrases the findings of Stanford Professor John Ioannidis in the USA and University of Mainz Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, and their points about the unreliability of much of the current data. He also informs the alien that human beings were never close to being immortal (at least not physically––whether they are spiritually immortal is a whole other question) and that the average life expectancy of humans worldwide is 71 years old. This outlier also provides him with this list of estimations:
There are around 18 million poverty-related deaths each year
Around 9.5 million people die from cancer each year (this figure is an estimate for 2018)
Around 9 million people die from starvation each year
Around 2 million children die from a lack of access to clean water each year
Around 1.35 million people die in road accidents each year (and 20-50 million suffer non-fatal injuries)
Around 800,000 people die from suicide each year
Up to 650,000 people (and at least 290,000 people) die of the seasonal flu every year
Around 405,000 people die from malaria each year (this is an estimate for 2018)
At this moment (16 May 2020)[1] an estimated 309,000 people have died ‘with’ or ‘from’ (we’re not quite sure) Covid-19.[2] Estimates diverge widely as to how high this figure could climb. We lack reliable data!
But, the alien objects, I thought human beings were the most caring of creatures (far more caring than my alien race who dwell on a planet many light years away) in that the whole point of the lockdowns is to protect the most vulnerable members of society, especially the elderly who have pre-existing illnesses and are likely to die if they catch the coronavirus. Why, the alien asks, is so little being done to eradicate poverty and to ensure that everyone in the world has sufficient food to eat and access to clean drinking water? The outlier responds with a tilt of his head and a puzzled stare. Then he explains that the coronavirus has a rather high hospitalisation rate and that the lockdowns really have to do with the limited capacity of underfunded and understaffed hospitals––we need to ‘flatten the curve’ so the hospitals are not overwhelmed. ‘Oh’, replies the alien.
Problems of Abstraction
While much of the worldwide response to the coronavirus shows a care and concern for the most at-risk members of society, the observations of the above-mentioned alien serve to highlight a number of valid concerns: double standards, tunnel vision (humanity seems at present only to be able to recognize one crisis in the world), the rise and passive acceptance of draconian political measures, and an abstract way of thinking that fails to take into consideration the dynamic interconnections and delicate balance of human life, health, illness, and mortality. The sole ‘enemy’ is the virus and many governments have acted as if the only responsible option is to freeze almost all aspects of life to protect us from this enemy.
Many of the responses to the pandemic evince a problematically abstract way of thinking that overlooks the dynamic ecological balance of life and mortality, and the relationships that give meaning to human existence. In our fixation on addressing one problem, we are inadvertently bringing about many other problems.
In several controversial articles, the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, has voiced his concerns that in the government lockdowns and the correlated passivity of citizens, the value and richness of life has been reduced to the abstraction of mere biological survival. Agamben writes:
The first thing that the wave of panic that has paralyzed the country [Italy] obviously shows is that our society no longer believes in anything but bare life. It is obvious that Italians are disposed to sacrifice practically everything—the normal conditions of life, social relationships, work, even friendships, affections, and religious and political convictions—to the danger of getting sick. Bare life—and the danger of losing it—is not something that unites people, but blinds and separates them.
Another thought experiment might help to reinforce Agamben’s point. Imagine a grandmother who is 82 years old. She is told that she will be able to live until the age of 85 if she resides in a sterilised cell and has no contact with her children, grandchildren, and friends. She will have an internet connection and TV and all her food will be delivered to her front door. Alternatively, she has the choice to remain in her own home and receive visits from her family and friends, go for short walks in the park (she is still mobile) and so on, but if she chooses this option she will only live until the age of 84. Which one of these options provides for a richer conception and experience of life? It should be up to the grandmother to decide, but it is worthwhile for us to reflect on this question. Of course, this thought experiment is artificial. In real life we cannot predict the outcomes. Probabilistically speaking it is fairly unlikely that one will die in a car accident. Nevertheless, due to a moment of absent-mindedness on one’s own part or on the part of another driver, one might be the unfortunate victim of a fatal crash.
In ordinary life we are always negotiating a variety of risks and ideally strive to be responsible and caring, while being aware that the elimination of all risks is simply impossible. Life is a dangerous adventure, but, hopefully, nonetheless a rich and worthwhile one.
The new coronavirus took hold of the world by storm and the challenges of treating the little understood illness of Covid-19 should not be underestimated. And in this time of physical distancing, it is vital that we find ways to show sensitivity and compassion towards those who are at-risk and who have lost loved ones. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to ask: what level of risk does this coronavirus present?
Despite the sensationalism of the media and the draconian measures of some states, we are not confronting the Black Death. It is important to note that since March, estimates of the fatality rate for Covid-19 have significantly decreased––though medical experts continue to contest the various estimates. (While in early March the WHO was suggesting a case fatality rate of 3.4%, this was based on a recorded number of cases and not estimations of the amount of people infected. Later the Imperial College London estimated a fatality rate of 1%, but since then there have been some much lower estimations [based on antibody studies in various places].) A peer-reviewed study of the worst hit area of Germany has estimated an infection fatality rate of less than 0.36% (possibly as low as 0.24%) and a recent study in California (Santa Clara County) has estimated 0.17% (the flu is around 0.1%) for that area. Significantly, Ioannidis who was involved in the latter study, early on regarded other estimates as inflated.
As a philosopher I neither have the expertise to say how high the number of deaths could rise nor to offer a detailed assessment of the effectiveness of the measures being taken. Nevertheless, it is important to consider the arguments of the medical experts in Germany (and scientists elsewhere) that, contrary to the complete lockdowns, a better approach would have been to focus on protecting the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions. [3] The current figures in Germany clearly indicate that the elderly population is primarily at risk (the average life expectancy in Germany is 81 years old and this is the average age of Covid-19-related deaths) and, in contrast to northern Italy, hospitals have not been stretched. A particular problem in various countries has been the spread of the virus in nursing homes. Nevertheless, leading virologists have spoken of some of the precautions that could be taken to minimise the risk of infecting elderly people while ensuring that they are able to receive company.
Complexities of Health and Mortality
Health is a complex matter because the human organism is a complex, dynamic whole, in which the health of the whole is dependent on the healthy functioning of the parts and vice versa. Illness and dying are similarly complex. When one part of the body becomes unhealthy it generally affects other parts. While some people infected with the new coronavirus remain asymptomatic or show only minor symptoms, elderly people with certain pre-existing conditions are at a greater risk of developing the severe acute respiratory syndrome. Thus, each case of Covid-19 is the expression of a particular relational dynamic between the virus and its host organism.
Most of the deaths relating to the coronavirus have involved comorbidities or pre-existing illnesses. The organism of someone who is already wrestling with cancer is less able to deal with the additional burden of the virus. If such a person dies, we can ask: did she die from cancer or from the coronavirus? The correct answer is neither (taken on its own) and both. Had she not contracted the coronavirus she may have lived longer, but the coronavirus was not the sole (or even the main) cause of death. Due to the complexity and interdependence of the part/whole relationship in a living organism, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant described organisms with the contradictory-sounding formulation that they are both the cause and effect of themselves. In other words, living organisms exhibit a holistic complexity in which there is no simple, one-way causality.
In some of the more detailed studies thus far of the epicentres of the pandemic, we can see that a complex of factors contributed to the number of fatalities. In northern Italy, these factors included (among others) a large elderly population, years of living with bad air pollution, a relatively high percentage of smokers, and a limited number of ICU beds. We should not assume that everywhere will reproduce northern Italy, although various other places might and will involve a similarly lethal complex of factors (as we have witnessed in some cities in the USA). One study suggests that there have been a much higher number of fatalities in cities with bad air pollution. What is the cause of death here? Coronavirus or air pollution? Both and, in each individual case, a whole host of other factors.
One of the positive outcomes of the lockdowns has been the improved air quality in many parts of the world due to the limited number of flights and other forms of transport and the correlative reduction of exhaust fumes. Though this was not their original intention, these limitations on transport have literally saved lives and are also something to keep in mind with regard to the larger crisis that humanity faces and has largely failed to address, namely anthropogenic climate change and the broader environmental crisis. But, as should be clear by now, I hope that humanity will find democratic rather than autocratic ways to address this crisis.
This should really go without saying, but given the disturbing rise of the libertarian far right in the USA, it is perhaps important to clarify that my concerns about civil liberties and democracy have nothing to do with the emphasis on negative freedom (‘the state should let me do whatever the hell I like’) of libertarians, but rather have to do with the best democratic impulses of modernity. Concrete freedom (as opposed to mere negative freedom) and democracy presuppose that individuals will act responsibly towards each other out of their own insight into the good. A mature individual does not act kindly towards others because they are concerned that the state will punish them otherwise, but because the individual recognises the value of kindness. In a mature democracy, the details of individual behaviour should not be monitored and dictated by the state. (The infiltration of the state into the private sphere is a mark of what Hannah Arendt identified as totalitarianism.) In a true democracy the individual is neither subordinated to the general will of the state (a kind of super-tyrant that maintains order and peace), nor is society a chaos of self-interested desires that disregard social goods. Rather, as the poet-philosopher Friedrich Schiller argued, the common good is embodied in the free collaboration of individuals. Whatever the merits or flaws of the Swedish response to the epidemic,[4] Sweden has as much as possible pursued a path which places trust in its citizens and gives advice and recommendations rather than encroaching on civil liberties. This strongly contrasts with Germany, in which basic rights have been restricted in a manner that has not occurred since the era of National Socialism and that contravenes the constitution. In Germany, where there has been a growing critique of the legality of the lockdown, lawyers have argued that, at this point, the denial of basic constitutional rights cannot be justified.
The fact that governments in many countries have declared a state of emergency, massively restricted civil liberties, and increased the policing and surveillance of residents (what Edward Snowden describes as the ‘architecture of oppression’) is perhaps a sign of the precariousness and immaturity of their democracies. (I am not saying that no sacrifices need to be made, rather I am questioning the extent of the restrictions, their consequences, and the undemocratic processes by which they have been instantiated.)
Complexities of Valuing Life
The famous Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek has politely disagreed with Agamben’s view that the lockdowns evince a reduction of value to a form of bare life that ultimately divides people. Rather, he regards them as showing a laudable concern for the lives of the most vulnerable. However, even if one thinks that our exclusive concern should be the preservation of lives, it is not clear that the lockdowns are the best strategy––though they may be for a time in specific places. (It’s worth noting that if we applied this logic universally, we would have long ago completely banned cars and countless other things.)
In a television interview, investigative journalist John Pilger recently mentioned studies that have indicated strong correlations between emotional isolation and the deterioration of health. Researchers at Oxford University have compared the health effects of chronic loneliness to ‘smoking 15 cigarettes a day’ and estimated that in 2019 there were 1.2 million chronically lonely people in the UK. There is growing evidence that the number of people suffering from loneliness and mental health issues as a result of the lockdown measures, self-isolation, and the climate of anxiety has significantly increased in the UK and various countries around the world (Japan is an interesting exception). There is now talk of an emerging global mental health crisis. In Australia, there are significant mental health concerns for Aboriginal communities (where suicide is the main cause of death for children between the age of 5 and 17) that are suffering under the lockdown.
The realities of loneliness and depression are only one example of the need to employ a broad concept of health that includes psychological, social, and mental health, as complementary to physical health. Since the lockdowns there has also been a marked increase in domestic violence, which not only causes physical injury (and deaths) but also psychological trauma for the members of a family.
The fixation on one health issue risks neglecting equally significant ones. We should question the logic and ethics involved in delaying cancer operations (however small the tumours) in Germany because a certain number of hospital beds need to be reserved for coronavirus ‘patients’, even when the beds are empty. In India, Arundhati Roy speaks of how healthcare for other illnesses has been placed on hold and describes cancer patients in Delhi being ‘driven away like cattle’ from the vicinity of a major hospital. In Africa, there are grave concerns that deaths from malaria could double this year (in comparison to 2018) to over 700,000 because of disruptions from Covid-19.
In the pandemic of panic, many people with other health concerns are afraid to visit doctors and such deferrals can lead to dire consequences. And we shouldn’t need doctors to tell us that sitting at home all day is unhealthy.
In debates about how best to respond to the pandemic, there has often been the articulation of a false dichotomy between protecting lives by means of the lockdowns and preventing an economic crisis. Of course, the current world economy is a disaster with its grotesque disparities between the wealth of the CEOs of mega-corporations and those on minimum wage struggling to make ends meet, from the devastating environmental impacts of many industries to the excess waste and consumption of our capitalist and consumerist societies.
But there is the very real danger that once the lockdowns end we will find ourselves in a situation in which the economy is even more unjust and destructive than at present. Due to the lockdowns around the world, the number of people facing the possibility of starvation has doubled to 265 million.
In a country like the US where healthcare largely depends on employment, a massive rise in unemployment and poverty will, of course, lead to many fatalities. Since the lockdowns, over 36 million people in the US have lost their jobs and there are predictions that, unless the government makes the requisite provisions the country will be facing a second great depression (given the current US government, something like a reiteration of the bailout of Wall Street in response to 2008 GFC, while millions of people lost their homes, is a more likely scenario).
Spain seems to have made a positive step forward in its plans to implement a permanent basic income. While Australia has increased its unemployment benefits, arts funding has been slashed in recent years and artists––musicians, actors, writers, poets, etc.––are suffering greatly due to the cancellation of so many events. To offer one example, all the members of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra recently lost their jobs for the indefinite duration of the shutdown. Australian universities are also in a precarious position; an estimated 21,000 researchers are facing the threat of losing their jobs.
So it is a dangerous abstraction––and perhaps a form of vague sentimentalism––to insist on the idea that to be in favour of strict lockdowns is to be in favour of life whereas to be concerned about the economy is to value money over human lives.
And what about the abstraction and inequality in the immense disparity between what a lockdown means for the wealthy and the poor? If you own a waterfront mansion with a large garden being ‘confined’ to your home is no great challenge. If you are a poor family cramped in a tiny city apartment, it’s a whole different story.
The German philosopher, Markus Gabriel, has highlighted the shortsightedness and problems of what he describes as the ‘new virological imperative’ that has been determining political decisions: all human beings should be isolated so that they don’t infect others. While virologists and epidemiologists (who themselves also disagree on the measures that should be taken) can best inform us about how to address the physical dimensions of the pandemic, they should not be the exclusive advisors on decisions that affect the whole of society, decisions that are undermining fundamental aspects of democracy. Gabriel mentions the need for input from political theorists and sociologists, ethicists and philosophers. To this list, I would add psychologists, artists, small-business owners, lawyers, economists, religious leaders, and representatives from all walks of life. Recently Germany made a positive step in this direction.
The last example of abstraction that I would like to mention is the illusion that we can replace vital, embodied, social interactions with the virtual space of online communication. A coffee with a friend cannot be substituted by a chat on Skype, the social dynamics and learning that take place between teachers and students in a classroom and in the playground cannot be replaced by Zoom. Or as Michael Leunig so aptly comments in the form of a cartoon, an elderly woman cannot walk her dog through a website instead of a park.
Towards a Context-Sensitive Approach
Within the life of an individual as well as within society more broadly, a crisis is often a painful opportunity and catalyst for much needed transformations. The inadequacies and shortsightedness of much of the response to the pandemic are a significant part of the crisis. As we move forward, I hope we can work towards realising a fairer and more sustainable economy, and a transformation of our thinking from one-sided abstractions to a concrete attentiveness to the nexuses of life. We need to find creative ways to take care––physically, emotionally and mentally––of those who are most vulnerable, while at the same time taking into consideration the complexities of the world.
The above thoughts are the concerns of a philosopher (and poet) and not the recommendations of an epidemiologist or a physician. I am not aiming to provide particular guidelines and calculations about which health factors should be weighted against others. Rather, my aim is to draw attention to the complexities of life and the dangers (in some respects of catastrophic dimensions) of simplistic ‘solutions’. In response to the wave of panic that has spread across the world (greatly propelled by the media), measures have been applied by governments that fail to take into account the relations of life and the specificities of different societies, places, and cultures. In my view, it is crucial that we learn to approach life and the great crises that we face in a context-sensitive manner that considers all the dynamic interrelations and specificities of biology, social ties, individual freedoms, societies, cultures, and environments. There is no one enemy or problem. There is no silver bullet. One size doesn’t fit all.
Life is a light-footed circle dance on unstable ground. Or, as the poet and philosopher Novalis put it: ‘The whole rests more or less like persons playing, who without a chair, merely sit one on the knee of another and form a circle.’[5] Let us not overlook the relational complexities that constitute and give meaning to life.
Notes
[1] Sourced from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
[2] There are many issues around how Covid-19 deaths are being counted in different countries (and debates about whether they are being overestimated or underestimated). It is well-documented that in Italy no distinction has been made between deaths ‘from’ and deaths ‘with’ Covid-19 and there are similar issues in other countries. As the present essay elaborates, there are also many deaths resulting from the repercussions of the lockdown measures (rather than Covid-19).
[3] In a very recent article Ioannidis also gives a clear overview of what he regards as a balanced course of action given the data and evidence that are now available.
[4] One of the significant criticisms of Sweden has been that its number of fatalities is much higher than that of its neighbours, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. Part of the reason for this, however, has less to do with the overall strategy and more to do with a problem in the management of nursing homes where over 50% of the deaths have occurred. Moreover, the per capita death rate in Sweden is lower than in a number of countries that have enforced strict lockdowns, including Spain, Italy, the UK, and Belgium. Finally, while there are gray areas around the development of immunity to the coronavirus, in the long term Sweden will quite likely be better placed than many other countries. Though the precise situation remains unclear, one recent study at Stockholm University suggests that Stockholm could reach community immunity by mid-June.
[5] Novalis Schriften: Die Werke von Friedrich von Hardenberg, vol. 2, ed. R. Samuel, H. J. Mähl and G. Schulz (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. 1960-1988), p. 242.
December 8, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Beth Spencer is the winner of the 2018 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award for The Age of Fibs (fiction). Other books include the verse memoir Vagabondage (UWAP), and How to Conceive of a Girl (Vintage/Random House) which was runner up for the Steele Rudd Award. She writes across genres and forms, her ABC-radio pieces have been collected on the double CD Body of Words, and she is also a contributor to the podcast Climactic. She lives and writes on Darkinjung land, and has a website at www.bethspencer.com
Playing cards on a red rattler
You always picked on my accent. ‘Are yous two gonna go?’ you’d laugh. When of course the ‘two’ was redundant, that’s what the ‘s’ is for. But you didn’t get that, like you didn’t get a lot of things.
And then the haitch/aitch thing. No, I’m not Catholic, it’s not about being Catholic, that’s just what you were told at your Proddy private school. (But really, if we’re talking about the letter ‘H’ then why leave the ‘H’ off? Makes no sense.)
The first time I met private school boys I was fifteen. We were standing around in a group at some inter-school Christian thing that I was into then and one of them asked me what school I went to. ‘Lilydale Tech,’ I replied. Silence. One of them reached into his pocket. ‘Here,’ he said, and handed me a cent.
It wasn’t until I went to uni and called home from telephone boxes that, with a shock, I began to hear the broadness of my father’s accent. The language goal posts shifting uneasily under my feet.
On the rare occasions my dad talked about the past he would say in them days, and refer to the toffy-nosed people on the other side of Balwyn.
(My grandfather’s blacksmith shop off Burke Street. My father’s clothes smelling of iron and steam and horses.)
Another time, with a similar bunch of private school friends, walking along a suburban street we saw a horse cropping grass in a paddock and stopped to say hello. One of the girls said something that prompted me to comment, ‘Well, my father is a farrier.’
‘Oooh!’ exclaimed an older boy. ‘Does he wear a big greasy apron?’
That fleeting rush of shame, just for a moment. (Well, yes. Yes, he does.)
Mostly I did manage to escape that shame and I think it was because my parents never desired that I be anything other than what they were, and what their parents were. A ‘good job in a shop’—what more could a girl want? (You certainly wouldn’t want to be like those toffy people! Goodness! Just the thought.)
I have a girlfriend who came from a similar working-class outer-suburb—a few stops down the train line—but her parents always dreamed that she would go to university. It was what they worked so hard for, aspired to. One day, sitting on her bed while she got ready to go out, I noticed when she opened her wardrobe that she had dozens of pairs of fine Italian leather shoes (and never enough).
Shoes, of course. I was slow about that. For years I had no idea that at uni, conferences, job interviews, writer’s festivals, I was being judged on my shoes. Like those men in Paris, years later, who followed me with invitations and suggestive comments whenever I went out walking, spotting me in my Doc Martens as an outsider, fair game. Like the professor who was asked once how he selected the right person for the job. ‘Well, it’s like looking in the mirror really.’
Did you notice this about me when we met when I was seventeen—my cheap and shabby shoes? ‘As long as it’s clean, washed and paid for,’ my father, a child of the Depression, would say. Meaning: good enough is good enough and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Cheap shoes. Cheap haircut. I started to notice it eventually when I would watch older and younger women bond over their stylish shoes, notice the swish of neat hair, not a strand out of place. (You don’t belong. You are an outsider.)
Is this what you spotted that singled me out as someone to take to bed, but not home to the parents?
In those early years at uni, while your parents lent you their Citroens and old Volvos and took you out to restaurants, I would catch the train back to the suburbs and my Dad would pick me up from the station in the P76 with the back seat removed for the horseshoes. Wiping down the seat with an old towel, taking me home to a prodigal daughter feast of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
In them days, at uni, I learnt words like déclassé and embourgeoised.
I learnt to spread out the times I would visit my parents so the visits became infrequent, and grudging. Over with as fast as possible.
You drove me out there once in the Citroen, your tourist eyes taking in all that had been invisible to me. I watched you backing down the drive speedily, past my father’s cattle truck, the dogs barking.
What was it about you that was like my brothers and father but with a posh accent? Was it the way you drove? Relaxed, confident. Was it that faint attitude of contempt?
Later at uni, doing my Masters, I learnt words like intersectionality.
And still, in between all the private school-bred girlfriends, you would seek me out. And I would practice saying things to you, fucking and fighting, that I could never say to my brothers or my father. You worked out some need with me, I worked out some need with you.
I learned that in amongst the pride and arrogance there was a shame in you that I could never have imagined, and that no amount of expensive shoes or cars or restaurant meals or high class jobs and travel and the right postcodes and saying ‘aitch’ and ‘you two’ could ever cleanse.
Right side of the wrong tracks. First class, second class, the trains taking us in different directions.
Tell them as long as it’s clean, washed and paid for.
Paid for, there’s the rub. Both of us living on stolen land. You just had a lot more of it.
I never know how to end these stories about you. Even though after all these years our story is well and truly ended. Or so I hope. So I tell myself.
And my father died two decades ago.
But we partake of each other. We live in each other. Just as the boy with the one cent coin lives in me, and the greasy leather apron, my friend with the dozens of shoes, the academics admiring each other’s haircuts.
As we pick up the cards and lay down tracks. This one, that one. Steaming through life, me in a red rattler, you in a blue train. Hanging out the windows. Buying time. Buying up whole suburbs. A country. An ocean between us. Whole worlds.
But you see it’s never about the things you thought it was.
December 6, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Stephen Pham is a Vietnamese-Australian writer from Cabramatta. He is an original member of SWEATSHOP Writers’ Collective. His essays and fiction have appeared in Sydney Review of Books, Overland, Meanjin, and Griffith Review. In 2018 Stephen received the NSW WRiters’ Fellowship from Create NSW to commence work on his debut manuscript ‘Vietnamatta’, to be published by Brow Books.
The Central express train rattles and sighs as it pulls up to Hornsby Station. I take a deep breath and hold it. Slide open the yellow door speckled with grime. Step on, look at the toilets. Neither of the doors are open but I’m not taking a chance. They’re sloshing with piss from Central Coast bogans. Turn, open the spring-loaded door, and step into the passenger’s section, which is carpeted with vinyl seats. It’s packed. I let go of my breath. The dampness of human bodies mixes with Lean Cuisine chicken, cheese, and pasta and burrows into the back of my throat. I gag. I should turn back. Stand between the carriages, where the air is fresh and the ground is shaky. No. It takes 30 seconds to get used to a bad smell. In a minute, it’ll be like I’m lounging in my White godfather’s TV room. Though last I heard, he’s living in a shipping container with his golliwog collection.
Upstairs, the seats are filled with people wearing red-and-white jerseys. Oh, it’s Friday. They’re headed to the footy. There’s a seat in the middle of the carriage. On the aisle side is a bag of Chicken Crimpy Shapes. I take the window seat, stepping over the glittery bits crushed into the carpet. It’s pretty dark outside. I can’t see much save for the streaks of rain outside and the line of steam creeping up on my reflection inside.
Behind me, someone with the nasally honk of Aussie Home Loans guy talks loudly. Instead of saying, ‘At Aussie, we’ll save you,’ he says, ‘The freckled moll’s place, ahh, it looks like housing, but, ahh, it’s not, so, ooh, she acts like she’s, ah, better than everyone.’
I grin at my reflection. I love this. The dumb-ass conversations on this train, which runs from Newcastle to Sydney, can’t be found anywhere else. The bogans, like Aussie Home Loans, are the loudest and crudest. One Wednesday arvo, a blonde lady in Mariah Carey bejewelled sunnies sat in the nigel seat yelling on the phone. She stood up and waved her free hand as she yelled, ‘Jayden, Jayden, Jayden. You fucked me, you fucked me reaaaaal bad. Real bad. Why’d you tell the court I was waving the knife around? Don’t ya remember how I was chopping tomatoes? I was chopping the tomatoes, and you said something. You said something, and I looked up. And I looked up and pointed the knife at you. And I pointed the knife at you and I pointed it away. Remember that? I was not waaaving the knife, I was pointing it.’
It took me everything to not laugh out loud then. I didn’t want her to point a knife at me.
Now Aussie is complaining about how the University of Newcastle pays him five dollars an hour to clean, but at least he makes 100 a week. My bad. He’s genuinely poor. I feel gross for laughing at him now.
His mate who has the deep, controlled drawl of Fitzy says, ‘Oi, but yeah…but nah…you take home…200 a fortnight, ay?’
That’s the same thing. We can’t all be Asians when it comes to maths, though. Shit. I’m doing it again. It’s not probbo if I’m laughing with them, but Fitzy seems dead serious.
He continues, ‘I’m so stoned, brah…Oi but, but…you know what they call my house? Cheech and Chong…come to Wyong.’
Aussie honks laughing. Guess I’m not with them after all. I’ve never seen Cheech and Chong, but I know it’s a stoner comedy. Toby McGuirk, the only other metalhead in high school, once told me he smoked dog shit. Was that like crack, or acid, or what? ‘I mean it’th thit. From a dog,’ he said. I’d seen him play Frisbee with dried cow dung before. I nodded. I guess it was only a matter of time.
‘I’m jutht kidding, man,’ he said. ‘It’th from Cheech and Chong. You thould thmoke with uth thome day. It’th a clathic.’
The train pulls up to Epping, black asphalt, grey metal ceiling jutting off the wall. Platform’s full of chinks and curries: black pantsuits, Herschel backpacks, puffer jackets and wire trolleys. Train’s about to get super crowded. I hope no-one sits next to me. But if they do, they’d better not be one of those dickheads that spread so much our knees are touching and the warmth of their leg makes me want to puke and retract mine but I also don’t want to seem weak so I just keep it there. That’s the worst.
The windows steam up completely as a procession of Asians fills the aisle. A burly Chinese guy with bulging, still eyes like a goldfish, plods forward. His white polo is splotched with pink. Rubber and blood floods my nostrils. Raw meat. An abattoir worker, maybe. If this was 2000 years ago, he’d be the town butcher. That’s what he was made for.
He’s hunched. Looks straight ahead as he gets closer to me. He’ll sit near the bogans. They’ll think he’s just gotten back from slaughtering strays in the neighbourhood. Nope. He grabs the handle on the seat in front of mine, swings his body around, and plops himself on top of the pack of Chicken Crimpy. It crunches. Did he even notice that? I scoot away. Our upper arms are touching. I’m pressed up against the window. Can’t be helped.
We’re moving. Conversations hum but the bogans have fallen quiet. Then Aussie says, ‘There’s, ah, so much Chinese, ay?’
Oh no. I hope this isn’t heading where I think it’s heading. Aussie’s in housing commission. Aussie makes five an hour cleaning up after uni shits like me. Aussie’s got nothing to look forward to but smoking up and watching the footy. They’re just not used to the city.
‘Yeah…but…what’s wrong with being…Chinese?’ says Fitzy.
‘Ah, everything!’ Aussie shouts. They piss themselves laughing.
Dickwad. I was rooting for you. I thought these idiots might be not-racist, but I’m the dumbarse for believing in them.
‘Hey, ah…sweet and sao-wah POK,’ says Aussie, in the voice of the City Wok guy on South Park.
Fitzy laughs, ‘Oi, but listen to this…Sweet and sao-wah POK.’
Cortisone floods my shoulders, stiffens my neck. I turn my head a little, not enough for the Butcher to catch me, and glance around. As far as I can tell, us Asians outnumber the Aussies by three to one. Maybe even more. We’ve got the numbers. But people are just talking to each other or looking right ahead. No-one’s turned around to check the bogans. Maybe it’s because most of us are old, or don’t speak English, or don’t care. Maybe we’re scared to break the silence.
Air conditioner whirs. Rain drums on the train’s tin top. I wipe the steamed window with my right shoulder. Outside is black.
‘Sweet and sao-wah POK,’ Fitzy says.
I breathe in deep, chest swelling. Fuck it. I stand up. Shoulder drags against Butcher’s. Out the corner of my eye, I see him watching me, his mouth ajar. My wrists pound. I turn around, gaze sweeping the suits, students, and oldies before locking onto Aussie. He’s a fat fuck with acne scars on his bright pink Wiffle ball face. St George Illawarra frayed at the bent bill. He stares at me, his grey eyes boring into mine. Fitzy props himself on an elbow, twists around to look at me. He’s got a buzzcut and Golden Arches hairline, face long like a mountain goat. ‘You hillbilly cunts better shut the fuck up,’ I shout.
Aussie’s thin lips draw back. Yellow teeth rest on his bottom lip. Hands rise to the sides of his face. They pull back the skin next to his eyes. His head wobbles from side to side as he says in the South Park accent, ‘Aw! Sutt da fuk ap!’
I’ve got nothing. I flip them off and sit back down. Carriage falls silent. My head’s throbbing. I couldn’t have done any better. You engage with idiots, you’re the idiot. Whatever, man. I can feel the Butcher staring at me. Maybe he’ll move away. He doesn’t. Just keeps staring.
‘Ahh, yaw mudda!’ sings Aussie.
A deep male voice pipes up. ‘Youse better stop it. This train’s full of them, youse know that? And one of them’s just gotten offended. I’ve been listening to youse go on since Gosford, and I’m sick of it. It’s not funny. I’m a cop on holiday, don’t make me do my job. It’s not funny. Don’t make me start up again. Don’t encourage him.’
In a small voice, Aussie says, ‘I, ah, won’t.’
The rest of the train ride is silent, save for Fitzy squeaking every now and then, trying to get Aussie to laugh.
At Strathfield, red brick, green poles, and black asphalt, the train starts to slow. Holiday Pig gets up and heads towards the bogans. He’s got a tiny face and a huge head like William H. Macy. Aussie honks, ‘I’m ah, sorry,’ to Holiday Pig. Pig replies, ‘You’re right, mate.’
I go in the direction I came. Hold my breath by the toilets in the mezzanine.
As the train comes to a stop, someone taps on my shoulder. I turn around. It’s the Butcher. Eyes shine, fat lip hangs, sounds like he’s trying to swallow air as he says, ‘You speak Chinese?’
I shake my head and say, ‘斩你做猪肉碎、喂畀狗.’
November 30, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Nadine Schofield is an emerging writer living in Wollongong. She is a high school English teacher helping young women find the magic of words and the power of their own story. Nadine is completing a Master of Writing at Swinburne University.
‘As I begin to write now a feeling of peacefulness comes over me as if I need not for inexplicable half-hidden reasons refrain from writing any longer… it is often not possible to write about events until they are over or sufficiently of the past, … secrets, if they are revealed completely, become mere facts, something extra to real life.’
—Elizabeth Jolley, The Vera Wright Trilogy
* * *
I was thirty-eight. We had been married for two months. And then we were going to be parents.
What to Expect When You Are Expecting (Murkoff) became our manual, our source of wisdom. In his radio voice, Colin would read aloud from the couch the weekly update of what was happening inside my body. A strange food motif runs through the week-by-week descriptions:
- Poppy seed
- Orange seed
- Large raspberry
- Medium green olive
- A prune
- A large fresh plum
Then the fruit was replaced with a heartbeat; the ‘lub-dub’, a ‘fetal symphony’ (Murkoff 181).
* * *
The Women’s Ultrasound and Imaging Clinic is behind a working construction site; a single level red-brick building with long corridors of brown carpet illuminated by exit signs at regular intervals. The smell of concrete dust is cut through with disinfectant. We find the right door to the right waiting room and, after repeating names and dates and numbers, we are called into the imaging room by a young nurse. The room is a cave, illuminated by two computer monitors and a dimmed light over the bed. The nurse is friendly, and the directions come quickly.
‘Everything off from the waist down. Up on the bed and I’ll put this over you.’ She is holding up a sheet of paper. I am embarrassed to be pulling my pants down in front of my husband and a stranger.
The purpose of the ultrasound is to date and confirm the viability of the pregnancy via a transvaginal examination. The nurse sheathes the transducer with a condom and cold gel and asks me to spread my legs. Colin and I watch the shadowy, swirling mass appearing on the monitor until the nurse ends the guessing game and we hear the baby’s heartbeat: a fast, rhythmic sound like a wobble board.
‘155 beats per minute, but that’s normal,’ she informs us before withdrawing the probe.
* * *
What did we hear? What is a heartbeat? Any medical textbook defines the human heart as an electrical system; the heartbeat is the sound of ‘atria and ventricles at work pumping blood’ (Clinic). In these terms, the human heart becomes a switch, a light that can be turned on and off. The Oxford Dictionary defines the heart as evidence of ‘one’s inmost being; the soul, the spirit’; ‘the seat of love and affection’ (“Heart”, 879).
We made a heartbeat.
We take each other’s hand and with the sun in our eyes we walk back to the car, our large white envelope in hand. We haven’t expected a photo, not so soon, and we sit in the car looking at our shadowy mass with three straight arrows pointing at it, so we know where to look. Is this going on the fridge?
‘We made a heartbeat,’ I whisper as I turn to face Colin. And there he is, a father. He has become a photograph, caught shirtless with our child curled into the wiry, grey hairs of his chest, head lowered, and eyes half closed.
* * *
At the worst moment, What to Expect When You Are Expecting becomes our doctor. There is a chapter on miscarriage. ‘Signs and symptoms can include cramping or pain, heavy vaginal bleeding, similar to a period’ (Murkoff 534). In Emergency I cannot speak. I go to the bathroom several times to check that we need to be in Emergency. Parents come with vomiting children, bruised children and bleeding children. Colin and I sit in silence.
I answer the questions of a trainee nurse about my pain and when it started and how many hours and my periods and how many pads and then Colin is asked to wait outside.
‘How many sexual partners have you had?’; ‘So, is there any chance you have AIDS?’ I don’t understand. It has been three hours. I become desperate and demanding: ‘We want to know if our baby is alive.’ An older female nurse with a bright pink stethoscope arrives with a doppler machine on a trolley.
No
Heart
Beat
.
‘Not always accurate these machines. Come back in the morning. Go to the Pre-natal unit upstairs.’ There is no comfort in the nurse’s voice, and she leaves the room quickly to attend to the next patient.
In the Pre-Natal unit the light is electric white. Everyone and everything is overexposed: the white floor tiles, the white dispensers of hand sanitiser near the white door to the white toilet. Chairs are fixed in rows facing each other. On three of these chairs are the shapes of other women waiting. I don’t look at these women and am momentarily distracted as nurses pass through the brutal light—flashes of uniform blue moving down the corridor. My eyes flick to a notice board of neatly spaced posters on breastfeeding.
Colin is beside me. His face is grey. I grip his wrist and rub at the smooth, hairless skin just to stay present. I can smell my own body: tinny, salty.
‘Should I call the Real Estate? I don’t have to explain, just give them the keys.’ Colin’s voice is soft and gentle. We are selling our apartment and it will be open for inspection at ten.
Colin meets the agent at the front of the hospital. What about the bathroom? We didn’t make the bed.
The doctor in the Pre-natal unit offers us statistics as comfort. One in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage (Hintz-Zambrano). We will discover we are not alone when we start talking about it with friends, the doctor tells us. How will we go about broaching this topic? We have three options and we take the first, ‘Expectant Management’, which involves letting the body expel the ‘baby’ naturally (“Treating miscarriage”).
In the third-floor apartment we are about to sell, I sit on the toilet with our ‘recognisable embryo’ on a piece of toilet paper in my hand.
I don’t know what to do.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
Our baby goes in the bin.
* * *
There is a frangipani tree in the front garden of our new Miner’s cottage home. Our neighbours have a frangipani tree too, and there is an old, large one at the front gate of the college where I teach. Staff enjoy morning tea before the holidays in its shade; pink flowers bruised and browning on the ground. The first summer in our house the neighbours’ frangipani tree buds and blossoms. Ours doesn’t. We string Christmas lights among the waxy leaves and in the late spring of the following year my aging mother snaps off a branch declaring it ‘dead’. The frangipani tree becomes a portent. When the tree flowers we will have a family. This is pathetic.
On the last day of the school year, all the staff sit around a cross marked out on the floor with tealights. The Dean begins something of a homily about the Journey of the Magi: three Oriental Astrologers who place faith in a baby above science and reason. At the end of the day, I drive home past the Anglican Church: ‘Be filled with Hope this Christmas.’
* * *
Colin and I attend our second appointment with a fertility specialist. The IVF website claims such specialists are ‘dedicated to giving you the best possible chance of having a baby using the most advanced science’ (Australia). We have been undertaking the routine procedures associated with ovulation tracking for three months. In the waiting room, I stare at the Anne Geddes photograph of a baby curled asleep on top of a pumpkin, and another, in black and white, of age-spotted hands cradling a baby’s head. On the coffee table are home decorating magazines and a small wooden nativity scene.
T.S Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’ is in my head. The poem has new meaning:
‘A hard time we had of it…
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly…
… were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?…
This Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death’ (Eliot 95).
* * *
The fertility doctor is a cowboy. Reclining in his chair with shoes off, it’s clear that he does not remember us. I am weighed and then there are the anecdotes and jokes about penises.
‘He had an erection, so I knew the spine was broken’; ‘No good being Errol Flynn unless you find a woman who can accommodate.’
I feel hot and irritated but I sit and smile because Colin and I need him. He talks about what he has done and what he is going to do; we need to keep going with another three months of tracking and then, if necessary, we will begin IVF. He asks us questions about tubal flushing and spermatocytes, and we look like children who missed out on sex education. Colin thanks him on our way out.
‘Don’t thank me until I get you pregnant,’ he replies with a grin.
On the first day of my menstrual cycle I call the doctor’s room. The receptionist takes a credit card payment and issues paperwork for an internal scan and blood tests. I am to take pre-natal supplements, an iron supplement and consume one cup of cream per day to gain five kilograms.
Then there are latex gloves. Condoms. Cold gel. Modesty blanket. Follicles counted. The pathologist, a woman close to retirement with frizzy hair, talks and talks about her grandson’s dyslexia. One day there is another pathologist, angular, no fuss. I arrive too late for the courier. Don’t I know what I’m doing?
We host Colin’s goddaughter, Emily. She is on holiday from Scotland during her university break. Emily watches me beneath her thick eyebrows and dark hair, seemingly unexcited by suggestions to eat out or visit the lighthouse. She mentions Ryan Gosling, so we drive into town to see La La Land, which she has promised to see with her mother. The fertility nurse sends a text message during the credits:
My dear you are surging
big time!! Lots of
hormones, LH 43 and
oestrogen 1689 so
ovulating this 24 hours
or so. Intercourse
tonight and tomorrow to
make the most of it!
Blood test next Thursday for
progesterone check
post ovulation.
The directive acts like a contraceptive. I worry and hide the nurse’s message from Colin, foolishly hoping that wearing the right lingerie and dimming the lights will be enough to get us in the mood. Sex is no longer love, or even pleasure, but the pressure to time intercourse and conceive. This proves to be too much for us and I accuse Colin of not loving me enough; he is hurt and stops talking for the rest of the night.
Like Eliot’s Magi, the death of our old ways is cracking my heart. Celebrating New Year’s Eve seems too pointless. We stay home and cook steaks on the barbeque, but the limes stay in the fruit bowl. We can’t be bothered making mojitos, our ritual since we were married.
Ariel Levy, in 2013 her travel piece for The New Yorker, ‘Thanksgiving in Mongolia’, evokes the wretchedness of losing a child while based in Ulaanbaatar. She likens motherhood to ‘black magic’ and her loss leaves her with a ‘dark hurt’ that is primal. The final image of the writer is of a ‘wounded witch, wailing in the forest, undone’ (Levy). Levy’s 2017 memoir The Rules Do Not Apply further explores the writer’s disorientation after her miscarriage. Her sense of guilt is palpable as she questions whether she had asked too much of life and been punished for her pride.
I am about to turn forty. There will be a big cake in the teacher’s staff room that won’t get eaten; next to it a sign, ‘Happy Birthday Nadine’. Colin and I have cancelled the IVF appointment. We are putting faith in the life force, since speaking of God has always been abstract and non-committal. It is the heartbeat that haunts me most. What have we lost? What makes the thought of being childless so difficult to accept? It is a schizophrenic headspace. There are websites, blogs and counselling services. There is Colin’s optimism in the face of statistics on IVF success rates for couples our age; a very low 6%. In a Four Corners program, ‘The Baby Business’, a childless woman who has undergone fertility treatment claims that IVF specialists do little more than ‘sell hope’ (Dingle). An article in The Conversation suggests that 80% of women forty-five years and over who bear a child have healthy pregnancies, and success rates with IVF increase with the use of a donor egg (Wilkinson). there are women in the public sphere and part of my micro-world who have given birth after forty.
* * *
Our Sunday lunch is not much. Salad.
‘Here is that article by Annabel that I was telling you about.’ Colin passes the iPad to me.
Annabel Crabb has written a commentary piece for The Sydney Morning Herald: ‘A Womb with a View Today’. The article is ‘a salute to the womb’ both as a source of life and a political space. Crabb refers to a public interview with Gladys Berejiklian, the Premier of NSW, that highlights how the role of female politicians is scrutinised and then trivialised dependent upon whether they have children. But it is Crabb’s ‘salute’ to the female body’s power to create life that defeats me: ‘This thing is the Thermomix of the human body. It can make everything from spleens to eyelashes; imagine that! Mine has made three entire human beings…’ I find her use of analogy simplistic and inaccurate; that it needs tempering with a complex discourse around motherhood.
Crabb is right to celebrate the power of the female body to produce life; it is one capacity that women will always have despite the other inequities we fight as a result of gender, and while celebrated journalists and social commentators like Crabb are quick to defend women who choose not to have a child, it is dangerous to perpetuate a myth around choice that does not include the reality of no choice, the frequency of miscarriage or failed IVF. It is tempting to run with Crabb’s analogy here and point out that a woman’s Thermomix might go on the blink. If your womb is not a magical machine capable of making human beings, if you are barren, then your place within the womanhood becomes tenuous.
Medical sociologists like Arthur Greil point to qualitative and quantitative research to suggest that infertility is a condition shaped by sociocultural context and not simply a medical condition that may or may not have psychological consequences. According to Greil, the perceptions of an infertile couple and those around them are understood to be ‘the product of social definitions’; couples attending appointments with specialists do not define themselves as ‘infertile’ but rather as individuals who wish to fulfil the social role of parenting. This is at odds with the medicalisation of infertility.
If the desired state of parenthood is a social construct, then filling this role ensures belonging to a group or community. The shared experience of parenting with peers allows participation in dialogue around common life experiences and bonding between adults who come together for family activities.
My filing cabinet in the teachers’ staffroom has been decorated with children’s drawings. Jane, a friend and fellow English teacher, has left them there after a visit from her daughter Molly. Jane has long, raven black hair and belly dances on the weekend. We talk about TV dramas and our frustrations as teachers, but not our private lives.
Last week Jane arrived with a paddle pop stick decorated with silver glitter and a pink feather pinned to her blouse: a gift from Molly for the World’s Best Mum. The other women in the staffroom quickly gathered to swap Mother’s Day stories, and Leah, the stylish Art teacher, produced a bag of toddler dresses for Jane.
Leah is hosting a birthday party for her son on the weekend and in a bubbly voice reminds everyone to arrive at ten on Sunday for the clown. I haven’t been invited. If there is no moral shame around being childless, there is still a silence.
* * *
I had called Mum from the waiting room outside the Pre-Natal Unit at the hospital: ‘We were going to have a baby and now we’re not.’
I do not remember the hugs we received as we entered the door of her unit, only that my mother made us toast with too much butter. There was strawberry jam if we wanted it. These were the practical needs of the day.
‘I thought you were. You just looked a bit plumper in the face.’ My mother enjoyed her toast and tea. ‘Oh well. It just wasn’t meant to be.’
The conversation was ended. There was nothing we could do but get on.
I have returned to my mother’s doorstep many times since the miscarriage and our subsequent failed attempts to start a family. She is not the source of comfort I often want and need but rather a woman of her generation: stoic and determined to make the most of what she has. She quickly imparts wise directives on ‘cheering up’ and then diverts my attention with updates on the pot plants in her courtyard.
Helen Garner, in Everywhere I Look, writes about her relationship with her mother, also a person of resilience who survived the hardships of World War II and the extraction of all her teeth at once. Garner’s respect and deep affection for her mother is evident in the chapter ‘Dreams of Her real Self’; at one moment the narration is broken with a single line, ‘Oh, if only she would walk in here now’ (Garner 100). Is the longing to be a mother in part a desire to be the source of comfort, or wisdom, or a role model of resilience, for another?
As I watch my mother feed parrots on the back doorstep and plan her week around cooking a corned beef, I feel a pain behind my eyes and a clamp around my throat. If only I could lay my head on her breast and feel peace. At home, the coffee table is littered with maps of Dublin City and Lonely Planet editions of road trips in Europe. On another table, in another room, is a referral to a new fertility specialist.
Statistics and medicine aside, there is a bigger moral quandary here. Not necessarily religious but a theological concern with the purpose of life. What can be the purpose of our lives? How to accept that we might not take a place in the line of ‘women bearing / women’, as in Gwen Harwood’s poem (“Mother Who Gave Me Life”, 170)—or parents bearing children? Acceptance and comfort do not come from academic research into the treatment of infertility or the social construct of parenthood.
I find myself reading blog posts of motherless women—websites dedicated to ‘Aunt’s Day’—but it is an article written by Lawrence Rifkin for the Scientific American that has stayed with me. Rifkin argues that the purpose of life cannot be reduced to the ‘making of babies’; that to do so is ‘an affront to human dignity’. The purpose of each life is to experience joy, relationships, and accomplishments. If we can add to the meaning of the life of another or improve the planet in some way, then all the better. It is difficult to disagree with Rifkin’s final statement: ‘human meanings are worthwhile regardless of long-term, universal, final consequences, because they are meaningful now.’ Here is comfort, a validation.
Holding onto hope in the life force or seeking out another fertility specialist is no longer necessary if the purpose of our lives is simply to live—even if that does mean getting on with an ache in my heart. This is where philosophy serves its purpose; when the twists and turns of life become inexplicable, the emotions too big, and we don’t understand.
Works Cited
Greil, Arthur et al. “The Social Construction of Infertility.” Sociology Compass, vol. 5, issue 8, 2011, pp. 736-746. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00397.x
Greil, Arthur et al. “The experience of infertility: A review of recent literature.” Sociology of Health & Illness, vol. 32, issue 1, 2010, pp. 140-162. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9566.2009.01213.x
IVF Australia. “Fertility treatments.” IVF Australia, https://www.ivf.com.au/treatments
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