Litro 181: Subcultures

ISSUE 181

JUST NOISE: The Barbarian Thrill of Noise in Music Kieran Gosney

THE TROUBLING WORLD OF INCELS Lisa Sugiura

THE TRIP, THE MEDICINE

An Insight into Wirikuta, the Sacred Land of Medicine and Ritual Gabriela Jauregui

sub CULT URES

CHOOSE YOUR OWN (LOVE) ADVENTURE:

How Unpacking Mononormativity Taught Me How to Love Dr. Liz Powell

$7.99 / £8.99

Cover Artist BERTIE TAYLOR

CONTENTS

ISSUE 181

PHOTO BY BERTIE TAYLOR

FEATURES

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EDITOR’S LETTER

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CONTRIBUTORS’ BIOS

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Nazimova Juliet Jacques

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The Trip, the Medicine Gabriela Jauregui

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Civilians at Work Heather Berg

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celebratory water Otis Mensah

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The Troubling World of Incels Lisa Sugiura

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Kadogos Georges Senga

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Choose Your Own (Love) Adventure: How Unpacking Mononormativity Taught Me How to Love Dr. Liz Powell

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Breaking Borders Natalia Toledo

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Protesting in the Pandemic: Meet the Activists of 2021 Katy Ward

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Just Noise: The Barbarian Thrill of Noise in Music Kieran Gosney

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Journey to the Other World Lilian Pizzichini

ISSUE 181

FEATURES

Bertie Taylor Photographer

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Eric Akoto

umans being humans, there seems to be no end to culturemaking. Whether their styles, interests, and philosophies are mainstream or more subterranean, when people gather in critical numbers and bond over what they share, culture-making eventually takes place. Unique rituals, traditions, codes, ways of seeing, ways of being seen are the result – and, in some cases, ways for remaining hidden to all but the initiated.

This issue of Litro is dedicated to an exploration of subcultures, those often vibrant, sometimes subversive, sometimes illicit cultures that exist within a wider normative culture and

I’m a photographer from Sussex, England. I shoot on film and digital. This series was shot on film. I’m a bit of a technophobe. I don’t edit my images; instead, I prefer to play with light, shadows, and expired film to create the look I want.

Style-wise, I have shot everything from fashion to documentary. “Shadow Selves” is about exploring the shadow parts of our personalities, behind our everyday persona.

are often invisible to it while subtly or not-so-subtly exercising their influence. Our mission has been to document and analyse, through the work of some stellar contributors, a few of the many subcultures operating in and beneath the surface of the contemporary now.

The relationship between subcultures and dominant cultures is a complex one. When subcultures are initially formed, they often have a gritty, nonconformist cachet that lessens their chances for broad appeal while arguably making their members more fiercely loyal and protective. Some subcultures desire visibility and acceptance; others would prefer to go unnoticed.

Those cultures that do go mainstream can lose their edge in the process, becoming tamer and more accessible, in what amounts to a form of cultural gentrification (and, since advanced capitalism can’t seem to leave much of anything untouched, commodification). Yet while some subcultures can make the passage to the cultural mainstream – graffiti artists, for example – others, like

incels, seem destined to remain limited in their following, forever sub-, however violently some of the culture’s proponents burst into online forums and, tragically, into public life.

The journey we’ve put together will transport you among people whom you may not have really “seen” before and to places that you may not have visited or that you may have visited but with the eyes of a dominant culture. So, let’s begin the journey among protesters, incels, and porn workers. Let’s travel along the inroads of poetry.

Let’s meet a Siberian shaman, Congolese child soldiers, a woman pondering the Gender Recognition Act. Let’s understand – and perhaps right some misunderstandings – about peyote rituals, noise, and practitioners of polyamory.

It is our hope that these works will reveal not only the contours of specific subcultures and their makers but also throw light on the human instinct for culture-making – an instinct for belonging and identification, for varying degrees of shared visibility, for marking difference and resistance.

PHOTO BY BERTIE TAYLOR

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Bertie Taylor Contents Page Images Bertie Taylor

EDITORS LETTER

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CONTRIBUTORS’ BIOS KIERAN GOSNEY is an Edinburgh-based film editor and writer.

HEATHER BERG writes about sex, work, and social struggle. Her first book, Porn Work (UNC Press, 2021), explores workers’ strategies for navigating – and subverting – precarity.

Heather is assistant professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

KATY WARD is a journalist, editor, and copywriter based in the north of England whose work has appeared in a range of national newspapers and independent media outlets. She has a degree in English from Oxford University and a postgraduate diploma in journalism from City University.

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JULIET JACQUES is a writer and filmmaker based in London. She has published three books, including Trans: A Memoir (Verso, 2015) and the short story collection Variations (Influx, 2021). Her essays, criticism, and journalism have appeared in many publications, and her short films have screened in galleries and festivals worldwide.

Photo: Robin Silas Christian

GABRIELA JAUREGUI is the author of ManyFiestas (Gato Negro), Leash Seeks Lost Bitch (with Allison Katz and Camilla Wills, Song Cave) and ControlledDecay (Akashic Books). She is also the editor and author of the Spanish-language books Tsunami (Sexto Piso) and Tsunami 2 (Sexto Piso), among others, and was named one of the 39 best Latin American authors under 39 by the Hay Festival’s Bogota39 list.

LILIAN PIZZICHINI is the author of four works of biography and memoir. She has taught Life Writing in prisons and universities. She is writing a travel memoir provisionally titled Ancona/Zante.

OTIS MENSAH is a writer and performing artist (former first poet laureate of Sheffield) with an alternative take on Hip-Hop music and abstract poetry. Focusing on art as a means of documenting journeys of introspection, Otis’ work aims to demonstrate the personal and political power of vulnerable expression. “celebratory water,” their poem from this issue, will also feature in their forthcoming collection drawn & quartered.

DR. LISA SUGIURA is Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Cybercrime at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Portsmouth. She has an interdisciplinary international research track record on, and expertise in, online deviance, and technologyfacilitated sexual abuse and violence.

She is the author of the forthcoming book The Incel Rebellion: The Rise of the Manosphere and the Virtual War Against Women.

DR. LIZ POWELL believes that great sex can change the world®. They’re a coach and licensed psychologist helping couples and singles develop selfconfidence and authenticity in their relationships, whether conventional or nontraditional. Their book, Building Open Relationships, is the newest way they are spreading the Great Sex word.

Photo: @megfirthphoto

GEORGES SENGA was born in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 2009, he won the special prize for the second edition of the Africa Photo Contest of Tarifa and has since exhibited in many countries. He is part of the artistic dynamic of the city of Lubumbashi at the PICHA art center and the Market photo workshop and Phototools in Johannesburg, South Africa.

NATALIA TOLEDO was born in Juchitán, Oaxaca, and has published several books of poetry. She writes in both Zapotec and Spanish. She is a member of Mexico’s prestigious Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte.

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NAZIMOVA JULIET JACQUES

Statutory Declaration Gender Recognition Act 2004 “I ______________________ do solemnly and sincerely declare that: 1. I am over 18 years of age.

2. I have lived as a male/female (delete word that does not apply) throughout the period of _____ years since I transitioned in __________ (month and year of transition).

3. I intend to live as a male/female (delete word that does not apply) until death.

Cafe / Bar / Restaurant Terrace Breakfast / Lunch / Dinner 246 Tenth Avenue New York, NY bottinonyc.com 8

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held my pen over my Gender Recognition Certificate application, contemplating my final step in moving from “male” to “female.”

Looking at the space where my name was supposed to go, I thought about how I’d changed mine. Coming out as transsexual, overwhelmed by friends concerned that it would ruin my life and worrying about how my parents would respond to my renouncing the name they gave me, I’d chosen as conservatively as possible, changing a few letters in legally feminising

it and insisting that people still call me what they always had.

How colourless, I thought, staring at the grey box. I glanced at my clothes. Almost automatically, I’d thrown on a white T-shirt, a black skirt, and thick opaque tights, as I did most days. Ever since I began “living as a woman” several years ago, my appearance, my voice, and my persona had been dictated by external pressures: my expectation that the Gender Identity Clinic would decline hormone treatment if I didn’t do enough to meet feminine norms, and the experience

of acquaintances or strangers criticising or abusing me if I did too much. The Gender Recognition Panel wanted me to declare exactly who I was, now and for the rest of my life. But I had to think harder – Was I the person I wanted to be?

I decided to go out, in search of inspiration. Flicking through the local paper, something at the cinema caught my eye: 7 p.m.: Salomé (1923). Bizarre silent version of Oscar Wilde’s biblical play. I got my bag and left, taking my seat just as the opening credits screened.

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PHOTO: MARVIN MEYER

Nazimova

in ‘SALOMÉ’ An Historical Phantasy by OSCAR WILDE Intrigued by the nerve of this Nazimova – who put her name above Wilde’s! – I was hooked by the assertion that “Salomé yet remains an uncontaminated blossom in a wilderness of evil” where King Herod had murdered her father, usurped the throne, and married her mother. What would such an “uncontaminated blossom” look like?

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despite her miniscule frame. “You must not look at her!” commands an intertitle as she shifts her plimsolled feet in tiny steps, holding her head above the gazes of Herod’s courtiers, her dark lips pursed into an irresistible pout.

Like everyone else, I couldn’t stop looking at her. She was utterly captivating – just as well, as nothing much was happening.

What little action there was centred around Salomé’s interminable attempt to seduce John the Baptist, imprisoned beneath the court (and called Jokanaan for some reason).

After Jokanaan spurns Salomé’s chess-like moves to “kiss thy mouth,” Herod, who’s spent the whole film lusting over her with his tongue hanging out, tells Salomé that she can have whatever she desires if she dances for him. Salomé takes some persuading –

she’s not the kind of girl who’ll jig whenever her stepfather claps – but sensing her chance for revenge, she acquiesces.

The intertitle promises The Dance of the Seven Veils. But where are the veils?

Surrounded by courtiers, yet completely unveiled, Nazimova tiptoes elegantly in a small, tight white dress; her hair is covered by a shocking bob wig, her frenzied eyes emboldened by heavy shadow and streaks of eyeliner. Finally, the courtiers find a veil, and when she throws her body to the ground, they throw it over her. She dances herself into a knot before untangling herself, rising and holding her single veil behind her head.

The dance complete, Salomé’s demand is unflinching: “Give me the head of Jokanaan!” Desperate not to kill his political prisoner, Herod offers anything else – a

headdress of peacock feathers, a frock fashioned from diamonds – but she stands firm. Finally, she gets her wish. She kisses Jokanaan’s mouth, on his severed head, and cries “Love hath a bitter taste! But what matter? What matter?” What matter indeed – Herod screams “KILL THAT WOMAN!” and the courtiers descend and spear the impetuous princess to death. * Immediately, I wanted to see more of Nazimova. Only one other film, Camille, survives: The style was similar to Salomé, but despite the presence of Rudolph Valentino (at least until she had him cut from her death scene), it was nowhere near as captivating. Contemplating the sad loss of her work to history, I knew exactly who I wanted to be.

In many ways, her life differed from mine. Alla Nazimova was born in Ukraine and trained under Stanislavski at the Moscow Art Theatre, where she adopted her stage name. I’d been in Miss Lambert’s form at a secondary school in Reading, where I got A Levels in Theatre Studies and Performing Arts. She lived in a mansion on Sunset Boulevard, building the Garden of Allah, where she threw decadent parties for Hollywood’s elite. I lived in a studio flat in Brighton, where I often ate tomato soup from a tin. She had lesbian affairs with Surrealist artists, film directors, Oscar Wilde’s niece, and Valentino’s lover Natacha Rambova, who designed the costumes for Salomé, and possibly an affair with her Camille costar himself. I’d not had so much as a message on OK Cupid for months.

C l e a r l y, t h e re w o u l d b e c e r t a i n limitations. For one, Madame, as she preferred to be called, was 5’3” and impossibly thin – but she hadn’t let being 43 years old stop her playing the teenaged Salomé, so I figured it wouldn’t dishonour her that I was a little bigger. (I’d try to be to scale, at least.) Another problem: Not only were Rambova’s fashions wildly impractical,

but they had cost $350,000 – in 1922. But I wanted to become Nazimova, not Salomé.

This, at least, freed me of the need to find a dress made of diamonds, but looking at the images online, I knew that I’d still have to spend serious money on clothes.

I scoured Brighton’s vintage stores for relics of the ’20s. I found a surprisingly large number that would have suited Madame, but not so many to fit me. Travelling to London, I fought through the retro shops on Brick Lane, telling myself that unlike the hipsters of Shoreditch and Dalston, I was an artist. I explained my project to a student who looked like an original Blitz Kid, and she grudgingly let me buy the glittering tunic that she’d found in the sale rail. I jostled my way to a svelte brown dress that resembled one I’d seen Madame wearing, a white minidress and a few other things that looked plausible and bought them, trying not to consider the gulf between her budget and mine.

I took a picture into a salon in Brighton and got an appointment.

“Who’s that?” asked the hairdresser.

“Lady Gaga?”

“Madame Nazimova,” I replied, handing the photograph to her. “She was an actress.”

“Oh right. What was she in?”

“Salomé.”

“Never heard of it,” she said as she tried to force my hair into Madame’s vivacious bouffant.

“Do you want me to colour it?” she asked, looking at the black and white photograph.

“Do what you can.”

“Okay, hon, pop your head forward,” she told me, and started cutting.

An hour and £70 later, I realised I’d have to buy some wigs. That was okay – Madame wore them a lot – and on the plus side, I could replicate her headpiece using beads instead of pearls. So after spending an afternoon traipsing around the North Lanes to find a brown bouffant and a white bob and an evening trying to put beads on springs and then attach them to a headband,

THE GENDER RECOGNITION PANEL WANTED ME TO DECLARE EXACTLY WHO I WAS, NOW AND FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE. BUT I HAD TO THINK HARDER – WAS I THE PERSON I WANTED TO BE? I DECIDED TO GO OUT, IN SEARCH OF INSPIRATION. my first outfit was complete.

I stared at the mirror, eyeing myself in the wig, tiara, tunic, skirt and little white plimsolls, practising Madame’s almost inimitable pout. I copied her makeup from the film – pale foundation, two coats of black mascara, lashings of eyeliner, and the darkest red lipstick I could find. But Madame wouldn’t get so dolled up for a quiet night in, would she? (At least not alone). I checked the listings to see what was on. One thing leapt out:

Masquerade

Celebrity Night @ Marilyn’s Featuring PENNY FARTHING, CANDY STYXX and MC MARIAMAXWELL Entry £5 – or FREE if you’re FAMOUS! Perfect! I called a few friends and asked if they fancied it. “You? Going to Marilyn’s?” they scoffed. I told them I had a new outfit (which was true) and wanted somewhere to show it off (also true). This swayed them, so we agreed to meet there. I packed my favourite handbag – the only one that I STORY

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thought Madame might have been seen with – threw in my makeup, my phone, my purse, and my favourite picture of Nazimova, and I was ready to go.

But how to get there? I had no change on me for a bus, and it was a 40-minute walk to St. James’ Street, through central Brighton and past the seafront on a busy Saturday night. I bet Madame never had to walk anywhere. She’d have been chauffeured in the finest automobiles, I imagined, or ushered around in a gold-plated carriage by some nubile young men. She wouldn’t have had to get the Number 7 full of daytripping drunks.

I set off for the nearest cashpoint, concentrating on replicating Madame’s delicate footsteps. So I wasn’t ready for the people who drove past, shouted “Tranny!” and threw a beer can at my head (missing) as they sped off. Undeterred, I continued.

I could see a big crowd outside the church, perhaps leaving a wedding, the men in starched suits and the women in flowing dresses. They must not look at me, I thought, knowing that they would. I stood tall, pursing my lips to show that I was above their stares. Someone with a pram eyeballed me as she moved her child out of the way, even though I took measured steps around her, and a group of elderly ladies talked about me, glancing conspiratorially like the courtiers at Salomé.

Ignoring wolf whistles from the bus stop, I could see the cashpoint across Seven Dials. There were three lads stood next to it, outside the off-license. There was nowhere else to get money, so I watched from across the road, hoping they’d leave. It started to rain. I had no umbrella (Can you imagine Madame with such a thing?) and it would ruin my makeup.

I rushed over the roundabout and darted towards the cashpoint, bank card in hand as an angry motorist swerved and swore at me. Withdrawing my money, I heard a voice: “That’s a man!” Knowing where this 12

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may lead, I gestured at the machine, urging haste. “Fucking bender!” Laughter. The notes came. I stuffed them into my bag. I turned. They blocked my path.

What would Madame do?

I stood on tiptoes and kissed the biggest man on the lips. I walked on, head high, then started running as they chased after me. I skipped past some startled shoppers, shoved a sandwich board for a Thai restaurant in front of my attackers and, as they stumbled, hailed a passing taxi. “To Marilyn’s!” I commanded as I threw myself onto the seat, locking the door as it raced through the changing light, laughing as I saw my man wipe my lipstick off his face. * I stepped out of the cab, dreaming of being mobbed by adoring fans. As it turned out, Steph, Orla, and Madeleine were huddled outside smoking, trying not to get wet.

“You didn’t come as celebrities!”

“Nor did you,” said Orla.

“This isn’t how I usually dress, is it?” I replied, hands on hips.

“We wouldn’t come near you if it was, sweetheart. Come on, we’re getting soaked,” said Orla, beckoning us all inside.

I realised that I’d spoken without ever hearing a word from Madame. Apparently she had a fine voice, theatrically trained, but her strong Ukrainian accent had destroyed her career on the arrival of the talkies. I’d had some speech therapy on the NHS, but I suspect I didn’t sound like a leading light of the Moscow Art Theatre. And how would she have competed with the Scissor Sisters at maximum volume? She may have preferred to remain silent, and that the pictures had too, I thought as the drag queen on the door stopped me. “£5 please, darling.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Don’t you recognise her?” said Steph.

“From Sunset Boulevard?”

“You’re Gloria Swanson?”

“No, I am not.”

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“Who are you then? Eartha Kitt?”

“I am Madame Nazimova,” I insisted, showing her the picture. She demanded £5. Angrily, I handed over the money and stormed upstairs, my friends giggling behind me.

We stood at the bar, celeb-spotting and gender-guessing. Amy Winehouse was a man, we were sure; Ryan Gosling definitely wasn’t. Male and female David Bowies jostled for drinks whilst someone brave enough to attempt Gaga’s meat dress fumbled anxiously at a steak, stinking out the sweaty room until the barman told her to get changed or get out.

I got a gin and tonic (I didn’t know Madame’s favourite tipple) and we watched the cabaret. They were inviting people to perform: After a Madonna in a pink dress and faux diamonds butchered Material Girl, we laughed as the Vogue-, Erotic- and Musicera Madonnas booed her off and the drag queen compere took the microphone.

“Right, which Britain’s Got Talent reject is next?”

Steph shoved me towards the front. “Pick her! She’d die to be on stage!”

“Oh, my Lord! Who on earth are you?”

“She’s Madame Nazimova!” laughed Madeleine. “Get her on!”

“Madam Nazi-what? What’s your act, love? Goose-stepping?”

“I perform the Dance of the Seven Veils… but not here,” I said, trying in vain to back away from the stage.

“I think we want to see the Dance of the Seven Veils, don’t we, boys and girls?”

A cheer went up. Steph, Madeleine, and Orla clapped and chanted, “Dance! Dance!

Dance!” and before I knew it, the clubbers were as transfixed as Herod’s courtiers.

A wave of hands forced me on stage to applause and whistles. Then, just as a grave realisation hit me, the compere piped up: “Where are the bloody veils, Madam?”

If only to shut her up, I danced without them. I stood, arms above my head, then leant back, tiptoeing in a circle to absolute

silence. I could see the crowd starting to talk about me, perhaps discussing my lack of classical ballet training as I quickened my pace, whirling frantically as they clapped ever faster.

“She is goose-stepping!” yelled the compere. “Can we get her at least one fucking veil? Preferably over her face?”

I saw movement at the bar, then a white sheet being passed towards the stage. The compere grabbed it and threw it over my head, saying “Got any more?” I twirled maniacally, ensnared in the heavy fabric, until I fell to my knees, exhausted. Hearing bemused murmurs from the crowd, I threw it off as I leapt to my feet.

“What the fuck was that, sweetheart? Go on, Madam – piss off!”

I took a bow and stepped down, my reception as muted as that given to Salomé all those years ago. As “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” kicked in and I reflected that

perhaps the world still wasn’t ready for Nazimova, a handsome stranger with slicked-back hair took my hand.

“Please tell me you’re Valentino.”

“Oh, I’m John,” he said. “I didn’t dress up. I liked your dance.”

“I’m glad someone did.”

“May I buy you a drink, Madame?”

Madame may have preferred a woman, I thought, and in truth so would I, but I felt sure she’d have gone with someone this suave. He took me to the bar and I told him everything I knew about Nazimova, and explained why I wanted to call him Jokanaan. I assured him that I wouldn’t demand his head on a plate – as long as he let me kiss his mouth. He did: We talked the night away, and when closing time came, I took a taxi back to his flat. It wasn’t Sunset Boulevard, but I didn’t care. * I woke in Jokanaan’s bed, the white bob

and headdress thrown atop my tunic and plimsolls. I could hear driving rain against his window, and I sensed that the temperature had dropped sharply. I went to the bathroom and removed my smudged makeup, wincing at the sight of my sweaty fringe strewn across my forehead. I asked my man if he had anything I could wear home. He rummaged through his wardrobe, throwing a white T-shirt over my head before digging out an old jumper, denim jeans, and some trainers that he thought might fit me.

Promising to return them soon, I trudged home, resolving never again to feel as grey as I did in his faded clothes.

Picking up the Gender Recognition Certificate, I thought that with a bit more planning, I might be able to sustain this persona. After all, if the money ran out, that would only make me more authentic. Finally, I completed the form:

Statutory Declaration Gender Recognition Act 2004 “I ______________________ do solemnly and sincerely declare that: 1. I am over 18 years of age.

2. I have lived as a male/female (delete word that does not apply) throughout the period of _____ years since I transitioned in __________ (month and year of transition).

3. I intend to live as a apply) until death.

(delete word that does not

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THE TRIP, THE MEDICINE GABRIELA JAUREGUI

hat brought me to the sacred land of medicine and ritual, called Wirikuta by the Wixarika or Huichol people, was a semipredictable combination of Carlos Castaneda, that trickster so-and-so; Jim Morrison; and the desire which Antonin Artaud expressed back in 1936: “When I went to peyote, I didn’t want to enter a new world, but rather, to leave a false one behind” – a philosophical and psychonautical aspiration, the root of many if not all trips by non-Indigenous people to that region. Wirikuta, in central Mexico, covers a little over 346,000 acres of unique flora, fauna, and ritual sites in the high desert of San Luis Potosí, and its name means the origin of the world. So perhaps it was those readings plus a whole lot of secondhand information from other young people my age who had been to the region before and whose lives had been forever changed plus some magic that brought me there.

If you go to Wirikuta, you can walk on the Tropic of Cancer, you may witness Wixarika rituals, witness titans turned into cacti, and you may also notice that you tread on sacred but endangered territor y. Threatened by Canadian

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mining companies for years and also by agribusiness (the pollution from tomato and chicken plants), its sacredness, its magic, its human and non-human inhabitants have been defended in a tireless fight for and by the Wixarika people that has brought together and organised countless collectives, NGOs, rock stars, schoolteachers, actors, poets, journalists and even a Nobel laureate, not to mention friends from ’round the way. But how did we all get there in the first place?

In the ’90s, a bunch of my best friends in junior high all went to Wirikuta by train (There were still passenger trains from the beginning of the 20th century in working order back in the mid-90s.)

A common thing when I spoke to several people of different generations was that they clearly remembered the train trip, more of a rite of passage really, a preparation for the even more serious trip of eating peyote, or Hikuri, as it is called in Wixarika.

On the phone from Belgium, Alan, one of my friends, remembers that they had partied the night before, hadn’t slept, and arrived to buy the extremely affordable first-class tickets at Buenavista

Station (now mostly reduced to a subway station and a mall), only to discover that there were none left. They got secondclass tickets, hoping they might rest on the 12-hour trip. But they were wrong.

It was pushing-room only. He ended up sitting on top of the beer cooler at the bar in the back, and people kept yelling at him to get up or get out of the way. Most of them spent hours standing and shifting from one foot to another, letting the lady selling tamales go by. Or the person selling pollo, pollo rico, lleve el pollo; or the youth selling melon and lemon sorbet (anagram ice cream? Yes!); the other lady with her four chorizo balls for 1000 pesos! Or the ticket man “who after checking tickets would switch his uniform into a different one to sell newspapers,” as Juan Gerardo Aguilar, a writer from Zacatecas, remembers. Like my friends, Juan Gerardo went when he was a teenager, “to the magical land of peyote that Fernando Benitez mentions in his book. It was the beginning of the ’90s and like in all high school tribes, there were subgroups, and ours bonded through the desire to have new experiences in all aspects. Goering, who was 20, was like the high school fossil…and was at

TRENAREAL TRAIN TICKET

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the forefront of an initiation journey to in the scorching heat, looking for peyote wish or a suicide mission. And so, after Wadley and Real de Catorce. He planted without finding any, with barely a bottle of stopping in Matehuala for provisions like in us the seed, or needle, to follow in his water for company and safety. Suddenly, a oranges and such, we arrived at a tiny steps.” They hitchhiked part way then got man on a horse – a spirit? a mirage? a real village, something smaller than a village on the train, again standing room only, and human being? – said to her and her friend, really, which in Mexico is known as a they were drunk. He and his friends were “You have to know how to look.” And as rancheria, called Las Margaritas. We left heading to Estación 14, but an Italian guy they sat down to rest for a moment, they our car there, near a friend’s house. She who let one of them sit down was going suddenly saw themselves surrounded was the local schoolteacher, something I to Wadley and so they decided to get off at by those characteristically round cactus still find hugely brave and commendable, Wadley, too. People would push their way buttons known as Hikuri, peyote, and her house was a tiny place – clean and out, then others would push their way in Lophophora williamsii or Lophophora dignified in its ascetic simplicity. We then until they finally arrived, before the train diffusa. Juan Gerardo remembers the smell started walking into the desert, on the way kept chugging on to Laredo. to the Las Animas reservoir.

Ursula Pruneda, an actress It was a summer afternoon, from Mexico City, laments the rainy season in Mexico, the fact that you can’t go by and so the small reservoir had CLEARLY, FOR DECADES NOW, train anymore: “To spend water in it and the desert was time in the train, with the surprisingly green. I knew LOCALS HAVE SEEN THEIR people who travelled on that that rather than looking for SHARE OF A CERTAIN KIND OF train…and, you know, time peyote, it had to find me.

URBAN TRIBE COME LOOKING passes differently when you And so I just walked and FOR PEYOTE. SO Y AND HER travel somewhere by train.” It walked until I started seeing clearly was an integral part of peyote and more peyote.

FRIEND WALKED AND WALKED IN the trip.

Once you see it, or rather THE DESERT IN THE SCORCHING Y, a 52-year-old graphic once it sees you, you can’t HEAT, LOOKING FOR PEYOTE designer who went in 1992, unsee it. I cut a few buttons tells me: “We didn’t know with a wood knife (one WITHOUT FINDING ANY, WITH what we were going to find, of those secondhand tips BARELY A BOTTLE OF WATER what we did know was what someone had told me), and FOR COMPANY AND SAFETY. we were looking for…It never from the root. Then I was the first time I got on a dusted the sand off, and we train,” and 30 years later she sat next to the watering hole still has her tickets. She got to eat it. off at Estación 14 (the one before Wadley) of creosote and how suddenly a family of Its bitter taste is unforgettable and will and looked for Doña Sabo’s cabin: an peyote guarded by a creosote almost three stay zinged in anyone’s memory forever. adobe house with two hammocks and feet tall appeared in front of me.”

Many people vomit from its bitterness, a small bathroom. The locals explained I’ve had peyote freshly cut from the some say it’s to cleanse all that city crap. in which direction to walk and how to ground, I’ve had it dry and rehydrated, I just took it real slow, chewing with properly cut the peyote with care. “Back I’ve had chocoyote, a delicious mix of intention and patience, and when the then we didn’t know it as Hikuri, as the peyote with cocoa, and I’ve had mezcaline taste was too overwhelming, I would eat a Huichol people call it, only peyotito,” she powder, which the shaman who led that slice of orange. Then we started walking. explains. “But we had a great respect for ceremony aptly called “dust from the stars.”

Talking. Walking, walking, walking. I it.”

The first time, though, I was barely out had this strange but wonderful feeling of Clearly, for decades now, locals have of my teens, and Wirikuta was a crucial stretching out. I sat down to watch the seen their share of a certain kind of urban stop off Highway 57 on a road trip from insects of the desert floor: The desert was tribe come looking for peyote. So Y and Mexico City to Los Angeles. Back then, anything but deserted – it revealed itself as her friend walked and walked in the desert crossing Mexico by car wasn’t a death full of life. Everything was so clear to me: 16

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the universe, my place in it. Eventually it started to get dark, the sun setting along the endless horizon. For a split second, I worried we would never find our way back to Las Margaritas. But no, somehow, we never got bit by a snake, we never got lost, we just enjoyed the moon, its iridescent rainbows connected me and all other beings. As Y put it, as a woman, “that feeling of walking through the desert with no fear, to feel so close to the earth, and also so cared for by that spirit was a unique experience.” Indeed.

The temperature had fallen several degrees, but Hikuri kept us warm. We found our way back to our friend’s house and talked and talked with her for hours.

I’m sure she’d put up with many friends who would come through on a trip. We talked local politics. She was worried about a local rancher and miner who was polluting the scarce water sources. This is still a concern 20 years later. I remember understanding in my body, not in my mind, how everything was connected and a hot feeling that a great injustice was being committed against this sacred place.

Then everything turned fractal rainbows and lucid dreams. That was my first time.

And there have been others, not always in the desert, sometimes with a Marakame (a Wixarika shaman) sometimes not, sometimes in large groups, sometimes with a few friends, but always powerful.

In 2007, Karely Muñoz had a dream where she ate a giant Hikuri that a very small old lady gave her. A professor in the Psychology Department at her university who worked in the Maya–Toltec shamanic tradition told her, “The deer is calling you.”

Muñoz is an educator and mother, and she also now happens to be my neighbour. It turns out she was one of the rural teachers who replaced my friend after she left Las Margaritas. So, back in 2007 when she had the dream, the psychology teacher started preparing her for a mushroom ceremony.

She fasted and did lots of temazcales.1 She went with him and a group to the desert for the first time in September 2008, to leave an offering at a water spring called El Ameyal. That’s when she ate her first little piece of peyote medicine. It was sunset, and they were in a corn field deep in the desert. The first thing she did was start running, as if a deer were inside of her. She found a 10 peso coin, which has the Aztec sun calendar, and she held it up to the sun and understood: “This is the birthplace of the sun…This is my home.” And “everything inside me was deconstructed.”

She then became a keeper of the fire in 2009 for those who do the Wirikuta pilgrimage, which starts at the border between Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí and stops at various ritual sites where the pilgrims leave offerings. She heard all the pilgrims’ stories and prepared to walk the pilgrimage in 2010. She had a revelation: She kept seeing rural schools during her whole walk. In July 2010, she arrived to Las Margaritas for the summer…and stayed for three years. She learned to work with corn, to work the land, and she got to know the community members. Then one day she found a little Hikuri under her bed and ate it. She felt that she had to stay there and give something back: She realised she wanted to become a teacher.

She asked the local teacher and got trained in Estación 14 and would go back and forth by bike. “That’s where I met the father of my children, a young hippie guy who had come to work on watergathering systems for the homes there and who had just come back from the Amazon. A few months later, we did an offering in the Quemado and the Ameyal Spring, and we asked for permission to be parents. A couple of months later, I was pregnant. That was another gift from the Hikuri. A Wixarika Marakame blessed my belly, and he gave me Hikuri medicine for the birth. The same thing happened

with my second child.” When she and her partner separated, it was also through this medicine, which reminded them that they would forever be family.

In 2012, when the land defence against the mining companies was reaching a critical point and people wanted to raise as much awareness as possible, Muñoz was interviewed by Elena Poniatowska, as were other locals. But Poniatowska wasn’t the only one to show support.

Famous writers, including French Nobel Prize winner J. M. G. Le Clézio, actively wrote letters in support, rock stars like Café Tacvba and Calle 13 organised a giant concert to raise awareness and benefit the land defence efforts, and ephemeral or lasting bonds were interwoven between the Wixarika, activists of all colours, local peasant farmworkers, artists, and musicians to try and stop several openair mining projects. Luis Aguilar, the photographer whose images accompany this text and who was actively involved in the land defence movement in Wirikuta, remembers the creation of a proto-bot that would send a letter in your name to every senator. “All those people who had come here, who had received so much from the plant and the space were signing. People from all kinds of places, like Australia, Finland, Holland, the US, Colombia, Argentina, Ukraine. It was unimaginable. The senators had to call us so that we would stop.”

W h e n a n a l y s i n g t h e b i t t e r s we e t results from that period and what happened during the Wirikuta land defence strategies, which eventually ended up temporarily stopping some of the proposed mining activity but not the agribusiness –or not yet – one of the foremost experts on Wixarika ritual and history, Professor Regina Lira, writes that for the Wixarika, “This way of making politics is learned and transmitted in ritual practice. First of ESSAY

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all, understanding ‘politics’ as a field of relationships established through plural and unstable relationships involving the human and the nonhuman, and which create the conditions to multiply or reconfigure the [Wixarika] relationships with the mestiza society or the State […] which create [Indigenous] alternatives to contemporary challenges.”2 Perhaps what has happened and keeps happening in relation to Wirikuta is the emergence of a phenomenon that overflows neoliberal individualism and opens the possibility of political subjectivities coming together to make resistance movements visible against extractive capitalism, the emergence of which Verónica Gago has called the “politics of the many.”3 Luis Aguilar went to the desert for the first time in 1988, lived there then returned to Mexico City but hasn’t stopped visiting ever since. He mentions how the Wixarika would bump into him walking and walking for miles and miles with his heavy analogue camera. “The plant and the desert gave me a shock.”

Many of us were from a generation who came of age with the Zapatista uprising and so already had a strong curiosity if not a political bond with different Indigenous peoples and theirs struggles for resistance in Mexico. So perhaps then it was no coincidence many of us found ourselves travelling to this region and learning from the Wixarika because “… through their religion, their spirituality, their arts and crafts, the Huichols have captured the imagination of an outside world that has increasingly lost its own spiritual bearings.”4 Matias Meyer even made a film about this whole experience titled Wadley (2008). He first went to the region because of what his older cousin had told him. He and his brother and cousins organised a trip to the desert by truck to find peyote and learn from it: “Its 18

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mysticism was a door for our generation which lacked mysticism and spirituality,” he said by phone from Montreal. “We couldn’t just eat it anywhere, like an apartment in Mexico City. And so going there was a pilgrimage. And we followed certain rules: cutting it with a wood knife, not metal. Not eating meat for a few days.” A little like it was for Juan Gerardo, for Matias “this group of cousins and friends did function as a sort of subculture or counterculture for me.” Then, a few years later, he went back with a group of friends from film school.

“One of them says that the first time we met I only talked to him about peyote.

I was going about three times a year and eating a lot of peyote. I’d heard if you eat too much, you start talking to dead people and start living with ghosts, so I thought I was maybe overdoing it.” He also went to San Andrés Coahamiata to be with the Wixarika people and witness their chanting and rituals. “And one night I thought about the film’s premise: A man goes alone to eat peyote and trip. I wanted to do it myself, but I wasn’t brave enough…any accident was too risky…I wanted to film during the full moon. In a week I got an actor, and we were on our way in my car headed for Wadley.

We ate a little. The actor didn’t want to eat, so I told him not to worry and to just copy me when he was acting. The idea was to make a film about peyote’s importance in party kids finding their own ritual and spirituality there. Finding a new way to see, finding a very clear inner voice that is accompanied by that desert landscape…And I haven’t been back to the desert since.”

Ursula, the actress who also supported the Wirikuta land defence, started her relationship with peyote when she was 15.

She tried it on the slopes of Iztaccihuatl, u n d e r t h e vo l c a n o , i n Pu e b l a , a n d remained, “petrified, glued to a rock.”

She knew she had to go to the desert and eat peyote there. So, she told me, she went with some hippie friends and they didn’t find any, so they bought it instead from some people. She remembers it as a horrible trip and knew she would have to come back to Wirikuta. The night before her 23rd birthday, she decided she would return. She had to. She hopped on the train with her girlfriend the next morning. She found peyote, peyote had found her, finally. She remembers many animals being present and feeling a special connection with the horses. She starts laughing: “That was me reading a lot of Carlos Castaneda and thinking perhaps the horses were my and my girlfriend’s spirit animals.” She laughs again. “I go back to the desert periodically. I love it.

I always climb el Quemado. One year I spent a month in July to commemorate the death of my daughter, and I saw a triple rainbow. So anytime I’m asked to help, anytime I’m needed I’m there, to help the Wixarika.”

Peyote, or Hikuri, is profoundly intertwined with the land where it grows and the people who worship it. Clearly, it has coevolved with the human, or rather, the human with the peyote. Perhaps in all its ageless wisdom, the plant has called the Wixarika, the Cora, and the Rarámuri peoples first and foremost. And then it has called the rest of us in different ways to come and visit, to be changed and be the agents of change, if only for a moment or for the rest of our lives.

CIVILIANS AT WORK HEATHER BERG

____________ 1 Ceremonial saunas 2 Relaciones Estudios de Historia y Sociedad 156, Fall 2018, p. 124.

3 Nueva Sociedad 251, May–June 2014, p.105.

4 Schaeffer and Furst, The People of the Peyote, p.11.

PHOTO: BY JEREMY YAP

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veteran porn director called me last spring. Mark* had given an interview for my book on labour politics in the industry, and he wanted to update me now that it was out. We’d first met in the early 2010s, at the San Fernando Valley home paid for by the midbudget films he directed. Filming equipment cluttered the living room that doubled as a studio, and we drank coffee left over from that morning’s craft services.

He was making a modest living, he told me, about the same as his insurance-broker brother. In some ways their jobs weren’t all that different – lots of paperwork either way, and the monotony could be wearing. Spreadsheets and stepfather themes seemed to have no end. But by 2021, both the market for his product and the performer labour supply he relied on had dried up. Now, Mark was working for the performers he used to hire, coordinating their social media presences, editing the clips they produced themselves, and, for an extra fee, pretending to be them in chats with fans. He laughed at the image of fans texting him, imagining that the 60-year-old man at the other end of the line was their favourite starlet.

The transition from brick and mortar to platforms, and from studio control to performer self-production, had made directors like Mark obsolete. Performers wanted to claim more of the profits from their own scenes, and they used the broader turn toward platformisation to do it. Mark was a little rueful but said he would have done exactly the same thing if given the chance.

Filming and editing equipment had gotten less expensive, and giving up autonomy, and profit, increasingly seemed like bad math. He got it, having encountered his own struggles over money and creative control working under the studio system.

Under that model, he followed the formulas handed down to him and paid himself out of whatever was left over from the budget.

But the stakes were different for performers. The costs of working under another’s control were greater, and (sometimes) they had enough star power to walk.

That part isn’t new – porn performers have always struggled against managerial prerogatives, and they’ve always been crafty about finding ways to monetise their status with fans. In the 1980s, they used porn scenes as marketing tools for strip club tours, sometimes pulling thousands a night. Paid fan clubs and escort circuits, too, let performers maximise their porn star brands. Sometimes they produced their own video content, but production costs were prohibitive for most and distribution networks favoured established studios. Now, anyone with a smart phone, an internet connection, and an ID can self-produce and distribute online. But that dynamic, too, is constantly in flux.

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hacks, and so on.

Mark wasn’t the only former interviewee who called when my book came out. I talked to Elle*, too, who’d become a friend in the years since we first met. When we’d interviewed for my book in 2015, she was just getting started performing in porn.

She’d recently quit her jobs as a waitress – the money was better in porn, the hours shorter, and she was sick of getting sexually harassed for free.

Performing on camera could be fun, too. But dealing with directors could be just as tedious as working under a manager at a bar. They, too, pushed boundaries, and sometimes expected sexual favours in exchange for casting opportunities. In porn, too, it chafed to know that she was doing the bulk of the labour while someone else was making the profit – working for others meant signing away her image for a one-time fee, with no royalties and no oversight over how the scenes got cut up and redistributed.

She got paid less than white women for the same work and struggled to find roles outside the racist caricatures set out for Black women in the industry. Like other performers of colour, trans people, fat people, and people with visible disabilities, she had to work within the confines of what porn’s traditional managers – mostly white men – thought would sell. “Ethical,” queer, and feminist porn didn’t play by these same rules, but they paid even less.

By last spring, though, Elle was running a thriving OnlyFans business producing scenes based on storylines she designed.

Her fans, less bound by conventional scripts than good old boy producers, were buying. She was making about as much as she had before, but she had a lot more autonomy. Now, she hires people like Mark to help manage her direct-to-consumer hustle.

She performs for directors sometimes, mostly to keep her porn star branding fresh. But she’s able to turn down gigs with the worst directors, the ones who treated her poorly, wrote racist epithets into scripts, or tried to get her to do more on set than they’d agreed on before she got there.

As the COVID-19 pandemic raged, she was especially glad to be able to work when, how, and with whom she wanted.

She filmed with her boyfriend or with performer friends who’d agreed to quarantine before a scene. Safety had already been on her mind before the pandemic, and she liked that self-production let her choose whether to use a condom. Without casting agents and directors to answer to, there wasn’t the same pressure for people to show up for work even when they weren’t well. Elle has Crohn’s disease; it made a big difference to be able to take a day off when she needed to. She could pace scenes, too, so that her body had time to rest. Filming a number of scenes when she felt good, she could then time their release to keep her OnlyFans

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account in new content and her income steady. That hadn’t been possible when working under studios, where bulimic production cycles meant working on someone else’s time.

Like other self-producers, Elle still had to give a cut to OnlyFans and deal with ever-changing terms of service agreements, payment processor discrimination, and anti-sex worker policies such as 2018’s FOSTA/SESTA (laws which made it harder for sex workers to advertise and distribute online). Fans could be demanding and sometimes verbally abusive – one of the reasons she outsourced some of the labour of dealing with them directly. And the market for content was, as always, marked by the racism, heterosexism, and ableism that shape desire in (paid and unpaid) sexual life. Platform-mediated sex work hustles aren’t easy. They’re work, and highly stigmatised and surveilled work.

But greater control over what the workday looks like makes platform-based work better for many. It means more power for workers like Elle, and less for directors like Mark and his less affable, and sometimes more abusive, peers.

We talked again in mid-summer. Her OnlyFans site was doing well, but she was nervous about the news that credit card companies might pull out, making it harder for sex workers like her to get paid. Payment processors were under enormous amounts of pressure from a strange bedfellows coalition of fundamentalist Christians and anti-porn feminists lobbying to make autonomous online sex worker harder to do. Cash transfer apps like PayPal had already kicked her off, and one bank had shuttered her account. It was getting harder and harder to make a living on her own. Elle didn’t want to go back to the old system.

She didn’t want to go back to working at a restaurant, either, especially then, with COVID variants circulating and her immune system weakened by medicines for chronic inflammation. I was anxious, too, about her situation and my

own. Faculty were being sent back into the classroom, and I didn’t feel safe. Other academics were in the same spot, and Elle talked about how strange it was that we were so overwhelmingly responding with anxious compliance rather than refusal.

She teased me, gently, about the distance between my antiwork politics and my response to work rules here. But she also understood that academia isn’t like porn. We comply because many of us are convinced we have nowhere else to go. It’s easier to negotiate with a porn director when there are others waiting if you walk. And easier still when you can strike out on your own and cut out the middleman entirely.

All of this room to manoeuvre is limited in porn, too – workers are replaceable just as managers are, brand reputations must be kept up, and everyone calculates openings for refusal in light of the bills they have to pay. Anti-sex work stigma and policy close exit routes, and workers must make a part-time job of devising new ones. But even with its closer-to-the-bone precarity, gig work can make the consequences of each “no” feel less weighty, or at least less final. So many people come to sex work for exactly this glimpse of autonomy. Creatively navigating stigma, state surveillance, and the demands of gigged service work, they sometimes find it. Complying with the everyday controls of nonsex work can come to seem absurd.

Most porn performers have quit jobs like yours. That is, if you’re a civilian – what porn and other sex workers call those who do non-sex work. They think about their conditions in view of the jobs they’ve left behind. Porn is precarious, labour intensive, and sometimes risky, but at least it’s not toiling away in a cubicle farm, a restaurant, or a nurse’s station. Porn workers leave these jobs because of their tedium, their grinding conditions, and their typically low pay. More than anything else, they talk about civilian work’s everyday control, and its assumption that once you’ve agreed to work, you’ve agreed to most every demand that comes next. Porn workers don’t always find the alternatives they’d hoped for in porn, but they hold on to their critique of the alternatives just the same. This informs their moves once in porn, where workers demand that each new ask be renegotiated and where they continue to seek out as much autonomy as they can.

Elle called again in late summer, as I was writing this essay. Content creators had just learned that OnlyFans would start banning “sexually explicit material” come October. The same coalition of religious fundamentalists and feminists who’d lobbied to get sex workers’ bank accounts shut down ESSAY

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had finally put enough pressure on credit card companies. Visa struggles in porn. This issue of Litro is interested in questions and Mastercard wouldn’t reliably process payments, even for legal about subcultures, and I was invited to write something on forms of sex work, and OnlyFans changed its terms to avoid the the subculture of porn. But the boundary between porn and fallout. Days later, OnlyFans reversed course in response to sex civilian life is porous, workers passing in and through. Porn workers’ mass mobilisation. But sex workers’ fight over autonomy worker critique turns the inquiry back on itself: If sub implies continues. a condition of being under or beneath, what becomes visible Lobbyists had identified OnlyFans as a hub for sex trafficking, from below? though there was no What if your job offered evidence of this being the a n e s c a p e ro u t e , w h e re case. The site has the most you could work where and rigorous age verification with whom you wanted, PLATFORM-MEDIATED SEX rules of any platform, and have more control over the without middlemen, forced terms of the work, and take WORK HUSTLES AREN’T EASY. work is less likely here than home more of the profits?

THEY’RE WORK, AND HIGHLY in studio porn. But it wasn’t What would your working STIGMATISED AND SURVEILLED good strategy to take aim conditions look like if at the parts of the business people could walk at the WORK. BUT GREATER CONTROL where workers said abuses rate porn performers have in OVER WHAT THE WORKDAY really were happening. the last five years? What if a LOOKS LIKE MAKES PLATFORMPorn’s legality as free speech mass exit reversed some of had been arbitrated and the lines of power and profit, BASED WORK BETTER FOR won, but lobbyists could employers now working MANY. IT MEANS MORE POWER slowly chip away at workers’ for the people they used FOR WORKERS LIKE ELLE, AND ability to use the internet to employ? And what if, a LESS FOR DIRECTORS LIKE to produce and distribute it few years into this process, on their own. The strategy’s people who’d never done MARK AND HIS LESS AFFABLE, end point: Workers will your job decided that you AND SOMETIMES MORE still be able to make porn, needed saving from your ABUSIVE, PEERS. but unless they have access exit strategy? What if they t o a s t u d i o’s w o r t h o f lobbied hard enough that start-up capital, their own the tools you used to exit got distribution networks, and taken away? a legal team, they won’t be able to get paid to do it. Elle was Elle’s story is an invitation for solidarity and also an education panicked, not just because so much of her income now came in desire. Outside porn and within it, workers’ struggles are from the site, but because she dreaded going back to working bound up even if they’re not the same. This isn’t only because under others’ control. sex workers are right when they say that they are a testing case How should civilians read this, perhaps especially as they for censorship – what happens there will come for civilians increasingly face employers’ demands to return to workplaces next. It’s also because struggles over workers’ room to refuse that aren’t just newly unsafe but also as tedious and exploitative reverberate in policy and in markets. Maybe they do, too, in as they ever were. Workers whose essential-ness legitimised matters of consciousness. Even as porn workers see their exist their disposability, of course, never left. But there, too, we see strategies closed off, the desire to exit remains. What if civilians struggle – service workers are quitting their jobs in droves, and took the cue? it is impossible to understand the enclosure of escape routes *This essay uses pseudonyms. like OnlyFans outside the broader context of the shortage of willing workers. Essential or otherwise, workers might sit with the question of what they might learn from workers’ 22

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celebratory water OTIS MENSAH it is not a word no no, it is not an amalgamation of uttered tones it is not changeable under the bridge of a tongue under the shifting dialect of a peoples it is not a thing one just names like a gun but a body full of bullets a story that cannot explain itself in literation but is understood unspeakably in the absence of alliterated iteration an obliterated sense of reason it has no sense or reason not a summer’s sky to be gazed into but a becoming without being named by exploiting eyes not a sound, no no, nor the whistle of a bird but the word is that which makes wings

PHOTO BY SOURAV MISHRA

wings like celebratory water the bad side of good where I’ve lived my whole life that one time there was no dessert, my father apologised with a jar of jam what a privilege it is to die fed and clothed like a glass bottle of air I fill myself with everything in front and behind of me spiritless but performing some kind of full I find myself no longer afraid of terror-soaked dreams whatever has followed me for decades has surely become a part of me now the same air we breathe becomes the same thoughts we think I no longer frisk the light switches nor commentate the saturated colour these quarters these lines once moats engulfing my swimming soul where I skinny-dip in this rotting levee rotting with a levy on my head like dead memes no longer piecing myself together for a timely fashion, a sea of sectors spectating because it is already done my best poems, I never wrote.

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THE TROUBLING WORLD OF INCELS LISA SUGIURA

PHOTO BY ISABELLA MARIANA

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and chat rooms imbued with misogyny, insidious connotations, including the ncels (involuntary celibates) are men satire, and a common vernacular. It aborted GF, which suggests that an incel’s who hate women because they won’t has no principal authority, but there potential girlfriend was aborted in utero have sex with them, right? Even is a compelling overlap with rightand propels anti-abortion advocates to though there is an element of truth to try and attract incels to their cause. wing extremism and white supremacy, that statement and certainly the lack of The origins of the manosphere particularly in regard to ideologies and or inability to have sexual relations is a c a n b e t r a c e d o f f l i n e t h ro u g h t h e the use of memes. Such memes are core obstacle for incels, this is an emergence of historical men’s liberation deprived of their provenance and edit oversimplification and fails to consider movements, which initially aligned with history, and/or downplayed as satire the nuances involved with a nonfeminism before splintering into groups or cultural in-jokes, meaning that it is homogenous community that isn’t borne that viewed it as the cause of men’s difficult for observers to appreciate and entirely of the internet. Over the course emasculation and wider societal failings. contextualise what they are presented of three years, I studied incels by The term manosphere was popularised with. Within the incelsphere, memes are spending time within incel forums and by author and pornography websites, and conducted marketer Ian Ironwood, who interviews with current and published a book collating blogs former self-identifying incels in THE VIOLENT RHETORIC and forums about perceived order to understand their PRESENT IN THE INCEL male struggles titled The formation and culture. The COMMUNITY EMANATES FROM Manosphere: A New Hope For purpose of the research was to Masculinity. The manosphere understand incel’s motivations FEELINGS OF FRUSTRATION encompasses a range of groups and behaviours, as well as the AND RESENTMENT AND such as Men’s Rights Activists evolution and spread of the IS GALVANISED BY WHAT (MRAs), Pick Up Ar tists i n c e l c o m m u n i t y. A s a n (PUAs), Men Going Their Own SOCIOLOGIST MICHAEL academic working in the field of Way (MGTOW), Tradcons, No online gender-based abuse, I KIMMEL DESCRIBES AS Fappers, and those concerned wanted to raise awareness of the “AGGRIEVED ENTITLEMENT”. with actual men’s problems harms arising from the rather than espousing vitriol misogynistic ideologies within against women, progressiveness, incel and other groups online, in abundance featuring Chads and Stacys, and feminism such as Fathers Rights which had been previously operating names which refer to the most attractive Activists (FRAs). It also includes what is relatively undetected due to being men and women. The millimetres of bone presented as the most problematic of all dismissed as minority fringe groups. memes involve side-by-side photos of – incels.

The incel subculture is increasingly similar looking men beside the caption: Although only a small minority of attracting public and media concern due The difference between Chad and nonincels or those ascribing to the incel to its association with violent attacks, Chad is literally a few millimetres of bone, ideology mobilise to actual physical predominantly in Canada, the US illuminating the Incel claim that women violence, fears are mounting about them and, more recently, the UK, along with are more biologically drawn to men radicalising people to extremist violence, its incitement of hatred, particularly with more prominent chins and jaws. with calls to define them as terrorists. against women. Incels, however, are Parody versions of cartoon characters The incel threat, in reality, though, is not an isolated phenomenon; they also feature within memes, such as nebulous, and through my research into are part of a larger backlash against this subculture, what I discovered is a handsome and regular Squidward, Shrek feminism and gender equality, which is community replete with contradiction, with exaggerated facial expressions, and not contained to the online spaces they absurdity, and inconsistency. Further, Hercules transitioning from an awkward and other groups within the so-called there are wider harms arising from incels teenager into his muscular adult form. “manosphere” inhabit. not just externally against women and Alongside these seemingly innocuous The manosphere is a decentralised society, but internally, experienced by memes, there are those with more network of websites, gaming platforms, ESSAY

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individuals within the community itself.

With all the negative attention placed on incels, it is easy to overlook the fact that the term had virtuous origins.

In 1993, queer female student Alana Boltwood, who, in seeking support and solidarity, wrote on her website, that incel was “anybody of any gender who was lonely, had never had sex or who hadn’t had a relationship in a long time.” There are still some who align themselves with this vision of a genderinclusive community, not least the female incels – the femcels – those who identify as non-gender binary, and men who actively reject misogyny. However, incel has foremost been appropriated by men and come to represent a subculture crystallised in its hatred of women. The majority of incels are now in fact men,

engaging in violent enactments. The incel community recognisable today has developed online since the mid-2000s and particularly gained traction since 2014, following the mass murders committed in Isla Vista, California, in which six people died. The perpetrator, who in being named achieves the notoriety he desired and whom I won’t therefore provide that honour here, killed himself following the attack and left behind a manifesto in which he justified his impending violence on his suffering at the hands of women for not being romantically or sexually interested in him. It is notable that the perpetrator did not describe himself as an incel, and evidence shows his connection with the PUA community; yet he has since become a deity for some incels and seemingly a source of inspiration for other incel-inspired or related attacks.

It i s d i f f i c u l t t o THE INCEL THREAT, IN determine the exact REALITY,…IS NEBULOUS, AND numbers of incels THROUGH MY RESEARCH worldwide. Users and visits to incel sites INTO THIS SUBCULTURE, suggest that numbers WHAT I DISCOVERED IS A are in the tens of COMMUNITY REPLETE WITH thousands, but these f i g u re s n e e d t o b e CONTRADICTION, ABSURDITY, v i e w e d c a u t i o u s l y.

AND INCONSISTENCY. There are individuals FURTHER, THERE ARE WIDER who only lurk rather HARMS ARISING FROM INCELS than engage in discussions online, NOT JUST EXTERNALLY AGAINST and so it is dubious as WOMEN AND SOCIETY, BUT to whether they can INTERNALLY, EXPERIENCED be considered tr ue incels, or tr uecels,

BY INDIVIDUALS WITHIN THE a c c o rd i n g t o i n c e l COMMUNITY ITSELF. parlance; moreover, the increased media, law enforcement, and and to date there have been no issues or academic attention will also inevitably concerns regarding female incels in terms impact upon website statistics. Moving of propagating hatred against others or beyond the emphasis on frustrated virgins, 26

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some incels have had sex but have since been rejected, been single for a long time, or slept with a sex worker (although this doesn’t count in the incel community); h o w e v e r, o n l y h e t e r o n o r m a t i v e relationships are recognised as valid by incels, and so homophobia is also prevalent within the community.

A misconception of incels is that they are principally all angry white Western young men. This contention, however, has been supported through my exploration of incel spaces, as the majority of YouTube channels and self-descriptions on forums indicated that members were white or whitepresenting and based in North America and Europe. However, this could be explained in terms of privilege and the prioritising of individual accounts, with English being the dominant language of the internet. Indeed, I did discover contributions from incels who made reference to their non-white ethnicities impacting further on them being rejected by women; such incels refer to themselves in derogatory stereotypes, highlighting the internalised racism that occurs, which also reinforces external racial prejudices. In addition, non-white incels are often told to commit suicide by other incels, more than their white counterparts, because they have no hope of ever attracting women. In a sur vey conducted by incels on incels via the incel.co site (now incels.is), approximately 45% of users stated they were from non-white ethnicities, including Black, Latino, Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, or they ticked the other/not sure option.

Further, although I mostly encountered seemingly younger men’s profiles online and the majority of those I interviewed were 18–24, I also spoke with some people in their 30s who had turned to inceldom after failed relationships

and had become disillusioned with the world. Nevertheless, younger men do appear to be more susceptible to joining the incel community, perhaps due to their greater use of technology and significant engagement in spaces where incel culture exists, as well as potentially identifying more with the ideology in a time where a positive movement such as #MeToo is presented as being a threat to men’s freedoms.

Feeling defeated is central to the underpinning incel ideology – the blackpill. The blackpill is comprised of commonly held beliefs in the incel community (and elsewhere) – namely hypergamy (dating or marrying up, the belief that women will only mate with high-status males), the “just be white” (JBW) or sexual racism theory (Women will primarily choose white men to be their sexual or romantic partners), the 80/20 rule of dating (80% of women desire and compete for the top 20% of men, and conversely, the bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 20% of women), lookism (improving your appearance to increase the chances of sexual success), and the halo effect (Men who look good are perceived better than men who don’t.) Blackpilled incels seek evidence to support their claims, relying on pseudoscience and uncritical interpretations of evolutionary biology and psychology studies, and on studies undertaken by dating sites. According to these claims, feminism is the scourge of all men’s – but especially incels’ – problems, and obstacles due to genetics, such as physical unattractiveness (as perceived by incels themselves), cannot be overcome.

Essentially, the blackpill is constructed from statistics used to validate incel perspectives and images, and memes are used to describe and visualise incel thoughts and feelings, which are generally bleak and denigrate women

about the world. Incels consider the for being egocentric, cruel, and shallow.

In becoming blackpilled, incels are vast majority of people to be bluepilled embracing fatalism. They are the zeta and criticise normies for their lack of males who will never attract the women original thought and being part of the they want, and so reject women and mainstream. The redpill is, hence, an societal values regarding relationships opportunity to be part of a counterculture and equality, which often manifests as challenging accustomed social norms, hatred. Although the incitement to hatred is not explicitly part of the A MISCONCEPTION OF blackpill philosophy, the deprecation of women INCELS IS THAT THEY ARE and progressiveness PRINCIPALLY ALL ANGRY occurs nonetheless.

WHITE WESTERN YOUNG Hence, though violence i s n’t n e c e s s a r i l y MEN. THIS CONTENTION, sanctioned by the HOWEVER, HAS BEEN incel community, the ideology presenting SUPPORTED THROUGH MY mixed messages about EXPLORATION OF men needing to retaliate INCEL SPACES... against women and the society that has supposedly privileged with incels focusing primarily on physical them, along with posts celebrating the attraction and sexual success. Not all actions of those who have committed redpillers are incels and not all incels violent atrocities, whether made in are redpilled, however; many incels are satire or not, is undeniably attractive to blackpilled. The blackpill is essentially those with a predisposition to violence. the nihilistic version of the redpill, as its Moreover, regardless of those odd outcome is cynicism and hopelessness, members who criticise the aggression whilst with the redpill some aspiration towards women (and often get removed remains as it presents the idea that it is for doing so), the majority of the incel still possible to game the system. community do not openly condemn the T h e v i o l e n t r h e t o r i c p re s e n t i n violence, instead presenting what seems the incel community emanates from like approval masked with irony. feelings of frustration and resentment The blackpill ideology crosses over with and is galvanised by what sociologist the redpill ideology permeating other Michael Kimmel describes as “aggrieved groups within the manosphere and the entitlement.” This is the sense that alt-right. The redpill draws on the film benefits to which you believe you are The Matrix, whereby the protagonist, Neo, is presented with the choice of automatically entitled have been removed taking the red pill or the blue pill. If he by external forces and you are, therefore, consumes the blue pill, he can continue not getting what you were expecting, to remain blissfully unaware of the facade which causes bitterness and resentment. he is currently residing behind, but if he In the case of incels, by being born takes the redpill, he will know the truth (white) men, they believe that they ESSAY

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should be dominant over women and thus have the right to access women’s bodies. The ideology is also exacerbated by the incel echo chamber, where ideas are constantly reinforced with limited counternarratives. The false sense of security that comes from being reassured that all your problems are not your fault is seductive, and incels fuelled by these perceived injustices engage in vengeful fantasies against women. These fantasies can cross the line from imagined to real, with the potential for incel-inspired offline violence to occur, as has sadly happened. The abhorrent attacks that have taken place are real and significant.

I suggest, though, that it is the everyday violence within the incel community – the misogyny, racism, homophobia, and ableism – that should also be taken seriously. These normalise the prejudices against already marginalised groups, threaten equality gains, and validate violence. Additionally, more attention should be paid to other groups within t h e m a n o s p h e re t h a t h a ve g re a t e r overlap with the alt-right and act under the guise of legitimacy, to comfortably permeate mainstream discourse. The Southern Law Poverty Centre states that male supremacy has provided the foundation to the racist alt-right, serving as its “gateway drug” in blaming feminism for the supposed decline in Western civilisation. Personalities from MRA and PUA manosphere groups have straddled t h e l i n e b e t w e e n m a l e s u p re m a c y and the alt-right, disseminating their hateful messages to the wider public.

As one example, the founder of the MRA website A Voice for Men called for October to be bash-a-violent-b---month, whilst the founder of the PUA website ReturnofKings advocated for the legalisation of rape on private property.

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hatred when it is mostly concentrated on self-loathing and solidarity-seeking.

Incels believe that they have failed at being men or that society perceives them as failures, which has resulted in detrimental impacts upon their self-esteem.

Restrictive expectations of masculinity stifling men’s emotional lives and mental health often remain an underreported issue, and incels do provide some valid critiques informing these debates. There is a societal importance placed on looks, with specific idealised masculine and feminine physiques and white and able-bodies hierarchies; but incels feel outside of body positivity and inclusivity movements, which seek to challenge this culture. Depression and loneliness are common themes discussed in the incel community, and there are a concerningly high volume of threads asking members if they are or have been suicidal, along with posts encouraging suicide. A poignant issue is that vulnerable men visit incel forums seeking support; however, instead of getting the help they need, they are taught to hate themselves to the point that their lives are worthless. There are real risks of a generation of (young) men being indoctrinated to self-loathe and blame women for it. This needs to be taken seriously and mitigated against via greater gender equality education in schools and colleges, better mental health support, and social media companies taking more responsibility about the harmful content available on their platforms – especially by preventing the echo chamber effect from occurring, developing digital citizenship programmes, and cultivating open and honest conversations about healthy relationships. The profuse misogyny and indulgence in narcissistic violent fantasies is clearly inexcusable and harmful to women and wider society, but the depression, anxiety, and suicide ideation demonstrate that being part of the community is also

harmful to incels themselves.

It is imperative that the threats posed from the ideologies within the incel community are not left unchecked. There are significant risks to not only women, society, and incels themselves but also to Western democracy and progressiveness.

For too long there has been a reactive approach to misogyny, with terrible incidents such as high-profile murders of women or incel-related attacks evoking public interest in misogyny, when in reality the hatred of women has been able to flourish both on and offline, unabated and often unchallenged. There is a virtual war against women, a war which is fought through the dehumanisation of women and ideological tactics in private online spaces as well as the public mainstream, which increases in prevalence whenever women make equality gains and/or substantially challenge men’s violence against them. If we don’t confront this issue, society risks becoming regressive and systems of oppression will continue harming everyone, irrespective of gender.

KADOGOS GEORGES SENGA Translated from the French by Jane Downs

few years ago, the Congolese government banned all military-style games designed for children including les plaines des jeux, which brought together a large number of young people aged between 6 and 18 and took place every year during the school holidays. This ban highlights the link that exists between a child’s desire to play war games and the recruitment of child soldiers in the various armed conflicts that have plagued the Democratic Republic of Congo. This desire was both incited and maintained by these games, although the violence perpetrated by the different armed groups depended directly on the malleability of these children and continues to make headlines – a number of trials

are still in progress at the international criminal court.

The main aim of les plaines des jeux was to occupy young people and divert their attention away from other less productive social activities that might lead to poor behaviour. Yet young people organise themselves in ways that represent their social reality and are influenced by their social environment, especially those living close to military camps where they witness the morning gatherings of soldiers known as “parades.” With the appearance of the “AFDL,” of which the “KADOGOS” or child soldiers, were a part, their influence spread across the entire town.

When influenced, children like to dress up as soldiers and to

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fight one another, and although this confrontation is not violent, it is in the attire, the dance steps, and their choreography that the difference (from other games) becomes apparent. In 1997, I myself witnessed child soldiers in the town of Lubumbashi, and, some years later, I saw children playing at being child soldiers simply to get some money at the end of the school holidays. It is true that in the Democratic Republic of Congo there really are child soldiers, but we allow them to exist a second time when we let our children play these games…

I decided to make portraits of children in this environment of “play” – of children who seek to adopt an identity based on influence. Their stories are really illusions because in their new identity, they don’t see themselves as child soldiers but as great military men – a fact that has given me a new way of seeing the reality that I and the other children of 1997 lived alongside those real child soldiers.

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The portraits of these children ran through my mind and reminded me of the story of a real child soldier named Serge Amisi, who was recruited by force, who did not choose to become a fighter. Deprived of his rights, he decided to tell his own story so that he would not be forgotten. In placing the portraits of children who are playing at being soldiers alongside the account of a real child fighter, I wanted to underscore the force of the written narrative through the selection of a few paragraphs from his book and my own visual record of what I experienced in 1997, to produce fictional works that show that this reality continues to exist in the DRC and raises an important question: What is the future of the Congolese child?

With a fiction, I seek in his book the paragraph that speaks to me and touched me; I interpret that with a photograph to put game and reality.

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CHOOSE YOUR OWN (LOVE) ADVENTURE:

hen people ask me how long I’ve been polyamorous, I’m monogamy is bad per se. Monogamy is a great choice for a lot of not sure how to answer. While it’s true that my first people! Instead, this framework helps to emphasise how much or polyam relationship was when I was 17, that one data how little choice people feel like they have when it comes to being point doesn’t tell the whole story. When you live in a mononormative monogamous or not. world, it can be hard to trust the voice inside of you that tells you When you’re told over and over again that monogamy is the only monogamy isn’t for you. Most of us are taught from childhood to mature, adult way to be in a relationship, you can find yourself look for “The One.” That one person who will be everything we fighting an internal battle, like I was, between what you’ve been want and need. We’re told that being in a long-term, monogamous told and what your own heart and gut are telling you. For me, even commitment is the sign you’ve finally grown up. After all, what kind from a young age, I found myself, again and again, starting to fall of monster would want more than one person? in love with someone new before I stopped being in love with the I still remember the internal struggle I felt in the months leading person I was already dating. Since the myth of “The One” states up to my marriage. Part of me kept screaming that I wasn’t happy that you’ll be fulfilled and happy when you’ve found The One, I in this monogamous relationship. But at 23, I thought that the took this to mean that the people I was already with weren’t The man I was to marry was the best I could hope for. I told myself One, so I had to break up with them. After all, when you really that this marriage was part of me growing up and doing the things love someone, you won’t find yourself wanting someone else, right?

I was supposed to do in order On the other side of that to be a real adult. I would be coin was the ways in which I viewed by others as someone found myself trying to force who had completed the the person I had designated next item on the grown-up as The One to be what I WHEN YOU’RE TOLD OVER AND checklist. And besides, what wanted and needed from OVER AGAIN THAT MONOGAMY IS if I threw away this person them. We’re often told that THE ONLY MATURE, ADULT WAY who wasn’t awful and all I The One will be your best found was something worse? friend, your confidant, your TO BE IN A RELATIONSHIP, YOU Before we get too deep support, your cheerleader.

CAN FIND YOURSELF into stories, it might be Your “Ball and Chain” will FIGHTING AN INTERNAL BATTLE... helpful to define some terms. become your automatic plus Polyamory, often written in one at any function and shorthand as polyam, is the anything you want to do desire/practice of having without them will require multiple loving relationships with the full knowledge and consent their permission. So what happens when The One doesn’t want to of all those involved. People who do polyamory can be from all give you what you want and need? Either you try to stop needing kinds of backgrounds, and the way that people enact polyamory and built a wall of resentment between you, or you try to make can look just as diverse as those who practice it. While there are them give it to you. After all, it’s your partner’s responsibility to lots of ways to be polyamorous, there are also a variety of ways to make you happy, right? And if your partner is finding too much be non-monogamous that aren’t polyamory (including people who happiness that doesn’t include you directly, well clearly that’s a identify as swingers, monogamish, or open). threat to your special and unique bond.

Mononormativity is the term to describe the sociocultural When I think back to how I thought relationships were structure that privileges those who are in monogamous, or supposed to work, I see so many cultural narratives that make monogamous-appearing, relationships. It also describes the ways healthy monogamous relationships harder to build. In many in which the culture and those within it pressure those around ways, the scripts we have about relationships that come from them to be monogamous. As with heteronormativity (the cultural mononormativity are ones that reinforce our entitlement to our paradigm that assumes everyone is straight until proven otherwise), partner – their time, energy, attention, body, heart, and mind. It mononormativity is all around us and woven into every bit of makes sense that when we live in a capitalist, white supremacist, our society – it’s in the law, the stories that get told, the ways we ableist patriarchy, our ideas about love and sex would be polluted support or challenge our friends and family, and the expectations with the toxicity of these systems of oppression and control. The for what it is to be “functional” or “healthy.” This is not to say that sexism in our culture tells us that (cisgender, straight, white, abled)

HOW UNPACKING MONONORMATIVITY TAUGHT ME HOW TO LOVE DR. LIZ POWELL

PHOTO BY ELIAS MAURER

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find most pleasing, is one of coercion and starting to surround myself with. In these men are entitled to the deference of people control. In The Dance of Anger, Harriet communities and relationship structures of oppressed genders. White supremacy Lerner talks about how so many of us, what I saw was not hedonism or depravity teaches us that white people are entitled to especially those of us raised as girls and but a deep and meaningful desire to create the deference of BIPOC folks, especially women, learn that when we’re upset about systems of empowerment, agency, and Black people. Late-stage capitalism teaches something our partner is or isn’t doing, we healthy interdependence. us that the rich are rich because they’re should focus on getting them to change.

First among these lessons was that you smarter, more moral, and better than those However, this just keeps us in a tug-of-war cannot own your partner. Warsan Shire, in who are in poverty and that the rich are between my partner’s desires and mine.

“For Women Who Are Difficult to Love,” therefore entitled to better lives and to What if, instead of trying to force my wrote about how a person may be drawn dictate how to live to those below them partner to be what I want, in socioeconomic status. In a I was instead trying to see culture so deeply entrenched where our desires overlap. in structures of control, Where do we already fit power over, and entitlement, WHEN I THINK BACK TO HOW well? Once I see that I can we could not help but create I THOUGHT RELATIONSHIPS then consider what kind of relationship models filled with a relationship I could feel the same toxic dynamics.

WERE SUPPOSED TO WORK, good about having with When I finally separated I SEE SO MANY CULTURAL them. If my partner hates from my now ex-husband, NARRATIVES THAT MAKE cheese and I want to have I found myself facing the cheese with every meal, contradiction between the HEALTHY MONOGAMOUS insisting that we eat the ideas I had internalised RELATIONSHIPS HARDER TO same food for every meal about what love and dating BUILD. IN MANY WAYS, THE together is bound to cause should look like and what SCRIPTS WE HAVE ABOUT pain for us both. Either my I was realising about myself partner is eating something and how I work. Deciding RELATIONSHIPS THAT COME they hate or I’m not eating to be polyamorous for the FROM MONONORMATIVITY what I want to be eating. foreseeable future forced me ARE ONES THAT REINFORCE Wouldn’t it make more sense to confront and unpack the for us to either eat different assumptions I had about what OUR ENTITLEMENT TO OUR foods or not eat together? healthy relationships look like, PARTNER – THEIR TIME, When we try to force what my partner owes me, and ENERGY, ATTENTION, BODY, people to be what we want, what my responsibilities are in we rob them of their ability a relationship. I had to face HEART, AND MIND. to be authentic. We tell my own failings to show up ourselves that our love for the people I loved in ways for them and desire to be that lived up to my values. I loved by them justifies this had to take responsibility for act of limitation and control. But what if to a person’s wildness only to try to tame the harm I inflicted because of my fear, we thought of love not as the feelings we it. In the monogamy I learned, it was my insecurity, and pain. have but the actions we take, as bell hooks right to tell my partner what they could On the whole, this work more than suggests in All About Love? Is it loving to do with their body, heart, mind, and time. anything revealed for me lessons that can treat our partner like an unruly child or They were mine. I was also theirs, and so if make any relationship better, not just wild animal? Are we being loving when we they limited me, it just meant that I would polyamorous ones. I saw that, contrary insist that our partner accept harm in order get to limit them back soon. This kind of to what I’d been told, mainstream to be loved by us? I personally think that approach to love, wherein each person tries monogamy had a lot to learn from the being loving is about honouring that my to cut their partner into the shape that they queerdos, perverts, and sex geeks I was 34

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partners are the top experts on their own lives. They know better than anyone else what they need and what will make them happy. I am loving, then, when I encourage them to share that knowledge with me and respect their right to do what is right for them, even if it’s not what I prefer, up until the point that their choices harm me.

I also think it is loving to tell the people I love “no.” Acceding to their desires that I know are wrong for me doesn’t help either of us – I become hurt, angry, bitter, and resentful, and they get a message that their entitlement and control are acceptable.

Another lesson I learned was that explicit, clear negotiation is a lifesaver in relationships. Mononormative relationship culture is full of assumptions about what kinds of behaviour are or aren’t acceptable.

If you look at any of the research on what is considered cheating in romantic relationships, you will find that there is very little agreement among those who respond. Some consider having close friendships cheating, some consider fantasies or porn to be cheating, some don’t consider anything but sex with another person to be cheating. Yet how many monogamous couples have a clear discussion about each of their definitions of cheating and monogamy?

In his TEDx talk “Sex Needs a New Metaphor,” Al Vernacchio talks about a new metaphor for sex in contrast to the sports and competition metaphors we most often hear – pizza. You can’t win at pizza, and you don’t usually try to force someone to eat pizza they don’t want. You also don’t tend to just order pizza for someone else and assume you’ll know what they want unless they’ve talked to you about it. While Vernacchio primarily applies this metaphor to sex, it works equally well for dating.

Those of us in polyamorous relationships tend to have very explicit discussions about what we want, need, and expect from our relationships with each person.

Since we know we’re not operating from the standard social script, we recognise that making assumptions is likely to create problems. Thus, we’re able to find clarity where many traditional monogamous relationships find murk.

We also work to recognise when we’re upset about something that we assumed our partner had agreed to but which we hadn’t actually discussed. If I’m ordering pizza for a group and I get pepperoni and cheese pizzas because most people like one of those two and I then find out one of the people is vegan and can’t eat any of the pizzas, it’s pretty easy for me to recognise that my assumption was at the heart of the conflict. However, if I didn’t tell my partner that I don’t like it when they take a phone call from their other partner while we’re together, it can be harder to notice how my assumption contributed to my own hurt and anger. In polyamory, we often joke that folks think we spend tons of time having sex when in reality we spend tons of time talking. While it’s definitely possible to spend so much of your relationship processing that there isn’t much of a relationship left, I think that most folks, especially in mainstream monogamy, don’t talk nearly enough about the concrete wants and needs they have, or about the hurts and harms they’re experiencing. Pretending there isn’t a problem rarely leads to a solution, and most of us are terrible at mind reading.

So we give ourselves and those we love the best chance at joy when we take the chance to be explicit and clear.

Finally, one of the hardest lessons I had to learn was that change is the only constant and any relationship that has to stay the same in order for me to be happy is destined to be temporary. If you want to be someone’s partner for 40, 50, 60 years, or more, it’s highly unlikely that both of you will stay the same or only grow along parallel paths. Many

of us like to think of “who we are” as something that is deep and unchanging, but there is little research to support this belief. Even at the cellular level, we are entirely new creatures every seven or so years. None of us will come out of the COVID-19 pandemic the same people we were going into it. Not all change is bad, and sometimes the changes that we experience mean that the kind of relationship we had with someone doesn’t fit anymore.

In non-monogamy, especially in models like Relationship Anarchy and solo polyamory, we look at how the “Relationship Escalator” tells us that relationship progression is linear and unstoppable. You can’t go from living with someone to not living with them unless you break up entirely and start over on the escalator with someone new. The Relationship Escalator then guarantees that we will find changes in ourselves or our par tners more challenging as each step up destroys the steps below or to other directions. If we want to be able to love people for half a century, we need to find our ability to renegotiate and restructure what that relationship is such that everyone in it can still thrive. Furthermore, sometimes the change that our partner needs is one that means we will no longer be able to have something with them that we used to have. We may need to agree to lose parts of a relationship that we value or that we wish we could keep. Sometimes those losses may mean we cannot be close with the person anymore, but more often, when we acknowledge our feelings, needs, and boundaries, we can find a way to be connected still.

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BREAKING BORDERS NATALIA TOLEDO Poems in Zapotec, in Spanish, in English.

Translated by Diego Gómez Pickering

Ra biziaa ca lindaa Ridide’ ca dxi nexhe’ lu xhaga ne ná’ ca gue’tu xtnine’.

Rarí’, ndaani’ yoodi’, ma gaxti’ xhaga ne ná’.

Bixhozedu biasaca’ ne zineca’, ladxido’do’.

La herida de los linderos Paso mis días sobre las mejillas y los brazos de los muertos.

Aquí, en esta casa, ya no quedan mejillas ni brazos.

Nuestros padres migraron y con ellos, nuestros corazones.

Boundaries’ Wounds I spent my days between the dead’s cheeks and arms Here, at home, there are no cheeks nor arms left Our parents migrated, and our hearts with them.

* Beelayoo Xoopa’ gayuaa gueere’ bi ridxaa ti binni huala’dxi’, beelayoo naca guie gundaa laanu ne nisadó’ nayaase’.

Lu ti ndani guie guirá iza risaananu guie’, ne lade ca guichiyaa, riuunda’ xtinu ma ziyaca nayati.

Ca lindaa nandxó’ guca’ xtinu nisi ti neza bandaga guie’ naguiichi riaana.

Carne de casa Seiscientas varas de viento por un indio, linderos de piedras nos separaron del mar mulato.

Acantilado en donde todos los años dejamos flores y entre huizaches, nuestras voces cada vez más débiles.

De nuestras mojoneras sagradas solo queda un camino de pétalos espinados.

House Game Six hundred sticks of wind by an Indian, stone boundaries that kept us away from the mulatto sea.

A cliff where every year we leave flowers and amongst huizaches,1 our voices increasingly weak.

Of our sacred markers, there is only a path of thorny petals left.

*

Guichigeeze’ Sica lidxi bizu lade za zeeda ca ridxi yati xti’ ca xiiñu’ bireecabe guiidxicabe sica za bidó’ ladxidó’cabe gui’di’ ñeecabe ca guiichi nuu guidxilayú.

Ma bixiá xtuba’ ca’ binnigula’sa’ ma bixiá ra bizee necabe ne rinni xticabe.

Ma bisabacabe laya bigose guxhacabe laa guixhe ni bisabane biní Ra ga’chi’ ca bidó’ xtiu’ guiiba’bi xti’ dxu’ guxha’ laa.

Espina de pinole Como enjambre de abejas de las nubes baja el zumbido de tus hijos, exiliados abrazan su corazón de cera con la que pegarán sus pies a las espinas de la tierra.

Ya no existen las huellas de los antiguos ya borraron donde dibujó su sangre.

Al zanate lo han desdentado le quitaron la red con que sembraba semillas.

A tus lugares sagrados: ventiladores extranjeros los han exhumado.

Pinole2 Thorn Like a swarm of bees your children’s humming descends from the clouds, exiled, they embrace their wax heart with which they will glue their feet to the earth’s thorns.

The ancestors’ footprints no longer exist where their blood was drawn has been erased.

The rook has been left toothless, the net used to sow seeds taken away.

Your sacred places: have been exhumed by foreign fans.

A type of acacia abundant in Mexico.

Roasted corn flour, sometimes sweetened and mixed with cocoa, cinnamon, or anise.

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PHOTO BY ISABELLA MARIANA

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PROTESTING IN THE PANDEMIC: MEET THE ACTIVISTS OF 2021

PHOTO:@SRAVYA_ATTALURI

KATY WARD

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t’s late summer 2021. Climate justice group Extinction Rebellion is nearing the end of two weeks of planned action in London. Almost 500 people have been arrested as protestors block London Bridge with a large bus and smash windows in the offices of investment bank JP Morgan. Meanwhile, sister group Animal Rebellion has also enraged royalists by s m e a r i n g t h e f o u n t a i n o u t s i d e Buckingham Palace with red paint and claiming the Queen has blood on her hands over animal agriculture and hunting.

Media scrutiny has been intense and public opinion divided: Many are sympathetic with the cause, while others lament the disruption to everyday life. Most are somewhere in between.

Watching rolling news from my home in the northeast of England, the images of the protestors intrigue me or rather make me feel faintly uneasy: not because I disapprove of direct action. Far from it. These activists force me to identify a personal failing and question whether I ought to have a more highly developed social conscience myself.

Even as a teenager, I lacked the protestor’s irrepressible spirit and, despite being aware of issues such as climate change and gender inequality, they seemed somehow on the periphery. In a move I still regret 20 years later, I even mocked the zeal of the student rep who ran the ethics committee at university. Perhaps I was jealous of her. My socialist father, who railed against any injustice and died when I was 18, would have been furious.

Clearly, today’s Generation Z doesn’t share my adolescent indifference. My teenage niece regularly attends rallies for climate justice and Pride. And it’s not just younger activists who have been struck by the urge to protest since the pandemic began. Several of my middle-aged, middleclass, right-leaning friends have also recently taken on the role of activist. Have

the events of the past 18 months made it impossible to ignore issues of women’s safety, race, and climate justice? Feeling decidedly self-conscious about my past apathy, I put out a call on social media to meet the protestors of the pandemic and find out what motivates them to take to the street and the web.

One of those to respond was Tolmeia Gregory, who attended the protests in London known as the Impossible Rebellion, during which she made a speech at an action outside Selfridge’s to highlight the fashion industry’s links to fossil fuel.

“Climate crisis is the crisis of our time, and I need to be channelling all of my energy into it,” says Tolmeia, who was named one of the UK’s leading environmentalists by Forbes. “Joining direct action, organising, and protests are what really changes things […] The more time goes on, the more desperate we’re getting, so I think something will and has to happen. We will make a movement strong enough, it’s just a matter of patience and doing everything we can in the meantime.”

From a psychological standpoint, it’s unsurprising that the incidence of protests and activism has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. “People felt less in control of their lives and our sense of control is necessary to our overall wellbeing, including our sense of safety,” says Kate Nightingale, consumer psychologist and founder of Style Psychology.

“I would not be surprised if that has intensified at least the need to protest in people. However, there is a bit of a way from intention to behaviour.”

Neil*, 42, is one of those protestors who attended his first rally during the pandemic in the form of BLM protests in Parliament Square in London, during which violence erupted between police and protestors outside Downing Street. As a person of colour, he believes events had reached a tipping point in terms of race but still has

THERE IS…A REMARKABLE INTERSECTION BETWEEN THE ISSUES FACING PROTESTORS AND THOSE RUMBLING BENEATH THE SURFACE OF MAINSTREAM CULTURE: THE PANDEMIC, CLASS SEGREGATION, INCLUSION, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND EVEN INTERNAL CONFLICT. mixed feelings about events.

“A friend asked me to go along and said that we couldn’t ignore everyday racism after George Floyd. I knew she was right, but I’ve got to admit I was a little reluctant.”

An Oxbridge graduate, Neil admits he has enjoyed the benefits of coming from an affluent class, which he feels sometimes places him in an ambivalent position.

“I never really felt like I fit in with the stereotype of the disadvantaged young Black man. I always felt a bit guilty when I saw how tough other young Black men had it.”

Despite this, he never felt fully completely comfortable among his circle of university friends who are predominantly white. “When I’ve been in a restaurant on a date with a white woman, there’d be glances and dirty looks.”

Although there were media reports of violence on the day he attended the rallies, Neil witnessed little of this himself. “I mainly felt stressed and overwhelmed. I felt ESSAY

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a bit like an imposter because I didn’t really know what to do.”

After returning home, he decided not to tell his family about his involvement. “My dad talks about how protest isn’t the right way and would never forgive me if I ended up with a criminal record. For fuck’s sake.

He was a Black man in the ’60s.”

But what does it mean to be arrested during a protest? Before speaking to Kat Hobbs, communication coordinator at police monitoring group Netpol, I would have been totally unprepared if I had attended a rally and faced arrest.

Would I be compelled to tell the police my name and address if asked? (No.) How long could they hold me without charging me? (24 hours, although this can be extended to 36 or 96 hours in the case of a serious crime such as murder.) Should I accept a police caution rather than go to court? (Kat says not.)

For Kat, the uncertain legal position protestors face has been exacerbated by the conditions of COVID-19 and the upcoming Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill in the UK. According to the government’s website, the bill is intended to improve the police’s ability to manage such protests and enable them to balance the rights of protestors against the rights of others.

Kat is not convinced. “As soon as you give the police new powers, the first thing we see is the abuse of those powers,” she says. “One of the reasons BLM demonstrations were so big is the increase in stop and searches and the disproportionate use of coronavirus powers to police Black and Brown communities.”

In fact, she believes the actions of police actively endangered the lives of protestors.

“As a result of kettling [in which police surround protestors before making arrests], people attending London BLM protests were detained for hours at a time in close quarters, making social distancing 40

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impossible. People were denied access to food, water, toilets, and medication, and protesters injured by police violence trapped inside the kettle were unable to leave and seek medical assistance.”

What Kat describes and the stories of kettling in many mainstream media outlets seem at odds with official police protocol. According to regulations issued by the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs Council in December 2020, “We police by consent. The initial police response should be to encourage voluntary police.” Under its policy, police will take a four-step escalation approach when dealing with protestors – engage, explain, encourage, and only as a last resort, enforce. Crucially, this guidance did not award police the power to “stop and account” in which officers can stop a person in a public place and ask for details about who they are and what they are doing in the area.

Through Kat, I also learn of the existence of legal observers: trained volunteers who support the rights of activists by providing basic legal guidance and acting as independent witnesses to monitor police behaviour at protests and connecting arrestees with support at the police station. Crucially, the observers do not participate in the protests themselves.

Whatever chaotic images we see of protests in the media, there is evidently a layer of professionalism and organisation behind these actions.

Likewise, Extinction Rebellion also has its own e-learning platform known as Rebellion Academy. Once signed up, students can take courses on subjects such as arrest support, with course material clearly labelled and online quizzes. It feels more like remote learning than seditious activity.

As a protestor herself, Tolmeia is keenly aware of the question of staying on the right side of the law when attending a

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protest. “It’s a shame that movements such as Extinction Rebellion have put such an emphasis on getting arrested, as obviously, not everyone is in a position where they can do so comfortably, whether it’s for financial reasons or whether it’s because they could actually risk their safety and lives due to police brutality. I think it would be better to focus on why direct action is so essential and why, if we mobilised together en masse, police forces wouldn’t be able to arrest everybody.”

For Sophia Waterfield, who attempted to organise a Reclaim These Streets vigil in March following the murder of 33-yearold Sarah Everard who disappeared while walking home in London, the experiences of police involvement were mixed.

Sarah’s death had sparked a national outcry, and a series of vigils were planned throughout the UK. Such was the level of tension that the High Court began an investigation into whether these events could go ahead. An hour and a half before the verdict was due, Sophia received a call from the police informing her the High Court had issued a ruling preventing the vigils. If she continued with their plans, she risked a £10,000 fine.

“This happened just as they announced that Sarah Everard’s remains had been discovered,” she says. Sophia then contacted the organisers of the Reclaim These Streets, who informed her that the information was incorrect and that the judges had not looked yet at the official papers.

As the official ruling did eventually allow individual police forces to make their own decisions regarding vigils, Sophia and her fellow organisers were forced to rearrange the vigil for a later date in May. By this stage, there had been a highprofile vigil in Clapham Common, w h i c h w a s m a rk e d by w h a t m a n y regarded as excessive use of police force.

The public was horrified by images of

officers holding terrified women to the ground. These feelings were intensified as a serving police officer later confessed to Sarah’s rape and murder.

“It obviously wasn’t a great look for the police,” says Sophia, who says the postponed event in May received far greater support from the police, as well as local BLM groups. What shocked Sophia most was the response she encountered from members of the public. “We used chalk to write Reclaim These Streets and people seemed more concerned about potential graffiti and whether it was going to be cleaned up than the issue of women being murdered on the streets.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the question of gender is at the centre of many protest movements in 2021. Until I met Charlotte Discombe, I was (shamefully) unfamiliar with the concept of ecofeminism: a term coined by French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne, which interrogates the way women and nature are treated by maledominant societies.

“A lot of people don’t know what it means,” says Charlotte whose activism mainly focuses on online campaigns and lobbying politicians. “People assume being eco means being a hippy and being a feminist means being an angry woman who hates men. There needs to be a space for accessible learning and understanding around these terms and movements. Otherwise these stereotypes and misunderstandings will continue.”

While Charlotte and Sophia both made efforts to ensure their actions were within the law, how would you go about organising a protest in which you face potential legal challenges? Rather than communicating over platforms such as Google and Facebook, which are under increased pressure to monitor this type of activity, many protestors have moved across to the Telegram app. Here, there is far less moderation, and many critics

believe it can be a breeding ground for conspiracy theorists.

This idea of furtive or coded behaviour in protest movements had its origins long before apps and social media. “Secrecy makes things more desirable; the idea of a forbidden fruit but also an element of exclusivity, making members feel extra special,” says psychologist Kate Nightingale. “Since secret societies tend to develop their own cultures, codes and rituals, they tend to enhance overall solidarity.”

If your activity has links to the antivaccine movement, the difficulties of discussing your actions online are even more intense. Shelby Thomson is a cofounder of Unjected: a dating app and online community catering to those who have not had the COVID-19 vaccine, which was taken down by the Apple app store in August amidst allegations of censorship.

Living in Hawaii, Shelby and her cofounder created the app when they observed the segregation taking place as a result of debates surrounding vaccination.

Despite being married herself, she says that she had observed an increase in those looking for unvaccinated partners or doctors.

Unjected is, of course, far from the first dating app devoted to a subculture: There are apps for skaters, emos, metalheads, and even bearded men and the people who love them. However, Unjected has faced more criticism than most and sparked global media attention.

“We, of course, get labelled as big anti-vaxxers, but a lot of people in the community wouldn’t even consider themselves that. We’re just not pro mandatory vaccination,” says Shelby, who had no knowledge of app design before creating Unjected.

How does she deal with the backlash against her product during a pandemic in which more than 4.6 million people have

died globally? “We have received backlash, which is to be expected, but we’ve also received an outpouring of love and respect from so many people who are saying, ‘Hey, I, believe in my own autonomy and I want to join this movement […]’ We just […] let it roll off and just keep on going on because, at the end of the day, we’re not standing up for this anti-vax movement.

It’s simply about freedom of choice.”

So, what have been the conclusions of my two weeks of meeting protestors online? Despite fearing that I’d be rumbled as a goody-goody or a conformist, most of the activists I met were welcoming and eager to discuss their cause (often surprisingly so). However, there is evidently a core of these organisations that is not open to outsiders: the Telegram message I’ll never read and the coded hashtags that will be forever lost on all but a select few.

Likewise, there were the protestors I simply couldn’t get in touch with: the organisers of the secret cannabis clubs I had read so much about or those planning immediate destruction of property.

There is also a remarkable intersection between the issues facing protestors and those rumbling beneath the surface of mainstream culture: the pandemic, class segregation, inclusion, social media, and even internal conflict.

What’s also clear is that there is often a solidarity and a great deal of overlap across many of these movements. As ecofeminist Charlotte puts it: “All these movements interlace with each other and can learn from each other, too. You can’t have climate justice without social justice, without gender equality, without race equality, and so on and so forth. We’re all fighting for the same thing, one way or another.

That’s what makes all these movements so complicated but also so brilliant.”

Wr i t i n g t h i s p i e c e o n m y 3 9 t h birthday, I can’t help but feel reflective and slightly maudlin, although I’m ESSAY

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buoyed by the alacrity of Charlotte and her fellow protestors. The horrors of racism, climate change, COVID, and violence against women are impossible to deny, but there are organised groups with a relentless appetite for change.

The younger generation is better than mine. And, while there may be debate surrounding the disruption protests can cause, I have equal reservations about police conduct during direct action.

With the spectre of middle age looming,

I only wish I’d had the zeal and rigour of these protestors when I was 20.

JUST NOISE: THE BARBARIAN THRILL OF NOISE IN MUSIC

*Name has been changed.

KIERAN GOSNEY

THE POWER OF PROTEST ART The notion of art as protest began long before the pandemic, with the Dada artists in the early 20th century and their anti-war pieces often being regarded as the earliest examples. However, the advent of digital technology and shareable content has brought a new dimension to this style of art.

Based in Hong Kong, Sravya Attaluri is the creative lead on the Our Streets Now movement to end public sexual harassment and has lead a #CrimeNotCompliment campaign, with artwork featuring on digital billboards and in shareable Instagram posts. The campaign has so far had almost 450,000 signatures on its petition and has the support of Plan International UK. Litro: What role do you feel art and shareable content can have in the activism movement?

SA: Understanding how to express your emotions through art is so powerful and can help so many people cope with their struggles, especially survivors of public sexual harassment.

There has been quite a lot of discussion around passive/ performative activism and activism that drives action. I believe art goes beyond simple performative actions and offers individuals an active way to visually communicate issues they are passionate about.

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Litro: What qualities are necessary for a protest artist?

SA: An artist needs to feel so emotional about a certain issue that they are driven to a creative medium to give their thoughts form. And the result is often art that cannot only connect with others but also makes them critically evaluate their perceptions or actions.

Our artworks and artists have played a role in amplifying testimonials from survivors of public sexual harassment, raising awareness about the issue and most importantly, driving our community members to take action. With the pandemic, I have realised that art is also a form of activism that increases accessibility, especially when individuals are not able to physically attend events.

Litro: Would you consider yourself an activist through your artwork? How do you feel about the term?

Riots for Stravinsky and cheers for Hanatarashi. How do you get from the tritone as “the devil in music” to an audience facing a wall of white noise with smiles on their faces?

SA: I prefer artivist! I choose art as my medium to educate, empower, and call to action as it has allowed me to connect with a global audience.

It’s amazing, really, how little sound comes out of something you’re smashing with all your might.

– Yamatsuka Eye

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he adventurous Noizu fans who came to see crackpot noisemakers Hanatarashi (meaning snot-nosed) at Tokyo’s Toritsu Kasei Super Loft on August 4, 1985, expected a raucous show. What they didn’t expect was a ferocious performance of industrial-grade destruction, with a backhoe bulldozer as the lead instrument. Handed waivers upon arrival that relieved the band of any responsibility for injury, or worse, the audience watched as frontman and HDV operator Yamatsuka Eye burst through the doors of the hall

atop the bulldozer. With percussionist Ikuo Taketani somewhat safely tucked away in the corner, Eye tore through the stage and inflicted brutal punishment on everything nearby, including the literal kitchen sink, while screaming the band’s trademark scatological and sexual non sequitur lyrics. The beleaguered bulldozer held out until Eye put the hoe into the wall. The dozer tipped backwards and gave out, but after pulling off the dozer’s cage to hurl across the stage and grabbing a circular saw, the destruction continued with the audience now nervously ESSAY

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dodging Eye’s fitful saw swings. Surrounded by bent metal, crumbled masonry, and the squawking remains of Marshall stacks, with gasoline pouring from the ruined bulldozer, Eye produced, as his grand finale, a Molotov cocktail that he’d prepared earlier. This was a touch too dangerous for even this daredevil audience, and Eye, confessing later in an interview for Banana Fish Magazine that he got “too excited,” had to be violently subdued by several members of the crowd.

In the settled atmosphere, once certain that explosive group immolation wasn’t to be the crescendo, the crowd that had remained, many with smiles on their faces, slowly filed out enclosed in their own bubbles of tinnitus. The bill for the annihilation of the Super Loft tallied ¥600,000 (approximately £6000), and Hanatarashi subsequently laboured under a ban from most venues that ran until 1990, when the band, slightly calmer and more safety-conscious, dropped the i and returned to what passed as civil society in the Noizu circuit.

Hanatarashi, along with fellow Noizu bands such as Hijokaidan, indulged in the kind of audial assault that would bring most people to the point of self-induced deafness, but the Super Loft audience signed off on possible death-by-bulldozer just for the opportunity to experience it up close and personal.

Extreme volume, distortion, and cacophony, with a ferocity of performance that completely transgressed the normal bounds of the relationship between the performer and audience, were unrestrained musical expressions that attracted large audiences to the Noizu scene in Japan from the 1980s onwards. It’s been argued that Noise as a genre was born in Japan at this time; whereby the noise was not a wash or flavour, but the whole.

The act of seeking out sounds which most people take care to avoid seems a strange masochistic ritual, but evidenced by the brutalised crowd at the Hanatarashi gig, there is – for some – much to enjoy in noise.

I did Noise Music because I genuinely liked noise…But a lot of people didn’t. At my concerts, people smashed beer glasses in my face.

– Noise musician Boyd Rice aka NON In music, the definition of noise has changed drastically over time and is still debated today. The simplest common usage of the word noise is that of unwanted sound and, although clearly subjective, in some sense this definition also works in the context of music. Noise in music is of a volume/tonality/ structure that breaks from previously held traditions of what is “pleasant” to the ear of the average person, or consonant. What may be considered at the time to be noise can be the sound desired by a particular composer and, one would hope for the 44

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composer’s sake, later embraced by the intended audience. In essence, history has shown that noise in music is unwanted until a musician proves otherwise, with help from a willing audience. Noise can be a disturbance, but disturbance can be key to progression. By prodding at the edges of the normative discrimination, musicians have expanded the appreciation for sounds that previous generations would have found genuinely violative.

Who wrote this fiendish “Rite of Spring”?

What right had he to write the thing?

Against our helpless ears to fling Its crash, clash, cling, clang, bing, bang bing?

And then to call it “Rite of SPRING,” The season when on joyous wing The birds melodious carols sing And harmony’s in every thing!

He who could write the “Rite of Spring,” If I be right by right should swing!

– Anonymous letter to the Boston Herald of February 9, 1924 An amusing example of how dissonant prodding has been received as violative is to be found at the Paris premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des ChampsÉlysées on the May 29, 1913, the year that the Ford Motor Company would develop the first moving, mass-production assembly line. Stravinsky was a young and innovative Russian composer, of little renown in 1913, hired by Sergei Diaghilev to write for the Ballets Russes company, with The Rite of Spring being the third such composition. Prior to the premiere, Diaghilev had promised “a new thrill that will doubtless inspire heated discussion,” and Stravinsky had written the work as a solemn pagan rite and hoped to present a “great insult to habit.”

When first playing the piano version for Diaghilev, Stravinsky was asked how long the dissonant, ostinato chords would sound, to which Stravinsky replied “to the end, dear Serge, to the very end.” The newly opened theatre, designed by Auguste Perret, was as avant-garde in construction as the contemporary music, opera, and dance that was to be presented inside. The geometrically strict and decoratively plain exterior of reinforced concrete mixed modern and classical architecture and made it the perfect venue for what Debussy described as “primitive music with all the modern conveniences.”

The atmosphere before the performance was lively; May 29 was unseasonably hot, reaching a height of 30ºC, and the halls and corridors of the theatre were packed with those who had bought into Diaghilev’s hype. The house was sold out, largely encompassing subscribers for the whole season of Ballet Russe, and there was a 50/50 split in the guest list between the

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Parisian elite of diplomats, dignitaries, and dilletantes, and the Modernist art scene. Patrons such as Daisy Fellowes (née Countess Severine Phillipine Decazes de Glückberg), an elderly Countess de Pourtales, and the ambassador of the AustroHungarian empire represented the upper crust, and batting for the avant-garde were the likes of Jean Cocteau, Maurice Ravel, and Edgard Varèse. Cocteau was quoted later as saying that a scandal was primed by the mix, with “a fashionable audience [in] low-cut dresses, tricked out in pearls, egret and ostrich feathers…side by side with tails and tulle, the sack suits, headbands, showy rags of that race of aesthetes who acclaim, right or wrong, anything that is new because of their hatred of the boxes.”

Alfred Capus, in Le Figaro, reported that during the first bars of bassoon with discordant accompaniment in the closedcurtain introduction, there was prompt hissing and jeering.

Incensed at a perceived misuse of the instrument, Camille Saint-Saëns exclaimed, “If that’s a bassoon, then I’m a baboon,” before storming out. The Countess de Pourales is recorded to have shouted, “I am 60 years old and this is the first time anyone has dared to make fun of me,” to no one in particular.

A back and forth between supporters and discontents followed, with the American music critic Carl van Vechten recalling “a battery of screams, countered by a foil of applause.” At the start of the “Augurs of Spring” section, the curtains opened and the ensuing polyrhythms, unresolved harmonies, rapid dynamic shifts, and familiar themes played in unfamiliar registers did not sit well with the patrons disinclined to experimental music. Furthermore, in an attempt to convey the agony of human sacrifice in a primitive society, choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky had his dancers land their leaps with flat feet, which added echoing thuds to the music. At its worst, the din from the audience was so loud that it drowned out the music, and Nijinsky resorted to shouting out counts to the dancers while standing on a chair in the wings.

According to Stravinsky, his friend Florent Schmitt shouted an insult to a group of elegant socialites, “Taisez-vous, garces du seizieme!” and the various reactions and counterreactions shared between the conservative and avant-garde sections pushed the battle onward. Diaghilev ordered the house lights to be flicked on and off in either an attempt to quell the uproar or, perhaps, sheer excitement at the press-baiting pandemonium he’d created. Stravinsky was horrified by the furore, leaving the auditorium to watch at the wings (it has been alleged in tears, but to claim so seems to kick a man when he’s down), saying later that he had “never been that angry.” At the intermission, the theatre proceeded to eject 40 of the most troublesome

audience members, but it was not particularly successful in restoring full order.

Stravinsky and Nijinsky were devastated by the negative response and embarrassed by the spectacle, but Diaghilev took delight in the publicity of scandal, expressing complete satisfaction at a celebratory dinner after the show. Mainstream reactions in the press to “Le Massacre du Printemps” were not great, with Giacomo Puccini damning The Rite of Spring as “sheer cacophony” and Adolphe Boschot in L’Echo de Paris claiming (pejoratively, it should be noted) that the composer had “worked at bringing his music close to noise.” The performance immediately made waves internationally with the New York Times reporting under the headline: “Parisians hiss new ballet: Russian dancer’s latest offering, ‘The Consecration of Spring,’ a failure.” However, there was strong praise from some publications, and subsequent performances were far more successful.

No doubt it will be understood one day that I sprang a surprise on Paris.

– Igor Stravinsky Dissonant music wasn’t the sole cause of the chaos, with the angular and provocative dancing, anti-Russian sentiment, reactionary morality, and hype all part of a melting pot.

However, the premiere was a key flashpoint in the debate over modernism, in which noise in music was a rapidly expanding form of expression. Arnold Schoenberg’s drive to “emancipate the dissonance” and expand the possibilities of musical expression lent dissonance a cultural cachet in the early 20th century. Schoenberg’s music was noteworthy for the absence of traditional keys or tonal centres, and although he faced a reaction similar to that of The Rite of Spring on occasion, his music and theories had lasting influence throughout the 20th century.

While composers such as Schoenberg and Stravinsky were experimenting with rhythm and harmony, the Futurist Italian Luigi Russolo, in his 1913 manifesto “The Art of Noises,” was arguing that the public, accustomed to the sounds of industry and traffic, were hungry for “the infinite variety of noise-sounds” regardless of whether they knew it or not. For the Futurists, the explosion of mechanical noise in the 20th century evoked the activity, speed, and progression that they celebrated in modern society. Russolo’s revolution was for music to no longer be a canonised system of notes but rather understood as a structure of non-periodic complex sound. Russolo categorised these noise-sounds into six groups: ESSAY

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1. Roars, Thunderings, Explosions, Hissing roars, Bangs, Booms 2. Whistling, Hissing, Puffing 3. Whispers, Murmurs, Mumbling, Muttering, Gurgling 4. Noises obtained by beating on metals, woods, skins, stones, pottery, etc.

5. Voices of animals and people, Shouts, Screams, Shrieks, Wails, Hoots, Howls, Death rattles, Sobs 6. Screeching, Creaking, Rustling, Buzzing, Crackling, Scraping

by 1940 The Rite of Spring was accompanying the extinction of cartoon dinosaurs in Disney’s Fantasia, and the following decades would see avant-garde composers such as Harry Partch, John Cage, and Karlheinz Stockhausen produce music that would have presumably killed the Countess de Pourales on the spot. These experimental composers would eventually find their ideas pushed into pop music by the likes of Sonic Youth, who managed to straddle the seemingly incongruous worlds of MTV and the art music underground, with the benefit of an audience of noise-primed Gen X youth.

We believed that music is nothing but organised noise. You can take anything – street sounds, us talking, whatever you want – and make it music by organising it. That’s still our philosophy, to show people that this thing you call music is a lot broader than you think it is.

– Hank Shocklee of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad, Keyboard Magazine, 1990

LUIGI RUSSOLO AND UGO PIATTI IN THE INTONARUMORI STUDIO IN MILAN

In order to produce these sounds, Russolo constructed 27 varieties of noise machine called intonarumori, each named after a different sound. The device was a crank-operated wooden parallelepiped box with a speaker at the front, the pitch being controlled by a lever on the top. The lever would modify the tension of a metal or gut string, wrapped around a wheel, that was attached to a drumhead inside the box.

Russolo introduced the public to these devices with a concert entitled Awakening of a City and Meeting of Automobiles and Airplanes in Milan in April of 1914, and, continuing the trend of violence in response to noisy spectacle, a riot ensued.

Futurists in the audience responded to booing with fists, and 11 audience members ended up in hospital. In 1926, influenced

by Russolo’s machine music and anticipating Hanatarashi’s use of machines of industry, George Antheil produced Ballet Mécanique, which called for three airplane propellers to accompany the pianos, bells, and siren in the orchestra. The reception to the piece was as mixed as that of the The Rite of Spring or Russolo’s Awakening, and the Paris premiere ended with – you guessed it – a riot in the streets. Despite the early negative reactions to these modernist experiments in noise,

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From the purposefully consonant compositions, within strict rules of tonality, of medieval religious music to the chaotic noise of Tokyo’s Merzbow or Detroit’s Wolf Eyes, dissonance has moved from something to be avoided to become an allencompassing driving force. What was an imperceptibly gradual change before the 20th century has now become rapid. The relationship between an experimental composer and his noisy environment and the advances in music technology has led us to the point whereby people will pay for a MP3 of almost pure white noise and call it music. Cued by Willie Kizart using a damaged amplifier on the recording of the Kings of Rhythm track “Rocket 88” and furthered by Dick Dale’s work with Fender, the electric guitar turned distortion and feedback into an art form, driving music more towards timbre than harmony.

Experiments with synthesisers, from Elisha Gray’s basic single note oscillator in 1876 to Hugh Le Caine’s Electronic Sackbut, engendered real-time, precision control of volume, pitch, and timbre. Rather than Russolo’s acoustic noise generators, noise could now be artificially created in exact and varied ways. With the development of recorded music from tape to digital memory, sampling became a new form of replicating and altering environmental noise. Just as Russolo and Antheil would take from the sounds of the modern mechanical world, musique concrete would mimic the electronic age with the use of tape loops and purely electronic-produced sound.

The digital revolution would lead to the hip-hop sampling of Public Enemy, which took the sounds of New York streets and media soundbites and reconfigured the noise into dense music,

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punctuated by sirens and drills, that articulated urban conflict.

There are many ways of conceptualising dissonance. The term consonance comes from the Latin consonare, meaning sounding together, and has become synonymous with particularly harmonious intervals in Western music. However, there is a psychological aspect to consonance and dissonance that is subjective and has changed throughout history. Psychologists would describe dissonance as a negative valence emotional response, meaning that it conjures feelings such as anger and fear; emotions that relate to suffering. In harmony, consonance and dissonance refer to specific qualities an interval can possess but, although consonance relates to mathematical constants, musical experiments outside the acceptable ranges of the time gradually attuned the human ear to more dissonant sounds.

In the Middle Ages, the tritone musical interval (the interval between, for instance, F to the B above) was once prohibited by the Roman Catholic church due to its dissonant qualities and perceived ties to the Devil. Nowadays, however, this very interval is one of the main building blocks in jazz harmony, especially in the music of Duke Ellington and Art Tatum; music considered completely palatable to today’s ear.

Differentiation in ability to determine pitch, timbre, volume, and time between tones could account for more or less appreciation of complex music. When two pitches are played together the mind appreciates the combination while also picking apart the unique pitches. More distortion or dissonant intervals will lead to added overtones and sum tones, creating very complex waveforms, which will force the listening brain to work harder to decipher it. These complex waveforms are what people would be hearing in music they consider to be difficult. The reason why some people react so poorly to modern classical music that delves into dissonance is that there are no easily discernible patterns. Philip Ball, in The Music Instinct, writes that “the brain is a pattern seeking organ, so it looks for patterns in music to make sense of what we hear.” The lack of predictability of tone sequences in the music of Stockhausen, for example, can confuse the brain, but the mind can learn to appreciate the complexity. We learn to appreciate this through listening to more complex music but, as the noise in our environment has increased, it is our adaptation that further enables us to enjoy what previously was rejected. The music mimics the noise in the environment and, in turn, the environment programs us to accept more noise as music.

Who are these loud and noisy people?

They are like fishermen hawking fish.

– Buddha

How much has noise increased in the past few hundred years? Statistical comparison is a struggle, but noise appears to have been a concern for every society throughout history. The Buddhist Digha Nikaya, committed to writing in 29 BCE, records some contemporary noises of concern: “Ananda was neither by day nor night without the ten noises – to wit, the noise of elephants, the noise of horses, the noise of chariots, the noise of drums, the noise of tabors, the noise of lutes, the noise of song, the noise of cymbals, the noise of gongs, and the tenth noise of people crying, ‘Eat ye, and drink!’”

Allowing for the unknown volume of an ancient Buddhist toast, the loudest sound on the list is that of the Asian elephant, trumpeting at a maximum of 90 decibels. The decibel level of the loudest sound in a city environment would increase as time went on, pacing more rapidly in the decades leading up to the 20th century. In an 1896 article entitled “The Plague of City Noises,” a clearly irate Dr. John H. Girdner called attention to the “injurious and exhaustive effects of city noises” from such sources as horse-drawn vehicles, bells and whistles, animals, persons learning to play musical instruments, peddlers, and that most infuriating member of late 19th-century street theatre, the organ grinder. What Dr. Girdner and the Buddha share is a concern for largely natural sounds of animal and human activity. However, the industrial and urban development of the 20th century altered the makeup of street noise, and a poll of New Yorkers in 1929 issued an updated list of 10 sounds to break a Buddhist samantha, with every one a product of a mechanisation.

The everyday noises of Girdner and the Buddhists pale in comparison to what the modern ear has to contend with, especially bearing in mind the logarithmic nature of the decibel scale. Rule of thumb: The sound must increase in intensity by a factor of 10 for the sound to be perceived as twice as loud. A car horn (120 decibels at one metre), a jet flyover at 1,000 feet (103 decibels), a power mower (96 decibels), a food blender (88 decibels), and a car driving at 65 mph (77 decibels at 25 feet) could conceivably occur simultaneously and for extended periods of time, albeit in a particularly poorly situated home. Even the average lowest limit of urban ambient sound today is 40 decibels; a constant hum that crosses the frequency spectrum.

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Natural sounds generate a sinusoidal wave, with rounded peaks, which is easy on the ears. Many mechanised sounds are square or sawtooth shaped or have jagged edges. If you see them on an oscilloscope, you’ll know why they’re unpleasant to listen to.

– Gordon Hempton

life years annually from noise-related disability and disease.

Noise could also be making us less kind to one another, as research into noise as an urban stressor has found that a noisy environment can increase antisocial behaviour.

A series of studies at Wright State University in the mid70s found that noise interferes with social cues from a The increasingly urbanised and industrialised modern world person in need of help and reduces helping behaviour. At the has become a place of almost constant unnatural sound. The University of Washington in 1979, further study into noise American acoustic ecologist and social discrimination Gordon Hempton contends found that noise may that in the whole of the cause people to distort Un i t e d St a t e s t h e re a re and oversimplify complex IN ESSENCE, HISTORY just 12 places that could social relationships. be considered naturally Key to these outcomes, HAS SHOWN THAT NOISE “s i l e n t .” B y m e a s u r i n g both physiological and IN MUSIC IS UNWANTED average noise intervals at psychological, appears to be UNTIL A MUSICIAN PROVES various locations over time, our primal response system.

Hempton demonstrated Studies of blood chemistry OTHERWISE, WITH HELP FROM that in the state of have shown that exposure A WILLING AUDIENCE. NOISE Washington, there are just to noise causes an increased CAN BE A DISTURBANCE, BUT three places that are free production of epinephrine, from anthropogenic noise DISTURBANCE CAN BE KEY TO a central component in the for longer than 15 minutes, fight-or-flight response. The PROGRESSION. BY PRODDING AT compared to 21 places in more “unpleasant” a sound, THE EDGES OF THE NORMATIVE 1994. In the UK, research by the more the amygdala, DISCRIMINATION, MUSICIANS Sheffield Hallam University which plays a role in found that the Sheffield processing fear, is activated HAVE EXPANDED THE City Centre was twice as and therefore the stronger APPRECIATION FOR SOUNDS loud in 2001 as it was in the emotional response.

THAT PREVIOUS GENERATIONS 1991. With this increase in The only rational the spread and intensity of reactions to an environment WOULD HAVE FOUND GENUINELY noise, there has followed that threatens are either VIOLATIVE. a general adaptation and to escape or to adapt. acceptance of noise but H o w e v e r, e v e n i f o n e accompanied by some very can ignore it, there is no negative consequences. physiological habituation to The word noise is derived from the Latin nausea, meaning noise; an auditory assault affects us even when not consciously seasickness, and noise can have many physiological and registered. Furthermore, it appears that the adaptation to noise psychological effects that are deeply unpleasant, even causing that modern life requires is leading to an increased fear of permanent harm. In addition to the obvious hearing damage silence. In 1999, the BBC accountancy office was refurbished that can occur from repeated exposure to loud sound, with noiseless air-conditioning, double- glazed windows, and diverse research over several decades has uncovered a variety silent computers. The makeover was effective in abating noise, of problems related to noise exposure. Fatigue, irritability, but the employees were uncomfortable. They complained insomnia, headaches, anxiety disorders, depression, and an that the silence was stressful, leaving them feeling lonely and increased prevalence of stress diseases have all been shown to paranoid that others were listening in on their phone calls. be possible negative consequences. A WHO report from 2011 In response, upon consulting noise expert Yong Yan from the estimated that Western Europeans lose over one million healthy University of Greenwich, the BBC decided to buy a noise 48

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machine to combat what Yan calls Pin Drop Syndrome. This covered the silence by producing a continuous 20 decibel murmur of unintelligible voices, with the occasional snippet of bottled laughter, and the accountants relaxed into their faux-hubbub soundtrack. In a world of noise, silence equals exposure. The noise can fill in spaces that separate, cover up the sounds that bring attention, and blend individuals into an amorphous group. Perhaps it was this comforting, masking relationship with noise that the BBC accountants were found to be craving when absent.

Our ears have an inbuilt hypersensitivity to sound that was invaluable in the days when humans were hunter and hunted.

We can hear a pin drop in a quiet room because our auditory system enhances the volume of a sound to several hundred times louder than the source volume before the brain itself registers the sound. While humans have transformed their relationship to environment and the conscious perception of noise, the brain and auditory system are still somewhat stuck in the fightor-flight world of precivilisation. We tune out the noise in our daily lives, but the physical and psychological forces are still present, pushing up blood pressure and promoting the release of stress hormones behind-the-scenes, even when we aren’t consciously aware of the sound.

“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating” – John Cage, The Future of Music: Credo, 1961 Today there is no firm basis for a distinction between music and noise. With the abandonment of traditional, harmonic definitions of consonance and dissonance, the distinction is entirely subjective and particular to context. There is no such thing any more as the “non-musical sound” that John Cage wanted to highlight in his compositions; everything is fair game. We are born into noisy environments, and the necessary adaptation means that the normative level of acceptable noise has been rising exponentially with each generation. But with musicians of today using white noise, the entire range of audible soundwave frequencies heard simultaneously, where is there left to go?

The Austrian anthropologist Michael Haberlandt claimed that the more noise a culture could bear, the more “barbarian” it was. Hanatarashi’s bulldozer performance was nothing if not proudly barbarian, but the violent expression was peacefully received – unlike the riots that followed the performances of earlier noise music. Noise has found its audience, and the Noizu crowd at Tokyo’s Super Loft were purposefully escaping

any sense of tranquility, seeking out that dangerous thrill that the body provides when the fight-or-flight response goes haywire. Like skydivers and train-surfers, they were after the exhilaration that comes from hacking the body’s primordial response mechanisms. They were all freaking out together, each body screaming to run but with safety in numbers and the perversely comforting wash of noise connecting and concealing everyone. The enjoyment of the performance came from the transgressive destruction on not just the venue but the audience themselves. They were pushing at the biological limits of their minds and bodies, going against the grain, like the boundarypushing experimental music, in order to feel a rush. In earlier decades, or centuries, that rush could have been achieved with less. The charge of a herd of elephants or the clattering and cheering of a horse race might have once been at the upper limit of common noise, but with the constant, and constantly increasing, cacophony of noise in our environment today, the level of acceptable noise has been dragged further up the decibel scale and further out from consonance. The result of this trend is that the noise music listener will always be like a heavy drug user who requires an ever increasing fix. The Hanatarashi fans amongst us are bathing in extreme noise to induce the fightor-flight response; musical adrenaline junkies looking for a high that the body and mind will continue to adapt to over time. Only, unlike drug use, everyone is taking noise everyday, whether we like it or not, and we have to choose to either embrace it or escape it.

But where to escape to, when silence is disappearing? Perhaps noise music highlights how people are too accepting of the damage and social alienation that the daily exposure to noise is producing. Are we all barbarians for living with noise that would have driven our forbears crazy? Noise is now presented by health authorities and scientific studies as a pollutant but, unlike with oil spills and insecticides, some people inure themselves to this pollutant through choice. By choosing to embrace the constant noise of modern life, with all of its negative effects, they are like the BBC accountants, a symbol of the slow death of silence. If a solution isn’t found, there might come a point where the silence on Earth is found through noise-cancelling headphones rather than a trip out of the city, and natural silence will have truly vanished. And what will the music of that time sound like? The Rite of Spring sounded like noise, even Beethoven sounded like noise to the ear of the day, so in a few hundred years time will we be looking back on Hanatarashi with a feeling of quaint nostalgia as we wonder how anyone could have considered such classics as “Boat People Hate Fuck” or “White Anal Generator” to be noise?

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JOURNEY TO THE OTHER WORLD LILIAN PIZZICHINI

PHOTO BY FOTIS FOTOPOULOS

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love railway stations at night, and my holiday romance began with a sighting of the Trans-Siberian Express framed in Russian Revivalism: a hangar decorated in loops of wroughtiron and panels of frosted glass. Energy was pulsing from the tracks. Faces were etched with anticipation and impatience.

My journey was beginning here. Queues of passengers were moving along raised gangways between wooden handrails. On the rows of orange plastic seating, we waited to board. We coughed, spat, shifted about, and spoke in a loud hum under the vaulted ceilings. A woman wept in the arms of her mother. Other relatives formed a protective circle around the plastic bags that contained the belongings accompanying her on her journey. The Trans-Siberian is not primarily a tourist train. It is a commuter train for passengers who cross five time zones and two continents in search of work. Built for steep gradients, it is the most powerful freight locomotive in the world. The train I was boarding was called the Rossiya. Decorated in red and grey stripes, she was unveiled at Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Plant in Rostov-on-Don as part of Railwaymen’s Day celebrations on August 3, 2014. Everything about her – her name, her livery, the place and date of her launch into the world – resounded with reminders of why I had come here in the first place. This was Russia. Here comes Asia. There goes Europe.

Finally, the platform was announced in ringing tones across the Tannoy. I was as giddy with excitement as I had been on approaching the Aeroflot jet bus at Heathrow. This time I was greeted by a provodnitsa (conductor) in the Rossiya’s red and grey stripes. A jaunty cap topped off a cheeky, freckled face. But her genial features were in stark contrast to her taciturn manner. She took my ticket with

a disapproving scowl and showed me to my cabin. She did not speak English but managed to convey through mime that the samovar was at the end of the carriage.

She had the efficiency of movement that only the petite have. With the flick of a wrist, I understood that there were toilets at either end of the carriage and that the dining car was the next carriage along.

She left me in a cabin that was caramel in its décor and charmingly snug. I was limbering up to be enchanted. I would not have to wait long. The train heaved into action, and Moscow faded from view.

Soon I would be feasting on the sense of immensity that mirrors my yearning for something larger than myself, in which I can forget myself.

But first things first. I made my way to the restaurant car stepping from one carriage to another over chains and cables joining the coaches together.

It was a nerve-wracking undertaking.

The train was clanking and shifting in alarming, arrhythmic jolts as I stepped over the metal grate, under which I could see the rails slipping past very fast.

The restaurant car was empty except for two men drinking beer. One was small and shaven-headed in combat trousers and a string vest. I had seen many men like this in Moscow. They were manual workers whose muscles come from labour, not the gym. With glassy eyes and an absent air, they have the signs of a chronic dependency on alcohol. His companion was a bear in casual sports gear with Mongolian features. He was scrolling down the screen of his mobile, impervious to his drinking companion whose head was now resting on the table in front of him.

I ate my vegetable soup by the cinemascope window watching suburbs become farmland become abandoned factories before revealing a slow reversion to taiga. The dining car of the Rossiya was

slowly filling. A young Dutch woman sat opposite me. A retired English couple joined us. Rows of birch get monotonous after a while, and here were curtains of them. I wanted to slip behind the curtains and be part of the performance they were concealing. But all I had was the Dutch woman, Adele, telling her story. I pictured her at home with her indulgent father and placid mother in a Dutch suburban setting.

I listened, but I could not help feeling that something interesting was going on behind these stretches of forest, and that my view was barred. Russia makes extravagant promises to travellers; it spreads like ink that has spilled across the nodal point for East and West. It contains ethnicities that bring with them strange customs and unfamiliar facial features. Not wishing to be impolite, I returned my attention to my travelling companions. They looked at me expectantly. What was my story?

In the ’70s, when I was a curious, bookish child, I had written to the Russian embassy and asked them to tell me about their country. They sent me pamphlets and brochures. I was disappointed. Secretly, I had hoped they might send me an invitation. Perhaps if I had told the collective I imagined reading my letter that I did not feel at home in South London, that my dysfunctional family was squeezed into a compressed, mouldy flat when other seemingly non-dysfunctional families lived in spacious villas, they might have offered me free passage. I was fascinated by the notion of Communism. I was angry at the unequal distribution of living space. I wondered if I should write again and explain that I was unlike my compatriots; I did not fear a society based on equality. If I did tell them, maybe they would send me the invitation I was hankering for, and ESSAY

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maybe I would find a home amongst my new comrades. The thought haunted me.

In 2018, when I finally got my ticket to Mother Russia, there were strange goings-on in the English cathedral town of Salisbury. This did not deter me. In fact, it gave me added impetus. As a writer and as a woman, I have gone into unlit spaces where no one is what they seem. I am almost recklessly at ease in this darkness. What does scare me is the administrative process of doing things, and the bureaucracy of arranging visas and accommodation did prove to be formidable. I hired a travel agency to smooth them away. This is probably not in the spirit of people who go on pilgrimages. You are supposed to revel in the blisters and the obstacles. But this kind of challenge does not appeal to me.

My pilgrimage would consist of a journey over the Urals into Siberia. Events: There wouldn’t be any. I was sure of that.

People: They would offer insights or they would recede from view. Emptiness: This was what I wanted, an empty space where I could feast on the riches that I knew would be coming my way.

Because at the end of my train journey was a destination I had invested with magic powers. It was so foreign it outforeigned Russia herself. Lake Baikal: a body of water, the largest and reputedly most beautiful body of fresh water in the world; a rift lake bordering the Republic of Buryatia and Irkutsk Oblast (district), invested with geographical significance, ecological significance, and divine authority granted by Buryat shamans who trace their lineage back to Genghis Khan. I had not yet reached Lake Baikal, and it had already sucked me in. * When I finally found him, there was an undercurrent in my encounter with Valentin Khagdayev that I struggle to put into words. It was as though, cloaked 52

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in ceremonial robes, intoning shamanic spells and, later, in his normal workaday clothes, sitting at his kitchen table, lecturing me on Western sanctions and Russian fortitude, there was no sign of who he was, just how heavily he was weighed down. A heartbreaking loss, the burden of unexpressed grief and how it bends people, how it shapes a society and strips an individual of his or her dreams – perhaps this was what I saw in Valentin Khagdayev.

A shaman is a middleman, a Mr. FixIt. In other words, he is an ecstatic, a soul-projector, a spirit-master. Valentin had a lot to live up to. To his neighbours, he is the tourists’ shaman. Even his cousin, one of my drivers, shook his head when I said I was going to see him.

“The real shamans only see their own people,” he said. I was disappointed when he refused to take me to them. I saw myself consigned to the kind of show tourist agencies put on for coach groups, full of bells and whistles and sing-alongs. I wanted an authentic, soulsearching experience. I had come all the way to Siberia, and I was not going to leave till I had dug deep into the earth of this vast, terrifying land. I had to see Valentin because I wanted to see inside the mystery of a continent that since I was a child my country of origin has considered the enemy. Everything about Russia, even its alphabet, spells mystification. I wanted to see the land that Gogol talks about when he describes h i s f e l l ow w r i t e r Pu s h k i n s a y i n g , “Goodness, how sad is our Russia!” and yet “...what is this inscrutable, mysterious force that draws me to you?”

I wanted to see if Valentin Khagdayev could explain what this force was that I myself felt emanating from the waters of Lake Baikal.

When I eventually look into the saddest eyes I have ever seen, I think Valentin understood this. Three years later I

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have not forgotten him. When I heard news of his colleague, a shaman from eastern Siberia who was forcibly hospitalised for offering to cleanse Putin of his demons and, more controversially, to cleanse Russia of Putin, I thought of Valentin.

In a post-secular world, Russia’s President Putin takes religion ver y seriously. If you happen to be Russian Or thodox, this is good ne ws. The Patriarchate’s embrace of Russia is so encompassing that it represents the geopolitical struggle of Orthodox Russia with its high moral values, tolerance of people of different cultures, and love of country in contrast to the spiritless West and its artificial concepts of political correctness, which do not require citizens to love their own country. In 2012, the church wrapped its grip around the courtroom with the trial of the Pussy Riot collective and other “blasphemy” trials against artists. This was in Moscow, Putin’s showcase. There is an old Russian saying that roughly translates as “the further you are from Moscow, the closer you are to God.” I was more interested in what was happening in some of the more obscure departments of Russia, where I hoped the grip would be looser.

Across the formidable expanse of Siberia, where the continent of Europe becomes Asia, ethnonationalist identities are being shaped by the practice of less orthodox but far older belief systems. In particular, Siberian shamanism is enjoying a resurgence. To express it in layperson’s terms, Shamanism is a mix of religion, naturopathy, and occultism. To express it more fully, one has to tell a story. * I disembarked the train just before it reached Mongolia, at Irkutsk, the Paris of Siberia. This was the southeastern part of the Siberian Federal District and the ancestral land of the Mongols and the khans. Hilly country surrounds the

memorise the “Moral Code of the Builder The campaign against smiling started in city. Herds of horses and cattle feed on the of Communism.” Many forgot their own the early Soviet era. Old agitprop posters broad pastures that spread out from the language, not to mention their religion. No show US capitalists wearing cylinder hills. My first driver was Anatoly, a direct one has told them that it’s okay to smile hats, smoking cigars, and smiling as descendant of one of the Cossacks who again. Or maybe they have forgotten how. they relish their piles of money and their came to this region in 1661. The Cossacks A new driver took over from Anatoly. power over the exploited classes. The founded Irkutsk Oblast as a satellite state Leonid was a Buryat, with a weatherimage of an insincere smile was used to of Tsarist Russia. Before the Cossacks beaten face as severe and unwelcoming as depict US politicians, “warmongers” drove them out, this land belonged to the Anatoly’s. The further I got Buryats, close cousins to their from Irkutsk the flatter the neighbours in Mongolia. land became; it was exposed Shamanism has been to winds from all directions, practised here for centuries WHEN I FINALLY FOUND HIM, so that every breeze was a (except during the Soviet sign of incoming weather. era, when any expression of THERE WAS AN UNDERCURRENT Some distance from the spirituality or freethinking IN MY ENCOUNTER WITH highway the land was an was a ticket to the gulag, if VALENTIN KHAGDAYEV THAT I empty space that filled me not execution). The closer with awe. Underfoot, there we got to Lake Baikal, the STRUGGLE TO PUT INTO WORDS. was spongy thistle and more Asian features I saw in IT WAS AS THOUGH, CLOAKED IN aromatic herbs, and to my the faces around me. Baikal, CEREMONIAL ROBES, INTONING mind this immense, treeless the oldest lake in the world, steppe was as enchanting is sacred to shamans; for SHAMANIC SPELLS AND, LATER, as the pine forests I had them, it is the holiest place IN HIS NORMAL WORKADAY watched from my cabin in the northern hemisphere.

CLOTHES, SITTING AT HIS window on the train.

There were still signs of KITCHEN TABLE, LECTURING ME At Lake Baikal, the sun Buryat shamanism along was high and the sky was the empty highway. The cult ON WESTERN SANCTIONS AND blue and the water was of obo, holy places of power, RUSSIAN FORTITUDE, THERE cool and transparent. It totem poles, were the most WAS NO SIGN OF WHO HE WAS, was once the purest on visible sign. At each obo, the planet. Local legend Anatoly paid tribute to the JUST HOW HEAVILY HE WAS has it that swimming in local spirit guide. He got WEIGHED DOWN. Baikal gives you an extra out of the car and placed five years of life. Its water, a cigarette at the bottom filtering down from the of the shrine. He advised surrounding mountains in me to sprinkle mineral 183 streams, is so clear and fresh it is like from the military-industrial complex. water in the four cardinal directions. drinking Perrier. In terms of surface area, But it also applied to normal Americans, It should have been milk or vodka, but the lake is as big as Belgium. Its volume who, Soviets were told, used smiles never mind. We then took advantage of is equivalent to all five of the North to betray one another in business and the narodnidom, or “people’s house,” that American Great Lakes. And just as the personal relations. A smile also indicated stands beside each obo. In the old days, cliffs rise up several hundred fathoms an egotistical expression of individuality travellers could find a room, stables, and from the edge of the lake, so do they go inappropriate to a collective community. a samovar. Now we entered breezeblock down to its bed. Given its unfathomable During the Soviet era, which lasted cafés with Formica tables and unsmiling depths, it is the largest body of water in just short of 75 years, the Buryats, like proprietors who serve up borscht and the world and, in a million years or so, other Soviet citizens, had to believe in the pelmeni. Packs of dogs whine for scraps will have become a sea. Another legend USSR, learn to speak only in Russian, and of meat or affection. No one smiles here.

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has it, and local newspapers report it to this day, that visions suddenly appear out of nowhere: Villages hang over the lake in summer, trains roll silently across the ice in winter, and castles and ships float on the horizon.

Stories of ghosts and gulags were coming fast and thick now. It turned out that my new driver, Leonid, was cousin to Valentin the shaman and one of the 16th generation of his family to live on Lake Baikal. “All Mongols and Buryats are descended from the same 272 men,” he said, and those 272 men were Genghis Khan’s sons. The ruts in the land were several feet deep. The 4x4 UAZ 469 was a real vintage piece, originally built in 1971 for the army. Stones smashed against the truck’s belly as we jolted from side to side. We were coming to the part of landscape around the lake that is semidesert. The road to the tract was constantly dissolving, and at times it would have been impassable if it hadn’t been for Leonid’s iron-fisted grip on the steering-wheel. This went on for hours.

In a forest clearing, we stopped to pick berries. Through Alina, my interpreter, I asked Leonid about his life. He said he had spent his youth in one of the labour camps that once surrounded the lake.

What was that like? I asked naively.

“Fishing in all weathers and processing it with my bare hands standing up to the waist in water; spending the night in the barracks, wet through and with very little food. The prisoners had it worse. In the winter, they stood for several hours at a time in frozen water holding the nets; they caught the omul under the ice and ate it raw.”

The steeliness of this man seemed unbreakable.

“When a stormy wind blew,” Alina said, echoing Leonid’s words, “the Sarma – we rejoiced.”

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Sarma is the coldest wind on the lake. It blows at 40 metres per second.”

I was speechless in the face of such extremity.

“Yes. Leonid and his colleagues rejoiced on those days because they were days off.”

It sounded brutal, I said.

He preferred it to being a tourist guide, she replied.

Why? She turned to him and repeated my question.

“I didn’t have to talk to anyone,” he said.

With the subject of tourism, Leonid’s tone became harsh. He was angry that tourists come to Baikal – this stretch of the planet that was so precious to his people, this cosmology of animal spirits and lost souls, where a species of shrimp eats all organic matter and keeps the water clean; they come and they climb over its sacred places, where the gods meet once a year on marble rocks jagged as fangs and where the Lord of the Lake lives in a cave festooned with red lichen.

They come here to take selfies and deface obos with their litter.

“They leave ribbons on poles and have no idea what they are doing. They don’t understand our traditions. When they go, when the season ends, we remove their ribbons and burn them. We keep our sacred places hidden.”

Mo re t h a n a n y t h i n g , m o re t h a n i r r i t a t i o n w i t h n a i ve t o u r i s t s a n d uncaring authorities and contempt for the hotels that dump their waste into the water, Leonid grieved for Nature. Leonid loved this land, and I found myself jealous of his place in it.

“A shaman is born once in 100 years with a cleft thumb.”

This is how Alina introduced me to Valentin Khagdayev. Unlike his cousin Leonid, Valentin is trying to educate the world about Buryat shamanism. In a windswept, bleak encampment called

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Yelantsy, about 160 miles northeast of Irkutsk, Valentin puts on displays of Buryat dance and storytelling. He is one of the few Buryats who actually speaks the Buryat language. He can even read it.

Like the steppe that harbours folded green shoots from the taiga, Valentin keeps his people’s language safe. The descendant of a long line of shamans, he was born with a split thumb on his right hand, a kind of sixth finger that is considered a sign of the shamanic spirit. As a boy, he was sent to live in seclusion with elders. He grew up in a yurt, learning the old ways. Despite stints in the Communist Youth League and the Soviet army, Valentin held to his beliefs. When I met him, he was wearing robes and carrying a drum similar to the Irish bodhran. It was made from animal skin stretched over a wooden frame and decorated with feathers and magical symbols representing spirit journeys to the Otherworld. He invited me into his home. I had just bought offerings for the spirits he was about to importune on my behalf, and I was having doubts.

The lady in the shop where I had done my shopping had just told Alina that Valentin was considered to be a tourist’s shaman, not the real thing. “ The real shamans don’t talk to Westerners,” she said, echoing Leonid’s words. “They help their own people.”

I asked Valentin about the grief his cousin felt for their country. Leonid had mentioned that the Chinese wanted Lake Baikal back – historically, it had once belonged to them. And now the lake and surrounding land are providing “the factory of the world” with raw materials – oil, gas, and timber. Increasingly, Chinese-owned factories in Siberia churn out finished goods as if the region were part of the middle kingdom’s economy.

In fact, Baikal is targeted by China’s Belt and Road strategy.

“All the hotels they are building are illegal,” Valentin said. “Chinese property d e ve l o p e r s p a y l o c a l s t o p u rc h a s e building permits in their name. They then tear down the traditional buildings and construct hotels and car parks so that they can come here every summer.”

Every summer Russian newspapers run headlines about a Chinese “invasion,” about its “conquest,” and even “China’s yo k e ,” a re f e re n c e t o t h e Mo n g o l stranglehold over Russia in the middle ages. Headlines like this inflame nationalist fervour and fears about Russia’s more prosperous and populous neighbour.

“Because of the sanctions from your country and the US, we need China to help our economy.”

Valentin led me past his family home, a concrete bunker in a windswept moonscape, into his yurt. He is a large man in the mould of Santa Claus, and he has an open and generous nature.

He showed me the cleft thumb on his right hand. “Like your Anne Boleyn’s,” he said, as though I might go and knock on her door and ask her to show me this sign from the gods.

To communicate with the spirits, he would have to go into a trance, “riding” his deerskin drum into the spirit realm, which was a mirror image of ours. He wore a long blue silk coat as armour to protect him against dangerous spirits he might encounter. He showed me his drum and explained how he got it. In unfelled woods that stand on an island in the middle of Baikal, Valentin had received his fifth level of initiation. He was given the drum by shamans who were more experienced than him. “This was a long time ago when I was young.” He is about 50 now, and there are no shamans in the Baikal region at a higher level.

One of the key features of a shaman, according to Mircea Eliade’s book on the subject, is that they go into an ecstatic

trance. Would I see Valentin reach an altered state? Already I could see there were so many obstacles. Shamanic actions can only happen within a culture that has a place for them, not only through an adequate cosmology but also through a social context that recognises and values the activities of a shaman. So far, I had not seen signs of Valentin being valued by his community. The use of the shaman’s services needs to be crucial. His service may have been crucial to me, but was that enough?

I asked him about the initiation process.

He described a trial that, as a recovering alcoholic, I could recognise. The process mostly takes place as a form of symbolic death or dismemberment, which is then repeated several times throughout one’s life as a shaman. Usually, the first trial is a serious illness from which there is a miraculous recovery. But those shamans born with an ambiguous gender, or an extra finger, like Valentin, can skip that part. Their shamanism is inherited. For the others, after the recovery from a neardeath experience, the shaman is removed from ordinary society (as is the newly sober alcoholic, who no longer partakes of alcohol and thus undergoes a removal from the world that consumes alcohol as a matter of course). Everything is different after this first test for the shaman; senses are sharpened, insights occur.

“At the ninth level,” Valentin said, “shamans receive the gift of levitation.

Not since the end of the 19th century have we been able to reach this level.”

I asked Valentin whether his children were taught the Buryat customs at school. “ The Constitution states that all ethnicities are equal, but these are just words,” he said. “Our schools don’t teach Buryat culture or language or music.

When the government donates money to preserving our traditions, it’s really just for the tourists.” Valentin’s children were

swimming in the sea of Russian language, Russian TV, and consumer goods.

Finally, he began the ceremony, intoning and tapping his tambour. The language was Buryat, and there was no pause for translations or explanations. I watched for signs of rapture. Instead, I saw intent. His concentration was total.

Although at one point, to my chagrin, he had to take a call on his mobile. I sneaked a shot with my phone camera, but the smoke from the stove made it blurry. He shook off worldly matters and took up his tambour again. I tried to shed my cynicism. The throbbing of his drum gained in urgency. I felt the rhythm course through me – an energy was taking the place of words and giving me freedom. The smoke from his stove was summoning a vision, a memory, perhaps, stored in genetic code from the days when his forerunners would have sacrificed a horse to the god of thunder.

Valentin’s song grew ever more intent as did the beating of his tambour, as did my anxiety. At first, I could not place it. But then I realised my anxiety stemmed from that fearful initiation. But in Valentin’s yurt, there was no sacrificial beast, no near-death experience. Instead, we fed the stove milk, butter, vodka, cigarettes, tea, thyme, and tinned meat – all from the corner shop.

I was glad when the ceremony was over. The pathos of Valentin’s loneliness and the weight of my expectations had begun to press on me.

I asked him how he saw the future for his people.

“Sanctions from the West will only make us stronger.”

Anatoly, my Cossack driver, had joined us for tea and noodles. He nodded enthusiastically at Valentin’s statement of national patriotism. The Buryat shaman, the descendant of Genghis Khan, was Russian after all.

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“We Russians come together to face the enemy,” Valentin said. Anatoly almost smiled.

B u t t h e r e a s o n s f o r Va l e n t i n’s identification with Russian hegemony are depressingly obvious. The Buryats have been virtually wiped out in their assimilation. Even the name Buryat is a Soviet creation, applied during the ’30s to separate them from their brethren in Mongolia. Just as it was in Soviet Russia, it is safer in Putin’s Russia to toe the line.

Feeling outnumbered, I asked Alina what she thought about sanctions from the West.

“I’m too young to have an opinion,” she simpered.

We were standing in Valentin’s doorway now. Anatoly had opened the passenger door of his 4x4. He was pawing the ground like a nervous racehorse, waiting to take me back to Irkutsk.

“Whoever the politicians are,” Valentin said as he clasped his hands together, “they are hand in hand with businessmen.

It’s about the money.” He uncoiled his fingers and shook my hand gently. As we said goodbye, Valentin revealed the weariness that prevents him reaching the transcendence of the ninth level.

This lonely man, isolated within his community because of a perceived betrayal of their customs and isolated from Russia at large because of his ethnicity, had brought me back to my childhood in south London. I was the daughter of another dark-eyed, haunted man – an Italian immigrant, exiled from his homeland and his culture, and ultimately, from himself. But there was something more in Valentin. The fragility of the practices he was trying to promote were set against his steely determination to continue.

I got back into the car. My phone pinged. It was an update on my news channel. Two Russian citizens had been 56

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identified by Scotland Yard as suspects in the attempted assassination of the Skripals in Salisbury. I read the headline to Alina, and she translated for Anatoly. I was curious to see if they would criticise their government or mine.

What I got was no comment. Once again, I was left feeling the discomfort of a naïve child who asks questions in a place where it is safer to leave them unanswered. Far better to focus instead on the journey to other worlds.

I watched a young man ahead of us on the long road for the city. He was on a motorbike. He was racing at the highest speed. He seemed to be powered by an overwhelming impetus to reach his goal. I thought of the time when Genghis Khan had a horde of one hundred thousand men just like this one, riding one hundred thousand horses, all of them driven by an overwhelming impetus to reach their goal.

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