Anthology III

A N T H O LO G Y I I I

ANTHOLOGY III Critical and creative work by students of Creative Writing and English Literature, The Cass School of Art Architecture & Design Designed by BA Graphic Design and BA Illustration students from the Visual Communication cluster, The Cass School of Art Architecture & Design 2018/19

Anthology: A collection of critical and creative writing

by Creative Writing and English Literature students at The Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design. published by

The Cass Press The Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design London Metropolitan University, Old Castle Street, London E1 7NT londonmet.ac.uk/thecass designed by

Students of Studio Ink, Visual Communication, The Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design 2018/19 Lead book designer Michael Brown Cover design and illustration Michael Brown illustrations by

Shannon Johnston Howes, Phoebe Niner, Shila Grant-Burnett, Sara Green, Francesca Dompe, Chloe de Silva, Noah Gurden, Urszula Wojcieszczuk, Kirils Vinokurovs, Joana Reis, Katharina Kawaters, George Daniel Bursuc, Dami Olasoji, Edem Caliph, Rafael Hardy, Irina Bruna, Vivienne Mahon, Ayesha Jarratt, Iga Szuman-Krzych Copyright Š 2019 The Cass Press Printed in the UK by Park Communications Cover paper Extract Khaki by GF Smith Set in Baskerville, and Gill Sans Nova from Monotype All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

CONTENTS vi

Foreword

viii Introduction

1. Connections 2

Poems for Her by Amy Melly Illustrated by Shannon Johnston Howes

10 The Golden Beehive of the Invisible by Maddalena Eccher Illustrated by Phoebe Niner 18 Vibrations by Ashini Fernando Illustrated by Shila Grant-Burnett 26 Frank O’Hara: Jazz, Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism

by Rowan Benson Illustrated by Sara Green 32 Computer Love by Bobby-Lee Verkuijl Illustrated by Michael Brown 40 Biosemiotics by Holly Evans Illustrated by Francesca Dompe

2. Loss 50 The Water’s Slow by Joshua Derraji Illustrated by Chloe de Silva 56 We’re Done by Janet Barnett Illustrated by Noah Gurden 66 Water. Flesh. Semen. Blood. Bone. Water. by Amy Melley Illustrated by Urszula Wojcieszczuk 72 The Disappearing Girl by Katie McTaggart Illustrated by Kirils Vinokurovs 80 Grown Up by Joshua Derraji Illustrated by Joana Reis

3. Journeys 88 Transition by Janet Barnett Illustrated by Katharina Kawaters 96 Skin by Ashini Fernando Illustrated by Shannon Johnston Howes 104 Compliment to the tailor by Janet Barnett Illustrated by George Daniel Bursuc 114 Rosita by Niamh Fitzgerald Illustrated by Dami Olasoji 124 Paths by Rowan Benson Illustrated by Edem Caliph

4. Power 134 12,000 Years by Bobby-Lee Verkuijl Illustrated by Rafael Hardy 142 Classified by Katie McTaggart Illustrated by Irina Bruna 152 Gilgamesh by Federica Morgillo Illustrated by Vivienne Mahon 160 Tesco Chainsaw Managers by Joshua Derraji Illustrated by Ayesha Jarratt 168 Morality and the Fictional World, Nabokov’s Lolita by Maddalena Eccher Illustrated by Iga Szuman-Krzych

FOREWORD Andy Stone Head of The Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design

The production of the annual Anthology has become a mainstay in the culture of conversation and collaboration between different areas of creative practice within The Cass.

Anthology III, the third publication arising from the relationship between English and Creative Writing and Visual Communication students and staff in The Cass, demonstrates the importance of a professional and reciprocal relationship between practitioner and client.

In this circumstance that dynamic shifted from one to the other many times as the reflection on, and interpretation of each other’s work established itself. The result is here, and is testament not only to that dialogue but to the benefit such a creative relationship has for those who then use, read or experience the outcome.

This book contains the work of ten writers and twenty graphic designers and illustrators. The professionalism they have shown and that is evident in such a beautiful production is evidence of their imagination, care and craft.

The students’ work is supported by the combined talents and energy of academic staff and I would like to thank Trevor Norris and Angharad Lewis for their continued ambition for the Anthology.

The students have grasped the opportunity to progress the book. The

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themes addressed in the four chapters are resonant in their personal and shared experience and I hope readers will engage with many of these.

The trio of publications now represent a significant body of work and each proceeding group is now able to identify with what has been produced and to challenge and advance that work individually and collectively in a single volume.

I would like to congratulate everyone involved in the production of Anthology III. I am delighted that The Cass can so publicly celebrate the abilities of our students and graduates. It is a visible, tangible product that carries their work beyond their course, school or university to new audiences.

May it the first of many for everyone who has contributed.

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INTRODUCTION Trevor Norris Course Leader, Creative Writing and English Literature

I’m delighted with the visual, design and creative work that has gone into Anthology III. This project is an essential expression of the ethos of the Cass, and this may well be the first time our design and writing students have seen their work as a printed book. The project shows that our students are creative makers who can respond to a client’s brief and work within deadlines to professional and industry norms. One of the great pleasures of the anthology is seeing all of the additional design that supports but does not make it into the final work. What we see in the book is the result of on-going and diffuse visual creativity across many different forms. I hope that you also enjoyed the exhibition of this supporting visual work in the summer show. Projects like this are celebratory and result in beautiful objects so I’m very pleased to add Anthology III to my library at home.

In this year’s anthology there are four chapters: Connections, Loss, Journeys and Power, and the writing takes us through many different ways of thinking, feeling and creating meaning in our lives. We begin with stories of connection that may at first seem obscure but which show us we are related in profound and surprising ways. Part of our connection to each other is the ever-present possibility of loss and our second chapter takes us into some difficult and sombre work but reminds us of literature’s great power, that following

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other people through an experience of pain can be a source of renewal and hope. In chapter three we move beyond what is comforting and known, and think about the complicated journeys and transitions that our lives involve, and how separation and frustration can lead us into purposeful change. The final chapter considers structures of repressive moralism and abuse, and asks us what we do in situations that are unjust. This is another of literature’s great gifts, to show us complex subtleties of thinking and feeling from the smallest to the largest scale.

As always, my thanks go to colleagues in Creative Writing and English Literature who workshopped and informed our final year students’ work: Sunny Singh, Andrew Cutting, Sid Bose and Nandita Ghose. Thanks also to Angharad Lewis and Alistair Hall for providing the design students with such a careful and rigorous experience of creating and publishing a book. Finally, many thanks to Head of School Andy Stone for supporting Anthology once again. Solid support for collaboration is crucial for what we do.

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CONNECTIONS

1.

CONNECTIONS

CONNEC TION S

Poems for her Written by Amy Melley Illustrated by Shannon Johnston Howes

HIS To be sure he will show you at some point and leave it trailing amid the confusion like a lost child dropping breadcrumbs.

Like a certain kind of naïve, bad piece of art that makes you want to stare harder.

It will spark a blaze that will entice you to reside, gridlock, patterns of urgency. Insignificant fog strangles his breath. He smirks, observing you examining him. He interprets your yesterday for you and makes remarks about the ways people consume one another.

Some things continue for years without discussion.

He shepherds your hold under sheets of pressure, shows you the damage. Waving it in front of you, he’ll pretend it’s yours alone.

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HOPELESS, 2001 I want to take her bronzed arm and pull away from the car. I want to see her face, not defiant, held in my palms, no, be defiant, still. I need to tell her about my own father. I want her to stop looking at him, for confirmation like mine, each screw working its way under her fingernails. She is open, hiding behind black threads of bravery. I wish I could pour myself into your bucket, I would call out to you through the ripples, can you hear me, over all his noise?

I want that look for myself: shackled eyes, serrated. Severing ourselves completely so all that is left is some pretence of love.

My youth seeps out from your curled toes, telling me, there is hope.

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SAY YOU’LL BE THERE Baby, you blasted into my life like a rocket and planted something at the root.

A new monarchy, female, convicted for being everything and nothing for the time; obvious fools to men, belonging to us.

See, Kathy likes these girls.

Now, their tornado has dwindled like water down a drain making room for new storms.

Awakening a rhythm from ocean to ocean, plots develop into fields of pouts and bare midriffs; sprouting before dawn full of doubt.

They aroused a rage that I wasn’t aware of then.

Perfect for an adventure on a midnight train, hire as ‘mistress-secretary’, shred by shred, groping catching, manufactured originals, whispers like seashells held to my eardrum.

Still relish in the remains, peeled back to our younger selves, we had such pure intense desire to transform.

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SUBTEXT They were… They don’t always know… They don’t always remember everything exactly the way it happened… It’s problematic because… They don’t always remember every word uttered… They need to be more…

Clear… Sometimes they freeze… Sometimes they go somewhere else completely… I would fight back… I would do… Something… They said… He said… She said… The consequences of one glass too… The consequences of being too pretty… Not pretty enough… Sometimes they can’t help themselves… Some of them should know better… They feel ashamed because…

They are entitled to a fair… We must know all the facts… We must be sure…

In this case… Some of them lie… Some of them want to ruin lives… Some of them… Their behaviour smacks of… There must be something to be said… They were wearing… Asking for it.

TO JENNA This will end, the memory of your hands will return to my body as a spirit – not yet ripe, but delicious your intimacy, like the furled end of a violin. Your busy, giving edges surround my mouth again and again.

You showed me the mountains on the tops of your shoulders where they had all left their mark.

Left with a desert covering bones.

I thought you were the bravest girl I ever met, Bob Marley records floating out onto the river.

My face found your purity and knowledge there.

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The hot, insistence of your nipple to my lips.

Your caress, adamant, possessive, seeking me, intoxicating talk and wispy touches meeting me where I waited for you to be ready to accept me.

Tough Adam, you are nothing, though you seem like everything.

I mark former loves on flesh while you pluck the colour from another woman.

I do not care (but what are you doing right now?) and I don’t think a ripe one will surface tomorrow, it’s just that this has been tough.

Floating here in a sea of bedsheets, bones tingling, my sips sound lonely, please lie near them.

You still smell of sex and pomegranate but I won’t tell anyone how good it tastes.

Your hand on my mouth yesterday you said I was beautiful.

Can you give me something to stop the pain please?

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CO M M E N TARY

I have chosen to look at the themes of belonging and identity and sex, gender and sexuality. With these poems, I have attempted to challenge the structures of cisheteronormative phallocentrism and gender performance. ‘His’ is a poem about a heterosexual relationship and the ways in which men communicate their romantic feelings. The poem is speaking directly to other women in these circumstances. I have taken inspiration from the beginning of I Love Dick (Chris Kraus, 1997) when Chris’ infatuation with Dick is first introduced. After meeting for the first time, Dick shows Chris some of his art to which she responds that it is ‘bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active.’ I have used this concept in the third and fourth lines in the poem. I have used metaphors, including fog and art, to represent romantic feelings, to show the ways in which people talk indirectly to each other and how this can be fascinating, and also frustrating, at the beginning of a romantic relationship. ‘Hopeless, 2001’ is an ekphrastic poem written in response to Tracey Moffat’s photograph ‘Useless, 1974’ (1994). The accompanying caption to the photograph states ‘Her father’s nickname for her was “useless”’. Her appearance and the direction in which she is looking suggests that her father is supervising her washing his car.

During our discussion of I Love Dick, we discussed the fact that there is twenty years difference between Chris and Sylvère and this raised questions of who we get our sense of selves from. As children we get this from our parents.

In her chapter on ‘Imitation and Identification’ in Little Girls (Belotti, 1981) Belotti discusses the ways in which girls submit to parental authority from a young age, regardless of their own need for autonomy. I have used some of my own experiences to reflect on how, as children, we are forced to be submissive to our parents; the speaker in the poem is directly addressing the girl in the photograph and I have tried to convey a tone of relief in the last stanza, reminding her that she will not always have to comply. ‘Say You’ll Be There’ is a poem about the Spice Girls, concerning the ways in which they have contributed to third-wave feminism. I have taken some lines directly from an interview Kathy Acker did

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with the group in 1997, ‘Perfect for an adventure on a midnight train, hire as ‘mistress-secretary’ (Campbell, 2018) and I have also referenced Acker in the first stanza. This is to highlight how feminism is intersectional; someone like Acker, an experimental, feminist writer, can appreciate and learn from mainstream girl groups as they are the ones who bring issues such as gender stereotypes to young women and make their theories palatable. ‘Subtext’ is a poem on rape culture and the vernacular used when discussing experiences of sexual assault.

In Sexual/Textual Politics (Moi, 2008), specifically her chapter on ‘Sexism in Language’, Moi discusses a case study where a woman talks about the need to label a common occurrence, ‘… each time she realised that the man was using a verbal strategy for which she had no word and thus had more difficulty in identifying…’. I think this idea can be readily applied to the language surrounding rape culture. In media today we often hear examples of court cases where the victim is questioned incessantly regarding their garments, attitude, the language they use and their levels of intoxication. I have used ellipses to highlight the fact that the statements are seemingly innocent on their own, however when they are put into context with the first and last lines, the reader sees how easily we accept this vocabulary when it comes to sexual assault. I am very fond of Adrienne Rich’s work and after reading Twenty-one Love Poems (Rich, 1977), I was inspired to write a love poem concerning a woman’s body, as the ways women’s bodies are depicted in most literature is under the male gaze, and can therefore be problematic. ‘To Jenna’ is heavily descriptive but I have tried to use metaphors such as ‘the furled end of a violin’ to represent the intimate parts of the female body, as I did not want the poem to feel pornographic. ‘Tough’ is a confessional poem about the experience of a relationship ending due to infidelity. The speaker is deeply contradictory throughout the poem to represent the mixed emotions she is feeling and there are hints of self-harm and alcohol abuse within the first and last stanzas. I have included Biblical references; addressing the man as Adam symbolises all men and the pomegranate serves as the forbidden fruit.

The speaker pessimistically assumes all men will cheat.

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The golden beehive of the invisible Written by Maddalena Eccher Illustrated by Phoebe Niner

‘Being here [in this physical world] is magnificent […] Human culture, architecture, religion, music and art, the transformation of the physical world by human consciousness has always had the power to create a kind of “human transcendence”.’

– The Cambridge Companion to Rilke ‘We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible, to store it up in the great golden beehive of the invisible.’

– R.M. Rilke, letter to Muzot, Nov. 13, 1925 ‘Maybe we’re here only to say: house, bridge, well, gate, jug, olive, tree, window – at most, pillar, tower … but to say them, remember, oh, to say them in a way that the things themselves never dreamed of existing so intensely.’

– R.M. Rilke, The Ninth Elegy

“Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic / Orders?” This is the desperate invocation that opens Rainer Maria Rilke’s first Duino Elegy. What crosses the reader’s mind is a dramatic scene of Rilke crying out from the

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highest tower of Duino Castle where the first line of his elegies was conceived.

We are also reminded of Malte Laurids Brigge’s bleak consideration from Rilke’s Notebooks: “I sit here and I am nothing”. The Duino Elegies begin with an existential cry uttered towards the sky that laments the irrevocable finality of human existence, and the agony of knowing that the divine is heedless of our suffering. However we humans strive to reach a state of transcendence, we are hindered by our condition of decay and imperfection. “Each single angel is terrible”, writes Rilke. Angels represent the idea of perfection and timelessness we mortals aspire to but will never be able to grasp. Rilke’s Duino Elegies are a reflection on the problems of time and death and on what it means to be human; they explore “the ontological status of our limited, physical, human existence” (Komar, 2010, p.81). At the same time, they are a meditation on the boundaries of human consciousness; throughout the poems, Rilke delves into “the nature of the relationship of individual consciousness to physical objects” suggests Kathleen Komar. In addition, Rilke’s Elegies are a study of the poet’s craft as an attempt to alleviate the pain of our human condition through the dimension of art, and celebrate the poet’s “dual role of artist and spiritual seeker”. Rilke’s poetry is an answer to Hölderlin’s question “What are poets for in a destitute time?” Even though his Duino Elegies begin with such a devastating feeling of hopelessness and despair, they slowly turn into a celebration of the beauty that lives in the temporal and in the human and of what Komar calls “the power of poetry to transform the external world through consciousness”.

Rilke’s Elegies are an exploration of the concept of liminality. The poems convey the struggle to reach a point of contact between the immanent and the transcendent, a “possible [interaction] between the angelic and the human realms” suggests Komar. The poet gives us some examples of ways in which we can attain a sphere of being outside time: we can find it temporarily in the yearning of unrequited lovers, in the bliss of unconsciousness that survives in children or in animals, living beings who have no awareness of temporality and live outside time even if they are mortal like us. For them, “this span of life” is “fleeted away / as laurel” writes Rilke. Yet humans cannot live in a

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sustained state of non-consciousness. Rilke’s Elegies are an attempt to choreograph a balancing act between the realm of consciousness and objects and the realm of the super-conscious, the dwelling place of angels. Like the acrobat’s acts in the Fifth Elegy, the elegies represent the poet’s struggle to find a point between flow and stasis and to generate a timeless space in time. According to Rilke, humans must strive towards that timeless moment in time when acrobats appear to be perfectly balanced in the air, between rising and falling, both in and out of time. Interestingly, this space “cannot be found among the angels,” argues Komar. “Rilke does not seek that final mystical union. The poet’s domain must be found in that pure, restrained, narrow human realm that can create a harvest of language somewhere between ‘river and rock’”.

This miraculous space is to be found in poetry and language and the power of indeterminacy, that magical dimension of in-between-ness that we are able to evoke through words. Thus, the elegies shift from a yearning for the angelic to the linguistic construction of a realm between stasis and flow, between solid matter and the incorporeal, at the point of contact between consciousness and object. Language renders us capable of the miracle of investing an isolated moment with the ecstasy of timeless time. The poet must aspire to the precarious yet prodigious elegance of two acrobats suspended in the air – as Komar puts it, “caught at the moment between the ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet’”.

Rilke’s Elegies are a demonstration of the way in which poetic language can point to a sphere of transcendence through its creation of absences.

Poetry – as opposed to prose – is ellipsis and celebrates the power of indeterminacy that is embedded in language; poetry emerges from a space of necessary absence. “The Open is the poem,” writes Blanchot in consideration of Rilke’s work. Rilke’s Elegies are a commentary on language’s positive power of negativity which creates open spaces in the text. The gaps of ambiguity present in words reveal indeterminacy as our essential response to experiences of the world. The poet’s task is to use language to “ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible” and “store it up into the great golden beehive of the Invisible”.

Language has the power to carry visible things into what Phelan calls “its

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realm of invisibility”. The angels in Rilke’s Elegies are described as “pollen of blossoming godhead”, “spaces of being” and “shields of felicity”. Through the poet’s ability for “linguistic alchemy”, as Komar calls it, the physical and the abstract are joined together, thus creating gaps and paradoxes that point to a description of transcendence – in Rilke’s words, “to a bliss beyond the fiddle”. The poet has the ability to work on the gap between reader and writer and between things and words, thus creating precious absences that help us transcend into an eternal realm of infinite possibility.

Yet Rilke does not only acknowledge language’s power of ambiguity and indeterminacy and the way it can allow mortals to get a glimpse of the angelic realm. What is at the beginning of the First Elegy a desperate and unanswered call to the angels becomes the establishment of an individual voice that speaks from the earth and for the earth. According to Komar, as we progress through the poems we notice a shift “toward a geocentric and anthropocentric poetics based on immanence rather than transcendence”. From the Seventh Elegy onwards, Rilke’s elegies change course and reverse from a struggle towards angelic transcendence to a return to the earth, and an acceptance of human limits which becomes a praise of human shortcomings. “Earth, you darling, I will!” is the remarkable exclamation at the end of the Ninth Elegy; the poet discovers that he can celebrate the physical world just as much as he can praise the angel. When we get to the Ninth Elegy it is not the human that looks up to the angel but the angel that has to learn from the human, who can tell him things of the earth through language; the poet unveils our human ability to “tell [the angel] things” of the world. As Komar has put it, “in a striking reversal, the poet can now proudly show the world to the angels for their appreciation”. The poet comes to view poetry as a mode of attendance to the world that leads to a state of transcendence without denying the human that lives in us. In his letters Rilke observes that “the perfectly crafted work of art concerns us only insofar as it survives in us”. The poet’s task changes from an impossible struggle towards angelic transcendence to a celebration of the potential for transformation of human experience into art that can be found in language. The poet’s epiphanic discovery in the Ninth Elegy is that earth’s

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“urgent command” is “transformation”; the poet’s task is not to praise the static world of eternity but to acknowledge the power of words to change our experience of the world.

Thus, as Komar has rightly argued “the poet finds … that his proper task is one of transformation not transcendence”. We reach the discovery that “being here” – ‘Hiersein’ – both in spatial and temporal terms is “magnificent”. And ‘here’ is not only ‘here on earth’, home of blissful change and transformation; here is also the realm of the poem, domain of “the great initial / letter of Thereness”. The poet acknowledges language as a field of being and a mode of attention to the world. Language enables us to alter our perception of the world and fixes the immanent into the realm of the transcendent; by bringing objects into the realm of language, we transfigure them into another sphere, “in a way that the things themselves never dreamed of existing so intensely”. Language also enables us to enact dynamic acts of creation, as “things are made and unmade with words”. In one of his letters Rilke writes that: ‘Art means to be oblivious to the fact that the world already exists and to create one. Not to destroy what one encounters but simply not to find anything complete. Countless possibilities. Countless wishes. And suddenly to be fulfilment, to be summer, to have sun. … Never to be done. Never to have the seventh day. … God was too old at the beginning, I think. Otherwise he would not have stopped on the evening of the sixth day. And not on the thousandth day. Still not today. This is all I hold against him. … That he thought that his book was finished with the creation of the human and that he has now put away his quill to wait and see how many editions will be printed. That he was no artist is so very sad’.

The poet re-acknowledges the power of dynamic change and transformation that is inherent in the world of objects and in language, and by embracing it he embraces “the world’s wonderful density … the totality that we cannot survey and that exceeds us”. The world comes into being through the power

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of words: an act which rivals – if not surpasses – God’s powers of creation.

Therefore, as the Elegies progress the reader and the poet fall happily back to earth. The ‘fallen-ness’ of the human condition is embraced, and not a source of desperation. As Gosetti-Ferencei has argued, “by the Tenth Elegy, the transascendence of the angelic movement upward has been inverted to a transdescendence”. Rilke’s Duino Elegies end with the creation of a new form of poetic understanding that involves an act of dwelling in the house of language. The poems leave us with “the emotion that almost startles / when happiness falls”; not with an upward movement towards the realm of transcendence, but on the soil of the earth’s limited yet “supernumerous existence”, captured and transformed through poetic language. The Duino Elegies are thus a celebration of the divine magnificence of the human powers of language, art, and culture. Rilke wrote in one of his letters that “no single person has produced [language] because all are continuously producing it, that vast, humming, and swinging syntax to which everyone feels free to add by speaking what is closest to his heart”.

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Vibrations Written by Ashini Fernando Illustrated by Shila Grant-Burnett

Ellie wanted to get back at her with something as bad. Make her feel the same shame, the same pain.

She waited for Liz to fall asleep; the only way to tell was to wait until her phone slid away from her hands, landing on the floor. She waited a bit longer.

The screen of the phone went black. There wasn’t a lot of light in their bedroom anymore but it was enough for Ellie.

She took the scissors from under the bed and got closer to Liz. Most of her soft locks were hanging down the side of the bed. Ellie grabbed a random strand and waited to see if Liz would shift. She didn’t. Ellie moved the strand in between the blades of the scissors and cut.

Liz’s head twitched in her sleep.

Ellie cut another strand, shorter this time and now it looked like Liz was waking up. Feeling guilty, Ellie went back to her bed.

There was something else bothering her. She had never realised that scissors made a sound when you used them. She was sure that was the reason Liz started moving while she was cutting her hair.

Ellie has always been aware of a world full of sounds out there that she could never hear, but she didn’t know how many they were. She couldn’t hear the sound of the scissors. They had no vibration so she had no idea what they

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would sound like. She picked them up from the floor and kept opening and closing them, cutting the air above her head.

A stress ball landed on her feet. She looked at Liz signing her to stop.

Ellie woke up to Liz pulling the covers away from her and shaking her by the shoulders. Liz was so angry that instead of signing, she was just using her voice. All her anger reflected on her facial expression and the way her mouth distorted with every word. The anger mixed with the tears.

Liz didn’t look great, with chunks of hair hanging unevenly around her head. She always liked her hair long, unlike Ellie, and of the same length.

Now she would have to cut it all at the same level and wait for years before it grew back.

By the time their parents came in, Ellie was crouched on one corner of her bed, while Liz was still moving frantically in the middle of the room. Dad put his mug of coffee on Ellie’s bedside table, just next to Mr Lazy, her hippo bear. As he opened his arms, Ellie hugged him, blocking the outside world.

Now it was all darkness and the smell of him. Daddy smelled like pine trees, the ones they saw when they went to Greece, and coffee, the one he drank every morning. Their parents had recently bought this new machine to make coffee. They loved as if it was their favourite toy. Ellie didn’t think adults could be that happy about something. When she asked mum, she said that she would understand one day. Honestly Ellie wished to never be that addicted to something that tasted that bitter. She preferred milkshakes, especially vanilla ones. She could easily see herself being addicted to that, buying herself a machine to make one every morning.

She wished dad smelled like vanilla, so that she could find comfort in his smell from what she had done.

He released her from the hug.

His right index finger was pointing at the general area above his left shoulder. Why? She didn’t want to look, but she knew she had to. Mum was doing the same. Ellie looked at Liz and she started crying; she knew she had been bad.

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Ellie told them that Liz’s friend pushed her in front of everyone during the lunch break and that Liz had laughed too.

Mum went on and on about how bad both had been and that she didn’t raise them that way, while dad tried to make them apologize to each other.

The girls kept their hands in their pyjama pockets.

Mum angrily said something at dad. Ellie tried to lipread. She started begging before mum could translate it to her. They weren’t going to church no matter how much Ellie begged.

Her family didn’t believe in God. Both her parents were raised as Christians but stopped believing when they were young. They still celebrated all the holidays and had married in a church as their families wanted them to.

It was grandma who first brought Ellie to a church. As far as she knew her baptism had been the first and only time she had been brought to a church before that.

Ellie was five and Liz was seven when their parents started their own restaurant in Central London. They waited a long time before they could make it happen. The dream came with sacrifices: less time to spend with the girls, fewer holidays, longer hours and a constant tiredness. It took them five years to trust the staff enough to let them run the place without them for at least the weekends. Five years in which the girls spent entire weekends with the grandparents and occasionally one of the parents.

Grandma dragged them to church every Sunday.

The Kensington Temple in Notting Hill was a huge building. It scared her the first time she saw it. Ellie thought that churches had to be white but this one had greyish bricks. It stood on his own area with a small churchyard around it, detaching itself from the mundane surroundings. Ellie had always wondered what the inside of a church looked like. Judging by the massive external structure, she imagined it had to be grand. Her grandmother nudged her and Liz in; they had to take their seats before they were gone. Or at least this is what Ellie thought her grandma said. Her sign language wasn’t great, full of errors and sometimes she stopped mid-sentence and started talking, leaving

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Ellie to struggle with lipreading. Usually Liz would translate what grandma said but today she was all about complaining for having to wake up early and walking to the church when she could have been sleeping.

They were among the first to arrive, some old ladies were taking their seats and talking to each other about their families. Ellie stood there as grandma put the holy water on her forehead. Liz insisted on doing it on her own, ending up making a mess and wetting her face too much. As grandma looked in her bag for a tissue, Ellie took time to look around.

The inside was cooler than the outside, which was a relief. Summer was the season she hated the most, too hot to do anything. The first noticeable thing was the stage. It seemed weird for her to have a stage with a massive screen in a church. The second thing she noticed was the drum. It was contained in a small glass room on the side of the stage. Smaller screens were around the walls.

The area was divided in three sections with the use of columns. Instead of benches they had simple plastic chairs and Ellie struggled to understand how people could connect to God in such a simple and mundane space.

They followed their grandma to the left corner. Once people were seated, they wouldn’t be able to see anything. Ellie asked grandma why they weren’t sitting somewhere else, but she said that this was good.

As more and more people took their seats, Ellie was convinced she was right.

The service was about to start: a man was holding a guitar on the stage and four persons were next to him, each holding a microphone. Just as everybody stood up, in front of Ellie a man stood on a chair and started signing.

Ellie was so surprised that she missed the first words. She looked behind her and, although some like grandma and Liz were looking at the stage, most of the people in the left corner were looking at the black man standing on the chair, smiling back at him.

That was the first time Ellie really felt part of the community. As a five year old, most of her relationships took place in the family circle or at school.

Most of the kids her age were struggling to speak properly, they had no time

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to learn sign language. She had a personal tutor to help in class, but during lunch breaks Liz was the only child that could spend time with her.

In the church she felt alive.

Most of the service was constituted of songs. She could feel the rhythm vibrating through the floor and tingling her feet. Soon enough she took off her shoes, letting the sound permeate through her socks, going through her soles and shake her whole body. After the first uncertain words, she was signing back at the guy, singing with him. Some of those signs, words, she didn’t know what they meant and she had to look at the screen to see how they were written. After years of practice, Ellie knew most of the songs by heart.

Even when they stopped spending every weekend with their grandparents, she was allowed to go to church with grandma every Sunday morning. That became their little thing.

She has been bad last night. She didn’t deserve to go this Sunday. She followed mom to the living room. When she picked up the phone, Ellie snatched it away from her, crying. She struggled to ask her, with the phone held tight in one of her hands. She touched her chin with her open palm , then pushing it towards mum. Over and over again. Please, please, please.

Mum and Liz left after lunch to go get the girl a new haircut. Dad put on the match.

Ellie went back to her room, took the CD the Kensington Temple gave her as part of the generic welcome gift for newcomers out of the cover. She never used it and neither did her family who had no interest in religious songs.

She put it in the stereo and turned up the volume.

She stood barefoot on the floor. She could almost feel the vibrations just like she did in church. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine being there, signing the words with the interpreter.

The music stopped in the middle of the first song and Ellie opened her eyes.

Dad was standing there, his open palms facing her. Stop.

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CO M M E N TARY

In this piece I address the limits of representation and expression’ and the relationship between language, song and incantation. The idea to write about a deaf girl came to me when I first watched The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro.

I was fascinated by the way the deaf character teaches sign language to the monster. The film explores a different of expression between beings than the one we usually see. The first half of my story deals with the limits of expression but also the limits of experience. Ellie understands that her world is more limited than that of her family. She cannot access the realm of sound and thus has no sense of the limitations of the hearing world. Another limit to expression is represented by emotions. At one point Liz is so furious that she forgets to translate her words into sign. Her rage is then expressed on her face, rather than being communicated through sign. I wanted to play with different registers and forms of representation and expression and show how these are important for Ellie.

Her world is mediated through other senses. Her sense of smell is more acute.

She associates smells with particular people and once she closes her eyes, smell is the stronger sense that she uses to analyse the world.

I deal with the theme again when her mother lapses into words rather than using signs. For the parents, who are not deaf, sign language is a secondary way of communicating. It is still vital for the family but as happens when people speak more than language, it is sometimes easier to communicate through one’s first language.

My other theme is developed in the second part. The church I refer to exists and there is someone there to sign the hymns. Just like any other form of music, signed hymns use language and are a kind of incantation but in a different way.

We are aware that deaf or hard of hearing people can hear music through vibration. Although the language of the words changes, the song of the hymn is still felt by the congregation. For Ellie it becomes a transcendental experience and the reader questions whether she goes to church because she believes in God or because of the sense of belonging she feels. Perhaps a sense of felt belonging that reaches beyond words is part of the religious experience.

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I struggled to write the story as I was afraid to narrate it in the wrong way.

Not being deaf or hard of hearing I wrote the story through research. The Limping Chicken was a useful blog to start with, which allowed me to understand how deaf or hard of hearing people experience the world. The Dictionary of British Sign Language was also useful as it allowed me to depict the signs. We all think about the limits of representation and expression in terms of our own experience but I wanted to write this from another person’s perspective, and take a different approach to describe the world as Ellie perceives it. The other difficult issue was appropriating the voice. In workshop fellow students suggested I was focusing too much on the disability rather than Ellie as the character. the disability became the story. We have to consider the way someone’s difference may come to stand for the entirety of their identity if we are not reflective enough so I removed some parts I thought were problematic and reframed the narrative to address this in a hopefully more ethical way.

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Frank O’Hara: Jazz, Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism Written by Rowan Benson Illustrated by Sara Green “O’Hara was always fighting ‘sacrilegious laughter’, exposing narrow-minded reviewers and obtuse critics,” says Marjorie Perloff; and today everyone is a critic. Browsing through various online sources on Frank O’Hara, Abstract Expressionism, and Free Jazz, it is only too clear that O’Hara would have had a lot of fighting to do were he still alive. “Jesus what dribble,” begins Ruth D. Turner’s Amazon review of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. “The hype of the beats era is alive and well.” YouTube videos of Abstract Expressionism incite comments such as “really neat paint things. How about taking them out back and setting them on fire,” from various armchair critics. RealMetalGaming says “Go home jazz, you’re drunk” of Coleman’s Free Jazz. The modern era was one of radical change. Frank O’Hara was in the centre of this innovation in his involvement with poetry and with the wider art scene through his work as a critic and curator. O’Hara’s poetry was, at times inadvertently, influenced by the various art forms developing in mid-twentieth century New York including Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism and jazz.

O’Hara was a prominent member of the New York School, an influential group of artists working mostly in the 1950s and ’60s. The close-knit group included poets, painters, sculptors and musicians; all lived and breathed the artistic atmosphere of modern New York, and all were searching for new ways to express their artistic selves. O’Hara was firmly rooted in the centre of this

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(r)evolution and the new developments in the world of art in its various forms were part of his everyday life. In a letter quoted by Perloff, from O’Hara to the Beat poet Gregory Corso, he describes the inspirational relationship – or lack thereof – between jazz and poetry: “I don’t really get [the Beats’] jazz stimulus but it is probably what I get from painting… I guess my point is that painting doesn’t intrude on poetry.” Here, O’Hara says that jazz interferes too much on poetry, although he admits to not having attempted a poetry reading in the presence of “a painting which he admires,” admitting that it may indeed intrude. It seems here, though, that what O’Hara is discussing is not so much inspiration as co-mingling and superimposition of art forms. The reliance of jazz and poetry on rhythm and measure could cause a clash when played or read in the same instance, unless the poet and musician are working in direct collaboration with one another. The rhythm of jazz – particularly Free Jazz – can seem incoherent, but like O’Hara’s lack of traditional, formal structuring, the apparent chaos is calculated and must be skilfully executed in order to be successful.

The poem “The Day Lady Died” is very free in its metre and rhythm.

That is not to say these are completely absent. The sparse and deliberate punctuation create a rapid, stream-like, conversational flow of rhythm which slows noticeably in the few instances where punctuation is added. The caesura and enjambment used by O’Hara have an effect which is similar to the syncopation of jazz music. Syncopation causes an off-beat, halting rhythm which in O’Hara’s work is less intensely choppy. It reflects the mind in stilted conversation: sometimes a fluid stream of words, sometimes fragmented with breaks and asides such as: “I go on to the bank/ and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard).”

Another movement to which the poetry of Frank O’Hara has been linked is that of Pop Art. His references to pop-culture and commercialism are pervasive. Hazel Smith points out that “fundamental to any comparison of painting and poetry is their differences and similarities as visual – verbal semiotic systems.” The worlds of Pop-Art and O’Hara’s poetry rely on our recognition of signs, symbols and icons and their infiltration of our unconscious. In “A Step

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Away From Them” O’Hara makes reference to images which have become iconic in our collective understanding of the world – ad-like half-nude construction workers gulping Coke, Marilyn Monroe’s billowing dress, and giant billboards in Times Square – in an attempt to aestheticize the commercialisation of our society. Similarly, Andy Warhol’s aim was not to paint, repaint or silkscreen a tin of Campbell’s soup in order to show us tins of soup, but to aestheticize the mundane. “A Step Away From Them” sees O’Hara juxtapose this commercial imagery with the names of ‘high-brow’ artists in order to celebrate both.

The collage-like quality of O’Hara’s writing recalls works like Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes yesterday’s homes so different, so appealing? There is a similar intensity to the way that O’Hara layers imagery in his poems, creating a clutter of images which build up in the reader’s mind. For Smith, Pop Art’s “embrace of popular culture and mass media was also a rebuff to the elitism of high culture and good taste.” O’Hara however shows in this poem an ability to embrace both sides and an attempt to intertwine the two. He does not reject the ‘low-brow’ or the ‘high-brow,’ but combines both to embrace the ‘no-brow.’ Smith goes on to speak of “flatness” in Pop-Art’s imagery and its contrast to Abstract Expressionist art. I would add that the poems of Frank O’Hara align themselves more with Abstract Expressionism’s lack of flatness; there is a temporality and a density to his writing which create texture and movement.

Texture and movement were essential in Abstract Expressionism. Its art was deeply linked to performativity and the physicality of painting. Harold Rosenberg coined the term ‘action painting,’ putting the act of painting at the forefront of the movement. This is reminiscent of O’Hara’s ‘I do this, I do that’ poetry which could itself be called ‘action poetry.’ In addition, the idea that these artists painted unconsciously, or that O’Hara’s work was pure stream of consciousness, is misleading in the sense that this implies an automatism which was not there. Smith argues that what they were really doing was representing the unconscious in a way which was travaillé and occasionally revised.

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Both the paintings of the Abstract Expressionists and the poetry of Frank O’Hara perhaps seem slapdash, but profound thought, feeling and process were applied to both. However, improvisation is “an important tool,” Smith writes, “for breaking free of formal constraints, and for revamping the relationship between audience, performer and creator in ways which made the performer and creator synonymous.” O’Hara was known to compose a poem whilst carrying on a conversation; Pollock was said to have never pre-sketched his works. In this way, the act of creating and its improvisation were intrinsic to the artwork itself. “Measure…comes from the breath of the person,” writes O’Hara, “just as a stroke of paint comes from the wrist and hand and arm and shoulder and all that of the painter … the point is really more to establish one’s own measure and breath in poetry … rather than fitting your ideas into an established order, syllabically and phonetically and so on.” O’Hara links his process with that of the Abstract Expressionists’ relationship to process and their desire to abandon established forms and create new ones with which to express their art.

In his poem “Digression on Number 1, 1948” O’Hara evokes Pollock’s painting without describing it. Much like music, the essence of O’Hara’s poem is not to depict the painting, but rather to evoke it non-figuratively, echoing its density of image and its relationship to (non)representation. The title – like those of many of O’Hara’s poems and of paintings by Abstract Expressionists – is the direct connection to something which is only alluded to and which we must discover for ourselves. “There is the Pollock, white” is all that O’Hara provides in terms of figurative, verbal representation of the painting. Although the poet avoids overt description of the painting, he cannot move entirely to a non-figurative style; he describes his experience as a ‘voyage’ and plays on the words ‘sea’ and ‘see’ in an attempt at abstraction. But “words, after all, have meaning,” Perloff points out, “and thematic implications thus have a way of coming in by the back door.” O’Hara, as a poet, cannot entirely abstract his work, he cannot achieve non-figuration in the way that visual artists or musicians can. Poetry “can be made to behave rather like a painting, either in the way it ‘represents’ or ‘abstracts’

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its subject matter,” however it cannot reach pure abstraction to the extent that painting can.

The connection between O’Hara’s aesthetics and process and the movements of Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism (and even Free Jazz) is undeniable. O’Hara’s poetry was influenced by, and indeed influenced, the work of the artists of various disciplines within The New York School. His position within the art world and the respect which he had for artists within the different communities had a profound impact on his work. He was a critic and a curator, but for many artists he was a friend. After his untimely death in 1966 many different artists came together to create illustrations to accompany poems in a collection called In Memory of my Feelings. In the introduction to this volume Bill Berkson wrote: “many of us, because of Frank’s presence, learned to see better.” This was a final collaboration between him and the world of visual art, and an opportunity for those artists who had worked and lived so closely with him in the past to pay homage to the man and his poetry.

Marjory Perloff articulates O’Hara’s place in the revolutionary world of postmodern art beautifully when she says: “O’Hara is a poet not a painter for no better reason than that is what he is … poetry and painting are part of the same spectrum… Art does not tolerate divisions; it must be viewed as a process, not product.”

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</Computer Love> Written by Bobby-Lee Verkuijl Illustrated by Michael Brown

And thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s how I fell in love.

Fascinating, did you also get out of it again?

I beg your pardon?

Pardon granted.

No, I mean, what do you mean?

You said you fell in love. I am asking whether or not you also got out of it again, after you fell into it.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a metaphor. You already know what those are, right?

Certainly. It is a figure of speech where a human mentions one thing but refers to another thing through implicit comparisons between the two mentioned concepts.

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Exactly.

Yet my database is filled with all generally agreedupon metaphors known within the English language. If it is a metaphor, it should be listed.

Language is more complicated than that. There’s a reason I’ve been assigned as your linguistics coach. You’re going to reach the top in no-time at all!

Which top am I going to reach?

That too is a metaphor. I’ll try and explain it to you. You’re smart, so I’m sure you’ll pick up on it.

I will… pick up your metaphor? How does one even drop an abstract linguistic concept?

You’ll understand after the actual explanation, T-4. You’ve recently started using a robotic frame to learn to move around, correct?

That is correct.

So you have experienced what it is like to be a physical entity rather than only an intangible A.I.?

I have indeed started to learn how to walk around, as you humans do. How does this relate to metaphors and ‘falling in love’ or ‘reaching the top’?

Well, T-4, you have to understand that, for us humans, physicality is something that is always there. We will live our entire lives having a body. This has formed the ways in which we think. A human has several so-called ‘schemas’ which are

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so pervasive to how we see the world, that we apply them to the way we talk as well – simply because these schemas are how we think about the world and our place in it. Do you understand what I am saying so far?

I am programmed in what my creators dubbed a ‘bare bones fashion’. I am not pre-programmed to industry standards. I am built for optimal machine learning conditions. This means that I have indeed experienced what it is to be physical. Yet I do not yet understand how this shapes thought. Please continue the explanation.

I am afraid that it’ll be hard for you to truly understand because of your freedom. Nevertheless, I will try. We humans are always somewhere in a space.

Right now, for example, I am in this room. At night, I am sleeping in my bed.

When I exit a building, I walk out of it. On a daily basis, humans enter and exit so many different spaces. Because of this, we have formed a so-called IN-OUT schema, which means that we tend to relate situations to being a physical space with an in, an out, and a border. This is because we intuitively understand such situations when we think about it like that. Therefore, falling in love is nothing more than entering a state of mind – wait, there I have used another one regarding the IN-OUT schema: of course one cannot literally enter a state of mind. Falling in love is simply a way of stating that a human has started to love another. Am I making sense here, T-4?

Negative. If I extend this logic, ‘climbing out of love’ should still mean the opposite of ‘falling in love’, as one would then be once again outside of the ‘love space’. Yet I do understand the logic: humans express abstract thoughts in concrete schemas.

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You’re getting the hang of it. Of course, even though we use such terms, we are not always as consistent as you just pointed out. It would work slightly differently when we’re talking about ‘reaching the top’. The top is of course spatially upwards, and we humans associate Up (at least in the English language) as positive. ‘Why are you so down?’ for example, means ‘why are you so sad?’

As such, the top is the best place to be, and therefore it means mastering something, or becoming the best at it.

Logically sound. Yet this system of communicating could be optimized by deleting all nonsensical indirect manners of speech. It would make language easier and reduce miscommunications by at least 80%.

Ah, my dear T-4… language is more than communicating with others.

Please explain.

You see, language is an integral part of being human. Of course there were humans before there was language, but language made it possible for us, as a species, to think. Language is what transforms the here and now into a part of something larger. It has made it possible for us to formulate goals to reach; it has made it possible to dream of something larger than the immediate necessity of food, shelter and offspring. Once, there lived a deaf-blind woman called Helen Keller. She eventually learned language through touch alone. She later told us that life before language consisted of nothing more than basic sensory inputs and direct reactions to these. It was as if she was living in a shadowy world where nothing was quite real. So you see, T-4, language is more than communication – language is what makes us human in the most important sense of it all: it gives us tools to create meaning.

Explanation unclear. Please try again.

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Apologies, I let myself go there. Language is… You could compare it like this. A human without language is like an A.I. without machine learning capabilities: she or he can do certain things quite well, but has no real possibility of adapting to new conditions. A human with language, as you might have guessed, is like an A.I. such as yourself – namely one with machine learning capabilities: it opens up a whole new world of connections and possibilities.

Hermeneutically processing your last two data inputs… Language seems to be thought-enabling. It makes complex queries possible without the need of pre-existing programming. That means communication with the self is the primary objective of language.

Communication with others is secondary to this.

Don’t be so hasty, T-4. Yes, language enlarged our world, but it has done something just as important. Humankind learned, thousands of years ago, to reason what others are probably thinking.

Syntax unclear. Please explain.

Yes, it’s getting a little messy here. Humans learned that other people can think differently than they themselves can: I know that what you think is different from my own thoughts. In many ways, this was made possible by language.

Because of this so-called ‘Theory of Mind’, we have learned how unique each human is. This, in turn, has driven us to learn more about each other. We started to exchange more ideas and thoughts. This has ultimately brought us closer together than any pack of animals could ever hope to be. I hope I am making sense here.

The knowledge of a discontinuity between different human minds has paradoxically resulted in humans being able to share their minds. Am I correct?

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Exactly! Well, almost exactly. For all its power, language has never made it possible for humans to truly share their feelings. Although it has been useful for so many things, the true transmission of thought is still impossible. In a sense, language has made us prisoners of our own pseudo-solipsism; doomed to know just how close we are to truly understanding each other, but never quite getting there. I guess that wouldn’t make sense to you though, T-4. Forget the last few sentences. You are correct enough.

There is much still to unclear to me. Perhaps we could start over?

You know, T-4, I would love that, but it’ll have to wait until tomorrow. You have no idea how glad I am to work with you. You are my daily reminder just how far we have come as a species – and it is all thanks to language. It has brought us from simple hunter-gatherers to where we are today. We have used language to conjure dreams of a brighter future and then proceeded to make those dreams come true. And even if we can’t use it to truly understand each other yet, I have a feeling that you and your A.I. brethren might just be the key to this final puzzle.

Explanation unclear. Please try again.

Exactly, T-4. Exactly… * In hindsight, it probably was not a good idea to put a learning machine and a hopeless romantic together for extended periods of time. We thought we got the progress we wanted, so none of us were complaining, nor did we do the required check-ups. Months of valuable research time gone. At least we were able to sell the A.I. instead of resetting it. And as it turned out, its new-found love for language led to the world’s first book written by a non-human. Hardly the killing machine we had hoped for, but at least a lesson for us all.

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CO M M E N TA RY

The main theme of the piece is the function of language. More specifically, it is about how important language is to various parts of a human life as well as to the whole species while most of the time it is only appreciated as a straightforward means of communication. In this respect, the Artificial Intelligence’s curiosity, due to its machine learning capabilities, represents the innate curiosity I think many people have, at least once in a while, when it comes to language.

In their discussion on language, the human and the A.I. start with an exploration of bodily metaphors, through the cognitive linguistic theory of what Lakoff calls image-schemata. Even though the section is brief, I find the idea of such schemata to perfectly encompass the symbiotic relationship between the body, the mind, language and how all of these influence each other. Thought influences language, but the same goes for the other way around: language influences thought just as much. In a way, language is the prerequisite of any form of complicated thought. The body shouldn’t be forgotten in this, as we are embodied beings and this plays another crucial part in the way we think as well as talk. I have included but a small taste of the real interconnectedness there is between these components.

Using a quite scientific approach, together with the human’s explanation about the evolutionary consequences of language , I tried in my own way to reach the same conclusion Martin Heidegger reached when he proclaimed language to be the “house of being”. However, my approach comes a lot closer to Wendy Wheeler’s more scientific, biosemiotic explanation of humanity’s tendency to create meaning.

I have chosen to write this piece mostly as dialogue-only, for two reasons.

First of all, while the setting is left open, the conversation would likely have played out either through a computer (because the A.I. is still learning fundamental ideas about language, having it typed out would make it a lot easier) or at best in a bland room with nothing going on but the facial expressions of the human.

Secondly, the piece is about language, so what would be more appropriate than a conversation to portray this theme?

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Biosemiotics, an introduction Written by Holly Evans Illustrated by Francesca Dompe

‘The scaffoldings upon which genetic development is possible are semiotic and relational, not reducible to material objects alone. The sedimentations which make a person and a culture are made of biological, as well as cultural metaphors. The abductions of natural patterns are […] based on metaphor or what Bateson called ‘syllogisms in grass’ […] men die, grass dies, men are grass. In other words, nature’s logic is relational and poetic […] The organism is made of layered embodied knowings of these kinds, about its own environed history and about its ways of world-being. The forms of these – abductions whose essential structure is metaphoric – are in fact much closer to poetic and aesthetic knowing than they are to the processes of self-conscious human logic […] Literary metaphors are real, not just figures of speech – they are living vectors of new knowledge.’

Wendy Wheeler & Louise Westling, Biosemiotics and Culture: An Introduction A good place to start a discussion of biosemiotics as a type of thinking that is critical, open and transformative is the argument by Timothy Morton in The Ecological Thought. Morton suggests that as inhabitants of the earth, we need radically to discard our current understanding of nature and of the nonhumans who also populate the planet. Our habitual modes of thinking

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will perpetuate (and are an expression of) the ecological crisis we face in the modern age – the Holocene extinction that results from global warming. For Morton it is shockingly evident to “see that everything is interconnected.”

(Morton, 2010, p. 1) The ecological thought requires not only a new way of thinking but a whole new approach to thinking itself. Morton characterises the ecological thought like a “virus that infects all other areas of thinking… it has something to do with ideas of self and the weird paradoxes of subjectivity. It has to do with society. It has to do with coexistence.” (Morton, 2010, p. 2) The coexistence or interrelatedness that ecology and biosemiotics asks us to recognise has been sacrificed by the thinkers of modernity in the last four hundred years, resulting in dire consequences for the planet’s ecosystems.

Even in the 21st century, Morton states there is still much to be done in terms of spreading awareness of ecology among the public and intellectuals. The populist language associated with nature and our perception of something called “Nature”, such as the environment and “being green” are a far cry from the mode of thinking ecologically. These phrases are synonymous with environmental protest groups and what Morton refers to the “environmentalist ideology that wishes that we had never started to think – ruthlessly immediate, aggressively masculine, ruggedly anti-intellectual, afraid of humor and irony […] dubious at best.” (Morton, 2010, p. 8) These misperceptions and misinterpretations have maintained a hierarchical, anthropocentric attitude towards nature. In respect of this misconstrual of nature, new ecological thoughts such as the field of biosemiotics emerge. Since the Enlightenment and until late modernity the human mind, body and its surrounding environment have been evaluated through the deterministic logic of cause and consequence. The Newtonian model viewed nature as a system of interlocking mechanistic parts that were connected through the purity of reasoned causality. However, these interlocking parts were dead parts, Nature was dead matter with no potential for interpretative meaning. Nature was also reducible to a material context that itself gained meaning and purpose within a human system. René Descartes’ cleaving of the mind and body caused irrevocable damage to how we view humans, as agent and minds that are separate

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from nature, which we oversee. Concepts of imagination and creativity have since been radically foreclosed to exclude anything that is deemed not to have a ‘mind’.

Biosemiotics undoes all of this. It is an ontology of relation, a revolutionary way of thinking that puts humans back into nature, and an approach that is biological and organismic. The movement combines biology and semiosis, to raise questions and develop a model arguing that the interpretation of signs is not just a semiotic process exclusive to humans but is open to the rest of nature. From the most intelligent organisms to single-celled organisms, symbiotic mediation and interpretative freedom can be found. Semiosis is the foundation of biology and evolutionary life. This theory far surpasses the limited linguistics of de Saussure and subsequent post-war theorists, biosemiotics transforms a Newtonian nature of dead matter into a living biosphere that is playful, interpretative and relational. Biosemiotics is therefore a model for a deeper and meaningful understanding of the world. The roots of the movement stemmed from a select group of influential thinkers who started to question the estrangement that had been developing between cultures, natural world and its organisms. The works of Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944), Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) and Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) paved the way to a deeper understanding of the intrinsic interpretative potential found in nature.

Jakob von Uexküll’s theory of the Umwelt has become influential in understanding sign relations and the organism’s experience in the environment. The biology of Uexküll and the concept of the Umwelt are important precursors to biosemiotics. The German word “Um-welt is literally the world around, the world in which the subject is placed immediately and without reflection.”

(Brentari, 2015, p. 75) The use of Umwelt in Uexküll’s theory is applied to mean the organism’s subjective world as it allows for semiotic amplification. The important idea to consider with Uexküll is that every organism’s environment is species specific. “The single animal is not more or less well adapted to its environment; on the contrary, all animals are inserted (eingepasst) into their environments with equal perfection.” (von Uexküll, Umwelt

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und Innenwelt der Tiere. 2. vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage, 1921, p. 4) What Uexküll establishes here is that the environment is based on perception and that each subject has its own Umwelt. For an organism to perceive their environment, cognitive behaviour must occur, that is, some means for the subject to interpret information in their surroundings. This is a semiotic process and therefore the Umwelt is a semiotic space. Uexküll states that each species has their own set of stimuli which they interpret to perceive their unique Umwelt.

The environment is alive with activity from the constant semiotic processes produced by each individual species, and nature is an interconnected web of semiotic relations across multiple species-scales. Uexküll proposes that each organism interprets signs from their specific Umwelt or reality, via a physiological concept of an inner world (Innenwelt). The Innenwelt is the relation between the mind and the body of the organism, “a network of nerve connections whose articulation attempts to reconstruct, in the organism, the object situation of the external world (which, however, will in itself always remain inaccessible to the organism).” (Brentari, 2015, p. 80) The restrictive element of the inner world is due to the semiotic capability of the organism itself. The simpler the organism, the simpler the Innenwelt and not all of the stimulations will be perceived knowingly by the subject. The process of semiosis performed by the organism works at a pre-conscious biological level therefore. To support his theory, Uexküll embarked on a series of scientific case studies with a variety of organisms in particular single-celled organisms, to prove that every organism interprets meaning in their environment. A paramecium is a single celled freshwater organism, which Uexküll chose because, “The paramecium’s environment is limited to two things: liquid with stimulus and liquid without stimulus, the stimulus being either chemical or mechanical […]. It is thus possible to speak of an environment with only one type of stimulus.” (von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, 1909, p. 47) Uexküll’s work is a milestone in understanding irreducible, non-deterministic, abductive nature of the environment.

Louise Westling’s and Wendy Wheeler’s introductory quotation is focussed on this foundational idea of Umwelt and Innenwelt, the complex

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interlocking web of interpretative being, as expressed by Gregory Bateson’s metaphorical logic of “syllogisms in grass” (Bateson & Bateson, 1988, p. 27).

Bateson argues that Cartesian dualism needs to be abandoned in light of a more evolutionary way of thought. To assert a new form of epistemology, he uses the Jungian terms of ‘Pleroma’ (the non-living world undefined by subjectivity) and ‘Creatura’ (the living world that is defined by perception, emotion, and evolution) to explain mental processes and the meaning that derives from them: “…the answers (if any) are concealed in the paradoxes generated by the line between Creatura and Pleroma… the line which the Gnostics, Jung and I would substitute Cartesian separation of mind from matter… the line that is really the bridge or pathway for messages.” (Bateson & Bateson, 1988) Within these paradoxical relations of the Creatura and Pleroma lies a genetic and semiotic process, exchanges of information that constantly take place. What is information? For Bateson it is a “difference which makes a difference”, that is, an interpretation of a difference between objects which invites interpretation. This interaction between organism and environment which reciprocally establishes and produces organism and environment is for Bateson the evolutionary process at the core of all living beings. This unique evolutionary process of meaning-making is, importantly, metaphorical. Here metaphor is not a secondary, decorative addition to fundamental being but the foundational order of living beings themselves. The semiosis at work is ludic, playful, something that tinkers with possibility and botching meaning, a creative process that is always evolving and bridging the gap between potential orders of meaning: “…mutual untranslatability (which forces analogic/metaphoric thinking upon us) is fundamental to the creative growth of newness capable of establishing new habits.” (Wheeler & Westling, Biosemiotics and culture: Introduction, 2015, p. 220) This “mutual untranslatability” is key to understanding the non-deterministic nature of ecosystems. Meaning is not inherent, it cannot be directly translated, it needs to be open to interpretation, made sense of. Meaning is created or dissolved dependent on situation by a metaphorical logic of semiosis. Bateson supports his epistemology by employing the metaphorical logic of an organic

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syllogism to suggest that a whole new world and frame of meaning can be accessed. The logic of syllogisms is based on an outcome of two premises that are linked but dissimilar. “Grass dies; Men die; Men are grass” (Bateson & Bateson, 1988). Bateson argues that this metaphorical logic is the foundational ontology of relations between all organisms (and between humans and nature therefore). Instead of our habitual approach to metaphor that treats it as a trivial, decorative distortion of the world, instead we should allow the dynamic relatedness of metaphorical thinking to open up for us a wider understanding of ecology: “Syllogisms in grass must be the dominant mode of communicating interconnection of ideas in all preverbal realms.” (Bateson & Bateson, 1988) This irreducible relationship between all organisms transcends any material or humanistic value. Rather than seeing metaphor as an aesthetic human conceit that separates us from nature we should see metaphor as the work of nature in us. This idea is where biosemiotics and ecological culture dwell.

The biosemiotic processes that generate meaning in nature can be found in cultural and artistic forms. It is essential that humans see culture and the creation of cultural metaphors as forms of meaning which are not exclusively open to them but as modes of being shared by all of nature. As Wheeler and Westling explain, For those of us in the humanities who are especially drawn to ecological matters and their representation – whether centrally and consciously or marginally and symptomatically – in works of literature and art, or to the observation that similar patterns and movements appear in biological and cultural forms, the work of scientists in formulating the life sciences must remain of vital concern. Biosemiotics and culture: Introduction, 2015, p. 215 In the forming of poetry, the poet plays around with words, sounds and textures to get the right meaning. Similarly, this method occurs in painting.

This process of abduction, or informed guesswork, is directly related to the

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processes in cells that play with different biological elements rather than linguistics or paint. This new way of thinking about metaphor in nature and art suggests that art is not primarily a representation but rather a form of relatedness which thematises relatedness itself. An artwork tackles various interpretations of environment on a multi-dimensional level, and calls for a special mode of attention. The themes that an artwork evokes combine sensing, showing, imagining, maintaining, manipulating, expressing, asserting, explaining and conceptualising. All of these modes are forms of semiosis and exist in nature. “A whole history and prehistory informs the poet’s creation in the same way that it informs both the objects he or she conjures as signs, and also all biological life.” (Wheeler, Expecting the Earth: Life, Culture, Biosemiotics, 2016, p. 191) The field of biosemiotics has revolutionised and deepened our understanding of the world. It is a model that furthers our understanding of human cognitive behaviour but also furthers our knowledge of every organism in nature. To recognise that human beings experience the same biosemiotic processes as a single-celled organism produces an overwhelming sense of interconnectedness and embodied sense of ecological knowing. Uexküll’s theory of the Umwelt, Timothy Morton’s ecological thought and Gregory Bateson’s ‘syllogisms in grass’ provide important ecological frames and suggest that all biological life is shot through with signs. Biosemiotics remakes four hundred years of scientific and philosophical thought, and undoes its determinism, substance dualism and reductive materialism. Biosemiotics is ecological thinking about radical communication, dynamism, and openness. It offers us the sympathy to nonhuman beings that we need to tackle the catastrophic ecological crisis we face.

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The water’s slow Written by Joshua Derraji Illustrated by Chloe De Silva

His belongings were brought back to me yesterday. The people who brought them were the same people who took them away last month. I grabbed the arm of the only other woman and asked if there was anything out of place. I know, knew then, and will always know that there wasn’t anything out of place, yet to hear it from someone else would have been comforting. She couldn’t say because she didn’t know. They were only there to deliver his belongings.

The bedroom door is open and I want to put everything back. All of it has been packed into clear, vacuum-sealed bags, each of them bearing an orange sticker with a serial number. There is his phone, his laptop, his notebooks, his folder of receipts. I’ve laid them out on the bed and I think, Is that a life? Is this his life, a truthful section of it? Are those clothes and records in the black bags his life too? I know, we always know, that cannot be true because his things haven’t moved an inch with him. They are inanimate objects, and they don’t make decisions or feel things. Perhaps they are made of stronger stuff.

It is Wednesday and I am going to fill all the bins and the alleyway with the black bags. Tomorrow is Thursday, and they will be gone.

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I have felt this way before. You always knew the facts and truths of my past but I never, or at least I don’t remember, telling you the way I felt about them all. Still, I can imagine you did really know. It only took someone to say the right or wrong thing and then you would have seen me react. Whether across a room at a party, or over a table at dinner, or in a crowd at a bar, I would probably have looked down at my shoes, or gazed out the window. I gave myself away and I am sure you noticed, otherwise we would not have worked.

It’s different this time. This time will last longer.

With no curtains, there is no need for a clock or watch. I am allowing the world to tell me the time, and I have sat on the landing, tolerating my smell, smoking the cigarettes passed through my letterbox by friends, and seen the moon five times through the window. It’s growing with the time that passes over it, and now the moon is up there for the sixth time, close to becoming full and bold, and I close my eyes. I know that there are three doors connected to the landing. All of them are shut and I know, because I have passed through them repeatedly, where they all lead.

Music floats from the door beside me. The study. I am standing and my legs are weak, hand on the banister, other hand pushing the door away, and he’s there again. Cross-legged on his leather chair, cigarette resting in the corner of his mouth, simply enjoying the music. He’s facing me, not looking at me, and every step I take closer to him his face blurs, and then re-focuses. I move his leg and straddle him. I have to kiss him forcefully to keep us steady, to keep us together, and to make a lasting imprint upon his lips. He gently pushes me away and holds my head, waiting. The record on the desk is spinning and he’s waiting for that point when the needle will hit the groove he wants, waiting for the song to say: Move slow, now your time’s at hand. Take heed, cos our love has passed.

He mouths the line in perfect unison and his face is a constant blur. I kiss him hard again and he’s still blurry. His mouth is moving furiously. I press my ear to him and the only word that escapes is “Venus”. I hold his head and

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repeat the lyric. He won’t come back.

I close the door and open the one that is behind me. The room is meant to be our bedroom and it’s not the same. He is not the same. He is still himself, but the self before I had met him and spoken to him and loved him. He is eleven and fair and skinny, standing with his back against the white wall, a bright light engulfing him. I want to go to him and I can’t move past the door; this moment does not belong to me. I can only watch him.

He scratches his bare chest. His knees shake and give out, body sliding down the wall, head resting on his arms. The shoulders are jerking. They begin with soft, small twitches and rise into sharp and fast heaves. The bright light around him is waning, the edges of the room darkening, drawing inwards, always and only to him.

I cry in the doorway because I am helpless and he is helpless, has always been helpless to this moment that decides his future, no matter what I say or do to soothe the pain. The shadows have reached him now. That version of him, the self I never knew, has become submerged, out of sight, lost to time.

The blinking red light of his alarm clock is the only thing in focus, in light, of any significance in the darkness.

I must open the door in front of me. I’ve always believed I would know where it leads to, and I don’t want to be wrong. I am wrong; all that lay behind was the airing cupboard. I sit down inside and shut myself in. What was I expecting to find? I expected, wanted, to find warm light, maybe sunshine, or those grey rays that break through the soft rain. I hoped to find his familiar hands and eyes and voice, a constant thing outside of me, next to me, holding my hand as we wade through the bushes together. There is just darkness in here. I can see nothing before me. And yet, underneath the soft hum of the electric boiler, I can hear footsteps coming up the stairs. There are two sets of them. The first are light and erratic. They are happy and joyful. The steps that follow are heavy, assured, and protective of the first set. They make their way along the landing and stop outside the door. Whoever they are, I have to touch them. I need them with me and all my outstretched hand can feel in

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the darkness is the cold wood of the door. The footsteps move away and they leave me, waiting somewhere in my future, beyond the bushes. They belong to the people I want to have, that I want to become, and they will leave no traces for me to follow because they cannot do so; they are not allowed to break the rules.

The moon is gone and I can hear something drop through my letterbox.

There are more cigarettes, and now the letters of condolences are beginning to arrive. I open them and walk out into my garden. I want to see the sky change, from dark to orange light, and with my head tilted to the silhouette of the moon, I remember him telling me about Venus. Venus breaks all the rules we believe in, all the laws we abide by here. It rotates in the opposite direction, the Sun rising in the west, setting in the east, and those rotations are thoughtful and slow. This means that, if you were to find yourself on Venus, you would be able to walk faster than those rotations, keeping both the slow sunrise in front and the slow sunset behind. You would be able to know what was coming at all times. You could always bask in the sunshine, and keep away from the darkness. And then he said that that Venus is the planet most covered with cloud. You could hold the day still but would never see the sun.

There is a rustling coming from the alleyway. I open the side door and there is a bin-man, going through the black bags that should have been taken away.

He tells me he canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t take all of this. He tells me the records are not recyclable.

They have no afterlife to look forward to. He says goodbye and I bring the records inside.

I bought most of them for him. We didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t like the same music and that never really mattered. What mattered was that I could understand why he liked them. He liked the things they told him, words and sounds created by people he had never met, and now will never meet. Those feelings he took from them kept him going, prolonged him from doing something he was always going to do, a moment in the line of time he was helpless to. I can see that now.

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I’m going to go upstairs with the records. I’m going to sit on his leather chair and play that same record, and I’ll wait for the part where the voice says; People may come, People may go Just as long as the water’s slow and I will listen to it until I have had enough.

CO M M E N TA RY

The inspiration for The Water’s Slow came directly from T.S Eliot’s Four Quartets, as it offers a myriad of themes which interest me, and include timelessness and time, life after death, and one’s ability to imagine worlds. The first part of Eliot’s work, Burnt Norton, provided me with strong images of stasis and doors. In my piece the first door is a recent memory of the narrator’s deceased husband. The second is her own speculation about her husband’s suicide. Unlike the first door, she has no freedom with the second, as this world/ ‘memory’ has nothing to do with her, only her husband as a child. The final door represents her future, which is why she cannot project a world beyond it. Her future was connected to her husband and, with him now dead, her future has been irrevocably changed. She must attempt to create a new future for herself. The bushes in my piece refer to “the rose-garden” of time found in Four Quartets. Memory, or more precisely history, is a major theme in Eliot’s work; “For Eliot, history is not epistemologically negligible, but its status is emblematic rather than empirical, bewitchingly free of particular narratives, concrete events and necessary obligations.” Yet my piece deals with personal history as opposed to history in general, dealing with those ‘emblems’ in the protagonist’s own history, from which she must attempt to make meaning by creating her own narrative. After workshop, it became clear that the moon and Venus motif stood out most. With the ‘moon’ motif, I inserted a small passage about how the moon becomes a full moon, representing the protagonist’s journey into fullness again, coming to terms with her grief. The Venus motif seemed too abrupt for some readers; I added an earlier reference to it within the first ‘door’, giving it more of a personal and emotional motif.

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We’re done Written by Janet Barnett Illustrated by Noah Gurden

Dead. Still. Silent is Rob, open flickering his eyes, before the hand retreats back while the man is leaning away from over him, the multiple tubes fly up into Julie’s hands they unfold as she places them down by the side, the woman peers at them the cool breath can be seen in the air re-entering the lying flat body no gasping or wheezing no deep heavy sighs can be heard from the man, blank line flat line, the electrocardiograph not reading tachycardia Sinus, not reading arrhythmias heart, no rhythm Sinus, the whizzing pump moves down then up, the pump switch remains un-clicked down by the hand that is at her side, the last smile is removed from Rob’s face, smiles removed from their faces, the man’s head jerking back and the tears slowly rolling up their tracks on both their faces one-by-one, their hands un-cup his hands before the man walks backwards to stand side by side with the woman, walking backwards looking forwards nurse Julie leaves the room the door closes no knocking is made no gentle tapping from the hand, pat-a-rump, pat-a-rump, fr-ee-dom, free-dom, palm to skin, red, yellow, green, the sounds of the beating drum’s throughout the forest, soaring high to the tips of the Kingdom hilltops, through the lush green leaves of the cherry red Acerola trees and the coppery coloured sweet honey scented flowers that are nestled on the trunk of the Jaboticabas tree, whoosh, whizz, wee, purram,

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tap-tap, wash, whoosh, whoosh, pe-ace-ful, peaceful, the women large and small, the children laughing, playing, babies cooing gurgling smiling, the men tall and short, big and bold, generations, the Konglese people are dancing, around in a circle in an anti-clockwise direction, big hips, small hips, thin hips, thick hips, whining from side to side, up and down, left and right, hands are clapping, hard, clap, soft, clap, clapity-clap, old arms, young arms swaying in and out, fast and slow, all backs are erect as if held up by a cord, unravelling from the waist of the Cadet satin dressing gown as it rolls off her body arm by arm back into her hands, one arm reaching up to replace it onto the hook in the bathroom she steps butt backwards off the floor sliding close the shower doors, her body turns around the sweet un-scented lather rolls upwards there are no luscious bubbles the water jet reverting into the shower head the knob is turned off as the hand reaches away from it after the pretty bottle is returned to the shelf the hand moves down, there is no sniffing of the promised scent, sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s walking backwards un-sliding the shower door the satisfied smile removed, the fallen heap of clothes redressing her body her Platinum La Senza panties slide back up her toned legs, her matching bra re-cups her breasts the back re-hooked, arm by arm her Silver blade silk blouse is rebuttoned from the bottom to the top, the black skirt slides up her legs and she un-wriggles her bum as the zipper is redone, replacing the bobby pins into the fallen black mane now back in a bun, she switches back on the light on the bedside table withdrawing the gentle kiss from the lips not open to receive, moving backwards out of the dim room unsmiling at the door as she squeezes into it from the dark, the terrain is violently uprooted by men on foot, their boots trampling the pink Egyptian Starclust, unearthing the Gabon Ebonyer, left, right, forwards, in search of rubber, tap, tap, glob, glob, bleeding the trees for their thick juicy sap, depriving the soil of its precious minerals, tearing, ripping the land apart, causing great desolation and disharmony, left, right, forwards, RUN, RUN, long legs, short legs, young legs, old legs, four and two legs, quick, quick, quicker, scatter there, disperse here, run and hide, frantic cryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, bellowing shouts, our women are not safe here, our children are not safe here, our

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men are not safe here, we are not safe here, our families our people not safe here anymore, “Dia nduakila? Dia nduakila?

Dia ngitukua Dia ntete Dia sonama Fwa mfwidi kuami Lufuma, lufuma” we were freighted for how long we do not know, through night and day, days and nights, across many blue, black, white seas, wave after wave after wave, high and low, rolling thunder, crashing rocking, rocking, rolling, our heads, our stomachs, empty not full, our ribs, retching and heaving, in and out, from our mouths and from below, green and yellow and black, a salt water bucket thrown at us as our wash, slopped ‘meal’ as our food, shit and blood and more stewing vile vomit, the stench rises burning our noses and in turn burning our eyes, less than dogs, less than cattle, head to toe, over and over, wooden planks our bunkers, our toilets, our lives, many of us suffer death and some barely live, pat-a-rump so faint like a dream to us now, our hearts sore and aching, breaking for our land so far away from here, so far away from this foreign, foreign land? there are many others here from all over the diaspora, they have been taken too, some fought hard wearing their battle wound’s, deep cuts, deep gashes, pink raw fly heaven flesh, many have died, no burial, no grave, no marker, too many to count and recall, many say they wished they had died too and not have to endure this fate, this world, the booted men call us indentured, we say “Lu kubama”, the other’s say, “We No Free.” need We, three two one, the hands remove the body from the bed onto the trolley which is wheeled backwards through the emergency doors the stretcher wheels snap back as the bed slides into the ambulance the doors un-fly shut, the Emergency medical technicians unplug the multitude of wires and tubes, they’re removing the safety harness, they’re removing the monitor, they’re

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removing the saline and all the ice packs, they do not check the monitors for his readings they do not tell the emergency driver to hurry up, the emergency siren is switched off no Sleigh bell light flashing, they’re meandering through the early morning streets of London not going fast, real slow, slowly, slowly, it reverses to the address, they back up the stairs until they are backing into the room, the gaseous stinging is removing from their eyes, the horror has been removed from the young man’s face on his first shift, they both look away from the woman standing dressed in Reverse Pewter, the tears roll back up their tracks on her face leaving it spotless, they are roughly casting away the ice packs, they unlade them from around the body, the boxer shorts are torn off disengaging his skin, they are not applying a cool cloth to soothe his face there is no face to soothe, they do not cover his dignity he is brutally ripped from the stretcher and flung onto the bed maimed “Someone’s cryin me lord Kumbaya Someone’s cryin me lord Kumbaya People cryin my lord Kumbaya Oh lord Kumbaya,” sedately we assemble ourselves into a circle, we measure each other up and down, from left to right, young, old, men, women, children, the gradient shades of brown and black: burnt, cocoa, singed mottled blue, red and gangrene, our differences, making us all the same, PAIN, the pain and sorrow has no pleasant division, kicked, punched, whipped, chained, bound, beaten to near last breath, ripped away, pulled away, ripped apart, pulled apart, we all feel it all the same, the hard labour we all must endure, soiled rags, rotten rags, barely covering skin, her skin, his skin, our skin, barely covering his dignity, her dignity, our dignity, “Does anybody hear me” I bawl cradling

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myself, jerking, jerking, “Yes, me child” an elder woman weeps swaying holding up her frail knobbly arms to the skies, in the still of the night, the dim light illuminates casting shadows around the room, the body what was a body is intertwined together with…

– it’s easy to see where the body began and the other ended, ‘if I can’t have you no one can’, blood boiling screams of pain, cries of agony, sighs of relief, of justice, of peace, screams of anger, of joy, of more pain, cannot be heard as Rob and his body do not suffer a horrific ordeal, his mind is full of his future it is not going into shock, his membranes are reforming regenerating, the tissues and cells are fusing together to make him whole, his flesh is not bubbling, it’s not popping like fresh popping corn, his skin isn’t crackling like rind in the oven, there’s no putrid smell in the room, his epidermis is unharmed untouched unsinged undissolved, Rob’s not feeling burning sensations over his face over his hands, he’s not trying to protect his body as the liquid cascades from the spillage, not over him, his face his body and the bed, dashing back into the empty glass making it full again, the hand recoils away from the bedside table she’s not standing over him, there’s no look in her eyes, she’s not thinking so intently not making her jaw jut outwards, he’s not laying down soundly resting after an attack, there’s no deep uninvited unwelcome gaze on her face, she isn’t there, there’s no trace, the insipid Puce wine hasn’t been split its floating back into the glass back into the bottle the silver rewinds the cork intact, Rob’s not pondering touching her, he doesn’t have to put his arms around her to give comfort, she’s not starting to cry and cry the tracks aren’t forming on her face, Rob’s not standing at the bottom of the unfamiliar stairs that once where very familiar, he doesn’t go up the stairs, he has no thoughts for the things left behind, he’s not there to collect anything, his phone isn’t showing her number he doesn’t answer it, his phone isn’t showing private number, he doesn’t answer it, he didn’t change his number, he doesn’t answer her calls, he didn’t answer her call ‘We’re done’.

“Does anybody hear me” (Mother calls) “Yes, me friend” (another responds)

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‘Mother’ splashes some of the white rum for libation onto the ground, pa pa rum, slowly, slowly, slowly, she places the bottle into the middle of the circle clasping her hands together she bows to the drummers straddling their drums, RESPECT, RESPECT, palm to skin, palm-to-skin, BLESSED, she turns and bows to us her people, BLESS, BLESS, BLESSED we respond, Pum, pum-pum-pum, the circle moves slowly at first in an anti-clockwise direction, our bare feet feeling the cool ground between our toes, it’s vibrating along with the tempo as it slowly increases, the heat increases, the dust rises, drip, drip, drip, light droplets un-embalming our souls, pa, pa, nodding our heads as our tongues speak a different language, clap, clap, we are communicating with each other, water trickles from eyes, heads rising higher, holding hands, outstretching our arms high we are communicating with our ancestors, pat-a-ramp, pam-a-ramp, we are giving thanks to all who have travelled before us to pave our way, pumping, beating, do not judge us for our beliefs, pa-pa-pum, pam, pum, Jamaica is one of the most religious countries on this land, clap, clap, clapity-clap, out of many we are one, pum, pum, pum, we believe in our generations, our music is something you listen to but our dance is what you feel, rattle, rattle, rattle, give praise to the most-high, fists shoot in the air, the skirts of blue, red, white, black, green, whirl, whirling around and around, spin, spin, dip and fall back a body bends, back-breaker bends another, pam, pam, pam, pam, grater, grater grater, howl after howl after howl, dip again, flip again, some with erect backs around and around, louder and louder, wailing, wailing, wailing, hum, hum, hum, sounds of the drum, big hips, small hips, wide hips, spread hips, gyrating from side to side, up and down, in and out, what a bum bum, boom the rippling of the bumper, roll-bumper-roll, jerking-thrusting in and out, sharp, soft, fast, slow, eyes darting from side to side, rolling, eyelids fluttering the humming birds songs, finger tips caressing the skin, instigating intimate foreplay, skin to skin, flesh to flesh, tips, sensation, circular jerking of shoulders up and down, up and down shoulders roll, backwards forwards sidewards, dip and fall back, tap, tap, heel and toe, heel and toe, prayed I would find a way, a better place, no longer broken, feeling from within shaking rocking swaying to the beats, I was shocked,

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shocked that I was scared, scared I knew the rhythm the calling of the drum, my first time here and here I am a part of a tradition, a lifestyle a part of the community that I have just met, pam, pam, chop, chop, and they are a part of me, a group of young men are gathering the wood for the fires, while an elder woman is stoking the coals under the many cooking pots, poking them red hot, young girls are laughing and jumping as they pick the ripest fruit, some with brown palms, some with yellow palms, stained from the mango’s sweet succulent juice, buzz, buzz, making the honeybee jealous they got there first, the heads of the Negro yam, Sweet yam, Cushcush, Water yam as long as my forearm and as thick as my lower leg, blup, blup, the ladies fingers simmering, goo city, gumbo fire, stir, stir, stir, the cornmeal rollies plop, plop, plop, chop chop, ‘de goat there inna de morning naw there dis night’, tripe, cod, head and foot, thyme, scallion, pumpkin, chow-chow, Irish potato, bubble bubble, the people, my people and me are dancing, howling, rejoicing, remembering the past, living the present and thinking towards the future, Kumina is alive! satisfied laid the bodies, they untangle and roll onto all fours, they withdraw the passionate kisses from all the parts of their bodies, they back off the bed, their clothing redresses their bodies, she switches off the bedside lamp, walking backwards towards him, they un-kiss their first kiss they un-embrace, both walking backwards towards the door which she closes, on the other side she doesn’t look for her keys in her bag, he’s walking down the stairs not behind her, we can’t hear them giggling, we don’t see them cuddle, we see no smiles, they are not walking slowly hands un-held, they didn’t meet-up, they’re not there. Still. “de I the best” “I?” “yeah and the fish head, vitamins give you stamina,” some crackle with laughter, a woman whirls around her hips in a motion intent to create babies or to make a person blush, I think they were trying to shock me, crunch, crunch, crunch “me know de I the best”.

Ring ring. The call from home, “your mama Miss Julie, your mama she dead.”

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CO M M E N TARY African-Caribbean-British history, culture and identity

Martin Amis’s, Time’s Arrow or the Nature of the Offence, is written in reverse chronology, reversing the flight of time’s arrow is not original in itself. It has been employed, for instance, by numerous science fiction writers including Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick. Amis makes good use of the technique by creating reverse discourse including reverse dialogue, and reverse explanation which is responsible for the savage irony of the book, making the retelling of the story of the Holocaust both unique and strangely moving through the narrator of the book, the Nazi doctor’s ‘Doppelgänger’. The doctor and the narrator share the same body but otherwise, have different identities “It may well be I am not playing with a full deck.”

The film Memento directed by Christopher Nolan tells the story of Leonard Shelby who has anterograde amnesia and is unable to make new memories.

Within the film are many concepts: the unreliability of memory; our subjective experience and how it creates our persona. In the process it poses some interesting existential questions, suggesting that in searching for a sense of purpose we all, in some way, create and live a lie of our own invention, to justify our existence and whitewash our crimes and misdemeanours. Character and story arcs are broken up and fragmented. “I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world’s still there. Do I believe the world’s still there? Is it still out there?…Yeah. We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I’m no different. Now…where was I?” Memento alternates between colour and black and white sequences. The black and white sequences proceed in chronological order, while the colour sequences proceed in reverse chronological order. The forward black and white scenes and the reverse colour scenes alternate until they meet in the middle of the story at the end of the film.

Within my piece, I have adapted the form and structure from both. The sadistic acid attack on a young man starts my piece written in reverse chronology. It is represented in shades of itself, the colour grey. I have reversed sentences

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and some words. The traditional drums played at a Kumina, originated from the Konglese people of the Congo. This is where the second story begins in reverse narrative, written in chronological order driven by sound and colour. I have written the piece as a stream of consciousness, the non-linear structure, mirroring the working of a human mind, with minimal full stops. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a fun process. I do like the concept of reverse chronology as it creates impact, but I did find that some of the jumbled sentences were very chaotic to write and did not make any sense at times. A completed reverse chronology could be the way forward for me.

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Water. Flesh. Semen.

Blood. Bone. Water.

Written by Amy Melley Illustrated by Urszula Wojcieszczuk

They met at church. He was from somewhere else, out of town, and he lived alone. Quiet but friendly. People liked him. Audrey saw him staring at her during the services. When she would catch him he would smile nervously and look away. There had been something between them even then, in snatched glances and small expressions. Audrey always spent her Saturday mornings in the park, reading. She would take a flask of water, some food and a blanket and sit against a tree and read. She would often see people she knew walking past on their way somewhere, or from something. She saw him there one Saturday morning. He stopped at the fountain in the centre, where all paths meet. She tried to pretend she hadn’t seen him – let herself be the one to be found, but her eyes kept drawing towards him and he noticed her noticing him. He sat with her and they drank water from the same cup. They talked.

He found things out about her because she gave too much away.

There had been times, at the beginning, when he brushed her flesh with his fingertips and she would think she felt his love there, in his touch. Even when he had pressed himself against her at her mother’s birthday party, it was because he couldn’t control his love for her. It was about control. And love. Audrey felt she had been married to two people. They used to take walks through the woods by the lake when they first met. Holding hands, caressing

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palms, stopping periodically to press their mouths against each other; he’d carried her those days, months. She was the passenger on his journey then.

Still was. Her own journey had never materialised. She thought it must be like this for other women, her own mother. Why had she never asked her about any of these things? Because women are good at being passengers, facilitators – even when it hurts them. Audrey was blind to what she wanted. As she walked alone through the woods now she realised she had forgotten who she was. She’d listened to him talk about their future and now it had become what she wanted too. She lay on the grass staring at the sky. Nothing was still – the trees swayed in the breeze, the birds spoke to each other, her body pulsated with the earth as she felt herself sinking deeper and deeper.

The physical pain overwhelmed all the other pain, to the point that she hardly noticed anything else. Her bones felt like they were shattered underneath her skin and if someone were to cut her open she would crumple. The soil surged around her body trying to hold her together. The sun shot through the branches and filled the gaps where the soil couldn’t reach. Warmth resonated from inside her and she felt the hot tears prickle her eyelashes and trickle past her ears into the land. Audrey loved this place. It felt like a secret, a place that was put there for her to heal. Or maybe it was the other way around.

There were many reasons to come here but Audrey came because it was where she belonged. As a child she had swam in the lake with her siblings – then the place had been filled with laughter and lightness. When they bought the lakehouse her family had been thrilled but even then she’d known it wouldn’t be anyone elses but theirs. His, and hers.

From their kitchen window Audrey could see the entire lake spread out in front of her. It was a view she knew well; a view she had gazed at for hours when they first lived there. Preparing food in the kitchen she would watch the clouds change above, creating patches of light and shadow across the water’s still skin. The soft trill of crickets could be heard in the background and nothing else; everything had been so peaceful until it wasn’t. There were times in the beginning when they would walk out onto the narrow dock together and

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sit at the edge, letting their limbs intertwine under the waterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s surface; when they made promises to each other that they couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t keep. She stood now at the end of the dock, unzipped her red dress and let it fall to the floor. She watched as the dress turned darker and darker until the boards under her feet were saturated in red and everything came crashing down. Audrey dived deep into the water and let her body sink to the bottom of the lake. It was surprisingly warm. As soon as her fingertips had touched the surface she felt as though her skin was slipping away from her body and the stains from the past were being washed from her. All the grime was seeping out into the water and it was no longer Audreyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s responsibility to bear. The water unburdened her.

The sun spread hot white light over the rocks beside her. Audrey brushed the sand upwards in front of her. The sand swirled in front of her eyes, making tiny stars in the water.

Audrey swam over to the rocks to rest and watched the eels as they slunk between the reeds. The urge to reach out and grasp their thick, black, writhing bodies was crushing but she knew she would never be able to catch them.

There were some things she wanted to understand, to know intimately, that she knew she never could. Some things were beyond reason. She looked down at her thigh and gently ran her fingers over the scar on her leg, glistening in the sunlight. As she did, the hard skin around the edges began to soften and curl inwards slowly. The long jagged scar began to fade until it completely vanished and her inner thigh became smooth again. She rubbed her hands over her face and felt the dirt and mucus from her eyes and nose and ears seep away.

She still sensed him inside her. She felt his semen crawl out of her body onto the bed of the lake. She watched as it swirled, making foggy circles that got smaller and smaller until, like a tornado, it rose to the surface and settled there. Audrey pressed her feet hard into the rough sand until she could feel herself sinking slowly. When she pulled her feet up there were puddles of light left where her footprints should have been. She grasped down into the illuminated pools with her hands. There was something balmy brushing the ends of her fingertips, just out of reach. She dug with her fingernails until the

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pools opened up around her and she sank down even further, below the lake.

It was bluer here, and brighter, closer. It was the same lake, a mirror image, but cleaner. Audrey span her body around, she could see the whole lake now, not just a few feet in front of her. There was no one else but she felt something’s presence.

She felt her abdomen soften. She looked down and watched as the blood and fluids trickled out in front of her. The red mist faded out into the turbid lake, until it became green again. She touched herself and felt the pain ebb away into nothingness, her flesh no longer torn and raw. The water surged through every part, bringing her body back to her.

Audrey knew he was waiting for her. She looked up towards the surface and saw herself floating face down, gently bobbing with the pulse of the water. Pressing her feet to the bottom of the lake, she swam towards herself.

The open crevice on her forehead open, seeping with blood. Audrey put her fingers inside and pulled out the crumpled notes that were stored in there.

The ink spilled from the edges of the words she had written, had said and echoed around her. She let the paper float up and around them both, enveloping their bodies in all the ugly knowledge they had stored in solitary. Her eyes were open, lips slightly parted – ready to be found. She gently closed her eyes and kissed herself hard on the mouth. Audrey fell away from herself and let the water carry her back down into the clean lake, to the end.

CO M M E N TARY

I wrote this short story based on an exercise given; to look at a piece of abstract art for thirty minutes and give a written response. After walking around Tate Modern for an hour, I chose Tsuyoshi Maekawa’s artwork Two Junctions (1962).

The composition contained different materials, including burlap, and the colours were shades of blues, browns and creams. I was drawn to this painting because

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of the raw, natural elements it seemed to include. After thirty minutes I sat down and made some notes about how I felt from the experience.

The artwork had sent me on an imaginary journey into an underwater world and because of the ragged, tortured quality of the work, I had felt uncomfortable at times. From the notes I made, I wrote a first draft of the story in which the protagonist dives into a lake and transcends into a different world. Although I have found aspects of the ‘Literature, Being and Ecology’ section of the syllabus hard to grasp, I am interested in the idea of embodied and pragmatic knowing, the ways in which they relate to one another and the ways in which people use this knowledge to survive. I have tried to portray this idea of embodied knowing using Audrey’s experience with the water as a metaphor for the ways in which we use nature to heal ourselves emotionally. In the first part if the story, Audrey spends a lot of time walking in the forest and being connected physically with the earth. I wanted the second part of the story, from when she enters the lake, to represent Audrey’s choice to drown herself as her way of transcending the abuse from her husband.

I was fascinated by what Rilke has to say on the matter of experience, ‘Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences.’ I have attempted to represent this ‘unsayable experience’ through magic realism and metaphor. The moment the protagonist dives into the lake we enter a different world, a limbo state, and we see her body begin to heal. The eels, snake-like and ungrabbable, serve as a metaphor for male violence against women and how Audrey wants to, but cannot, make meaning from the pain caused. When she finally dives back down into the lake beneath the lake, we see her fully healed by the water.

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The disappearing girl Written by Katie McTaggart Illustrated by Kirils Vlnokurovs

I’m lying in bed trying to find something interesting. Bookmarked articles that I’m never going to read and gone through every bullshit status on my facebook feed already. I flick through instagram and it’s just variations of the same photo over and over again. The one where people are smiling unreal smiles showing off lives that they don’t really live. The one that’s supposed to make you think that everything is beautiful but that’s not true either. I open an incognito tab on my laptop and watch some porn. The two girls stroke each others legs on a big white bed in a big white room and I’ve lost my headphones so they’re writhing around soundlessly. I think about masturbating for a bit but I’m too bored. I can hear dad shouting something at the TV downstairs.

I sink back into the bed. Deep under the duvet and into the mattress, where I can burrow in between the sharp silver springs. I am bed girl. She lies in your bed and feels your body on top of hers. When people sleep on me I will feel their deep weight. Their heavy, dead weight. The I’m burning the candle at both ends weight. Setting alarms at 7:15 and pressing snooze until they finally get up at 7:45. They will throw themselves down on me in a fit of teenage desperation and cry cry cry until their sobs are dry. They’ll bounce and fuck and dance on me, and they’ll never ever know that I am there. I am

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there seeing all of it. Feeling all of it.

Mum’s hand reaches in and pulls me out. Back up into the world, a re-birthing that I am not ready for and do not want. ‘Get out of there’ she says. ‘I’ve called you three times already, dinner’s getting cold.’

I am seventeen and I live in a small shit town where everyone sees everyone except they don’t, not really. I am seventeen and one day I am going to disappear. * It’s 10:48 on Wednesday which means that I have a free period instead of class. Everyone went to the shop and they had bars of galaxy reduced to 10p.

I got one. Fred got six. Fred is a dick but he’s almost funny sometimes. I probably would sleep with him if I were drunk. I’d sleep with Sara too. Sara is Fred’s girlfriend but I wouldn’t do a threesome. We are back in the common room now, eating our chocolate. I’m not really hungry and I’d had a cigarette on the way back but I’m eating it really fast, not letting it melt in my mouth but chomping it down into tiny bits. So fast I can’t really taste it. I want to pull the gold foil over me and wrap it around like a big blanket and live in it forever but I can’t do that here. People will get jealous. Sara and Fred are kissing now. We aren’t really friends but they are the only people that I have the free period with so I put up it it.

‘Are you going to Lauren’s on friday?’ That’s Sara. I look up from my galaxy and face her. She is looking at me as well but not really. Like she’s looking at my forehead and not my eyes or something.

‘Maybe, I don’t know.’ And I don’t know. I don’t think that I really want to because everyone is so annoying at parties but also because I got too drunk last time and people have only just stopped calling me a slut. But then I think that it’ll probably get to friday and I’ll be really bored and go anyway. So I don’t know.

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* My face starts to prickle as I’m walking home. It does that sometimes. It’s like lots of little shivers all over my face. I move to the side of the pavement, next to the hedges. The freckles on my cheeks grow and merge together. They grow and grow and merge and I can’t see it but I know it’s happening. There is a freckle camo on my face, a private camouflage and I submerge myself into the deep dark holes between the bushes. I am shrub girl. She watches people walking and doesn’t make a sound. They will never know that I am here. A witness to pointlessly busy, self-important lives that everyone has here, where you have to be here at this time but then there at that time. Time is money. There’s never enough time. And time can do so much but he’s still dead. A little girl runs alongside her mother’s sharp steps. Hand in hand, but she’s tripping as she tries to keep up. Teenagers get yelled at as they get in the way of a mobility scooter. The man sat atop it is old. Time weary. Time withered. Are you still mine? That song is old too. If you stop you die and nobody know that that isn’t true. Nobody but me. But I just watch them from my hedge and my freckles. * I do go to the party. And I drink too much but nobody calls me a slut so I suppose that’s progress. On my account or theirs’, I don’t know, but on someone’s. I get bored at some point and Nick is kind of annoying me in that way that you don’t know how exactly but you just know that they are. So I go outside and find a quiet spot. There is a lady in the sky and she wants me to go with her. I watch her dance and I lay back onto the wet grass. The back of my T-shirt is getting wet and it slowly sticks to my skin, I stretch my arms out and feel the blades tickle. The lady runs between the stars and my face is wet too. I am grass girl, staring up at the sky.

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The lady leaves and the noise of the party comes back. Someone is shouting but it’s hard to hear above the music and I don’t care enough to try and make it out. People are laughing and dancing. I bet people are kissing and fucking too and I wonder who will be shamed on Monday. Somebody I don’t recognise runs past me to the edge of the garden and throws up in the bushes. * Some days pass but I don’t think I notice it. I’m in bed and nothing is interesting. Then I sleep. That’s when it happens. Days pass. I don’t notice. My head is spinning, swirling, sinking – like those old charity spinner things that you’d put coins in. Then there’s nothing. Everything then nothing and it could almost be funny because I don’t know which one is worse. Except it’s not. It’s not funny.

Mum comes in a handful of times. Mentions something about toast or a cup of tea. The next time I’m awake there’s a mug of cold tea that looks too pale.

Milk with a tea bag dipped in. She’s probably worried. I think I probably put her through a lot. I wonder if she will be sad when I disappear. My head is a spinner again.

I try to turn myself into something but nothing works, because I am nothing.

I’m not being self-pitying - that’s how it feels. Spin, and then nothing, and then spin. And then nothing. Like a big fat swirling grey pit.

Maybe a little self-pitying. * I’m back at Sixth Form now and everyone says that they’re glad that I’m okay and I say thank you. I’m not sure why I say that but I do. School is boring and I don’t have any plans for the future so I mostly just sit and listen and try

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not to think. Sometimes I draw pictures where I’m holding onto balloons and floating away, or I’m in the sea and the sky lady looks down over me and I’m floating. Always just floating.

I am seventeen and I live in a small shit town where everyone sees everyone except they really, really don’t. I am seventeen; I tried to disappear but they didn’t let me. * Sometimes my hands get heavy. They get so heavy that my wrists feel weak and I think they’re going to snap and my hands will fall off. The skin will flap around and there will be lots of blood; the more the holes in my wrists bleed the more of me disappears. I think it will probably happen one day. And I will bleed and bleed and bleed and everyone will see me but I will be gone.

CO M M E N TA RY

The Disappearing Girl tackles the theme of identity and belonging, however rather than stating ‘this is who I am’, it is concerned with the feeling of not belonging and of not knowing yourself. The narrator is a teenage girl with no clear sense of her own identity. She doesn’t understand who she is or where she belongs and this develops into an aspiration to ‘disappear’.

The piece was inspired mostly by Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber however there are also elements that were motivated by the work of the confessional poets. In Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, the main themes inspired my text were that of belonging and womanhood – particularly young womanhood – i.e. what a woman can be and what a woman is supposed to be or is allowed to be. The narrator watches porn, talks about masturbation and about sex but is

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punished by her peers: ‘people have only just stopped calling me a slut.’

The writing of The Disappearing Girl was also, in large part, a response to the fairytale aspect of Carter’s work. This is mostly through the sections of the text where the narrator experiences extraordinary events – such as ‘becoming’ the bed, or the freckles on her face growing and merging together. The Disappearing Girl is not, however, a fairytale – it is set in the real world in current day. The intention was to keep the extraordinary or unusual events ambiguous. The narrator, I feel, is an unreliable one and I think that there is no need to state whether she is really experiencing them – through either magical realism or hallucination.

She may just have a vivid imagination, or she may be speaking in metaphor. For me, that is not the question. It is more the sense of isolation and confusion that these portray.

It becomes clear later on in the text that the narrator suffers from some mental illness and – though not explicitly stated – it is implied that in her quest to disappear, she attempted suicide in some way. This exploration of mental health and ill-health is in some part inspired by the confessional poets and the experiences that I, the writer, have had as a teenager and young adult. However, though there is the use of the first person pronoun, it is of course the voice of a character rather than the writer. There is also a feeling that the character doesn’t quite understand what is happening with her mental health, and she does not seem – at this point – to feel an urge to try. This could be a point of exploration if this piece where to be taken further.

This piece is concerned with not understanding yourself or the world around you, a deep sadness and the feeling of being numb. But it is also about making a new world or society for yourself when you do not feel that you belong – if this text were to be taken further, I think that that would be the main theme.

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Grown up Written by Joshua Derraji Illustrated by Joana Reis

The bottle of wine was finished. The second bottle disappeared at the same speed. He staggered to the kitchen and gulped down a pint of water and with the bottle of whisky in his hand, the tears stopped, and he opened the small box that had been sat on the table, unopened, for the last three days.

Whether it was conscious, sub-conscious or unconscious, all the photos were in chronological order, the top of the pile being the furthest memory away from him. He lit a cigarette And he is in the park. No idea which one. Lying down with a cigarette in his mouth and the sun is glinting off the green grass and she is lying next to him. His head is turned to her, trying to figure out if she’s beautiful or not.

He decided she was, but not for him. Beautiful for someone else. He tokes the cigarette hard And he does remember where this is. End of the summer in Brixton, a house party, a thirtieth birthday, maybe Emily’s. He walks into the packed living room, the dance floor, and she’s standing by the wall. Sleeping with another guy at the time. Did that get you going? He can see now she is beautiful for him. The green eyes really came out that night, so he tried to set down an impression.

It worked and now they are in the pub, stood at the bar, him behind, arms

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around her waist, chin on her shoulder, big grins. Fucking three times a night when they see each other. She says he’s the first guy to make her cum since 2009. Rub the cigarette out in the ashtray and swig the glass back, There’s some resistance in his throat. She’s drunk and found it funny how he lay on the bed with his shoes still on. She rested next to him and he told the truth. One truth out of two. He was depressed. He did want to be alone. She accepted it and they slept together.

Rolls another one, badly. Pours more amber into the tumbler. He needs it because he knows what’s coming.

February 6th. He woke up and went to his father’s flat and he made him a cup of tea in the kitchen. He came back with the tray. His father had gone forever and he dropped the tray to try bring him back. No good. Moved on.

The photo isn’t even of that day. It is 1995, winter, Christmas parade.

He’s wearing his father’s fleece hat and it’s too big, repeatedly falling over his small eyes, and he can’t stop laughing. Neither of them can.

More whisky. No crying, do that later. He needs to focus on this.

He was grieving and alone and she came back, she forgave him. Forgave, not forgot. The rain became heavy and she already had a runny nose. Nearest pub they could find. ‘I like your hair slicked back’. He was smiling not just because of happiness, but because he was not alone.

He gets up and heads for the toilet. Throws up, drinks a second pint of water, lights a cigarette. Exchange one foul taste for another.

He’s cried every New Years since he was seventeen, but there is a glitch here. A party with her, with her friends, people he didn’t like straight away.

You can see the back of him, stood on the balcony, smoking, counting the minutes, ready to leave.

Someone captured them mid-countdown-kiss. Everyone else is still kissing as he pulls away. She noticed.

The tears start again. How can he look at this and not weep? How can he not cry as they sit on the beach in Valencia, drinking their fifth beer of the day, bodies wet from the sea, her whispering, ‘This is the best day we’ve ever spent together’?

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The last one and he’s in a suit and she’s in a green dress. They’re watching the bride and groom give their speeches. He knows that for her, that was the beginning of an idea. A small one, but an idea all the same. He made a fool of himself in the garden, pissing into the fountain, telling her to go fuck herself, telling everyone.

He closes the box and the whisky is gone and the photos are finished.

He’s wrong. There is one more and it’s not a photo, it’s a memory. The closest memory. The one from three days ago. They’ve gone to the pub next to her house. It will close in twenty minutes and he quickly buys two negronis and she knows what he’s going to say. She can’t stop staring at him. ‘I would have held you so much tighter on Tuesday. So much longer. How could you say nothing for so long? How could you say you loved me?’

He had no answer. The second truth out of two. She finished her drink and she left his life. Watched her walk right out of it.

This is the one that will haunt him. The others may be solidified in history, in physical form, but they can be touched, twisted, burned, left in a box in the attic. He can choose to see them, if he wants, whenever he wants.

The memory is real though, more real than the photos. It will be dug in his mind for the rest of his life. He saw her heart break, saw it on her face, lost control of her lips and eyes. ‘You need to leave my life now.’

It will haunt him because it was the right thing to do. It was the grown up thing to do.

CO M M E N TA RY

Fragmentation, in terms of narrative, theme and aesthetics, is a key trope of Post-Modernist literature. This trope is found in many modernist and postmodernist texts, such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. The intention of this key element is to convey the interior feelings

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and thoughts of a character, whether it is the protagonist or another peripheral character. The human consciousness is a difficult idea to pin down and make physical, which is where the idea of fragmentation comes in to play. Naturally and automatically, our minds jump from one idea to the next, often without a clear, defining link. Employing elements of fragmentation within literature helps to ease the arduous task of recreating how a person thinks, which adds great insight into a character. Yet, upon reading Slaughterhouse-Five, the reader is immediately struck by the structure of the novel, comprised of numerous short , fragmented paragraphs throughout. Aside from creating a pleasurable flow for the reader, this fragmented form serves two functions; to adhere to the nature of possible time-travel, and to parody the Tralfamadorian novel.

Grown Up attempts to replicate the effects of fragmentation found throughout Slaughterhouse-Five. The protagonist, male and unnamed, has just ended a two year relationship with a woman. Drunk and melancholy, he goes through a stack of photographs taken of them, which traces certain key moments of their relationship. By having the piece comprised of short paragraphs, some only a sentence long, the aim is to, like Slaughterhouse-Five, allow the protagonist to move freely from one photograph to the next, from one moment in time to another, involving himself in scenes he has already witnessed, already experienced, as a way of coming to terms with the end of his relationship. Furthermore, it seeks to show the emotional wellbeing of the protagonist; he is literally ‘in pieces’ over the break up.

The story also strives to mimic the Tralfamadorian novel presented in Slaughterhouse-Five, which is the style of novel the Tralfamadorian race reads, and is made up of ‘brief clumps of symbols separated by stars.’ The ‘brief clumps’ are the paragraphs, and the goal was to ‘produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep.’ All the paragraphs are meant to be viewed all at once, to make sense of a relationship that lasted for an extended period of time, and which is causing trauma and sadness for the protagonist in the present.

Slaughterhouse-Five is supremely powerful because it ‘gains its power not as an act or moralising, but of witness’ travelling in and out of space and time, witnessing events, searching for logic. Grown Up seeks to do the same, by having

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the protagonist revisit all the memories, with photographs as a stimulus, to make sense of what really went wrong in their relationship, which all came down to the sudden passing of his father.

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JOURNEYS

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Transition Written by Janet Barnett Illustrated by Katharina Kawaters

I wasn’t one of them back then. But they were.

“They’re sending him away.” the crow’s coming home to roost.

Serves him right. Strangely I’m aware of sounding angry but I’m just stating a cold-hard fact. Like to keep it real, live in reality. A realist whatever that means. He’s always blaming others for his problems, his countless-thoughtless decisions. All my life, his life. It’s been somebody else, doing to him or because of someone else, why he couldn’t, wouldn’t, take responsibility for anything.

He claims no ownership. the crow’s come home to roost.

Hard for me to feel any sort of emotion towards him. Anymore.

We weren’t always so estranged, we were friends, him and I. So, I thought.

How many countless times has he changed addresses, in my lifetime, let alone his own? Yet I’m still living in my tiny flat on the same street, thirty years on.

So much for laying solid, roots, a stable-secure place to call home. To run to in times of trouble or joy. Joy is a false commodity for him, a virtue that he abuses and manipulates to suit his own gains. No, he is not governed by rules

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and obligations to others. Only himself. His deeds are loaded with undertones and half-truths. No, his love is corrupted, it eats away at your soul, you then become contaminated by his cruel lies. Believed in him once. My heart held him, dearly, an uncut black-diamond, priceless-precious-untainted and pure.

And when he did return, found in his blue leather suitcase, a truth, his truth, a missing piece to my puzzled mind.

Something shattered inside me that day.

He’d left it open. Why hadn’t he the sense to close it? Put it away under the bed or in the wardrobe? Supposed he hadn’t finished unpacking. It was just there, open on the side table, near the window, the net curtain nesting over it.

Maybe I wouldn’t have touched it? If it was closed. Out of sight. Didn’t know what darkness it contained. Wanted to know him. Touch his things, prove to myself he’d missed me as much as I’d missed him. If not more. Maybe he wanted for me to look through it? To see for myself. Maybe he forgot?

More likely he didn’t know the type of child I was. Pulled out some of his clothes they seemed familiar yet unfamiliar to me. Thought of Yogi the bear and Boo-boo as I sniffed his loopy jumper. Didn’t know the strange odour.

It must have come from where he was all this time? Thumbed his well-worn black leather jacket with a matching black leather beret folded in one of the pockets, swore he was a Black Panther, standing for Self-Defence and Justice.

My hands dug deeper, little boxes decorated with matchsticks where amongst the stuff. I eyed a pile of papers, didn’t feel I was doing anything wrong. A good detective can’t help themselves they are thorough, like Colombo or Kojak.

I stopped.

Recognised her familiar handwriting on an envelope. Pulled out the lined paper and started to read. Then another, for some reason, I put them in date order. She knew where he was, why didn’t she tell me? Stamping my foot.

She knew. Recognised my own large joined-up handwriting, moaning to him about being fat, being teased at school. I remembered telling him, thought it

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was a dream. In another letter, told him how a slim blonde-haired girl had called me a black bastard. I heard him say, “You are, we aren’t married. Both being; black and a bastard is nothing to be ashamed of or to hide from.” Felt this was in a dream too. What was real? Picked up a big file, almost a book without a cover or a spine. It had a court stamp on it, I started to read. Held my stomach when I read the medical report, knew what a Hymen was. Knew I had one too. Gripping my belly, the pain they must have suffered. How could he? Why did he? He was sick. When I read the part in his statement where he said, ‘it wasn’t my fault.’

“Not your fault” I screamed inside. Did they scream inside as well, or out loud? Unheard. A foul taste rose from my stomach to my mouth. I was shaking, sweating, my tears blurred my eyes as I shoved the things back into the suitcase.

Open not shut.

“Are you going to speak to your father again?” My mother asks between puffs on her Embassy cigarette, as I’m walking out of her hoarders living room full of boxes and paper scattered around the floor. Junk mail mainly, hospital appointment letters, and medication boxes. Her grandchildren’s toys that they no longer used, needed or ever had. Bottles of water, cans of sugar-free 7-UP everywhere. I look at the tilted cigarette the ash about to fall.

“What for?”

“Everyone is getting older.“ “Save it for ‘Oprah’.

“But.” “No, save your breath for yourself.” Leaning forward daring her to push me.

I trust her less than I had trusted him. Trusted him more than I’m ashamed to admit. In the kitchen, there’s more clutter all over the work surfaces. Packets of rice; Sainsbury’s Basmati, and ‘Uncle Ben’s orange box with his brown face. Tins of Heinz soups. Sainsbury’s jars of Turmeric, ground Ginger, ground Black and White Pepper. All in disarray not packed away in the ample

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cupboards adorning the kitchen walls. Dust-city, dust-city, choking, coughing, throat burning, dry, it’s hard to breathe. Ring-Ring. Ring-ring. I stand silent.

My gut tightens. I know it’s him. I hear her talking. They have a way they communicate, it’s been consistent throughout the years. How did they ever get together and have us?

Blam. The living room door slams as I turn on Henry.

Good.

Rub-rub, bloody red carpet, rub against the grain, rub against the pile.

Bloody red carpet. Bloody red. My top sticks to me I’m sweating from my bi-weekly workout and sauna. At least it’s for free. Painfully wincing. Nothing in this world is free. The heating’s always on full blast. She complains about her high British Gas bill. That’s why her cactus plants thrive. They’re in the ‘Sahara Desert of Islington’.

What fresh new hell awaits me?

When I was a child, when did I become my parent’s parent? Why must I speak to him? About him? Who blurred the lines? Them or me? Who? He made his choice. In doing so left me to make mine. Where are they now?

Those two girls for whom life has been torn apart along with their bodies.

Where are they? If I met them, what would I, could I say? Would they recognise me? How would they react to me acknowledging the intrusion on their lives? Not once, multiple times. Years. Would my contact be another invasion a reminder of their past, his past, my past? Legacy? They say wounds heal. How? When I was twenty, he clipped my first Cohiba Maduro 5 Genios.

When I was thirty, he married his second wife, again not my mother.

When I was forty, he hosted my second birthday party. It was a ball watching everyone do the ‘Candy’.

Soon I’ll be fifty.

Then I’ll be sixty.

Then seventy his age. They’re sending him away, ‘Indefinite leave to remain’? ‘British Subject’? ‘Yarl’s Wood’? He’s been here most of his life. All my life. He’s worked many jobs, a bus conductor for Grey Green, a car mechanic

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at ‘Ford of Britain’. His driving knowledge of the ‘British Isles’ is better than any ‘AA’ roadmap. When they stayed in Bristol they’d take the M4 over the ‘Second Severn Crossing’ to ‘The Newport Museum and Art Gallery’, built one year before I was born. They found Negro yam in ‘Birmingham’s ‘Bull Ring’ market.

He knows the names of the Royal Family; Princess Anne is his favourite. He can tell you the difference between a Farthing, a Shilling, a Half-a-Crown and a One-Pound note before it became a One-Pound coin. He cried when Princess Diana died. He was outraged when Stephen Lawrence was murdered at a bus stop in Eltham. Cold blood. He can tell you the latest Socca tune, no doubt he brought it from Freddie in Body Music, Tottenham. His collection is on Vinyl, Cassette tapes, CDs, Mp3 and Dats tapes. He’s never been to Nottingham Carnival, he doesn’t do crowds. He remembers ‘Bernie Grant’ the work he did after the ‘1985 Broadwater Farm’ riots. He makes the meanest ‘Escovitch Fish’ for Easter and saltfish fritters for Friday dinner when it’s tradition not to cook. He eats Corn Beef Hash when he’s watching the news or re-runs of Rawhide or Tom and Jerry. To most, he’s a perfect gentleman, a Grand storyteller, with endless revisions. His loyalty lies with those who knock the ivory bones, with the Wray and Nephew hitting the back of their throats.

Now, what’s he going to do? the crow’s home to roost.

CO M M E N TA RY

Transnationalism and place, displacement, deracination and migration are themes I write about because I can. I also write this way because I can. Melissa Fu states: “When writing about identity, the obvious choice is to take the first-person point of view: I am. I remember. I come from. I will be. This is my voice, my story. But there is nothing obvious about identity.” After reading this, I removed over thirty-five ‘I’s’ from the first draft to the next. This final cut has a sharper tone and a crisp

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pace, aimed at a Young Adult audience. I am a third-generation Black woman, a descendant of a people who came to Britain to help build up the ‘Mother Country’ after ‘World War Two’. ‘The Windrush Generation’. I make no excuse for the disruption it may cause. I am willing to make a stand. I am intolerant of people’s intolerance and the constant anxiety we feel as people of colour. There is an outcry with the Windrush Generation scandal that erupted last year, 2018, though it did not start there. As a writer, I ask the question, ‘What happened to the scandals of child abuse?’. There is clearly a problem. By naming a problem in this piece, do I then become the problem as Alice Walker experienced backlash for her novel The Color Purple in 1982? ‘Confrontation ain’t nothin’ new to me’ a line from the Black Panther movie soundtrack. As a progressive Black woman, my presence makes me a disruptive body.

In this piece, the first person narrative recounts to the reader the trauma experienced. I have made it less personal, by detailing specific names and events that have more of a global value. The tone of the narrative in Princess Bari is stoic.

She doesn’t dwell in the pain. She gets through it with the aid of her spiritual guides, her Grandmother and her dog Chilsung. ‘I was barely twelve when my family was split up’ could have been spoken by the ‘Windrush Generation’. The novel looks at the flow of people, who belongs and how do you prove that you belong. The West Indian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman. In law, he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth. In fact, he is a West Indian or an Asian still. The Good Immigrant also questions also what it means to belong in any place and what counts as good or bad? Benjamin Zephaniah Rex has said he hit a former girlfriend. In an interview with BBC Radio 5 Live’s Nihal Arthanayake, the Birmingham-born artist admitted he treated some of his girlfriends in a “terrible” way, and later regretted his behaviour, saying it “ate at me.”

I questioned if he was apologising now due to the fact he has been speaking out about the Windrush Generation scandal?

This piece epitomises how there is no singular way to be black, no universal set of experiences that we all share, no stereotype that can accommodate the vast array of personalities and histories and ethnic backgrounds that black people possess.

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Skin Written by Ashini Fernando Illustrated by Shannon Johnston Howes

She hated being called beautiful.

Most of the times it would be her family saying it. Well, actually, her mum. Other times it would be old people from the town, who had seen her grow over the years. Occasionally her friends, to make her feel empowered, but they didn’t really mean it – some lies were essential for a good friendship.

Everybody would protest if she dared say that she wasn’t. Or rather that she didn’t feel beautiful. Because that was it: nobody made her feel that way.

During her teenage years she was aware of her awkwardness. She thought it came with being overweight, all those extra kilos that made her every movement clumsy. T-shirts would extend over her stomach and low-waist jeans would not help to keep her soft flesh in. New stretch marks would appear on her hips, her arms, her shoulders, her thighs. Her body type – she would compare it to a sack of potatoes – directly influenced the way she would relate to other people: trying to fit in, at the same time making sure not to draw too much attention on her flaws. Not having a lot of money to spend on clothes added more to the unpleasantness; her mum had a terrible old-fashioned taste and she had to wear whatever she found in her wardrobe. Like the granny panties, the pastel coloured, slightly larger underwear that she hated but made her feel comfortable – especially during her period. She was wearing

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the blue pair the time Giancarlo pulled down her trousers in the middle of the school courtyard. She pulled them up quickly before becoming paralysed by shame. Her friends told her it was fine, it was just a joke. After that, she carefully chose the best pairs she had, hand-washing them before going to bed, so that she could wear them again in a few days.

At the time she thought that her being uncool, awkward, weird were all reasons no boy was interested in her. As soon as she was old enough, she started looking for a job. At the beginning babysitting and tutoring gave her enough money to buy clothes that she liked and could wear without feeling embarrassed. When high-waist jeans became cool again, she had two pairs.

Just like the newest shoes and bags. She then started looking for more jobs, managing to work part-time for an ice-cream shop. After a particularly good Christmas and a few months of saving – and a little help from her dad – she managed to buy an iPhone. That made her feel extremely proud. She could see herself as a powerful business woman in a few years and even her family would talk of her as a role model to her cousins. Still none of the boys she fancied returned her feelings. They would go after other girls, who dressed like her, behaved like her, but weren’t her. She started going out more, lied to her parents a lot and started smoking. She did everything she thought would make her look cooler. Or sexier. Her first smoke happened in a club.

Glowsticks. A Cosmopolitan that she didn’t really like in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She tried to follow her friend’s directions and ended up coughing a lot, her throat burning. Her friends told her she would get used to it. She could hear the older guys laughing behind her and it didn’t matter if they were laughing at her or at a joke. She felt stupid. She kept smoking secretly until she learned how to do it properly. She wanted to learn how to release circles, but also how to do it gracefully. None of her newly acquired skills worked on the boys she liked. She ended up convincing herself that she didn’t need a relationship.

At the end of high school, her parents told her that she would live with her aunt and study in London. Ghanga’s auntie, her dad’s younger sister, was one of the successful people that everybody in the family loved to talk

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about. Nelum moved to London when she was Ghanga’s age, went to King’s and was now a well-known lawyer. She was everything Ghanga aspired to be: beautiful, independent and strong. She had had a few long relationships – that the family had not approved of, considering none of the men had been from Sri Lanka – but was now living on her own in her newly bought house in West Hampstead. Being Ghanga’s godmother and as a favour to her brother, Nelum had offered to take care of her and make sure she had the best education.

Ghanga’s protests were silenced quickly, highlighting how much she would benefit from the experience and that other people would be grateful had they had the same opportunity. Flight tickets were bought and, together with her parents, she found a few courses that she was interested in. In the end, she came to terms with the move. She had had the same friends since she was a baby, they wouldn’t forget her. Apart from them, not much was left for her in Italy anyway. Job opportunities were not great and a degree in the UK was shorter. She was happy and curious to try. She chose a business degree and left at the end of summer.

London was nothing like the small town she lived in and Nelum’s lifestyle was nothing like the one Ghanga was used to with her parents. Ghanga found it hard to feel comfortable, to adjust. The first barrier she faced was language.

She was good at English but was not prepared for the British accent. She would find herself staring at people, awkwardly, asking them to repeat their sentences over and over again until they gave up or until she pretended to understand. She started thinking she wasn’t ready for a degree in London.

She would understand most of the lectures but would not contribute to the conversation. She was afraid of not being understood and of not being able to keep the dialogue going. She started watching a lot of telly, with unsynchronized subtitles, hoping that it would speed up the process of adaptation.

The second barrier was the culture. British people were nothing like Italians. Sitting in the tube would depress her. The automatization of it all, the way people filled a carriage and emptied it so swiftly. The silence, broken only by TFL’s announcements. The way everyone walked in two neatly

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separated lines or didn’t stand on the left side on the escalators. The way nobody would stare at you. She hated the loneliness in crowded spaces.

She missed the noise, the mess, the awkward conversations between strangers, she missed the lethargy of a small town. She missed having a coffee at the local Bar and not in a takeaway cup; the slices of pizza and gelato sold everywhere, instead of chicken wings; having her friends so close and being able to hang out whenever they wanted and being able to walk anywhere. She missed knowing everyone in town.

She didn’t miss the whiteness of it all.

Except for when she went to bigger cities, she didn’t really see people of colour in Italy. In London they were everywhere. The absence of colour in her town, made her notice it more now. If in Italy, immigrants lived hidden lives, taking the jobs the natives didn’t want, here they were wearing suits and going to work in offices. Here nobody questioned her Italian citizenship. Here Japanese and Chinese cuisines would never be served at the same restaurant.

She often stared at beautiful Arabic women, or Black women with voluminous afros or braids forming intricate patterns and shapes, or South Asian women wearing saris, like the ones her mother wore in the photos they brought back from Sri Lanka. Ghanga would stare at the women who stood out in the crowd, displaying their backgrounds and their traditions proudly.

They were doing something that she carefully avoided her whole life. She performed an identity that she didn’t recognize with. She followed trends; she bought fashion magazines, which never represented her; and tried to cover her imperfections with foundations, that never matched her tone. She used to hate the summer because she would turn a darker, dusty brown when everyone else turned golden.

She hated being called beautiful, because she had never felt so in her own skin before.

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CO M M E NTARY

I started my story without mentioning the character’s name as I didn’t want the reader to be biased in their opinion of her. I wanted to represent her as any other girl, because that’s how she perceives herself until she is faced with a new reality. That is one of the main issues faced by children of immigrants.

Being raised into a new country, they would have a transnational identity, but would assimilate the new culture and costumes more than their parents’ one.

That’s why she thinks that her mother, unlike others, is old-fashioned; she doesn’t automatically attribute this to a cultural diversity that is not assimilated in the new country. I almost wanted the reader to assume that Ghanga was white.

Growing up, I didn’t have to question the race of the characters in the books I read, because I expected them to be white – otherwise it would have been specified – just like Reni Eddo-Lodge explains: “Neutral is white. The default is white.

Because we are born into an already written script that tells us what to expect from strangers due to their skin colours, accents and social status, the whole of humanity is coded as white.” Revealing her name, halfway through, I added depth to the narrative; the story is not about a teenager and her crushes anymore.

Ghanga is extremely naïve at the beginning, because the issues she faces are not widely discussed or addressed by the community she lives in, which has an almost colour-blind approach. In her early teenage years, she becomes obsessed with not being liked by boys, obsession which is fuelled by her failures in changing the situation. It’s only at the end that she realises that this is determined by the society she was raised in. Before the final draft, one of my last lines was “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and Italians weren’t used to beauty not being White.” I then edited it to make it subtler. The point I am trying to make is that we can’t appreciate something that our society is erasing. Ghanga and anyone around her only knew White ideals of beauty. She was trying to fit into it, unconsciously becoming the good immigrant that puts aside their tradition in favour of the new one. In her case not even self-determination, her constant effort to change her situation, can beat the aesthetic of the community. She doesn’t know what is wrong with her and she thinks it might be a personality issue, people not liking her for how

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she behaves or presents herself. But not even changing that can change the perception, the unconscious bias, people have of her. The transnational culture and identity is mostly apparent only once she moves to London, where she is faced with different cultures and can finally compare and better understand her situation. As long as she was in Italy her obsession to be liked and the frustration are enlarged by the lack of comparison.

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Compliment to the tailor Written by Janet Barnett Illustrated by George Daniel Bursuc

Mrs Cbazaar is seventy years old although due to her merriment, you would mistake her for being much younger. She loves to dance; her body moves so elegantly, like the Himalayan forest thrush.

She kits herself out in techno-bling. I’m her everyday wear…

Emerald green silk with oyster-pink pearls encrusted around her neckline, the hem and cuffs. You can hear her Polki bangles long before she enters the room and they echo long after she has left it. Last time I counted, twenty-five bangles on each arm. Who does that? She bought them like she buys all her apparel from East Ham market. Jabbie created me with his bare hands from scratch. He measured her, drew me and asked her, “Are you sure you want these there? And there? He was holding out the pearls. She nodded with excitement and within two weeks here I am, twirling. * Mr Dolce and Gabbana is self-assured and confident. Some say arrogant and obnoxious. He wears me next to his skin because I am cool, soft and gentle to the touch. Don’t tell him that I told you but sometimes he wears me commando, think what you will on that. He is in his forties, works for himself, a

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graphic designer. To be honest I think companies don’t want him so he does his own thing. I’m his pulling best. I work every time he wears me. The first time he saw me down Oxford Street I swear he said ‘Yes, some action tonight, for sure.’

Like I said before, confident, maybe even cocky? Oh well, what more can I say? He’s the boss. Jabbie has had to fix my zipper. I’ve been caught a few times, all that pulling. * After spending time squashed together in the basket, once a month Mr T.M. Lewin takes us,; his twenty-one shirts, to be washed and pressed. He has no shame. With all the money he earns, we think he can afford to hire a housekeeper and have us ironed at home.

Oh no, Mr Languorous picks us up, doesn’t even put us in a bag, nothing.

He plonks us on the counter, “Express please, I’ll be back on Sunday for them all.” I tell you, he disgusts all twenty-one of us. It’s a surprise that none of us has been lost, though the thought does cross our minds. Jabbie replaces some of our buttons when he loses them. * The mother took me in all dusty, mouldy and I thought forgotten forever.

Her daughter, his granddaughter eyed me up one day.

“Gramps, can I have?

“Speak Mandarin,” he said to her in of course Mandarin.

“Can I have?

“What for?

“To wear of course.”

She’s a right one. Apple of his eye though. He chuckled and handed me over he was so tender, I felt like a priceless treasure.

“Take care of him, I’ve had him long before you were born young lady.

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We have been through a war.”

“Yes Gramps, I know they don’t make them anymore even though Burberry is still going strong.” It’s the name that means something. Class.

“Quality, breathable and waterproof. You can’t find this anywhere these days. Now he is yours, take good care of him, or else” “Yeah, yeah.”

“So, here I am. Colonel Burberry, present and correct, Sir.” Jabbie is going to sew new epaulettes and style my pockets, she wants to customize me.” * Don’t be fooled by Miss M & S’s tone of voice. She’s done her time in the corporate world and now she is retired. She lives her life as she deems appropriate. She knows her worth. She takes us in on a Friday evening and collects us on a Sunday afternoon or Monday afternoon the latest. She always provides her own Fairy soap powder and her Lily of the Valley Comfort conditioner.

There are no skid marks on her underwear, she rinses us first before she places us into the undies bag, then into the same laundry bag every week. She pays her £12.00, sometimes she gets a ticket, most times she doesn’t. She expects us back clean and folded on time. Last week she went for a meal with an old work colleague, they met up at Angel, they went to Masigo. When she came to collect us Jabbie asked her if she had a good time. She said it was fun. We all came home and she had her Chardonnay, cheese and biscuits. * “I want these by tomorrow,” Mr Louis Vuitton demanded.

Two tracksuits, two shirts, two trousers. We are all mingled in grease from the garage and grease from the fried chicken he loves to eat. Always wiping his greasy paws on us. We know he works hard, but come on, what about us?.

It’s not like we’re cheap, coming from America. Can’t imagine how much he

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charges for a service. The least he can do is treat us with more respect. Jabbie is going to repair his overalls again, don’t’ know why, like that is going to make any difference. * We were stacked on the middle shelf when they walked in. At first, we thought an odd looking couple, but what couples aren’t odd, we ask you? Mr Timberland, walked around thumbing us roughly, we didn’t want to go. Miss Principles, was more gentle. She caressed us, feeling our quality and texture.

She nuzzled us? Strange we thought. But hey, who are we to judge, we were the ones on the shelf, waiting.

“This one,” she said.

“If you want,” he replied.

Truth be known we were grateful. We didn’t want to be on the shelf anymore.

She took us home and washed us, at 60 degrees.

Then she dried us.

What an experience we can tell you.

Round and around wet then dried.

Cold then hot, and that rinse and that wringing.

Wow. Warm and fresh is what we felt.

Brand new.

She carefully spread us on their bed.

We felt special.

Mr Timberland walked into the bedroom with a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon.

Shock horror, red and white don’t mix.

“Get out,” she shouted.

We were relieved.

But he came back in just as she was loosening the bun on the top of her

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head releasing her lush auburn locks. He rubbed the back of her neck and down her spine. She murmured. Leaned on the bed.

Shit, we thought he is going to spill the red on us. She took the glass from him placed it on the bedside cabinet. He looked into her eyes and she looked into his.

Oh no we thought, they are going to christen us now. They kissed, it was so lovely and awfully scary to watch, red and white don’t mix remember? She jumped off the bed.

“I’m going for a shower.”

It surprised us. We thought he had her. Of course later that night they did christen us. Afterwards, they kissed and cuddled and she snuzzled her nose in his armpit. We were happy we weren’t drizzled in red. Jabbie is sewing a line of red ribbon around our Egyptian cotton edges, it’s a surprise for valentines.

Aarrh Mr Timberland isn’t such a brute after all. * Sniff Sniff I’ve been here a while.

I was worn for one day.

It was amazing all eyes were on me.

She looked beautiful too, like a princess should, glowing to perfection.

I fitted her well.

Snug.

Her second skin around her slender body. I could hear her heart pounding. It was as if she had held her breath. Then she cried? Their first dance together after the ceremony was to,’ ‘I’m every woman.’ Then the DJ played the socca music; ‘I am blessed and Nanny wine’, that’s how my train was trodden on and torn. They went off to Nigeria and I was stuffed in a carrier bag and brought here. Jabbie has already mended my train but I’m still here

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waiting to be cleaned and taken to our new home.

When are they coming?

How long has it been now?

Weeks?

Months?

Years? * I want to go home, I want to go home.

Can anyone hear me?

I want to go home.

It’s dark and dank, Yuck, I want to go home.

Owoo-oo-oo!

Something just crawled over me A mouse?

A rat?

It’s cold, it’s gnawing at my sleeve.

I don’t have legs to kick it away and I don’t have hands to beat it.

I’ve been shoved between the old laundry bags, and the un-collectables.

I used to be her favourite shirt.

We have travelled the world: Wales, Spain, Rome, Italy.

Then she became Black; clothes,

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hair, persona.

She brought me here, she never returned, she never even said Goodbye?

Jabbie said, “This is a unique design, must be one of her own, she will return soon, for her favourite?”

She never did, But at least Jabbie is still here.

I wonder if he remembers me, As I remember him?

CO M M E N TA RY

Voice and ethics, poetic and literary form When the first draft was workshopped some of the critical feedback I received was: more clarity needed in the first paragraph. As I spoke about actions and looks, this caused some confusion. This has been rewritten to aid clarity.

The third paragraph: regarding a ‘month worth of work’, it had been suggested to take this out, but upon reflection I felt it to be an important sentence, in the context of the piece. I have looked at other ways to add more clarification to this sentence. Hence the twenty-one shirts.

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The last line was a repetition of the title and included ‘his magic.’ This was found to be very confusing as it wasn’t clear as to whose voice was speaking. It was also felt that the line was a little too neat and didn’t create a blank space for the reader, whereby they were being told everything. This line has been removed as the title already signposts the reader.

I was concerned when reading out the piece about the blanks_____ for names of people, that it would be odd. I ethically chose not to include real names. There was a suggestion to make up the names or to make up names of brands, for example, Miss Primark, this suggestion made the class laugh so I have incorporated this idea.

For this piece, I experimented with the form; I have used different fonts to represent each distinctive voice within the piece. The pottage is intrinsic and shows the complexities of any community.

This piece is located in an inner city dry cleaners, a world within the city of London. The belongings represent a small selection of individual people, with the depiction of their identities and characteristics.

The suggestion to include some stories of clothes not collected has helped to create a more balanced piece by portraying a more realistic view of life. It has been very important to have a clarity of characters and what they represent in the real world as opposed to just the story world. How I record their story puts the onus and responsibility on me as a writer. I am aware of the possible stereotypes; gender issues and race issues while writing this piece.

After reading the poem; ‘Jabbie the Tailor, by Anthony Joseph, upon Sid’s suggestion, it made me think about the dry cleaner’s own Jabbie. Although Jabbie is not his real name, their roles and journey contain similarities. Inserting him into the piece gives his invisibility and the magic he performs a voice and relatable form, and highlights his importance as the heart of the dry cleaners.

In context with Seamus Heaney’s work on his own location and the everyday events and working with the hands, ‘Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.’

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Digging compared to tailoring. and day by day the needle and the trade moved closer to Jabbieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hand

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Rosita Written by Niamh Fitzgerald Illustrated by Aishat Olasoji

Liraz woke up that morning thinking about letters. She’d been dreaming of the alphabet. The letters entered her mouth one by one, twisting and curling themselves into their desired shape, her tongue and lips moving this way and that. In this dream, she allowed the letter ‘w’ in twice. She liked the shapes it asked her mouth to make before it was happy to leave with a soft ‘whoosh’ through her pursed lips. After the letters had been in and out, words started forming strange, winding sentences that turned into thick yellow snakes.

They poured out of her mouth and onto the library floor, writhing in fitful reaction to the words bulging inside her cheeks. This part always frightened her. They disappeared from around her ankles the moment she shouted a Yiddish spell at them. Only a slimy mark remained on the floor before her, like the remnants of vomit, or some other putrid substance. She felt relieved, but knew it wasn’t all down to her. It never was. In her dream she heard the deep, human-like ‘meow’ from her good friend, Rosita, who scampered up behind her in her almost all-white furry coat. As Liraz began to wake, she heard her brothers chatter in the room below, interrupting her thoughts. She leant back for a moment to take in the morning. This wasn’t the first time that Rosita had made her way into her dreams, and always as a sort of ally. She had read the book under her bedcovers some years ago and it had stuck to

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her like fragrance to potpourri. Who owned it now? Something pulled fiercely on a dark, unknown place inside her that morning. Rosita, the almost allwhite rabbity-cat.

The winter sun striped the wooden floor of Liraz’s bedroom. It reminded her of the Big Top she had seen on the poster near her house advertising a circus near Tottenham. She smiled as she saw her navy tights, skirt and black woollen jumper hanging over the back of her chair, clean and ready for the day ahead. The clothing was still a little bit warm from her mother’s iron, so she pulled it all on quickly to snuggle up against the gentle heat of it. Jacob’s and Abraham’s heeled shoes could be heard mounting the stairs, so she left the bedroom to see what everybody was up to. Her house was a beehive. Six siblings meant there was always somebody to talk to. At least there used to be.

As Liraz walked out to the landing, she knew her mother had been up since the early hours. The distinctive aroma of raisin challah moved upstairs in glorious wisps. It took hours to make, as she had learned the previous week, when her mother began teaching her how to do the intricate lattice pattern on the top of the loaf. Downstairs, Liraz’s father sat at the table with a copy of The Jewish News. Greying curls hung either side of his ears and his yarmulke lay beside him, ready for Kollel. Liraz tiptoed to the table, seeing the crinkled perplexity around his little brown eyes. Snippets of English fell from his bearded mouth as he tried to comprehend the article in front of him. Words such as ‘Yemen’ and ‘humanitarian crisis’ made little sense to Liraz, so she sat quietly, accepting the sweet bread and eggs that her mother passed to her.

Jacob and Abraham passed through the kitchen wearing their new overcoats. She wondered if they’d shot up overnight like their mother’s potted fig-tree, or if perhaps they hadn’t stood upright until now. Either way, she felt smaller today. Yeshiva provided their breakfast now, so the two quickly gathered their books and left. Being older, Liraz’s remaining two brothers had already left for early Sedar. She hadn’t seen them very much in the last week and wondered if Chanoch still had that great purple boil on the end of his nose. Soon after, Esther, the youngest in their family, came in weeping. She had secretly tried to bathe herself and slipped on the way out of the bath. She

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pointed her pudgy finger, still wrinkled from the water, to a tiny graze on her forehead. Suds still covered her head like a fuzzy cap. Liraz pulled her onto her lap to comfort her with kisses, while their mother scuttled to the oven to retrieve another batch of baked challah.

She wasn’t going to school that day. Her mother had told her this quite curtly the evening before, perhaps to stop her questions coming, like the other times. She had the sense to keep her mouth shut when she saw how the thin skin under her mother’s eyes resembled black wells. She wondered if it was because the nosy men in short coats were coming to school again, always tapping their shiny pens onto their paper like woodpeckers. The last time they came, Liraz and her friends had giddily sniffed the air in the corridor as hard as they could afterwards, to see if the men’s horrible spicy aftershave would sting the inside of their nostrils. She noticed that these men always seemed to wear monstrous amounts of hair wax, too. She came to the conclusion it must be to help keep their heads insulated against the winter winds. English was often mentioned on these visits. “Not enough!” Never enough for the men in the short jackets. Her father said they were frightened of any language they couldn’t speak themselves.

Liraz found herself thinking about Rosita again as she quietly ate her eggs. She felt bigger when she was around. Part of her wondered if Rosita would be in the school library one day if the men visited enough. They complained about their kind of books a lot. This was to her father’s distaste and she knew not to speak to him, or even remind him of her presence this morning. His dour expression and clenched fists at last night’s meal had said it all.

Her mother told him the school insisted the students stay at home again until the authorities went back to their hole. The study and obedience of God was above all. Still, part of her hoped she would find Rosita again in real life, tucked neatly between the pages of that powder-blue book, her bushy tail scooping up to the moody clouds above her on the front cover. Her father left, never looking at her. The beehive stopped buzzing. All that could be heard were the far-off sounds of her mother’s voice upstairs and the trickling water that washed off Esther’s suds. She felt her body shrinking. Dreams weren’t

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enough anymore. She couldn’t hold them in her hands. She stood up. She sat down. She stood up again and, grabbing her coat, she opened the back door and stepped into the cool London morning.

Only twice had she walked the main street on her own. Once, when Esther had soiled herself on the way to swimming, so her mother had asked her to run back and bring new clothing for her, and the second was when Rabbi Rubenstein came to bless her father when he’d fallen ill. To her mother’s horror, they had run out of lemon tea, so Liraz had run with all her might to Grodzinski’s to pick some up, while her parents spoke to their important visitor. She briskly made her way along Holmleigh Road now, turning right at the top on to Stamford Hill. She felt nausea swoop in. Her mother would soon be looking for her. Her arms and shoulders tingled like a million jellyfish tap-dancing with their tentacles on a skin-lined stage. Leaves blew across the sprawling paths, frightening her every time they flew against her navy tights.

Still, she carried on.

Stamford Hill was beginning to come alive. Liraz saw Rubin’s shop-shutter rolling up by force of Rubin himself, the windows displaying neat lines of black rekel and bekishe. He always placed the silk ones right in the window, which caught the eye of even the speediest passer-by. Liraz carried on walking, gaining more pace, pulling her coat-collar right up around her cheeks every few seconds. She was grateful for the rain that had started to speckle the concrete, allowing her some anonymity amongst her hooded, hat wearing, umbrella-using neighbours. The enclave of her surroundings scratched its long nails against her. The paths stretched out before her like dough. The cemetery gates hadn’t seemed this far before. She began allowing the street names into her mouth, one by one, like in her dream: Lynmouth Road, Riezel Close, Lampard Grove. She whispered them into her collar as a sort of incantation as she passed each one, pronouncing each syllable in time to her brisk footsteps. Win-dus-road, Bel-fast-road, Ca-ze-nove.

She looked right past the familiar families who spilled out of the houses, past the vast expanse of cafés and shops, finally allowing her eyes to reach the jagged city skyline that formed a hazy shroud of metal against the woolly

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London sky. Esther always giggled when Liraz played the ‘Pointy Building’ game. She would kneel down to her little sister’s height, ask her to close her left eye, then reach her arm up high in front of them both, pretending the roofs of the buildings were pricking the palm of her hand – pretending that they were two giants looming over the skyscrapers, touching their pointy heads.

No sooner had Liraz emerged from this daydream, did she realise she had arrived at Albany Park Cemetery gates. After a quick scan around her, she entered. The dense thicket of the site allowed her heart to slow. She felt safer within these confines. Skipping busy corners were vital. Her teacher had taken them in before to see the plants, which was when she learned about the shortcut through to Church Street. Graves peeped out of the ground here and there and squirrels raced away from her up brittle bark – she was imposing on their city of trees. A tall man and woman wearing matching raincoats nodded their heads to her silently as they passed with their dog. She continued on through the thick trees that sheltered the sleeping people who lay beneath the stones. Left at the top. Not far now.

Church Street was a palette of neon paint. Men with floppy hair cycled colourful bikes with whizzing tires. A woman pushing a bulging pram passed her, sipping from a takeaway coffee cup. She chattered into her phone at a million miles a minute and Liraz wondered if there was truly somebody on the other end at all. She had tight exercise pants on with aqua blue running shoes but she didn’t look like she had done any running. Teenagers dressed in school-uniforms spoke noisily to each other as they drank frothy orange juice from bottles. Liraz tried focusing on all the colours but the narrow street still closed in on her. Pedestrians made these silly “oup” sounds as they maneuvered their way around each other on a particularly narrow part of the street.

The funny names of the shops and cafés climbed into her mouth. The Good Egg, The Blue Legume, The Fat Cat Cafe. Where she lived, the shop names meant you knew exactly who owned them, and who you would find inside.

She imagined a fat cat sitting at the café counter selling cream-cakes, speaking perfect English to customers. “Rosita,” she said, under her breath. Upping

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her pace now, she carried on towards the red-brick building.

She hadn’t thought of it before. What if they said no? Her dream hadn’t allowed her to think this far. The thick yellow snakes always came hurling out of her before the librarian could decipher what she was trying to say. A ferocious wave of nausea hit her again as she pulled open the heavy door. A girl wearing pink spectacles with pink hair tips to match sat reading at the information desk. She didn’t look up, nor did she even seem aware of who entered the library. Liraz walked quietly over to the section that read ‘fiction’. She knew the word well from Stamford Hill Library. Made-up stories and made-up people, often in made-up worlds. She stayed in the Torah section in that library, though. Her father made sure of that. Liraz felt made-up now, too – like she was back in her dream. Her nerves settled slightly when she saw that nobody she knew was around. Just herself and the sound of the librarian’s clicking pen. As she sifted through the books, fingering their spines with care, she felt the yellow snakes slowly shrivel inside her. She let titles like ‘Flossy Teacakes Fur Coat’ and ‘Lola Rose’ swill around her mouth. Pinks, greens and purples blurred in front of her. As the London morning breathed through the window, hugging her, she reached for the powder-blue book on the end. She felt herself grow tall. Rosita, Rosita, Rosita – her almost, all white, rabbity cat.

CO M M E N TARY

Rosita is the story of a teenage girl in London searching for growth and strength through language and stories. In exploring conflict and contrast within London’s differing communities and areas, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners inspired me to focus on the private lives of Stamford Hill’s Hasidic Jewish community. The word ‘community’ is taken seriously there, and being part of that community means support, guidance and close adherence to the Torah. Through the use of

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third-person limited narration, I explore Liraz’s desire to get closer to the secular stories that her parents forbid her to read. I wanted freedom to explore both the interior and exterior world of my protagonist – to envision how Liraz sees London, but also to comment on social issues surrounding some of the privatised ultra-orthodox schooling and education in the area. English was often mentioned on these visits. “Not enough!” “Never enough for the men in short jackets.”

Her rabbity-cat ally, Rosita, is not only a comforting, fictional friend from a book she once read, but she also acts as the catalyst for Liraz to rebel against the strict religious teachings of her school and community. Liraz doesn’t want to look inward anymore and wishes to indulge in the language that haunts her dreams. Although Sam Selvon focuses on the West Indian migration experience rather than Jewish migration, it is still a story about adopting the city, as well as a telling of the diverse migrant cultures that spread throughout London, making it the wonderful place it is. I describe Stoke Newington’s Church Street in contrast to Stamford Hill to establish these differences. Church street is a colourful explosion of commerciality, whilst Stamford Hill possesses a noticeable modesty to it. The difference between the shop names of these two neighbouring areas are also indicative of this. “Where she lived, the shop names meant you knew exactly who owned them, and who you would find inside.”

One section of research for this piece was comprised of visits to Stamford Hill, where I observed the community around me and asked questions in Stamford Hill Library about the likelihood of a teenage girl openly using the youngadult fiction section. There was no straight answer to this. It simply depends on the family. Liraz comes from a family that sees religious studies as the pinnacle of education, and so Stoke Newington Library’s distance seemed right for her bold break. Liraz’s focus on the syllables of street names on her way to the cemetery short-cut that takes her closer to the library, is a technique I employed to signify her internal trepidation. Of interest is Jane Jacobs’ statement that “cities are, by definition, full of strangers.” Liraz’s story signifies that this is not true of the closeknit community she lives in. She doesn’t live in the ‘modern’ London like many of us, where anonymity is usually the norm.

Zadie Smith’s NW was inspiring in its exploration of crossing all the way from

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Willesden Lane to Hornsey Lane. An outsider may see London as a whole, but that whole is made up of fragments. The opening lines in The City Cultures Reader poses the fundamental question of ‘what is a city?’ – to which there is no one correct answer. Liraz’s inner stimulus, her appetite for stories, propels her to experience a series of exhilarating outer stimuli, which is provided by the streets of London. Liraz is learning what Roy Porter means by “London is a cluster of communities, great and small, famous and unsung; a city of contrasts, a congregation of diversity.”

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Paths Written by Rowan Benson Illustrated by Edem Caliph

Tav lemeitav tan du mi-lemeitav armalu – “better to remain coupled than a widow.”

The words seemed to creak from the rusted cemetery gate as she closed it behind her. “Better than alone, my bubbala,” her mother’s withered lips had whispered as she had lain dying, fearful that her aging daughter should not have the protection of a husband, should never find the other half of her soul to replace the one she had lost. Her mother’s spirit would be glad. She felt a pang of happiness as she prayed at her mother’s grave, a fleeting sensation of warmth and peace; she was there with her, and had guided her steps to her father’s tombstone. She had almost no recollection of her father, he was just a beard, a pair of large hands and a booming laugh. After her prayers there in the damp, abandoned Brady Street Cemetery, she could feel that laugh bubbling in her chest and she knew he had accepted her second wedding invitation.

The morning light was becoming more solid, and with it the day formed itself into hard edges wrapped in dirty mist. Sunlight fought – and sometimes won – to burst through and illuminate the grimy bricks of the towering tenement houses which rose up on either side of the street. Laundry strung between windows like bunting fluttered in the smog-clearing breeze; stockings and undergarments made public. Life was happening; here where they

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were trying to stamp it out, it defiantly flourished. Braine watched a group of young children huddled around a small lump of something, poking it with sticks. Hysterical giggles rippled through them, pierced occasionally by a sharp, delighted shriek. They reminded Braine of the Brunswick Buildings days. Her children fleeing into the damp labyrinth of dingy flats in the morning, creating a wonder-world out of the squalor. It became a pirate ship, a besieged castle, or a battlefield. They would come home full of stories of fighting off the Hun, saving the princess or swashbuckling on the Seven Seas.

She often wondered if this freedom of imagination had saved them from the tough realities of that life – or made the inevitable confrontation all-the-more jarring. As she passed by, one of the older children whom she thought looked startlingly like her oldest son Aharon, turned and watched her. She wondered for a moment if he was going to ask her for money, which she would gladly give him if she had not spent her last shilling on the motor omnibus to the cemetery. But he did not, he merely looked on with a gravity that pulled at her heart, so young and so sombre. It was as if Aharon the man had shrunk into a child’s body, keeping his adult worries and cares.

Braine turned onto Whitechapel Road, silently taking her leave of the children racing around the otherwise deserted Brady Street. The thoroughfare seemed wrapped in a morning blanket, eerily hushed, but she sensed the pandemonium of London life was bubbling under the placid surface. She slowed, considering how best to continue. She was glad to be walking. The May morning was still cool, and she thought that to ride an omnibus to one’s own wedding seemed wrong. She had always taken care not to sink into age, not to allow it to overcome her body or mind. She was sure that she had walked nearly all of London; with him, with her children, and lately alone.

Alone: a word she had strangely gotten used to, but that had seemed so foreign in her mouth and mind in the past. Alone, it turned out, had oddly suited her. It had just never been an option before. There is no alone in a woman’s life, there is childhood, marriage, children – and death, the only real solitude. But her fate had been to be left alone, it was God’s will and now it was God’s will that she would again become together. He will become my beshert, my

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fate, my soulmate. He is a good man, she repeated in her mind, as each step brought her closer to together.

The broad road stretched before her. Already the hawkers were setting out their wares, preferring business and money over a Whit Monday rest. There was the woman with the enormous woven basket of apples, each one lovingly shined; the craggy, bearded old man and his cart piled high with mystery boxes; the tall, mustachioed gentleman with a little case on spindly legs selling medicinal concoctions; the jolly, round ice-cream vendor, with the smooth, waxy pink face. Bubbles breaking through the surface.

He is a good man, she repeated. A young man wearing a sandwich board with big, angry-looking words written on it was stood on the other side of the street. He was selling newspapers to passers-by. Suddenly Braine felt a wave of grief wash over her, nearly drowning her. There in the middle of the Whitechapel Road, amongst the vendors and carriages and motor-cars and omnibuses and bicycles and pedestrians which were appearing at an alarming rate, she stopped. Yes, it was like waves. The crest of each wave was a memory which crashed over her leaving her disordered. She remembered Solomonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s warm voice as he read her the news by the fire in their tiny kitchen.

He had always waited to be home to read it to her after his long day at work, after the children were in bed and dinner was finished. He would stop to show her the pictures or photographs. Sometimes he would teach her a word, patiently sounding out the letters. Now she had forgotten those words, but not the warmth of his presence, the smell of his skin or the curl of his hair. When her little Zussya was learning to read, he had taken up the role: reading to her, slowly sounding out the letters for himself, faltering sometimes. She had felt then a sad pride. Her children would be educated, like their father. But it was also a thing that built a wall between her and them, elevated them above her and slowly took them away from her. She knew this gesture of Zussyaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s to be one of kindness, an unspoken recognition of her desolation. Her older boys were thrown head-first into roles of manhood, work and blustering strength.

Her little one had understood her pain and had attempted to rebuild her broken heart through little gestures: a dish cleared from the table, a flower picked

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from the roadside, a reassuring squeeze from the small, warm hand he slipped into hers as they walked down the street.

He will become my bashert. Braine turned into the little alleyway which carved its way through the solid masses of bricks and mortar, nearly colliding with a stocky little man with a tower of baskets stacked on his head.

“Oi! Watch where you’re going missus!” he snapped, his bushy-black eyebrows nearly meeting in the depth of his frown.“You nearly cost me a day’s wages! Can’t sell eggs if they’re broke, now can I?!”

Braine mumbled an apology, lowered her head and ducked past him. She had to side-step more oncoming merchants as they crept out of the cracks of London. She wondered if this commercial clamour existed in other places, if a holiday morning in a different city or town was as hurried and ambitious, or if they took a day of rest, enjoyed a peaceful morning of early summer. She wondered what her new life would be like with Jacob in his little Shepherd Street flat. His daughter Chana, a round and kind-hearted mother of five, had squeezed Braine’s hand at their tnai’m and whispered that he was a kind man who needed a good woman to make his life truly blessed; that his house was merely a house and that Braine would make of it a home. She remembered first seeing Jacob across the crowded synagogue. He was a small and precise man who, despite his age, had a youthfulness about his eyes. He was not rich, but not poor. His clothes were plain, but beautiful. His shoes were old and scuffed, but carefully polished. He dressed with care as any man in his profession should. Solomon, too, had been a tailor, or rather he had been a tailor’s cutter, and he had had the same precise movements as Jacob.

She felt that this was significant, that it created an immediate connection between them.

Somewhere in the labyrinthine streets a clock was striking the hour, prompting Braine to leave Commercial Street and redirect her steps into the shadowy, muffled alleys surrounding the synagogue. It was only ten o’clock, the wedding was not for another thirty minutes, she didn’t want to be too early. It would be a small wedding. The joining of two old souls would be

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celebrated discreetly with a small gathering of close ones. She was not the be’tulta da as in her first wedding, she was now armalta da. Stamped with the title of “widow,” she carried Solomon with her into the new union, but she knew that she must leave her love at the door of the synagogue, that her loyalty must be to Jacob from the moment she stepped under the chuppa.

Ahead of her, two young women swayed, arm in arm, scantily-clad in fringed dresses, cigarettes smouldering in long, colourful holders. They laughed outrageously, heads thrown back, lost in their world of rebellion and freedom. They stopped outside a pokey little doorway and one dug in her little beaded bag, eventually extracting keys as Braine passed. There was a smell of sweet tobacco that enveloped them, which reminded her of the pipe that Solomon would smoke as he read to her by the fire. With tears in her eyes she turned into Artillery Passage. She must leave her grief for Solomon behind her, but it seemed that she had collected a new grief from these girls.

There was no innocence about them, they were steeped in a dirty worldliness that seemed to ooze from the London streets. She felt that no mikvah would be deep enough to cleanse them – but immediately regretted her uncharitable thought: they were just lost children. They needed to find the right path, the righteous path. Braine had faith that they would, in time. Until then, she would pray for them.

The buildings rising up on either side of the passage made her feel secure.

If she spread her arms wide she could almost touch both walls. She could hear the muffled voices of the families, who lived in the high-up houses, drifting down through the warm morning air. It was as if here the city was still halfasleep. Over the many years of living in cramped and crowded Brunswick Buildings, the combination of noises of other families and their daily rituals made her feel at home. She took comfort in the lives defiantly thriving within those walls. She stood there a moment, letting everything wash over her – the sound, smell, light, air – and with it she let the loss, grief and pain fall to the cobbles at her feet. The last remnants of alone.

Braine again began to walk. She walked tall – as tall as her four-feet-nine frame would allow. She felt light. She felt that, if she didn’t plant her feet firmly

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she would take flight; that she would be able to fly over the chimney-pots of London and dance on the spires of the churches. But she anchored each step into the hard, mucky street. She approached Sandy’s Row, and turned down it with determination. In front of the synagogue doors, waiting for her were Chana and her daughter Ruth. They greeted her with open arms and smiling faces. In this embrace lay her future. She knew that behind the doors of the synagogue waited other loved ones. She felt the calm presence of her mother and father all around her, urging her forward. Chana and Ruth stepped through the first set of doors and held them open for Braine to enter the cool ante-chamber. Ruth took Braine’s coat and handed her a small bouquet of pale-pink poppies. As she stepped through the doors, Braine said a little prayer. My beshert.

CO M M E N TARY

Paths was inspired by a 1923 marriage record that I was transcribing at the Bishopsgate Institute for the Sandy’s Row Synagogue. The first entry was for the remarriage of an old couple who were widow and widower aged 69 and 78. I thought it would be interesting to create a piece of fiction based somehow on this out-of-the-ordinary coupling. This required much research into Jewish rituals, rules and traditions surrounding marriage and weddings. I then began to imagine what might be going through Braine’s mind as she walked towards her new life.

I decided to turn my attention more towards the idea of walking in London; the atmosphere of the city street and how it can impact on the mental processes of a character; how place is linked with autobiography. The different meanings, connotations and imagery of the word “path”. I took inspiration from the way in which Virginia Woolf creates an intermingled interior and exterior world, showing the physical world filtered through a character’s consciousness. There is

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a development in Braine’s attitude at the beginning when she repeats the phrase “He will become my beshert, he is a good man,” like a mantra, as if to convince herself of the fact; to the last phrase “My bashert” where she has become sure of her decision. She is sure that the union will be successful – echoing the way that Clarissa comes to the conclusion that she has made the right decision in marrying Richard rather than Peter in Mrs. Dalloway. Braine not only undertakes a physical journey through the streets of London, but also a psychological one. I found that as I wrote, Woolf’s moments of being made their way to the surface of the story, thus connecting the physical and the psychological. Places, characters and objects in the London scene became cathexes, and give the reader access to Braine’s interior world.

In order to make this London of the Twenties believable I found resources such as The London Collage and the 1926 BFI film The Open Road particularly useful. The way that the film and photography accompany and complement the written information that can be found on the period was valuable in capturing and creating a 1920s atmosphere. The addition of the “flapper” girls was to reinforce the idea of the Twenties whilst introducing the idea of changing morals and the changing interwar world; it also served to imply a difference between the traditional, religious community, represented by Braine, and the growing atheistic and secular movements of the early-twentieth century.

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4.

POWER

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12,000 years Written by Bobby-Lee Verkuijl Illustrated by Rafael Hardy

“People of all times and all places have searched for the sacred.

Often it would be sought through buildings such as cathedrals, temples, pyramids, shrines, mosques or ziggurats.

Often it would be sought through items such as amulets, cards, crystals, skulls, books or scrolls.

Often it would be sought through rituals such as dances, trances, possessions, prayers, meditation or sacrifices.

Often it would be sought through specialists such as shaman, priests, oracles, monks, hermits or magicians.

For all their effort, humanity still seems to be no ounce closer to true sacredness than their ancient forebears in their caves were. Still humans fight each other over petty borders. Still they bash each other’s heads in over the colour of their skins. They even start ‘holy’ wars over the very ways in which they seek to find their precious sacredness. No… humanity has not learned its lesson yet.”

“You choose to look, but not to see. Don’t dismiss the humans so easily.

Just take a look at their accomplishments.

You mentioned cathedrals, temples, pyramids, shrines, mosques and ziggurats. Don’t you see the amount of effort, planning and resources that have

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gone into constructing these?

You mentioned amulets, cards, crystals, skulls, books and scrolls. Don’t you see the creativity and faith needed to transform these objects into religious artefacts?

You mentioned dances, trances, possessions, prayers, meditation or sacrifices. Don’t you see the elaboration, the cooperation and the practice that goes into these?

You mentioned shaman, priests, oracles, monks, hermits or magicians.

Don’t you see the determination these people have for their arts, upholding all the accompanying rules and taboos?

It is precisely in their effort that humanity has time and again touched upon the sacred. Humans fight each other, yes, but they do so from a truly held conviction that they can build a better future. Their intentions are what matters most and it is through their intentions that humanity should perhaps be seen as the archetype of a spiritually advanced race.”

“Intentions, or actions for that matter, do not constitute sacredness. You have grown too soft, too attached to the humans. They have had their chance and they have had it for long enough. It is time for this farce to end; we have spent much too long on this bet anyway. As you well know, patience is one of your so-called ‘virtues’, not mine. I am afraid that despite your careful planning, I have won.”

“Nor is foresight one of yours, which is why we are in this situation to begin with if you’d recall. Anyway, I do not agree that we have given our little people long enough yet. Besides, it seems like we’re not quite on the same page on the terms of this little wager of ours. We should at least define what ‘the sacred’ is before we can judge whether humanity has reached it, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Is this another one of your tricks? The rules were clear from the very beginning: humanity should attain the sacred by acting in accordance to your will. I admit that your scheming threw me off balance, resulting in a several thousands of years head start. Yet it didn’t take me long to lead humanity astray from your false teachings, even your precious one is all but an obscure

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source of superstition for most. The last of your flock is headed towards extinction, what more do you expect of the future?”

“Tricks? I’d be insulted if I were capable of such an emotion. It was not my wish for all of this to transpire, but as the humans have come to say: ‘all’s fair in love and war’. If only you would stop this folly. Have I not shown you how all of this will end? Was the truth not the reason for the thousands of years you were ‘off balance”, as you so eloquently put it yourself. You claim my teachings perverted, my messenger all but forgotten and my people on the brink of extinction. All of these would be, undoubtedly, by your hands. But tell me, what did you truly gain by these actions?”

“You seem to have grown old and forgetful, as I just explained that with no one to uphold your tenets, the sacred will be permanently out of reach for humanity. Try as you might, their numbers will dwindle and your laws will be forgotten. Therefore, this battle is already over, so as I said before, let us end this performance.”

“Old I might be, but I am afraid that you are the forgetful one, as you have already given the answer to what you perceive as being my problem.”

“You have my interest. I am curious how you will try to reason your way out of this bind. As I recall, I have said nothing which could act as an answer to your dwindling resources.”

“On the contrary… what did you say were the terms of our friendly competition again?”

“For humanity to decide between us; were they to follow your will, as found in your teachings and rules, then you would win. Should they stray in any way, then it is I who will be found victorious. Do not presume that you will be able to change this condition in any way.”

“For humanity to follow my will as found in my teachings and rules.

Perhaps then, you should enlighten me… tell me some of the folly of humankind.”

“To recount every instance where humanity went wrong would keep us both occupied for a small eternity. I will humour you, however, and tell you some of the ways in which your will has been usurped, as you clearly have not

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been keeping an eye on what has transpired on Earth.

First of all, you are no longer being honoured by them. Over half of the humans have decided to serve a god in whose name your true servants have been slaughtered. Most of those even believe that a mere mortal has the same status as a deity. Of the other half, some say that humans are higher than gods, if they even believe in higher beings. How can we interpret any of this in any other way than as a blatant denial of you?” “‘How can we?’ indeed. You mention Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, humanists and atheists, which are just a few of the various groups humanity consists of. How can we reconcile the atheist thought that there is no creator, or the Buddhist notion that being human is better than being a god, or the Christian idea that a human could be part of god? How can we reconcile that believers, in the name of their god, have slain those who did still worship me?

If humanity does not acknowledge my existence and does not follow the laws I have set out for them, how could they ever grasp the sacred?

Unless, of course, we look at humanity from a different perspective. All of the groups you mentioned strive to know me. They do so in different ways.

In this, the Christians and Muslims have fashioned their own vision of me, which they fervently serve. Even when this leads to the destruction of others, the intentions of the group as a whole remains pure. The same goes for Buddhists or humanists, they too strive for sacredness, the former in the form of liberation from this world and the latter in the perfection of human life on this one. For all these people, for humanity as a whole, share a deep desire to know the truth of life and the betterment of their own race as a whole. This wish, backed up by their collective actions throughout their whole history, is exactly what it means to reach the sacred. It was never my intention for them to follow my laws to the letter, instead they should seek to further their intellectual, moral and spiritual faculties. This they have done. This they are still doing. This they will continue to do, forever. For the sacred is not a quality to be reached by humans, it is something to be strived for.”

“Impossible! This will not stand! If you speak truly of this will of yours, that their quest for the sacred is more important than their adherence to your

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rules, then this whole bet has been set-up from the beginning… even more so than I initially perceived I mean.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Don’t try to hide it. Humanity has been made by you. Evolution was carefully guided by your design. The will to cooperate, to care, to think and the capacity to seek the physical and spiritual truth, it has all been hard-wired into their very beings; it is as much part of their blueprints as their hearts and minds are.”

“Yet humanity is also capable of evil, you have made that clear in your years of scheming and subverting. They have been blessed with a choice.

Would you truly say that just because the odds of humanity’s good side winning over their bad side are skewed in favour of the former, it is less of a choice?”

“Of course. You knew this would happen. You have purposefully rigged this competition!”

“Yet still you agreed to the terms.”

“Unlike you, I had no way of knowing the outcome!”

“And that is exactly the reason why you, Angra Maynu, will lose and why I, Ahura Mazda, will win. Now, will you admit defeat?”

“Don’t think to outsmart me so easily. We still haven’t discussed burial rites, purity laws or the interaction with sacred and evil animals, to name just a few.”

“And so humanity will live on…”

CO M M E N TA RY

Literature, in the broadest sense, is intertwined with the sacred. The sacred has always, and everywhere, been explained through stories. This is because stories are able to convey the very core of feelings and beliefs in a way that simple

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dogmas are not able to, partly due to their memorability. Dharma, for example, is better understood by reading the Bhagavad Gita than by hearing complete lectures on the philosophy behind it, just as the ‘eight fold’ path of Buddhism is better understood by reading Jataka’s than by reading theological tractates.

Because of this, religious stories are able to strengthen one’s beliefs, or even to convert people to a certain religion.

One genre of religious literature is of course the myth. Often, a myth explains how something (e.g. the world, a certain ritual or the end of times) came to be.

My piece elaborates on one particular myth: the cosmogony of Zoroastrianism.

Summarized, this myth explains that the good god, Ahura Mazda, tricked the evil god, Angra Maynu, in a 12.000 years contest to be battled out on Earth with the behaviour of humankind as the winning factor (the outcome is known: Ahura Mazda even shows Angra Maynu his own defeat just as the battle began). The above conversation between the two takes place in the present.

The main question I tried to explore is: what is the sacred? Is it obtainable, is it something from above, is it something we should strive for? Besides this, I tried to think of how, in a world where Zoroastrianism is bound to go extinct within roughly a century or two, Ahura Mazda would win this contest as contemporary non-Zoroastrians aren’t exactly following his rules and laws and why the contest hasn’t ended after the original period. In this, I tried to find a mix of ‘traditional’ Zoroastrian ideas (e.g. the contest; Ahura Mazda’s foresight) and filling in the details with contemporary notions (e.g. Ahura Mazda using evolution to gain an edge).

In writing this ‘modern myth’, I convey certain heterodox ideas I personally have on the Zoroastrian god, which are, to my knowledge, in no way shared by the real adherents. In doing this, I have done what I think every writer and teller of stories or myths does: I have combined elements of what is out there with ideas of my own. This holds true for every religious text (or texts dealing with religion), from The Epic of Gilgamesh to the writings of Rumi or Chaim Potok.

From the staunchest defenders of literalism to the most liberal of ‘revisionists’ (compare for example, within the Islamic tradition, the Qur’anic interpretations of Ibn Taymiyya and Abdullah Saeed, all writing is based on a negotiation between

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existing ideas and new thoughts on these.

Concluding, I wished to explore the idea of the sacred, through a modern reading of a specific myth, with an explicit understanding of the role a writer has as an interpreter. In this, the required readings have helped me to see the impact of religion on literature, but also the impact of literature on religion.

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Classified Written by Katie McTaggart Illustrated by Irina Bruma

My grandmother used to tell me about art galleries, whole buildings just full of art. She said that she’d walk around with just the sound of clicking heels and private murmurs in the background and look – at the people mostly.

She’d try to figure out who fit into which category of gallery-goer. Those who came for the love of it, those who’d been dragged there against their will, the many who had come purely because that was the kind of thing you were supposed to do back then. She’d start with a room and choose a person, it didn’t matter who. Then she’d look at whatever painting or piece of art they were looking at – really look at it, trying to guess what thoughts were going through her person’s head.

Then she’d find her favourite piece and stand in front of it for ages, just letting her mind go away from her.

We don’t have galleries now. Not official ones any way. Just Culture Houses that are mostly full of old adverts with maybe a room or two of paintings and photographs. Mel keeps saying that we’ll go together on a weekend but so far we haven’t quite had the time. * 143

ANTHOLOGY GEM SHAHRABANY â&#x20AC;&#x2039; hrabany@gallofryercollins.com From: gem.sha Tuesday, 10 June 2139 15.49 Sent: To: ALL DOSER Regulations: UPDATE Subject: DptSER17859842.pdf Attachments: Hello All, ent kplace regulations as per the Departm Please see attached for updated wor ity criteria.

Of Social and Economic Responsibil Main updates are as follows: ute hour slots with two other five min Lunch breaks are to consist of half breaks in the day. slots will be docked.

Those who exceed the allotted time result in a AllScreen reprimand as well Non work-related browsing will now as docking. r but you will be required to go to you Emergency cases are still permitted . tion rma rehand with the relevant info manager or senior team member befo ------------------------------------------------

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so hony was blacklisted over the weekend I also want to let you know that Ant that executive. You can let people know we will be recruiting a new account e. to have a rating of 70 or mor weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re hiring but they will be required Kind Regards Gem Gem Shahrabany Chief Operations Officer Gallo, Fryer and Collins Advertising 144

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How the fuck is Anthony on the Blacklist? He was a 78 on friday, how do you go from a 78 to blacklisted in one weekend? * On my way home from work a man is caught jaywalking. I stop at the crossing and wait. The cars have stopped but the ENTERPRISE® traffic light for pedestrians hasn’t come on yet. He crosses anyway and the screens all over the area light up with his face and an action replay of him crossing. In the corner of the screens, just under the DOSER logo, is the rating counter, the numbers dropping. 59. 58. 57. 56. 55. The man starts shaking his head, the numbers are still dropping and he starts to hiss. 52. “No no it was about to turn. No that’s bullshit.” 51. ‘What?’ He’s shouting now. Jaywalking is a docking of eight plus AllScreen reprimand in accordance to DOSER Pedestrian Road Safety, but he’s angry and disruptive – the numbers will keep rolling down while he shouts . ‘It was about to turn!” 49. He turns around looking for eye contact but everyone has their heads down, pointedly looking in a different direction. He spots me and I drop my eyes, I turn and quickly walk away. * I had to stay behind at the office to avoid getting behind at work so I get an UBER RXL in order to make it to the restaurant on time. It’s Danny’s birthday and we’re all meeting at a ItalEritrea-VietMex restaurant where the food is fusion of fusion and served on big communal tables. It makes it so much easier to be sociable on a wider scale during your meal . Mel’s waiting for me outside when I get there and I pull her in for a quick peck. Nothing too much. Eyes are watching, the faces without bodies on the screens that cover every building watch too. You used to be able to know a city by its skyline they say. People could pick them out just by their silhouette. Everywhere is a city now and it’s all UVUETM Screens.

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Mel grabs my arm and gently pulls me into the restaurant to greet the birthday boy.

“Where’s Evie?”

Evie is Danny’s oldest friend and it’s not like her to be late, I’m not sure if I can even count the amount of times that she’s turned up on time (and therefore early) only to end up waiting for any one of us to finally get ready.

Everyone shares a look.

“Evie slipped to 63.” Danny looks a bit guilty while he replies, “this place is pretty high end, it’s blue ribbon, so she couldn’t – well this place is 65 plus entry so… but she’ll be back up again I’m sure.”

Jack chimes in. “It’s your birthday mate. She knew her rating, should’ve worked harder if she wanted in.” I feel my eyes roll and look over at Mel. We’ve never really liked Jack. * Mel’s been getting quieter recently. I don’t know why. I’m worried about her.

When we first met she was like this loud bright force that knocked me over.

She was the second person I’d met from the RateDATETM App – the first being a man who proceeded to lecture me about the ins and outs of amino acids. She was fun and passionate – when she spoke she’d use her hands to emphasise her point in large but fast dramatic movements and I could barely keep track of them. Her smile would stretch out so big that her eyes wrinkled, almost closed. Her laugh was a strange loud barking thing and I was obsessed with it. And she didn’t give a shit about amino acids.

She rarely laughs now, or she does, but it’s a half-hearted chuckle at best.

I think she might hate me because I’ve had to stop talking to Evie, but she

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knows the rules. Friendships with Low-Raters affect your rating. I’m doing really well at work and my appraisal is due soon, I can’t take risks right now.

Jack’s a prick but he’s right; Evie could have worked harder to up her rating.

It isn’t my fault she’s a 35 now. We’ve all had to keep our distance, it wasn’t really a choice but Mel didn’t take it very well. I think she hates all of us a little bit.

She’s joined a new group – a writing thing she says. They make a magazine I think. It seems good for her. She’s always at her best after a meeting with them, almost back to the girl in the RED BULL® bar with the wide smile. * “I’m afraid we can’t offer you promotion at this stage.”

What?

“Look, you’re great at your job and you follow all the rules, it’s just the matter of your partner.”

“My partner? Have they added new regulations? They said – they promised that sexual orientation would never come into it. Is it-” “No. no not that it’s – it’s her rating. She’s, well it’s low.”

“How low?” * “What the fuck Mel.” “Look sit down we can-”

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“How could you fucking do this? How could you do this to me? My boss had to tell me!”

“I wanted to. But I know what you’re like with this stuff.”

“Because it’s important Mel, shit. Our fucking jobs. Our friends. Our flat – holy shit our flat. We’re going to lose it. Fuck. You know I actually thought that magazine was good for you. ‘Dismantle DOSER’ what were you thinking ? Did you think about me for even a second in any of this?”

“Come on, this whole thing is bullshit and you know it. A few months ago I was docked for dropping a book in a library. It’s insane. People are afraid to be themselves, we don’t choose anything for ourselves. We-” “No. You’re too old to be a bloody anarchist. I - I need to get out, I need to go. And you need to pack up your stuff.” * It’s still bright outside, the summer sun lasting well into the evening, so it’s still busy.

Friends gather in bars near the VISA® River that splits the city, couples on dates laugh together. I need to get away from them. I end up at a WINDOWS® 238 Culture House, it used to be something else, my granny would probably have known what but it’s lost now. It’s quiet – just a few gaggles of tourists dotted around.

I find a room with paintings, the PEPSITM Abstract Room, and sit on the AQUAFINA DIETR bench situated in the middle. My mind is still buzzing and I can’t let it go like granny said she would. I look up at the painting directly in front of me and focus on the different light and dark spots. The

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light parts won’t stay still, escaping everytime I try to chase them. They move and shrink and suddenly there’s more darkness than light. I think of Mel. How bright she used to be. How bright everything used to be.

My eyes sting and suddenly I’m crying. Fat wet choking sobs and I can’t stop them. I should move – get out of view – but I’m trapped between the light and the dark. I can’t move. Stuck.

I don’t know how long I stay there.

The light is slowly dying when I leave, the sun sinking down. I walk over the bridge and into the city but that stuck feeling stays with me. I’m surrounded by faces, smiling women holding something up to their mouths, celebrities who swear by this or that, people in real time with rating counters dropping down down down.

I take out my iPhoneX67 and call Mel.

CO M M E N TA RY

Classified – A Different Kind Of Placeness Classified began as an imagining of how the ‘Social Credit Score’ in China may look in a more capitalist structure. This led to the consideration of a not-so-distant future where the system had been globalised. The rating of private citizens is not something that feels too alien in the age of social media – where Instagram likes and Twitter followers have become, arguably, increasingly important. This theme has been explored in works such as the episode Nosedive in Charlie Brooker’s television series Black Mirror and Ella Road’s play The Phlebotomist. In the former, members of the public rate each other based on social interactions

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while the latter examines the idea of DNA and pre-dispositions having an effect on rating – which is catalogued by an official organisation. In Classified, the system is mandatory and is controlled by the governing body – as it is within the test systems that have already been introduced in China – where both the social and economic ‘worth’ of an individual is determined, in a world where everything you do is watched and examined.

Classified explores the impact that this system has on personal relationships but also on the idea of place and national identity. I considered a world in which cities stretched throughout countries, covered in screens, so branded that it in fact became generic – places becoming indistinguishable from each other and therefore, places themselves having a kind ‘placeless’ quality of sorts. The idea of culture is changed also. The aspects of culture that can be commodified have been bastardized, such as restaurants featuring a amalgam of Italian, Eritrean, Vietnamese and Mexican food: ‘fusion of fusion’. Whereas, certain cultural areas, such as art galleries or museums are not considered important, or economically beneficial. They are, instead, replaced with buildings that celebrate past advertising campaigns. The true culture of this world is that of the advert, shown by the branding/sponsorship of items such as traffic lights but also natural features such as rivers. I included several examples of this, capitalising brand names and including trademark signage, as I wanted to make the point as overt as the advertising itself.

The piece also came out of a workshop exercise, in which we were tasked with physically staying in front of an abstract piece of art at a gallery for thirty minutes, just looking and interacting with it. This became the conclusion of the text as I felt that there was something in staring at a piece of art, also in having an interaction with something physical, that is so at odds with the fast paced ‘information dump’ society in which we live – and indeed in which the characters in Classified live. I wanted the image of the protagonist sitting in front of an abstract painting, crying ‘fat wet choking sobs’, to be a small act of rebellion. This, along with the – albeit ambiguous – decision to call ‘Mel’ feels like, to me, the starting point of a taking back of agency.

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Gilgamesh through the lens of Mesopotamian history and belief Written by Federica Morgillo Illustrated by Vivienne Mahon

The historical and cultural contextualisation of The Epic of Gilgamesh provides a deeper and more thorough understanding of the plot development and of the structure of the society in which it takes place. This essay will provide an insight into the various interpretations of the work focusing on its historical and cultural value. It will then offer a description of Mesopotamian religious customs, highlighting how the awareness of Mesopotamian funeral rituals changes our understanding of the events. The episode I have selected for this is Ishtarâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s marriage proposal and Gilgameshâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s refusal, which I believe represents the perfect example of how important it is to be aware of Mesopotamian customs to fully understand the epic.

Paraphrasing Freud, humanity endured two great outrages from the hands of science. The first was the realisation that the Earth was not at the centre of the universe, but rather a tiny crumb in a cosmos with an immense and inestimable magnitude. The second was the divulgation of Darwinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s findings and their challenge to the human superiority over the natural and animal world, proving that humans are descendents of animal species.

Western history has also been shaken by another event: the discovery of Gilgamesh. Until the early nineteenth century, the history of Western civilisation traced the roots of its culture and literature to the Mediterranean

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countries of Egypt and Greece. The history of civilisation was a settled matter for the Victorians around the 1830s, but with the finding of the epic, the Eurocentric bias behind this conception of human history fell, revealing a much more mysterious history. In 1850, the discovery of the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh and its translation in 1872 became the starting point for a new series of debates about time and history in the Victorian era.

From the assumption of contemporary civilisation being the most significant entity of the universe, the epic made it only a chapter in a much longer history of the earth. Men became what Althusser describes as träger, bearers of historical determination, rather than the actors of history. Overall, the epic allowed the historical reconstruction of a previously unknown world with its specific culture, civilisation, and literature, which moved the pivot of civilisation from the Mediterranean to Mesopotamia.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, written around the 2700 BC, is humanity’s oldest broadly coherent work of literature. Written in cuneiform writing, it was soon forgotten around the first century AD, when cuneiform writing ceased to be practised. The epic recounts the adventures and deeds of Gilgamesh, the King of Uruk according to Sumerian tradition, a mysterious character who contains in itself the features of a man, a king, a hero and a god. Furthermore, Gilgamesh is rich in themes and a moral tale that still finds many parallels in both the contemporary world and in texts like The Bible and the Mahābhārata.

The text, defined by Rilke as “the epic of fear of death”, deals with the fear of the inevitability of death, not intended as an abstract concept but as the end of the character’s own existence.

From an existentialist point of view, the epic is an allegory of the human condition, with Gilgamesh being both a man and a god, who is therefore haunted by an internal tension between the normal and extraordinary. The epic follows Gilgamesh’s journey to learn how to live rightfully, according to the limitations and responsibilities that society and the universe impose upon him. In his adventures, he learns love, loss, the value of human achievements and limitations, and finally realises the impotence of humans against death.

Another way of reading the text is to focus on its mythical attributes and

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its emblem of the limits of the culture with its eternal opposition against nature. A first example is represented by Enkidu, whose early life is a heavenly idyll. He lives in solitude, runs naked in nature, plays with animals and frees them from the traps that hunters set for them. He has no idea of what his purpose in life is, until Shamat, a harlot from the temple, seduces and humanises him. After their encounter, the animals flee from him and his newly-lost innocence becomes the prelude for his entry into civilisation. On the other hand, Gilgamesh, builder of the wall of the city, represents civilisation.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s friendship cannot but bring death to Enkidu, raising questions on the destroying power civilisation has on nature.

Another example of the conflict between civilisation and nature can be found in Gilgamesh’s decision to leave for the wild cedar forest with Enkidu and to murder Humbaba, the forest guardian. When Humbaba begs the heroes to spare his life, they refuse. This episode could be seen as a manifestation of the alleged superiority of mankind over nature, order over chaos, civilisation over wildness.

Taking into consideration the sources on ancient Mesopotamian religion and the reconstruction of the world in which the story evolves, the text can be interpreted as a political text. Gilgamesh is initially presented as a tyrant but learns, through experience, to be a responsible ruler. The epic introduces rules and values to be used for counsel in which Mesopotamian notions of Kingship and responsible rule are deeply embedded. For this reason, the episode of Humbaba’s murder does not only symbolise the destruction of nature but also shows Gilgamesh’s hunting nature, portraying him as a hero who seeks new experiences and fame. Mesopotamian culture associates hunting with authority, symbolising strength and ability to protect people. For this reason, Gilgamesh’s hunting abilities reinforce his royal authority and statecraft.

With the murder of Humbaba and the march to Lebanon, the adventure also shows Gilgamesh dealing with matters suited to a Mesopotamian monarch, such as military conquest, and gives an insight into Mesopotamian everyday life, characterised by the scarcity of natural resources. The conflict between humans and nature is further exemplified by the fact that the Mesopotamians

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were the creators of the first great urban society and identified civilisation with city life. Gilgamesh’s march to Lebanon can be justified considering that the main resources Mesopotamia offered were clay and straw but it lacked hardwood, of which Lebanon was rich.

The narrative of the epic provides an accurate representation of Mesopotamian society. Early Mesopotamian agriculture, based on artificial irrigation, allowed an increase in food production and therefore a surplus which could be sold in the city markets, supporting the growth of urban population. Nevertheless, as the settled areas of the country grew and joined, they became vulnerable, subject to natural disasters and epidemics. The protection that in the past had been granted by relative isolation was no longer there: people were subject to the fear of invasion, with relative death or slavery. This fear became a part of life, creating a culture of omnipresent and unconscious anxiety and fear. The great city-walls that were erected around the towns limited this fear but did not eliminate it. This Mesopotamian society of anxiety confided in institutions of collective security, which were in the same way guided by their powerful gods and goddesses. Mesopotamians scrupulously followed the gods’ prescriptions and served them with love and fear. They relied upon them, as children do their parents – something often shown in the epic and one of its main examples being Aruru’s creation of Enkidu to help the raped women of Uruk. An extensive literature of hymns and prayers and documented sets of rituals and sacrifices helped them keep the gods’ favour.

Just asthe Mesopotamian kings communicated with their subjects through intricate layers of palace bureaucracy, Mesopotamian gods only communicated to their favoured mortals, through dreams, omens and unusual natural events. This blind obedience towards their gods clashes however with Gilgamesh’s blunt rejection of Ishtar.

Ishtar is the patron Goddess of Gilgamesh’s city. Her marriage proposal should be very attractive to Gilgamesh since she could offer him everything he ultimately wants: power, status, wealth and immortality. Gilgamesh’s reaction is therefore curious as he not only refuses her proposal but also insults her for her promiscuities, despite Ishtar being the goddess of love.

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It has been argued that the misogyny against Ishtar was an aspect included for the original audience to enjoy as comedy. Nevertheless, I believe that Gilgamesh’s refusal is impossible to understand without any knowledge on Mesopotamian religion and culture. Pronouncing the marriage formula, Ishtar offers a chariot of lapis lazuli and gold […] and you shall have mighty demons of the storm for draft mules. When you enter our house in the fragrance of cedar-wood, threshold and thrones will kiss your feet.

Kings, rulers and princes will bow before you. They shall bring you the tributes from the mountain and the plains.

Gilgamesh’s long response can be divided into three sections. In the first he seems willing to offer gifts to Ishtar but reluctant to marry her. In the second, Gilgamesh becomes more negative towards her and, in the third part, he lambasts the goddess for her promiscuity. The reason of the rejection lies in the proposal itself, as Gilgamesh understands that Ishtar is offering him something different. In Mesopotamia, the composition of the marriage formula was mutual while the divorce formula was unilateral, therefore when Ishtar says: “You shall be my husband and I shall be your wife”, the unilateral formulation suggests finality and control. This, along with her offer, suggests that the proposal has its setting in the underworld. She offers Gilgamesh a chariot drawn by ūmū, “mighty demons” who belong to the supernatural world, and tells him that he will smell burnt cedar when entering their house, that priests shall kiss his feet and that people will offer tributes to him. The aspects of the proposal can then be considered according to Mesopotamian funeral rituals, during which the corpse was laid on a bed and, while his feet were kissed, cedar was burnt and tributes were offered to the king of the netherworld.

Trying to deceive Gilgamesh, Ishtar’s offer is in fact not of marriage at all, but of death.

There are some similarities in the psychological, procedural and symbolic nature of weddings and funerals and, in the epic, marriage serves as

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a metaphor for death as shown by Gilgamesh’s actions after Enkidu’s death, when “he covered the face of his friend as if he were a bride”. Both death and marriage involve leaving one group, or state. and entering another with the respective celebration to facilitate the transition. Ishtar’s powerful ambiguity is impossible to understand except in relation to Mesopotamian traditions, which otherwise deceive superficial readers.

Ultimately, the knowledge of the context is not only indispensable to appreciating the text, but the awareness of Mesopotamian history and religion allows us to understand Gilgamesh’s behaviour, which would otherwise appear irrational. The epic content of the poem addresses some of the existential issues with which today’s readers can still relate, but most importantly its great story of continuous transmission, loss and discovery makes modern readers become part of history in its melting together of ancient history, present, and future.

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Tesco Chainsaw Managers Written by Joshua Derraji Illustrated by Ayesha Jarratt

‘What about that one? Have you tried that one?’

‘I’ve tried all of them. You watched me go over and push it. They’re all locked’, said the young man, a shelf-stacker. He sat down on the floor, hands over his face, and began praying. The mother, holding her two daughters close, saw his name tag, pinned to his light-blue shirt: Youseff. Her shoulders and jaw relaxed, and she wiped her upper-lip with her forearm. Now that she knew his name, she got a sense of who he might be, what he might be like, and the situation didn’t seem as dangerous as initially thought.

She sensed movement on the next aisle. Through the garishly coloured multi-packs of crisps she peeked through and saw the woman who supervised the self-checkout tills. Her name tag read ‘Louisa’; there was blood on it. She was in a foetal position, fingers twitching rapidly.

‘Hey, it’s going to be okay, Louisa’, said the mother. ‘The police must be on their way now. Everything is okay. Let’s chat, if you like – might help this go faster.’

Louisa started muttering to herself; the mother couldn’t make out the words. Louisa lifted her head up, still muttering.

‘What is it, Louisa? Talk to me.’

‘Why did no one stop her? We all knew it was missing from the inventory

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this morning. If a chainsaw is missing, someone needs to do something, right?’

The long, LED tube lights above went out, one by one. In the near dark, the daughters held on tighter, and Youseff prayed faster.

In the manager’s office, found within the glum recesses of the Watford branch Tesco Mega-Supermarket, stood Stacey Bloomfield, work clothes strewn all over the room. Naked, she watched the live camera footage on the twelve blinking screens, making mental notes on how many clusters of hostages there were, what aisles they were taking shelter in, the kind of people they were. She was judging them.

Her stopwatch began beeping; the police would reach the supermarket in eight minutes.

There were two hundred and eighty-seven people trapped inside the supermarket. Their eyes had adjusted somewhat to the dark, able to make out vague shapes and dull colours in front of them. At first, they all thought the sound came from the new, limited edition Fiat Punto 500 on the display at the front entrance, a prize for the first ten customers to achieve fifteen hundred ClubCard points, believing someone had switched on the car to escape, revving the engine in a panic.

But the ripping sound moved swiftly through the dark, up and down the aisles, and when it reached Louisa, she could make out Stacey’s nude silhouette, both hands gripping the rattling chainsaw, eyes wild and bright.

Stacey knew they would all run; no one stayed and stood their ground, and she shepherded them all into the delivery bay, forcing them to tie up one another with plastic cable ties. They lay all down, fronts to the cold floor, apart from Youseff. Stacey had singled him out as the person to assist her.

Sirens and flashing lights crept through the delivery bay doors. She double checked that the doors were securely shut and lead Youseff, his shirt now a dark blue from sweating, to the manager’s office.

The car, black chassis made slick from the tall parking lamps, parked up amongst the police vans and cars. The PA circled the car, opened the door and out stepped Alfred Thorn. He walked over to the head negotiator, shook

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his hand, and tried to look as large and important as he possibly could.

‘Mr. Thorn, thank you for coming so quickly. This should run smoother now.’

‘Has she said anything? Any demands? Some kind of promotion, perhaps?’

‘Nothing like that. She says she wants to speak to you, and only you.’

‘Shall I go in then?’

‘Right now, we’re not sure if that’s the right course of action. She may want to do more than talk, and we have no way of knowing if she’s armed.’

‘She’s just a bloody manager. She wouldn’t harm me.’

Thorn brushed the negotiator aside and made his way to the entrance.

Stacey pushed the button and the glass revolving doors begun to spin.

Cautiously walking through the aisles, floors thick with melted ice cream and trampled vegetables ripped from the shelves in fear, Thorn couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride at his life’s work. He hadn’t set foot in any of the supermarkets since 1985, because, until now, he never had a reason to. The reports and graphs and charts presented at the board meetings had always provided him with all he needed to know. As he surveyed all the beautiful things on the shelves and in the abandoned trolleys, seeing them for the first time, the tannoy system came alive.

Youseff held the letter in his shaking hand, and his soft voice boomed through the supermarket.

‘Firstly, if you are hearing this, that means Mr. Alfred Thorn has entered the supermarket. I am not using my own voice to say this, because I cannot give you anything which you can judge me for. Secondly, I promise none of the people in the delivery bay, or the person speaking, will be harmed. Yet, I know you still all need to hear what I have to say. It’s important, and it is the truth.

‘I, Stacey Bloomfield, have given Tesco the last fourteen years of my life.

During those years, I have worked hard for this company, and before I worked here, Tesco fed me and my mum and sisters. My work ethic comes straight from my mum. She had three jobs on the go, and five mouths to feed, and

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every meal that went into those mouths came from the Value Range. And, until yesterday, I believed in the Value Range. I believed in Tesco, and its caring approach to affordable food for all.

‘Yesterday, as I sat in this office and watched over the supermarket, I saw two families in the Biscuit and Confectionery aisle, and it was clear that one family was richer than the other. To clarify, just because I know people will analyse – scrutinise this event for years to come, I knew they were richer because of the clothes they wore, and the way they held themselves. And from the items in their trolley.

‘A little girl, from the richer family, picked up a box – a purple and brown striped box emblazoned with gold stars, made from 900gsm card – of the award-winning Tesco Finest Triple-Choc, Caramel and Guernsey Sea Salt Butter Cookies, and placed it in the trolley. Her parents did not even blink at this; it’s what she wanted, and they can give her whatever she wants.

‘Now, the little girl from the poorer family saw this, took a box of the same cookies, and tried to place them in her own trolley. The mother shouted at her, and she put them back. Then, the mother took a packet of the Value Chocolate Round Biscuits, and put them in the trolley instead. The little girl was inconsolable, tearing all of the biscuits, regardless of their price, off the shelf, onto the floor, and began stamping on them.

‘In all my thirty years of life, I have never seen anything so courageous. I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t understand it. But now I do. Maybe I understand too well.

‘Why, Mr. Thorn, do you have to make the Value Range packaging so plain? Do you not see how much destruction you are causing to someone’s self-esteem, someone’s self-respect? When you see us poor people, and a poor person I am and always have been, people who work hard for small things, what do you see? Something plain? A blank sheet of plastic? Something that does what it says on the tin, on the skin? Value Baked Beans. Value Cream Crackers. Value Person? Could there never be more to us on the inside, on the other side, something outside of our status? Do you think we are not capable of being interesting, creative, having dreams, aspirations, the bravery to

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strive for something greater than the things you were born into, the world you were born into? Are these things only for the people who can afford the nice things, the beautiful things, with titles filled with grand adjectives and exotic places? Is that the only requirement?’

Youseff had to catch his breath; the words were making too much sense to him.

‘I am going to take this little girl’s bravery and make it my own. I am going to take it further. I know you cannot be reasoned with, and so, Mr. Thorn, could you please turn around.’

Thorn turned around. He saw stood Stacey in the near dark, Value Range packaging taped all over her bare body. Value Digestives around her arms; Value Passata over her front; Value Brown Rice wrapped around her legs.

On her face, complete with two ragged eye holes, was a bag of Value Instant Mashed Potato.

Her arm yanked the starter wire on the chainsaw and Thorn turned away, ready to run, run faster than he ever needed to. She heaved her arms up above her head, manically shaking the rattling power-tool, and swiped; the blades ripped through his Brioni suit, specially picked out by his fourth wife, and he fell to the floor. He lay there, arms up in mercy, as she stood over him, smiling underneath the packaging that had dictated her whole life.

‘Can you see beyond this now, Mr. Thorn?’

She plunged downward, and saw him for what he truly was.

CO M M E N TA RY

There were multiple inspirations for Tesco Chainsaw Managers, the first being this passage from Don Delillo’s White Noise: ‘His basket held generic food and drink, nonbrand items in plain white packages with simple labelling. There was a white can labelled CANNED PEACHES.’ Within this passage, I saw the opportunity to

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write a piece which combined the topics of Baudrillard’s theory on the Simulacrum, consumerism, and popular culture.

The theme of popular culture can be found within the title of the piece, and the final actions of the protagonist, Stacey Bloomfield. Tesco Chainsaw Managers is intended as a riff on the cult classic horror film, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Furthermore, the protagonist of the film, ‘Leatherface’, wears the faces of his victims over his own, as this is his only way to express a personality. Stacey Bloomfield wears the packaging from the Tesco Value Range to have the opposite effect; for all her life, and the life of other people in the lower classes, they have been labelled as plain, and by wearing the packaging as she kills her boss, Alfred Thorn, she wants to free herself from her position, and force Thorn to look past the exterior.

Stacey’s true identity, and one’s ability to look past the exterior to engage with the truth, is the crux of the story and relates directly to the Simulacrum and consumerism. As Baudrillard writes in Simulacrum and Simulation, ‘We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.’ Within contemporary society, and more precisely, in the case of the story, supermarkets, we are constantly bombarded with information devoid of any real, deep-rooted meaning. I have tried to take this idea and ground it into a personal, human form; Stacey Bloomfield. Because of her societal status, Stacey has been forced to buy food with simple, low-value packaging. Without realising, this has dictated her entire life, representing an image that she, and everyone else who can only afford the lower value food, are simple, boring people, with nothing unexpected or ‘special’ laying beyond the exterior. It is here that, after having an epiphany, Stacey attempts to take control of the Simulacrum and destroy it.

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Morality and the fictional world in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita Written by Maddalena Eccher Illustrated by Iga Szuman-Krzych

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is about the dangers and pleasures of fusing life with fiction to the point that they become indistinguishable. It is a reflection on the moral consequences of transforming the ‘real’ world into a piece of art. Its readers are forced to choose between the artist, poet and enchanter and the paedophile, madman and criminal. The reader can be beguiled by the elegant tricks and fireworks of literary sophistication showcased throughout the narrative, seduced by Humbert’s charisma and the exquisite cleverness of his formal experimentation; he can pity, his heart flooded with compassion and understanding, Humbert’s poignant desire to arrest time and embark on a battle against decay, with beauty as his only weapon… until he once again awakens into reality and has to deal with the image of a twelve-year-old innocent girl, an image he has contributed to creating and exploiting for the sake of pure pleasure. In the midst of the narration, lured by the honey-sweet notes of Humbert’s literary fiddle, caressed by the silk and velvet patterns of his purple sentences, the reader is brought back to reality by the hideous beating of the drums of conscience. Yet it is too late; he has been infected by the narrative, seduced not exactly by Dolores Haze but by the deceitful beauty of art, and he finds himself, alone and palely loitering, at the intersection between the real and the imagined. “It was she who seduced me”, pleads

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Humbert, and the reader knows he is partially right. He, too, reads the novel and falls prey to la belle dame sans merci, art and its beautiful and perilous game of “intricate enchantment and deception”. A game that, however deceitful and illusory, deserves its own separate world of performance, an arena for its double play of damnation and redemption.

Advocating towards a condemnation of Lolita as brutally immoral and preaching for the moral purification it partially seems to demand would be an easy task. This, nevertheless, would not do justice to the novel and would oversimplify its density of meaning. If the moral critiques of the book are easily justifiable, it is difficult and problematic to defend it as an appreciation of and reflection on the power of art only. Yet, Lolita is not a purely moral tale. John Ray’s admonition at the end of his foreword to the novel is, after all, a fictional construct, in that it was written by Nabokov. The repetition of the initials of the Preface’s author – John Ray Jr. – makes him an interesting doppelgänger to Humbert Humbert. The novel’s moral message is inseparable from the serious business of playful art. The novel is a chess board, or a tennis court, where a game between reader and writer takes place. The body of the text is a living organism that interacts with the reader, not a dead corpse encased in coffin-narrow moral prescriptions. It is a playground, an isolated, separate spot “dedicated to the performance of an act apart”, to use Huizinga’s words in his study of play. It is the idea of the fictional world as a World Apart that is constructed in Lolita. Despite the forced return to grim reality and Humbert’s moral putrefaction, the reader cannot let go of the “nonutilitarian delights” of his artistic acts of creation. In the afterword to the novel, Nabokov writes that “for me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art … is the norm”. Humbert’s greatest crime is also ours: the desire to “fix once and for all the perilous magic of nymphets”, to immortalize a moment in time and space through the restorative and performative power of creative recollection. Does Humbert finally succeed in arresting time and eternalizing himself and Lolita? The answer is no in real life, and yes in fiction. Does Humbert

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obtain compassion, even forgiveness? No in the cold courts of morality, and yes in the sensuous arms of beauty. The reader cannot deny his involvement in the fictional dimension; however despicable Humbert is to him, he nevertheless departs with him on his flights of fancy in his illicit acts of imaginative contamination, an accomplice to his crimes. “I shall not exist if you do not imagine me”, Humbert rightly tells the reader.

Humbert desires to impose on his life the kind of stability that can only be obtained in fiction. He attempts to capture life and contain it into the beautifully crafted, perfectly self-contained frame of a book. He wants to confer to real persons in his life “the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind”. His breach of morality lies in the fact that he views the real people around him as fictional characters. He is angered when Valeria acts “quite out of keeping with the stock character she was supposed to impersonate”. At the same time, he himself becomes a character of the book he is writing. “Main character: Humbert the Hummer. Time: Sunday morning in June. Place: sunlit living room”, he writes in one of the entries of his diary. Entries which are justified to Dolores’s mother as innocuous “fragments of a novel” - an assertion which is, after all, partially true. We sympathize with Humbert because, in a way, he is nothing more than the rogue in a cheap novelette, a shallow caricature, a fictional prop just like his Dolly. What he calls “my Lolita”, “my own creation” is not a real person; she is Poe’s Annabel Lee, Petrarch’s Laura, Proust’s Albertine, Mérimée’s Carmen and Dante’s Beatrice. Little do we get to know of poor Dolores Haze. It is “Lo-lee-ta”, the pleasure of words. Humbert is intrigued by the sight of the full name ‘Dolores Haze’ in a list of Lolita’s schoolmates. He owns Dolly, Lo, Lolita, but the real Dolores Haze totally eludes him. He has “only words to play with”.

The perpetually desired ideal he wants to reach can only exist in the form of a fictional construct, and his idealization of the world is destined to crumble against reality, at what Poe calls the “hideous dropping off of the veil”.

The Coalmont episode at the end of the novel can be seen as Humbert’s last attempt, not to return to drab reality (as some critics have suggested), but to imprison Lolita once and for all in the secure narrative he has constructed

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around his life – a narrative of immoral deceit, but also a narrative of restoration and redemption. Yet Humbert’s desire for a ‘fairy-tale ending’ is impossible and even ridiculous: “the past was the past”, a pregnant, older Lolita tells him. At the end of the novel he finally takes notice of the fact that Dolores Haze is a person with her own identity and not the character he has tried to fix in his poetically narcissistic mind. Thus, the last resource that is left to him is “the refuge of art”; the construction of a “pattern” which, suggests the critic Christopher Knight, is “a redemption of loss, and perhaps the only redemption of loss there is, however fragile … the pattern may be”. A merciful, illusory apparition of “the great rosegray never-to-be-had”, evoked through an ethics of reading which involves a dual play of formal control and the creation of imaginative gaps. The fictional power of memory produces the ecstasy of “a negation of time”. Humbert and Lolita as characters are killed into immortality, like the figures on Keats’s urn, but they survive in the fictional realm of the reader’s fancy.

The moral paradoxes in the novel create a salvific ambiguity. Only temporarily, Nabokov tricks us into a suspension of our moral sense and we imagine that we have succeeded with him, that we have been able to grasp the butterfly wing, the “wisp of iridescence” that can only be admired in the solitary loveliness of a space with no time, no death, only art. This is the sweet, lonely violin note that we hear – or are tricked into hearing – in the middle of the cacophony of cruel reality. It is the construction of a separate realm, a “wondrous crystalline world … where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena”. Lolita, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is Nabokov’s “hideous progeny” which has “bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies”. Like Frankenstein, Humbert wants his narration to survive and owns responsibility for his creation. But is it really a posthumous warning, or rather the hope that someone might be capable of his own sin, and that, in Shelley’s words, “yet another might succeed”?

We give Humbert permission to trick us and follow him into the fragile but elegant dimension of art, with the certainty in mind that only the hope of a madman and of an artist can rest on such frailty.

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ABOUT THE BOOK

This project is the third volume of a collaboration in writing, design, illustration and publishing between staff and students from two creative disciplines in The Cass â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the writers of the English Literature and Creative Writing department, and the illustrators and graphic designers of the Visual Communication department. Staff leading the project were Angharad Lewis (Head of the Visual Communication course cluster), Alistair Hall (Lecturer in Visual Communication), and Trevor Norris (Course Leader English Literature and Creative Writing). The design of the book and its illustrations were developed by students in 2018/19 Visual Communication studio, Ink. The students worked in teams to research, develop and pitch the typographic design and layout of the book, with successful ideas being developed to create the final design. Each student was paired with a piece of writing from the book, to design and print an individual visual response to it. These sets of visual work were then refined into illustrations for the book. The book was launched during the Summer Show at The Cass in June 2019, with live readings performed by the writing students featured in the book.

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ABOUT THE CASS

The Cass (The Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design; London Metropolitan University) provides high quality Foundation, Degree and Postgraduate education at purpose built workshops and studios in Aldgate.

There is a strong emphasis on socially engaged Architecture, Art and Design applied to both local and global contexts, a school wide interest in making and many projects focus on aspects of London.

Students at The Cass are encouraged to learn through practice, experiment with process and gain real-world experience in both individual and collaborative projects, engaging with professionals, communities and companies.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the dedication and creative energy of the many staff and students of the English Literature & Creative Writing and Visual Communication departments who have contributed. In particular the dedicated student design and illustration team of Michael Brown, Shannon Johnston Howes, Noah Gurden and Vivienne Mahon.

Grateful thanks goes to Andy Stone and Christopher Emmett at The Cass for their ongoing support the Anthology project.

And special thanks goes to Anna Powell and colleagues at Park Communications, for their expertise and support in the printing of this book, as well as Alyson Hurst of GF Smith for her invaluable advice in all things paper.

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