The Isis | Awakening | MT20

THE Isis MAGAZINE

AWAKENING

MT20

CONTENTS 1. Editors’ Letter Alexander Haveron-Jones & Barnaby Pite 2. Because my mother’s best friend is Catholic Natalie Perman 3. Summer Scents Vincenza Jacquest 4. British Community Spirit Hani Elias 6. Keep Anoushka Chakrapani 8. Fragments 10. Two Women Amber Haslam 12. Under His Skin Anna Schechter 14. Observances Kate Greenberg 18. Democracy Born in the Wild Kalli Dockrill 24. Rubber Fire Eleanor Cousins Brown 25. The Viewing 26. Nijinsky Rita May 30. Diving Asa Breuss-Burgess 31. Amber Means Wait Laura Hankins 32. Pest Control Jessica Halliday 35. Meat 36. Desire in Love S. Luke Doughty 40. Gilt Pastiche 42. My Mother, After Matilda Houston-Brown 46. Action 48. Mary Louisa Ivy 51. Embryo 52. The Academic Gig Economy Ben O’Brien 56. Watching 57. Descent 58. The Moderne Witch 60. Pigeon, Ophelia Printed with thanks to Jeffrey Archer, whose generous support guaranteed the publication of this issue.

Cover Image: Tayo, Alexander Haveron-Jones

Editors’ Lette

In 1939, while exiled in Denmark, the German Marxist dissident Bertolt Brecht wrote, “What times are these when a conversation about trees is almost a crime, because it contains a silence about so many misdeeds?” To produce art which examines the minutiae of human existence can often be self-conscious: the abstraction of poetry and prose seem incompatible with greater injustices or a society in flux.

estimations of how far apart 2 metres is—are commonplace, we wanted our magazine to be anything but.

The conditions in which we published this issue have been remarkable: our team has never met. Digital restrictions seeking to render us all inadequate, we have been reduced to our limited and pixelated selves, confined to our college rooms in the second national lockdown, and often wondering how we would finance a magazine which we would put together while never in the same room.

Alexander and Barnaby

This publication seeks to combine polemic with poetry, art with analysis —and is confidently eclectic. In a impersonal climate of isolation and sanitisation, these pages provide a hot, gleaming, clanging moment of saturated distraction from our everyday lives. We hope you enjoy its brash milieu.

Somehow, with the help of former MPs, College JCRs, and boundless patience from our Senior Editorial Team, Awakening is complete. In an uncertain situation such as ours, it is difficult to avoid cliché: ‘The new normal’; ‘unprecedented times’. But when masks and isolation—and vague 1

Because my mother’s best friend is Catholic today it seems the missionaries are bound to send their best-disguised recruit— the tickle of hair on your top lip better found at the wheel of a Ford F-150, camo drying on the boot, but filters the word of G-d to a tinny sound a frequency between carrie underwood and orchestral flute, country-classical. you pronounce proselytise like a round of whisky, on the house, a crowned glory, a correct citing of john 8:44 draws a winning suit of cards or a dart on bulls-eye. in your eyes ‘the ground’ and ‘the water’ were mixed up in a second genesis and we drowned where we should have donned a swimsuit and floated. these moments bleed like a wound inside us. for example: you told me that G-d told you (rebound through a line of chinese whispers, like prophecy was an offshoot of the national lottery where you could win big) that I was in profound need of help; that you would save me; astound me with revelation. did I have love, duty, an acute belief that if I asked G-d would bring me cut-up fruit or browned butter cookies while I did my homework?

I cried as faith marched towards the parade ground.

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3

@cenzaphotography

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SPIRIT SPIRIT

COMMUNITY COMMUNITY SPIRIT SPIRIT SPIRIT SPIRIT

BRITISH

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Keep

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I don’t see it as a word anymore spell out every letter enunciate every syllable begging for kinship from a word so distant, like your grandmother’s saris, the one in the pictures where she smiles unaware of being photographed woven in Banaras, home to poverty and colour, eyes wandering from street to street to find the next child wearing red and orange smiling at the white man.

Your grandfather’s khadis, one with history of freedom of rebellion and fires that burn as tall as buildings now greenwashed and housed in sweatshops, your aunt’s jhumkas heirlooms like recipes and your uncle’s Chandi passed down through generations relative to relative spoons and necklaces made from the same silver.

Keep them in a trunk, lock it forever sipping tea in the dark,

What do you call the thing that slithers across your waist?

What shines like white tusks on your ear and neck?

Words that are on the tip of my tongue but no longer mine now each spoken with softened r’s and double o’s, ornaments so unknown I don’t know if they belong on my ear or my chin, so exotic that if they were at the British Museum I’d applaud them.

Keep

fold up the shawl that winces at the sound of cashmere.

You won’t need warmth; “it’s always sunny in New Delhi”.

So I sit here freezing walking barefoot with Sher Khan holding The Tempest when I’d rather read Une Tempête.

Place some Shakespeare, Kipling and Dickens on top weigh it down, make sure they don’t spill out

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TWO WOMEN are wearing high necked jumpers, wrapped up to their chins

like coffee cup sleeves.

Their spines taut trunks,

legs straight, like those of the oak table nestled into its dents.

Beneath

all hands are hidden, as if they both held weapons between their narrow fingers,

barrels face to face.

Undisturbed by the scream

of the ticking clock.

Skin cloaked in bark, cocooned within, sealed inside.

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Talons of a bird on a branch, gripping the top of her arm with her hand Looking away from the eyes nailed onto her figure,

pupils like

the slender,

pointed tip.

Parchment skin: battered, pages of the notebook.

Laid open, spine cracked.

She knows that it has been opened, pages flicked through and words read— Moss burrowed into every crease, blanketing each nail scraping back bark: skinned until split down the middle and green leaks into light.

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UNDER HIS SKIN I don’t think he knows I’m here, embedded in his dermis. We ended things in a typical rage:

“God, you get under my skin!”

And I said what now seems to me the line which sealed my fate: “You’d be so lucky!”

And, the next morning, I came to, and there I was.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite at home here. I don’t miss my old life with its commutes, bills, obligations, and politics— I sleep at the crest of the ‘A’ tattooed without forethought into the inner left forearm of my simpleton ex-lover. ‘A’ for Alexandria. ‘A’ for me. I think he was supposed to add the rest of my name at some point but never got around to booking the appointment, or so he said. (Now, I realise a mouthful of a name like Alexandria would never fit across a forearm). When he got it two months into our two year on and off tryst, I’m sure he had no idea he was putting a down payment on my future home. Now, the ‘A’ is my domain. I stroll its thin black tunnels, hiking the rolling hills of its lines, and sliding with glee around its curled tail end. The bridge of the ‘A’ is my favorite spot, offering gorgeous views of his capillaries and hair follicles. His tiniest and finest features have become blue skies and wheat fields.

I took comfort in knowing this calligraphic terrain well. I had mapped it with my finger’s mindless tracing and outlined it with my tongue’s coquettish teasing many a time. I’d 12

even sat with him in the parlour while beads of blood and excess ink bubbled from this very spot. Now I was in this universe which begun with a bang, with the artist drilling it into existence.

Here was this letter, ‘A’, which belonged to me. The tattoo itself existed physically. It had depth and height. It was (surprisingly, wondrously) habitable. It was material, no different than brick or vinyl or even ink on a page. How was getting a tattoo different from building a house or writing a letter? Those are things one can dwell in, so why not skin, too?

There was soon the question of sustenance in my new home. Water seemed easy enough. Sweat passed me by, and I supposed the salt didn’t taste so bad. With a whiff, I learned to differentiate the non-potable postgym sweat—since when did he work out?—and the refreshing cool-off provided on a warm spring day. I was well on my way to hydration.

But food? What was I to eat? I paced the fraying, fanned-out ink at the edge of the tattoo, gazing into pale pink skies. How he used to blush with his whole body! But why blush now? He had no reason to.

I was famished.

Could he feel my stomach rumbling?

Did he wonder if my hunger was some phantom tickle, a gnat, a misfired synapse, a tremor below the earth’s surface?

I started to consume the little flakes that burst from my ex-lover’s skin. I eat only what is already on its way out, straining to coat his pillowcase, ready to assume its final dusty form. I debated the ethics of my leechlike

lunches, and came to the conclusion that until I dip into his veins for a coppery milkshake, I’m in the clear. After all, it’s just skin. It’s not that deep.

If asked to defend my case—let’s just say we’re on a cheesy daytime divorce court show, or I’m accused of breaking and entering his permanent residence or something, I would say this: I believe that my client (I would represent myself) has a right to these meals, as she (I) was always asking him, begging him, to moisturise. He never did.

(Now this would get my imaginary jury revved up. Sympathy for the poor ex-girlfriend). Out of the goodness of my heart, I tried to prevent him from flakiness. (Dramatic pause). Now that I’m a parasitic dermis-dwelling ex, I thank the heavens above that he never listened to me. Thank you. (Canned audience clapping. Roll credits).

Only one thing continued to nag at me: the possibility of him laser-erasing my home. Isn’t that what scorned ex-lovers do—blot out signatures of affection? Naïvely, I’d always thought of these things as binding, a comwould summon the memory of my aunt mitment or a contract, a “please initial on with three-quarters of a rose on her ankle. the dotted line” kind of situation. I could She only made it through erasing half the work myself up thinking about how apstem before screaming it quits. I couldn’t parently unbearable tattoo removal was for imagine the pain of being within the zapped the remorsefully inked. In such moments, I body art. I mean, where would I go? Would I become medical waste? Disposed? Would I be released from one area to roam his skin unbound, a climate of grease, pimples, and oil? The man had great forearms. But those legs? Are you kidding me? Uninhabitable. He wasn’t all wheat fields.

What would happen to life among the blonde wisps? What was the afterlife of a tattoo?

My questions never found answers.

What I can say is this: he didn’t remove the tattoo.

One day there was what I can describe only as an earthquake. I thought the tectonic plates at large were in a tizzy, that I was merely experiencing the celldeep, bone-shaking rattle of it all.

I was not.

I ran for cover. A fresh, still-wet tunnel split open at the bottom left of the ‘A’. He wasn’t removing my home but altering it. Adding on. Allowing himself to forget.

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OBSERVANCES I was staring at the spidery print and into the fresh whiteness of my copy of Beowulf one Friday evening last September, while far away and unbeknownst to me, tales older and stranger had begun to sprawl inside my phone. A reticent but attentive member of an English freshers’ Facebook group, I scrolled, a day later, through a conversation gone sour. In response to some innocent query of everyone’s favourite novel, I saw that someone had ventured Mein Kampf. There followed then silences and words of showers which I didn’t understand, and further, much deeper down, came the leak of an ancient sadness which I didn’t know how to pronounce.

In advance of leaving for university, like many of my Jewish peers, I had been given fair warning about atmospheres going awry, had been lent advice about how to know how hard I should bite my tongue.

The 2019 election approaching, a general disquiet in the Jewish community sat more

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loudly and stewed more deeply.

In

those months and moments it was like gathering spare buckets from the back of the shed, watching fundamental details drip through cracks on high. In the bigger picture, in other rooms and parts of the country, those cracks and tears might have been invisible: rustlings of the wind, of coins, the clamour of business as usual. But for the overwhelming majority of Jewish people, signs and smoke and damp ceilings were very, very difficult to pass under.

But measurements must be taken, distinctions must be made. There remains a certain kind of discrimination which

Jewishness holds dear, which embraces all the laws and melodies and customs passed down from generation to generation in order, to some degree, to be separate. These things fall and have always fallen; the curl on the corner of the forehead, the silence and the knees during prayer, the seafood platter without the shellfish, the soft and loose pages of my grandfather’s siddur.

the third day of freshers’ week, with some happy solemnity I did not participate in any planned events or go out and meet new people: it was Yom Kippur. I fasted, prayed, and played board games I’d brought from home with friends from home whom I’d never met before. I used to know the rules off by heart, but now I would say it is more by ear. I have spent long mornings tweaking emails apologising for the inconvenience But I turn them with my own hands and pointing to the moon, have broken my now, and through so many fine shades and words, have regathered them in a different shelves of difference, through so many dif- order, have fallen asleep over the pages of ferent depths of desire to draw them. It is Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle late in but a footstep, but a plummet from clause bed. It went over my head when I bought to clause. In disbelief I have tripped over it, translated and removed, but still someswastikas on pavements, times, and since memhave raised my hand to ory, I stare at ceilings, my mouth at the long thinking about names blast into the ram’s horn. and names and other I love Israel with a love names, hills of unbuckthat is lost inside and led shoes. Those farafound apart from myself. way and morbid lands I stand with the Paleslie under so many cartinian people and carry pets, in so many dusty their tragedy in the corcorners. They have alner of my star of David ways been there and that is always getting tanI have always known gled around my neck. I them. Perhaps enough do not always know what time has passed for to say, or if I am expected to say something, things to be turned on their head, but I or if I have said too much, at the wrong find I am still looking over my shoulder, table and at the wrong time. I have forgot- through loopholes, inside wrinkles, holdten what some words mean in Hebrew, but ing onto some last length of railing, holdhave learnt new ones in Yiddish. ing out for faces I’ve only ever heard of.

I have ruined my eyesight straining to connect worlds, trying to get the accent just right. But I can still figure out human faces, continue to trip and trust across so many caveats, so many cushions. I have missed out on countless opportunities which have fallen on a Saturday, or a Shabbat, that heaviest and most precious piece of furniture. On

That Yom Kippur, there were words of a shooting in a German synagogue, thoughts of ambulances faraway, a hum which stayed and stayed inside our throats. This I write a year later in the flurry of a long Shabbat afternoon, with a brick of guilt balanced on my chest, unable to wait for the sun to set.

This is just a turning down of some angry 15

noise, some twittering and pecking that has gone on too long. This is just a paying up of sorrows with what I happened to have in my pocket.

And some things are not up for sale. It must be said that white Jewish people are privileged today, and do not suffer the ongoing reality of systemic racism as Black people do. There is no exchange rate here.

Today we have space, whole suburbs to breathe in; we do not live in fear of being stopped and strangled by the police.

We can hide our Jewishness in the attic, when we need to.

But when may we need to? I fear there must be and long has been some assumption— that all Jews are white—as well as some subclause—that the whiteness of white Jews comes with strings attached.

Tones and pages have been turned with terrifying grace, people have been turned into goats, been herded in by the hundred to warm consciences and whiten Christmases. Lately, I have seen photographs of cattle-cars and long queues far away, and well up with thoughts of full circles. I sit buried in my sofa, and only saddle upright to hope against old sentences being replayed, new silences being respected, more museums made.

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Saturdays aren’t so special now; now the falling of snow a miracle; winters now like springs. But there is something in the air, something else which I wear on my sleeve.

My oldest book sleeps by my bed, waiting for me to want it all to come flooding back, the frills and the warts and all the words. I kiss the covers when I close them, and sometimes that is all that I have done.

Once, crossing the main road on a Friday evening, holding onto it, a man shot his head out the window to yell at us, us fucking Yids.

I held it so hard then, I dug it into my ribs, and then afterwards, sitting in synagogue, I squinted at the letters of gold and the yellow pages which touched my cold and mottled palms, trying to see what he caught sight of, trying to make out something in the angles and between the lines. There settled drops of water, rivers of ebony twigs and ivory bones, filled with every slight look and syllable for which I have tried to find an answer, have tried to find a different home.

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DEMOCRACY

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BORN IN THE WILD

LD

Overnight camp is a staple of North American summer: weeks spent sleeping in bunk beds, nose to nose with the person next to you, tanned skin, and skinned knees against the backdrop of endless lakes.

Camp screams freedom; hours in the wilderness with no parental supervision, where

the most authoritative figure is a twenty-something undergraduate more interested in organising a prank than encouraging you to wear sunscreen. In that slice of blue-green heaven, not only are kids allowed to be kids, but they experience the world outside the hierarchies of imposed parental authority. For two months the world dissolves into one of peer collaboration and wholehearted enthusiasm.

In a world of temporary egalitarianism, children learn not only to love democracy—but to demand it.

Engagement in democracy is shaped by informal experiences with other forms of authority. Political theorists like J S Mill argue that belief in one’s ability to have political impact stems from engagement in democratic workplaces. However, this argument assumes that political engagement does not develop until adulthood when we are exposed to such microcosms of democracy. Yet social movements are dominated by young people: Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, the Greensboro sit-in in 1960— before adulthood, children learn to reflect on their society and realise they have a part in shaping it.

Marginalised people are often at the forefront of social movements despite frequent exclusion from the spaces Mill identifies as ‘democratic’. Disabled children are segregated

in special classrooms, or forced to be homeschooled.

Disabled teens are discriminated against in job interviews under the assumption that they don’t have the capabilities to fulfill the role.

In North America, summer camps fill the gap—developing self-determined and collaborative individuals.

Camp teaches marginalised children that they deserve representation and gives them tools to demand it.

There are approximately eight thousand overnight camps in North America and each boast a tradition of unadulterated fun. More than that, camps boast a tradition of believing in the strength and independence of children. No kid is too fragile to be nailed in dodgeball or incapable of playing tackle football.

Especially for often marginalised children, such as the Deaf or physically disabled, who have spent the majority of their formative years relegated to the side lines, camps are the first exposure to a societal microcosm which assumes their equality. Camp Jened, a camp run by the physically disabled for the physically disabled, is the pinnacle of an inclusive utopia. Jim Lebrecht says: “At home we wouldn’t be picked first for the team; at Jened, you had to go up to bat!”

Play is fundamental to both camp and developing children’s values. In 2018, Johann Lundqvist et al.

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interviewed Swedish school children, with and without disabilities, by collecting their drawings and conducting interviews. The children drew pictures of bikes, swings, and ideas for games that involved treasure hunts. Play was as important to children as all their other desires, perhaps because play was how they understood their desires. Treasure hunts are symbolic of intellectual and physical stimulation, allowing children to test and reaffirm their abilities. Games of football demand collaboration and the development of social bonds. Bikes and swings, solitary activities, reassert desires for independence, but more than that, they indicate a joy in relying on yourself, propelling yourself forward or into the air, taking responsibility for your own enjoyment. In all aspects, children emphasised that they enjoyed choosing the form of their play—'self-determination'.

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Desires such as these can be linked to ideas of democratic engagement. The collaboration of capture the flag indicating a craving to belong, relates to voting for representatives in government. A desire for intellectual and physical challenge indicates a want to affirm one’s capabilities, linking to ideas of political efficacy: belief that your vote is capable of creating difference.

Perhaps most critically, self determination led to a desire for increased involvement foundational to marginalised groups demanding inclusion through social movements.

Yet, increased involvement and self-determination are not always reality for disabled and Deaf children.

The 2020 documentary, Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution, follows the paths of disabled activists from their days as campers at Jened to their time as leaders of the American Disability Rights Movement.

Activist Judy Heumann describes how she was originally home-schooled because her wheelchair was considered a fire hazard. When Heumann began school she was confined to the basement, separated from those without disabilities who she referred to as the ‘upstairs’ kids. “I don’t think I felt really shame about my disability,” says Heumann, “what I felt more was exclusion.”

Exclusion is often based on a misplaced desire to ‘protect’ the physically disabled or the Deaf. The most common Google searches for ‘can deaf people…’ are ‘drive’, ‘read’, and ‘speak’, indicating that the misconception that these individuals need to be protected is constructed based on the idea that they are incapable. In a round-table shot filmed at Jened, Nanci D’Angelo says: “my parents are great but sometimes I really hate them ‘cause they’re too great and they’re too overprotective

of me.”

Under the guise of altruism, the abled and the hearing allow paternalistic instincts to take over, ‘correcting’ this ‘lack of capacity’ patronisingly. Heartwarming ‘hearing porn’ depicting Deaf children hearing for the first time after cochlear-implant surgery dominates the internet. These videos propagate the false idea that the Deaf have to be ‘fixed’ and that the hearing will be the ones to ‘fix’ them, perpetuating the idea that the Deaf are ‘not enough’. Rather than responding to actual demands for change that support the agency of the individual, such as increased demands for interpreters, they only fuel audism.

Camps, rather than being overprotective, are almost anarchic in their belief of ‘fun first, safety second’. In a shot of Jened, camp director Lary Allison tells the cameraman he’s digging holes around the swimming pool because the campers are kind of clumsy and he hopes they trip. The photo archives at the Rumball Camp of the Deaf depict campers warring with each other in mud pits, knocking each other off an upturned canoe with pool noodles.

Isolated from the rest of society, the façade of political correction fades away; a Wild West of scraped knees and bloody lips always accompanied by large grins.

Michael Brandwein, an ex-

pert and consultant for constructing teams and developing leadership skills, emphasises camps as an “oasis.” “In this less pressured atmosphere, children learn more readily what positive things to say and do when they make mistakes and face challenges,” Brandwein told the American Camp Association. Confidence in the face of hardship is developed by allowing children to make mistakes and get hurt in a positive environment.

Camps act as a microcosm of society, where inclusion and involvement is gospel. At camp, there is no clear hierarchical structure.

Agency is restored to the child in many ways as they are encouraged to pursue their own interests. “Camps help young people discover and explore their talents [and] interests,” says Peter Scales, of the Search Institute. Restoration of agency reinforces the idea that their opinions matter and deserve to be included. “The traditions [act as] secret code [allowing] those who know it to feel embraced,” says Brandwein. “Campers are urged to include, not exclude others.”

The Rumball Camp of the Deaf, founded in 1962, is a sanctuary where Deaf kids can just be kids. Traditional camp games played at ‘Deaf Camp’ exemplify Brandwein’s point. Knights, Horses and Cavaliers, where campers mingle in

a large group and find a new partner when different poses are called out, teach campers key skills. Campers learn confidence when finding new partners, inclusion by choosing different partners, and interpersonal trust—especially when ‘cavaliers’ is called and one partner picks the other one up. The game is modified, flashing lights when a pose is announced as opposed to yelling—but the foundation remains the same: connections and collaboration are the key to success.

In Ontario, the Camp of the Deaf has been the foundation for changes in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Bob Potts, a member of the camp’s Board of Governors says, “When camp first started there was a different mindset in the Deaf community, audism [the consideration of Deaf culture as inferior to hearing culture] was rampant.” Deaf people faced systemic barriers in every aspect of their lives, national news coverage was not close captioned, and lack of access to interpreters in the criminal justice system increased charges against the Deaf. The construction of ‘Deaf Camp’ was proof that “there were no barriers.”

Games like Knights, Horses and Cavaliers. though seemingly trivial, taught the importance of inclusion and community which became the building blocks for political change.

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“I’ve seen lots of kids who’ve gone to camp […] become very active in the Deaf community,” says Potts. He describes the decision under Trudeau Sr.’s administration to include the Deaf in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as particularly exciting: all of the Deaf Church and many current and former campers standing outside the Ontario provincial

bases in baseball. Joyfully partaking in talent shows and clapping for every act.

Seemingly normal camp activities were foundational to a mass movement responsible for changing the American constitution. The Disability Rights Movement in the 1970s was born out of Camp Jened. Activists, such as Judy Heumann, and Stephen Hoffman (previous

out of the Independent Living Movement, the Disability Rights Movement argued that the physically disabled could lead independent lives but were being barricaded from doing so by infrastructure promoting their exclusion. While the Independent Living Movement aimed to provide the physically disabled with the resources to live on their

government building as the Charter was amended so that every Deaf person had the “right to understand and be understood.”

Crip Camp, similarly to Deaf Camp, depicts campers taking part in normal camp activities. Leaning on each other as they run the

Jened campers) became central to the fight for Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitations Act to be passed.

Section 504 prohibited discrimination on the basis of physical or mental disability, guaranteeing equal access to employment and public services. Developing

own in the ableist world, the Disability Rights Movement demanded more than that: This ableist world should evolve to incorporate and support the physically disabled.

Skills learned at camp launched contentious action. Heumann herself de-

scribes how organizational and leadership skills she learned planning group dinners at Jened developed into organizing traffic stops outside of Nixon’s headquarters. At the peak point of the movement, Heumann was one of the leaders of the San Francisco sit-in at the federal offices of Health, Education and Welfare. The San Francisco sit-in lasted twenty-eight days with two hundred people remaining even when water and electricity were cut off.

The same collaborative atmosphere of camp carried through to the sit-ins: “You know Kitty and I, we just sort of took a vote,” says Heumann, “and we asked who wanted to stay overnight.” Agency and collaboration, the foundations of camp learning, melded together. A determined sense of agency fueled the desire of individuals to stay and be heard, unafraid of the hardships that would come with it and certain that their opinions mattered. There were no back-up ventilators, or catheters…quadriplegics who couldn’t turn themselves over in the night were sleeping on the floor but

they stayed. Moreover, Heumann made sure every voice was heard. D’Lil, a participant in the sit-in, describes how a meeting couldn’t start until a sign language interpreter was present, groups formed committees dedicated to working on media or food, and at the heart was Heumann asking each individual day by day if they could stay one more—a base of personal connections and trust.

Most intriguing are the moments beyond the hardship. Singalongs accompanied by signing proclaim “we shall not be moved.”

Walls and floors used as drums are reminiscent of campfire singing circles.

LeBrecht says, “everything we learned at camp was what we did there.” Camp provided the tools to fuel a movement but it also infused it with a sense of sacredness. The same sense of play integral to developing the values of autonomy and altruism materialised in the fight for them.

On April 28, 1977 Section 504 was signed into law.

Our capacity to demand the best from our democracies is dependent on our

informal experiences of authority. The Campers at Jened and Deaf Camp were taught in their formative years that they were capable of independence, and so they expected their societies to reflect that. The messy and disorganised nature of camp encouraged the kind of play that developed autonomy, and interpersonal trust, not only providing the tools for a movement but encouraging the psychology which strived towards achievement, benevolence and collaboration. The physically disabled and the Deaf were often isolated from traditional institutions of childhood development, but camps were a haven where the values and nature of social movements became entrenched in their identities.

Democracy, taught among the stones of the Canadian Shield or in the mountain defined wilderness of the Catskills, was not only desired, but beloved.

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Rubber Fire Horizon catches the cap of our neighbour’s fire oiling gashes through wood floorboards spiked with old plimsolls.

The deadliness is in the sunsink behind the flames: in things suspended there is so much space quivering from absence into being.

Strange faith. I tap your shoulder to make sure, test solid amongst all the dusk cutting mineral and the rock that never was.

The heat is more irreverent than we can be.

Lilac clamouring scent falls a week from the tree after the swell in the lawn mower three blooms heat gut the drains under absurd rainfall and the lowness of unbelonging.

All there is like sunset is gasoline that fuels its burning from air glistering, and hazy chokes on endings that once drove to peel back the skyline and now ignites itself.

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VASL AV VASLAV NIJINSK Y NIJINSKY I often pretend to be in love with Nijinsky. It’s easier that way, I tell myself.

Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950) was a Polish-Russian ballerino and choreographer who is often credited with the modernisation of dance. Perhaps his most famous piece, The Rite of Spring, was so radical in its time that the audience rioted at its premiere.

Nijinsky was not only a dancing prodigy, but beautiful, beyond what words will do justice to, all doe eyes and elaborately combed hair.

He is often called the greatest male dancer of the 20th century—not merely a man, but something greater than human.

Nijinsky’s final performance was in 1917, when he was only twenty-seven years old. Those who were present say that Nijinsky displayed such erratic confusion on the night of his final performance that he appeared beyond comprehension. His accompa-

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nist, they say, wept at the demise of a great artist.

Nijinsky was, by this point, in the midst of a psychiatric disorder we now know as schizophrenia. Nijinsky the man had been lost to the world, and his life became a tragedy.

There is no record that Nijinsky wept that night alongside his accompanist. In fact, the only records we have of his attitudes toward his condition are recorded in the diary he kept for six weeks between January and March 1919. This is what I hold in my hand now—all that remains of him for us to know.

Nijinsky’s diary is a rarity. It gives us insight into the mysterious process of succumbing, as they say, to madness. At times it is a manifesto of love for humanity, with passages such as “everyone has a nose, eyes, etc., and therefore we are all the same.

By this I mean that one must love everyone.” At others, Nijinsky is cruel and narcissistic. He criticises his wife, and says he

was disgusted by a prostitute’s menstruation.

He calls himself ‘God’, over and over.

The pages reflect a tension between the divine and the mortal, existent in his body.

This is a tension I know well. Up until the age of fifteen, I occasionally experienced moments when time seemed to stand still.

Kaleidoscopic colours would enter my eyes and I would see the world wavering in front of me. I could barely move, and when I did, my body felt heavy and weak, as if I were walking through jelly. The physical sensations should have been frightening, and yet, in my heart, I felt a calm I have never experienced before or since. It was as though I had been imbued with a fragment of heaven.

I would have happily lost myself in this state forever.

A central aspect of schizophrenia is that it defies understanding from the outside. It’s in the name itself. The word schizophrenia combines the Greek skhizein—‘to split’— and phrenos—‘of the mind’; it means, quite literally, a splitting of the mind. The patient’s mind is distorted, lost to the outside world.

It is as Esmé Weijun Wang puts it: to have schizophrenia is to “deteriorate in a way that is painful for others.”

I never told anyone about my strange sensory experiences growing up. Once the moments of bliss had passed, shame and fear set in. For a long time, the only terms I could find to label my condition were madness, insanity—too far outside the norm of human experience to feel like it could belong to a proper person. For a while, I was terrified that I was developing the prodromal symptoms of schizophrenia—symptoms that are sub-diagnostic, and which appear several years before the onset of the full-fledged disease.

It was not until years later that I discovered my experiences were more likely a rare form of childhood epilepsy. I have fancy words now, like temporal lobe seizure and dopaminergic to describe the probably neurological basis for my visions. But knowing these words, having scientific articles to cite about this condition—that changes noth-

ing about how I felt, or about my longing to forego reality for those moments of bliss.

I wonder what Nijinsky made of his own schizophrenia. To me, at least, it never seems as though he is distressed by the condition itself. His diary does not express beliefs in non-existent persecution; nor does he indicate that he is hounded by any frightening hallucinations. Rather, the sentiment that appears time and time again is his distress at the reactions of the people around him. At one point he writes, “I am afraid of people because they do not feel me, but understand me.”

Nijinsky’s wife, Romola, was one such person who, whether intentionally or not, brought distress upon her husband.

Romola Nijinsky was a conniving woman who stalked Vaslav and pretended to be a dancer in order to convince him to propose. She was infatuated with Njinsky, but did little to grant him autonomy after he developed schizophrenia, taking many lengths to distort his public image after diagnosis.

She extensively edited his diary to make his disjointed thoughts appear more coherent, and to conceal his sexual encounters with men as well as women.

Perhaps Romola meant well. Perhaps she made all of these changes and editions simply because of the desire to save her husband from falling into disrepute; perhaps she still wanted his legacy to be that of a divine creature who had blessed this earth.

Still, Romola failed to protect Nijinsky from the thing he feared the most: hospitalisation. Nijinsky’s diary is filled with anger at Romola for consulting a doctor as he slipped further into psychosis. He writes to her, “You have trusted a stranger, and not me.” Romola no doubt wanted to help him; still, her actions pushed him away. His deterioration pained her, and her pain fueled his hatred towards her.

Nijinsky’s experience of having a stranger’s opinion prioritised over his was a fact of psychiatric treatment in the early 20th century : the desires of the patient came second to the expertise of the doctor. Thankfully, things are better nowadays. There is currently no ‘magical’ treatment for schizophrenia, and it is generally considered a condition to be

27

managed rather than cured. Eradicating hallucinations or delusions is not always the goal of treatment.

In fact, patient-focused treatments, which seek to identify individual causes of distress have become increasingly popular. Rather than aiming to make them more manageable for others, approaches that genuinely aim to improve patients’ lives are growing more and more ubiquitous.

Yet even now, the mentally ill can be treated as subhuman far too often. It is still legal to involuntarily hospitalise and physically or chemically restrain a patient who has been deemed not to possess mental capacity, as long as it is done “in the patient’s best interests.” The issue is: who gets to decide what the patient’s best interests are?

Today, many would say it would have been in Nijinsky’s ‘best interests’ to be ‘cured’. Such a shame, everyone says, that his career ended so soon. What could he have created if he had had five more years, ten, even, to contribute to the world of dance?

Such attitudes completely neglect the richness and humanity that Nijinsky’s diary holds, albeit hidden beneath a layer of what we call ‘madness’. The text is clear: Vaslav Nijinsky was not a violent man, nor an evil one. This was a man who wrote, “I love everyone, and I do everything for other people,” and “My madness is my love towards mankind.” He mentions devotion to God repeatedly, as if the nature of his schizophrenia had brought him closer to heaven. His diary is filled not only with suffering and the fear of others, but also with the all-encompassing joy of feeling connected to the universe at large, a joy so strong that it is almost painful, begging to burst the entire soul at the seams.

When I read Nijinsky’s words, they are reminiscent of my own childhood experiences, in which I felt full of the world, too

28

full, my eyes bursting with colour and light.

Life, in those days, was experienced to the extreme. I was afraid of what these experiences would mean for me, but ultimately, I was filled with joy. I would not take any of it back, even now.

I like to think that Nijinsky’s thoughts and feelings reflect my own. I do not have people in my life who have gone through the same experiences as I have, or who know that the confines of normal life are a mere fraction of the possibilities contained within human experience.

I like to think that Nijinsky understood the loneliness that comes with these thoughts, because I do not want to face the notion that I could be alone in this feeling.

I still pretend to be in love with Nijinsky, because I would rather tell myself that I am infatuated than that I am afraid.

My fascination with him is both affectionate and morbid. On the one hand, he seems to be what society deems a ‘good’ mentally ill person: even though people do not truly approve of him, they accept him because he made a contribution to history that others can consume and enjoy. As a child, he was proof to me that I could still make something of myself even

if I went ‘crazy’, proof that I could be loved in spite of what I was. I became obsessed with leaving something permanent behind before I evaporated into nothingness–obsessed with honing my writing skills so that, like Nijinsky with his diary, I could preserve a piece of myself for others to remember me by.

Having said this, Nijinsky is my worst nightmare. I still wonder if I am wrong about my retroactive self-diagnosis.

I wonder if these are just my ‘good’ years, and that in time, my symptoms will come back with a vengeance to consume me. Even if I am lucky enough to create something that will make a lasting change in the world like Nijinsky did, I do not want to be remembered as a tragedy. I am sitting here with mortal flesh, soft arms and thighs and a heart that will give way someday.

Like Nijinsky says, I have a nose, eyes, etc., and because of this, I am the same as you, as anyone else. The only difference is that I once felt as though I had heaven in my palms, and I still think I would trade the rest of the world for a few moments of that bliss.

The sweetest wines and the softest kisses pale in comparison to what I once felt. I am ‘better’ now,

which is to say, more sane.

But I feel as though I have been robbed of heaven.

I want to want a normal life, but it feels not quite right, as if I am out of tune while everyone else is playing in perfect harmony. And I am afraid of how the people in my life would react if I were to admit this.

I want to live in a world where everyone understands that to be human is more than just this life where the colours are grey and emotions barely deviate from some arbitrary midpoint; I want people to feel as I once did, with feelings so strong that they do not think their bodies can contain it all. But I know that such experiences are strange, or rare, at the very least. And this makes me very lonely.

When the loneliness sets in, I like to open up Nijinsky’s diary to a random page and skim through the lines. Reading his words reminds me that there is a desire for a life and for feelings outside of how others experience them. Nijinsky said: “I want to dance because I feel and not because people are waiting for me.”

I want to dance too, Vaslav. I want to feel free.

Resources for schizophrenia: Charities such as Mind and Mental Health UK offer helpful guides for better understanding the condition. Some first-person accounts of individuals who have experienced schizophrenia that may be of interest include: healthtalk.org’s collection of experiences with psychosis, Eleanor Longden’s Ted Talk ‘The voices in my head’, and ‘The Collected Schizophrenias’ by Esmé Weijun Wang.

If you are experiencing mental health difficulties yourself, you may consider reaching out to one of the following: your GP, your local NHS counseling service (TalkingSpace Plus in Oxford), or mental health charities such as those mentioned above, which offer information services.

29

Diving, 2019 Asa Breuss-Burgess

30

The chicks fledged in June. As I studied them, the traffic lights changed again. Green, traffic pounding. Amber, an empty nest. Red. Red means stop. I stepped over them as I crossed the road, melted tarmac coating their feathers like oil. Young birds seeping into the concrete heart of the city, sinking without a trace.

Spring began to fade into summer. The birds started singing, penetrating the rumble of traffic. I didn’t like it. I preferred for them to be illuminated silently, like small zeppelins in a searchlight. Calling loudly for food, they seemed too robust, too mature. Too sure of what they wanted.

Soon they would leave the nest, catching rides on the synthetic thermals of car exhausts, or on the hot wind that escapes the entrance to the Underground. I thought of his belongings strewn across our room, jeans intertwined with mine, like a makeshift snare. Amber means wait. I no longer enjoyed watching the birds once I could hear them, too.

All I could smell here was petrol and hot asphalt as the Westway pulsed around me. There was no hint of anything organic as I looked down at the unused digits still sitting there in my phone, thumb hovering over the call button. Distracted, I imagined thousands of seeds stranded deep beneath my feet—long, anaemic tendrils pressed skyward to hammer against the paving slabs above. Concrete is too thick for seedlings to dislodge.

I realised I was still staring at my mobile, that I had missed my cue to cross the road. I locked the touchscreen and shoved the phone back into my pocket.

One day I bought an ice-cream on my way home. Licking the soft serve off my lips, I dialled up his number in an attempt to imitate the boldness of the birds. As my teeth crunched into the cone, I thought of twigs snapping underfoot, crackling bracken, the musk of earth and vegetation.

That’s a smell you don’t encounter in the city. It’s the scent of growing plants pushing the dirt up in whole scoops, displacing it so forcefully that it rises as a fine powder. Geotaxis. They know which way to grow, even in the darkness.

At one week old, feathers sprouted like dark abscesses on their skin, growing along black lines that traced their spine and wing bones. Before that, they had been a translucent pink, skin too big for them like those hairless cats you see in glossy magazines. As they grew, their bones strained against their flesh, ribs like shipwrecked hulls, and their eyes opened as dark beads set into their heads. They began to fight for maggots, caterpillars, flakes of pastry, unencumbered by manners or common courtesy. I admired them for their persistence.

The chicks hatched in late April. It was unusually hot. I was wearing a summer dress and sandals. He had begun to talk to me using the same tone he reserved for his mother. City dust was sticking to the sweat between my exposed toes. I waited for the traffic lights to blend through their colour gradient, stop the cars and allow me to cross the street and disappear underground. I looked up as the middle light came on, hole-punching out the nest’s silhouette. The small bodies writhed blindly for a second before the light went out again, like a clip from a minimalist music video. The tinted lights were strobes, catching them in freeze-frame. The birds pulsed to the rhythm of the cars below, soft fleshy bodies pressed up against the edges of the nest.

The sparrows had nested in a traffic light. They selected the orange filter, periodically warming themselves against the bulb whenever the light changed from green to red, or back again. When I first noticed them, crossing the road on my commute home, they looked like the end scene of a Looney Tunes flick. That’s all, Folks! At other times the nesting material formed an artificial horizon; the amber light behind it was their setting sun.

AMBER MEANS WAIT

31

Pest Control A round mid- M a rch, m y m o t h e r develo p e d an ob s es s ion wit h ki l l i n g w as p s.

The weather was still cold and grey when

than a few days again, and yet here we were.

I arrived home, the threat of the pandemic having driven me from my university ac-

Whether there were just more wasps

commodation; but as it began to brighten

around or whether she was starting to be-

and grow warmer, a few sluggish and lazy

come more militant in her goal of elimina-

queens found their way into the house. They

tion, I’m not sure. Either way, her kill count

were large and fat and vaguely threatening,

was growing exponentially. At the end of

though still too drowsy to pose any real dan-

each day she would exclaim, full of pride.

ger. My mother would eliminate them me-

how many she had destroyed, and I won-

thodically, favouring as her weapon a paper-

dered whether they were still all queens,

back book or a rolled up magazine. “There

or if her reign of terror was extending

will be 5,000 fewer wasps in our garden next

to the wider population. I also had some

year!” she reminded me gleefully each time.

half-hearted anxieties about the contribu-

Where she got this statistic from, and indeed

tion that wasps make to the ecosystem, but

whether or not it was true, I have no idea, but

never really had the energy to voice them.

she said it with such conviction and pride that

Where before she had only killed the wasps

I found it hard to argue with her. I couldn’t

that she came across inside the house, as

say I cared too much for wasps anyway.

April came and went she also ventured outside, actively seeking out her prey. My

32

As March wore on and the situation with

brothers and I would inform her of a place

the virus worsened, my brothers each de-

where we had seen a wasp, and a look of

cided to come home. But it struck me that

steely determination would appear on her

neither of them had really called our house

face as she strode with purpose to search

‘home’ for some years. Suddenly we were

for it. I think this quest of hers amused us

a family again. My mother would remark

somewhat. It was an odd little bonding ex-

to me most days that she didn’t think she

perience. Having never been particularly

would ever see us all together for more

close to my brothers, I took what I could get.

33

At this point, rapidly becoming a master as-

ral remedies, and how the swelling eventually

sassin, she expanded her armoury of weapons,

went down. Later, she started to bleed. Heavily.

once using a vacuum cleaner to suck a wasp

She miscarried. She blames the wasp.

directly out of the air. In the end she favoured

The loss triggered a deep resentment for

the oar from the rubber dingy we used as chil-

the species as a whole. It makes sense that

dren at the seaside. The large surface area of

this prejudice reached new heights this

the paddle combined with its length offered

year. After so much time apart, she final-

the optimum combination of power and dis-

ly had all of her children together again.

tance. She came to spend a lot of time out-

With the prospect of returning to normal-

side. At intervals, those of us within the house

ity, she was fearing our inevitable loss, and

would hear the methodical smack of the oar

feeling a need to defend us from a differ-

against the paving stones or the steps that

ent kind of pest. A contagion. A pandemic.

lead into the garden. This amused my brothers and me; it provided added interest to the

Whether it was obsessive cleaning, hy-

days that were increasingly blending togeth-

per-productivity, or her tendency to blame

er. I wonder if the enjoyment she perceived

everything, as my father did, on the mild win-

in us was one of the reasons she continued.

ter, everyone dealt with the new normal of the pandemic in different ways. But, for my moth-

She’d never liked wasps—not that there’s

er, this need for control came in the form of

anything particularly remarkable about that.

wiping out a plague of her own. She was des-

Throughout my childhood, whenever we were

perate to protect us in the only way she could.

eating outside in the summer, she would, like a lot of people, freeze at the sight of one, not

As June arrived, lockdown slowly started

relaxing until it was well and truly out of

to ease. My brothers, one by one, returned

sight. Where her distaste starts to differ from

to their respective lives. I stayed on. Wheth-

the norm—and becomes a vindictive obses-

er my mother’s concentrated efforts have

sion rather than an ordinary dislike—can be

meant there are fewer wasps around these

explained, she tells me, by one experience she

days, or if this was a natural change, or if I

had around 20 years ago. She was pregnant

just don’t notice them as much due to a re-

at the time, and cleaning a windowsill in the

laxation in her regime, I doubt I’ll ever know.

kitchen, when she accidentally brushed her

34

hand against a dead wasp there, where it left

Once again we are regaining control in our

a sharp sting. She recounts how her entire

lives. Once again her nest is emptying, the pro-

body swelled up the next day, how their ho-

cess of loss occurring all over again. Although

meopath neighbour gave her a string of natu-

she tried her best, she can’t protect us anymore.

35

Summer, with Eli 36

Desire in Love I waxed fiction out of reality at a young age, after my father gave me advice for dealing with life’s vicissitudes: “Pretend you’re the protagonist in a story. Create a world around you to make you feel less alone.”

When my family moved from Indiana to Texas, I transformed our new town into something more captivating. Texarkana, I thought, was both a portmanteau of Texas and Arkansas, as well as a metonym of the United States: split down the middle, it had two mayors, legal systems, and two histories. With Keatsian negative capability, I tried to reconcile two disparate things to create something beautiful.

Earlier that year, Texarkana’s dualism had become a metaphor for something else.

When I came out as bisexual, the straight character that I had spent decades constructing had cracked. With this new-found identity, I viewed myself not only as the author of my present fictions, but also as a critic of my former ones. Sam See—the late literary critic who taught at Yale, and the author whose writing I explored during the summer we moved—wrote that “For [Leo] Bersani, the realist novel desires yet betrays history by pretending to love it; “[R]ealistic fiction proudly advertises its fidelity to history: it documents the ways in which a particular time and a particular place determine the nature of human desires and the field in which they may be realized”. Almost opposite to realistic fiction’s dubious relationship to the past, I was openly hostile to mine, and the past self who made my sexual truth unconscionable. I rebuked the years when he—an untrustworthy amanuensis—

constructed a straight protagonist for an interpellating audience. In other words, I finally retaliated from society’s control over my own story.

When I wasn’t reading See that summer, I was falling for a local boy named Eli Depson, who became my first boyfriend. He widened the lacunae in the pages of my old story: “Love is the pleasure of ignorance: the pleasure of renouncing our desire to fill the hole of knowledge”, writes See. When Eli and I acknowledged our mutual queer falling in love, we unlocked a way of unknowing ourselves and each other. The ensuing relationship meant un-writing our dramatis personae: personalities, affective dispositions, imagined futures, vices. Love with Eli became my pleasure of Keats’ negative capability, another concept I had learned from my father. Dad explained Keats’ idea to me as the ability to sustain judgment, to refrain from reaching a conclusion, or to entertain the possibility of two contradictions co-existing. I suppose this type of thinking is what made my sexual denial possible for so long.

Eli and I had spent years of our lives raising questions and avoiding answers about ourselves. When Eli finally answered the most important one for himself, his family kicked him out of his home. I was more privileged during adolescence, but for some reason, that meant that I asked my question for longer. Regarding my sexuality, I became comfortable on the margin of reality and fiction, living in a negative space of knowledge—of denial of self, a limbo of phenomenon and knowledge that lasted for years.

37

My interest in fiction had less to do with the quality of my father’s advice and more to do with my commitment to running from truth that would cause pain, not pleasure. Now, when people insist on my homosexuality, and find my ‘bisexuality’ dubious, I hold onto my ambiguous identity. This is incredulous even for me at times, though I have always lived within unidentifiable liminal spaces.

On our first date, Eli and I went swimming with my family. We were both anxious to be around my parents in particular. He handled nerves differently from me. I shut down; he became more outgoing. This was a difference we accepted about each other. Our distinctions were a point of excitement, not a cause for fighting. Eli’s extroversion led him to kiss me. That moment, which I hadn’t anticipated, became a spontaneous and critical venture of unlearning my past as a straight man, and giving my family an opportunity to unlearn me as well. For one, the situation asked me to reconsider my boundaries for public displays of affection now that they felt like outlawed behaviour. The interpellators in my head shouted loudly, accosting me for what felt like supremely unsexy actions. Moments like that kept happening.

Performances of queer love shattered the artifice I had used to design my life. Altering my sense of self also changed the hermeneutics I used to understand my past—such as the tropes of strength, invincibility, and worthiness. The topos of the hetero-normative timeline I had fashioned (fall in love with a woman, get married after college, have kids) also seemed to stay behind in Indiana. I lost touch with old archetypes that I had used to construct my character and those whom I dated: the stoic, troubled boy with a flat, unreadable and unknowable expression, and an equally monotone and neutral voice. Of course, these losses ended any affective familiarity wrought from hetero-normative aesthetics: the normal, the known, the predictable, the comfortable. The fictions of white Protestantism had defined me. In its wake came the fiction of my

38

bisexuality, which at least held more personal truth.

Each display of queer desire in front of others made us giddy at how strange we were becoming. To borrow Bersani’s words, our “lying holes” became “lying wholes”. The aporias of our past fictions—the obstreperous ironies and contradictions of our straight narratives that we often failed to fill—had finally fractured any cohesive narratives of ourselves.

This artistic self-shattering happened at the same time as my physical shattering, with Eli, which created a sort of death.

That process enabled me to understand what See meant when he suggested that ideal love has been deemed critically bankrupt, and that it has been somewhat divorced from desire. He explains: desire is about pain from ignorance of someone or someplace, while love is about pleasure of ignorance of someone and someplace. Yet my relationship to Eli reunited love and desire, I think, because our desire became a love in remaining strangers. As queer people, our very attraction to men is what had made us unrecognizable to ourselves for most of our lives. Now, with every touch or conversation we kill each other’s poetical self. Since exercises in negative capability felt right, acting on these desires gave us love for each other’s overwhelming and unknowable complexity.

See notes that love has the unique ability to shatter our sensual bodies, matched only by death’s ability to do so. That death and love work on the body similarly explains why the two have often been invoked together in literature: Orpheus loved Eurydice, ironically, in Hell, a place that arguably rebukes love. Ovid’s golden arrow in the Apollo and Daphne myth shot from the same bow that, moments later, would ironically fire a deterrent—a leaden arrow—which functioned as a contraceptive, an antithesis to love.

Cupid in particular, love incarnate, during an ancient time when love and desire collapsed together, further defined love by its dramatic opposites in various myth cycles. In

Amores, Cupid steals a foot of Ovid’s meter, forcing the poet, dramatically and hilariously, to abandon his charge to write about war, and instead to write about love: arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam edere materia conviente modis. par erat inferior versus—risisse Cupido dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem.

Just now, I was preparing to start with heavy fighting And violent war, with a measure to fit the matter.

Good enough for lesser verse—laughed Cupid So they say, and stole a foot away.

These stories made me wonder if, throughout history, there was ever the possibility of love between men at war. I thought of See and his husband. After an altercation between the two in 2013, See was arrested and soon mysteriously died in his jail cell. He left behind his criticism about love, queerness, and fiction—as well as a group of distraught colleagues, whom I have to thank for publishing his works. It was See’s writing, shortly after I came out, that helped me understand how conflict within myself could create its ostensible antithesis.

That love and violence have often arrived together in both life and literature seems too frequent to be a coincidence. It is Cupid who turns violent when his lover, Psyche, peeks at him in the middle of the night. In that moment, Psyche’s shattered image of Cupid seemed to inflect ideal love—that which celebrates the unknown—into something almost its opposite. Psyche couldn’t help but know her Cupid, as Orpheus couldn’t help but know Eurydice, and it destroyed them. This is the very tension See draws out: desire is pain from ignorance, while love is the opposite.

Yet Eli and I, desire in love, died delightfully, unlike these classical examples, by each other,

and because of our ignorance.

If I have learned anything through my rediscoveries, it is that I am presently defined in part by my past, yes, but also by what I make with it, the way I interpret it, the ownership I take of it, and the undoing I do to it, with others who have an abiding pleasure in such things. See feels like one of those people to me. His personal life and professional enterprises bled together; interests in intimate sensations (sex, death) and phenomena (love, desire) superimposed onto the way he taught history and studied literature. He seemed to think, through our intransigent acts as queer men, that we could heighten our discretion as authors of ourselves and world, that we could thrive in contradictions—which don’t make sense to others—by embracing our own logics.

39

40

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6

pastiche, n. and adj.

2. a. A work, esp. of literature, created in the style of someone or something else; a work that humorously exaggerates or parodies a particular style.

b. The technique of incorporating distinctive elements of other works or styles in a literary composition, design, etc.

1791 J. Boswell Life Johnson anno 1775 I. 502 [Johnson:] One of the rooms was gilt to a degree that I never saw before.

1806 R. Cumberland Mem. (1807) I. 184 Its magnificent owner..had gilt and furnished the apartments with a profusion of luxury.

1815 J. Smith Panorama Sci. & Art II. 800 Articles of iron or steel may..be instantly gilt by dipping them into this auriferous ether.

1875 E. H. Knight Amer. Mech. Dict. II. 967/1 Porcelain or glass is gilded by a magma of gold, quicksilver, [etc.].

1974 M. Ayrton Midas Consequence (1978) v. 115 He is holding, on a length of yellow twine, Capisco’s arm, whose great curling horns also seem golden and that, I see, is because someone has fancifully gilded them.

2013 India Internat. Centre Q. 40 89 The arches and the internal dome are ornamented by high-relief papier-mâché cartouches, gilded and painted after a restoration exercise.

41

My Mother, After When my mother’s hair came back slightly thicker, she decided she wanted to dye it bright blue. My dad put on the colour as she sat with a towel wrapped around her shoulders in front of the bathroom mirror. I remember that when she turned to look at me: the frantic smudges around her hair line looked the colour of woad, Boudica’s battle paint.

Before chemotherapy, her hair had been dark red, shoulder length and curly: it was a huge part of her hippy identity, the way she styled herself in 70s prairie dresses and pink cowboy boots. Before, she’d sometimes fret about her fringe being in the right place to cover the parts of her forehead she didn’t like, sitting in front of her mirror with straighteners as we discussed what she planned to wear to work. Last December, after her first chemo session, she chose to cut off her hair before it fell out. It was “a way to gain control,” she told me, a chance to “turn it into something powerful.” As part of the process, she filmed it and posted the video on Facebook. I still feel now the surprise of the notification, stuck in Oxford while all my family was back home in Stoke. It was strange watching her at the other end of the country, sitting with scissors at the kitchen table while my little brother nervously laughed behind the camera. As she cuts the curls, she speaks: “You are not your hair, you are not your boobs, you are not your eyebrows—you are the people that love you, and you are what you do in the world.”

In little ways, as well as in big ways, cancer has changed my mum. Who people are after cancer is a scary thing we don’t often think about. When we are around people we love who are dangerously ill, all we want is for them to

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get better—for the whole world to be normal again. Normality is something we all crave, tinged as we are with nostalgia for days before a diagnosis.

Today, when headlines are flooded with this idea of ‘the new normal’ in light of the pandemic, I can’t help but think how aptly it applies to my mum’s life after her treatment had finished. When my mum was first diagnosed with breast cancer, this was a phrase my dad would often say: “we have to get used to a new normal.” It was ‘we’, a collective, a community of mutual familial support to help my mother as much as we could through the trials of surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy. We used it to emphasise our nature as a family unit as a way to keep us together in a world that seemed to be rapidly falling apart. It was a reminder of our ability to adapt together. When I think about the language of solidarity we took so much effort in employing, I wonder at this phrase, and how everything already difficult became a little harder. Because, of course, my mother recovered from cancer in a pandemic.

Though neither her chemotherapy nor her radiotherapy was delayed or cancelled due to Covid-19, when so many others’ treatment was held back, her last chemotherapy sessions and the entirety of her radiotherapy occurred whilst we were under increasing lockdown restrictions. My mum doesn’t like to complain about this. Perhaps she was lucky to be having treatment at all, but there is no mistaking how difficult it is to go into cancer treatment entirely alone. My dad had been by her side during every chemotherapy session, but had to wait in the hospital car park as he was now unable to step into the building. My mum suf-

fered allergic reactions to docetaxel during her last chemotherapy session without him there.

She had the dotted tattoos for radiotherapy alone. She rang the bell to signify the end of treatment without any of her family around her. This moment especially should have been one of celebration, a last big battle cry to rejoice that she had reached the end; it was also something my mum had been looking towards with hope. “The bell had become this golden bell. I thought I would have my husband with me, my children, at least my son, with me,” she tells me. There’s a picture of her ringing this

bell taken by one of the nurses, but my mum doesn’t like it. She says she doesn’t look well.

I didn’t get to be with my mother through her surgery, or much of her chemotherapy— we kept in contact during term through frequent messages and the odd phone call—but I did get to be there for her afterwards. So, I came to know, at least a little, what it means when a recovering cancer patient can’t start stepping back into the world again. I can understand, just a tiny bit, that it is very hard to be sent home with a warning to check for recurring lumps, to be told to think of yourself as

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cancer-free, with nothing to truly distract you from burns, and scars, and the fear that it’s all going to come back. Without in-person aftercare appointments, my mum’s anxieties were worse—she would worry about the scar looking abnormal or the burns being too severe.

When she attempted to book a GP appointment to check these burns, the receptionist requested images. “It was so ugly, so painful I didn’t want anyone to see it,” my mum admits.

There are other little things which hurt too—events that should have been joyous but were tinged with loss. After her treatment finished, we dressed up and ate cake outside in the sun.

Over prosecco my dad made a toast, a celebration of the beginning of something new and apart from cancer. It was just us four. My grandparents should have been there, so should my aunt and uncle and cousin, but they simply couldn’t because of the lockdown. My mum had so many plans to celebrate being alive. She was going to go on holiday to Whitby, her favourite place in the UK: when that got cancelled, she told me how the last time she was there she’d had a strange feeling she’d never see the seaside town again. Now a small and superstitious part of her was convinced she never would, and that belief fed her fears of cancer returning.

There were plans to follow old pilgrimage routes across the UK with my dad, inspired by previous trips to

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Lindisfarne and the comfort she had found in God, but these were also cancelled.

Called-off holidays are minor inconveniences; she tells me repeatedly she does not want to seem like she is whining. But that long golden summer after treat-

ment—the months-long stretch that was always there as a promise or a goal, a sign to show that she still had the whole world to look forward to—had been taken away. Today, “where the cancer treatment ended, and the pandemic began, has blurred indefinitely.”

days before she’d told me, had walked me and my little brother down the field to release a frog my granddad had found stranded. As it crawled away into the grass, she turned to us.

“We’re so lucky. It’s like heaven down here,” she said, a little as if she might lose it.

Talking to others helped. The local Staffordshire breast cancer support group Pink Sisters (And Misters) has been invaluable to my mum, providing a community for patients to talk about cancer without any pressure to seem like things were ‘back to before’. My mum met Jackie Mackenzie, who began the Pink Sisters five years ago after recovering from breast cancer, at social distance when lockdown restrictions eased. They spoke about her worries for hours, as Jackie offered her own experiences with cancer in a way that helped to assuage nagging concerns and reassure my mum of her strength. The power of a chat is something that cannot be underestimated. My mum often comes back from group meetings feeling grounded, having spoken to people who are living, who are positive and powerful individuals. It helps her feel like a warrior, knowing she always has a community of people who can truly understand; talking to people who are five, ten, or fifteen years out of treatment often helps her to cope with the anxieties surrounding a disease that doesn’t truly go away, that looms over you like a threat. “People need to recognise that just because someone’s stopped treatment, it’s not back to normal, it’s a new normal,” Jackie explains, using that phrase once more.

I think quite often about the fragility of before, that handful of days when I didn’t dare ask. I think about how I put my head down and cried on that kitchen table, how I felt so entirely useless, so impossibly unhelpful. The fragility of afterwards is different. It has a lot more grit. Over lockdown sometimes I would catch my mother planting tomatoes, or drawing her eyebrows on in the mirror, and learn every time something new about strength.

It was October when my mum told me about her diagnosis. She sat me across the kitchen table a few weeks before I left for University and admitted it: they’d kept it quiet for a week or so, to try to figure out what to do, but I’d sort of known already. My dad had started making declarations, long term promises of a greenhouse moved up to now. He’d held her hand just slightly more. And my mum, a few

“It would have been nice to be in a normal world.” My mother laughs a little. “But I am really happy to be breathing. Although it’s not the normal I was expecting or aiming for, I’ll take it because I’m alive.”

We talk about hair in terms of future plans now, the colours to dye it next. The growing fuzz when chemo ended was “like seeing a snowdrop at the end of a garden in crappy, cold weather,” but my mother also knew she didn’t want her long curls again; “I didn’t want to go crawling back to an identity that had changed, as though it was all about loss,” she says of her short blue buzz cut. It is ironic, she notes, that the summer before her diagnosis she had been tempted to have all her hair cut off but decided against it—she’d thought her hairline was too high. Without the cancer she would never have been proven wrong: “People say I like your hair and I can go Oh do you? and I can say I love it too. And when it gets long and thick, I can buzz it off again because that’s who I am and that’s who I want to be.”

A few days ago, she sent me a photo of her buzz cut dyed pink.

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Untitled, 2020 Acrylic and water-based pigment ink on cardboard, 82 cm x 132 cm Erica Nuamah 46

Maya Angelou

“Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible.”

IF YOU CHOOSE NOT TO SEE,

YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM.

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MARY

Mary was the only passenger on the bus until they were out of the mountains. It was the first time she had left her boyfriend’s house that summer. He had dropped her off at the bus stop, on the side of a shadowy road cutting through the dense pine forest. By the time the bus was nearing the city, she had managed to fall asleep—head wedged against the grimy window, palms pressing against the prickly upholstery of the seat.

She was dreaming about a great crab the colour of bone. It was crawling out of the sea towards her, as she lay on the sand, feeling dread creep into every corner of her body. The crab crawled nearer, scuttled between her legs, and, in one swift motion, climbed inside her body.

Mary thought its hard needle-like legs would hurt her, but she could hardly feel it. Yet she knew it was in her womb, laying its own eggs. When the eggs began to hatch, she nearly suffocated.

Thousands of tiny crabs were writhing around inside her, scrambling to escape her human body. And so they streamed, not only through her vagina, but out of any opening they could find: her mouth, her nostrils, her eye sockets.

When she awoke, the seats around her had filled with people—she was unable to untangle the people around her from the dream-crabs—until a moment passed, and the dream faded, and the shapes around her solidified into the human bodies of her fellow travellers.

By then, the bus was nearing the city. Mary was getting off on the other

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side of its outskirts: a place where, she thought fancifully, the urban dinginess lifts just enough for garden flowers to grow. The hotel where her mother had instructed her to book a room was only a few blocks away from the house where her sister Melissa had lived for as long as Mary could remember, and where she had died. Maybe there, in that old house—in its eaves or its bay window, in the cracks between its floral couch cushions—there was a store of memories, which, upon her entering, would unroll before her and allow true grief to flow.

Or maybe she wouldn’t feel anything. It had been years since she had been there: she hardly remembered the place. As it was, in the sleek lobby of the hotel, death was simply a nuisance.

Her mother was standing by the concierge. She was dressed in a long black skirt and a black cardigan, her ankles crossed, her body curving against the glassy white wall. Mary stood in the queue, furtively watching her mother.

She didn’t notice Mary; she was staring out the window, at the restaurant across the road. Inside, near the doorway, there was a fish tank. It held a single bright white goldfish, with delicate fins that floated spectrally in the water.

Finally, her mother turned away from the window, caught sight of her, and said softly, “You came.”

She stepped towards Mary and pulled her by the arm, gently, out of the queue.

“It’s so good of you to come. It’s so good to see you.”

“I had to be here,” Mary said. She had been holding her duffel bag in one hand, and now she set it on the floor, eyeing the queue, which extended to the lobby entrance.

Unexpectedly, her mother took her

hand. Mary almost recoiled at the feeling of her mother’s swollen joints, her crude thick fingers, the hard metal of her wedding ring. “It’s too bad you couldn’t come last weekend. It was lovely, everyone gathered around Melissa’s bed, bringing life into the house. Melissa was so happy to see everyone.”

Mary thought, with revulsion, that her mother was going to cry. “Sounds nice,” she said.

Her mother clutched a hand to her mouth, stifled her tears, collected herself. “It would’ve been so nice to have you there. But I’m glad to see you now, I am.”

A week before, her mother had phoned her. “We’re going to visit Melissa tomorrow. I’ll tell her you send your best.

There’s no sense in making the journey when you don’t want to come.” Mary’s choice had been made for her, she hadn’t gone, she hadn’t known everyone was going. She hadn’t known that it would be her last opportunity to see her sister.

Even if she had known, she wouldn’t have taken part in this great send-off.

Now, she pulled away from her mother’s grasp and pushed, once again, to the back of the queue. ~ After the wake the whole family ordered drinks at the hotel bar. Mary got an orange juice and sat on the edge of a chair. She tried to trace the loosely-bound gatherings of bodies, as if they were cloud formations… but they shifted and swelled, cousins drifting away from each other and towards aunts and step-uncles, who slipped towards Mom with words of consolation. Mary turned

away, overwhelmed by the inconstancy, the never-ending movement.

She could no longer deny the presence of something pressing on her. The whole day had passed in a fog, her movements had been foreign and slow. But was it her own secret grief, or the weight of others’?

She felt, in her stillness, like a stranger.

Amidst her family, this mass of figures laughing and conversing loudly, this great clinking of glasses, these bodies sweating and flushing with alcohol, she was lost and distant, as if watching a faroff storm, a chaos that was frightening, but did not belong to her.

She had not seen Melissa in years. This thought kept surfacing—as a shield, as a justification. Melissa had been much older than Mary, and was already living alone when Mary was small. And there had always been something about her that made Mary nervous. A severity in the set of her unsmiling lips, the dry tone of her voice. The way she made Mary feel as if she were not even there.

“She doesn’t have children of her own,” Mom had said. “She doesn’t know what to do around you.”

A fragile memory, corroded at the edges by the photograph in the funeral home. The softness of Melissa’s body, which Mary remembered from the rare occasions she’d oblige them a hug, had turned hollow.

Mary felt these images, which were not hers, consuming her own memories. Her sister was becoming someone other than the person Mary had known, becoming the pictures and the words the family spoke about her. Her true memories were sparse threads, too weak to bear out the weight of the narratives that spilled out upon them from all sides.

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And her mother, wrapped tight in condolences, would willingly dissolve the past. Mary thought it must be harder that way, to cling to some thorn-less version of Melissa: it was easier to feel nothing resembling love.

She felt the heaviness upon her, and felt worse for her own selfish, vague fear.

Towards midnight, Mary found herself across the road from the hotel. She was standing very still, looking through the glass panes of the restaurant, so close that her nose sent pools of fog onto the window. Before her floated the white goldfish. The strange shadows beneath its body gave it a translucent appearance, like vapour. If you looked close enough, you could almost catch a glimpse of its innards.

The fish floated up and down in the tank, seeming completely passive, as if yielding its body to the rocking of the water. Once in a while it threw too much energy into a fin and broke the illusion, just for the briefest of moments.

When the fish rose to the surface of the water, Mary saw what its pale body had obscured: clinging to the back wall of the tank was a dusting of tiny spheres, like scattered wet pearls, glowing in the blue light. Eggs.

She saw a jerky quivering, little more than a vibration, and all of a sudden there was a child, thin as thread, wriggling out of its egg towards the surface.

The mother fish approached, her mouth welling open. Quickly—Mary second guessed herself until she saw it happen again, again—the mother fish sucked down the little body of her offspring.

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Her cruel meal thus begun, she continued hungrily, perverting their birth, as they wriggled out of their eggs and into her jaws.

Mary watched the fish and her babies, and then looked back across the way. In the hotel bar, most of her relatives had dispersed. Alone, in a corner, looking blankly onto the road, was her mother.

She looked hollow, her skin worn down almost to her skull, but her bones hard as ever. And she knew her mother could be incorporeal in an instant, that the sight of her like this was already blurring out at the edges, swimming within her vision: a fragile image, easily destroyed.

IT ENDS AS IT BEGAN

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The University and College Union (UCU), which represents staff at UK universities, has for many years campaigned against these casual contracts, and what it calls the ‘casualisation’ of academia. But the most recent national figures show that casualisation is getting no better—and at Oxford things are even worse than the national level. The latest available data shows, for instance, that sixty seven percent of all academic 52

The Academic Gig Economy

It isn’t obvious that Uber drivers and other 'gig economy' workers have a great deal in common with Oxford dons. Gig economy work is highly precarious, as companies like Uber use zero-hours and other short-term contracts to create a ‘flexible workforce’ which they can dismiss with relative ease. The gig economy business model is simple and exploitative: via a legal sleight of hand which lets them classify workers as ‘self-employed contractors’ rather than ‘direct employees’, gig economy companies are able to extract maximum labour whilst being obligated to provide only the minimum employment rights. The Oxford dons, on the other hand, spend their lives teaching, researching and dining in luxury and security, at one of the world’s most prestigious universities—or so we tend to think. The reality is rather different, because in recent years academia has become part of the gig economy. One report, by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, estimates that as many as half the academics working at UK universities do not have permanent employment contracts—and this is a conservative estimate. Many of these academics are on exploitative contracts not so different to the ones used by Uber and other gig economy firms.

staff at Oxford are on fixed-term contracts, compared to around thirty three percent nationally.

Fixed-term contracts are one of the two most common types of casual contract at Oxford, neither of which guarantee any long term job security.

Fixed-term contracts are mostly ‘research-only’, meaning they are used by departments to hire academics to work on specific research periods for a limited period of time. They are full-time and salaried, but their duration varies enormously: they might last three years, they might last nine months or even less. According to the latest figures, ninety three percent of research-only contracts at Oxford are fixed-term, compared to two thirds nationally.

Second, there are ‘atypical’ contracts.

These are mostly used by colleges and are ‘teaching-only’. They are usually ‘fractional’ (part time), very short term, and pay by the hour; an atypical contract will be used, say, to hire a young academic or a doctoral student to teach a few tutorials per week for several weeks.

At Oxford just over 3,500 academics— one third of all academic staff—are on atypical contracts. Most of these academics are not classified as employees.

According to the standard central university contract, a casual worker has no entitlement to training or access to the University maternity or paternity pay scheme. The contract also stipulates that hours and days of work can be varied at the University’s discretion.

Because casual contracts often only pay for the time teachers actually spend with students, a lot of staff are effective-

ly giving away much of their labour for free; a tutor is paid for an hour-long tutorial, for instance, but not for the time spent replying to students’ emails and marking their essays. In one UCU national survey, three quarters of the respondents who were on casual teaching contracts said that they regularly work beyond their contracted hours, meaning that in reality just under half the time they spend on teaching is unpaid.

This reality shatters one of the justifications for fractional contracts, which is that teachers are free to create a fulltime role out of several part-time ones, should they wish. But because teachers have to work beyond the hours for which they are remunerated, this isn’t possible, says Tom White, postdoctoral researcher at the English faculty. "A lot of the narratives around these fractional and casualised roles rely on the myth that people are piecing together these jobs into a full-time role," he says, "but when you factor in teaching preparation and marking and pastoral care, that 0.5 role will actually add up to 0.7 or 0.8. In reality people are just living on very little money in a very expensive city."

One consequence of this is that it impedes efforts to diversify academia.

Casualisation works as a filter, because the disadvantaged are relatively unlikely to be able to afford to take poorly remunerated contracts—something which might go some way to explaining why Oxford only has seven Black professors.

Another of the myths used to justify casualisation is that casual contracts are only brief steps on the way to a permanent position: these contracts are, so the narrative goes, the opportunity for ear-

ly-career academics to get the teaching and research experience that will quickly build their CVs and land them something permanent. But the reality is that many academics are stuck in a vicious circle of casual contracts. James Robson, lecturer at Oxford’s Department of Education, says it is increasingly the case that, "you either come to the end of your fixed-term contract and leave the University, or you struggle to get another fixed-term contract and you’re stuck at the same level—there’s not really any built in career progression." Data obtained by The Isis bears this out: of all staff at Oxford with at least four years’ service, around forty percent are on fixed-term contracts. On average these staff have worked at the University for around eight years—despite the fact that fixed-term workers have a legal right to be considered for permanency after four.

Indeed, the paradox of casual contracts is that they make it inherently difficult for staff to find a permanent position; because so much time has to be spent worrying about securing the next contract, it can be impossible for staff to fully concentrate on the research and teaching that is supposed to help them progress. In another UCU survey, for example, one third of fixed-term academics said that at least a quarter of their time is spend on searching for and applying to their next position. In the very worst cases, academics must start looking for the next contract the moment they begin the present one. Someone at Oxford with direct experience of this is Anderson Ryan, who is Associate Professor at the Oncology department and manages teams of fixed-term researchers. Whereas three-year contracts were once the 53

norm, two—and even one-year—contracts are increasingly common, he says: "on a two-year contract you begin to look for your next position after a year, and on a one-year contract you’re essentially looking straight away […] it’s a highly precarious and risky way of progressing your career."

responded to The Isis’ freedom of information requests by saying they hold no data on staff contracts of any kind.

Even where the data technically does exist, Oxford’s college system works to obfuscate it. An academic might have a research contract with a department as well as several part-time teaching contracts across multiple colleges, but there is no single institution keeping a record of the fact. The result is that an ‘invisible workforce’ has been left to develop, as James Robson puts it: "nobody really knows who they are or what they do."

££

Unsurprisingly, academics on casual contracts are highly likely to find their job stressful. In another UCU survey, seventy one percent of respondents said their mental health had been affected by the stress and insecurity of working on casualised contracts. Oxford might argue that its own record is better than this—its 2018 staff experience survey reports that just one in ten respondents experienced an episode of mental ill-health in the previous twelve months—but the University’s ‘Mindful Employer Action Plan’ says that mental health issues are currently underreported. The plan also admitted that casual staff, such as those coming to the end of fixed-term contracts but hoping for renewal, may be reluctant to report ill-health to their line managers. In any case, because Oxford doesn’t collect data for specific contract types, the full extent of the links between casualisation and mental illhealth remain hidden.

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And herein lies one of the difficulties for the campaign against casualisation: universities are not actually obligated to provide anything but the most general data about the contracts their staff are on. In the past, Oxford has failed to provide any data at all about its atypical staff, and two of the largest Oxford colleges, Christ Church and Balliol,

Oxford and other universities claim they are addressing casualisation, but their commitment to doing so is questionable. They like to point out that nationwide the proportion of academics on casual contracts is declining, but in fact the current rate of change is so glacial it would take five hundred years for the proportion of teachers on casual contracts to fall below five percent.

Oxford’s ‘Strategic Action Plan 201823’ includes a commitment to "review and improve our current arrangement to support the personal and career development of all staff," but there is no specific reference made to casual contracts. In any case, between 2018 and 2019 the proportion of academic staff on fixed term contract remained unchanged, at forty nine percent—compared to forty two percent in 2013.

Some staff feel that the University simply has no interest in addressing casualisation. Oxford says that a permanent position is merited where the work being done is "essential to the future plans of the department," but the University always finds a way to claim

that a casualised role fails to meets this criteria, says Tom White. "It’s clear in a lot of cases that there is a permanent need for the work to be done but that the university resists translating that into a permanent job […] precisely so that universities have more power over their workers." In his view, the University has a clear interest in keeping a supply of workers ‘on relatively low wages, who are disposable at very short notice."

universities had previously barely recognised the existence of casualisation.

It is not inconceivable that casual contracts might in some circumstances be mutually beneficial. James Robson is highly critical of casualisation, but says he does not necessarily see a problem, for instance, with doctoral students doing casual work. "A lot of doctoral students need the money and want the experience, and so having a system that enables this, and which makes it possible for academic staff to get help with work, can be beneficial to everybody," he says.

Maybe so, but it is difficult to draw the line between mutually beneficial work and exploitation. Marina Lambrakis thinks that casualisation has become so embedded that "the culture is that you should be grateful for the opportunity because its building your CV, so people just accept it for the way that higher education is. People do get very exploited, but they don’t really think of themselves as being exploited." It is easy to take advantage of academics' goodwill, and too easy for work to cross the blurry line into exploitation.

££ The further difficulty for the campaign against casualisation is that academics are often afraid to speak out, for fear of further damaging their already shaky career prospects. Marina Lambrakis, anti-casualisation officer at Oxford’s UCU branch, says that "Oxford’s attitude is that if you don’t take the contract then somebody else will, so you should accept terrible terms and conditions and very low pay, because they are doing you a favour […] and if you start to push for particular demands for workers then basically we will stop hiring them."

Nevertheless, the campaign is getting results. Earlier this year the Russell Group, made up of twenty four of the UK’s leading universities, met to discuss the "reputational damage" that casual contracts are causing, and decided they need to demonstrate an "openness" to the issue. Similarly, the UCU got the Universities and Colleges Employers Association, which represents universities in industrial disputes, to advise its members to review their employment practices, and remind them that indefinite contracts should be the "general form of employment relationship between employers and employees." These may seem like small victories, but they are significant in light of the fact that

Companies like Uber—and now universities like Oxford—have made a business model out of crossing this line.

But the gig economy remains much more closely associated with Uber drivers on zero-hours contracts than with researchers and teachers at Oxford. This means that, as well as being a fight for fair working conditions, the anti-casualisation campaign is a fight to change the way academic work is perceived by the general public, by students, and in some cases, even by academics themselves…

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