The Isis | Movement | TT19

The Isis

The Isis

Movement

Movement

TT19

03/06/2019 14:21

COVER.indd 2

1 7

2 12

3 17

Editors' Letter Leo Gadaski Antonio Perricone

Hands Eduardo Paredes Ocampo

Death and Birth in New York Jack Womack

The Snail, or Nancy Alex Chasteen

Waste Not Want Not Barnaby Pite

We Only Want the World to Live R.T. Sweeney

18 30

24 26 37 40

Keeping Tabs Mack Willett

Kaddish Lucie Richter-Mahr

Cycling in Bohemia Altair Brandon-Salmon

The Ties That Bind Jorrit Donner-Wittkopf Jacob Harrison

Migraines LĂŠa Gayer de Mena

How Things Are Here Ng Wei Kai

43

Lethe Alison Ferrante

46

Accoglienza Antonio Perricone

51

In a Churchyard Alex Haveron Jones

Editors' Letter A lot has happened since we published our last issue. The world has witnessed mass shootings in Christchurch and Virginia, terrorist bombings in Sri Lanka, the introduction of the death penalty for gay sex in Brunei, the electoral victories of a Hindu nationalist in India and a comedian in Ukraine, the arrest of Julian Assange, the publication of the Mueller report, the de facto ban on abortion in several American states, the formation of the Brexit party and its victory in the unexpected MEP elections, the crippling of Britain’s two political powerhouses, and the subsequent resignation of the prime minister. At the same time, the final Islamic State stronghold collapsed, a host of far-right activists were banned from Twitter, scientists took the first ever photograph of a black hole, Extinction Rebellion protestors brought central London to a standstill, and a sixteen-year-old climate activist gave a speech to Parliament after initiating a global wave of youth-led climate protests.

To be part of our generation is to bear witness to a world moving in opposing directions. The rapid development of technology outpaces our understanding and our laws. We´ve been promised an abundance of real human connection at the cost of a colossal erosion of privacy; of the infringement of our human rights. Fifty years on from the Stonewall Riots in New York, queer activists are addressing the legacy of their own liberation movement and holding it to account.

As Pride increasingly becomes a corporate ad campaign, Verona hosts the conservative World Congress of Families, and protests against LGBT inclusive education continue in Birmingham. Queer people around the globe are more vocal than ever. Over the past decade, refugees have fled to Europe in their millions. The threat of imminent environmental collapse will only add to these figures. While cynics such as members of the 'Near Term Extinction Support' Facebook group, an apocalypse consolation forum, describe any kind of optimism as ‘hopium,’ perhaps there is a middle ground.

Torn between optimism and pessimism, where do we look? From a boy who crossed the sea to start a new life in Europe and those who were there to meet him, to the community who fought for queer liberation when it was unimaginable, to the thousands behind the biggest protest movement in the UK since the turn of the century: these stories of collective human action, accommodation and empathy, accountability and reconciliation, are the things that demand our attention. There is opportunity for change.

Leo Gadaski & Antonio Perricone

What lies at the roots of ecstasy horrifies me.

In the first minutes after the Mauri snake’s bite, my godfather told me, the body secretes a discharge of pleasure-inducing hormones: a rapture comes so uncontrollably it threatens your every heartbeat.

I lay there, he said, with a mammoth boner, while dying.

After being the first known man to survive the Mauri snake’s bite the look in my godfather’s eyes changed.

You could tell he was endlessly searching for someone who shared his craving for absolute desire.

But no one glanced back with the same dissatisfaction: he had the loneliest of pupils.

Also, he started drinking (I remember him telling me the story of the bite on some bar terrace at sunset, downing one mezcal after the other).

Months later, in a cheap hotel room in Bangkok, he hanged himself.

He was naked, marks of extreme torture all over his body.

From then on, family, friends, they all thought he was either a pervert or a suicide.

Me, I only think of his hands, unjudging witnesses of every moment, dangling motionlessly at each side of his naked legs, tying tightly the rope around his neck, lifting with unaccustomed glory each glass of mezcal, while crying “salud, salud” to every passer-by, pressing the four spots in his legs, the mark of the Mauri snake’s bite, from where the poison stepped in and life out, and patiently, lovingly holding me before the baptismal font, the day he was told they were giving me his name.

Eduardo Paredes Ocampo

Death and Birth O

n a hot night in 1969, eighteen-yearold drag queen Martin Boyce saw a high heel-clad, nylon-wrapped leg shoot out of the back of a police van towards a member of the NYPD’s Public Morals Squad, hitting him squarely in the chest and throwing him backwards. This is one of many stories from the Stonewall Riots, stories of queer revolution and defiance. Such is the power which Stonewall possesses within the narrative of LGBTQ history that stories like these now occupy a mythic space, somewhere between fact and dazzling fiction.

The symbolic resonance of a high heel thrust directly into the embodiment of ‘American decency’ is hard to ignore; one might even dismiss it as a little cliché if it found its way into a film script, too heavy-handed perhaps.

It is a great irony of that day, however, that one of the leading stars of Hollywood sentimentalism was laid to rest only a few hours before Stonewall.

Judy Garland’s film career spans the second half of the ‘Golden Age’ of American cinema.

Her public image – rooted in her breakout role as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz – as the quintessential ‘girl next door’ endeared her to audiences hungry for wholesomeness in an age of turbulence. The pressure to maintain this youthful persona well into adulthood led to her famous dependency on drugs and alcohol, followed by her tragic demise.

The ‘Dorothy’ figure was a powerful one, but its appeal to gay audiences was particularly strong: there is something undeniably camp about such a synthetic model of uncomplicated virtue. Only this year, RuPaul included a ‘RuPaul’s Best Judy Race’ on the All Stars edition of Drag Race, with each contestant attempting their best Judy impression. This connection between the star and the queer community harks back to an era in which oblique language was needed to discuss sexuality. A ‘Friend of Dorothy’ as slang for a gay man dates back to World War II, yet the euphemism has maintained its cultural resonance until more recently. During the early 1980s, the investigative branch of the US Navy misunderstood the term whilst investigating homosexuality in the Chicago area. Agents mistakenly believed that a real woman called Dorothy inexplicably happened to know a great number of homosexual military personnel. Hoping that ‘Dorothy’ might reveal the names of gay service members, the search for her was frustratingly ineffective.

On the morning of 27 June, Judy Garland was laid to rest at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel in Manhattan. That same evening, the Stonewall riots kickstarted the modern gay movement for equal rights and liberation. These two events happened four miles and around twelve hours apart. A Village Voice column by Walter Troy Spencer from 10 July 1969, entitled ‘Too Much, My Dear,’

3

The symbolic resonance of a high heel thrust directly into the embodiment of ‘American decency’ is hard to ignore.

Garland stands for an era of homosexuality in which gay people existed in the shadows, kept firmly in the closet by repressive moral values and laws.

mockingly suggested that: “the combination of a full moon and Judy Garland’s funeral was too much for [the Stonewall rioters].” Spencer went on to call Stonewall the “Great Faggot Rebellion,” using Garland to paint the rioters as a hysterical group of screaming queens.

Spencer’s sniggering column is not worth dwelling on, but his words demonstrate that awareness of Garland as a 'gay' figure was sufficiently widespread for him to make the connection, and trust that readers would be in on the 'joke.' Garland stands for an era of homosexuality in which gay people existed in the shadows, kept firmly in the closet by repressive moral values and laws. Stonewall was the antithesis of this repression: a noisy, violent demonstration in which queer people announced their presence to a hostile America not yet ready for them.

When I spoke to gay activist and writer Michael Bronski, Professor of the Practice in Media and Activism in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, he immediately identified Garland’s dual status within American society: “In the 1950s, I grew up in a house where my parents listened to Judy Garland all the time. In America, Judy Garland was a major figure whether you were gay or straight.” For gay audiences, though, the singer represented something more. The phrase 'gay icon' barely scratches the surface when it comes to capturing the affection gay men felt for Garland. A Time magazine review of a 1967 performance sneeringly

notes the number of “boys in tight trousers” in the audience, who would “roll their eyes, tear at their hair and practically levitate from their seats.” For Bronski, Garland epitomised “a certain mystique within the gay community before Stonewall,” what he terms a “queer sensibility.” When I asked him how Garland came to be identified with this sensibility, he defined gay men’s adoration of her as: “a cult based around her expression of emotion, possibly to a large degree the constant tragedies in her life.” Garland struck a chord with gay audiences who found their personal and professional lives stunted by systemic homophobia, communicating their suffering through songs such as ‘The Man That Got Away’: “The dreams you dreamed have all / Gone astray.”

Sylvia Rivera, a transgender activist and drag queen, said of Stonewall: “I guess Judy Garland's death just really helped us really hit the fan.” The sense of loss which Rivera and others felt at Garland’s passing unsurprisingly contributed to an already febrile atmosphere on the night of 27 June, but Stonewall was not a glorified ceremony in honour of Garland.

It was a powerful release of explosive anger, a show of force from a community sick of being bundled into the back of police vans. Rivera explained the mood as a desire to hit back: “I wanted to do every destructive thing that I could think of at that time to hurt anyone that had hurt us through the years.” If Garland was expressive of pain and rejection, then Stonewall was about a destructive kind of defiance, a

5

Stonewall was the antithesis of this repression: a noisy, violent demonstration in which queer people announced their presence to a hostile America not yet ready for them.

sentiment closer to the rock music of the late 1960s than to any of Garland’s recordings.

As Bronski put it to me: “the reality is you wouldn’t have a riot to Judy Garland, but you would have a riot to ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’”

The people at Stonewall were not the same crowd you would find in Carnegie Hall at a

Stonewall signalled a change in sensibility by demonstrating that serious change could not be achieved through being passive.

6

Judy Garland concert. They were drag queens and sex workers, homeless young people and people of colour. Stonewall was a home not simply for queer people, but for the most marginalised within the queer community.

For Bronski, “part of what gay liberation did is that it said, like a lot of movements do, ‘we’re brand new – we reject the past.’” On that day in June, however, and in the months and years afterwards, a gradual replacement took place, rather than an outright rejection of the old queer culture. Garland was by no means the last gay icon: Barbara Streisand became the natural heir to the role Garland had previously occupied. Bronski sees the two figures as emblematic of the difference in pre- and postStonewall 'sensibilities’: “Garland sings and she’s hurt. Streisand sings and she’s either angry or she’s forceful or she’s overtly sexy or she’s playful.” Stonewall signalled a change in sensibility by demonstrating that serious change could not be achieved through being passive. Unless queer people fought back, the NYPD’s Public Morals Squad would not stop the arrests and the raids of bars like Stonewall.

This recognition of a need for change existed before Stonewall, however. In early

1969, activist Carl Wittman wrote A Gay Manifesto, which included the list ‘An Outline of Imperatives for Gay Liberation’: 1. Free ourselves: come out everywhere; initiate self-defence and political activity; initiate counter community institutions.

2. Turn other gay people on: talk all the time; understand, forgive, accept.

3. Free the homosexual in everyone: be gentle and keep talking and acting free.

4. We’ve been playing an act for a long time, so we’re consummate actors. Now we can begin to be, and it’ll be a good show!

On this understanding, liberation means queer people can start “to be,” a process which involves not “playing an act” anymore.

Wittman emphasises the need for gay people to “free themselves,” to introduce other people to the possibility that happiness was within their grasp. Garland was forced to play an act for most of her life – she was dubbed ‘Little Miss Show Business,’ a name which she was expected to live up to long after her child stardom.

In her lifetime, Garland was never able to successfully escape from the roles to which Hollywood confined her. Stonewall showed queer people that escape was possible – it was time to put on a good show.

Jack Womack

Snail, Or Nancy

When I write her into a story, I make her the greatest interviewer in the world. She starts humbly, at her college radio station, and begins to gather a following. Her show is just her interviewing a weekly guest.

She finds a woman from South Dakota, who introduced herself at a bus stop via a sexual proposition for money, and asks her: imagine you make a deal with a devil.

He creates a snail that cannot die. Its only goal is to chase you, and if it ever touches you, you die. For a million dollars, would

7

W The

hen I write her into a story, the first thing I do is make her older.

She’s in her thirties, age starting to show on her face, but still dressing young.

In real life, I have left California, and soon she will too. We know things will never be like this again, but one day, as real adults, we will converge once more. So this is the age I write her into.

you do it? Two million? For a billion? She interviews a janitor who maps the sewers, a Milton scholar who spent three years in New Hampshire distilling maple syrup, a Japanese architect who has never eaten a hot dog. She asks, and asks, and no one ever turns the questions back to her.

8

In the story, I find her show online, and I listen on the bus to work. Sometimes I know why she asks that question in particular.

Sometimes I hear her ask questions she has asked before, and I smile. Sometimes I imagine driving through her town – I lie, say it’s on the way – and I call, and she has me on the show, and I prepare my answers.

Nancy hates nothing more than a nonanswer – though I know that she herself never knows what to say.

Like when I asked her: if you had a perfect soulmate out there, and I mean perfect, where would you eat on your first date? She hemmed and she hawed. First she asked, how am I sure about soulmates? A psychic tells you, I said. Or you’re psychic. God tells you.

Doesn’t matter. Then she said sushi, which is terrible first date food but my soulmate would understand. But that wasn’t right. Then she said maybe Korean barbecue, because how you eat Korean barbecue says so much. But this wasn’t right. Then she said her soulmate

– if they were really perfect – would have to choose, and if they were really her soulmate they would choose perfectly. They would order for her, and it would be the perfect choice. I said, cop out. And she said, I know, I know.

Her show would start to get local attention, then become a bigger and bigger deal. This isn’t the A plot; it’s flashback, exposition.

By the time of the story, her technique is exquisitely refined. By then, she is so smooth that her guests forget she is a stranger and feel like they have known her for years. Or even that she knew them before, that in some other life they had fallen in love maybe, or were mother and child, and when they were born, they forgot. But Nancy remembered, and she could look into your eyes and see all the lives you have ever lived, and pluck the question, the one perfect question, right out of you. And she could show you, through asking, the answer.

In the story, there develops fierce competition to coax answers out of her.

Anything from her life, even the smallest relinquished detail, is a victory. Journalists track down college friends, high school acquaintances, minimum-wage-job coworkers, and shake them down. None of them have anything to give up. Even those closest to her knew only the barest details – she was from somewhere near LA. Born in Vietnam, came to America at a young age, though no one knew how young. She gave

herself a new first name, which I change in the story, but told no one her first name, the one she was born into. She kept her last name, which I keep too, as Nguyen isn’t much for tabloids to go on. No internet presence, and huge swathes of her life left with no documentation at all. Jobs held and rent paid under the table, tabloids guessed.

At twenty, it seems, she burst into the world, fully-formed, in the recording studio on the fourth floor of the student union.

When work is slow, I see these stories with their baiting headlines and sometimes I read them. I keep a document on my computer of all the stories where someone remembers something right, or something almost right, when someone recounts half a detail about a party, a restaurant we went to. I note, too, names of those who obviously never knew her. I can always tell.

Sometimes I read ten in a row and go home thinking of nothing else. On these nights I drink an entire bottle of Trader Joe’s white wine, the kind we used to buy, and I put on the songs that played on the radio then. In

In the interviews, news anchors with famous names ask me simple, open questions, and I tell them everything. In these years we took a lot of photos together, which I show – from our trips to downtown LA on the Saturday train, bus trips to Berkeley, her posing in front of hundreds of meals. Photos she sent me when I was away in college, us in Vegas or the Grand Canyon or McDonald's or Disneyland. The world’s eyes, suddenly, turn to me: we knew nothing, and then we knew everything. Then the effect of the wine starts to fade, I tire, and I go to bed. When I wake up, no one knows anything again.

Everyone pressures her to get a show, a podcast, anything, but she demurs. She will interview almost anyone, and she delights in appearing in bizarre places, speaking to bizarre people, and vanishing again.

Websites attempt to track her appearances and make sense of them, but there is no pattern. I, too, cannot follow her logic, except that she goes wherever it would be funny to show up.

9

the empty apartment, I sing along and I still know all the words. I stand in front of my big hallway mirror and practice what I would say if I ever spoke about her. But even though I was her close friend in high school and one of her best friends in college, and even though we lived together for two years, no one’s found me.

10

The media gets so caught up in the mystery of her that everyone seems to forget that this, her humor, is her greatest charm. In our time living together, she became much more subdued, but even so, we spoke only in riffs, a game of one-upping absurdity.

This is what I try, but fail, to get across in the mirror. She was hysterical, I slur. So fucking funny.

There is much, as drunk as I get, that I do not tell the mirror. I do not talk about her sister, who is infinitely stranger than Nancy herself. I do not talk about when in high school she twice slept over on a school night. I do not talk about the circumstances that led to her living in my house, which she did not even tell me. I say she is funny, thoughtful, brilliant. She has a talent for statistics. She has accumulated over four hundred and fifty thousand points on her Edwards-Regal rewards card. I do not say she has endured things that I cannot imagine. I don’t even think those things to myself. She’s funny, I repeat. Funniest person I ever met.

I refrain even from repeating some of the nicest things. I do not say that she knew better than anyone how not to compare pain. I say, she was my best friend. She isn’t like anyone I’ve ever met. She isn’t like anyone at all.

When I drink in bars I worry that I will let this fantasy slip and tell someone. I keep myself to two, three beers. When I wake up after blacking out, I am terrified that I said something and scour the news, flip through the channels on cable TV. Even though I can’t find anything, I do not sleep easily.

I do not see her until our twenty-year high school reunion. All our friends gossip about who’s going – Anne swears DC keeps her

too busy, Michelle hates all of us, and some of us are dead – but no one can decide on Nancy. For her to appear at something like this seems so unlike her that’d it’d be impossible – and so of course she’s there.

I am certain she would never come, because even before all this, she hated parties. But our best-friendship, it seemed, was good for nothing, because she comes up behind me and scuttles her long nails down my back, a sensation I’ve never forgotten. I say Nancy, I say oh my God, and she says how are you, how are the students treating you?, and I begin to ramble, and she riffs and I riff and we talk and talk and I check my watch and it has been hours, and I say God, I have to see everyone else too. I turn around to see who I might drag over. When I turn back she is gone. When I call her she doesn’t pick up.

I call three times because she is always on Do Not Disturb but she doesn’t pick up and of course she changed her number – dumb.

I spend the rest of the night searching for her and do not find her. I find our friends, and I say, have you seen Nancy, and they say NANCY, and I say, Nancy, and they say no, how is she? I realize then that the entire time, I did not ask her a single question. Not one.

Alex Chasteen

a s t e N o t Wa n o t Wa s t e N o a n t N o t Wa s t ot Wa n t No a s t e N o t Wa n o t Wa s t e N o a n t N o t Wa s t

J

ust over halfway through a ten-hour shift waiting tables at a fancy wedding, I tapped out for a few seconds in the men’s bathroom. Kneeling down on the tiles, I took a few deep breaths, counting them, and tried to stop retching.

A glance into a green food waste bin had prompted my exit. It had been a particularly wasteful shift; we’d been forced to throw away several trays of freshlycooked mashed potato with salmon and many of our guests had turned down our chicken curry, naan bread, and yoghurt. Imagine how that would smell in the heat of a busy kitchen. Imagine how it would look.

Statistics are the wrong way to think about food waste. A better way to conceptualise the reality is to imagine the world’s largest stadium filled right up to the roof with food waste and then

to realise that that’s how much food the US throws away – in a single day. The global scale of food waste is hard to comprehend or visualise. A third of all food produced globally is never eaten. An area larger than China cultivates food that isn’t used. Uneaten waste produces more CO2 than all of the world’s countries except the US and China.

Working as an agency waiter during the vacations, I’ve seen firsthand how endemic this problem is in the hospitality industry.

Commercial kitchens hugely overproduce food (mostly as an insurance measure – nothing is worse than stocks running dry). A shameful proportion of all this produce is never eaten, and binned. Customers will buy huge plates of food, either for themselves, or, more commonly, for their children, only for fried chicken, chips, or curries to

be binned a few moments later, totally untouched. In one shift, I was given the job of clearing bins when they filled up. There are few things as galling as looking into a skip of black bags and throwing in yet another one, full, all of it about to rot.

I have asked myself several times if it is ethically defensible for me to be knowingly and needlessly throwing away food. I know how harmful my actions are, but I do them anyway in my capacity as an employee. Does that make me complicit? It is difficult to watch good food go to complete and abject waste, knowing the extent of food poverty in the UK and internationally, but it is hard to shirk something I am paid to do. Clearly, there are more important things than holding down a crap job, but it’s never easy to take a stand.

13

Kneeling down on the tiles, I took a few deep breaths, counting them, and tried to stop retching.

14

I threw away most of a side of beef on a shift around Easter. The agricultural and environmental effort it takes to produce a single tray of beef is huge; land needs to be cleared for livestock and for the grain that feeds them; water procured for irrigating feed and raising animals. The livestock needs to be nurtured to maturity and then slaughtered. That meat is then processed, oil is drilled, refined, and piped to fuel the boats or planes that transport the meat, and then the meat is cooked and served. But if someone doesn’t fancy their beef and it ends up in the bin, then all that effort – expensive not just

financially but also in terms of the damage it does to the planet – proves fruitless. The meat rots away, and we know the rest of the story.

We are undoubtedly the first society in history that is able and willing to throw away this much food. For millennia, humans lived by subsistence: if on the offchance you managed to kill an animal, you damn well ate the whole thing. A consequence of this history is that we have become infatuated with the sensual experience of plenty. We love the toxic appeal of an all-you-can-eat buffet, despite the greasy food and

If someone doesn’t fancy their beef and it ends up in the bin, then all that effort – expensive not just financially but also in terms of the damage it does to the planet – proves fruitless. The meat rots away, and we know the rest of the story.

the smell. All of us have felt the odd rush of an overfull fridge. An old part of our brain remembers a time when food was hard to come by; it’s overwhelmed by all the produce we see around us on the shelves in Tesco and it tells us to buy food we know we don’t need.

Another loaf of bread, chips for our wailing child, old broccoli, more for the way it looks than for anything else.

This is a part of our brain we need to listen to less – we need to be more careful, and hold back.

We make decisions like this in but a fraction of a second.

The point of fast food is that the customer goes from hungry to satiated in a matter of moments; that’s where the real problem lies. There is no such thing as ‘fast food.’

The consequences of buying a Big Mac, eating half of it, and throwing it in the bin may not feel like much as you’re doing it but you’re not only throwing away a Big Mac – you’re throwing away the water, grain, and land it took to feed and graze the cattle, the oil it took to fly it across the world and to fry it, and all of the human labour that went into putting it together. The rise of fast food and food waste more generally is symptomatic of a detachment from the

What’s more, it has been well-proven that large multinationals could

implement schemes which rapidly and substantially reduce food waste. Pret A Manger provides three million meals a year to homeless people, free of charge, ensuring that unsold food is eaten and doesn’t rot away. Komal Ahmad, a social entrepreneur working in the US West Coast, founded startup Copia PBC, which aims to provide an online platform linking businesses and individuals with a surplus to people who are in need. According to Ahmad’s LinkedIn, the project has saved two million tons of edible food from landfill and will feed over three million people this year.

The really frustrating thing about food waste is that it is, fundamentally, an entirely solvable and preventable problem. In many places, there is clear demand for food that, elsewhere, is in oversupply – look around Oxford and you’ll see hungry people without a roof over their head. But people – consumers, chefs, hospitality managers – don’t have the energy or the inclination to join the dots. I thought seriously about what it would take for my workplace to donate their leftover food to local homeless shelters at the end of the workday: it wouldn’t take much. What

it would take is a serious, concerted, considered effort. But in the hospitality industry – with notoriously tight margins, stressed workers, and unstable and unpredictable market conditions – management teams can be forgiven for prioritising other questions, even if making that decision does substantial environmental damage.

World hunger is not a problem of scarcity. Far from it. If I’ve learnt anything in hospitality, it’s that humans are producing more than enough food. The problem, as is often the case, revolves around logistics.

The problem is administration, management, economics – it’s about joining the dots.

In simple terms, this is a problem we really need to fix. Food is precious, in terms of land, labour, and resources. It’s worth its weight in gold. Throwing away that value should hurt as much as losing a fiver by mistake. Until more of us come to terms with the necessity of that pain, people all across the affluent countries are going to keep on throwing away more food than anyone can afford. I don’t like how that story ends.

Barnaby Pite

15

physical and economic realities of food – what it actually takes to raise a pig or bake a loaf of bread.

There is, somewhere in the background, a deep disregard for the effort that goes into putting together a meal. I don’t want to sound Victorian, but ‘waste not, want not’ is a longestablished, time-honoured sentiment and for hundreds of years, people have said grace before they eat, giving thanks (albeit in an explicitly religious context) for all the time and care that goes into a meal. We’ve lost a sense, deep down, of what food is and what it takes to make it. We need to redevelop an appreciation of that which is precious about food and the danger of wasting it. Of course, this needs to happen alongside more practical measures for reducing food waste: food-cams, programs linking those in need to those who have more than enough, and campaigns lobbying catering managers and hospitality executives to produce more sparingly.

We need to remind people that food is valuable, that it always has been, and that wasting it is an insult to thousands of hours of labour.

Zoom slowly in Camera vertical 2 seconds

WE ONLY WANT THE WORLD TO LIVE But its pirouette proves endless.

And once again the floor finds me fallible.

It is strange that we should so carefully cherish the fallacy stopping for us.

of the World

Perhaps romantic pity is what led us towards our inevitable, Each warning we ignored until we found ourselves living on the outskirts of life, The love we were promised by poets who knew nothing and continue to know nothing burnt in the bush fires and cast out to sea,

Wa n

It’s true

Her hands muddied, she scowered the shores of the Old World in search of poetry.

The lines between

Have crumbled.

She threw that debris from mountain tops, As if finding a way to start again.

Vagrant men scrape what’s left of what was, No longer worthy.

Long forgotten childhood, happiness, form, and color.

OMEN’s tears are but water; The tears of men are blood.

Is what she wrote she wrote to

me. all the hours that laugh, the hours that mourn,

Sank deeper through the sea.

A dream lies dead there.

That much we know.

It has no politics, leads no new movements, is the organ of no generation.

We lost the war.

Heedless of the crying children, We walk beneath the beating of a wing, What is this sorrow you are breathing?

Poets write elegies But on the Toothed wind of the seas, I have whispered thee in the solitudes somewhere, pirouetting in the deep.

R.T. Sweeney

to The grass and the sky. are where your words lie.

And from the cliff I leap.

I know that you’re down here

e

W

O n ly

WILD NATURE and DOMESTICATED

I

This was the predicament in which US defendants Aaron Graham and Eric Jordan found themselves: on trial in a Maryland District Court in 2016, arguing that the acquisition of the CSLI was a violation of the Fourth Amendment (which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, and sets requirements for issuing warrants). Graham and Jordan were being charged with a series of armed robberies.

Law enforcement had confiscated their phones and, without a warrant, contacted Sprint (their cell-service provider) for CSLI to place them near the robberies. Sure enough, Sprint

magine you've committed a crime. You’re going to court. Maybe you’re being accused of murder, or getting involved in a few burglaries. You’re guilty, but you’re desperate to walk free. You’re organising your case with your lawyer, and at a certain point in proceedings you have to present all the evidence you plan to use to the prosecutors, and they have to do the same. You’re making your way through their evidence when you get caught on this abbreviation, CSLI: cell site location information. It becomes clear what the prosecutors are doing. You realise that the police have contacted your cell-service provider (EE, 3, O2, etc.) and requested CSLI for this case. The information details which cell towers your phone connected to when searching for service. It links you very accurately, in location and timeframe, to the crimes.

19

Until recently, the acquisition of CSLI without a warrant had been perfectly legal in the US. The US justice system works on precedent, as it does the UK, meaning that previous cases are cited to add validity to certain claims.

United States v. Graham is just one of a host of cases that helped establish the government’s ability to access the location of any defendant without a warrant – until recently. In 2017, this discussion was thrust into the mainstream all across the US by one of the most significant privacy cases in history: Carpenter v. United States. A Michigan District Court jury had convicted Timothy Carpenter of armed robbery, and after a number of appeals from Carpenter to re-evaluate the case, it was eventually reviewed by the Supreme Court, the highest court in the United States. As in US v. Graham, government prosecutors were able to determine that Carpenter's cellphone communicated with certain cell towers at certain times, and had used CSLI to link him to four robberies. All investigations were completed without a search warrant.

provided the evidence linking Graham and Jordan to the time and location of four separate robberies. Their lawyers contested the evidence, claiming that it allowed the government “to paint an intimate picture of the defendants' whereabouts over an extensive period of time," but the court denied the request, prosecuted them, and they were sent to prison.

[S]eismic shifts in digital technology [...] made possible the tracking of not only Carpenter’s location but also everyone else’s, not for a short period but for years and years. Sprint Corporation and its competitors are not your typical witnesses. Unlike the nosy neighbor who keeps an eye on comings and goings, they are ever alert, and their memory is nearly infallible. There is a world of difference between the limited types of personal information

The legal specifics of the case are complicated.

Like in US v. Graham, the dispute involves discussion of numerous different aspects of criminal justice procedure: the difference between court orders for disclosure and search warrants, the 1986 Stored Communications Act which governs the privacy of stored Internet communications, and the ‘third-party’ doctrine, which determines whether citizens can expect privacy when disclosing information to a third-party (in this case, cell-service providers).

To the average person, the legal justifications don’t seem important, but the June 2018 Supreme Court ruling was monumental; in a five-to-four majority decision, the court ruled that the government, when it accesses historical CSLI without a warrant, is in violation of the Fourth Amendment. In a seminal departure from precedent established by cases like Graham, the Court found that the proliferation of cell-phones in the modern world meant that the rules had changed. The Opinion of the Court neatly sums it up as follows:

addressed in Smith and Miller [landmark privacy cases from the 1970s] and the exhaustive chronicle of location information casually collected by wireless carriers today.

20

Cases like Graham and Carpenter provide insulated environments in which lawyers and judges can conceptually address data privacy, one of the most pressing issues of the modern world.

It’s easy to feel distanced from the issue; after all, we aren’t criminals, are we? But the Supreme Court conspicuously mentions “everyone else”; that’s us. Unless people around the world acknowledge that the implications of conclusions around CSLI and location data ripple out far beyond the courtroom, Carpenter v. United States will have been for nothing. Criminals and defendants aren’t the only people affected by the concerns surrounding location data, and it doesn’t take much imagination to realise that location tracking can and does affect the regular consumer, in numerous ways, on a day-to-day basis.

You know when you’re talking about something with a friend, and then a minute later you check your phone and see an ad for the exact thing that you were talking about? Facebook and Instagram (who are usually the culprits) aren’t actually listening in; they’re exploiting your location data.

In an episode of the tech podcast Reply All, hosts Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt debunked this urban myth. With the help of ex-Facebook employee Antonio Martinez, they demonstrated that location tracking (using CSLI) and the Facebook ‘check-in’ feature created a pretty accurate map of your surroundings, and that that, rather than sound recording, was one of the biggest factors in targeted ads. If you’ve been to Caffè Nero, Facebook knows you’ve been, and if you’ve been eight times in a week, Facebook knows you love Caffè Nero. In the all-too-common occurrence of feeling like your conversations are being listened in on, the likelihood is that Facebook knows that you and your friend are together, and bases your advertising profile on the recent consumer interactions of both parties. From patterns of movement, companies are able to weaponise your location data against you and tailor your advertising profile accordingly.

From patterns of movement, companies are able to weaponise your location data against you and tailor your advertising profile accordingly.

Even when location data is anonymised, it can be reliably traced back to you. Last December, The New York Times ran a piece on their website using forty-six-year-old maths teacher Lisa Magrin as an example: the data they accessed, which had been sold without her knowledge, traced her to her home, the school she taught at, her exboyfriend’s house, and even her weightwatchers class. Connecting the dots, you could pretty easily correlate her location data with her identity. Nine out of ten times, you could do the same with anyone; researchers at MIT and the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium found that it took very few pieces of data to uniquely identify ninety-five percent of users. Could someone identify you if they were just looking at a map with your footprints on it? Statistics suggest they could.

Even more concerning are examples of government agencies tracking the location of their citizens. This year, leaked government documents revealed that the Trump administration systematically identifies and monitors many journalists, attorneys, and even protestors who work on immigration and civil rights. In a secret database accessible to the Department of Homeland Security, suspects’ names, dates of birth, and passports are available, alongside suspected links to 'migrant caravans,' immigration journalism, antiNRA protests, and immigration protests. The Western consciousness often relegates this kind of surveillance to China or North Korea, but it happens right under our noses. What if the Trump administration had obtained warrantless location data, too? Suddenly, the Carpenter ruling takes on the significance of protecting dissenting journalists and upholding the right to criticise government policy. If it hadn’t been for the landmark privacy case, location data

would’ve made the database even more invasive, and even more troubling.

To make things more complicated, CSLI isn’t even the only way your location can be tracked.

Whilst governments might not be able to access CSLI without a warrant, there’s plenty of other ways to obtain location profiles. Have you used Uber in the past year? If so, you’ve created a locational profile for yourself through their app, based on your rides. Up until 2017, Uber could track you even when you weren’t in the car; this controversial, since-removed feature, which they say was used to optimise pickups and dropoffs, was likely used to build locational profiles of users and establish how long the average user might walk before and after a journey. What about a fitness app? You’ll meet the same problems. In fact, running/cycling app Strava’s location services were so used by so many people that they unintentionally gave away the location of multiple secret US military bases. The company released a global heatmap visualisation of running routes as a way for users to see popular trails, but analysts quickly noticed that military personnel, who’d been using the app to keep in shape, had created accurate heatmap representations of operating bases in locations such as Afghanistan, Djibouti, and Syria. Whilst the average consumer doesn’t have the same considerations as the US military, it’s a stark reminder of just how intrusive running apps can be. Apple Pay, WiFi connections, Google searches from your IP address: all of them can be correlated to create an accurate map of your location through your phone. If you’re not worried, you should be, and if you don’t believe me, search up “meet jack ACLU” on YouTube.

No spoilers.

In the UK, we haven’t had our Carpenter v.

United States yet. If you Google “CSLI US” you’ll find hundreds of results about privacy, with news

outlets reporting the monumental Supreme Court case, Youtube videos explaining how cell towers work, and article upon article celebrating the landmark ruling or looking forward to the future. Do the same with “CSLI UK”, and all that’s there is maths textbooks, computational linguistics analysis, and an NGO called the Lazarus Union whose website looks like it was made in 2002. In 2016, the British government released an appendix to its Codes of Practice and Conduct, put together by the inspiringly-titled Forensic Science Regulator. It’s pretty difficult to find, but the title reads “Appendix: Digital Forensics – Cell site analysis.” It’s 23 pages long (bear in mind that the pdf. of Carpenter v. US is an enormous 119-page document). Nowhere in the directives are the implications of the technique mentioned. The word ‘privacy’ doesn’t appear once. It’s interesting, if concerning, that the same discussions around the justifications and objections to CSLI and location tracking raised in the US just don’t seem to be happening in mainstream UK discourse.

The world over, we need to assess the way we think about location data. Some might use the word ‘reassess’, but in many ways this is the first time location data has been addressed at all; if the Supreme Court of the US is acknowledging the speed of technological development, we certainly need to as well. We need to think about it at an institutional level; there’s a very limited amount any given consumer can do to protect their location privacy. Google can track you in numerous ways even if you do turn off location history, and without a significant amount of time and effort, a regular user can’t reliably stop that.

We’re relying on institutions like the Supreme Court and the government to take action, and that won’t happen without advocacy. We need to get started.

Mack Willett

21

In the UK, we haven’t had our Carpenter v. United States yet.

It is just semolina with chocolate powder.

I just felt so much love!

My mother says. She spreads both hands and waves them around. It was a giant love. She also uses both hands to talk about the semolina.

The word Obu is warm and round. This is how it sounds. It is warm to go with my mother’s hands and the lines on her face.

I used to have terrible asthma, my mother says, sometimes when I woke up in the morning I couldn’t breathe and I had to stay in bed all day.

The semolina is savoury, so you have to put chocolate powder on it.

In the picture she showed me Obu has grey hair, pinned back on either side of her head and curling above her shoulders. She is wearing round, black rimmed glasses. She sits in a kitchen, in the middle of the photograph, at the head of a table in Budapest. Behind her is an open cupboard. Little cups hang in it from hooks, and a row of plates are propped upright against the wood, facing out.

Every time my mother was ill she got it and the milk would make her worse.

When she woke up in the morning she couldn’t breathe and she would have to stay in bed all day. It’s so good we didn’t know, she would have just died, my mother says.

In Scotland in March, I turn back because it is beginning to rain. It blows down the street horizontally, and suddenly my cheek is stinging, and it’s not rain, it’s hail.

I want to call it Kaddish, says my mother, waving her hands at the walls. A volume of photos lies open on the floor. There aren’t enough of these to cover the space, so I will print more than one copy of each. There will be pictures of them all over, on the walls, the ceiling, the floors, everywhere.

Hungarian, English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, Hebrew, even Esperanto! My mother counts on her fingers at the kitchen table.

kaddish My great grandmother was a simultaneous translator. She could speak nine languages. She worked for the Palestinian government. She worked for the U.N. She met her husband in Paris before the war and got married in three days. It was a different time, my mother says. They all moved to Chile afterwards.

Behind her, the china hangs on little hooks.

I don’t look up when the door opens. I hear rain hitting the pavement impossibly hard, the brief sound of bells, footsteps shuffling from the door to the counter, the door swinging back into its frame. When the woman sits down across from me, her hands are pink and purple. They are wet from where they have been holding the umbrella flat against the rain. A teapot is set down next to her, and a small, white cup. Her pink hands move slowly.

She holds them to either side of the teapot.

There is a picture in my grandmother’s house of a child’s foot raised over a toy street in a toy town.

Around the ankle you can also see pyjamas.

I just remember love, she says.

Obu is in the kitchen.

Beside the cupboard that is open and holds the china there is a gas stove.

A tin of cocoa powder stands on the table with its lid off. Brown powder covers everything like a gust of dark snow. The door is propped open to let the warm air out and on the stove, one black pot is bubbling. An empty bowl has been laid out next to it.

My grandmother was a warm woman, my mother says. The word Obu drops like a warm stone onto the floor.

25

At the table, she has finished her tea. She puts down her cup and moves a finger around the rim.

Behind the dark frame of her glasses her eyes are blue. We all have these blue eyes, my siblings and me. Her eyes tick back and forth over the table as she puts both hands to the sides of the teapot. Her eyelids look pale and soft.

When the rain stops she makes as if to move.

The Kaddish or Qaddish (Aramaic: ‘holy’) is a hymn of praises to God found in prayer services as part of mourning rituals in Judaism. It is the prayer traditionally recited in memory of the dead, although it makes no mention of death. The Kaddish is said at funerals and memorials. Kaddish cannot be recited alone.

Lucie Richter-Mahr

The black frame of her glasses runs underneath her hair to her ear. It comes into view when she turns her head to stop the hair from falling in her face. Little cups hang in the cupboard from hooks.

She has propped a row of plates upright against the wood, facing out. She says, Will you hold this for me?

Carefully. She is peering over the rim of the pot. At her elbow, a smaller pair of hands are hovering. The wooden spoon is passed back and forth like a torch.

Obu uses both hands when she gets up. She plants them on the table in front of her and steadies herself with them.

They are pink and purple.

She walks left around the table to stir the pot.

Cycling in Bohemia

26

F

The air had been cool that summer in Bohemia. Often I’d awake to the patter of rain against the windows and walk beneath the trees, past peacocks and deer, through the castle park and into its antique courtyard. It was a good summer to be cycling.

or the first ten kilometres, I wondered why I’d embarked on this madness. My stomach heaved; twisting shoots of pain speared my legs and a film of sweat slid across my brow. I bit my tongue and pushed down on the pedals as I mounted the hill. Around me lay the vast, rolling expanse of the Bohemian countryside, coloured by polychrome grass: yellow and green, streaked with golds, purples, and reds the shade of clotted blood. Lining the horizon were dark woods, shaded by a high armada of clouds. I sucked in air with heavy wheezes of effort.

promotional possibilities with their moated castle, but it left a large amount of time to loiter around the country. Yet without a car to hand, and with the railways clearly reluctant to undertake any trip outside of Prague, I was left cycling across Bohemia.

Yet once I’d crested the hill and could sail down the long, sloping road, a wave of bliss swept over me.

I had borrowed the bicycle from the Czech castle where I’d been working for the summer and had made a number of weekend outings, exploring the seemingly infinite land of the southern Czech Republic. In my fantasies, I imagined setting out and cycling all the way across central Europe, through Poland and Ukraine, and not stopping until I reached Moscow – 2000 kilometres away.

In a landlocked nation, every road seemed to lead somewhere important.

It was a strange, peripheral existence, living in a small town where people spoke a language I didn’t recognise. The Baroness’s energetic young son who ran the castle day-to-day was an Anglophile, and indeed his upbringing – in Athens, London, and Prague – was a testament to the history of a wandering, nationless aristocracy. Austria-Hungary, overseen by the benevolent Emperor Franz Joseph, had chosen the wrong side in the First World War and consequently ceased to exist in 1918, its territories carved up to form a bewildering series of new countries, one of them being the nascent Czechoslovakia. Yet the newly emancipated Czechs and Slovaks had no wish for another monarchy and its attendant aristocracy, preferring instead a republic, which left many families with castles and chateaus but no official titles – only honorifics such as ‘Baron’ remained.

I was being employed by an old, aristocratic Austro-Hungarian family to help develop

The remnants of the vanished empire of Austria-Hungary are now spread out across

The air had been cool that summer in Bohemia. Often I’d awake to the patter of rain against the windows and walk beneath the trees, past peacocks and deer, through the castle park and into its antique courtyard. It was a good summer to be cycling.

“If only the whole journey cycling to Orlík Castle could be downhill,” I idly wished, resting briefly by the roadside. Still another twenty kilometres to go until I reached my destination, a castle overlooking the Vltava River. There were long stretches of empty road as I made my way towards it, my only company the occasional hare or squirrel darting along the banks of shrub. I had set off late and already the sun was high in the sky, flattening everything into a shadowless landscape. I passed through a succession of small villages – in one, a group of men sat around an old Land Rover with guns and hunting dogs by their sides, flat caps pulled low over their foreheads. The dogs barked at me, but I was already sailing down a steep, winding slope, the village disappearing behind.

Over a main road, past train tracks, through a forest, up a hill, down a hill, birds singing, gasping breaths, screaming legs, a fat red fox with long whiskers staring at me as I passed, and then, there, above the treeline, a glimpse of castellation, before I was plunging down, down, down to the rocky outcrop – the dazzling white walls of Orlík Castle.

Orlík Castle belongs to the Schwarzenbergs, restored to the family after the fall of the USSR in 1989. The Czech Republic, of all the former satellites in the Eastern Bloc, has had the largest programme of property restitution, partly out of economic necessity – it was impossible for the new democratic government to maintain the thousands of crumbling chateaus and castles in the early 1990s. The current head of the House of Schwarzenberg, Karel, was a close ally of Václav Havel, the pivotal figure in ending Communist rule who became president in 1991. Karel served as both chancellor and foreign minister and in 2013 narrowly lost the presidential election to Miloš Zeman. A century of republicanism and four decades of communism have not been enough to sweep away the vestiges of Austria-Hungary and its nobility. The old families are still here.

Karel Schwarzenberg has opened Orlík to the public and now it’s stalked by tourists speaking German, Slovak, Polish, and Russian. I rested on a bench outside the castle gates and watched families squabble over ice cream. Beyond, boats had come down from Prague and cut swathes of white spray across the Vltava River. My legs throbbed, overworked machines registering their complaints with the operator. I pulled a large water bottle out my satchel and took a long drink – it tasted warm and stale. I measured my gulps carefully; I needed to preserve it for the return journey.

The tour of the castle was in Czech, but I didn’t mind. I wandered around the edges of the crowd, looking at the thousands of stags’ heads hanging from the walls in-between rifles and ornately-worked swords. Each head had its shooter’s name attached, tracing friendships amongst the Austro-Hungarian elites: there was Schwarzenberg, of course, and the family employing me, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand,

27

half a dozen countries, many of them a little unsure of what to do with a past they are reluctant to claim. The staff at the castle confided in me that the Baroness and her family didn’t speak Czech with a native accent. Still, the old divisions of an empire dissolved over a century ago linger, like an illness borne by the flies which hovered above the still green waters of the moat.

28

too, the man whose murder changed Europe forever and irrevocably.

The Baroness, in her early 70s and sharp as a tack, had told me a story one evening about the Archduke while we had a drink on the castle’s loggia after work. Ferdinand used to come and stay to hunt deer at their castle, sitting on the loggia overlooking the park with rifle in hand.

One day he shot a white deer, an act of grievous bad luck in Bohemia (and virtually all hunting cultures); shortly after, he was assassinated in Sarajevo. It is part of the collective culture of this land to believe that amidst these tranquil fields of central Europe, the fate of a continent was cast.

The Schwarzenbergs have been amongst the most successful in reclaiming their former land and properties; most families, however, do not aspire to such a height. Many have returned to their chateaus and live in them,or in the Baroness’ case, in a summer house in the park grounds, while opening the castle to tourists. Her parents had fled Czechoslovakia in the early 50s, going first to East Africa, then to a Mediterranean island, before finally settling in Greece to wait patiently for the end of the Cold War and the fall of communism. They were itinerant years, which spoke to their lack of ‘rootedness’;

now they feel at home in their castle, but their relationship with the nascent Czech Republic (only twenty-six years old) is more ambiguous.

The people who surround them in towns and villages are often the descendents of the Party cadres who expelled them from their homes seven decades before. The countries change, but the people remain the same.

After the tour of Orlík, I wandered down the steps which slid around the castle walls and towards the water. A dam had raised the water level significantly, so that it now lapped against the fortress’ edges, yet in the clear light the immense body of water seemed calm, even inviting. My body wanted to give out, rather than contemplate the exertions needed to return home; to fall into the cool river and be cocooned by it until I disappeared from view altogether.

A white sailing ship passed, its sails unfurled and pressed gently taut by the low breeze down by the lakeside. A barefooted man stood on the bough wearing sandy shorts, watching me beadily as he glided by. In the castle’s immense shade, I crouched on my haunches and threw a few pebbles back into the water, then wearily stood up and made my way back to the bicycle, chained to a tree at the top of the road.

Up the hill, neck burning, tongue itching, legs roaring like waves breaking on rocks, and then the flat expanse of yellow Bohemian fields, low hedgerows marking my progress, the sweat sticking to my back and bag chafing my shoulder. But the pleasure of my whole body as I flew down a gently sloping road, wind in my ears, legs hardly having to move, my head clear, was immense and somehow gorgeous. Yet when I reached the inevitable vertical curve to the brow beyond, I slipped off the bicycle and pushed it by the roadside for a little while, until I mounted it again and kicked off, wobbling at first before gradually picking up speed and summoning the strength to crest the hill.

If I kept on west I would hit Germany, although many of the towns on the Czech side of the border spoke German anyhow and boasted bilingual signs. The spa town of Mariánské Lázně is perhaps better known by its German name of Marienbad, and idle shopkeepers there would enquire, ‘Sprechen Sie Deutsch?’ The cultural border lay far further into the Czech Republic than the line on any map. In a way, only a polyglot country like Austria-Hungary made any sense in central Europe, because it refused to cut hard divisions amongst ethnicities which were geographically interspersed. The nobility which had survived from that forgotten country were a living testament to that old history – their

very presence repudiated the narrow-minded nationalisms which had infiltrated so much of the region.

Before I reached home, I had to plot a course through a forest high above a clammy lake, then along a series of switchback turns before finally coming onto the wide plateau above the town. In the distance, below the horizon, I could see the castle tower. I paused; I let my bicycle be cradled by the long grass and I drank my final dregs of water. Across the road was a small shrine, stone and whitewashed. On each side of it was a niche with the image of a saint, hand raised in benediction. It had a slate tile roof, to keep the hail and the rain off the holy images. It was ageless, neither new nor old, emerging out of the landscape.

I took a photo of it. I circled around it, almost warily. I didn’t want to touch it – that felt sacrilegious in some strange way. This small, humble structure exerted an enormous power whose origin I could not ascertain.

The air was fresh, the clouds high up above, the land huge and empty, and I was very small.

There, by the roadside, I rested.

I thought of the armies that had traversed this land, the kings who had claimed ownership of it, the landlords who had ridden through it in horse and buggy, the peasants who had lit the candles in this shrine and their descendents who continued to do so. The borders containing these yellowed fields have changed with each century – who am I to believe they won’t do so again in my lifetime? But for now, they are at peace, and still people move through them. The actors change, but the roles remain the same.

Altair Brandon-Salmon

29

The first time I went cycling in Bohemia I had become hopelessly lost threading my way through small country lanes. I had tried to ask directions from a couple of bored-looking children hanging around an empty village square, but they left me none the wiser. I had only reached home as the darkening blue of the sky began to envelope the silhouette of the castle in gloom. However, I had armed myself for my journey to Orlík with a map, and retracing my route back was not difficult – I had only to trace the falling sun on its journey through the western sky.

Fifteen years ago, he owned one of the largest organic vegetable businesses in the UK. He knew about climate change then. He’d known about it since the 90s like everyone else but he’d never really acted on it.

“People have a very Marie Antoinette relationship with the world, with the climate,” he says. “You know, ‘let them eat cake.’

They think it’s happening to someone else.”

Roger Hallam is a wiry man – slim but tough. He has dark eyebrows, eyes sunk deep in their sockets, and wisps of hair either side of his face. He’s married, a father. What stands out the most though, when he starts to speak, is that somewhere – not too far beneath the surface – he’s furious. He has an edge of mania. You can see a tense frustration tugging at the lines of his face.

unity in the face of imminent climate collapse

the ties that bind

It’s clear that the anger began to fuel him. After the demise of his farming business, he decided it was time to stop looking away and do something.

He did a doctoral degree at King’s College, London. His thesis analysed radical nonviolent protest movements over the last century, from the Indian independence struggle led by Gandhi to the US civil rights movement. It was not the

For Hallam, suddenly it wasn’t happening to someone else; it was happening to him. It made him furious. Furious that the situation had deteriorated so extensively, that no one in our systems of governance, control, and regulation seemed to be doing anything to try and stop it.

Furious – and he doesn’t say this explicitly, but it is there – at himself; at the part he played in the collective negligence that has come to embody the global response to climate change.

Naomi Klein, in the now-legendary This Changes Everything, calls this kind of behaviour ‘looking away.’ It is a refusal to acknowledge the severity of the problem that is climate change. It is making a small, token gesture in order to feel as if you’re doing your part. Using paper straws or a reusable cup – that’s looking away. Making sure you recycle is looking away. Giving up meat is looking away. Hallam, like the rest of us, was looking away. Until one fateful summer when it rained every day for seven weeks and his crop, hundreds of thousands of pounds worth, rotted.

His business folded.

31

Sometimes, sheer force of will can initiate change.

Somewhere along the way, these experiences were knit together; all the frustration and sense of loss, the deep-seated belief in nonviolent direct action and, most of all, the disenchantment with the current political class and the failure of our socioeconomic system. What emerged was ‘Extinction Rebellion.’ Say it out loud. Listen to it. You can hear the anger. The seven syllables rush out one after the other in a frantic attempt to communicate an uncomfortable message. The sharp syllables of Extinction – complete destruction, the extinguishing of all life as we know it, darkness.

The fiery timelessness of Rebellion – upheaval, the changing of systems, the unknown. Greenpeace,

“It was a manual for changing the system,” he says. A kind of ‘how-to’ for revolutionaries. His conclusions are startlingly simple. “Violence is bollocks. If you look at the history, it doesn’t work.

Nonviolent civil disobedience is the method that works. It’s science.” He lives by these very principles: in 2017, he went on hunger strike in an attempt to get King’s College to divest their investments in fossil fuels. After 14 days with no food or water, his protest succeeded. For a while, he travelled the country giving talks to groups who wanted to stage successful protests. A mercenary in the revolution-crafting business.

issues that drove his interest (although it’s clear that these causes matter to him deeply), but rather the reasons these movements were successful.

In spite of all this, Monbiot exudes none of the same mania as Hallam. He is almost infectiously calm and unhurried, especially for a man who churns out several articles a week for The Guardian, organises nationwide protests, and looks after his two young children. On the day of our interview, he would go on to tell an excited crowd of children at the Youth4Climate School Strike that they were “the most beautiful thing” he had seen in several decades of environmental campaigning. Still, his optimism is measured:

In many ways, George Monbiot couldn’t be more different to Roger Hallam. Straight after graduating from Oxford with a degree in Zoology, Monbiot became a documentary maker. He travelled far and wide, chronicling the breakdown of ecosystems from Brazil to Tanzania. The way he tells them, his travels sound somewhat Odyssean: Monbiot has been shipwrecked, shot at, and stabbed through the foot with a metal spike. He is banned from seven countries and was sentenced to life in prison in absentia in Indonesia. He attempted to perform a citizen’s arrest on US ambassador John Bolton for his role in the Iraq War, co-founded the Respect Party, and even had time to record a very successful folk album along the way.

founded fifty years earlier, suddenly sounds very tame indeed.

32

"'Happy' would be a grotesque exaggeration – I have a gem of hope which wasn't there before."

Monbiot may well be softly-spoken, but he is a troublemaker just like Hallam; one who came from inside the establishment. “There was only one job I wanted to do and that was to make investigative environmental programs.” He did this at the BBC for several years, but with little success: “There was a fatwa against environmental coverage. Time and time again, we were told: no environmental programs.”

Like Hallam, Monbiot’s frustration culminated in an epiphany – you can still trace the shock in his voice today. This wasn’t just individuals looking away, there was an ingrained bias against covering climate change at the largest broadcasting organisation in the world. Environmentalism was, in Monbiot’s own words: “the skull at the feast.” These two men are bound together by their shared reaction against the framework for looking away.

How has this changed in 2019? What of the excitement galvanised by movements like Extinction Rebellion (XR) and the School Strike for Climate?

Is this the year where the climate finally embeds

itself in the public consciousness, sitting firmly at the top of our to-do list? Monbiot nods vigorously.

We’ve finally broken the deadlock. “I’d struggled for years to get any sort of readership. People really didn’t want to know.” Now Monbiot’s environmental articles are almost always his most read pieces; his speeches at demonstrations receive raucous applause and gain millions of views online. At the moment, he is arguably the most prolific voice backing rebellion through nonviolent direct action and, crucially, was one of the first to emphasise the importance of young people’s participation. “Young people aren’t putting up with it anymore. They’re not putting up with the denial, the indifference – this cannibal culture we’ve developed where the old eat the lives of the young.

They see this is the last chance we’ve got and they are determined to take action.”

XR has become a lightning rod for a new wave of activism. University professors in Bristol were arrested for spray painting public buildings with the group’s logo. Children as young as 14 attempted to blockade roads to terminals at Heathrow Airport.

There have been two open letters, signed by more than 200 academics, criticising the government for

Young people aren't putting up with it anymore... They see this is the last chance we've got and they are determined to take action.

Instead, Mary says she’s here for their four grandchildren: “Nearly four, nearly five, nearly eight and nearly ten,” she rattles off. They feel it is their responsibility to participate for the sake of those who will come after them. They believe in XR’s principles, Mary says, but they are just here for the day. Unlike in some other protest movements, behaviour like this isn’t shamed: XR makes a conscious effort to accept and acknowledge everyone’s contribution.

XR heralds a new era for environmental activism.

It is the first group in decades to consistently bind together thousands of people from outside the ‘activist scene.’ What’s more, XR successfully rallied them to take part in direct action, risking arrest and even prosecution for their activism. Monbiot views the richness of XR’s composition as underpinning its success: “Some of the people involved are veteran campaigners, whereas the majority are very young people, some in their early teens and already highly articulate in putting forward the environmental case. We have that great combination of experience and determination.”

This is due in part to the kinds of ties the group cultivates between its members – a direct product of Hallam’s research into protest design. XR has little to no brand management team and is highly decentralized. Anyone can do anything, so long as they check with the people closest to them in the extended network of loosely connected XR chapters.

XR’s strength lies in the capacity to create meaningful bonds without restricting forms of action. In this way, Jenny, who is spending her Saturday afternoon sat in the small camp illegally blocking a junction at Parliament Square, worked with XR’s Norwich chapter to have a say in some key structural changes in the messaging the group uses.

Take Mary and Bob: they are sitting on a low wall in Parliament Square, soaking up the April sun. Mary wears a broad brown sun hat and both sport distinctive XR badges. They must be in their seventies. “I’ve never been to a protest before,” Bob says. “But Mary is a veteran of Greenham Common [a renowned anti-nuclear arms peace camp established in the 1980s]. We’ve got a bit of the fence in our bedroom.” Though there is a sense of resignation, they’re not angry. They’re not driven by hatred of or frustration with the system as Hallam and Monbiot are.

For Jenny, the way the XR group works together is an expression of the way she sees the world. She feels connected to the earth: we are a product of it and thus part of it. “When people talk about doing harm to the environment, I think: ‘What?’ I don’t see a border there. We are the Earth.” Finding a group that was bound together but still open to individual expression of its core principles felt like a homecoming to her. She is not angry either, but there is a deep sadness when she thinks of the way other people have responded to the crisis.

33

the way in which it has handled what XR was one of the first to call the ‘climate emergency.’ This shift in language is typical of XR tactics. ‘Rebel for life’ is another example of their deft use of language, and Monbiot, like many activists, repeatedly refers to the destruction of our ‘life support systems.’ Their lexicon reflects the urgency that Hallam exudes – and it works. Parliament declared a nationwide ‘climate emergency’ just months after activists coined the term.

Make no mistake... once we hit those thresholds, we are fucked.

One of the lesser-publicised problems with climate breakdown is that the climate is a ‘non-linear system.’ Hallam is very clear about this: “Make no mistake… once we hit those thresholds, we are fucked.” As a non-linear system, changes can appear to be happening gradually. A steady climb in CO2 parts per million or a gradual melting of the ice caps are undetectable. However, once a specific critical mass is reached, the new levels of certain materials in the atmosphere will cause chain reactions across the interconnected climate system that establish a new equilibrium which is difficult to reverse. By this point, it won’t be enough simply to return the atmosphere to its previous composition. We will be in a new state of balance – one that is not in our favour.

This rational, systemic way of thinking is rarely associated with XR’s approach to activism and protest design, and yet it has shaped much of the group’s ground strategy. Hallam is fascinated by psychology. He refers to Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion as the seminal text in inspiring his own work. The research and the work Hallam has done with the other core members of the movement have shown that after around a thousand arrests, and with the support of a meagre 3.5% of the population, the system as it stands will break and reform.

In a sense, this is the technocrat’s protest movement.

In a video explaining the methodology of the group, Hallam describes why nonviolent direct illegal action is the most effective method of creating change. The pitch is carefully argued and highly convincing and as the example of the April protests demonstrate, the group is able to pull together a massive variety of people under its umbrella.

This design has also exposed the particular weaknesses of XR. Decentralisation limits the opportunity for a charismatic figurehead to come forward; Greta Thunberg, though not specifically associated with XR, is an exception. XR’s extended sit-in protest style also limits the possibility for certain sections of society to participate: there’s no escaping the fact that for most people, taking two weeks off work to sit in the middle of a road in central London just isn’t feasible. There’s also no dodging the fact that even in central London, participation by ethnic minorities remains slim – in itself a symptom of a very ‘white’ British climate activism scene which XR members are attempting to remedy with calls for greater intersectionality.

Confronted with the imminent collapse of our life support systems, the greatest risk of failure facing XR, for Monbiot, lies in the question of narrative.

What story is XR telling people? Is it a story that resonates with them and does it chart an obvious path to recovery? “Almost all successful political and religious transformations have been accompanied not just by a powerful narrative, but by a narrative that has a particular structure.”

This is the so-called ‘Reformation Story,’ a narrative which you can trace in everything from the Bible to Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. It is a simple, age-old story. Disorder afflicts the land, caused by powerful and nefarious forces working against the interests of humanity. But the hero confronts these powerful forces against all odds to overthrow them, restoring order to the land.

35

XR Norwich have taken as their symbol a murmuration of starlings: moving independently but still working in unison. Watching people holding the XR logo whilst blocking a highway in Denver, Colorado, or ‘dropping dead’ in the middle of the street in Palma, Mallorca, it’s easy to be struck by how appropriate the decision was. Like starlings, the ties that bind XR together are strong enough to maintain a whole, yet still flexible enough to allow each member to express their unique connection to the central issue the group wants to tackle.

XR have tried to confront this problem headon. One solution is obvious. To help manage the transition to a new normal, XR want to set up ‘Citizens’ Assemblies’ to oversee the changes the government is too slow to do themselves (or too in denial and dictated by vested interests to address). Oxford City Council recently set up the

This is the faultline that keeps Monbiot awake at night; the chink in the armor; the loose end that threatens to unravel the bonds that hold XR together. What does succeeding look like?

What exactly do the people blocking city streets imagine the authorities should do? Hallam and Monbiot both admit that the way in which this new equilibrium will be found is hard to predict.

Modern society is a non-linear system, just like the climate. Bound together in innumerable ways, it is nearly impossible to predict how changes will propagate through our complex and interconnected system.

Many of the parts which make up XR’s own ‘Reformation Story’ are already in place. The disorder is obvious: 97% of scientists agree on the imminence of mass extinction. The powerful and destructive forces working against humanity’s interests are also obvious: unfettered consumerism and oligarchic power (those behind the 100 companies creating 71% of global emissions).

Who the heroes are is clear: XR. The people. You. But how does the story end? What does restoring order look like?

It is impossible to know how the story ends.

For the time being, it seems to be enough for XR to serve as a space for people to express the connections they already have; whether with nature, with their grandchildren, or otherwise. At the same time, XR make it possible to create new connections with others who are undertaking all kinds of direct action in the face of climate breakdown. As a cultural moment, XR binds

A somewhat loftier solution is Monbiot’s concept of ‘private sufficiency/public luxury,’ which he has been honing with his friend, the prolific economist Kate Raworth. Instead of a system which tries to ensure that everyone achieves ‘private luxury,’ we create one which guarantees everyone sufficiency, with luxury in the public domain. The pursuit of public luxury creates more space for everyone. “The same applies to ecology,” he says. “If we share instead of hoarding our resources we can distribute the wealth and use much less of it.” As Raworth explains it in her Doughnut Economics blueprint, it all sounds very simple. And yet, it is a foray into a radically alternative kind of economics, one explicitly honed to the Anthropocene, or, in other words, the current ecological age in which humans are the dominant influence on the environment.

first of these climate focussed ‘Assemblies’ and others are following suit.

36

Jorrit Donner-Wittkopf & Jacob Harrison

It remains to be seen how XR’s protests will affect the way things are, both now and in the future.

But one thing is for certain. Every person looking away whose face XR grabs and turns towards the spectre of mass extinction is a victory. Or, as Jenny might put it, with the arrival of each new starling, what was once a murmuration may well become a chattering. We can draw some hope from that.

together even those who sit on its periphery.

Take the Davidsons, who are practising their very own kind of ‘Doughnut Economics’ in the form of ham sandwiches, which they eagerly devour underneath Marble Arch. They’re on a weekend away from Glasgow and have wandered into the protests by accident. All of them, from the ages of four to forty, share a feeling of relief.

At last, it seems, someone is doing something.

They see XR as part of a great wave of change in environmentalism, particularly in how people think and talk about climate breakdown. They see Hallam’s anger and Monbiot’s determination – they see the watershed moment which XR and other movements constitute; the epiphany; the very instance, collectively, when people began to stop looking away. In this sense, the Davidsons’ connection to XR is just the tip of the iceberg.

What about us, the authors of the words you’re reading right now? What about you?

Routine.

It starts with the little finger.

Nibble, And another.

Its small serrated teeth confuse you at first – Maybe not again.

Its rugged tongue is insistent Chaw at my sphinx nose Claws sink into flesh I now know – no speaking Unless you want words that sound like blood Eroding cliff, half-mask, From corpus callosum to sternum to pelvis I want to scream, Pulling my jaw open, quivering like a bow Any second now.

Perforated skull.

Third eye.

Recent enough that it cries, let the mouth corners rise Pulling on this jaw Until I can push it into a soft chest Ripped like a mouldy peach, Or maybe clench it shut Wound up on my hands Teeth crunch, fingers crunch Crunch, crunch, crunch.

What I wouldn’t give to iron out my body, All the searing creases.

Or to fold my head up Squeeze it all out.

Léa Gayer de Mena

Colouring The Rainbow

"I, within POC communities, make sure I know that there are people who are queer friendly there. The same applies in queer spaces: I try to be around people who I know are very aware of racism, exoticisation and fetishisation. When you are part of both of these communities, you can feel othered in both. You don’t have a space that confronts both the homophobia that affects you and the racism that hugely impacts your life – and this is what ‘Colouring the Rainbow’ tries to address. It gives you a support network and creates a space where you don’t need to cater to people who don’t understand homophobia or racism as well as they should."

Henna Khanom, co-chair of the Oxford SU LGBTQ+ campaign, corunner of Colouring The Rainbow

How Things Are Here B

oon Hian shoots a hundred free throws before he allows himself to leave. It’s dark now, and everyone else is gone. Termites flit around above him, drawn by the smell of rain out and towards the floodlights.

They come to mate and leave, but instead they fly in circles – banging against the plastic glow until, exhausted, they fall dying onto the court below. He does not notice. He feels only the filthy seams of the ball as it slips from his fingertips, hears only the heavy flick of the net and the single bounce it makes on the hard, orange asphalt before he retrieves it and returns again to the free throw line.

Back home he washes his jersey.

Squatting on the bathroom floor he dips the faded polyester into a red plastic bucket, swirling it around in the soapy water before wringing it out. In the living room of their one bedroom flat the old woman watches TV. He hears the hum of the news, but

cannot make out the words. Only a faint glow from the hallway, blue from the TV and red from the altar in the corner of the living room.

Suddenly, she is crying. On the television the Americans have landed on the moon. Eyes wide and streaming, she bats away his hands.

Boon Hian slips out into the corridor. Two floors down and three flats across, he knocks on a window. It opens, just a little.

Dark eyes peer out; a careful smile.

Now they are sitting in a field. His legs are covered in mosquito bites, but he pushes the stings far away, absorbed. He slips his hand up to the edge of her jaw. The motion feels heavy, as if he is pulling through water. His mind is light with unfocused attention.

Anna’s gaze moves over his face.

"You’re distracted again."

He idly traces circles on her skin.

Anna presses her face to his thigh, gently grazing his skin with her teeth. Cars slide by in ones and twos. People – paired and unpaired – wander through dim yellow lights.

"Or do you think it’s more focused? I think it probably has its own kind of mind, not like ours.

Like a tree maybe. Or a forest."

"I don’t care." She looks up at him. "When are you leaving?"

"She was screaming at the TV again today. The Americans landed on the moon. She thinks Chang’e is still up there with her rabbit. She thinks she’s still on a farm in China, she…"

He lets go of a tuft of grass he finds in his hand. Dirt falls from the roots.

Boon Hian gets up at five and walks to the bus stop. He gets on the first 154 and finds his favourite seat at the front of the upper deck. The windows are half open. He presses his face to the glass.

He’s the first one in the gym. It will be two hours before practice starts, but Boon Hian keeps shooting. One bounce, back to his spot.

The old woman wakes early. She pours rice into a metal bowl, rinses out the starchy dust and places it on the gas stove. It’s still dark, but the house is lit by a purple half-light.

She boils the rice into a congee, adding chicken, onions, and ginger to the thick liquid. This is Boon Hian’s favourite food. She heard him leave in the morning.

He will be hungry when he’s home. He keeps playing even while the money dries up. Boon Hian is good at basketball. Anna from downstairs says maybe he can make money playing.

Anna says overseas anything is possible, and that people make money playing all kinds of things – music, basketball, other people.

She does not know what Anna means by playing other people.

More than this, she does not trust Anna. Anna, with her white husband. Anna, with her car, and her degree. She’s forgotten how things work. How things are here.

Leaving is for rich people, for other people. Leaving is for good.

Maybe she should be happy for him – for them. She left as well, after all. Now everybody here is from somewhere else. Halfway through an onion, the old woman cuts herself. Warm red blood flows over the off-white chopping board. It trails down through the metal sink and out of sight.

Ng Wei Kai

41

"Do you think the universe has a consciousness? Do you think it knows about us?"

Dolly backward; truck right to left Camera 30° 3 seconds

On the second day you will not care for the news.

Like a child you will play: tearing away the cross word puzzle and forgetting the old country with your gaze pointed at the painted sunlight of the dayroom.

The hospital doors You will remember are painted a silent green, the sixth day most of all the color I imagine because you will have the River Lethe to be. an answer; ticking each grey box And, like you, the undead with letters shaped know their fate like the pursed lips when they grit their teeth of the smoking doctor and press their glass who juiced his head to blue lips, like an orange giving it up in medical school. unflinchingly.

When the nurse pulls Imagine the strength – the telephone from its cradle the voluntary act quietly, you will not mind – of passing from one life unreachable lunatic, into the next. distant as the dead.

There must be déjà vu. A tremble Alison Ferrante of the hand at a mother’s perfume, the same hand that grasped for the warm pit where milk flowed like the red sea.

It's Not Just

45

A Game

Oliver Garrett

I 5

n the Kalsa neighbourhood of Palermo, between the city’s historic centre and its seafront and ports, you’ll find Piazza Rivoluzione. A square that is more of a triangle, the piazza is a meeting point for five winding streets. At its heart currently stands a mass of scaffolding and tarpaulin, a plastic pillar, tall and white, right in the place where you’d expect a fountain or a monument. I’m told that there is in fact a fountain here but it’s undergoing restoration; specifically, on the sixteenth-century statue of the Genio of Palermo that sits on it. Cut by an unknown artist in Carrara marble, the Genio (Genius) looks up to the mountains on the southern horizon, holding a feeding snake to his breast; a symbol of the city providing for, teaching, and transforming everyone that comes to it, foreigners and locals alike.

If you look at a map, Sicily is the football being kicked by the tip of Italy’s boot. It’s one of the southernmost parts of Europe, a sun-warmed island with only the Mediterranean Sea separating its coasts from those of Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, Egypt, Israel, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Syria. In the last six years, nearly 750,000 people have successfully crossed that sea to reach Sicily.

Migrants largely originating from war-torn and poverty-stricken regions travel for months at great personal cost, just to get stuck in an overpacked vessel in the Mediterranean, in the hope they’ll be rescued by Italian forces.

I travel to the edge of the city, to a huge, nearderelict psychiatric hospital complex next to the autostrada. It’s been taken over by the SPRAR (in English: Protection System for Asylum Seekers and Refugees) and is now a centre for refugee and asylum-seeking minors run by local authorities.

Finding the SPRAR means navigating identical lots of connected convent-like structures, all with shuttered windows that look over overgrown cloisters and courtyards. Deep in one of the buildings, I’m finally led to what looks like a children’s wing at a hospital. Waiting for me is Bakary, a Gambian migrant who has lived in Palermo for just under three years. He’s only eighteen now. After deciding to leave his home in Gambia, it took Bakary nine months to reach Sicily in the winter of 2016. “There were maybe 120 of us,” he tells me. “We spent four to five hours on the water, which was really lucky.” He says that his boat set off from the coast of Libya but leaves out further details of the journey. After being rescued from the sea to the West of Trapani, Bakary was brought to Palermo and has since made a name for himself amongst social workers for his interest in journalism, particularly related to migration issues. I’m introduced to him by my aunt Emma and her co-worker Yodit, both of whom work at the SPRAR. They are some of the very first people who migrants and asylum seekers meet when they arrive at the city. When I ask why he came here, Bakary is concise: “I think it’s better than my country; there’s freedom of speech here, freedom of movement. We have more opportunities.”

47

Accoglienza

Palermo is the capital of Sicily, an autonomous region in southern Italy famously proud of its multifarious history. Palermitan identity is based on a long, cobbled-together culture formed through centuries of foreign rule. First came the Phoenicians, then the Greeks, the Romans, the Ostrogoths, the Romans again, the Arabs, the Normans, the Germans, the French, the Spanish, until finally Sicily was marched on by Garibaldi and joined with the other Italian regions in 1860, forging modern Italy as we know it today.

Palermo’s mayor is Leoluca Orlando. He famously entered politics following the death of his friend, the President of Sicily, Piersanti Mattarella, who was murdered by the Mafia in 1980. The murder catalysed a long resistance to political corruption in the 1980s and 90s, and Orlando was on the Mafia’s death list alongside judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, who were both killed in bomb attacks in 1992.

Now Orlando is taking on another huge task to continue his anti-mafia efforts; he is famed for his pro-immigration stance and known for personally welcoming the ships that arrive at the city’s ports. His logic is based on the knowledge that penalising migrants and frustrating access

In 2018, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Salvini described Sicily as “the refugee camp of Europe.” Inflammatory, but not particularly shocking, Salvini’s language shows the recent trend of European (not to mention British) politicians adopting increasingly hostile rhetoric around migration. Bakary is one of the many people, demonised as part of “a swarm”

by David Cameron in 2015, who undertook the precarious journey by boat across the Central Mediterranean. Nigel Farage’s notorious ‘BREAKING POINT’ billboard, which depicted a queue of brown-skinned migrants and bore unsettling similarities to old Nazi propaganda posters, was a clear litmus for just how toxic the rhetoric of xenophobia at home had grown. Whilst the likes of Cameron, Farage, and Salvini can drop the crise-du-jour of migration as quickly as they picked it up from the comfort of their seats in London, Brussels, and Rome respectively, for Palermitans, migration has always been a fact of life to which they’ve adapted, rather than a distant fear capitalised upon for political scaremongering.

“Looking at us from England, you must think we’re mad […] but we’re not. This city is full of contradictions. It’s poor but it’s rich. We have plenty. We live well. It’s so dignified. It’s a city that has always fought for its life. It’s defended itself; there’s a different story here to yours.” Emma speaks with love as she describes her hometown over lunch. We’re eating at Moltivolti, a restaurant-cum-workspace for NGOs and freelancers working with migrants.

The kitchen is entirely migrant-run. It is situated in Ballarò, one of the most ethnically diverse parts of the city, and offers a half-Sicilian, half-foreign menu: between us we order dishes from Palermo, Afghanistan, and Senegal. She’s brought me to meet Yodit, her colleague and project coordinator at the SPRAR, who later introduces me to Bakary. “I’m not a citizen but I feel like one,” Yodit says. She was still a child when she arrived in Palermo from Ethiopia thirty years ago. “For me, migration is both personal and political […] I may have been born in another part of the world, but I always say: Palermo didn’t just happen to me, I chose Palermo. I chose to make it my home.” To Yodit, Mayor Orlando’s pro-immigration stance isn’t

to citizenship only fuels the Mafia’s absorption of illegal arrivals into their drug gangs. In every interview I can find, Orlando invariably touches on two central tenets: “Palermo is open” and “There are no migrants in Palermo.

Everyone in Palermo is Palermitan.” Because of Orlando, migrants have access to medical care and education after living in Palermo for only two months. This approach has fostered a newfound cultural pride in the city; one that values hospitality, multiculturalism, and change, and that has laid foundations for new arrivals to build a life in Europe.

48

For Yodit, the people who come through the doors of the SPRAR are no less Palermitan than she is: “It’s a lottery where you’re born.”

A few days earlier, I spent the day walking the city’s immigrant neighbourhoods with a twentyseven-year-old called Giorgi: ‘Giorgi from Georgia.’ He came to Palermo as a teenager and is now training as a social worker and cultural mediator with my aunt Emma. We find one another on the steps of the Teatro Massimo, where I’d been sitting under an olive tree.

Within a few streets’ walk away, we’re dodging the traffic of shoppers and talking quickly. We end up at the edge of the Ballarò street market, one of many markets which divide up the week for Palermitans. Nestled low between sunlit

purely altruistic, it’s rightly self-interested: “He’s not just respecting human rights, the thing he’s really dealing with is the security of his own city.

So many other mayors are following our example now in opposing the current government. If you make arrivals uncomfortable, make it a struggle to find work, to rest, to live, that’s what creates chaos, anger, suffering, and frustration. It’s a huge security flaw.” When she speaks about her work, Yodit reframes the language around migration: “the principle objective of our work here is to follow these kids on their journeys of ‘autodetermination.’” On this last word, Yodit pauses and looks at me with real intention. She’s been hitting the table as she speaks. “I prefer ‘autodetermination’ as a term. I like to use it instead of ‘integration,’ or even ‘interaction.’

‘Autodetermination’ is about letting these kids show what skills they have, working on what they’ve got and what they lack, orienting themselves. We accompany them along a small part of the journey, but as they grow up, they stray into completely new territory without us.”

palazzos and churches, it is a maze of stalls heaving with meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, clothes, trainers, household items and more. The sellers spar with their voices, punches of ‘buongiorno’ ringing across the crowds of shoppers, listing everything on offer. At times, the vocal competition grows so fierce that their booming calls drown out our conversation.

“They’re so beautiful, so colourful,” he muses, though I can’t tell if he’s talking about the markets or the people; I’d been told proudly by my grandmother that if I went to Ballarò, I’d see Palermitans and foreigners working side by side.

As a cultural mediator, Giorgi spends his time explaining Palermitan culture to new arrivals, as well as helping them understand one another’s cultural backgrounds as they settle in to the city.

He talks to me at length about candlelit dinners out on the city’s streets, where people share food, music and poetry. I ask him if it’s easy to be Palermitan and he squeals a long “yeeees” in response. “I am Palermitan. I’m so proud to live in this city. To be Palermitan is to be so many different things. It’s liberating here. The colour of your skin, who you’re into, where you’re from […] it’s a non-issue. What you are on the inside: it’s all the same.” Giorgi is part of a new generation of Palermitans taking root in the city centre, Sicilians and foreigners alike, whose politics are perhaps even more liberal than their hospitable predecessors. “The youth have got more space of mind, more ways of thinking, bigger, higher dreams. There’s a complexity in their approach. The mindset of the youth is, in my opinion, so unrestrained. A change is going to come. It’s only just starting.” While it would be easy to turn this into a story of young against old, or a generation taking over those before them, Yodit sees the current climate as part of one long tradition of accoglienza, most closely translatable as ‘hospitality’: “Sicily is in the Mediterranean.

It’s in our geography. It’s in our history. It’s part of our nature, part of our DNA, to be a centre of movement, of transformation. Sicilians have always been familiar with this flux, this change. They’ve always fought for justice, for fortune, there’s always been a different take here.”

“I’m convinced that immigration is a phenomenon that no one can stop. It’s pointless to try. You can invent laws, you can pass acts, anything you want.

But no political force, whether Italian or European, can stop it. Mobility, the sense of movement – it’s an intrinsic human right embedded in every person.”

Antonio Perricone

In a Churchyard The drops from swollen clouds conspire to form a tremulous and fearsome storm of rain; like small glass stones, converging in a swarm of rock salt – spiteful, jagged in their strain.

And in that churchyard – ancient, veiled from sun, I trudge the rows and glance at all the dates, in desperate search to find the the oldest one, unsettled by the wind-blown, clanking gates.

My mind predicts a sight of what’s below, a flashing horror: skull, and crooked teeth – the flowers rot amongst the melting snow, and long to feed upon the bones beneath.

I find the grave – its stone is loose and bent, and see a shifting in the sediment.

Alex Haveron Jones

TEAM

Leo Gadaski, Antonio Perricone, Dan Brooks, Elizabeth Merrigan, Léa Gayer de Mena, Jade Spencer, Mack Willett, Alice Yang, Crystal Lee, Juliana Pars, Michelle Xu, Poppy Sowerby, Ng Wei Kai, Alex Chasteen, Shayon Mukherjee, Jess Vyas, Zehra Munir, Mónica Lindsay-Pérez, Holly Fairgrieve, Sophie Coe, Laila March, Ana Sengupta, Noah Seltzer, Max Watkins, Eve Robson-Rooney, Kathleen Quaintance, Kirsty Fabiyi, Anna Covell, Sophie Kuang, Ellen Sharman, Emily Reed, Rachel Qiu, Bethany Molyneux, Abby McCann, Indi Marriott, Annabelle Fuller, Scarlet Katz Roberts, Alex Haveron Jones, Bella Daniel, Chung Kiu Kwok, Francesca Peacock, Eleanor Redpath, Martha Davies, Beth James, Emmeline Armitage, Niuniu Zhao, Cerian Richmond Jones, Rachel Tudor, Jack Womack, Neil Natarajan, Sanjana Gunasekaran, Emily Louise, Tom Shah, Olivia Hicks, Emilia Cieslak, Isabel Morris, Leela Jadhav, CJ Salapare, Allie Pitchon, Kathy Rawlings, Oscar Heath Stephens, Jorge López Llorente, Jason Liu, Matthew Hardy, Johan Chung, Victor Azmanov, Willow Senior, Daisy Lynch, Tabitha Owen, Margot Harvey, Gerda Krivaite

The Isis Movement TT19

COVER.indd 1

03/06/2019 14:21