The ISIS, Hilary 2017

THE ISIS Hilary Term 2017

EDITORIAL

T

his edition of The ISIS is in conversation. We wanted this term’s writing to be about the everyday, and we wanted to give readers the opportunity to make the magazine meaningful to themselves in each of their lives. We hope you’ll find each piece of work to be an encounter, not just between yourself and the writing, but also between the writing and the world that gives it meaning.

We’ve spent three months talking. To each other, to our writers, to everyone around us. You’ll find obvious examples of conversation in this edition; interviews with Francis Morris, director of the Tate Modern, and nature writer Robert Macfarlane, but the focus on discussion doesn’t end there. Madeleine Pollard’s ‘Celebration and Censorship’ is a dialogue is with her readers on a rarely discussed topic, and Fintan Calpin’s ‘What You Reading?’ explores the way we exchange ideas when we read and write, and whether we might, after all, be bad at it. You’ll notice an emphasis on fiction in this edition. We wanted to ensure that there was a platform for those who write stories. They, too, are always in discussion; with potential, with possibility, with what could be rather that what is. We’ve spent three months talking, and we won’t stop now.

Thank you Ben Eastham, Tom Gatti, Robert Montgomery, Daniella Shreir, Frances Morris, Robert Macfarlane, OSPL, Turl Street Kitchen, John Berger, Facebook messenger, Vicky, Max, Jamie, Summer, Thomas, Tess, Alexis, Ali Smith, Gwen Stefani, Kez Fender, William Morris, Cellar, Sula Collective, the Glass Armonica, the X5 bus to Cambridge, Nina Simone, red grapes, Niloo, Ellie, TJ, Lily, Zadie Smith, Rosie’s bike, the personal photography collection of Sir Elton John, Grace, Ezra Furman, Google Sheets, Cuntry Living, Eleanor, Jacob, Fintan and Christian, to our friends for putting up with us, to our writers, readers, and to each other.

Enjoy.

Rosie and Sam x

2

STAFF LIST Broadcasting Director: Max Reynolds

Editors: Rosie Collier and Sam Dunnett

Broadcasting Team: Lucy Flemming-Brown, Alex Hine, Oscar McNab, Georgia Robson, Jamie Tahsin, Tobi Thomas

Deputy Editors: Lily Begg, Ellie Gomes, TJ Jordan, Niloo Sharifi

Events Directors: Alexis Murray Luo and Tess Hulton

Sub-Editors: Billie Esplen, Julieta Caldas, Mouki Kambouroglou, Gaby Mancey-Jones, Madeleine Pollard, Aibhe Rea

Events Team: Ted Mair, Zoe HarrisWallis

Fiction Director: Summer Koo

Business Manager: Thomas Munro

Fiction Team: Jess Brown, Kat Dixon-Ward, Thomas Graus, Gazelle Mba, Flo Ward

Business Team: Richard Birch, Mary Ormerod, Aditya Badaya

Creative Director: Vicky Robinson

Review Editor: Frey Kwa Hawking

Creative Team: Megan Black, Florrie Engleback, Anjelica Smerin, Kate Weir

Blog Writers: Katy Cowles, Maddie Duperouzel, Harrison Fannon, Patrick Grealey, Shahryar Iravani, Carl du Jeu, Noush Kavanagh, Jeevan Ravindran, Michael Sackur, Nina Sandelson, Abhisvara Sinha

Creative Events: Grace Linden

3

CONTENTS BODY ‘Our Daughters’ Daughters Will Adore Us’ Avery Curran

6

Celebration and Censorship Madeleine Pollard

9

A Conversation with Sophia Yuet See, 13 co-founder of Sula Collective Mouki Kambouroglou

TELL O (water) Charlotte Jackson

47

Bendrigal Oliver Eagleton

48

Lightning Tree Tabitha Hayward

50

Tell Us Gazelle Mba

52

Notes Alexander Hine

54

A Maker of Things Gaby Mancey-Jones 23

Right Natalie Nickels

54

Architecture’s Shifting Meanings Matt 26 Roberts

Fat Alexander Bridge

55

Blackness in Brazil Tobi Thomas 16 A Conversation with Frances Morris Rosie 20 Collier

CRAFT

Oxford’s Radical Past Matthew Myers 28 Stealing Food: A Tribute to John Berger 31 Sam Dunnett

NOW

Shadows Can’t Know the Sun Lucy 56 Thompson Wart Margo Munro Kerr

57

Yours Haroun Hameed

58

500 WORDS

Wyr: An Essay on Reading Badly Fintan 34 Calpin Social Media and Social Memory Christian 37 Amos ‘You Will Never Make Australia Home’ 41 Julieta Caldas A Conversation with Robert McFarlane 43 Gaby Mancey-Jones

4

Thomas Ball

62

Francesca Violich Kennedy

63

Naomi Polonsky

64

Aaron Skates

65

BODY

5

Avery Curran

“OUR DAUGHTERS’ DAUGHTERS WILL ADORE US”

A

out an alternative historical model. As the first female presidential nominee in American history, she said “standing here as my mother’s daughter, and my daughter’s mother, I’m so happy that this day has come.” The gulf between Trump’s rhetoric and hers was perhaps never clearer. The coverage of the events and speeches began to blur together. For one correspondent, the strong women he knew, and those that were in the public eye, often looked less at individual moments of struggle and achievement than at a continuum stretching from women who had fought long before them to those not

s Donald Trump officially became his party’s nominee during the Republican National Convention in July 2016, commentators remarked on his Nixonian speech, with its frequent references to law and order, stirring up fears of “mass lawlessness”. The more pessimistic among them drew comparisons between Trump and the ‘America First’ rhetoric of America’s Nazi sympathisers in the 1930s. More so than usual, people and pundits alike looked to the past to make sense of the present. A week later, Hillary Clinton gave her convention speech, and set

6

yet born. Clinton’s statement that she still hears her late mother’s voice, “urging me to keep working, keep fighting for right, no matter what”, occupies a specific place in feminist rhetoric. Followed by a rather clumsy attempt at cultural relevance by way of a Hamilton quotation about legacy, her speech draws together past, present, and future generations of women. Again and again, she comes back to the debt owed to the past, to her own mother.

daughters. Not for nothing did Mary Poppins’ depiction of the suffragettes make reference to “daughters’ daughters” and a sense of sisterhood. The boundary between literal and metaphorical motherhood is, however, a knife-edge. Is the politics of motherhood centered around the idea of a continuum of action between generations of women, or is it centered around actually having children? On the one hand, by co-opting a historical mode of women’s oppression, the motherhood discourse in politics grants dignity to the multitudes of women who have historically been confined to the household.

Emphasis on ‘literal’ motherhood, on the other hand, carries with it a number of problems, chiefly biological essentialist implications: it excludes transgender women, reduces women in general to their bodies, as well as implying that women without children somehow cannot participate in feminist tradition.

Looking back to over a century ago, many women in the public eye were using remarkably similar language. The late nineteenth century saw women beginning to discuss their experiences of motherhood publicly. A series of articles appeared in 1894 in the Contemporary Review, a periodical which was often the home of spirited public debate. Blanche Crackanthorpe’s article is the opening salvo, raising the warning to domestic culture of an entire generation of middle-class daughters going on strike as their shocked mothers look on. She sympathises with the daughters, defending their desire for autonomy, but compares them to a “rebellious baby”. For the mothers, whom she considers the “legitimate rulers”, she urges magnanimity and the understanding of daughters as part of a collective youth.

It is a complex and sensitive portrayal of tense relations between generations entering a brave new world of opportunity

While an overly literal interpretation of the politics of motherhood simply puts women against each other, the construction of a metaphorical political motherhood promotes a much-needed long view in politics; building on the work of those who went before, for those who will come after. Clinton’s leftward shift during the primaries, while seen by some as cynical, could also be an attempt at furthering this dialectical approach. Her and her husband’s history in the 1990s of increasing mass incarceration and her infamous statement describing some young black men as “superpredators” have been rightly called racist. During the 2016 election, though, she worked closely with a group called the Mothers of the Movement, seven African-American mothers whose children were killed by law enforcement or died in police custody, who also spoke

Familial relationships also became important as radical men and women raised daughters who became prominent feminists, such as Emmeline Pankhurst, whose mother, Sophia Crane, was an early supporter of women’s suffrage. The Pankhurst family went on, of course, to found the Women’s Social and Political Union, led by Emmeline and her three

7

at the convention. If this effort can be read as earnest, it is The Evolution of the Daughters, indeed: an evolution from her own previous views, and an evolution from the feminism of the nineteenth century which was often imperialist in its outlook and sometimes flirted with eugenics.

The question of whether Clinton’s evolution was in earnest, though, is not entirely settled. While she offered a retraction of the “superpredator” accusation and explained her commitment to ending the “school-to-prison pipeline”, it wasn’t a full apology. Understandably, some felt that she had lost their trust. Her work with the Mothers of the Movement could then be seen as an empty, performative gesture, a way of creating an artificial sense of solidarity with those she had wronged in the past. Such a gesture recalls a tendency of some to paper over the cracks in feminism, both historical and contemporary. The racism of many white American suffragettes, for example, only came to the fore in discussion of the suffragette movement relatively recently.

The fact that some predecessors in the continuum of political women may have rejected the women of colour who followed them is an indication that the politics of motherhood is just that: politics.

possible a century before, or even just a few decades ago. She stood describing all those people who were enslaved, segregated, and oppressed but continued to do the necessary work that enabled her to “wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And […] watch [her] daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women playing with their dogs on the White House Lawn.’ It brought the audience to tears — this image a visual reminder of the progress made by black activists of the past combined with her perspective as a proud mother, looking on.

This time around, the politics of motherhood and the long view were rejected, in favour of chauvinistic bombast with a short-term outlook. This is one area, though, where historical perspective—so important in a time of fear and upheaval where everything feels unprecedented— can be galvanising, not just a warning.

These women of the late nineteenth century, for all their flaws, fought tirelessly throughout their lifetimes to secure victories for their daughters, and we continue to reap the benefits of their work.

In the years ahead, we should remember that one of the defining features of the suffragette movement was persistence.

They were not the first generation in their struggle, just as ours will not be the last: the continuum stretches forward.

Michelle Obama’s appearance at the Democratic National Convention represented a long-term evolution, though. In those halcyon days of July (for hindsight is 20/20) a black first lady, proudly introducing a potential first female president, seemed to portend a new centre of American politics. Her speech and subsequent standing ovation at the Democratic National Convention, followed by calls for her to consider running for office herself, were a scenario that would have been im-

8

CELEBRATION AND CENSORSHIP Locating the Clitoris in the UK Madeleine Pollard

S

ex is ingrained upon our cultural consciousness, flowing freely through our media, conversations and consumer society. However, this pervasiveness creates an outward impression of sexual liberalism that is, unfortunately, not entirely accurate. The gendered narrative that has been spun since time immemorial continues to generate an unsettling imbalance in the ways in which we conceptualise and respond to sexuality.

Women’s bodies* have conventionally been treated as desired objects to be acted upon, for example, as opposed to desiring subjects with sexual autonomy.

Recent initiatives designed to embrace female sexual agency, such as the website OMGYes.com, are being countered by legislative attempts to suppress representations of female sexual pleasure in pornography. These conflicting efforts to celebrate and stifle female sexuality warp and confuse our relationship with something as natural as sexual pleasure.

Female sexual agency should be a given, yet it has historically been denied or encircled by shame and discomfort.

Lady Hillingdon’s admission in 1912 that “upon hearing my husband’s footsteps outside my door, I lie down on my bed, open my legs and think of England”, engendered the rather telling idiom that encouraged women to embrace any unwanted or unimpressive sex for the sake of populating our nation with fine young men. From this archaic reduction of women’s role in sex to the weight placed on female virginity, women have been subject to a disturbing double standard that we have failed to shake off.

Talk of male masturbation is peppered around playgrounds from pre-pubescent years, yet in my experience not a word was spoken of female masturbation—it was considered something of a taboo by people of all genders. I can remember my shock aged seventeen at a friend

9

talking openly about her vibrator in front of a group of guys, however I did not bat an eyelid when yet another male friend declared his propensity for “revision wanks”. There was a pervasive assumption that heterosexual men masturbated, due in part to the multibillion pound mainstream porn industry created for just that. Speaking to Dr. Fiona Vera-Gray, research fellow at Durham University Law School whose research interests specialize in sexual violence and female embodiment, she outlines that although porn is used by all genders, and is certainly not the only force that shapes our gender norms. “It is certainly implicated in the promotion of men’s sexual entitlement and the prioritization of men’s sexual release; after all the ‘goal’ of mainstream pornography is the male orgasm – the literal money shot”, she states. Vera Gray’s 2016 research project Women on Porn is the largest ever survey of women’s relationship to pornography, attempting to examine the complex responses of “users and refusers, and their myriad combinations over a woman’s sexual biography”. Fiona’s project was motivated by a similar awareness of the disparity between the ways in which male sexuality and female sexuality are discussed. Working for almost a decade at a London based Rape Crisis Centre, delivering workshops and assemblies to assist in a whole school approach to

violence prevention, Fiona came to the uncomfortable realisation that absent from her necessary focus on safety was a discussion of its counterpart: freedom.

“We were inadvertently feeding into something positioning women as those whose sexual selves were acted on, rather than as also being sexual agents who acted through their bodies and out into the world,” she reflected. Despite the tacit knowledge that men masturbated and used porn to do so, she found that there was no space available to talk about or even point to the possibilities of young women masturbating. “I struggled to see how we were helping young women gain a sense of sexual autonomy, and began to wonder how women experienced their own”.

Perceptions of female sexuality as a taboo topic continue to be subtly enforced by government legislation. The 2016/17 Digital Economy Bill has been designed to further regulate online pornography, forcing website operators to adhere to the guidelines of The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) when publishing content. While there is no definitive list of sexual acts prescribed by the BBFC, adult film producers who have worked with them on pornographic DVDs have historically been prohibited from showing acts such as vaginal ejaculation and face-sitting—content that ultimately represents women as sexual agents. Acts

10

that prioritise male pleasure, such as deep throating and sperm ejaculation, have evaded censorship, delivering a disturbing message that the visible penile orgasm is acceptable, but the clitoral and vaginal orgasm must be policed. The idea that face-sitting might be ‘dangerous’ but deep throating entirely safe is a bewildering one, while prohibiting the sight of menstrual blood in porn only increases the stigma surrounding natural functions of the body. As a spokeswoman for MindGeek, one of the world’s biggest pornographic website operators, told the Guardian; “Many of the sexual activities prohibited from R18 [the BBFC’s most explicit certification] are normalised and accepted aspects of healthy sexuality, and are proudly celebrated by the feminist, queer and ethical porn movements internationally”.

in, for example, the context for violence against women and girls, discrimination against transgender people, or harmful racist stereotypes”. A push for safer porn should surely centre less on misogynistic suspicions surrounding female sexual pleasure, and more on the rights of those at risk within the industry itself.

Common conceptions of sex deriving from porn are likely to be unrealistic and socially reactive when viewers are presented with sexual acts sculpted purely by the age-old male gaze. As a product and an industry, porn is necessarily subject to government regulation just as the advertising industry is. Yet it is inherently troubling that the government and commercial producers can pick and choose when female sexuality should be made visible. The naked cis-woman’s body permeates our adverts; it is fragmented, polished and capitalised on to sell products, but the natural functions of that body in its authentic form are hidden and consequently stigmatised.

“Our orgasmic bodies sit outside of the capitalist structure; we don’t need to buy anything to do it, we don’t even need anyone to participate”, Fiona explains.

“This poses a problem for consumer capitalism, and so the system has created the product of porn to try to satiate that need in a way that continues to atomise us. Indeed, the multi-billion pound nature

Within this legislation efforts are in place to protect younger viewers, banning access to anyone under the age of 18, and it’s prohibited content also includes violent sex acts. However, it is difficult to see how a push for Internet safety can justify the suppression of female sexual agency in an industry that, whether it likes it or not, participates in the dialogue of gender politics. Fiona argues that regulating pornography on the current basis of obscenity detracts from “a valuable focus on how pornography is implicated

11

increases the value of OMGYes in giving women agency over their sexual pleasure.

It contains video interviews that provide a visual component without fetishizing the female form — something rarely seen on our computer or film screens.

of the pornography industry becomes conveniently lost in the civil liberties versus censorship framing of the debate.”

The vision we are sold of sex can therefore differ entirely from the reality.

While what we may gain pleasure from privately does not necessarily translate into the people we are in our social or political lives, and while some users of porn can isolate it as a commercial product distinct from their perceptions of sex in reality, these government measures do the exact opposite of making porn safer.

By censoring female desire in action, they project a view of sex as predominantly for men and reinforce a dangerous framework of gender inequality.

Yet efforts to develop this website into an app have been met with resistance by more censorship laws. As co-founder Richard Perkins explained to GQ Magazine, “Anything that has to do with women’s sexual pleasure—even using the word ‘clitoris’ or the word ‘orgasm’—is blocked in places like the App Store and the Google Play Store... So we’re still sort of in the Stone Age, where women’s pleasure can’t be talked about too specifically or else it’s worthy of getting bleeped out.” Although efforts are being made to embrace and celebrate female sexuality, we are still a long way from unraveling the sexist double standard that has intertwined itself around our culture. Ventures like OMGYes that are driving progress in the acceptance of female pleasure are crucial, however the censorship of female sexuality from a body as powerful as our own government could keep us fixed in the past.

However, in 2016, we also witnessed the rise in popularity of the revolutionary website OMGYes.com, which aims to demystify and celebrate female sexuality.

As a website that aims to educate individuals of all genders and couples about clitoral pleasure and effective techniques for achieving an orgasm, it is as an online source far healthier in educating us about sexual pleasure than porn and is the first of its kind.

Based on extensive research by Indiana University’s School of Public Health and the Kinsey Institute, as well as interviews with “real people inspired to share their personal experiences”, demonstrations and touchable simulation technology, this website is both refreshing and revolutionary in its approach to female sexuality. According to Cosmopolitan’s Female Orgasm Survey, which surveyed more than 2,300 women aged eighteen to forty, only fifty-seven per cent of women usually orgasm from penetrative sex, compared with ninety-five per cent of men. The importance of clitoral stimulation for many women therefore

*The terms ‘women’, ‘female’ and phrases ‘women’s bodies’ and ‘female sexuality’ in this article concentrate on the experience of cis-women, with the acknowledgment that gender is not defined by the body and many experiences of sexuality and gender lie outside that of cisgender women.

12

“CREATING AN ARCHIVE OF OUR CONTEMPORARIES”

a conversation with Sophia Yuet See, co-founder of Sula Collective Mouki Kambouroglou

T

he birth and growth of Sula Collective is something I’ve followed with pride. Standing in the familiar applegreen kitchen of my childhood, Sophia and I are, to my observant mother, the same rowdy eight year olds from over a decade ago. And while in some cases nothing has changed—I’m still the book nerd, Sophia is yet to grasp ‘talking’ as opposed to yelling—we have travelled convoluted paths to the present, assumed adulthood. Sophia, barely nineteen, is a full-time art student in London who volunteers for Shake!, designs covers for Consented and has her short films screened at the BFI. Though it’s hard to keep up with her day to day developments as a multimedia artist, the one thing I can rely on is Sula. In her and her cofounders’ own words, Sula Collective is “an online magazine by and for people of colour [PoC]”. The collective is named after the eponymous hero of Toni Morrison’s novel, Sula, a character whose complexity intrigued and inspired the cofounders. Using the limitless expanse of the internet, Sophia, and her co-founders Kassandra and Casey, have carved out a

platform for PoC to connect with each other and simply breathe creatively. “It’s about being heard,” Sophia explains to me. “There are a plethora of social justice zines and collectives these days, but when they breach subjects of race, a lot of well-meaning allies can decentre PoC by just not listening.” Sula is a different form of social justice — it’s not about being overtly political, but about reviving the voices of the silenced. And for Sophia at least, it was a cathartic project that followed a summer of disillusionment.

We are sitting at my cluttered desk now with matching mugs of tea—talking about university, catching up, Sophia tells me about a zine she made on mental health for a brief on ‘collections’: “In the feedback group, someone said they felt I was oversharing, that they knew too much about me too quickly.” We talk about the stigma of mental health, but also how the viewer’s discomfort can make an artist feel embarrassed, silenced, ashamed, when the process had been empowering and made them feel brave.

“Someone told me once that using the

13

of colour makes me think of something else. I have just finished reading Zadie Smith’s new novel, Swing Time, and I ask Sophia what she thinks about the narrator’s description of the phrase ‘PoC’ as a euphemism. “I guess it’s an inclusive and sometimes empowering term, the way we use it in Sula, for example, but more generally it is problematic in that it does not capture the nuances of our experiences.” Most reclaimed slurs suffer the complexities of language politics, and Sophia and I agree that this one too is difficult. I would rather avoid whitesplaining an issue as thorny as this, but it does seem as if a lot of white people still fear describing others as ‘black’ or ‘brown’ and do use the epithet ‘of colour’ euphemistically, perhaps subconsciously perpetuating societal complexes. Even in the online creative world “you have to pick your battles,” Sophia says, “because sometimes engaging costs too much, and you have to look after your mental health.” I know this well; I have watched her and others close to me go through it, feeling helpless and enraged by my own privilege. But I know that my own

phrase WOC — woman of colour — is defining myself too much by my race.”

It is funny how people in positions of power feel they can decide when to see race. I think of an exhibition at the Met Breuer in New York that I visited in early December, how the curation seemed to impose political readings upon Kerry James Marshall’s paintings in places where, to me, he seemed to be portraying scenes of black American civilian life like any other twentieth century artist.

The abundance of black figures—solely black figures—was, in the curators’ minds, a move to rewrite history. And though I later found through research that Marshall does indeed seek to fill “[a] vacuum in the image bank”, my first impressions of the exhibit as a whole were blinded by my liberal gaze: are the curators politicising the black body? Is he not just painting day-to-day experiences?

I tell Sophia about this and she replies unassumingly, “for many artists of colour, the personal is inherently political.”

But Sophia’s comment about being told not to define herself as a woman

14

white guilt is useless, a hindrance even, to the plight for social justice. A lot of people pick and choose when to see race, and that is damaging, but choosing never to see race can be worse. “It means recognising your privilege and they do not want to implicate themselves,” is how Sophia puts it, and it is obvious; the more people opt out, blissfully ignorant, the less progress will be made.

Sophia describes as “no standards” but really means ‘no requirements’. Although there is a curation process, there’s no hierarchy in the team, no money involved, and criticism is constructive; but more importantly, this criticism comes from a place of understanding. In a world where representation of minorities is an ongoing struggle, Sula’s platform is mutually beneficial; a personal, therapeutic space for the founders, and a place for creators to be seen and found by brands, agents and the like.

While online magazines can seem cold in their virtual nature, Sula retains its intimacy. Though they encourage white people to engage with the space, the creators come first, making Sula a safe environment for expression of emotion that can too often be taken as a personal attack and trigger arguments elsewhere on the internet. The intimacy of the environment is crucial in supporting the site, as it relies on the will of volunteers to submit personal work. The team has really taken advantage of the internet, making a space for themselves instead of assimilating into creative spaces that were, in Sophia’s words, “not made for us”. Similar spaces – La Liga Zine, OOMK – serve similar purposes, but the idea of competition is scary to Sophia.

“Growth is scary!” she says and I chuckle, because a couple of months prior to this conversation, I was emailing her Time Out interview to my parents and university friends with big-sisterly pride, and all I can see for her is a path heading up. We are both second generation immigrants, so our parents share the same burning desire for us to get through university and bag a degree — “become an artist after!” is a phrase we are painfully familiar with — but for Sophia, it is less important. In some ways, Sula reflects that option; its openness with regard to submissions extends to what

We’ve heard it before, what goes on the internet is permanent—parents, teachers, strangers even, love to remind us that this virtual reality is more real than its epithet implies. Sophia has never met her co-founders; the majority of her team live across the pond. Having found each other through the blogspot community, the entire space was planned and produced via lengthy skype calls—and continues to be curated in this way too. This aspect alone speaks for the strength of the blogosphere, if we needed any further convincing. “Everything I’m saying has been said before,” she says, “my knowledge is largely passed down from other PoC”.

As a close friend of hers, I can vouch for that. I’ve seen the internet comfort her and help her grow over the past couple of years. She is certainly no recluse, but the unique experience of inhabiting a space you feel so out of touch with can demand a search for solidarity in both the online and offline worlds. Despite popular belief, the internet is far more social than it seems, and increasingly real as we invest ourselves and our relationships in it. Though we enjoy its growth, we fear its strength. But we shouldn’t; its limitless space provides true democracy, and true representation of the individual.

15

BLACKNESS IN BRAZIL Tobi Thomas

P

inches from your head when passing through the many paths and alleys, may appear treacherous at first glance, but in reality is safe and secure enough to supply power to Rochina’s 70,000 residents. Its relatively large population resembled that of a vast but tight-knit family.

Despite suffering due to an indifferent government, an innate sense of care for one another was unchanging amongst Rochina’s community. Homelessness was uncommon, and no one ever went hungry. It was only a few days after my

erceptions of the favelas are often reduced to a bundle of misconceptions and superficial stereotypes; they are portrayed as exotic playgrounds permeated by drugtraffickers and armed children, by both the Brazilian and international media.

But my stay with a family friend in Rochina, the largest favela in the city, was characterised by its eclectic quirks and its adherence to DIY culture as a way of life. Its distinctly homemade network of electric wiring, haphazardly draped

16

arrival, that the community’s unspoken laws, contingent moral codes and demographics became apparent. Rochina was overwhelmingly black and poor.

with the recognition of my mediocre Portuguese, sculpted by my distinctly British accent. To many Brazilians, Great Britain is to wealth and empire what blackness is to slavery and poverty, causing me to feel like a walking paradox in their eyes. “They view you as British first”, Obi informed me, a friend and the owner of a popular café in the favela of Tabajaras. “They see you as a passport once they hear you speak”.

A brief wander away from Rochina’s centre, over and across the adjacent flyover footpath, the glitzy yet somewhat stale apartments and penthouses of Sao Conrado appear, a visual representation of Brazil’s barefaced and unabashed class divide — and how it is intertwined with racial identity. Brazil is often framed as a cultural melting pot, a multi-ethnic utopia in which racism simply does not exist. In reality, fifty-three per cent of Brazilians identify as Afro-Brazilian, but make up seventy per cent of those living in the favelas, and only seven per cent of those living within the wealthier district.

On passing through Gavea or Leblon, the contrast with Rochina was immense; not only because of the missing joyful thunder of funk carioca, which blasts from the makeshift speakers scattered across Rochina, but because the only black Brazilians I encountered were confined to professions in food service or construction.

Black Brazilians, on average, earn half of what their white counterparts earn per month, and have an unemployment rate of fifty per cent — a statistic that materialises in Lapa. Despite being hailed as a suburban neighbourhood and famed for its historical arches and dynamic nightlife, Afro-Brazilians make up the majority of Lapa’s homeless population.

Such structural inequalities and biases prominent in Brazil are traced back to the country’s own legacy of slavery and European colonialism. Having shipped in five million slaves (eleven times more than the USA), Brazil was the last of the Americas to abolish slavery, finally doing so in 1888. Shortly afterwards, the Portuguese government began to subsidise Portuguese migration to Brazil, in an effort to vanquish the supposed ‘stain’ of blackness: in 1890, sixty-five per cent of Brazil’s population was black, and between 1890 and 1914, two and a half million Europeans migrated to Brazil. The European migrants were favoured by those controlling housing and employment, while the black population was forced to live within the city’s shadow, a shadow from which the favelas emerged. But a spectrum of variations exists within the very nature of Brazil’s racial identity. Without the enforcement of institutionalised segregation, racial lines have always been indistinct. Consequently, notions of racial purity have become blurred; there isn’t a polarised dichotomy between black and white, but rather a scale. Although this may appear to be less harmful than the racial polarity we associate with the USA, it has brought about racism in a veiled and insidious form, one that

I felt Brazil’s warped perceptions of class strongest when navigating the city as a non-Brazilian black. My interactions, especially with those native to the areas of the city, were notably different during conversation. Changes in their posture, poise, and body language came about

17

inhibits conversations addressing the deep racial disparities that exist today.

of Women, Racial Equality and Human Rights was dissolved into a less focused Ministry of Justice and Citizenship.

Afro-Brazilian people reside within the paradox of being both visible and invisible. Their art, food and music populates certain areas of Rio; from the community A Pequena Africa, built by Africans originally from the northern state of Bahia, to the touristy hippie market on Ipanema beach where more recent African migrants serve traditional Yoruba food such as yams and plantains.

Samba, Funk, and Capoeira, considered to be essential elements of Brazilian culture, can have their roots traced back to the West Africans who were brought to Brazil from the beginning of the 16th century. Despite this, Afro-Brazilians experience erasure and marginalisation in many other aspects of life. The election of Michel Temer, the current President of Brazil, has in many ways signified a retrograde in Brazil’s long and complex struggle for racial equality. His cabinet of twenty-two officials contains no women or Afro-Brazilians. The previous Ministry

Maria, a neighbour who had been living in Rochina for the past six years, told me that she struggled with classifying herself as black. “People here only associate black with negatives, like poverty and slavery. That’s why I was reluctant to describe myself as such.”

The idea of Blackness as a burden is a reality that pervades the minds of many Brazilians. Representation is scarce, with Maria informing me that she has always struggled to find role models that she could identify with. She showed me the pictures she drew of herself as a child, with fair skin, light eyes and cascading hair, a direct contrast to her tight curls and brown skin. Brazilian magazines, billboards, and other aspects of pop culture all subscribe to and depicted this narrow definition of what beauty is, making it virtually unattainable to anyone who isn’t of European ancestry.

“But I do think things are changing”,

18

she tells me, in-between watching the Pacifying Police Unit enter Rochina’s main road from her bedroom window.

yet disguising its roots. Social media platforms such as Afropunk, which has almost 600,000 Instagram followers, have established units in Brazil aiming to unify this imbalance by creating a space that cultivates Afro-Brazilian pride. Youtubers such as Nátaly Neri and Gabi Oliveira create content that caters to Afro-Brazilians in a way that the mainstream media fails to. Maria tells me how she and many of her peers at school are starting to show pride in their roots. “I’ve noticed that many more of my friends are self-identifying as black. It may seem insignificant, but to wear our culture with pride is a major step forward.” These individual actions of non-conformity should not be viewed within a vacuum. Just like Maria, there’s a new generation of young AfroBrazilian trailblazers in bloom; steadily tearing down racial barriers in a world which tells them that they’re invisible, unheard and belong in the favelas.

The presence of the 2016 Olympic games coincided with an emerging cultural movement; Afro-Brazilians, who had been confined to the margins of society for so long, recognising that they were at the core of the bold, vibrant and innovative lifestyle that many perceive as Brazilian. The success of Judoka Rafaela Silva, who won Brazil’s first gold medal at the games, somewhat signified a cultural shift. As an Afro-Brazilian woman who grew up in the notorious Cidade De Deus favela, her win was symbolic for many young girls who recognised pieces of themselves within her. With an underground culture on an upward trajectory, acting as a source of counter hegemonic visibility and representation, Afro-Brazilians are creating their own platforms of expression. For so long, Brazilian culture has had a tendency to valorise African People and their culture, classing it as exotic and admired,

19

F

A CONVERSATION WITH FRANCES MORRIS

rances Morris joined Tate as a curator in 1987. In April 2016, after holding positions as Head of Displays and Director of Collection, Frances was appointed the role of Director of the Tate Modern. Morris is, in a sense the gallery’s own architect. She has already had a greater influence on the gallery than the three men (Lars Nittve, Vincentre Todolí and Chris Dercon) who have directed the Tate since it opened in 2000. And as the first female director, she will continue to cast her mould.

Rosie Collier

she states. For Morris, “this includes a strong commitment to women and the practices that have been overlooked historically”. “Art changes, we change” was the slogan for the opening of the new extension in July 2016, printed on the side of the Southbank gallery. Her direction has given more space for female and international artists within the Tate Modern’s walls: Louise Bourgeois has been given an ‘Artist Room’, with Marina Abramovic and the Guerilla Girls having extensive gallery space. This direction seems to be the climax of her work in the gallery since it opened in 2000. Already Morris had provided space for women within the Tate, curating landmark retrospectives of women’s art such as Yayoi Kusama in 2012 and Agnes Martin in 2015. Her vision as director to offer more space to women in art inside the Tate Modern seems to be the culmination of her previous achievements.

Inside the art world, she is described as “a brilliant and imaginative curator”.

Outside the gallery Morris is “just a lovely person” and “fiercely intelligent and very generous with it”. Speaking on the phone, she is academic and approachable, friendly and intelligent. Her language is polished and refined and every sentence seems like it has been carefully considered. She speaks to me about her vision for the Tate Modern and its new Switch House Extension— a “commitment towards a better vision of what constitutes as creativity and the visual arts”,

And her vision for the Tate does not stop there. For Morris, the gallery is a space that encourages us to actively engage and participate. She stresses the need for “a commitment to understanding the way time based media and

20

upcoming ‘Uniqlo Tate Lates’, a chance to experience the gallery after hours with “a mix of art, music, film and workshop”) and collaborative ‘Tate Exchange’ see the gallery perform a social function. Her art, and the experiences of the individuals who “flock” here, is interactive.

In 2012, Newcastle Upon Tyne’s local council was threatening to reduce the culture budget by one hundred per cent.

Eventually, it was slashed by fifty per cent. Morris, aware of these divisions, assures me it is in the Tate’s interest to relieve this. The Tate’s Plus Tate scheme works closely with a community of galleries across the UK, and offers a professional network of mutual support and networking for artists. “Then of course”, she tells me “we are a place at the centre that can give a platform to regional artists. We have fifty-two organisations from across the UK over the course of the year, who will come to London and do programmes with us here.” But the emphasis here is on the artists in mind, and these artists must eventually go to London. For the children outside the capital, their experience of the arts is somewhat deprived in comparison.

And for Morris, the Tate’s role is also a political one. She talks of “a firm commitment to ‘cradle to grave learning’” and stresses that over the next few years, this is a model that they hope will be even more collectively delivered. The institution reaches out to its local communities in Southwark and Lambeth, encouraging the children in these areas to establish a strong and enduring relationship with the Tate Modern. “These children will have many opportunities to visit the Tate Modern— it won’t just be like “once when I was at school I went to Tate” it will be “Tate modern was my local museum”, she tells me. Of course, this commitment to arts education is invaluable, but I wonder if this highlights the disparity between arts and cultural access between the North and the South. Whilst children in these London constituencies can call the Tate Modern their local gallery, for many of those up North the same cannot be said.

According to the Arts Council, between 2010 and 2015, figures demonstrate that the total spending by local government in England on arts and culture has been reduced by sixteen per cent, hitting regions outside London the hardest.

We talk some more about arts and education, and out of curiosity I ask Morris how she got to where she is today.

“I wanted to have a creative engagement with what was basically an academic subject”, she tells me. Both a creative and an academic, Morris is an example of art’s ability to seep into, and form intersections across, all disciplines. With contemporary art in the UK in Morris’ hands— hands that are changing not only the art we see, but how we engage with art within the gallery space—we seem to be in for an exciting future.

21

CRAFT

22

A MAKER OF THINGS Decorative Art, Objects, and Sincerity Gaby Mancey-Jones

K

enji Ekuan died on 8 February 2015. He was known mostly for a handful of designs: the Kikkoman soy sauce bottle, Yamaha motorcycles, the Komachi bullet train, amongst others.

Underneath their mundane contexts, the commercial functionality of these objects hid a heartbreaking motivation.

Seven months later, Banksy’s Dismaland opened to great media attention and public demand. As with much of his work, there was a theme of crude anticonsumerism running through: a series of cereal boxes with the names changed to spell out “Your Dreams Are My Nightmares”, distorted and dying models of Disney princesses, butchered carousel horses. Speaking about his return to Hiroshima after the atrocity that killed his father and sister, Ekuan betrays a commitment to design that is in striking contrast to Dismaland’s anti-consumerist attitude towards objects: “Faced with that nothingness, I felt a great nostalgia for human culture. I needed something to

touch, to look at. Right then I decided to be a maker of things.”

Koons blows them up, Warhol repeated them, the YBAs did all sorts. In contemporary art, at least, satire, wit and other sideways views define the way we see objects and products. The objects we live amongst are reduced to symbols of a hyper-consumerist world, whether a can of tomato soup or the “superflat” satirical world of Takashi Murakami.

Outside of the lofty world of fine art, Banksy has made anti-consumerism into a lucrative business, his graphic diatribes against products appearing worldwide on posters and mugs and t-shirts. But wit alone is not necessarily a healthy way to view the world that surrounds us. In a tirade against Dismaland, conservative columnist Brendan O’Neill notes the unnecessary cruelty of “balloons that say ‘I am an imbecile’ (because if you buy a balloon at a theme park you are obviously

23

an imbecile)”. Ultimately, we live amongst objects: we buy balloons, watch TV, lie in beds, ‘unmade’ or not. Constant irony isn’t the right approach.

issues posed by mass consumption. But in the decorative arts we may nevertheless find the sincerity needed to combat the brittle and ironic approach to products that characterizes the work of many of the most well-known artists today.

In a pamphlet for his company before his death, Ekuan explained how he heard the voices of bicycles and cars in the burntout streets of Hiroshima, mangled and broken, telling him they wished they’d been used more. He subsequently turned from a Buddhist priesthood to industrial design: “The path of Buddha is the path to salvation for all living things, but I realized that, for me, the path to salvation lay in objects.” As opposed to the metaindustrialisation of Warhol or Hirst’s work—artwork built in faked factory settings—Ekuan was a believer in the sincerity of industrial design. In his eyes, one of the over three million soy sauce bottles that have come out of the Kikkoman factory have just as much of a soul as a heavily conceptualised Warhol screenprint.

Consider Ekuan’s predecessor, William Morris, another designer whose social views infused his work. Like Ekuan, he wanted a democratisation of beauty, but his view of industrialisation was more nuanced. Cautious about the increasing role of machinery, he advocated a return to the artisans of previous eras; Ekuan saw a socialist ideal of the Middle Ages in handmade objects built with skill and attention to function and beauty: “Because craftsmen took pleasure in their work... The treasures in our museums now are only the common utensils used in households of that age, when hundreds of medieval churches— each one a masterpiece—were built by unsophisticated peasants.” In both these cases their social ideals could be identified in their aesthetics: in the minimal beauty of a soy sauce bottle or the medieval patterns twisting across Morris & Co wallpaper. What makes this decorative art special is that it is not using fine art to comment on the social role of objects, it is letting them speak for themselves.

Ekuan’s work can be meaningfully classed under the label of the decorative arts: “the arts concerned with the production of objects which are both useful and beautiful” (OED). This group is defined in the post-renaissance West as distinct from fine arts, “which generally have no function other than to be seen”. Ekuan’s view of objects may not be critical enough, ignoring as it did the very real

Some contemporary artists attempt to use traditional forms of decorative art

24

to express social and political messages.

Amongst other mediums, Grayson Perry and Lisa Anne Auerbach use pottery and knitwear respectively. Auerbach, however, appears less invested in the form itself than its potential as a canvas for the bumper-sticker style slogans she knits into jumpers and scarves. In Perry’s work, depictions of modern society and all its paraphernalia (smartphones, tracksuits, bankers’ suits) are intended to contrast the traditional medium; The Existential Void (2012) is a pot covered in scribbles such as “Cute Irony”, “Another Blob”, and even “Meta Pot”. For both artists, objects are once again shrouded in irony.

approached by a pair of cut-out policemen holding batons. Today, arpilleras are popular tourist tat depicting innocuous scenes of market life and beaches. But their original use is a striking example of how decorative art can be a for political expression.

Decorative arts have their limits and hypocrisies: Ekuan’s vision of the speaking souls of his designs conveniently overlooks the environmental impact of consumerism; Morris’ complicated relationship with industrial machinery veered from labelling it “altogether an evil” to condoning its use by manufacturers he worked with. Clearly, there are reasons why we shouldn’t leap to defend consumerism—or mass production, or unnecessary waste. But we should take our relationship with objects seriously; blanket irony or crude anticonsumerism isn’t enough. “Regardless of what the object of design is, humans need design. For anything humans use in their day to day life, they need design, and it is a clear and concrete proof of the fundamental human right to live.” Ekuan understood the pervasive importance of objects: how the artefacts we study allow us to understand our past, and the products we design shape our future.

A useful comparison can be made between Perry’s tapestries and the arpilleras of Chile. This patchwork tapestries were created by the wives and family of los desparecidos, the men who disappeared under Pinochet’s dictatorship. This Catholic Church arts program for the women led to the creation of a new, politically charged art-form. There is no Perry-like clash of content and form in these original arpilleras. The apparent naivety of brightly coloured felt and simple shapes lent a weight to the scenes it depicted: a family of three women sat at a kitchen table, the fourth chair marked with a question mark; black outlines of corpses on a sunny desert landscape; a group of cut-out protesters, being

25

broadsheets. A more novel and interesting question is posed by the buildings which were never optimistic or utopian like the reforming projects of the 1950s and 1960s; those which reflect a less savory side of the historical British State.

ARCHITECTURE’S SHIFTING MEANINGS Redevlopment, Memory and Reading Gaol

Reading Gaol was designed by George Gilbert Scott in the language of the Gothic, which Scott would later appropriate for religious monuments such as the Martyr’s memorial, and industrial monuments such as St Pancras.

The prison is a brooding, imposing crenelated hulk. An octagonal lantern

Matt Roberts

I

n November 2016, a government minister declared himself to be at the “vanguard of a Renaissance”, promising an eradication of the aesthetically unworthy and a reconstruction of the unfairly demolished. On Facebook, the ‘Brutalism Appreciation Society’ has 47,792 members, at the time of writing.

In the cultural and political spheres, architecture is back on the national agenda.

“Governments consistently wage war against architectural heritage that alludes to the historical existence of ideological systems opposed to their own.” tower proclaims the militarism which lawbreakers could expect to feel the full brunt of inside. The public courtyard was regularly used for ritualised hangings in front of vast crowds, when the prisoner’s deeds had been suitably salacious—and as the decades passed, the life of the prison did not soften as much as we may expect. Perhaps more shocking than Victorian hangings are the internment programmes which ran during the Second World War, and the illegal detention and alleged mistreatment of dissident Irish Nationalists throughout the early twentieth century. Reading Gaol is, physically and symbolically, an immovable point in our cultural heritage, immortalised by Oscar Wilde’s ‘ballad’ and in De Profundis, a letter to Wilde’s lover Bosie written while the former was imprisoned for ‘gross indecency’. The insistent presence of the prison in the centre of Reading evokes an inability to

The comments of Transport Minister John Hayes take place in a long tradition.

Governments consistently wage war against architectural heritage that alludes to the historical existence of ideological systems opposed to their own.

A prominent recent example is that of Alison and Peter Smithson’s architectural legacy and its bleak fate: where we once had the promise of, or at least an attempt at, a long term solution to the crises of free market housing, there came instead Right to Buy, demolition, disparaging articles in the Daily Mail and cultish adoration for the ‘good old days’ of public architecture.

Criticisms of our abandonment of social housing heritage are nothing new.

The accusations of mismanagement have been played out a million times in back-and-forth exchanges between

26

accept or atone for historical realities, including those of state-sanctioned violence against LGBTQ people. But the building is not a perfect metaphor. Unlike the amnesia of the Government’s recent inability to pass the ‘Turing Bill’ and pardon the victims of horrific oppression in the twentieth century, its approach to the fate of prisons has been hands-on.

these buildings are no longer the property of the crown. A veritable legion of property developers await the answer with eager anticipation.

It was announced in 2013 that ‘Her Majesty’s Prison, Reading’, was to be permanently closed as part of an ongoing programme of shutting down centuries old prisons which fail to comply to modern standards of security or accommodation.

Luckily, the Government cannot simply knock down a building which contributes to the fabric of national heritage without an endless series of consultative workshops, planning applications and surveys. The National Planning Policy Framework lays down a very clear set of guidelines regarding the protection of such ‘heritage sites’, instructing authorities to “conserve heritage assets in a manner appropriate to their significance, so that they can be enjoyed for their contribution to the quality of life of this and future generations.” In the case of Reading Gaol, this arduous process has bought time for a brave and confrontational exhibition within the prison’s walls. 2016’s ‘Inside’ saw writers, artists, and actors from Ai Wei Wei to Ralph Fiennes eulogise, via Oscar Wilde, victims of detainment across history and the world. But creative projects stand like Cnut against the overwhelming pressure of cash strapped councils and aggressive development. In the discussion around the government’s prison programme, the question remains as to what happens to the exceptionally valuable inner city real estate which is made available when

Just as the social housing of the postwar era came to represent contemporary ideological assumptions, Reading Gaol is indicative of our era’s collective mindset. UK planning laws ensure that it is almost impossible to change the outward appearance of listed buildings. Their internal structure can be endlessly altered, and no end of ‘repurposing’ is encouraged, but they must maintain their original aesthetic shell. Of course, a building is more than its form.

Function plays a vital role in defining the way prisoner and guard alike relate to a built environment. ‘Inside’ used this irony to its full, provocative advantage.

But as the artists leave, Reading Gaol will doubtless become yet another set of luxury flats — conveniently close to the station, the property would be a steal in a madly competitive housing market. It will look like a Gothic prison, just like the flats that look like synagogues and the bars that look like Greek orthodox churches, but this is no substitute for true, complex, historical memory. We are shocked by the abuses which occurred just behind the Gaol’s mock medieval gates in the past. What is more shocking in the present is that we allow our history to be demolished, sold, hollowed out. As architecture becomes a talkingpoint once again, we must remember.

27

OXFORD’S RADICAL PAST How OUSU was won Matthew Myers

O

xford’s dreaming spires hide a radical history. In the swift turnover of student generations, memories of past struggles become lost. The rights that Oxford students hold today, however, were won through hard-fought campaigns. The story of how the Oxford University Student Union (OUSU) was won is one such forgotten episode.

to organize student-worker solidarity.

The protesters — led by revolutionary groups like the International Socialists and International Marxist Group — demanded a “legally binding agreement to provide a CSU in three years”, “provision of interim facilities”, and “no victimisation of those involved in the occupation”. The university authorities eventually switched off the electricity in Examination Schools, to which students responded by using candles and generator they had brought with them. Peter Mandelson — then a first year PPE student and reporter for The Cherwell – reported on the “communal atmosphere” inside the occupation (The Cherwell, 8 November 1973). The university chiefs brought a High Court injunction against the students and called on the police to intervene. In a final meeting around a thousand students

The campaign for a Central Student Union (CSU) —what would become Oxford University Student Union (OUSU) —started on 5th November 1973, when seven hundred Oxford students took part in an occupation of Examination Schools.

The campaign united much of the student body, from the revolutionary socialists to members of sports teams. Each wanted a central space for the provision of facilities, representation, and resources, whether that was sports fields or spaces

28

voted to end the occupation after the university agreed to negotiate. The ISIS reported the protest as a great victory:

incidents. Eventually, in January 1974, the university acknowledged the Oxford University Student Union (OUSU) as the representative of all the university’s students, but rejected the requests for a Central Student Union (CSU).

This decision stays with us today.

This week’s occupation was bigger, better, and more organised than any in Britain for five years…The idea of student power has finally found a home in that last cloistered refuge of academic feudalism.

For some that is something to regret, but for the great majority of students it is an exciting feeling…Never has such cooperation or goodwill been felt among students, never had sectarianism been so routed in favour of a common cause.

That students could take over a shell of a building and provide those inside with electricity, food, music, fireworks, theatre, films, and run an extensive publicity and defense network outside gives new confidence to all student radicals. If nothing else is achieved, the occupation has given self-respect back to the armchair socialists of the University (The ISIS Magazine, 16th November 1973).

However, the campaign didn’t stop there. In OUSU’s first meeting on 4th January 1974 — attended by over four hundred students — OUSU passed a raft of policies. OUSU called for: a CSU, an increase in student grants, the acceptance of women into all Oxford colleges on an equal basis, an end to university investments in South African apartheid, solidarity messages to the working class struggle against Ted Heath’s Tory government, crèche facilities, nurseries and equal pay for women, and a condemnation of the brutality of the British government in Northern Ireland.

OUSU’s first student radicals wanted their union to be more like a workers trade union, so as to better fight capitalism.

The proctors reported over £9,000 of damages, and irate students and townspeople condemned the protesters.

To satisfy these critics the university created new disciplinary regulations that outlawed occupations, and created provisions for police evictions in future

A few days after OUSU’s first meeting, another demonstration occurred. A march through Oxford ended in seventy out of two hundred student marchers — including the future Liberal Democrat

29

cabinet minister Chris Huhne — attempting to storm the Indian Institute (the former History Faculty library, now the Oxford Martin School) on Broad Street.

Eight student protesters were arrested, while the university disciplined nineteen students. A national demonstration was called for the 4th of March which ended in hundreds of students storming the administrative offices on Little Clarendon Street and breaking the glass of the windows. In words that echo today, the left-wing student newspaper Oxford Strumpet described the events:

his fist raised to a baying crowd waiting outside. However, the university stood firm and eighteen of the defendants were expelled from the university.

So ended the protracted struggle for an Oxford-wide student union.

The rights to student representation we have today weren’t given by the munificence of the powers-that-be. They were won through protest, occupation, and radical transgression. Many, like those who were ‘sent-down’, faced repression for those rights to be won. The fight for OUSU shows that its founders saw the union’s role not solely in terms of provision of services in Oxford, but as a tool for solidarity with those outside the university. What inspired student radicals of the late 1960s and 1970s to put time and effort — and risk their university careers — to fight for OUSU was the hope in radical social transformation.

The students that founded OUSU saw the student struggle as intimately tied to the struggle of workers, oppressed groups, and international liberation struggles.

If students could get their own union, they could better fight alongside those struggling outside the university. Their dream of revolutionary rupture may not have come to fruition, but their labour created the institutions we know today.

Our wishes for an effective Union, for men and women to be taught and live side by side, for the updating of ancient academic courses, all have been frustrated

by University intransigence…We are right to demand certain things from the University and to express these wishes forcibly if necessary. If Wednesday shows anything it shows the real nature of what we are up against – not conciliatory liberalism, but ruthless reaction (Oxford Strumpet, 14th February 1974).

The students fought the trials. Sue Lukes, one of the defendants refused to sit down and shouted objections during the hearings. Tariq Ali was her legal council, storming out from the proceedings with

30

STEALING FOOD A Tribute to John Berger Sam Dunnett

A

man in a tight, patterned shirt approaches what appears to be Botticelli’s Venus and Mars, and calmly vandalises it with a Stanley knife. The man is John Berger, who died this year, aged ninety: revolutionary, art critic, and star of the best Marxist theory documentary

series the BBC ever put on at teatime.

From Ways of Seeing: “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled”. Why never settled? Because, as Berger’s work from his broadcasting to his nonfiction and novels repeatedly insists, this relation

31

refers, essentially, to history. That is, to attempts, oppressive and collaborative, by human beings, to relate to one another.

In this respect, there is no fundamental difference between an oil painting and an advertisement, between a sunset and a music video, between looking at a human face and stargazing or scrolling through Facebook. All are subject to ways of seeing.

Ways of seeing are subject to change.

Ways of Seeing is joyful in its association of the material and the ideological, the contemporary and the classical. Yet, in some of Berger’s later work, he seems to move outwards from this focus to write about Time, Space, Nature. For a Marxist, he has a remarkable tolerance for what may be called mystical. In discussion of the trancendent, though, he holds tight to the particular. From the friction between immediate, static experience and the incomprehensible totality of the transcendent, he draws hope. From Keeping a Rendezvous: “that we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone… art does not imitate nature, it imitates creation, sometimes to propose an alternative world, sometimes to make social the brief hope offered by nature”. From poet Gareth Evans, quoted in Ten Dispatches about Place: “hold everything dear”. From Hold Everything Dear: “Look at the stones! it said. OK, I replied, the stones, in my own way”.

of ways of seeing and want to hold that infinity, to keep all possibilities open, to see in all ways at once, as if we’re trying to draw something from all viewpoints. Because we can’t do this, writers and drawers and other artists are self-deprecating about our ability to help another world along. Not Berger. From To Take Paper, to Draw: “drawings are visions of what would be if.” We suspect that art is not enough. How can artists turn their work towards social change, if we don’t have £5000 from the Nobel Prize for Literature to donate to the Black Panthers, as John Berger did? By acknowledging that this suspicion is correct, by making room for something other than art, on the other end of the conversation. Ways of Seeing promises to “attempt to relate the experience of art directly to other experiences.”

Relate–that word again. A man in a tight, patterned shirt sits with a group of children and calmly listens as they tell him what they think about Carrivaggio’s Supper at Emmaus: “I think it could be they stole the food… He looks like he’s going to jump up and give her a cuddle…”

My use of Berger’s words are not enough, so I should make room for something else. Ali Smith’s: “Berger, who can do anything with a text, but most of all will make it about the gift of engagement, correspondence – well, I can’t give him anything but love, baby, it’s the only thing I’ve plenty of.”

My use of Berger’s words are not enough.

He, undoubtedly, has put everything I’ve written much better. But even if you read and watched all his work, the process of understanding his work still wouldn’t be over. Process comes from conversation which comes from friction which comes from incompletion. Someone once told me that we tilt our heads when we look at things because we know the infinity

32

NOW

33

Wyr: an essay on reading

badly Fintan Calpin

Have you read one way street by Benjamin?

Waiting for you.

Omg, look what I found pressed in intro pages

I

was lucky enough last summer to talk on a panel with Philip Pullman, Mary Loudon and one of my tutors, on the topic “How and why I write”. I think I pissed Philip Pullman off. I spoke about how my experience of writing from the start was shaped by the various online and irl communities of writers I’ve involved myself in. They aren’t big and some are definitely imaginary but they have felt significant. I’ve swapped poems with friends that we wrote about each other, I’ve set up a Wordpress where I can self-publish my writing. I guess I’m mostly shouting into the void but it’s nice to think that it’s going somewhere. Idk.

Seeing as I was there as a ‘student voice’, I wanted to try and say something that might represent the experiences of other young people too. I wanted to talk about the place where I do most of my writing, and where I think a lot of other people cut their teeth with self-expression, which is maybe one thing that writing is. I spoke about Instagram and Twitter, about how many notes a quote from Frank O’Hara can get on Tumblr, about Rupi Kaur’s Instagram, about how I sometimes find it hard to make time to sit down and write a poem or a story but instead I can use the small slices of time I get around my day to think of funny tweets or captions

34

for grams. But the internet is probably a shitter if you’re trying to protect the employment and intellectual rights of print authors. Phillip and I shook hands after but he still hasn’t followed me back.

IS THE INTERNET MAKING US BAD?

“Vanguard of Brexit fiction set to appear in 2017” – The Guardian, January 2017

It’s true that the medium is the message.

The internet has changed the way we read and write and think, altered the scope and form of our actions and communications. Our minds want and need to absorb and relay information in short, fractured, speedy bursts. I’ve seen a lot of think pieces about the supposed threats posed by new technologies to our quality of life and communication: the fracturing of experience, the constant distraction, the death of the novel, the ‘echo chamber.’ There’s a kind of scaremongering common in the ways we talk about new technology which isn’t all that helpful. People still definitely read novels. We should take pains to avoid moral outrage in preference of nuanced critical engagement. If this really is the way people are reading now, then it seems dangerous to dismiss it for being bad.

The way we read is second nature, and we should see it as such. There is a cultural and political imperative to engage, as both readers and writers, with the kind of reading that we do online.

What you reading? I’m not very that good at reading, but in the novels of Ali Smith, I found someone that made me want to read more, to read better and differently.

Smith’s novels spend a lot of their time representing different acts of reading themselves. Her remarkably up-to-date novella, Autumn, published last October, narrates the relationship, past and present, between a young art historian, Elisabeth and her friend and former neighbour, the 101 year-old Mr Gluck, and through it explores the experience of time, death

No.

What you reading? I’ve always been encouraged to read, and I consider myself a reader. I’m not that good at it though. I love getting a text and having to put my book down, and it’s rare that I find myself totally captivated by one. It crossed my mind recently that this might be to do with how much I hang out online, under the influence of the Web. I literally live with my phone and laptop, and although people have always been accused of being bad at reading, there are tangible ways in which new technologies have changed the way we read. The subjects of a study by nGenera on “Generation Net” (in other words, kids who grew up with the internet) were found to not read pages left to right and top to bottom, but skip around them. The kind of reading enabled, and even necessitated by the infrastructure of the web is different from the way we read print books. We skim across websites and scroll through feeds, picking out interesting bits to read and retweet. We follow hyperlinks, watch videos and listen to soundbites, flicking between different tabs and windows, switching between laptops and phones and tablets. Reading becomes, in a word, non-linear. The kind of deep, concentrative reading that is required to lose yourself in a novel is made harder in an age of constant distraction. My god, I’m reading, stop texting me. Don’t.

35

and mourning, alongside countless questions about the way we produce and receive art. Against all this, and the bleak backdrop of a post-Brexit Britain, Mr Gluck’s persistent question rings out as a refrain: “What you reading?”, he asks Elisabeth, again and again. Against all this, Elisabeth makes time, again and again, to read aloud to Mr Gluck on his deathbed, but most times she falls asleep. Smith’s Artful, a part-novel partessay collection, began life as a series of lectures at St Anne’s, Oxford, in 2012.

Its reflections on art and literature are framed by a ghost story, in which the grieving protagonist is visited by their undead partner. She reads the essays they left behind in mourning, some of them unfinished. It is a novel interested in not-reading as well as reading, in failing to find solace in the act, in stopping to inspect a fly crushed between two pages, in finding solace after all. It lifts its name from Dickens’ Artful Dodger, and closes with some readings of Oliver Twist that are critically rigorous, but far from dustily disinterested. Smith’s reading, and reading Smith, is experiential, subjective; an experiment in reading, in doing so freely and naively.

barack obama what should I do with my only life and what if v neck stood for very neck

What you reading? When I read Crispin Best’s poetry, I feel like I’m good at reading after all. His writing is like being invited into someone’s DMs, but that someone is the funniest and nicest person that you know. Recognizably shaped by the forms and registers of social media and instant messaging, there’s an earnestness and urgency to the informal

voice, and Best’s knack for wordplay equals Smith’s. It is, fittingly, easy to dip in and out of the text. But I often return to it, and find more nuances of language and meaning, or just more jokes, than the previous time. It offers a multiplicity of acts of reading, but most of all reminds me that the intuitive ways in which I read are themselves complex, multiple, full of potential.

From Walter Benjamin’s One Way Street: ‘Under these circumstances true literary activity cannot aspire to take place within a literary framework— this is, rather, the habitual expression of its sterility. Significant literary work can only come into being in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that better fit its influence in active communities than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book–in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards.

Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment.’

Sometimes I go through my phone and look through all the screenshots I’ve taken of conversations with my friends and family. They’re normally when someone says something really funny, or cute, or weird. Revisiting these chunks of real dialogue as screenshots, it’s interesting how even out of their instantaneous, communicative context, they feel embedded in something larger than themselves, even that the embeddedness is more visible in the screenshots than in the original conversations. One of my favourite things to do is to read conversations out loud in my head, as though they were poetry.

Social Media

and

Social Memory

Christian Amos

T

he virtual-reality game Pokemon Go places its creatures in unlikely places.

In July 2016, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum was forced to issue a statement following an image tweeted by a player, reminding visitors that “playing the game is not appropriate in the museum, which is a memorial to the victims of Nazism”.

The Pokemon Go incident is emblematic of the way in which museums, as places of collective memory and contemplation, are struggling to cope with the intrusion of new technologies and platforms for social interaction.

a space that was set up to help the world not only understand, but also feel, the pain and trauma inflicted under the Soviet Regime. The responsibility for meaningful engagement in the horrors of the past is therefore shared between the visitors, the museum organisers and the social platforms that document our interactions with these spaces of commemoration.

In January 2017, artist Shashak Shapira launched his new project, YOLOCAUST. Shapira noted how social media sites abounded with tasteless photos taken at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, such as selfies of people juggling, grinning, and even doing yoga. YOLOCAUST juxtaposes these original images with edits incorporating archival holocaust footage. It is easy to look at the swathes of photos inappropriately taken in sites of introspection and commemoration, and then blame this inadequate engagement in historic events on the burning desire, promoted by social media, for instant and excessive sharing. Taking a step back, however, what is evident from these photos is that there is a problem with the collective effort of commemoration more generally. Social media may be symptomatic of this lack of engagement, rather than an actual cause. In examining the problem of popular engagement, we have to examine how social memory is affected by the presentation of the past,

Pokemon Go was caught up in another commemorative space in 2016. The GULAG History Museum in Moscow, which opened in November 2015, has been praised for its successful attempts to remember victims of terror under the Soviet Union. On the museum’s Instagram account, which is mostly used to promote new exhibitions and events, a screenshot was uploaded from a smartphone playing Pokemon Go, with a creature appearing in shot of the central display cases. The caption reads “And we have a guest. Would anyone have thought that Pokemon and GULAG could be in the same sentence?”

In contrast to the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s condemnation of Pokemon Go players, the GULAG History Museum actively made light of the appearance of the game in such a serious place of contemplation. In doing so, it trivialised

37

as well as the ways in which individuals interpret it.

the museum’s designers as well as the visitors. Architecture, signage, lighting and the layout of an exhibition all contribute towards a museum’s agenda.

However, as opposed to encouraging popular engagement in the sufferings of the Soviet Regime, there is a discord between the museum’s visual elements and the history that they are attempting to convey. One of the most striking exhibits in the museum is a collection of doors from the prison cells of different camps. The doors are devoid of notable information on their origin and the horror that went on behind them.

Artistically arranged as a collage, the museum’s focus on stylistics subsumes the historical significance of the doors.

Out of all the photos featuring the door exhibit (ten per cent of all photos taken), a recurring shot involved a person putting their hand through the slot in the door. The intended comic effect of such a photo is jarring when considered in light of the knowledge that physical and

I analysed photographs taken at the GULAG History Museum through the geotag function on Instagram. I studied 1300 photos across thirty weeks of uploads, all taken at the museum.

Twenty-two per cent of the 1155 photos taken and tagged were selfies. Devoid of context, these photos demonstrated a profound lack of interest in the horrors of the Gulag system. They focused on the aesthetics of the museum experience: the award-winning architecture of the building, the dramatic lighting, and the ghoulish display cases that completely overwhelmed the exhibition materials within. Individuals had incorporated the aesthetically striking surroundings of the museum into their personal social media identities, displaying a greater interest in themselves than in the exhibition they were visiting. One of the tagged photos, taken against an anonymous brick wall in the museum, features a couple kissing.

These photos could be taken in any prizewinning building; the memory of mass repressions and the human cost of the Gulag fade into the literal background. ll;Uncomfortable responses to history in the GULAG History Museum go beyond the selfie: there is also an overwhelming focus on aesthetics over commemoration by

38

psychological torture was inflicted from one side to the other.

The museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau is perhaps the best evidence that the decisions of museum organisers can be critical to visitor interaction. The strict ban on photographing the mass of hair and shoes from the murdered victims of the Nazis, aids in this meaningful engagement with human suffering; we witness it through our own eyes and not through a camera lens directed towards an online identity. The intrusion of social media in these spaces of commemoration prevents respectful responses of immersion and inward reflection. The responsibility for commemorating our past lies with the individual visitor and the museums themselves. It is only by creating an environment conducive to meaningful engagement that we can ever hope to achieve it; without being compelled to properly contemplate the past, we walk through these spaces unaffected by the gravity of the world they represent.

Alexander Etkind discusses three types of commemoration: hardware, which refers to physical monuments and museums; software, which refers to texts and dialogue; and ghostware, which refers to the ephemeral traces, or ghosts, of repressed memory. Only by the hardware (the museum) engaging in software (public debate) can adequate commemoration of the past take place. In the instance of the GULAG History Museum, the stream of selfies and aesthetic shots suggests that the hardware is too dominant, and that the software, public debate and experience, is failing to keep up. Our hunger to take selfies and share photos of aesthetically appealing displays arguably stems from the practices of social media — a hunger that is met in this instance by the designers of the GULAG History Museum.

39

40

‘You Will Never Make Australia Home’ Julieta Caldas

I

n a government-sponsored TV advertisement, a shot of dark, stormy waters is overlaid with the phrase ‘NO WAY’ in bold red letters. Dressed in an army uniform, General Campbell, the commander of ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’, warns: “If you come to Australia illegally by boat, there is no way you will ever make Australia home… The rules apply to everyone: families with children, unaccompanied children, educated and skilled. There are no exceptions.”

detainee protests includes that of a man on hunger strike with his lips sewn shut.

And yet a comment under a Channel 4 news report about conditions on Nauru asks a question expressing a sentiment common on the right of Australian politics: “How is Australia not looking after these people, when they have a roof over their head, they are fed, watered, clothed, given access to all medical facilities at the cost of the Australian people?” It is true that Australia is paying significant amounts of money to house and feed immigrants offshore. But this commenter’s inability to comprehend the anger of Nauru detainees is telling of how useless expenditure figures alone are as indicators of the situation on the ground, or of the state’s true intentions.

The government’s immigration policy is one of ‘punitive deterrence’. By adopting an uncompromising position towards migrants, it hopes to deter more from arriving in the future.

Since the release of this advert in 2013, the Australian government has upheld a policy of rejecting boats of refugees seeking asylum, as promised.

Those who aren’t turned back are held in mandatory detention in one of Australia’s offshore centres in Nauru or Manus, often for years at a time, without legal aid or proper medical care. The centres came under fire following the Guardian’s release of the Nauru Files, a series of more than 2000 leaked incident reports suggest the centres to be sites of “routine dysfunction and cruelty”. More than half of the reports involve children, a disproportionate figure given that children only made up about eighteen per cent of those in detention at the time. The documents include one report of a guard threatening to kill a boy once he leaves the detention center, as well as fifty-nine reports of assault on children and seven of sexual assault.

Meanwhile, Australia manages its intake of successful migrants with a pointsbased migration programme weighted towards skilled Anglophones, a scheme that Brexit campaigners including Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson repeatedly expressed interest in imitating this summer. Previously, Australia has been invoked as a positive example for Britain to more obviously harmful effect, even than that of the original Australian policy. In response to influxes of asylum seekers travelling to the UK by boat from Libya and Turkey in early 2016, many politicians and journalists urged the

Many migrants say they would rather return to war-torn home nations than stay in the camps. Video footage of

41

Prime Minister to ‘follow the Australian example’ and turn back boats, in order to deter migrants and disrupt human trafficking. But whereas most boats arriving to Australia have been routed through a ‘gateway’ country such as Indonesia, where relatively little immediate risk is posed to returning migrants, boats leaving for the UK from Libya were directly fleeing conflict.

By turning these boats back, the UK government knowingly returned refugees to a site of civil war. As in Australia, the hard-line approach was popular. A YouGov poll published in August 2016 reported that at least one in five people say that the UK should not admit a single migrant from Turkey, Romania, Nigeria, Egypt or Pakistan.

government accountability in this area; both Britain and Australia have privatized such centers, removing them from the sphere of public debate. It is, accordingly, a lack of sustained criticism which allows British politicians and voters to support Australia’s policies without any nuanced understanding of their real-world implications.

In the name of effective opposition at home, the humanitarian disasters perpetuated abroad must be linked to discourse as well as to concrete policies. A self-perpetuating cycle of dehumanisation is taking place in the public conversation, in both the way people think about immigration and in the treatment of migrants themselves.

The flat refusal of resettlement for refugees in Australia both legitimises the view that immigrants are not deserving of basic protection, and suggests that they do not truly need it, that they are ‘economic’ or ‘welfare’ migrants.

Likewise, by emphasising the role of people smugglers and effectively blaming them for the misfortune of immigrants, the British government evade the root causes of the migrants’ desperation.

The effect of these unsettling parallels should be that we learn from Australia’s example, not by following its lead, but by examining the gaps between supposed government intentions and the reality of suffering. The same rift between the two exists on British soil and waters.

The exhortations to emulate Australia did not acknowledge that the parallels between the two countries have been strong for years. Britain has demonstrated astonishing negligence in its handling of asylum seekers— immigration removal centres such as Yarl’s Wood and Campsfield, used for the indefinite detention of hundreds of immigrants, including under one-time Home Secretary Theresa May, have faced numerous allegations of human rights abuses. A document released in 2015 revealed a decades’ worth of reports of sexual abuse and mistreatment within Yarl’s Wood, and in October 2016, an officer was accused of raping a detainee.

Measures are being taken to reduce

42

Writing the Shadowtimes: A Conversation with Robert Macfarlane Gaby Mancey-Jones

R

obert Macfarlane wants to introduce us to a tree. We’ve arrived at Emmanuel college on a bright blue February afternoon, expecting a cup of tea and a chat about his work–and we do get that, eventually. But, striding up, tall and affable, he has other things on his mind first, and so we’re given a quick and selective tour: an orange-branched ‘punk’ willow by the pond, fat corvids ripping up the turf in the quad, and a personal introduction to “one of the greatest trees on the planet”. It is indeed majestic, a Great Oriental Plane tree, white-boned and bare in winter, its knuckled branches dragging across the ground. Later that day, while deep in conversation, it will occur to me that it seems only right to have met the tree before the man.

Macfarlane is often labelled a nature writer, but, as befits someone whose work is so preoccupied with language, this generic label, a ‘term he doesn’t really use’, provokes contemplation. “There’s such a volume of it now, and so much of it is written merely by numbers; I’m so uninterested in this kind of genre fulfilment which is really genre parody.”

Throughout our conversation, which touches upon “timescales and politics and landscape and memory and hope and action”, he makes clear that it is this stunning array of topics that is “what ‘nature writing’–if we must call it that– must be about... if it just lapses back into an easy echo of itself, then it’s pointless.

And that’s why the only writers who

really interest me are the few who are pushing at every sentence, testing every thought. That’s when it feels worthwhile again.” He is drawn to writing where “the effort is being made to strain and strange the relationship.” In the years since the self-described ‘Romantic’ work, The Wild Places, the upcoming Underland and Eerie, Unsettled will both explore stranger landscapes and darker subjects.

He is interested in the emotional response to the bleakness of contemporary environmental politics, repeatedly making use of the term “stuplime”, a coinage of writer Sianne Ngai in her Ugly Feelings: “when confronted with a sublime anxiety such as environmental crisis, we increasingly respond not with a vast single outrage but with ‘a series of minor fatigues’. And so we collapse into helplessness: we’re afflicted by stupor and torpor, we’re left stupid, but also awestruck.” For Macfarlane, this state is the “endpoint” in our environmental fight. It follows that politive, hopeful responses should be cherished and defended.

He applies this principle to aesthetic sensibilities, in the early books and the new, more explicitly political work alike: “It can be problematically easy to exclude the contextual politics that might press upon the lyric moment, as it were–but I think it can also be problematically easy to allow a political context to exclude the possibilities of wonder, beauty and hope– the responses that lie at the heart of positive impulses during what is clearly

43

a profoundly bleak time, environmentally speaking.

There is a danger, which is less often discussed, of crudely disallowing that repertoire of feelings.”

The dangers of nihilism crop up again in discussion of the role of time in his books.

I ask about the ethical risks of juggling the “drastic dimensions” of a ‘macro’ view of history (he often makes reference to ‘glacier time’ or ‘tree time’) with the importance of the present moment. He replies: “It’s seductively appealing to read the present moment or even the near future in a deep-time context. But the easy next move from there is to evacuate ethical concerns from these ‘shallower’ timescales.” He turns to another newly-coined word to describe an alternative view of time: ‘shadowtime’, a proposed entry to the ‘Anthropocene glossary’: “I was in Onkalo–a deep geological repository for the final storage of high-level nuclear waste–in the week of Trump’s inauguration… Our conversation today is happening during a presidency which will hopefully only last four years, but in which decisions will be made – have already been made – that will have massively amplified time-consequences in terms of climate change. This is a fouryear presidential term with a 40,000 year legacy.”

There is thus a need for us to “acknowledge that we increasingly exist within these multiple shadowtimes, as well as the bright pristine present.” A trip to the Lofoten archipelago in Norway provides a perfect illustration for his point. Here, he tells us, the churning maelstrom nominated by Edgar Allen Poe as the gateway to the centre of the Earth is

overlooked by bronzeage sea caves, at the site of a current protest over seismic testing and offshore drilling: “the three shadowtimes of the underworld”. Later, he recalls visiting the British Antarctic ice-core storage freezer, and how the 40,000 year-old ice core was sliced “like salami” in front of him: “you hold it up to the light and suddenly there’s a night sky there: it’s like looking at this circle of stars, and then you realize that the stars are air bubbles and each of the air bubbles is a little museum of atmosphere from 40,000 years ago; I found myself looking out and up into an imaginary galaxy, but also back into the distant past. It was another of these unforgettable time-slips and scale-slips that have characterised my years of underworld research and travel”.

A key theme in Underland will be the Anthropocene, the proposed current geological epoch wherein human effect on the environment has become the dominant determining factor, as read in the signs of this effect in the geological record: “the great stone book, as the nineteenth century called geology, might increasingly become a storage medium that is legible in terms of our script within it.” He is talking about scattered radio nucleids and deep repositories, marks of present-day humanity deep within the Earth, fusing grand, almost incomprehensible timescales with immediacy. Even prior to these new works, his books are full of archivists and collectors, for whom, it strikes the reader, looking back is a form of engagement with the present. The same is true for geologists of the Anthropocene. Is it now true also for ‘nature writers’? “I’ve been thinking a lot about how different forms of style can serve different timescales”, he states, indicating his concern for the conceptual effect of his writing at the most immediate level. “I

44

think particularity is very amenable to evoking the present; those quickjewelled or fleeting moments that we all carry away from a specific natural encounter.” He mentions the immediacy of birdsong, and a mass of similar moments from his books spring to mind. “I wouldn’t want to write those out of my prose, or to somehow regard these piercing instants and details as an inadmissible luxury.”

Macfarlane’s conversation, like his work, is heavily peopled. He mentions a 92-year old farmer who only left his parish six times; W. H. Murray, the Scottish mountaineer who “discovered mysticism in an Italian-German prison camp”; Palestinian lawyer and writer Rajah Sehadeh; the “lost” painter Eric Ravilious. Remarking on his clear affinity for the people in his texts, he asserts: “I would hate to write an unpeopled landscape–a landscape without figures, as it were–and I’m consistently fascinated by the people that places tell, or the places that people tell, if you’ll allow that phrase. Even in Underland, one might think that the subterranean is a domain where there’s almost no population. But of course that’s not true, because – for instance– the shaken-out and the shat-upon people of the world are often forced to live underground in one way or another: in the storm drains of Las Vegas, say, or the sewer systems of Bucharest.”

Again, we’re back at contemporary society. Nature writing’s “easy echo of itself ” is nowhere, and in his hands, the relationship between landscape and politics doesn’t seem strained or strange at all.

We are, therefore, curious to know

45

more about his take on the political potential of literature. He mentions Landmarks, his 2015 book exploring the multiplicity of specific dialect or poetic terms for nature, which has “become oddly the most politically active of my books. It’s entered action and practice in countries around the world, in ways I couldn’t have anticipated.” He still receives coinages and recoveries of new and ancient nature-words inspired by the book, by letter and email. Although, as forms of social and environmental action, “books feels so sluggishly slow moving”, he admits that, for writers, the need to find hope that our work may have some impact is personal and emotional: “otherwise, when you think of the methane presently unlocking in the Siberian permafrost, or the anthrax-filled corpses of buried reindeer that are were unearthed last summer by high temperatures in the Yamal peninsula, causing an anthrax epidemic, you feel utterly impotent.”

Yet, unlike the scrawlings of the two students interviewing him, there’s some concrete basis for his belief in the impact of his words. Specific examples aside, in all his work, a “quiet theme” slips through. The potential for writing, in its immediacy and particularity, to give hope and create change, is made clear. Admiringly, he mentions the writer-activist Rebecca Solnit, and her “beautiful idea of some books being like bristlecone pine seeds: they can lie dormant for years, until a fire sweeps over them and activates them. And then, they’ll grow.”

TELL

46

O (WATER) Charlotte Jackson

The water blooms between my toes Sandspreaded, sinking into the mulching ooze drifting land; pillowed waves; the moment suspended & shimmering on threads of silk I catch it, And watch it as it shivers from soundlessness into song **** You are shivering and seahaunted; You sink your toes and the earth strikes blue [give me your mouth says the sea so i can eat it let me wrap you in milksoft tide i must devour and divine give me your hand says the sea and we can sit in salt-thick silence like in a london cab, with that mulchy london cabsmell, that petrolstink of oilslickened sand give me your daughters says the sea i will raise them as my own and cradle them in seaweed green and blue.] **** In seaweed, green and blue, the young lady observed a limpet.

(Limpety limpet, limpette is probably the French word for it i wonder why it makes everything sound so pretentious, prĂŠtentieuse, smells like wet socks and fishsalt o will i ever catch a crab i wonder probably not at this bloody rate iv grown sick of sea o crap dads calling me) - si papa Running, sandfaced and elmlight, she considers only the next step in each bare millisecond (milling seconds) that elapses under her feet.

47

BENDRIGAL Oliver Eagleton

Since April, Meeting Room C has housed the Knitting and Embroidery Association, whose swollen ranks forced it to migrate from the micro-kitchen. Few groups can boast such an avid or committed membership. Each lunchtime an incessant clicking fills the room’s adjacent hallway as dozens of tightly gripped needles stitch and scrape and collide. Though this noise means nothing beyond the K&E’s interminable production of patterned kitsch, I make believe its source is an arthritic giant. I listen out for his slow movements – for the agonised crick of a stiff collarbone, the cracking of vast knuckles. I am soothed by that impression.

The vacant micro-kitchen became a site of intense conflict when our in-house bodybuilders tried to occupy it. Some felt that their activities, as well as the paraphernalia they employ, were unsuited to this four-by-six tiled space. Others held that the freedom to develop one’s unique potential in the workplace must transcend practical considerations. If we yield to what is ‘suitable,’ they said, we will accept the laboured tropes of ‘Health-and-Safety’ that Bendrigal – Britain’s most innovative management consultancy firm, where my favourite uncle landed me an internship – has rightly and persistently shunned. Ban the mix of dumbbells and kettles and you restrict the workers’ right to self-realise.

I didn’t align myself with either side of this dispute, though I certainly admired Bendrigal’s ethos, which allowed its staff to act without huge fetters from on-high. I sat next to the Metaphysical Society’s meeting point so whenever my client reports built into an unconscionable stack it took just a minute of eavesdropping to relearn the reason for existence. And when I happened to tell Alan, a fellow intern, that friends seemed hard to come by in this ambitious environment, he introduced me to the Friend Club whose manifesto aims to ‘mop up Bendrigal’s social surplus and wring it into the warm, welcoming bucket that is Storage Room 2B,’ where weekly get-togethers offer herbal tea conversational cues to the deservingly inept. I mention these instances because, for me, they demonstrate how our South London office block – whose shimmering façade swallows the clouded skies outside – leaves no aspect of selfhood untapped nor neglected. The dynamic careerist is nourished through and alongside the philosopher, the socialite, the lover (though, for legal reasons, the latter doesn’t have an official society just yet). I needn’t stifle aspects of my character which an average job would deem dispensable.

This is not to say that Bendrigal is a free-for-all (though our competitors have made much of that unfortunate half-rhyme). While the management has no formal involvement in worker societies, those who detach from our community – who spurn their singular opportunities or refuse to mix with colleagues – are often treated with a heavier hand. One exemplary case was Taylor, an acerbic twentysomething from HR, who complied with company protocol and met each of her deadlines yet adopted a demeanour – icy, disengaged, aloof – which seemed to vex her superiors.

Last winter, items of clothing she deposited in the company cloakroom somehow attracted substantial moth colonies which ravaged and infested their fibres. When

48

she brought her garments to the Meeting Room C knitting clique for repair, they were returned with expletives stitched into the wool. This prompted a trip to the staff counsellor, who heeded Taylor’s grievances with patience and compassion but paused every so often to adjust what looked like a wireless earpiece and posed certain questions (‘Can obtuse and shallow hermits really function in the vibrant world of Bendrigal?’) which jarred with her professional disinterest.

Taylor soon cracked under the pressure. She is now the much beloved goalie on our company la-crosse team. *** The day of my performance review was mild and blustery. Before commuting to the office I sat over a plate of scrambled eggs whose consistency evoked neural tissue and spoke to my uncle on the phone. He sketched what was expected of me, describing the reputational damage he would incur from my failure to meet certain standards. If the review is conducted by Mr Jenkins, he said, then reserve and concision are essential; but if Ms Dalton chairs the meeting some vivacity might help. I made assenting noises between mouthfuls of toast.

The receptionist led me into a cordoned-off waiting space on the eighth floor. I sat cross-legged, perusing a National Geographic spread on the endangered Javan rhino, whose image – solid, dusk grey and hulking – quickly cooled my nerves.

When summoned, I walked towards the Director’s Office with the steady grace of a wetland mammal and greeted Jenkins briskly. He told me to sit down.

‘We’re delighted with your progress,’ he muttered, installing himself in a red upholstered armchair on the opposite side of the room.

Behind him, through a wall-length tinted window, one could see the entirety of floor seven – an aerial view of its cubicles and computers. The people down there looked small, their movements pained and rigid, like the shoddiest Claymation models.

He read my file through round spectacles by the dim light of the desk lamp. I nodded at his approbation, arranging my features to signal gratitude but not surprise. Our exchanges were brief and listless; we addressed my prospects at Bendrigal in a cluster of words too hasty to recall. After breezing past each discussion point Jenkins rose from his seat, made a calculated adjustment to his collar and slid across the carpet to a vintage phonograph, whose needle he gripped firmly between index finger and thumb.

‘Can you tango?’ he asked.

I said I’d like to learn.

The needle was lowered, cautiously, until it rested on the whirling black vinyl from which came Al-fred Hause’s Du Schwarzer Zigeuner. Without prompting I stood upright and tiptoed to the room’s centre, where Jenkins met me with an outstretched arm. Locked in open embrace, I followed his footwork with singleminded purpose, gyrating to the syncopated rhythm. We revolved in front of the seventh-floor vista, his hand placed on my hip. And as the brass notes surged to a crescendo he leant closer, assuming a strident baritone: ‘Your uncle told me you were a fine dancer.’

49

LIGHTNING TREE Tabitha Hayward

The lightning tree is full of eyes. I watch them stare us down. They saw it all; moment of impact still scorched on vision, nuclear flash that fused eyes shut, arms all uplifted, outline burnt into the sky.

It stands there now, dressed in its bones. We slip into the hollow of its stomach, break bark from sinews, still straining, aching.

Our footholds are its elbow sockets.

Stand here in its rib-cage, the reverse image, the white on the black; x-ray, testing for damage. Moment of electric, fire-flash-pain that rips the world up; moment repeated like a pulse in time, and I know it now when it comes, everything trembling away again, to the shock of that pearly fresh tissue, the join that won’t quite fix it, still tender, still wounded, arms raised, and waiting for the aftershock.

50

51

TELL US Gazelle Mba

Y

ou named your dog Fido, Latin for faithful. You never claimed to be original or clever. Naming him, you thought, was a divine act. God had said let there be light and there was light, you called for loyalty and it appeared. You praised Fido like some people praise their children, my daughter, she is uncannily perceptive, look how well she reads, she is beautiful and succeeds at everything. We are so proud of her. Or once a couple of years ago, a mother walking hand in hand with her son; they are on their way back from school. She holds his tiny, sticky hand in her left and with her right she texts her sister furiously. Some kid hit him with a toy car; I wanted to slap the little twat. Fido was your furry child. When he chewed the dry wall, peed on your bed, you scolded him lovingly. Later it would remind you of a scene in an airport, when you walked behind two blond women. The younger one was proud and cold, unfazed in her brown coat.

She was 19. Her mother seemed tired. Her mother, she yelled you never apologize, you never say you are sorry, very clearly wanting her to apologize, wanting her to say she was sorry. Her each word an opening her daughter could squeeze through.

When did you make your first friend? In a library no one cared about. You first saw your friend, sitting in a cubicle on the other side of the library; you were the only ones there. Lonely, voiceless children huddled around books. You saw that your friend was systematically making her way through the Roald Dahl’s, you immediately inscribed messages onto the back of each one, what is your name? Where do you go to school?

You read carefully each message, making sure there were no spelling mistakes, nodding to yourself, pleased. When your friend invited you to play for the first time, you brought your best doll and wore your checked dress. You walked yourself to her house. In hindsight, although precious and sentimental, it was also the most peaceful afternoon you would ever have in your whole life, an approximation of every date you would ever experience.

The house your parents moved into can be described using only the following adjectives: large, spacious and comfortable. You had a room decorated by your new mother; your old mother had been replaced. The room was wallpapered with a Japanese print your father had imported from his business associate. The wallpaper was thick and creamy as though fresh cows milk had been slathered over the walls. At night when the room filled itself with heat, like a balloon fills with air, you often left your bed and ran your face over the wall, allowing it to cool you. Once a boyfriend rested his hand over your feverish neck, you said it felt like caressing marble, like a sculpture in a museum had suddenly come alive and touched your delirious body. That was what the walls felt like. You think of your childhood now, the way paper remembers writing that has been erased.

52

You won’t talk to us about your teenage years. We agree no one likes being young anyway.

Now tell us about work, about the women’s movement, about New York. Instead you mumble something incoherent about housing prices and inflation, everyone becomes the old man in Orwell’s 1984. When you were young and your ass still looked great in jeans, it was 1971.

You shared a three-bedroom flat and wrote articles about things people only seem to want to read about now. The irony of current affairs it occurred to you, is that they only truly become affairs worth discussing when they are no longer current. You had a boyfriend once.

You liked him at first because he knew the difference between performance art and conceptual art, which you didn’t. He would have been the great love of your life if you had lived to be only 29.

For a while it went well. But he was filled with a pervading sense of his own rightness that made it impossible for you to judge him. When the relationship ended, you described it to a friend, the one who never wore her hair down but knotted in a high chignon above her head like a round horn, who listened, nodded and smoked, that the day he left felt like the breaking of a communion tablet during mass. That unknown to you, without documentation or a wedding dress, somehow your skin and his skin had molded into one, as though days spent on the beach had baked you two together, joined yet delicate. She passed you a box of cereal poured some milk and said you’re probably just hungry. It was not so much the person you missed but the name.

You invented the saying “single people can only meet other single people at parties.” It didn’t catch on. You met The Professor at a party someone threw for no reason, it was 1988, and the doctor had told you to stop expecting children. You said to her, at night you felt your womb rattling like a pod. The Professor was brief in everything. The wedding took place shortly after meeting, at a hotel, ideal for pictures. You thought: this day only marks the beginning of other days. In ancient Greece women’s birthdays began on the day of their marriage, in this society somehow I understand. Before bed your husband made a joke about why you had bothered to wear that white dress. You stayed awake all night, his hairy body asleep next to you. The dress glittered; pale and white like a star in the dark.

53

NOTES Alexander Hine

OH! Bellowed the mind so quietly

no one could hear her.

Then snow! and a grand piano fell

RIGHT Natalie Nickells pinned on the line by my right shoulder, the peg metal clashes the bone, clashes the right blade, numbing to the fingers of my right hand which so tightly dig my right thumb nail into palm flesh. held in place by nails! how ironic given my no belief. god cure me god help me i am pinned to the line holding my right to dream, crumpled in the fist of a hand that has given up. give me my voice back father i need to right.

54

FAT

Alexander Bridge

An old oak in a forest, still, there, Culled mushrooms avoid my feet around the roots Two mirrors propped in the wet leaf beds there

and there Something walks up Tipfeet on knots I put my ear to the bark “You look kind of chubby today”, he whispers, in a voice I would’ve expected to be deeper.

I’m caught in the evening, at the little nights-in,

with the heady wines

and the bombe you mustn’t touchIt’s my fourteen thousand three hundred and eighty seventh temptation,

and my second chocolate milk Simeon dies on the pillar, peaches rot “Half sugar please, oh, no, wait, could I go for seventy-five percent?”

-I’ve never lived a neutral life Sabatier, my finest salmon, Slicing fish thinner than skin I can’t shake myselfI feel fat today.

The two mirrors propped in the wet leaf beds

only show

each other I walk up and listen to the bark “When will you lose the baby fat”, he whispers, and I store his tone away for ever, as my ancestors apologise

55

SHADOWS CAN’T KNOW THE SUN Lucy Thompson

Amber oak trees stand around a rusting tarn and leaden sky.

Atoms carry on the wind through branches, scatter: shatter, dust the forest floor in nonsense.

Fog- thick, white, blurs night and day.

Willow feathers fall and rot, fall apart in toddlers’ hands like smoke.

Like smoke, the thread of self disperses, glimpsed and lost in garden shade, tangled with the strings some shallow faces left to mark their way.

As if their will were not the maze.

And while the driveway gravel crunches under fallen leaves, the Himalayas shrink to dust and pavements grind to sand, the car to rust.

56

WART Margo Munro Kerr

First I tear you out It hurts it hurts at least it’s gone now But you bleed me and grow slowly strongly I file to reach the heart of you, the gritty But that makes my blood run bright it hurts again and again I leave you and again you grow through scab I tell my mother half of it She gives me salicylic acid Use this she says her eyes glinting Use this she says, as often as you file it, and I think of her as I set to work scrubbing feverish the acid turns white red I want to lick the salty acid off from round you softly Rub you I stop trying to uproot you You grow almost comfortable I grow almost fond With the pain gone you lose substance My body roots you out.

57

YOURS Haroun Hameed I am speaking to you from within the nightmare. Because I am within it, you might think me in a privileged position to describe its contents. But you would be overlooking the only fact we know to be safe from doubt: the nightmare’s best-loved trick – or, if you prefer, it’s very machinery of terror – is hospitality. The only word that bars my trespass is neon-lit, and reads ENTER. It is my great misfortune that I cannot, even summoning all my powers, tell a tale that invites its own telling. Please allow me to dwell a little longer in the story of another. *** At the threshold, twin revolving doors furl and unfurl like a mobius strip. A bellman attends them with a tasselled cap. His coat is bright with decorations, relics of a braver age that is now, at last, admitting you to its ranks.

There, in the entrance-hall, realities are juxtaposed in glass. You did not think so many types of glass could exist, let alone coexist in the architecture of one lobby. Windows and mirrors, liberty and limitation… defining a boundary they will instantly subvert, beckoning you to cross. Could you count them – were innumerability not among their most beguiling features – you would be tempted to linger in this stairwell forever, turning out each of their angles to the light. Green glass. Sheet glass. Glass so cold it sings. Prophetic glass. Forgiving glass. Glass that holds a grudge.

And, in amongst them, tucked just out of sight, their keynote: you-glass.

Glass-you. The looking glass opening onto the space beyond its surface, where your own Platonic form awaits. What has glass-you been up to, you can’t help but wonder, holed up in there for all this time? Conspiring, perhaps.

Gnashing its teeth and cackling like a lunatic. Plotting, in obsessive detail, this moment of confrontation, this mutinous act.

Because the glass has not just reflected you. It has, first of all, enlisted you – drafted you into an army of others whose being is the inverse of yours, their horizons the outermost edge of your own. Here, spread out like paperchains, are the infinite possibilities of your non-existence. One of them, smiling suavely, winks and slicks its brow. Another, lips contorted, waves a bloody hand. A third masks over, with a look of pale indifference, a legacy of suffering only you can discern. Ganging up, accusing, these images cause you to recoil. They are not you; they bear not even the slightest resemblance to that person whom you must, in all truth, be.

58

But the nightmare’s logic is more warped than you had thought, for now, in the chamber of absences where these thinned-out figures dance, something unforeseeable occurs. In an abrupt turn of events, the army partitions into two camps, each staking out an opposite recess of glass. On one wall, passive natures group together and take up arms for self-defence; on the other, the chain of aggressors extends to an invisible terminus. The hall resounds with the scrape and clink of sharpening spears, military outfits produced out of nowhere and donned with grim resolve. And you, most insolent absence – where do you find yourself in all this?

In no-man’s land. You mark the dividing line, dark heart of the crossfire region where, as long-neglected sores begin to burn, it seems your destiny can be none other than self-annihilation. You wait. You invite an apocalypse at your own hands…

A conch shell sounds. Its note is answered by a war cry, deliberate and shrill, mounting in pitch as the charge gathers pace. A wash of red tunics and burnished helmets. The glass teems with life. But this battle’s perfect choreography will be rewarded only with bathos, for in their feverish state, the militiamen have overlooked the fact of their confinement. With a roar of disappointment, both armies collect against the panes that divide them.

Spears impale their wielders. Cheeks struggle under thighs. From amidst the wreckage, the honour of one soul escapes unscathed. That soul is yours.

If this scene had a witness (any other, that is, beyond the heap of broken images now fogging up the glass), he would mark how you now stand a little more erect. Your eyes have a new keenness. Your nose seems to root for some not-quite-faded scent. You yourself observe that, from the innermost corner of your being, there springs some freshness, a twinge of lymph and marrow, bone and breath. The taste of blood rises at the back of your throat, pronounces you alive. You have arrived beyond the looking glass, come into your own.

Who, in the history of invitations, has ever felt such flattery, such warmth?

You dance and scamper along the stairs, trying on your new gestalt for size.

Nor are you alone – for the host of glassy images are now your footmen, escorting you up into the nightmare’s windy heights. They have lost – thank heavens – their former bluster. They no longer seek your death, but stand before your living, breathing self as possibilities, glittering invitations of their own.

Says one with a suave smile, ‘Choose me. I’ll show you what fun is to be had in living stylishly. I’ve never left a wrinkle in a sheet, a patch in a bank of daisies, a mark on a lover’s cheek.’

59

Says another with a bloody hand, ‘Look here. Now you know there’s no point hiding anything. If you really wish to be yourself, let every last morsel come to light.’

A third stares blankly back at you, giving no offence.

No longer limits, but golden opportunities. You are at liberty to ignore them altogether. These revolving doors, furling and unfurling at the summit of the stairs – they too are opportunities, risks.

‘Enter,’ says the voice inside your head. It finds itself echoed by a voice behind the door.

You leave the broken images on the landing and pass through. There is a drop in pressure, and you notice that your body feels light, translucent. You are in a huge boardroom, lavishly upholstered, its central area occupied by a golden table. Countless others, beings like yourself, are stationed along its flanks. There is no hurry. Your arrival is welcomed without the slightest ripple. They have been waiting for much longer than you can conceive. Bursting with pride and tenderness, their eyes follow your passage to its destination at the furthest edge of the golden table where, perfectly modest, barely visible from a distance, there squats an unoccupied podium.

The raised platform allows you to examine their faces closely. Many of them are beaming. Like you, they seem replenished, having left their broken images at the door – but unlike you, they are masters of plenitude, perfectly at ease in their perfection. Why have you been singled out? You are only an initiate to this club of brave souls. What could they possibly wish to hear from you?

Only what you, truly, wish to say. Infinite license. Limitless acceptance. Ladies and gentlemen: your heart of hearts.

You look upon their hungry, trusting eyes and are gripped by sudden fear. You realise that you are dangerously alone, exposed. Leaning back, you notice the great chandelier poised above you. The waterline in a nearby teacup quivers. Impossible… can you really hear, just beyond the doors, the laughter of your glassy counterfeits? The body you have freed breaks sweat, starts to falter. You are as faint, as false, as glass.

You clear your throat.

‘I am speaking to you from within the nightmare.’

60

THE ISIS 5 0 0 WORDS FICTION COMPETITION “There’s imediacy to this”

T

his term, we invited responses from this quote and a selection of images, inspired and crafted by our fiction and creative teams. ‘there’s imediacy to this’ was an opportunity for writers and creatives to respond to the challenges of the prompt and to think about misspelling and meaning. For a few days our email inbox was alive with submissions from students across the UK responding to both image and text. They did so in creative, innovative and curious ways, challenging the boundaries of fiction in their responses.

The winner and shortlist, chosen by our panel of judges, are published here. Our judges included: BEN EASTHAM Co-founder and editor of The White Review TOM GATTI Culture Editor at the New Statesman ROBERT MONTGOMERY Artist, sculptor, poet and founder of the New River Press poetry publishing house.

DANIELLA SHREIR Previous ISIS editor and founder and editor of Another Gaze film journal.

61

WINNER: Thomas Ball FLEET 2013 Deep Blu

I used to go past here and try and catch the dates one by one before they sped out of view

andrea + scott forever

andrea + craig forever

SNATCHY woz here and I was here too crouching behind the clatter of these slow wasted trains I took a stone from the park and came up to write through the brambles and across the rails to add my name with Snatchy scott and Blu alongside each other for the night just 4 years and four feet divide us

as tho only I knew the secret power of the paint but theres something good about the feel of the rock in my hand the concreet scratch the chalky tan dusting my knuckles with each new word upon this cold hard page I look at the time and see it mistified still and cover my ears and my eyes against the noise of a new bright train and how sweet it is to think of these words that a passer by had seen glowing beyond the pane and sweeter all the more when looking back to see these milky scrapes already fade, the slate already clean and nothing but the clearing glass a discarded stone, this frostbiten fist can remember and will remember to think that once I knew it well and that suddenly there was an imediacy to this

2016 Chalk TAnn I can see my breath in the air and I breath it on my watch and wait for the glass to become clear again – thats the real way to count time. if I wanna take up half the wall I will. maybe Im not like the rest you, I cant mark myself in just a word or two I used to go past here and trace the distance from the station by the names like neon milestones on a country lane

62

SHORTLISTED: Francesca Violich Kennedy Jack’s bombardier was a stout man who looked younger than his twenty-one years because he had freckles plastered all over his snubbed nose, and his wide and innocent brown eyes were not unlike those of a placid cow that might have graced the front of a Swiss postcard. The bombardier’s name was Oliver and Jack did not trust him. Jack knew that that it was a ridiculous thought but he could not help but notice that the bombardier’s temper and the maneuverability of the plane seemed to be inversely related. When Oliver swore loudly, the engines purred like a cat, and all was well in the world. But when Oliver broke out a toothy grin, the plane dipped and swerved—one time he could have sworn that he saw the balsa wood peeling away from the cockpit—and Jack would panic and slam his heel down on Oliver’s booted toe or direct a pointed insult at Oliver’s feminine hands or his water-heavy head and the wings straightened out and the machinery stopped clanking and the navigational indicators sparked back to life and Jack would let out a breath as if it were his last.

It took seventeen days for them to become friends.

One day shortly after that thirty one-oh-nines appeared from under the low-lying cloud cover and Oliver panicked. Jack panicked too. Everything seemed to be happening in small flashes. Jack could see no longer the gleaming fragile bones of the flock of Bristol Blenheims they were meant to be escorting. A bead of sweat rolled down Oliver’s pallid face, and he let out a string of terrible curses and the plane lurched up like a forgotten dog, happy to hear the lewd spew, and Jack felt bile rise in his throat. At fifty yards Jack screamed hysterically for Oliver to shoot, and Oliver did. The left wing blossomed into flames; the German pilot bailed out, a wisp of shadow blown from a burning dandelion of propellors.

“We’re alive!” Oliver screamed hysterically when they tumbled out onto the tarmac.

“WE’RE ALIVE!” That night, even though it was a Tuesday, they got drunk on stolen vodka and lay on the asphalt giggling like schoolgirls, their backs soaked to the skin under the starry sky. Jack felt a certain ineffable something. He reached for Oliver’s hand.

By Friday Ollie was dead, gunned down in France. His lieutenant gave him Oliver’s personal sundries, which Jack sobbed over on Saturday. He flew on only for a few more Saturdays. A new recruit from Bristol received the sundries after that. He took good care of them except for one time when he, in a rush, dropped the well-worn toothbrush and watched with a strange sense of horror as it plummeted down to the cold white lavatory sink. He felt strangely guilty.

Later, the toothbrush, landing in a heap of paper and other soft refuse, made barely a sound as it hit the bin on his way out.

63

SHORTLISTED: Naomi Polonsky daddy buys me sum candy floss its pink and fluffy and sweet and sticky and it sticks to my face so mummy picks it off and tells me to eat it tydily please but i know she isnt angry becos shes smiling and she is really happie today just like me and also daddy and i run to the next rollecoaster and i pull mummy and daddy with me becos they are walking too slowly and its the big thunder mountain railroad and it looks like the mounten in the picture in the living room with the presidents on it but it doesnt really look like a real life mounten more like a really big toy one and lily already told me about this one becos shes goned to dinseyland four times becos her daddy drives her in his big shiny black car and on the rollercoster ill wizz round and round really fast like a spining top or buster running round the garden when daddy comes home from work too late to take him on a walk and i jump up and down becos i cant wait but theres lots of people who have to get on befor us so mummy tells me to be payshent but i dont like being payshent and daddy picks me up and gives me a big kiss on the cheek and says what a pritty girl i am with my speshle bow in my hair and at last we are at the front and the man who works here says i have to mesure myself to see if im tall enuff to go on but i know that i am becos mummy mesures me on the wall every week and ive grown more than a hole inch since i turned six and i sit down on the seat with daddy on one side and mummy on the other side and theres another man sitting next to daddy and it starts and its so fast we go up and down and up again and down again its so fast and marnie wont even beleive me when i tell her about it and it stops and we get off and its already geting dark and daddy says we have to leave now so we can get back home in time for bedtime and im so sad becos i luv dinseyland and mummy and daddy and candy floss and rollecoasters and i want to stay here frever and ever and we sit down in the car and mummy turns round from the front seat and her face is suddenly really serius like when shes talking on the phone or praying in church and she says abbie mummy and daddy have sumthing to tell you daddys going to live in a different house from now on nuthing will be different except now youll have two homes and she turns round and daddy starts the car

64

SHORTLISTED: Aaron Skates Jake was upstairs getting ready while I talked to his stepdad -- on the wall was a road sign with a whiteboard surface on which someone had written ‘hippies use other door’ and next to it was another that had yet to be filled in

i: yeah, of course 3: Steve’s very proud of his poems aren’t you Steve?

S: I wrote a few after my discharge, would you like to see them? i: yeah, of course 3: oh Steve you’ve finally got your audience

The bottom of the mug had a circle of hair at the bottom where is had been scratched by the spike that held it in place in the dishwasher. A thick coiled black hair. I stared at the hair for a while. It was hairy.

Steve’s hair was black and thick and thick because he was Jake’s dad and I was Jake’s mate and Jake’s hair was thick and Steve’s hair was thicker and it was in the bottom of my mug.

i: ...

S: what do you think? i: I like the ryhmes.

S: Yeah life is full of ryhmes isn’t it?

I looked at the wall hanging photo of the hairy man standing next to a forty tonne hairy tank and it was hairy. Jake came down the stairs and saw me holding his stepdad’s poems and asked if anybody wanted a cup of hair.

On the Whiteboard:

S: So do you like poems then?

S: I wrote this one after the man next door hung himself and I had to cut him down...

65

...despair nightmare out of thin air book of common prayer national healthcare social welfare.

facebook.com/o2academyoxford twitter.com/o2academyoxford instagram.com/o2academyoxford youtube.com/o2academytv

Sat 25th Feb • £20 adv • 6.30pm

White Lies

Sat 25th Feb • £15 adv • 11pm

Dusky Live

Fri 3rd Mar • £12 adv • 6.30pm

Tue 21st Mar • £8.50 adv • 7pm

Declan McKenna

Tue 11th Apr • £14 adv • 7pm

(hed)p.e.

Fri 21st Apr • £8 adv • 6.30pm

Tue 21st Mar • £21 adv • 7pm

Coast To Coast & Better Than Never

The Wailers

The Amy Winehouse Wed 22nd Mar • £27.50 adv • 6pm + One State Drive Scott Bradlee’s Experience a.k.a Sat 22nd Apr • £15 adv • 7pm Postmodern Lioness Electric Six Jukebox + Nightmares from the + Alice Victoria Sat 4th Mar • £8 adv • 6.30pm

Evarose + Veridian + Matchboy + The Kaos

Sat 4th Mar • £13 adv • 11pm

Solardo Sessions Tour

Tue 7th Mar • £5 adv • 7pm

Thu 23rd Mar • £16.50 adv • 7pm

Bear’s Den

Discotheque

Thu 27th Apr • £15 adv • 7pm

Fri 24th Mar • £8.50 adv • 6.30pm

Sonic Boom Six + Ghouls

Sat 25th Mar • £15 adv • 6.30pm

Circa Waves

Blackberry Smoke The Pogues Irish Whiskey Present: Mon 27th Mar • £12 adv • 7pm A Shot at Discovery - Pulled Apart By The Heats Horses

Fri 28th Apr • £23.50 adv • 7pm

Tinariwen

Sat 29th Apr • £8 adv • 6.30pm

Chasing Daylight + Earinade + Ben Champion + Cora Pearl

Sat 29th Apr • £13 adv • 6.30pm

Wed 8th Mar • £10 adv • 6.30pm

Tue 28th Mar • £19.50 adv • 7pm

Thu 4th May • £28 adv • 7pm

+ Her’s + 31hours

+ Shame

Morgan Heritage & Etana

Thu 30th Mar • £13 adv • 7pm

Sat 6th May • £16 adv • 6.30pm

Rat Boy

Warpaint

Ashanti

The AC/DC Experience

Sat 11th Mar • £15 adv • 11pm

Fri 31st Mar • £10 adv • 11pm

MC A.M.C, Phantom MC, Voltage

Sun 2nd Apr • £27.50 adv • 7pm

Thu 9th Mar • 7pm

Genres feat. DJGuv & Eksman

Mon 13th Mar • £20 adv • 7pm

Laura Marling

The Jesus and Mary Chain

Tue 14th Mar • £12 adv • 7pm

Mon 3rd Apr • £22.50 adv • 7pm

+ Tequila Mockingbyrd + Killer Bee

Tue 4th Apr • £16 adv • 7pm

Bonafide

Wed 15th Mar • SOLD OUT • 7pm Sat 18th Mar • £20 adv • 6.30pm

Fri 7th Apr • £15 adv • 7pm

Mon 20th Mar • £24.50 adv • 7pm

+ Terminus + Nasty High

The Velvets: Celebrating 50 Years of The Velvet Underground Sat 7th Oct • £13 adv • 6.30pm

The Smyths: Strangeways Here We Come Tour

Fri 27th Oct • £12 adv • 6.30pm

Guns 2 Roses

Fri 3rd Nov • £23 adv • 6.30pm

From The Jam “The Gift” 35th Anniversary

Tue 9th May • £10 adv • 7pm

The Japanese House The Magic Gang

Sat 13th May • £17 adv • 11pm

Tue 16th May • £13.50 adv • 7pm

The Comet Is Coming + Flamingods

Half Man Half Biscuit Tigertailz Goldfrapp

+ Regulus + New Generation Superstars + Hell’s Gazelles

Fri 29th Sep • £13 adv • 6.30pm

The Oxford Soul Train

Mallory Knox

Lucy Spraggan

Bigfoot

The Inflatables

Wed 10th May • £10 adv • 6pm

Feeder

+ Lonely The Brave + Fatherson

Ward Thomas

Sat 6th May • £12 adv • 6pm

White Magic Sound Birthday Bash featuring: Seani B

The Skids 40th Anniversary Show + Roddy Radiation & The Skabilly Rebels + King Hammond & The Rude Boy Mafia + Madan Scorcher + Darren Bennet

+ Tigercub + Thee MVPs

Dutch Uncles

Fri 9th Jun • £25 adv • 7pm

Sat 24th Jun • £18.50 adv • 7pm

+ In Hearts Wake + Fizzy Blood

Sun 5th Mar • £11 adv • 7pm

VANT

The Verve Experience: Celebrating The Twentieth Anniversary of Urban Hymns

While She Sleeps

+ Art Theefe

Mon 27th Mar • £20 adv • 7pm

Sat 20th May • £10 adv • 6.30pm

Thu 18th May • £27.50 adv • 7pm

The Mission

ss

+ The Skeletal Family + Pauline Murray

o2academyoxford.co.uk 190 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1UE • Doors 7pm unless stated Venue box office opening hours: Mon-Sat 12pm-4pm ticketweb.co.uk • wegottickets.com • seetickets.com • gigantic.com

66

Develop a truly global perspective With our vast repository of knowledge and expertise on our specialist regions, we are uniquely placed to inform and shape current thinking about the economic, political, cultural, security and religious challenges of our world.

From day one at our central London campus, our students are encouraged to challenge conventional views and think globally – and that’s one of the reasons why they develop careers that make a real difference.

Come to an Open Evening Thursday 8 June 2017

Find out more www.soas.ac.uk/pgevents

IMAGE CREDITS

2-3: Florrie Engleback 5: Megan Black 10-11: Vicky Robinson 14: Pinky Ortiz, www.sulacollective. com 16-20: Tobi Thomas 20: Florrie Engleback 26-7: Florrie Engleback 28-29: Anjelica Smerin 31: Kate Weir 33: Megan Black 46: Megan Black 47: Megan Black 48-9: Megan Black 51 :Megan Black 53: Megan Black 55: Kate Weir 56: Kate Weir 60-65: Anjelica Smerin

OSPL Chairman: Daniel Kodsi Managing Director: Rebecca Iles Finance Director: Katie Birnie Directors: Mack Grenfell, Steven Spisto, Sophie Aldred, Josh McStay, Tom Hall, Tom Metcalf

67