In translation

I started writing in my books this summer. 

Let Others cycle in Cambridge

Turn right away from the track, down the road of tennis courts and cottages dressed in autumn, heading towards the traffic lights; the turning I took after my first training session with CUAC, whence I spent an hour and a half transgressing a ten minute journey back to college. Head straight on at the traffic lights, over the wooden xylophonetic bridge and up around the lefthand corner; dodge the cyclists racing back from the UL and walk the steps where I discussed intersectional feminism and setting up societies with friends. Cross the lights I've run a thousand times in makeshift interval sessions clothed in the escape from work, and walk up over the bridge past Trinity and Tit Hall, on which I scattered sequins and stars as I ran over it and back to pose for pictures with friends before King's Affair. Turn right past chalked signs pointing To The River and over cobbled stones, past the room in which I discussed postmodernism over tea and red wine in the early hours of the morning and the gateway in front of which I posed in tacky Christmas jumpers, turning left again and then right. Trinity Lane and King's Parade: the heart of Cambridge. Walk past the spires of King's chapel, the wall I jumped off at 6am in a white ball gown and stupid-inch heels after a ball, where I sat eating sushi with friends and past which I loudly speculated to tour-guides trying to sell me punting trips that I was neither here nor there. Past the haunt of coffee shops and unproductive dates, the bookstores I've convinced myself another two, or three, or five, books can do no harm, and the route I walked whilst trying to convince a guy I wasn't his soul mate, or whatever. Past Catz, the college in which I first encountered the prospect of studying in Cambridge. Past the sandwich shop that sells over-priced ice creams but is the only place that stocks them in January so I buy them anyway. Keep walking. That's how I constitute my geography of Cambridge. Flâner; wander, aimlessly, solitary. The world is yours for the making, as they say. 

Except maybe it's not. 

Writing my public space

"There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see." - Leondardo da Vinci

Johannesburg was my first city. Vanderbijlpark was my first town. London was my first metropolis. Cambridge was my first home. These places are all integral to who I am; their grid lines, their street names, their dead ends and their hidden buildings, their territorial boundaries, are as much a part of me as the fact that I have brown, chestnut hair, that I always have my toe-nails painted red, that I'm never without a book. Pemberley, Derbyshire is where I first fell in love. Molching, Munich is where I learned a love of words as freedom from the oppressive political climate in which I lived. Long Island and New York are where I learnt the fallacy of wealth and obsession. They may be fictive, but these geographies and their associated memories, learnt from Austen, Zusak and Fitzgerald, are no less constitutive of my identity nor less real to my sense of public space than Joburg, Vanderbijlpark, London and Cambridge. Because my perceptions of space and place aren't objectively granted, and neither are yours. They're written. By you, by others, by me. 

Geography is, linguistically, about writing the world. Geo-Graphy. Earth-Writing. It's inherently subjective and situated. Geography, at heart, is a personal interpretation, shaped by personal experience and perception. My geography of London is not the same as yours, or anyone else's, for that matter. Let's go beyond the gridlines and the barriers, the street names and the territorial boundaries, to the emotional and the psychological constitution of space in its identity as place.

Geography is as much an art as a science. You can get a sense of a space physically by analysing the geomorphological make-up of the rocks, or the biodiversity of its biomes, or the pollution of the air. But you cannot get a sense of place that is objective, scientific. It is, by trite definition, subjective. That's what makes it a place. Calling a space a 'place' gives it an identity. And this identity is unique to each person.   

F WORDS AND B WORDS

We're all equal now, and I can walk the streets as freely as my brother, right?
Spoiler: wrong.

Today as I walked to fetch my sister from school, a grand total of three drivers in the space of one road honked their horns voraciously as they drove past me, leaning out of the window and staring unabashedly rather than focusing on the road ahead. It's nothing out of the ordinary, and I'm used to it. I'm used to hastening my step and pulling my coat tighter. It's normal to cross the road or redirect my route if a group of burly men are up ahead. It's a reflex to walk past shouts and whistles without showing any sign of having heard a thing, tightening my facial muscles and gritting my teeth, pronouncing, irrespective of the truth, that I had a boyfriend and was on the way to meet him, when a random guy on the street approaches me and asks what my plans were for the evening, refusing to leave until the B word is spoken. All part of negotiating my everyday. But today those skin-jumping honks were three too many. I'm fed up of this discrimination being part of the patchwork construing my everyday; I'm fed up of them informing my imaginative geographies and the ways I perceive places; and I'm fed up of their existence being contingent upon the presence of a male, be this physically with me or imaginatively referenced. 

Fresh, man

September. New highlighters, new loafers, new goals. A new school year. A new beginning. September is, in my academia-led life, my New Year. 

A blurred capture of the Wren library at dusk after listening to Trinity choir sing on punts, as we rushed through the college to pre's. An apt capture of the frenzy of undergraduate days in Cambridge. One of my favourite pictures of first year, precisely because of its innocent ineptitude and undue glory, its unabashed identity. 

This October someone else will sit at my desk by the window to a 20cm wide balcony, leaning back in the way my year 9 German teacher told us not to on the chair that should have been, according to my room itinerary, a swirly chair, and gazing intermittently at the three drooping shelves above their head and the people playing basketball on the courts outside, in lieu of the blank word document staring at them from a virginal laptop screen. Someone else will spend hours pinning polaroids onto the small board by the desk and imprint holes into their fingers for the next week. It'll be someone else's heart in their mouth as they boil the kettle they brought with them under the advice of every cliche Fresher Guide on the internet in the corner of the room with the balcony door jarred open, as far away from the smoke detector as possible for fear of being that person who sets off the alarms and forces everyone outside. The room will tell different stories. That night planned to be a mean feat of tackling an essay crisis which spontaneously turned into a four hour long tea party might become instead a spontaneous 3am Coldplay rave. The solid week the room spent covered in glitter, sequins and stars, with white tie dresses, ball tickets, high heels and red lipsticks lying in a mosaic across the floor and covering all but the very shyest peeks of furniture might instead be a week of binge-watched Gilmore Girls episodes with new friends huddled around a small laptop screen, covered in an array of quilts and dotted with sliced apples covered in peanut butter and biscotti. The 3am phone calls complete with cross country pacing around the room in a vain hunt for signal may instead be a reel of early morning inspiration, of poetry sprawled across discarded Sainsbury's receipts. It'll be someone else's room in October, but N15 will always be my room. And changing its resident and the stories it'll tell a year later doesn't erase my residency or the stories I protagonised.

Unveiling the burkini

On beaches across the Mediterranean, White women have found themselves victim to the latest fashion fiasco as the French ban bikinis; just last week a woman was fined €11 for wearing a bikini and sunglasses on a beach in Cannes. This week, pictures have emerged of French police forcing women to put on jeans and long-sleeved shirts over their bikinis as part of the ban on Nice beach. Inventor of the bikini, Louis Réard, explains that he created the swimwear to give women freedom, not to take it away. One would surely be right to argue, nonetheless, that having the option to wear something that exposes so much of their skin takes away their freedom, making them subject to purporting extremism around the sexualisation of women's bodies and therefore explicitly supporting the radical movement Sexism. It's clear to see, therefore, that forcing women to cover themselves completely when visiting beaches, effectively implemented through the banning of bikinis across the Mediterranean, gives them back their freedom and helps emancipate them from the hold of patriarchal traditions. Whites pose a lot of threat to the Western way of life, basically because they're White, marking them out as different, and 'Other'. If we want to fight the extreme force of Sexism, we need to control these Whites and give a lot of media attention to Sexism. It's obviously fine if men want to just wear shorts at the beach and not cover up; they're already free and what they wear is of little concern in the fight against Sexism. Rather, the ban is there to help the White women. In no way obviously is their specific targeting aggravating to Sexist leaders, and it's obviously well-informed and considered. It is advised that one respect the bikini ban and embrace covering up completely. It'll free you, White women. 

******

Burkini, bikini. Burkini, bikini. Burkini, bikini.

Try say that repetitively and fast. Think Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry. The two words merge together, right? They're not that different, after all. But wait; there you're wrong. These two words, burkini and bikini, have a huge gulf between them! They're practically oxymoronic! The paragraph above reads farcically because we're conditioned to bikinis. Replace the word bikini with burkini and White with Muslim, and, suddenly, apparently, it's not so farcical. That statement itself is a farce. 

Source: Babe.com

In Rambling Response: Miss Representation

In 1992, Pat Roberston remarked that ‘the feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women’ but rather ‘about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians’. Misogynistic and dismissive rhetoric such as this has served to socialise a stigma around the term ‘feminism’, which should less hyperbolically and more truthfully perhaps be defined as a belief in and advocacy of the equal rights of females as males. Its name is not ‘equality’ as the definition denotes, for such a genderless noun would deny the historically precedent patriarchal bias in power relations and understandings. Feminism is more than campaigning for equal pay or votes for women; it’s also about how we subconsciously perceive the difference between opportunities as viable for, and the breaking down of the apparently rigid dichotomy between ‘male’ and ‘female’. Arguably the greatest vehicle debilitating this movement and continuing to socialise a stigma around ‘The F Word’ in the contemporary political climate is the media, which, Siebel Newsom argues, is both ‘the message and the messenger’. Vitally, the neutrality of ‘message’ and ‘messenger’ should be highlighted in Newsom’s argument, for whilst the media is undoubtedly often a hindrance to the advocacy of equality, reinforcing and perpetuating existing patriarchal structures of power, it can also be used as a powerful and revolutionary vehicle of social change. It all depends on who is behind the discourse.

American teenagers spend an average of 10 hours and 41 minutes each day consuming some form of media. From just this one base fact it is hard to deny the precedence that media holds in shaping our national discourse – one could even go so far as to argue that the media is our national discourse in the technological age, as hinted by the 2011 documentary, Miss Representation. And what, exactly, is the discourse that American teenagers are being fed in their 10 hours and 41 minutes, give or take, each day with regards to femininity? Studies show that 53% of 13 year old girls are unhappy with their bodies, a statistic that increases to 78% by the time girls turn 17. In parallel, rates of depression amongst girls/women doubled between 2000 and 2010, a period of dramatic rise in the pervasion of (social) media into the everyday. And, further, the American Psychological Association has found that self-objectification is now a national epidemic and problem. So? The problem is undoubtedly rooted in the reality that the media treats women as bodies. It’s largely unconcerned with women as intellectuals, equals, or, basically, human beings. As Margaret Atwood insinuates, women are bodies as men are minds. She writes, 

Performative Post-Politics

I've always been a fussy eater. Peas? Fish? A slab of plain chocolate? Gag.* In a commendable but largely unsuccessful ploy to get me to eat such gag-inducing items, my parents frequently delivered the line of how ungrateful me should just think of Those Poor Children In Africa who would die for my discarded plate of peas and fish. Noted, Poor Children In Africa, but I just don't like peas or fish, or chocolate. I'd gladly give them to you if I could. Also, whilst we're in this hypothetical and quixotic dialogue, how did you come to enter the performative politics of my parents' diction, let alone my fussy eating habits? Dear Children in Africa who would die for my plate of peas and fish, who are we to appropriate your sociopolitical demographics in our discussions concerning personal political opinions (This is a democracy, Mother, therefore, no, I will not eat the peas and fish, but thank you for your input)? Do you talk of Those Poor Children in Britain who would just die for your plate of chocolate? Because you're misinformed. I wouldn't die for your chocolate, sorry. 

Does this innocent appropriation of politics, with a multitude of suffixes attached on front (geopolitics, international politics, etc.), into a normative performance by You and I stretch beyond the innocence of my personal food politics (Peace Not Peas!), or, is political discussion the violated territory of Them (the politicians, the journalists, the victims, the perpetrators, the in-the-know people) by Us? I came across someone's statement on Tumblr where they touched upon performative politics in a diatribe against the 'commodification' of grief and outrage again the other day, having previously saved it for future reference, and, currently being in France surrounded by a multitude of EU flags on the backs of every car that passes on the road, scratched stickers of solidarity with Je Suis Charlie plastered onto the tilted walls in our small village and shadows of the recent terrorist attacks in the presence of armed soldiers patrolling the beaches, I can't help but question its point.

Translating definitions of I

Dusk is beginning to edge forwards as the golden shades of Autumnal months slowly blur the fading hues of Summer. I'm looking to choose my second-year modules and explore dissertation options, whilst my brother and his peers look to draft personal statements and compile lists of prospective universities. It's the season of exam results and back-to-school. It's the season of bated breath and tentative preparation for those looking to make and those looking to solidify university applications. It's a question of who I am, and who I need to be to be who I want to be. What defines me? What do I have to offer? What have I achieved? I've long been someone who reverts to defining herself by her grades, but such a definition has a propensity to collapse and is interpretatively variable (an A to one may be a failure whilst to another it is irreducible success). And yet, this season unforgivingly begs the question, who am I? 

I am a hundred unread books and 500 devoured books. I am bitter coffee disguised in taste by the sweetness of three sugars and drunken sullenly for the #aesthetic and the caffeine. I am pink loafers worn to death and stubbornly kept for old times' sake. I am overused semi-colons in an essay laboured over to the soundtrack of Interstellar. I am thirty photos taken on a rainy walk to supervisions, catching old buildings and fresh faces. I am an old 1930s typewriter gentrified into the 21st century and used to type notes and quotes, waiting for the adventure of a five page letter. I am breakfast hurriedly eaten on the way to lectures. I am hopping, skipping and bounding into hard sand on an athletics track, eyeing the clock for dinner. I am burnt popcorn at 4am. I am quoting the words to Father of the Bride out of context and subconsciously so. I am leather satchels and old school blazers. I am the dreamy spires of Cambridge, the mounds of reading lists and the forts of library books. I am the words I type and the words I read. I am. I.

Who am I? 

Each definition is, and can only ever be, mere translation. 

ON THINKING AND CHLOEGRAPHY

"When we 'see' a landscape, we situate ourselves in it."

- John Berger, Ways of Seeing

I'm no longer reading around the world in eighty novels, but writing myself. I've changed my cyber-address and, though I've dragged my old luggage with me, I want to situate myself in this new address more pervasively than before. 

The first undergraduate essay I was set, in Michaelmas 2015, was to discuss the nature of Geography as a subject being unified or divided. Having no extensive accompanying reading list or lecture scribbles for guidance in formulating an argument, as quickly became the norm for supervision essays, it was entirely in the abstract that my essay planning began. What is Geography, really? The OED says that Geography comes from the Greek geōgraphia, constituted by gē (earth) and graphia (writing). Essentially, Geography is therefore literally writing the earth, or, earth-writing. The suffix 'graphia' (or more colloquially, 'graphy') is hence used to denote some particular form of writing or field of study.  

19 art 

6 writing

1 science

6 types of works

and 19 fields of study are listed on Wikipedia under the brief explanation of 'graphia' as a suffix.

Chloegraphy is not one of them. It's made up. But it's apt. 

Modern Romance and Snapchat

"That's so Postmodern."
"What?"
"Postmodern."
"What does that even mean?"
"Exactly, it's Postmodern."

He swipes left, left, left again. He pauses, flicks through some pictures; swipes left. He swipes right. He swipes left. She zooms in, peruses mutuals, rejects the request. He doesn't like peanut butter; therefore, he's not The One. She seems nice, she's pretty, she's smart. So much potential. Ah! But wait. She liked Evita and I just can't stand musicals. She's a No then. Such are the woes of modern romance. Or so intimates Aziz Ansari in the international bestseller, 'Modern Romance: An Investigation'.

He's right. I've seen such things amongst my peers; heard countless tales of Tinder and seen countless so-called chick-flicks where the main FEMALE character (think tropes like Bridget Jones or Elle Woods) are longing for love and loathing their singledom amidst an inability to bag The Guy IRL (that's In Real Life, the Modern way) and so resort to some means of being set up or finding someone online (note - the Bridget Jones/Elle Woods allusion only extends as far as the ditzy female character trope); and, I've been on the receiving end of people despairing over their lack of romance in real life. Our search for partners is more aestheticised and idealised than it once was, where our grandparents, say, would more readily settle for the person they'd known since childhood or who lived around the block (assuming such an equivalent person exists today as an option). The science and the patterns explored in conjunction with several social scientists and in collaboration with Eric Klinenberg are fascinating and point to undeniable trends in the way romance is perused in the modern climate. People are increasingly reluctant to settle for anything less than The Boy/Girl Next Door (think more Soul Mate than Hey, He's Got A Decent Salary And Seems Like A Nice Chap), are more reticent to settle down in their early twenties, are increasingly reliant upon forms of social media and online dating platforms to meet romantic interests, hold differing views to older generations with respect to such things as sexting and infidelity, and the like. But I'm still reticent to accept it; to engage with it. I still like the notion that you can meet someone in real life (not IRL) and cultivate a relationship which is not dictated by nor subject to the world of virtual reality.

But then, you should question me: is this itself not just another situated, romanticised ideal borne of the ways in which modern romance is conducted? Am I myself not subject to the trap of the Internet, which Ansari so brilliantly highlights? Surely this is just another version of The One, The Ideal?

Save the Children: Saving Them and Saving Us

Some adverts are really creative and get your imagination working (though, as is typical of adverts in the automobile industry, they don't have any apparent connection with the product or service advertised besides a tenuous adjectival link), others are seductively persuasive and manipulate a good combination of music and graphics to promote whatever it is they seek to sell, and others are simply, obnoxiously, ridiculous. And then you get the rare advert that really makes you think. 

I went to the cinema to see 'Me Before You' earlier this evening and though the film itself has much to provoke discussion of, both good and bad, it was a (roughly) minute long advert which caught my attention and continues to peruse about it. The new Save The Children advert shows a young white girl fleeing a war-torn Britain, relocating the plight faced by millions of refugees from marginalised regions loosely fabricated as that normatively termed 'Middle East' (see Culcasi, 2012 for further discussion) to the intimately familiar UK. Upon hasty reading as I left the cinema, I've since found that it's a sequel to an earlier advert depicting the same girl experiencing her homeland turn into a war zone. The first thing to strike me about the campaign was the use of familiar cultural features - the thick British accents; the locations of the second-long shots; the BBC news coverage in the background - which explicitly situate the context of the imagined war in the realm of the local. The second was the use, powerfully, of a young, white, middle-classed girl to focus the experience of the imagined war upon; besides the connotations this invokes of parental and generational sympathy ('Think of your children's future!'), it appeals to the privileges of power typically hidden within complex subjugations of relational webs. To expand upon the wordiness of the latter point taking skin colour as an example: race is generally taken by white people to mean the colouring of other people's skin, rather than their own. Rarely does the term 'race' provoke thought of 'whiteness' for a white person, but rather of 'coloureds'. In the same respect, the imagined context of war is rarely located by the popular imagination in the realm of familiarity, be this in terms of race, religion or other differentiated forms of commonality; as such, it is harder to relate to or effectively empathise with. The tag line of the campaign inherently stresses the inactive, dismissive attitude such a lack of commonality or empathy risks.  

"Just because it isn't happening here, doesn't mean it isn't happening."

Normative Vocabularies of Everyday: Reflections

10:32am, 14/05

It's raining outside, and I'm sitting at a desk by a window on the third floor of the UL, part learning references for my Human paper, part staring out the window at passers by. Pathetic fallacy? An allegory for the daily slog that is repetitive revision? A metaphorical musing to set the scene for this post? Or perhaps, it's simply raining outside, and I'm sitting at a desk inside the UL revising and occasionally being distracted by the happenings and myriad of daily lives outside.

I can't remember the last time I wrote a post (and published it); I've had so many ideas over the past two and a bit terms of university, and have been challenged in innumerable ways, but I've just never sat down to type them. They've been written in many places - odd scraps of paper; letters; notes on my phone; scribbles in my Moleskine; far too many post-it-notes - but are yet to take on coherent form. But does that mean that they haven't existed? Because they don't have coherent form? Is their lack of public form constitutive of their non-existence?

11:38am, 30/05

Since starting this post I've written both of my 3-hour-long, hand-stiffening, essay-full exams and (unofficially) finished my first year of university. I'm one of the first to finish both my exams and work, so the daily slog of revision continues for most people whilst I wander through the city enjoying it for the first time without the ever-present nudge of supervisions, essays, lectures, reading and what else have you in the back of my mind, waiting for my first elusive May Week. After three days I was ready to return to work (not revising, but learning)... then I thought: "Ha! You started writing nearly two summers ago to prepare for the thinking that would be thrown at you in university and you've not, since starting university, written anything on there! If you miss writing and learning, then write and learn." Your probable thought line concerning my weirdness - Isn't she on holiday? Hasn't she just finished three terms at university of intense, non-stop work? - is definitely qualified.

Anyway. Normative vocabularies of the everyday: reflections.