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