Remembering: 'In Memory Of', Active Tense

The idiom, Those Who Forget The Past Are Doomed To Repeat It, is thrown around a lot. It’s an oft-banked opening to many a journal article about a commemorative date or breach, a fail-safe reprimand with matured acceptance in political speeches, and an easy conclusive point to open an undergraduate essay argument up to further implication and significance. Really, though, George Santayana’s oft-quoted statement has become something of an excuse.

The traditional commemorative dedication, In Memory Of, shares, in many instances, the same problem as Santayana’s idiom: passivity. When something is dedicated In Memory Of, it is a conclusion to that which is remembered; it says, We Have Done Our Duty and Remembered This. Countless studies draw similar conclusions from various memorial case studies, suggesting that this dedication is often a close (or attempt thereof) on discussion and an imposition of finality. An erected statue to X shows that we have remembered and cared for it for time immemorial, no further act on memory necessary. It encourages and, crucially, excuses, subsequent inaction. Santayana, by referencing the act of forgetting in absentia of its inverse, remembering, provides similar encouragement. Interestingly, Santayana dooms not the active act of forgetting, but the finality of having already forgotten. Though an implicit proviso of encouragement to inaction (and one reliant on a deliberately closed reading on my part), his prioritisation of that which is forgot over the persistent, active struggle of/with remembering allows the documented use and reuse of his statement as an excuse for its users’ failure to engage with the latter. By reprimanding the memory of others already lost, the statement’s use excuses one’s own passivity in struggling with the mess of actively remembering. 

South African Memorial at Delville Wood. Source: Author's Own

When I visit a memorial I choose one name and emphasise their story throughout my visit. Trying to picture what the person (and indeed people) behind this name went through, what they felt, what they saw, is a means of actively engaging with memory: it forces active remembering, displacing the passivity of forced silence as you will (read: kid) yourself into thinking that you won’t forget this when you leave the space of deliberately defined commemoration. At Auschwitz six years ago, it was a small religious community pictured and hanging on the walls of a nearby church; they reminded me of my own church community, placing them, and by extension myself, in the act of remembering. In the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in France this summer, pillaged and destroyed on 10 June 1944 by a Nazi German Waffen-SS company, it was a 22-year-old girl named Yvonne, murdered in said pillage; she was (approximately) my age, and she forced me to picture my own life transposed in her situation. In the fields by Delville Wood commemorating its losses of WWI, also this summer, it was 22-year-old Private France; like me, in age and nationality, but what had he been forced to face here that I never would? 

The past is a foreign country

We live not only in a place, but also a time. 

I never understood, truthfully, (and despite extensively quoting it in drafts and redrafts and final drafts of essays and my undergraduate dissertation; wherever memory was concerned), David Lowenthal’s line: ‘the past is a foreign country’. Until I put time and place together as adjuncts: suddenly both were inhabited and necessary to identity, fundamental to it. You cannot abstract the past from time: history without time is absurd, nonsensical, and memory without the backbone of temporality ceases to exist. Similarly, any notion of the future without reference to time simply isn’t ‘the future’. The shared temporal reference core to both concepts is the present: the origin of the axes of time (that is: coordinates (0,0)) from which we read the graphs of past and future. As such, time, like identity itself, is a matter of alterity: that which something is defined against and is itself defined against something else, never an abstract independent. I am in the present because I am not in the past; that is the past because it is different to now, lived in the tense that is occupied; this is the future because it is different to now, vacant of experience. I am who I am because of my past and that which is my future. We are who we are because this is our past and this is our future. 

We are a country that shall defend our island, whatever the cost shall be, we shall fight on the beaches and we shall never surrender. We are a county whose heritage is mining. We are a city of learning and academic excellence, the names of scholars more numerous than the faces hanging in our great halls. I am a ‘90s kid, because I understand this set of niche cultural references those born in the 2000s could never ‘get’. The various claims made on time in these examples are fundamental to the identities they list at various spatial scales, from nation to individual body.  

Monuments to everyday lives

Beyond the trope of a haunted setting for gothic characters or mauve hangout for teenagers trapped in a budget horror film replete with green slime, the graveyard is frequently a place of reflection: both of individual experience and time itself. Common to all characterisations of the graveyard aforementioned is its stasis in time and space; its atmosphere is typically one of sombre mood, a quiet setting where noise is out of the ordinary (hence its easy lend to the gothic genres), and its location removed from the surrounding urbanity of mobility and fluidity, a place seemingly dislocated from its spatial setting. Yet this stasis is actively and always undermined by movements of organic growth (lichens, moss etc.), demography (as more graves expand its space), and time (as living connections to particular graves shift with demographic cycles and Mr Smith, Loving Husband and Devoted Father, 1889-1957 shifts from an active monument visited weekly and decorated with fresh flowers to a forgotten name, half corroded to a Mr Smi glanced over on the way to more contemporary plaques). It is this contradiction of stasis and fluidity in the marriage of memory and place that makes graveyards so interesting. 

I’m driving through Paris, thinking about the Vichy regime, national memory and the Vélodrome d’hiver, when we pass a massive graveyard awkwardly slanted and slotted between two dual carriageways and a medley of roundabouts. A sea of grey plaques of varying shapes and efforts, interspersed with dying plants and ribbons. A statue to an eighteenth century figure, apparently held in place by the surrounding vines’ embrace, juts out of a wall by the road a few minutes later. I don’t catch his name or purpose worth monumentalising, and I wonder if many (any?) drivers negotiating Paris would notice him. The Eiffel tower is of course the monument one thinks of when Paris is called to mind, a psychological relation normalised by the relentless capitalisation of the monument in the sale of the city and its ideal. Trying to spot it makes me think of the Statue of Liberty, that figure that curses through the full-American blood of their constitution, and the fact that it was a present from France. What are they monuments to? 

Nostalgia is being used to steal the future

The Financial Times published an article yesterday morning arguing that ‘nostalgia has stolen the future’:

“I remember when elections were won by leaders selling visions of the future: Harold Wilson’s white heat of technology, Ronald Reagan’s morning in America or Tony Blair’s New Britain. In the new democratic disorder nostalgia has replaced optimism as a ruling emotion. Populists recognise the power of adjusted memory. America’s Donald Trump, British Brexiters, Europe’s new nationalists – they all inhabit a rose-tinted past. Nostalgia’s force lies in a human instinct to screen out the bad while recalling the good…”

Though I agree largely with Stephens’ polemic, and the questioned use of nostalgia is something I have been thinking about for a while, I would argue a more active accusation of nostalgia’s theft of the future. That is: nostalgia has not simply ‘stolen the future’, but is actively being used to do so. 

Nostalgia has a complicated etymology beyond the popular understanding of rose-tinted glasses. Borrowed from Latin, its early usage from the mid-18th century was as a medical diagnosis for homesickness, a meaning that retains contemporary use as a longing for familiar surroundings. In the early 20th century the term is de-spatialised by an emphasis on its temporal properties; nostalgia thus comes to describe a sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period in the past, especially in one’s own lifetime, or a sentimental imagining or evocation of a period of the past. In the 1970s it transmogrifies once more: a collective term for things that evoke a former (remembered) era. Retaining its triad of forms, nostalgia today is generally understood as a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past. It’s the sighed remarks of older generations about Their Day and the comparative ignorance of The Youths Today; the #throwbackthursdays shared across social media platforms in weekly longings for beaches, parties and other off-days past; the renewed (characteristic?) contemporary fascination with period dramas of vintage styles, romances and heroes. 

What is time?

I don’t think we actually know. That’s not to say that we haven’t tried to define it, containing it within the parameters of what we (think) we know. I could answer with the numbers consigned to the movement of the sun and the gradient of its light that the hands of my clock now point to: 20:23. Or the number of planetary resolutions around the Sun since the death of Christ: 2018. I could answer with a cultural polemic describing the shape of contemporary society and its difference from earlier societies. Or I could quote Shakespeare and suggest that “we are time’s subject, and time bids be gone”. I could answer that time flies; that it is lost, irretrievable, wasted. That it is short and that it is endless. That is, we can describe time and we use time itself to describe all manner of things. We cannot, however, define it. And I think that’s because we don’t, really, understand it. None of those answers are wrong, but not one of them looks you in the eye and, unflinchingly, absolves that this is all and everything that time is. 

Time at Murray Edwards College. In the changing colour of the leaves; in the fact that I am stood here where so many previous female scholars stood and future female scholars will stand, and narrate it from this particular point within the lineage of continuity; in the movement from a lecture to a supervision, their schedule interrupted by the taking of this picture.

Noun: the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole. 

Verb: to plan, schedule or arrange when (something) should happen or be done.  

Does time even exist? As a noun or a verb, time confounds simple ontological description. Whilst the progression of existence and events and the act of scheduling both suggest an ontology (‘progression’ or a ‘schedule’), neither are really so tangible nor definite as to refute the question of time’s existence in a satisfactory, end-of-argument way. Yet time, or whatever it is that we have so called ‘time’, irrefutably exists. It’s in the wrinkles that gradually write themselves across foreheads and the grey that slowly tinges the colour from hair. It’s in the consciousness that delineates a present from a yesterday and a tomorrow. It’s in the knowledge that two people will show up at the same place simultaneously (or, depending on punctuality, thereabouts) when they agree upon a ‘time’ to do so. In all this evidence, however, it differs. They all describe ‘time’, but the concept of a simultaneous meeting is not the same as an agent of age, nor is the concept of changing from young to old the same as understanding the distinction between what one has experienced and still hopes to experience. The differences are not to be understood as dichotomous: they overlap, blur into multiplicity, trap each other in intertextuality. 

Visualising Space as Place: The Invention of Oxbridge

** ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED VIA COMPASS MAGAZINE BLOG BY SAME AUTHOR ** 

1209. A few students leave the stuffy spires of The Other Place and decamp to The Bridge, a land of denser castle-colleges sitting on the edge of the river Cam with similar traditions and a lighter blue sky. Or so the legend goes. The all-knowing, ever-present, fancy-punting-today-ladies tour guides will tell you something along those lines as they push you along the Cam, woven into soliloquies about Prince Charles failing his exams whilst his body-guard passed, cheeky Clare students scaring tourists into the water with a polystyrene ball, and John’s architecture snubbing Trinity with its eagle, et cetera ad infinitum.

Dusk in Clare College.

You know the tropes: New York, the city that never sleeps; Rome, the city of love; London, the city of fog. Oxford, the city of dreaming spires. Cambridge. The city of sleep-depriving, caffeine-fuelled essay-crises? Anonymous crushbridge stanzas? Generally mild weather with winter fog you can catch if you row or, more keenly, wake up before 8am? Turrets, bridges and a dome to boot?

Reading Geography

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POST ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON COMPASS MAGAZINE BLOG BY SAME AUTHOR 

**

Jane Austen thought those who didn’t read were stupid. More precisely, that ‘the person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid’. My 13-year-old sister would beg to differ. She thinks reading is stupid – because, and I quote, it’s boring. I’ve always been a reader, and a pretentious one at that (think the precocious figure of Roald Dahl’s Matilda), so have never shared my sister’s sentiments. What I did think stupid once upon a time, however, is Geography. The hydrological cycle and demographics of one population or other were in fact ‘intolerably stupid’ in all their bore. If this was Geography, I’d have nothing to do with it, thank you very much. Not even Austen’s ‘what are men to rocks and mountains?’ could convince me otherwise. Yet, beyond the rigidity of a GCSE exam syllabus, geography is perhaps more than anything else about reading. (And I don’t think it intolerably stupid anymore, in case you wondered – even if it retains the trope of a doss degree).

Plato believed reading gave soul to the universe and wings to the mind. A pretentious reference, yes, but also an effective capture of geography’s relation to reading. The etymology of geography grounds the concept, with Greek roots, in writing: gē-graphie, earth-writing. If the verb is writing the earth, its noun is reading this writing and, by extension, the earth. So in reading, I am at core engaging with geography. Take Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The novel’s writing is geographical for through it Austen explores, translates and comments on the world, whether this be a construction of the rolling rocks and mountains of Derbyshire or a commentary on the patriarchal social conventions of the time. Its reading is equally geographical, for through the novel I engage with the world in particular ways and shape my understanding of it. The same can be said of most writing, almost all of which functions as an engagement with the earth and hence can be analysed for its geographical function.

Placing Art

"How different Sibyl was! She lived her finest tragedy. She was always a heroine. The last night she played - the night you saw her - she acted badly because she had known the reality of love. When she knew its unreality, she died, as Juliet might have died. She passed again into the sphere of art." 

-Dorian Gray to Basil Hallward, Ch. IX, The Picture of Dorian Gray

I spent my first year of English A-level debating, amongst other less pretentious study, whether Oscar Wilde subscribed to the hedonism and aestheticism of Lord Henry and Dorian Gray and if, as was used to testify against him in his trial and subsequent conviction for gross indecency, the novel these two characters situate, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', was in some way a reflection of Wilde himself. Contrary to Wilde's dubious preface outline that 'it is the spectator and not life that art really mirrors' and 'all art is quite useless', the fate of Dorian and his portrait almost perfectly mirrors that of Wilde and his novel; a perfect thematic and contextual parallel for a literature student to note in an exam, but also interesting from a semantic perspective.   

In 1907 Alfred Lichtwark, a German art historian, mused that 'in our age there is no work of art that is looked at so closely as a photograph of oneself, one's closest relatives and friends, one's sweetheart'. Theorists like Walter Benjamin and John Berger alike have essayed around Lichtwark's muse by questioning the understanding of photography and art through inquiry of aesthetic distinctions and social functions (see: 'A Small History of Photography' (1931, Benjamin) and 'Understanding a Photograph' (2013, Berger)). The argument that photography might itself constitute a form of art has been enumerated by proponents for almost a century, at its heart lying the question of art and purpose posed rather fatefully by Wilde. But whilst the medium has been thus explored, its location is oft left implicitly static. Photography: art. Art: gallery (primarily). Gallery: exclusivity. We've recognised the self-expressionism of art, and eventually expanded its tool from brush and paint to camera (etc.), yet it remains a term of exclusive connotation. I don't want to debase the concept of art - its very core dependent upon an aspect of creativity, peculiarity, and representation rather than pure being such that it cannot, surely, be the everyday - but I do think that art can be found in the everyday, beyond the canvas and outside of the gallery.

Might not your social media page be a site, or at a greater stretch form, of art? Queue Lord Henry dropping his glass of gin and shuddering upright in the study of his West London apartment at the very thought.      

Sir! To the ghetto and then to Auschwitz for only €99 - with return!

To remember and not only to commemorate - Irene Eber, Holocaust survivor

I'm in Krakow, Poland. I've been here for two weeks to conduct research for my dissertation (gulp), and I've tried to embody, as much as is possible in the frame of research, the foreign, keen-to-see-everything and ask-a-million-questions Tourist. At the same time, I'm completely aware of the weight of the time that I tour and the history it holds; that my imposition as a tourist is by necessity in dialogue with this.

Staircase and courtyard in Kazimierz, Krakow made famous by Spielberg's 1993 film, Schindler's List. 

Wherever you look there are signs advertising an excursion to Auschwitz at various prices, nay 'bargains'. Guides stop you at every corner asking if you'd like a tour of the old Jewish quarter or a trip to the sites of the ghetto. Students earning summer pay try to hand you flyers about Schindler's Factory and the local concentration camps. One tourist I spoke to exclaimed how it was all so much less Disneyfied than they were expecting. 

You can get to Auschwitz via bus, train or taxi. We get the train. 

Forgetting to Remember

'For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.' - Elie Wiesel

'Forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself.' - Jean Baudrillard

It’s a common incantation that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it (George Santayana, 1906); it comes out with the familiar litany of prosaic quotes to mark historic anniversaries and commemorations, it prefaces innumerable texts, and it serves as an effective justification for any historical analysis. I’ve even written it on the inside cover of my dissertation notebook. And yet, whilst we remember this incantation, do we always remember to remember the past?

Tomorrow, January 27 2017, marks international Holocaust Memorial Day: a day completely and totally dedicated to remembering the Holocaust, to remembering not to forget it.

Iconic scene from Spielberg's (1993) 'Schindler's List'. Source: photo by Allstar/Cinetext/Universal - © Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar from Imdb.com

I’ve struggled with the idea of having a defined temporal bracket set aside for the purpose of memorial for a while, traceable, I think, to when I sat cross-legged on the floor of a classroom, listening to my primary-school teacher translating the news of some bombings in London and asking us all to be quiet for a minute to remember the victims. Amidst several other fidgeting, cross-legged kids, I scrunched my eyes together and tried to will myself into remembering. Every few seconds I’d soften the scrunch in one eye to a split vision, quickly checking that everyone else was still remembering. I’d then resume my scrunch and focus on my own remembering. I don’t think I ever thought about the victims for more than a few negligible seconds; what really occupied my minute of remembering were tangential thought processes about the act of remembering, about why on earth I was being told to sit in silence and remember something that no one I knew had experienced and I certainly hadn’t experienced, or about what other people were thinking about and, oh dear! I wasn’t actually remembering what I was supposed to remember! I kept forgetting to remember it! I’ve observed countless minutes of silence since my cross-legged, scrunched-eyes experience, and I always find myself coming back to this circular questioning of performing commemoration of particular memories within a defined, imposed minute of silence – or, by extension, a universally dedicated day.

From the outset, I want to be clear that I do not dispute the dedication of minutes of silence or days of dedicated memorial to remembering particular events/victims. What I seek to question is the everyday alternative – are, the everyday alternatives, I should say – to these normalised forms of ritualised commemoration.

In critique of critique

At Cambridge, critique is something constantly drilled into you, thrown at you and encouraged from you. And I've noticed in my everyday life that I'm much more critical of things, I'm 'very much more political', as my mom would have it. It's something I'm grateful to have gained from my time at Cambridge, so far, and an aspect of my course that keeps me going when I've got sixty dense pages of reading notes to get through in one afternoon for the umpteenth supervision essay of the term and I'd really rather not read about the historiography of milk consumption. Genuinely.

Critique to me is a form of analysis, engagement, a means of reading and interpreting the world that expands upon the black and white frame given to you. But I think there's a limit to critique, and a backbone to it. Critique is an Achilles heel. It's necessary, but it's often essentialist, and I think there's a point to be made about critiquing critique: its application, its point and its context. 

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.