She would recognize that poetry isn’t revolution but a way of knowing why it must come
- Adrienne Rich
In the no-man’s days between public holidays I swam twice daily in the rain-greened sea. At this time of year there is no point showering between each dip — better to became a salt-crusted thing. Sunscreen, sweat, swim, and all again. Sun and salt burns compete for top discomforts in the humid murk of December. Of those off work no one thinks to ask what do you do. Instead, the lucky people live as playful amphibian creatures with only periodic bursts of labour as they fashion loaves-and-fishes meals from leftovers.
Last week my sister arrived from her home place overseas, and our mum and I went to the airport to greet her. We were running late only to find that we were running early, with a bottleneck of passengers from nearly every continent queuing to get through the border. But our mistake came in relaxing too much into our new-found earliness. We stepped outside the busy arrivals hall for some fresh air, only to lose track of time and miss Martha’s ceremonial ejection from the sliding doors of the beagle-staffed biosecurity zone. Too late, too early, too late.
Time has felt wrong-footed these past months. Or I have felt wrong-footed in time. Never sure whether I am late or early, but losing so much of the sense of being on track, in the same place at the same time; finding clarity and abiding solidarities but finding confusion and social splintering, too. It’s not only interpersonal but internal. Things I have long known to be true feel brand new. True things under pressure have to be galvanised with courage. Maybe Twitter user @TheAgentNDN, said it best this month:
The genocide of Palestinians is changing something inside of me. I don't know what it is. I don't have the words for it. It's probably just sorrow welling up but it's changing me. I don't think I was under any illusions yet I'll never look at so many things the same way again … I felt this the first week and ever since but it's as if that drumbeat is getting louder now. It's actually changing how I think and feel about colonialism in Canada and the US. I probably won't be able to put words to those feelings for a while. They're big.
I am not shocked and yet still shocked by the the denial and justification of the genocidal wrong we are seeing play out day after day. Not shocked yet still shocked by the way western leaders unceremoniously ditch the ideals of the post-WWII settlement, but who fully expect to hold the ceremonial authority that acting by those ideals would secure. All I know is that all people need basic safety and agency, and that safety and agency cannot be bought with oppression and annihilation; that settler-colonies are curdled from the get-go — places where the lucky people play in the sea of the disappeared, but who fail to account for the we-teach-life survivance of the oppressed.
This time of year often feels slow for me, with plenty of time to reflect. But I’ve been around people for the whole month, and the arrival of the last day of the year has taken me by surprise. I’m not sad about it, though. So much has been written on the air that it is fine to leave sparse pages. This year I thought I would find a home in writing. But I ended up finding it hard to find a home in general. It feels vulnerable to tell you that I crave an ongoing writing project to keep me warm (and puzzled and mad!), but that I don’t currently have one. I have struggled with all sorts of stability in 2023. Unhomeliness is a reevaluative opportunity, though.
We had to leave the little house on the island, and in so leaving loosed the stopper on the old dreams of righting the wrong of my far-from-home-ness. Ever since I arrived in New Zealand as a teenager I have felt the wrongness of this place, or my place in it — my elders sold (or recruited?) on a dream of settler safety and optional adventure. I feel myself a splinter under the skin of this place, an irritant. This time four years ago I left for London. I’ve been back here for two years and feel the splinter working its way out again. I will always be entangled. There is no pure, intact identity waiting for me to pick back up. But I will find homes in rituals, made and re-made. Rooted not in stolen soil, but in clouds and leaves and songs.
2023 in Newsletters
It has been a joy to reach you in your inbox. Thank you for being here at each month’s end, and a warm welcome to any new-comer. It is an arbitrary thing to sit down to write — or read! — each end-of-month etching. But you keep me going, and I am so grateful for this ritual.
January Please (On the floods): Maybe, understandably, when there’s everything to lose a sense of gravity can be the first thing to go.
February Please (On burnout): I just want to bump into people. I want things to happen between us and for that be that and then the next thing to be the next thing.
March Please (On Waiheke - my favourite letter this year!): My bed was a pullout couch and I liked the way it sagged in the middle, like a gentle hammock.
April Please (On the marathon): an event so pointless that to see so many people opting in to such pointlessness was to see the creation of a tremendous spectacle and, ultimately, some real kind of point.
May Please (On chronic health, among other things): Not a crisp ward cotton but more of a napped flannel, a small kindness to have that softness against the skin
June Please (On refusal): In this kind of world I love glinting anger as much as joy. Anger knows what’s what.
July Please (On London!): In these pandemic years my future has felt foreclosed and foreshortened. Could life be back? Could life be me? I have nothing and I have everything, how can this be!
August Please (On Scotland - no, this is my favourite letter of the year): Feeling alive here makes me see how much of my life has been not-here, lived but also not lived — a pain of recognition for the parallel life, the one where I stayed
September Please (On photographing a wedding): The pair wore finest wool and crispest poplin, their faces a blend of deep familiarity and unscriptable surprise: look at you, here, really here, in finery, in front of all who love us.
October Please (On solidarity): A shared humanity is our guide. Sometimes spiky but always shared; humanity as an immensity, a remembrance, a wide attention, a woven existence, beyond domination.
November Please (On the conditions of life): Not being normal is not a broken-song after all. Until next month may you sing your one note well & never think of forfeiting.
Decembers Past
December 2019
December 2020
December 2021
December 2022
Three Things Today
A poem —
Empire of Dreams, Charles Simic
On the first page of my dreambook
It’s always evening
In an occupied country.An essay —
Haruspex, Rebecca May Johnson
When I saw the words ‘early pregnancy’ on a sign, they did not seem to refer to me. We sat in the waiting room, but our waiting had a kind of flat energy, as if waiting for nothing, knowing there was nothing to wait for.A maker —
Misma Anaru, ceramicist & great thinker and sharer
See you in 2024! May the new calendar year bring life, not death!
Until next month,
Hannah x
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It really is disturbing, but perhaps what’s even more disturbing is the justification and support of it, and the silence of majority.
Beautiful words as always, Hannah! Big hug for the new year!! 🫶🏼