3. Goodbye 2019, Goodbye New Zealand
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
—James Baldwin
Welcome back to Think Club, the monthly newsletter for thinkers and over-thinkers everywhere! If you’re new here then hi, hello, I’m Hannah (find me elsewhere here or here) - an English teacher turned postgrad researcher turned, well, I’m still turning - watch what’s next. I’m considering applying for PhD programmes at some point, but there’s a lot of percolating to do before that happens. Happy year’s end. We made it! But we’re looking raggedy. This year we’ve witnessed or borne environmental horrors, violent terrors, and spectacular political failures (paraded as successes). Here in Aotearoa settler-colonialism is our ultimate crutch. Those of us in positions of unearned dominance want to ‘be better’ but don’t let ourselves leap from the plinth that would mean true divestment from our unfair allocations of power and resources. This plinthy power problem is not only an intra-human, equity-based issue, but an ecological one, too. Settler-colonialism is an accumulation machine. Being colonial is about amassing land, capital, knowledge, and lives into a unified schema of growth. It’s time we leave the growth to the trees and focus on getting smaller. I’m wishing for a new calendar year of release from afflictions or of overcoming the fear of divestment - whatever your positioning demands.
I’m typing from the airport, about to board a plane from Auckland to a new life in London (hypocrisy alert! Flygskam alert!). Well, it will be a new little life - a life-within-a-life (if we’re lucky we each get a few of these nested chances at fresh starts). I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, but it’s a one-way ticket. I depart just before midnight, surely an auspicious time - I’m imagining a group countdown as we take off above the partying firework that is my adopted home harbour city. New year, new country, new (little) life. I don’t know what’s there for me except my favourite person in the world, who moved ahead of me seven weeks ago to start his dream job at an animation studio. Since Ryan left I’ve handed in my thesis on colonial, resistant, and decolonial writing experiments at the University of Auckland. I’ve emerged from my hermit life. Being so busy with goodbyes and Christmas and packing has been wonderful but also wonderfully dulling; my blade already feels less sharp. I’m okay with that right now. One thing I’ve noticed about this newsletter is that it makes almost exclusive use of my jaunty, critical voice. My quiet, deliberate voice has not seemed quite right for the space of a missive. I keep things zingy here because, well, it’s an email not an essay. But since it is the new year - a time for refection - I might ease off the hopped-up, knifey tone for a moment.
Since last decade I’ve finished high school, started uni, finished uni, started uni, finished uni, started uni, finished uni, started uni, and finished uni. Four qualifications - two full-time, two part-time - over eight years. I worked as a secondary school English teacher during a fair few of those years. I also worked for an educational non-profit. The entire decade has been characterised by some form of involvement in education as a student, a teacher, a researcher. I said last month that I was’t going to run the CV-style decade gamut, so this seems awfully like a broken promise. But this is not a humble brag. This is a white flag. I need to take some time to work out what it has meant to be so institutionalised and to be complicit in institutionalising others (hence the handbrake on PhD thoughts).
I’ve always tried to free students - and the new teachers I’ve helped bring into the profession - from the strictures of schooling and instead favour learning: that radical, collective, curious, free-wheeling mode of study that is so far away from control, discipline, and didacticism. But I don’t know that I’ve always, or even often, been successful. Some of my failures have been entirely my own: assumptions about what it means to be culturally-responsive when what I really needed to be practising, from the beginning, was cultural safety; projections of my own fears and neuroses onto my students; my characteristic too-muchness, being, well, just too much for some students that needed to be around someone with a routinely calm affect rather than me, a playful pingpong relativist of a teacher.
Other failures have belonged to the systems that I have worked in. Unsustainable class sizes often stymied one-on-one learning conversations. Those bloated class sizes also led to personal contortions. I used myself as a sheepdog or an orchestra conductor or a traintrack signal system to try to guide the body of the class into engaging yet ‘manageable’ arrangements. The frequent times that I did manage to produce a (personally counterintuitive) calm affect might have been great for the students that needed it, but such forceful self-censoring had a high personal cost - one that I am still recovering from. How can one person be Goldilocks-just-right for thirty different people at a time? I’m still catching myself chameleoning and self-monitoring and adjusting my tone based on who is listening, always gauging what an interlocutor needs from me and working doggedly to deliver it. Teaching taught me to fear a restless audience. I don’t blame a classroom of fourteen year-olds for being less than permanently enthused about the English language and its literatures but, thanks to a few violent classroom episodes, I now carry a hangover fear of boring people. I am hyper-sensitive to even a slightly glazed eye that could be a literal stone’s throw away from chaos. Schools can dehumanise students and teachers alike.
But I learned to ride the waves, corral the divergent energies, knowledges, and interests in the room, let the students lead the way, narrate our collective structural frustrations, organise micro resistances. I do miss it. Despite its Victorian, production-line clamour I even miss the din of the school bell - that sense of urgency: must move on, must plan, must arrive, must read the room, must adjust plans according to the mental weather of the group, must choreograph an hour-long rhythm of newness and oldness and consolidation and questions and attempts at articulations; must farewell right before the bell, offering little rememberings of students’ lives as they each head out the door for their mysterious weekends.
It wasn’t just learning and teaching and education settings that characterised my decade, it was all the settings of the books I read, and all the settings I read them in. I’ve gone with Booker winners here - not because prizes mean everything or anything, but because they provide those rare orbital events that we can all fall into. The year that Marlon James won I was in a pub that played the ceremony live on its television screens. Not rugby or football, but a bloody literary prize.
I read Mantel’s Bringing up the Bodies under a nylon pop-top tent roof in the Blue Ridge Mountains after bathing with a snake in the river.
The Sense of an Ending I read at the ex-brothel flat on Airedale Street, where each room had its own spa bath nestled into council-protected colonial brickwork corners.
A Brief History of Seven Killings was read under the perforated ceiling tiles in our bottom floor flat in Grey Lynn - the worst house on the best street.
I read The Narrow Road to the Deep North in an apartment in Dubrovnik, in a heavy mood right next to that most buoyant of seas, the Adriatic.
I devoured The Luminaries in a delirious two days under the watch of the sky tower while sitting on the balcony at Ryan’s flat in St Kevin’s Arcade - the most familial of flat families I’ve ever been lucky enough to stay with.
The Sellout was a funny one - I read it in between shifts at the Auckland Writers Festival and had Beatty sign the library copy I was borrowing. I wonder who has that signed copy right now.
I crawled through Milkman on the ferry, shuttling back and forth between Waiheke and the CBD, stopping my reading for those headland stories I insisted on making for each crossing. There won’t be any headland stories for a long while.
I’ve got Girl, Woman, Other with me to read on the plane. I’m ignoring the other winner. I’m sure it’s great, I’m just peeved for Evaristo having to share.
I’d love to hear from any Londoners out there. I’m hungry for your recommendations, your warnings, your contradictions, your highly specific references to particular plants or birds or buildings or micro histories or peculiarly perfect walking routes that I need to become familiar with. I think that’s what scares me the most right now - not knowing where everything lives, not knowing how the city knows itself.
Happy New Year. Here’s Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor, composed 300 years ago. I feel physically sick when I listen to it, it’s so beautiful. 300 years is not long though, is it. We’re all small in the eye of the world, let’s not get in its way.
Next month I’ll share more of what I’ve been reading and watching recently. Thanks for humouring this decadey occasion. So glad to have you here.
H x