If our happiness depends on turning away from violence, our happiness is violence
- Sara Ahmed
A whole January’s-worth of rain fell in one hour last Friday in Tāmaki Makaurau, or maybe even more. The effects were not felt evenly, and neither are the after-effects, nor the coordinated support available. People that were already struggling have lost everything to the floodwater. Four are dead. In many places in Auckland mutual aid has been worth far more than could be offered by irresponsible leadership; Leonie Hayden and Chlöe Swarbrick have compiled a useful list of resources to access, and response-able community helpers we can help.
Not the biggest loss, but a sure sadness: the library near my parents’ house has had to throw away its entire collection after the stormwater rose right up to the ceiling. Students and teachers were all set for school starting this week, but Term One has been delayed till next Tuesday. We are still in a state of emergency, and more rain is coming. The new mayor was missing in action on the night of the atmospheric river, then defensive and insensitive the next day as the city faced the wreckage. He brushed it away at first, but had to admit on Monday that the floods were caused by climate change. Clouds become heavier as the earth heats. There will be more of this.
I am not a reporter; there is no big need for me to give this account. If you live here you already know everything, and if you don’t live here there will be something closer to home to attend to. It’s just that this trouble is all we’re thinking about, and I think it’s worth keeping on thinking about — both the facts and the affects. The night of the flood reminded me of the panicked start of the pandemic: trying to get a sense of the thing from the vantage point of a small screen. Wondering which sources to trust. Doing a long-distance roll call to account for everyone. Helplessly urging caution to those trying to get home. Watching strangers’ first-hand clips, with their peculiar detachment and even laughter. Maybe laughter lends a brief burst of control in the uncontrollable. Or maybe we do hurt ourselves when we meme-ify a fearsome flood. Maybe, understandably, when there’s everything to lose a sense of gravity can be the first thing to go.
But the heaviness is very much here in our topsy-turvy climate-busted over-concreted city. It’s not sensationalism to sit with it. Primarily it’s about compassion and material and emotional support for the clean-up, yes, but it’s also about grief and, eventually, justice. Even if it’s only possible to feel sad right now, that sadness is not useless or indulgent or cynical. Sadness is part of accepting what is happening — not in a shruggy kind of way, but in a denial-busting way. Denial is the wishful thinking or exceptionalism or too-big-ness that lets us divert our energy elsewhere, while the oil companies crack on, and while the centrist parties preoccupy themselves with the paranoia of courting the swing voter (who is a 52 year-old high-earning property-owning pākehā woman, according to analysis by journalist Henry Cooke). We can’t let the climate change faster than we can change views, policies, economies and power relations.
We can’t wish away the absurd scenes that climate breakdown brings. Blink and re-see the commuter buses filled with gurgling brown water as brave drivers ploughed people home. Or the international airport hall (the one I wrote about last month) fast filling with the night’s famous liquid fury. Shelves of food disappearing as supermarkets succumbed to the waters. Possessions floating through homes. Fields of onions lifted from their furrows only to turn up the next day on suburban pavements and doorsteps.
“[W]hat would make anyone want to preside over a politics-as-usual that seems as incommensurate as ever to the problems facing our country and the world” - Giovanni Tiso on Jacinda Ardern and the politics of care (Overland)
“[W]hen corporations, and the state contrained by corporate thinking, start to behave in the same way, and in a manner that runs directly counter to the people over an issue such as climate change, then that is a problem". It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas” - Crude Briannia: How Oil Shaped a Nation, by James Marriott and Terry Macalister (Pluto Books)
“We — all of us on Terra — live in disturbing times, mixed up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all our bumptious kinds of response” - Donna Harraway, Staying with the Trouble
I’ve heard that bluebottle jellyfish have washed up on the big beach. I’m going to go for a walk now, on the cusp of this month’s end. I might see the jellyfish, I might not. I will definitely look out at the wind-rucked sea and turn the coin of my little life over in my pocket, fiercely glad to feel the salt sting, open to feeling the potency of devastation that January brought (sadness real but edges open), hungry for inventive connections and kin forged through honesty.
Until next month may you stay with the trouble (and maybe make some trouble where it’s needed, too),
H x
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Keep warm, Hannah x