I just need to pay my yearly overheads, get shit off my chest, and not compromise or prostitute myself spiritually
- Sinead O’Connor
I want the genocide to end for selfish reasons. I want life to matter. I want my own life to matter. I want the lives of all others to matter (how the hell could my life matter at all if any life — any where — is made to not matter). I want my way of being to be peaceably allowed, not enshrined up there or stamped down there, just on a level with all other ways of being. I don’t want to banish my human capacity for violence and say I could never. I could, I really could; I have, and I don’t want to disown it. I want to love my self and all of my capacity for monstrosity and never shuttle it off. I don’t want to make a monster of others so that I can be falsely sure there is no monster in me. I don’t want compensation for monstrous things done to me, especially when the compensation will make others less free, especially when the real answer is for everyone to mind their monsters. I don’t want to live under the withholding sneers of the narcissistic parent-leaders of our coloniser countries. I don’t want to beseech and fawn. I don’t want to be a good girl. I don’t want to own land that is meant to be free.
This month I walked down the road of our old home that we used to rent on Waiheke Island. We would have stayed if we could, but we couldn’t, and now I see that some sense has come from the rupture. I will always be moving. On my walk I saw that our old neighbour had chopped down the mature olive trees on the plot of land he believes he owns. He thought he could, so he did. He had no thought for the resonance with the olive trees destroyed on another colonised land 16,000 kilometres away. Too many kilometres to care, for too many. The destroyed branches lay prone on the ground, silver-backed leaves hacked off and marooned from their life source. When night fell I snuck back and touched them, said sorry and thank you, as the man clinked glasses with his family inside the house.
*
I’ll be honest, sitting down with this newsletter here on Easter Sunday is the most calm I have experienced all month. Opening the page feels as though I am sinking down into the deepest part of my life, dropping down into the manifold, heavying myself on earth after days of cloud-scudding anxiety and hurricane howls. This coming Wednesday I am leaving New Zealand for Scotland, with Ryan. April’s end-of-month newlsletter will come to you from the other side of the world. I don’t know how to build a bridge between the lives I’ve lived here and there, between the ruptures that have happened in my life and the ruptures that have happened in the life of the world. I have been living under the strain of trying to design a bridge, but I am not sure if it can be done. Is it possible to start again and leave disparate the pieces I thought needed bridging? Shall I leave them as islands? Must I? I know for sure that I am leaving this particular island, within this sea of islands of Te Moana-nui-ā-Kiwa. This place was never mine. But it has been a life source. Sorry and thank you.
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End-of-March newsletters of yore:
March 2023 (Waiheke Island, NZ)
"I feel like the story of this place has run away from me. I’ve worked at the school with the electric teacher - he was still there, and the kids still loved him. I’ve continued to gain a different kind of education at the library. I’ve walked every day to the beach with the Catholic church, which in winter turns from turquoise to steel — a sight the holidaymakers are not around to see. Ordinary things. Special things. It is painful to be squeezed out of a place that is a home place.”
March 2022 (Waiheke Island, NZ)
"Right now when people ask how are you I have no idea. I am an avatar. There are so many immediate stressors that there is no time to let the unconscious do the work of coming up with the creative ideas to meet the said stressors. A busy mind could be the sloppiest thing I have ever come across and I am shocked each day by the deoxygenated torpor that comes over even the most enjoyable things”
March 2021 (Edinburgh, UK)
"Anxiety swirls around my interactions with beloved people in New Zealand. It’s a mash of fearing not having anything new to say, not wanting to drone on about my isolation, wanting to empathise with their own recent weeklong lockdown, being flooded with rage at their relative (oh so relative!) ease, flooded with guilt at my rage (so unappreciative of relativity!), entranced by their dancing limbs in large crowds, repulsed by their inequality-as-usual normality, truly wanting to listen to their life events, suffering while listening to their life events, shuttling the suffering off somewhere else like nuclear waste buried underground or launched into space, hoping it will disappear but knowing very well that you can’t rush a half-life.”
March 2020 (London, UK)
“I live near an arterial road and there are more ambulances and hearses passing than usual. It is hard to focus for all the sirens. Not a lot feels sure but one thing is—
If you (someone with an internet connection) are reading this you are either sick, trying not to get sick, or not yet sick but at risk every day thanks to your socially-necessary work.”
March reading snippets:
Lee Seong-bok, Indeterminate Inflorescence, translated by Anton Hur (2023):
The writing must keep trying to show. There’s no point in going, “I’m depressed, don’t come near me!” when the reason for writing is to discover why one is depressed and how.Hashem Abushama, “a map without guarantees: Stuart Hall and Palestinian geographies”, Stuart Hall Foundation Essay Prize (2024):
Is not the space of the refugee camp in and of itself a spatialization of a political demand? It is a space of waiting for an eventual return. And in that space of waiting lies the everyday politics—what Hall termed the “social transactions of everyday colonial life” (Hall 2017, 93). Nothing can be taken for granted when the street you live on is named after a village you have always imagined but never visited.Dr Mike Joy - Science-Based Climate Action, The Lentil Intervention Podcast 2023 (recommended by Nadine Anne Hura, iti te kupu newsletter):
The delusion is bad enough. I talk about ‘dangerous trees’ — trees are great, any tree’s a good thing, [but] the dangerous tree is one that we plant under the illusion that it’s going to take away the impact of the fossil carbon that we’re releasing. I feel like we have to grow up, but what we’re doing is just acting like teenagers at the moment … we need to face reality and stop kidding ourselves about it.SPIN magazine interview with Sinead O’Connor (1991):
SPIN: I grew up in a broken marriage, which was, thank God, not abusive. The family was very together. But I was effectively running the family at 15.O’Connor: Well, that’s abuse.
SPIN: Yeah, but a mild form.
O’Connor: Well, what abuse constitutes is not allowing a child to be itself, not allowing a child to be a child.
SPIN: Don’t you think the real world does that anyway?
O’Connor: It shouldn’t.
SPIN: Well, in a perfect world it wouldn’t.
O’Connor: It can be a perfect world. The cause of all of the world’s problems, as far as I’m concerned, is child abuse. It’s the lack of understanding of children and of what they are and of the fact that they must be allowed to be themselves and form their own opinions and make decisions for themselves.
“Love and Hate in a Different Time”, The Gabriels (2020)
Last few years that I have seen
Walking dead all around me
Silent fears, neatly folded dreams […]
Even in the valley
Children smile through the misery
Diamond tears hide the casualties
Grace and mercy, do you follow me?
Grace and mercy, can you hear me?
Until next month may you know mercy; may you know that it can be a perfect world,
H x
Thank you for the beautiful words again, Hannah. Reading your end-of-March newsletters made me realise that it’s been a while that I am privileged to receive your words at the end of every month… So, thank you, really.
Oosh. That Sinead quote.