The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is ‘escapism’ as accusation of?
Ursula K. Le Guin
When I used to live here - before the UK, before the pandemic - I used to take myself out west on my birthday and go to Te Uru gallery and head down to Otītori Bay. I’d watch the planes take off from Māngere and arc up above the Manukau Harbour. They’d be going elsewhere - toward a so-called Australian city or island capital - but being right here would be just fine. Tōrea would stalk the mudflats and kererū would make bough-bending landings along the dense-thicketed shore. The day would be close to the shortest of the year and things would feel cold and clear and possible, damp touches of ancient air against the cheek of a new age.
This year the ritual came early. I made the pilgrimage in May instead of June, and I felt both more and less moved than the last time I was out west, in 2019. Whilst dog-sitting for friends in Glen Eden this weekend I passed the place where I lived with my family for a time as a teenager. I also passed the video store which is now a real estate agent, the secondhand clothing shop which is now a gym, the healthfoods shop which is now a purveyor of car accessories, and the carpark which is now a carpark cum petrol station. I don’t want a place to fossilise. I don’t need for nothing to change. We just need for things to change in the right direction. In New Zealand my old problem arrives again: here here is not here. My sister doesn’t live here anymore. My brother doesn’t live here anymore. My dad didn’t live here half the time to begin with, which was half my problem growing up.
The only place that feels like home here is the island, which can’t stay home forever. On the ferry back to the little house from the city last night I sat alone out on the top deck. White harbour lights began to perforate the night wash of blue-black. A choreography of seagulls wheeled about the berthing boat. I looped my scarf tighter against the chill, buzzed on a cup of captain’s club chardonnay. The tide had come in since the last ferry departed, and a huge heave was required to bring the gangplank up from the wharf to the passenger deck. A male passenger cooed across to the young woman who was deftly performing the manoeuvre, too much, too much, you will hurt yourself, too much.
I was exposed to a person with covid for a few hours at work yesterday. They weren’t wearing a mask and it was a poorly-ventilated room. Someone shut the door that I had opened because they were cold. It didn’t feel good to find out after the fact about the positive case - picturing all that stale air filling up with the aerosolised contagion. I had chosen a desk next to a tiny window and opened it up because that was my domain for the day and no one could close it if I was goose-guarding. I wore a respirator the whole time and felt like a dick because everyone else was bare-faced. But now I guess I don’t feel like such a dick. Another person later said that they were feeling sick but that they came in anyway. A further person said that they had sick people at home. Safe to say I don’t really understand the New Normal.
Bernard Hickey, in his newsletter The Kākā, describes the current mood in New Zealand as, “a collective national exhaustion and frustration with the failure of the [covid] elimination strategy, and the failure of the government to deliver on its transformational promises when it was first elected in 2017”. I like Hickey’s newsletter. It exists to analyse the housing, climate and poverty crises in New Zealand. I’m more convinced by the reader-pays model now. I used to cringe at the idea of an individual asking readers for money, but it’s just a small version of what larger media outlets should have done years ago.
Instead the bigger guys made a deal with the advertising devil. I used to subscribe to The Spinoff’s daily Bulletin newsletter, but couldn’t carry on in good faith once they accepted money from Z Energy (the New Zealand company comprising the former ‘assets’ of Shell and Chevron). I would rather pay than see them accept that blood money. I do pay a yearly subscription, but the commercial arm has me conflicted. How can anything be in the public interest if it is delivered “in partnership” with a fossil fuel merchant? That’s why I responded to the latest Novara Media reader fundraising call: “we’re free to report on the issues that drastically impact our lives. We’re free to analyse what it takes to build a society that works for us all”.
There was a Protect Pūtiki town hall meeting last week on the island. The Minister for Conservation came, for the first time, to meet the people protecting Pūtiki Bay and the kororā penguins that live there. A settler system that grants consent for a marina development that privatises the commons, creates a floating carpark on the ocean, and harms life for profit is a broken system. The Minister responsible for conserving the environment became frustrated with the crowd at one point and claimed that there is nothing to be done to stop the marina now that it is underway, and that their job as parliamentary leaders is simply to reform laws.
Our stomachs clenched in disappointment at the evacuation of imagination. It was demoralising to hear an elected leader - with such a beautiful title and portfolio - deny their part to play in weaving consensus against current-day harm. But the protectors that spoke weren’t only there to name the brokenness of the system. Emily Weiss shared that, whakapapa is the system that works; we are the system that works. Return always to whakapapa - this is a system that isn’t broken. And it’s true. Hundreds of days protecting the bay and spreading the message. Never succumbing to too much, too much. Whakapapa means to place in layers: not only a line of ancestry, but a multi-dimensional lamination of connectedness. Our selves do not stand alone, but stand in the layered light of our ancestors; our great unifying ancestry on and of the earth.
Capitalism could never.
If here here is not here then maybe it is because my self lives in layers upon layers in Scotland. I am a guest here, and since returning I still haven’t felt the touch of cold and clear and possible. Next time I talk to you I’ll have made it to that new June age. I might know more about what I need to do next. I might have slowed down long enough to listen. Are you on any kind of threshold? Sending stamina and tenderness.
Until next month,
H x
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Here here and here… in our own skin, in this place, in this whānau… in this whakapapa… Now… Thanks, H xx
Arohanui for a happy birthday when it arrives, dear Hannah 🧡