Rhyme is the public truth of language, sound paced out in the shared places, the echoes are no-one’s private property or achievement
— J. H. Prynne
We slept in a green-domed tent in the garden of the place we’ve been staying last night. In the day’s last light the kākā made their primordial parrot crackles and the broken-song tūī sang the same one note, over and over. Rain started up and drummed down on the nylon — all hallowed atmosphere until the tent proved not to be waterproof. Curled into a human ball, we kept away from the dripping edges and never once thought of forfeiting.
*
Last month an edifying polemic mode flowed more freely than it does today. This month’s end arrives in watercolour rather than permanent marker. No indelible formula, more a wash of impossible impressions. In 50 days at least 15,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s bombs, bullets, and all other manner of monstrously convenient killing and maiming technologies. Resolute is the wrongness of this reality; faint is the faith in a humanity with powers that could make this reality. Cowardice and cruelty try to coerce and censor those who speak up. Apathy is involved, too. Each week protestors march down Queen Street while bemused shoppers look on.
Around the world marchers wave the Palestinian flag, but the flag is not the ultimate point. The flag is scaffolding on the way to building a society safe enough for everyone, a homeliness where hierarchies are unintelligble and categories are utterly anachronistic. Jacqueline Rose wrote this month of Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman, whose “most fervent political wish was to see Palestinian self-determination and the raising of the Palestinian flag. But, as soon as he achieved that objective, with the freedom and dignity it would bring, his overriding desire would be to take the flag down.” The flag is not the ultimate point.
*
The settler-colony of New Zealand has sworn in a new government beneath its union-jacked flag, a triumvirate coalition of the tax-cutting right, landlord-loving libertarians, and minority-blaming populists. As Mihingarangi Forbes said, anyone working in the margins “were probably bracing themselves for some change of direction, but I think they [the new coalition government] have burnt the house down … It’s the right of Indigenous people being decided on by the majority”.
So many people seem so easily inspired to hate and fear. Intolerance and prejudicial treatment arise from over-dependence on an ideal. For example, an ideal of a life of comfort. For example, an ideal of a perfect mother. For example, an ideal of a mirror rather than a window — a world that reflects you back at you, no Others to interrupt a selfsame image. For example, an ideal of a promised land that makes little to no place for real life people who were and are and need to still be living real lives there.
Afaf Al-Najjar shares that, “this pause has been more painful than the 50 days before it. It is the first time the people of Gaza were able to look at their open wounds, martyred children, slaughtered families, destroyed homes and shattered lives. Just imagine living for six days just to prepare and wait for your death on the seventh”. Death everywhere, and the conditions of life for the still living gone, too: “there are whole stretches of land where there is not a single building standing. Nothing has been spared: houses, residential towers, shops, bakeries, cafes, schools, universities, libraries, children’s centres, mosques, churches”.
Time does not behave in a linear way during these queasy days. A west-lauded ‘pause’ is not experienced as progress but more as a chance for loss to bed in. Bombs may be on hold but disease multiplies and knows no remedy in rubbled hospitals. All the present knows is that the future is uncertain and the archive of rich existence is under attack. The end of a hard day leads not to rest but more darkness to fill up the eyes. So in this wash of queasiness I want to remind myself of last month’s permanent marker polemic: 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.
Prompts from greats:
Do you have the courage to embody and express your pain and fear and rage even when nobody around you is feeling you?
-Dayna Lynn Nuckolls, 2023
What kind of schools and what kind of streets and what kind of parks and what kind of privacy and what kind of beauty and what kind of music and what kind of options would make love a reasonable, easy response?
-June Jordan, 1981
Love has never been a popular movement. And no one's ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.
-James Baldwin, 1970
People think this exploration of self is self-centred and selfish, but I notice that whenever I clear up something for myself it quickly affects everyone around me, as if it were a psychic liberation which in turn affects others' conflicts … It is more powerful than the self-sacrifice of the so-called selfless ones.
-Anais Nin, 1955
Song of November:
(“I kind of like music I can have my own thoughts to,” André 3000 once told Rick Rubin. I say really good brain massage for PTSD or hypersensitivity or any manifold neurodivergence. Coincidentally 2:47 contains the same one tone of last night’s broken-song tūī. André 3000 also told Rubin that, “there have been times where I've prayed to a God that I didn't even know existed, like, 'I'd rather you take this away from me. All of this, if I could just feel normal’. But that’s not how it works”. Not being normal is not a broken-song after all.)
Until next month may you sing your one note well & never think of forfeiting,
Hannah x
subscribe / heart / share - it all helps
Thank you for these truly beautiful and transcendent reflections/invitations. I read half last week then came back to finish and I’m so glad I did. What a gift. And those quotes, too. The broken-song tūī... “All the present knows is that the future is uncertain and the archive of rich existence is under attack. The end of a hard day leads not to rest but more darkness to fill up the eyes. So in this wash of queasiness I want to remind myself of last month’s permanent marker polemic: 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.” Just lovely... spiky, always shared. And that last quote about wanting to feel normal, that hurt/hit... felt like I could hear my brother’s notes inside it. I will make space to listen to that song you shared. Thank you. Xxx