Imagine that. Imagine claiming a whole vast and fast continent was empty, naming it Terra Nullius. The land of nothing. Imagine thinking you could fill it up with people you had no use for, people who had stolen, who had committed crimes. Imagine emptying your prison ships squalling on the Thames into big boats and sending those off far away south. And then you let your people starve, too proud and stupid to ask advice of the local native people, to ask them, “So what do you eat?” Imagine giving blankets out as donations, as a kindness, that had been seeded with deadly smallpox virus. Imagine poisoning waterholes. You steal their children and rape women and enslave women and men. You classify them as animals in the first Constitution, flora and fauna. You won’t let them out at night and Australia is crosshatched with Boundary Streets and Boundary Roads. You torment and torture men and women who have not paid a fine or who are drunk and disorderly and allow malicious racist police to murder them in cells. Imagine tolerating the suffering of a longstanding people who contract in their remote communities Dickensian diseases. Imagine ignoring the wisdom and courage of this oldest continual culture on all the earth, while you set fire to the continent you have stolen and then plundered. A billion native animals die. You won’t help and you won’t be helped. A coup arrives, a coup de grace, a shaft of insight in the form of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, written so graciously and with such courage and truth, and all the 3% of our population who have survived ongoing genocide ask for is just to be heard and to have some say in the running of the place, imagine just that, and you turn it down, call it division instead of progress, spit in the mouth of everything real and lasting, imagine currying the No vote and seeding doubt and calling it selfish and mean, imagine turning down this very small and modest and ambitious and generous-minded offer: we will help you run the place. We will bring our warriors and our mind. We’ll bring our heart back into the nation. Imagine turning down all of that. Inglorious, short-breathed, and stupid, and stale. Australia this is a referendum on our truthfulness and kindness. We are not enough.
Category: imagine if
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#NotAllLives
Thinking this afternoon about the insulting phrase All Lives Matter, and its to me clear and obvious translation: “Black Lives Do Not Matter to Me.” It seems to me we may need an alternative explanatory phrase for those who are unwilling to get it. Something like this:
White lives matter too much. White lives are going to have to be valued less, so that black lives can matter enough.
We cannot level the playing field without giving up privilege, if we have it.
It reminds me of the idea that All Life is Sacred, and other such phrases used by forced birthing advocates to render women into breeding boxes. This prefaces the life of the unborn foetus over the life of the labouring mother. “All Lives Matter” zooms out so far it is a sentimentalising sepia soft focus: if we keep telling ourselves we are practicing Universal Love, we can save ourselves the difficult and exacting work of again and again learning to love the individual and faceted real human next to us. -
cemetery days
I just spent a few precious hours working in a greensward where I could be safely distant from everybody and they could be safely distant from me. Then a woman approached me. She was wearing uniform. It is not permissible to sit in this space, on the grass: you must sit on a bench.I gazed at her. “I understand you, but… isn’t it somewhat exceptional circumstances? I have hardly left my house in six days, I need the sun. People need a place to sit that’s not hard surfaces which can retain the virus for hours.”
She repeated exactly, “Es ist nicht gestattet” I think it was – it’s not authorised. At home, on Twitter, I found two resourceful Italians playing table tennis, from window to window, one right-handed and one left-. They’re just going to keep playing until they lose the ball. I live for this sense of playful joy. As this lady approached me I was just thinking, ‘now: I have peace in my heart.’ It is hard-won. It’s mine. She cannot have it, no, indeed, I will not drop this ball, it is airy, it is light and it bounces.
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love of all things
When we eat too much ~ what we really want is love. When we cling too hard to money ~ what we really want is love. When “he’s just looking for attention” ~ attention is a form of love. When we become addicted to work and success: success is approval & praise from others. What we’re really after is love.
Love is the meaning of life. What else can it be? I don’t know why people keep asking.
Another way to frame this: life is the result of an unending chain of meaningless coincidence. It has only the meaning we give it. The meaning we give it is, the things we love. Most of which ain’t things.
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Make Africa Great Again
We went out to the white people’s restaurant, as he calls it, which is a street stall on a dirt laneway behind the supermarket. There’s no street lighting, no cutlery. Collapsible plastic tables are set up between the parked cars. Vivid local tunes blast from the tiny bar across the road, which brings icy beers in brands no one drinks in Europe. We sit there for hours eating chicken and fish with our fingers. Last week a white girl got up and went over to the bar, carrying her phone. She persuaded the barkeep, who is a rapper, to link up her tunes to his speaker. Within seconds this wholly fresh and salty sound bathed the scene, and at their work and in their seats everyone was dancing.
Tonight a man sitting against the wall behind us had on a MAGA hat. A black man. I looked closer. MAKE AFRICA GREAT AGAIN. I got up and went over. Close up his red baseball cap read MAKE AFRICA HOME AGAIN.
I crouched beside his table to say hi as I do occasionally when a table of visitors have stiffed the boy dancers. “We can’t afford to give money every day,” they say, reasonably, demonstrating they can afford to eat out every day and I spread my hands, “I know, me too,” and persuade them that it’s ok not to give, it’s not ok to turn your stiffened faces away and keep eating while someone is standing there, sweating with performance, holding out an upturned cap. He is standing there. Treat him like a human. You are not greater nor less. Make whiteness great again.
Since so much of our cruelty comes from diffidence, I offer scripts. “I say, I’m so sorry, I cannot help you this time.”
“But then they don’t go away!”
“Just be direct. It’s courteous. ‘I’ve said no three times, you have to leave now. Bye.’” I tell them the dancer who stuffed fire down his pants but was yet to bloom in puberty “came to our table after you, and he just looked so wounded.”
Poverty is all around us like jackrabbits in the grass. Poverty, hard work, resourcefulness and struggle. We are like big birds of prayer gliding like clouds across the sun, idle on the air and wondering which one next we will swoop on to assist or exploit. Building our bullshit churches, insulting sufferers with thoughts & prayers in place of action, rendering free men into slaves, free woman into sex slaves. Calling the children they raise from rape ‘half caste’, as though only that portion of their humanity fell into any class we recognised.
Next morning four boys came to the low wall around our house which keeps the goats out. Their upturned faces were lower than the wall and I had to go and peer over, to hear. “Please, we want you go buy us four bicycles.”
Oho! I said. Well I would love to buy you four bicycles. I wish I could. I explained that I would love to have a bicycle, myself. But of course, I meant a second bicycle, here in my second home at which I arrive by jet plane.
The spokesboy suggested, “Or maybe a ball.”
My heart flooded with regret and shame, yearning and heat. Why shouldn’t these smiling, reasonable, kindly, and well spoken courteous boys have a ball? A ball to play with. A boy standing behind him said, “Bicycles!” and got cuffed for spoiling the deal. I asked, “Ee gon be how much?”
They reasoned. “Well, ee cost 25 cedis.” Five dollars. The spokesboy explained, you can get them for 18 cedis, but… “They get spoilt?” I suggested, using a word that in the wealth world we use to describe unhappy children but which here means, I had a phone once, second hand from the markets, and now it doesn’t work.
I tried to respond to this adventurous, eminently reasonable, and brave request the best way. I didn’t want them to feel that if this ball got spoilt they could just come ask the white lady for another, that a ball was nothing to me. I didn’t want them to feel I gave something which was nothing, it seemed insulting. I explained I had little money right now. All Africans know little money. It’s the most usual form of money. “But I will try. I’m going to try to find some money for you so we can buy a ball. I can’t promise you,” I said. “But I will do my best. Do you get me?”
Of course I’m going to buy them a ball. I just want them to have a week of looking forward to it. I see school children carrying their homework under the awning of a shop which has a light. I see people eating yam for breakfast, just boiled yam. If you have a sauce on your rice, the sauce is a couple of spoonfuls of garnish; in Europe garnish is the main dish. The man in the MAKE AFRICA HOME AGAIN cap made me at home at his table and we spoke for some few minutes. Neither of us mentioned Trump. We exchanged our numbers, as Europe and Africa should do. We are so few and have so much. They are many, and have little. We, they. We spoke about the music. The rapper who brings beers played his own song again. Coming back to our table I was dancing, a little. In Ghana I always want to give everyone everything and as I build my tiny business I am finding out a way we might be able to do that, one transaction at a time. It’s not giving everything: it’s not giving at all. It’s giving up what we can afford of what we stole. It’s giving part of everything back.
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hanging weekend
Ahhh, weekend in a hammock, swinging softly from side to side and hearing the waves crashing, the moon imperceptibly rising with its bald and honest glare, yes, you can hear it, you know it, we know it. A nearby little restaurant – the only one in this seaside town – was kind enough to deliver meals and beers, one of their staff members lives across the road. Behind us, Africa. Ahead of us, the poisoned sea riddled with plastics and emptied of all piscine life by hulking ships like the ghost ship tethered to the beach. This sea from which English, slaving ships, and gold miners came.
I read a most wonderful book and read parts of things I’d written, to my beloved. We sat tail to tail in our hammock two days over, or my head on his chest, or his head in my arms, or in our little high netted boat of bed. A simply stone-flagged bathroom with a tap that hangs from the whitewashed stone ceiling; that’s our shower. Nothing could be nicer, nothing was. And then the quiet drive back to town chasing racing red taillights, the crowd of people at intersections selling chocolate made from Ghanaian cocoa, children’s books, necklaces of steering wheel covers, brooches of soft packs of cotton buds or giant crowns of watermelon on a tray, like Carmen Miranda.
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waking up in Africa
It is my birthday tomorrow and I’ve woken up in Africa! Beautiful Ghana of the glorious peoples. At the spanking new immaculate airport a man was bobbing at his keyboard and singing, in the arrivals hall, “And you’ve all arrived safely on this Wednesday night, hope you’ve had a great flight, welcome, welcome.” My flight was grumpy cos we got stuck on the runway for an hour (in, you know, air-conditioned comfort with personalised movies to watch) and I reminded the guy rolling his eyes next to me and complaining, you are in Africa. You arrived here on a million-dollar machine. A fast-disappearing luxury neither our planet nor most people working late at this airport can afford. We were fed and offered tiny bottles of wine and scented towels to wipe our hands and no one fell out of the sky on long wings of flame *just enjoy it!* Singing and bobbing in the passport queue, overjoyed to see my sweetest honey the kindest most gorgeous man in the world, whom I adore, who waited patiently outside in the crowd an hour for me and carried all my cases. I travel heavy, mostly books.
He had brought me a malaria tablet and fed it to me in a swallow of boiled drinking water in the car park. Then we got as close to each other as we can on the back seat and drove away into Ghana. What a blessing and privilege to be here, to be with him, even to know him when we have spent our lives on separate continents, to be running a tiny business with big eyes that wants to construct a way for Europeans to offer ‘personal, partial’ reparations to Africa.
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The Great Fire
Only Shirley Hazzard could end a novel by writing explicitly of a virgin woman’s clitoris – which she describes with a kind of cheerful poetic simplicity as ‘the final fleshly inch where he could wake her and touch her, and say her name’ – using it to literally embody survival, and art, and all of life; turn her back on the War, which is, as we see, unending – ‘the inextinguishable conflagration’ – and write, at last, ‘Many had died. But not she, not he; not yet.’
Even to her, he would not say outright that he was thinking of death; of the many who had died in their youth, under his eyes; of those he had killed, of whom he’d known nothing. On the red battlefield, where I’ll never go again; in the inextinguishable conflagration.
These hours would be lived to the full. Years of hours would follow, but not this. He had felt their chance passing; she too, in fear. For this he had travelled to the airy, empty harbour where, like a legend, she lay in a mildewed swing-seat, waiting. As surely as if she had leapt from a planked deck into the ocean and swum ashore, she had jumped ship for him. Ten thousand miles had been retraced, down to the final fleshly inch where he could wake her and touch her, and say her name.
Many had died. But not she, not he; not yet.
~ Shirley Hazzard.
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presidential debate
Big guy who shouldered in front of me to the vegetable stall on the markets kept picking up and fondling everything, laying things lingeringly down. In between handling the produce he was adjusting his own paper bag, at the crotch, for greater personal comfort. I avoided all the produce his omnivorous fingers had touched but his wife, heavily pregnant, presumably now has to just resign herself.
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while he sleeps
Today I am sitting beside my father while he sleeps. It is the last time, probably ever. We are outdoors in the sunny Queensland day and I can hear all the birds. These birds are what I miss. I miss the little endearing coy breezes, the big leaves that rattle like jewels. My father has woken up several times and when he does I smile at him and he smiles at me back.
The last time he opened his eyes I was leaning forward looking at him and when our eyes met I started to cry. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said, and he said, “You’re leaving tomorrow?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding helplessly, “I’m pretty sad about it.”
“That’s no good, pet,” he said, closing his eyes and drifting peacefully down into the sleep that is the love of his late life while I curled in the creaking cane chair and wept copiously. It’s not just Dad. It’s not just the exhausting and dispiritingly servile position I occupy in this household which I now choose consciously, for it is all the last times, that has worn me out. Why I’m crying is, the relationship I have been in through all its vicissitudes for the past four years has dissolved this morning, seemingly finally. We have reached this point before. There are certain intractable obstacles and our dear and passionate love and longing for each other keeps sweeping them aside and then they just rise up again. This man, this dear and loving, sweet and nonchalant, cool and long-legged tender and painstaking golden-eyed man has a dog, and the dog belongs to him and to his ex partner. She lives in the United States but still sees Felix as her dog. She once introduced my beloved, after she had moved to the US and was visiting Berlin for the summer, to an acquaintance as “the guy who’s babysitting my dog.”
It is like being unwilling stepmother to a ferociously dysfunctional, sometimes aggressive and sometimes sweet overgrown child who is never going to grow up and leave home, is never going to go out and get a job, is always at the end of the bed wanting to take part in all our exchanges. The dog when I first took my place in this man’s bed shimmied on his belly all the way up my legs and hips and onto my chest and put his face in my face, drew back his lip like Elvis, and growled at me. “I’m just letting you know,” he growled, “that this is my bed and you have no place in it.”
Just talking about him exhausts me. The little cat is crying at the glass verandah doors and I go and open them and lift her into my embrace. She is purring. She slept all night in the crook of my elbow, purring and opening her sleepy eyes from time to time to gaze at me. Dogs only live ten or fifteen years, I have pointed out. I’ve argued. I’ve told him, your ex can’t just move away – to another continent – for half the dog’s lifetime and still expect to share in his keeping. When I first came on the scene they were meeting up every fortnight in the park to swap the animal back and forth as though he were a child.
He has sprung stiff-legged from a standing position onto our legs as we fell asleep and had to be dragged screaming and threatening behind the only internal door in that tiny apartment, into the bathroom. He has threatened to rip our throats out whenever he feels cornered or defensive or scared. When my sweetheart wants to come stay the night with me he has to wait til the dog has been taken for his last late-night walk, then rush home before breakfast to walk him again, so that we can never spend an evening together unless he goes home at the end of it. The alternative is I allow the dog to visit too and this means an evening of perpetual negotiations as he tries to creep closer and closer and puts his paw suggestively up on the couch. I could handle all of this, I could handle the fortress we have to build on my couch before bedtime to keep the dog off it, I could handle the needy pleading pellmell greeting extraordinary in dogs which makes each morning such a big production, but I can’t and won’t handle the dog’s recurring aggression in my home, I need to have a home where I feel safe.
This house is not such a place. It took me courage to return. I was to stay only two weeks and a half and now six weeks have passed and the whole thing has worn me to the nerve. Things fell apart many years ago and since then my family are what I miss. All day I look after my parents and after they’ve gone to bed I have packed all my effects. I have so been looking forward to the night I would step off the airplane in Berlin and into the arms of the man I still love. He loves me too. Despite this love our story is wasteful and sad. I know that if we had been blessed with a child of our own or even if we had kept living in our little rented cottage in Brisbane where we were so happy this animal would have loosened his hold on that strong and intricate heart. I have begged him to make more room for our closeness. Even our physical closeness has been tyrannised to an extent by the presence of this needy animal, who clamours to climb into the bed and if banished to the bathroom emits rhythmic yearning pants that disgust me to the marrow. It’s too much and I cannot cope with it. I am tired of coping with the way the sanity and sweet nature of my man turns into defensive insobriety round this animal, this four-legged reason we are not living together. I have been away from Berlin a month longer than we planned and his closeness is what I have missed. I am gazing at the little grey cat with her ludicrous big ears who has curled on my father’s lap and fallen asleep. I love her dearly, passionately, she is my boon companion. But were she to growl and hiss and spit when people carried out ordinary transactions, had she bitten me so fiercely on both hands that I was left with nerve damage, if I found it difficult to find a place for her to stay when I was travelling because so few of my friends could trust her or enjoy her – I know what I’d choose. I would choose you. I’d choose you and love you. I’d fuck them all off my loyal loving long-legged superdarling and just love you.