tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/book-reviews-11438/articlesBook reviews – The Conversation2024-03-27T19:07:34Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2199072024-03-27T19:07:34Z2024-03-27T19:07:34ZA philosopher makes the case for a thoughtful life – but life is more than a thought experiment<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/584328/original/file-20240326-26-46r6h3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=25%2C19%2C4255%2C2824&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Yuliia Myroniuk/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Svend Brinkmann’s <a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-au/Think%3A+In+Defence+of+a+Thoughtful+Life-p-9781509559602">Think</a> is a book in praise of the thoughtful life and an easygoing exploration of the role of thinking in our lives today. </p>
<p>The book is essentially in two parts. The first is descriptive. It explores questions like “what do we mean by thinking?”, “why has it become difficult to think in today’s world?” and “where does thinking come from?” </p>
<p>The second part is prescriptive. Brinkmann provides some quick and relatively simple strategies for bringing more thoughtfulness into our everyday lives.</p>
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<p><em>Think: In Defence of a Thoughtful Life – Svend Brinkmann (Polity)</em></p>
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<p>The reader is introduced to a variety of important and complicated philosophical questions. Brinkmann introduces, for example, the Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates and refers to a challenge that Plato’s brother, Glaucon, raises in <a href="https://iep.utm.edu/republic/">The Republic</a>. </p>
<p>Glaucon asks Socrates to imagine that the existence of a ring capable of making one invisible whenever the wearer desired. Anyone with such a power, Glaucon argues, would steal and murder and “in all respects be like a god among men”. </p>
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<p>At the heart of Glaucon’s challenge is the claim that it is the possibility of being discovered that compels us to be good. If we could safely be unjust, then we would be. </p>
<p>Brinkmann summarises Socrates’ important response to this challenge, which involves Plato’s views on the intrinsic value of justice, understood as harmony within the soul. </p>
<p>But he does not settle the question of whether or not Socrates’ response is adequate. His point here, and with the many other “thought experiments” that appear in his book, is to exercise our thoughtfulness: “the act of rationally thinking about questions to which there is no single answer”.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-platos-republic-127724">Guide to the classics: Plato’s Republic</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<p>What Brinkmann means by thoughtfulness must be distinguished from other popular treatments of rational thinking. For example, he opens his book with references to Daniel Kahneman’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/thinking-fast-and-slow-9780141033570">Thinking, Fast and Slow</a> (2011). Kahneman distinguishes between “System 1” and “System 2” modes of thought. System 1 is thinking that is fast, intuitive and automatic. System 2 thinking is slower and more analytical. </p>
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<p>Consider the famous <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task">Wason selection task</a>. Imagine you are presented with four cards, each with a number on one side and a colour on the other. You are dealt the cards in the following order: 3, 8, Blue, Red. </p>
<p>You are then asked which card or cards you must turn over in order to prove the rule that a card showing an even number is blue on its opposite face. Which card or cards do you turn over? </p>
<p>The test seems simple, but the original experiment found that about one in ten of us answer it correctly. </p>
<p>The Wason test probes our ability to apply rules of classical logic surrounding hypothetical syllogisms, or conditional reasoning. Intuitive answers to the test which utilise only System 1 modes of thought won’t cut it here. It takes slow and careful deliberation, the kind of rational thinking Kahneman attributes to System 2, to deduce that we should turn over the 8 card and the red card to prove the rule. </p>
<p>Brinkmann’s idea of thoughtfulness, however, is not just about exercising our rational powers to solve puzzles like this one. He calls for a greater emphasis on what he calls “the existential dimensions of thinking”. </p>
<p>Just as the mindfulness movement seeks to bring our attention to our being in time and space, Brinkmann’s thoughtfulness is about exercising our capacity to contemplate ourselves and the world around us.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/finding-your-essential-self-the-ancient-philosophy-of-zhuangzi-explained-196215">Finding your essential self: the ancient philosophy of Zhuangzi explained</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<h2>Thought experiments</h2>
<p>The breadth of Brinkmann’s exploration of thought-provoking ideas is likely to please the curious reader. In just the first two chapters, he briefly introduces the ideas of <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle/">Aristotle</a>, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/">Martin Heidegger</a>, <a href="https://hac.bard.edu/about/hannaharendt/">Hannah Arendt</a>, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey/">John Dewey</a>, <a href="https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/thomson-judith-jarvis">Judith Jarvis Thomson</a> and <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/">John Rawls</a>. </p>
<p>Each of these philosophers, either in the study of their work or in the exercise of their thought experiments, offers important lessons in the significance of the thoughtful life. </p>
<p>Each chapter ends with an exercise – mostly famous thought-experiments from various fields of philosophy – which Brinkmann offers as a practical applications of the kind of thoughtfulness he explores.</p>
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<span class="caption">Svend Brinkmann pictured in November 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Svend_Brinkmann.jpg">Mogens Engelund, via Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>The second part of his book, the prescriptive part, is unfortunately the shortest part. But Brinkmann offers seven different ways we can all better incorporate thoughtfulness into our lives. </p>
<p>We can think with the world, by which he means we can curate our environments in such a way that is conducive to living a thoughtful life. This might involve learning how best to externalise certain cognitive exercises (for example, by keeping a journal) and creating an “ecology of attention” for ourselves. </p>
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<span class="caption">Plato, Seneca and Aristotle – artist unknown (c.1330).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plato_Seneca_Aristotle_medieval.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>We can think with our bodies and think while moving. There is a long tradition of walking and thinking. Socrates famously walked with the citizens of Athens as he practised his distinct line of philosophical questioning. Aristotle’s school in Athens also became known as the peripatetic school, after his habit of walking while lecturing. </p>
<p>We can think with books, so long as we take the time to read slowly, carefully and thoughtfully. We can think with children, who constantly inspire us to imagine, question everything, and think creatively. And we can think in conversation because, Brinkmann argues, “all thinking is dialogical”. Thinking with others and thinking with ourselves requires the time and patience of inquiry in the form of dialogue. </p>
<p>Finally, we can think with history. We ought to direct a thoughtful attention to the past, according to Brinkmann, because the better you understand “the historical forces that shape you, the better you can think”. </p>
<h2>Instructing and teaching</h2>
<p>The final experiment that Brinkmann leaves us with is thought-provoking. “Leave behind philosophical reflections on ethics, politics, and personal identity,” he says, and instead “undertake a more personal and existential thought experiment”. </p>
<p>Imagine that our lives are to be turned into books. What would the chapters be named? How would the book begin? How would the book end? </p>
<p>Brinkmann here envisions a personal framing of the thoughtful life. Our reflexivity and contemplative abilities are supposedly what distinguish us, <em>homo sapiens</em> (literally “wise human”), from non-human animals. So if we are to lead more meaningful and fulfilling lives, then: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>we need to practise thoughtfulness and create better conditions for thinking, particularly in a society that has focused for so long on efficiency over immersion, and utility over meaning.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Despite its merits, this is a book in praise of thoughtfulness which may ultimately fail to prompt the meaningful contemplation it espouses. Its pace and brevity are likely to make the book more accessible and appealing to the modern reader, but Brinkmann risks falling prey to the very “efficiency” and “utility” he criticises. </p>
<p>The philosopher is a lover of wisdom. Inspiring thoughtfulness, and so inspiring the process of being and becoming a philosopher, must involve loving attention, wonder and awe towards the world, and towards our existence as members of a global community. </p>
<p>Reminding us that thinking is what makes us human, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/">Immanuel Kant</a> wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not merely conjecture them and seek them as though obscured in darkness or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon: I see them before me, and I associate them directly with the consciousness of my own existence. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Perhaps the flaw of Brinkmann’s book can be best summarised in an analogy. A great science teacher does not just lay out the laws that govern the natural world and list the many achievements and discoveries that have resulted from humanity’s collective efforts over millennia. This is merely instruction. </p>
<p>A great science teacher, with the aim of inspiring his students to truly become scientists, fosters the curiosity within them. This is teaching. </p>
<p>The many thought experiments that Brinkmann offers are removed from the context of their debates. They are used as trials of thoughtfulness. But it is not clear how <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-trolley-dilemma-would-you-kill-one-person-to-save-five-57111">Trolley Problems</a> (to take one example from the book) inspire meaningful thinking about the particularities of our complex and dynamic moral lives. </p>
<p>Instead of being asked yet again if we would pull the lever, Brinkmann should perhaps spend more time challenging us to rethink what thinking really involves. Living more thoughtful lives is hard and not always convenient. Meaningful thought must be done slowly and carefully. It is also easy to forget that it requires practice, patience and guidance from good teachers.</p>
<p>The project of creating a short and accessible book in praise of thoughtfulness and its significance to the modern world is timely and important. Brinkmann is right to remind us of this. </p>
<p>But he also takes on the more challenging task of guiding his readers’ thinking, in an attempt to model what thoughtfulness involves, and this is where he may be underestimating them – where he does more instructing than teaching.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219907/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Oscar Davis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Svend Brinkmann’s idea of thoughtfulness is not just about exercising our rational powers to solve puzzles, but the existential dimensions of thinking.Oscar Davis, Assistant Professor in Philosophy and History, Bond UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2247362024-03-26T03:08:35Z2024-03-26T03:08:35ZSuffragettes resurrected, maternal ambivalence and toxic teens: two Australian novels impress, but one overpromises<p>Earlier this year, I spent a day immersed in the second wave of British feminism at Tate Britain’s <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/women-in-revolt?gad_source=1">Women In Revolt: Art and Activism in the UK 1970-90</a>. More of an event than an exhibition, the show was brimming with multimedia installations and artworks celebrating 20th-century, grass-roots activism. </p>
<p>I was equally struck by the audience and the exhibition. The gallery was buzzing as multiple generations gathered to learn and reminisce about the creative, politically engaged, socially diverse communities of women who altered British culture 50 years ago. </p>
<p>As their name suggests, second-wave feminists were not the first women to agitate for change. The pioneering work was done by suffragettes (the first-wave feminists), as Melanie Joosten explains in her vibrant new novel, <a href="https://ultimopress.com.au/products/like-fire-hearted-suns">Like Fire-Hearted Suns</a>. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Like Fire-Hearted Suns – Melanie Joosten (Ultimo), Thanks for Having Me – Emma Darragh (Allen & Unwin), Lead Us Not – Abbey Lay (Viking)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Unlike their successors, first-wave feminists were mostly white, wealthy women, and the movement was characterised by structural privilege. But Joosten’s clever choice of protagonists allows her to critique this inherent issue, while detailing the struggles and dreams of the individuals involved. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Women in Revolt celebrates 20th-century, grass-roots activism.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>A suffragette prison story</h2>
<p>A fictionalised account based on historical research, the story begins in 1908 and revolves around two young students, Catherine Dawson and Beatrice Taylor. The third protagonist is prison warden Ida Bennett, who oversees the suffragette inmates of Holloway prison.</p>
<p>Ida, a widow of mixed ancestry with two young boys, is clearly distinct from the well-to-do Catherine and Beatrice. Resentful of the uppity attitudes and frivolous demands of her prisoners, her distress is further complicated by her racist treatment and the traumatic burden of having to force-feed the inmates when they go on hunger strike. But Ida is also a single working parent, unable to raise her own children: she understands the need for change more than most.</p>
<p>Catherine and Beatrice share student digs, similar wealthy backgrounds and a belief in women’s voting rights. They are also fiercely critical of each other’s lobbying styles and contrasting political approaches. </p>
<p>Beatrice is happy to throw bombs and smash windows as a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union, even though this results in repeated arrests and nightmarish spells in Holloway with Ida. </p>
<p>Catherine prefers the pacifist campaigns of the <a href="https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting/womenvote/overview/womens-freedom-league/">Women’s Freedom League</a> and sells copies of the League’s own newspaper, The Vote, while petitioning the government. Catherine does not approve of Beatrice’s tactics, and Beatrice deems Catherine’s actions to be ineffective.</p>
<p>Together with Ida’s conflicted attitude, the womens’ mutual irritation and political divide adds personal depth and insight to the historical context of their story. The varied perspectives remind the reader feminism has always been a pluralist discourse. </p>
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<p>With such distinct characters at play, the narrative’s omnipresent point of view works well enough, though the switches from one individual’s interior state to the next can be sudden and jarring, and the intentionally old-fashioned linguistic style is initially awkward to read. But Joosten is a gifted writer who manages to integrate factual detail into an engaging, compelling story with a fascinating cast. Her ability to revitalise such an important chapter of women’s history is a huge achievement. </p>
<p>Brutalised and sexually assaulted by the police and the public, and horribly abused within the penal system during their 25-year campaign to gain the vote (from 1903 to 1928), the suffragettes’ battle was a violent one, often enacted upon their own bodies. </p>
<p>Name-checked in recent years by <a href="https://rebellion.global/">Extinction Rebellion</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Rush">Climate Rush</a> and <a href="https://juststopoil.org/">Just Stop Oil</a>, they were honoured in 1981 by the women of <a href="https://greenhamwomeneverywhere.co.uk/">Greenham Common</a>, who wore their predessors’ colours of green, purple and white while marching to the Royal Air Force base in Berkshire for their anti-nuclear campaign. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583388/original/file-20240321-16-kvg8eq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Women protesting wearing rainbow crowns and plastic raincoats. One holds a megaphone." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583388/original/file-20240321-16-kvg8eq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583388/original/file-20240321-16-kvg8eq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583388/original/file-20240321-16-kvg8eq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583388/original/file-20240321-16-kvg8eq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583388/original/file-20240321-16-kvg8eq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583388/original/file-20240321-16-kvg8eq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583388/original/file-20240321-16-kvg8eq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In 1981, the women of Greenham Common honoured their predecessors during their anti-nuclear protest.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://greenhamwomeneverywhere.co.uk/portfolio-items/jude-mundens-archive">Jude Munden Visual Archive</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nevertheless, the suffragettes have been largely consigned to the history books, where their stories have been misrepresented and misunderstood. Joosten’s novel reasserts their right to be heard on a wider scale. </p>
<p>Like Women In Revolt’s tribute to the Greenham women at the Tate, it’s a worthy commemoration of a conflict that should never be forgotten.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-are-the-four-waves-of-feminism-and-what-comes-next-224153">What are the four waves of feminism? And what comes next?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Maternal ambivalence</h2>
<p>A very different tale of 20th-century women comes from Emma Darragh in her debut novel, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Emma-Darragh-Thanks-for-Having-Me-9781761471018">Thanks for Having Me</a>, the first fiction release of <a href="https://www.joanpress.com/">Joan Press</a>, the new Allen and Unwin imprint under the curatorship of Gamillaroi and Torres Strait Islander actor, writer and producer (now publisher) <a href="https://harpersbazaar.com.au/nakkiah-lui-digital-cover-story/">Nakkiah Lui</a>. </p>
<p>Confronting, poignant and tender, the novel highlights some uncomfortable truths about the bonds of love and conventional family systems, within a mosaic of beautifully crafted stories that turn the spotlight on maternal ambivalence. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583356/original/file-20240321-18-em9c0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583356/original/file-20240321-18-em9c0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583356/original/file-20240321-18-em9c0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583356/original/file-20240321-18-em9c0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583356/original/file-20240321-18-em9c0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583356/original/file-20240321-18-em9c0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583356/original/file-20240321-18-em9c0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583356/original/file-20240321-18-em9c0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption"></span>
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<p>Refusing a straightforward chronological sequence, these tales of transgenerational trauma unfold around each other organically, hanging together in a loose but discernible pattern. Fraught and fragile mother–daughter bonds are juxtaposed with toxic sibling rivalries and unfulfilling marriages. Lost ambitions are weighed against the disappointing realities of family life and unfulfilling relationships. Yet somehow, love is never quite absent from the picture. </p>
<p>Mary Anne, her mental health in the balance, walks out on her husband and teenage daughters, retreating to the seat of familial dysfunction that is her parents’ house. </p>
<p>Nursing a hot, maternal wound, Vivian is volatile and unstable but settles down with a caretaking husband, only to leave her own child, Evie, when life gets too beige to bear. </p>
<p>Little Evie, born around the millennium and named after her late great aunt, is left at home with her dad and her broken, child-sized heart. Caught in the crossfire, Vivian’s love leaves enough of a trace to sustain her. Over the years, she shifts into a touchingly maternal role with her motherless mother, who has never quite grown up.</p>
<p>Written with varying degrees of grit and empathy, Mary Anne and Vivian make ill-judged decisions and create terrible predicaments for themselves and those around them. They grasp at love, security, acceptance, and try their best to make things better – to <em>do</em> things better. This saves the novel from becoming bleak, despite the pervading sense of hopelessness.</p>
<p>An assured debut ringing with empathy, Thanks for Having Me critiques the flawed institution of motherhood by showing its impact on maternal experience. </p>
<p>With nonfiction publications like <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/29/matrescence-by-lucy-jones-review-the-birth-of-a-mother">Lucy Jones’ Matrescence</a> now addressing maternal ambivalence and the challenges of parenting from the perspective of science as well as culture, second-wave feminists like psychotherapist <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2006/oct/28/familyandrelationships.family2">Roszika Parker</a> and poet and essayist <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/of-woman-born-by-adrienne-rich-3528976">Adrienne Rich</a> are being reappraised. </p>
<p>Projects like the <a href="https://www.mothernet.eu/about/">MotherNet</a> collaboration between universities in Vilnius, Uppsala and Maynooth are funding research into a range of fields that converge on maternal experience, which doesn’t necessitate having a child. Conversations are changing, and Darragh’s novel is a valuable contribution.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ive-had-enough-of-sad-bad-girl-novels-and-sensationalised-trauma-but-im-hungry-for-complex-stories-about-women-213901">I've had enough of Sad Bad Girl novels and sensationalised trauma – but I'm hungry for complex stories about women</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Teen girls and toxic friendship</h2>
<p>Thanks For Having Me is not just about family though. Friendships play a part here too, with their capacity to soothe or exacerbate familial harm. Joosten also acknowledges the importance of friendship within the testing conditions of political divide. And in her debut novel, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/lead-us-not-9781761340680">Lead Us Not</a>, Abbey Lay makes friendship the whole story. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583357/original/file-20240321-18-ltnvd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583357/original/file-20240321-18-ltnvd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583357/original/file-20240321-18-ltnvd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583357/original/file-20240321-18-ltnvd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583357/original/file-20240321-18-ltnvd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583357/original/file-20240321-18-ltnvd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583357/original/file-20240321-18-ltnvd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583357/original/file-20240321-18-ltnvd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Toxic teenage dynamics have become something of a trope in recent years, and for good reason. With the complexity of adolescence now troubled by the rapid ascent of social media, and the added confusion of online networking, there is much to explore. But while Lay’s subject matter holds currency, especially with the added questions of sexual exploration, her story lacks intrigue and ultimately fails to convince. </p>
<p>The premise is familiar enough. Millie, an insecure teenage girl develops a fascination with the more beautiful, more sexually experienced Olive, who moves in next door. Both are in their final year at the same Catholic girls’ high school, though their paths have never previously crossed. </p>
<p>Olive quickly establishes herself with the upper hand in the relationship, while the fixated Millie does her new friend’s bidding, happily dumping her old one, Jess, in the process. Boys are present but peripheral, serving as fodder for the girls’ intimate discussions. To this end, Olive instructs Millie to lose her virginity with the painfully awkward Leon, while divulging the details of her own sex life with handsome tennis player, Hunter. </p>
<p>There is nothing surprising in any of this. Teenage girls are renowned for their intense, romantic, often cruel, sometimes transgressive friendships. The merging of identities and unequal power dynamics are virtually a high-school rite of passage. After all, TV shows like <a href="https://www.paramountplus.com/au/shows/yellowjackets/">Yellowjackets</a>, in which teen-girl rivalry escalates into lifelong trauma following a plane crash in the wilderness, were not born into a void. </p>
<p>There is nothing wrong with this story arc either – and Lay’s prose is elegant and well crafted. She carefully avoids extreme drama, while raising interesting questions about the authenticity of friendship. But while she builds tension with skill, the plot is too pedestrian and the characters are not compelling or mature enough to match the level of suspense she spins.</p>
<p>Olive and Millie, supposedly in year 12, behave more like year 9 or 10 students, setting out on relatively innocent social and sexual adventures with high-blown attitudes. However, their emotional concerns and conversations are too young for their age. </p>
<p>Next to <a href="https://theconversation.com/girlhood-misery-bullying-and-beauty-combine-for-laura-elizabeth-woolletts-unlikeable-west-coast-girls-211427">Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s West Girls</a>, with its complex twists of social, cultural and ethnic hierachies, their white middle-class preoccupations appear simplistic and anodyne. </p>
<p>There is a distinct uniformity to Olive and Millie’s world. All their friends are from conservative backgrounds, with good-enough families and comfortable homes. The Catholic girls consort with the boys from St Marks as if in a preordained bubble. Nobody deviates or dissents, which makes Millie’s obsession with Olive all the more curious, because apart from a touch of drama-school charisma, Olive is no different to the rest.</p>
<p>When the girls explore the boundaries of their friendship during a school camping trip, there is potential for something to develop. But the tentative steps they take towards each other are barely discernible, and the emotional landscape remains under-explored. </p>
<p>After the trip, a communication failure brings the unhealthy dynamic to a head. Olive retreats, leaving Millie upset and confused. Millie, an intelligent, sensitive girl on the verge of womanhood, inexplicably fails to understand why Olive has withdrawn from her. The narrative presents this emotional temperature change as a pivotal mystery for both Millie and the reader, but it’s too much of a stretch: there is no mystery. The reasons for Olive’s vanishing act are all too plain.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583392/original/file-20240321-16-2md0hr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="a white woman with blue eyes and long, straight hair" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583392/original/file-20240321-16-2md0hr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583392/original/file-20240321-16-2md0hr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583392/original/file-20240321-16-2md0hr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583392/original/file-20240321-16-2md0hr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583392/original/file-20240321-16-2md0hr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583392/original/file-20240321-16-2md0hr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583392/original/file-20240321-16-2md0hr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Abbey Lay is ‘hopefully on the edge of a promising career’.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Overall, Lay’s novel would be better suited for the young adult (YA) market. The book’s attempt to interrogate themes of control, vulnerability, trust and honesty within a toxic dynamic is worthwhile, but the level at which these topics are addressed is too naive to satisfy an adult, or even an older YA readership. </p>
<p>A poised and assured writer, Lay is hopefully on the edge of a promising career, but her use of subtlety and restraint needs to be balanced with greater depth and scope. And her characters are in danger of sleepwalking into the future. By contrast, the women and girls of Like Fire-Hearted Suns and Thanks For Having Me understand the need to fight. </p>
<p>If I could, I’d pitch the Catholic girls into the thick of a suffragette rally with Beatrice, or get Evie to sneak them some vodka at a party while Vivian flirts her arse off. Then I’d transport them to the Tate and the epicentre of Women In Revolt, where <a href="https://www.euronews.com/culture/2023/11/15/women-in-revolt-british-feminist-art-from-the-1970s-and-1980s-takes-over-tate-britain">Gina Birch’s Three Minute Scream</a> echoes through the galleries. </p>
<p>Finally, I’d guide them through all the feminist diversity of that whole heartstopping show, in the hope of enriching their perspectives and expanding their vision. </p>
<p>And then I’d let go of their hands.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/224736/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Liz Evans' debut novel, Catherine Wheel, is to be published by Ultimo Press in August 2024.</span></em></p>A novel about first-wave feminists cleverly critiques the movement’s privilege. The first fiction from Nakkiah Lui’s imprint highlights uncomfortable truths. And a debut about teen girls is ‘too naive’.Liz Evans, Writer, author, journalist, Associate Lecturer in English & Writing, University of TasmaniaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2253572024-03-25T00:46:33Z2024-03-25T00:46:33ZCatherine Chidgey’s revealing, uncomfortable novels bridge worlds. Is she New Zealand’s latest global literary star?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583639/original/file-20240322-18-xmjohd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=163%2C467%2C1903%2C1165&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Catherine Chidgey</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Chidgey#/media/File:Chidgey_Nov_2019.jpg">Helen Mayall</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Catherine Chidgey is one of New Zealand’s most accomplished and consistently surprising novelists. Since her debut in 1998, her works have also attracted international accolades and prizes, including the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for best first book (for <a href="https://teherengawakapress.co.nz/in-a-fishbone-church/">In a Fishbone Church</a>). </p>
<p>After a 13-year gap between her third novel in 2003 and her fourth in 2016, her career has seen a remarkable second act. The five novels Chidgey published between 2016 and 2023 have been met with critical acclaim both in New Zealand and abroad, and explore diverse subjects and styles. </p>
<p>Her most recent work, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Catherine-Chidgey-Pet-9781787704732/">Pet</a> (2023), has attracted glowing reviews in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/02/pet-by-catherine-chidgey-review-sly-psychological-thriller">The Guardian</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/06/books/review/catherine-chidgey-pet.html">the New York Times</a> and was <a href="https://theconversation.com/best-books-of-2023-our-experts-share-the-books-that-have-stayed-with-them-214578">my favourite book</a> of last year. And her 2020 Holocaust novel, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Catherine-Chidgey-Remote-Sympathy-9781787703711">Remote Sympathy</a>, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.</p>
<p>The novel published between, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Catherine-Chidgey-Axeman's-Carnival-9781787704619">The Axeman’s Carnival</a> (2022), won New Zealand’s <a href="https://www.ockham.co.nz/stories/magpie-magnificence-wins-big-prize-at-2023/#:%7E:text=Celebrated%20New%20Zealand%20writer%20Catherine,menace%2C%20narrated%20by%20a%20precocious">most prestigious prize for fiction</a>, The Ockham Prize, and is now being published in Australia for the first time. </p>
<p>It explores the disintegrating relationship of a rural New Zealand couple from the perspective of their pet magpie, Tama. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583641/original/file-20240322-18-4nwr5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A magpie in a grass field" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583641/original/file-20240322-18-4nwr5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583641/original/file-20240322-18-4nwr5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583641/original/file-20240322-18-4nwr5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583641/original/file-20240322-18-4nwr5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583641/original/file-20240322-18-4nwr5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583641/original/file-20240322-18-4nwr5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583641/original/file-20240322-18-4nwr5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Axeman’s Carnival is narrated by a pet magpie.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jack McCracken/Unsplash</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Strange associations</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>People tell bad stories about magpies. That we hold the souls of gossips, That we carry a drop of the devil’s blood in our mouths. That to meet a single magpie brings bad luck, sorrow, or death. We refused to take shelter in the Ark, people say; instead we sat on its roof and laughed at the drowned world. We were the only bird not to sing at the crucifixion. Magpies bore into sheep and cattle and eat them from the inside out. Magpies steal anything that shines. Witches ride to their seething Sabbaths on magpie’s tails. To make a magpie talk, cut its tongue with a crooked sixpence.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This passage comes early in The Axeman’s Carnival and speaks to the strange associations sometimes attached to these birds. They are frequently perceived as an aggressive and invasive species. But they are also often attributed human qualities: greed, mischievousness, malice, humour. </p>
<p>Because of their intelligence and their capacity to mimic human voices and language, it becomes easy to anthropomorphise magpies. We project our own qualities onto them, reading their behaviour as a mirror of our own. </p>
<p>Tama (short for Tamagochi) is frequently subject to this kind of projection. Thanks to his owner, Marnie, he has become a rising internet star. Marnie films him dressed in a range of outfits, performing tricks and tasks, and spouting shareable one-liners. </p>
<p>They live with Marnie’s husband Rob, a farmer, deep in Central Otago in the South Island of New Zealand, on the aptly named “Wilderness Road”. In contrast to Tama’s growing international fame, Rob is a local celebrity. </p>
<p>He is a regular competitor in an annual competitive wood-chopping event: the “Axeman’s Carnival”, which gives the novel its title. Having previously won nine “golden axes”, he is hoping to bring home a tenth in this year’s contest. </p>
<p>While Rob and Marnie’s relationship seems idyllic to outsiders, Tama is witness to its unravelling. As the farm struggles and competition for the tenth golden axe stiffens, Rob becomes increasingly volatile and possessive towards Marnie. He also grows resentful of Tama’s presence in their house. </p>
<p>Rob is threatened by the attention his wife pays to the bird, whom he only grudgingly accepts because of the revenue generated from his social media presence. </p>
<p>Tama’s videos are a hit because of his seemingly “human like” attributes: his voice, intelligence and affection for Marnie. However, as the narrator, Tama also reinterprets human spaces from a bird’s perspective. He is acutely aware of Rob’s mounting frustrations, understanding them as the dangerous need to assert control and dominance over a diminishing and contested territory. </p>
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<p>Tama’s translation of the magpie’s call – “We are here and this is our tree and we’re staying and it is ours and you need to leave and now” – is repeated throughout the novel. As the tension in Marnie and Rob’s relationship gradually builds, this refrain seems to express the sentiments of the human characters as well. Sooner or later, someone – whether Rob, Marnie or Tama himself – will be forced to “leave” by whatever means necessary.</p>
<p>As the narrator and protagonist of the Axeman’s Carnival, Tama straddles the divide between domestic and natural spaces. He was rescued by Marnie as a fledgling, after falling from his nest and then released as a young adult. After a brief period where he attempts to reintegrate with his magpie family, he abandons them to return to the farmhouse. He is drawn back by his love for Marnie and by the ease and safety of life as a pet. Within the house, he is treated as a surrogate child by Marnie and as a pest and interloper by Rob. </p>
<p>Outside the property, his magpie sister views him as an amusing curiosity, questioning whether he is “bird or not”, and his human-hating father denounces him as a traitor, dismissing him as “not even a memory. Not even a ghost”. </p>
<p>Tama’s relationships with these characters are sometimes dangerous and constantly shifting. He is often rebuked, threatened and blamed, but also confided in and admired. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ambition-corruption-and-guerilla-gardening-eleanor-cattons-birnam-wood-is-a-horror-story-for-our-time-195207">Ambition, corruption and guerilla gardening: Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood is a horror story for our time</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Kiwi Gothic?</h2>
<p>The Axeman’s Carnival has been received in <a href="https://womanmagazine.co.nz/birds-eye-view/">some reviews</a> as an example of the “Kiwi Gothic”, due to its secluded rural setting and its undercurrent of mounting dread. Narrated from Tama’s idiosyncratic perspective, the novel has the tone of a dark fairytale. The nine golden axes that hang above Marnie and Rob’s bed and the empty space left for the tenth seem to signal some inevitable disaster to come. </p>
<p>Rob’s increasingly brutal domestic outbursts are subtly mirrored in the quiet menace of his daily routines, as observed by Tama. His efficient skinning and butchery of dead lambs. The furious precision of his axe-work. The crime shows he watches, all “about dead naked beautiful women, strangled in secluded forests”. </p>
<p>Beyond the farm, Tama’s father lurks in the pines, repeating his warnings and calling for violence. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>You must swoop. Go for the hair, the scalp, the face. Pierce their eyes, drink their blood, clean their bones … Things do not go well for birds who go to humans of their own free will.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>However, Tama’s growing online popularity works to puncture the grim isolation of Wilderness Road in surprising and hilarious ways. To Rob’s consternation, their previously remote farm becomes a locus for tourists and backpackers who come to see “the bird who thinks he’s a person”, as one German visitor puts it. </p>
<p>Tama becomes the focus of attention for media workers, marketeers, merchandisers and animal-rights activists. He picks up on this growing medley of voices, mimicking and adapting them as the novel progress. </p>
<p>Chidgey’s previous works have frequently focused on both the contractions and the new forms of meaning that emerge by drawing seemingly distant experiences, voices and perspectives together. </p>
<p>Her first two novels, the intergenerational family narrative <a href="https://teherengawakapress.co.nz/in-a-fishbone-church/">In a Fishbone Church</a> (1998) and the correspondence-driven mystery <a href="https://teherengawakapress.co.nz/golden-deeds/">Golden Deeds</a> (2000) both use their premises to explore unexpected connections between disparate locations and lives. </p>
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<p>Her foray into Gothic horror, <a href="https://teherengawakapress.co.nz/transformation-the/">The Transformation</a> (2003), presents 19th-century Tampa, Florida as an occasionally nightmarish meeting point between the old world and the new. </p>
<p>More recently, Chidgey’s 2017 “found” novel, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/09/beat-of-the-pendulum-catherine-chidgey-review">The Beat of the Pendulum</a>, records a year in the author’s own life through a collage of recorded and remembered conversations, email chains, social media posts, news articles and other media fragments. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Catherine-Chidgey-Remote-Sympathy-9781787703711">Remote Sympathy</a> (2020), one of two novels where Chidgey explores Nazi Germany as its subject, is constructed from intersecting accounts from both former Nazis and Holocaust survivors. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-zone-of-interest-the-dark-psychological-insight-of-martin-amiss-holocaust-novel-is-lost-in-the-film-adaptation-221867">The Zone of Interest: the dark psychological insight of Martin Amis's Holocaust novel is lost in the film adaptation</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Waiting for the axe</h2>
<p>In the Axeman’s Carnival, Tama’s hybrid nature also bridges previously discrete and separable worlds, in ways both revealing and uncomfortable. Human and animal. Online and physical. As a natural mimic, he copies and reenacts language and behaviour from all these spaces, to the delight and annoyance of his various audiences.</p>
<p>However, this mimicry is not empty or superficial. Rather, he uses it to connect different discourses. He steals, magpie-like, from the sources around him. The television, radio and social media feeds. His sister and his father. Marnie and Rob. This gradually affords him new ways of acting, and new forms of understanding. </p>
<p>In one sequence, he assembles a horde of objects stolen from Rob as “evidence”, attempting to form a deduction in the manner of the crime shows he has seen on TV. In others, he uses his learned snippets of language – particularly his increasingly ominous, viral catchphrase “don’t you dare!” – to rile and confound his rival. </p>
<p>Ironically, the attention generated by Tama’s increasingly shrewd and sophisticated performances traps Rob in a performance of his own. To maximise their revenue from Tama, he and Marnie open their house up to 24-hour online scrutiny. This temporarily arrests his violence, as he is forced to act as a good husband to Marnie and a loving “dad” to Tama. </p>
<p>Perhaps the most fascinating and suspenseful section of the novel comes in its final third, which sees Tama and Rob trapped in this curious détente. They are both performing for the cameras. Only the occasional lapse – an outburst, or a messily consumed mouse – might alert a viewer to what lies beneath the surface. </p>
<p>In this sequence, they almost reflect one another. Two uncanny creatures, not quite wild and not quite tame, circling one another in an increasingly claustrophobic house. Both waiting for the axe to drop.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/225357/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julian Novitz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Catherine Chidgey’s disquieting, award-winning novel The Axeman’s Carnival explores the disintegrating relationship of a rural couple from the perspective of their pet magpie, Tama.Julian Novitz, Senior Lecturer, Writing, Department of Media and Communication, Swinburne University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2252722024-03-20T19:03:44Z2024-03-20T19:03:44ZGabriel García Márquez’s last novel is a moving testament to his genius<p><a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/03/07/ten-years-without-gabriel-garcia-marquez-an-oral-history/">Gabriel García Márquez</a> (1927-2014) – affectionately known as “Gabo” – started his career as a journalist, but is famous for the novels and short stories that earned him the <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/summary/">Nobel Prize for Literature</a> in 1982. </p>
<p>Alongside Peruvian author <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2010/vargas_llosa/biographical/">Mario Vargas Llosa</a> and the Mexican <a href="https://achievement.org/achiever/carlos-fuentes/">Carlos Fuentes</a>, he was the best-known member of the triumvirate that started the boom in Latin American literature in the late 1960s. He popularised the style that came to be known as “magical realism”, influencing later authors such as <a href="https://www.isabelallende.com/en">Isabel Allende</a> and <a href="https://www.salmanrushdie.com/">Salman Rushdie</a>. </p>
<p>His novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/one-hundred-years-of-solitude-9780241968581">One Hundred Years of Solitude</a> has sold more than 30 million copies and has been translated into 37 languages. He is one of the most translated Spanish-language authors in the world, alongside Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, and the author of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Until August – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated by Anne McLean (Viking)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>News about Márquez’s unpublished novel has been making headlines for close to a year. Posthumously published novels can be contentious. They tend to come in four categories.</p>
<p>Some are unfinished or incomplete. These are either fragmentary works, like Vladimir Nabokov’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-original-of-laura-9780141191164">The Original of Laura</a>, or substantial works that were never fully revised to the author’s satisfaction. Franz Kafka’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/amerika-9780241372586">Amerika</a>, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-trial-9780241678893">The Trial</a> and <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-castle-9780241678916">The Castle</a> are famous examples of unfinished, posthumously published novels.</p>
<p>Some are unfinished but partially complete. In this case, we have sections that were fully revised by the author to their satisfaction, but not a full draft. Charles Dickens’ final novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-mystery-of-edwin-drood-9781409075257">The Mystery of Edwin Drood</a> falls into this category. When Dickens died in 1870, he had finished and fully revised six out of twelve chapters.</p>
<p>Occasionally, posthumously published books are finished and complete. E.M. Forster wrote <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/maurice-9780141441139">Maurice</a>, his novel about homosexual love, in 1914. He revised it to his satisfaction, but then decided not to publish. He was afraid of legal repercussions due to the attitudes against homosexuality at the time. The novel was published in 1971, the year after his death.</p>
<p>Then there are novels that are finished but unrevised. A full draft exists, but one that we know required further revisions by the author. J.R.R. Tolkien’s <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780007523221/the-silmarillion/">The Silmarillion</a>, for example, was written after The Hobbit, but was at first rejected. This resulted in Tolkien writing The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Silmarillion was eventually revised, edited and published by Tolkien’s son, Christopher Tolkien, four years after his father’s death.</p>
<p>Marquez’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/until-august-9780241686355">Until August</a> falls into this last category. It is a complete, but unfinished work that Márquez was not able to fully revise to his satisfaction. The novel has been edited by Cristóbal Pera, who also edited Márquez’s memoir, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/living-to-tell-the-tale-9780241968772">Living to Tell the Tale</a>. The published version is based on Márquez’s fifth and last draft, incorporating some fragments from earlier drafts. </p>
<p>It is important to keep this in mind as we read the novel, as well as the reasons why it was not fully revised.</p>
<h2>Literary rumours</h2>
<p>There had been rumours about the existence of an unpublished Márquez novel since March 1999, when the author read a chapter of Until August at the Casa América Madrid, during that year’s forum for the Spanish Society of Authors and Publishers. Three days later, the Spanish newspaper El País published the chapter, which was later translated into English for The New Yorker. </p>
<p>In 2003, another fragment of Until August came to light. It was published as a short story in the Colombian magazine Cambio (owned by Márquez) with the title The Night of the Eclipse. </p>
<p>After that, silence. For a long time, it appeared the rumours had been precisely that, nothing but rumours, until August 2023, when Penguin Random House confirmed the existence of the novel and its publication date in 2024, the ten year anniversary of Márquez’s death. The publication date is doubly significant: the book came out in Spanish on March 6 – his birthday.</p>
<p>Márquez was a perfectionist. He revised his novels meticulously, rewrote them over and over, within an inch of their literary lives. His indisputable masterpiece, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-autumn-of-the-patriarch-9780141917252">Autumn of the Patriarch</a>, took him 17 years. </p>
<p>This is why his children, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, now in charge of their father’s literary estate, were at first uncomfortable with publishing Until August. In the preface to the novel, they share their father’s opinion about it: “This
book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.” </p>
<p>As the brothers point out, however, Until August was their father’s “last effort to carry on creating”. In 1999, Márquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. Shortly after, in 2002, he was diagnosed with dementia. As his health deteriorated, his writing suffered. Until August was composed during this time.</p>
<p>The “novel” is really a novella. Scarcely 100 pages long, it is divided into six chapters organised around the main character, Ana Magdalena Bach. Ana Magdalena is 46 years old. She is named after Johann Sebastian Bach’s second wife and, like her namesake, she is married to a musician. Her husband of 27 years, Domenico Amarís, is the director of the local conservatory. </p>
<p>Ana Magdalena’s mother died eight years prior to the start of the book. Her last wish was to be buried on a Caribbean island. Every year on August 16, the anniversary of her mother’s death, Ana Magdalena embarks on the one-day journey to lay flowers at her grave.</p>
<p>On her eighth trip to the island, Ana Magdalena meets a man and has sex with him. It is tempting at this point to assume that the book will be about Ana Magdalena’s affair with this man, finding true love, yearning romantically throughout the year to meet him in August. But that’s not it. After that first encounter, Ana Magdalena makes a point every year of finding a new man to sleep with on August 16. </p>
<p>But the book is not about her sexual liberation either. We are expressly told that after almost three decades together, Ana Magdalena and her husband still have a strong and emotionally fulfilling marriage, as well as a steamy sex life involving all manner of kinky escapades that one might associate with much younger couples. </p>
<p>The anonymity of the island allows other elements of Ana Magdalena’s identity to come to the fore and to change her in different ways. Her sexual experiences are diverse. One encounter is with a man who assumes she is a sex worker and, to her great indignation, leaves 20 dollars behind in her copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Another, a hurricane in bed, turns out to be a criminal. Then there are visits to the island when, much to her frustration, nothing happens. </p>
<p>Interestingly, none of the men Ana Magdalena sleeps with is given a name. They are
anonymous, making her the undisputed protagonist and subject of these encounters.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-magical-realism-51481">Explainer: magical realism</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Writing against adversity</h2>
<p>Until August glimmers with Márquez’s genius. The narrative voice is enthralling, the plot is cleverly creative. The characters are complex, contradictory and engaging. </p>
<p>Most astonishing is Márquez’s poetic prose, which has been fluently translated by Anna McLean. The cadences of his sentences continue to hit like a hammer to the heart. Take the following passage before Ana Magdalena’s first sexual encounter:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>After the second drink she felt that the brandy had met up with the gin in some corner of her heart, and she had to concentrate in order not to lose her head. The music ended at eleven and the band was only waiting for them to leave so they could close. She knew him by then as if she had always lived with him. She knew he was clean, impeccably dressed, with inexpressive hands accentuated by the natural shine of his fingernails, and with a good and cowardly heart.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Until August is not a magical realist novel, so don’t expect one. It isn’t <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/leaf-storm-9780241968765">Leaf Storm</a> or <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/chronicle-of-a-death-foretold-9780241968628">Chronicle of a Death Foretold</a> – astonishing novellas and masterpieces of the form, written at the height of Márquez’s creative powers. </p>
<p>It is, however, a captivating book, and a testimony to the challenges Márquez was working to overcome when he wrote it. Books do not exist in a vacuum, they are the product of the circumstances in which they are written. Consequently, Until August is not Márquez’s best work. There are minor contradictions in the plot, some unnecessary repetitions, and a lack of clarity in a couple of passages. The ending is abrupt. It comes with a nice twist that could have been beautifully executed, but it isn’t, so the novel does not have the resolution it deserves. </p>
<p>And yet this is a hell of a book, particularly when we consider Márquez wrote it with one metaphorical hand tied behind his back.</p>
<p>In her Nobel lecture <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1991/gordimer/lecture/">Writing and Being</a>, South African author Nadine Gordimer mentions Márquez’s political commitment to writing. She summarises his views in one sentence: “When it comes down to it, the writer’s duty, his revolutionary duty if you like, is to write well.” </p>
<p>In the face of battle, the writer writes; in the face of illness, he did too. Until
August is the fruit of that labour against adversity, a moving testament of Márquez’s love form and commitment to literature.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-don-quixote-the-worlds-first-modern-novel-and-one-of-the-best-94097">Guide to the classics: Don Quixote, the world's first modern novel – and one of the best</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/225272/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gabriel Garcia Ochoa does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Until August is the fruit of Gabriel García Márquez’s labour against adversity, a moving testament of his love for and commitment to literature.Gabriel Garcia Ochoa, Global Studies, Translation and Comparative Literature, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2213032024-03-19T19:42:52Z2024-03-19T19:42:52ZLiberalism is in crisis. A new book traces how we got here, but lets neoliberal ideologues off the hook<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582433/original/file-20240318-22-yg77o7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=6%2C0%2C4396%2C1855&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Haruki Yui/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>What is post-liberalism? That is no simple question, though the simplest responses are given by those who identify with it as a movement. </p>
<p>Adrian Pabst, author of the <a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-au/Postliberal+Politics%3A+The+Coming+Era+of+Renewal-p-9781509546817">most influential book</a> on the subject, proposes it as a way out of the impasse created by the excesses of hyper-capitalism on the right and identity politics on the left. He calls for a renewed focus on the collective identities of community, family and location. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>How We Became Post-Liberal – Russell Blackford (Bloomsbury)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>British journalist David Goodhart envisages an “<a href="https://demos.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/files/apostliberalfuture.pdf">embedded individualism</a>”, which acknowledges the messy realities of contemporary life, while insisting on traditional values of interdependence, mutual trust and social duty.</p>
<p>Both writers may be seen as part of a distinctly British mode of centrism, which combines left-wing commitments to economic justice and workers’ rights with principles of social conservatism. As advocates for consensus politics, they present their views with a reasoned account of the factors contributing to the crisis in liberalism, avoiding shrill statements and overly contentious assertions.</p>
<p>But the movement has less temperate adherents. In the United States, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/opinion-free-expression/a-postliberal-future/6199298e-6b01-44aa-9e3a-d272ba2fcea3">Patrick Deneen</a> has made the title of his book <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/618154/regime-change-by-patrick-j-deneen/">Regime Change</a> a rallying cry, gaining him an enthusiastic audience among some Republicans in Washington. </p>
<p>The “regime” Deneen wants to change is the supposed cultural and institutional dominance of social liberalism – a longstanding shibboleth of the American right. He talks of a “distinct and pernicious” ruling class arisen from college campus liberals, who have created a new tyranny under which individual rights are the be-all and end-all. </p>
<p>The concept of post-liberalism, then, is ideologically ambiguous. It has the potential to embrace ideas from both left and right. Its one common assumption is that traditional liberalism – in its economic and social versions – is in trouble.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578500/original/file-20240228-24-fudfhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578500/original/file-20240228-24-fudfhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578500/original/file-20240228-24-fudfhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578500/original/file-20240228-24-fudfhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578500/original/file-20240228-24-fudfhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578500/original/file-20240228-24-fudfhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1180&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578500/original/file-20240228-24-fudfhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1180&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578500/original/file-20240228-24-fudfhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1180&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Russell Blackford’s <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/how-we-became-postliberal-9781350322943/">How We Became Post-Liberal</a> purports to offer a detached, historical account of why liberalism is in trouble. As its proponents are keen to anchor their principles in deep tradition, the history matters.</p>
<p>There may be no simple answer to the question of what post-liberalism is, but Blackford shows how liberalism may be easier to define, at least in its origins. </p>
<p>His first three chapters chronicle the horrors of religious persecution, from late antiquity through to the early modern period, when liberalism began to mean something more than basic tolerance. Given the strong presence of Christian advocates in the post-liberal movement, it is interesting that Blackford places his emphasis on Christianity as a major player in the history of murderous intolerance. </p>
<p>If liberalism began as a bid to reverse some of the worst tendencies in Christian tradition, what has happened to cause a second u-turn in the movement?</p>
<h2>An impossible paradox</h2>
<p>This question underpins much of the argument in Blackford’s book, which pays sustained attention to the fuller realisation of liberalism in the long 19th century, when it became the subject of moral and philosophical treatises. </p>
<p>John Stuart Mill’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/on-liberty-9780140432077">On Liberty</a> (1859) argued for the free expression of opinion as a prerequisite to intellectual progress. Perhaps the founding work of modern liberalism, Mill’s essay has been reinvented by current advocates as a primer of post-liberalism.</p>
<p>The expansion of industrial capitalism, population growth and political revolution subjected moral thinking to radically changed conditions. Mill made the case for a shift in values that placed the individual at the centre of the picture. He emphasised the dangers of a new form of tyranny in “the moral coercion of public opinion”. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578504/original/file-20240228-26-jx645r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578504/original/file-20240228-26-jx645r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578504/original/file-20240228-26-jx645r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578504/original/file-20240228-26-jx645r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578504/original/file-20240228-26-jx645r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578504/original/file-20240228-26-jx645r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578504/original/file-20240228-26-jx645r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578504/original/file-20240228-26-jx645r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">John Stuart Mill (c.1870).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Stuart_Mill_by_London_Stereoscopic_Company,_c1870.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>In the 20th century, the longstanding dynamic of liberalism, which defined the free individual in opposition to church and state, shifted in Europe and America, as political innovators introduced notions of liberalism to government. With the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/New-Deal">New Deal</a>, Franklin D. Roosevelt succeed in redefining the word liberal by associating it with new kinds of government intervention to address social problems. </p>
<p>Free speech became core business in US politics as the Soviet Union moved in the opposite direction. Then came <a href="https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/age-of-eisenhower/mcarthyism-red-scare">McCarthyism</a>, described by Blackford as “one of the most severe episodes of repression in the universities that the United States experienced in the 20th century”. </p>
<p>The underlying rationales of liberalism, forged through the long 19th century, were threatened with an impossible paradox. What if freedom cannot be preserved without coercive measures? It only takes a significant minority of a democratised population to believe that for the ideals to become untenable. </p>
<p>The paradox played out through the 1960s. Countercultural movements and the rise of feminism introduced more widespread determinations to keep individual freedom paramount. There was never a golden age of liberalism, says Blackford, although for a time we seemed to be on the way. </p>
<p>The radical visions of the 1960s faded into disappointment and disillusionment. Neoliberal policies introduced another ideological twist, with their stringently economic interpretations of individual freedom. A strong element of backlash was in evidence.</p>
<p>Curiously, How We Became Post-Liberal does not really engage with this side of the story. By the time Blackford gets to the mid-20th century, his already sweeping historical canvas has stretched beyond what is really manageable. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-neoliberalism-became-an-insult-in-australian-politics-188291">Explainer: how neoliberalism became an insult in Australian politics</a>
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<h2>A Rorschach test</h2>
<p>Cultural history at this level of generality is something of a Rorschach test. Points are selected from an infinite network of hubs and intersections. A selective design is composed, becoming ever more subject to distortion as it approaches the present. </p>
<p>Blackford’s focus is on the growth of rights movements and identity politics. He spends time examining the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_Verses_controversy">controversy over Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses</a> as an Escher-like puzzle, in which contemporary notions of free speech came into conflict with stringent cultural definitions of blasphemy. Claims about rights and their infringement drive in both directions. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579452/original/file-20240304-24-8rkce3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579452/original/file-20240304-24-8rkce3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579452/original/file-20240304-24-8rkce3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579452/original/file-20240304-24-8rkce3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579452/original/file-20240304-24-8rkce3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579452/original/file-20240304-24-8rkce3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579452/original/file-20240304-24-8rkce3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579452/original/file-20240304-24-8rkce3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Salman Rushdie at the Frontiers of Thought festival, Sao Paulo, May 2014.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Salman_Rushdie_no_Fronteiras_do_Pensamento_S%C3%A3o_Paulo_2014_(14196012581).jpg">Greg Salibian/Fronteiras do Pensamento, via Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-a-new-identity-focused-ideology-has-trapped-the-left-and-undermined-social-justice-217085">How a new identity-focused ideology has trapped the left and undermined social justice</a>
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<p>And so the atmosphere around liberalism heats up. Melbourne psychologist Nicholas Haslam has identified a trend he calls “<a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2016-08154-001">concept creep</a>”: an expansion in the use of terms related to the experience of harm – abuse, bullying, trauma, prejudice, vulnerability, being triggered, feeling unsafe.</p>
<p>As Blackford reminds us, harm is a central concern in Mill’s work. It is the philosopher’s guiding principle for where free speech should or should not be sanctioned. </p>
<p>But what happens when a society becomes so obsessed with the anticipation of and redress of harm that the obsession itself becomes a form of tyranny? We are finding out, Blackford suggests, as social justice movements move into a zone where permits for anger and indignation are handed out so keenly they lead to new modes of zealotry and intolerance. </p>
<p>Here lies the central problem with the post-liberal movement, and with the way it is explained in this book. There is too much animus and it is directed selectively. Why focus on social justice movements as the heart of the problem, rather than the culture of extreme individualism generated by neoliberal orthodoxies? </p>
<p>If people on college campuses are becoming prone to zealotry in their campaigns against racism, bullying and harassment, and in their determination to gain recognition for diverse sexualities, what about those in the corporate world who garner obscene levels of personal wealth at the expense of people working for <a href="https://ilostat.ilo.org/topics/working-poverty/">below poverty wages</a>?</p>
<p>And where are campaigners like <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paine/">Thomas Paine</a> (1737-1809) and <a href="https://williammorrissociety.org/about-william-morris/">William Morris</a> (1834-96) in this history of liberalism? </p>
<p>Paine gets a passing mention as “pamphleteer, free thinker and political radical”. But there is no discussion of his commitment to the principles of social security and a version of basic income as means of redressing extremes of economic inequality. </p>
<p>Morris, who parted company with Mill’s doctrines on free-market capitalism, may be seen as an early example of post-liberalism, but one that moves explicitly towards socialism. Religious persecution may have been a primary cause of intolerance and oppression in the early modern period, but industrial capitalism rapidly took over as the most pervasive form of tyranny in Europe and America.</p>
<p>Here the secular liberalism of US philosopher <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/">John Rawls</a> (1921-2002) warrants more than the couple of paragraphs that allude to his work. Rawls’s vision of an economy based on social justice and the greater good has been an influential counterpoint to the orthodoxy of neoliberalism. His ideas, surely, may also be seen as an earlier version of post-liberalism.</p>
<p>The contemporary post-liberal movement is showing a distinct bias towards targeting identity politics and social justice campaigns. Pabst is one of the few to offer an evenhanded critique on this score. At their worst, the proponents of post-liberalism are starting to sound like Russian propagandist <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/23/who-is-russian-ultranationalist-alexander-dugin">Alexander Dugin</a>, who caricatures Western individualism as infantile indulgence, slurring the word “leeberaleezm” as if it were an obscenity.</p>
<p>Isn’t the problem that we get caught in one vituperative backlash after another? Beware of those who seek to herald new forms of sanity. They may be harbingers of the next wave of tyranny.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-george-orwell-is-everywhere-but-nineteen-eighty-four-is-not-a-reliable-guide-to-contemporary-politics-190909">Friday essay: George Orwell is everywhere, but Nineteen Eighty-Four is not a reliable guide to contemporary politics</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/221303/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jane Goodall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Russell Blackford’s How We Became Post-Liberal purports to offer a detached, historical account of why liberalism is in trouble.Jane Goodall, Emeritus Professor, Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2228042024-03-18T19:21:49Z2024-03-18T19:21:49Z‘I wanted to stop … but I also wanted to pull’. 1 in 50 people have trichotillomania – a new memoir unpacks compulsive hair-pulling<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581450/original/file-20240312-22-juqvok.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3994%2C3982&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Conversation/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Towards the end of Adele Dumont’s affecting memoir <a href="https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/the-pulling-9781922585912">The Pulling</a>, she thanks the reader, her “stranger”, for the opportunity to unburden herself of her compulsion of 17 years (and since the age of 17): to pull out strands of her hair, regularly and frequently. As a result, a large section of her scalp would eventually lay bare, yet cleverly concealed from others. </p>
<p>Hair-pulling, or <a href="https://theconversation.com/pulling-out-your-hair-in-frustration-what-you-need-to-know-about-trichotillomania-45228">trichotillomania</a>, does not come up much in public conversation. While terms such as ADHD, OCD or PTSD have almost passed into common parlance, hair-pulling is not well known, despite, as the author claims, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9063575/.">affecting 2% of the population</a> – an incidence greater than that of <a href="https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/schizophrenia">schizophrenia (0.32%)</a> or <a href="https://library.neura.edu.au/bipolar-disorder/epidemiology-bipolar-disorder/prevalence-epidemiology-bipolar-disorder/worldwide-4/index.html">bipolar disorder</a> (around 1% over a lifetime). </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/pulling-out-your-hair-in-frustration-what-you-need-to-know-about-trichotillomania-45228">Pulling out your hair in frustration? What you need to know about trichotillomania</a>
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<p>But the secrecy and shame that surrounds trichotillomania mean it is very much a hidden disorder, poorly understood by the general population. <em>Pull your hair out – why don’t you just stop?</em> </p>
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<p><em>Review: The Pulling – Adele Dumont (Scribe)</em></p>
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<p>Dumont’s memoir is structured around themes (“inside an episode”, “shame”, “other people”) and starts with an account of her childhood and family upbringing. The quality of the writing and the tender voice quickly drew me into the mystery of this baffling disorder. </p>
<p>Reading it, I was alert for evidence of trauma or abuse, anything that might explain Dumont’s “eventual unravelling”. There are very few clues from childhood. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581470/original/file-20240313-18-g2eevp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581470/original/file-20240313-18-g2eevp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581470/original/file-20240313-18-g2eevp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581470/original/file-20240313-18-g2eevp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581470/original/file-20240313-18-g2eevp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581470/original/file-20240313-18-g2eevp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581470/original/file-20240313-18-g2eevp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581470/original/file-20240313-18-g2eevp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Adele Dumont’s affecting memoir investigates her trichotillomania, or compulsive hair-pulling.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Scribe</span></span>
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<h2>Sensing something amiss</h2>
<p>Her parents met while fruit-picking in far-north Queensland; her father was a backpacker from France. Together they spent 15 years moving between orchards and later, with their two daughters, from farm to farm across rural Australia. The family lived in tents and later a caravan, and the young Adele remembers a solitary childhood: lived in nature, but never far from her parents. </p>
<p>The family moved to the outskirts of Sydney for the girls to attend school. In the holidays or on weekends, the young Adele remembers her father lifting her gently from sleep to her bed in the Kombi, waking up in orchards. </p>
<p>Her parents stayed together, despite some “unease in the marriage”. She adored her self-taught French bookworm father, his devotion to her and younger sister (“E”), his capacity to accept others “as they were”. Dumont presents her mother as a psychologically complex character, a little scary. “Mama” was at pains to provide materially for her daughters, but not present in a way that enabled them to relax in their own home.</p>
<p>Mama was devoted to her daughters and they led a frugal (“elemental”) life where nothing was ever wasted. Dumont uses the example of her mother’s tendency to hoard, and her own tendency to hoard secrets, to explain her eventual writing of “this silence and all this story” — lest it be wasted. </p>
<p>Dumont writes of her mother’s “laughter without any happiness in it”. She can’t remember her mother “ever being calm”. Perhaps her mother’s family history might account for this: she had an alcoholic brother who died young and a father diagnosed with PTSD – Dumont recalls him as “emotionally detached and damaged”. </p>
<p>The watchful young Adele falls into a pattern of reasoning that is common to hyperaware and highly empathic children who sense something amiss in the people they love. She feels responsible for, in this case, her mother’s suffering. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/can-reading-help-heal-us-and-process-our-emotions-or-is-that-just-a-story-we-tell-ourselves-197789">Can reading help heal us and process our emotions – or is that just a story we tell ourselves?</a>
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<h2>Compensating by being ‘exceptional’</h2>
<p>One possible clue to the origins of the hair-pulling habit is that the young Adele resented comparison with her mother (her thick hair or full cheeks, for example) but loved being noticed for being “just like Papa” for her habit of playing with her hair while reading. This innocuous-seeming gesture was, in Dumont’s words “a convenient cover for what I was really doing”. </p>
<p>Another clue is Dumont’s tendency towards perfectionism and savage self-criticism. Like so many young women who, sadly, are not comfortable about their appearance, Dumont developed “good girl” behaviours and excelled at school, writing and languages. (“To compensate for this ugliness I needed to be exceptional – exceptionally good, exceptionally polite, exceptionally kind.”) She became a teacher of English and taught asylum-seekers in detention, the subject of her first book. </p>
<p>Dumont claims her secret was too “nebulous” to even attempt putting into words. But she manages to powerfully and elegantly deconstruct the experience of a hair-pulling episode, at the same time cautioning her reader (“you”) that this might be painful to bear. </p>
<p>She describes the urge to go to the place “where only [she] could go”, the desire to pull, the trance-like state it engendered. In her transportation, she finds something “unknowable”, a kind of clarity and “grace”: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Rather than different thoughts all jostling for attention, I am able to discern one strand of thought, which reveals itself as cleanly as a fishbone lifted from its surrounding flesh. This strand of thought distinguishes itself not only in its purity but in its fluidity; roaming and cartwheeling and leaping like a creature released.</p>
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<p>Dumont manages very effectively to evoke the full, sensory, “surreal” experience of hair-pulling for her. As a reader, I felt I could enter her world and (almost) comprehend the payoffs of the behaviour. I understood these as something to do with being in flow and claiming an intimate, secret space of oneness with self. There is some enlightenment, yet enough mystery to keep reading. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/pulling-out-your-hair-in-frustration-what-you-need-to-know-about-trichotillomania-45228">Pulling out your hair in frustration? What you need to know about trichotillomania</a>
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<h2>Defining compulsions</h2>
<p>There are no simple answers to the problem of trichotillomania: “I wanted to stop pulling, but I also wanted to pull. And one of these desires was always stronger than the other.”</p>
<p>The ambivalence Dumont reveals about her hair-pulling is also reflected in the “irreconcilable” chasm she feels between herself and others, and between her known self and the self revealed to others. It also explains her resistance to therapy. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581237/original/file-20240312-22-3mx1s3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581237/original/file-20240312-22-3mx1s3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581237/original/file-20240312-22-3mx1s3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581237/original/file-20240312-22-3mx1s3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581237/original/file-20240312-22-3mx1s3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581237/original/file-20240312-22-3mx1s3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1173&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581237/original/file-20240312-22-3mx1s3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1173&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581237/original/file-20240312-22-3mx1s3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1173&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>It took Dumont 11 years to seek professional help for a disorder that started as a harmless habit and morphed into a significant compulsion that threatened relationships, work, quality of life and her future. Such resistance might resonate with anyone trying to dispense of an unwelcome habit. </p>
<p>There is the sense of not wanting to let go of something that is in some way defining, as Dumont puts it: “Nobody – no professor or psychiatrist – has the power to eradicate my compulsions. They are mine to keep.” </p>
<p>There is also, fortunately for the reader empathising strongly with Dumont’s conflict and pain, a healthy dose of self-dignity at stake (no doubt also familiar to hesitant help-seekers). “Asking someone for help was a form of cheating.”</p>
<p>But the biggest reason for resisting help or even disclosing the habit to those close to her – not even her parents or sister knew – was shame. Shame and being “ashamed at [her] own shame” drew her into a defensive cycle of approaching/resisting help and disclosure. The tension and effort of having to keep the habit secret for fear of being discovered took a toll Dumont admits is “so high it can shape one’s destiny”. </p>
<p>Dumont’s silent plea for the psychologist to whom she would eventually confide could also be “you” – her reader, her stranger. She writes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I need her to be tender and patient and sensitive but not to pity me. Professional but not clinical. I need her to understand the gravity of my situation, but not to try to amend it. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is a plea for acceptance and a strong aversion to glib solutions. </p>
<p>There is a sharply intellectual quality to this memoir, written by a deeply reflective young woman. By the last page of the memoir, I felt I was indeed Dumont’s intended reader, her stranger, her “you”. I returned her appreciation, grateful for the opportunity to walk a little in her shoes, painful though it was at times – and for her honesty, courage and intimacy. </p>
<p>Dumont’s testimony is written with perceptive insight, both into herself and those around her. She is a gifted and compassionate linguist and writer. </p>
<p>Despite the very specific nature of the subject, the memoir speaks to a broad readership: to anyone who has felt the isolation of difference, whether “being” different or simply feeling it. Hers is at once a brave appeal to readers for understanding and acceptance, and a brave read.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222804/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jane Turner Goldsmith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Adele Dumont’s affecting memoir, The Pulling, draws the reader into the secrecy, shame and impulses behind trichotilllomania, or compulsive hair-pulling.Jane Turner Goldsmith, PhD candidate, Creative Writing, University of AdelaideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2254582024-03-18T02:48:35Z2024-03-18T02:48:35ZVanity, money and ‘angry masculine impastos’: Liam Pieper’s Appreciation is a mordant tale of a tragically flawed artist<p>A nuanced exploration of the value and personal cost of art-making runs through Melbourne writer Liam Pieper’s jaunty new satirical novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/198119002-appreciation">Appreciation</a>.</p>
<p>Set in the near present, the novel is about Oli – a gay painter from the country who has learned to capitalise on this fact in public appearances – while also reflecting on “toxic masculinity” in a vague, rote-learned way. Oli paints over-sized, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Basquiat">Basquiat</a>-inspired paintings, with “angry masculine impastos” and “rough impressionist wheatfields”. They have names in an Aussie battler idiom: “Daffo”, or “Thresher”.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Appreciation – Liam Pieper (Penguin)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>In the outer orbit of Oli’s universe lurks a flock of art “appreciators”. They are portrayed by Pieper as more interested in the long-term appreciating value of the works they’re bidding on than their artistic merits.</p>
<p>The struggle for artistic survival is the main conundrum at the heart of this mordant romp. Artists compete for a modest elite of buyers who in turn, despite their tastes (or lack of them), hold the keys to the wealth and enduring relevance of a select few (Oli being one of them).</p>
<p>Appreciation is Pieper’s fourth novel, (he has also <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/12/liam-pieper-celebrity-ghost-writer-author-bestselling-book">ghostwritten bestsellers</a>). His first, The Toymaker, a work of historical fiction, won the <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-toymaker-9780143784623">Christina Stead fiction award</a>. His third, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/52016160">Sweetness and Light</a>, deals with similar themes to Appreciation, including drug abuse, relationship breakdown, and an examinination of how larger systemic forces underpin personal relationships and the myths we make about ourselves.</p>
<h2>Meeting the artist</h2>
<p>Appreciation opens with a postmodern meta-reflection on the nature of story, before introducing our hero.</p>
<p>Oli has “just enough distinct elements to him”. He is in his early 40s. He drives a Toyota Hilux. He is a little too cavalier about his health, his life, and those around him. He has an incredible tolerance to recreational drugs and alcohol. Despite his recklessness, Oli is good-looking enough that nobody “has ever told him that the story of how he got his tattoo is not interesting”.</p>
<p>As Pieper writes, Oli</p>
<blockquote>
<p>has a way of shuffling into the room like a very old dog, turning his attention on you, and in doing so lighting up your day.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet Oli is painfully conceited. At the start of the novel, he gazes at himself in the mirror, in a scene evoking the Baroque painter Caravaggio’s Narcissus. Like the painting, in which Narcissus is entranced by his own reflection, the novel continues in this self-regarding loop, with Oli embarking on a journey of scrutinising his own image.</p>
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<p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/who-was-narcissus-216353">Who was Narcissus?</a>
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<p>Oli quickly trades his reflection in the mirror for perusing his social media platforms. As he scrolls, he harvests jolts of validation from followers who’ve deluded him into thinking “somewhere out there, he is loved”.</p>
<p>Several pages later, we discover how deep-seated Oli’s insecurities are when – despite his success, wealth and endless baggies (of cocaine) – he confesses his favourite sensation is being watched. Oli has no shortage of unlikable or even ugly qualities. Still, he does not eclipse the unlikability of Ottessa Moshfegh’s unnamed protagonist in My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), a young woman who tries to chemically sleep for a year.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/my-year-of-rest-and-relaxation-sad-girl-fetishism-or-cuttingly-funny-feminist-satire-188471">My Year of Rest and Relaxation: 'sad-girl' fetishism or 'cuttingly funny' feminist satire?</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<p>There is something to be said for Pieper’s exploration, in this novel, of the value of ugliness in contemporary art and its ability to challenge our existing conceptions of what we consider “good”. However, throughout the work, mentions of Oli’s art and art-making emerge as afterthoughts. This echoes the sense that his rise to fame has been less about his paintings, and more about personal brand-building.</p>
<p>Oli has forfeited so much – and received so much – for his artistic success he can no longer comprehend the true shape of what’s on the easel, or in the mirror before him.</p>
<h2>Irony</h2>
<p>Oli’s world is populated by two kinds of characters. There are those who are profiting off his success and working for him, such as his agent, Anton. And there are those who are trying to profit off his work through “appreciation”, such as buyers or The Paperman: a critic and arts editor of an influential broadsheet newspaper.</p>
<p>Anton, an old drug-dealer-cum-friend, plays a somewhat paternal role in Oli’s life, overseeing nearly all aspects of his livelihood. It is Anton who arranges Oli’s television appearance on a program “beloved by a left-leaning audience for its soothing politics”, which ultimately leads to his downfall.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581545/original/file-20240313-26-a337ji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The cover of Appreciation" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581545/original/file-20240313-26-a337ji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581545/original/file-20240313-26-a337ji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581545/original/file-20240313-26-a337ji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581545/original/file-20240313-26-a337ji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581545/original/file-20240313-26-a337ji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581545/original/file-20240313-26-a337ji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581545/original/file-20240313-26-a337ji.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodreads</span></span>
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<p>As Anton coolly reminds Oli before he gets up on stage under the influence, “too many wealthy and powerful people have invested in Oli over the years, and too deeply, to let him fuck it up now”. However, by this point in the narrative the odds are higher than even Oli himself.</p>
<p>Critic Northrop Frye, in his influential work <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/318116.Anatomy_of_Criticism?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Z9hRT5eyrB&rank=1">Anatomy of Criticism</a> (1957), defines satire as “militant irony”. Appreciation is peppered with this irony. Giving a speech at the opening night of a rising artist’s first solo exhibition, Oli unabashedly forgets the artist’s name mid-speech. Later, he circumnavigates the after-party searching for the richest guest to schmooze with, whom he ultimately despises for their wealth.</p>
<p>The resounding absurdity in Appreciation is Oli’s painful lack of self-knowledge and awareness (along with the insalubrious behaviours that sustain his art-making). In turn, Oli’s inability to see people for who they are beyond how they can help him reduces the characters in his world to mere outlines. This way of looking at and perceiving others is filtered through the narration. The art collectors are rendered as all parody, and lack any of the idiosyncrasies that give characters true depth and animation.</p>
<p>In Oli’s head, he has assigned the collectors names like “Baron”, who is scornfully described as a “third generation squatter who had inherited enormous wealth and, with it, limitless reserves of white guilt”. </p>
<p>No character – whether it be artist, critic, buyer, those in favour of identity politics or against – is spared from the sharp strikes of Pieper’s sardonic humour.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/were-laughing-in-an-echo-chamber-its-time-to-rethink-satire-95867">We're laughing in an echo chamber: it's time to rethink satire</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<h2>Oli’s tragic flaw</h2>
<p>On a live television panel “broadly themed around an ongoing national identity crisis”, Oli is confronted with what <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13270.Poetics">Aristotle describes</a> as <em>hamartia</em> — a tragic character flaw that leads to their own undoing.</p>
<p>When pressed by an audience member as to whether his work is perpetuating the toxic masculinity he claims it tries to subvert, Oli is exposed as a woke-fraud. Then, after a clumsy tirade by Oli, the same audience member poses the possibility that he might, in fact, not be a very good artist.</p>
<p>After the burn of public humiliation, a disgruntled Anton explains to Oli that the only path towards salvaging his tainted image is to perform the demoralising task of writing a memoir – and, of course, going on a tour to regional schools.</p>
<p>Despite the gags and Oli’s overwhelming unlikability, his journey to try to rectify his self-destruction results in a great digging into his psyche and past. As Oli reconstructs windows of early adolescence with the help of a ghost-writer, a deep tenderness is stumbled upon. </p>
<p>As these past episodes are recounted, a meditation on the early formation of Oli’s artistic identity develops. A new type of character, Rio, also enters the story. Rio is different from those who dominate Oli’s emotionally numb, transactional present. He is wholly unique and effectively drawn – a hum of the real reverberating through the novel and bringing with it emotional subtlety.</p>
<p>However, as Frye reminds us, in satire the “sardonic vision is the seamy side of the tragic vision” where the “sublime and the ridiculous” are “convex and concave of the same dark lens”. As with Appreciation, in the echo of laughter are shards of truth and tragedy: what has been lost, exploited or given up in the pursuit of an uncompromising vision.</p>
<p>Appreciation is a literary page turner with no shortage of dramatic flair. The wry and incisive narration is reminiscent of the theatrical work of Oscar Wilde.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/225458/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Georgia Phillips does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The novel Appreciation is a literary page-turner with no shortage of dramatic flair.Georgia Phillips, Lecturer, Creative Writing, University of AdelaideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2236462024-03-14T03:55:30Z2024-03-14T03:55:30ZWhy is the male body the scientific default when the female body drives the reproductive success of our species?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581526/original/file-20240313-20-9ueone.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=6%2C0%2C2038%2C1536&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Eve – Lucas Cranach the Elder (c.1510)</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cranach_Adam_and_Eve_(detail)_3.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>American essayist Cat Bohannon loves a bit of pop culture to contextualise her ideas. <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/eve-9781529151244">Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution</a> – her ambitious, funny, intelligent history of female evolution – is threaded with it. </p>
<p>The book opens with a futuristic scene from <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1446714/">Prometheus</a>, the 2012 prequel to <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078748/">Alien</a>. Archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw is in an AI surgery pod, seeking a life-saving caesarean (she has been impregnated with an alien squid) when an affectless voice gives her an error message: “This medpod is calibrated for male patients only.” </p>
<p>Crash-test dummies, heart-attack symptoms, anti-depressant dosages, air-conditioning systems in large office buildings: we are all pretty aware by now that these are “calibrated for male bodies only”. Alien Prometheus is set in 2093; one can only hope the scientific technology of the late 21st-century turns out to have, at least, a “female-registering” option.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution – Cat Bohannon (Hutchinson Heinemann)</em> </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581482/original/file-20240313-30-i0czkw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581482/original/file-20240313-30-i0czkw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581482/original/file-20240313-30-i0czkw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581482/original/file-20240313-30-i0czkw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581482/original/file-20240313-30-i0czkw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581482/original/file-20240313-30-i0czkw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581482/original/file-20240313-30-i0czkw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581482/original/file-20240313-30-i0czkw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>While women’s hormonal cycles have made us messy in the arena of “clean science” – not good controls, not good at being controlled for – Bohannon reminds us that an understanding of the female body cannot be retrofitted to an understanding of the male body. Women are not just men with extra fleshy bits and confounding hormones. </p>
<p>Bohannon also reminds us those “fleshy bits” have a function beyond providing a curvaceous silhouette. </p>
<p>Female adipose tissue, 600 million years old, stored around our butts and thighs, is necessary to the development of babies’ brains. It is so necessary that girls begin storing it in childhood and when women liposuction it out of their lower bodies it returns in unexpected places: the armpits, for example. Bohannon points out that the possible repercussions of liposuction on the brain health of future offspring has not yet been studied.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/women-have-heart-attacks-too-but-their-symptoms-are-often-dismissed-as-something-else-76083">Women have heart attacks too, but their symptoms are often dismissed as something else</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Reproductive success</h2>
<p>The salient question here is: why is the male body the scientific default when it is the female body that crucially drives the evolution and reproductive success of our species? Eve is both a rectification of this immense blind spot and, in Bohannon’s own words, “a user’s manual for the female mammal”. </p>
<p>Yet how to collapse 200 million years of evolutionary history into 500 pages (let alone 1500 words)? </p>
<p>Bohannon does this by organising her book into a series of “Eves” from whom we inherited our current biological functions, creating an often diverging, often interlocking chronology. There is the Eve of milk, “the real Madonna”; placental Eve, “an HR Giger fever-dream meat factory” (Bohannon has fun with language); Donna, Eve of the uterus; and Pergi, the tree-dwelling Eve of perception. </p>
<p>This structure allows Bohannon to move from microbiology to paleoanthropology, evolutionary biology to gynaecology, anatomy to social history. I learnt much about my own body in her sprawling, illuminating discussions, but also about animal reproductive biology in general — from monotremal cloacas (platypuses and echidnas have them) to squamation hemipenises (snakes and lizards) and “notoriously foldy” anti-rape duck vaginas designed to circumvent corkscrew penises. </p>
<p>It was some small relief to learn the fairly straightforward design of the human penis is testament to a “not-particularly rapey” human evolutionary history. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581824/original/file-20240314-18-pjj64q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581824/original/file-20240314-18-pjj64q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581824/original/file-20240314-18-pjj64q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581824/original/file-20240314-18-pjj64q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581824/original/file-20240314-18-pjj64q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581824/original/file-20240314-18-pjj64q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581824/original/file-20240314-18-pjj64q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581824/original/file-20240314-18-pjj64q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">‘Notoriously foldy.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Detailed_white_duck.jpg">Image: Roger Heslop, via Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>Bohannon writes with tender care of her “Eves”. She manages to both penetrate and animate deep time for the reader, a textual equivalent perhaps of Walking with Dinosaurs. She describes the Jurassic insect-eater <a href="https://museum.wales/blog/1895/Meet-Morgie/">Morgie</a> (my favourite), one of the earliest known mammals, skittering over the feet of dinosaurs to get home to her burrow, where she sweats milk through mammary patches to feed her hidden brood. Morgie comes vividly alive in her small precarious existence: “funny, warm, heart-fluttering Eve”, Bohannon writes. </p>
<p>For a female with a uterus, who has twice given birth and twice breastfed, Bohannon’s book demystified many of the mysterious goings-on of my reproductive system. I had no idea, for instance, that lactation was such an intensive co-production between mother and baby. </p>
<p>I knew it enabled a baby’s gut to be colonised with good maternal bacteria, and I knew the basic mechanics of the let-down reflex. But I didn’t know that the composition of the milk itself is informed by a baby’s needs. These needs, codified in a baby’s saliva, are registered by the mother’s body, which then customises its milk accordingly, so it is full of the particular bacteria- or virus-fighting agents required.</p>
<p>This recriprocity is also apparent in the biological wonder that is the placenta. Built out of both endometrial and embryonic tissue, the placenta is “one of the only organs in the animal world made out of two separate organisms”. </p>
<p>Did you know this? I certainly didn’t. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581827/original/file-20240314-30-yukxv4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581827/original/file-20240314-30-yukxv4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581827/original/file-20240314-30-yukxv4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581827/original/file-20240314-30-yukxv4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581827/original/file-20240314-30-yukxv4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581827/original/file-20240314-30-yukxv4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=369&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581827/original/file-20240314-30-yukxv4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=369&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581827/original/file-20240314-30-yukxv4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=369&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Morgie’ – Morganucodon, one of the earliest known mammals.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Morganucodon.jpg">FunkMonk (Michael B.H.), via Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-raunchy-new-big-history-tells-the-story-of-sex-but-raises-some-unanswered-questions-213538">A raunchy new 'Big History' tells the story of sex, but raises some unanswered questions</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Life: a user’s manual</h2>
<p>In this sense, Eve really is a user’s manual. At the risk of sounding “miracle of life” about it, Bohannon’s book puts wonder into the commonplace by explaining not only how our reproductive systems work, but how they came to be.</p>
<p>Women’s bodies are not just about babies, of course. Bohannon charts new political territory, tracing her anatomical discoveries through to their social outcomes. Truisms of human and social evolution are turned on their heads and gynaecology gets its rightful place in the story. </p>
<p>Milk again: the population growth that enabled humans to become the ferocious planet-hogs we are today might be down to the humble wet-nurse of ancient civilisations. The prevalence of wet-nursing meant the natural contraceptive properties of breastfeeding were not in play for many women. This meant women had much shorter spaces between pregnancies and had more babies. Wet-nurses, those under-sung footnotes in history, might well have catalysed the growth of modern cities.</p>
<p>Bipedalism? It might just be that we stood up on two feet not so we could better carry spears, but so we had free arms to carry babies while hunting and still cart as much food home with us as possible.</p>
<p>Tool-making? The seminal moment here may not have been a Kubrick-style raising of a femur bone to crunch down on a challenger’s head, or beat an animal to death for dinner (fossil remains show we really didn’t eat a particularly intensive paleo diet). Instead, it might have been a woman, baby on back, chewing a sapling to a neat point to hunt “<a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/facts/bushbabies">bush-babies</a>” asleep in tree hollows. </p>
<p>Bohannon makes a good argument that it was women, not men, who most needed tools to hunt. Our biologically stronger male counterparts often needed only the heft of their bodies to bring down an animal. Women were inventors, she says, because, being smaller, being weaker, they had more need.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581555/original/file-20240313-18-z1f8bf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581555/original/file-20240313-18-z1f8bf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581555/original/file-20240313-18-z1f8bf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581555/original/file-20240313-18-z1f8bf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581555/original/file-20240313-18-z1f8bf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581555/original/file-20240313-18-z1f8bf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581555/original/file-20240313-18-z1f8bf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581555/original/file-20240313-18-z1f8bf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cave painting depicting a woman giving birth, Serra da Capivara national park, Brazil.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Serra_da_Capivara_-_Painting_8.JPG">Vitor 1234, via Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-matrilineal-societies-exist-around-the-world-its-time-to-look-beyond-the-patriarchy-200825">Friday essay: matrilineal societies exist around the world – it's time to look beyond the patriarchy</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Womb triumphalism</h2>
<p>Our most important invention, though – and this is the overarching thesis of Bohannan’s book – is gynaecology. “What got us here,” she writes, “is not tool triumphalism but womb triumphalism.” </p>
<p>Considering how hard it is for the human female body to get pregnant, stay pregnant, deliver a baby (without us or it dying), and then look after it through its protracted childhood, it is a miracle that humans populate – and over-populate — the planet in the way we have come to. Gynaecology, Bohannon writes, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>is absolutely essential for our species’ evolutionary fitness. Without it, it’s doubtful we would have made it this far […] The arrival of midwifery is one of those moments when we can truly say, “Here is when we become human” […] No other mammals on the planet have been observed regularly helping one another give birth.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>With gynaecology comes contraception, reproductive choice and birth-spacing. Knowledge about the properties of herbs and plants, about labour, about delivering a breech or posterior baby, or really <em>any</em> baby (they are all life and death situations) – all of these combine to enable the flourishing of humans, in spite of our large heads, narrow pelvises, complex gestation and birthing trajectories. </p>
<p>“Women had their hands on the actual machinery of evolution,” Bohannon writes. And while she notes that “[m]odern female coalitions are scattered, vulnerable, brittle”, her book celebrates the ancient collaboration between women and the spirit of cooperation over competition that got us here. </p>
<p>Bohannon repositions this as profound in its significance for the human race. A failure to fully apprehend the different workings of male and female bodies and not provide for these differences – or to provide comprehensively for one sex, and neglect the other – doesn’t just mean there will be no caesarean option in a future surgery-pod. </p>
<p>It means limiting human possibility and opportunity. It represents a failure to grasp the whole human story and its potential.</p>
<p>Bohannon ends her book with a practical feminist statement about the importance – and boon to society – of educating women, feeding them properly (not last), and putting financial means in their hands. </p>
<p>Smart humans of the future – who might want to flourish without destroying the means of their flourishing – will require women with adipose fat to feed the brains of their suckling babies, with reproductive choices to plan and space those babies, and with life choices which enable them to contribute their full potential to the world. </p>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/223646/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Edwina Preston has received funding from Creative Victoria and the Australia Council for the Arts. She works for the Australian Education Union</span></em></p>The story of human evolution is inextricable from the story of gynaecology.Edwina Preston, PhD Candidate, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2227512024-03-13T22:28:39Z2024-03-13T22:28:39ZHow do you write a ‘Vietnamese’ poem? Nam Le’s defiantly cerebral verses shuffle the deck of identity, belonging and being<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581500/original/file-20240313-28-dismmx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C10%2C2293%2C2341&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nam Le.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Simon & Schuster</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Flying in the face of much contemporary poetry, Nam Le’s first collection <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/36-Ways-of-Writing-a-Vietnamese-Poem/Nam-Le/9781761423369">36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem</a> is defiantly cerebral, relishing the polysyllabic, the latinate and the esoteric. This is not to say that there aren’t notes of utter beauty and great feeling, just that Le is not afraid of being difficult. The difficulty is part of the collection’s aesthetic. </p>
<p>In an interview, Le said that he dreamed his work could sustain a “cold read” as easily as an “academic assault”. These are severe yardsticks for a poet to write by, so it is little wonder that his poems are exacting, sometimes peremptory in tone. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: 36 Ways to Write a Vietnamese Poem – Nam Le (Simon & Schuster)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Underlying even the most comic or lyrical of moments in the book is a seriousness and a woundedness that tips into anger and sorrow. Because the poetry is meticulous and skilled – the work of a poet who has lived with poetry for the longest time – the anger, the woundedness and the sorrow are directed and purposeful, not confessional, not easily sincere or authentic.</p>
<p>With poem titles including [16. Violence: Autologous], [18. Inter-Analectional] and [30. Asymptotic], there is no quick or easy reading. The square brackets suggest domains outside of poetry – linguistics, coding, mathematics – but brackets also embed a phrase or idea more deeply within a sentence or an already parenthetical idea. </p>
<p>The effect is of a <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100201557">mise en abyme</a> – an infinite regression – that resists the impulse to classify and order. The bracketed and numbered titles make the process of referencing a poem from the collection, whether in a review or elsewhere, more laborious and exacting. This is a kind of play – serious play, but play nonetheless. </p>
<p>That each title is adjectival is a reminder that each poem refers outwards. It is not an end, but a “way” to a larger poem – perhaps but not necessarily the elusive, impossible Vietnamese poem of the title.</p>
<h2>Imagination, emotion, intellect</h2>
<p>Nam Le has won prestigious and lucrative prizes. He studied at Harvard, where he was fiction editor of the Harvard Review, and has published <a href="https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/david-malouf">a book on David Malouf</a> as part of Black Inc.’s “writers on writers” series. </p>
<p>But he is best known as the author of <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-boat-9780143009610">The Boat</a>, a collection of short stories that includes the award-winning eponymous story about Mai, a young girl who is smuggled out of Vietnam. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580028/original/file-20240305-24-1thewk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580028/original/file-20240305-24-1thewk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580028/original/file-20240305-24-1thewk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580028/original/file-20240305-24-1thewk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580028/original/file-20240305-24-1thewk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580028/original/file-20240305-24-1thewk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580028/original/file-20240305-24-1thewk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580028/original/file-20240305-24-1thewk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>The story was written beautifully and viscerally enough to find itself on reading lists of universities and schools, nationally and overseas. In its scope and language, The Boat drew something mythic from the short story form. Perhaps this had something to do with Le’s disregard for length – at 40 pages, it’s a long short story – or perhaps it was because his driving narrative prose dipped into the rhythms and imagery of poetry. </p>
<p>The Boat was a story that captured the imagination, harnessing the historical and the political, but ultimately rendering these realities secondary to the work that art does. If transcendence is too vexed a term, then Le’s story might be said to transform the reader, at least temporarily, into a being concerned with existence, with the business of being human in a fallen world. </p>
<p>In pitting the frail singularity of a child against the forces of war and border politics, The Boat appeals to the emotions. 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, with its insistence on the constructedness and the materiality of language – both as sound and writing – appeals to the intellect. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/andre-daos-brilliant-debut-novel-explores-his-grandfathers-ten-year-detention-without-trial-by-the-vietnamese-government-201570">André Dao's brilliant debut novel explores his grandfather's ten-year detention without trial by the Vietnamese government</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Ways and means</h2>
<p>To ask whether this book is a collection of poems or a single long “Vietnamese” poem is to step through the looking glass, where an entity called “You” looms large, and meanings and associations become slippery. </p>
<p>Read as a book-length poem, 36 Ways to Write a Vietnamese Poem has an almost overdetermined chronological structure. Narratively speaking, it starts at the beginning and ends at the end. </p>
<p>The first poem, [1. Diasporic], is too stylised to be read as straightforwardly autobiographical. But when Le posits it as the first “way” to write a Vietnamese poem, he plays on his origins and the “dynamic borderline” (as Jacques Derrida puts it in <a href="https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska-paperback/9780803265752/">The Ear of the Other</a>), between a writer’s life and their work. </p>
<p>The book ends with a 37th poem, implying that one poem in the collection does not constitute a “way”. [37. Post-racial/-glacial] is ecopoetic. It is an exercise in speculative futurism that imagines a post-racial world – something that may be the furthest thing now imaginable. The “glacier” is the addressee, but it is also an image, symbol and metaphor – of climate catastrophe, geological timeframes, and the “sediments” of page and self. </p>
<p>[1. Diasporic] opens with parody, a deep-throated burlesque: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>In English, mind You.<br>
You dink I writee Yiknamee?<br>
Shame on You.<br>
It was Your violence dumbed me.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The forceful use of deictic markers – the “you"s and "me"s and "here"s and "now"s – moves the reader about the poem as effectively as game controls. Second person is always a bit abrasive, but the capital letter makes "You” an affront to the reader, and deliberately so. </p>
<p>The parody of migrant English – “dink” – is cringeworthy, but it is also the perfect set-up for the wordplay that follows when Le breaks “displacement” up into “dis place ment”. The effect is poignant, the punning almost Beckettian (this place meant). The final line of the poem, the line that propels the reader on their “way” through the collection, is: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>What’s Vietnamese in me<br>
Could fit in a poem.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The simplicity of the statement has the beauty and affecting quality of the confessional. But to draw the easy parallel between the life of the poet and the line of the poem would be to miss the art. The effect of the stripped back eloquence is heightened by the movement away from the crass, parodic, cruel opening. </p>
<p>Le has almost written a manifesto for art in a post-truth world. Throughout the collection, he displays a passion for the truths that emerge from art, which is not the kind of truth that relies on the fidelity between a poet’s biography and their work. </p>
<p>Sincerity is challenged and reconstituted in [13. Eastern-epistemological] / (NINE WHITE MASTERS SITTING IN A TREE). In this poem, Ezra Pound and Seamus Heaney – white patriarchs of poetry – are targeted with “sitting in a tree” nursery-rhyme mockery. But by the end of the poem, Le does something else with Pound. Remembering Pound’s complicity with Mussolini, but also his support of the poetry of the Jewish-American <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/objectivist-poets">Objectivist poets</a>, such as <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/louis-zukofsky">Louis Zukofsky</a> (“Zukofsky about sincerity”), Le elevates the “word”. Pound ends up entangled in the complicated grammar of something beautiful: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>singing sunrise through an ideogram tree<br></p>
<p>Its shade lanced sunlight down to just the<br>
Spot where word’s made perfect, and the<br>
Word’s – the word is, that – the word<br>
Is “sincerity”.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is the opposite of polarising hate-discourses. Nuances, paradoxes and antinomies arise in and through the difficulty – from the need to apply intellect and learning. The complex deck of cards that produce identity, belonging and being is shuffled. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580024/original/file-20240305-22-op06ps.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580024/original/file-20240305-22-op06ps.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580024/original/file-20240305-22-op06ps.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580024/original/file-20240305-22-op06ps.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580024/original/file-20240305-22-op06ps.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580024/original/file-20240305-22-op06ps.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580024/original/file-20240305-22-op06ps.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580024/original/file-20240305-22-op06ps.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Many of the poems use avant garde techniques: fragments, quotations, collage, lists. There is the typographic play of footnotes, grey shading and the blacking out of lines. [26. Erasive] takes bureaucratic violence to task, semi-obliterating official reports, leaving only a trickle of letters to be pieced together in the tradition of Blackout Poetry.</p>
<p>Le is as concerned with visual appearance as with semantics. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that he is serious about the way form produces meaning, and is often complicit in political violence and oppression. </p>
<p>Lines are often dense – wordy mouthfuls where syntax is distorted, broken up or down. Words are chosen as much for their sound and percussive qualities as their meanings. This concern with materiality of language means that in the most turgid of lines, or lines where diction teeters towards bombast, even outright bathes in it, there is a reward in the sounds of “smashed-together consonants” and the “tonguing” required for articulation.</p>
<p>Reminiscent of the <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/language-poetry"><em>L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E</em> poets</a> and Mallarmé’s <a href="https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/MallarmeUnCoupdeDes.php"><em>Un Coup de Dés</em></a>, [31. Nautical] is the most experimental of Le’s poems. Typographic symbols are arranged down the page, organised around the capitalised and bolded word “<strong>ARCHIPELAGO</strong>”. The layout invites alternate thought-routes and encounters, presenting the poem as much as a visual artefact as a semantic packet. </p>
<p>It is important to note that not all of Le’s poems are difficult or highbrow. Idiomatic speech and profanity are important parts of his arsenal. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Mother country mother tongue<br>
motherfuckers on the run<br>
eat their words and white bread, son<br>
earn your white man’s tongue.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>These lines are from [19. Oral-metaphorical], where bathos and vulgarity abound. As Le riffs on the concepts of mouth and tongue, an alternative anatomy of speech emerges. The mouth is described not only as the apparatus of speech, ingestion and eroticism, but “the true / soul’s window”.</p>
<p>Lines and words of Vietnamese are sparingly and strategically placed throughout. They are integral to the experience of the book, as they redraw the boundaries and territories of English with forms and words and concepts that make the language strange and new to itself. </p>
<p>Le takes English to task as a language of empire and capitalism. He challenges its grammar, its generative racism and inherited prejudices. Latin, untranslated, is as present as Vietnamese – even more so. It serves as a reminder of how idiotic it is to think in terms of purity of language, and who speaks what.</p>
<p>This is especially the case in [15. Dire-critical], where English’s lack of tonal variation is foregrounded as poverty. Diacritics signalling the rise and fall of voice are essential to Vietnamese (and so many languages). They are figured here as both endangered and precious. </p>
<p>In a superb final stanza, a Vietnamese body burned by napalm compounds pregnant grief and intergenerational trauma into a single, loaded, “future-tensed … dot”.</p>
<p>In [5. Violence: Taxonomic], racist taxonomies and translations are formally flipped. The first half of poem runs through the Latin of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_nomenclature">Linnaeas’s binomial system</a>, ending strategically with the infamous “<em>varietas</em>” of humans classified by colour of skin. </p>
<p>The second part of the poem hinges on the motto “<em>Nosce te ipsum</em>” – “know yourself”. Every skin colour Linnaeus identifies is fed back to him, as though he were the specimen, from his “yellowish” sallowness to blood irrigated by “black bile”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-case-for-david-maloufs-an-imaginary-life-28201">The case for David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Difficulty and artistic sovereignty</h2>
<p>Part of the point of making poems difficult is that they don’t talk to everyone. The difficulty resists a populism that devalues expertise. At at time when people seem increasingly unable to read in any way other than literally, satire and irony are also risky. 36 Ways to Write a Vietnamese Poem shows that Le is not risk-adverse.</p>
<p>Difficulty slows the reading down. It makes the reader either accept a partial understanding or inspires them to work harder to decode and understand. It resists simple causal readings – the kind of readings that would see an event in the writer’s life as the explanation for an event in a poem or a book.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581445/original/file-20240312-16-jbe3pm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581445/original/file-20240312-16-jbe3pm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581445/original/file-20240312-16-jbe3pm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=959&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581445/original/file-20240312-16-jbe3pm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=959&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581445/original/file-20240312-16-jbe3pm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=959&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581445/original/file-20240312-16-jbe3pm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1205&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581445/original/file-20240312-16-jbe3pm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1205&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581445/original/file-20240312-16-jbe3pm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1205&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Artistic sovereignty is something Le admires in the work of David Malouf. In an essay in Granta titled <a href="https://granta.com/a-great-lake/">A Great Lake</a>, he argues that Malouf’s writing has refused to follow a particular trajectory. It has not followed the trajectory of Malouf’s life, nor has it stuck to a few recognisably “Maloufian” themes or topics. Cutting his own artistic path, irrespective of market demands or literary trends or publishing expectations, Malouf “seems to have preserved – with natural lightness of touch – this personal, artistic sovereignty for himself”. </p>
<p>Sovereignty comes with the power to name, to call the shots – to decide what is war, what is terrorism, who is beautiful, who isn’t, who speaks, who doesn’t, who belongs, what matters, whose stories dominate.</p>
<p>The moments in 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem that appear unguarded are few, but they are also sovereign. Like the small knapsack of cut diamonds in the collection’s 32nd poem, they are unexpected, worked for – and the work matters – and designed to give old ways new currency.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222751/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Hamadache does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>To ask whether 36 Ways to Write a Vietnamese Poem is a collection of poems or a single long poem is to step through the looking glass.Michelle Hamadache, Lecturer, Literature and Creative Writing, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2231992024-03-12T19:14:35Z2024-03-12T19:14:35ZFire represents power and control for an Indigneous teenager who lacks both, in Melanie Saward’s compassionate debut novel<p>“From the moment I got here, I’ve wanted to set the whole of Brisbane on fire,” reflects Andrew, the protagonist of Melanie Saward’s debut novel.</p>
<p>Saward, a Bigambul and Wakka Wakka author, moved to Bracken Ridge in the northern suburbs of Brisbane as a teenager, after growing up in Tasmania. So does Andrew, who like her, is Indigenous.</p>
<p>When we meet him, he is in Year 10 and has recently moved to Bracken Ridge with his mother, Linda, and her boyfriend, Dave. Neither of them show Andrew much love or care and he is saving to return to Tasmania to find his father, who he is no longer in contact with. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Burn – Melanie Saward (Affirm Press)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>In alternating chapters, Saward fills in the back story. After eight-year-old Andrew lit a fire in his primary school’s bathroom, his father pulled him out of school and they all moved from social housing in an impoverished suburb of Launceston to a caravan in Port Sorell on the north-east coast of Tasmania. </p>
<p>The novel is structured around three main fires. The first is the one Andrew lights at his primary school. Then a fire lands Andrew and his closest friend Sarah, an adopted Indigenous girl being raised by religious parents, in the youth justice system. Threaded through the book, there’s the drama of a third, serious fire in Queensland, in which Andrew is implicated. </p>
<p>Fire is symbolic: it’s power and control for Andrew, who has precious little control over his life.</p>
<h2>Reading as ‘invited guests’</h2>
<p>In her chapter “Presencing” in <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-the-australian-novel/4AE03434E69DB67466E58C9AD5CDCADD">The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel</a>, Wiradjuri writer and scholar <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/authors/jeanine-leane">Jeanine Leane</a> urges settlers to approach Indigenous texts not as “tourists” but “invited guests”. Writes Leane: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Presencing means the recognition that First Nations works are happening in the same ‘now’ as the settler reader. The writer and the reader are in the same moment in time, but this moment in time is interpreted from different cultural standpoints and perspectives. </p>
</blockquote>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579103/original/file-20240301-17-qbt90m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=38%2C83%2C1559%2C977&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579103/original/file-20240301-17-qbt90m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=38%2C83%2C1559%2C977&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579103/original/file-20240301-17-qbt90m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579103/original/file-20240301-17-qbt90m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579103/original/file-20240301-17-qbt90m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579103/original/file-20240301-17-qbt90m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579103/original/file-20240301-17-qbt90m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579103/original/file-20240301-17-qbt90m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Melanie Saward’s debut novel is set in the Brisbane suburbs she moved to as a teenager. Jill Kerswill.</span>
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<p>I also had a Tasmanian adolescence. While my own experience was very different, I recognise the way poverty and deprivation press up against natural beauty in Saward’s novel. </p>
<p>As an adult living in Melbourne, I became gradually aware of the <a href="https://www.griffithreview.com/editions/tasmania-the-tipping-point/">economic gap between the mainland and Tasmania</a>. High levels of youth unemployment and lack of opportunity, low levels of education, limited health services, and an appalling lack of duty of care to young, vulnerable people were all part of my adolescence. They were reasons I left the state when I was old enough to do so. </p>
<p>The consolation of a Tasmanian adolescence was wilderness. I grew up in the foothills of a mountain, observing the way the weather moved across the landscape. I was soothed by the sound of Silver Falls, and the way streams of bright sun penetrated the fern forests on the pipeline track where we used to go to drink, smoke, bitch and have sex. </p>
<p>Despite living in Melbourne for nearly 30 years, I still feel the thread Saward writes about, connecting me to Tasmania.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Dad used to say that we were connected to Tassie, even though we didn’t really know who our people were. ‘It’s about where you’re made as much as where your people come from,’ he said. I never understood what he meant by that till Mum told me we were leaving. From the minute the plane took off, I felt the thread connecting me to home get more and more stretched.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Like Andrew and his father, I was made in Hobart. But I was the child of a third-generation Tasmanian mother descended from Scottish and Irish farmers and teachers, and a father who moved to Tasmania as a ten-pound pom after his first marriage ended. </p>
<p>When I was a child in the 1980s, we were taught in schools that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/28/unesco-removes-hurtful-document-claiming-tasmanian-aboriginal-people-extinct#:%7E:text=The%20inaccurate%20claim%2C%20stating%20that,world%20heritage%20list%20in%201982.">Tasmanian Aboriginals were extinct</a>, a lie that serves the idea colonialism is something that has already happened and exists only in the past – in remote, almost mythical, places like Botany Bay and Port Arthur. </p>
<p>By turning her gaze on the impacts of <a href="https://www.indigenousmhspc.gov.au/publications/trauma">intergenerational trauma</a>, Saward shows the full force of present-day colonialism in Australia. </p>
<p>I was tender towards Andrew and understood his rage. I was angry with his absent and neglectful parents. Burn, however, generates a type of “presencing” that allows you to see complexity in the way the past manifests in the present. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-30-years-after-mabo-what-do-australias-battler-stories-and-their-evasions-say-about-who-we-are-187110">Friday essay: 30 years after Mabo, what do Australia's battler stories – and their evasions – say about who we are?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Inside family trauma</h2>
<p>When eight-year-old Andrew first lands in Port Sorrell with his parents, he is happy there, fishing and riding his bike with his father. However, Andrew’s mother’s mental health worsens and Andrew’s dad withdraws, emotionally at first, before finally leaving town without saying goodbye.</p>
<p>Before that happens, Andrew’s dad takes him fishing in a tidal pool, but warns him not to swim there.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We don’t know how deep it is,” he said the first time I started wading in for a paddle. “And we don’t know if there are sharks and other nasties trapped in there. They’ll be angry about being stuck and hungry. If a nice, warm, nearly nine-year-old boy gets in, they might think you’re their dinner.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The tidal pool becomes a recurring image for trauma. In one scene, Sarah dares him to go skinny-dipping in the tidal pool. Andrew warns her against it, remembering his father’s warning. This scene poignantly foreshadows both Andrew’s resilience and Sarah’s inability to resist her own hidden darkness. </p>
<p>At first Andrew’s mother, Linda, reminded me of the cold, angry mother in Jasper Jones, a flat character with no redemption. But unlike Craig Silvey, whose loyalty lies solely with his young characters, Melanie Saward writes with deep compassion and understanding for Andrew’s parents. </p>
<p>We see inside family trauma, how the dynamics are self-perpetuating. The parents are confronted with the messiest, most vulnerable, most hidden and shameful parts of themselves – made manifest in Andrew. </p>
<p>We also bear witness to the role institutions play in exacerbating trauma associated with colonialism, such as ongoing disconnection from culture. School, youth justice, community housing and the health system all fail Andrew and his parents in multiple ways, even when individuals within these institutions mean well. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/my-favourite-fictional-character-queenie-a-young-black-woman-living-and-dating-in-london-is-complex-funny-broken-fun-188297">My favourite fictional character: Queenie, a young Black woman living and dating in London, is 'complex, funny, broken, fun'</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<h2>Crossover appeal</h2>
<p><a href="https://affirmpress.com.au/browse/book/Melanie-Saward-Burn-9781922848482">Burn</a> has obvious crossover appeal for teen and adult audiences, with a strong adolescent protagonist driving the story. So it interests me that this novel has been published as adult fiction. In fact as a young adult author and once-upon-a-time editor of books for teenagers, I puzzled over the decision. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579105/original/file-20240301-16-8hnnku.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579105/original/file-20240301-16-8hnnku.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579105/original/file-20240301-16-8hnnku.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579105/original/file-20240301-16-8hnnku.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579105/original/file-20240301-16-8hnnku.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579105/original/file-20240301-16-8hnnku.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579105/original/file-20240301-16-8hnnku.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579105/original/file-20240301-16-8hnnku.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>But ultimately, Burn breaks a particular young adult formula. When teaching young adult fiction to creative writing and publishing classes, I often ask <a href="https://www.liliwilkinson.com.au/">Dr Lili Wilkinson’s</a> four powerful plotting questions: What does your character want? What’s stopping them from getting what they want? What will happen if they fail? What do they need to do? </p>
<p>In this novel, there is nothing Andrew alone can do to break the cycle of intergenerational trauma. The only answer posed to the question, “What does Andrew need to do?” is: light fires. The most uncomfortable truth at the heart of this novel is that Andrew exists in a narrow space of limited possibility. He can’t save himself. Individual agency is not the solution to intergenerational trauma or broken systems. </p>
<p>Andrew lights fires under the adults who have turned from him and failed him. Andrew lights fires to disrupt colonialism and patterns of intergenerational trauma. Andrew lights fires which destroy, but Andrew’s fires also offer regeneration and renewal. </p>
<h2>‘Who’s your mob?’</h2>
<p>Something I particularly loved about this novel was the way the adolescent characters try to take care of each other. In Tasmania, Sarah and Andrew try and fail to imagine new futures for themselves, to generate a fantasy of who they might be. In Queensland, friends Doug and Trent strive to dismantle Andrew’s barriers. New love interest, Tess, makes clumsy attempts to connect with Andrew, and he in turn tries hard not hurt her. </p>
<p>In a white, middle-class novel about a young protagonist, these friendships might have become Andrew’s found family – the non-biological ties that so often permeate youth stories in the face of adult failure. However, Melanie Saward decides not to place the burden of Andrew’s continued wellbeing on his peers. Instead, she allows herself a speculative experiment in future thinking, within the framework of contemporary realism. </p>
<p>What could an ending for a kid like Andrew look like when youth justice is decolonised? Melanie Saward looks to the adults and the systems they control to step up and take control.</p>
<p>The question Sarah asks Andrew – “Who’s your mob?” – demands an answer, in order to end the cycle of trauma and create a hopeful ending. This question cuts to the heart of what it means to belong: to family, to Country, to culture and to your own story.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/223199/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Penni Russon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Bigambul and Wakka Wakka author Melanie Saward’s Burn is structured around three fires. It bears witness to the role institutions play in exacerbating trauma associated with colonialism.Penni Russon, Senior Lecturer, School of Communication, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2219832024-03-06T19:14:31Z2024-03-06T19:14:31ZFrom micro to macro, Andrew Leigh’s accessible history covers the economic essentials<p>Andrew Leigh’s <a href="https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/shortest-history-economics">The Shortest History of Economics</a> is the latest in a series of such histories, mostly focused on particular countries. </p>
<p>It begins with a striking mini-history of household lighting, focusing on the amount of labour required to produce the light now given off by a standard lightbulb: 58 hours for a wood fire, five hours for a candle based on animal fat, a few minutes for an early electric lightbulb, and less than one second for a modern light-emitting diode.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>The Shortest History of Economics – Andrew Leigh (Black Inc.)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Importantly, what is true of labour hours is also true of material inputs. Older technologies required felling a tree or killing an animal, but an LED uses the photoelectric properties of common crystals. It only needs tiny quantities. The input of electricity is similarly modest. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, because workers in all kinds of activities have become more productive, the purchasing power of their wages, expressed in terms of services like lighting, has risen. The result is that services like lighting have become exceptionally cheap.</p>
<p>As this example shows, The Shortest History of Economics is not, as might be supposed, a history of economic thought (a topic primarily suited to retired economists like the author of this review). Rather, it is primarily a history of economic life, from Paleolithic times to the COVID pandemic. </p>
<p>The history is, however, informed by modern economics, included in the narrative in palatable doses.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576942/original/file-20240221-22-3jsbds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576942/original/file-20240221-22-3jsbds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576942/original/file-20240221-22-3jsbds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576942/original/file-20240221-22-3jsbds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576942/original/file-20240221-22-3jsbds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576942/original/file-20240221-22-3jsbds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576942/original/file-20240221-22-3jsbds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576942/original/file-20240221-22-3jsbds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<h2>Standards of living</h2>
<p>The first half of the book, covering the period up to the Industrial Revolution, is mostly about technology. Leigh begins with the transition from hunter-gatherer societies – made up of relatively small groups of people, who followed their food sources around – to agriculture, which permitted and required larger settled populations. </p>
<p>The effect on living standards was ambiguous at best. Farmers were less likely than hunter-gatherers to suffer violent deaths or starve in winter, but they were almost permanently undernourished. They overworked to produce a surplus that enabled a small stratum of priests and warriors to live relatively luxurious lives.</p>
<p>The millennia following the agricultural revolution are covered pretty quickly, with a focus on developments in transport (mostly water transport) and trade. Leigh traces the gradual emergence of a global economy, culminating in the rise of European empires, whose reach depended on sail. </p>
<p>There are lots of interesting vignettes, covering topics such as social mobility. There wasn’t much, as can be seen by the persistence over centuries of the same surnames in high-status positions. More depressing is the discussion of the central role of the slave trade, which was a major source of labour in the Americas and income for European nations.</p>
<p>The second half of the book, covering the period after the Industrial Revolution, shifts the focus from technology to economic institutions and policy. The 19th century saw the rise of the corporation and the concentration of economic power. </p>
<p>This produced responses in the form of “anti-trust” legislation in the United States, usually referred to as “competition policy” in Australia. This remains an issue of central concern to Leigh in his day job, as assistant minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury. </p>
<p>The 19th century also saw the rise of the trade union movement and the beginning of an era of continuous struggle over the distribution of income between capital labour. The balance has ebbed and flowed. </p>
<p>As Leigh shows, labour has been losing ground since the 1970s in most countries, while those at the top of the income distribution have gained massively. The offsetting positive development is that the very poorest people in the world have generally improved their lot, thanks to the belated arrival of modern technology.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/income-redistribution-or-social-insurance-a-federal-mp-considers-the-future-of-the-welfare-state-187603">Income redistribution or social insurance? A federal MP considers the future of the welfare state</a>
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<hr>
<h2>Macroeconomics</h2>
<p>The issues I have discussed so far have mostly concerned markets and prices, the topics studied by economists under the label “microeconomics”. But the 20th century also saw the emergence of “macroeconomics”, the analysis of booms, depressions, inflation and mass unemployment. </p>
<p>The key figure here was English economist John Maynard Keynes, whose <a href="https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125515/1366_keynestheoryofemployment.pdf">General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money</a> (1935) provided the theoretical basis for the use of public expenditure and taxation (fiscal policy) to stabilise the economy. </p>
<p>As Leigh notes in his introduction, The Shortest History of Economics is unusual among recent popular works on economics in covering both microeconomics and macroeconomics.</p>
<p>Despite proceeding briskly through millennia of economic history, Leigh manages to convey the essential points in a way that does not leave the reader feeling rushed through an incomplete argument. While it makes sense to begin by reading the book from beginning to end, it is also enjoyable to dip into it, more or less at random.</p>
<p>Inevitably, I have some points of disagreement. At a couple of points, Leigh gives uncritical credence to beliefs widely held among economists, but not supported by the evidence. </p>
<p>He repeats Adam Smith’s creation story for money as a more efficient alternative to barter. But a hundred years of anthropological evidence, beginning with my namesake <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Hingston_Quiggin">Alison Hingston Quiggin</a> and continuing to the work of the late <a href="https://davidgraeber.org/about-david-graeber/">David Graeber</a>, suggests that money first emerged as a way of discharging debts (owed to the king whose face appeared on coins or as recompense for private injuries). It was only later adapted to use in commerce.</p>
<p>In his discussion of Keynesian macroeconomics, Leigh cites <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk">a popular rap video presenting a dispute between Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek</a>, two of the great economists of the 20th century. </p>
<p>But in reality, although Hayek had criticised Keynes’ earlier <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/65278">Tract on Monetary Reform</a> (1923), he did not even review his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Arguably the most effective critic was <a href="https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Pigou.html">A.C. Pigou</a>, best known nowadays as the inventor of pollution taxes. </p>
<p>And Keynes was <a href="https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2014/03/14/prophets-for-today">quite sympathetic</a> to the arguments against economic planning Hayek presented in <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo4138549.html">The Road to Serfdom</a> (1944). </p>
<p>The idea of Hayek as Keynes’ primary antagonist is largely a piece of retroactive continuity (“retconning” in the jargon of genre fiction). The myth was created in the 1970s, following Hayek’s Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 and his influence on political leaders, including Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet. </p>
<p>But these are quibbles, which will be of little concern to the general readership at which the book is aimed. As with all of the dozen or so books Leigh has produced since his election to Parliament (while also raising three children and maintaining a strenuous athletic regime – how does he do it?), The Shortest History of Economics is an engaging read, conveying economic insights to readers who would find a standard economics text both boring and impenetrable.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/221983/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Quiggin is a friendly professional colleague of Andrew Leigh, in his capacity as an academic economist</span></em></p>The Shortest History of Economics is not just a history of economic thought, but a history of economic life.John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2221552024-03-03T23:43:49Z2024-03-03T23:43:49ZMykaela Saunders challenges colonial concepts of time – and their use to dehumanise Indigenous people<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579129/original/file-20240301-30-b2fo5c.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=31%2C244%2C2987%2C2014&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Mykaela Saunders </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">UQP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Our understanding of ourselves is woven together with threads of time: a concept deeply entangled with power, culture and identity. Time is not a neutral concept. </p>
<p>Historically, time has acted as a tool of oppression and marginalisation. Colonial notions of “civilisation” were linked inescapably to the prudent use of time. So on the one hand, time is an objective measurement derived from observation of phenomena. On the other, it has been a cultural artefact, wielded to dehumanise Indigenous peoples. Their societies have been depicted as “time-less” – and therefore inferior. </p>
<p>The coloniality of time, and the society we have built around it, is the subject of the first short story in Dr Mykaela Saunders’ engrossing collection of Aboriginal-centred speculative fiction, <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/always-will-be">Always Will Be</a>. </p>
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<p><em>Review: Always Will Be – Mykaela Saunders (UQP)</em></p>
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<p>In Taking our Time, a future Goori community in the Tweed assert their sovereignty by confiscating all the clocks, reclaiming – and reasserting, as they do so – Goori understandings of space and time. They directly challenge the centrality of quantifying, and accounting to, linear time.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579127/original/file-20240301-21-i8a706.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579127/original/file-20240301-21-i8a706.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579127/original/file-20240301-21-i8a706.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579127/original/file-20240301-21-i8a706.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579127/original/file-20240301-21-i8a706.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579127/original/file-20240301-21-i8a706.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579127/original/file-20240301-21-i8a706.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579127/original/file-20240301-21-i8a706.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>The short stories in Always Will Be each take place in an alternate future version of the Tweed. Each story is infused with a clear and critical insight into Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing, linked comprehensively and beautifully to the future place where their events unfold. The stories are seamlessly blended with echoes of history and the realities of colonisation, skilfully explored and critiqued through these imagined futures. </p>
<p>In Fire Bug, young Tyson travels on a high-school camp to his country. It’s Country he has been disconnected from, because of his schooling and living situation. On camp, Rangers teach the students about fire and burning practices. At one stage, in an attempt to teach the students how to light fire the proper way, another student, Betty, observes “yeah but we got lighters and stuff now”. This is a relatively minor component of the story – but it stood out particularly to me. </p>
<p>This one exchange foregrounds, with precision, the challenges faced by Tyson, his family and the Rangers who will set out to help him. Communities face difficulty in passing on cultural knowledge, and not only from imposed systems of outside control. There are also challenges in passing that knowledge from within, to youth born and growing up <em>between worlds</em>. </p>
<p>Each of the stories in Always Will Be includes examples like this. On one hand, a clear articulation and respect for the expression of culture and connection to place. On the other, an equally clear-eyed engagement with the complexities of colonial legacies. The stories invite both Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers to reflect and imagine Aboriginal sovereignties – and to do so in ways that honour the wisdom of Aboriginal knowledges.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-first-australian-first-nations-anthology-of-speculative-fiction-is-playful-bitter-loud-and-proud-182228">The first Australian First Nations anthology of speculative fiction is playful, bitter, loud and proud</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘Powerful validation’</h2>
<p>Always Will Be consists of 16 stories. Each story has made me stop and think. Sometimes it’s with a realisation of shared experience – I draw connections and see similarities. </p>
<p>Other times, I recognise a concept that I knew academically, politically, historically or culturally – but reading these stories, I experience the concept as it plays out, or is extended or engaged with in ways I hadn’t necessarily expected. </p>
<p>For example, The Girls Home begins with Jalah waking up from a nightmare inside a facility under guard. The facility is revealed to be a factory where girls are kept and exploited for their labour and bodies. After plotting an escape with other girls in the home and putting that plan into action, the story shifts dramatically.</p>
<p>What felt predictable and known was not as it appeared. The girl’s Elders were testing them. We are left to question the future relationship between Indigeneity and trauma: what will it mean to be connected to community and culture when disadvantage gives way to privilege?</p>
<p>In moments like this, I found myself stopping to ponder. Paragraph by paragraph. Line by line. Yet at other times, I was engrossed, racing to the story’s conclusion.</p>
<p>For Indigenous readers, these stories can serve as a powerful validation of their lived realities. They offer the opportunity to see a representation of our culture and perspectives represented in literature. Through Saunders’ short stories, Indigenous traditions and struggles are honoured and celebrated, fostering a sense of empowerment and belonging. These stories invite readers to challenge dominant colonial frameworks, binaries and deficit discourses.</p>
<p>For non-Indigenous readers, Always Will Be is a compelling invitation to confront their own misconceptions. By immersing themselves in the richly textured worlds crafted by Saunders, non-Indigenous readers are invited to witness assertions of Aboriginal sovereignties, and experience actions that embody them. The stories serve as a catalyst for understanding, encouraging readers to engage with Indigenous perspectives. </p>
<p>For example, in The Fisherman’s Story, the Goori protagonist is asked to assist with an fungal outbreak in a fish farm. After witnessing the methods employed, he thinks to himself:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We heard whispers about their strange beliefs but did not know whether they were true or not. No wonder these fish were always dying; it only appeared to be a scientific method. These practices were based on a charlatan system. Still, I bit my tongue for the time being.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Because Saunders centres Indigenous perspectives, the focus of examination becomes non-Indigenous practices, beliefs and knowledge systems. And these non-Indigenous practices, beliefs and knowledge systems are problematised. Indigenous sovereignties are then enacted, to find solutions within Indigenous knowledges.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-30-years-after-mabo-what-do-australias-battler-stories-and-their-evasions-say-about-who-we-are-187110">Friday essay: 30 years after Mabo, what do Australia's battler stories – and their evasions – say about who we are?</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<h2>Imagined futures</h2>
<p>The unpublished manuscript for this collection was awarded the 2022 David Unaipon Award for Emerging Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander writers – and it is not difficult to see why. The stories in Always Will Be started as the creative component of a Doctor of Arts degree, and they have been crafted with care. Each introduces its characters and place with clarity, depth and feeling. </p>
<p>But these imaginings must also be understood as just that: imaginings. As Saunders makes clear in Bugalbeh!, she is not writing history, nor is she sharing <em>specific cultural knowledge</em>. </p>
<p>As she states in Bugalbeh!, the collection’s conclusion: “I’ve imagined futures, and so the cultures in these stories are just as made up as the rest of the world building is”. </p>
<p>Instead, Saunders is, through creativity, creating space to explore different climates and politics – and to imagine alternatives to the business-as-usual state of Aboriginal relations. Published in the year following the failed referendum, when there is a lack of clear policy direction from the Australian government, this is a very timely endeavour. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579128/original/file-20240301-28-jnwj87.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579128/original/file-20240301-28-jnwj87.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579128/original/file-20240301-28-jnwj87.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579128/original/file-20240301-28-jnwj87.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579128/original/file-20240301-28-jnwj87.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579128/original/file-20240301-28-jnwj87.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579128/original/file-20240301-28-jnwj87.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579128/original/file-20240301-28-jnwj87.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1126&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Within the broader landscape of speculative fiction, Saunders’ work represents an important intervention. She injects Indigenous perspectives and worldviews into a genre often dominated, at least in the published form, by Eurocentric imaginaries. </p>
<p>In doing so, Saunders’ builds on their recent work editing the groundbreaking 2022 collection, <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/this-all-come-back-now">This All Come Back Now</a>, the first published anthology of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander speculative fiction. Its contributions were from both emerging and established Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers.</p>
<p>Always Will Be exemplifies the power of literature to both reflect and shape cultural landscapes. Saunders not only contributes to expanding the scope of speculative fiction, but also challenges readers to reconsider whose stories are deemed worthy of speculation and exploration. </p>
<p>The stories in Always Will Be were crafted with care, respect and humour. They are in equal measures enlightening and entertaining. This collection is a must-read in 2024.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222155/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kristopher Wilson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Mykaela Saunders’ Indigenous speculative fiction collection Always Will Be, published in the year following the failed referendum, is a very timely endeavour.Kristopher Wilson, Director of Indigenous Leadership and Engagement and Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Engineering and IT and Faculty of Law, University of Technology SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2211162024-02-28T19:14:56Z2024-02-28T19:14:56Z‘If we burn … then what?’ A new book asks why a decade of mass protest has done so little to change things<p>In 2010, in response to ongoing ill-treatment by police, a fruit vendor performed an act of self-immolation in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia. This set off an uprising that led to the <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/1/14/remembering-the-day-tunisias-president-ben-ali-fled">removal of dictator Ben Ali</a> and a process to rewrite the constitution in a democratic direction. </p>
<p>Inspired by this, huge demonstrations against police brutality erupted in Egypt, centred in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the protesters calling for the removal of the country’s president, <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/02/hosni-mubarak-legacy-of-mass-torture/">Hosni Mubarak</a>. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution – Vincent Bevins (Hachette)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>These events catalysed what Vincent Bevins calls the “mass protest decade”. The years from 2010 to 2020 saw a record number of protests around the world seeking to transform societies in broadly progressive ways. Many groups were inspired by democratic ideals. </p>
<p>These protests were truly global. Those in Tunisia and Egypt became part of the wider uprising that came to be called the “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2021/jan/25/how-the-arab-spring-unfolded-a-visualisation">Arab Spring</a>”. </p>
<p>In 2013, the <em><a href="https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/brazilian-free-fare-movement-mpl-mobilizes-against-fare-hikes-2013">Movimento Passe Livre</a></em> (MPL) or “Free Fare Movement” led to mass protests in Brazil. Initially directed against rises in transport fares, they rapidly expanded to include an unwieldy and contradictory set of groups and grievances. </p>
<p>Many other protests sprang up, including Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests in 2014, dubbed the “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/30/-sp-hong-kong-umbrella-revolution-pro-democracy-protests">umbrella movement</a>” in their first phase by the global press. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/whatever-happened-to-the-arab-spring-10973">Whatever Happened to the 'Arab Spring'? </a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>From bad to worse</h2>
<p>In his new book <a href="https://www.hachette.com.au/vincent-bevins/if-we-burn-the-mass-protest-decade-and-the-missing-revolution-as-good-as-journalism-gets">If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution</a>, Bevins starts by asking “how is it possible that so many mass protests apparently led to the opposite of what they asked for?” </p>
<p>The answer he provides is suggested in the book’s title, which <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If5w78BrmT4">he expands</a> as: “If we burn … then what?” </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576967/original/file-20240221-24-3nryt0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576967/original/file-20240221-24-3nryt0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576967/original/file-20240221-24-3nryt0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576967/original/file-20240221-24-3nryt0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576967/original/file-20240221-24-3nryt0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576967/original/file-20240221-24-3nryt0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576967/original/file-20240221-24-3nryt0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576967/original/file-20240221-24-3nryt0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Aiming to make sense of the significant role of mass protest across the decade, Bevins focuses on countries where the protest movements were so large that the existing government was either seriously destabilised or dislodged: Bahrain, Brazil, Chile, Egypt, Hong Kong, South Korea, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine and Yemen. His book explores why movements failed to achieve their goals and why, in many cases, things got decidedly worse. </p>
<p>In Egypt, for example, the Mubarak regime ended up being replaced by the even worse <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/egypts-sisi-authoritarian-leader-with-penchant-bridges-2023-12-08/">El-Sisi dictatorship</a>. In Brazil, the leftist-led protests ended up undermining the progressive government led by <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dilma-Rousseff">Dilma Rousseff</a>, when groups on the right adopted similar tactics, media strategies, and anti-establishment and anti-corruption rhetoric. What ensued led to the impeachment of President Rousseff and the rise to power of far-right demagogue <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Jair_Bolsonaro">Jair Bolsonaro</a>.</p>
<p>For a significant part of the mass protest decade, Bevins was based in Sao Paulo as the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. In If We Burn, he draws on his extensive experience as a journalist, as well as his academic background. He has travelled around the world and conducted over 200 interviews in 12 countries, which he has woven into an interesting narrative history. </p>
<p>His particular focus is on the activists who conceived and enacted the protest movements. Bevins covers their experiences at the time and, later in the book, what they came to understand about the events that unfolded, and their advice for future activists. He also engages with others, such as politicians and journalists, and draws on the work of social and political theorists. </p>
<p>The narrative is slanted towards his Brazilian home base. Bevins was there to witness the Free Fare Movement and the waves of mass protest it unleashed. Caught up in the action, he experienced, among other things, tear gassing. His colleague Giuliana Vallone was shot in the eye with a rubber bullet.</p>
<p>Vallone found her picture “flying through social networks”. Her image was used as a part of the Brazilian media’s reframing of the protests from broadly bad (leftist troublemakers) to broadly good (nationalists and patriots). </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578462/original/file-20240228-28-jrhegh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578462/original/file-20240228-28-jrhegh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578462/original/file-20240228-28-jrhegh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578462/original/file-20240228-28-jrhegh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578462/original/file-20240228-28-jrhegh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578462/original/file-20240228-28-jrhegh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578462/original/file-20240228-28-jrhegh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578462/original/file-20240228-28-jrhegh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Journalist Guiliana Vallone was hit in the eye with a rubber bullet during the Free Fare Movement protests in Brazil.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6QVLE8PQJ8">YouTube</a></span>
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<p>The effect of this reframing illustrates the power of dominant news media. As Bevins argues, media narratives shaped how the decades’ protests were viewed around the world, but they also shaped the configuration of the protests in real time, influencing who showed up, and why.</p>
<p>The reframing turbo-charged popular support for the mass protests across Brazil – but not in ways that aligned with the goals of the originators of the protests, which were taken over by an assortment of better organised right-wing groups, including proto-Bolsonaristas. </p>
<p>In a classic right-wing tactic, one group – the <em><a href="https://reason.com/2016/10/15/free-brazil/">Movimento Brasil Livre</a></em> (MBL) or “Free Brazil Movement” – even appropriated the originators’ name. “In Brazilian Portuguese,” Bevins notes,“‘MBL’ sounds nearly identical to ‘MPL’.” </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-bolsonaro-failed-to-overthrow-democracy-and-why-a-threat-remains-223498">Why Bolsonaro failed to overthrow democracy – and why a threat remains</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>International solidarity</h2>
<p>On June 13, 2013, while being tear gassed, the crowd in Sao Paulo chanted “love is over – Turkey is here”. They were referring to the ongoing repression of protesters in Turkey, whose <a href="https://carnegieeurope.eu/2019/10/24/legacy-of-gezi-protests-in-turkey-pub-80142">occupation of Gezi Park</a>, next to Taksim Square in Istanbul, began as a protest against the park’s redevelopment, but became a focal point for wider discontentment with the regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.</p>
<p>Bevins posts the words on Twitter and is stunned to see them go viral. He receives a flood of images and messages in response. Signs pop up in Gezi Park over the following weeks reading “the whole world is Sao Paulo” and “Turkey and Brazil are one”. </p>
<p>The story exemplifies a new type of international solidarity. Facilitated by the speed of social networking sites, digitally mediated mass protests in significant public places, often squares, emulated the Tahrir Square “model”. </p>
<p>The global protests extended from Taksim Square and Gezi Park in Turkey, to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/12/occupy-wall-street-10-years-on">Zuccotti Park and Occupy Wall St</a> in the United States, to the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-13551878">Plaza del Sol in Spain</a> and the <a href="https://kyivindependent.com/euro-maidan-revolution/">“Euromaidan” protests in Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Ukraine</a>. </p>
<p>Bevins emphasises that these protests tended to share certain features: they were “digitally coordinated … horizontally structured … apparently leaderless … apparently spontaneous”. </p>
<p>He describes this phenomenon as a “repertoire of contention”. It involved a certain “recipe of tactics” that became largely taken for granted as the “natural way to respond to social injustice”. </p>
<h2>Repertoire of contention</h2>
<p>During the protest decade, this “repertoire of contention” was more successful than expected. It often put so many people on the streets that it gave protesters real political leverage. They were suddenly in a position where they could make demands and extract reforms from the political establishment. In some cases, they generated “revolutionary situations” where they might potentially take power themselves. </p>
<p>But this type of protest is, as Bevins observes, “very poorly equipped” to take advantage of the kinds of destabilisation or “revolutionary” situations that they create. In such situations, groups must either enter the ensuing power vacuum or use their leverage to negotiate with the establishment. The problem was that to do this effectively required the type of representation and organisation that had become almost impossible. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576969/original/file-20240221-28-vktr16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576969/original/file-20240221-28-vktr16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576969/original/file-20240221-28-vktr16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576969/original/file-20240221-28-vktr16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576969/original/file-20240221-28-vktr16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576969/original/file-20240221-28-vktr16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576969/original/file-20240221-28-vktr16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576969/original/file-20240221-28-vktr16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Vincent Bevins.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vincent_by_Best_Wishes.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>On one hand, Bevins says this was due to the “material conditions” existing before the popular explosions. In the North African dictatorships, for example, unions and alternative political parties had been severely weakened or suppressed. As such, the protests took the “horizontal” form characteristic of the decade.</p>
<p>But in countries with democracies, however imperfect – Brazil and Chile, for example – there were unions and alternative political parties. The horizontal nature of the protests there tended to be driven by an ideological commitment to “horizontalism”. </p>
<p>The ideal was a form of radical participatory democracy, emerging from left-libertarian and anarchist traditions, in which “everyone is equal”. Hierarchy is eschewed, as is any type of enduring formal structure of leaders or spokespeople. As the anthropologist and activist David Graeber wrote: “It is about creating and enacting horizontal networks instead of top-down structures like states, parties or corporations.”</p>
<p>Bevins reports that, at crucial moments, due to their lack of organisation and structure, key actors often replicated tactics they had learned beforehand. Their “repertoire” left them ill-prepared for both the challenges and opportunities that arose.</p>
<p>An unprecedented, technologically facilitated sense of solidarity and inspiration flowed around the world, but it happened so quickly that it led to the “cutting and pasting” of approaches into different national contexts. “Transfer of solidarity” became bound up with “transfer of tactics”. </p>
<p>This meant, in particular, that the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alter-globalization">alter-globalisation</a>” movement, conceived in the democratic context of North America, had a disproportionate influence, creating a mismatch of tactics and circumstances. The hasty adoption of tactics meant most movements did not take the time to think through strategies that might be successful in their local context. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/louisa-lims-outstanding-portrait-of-a-dispossessed-defiant-hong-kong-is-the-activist-journalism-we-need-179091">Louisa Lim's 'outstanding' portrait of a dispossessed, defiant Hong Kong is the activist journalism we need</a>
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<h2>New strategies</h2>
<p>Bevins suggests that by taking this and other lessons on board, the deep desire for progressive change, both nationally and in the global system, might come closer to being realised in coming decades. The “mismatches” can be overcome with study and reflection on the events of the mass protest decade. More suitable “repertoires” might be arrived at. </p>
<p>The spontaneous horizontal protests, Bevins observes, “did a very good job of blowing holes in social structures and creating political vacuums”. But the power vacuums they created were filled by those who were ready. </p>
<p>In Egypt, that meant the military. The Gulf countries, especially the United Arab Emirates, were also involved in the El-Sisi coup, via their funding of the anti-Morsi <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-23131953">Tamarod movement</a>. In Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council “literally marched in to fill in the gaps”. The Hong Kong movement was crushed by Beijing. In Brazil, Rousseff was “not removed, not immediately; but to the extent that she lost influence in June 2013, that power did not fall to the anti-authoritarian left, as the [Free Fare Movement] would have liked”.</p>
<p>Lasting progressive change, Bevins argues, requires better organisation and vehicles capable of handing down knowledge, strategy and tactics to the next generation of activists. He offers the example of Chile. </p>
<p>In Chile, the role of unions and political parties, as well as the activists engaging in institutional politics, proved more successful in producing progressive outcomes than digitally organised, horizontal, mass protests alone. </p>
<p>The powerful student unions played a strong role. The “autonomist” left-wing activist <a href="https://www.gob.cl/en/institutions/presidency/">Gabriel Boric</a>, who emerged through university politics, ended up becoming president in 2022. He was pivotal in the referendum process that sought to rewrite Chile’s Pinochet-era constitution. </p>
<p>Bevins proposes that the horizontalist left is so traumatised by the “sins of the Soviet Union” and “other revolutions” that many activists have given up “the things that work” – like organisation, structure and co-ordination. </p>
<p>“But if you refuse to use the tools that work”, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If5w78BrmT4">he points out</a>, you are “ceding your power” to those who will. It is “like showing up to a football game without a coach, strategy, or even a clear idea of who’s on your team”. Being well organised does not guarantee success, but it is essential when you enter into conflict with other well organised forces. </p>
<p>Bevins describes the decade’s dominant form of protest as being ultimately “illegible”. A key part of the problem was that “the square” was, in most of these protests, not asking for one coherent thing, or set of things. Activists, years later, often had widely divergent views as to “what the movements were all about”. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Vincent Bevins speaking at the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College, October 25, 2023.</span></figcaption>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-20-year-rule-of-recep-tayyip-erdogan-has-transformed-turkey-188211">How the 20 year rule of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has transformed Turkey</a>
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<h2>American influence</h2>
<p>As the world’s dominant superpower, the United States is entwined, in complex ways, with the individual countries and the regional power-politics Bevins discusses. In 2011, for example, the US took the opportunity provided by unrest in Libya, and a brutal state crackdown in response, to invade and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/20/nato-libya-war-26000-missions">overthrow the Gaddafi regime in a NATO mission</a>. Hong Kong protesters came to believe they were “sacrificed” for the Trump administration’s ongoing “propaganda war against China”. </p>
<p>Bevins also argues that the American domination of the internet has contributed to unrealistic views about the nature of social institutions, power and social change. The techno-utopianism that has accompanied its rise, the US-centric culture and ideas that circulate on oligarch-owned social media platforms, and “online communities born in the alter-globalisation era”, such as <a href="https://indymedia.org/">Indymedia</a> and <a href="https://www.adbusters.org/about-us">Adbusters</a>, played an “outsize role” in the mass protest decade. </p>
<p>Protesters’ ideas about what was possible and how to proceed were shaped by their immersion in this media landscape. Reflecting in retrospect on the prominent use of material from The Hunger Games, V for Vendetta and Star Wars, a Hong Kong activist said: “I think it is … a little sad, and definitely very unfortunate, that we got so many of our ideas from pop culture.”</p>
<p>The simplistic faith of “liberal techno-optimists” that the internet and social media are intrinsically progressive has proved unfounded, as has the belief that “the internet would make the world more like the United States”. </p>
<p>No protest action or technology is intrinsically progressive. As Bevins points out, is has become clear in recent years that the protesters’ “repertoire” of tools and tactics can be used at least as effectively by right-wing demagogues and disinformation outfits. The shock of Trumpian politics was accompanied by a sobering realisation that “the internet was something that could be used by malevolent foreign powers to undermine the American project”. </p>
<p>Digital communication, Bevins observes, has facilitated “the existence of big protests that come together very quickly – so quickly, perhaps, that no one knows each other, people are trying to realize contradictory goals, and after the initial energy fades, nothing remains”. In a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTRkIY6NQhA">recent interview</a>, he paraphrases one Free Fare Movement interviewee reflecting on how events unfolded in Brazil: “all we wanted to do for eight years was to cause a popular uprising; and then we did, and it was awful”. </p>
<p>Throughout If We Burn, Bevins shows that “movements that cannot speak for themselves will be spoken for”. As an Egyptian activist reflects: “we thought representation was elitism, but actually it is the essence of democracy”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/221116/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christopher Pollard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Throughout If We Burn, Vincent Bevins shows that “movements that cannot speak for themselves will be spoken for”.Christopher Pollard, Tutor in Sociology and Philosophy, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2228102024-02-27T19:10:18Z2024-02-27T19:10:18Z‘Who cares for men like Brian Houston?’ The Hillsong leader’s rise and fall is a gripping story, but how was it allowed to happen?<p>Hillsong was first formed in 1983 by Brian and Bobbie Houston as the “decidedly functional, even dowdy” The Hills Christian Life Centre, in outer-suburban Sydney. Now one of Australia’s most recognisable Pentecostal megachurches, it has congregations and campuses across the globe. </p>
<p>In recent years, “unlikely king” Brian got widespread attention as a “close friend” of Scott Morrison, who had regularly attended Horizon Church, founded by a former Hillsong pastor, before he became Australia’s prime minister.</p>
<p>However, Houston resigned in March last year, after <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/19/hillsong-church-apologises-after-investigations-find-brian-houston-engaged-in-inappropriate-behaviour">allegations of inappropriate conduct</a> of “serious concern” with two women.</p>
<p>In the same month, Hillsong was accused in Australia’s parliament of <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-10/federal-mp-accuses-hillsong-money-laundering-tax-evasion/102077080">“fraud, money laundering and tax evasion”</a>. And last August, Houston was found not guilty of charges of covering up sexual abuse by his pastor father Frank, <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/brian-houston-found-not-guilty-of-covering-up-father-s-child-sexual-abuse-20230817-p5dx7m.html">whom he described as a “serial paedophile”</a>. (The court accepted Brian’s claim his father’s victim had asked him not to report to police.) </p>
<p>In the last two years, there have been two four-part documentary series, a podcast and and an SBS documentary on Hillsong.</p>
<p>Now, Crikey journalist David Hardaker tells the story of Hillsong in his new book, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/David-Hardaker-Mine-is-the-Kingdom-9781761069123">Mine is the Kingdom</a>. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Mine is the Kingdom: The Rise and Fall of Brian Houston and the Hillsong Church – David Hardaker (Allen & Unwin)</em></p>
<hr>
<h2>How do we tell Hillsong’s story?</h2>
<p>How did Hillsong come to dominate Australian Pentecostalism – and Australian Christianity more broadly? Through the 1990s and 2000s, Hillsong drew crowds and attention: it was young, vibrant and popular. Until at least 2016, Pentecostal churches <a href="https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JASR/article/view/2089">were growing</a> while other Christian churches were declining.</p>
<p>Hardaker tells the story of Hillsong by charting Houston’s ministry through a “rise and fall” narrative, in which the success and failure of Hillsong and Houston become one and the same. For Hardaker, “Hillsong was Houston, and Houston was Hillsong. It was a concentration of fame and power not possible in the traditional Christian denominations.” </p>
<p>He begins by depicting Brian Houston as a boy from New Zealand who “inherited his father’s name as a leading New Zealand preacher, but not much in the way of wealth”. The Houstons moved to Sydney in the 1970s after Frank Houston received “a picture of Sydney, Australia” and a divine message to start a church there. </p>
<p>Hardaker presents Frank and Brian Houston as “outsiders” who “moved to the very top of the Assemblies of God movement in Australia”. He then documents the early contributions of other key players, drawing on a mix of news sources, documentaries and interviews conducted for the book. </p>
<p>Hillsong is known for its <a href="https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789004425798/BP000011.xml">music</a>. While music production is not central to the book, one chapter begins with former music pastor Geoff Bullock, who left his ABC job in the late 1980s to work for Hillsong full-time. He left the church in 1995, after 12 years, deciding he no longer shared its vision. </p>
<p>This chapter also introduces Nabi Saleh, former co-owner of Gloria Jeans coffee chain, who is described as a “fabulously wealthy” donor and key advisor to Houston. Hardaker shows how the business interests of Gloria Jeans and Hillsong were often “symbiotic”, with coffee shops on site at Hillsong churches and Gloria Jeans franchises owned by Hillsong attendees (who returned financial tithes or donations to the church). </p>
<p>He details how Saleh cultivated relationships with leading American evangelical preachers, including two, Casey Treat and Rick Godwin (also authors and motivational speakers) who were “among the most influential” in Houston’s life.</p>
<h2>‘Go to another church’</h2>
<p>In the second half of the book, Hardaker moves on to discuss “the sins of the son”. He begins by turning to an incident in 2019, when Houston spent 40 minutes in a hotel room with a woman “known to Houston as a financial supporter of the church”. </p>
<p>Little detail is known about this incident, and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/03/21/hillsong-brian-houston-board/">Hillsong has stated</a> Houston can’t recall what happened in the room, as he was under the influence of alcohol while taking anxiety medication. </p>
<p>Hardaker also focuses on the mishandling of complaints made by <a href="https://www.christianpost.com/news/after-assault-by-hillsong-church-administrator-she-fought-back.html">Anna Crenshaw</a>, who was assaulted by Jason Mays, an administrator and volunteer singer at Hillsong, at a party in 2016. She was 18. She says Hillsong only took her complaint seriously and notified police after her father, an influential American pastor, pushed church leaders to act. Hardaker describes this as starting Hillsong’s “own #MeToo movement”.</p>
<p>Hardaker records that one young woman, Helen Smith, said after the Crenshaw incident:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wasn’t sure that I was okay with taking my kids to church, which is what I grew up expecting I would do. I didn’t see it as a safe place anymore for me or my children. The way they handle serious allegations, they think that they’re above the law.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In documenting these accounts, Hardaker is compelling, while largely resisting sensationalism.</p>
<p>In the next chapter, Hardaker takes us back to 1995. He describes the burnout experienced by volunteer music and production crews. Bullock re-enters the story, and recalls telling Houston, “Listen, if we keep going this hard, it’s gonna break.” </p>
<p>“This was a spiritual home for them and they were just working like dogs,” he reflects. Houston apparently had little concern, dismissing Bullock by saying, “you’re not a union rep […] if they don’t like it […] Go to another church.” </p>
<p>Houston’s response is certainly uncaring. Yet, churches typically rely on volunteer labour and Hillsong is no different in this sense. As Hardaker notes, “Hillsong’s music had taken off worldwide and was set to become the river of gold that would fund the church’s expansion.” </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/were-told-pentecostal-churches-like-hillsong-are-growing-in-australia-but-theyre-not-anymore-is-there-a-gender-problem-199413">We're told Pentecostal churches like Hillsong are growing in Australia, but they're not anymore – is there a gender problem?</a>
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<h2>The pastor and the politician</h2>
<p>Hardaker describes Houston’s dream of “a world beyond borders, where Hillsong and Pentecostal Christianity would reign”. Houston, who “ruled the roost” as a “salesman” for Jesus, is described throughout using images of monarchical rule, sales and showmanship. </p>
<p>Hardaker is interested in another rise and fall, too. Hardaker weaves Houston’s story with that of Scott Morrison, whom he works to “unravel”. The first chapter sets up this dual narrative by recounting <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jul/10/scott-morrison-calls-for-more-love-as-he-prays-for-australia-at-hillsong-conference">the moment</a> “the two men – the pastor and the politician – prayed on stage together”, at the 2019 Hillsong conference. “Both of them, at this moment, were at the peak of their powers.”</p>
<p>This pairing is an interesting aspect of Hardaker’s book – one I wish had featured more prominently. </p>
<p>The convergence of Pentecostal theologies and neoliberal ideologies is embedded in the text, but underexplored. Early on, Hardaker uses Morrison’s oft-repeated refrain, “if you have a go, you’ll get a go”, to introduce the concept of prosperity teaching and to frame the wealth of the Houstons and Hillsong</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As the Houston story would show, all things were possible if you had the spirit to spread the word of Jesus Christ. If you had a go you would certainly get a go – and a God-given go at that.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hardaker explains that within prosperity teaching, the word “blessing” has</p>
<blockquote>
<p>an overt meaning of “material blessing”. It was based on an interpretation of the Bible that Christ lived in poverty while on earth so that we could live well and be removed from the curse of poverty. […] if we did not claim our rightful blessings as Children of God, then we were wasting the life of poverty that Christ had led.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a risky lesson. Hardaker rightly notes it “has the effect of demonising the poor: if you are wealthy because you believe in God, then the flip side is that you are poor because you lack faith.” </p>
<p>Pentecostalism’s creep into Morrison’s politics emerges as a key issue. Hardaker contends:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In some ways, Houston’s brand of prosperity Pentecostalism is so perfectly intertwined with neoliberal thinking that it is difficult to say where the religion stops and the political policy begins.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Though Australians tend to feel uneasy when they see religion creeping into public life, Christianity has <a href="https://theconversation.com/yes-religion-plays-a-more-prominent-role-in-politics-but-secular-australia-has-always-been-a-myth-160107">long been part of it</a> – through policy, education, church-based charity and welfare. </p>
<p>Pentecostal leaders and churches who embody the neoliberal values of individualism, competition, market value and merit are not merely influencing politics – they are <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24764190">responding to neoliberal conditions</a>. </p>
<p>As pastors and politicians continue to “rise and fall”, we need to look to the systems and cultures that enable them.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Scott Morrison called allegations he tried to get Brian Houston invited to a US dinner ‘gossip’, but refused to deny them.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>A familiar pattern</h2>
<p>Brian Houston is not the first evangelical leader to “rise and fall”. Hardaker tells us other global ministers Houston had been close to fell from grace long before he did.</p>
<p>Hardaker illustrates a “familiar pattern”. South Korea’s <a href="https://www.christianpost.com/news/megachurch-pastor-david-yonggi-cho-convicted-of-embezzling-12m-says-suffering-taught-him-individuals-shouldnt-possess-anything.html">David Yonggi Cho</a> embezzled church funds. In the US, <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/scandals-brought-bakkers-uss-famous-televangelists/story?id=60389342">Jim Bakker</a> was found to have sexually assaulted a church staff member and committed fraud.</p>
<p>“Rise and fall” narratives bring us into the lives of powerful leaders and show how the worlds they create spectacularly fall apart. As outsiders looking in, the personal drama is part of the appeal. </p>
<p>The problem? Such narratives frame these once-powerful leaders as the source of trouble. If only we could be rid of such people, churches (and parliament) might be safer, healthier places! It is an enticing idea. </p>
<p>However, we need to look beyond analysing the actions of any individual church leader. We need to ask what sort of systems allow abuses of power to happen again and again.</p>
<p>In her analysis of the now-dissolved American megachurch Mars Hill, anthropologist <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/biblical-porn">Jessica Johnson</a> argues we should not view abuse of spiritual authority as the isolated acts of a few bad men: the supposed rotten apples. Rather, we need to attend to the networks and systems that support and produce the kind of hierarchical leadership which parishioners do not feel safe to question.</p>
<p>If we want a healthier Hillsong, we cannot look just to Brian Houston. While he may have been the founder and face of the movement, the movement is bigger than him.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/religion-would-take-my-life-two-women-testify-to-enduring-and-surviving-harm-in-evangelical-christian-communities-207146">'Religion would take my life': two women testify to enduring and surviving harm in evangelical Christian communities</a>
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<h2>Who cares?</h2>
<p>Throughout the book, Hardaker points to a lack of institutional accountability to explain both the minimisation of Frank Houston’s crimes and the “reign” of Brian. Hillsong’s elders were apparently unaware of how Brian Houston operated as global pastor: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hillsong’s elders are the church’s most illustrious figures; some date their association with the church back to its earliest days. They are meant to act as spiritual counsellors and to provide wise advice to the church, But they were now hearing disturbing details about Brian’s behaviours for the first time.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This raises more questions than it answers. If a church has elders who are charged with providing spiritual care, how can a king-like leader rise without being kept in check – and without being cared for? Is a leader only in need of oversight after they fall? And then, are they cared for or cast aside? How can we make sure such a figure does not rise again? </p>
<p>Who actually cares for men like Brian Houston? I mean that in its most generous sense. Houston was successful. Hardaker asks: “So why the pills? And why the Booze?”. He refers us to an interview Houston gave in 2018:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I was overseeing a whole movement of churches in Australia, eleven hundred churches. I sort of dealt with it as a church level and on a father level … but I’ve probably never, ever really looked after myself, and the grieving and the impact on myself. So from that point – over the next, maybe, ten to twelve years – I think, slowly, I was winding down emotionally.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Neoliberal conditions push us to be responsible for our “<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-neoliberalism-colonised-feminism-and-what-you-can-do-about-it-94856">own wellbeing and self-care</a>”. Yet, at the same time, the need to work, to make money, to be bigger and better, often robs us of the ability to genuinely care for ourselves or our communities. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578172/original/file-20240227-28-1a0aos.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578172/original/file-20240227-28-1a0aos.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578172/original/file-20240227-28-1a0aos.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578172/original/file-20240227-28-1a0aos.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578172/original/file-20240227-28-1a0aos.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578172/original/file-20240227-28-1a0aos.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578172/original/file-20240227-28-1a0aos.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/578172/original/file-20240227-28-1a0aos.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>I’m wary of being overly sympathetic towards Brian Houston, but for the sake of the community of believers who were under his “care”, we need to ask: who is making sure these people and their leaders are genuinely cared for? </p>
<p>Houston may have cared for his own material wealth, but did he have the capacity to care for his spiritual and emotional health, to seek help when it was needed or to genuinely care for others?</p>
<p>As Hardaker acknowledges, within Pentecostal Christianity “the extraordinary reigns” and miracles are commonplace. Christianity itself is centred on the belief the dead do rise. </p>
<p>Phil Dooley, the new global pastor of Hillsong, wants Hillsong under his leadership to be a <a href="https://hillsong.com/newsroom/blog/2022/08/church-update-evening-building-a-healthier-church/">“healthier” church</a>. Brian and Bobbie Houston have <a href="https://relevantmagazine.com/faith/church/former-hillsong-pastor-brian-houston-is-starting-a-new-church/">announced on social media</a> they’re starting a new online ministry and church. </p>
<p>As we plot the rise and fall – and potential rebirth – of churches such as Hillsong, we should leave space in the narrative to carefully attend to the ways churches and their leaders are safeguarding against spiritual, financial and sexual harm. </p>
<p>We should care that Christian leaders are cared for, so they may be able to care for those in their community.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222810/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rosie Clare Shorter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A new biography tells the story of Hillsong and its leader Brian Houston. How did Hillsong come to dominate Australian Pentecostalism – and Australian Christianity? What can we learn from its decline?Rosie Clare Shorter, Research fellow, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2193922024-02-25T19:05:45Z2024-02-25T19:05:45ZCritics of ‘woke capitalism’ want to return to a time when money was the only value. But it never existed<p>“Corporate virtue signalling” is a phrase of our time. <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/21/business/desantis-bud-light-explainer/index.html">Bud Light</a> was accused of it when it hired TikTok personality and trans woman Dylan Mulvaney to promote low-cal beer. </p>
<p><a href="https://nypost.com/2022/05/07/thumbs-down-on-woke-disney-debacle-lesson-for-ceos/">Disney</a> was labelled a virtue signaller for its opposition to the US state of Florida outlawing discussions of gender fluidity and sexual orientation in schools. </p>
<p>When multi-trillion-dollar investment company <a href="https://swarajyamag.com/news-brief/larry-fink-ceo-of-worlds-largest-asset-management-firm-blackrock-rejects-accusation-of-pursuing-woke-capitalism-esg-virtue-signalling">Black Rock</a> promoted environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards, it too was branded a virtue-signaller.</p>
<p>These are only a few of the many high-profile examples of corporations who have made headlines for publicly supporting progressive social and environmental political positions. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World – Hannah Forsyth (Cambridge University Press)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>The loudest critics of virtue signalling come from the more vocal end of right-wing politics. Many conservative pundits angrily denounce the “woke” for failing to follow what they see as the real purpose of capitalism. </p>
<p>“Go woke, go broke,” they vent, insisting there is no place in the competitive world of market rivalry for taking sides on social and political issues. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Bud Light was accused of ‘virtue signalling’ when it hired trans TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Anti-woke critics want to make corporations great again: let’s get back to the old days, where making profits was the only thing harried managers had to worry about! Wheeling out <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html">Milton Friedman</a>’s hackneyed 1970 dictum, they censure today’s managers for failing to meet “the social responsibility of business […] to increase its profits”.</p>
<p>If you buy into this rhetoric you might believe that, prior to the 2020s, business leaders were unencumbered by ethical or political concerns. </p>
<p>The problem is the anti-woke mob are nostalgic for a past that never existed. This is borne out in the pages of Hannah Forsyth’s history <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/virtue-capitalists/E5DEC7049458F3FAE69C77AF6317CB51">Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World, 1870-2008</a>. </p>
<p>“Woke capitalism” was first called out by conservative columnist Ross Douthat, who coined the phrase in the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/corporate-america-activism.html">New York Times in 2018</a> – a decade after the period Forsyth spans in her book. </p>
<p>But what she uncovers, with all the specificity and detail to be expected from a historian, is a story of “virtue capitalism” that existed long before the concept of “wokeness” became a political weapon of the recalcitrant right. </p>
<p>In one sense, Forsyth’s book will interest those who want to know more about the history of capitalism and the mixed fortunes of the professional and managerial classes. </p>
<p>In another very important sense, it provides the material for something akin to what French philosopher <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-ideas-of-foucault-99758">Michel Foucault</a> once called “a history of the present”: it helps us understand our present situation by tracing its genealogy in the past.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-ideas-of-foucault-99758">Explainer: the ideas of Foucault</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<p>Forsyth shows that, contrary to the imaginings of anti-woke crusaders, capitalism has always had a relationship with virtue, and a troubled one at that. This goes back to the very beginning of modern industrial capitalism, well before “virtue signalling” became a catch cry for those yearning for an illusory version of a purely economic capitalism. </p>
<h2>The long 20th century</h2>
<p>Forsyth covers the “long 20th century”. Her book starts in 1870, when the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard#Impact">establishment of the gold standard</a> marked the birth of modern capitalism, and the ascendancy of the professional class. It ends in 2008, just before the <a href="https://www.rba.gov.au/education/resources/explainers/the-global-financial-crisis.html">global financial crisis</a> exposed the world’s vulnerability to capitalist excess. </p>
<p>The book focuses on the professional classes in Anglophone settler colonies: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, in particular. In these countries, the process of supposed civilisation was married to economic domination and colonisation, administered by a new professional class of white-collar workers.</p>
<p>With the growth of the new class of professional workers, Forsyth argues, morality became entwined with capitalism. The moral virtues that emerged centred on the value of education and a belief in meritocracy, bolstered by precision, integrity, discipline and efficiency. For workers like nurses, journalists and accountants, professionalism became associated with moral standing, which translated into economic value.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/global-corporate-power-is-out-of-control-but-reports-of-democracys-death-are-greatly-exaggerated-210270">Global corporate power is 'out of control', but reports of democracy’s death are greatly exaggerated</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>But the Anglophone colonial world and its capitalist economies were, as Forsyth observes, “founded on violent dispossession, where land theft in the settler colonies was the precondition to property ownership”. The so-called morality of the virtue capitalists was used to justify colonialism’s brutal acquisition and racial oppression. </p>
<p>Professional integrity and virtue may have given colonialism a sense of respectability, but it reflected a moral system that at best regarded Indigenous populations as the benefactors of Western civilisation and assimilation in Western culture. At worst they were seen as impending the natural course of progress, and hence dispensible. </p>
<p>The result was the displacement of the Indigenous moral systems that came before the colonisers. White virtue, cultural domination and capital expansion were inseparable companions. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577496/original/file-20240223-22-nhq16l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577496/original/file-20240223-22-nhq16l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577496/original/file-20240223-22-nhq16l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577496/original/file-20240223-22-nhq16l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577496/original/file-20240223-22-nhq16l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577496/original/file-20240223-22-nhq16l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577496/original/file-20240223-22-nhq16l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577496/original/file-20240223-22-nhq16l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Hannah Forsyth.</span>
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<p>Forsyth portrays professional virtue not so much as a self-serving hypocrisy, but as a culturally narcissistic form of self-deception that masked the brutality of colonial self-interest. Indigenous populations were castigated as “savage” and in need of education. White moral authority was established as the colonial order, and it was all proper.</p>
<p>By the end of the second world war, the virtue capitalists reached their peak power. They designed a new world economic order rooted in their own sense of righteousness. <a href="https://theconversation.com/measuring-a-presidents-first-100-days-goes-back-to-the-new-deal-159852">The New Deal</a> was established in the United States, focusing on relief for the needy, economic recovery and financial reform. The “welfare state” was established elsewhere. Education and health were provided to the masses, protecting capitalism from the threat of communist revolutions. </p>
<p>Away from home, virtue translated into international development that was intent on “civilising” and “developing” the once-colonial world in the image of the professional classes.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/greed-is-amoral-how-wall-street-supermen-cashed-in-on-pandemic-misery-and-chaos-207311">'Greed is amoral': how Wall Street supermen cashed in on pandemic misery and chaos</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>An economic and moral crisis</h2>
<p>The mid-1970s ushered in an economic and moral crisis. Forsyth argues this triggered the downfall of the professional virtue capitalists after a century on the rise. By the 1980s, a new wave of managerialism was sweeping the business world. Economic management became increasingly divorced from the professions. </p>
<p>In the heyday of early neoliberalism, the conservative professional was displaced in favour of a prototypical manager who was showy, entrepreneurial and hypermasculine. The new focus was on financial and economic success, rather than professional morality. Success at all costs was the neoliberal mantra. </p>
<p>A globalising world economy became ripe for new forms of exploitation and Western wealth accumulation. A new elite discarded the old professional virtues as quaint, starchy and old-fashioned. Forsyth characterises this as “moral deskilling”. The market became the solution to all problems. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574805/original/file-20240211-18-m5e8r4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574805/original/file-20240211-18-m5e8r4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574805/original/file-20240211-18-m5e8r4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574805/original/file-20240211-18-m5e8r4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574805/original/file-20240211-18-m5e8r4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574805/original/file-20240211-18-m5e8r4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1108&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574805/original/file-20240211-18-m5e8r4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1108&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574805/original/file-20240211-18-m5e8r4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1108&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Virtue Capitalists ends with the managerial class having reached a crescendo of power, as masters of a new world order where “success is the only virtue”. The book leaves us in a world where traditional professional virtues have been all but dismantled and professional expertise has been discredited in favour of can-do capitalism. </p>
<p>There is no happy ending. With the rise of the managerial class came a new political populism characterised by a distrust of professional expertise, and professed hatred of “the elites”. Think, for example, of anti-vaccination campaigns undermining medical expertise, or climate denialists flouting the findings of climate scientists.</p>
<p>“Virtue was, and is, used for power,” writes Forsyth. That power was deployed in the long 20th century, initially to justify colonial exploitation, then to further ransack the world as it opened up to global trade. </p>
<p>Virtue, by this account, is a cloak of respectability that hides the realities of a global economy geared to produce inequality. Perhaps it hides them so well, even the professional workers crunching the gears cannot see them. </p>
<p>Virtue Capitalists is not without fault. At times, the narrative is disjointed, the argument lacks consistency and ideas are presented without being developed. The references to theorists and theories can, at times, appear superficial and unnecessary. But the strength of the work overcomes these faults. It provides us with a historical account of the tight connections between morality and economics that popular narratives have ignored.</p>
<p>Like the virtue capitalism of the past, today’s “woke” capitalism is an act of power, as much as it is an ethical movement. Where would capitalist legitimacy be if, in the wake of the global financial crisis, the 1980s entrepreneurial “success at all costs” attitude returned unvarnished? Surely capitalism’s legitimacy would have come to an end, at last. </p>
<p>While no such end was reached, there was no change to the inequality driving core of capitalism either – it was just woke-washed. The morality of today’s woke corporations serves to re-legitimise capitalism, while leaving its exploitative nature unaltered. History repeats. Virtue is still a way to increase profits. </p>
<p>This will not make the world great again. It will keep us on the same trajectory of inequality and exploitation. History’s lessons are worth learning, so we might imagine a better future. Forsyth’s book provides a valuable means to do that.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219392/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carl Rhodes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Conservative critics argue the ‘social responsibility’ of business lies in increasing profits. But values have always been tied up with money-making, from the welfare state to colonialism.Carl Rhodes, Professor of Organization Studies, University of Technology SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2142542024-02-22T00:54:45Z2024-02-22T00:54:45ZChangeling warrior Robyn Davidson has never been lost. She’s a seeker with the courage to keep looking<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576605/original/file-20240219-16-1t7zcz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=15%2C83%2C5058%2C3344&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Robyn Davidson as a young woman in Alice Springs</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bloomsbury Publishing</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Most people know Robyn Davidson as the camel lady, a young woman of 27 who walked over 2,700 kilometres across Australian deserts to the sea with four camels and a dog. A journey captured in her 1980 memoir <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/78895">Tracks</a>.</p>
<p>The vivid images <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/article/rick-smolans-trek-with-tracks-from-australian-outback-to-silver-screen?loggedin=true&rnd=1708299868794">commissioned by National Geographic</a>, which beamed around the world at the time or those recalled from the 2014 film version of Tracks (starring Mia Wasikowska): how iridescent blue the ocean was on a deserted beach in Western Australia, how regal and accomplished the camels appeared in their watery playground, but most of all Davidson – brown as a nut and beautiful and something else – unflappable, warrior-like, assured.</p>
<p>I, like millions of others, adored her instantly. The story was compelling, but it was the power captured in those images that made Davidson a global celebrity. Tracks, now in its fortieth edition and published in over 20 languages, has never been out of print. But while interest in the book has never waned, few people know exactly why she spent nine months in the desert. What had drawn or taken her there.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Unfinished Woman – Robyn Davidson (Bloomsbury)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Her motivations are not mentioned in detail or are avoided in Tracks where the focus is on what she is moving within (her developing relationship with country) and toward (an unmapped future). The reasons for the journey were private. But the bullet train of people’s interest in her was already in motion. In a 2015 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ6Q5GYwKlc">interview</a> she said, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The more I tried to disappear underneath the radar, the more private I wanted to be, the more people wanted to know about it, to be involved with it somehow. And that has continued.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576606/original/file-20240219-28-ybdu9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A portrait of Davidson today." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576606/original/file-20240219-28-ybdu9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576606/original/file-20240219-28-ybdu9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576606/original/file-20240219-28-ybdu9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576606/original/file-20240219-28-ybdu9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576606/original/file-20240219-28-ybdu9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576606/original/file-20240219-28-ybdu9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576606/original/file-20240219-28-ybdu9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Robyn Davidson today.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bloomsbury Publishing</span></span>
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<p>In Unfinished Woman, Davidson’s first book in over 20 years, we come closer to knowing her. We learn about where this extraordinary self-determination came from and what propelled her into (what was for her, at least initially,) the unknown. We come to know about before. The moment happens a few pages in, when Davidson writes the astonishing line, “My mother hanged herself from the rafters of our garage, using the cord of our electrical kettle.” She then asks, “Where can I go with a sentence like that?” Where indeed. </p>
<p>Davidson, <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/after-trying-to-write-about-her-mother-s-death-robyn-had-an-epiphany-20230803-p5dtpv.html">who was 11 at the time her mother died</a>, went many places. She moved interstate at 19 and squatted in abandoned terraces in Sydney. She dated a gangster and worked as a croupier in underground, illegal gambling dens. She traversed a continent. Moved to London and lived in dingy flats and wrote Tracks. She was given a cottage to live in by novelist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Doris-Lessing">Doris Lessing</a> and spent time with the literary establishment, absorbing words but hating the pretension and the envy. </p>
<p>She followed and documented nomadic peoples in India and Tibet, developing deep connections with many women who were not as free as she was to traverse a wider earth. She “married” a Rajput prince and got to their house in the Himalayas for the first time by way of an elephant. Davidson is a beauty, but it takes a rare kind of person to be able to walk into the different arenas just described and be embraced, confided in, taken on, loved. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576607/original/file-20240219-22-gslf2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Robyn Davidson greets two Indian women in Rajastan." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576607/original/file-20240219-22-gslf2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576607/original/file-20240219-22-gslf2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576607/original/file-20240219-22-gslf2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576607/original/file-20240219-22-gslf2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576607/original/file-20240219-22-gslf2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576607/original/file-20240219-22-gslf2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576607/original/file-20240219-22-gslf2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Robyn in Rajastan circa 1990.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bloomsbury Publishing</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/tracks-a-film-that-lets-a-woman-thrive-in-the-outback-24026">Tracks, a film that lets a woman thrive in the outback</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The maelstrom</h2>
<p>Davidson’s face didn’t get her to where she needed to go – she went anyway, sometimes ill advised. Her unique philosophy and drive was formed in a defining moment she documents in Unfinished Woman a short time after her mother’s suicide where she cleaved from the world into nihilism. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I don’t know why it was on that ordinary afternoon there was a sudden shift, or breach in the appearance of things. Of things as they seem. Not a vision exactly, because nothing changed outwardly. But rather an insight that penetrated the everyday world and caved it in […] I sat down by a tree but it was no longer a tree, a life form one could feel kinship with, it was a whirlwind of energies streaming into a tree-shaped funnel […] The agreed upon world trees, leaves and people was something we draped over the top of the maelstrom to protect ourselves from the truth. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576608/original/file-20240219-29-yhjmsu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black and white photo of a mother holding her baby." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576608/original/file-20240219-29-yhjmsu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576608/original/file-20240219-29-yhjmsu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576608/original/file-20240219-29-yhjmsu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576608/original/file-20240219-29-yhjmsu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576608/original/file-20240219-29-yhjmsu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576608/original/file-20240219-29-yhjmsu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576608/original/file-20240219-29-yhjmsu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Robyn and her mother in 1950.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bloomsbury Publishing</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>From that moment, Davidson would be adrift. Some of that free-fall was monstrous and painful but mostly this understanding provided her with a portal – a connection to infinity she’d tuned into and tried so hard to make sense of, wandering with her “kind, faraway Dad” in big sky spaces in Queensland, especially at their property Malabah – evoked throughout the book like a psalm. </p>
<p>To live conventionally would have betrayed that knowledge she describes as moving inside her “like a huge snake”. Some would say to live unconventionally was a movement against her mother’s fate and the times. But it was more than that. The choice to live unbound was existential. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Continents slammed together, crumpled, melted like cheese. Stars exploded, suns collapsed to the size of fists, oceans froze or boiled away, galaxies collided, ripping each other to wisps, and nothing, nothing at all was solid, nothing held still, reality was this and only this: an apocalypse consuming itself, shitting itself out, eternal, merciless […] and where was ‘I’ in the tumult? What and where?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Davidson’s natural habitat is not singular – it is not a particular place, vocation, or family unit – though all these things have reverberated in her at times, her sense of home could not be contained for long. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I would not remain in any of these worlds: that is, make them my home. Homes were things it was necessary to escape from. If you did not leave them, what happened to future selves. If you did not leave them, you were stuck with remaining who you were.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Davidson’s natural habitat is a way of being. As such, tripping around the intricacies of her mind – the selves she describes as the “different frames” she uses to move between worlds – is at times unsettling. The chaos of thought, a life lived in discontinuous passages can leave you feeling unmoored.</p>
<p>Then there is illumination. The kind of poetic and deeply felt connection to place and sometimes, people, Davidson depicts is breathtaking. She is not looking at landscape, she is sending us missives from the inside. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>At eight thousand feet the air had a sharp quality; nothing was out of focus. Sound, particularly thunder, rolled around the slopes unmuffled. Storms could be extreme, horizontal sleet blasting from the north-eastern side, from the line of shattered white peaks along the horizon […] as well there were transformations of monsoon, when oaks grew beards of lichen; fungi fruited from earth, trees, log, dry gullies became waterfalls; leeches longed for you to pass by. Rain came down so heavily on the roof that you ducked instinctively […]</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Emotional power and sensory wonder</h2>
<p>I’m not sure I agree with critics <a href="https://www.startribune.com/tracks-writer-robyn-davidson-returns-with-memoir-of-her-mother-unfinished-woman/600323376/">who say</a> her inability to get at the crux of something, her “loss for words” is linked to her mother’s suicide – that she is trying to pick through and make sense of the subsequent trauma she carried would be only part of the story. For Davidson, her mother is a multitude of visions and contradictions – “under cement” or vividly drawn, never thought about, then thought about all the time. And while she lost her so young and ran from those memories and then struggled to reconstruct them, the writing about her mother is, in a strange convergence, full of emotional power and sensory wonder. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>In my memory there are bits of her floating around in a kind of fog – hands, smells, veins, phrases, shoes, a crocodile-skin handbag and its contents, the smell of Helena Rubenstein lipstick, a gold tooth, fine pale hairs on her arms, goosebumps, a crystal stopper being dabbed in the crook of an elbow, nervy fingers twisting rings, fingers twitching as she holds my hand […]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When it comes to representations of selfhood, Davidson is slippery, suggesting being convinced of who we are is a delusion, an exercise in narrative control she doesn’t want to enter into. It does take courage to allow yourself to fragment, and I sense a large part of Davidson has always been ephemeral, drifting, hovering at the high altitude she loved so much in her sky home in the Himalayas. Another frequency. Not really of the man-made world with its straight lines and demarcations, its restrictive real jobs and endless, mind-numbing suburbs.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-write-about-broken-trust-in-a-memoir-janine-mikoszas-homesickness-maps-trauma-in-bold-new-ways-179086">How to write about broken trust in a memoir? Janine Mikosza’s Homesickness maps trauma in bold new ways</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A struggle</h2>
<p>From the outset, Davidson signals she’s never played her cards straight in life and she’s not about to start doing so with her readers, refusing to be neatly categorised by triggering experiences or the expectations of form. In this way Davidson is being true to herself.</p>
<p>Perhaps she resisted the editorial intervention I craved because that would have created an artificial veneer, a sense of refined continuum, her life – indeed any life – does not have. To do so was a risk but Davidson is a changeling. A curlew darting between shadow spaces then suddenly still. Frozen by the notion of being watched, the strange awareness of artificial light. </p>
<p>She struggled for a long time to write this book and at times it shows. Passages written in different moments can overlap or seem incongruous, repetitions and non-linear time frames you must make sense of on your own.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The writing stalled and stalled. A hundred beginnings thrown away, pages and pages of notes stored in boxes, then forgotten. Nothing seemed quite right, or quite true, the memories too scattered, too untrustworthy. Everything I wrote was like debris in a centrifuge, at the core of which, exerting all the power, that purely mathematical point, my imaginary mother.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Is this a frustrating headspace to encounter? Certainly. And maybe this is the point – this is not a Sunday afternoon spent dipping into the juicy gossip of literary celebrity – she did once date Salman Rushdie, after all, a relationship referred to obliquely as “The Catastrophe”. </p>
<p>Unfinished Woman is confounding and moving simultaneously and that’s why this review has also been hard to write. I resisted for months. At first, I was hesitant about wrestling with an idol, but I’ve come to realise Davidson doesn’t want to be fully captured. Even by herself. Though her literary gestures would suggest otherwise. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576609/original/file-20240219-30-2rlyd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Cover of Unfinished Woman" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576609/original/file-20240219-30-2rlyd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576609/original/file-20240219-30-2rlyd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576609/original/file-20240219-30-2rlyd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576609/original/file-20240219-30-2rlyd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576609/original/file-20240219-30-2rlyd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576609/original/file-20240219-30-2rlyd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576609/original/file-20240219-30-2rlyd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bloomsbury Publishing.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Her beguiling face on the cover of this book has followed me on planes challenging me to know her. Her wry smile suggesting the more I read, the less I’d know – how this probably wouldn’t work out, despite the fact she’d written almost 300 pages telling me it would. Davidson has sat next to me in bars. Stared up at me from ornate chairs in Bali, bedside tables in dim hotel rooms in Melbourne, peeking above menus in my local cafe. I kept turning the book over. Because at least on the back cover she is not looking into my eyes.</p>
<p>I have seen reviews of Unfinished Woman or press materials riddled with throwaway lines like: this is a book about a woman who doesn’t belong anywhere – and it’s hard for me to understand that take. Why people confuse curiosity with restlessness and perpetual movement with being lost. Davidson walked across the middle of Australia and never got lost. She spent months in bed in a mental health crisis and crawled out. </p>
<p>On a ten-day pilgrimage to the peaks in the Himalayas she and her dog Malaki were stalked by a panther and she “came to understand viscerally what it means to be prey.” She built a fire, the dog in her lap and waited out the night. She has belonged profoundly and deeply to many places. Has fallen in and out of love with many people. </p>
<p>Her sense of connection is not parochial, it is not delineated or owned. It is not that Davidson doesn’t fit anywhere it is that she blends into multitudes.</p>
<p>Most people don’t fit where they stay but they stay anyway. Davidson had the courage to keep on looking. She is a seeker. A philosopher but not the ivory tower kind. She has tested her theories in open air cathedrals. In life. Go into this book without a compass and she is more than worth your time.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214254/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sally Breen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>At 27, Robyn Davidson trekked through the Australian outback with four camels and a dog. In her long-awaited memoir we come closer to knowing why she made this journey.Sally Breen, Associate Professor, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2187462024-02-20T13:14:07Z2024-02-20T13:14:07ZWomen in South Africa’s armed struggle: new book records history at first hand<p>South Africa’s young democracy was a culmination of years of sweat, blood and revolution against the apartheid regime. In the early 1960s, after decades of “<a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/1960-1966-genesis-armed-struggle">non-violence</a>” as a policy of resistance, the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) formed military wings to take the fight to the apartheid regime. </p>
<p>Based on the living record and popular discourse, it would be easy to assume that the struggle against apartheid was almost entirely the domain of men. But women played a crucial role – one which is only really coming to light today.</p>
<p>In her book <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Guerrillas-and-Combative-Mothers-Women-and-the-Armed-Struggle-in-South/Magadla/p/book/9781032597249">Guerrillas and Combative Mothers</a>, political and international studies academic <a href="https://www.ru.ac.za/politicalinternationalstudies/people/academic/profsiphokazimagadlahod/">Siphokazi Magadla</a> uses life history interviews to offer firsthand insights into women’s participation in the armed struggle against apartheid in South Africa from 1961 until 1994. She also examines the texture of their lives in the new South Africa after demobilisation.</p>
<p>Magadla interviewed women who fought with the ANC’s military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK); the PAC’s military wing, the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (Apla), formerly known as Poqo; and the paramilitary self-defence units in black urban residential areas. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573453/original/file-20240205-15-bk6g7c.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573453/original/file-20240205-15-bk6g7c.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573453/original/file-20240205-15-bk6g7c.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573453/original/file-20240205-15-bk6g7c.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573453/original/file-20240205-15-bk6g7c.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1200&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573453/original/file-20240205-15-bk6g7c.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1200&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573453/original/file-20240205-15-bk6g7c.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1200&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">UKZN Press</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As a sociologist interested in gender and sexuality, I was keen to read this book for the gendered experiences of liberation struggles. I read it alongside <a href="https://www.google.co.za/books/edition/Guns_and_Guerilla_Girls/dK1borNjTBMC?hl=en&gbpv=1">other studies</a> about <a href="https://www.google.co.za/books/edition/The_Front_Line_Runs_Through_Every_Woman/foMvd3m6KDQC?hl=en&gbpv=0">women in southern African liberation wars</a>. </p>
<p>Much of the prevalent discourse about women’s wartime participation tends to centre on one question: why do revolutions and wars fail women? This discourse tends to, for example, heavily examine women’s experiences of sexual violence and victimisation in wars. It excludes their agency and contribution to wars. </p>
<p>But Magadla’s book, as well as the feminist analyses I read to complement it, widens the lens. She wants to know why women joined the armed struggle. How did women use or play with femininity and womanhood to optimise military effectiveness? How can women’s participation broaden our understanding of combat beyond direct physical fighting? And, lastly, how do women view their involvement in the revolutions that result? </p>
<h2>Broadening the definition of combat</h2>
<p>Some may argue that the women profiled by Magadla were not combatants. Few of them engaged in direct combat; that is, physical fighting on the battlefront. But the author urges us to widen the definition of combat. </p>
<p>Citing the South African political activist and academic <a href="https://raymondsuttner.com/about/">Raymond Suttner</a>, Magadla argues that apartheid was a war with no battlefront. Instead it occupied all corners of society. It was fought in homes, schools and churches. Women guerrillas put themselves at risk in different ways and relied on creative approaches to get close to potential targets. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.parliament.gov.za/person-details/231">Thandi Modise</a>, who has served in South Africa’s parliament since 1994 and is currently the minister of defence and military veterans, is one of the women profiled in the book. She tells of carrying a handbag from which protruded a pair of knitting needles – an absolutely ordinary, nonthreatening sight – while she observed potential military targets. </p>
<p>On the rare occasions that women’s wartime participation is recognised in the wider discourse, they tend to be shown as armed revolutionaries who are, simultaneously, feminist icons. Images abound of these women soldiers toting AK47s, ready to shoot, or carrying rifles – and babies on their backs.</p>
<p>Magadla weaves in accounts throughout the book to disrupt this popular narrative. After all, it potentially erases those women who carried neither AK47s nor babies on their backs during the war for liberation. Some women hid bullets inside tampons to bring into the country for the war while others carried explosives in their purses. Some spent endless hours watching and testing for potential dangers and weaknesses in the apartheid military’s defences.</p>
<p>One example is <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275874041_The_Road_to_Democracy_South_Africans_telling_their_stories_-_Nondwe_Mankahla">Nondwe Mankahla</a>, who, while working as a distributor for the New Age newspaper, simultaneously couriered bomb equipment for political activists Govan Mbeki and Raymond Mhlaba. </p>
<h2>Soldiers, not ‘she soldiers’</h2>
<p>Throughout the book, Magadla refuses to pigeonhole the participants. She recognises that their experiences vary and analyses how the women of MK negotiated its culture of patriarchy in a way that highlights the women’s agency without romanticising their struggles. </p>
<p>Women in MK were known as “flowers of the nation” or as <em>umzana</em> (a small home) of the organisation. Some of the women found the labels, <em>umzana</em> in particular, endearing. Others felt that they diminished women’s roles. Similarly, they resisted qualifiers such as “she comrades” and “she soldiers”.</p>
<p>But they did not want to erase their femininity. Some aspects of the patriarchal culture worked to the advantage of women both inside the organisation and in their encounters with the apartheid security police during operations. Women combatants could easily manipulate their femininity to defy the guerrilla image contained in <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2019-05-27-00-the-knitting-needles-guerrilla/">government propaganda</a>.</p>
<p>During the 1980s MK staged <a href="https://www.news24.com/News24/Secret-world-of-Operation-Vula-20040331">Operation Vula</a>, a mission to bring exiled leaders back into the country. <a href="https://www.ru.ac.za/latestnews/womanveteransreflectontheirrolesinsouthafricasarmedstruggle.html">Busisiwe Jacqueline ‘Totsie’ Memela</a> successfully smuggled anti-apartheid activists Mac Maharaj and Siphiwe Nyanda into South Africa from Swaziland (Eswatini). Magadla attributes her success to a combination of her military training and dynamic use of femininity: Memela dressed as a Swati woman while observing the border around the clock. </p>
<h2>A work of theorising</h2>
<p>Guerrillas and Combative Mothers is more than just a project to name the women who dedicated their lives to liberating South Africa. It also presents different ways of theorising. It raises an interesting methodological question about seeing the limits of verbal language and the utility of silence when <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0011392104045377">dealing with traumatic events</a>. How do we analyse silence when the people’s wounds have not healed and therefore their lips remain sealed? </p>
<p>However, while Magadla’s argument is sophisticated, the language doesn’t “sweat”, <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/95923/the-language-must-not-sweat">to quote Toni Morrison</a>. It remains simple and accessible to all audiences.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218746/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Thoko Sipungu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The interviews in this book offer firsthand insights into women’s participation in the armed struggle against apartheid.Thoko Sipungu, Lecturer in Sociology, Rhodes UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2218662024-02-19T19:04:04Z2024-02-19T19:04:04Z‘I was who I wasn’t’: McKenzie Wark’s memoir of late transition envisions a less gender-restrictive world<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576367/original/file-20240219-24-miu7bl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C7%2C2404%2C1193&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">McKenzie Wark.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MackenzieWark1.jpg">BaixaCultura, via Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>McKenzie Wark is a cultural and social critic who teaches at the New School in New York. Her new memoir, <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3113-love-and-money-sex-and-death">Love and Money, Sex and Death</a>, is structured as a series of letters to people she has known: her younger self, her mother and sister, her ex-wife of 20 years, more recent lovers, some fictional people – even a god. </p>
<p>In this series of letters, Wark speaks to her past and imagines possible futures. She muses about how her life has changed since coming out as transgender in 2017 at the age of 56, but she also writes evocatively and fiercely about the loss of her mother as a child, her life and relationships in New York, and her visions for a less gender-restrictive world. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir – McKenzie Wark (Verso)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>This is a book which has a lot to say about being trans, but it deliberately avoids becoming a linear story of discovery of a “true” self. Instead, Wark shows us how a “self” is made from its relationships, through “fights and feuds”, through “covens of care”. There is a continual sense of her reconstructing herself through and with others. </p>
<p>This is conveyed in the style and form of the book. Part of the beauty of an epistolary memoir is that Wark gets to write throughout in the second person, giving the book a feeling of intimacy. The concept of “writing to a younger self” in the first and last chapters allows Wark to reconstruct a life in hindsight, retro-engineering the story to fit her late change of identity. </p>
<p>This is done with a light touch. Wark writes to her younger self as to another, someone she knows well, but who has their own problems, perspectives and choices. Stories of the past are as much “about” the present self as the facts of what actually happened. Wark writes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>When one transitions to another sex, the past comes back as if in a different medium. Memories tell not of who one was but who one wasn’t. I was who I wasn’t for the longest time. Transition brings rushes of the past back. Shots for an incomplete home movie. I had to edit memory as I edited flesh.</p>
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<p>These “edited memories” are told in ways that foreshadow, without reducing to, any story of “I was always a woman”. Wark complains that trans people are always pushed to tell essentialist stories about their gender. She presents her life as a series of encounters and experiments, which happened to turn out this way, but might have gone another. “I’m writing this to your own future, or a possible one at least,” she writes on the first page, addressing a young McKenzie.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m not going to say you are a girl, or that you always were. You’ve been reading transsexual memoirs on the sly already and not finding yourself in that ‘born in the wrong body’ story. You feel like your body is already a girl’s body. […]
Maybe some sorts of transsexual people ‘always knew’, but you didn’t. You’re always swerving, blindly falling through gender.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Wark’s vulnerability and openness about failures, letting people down, not knowing the plot, is part of the book’s aesthetic. But this does not make it a sad story, even as it canvasses death and failed love. As Jack Halberstam argues in <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-queer-art-of-failure">The Queer Art of Failure</a>, failure can open up alternate possibilities for life and love. </p>
<p>Wark is often cynical about the future: “There’s no past, no arcadia. But no future either.” All the same, the book carries the strong themes of care and desire for revolution or utopia, which make it a deeply optimistic work.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/judith-butler-their-philosophy-of-gender-explained-192166">Judith Butler: their philosophy of gender explained</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<h2>Vulnerability and receptivity</h2>
<p>While not sure she was always a woman, Wark writes that she “need[s] to feel feminine”. This does not just mean that she needs to paint her nails (although that, too). It is an overtly sexual “femme” desire: to be exposed, penetrated, made to feel her own vulnerability, openness and receptivity. </p>
<p>One of the things the book does is to enact the queer understanding that this “femme” does not need to be the property of people of any particular gender. Even though she has transitioned into womanhood, Wark maintains a deliberate blurriness about what gender means. Ultimately, she suggests, there can be more revolutionary potential in failing to live up to a single gendered identity than in trying to achieve authenticity. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wouldn’t say that being trans now is living my truth. I’d say it’s a better fiction.</p>
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<p>In the first chapter of part three, McKenzie and “Veronica”, an elegant trans woman friend, talk over lunch in an expensive New York restaurant. Amid cocktails, disagreements and speculations about the other guests’ sexuality, McKenzie presents a full-fledged theory of trans women as utopian avant-garde. </p>
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<p>The trans woman bears the burden of the absurdity of gender. She is the scapegoat for what everyone imagines they’re denied. </p>
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<p>Precisely because trans women are accused of being deceptive, Wark suggests, they can lead towards a world where people are not constantly in thrall to unattainable “true” models of gender, but instead “make our being together with reference only to each other”.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576411/original/file-20240219-22-andlwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576411/original/file-20240219-22-andlwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576411/original/file-20240219-22-andlwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=676&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576411/original/file-20240219-22-andlwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=676&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576411/original/file-20240219-22-andlwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=676&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576411/original/file-20240219-22-andlwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=850&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576411/original/file-20240219-22-andlwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=850&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576411/original/file-20240219-22-andlwy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=850&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">McKenzie Wark.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.goodreads.com/photo/author/60623.McKenzie_Wark">Goodreads</a></span>
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<p>The “Venus” chapter is addressed to a Black trans woman friend who committed suicide during COVID lockdown. It reports on the Brooklyn Liberation for Trans Lives protests for Black trans women. Here, Wark reflects that she has given up her status as a man, but become a middle-class white woman, a “Karen” (a name she had previously chosen for herself). </p>
<p>Following from the scenes in expensive New York restaurants, this (inevitably) feels a bit tokenistic at first. It finishes, though, in such a blaze of anger and ragged grief, of political will for revolution, connection and shared fate that we can glimpse a form of alliance that might be possible when the privileged are prepared to let themselves be undone. </p>
<p>The “hindsight” structure of the memoir means that the reader is always aware of time. Wark counts the years between herself and her past, herself and her future. “Your life as a woman will be brief,” she says to her younger self. “She’ll die young.”</p>
<p>In many ways this is a book about growing older. It addresses the themes of maturing and how priorities in relationships change over time: the gaining of a warmer, less anxious perspective. </p>
<p>Time was necessary for Wark to become her (if that is what she has done) self. The “trade-off with late transition” is ever-present, for better and worse. There is an insistent sense of time shortening ahead of her. But as with her sense of gender, Wark’s sense of time is fluid, often felt through music – jazz when she was younger, rave and ambient later. Time is felt in Wark’s writing, more than measured. It has a music of its own.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How long have we been here? How long are we dancing? […] We are in a pocket in time where there’s more time […] We go into weightless days, seconds, millennia. On the other side of the measure of beats is a time without measure.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576336/original/file-20240218-22-cja5ia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576336/original/file-20240218-22-cja5ia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576336/original/file-20240218-22-cja5ia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576336/original/file-20240218-22-cja5ia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576336/original/file-20240218-22-cja5ia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576336/original/file-20240218-22-cja5ia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576336/original/file-20240218-22-cja5ia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576336/original/file-20240218-22-cja5ia.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">McKenzie Wark’s new memoir is fast moving and kaleidoscopic.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nito/Shutterstock</span></span>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-essentialism-and-how-does-it-shape-attitudes-to-transgender-people-and-sexual-diversity-203577">What is essentialism? And how does it shape attitudes to transgender people and sexual diversity?</a>
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<h2>Freedom and joy</h2>
<p>Wark often assumes an educated reader. Phrases like “This was postmodern aesthetics as Oedipal break-up” will make sense to some readers, but not others. Wark draws on her career as a media theorist, but is also happy to laugh at her “weird brain labour”. There are many funny (although still sometimes painful) moments. Of the dating app Tinder, she writes:</p>
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<p>when I say I’m trans, they say it’s OK because they’re into kink. (Then ghost me.) They say they have several selves, only one of them female. (They all need a bath.)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>One of the delicious things in this book is the sense of freedom that it invokes. Wark has lived a life of experimentation, following impulses, paying little heed to social conventions. She acknowledges that, at times, this has made her unreliable or even cruel. She does not shy away from responsibility and regret. But overall there is a sense of joy: a “capacity for delight”, as she says of a lover. At heart, these letters are love letters. </p>
<p>There is always more in a book than you can convey in a review, especially a book as fast-moving and kaleidoscopic as this one. But it could perhaps be summarised as a book written from the other side of multiple processes of undoing – loss of loved ones, restructuring of the body and identity, confrontations with violence and prejudice. </p>
<p>Love and Money, Sex and Death ricochets between sparkling defiance, unravelled grief, and furious hope. It always seeks connection with the others it addresses. It combines the personal and political through a philosophy of intimate coalition, in the name of a world where all can find a home and freedom. It’s a fun, wild, devastating ride. Read it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/221866/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Love and Money, Sex and Death ricochets between sparkling defiance, unravelled grief, and furious hope.Anna Szorenyi, Lecturer in Gender Studies, University of AdelaideCambrey Payne, PhD candidate, University of AdelaideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2227602024-02-19T03:49:58Z2024-02-19T03:49:58Z‘The future has a way of finding you’: Georgia Blain’s haunting final stories reveal the fragile moments that shape us<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574887/original/file-20240212-21-d186g8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C32%2C1202%2C768&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Georgia Blain.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Scribe Publications</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>I first met Georgia Blain at The Basement. This was back in the 1990s, when the iconic underground jazz venue near Sydney’s Circular Quay still drew a vibrant, edgy crowd. We were young, in our late 20s, and had been invited to read for an event hosted by the Sydney Writers’ Festival; there to be the “bright young things”.</p>
<p>I look back and cringe at my awkward younger self, but I can see Georgia very clearly. Her pixie hairdo; her skin luminous in the semi-darkness. Georgia had a way of talking to you that was totally focused in the moment. </p>
<p>She read from her first novel, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Georgia-Blain-Closed-for-Winter-9781743313374">Closed for Winter</a> – a fictional exploration of her grief at <a href="https://theconversation.com/belvoirs-tell-me-im-here-looks-at-the-impact-of-mental-illness-on-the-whole-family-it-is-a-wrenching-and-beautiful-work-188432">the loss of her brother to schizophrenia and drug addiction</a> at an early age. It was “material”, an emotional fabric, that Georgia would be drawn back to, again and again.</p>
<p>I can’t seem to find the passage in the book, but I remember how the words felt. There’s a kind of stillness at the centre of Georgia’s writing; a grief, an absence around which the characters swirl – in scenes always shapely, poised, sharply observed and elegantly suspenseful. </p>
<p>And so, it was with a small shock that I picked up and read the posthumously published <a href="https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/we-all-lived-in-bondi-then-9781761380730">We All Lived in Bondi Then</a>, the “new” collection of short stories Georgia wrote between 2012 and 2015, before her death from cancer in December 2016. </p>
<p>The voice is familiar, elegiac, but clear-eyed. There was never any artifice, melodrama or sentimentality in Georgia or her work. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/goodbye-georgia-blain-a-brave-and-true-chronicler-of-life-70329">Goodbye Georgia Blain: a brave and true chronicler of life</a>
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<h2>Familiar preoccupations</h2>
<p>The opening story, Australia Square, is frankly magnificent, weaving together Georgia’s familiar themes and preoccupations. A baby boy goes missing, then mysteriously reappears. Years later, his sister looks back on a childish mistake – the dropping of a stuffed toy – and is gripped by the idea that if just this one thing could be corrected, then perhaps the devastating aftermath, the loss of the baby, her parents’ divorce, the breakdown of her family, her brother’s psychotic episodes, would not have followed. </p>
<p>The thought is all the more poignant because the reader suspects the future has a way of finding you, regardless.</p>
<p>In Dear Professor Brewster, a daughter grapples with the onset and inexorable progress of her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. The daughter’s finely wrought anguish is punctuated by the letters she writes to her mother’s treating doctor, who – bound by a code of medical ethics – sends only inscrutable, perfunctory replies. </p>
<p>Among the haunting stories in the collection, Ship to Shore features a mother paralysed with grief following the death of her four-year-old son. She embarks on a desperate journey down south, her visceral pain exquisitely rendered by the boom of artillery fire, as gunships practise manoeuvres on a nearby naval base. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574831/original/file-20240212-23-vc8vu3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The cover of We All Lived in Bondi Then" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574831/original/file-20240212-23-vc8vu3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574831/original/file-20240212-23-vc8vu3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574831/original/file-20240212-23-vc8vu3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574831/original/file-20240212-23-vc8vu3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574831/original/file-20240212-23-vc8vu3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574831/original/file-20240212-23-vc8vu3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574831/original/file-20240212-23-vc8vu3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodreads</span></span>
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<p>The stories in the collection are mostly written from the vantage of middle age, looking back on a life that seems to turn on some impossibly fragile occurrence, a chance encounter, or small mistake. </p>
<p>The characters that flit through the pages – the would-be actors, artists and photographers, young and ageing singers, and environmental campaigners who represent the flotsam and jetsam of inner-city Sydney life – form a familiar generational milieu. </p>
<p>The characters live in Bondi flats “two up, two down”, or dark Marrickville semis, filled with salvaged street furniture, “sagging club lounges” and “glass-topped deco coffee tables”. They dress in op shop suits with shot-silk shirts, and other recycled discoveries.</p>
<p>It’s hard not to see the ghosts of real traumas here: the death of Georgia’s brother, her mother’s Alzheimer’s, their complicated family relationships. But as Georgia’s friend the novelist Charlotte Wood writes in her exquisite introduction to the work, there’s a world of difference between writing “close to home” and “writing memoir”. These nuanced stories contain revelations for everyone.</p>
<p>This is something Georgia’s friend the writer James Bradley, quoted in the introduction, identified in Georgia’s most powerful works – from <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/births-deaths-marriages-9780143790693">Births, Deaths and Marriages</a> to <a href="https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/between-a-wolf-and-a-dog-9781761380778">Between a Wolf and a Dog</a> – as a sense of being “simultaneously more personal and more expansive”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/belvoirs-tell-me-im-here-looks-at-the-impact-of-mental-illness-on-the-whole-family-it-is-a-wrenching-and-beautiful-work-188432">Belvoir's Tell Me I'm Here looks at the impact of mental illness on the whole family. It is a wrenching and beautiful work</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>When dreams were huge</h2>
<p>Some stories in the collection seem to strike a note of nostalgia, evoking shimmering visions of younger selves at a time when dreams were huge and life felt unlimited – always up ahead, as the narrator in Still Breathing says, “the self that I was to become beckoning, waiting”.</p>
<p>But these compassionately observed stories also show the reader that there is a sort of desperate awfulness that comes from being young, what Wood, in her introduction, calls the “brutal clumsiness of youth”. This is us before life throws up its damage, and knocks us flat, or takes the edges off.</p>
<p>Characters constantly try to outrun the damage, like the mother in Last Days, whose fear that she has lost herself in the wake of motherhood, materialises as an extended suburban electrical blackout. At the end of the story, she gets into a car, and drives, trying to locate the edge of the darkness. “Just one more street,” the narrator tells herself. But the streets fly by, and “the blackness stretches forever”.</p>
<p>The edge of the darkness, rather like the metaphor of the line in Still Breathing, is an illusion. As the narrator in Still Breathing says,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is strange how often we long for life to move forward; <em>I just have to get through this</em>, we think, as though the past, with all its fears and fuck-ups and anxieties, can be completely left behind, neat, contained, never spilling over the line we imagine is waiting for us. And yet the past is always there, hovering at the edge, teasing us, reappearing when we least expect it … </p>
</blockquote>
<p>I had been a little scared of picking up this “new” collection, almost eight years after Georgia’s death. Like the narrator in Still Breathing, I could sense the memories, with all their “fears and fuck-ups and anxieties”, that might be waiting. But I was wrong.</p>
<p>What Georgia’s work offers the reader is a clear-eyed, calm compassion, a capacity to live with, and alongside, damage, trauma and unspeakable loss, and a way of staying human.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222760/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Camilla Nelson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Georgia Blain’s final, posthumous collection offers clear-eyed, calm compassion – and a capacity to live with, and alongside, damage, trauma and unspeakable loss, and a way of staying human.Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2222992024-02-02T16:25:32Z2024-02-02T16:25:32ZCompleted Dry January? Reading fiction can help newly sober mothers decide what’s next<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/572156/original/file-20240130-27-fh57zq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=88%2C35%2C5841%2C3920&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/european-girl-reading-book-drinking-tea-2124750215">WellStock/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>More people in the UK have gone dry this January <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68019470">than ever before</a>, so drinking, not drinking, and navigating a course between the two, is on many of our minds.</p>
<p>Many of those people <a href="https://alcoholstudies.rutgers.edu/women-increase-drinking-during-pandemic/#:%7E:text=Recent%20data%20show%20the%20pandemic,overall%20population%20increase%20of%2014%25.">are mothers</a>. The pandemic saw an unprecedented <a href="https://www.channel4.com/news/the-frontline-of-britains-lockdown-drink-problem-as-alcohol-deaths-soar">escalation in domestic drinking</a>. With the arrival of high-speed home delivery companies, alcohol became more readily and rapidly available than ever before. For many women juggling not just work and childcare but also homeschooling, alcohol may have seemed to offer a coping mechanism, a way to survive <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/15/smoking-weed-motherhood-son-child-habit">“the grind of motherhood”</a>.</p>
<p>If you’ve been participating in Dry January, you may be feeling relieved, proud or anxious now that the month has come to an end. If you are wondering what to do next, there are blogs, podcasts, memoirs and self-help books on hand to offer advice. But other books can also help. Fiction offers precious – sobering – insights into the impact of alcohol in the lives of women and children.</p>
<p>Two works in particular stand out. Doug Stuart’s Booker Prize winner, <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/douglas-stuart/shuggie-bain/9781529019292">Shuggie Bain</a> (2020), and the short stories of American writer <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-story-is-the-thing-on-lucia-berlin">Lucia Berlin</a> provide visceral, insider portrayals of the devastating effect of life with and – occasionally, blissfully without – drink for mothers and their children. </p>
<h2>How fiction can help</h2>
<p>What exactly do these works of fiction offer that you might not find elsewhere? Set against intimate domestic backdrops, they provide unflinching accounts of drinking as a woman and mother and where extreme addiction can take you. </p>
<p>One example comes from Lucia Berlin’s short story, Unmanageable, from the collection A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015). On waking – hyperventilating – during the night, the unnamed protagonist sets out on an unnerving trip to a liquor store to get the drink which will enable her to function. </p>
<p>She succeeds, returns home, and sets about making her children their breakfast and washing their school clothes. She is trying to hold it together and paper over the cracks and she very nearly succeeds – but the socks for her sons aren’t dry in time. </p>
<p>Unmanageable offers a glimpse of the experiences of children of alcoholics, as well as their parents. The protagonist’s sons take her bag and car keys in an effort to protect her, but are unsuccessful and must go to school sockless. </p>
<p>In Shuggie Bain, one of the things that Stuart does so brilliantly is combine and move between the experiences of the beautiful, wasted – in all senses – Agnes and her youngest son, the eponymous Shuggie. Over several hundred pages of often excruciatingly painful prose, he shows both how and why Agnes drinks and the impact of addiction on the lives of her children. This includes the astonishing range of strategies they undertake to keep her safe. </p>
<p>In Berlin’s stories it becomes clear that the same mother who heads out to the liquor store in the dead of night had also experienced the effects of drinking on her own mother and other family members when she herself was a child. Threading the stories together, the generational legacies become painfully clear.</p>
<h2>An offer of hope</h2>
<p>Neither work pulls any punches. Shuggie’s strategies are all ultimately futile. But these characters aren’t all doomed. Stuart <a href="https://news.stv.tv/entertainment/shuggie-bain-author-douglas-stuart-says-writing-booker-prize-winning-novel-called-him-home#:%7E:text=Stuart%20insists%20that%20Shuggie%20Bain,addiction%20when%20he%20was%2016.">has acknowledged</a> that aspects and characters in the book reflect his own childhood. His ability to write Shuggie’s experiences at all – as well as his successful career working in fashion in the US – suggests there is a way through. Lives can be turned around, relationships saved. </p>
<p>In another short story, So Long, Berlin describes a mundane, relaxed breakfast with her adult son: “The same son I used to steal from, who told me I wasn’t his mother.” They read the papers, chat about sport and politics, then he kisses her goodbye. “All over the world mothers are having breakfast with their sons, seeing them off at the door,” she writes. “Can they know the gratitude I felt, standing there, waving? The reprieve.”</p>
<p>One of the key insights of these works for those wondering about their own next steps is the extraordinary and often contradictory pressure exerted by what other people think. </p>
<p>Perhaps the most heartbreaking scene in Shuggie Bain occurs at a golf club restaurant where Agnes’s new partner badgers and seduces her until she finally capitulates “because it’s what normal people do”. His inability to accept her as, at that point, a 12-months sober alcoholic, and her fear of what other people think, is something Agnes never comes back from.</p>
<p>As this scene plays out, we feel with and for her: stiffening when wine is ordered, overwhelmed with tiredness and fear just before finally giving in. These aren’t works which point the finger, but which offer insights and understanding, tenderness and compassion. </p>
<h2>No perfect fix</h2>
<p>As the books themselves make clear, fiction doesn’t always work or help. Shuggie’s attempts to entertain Agnes by reading to her from Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World don’t keep her sober. But for the Lucia Berlin character in Unmanageable, literature literally saves her life:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“She was shaking too hard to stand. She lay on the floor breathing deep yoga breaths. Don’t think, God don’t think about the state you’re in or you will die, of shame, a stroke. Her breath slowed down. She started to read the titles of books in the bookcase. Concentrate, read them out loud. Edward Abbey, Chinua Achebe, Sherwood Anderson, Jane Austen, Paul Auster, don’t skip, slow down. By the time she had read the whole wall of books she was better.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ultimately then, as those who have participated in Dry January decide what comes next, looking to the world of fiction has the potential to do a lot more good than dwelling on what other people think. </p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kiera Vaclavik does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Fiction offers precious and sobering insights into the impact of alcohol in the lives of women and children.Kiera Vaclavik, Professor of Children's Literature & Childhood Culture, Queen Mary University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2197052024-02-01T19:03:35Z2024-02-01T19:03:35ZKiley Reid invites us to judge her college girls, as money, status and desire lead them into murky ethical territory<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573657/original/file-20240206-29-56el8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C41%2C3967%2C2978&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Goddard/Bloomsbury</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>At the beginning of <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/come-and-get-it-9781526632555/">Come and Get It</a>, the second novel from the Booker longlisted author of <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/such-a-fun-age-9781526612151/">Such a Fun Age</a>, college student Tyler presses $20 on Millie, her resident assistant. Millie, whose job it is to look after the students in the dorm, has helped Tyler sort out an awkward interpersonal situation. </p>
<p>Tyler’s roommate, Kennedy, has filled her side of their dorm room with an immense amount of stuff. Tyler doesn’t know how to talk to her about it, so Millie deftly assists with a roommate switch.</p>
<p>Millie doesn’t exactly accept the money. Indeed, she tries to refuse it several times. But it ends up in her possession anyway. This becomes, in many ways, the beginning of an internal schism – between who she thinks she is and how she is read by the people around her. When taking this $20 bill comes back to haunt her, this schism will become eminently clear.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Come and Get It – Kiley Reid (Bloomsbury)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>On the surface, Come and Get It is a book about money. It has three perspective characters, each with a different, multilayered relationship to money. </p>
<p>Millie, the resident assistant who accepted the fateful $20, is one of the few Black students in her dorm at the University of Arkansas. She’s working as hard as possible (and at as many jobs as possible) to achieve her goal of home ownership, “after becoming mildly addicted to TV shows featuring tiny houses and youngish owners”.</p>
<p>Kennedy is one of Millie’s residents, a perpetually lonely undergraduate who uses trips to Target – a place which feels like “home” to her – as a way of coping with the lack of connection with her peers (hence the overstuffed dorm room). </p>
<p>Agatha is a visiting professor to the university who becomes fascinated with students’ relationships to money while conducting a research focus group about weddings with students in Millie’s dorm. She starts paying Millie – meaningfully, in $20 bills – to listen in to the dorm residents’ talk every Thursday night, which becomes the basis of several pieces she publishes (without telling Millie or any of the students she’s eavesdropping on) in Teen Vogue.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/572064/original/file-20240130-27-scufj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C17%2C3955%2C3395&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Smiling Black woman in profile with black turtleneck and ponytail" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/572064/original/file-20240130-27-scufj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C17%2C3955%2C3395&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/572064/original/file-20240130-27-scufj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572064/original/file-20240130-27-scufj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572064/original/file-20240130-27-scufj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572064/original/file-20240130-27-scufj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=656&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572064/original/file-20240130-27-scufj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=656&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572064/original/file-20240130-27-scufj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=656&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">On the surface, Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It is a book about money.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Goddard/Bloomsbury</span></span>
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<h2>Questions of identity</h2>
<p>The Teen Vogue pieces are a neat illustration of some of the broader questions the book grapples with – questions about money, yes, but also questions about identity. </p>
<p>Agatha renders these pieces as if they were interviews; however, they are in fact caricatures, cobbled together from out-of-context, cherry-picked quotes from both the initial focus group Agatha conducted and from things she overheard while eavesdropping from Millie’s room. </p>
<p>Agatha is aware what she’s doing is wrong: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It did feel unfair to paint the young women with a two-dimensional sheen [… She] knew firsthand that Tyler, Casey, and Jenna were not composed solely of pull quotes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She even vaguely intends to correct it: “the <em>book</em> book, that was where she would right her current wrongs. That was where she’d interview college women the right way, under the umbrella of a signed release.”</p>
<p>But as the interviews become more and more popular, the lure of their success – and the accompanying social media followers and royalties bump for her older books – proves too great, and she starts to push the ethical boundaries even further.</p>
<p>Yet despite her actions, Agatha’s image of herself does not change. Even when she starts sleeping with Millie – an undergraduate student 14 years younger than her – she continues to justify it to herself, so as to maintain her self-image as an ethical scholar. </p>
<p>Yes, she’s sleeping with <em>a</em> student, but not <em>her</em> student. Yes, Millie is younger than her, but she’s not <em>that</em> young. Yes, there’s a power differential, but honestly, it’s not as bad as you think (which, <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/kiley-reid-come-and-get-it-review-b2481591.html">as another reviewer has aptly noted</a>, is a common preoccupation of professors sleeping with students in campus novels, though those professors are usually men). </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/beyond-oxbridge-and-yale-popular-stories-bring-universities-to-life-we-need-more-of-them-in-australia-168943">Beyond Oxbridge and Yale: popular stories bring universities to life — we need more of them in Australia</a>
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<h2>Judging the characters</h2>
<p>“Show, don’t tell” is an incredibly common piece of storytelling advice (a blunt instrument, yes, but certainly one I’ve used in my creative writing classroom and will probably use again). Come and Get It digs into the gap between the two concepts. The novel is fascinated by versions of the self – the narrative of the self we tell to ourselves, versus the version of ourselves others read from what we show them through our actions.</p>
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<p>It would be tempting to read this slippage as an invitation to pass judgement on the characters. Indeed, at many points, it is impossible not to – we are, after all, readers, and these characters are there to be read. </p>
<p>For example, I, a female academic of approximately Agatha’s age who uses many similar research methods, had some extremely strong opinions about her ethics (and lack thereof). When she is confronted about her unethical behaviour towards the end of the book, I found it immensely satisfying. </p>
<p>Likewise, it is very difficult not to feel sympathy for Millie – to believe in the version of herself she has in her mind, rather than the image a dispassionate list of her actions would create. This is particularly true when the whiteness of the people around her is cast in sharp relief: there are facets to her identity that her white friends, however well-meaning, simply cannot parse.</p>
<p>And there is perhaps no greater invitation for the reader to pass judgement than with Kennedy. For the first half of the book, she is easily the least interesting of the three perspective characters – a lonely college student worried about making friends, unsure how to reach out to the three students Agatha is busy turning into caricatures in Teen Vogue.</p>
<p>At about the midpoint, though, the horrifying reason Kennedy transferred from her old university is made clear. Despite Kennedy’s mother emphatically telling her that she is “not a bad person”, we as readers are inevitably provoked to form our own opinion.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/girlhood-misery-bullying-and-beauty-combine-for-laura-elizabeth-woolletts-unlikeable-west-coast-girls-211427">Girlhood misery, bullying and beauty combine for Laura Elizabeth Woollett's 'unlikeable' west-coast girls</a>
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<h2>People are complicated</h2>
<p>But the point here is not deciding whether characters are good or bad, moral or immoral, their actions justified or unjustified. The point is – perversely – a simple one: <em>it’s complicated</em>.</p>
<p>One of the things Agatha notes about Millie is that she is gifted at impressions. For instance, when Agatha asks her what the students she’s eavesdropping on mean when they talk about “believers”, Millie does the following impression of “a cool, nature-y Christian person who is … probably white”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So, Agatha. Listen. Can I talk to you for a second? God’s really putting Hannah on my heart this week … The other day? […] And keep this between you and me – but the other day she did blah blah blah? And yeah, it just wasn’t the sweet Hannah that we know. And I need to figure out a way to hold her accountable while I do my best to shower her with grace. But I also want to start asking important questions, like, is this a godly friendship? Is she going through a rough season? And maybe she is! And that’s okay. But if that’s the case, is my birthday weekend at Hilton Head the best place for her to do that?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Millie’s ability to do comedic impersonations is one of the things Agatha finds most appealing about her – perhaps unsurprising, given she’s essentially in the business of comedic impersonations herself, with her Teen Vogue pieces. </p>
<p>But it’s also symptomatic of the broader theme running through the book: the tension between who people are (complex, three-dimensional) and who we interpret them to be (frequently stereotypes or caricatures, because we lack key pieces of context). </p>
<p>This is a book liberally peppered with similes and comparisons. “She looked like the kind of person who slept eight hours every night”, “she looked like any of the redheaded celebrities when their names were put into search engines with <em>grocery store</em> or <em>no makeup</em>”, “he had the complexion of a person who loves ‘being out on the lake’”. These approximations are a sentence-level demonstration of the impossibility of capturing the complexity of a whole human being. </p>
<p>Tellingly, the first time Agatha meets Millie, she interprets her as a caricature of her job: “she looked like an adult poking fun at campus life, someone dressing like an RA for Halloween”.</p>
<h2>Life under capitalism</h2>
<p>There is no denying Come and Get It is a book about money. The crisply folded $20 bill is hardly the only financial motif. However, in many ways, the characters’ relationships to money are some of their most legible attributes. </p>
<p>Millie is painstakingly saving it, in order to buy a house. Kennedy spends it in order to make herself feel better. Agatha is financially secure, but not so secure she cannot be capable of irritation at her ex-partner’s financial cavalierness, and profoundly tempted by the money Teen Vogue offers her.</p>
<p>This is interesting, but perhaps not particularly revelatory, especially when it comes to the murky ethical territory money leads the characters into. Life under capitalism is complicated. We know this.</p>
<p>The ways this book considers the gulf between the version of ourselves in our own minds and the one read by other people, though, are fascinating – making it a worthy follow-up to Such a Fun Age. </p>
<p>People are fundamentally, and perhaps ungraspably, complicated – something Reid does a substantially better job of capturing in this book than Agatha does in her Teen Vogue pieces.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219705/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jodi McAlister does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Kiley Reid’s follow-up to her Booker longlisted debut is a novel about money. But it’s most interesting when it explores the gap between our imagined selves and what our actions reveal.Jodi McAlister, Senior Lecturer in Writing, Literature and Culture, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2202212024-01-30T19:10:03Z2024-01-30T19:10:03ZAt a time of defensive wars of aggression, what constitutes ethical violence?<p>As the title suggests, <a href="https://www.transcript-publishing.com/author/bordoni-carlo-320001319/">Carlo Bordini’s</a> <a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Ethical+Violence-p-9781509561032">Ethical Violence</a> studies the ways different forms of violence – especially but not only, war – come to be accepted as morally legitimate. </p>
<p>The book builds on the Italian sociologist and journalist’s <a href="https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/carlo-bordoni/1772601/">prior work</a> examining social forces and changes unfolding in modern times.</p>
<p>For Bordoni, “ethical violence” is violence that, though dangerous, has become legitimised and accepted by a community as permissible or even necessary. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Ethical Violence – Carlo Boldini (Polity)</em></p>
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<p>Bordoni explores the horrors of Nazi Germany and considers the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While the book does not touch on the current conflagrations in the Middle East, these provide all-too-clear examples of brutality that is accepted and even celebrated by different sides.</p>
<p>It is a basic moral tenet and enduring concept in ethics that life is sacred and worthy of respect. So how might the known, intentional killing of thousands of human beings, such as in a war, be morally accepted? Or even seen as rational?</p>
<p>Bordoni surveys a myriad of hypotheses, traversing sociology, philosophy, political theory, history, legal theory and the social sciences. He brings into discussion thinkers as diverse as <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-nietzsche-nihilism-and-reasons-to-be-cheerful-130378">Friedrich Nietzsche</a>, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weber/">Max Weber</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-ideas-of-foucault-99758">Michel Foucault</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt">Carl Schmitt</a>, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/">Hannah Arendt</a>, <a href="https://stevenpinker.com/">Steven Pinker</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Zygmunt-Bauman">Zygmunt Bauman</a>.</p>
<p>The German sociologist Weber, for instance, viewed war as a beneficial catalyst for change. German philosopher <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Georg-Simmel">Georg Simmel</a> speculated on war’s capacity to create valuable internal cohesion among nation states. </p>
<p>Sifting through various views, Bordoni reflects that even in a single case there may be multiple answers. Leaders may have rational reasons (moral or self-interested) for going to war. Yet solidarity, heightened emotion and even irrationality might also be required to ignite the popular will to wage war, with all its sacrifices and brutalities.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/israel-palestinian-conflict-is-the-two-state-solution-now-dead-221967">Israel-Palestinian conflict: is the two-state solution now dead?</a>
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<h2>Self defence</h2>
<p>The late 20th century saw the fitful development of the view that wars must not be fought for a state’s general political or economic interests, but only in self-defence. As Bordoni observes, this shut the front door to war only to allow it in through the back. Today, he writes, “we only have defensive wars”.</p>
<p>The current conflagrations in the Middle East support Bordoni’s insight. Israel and Hamas, the United States and Yemen, Iran and Pakistan: all these very different conflicts are, in the eyes of those fighting them, defensive wars. Each side sees itself as justifiably responding to a past or present attack. </p>
<p>Even Russia dubiously justified its invasion of Ukraine by claiming it was <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230127-putin-blasts-neo-nazis-in-ukraine-on-holocaust-remembrance-day">defending citizens against “Nazis”</a>, describing <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/28/nato-expansion-war-russia-ukraine">NATO’s expansion</a> as “a serious provocation”.</p>
<p>Bordoni’s work helps us understand the many reasons why societies might adopt a war footing. It is less useful, though, in trying to think through the ethics of these conflicts, if by ethics we mean what we <em>should</em> do.</p>
<p>Bordoni suggests that if we truly acknowledged the ethical value of all human life (including that of our enemies), war would not be possible.</p>
<p>He draws on Judith Butler’s idea of “<a href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/2339-judith-butler-precariousness-and-grievability">grievability</a>”, where communities determine whose deaths are appropriately mourned. Some lives will not be seen as valued and their deaths not worthy of grieving. If all lives were recognised as grievable, Bordoni argues, it would be impossible to accept war’s human costs. </p>
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<em>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-what-else-should-i-lose-to-survive-the-young-writers-living-and-dying-in-gaza-219806">Friday essay: 'what else should I lose to survive?' The young writers living – and dying – in Gaza</a>
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<p>But Bordoni’s argument here seems flawed on two important counts.</p>
<p>First, it is not necessary to dehumanise someone to decide they must be killed. It is entirely possible to cleave to a moral principle – such as everyone’s right to life – and at the same time to <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25482401">neutralise</a> the principle’s applicability in the present case. </p>
<p>This can be done in selective and hypocritical ways. Our ingenious human brains can confect reasons why this case is an exception to a rule we otherwise righteously acknowledge. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine presents a plausible example. Russia never claimed state sovereignty was meaningless or Ukrainian citizens deserve to be slaughtered. Instead, its claims about Nazis and NATO sought to show the Ukrainian context created an exception to the widely accepted prohibition on military aggression.</p>
<p>Second, there is one case where that “exception” does seem justified, namely, in genuine cases of self-defence. Most contemporary ethical thought – in particular “<a href="https://iep.utm.edu/justwar/">just war theory</a>” – allows the use of war, and even collateral damage, in self defence against aggressors.</p>
<p>This is an important point: “ethical violence” is not merely a sociological process of building popular legitimacy for mass violence (Bordoni’s focus). It is also the demand to temper our violence until it can pass ethical muster. This involves providing strictures on when actions like war are permissible (the “<a href="https://www.icrc.org/en/document/what-are-jus-ad-bellum-and-jus-bello-0%EF%BB%BF">jus ad bellum</a>” of just war theory). It also requires respecting laws like the Geneva Conventions and the <a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africa-has-made-its-genocide-case-against-israel-in-court-heres-what-both-sides-said-and-what-happens-next-221017">Genocide Convention</a>, that protect civilians during war (the “<a href="https://www.icrc.org/en/war-and-law/ihl-other-legal-regmies/jus-in-bello-jus-ad-bellum#:%7E:text=International%20humanitarian%20law%2C%20or%20jus,Read%20more">jus in bello</a>”).</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-should-we-think-about-war-understanding-just-war-theory-40321">How should we think about war? Understanding Just War Theory</a>
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</p>
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<p>Still, a counter argument here is that, while genuine claims of self-defence are pivotal in ethical decisions to visit violence on others, it may be that the social and psychological weight of actually inflicting the brutal violence demanded by war requires a dehumanised and hated foe. </p>
<p>If this is the case, even the most justified war carries a profound moral risk. We must demean the enemy, seeing human beings as obstacles requiring elimination, rather than intrinsic sources of value.</p>
<h2>Modernity and mass violence</h2>
<p>How is it that modernity – since the Enlightenment – has not consigned war and terrorism to the barbaric past? Bordoni develops a complex picture of modernity – or rather <em>modernities</em>, following Israeli sociologist <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Multiple-Modernities/Eisenstadt/p/book/9780765809261">Shmuel Eisenstadt</a> in seeing a series of sociological and economic upheavals over recent centuries. These included the creation of state sovereignty, the rise of reason and science, industrialisation and the proliferation of technology. </p>
<p>To these we must add the crises of modernity in recent decades, with its values of progress, human equality and rationality being questioned. </p>
<p>Bordoni sees our current times as characterised by a push back against rationality and science, with the embrace of emotions (including resentment). We take rationality for granted, he warns, but in truth it is a cultural achievement – a “precious plant”.</p>
<p>Even so, Bordoni cautions against the comfortable view the excesses of 20th century violence were departures from modernity. For modernity promises an orderly, standardised world, governed and controlled by precise rules to achieve conformity, security, safety and prosperity. This demand for control and perfection characterises the totalitarian impulse. Totalitarianism inevitably produces enormous violence. </p>
<p>Bordoni’s book is intellectually refreshing in its willingness to marshal many different ideas and to resist definitively choosing one theory or approach over another. But this very feature can make Ethical Violence a challenging and at times frustrating read. The book doesn’t have a central driving thesis or overarching argument the author systematically pursues. Many ideas are raised, briefly discussed, then left aside.</p>
<p>Bordoni’s sociological and historical approach helps the reader stand back from the headlines to consider the modern world’s large-scale structures and disruptions.</p>
<p>He gathers disparate threads together meaningfully, allowing us to recognise key changes and see our present moment anew: a time when, he suggests, technology is trusted but science is not and emotion and individuality have superseded rationality and competence.</p>
<p>Yet there are worries with this broad-brush approach. A focus on the differences across generations and centuries can obscure the continuities. It can also simplify. After all, in every era there are dissenting voices and rival movements. Modern societies – like, perhaps, all societies – have threads of rationality and irrationality, domains where emotion is praised and times when it is repressed.</p>
<p>As a result, a very different story of modernity could be told, arguing modernity actually represents the dawning awareness we must <em>relinquish</em> control and <em>divide</em> power. After all, modernity gave us the toleration valorised by <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/">Locke</a> and <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voltaire/">Voltaire</a>. The distrust of government that delivered the US Constitution. The elaboration of the <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2856877">separation of powers</a> and democratic accountability. John Stuart Mill’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Liberty">celebration of human diversity</a>. And the creation of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/07/what-has-the-un-achieved-united-nations">institutions</a> (such as the United Nations), developed not to build heaven on earth, but merely to save us from hell.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/criticism-of-western-civilisation-isnt-new-it-was-part-of-the-enlightenment-104567">Criticism of Western Civilisation isn't new, it was part of the Enlightenment</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<h2>A sweeping work</h2>
<p>In Bordoni’s book, “ethical violence” is a recurring theme rather than a singular focus. He engages in many intriguing discussions. It is impossible in a review to even mention the myriad ideas he raises. Indeed, in the book’s final chapter, the topic of ethical violence is entirely left behind, as Bordoni ruminates on technology, science, rationality, human individuality, loneliness and alienation.</p>
<p>Still, Ethical Violence is a valuable book for those who want their thinking to be challenged and enriched, to reflect on the modern condition, and to consider where we might all be heading.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/220221/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hugh Breakey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>How can violence be viewed as ethical? Carlo Bordoni’s new book helps us understand why societies go to war and how they justify it.Hugh Breakey, Deputy Director, Institute for Ethics, Governance & Law. President, Australian Association for Professional & Applied Ethics., Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2203252024-01-29T19:05:26Z2024-01-29T19:05:26ZDassi Erlich and her sisters were ‘easy pickings for predators’. With their abuser Malka Leifer’s conviction – and a new book – they take control<p>Dassi Erlich was groomed and abused from when she was in year ten, by the principal of her Ultra-Orthodox Jewish school, who knew about her difficult home life. Last year, after a 15-year campaign, her abuser, Malka Leifer, who had fled to Israel, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/24/malka-leifer-jailed-child-sex-abuse-sentence-school-principal-15-years">was tried and sentenced</a>, convicted of 18 charges of sexual abuse against Erlich and her sister, Elly. (She was acquitted of charges involving a third Erlich sister, Nicole.)</p>
<p>At the very end of Dassi Erlich’s account of abuse, trauma, and recovery through the slowly grinding mills of justice, she lists places where those who experience abuse may find help: including <a href="https://kidshelpline.com.au/">Kids Helpline</a>, <a href="https://www.lifeline.org.au/">Lifeline</a> and <a href="https://www.wlsa.org.au/">Women’s Legal Services</a>. </p>
<p>But when her need was most acute, Erlich could not have contacted any of these services. She had absorbed the message that contact with the world outside her family’s enclosed community was a sin.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: In Bad Faith – Dassi Erlich with Ellen Whinnett (Hachette)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>As the <a href="https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/">Royal Commission into Institutional Abuse</a> has revealed, coercive control comes easily to patriarchal institutions – and Melbourne’s Adass Israel community is particularly patriarchal and controlling. </p>
<h2>Adass Israel ‘evokes 19th-century Europe’</h2>
<p>As with most ultra-Orthodox Judaism, <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/adass-jeshurun-adass-jisroel">Adass Israel</a> originated in 19th-century Europe as a conservative reaction to liberal secularism. The cut of the men’s black silk coats worn with white shirts, and their mink hats, come from that time and place. </p>
<p>The Australian congregation was only formed in 1939, but the tiny enclave within East St Kilda and Ripponlea where Melbourne’s Adass Israel community lives effectively evokes 19th-century Europe. </p>
<p>Its members live without television, radio or secular newspapers. Internet access and telecommunications are strictly regulated. Lives revolve around the synagogue and festivals of faith. Most of the approximately 250 families are descended from immigrants who arrived as Holocaust survivors in the years after World War II. That collective memory colours responses to any perceived threat.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570783/original/file-20240123-19-btnti9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570783/original/file-20240123-19-btnti9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570783/original/file-20240123-19-btnti9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570783/original/file-20240123-19-btnti9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570783/original/file-20240123-19-btnti9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570783/original/file-20240123-19-btnti9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570783/original/file-20240123-19-btnti9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570783/original/file-20240123-19-btnti9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The ultra-Orthodox community Dassi Erlich (pictured) grew up evokes 19th-century Europe.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Hachette Australia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In this community, Erlich’s family were outsiders. Her parents had joined a generation later, as converts to Orthodoxy after emigrating from England. She notes that as a result, “my mother was on a mission to prove her worth to the Adass community”.</p>
<p>The children suffered for her ambition, and from her unpredictable rages and punishments. Erlich writes that from a young age, she realised her mother’s rage “had no rhyme or reason, no trigger we could predict”. On one memorable occasion, her mother cut the faces from her daughters’ dolls, as they were “idols”. The children were punished by being deprived of food and even the ability to go to the toilet at night. </p>
<p>The community’s rules are many. Women’s dresses have long sleeves, while thick stockings cover their legs. Wigs or scarves conceal their hair. Modesty is all. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/613_commandments">613 commandments</a> extracted from the Torah govern every aspect of daily life, including the timing of sexual relations between married couples. There is no birth control. Large families are the norm. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570772/original/file-20240123-23-77i0s4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570772/original/file-20240123-23-77i0s4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570772/original/file-20240123-23-77i0s4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1352&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570772/original/file-20240123-23-77i0s4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1352&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570772/original/file-20240123-23-77i0s4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1352&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570772/original/file-20240123-23-77i0s4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1699&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570772/original/file-20240123-23-77i0s4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1699&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570772/original/file-20240123-23-77i0s4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1699&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Dassi at her wedding, aged 19.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Hachette Australia</span></span>
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<p>People marry young, shortly after the legal age of consent. Marriages are arranged via matchmakers, and couples have few meetings before their wedding. Erlich writes that the first time she had an unsupervised conversation with her former husband, Shua Erlich, was on their wedding day. </p>
<p>Such is the fear of contamination by gender, unrelated girls and boys do not mix after they turn three. At the school for girls, the modified curriculum teaches to keep the commandments, to be good wives and mothers, to obey both future husbands and the religious authorities. Descriptions of animal or human reproductive organs are off the agenda. </p>
<p>In adolescence, Dassi Erlich became upset at the way her father would grab her and hold her close to his body, but did not understand either his motivation or her response.</p>
<p>Such children are vulnerable, easy pickings for predators. The Erlich sisters, with their difficult mother, were especially so.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/malka-leifer-found-guilty-of-sexual-abuse-of-former-students-199582">Malka Leifer found guilty of sexual abuse of former students</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘It was just a woman’</h2>
<p>When Dassi Erlich was in year nine, <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/court-told-of-principals-plea-to-alleged-abuse-victim-20150507-ggwb1q.html">in December 2002</a>, a new principal was appointed to the girls’ school. Malka Leifer had come from Israel with excellent references and appeared to be everything this devout congregation could desire. Erlich writes of “the respect and awe” the schoolgirls felt in the presence of this charismatic woman, who exuded authority. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570778/original/file-20240123-23-hpx2yr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570778/original/file-20240123-23-hpx2yr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570778/original/file-20240123-23-hpx2yr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=828&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570778/original/file-20240123-23-hpx2yr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=828&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570778/original/file-20240123-23-hpx2yr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=828&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570778/original/file-20240123-23-hpx2yr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1041&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570778/original/file-20240123-23-hpx2yr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1041&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570778/original/file-20240123-23-hpx2yr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1041&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Dassi as an Adass Israel school student.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Hachette Australia</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>At first, the child was thrilled to be noticed, to be singled out for particular attention, to be told she was “special” and not stupid. Her mother was flattered when Leifer offered to give her daughter private lessons out of school hours, to advance her religious education.</p>
<p>Erlich wrote of these “lessons” that “I never found my words” to object to the continuing assaults on her body. She lacked the language, the knowledge or the power to speak out. The account of her inability to escape is hard to read, but is also hard to stop reading. The abuse only ended with her wedding, in September 2006, when she was 19. Its consequences never ended.</p>
<p>It was only some years later, when she was in Israel and being counselled for her ongoing depression, that Erlich recognised what had happened to her. She then discovered two of her sisters had also been abused, under similar circumstances. Without language, without knowledge, they had not been able to confide in each other.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/">Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse</a> uncovered that when abuse is discovered, the standard response of many religious institutions is to conceal the evidence. It is hardly surprising the Adass community reacted to the news of the principal’s criminal behaviour in the same way.</p>
<p>In 2008, Leifer vanished overnight from both the school and Australia – before any formal complaint could be made. When the issue was raised, the rabbi’s response was: “Mrs Leifer should not be considered guilty of any crime as there has been no investigation.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570774/original/file-20240123-29-vhbibo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570774/original/file-20240123-29-vhbibo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570774/original/file-20240123-29-vhbibo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570774/original/file-20240123-29-vhbibo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570774/original/file-20240123-29-vhbibo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570774/original/file-20240123-29-vhbibo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570774/original/file-20240123-29-vhbibo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570774/original/file-20240123-29-vhbibo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">At first, Dassi Erlich (back row, face featured) was thrilled to be noticed by her school principal, Malka Leifer (front row, far right).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Hachette Australia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Given the circumstances, it is hardly surprising Erlich suffered from recurring mental health issues in the following years. Her religion controlled every aspect of her life, but could not save her from being raped. One rabbi, on hearing of Leifer’s acts of abuse, said, “What’s the big deal? It was just a woman.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/holy-womans-fleshy-feminist-spiritual-pilgrimage-is-a-warning-against-religious-coercive-control-185388">Holy Woman's fleshy, feminist spiritual pilgrimage is a warning against religious coercive control</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Unrestrained power, control and authority</h2>
<p>In the way it charts her pathway towards healing, <a href="https://www.hachette.com.au/dassi-erlich/in-bad-faith-inside-a-secret-ultra-orthodox-sect-and-the-brutal-betrayal-it-tried-to-hide">In Bad Faith</a> becomes more than an indictment of a fundamentalist misogynist sect. There are heroes as well as villains. </p>
<p>When Erlich becomes suicidal after the birth of her daughter, her husband’s liberal Jewish father pays for her admission to the <a href="https://www.ramsaymentalhealth.com.au/albertroad">Albert Road psychiatric clinic</a>. She gives full credit to both her therapists and her fellow patients as she maps her slow walk to self-realisation and the need to reject the rules she had always lived by.</p>
<p>The end of her marriage was inevitable, as were her many missteps on the way to freedom. But her stumbles are relatively minor compared to the trauma she experienced.</p>
<p>In enclosed sects, whatever their complexion, those who leave and speak out against misbehaviour are shunned, often losing all contact with their families. In this, Dassi Erlich is fortunate: her siblings have always stood with her. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570780/original/file-20240123-27-twlqdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570780/original/file-20240123-27-twlqdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570780/original/file-20240123-27-twlqdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570780/original/file-20240123-27-twlqdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570780/original/file-20240123-27-twlqdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570780/original/file-20240123-27-twlqdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570780/original/file-20240123-27-twlqdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570780/original/file-20240123-27-twlqdn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Erlich sisters always stood together. Here, they’re pictured on a visit to Israel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Hachette Australia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Their support was essential when she eventually made a formal complaint to the Victorian police and initiated a civil case against the school. By quoting extensively from the court’s judgement, Erlich makes clear that the formal, legal acknowledgement of the crime committed against her was just as important to her healing as the record damages she was awarded.</p>
<p>The response of the Orthodox Jewish community to the truths exposed by Erlich and her siblings was as expected. As well as abusive phone calls and online trolling, there has been a subtle public relations campaign. </p>
<p>In 2016, a year after the judge in Erlich’s civil case ruled that “Leifer’s appalling misconduct […] was built on this position of unrestrained power, control and authority that had been bestowed on her by the Board”, Adass Israel was the subject of a television documentary, <a href="https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/the-screen-guide/t/strictly-jewish-2016/33836/">Strictly Jewish</a>. </p>
<p>This sanitised account of the community blithely dismisses the abuse as an unfortunate event, quickly excised. At the time the documentary was aired, members of the Adass community were continuing to actively financially support Leifer, who was living free in Israel.</p>
<h2>Global quest for justice</h2>
<p>In 2014, when Malka Leifer was first arrested, Australian authorities had a reasonable expectation she would soon be extradited to face trial. Instead, she was released from custody, feigning a mental illness that had turned her into a zombie-like state. There is a certain irony in a perpetrator masquerading as being mentally ill, after inflicting enduring pain on the minds of her victims.</p>
<p>The book details the behaviour of Israeli medical, legal and political figures in their efforts to prevent Leifer from facing trial. Medical reports were falsified, <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/litzman-gets-minor-fine-no-jail-for-shielding-alleged-pedophile-leifer-from-justice/">the Israeli minister for health was implicated</a> in corruption of due process. Leifer was one of their own. </p>
<p>It is hard not to contrast the crude tribalism of the Israeli political establishment with that of the Australian one. Jewish politicians, both Liberal and Labor, led their colleagues in supporting the sisters’ quest to bring Malka Leifer to judgement. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570776/original/file-20240123-19-bz731n.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570776/original/file-20240123-19-bz731n.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570776/original/file-20240123-19-bz731n.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570776/original/file-20240123-19-bz731n.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570776/original/file-20240123-19-bz731n.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570776/original/file-20240123-19-bz731n.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570776/original/file-20240123-19-bz731n.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570776/original/file-20240123-19-bz731n.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Australian Jewish politicians, including Josh Burns (pictured) supported the sisters’ quest for justice.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Hachette Australia</span></span>
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<p>Malcolm Turnbull <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/31/malka-leifer-how-a-long-running-child-sexual-abuse-case-tested-australias-relationship-with-israel">formally raised the scandal</a> of Leifer’s protected status in a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu. When the extradition case stalled, the Australian parliament, in a motion jointly moved by Josh Burns, Dave Sharma and Anthony Albanese, unanimously called for Mrs Leifer to be returned to face trial. Our diplomats made it clear her presence was required.</p>
<p>Erlich’s account of how her predator was <a href="https://theconversation.com/malka-leifer-found-guilty-of-sexual-abuse-of-former-students-199582">eventually brought to justice</a> shows how well these siblings learnt to work with the once unfamiliar outlet of social media. After their Facebook group was trolled by Leifer’s supporters, they established a Twitter thread, #bringleiferback. </p>
<p>This became a conduit for supporters in Israel to reveal more information, including evidence Malka Leifer had been appointed to the school in Australia after similar acts of abuse in Israel. </p>
<p>Supporters infiltrated the enclosed Israeli community where Leifer was living, using concealed cameras to show the falsity of the claims made about her ill health. After the footage was sent to Interpol, she was re-arrested.</p>
<p>Although the extradition, trial and conviction of Malka Leifer was a group effort, full credit for bringing her to justice must go to the sisters – Dassi Erlich, Elly Sapper and Nicole Meyer. In their single-minded pursuit of their abuser, they are like <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Furies">the Furies</a>, Ancient Greece and Rome’s goddesses of vengeance, hunting down those who have committed evil. </p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-extradition-between-countries-and-how-does-it-work-124637">Explainer: what is extradition between countries and how does it work?</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<p>This is a very self-aware memoir: Erlich and her sisters know they need to take control of their own narrative. They’ve worked with local and international media to ensure their story – of abuse and the protection of the guilty – is fully exposed.</p>
<p>In Bad Faith is itself a part of this process of shaping the narrative – not the least because a draft of the manuscript became a document in the criminal trial. Dassi Erlich gives due credit to both her editor Ellen Whinnett, who is rightly credited as a co-author, and to the many others who helped her find her words. But this is her book, and one to be proud of.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/220325/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joanna Mendelssohn has in the past received funding from the Australian Research Council</span></em></p>Dassi Erlich details the crime, the cover-up and her eventual victory in court against Malka Leifer, the former school principal who abused her.Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2197002024-01-28T19:03:43Z2024-01-28T19:03:43ZMaid author Stephanie Land reveals the ‘constant, crushing’ panic of her hungriest year, but this college memoir is ‘emptier’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573656/original/file-20240206-27-poso37.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3594%2C2392&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Margaret Qualley as Alex in Maid</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ricardo Hubbs/Netflix</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s 2014, her senior year of college. Stephanie Land, bestselling author of <a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/stephanie-land/maid/9780316505116/">Maid</a>, is almost 35, still two years away from landing the publishing deal that will change her life.</p>
<p>A single parent of a six-year-old, she gulps coffee from an empty peanut-butter jar in college classes and struggles to stay awake after kindergarten drop-off. Before the year is out, she’ll be pregnant again, her circumstances infinitely harder.</p>
<p>Land’s mind is always somewhere else. <em>Rent. Bills. Groceries. Medicine, if the budget will stretch that far. An abusive ex-partner who’s stingy with child support.</em></p>
<p>“It’s pretty relentless”, a college professor remarks dismissively in the feedback on one of Land’s life-writing assignments, a quibble that “throbs” in the aspiring author’s head for days afterwards.</p>
<p><em>My life may be relentless</em>, she later writes in one of her many notebooks, <em>but goddammit so am I</em>.</p>
<p>So the days and weeks unfold in Land’s second memoir, <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Class/Stephanie-Land/9781982151393">Class</a>, an insular but vivid reflection on a tertiary education system that seems to sabotage the very students who work hardest to be there.</p>
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<p><em>Review: Class – Stephanie Land (Atria)</em></p>
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<p>“Of all the things in my life that I didn’t have access to or felt like I didn’t deserve for some reason, an education hadn’t crossed my mind as a thing I wasn’t supposed to have,” Land recalls.</p>
<p>Yet getting an English degree while struggling to put food on the table leaves Land frequently wracked with guilt, a “constant, crushing panic”.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571312/original/file-20240124-21-2wqmpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C9%2C3222%2C2156&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571312/original/file-20240124-21-2wqmpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C9%2C3222%2C2156&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571312/original/file-20240124-21-2wqmpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571312/original/file-20240124-21-2wqmpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571312/original/file-20240124-21-2wqmpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571312/original/file-20240124-21-2wqmpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571312/original/file-20240124-21-2wqmpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571312/original/file-20240124-21-2wqmpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">In Class, Stephanie Land is still two years away from the publishing deal that will change her life.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Erika Peterman</span></span>
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<p>Pressing towards graduation, often on the brink of physical exhaustion, she reflects bitterly on the administrative hoop-jumping required of students with little financial or social support, striking at the corporatised core of higher education in America:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I had forgotten the part of the game where no one’s education mattered more than the money the university could make from your opportunity to soak up all that learning. God forbid they would make it affordable or easy.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The years she spends in snowy Missoula, Montana, are not just plagued by hunger in the literal sense. They are propelled by it too. She hankers for the respite of an easier life: financial security, reliable child care and possible entry to an MFA program.</p>
<p>But even as the book’s titular play on words conjures both the experience of class immobility and the college classroom Land sets out to critique, the book ends up being about neither in particular. As a sequel of sorts to Land’s celebrated debut, Class lacks the sustained storytelling that helped establish Land as an unflinching class commentator.</p>
<p>Maid makes unexpected connections to the privilege and plight of America’s precarious middle class – afforded by the author’s invisible but intimate presence in the homes she cleans. But Class turns inwards, often as disconnected and unfocused as the year it documents.</p>
<p>As one <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101160309-class?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=TuXFi7pBGX&rank=1">Goodreads reviewer</a> has commented, Class falters in its telling, feeling more like “a recitation of things that happened” than the feat of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/from-middle-class-to-homeless-a-mothers-unapologetic-memoir/2019/02/01/e4db6410-137c-11e9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html">“unfussy prose and clear voice”</a> that glues Maid together.</p>
<p>“Not much actually happens in ‘Maid’,” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/from-middle-class-to-homeless-a-mothers-unapologetic-memoir/2019/02/01/e4db6410-137c-11e9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html">Jenny Rogers commented</a> in The Washington Post. Yet it “holds you”.</p>
<p>If Class has a looser grip, what else does it offer readers? </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/barbara-ehrenreich-never-stopped-trying-to-change-the-world-189953">Barbara Ehrenreich never stopped trying to change the world</a>
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</em>
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<h2>Mega-success with Maid</h2>
<p>If yours was one of the 67 million households that tuned into <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maid_(miniseries)">Maid on Netflix</a>, you may be more familiar with <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/10/maid-netflix-margaret-qualley-andie-macdowell">Margaret Qualley’s “Alex”</a>, loosely based on Land, whose unplanned pregnancy and subsequent attempts to make it alone push her below the poverty line and into the houses of wealthier people whose toilets she scrubs. </p>
<p>Published at the beginning of 2019, Maid <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/2019/02/10/">launched at number three</a> on The New York Times Best Seller list and was praised by <a href="https://time.com/6101999/maid-review-netflix/">Time magazine</a> as “an empathetic portrait of poverty that dispels the myth of bootstrapping”. Former US President Obama handpicked it for his <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B1J3hS-AyW5/">summer reading list</a> later that year. </p>
<p>And in 2021, Netflix’s ten-episode limited series based on the book was a commercial and critical success, laying bare what Lucy Mangan <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/oct/01/maid-review-netflix-homelessness-drama">has rightly called</a> the “unflinching anatomisation of the red tape that surrounds every effort to access the (already minimal) help supposedly on offer to desperate women and their children”.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cLd0dN25i5g?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Netflix’s commercially and critically successful Maid was based on Stephanie Land’s first memoir.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Class picks up where Maid leaves off. </p>
<p>In the acknowledgements pages, Land describes a sense of responsibility to her readers to continue the story she’d so far “only partly told”. She insists it’s the book she always wanted to write, focusing on her “hungriest year” – when her “stomach and brain lived in a constant state of anger and lightheadedness”.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/i-just-go-to-school-with-no-food-why-australia-must-tackle-child-poverty-to-improve-educational-outcomes-178426">'I just go to school with no food' – why Australia must tackle child poverty to improve educational outcomes</a>
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<hr>
<h2>‘Easily’ reliving imposter syndrome</h2>
<p>To anyone who’s experienced persistent poverty, generational trauma or the vagaries of solo parenting firsthand, the pervasive themes of frustration and despair that reappear in Class will remain uncomfortably close.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571340/original/file-20240125-19-rygyvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571340/original/file-20240125-19-rygyvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571340/original/file-20240125-19-rygyvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571340/original/file-20240125-19-rygyvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571340/original/file-20240125-19-rygyvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571340/original/file-20240125-19-rygyvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1144&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571340/original/file-20240125-19-rygyvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1144&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571340/original/file-20240125-19-rygyvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1144&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>When Land looks down at her faded clothes and feels like “she always had on the first day of school: a nerdy new kid who didn’t know what to wear in order to fit in”, I can easily relive the imposter syndrome that haunted my own academic journey from start to finish. </p>
<p>The first in my working-class family to complete a university degree, I subsisted on a budget of only $200 a week when I first moved to Brisbane to complete my bachelor’s degree. Ten years later, after bouncing in and out of hospital with life-threatening depression, I was left to pay off thousands in medical debt through my PhD stipend and casual university teaching.</p>
<p>But no matter their background, I suspect few readers could come away from Class without a sharp sense of the unremitting fatigue, frequent indignities and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/books/review/maid-stephanie-land.html">“bleak mental arithmetic”</a> striving to stay afloat demands of the economically disadvantaged. </p>
<p>In Class, Land continues to keep “obsessive track” of her bank account. She pockets toilet rolls from public bathrooms and carries a list of fixed expenses and estimated income with her wherever she goes. </p>
<p>“All my school notebooks had these tiny budgets written inside,” she writes. They’re taped to the wall beside her desk; she scribbles “different versions of it” in her day planner at the start of each month. A tangle of upbeat acronyms – sources of financial assistance like <a href="https://studentaid.gov/h/apply-for-aid/fafsa">FAFSA</a>, <a href="https://www.benefits.gov/benefit/613">TANF</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assistance_Program">SNAP</a> – represent a demoralising bureaucratic burden for little ultimate gain.</p>
<p>Perhaps surprisingly, though, Class is strongest when Land allows herself to drift into a more digressive mode. Her commentary on contraceptive choices, for example, is far more interesting and well developed than the diarised recollections she shares in the lead-up to discovering her second unplanned pregnancy. </p>
<p>Partway through the book, she recalls a time when Missoula was labelled the <a href="https://jezebel.com/my-weekend-in-americas-so-called-rape-capital-5908472">“rape capital”</a> of America after a number of University of Montana football stars were accused of sexual assault. Curiously, she mentions only in passing that a flurry of letters to the editor in response to the news helped her recognise her own experiences of rape.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/where-are-the-most-disadvantaged-parts-of-australia-new-research-shows-its-not-just-income-that-matters-132428">Where are the most disadvantaged parts of Australia? New research shows it's not just income that matters</a>
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</p>
<hr>
<h2>Missed opportunities</h2>
<p>In this way, Class sometimes feels like a series of missed opportunities in the plotting, pace and development of what’s otherwise a compelling premise and an evocative setting. Land writes with an explicit distaste for having to justify or explain herself. She openly objects to the expectation (and veneration) of resilience or “success stories” in the face of gross inequity. </p>
<p>But in Class, this resistance often translates as an unsatisfying emotional distance.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571342/original/file-20240125-19-cohymi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571342/original/file-20240125-19-cohymi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/571342/original/file-20240125-19-cohymi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571342/original/file-20240125-19-cohymi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571342/original/file-20240125-19-cohymi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571342/original/file-20240125-19-cohymi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1161&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571342/original/file-20240125-19-cohymi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1161&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/571342/original/file-20240125-19-cohymi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1161&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>In Maid, where Land speaks of the startling imprint of cleaning other people’s houses on her life – the vulnerabilities she’s exposed to “somehow reminding of her own” – we’re generously treated to what renowned memoirist <a href="https://www.marykarr.com/the-art-of-memoir.html">Mary Karr calls</a> the “totemic objects”, or the idiosyncratic details, that sophisticated writers strive to “place on every page”. The minutiae of her life — and those hers overlaps — feel real in the pungent whiff of her sick daughter’s breath, a client’s hidden cigarette stash, the flecks of vomit on an upturned toilet seat.</p>
<p>Class carries a greater sense of urgency, resorting to a more fervid yet mechanical style that belies its byline as a rumination on motherhood, hunger and higher education.</p>
<p>Land alludes to white privilege only once, commenting that her “plain” appearance has allowed her “an occasional break from my poverty, at least in terms of its visibility to others”. Of class hierarchies, she remarks fleetingly that “what society encouraged and what it actually supported were two different things depending on what economic class you found yourself in”. </p>
<p>Critical engagement with the intersections between identity and the ways we experience the world is noticeably absent. As a writer who labours to reveal the bergs of difficulty that may lurk beneath the appearance of success or stability, she is not always willing to excavate those depths outside her own immediate experience.</p>
<p>In a telling aside that mirrors the book’s inward focus, she exposes a habitual impulse for assuming her circumstances are exceptional, rarely interested enough to look deeper:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My friendships were surface level only. Not because I necessarily wanted it that way. I just didn’t have much to give back. There was so much going on in my life between work, kid, and school that I didn’t have the bandwidth to sit and listen while someone talked to me about struggles they had. When I confessed this to anyone, they invariably said that friendship was a two-way street, a give-and-take, where one person needs more support and then the other might and so on. “Yeah, but I don’t know if I will ever not need more support,” I would say.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Most baffling is Land’s treatment of her thwarted dream of enrolling in a Masters of Fine Arts (one of few anchoring elements of the narrative), when an unsympathetic college professor denies her application: “Babies don’t belong in grad school”. It’s a gut-wrenching disappointment Land brushes aside in less than a page. </p>
<p>Even America’s increasingly decentralised higher education system goes largely unexplained and unexamined, in a story the publisher packages as a “searing indictment”. </p>
<p>Class is an emptier book, hungry for the reservoir of rich episodic detail that spurred Maid to its unprecedented success as both a memoir and a televised adaptation.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-single-parenting-with-a-disability-how-my-9-year-old-daughter-became-my-carer-in-shining-armour-176013">Friday essay: single parenting with a disability – how my 9-year-old daughter became my carer in shining armour</a>
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<h2>Like its author, ‘Class works hard’</h2>
<p>Maid, however, was always going to be a tough first act to follow. The so-called “sophomore slump” (or, second-book syndrome) is a recognised phenomenon in the most ordinary of circumstances. An author whose debut has achieved bestseller status and been adapted to the screen invites inevitable comparison.</p>
<p>Even so, Class makes up for what it lacks in craft in its simple insistence on being heard.</p>
<p>Reflecting on her interactions with readers, Land explains that people often ask what motivated her to write about her own life. “The answer is both lofty and painfully basic,” she reveals at the back of Class:</p>
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<p>On the one hand, I wanted to dismantle stigmas surrounding single moms, especially those who parent under the poverty line. On the other, I needed the money. The prospect of publishing a book wasn’t just the answer to a lifelong dream – it was the discovery of a life raft on a sinking ship.</p>
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<p>For readers like me, who’ve floated adrift on their own sinking ships, Class may well be a life raft of another kind. Land’s relentlessness – and her strident aversion to inspirational gloss-coating – creates a redemptive space for lives messily lived, intrusively bureaucratised, and unfairly judged.</p>
<p>At a time when the prohibitive cost of higher education deters so many from the liberal arts (in Land’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/cost-and-lack-of-majors-are-among-the-top-reasons-why-students-leave-for-profit-colleges-204671">America</a>, but also <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-27/generational-hecs-debt-university-access-higher-education-cost/102480290">Australia</a> and elsewhere around the world), her story stands as an imperfect but powerful reminder that all voices matter. </p>
<p>Storytelling, Land reminds us, can serve a variety of purposes, discouraging silos of silence from expanding around experiences of marginalisation and expressions of outrage.</p>
<p>Much like Land herself, Class works hard.</p>
<p>It doesn’t always get where it wants to go, but there’s value in its effort.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219700/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amber Gwynne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Stephanie Land’s sequel to her mega-successful debut memoir Maid works as hard as she does – but while its details of low-income single-parent life as a student are valuable, it suffers by comparison.Amber Gwynne, Associate Lecturer in Writing, The University of QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2211832024-01-24T17:21:13Z2024-01-24T17:21:13ZFive books about the COVID pandemic to look out for in 2024<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569571/original/file-20240116-26651-g7hw7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=89%2C89%2C5901%2C3898&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/beautiful-blonde-woman-wearing-face-mask-1857379738">Luis Monasterio/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Vi-fi, short for virus fiction, describes contemporary fiction that features the devastating events of world-changing outbreaks and epidemics. Rooted in science fiction, vi-fi draws on bio-thrilling realism and parallel worlds with multiple, dystopian possibilities.</p>
<p>Since 2020 there has been an exponential rise in vi-fi by a new COVID generation of authors who came out of isolation having experienced a pandemic in real time. </p>
<p>We <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/4AlmyluJOBTdreBkx8YvX6">present a podcast</a> about the latest in pandemic fiction. Here are five books about COVID we’ll be looking out for in 2024:</p>
<h2>1. Day by Michael Cunningham, released January 18</h2>
<p>Published 25 years after his literary masterpiece, The Hours, Cunningham’s new book, Day, taps into the COVID genre’s sense of a distortion of time. </p>
<p>The plot recounts the troubles of married couple, Dan and Isabel, and their children, Nathan and Violet and Isabel’s younger wayward brother, who lives a secret life on Instagram in the attic, as they navigate the pressures of lockdown in a brownstone townhouse in Brooklyn. </p>
<p>The narrative is built around the events of three separate days, each a year apart. The first is just as the pandemic is about to hit in 2019, the second during the middle of the lockdown in 2020, and the third as they are coming out of the lockdown in April 2021. </p>
<p>COVID is never mentioned by name, but the narrative promises tumultuous themes of incarceration and isolation, the extremely difficult accommodations that families had to make and the ways that so much is left unspoken between people.</p>
<h2>2. Fourteen Days by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston, released February 6</h2>
<p>Inspired by Italian Renaissance writer Giovanni Boccaccio’s book, The Decameron (1353), and a short story collection by the New York Times called The Decameron Project (2020), comes this much anticipated collaborative pandemic novel. </p>
<p>Beginning on the first week of lockdown in March 2020 the narrative takes place in a rundown New York City apartment complex where tenants share stories on the rooftop. </p>
<p>The book features different chapters written by A-list authors such as Emma Donoghue (Pull of the Stars), John Grisham, Celeste Ng (Little Fires Everywhere) and Weike Wang (Joan is Okay). </p>
<p>The book vows to be packed with secrets, ghost tales and sensational revelations from self-isolation, when the residents’ outlook on their situation is forever altered by the story of the newest, anonymous tenant: the Super.</p>
<h2>3. Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru, released May 16</h2>
<p>Kunzru’s portrait of the pandemic is tipped to be the most gripping COVID-noir novel yet. </p>
<p>Twenty years after graduating from a London art school, Jay is working as a delivery driver in New York in 2020. Having just returned to work afer the first lockdown, he unknowingly collapses on the porch of an enormous mansion in the middle of a remote woodland. There, his former lover from art school, Alice, is living with Rob, the man she she left him for and who was also his former best friend, as well as with Marshal, a gallery owner, and his girlfriend. </p>
<p>Exhausted with sickness, Jay is confronted by the personal history he has tried to shove into the rearview mirror. But this chance encounter in the middle of lockdown begins to unravel the secrets of his darkly destructive past with fateful consequences.</p>
<h2>4. Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes, translated by Frank Wynne, released in September</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569579/original/file-20240116-29-og0e3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Author Virginie Despentes, a white woman with brown hair." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569579/original/file-20240116-29-og0e3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569579/original/file-20240116-29-og0e3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569579/original/file-20240116-29-og0e3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569579/original/file-20240116-29-og0e3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569579/original/file-20240116-29-og0e3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1083&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569579/original/file-20240116-29-og0e3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1083&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569579/original/file-20240116-29-og0e3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1083&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Virginie Despentes.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Virginie_Despentes_2012.jpg">Georges Biard/WikiCommons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p><a href="https://pledgetimes.com/virginie-despentes-on-dear-asshole-be-radical-with-ideals/">Dubbed</a> “a French punk on the literary scene” and the “literary Balzac”, Virginie Despentes – who was shortlisted for the The Man Booker International Prize 2018 for her novel Vernon Subutex 1 – takes on #MeToo, COVID and social media cancel culture in Wynne’s translation of her new book. </p>
<p>A writer threatened by the public scrutiny of his “flirtations” with women, Oskar Jayack, finds himself at the centre of an Instagram hate when he rants on social media about the 50-year-old declining actress, Rebecca Latte, blaspheming her in a string of brutal insults which degenerates her as a dirty, worn-out, loud old woman. </p>
<p>Despentes uses email exchanges between the characters, but the author’s real message comments on a string of modern social problems: on transphobia, addiction, abuse and the effects of COVID policies.</p>
<h2>5. Real Americans by Rachel Khong, published April 30</h2>
<p>Khong’s take on the popular genre of generational saga ushers us into the past, across three continents and onto a post-pandemic Washington island. </p>
<p>This is an expansive social novel about the lives of three members of a Chinese American family, spanning 70 years: May (who we meet in 2030), Lily (in 2000) and Nick Chen (in 2021). </p>
<p>Nick is only 15, but he can’t help feeling that his mother, Lily, is hiding something from him. The only thing Nick knows about himself is that his dad is white and has never wanted to be in his life. He sets out to search for his biological father and get some answers. </p>
<p>Khong queries modern concerns through questions which plague her cast of characters. How much of our lives come from a spark of chance? Are we destined, or made, and if so, who gets to do the making? What makes a real American?</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/221183/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Since 2020 there has been exponential rise in ‘virus fiction’ by a new COVID generation of authors who came out of isolation having experienced a pandemic in real time.Lucyl Harrison, PhD Candidate, School of Humanities, University of HullCatherine Wynne, Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise, Faculty of Arts, Cultures and Education, University of HullLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.