Annual 2 (inside) by Notes Magazine

Preface At three years old, Notes magazine will soon be leaving its toddler years behind. The momentum it has gained during this time has been phenomenal, and for this we must thank the entire Notes community; from those who bought copies at their faculty libraries to read furtively between lectures, to those who came to every poetry reading, and to our faitful subscribers. But most of all we thank the contributors who have filled the Notes inbox once a fortnight with the fruits of their labour. This, our second annual, contains the some of the best pieces from the last year of fortnighly issues. In selecting the pieces to include we have had to leave out lots of great writing and artwork, which has not been easy. The work is split into four sections: land, identity, presumption and renewal. Though thematically connected, each section contains a wide range of pieces and styles, from the light-hearted and humourous to the contemplative and weighty. We hope they reflect the full range of talents and styles in the Oxford and Cambridge writing communities. Accompanying this annual is the first issue of the micro-journal footnotes. It contains thoughts, aphorisms, poetry, flash fiction and mini-essays: the pieces are concise but by no means lacking in thought or inspiration. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re also pleased that it features some established writers as guest contributors, alongside the work of students (some of whom, we hope, will make their own careers out of writing). The quality of writing in these pages, and in footnotes, is indicative of the current strength of the university literary scene. We hope this continues for many years to come.

Contents Land Emily Fitzell DĂ˛mhnall MacDonald Rosie Jewell Saki Shinoda Ali Alam Henry St-Leger Davy Katy Lewis-Hood Abbi Brown Chris Warwick Aska Welford

5 6 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Tarbert, Co. Kerry A portrait of the factor Hanger Down And the thunder cries once Boat Three Haiku Morning Dorinda Wake-up Call The Boy and the Bear

Identity Tam Stojanovic Thomas Evans Hannah Greenstreet Justina Kehinde Kat Addis George Moore Arthur Thompson

19 20 23 24 26 28 31

To whom it may concern The Pleasure Principle A Fragment Amutorunwa , A Mother s Legacy Imperial Masks M and Window

Presumption Verb to Noun The Tale of the Joker Rapunzel Operation Overlord Letter to my closest friend The Prof it P Self-Portrait #10

33 34 38 40 41 42 43

Adam Napier Aylin Yildiz Ploy Kingchatchaval Rob Oldham Paul Tait Marcus McPhillips Charlotte Clark

R enewal Self-Help Sonnet #9 Morning Reproduction & Technology Lord Proof-Editor Pastiche or Pistachio Song of Io Untitled

45 46 50 56 58 60 61

Tristram Fane-Saunders Emma Levinkind Gavin Stevenson Sam Grabiner Michael Panayi Ciaran Chillingworth Angelica Van Clarke

La n d

arbert, Co. Kerry Fallow or barren, which is it then, this haggard piece of land which here, beneath the burn remains untilled? “We’ll wait ’til Spring” -to her he’d say“When the land will come alive once more and rise anew to make this time their fodder.” For the cattle were long gone from that marred place; Eyes dragged downward; down towards the dirt. But so too were their keepers, now, Near-stolen by the loam. From ashes, ashes, dust, dust- a new crop never came. Yet here, there still remains a touch of the old, familiar, acrid, burning turf; Stealing its way up frozen, breathing nostrilsThe sun knelt at the foot of the land, kissed its dirt, and set it there aflame.

Emily Fitzell 5

Land

portrait of the factor as an old man

Erchie Iain Erchie was the most godfearing man on the island. A hardworking, upstanding member of the community who, had he lived in some leafy Home Counties village, would probably have been put up for an MBE. Now enjoying his retirement, he was manager of the local football team, secretary of the Common Grazing Committee, chair of the District Council, an Elder in the Free Kirk, and patriarch of a dynasty of MacLeans whose grandchildren had spawned all along the Hebrides, from Barra to the Butt of Lewis. Unfortunately, like most men of his generation, he had never needed to write a CV, having been in the same job from the morning after V.E. Day to the night of his Retirement Do. The hills of East Uist gloomed to his left as he drove his bent-up old corsa north along the only road on the island. The road was a relic of the Second World War, still wide enough to support the convoys of sheep Young Iain Alasdair marched down north it from Milton every morning. As was the fate of a godfearing man in that part of the world, he had spent the entire day in meetings. And like all godfearing men west of Argyll, he was now content to drown his tiredness in a halfbottle of White & McKay. He found himself whistling a song as he drank, his fingers tapping the steering wheel. A Pheigi A Ghraidh – as all popular Gaelic songs, about a man who went to sea and left his darling Peggy (or Morag or Theresa) behind at home awaiting his return. But these days there was no Peggy standing by his stove. Erchie Iain Erchie had lost his wife of forty years to the cancer more than a decade ago. Only two months after their Ruby Wedding. He took a swallow from the whisky bottle. Och, they’d been on the dance that night! he thought wistfully. But he had his home-help, and she kept him comfortable, made sure he could attend his meetings. He needed to keep himself occupied. Wasn’t that how he’d got involved in all this fuss over Land Reform in the first place? Not the school, or the Sunday League for Erchie Iain Erchie today, but something altogether more radical... Everyone knew Erchie Iain Erchie was a godfearing man, that like all sensible men of Hebridean stock, he detested the communists and the atheists and the papists. He might have a pint with Duncan Ban the Barrach, but that didn’t mean he didn’t hate the man’s idolatry. Strangers and radicals, tinkers and cobblers, Jews and Jesuits, they just didn’t belong here. But that didn’t

stop him feeling the attraction, deep in his lager-soaked heart, of a lifestyle less than godfearing. Like the day in ’89 he’d been repainting his eldest John Archie’s bedroom and had found the boy’s pornography collection under the bed – he still blushed to think of those bleach-blonde Swedish girls, bare as the day their Lord God brought them into the world. He felt the same stirrings of excitement today, driving back from his day of meetings. Land Reform. It was like the words had given his weathered body a good blast of WD40, oiling the old engine into life. His foot slammed down on the brake. “Taigh Iain Ghròid!” he shouted, the half-bottle smashing to the floor. Hadn’t his father always told him that daydreams were only for fools and Englishmen? Let the mind wander and you let the sheep wander, so his saying went. There was a stag standing in the middle of the road, its antlered crown a silhouette against the sunset. Erchie Iain Erchie felt his bones creak with relief. The beast was huge. He remembered poor Duncan Beg’s boy, on the drink and driving home after the Cattle Show Dance, he had crashed into the Estate’s prize stag. The funeral had been well-attended. The stag’s eyes glowed like headlights as it turned to face him. It hulked above the corsa, the beast’s gaze cold and contemptuous. Now Erchie Iain Erchie wasn’t a man for poetry. He knew most of the traditional bards, their songs about sailors leaving their Peggies behind, but he had no time for what they were at in the University these days. Once his daughter Catriona (MA, Second class honours, Glasgow, he thought proudly, now a schoolmistress in Lochaber) had given him a paperback of Modern Gaelic Poetry. He had been shocked at how lewd these professors could be. And they kept starting on a new line halfway through a sentence... No, Erchie Iain Erchie wasn’t a man of poetry at all. But even he could see the symbolism in the strutting stag, better fed than half the crofters of Flobost, lording it over his corsa. When Erchie Iain Erchie had been growing up, the hills had been his home over the summer, where they watched the sheep on the Common Grazing, and lived in peaty shielings. But then the late Colonel MacDonald had sold the island of East Uist, and his tweedy figure had never been seen again (debts, the demon drink, people whispered). The new landlord, the Sporting Consortium they called themselves, had fenced off the screw-strewn hills, and filled them with the deer. They would visit for a weekend once a year, go fishing and stalking, and send any young man found in the hills to the sheriff court in Stornoway to be prosecuted for poaching. But as the decades wore on, and the lairds grew fed up of East Uist, their

Land visits grew fewer and fewer, and the deer grew in number, til they outnumbered even the MacNeils of Barra and the descendants of Somerled, King of the Isles. And now the stag was standing in the middle of the road, standing like a soldier, a constable of the crown, stopping the godfearing Erchie Iain Erchie from getting home in time for the Requests on the Gaelic Wireless. Erchie Iain Erchie seethed, his anger hot as the steamer that took the mails from Gourock to the isles in the old days. Erchie Iain Erchie was a godfearing man. He had been a POW in the war, one of the 51st Highlanders who’d been captured at St Valery after Dunkirk. He had listened to the Queen’s Christmas message on the BBC every year without fail. He had bowed to his betters and never spoken Gaelic in polite company. But today was the day the anger of seven decades of servitude at the edge of the Atlantic boiled over inside him, like broth left unattended in the pot. He climbed carefully out of the corsa, his legs unsteady on the whisky, trying not to startle the stag. But he needn’t have feared, the stag knew it owned the land, knew it had more right to be here than the islanders who’d eked out their existence from this earth for centuries. Erchie Iain Erchie walked behind the corsa and opened up the boot. There were folders, lovingly inscribed with the name of every committee he’d been on. There was a rotten old rug, covered in dog hair that his collie liked to sit on. There was the obligatory empty can of blue Calor gas. And then there was the long snout of his shotgun, that his father had used to shoot the cormorants for Colonel MacDonald, and that now, Erchie Iain Erchie, retired factor of East Uist Estates, would use to shoot the stag that stole his island from him. It was political act and, as the sound of that shot rung loud through the Hebrides, Erchie Iain Erchie, on the drink as he was, knew it would have consequences. ,

They had been trying for a peaceful solution for years. The lady from the Scottish Executive had implanted the idea in their minds in the days when STV was still called Grampian. Her name was Rhoda Henderson, her father a Skyeman, but herself all high heels on Edinburgh cobblestones. Special Advisor For Rural Affairs was the title written in an unfamiliar font at the top of her letters. And when the Minister for Agriculture had visited the island as part of a government outreach scheme, she had dived like a gannet right into the churning ocean of local politics. She had been to Community Council Meetings, and Parish Committees, MPs surgeries and the Health Board, all the while whispering over the stale digestives and lukewarm Tetley her grand plan of action points and matters arising.

Land Reform. Community Buyouts. Locally-run estates. Even the words sounded seductive. To the boiler-suit wearing island politicians, their beards greying and heads balding from a retirement spent writing grant applications for Youth Clubs and bus services for the elderly, the ideas of this nicely put together Edinburgh lettie sounded radical and revolutionary. For the teachers and ministers among them, it would be like going back to those years at the University, where they had fought racism and sexism and imperialism, and danced with girls from London with names like Olivia, and got to pretend they would never need to go back to the island again. For the fishermen and crofters, electricians and joiners – well, a life spent cursing Maggie Thatcher in the Hotel Bar had prepared them for their own little bit of disobedience. And as for the former factor, Erchie Iain Erchie, who had recently lost a wife and had daughters married into most of the larger extended families of East Uist, he was a natural choice for chairman. A gofearing man. Diligent, hardworking. And as former factor, he knew the landlords well enough that the whole sorry buyout would be done by the Old New Year. ,

“Erchie! What have you done?” shouted Tormod a’ Goose in his gruff, grandmother-learnt Gaelic. Erchie Iain Erchie could only look down at the shotgun he held in his hands. He remembered the last time he’d held a rifle, when the Fuhrer’s army had encircled them in that corner of a foreign field that was for ever England. He had not shot that day, he had surrendered under the shadow of the Swastika. And now under the shadows of the setting sun, he had shot the prize stag of East Uist Sporting Estate. Tormod a’ Goose had pulled into the passing place to his right when he had heard the sound of the shot go off. “Erchie, you fool! You know poachers belong in prison!” “Aye,” murmured Erchie, suddenly feeling the weight of all his seventy three years, “I threatened as much many a time when I was factor and I caught you with the rod in the Colonel’s loch.” “You’re a godfearing man, Erchie,” said Tormod. “That I am, a Thormoid, that I am.” There was a flash of light. Torches. Then voices. Voices like dialogue from a book. Crisp voices, each like a shotgun in the twilight. And then Erchie Iain Erchie realized who they were. Between the hills of Strueval and Beag, where Hohagarry Lodge, its walls decorated with the heads

Land of deer and its tables laden with venison and freshly-caught salmon, stood like a throne on the moor. A’ bhochan, he realized, there was a party in the Estate Office tonight, wasn’t there? “We’re here,” Erchie shouted, his voice cracking. “Oh my!” the voice yelled back, crisp, cutting through the air as a knife guts a fish, “Mister MacLean, the old gilly? Weren’t you at the meeting earlier?” The voice hiccupped. Its owner sounded tipsy. “Aye, sir, I was indeed,” said Erchie. “But what the devil are you doing out here in the cold this evening?” Erchie didn’t answer. Tormod scrambled back into his car. “We thought we heard a gunshot. Ghastly business. But I’m told the locals are celebrating with fireworks this evening. Bit early, but I can’t blame them.” The voice chortled goodnaturedly. “Good job on your part Mister MacLean, now we’ve finally agreed a price for my estate.” Erchie remained silent. “Tell you what, why don’t you come to the lodge and we drink a dram or two to celebrate selling my island?” “Sir, I’m afraid it’s not your island to sell.” Two more shots followed that evening. Erchie’s funeral was well-attended, the landlord’s was not.

D ò mhnall MacDonald

nd the thunder cries once The sky has fractured, like cartilage snapping. The varnished cage of her face, blank in the silent flash, is now an echo caught in shattered glass. The clouds’ bellies’ breaking steals the tongues of roiling bells and stills the needles etching craquelure across her skin. The mind endures. Quiet. Her respite is her size in the thunder’s mouth. Loud, he drowns her, but she knows: the thunder only has to die once.

Saki Shinoda

hree haiku we lie like shadow etched in sand with a slow thought blurred with a slow hand

a cold branch far off scratches the bark like vinyl plays our timber tune

I hear near nothing the hum of an offshore sea sunk in its own crater

Henry St-Leger Davy 13

Land

orning

Shut in like sardines, on a razor-cut edge, They sleep on; whisky entrails Trailing around their crumpled, lumping bodies: Bumped-together rag-dolls. A cloud-bright morning; still; Stolen from some Scottish short With a dead author who spun words Like Indian kite strings: twisting, shredding, looped; Out of sync – tracing paper days – the over Lay cruel as a caesura; the mocking rhyme Falls out of line, falls out of time, Tick, tock, goes the clock. Flushed faces in lantern-light pale in its loss: A potent reek of green glass On the sharded seabed, blood underfoot, Forms vinegar tears that stain; dull rain On acidic pavements; the dried-out Sweat of the night in a cool layer Of rippling grime – dirt beneath the fingernails – Shrugging somnolence eats away.

Katy Lewis-Hood 14

orinda

You taught me to fold crisp packets: chipped, Barry M blue fingernails carefully smoothing the foiled edges into three perfect points. Hedgehogs crawl into crisp packets, you said, in landfill sites, and die. So you folded, and brigades of neat isosceles triangles grew along a single slat of the wooden pub bench, and, somewhere, a hedgehog carried on breathing. Back home, your mother’s ventilator puffed and crackled and whined for attention, for your blue-varnished fingers to change the canister. She’s been taken off the waiting list, you said; she’s too ill for a transplant eyes down, examining your ranks of crisp-packet soldiers, hands clasped tight around your empty glass, waiting.

Abbi Brown 15

Land

ake-up Call Nodding heads pout youthful petals, Morning sun treads ordered patios, Zealous pigeons hark breakfast's impatience. Sigh the duvet, sigh the day, Risen orange swiftly downed, Clawing dreams soon forgotten. Muscles warming, pedalling faster, Freedom weaving, deeply breathing, Woah! A really hot girl on a bike!

Chris Warwick 16

Aska Welford 17

Identity

o whom it may concern

It is a strange thing, to seek shelter in the arms of a country that bombed your own, collapsing walls in your childhood city, buildings peeled open like tins of sardines. Years later, wires still protrude from the cut off floors and as we pass them by, you say: “I used to walk this way to get to school, when I was your age.” We climb the broad stairs and I crane my neck, look upwards. There, at the jagged top of the apartment block, no roof or floor, one wall cut away like the door of a dollhouse, are a sink and mirror. Hanging, suspended, on a wall facing nothing. We came to visit the ones you left behind. And now, a lifetime later, flicking through a magazine plucked from the clutter of a kitchen table, the name of that country catches my eye. A train journey conversation with a group of students. “We hate the English,” they told him. If you’d stayed, could one of those voices have been mine? I often wonder about her, my other self. The one who never left, who grew up walking the same streets you did, speaking the same language you did. I wonder how similar we would be. How different. “We hate the English.” And here I sit. Think, speak, dream English. I’ve lost the words of mother tongue; cast them off carelessly like a too-small coat. When I try to claw them back, they are jagged in my mouth, my lips have lost their childish agility, I choke. S-s-stutter, stumble, spit them out. They sound foreign. Queues, and conversations about the weather, and offering tea in a crisis; the words like a reflex slip unbidden from my mouth, without thought. Like I was born to speak them. There is more that divides than borders and oceans. It is a strange thing, to seek shelter in the arms of the country that bombed your own. Yet here you are. Perhaps it was the safest place to be. But did you know? Did you know when you came to be clasped in its embrace, this island nation? Did you know you were giving it your children?

Tam Stojanovic 19

Identity

he Pleasure Principle

It had been raining, and that meant you could not tell the difference between his sweat and the water. His green T-shirt was wet through, had gone a deeper shade, and was now sucking body-consciously onto his torso. The moisture had penetrated the fabric, and it made the skin on his chest feel amphibian and dampish. I had heard the rainfall loudly beating, quite rhythmically, against the bedroom windowpane, and in the background I sensed its firm patters against the ground as it trickled in clumps from off the eaves, and I heard when he entered the house downstairs. I didn’t actually see him come in, but I imagined it. You would be able to tell from his gait that it had been vigorous: limbs slightly shivering, muscles sore within, and his breathing still intense. Clearly the rain was all over his body. It would have been cold outside, because of the wind, and he had finished. He was tired, but pleased, and you would see it on his face. His eyes likely wore the tender satisfaction of a job well done. That’s how running works. It’s biology. There are chemicals inside you called endorphins, and they tell you that whatever your body is doing feels good. Like going on a run, or eating a curry, and especially when having sex and when you’re in pain, too, they take all the pain away. Endorphins are not entities that require contemplation. It’s wholly superficial, almost sensory in its nature, in that it is indubitable. It is simple to see. It is not a matter of the mind. It exists outside of the brain, and resides in the flesh and beneath the skin. I heard the door close. As I descended the staircase and made my way into the kitchen, I realized that the rain had now begun to move on. Oscar was sitting at the dining table, indifferently leafing through at the newspaper. His elbow rested on the table so his fingertips could gently play with his moist hair, and drips would drop down on to the paper so that the dry ink now ran, forming flat black spiders across the page. I sat down next to him, and I could feel his energetic warmth next to me. His body was like a radiator, and it emanated a wall of muscular heat that reminded me of panting greyhounds fresh off the track. If he were wearing his glasses, they would have probably steamed up. He briefly smiled at me, I half-smiled back, and we traded a friendly nod.

At the end of the kitchen was Sofia. She was stood up in front of the stove, cooking herself dinner. She turned to look at me, to, as one should, acknowledge a friend’s entrance, said hello, and then turned away again, her back towards me once more, to attend to the risotto. She silently picked up her knife, slid it smoothly through the upmost layer of the butter, and slipped it gently into the rice using the free fingertips on her other hand. A thin, shining trace lingered on the tip of her ring finger. She paused, quickly licked it with her tongue, and continued stirring the food. It was easy to see from the way she was pouring the freshly made, almost boiling stock into the pan that she enjoyed to cook. She didn’t pour it from height, and revel in the form the liquid adopts as it falls and flows, furling like draped fabric, or its splashing sound that evoked a quiet sense of vertigo, but she threw it in eagerly, briskly sloshing the solution into the wok, and unsurprisingly a little splattered over the rim and was now dribbling down the edge, dripping under gravity down onto the base of the stove. It would be very sticky in the morning. Like warm honey. The smell of the risotto gently simmering on heat was making me salivate. I did not realize until then that I was hungry and wanted to eat. There’s a word for that, the taste that one craves when thinking about food. It’s called umami. That’s the flavor of meat, and other things, too. Umami is a Japanese word, and it means “delicious taste”. I know these things. The first experience humans have with umami is when they suck on their mother’s breast milk. I didn’t tell Oscar and Sofia that. But umami is overwhelming. It is found deep within the mouth, at the back of the throat, and on the roof of the mouth, and all over the tongue, of course. Umami is far superior to the other four tastes. Salt is unpalatable when served in a portion any larger than a soupspoon; sugar is plagued with guilt, or worse, regret; bitter is self-explanatorily loathsome; and sour is, admittedly, rather pleasurable, but also entirely masochistic. Umami sees no such diminishing returns, nor negative weight. It exponentially satisfies, and I question whether there is even a satiation point, at which demand is met and done. It is an insatiable, voracious lust. It is a fundamental psychological drive. It’s quasiFreudian, like libido or death. Umami tells ravenous carnivores that they’re digging and sinking their very own teeth straight into succulent blood-soaked flesh. Their mouths suck and chew on the fuel: muscles – once contracted so tense, and heavy with potential to recoil and deliver death upon its owner’s prey. A tension was stored deep within the taut, firm fibres, and now it is dead.

Identity Umami is a sign of sin: of animalistic tendencies, of corporeal wrong; but simultaneously, as a sense and a pleasure, it becomes the true call of the wild. Sofia finished cooking, and was ready to dine. She turned off the gas, dished up, carried the plates across to the dining table, and sat down. It was a simple dish, a risotto with porcini and chestnut mushrooms, and it tasted fine. I thought of something to say to begin a conversation, but nothing came to mind. Perhaps one of them would initiate a conversation instead of me, but they both seemed tired, and their heads hung down so their eyes could lazily focus on the food. We ate in silence. And this is how it was in my house. Sofia cooked, Oscar ran, and I wrote: umami, endorphins, and words. But as we ate our meal, not talking, I got thinking. It felt like we were staring at each other from distant, incommensurable paradigms. I did not despise them for their pleasures; it is much more like I could not understand them as much as I tried. I sat there and was consumed by the feeling that they spoke a different language, and that I was helpless to talk to them. And yet I knew they were being quite unambiguous. Their pleasures are real. Precipitation, gravitation, contraction, blood and sweat, teeth and torso. Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re just matter and atoms. It is there for me to read. It might not be lettered out in alphabets and syllables, but everyone can tell itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s there. And in my mind, I felt that I had germinated this silence on the table in front of me. A tiny seed was sat on it, and I felt it began to grow. It swelled between us, widening and bloated, and something like a bubble emerged from within, and as it inflated it began to encompass my body in a vacuum, suffocating my mouth in its translucent film, and as I tried to breathe in, it sucked inwards, choking me and wrapping itself around my tongue, and I thought it was clear to see that I felt that I was dying. I looked at my friends urgently, screaming with my eyes, but their heads remained hung. And as I noiselessly panicked, I felt paralyzed. I could not speak, and I wanted to run, and I wanted my body to move and my legs and my shoulders to get up and out. I wanted to sweat, and feel my lungs burn, or my thighs to strain and ache with the urgency of a predator on a hunt. I wanted my feet to moan in agony with every step I ran, and I wanted pain to suffuse my tissues and redeem me. But I could not. I remained rigid, sitting, and stuck. And gradually, as this feeling steadily subsided, I could feel another, different seed forming again, but this time inside of my head, slowly growing, its life about to begin.

Thomas Evans 22

Fragment

Duncan. [softer] I’m sorry I shouted, that day. I didn’t mean to. Margery. The paint had barely dried in our new bedroom and we were already arguing, across our tiny baby. Duncan. Alright, I did mean to. I wanted to make you listen. Margery. And I thought, will this be what the rest of my life will be like? Have I signed up for this? Duncan. My skin connected with your skin, fast, trailing friction burns. Margery. The gabled windows closed like a fist around my lungs. Duncan. I can’t take all the blame. I can’t take it. Margery. A child’s cry, melting in the wall. My child was crying. Duncan. One slap. I have spent our marriage atoning for one slap. I would take it back a thousand times over if I could. Margery. You can’t.

Hannah Greenstreet 23

Identity

mutorunwa

When he called my name, my father smiled in between each breath that slipped between ivory teeth and a peeled back smile. The very air he breathed was humid, moist, perfumed with the smell of petrol as it oozed out of broken exhaust pipes. It was the wet trickle of an ancient thunderstorm that bled itself dry as it slipped elusive hands between corrugated soil and iron bound souls, too cracked to recognize the ground that they walked upon was scattered with pot holes. As his lips fit round the Kâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s and Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, the implied N and the silent H that would often rise out of the currents of exhaled moments, I felt my sides bleed in anticipation of the long overdue pronouncement. It smiled along the veins that lined his lithe limbs, interlocking and inter linking, as I inter-railed the forgotten elements of my long established critical evidence in this case that had lain cold in the concealed remnants of a tepid, anglophone drawl. With reverence, I snatched the name that rolled easily from perfectly formed lips, their shape able to conceive me whole, inscribed in my sighs, billowing in the salty streams that laced my shame shaded eyes, it was drawn onto the winds that had failed to carry me home. Broken I had lain mute. My tongue carved out like a hollow flute, the trill aborted, the melody thwarted in the cacophony of a nameless child that lay destitute, in the swirling mass of alphabets and supply teacher smiles - plastic they apologized for my funny name, whilst laughing at the absurdity of a sound that was so unfamiliar it had to be born again. Fried like the electric slide on heat I became a sweet sugar treat for all the boys to lick, and the perfect escort who was really a Mattel produced high-school prick I was aborted. Silenced before the will was placed before me and I could gain my rightful inheritance, my name was distorted. Yet here, under the expanding umbrella laced with ascending dew and descending hail, coloured in grey like the sleet of industrial steel, those rich tones evoked a resuscitation that shot an IV drip straight into my bones, by-passing the organs as it resurrected the catacombs of ancestors that had been praying in the sanctuary of my paternal home.

His tongue hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t been corrupted. Instead it slipped like silken strips rippling along the contours of a lovingly defined body of nominal identities and culturally intoned sanctuaries ďŹ&#x201A;ashing between the conďŹ dent gleam of milk coated eyes and teeth like yellowed pearls uncurling itself in the contours of a deep, moving sigh, of signs that traced bloodlines against my skin, drew family trees against my parted lips the haemoglobin stained leaves fluttering in the emptiness that defined the space between my seared tongue and the sensually formed orifice that was his. Born upon his lips His mouth formed the birth canal, that would squeeze me forwards emerging from the abyss of namelessness The sonorous breath, as gentle as a shy first kiss, curled into the sound that was my first wail, my first cry, the first statement, that at last formerly divided by national boundary lines and census forms that created a distinct ethnic divide I, was at last, most emphatically, alive.

Justina Kehinde 25

Identity

he Mother,s Legacy After Elizabeth Joceline (d. October 12th 1622)

No, I never aimed at so poore an inheritance for thee, as the whole world. She is the one who assured you this. Four-hundred years and gone. Twenty seven years, then you, and the sudden hot deathly blush of her open body arched out of life. no she never aimed at that, but she had known it was coming. She left with God: and there he is. Darest thou then, silly wretch, absent thyself from him? I know, thou darest not. No, I never aimed at so poor an inheritance for you, as the whole world.

I knew I would die when you were born, and all I wanted was to scold you like the mother that would. A morsel of the heaven of your eyes bluer, tear-filled. To tell you a thing or two I knew in a way that would hurt a little. So you'd feel my slap, love, and smarting with my dead hand, enact these words, be someone. Particularly, you, the girl, the unspoken possible. For whom it's hard.

Kat Addis 27

Identity

mperial Masks In 1936, George Orwell published a short story called ‘Shooting an El-

ephant’, based on his experiences as an officer in the Imperial Indian Police. In the story, he describes how a mad elephant breaks free and tramples through a village. He is sent out alone to deal with the situation, and is faced with a crowd of natives in excitable mood. He realises they want, and expect, him to shoot the elephant, even though he thinks there might be a better solution. But, “solely to avoid looking a fool”, he kills the beast. It in this moment he realises that the white man “becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy”, fulfilling a stereotype in trying always to impress the native. Orwell writes of the sahib: “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.” The metaphor of the mask is a potentially enlightening one through which to explore imperialism more generally, and we can trace its usage through diverse colonial contexts. The idea of the mask points to the hypocrisy of imperial rule; the necessity for concealment of truth and the creation of elaborate fantasises to explain the harsher realities. This was first observed in 1901 by J. A. Hobson, the liberal Victorian critic of empire, when he wrote of the way imperialism lives upon “masked words”. He described how the “verbal armoury of imperialism” allowed the conqueror to view the “brute” facts at several removes, “refracted, interpreted, and glossed by convenient renderings.” Hobson was drawing on earlier writings by Ruskin, in which he had described how “there are masked words droning and skulking about us... which nobody understands, but which everybody uses, and most people will also fight for, live for, or even die for.” The utility of this idea in the imperial context, Hobson argued, had been that elites could conceal the financial and greedbased reasons for overseas expansion under a cloak of religious, patriotic and racial language that talked of “civilising missions” and the responsibility of superior, white, nations to educate and oversee backwards people. These were the beliefs that inspired enduring popular support for empire, as most people would never enjoy what economic fruits could be reaped from colonies they would never see.

In talking of “masked words”, Hobson was describing the mask placed over the imperial project and thus over the faces of the imperialists themselves. It was this mask that Orwell observed. But the ideas of Hobson, in prefiguring Foucauldian discourse theory, and the writings of Edward Said and all who followed in his wake, point us in the direction of the mask that was formed and made to fit the face of the native. Said’s Orientalism described how the imperial powers constructed powerful representations of the subject “other” that demonstrated the latter’s suitability for servitude, and Homi Bhabha (verbose, impenetrable but insightful literary critic) further conceptualised the tools by which this was achieved. For instance, the stereotype of the irrational, lazy, and untrustworthy (take your pick) native, as represented in high and low Western culture, served to buttress the authority of the white man to rule over them, to coax the best out of them, or simply control them. But of course sometimes the stereotype failed, the mask slipped from the faces of the natives and revealed an alternate reality. In West Java in 1919, a secret nationalist organisation was discovered to be plotting against the Dutch government. The colonial state and its security apparatus was totally unprepared for such a discovery, it went against the assumption of the irrational native mind, a mind incapable of political thought, let alone subversive action. This discovery produced panic in the Dutch community: what else had they got wrong, what did it mean for their personal safety, but also their purpose for being there? To counter this information crisis, a whole new intelligencegathering programme was established to root out threats. The breakdown of stereotypes, and of the masked words that had been spun about them, could produce great fear in the colonial community. But what of the impact of empire on the native subject, surely that is of more worthy commentary? We can turn here to perhaps the most famous “mask” in imperialism, that in the title of Frantz Fanon’s groundbreaking polemic Black Skin, White Masks. The book describes the deep psychological alienation experienced through colonial domination, and reveals again the hypocrisy at the heart of the “civilising mission”. Although the native might take on the language and manners of his masters, he will never be one of them, and in so doing he alienates himself also from his own culture. The book was inspired by Fanon’s own experience of first stepping foot in France, the “mother country” in this Freudian reading, where he realised

Identity that he would always be an “other”, that all his learning had only earned him a white mask, that he would always be black skin beneath. The trauma of this revelation inspired Fanon for the rest of his life as he wrote and fought against French colonialism, and he would describe the psychological impact again, this time through case studies of others, in The Wretched of the Earth. The pernicious effects of empire were the subjects of all these writers. For Fanon it was the alienation of the native. For Hobson, it was the duplicity of the elite and the slow poisoning of the general populace through the pursuit of an ignoble scheme. For Orwell it was the destruction of an individual’s freedom in the assumption of a false and hypocritical role. For the Dutch inhabitants of West Java it was the insecurity and paranoia of everyday existence. Their experiences were not the experiences of everyone of course, not many other colonial officers would have been struck by the same insight as Orwell during a moment of indecision for instance. Equally, the notion of a “civilising mission” became a self-fulfilling prophecy in part, railways and roads, cricket and courtrooms evidence of this. But just because many did not see the mask for what it was, does not deny the force of the impact made when it slipped, when we are made to come face to face with the reality of a situation. Eventually, as more came to understand this, whether through personal experience or the polemics of anti-colonialists, the mask was torn away for good.

George Moore

Arthur Thompson 31

Presumption

erb to Noun Kissing a sleeping beauty loses some chivalry when they press charges. You hear stories (don’t you?) of a drunk sun climbing under the covers, night time sliding on with a latex squeak. I worry too much that P-H at a house party will explode on Jäger that the pixel love that hurts his wrist will grow in the dark – that I’ll see his hands (so used to getting QWERTY) fold around the door handle of a friend that I’ll hear the lips the kiss the moment of change.

Adam Napier 33

P r e s u mp t i o n

he Tale of the Joker

Person A and J: “J, you are an interesting being.” “What?” “You are an interesting being, you always seem to have a smile.” “How?” “Because your smile is a paint. And because it is a paint, it is always there. It never fades away, nor does it ever wash off.” “Why?” “It must be due to your lack of mobility- you remain at the same spot every day. You never change your position. We live, work, breathe, eat, growold while you rest at the exact same spot.” “Then?” “Then alas! Your paint is preserved. You do not have to meddle with the crowd in the tube, you do not have to attend people's compulsory social events, you do not have to show effort for appeasing people, you do not have to contribute others' lives in any way. Thus, your paint always stays! No one can remove it, as no one has any reason to remove it. We all know your smile is there to stay, we all know your smile is meant to stay. Without it, us as we know ourselves, would not exist. Your interesting smile is here to stay for eternity, unlike myself, as I must be heading off to work. I must go and meddle with the crowd in the tube, attend people's compulsory social events, show effort to appease people and contribute their lives.” “Bye!”

Person B and J: “J, you are a scary being.” “What?” “You are a scary being, you are the sole owner of the crown.” “How?” “Because your crown is a paint. And because it is a paint, it is always there. It never fades away, nor does it ever wash off.” “Why?”

P r e s u mp t i o n “It must be due to your lack of discoverability- you remain unknown and unreachable at all times. You never contact us. We all believe, and thus know that you exist. But there are no means for us to come into contact with you.” “Then?” “Then voila! You keep your firm grasp of the crown for eternity! For centuries we have fought, argued and rebelled against any one with the crown. We could do so because we could see the owners of the crown, we could touch them, and upon what we have observed, we managed to draft new ideologies, new systems based on abolishing the crown and attested everyone as equals. We gave up a hell of a fight. We lost lives and we lost ourselves. Until we realised that was the only way to truly construct ourselves. But we can never touch you, we can never observe you, we can never draft new ideologies or new systems superseding you. You will always be the owner of the crown because we can never discover you. Due to that, you are a scary being. Now if you will excuse me, I will take off and return to touching, observing, criticising and drafting new ideologies and systems based on absolutely everything but you.” “Bye!”

Person C and J: “J, you are a dubious being.” “What?” “You are a dubious being, one half of your face is different than the other half.” “How?” “Because your face is a paint. And because it is a paint, it can be painted as desired to appeal whomever you wish to reach.” “Why?” “It must be due to your suitability- you answer to anyone who wishes to listen, you welcome them with open arms. And when they take a good look at your face, they see themselves in you. They are so envious of your powerful attraction that what they do, really, is to neglect the other part of you, the other half of your face. They gaze into one part, the part that they wish to see, and they follow you.” “Then?” “Then eureka! You announce your dubiety without anyone's realization, as you have fooled them with your suitability! Whichever of your painted half enchants us, the other half comes as a burden. We learn that loving you is accepting all of you, studying you is cherishing your unity. Once we are in this deal, once we

are blindly into the part of you we might actually approve, we are bound by the laws and commands the other half of you rules. So all of our decisions, our free will and actions must be suited to obey you. But now I must go, as I have questioned a great deal, and spoke with a poisonous mind. I must go and visit one of the hundreds of castles your Crown breeds in all shapes and sizes, and get well-suited.” “Bye!” ,

A long, indefinite time later, men gathered by the spot J shed its light. The men looked wild and inexhaustible, they had no intentions of leaving without a fight. Suffered they have, fooled and turned against each other countless times. This was the end. They were going to win. Some had washing clothes, sash brushes, paint rollers and some attacked with bare hands. Then arrived the big guns. They splashed the paint on the wall It was indeed hectic, children laying their back on the wall to transmit the mistaken paint at their back, men hitting, slapping, rubbing the wall with their bleeding hands. First went away the smile. The red lips broke into men's veins and caused them to suffocate. But there were plenty of them, as the initial row of troops fell down, the second row filled the gap to pursue resistance. Secondly they dethroned J. Even a small touch to the Crown’s gold captivated one's body all the way to full-scale paralysis. Yet the men did not retreat. The upcoming days played tricks on the men's mind and body. Physically they were drained, and their mind was in a state of delusion. But at last, they reached the upper face. Half blue, half white. They fought day and night... They had lost many on the road for salvation, but they could finally see the Sun. It was over. Men gathered once again for celebrations. Laughter, hugs, cries out of joy... “What kind of a new order do we establish now?” was the question wrangling in their head. The answers were random, “it must symbolise happiness”, “it must appeal to everyone”, “it must create a higher order, almost as if it itself is a high being”. Men grabbed brushes, and started to paint a high being so happy and so understanding that it is almost as if it suited everyone. They took a look at their work after continuous effort. “It looks interesting”, shouted one. “It is dubious too”, said the other. “Almost as if it is scary”, commented the one at the far back. Their new age began.

Aylin Yildiz 37

PPresumption r e s u mp t i o n

apunzel

The forest was quiet before you came. I heard you from a mile off. White horse – of course – and not a sign of remorse about disrupting the peace. You thought you’d increase your chances by coming with a lute. How astute. Unfortunately, we in the woods prefer our suitors mute. (It was partly my fault. He came to a halt before I could haul up my plait. Fat chance of him leaving after that.) I’d heard all the songs before – the usual bore about strands of silk and fields of gold – and it all got old very fast. I’d have asked if I’d wanted an encore.’ ’Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!’ ’This golden stair is not in use. It won’t be let loose until the next blue moon – as in, not any time soon – so ride on. Good afternoon.’

But you begged and pleaded and placated and kneaded my ego until I could stand no more. I dropped my braid to the floor. (Stop reading now if you’re opposed to gore.) Snip snip. Abandon ship. The forest was quiet once more. So let this be a warning to the boys next door – the Casanovas looking to score, the Peeping Toms, the grinning flirts, the plain old dirty perverts – take it from me: love hurts.

Ploy Kingchatchaval 39

P r e s u mp t i o n

peration Overlord In the unsleeping hours I was thinking of a war A film of the war Where men the age of boys were great and dying In the gore And in the fields of flowers. On a warm afternoon My grandfather Opens small tubs of ice cream with strong, shaking hands In the garden Standing by the rain-worn table And gives them to his grandson, smiling. He saw burning men leap From burning metal Scream and melt Rubbing their eyes like sleepy children.

Rob Oldham

etter to my closest friend

You know I love to shower with my clothes hanging From the frame, peering surreptitiously then shrugging, (Because I know they look) and I can shove My morning pride in sleeves of cotton before she sees (me) Trudging back along the hallways – imagine! – She blows a kiss into my ear, “Hello!” and I sink Into such saccharine melancholy that clouds dissipate! That evening I straggled with strangers, her center These birthday eyes fix on locks, how to part That sweet but frantic fringe; Listen for the click, and slide Like butter between steamed bouncers I embark Beside her, and she rhythms me in beat with fair blue eyes, pouts whispered lips Blurting out in swears of step, his chest you know I love to cower in bed with clothes hanging! from my skin, static and stained with beer in my bed! (because I know they looked) and I can’t clench a jawful smile when my mourning cloak crawls under my skin whimpers glistening along my, spine – – She sees me, I mouth “Hello!” I looked at walls. I said Hello

Paul Tait 41

P r e s u mp t i o n

he Profit P Whilst the alphabet of the Ancients, Toils in the analysis of ’rational agents’, Modern Greece, the great philosophers’ daughter, Austerely prepares its lambdas for the slaughter.

Marcus McPhillips

Charlotte Clark 43

Renewal

elf-Helf Sonnet #9: New Yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Resolutions

[Q.] Are you fed up with patiently endorsing your friendsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; smug hopes? Remember: enduring resolutions are imaginary. Take my advice. Resolve this January to give up all the things you'll never own: Burn your origami bridal gown. Hand back your second knighthood. Gift your goat to Oxfam. Leave your mansion to the squatters. Board up that private zoo, bequeath your otters to the National Trust. Adjust your expectations. Ignore the optimism of relations who boast of smoke-free, carb-free future selves. Your stress-free life is better. Think of the shelves where all your Oscars aren't, and let them gloat.

Tristram Fane-Saunders 45

Renewal

orning (noun.) That time between breakfast and lunch when you think something might actually happen that day.

9:02 Jimmy Jones is supposed to give a speech in front of the whole school. He is wearing his favourite blue shirt. His mum has ironed it specially, and he’s had the speech in the pocket since breakfast. All of Jimmy’s friends are watching, everyone he knows. But on his way to the podium, he trips. On his knees, he sees the head of Geography, Mr Frank, laughing. Jimmy makes a mental note to have him fired. No-one should laugh at the headmaster like that.

9.03 Down the corridor, a student, Ben Hayes, is debating whether to join the assembly. He is late, and his entrance would be conspicuous. His excuse for his lateness is based on his dog (which is based on a Labrador). He’s planning to say that his homework ate his dog. It doesn’t really work as an excuse - unless the homework was to breed a strain of flesh-eating bacteria, or look after the class lion (which it wasn’t) - but Ben’s hoping that he’ll get points for originality. He decides to skip the assembly, and head to the library - there’s good wifi there, and he can use facebook on his phone.

9.04 Upstairs, the librarian (a mousey woman, with an overbite, overdraft, and tendency to overanalyse) wonders if she looks as tired as she feels. She didn’t get much sleep last night; after an intense argument, her boyfriend agreed that they should ‘take a break from seeing each other’. The argument had been over films. The philistine had said that ‘Cillian Murphy running away from things’ and ‘Arnold Schwarzenegger running towards things’ were genres.

9.05 When Ben Hayes walks into the library, the librarian confiscates his phone. This does not make her feel better.

She throws the phone into a large, polythene bag, already heavy with the weight of apples and blackberries. The bag goes into the bottom drawer of her desk. The drawer is locked.

9.06 In the bag of phones, one rings. The caller is a TV breakfast show host. The owner of the phone has won the weekly competition, earning themselves a two week holiday in the Bahamas. The phone’s vibration causes the entire bag to judder, as if someone had sedated a racoon, stuffed it in the bag full of phones, and it had just woken up. In the studio, the producer draws her finger across her neck. They’ll choose another winner.

9.07 In the studio’s green room, panic breaks out. Since the competition segment has over-run, one of the acts will be dropped from the morning’s bill. An author (there to promote his new non-fiction effort, ‘The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Lava Lamps’), nervously glances at his potential competitors - a four piece band in three piece suits, and a woman demonstrating a new bit of exercise equipment. Like most new bits of exercise equipment, it looks like a cross between a ladder and a medieval farming implement.

9.08 On the studio floor, they’ve reached the relationship segment. An emotional caller is saying how his girlfriend broke up with him over film genres. The panel are not sympathetic; they agree that ‘Arnold Schwarzenegger running towards things’ is not a genre. It’s a sub-genre, belonging to the school of ‘films you can accidentally watch in fast forward and still understand’.

9.09 Watching the show from a TV balanced precariously on a microwave, like a ballerina, balanced precariously on a microwave, Mike and Sally Davis are eating breakfast. Breakfast is cornflakes. Sally is a vegetarian, therefore Mike is a vegetarian, and the bacon that Mike is craving is not allowed. Mike is convinced that vegetarians don’t actually live longer. It’s just that life without bacon feels longer.

9.10 47

Renewal Outside Mike and Sally’s house, a woman staples a ‘missing cat’ poster to a tree. Technically, she hasn’t lost a cat. Her main priority at the moment is meeting a man, someone compassionate, good with animals. So she bought ten white kittens, deliberately released them, and is in the process of putting up wanted posters. The idea is that the men who return the kittens, they’ll be kind, and gentle, and already have her number.

9.11 Down the road, in the corner shop, a man buys a snickers.

9.12 Round the corner, at the tube station, a commuter pulls out his book for the journey. It is an illustrated textbook of tropical diseases. This commuter is not a fan of the rush hour, but has perfected a technique to get more personal space – carrying a book with extremely graphic passages. Other passengers read over his shoulder, before taking a large step back. Yesterday, he carried a section from Chuck Palaniuk’s ‘Rant’, in which a stripper has her toes bitten off by a client. Tomorrow, he will bring a coroner’s report. But today, it is tropical diseases.

9.13 Walking briskly from the station platform is a policeman on his way to work. This is not his stop, but the day before, he caught sight his reflection, and didn’t like the way it looked, so he’s resolved to start getting off the tube one stop earlier, in an attempt to lose some weight. Like most people attempting to lose weight, he’s taken to breathing in when he walks past mirrors. Like all people on a diet, he had taken to explaining to everyone he met that he was on a diet. It will, in fact, be this extra gesticulation (combined with the fact that it’s difficult to stuff your mouth full of food when you’re talking) that will go on to account for his weight loss.

9.14 The policeman’s walk takes him past a white kitten.

9.15 Above the policeman, in a flat that an estate agent might describe as ‘deceptively spacious’, stands a man that the policeman will later go on to arrest. He is carefully ironing a balaclava. If you’re going to commit a crime, he reasons, there’s

no reason to dress down. In fact, there’s every reason to dress up – if your picture’s circulated, you’d like it to be a picture in which you’ve done the ironing. He doesn’t really want to admit it, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Do you iron a balaclava front-on, or folded on its side? He wants to google ‘how do you iron a balaclava?’, but his associate, a large man with small eyes (currently eating a snickers), says that the government would be able to trace the search, and they’d be caught. As a compromise, they agree that he can google ‘how to iron a hat’. In the coming months, both men will convince themselves that it is this google search which lead the police to trace them back to the flat.

9.16 Across the hallway, in a flat with an identical layout, two pensioners sit sideby-side on a sofa. They are both absorbed in their own thoughts. She is wondering whether it is theoretically possible to drown while skydiving, if you breathed in when you went through a really big cloud. He is reflecting that if he’d been given a pound every time someone said that he had a good memory for a man of his age, he’d have £136. Their son’s giving a speech at his school today.

Emma Levinkind

Renewal

uman Reproduction and Technology

By exploring the scope of popular imagination of the possibilities and technological capacities of reproductive science, we can observe a trend whereby human subjectivity is attributed to an increasing number of products, in the sense of materials which we create, both metaphorically and through disciplinary techniques. By re-examining what constitutes the limits of human reproduction over the last century one can demonstrate that technology is one element which has changed human reproduction, but only insofar as these technological advances exist within a realm of renegotiated meanings, which are often ambiguous, contradictory and reflexive. If the primary means of constructing life and the human subject was through sexual reproduction, it is evident that changes in technology complicate this unidirectional relation. When we examine technological developments over the past century, which focus on cells, we can problematize notions of human reproduction by exploring the multiple discourses and disciplinary understandings which disembody and (re)culture human reproduction. Biology is both a discipline, which has a set of techniques for understanding and manipulating the second sense of this word – biology as an object of study. Franklin and Lock argue that biology, following technological innovation, has increasingly become a set of techniques which are deployed, as opposed to a field of natural study (Franklin & Lock, Animation and Cessation 2003, p. 14). However, they also argued that multiple discourses and disciplines inform and move through biology as a site of knowledge production. As these multiple layers of meaning interact, they have the potential to work reflexively with the public imagination: “The cultural analysis of visual, textual, popular, discursive, and national forms of representation of the body requires paying attention not only to embodiment itself but also to biology as a site of knowledge production, moral dispute, and economic worth. It is, for that matter, a site of aesthetic spectacle, heroic narrative, and imagined future.” (Ibid. p. 21) As a result, the discipline of biology carries numerous meanings, which interact with public understandings, which are in turn used to shape the discipline itself. The process of making meaning within science is reflexive. It is with the notion of reflexive biology that I wish to continue this debate and situate several examples of human reproduction, in order to understand how technology and understanding coexist as opposed to exist in a one-directional informational flow.

Molecular biology has been attributed, as a discipline, with the ability to turn life into standardised items to work with. For example, Charis Thompson argues that reproduction is productive in an industrial sense, but because of its discursive bindings, there are also some fundamental differences in the way we understand biology as standardised industrial units (Thompson, The Sacred and Profane Human Embryo, 2005). One major difference Thompson highlights is the unit of production within industrial biology being conceptualised as ethical material, i.e. “the priceless child” (Ibid. p. 255), which cannot be accumulated in the same sense as other products and whose value is located within an imagined future. Thompson discusses the contradictions that exist within a biomedical mode of reproduction, whereby these biological-industrial units, such as gametes “...have the ability to subvert the identity and kinship categories that biomedicine was initially designed to asset and repair” (Ibid. p. 267). For example, whilst ARTs were originally a technology used to “fix” broken family elements, they have in fact subverted linear reproductive temporality, which in turn can be conceptualised as having queered family formations. There are numerous examples of interrupted or re-temporalized reproduction which interacts with biomedical modes of industrial reproduction. Tissue culture is the practice of isolating a small fragment of tissue from the body and cultivating it in a glass vessel containing a suitable nutritive medium (Squier, Life and Death at Strangeways, 2000). Squier examines the different modes of understanding which flow through the Strangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge during the rise of tissue culture, as a set of practices and demonstrates the multiple formulations of temporality and subjectivity which these practices are infused with, as cells are taken outside of the body (disembodied) and frozen (taken out of time). In doing so she demonstrates that our experience of the body is shaped not only by medical practices, but also through those in literature and images. A striking example Squier uses is a poem, written by one of the scientists who worked on these tissue culture projects, which described a fertilized ovum (in vitro) in terms of a rights-bearing subject of the liberal state, which traces a narrative of the development of an enlightenment individual: “Feeling, thinking, feeding come by limiting this freedom of each being any, now each for all performs its special function.” (Ibid. p. 40)

Renewal This demonstrates the manner in which technology is understood through the vehicles of understanding that we already possess. In this case, an analogy is drawn between the narrative development of the “free-thinking” enlightenment subject and the cells, which specialises and has autonomy. In a similar way, Squier also identifies patterns within Martinovitch’s poems, which are influenced by the technology of cinema, where the gaze of camera turns cells from object of scientific study to subjects, but also commodifies that subject (like Mickey Mouse): “The motto of the undertaking Of motion pictures making Is: You must tell a tale! So, of late, an attempt has been made By chromosome X and his mate, (the latter in its non-existant [sic] state), To imitate Mickey Mouse and his gait.” (Ibid. p. 42) I would argue that the central point to be drawn out from this, is that as the understanding of scientific discovery relies upon technologies of display already available, it becomes bound within the conventions of that genre. In this case, as it is demonstrated, cinema, which was used to relay the discoveries of tissue culture to lay populations, requires a subject or hero. As such, the tissue becomes a subject in and of itself in popular imagination. Thus, it is not just a product, but a potential, imagined life, which follows Thompson’s argument above. We must ask, then, “what does this mean for reproduction?” The creation of a subject exists not only through sexual reproduction, but also through creature of cell cultures, which are given human subjectivity through complex discursive mechanisms. Human subjectivity becomes disembodied and understood as created, in this instance, in vitro. We can further demonstrate a queering of the time and space of reproduction through Hannah Landecker’s exploration of the HeLa cell line (Landecker, Knowing and Relating, 2000). Landecker follows the narrative of the HeLa cell line and traces an imagined history and archive of a cell, attributed to a woman - Henrietta Lack, who in 1951 dies of cancer. A piece of cancer tissue is cut from her and living cells from her were grown in test tubes, supplied with nutrients – called HeLa cells – using the tissue culture technique. This cell line was described as immortal, for it could be grown indefinitely outside

of the body. The cells continued to live and she did not. A paradox was created whereby the woman lives immortally through the cells which are preserved (through the personification of cells), but woman’s death is necessary to elevate these cells to immortal life and give them a form of conceptualised autonomy. Whilst at first this point may seem tenuous as an argument demonstrating how human reproduction has changed when interacting with technology, I believe it can be used to highlight human reproduction as temporally ruptured by new formulations of life, through attribution of subjectivity to biological product. If this was said to represent immortality, at once it was a narrative constructed and erased, a subjectivity praised and demonised over a course of time. HeLa, constructed in the media, was originally given the imagined subjectivity of a self-sacrificing woman, a suburban housewife, who had died but whose cells had been used to save lives. Significantly, as the HeLa cells were discovered to have taken over other cell lines, Henrietta Lack’s identity as a black woman was made apparent in the media. In turn, the cell line was then prescribed a subjectivity which followed American grammars of race which were deeply essentialist and racist: “The narrative of reproduction out of control was linked with promiscuity through references to the cell’s wild proliferative tendencies and its “colourful” laboratory life” (Ibid. p. 66). Notably, the image of Narratives of purity, likened to that of inter-racial reproduction were analogised and in doing so public fears about biology as craft were drawn upon. A similar case of anxieties about changes in reproduction is located within Sarah Franklin’s work on Dolly the sheep (Franklin, Dolly Mixtures, 2007). Franklin uses Dolly the sheep as an example whereby the practice of construction of biology and combination of techniques to reproduce (a combination of asexual and sexual techniques, of sameness and mixing), which in turn teaches us new things about the potential flexibility of life. Franklin argues: “Dolly was supposed to be a biological impossibility because before her birth it was assumed that all cells “commit” as they develop, becoming particular kinds of cells, such as hair cells, skin cells, liver cells, bone cells, or heart cells. The assumption was that as cells differentiate and develop to become specialized cell types, they lose the capacity to become other kinds of tissue.” (Ibid. p. 38) Once more, reproductive temporality becomes queered, in the sense that biotechniques surrounding the production and reproduction of life demonstrates that cells do not follow the logic of permanent specialisation. As we imagine specialised cells going back in time, to a formation before specialisation, we disrupt our views of linear reproductive temporality. Biology and reproductive techniques are demonstrated in this sense to be a matter of artificial

Renewal construction. As a result, Franklin describes Dolly as created for a mixture of agricultural, commercial, industrial and medical purposes. Dolly becomes a site where multiple disciplinary techniques and discursive practices interact and blend and in doing so create a hyperbolic possibility for the course of human reproduction. We can take this argument, about the potential artificial construction of human bodies through Habermas’ argument about the imagined possibilities of the “auto-transformation of the species” (Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, 2007, p. 21). Habermas argues that notions of constructed human subjects, through processes such as PGD, complicate our understandings of the liberal, autonomous human subject. Usually a person can take hold of their own life history in a revisionary self-understanding (Ibid p. 14) but genetic manipulation through PGD permits screening and possibility of trait selection by parents, which creates an asymmetrical relation between adult who can choose and child who is trapped with the decision of parental trait choice. As mentioned above, subjectivity is attributed to biological products. Whilst Habermas argues that individualization is a process and outcome of socialization, which requires an interaction with a shared, public intersubjective world, we also practice anticipatory socialization, whereby parents attach subjectivity to a child in vivo (Ibid. pp. 34-5). Habermas takes this process to argue that PGD stirs so many hyperbolic emotional responses as it removes a sense of chromosomal contingency which is associated with “natural” human breeding in popular imagination. Thus, he states that, “Getting used to having human life biotechnologically at the disposal of our contingent preferences cannot help but change our normative self-understanding” (Ibid. p. 72). This anxiety is located within a dissemination of the autonomous liberal subject, who, perceived as determined by PGD in their genetic makeup, loose the ability to post hoc change their understanding of self and life course, thus become overdetermined by genetics. However, John Bestard notes that whilst some predict a form of genetic essentialism arising out of ARTs, as with Habermas, this is not necessarily the case when examining current ethnographic examples (Bestard, Knowing and Relating, 2009). One such example used is of a Spanish woman, who used egg donation to conceive. Bestard argues that when the baby was born, many who knew about the egg donation still argued there was a stark resemblance between mother and child (although the two were not genetically linked): “She concluded by saying how important pregnancy is to identify with a child: pregnancy blurs biological milieu and genetic endowment. She has been pregnant, given

birth and fed her child. Across these very biological and cultural actions she has passed on substances of her body and has identified herself with the child. Therefore the child resembles her and she thinks in terms of continuity.â&#x20AC;? (Ibid. p. 25) In this case, what becomes important is how a subject repairs this temporary discontinuity between past, present and future of the baby, if the past of the baby is not hers and the future of the baby must be hers. Thus, this process becomes a reflexive process of identification, where new narratives are mixed with metaphors of blood and genes, which are not wholly deterministic. As a result, this process is more complex than some critics of geneticism would claim. Above all, what I believe this final example provides, is a demonstration of the reflexive mechanisms in which people understand reproduction and technological advancement. Whilst views of conventional reproductive temporality (in the form of infertility), and genetic descent (in the use of egg donation) are ruptured, they are renegotiated through other available narrative and discursive tools. The biological element of reproduction is repaired by the subject by drawing on metaphors of gestation as relation in this case, which make the future of the child tied to her through a differentially conceive descent. If, in this example, human reproduction is changed by technology, it is also interacted with in a manner which keeps conceptions of human reproduction the same. If human reproduction is changed by technology, it is not necessarily done so in an uncomplicated manner. ARTs, used to repair conventional notions of reproductive temporality, and to â&#x20AC;&#x153;treatâ&#x20AC;? infertility, also become an agent that tangibly changes that which is human reproduction as it interacts with numerous models of production. As biological material becomes a product, commercialised and ready to be used within certain moral boundaries, it takes on an apparent subjectivity, which is temporally and spatially queered as it is a subject disembodied and taken out of time, in vitro. Whilst popular imagination and science fiction imagines the self-replication of the species as the ultimate end of human reproduction and agent of a new age led by biotechnology and biosociality, we must also be acutely aware of the discourses used by individuals to re-temporalize and re-embody reproduction. Thus, whilst technology has a capacity to change human reproduction, it reflexively interacts with disciplinary tools, discourses, human subjectivity and popular culture and art, to produce contemporary notions of what is constituted as a legible practice of human reproduction.

Gavin Stevenson 55

Renewal

ord Proof-Editor

Opposite ourselves over a table, looking into our reflections in one another’s pupils: we thanked memory. For making today’s yesterday softer than yesterday’s tomorrow. We toasted to the forgiving proof-editor of time – who crosses out awkwardness and scribbles in nostalgia; puts a toughening of skin in place of pain; corrects stumbling to eloquence; re-writes anger to passion; scratches pensiveness over a Tipp-Exed boredom. Meal over, we shuffled down a busy street past boxes of shops, rode the moving stairs like hover-people, into the belly of some Complex, sailed up past Nando’s and through the Pick ’n Mix. We gave thanks to the great rose-tinter; drank her wise dizzying blood, ate her sugar-coated bread.

Sitting now, beside ourselves in the horizontal row on soft(ish) seats in a tepid present, we close our eyes from one another, faces lit by fifty feet of beaming bright â&#x20AC;&#x201C; project our future onto our past and try to ignore the leak around the edges of the screen. We bowed in prayer to the Lord Proof-Editor of time.

Sam Grabiner

Renewal

astiche or Pistachio

I could hear him hearing her giving birth to it. It was a strange thing. Why

would anyone choose to give birth like this? In the snow. In the middle of Time’s Square. It was so very ... uncivilized. An act of disentangling the thread of normality. A weird freak-show. Carnivalesque. Like a mama bear devouring her cub in a bloody fiasco. A disgusting parade of moving guts and crying Chucky dolls. At least I gather that’s what he heard. Seeming as the filtered echoes of unbridled agony were not enough to satiate my birthing-in-the-snow fetish, I thought it best to take a stroll outside. Coat – on. Scarf – arranged lackadaisically. Shoes – quickly polished. Hair – flicked with a wink. Boxers – going commando. A gust of icy torture blew my door wide open; how convenient! I skipped outside. Yes, I skipped. Walking is for other creatures. Every skip accentuated the pangs of rage against the world. I skipped ever so slightly faster in anticipation, without appearing rushed (what would the cosmos think if I looked rushed?). Snowflakes swirled around me in a charming little twister, propelling me forward like a character in a comic. The timid sun had even decided to come out and welcome me. It cast an anorexic beam that gradually grew in strength, pointing me to Oz. I skipped. Granted, the timing could have been better. The mother’s sense of ‘the moment’ was sadly unfortunate. I would have much preferred her to give birth when Christmas Eve bowed down to welcome Christmas Day. What a statement that would have made. The magi over at Macy’s would’ve come running! Ha! Yet the North Star pointed me now, at this unprophesied time. And I had to comply. I greeted the ballet dancers who formed well-rehearsed formations near a fountain. They, in turn, plié-ed, pointing supple fingers to pirouetting street vendors. They, in turn, trumpeted confetti which engaged in a pas de deux with the specs of dust. Those, in turn, enshrouded the demon-bearing mother in a UFO-kidnapping-you-like-in-the-movies sort of formation. I gasped at the sight, and the air escaping my mouth exploded in hazy

arabesque. I skipped higher and with more purpose. The father was running around the mother, hands in the air, like a misguided Native Indian ritualbearer. He was yelling some clumsy words: ‘Things are going from bad to worse, to worse and worse. Not that she neglected me, she could never have neglected me enough, but the way she’s plaguing me with our child, exhibiting her belly and breasts and saying it’s due any moment ... it’s as if she can feel it lepping already!’. Familiar words often spoken as a chant at birthing-in-thesnow affairs! I wish he’d infuse his words with more gusto though! ENJOY THE MOMENT MAN! He pulled tufts of hair out and used them to clear away the saliva that he had spat on his chin. THAT’S MORE LIKE IT I shouted. He took the encouragement and ripped out the mother’s hair to mop up the blood. She howled. My eyes were so entranced that they felt like levitating out of my head and zooming in. The mother – oh how delectable! Her lips, shaped like half a tinned mushroom turned pink, then pale, then a post oil spill oceanic tinge. Her eyes, an atrophied vanilla, lectured the world, berated the laws of childbearing. And she screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed. And she screamed also. It was a screaming-fest! The screaming worked. The child was fed up! It starting crawling out, ripping through all obstructions. Its tiny hands, so monstrously charmant, conducted its mother’s tears. This child would grow up to be great! A master of the arts! I’d train it. It would be my project. I foresee triple axels and quad salchows in his future. And why not a double Arabian? He’ll be multi-talented. Meanwhile, the father had packed his bag. He seemed ready to go somewhere far far away. A distant galaxy perhaps. This was new to me. Oz had never disappointed. He was molesting the sanctity of the ritual! Even the gay ballet dancers sat grumpy at the fountain. COME BACK FATHER. He refused. He walked away. WALKED. He didn’t even have the decency to skip. SHAMEFUL. The mother lay on the snow, guts still pouring out of her. The child tried his very first toe loop. He’d lose marks on his grade of execution. I stared, not knowing what to do. The moment was ruined. It had self-destructed. I saw a vendor to my right. What a dilemma. To stay and help, or to explore the wonders offered by the vendor and wait for the next time the ritual occurred? Pistachio ice-cream it is.

Michael Panayi 59

Renewal

ong of Io Io. Former cow on her ID card. Former feast for the crocodiles. Was relieved ’Io’ came out of her mouth and not another ’Low’. Io. Her first word in years. She says it again. Io. The sound of rainbow bait breaking the water in the fisheye. Io. The sound of coffee poured into the coffee cup under a familiar judgeye by quivering determined hands of dotage. Io. The woman. Leaves a note for the crocodiles: IOU one beefheart.

Ciaran Chillingworth

Angelica Van Clarke 61

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