The ISIS, Michaelmas 2015 by The Isis

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Fiction and Poetry Editor: Alexander Hartley

Editors: Thea Slotover James Waddell Creative Director: Mayya Gulieva Creative Director: Mayya Gulieva

Deputy Editors: Alexander Hartley Noah Lachs Jessica Sinyor Ieuan Perkins

Sub-Editors: Melissa Thorne Thea Bradbury Ione Wells Dominic Hewett Christian Hill Lucy Valsamidis Fintan Calpin

Staff List

Creatives: Roman Leander Cascorbi Nathan Caldecott Website Technician: Brian Wong

Broadcasting Team: Eleanor Barnes Jasmine Cameron-Chileshe Ruby Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Grady Events Director: Beth Davies-Kumadiro Events Team: Frances Varley Adam Porter Sophie Aldred David King Business Manager: Claudia Martinez-Madrid Business Team: Maria Hunt Josh Mahir Chris Parsons Callum Tipple Duncan James

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gime, as well as to notorious members of organised crime rings. Lynton Lees, meanwhile, points out the hypocrisy of the Conservative government’s celebration of the Kindertransport, given their reluctant and inadequate policy towards those in need of refuge in 2015.

Our first instinct was to challenge these preconceptions of what The ISIS should look like, how it should sound, and to whom it should be addressed. The magazine will be delivered through medieval porticoes into palatial colleges, but it opens under the railway arches on Rye Lane, in Fintan Calpin’s native Peckham, at Rammie’s fruit stand. Frances Timberlake takes us further afield, to overcrowded and unsanitary converted nuclear bunkers in Geneva to hear the stories of asylum seekers from Syria, Eritrea, and Afghanistan. Our writers have listened to the voices of young Ugandans wearied by a corrupt regime, Jordanian women struggling to have their rights recognised, and Colombian balladeers singing of the bloody costs of the drug cartels’ warfare.

But despite our best efforts to make ISIS radical and provocative, we couldn’t help but be charmed by the poised and polished erudition of Sophie Eager’s elegant reflection on the belly button (perhaps the stereotypical ISIS article par excellence), or the enchanting, sophisticated idiosyncrasy of Grace Linden’s response to Agnes Martin. And Dom Hewett’s short piece advertising an upcoming “six-part sitcom and profound commentary on depression and masculinity” featuring the boyband Blue hardly presents a major challenge to any school of psychoanalytical thought, but that hasn’t stopped it making us laugh every time we try to edit it.

The hypothetical ideal of what an ISIS article should be is not the only institution that we have tackled. After a tip-off earlier in the year from a Czech journalist, Noah Lachs spent months working on an indepth investigation into the background of Luděk Sekyra, real estate billionaire and benefactor to Harris Manchester. Noah exposes Sekyra’s connections to the oppressive Czech communist re-

Editorial

The weight of the idea of what ISIS should be is such that, in our time at the magazine, the word has been adjectivalised. It’s not unusual to hear members of the team describing content as sounding, or feeling, or looking very “ISIS” - cerebral, bookish, aloof.

We’ve tried not to be buried under the weight of ISIS’s history, but ultimately our magazine has been defined by neither recalcitrance nor deference. In fact, despite our fretting over editorial policy, it’s only tentatively that we claim responsibility for the magazine’s character. It is crowd-sourced; collaborative; a product of the voices that make it up - high-brow and low-brow, sophisticated and simple, bold and muted, but always unique. We hope you enjoy hearing them as much as we have.

James Waddell & Thea Slotover

Pascal found order in a game of dice. Can you find the patterns in chance events? If you can bring science to bear on the toughest challenges, apply here today for our Quantitative Analyst roles.

www.gresearch.co.uk /predict-the-future

Contents 6 Flat White Fintan Calpin

10 A Story Which Has No End Isabella Woolford-Diaz

13 We Shall Visit Like Altars Cleo Henry

14 A Place of Greater Safety Lynton Lees

18 Shorts

James Waddell, Ione Wells, Melissa Thorne

32 Undesirable Persons Noah Lachs

36 An Articulation of the Rights of Women Lucy Valsamidis

38 This Is My Body

Caroline Ritchie

40 Gridlock on Entebbe Road Charlie Parkes

43 The Bees, Hallucinate Catherine Kelly

44 A Fragile Thread

Grace Connolly Linden

20 Why am I denied my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rights? Sophie Dowle

Poems for Amman Zoe Sandford

26 The Duke of Nablus Thea Slotover

29 Rift Valley

Tabitha Hayward

30 Nombrilisme Sophie Eager

46 Sheltered From Harm? Frances Timberlake

48 Feeling Blue Dominic Hewett

50 Political Beef Karan Jain

52 The Glass Ceilings Ione Wells

54 500 Words Competition

Emma Levin, Hester Styles Vickery, Billy Beswick, Ellie Myerson

Flat White The changing faces of gentrified Peckham by Fintan Calpin

I’ve been coming regularly to Peckham, from my home in neighbouring East Dulwich, for all 20 years of my life. Peckham is an area of south-east London known for its long-standing working class population and cultural diversity, notably becoming home to a new migrant population following the Windrush and postwar immigration in the ’50s, and today the majority of its population is Black African or Black Caribbean, as well as comparatively high Chinese, Bangladeshi and other Asian populations. As I’ve grown up, I’ve seen it from different perspectives. When I was much smaller, accompanying my parents round the markets, Peckham was the smell of fish, fruits I couldn’t reach, and on the best days blurry, knee-high views of the inside of Woolworths for popcorn and coke, followed by the sticky floors of the Multiplex for the latest Pixar. Later, my parents opened a savings account for me in the Nationwide on Rye Lane and I remember long queues out the

“Since 2008.” Rammie, who owns a shop and fruit stand under the arches on Rye Lane, gives me a precise timeframe for when Peckham’s property prices became an issue.

door there, but it closed permanently in 2011. It was also in 2011 that my friends started talking about going to Frank’s Café on the roof of the car park behind the cinema, with its cool promise of an open-air bar and art installations. Peckham was now a good place to go for everyone, a change that had happened synchronously with me getting old enough to go out and drink. My friends would come from across London to go to the Bussey Building, a trendy and increasingly popular nightclub and arts centre. Bellenden Road, which to me had always just been a thoroughfare onto the main Rye Lane, became a place for coffee and dinner. I spent my last summer evenings before university nursing whisky sours in the desperately trendy Peckham Springs, a bar frequented by a generation of young artists and professionals new to Peckham and tucked behind the arches of Peckham Rye station, between the metalworks and mechanics that have been there forever.

I’m back a year later on a Saturday in mid-July. Yuppies pile off the Overground from East London and filter into the bar underneath. My friend remarks that there are “a fuck lot more T.M. Lewin shirts and shit Vneck jumpers” than the last time we came. We talk briefly and inconclusively about gentrification, mostly regarding how the cocktails used to be cheaper and more alcoholic. I wonder quietly if I’m gentry. Earlier that day I’d been wandering up Rye Lane when I asked Rammie if I could speak to him about gentrification in Peckham. He shrugged, said he wasn’t busy, and invited me into his shop. Rammie has lived and worked here for about twenty years, but the biggest change, he told me, has come in the last seven. He says the area has “cleaned up” and crime has gone down, but it has become significantly worse for business, largely thanks to the increasing rent prices. He reckons that property prices have doubled since 2013. When I Google this later I see he’s not exaggerating, but the facts beggar belief. The rent he pays for his shop has gone up dramatically since 2008. I remember that Frank’s Café opened that year. “Peckham has a different mentality now,” he says. Considering the way it’s going for businesses like his, I ask him if he plans on staying in Peckham. He shakes his head and mentions plans to move to Bromley, further out into London’s more affordable suburbs.

After talking to Rammie I walk up and down the lane, perusing the shops and market stalls. Much of Peckham seems unchanged – the fresh fishmongers and butchers, those great stands of fruits and vegetables, Asian and African minimarts, the barbers by the station. I walk past two guys sat next to an enormous speaker playing dub, and chat briefly to the owner of a West African clothes store in the indoor market. It is different though: I’m more aware of that unassuming archway between a butcher’s and newsagent’s leading to the Bussey building and can’t help but notice the trendy white kids slipping down past the Multiplex towards Frank’s as the evening gathers near. Trying to put my finger on exactly what Rammie meant about Peckham’s changing mentality, I try to keep in sight two different views of Peckham, one of its arty bars and cool clubs, another of its well-established community and culture.

Going down a street perpendicular to Rye Lane I come to Bellenden Road. With its indie shops and trendy restaurants, this is the face of gentrified Peckham. Gastropubs here charge £10-£17 for a main and you’d be hardpressed to find a pint under £4. There’s a giant mural on the wall of a pub that was almost certainly commissioned. It’s a gesture towards an urban aesthetic, echoing the graffiti coating the nearby train lines and hard-to-reach places of Rye Lane. It’s clear how the longstanding culture and character of the area has influenced the aesthetics of gentrification here. But the difference is palpable: this is Street Art with a capital ‘A’. When money and commercial demand meet the cultural expression of a minority group, it’s hard not to think about appropriation. The ‘regeneration’ of an area in the process of gentrification seizes on a notion of ‘decay’ – ironically, it renews this ‘rundown’ aesthetic. Given the narrative of ‘improvement’ that this development implies, it’s worth noting how the language of colonialism is present in the way we talk about ‘up-and-coming’ areas like Peckham. Lifestyle articles talk about ‘discovering’ them, and in doing so write out the communities that existed there before. Peckham has always been there, but it’s been working class and black.

When I ask someone working on Bellenden Road if they’ve noticed any changes in Peckham since they’ve been here, she says, “Yes, more racist attacks.” She’s seen young, rich, white kids chasing a black man down the road shouting “You don’t own Peckham anymore.” There’s an influx of moneyed white people entering this area – the incoming population ‘discovering’ Peckham – and a growth in violence against its longstanding communities. She tells me that the gentrification we’re seeing here is just a semiotic factor, a symptom of rampant free market forces. Peckham’s isn’t just a problem with property prices, but of practised social cleansing.

It’s true that the problem is bigger than new businesses taking advantage of increased demand and setting up niche, up-market shops in trendy areas, as the viral defence of Shoreditch’s Cereal Killer Café in an open letter from its proprietor insisted. But this doesn’t shift responsibility entirely: I do understand and support the recent protest in Shoreditch that targeted the café as a symbol of gentrification, if only because by targeting a symbol we can draw attention to the issues of which it is symbolic. Integration is key, and small businesses have to be careful to support the local economy, not siphon money away from it and price out its people. It is a very dangerous assumption indeed to think that sipping a flat white on Bellenden Road is a politically neutral action.

“She’s seen young, rich, white kids chasing a black man down the road shouting “You don’t own Peckham anymore.”

I end my evening in Peckham drunk at the Bussey Building. It is full of middle-class accents dressed in working class clothes. The whole urban, edgy thing wears thin as I sober up, staring confusedly at my Reebok Classics in the smoking area. I imagine gentrification drinking Peckham dry and in its place offering up a flat white with some graffiti on the side of the cup. I conclude that I am socially conscientious but part complicit in gentrification and experience self-loathing. Next time I come to Peckham I will shop at Rammie’s store. Hopefully he will still be there.

A story which has no end ‘Narco Culture’ and the ballads of the Colombian cartels by Isabella Woolford-Diaz Diaz

“I work for my people; I’ve got a huge armed crew. They’ve told a thousand tales. They’ve marked me as a wanted man for being the prime minister. I’m still listed as a wanted man, but they’ve not asked themselves who’s going to support this town like I have.” These are the words of the 2001 song ‘The Prime Minister’ by Gerardo Ortiz, written from the perspective of the Mexican drug lord El Chapo Guzmán, just after he had escaped from prison for the first time. This song is one of the hits of the narcocorrido genre, literally translated as ‘narco-ballads'. From tales of elaborate heists and assassinations, to narcos apologising to their children for the fact that no one wants to be friends with a narco’s son at school, these songs explore the complex world of narcos in Latin America. Narcocorridos stem from traditional Mexican ballads, or ‘corridos’. These songs emerged from European romances brought to the region by Spanish colonial rule, taking on lives of their own over the course of the Mexican War of Independence and the Mexican Revolution. In the latter conflict especially, corridos were used to transmit news, often with subver-

sive undertones, about the successes or failures of battles in different regions of the country. Corridos, due to their folkloric nature and their place in the oral history of Mexico, developed into many different versions popularised by opposing parties. The lyrics of ‘La Cucaracha’ were adapted by supporters of the revolutionary general Pancho Villa, giving rise to one of the most famous versions of the song, in which the drug-deprived cockroach in question represents the counter-revolutionary president Victoriano Huerta. A century later, within hours of El Chapo’s second escape from prison this July, dozens of narcocorridos began to surface all over the internet. This modern-day descendant of the corrido is as multifaceted as its ancestor, and the diversity of treatments that El Chapo receives in these songs is a testament to the extreme times Mexico, and other Latin American countries affected by cartel culture, are enduring. Some of these narcocorridos cast aspersions upon the integrity of the government of Peña Nieto, alluding to corruption and collusion with narcos, while some praise the drug kingpin for smashing the establishment and defying the rule of law.

These polarised perspectives on El Chapo immediately struck me, as the child of a child of the Colombian conflict, as parallel to those on another narco kingpin: the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. Narcocorridos rose to popularity in Colombia in the 90s, one of the bloodiest decades in the country’s history. Left-wing revolutionary guerrillas, US-sponsored far-right paramilitaries, cartels with changeable political alliances and the national army all contributed to a conflict that, until the Syrian war, had caused the largest internal displacement the world had ever seen. This was a time when the Colombian cartels ruled the waves – literally. They dominated narcotrafficking routes via the Carib-

bean, but as this became less secure due to increased US monitoring, they began to employ middlemen in Mexico who would simply transfer the loads. The song ‘The Secret Airstrip’ and its music video by the Mexican band Grupo Exterminador tell the tale of a group of Colombian traffickers attempting to double-cross their Mexican boss, who is expecting a drugs shipment to arrive at a secret airstrip in the Sinaloan mountains. The Colombians, thinking they have got away with the sting, bid him goodbye and the boss, as the song goes, “wished them a safe journey, and then sent them to hell” to the sound of gunshots as he takes his revenge.

The intervention of the US government, which collaborated with Colombian officials as well as paramilitary and vigilante groups such as Los Pepes, led to Escobar’s demise and the fall of the Medellin Cartel. The Cali Cartel was later brought down by an ironic betrayal by the man they had hired to assassinate Escobar, and who colluded with the very same US forces that had once sided with them. The Caribbean corridor became relatively obsolete, and the previously tangential Mexican cargo transporters, like El Chapo, became the most prominent drug lords. US intervention is said largely to have obliterated the Colombian trade; in reality the drug trafficking and the violence that accompanied it were only pushed north to Mexico.

“Henao sings; 'They call me The Child of Coca. I have no one but I know how to defend like the money the US pumped myself” Just into Colombia in the ’90s and 2000s, the funding it has provided

to the Mexican government has only served to escalate the violence and increase civilian deaths. The Merida Initiative, which declared outright war on the cartels, has failed to address the roots of the problems: poverty, disempowerment, and the consumption, rather than production, of cocaine. Civilians have sometimes commented that the adoption of the ‘kingpin’ strategy, as employed by the US in Colombia, which targets specific drug lords only, has simply led to further fragmentation and bitter violence between cartel members, with many innocent lives caught in between. Worse still, US funding is known to reach bloody hands. There have been repeated revelations that even high-ranking Mexican officials, police and army members have been involved in large-scale atrocities such as kidnappings and massacres, working alongside the very cartels they purport to oppose in the drug war with near-absolute impunity. According to Sandra Rodriguez, a journalist in Juarez, 97% of the 10,000 murders committed from 2008 to 2010 in the city were never investigated. In Mexico and Colombia, the verb ‘disappear’ has taken on a transitive meaning.

The narcocorridos can represent a voice of resistance to the establishment, such as ‘The Child of Coca’ by the Colombian singer Uriel Henao. Recounting the life of a narco, Henao presents him as the product of a broken society and a link in a chain of violence, rather than its instigator. Of his childhood he sings, “I find myself picking coca leaves in the Colombian mountains because there’s nothing else to do. I know there are other children in this situation who have to get by all alone. They call me The Child of Coca. I have no one but I know how to defend myself.” ‘El Bacan’, by Aguilas del Norte, points out the hypocrisy of the US: “Uncle Sam likes to get wasted too.” Critics of narcocorridos argue that the genre glorifies the violence of figures such as El Chapo and characterises them as the Latino Robin Hoods of their time, while trivialising the suffering and brutal violence they have created. The fact that narcocorridos are banned from radio in Mexico, and in Colombia radio stations prefer to self-censor, can serve as an argument for both sides: do narcocorridos tell truths that corrupt authorities want to conceal and that threatened journalists are prevented from telling, or serve as propaganda for Mexican cartels in recruiting youths and instilling fear in society? Some narcocorrido singers are even employed directly by cartels to extol their virtues, with fatal consequences for artists who do not remain loyal to one patron. The group Kombo Kolombia, which played Colombian vallenatos for the cartel Los Zetas, had 17 of its members executed and their bodies dumped in a well as punishment for playing for the cartel’s rivals. Singers of narcocorridos are not just commentators upon the drug war; they can be both propaganda tools and victims of it.

These narcocorridos are thus not simply a phenomenon peripheral to the Mexican drug war: they form part of what has been termed ‘Narco Culture’. For all its violence, ‘Narco Culture’ is devoutly Catholic. The Knights Templar cartel, actually modelled on the European order of the Middle Ages, declared a truce for the 2012 papal visit, and venerates its syncretic folk saint Santa Muerte, ‘Holy Death’, who offers protection specifically to the poor, the LGBT community, sex workers and narcos. This is a culture in which drug kingpins are buried in palaces with bulletproof glass and air con in what is essentially a narco wall of fame at the Jardines de Humaya cemetery in Sinaloa. This is a culture in which the polo shirts big-dog narcos get arrested in suddenly spike in popularity, and street sellers will offer to personalise them with your own name studded across the back. It’s unlikely that this would seem outlandish to Colombians, whose native kingpin Escobar was permitted by the government to build his own palatial prison in order to avoid extradition to the US. The complex included a waterfall, jacuzzi, football pitch and giant dollhouse and became known as ‘The Cathedral’. Narcocorridos hold up to us, in plain view, the absurdity of the world Mexicans and Colombians live in. The song ‘El Cartelazo' by Aguilas del Norte ends with these words: “Today I remember the path of ‘El Mexicano’ and ‘El Doctor’, Pablo Escobar. They died as they lived, like proper men, and they marked a story that has no end. Because even though they’re gone forever, others are burdened by their fate.” This narcocorrido could already predict what the Merida Initiative would bring to Mexico: a war on drugs is a never-ending story of violence, which continues to be told by our never-ending songs.

We Shall Visit Like Altars by Cleo Henry A hand of apologetic translation on a sun-bleached welcome plaque sticking out of a temple dried and shrivelled by the sun. Should you want to visit like altars, The Asclepion of Kos hosts the architecture typical â&#x20AC;Ś We shall visit like altars, and like gods will tear the sky into velvet ribbons for us. Like conquerors will raise their fists against our turrets and foundations which oracles once condoned. The like yellow, swollen moon, bloated with cricket song, sits like a pudding, heavy and rich, on our shoulders. We move with assassinsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; feet through museums, pocketing tokens of a collective past with fingers stained by the loose pigments of guide books. That morning you had said that the hot chocolate in the hotel was the best you had ever tasted. You drank and laughed at the improbability of this while the lobby kid hovered nervously.

A Place of Greater Safety John Fieldsend was seven years old when he arrived in Britain from his native Czechoslovakia. “One day my father called my brother and me and said ‘you’re going on a long journey, you’re going to a country called England.’ My parents took us down to the local railway station, put us on a train, and said goodbye.”

On the 14th June 1999, the then Speaker of the House of Commons Betty Boothroyd unveiled a plaque in the Palace of Westminster. Its message was one of “deep gratitude”, thanking the “people and Parliament of the United Kingdom” for their role in rescuing ten thousand Jewish children from Nazi persecution in the late ’30s. Those rescue operations, thereafter known as the Kindertransports, spared the children the fate of their parents and fellow Jews who remained on the continent, the vast majority of whom perished in extermination camps. The children of the Kindertransport tell a story of survival, a seemingly triumphant account of innocent children finding refuge in a country with open doors, while so many nations kept theirs firmly shut. Britain is proud of this act of human compassion during European Jewry’s darkest hour. When David Cameron spoke of Britain’s “proud tradition of providing sanctuary for

The weight of Britain’s past on the refugee crisis by Lynton Lees

those fleeing persecution” as part of June’s Refugee Week, he undoubtedly had the story of the Kindertransport children in mind. “I have a lot of questions about the present immigration policy,” says Mr Fieldsend. “As one who was taken in as a persecuted minority, I wish persecuted minorities were much higher up the agenda. I realise there has to be a limit, but I don’t think we’re anywhere near the limit.” He is not alone in perceiving a disjunction between the British government’s policy towards the Kindertransport children and its neglect of present-day refugees. In a recent letter to the prime minister, 200 eminent rabbis and other Jews recalled the Anglo-Jewish refugee experience in a plea for British compassion. “Our experience as refugees,” it states, “is not so distant that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be demonised for seeking safety.”

It will be 76 years this November since the first Kindertransport children arrived in Britain, yet it is an anniversary likely to be overshadowed. Europe’s modern-day refugee crisis is the largest of its kind the continent has faced since the Second World War. The Syrian conflict has driven four million refugees beyond the Syrian border; other refugees have fled conflict and persecution in Eritrea and Afghanistan. Coverage of refugees’ frantic attempts to seek sanctuary in Europe – clinging to the underside of lorries, enlisting the help of exploitative traffickers, risking death aboard crowded vessels crossing the Mediterranean – dominated the summer’s press coverage. The close attention paid by the British media to those four thousand people desperately trying to reach British soil from Calais has brought the crisis uncomfortably close to home.

It is not only the scale of the present refugee crisis that brings back echoes of the ’30s and ’40s. Children constitute an alarming proportion of the displaced populations in Europe, much as they did during the Second World War. The current Syrian conflict alone has produced 1.5 million child refugees, while Calais’ infamous Jungle 2 camp – where sanitary conditions are poor and food scarce – is home to children as young as twelve. There has been little talk about Britain’s proud tradition of granting asylum when it comes to these children. Under its Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme, Britain has welcomed a mere 216 Syrians. For those refugees seeking sanctuary in the UK beyond this scheme, the total number of successful applications stands at just under five thousand. The prime minister’s decision to admit twenty thousand Syrian refugees over the course of the next parliament came only after widespread public outcry at Britain’s pitiful contribution to the crisis. It was a policy sharply criticised by three hundred of the most senior figures in the British legal profession, who in a recent statement declared it “too low, too slow and too narrow.”

Is Britain forgetting its historical obligation to offer sanctuary to the world’s most vulnerable? It’s certainly easy to look to the Kindertransport and see a government exercising a humanitarian compassion now absent in Britain’s interactions with present-day refugees. But remembering the Kindertransports as a gesture of profound generosity on the part of the British government is neglecting to

tell the full story. “There’s an idea [about the Kindertransport] that it was an overwhelming outpouring of kindness,” says Rabbi Mark Goldsmith, whose congregation at Alyth Synagogue in Golders Green includes several former child refugees. “You don’t have to spend long in the Jewish community to know that’s not quite how it was.”

The Kindertransport story is indeed no fairytale. Press reaction at the time was often sharply critical of the government’s decision to take any children at all. The Daily Express at the time complained that Britain had “already accepted” its quota of “foreign Jews”, while the Daily Mail insisted there was “room elsewhere” for these refugee children. While many Kindertransportees were welcomed into British society, a considerable number were exploited by families who forced the children to serve as domestic staff. At a governmental level, MPs were adamant that only temporary residence in Britain would be offered to the children, and there was no question of extending the policy to adult Jews. Samuel

Hoare, the home secretary, blamed rising unemployment levels and a national “anti-Alien” feeling, a sentiment strongly reminiscent of complaints from those on the British right that today complain Britain lacks the space and resources to host large numbers of refugees in need. And while ten thousand children may have been permitted to enter Britain in the late ’30s, many more were not so fortunate. John Fieldsend is painfully aware he was one of a lucky few. “How many children got out of Europe in the Kindertransport? Ten thousand. How many children died in the camps? One and a half million.”

Kindertransport Memorial in Prague by Flor Kent

It’s a deeply unsettling thought. Numbers as stark as these cast the Kindertransport story in a new light. The British government’s contribution to the Jews of Europe was far smaller than it could - and should – have been, and the same is true of its attitude towards refugees today. Perhaps British refugee policy has not lost its way since the thirties but instead remained very much the same; reluctant, highly limited in scope, and wholly inadequate given the scale of the crisis at hand. If there is a tradition in British refugee policy, it is not a proud one. Yet there is still hope for the modern refugee in the story of the Kindertransport children. Looking beyond policy and to the Kindertransportees themselves, there is much to be proud of when it comes to the achievements of the children taken in by Britain all those years ago. Those fortunate enough to find safety in the UK have given back to British society in ways The Daily Mail could never have imagined. Their collective contributions to British politics, industry and the arts have been astonishing; four are Nobel Prize winners. Far from representing a drain

“Remembering the Kindertransports as a gesture of profound generosity on the part of the British government is neglecting to tell the full story” on national resources, the Kindertransport children in Britain are a testimony to the extraordinarily positive impact refugees continue to have on societies that welcome them. When remembering the Kindertransport the focus should be not on the policymakers but instead on the resilience and resourcefulness of those young people who made Britain their home. The lives they went on to lead are a lasting reminder of all that Britain stands to gain from providing sanctuary to the vulnerable and the persecuted. Rabbi Goldsmith is optimistic. He is actively involved in the work of Citizens UK, a pressure group whose membership push for more refugees to be resettled in Britain. He firmly believes that by emphasising the Kindertransportees’ positive impact on British society that a proud British tradition of welcoming refugees can finally become a reality. “It gives us an example of where opening up provided this country with people who made a real contribution,” he says. “So you can say to people who question, look at the benefit that it’s had... It resulted in something that was good for this country.”

With thanks to the Holocaust Educational Trust.

As I write, I am listening to a track entitled 'Brownian Noise with Square Tones and Sine Waves', by Sleep Sounds Library XL, on a loop on Spotify. It sounds like sitting next to an air-conditioning unit, whilst holding an offthe-hook phone with a dial tone next to your ear. There are thousands of tracks like this on Spotify, staking claims to nigh-shamanistic properties: granting superhuman concentration and focus, curing insomnia, tapping into an astral plane, reinvigorating your sex life. Some, like the one I am listening to, are sterile and (pseudo)scientific, but others, while

“words, words, words” I’ve been staring at this line in my weekly reading over and over again. Not because it is perhaps one of the most overquoted lines of literature, or to attempt to give it some ground breaking new analysis, but because the more I look at it, the more the word “words” becomes increasingly nonsensical to me. This phenomenon is something that, peculiarly, is a common quirk of human thought. I once borrowed my mum’s

still artificial, are comfortingly skeuomorphic: 'Office Air Conditioners', 'Old Ceiling Fan', 'Quiet Train'. The best have a startling lyricism, sounding like the titles of Romantic poems: 'Slow Simple Morning Waves on a Quiet Beach', 'A Gurgling River Torrent Babbling and Frothing', 'Hiding Under a Tree by a Mellow Icelandic Waterfall'. I secretly hold out hope that, one day, Sleep Sounds Library XL will upload 'The Still, Sad Music of Humanity, Nor Harsh Nor Grating, Though of Ample Power to Chasten and Subdue (Four Hour Looped Version)'.

laptop to discover that her last Google search was ‘how to spell spicy’ after an afternoon of making spiced jam in which the labelling of tens of jars with the same word had rendered it meaningless, and made her call its spelling into question. It took a Google of my own to discover that this sensation actually has a name: semantic satiation. It turns out that the term was coined in 1962 by Leon Jakobovits James, who discovered that test subjects found

tasks more difficult if they had repeated the key word over and over again beforehand. Any word, if repeated or stared at long enough, can change the way our mind perceives it - causing the word to temporarily lose sense or meaning for the reader or listener. I rather like the idea that even immaterial things can lose their significance if overindulged in - a reminder of the often necessary, yet frequently neglected, art of not over-thinking.

What’s in a name? ‘Melissa Thorne likes a photo of you.’ But I didn’t. Although it might not be obvious to an outsider, it was not me who narcissistically liked a picture of myself, but rather one of the eight other Melissa Thornes with whom I have been Facebook friends since 2008. Seven years ago, as a fourteen-year-old enthusiastic to exploit the new possibilities of a technological network, I added twenty of my namesakes. Over the years, some have unfriended me, deactivated their accounts or broken the link between us by marrying or changing their online identities. However, the ones who remain have wished me ‘happy birthday’, expressed their support for my year abroad and shared an online fragment of their lives with me, leading even their friends and families to sometimes confuse me with them.

Melissa Thorne, 31, Project Manager, Sydney

Melissa Thorne, 25,Contract Administrator, Newfoundland

Melissa Thorne, 32, Area Director, Austin TX

Melissa Thorne, 20, Art Director, Calgary

“Why am I denied my mother’s rights?”

Jordanian Women and Middle Eastern Identity Politics by Sophie Dowle

“I feel like I am a foreigner in my own country. I feel Jordanian, my mother is Jordanian, but as far as the Jordanian authorities are concerned, I am not a Jordanian citizen.” Dina is a student in Amman, the capital of Jordan. Like several other countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, children are not entitled to share their Jordanian mother’s nationality, even if they were also born in Jordan. Dina has an Egyptian father, which means that she does not qualify for the Jordanian citizenship held by her mother. As a result, she has struggled to get the textbooks she has required throughout her studies, because her Egyptian nationality means she is ineligible for state support. She explains, “I love Egypt, but it is not my home. I am more Jordanian than I am Egyptian, despite what the law says.” International law and the majority of constitutions in the MENA region guarantee women and children the right to equal citizenship. However, women in Jordan who marry

men of a different nationality cannot confer their citizenship on their husbands, or even their children. Men, on the other hand, can pass on their nationality to their wives and their children. The inequality of these laws has made children foreigners in the country they grew up in. These children are often restricted in what they can inherit and where they can work, and can be treated as international students when applying to their local university. Moreover, husbands are deprived of key rights, such as free or subsidised healthcare, even after living in the country for many years. Researchers at the Information and Research Center of the King Hussein Foundation in Jordan discovered that 72 per cent of the estimated 90,000 families affected by the discriminatory laws cannot access healthcare. They also found that women faced serious difficulties in claiming child custody and access at times of marriage break-up. However, the problem is more widespread than Jordan alone,

as families in Lebanon, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Syria are also affected. Lebanon is historically a liberal country, which became the first Middle Eastern nation to grant women the vote in 1952, only five years after men had gained suffrage. However, their government has still not reformed their nationality law, and in Lebanon alone, there are over 17,000 dualnationality families whose daily lives are affected. For example, Faisal, a 23-year-old student studying medicine in Lebanon, tells me that he will not be able to practice there when he graduates as a doctor. He explains, “It’s so frustrating! Even though my mum is from Beirut and I’ve lived here as long as I can remember, I don’t actually have Lebanese citizenship, because my dad is American, so I can’t be a doctor here. I’ll have to move to America or somewhere else in order to follow my dream of becoming a surgeon.” In Lebanon, people without full citizenship are banned from certain professions, including medicine, even if they have studied at a university in Lebanon.

The campaign for citizenship rights has been central in the movement for women’s rights in Jordan and Lebanon in recent years. “Women are like second-class members of society because of the nationality law,” the equal rights campaigner Nima Habashna tells me. Nima is leading the campaign ‘My Mother is Jordanian and Her Nationality is My Right’ in Jordan. This movement was started in 2009, aiming to persuade the Jordanian government to change the law so that mothers and wives can pass their nationality on to their children and husbands. Nima works tirelessly to make the voices of thousands of women like herself heard. As her husband is Moroccan, the laws have directly affected her and her five children. Nima’s campaign and others like it across the region gained further international support when the Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights was set up earlier this year. Led by four NGOs and two United Nations agencies, this effort calls on governments across the world to amend any nationality or citizenship laws that discriminate on the basis of sex. These campaigns are slowly starting to have an effect, and the laws are beginning to change across the MENA region. In 1993, Tunisia became the first Arab country to give women the right to pass on their citizenship. Then, in the first decade of the new millennium, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and Libya in turn granted women this right. In 2012, Saudi Arabia, not well-known for being a pioneer of women’s rights, announced

that it would grant citizenship to children of Saudi women married to non-Saudi men, on the condition that they met other citizenship requirements. Jordan made some moves in late 2014 to reform the citizenship laws in question, bringing them in line with Article Six of their constitution, which states: “There shall be no discrimination between Jordanians as regards to their rights and duties on grounds of race, language or religion.” As a result of these reforms, the children of Jordanian women married to nonnationals are now able to own property, invest in a business, obtain a driving license and other personal identification documents, enrol in government schools and seek care in government medical facilities. Their mother must be a permanent resident of Jordan for at least five years and they, the children, must also be legal residents in order to qualify for these benefits. However, these reforms stop short of granting full nationality rights, as these children will have to renew their residency permits every year. Although campaigners such as Nima have welcomed the reforms, she says that she has seen little change in practice: “The law has only changed on paper and not in the minds or hearts of the people.” Nima says that she will continue to campaign until she sees these reforms implemented properly, and until she can pass her full rights onto her children.

“Women are like second class members of society because of the nationality law”

Members of the Jordanian government have had concerns that granting Jordanian citizenship to the children of Palestinian men could shift demographic balance in the kingdom towards the Palestinians, who currently make up 50–60 per cent of the total population. This same concern has been raised by Lebanese MPs when debating the issue. Current regional conflicts have now brought growing numbers of Iraqi and Syrian refugees into Jordan and Lebanon, which further heightens the tensions. Jawad Anani, Jordan's former deputy prime minister, says the demographic issue has always been a sensitive one for Jordanians. “They feel the influx of non-Jordanians could have repercussions on the limited work, energy, resources and mounting budget deficit,” he explained in an interview on the TV network Al Jazeera. Furthermore, dual nationality of two Arab states is also not permissible due to an agreement by the League of Arab States, a regional organisation of 22 Arab countries that aims to bring the countries closer together. This has been repeatedly cited by Jordanian politicians as a reason to block equal citizenship rights. However, Dina, Nima and other activists say these are just excuses. “If other countries in the League have managed to implement laws whereby women can pass on their nationality, why can’t Jordan?” Dina exclaims, exasperated. In modern-day and historic Arab societies, the balance of power is sometimes reversed, placing value on women in the system of inheritance. The Comoros is an Arabic-speaking, Sunni Islamic island nation, which, like Jordan and Lebanon, is

a member of the League of Arab States. Many of the tribes in this small Indian Ocean archipelago practice the matrilineal system of inheritance, where lineage and land are passed along the maternal line. While Jordan and Lebanon argue that including women in the inheritance of nationality will just make it more complicated, many argue that a matrilineal system is in fact simpler. The system creates fewer disputes regarding inheritance, tribal membership and nationality than in similar patrilineal societies, as it is often easier to prove your maternal line than your paternal one. Furthermore, as men remain head of the household and still have some inheritance rights, this system allows for greater equality of men and women within the society than seen elsewhere. Some have suggested that the recent reforms in Jordanian law hark back to women’s freedom in the Middle East’s ancient past. The Jordanian journalist and editor Moussa Barhoumeh, commenting on the slow progress in granting women equal nationality rights, declared that “one cannot but reminisce about the privileges and rights of women in the Mesopotamian civilization, nearly 2,000 years before Christ, when women were free to marry a slave and their offspring would be free!” Women in the ancient civilisations that preceded the Middle East as we know it today were entrusted with the ultimate power: to liberate the enslaved through the act of marriage. The campaigners of today are fighting for an even greater goal: to secure their own freedom.

Poems for Amman by Zoe Sandford i. Soundscape From the modest minaret the muezzin greets the morning. Birds begin to flock from the high wall to the rooftop. The gas truckâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chiming song competes with the scrap collectorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s strident cry. The stranger greets the road-dust on sand-shaded shoes. The stranger greets the fig tree, the olive tree, the date palm. The stranger greets the brutal blue of the sky; the stranger wants to greet the passers-by. Undisturbed, the everyday goes on. The street cat greets the stranger. The soaring roar of traffic in the chaos of the thoroughfare greets the stranger.

ii. Souq al-Juma'a

The wreck of a merchant ship's washed up in a landlocked cove by a desert hill and spilled out over crates and hands fine dresses, jewels, pots and pans and shoes and hats and sweetcorn stands and all the wreckers cry their wares: Awa'i banat, shabab â&#x20AC;&#x201C; lirtain! and every garment calls your name. Beneath the painted walls we walk, our faces hid from the beating sun by brightly-coloured tarpaulins that turn the light to blue and green and orange, stain the ground with gold. In a syncopated dance, crowds move of black abayas, football shirts, and children find a changing maze of spills and gravel, legs and stilts, and like a flag in spring wind-gusts the tea-urn bearer stands and stoops. Coincidence's perfect wreck of a Friday morning all meets here and you wonder how, quite how and why it comes together with the desert sky.

As you approach Nablus from the south, the rolling hills and Israeli settlements give way to the dusty concrete towers of the Hawara checkpoint, then to the dusty concrete blocks of Balata refugee camp – both a common sight all over the West Bank. But look to your left and upwards, and you will notice an enormous Palladian villa, whose domed roof appears about as congruous with its surroundings as a parked spaceship. In spite of this, the house is named Beit Filasteen, ‘The House of Palestine’.

This is the home of a man who has been dubbed ‘The Duke of Nablus’ and ‘The Godfather of Palestine’: Munib Masri, the world’s richest Palestinian. The 81-year-old industrialist began his career in petroleum engineering and is now chairman of Edgo Group, a multinational energy and engineering conglomerate, and of PADICO, a holding company which controls 35 companies in a variety of sectors. Masri’s personal fortune is estimated at 1.6 billion dollars, and his holdings reportedly account for a third of the Palestinian economy. After several wrong turns, we finally pull into the perfumed gardens of what my taxi driver calls “Qasr al-Masri” or ‘The Masri Palace’. I am met by an aide and taken through the domed atrium of the main building to Masri’s office. He is bent over a laptop, engaged in a Skype call in Arabic, when I arrive, but towers over me when he stands up to shake my hand. Still in brisk business mode, he speaks with a sense of urgency. “Now, what do you want to know?” he asks. But before we can start to speak, Masri is interrupted by a call from a foreign journalist, asking about his involvement in a UN-led initiative to help to bring stability and economic development to Gaza. When asked whether this would be easier to achieve if Hamas were to recognise Israel, he cuts her short. “Western media is full of lies – Hamas has recognised Israel! On the fourth of May 2011, Hamas recognised Israel within its 1967 borders. I place myself responsible for this negotiation.” This was not as straightforward as Masri implies: on the date he cites, Hamas officials released the statement that Hamas would recognise the 1967 borders as part of its unity deal with Fatah, but would not recognise Israel. “Look,” he continues on the phone. “Everything I have worked for has been for Palestine.” I have been sitting opposite him, scribbling notes on his conversation. Continuing his monologue to the journalist, Masri paternalistically takes hold of my hand and leads me to the hallway opposite his office. This is decorated with a mural that tells the story of his life in the context of Palestine’s history since the Balfour declaration, and he begins to narrate this, for the benefit of both me and the journalist on the phone. The first image shows him as a boy, placing rocks on a railway track to derail a British train in 1942.

The Duke of Nablus An audience with Munib Masri by Thea Slotover

He then begins to take us through the portraits that show his friends, family and associates. We linger on one in particular – Yasser Arafat. The two met in 1963 and maintained a close friendship until Arafat’s death in 2004. While serving in Arafat’s cabinet, Masri was asked to take up the premiership no fewer than three times; each time, he refused his boss’s offer. The journalist has hung up now, so I am able to address Masri directly, and I ask him about one of his most controversial views. According to most Western news outlets, the cause of Yasser Arafat’s death remains unanswered, but Masri says that “he was poisoned, definitely.” Teams of scientists have alternately revived and dismissed this theory since Arafat’s death in 2004, but Masri is certain. He cites the now well-documented 1997 Mossad attempt to poison Hamas leader Khaled Mashal as evidence “that the Israelis are capable of it.” Masri was particularly closely associated with Arafat at the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords, the agreement that promised to pave the way for independent Palestinian statehood. Such was his skill as an intermediary that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told Masri that he felt unable to shake Arafat’s hand and asked him to take the presidency instead. After the Accords were signed, foreign investment poured into Palestine, which no doubt benefitted Masri’s business interests. However, with the prospect of an independent Palestine still distant, and the increasing expansion of Israeli-controlled areas within the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Masri regrets the deal. “If I knew what I know now, I would not have voted for Oslo.” After less than fifteen minutes with Masri, I find myself experiencing the extent of his ability to persuade. While laying the foundations for his home, the architect, Masri’s son, discovered the remains of a Byzantine settlement under the site.

Masri has turned this into a small museum adjoining his office and shows me around it as we talk. We stop at what appears to be beautifully-carved stone altar, and he orders me to kneel down at it. “Put your hands together and close your eyes. Even if you are not religious, you will feel something. I will leave you here for five minutes.” I do as I am told until Masri is out of the room, then begin to open my eyes – until I hear him shout “Eyes closed!” from next door. I give in, and wonder what his negotiating style must be like in the boardroom. Masri is no longer a member of the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s cabinet. Since Oslo, he has attempted to use his clout as a businessman rather than a politician to apply pressure on the Israeli government and international community to make progress towards realizing Palestinian statehood, most recently by founding the joint Palestinian– Israeli ‘Breaking the Impasse’ initiative in 2013. I ask whether Israeli and Palestinian businesspeople were incentivised to join the initiative by the possibility of doing business together if an agreement between the PA and the Israeli government were reached, but he cuts me short. “I was not looking for a business partner, I was looking for a partner for peace.” During the group’s first public conference, Masri repeatedly stressed that there would be no “Economic Peace”, and today he is far more explicit in his condemnation of the normalisation of economic relations. On the subject of the movement of ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ targeted at Israel, he says: “I support BDS. When the occupation is over, we can do anything, any business.” But for the present, Masri emphasises, “Money is not dignity; independence is dignity.” ‘Breaking the Impasse’ has itself now seemingly reached an impasse, and Masri considers it to have failed. “I failed with this initiative because of the Israeli side … they chickened out. They would not sign on the 1967 borders and East Jerusalem.”

Even from this castle on the hill, there can be no ignoring the occupation: on the slope facing Beit Filasteen stands a large Israeli settlement. This occupation has become so entrenched since 1993 that some supporters of Palestinian independence have been led to declare the two-state solution dead. Israel continues to annex land in the West Bank through the building of illegal settlements, now home to 356,000 Israelis in the West Bank and 200,000 in East Jerusalem. The PA also has minimal control over Palestine’s infrastucture – the Oslo Accords also gave Israel ultimate control over the West Bank’s water and electricity supply. But Masri believes that if Palestinian independence were to be granted under the current conditions, the country would be able to extricate itself from Israel. The experienced industrialist says that building up the infrastructure would be “easy.” “It was done in the Gulf, it can be done in Palestine.” For the settlers, “there are two options. They can leave, or they can stay. If they stay, they should become Palestinian citizens.” Now, he says, we must go into Nablus, to attend a protest against the Israeli incursions into Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque, considered the third-holiest site in Islam. On the way, I ask about rumours that President Mahmoud Abbas will announce an end to the PA’s security coordination with Israel. Under current agreements, 18 per cent of the territory of the West Bank is currently under full PA civil control and security authority, 22 per cent is under Palestinian civil administration but Israeli security authority, and 60 per cent is under full Israeli civil administration and security control. It has been speculated that Abbas will abandon these agreements and demand that Israel changes the nature of its relationship with Palestine and takes on the protective responsibilities of an occupying power over its occupied territories, as required by the Geneva conventions (to which Israel is a signa-

tory). Could it be the spark to ignite a Third Intifada? “You never know what will kick it off,” Masri acknowledges. I am keen to ask more about the conditions that, in his view, might lead to Intifada, but, as we step into the crowd, Masri immediately begins to warmly greet protesters, who mostly seem to be familiar to him. He also poses for a photograph with a young boy, who recognises him as the sponsor of Palestinian Arab Idol winner Mahmoud Assaf. Two days later, at the UN, President Abbas suggests that the PA will end its commitment to security agreements signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), “[since] Israel refuses to commit to the agreements signed with us … We declare that we cannot continue to be bound by these agreements.” In the month following my visit to Beit Filasteen, tensions caused by the Israeli incursions in Jerusalem lead to a surge in violence across the West Bank in which 66 Palestinians and nine Israelis are killed, and some observers begin to describe events as the start of a Third Intifada. Amnesty International denounces the Israeli forces for their use of “collective punishment” against Palestinians. However, the PA has yet to take any steps to dissolve its security coordination with Israel. I email al-Masri to ask whether he thinks Abbas will follow up on his declaration given Israel’s continuing violation. He writes back: “I do not think it is an empty threat.” Both the PA and Masri seem to despair of Palestine’s ability to secure independence through the negotiations of the ‘peace process’. “We have agreed to 22 per cent of the land of historic Palestine, according to the 1967 borders. Palestine has made peace. It is up to the Israelis to make a settlement.” You don’t need to be a consummate businessman to appreciate that the Palestinian people are getting a raw deal.

Rift Valley by Tabitha Hayward We came upon it slow, slow climb up the taut, sprung coil of the not-quite road. Somewhere, a lorry, lame, on its side. Somewhere, a man with a string of tiny, dancing people. And us, rounding each knuckle-bone corner, and still not expecting, not knowing. Nothing in the hushed hills, the mute, grey ascent, to ready us for that gash of gutted earth. Like seeing your insides, the womb, the rift that sprung mankind, there, there, in the too-red, too-real landscape. The vastness, and us, small as the dancers, spinning from their strings. I spin with them, nauseous, unnerved, the world falling away behind me, devouring itself. It will not scab, it will not scar, the blood is warm as earth. The wind claps her hands, and all the bones rattle.

NOMBRILISME: Belly buttons and the art of selflove by Sophie Eager

In his short story The Apologizer, Milan Kundera’s protagonist Alain meditates on the navel as he observes the naked stomachs of the young girls on the street around him. He is captivated by them. Kundera posits that the part of our flesh we choose to most obviously expose says something particular about the erotic orientation of our time. Alain reflects that leggy girls with long bare thighs are the metaphorical image of the fascinating road that leads to erotic achievement, always reminding us of the lure of the inaccessible. Similarly, chesty girls with exposed cleavage suggest sanctification of the woman, “the Virgin Mary suckling Jesus, the male sex on its knees before the noble mission of the female sex”, as Kundera puts it. But now Alain sees girls with their navels obviously exposed, and is unable to improvise an answer for how to define the sexual orientation of an age that eroticises this newly bared bit of the body. Once you start noticing belly buttons, they are hard to ignore. Funny little knots right in the very middle of the body (check Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man); sticking out, twisting in; a symbol of both the freedoms of the sexual revolution and of our umbilical tie to the mother. But they are also a sign of nombrilisme. Nombril in French, like ‘navel’ in English, is a word both

for the centre of a physical space and for a belly button. So nombrilisme, translated as ‘navel-gazing’, is the word the French have for the attitude of seeing one’s self as the centre of everything, as the navel of the world. But in 2015, exposing your belly button has also become a symbolic act. The bare belly button is a distinct kind of nakedness that says something significant about our generation’s attitude to the self. The act of its exposure has a different message: a defiant self-centredness. A belly button, unlike the curve of a breast or the line of a thigh, is isolated from the continuous lines of the rest of the body. It is exactly where something has been cut off, a constant reminder of the vital link to our mother that bought us into existence, which is now severed. It is a scar of separation, and actually looks quite strange when observed up close, like the tie in the end of a party balloon. The combination of its exposure and its oddity inevitably draws the eye. In Hollywood films of the ’50s, the strict Hays Code enforced firm rules on what could not be shown on film flesh-wise. But as hemlines and necklines receded, navels remained taboo. In the 1955 film Land of the Pharaohs, Joan Collins’ bare button had to be filled with a large ruby to get her belly dancing scenes past the censors. Marilyn Monroe, whose plunging dresses exposed all parts of the body bar the navel, wasn’t allowed to expose hers on film until Something’s Got to Give in 1962, when she drily noted, “I guess the censors are willing to recognize that everybody has a navel”.

‘Nombrilisme’ (masculine noun, French): an attitude of self-absorption, when a person believes that everything revolves around or relates back to them ‘Se prendre pour le nombril du monde’: to consider oneself as the centre of the world. Next came the power pop females of the 90s. Madonna through Shania, to J-Lo and Christina Aguilera rocked bare belly buttons. Britney Spears’ bare navel even earned her a hot-under-the-collar article in the esteemed Encyclopaedia Britannica in 2001, which described it as “a heated boundary between baby and babe… halfway between head and genitalia, not strictly sexual, but - like Spears herself - ‘not that innocent’ either...” Despite some flustered semantic guff, the essence of the article is coloured by the same confusion that Kundera’s Alain experiences. The belly button is sexy, but also childish; neat and taut, yet disconcerting when viewed up close.

This was quite a long time ago now, but wearing a crop top in a Parisian club still earned disapproving hisses of “anglaisssseee” from my fellow revellers. I found this curious, because the French language seems to encourage nombrilisme. Any enunciation can plausibly start with the double personal pronoun: “Moi, je”: “Moi, je crois… Moi, j’y vais…”, ever faithful to the Cartesian foundation for the source of all certain knowledge as yours truly, the thinking self. ‘Moi’ is the figure of this inward movement, with its own navel in the smug middle ‘o’, the curve of its diphthong turning the enunciation in on the speaker. I see the exposed belly button as a symbol of this disjunctive pronoun, its nakedness prefiguring the self-centredness of subsequent actions by the subject. However, the all-pervasiveness of social media has now made self-centredness entirely standard, providing an accepted and widely used platform for self-promotion and external validation. Equally, its very visualness has

shifted new significance onto our bodies and changed how we present them, an effect that can be hugely positive when well-directed in campaigns like #freethenipple. Yet the same mood also entails streams of gym selfies, bikini beach photos, #eatclean, #fitspo, #abs. The issue with the world revolving around your navel is that it requires devoting a significant proportion of your free time to get that navel ‘in shape’ in the first place. A navel ready to be exposed actually takes a great deal of self-centric work. So to be able to present the bare belly button, our world actually starts to revolve around the navel; we gain our sense of self-worth from its attractiveness, it is a sign of our achievements and the culmination of our goals. And this means people are looking great – but they are not necessarily doing good. Is this worrying? Like Kundera’s Alain, I am still confused. The navel has served its biological purpose long before we even come to have a concept of ‘me’, and yet we now choose to spend so much of our time making our navels look as good as possible to prove how wonderful we are too. This dedication is ostensibly harmless, even admirable, but it seems a shame that it has been elevated to such a high level of importance. We are losing time for putting other, worthier things out into the world. I point no fingers; I too am partial to a crop top. But the nagging nasals of nombrilisme persist; look beyond the belly button and find another, nobler ‘navel’ upon which to gaze.

Undesirable Persons Harris Manchester and the redemption of Luděk Sekyra by Noah Lachs

In University Parks, Oxford, a linden tree grows through the centre of a table, with two seats branching out from either end. The spot, known as Havel’s Place, is a tranquil space for rest and contemplation. It is named after Václav Havel, who, in 1989, became the first democraticallyelected president of Czechoslovakia in 41 years, after spearheading the ‘Velvet Revolution’ (named thus for its remarkable non-violence). The inauguration of Havel’s Place was part of Oxford University’s ‘Velvet Commemoration’ in November 2014. The link between Oxford and the events of 1989 is stronger than one might realise. The Jan Hus Educational Foundation, an underground philosophy and education network that subverted the “Communist Party of Czechoslovakia” party’s propaganda, was powered by an Oxford academic, Dr Kathleen Wilkes. Just as Havel is honoured in University Parks, Wilkes has an historic square named after her in Dubrovnik.

Oxford’s ‘Velvet Commemoration’ was widely covered by the Czech media. Ceremonies were attended by high-profile Czechs, including MP, and ex-minister of foreign affairs, Karel Schwarzenberger; Minister of Culture, Daniel Herman; head of the Christian Democrats and deputy prime minister, Pavel Bělobrádek; and a property developer called Luděk Sekyra. Sekyra might seem like the odd one out alongside this politically esteemed company. He is, however, the only attendee boasting a tangible relationship with Oxford. At Harris Manchester College, Sekyra House was unveiled by the man himself, revealing new student study rooms and a lecture hall. Sekyra was also granted a Foundation Fellowship and seat on the Board of Regents at the College. Beneficial as Sekyra House may be for students, it represents a very different set of values to Havel’s Place. Sekyra’s political associations were anathema to just about everything Václav Havel and the Jan Hus Foundation stood for. Sekyra was a renowned leader within the youth movement, a prolific member of the Czech communist party, and a beneficiary of the regime. On 13th November 1989, days before hundreds of thousands of idealistic Czechs, enraged by police violence, would take to the streets to demand democracy, Sekyra was photographed by leading Czech newspaper Rudé právo addressing leaders of the Socialist Youth Union.

Academic repression was central to the cultural plan of the Czech communist regime. The communist state’s policy of compliance within academia sheds a light on how Sekyra’s political history compromises his current associations with Oxford University. The son of satirist Jaroslav Doleček was refused a university place in Czechoslovakia, not because of his own views, but because “his father made anti-Soviet films”. It was only after Mr Doleček offered to buy a lace wedding dress for a party official’s daughter that his son earned a place. Higher education was reserved for students who participated in communist youth organisations, for those whose parents were party members, and for students from working class backgrounds. Students fitting the criteria for admission were obliged to follow prescriptive political curriculums: Marxism-Leninism was a basic requirement for all, and students learnt by rote, not through developing and sharing opinions. The roots of the Jan Hus Foundation lie in the apartments of the Czech professors who defied this atmosphere of academic repression.

In order to circumvent the injustice of admission by political compliance, and of a onedimensional syllabus, some academics ran bytové seminảři, ‘home seminars’. To garner support for their underground university, many academics reached out to their Western counterparts. Letters were sent to Harvard, Heidelberg and Berlin’s Free University; these fell on deaf ears. However, in 1979, Julius Tomin wrote to Oxford’s philosophers inviting them to attend his weekly seminars on Plato; Dr Kathleen Wilkes accepted. Inspired by the quality of discussion she witnessed during her visit, Dr Wilkes urged her colleagues to take up similar invitations. Subsequent visits from Oxford academics culminated in the establishment of the British Jan Hus Educational Foundation in 1980, formalising and bolstering the underground university. In turn, this sparked the foundation of the American Jan Hus Educational and Cultural Fund, the Canadian Jan Hus Fund, and the French Association Jan Hus (backed by Jacques Derrida, among others). The foundation, in all its global incarnations, was founded on the principles of academic freedom and equality in education. It remains a hallmark of peaceful, yet daring and effective, resistance.

As a member of the communist party, Sekyra’s views would have aligned him with the Czech police, who deemed the Jan Hus Foundation a ‘Centre of Ideological Subversion’, and placed its participants on an ‘Index of Undesirable Persons’. With this in mind, the notion of Sekyra as a national delegate to Oxford University, both in an official and unofficial capacity seems incongruous. . However, it is unlikely that the most high-profile attendee, Pavel Bělobrádek (deputy prime minister and head of the Christian Democrat Party) would pass comment on Sekyra’s attendance at Oxford’s ‘Velvet Commemoration’; Sekyra is one of his party’s major donors. Yet the paradox of a staunch supporter of an oppressive regime being invited to celebrate intellectual freedom is only the tip of the iceberg.

“Sekyra and Mrázek used codenames... Sekyra is recorded telling Mrázek, “I am going to need the Professor.” Roman Janoušek and František Mrázek are two of the Czech Republic’s most notorious criminals. The former man is known as ‘Voldemort’, the latter, the ‘Godfather of organized crime’. Janoušek is under investigation for tender rigging and bribery; he recently began a fourand-a-half year jail sentence for deliberately running over a woman in his car. Mrázek was even worse. Czech authorities suspect his involvement in 30 murders; he was also directly involved in the fraudulent renegotiation of Soviet debt owed to the Czech Republic. Naturally, Mrázek profited and the Czech

state lost millions. In 2006, an unknown sniper assassinated Mrázek. In 2007, Sekyra took Janoušek on an all-expenses-paid holiday to Italy (an invoice from the time demonstrates that he covered the costs). The trip took place soon after Pavel Bém had been reelected as Prague Mayor. Janoušek was Bém’s bagman and personal friend; it is not coincidental that, in both his elected terms, the mayor’s planning decisions frequently dovetailed, not only with Janoušek’s business aspirations, but Sekyra’s real estate interests too.

It is even easier to expose Sekyra’s relationship with Mrázek. Wiretapped phone conversations from 2000 show the two working together on Sekyra’s planned takeover of the 2.2 billion Koruna construction firm, IPS. Sekyra needed a loan extension to complete the deal, and relied on Mrázek to lean on senior politicians to make this possible. In their telephone conversations, Sekyra and Mrázek used codenames; the soon-to-be president and proxy head of IPB (the bank from which Sekyra sought his loan), Václav Klaus, was renamed ‘the Professor’. Sekyra is recorded telling Mrázek, “I am going to need the Professor.” The supreme wealth of Sekyra, Janoušek and Mrázek is rooted in varying degrees of bribery, political influence, underground networks, theft, and even violence. The lecture hall and complex of student study rooms at Harris Manchester College, funded by and named after Sekyra, cannot simply shrug off this past. Affiliations with suspect characters are nothing new in British universities. LSE has enjoyed £1.5 million worth of donations from Muammar Gaddafi’s son, whilst Oxford boasts buildings named after arms dealers and brutal colonialists. However, Sekyra’s case is unique in its irony: if Sekyra resented Václav Havel, and what he and the Jan Hus Foundation stood for, why does he now publicly laud them? Sekyra seems to be is attempting to launder his reputation by associ-

ating himself with Havel and Oxford. Perhaps Sekyra wants to whitewash his past, to replay his newfound international respectability back into the Czech Republic. Nowhere is this clearer than in a recent article in the Czech newspaper Lidové noviny, in which Sekyra signed off as “a member of the academic body of Oxford University”. However, the more pressing question is why Harris Manchester College so willingly and publicly honoured a man associated with organised crime and violence. Finding out from the college themselves proved tricky – on the phone, the Harris Manchester College librarian flatly dismissed the evidence of Sekyra’s incriminating history, and the Principal, apparently in a great hurry, claimed Sekyra “came to him on the best of recommendations, that the necessary background checks were made, and that nothing illegal or immoral was discovered.” It seems that there’s one thing that might recommend the brutal police force of Sekyra’s communist heyday above Oxford University in 2015: their scrupulous assessment of “undesirable persons”.

An Articulation of the Rights of Woman

d á a hal

miliar ing a fa ] h is u q n n t of reli of perceptio [the ac e m a fr or illusion

In 1984 linguist Suzette Haden Elgin quietly published a sci-fi novel with a grand ambition. Native Tongue imagines a patriarchal society where women create their own language, Laádan, to articulate their experiences. But Elgin’s hopes went beyond her novel. If women adopted Laádan as their own, she thought, they would be able to articulate their own perceptions freely, breaking away from a language rooted in oppression. The idea that language had failed the women’s movement wasn’t new. At the very start of second-wave feminism, Betty Friedan had called the first chapter of The Feminine Mystique ‘The Problem That Has No Name’. ‘Sexism’ was a word unspoken, a thought without articulation. Humans were ‘mankind’. Feminists spoke of ‘silencing’, ‘alienation’, of an absent language of resistance. It wasn’t just a culture that created these boundaries. Just as men controlled the dominant culture, argued influential feminist Cheris Kramarae, they also controlled language. Most formal and technical language, she argued, was derived from a scholarly Latin that for centuries had been the preserve of men. This meant that formal modes of expression privileged men’s experiences over women’s, while women’s informal language was dismissed as

by Lucy Valsamidis

The power and pitfalls of a feminine language

chatter. Language itself failed women when they tried to talk about their own lives. Kramarae also suggested that if language could influence perceptions, as some linguists then believed, women would struggle even to articulate their thoughts, silenced by their own tongue. It was this that inspired Elgin to create Laádan. Her novel, Native Tongue, imagines a world a step beyond Friedan’s suburban nightmare, where women live in complete subjection. But it is also a future where the need to learn alien languages has made linguists, male and female, an elite. What if, Elgin wondered, these women started to form a language to match their own perceptions? Elgin set out to construct that language herself. Within a few years, Laádan had gained more than a thousand words. Its vocabulary has nuance where English does not, using an agglutinating system to assign subtle shades of emotional differentiation to each morpheme. Love for someone liked but not respected. Love for someone respected but not liked. Love for someone sexually desired once, but no longer. Tending towards the specific, it opens sometimes into striking expression of the anxieties of the white, middle class second wave feminist. Doroledim, n. The guilty overeating of the housewife who has no other opportunity to indulge.

a n da

ut , witho reason h it w is ich tion [[ffrustra to blame, wh e n o e m so le] not futi

Beyond the vocabulary, Elgin tried to ensure that the very structure of Laádan breaks away from the language of patriarchy. Suffixes attached to words explain why each sentence is claimed as true – because it has been seen, because it is obvious to everyone or because it has been learned from someone else. Personal experience becomes a category by which a statement can be justified, as legitimate as any other. The oppressed hero of Native Tongue thinks towards the end of the novel, “There were no words, not in any language, that could explain what it was that had been done to her”. With Laádan, Elgin hoped, the experiences of violence and trauma that seemed inexpressible in the language of an oppressive and patriarchal society might be spoken. The novel begins with a 25th Amendment to the US Constitution reducing women to the status of minors. The apparently rational language of patriarchy is exposed as a system of “dull categories”, our perception of women’s speech as coy, manipulative, childish its creation. And that wasn’t just in the world of the Native Tongue series. If language really did structure perceptions, Elgin thought, women might start using Laádan to create a world where their perceptions were the norm. And they did. An online community began to grow up around the language, and, slowly, it became organic.

ed one lik r some d] fo e v o [l te respec but not

Sci-fi fans, linguists and feminists came together to make Laádan a way to express their own realities. The new coinages form a landscape of the revealingly banal and the newly expressible, the furniture of the life of the middle class American woman. Háatheni, n. When you can’t speak on the phone for thirty seconds because the kids won’t leave you alone. Wehebuthebod, n. Strip mall. Years on, Elgin’s dream of a language to express the reality of women’s experience seems a warped sort of utopianism. Even as it attempts to break down the barriers that silence women, Laádan privileges a definition of womanhood – the experience of the white American housewife – that itself excludes and silences. Yet a glance at modern feminist culture confirms that the attempt to shift away from the language of patriarchy continues. Without creating narrow definitions of womanhood, we still try to escape a language that dismisses women’s speech as childish chatter and women’s experiences as irrelevant. Where Laádan succeeds is in its insistence on seeing normative modes of expression not as natural and rational but defined by male experience. This is the mission that modern feminism has taken up, now subverting rather than replacing English to draw attention to the unspoken, rejecting ‘mansplaining’. The search for the right words continues.

This is My Body

by Caroline Ritchie “Dinner time!” trilled Vanessa. “Come on, honey. It’ll go cold.” She reached for the tin of after-dinner mints and, quivering with a little frisson of delight, she popped one into her mouth. How simply delicious! She was nearly forty now. Women of nearly forty needed such little secrets.

Vanessa and Herbert, eating their dinner at dinner time. Herbert thought the wine was deliciously light and fruity. Vanessa thought the chicken looked like a naked woman with legs akimbo. When dinner time was over, Vanessa offered Herbert an afterdinner mint.

“I’m here, Nessa,” growled Herbert. He didn’t ask where she had been all afternoon. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. Or perhaps it was. In any case, it was dinner time. Vanessa spun around, smiling sweetly.

That evening, Herbert had noticed that Vanessa’s skin, ordinarily patchy and inflamed, and her ginger hair, ordinarily all afrizz, seemed somehow placated after her unexplained afternoon expedition. Herbert hadn’t asked questions. As it happened, he was disposed to make unexplained disappearances of his own. That very morning, for example. Had Vanessa even noticed his absence? It was lucky she hadn’t asked questions. Herbert was an appalling liar. It was a problem that hearkened back to his school days. Once, in Phys Ed, the young Herbert had fumbled for an excuse not to wear those dreaded skimpy swimshorts. Just in time, he had recalled his sister’s time-honoured claim that it was ‘that time of the month’. His gym teacher had not been amused. For the truth was that – ironically perhaps, for he was now a surgeon – Herbert was repulsed by the sight, by even the very thought, of human flesh. For example, he and Vanessa never coupled any more. He had retched the first and only time.

“All right, lights…” The dining room, snoozing under the cover of a crepuscular gloom, blinked awake as she flicked on the Venetian-glass chandelier that hung over the dining table. “And action.” Herbert grunted, unamused. She knew that this gaudy light show offended his sensibilities. But she was proud of her chandelier. It brought much-needed character to their mahogany-scented, Persian rug-lined house. Herbert noticed, too, that Vanessa had brought out those kitsch brass candlesticks with the absurd (that is, stark naked) caryatids. No taste, he thought, no eye for aesthetic finery. But the table spread, of plump chicken and Riesling, silenced his qualms about the decorative arts. It was dinner time! Dinner time, that most singular, that most hallowed of times. Dinner time, the reliable reveller, the mystical leveller! Yes, it was dinner time and there sat

And yet something was changing in Herbert. More precisely, she was changing something in him. ‘She’ does not refer here to Vanessa, but to the enigmatic femme fatale between whose legs he had found himself not only that morning, but countless other Saturday mornings, like a startled schoolboy, his eyes as wide as her open legs. Perhaps it was her ease, the fluidity with which she moved, cat-like, from art to sex and back again. Nudes sprawled across the walls in her apartment, unashamed of their nakedness, unburdened by candles, flooded with natural light. Even her name was tasteful: Ramona. Songs – tasteful songs – had been written about girls called Ramona. Yes, thought Herbert, that was it. She had good taste. She was like an artwork. That was why her body was so intriguing: because she kept no secrets and yet was a walking secret. A secret of his very own. Vanessa had her secrets too. While Herbert was away on those Saturday mornings, she treated herself to indulgent aromatherapeutic baths. She had a ritual. She took care to shave her legs and moisturise her skin evenly, to give her body a soft, luminescent look that would prepare her for her afternoon expedition. This is my body, this is my body. She murmured the words to herself in a hum, like a worshipper chanting a mantra in a temple. She chanted to every wrinkle, every fold, every pore, every bump and blemish of her middle-aged body. It – her body – didn’t sag quite so much as she had expected it to. Maybe that bothered her. She liked to stand in front of the mirror practising poses. If she twisted this way, she resembled a lumpy hourglass; if she lifted her arms that way, a knobbly steeple.

How marvellous, to be a steeple! Everyone’s gaze was drawn to steeples. The next afternoon, as they lay on her bed in a post-coital tangle, Ramona turned to Herbert. “Come on, it’ll be fun,” she crooned, tweaking his eyebrow with her vermilion acrylic nails. “After all, you’re a surgeon. You must have an eye for detail. And an interest in the body.” Weeks had gone by, and still his secret was safe. Well, Herbert thought, it couldn’t hurt. Although this latest venture of Ramona’s struck him as wildly, even scandalously, bohemian, he trusted her instincts. She was a true artist. All of his and Vanessa’s acquaintances were so artless: uninteresting and uninterested people who had no notion of good taste. So he went along with it, against his better judgment. They arrived at the venue a little late, just five minutes after the hour. “Don’t worry about it,” Ramona reassured him, “I come all the time. I know the lady, and I told her I was bringing my boyfriend with me. She seemed glad to have more participants. She won’t mind us being a few moments late. It’s very relaxed.” In they walked. The class had already started. Easels lined the well-lit room, and the students had begun to lay down their preliminary sketches, alternating their gazes between their canvases and their subject as they marked out sloping contours in charcoal, pencil, ink. The muse stood in the centre of the room. Yes, there she was, legs akimbo, perched on the chaise longue, not a stitch on. Herbert stared. She stared back. “Hello, Herbert,” said Vanessa, “you’d better make yourself comfortable.” Herbert felt nauseous. Soon it would be dinner time.

Gridlock on Entebbe Road Political disillusionment amongst Uganda’s youth by Charlie Parks

Almost every day, the traffic along Entebbe Road, leading into Kampala, will draw slowly to a stop. Seconds later, a wailing police car will buzz between the cars and taxis. A moment of silence, and President Yoweri Museveni’s motorcade will shoot past, all sirens and khaki-clad soldiers. If you look closely, you’ll see the president himself through the window of a black limousine (he’s usually reading a newspaper).

As Museveni rushes from his residence into Kampala to address Uganda’s political crises, this scene is repeated endlessly: the next renegade former ally, the latest action in the campaign against Al-Shabaab or the next politically-motivated arrest. With campaigns gearing up and battle lines already being drawn for the 2016 election, it seems the number of army-escorted journeys can only increase. These trips seem to be working for the president, who is enjoying his 29th year at the head of the regime. His stranglehold on Ugandan politics is tighter than ever, with presidential challenger (and former prime minister) Amama Mbabazi’s campaign for office recently stopped short by his undramatic arrest, and plans for the president’s son’s eventual takeover rumoured to be well underway. Uganda seems anything but the near-dictatorial police state that it is – political violence is infrequent and isolated, and anti-government movements are rare. The two armoured police trucks that loom over Kampala’s city square appear to be guarding against nothing.

“When asked about the possibility of a change in government, he shrugs wearily.“That’ll only happen exactly when Museveni wants it.” But this stability reflects not satisfaction, but disillusionment. George, a former politics lecturer at Makerere University, tells me that “Museveni’s initial promise has worn off,” adding, “He has done a lot of good things for us, but he needs to go.” Would-be voters know that casting their ballot is a pointless gesture in a rigged elec-tion that will, like every election since 1996, return the president to power. Citizens reluctantly accept that hope-fuls like Mbabazi will either lack the weight to run a proper campaign or face arrest. Many are as corrupt as the incumbent, anyway. A recent poll put support for the president at over 80% – which indicates either extreme popularity, or an impressive boldness in political manipulation. Museveni will win because he always has. Importantly, disillusionment isn’t limited to cynical adults who have lived under him for decades. Students and young graduates, historically key players in African political resistance, have succumbed to the regime’s obses-sive self-protection. Museveni has been around for thirty years, and few see potential for upheaval. As one third-year student at Makerere University, who wanted to remain anonymous, put it, “He’s going to win. He’s been winning elections all my life.”

Young people aren’t seduced by Museveni – they understand that another five years of his rule means another five years of inefficiency, self-aggrandisement and autocracy. They will have noticed the irony when Museveni nodded slowly as Kenya’s President Kenyatta stressed the importance of young people in his recent address to the Ugandan parliament. One student, Jack, tells me simply, “Museveni is bad. Mbabazi isn’t any better.” But when asked about the possibility of a change in government, he shrugs wearily, a knowing smile on his face as he replies, “That’ll only happen exactly when Museveni wants it.” The gloomy implications for Uganda’s future are clear – if change is to happen, it’s unlikely to come through the gates of Makerere University or one of the country’s other student establishments.

This isn’t an accident. Museveni’s policies have cleverly targeted the educated elite that could go on to be his challengers. Government funded scholarships have been cut, ensuring that the majority of those at university are fortunate enough to have a lot to lose, and legislation currently being pushed through will make it harder to pay tuition fees that, at £500 a year, are higher than per capita GDP. Activists like Kizza Besigye, particularly popular among students due to his resilience in the face of repeated arrest and mistreatment, have been undermined and humiliated. His online platform naturally faces a younger audience, but many are scared to associate their social media profiles with the controversial figure. Dozens of police surround sites that could, like the city square, be starting points for protests. Most importantly, Museveni’s police have consistently shut down peaceful student demonstrations on anything from tuition fees to student behaviour as soon as they start, with the ring leaders arrested and often given lengthy prison sentences – it is uncommon to find a graduate who hasn’t been stung by their liberal use of tear gas. But Museveni very carefully avoids overstepping the mark – the police action and state-sponsored repression never quite grow serious enough to spark more widespread dissent, and the students accept him with reluctance. Ella, a 22 year old student, comments that although “he is bad, he could be worse,” saying, “I don’t like him, but I don’t mind him that much, either.”

“l’ve protested a few times, but when you’re crying from the tear gas, it really makes you question whether it’s worth it.”

Opinion is divided: some see Museveni as an immovable villain, others a tolerable inconvenience. But whichever view they hold, students all face the same problems – the lack of jobs, and the difficulty of making headway in a society where nepotism and clientelism dominate. The realities of expensive city living and prohibitively steep tuition fees mean it’s inevitable that students are often the most fortunate, with the money to study and the networks to find graduate jobs. Upsetting the delicate structures that uphold their positions isn’t in their interests. Sophie, 22, described this as ‘a matter of self-preservation. I’ve protested a few times, but when you’re crying from the tear gas, it really makes you question whether it’s worth it.’

Without a promising alternative, there’s nowhere for students to turn. Muhammed, a business graduate, said, “Although I want Museveni out, I don’t know who I want in.” Mbabazi, in his tenure as prime minister, was so corrupt that UK aid was suspended. Besigye isn’t allowed enough freedom to organise an effective campaign. Without a focal point for support to gather around, student opinion is drifting and vague. It’s this political climate that means Museveni is safer than ever. Faced with the youngest population in the world, the president is ready to absorb at least another generation into his legacy. Like their parents, the youth of today accept the election result as a foregone conclusion – devoid of hope and optimism, they focus instead on trying to get jobs in Uganda’s struggling economy, where some estimates put youth unemployment at almost 85 percent. Behind a bulletproof window, reading the newspaper that he runs, escorted by police he controls, Museveni is untouchable, and everyone knows it.

The Bees

by Catherine Kelly

The bees are going down, you know, it’s a well known fact statistically but also purely anecdotally, because the ground is suddenly pebbled with the dead little things. Two in the kitchen, three on the wet slope of concrete as I was pulling the door outside where it’s almost August. Curled up in fur as if, in a final moment, to curb that sense of being far away from the edges of yourself. I don’t think of fur as something settled on cadavers except maybe the cadavers of fruit, lost in the corner, earthed in that fungal smell, the sweet heave of mould on the remains of a pear or an apple or orange – in the residual curve like cartilage they carry inside them an Autumn in hours.

Hallucinate Keeping the limbs aligned to trap that smell of fermenting – Just on the edge of the city, my Blood was boiling with something utterly unlike Anger, Oxfordshire’s all appleskin and my mulled blood’s cider. I’m serious – In London there’s no need to hallucinate. I saw that horsehead Grimace at the ground – Saw animals in war turn back – Took the city in my teeth today, and caught the blunt dawnlid open and shut. Night means nothing here, and bones melt down like Milk, Sallowed sour in the heat, singeing the tar road all the way home.

A fragile thread How it feels to look at Agnes Martin’s A Grey Stone First, a confession: I would like in some way to possess A Grey Stone, the 1963 painting by Agnes Martin, currently on show as part of a retrospective of her work at the Tate Modern. This does not manifest as any kind of will to practical, material ‘ownership’, but rather as an insistent wish to run my fingers over the electric second skin, which hovers just above the surface of the painting, to hold the sight of it in the hollow space just below the heart. The canvas measures 72 by 72 inches – slightly taller than me. Its formal components are simple enough: a square canvas covered by a pale grey wash, then a very fine pencil grid, then small darker grey marks within, but not completely filling, the spaces of this grid. But it is impossible to convey the nature of a painting that has the strange quality of being so ‘other’ to the sum of its apparently basic parts. Any photograph of A Grey Stone bears very little relation to seeing the painting itself. Moving close, I lose sight of the edges of the painting, held for a while by the detail that becomes apparent. As I move back again, the surface blurs, the grid becomes clearer while its fine variations disappear. Further back still, the surface appears opaque, misted, somehow unified. Why, though, do I move? Perhaps I am seeking the “definitive” view – the one that will reveal the meaning that lies inside or behind the painting.

by Grace Connolly Linden But A Grey Stone is not a window: it offers neither a framed view nor a way in. Compare it with Lucio Fontana’s Spacial Concept, Waiting, which consists of a single slightly slanting, vertical cut into a raw, stretched canvas. A Grey Stone shatters Fontana’s facile surface–depth distinction. The cut in his canvasses is a formal deception, which seems to offer a way through into, as he put it, “serenity in infinity” – but if you were to complete the cut and tear away the canvas, all that would appear would be another surface. The components of the surface of Martin’s painting – the pale grey wash, the grid, the darker grey marks in the spaces of the grid – combine to create a constant interchange between background and foreground, surface and depth, and hence a shifting, breathing image.

“The word she speaks belongs neither to her nor to the object –

Yet the materiality and precision of the pencil grid reasserts itself, quietly insistent. A real mesh catches small creatures and casts enchanting shadows; this drawn mesh is simply a regular arrangement of boundaries. These boundaries create spaces within and without; they define body and shape. Thus, in a sense, they should not have significance apart from the spaces that they define. But the nature of this grid, and its significance within Martin’s practice, seem to insist on the importance and independence of the lines themselves. It makes me think, not of words or phrases, but of letters and sounds, and the mouth as it moves to shape them. This is perhaps why I find it the most strangely silent of Martin’s paintings, since the spaces created by the grid are not completely empty, like an open-mouthed breath, but partially closed by darker grey marks.

it is a line cast out across that space, a fragile thread, the visible or audible trace of an absent meaning.”

Closer to, the grid undoes itself a little as its details and irregularities become clearer. Just as cadences and hesitations mark the formation of sounds, so the minute unsteadiness of Martin’s hand marks her line. The effect is as irreproducible as a particular moment or memory of joy. The impersonal structure of the grid tempts you towards expansive statements about pure abstraction, while the fine variations in the lines themselves call you back to the touch of the pencil, the individual wave, the grey pebble in the palm of your hand. Italo Calvino writes of two directions of thought: one travels “into the mental space of bodiless rationality,” tracing “lines that converge […] projections, abstract forms, projections of force”; the other goes through a space crammed with all the objects that might be sayable. The tension between them denies any kind of resolution, in the same way the dissonance between the rectangular grid and the square canvas space, as Martin puts it, “lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.” Desire exists in the spaces between things. It exists in the moving space between the painting and me; it is also the breathing tension within the painting itself. There is a space, rarely fully acknowledged, between the person who speaks and the object she refers to. The word she speaks belongs neither to her nor to the object – it is a line cast out across that space, a fragile thread, the visible or audible trace of an absent meaning. I think, finally, that A Grey Stone depicts this strange space between, that this is where its moving appeal comes from. The grid itself is a word cast out across its surface, which is like a restless sea, suspended in such a way that it belongs neither to us nor to the painting.

Sheltered From Harm? Asylum seekers in Geneva’s nuclear bunkers

by Frances Timberlake I step off the tram forty minutes from the city centre, peering through the dark in search of a group of people that I have been told will be gathering here this evening. A little further down the empty road looms a large concrete apartment block cutting into the skyline, in front of which two young Eritrean men stand talking. I ask them if I have the right place. “No”, one of them replies with a laugh, and points downwards. “It's underneath this.” I am looking for the bunker des Coudriers. At first sight you would mistake it for a subterranean car park, or more likely not see it altogether behind the thick bushes which cover its entrance several metres below the main road. Security guards stand defensively at the entrance, ensuring that any member of the public coming too close is moved swiftly on. This bunker is one of the numerous underground nuclear shelters now being used to house Geneva's asylum seekers, out of sight and public knowledge. Caught in limbo between hope for permanent residence and fear of deportation, the past few years have seen hundreds of men, from Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan and elsewhere, forced to live in these overcrowded and unsanitary conditions beneath a city commonly known as the human rights capital of the world. In the bunkers, up to 60 men are assigned to each room, sleeping in beds stacked three-high and lined up together with no partitioning. There are five toilets. The men living here speak of the impossibility of telling the time when inside, or of sleeping, due to the continuous coming and going of people throughout the night, the lights turning on and off every time. One man describes the sleep deprivation as a form of torture. Those living in the bunkers are openly critical of the authorities’ strategy to house them underground, and have formed a collective which meets every week to protest, to share their experiences with those interested in their cause, or to simply regain humanity for a few hours. The first thing people mention is the air. “It's not ‘normal’ air,” writes one man in an anonymous testimony. “It's not fresh air.

Down there, we find ourselves breathing a type of – how can you describe it? – ‘recycled’ air, contaminated air, because there's no ventilation. One day, I discovered that the air is brought in by a machine from the garden behind the parking area and that the entrance of the pipe bringing the air inside is right next to the area where dogs shit. I can’t find the adequate words to describe what this is like. I would never have imagined that, one day in my life, I would be treated like this, in a country like this one, as an asylum seeker,” he continues. “What does ‘asylum’ mean? Seeking protection, seeking an honest, democratic and free life. In my country, I lived with my family in my hometown, with my own friends, my own social network. It’s incomparable with the situation here, where I can’t find a family like my family, and I can’t find a home anything like my home. I don’t want to think about it. I ended up inside a bunker, as though somebody had pushed me in. I had no choice. Inside, I tried hard to retain my sanity, but I couldn’t until I got out. Even now, I am not completely myself.”

The trauma experienced is not just psychological but also physical. Two meals a day are provided in the bunkers, made up of food that has been frozen for long periods of time. “It’s for dogs”, Gzam, a 30-year old from Tunisia, tells me. “You can’t eat it, it blocks your intestines. But we just have to take what they bring us.” Despite a letter from the doctor assigned to the inhabitants of the bunkers testifying that the food was not good enough for eating, nothing has changed. Asylum seekers housed in above-ground foyers are given a weekly stipend for food and living, but those in the bunkers receive nothing. Gzam arrived in Switzerland in 2012 and was moved to the bunker three months ago. He describes to me the long, artificially-lit corridors of the bunkers, and the desperate attempt to find a bed next to the air pipe at night, even if the noise from it keeps you awake. “It’s not a life there,” he says, “It's only the dead that are supposed to live underground, it’s for graves. Not living people. After three or four months people begin to go crazy.” He speaks too of the chronic uncertainty of life as an asylum seeker, of not knowing when the decision on his future will be made.

“It’s not a life there,” he says, “It’s only the dead that are supposed to live underground” tended to be suspended for indeterminate time periods, meaning that people seeking refuge and protection are made to live in extremely precarious situations for months or even years at a time.

The collective strongly criticises the deference to the Dublin agreement when making these decisions, a regulation acceded to by Switzerland in 2008 and under which an asylum seeker may only apply for asylum in the country in which he or she first arrives. This has led to countries such as Italy and Greece being overwhelmed by migrants coming by sea, and the regulation has been criticised for this reason by both the UNHCR and the European Council on Refugees and Exiles. The decision of the Swiss authorities to invest all their resources into the implementation of this agreement has given them the power to deport asylum seekers back to these other European countries in a mechanical manner, without regard for their age, state of health or country of origin. The asylum demands of those from Syria, Eritrea and Afghanistan have in recent years

“It's shameful,” Gzam asserts angrily. “Everyone thinks of Switzerland as a rich country where the people have everything. But they don’t give it to anyone else. They don’t do anything to help.” The sense of injustice and frustration is tangible when speaking with those who have experienced a liminal existence here, guilty only of seeking dignity and better life conditions within a dysfunctional system. Gzam articulates the hopelessness felt by so many in his situation. “We are not criminals, we are not animals, we are just normal people. So why send us beneath ground? Like everyone, we have rights. To survive and to go forwards, you need force, you need courage. If you don't have that, what will happen is simple...’ciao’.”

Feeling Blue

by Dominic Hewett

Feeling Blue is an upcoming six-part sitcom and profound social commentary on depression and masculinity in the 21st century. The cast is solely made up of the four members of the boyband Blue – Lee Ryan, Simon Webbe, Antony Costa and Duncan James. The protagonist, Neil (Lee Ryan), is an ambidextrous Cornish fishmonger who begins to suffer from depression following the breakup of his marriage. In the first episode Neil meets his therapist, Colin (Simon Webbe), who hides a secret passion for pottery and the novels of Enid Blyton behind his cold, emotionless exterior. Neil’s best friend, Alan (Antony Costa), a professional jockey and battle reenactment enthusiast, struggles to accept his best friend’s illness. All other characters, including Levi Goldstein, an unexpectedly antisemitic piano tuner; Stanley Sidcup, a one-armed Geordie juggler; and Tony Flower, a flirtatious florist with a taste for ‘the exotic’, are to be played by the versatile Duncan James. Will Neil learn to cope with his depression? Will Colin become more open about his inner creativity? Will Alan apologise to Neil for his behaviour? Will Levi realise that he’s actually Jewish? Will Stanley find a more suitable occupation for someone with only one arm? Will Tony read Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism and come to appreciate that paternalistic preconceptions of ‘the exotic’ are inextricably linked to repressive Western cultural hegemony and are thus both intellectually and morally dubious?

Salt by Cleo Henry

Twenty minutes ago she had climbed out of the dead sea. She now lay drying on the leathery shore. “We should go,” he said. He was sitting up next to her and looking over his shoulder at their hire car perched anxiously above them at the side of the road. It was framed by the beetling rocks, which stretched back for miles until they turned into the ballooning peaks of Jerusalem. They had driven along the shore for hours, looking for a spot that was not part of some holistic health centre. They did not want to be healed. They wanted to float. “Why?” she said, her eyes closed. “I don't think we're allowed here.” He had been fidgeting since they arrived, swimming in fretful little strokes, glancing up and down the grey expanse of beach. “Why?” “There is a sign over there with an X on it. Not allowed. That's what an X means.” “X-ray? X marks the spot? No, you're thinking about a cross. Crossed out. X is a letter. It needs a word, a context, or a sum or something.” “A some or something?” “A sum or something!” They had come at the wrong time of day, really. The sun seemed to be scorching the air around them. “Okay,” she sighed, sitting up and beginning to stretch to her feet. “Let's go.”

“You should shake all that stuff off you, before we get in the car,” he gestured at her. “What stuff?” She looked down at her body. She was covered in a brittle layer of salt. It was clinging to all the fine hairs, with the fragility of the diamonds at the neck of an old woman, about to peel away. Roman soldiers were paid in salt, she remembered. It was valuable. Each time she moved, even slightly, it would fall away like the flurry of gunpowder from the back a shot musket. “No, I'll keep it on,” she said, and began walking gingerly back to the car over the parched, crystallised ground. “Oh come on. What are you doing?” “Getting my money's worth.” “We didn't even pay!” “Roman soldiers were paid in salt,” she called back to him as she started climbing up the bank, her arms sticking awkwardly out from her sides to try and preserve as much of the salt as possible. “It was valuable.” He followed behind her, shouting about modern times, car seats, saline. She opened the car door and sat down in the passenger seat, waiting for him to join her. Modern times, car seats, saline. “Why did we even bother coming?” He finished. “To float.” With a groan, the car started and they pulled out onto the road. Holding her arm up to the light, which was harsh and sharp against the rocks, she examined it. It glimmered reassuringly. She thought about the Roman soldiers, fighting and sweating and being paid in the very stuff they sweated out. They were all wars of definitions, she knew, and she was winning.

The local police in Malegaon, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, have recently been photographing and registering all the cattle in the town. These photos are being carefully tabulated into the ‘cow, bull, calf’ register at each of Malegaon’s seven police stations, alongside their owners’ details. This rather unusual task is being performed in response to the state government’s recent ban on beef. Banning cattle slaughter has been high on the agenda of India’s prime minister Narendra Modi ever since his Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) won a historic victory in the parliamentary elections last year. While laws of this kind are not new in India, with some dating as far back as 1931, their enforcement gained a fresh impetus after the current bans came into force. Sale of any form of beef in Haryana and Maharashtra can now entail imprisonment of up to five years, while cow slaughter is now a non-bailable offence. In Jammu and Kashmir, the High Court has directed the government to enforce an 83-year-old ban on cow slaughter. One of the slogans used extensively by the BJP during their election campaign in 2014 was “BJP ka sandesh, bachegi gai, bachega desh” (“BJP’s message: the cow will be saved, the country will be saved”), and home minister Rajnath Singh made it crystal clear in a recent speech hat the BJP will not shy away from using its “might” in order to abide by this particular poll promise. Mayankeshwar Singh, the national convener of the Cow Development Cell of the BJP, told Al Jazeera in an interview recently that that the BJP plans to build

‘cow hostels’ in cities, establish a ‘cow pension’ scheme to incentivize farmers against selling old animals to slaughterhouses, and mobilize a ‘cow protection force’ to rescue cows. He went on to add that it is their dream to build a ‘cow university’, to teach the usefulness of the indigenous cow. The ban on cow slaughter has been a topic of heated debate across the country in recent times, with critics accusing Modi of unfairly targeting and discriminating against Muslim and Christian minorities, the predominant consumers of beef in India. Another community which has been hard hit by these laws is lower-caste Hindus, whose poverty does not allow them access to expensive meats like mutton and chicken.

The reason most often cited to justify the ban is respect for the sentiments of the Hindu community in India, which reveres the cow as holy. But many view the ban as a symbolic gesture aimed at alienating and demonizing minority communities in India. Before Modi came to power last year, his right-hand man, and current BJP president, Amit Shah had a charge sheet filed against him for making hate speeches during his campaign, after allegedly saying the polls were an opportunity to seek “revenge for the insult” of riots between Hindus and Musims in 2013 that resulted in at least 62 deaths. Even after the results of the general election, the barrage of hate speech from within the BJP’s ranks continues unabated.

Political Beef What cattle can tell us about Hindu Nationalism

by Karan Jain

BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj has labelled madrassas (Islamic religious schools) “hubs of terror.” He has also publicly advised Hindu women to bear four children to counter the alleged Muslim practice of having four wives and 40 children – a fiction of majoritarian paranoia. Another BJP MP, Yogi Adityanath, was caught on camera allegedly telling supporters at a rally that “for every Hindu converted, 100 Muslim girls will be converted in retaliation.” While some argue that these are just fringe elements in an otherwise moderate party, Modi’s failure to distance himself from these comments or reprimand his aides means this is a difficult case to make.

There have also been concerns over the attempts by the BJP to control public discourse by ‘saffronising’ the educational system – impregnating the content of education with elements of Hindu nationalism. People affiliated closely with the BJP are being installed in key positions in educational bodies responsible for advising the central government on education. One such new appointment is Dr Yellapragada Sudershan Rao, new head of the Indian Council of Historical Research, who has claimed that “‘secular’ historians and ‘progressive’ intelligentsia make concerted endeavour in support of the Muslim cause.” Another is Dinanath Batra, education adviser for two BJP-ruled states, Gujarat and Haryana. In one of Batra’s textbooks, which is being used across schools in Gujarat, he claims that cars were invented in India and the map of India is shown to include the neighbouring countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. This trend of viewing history through an unscientific and anti-secularist lens has received support from the topmost echelons of the BJP government, with PM Modi himself publicly backing the view that holy texts show many discoveries of modern science to have been made by ancient Indians. He told an audience of doctors recently that the Hindu god Ganesh’s elephant-shaped head was evidence of ancient plastic surgery. Meanwhile, university freedom has come under threat with the Indian Institute of Technology’s recent ban of student group the Ambedkar

Periyar Study Circle (APSC) after anonymous allegations were made to the government that it was “spreading hatred” against PM Modi and Hindus. APSC is a student society for discussing the social issues faced by the lower castes in India. According to a Times of India report, the group did not hold any public protests or organize meetings – though both are constitutionally mandated rights – only distributing pamphlets criticizing government policy. Although the ban on the group was lifted after a country-wide protest, the incident clearly indicates the government’s efforts to curb dissent and control public discourse. All this has resulted in fears that the BJP is attempting to revive hardline Hindu nationalism, with its aim to transform India into a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ (Hindu nation). Extreme rightwing tendencies in the BJP are not new. In 1992, the mob destruction of the 16th century mosque Babri Masji, incited by senior BJP leaders including future home minister of India Lal Krishnan Advani, prompted nationwide rioting among Hindus and Muslims in which more than 2,000 people died. Ten years later, riots erupted again in the state of Gujarat under the chief ministership of Modi himself, killing between 1,000 and 2,000 people. While the current politicization of beef may not at the outset appear to be the most pressing issue facing India, when viewed in light of BJP’s history, it does seem to offer a glimpse of the unpleasant things that could be in store for the country.

The Glass Ceilings Learning from the Case Study Houses of the 1960s

The editorial of Arts & Architecture magazine that year stressed the social intent of the Case Study Houses, claiming “the over-all program will be general enough to be of practical assistance to the average American in search of a home in which he can afford to live.” Le Corbusier noted that the post-war period was a time of “architecture or revolution.” Good architecture could have an immediate effect on preventing social crisis by improving people’s quality of living. Yet Corbusier’s aphorism contains a reactionary contradiction which can also be detected within the Case Study Houses project.

by Ione Wells

The adage ‘a room with a view’ is an understatement in reference to Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House. One of the emblems of modernist architecture in the USA, the floor-toceiling glass walls offer a panoramic view of LA from its position high in the hills of Hollywood, while the correspondingly glassy surface of the swimming pool allows inhabitants to soak in decadence whilst overlooking the ninth most unequal city in the USA. Yet the Stahl House was not built to be luxurious: it was part of a 20th century utopian vision of affordable housing that, paradoxically, resulted in an exemplary form of architectural exhibitionism. It was built in 1960 as one of the Case Study Houses, the project endorsed by Arts & Architecture magazine, as an experiment in providing cheap, welldesigned residential housing after the Second World War. The designs for Case Study House #1, by J.R. Davidson, were released in the February issue of Arts & Architecture in 1945 and the programme ran until 1966. Private clients commissioned some of the most renowned American architects of the time, from Charles and Ray Eames through Pierre Koenig to Ralph Rapson, to create houses from prefabricated sheets of glass, steel frames and poured concrete floors. The houses weren’t just architecturally innovative, they also represented the dawn of a new way of living. The dark days of war were over, and now the average citizen could hope for a life that was full of light, openplan, and crowned with the crystal of the modern age – glass. Light and transparency were the hallmarks of a new era, defined by optimism rather than by bombs.

In the February 1945 edition of Arts & Architecture, Entenza imagined the family who would live in Case Study House #1 as “a Mr. and Mrs. X, both of whom are professional people with mutual business interests” with “one teen-aged daughter away at school and a mother-in-law, who is an occasional welcome guest in the house.” Entenza notes that the house “must be designed in such a way that care and upkeep do not interfere with the professional activities” and have “provision for indulgence in gardening as exercise and recreation.”

The house is to be a “simple and straightforward expression of the living demand of modern minded people.” Yet the paternalistic undertones of Entenza’s imaginary household sound less like individual “expression,” and more like prescriptions for the lifestyle of an idealised nuclear family. One wonders whether the houses were solely for the benefit of the average citizen, or whether they were also intended to have a pacifying intent on the population, as Corbusier’s dictum implies.

The public-spirited intent of the houses was further compromised by private profit. The name “Case Study” indicated the nature of these houses: they embraced modern materials and techniques in order to serve as a model for social housing. John Entenza, editor of Arts & Architecture at the time, intended them to be “capable of duplication and in no sense be an individual “performance.”

But if you visit the Stahl House today, yours in 2007 for $3.1 million dollars, or its contemporaries such as the Eames House, the first house ever to use a steel frame, you’ll find yourself paying a hefty entrance fee, or even, as with Case Study House #21, find the house stripped of its residential purpose to make way for a swanky art showroom. Corbusier had a vision which seemed to foreshadow the Case Study Houses – the idea that modernist architecture would inevitably arrive at the “HouseTool” or “the mass production house, available for everyone.” However, he also predicted their failure. Corbusier referred to “the right state of mind for living in mass-production houses,” the prevailing state of mind within the Case Study Houses project was one of opportunity married with newly invigorated postwar capitalism. What were intended to be models for socially driven housing became masterpieces reaping money from their status as some of the finest examples of modernist residential architecture in the USA. The masses of LA are not living in Stahl Houses today because the Stahl House was never replicated. Though the first six houses were built by 1948, many of them were left in the design stage, taken down or vastly altered by their private owners. The houses that have remained unaltered have been granted recognition by the LA Conservancy, yet the drive here to conserve rather than replicate, to be “historic” rather than innovative, shows a shift toward a project focused on individual legacy rather than communal design.

It is as if we have become so used to the architectural experiments of our predecessors being of historical significance that we have forgotten the true purpose of buildings, particularly residential ones. This year, it was announced that London had finally exceeded the population peak of 8.6m that it had last reached in 1939. We are faced with the same scenario that John Entenza outlined in his proposal for the Case Study Houses. Can we learn anything from the project? Arguably, yes. The project did recognize the importance of housing people in pleasant spaces, and the ability to turn limited spaces and restricted budgets into something that felt spacious and practical. As Natalya Wells, this year’s organizer of Open House in London, told me, the residential architecture that Open House showcases is key to their work because it sends the message that “your built environment has a huge effect on you and it shouldn’t be something that is exclusive.” Yet we still face the problem that led to the downfall of the Case Study Houses: the influence of private property developers and neglect of the core purpose of buildings. The art critic Robert Hughes described architecture as the “one art that nobody can escape.” We may not be able to escape architecture, but architecture can escape us. Sadly, the Stahl house and the rest of those built by the project have become case studies in how housing built with progressive aims all too frequently flees the grasp of the people for who it was intended.

500 Words Competition This term, we asked readers to respond to this photograph by Nick Waplington, in under 500 words. The quality of the responses was excellent, but we narrowed down the hundreds of diverse, original and creative entries to a shortlist of just six. The winner and runners-up were chosen by our judging panel, comprised of Fiona Sampson, Professor of Poetry at Roehampton University, Lorin Stein, Editor of The Paris Review, Man Bookershortlisted novelist Monica Ali, critic and writer Geoff Dyer, and Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper. Their choices are published here.

image by Nick Waplington

by Emma Levin

Heaven’s Gate

University College London

When a doorway to heaven appeared in Surbiton, the newspapers weren’t sure where to print the story. The event was too strange for the front page, but too big to go after the animal interest stories. In the end, they decided it should go after the science segment (about how coffee seems to both cause and cure cancer, so it cancels out if you drink an even number of cups). The man on the television said it was irresponsible to publicise the doorway to heaven. People would leave their jobs, and swarm the area. The lady on the television said that she completely disagreed, because people would be sensible, and also that was the opinion that the producer was paying her to express. She then left her job to swarm the area. * Within a matter of hours, an orderly queue had formed at the doorway’s edge. And a disorderly queue had formed behind that. Cars were abandoned, buses and coaches littered the pavements as everyone, including the driver, got off and joined the queue. Impromptu stalls sprang up, selling ‘last meals’. As the queue continued to grow, about a mile behind that, a second set of stalls appeared, selling ‘penultimate meals’. * By lunchtime, heaven had a waiting list. Once someone got a velvet rope in on the act there was also a guest list, until the bouncers realised that they were at the front of the queue, and let themselves in. The approximate wait time was seventy years. You might as well live your life, people thought, but didn’t say. Because that was a gamble – you could live your life and not get in. Was that a risk people were willing to take? There was also the fact that most people, on their journey to the gate, had given up all their worldly goods. They didn’t want to go back to the same lives as before, but without a colour television. And so people queued. And queued. As the months passed, those who were pregnant gave birth. Many who hadn’t given birth became pregnant. Improvised schools appeared. Unexpectedly, improvised Ofsted inspections also appeared. People started to trade their places in the queue, so they could get their children into a better improvised school (presumably so, in a few years’ time, they could get into a good improvised university). In time, people forgot what the queue had been for. But no-one left it. If they’d been queueing for years, it had to be good. They wouldn’t queue for years for nothing, would they? A generation passed. The queue limped forwards.

‘a gem of a story – funny, wildly inventive and deeply incisive.’ – Monica Ali

One day, a child raised in the queue (on the A306, and the B282 after the queue passed New Malden) asked if he could explore. Not far. Just over the hill. His parents didn’t see why not. They were curious themselves. They promised to save his space. He climbed the ridge. There were fields, and buildings, and you could walk in any direction you wanted. It was heaven.

by Hester Styles Vickery

Oxford University

It is autumn, and the lifts are all broken, and there is an angel in your kitchen, handing out cheap seats to the apocalypse. Or not so cheap, as it turns out. Apocalypse, here, according to the Greek; as in an uncovering; a lifting of the veil of revelation. As in a tower, and a halo of wings like the spokes of a huge window next to your fridge. It wears its body like a secondhand coat, except the sagging lining is all gold. Motheaten by light. Godhead wears through the way treeroots crack pavings. You are reminded of paintings in the National Gallery, and the inadequacy of gold leaf and peeling paint. The lost art of seeing Gods in woodwork on a wall. There were signs, of course. All you’ve seen for days is graffiti above bridges. All up from King’s Cross and Gospel Oak, Canonbury and Whitechapel. And the repetition turns the aphorism from trite to desperate. For God’s sake ‘hope’, over and over. The city is full of holy footnotes: The foreecho of a train in the wind. A leaf blown onto the underground, caught in the slipstream of the crowded commute. The sky whited out. Heaven in the mouth means God in the mouth, according to the footnotes, and He tastes like cheap wine at the sacrament, and woodsmoke. He tastes like coffee cooling in the grey November sun of your kitchen. The angel says, “Greetings, thou that art highly favoured,” in a voice that sounds like all the pigeons in Trafalgar taking off at once. And you say, “What?” Sainthood is such poor poetry, and it pays badly, mostly in blood. It leaves you with little but a walking monument with its feathers crushed against your cupboards, your door wingcharred, and the dome of the white sky cracked like an eggshell. This is the gate of heaven. There is an angel in your kitchen.

‘stunning writing. It risky and full of conviction… Every phrase gives us that particular sensation, of new-minted astonishment, that is the mark of what, to use a technical term, we call “the Real Thing” – Fiona Sampson

Three Letters Home, Beijing 2015 I went to Tiananmen square today. Tiananmen means “Gate of Heavenly Peace”. It’s the name of the red archway through which you enter the Forbidden City; the Emperor and his concubines lived there until as late as 1924! My friend made a joke about how fortunate it was to be blessed with so much red. All the communists had to do was stick Mao’s face there, and the Palace was transformed into an emblem of socialism. It’s the kind of joke that Americans make: Foreign nations, with their silly symbols, not like us with our Enduring Freedom.

by Billy Beswick

Oxford University

I was listening to Joni Mitchell on my way to class this morning. Remember that line in A Case of You where she says ‘I’m frightened by the devil and I’m drawn to those ones that ain’t afraid”? Joy is the devil for me, I think. It’s something to do with city living. I’ve only ever lived in a city. They’re all the same; New York, London, Beijing: Money so ubiquitous it blinds you to the suffering people endured; miners starved and students killed. No matter. Now that the coffers are full to bursting you can fuck history; heaven’s waiting. It always rains on June 4th in Beijing, or so our teacher told us this morning. When I came traipsing in 20 minutes late, sopping wet, I did not expect the solemn silence which greeted my apologies, that I delivered loudly in shoddy Chinese. He was finishing his tale, which he told with the kind of quiet dignity Dad uses when he speaks of Granddad dying. ‘My mother couldn’t reach me and she was terrified I might be dead. I couldn’t contact her until two days later; when she heard my voice she started crying. It always rains on June 4th in Beijing.”

‘a sensitive tribute to the costs of history’ - Fiona Sampsons

The Gate Speaks

by Ellie Myerson Cambridge University

I see you, comin up toward me all sly & sidlin. Yeah you. Wit the camera. Yeah, an I can see the sorta pic you’re gna take too. I bet it’s real clever. So they’ve not cleared out them rubbish bags yet; I’ll tell you what, some people got other things on their mind. An it’s real unfair to snap it like that, when they been real busy all week, preachin. Rubbish bins! By the Gate of Heaven! Yeah that’s how it goes, an you’d betta get used to it. If I don’t mind the smell, you’d betta stop wrinklin your nose young man. Oh my paint’s peelin a little. I know. Well he – the pastor don’t you know – has gotta lot on his plate right now. But he’ll be back for me. I’ll be all spick & span by the week after nex. ‘This is the Gate of Heaven,’ I hear him say wit bucket in hand, lickin glazes. Oh yes. ‘This is the Gate.’ So you’ll be laughin then, will you? I don’t see you walkin in this door young man. You’ll be laughin then? You’ll be makin a lil joke bout them cars too I bet. Drivin right past me. Well see how much I care. An bout the lil arrow on the bus, yeah, pointin right the other way is it. Not evryone’s gna spot that joke young man. Not evryone’s gna laugh wit you. Say, I don mean to come across fierce. Maybe you was comin in. Yeah, & do come in, jus this way. Plenty room. So the sign’s a lil worse for wear, well, it wasn’t mean to get that way. I’m a lil sensitive bout it. It’s jus there’s a fine history of gates & signs. & none of them others got people gettin all funny bout it like I do. An now we’re talkin, I gotta say, I think I’d look betta in a big ol oil paintin than a photo. Yeah, or an etchin, ol school. Photo’s a lil – now don take this personal – casual for my likin. People might be seein it the wrong way, you get me? & I know you got the big ol tree waving away all spiritual & fresh but, it’s jus you also got them weeds in the foreground an, well I’m jus sayin you might wanna think bout some diff’rent styles that’s all. If you wanna inspire the people wit the love of the lord. See I know a thing or two bout the way you go bout spreadin the trut after all them years sittin here. Problem is, there some people always gna be doubtin. So you wanna make it feel real, yeah, you jus wanna be careful you showin the right kinda real. You get me?

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