Out of Bounds
The Isis
1
Editors’ Letter
2
Ivana Cholakova & Chung Kiu Kwok
Telling with my eyes
Rita May
4 Voices from the Entr’acte
Maggie Wang
9 Unguarded
Julius Thieroff
10 Silk Road 13 The Shakedown of Pornhub 18 Crawling Order 20 Cinema
niuniu
Liz Murphy Claire Ion
Nikita Biswal
21 The Lakebed
Devi Sastry
22 Six Months 28 a brief history of the cane toad
Humzah Khan
Charles Pidgeon
32 Leaf Racing 35 the smell in my room 36 Tapioca Age 40 Losing Füsun
Sophie Edwards Mukahang Limbu
Gee Ren Chee
Jorrit Donner-Wittkopf
43 Catherine
Beth Simcock
47 Team List
The Isis
W
e never set out to be the quarantine magazine, but to ignore our uncanny circumstances is to go against the confrontational and honest character on which The Isis prides itself. The result is a publication that shows awareness of the current pandemic but refuses to be consumed by it. Out of Bounds is a testament to creative resilience. In times of crisis art is not only a coping mechanism but a powerful outlet for our restricted voices. Despite our shared social isolation we journeyed from deserted cafes in New Zealand, through sunny book markets in Karachi, to the hectic silk road. Over three frenetic months, dozens of writers, artists, editors, and organisers came together to produce this magazine, working on up to a 16-hour time difference. We learned to disagree. We learned to consider each others’ beliefs and to interrogate our own. Out of Bounds was a joy to create. We hope you get as much out of it as we put in. Ivana & Chung Kiu
Photography by Lucien Whitworth
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眼 に て 伝 ふ This poem was originally written by the hugely influential Japanese poet Kenji Miyazawa. Despite his many contributions to Japanese literature, his work is seldom translated into foreign languages due to his ascetic values which kept it hidden from the public eye. This piece is an attempt to introduce his writing to a wider audience.
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Telling with my eyes It’s no use there’s no stopping it now it’s spewing over, gurgling I haven’t slept since last night blood’s been flowing ever since every inch of me is throbbing blue it seems I’m soon to die Yet still what a wind! Mid-spring is fast approaching; as if from deep wells underground such lovely winds find me across this sky so very blue forming waves like swirls of autumn grass across new leaves and hairy flowers even the burnt weaving on this mat is glowing so very blue Doctor, were you heading home from some conference or another? With your black frockcoat across your back you treat my wounds so earnestly no complaints could ever leave my mouth even if I died It’s funny though this blood, it swells really, I only feel at peace I think my soul’s recently departed but oh! How cruel not to let the body know if only to stop this bleeding From where you stand I know I must be a grisly sight indeed but all I see with my two eyes is the beautiful sky and translucent winds
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Voices from the Entr’acte
“Y
ou’re not performing femininity in a way that we can read onstage, so you’re failing at performing this,” says Aiden K. Feltkamp, recalling the rehearsal process for a scene from Rossini ’s The Barber of Seville. Feltkamp – a transgender non-binary writer based in New York City – trained and performed as a mezzo-soprano before writing libretti. For them, putting on the mask of the stereotypically feminine Rosina – the love interest in Barber – was difficult: “I felt like I couldn’t get into that physical space in the way that I wanted to. [The obstacle] was my own idea of what a very femme person looks like or moves like.” Opera, like many aspects of society, seems to have frustratingly specific classifications of what
gender is and how it should be depicted. But Feltkamp is one of several innovators in the opera world who have dedicated their careers to challenging these definitions and making opera more inclusive, authentic, and accessible. Feltkamp discovered opera when they saw a production of The Marriage of Figaro in their first semester at university. At the time, they were studying cello performance but were “ blown away” by Mozart’s drama. What drew them most was the character of Cherubino, a boy in the throes of puberty who disguises himself as a girl so he can be close to the woman of his dreams. Traditionally sung by a woman, this role is at the forefront of discussions about gender in the opera world: “I’d
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always had ambiguity around my gender growing up,” Feltkamp says, “ but I could never really articulate it or explore it, so getting into opera let things ‘click ’ a bit more for me.” Still, they often felt confused by the relationship between gender, characterisation, and voice. Some teachers criticized them for not sounding feminine enough, while others praised them for not trying to affect femininity. Eventually, when these conf licts became too much, Feltkamp faced a choice: “Between myself and my voice, I had to choose myself.” Now, in addition to leading education and diversity initiatives, Feltkamp writes opera libretti. Their first major work The Times Are Nightfall was a sequel to
Mozart’s Don Giovanni. It follows Donna Elvira and Donna Anna, two of Giovanni ’s scorned lovers, as they recover from the trauma he inf licted upon them. For Feltkamp, writing their love story was a chance to challenge two f laws present in productions of Mozart’s opera. The writer was initially frustrated by many directors’ decisions to “ downplay the sexual assault aspect” of the opera and instead portray Giovanni, a notorious libertine, with his own “ book of conquests”, as
“ just a lovable rogue who gets in trouble.” Secondly, Feltkamp was disconcerted by the prevailing taste for portraying Anna, whose father dies while defending her from Giovanni ’s attempted rape, as a liar. In opera, Feltkamp notes: “Women’s emotions are often belittled, or they’re called ‘crazy’.” By uniting Anna and Elvira over their shared trauma, they hoped to resolve Mozart’s – and the librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte’s – unresolved depictions of female
experiences and “ legitimise women’s feelings and emotions […] in a modern way.” Feltkamp makes a convincing argument for this reinterpretation of Don Giovanni, but, even among those at the forefront of opera’s gender-identity debate, it is not the only reasonable – or successful – reinterpretation. In May 2019, Lucia Lucas became the first female baritone to perform a principal role from the operatic canon
in the United States. This was the title role in Don Giovanni, and Lucas remembers her monthlong stay with the Tulsa Opera “ like a big fever dream.” Lucas, who is one of few transgender opera singers with international recognition, received a substantial amount of media attention, especially given the hyper-masculine nature of the role. Yet, she does not see this contrast of gender identities as anything unusual: “My first week after coming out, I was playing hyper-masculine characters,” she says. “I had lots of performances already scheduled, and I just did those performances.” These experiences with hypermasculinity have led her to her own unconventional interpretation of Giovanni. “I think Giovanni is
somewhat misunderstood,” she says. “It’s not strictly clear where Giovanni stands on everything. It’s up for interpretation whether he’s a womaniser or whether he’s a libertarian.” Perhaps because of these experiences, Lucas does not characterize her own gender identity as unusual. When asked to introduce herself, she highlights her decadelong professional career in opera, adding, at the end, “I happen to be trans.” In her career, Lucas has played numerous characters like Giovanni: “The baritone […] is quite often aggressive and jealous,” she explains. However, she has not allowed her onstage persona to overshadow or define her offstage identity. “Fach is separate from who you are,” she says, referring to
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the convention for placing voices into categories associated with particular character archetypes. Opera singers tend to make careers for themselves by specialising in specific styles, composers, or roles. A singer’s public image often amalgamates this musical niche with their offstage persona. Lucas, however, sees nothing wrong with refusing to conf late herself with her characters. Despite – or perhaps because of – her groundbreaking image as a transgender singer, Lucas has developed a forwardthinking yet restrained outlook about the future of opera. “I would caution people about producing the ‘woke version’ of something,” she says. On one hand, simply adding
a warning label to works now seen as ‘problematic’ – Puccini ’s Turandot, for example – is not enough. On the other hand, the extent to which artists can rectify the problems of such works is limited. “If you’re doing Madama Butterf ly or Turandot,” she continues, “you have to talk about how narrow you’re going to make the casting.” She recalls an instance in which she sang Butterf ly with a Korean soprano: given that the title character is Japanese, she wonders if this is “good enough ”. Casting is only the beginning of the story when it comes to identity in opera, but it is an important first step in tackling the genre’s more controversial works. The full solution, as far as canonical works are concerned, is still ambiguous. Though Lucas is comfortable with this ambiguity, Feltkamp has a much more decisive view on purism and the “woke versions” of opera. They say the issue comes “when [problematic] operas are done over and over again problematically, and they’re not being analysed with a contemporary eye; a critical eye; or an antiracist, feminist eye.” If delivering problematicyet-canonical operas with contemporary relevance requires altering the music, Feltkamp does not see why
we should not do so. “The industry is in a lot of ways still very conservative and traditional,” the writer admits, “ but in the Baroque era, why did they choose a countertenor or a castrato to play the hero? ” Moreover, Feltkamp explains that the way people thought of femininity and masculinity in the Baroque era is very different from our contemporary gender perception. Knowing this, they find the popular image of opera as a bastion of ‘traditional ’ gender roles baff ling. If many of the greatest opera composers defied gender binaries in their work, why shouldn’t we do the same? Perhaps the answer to opera’s inclusion dilemma lies not in rethinking gender within new frameworks, but in moving beyond traditional conceptions of gender to see opera through a purely artistic lens. This is the approach taken by Kangmin Justin Kim, a countertenor known for becoming the first male singer to perform Cherubino at the Royal Opera House. Kim, trained in musical theatre, has developed a character-focused approach to opera in which gender becomes all but irrelevant when juxtaposed with that character’s aims and emotions. When preparing Cherubino, he deliberately looked beyond the gendered
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masks for which the role is known and sought out his character’s most fundamental intentions. “It’s about where his heart is and what his heart is trying to achieve,” Kim says. “Performativity of gender is not my job. How you perceive this character I’m portraying is your job as the audience.” Kim approaches an opera foremost as a work of art and favours a production removed from personal or political agenda. “I don’t have a set way of singing a certain character,” he explains. “My agenda is not even secondary – it’s tertiary or quaternary. Before I can put my personal agenda into anything, I have to think about the music, the original text, [and] the playwright who inspired the text. There’s no room for my voice except as a vessel [to] bring the music into the audial universe.” Kim is enthusiastic about making opera more accessible, but he is, at heart, deeply loyal to the works as they were originally written. This need for balance informs much of his approach to performance. “I think there is room for everybody,” he says, regarding reinterpretation of the classics. “Reinterpretation can be done so tastefully because you can discover certain thematic elements or see the same work from
a different perspective.” But Kim is ambivalent about directors who try to force opera to conform to their agendas: “Who do you think you are, to silence all these great voices from the past by inserting your own voice? ” Nonetheless, Kim does appreciate opportunities to make statements, as evidenced by his involvement in new works. Here he displays balance and openmindedness in his approach. “If I had the opportunity to make a statement, I wouldn’t do it alone,” he says, emphasising the necessity of incorporating the voices of directors, conductors, writers, and musicians in order to tell a complete story. Before
the coronavirus pandemic threw the arts world into disarray, Kim was scheduled to sing the title role in the premiere of M. Butterf ly, which tells the story of a male Peking Opera star who attracts the attention of a French diplomat. Kim is particularly enthusiastic about productions of opera where issues of gender and race are made apparent. Yet, with new music, as with reinterpretations of older works, Kim stresses the importance not simply of raising problems but of presenting solutions. “I hate productions where the directors leave open question marks at the end of the opera,” he explains. “History is history. So, if you’re bringing something into modern times, you had
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better find a good reason to do so, and also do so in a way that provides solutions to the problematic aspects.” Providing such solutions is understandably difficult. Challenging the gender bias and binary in opera, in the attempt to rescue it from its conservative image, is equally complex. But Kim hopes to achieve these goals, as long as operamakers retain authentic artistic principles. He does not believe that certain roles should be confined to certain interpretations or performers, and he is confident in the opera world ’s ability to broaden its own worldview while maintaining a high musical standard. Lucas expresses a similar sentiment when she mentions the success of female tenors and baritones in jazz and is hopeful that opera will move towards greater gender representation. In an effort to normalise diversity, Feltkamp has proposed a new classification system which does away with traditional voice parts. “If you can sing something well,” Feltkamp asks, “why shouldn’t you be hired to? ” As Kim puts it, the figure of the “ diva” is genderless, so any attempt to apply a gender is neither logical nor progressive for opera in the modern day.
‘Unguarded’ Oil on canvas 16 × 20 in Inspired by the current Mediterean refugee crisis
Winner of The Isis visual art competition Trinity 2020
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Silk Road
金, the gold caged bodhi tree among monks one quick-tempered another on the phone another ten years old dying monks among dying tourists among red eaves and paper walls they speak of peppered chives and burnt tea (and a cat strutting across the floor)
火, the fire has long deserted the beacon tower where the poet once passed by in an emerald spring he said, “farewell, my friend, drink up, west of the gate, there will be no more friends” (and how very old is the willow tree)
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木, the wooden combs and tawdry bracelets hauled in from factories on the coast glitter among drip-fat lamb skewers raisins and plump dates in the jingling of good camels travellers and swindlers flock (and bargain over imitation jade) 土, the soil green, then alkaline then dry as salt upon which the roads wriggle against the slim horizon of an uncertain history, extended by overpriced counterfeits in a drooping mist this reminiscent hour sun rays cascade on the ancient trade route cars speed through pausing occasionally, only for a flock of cows or yaks (civilisation twists, turns, stumbles on)
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Rupa’s Cafe Freemans Bay Auck land, New Zealand S. Parke
Piha The Waitakere Ranges Auck land, New Zealand S. Parke
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THE SHAKEDOWN OF PORNHUB
I
n writing about Shakedown, Leilah Weinraub’s 2018 documentary feature, I am at a disadvantage. It is difficult to translate into words the dreamy visuals and experimental narrative that follows the queer women who performed in the Los Angeles black-lesbian strip club from which the film gets its name. Yet what I find most striking about the documentary surpasses these formal descriptions: watching these ‘Angels’ perform is still groundbreaking today, nearly two decades after this footage was taken. To see this marginalised community represented on screen and on their own terms so unapologetically feels refreshing. Early in the film, in a short voice recording of the club, an unidentified individual pronounces: “if you straight, you don’t need to be at the front.” The tone is set for an environment that exists to serve the lesbian community first rather than to be exclusionary.
When brought to the club by a friend in 2002, Weinraub was so inspired by the performers she saw on stage that she asked Ronnie, the club’s charismatic owner, if she could work there as a photographer. After finding the photos she took flat, static, and unable to capture the exuberance of Shakedown, she switched to filming. So, over ten years, and four hundred hours of footage, Weinraub carefully chronicles those moments of spectacle – the uninhibited performances, bedazzled costumes, and endless dollar bills – through the eyes of someone for whom Shakedown was a formative home. Shakedown documents the club’s heyday, before its main venue was shut down in 2004 on accounts of nude performers soliciting – around the same time that the City of Angels became a “resegregated Los Angeles”, according to Weinraub in an interview. But the extent to which this
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documentary feels so radical is not merely a result of the subjects it explores; much of its radicalism owes to the platform on which I viewed it: Pornhub. In March 2020, Shakedown became the first nonpornographic film to be streamed on the Pornhub website. Though it must be said that the ‘non-pornographic’ label, whilst technically accurate, is misleading – be under no impression that this is the kind of censored, sanitised portrayal of sex workers that you would expect to find on the BBC. This unusual collaboration is in fact a continuation of a preestablished partnership between Weinraub and Pornhub. Weinraub had previously worked with the porn streaming giant through the high fashion brand Hood by Air, resulting in a joint project for its Spring/Summer 2017 show. What is so remarkable about the decision to collaborate
with Pornhub is the audience the documentary can now reach. The international juggernaut, the world’s leading porn site, was visited over 42 billion times in 2019, equating to 115 million daily views. For a feature that was initially making the festival rounds and primarily being screened in museums, from a strip club known by its regular customers as “the only place like this in the hood”, this reach is unprecedented. Using this platform to showcase the documentary’s ‘Angels’ and their underrepresented community is undoubtedly a good thing. At the same time, by streaming on a porn site, Weinraub and her feature are entering fraught debates surrounding the morality of the sex industry. These industries have historically been inextricable from feminist issues and, in the case of Pornhub, the issues of working with what many believe to be a corrupt content provider. Choosing to stream directly onto a website that provides access to pornographic videos implies a tacit approval of pornography. Collaborating with Pornhub as a distributor suggests that Weinraub is supportive of their industry and at least to some degree its operation. The same unspoken acceptance of sex work is present in Shakedown itself, where Weinraub forgoes a conventional documentary structure of problematising the subjects, in the sense of making their stories and circumstances issues for the documentarian and viewers to resolve. Instead the documentary favours a structure more akin to a textural collage – a vivid photo album that draws viewers into its world and totally immerses them in the club and its angels. It is not a didactic experience. Weinraub’s interview style eschews judgmental, pointed questions in favour of the Angels’ candidly discussing their work. The result is such that when I watch the
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film, I feel like a friend to the Angels, rather than a detached onlooker seeking to resolve their ‘issues’.
Like any other form of work, sex work should receive the same guaranteed levels of safety and protection; the issues for women who are sex workers intersect with issues for women more broadly. Yet on a pornography film set or in a strip club, it seems from an outsider’s perspective that the risk of sexual abuse or assault is much higher. There are many cases that testify to this fear. In 2019 the producers of GirlsDoPorn, whose videos are uploaded across several pornography websites including Pornhub, were embroiled in a trafficking case. The court found that the producers had entrapped and defrauded women into making pornography through false advertising of modelling opportunities. When these women, all of whom were very young “college-type pretty girls” as specified in the adverts, arrived for the meeting, they were forced into filming a pornographic video. Pornhub continued to host these videos even as the court ruled that these were trafficking crimes.
However, whilst the feature resists moral judgement on sex work, it is an inevitability that others will soon impart theirs. The complex relationship between feminism and pornography goes back decades, kicking into high gear in the 1970s with the legalisation of porn across most of the Western world. In response, so-called radical feminists believed shutting down the industry was essential to fighting violence against women. Susan Brownmiller, the author of Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, wrote in 1975 that pornography transformed women into “adult toys […] dehumanised objects to be used, abused, broken and discarded.” It was radical feminists’ firm belief that pornography perpetuated the oppression of women. And while this certainly holds truth, this charge against pornography could be made against most erotic art. Sex is rendered similarly transactional in all parts of our commercial culture. So why is pornography singled out as the sole culprit of sexist oppression in many of these debates?
This is not an isolated case. Pornhub insist that they have robust procedures to stop illegal content being posted and defend the material uploaded to its site as content protected by freedom of speech. Yet only last year, a missing fifteen-year-old girl from Florida was found when over 50 videos surfaced on
The answer may be in the relatively unregulated nature of the sex industry.
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the platform depicting her being raped and abused (the rapist has since been identified and is now facing a felony charge). These instances have led to global protests; a petition accusing Pornhub of profiting from videos of rape and sexual abuse reached over 350,000 signatures in February 2020. The issue of exploitation remains a major issue in the current pornography industry. Yet this example of trafficking points towards a genre of porn that is of major interest to viewers: the vulnerability and degradation of women. The issue lies not so much in its commercial form as in its misogynistic content, whose spirit is reflected in the exploitative means by which it is produced. The GirlsDoPorn site marketed itself as having non-professional sex workers without safe working conditions and fair compensation, creating a situation which the women would not have chosen for themselves. The defendants were doing exactly what they told their viewers they were doing: tricking and humiliating women for men’s titillation. The same can be said for revenge porn videos or pornographic videos uploaded without consent. Producers like those from GirlsDoPorn, and by consequence distributers like Pornhub, essentially profit from the commercialisation of nonconsensual content. Shakedown, by significant contrast, is notable for its presentation of an environment where women’s sexuality is
celebrated. Never does it feel like the women are partaking in an exploitative job. The cutting between club performance and candid interviews, and the deliberate inclusion of all those involved in the club – such as security workers – lends to the documentary a sense of community. I felt there was a genuine friendship that translated on screen between all the women – and Weinraub too. It was brought to the fore during the film’s climax, when an undercover police sting operation resulted in Jazmyne’s topless arrest amid her dance routine. The other Angels rush to put on her clothes as she is handcuffed by police, naked. The documentary forces the audience to reckon with the humanity of these women, and how their work feeds into their day to day lives. It becomes harder to separate the women shown in clips of performance from the clips of interviews as we get to know them better. Naturally, there is illicit footage in the documentary, but this is always on the Angels’ own terms, and there is frequent reference to their jobs as strippers as being innately connected to their exploration of their own sexuality. Egypt, one of the star performers, speaks openly about her homophobic attitudes as a high-school cheerleader and only defining herself as lesbian once she became involved as a sex worker. The choice to stream Shakedown on its platform is likely to be a conscious
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rebranding opportunity for Pornhub. Dr Ann Olivarius, founder of McAllister Olivarius, a firm that specializes in non-consensual pornography, has pointed out that image-based abuse videos and coerced videos such as GirlsDoPorn are a significant part of Pornhub and other sites’ current business models. “They are massively popular with users and with site owners, and either free or incredibly cheap to produce. What, exactly, is the incentive for a site like Pornhub to remove one of their most popular products?” But the recent protests show that the backlash against pornography isn’t desisting either, so Pornhub must make a choice on what they want the future of their brand to be. The inclusion of Shakedown as part of this portfolio diversification is promising. In 1993, the queer anthropologist Gayle Rubin argued that ending sexism and misogynistic violence in commercial sexual culture could be addressed, not by getting women out of porn, but by getting them into it at an executive level. Shakedown is the first tentative step towards this new ideal. “If your mind records a pornographic image [. . .] that may stay with you the rest of your life,” warned state senator Todd Weiler, calling for Utah to declare pornography a “public health emergency”. Although the statement was exaggerated,
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his sentiment is shared by many. The concern is that by being desensitised to these violent and degrading portrayals of women, viewers of pornography acquire a skewed sense of what sex is. For one, they may form a different image of the appropriate way to treat women; they may see female pleasure from sexual acts as subordinate to those of her male counterpart. Likewise, the conventional image of a porn star sets an unrealistic expectation for women. Mainstream porn makes women hyper-visible, and the industry goes to great lengths to make the conditions of their labour invisible. Most female porn stars have to do their own hair and makeup without reimbursement, unlike in film and television. But it is for these exact reasons that more features like Shakedown should be available on these websites. Putting women in positions of executive control in the production of pornographic material and in sex work helps dismantle these misogynistic structures that have been inscribed into the industry for decades. The porn industry is not going anywhere soon. In its current state – discriminatory, abusive, and usually exploitative – it struggles to serve any feminist purposes. Yet by spotlighting narratives that challenge sexism, racism, and exploitation in intimate settings, work like Weinraub’s is paving the way for a long overdue shift in the porn industry.
Crawling Order forget about hands and knees – his chest is on the ground. he is flattening himself like sourdough naan as men in hats stand sentinel and impatient. this procedure takes all day he is heaving his bones – elbows bear the weight of stomach, ribcage, legs for the distance of one hundred and fifty yards. he has gone past the flogging station in the middle of the sunlit lane – he is a stick-insect with a stick-like body. his outstretched arms caress the earth on command. he watches his sweat form into pools on darkened soil. the standing men are unaccustomed to the hot weather. it has made their faces rosy-cheeked. he feels a growing intimacy with their bootsoles as they stare him in the face. he is joining the ranks of his fellow stick-men; they are the jewel in the Crown – the standers divide up between them a flag, of colours emerald, citrine, and quartz. in the ghost of Miss Sherwood’s bicycle tracks, he is left to choke on the dust. — 18 —
“Some Indians crawl face downwards in front of their gods. I wanted them to know that a British woman is as sacred as a Hindu god, and, therefore, they have to crawl in front of her, too.” Reginald Dyer
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My grandparents came from a movie-going age – he would call from the office and my grandmother would dress all her children in evening clothes, and wait. At the cinema, the world dissolved into light and sound, the salt of popcorn on your fingertips, and pink soda that fizzed up your nose, the colour they made sunglasses in in the eighties.
C i ne m a
Maybe they picked matching straws for their drinks, and that was how it was back then. My grandfather used to sing late in the evening with his technicolour drink in one hand, the red heads of Ship matchsticks lighting the tip of his cigarette. My grandmother always sat by his side, listening. I secretly picture them dancing, and my mother and uncle laughing as children do. Sometimes there is only a memory – my mother sings a song as she drinks her cola on the balcony.
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In a riverless city, the promise of water is enough. My mother and I pin our hopes to each monsoon, and evenings in June that stroll the circumference of our bayou-to-be. Starved of fish, the empty lake harbours cattle, gangs of dogs and cricket games — we see snatches of batsmen through the fence too far to catch anything but glances. On our walks, the lack of water loosens my lips: I ask how long, and who’s that, and what’s this cluster in the fence? My mother answers: maybe two more years and Mr. Kumar, his daughter was in your class and stops to examine the clump of web and air — almost a star, A spider’s nest, she says, nebula of hidden eggs at the bend in the path. In the chinks of chain links, a home has grown. Months later, they remain unchanged: the lakebed, the spider’s nest, and my mother: but for an inch of rain, but for new dust but for a haircut, and another half-trip around the sun.
ke b e d a The L — 21 —
I
spent traveling, learning Summer and Autumn of 2019, and living in the Muslim World. I conducted a research project in Pakistan and studied in Amman for a semester. I spent about a month in Palestine and also travelled to Oman. The time I spent in these places was formative personally and academically. Despite being Pakistani-born and growing up in a Pakistani household, my education and socialisation was founded on
Six
English books, English news, and occasional vacations in upper class (westernised) neighbourhoods in the ‘Orient’. The Muslim World was behind a veil of obscurity even for me, and the worst part of it is that I was too ignorant to realise it. These pictures are some highlights of discovery and rediscovery – people and places that introduced me to histories, legacies, stories, and more implicitly, philosophies born out of migration.
It is not less in desolation; but in extensiveness? That is known – In the desert I have such luxury that I do not remember the home. Mirza Ghalib
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“You know Captain Barbossa?” I was walking through downtown Karachi, in an old neighborhood called Saddar, and entered a random bookstore. I started talking to the owner, who said: “You all living in America don’t even know your own heroes. Our heroes have been made into villains by the West and that is all you know.” I asked him what he meant and in return he asked if I had ever seen Pirates of the Caribbean.
Confused, I said “yes of course.” “You know Captain Barbossa? You know who he is based off? There was a great captain of the Ottoman Empire. During Inquisition, when the Spanish were slaughtering Muslims and Jews, he rescued Muslim and Jewish refugees and transported them out of Spain into Muslim land. So he was nicknamed ‘Baba Aruj’. The Europeans called him Barbarossa. Then
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your Disney came. See what they turned him into!” I was very sceptical of his account, but at the book sale in front of Frere Hall, I found a book called The Sultan’s Admiral: The Life of Barbarossa. I skimmed through it and it more or less confirmed what the Saddar bookstore owner had told me. “You don’t even know your own heroes” is a line that still haunts me.
Hebron and Bethlehem Palestine
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Wadi Rum Jordan
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a brief history of the cane toad Y
esterday, I took out the kitchen compost. As I flung it into the bin, there, sitting on the rubbish, was a big fat cane toad. Revulsion flowed through me – and then, just as quickly, nostalgia. Is there a more Australian sight? Shocked, I reeled back: when did my mind transmute Australia’s most hated critter into a symbol of home? The cane toad is famed for warty skin, poison-secreting glands, a bony ridged brow – and for being detested by Australians. I cannot remember when I became aware of the existence of cane toads. Growing up in Queensland, it was something you took for granted: summers were too hot, we were always in drought, and cane toads were to be loathed and destroyed. National Geographic describes them as “much maligned”; the World Wildlife Fund puts it diplomatically, stating that the toad has “developed a bad reputation”; while the Australian Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 lists the growing cane toad population as a key threatening process. And yet, in this righteous hatred, is
there a little wart-shaped nugget of affection for the critter? For those unfamiliar with the story, the cane toad (rhinella marina) is the most famous and ecologically disastrous case-study of an “introduced species”. In 1935, the Australian Bureau of Sugar Experimental Stations brought 102 cane toads from Hawaii to Meringa Station near Cairns, Queensland. They bred around 24,000 toads and released them into north Queensland’s sugarcane fields to help control cane beetle infestations which were damaging crops. It was an abysmal failure. The cane toads were unable to jump high enough to reach the adult beetles (which lived on the upper stalks of the plant).
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Despite this failure, cane toads thrived, adapting to the Australian environment – and spreading at an astounding rate. As of 2019, the WWF estimates that there are over 200 million cane toads in Australia, spreading across the country and damaging the environment. Following the arrival of cane toads in a region, local wildlife populations decline: snakes, goannas, quolls, and many other native species are either pushed out of their territory (unable to compete for food and
toad problem epitomises the hubris and senselessness of seeking to solve problems by transporting living creatures to foreign places. The Queensland Museum concludes its cane toad database entry with elegiac incomprehension: ”The full impact of Cane Toads on our wildlife may never be fully appreciated.”
shelter with the rampant toad) or else they eat the toad and are subsequently poisoned by its milky-white bufotoxin. “Introduced species” have a long and troubled history in Australia. Cats, camels, deer, boar, and rabbits – in fact, most domestic species brought by white settlers – are considered pests for how they damage Australia’s native ecosystems. Under most rubrics, the settlers themselves would be considered introduced species – but, unsurprisingly, the makers of the taxonomy didn’t think to include themselves in it. In many ways, the cane
The cane toad was described by Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae. Under his taxonomy, the toad was called bufo marina, because Linneaus based his description on an illustration by the Dutch zoologist, Albertus Seba, who incorrectly believed the cane toad inhabited marine environments. Despite the widespread despair at ever being able to manage the toad spread, there are many energetic local organisations that aim to protect vulnerable ecosystems. The Kimberley Toad Busters of Western Australia proudly proclaim on their logo, ”If everyone was a toadbuster, the toads would be busted”. These
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groups are the definition of grassroot community action: many of the toadbuster groups revolve around planning ToadMusters in their local parks. The Northern Territory based ToadWatch elucidates: “ToadMusters are when people go out and collect toads at night. You can do this in your backyard or the local wetlands.” Advice includes bringing highpowered spotlights to the muster and maybe using a small net, ”but we just use our hands, gloves optional.” The accepted method for eradicating cane toads is to put them in a plastic bag in your freezer (this is recognised by experts as the most humane way to kill them). We all grew up wary of small freezer bags – in case they held a long-forgotten, cryo-euthanised cane toad. To this day, if my little cousins are feeling particularly virtuous (or adventurous), we end up with mysterious plastic-wrapped lumps in the freezer. To this end, cane toad catching has become something of an Aussie sport. Aimed at controlling the pest, Townsville’s annual Toad Day Out is a toadcatching extravaganza, with prizes for largest toad caught as well as highest number of toads caught. In 2015, participants of the event caught a collective 143.6kg (317lb) of toads. Townsville also encouraged cane toad golf in a tourism campaign, and was promptly reprimanded by the RSPCA for encouraging animal cruelty. To
find a use for all the culled cane toads from toad-busting exercises, entrepreneurs have turned the notorious amphibian into leather to make novelty purses. We see in gimmicks such as these the cultural undercurrent of joking around with cane toads. I remember a souvenir shop in Brisbane selling cane toad plush toys dressed in kilts, and there is an establishment in Port Douglas called The Iron Bar which is famous for hosting cane toad races at 5.45pm nearly every day (‘No jockeys, no whips, no steroids, no Dettol, no golf clubs, no bribery’ – proclaims the pub’s website). Clearly, there is something cheeky and mischievous about how cane toads are represented culturally. A striking example is The Cane Toad Times, an anti-authoritarian satire and humour magazine established in Brisbane in the late 1970s, and revived from 1983-1990. The introduction to the first edition ironically describes ”the much maligned, but fascinating amphibian” as having a ”myriad of uses [...] from organic cricket to live-action barbecues.” This edition also includes a satirical section on Elizabeth’s silver jubilee, which aims to revive ”all those flagging anti-monarchy sentiments with five pages of unadulterated royalty-roasting”. In case the flavour of The Cane Toad Times wasn’t clear, we can see from the advertisements that accompany the poems and political cartoons, as well as the ‘What’s On in Brisbane’
section, that the magazine oriented its social critiques around backyard banter and an emphasis on the local. There are advertisements for record shops, independent booksellers, pregnancy testing centres, and local radio stations. The cane toad mutates into an endearingly repulsive rallying symbol for some of our ‘Aussie battler’, underdog spirit: anti-monarchy, probirth control, supporting home grown culture, and celebrating the peculiarity of Queensland. Phenomena such as The Cane Toad Times iterate that the toad has come to have a sort of counter-culture, punk-adjacent roughness to it. Not confined to country narratives of small towns with ToadMusters, or as an ecological case study in universities – the cane toad’s spread as iconography has been almost as ubiquitous and unruly as the spread of the species itself. One of Australia’s highest grossing documentaries is Cane
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Toads: An Unnatural History (1988), a cult classic often used in school biology classes to tell the disastrous story of the toad spread. The film was nominated for a Best Short Film BAFTA, showing the grip that cane toad spoofery has on the Aussie psyche. Now, it was not the cultural phenomenon of An Unnatural History, but my sister and our neighbour made a home video about the Cane Toad Problem for a school project. They
used a toad-shaped ceramic garden ornament as a proxy toad, zooming in for close ups with our family’s chunky 00s digital camera. My sister and our neighbour put on school lab coats and acted as scientists trying to stop the toad spread – the film ended with the scientists being hopelessly outsmarted by the toad-statue (voice-acted by my mum, complete with movie-villain malevolent laugh and all). An Unnatural History (and my sister’s project) depict cane toads as the camp and compelling villain that you know should lose, but secretly root for anyway. Almost like Scar or Ursula, cane toads become the crowd favourite. For my generation, the most famous cane toad was probably Limpy, the protagonist of a series of children’s books by Morris Gleitzman. Limpy and his friends go on a series of hilarious and yucky adventures to try and reconcile cane toads and humans. Toad Rage (2000), Toad Heaven (2001), Toad Away (2003), and Toad Surprise (2008) were stalwart ‘books for boys’ because of their gross humour, wild adventures, and likeable toads. I remember seeing Gleitzman at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival when I was a kid. He spoke with boundless energy, like we were all in on the same silly joke. He read out revolting excerpts from his books with glee. In the car afterwards, I remember Mum saying disapprovingly: “Cane toads are a serious problem, he shouldn’t be writing books about
them as heroes!” But it has never been that simple. As Gleitzman says on his website: “I love the fact that the rangers in Kakadu once printed a picture of Limpy on their stubby [beer] holders even as they did battle with the same warty, ecologicallydisastrous visitors to the park who can cause the death of a magnificent five metre crocodile just by being swallowed.” That cane toads are beloved characters in a children’s series, the subject of a cult documentary, the punchline of quintessentially Australian joke events, as well as an incredibly serious ecological threat, points to the complexity that the warty creatures hold in our cultural psyche. But Australians have a long tradition of reclaiming the reviled and turning them into anti-heroes – just look at Ned Kelly’s quasi-mythic reputation. The anti-authoritarian, violent
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bushranger has long been held as an embodiment of Australia’s cultural mythos. Maybe it comes from a cultural obsession with underdog narratives, tall poppy syndrome, and unlikely heroes, but the cane toad has arisen as a complicated symbol, particularly in Queensland. Rebounding between an in-joke and an icon, it is hard sometimes to tell whether the cane toad is reviled or revered.
LEAF RACING M
y sister Lena was a mess when Funtown Playland let her go. Two months of playing Princess Thistle in their daytime production – and nothing. She came home in street clothes with her gaudy yellow dress crumpled to her chest. Back when Lena first moved into my spare room, I hoped Funtown Playland would be a golden opportunity. Being back in New Jersey will cheer you right up, I comforted her. She had a theatre degree from a tiny, expensive college and danced in the background of a Broadway production of Chicago once. But she wasn’t cut out for the city. Her agent suggested she try the amusement park world. It was the new frontier of community theater, he assured her. Funtown Playland offered her the role of Sleeping Beauty. She turned it down. Lena said she wouldn’t be a sell out; she would be a princess with agency. They wrote a show just for her. Princess Thistle. Lena was a killer Princess Thistle. She was given bouquets of roses and raving reviews in the local papers: The Daily Acorn even called the show feminist. The night Lena got fired she collapsed on my kitchen floor with one false eyelash clinging to her cheek. She wouldn’t do her dishes or make her bed or take out the trash. She left the same makeup on until it blobbed in blurry bruises. She slept until 1pm and cried when I woke her up. She cried at night when I asked her to turn off the television. I worried she would try something drastic.
Then one morning I was cooking eggs with peppers, and the smoke alarm wouldn’t stop beeping. It was only 7:30 am, but Lena exited her room. She was wearing the Princess Thistle dress, chiffon and glitter and silk roses everywhere. Her hair was a wiry cloud and her face was smudged, but she was wearing that puffy cupcake of a dress. “I think I’ll leave the house today.” She announced, walking out the front door. I clutched the spatula. When I got home from work at the social work centre and she wasn’t there, I was nervous. But, thank God, 10pm she clamored through the door, clutching a new tote bag and an open bottle of wine and a pile of men’s flannels. With cheeks flushed, words boisterous and bell sleeve fluttering she told me about her day; she’d gone to the salvation army and drank tea at the new place on Market Street. She said one of the flannels was for me, even though it didn’t look anything like the crisp blouses I usually wore. I told her I was proud of her, and I was. She started wearing the dress every day, and things started getting better. Lena in the dress was into holistic wellness; meditation and organic vegetables and exercise and veganism. Lena in the dress did her dishes after breakfast and made her bed with the top sheet. She took out the trash in her room. It was full of lip gloss tubes and bud
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light cans and tissues hard with spots of mucus. Sometimes at dinner, we’d have conversations. She wore the dress everywhere; to dinner parties, in the park, in the grocery store, to new job interviews. Her dirty white sneakers poked out the bottom. Little girls stopped her on the street to ask if she was a real princess (their mothers gripped their hands more tightly). Men asked if they could be her Prince Charming and she flirted (she was a lesbian). On the days I made her wash it, Lena crouched by the washing machine and locked me out of the laundry room. I wasn’t sure what to expect when Lena asked to have her new girlfriend over for dinner, but I cooked Lena’s favorite green beans and dusted and mopped and brought out the hand-painted dishes anyway. When the doorbell rang Lena hissed: “Can you get it? I don’t want to seem overeager.” I pursed my lips and headed for the door. Behind it was a woman dressed as Peanuts, the elephant mascot of Funtown Playland. The costume was complete with floppy ears and a trunk sloping lackadaisically from its head, made of a material that looked like leather but wasn’t leather. The woman peered out from two mesh eyeholes. She extended a clunky hand. The woman’s name was Gloria. During dinner, Gloria’s trunk kept falling into the vegan gravy and bits of food caught in the costume’s fur. I crossed my arms over my chest. They spent the dinner talking about Princess Thistle like it was real life. Gloria poured Lena
another glass of wine. While I cleared the table, I could hear their raucous discussion and sloppy kisses in the living room.
On a day with no tears, Lena and I had a picnic at the park. The crocuses were just splitting their infinitesimal purple buds. I brought sparkling cider and hummus in this wicker basket. Lena told me about her natural eye cream and I told her about the new hire at work who played his music too loud. Lena showed me a yoga breathing technique. We sat quietly. She gasped. Lena always makes a point like she was having some breathy epiphany. “Liz, do you remember that game we used to play, the leaf racing game?” I knew what she meant. You drop a leaf into the river and whoever’s leaf reaches a rock first is the winner. I was always the winner. The dress skimmed the grass as we searched for leaves, chiffon glinting in the low sun. Lena frowned. I knew that she couldn’t bend in the dress, but I let her look before I handed her a red maple leaf. We stood by the river and solemnly dropped our leaves. They sat in the creases of the water, drifting towards their destination.
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“Liz, Look!” Lena pointed downriver at a drifting wiry brown mass. It was dark with mud and soaking wet and its paws were flailing wildly. A black nose poked from the water. It was a puppy. Lena had already crawled into the river, the lacy bottom of her dress sunk into the muddy riverbank. She waded and stretched her arms; a dirty, overdressed Jesus waiting for the coming of the dog. She tried to plant her feet, but the water rushed against her, dragging her heavy petticoat back with its rolling weight. The dog was close. Lena unzipped the dress and pulled the sopping garment over her head. It drifted downriver until it dragged on a jagged rock. Lena clutched the puppy tight. When I grabbed her to hoist her from the water, her naked arms were all sinew and muscle in my hands and her bra gaped at her bony chest where it had not shrunk with her. The dog in her arms pressed into me, spraying muck up my sweatshirt sleeves. She held the dog tight with her goose pimped arms. Smelly wet muddy dog against smelly wet muddy woman. Her lips were already turning blue. “Here, just hold Sidney, I’ll go grab my dress and then we can go.” I couldn’t believe she’d already named him. She tried to push the tangled mess of dirt into me, but I kept my arms crossed at my chest. Lena sat down on the grass, cross legged, naked, dog in her lap. Sidney nuzzled her cheek. She glared up at me, eyes icy and detached. Clumps of silt sat in the creases of her skin and smelled like
rotten eggs; an indelible odor that a wash wouldn’t shake. She extended the dog towards me. I shook my head. We glared at each other hard, wishing to be different women. “Lena. Please.” I whispered. Lena was silent. She clutched Sidney to her breasts and walked towards the car. She had an elegant walk, when you could actually see it. She didn’t mind that she wore nothing but a bra and underwear in a public park. The dress floated listless in the river and most of it had already sunk, muddied to a pumpkin hue. At home, Lena washed Sidney in my bath, leaving a cake of mud around the drain. She didn’t offer to clean it. She brushed past me to take Sidney on a walk. The next day, I found a Funtown Playland poster and a gem-studded crown in the trash. The next week, she broke up with Gloria. I worried things would get bad again. But they didn’t. Lena started wearing leggings and sneakers so she could take Sidney on constant walks. She spent a fortune on CBD treats, gourmet dog food and dye-free toys. She let Sidney sleep in her bed and stand in the bathroom while she showered. A month later, she had a new girlfriend over. I brought out the nice dishes and opened the door to a woman with a havanese under her arm and two great danes on leather leashes. I held out my hand. The dogs barked wildly.
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what if
the smell in my room is not the brown skin samosa cold in the corner, grease leaking
through wooden floors, or the curry my mother left dead on the desk
next to the photos where sunlight from a distant summer is caught between
some fat boy’s teeth, laughing with a stranger’s family? no, it’s the mustard of sweat, the breath of silence salty with unspoken words, leftover from my name being called for the first time
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Tapioca Age
M
y grandfather was born in Malaya, a first-generation ethnic Chinese immigrant. Gong-gong’s temperament – quiet and minimalist – fits a man of his humble background, but his eagerness for adventure is exceptional. His extensive travels grant him a remarkably inquisitive palate that is rare among the older generation. Out of curiosity, I’ve once asked my father if there was anything Gong-gong didn’t like to eat. “Tapioca.” Gong-gong grew up amidst a complex series of events inaugurating Japan’s entry into World War II. Japan’s Asian campaigns are often overshadowed by the attack on Pearl Harbour in the eyes of a Western-centric world, but the plan was ambitious: establish a vast empire covering most of East and Southeast Asia. They would be treading into territory long dominated by European imperialist powers that had no place in the new regional order. On the 8 December 1941, Japanese troops landed on
the shores of Kota Bharu in northern Malaya. Thus began an advance down south, and the advance of a dark epoch. Japanese troops quashed British resistance as they speedily traversed through Malaya’s heartlands on bicycles. By 31 January 1942, the whole of Malaya had fallen to the Japanese. In under three months, they ended over a century of British rule. Though outnumbered, Japanese troops were mentally conditioned to die for the glory of their empire, and the British had their share of problems to deal with back home. Locals differed on what to make of this new arrival. Chinese immigrants, rightfully afraid, were only too aware of the entrenched Sino-Japanese antagonism. Gong-gong had heard tales of the beheadings and rape which China had suffered. To some radical Malays, Japan embodied a bold resistance to the West. Malaya had been under the yoke of British rule for over a century, fostering
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a nascent nationalism that Japan exploited in propaganda campaigns. ‘Asia for Asians’, they promised. Malaya was no stranger to the empty promises of a foreign power; betrayal and broken treaties had given the Portuguese, Dutch and British their nearly half-century-long presence in the peninsula. But the prospect of independence proved irresistible, luring nationalists to fight alongside their supposed liberators. Malaya’s heterogeneous society of Malays, Chinese, and Indians would have different experiences of the occupation due to Japan’s animosity towards the Chinese. The Sook Ching, a cleansing campaign to eliminate perceived threats, was a manifestation of this antipathy. One by one, ethnic Chinese were screened for antiJapanese elements by either officers or hooded informers. Massacres were seldom officially reported, but death estimates range in the tens of thousands.
The mass killing eventually stopped. Japan had an empire to build and moved to prioritise the cultural integration of their subjects. Gong-gong survived, and considered himself lucky for it. The Japanese occupation brought about a new hell for Malaya, transforming daily life as the Japanese introduced measures to cement their pervasive influence on Malayan society, with education treated as a crucial avenue in building a loyal generation. Schools were taught in Japanese and followed a Japanese curriculum. Rice, so integral to the local diet, was strictly rationed. The bulk went
to feed the Imperial Army, with the local population fed on scraps. Students were rewarded for undertaking a Japanese education with additional food supplies, but most locals practiced self-sufficiency by planting easy crops like tapioca and sweet potatoes in order to avoid starvation. Gong-gong didn’t go to school. After a youth spent living off tapioca, it’s not surprising that he now can’t stomach it. Japanese military police, the Kempeitai, oversaw the enforcement of law and order. During their frequent house
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visits, Gong-gong and his family would hide in bushes to escape the regular beatings and stabbings. The Kempeitai routinely inflicted barbaric torture on civilians in order to extract information on anti-Japanese activity. A particularly cruel example, ‘Tokyo wine’ involved water being pumped into a subject’s mouth. Interrogators would then stomp on the subject’s bloated abdomen, forcing the water out through their orifices. Meanwhile, young women were forcibly taken from their communities to serve as sex slaves, euphemised to this day
as ‘comfort women’. They were confined to their own rooms and faced rape up to 60 times a day. Most did not survive their time, and those who did endured severe sexual trauma. Malaya’s experience of the Japanese occupation is by no means an anomaly. Atrocities defined the abominable period of history, shared across nations that fell under Japanese rule. The true extent of Japan’s impact, in East and Southeast Asia, deserves attention for the permanent mark left on the lives of people who lived through it. Mainstream history in Western countries has not afforded Japan’s war crimes a similar amount of attention as it has to Nazi Germany’s, easing the pressure on Japan to examine its past. Malaya’s unconventional recovery from these imperial wounds also failed to involve the retrospection thought essential for reconciliation. Instead of holding on to grievances of events fresh in their memory, newly independent Malaysia moved on with remarkable speed. Poor, vulnerable, but finally free, a profound sense of excitement for selfdetermination and prosperity took precedence over demands for justice. Japan, thriving in its post-war economic miracle, presented an opportunity for a valuable source of investment into Malaysia’s industrialising economy.
Japanese capital pouring in, helping stimulate the country’s subsequent economic development. The now familiar signs of Japanese influence slowly made their way into Malaysia’s culture. Malaysians showed a liking for these innovations and the nation which developed them. Politicians consciously cultivated good relations to continue driving growth, as when Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed endorsed a LookEast policy calling for the emulation of the Japanese work ethic and management style. These official sanctions by the government further solidified an admiration of Japan among Malaysians. No longer were they murderers and rapists. Japan is now viewed as an ally, a contributor to the nation’s higher standards of living, and a society of extraordinarily civilised people. Flipping through the pages of the history textbook as a young Malaysian, an undeniable tension occupied my mind. It is hard to reconcile our history with the current reverence we have for Japan. Anger somehow felt trivial, directed towards horrific events that were quite detached from the present. I didn’t live through the occupation. I live without fear of persecution, privileged enough to enjoy the many comforts Japanese capital has brought to my country. Even Gong-gong likes Japanese things as much as anyone else.
The coming decades saw
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To those who lived through the 1940s, forgiveness wasn’t a choice. The state had already done it on behalf of them, effectively shutting off hopes of reconciliation. They contented themselves with enjoying the material benefits of economic development. The older generation don’t hold explicit grievances towards the Japanese and rarely talk about their experiences during the occupation. It’s hard to tell whether the wounds have healed. Perhaps the decades seeing Japan in a positive light made up for the brief period of hell. Asian culture revolves around a ‘show, don’t tell’ principle. Outright expressions of remorse are hard to come by, and apologies are often presented in a material form instead. To the older generation who are most familiar with these norms, maybe Japan’s help in lifting the nation’s standard of living symbolises a genuine apology in its own right. Perhaps, true to their emotionally closed off selves, they’ve managed to bury those ill feelings – still very much alive – and got themselves in line with a society that cannot see the Japanese the way they do. Malaysia’s experience in moving on from the occupation was set amidst a major imbalance of power between the two
nations. The government chose to swallow their pride and reap the economic benefits of strong relations with their former tyrants. The power imbalances a nation faces appear to affect how strained relations are repaired post-conflict. Japan got off easy because of what they could offer. They weren’t forced to confront their past in a way conventionally expected of perpetrators of war crimes. Their investments didn’t reflect pure remorse, but allowed them to extensively reach a booming market as a bonus. In comparison, survivors of the occupation had to suppress their intense anger and come to terms with the fact that the iniquities they faced might never be resolved. For a while, South Korean society looked to have moved on from decades of Japanese imperialism in exchange for economic support. However, long-suppressed animosity seems to have recently manifested after South Korea achieved its own growth miracle. No longer restrained by an unfavourable position, young South Koreans are taking on the grievances of those subjected to Japan’s atrocities. It feels wrong to attribute the status quo to Japan’s efforts. Japanese aid was valuable, but the true
burden of moving on was borne by the Malaysians who lived through the 1940s. They didn’t deserve that emotional labour, but took it on anyway. Is moving on comparable to a reconciliation between the two countries? Maybe Malaysia has been lying to itself and will one day attain a renewed consciousness of history as South Korea has. This possibility of a resurgence in anti-Japanese sentiment seems unlikely. Though Malaysia is now less dependent on Japan, there is little to be gained from revisiting old wounds. Moving on from the past traumas inflicted by Japan and Britain allowed Malaysia to achieve a sense of mutual respect with its old oppressors, affirming for people that the colonial subjugation of the past will not be repeated. However, Malaysia’s progress in looking past its history was the result of its own effort. Our experiences cannot absolve Japan’s responsibility to ultimately confront its complicated history.
FÜSUN
Losing
I
can almost never recall my dreams. But last night I dreamt of cycling the US President towards Somerset House. He wanted to see London, and I wanted to make him feel at home. So, I put some cushions in the back of my
rickshaw and rode him to the bank of the Thames. Late at night, we meandered through barely lit streets – me pedalling and panting, him in his huge, beautiful greatcoat, glaring out at the people on the pavements from under the rickety canopy. No one believed it could really be him.
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On the way to Somerset House, we got distracted and went in search of a late-night drink. I desperately wanted to please him, but there was only one bar open so late at night. What was worse, the only thing they served were tiny bottles of Leffe Brune, a Belgian beer. Of course, this simply would not
do, so I remonstrated with the barman – shouted at him a little and made to pour one of the tiny bottles of Leffe Brune into a glass to show him just how tiny and brown his portions were. But instead of pouring the Leffe Brune into the glass, I poured the brown beer all over my forearms. I returned to the place where I had left the US President to find him eyeballing the other guests in the late-night bar. I had so desperately wanted to please him with a large portion of English beer, but I came back empty-handed. He didn’t care, though, and abruptly asked me to spend tomorrow night with him. whether *I * I wasn’t sure * wanted that. He had scarcely said a word all night and he was well-known for his passing fancies. Besides, didn’t he have a lot on? Was I really interesting enough to him? And yet, I also remember contemplating – as much as you can contemplate in a dream – how special it might feel to be with the US President, even just for one night. It had been so very hard cycling him all the
way towards Somerset House, and perhaps he had realised just how Herculean an effort I had made to please him. Perhaps he was impressed. I certainly felt admired.
something on Twitter about a famous Turkish author called Orhan Pamuk.
What irritated me even more were the hundreds of flies in my room. I had carelessly left a pot of taramasalata open on my desk. Through the midday heat, it had slowly melted to become a kind of colloid paste, and now the flies – some large, some small – were drowning in pink. I looked on from my bed in disgust.
My mother read his book to me when I was nine or ten. It was a love story set in Istanbul, where a wealthy, married man falls in love with a shop girl called Füsun. He leaves his marriage and his family behind. But the man soon realises that he will never be with her. He will never be happier than when Füsun and himself made love for the first and only time in 1975. Now, the only things the man can find which bring him close to this fleeting happiness are Füsun and her family’s belongings. He spends three decades gathering these from their estranged home. Each evening he goes across the moody Bosphorus to smuggle the relics in between mouthfuls of dolma, to make his own shrine to the image of a past Füsun, of a previous life. What arises is a museum – Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence.
Sulking over the flies and lost kip, I instinctively reached for my phone. Thirteen days earlier, an old acquaintance had posted
My mother took an eternity to read the thick book to me. Each night for almost half a year, Füsun filled my mind as
*
*
*
We never got to Somerset House. Instead, I woke up at 12.37am with ASMR still hissing out of my earbuds. These had flopped out of my ears as I pedalled in my dream. I had only slept for an hour, which irritated me because I was trying to break my recent sleep pattern of restless nights.
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I drifted in and out of consciousness. Füsun was never really there, always scarcely out of reach as I skimmed just above a choppy sleep. I never got to see her face. The closest I came to Füsun was in 2016, when I was able to go to Somerset House to see her belongings. The Museum of Innocence had come to London from Füsun’s family house in Istanbul, which the man bought with his savings to house the museum. You can imagine how long I stood staring at her things. I wanted to inhale them – her silent clocks, her dusty medication, her hairbrushes. *
*
*
A few years later, by some miracle, I found myself at a football match with Orhan Pamuk’s brother, Şevket Pamuk. We ate hotdogs and laughed a lot. Şevket – though nearing 70 at the time – was as boisterous a football fan as any. He spent the entire 90 minutes hurling criticism at the players of both teams, neither of which he
supported. He explained his lippiness as a product of his childhood amidst the ritual violence of the fearsome Fenerbahçe-Beşiktaş-Galatasaray love rivalry. His demeanour shocked me. I had imagined Şevket might be a little more like I had imagined his brother Orhan to be – someone who had a way with words and wrote so thoughtfully about the melancholy of love and time. When Arsenal scored, Şevket leapt out of his seat. Crazy-eyed, he turned to me and gave me a tremendous bear-hug. This was the London he came to see, he told me, as the stadium roared and beer flew through the air. When he sat back down, Şevket’s folding seat trapped my little finger and broke it. I squealed in pain, but thankfully Şevket did not notice, so loud was the din in the stands. I didn’t want him to know – I desperately wanted to impress him and make him feel at home in London. My hand hung limp by my side for the rest of the football match. Fortunately, I had lost all feeling in my finger.
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Catherine O
ne of the women I worked for when I first moved here was also named Catherine. She lived in one of those pretty Georgian terraced houses in an expensive suburban fold of the city that I never usually found cause to visit. The front entrance to the house was through a narrow feature door that for several months trapped a lilac thread in its hinge from the blouse sleeve of Annie, the Tuesday assistant nurse. It was a cold place, but still I grew fond of it. The other Catherine was kept like a geriatric Rapunzel, bedbound in the attic room at the very top of the house; four and a half flights. This climb I made twice each weekday and every other Saturday. Once a week I was trailed in my footsteps by Annie’s lurching stride, with each one a ‘huh’ noise like the tail-end of a question: another? I imagined it was hard for her to breathe properly because most of the air that it takes went into inflating those breasts which were like party balloons under her uniform button-up. Catherine’s room used to be a library. Arched windows in the far wall leaked a blue-grey dishwater light over the sparse dark wood furniture. In the daytime the low-vaulted ceiling and bookshelves held diamonds of that shivering wet colour, like the reflections on the surface of an indoor swimming pool when you are underwater and looking up.
age bald and wrinkled like an infant – such is the supreme irony of living, I am told. Her skin was an unruly pink all over, just like the pickled things in jars at the Middle Eastern grocery store. Her image was a little slack; the likeness of a close friend drawn fondly but inexpertly from memory. A bleached photograph at the bedside showed her as a grinning young woman – too many teeth and the same long, fine hair blown soft about a handsome face. The type of pretty girl that you want to make laugh. She liked to have her hair brushed each time I came over – hard, with a heavy gold paddle brush. On special occasions I would braid it with a ribbon like the tail of a prize pony. We found many special occasions between us – full moons and half-birthdays, religious holidays we knew only by their names under the date on the weekly flip calendar. While I fussed with my brushing or sticking the bright blue incontinence pads to the crisp ironed sheets, she would talk to me. She had few other people to really talk to. The only other person living in the house was the youngest of her adult sons. Charlie was late into his 50s and hadn’t yet graduated to ‘Charles’. The nurses and I
The first time that I took back her paisley patterned blanket to bathe her, I was shocked by the white tufts of pubic hair that grew out of her like desert grass. It had never occurred to me that that might happen to you. I later learned that it often falls out completely. Eventually you come to your grand old
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regarded him between us as an asshole of the highest degree. Charlie brought with him for company a string of thirty-something-year-old girlfriends with tasteful gel manicures and PA jobs in the city, each new shampoo bottle lasting only a few weeks or months on the bathroom shelf until the inevitable door-slamming flurry of khaki trench coats and expensive acid-wash jeans marked the changing tide. And then there were two dozy slat-eyed Persian housecats: Elvis and Prissy, bought for company by a well-meaning relative as a gift to Catherine, who diligently took a daily pill for her allergies. The cats she loved dearly and they never left her bedroom. The two of us talked the way that people talk in arthouse movies – little beats between each question and answer. She would stroke one of the cats over her chest and ask me things like if I had a favourite song (I didn’t), or a boyfriend (I didn’t) or hunch about how I would die (yes, I had always harboured a tender fear of deep water). She told me that she had always believed she would be savaged by animals; this was why she had never been to the zoo. I said that she was lucky to have escaped her fate and she said: “maybe, but now I think I would’ve liked to see a penguin.” We left it like that. She had a maddening way of just ending conversations
where she chose. This was an infectious habit and so it happened that our conversations stopped and started like passing sailboats on a still lake. One afternoon I brought up a letter addressed to her, a large cream envelope that I tripped over on the threshold so that it bore the print of my plimsoled foot across the front. It was a little different from the mail I usually read aloud to her; postcards from tropical destinations from her other children – glib tales from sunny all-inclusive resorts in Aruba that she received with the appropriate smiles and eye rolls. This new script was a terribly romantic letter from a high school boyfriend who had discovered that she was still alive and wanted to reach out before he died, which would be soon. My reading made her deep eyes glitter over. Prissy, whose turn it was lying over her breast, found her grey marabou tail constricted in a tight fist. This was probably the first time that the fact of her dying had really occurred to me and it felt something like waking up with concussion. It made my stomach ache to know that she wouldn’t be able to leave this house or this room, where her teeth floated in a glass beside her bed like a poisoned goldfish, until she was cold dead. I thought often of her little sick-bird body, of her insides slowly puddling to mush in there. If I lifted her to her feet, I was sure her flesh would just slide off the pit of her, like the soft part of a rotten fruit. I cried stinging crocodile tears for the widearmed running TV-soap airport reunion that I wanted for her and the dying ex-boyfriend from the
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if I liked. I arrived to a room full of people whose names I only knew from the postcards, all with the same sloped nose. The smell of a new plug-in air freshener perfumed the funeral small-talk - it was her time to go and what a shame that Sarah had to cut her holiday short.
letter. I knew that she would have taken a cashmere slipper to my head if she had had the strength; she hated crying, and it didn’t do to be so pathetically romantic. We were in silence for some time after I finished reading and sobbing – it was my last call of the day and I had nothing much to go home for. Life took place in those quick hours somewhere between the bed and my little reading chair and the view out of those glass arches – the dull-bricked backs of other people’s houses; wives of lawyers suntanning pale breasts in their backyards, and teenagers throwing loud, late parties, and starting ill-fated rock bands while their parents are out of town. The fat-fingered bloom of magnolia trees hung sweet over garden fences; leaf blowers and games of hopscotch turned to far away and simultaneous colliding stars. Then it was back to evening and our two bodies in a strange room, quiet enough but for the occasional passing car far down on the street and the two cats purring fat and constant at her lap.
After I had eaten enough cold appetisers to want to leave, Charlie stood up and grabbed me by the arm. He said that he had never liked cats and would much rather I take them home with me, if I wanted, because they preferred me anyway and he knew I lived alone. A teary, mute girlfriend nodded toward the kitchen, where I saw two stacked cat crates and a plastic shopping bag full of collected animal paraphernalia propping open the door. I cried all the way home in the taxi with them beside me on the car seat. That night I dreamt of being mauled by a tiger. When I woke to small rough tongues between my toes, I took both cats in my arms and brought them to the garden, where I intended to set them free. The animals tripped into their brave new world like new born lambs before the rising sun called their soft bodies sweetly to the warming dirt. Lying supine in the first yellow light of the morning, Elvis rolled his dark belly skyward and thought, I imagine, something about how good it is to be alive.
“For me it’s like this all of the time.” You learn to feel things from a distance. I wanted so badly to plan an escape for her. In the last few days of Catherine’s sickness, the family asked that I didn’t make my visits anymore and gave me the week’s pay in advance. I waited, thinking of her, and all of the universe carrying on around her in its usual way, and how much she would hate the fuss. When the phone call came it told me that I could come to the house after the memorial service,
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‘Through the Eye of a Needle’ John Mills 1989
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Chung Kiu Kwok. Ivana Cholakova. Katie Harkins. Gerda Krivaite. Daisy Lynch. Natalie Perman. Barney Pite. Alexander Haveron-Jones. Jules Desai. Sasha LaCômbe. Holly Anderson. Michela Gerardin. Wei Kai Ng. Eloise Fabre. Rita Kimijima-Dennemeyer. Lucy Thynne. Josh Booth. Eira Murphy. Lottie Page. Marnie Shutter. Mukahang Limbu. Sofia Aguilar. Eleanor Cousins Brown. Harry Lauchlan. Elanor Ludlam. Ruth Thrush. Noel Low. Amira Kazi. Nat Cheung. Kalli Dockrill. Humzah Khan. Claudia Warren. Charlotte Banks. Amber Syed. Noorie Abbas. Gee Ren Chee. Theo Davies. Margot Harvey. Jaimini Patel. Beatrice Barr. Isla Chaplin. Isabella Colletta. Sasha Mills. Lucy Zhang. Pete Miller. Maya Thapa. Emma Rath. Charlotte Copeman. Rachel McNaghten. Emma Hewlett. Dalveen Sandhu. Sophie Edwards. Emmaleigh Eaves. Asma Waheed. Krisztina Jedlovszky.
Back cover Liv Fugger
of
Out
Bounds
Trinity 2020