DISRUPTION | The Isis HT19

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2 019 f e e l s d i f f e r e n t . M a y b e w e h a ve r e a c h e d a t i p p i n g p o i n t . S t r u c t u r a l p ow e r i s u n r a ve l l i n g a n d t h o s e w h o h o l d i t a r e c o m i n g u n d e r i n c r e a s e d s c r u t i n y. Eve n t h o u g h t h e p r eva i l i n g m o o d r e m a i n s p a r a n o i d a n d d i s c o n t e n t , i t i s b e g i n n i n g t o m a n i f e s t a s a n g e r a n d m ove m e n t . We s a w t h i s o u t s i d e t h e H o m e O f f i c e , i n t h e c a n d y f l o s s s e a o f b r i g h t p i n k h a t s a t t h e d e m o n s t r a t i o n s fo r s o l i d a r i t y w i t h t h e S t a n s t e d 15 . We h e a r d i t i n t h e d e m a n d s o f s c h o o l c h i l d r e n , w h o d i t c h e d l e s s o n s t o p r ot e s t c l i m a t e c h a n g e . T h e i r c o l l e c t i ve vo i c e e c h o i n g t h r o u g h We s t g a t e s h o p p i n g c e n t r e a n d r i s i n g i n t o t h e c r i s p w i n t e r s k y.

I t s e e m s l i ke a l l t h e p i e c e s a r e , a t l o n g l a s t , c o m i n g t o g e t h e r. A m o r e concrete picture of what we face is beginning to cr ystallise. As the d ot s s l ow l y c o n n e c t , t h e w h o l e r ot t e n s y s t e m i s c o m i n g i n t o fo c u s .

There are many things that seem incomprehensible to the human mind. Imminent e n v i r o n m e n t a l c o l l a p s e i s o n e o f t h e m . B u t t h i s c a n n ot b e s e e n a s a s i n g u l a r i s s u e o f ‘c l i m a t e c h a n g e .’ I t b l e e d s i n t o w i d e r s o c i e t a l i m p l i c a t i o n s , a n d r e s t s on a far more insidious bedrock than the science we use to understand it.

U n r e g u l a t e d c a p i t a l i s m i s , fo r t h e m o s t p a r t , t o b l a m e . I t s l a t e s t m a n i f e s t a t i o n – N e o l i b e r a l i s m – h a s o n l y a c c e n t u a t e d t h a t . D e s p i t e a s l i g h t s h i f t t ow a r d s e t h i c a l m a r ke t i n g , t h e r e l e n t l e s s fo c u s o n p r o f i t m e a n s t h a t c o r p o r a t e f i r m s c a n n ot r e g u l a t e t h e i r ow n c a r b o n fo ot p r i n t . A s a r e s u l t , t h e s t r u c t u r a l l y d i s a d va n t a g e d a r e n o l o n g e r f a c t o r e d i n t o o u r p l a n s fo r t h e f u t u r e . O u r e n v i r o n m e n t i s s t i l l p r e d i c a t e d o n t h e a xe s o f i m p e r i a l i s m , w h o s e fo ot p r i n t s a r e visible from the subtle violence of gentrification, to the segregation of minorities a l l ove r t h e wo r l d . I t i s l i t t l e wo n d e r t h a t t h e g r ow t h o f t e c h n o l o g y h a s o n l y wo r ke d t o c e m e n t t h e s e d i v i s i o n s . I t b ot h a u g m e n t s t h e h i s t o r i c p r e j u d i c e s t h a t o b s t r u c t m e a n i n g f u l p r o g r e s s , a n d p e r p e t u a t e s a n a vo i d a n c e o f g u i l t .

I t ’s e a s y, t h e r e fo r e , t o b e a n g r y. I t ’s a l s o e a s y t o c o l l e c t a n d s h o u t . W h a t f e e l s h a r d i s t o e n a c t c h a n g e , m o s t l y b e c a u s e n o o n e r e a l l y k n ow s h ow. T h e s y s t e m w e a r e t r y i n g t o f i g h t w a s b u i l t t o s t o p u s f r o m d o i n g s o, a n d a s a r e s u l t i t i s o f t e n m o r e c o n ve n i e n t t o b l a m e e a c h ot h e r i n s t e a d . T h i s b l a m e n a t u r a l l y p e r c o l a t e s d ow n , u n t i l t h o s e w h o h a ve t h e l e a s t p ow e r a r e a p p o r t i o n e d t h e m o s t a c c o u n t a b i l i t y. T h e s e r v i c e s t h a t a r e ‘ b u i l t ’ t o s u p p o r t t h e m a r e f l i m s y. T h e r e a s o n s fo r t h e i r s t r u g g l e are dismissed. And all the while, the big corporations are profiting, making the most o f o u r d e p l e t i n g r e s o u r c e s a s w e e d g e eve r c l o s e r t o a n a l m o s t d y s t o p i a n r e a l i t y.

A n d s o, i t a l l s t a r t s t o c o m e t o g e t h e r. T h e q u e s t i o n i s , w h a t d o w e d o? We c a n o r g a n i s e , a c t a n d d i s s e n t . We c a n r e a d , w r i t e a n d p r o d u c e . I t s e e m s e n e r g y i s n ot l a c k i n g , b u t t h i s m e a n s t h e r i s k o f b u r n o u t i s a l w a y s p r e s e n t . T h r o u g h o u t o u r e f fo r t s t o s p a r k n e c e s s a r y c o n ve r s a t i o n s t h i s t e r m , w e’ ve r e a l i s e d h ow i m p o r t a n t i t i s t o l e t g o. We n e e d t o l a u g h , s m i l e a n d b r e a t h e , b e c a u s e p a r t o f t h e s y s t e m i c t r a p i s i n f e e l i n g t r a p p e d . T h i s m a g a z i n e i s p a c ke d w i t h u r g e n t a n d a n a l y t i c a l c o n t e n t , b u t w e’ ve a l s o f i l l e d i t w i t h l i t t l e p o c ke t s o f j oy. I n t i m e s o f s u c h u n c e r t a i n t y a n d d r a s t i c c h a n g e , w e m u s t a l w a y s r e t a i n w h a t m a ke s u s h u m a n . E m p a t h y c o n n e c t s u s f a r q u i c ke r t h a n s t r u c t u r e s eve r c o u l d ; R a t i o n a l i t y a s a w a y t o ‘ u n d e r s t a n d ’ i s n ot f l a w l e s s , n o r i s i t a l w a y s a p p r o p r i a t e . I t c a n i n s t e a d c e m e n t t h e b o u n d a r i e s t h a t ke e p u s d i v i d e d . T h e b u r s t s o f a f f e c t i o n i n t h i s e d i t i o n h o p e f u l l y r e m i n d yo u t h a t , h ow eve r s t r o n g t h e d i v i s i o n s b e t w e e n u s , t h ey a r e i n h e r e n t l y c o n s t r u c t s .

T h ey a r e , t o a n ex t e n t , f i c t i o n a l a n d i m p l e m e n t e d . T h e i r m a t e r i a l i t y c a n b e f i c t i o n a l i s e d . A n d s o, i n b e t w e e n a l l t h e i n s t a b i l i t y a n d t h e i n j u s t i c e a n d t h e c r i e s fo r r e c o g n i t i o n , yo u s h o u l d j u s t a b o u t b e a b l e t o t r a c e a m o r e i n t r i n s i c a l l y h u m a n ex p r e s s i o n o f v u l n e r a b i l i t y, r e s i s t a n c e a n d s o l i d a r i t y. We t h i n k t h a t w e a v i n g t h e s e t wo t h r e a d s i n t o a s i n g l e t a p e s t r y i s t h e m o s t d i s r u p t i ve t h i n g w e c o u l d h a ve d o n e .

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Gratitude I was Lord of a country no one cared for.

The Queen fucked men for money, and the King dug graves. At luncheon, he played Death with his favourite courtiers, kissing them once on the forehead and then declaring them knaves - he buried them living. Nobody cared. A good King kills one man for each that he saves, and besides, they were not our men.

They say this earth remembers.

They say the soil cries out in protest, and that this is why it is fallow. For years, we ate dirt for dinner, dirt for afters, dirt for five dirt cheap drunken courses, whilst the people fled like rats from disaster - they left us with curses. I hardly noticed. The people may go from the Land That Won't Grow - a Lord is a Lord whether he has subjects or no, and besides, I was not the sort of man to give up a castle.

(When he buried me I swallowed my dry earth laughing, laughing, and grateful.)

inverno e inferno In an indigenous community in Northern Brazil, I sat with a group of community leaders in a wooden-clad room. I was taking part in a project with Vaga Lume (‘firefly’ in Portuguese), an organisation that works to improve education in roughly a hundred communities in the Brazilian Amazon. In the community meeting room, a fan mounted in the corner was whirring gently, stirring up the heavy air.

The lime-green paint on the walls had flaked over time due to the perpetual heat and humidity. It was November, and summer temperatures were beginning to take effect. Fanning themselves with sheets of paper, the community members discussed the politics of Brazil. Just last week, a new president had been elected in Brasilia, the country’s capital, nearly a thousand miles away from their home. President Bolsonaro, at the time the president-elect, left no ambiguities in his campaign that the protection of the rainforest, and the rights of the indigenous communities within it, were nothing but a barrier to Brazil's economic rise: "where there is indigenous land, there is wealth underneath it."

I sat there listening as they talked about what would happen to the land and environment on which their lives depend. It seemed inconceivable that events in Brazil’s southeast, the most urban and industrialised region, could filter through into the lives of people

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like these: inhabitants of riverside communities scattered throughout the Brazilian Amazon.

The Amazon is a place where cultures and narratives are created and destroyed in equal proportion.

It is a place that has been morphed, manipulated, and made home by people from almost everywhere in the world. As such, it forms part of the puzzle of our own past, the construction of our nations, and the formation of the world as it is today. Yet over hundreds of years, little has changed about the way we view the people of the Amazon. A palatable image is generated by the Western media to encapsulate them, reducing them to a trope: naked tribesmen, hidden behind green foliage, armed with spears and blow pipes, gazing curiously at the sight of westerners. Above all, these people are regarded as distant, isolated, and ‘primitive.’ It is an image that lingers as a romanticised remnant of European colonisation, a fetishised presentation of ‘New World’ cultures as objects of intrigue, coffee-table ornaments, cabinet-fillers in the British Museum.

Many members of this village community of Atodi in the North Brazilian state of Pará are indeed ancestors of indigenous people as the Western media understands them. Some carry their babies on their backs in bags made of cloth. Some even continue to speak languages such as Tupi that existed before the introduction of Portuguese. So the question remains: what lies behind this romanticised narrative? What about the people who can be contacted?

And what is it about them that makes their story so much harder to find? To untangle the mystery of the Amazon and challenge the misconceptions surrounding it, we must look into the lives of the people who live there.

Between wildlife documentaries and televised ‘explorations', a typical Western narrative is that the Amazon is, and always has been, a hostile environment for humans. Often exoticised as an ‘untouched eden’, it is implied that whatever human life exists there must be so sparse, so brutal, that it is has not been touched by the reaches of meaningful global expansion. However, evidence found in the last decade reveals that the Amazon has a long history of human settlement. In contrast to famous, relatively intact Amerindian settlements like Machu Picchu, pre-sixteenth century Amazonian communities lacked long-lasting building materials like stone, so the remnants of their societies have been difficult to trace. However, the complexity of these settlements is now coming to light. Thanks to thousands of years of experimentation, Amazonians developed sustainable farming techniques that both suited their needs and maintained the biodiversity of the forest. The cause for their decline, more so than the genocides committed by Spanish and Portuguese colonisers, was the introduction of European diseases such as smallpox, typhus and influenza, against which the native populations had neither immunity nor protection. Immediately prior to European contact in the early 1490s, North and South America are likely to have supported between 90 and 112 million people, a figure greater than the estimated population of Europe in the same period. In the first hundred years of European exploration of the Americas, the indigenous populations was devastated: reduced by ninety percent.

And so the societies of the Amazon Basin were almost wiped out. With them went their art, music, creativity, farming systems, and societal structures, along with almost everything else that constituted their existence. In essence, a significant piece of human history has been lost. Only now is Western society beginning to realise this.

Today, huge cargo ships, sent by American and

Chinese companies, slug their way up and down the Amazon’s main waterways. They contribute substantially to the economy of the entire Amazon region, transporting minerals and other raw materials to far corners of the world. Yet their engines pollute the rivers in which local communities fish. A complacent fisherman, having moored up in a place exposed to the awesome wake of an in-ternational trade ship, can have his boat capsized by the wave as it meets the shore. Near the town of Oriximiná, one village has given up fishing altogether: propped up on stilts to protect against the fluctuations of the river, its houses have almost all been converted to brothels.

Like many towns near major ports, the village attracts passing trade from the sailors of these cargo ships. The money at stake from this is simply too much to refuse.

Priscila Fonseca, coordinator of the Network Program at Vaga Lume, and a woman who has dedicated much of her adult life to the communities of the Amazon, describes the situation today: “there is a lot of international influence in the deforestation and in the huge plantations and cattle ranches in the Amazon. It is a huge shame because they are losing their own land, losing the forest, and losing their quality of life. This is not something new. It is the accumulation of many years of exploitation of the land and the local people.”

Historically, government involvement in the Amazon has been questionable. By and large, the relationship between politicians in Brasilia and the people of the Amazon is characterised by neglect. Lack of investment in public services, principally in education, has left the Amazon with a Human Development Index score drastically behind the rest of Brazil.

The head teacher in the community of Atodi understands the importance of an educated population: “it is essential not to let these children be imprisoned by their lack of knowledge, because this is what makes our population a passive population, a population that does not understand the complexity of the world." In other instances in history, the government has been more instrumental in pushing these communities even further behind. The military dictatorship in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, having discovered gold in Roraima, a small state bordering Venezuela, encouraged the influx of Brazilians from outside the Amazon to expand mining production there. The white population more than doubled in two decades. With the newcomers came new diseases to which the local population, again, had neither protection nor immunity. In a virtually unthinkable feat of governmental neglect, thousands died from illness and malnutrition. Evidently the lesson of foreign disease introduction from the sixteenth century had not been learned.

A more hidden story runs alongside the history of indigenous people. The Afro-Brazilian inhabitants of this village, the community of Atodi, represent a crucial yet littlepublicised fibre of the Amazon narrative. They are descended from some of the millions of Africans brought over the course of a few centuries to this wet, equatorial habitat, thousands of miles away from their home. In this way, they and their predecessors have become part of the Amazon tapestry. Slavery has proved to be one of the most defining aspects of Brazil’s ethnic make-up, and the Amazon is no exception. It is for this reason that a complex African heritage is woven into the anthropology of Amazonian communities. Rubber plantations owned and run by Dutch and Portuguese ‘rubber barons’ imported West Africans for slave labour. They were forced to sap rubber from the trees in the heat, and the thick, punishing humidity of the rainforest. Locals jokingly describe the weather in the Amazon as having two states: “inverno e inferno” – winter and hell. For the Angolans arriving on slave ships in Northern Brazil, “inferno” alone would have been more fitting.

Due to favourable ocean currents and a relatively short shipping distance from the outposts of West Africa to the ports of Brazil, African slaves were sold most cheaply to the Brazilian market. The scars of slavery are felt as acutely

in Brazil as anywhere in the world. During the era of the Atlantic Slave Trade, an estimated four to five million African slaves were sold in the then-Portuguese colony. The United States and Canada, by comparison, imported 400,000. Since the cost of replacing a weakening slave was lower than the cost of adequately feeding one, the quality of life for the slaves that worked the mines, sugar cane fields, coffee and rubber plantations across the country was particularly low. The life expectancy of a slave in Brazil was substantially lower than the equivalent in the United States, where the lives of the comparatively expensive slaves were priced highly enough to merit a plantation owner’s longer-term investment.

The climate was not the only cause behind the degradation of these slaves. Regardless of their respective linguistic and cultural differences, these people were shipped, housed, and sold together. The Atlantic slave trade activity in Brazil was the first of its kind that made active efforts to wipe out the identity of the slaves. Once delivered to their destination, they ceased to be classified by origin or name; they were now simply ‘slaves.’ Since oral traditions were the primary method of passing down cultural identity, without effective communication, there were few ways to retain them. The result was that the traditions and stories told from one community member to the next became extinct, and with them went the identity of the enslaved.

Many Afro-Brazilians today have never been taught about the injustices suffered by their ancestors, an indication of the deficits in the Brazilian education system, and a gap in the consciousness of the country’s past. “When I was a child there was no reference to the process by which black people arrived in Brazil,” Priscila tells me. She describes her experiences growing up there: “textbooks at school had two or three pages on slavery, but I didn't know who these people were before being enslaved here. I never had black teachers, or saw black people on television or in magazines. It had a major effect on my self-esteem, and it hindered the process of getting to know myself as a black woman.”

For the slaves sent to the Amazon in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, this hellish life was often too much to bear.

Suicide attempts, a transgression that carried its own penalties, were a common occurrence. For others, perhaps the younger, stronger Africans on the plantations, escape seemed a better option. They fled by whatever means available, be that paddling makeshift canoes up hundreds of miles of river, or simply running into the murky, impenetrable forest. Some slave owners, such as the Dutchman, Friedrich won Weech, saw the first escape attempt as part of the breaking-in process of a new slave. Most escapees were unsuccessful; with hardly any knowledge of what continent they were on, let alone the geographical features of the surrounding equa-torial landscape, they were quickly caught. As punishment, they were forced to

wear an iron collar around their neck for the remainder of their life, which, as one can imagine, was not very long.

However, some escapees did successfully evade the hands of the plantation owners. Learning from the indigenous communities already present in the Amazon, they harnessed its natural abundance in a miraculous bid for survival. By living in small groups that gradually transitioned into settlements, villages, and communities, they used their rapidly developing knowledge of the dense jungle as protection from their captors. These communities of escaped slaves became known as quilombos.

During the era of slave trafficking, natives in central Angola, called Imbangala, had created an institution called a kilombo that united various tribes into a community designed for military resistance. It is widely accepted that the term quilombo derives from these communities in West Africa. These quilombos, inhabited by quilombolos, have a culture of community spirit and fighting. Due to the historical subjugation of these people, foreign white Europeans are to this day treated with extreme suspicion.

When the team in which I was working tried to access one particular community, I was, as a white gringo, not allowed to enter. Their political attitudes are characterised by resistance. Collective ownership and shared responsibility are paramount values and have been historically vital to the survival of such villages, since times when slave-owners actively hunted for them. Priscila summarises her experiences of such

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a culture of resistance: “it is something very powerful to see that, even after five hundred years, the people of these communities are still looking after the land, respecting each other, and fighting for the right to what is theirs: their land, their communities, and their traditions.”

The natural setting of the Amazon also has a crucial part to play in the survival of its inhabitants. The abundance of water, heat and sunlight creates an intensely hospitable environment for life. The importance of caring for these surroundings is something ingrained in the consciousness of these people. The forest, a plentiful resource on which the communities depend, is treated with a level of almost mystical respect and appreciation. Whether during the summer or winter, no one enters it between six o’clock in the evening and sunrise the following day. There are a variety of stories and legends that uphold rules such as these. From six o’clock onwards, the forest is said to be teeming with demons.

One of them is a young boy with long red hair named Curupira. He resembles a normal human child in all senses other than his feet, which face the wrong way round. In this way, he runs around the forest leaving footprints that create the impression he is running in one direction, when in fact he is running in the other.

Hunters, mistaking his trail for a boar or other small game, follow his footsteps into the wilderness, and they subsequently never find their way out. Two of the community leaders in the meeting in Atodi explained to me the significance of stories like these: “It's very important to us to believe in something in which our parents and grandparents believed.”

“It's not a myth.”

“No, it's not a myth. It's a truth, because we believe in it.”

It is these stories that revive the oral traditions that were lost in the process of displacement. In this way, the community members have cultivated a vibrant culture of their own. The will to sustain life, to sustain culture and identity, has survived the test of hundreds of years of oppression and thousands of miles of displacement. And so, they too have created a home in the Amazon, tapping into the lifelines created by the river and the natural abundance of food. In this way, they shape their own history and their own narrative. It is an inspiring story of human resilience.

Meanwhile, the unbridled process of international excavation of the Amazon’s natural resources continues to accelerate. The recent election and inauguration of Bolsonaro, a politician whose policies are more hostile to the Amazon than any other presidential candidate, serves as the most recent escalation to a set of problems centuries old. As such, community resilience alone is unlikely to prevent the disintegration of the Amazon’s diverse array of human life.

Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian communities are running an ever-greater risk of their lands being taken from them. Priscila concludes: “I feel sorry for the risk not only to traditional peoples but to all Brazilians and to people all over the world, because if we devastate the Amazon it will impact all of us, not only through climatic changes, but also through the destruction of our human heritage.”

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A U T O M A T E D

and appropriate justice, but in practice the algorithm proves much more complicated.

One year after his conviction, Loomis and his lawyer brought a case to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals. Loomis contended that the use of the algorithm violated his right to due process because of its lack of transparency.

Although the court could view the risk score and the inputs which affected it, Loomis argued that Equivante was constitutionally required to disclose the algorithm’s code.

After all, not even the judge knew which decisions the software had been programmed to make. The appeal went up to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled against Loomis, but called for caution in the use of predictive algorithms like COMPAS.

I N J U S T I C E When Eric Loomis was sentenced to six years in a Wisconsin prison, he didn’t know why. What he did know was that he had been detained in connection to a driveby shooting in La Crosse. The car he was driving had been the getaway vehicle. He even pleaded guilty to two of the less severe charges: “attempting to f lee a traffic officer and operating a motor vehicle without the owner’s consent.” He just couldn’t understand why the judge had given him six years. More importantly, he did not know the factors and decisions which had dictated the sentence. This was because they had been weighed up and assessed by a computer.

Loomis’ case isn’t the only time COMPAS has come under scrutiny. In 2017, Glenn Rodríguez, an inmate at the Eastern Correctional Facility in upstate New York, was denied parole despite an almost spotless rehabilitation record. Like Loomis, Rodriguez was bewildered; his COMPAS score was to blame. Unlike Loomis, however, he realised that the algorithm’s lack of transparency was not the only issue. Rodríguez was able to review his questionnaire, which provided inputs to the software, and found a mistake: one of the correctional officers who had been filling out the 137-item form had given an inaccurate answer to question nineteen.

He talked to other inmates with similar scores to him in an effort to comprehend the significance of that single question, and, after some searching, found someone with an almost identical questionnaire. All their answers were the same except for question nineteen, and yet their scores were entirely different. He brought his findings before the parole board, contending that if an input had been wrong, his final risk score couldn’t possibly be right. But Rodríguez ran into the same obstacles as Loomis: without knowing how inputs were weighted in the algorithm’s code, he wasn’t able to prove how important the error was, or indeed persuade anyone to correct it. Sat in front of the parole board, he was forced to argue his case without

The judge who adjudicated the trial had used data provided by COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions), a risk assessment algorithm which predicts the risk of a defendant committing another crime. Based on an interview with the defendant, their criminal record, and a 137-item questionnaire, the algorithm gives defendants a risk score from 1-10.

It’s used across the US in crime prediction, prison treatment, and inmate supervision.

In Loomis’ case, it was used to determine an appropriate sentence. The algorithm, written by software company Equivante, is supposed to provide supplementary data to inform a judge’s decision; a high-risk score usually means a longer or harsher sentence. In theory, the software appears to be the perfect tool for delivering fair

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being able to challenge the score or how it was calculated. Rodríguez was granted parole in May 2017, but would never be permitted to dispute the troubling issues of his COMPAS risk score.

Systemic racial discrimination is the context in which COMPAS operates, a context which significantly raises the stakes in any discussions of institutional transparency in the United States.

Rodriguez and Loomis’ cases illustrate the extent to which minor details and opaque systems can impact defendants’ cases and alter people’s lives. Taken in isolation, these cases may seem like minor anomalies, but it’s when the issue of transparency intersects with racial bias that the ramifications of these kinds of errors really hit home. Programs like COMPAS operate in environments where racial bias is present at almost every juncture. The criminal justice system in the US was designed to preserve racial order in the Jim Crow years of the nineteenth century.

Then laws enforcing racial segregation were implemented, and today’s justice system retains much of its function in this regard. Statistically, the racial disparity in police shootings of black people cannot be explained by higher crime rates in majority-black communities. Ava Duvernay’s documentary, 13th, notes that “police violence isn’t the problem in and of itself. It’s a ref lection of a much larger brutal system of racial and social control, known as mass incarceration, which authorises this kind of violence.” Black people are overrepresented in the prison population.

When black men and white men commit the same crime, black men receive an average sentencing of almost twenty-percent longer. Even at a judicial level, politically motivated legislation and court processes such as the encouragement of plea bargaining are all specifically prejudiced against the US’s African-American population.

In 2016, ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prizewinning non-profit newsroom focused on civil rights journalism, ran an investigation into COMPAS. It raised troubling conclusions: problems with algorithmic justice actually ran far deeper than previous isolated incidents suggested. ProPublica found the software to be heavily biased against black people. Juxtaposing a list of convicts against one another – one black, the other white or Latino – black people were consistently given what seemed like inf lated risk scores despite input factors suggesting the opposite. In one case, a black woman with four juvenile misdemeanours was given a score of eight. By contrast, a white man with two armed robberies and one attempted armed robbery was given a score of just three. Even when controlling for prior crimes, recidivism (likelihood of reoffending), age, and gender, black defendants were forty-five-percent more likely to be assigned higher risk scores than their white counterparts.

Equivante rejected ProPublica’s findings. Still, the media spotlight grew, with several news outlets running a sequence of follow-up investigations.

The Washington Post’s analysis centred around definitions of fairness and disputed elements of ProPublica’s methodology, but ultimately reiterated concerns of transparency. Despite the media storm, Equivante still rejected calls to release the algorithm’s code for investigation.

Just like Loomis and Rodriguez, ProPublica and other media outlets had run into the same transparency problem; unable to inspect the algorithm and relying only on input and output data, the investigations could not conclusively prove any racial bias in the system.

Programs like COMPAS operate in environments where racial bias is present at almost every juncture

It is well-known that algorithms are far from objective. They have the potential to be just as f lawed as human decision-making: many stages in COMPAS’ process could allow for bias to seep in. Maybe the system is trained on data which ref lects the police’s own racial discrimination. Perhaps the data is too narrow and fails to encapsulate a diverse spectrum of criminals and citizens. Most probably, certain input variables are weighted differently to others, variables that can skew final scores. In any case, what is alarming about the Equivante case is not only the possibility of racial bias, but also the glaring issue of transparency. Since Equivante is a for-profit organisation, the COMPAS code is protected from inspection by trade secret laws. Software like this is safeguarded because code is often not patentable, like an abstract idea or mathematical formula. Protecting it can

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of course - incredibly secretive. It took years of public pressure for PredPol to finally release a general description of their algorithm in 2016.

It was immediately investigated by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and the findings were predictably gloomy. The algorithm was found to exacerbate previous racially biased policing practices: PredPol would home in on areas overrepresented in previous arrest data (predominantly black neighbourhoods), increase police patrols in those sectors, and then use the corresponding spike in reported crime to validate its predictions. An unsettling feedback loop. It was argued that the bias ultimately came from the training data. Nevertheless, it is alarming to think that were it not for public pressure on PredPol to release a ‘transparent’ description of their software, this system would still be in use today.

When black men and white men commit the same crime, black men receive an average sentencing of almost twenty percent longer

Bias and transparency are the key concerns regarding the use of algorithms in the criminal justice system. It is no wonder that organisations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are homing in on algorithmic bias as a pivotal area of civil rights investigation. It is somewhat ironic that a central problem for an institution which prizes transparency is transparency itself; it ref lects the duplicitous nature of a criminal justice system which we already know to be riddled with injustices.

Without consistent and rigorous investigation, algorithmic decision-making could become just another step in a legal process already rigged against racial minorities. If we fail to act, algorithms such as COMPAS and PredPol will transpose systemic oppression into the digital era: an insidious, sanitised, digital version of age-old racism. Think of the alternative these are useful tools which could mitigate racial bias by eliminating human error. Whilst problems at the structural level might remain, algorithms implemented with appropriate caution, cooperation, and transparency could be a huge step towards change in how justice is delivered. But issues of algorithmic bias and transparency are not limited to the US; there are equally murky areas in UK policing that need investigation, and cracks in our sentencing system that require examining. Algorithms reinforce the idea that, as digitization becomes global, the accompanying problems become global too. The world is headed towards a tipping point. The sooner we face up to the consequences of biased and opaque algorithms, the better.

incentivise new intellectual creations. However, in the case of COMPAS, trade secret laws permit private companies to withhold information, not only from competitors or patent-thieves, but also from the likes of Rodríguez and Loomis, individual defendants with sentences on the line. Accessing information about how these technologies work can be critical to a defendant’s case, but it involves a seemingly unsolvable legal contradiction between freedom of information and trade secrecy. In the context of US mass incarceration, it is a dispute which urgently needs a resolution.

Already ingrained in America’s institutional fabric, the global diffusion of algorithm tech means that these same issues are steadily spreading. Elsewhere in the global justice system, algorithms, machine learning, and prediction software are being implemented with equally concerning results. Take PredPol, a crime-prediction software used in the UK and the US, which calculates high-risk areas and allocates police patrols accordingly.

Like COMPAS, PredPol is privately owned, generates between $5-6 million a year, and is -

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The following anecdotal essay, which appears to refer to a major incident at the “National Horse Racing Cup” won second prize in a competition at Bright Future Linguistic College.

A Day at the Races I was very proud when I got the message saying I could volunteer in England at the horseraces. When I was younger, my cousin gave me a book by Jane Austen, that had ‘horses’. I had a tape of a John Wayne movie. He leaps from one horse to another, six horses, while they’re charging in front of a carriage (which is like an old kind of Renault).

I saw that tape a hundred times, and that’s why I volunteered at the horses.

The shuttle that came to collect me was very good and fast. Because I didn’t take medicines and my mother gave me all the forms I got to step onto the nicer coach, which had windows where you could see in from outside. We were racing with the other coach which was funny but when we went through the tunnels it had to wait which made me sad.

We only stopped one time with all the checkpoints! Four men who were all in black were talking so their forms were looked at and they had to get off. They walked really differently to the men who were walking with them but I was listening to [REDACTED].

The journey was not too long. So the hills and vales and drifting breadth of the river made me long for England; the shuttle took the long way, around the Gororau Cymreig [Welsh Marches]. Below, a heron sheathed himself like scissors.

NB: This sentence was highlighted by EXAMINER, likely meriting extra credit. To us, of course, it is transparently a product of Poetmixr.

There were a lot of police around the event and there were protestors carrying placards. I had to wait for a long time before I was given my role. I sat on the floor and waited while a man called out the names of people and where we had to go. While we were waiting to be sorted, I saw a real horse! He was chestnut brown and smelt of hay. It scared me when I saw its rider wasn’t a man but then took us to the assignation point. So I couldn’t see the horse anymore. I had to stand with the litter-pickers and people who probably wouldn’t be given work. They waved their credit codes about which was very funny and I laughed, because they were way too far from anyone who would care.

When I was given my work I was so happy. I went with the others and stripped out of my own clothes, which I never saw again. I changed into my uniform, which was crisp and white like snow and a smart grey tie. I got to work in the restaurant! It was high above the race course in a special glass box. It was serene for a long time before the customers and, later, the protesters showed up. The real-grass course was massive.

The races started and we were working but everyone was nervous. There were bangs and claps that kept getting louder and we started to hear the yelling through the restaurant noise. During one of the main races fighting actually broke into the amphitheatre. For a while, through the glass on the right side, I could see the protestors coming down on the crowd like a wave of beetles, or wasps. So many of them, and all the flares and smoke! If I turned my head, to look through the other glass, I could see the race still happening, the dazzling wide green and the distant horses looping round it with their heads down. I didn’t know what to do and cried a bit.

We came out of the backroom once the event had shut down and all the customers were evacuated. We mopped the floor of the room so that it could be used again. I was so tired, and I didn’t want to keep my eyes open.

Because of the disruption, me, and a few others were taken off-site, to the shuttles. I could hear the crowd chanting their slogans. I shut my eyes for a bit on the shuttle, but didn’t sleep and was still so tired when I got home.

When I felt better, I spent the money that I was given on a painting of horses at night by , and paid extra for a frame. The next day I drew it in 105-Art.

Bright Future’s EXAMINER AI removed references to trademarked material.

Further censorship by these publishers has been necessary for the safety of students and workers’ families. This is in order to avoid the possibility of implicating any public bodies, in compliance with most recent DWP UK legislation.

This is a work of fiction published here for your enjoyment.

GROW OR DIE

In 1934, a private housing developer built two nine-foot walls to separate council houses from a middleclass housing development in North Oxford. They were topped with metal spikes. It took over twenty years for the notorious Cutteslowe Walls to be torn down, but the divisions and resentments that they symbolized still remain. Last September, after the council chose to only resurface the ‘posh’ side of the road, the words “CLASS WAR” were spray-painted across the middle of the street where the wall once stood.

Oxford has always been a city of extremes, between a wealthy (often academic) elite and a much larger local population whose existence is forgotten and overshadowed by the university. The way in which this institution dominates the city’s economy and housing market is easily overlooked. I grew up fifteen minutes away from the city centre, but had never been inside a college or university building until an open day, aged eighteen. Four homeless people have already died in the city this winter: some of them grew up in Oxford, the same city where a single institution has a combined wealth of over £9 billion. If you walk past St. Giles’ Church hall on a Sunday, you will see that in the afternoon it is used as ‘The Gatehouse’, a hub that huge numbers of homeless and vulnerably housed people in the city use to access support, food, and warmth for a couple of hours each day. Yet on Sunday evenings, it is cleared out for members of the student Conservative Association to drink port and debate politics, their discussions abstracted from the punitive reality of the policies their party advocates.

Oxford may claim to be one of the richest and best universities in the world, yet its wealth and reputation have always been rooted in oppression.

Colleges have benefitted from the spoils of colonialism and slavery, and more recently we have seen how investments in the arms trade and fossil fuels fund our ‘elite’ education. Climate Justice, Common Ground and Rhodes Must Fall are all poignant examples of how we ought to hold the University to account, but the transient student population often ignores the effect the University has within Oxford itself. The division between those who call the city home and those who leave after three years, never to return, is just one of many obstacles to cultivating a sense of community solidarity in discussions around housing and land.

average rents in the private sector, so renting – let alone owning a home – is practically impossible for those on low incomes.

Oxford students, on the other hand, rarely leave the city centre or the heavily gentrified streets of Jericho and Cowley Road. They fail to see the daily realities of those trying to live in the city on low or even middling wages, realities made all the more difficult by our existence here as students. I say our existence, because the University and its students exert a huge burden on the city, a rampant growth that the resources of the council and local activists are struggling to sustain.

Local Green Party councillor Dick Wolff describes Oxford City Council’s policy to infrastructure as “Grow or Die.” This was the mentality behind the building of the monolithic Westgate Centre and the yearly expansion of both Oxford University and Oxford Brookes in the name of the city’s economic growth. Yet provision of the social housing needed to accommodate the low-paid workers who support this expansion is virtually non-existent. In 2016, there were 2,116 households on the council housing waiting list, but only sixty new homes were built by housing associations or the council. In any new housing development in Oxford, 40% of homes must be affordable, which means that they are sold or rented at 80% of the market rate. However, in a housing market as unaffordable as Oxford’s, this makes little difference. Craig Simmons, another Green, shares concerns about the city’s unsustainable growth. Housing planning in Oxford is led by the whims of private developers, rather than a communal vision of the city that residents want and need: only ten percent of new homes built are actual social housing.

There is a huge disparity between what is being done and what is truly needed.

Walking around Blackbird Leys with Professor Danny Dorling (a geographer at Oxford), we see back gardens in which owners have built large sheds to be let illegally to those whose wages barely allow them pay the rent. Dorling explains how even in this area a council estate, once notorious for its crime, has now become so heavily gentrified that even associate professors coming to the city would struggle to live here. We drive to Marston, where there is a large caravan park for people pushed out of the hugely expensive rental market. On the same trip we pass the gated mansions of Haberton Mead, where a five-bedroom home will set you back more than £2 million. The close proximity of these locations in a city as small as Oxford is particularly striking: it would take me fifteen minutes to cycle from there to Rose Hill, one of the most deprived areas of Oxford where almost half of children live beneath the poverty line.

Photography by Daisy Lynch

Housing and where you live in Oxford are key to understanding these rampant social and economic All of this feeds into the homelessness crisis: there has inequalities. A man from Northfield Brook in the south of been a 175% increase in rough sleeping in Oxford since 2012. the city dies, on average, fifteen years before his wealthier Anyone who has lived here since before the coalition government counterpart in Summertown. One in four children in Oxford has seen this change manifest, as social and welfare budgets grow up in poverty, and attainment in local state schools is have been savagely cut under austerity. The University has even significantly lower than the national average. Oxford’s ten suggested that the generosity of students attracts homeless people poorest neighborhoods rank among the poorest twenty to the city, seemingly unaware that many of these people are percent in the country at large. The effect of letting the free locals. In fact, the sharp spike in homelessness should be viewed market dictate the city’s housing provisions is tantamount to as a product of the removal of crucial welfare support, and is all social cleansing: families and individuals on the waiting list the more horrifying against the backdrop of the wealth of the for council homes are rehoused as far away as Birmingham, University, which refuses to acknowledge its role as the city’s or pushed into wildly inadequate private housing. There is a biggest landlord. At the same time, many of us psychologically gap of almost £200 between local housing allowances and 17shut out this reality: we ignore the rising levels of homeless

people who live and die on Oxford’s streets. This apathy renders us unable to confront the political causes of the crisis.

In November of last year, a retail unit in Jericho was converted into ‘Oxford Open House.’ Everyone is welcome to come and talk about their experiences with housing, especially those who are homeless or vulnerably housed. The space is also used as a venue for events discussing housing and inequality, and for community and student organising.

When I met Lucy Warin, the project manager, she was conflicted about the role of the University, which allows her to lease the building for free (in return, the University avoids heavy fines under the council’s ‘meanwhile leases’ policy on empty buildings.) She told me: “whilst I’m really thankful for them giving us this space, it is not enough… if Oxford University made a rent cap, you’ve almost solved the homeless problem in Oxford because they push rents up so much. I can’t believe people aren’t more outraged by their lack of engagement.” Every day, Warin speaks to homeless and vulnerably housed people who come into ‘Open House’ to talk about their experiences. She has seen first-hand how university students and academic staff saturating the rental market hikes rents to inhospitable levels: “that bottom ten percent of the private rented sector has disappeared – people who are evicted, leaving prisons, breaking up with partners… they are suddenly looking at a cliff edge – they shouldn’t be facing hostels and homeless shelters, they just need a fucking home.” This is a point which Caroline Crawford, who works for the housing charity Shelter, reiterates. She now sees people on the streets who would never have slipped through the cracks ten years ago. She has seen the disparity of living conditions rapidly worsen, and is sceptical about the short-term solutions currently on offer: “if we as a society think that the most vulnerable people need help, then what are we investing in doing that? A bed for one night isn’t going to do that.”

Oxford’s economy is dependent on migrant and low-paid workers, yet so many of them are forced to live in precarity: insecure, illegal or zero-hours contracts often mean that they are rarely paid the minimum wage. Another issue has been the rolling out of Universal Credit in the city since October 2016. Since then, Al Bell at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau has seen the number of cases they deal with increase significantly. Universal Credit, the brainchild of Iain Duncan-Smith, is essentially a monthly ‘streamlined’ lump sum that replaces the six kinds of benefits claimants would normally receive. The Oxford branch has seen a multitude of problems associated with Duncan-Smith’s legislation, such as Universal Credit penalising victims of domestic violence, financial abuse by lumping households together in payments, lateness in payments from the Department of Work and Pensions (one Oxford client was not able to pay their rent for nine months), and claimants’ continuous fear of making ends meet every month. Universal Credit is just one example of Tory austerity in action: in theory, it is meant to encourage people to work and give them more ‘dignity,’ but in reality, it often drives them deeper into poverty and insecure housing.

However, the University’s ownership of land here is still crucial: this is something Warin emphasises to me. The number of empty homes and properties it owns in Oxford is shocking enough. But the sheer volume of empty or underused land in the city and across the country, called ‘land banking’ by one of the Green councillors, is demonstrative of how much power the University has when it comes to housing and homelessness in the city. Such realities make it difficult to believe Labour councillor Louise Upton, who tells me that she isn’t sure if she would blame the University any more than BMW (which owns a large factory in Cowley.) Upton is the councillor of the ward where Farndon Court, a social housing block, was sold to the University, resulting in ninety-six women being faced with immediate eviction. As Caroline from Shelter tells me: “the really sad issue seems to be it was sold to the University to increase their mature student population.” Again, the relentless expansion of the University, which can afford to dominate the property market in this way, pushes residents of Oxford further and further out of the city. For example, the richest Oxford college, St. John’s, owns more than £198 million worth of property across the country. There is no doubt that much of this is in Oxford itself. Queen’s College, for instance, owns more than thirty properties in the city. The University and its colleges are already rich enough to expand, yet continually encroach upon the city’s land and resources to do so.

We should also remember the nature of the institution we are talking about. Oxford is still fundamentally elitist: a disproportionate number of those who come here are already some of the most affluent and privileged in our society, and many go on to occupy positions of immense power and influence. The University, despite huge criticisms in recent years, still does not fully represent state school students or ethnic minorities. As Danny Dorling says: “This is exactly the wrong place to come to learn about Britain” for a young politician; it is a “fairy land.” This detachment that the University and its students often have from the ‘real world’ harms the city as a whole, which suffers so that many can live a Brideshead Revisited fantasy. The University itself has produced many of the politicians who have created the crisis in housing and homelessness in this very city. It is no coincidence that the problem is so acute in Oxford.

At a recent panel on housing in built-up areas, the social historian John Boughton argued that the dire situation in Oxford is the blatant result of forty years of neoliberalism. This is, of course, true, as the economic growth of Oxford has gone virtually unregulated for years, allowing developers to build with no responsibility to the social housing needs of the city. Nationally, the deregulation of the housing market met its most tragic, visible climax with the Grenfell Tower fire.

At the same time, Tory austerity has decimated welfare services through budget cuts and the implementation of Universal Credit. In Oxford, when an institution as rich as the University is allowed total monopoly over the land, property, and wealth of the city, homeless people will continue to die on our streets every winter, and more will be pushed out of the city every year. Housing is a basic human need, yet it is denied to those in Oxford who need it most by a government whose ideology treats housing as a right to be earned by the privileged, and by a University which refuses to acknowledge its chokehold on the city. It is long overdue that we challenge the silent and insidious encroachment of the neoliberal profit motive into the realm of social reproduction and our local housing economies. Our own university helps to perpetuate the very system 18It is our duty – be it as locals or as students – to resist it. which claims untold lives each year and ruins thousands more.

She’s not actually much of a celebrity. Her hair is yellow and shiny like sweetcorn. She performs on stage mostly. I watched the three clips of her acting on YouTube on my computer but I have bad Wifi and the numbers of the seconds kept spluttering so I turned the screen off.

It’s the tiny movement of her lips I like. When she goes off on a tangent on Shakespeare, her top lip buffers; stutters; she drops in numbers of certain scenes awkwardly, like she’s worried she’s just talking on and on and that the interviewer would prefer her to stop. I like it, and I wish my computer would cough her up into 3D for me while I watched.

Since February, I must have watched her everyday now – usually after dinner. If I don’t, everything switches off as if someone’s tripped up and unplugged a computer.

Honestly, I don’t know if I want to be with her or be her – or what I’d even do if I could touch her. But I only feel turned on when I know that the day can tend towards the series of numbers that make her up – those times with her in the evening when the numbers on the clock routinely burrow on. She’s watched me watching her and I’ve watched her (watching me), seen the two of us trip on and off, on and off, on and off.

Similar predictable patterns, with either me or her as the base number. I don’t really know how a computer actually works. Last week I thought I would try not to use my computer after two girls who were pretty and kept looking at me gave me their numbers and I slept with one of them but I couldn’t think of anything but her.

I like that she’s watching me and I’m watching her but neither of us are actually being watched.

What I mean is that, whenever I want, I could probably just switch it all off like a hairdryer. But since we’re already on the topic of her, I should say I watched her on stage last week. Sweated through the seat numbers. But she was such a way off with no computer, so in the interval I cried in the loo. Plays just go on and on.

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WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN

The first time I saw her was on the cellophane screen of my silver computer on a Sunday, as the evening slunk off into nothing and I condensed against pixelated glass. Only numbers: 240 pixels. Still, I watched every video I could find of her.

SKINNED “Cats?”

“Oh, all the fashionable wear them. You see,” She points towards the windowpane and outwards to the street.

A lady with a pencil stance and outstretched limbs (who carried herself with boundless haute contempt) laced in-between the passing hoi polloi with jagged-heeled shoe and silken emerald dress.

“There - I told you that they’re worn only by the fashionable.”

She smiled with smug satisfaction.

The two girls watched from deep inside as down below, across the street, this microscopic subject swayed on top of pointed feet, wavered, flickered in-between and guttered in the breeze.

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“Is it a Bengal?” said the one with curious eyes.

“Bengal, indeed,” replied the other. Ssh. They turned back to watch.

The knock of wooden heel on cobbled pavements, our study walked with a dark green shopping bag.

A plume of air-blue tissue paper could be spied within.

I imagine when she got back to her apartment she would: 1. Lay down the dark-green bag 2. Go to the sink and wash her hands, removing rings 3. Turn back to the table and 4. Remove the paper parcel 6. Unwrap the corners - examine at pleasure.

This one is a simple bobtail.

Look at the patterns and swirls in its artificially-scented coat!

At the store they work wonders with all their products all silk-lined - saffron, pearl, opal.

They have a skill in preserving all the face, the sweet, sweet face with little nose and wiry whiskers (although these tend to malt and pop-up on the carpet).

Between a fox-fur, full-length coat and ermine collar stole it can be hung up in the cupboard with the others.

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“In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. She is the slayer.”

That’s how every episode of Buff y the Vampire Slayer begins. For the uninitiated: Buff y Summers, a sixteen-yearold California schoolgirl, must fight the monsters that plague her town with the help of her loser friends, a stuff y English librarian, and one-liners sharper than her stakes. Stakes for killing vampires, which then turn conveniently to dust. Obviously.

The show ran from 1997 to 2003. It was campy and ridiculous, but it also created a world in which the 'hell' that is high school was made defeatable. Buff y was a breath of fresh air: it acknowledged that teenagers, unlike in the feckless, reckless world of Skins, have real responsibilities that they struggle to cope with. Buff y goes to school, has friends, homework, and a love life, but she's also patrolling the graveyards of Sunnydale killing vampires every evening. She’s the perfect metaphor for what it’s like to be a teenage carer.

There is no public recognition for saving the world from apocalypse in Buff y.

Likewise, staying up all night with your brother who thinks everyone else in the house is possessed doesn't get you out of your A Levels. Buff y was ground-breaking in so many ways. If you type Buff y the Vampire Slayer into SOLO you will find a slew of papers on its cultural effect. What made it a revelation to me was the way it allowed Buff y to be both strong and weak, self-sacrificingly adult and stubbornly childish, all while bearing a burden that her classmates didn’t understand.

I was lucky that I was late to the caring gig. When Buff y is fourteen, a man shows up at the school gates and tells Buff y that she’s about to become the “slayer.” When I was fifteen, my brother got very sick. Both Buff y and I went “Huh?!”

I’d always been vaguely puzzled by the posters at school saying things like: “in

every classroom there is a young carer.” Who were these kids? Where were all the sick people? The irony of it is that even though I started cooking meals, babysitting, helping my sister with her homework, and calming my brother down so my parents could go out together for the first time in a year, I never thought of myself as a young carer. Lots of kids cook and help round the house. Who wouldn’t want to keep their brother safe?

There are so many people a lot younger than me doing a huge amount more. And lastly, if I was applying to university, which meant leaving my parents and my little sister to do the things I was doing, how could I possibly claim to be a carer?

One of the weird dualities of caring is that you often feel you are both doing too little and too much. Trying to switch between sibling and carer, child and adult, is exhausting. Friends who don’t get it are disheartening. Being the only thing between your brother and a trip to hospital is terrifying, but the weirdest thing is that looking after my brother, or my sister when my parents can’t, is also the most rewarding thing in the world.

It’s what I do. It’s what anyone would do. But I do struggle, and I do fail, and I do judge it wrong, over and over again.

Part of the reason I couldn’t identify with that poster was that I felt young carers were often presented as superhuman.

I’m certainly not superhuman.

Sometimes I don’t even behave like an adult, let alone a carer.

This is why Buff y, with her responsibility and lip-gloss and teenage angst, was perfect.

Here was a girl who could laugh about the monsters in the night with her friends, but would also crumble over boyfriend drama and ask for help from an adult in the form of her ‘watcher,’ Giles. He would

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help without telling her to just ‘ignore the problems and leave it to the adults.’ Whenever Buff y's role as slayer was in danger of falling into self-pity, the show would remind its viewers, in its wonderfully cheesy way, that everyone had it tough: “My life happens to, on occasion, suck beyond the telling of it. Sometimes more than I can handle. And it's not just mine. Every single person down there is ignoring your pain because they're too busy with their own.”

The majority of young carers say they are happy to help their family member.

This doesn’t do justice to the huge range of experiences and emotions that comes with looking after someone. Because every person is different and every illness is different, every experience of caring is different.

There are ten-year-olds who are primary carers for their parents, there are twenty-year-olds who are carers for their children, and there are seventy-year-olds who still live with the siblings they’ve cared for their whole lives. At an access event I asked the coordinator what my college did to target young carers. He looked at me and said: “to tell the truth, not a lot.” Partly because they’re difficult to find, scattered across all demographics, regions and backgrounds, and partly because… I finished his sentence for him: if I were my brother’s primary carer, I would struggle to be here. I simply couldn’t be here, living my own life and getting qualifications to support my family and myself.

There are so many people with disabilities, and so many carers who never get that chance. The government doesn’t treat either group with the dignity and respect they deserve, and that’s something to be angry about.

In the world of Buff y, bad things happen because of the strange laws of demon nature, or because people make mistakes.

There are ‘big bads’ but there is no fatal error that cannot be overcome or defeated. Life just keeps on coming. Sometimes it's vampires, sometimes it’s the evil bureaucracy of the school principal, and sometimes it’s what inevitably happens when you under-fund local councils.

The educational provision for children out of school is bad. As the system stands, my brother was out of school for eighteen months. My mum went round a seemingly endless circuit of collecting reports from doctors, hospitals, old schools, new schools and several different ‘co-ordinators’ to format and submit to the local council. The result is an Educational Health Care Plan (EHCP), which gives my brother access to funding so that he can attend a school that is right for him. My mum kept her end of the bargain: the council missed every single deadline they set for themselves. The maximum time between an application being submitted and the decision actually being made is supposed to be twenty weeks. It took them over a year, and this was comparatively lucky. The Suffolk Council took 1,023 days to finalise one young person’s plan. The home-schooling arrangement that helped my brother do his GCSEs simply doesn’t exist across the border in Birmingham. Several councils recently came under fire in The Times for hiring private law firms to defend them against individual families who had appealed their decisions. The government can, and must, do better for disabled people and their families. Instead, they insist on placing the burden on the individual to access 24

their own support, whilst undermining them at every turn.

Andrew Barrowclough, director of HCB solicitors, described how he “was recently told of a Local Education Authority that had adopted a criterion where children allegedly had to be over thirteen with a reading age of six to apply [for an EHCP].

That is simply unlawful, but parents don’t know this.”

Where do you go when the system is against you?

How do you see the funny side of life? Activists, many of them disabled people and carers, are beginning to take a stand against the government’s failure to provide adequate education and healthcare. My brother loves going to the farm with his new school. My mum has her book club. For me, it’s Buff y the Vampire Slayer. Buff y might be able to backflip her way into saving the world, but she also offers generations of young people a way to fight the struggles of everyday life.

It’s what she can’t do through superpowers that makes her such a compelling character.

It’s the patchy test scores and pressure to save the world and later, in the darker post-high school seasons, watching her struggle to look after her sister and make ends meet. The show laughs at itself, but deep down it takes teenage girls seriously.

Buff y shows us that having responsibility doesn’t mean you can’t feel the pressure of it, or struggle with the little things.

She also shows us that you can still have fun with your friends, despite it all. In the series finale, Buff y splits her slayer powers with the other girls in the show, sharing with them the strength she needed to survive teenage girlhood. It was cute, it was cringey, but it was also a nod to what the show had been doing right from the very start.

26

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29

W he n t he world d ie s i n f ic t ion, it’s p a l at a ble b e c au s e it i s re move d f rom t he t r ut h . W he n t he world i s dy i n g i n re a l it y, p e rh a p s it i s to o d i f f ic u lt to d i g e s t i nto ve r s e . A s t he d r y s e a s on s le n g t he n a nd f r a g i le c l i m at e t re at ie s d i s sip at e i nto s mo g , t he l a nd s l id e i nto a p o c a ly p s e f e e l s more i m m i ne nt t h a n e ve r. I n a t i me w he n p o e t r y s e e m s i nc re a si n g ly p ol it ic i s e d , w he re a re t he f ic t ion a l n a r r at i ve s a b out c l i m at e c h a n g e ?

Po e t r y h a s a l w ay s re f r a c t e d c u lt u re , b ou nc i n g of f t he c om mo d it ie s a nd a c t i v it ie s we u s e to c on s t r uc t s o c i a l nor m s , a nd we av i n g t he s e i nto n a r r at i ve s .

But w he re a re t he s o c iolo g ic a l d i s c u s sion s of e c olo g ic a l d e s t r uc t ion ? W he re a re t he s on g s ? T he pl ay s ? A nd , s u b s e qu e nt ly, w h at do we do w he n t he re i sn’t e ve n a c u lt u r a l d i s c ou r s e to d r aw f rom ? How do you re c on s t r uc t f rom a c u lt u re of d e n i a l ? Fic t ion s e e m s p a r a ly s e d , or s t a g n at e d . I n E z r a Pou nd ’s word s: “I c a n re me mb e r/A d ay w he n t he h i s tor i a n s le f t bl a n k s i n t he i r w r it i n g s .” We mu s t d i g d e e p e r. C re at e ne w d i a lo g u e s a nd re w r it e old c onve r s at ion s . It f e e l s i mp or t a nt t h at t he s t r u g g le a g a i n s t t he tox ic p owe r s t h at we h ave c re at e d , a nd t he e f f or t s to pre s e r ve w h at i s le f t of t he world we i n h a bit , mu s t i nc lud e c u lt u re ju s t a s muc h a s e c onom ic a nd p ol it ic a l a c t ion .

Z a d ie Sm it h onc e w rot e : “ T he re i s t he s c ie nt i f ic a nd id e olo g ic a l l a n g u a g e f or w h at i s h a pp e n i n g i n t he we at he r, but t he re a re h a rd ly a ny i nt i m at e word s .”

T he p o e m s ove rle a f a re s l ic e s of t r ut h t h at we ave i nto a f a br ic of re si s t a nc e .

T he i r i nt i m a c y i s c on s t r uc t e d t h rou g h a c ol le c t i ve me mor y of h i s tor ic s y mb ol s a nd mot i f s , re work i n g t he a g e - old l aye r s of me t a phor i nto a s t a rk me s s a g e : we mu s t a c t now. T he y c ou nt e r ou r a p at hy b e c au s e t he y a re pie rc i n g , s uc c i nc t , a nd hone s t ; a nd mo s t of a l l, l i k e Z a d ie s ay s , w h at ‘u s e d to b e ’ i s p a i n f u l to re me mb e r.

huddled We huddle in the belly of a large and leaking ship.

We cannot see who’s steering it.

We wait for drip on brackish drip to drench our lungs in salt and grit.

We hoist in air at every dive and dip.

We try our best to speak of other things, fuse smiles onto our lips, yet fettered where the timbers creak inside this hulking, leaking ship, we fester in passivity.

We think not on the dread typhoons outside, but over mugs of tea we while away wet afternoons.

Occasionally, a quiet voice might say “I’ve seen what’s above deck thin petrel noises - plastic nooses feathers smothered dolphins drowsy as they broil there must be something we can do.”

Some frown. “Come now; your tea will stew.”

The seawater ahead is hot and thrashes black; the steaming froth hisses contemptuous. And sailing on we know we’ll simmer where we sit.

We cannot see who’s steering it.

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Conference in Orlando Red clouds wrap themselves around red spires, threads of lambs’ wool ripped on red barbed wire.

They twist in bloody curlicues, like cave-paint advertisements for a new world.

The air lies heavy on four-storey blocks; a spiteful asthmatic who chokes pigeons and glues murmurations of black starlings into one screeching, falling,

feather-spitting meteorite. A red electric light melts horizons down to wobbling pools of ink, where empty stars sink in shame as they lead the cold faithful into deserts, strewn with

abandoned workers’ cottages and tin cans which used to hold flowers of remembrance.

Plants still grow, under glass, but locusts beat against the panes - an unrelenting swarm of red bodies, red wings, red teeth. Long red stains cover the dress shirts of pale men who blink like moles as they exchange cards, trade futures, and sweat in the damp Floridian heat.

They blink, and condensation clouds their eyes; in the sky a red neon sign prophesies that they can not save the world. They sweat, and blindly buy nuclear bunkers.

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Hambach mine A little man stood fluorescent under a bucket-wheel excavator.

The sun too had near wheeled its course into the open pit, the land - mother bade them return into this eclipse.

By necessity thus by hand, (so) by nature thus by God.

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SPEAKING THROUGH BORDERS

language/politics/identities in Eastern Europe’s breakaway territories

After a lengthy interrogation by a Russian soldier, which included questions ranging from the etymology of my middle name to my dad’s job (but not, naturally, my mum’s), I was allowed to cross the border from Georgia into the sunny Republic of Abkhazia. The strange thing about this crossing, however; as the Home Office, the UN, and any other western government source will tell you – was that this border does not exist.

Abkhazia is one of a high number of so-called ‘frozen conflict zones’ – ‘breakaway states’ – in the former Soviet Union. Its independence is recognised by a rather motley bunch: Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Nauru, and Syria. This is, of course, excluding the other places like it: South Ossetia, Transnistria and Nagorno-Karabakh, which are generally considered to be parts of Georgia, Moldova, and Azerbaijan, do so, too. Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the deterioration of centralised control from Moscow, violent separatist conflicts erupted in each of these places, most of which ended without official peace agreements. Independent governments retain de facto control with financial and military support from Russia, or, in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh, from Armenia. Almost any man you encounter in the regions who was of fighting age at the time of the conflicts will have harrowing tales to tell. The dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh remains the most volatile of the three. It is strictly prohibited for tourists to travel anywhere near the ‘border’ with Azerbaijan. Soldiers patrolling this border – officially deep into Azeri territory – are occasionally picked off by snipers. The conflict is far from ‘frozen.’

My Russian was far more useful in Abkhazia than elsewhere in Georgia; for all you knew, it could have been a part of Russia. Although Russian seemed the predominant language, I would often hear another alongside it: Abkhaz, a language I had scarcely known of prior to my trip. In Abhkazia, Russian happens to be a co-official language, just like Belarussian in Belarus, Kazakh in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyz in Kyrgyzstan. I had not overheard it nor found anyone who claimed to speak it, yet I was struck by the sight of Abkhaz on signs and official documents. Later, while travelling, I finally came face to face with a proud Abkhaz speaker, the monk Panteleimon Adzhinzhal. I took the opportunity to ask him how important this language was to the Abkhaz people: “You know, I myself have many questions about the meaning and role of social communication in this country.

There’s much that even I don’t understand. I almost always see no logic in the political declarations that make up official modern Abkhaz narrative. I can only notice that the vast majority of Abkhazians – both in the public sphere and in their close circles – believe with conviction that the Abkhaz language is extremely important. Of course, if you take an outsider’s point of view, that Abkhazia is a destroyed country which has still not fully recovered after 25 years, it’s hard to believe that the situation for true Abkhazians has nonetheless radically improved over this period.”

Here he is referring to the devastating separatist war of 1993 which led to Abkhazia’s quasi-independence.

Atrocities were committed on both sides, most notably the ethnic cleansing of Georgians in Abkhazia by pro-separatist

troops. Much of the capital, Sukhumi, was destroyed during the conflict. Today, the shell of the abandoned parliament building remains standing in the centre of the city as a harrowing reminder of the all-too-recent horrors.

Panteleimon continued: “Ethnic Abkhazians have turned from a marginal community to the leading ethnic group in the territory, therefore they haven’t felt the destruction so keenly. The same goes for the language… The situation with the Abkhaz language has vastly improved over the last 25 years and continues to do so. Another question is to what extent this is necessary – to what extent is language a real priority in the Abkhaz question?”

This was exactly what I’d been wondering. Now I asked him whether he spoke Abkhaz and if he might be able to shed some light on the relations between Abkhaz-speakers and Russian-speakers within Abkhazia: “We have a difficult relationship with Russian. When Georgia started to impose its language everywhere, it became clear that we’d only be able to survive using Russian. It’s said that there was even a moment during the Soviet era when Georgia decreed that in Abkhaz schools, all teaching should be done in Abkhaz… I’m not sure if you’re aware, but during the Soviet era students were only taught in Abkhaz schools until the age of ten. Therefore, Abkhaz language and literature were taught almost every day but the rest of the subjects were taught in Russian. Abkhazians refused to conduct all teaching in Abkhaz, as the graduates from these schools wouldn’t be able to continue their study in Russia, and they’d have to study in Georgia according to Soviet quotas. So Russian for us was not just a civilising language, but our saving grace.”

It is important to see Russian as an imperial language, like French and English. Russian opens up a huge wealth of cultural and economic opportunities that Georgian does not. This is particularly appealing to Abkhazians because the opportunities that the Abkhaz language provides are extremely limited, even in contrast to Georgian. This explains some of the nostalgia felt towards the Soviet Union in its former borderlands. Being ‘Soviet’ was an easy way to identify oneself. If you were, say, half-Kazakh and half-Polish, but ended up living in Ukraine after the Soviet Union’s collapse, where exactly were you from? I myself encounter this same difficulty when explaining my heritage to people: “Well, my Dad’s from St Petersburg, but we’re not really Russian – we’re Jewish and a quarter Ukrainian.” I’ve found it’s easier just to say ‘Russian’.

Nonetheless, Panteleimon’s words struck a chord in me, so I decided to press him further: could the use of the Russian language as a ‘shield’ from Georgian reflect the political reality? And in what ways exactly has the situation with Abkhaz improved?

“In every sense… During my childhood, there were regions in Sukhumi where Abkhaz was practically never spoken, whereas today it is spoken everywhere. In the Soviet era, fewer than 200 ethnic Abkhazians lived in the Gulrypshskii region and in the Gagra region and the city of Ochamchire, they constituted less than 5% of the population. Today, even right by the border with Georgia in the Gali region, Abkhaz is the official language. All official activity is conducted in Abkhaz.

The language’s reach has extended. Today, it’s very prestigious to be able to speak Abkhaz. There’s a fair number of people who occupy top positions in Abkhaz society due in no small part to their knowledge of the language. In any case, today noone physically or legally limits the use of the language. The use of the Russian language as an instrument of defence from Georgian influence reflected (reflected, but no more) the political situation.”

He even repeated the word ‘reflected’, (‘otrazhal’ in Russian), to me in English, to ensure that I did not misinterpret him. Evidently, he was trying to emphasise that linguistic developments in Abkhazia were products, rather than causes, of the way that politics in the region has unfolded. He then outlined what he saw as the way forward for Abkhazia after years of colonisation and warfare: “Our tragic history from the middle of the 19th Century until the end of the 20th has shaped the political culture

in Abkhazia for the worse, and it’s in this that the main problem lies. We now need to construct an agenda ourselves; not simply dodge the regular blows from Georgia but form our future for ourselves… we know what we don’t want, but we don’t know what we do want. We need to learn to form our own positive agenda, and not simply remain fixated on the traumas of the past. If Abkhazians are able to mobilise to form the foundations for positive goal-setting, then everything will work out for us. If the old elite doesn’t allow this, Abkhazia will suffer.”

Brother Panteleimon lays no claim to objectivity. In fact, he made a point of repeatedly reminding me that his is not an impartial voice – “Abkhazians cannot be objective in relation to Georgia.” However, his perspective provides an invaluable insight into broader Abkhaz thought. The dynamics at play don’t quite fit into classic notions regarding imperial power and nationality; it goes without saying that Russia was and continues to be an oppressive, imperialist state. But for Abkhazia, Georgia is the bigger threat. Perhaps this is due to Georgia’s insecurity regarding its own self-determination.

In Russia they have no such qualms: leaving Abkhazians to their own devices is not an issue. However, If Abkhaz culture flourishes in Georgia, it is seen to be at the expense of Georgian culture. As Panteleimon says, the Abkhaz language has seen a resurgence over the last 25 years.

Elsewhere, these types of forces play out on an even larger scale. In Kazakhstan and Ukraine, governments are enacting a crackdown on Russian. Although it is spoken as a first language by many, the language is seen as a threat to national unity and identity. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Kazakh language has grown, yet this has not been accompanied by a corresponding decline in the use of Russian. In both Ukraine and Belarus, proficiency in Russian has in fact grown over the last twenty years, despite the proportion of ethnic Russians in their populations shrinking. In Belarus, according to the 2009 census, 40% of the Belarussian community considered Russian their native language, and 70% speak it at home. Whereas Belarussian is almost seen as a counterculture, Russian is associated with the political elite.

Russia’s political influence should not be conflated with the Russian language, the latter of which has not been linked to Russia alone for a long time. Eastern Europe’s breakaway territories, however, are tied very closely to the former.

Moscow’s support for separatist forces is hardly altruistic. Firstly, and most significantly, that support comes from a desire to uphold a sphere of influence. By keeping these breakaway regions isolated and dependent on its aid, Russia maintains a firm grip on their internal politics and keeps a foothold in the post-Soviet world beyond its official borders. Secondly, it is a direct response to western recognition of Kosovo, which Russia perceives as illegal. Moscow’s outlook remains as paranoid as ever regarding the meddling of Western powers worldwide. Its foreign policy can only be understood when situated in this context.

Panteleimon and I also discussed our favourite writers, interesting case studies for the implications language has upon identity. This is particularly significant in the Russophone world where, in the absence of democracy and a free press, they have historically formed the loudest voice opposing the state. Fazil Iskander, arguably Abkhazia’s most renowned author, was an Abkhaz speaker himself, and focused much of his subject matter on his homeland. He spent much of his childhood in Abkhaz-speaking villages and spoke of himself as ‘the bard of Abkhazia’. But he wrote almost all his work in Russian. He was referred to, both by himself and others, as a ‘Russian writer’, and attended a Russian-language school in Sukhumi during his childhood.

The most famous writer in this vein is undoubtedly Nikolai Gogol, one of the founding fathers of Russian literature.

Half-Polish and half-Ukrainian, he wrote in Russian about provincial life and folklore in Ukraine, where he had grown up. His conceptions of Russo-Ukrainian relations are still espoused by Putin today. Putin has repeated on many occasions that Russians and Ukrainians, along with Belarussians, are ‘one nation’. The historical names of the countries in Russian reflect this. Russia is (and remains) ‘Rossiya’, whilst Ukraine was ‘Malorossiya’, literally ‘Little Russia’, and Belarus was ‘Byelorossiya’, ‘White Russia’. At the start of the nineteenth Century, when people talked of ‘Russians’, they were referring to the natives of all three countries. Gogol saw himself as a Ukrainian, but this did not preclude him from considering himself a Russian, too.

As we move towards Ukraine we reach another breakaway state, Transdniestria. On the eastern bank of Moldova, it is inhabited by a mixture of Moldovans, Ukrainians, Romanians, Russians, and Russian-speaking Jews. The conflict which saw Transdniestria’s birth in 1992 was the culmination of various historical and political factors. It was fought on ethnic and linguistic delineations between Moldovans and the Russians and Ukrainians. The Slavic nationalities held a demographic majority in the territory east of the river Dniester, and while the Moldovans were discussing leaving the USSR and reuniting with Romania, they were conversely in favour of maintaining close ties to Russia and upholding Russian as the region’s principal language. Russian is now the official language of the government and education in the de facto independent region, so you can guess which side won. In the rest of Moldova, Russian does not even share the status of a co-official language and it has not been obligatory to teach it in schools since 2002.

I put my questions regarding Transdniestria to Denis, a local. He said that Transdniestrians “sincerely feel themselves to be a part of Russia and the Russian-speaking world.” He claims many would say that they are “mentally Russian.” His impression is that Transdniestrians see Russia as a “mother”, whilst Moldova is a “neighbour, and nothing more”. And when he says this, I do believe it – or at least his perception. He is not particularly political and even said that he couldn’t answer when I asked him what he termed a ‘political question’. But it would be hard not to think this: comical as it may sound, the buses which travel around Tiraspol, the region’s capital, all have ‘TOGETHER WITH RUSSIA IN THE FUTURE!’ plastered on them in Russian. There was even a controversial referendum held in 2006. 98% of the Transdniestrian population voted for potential future integration with Russia, and 97% against renouncing independence and reuniting

with Moldova. There were many allegations of voters being coerced by activists, exclusion of ‘unreliable’ voters from the voting list, and others being allowed to vote multiple times.

I often find the coverage of Eastern Europe in the West disheartening. Vodka, Putin, communism, and brown bears crop up all too frequently. The result is the simultaneous romanticisation of what can often be a harsh reality, and the homogenisation of rich and complex cultures into something simplistic and vulgar. If you search ‘Transnistria’ on Google, for instance, the first article that appears describes it as ‘A Stuck-in-Time Soviet Country’, and on the face of things, it may seem so. But its residents cannot be lumped together, as is the case in any country. Denis, for instance, is an avid photographer and a huge fan of The Chainsmokers. These places are not ‘backward’; they are not frozen in time.

From what I’d read, I’d expected to cross the bridge into Abkhazia by foot, or by horse and cart. But a taxi was easy to find.

As opposed to nationalism, I’ve been struck by the sadness locals tend to feel due to how the current situation limits their opportunities. After all, what use is a passport from somewhere that does not exist? One person I met has what I find to be a very depressing Instagram account filled with what they described as ‘things I find cool, and dreams for the future’: pictures of Paris, London, cars and watches. Brother Panteleimon does, admittedly, seem somewhat more nationalistic. However, we need to remember several things. Firstly, that out of the breakaway territories, Abkhazia is the most set on complete autonomy and independence; secondly, that he is an overtly political person; and thirdly, that I was pressing him on his views.

I recently attended a talk on these breakaway territories, where the speaker recalled seeing an ‘IKEA’ sign in Sukhumi; needless to say, following the sign did not direct you to IKEA, but rather to the second floor of an arbitrary shop. Yet it hints at something larger: a deep-seated desire for normality. In the same talk, the speaker said how he had walked in on an ‘English language week’ at Sukhumi University, where prior to his arrival, there had not been a single native English speaker. This reminded me of my own experiences, and the bafflement and awe I consistently provoked when I told people I was from the UK. I believe that rather than romanticising the negative aspects of eastern Europe and its breakaway territories, or conversely exotifying them, we should work to seek constructive solutions for those on the ground. I only shed the misconceptions I held when I saw these hinterlands for myself, and interacted with the people who actually lived there. Whilst not everyone will be able to visit Abkhazia and talk to Panteleimon, I hope that if western coverage of these territories improves, people may not fall into the same traps I once did.

[all quotations are translated from Russian]

regular-priced milk

and the view over Pearl Harbour When we arrived in O’ahu we headed first for Waikīkī.

From the airport we walked to the Alamo car rental, where my father talked to the desk as my mother sat in one of the plastic chairs between me and my brother and sobbed as quietly as she could. “We’re safe,” she kept muttering to herself in a scolding tone, as if her own words were ridiculous. “We’re safe, we’re all safe, everyone’s safe.”

We had spent a week already in Hawaii, on the Big Island.

Our trip lasted two weeks total over Christmas, a trip to do all the things we couldn’t afford to do when we lived there. We drove around the Big Island’s edge, in a big circle like we used to on Saturdays, perusing the farmers market in Hilo, wetting our toes on the beaches at Waimea and Punulu’u, trekking through the jungle to reach Akaka falls and climbing the peak of Mauna Kea at sunset. We all wore Hawaiian shirts and pretended that we were regular tourists, that this land meant nothing to us.

My father drove, because though it was still one of the we were all on edge but none most stunning places I had ever more than him. For the second seen, will probably ever see. time that year we had travelled She walked us through the somewhere for him to face what Honolulu military hotel, an had happened there. When unassuming place, repeating my father is on edge it is best the same stories that we’d to put him in charge, to give all heard hundreds of times. him something to fixate on. Leaving the lobby, she turned He controlled the stereo and to my father and asked if there played Hawaiian Christmas was anything else we needed to music I’d grown up with on do before leaving Waikīkī. an endless loop. My mother “The BX,” he said. “For Alex’s alternated between weeping cold.” and staring out the passenger I’d picked up a slight cold in side window towards the ocean. the past twelve hours and my I sat in the back, reading Moby mother had insisted we buy Dick, thinking about power. things at a BX. “There’s one in Like tourists, we drove the hotel,” she shooed us down straight from the O’ahu a hallway. “Many good times car rental to Waikīkī beach, buying Advil and Gatorade ogling the skyscraper resorts for hungover troopies in this and the overflowing beaches. particular BX.” My parents trailed behind, BX, short for Base Exchange. pointing out hotels or My mother insisted on waiting restaurants or landscaping that because of the absurd pricing did not exist in the Honolulu in Hawaiian civilian stores. of sixteen years ago.

“It’s like five dollars for a gallon My parents ushered us to of milk in a regular store,” she the beach where I’d celebrated whispered. “I’m not paying my first birthday. It wasn’t so that.” The BX is always cheaper commercial in those days, my than local prices. If there’s a mother sighed. I nodded along, BX (which sells anything a 39

department store would, in addition to military-specific items like uniforms or chem gear) my mother will insist that we go. In California or Oklahoma or Washington, where the difference had been a few cents, I hadn’t paid it much mind. But here it’s different. Sucking on the lozenges and swallowing the Tylenol just made me feel sicker.

I ran around to make sense of things, to let myself sleep, to decide when to stop marching or reading or refreshing the news. The fact is that half the time it comes down to money. When my mother was on active duty we were poor. But my mother hasn’t been on active duty for a long time, and we had the money, finally, to take a trip like this, the way other middle-class Americans could.

After, we drove to the base.

My mother always loved this part, when she handed over her military ID to the gate guardsmen and they saluted her, called her Major. It was a level of respect she didn’t often get paid.

We had come to the base mostly to see our old condo.

The Joint Base Pearl HarborHickam, or as the Air Force called it, Hickam. Pretty, lush, straddling a famous harbour, but not terribly exciting. Twelve moves and sixteen years later, my parents still remembered the exact address. It should have been an easy house to find because it was on the corner, and all the houses on the officer street had plaques with the name and rank of the officer living there, but it took a good half an hour of arguing. My parents went back and forth for a good ten minutes about whether they remembered a specific tree in our old front yard, before deciding they did remember it and that the houses just looked different now.

After we found it, we just

stood on the sidewalk and stared. My father pointed to where a lānai once stood, where he was when they called to tell him he had been accepted into a PhD program.

My mother found the patch of shrubbery where she’d taken a particularly cute photo of me riding a tricycle. We tried to peek into the windows, to see

over the din. “That’s the reason your mother can’t hear shit anymore.” It was impossible to tell whether or not she was joking.

We took some photos in front of a statue near HQ. My brother was hungry, so we stopped in the base cafe and my mother told stories and wept.

My father sat stony-faced, ate

what the insides looked like now, but the curtains were drawn.

As we walked back to the car, a jet took off and passed overhead. If you’ve only heard a plane’s engine from inside, imagine that sound a thousand times louder. The loudest sound you’ve ever heard.

“That’s the sound of freedom, children,” my mother shouted

nothing. I patted my mother’s back when appropriate, gazing across the perfectly still Pearl Harbor. We took more photos in a memorial garden and then drove away. “And now we’re back in 2017,” she sighed with audible relief as our car was waved back through the gates.

When I was younger everyone assumed that, as a military brat, I would be a patriot, and they were 40

confused when I was not. My mother held and still holds contradictory and confusing opinions about the things she’s done. “Your job in the military is to do two things, kill people and break things,” as she always said. “And the terrible thing is that I would go back in a heartbeat if they asked.”

I do not deny the military’s evil just because my mother was part of it. But things are always harder when it has to do with your mother.

Only later, when my father had wandered off to find an espresso and my mother and I sat in a boba shop drinking taro milk tea, did she tell me the whole story of why we’d made the trip. She had received a phone call whilst on deployment to Saudi. One day our neighbour Angela had sat on her porch and watched my dad leave to take me out for the day. My mother didn’t say it was beautiful but I’m sure it was: even in the dead of winter the cloudless sky burned blue over the line of palm trees in the centre of our street. Apparently, we went to the zoo. She came over in the afternoon to invite us for a barbecue. No one answered the door, and when she looked in the window she saw me, cross-legged, eating carrot sticks and watching Blue’s Clues on the television. And she saw my father, collapsed unconscious in an enormous pool of his own vomit on the living room floor. The doors and windows were all locked.

The cops had to break the door down and bring my father to the big pink hospital where he was kept for a week. They left me with Angela. I probably thought it was a play date.

Then the officers cleaned the house from top to bottom, so my mom wouldn’t have to come back to a house full of vomit. It took my mother three days to make it back to Hawaii.

It later turned out that my father’s blood alcohol level had been .4, far beyond what

humans normally survive. A miracle, we guessed. He’d had problems with alcohol for years, and it would be more years and another suicide attempt before my father got sober. The last attempt had been in Rome, a city we’d visited earlier that year for similar reasons, where my father had sat stony-faced on double decker bus tours in the July heat as our sweat pooled in the plastic seats and my mother had wept. Another gorgeous backdrop, another place that needed to be seen to be believed.

But in Rome I was ready. When my father went to Rome, I knew he was legally missing for three days.

When he came home, I knew he’d given himself the deep scars in his forearms, though I was eight and didn’t know what it meant yet.

When he left for rehab, I knew a little better what that meant. As I got older, I pieced together what I’d seen and couldn’t decide what was worse: the parts I knew or the parts I didn’t.

When I was fourteen and hospitalised for a week for suicidal ideation, my mother figured I deserved to know the full Rome story, narrated staring straight ahead in the family visiting room as my father and brother played ping pong with the other patients. I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, at how little I knew of what happened there, and at how much worse the story could get.

This is something I cannot separate from O’ahu: regularpriced milk and the view over Pearl Harbor together with my mother

41

being commended and my father lying in a pool of his own vomit.

None of these things cancel the other out, but it is impossible to keep Hawaii in my mind without thinking of all of them at once. I was too young to grasp all of these things, sometimes too young to even remember. I only know all these details because my mother decided they were worth telling.

I don’t know if there are more incidents, more picturesque destinations my parents plan to return to one day. I’m not sure I would want to know if there are more stories. For now, I think, what I know is enough.

«

«

«

TH E SAN DWICH ARTI ST «

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«

«

“The Earl. They love that story, that he demanded the first sandwich to keep him going during a gambling match (which probably never happened, of course, because he was in fact rather stingy and wagered little for a man of his class.) They love that tale in Italy especially, you know. They love it when food has a story behind it, they like a story of their own food most of all, but they also like this story of English genius, a virtuoso moment of snacking. They have a phrase in Italian, ‘se non è vero, è ben trovato.’ ‘Even if it’s not true, it’s been well made-up.’”

Cheddar and Pickle. What a stroke of… divine inspiration! Sublime, from start to finish. Think about it. Carrier: baguette. Barrier: mayonnaise, but not too much. Filling: cheddar, mature of course, but not plasticky. Add some rustic accoutrements: thickcut red onion, lettuce, et voilà! The old story comes alive again, like Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet.

You regain perspective. Just as it was in Florence when they unveiled Masaccio’s Trinity: nobody had seen linear perspective before. They thought he had smashed through the wall. Here we have the same (only with sandwiches!) But you must admit, it is really rather magnificent.”

He said all this to me while he was eating a sandwich. It was one I knew well: the M&S Prawn Mayonnaise. There is a certain ghastliness in mayonnaise and yet, we crave it. Prawns are, when you think about them, foul: tiny grubs that crawl and clutch on the ocean floor. And yet, M&S sells more of these sandwiches than any other, and they have done for thirty years.

“They love that story, they really do,” he said as he finished the last of it and brushed the crumbs into the cardboard skillet. Arthur Gordondale is Britain’s foremost sandwich designer.

“I’ve had a hand in them all,” he told me as he put a mint in his mouth to dispel the smell of fish. “Seriously, I have worked on most of the great sandwiches imported to this country.”

“What do you mean, ‘imported?’” I asked.

“Well, you have to understand, British people invented the sandwich but we’re always worst at what we invent. We invented trains and ours always run late. Do you watch football?” I shook my head.

“It doesn’t matter. What I mean to say is that we had to import sandwiches from all over the place.

Say what you want about the Americans,” he said, cradling his head in his hands and exhaling in a kind of extended reverie, “but they make glorious sandwiches. The Reuben. The BLT. Hamburgers.”

It was strange to hear a wiry, thin man like Gordondale talk about meat between bread with such a desire and a palpable hunger in his eyes.

“But we had to get them across to the UK. You can’t imagine it, maybe you’re too young, but there was a time when we didn’t actually eat hamburgers.

We considered them in a sort of faraway, academic context, but that was it. What the hell was a BLT to us 30 years ago? Who knows. The important thing is that we could convince people to eat them, so we brought them over. Then other stuff. You know Pret?”

I nodded.

“Their best sandwich is without a doubt the Posh

*** Gordondale does not give his interlocutors much time to respond. He speaks in a staccato burst of revelations and nonsense and it is often hard to tell which is which. Usually the way my job works is that I contact people and then ask for an interview.

Gordondale emailed me. He found an article I had written about Will Self and sent me an email asking for one. He feels like a man from a different plane.

It’s not as simple as saying that he’s from another time because he is not a traditionalist, but more that he feels as if he grew up in a strange other world. He emails like this: Dear Phoebe : Hello.

You write many good articles about culture.

(I especially liked your piece on Will Self) But — You have as of yet, regrettably, not written about sandwiches.

They — surely (?) — are culture also!

Write to me!

Yours — Arthur Gordondale.

When I read this I was admittedly taken aback.

But I googled him. He was Head of Sandwich Development at the M&S Edinburgh branch: the first Marks and Spencer’s in the UK to sell chilled packaged sandwiches and he never looked back.

“I just knew from the first moment that it worked for me. It was really profound self-knowledge at that point.” It seems a curious way to talk about sandwiches, but his passion runs deep.

“They are, in one way, perfect. From nothing,

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«

«

«

"Divine inspiration! Sublime, from start to finish… The old story comes alive again, like Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. You regain perspective." «

everything. You put something between two pieces of bread and complexity emerges. Everything about the sandwich insists on its simplicity, but it is inherently an enigma suspended in bread. And no two sandwiches live in a vacuum; like books they speak to each other, calling down in history from now to the first one the blessed Earl never made way back.” Quoting Gordondale is very difficult because you never know when his sentences are supposed to end. Applying punctuation to his speech is nigh on impossible. There is no punctuation mark for a pause that should be uncomfortable but isn’t. You can’t help but think that maybe everything he’s saying is true.

“In your email, you called the sandwich ‘culture.’

What do you mean by that?” I asked him. I wanted it to come out in that perfect balance between accusatory and disarming that great interviewers can get right but it just came out as a kind of confused reverence.

“People act as if what you look at is any more culturally relevant than what you eat. Yes, you might look at the Mona Lisa and think you’re cultured, but how much does that actually invade your life? Even the - pardon the word - bastards who sit on the train reading some clever novel.” He said these words with particular disgust. “They’re just pretending. Oh, look how clever I am, look at me reading Anna Karenina, ugh. Useless.”

“So reading isn’t culture? Is literature not culture?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. If you want to see what someone really likes doing, it’s best to look

«

«

at what they do with a little bit of shame. People who really like reading those dreary novels do it in private and they never talk about it. When was the last time you saw someone proud to eat a sandwich? It’s a quiet passion. With it comes the shameful looks around, the desperate hope no one can hear your crisps crunching, or just at least that for the next five minutes everyone will pardon - leave you the fuck alone. Just like when you read a book. I don’t mean to swear but it is a visceral desire. Like Jane Eyre wishing that she could sit in peace, and read that book about birds, and that her cousin would leave her alone.”

“So you do read.”

“I do. I love reading. I just… don’t see why it’s worth talking about.”

“You were using it to talk about sandwiches.”

“Yes, but I mean generally. People who read quietly need it the most. The people who need sandwiches are the ones who need a little respite and a little break. Shameful? Perhaps. But needed.”

“Do sandwiches offer that more than any other food?”

“Yes.” “Why?” “They’re comforting.”

“Why?” Now I was getting somewhere.

“Because what does any artist want more than complexity with the appearance of simplicity?”

“Like cheese and pickle.”

“Like smoked salmon and cream cheese! Imagine two things more different - in provenance, in

45

taste, in texture… And yet in the bread, in the sandwich, in the medium, they are reconciled so harmoniously that you can’t imagine them apart.

And all that without a single word, or thought, or character: marvellous.”

“Do you think most people think about sandwiches as much as you do?”

“Of course not. I do the thinking for them so that they can feel the way they need to.”

“Isn’t that a bit… megalomaniacal?”

“Yes, possibly. But I don’t think people would mind. They’re only sandwiches.”

“I thought they were important.”

“They are. But they’re still only sandwiches. The importance comes from the fact that they seem insignificant.”

“What does that have to do with culture?”

“That’s what I was trying to say. Culture isn’t grand moments of artistic genius or anything like that, and the thing is it never was. You know what you see in Florence?”

“What?”

“Not the Uffizi, or Michelangelo’s David, or any of that, no, you see tripe. They eat tripe out of vans.

Really, they do! I have seen the most glamorous Florentine women you can imagine walking down the Tornabuoni or by the Palazzo Strozzi, head-totoe Armani, eating tripe from polystyrene boxes.

That’s culture.”

“Really? I’ve been to Florence a lot, and I’ve never seen it.”

“You were probably looking at the buildings and the art”.

“Well, yes.”

“Classic mistake. The Italians want you to think that’s what their culture is. It makes them comfortable.”

“Se non è vero, è ben trovato.” I replied.

“Yes. Because when you look at the Duomo the fact is that Brunelleschi has already done the thinking for you. When you eat a sandwich the thought behind it is sublimated into pure emotion, with the effect that there seems to be no thought at all. But it’s all like the Earl. They need to think that what Florence means is the Duomo, when it’s actually the tripe. In the same way they need to think that the UK is corgis and London and buses, but it’s deep down just a nation of sandwicheaters wishing they didn’t have to eat at their desks. Even if it’s not true, it’s worth believing, but they need the sandwiches. They need the

small respite, so that they can believe in something a bit bigger.”

Gordondale said all this gazing out of the window.

As soon as he stopped speaking a silence of monkish contemplation came over us both. Sometimes you look at someone and you can feel them let their guard down. The walls loosen just that little bit, and suddenly you know them. I thought of another Italian word, simpatico. For one delicate moment, we were simpatico, and I grasped at the question I now knew to ask.

“Are sandwiches big enough for you to believe in?”

Again, he looked out of the window. I had the sense, or maybe I wanted to have the sense, that he was searching for something meaningful, some final maxim.

“They are… infinite. I shall try to make many more good ones.”

The conversation went on a bit longer, but I think I have written all that I need.

HARDER THAN HARVARD

Whether Harvard actually does discriminate against Asian applicants (it does), and whether repealing affirmative action really will solve that (it won’t), the discussion over who gets into university remains divisive as ever. The fight for Asian representation at elite institutions continues at the expense of black and Latinx students, for whom the crushing intersection of class and race means that they are far less likely to be accepted at Harvard. Asians blend into whiteness better. They are more easily placed alongside white students in a world where attaining whiteness is, more often than not, the ultimate marker of successful social mobility.

In 2015, Chinese-American police officer Peter Liang was indicted for fatally shooting an unarmed black man, Akai Gurley. Protests erupted across the United States, as Chinese-Americans demanded “Justice for Peter Liang”.

Although Liang had murdered Gurley in cold blood, many argued for his release on the grounds that white officers had not been punished under similar circumstances. Whether the court’s verdict was just or not, the way in which many members of the Asian-American community responded to Liang’s sentencing serves as a fascinating litmus test for contemporary race relations. ‘Justice’ in these cases appears to mean attaining the same level of privilege as white people: ‘if white people can do it, why can’t we?’

In the black-and-white dynamic of countries such as the US or South Africa, Asians have always occupied an ambiguous position. In 1839, the Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker obtained legal status equal to whites, married white women, and owned African slaves on their plantation in North Carolina. They were successful too, funding their lavish lifestyle through investments of more than $60,000 dollars (equivalent to £1.5 million today). On the other side of the Atlantic, Asian South Africans who were descended from Chinese, Indian and Indonesian shopkeepers, were classified as ‘Coloured’ during apartheid, whereas those recently arrived from Japan, Korea and Taiwan were deemed ‘honorary whites’, escaping forced relocations, armed police raids, and a plethora of other barriers in society. The latter group furnished South Africa with a lucrative trade in foreign electronics and luxury goods, and thus had a higher social worth attached to them. Immediate economic value translated into social mobility: the market dictated your place in society.

There is much that remained peculiar to the social status of Asians in South Africa. Chinese communities in particular occupied a specific in-between position well into the twentieth century. In the 1970s, official attempts to attach full ‘white’ status to Chinese South Africans were rejected by the very demographic such legislation would supposedly emancipate. Chinese people were reluctant to give up their unique ‘Chineseness’ for a homogenous whiteness, even in the midst of a horrendous apartheid. The idea that Chinese South Africans were heirs to a rich Confucian culture was not only a source of community pride, but was also used as political leverage. In 1985, they were allowed to purchase land in historically white areas without permits. This was partly due to Chinese insistence that they were far better behaved than other minority groups and black South Africans. In this vein, many Asian South Africans actively campaigned to retain their in-between status.

East Asians have been toeing the race line for centuries. Even today, in an age where government legislation seldom discriminates explicitly on the basis of skin colour or ethnicity, their experiences reveal the total arbitrariness of whiteness. It goes without saying that being ‘white’ isn’t a biological identity but rather a socio-political one, replete 47

with a long history of exploitation stemming from the colonial era.

The idea of whiteness was constructed for social control.

It does this by establishing an us-versus-them dynamic.

Orientalism was a cultural means of setting up the East as the West’s opposite, helping to define ‘white’ European identity at the dawn of imperialism by constructing an irreconcilable Other. The subordination of indigenous populations – from Ireland to Papua New Guinea – was pseudo-scientifically justified on the basis that the ‘white’ coloniser was inherently more civilized and developed than the subjugated Other.

Whiteness is a fluid category which has always been deeply intertwined with class. In many settler colonies, workers from a range of ethnic backgrounds intermingled, including ‘white trash’ groups who had been deported to the New World from Europe itself. Whiteness as an ideal of superiority undermined solidarity amongst predominantly impoverished settler communities. The indentured white workers, often deported convicts who were sentenced to years of labour as ‘repayment’ for their crimes, considered themselves superior to the black slaves around them. And yet, white elites in those very same settler

communities viewed them as even less human than the enslaved Africans and a stain on the white race as a whole. In the words of Nancy Isenberg, author of White Trash, certain white workers were classed as ‘waste people’ and conceived as ‘evolutionary stagnant.’

When the Irish first began to immigrate to the United States, they too were labourers, who, like English ‘white trash’, were seen as violent and biologically inferior.

Popular media envisioned them as the evolutionary missing link between Europeans and Africans. The Irish would only go on to ‘earn’ their whiteness by opposing abolitionist movements and lynching black people, such as the 1863 New York City Draft Riots when Irish workers subject to the Civil War draft attacked their black colleagues, fearing they would steal their jobs. Otherized European migrants in the United States made a conscious decision to buy into the status of ‘white’. In doing so, they implicitly accepted the homogenisation and white-washing of their diverse ethnic origins as a means to attaining elevated social status and reaping the rewards which accompanied escaping ‘blackness’.

The definition of ‘Asian’ that currently dominates Western cultural imagination is similarly that of the model minority: meek, intelligent and dignified people who worked hard and sacrificed a lot to achieve the middle-class ‘American

dream’. Social mobility of this kind often materialised at the expense of black people: for example, the formation of Asians’ model minority status between the 1940s and 1970s was in direct contrast to the demonisation of the Civil Rights movement.

Professor Ellen D. Wu has demonstrated how Asian-Americans were defined negatively, primarily characterised by what they were not, whether this was white or black, at different intervals in history. We can trace a progression from when Asians were ostracised as the ‘yellow peril’, or ‘non-white’, during World War II, to when a postwar affinity towards Asian countries shifted their status to the comparatively positive ‘non-black’ category. With a shift in US foreign policy, Asian-Americans morphed from a horde of unhygienic, degenerate, opium-smoking railway and agricultural workers into a model minority. As the Black Po w e r movement gained traction, their reputation as ‘ w e l l behaved’, self-made migrants – a minority foil to black and Latinx minorities – was only buttressed further.

But, as Professor Wu stresses to me in an interview, Asians were not just a tool for oppressive discourse. As in South Africa, they also actively participated in the rehabilitation of their public image from invasive to patriotic. In the long-run, it was a way of securing a place in the sun of postwar society; most immediately they sought to ensure that something like Japanese internment in the 1940s would never happen again. Japanese Americans used their participation in the US armed forces to show their loyalty; later, during the Cold War, Chinese Americans went to great lengths to prove that they harboured no sympathies for the victorious Chinese communists.

“Actually,” Wu tells me, “that foreignness is their key to acceptance.

American leaders and thinkers – and Asian Americans themselves – start to see that it’s useful to have members of American society that supposedly have this natural affinity to Asia. They can become this mediating or brokering force to help the US firm up its relations with a really important part of the world in terms of national security.” So paradoxically, Asians gained acceptance precisely because of an inherent foreignness. The way they were conceptualised – predicated as it was upon a meticulous blend of inclusion and exclusion – was adopted into racial rhetoric and used to

justify white disdain for black activists.

Of course, Asians never originally intended to advance themselves at the expense of black people. Racism reproduces itself beyond its historical conditions, sustained by the media and politics. Over time, the model minority myth has been supported by the Silicon Valley boom, where thousands of skilled immigrants from East and South Asia work for immensely successful tech companies as well as in a rich variety of other post-industrial sectors, most notably healthcare. Today, the Harvard lawsuit and Peter Liang protests have shown the skewed sense of self-preservation and entitlement in contemporary Asian-American activism. Such is the feeling of entitlement to social and political amenities that heightened class mobility has brought with it.

So could it be possible that, in a hundred years’ time, Asians would be considered fully white? To Wu, the only way this can happen is if nations such as the US stop pursuing geopolitical interests in Asia. Only then might Asians cease to be considered foreign bodies, in opposition to an all-American whiteness. “At heart,” Wu tells me, “whiteness is about an erasure of difference.” As long as the US sees itself in opposition to a nation, immigrants hailing from that region will never be true, homogeneous, apple-pie white citizens.

And what about darker-skinned Asians? In popular imagination, stereotypes of South Asians overlap greatly with those of East Asians, namely spiritual, accented, overachieving, emasculated men and servile women in need of white protection. But if East Asians can buy into whiteness, can South Asians do the same? According to the Pew Research Center, Indian Americans currently earn the most out of all Asian Americans with a median household income of USD $100,000 per year, providing class privileges that can help procure access to exclusive institutions such as the top universities. But no amount of wealth can erase the fact that race has always been constructed on ideas of difference. Wu points to the fact that we are still very much in the shadow of 9/11: “A new parallel to the yellow peril idea is the brown Muslim terrorist threat,” she says. “Certainly, if we can think of the group that is thought of as oppositional to Americans, I would say it’s the ‘Muslim terrorists’ or the so-called ‘illegal immigrants’, which usually means Mexican people.”

Until very recently, the US census’ definition of white was people whose origins were in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. It was only in February 2017 that the government proposed adding a specific category to identify Middle Easterners and North Africans as separate from white. Many Arab Americans feared that if they were to tick this new box instead of ‘white’ or ‘other’, the Census Bureau

49

might pass on that information to the Trump administration. To them and to many observers, it is a phenomenon eerily reminiscent of Japanese Internment during WWII, when census data helped authorities to arrest people in their homes, and seize their properties for resale to white farmers.

Just as groups like the Irish can evidently become incorporated into conceptions of whiteness, we must remember that other groups such as Arabs, Hispanics, and the Polish seem to be transitioning out of whiteness.

The idea of whiteness can be deconstructed and rejected: diasporic Asians can, and have in the past, cast their lot with other people of colour. The Vietnam War protests, widely recognised as seminal in crystallising pan-Asian-American identity, saw students across the world fervently oppose American neo-imperialism and identify with the suffering of civilians in East Asia. At the 1971 San Francisco Peace Rally, Patsy Chan delivered a rousing speech which still resonates today. She stated that: “the vicious imperialism which seeks to commit total genocide against the proud people of Indochina is the same imperialism which oppresses those of us here in the US by creating dehumanising conditions in our Asian communities, barrios, black ghettos and reservations.” The intersectionality that Chan agitated for directly catalysed the formation of the Third World Liberation Front, an organisation founded by black students which quickly formed coalitions with other students of colour. As a result of the TWLR’s direct action, university departments instituted African-American, Latino, and AsianAmerican Studies departments. The protests were successful primarily because they united people of colour with clear, specific aims and were successful in galvanising broader support amongst other progressive movements.

Some Chinese South Africans took a stand when they rejected the ‘white’ label, even when it would have put them on the winning side of Apartheid. But it’s not just Asians who need to fight against the cultural current that seeks to make us white – ‘white’ people themselves need to become conscious of the arbitrariness, instability and violence of the category. Constructions of whiteness may provide safety, comfort, and power, but they erase precious nuance in creating artificial, toxic homogeneity.

We need to work towards a more effective idea of solidarity – one that seeks to dismantle those same structures which underpinned colonialism and are ever-present today. If we are to chisel away at the bedrock of racism, the mechanisms by which insidious conceptions of whiteness perpetuate themselves must first be destroyed. So let’s stop bickering over Harvard, and think about how we can build a more concrete, resilient and powerful activism for the future.

50

Photograph

by

Ebubechi

Okpalugo

INFORMAL

POETRY

COMPETITION

SONNET FOR MY GRANDPARENTS You, doused in sugars from my papa’s cane.

You, a sickening cinnamon burning.

And this plum amidst your wet, fat folds: pain: It knows of none. Nonna’s dough is churning.

Pubescent grand-kids shunned sugar-gnocchi All the while adults gorged, and nonna fed.

Tongue-buds grew. Sweet-lover, I came to be.

Yet, knew little of the sugar-cane dead.

My nonna (grandmother)’s hands I hold tight, And like her? No body can keep me warm.

(Jamaican papa be a thing of light) And for devoured doughy plum balls we mourn.

Through inky print written in die-a-lect I seek to resurrect that Jam-ache-an Voice of nonno roars at Berlusconi on TV. Soon come the last disrespect.

Gnocchi and grandparents — warm and sweet — say: “Remember us when we are gone away”.

Outside Turl Street Kitchen last term we decided that The Isis needed a new poetry competition. We thought - what about poems that disrupt traditional forms? We went inside and proposed it to the team - they all agreed it was a good idea.

About three weeks later we met in the Costa Coffee above Kings Cross Station, and tried to formulate the whole thing. I almost missed my train, and Juni did everything else. We received some really wonderful material, and our favourite is published here. The rest can be found online.

Louis Davidson and Juni Ham, Deputy Editors I love the play with sense and sound - 'sickening cinnamon', 'shunned sugar-gnocchi' - and how it captures the synaesthetic (tasty, smelly) music of memory. I also love the audacity of its italicised extra stanza, which completely reinflects the poem, and the sonnet as a form. Just when things could turn saccharine, it brings in a social/political context, and makes clear the poet's racial and textual consciousness.

Will Harris, Judge I find the soundscape of the poem tantalising. There is a sophisticated use of sound and chopped-up rhythm running against the usual ‘smoothness’ of a sonnet that really makes it stand out.

Tracy Chevalier, Judge 5252

SHEEP Most people forget that sheep have tails.

They're camouflaged: white on rump and dangling black.

Most people remember the devil-horns (And what a ritual mush they transmute!)

But these little devils are my friends.

Most people forget that sheep have tails: they're camouflaged.

I forget that sheep have tails: they're camouflaged.

I forget - and I know what you think But the sheep is now gone, And is perhaps that tree, Or something else seen, unseen, or seemingly obscene.

Most people remember the devil-horns.

Well, these little devils are my friends, And I will stay with them til I too chew cud, Or forget.

53

Leela

Jadhav,

Wittkopf,

Jorrit

Louis

Kambouroglou

TEAM L I S T DonnerHadlow-

Davidson, Bethan James, Arjuna Keshvani-Ham, Antonio Perricone, Dan Brooks, Shayon Mukherjee, Zehra Munir, Jade Spencer, Maia Webb-Hayward, Sophie Kuang, Esme Bright, Lea Gayer de Mena, Elizabeth Kyung Merrigan, Alex Chasteen, Isabella Daniel, Martha Davies, Alex Haveron-Jones, Chung Mouki

Kiu Kwok, Ng Wei Kai, Poppy Sowerby, Keisha Asare, Christian Edwards, Leo Gadaski, Gabs, Scarlet Katz Roberts, CJ Salapare, Mack Willett, Jack Womack, Anna Covell, Issy Davies, Jules Desai, Julia Jones, Daffodil Dhayaa, Ruby Gold, Tara Kelly, Max Watkins, Alex Willis, Emmeline Armitage, Isla

Dawson,

Emily

Godwin,

Francesca Peacock, Victoria Tann, Oscar Heath-Stephens, Jorge Lopez Abigail

Ridsdill-Smith,

by

Llorente, Isabel Morris, Isla Dixon, Leila

Roberts, Mrinmoyee Roy, Rachel Tudor, Phoebe Bachsleitner, Kirsty Fabiyi, Christian Jones, Matthew Hardy, Izzy Kent, Jason Liu, Nick Whitley, Holly Fairgrieve, Kate Haselden, Daisy Lynch, Matilda Wiwen-Nilsson,

Sophie

Coe,

Martha Cruz, Tabitha Owen, Nick Ching, Niuniu Zhao, Altair Broninski,

Michael

O’Connor 54

Photograph

Brandon-Salmon, Bertie Harrison-