Les Liens du Lundi

Short essays, current affairs, hot takes:
I am not going to post current affairs and hot takes about Christchurch. If anyone has good reading on it from NZ authors, ideally kiwi muslims or at least non-white commentators, hit me up? I'm pretty uncomfortable with how the narrative I'm seeing is very much 'what this says about Australia', even from Australian muslims. I realise owning our trash is better than disowning the shooter, but... we do have an amazing knack for drowning out NZ, and a lot of white Australian commentary has come tinged with 'but we thought NZ was a nice place'.

(Don't even get me started on Americans who woke up on Friday morning to tell the world that a white supremacist raised in Australia, living in NZ, who spent time in Europe and whose manifesto is run through with discourse typical of the French identitarian movement must be what America has done to the world. Puhleaze.)

Longreads - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Roberta Rodriguez-Estrada (Electric Lit) interviews Esmé Weijun Wang: Illness is inseparable from the self
  

  RRE: You return throughout your essays to the idea that dividing illness from self is impossible. “When the self has been swallowed by illness,” you write in “Perdition Days,” “isn’t it cruel to insist on a self that is not illness?” After, you list simple facts about yourself in your journal — your name, occupation, height, family details, your favorite flowers — anchoring yourself into the small but significant details that populate your daily life. Have your thoughts on the division of illness and selfhood changed since writing this book?

  EWW: No, not really. I continue to see illness as inseparable from self. It’s a series of complicated relationships, particularly between my physical illnesses and self, but that word, “relationships,” also means that I’m always negotiating the connection between them.

  
  
• Eliza Berlage (Meanjin Summer 2018), Australia in Three Books, which I loved for its description of Possum Magic in relation to the author's eating disorder.
  
• Yvonne Conza (Electric Lit), Whatever happened to Letitia Elizabeth Landon?, interview with Lucasta Miller, LEL's biographer. Quote from Miller:
  

  The commodification of the private self is endemic in our Instagram culture, having been democratized at a cost. The idea that you have to market yourself to survive is something Letitia Landon — who thought “society is a marketplace” — would have recognized. What makes her special is the way in which her work surreptitiously registers the conflicts and traumas that entailed, especially for a woman.

  
  
• Katharine Murphy (Meanjin Summer 2018), Prime Minister, Disrupted, a very good analysis of the downfall of Malcolm Turnbull. Nevertheless, I read the first paragraph and had to google 'Australia Prime Minister' because I'd forgotten who'd replaced him and when (no one really knows WHY).
  
• Tegan (latetotheautisticparty), Autistic Debt.
  

  Being in Debt is a process where you are given invisible (and not so invisible) fines, that slowly shape your identity and form your core belief about yourself. This is the only way I can explain it. It is a debt of shame, that you carry with you, that you don’t know what to do with, or what it means, or how exactly to pay it off – you just know that you are in some kind of personality deficit. That you are less, and that people like to let you know that you are less (sometimes it’s their job), because it frightens them that you are. “Be more” they sometimes say. “Be me”, they mostly say. “Stop being less!”, they yell, in chorus. And you listen because you are young. Anyone can give you a fine – that is the cruelty of becoming indebted. 

  
  
• Jasmine Andersson (inews.co.uk), LGBTQ teachers who taught under s 28 are still 'scarred' by law's legacy: report finds these teachers less likely to be out in the school, to avail themselves of LGBTQ leadership programs, to live in their school catchment, or to bring their partner to school events, than younger/later trained LGBTQ teachers.
  
• Samia Mir (Guardian UK), Divorce, Islam and Me: I will forever be the woman who has left two husbands.
  

  And so I applied for khula, the Islamic form of divorce that is granted when a woman wishes to leave her husband. Seated in a small room in the mosque, my parents beside me, and my husband and his father in front, I asked for a divorce. “But I don’t want to give it,” my husband said to the qadi. There is a misconception that Islam does not allow a woman the right to divorce her husband. This lie is spread and made powerful by the halting of the education of girls and women by men, by cultural stigma, and by the mullahs who want to maintain power. But a woman who can read the Qur’an soon learns that her subjugation and oppression is a man-made construct.

  “I don’t need your permission,” I said coldly. It was the first time I had felt such resolve.

  “She’s right,” the qadi said. “She doesn’t need your permission.”

  “I don’t want to have anything more to do with these people,” I said, looking into my father-in-law’s eyes. A stunned expression spread across his face. He had assumed me to be weak, that a woman who was divorced once would be oppressed and beaten into submission, that I would do anything to avoid the shame again. They had taken my kindness for weakness. But I knew what it meant to be happy, and I knew I deserved better.

  
  
• Cara Delay (Nursing Clio), The Lady With the Alligator Purse. Miss Lucy called the doctor, Miss Lucy called the nurse, Miss Lucy called the lady with the alligator purse. Who was the lady with the alligator purse?
  
• Jennifer Wortman (Electric Lit), Theories on the Point of View Shift in AC/DC's You Shook Me All Night Long. This is an absolute delight: the line between astute literary analysis of a pop culture artefact, and parody of literary criticism through pop culture, is drawn out, criss-crossed, looped around, and thoroughly entangled.
  

  1. The speaker — let’s call him Brian — is documenting the shift, à la Buber, from I-It to I-Thou relations, from subject-object to intersubjectivity. Confronted with his lover’s fast machine and clean motor, Brian can no longer maintain his stance as autonomous male subject gazing upon the Other. He and his lover merge; he is shaken.

  Was I not a sufficiently fast machine? Did I not keep my motor clean? I cleansed assiduously for you, removed hairs, performed ablutions. True: over time I relaxed a little, cleansed and removed less of myself, slowed down. But is love not a sagging into each other, a softening of edges, an ooze? Was my dirt and languor not yours too?

  
  
• Joshua Badge (Meanjin blog), Difference and the Politics of Fear. Technically this is a response to Christchurch, but it's a very long read on Australian race politics from the mid nineties, and... Wow. It just really struck me: this is the entire span of my life. My first memory of politics is the election of Howard. What's really striking is that while this is a spot on chronicle of Australian politics as I experienced it, it is in stark contrast to the stories my civics and history education taught me about us. Not just because I, as Badge discusses, got the 'laid back larrikins in harmony' story of Australian identity. Because in the early 2000s, our high school 'history' curriculum peaked at 1998, and, under the NSW labor government, had a very strong pro-multiculturalism bent. I don't think I ever quite realised that the unravelling of multiculturalism isn't a post 9/11 phenomenon, but something that started... almost as soon as it became official policy.
  

Art:

• Tumblr has informed me of the existence and works of Carmen Papalia. I am particularly delighted by Mobility Device, a collaborative art project in which a sighted human noisemaker replaces his white cane. Pictured is a high school marching band, whose conductor led them in making thematically appropriate noises as Papalia explored the town centre of Santa Ana. The project page also talks about an instance at the V&A, when BBC foley artist Alison Craig accompanied Papalia through the exhibits with her suite of noisemakers. I would love to have seen that in action.