Archive for the 'history' Category

you dreamed of empires, by álvaro enrique

Tenoxtitlan is unshakable, she said, but we are only passing through.

structural violence and little museums

In current traffic conditions, a taxi from JFK takes about seven years to get to Lower Manhattan. It gave me a lot of time to think. The phrase I thought about was structural violence. The soaring new condos with their empty billionaire penthouses are panopticon eyes glaring at the property values below. While as a queer theatre kid I am contractually obligated to love New York, Succession and the art of Diamanda Galas and Basquiat and the memoirs of ballerinas and the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton have always kept its icy, Gothic nature in sharp focus.

That’s incomplete, as anything about the city must necessarily be. We visited the Transit Museum in Brooklyn. It’s extraordinary, an entire subway station filled with buses and old carriages, their period advertisements intact. The surveyors and engineers and miners who built the subway challenge your gaze in exquisite photographs taken during construction. The contributions of immigrant and Black workers, and the way the political machines divided and exploited them, are carefully described.

It’s a terrific museum and I love museums, even the bad ones. I’m still thinking about an hour I spent last year at the museum of Las Vegas, New Mexico. It dwelt on Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, cowboys he recruited as cavalry whose exceedingly brief (and horseless) campaign in Cuba formed the mythos for his presidential bid. The Rough Riders took their name from Buffalo Bill Cody’s stage show, and included Ivy League athletes and glee club singers as well as frontiersmen. The white version of the Wild West is a PR campaign designed to erase the Black and indigenous history of these lands.

The Rough Riders met to celebrate their weeks-long active service every year for the next seventy years. In her book The White Possessive, Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes:

It takes a great deal of work to maintain Canada, the United States, Hawai’i, New Zealand, and Australia as white possessions.

Since I read that I haven’t been able to stop seeing the work, in everything from high-end residential architecture to little museums. What if we just… stopped?

wifedom, by anna funder

The horror is so persistent, it’s almost banal.

hither page, by cat sebastian

Theirs was a world of fear and chaos, with tiny islands of goodness and hope.

the visitors, by jane harrison and wesley enoch

…there is no exclusively ‘white’ history of Australia—when we—First Nations people—have always been here. There is no ‘Black’ history of Australia in the last 240-plus years, either. We are each other’s shadows. To make sense of our shared history, we need to go back to the very beginning.

20 years ago

“There has been a break-in,” says Jeremy. “They need you to go down there and talk to the police.”

cold comfort farm

For Easter I rewatched my favorite film, Jesus of Montreal, and reread my favorite novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Both of these, along with the sonnets of Donne and Hopkins, the complete novels of Graham Greene and the second season of Fleabag, describe unhappy love affairs with God, which I suppose makes that one of my favorite genres. At one point Angel Archer quotes Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” in its entirety. My unsettled mind latched onto “Reason, thy viceroy in me” and has been worrying it like a broken tooth ever since.

It’s easier to leave some parts of the church than others. It’s easier to leave the smiling horrible minister who was raping a teenager in the vestry, and all the others like him, easier to leave the inerrancy of scripture and a scholarship fund called Sons of the Parish than it is to leave sixteenth century choral music and the enigma of Jesus himself, remote as the Nabateans one minute, immediate as any other Palestinian freedom-fighter the next. I think Jesus is hardest to understand, or maybe believe, when he is at his simplest and most direct. Sell everything you have and give it to the poor. Okay I get that, I do, but Jesus I’m genuinely worried I haven’t saved enough for retirement?

Consider the lilies of the field, says Jesus, and I consider them a lot actually. Louise, my house’s benevolent ghost, planted calla lilies and roses in the garden, and while I indulge her survivor roses, I dig the calla lilies out by their roots as soon as I catch so much as a tender leaf unfurling. Sure, I can say they’re invasive and toxic to cats and that I’m trying to nurture wildlife habitat here, and God could say the same about me. This is Ramaytush land, pull me out by my roots, three-person’d God, you coward. So the lilies of the field are cold comfort to be honest.

My high school librarian Marie Suchting, may her name be blessed forever, never reread anything – she didn’t have time – but I circle back endlessly searching for clues. How in God’s name did I end up here? What ridiculous superposition of texts made this set of choices seem logical? I just wanted to be safe and happy and not to have to hurt anyone, and here I am working in the tech industry. Humbling to acknowledge how much of my ethics I owe to Hawkeye Pierce, how great my debt to Felicity Kendall in The Good Life. Reason, thy viceroy in me, frankly derives its political legitimacy from highly dubious grounds.

the possessed, by elif batuman

The British called this conflict “The Great Game,” but no Russian people called it that.

109 east palace, by jennet conant

“The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.”

i suffer alone, uncomplaining

Having traced my mother’s family to the Kingdom of Mercia I am in gales of laughter over the title of the most important surviving text in the Mercian language: The Old English Martyrology. Even other people who knew my mother and grandmother don’t think it’s as funny as I do. Story of my life.

some books i loved this year and why you might want to read them

America is Not the Heart and How to Read Now
Have you ever really thought about Fremont? No? Why not?

An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873
Learn your blood-drenched history and mourn your courageous dead

Another Day in the Colony
Know that history is in no way done with us yet

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
Comics aren’t supposed to make me cry (are they?)

Homage to Catalonia
Reread old novels now that you’re big enough to understand them

Nona the Ninth
Meet the soul of the earth

Outrageous Conduct: Art, Ego, and the Twilight Zone Case
Understand how power corrupts

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
Consider alternatives

The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred and The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)
Drive from San Francisco to Joshua Tree thinking about deep space and social justice

The Years
…so that when Annie Ernaux wins the Nobel Prize you can say “oh yeah Annie, I call her Annie, she’s great”

whale fall, by david baker

I wish I had spoken when it mattered

in the eye of the wild, by nastassja martin

Three years ago Daria described the fall of the Soviet Union to me. She said, Nastya, one day the light went out and the spirits came back. And we returned to the forest.

a calm & normal heart, by chelsea t. hicks

treaties are for settlers, too.

in which i succeed in naming three (3) emotions

I’m sad she’s dead, for the usual human and parasocial reasons.

I’m genuinely curious if also worried about what comes next.

And I’m angry, I am so so angry, about the British empire.

As a white Australian I exist because of what Britain saw as surplus population it could send to administer its stolen wealth. The ways in which my life was predetermined, the ways in which I was raised and educated to be a colonial bureaucrat, were callous and calculating and fundamentally genocidal, and have left me traumatized.

The thing about Elizabeth. The thing! That I managed to grope towards just now, is that she was a human sacrifice to empire. She had no choice and no escape. She had to do her duty.

And she did her duty flawlessly. She was incredible at it. A genuinely awe-inspiring triumph of will.

And she shouldn’t have done that. For two reasons. One (the most important) is because the Empire is a death cult that murdered millions on her watch. The other is that her performance of that duty is and always will be forced on the rest of us as the standard we will inevitably fail to meet.

I admire her. But I will not seek to emulate her. Her indulgence of powerful men and her racism were ruinous even in her immediate family, and catastrophic for the world. What she did so amazingly well is a thing that should never have been done.

Which loops back to sorrow. Those glimpses of the woman she could’ve been: the 18yo ambulance driver, the rider galloping her own racehorse.

What a fucking waste and betrayal of all her strength and integrity, to pour it out in the service of maintaining a corrupt status quo.

What a waste of mine.

uncertain glory, by joan sales

who’d have thought that explosion of joy would end five years later in the most absurd butchery . . .

homage to catalonia, by george orwell

Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.

thresh & hold, by marlanda dekine

I care for Henrietta Lacks and all the names whispered in my ear by the live oak trees. I don’t care about the father of modern gynecology, honored on South Carolina’s golf course capitol.

putting the mans in mansfield park

The title is Jeremy’s excellent joke about Bridgerton, occasioned by my return to reading Austen (“Do you read novels?” “Yes! All six, every year.”) I began this time with Mansfield Park, long my least favorite for all the reasons it’s usually people’s least favorite; Fanny and Edmund are a bit dull. Reading it this time around, though, I was struck by how very much this book is not a romance novel or any kind of love story.

The title Mansfield Park could be arguably related to the judge whose famous verdict stated, “The state of slavery… is so odious… whatever inconvenience, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore, the black must be discharged” (White). The irony of such a title would no doubt have appealed to Austen.  Bertram’s country estate was supported by a slave driven economy.  By naming his estate Mansfield Park, Austen was delivering a quiet jab at slavery, an institution against which its namesake struck a blow thirty years earlier.

Austen and Antigua – Slavery in Her Time

The third act of Mansfield Park consists of Henry Crawford’s proposal to Fanny, and of the efforts of Sir Thomas, Mary and even Edmund to persuade Fanny to accept him. Henry is rich. His feelings for Fanny, once frivolous, have become sincere. She is a good influence on him. Fanny herself is poor. Henry is offering far more than she can reasonably expect to command on the open marriage market; there will never be another offer like it. Sir Thomas – her uncle, the slaveowner – is at pains to point this out to her; along with the fact that Fanny owes Sir Thomas for her care and education since she was nine years old. This would be an acceptable return on his investment.

Fanny says no. Being Fanny, she doesn’t say it with the panache of Lizzie Bennet rejecting Mr Collins or Darcy Proposal #1, but she does say no. Despite the awful powers arrayed against her, of family feeling, obligation, economics, reputation, and even (in Edmund’s case) real affection for her and concern for her interests, she holds to her inner truth, which is that she dislikes Henry and always will.

In a letter to her sister Cassandra, Jane said of Mansfield Park: “Now I shall try to write of something else, & it shall be a complete change of subject–ordination.” Edmund’s taking orders is part of the plot and the main driver of his conflict with Mary. His ambitions are modest, but through the church he hopes to have a small part in making the world a better place. Mary’s ambitions are vast and selfish; at her peak, she hopes for Edmund’s brother to die, so that she can marry an Edmund who stands to inherit his father’s baronetcy and estate.

But I wonder sometimes if Jane was hinting at the other meanings of ordination. Putting things in their proper order: Tom is the first son, and Edmund is the second. Plotting co-ordinates on a Cartesian plane: a place for everything, and everything in its place. Social order: no one getting ideas above their proper station. Austen never directly compares Fanny’s position to those of Sir Thomas’s slaves in Antigua, thank God, because that would be unconscionable. But Fanny’s constraints are real. She can’t have a fire in her room. She can’t choose to visit her family, and once there, she can’t choose to return to Mansfield Park.

Fanny has precisely two degrees of freedom. She can think, and she can feel. She thinks a lot. She’s a reader and a nature lover. Her eye for gardens and landscapes, which I skimmed over when I was younger, is a lot more resonant now that I have arrived at my own connection with my ecosystem and watershed.

And she feels, most notably, antipathy towards Henry. Her steadfastness in refusing him overturns the social order, which dictates that she has no choice but to accept such a superficially advantageous match. In refusing him, Fanny sets his material wealth at a lower value than her own integrity. It’s an affront in a society like hers (and ours) that prioritizes extractive capitalism – cruelty and greed – over every other consideration, including personhood and the sustainability of the planet itself.

Settler colonialism works by violently severing the connection between a person and their personhood, and between communities and their land. The potential energy released by that severance is captured and hoarded as wealth and inequity. In this year of our Lord 20 and 22 we still struggle to know the truths of our own secret heart, because the state would prefer that we didn’t transgress its preordained categories for us. Those of us who are settlers still live in alien countries on stolen land, the names of whose wild things are lost. We haven’t moved past Mansfield Park. We haven’t even started.

orwell’s roses, by rebecca solnit

Authoritarians see truth and fact and history as a rival system they must defeat.