THE OVERPASS has been republished by The London Magazine, so now anyone can read it for free online by clicking here.
Sine Theta is turning 10 years old in March! For Sunday 15 March, our co-founder Chi has organised a really wonderful celebration at Morocco Bound in London (where we also celebrated our 7 year anniversary... time flies!) and you can get tickets here. It's a small space so be sure to reserve your spot quickly <3 Words are not possible to express how meaningful and important this moment is, so I'll just leave it at that.
Speaking of Chi, they will be reading at Reenchantment on Friday 6 March: link. Reenchantment is a lovely series and I can't believe this is only going to be my first time catching it, since I never seem to be in London at the right time.
There will also be a launch for THE HAJAR BOOK OF RAGE in London, on the evening of 31 March - save the date!
--
Yesterday in therapy we talked about my difficulty with saying goodbye and how things only feel 'successful' if they last forever (or perhaps framed conversely: things feel like failures if they flounder, dissolve, or die). My therapist brought up a scenario in which you are out walking a dog and you meet someone and have a nice conversation for two minutes and never see them again - how something like that can be really wonderful. My reaction was that, every time I walked my dog after that, I'd be like, "I hope I run into that person again!" Like that time I was really devastated that I hadn't become Instagram mutuals with the kid I moshed with at a music festival (or how social media allows for a passive kind of keeping-up-to-date with people that can lull you into complacency but that is also just really nice to have). Last summer, I was working on a fiction project set in the post-apocalypse that became a space for me to relive and process so much of the grief, rage, terror, and fatigue that I have been holding in my body. Today, now, I find myself wanting to dig up this passage and share it, share it in this newsletter:
Mama, I did everything I was told but still I lived my whole life wobbly. All those books you bought me, what’s happened to them now? I remember photos and videos of cop cars set aflame. A cop station swallowed by fire. [………] I remember G’s kindness. I remember Lili’s warm smile, braces on her teeth until the day she died. I remember French, I’ll always remember French as the language of me and Lili, childish jokes and whispered secrets, I’ll always remember the exhilaration I felt when the protest swelled with Tout—le monde—déteste la poli-ceuh—. That was the French of my life long after Lili died. It sped up, got faster as it was chanted, people jumping up and down to it: Tout! le monde! dé-tes-te-la-po-li-ce! Tout! lemonde! détestelapoli-ce!… The four-four time of the beat. Sometimes at rallies there were drummers, snares strapped to their chests, the consistence of the meter, it could go on forever. I believe… I believe… Get low, get low. I believe that… I believe that… Wait, crouching. I believe that we… Jump up, jump up. I believe that we will win! I-be-lieve-that-we-will-win! Faster. Ibelievethatwewillwin!
I remember! The kind stranger in the mosh pit, freshly eighteen, that I made friends with at that festival, after every song we’d find each other and I’d grab his shoulders and say You okay? And he’d nod and say Yeah, you? He picked me up when I fell. Sweat pouring down our backs. Screaming the lyrics at each other—I needed you there, I needed you there, I didn’t know, I didn’t know. Smashed against all the bodies of the others. Passing around cups of water to take sips from. It didn’t matter who else had drunk it. We were parched, panting. We threw ourselves into the crush, we jumped in willingly, gave up control of where our bodies would land. I remember that boy, I remember him. Thank you. I remember the video of my friend [X], masked up, hair flying out of her ponytail, clutching at the shoulders of a cop who was dragging a protestor across the pavement, scrambling at him, her skinny elbows, rage. I remember watching the slaver’s statue coming down in Bristol, the ropes pulling his groaning weight to the ground as the crowd watched and cheered, he smashed face-down into the water. Sitting at my laptop. I remember feeling so happy I thought I was going to be sick. I feel it pooling beneath my tongue, I feel the dizziness. The enormous rubber band ball in the center of my chest, the monster scrabbling with raw nails at the sides of the cage, my blunt heartbeat, all that stretched-out tension. Thank you. That whole time, that feeling, that’s what it was all along. It was happiness.
It's been useful, interesting, sometimes scary, always circular, to think and talk about craft with myself and with others—Yan Ge when I went to visit her in Norwich, Mary Jean Chan who I ran into on the bus yesterday (! and how wonderful!), Alison all the time, there when I'm in crisis, Amu in visits where it suddenly seems like we're starting to have huddles about what writing is for and what it can do. Conversations that bring me out of myself before I land back there again, wondering what it is I'm working on now, and what 'work' is, what it means to me, how I'm doing it.
I read 'Hatchling' by Rucy Cui. You don't need to read the full story (which is quite long, and, it turns out, does not consist of just 2 paragraphs screenshotted and spread around the Internet by bad faith misogynists whose own embarrassing self-pity about not having gotten into the Stegner is laid bare for all of us to witness) to realise that this is quite obviously an ironic, nuanced, ambivalent piece about what happens when identity marker and self become confused into one and the same, which is then itself submitted into market circulation. About how deeply attractive it is to consider giving in to the impulse to become a passive bystander in one's own life, to stop fighting, to stop struggling, and how contemporary economic precarity structures and encourages that. About the inability to truly access knowledge about oneself, and therefore desire. About how inconceivable violence is found in the most intimate and small-scale. Not that anyone, especially not those tripping over their own feet to take advantage of an opportunity to 'wokely' shit on a woman of colour, has actually read it.
Maybe you didn't get the "most prestigious writing fellowship in the world" because you can't read, let alone write? But who knows...? I applied twice and didn't get in either.
There is a huge amount of work to do on analysing and contextualising 2010s-onward identity politics and how this has shaped our current culture, of course, but it's quite noticeable how enthusiastic some people get about declaring a complete overturning of identity discourse, acting as though there was never a need for these kinds of conversations in the first place. Often these people are the ones who have been 'made to feel bad' by diversity initiatives and are wondering whether it's now OK to be a straight white man again, as if it was ever 'out'. I think everyone's got it all upside down.
Let me be clear: I never, ever want to see some random white person posting a whole carousel on Instagram of memes that come from intra-community discussions about the positionality of diaspora, radical aesthetics, and meaningful solidarities in the artmaking of people whose experiences are structured by racialisation, imperialism, and colonialism—discussions in which white people are not welcome to give their 2 cents. I think we happen to be quite capable of formulating our own rigorous critiques of things like Representasian without having what we say get coopted, parroted, and instrumentalised by smug opportunists pushing a reactionary agenda.