With my dear friend Irwin, we talked about ideas of privilege, about being a teenage communist, about the internet, about ‘caring about’ versus ‘caring for,’ and about what it means to be conducting our conversation in a format like this. I’m so grateful to get to walk this life alongside you and to ‘let who you’re becoming change who I become,’ Irwin—thank you for talking to me!
If you're getting this as a newsletter, read the properly formatted post here: https://jiaqikang.mataroa.blog/blog/questions-for-my-friends-3-irwin/
The idea for this project is that I’m interviewing my friends and people I feel close to, who inspire me. There’s obviously a difference between this ‘on the record’ discussion, which will be published online for anyone to read, and the normal ‘off the record’ conversations we’d have as friends. I’m interested in the ways I might get to know you more through this slightly more ‘formal’ format and the choices you make in representing yourself. I’m also interested in oral history as a form, and in ways to preserve and archive intimacies and relationships in time and space.
Please come up with how you want to be called: name, initial, or pseudonym. I’ll be “Jiaqi Kang.”
The questions below are the 6 main questions I’ll ask you, but your answers will probably prompt some follow-up questions. Your answers can be as long or short as you want. The interview will be conducted orally, then transcribed using Loom and edited for length and clarity. You’ll get to take a final look at it before it goes up, and of course I can take it down anytime you like in the future (although it’s on my blog+newsletter which means that it will also exist in people’s email inboxes).
1. Please introduce yourself and your background, in any way you’d like.
2. How did you become politically engaged?
3. How did you and I meet?
4. What does the word ‘care’ mean for you?
5. What are some things you’re currently looking to learn, or learn about?
6. Is there anything else you’d like to say, or to ask me?
Thank you <3
With thanks to CM for helping me plug the audio files into Loom!
This interview was conducted virtually in April 2025 and has been edited for length and clarity.
Jiaqi Kang: Please introduce yourself and your background in any way you'd like.
Irwin: I'm Irwin. I am from London. I’m white British. I have lived where I'm living now for about seven years. The things I like: reading, cooking, eating with people, and swimming. And I had a very nice swim today… I am a person who is preoccupied with global liberation.
JK: Did you spend a long time thinking about what you were going to say for that?
I: I'm not going to lie, when I was engaging in quote unquote ‘preparation’ for this, I got as far as thinking about my name. I spent a lot of time thinking about my name. That was kind of it.
JK: How did you become politically engaged?
I: I think I had what I have described to other people as the luxury of a gentle coming-to-consciousness, by which I mean, I think my existence wasn't marked in the ways that I know have been immediately politicising for lots of people. My surroundings, my immediate context… My family is, like, upper middle class. I think that I was insulated by those things, from some of the particular violence of gender-based discrimination. The marking characteristics of my identity are things that emerged later on, like sexuality [and] transness.
Most of the time, when I was growing up, I was one of the people for whom the systems in which we exist function very neatly. I existed mostly in spaces that work to numb political engagement. I went to a fancy girls’ school for secondary school. That is a kind of place that is geared towards effecting a complete siloing off from the real world, because it's trying to produce ‘the leaders of the world,’ which was how my school constructed itself. In order to do that, you have to imagine yourself as distinct from everyone else.
One of my memories of a dawning politicisation is, I remember being in a history classroom. In the previous class, the students had made a mess, and my history teacher, who was one of the few people who spoke openly about class in this context, said, “Oh, girls, can you clean this up?” This girl in my class said, “Why? The cleaners will do it.” And I have a vivid memory of my teacher being aghast, and also of me having an immediate distraught sense of: “This is wrong, but I don't yet have the language to explain why this is wrong.” For a long time, I was immersed in the amniotic fluid of a very girlboss liberal feminism, which is also the tradition that my mum comes from.
This is so long. This feels like a full political biography. One of the first times I was asked to think about geopolitics was in the context of the most evil hobby for children: competitive debating, which I firmly believe should be outlawed for children and adults, because I think it effects a worsening of the human person. It encourages you to treat the lives of others, the lives of nations, and the sweep of history as gamified. As something where you can think about it for 15 minutes, and then you, a private school student from London, can discourse about it, you can expound.
We know this, but it's the philosophy that undergirds most of how the UK is governed now. One of the things about debating is that it teaches you that everything is arguable either way. The way [to be] good at debating is by having no political compass.
I remember becoming increasingly frustrated, because in this very dim, dawning awareness, I started to be asked to argue things that I found morally unacceptable. At first, those things had to do with my incipient identity, the first glimmers of my identity running counter to hegemonic political systems—when I was first starting to understand myself as queer, when I was first starting to understand myself as trans. But then also having to do with geopolitics, things like benefits. Basically, I found it increasingly difficult to argue for, like, the immiseration of or the stripping of dignity from the poor. In reaction to that, I started to describe myself as a communist when I was a teenager.
Since that time, since leaving that context, my life has been about trying to live up to the things I previously described myself as in a purely theoretical and mostly aesthetic way. My initial surface understanding of communism would have required no changes to the substance of myself and my life. The time since then has been about gradually seeking to bring into alignment my actions and the substance of my life, and the words that I pinned to myself, like ‘communist’ and ‘queer,’ ‘trans.’ What does it mean to live a queer and trans life? It used to be the case that you put words in your Tumblr bio, like ‘anti-racist’ or like ‘communist,’ right? And the extent of your enactment of these things was that they were in your Tumblr bio.
I would say my real material political engagement has only come through action and through the grace and patience of people around me who did not have this luxury of a gentle coming-to-consciousness.
2019 going into 2020 was the first time I remember feeling the stuff of myself being changed by political awareness. That was about migrant solidarity movements. Beginning to think about: What does it actually mean to say ‘No borders, no nations,’ which is something I've been chanting on marches for years? I first started to think about that and act on that in 2019, going into 2020. Again, living the politics of mutual aid, having my first fractious encounters with police in 2020, which is crazy to think about now—that there was a time when, because of the kind of person I am, I used to see police on the street and not flinch, not recoil, or not feel disgust. So I think that began then.
And then, over the years, a kind of exponential acceleration of my politicisation up to particularly the past year, which has been so acutely politicising for many people. The context of that is Palestine solidarity movements and also being part of an encampment, which has changed me so totally that it is hard to think back to the stuff of my life before. It's crazy to think that it was possible for me to have been anything else or to have been living in any other way.
“How did you become politically engaged?” I feel like the phrasing implies that it's a finite process, that there's a moment. But I think I am becoming politically engaged every [day]… It's a constantly unfolding thing.
JK: Do you want to talk more about the internet and/or Tumblr?
I: It was when I first encountered the dimmest idea of a politics of solidarity, in its loosest and least actualizable terms. The main way I experienced the politics of solidarity online was in terms of a series of mistakes I was terrified of making, and crimes that I feared to do, due to the rabid nature of fandom rap sheets of crimes. It is not healthy for anyone's politics to be based on a fear of getting cancelled, but I fear that was my situation.
But I also think the internet is how I first started reading stuff. The internet is both the cause of the hour-long debates I had with my high school ex-girlfriend about whether I had privilege over her as (at the time) a monosexual lesbian. But it is also the place where, admittedly—in gifsets and aesthetic posts and beautiful serif fonts over a kind of soft fade of hills into the horizon—I first encountered, like, James Baldwin quotes. Reading these text posts, like, “Friendly reminder that the Nicaraguan Revolution happened.” That's a bad example. But it felt like gleanings.
Often, the internet felt like quite a confining thing, confining in terms of what it was possible to say and what groups [and] networks it was possible to be part of. But sometimes you would get these glimmers of possibility. Also because it does often function—especially if you're an extremely mentally ill teenager, as I was at this time—as a kind of shop grill coming down between you and the world outside. Sometimes you would get these flashes… like something being thrown at the shop grill and you’d feel the thud reverberating, and you'd be like: There's something outside here, there's something real. There's a world of struggle that I am committed to in theory, but I'm scared to engage in and practice, beyond, like, anti-Brexit marches where you would sometimes see Bill Nighy (shoutout to Bill Nighy).
JK: I really relate to that. Recently I remembered how [around 2013-14] people would post PowerPoints on Tumblr—as in, they would make a PowerPoint and then they would screenshot it and post it, [with] Comic Sans and this jokey aesthetic. There was one I saw that someone had re-blogged that was like, “Friendly reminder that reverse racism is real.” I read it and I was like, “Oh, wow.” And then another one later was like, “Friendly reminder that reverse racism is NOT real.” And I read it and I was like, “Oh, yeah.” [The internet] was good, but also bad, and I love the shop grill metaphor that you use.
I: It's weird. I was just thinking about that shop grill metaphor. That is a metaphor that I had in my head before, to think about being catatonically mentally ill. But actually, when I say it now—this is again a reflection of the extent to which I feel like things have almost physiologically shifted over the past year—the image that I think of is actually from a documentary about the First Intifada. The image of Palestinians shutting shops as part of the wave of strikes. It's kind of bizarre to experience… That [metaphor] is something that I have used internally to think about my own Weltschmerz and internal isolation. But now, when I said it, the image that came to my mind was that [of] people closing shop doors, shop grills, in solidarity, as part of a national liberation movement.
JK: Where, when, did you articulate to yourself the original shop grill analogy?
I: I used to call it ‘the trap,’ which was just this feeling of enclosure and of separateness and distinctness. I was thinking about escape strategies, escape hatches, ways to scramble out from this. And I articulated a bunch of them to myself. Lots of them are still important to me. They included kissing, swimming, and being part of a mass movement. I think I meant that physically, like a mass of moving people, in a protest crowd. I don't know if then, but certainly now, I also mean that in terms of being part of a mass movement that's a real lifelong commitment.
JK: At some point, I thought of my sadness as the shell of a hermit crab. I just couldn't conceive of what I would be without it. I would just be this little shivering thing.
How does it feel for you to narrate this? We both have done kinds of work that prompt us to narrate our lives, or to narrate [in general]. Something that I have thought about lately is what it means, as a writer, for people to just be able to find out so much about you by reading your work.
I: I think what I'm experiencing is how easy it is to narrate and almost caricature. I don't want to try and do that, but I think it's something I lapse into. What I would describe as my pre-politicization self or myself pre- the actualization of my politics [becomes caricatured]. How hard it is to narrate the slipstream of what came after that: post-2019, the past six years, maybe since I was 19, 20. I guess it's because it's all about stuff outside of me. I guess it's about allowing myself to be acted upon, right? And the minute you allow yourself to be acted upon, the minute you peel yourself open and allow yourself to become receptive to these currents, it stops being as easy a story to tell, because you start having to account for factors and factors and factors and factors.
If I were to name everyone who was responsible for my politicization, it would take days, and that list of people increases exponentially. People both living and dead. People who I encounter in the flesh, and people who I encounter because someone in the flesh reminds me to read this person, or watch this thing. I start telling a story about a kid who was both insulated and isolated. And then I end up telling a story of a person who… I feel like I'm scrambling out in so many directions right now, politically. And maybe that's also because I'm young, and learning a lot. Maybe that won't always be true. So I'm finding it very difficult to narrate it coherently, past the point of stuff becoming real. Which is such a shame because that's the thing that's important, right? But it's so much harder.
JK: Yeah, but I also wonder, because you very rightfully pointed out the trap within the question itself, [which posits becoming politically engaged] as a process that has happened and is done. That idea of, “Oh, I was a kid, and then things became real.” To what extent is that narrative also just structured by the structure of the question itself?
I: I think it's true. There's another way to tell that story where the factors I describe as products of my insulation and isolation and products of being a teenager (a state that I deride and deplore in myself even though, famously, everyone has been a teenager), experiences of loneliness and isolation, of being crazy, of psychosis… To try and think of those [experiences] as politicizing. I think that's probably not something I'm ready to do and that I find really difficult, not least because around my late teenage years, I was so mentally ill. I [was] periodically so disconnected from reality that I can't really remember [those years] with much clarity. I don't know what it would be like to think about my experiences of the structures of care, that hem in the nuclear family of a certain class in a certain city… How would it be for me to try and really think about those things as part of my politicisation, rather than as barriers to it? I feel like that's something I'm still not ready to really do, because it would involve thinking quite hard about stuff that I am still scared to think about.
JK: I'm struck by what you've just said. Sometimes I'm like, “Oh my god, my whole childhood was such an experience of loneliness and feeling really marginalized. What does that mean?” And then I'm like, “Well, it's probably because of racism and stuff.” But there are so many ways to feel marginalized. At the same time, I grew up with a certain degree of class privilege.
Maybe this is a total tangent… Going back to the fear of cancellation, which is real and which, unfortunately, is a huge factor that influences how people behave… If you're a POC but you have class privilege, or you're gay and white, or whatever—there's this reluctance to really face up to the part of you that is quote unquote ‘the bad guy.’ In some cases, it's easier to get away with, “Oh, I'm so oppressed. I'm so, like, absolved of accountability or of privilege because of this oppressed part of me, for example my race.” You can kind of get away with not addressing the other stuff. And you can really see that sometimes, in the Representasian people or in a certain level of elite capture of identity politics… I don't know if this is a weird thought, but I wonder whether it's harder to be able to be like, “Oh, I was really marginalized growing up,” if you're white?!
I: [Laughs]
JK: But you were.
I: I wouldn't say marginalised. That's not the word I'd use. I don't think I was marginalised. All of the discourses available to me, even the discourses around the things that made me anomalous, they still centered me, because the discourses were like, “Your peers don't understand you because you're so smart and not because you're an autistic freak.” I think I was isolated, but I don't think I was marginalized. But I think isolation and insulation can themselves be politicizing, even as they empower you within that kind of hegemonic politics.
I feel like I'm not expressing this clearly, but I do think it's kind of true. This isn't to be like, “Boo hoo rich white people,” but I mean, this is one of the tenets of family abolition, right? Even if you are a person for whom the system quote unquote ‘works,’ even if your family is able to materially provide for all your needs, there can be something narrowing and isolating in the very premises of that kind of care. And that, too, is part of your political formation, even if it's harder to acknowledge. Does that make sense?
JK: I think it does. That's interesting to me. Maybe we haven't really talked about this before, because I've never really just sat down and been like, “What's it like to be white?” Which is something that I've been thinking about [lately]. I resent white people, or anyone who didn't grow up a racial minority, because they will never truly understand what it's like to have grown up racialized. But at the same time, I can never understand what it's like to be white and to have grown up white. So that's a funny question for me. It's interesting to me that you now say, “I was never marginalized.” I understand why you would say that because there were quote unquote ‘things wrong with you’ and you suffered because of that in the social environments that you were in, but what it sounds like you're saying is, you don't think it's necessarily useful to put that within a framework of political marginalization or of political oppression. Is that right?
I: Yeah, I think that's true. If the conclusion from this interview is like, “Wow, you've given me a lot to think about (being white),” I'm gonna—
JK: No, no, no, no, that is not the conclusion of this interview.
I: But, no, I think that you're right. Recently, in my life, I’ve started to engage with transness as a structure of political oppression rather than an identity, an identity to put in a Tumblr bio. I think all existence is politicized and all existence would be improved by some form of political revolution. But I don't think that my experience was politicized specifically through the framework of political oppression, as something which yokes people together in such constructions as class or race.
JK: I think that's [interesting] because obviously that [idea of one unifying oppression such as race or class] isn't necessarily successful [either] as a basis, because of intersectionality, right? But yeah, thank you for that insight. The conclusion of this interview is not, “Wow, it's so hard being white.” But it is a bit like, “Wow, it's so exotic being white.” Just kidding, that's also not what it is. But it's something that was kinda on my mind. Anyway, how did you and I first meet?
I: I first became aware of you in 2020. I was spending a lot of time on Twitter. I was also doing a lot of coordination for mutual aid groups, so I was really stressed the whole time. We were famously in a Kapital reading group conducted over Discord, and neither of us attempted more than one session, and [to this day] neither of us have read Kapital. Now, how the turn tables, I am going to be in a Kapital reading group with my girlfriend and my housemate, and this time we're going to do it.
[Two embarrassing anecdotes discussed here have been deleted by Jiaqi.]
Yeah, and then we were online friends. I think we talked a lot online during my famous year of misery when I was living in Germany. And then we first met for the first time in person at a coffee shop [in 2021] while I was in the middle of my 48 hour breakup cinematic experience. I was really stressed, but I really liked talking to you. We met in a more sustained way when I returned from my year of misery in Germany. We had coffee outside, and my clearest memory is of you showing me how you did what you called the ‘California teapot.’ Do you know what I mean? Where you would be like, [Irwin puts hand on hip] “I'm Jiaqi. What's your name?” You demonstrated this method of introducing yourself in a way where I was like, “Ah, this person's so cool.” So anyway, that's how we met. In multiple stages of embarrassment for me.
JK: And also me. All of those things are embarrassing for me.
I remember, actually, the first time we met in person was on the street, another time, earlier, when you were with your ex. And I remember that for a long time, I didn't know how to pronounce your name.
But yes, I'm so glad that we met and that we are friends because our friendship is extremely important to me. It really wasn't until we became friends in real life that I, for the first time, felt like I had someone to go to protests with.
I: Oh, that's really nice.
JK: Before that, I frequently felt deeply frustrated when it often felt to me like none of my friends wanted to go to protests with me. I didn't have any route of access into this. I [felt] really alone, and maybe I just didn't feel specifically that I could go together with this person [or that person]. Maybe I'm making it too black and white… But I think having that genuine sense of security and trust and, “Oh, I can hit up this person and they're gonna come with me no matter what. And if I do this thing, they're gonna do this thing. And if they do this thing, I'm gonna do this thing.” Being in step with someone politically. I think I didn't truly have that feeling of certainty with anyone before you.
I: I remember that being a thing that we said to each other at the start of the encampment. “If you do it, I'll do it. If I do it, you'll do it.” That felt like such a remarkable assurance to be able to offer someone. I felt both trusted and emboldened by being part of that compact with you.
JK: What does the word care mean for you?
I: I can talk about this, at least initially, by talking about a conversation I had with another friend, a person whom I care for a great deal. I’ll call her M. I was talking to M about a book that I've been talking to loads of people about, which is Let the Record Show by Sarah Schulman, an oral history of ACT UP New York. One of the remarkable things about the structure of ACT UP was that they would select a day of action, but then the vast majority of the actions would be performed within that [day] by individual affinity groups, such that you would have this remarkable simultaneous array of different actions being performed. You would have a group dressed up in clown makeup cycling around and you'd have a group who was like breaking into the CDC and you'd have a group on the roof of the CDC and you'd have a group doing this and that… Simultaneous and variegated affinity groups, and within those groups, as a result, you would have these really tight bonds. These were the people you would meet every week, outside of the big general meeting.
I was talking to [M] about the thing that is described in the book whereby those affinity groups, when someone got sick, would turn into structures of care. Because, you know, lots of people were sick, lots of people were HIV-positive. [The affinity groups] would turn into end-of-life care for a person. So the same people you had met to break down the doors with, would become the people who sat and waited while you, like, shat yourself, or had dementia, or couldn't see. Those would be the people in the hospital, those would be the people cleaning up after you. And my friend M was like, “Well, it's the same thing, isn't it? It just means not letting anyone get left behind. The person you wait for outside the police station once you've all got arrested becomes the person you wait to tell you what they need when they're dying.” And I thought that the thing of care being ‘no one gets left behind’ was really beautiful.
The idea of it being: care is the thing that has to sometimes make you slow down. Sometimes it can be a thing that makes you race ahead because it's like, “I care for you, you care for me, and we can run ahead together.” But sometimes there's something that makes you slow down, that forces you to be patient, and that also becomes something that you have to transfigure yourself around, you have to let yourself change around. You have to let care be a thing that can change you completely. A kind of kernel that you grow around, like a tree. I don't think trees come from kernels, but yeah. I found that really beautiful.
Another thing I've been thinking about a lot is the difference / overlap between ‘caring about’ and ’caring for.’ I think ‘caring for’ implies a relationship with mutual responsibility, and of intimate feeling. It is the thing that you were talking about with us, like, “If you do this, I'll do this.” That's what it is to care for someone.
But there's lots of stuff that I care about where I could have no point into caring for as a felt relation.
Part of what I think about a lot in my professional life is people not feeling the way they're supposed to, or lacking in feeling where they should have a lot of feeling. For me, also, being autistic and having what I've often thought is a strange relationship to tradition [in terms of] what I believe to be societal standards of empathy… I've thought a lot about how I can come to ‘caring about’ as an ethical and intellectual commitment without necessarily ‘caring for’.
I think it’s the Che Guevara quote where it's like, “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a friend of mine.” [nb. the quote uses “comrade”] That is something that immediately resonates, and you're like, “Ah, yes, that's what it is to be like an internationalist.” But when I stop and think about it, I'm like, “If you tremble with every injustice, your body would just shake apart, right?” Like, it's not actually possible to live in that state of feeling, of ‘caring for,’ all the time. But what it is maybe possible to do is to commit yourself to an unfailing ‘caring about,’ even if you're not trembling, or even if you're trembling more for yourself than you are for the people who are hundreds of miles away who are undergoing sufferings that you cannot comprehend. And in many cases, I don't think it would be just for you to claim to comprehend, or claim to be able to feel [what they feel].
This is all to say that care is, for me, intimately bound up with solidarity, and I don't think solidarity has to, or even necessarily should, rest on the felt intimacy that is conveyed by that idea of ‘care for.’ I'm in solidarity with lots of people where I would never claim to be intimate with what they are experiencing… And how solidarity can hold within it, not only difference, but distance. That's really important to me.
I guess I'm talking about two forms of care. One is this profoundly intimate, “I'll wait for you; I'll be patient for you; I'll let what you're becoming change what I've become.” And then another one is a kind of ethically committed and thought through, “I care about you; I will be with you; I will come when the time comes, even if I feel very far away from you.” This is also something about organizing, right? The informal sense of ‘I don’t care for’ where it's like, “I don't always like you.” The Arrested Development [quote that’s] like, “I don't care for Gob.” I ‘care about’ and organise with these people [that] I sometimes don't ‘care for,’ and sometimes I really don't care for. And that's okay. That's fine. That's what it is to be in community.
‘Caring about’ is also quite well expressed by the Emmanuel Levinas thing [of] looking the other in the face, and not trying to make their face your face. Not trying to assimilate their otherness, but holding their face entirely before your eyes all the same. That was another very long answer, but I think, yeah, those two strands of care are very important to me.
JK: Thank you. I remember you said that thing about looking in someone's face to me a really long time ago in a completely different context and I was really struck by it [then] as well. That was really powerful. Thank you for that.
I: I’ve been thinking about it a lot.
JK: What are some things you're currently looking to learn or learn about?
I: Every time someone asks me this or a version of this, like, “What are you gonna read next?” I feel like it cracks my brain up because I'm just like, “I just want to learn about everything.” I love to learn. I'm so excited by so many things.
What am I looking to learn about? I'm just gonna list things. I wanna learn more about the Naxalites. I wanna learn more about the US-sponsored counter-revolution in the seventies and eighties. I have been thinking a lot about Chile and Grenada—I was reading some Maurice Bishop stuff, and I was like, “Damn, I gotta know more about this.” What else am I looking to learn? Harm reduction; the history of harm reduction is not something I know a lot about, but also harm reduction as a practice. I don't know how to administer Naloxone. I would love to know how to administer Naloxone. I want to read Kapital. I feel like my commitment to internationalism is hampered by the fact that… I'm not quite monolingual (although the other language I speak is so fucking unhelpful), but I really want to learn Arabic, and I really want to learn Spanish. I want to learn about the practicalities of organizing in autonomous zones—I think about the Zapatistas, I also think about Rojava. That's something I really want to learn about at the minute. I'm so full of wanting to learn.
I feel like I'm gonna live my life just running… There's a poem by [Stephen Crane]. I really do have it on my wall.
[I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never —”
“You lie,” he cried,
And ran on.]
I think I'm going to be doing that with “What do you want to learn about?” for the rest of my life. Because, yeah, I always want to learn about stuff. I feel like I know so little stuff. And I want to know so much more stuff.
Squatting, I want to learn about squatting; thinking about squatting as both a political practice and a necessity. You gave me a book for my birthday that I read, [From Sylhet to Spitalfields by Shabna Begum] about the Bengali Housing Action Group in London in the 70s. God, so many things. This really scares me, thinking about it, like, “Oh damn. I don't know anything.” But that’s good! That's exciting.
[Silence]
I: Have you frozen, or are you being very still?
JK: I'm being very still. I'm thinking about how I love you. But I suddenly feel self-conscious because the two other interviews I've published already have me and the interviewee saying “I love you” to each other. And suddenly, I feel hyper-aware of the performance of saying that in an interview.
I: Yeah. It also creates a certain expectation, because if you say it—because also, I love you. And if we have this exchange, and then you interview other people, what happens if you interview other people and you don't say it? Then it’s gonna be difficult. [Laughs] I don't think it will be difficult. I think it will be fine. I think it’s allowed.
JK: But I'm prompted to say it [because I feel it]. [And yet] I feel an expectation to say it now. So I've created a trap for myself. But hearing about all the things you want to learn makes me… That's one of the many things that I love about you.
I: That's very nice. I love you very much.
JK: I love you too.
I: Reading the two interviews that have preceded this one have given me lots of things where I'm like, “I want to learn about that.” And that's pretty cool.
JK: Is there anything else that you would like to say or ask me?
I: I guess you’ve done two of these now. How are you feeling about it?
JK: I feel pretty excited. There's a lot of people that I want to do this with, but I think I'm also aware of the creation of an expectation, because I'm not doing this all in one go and then releasing [the interviews together]. People can read what's come before now, and that's odd.
I: Right! People are participating in a genre. But I also think it's very nice that the two that precede this, with A and with Sigrid, have set up such different senses of what this could be. I was reading them together again, and I was like, “Wow.” I guess this is one of the things about oral history, which is something we both wanna learn more about as a genre: its incredible capaciousness and the possibility to admit as many forms as there are speakers. And that's so cool and exciting.
JK: Do you have anything else you'd like to say?
I: Again, I'm feeling formal constraints because I feel like A, at the end, was like, “Free Palestine, that's all I wanna say,” and I was like, “Oh, that's so cool,” but I'm not gonna steal it. So, I don't have anything I wanna say.
JK: I mean, it wouldn't be stealing.
I: Okay. I can't steal “Free Palestine.” That's so true. Okay. Yeah. There you go.