Beyond Selidor

We're up to Day Twenty of the fandom meme:

T: Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending?

I'm not sure I'd quite go to the extreme of dying to defend it, but I remain eternally irritated with the ending of Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows series. I'll explain my irritation (and the headcanon which negates it) behind a cut, due to spoilers.

( Spoilers )

( The other days )

I would appreciate this post being shared, whether you are Australian or not.

Every morning this week I've woken up to increasingly terrible news from Manus Island, one of the locations of Australia's so-called 'offshore processing' of refugees seeking asylum in Australia. The situation is becoming desperate, and I'm seriously concerned for the wellbeing and safety of the hundreds of men held on Manus.

Before I go on, a content warning for human rights violations, violence, deprivation and trauma.

The refugees held there had been refusing to move from their current 'residence' (I use the term loosely) to another — in fear for their safety, and also due to the fact that the new 'residence' is not adequate (many of the rooms are simply shipping containers without windows). They have been protesting for three weeks. During this time, they have been deprived of food, water and electricity. They have rigged up a generator, and have been collecting rainwater in rubbish bins and rationing it out. As you can imagine, hygiene conditions are poor, and medical professionals have warned they are at serious risk of disease. The PNG authorities keep knocking over the collected water, as well as fouling it with mud to make it undrinkable. Most of the men were also on various forms of medication, but they have been denied access to this, as well as access to healthcare professionals of any kind; one man went into cardiac arrest and had to be helped over the phone by a doctor from Australia, and treated with nothing more than aspirin. Another man had severe pain from kidney stones, and another is suffering from diabetes. There are reports that the men formerly taking antidepressants have resorted to drinking 20 cups of coffee a day to replicate the effects.

Yesterday, the PNG authorities raided the camp, forcibly moving several busloads of the men to the new 'residence', as well as detaining the ringleaders of this impromptu resistence movement. Behrouz Boochani, a journalist and refugee from Iran, seems to have been deliberately targetted; he was detained and kept in handcuffs for two hours, and several of his fellow ringleaders were tweeting that the authorities were searching for them too. Although Boochani was released, he and the rest of his fellow protesters were forcibly moved last night (UK time). They were beaten with sticks and metal rods, and their belongings were destroyed. The new 'residences' are, as suspected, inadequate. There aren't enough beds -- many of the refugees have been forced to sleep on the floors of other people's rooms -- and there is no running water or electricity, including in the toilets. The locals have blocked the roads, meaning no food, water, or other supplies can get in or out.

We cannot let this go on. It shames us as Australians. The majority of these men have been found to be geniune refugees, and their resilience, resourcefulness, and compassion for each other should mean Australia would be lucky to have them. New Zealand has indicated that they would be willing to take several hundred of these refugees, but Australia is refusing to allow this. We must speak out. Imagine if these were your brothers, your husbands, your fathers or your sons. I don't have to imagine — MY father, like Behrouz Boochani, is a journalist, and it absolutely chills me to think of people in his field of work suffering like this. For those of you who think of these refugees as illegitimate 'queue jumpers', I'd like you to seriously consider if it would've been safe, as a political dissident, as a gay man in countrires where being gay is punishable by death, or as a resident of a country ruined by war, to wait it out in a 'queue' until Australia, or another safe country, had processed their refugee status applications.

Here are some practical things you can do to help.

The first, and most urgent thing to do is contact your political representatives. I would recommend contacting both Malcolm Turnbull, and your local MP, and possibly Peter Dutton. All are reachable by phone, or email. You can find the contact details by Googling 'contact NAME OF MP'. If you don't know who your MP is, you can find this out by looking up your address on the AEC website. That will give you the name of your MP and you can take it from there. I would strongly urg you to do so in particular if you live in a marginal ALP electorate. The Labor Party need to know that their current silence and policy on this issue is unacceptable and will have an impact on their vote.

If you want to do more than just shout into the void, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre is the place to start. They tend to need medical professionals of all kinds, as well as translators (especially Arabic, Farsi, and languages spoken in Afghanistan), at very short notice. If this is something you can help with, get in touch, or follow them on social media to keep up to date with what they might need.

If you celebrate Christmas, and you were going to send cards this year, might I recommend spending the money supporting a refugee charity instead? I will be doing so this year, donating to a UK-based refugee charity. In Australia, the ASRC is running a Christmas appeal. Donate here.

If a protest is happening in your city, go along. I am highly skeptical that these protests are going to move the hard hearts of our politicians, but I know that they lift the spirits of the refugees, so it's really important that they see that Australians haven't abandoned them. I know of rallies happening in Melbourne and Canberra this weekend, and I'm sure that there are others in the other major cities. If you need help finding out about protests in your city or town, let me know and I'll try to find out.

Finally, if you're on social media, and you feel able, you should follow these men and bear witness to what they are experiencing. Here are several accounts that I know of:

Behrouz Boochani: BehrouzBoochani
Ezatullah Kakar: EzatullahKakar
Walid Zazai: ZazaiWalid
Abdul Aziz Adam: Aziz58825713

I should warn that I find it deeply distressing to read their accounts, so make your own judgement as to whether this is something you can handle.

If anyone else has any suggestions, please feel free to make them in the comments. I am happy for this post to be shared anywhere you like.

I'm sorry I've been so absent recently. I just haven't felt much like blogging. It's strange how energy-draining I find my current job, considering it's only part-time and considering I've been doing similar work for the past four years! I think I may have to look into getting another blood test, as I've had ongoing problems with absorbing iron all my life, and my low energy levels may be related to this.

Aside from that, though, my job has made me more certain that I made the right decision in not staying in academia and pursuing work in libraries. My original library job always made me extremely happy (to the extent that I looked forward to going to work, which is something I've never experienced before in any other job), and I've loved the opportunities that this new job has given me. My weakness as a library assistant was always that I had no formal training in cataloguing, but I've since been taught how to do it. It's actually surprisingly simple, at least for the tasks I've been doing.

At the moment, I'm only allowed to work twenty hours a week, which rules out any second job or full-time work, and I'm thinking that once I've finished my PhD corrections, I'm going to try and volunteer at the local municipal library for one or two days a week. I'd like to try and spend as much time as possible on my feet, as well as gaining experience in a different library system, so that seems a sensible thing to do. At the moment, it's not feasible, as I need to spend some of my days off on my PhD, but I should be done by April.

Aside from work, I don't have a huge amount going on. Two weekends ago, my department had its annual postgrad student conference. I helped organise it several years ago, and I gave a paper there once, but these days I just go along, hear the papers, enjoy the conference dinner and catch up with friends from other universities. I don't usually enjoy conferences all that much - I find the need to be constantly chatty and engaged and making small talk during the tea breaks extremely draining - but I like this one, because it's basically a gathering for a whole bunch of my friends.

And that's basically it from me. Have some links.

Matthias first alerted me to this really excellent article by James Wood about the literature of exile and immigration. One line in particular jumped out at me: To have a home is to become vulnerable. Not just to the attacks of others, but to our own adventures in alienation. It just described so perfectly how I have felt about my hometown of Canberra, about my adopted hometown of Sydney, and about Australia itself, ever since I was eighteen years old. The weird thing is that I only left Australia when I was 23, and for a lot of the time, my own sense of displacement and vulnerability was related entirely to age, and not to a place. Being an adult made me feel dispossessed of my own identity, and I sort of transposed those feelings onto physical places. It was only when I moved overseas that I started to feel at home in my own skin and as if my mental identity mapped onto my physical identity again. But this came with a price: Australia doesn't feel like home any more. Wood's article conveys very nicely all my complicated feelings about place and migration and identity.

Here is a great article by Megan Garber about the peculiar power of nostalgia, and how it's been harnessed by the internet. As you can probably tell from all my wittering about home and identity, I'm an incredibly nostalgic person, so much so that I have a specific tag for it on Tumblr.

This article by Caitlin Flanagan about fraternities in US universities will make you really angry (and note: it contains discussion of abuse, hazing, rape and victim-blaming, so if those are things you'd rather not read about, don't click on the link), but is well worth a read. For more on rage-inducing fraternities, check out this article by Kevin Roose about a fraternity of Wall Street's wealthiest traders:

I wasn’t going to be bribed off my story, but I understood their panic. Here, after all, was a group that included many of the executives whose firms had collectively wrecked the global economy in 2008 and 2009. And they were laughing off the entire disaster in private, as if it were a long-forgotten lark. (Or worse, sing about it — one of the last skits of the night was a self-congratulatory parody of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” called “Bailout King.”) These were activities that amounted to a gigantic middle finger to Main Street and that, if made public, could end careers and damage very public reputations.

It's enough to make you sick with rage.

It's not all bad news, though. The recent extreme weather in Britain has exposed a prehistoric forest in Wales that had been covered by sand:

The skeletal trees are said to have given rise to the local legend of a lost kingdom, Cantre'r Gwaelod, drowned beneath the waves. The trees stopped growing between 4,500 and 6,000 years ago, as the water level rose and a thick blanket of peat formed.

Super cool.

Finally, the internet is kind of awesome. Two young women, raised in adoptive families on opposite sides of the globe, discovered each others' existence through the power of Youtube.

I hope you are all having lovely Mondays.

Life is a bit crazy at the moment. For the past couple of weeks, my supervisor and I have been discussing the final stages of my PhD, and yesterday we had a meeting where we sorted out four potential examiners. (I need two examiners, one from within my department and one from another university, but I need to nominate two potential people for each examination slot.) I've written my abstract and am at the point where I need to inform the university of my intention to submit...in September! I am both terrified and relieved to have got this far. But this means the next few months are going to be extremely sleepless.

I have had huge numbers of tabs open for weeks and weeks and weeks (and even resorted to emailing links to myself in order to close some tabs), just waiting for me to have the time to do a linkpost. I don't really have time, but I want to get these out there before too much time passes, so here they are.

I finally dusted off my Romanitas blog and posted the next of my commentaries. This one's for Romanitas Chapter 5, 'White and Silver'. I also wrote a fairly negative review of Juliet E. McKenna's Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution series on my Wordpress review blog:

I’m sad to say that the series just doesn’t work, or at least it doesn’t work for me. The problem is partly one of characterisation (I find all the characters clichéd collections of tropes rather than engaging human beings), but really one of believability. The problem is that the whole revolution is too easy.

This is an old post by sophiamcdougall about London, but it's so wonderful that you need to read it anyway.

Australian YA author Melina Marchetta is someone I really admire. She's constantly pushing herself in terms of what she writes, and is thoughtful and articulate about her writing and that of other people. This interview with blogger Jo at Wear The Old Coat is characteristically excellent:

I don’t believe that writing for and about young people is a public service. The problem about role models is that some people may believe a good female role model is someone who doesn’t have sex as a teenager at school. Other people may believe that a good role model is someone who challenges the establishment. Or someone who works hard and gets into university. Or someone who doesn’t have to go to university or college to succeed. I don’t think of role models or teaching lessons when I’m creating character. If I did have a secret wish of what I’d like to come out of my writing, it’s that someone feels less lonely. Or someone feels more connected. Or someone questions the status quo.

Another author very dear to my heart is kateelliott. I've mentioned before that I'm deeply interested in people on the margins of history, people who led fulfilling, happy and interesting lives, but whose stories were never recorded because the Powers That Be didn't view those people's activities as being important. Elliott is an author after my own heart. She puts such marginal people front and centre in her medieval (and nineteenth-century) inflected worlds. Her interviews and blog posts make it clear that this is a deliberate choice. If you're not reading her already, this latest offering might tempt you:

I am not, by the way, a monarchist nor do I yearn for the halcyon days of yore with a secret reactionary bent to my heart. The idea that epic fantasy is by nature a “conservative” subgenre is, I think, based not only on an incomplete reading of the texts but also on an understanding of the medieval or early modern eras that comes from outdated historiography.

I don’t doubt specific works can be reactionary or conservative (depending on how you define those words), but more often than not I suspect–although I can’t prove–that if a work defaults to ideas about social order that map to what I call the Victorian Middle Ages or the Hollywood Middle Ages, it has more to do with sloppy world-building in the sense of using unexamined and outmoded assumptions about “the past” as a guide. I really think that to characterize the subgenre so generally is to not understand the variety seen within the form and to not understand that the simplistic and popular views of how people “were” and “thought” in the past are often at best provisional and incomplete and at worst outright wrong.

Historian Judith Bennett calls this the “Wretched Abyss” Theory, the idea that the European Middle Ages were a wretched abyss from which we modern women/people have luckily escaped. It’s one of the founding myths of modern feminism as well as the modern world. Me, I want to live now, with internet, antibiotics, and that nice intensive care nursery that saved my premature twins. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t also responsible to depict a more nuanced and accurate representation of “a past” as it was lived and experienced as a dynamic and changing span.

And now, for a complete change of subject, have a link to a post about Oideas Gael, the Modern Irish language school where I've spent a couple of happy summers. It really captures the heart of the little village and the classes. I was sorry to hear from the post, however, that Biddy's (one of the three pubs in the Glen), has closed down. Its wall had a sign promising 'ól agus ceol', which is really all you could possibly want in a pub...

Love, Joy, Feminism is pretty much my favourite blog these days. It's written by Libby Anne, who grew up in an abusive fundamentalist subculture in the US, but broke away as an adult. She is an articulate, unflinching and persistent critic of the culture in which she grew up, and this makes her dangerous to those who promote that subculture as a way of life. If you feel up to it, I highly recommend her most recent series of posts, which are on homeschooling and its potential to exacerbate abuse and neglect. You can tell how rattled Libby Anne's posts are making some people, as she's receiving a huge backlash from the (so-called) Homeschool Legal Defence Association (an organisation that believes children have no rights, parents have complete ownership over their children and that any regulation beyond parents informing the state of their intention to homeschool is an infringement on parents' freedoms). I highly recommend reading everything Libby Anne writes.

Still on the topic of homeschooling, here is a post by Jon Bois about his homeschooling experience as a child in rural Georgia in the '90s.

Check out this TED talk about changing the way we talk about abuse and harassment. The gist of it is that men (are the perpetrators in not all, but most cases of abuse and harassment) should be told that being bystanders to abuse and harassment is a failure of leadership - that if they are in positions of authority or relative power, and they do nothing to investigate, discourage or stop abuse and harassment, they are failing as leaders.

Finally, have a read of Maureen Johnson's post about genderflipped YA book covers.

One thing guaranteed to make my hackles rise is the argument that because women didn't 'do anything important' or 'didn't contribute much, historically', before modernity, they can be left out of narratives taking place in, or inspired by, pre-modernity. By whose measure are we judging the activities of pre-modern women? Tansy Raynor Roberts expresses exactly what's wrong with such attitudes:

History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.

History is actually a long series of centuries of men writing down what they thought was important and interesting, and FORGETTING TO WRITE ABOUT WOMEN. It’s also a long series of centuries of women’s work and women’s writing being actively denigrated by men. Writings were destroyed, contributions were downplayed, and women were actively oppressed against, absolutely.

But the forgetting part is vitally important. Most historians and other writers of what we now consider “primary sources” simply didn’t think about women and their contribution to society. They took it for granted, except when that contribution or its lack directly affected men.

This ties in with something kateeliliott was saying about the fact that Cat, the protagonist in her Spiritwalker trilogy, is proficient at both swordplay and sewing, but when she finds herself stranded with nothing more than the clothes on her back, it's the sewing that saves her:

In book two, Cold Fire, Cat is thrown out into the wide world alone and far afield from the place she grew up. Basically, she finds herself with the clothes on her back and her sword as her only possessions. It would have been easy for me at this point to focus on Cat’s sword-craft.

Being confident with a sword is a useful competency for a young woman unexpectedly out on her own in an insecure and often dangerous world. Her ability to use the sword could become the most important and most visible of her skills as she continues her adventures.

But I did not want to imply that the skills most important to her ability to adapt to her new circumstances were solely or chiefly the skills that have long been culturally identified as “masculine,” such as fencing (fighting). I wanted to depict skills identified (in American society but by no means in all societies) as “feminine” as equally important to her survival.

Why? Because as a society we often tend to value the “masculine” over the “feminine.” “Masculine” is public and strong, “feminine” is private and (often) sexual, and frequently “feminine” concerns are defined as trivial and unimportant. Such definitions are cultural constructs, as is the relative value assigned to various skills and experiences.

Elliott tends to emphasise this concept in her writing. In her previous series, Crossroads, the main characters, married couple Anji and Mai, arrive with all their followers in a new land, and wish to settle. They are welcomed in partly because of Anji's military skills and large band of mercenaries (because the new land is at war), but it is Mai's skills, bargaining, barter and diplomacy, learnt at her family's fruit stall in the marketplace, for which they are really valued, and which save them time and time again. Elliott is committed to redressing an imbalance and writing traditionally 'feminine' skills as heroic, and it's one of the reasons she's one of my favourite authors.

This ties in with another interest of mine - the desire for survival, compromise and accommodation to be viewed as powerful and brave, as well as active rebellion and resistance and uncompromising, principled morality. Because sometimes, when you are dispossessed, survival and bargaining are all you've got - and they are powerful. (This is one reason why I was uncomfortable with the way the debate about the recent Lincoln film was being framed - as an either/or distinction between principled, uncompromising resistance and compromised negotiation. Of course the situation being debated was very different to what I'm discussing here - all the characters discussed were powerful, privileged men - but it was too black and white for my liking.)

Which brings me to my current reading material, Signs and Wonders by Marina Warner. And she says, of her novel Indigo (set in the colonial Caribbean and reframing The Tempest to give voice to the female characters),

Serafine (the Sycorax character) teaches my Miranda how to pass, how to survive, how not to attract attention and punishment. On the one hand, a storyteller will mould listeners to conform, but on the other hand she will try to open up possibilities by calling the rules into question. The relationship between Serafine and Miranda operates in this doubled way: Serafine is a captive of the colonial world, and there is no other way she could be - in those times, at the beginning of the twentieth century - but at the same time her stories open up alternatives for Miranda. So Miranda is brought up by Serafine to resist, even though the surface messages of the stories she tells her are conformist; covertly, Miranda learns otherwise.

This is exactly what I've been trying to get at. Heroism has many faces, and power is expressed in many different ways. We would do well to make room for this multiplicity.