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zealand
October 17, 2017
As a child, all I knew about New Zealand was that it was the safest landmass on earth in the case of nuclear war between the US and the USSR.
A Cold War education, one that recently seems relevant again. A Jewish education, where I learned more about Israel than I did about Britain; certainly, more than I learned about British imperialism.
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I wasn’t just raised by the Cold War and Zionism. I had Sesame Street too.
This isn’t about how a liberal American 1970s vision of multiculturalism and pun-laden songs saved me. It’s not even about why the show’s creators decided that Mr. Snuffleupagus had to be visible:
In the wake of news reports about child abuse cases [in the mid-1980s], Big Bird’s implausible eyewitness testimony about his oversized friend might have real-life consequences. If adults were ignoring Sesame Street’s biggest star, would kids feel like they wouldn’t be heard, either?
Today’s tinyletter is brought to you by the letter Z.
School said “zed.” But Sesame Street said “zee.” I said both until I was seven: ex, why, zee, zed. 27 letters.
Was it the mediator-peacemaker in me, child in a household of domestic violence, who pitched for both/and (and let’s call the whole thing off)? Or the feminist experimental writer who believed—believes—in plenty, and in the great power of destabilising assumed truths and the language of the status quo?
Either way: this is my 27th and final letter. I felt, this week, like we needed it. Like I needed it.
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You’d think that, after writing this pissed-off post of “activist wisdom” and contributing to Raising Film’s open letter on addressing systemic harassment and discrimination, I’d be sick of the sound of my own voice. Or realise that you are.
I am.
Or rather: I am sick of the sound of the choked, pleading, breathless voice that I thought was mine. The voice that I hear in recurring nightmares where I am begging an authority figure—someone busy telling me just how small I am—to listen. Sometimes in those dreams, I am also drowning in a dark ocean, still calling out.
This tinyletter project has given me—your listening has given me—the chance to try out a new voice: slower, more thoughtful, perhaps more capacious. Less of an emergency, but more urgent, to paraphrase Donna Haraway’s neat and helpful formulation. More open to being wrong, to working it out.
Not so much in my head, more in my chest. Breathing, not drowning. Resonating up from the ground that my boots, because I have the privilege of being able to stand, stand on.
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I think we all have an inner Zealand—ringed by zee, the Dutch for sea; moated—where we go to feel we have ground to stand (sit, lie) on, when the attacks begin, or begin to be talked about. When the trigger (q.v.) is pulled.
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That’s where many of the people that I know—friends, colleagues, admired artists—are this week. Or want to be. Or half-want to be, and are half-stepping out in rage and solidarity. We are all, collectively, realising that is where we have been, when it comes to sexual assault and harassment in the film industry (as in many other industries and institutions).
Even those of us who are—as I like to think of myself—feminist activists; who think we have listened; who think we have acknowledged structural power and its intersectional violence. We have not. We have all internalised the domination that works, not least, through silencing; through the belief that we will destroy only ourselves if we speak out, or seek justice.
That (that internalised domination says) we are to blame, whatever we do.
So we need zealand, we do. We need a place to be where, even if for a brief moment, we can stop blaming ourselves; can stop feeling constantly under threat; can maybe think about what to do next.
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But—and because—zealand is also, strangely, where we keep our memories of previous attacks and threats: a silo, chosen for its distance and isolation from other parts of ourselves.
This conflation of flight and storage is what Sigmund Freud intuited from the nightmares of soldiers who returned from WWI, who dreamed with precision of the moment of the attack that should have left them dead, repeating with uncanny accuracy a kind of documentary memory every night.
Shell-shocked. We are shell-shocked.
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What happens with life-threatening trauma (and a sense of vulnerability can make any attack feel life-threatening: attackers use that threat of both homicidal and reputational violence to buy passivity and silence), as Freud intuited and greater thinkers such as Judith Herman have gone on to demonstrate, is that we literally cannot experience it in the moment. It is too much. All our senses and skills are focused on surviving, which we couldn’t do if we thought—actually—about what we were facing.
At the same time, we are on high alert, so our senses and faculties record every detail, in case it is a clue about what comes next, or how to escape. And all this information—what we experienced, and how it would have felt—is stored away; experimental psychologist Antonio Damasio suggests in the amygdala.
How clever and sensitive our mindbodies, what fine-tuned tools of survival. But when we get to some as-if place of safety—some temporary zealand—the silo spills, and the question becomes: What do we do with this knowledge? About the world, about ourselves.
We need to remember that the mindbody knows what it is doing in this too, even though it might (it does for me right now) feel like having an erupting volcano in my chest, a buzzsaw in my ears, and legs made of concrete.
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One of the things we know—I know, although I struggle to know I know, so please take this as addressed to the you (q.v.) that is me, as well as (if it feels relevant and/or helpful) the you that is you—is that we feel powerless.
We feel powerless when the attack—assault, abuse, harassment, violation, rape, beating—happens; and we feel powerless when we remember it; and we feel powerless when we (are called upon to) speak it—even to speak it only to ourselves.
And we feel powerless when we speak it (even if only to ourselves), and the incalculable damage done, by the attack/s (which are, after all, symptomatic of a culture of domination under which we all live, but which rewards and punishes us asymmetrically along lines of oppression based on constructions of difference that relate, in some measure, to vulnerability) to our self-worth, integrity and agency isn’t magically healed in the way that all those inspirational memes and movies said it would be.
However many people (and it has been many, on social media and offline this week) do support us, amplify us, listen to us, share their stories, parse the nuances of speaking out, band together with us, soothe us, speak truth with and to us, hold us, make us laugh, be there when we cry, engage us respectfully, believe us, plan solutions with us…
Because the people who do not listen, who do not speak in support, are the ones we hear. Because they are the ones that we want to hear us. They are the powerful, and part of their power—their privilege—is not listening.
And when we listen only to them—I am not saying that they should not be held accountable, that they should not have to respond—when only their voices or responses count, we let them take even more of our power.
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Because here is why we feel powerless: I did not give up my power; it was taken from me.
This is something that I have to tell myself, and I was an infant (in-fans: pre-speech) the first time I was raped. I still blame myself. Because I don’t want to feel that I had no power; that I had no agency. I don’t want my attacker to have taken that away from me.
But I was born into a culture that disempowered me from the start, because I was assigned female at birth. In Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine presents studies from Eurowestern countries that show physiological changes in placental nutrition and hormonal delivery when a pregnant person is told that the foetus they are carrying is assigned female. There are also (unconscious) changes in interactions with the foetus, including change of vocal tone and frequency of speech, as well as descriptors used.
That is definitely not because sex is a biological binary, but because our socialisation into the hierarchy predicated on the construction of binary sex/gender is so forceful that it is internalised at physiological levels.
That does not mean it is inescapable—that passivity is inescapable if you are assigned female or if you are feminised. Is there a way to say “you are not to blame” that does not also feel like it means “because you are powerless.”
The silo spills, and the question becomes: What do we do with this knowledge? About the world, about ourselves. It is in our decision about what we do now, when we are out of the attack zone, that our agency resides.
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And this is why—bear with me—Gal Gadot was literally the absolute perfect casting for the film that Wonder Woman was.
What a shameless self-confession of the grotesque and destructive fantasy of militant power-over on which both the blockbuster film and imperialisms depend.
Because if not zealand, then zion. Zionism is the other fantasy I was given of where to go when you feel powerless. It has taken me a long time to unlearn.
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A lot of smarter, better-informed people than me have written about Zionism as a collective response to the continuous historical traumas of anti-Semitism and the Sho’ah.
I do not deny those realities or their incalculable traumatic effects.
But I am wary of zion: of revenge. Of militant masculinisation. Of walls and borders and torture. Of claims to exceptionalism. Of any sense of self, or as-if safety, that is fundamentally (or in any way) built on the oppression and exclusion of others.
It’s oh so tempting, to believe that being powerful means taking power. Except: that power has to be taken from somewhere, from someone. And that is what attackers and abusers do. That’s why they took y/ours.
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Our culture has a power addiction. And it glamorises it relentlessly, in every story that hinges on someone taking power. Sure, those stories often depict the violent and unethical means by which they do; and follows with their inevitable downfall. And we get our kicks from both the rise and fall. And—feeling that we have learned about power, but amped on the narrative—we do nothing to challenge it.
The treatment for power addiction is not the catharsis of a revenge tragedy, nor its modern variants: a spectacle of celebrity-led reporting, a few weeks in an expensive spa (sorry, “sex addiction” clinic for wealthy white straight cismen), and a false and defensive “apology.”
It does involve acknowledging that many abusers were abused themselves—but it doesn’t mean stopping there. We have to acknowledge, also, that many more survivors do not become abusers, and we need to know what makes the difference. So that the abusers can do the work.
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Or (I ask myself) is there a difference?
I am complicit. #Metoo.
I bullied my younger siblings
I was a Zionist, and I am still learning not to be
I have used my fear as an excuse for rage and other oppressive behaviours
I have been verbally aggressive, and used my educational privilege to shut down debate
I have continued to work for a man who harassed and attempted to assault me, and others
I have continued to work within and for oppressive and exploitative institutions that employ and defend abusers and attackers
I have retreated into my zealand and been too wrapped up in myself to be an accomplice
I have not been outspoken enough, or done enough, about benefitting from whiteskin privilege, from colonial privilege, from class privilege, from educational privilege, from passing as heteronormative, from passing as cisgendered, from passing as able-bodied.
I have had to learn consensus-building. I have had to learn to listen. I had to learn not to be so afraid of losing my (illusion of) power that I couldn’t admit I was wrong; that I couldn’t admit I was closed-off; that I couldn’t admit I was vulnerable and afraid.
I had to learn to want peace rather than the constant threat level my adrenaline addiction demanded to justify itself.
I had to learn to love: to be open to another person without feeling like I was giving away my power. I’m still not that good at it, but I want to do the work to learn to be better.
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I have not done enough to thank and celebrate and support and amplify the people who have been so patient with me while sharing their wisdom and their lives and their learning and their love. I do not live what I have learned as well as they live and teach it.
I have been heard and held and honoured, and I have not valued it, because all I can hear and feel is power’s continuing cold silence. And I have been power’s accomplice in this, too.
I have devalued you, and I have devalued myself. #Metoo.
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There are two powerful words in the hashtag, which was started ten years ago by consultant, blogger and advocate Tarana Burke.
- Too: Burke calls it “empowerment through empathy.” Community, solidarity, support network, critical mass, the choral. The realisation that abuse and assault are not special (as your attacker wants you to believe—you, the chosen [people]) but banal, in Hannah Arendt’s sense. It is collectively experienced and collectively practiced.
- Me: If we accept “too,” then “me” cannot mean atomised individualism and its will to power. It cannot mean the lonely Strong Female Character. It means saying: this—this collective narrative of power addiction and its assaultive effects—belongs to me. It is mine. It is inside me, one of a complex set of interlocking factors shaping my interactions with my self and others, every day. And because of that, because I am accountable for it, that is what gives me agency: I can decide what to do with this narrative. Preserve it and perpetuate it, or do the work to dismantle it.
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#metoo was never about me; about all our me’s. It was about you and about us. It was about realising that no one is a zealand.
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I always thought of writing—even for publication—as a kind of zealand. In the belief that the kind of writing I do, whether experimental poetry or feminist film criticism or personal blogging, stands at an isolated distance from the mainlands of human activity. I chose these forms, in some way, for their zealandic qualities.
I’ve always been afraid to be read: both for what (I think) I’m stating clearly; and for what is coded and hidden from me. Or, what I mean is: I’ve always believed that only certain readers “count”—those with power, who are waiting to call me out, call me an impostor, punish me, reveal me.
It’s like living through the Cold War waiting for the bombs to fall, while paying no heed to the quiet collective of activists holding up the sky with songs and signs that another world is possible.
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Yet here you are, holding up the sky.
Because of you, I am not hiding in zealand any longer (although if you are, if you need it, I understand). Because of you, I am not braced for the fight in zion. I am, precariously, here, as you have been, so generously.
Even for this extra letter, which disturbs one of the most basic facts we are given in Anglophonia: the alphabet has 26 letters.
Here we are, together. Swimming in the zee.