Blueberries

by Ellena Savage

  Garlic stir-fried greens.

  Back home again, I search online.

  —Useless. Nothing.

  —A lot of people with names just like theirs. Even with their middle names, nothing.

  Tomas must have changed his name. For sure.

  —Coward.

  I think about hiring a private detective.

  I find one Tomas da Silva on Facebook, private account, and I message him.

  Do you know me.

  Blueberries

  I was in America at a very expensive writers’ workshop, maybe not expensive compared to say an MFA in America, but expensive enough that you’d have to save for a while to go, or else have someone pay your way, which I did, which was for the purpose of furthering my career as a writer-scholar under the auspices of a PhD in English at a university in Australia.

  I was in America at a very expensive writers’ workshop and I met a new soul friend, a woman whom I bonded with so intensely that by the end she told me that now she knew for sure that she wasn’t a dyke, and by the end I knew I still had it in me to love women like that, but in this case I turned it off, because it was something else, it was an innocent line of understanding between us.

  I was in America at a very expensive writers’ workshop with my new-found soul friend, complaining that our very expensive faculty was somewhat mediocre—not the faculty member I was studying directly under, more specifically two of the very expensive male faculty who didn’t prepare lectures and just ad-libbed at the almost all female, almost all forking-out-money-they-didn’t-have students, who stared blindly and adoringly into the giddy promise that a two-thousand-dollar ticket offers on you.

  I was in America at a very expensive liberal arts college, sitting on my rubber prison-issue mattress, trying to punch words on my two-hundred-dollar laptop that would turn ‘I went to a very expensive writers’ workshop and it wasn’t perfect’ into a salient political argument about the friction of class and gender and race against the surface of art in real-world institutions, and I was eating blueberries and I was naked but for my black silk robe, and I was disappointed not for the first time that ‘excellence’ was turning out to be mediocrity dressed up in money and maybe masculinity too, not the masculinity that is visible to us, brawny and street-smart, but real masculinity, which is reedy and tepid and well read and invisible.

  I was sitting in a very expensive American college chapel, locked in the centre of a pew by bodies sitting at either end, listening to one reedy and tepid and well-read faculty member tell us that he’d considered reading us a lecture, which was also the introduction to his most recent book, but instead he’d decided to just stage a chat with us about general nonfiction concepts, and in doing so revealed that his sister no longer speaks to him because of the way he figured her in his books, and he can’t for the life of him understand why, but that they are still in touch for the sake of his daughter, who—he reminded us several times—suffers from a ‘weight problem’. The faculty member with the mute sister and the fat daughter later ended up embroiled in a workshop scandal, which saw the only woman of colour present abandon the classroom, and the only woman over the age of forty—a school teacher in her other life, apparently—take him aside to explain to him what he’d done wrong, for which he scolded her, the boom of it ricocheting down the corridor into the other very expensive workshops. He had simply critiqued a young woman’s writing against the clothing she was wearing, and couldn’t for the life of him understand why this had been so badly received.

  I was in America, sleeping at the kind of very expensive liberal arts college that is so progressive it has gender-neutral toilets in some of its buildings, which is good, and necessary, a hard-won victory for all, though I choke at the thought of admiring a university that confuses charging its students eighty thousand dollars a year with radical acts, by which I mean what is the significance of gender-neutral toilets within an institution whose barriers to entry are configured so that, for example, a new migrant with modesty obligations as part of their religious convictions could or would never earn a degree within its walls, which is not to say that a new migrant with certain convictions would oppose the existence of a gender-neutral toilet but rather that it is something which cannot be tested or even really considered, because the unofficial motto codifying the morality of this college is ‘communism, atheism, free love’, all of which are sentiments I can get behind except for when these sentiments are possibly actually celebrating individuals wealthy enough to be free from class, free from community and free from the need to develop lasting bonds of mutual obligation, all because these individuals have benefitted from some radiant power whose axis remains mysterious to them. I was worried, at this very expensive writers’ workshop, that the wool so to speak had been pulled over our eyes, that we had been stooged, that what we had been made to believe was most pressing was simply that which we could most readily and tokenistically address, i.e. accommodating wealthy queers into mainstream wealthy spaces, and I suspect that this is what is meant by hegemony, rule through the consent of the ruled, the distraction from material problems that are categorical and unsolvable by championing ‘issues’ that can be solved today by changing a sign on the door, issues that serve to empower individuals within a cloistered class environment rather than upend the economic inequity that is the foundation of institutions like it and, who knows, maybe they’re the same thing but probably they’re not. Hegemony is always at some level coercion, it is trickery, and the problem of this expensive college is not that it is a transphobic institution per se—though there is no doubt that it is—but that it naturalises an elite class into the logic of its own superiority and the violence of this could only ever be remedied by burning this institution to the ground and who in their right mind would do such a thing.

  …

  There were five minutes in which to pee during the break in a very expensive writers’ workshop session and so with fifty women in the halls lined up for the stalls, I entered the male toilets—black and white tiles, Edwardian brass taps—and as I left the cubicle the reedy, well-read male faculty member walked in and he was shocked, he was really astonished to see me exit a cubicle in the so-called male toilets, and really? This is of course one of the many reasons why we need gender-neutral toilets; one of the many reasons being that same-sex spaces seem to produce uncomfortable and sinister interactions. When I was a young woman in the Women’s Room at uni I freaked out a lot that I was a fraudulent feminist because I wore lipstick and I lived with my boyfriend, who was religious, and I didn’t feel that the statement ‘women aren’t safe anywhere but here’ was factual because in some ways I didn’t feel safe in the moral judgement of that space, and I identified more with my boyfriend even though he believed in structures I couldn’t see, ones spelled out in ancient texts, than I identified with these women with sturdy egos and chunky shoes, because he and I both lived in invisible places and we both worked shitty jobs for unpleasant people and we neither of us felt particularly entitled to anything much, but that was when I really believed in what you’d call class difference, and now I think perhaps that race and gender produce different class affects, and they produce variation in the ways that people learn to speak for themselves, and I understand better now that although I have no money, I am thinking about the toilets at a very expensive liberal arts college and this stands in for something, it stands in for a kind of class mobility that I have because maybe my race is my class now, or my class is the class of my peers, and part of me is proud to say that some of my friends now are borderline famous.

  I was naked but for my black silk robe, wondering why it was that when I was eighteen I became the first person in my family to go overseas for anything other than economic migration and that this was it now, me making it, eating blueberries at an expensive liberal arts college complaining about expensive mediocrity which I didn’t even pay for, waiting till it would be time for the sun to fade over the outdoor amphitheatre with a pond behind it
where ducks would mate violently, and we’d all chuckle at that and strain harder to hear authors tell us stories that were not mediocre but not brilliant either because brilliance isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, just stories by storytellers, just storytellers shooting tendrils of words like silk at us, which we’d plant in our ears—the possibility of new constellations.

  I was walking around moderately priced south-eastern Portland with my new-found soul friend, sweating and attempting to determine whether the rock-dog knuckleheads wearing AC/DC shirts on the streets were in fact real knuckleheads or if maybe they were ironic knuckleheads, which would make them more genuinely knuckleheaded, and this made me feel indignant and critical and cool yet also aware that a person could look at me and my sweat, my greasy hair and my dirty Nike Frees and think something similar about me too.

  I was walking around moderately priced south-eastern Portland with my new-found soul friend, talking about writing and aspiration and how complicated these things were, like how do you live outside capitalism and still have dirty Nike Frees. We talked about the impossible, egotistical nature of feeling called upon to spend every day, each moment, give or take, writing, and the times not writing, either talking about writing or suppressing the urge to write in order to pay the dues of living in the real world, but also that conversely no one cares to give their permission for you to write, because it is a luxury of the gods, so you end up with this feeling like it’s so hard, and I’m so marginal because in spending your time writing you offer very little to capitalism or, frankly, your community, yet on the back of your unpaid labour, festival organisers, publishers, printers, distributors and academics earn middle-class salaries. An idea I have is that arts professionals could tithe ten per cent of their incomes to pay the artists whose labour affords them their jobs, but this is an aggressive stance because there are other benefits to the role of the writer, benefits like authorship and hypothetical interestingness and sexiness too, particularly (or solely) for the young.

  Before I was in America at a very expensive writers’ workshop, a person asked me the question ‘how did you become a writer’, which I wasn’t sure I was, and the story as it plays out in my mind is that I became a writer (if that was what it was) when I started to realise that I wasn’t loved and that maybe I never would be: I was nineteen and poetry was snaking out of me because I felt badly treated, or I was newly aware that I’d colluded in my self-annihilation and the love I had sought out up until then was shit. I became a writer when I learned that I was a person and not just a figure inside another person’s libidinal imagination—I am still not entirely that, though, a person; still part of my brain is lobotomised by the fantasy of glory and worthiness in libidinal abjection and I have to somehow live with that. But that wasn’t how I responded to the question. Instead I said something about failing to be good at university and failing to write decent American short stories and contemporary poetry and metred poetry too but still feeling compelled to have my new-found being seen: dancing was off the cards, wrong body, and music was my mother’s trade, and acting made me nervous about lying, and painting was expensive. And so writing was like a triumph of being, it was the first claim I made on living outside someone else’s love or not-love, approval or contempt, and at the same time it was a culmination of a failure of all other things. And this was not exactly the right answer or true, but it was not a lie, either.

  I was wrapped in my black silk robe sucking blueberry juice from my fingers, relishing the colour of it inky and regal, pure decadence, because where I live blueberries are strictly a seasonal treat, but in the Pacific Northwest they’re normal priced and abundant. The college food at this very expensive writers’ workshop was locally sourced and organic, which you certainly can’t argue with, but which brings up in me confused feelings about how morality is understood in places like this very expensive liberal arts college, as an innocuous topic but a cruel one, useful for slinging indictments across dinner-party tables, dinner parties at which the worst thing that could happen is that somebody might assume a passive-aggressive tone and another might fiddle silently in their discomfort. This dynamic is very common in the place I live, in places where your moral character extends from your decision to shop either at the shoddy little independent grocer, where the capsicums are wrinkled and shelves are half empty, or across the street at the organic grocer, where ten dollars will get you a packet of black teabags and little else. These scenes of dinner-table righteousness can only occur where the wars are buried deep underground, where the morality is decided, it’s so over, because there’s no situation left to test it against, no one who will scream let alone kill for anything more trifling than a pub brawl or a hatred of women, and the only way to be good here is to eat seasonally and organically, but still sometimes I shop at the independent grocer with the wrinkled capsicums out of a confused sense of class loyalty, and to make up for it I grow my own food a little and badly, and I scatter these pea-green snail pellets because I fear for the saplings, and the pellets are of course poison, I am poisoning the soil, and in my culture, this niche, comfortable and rather unpleasant culture, this sort of implies I am a bad person and I don’t consider myself that, not really, but I am a person trapped inside a matrix of bad ideas bad histories bad reactions. Bad spirits trapped under my house back home move through the pine floors at night and I am sure the dread they impress on me is the hymn of a pellet-poisoned earth.

  I was wrapped in my black silk robe pushing velvet blueberry skin against the roof of my mouth, a fleshy eruption, thinking about what it might mean to reintroduce shame into my culture, a thought experiment based on a conversation I had with a friend who is a judge’s assistant and like me formerly a Catholic, about some of the things they’d forgotten to include in the law regarding women’s safety, for example in my state it’s not illegal to trick someone into having unprotected sex by providing false documentation of blood-test results and it’s not illegal to start the sex consensually with a condom and then remove the barrier sneakily and ejaculate inside the woman, and this seems not only humiliating but dangerous, and yet the only thing you can really do about it is tell your mates and maybe if you’re a bit aggro have a male friend go round to their house with a cricket bat, but basically you’re on your own and imagine if you had a weapon called shame in your arsenal. But shame is useless these days, we only feel it about weight gain or having poor parents or being bullied at school, it’s the wrong way around. What if shame, I thought, if shame was available to leverage against the selfish the dangerous the racist the gross, and this reminded me of the propriety involved with the organic-food moralism, which, while it may in fact be correct, as in, organic food is possibly better for the environment, it seems to be more about the entitlement of an elite class to impose its moral directives on the people whose labour allows them to be elite in some way or another, just as the moral temperament of the Victorians justified their aggressive economic expansion, their commitment to religious and moral regulations serving as a tool of dominance. And this is not quite the same, but it is often the people for whom power is not a birthright who consume decadently in public and I’m not talking organic-blueberries decadent I’m talking high-school girls in Juicy Couture I’m talking fine dining on a teacher’s salary I’m talking health spas in Bali on a builder’s salary, which we’re supposed to tut-tut even if we’re not the elite, because people who have bad taste in things are extravagant, are not supposed to have the money, and they’re not supposed to be wasteful like the true elites who eat organic blueberries. And these food politics being the site of moral rigour in a scene in which it’s basically legal to non-consensually ejaculate inside a woman invokes a desire in me to bring back Victorian repression but in the inverse—meaning bring back shame and maybe even honour, but the shame in this instance will be imposed upon the aggressive expansionists, on the church and the institutions that possess that authority now, and concede that the moral fortitude belongs to the people whose labour cre
ates the organic-blueberry wealth. I know it’s unpopular now, even, especially, on the left, where I situate my thinking, but I am somewhat concerned that God is nowhere anymore—and, well, it’s religion’s fault, it shamed the wrong acts—because this aggressive accumulation now simply justifies itself.

  I was wrapped in my black silk robe sucking blueberry juice from my teeth at a very expensive liberal arts college when I read an interview with a friend of a friend, a writer who said that he always knew he was a writer, and I thought, bullshit, that only means he always knew he was an ‘I’, he was never a girl who imagined herself only in relation to, an object of the writer. Growing up I thought I would be an artist, as in a painter like my grandparents were, but really it was Grandpa who was the artist and Grandma was a glass-cutter an illustrator a drawer a teacher, it was she who did the housework and it was she who went to work when there was no money coming in. And to me, then, being an artist meant some weird conjugation of maker and muse, lover and wife, intellectual and subordinate, living wrapped in a black silk robe. I had a friend in high school who, like me, loved drawing singing acting reading, and we talked a lot about one day maybe becoming someone’s muse, like, we were always ironic about it, ha-ha, but there was a touch of the Simone d. B. syndrome about it too: the only way we could imagine being something was attaching ourselves to its author, a living person in a male skin. We were pretty enough and precocious enough that boys wanted to get with us, so that’s what we thought the route was (no pun); the goal I think was to get higher status guys in the cultural sense to want to fuck us, and that that would be some act of creation. But no, it’s not. It’s not. This friend’s mum worked as a curator so when we were sixteen-seventeen we’d get to go to openings that were so extravagant and high class, and we’d wear luscious op-shop outfits and cheap-as heels and men would comment on how pretty we looked and we were able to think right then: this is access, this is the beginning of making it, even though those guys were just her mum’s colleagues being mildly inappropriate and if there was anyone we’d actually want to get with it was one of the uni student casual workers behind the bar. And so at these events, these openings, I never once thought my name could be on the wall one day, though I was aware I could if I played my cards right end up like my peers, naked on the wall, represented by somebody else, so instead I’d just look to the immaculately dressed women who always introduced the artist and I’d think: there is an important woman. She’s wealthy, she’s charismatic, and it looks like she’s at the centre of power. But she’s not, or not entirely, she’s just got a nice suit and a rich family maybe, and when she’s dead in most cases no one will remember that she was ever alive. Then one day me and my friend were at a big gallery and I looked at a wall of photographs of famous European artists, artists whose faces you’d recognise as those of famous European artists, and for some reason I saw it all at once laid out and the only thing I could say was ‘Where are all the women artists’, like I had only just noticed, which could as easily have been where are all the Aboriginal artists where are all the trans artists where are all the Asian artists, except that we’re talking about a group that constitutes fifty per cent of any otherwise marginalised population and any privileged one too. My friend laughed at me, but I could see that she knew it too, and we had both been raised by women who made art of various kinds but hadn’t made big enough splashes to be up on that wall, and after that it became a line I said all the time—where are all the women—and this appeared hostile, maybe obnoxious, like I had been a feminist all my life but until then I hadn’t always been complaining. Maybe it didn’t happen just like that. But I remember the heat in my cheeks when at once I knew I couldn’t laugh anymore about women’s abjection. The normal woman who is just an object and the muse is the signifier’s mistress. The feminist woman is the signifier’s ex-girlfriend who he tells everyone ‘has got a bit stalk-y’.