Everything then was rich with abundance. And everywhere was true danger.
…
At the age of seventeen, Jamaica Kincaid was sent from her native Antigua to New York City to work as a domestic servant to earn money for her family. Once there, she decided to cease her remittance payments to her mother. They had had a difficult relationship. Her mother, Kincaid felt, had discarded her when the younger siblings came along. Kincaid soon began building a life of her own, an act of radical autonomy: she found a job in a photo store, started writing, started writing for the New Yorker, converted to Judaism, started writing novels, leading her to us, to her readers. In an interview, she once said that when she was ten, her French teacher shoved Jane Eyre in her hands to read as a punishment for disrupting the class. She says: ‘Jane Eyre transformed my life…I started to think the possibility of living outside the prescribed life. And my prescribed life was I was a servant.’
Jane Eyre is a book that transforms the lives of many girls unhappy with their station. Badly behaved and hungry girls. Well-behaved girls find their pleasures and permissions elsewhere. On her arrival in New York, Kincaid was five foot seven inches. Within two years she was just shy of six feet. ‘Certain things I had left home with, I outgrew rapidly,’ she says. ‘One of them was the feeling that I would always be this person, my mother’s daughter. I quickly outgrew that. And in this state I became a person who could write, who wanted to write.’
…
In the eighteenth house, I learned to write, or learned to imagine that I would be a writer. To sit at a desk, or stand by it, and not leave until something was achieved. To comprehend money as a tool for securing empty time for this process. Live poor. Reconfigure self-worth differently from friends with jobs and relationships that mattered much more than my own. The lonely labour of it. Unimaginable time. The cost of my room, in this crumbling haven, was three hundred and thirty-three dollars a month, the same as it had been for fifteen years before I arrived. A third of what friends who lived in sharehouses round the corner paid. Without the archaic lease, there would be no writing. At least, none of my own.
In the eighteenth house, I learned to discipline space. Not the communal spaces, which were beyond human control. But my room, my own room, with the black mould blooming across the ceiling. Trapped there for so many dead hours, writing, not writing, I polished and arranged my glass objets with neurotic glee, trimmed and wiped the fronds of tropical plants, swept beneath every dark underside. Light stabbed through my window pane onto a prim arrangement: tiny golden echidna. Marbled glass egg. A chain of nasturtiums cascading along the edge of my desk. I washed and sunned my white sheets every Saturday morning.
‘I don’t know where you came from,’ my parents would say when they came to visit. People I brought home, however, were impressed. A boyfriend deduced from it that we could never live together; that if you followed the nasturtiums’ tendril to its source, you’d find there a twisted madness. And he was right. My aspiration, so sharp it felt immoral, to own a white monad of my own, pin photos to the walls that no landlord could ever take from me, install cupboards with my bare, unskilled hands—this was the opposite of the animal woman lurking inside me, the one who threatened sometimes to take over.
This Australian is passionate about property.
To have a place to transform and not have to leave. Which is the spiritual end to private property. (A Jesuit friend once said, ‘When you leave a place, really leave.’ A sentiment that fills me with unease.)
…
The adage ‘property is theft’ is something of a provocation. I heard my parents say it when I was little, and took it then as a given. Coined by the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1840, it has been applied by Marxists and anarchists to suggest that, at best, private property operates against the principle of human equality. It suggests that, at its worst, property is the means and material of exploitation. Is there a place on earth where this is truer than Australia?
Australians are passionate about property.
In the sixth house, actually a medium-density townhouse, a mushroom sprouted from between the laundry sink’s broken tiles. The place had been handed down through a decade of first-house-out-of-homers. My older brother introduced me into the system. My brother, who thought that maybe if you tipped a pot of old lentil soup out in the backyard, lentils might sprout. The more desperate the housemates’ financial circumstances, the longer they stayed. Many of the original house keys were missing, and quite a few of the doors could be easily opened using a credit card, front door included. None of the windows had flyscreens. Nothing ever smelled right. Five of us crammed into a three-bedroom townhouse—Cat lived in the garage. But I paid something between fifty-five and seventy-five dollars a week—as much as I could then afford—and the location was primo. Eventually, the landlords, who’d never invested in the upkeep of the property—how could they?—found a loophole and kicked us out, slapping us with a three-grand bill.
In the circles I run in, it is considered improper to not bring any landlord horror stories to the party. What are you—a prince? I imagine the people on the other side of the town, or maybe just a street away, whose dinner-party capital hangs on horror-story renters.
What Proudhon says is that private property, here meaning the possession of real estate for the purpose of profiting from rents, produces an asymmetrical power relation between landlord and tenant. Asymmetrical power relations produce despotism. Property, Proudhon writes, is ‘the right to use [something] by his neighbour’s labour’. Or in other words: to ‘live as a proprietor, or to consume without producing, it is necessary, then, to live upon the labour of another’. Of San Francisco’s rapid gentrification, Jarett Kobek writes: ‘Gentrification was what happened to a city when people with an excess of capital wanted their capital to produce more capital while not attributing any value to labor.’
Those who don’t own real estate—renters in Australia are a fine example—find their lives occurring between mouldy walls; they pack up and move biennially; moreover, they pay handsomely for the privilege of paying off another person’s debt. These indignities, it could be said, act as a strong incentive for individuals to strive to possess property of their own. Much rarer do we see these indignities act as a catalyst for upending the despotic relations that are born of inequality.
And yet. Property is theft! In Australia, it is bloody, violent theft. There is no property without invasion; colonial theft precedes all other thieving. The date of the initial theft is enshrined in the calendar for everyone to see. Unabashed. This first act was an act of despotism, and so every act made thereafter, in its name, could only be violent: invasion, rape, massacre, starvation, infection, miscegenation; incarceration, assimilation, appropriation.
Are these violent tides arbitrary or are they by design? The answer depends on how and where you dwell.
…
The fifteenth house, the apartment, was shared with another couple with whom we rarely spoke. The entire Tokyo building swayed like a ship some nights. After a quake I’d lie awake, refreshing the news until the report came in. Only a four-point-two. A three-point-six. A four-point-five. Nothing to worry about. Oh, sure. By the fifteenth house I was fairly sure I’d never stop moving. And I might’ve been right. In the mornings, the sullen cries of crows. Black coffee. Nude, blanched, winter trees. I ran and ran around that lonely city. Around the grounds of the Imperial Palace, at whose foot lay snapping turtles. Primordial arseholes.
They can bite through a human finger, he told me. I believed him, about almost everything. Unlike most of it, the finger thing was true.
…
Adorno writes, in Minima Moralia, that ‘The house is past. The bombings of European cities, as well as the labour and concentration camps, merely proceed as executors, with what the immanent development of technology had long decided was to be the fate of houses.’ But new houses were built and apartments crept up and over the skyline. The fate of houses was to bec
ome housing. A rational perversion of what should be a place to live (instead it is a place to exist).
…
The nineteenth house, tall and slender, with pale, glossy tiles on every surface. Two rooms on each floor; bedrooms? Despite the fluorescent strips lighting them, their stark officiary feel, bedrooms are what they became. There I lived as if alone, though I was surrounded by my many housemates. All of us, strangers in Saigon. All of us, longing for the freedom promised, for Christ’s sake, of being alone. The bonds I developed in the nineteenth house were single-use and mutually disposable. I went out when I felt like it and returned without notice. When I did have friends visit, I smuggled them into my room, not because the other housemates would object to my having guests, necessarily, but because I objected to the existence of any possible judgement by any possible person. One of my more frequent visitors, who sat somewhere between friend, enemy and lover, incurred a positive review from one housemate. After that I pulled myself further from view.
In the nineteenth house, I wrote a play about sexual obsession, the kind that could only be written in the absence of real sex, sex sex. That could only be read in the absence of sex, amid a deracinated appetite. The air out on my tiny balcony, which was wide enough only to stand and smoke a cigarette on, was languid, tropical. Out there I’d watch the men in the upscale wood-panelled restaurant across the laneway: a regal place where members of the Party, red lanterns strung across the open air above them, were served steamed chicken by thin, bare-legged young waitresses. Dust in the afternoon sun, then the clouds swelling into an eruption. Though that latitude colours my face mauve, chafes raw my inner thighs, I miss it all the time. No home there, but freedom from home’s talons. When eventually I felt the bonds tangle and tighten, I left.
…
In the twenty-second house, I live alone. I live with you. The walls are white, aerial. No one calls. I eat when I am hungry. Go to sleep and wake early. This morning, though, I thought I heard someone knock on our front door. An anxiety rose in me, though I can’t explain why. You opened it, but no one was there. I was relieved. Though this longing for isolation, this enjoyment of it, induces a guilt feeling.
…
A few months ago, I read a feel-good—or maybe it was horrifying—news story about an elderly couple in Rome who found themselves so despairing with loneliness they wept and wept until the neighbours called the state police. Four officers knocked on the door and made the couple spaghetti with parmesan to soothe them. One officer described the encounter: ‘Sometimes the loneliness melts into tears. Sometimes it’s like a summer storm. It comes suddenly and overtakes one.’
I thought, I don’t want to live through that. But also, I thought, how many millions of people are sitting in their apartments right now with no reprieve from their isolation? I’ve had peace and privacy, living without a hundred housemates with a hundred opinions, for three months out of my three decades. I cherish this quiet, this long-awaited solitude. But for many, aloneness, for years, and involuntary, unkind—that’s a different story. Millions of people not kept busy enough to assuage this dread.
…
My parents raised me to believe in incredible busyness. Really adhere to it. An idle afternoon is still, for me, a cause for self-flagellation. Not so unusual in this busy world. ‘Busywork’ might be the word. Busy/work. Because there are so many conveniences to a life where I am from. Growing up we didn’t offer our busyness to weave cloth for the winter, we did not churn butter nor make candles nor pluck animal corpses nor walk miles to send a message. We were catching the train to school we were walking the dogs we were memorising our lines we were queueing up at the supermarket we were stirring in the mincemeat we were waiting to be picked up from soccer we were rinsing the plastic-bagged spinach we were mopping. We were tramming to part-time jobs we were meeting friends for coffee we were searching for missing library books we were calling Mardi we were watching Law & Order. This whole time, any one of us could have sat in our rooms and read the dictionary, or the Bible, or learned a language from scratch and no one would have noticed. Could have lived off dried beans and potatoes, some leaves from the garden, a chicken once a month. But we lived instead as we were supposed to, which is to say we lived according to the principle of industriousness.
Once it is installed, the belief in the need to always be painfully useful, but not really helpful, it is unshakeable. (Annie Dillard: ‘How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.’) We live where we live so that we can go to work and be useful. We endure gendered labour divisions so that we can help others to be useful. We endure endless boredom and repetition at our jobs indebted to this belief. When we are ‘out of work’ we lose motivation, feel worthless, start sleeping nine, ten hours a night. When we feel worthless we leave our sheets on the bed until they are dank. We eat too many simple carbohydrates, we drink, we lose faith in our unrealised abilities.
We consume according to how much our particular busyness is valued against other people’s business. We consume according to how valued our business is against other businesses. Or we consume according to the status of our dead ancestors, whose money is the spoils of other people’s dead ancestors’ labour, labour which was, often, never paid for.
Religion is not too close to me, not really, not in terms of worship, yet here I am, a lapsed bad Catholic, caught in the larger culture of what Max Weber named the Protestant work ethic. Weber describes Calvin’s doctrine of predestination: that only a select few mortals are chosen to join God in heaven after death. And its connection to industriousness: knowing of predestination, the only way a person can live with hope is to believe that they have been chosen, and so live life faithfully to honour this birthright—work like a dog to prove your pre-selection was a sensible choice of God’s. ‘In its extreme inhumanity,’ writes Weber, ‘this doctrine must above all have had one consequence for the life of a generation which surrendered to its magnificent consistency …A feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness.’
This work ethic, which is my work ethic, makes it a moral duty to pursue the drudgery of daily labour. In the Calvinist framework, becoming ‘successful’ in a particular professional field—or simply successfully accruing wealth—is a sure sign of having been chosen after all. If success does not arrive from a person’s ‘good works’, this is a clear indication they are not among the chosen; to not even try would be sacrilege.
…
The best place to live is nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere is the only place that is unconstrained by ideology, untainted by any terrible history. Nowhere is the only place where you can step on the ground and not disturb old graves, old horrors. Nowhere does not project the picture of your future. It’s only in Nowhere that you can be in the moment; in Nowhere, time has no objects nor movement to mark itself against. Nowhere, you are in the midst of immortal blessings. That’s Epicurus: ‘For man loses all semblance of mortality by living in the midst of immortal blessings.’
Perhaps Nowhere is a fugue state, a state of primeval being, the flow state you enter when you focus for so long your body doesn’t exist and you’re just pure kneading or pedalling or fucking.
The worst place to live is Australia. Or maybe that’s taking it too far.
…
The eighth house, I am saying house again but this too was an apartment, was in what was supposedly the last remaining building of the Warsaw ghetto. Two months? I don’t know, four? I didn’t pay the rent. The place was owned by a friend, well, his parents owned the place, and this friend and his girlfriend and their several pet rats stayed always in their bedroom. When his girlfriend went home to Bristol, my housemate forgot to eat for several days and the rats began to smell putrid. I spent my days in Warsaw more or less alone, walked around the old ‘Palace of Culture and Science’, aka Stalin’s birthday cake, ha-ha, and came home to wrap myself in blankets inside the old, grand apartment. When my boyfriend came home, we’d talk, wrapped up on the lounge bed we slept in, or we’d go s
ee an old movie at the film club for just two złoty. Some mornings a tour group of American Jews would come into the building’s courtyard, with only cameras separating them from the concrete walls that had imprisoned their people. At night, I dreamed I was raped by Nazis.
These Warsaw days were long and empty: I couldn’t find work teaching English, so I read and got bored of reading; I cooked; I sat at the kitchen table and sketched the fruit bowl, badly, waiting for the boy I was there for to come home. I was out of money, so I spent nothing. I thought, then, I would become an artist.
How could I know there would be no epiphany?
On a tram one day, a friend pointed out the Powązki Cemetery and the Jewish cemetery that abuts it. The graves of the Jewish dead were all cloaked in long grass or consumed by vines. The headstones that were visible were moss-soaked and crumbling, tumbling over. Seeing this decrepitude, I was overcome with sadness. There is no one left to look after them, my friend said. A small Jewish population still lives in the city, of course, but it’s surely not their responsibility—a few thousand individuals—to safeguard the legacy of the millions of dead, dead and murdered. Surely, I thought, the legacy of Jewish people in Poland concerns the Polish legacy, too; though the ‘ethnic’ Poles may have, mostly, forsaken their Jewish brothers. In 2018, Poland passed a law making it illegal to ‘accuse’ the Polish nation or state of complicity in the Holocaust. Yet there are four hundred years, or five—some say a millennium—of Jewish life within the nation.
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