At twenty I did not want to be someone’s mother. At thirty I have been all kinds of mother: I have paid the rent for rock-dogs, I have made more meals than have been made for me, I have given more pleasure than has been given me, I am practically a saint, but no one tells me that, not enough anyway, though I am trying again to choose to not do that, to not be a mother.
Instead I’m trying to see that my tender red organs and the few dollars I earn and the words that I say and write are truly mine and that I’m therefore responsible for what I do with them. Sheila Heti writes that the hardest thing for a woman to do is to choose to not become a mother, and while the hardest thing is not always the best thing I am curious about a life where choice is more rigorously available to me and perhaps the first choice to make is the choice to take my agency take it make it mine.
…
‘What do you love most about 7-Eleven stores?’ the questionnaire asks me.
‘The convenience,’ I reply. ‘And the charming service I always receive! :)’
Holidays with Men
When I was starting out writing my own stuff, I published a series of vignettes titled ‘Holidays with Men’ in a zine that a guy from uni put together. I read at the zine’s launch, which was held upstairs at a gentrified East Brunswick bar: bare walls, aluminium stacking stools, tall, bright windows. It was a damp white afternoon. A few friends came along.
The day of the launch, I felt more self-conscious than usual. I had recently gained weight—quickly, I thought, and without grace. I felt hideous and ungainly and I didn’t yet know how to wear clothes on the new parts of my body. I was newly single, too, in a desperate and deplorable kind of way—desiring but spurning any and all attention. The store I worked at had recently cut my shifts down to the barest minimum. So I was broke, too. I was a pitiable character. I didn’t feel like parading stories from my love life in front of a small crowd of artsy people; clearly I was a troll who did not deserve a love life.
I remember what I wore that day, possibly because of photographic evidence that hung around on my social media for years afterwards: a long-sleeved grey top and a waist-high blue cotton skirt; an outfit that was supposed to create the illusion of a slim waist but in fact exaggerated the opposite. I was nervous. I didn’t take a beta-blocker before the performance (I didn’t know about beta-blockers yet). As I read, my hands shook. At a dramatic moment, one that made mention of a death I had not yet integrated, I swallowed my saliva so as to not burst out a sob. The sob I repressed was not, as the audience might have inferred, a sob of sadness, but one of sheer embarrassment. Nobody who attended that launch could argue that this reading went well.
After the reading, I stood with my housemate James, feeling mortified. Two guys approached. The one with glasses and a smooth brown face was full of praise.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’ And excused myself to go to the bar. James followed me. He said, ‘If you wanna meet someone, Ellena, you’ll have to let them talk to you first.’
The break-up that preceded ‘Holidays with Men’ was with someone I’d been with for a couple of years. Not the longest time, but I was shattered. The romance had been predicated, I now realised, on a fantasy of the transformative power of travel and of love realised in the realm of the intellect. In the very beginning of the romance, I had followed him on his research trip to Papua New Guinea and to Japan. This man was a charming and quite brilliant person, but complicated in ways that are often concomitant with charm and brilliance. The failure of the relationship presented itself to me as a single failure containing within it all other failures. After the break-up I didn’t yearn for this ex-boyfriend. I resented him. The shattering was instead of a narrative kind. It marked the end of a trick vision I had designed for my young life.
For example. Why did I go after him? An instinct for competition. Other women had wanted him (or so he said) and so I did, too. What did I want from him? Access to a social class I had not been invited into. Travel—for a purpose. He’d experienced a cultural and economic mobility that I hoped to replicate. Why did I stay with him long after I got, or didn’t get, what I hoped for? A fantasy needs an application to prove itself unreal.
A year after ‘Holidays with Men’ was published in that little magazine, an acquaintance wrote to me saying that she’d found a copy and had recognised herself in one of my vignettes.
The acquaintance had been one half of a couple on the rocks I had met and dined with in New York City. During the dinner, and drinks afterwards, they’d had a public, and dramatic, falling-out. I wrote about it in ‘Holidays with Men’ jokingly, frivolously, as in: look at these out of control people. I’d reduced this couple, strangers almost, to characters in a nasty little play. My acquaintance wrote about how damaged and damaging that relationship had been for her, and how reading about it from someone else’s perspective stung.
It hadn’t crossed my mind that a tiny nothing, printed on low-quality stock, could travel just as easily as my writing body had. An impression of a relationship not working. Too much bourbon. A fleeting encounter in a city that turns white with snow in winter. I was mortified. I had exposed this person, who hadn’t wronged me in any way, to the awfulness of having been written about. An experience that is all the more horrible because its humiliation is lined with the egoistic delight in being written about. An illicit, almost sexual chill aroused by the twinning of exposure and shame. A shock of the obvious: that my body, my voice, my writing, had, in its public exhibition, a public dimension which equated to a responsibility.
‘I will do anything to avoid boredom,’ writes Anne Carson. ‘It is the task of a lifetime.’ I’ve travelled more than others in my family, though they are beginning to catch up. I’ve travelled more than many of my friends who have money. Still, I’ve been to few of the places I long to see. Not yet the Trans-Siberian. Not yet the Albanian coast. Not yet Karachi or Beirut or Johannesburg. A lot of effort to experience a simple sensation of out of place and out of time. There were moments in my twenties when I considered laundry powder ‘too expensive’ to justify its purchase, yet happily blew a fortnight’s pay on a discounted fare to Indonesia. There were times when I lost part-time jobs because I wanted to go for weeks, or months, to a place where no one knew my name. It has been the task of a lifetime, avoiding boredom. Travel has, in a way, allowed me to avoid the cost of living.
Pierre Bourdieu writes that there is a spiritual dimension to ‘cultural capital’ (the social qualities that enhance class mobility in a stratified society). He writes that in cultivating rarefied artistic tastes, the upper-middle classes find ‘a feeling of social flying’. I am no sociologist, but I might add to the sense of social flying the theme of travel. Literal flying. Soaring into spaces, uninvited, with the security that attends the privileges of disposable incomes and homes to return to. Though ‘homes to return to’ are perhaps rarer than they once were.
In the wake of Europe’s devastation under fascism, Theodor Adorno wrote that ‘dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible’. For Adorno, and the exiles and refugees like him, home was a long-gone fantasy. ‘The best mode of conduct, in face of all this,’ he wrote, ‘still seems an uncommitted, suspended one.’ And what could be less committed than a life of travel? Travel, in discourse, is a lack of commitment, even to the extent that it signifies a tainted, perhaps even immoral, movement of one kind of body from one place to another and back again home. That body is coded as white, usually, and male.
There are negative and positive frames to read discourses of travel through, writes the historian James Clifford. There is ‘travel, negatively viewed as transience, superficiality, tourism, exile, and rootlessness’; and there is ‘travel positively conceived as exploration, research, escape, transforming encounter’. In either iteration of travel, positive or negative, its language is limited; its presumed subject is free in ways that people, en masse, in history, have largely not been. And yet, as Clifford points out, for every little lord on his Grand To
ur there was his team of servants: people carrying his cases, cooking his meals, perhaps even catering to his sexual wants. Were they not travellers, too?
Travel is not just tours of the Grand or Contiki variety. Travel is connected to migration, to economics, to security. Who travels? Tourists, of course. Who else? Pilgrims, sports fans, seasonal workers, touring artists, international students, parents visiting children who live in the city, children of migrants meeting grandparents for the first time, scholars, soldiers, miners, voluntourists, sailors, truckers, emergency workers, retired English nurses living out divorcée twilights in Mallorca, economic migrants returning to their cities of birth after decades away, carrying with them tartan bags bursting with medicines and blankets. A traveller might return home; she might not. A return, to paraphrase Heraclitus, may not be possible. The traveller is not a migrant, though, writes Iain Chambers, a scholar of cultural and postcolonial studies. For the migrant, ‘the promise of a homecoming—completing the story, domesticating the detour—becomes an impossibility’.
Although it was still in its early stages, the relationship started to unravel when we settled into daily life in PNG. He began to sink under the weight of his research project. Within weeks, his sparkle dimmed; he stayed in bed longer and longer. His supervisor had warned him about taking a partner to the field. Apparently, the wisdom goes, partners don’t fare well in isolated foreign environments with nothing to do and no one to talk to. But I’m a writer, I said. I always have something to do. A woman from the women’s council I talked to knew a man who was looking for help from a writer to write his life story. I met with him one day and he looked at me in a way I knew about. The man was not an innocent, and, at twenty-four, neither was I. I introduced myself as my boyfriend’s fiancée. The man laughed. Clearly, I was not. Clearly, my boyfriend and I had just met. I was talking to a man who had been to prison and broken out of it a freedom fighter. Had lived through a heinous civil war. Had travelled through every town and village in the archipelago. Spoke a handful of languages. Was a polygamist, with designs on chiefdom. Here was a worldly man, much worldlier than I, and I had thought I might offend him by admitting that I ‘lived in sin’ with this skinny man who was struggling to finish his PhD.
Travel, in the broadest sense possible, encompasses the furthest reaches of a culture. Networks driven by survival, by desire, by a twinning of the two, have flung bodies and stories away from homes for all of history, and all of prehistory, too. These movements make history. They make history history.
Discourse, writes the author Samuel R. Delany, ‘is what tells us what is central and what is peripheral—what is a mistake, an anomaly, an accident, a joke’. Discourse is what insists that a traveller is a decadent and thoughtless tourist. Or a foolish seeker of enlightened truths, which he will never find (wherever you go…). Perhaps that is correct; or that one iteration of travel is corrupt beyond redemption. Discourse (Delany again) ‘tells us what to pay attention to and what to ignore. It tells us what sort of attention to pay. It tells us what is anomalous and therefore nonserious.’ Therefore: what else.
…
The Egyptian tour guide who studied abroad, in Germany.
The Vietnamese would-be party girl whose passport blocks her from being flown on a drugfuelled whim to Singapore by the international DJ.
The musician from Brisbane who falls in love with a gitano man and moves into his home, in a cave, studies flamenco, stays for six years.
Therefore: and.
Responsibility for this mass and unprecedented movement of bodies is assumed by the planet’s precarious diversity. The cultural hierarchies imposed by tourism as a consequence of globalisation are all too clear. The destruction of locales and languages, of atavistic knowledge, of survival skills, delicacies, forms of pleasure and praise—the eradication of the particular under the careless heft of the commercial, the new universal.
I’ve moved about the planet in ways that seem anomalous, even wrong. Global economic inequality and a strong-enough Australian dollar. Cheap air travel. Low personal expectations of comfort and security. Precarious employment, and months of no-income, when living somewhere other than my city made fiscal sense. But doing that alone, I exposed my form to the possibility of its rape, its murder. Its erasure. More time away from networks of security. More time in places without a care in the world for me.
Violence, and the threat of it, provides the materials for one class of people to extinguish another. This asymmetry is formed first, at conception, in the ideation of male over female, masculine over feminine. This asymmetry is replicated infinitely in all other forms: adult over child, landowner over tenant, human over land, cis over trans, coupled over single, person over animal, capital over person, captor over captive, invader over native, unscrupulous over principled. Every person who is not at risk of extinction benefits from the other’s precarity. Even the nice ones. Even the good ones. Even the me, and the not me, too.
A threat is always real and unreal simultaneously. It is made material by how it structures experience. How women and queer people walk, speak, smile. What we do and say and where we allow our bodies to see and be seen alone. The threat and its indiscriminate actualisation encourages us to stay in, or to tacitly accept the risk: to spend energy considering how best to navigate danger. No amount of self-discipline can protect a person from her protector. One in ten women. The same number the Romans used to control their military platoons. It’s called decimation. And, to seek protection—voluntarily or involuntarily—from men. And what a danger it is, to need a protector, and protection from that protector.
Coins
I had never met a man with such a coordinated sense of Englishness about him. He left the house in a tweed hat, a tweed coat and, if my memory serves me, a tweed tie, though this detail seems like overkill. He wore leather gloves to drive around town in his little hatchback. He was my grandfather and he loved me, even though we’d never met. I was eighteen. He was small and seventy-something. On the walls of his home hung school photographs of my brothers and me, which my mother had been sending him, in secret, for years. He had not seen my father, his son, in fifty years.
At lunch at the pub, he told me the regret of his life. I didn’t want this confession, it was too sad for me to bear, but I listened. He had not been a father to his son. They had been too young, he said, when they had him; they would never have made it. And then the migration severed all chances of a reunion. As he told me of his heartbreak, his body moved just like my father’s. I couldn’t get it out of my head. He was my father, accelerated in time. I didn’t want his sadness, I was too young, but I opened myself to it.
When he stood up to pay, he shook the waiter’s hand, and slipped into it two two-pound coins.
Lighthouse
We bickered the whole way along the beach and through the pretty shrubs in the way holidaying couples who will not stay together very long are prone to, protracted arguments which are, perhaps, designed to bring the couple closer by testing the limits of their love, but are in fact simply exhausting. We had been walking all afternoon, looking for a famous lighthouse, famous in part because it had somehow not been bombed by the Germans. Between us we had ten euros for the rest of the trip—another twenty-four hours—and we were both so hungry. But I knew that because he was male and tall, he’d get to eat more of whatever food we could afford to buy (a loaf of bread and a family-sized pack of orange Cheetos). On the way back, we had sex on the cold beach for no reason other than to up the romance factor, despite the fact it wasn’t all that pleasurable and we were not exactly having a romantic time. He took a photo of me that turned out sort of pretty, right at the spot where we did it. I know, now, not to get envious of other people’s holiday snaps because although in the photo I am smiling, so happy, I was in a vile mood that lasted until we played Scrabble that night, where I cheated, banking on the fact that he was not a native English speaker. Words like ‘moted’ and ‘peb’, which are not real words in the Eng
lish language but sound like they could be.
Denzel
He and I walked all the way along Venice Beach to where it becomes more like Santa Monica, where the hustlers spoke to us in French because we looked foreign, I suppose, or because both of us were wearing Lacoste. We lay next to each other on the fake-green grass and took photos up close because that’s how we wanted to remember each other forever, basking in clear light and love. Then we went and saw that terrible Denzel movie because it was on and we had time to kill, and even the security guard at the cinema agreed that it was ‘a bit sanctimonious’.
Truck Stop
We decided on a week in the flower mountains. Get out of the city. Get him away from hard drugs. I had just quit my magazine job. We made our way to the back of the night bus as it stumbled into gear just before dusk, sat ourselves down in the corner sleeper seats. As the bus yawned out of view of the city’s brilliant lights, I pulled a bottle of rum from my bag. Hours passed. We talked. We held each other. We crashed.
When, at three a.m., a truck smashed into the rear corner of the bus, a foot from my head, he and I were asleep. Confusing, then, to awake covered in a film of powdered glass, heavier shards of it dispersed across my body. I drew a hand to my face, which felt wet and gluey. Blood, lots of it, which didn’t seem like mine. Which was mine. I turned to see him looking at me in horror.
Shit, I thought. I’ve lost my face.
I sat quietly, blood sticky on my hands, while he screamed at the bus driver to do something, give him something to mop it up. Together we cleaned my face with a wad of cotton wool and water from a bottle, and found the source of all that blood: a small gash just above my right temple. Deep and swollen, but not very wide.
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