It’s a quiet evening, the dull ebb and flow of traffic comforts, there’s an amber glow that lights up leaves turning copper as the late summer months creep towards us. I guess I am almost three quarters through my first year back in Europe, and life has sprung open to an extent that it almost feels like those empty months of waiting never happened.
In fact, everyone is bored of talking about viruses, bored of thinking about viruses, bored of pictures of round, spiky globs, bored of hand sanitiser spray, of face masks and all of that. I’m so bored of all that I’m not even going add any more descriptive words on the subject, but I will note that I no longer check infection rates with any regularity, nor have I signed up for any more of the investigative journalism webinars on the subject for stories I cannot commit my brain to, or hound the scientists I know (read: share DNA with) with questions I am not 100 per cent certain they have the correct answers to. I guess my mind has been on other things. Germany having the handle on the situation in a way that is not the case elsewhere, I have the privilege of not having to worry too much about the consequences of my actions, which would not be the case in other places. I am pretty sure, at this point, I am not at risk of getting seriously ill, and that the chance of passing anything on to anyone who is and who doesn’t have access to this robust healthcare system we enjoy, is quite slim. Adaptations to life as we know it have been made, adaptations that are workable, and fine. Adaptations that don’t impinge on too much. There are grumbles from all sides, a lot of people want to have their say in things, and it still surprises me, the level of granular detail over which individuals advocate for their own interests, the amount of noise that goes into decision-making here. But I have to remind myself that I have come from a place in which advocating for anything at all has increasingly felt like chucking water off a sinking ship with your fingers, or, as one campaigner described it to me; “like playing a game of whack-a-mole”. [Although the above comment comes with a caveat that I am aiming this week not to give too far into gloom. Rebecca Solnit: “To me, the grounds of hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable.] Power structures Thinking about these things makes me think a bit about a metaphor comparing authoritarian and democratic systems used by Polish poet Czesław Miłosz in The Captive Mind, in which he describes democracy as a cumbersome and rather unfancy paddle boat which everyone to some degree finds themselves operating in all sorts of directions such that it slowly, but safely lumbers ahead at a pace that just about manages everyone’s needs. Conversely, authoritarianism is a shiny, kitsch and bombastic ship operating at full-throttle, crashing into things. I like to think this metaphor, this dichotomy still holds up. That is in spite of the high number of stupid people there are running things that have been voted in all over the world, making that paddle ship feel like its teaming with idiots poking holes into the deck because they feel like it, because they’re somehow convinced that the laws of gravity will always work how they want them to. Now I think about my mentor, too, and what she once said in one of my more maudlin moments: “Democracy is a work in progress.” So is humanity, too. I guess. And now let’s bring in another voice that has made reverberations in my head through this week. One of my best friends from university, whose friendship profoundly altered how I perceive myself in the context of my own gender, and the potentials for curtailed freedoms that come with it, recently wrote on the mental labour that comes with living as women in a world where rape culture continues to hold sway and embeds itself all sorts coercive corners of our consciousness. She writes of the mental arithmetic that goes into navigating interactions such that we feel we can ensure our own safety. I was reminded of it the other day when I came away from an interaction thinking through steps I took that I shouldn’t have taken, that were perhaps unwise. The interaction went as follows: I was buying dinner from a burrito stand. I might have smiled. A friend once told me that monkeys smile when they want to show submission. This I have yet to fact check. Small talk initiated on his end led to me inadvertently divulging details about myself; my line of work, the neighbourhood in which I lived, my working hours. He wanted to take me out for a drink. I declined. He wanted me to have the burrito I’d ordered for free. I again declined. Politely, but firmly. In the end we got to a point where he was clutching the burrito waiting for me to agree to make some kind of plan with him, or whatever it was he was seeking out of that bizarre behaviour, that I ended up just pulling the burrito out of his fingers, throwing my coins on the counter and storming off. I broke a rule I have, that is not to give people like that much of a reaction. But I did not break my rule of allowing a scenario a little bit of escalation on my end knowing that if I needed to, I could defend myself. It’s part of the mental arithmetic I make, and that I am better equipped at making these days, knowing my physical capabilities far better than I used to. It’s reduced my worry by about 50 per cent, in fact, I make far fewer fear-based decisions in this area, now. But the fact still stands, to live with this level of dread poses certain cognitive burdens that are unfortunate. In an ideal world, this dread would not be there, and the modifications to my life I make that serve to reduce it would not take place. I cannot imagine how this life would look. Would I be less neurotic? Or would I just find other things to worry about. Like climate change, germs, shifting world orders, the rise of authoritarianism. What it is Facebook plans to do with my data. This is to say of course, that the types of cognitive burdens we regularly experience reflect on our privilege. There are things I have to worry about that other people don’t, really, and vice versa. And of course this is relevant in the context of two specific things besides rape culture: the curtailment of freedoms in authoritarian states, and the burdens of bearing witness as such events take hold, and afterwards. Worry drains, but it also sharpens. When COVID-19 first swept through China, a well-meaning colleague made a comment I found myself having to correct. She said: “Well, the good thing is that it is happening over there, where there are really strict rules, so when there’s a lock down, people really do stay at home.” The statement asserts that control tactics in authoritarian regimes actually work. When they absolutely do not. Anyone who has been in a situation of intense coercion knows that what actually happens within these dynamics is that you just get more bendy with the truth. Resistance becomes a delicate cat-and-mouse dance that operates at a level of sophistication and art that history can’t help but remember. And trust, on all fronts, eludes. Personal/Political I can’t say I enjoyed the most feminist of upbringings. Far from it. But what I did grow up with is that lens one has when one feels constantly obliged to scrutinize power structures, to see the rot that others are privileged enough to be able to ignore (gender was one of our many blind spots). The daughter of a journalist whose way into the industry came as a form of resistance to the political system that had oppressed him and his family, my living without this lens he passed on to me is unconscionable. That lens comes with responsibilities and problems (let’s open the mental health can of worms another day, shall we?), but one thing it has not done for me is made me complacent in the way that is the case for many who have grown up in democracies. This has all sprawled into many corners and I am finding efforts to tie it all together a little bit of a struggle, but of course this process I am taking my thoughts through is helping, too. After I have completed this, I will feel calmer. At least for a couple of days, and subject to whether or not I think it might need edits. I will probably bump into things less, forget things less, feel a little bit less like I am coming apart at the seams. Until the next body of text begins its drafts in my head and I’ll have to configure all that while trying to live a semblance of a life that I’d promised myself would look a lot more steady and 'normal'. I recently joined a writer’s group, though I keep struggling to find our meeting place. Yesterday I found them and we sat, talked words and slapped dead mosquitos in a nice green park with ponds and foxes. They ask me where I am from. At this point, I don’t really know what to say when I am asked this. I gave the summary. “Well, no wonder you seem so lost and confused,” they said.
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Sarah KaracsA Berlin-based writer engages in the study of belonging and in-between places after years spent faraway from 'home'. Archives
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