change the pear vol. 19 1 Dec 2023

hello. scraping in at the tail end of november with a newsletter. i haven’t really been in the mood for writing, because there are more important things going on than what i’ve been implanting into my brain, but i drafted this last week when i was in bed sick and i wanted to share it. take care of yourselves out there, agitate educate organise, end the occupation, fuck western imperialism, free palestine now and forever.

on repeat

i’ve been listening to a lot of johnny flynn lately, as autumn hurtles inexorably towards winter. lee and i went to see him perform his latest album, co-written with rob macfarlane, the moon also rises. this is music for dark nights by a warm fire, for the turning of the seasons, for tramping through a muddy country lane on a crisp cold afternoon. it feels connected to the earth, somehow; elemental. like stories you were told once, long ago, and just about remember. i love johnny flynn’s voice: rough and sweet, expressive, welcoming. there’s a song off the album, burial blessing, where the refrain goes, be not afraid, and i’ve been holding onto it like a lifeline.

last seen (concert)

fall out boy: band of my heart, band of my life. i remember seeing them for the first time in 2013, skipping school so i could go queue in the cold outside a tiny venue in islington right after they ended their hiatus. fast forward ten years exactly and i’m once again queueing in the cold to see them live with alfie and siyang. baby seasons change but people don’t!

as a teenager, it blew my mind to hear someone rip out their guts and set them to music. i resonated so deeply with the unguarded emotions expressed in pete’s lyrics: the pain and anger and joy. now that i’m twenty-six, i have a better understanding of the experiences pete was writing about; i’ve shared some of them. listening to, say, i’ve got a dark alley and a bad idea that says you should shut your mouth hits a little different now. the refrain in (coffee’s for closers) of change will come / i will never believe in anything again certainly does. and yet i think the way i felt about these songs at sixteen is just as true and real as the way i feel about them now. it’s a little different, sure, but fall out boy’s music will always hook into something deep at the core of me.

it was pete wentz who first taught me that it was okay to feel things deeply and to express them however you want to. it was pete and patrick’s creative relationship that taught me that someone else can catch the worst thoughts you’ve ever had, and hold them, and sing them out loud, and the world won’t fall down around you. seeing the whole of you, and staying anyway. it was fall out boy who taught me that nobody can read your mind, so you have to tell them how you feel. it was fall out boy who taught me that vulnerability is a brave, beautiful, bold thing.

and they’ve kept teaching me that. the concert wasn’t a nostalgia trip. fall out boy were my number 2 artist of 2023 and my top song was heartbreak feels so good (yikes!) i will always turn to fall out boy when i need a particular kind of comfort. standing in that crowd reminded me that part of me was shaped by this band, and always will be.

last seen (film)

jeon jungkook (of BTS) sometimes makes short films known as ‘golden closet films (g.c.f.)’. he recently uploaded a new one, so i revisited my personal favourite, g.c.f. in helsinki. i’ve talked before about how i love being let in to the love between other people love each other. true, the sincerity of these displays can be a contentious issue when it comes to celebrities, particularly idols. how much of it is real? how much of it is done simply to satisfy fans? i have opinions on this (where’s that tweet that was like, i don’t care if it’s fanservice as long as the fan they’re servicing is me). but i also think that nobody could possibly doubt the sincerity of jungkook’s love for the other members of BTS, and their love for him, after watching g.c.f. in helsinki.

i believe that paying attention and bearing witness are some of the purest forms of love, and so i’ve been interested lately in the extent to which the camera and photography can be a vehicle for expressions of loving someone. g.c.f. in helsinki captures this perfectly, in so many ways. the film feels almost insubstantial at times, like a lost dream slipping out of your reach; but the members bring it back with their aliveness and beauty. the colours shift from grey to warm as the camera lingers on namjoon. the bright leaves and the music swells into the shot of jimin. i said to zoë (while crying hard tears over it in the pub) that there’s a sadness to the video; a nostalgia, almost, for this moment in time where they are all together and young and untouchable. it’s suffused with the fragility of being around the people you love most in the world, who are part of your heart and soul, who have shaped you irrevocably—and knowing that nothing is guaranteed, and the future is coming for you all, and that you may never have this again.

reading

why has it taken me so long to get on the tana french train? her dublin murder squad books are about everything i love: how every story is told from a certain perspective, the overturning of the narrative you tell yourself, how relation absolutely fucks you all the way up, solving mysteries, buddy cops. they’re happy valley meets line of duty meets endeavour in literary form, and i couldn’t be more obsessed. here are some thoughts.

in the woods. the first instalment and probably my favourite. narrated by detective rob ryan, who survived the mysterious disappearance (and probable murder) of his two childhood best friends when he was 12 years old. another crime occurs in the very same woods, years later—and he’s now a murder squad detective, and sent to investigate. this obviously does severe damage to his psyche, which was already damaged enough to begin with. midway through reading this, i messaged arenike going, “is there going to be some fucked up twist where it turns out that rob did both crimes”, and she replied, “no, he just needs therapy <3”. never have truer words been spoken. rob has never come to terms with the loss of his friends, never even really spoken about them, and so he has no idea how deeply their disappearance has shaped him, nor how his survivor’s guilt has coloured just about every relationship he’s had since. including… you guessed it, the one with his murder squad partner, cassie. these two honestly had me shaking crying screaming throwing up. they have the perfect partnership and friendship, but rob’s inability to a) communicate b) make a lasting connection with someone c) get over himself or d) realise that he’s not the only one who might have hidden pain and trauma means that things implode spectacularly. the fallout is horrible, culminating in an incredibly tense interrogation between cassie and the perpetrator of the most recent murder, while rob listens from afar, unable to do anything. 10/10!!!

the likeness. now this one really fucked me up. cassie, fresh out of the aforementioned implosion of her partnership with rob, takes on an undercover mission in the house of four phd students. cassie’s desperation to belong is so palpable, and her grief over the loss of rob actually made me want to tear my hair out. every time she mentioned him it was like squeezing lemon juice into a cut. it’s a pain deeper and more profound than a broken heart: she’s lost the person she thought belonged to her irrevocably and the best partnership she’s ever had, and now things will always be different. there will always be moments when she needs rob, and remembers once again that he’s never coming back. some quotes:

“I used to have a partner,” I said, “at work. We were like you guys: we matched. People talked about us the way you do about twins, like we were one person—‘That’s MaddoxandRyan’s case, get MaddoxandRyan to do it . . .’ If anyone had asked me, I’d have said this was it: the two of us, for the rest of our careers, we’d retire on the same day so neither of us would ever have to work with anyone else and the squad would give us one gold watch between us. I didn’t think about any of that at the time, mind. I just took it for granted. I couldn’t imagine anything else.”

ouch!

There was this night, during our last case. At three in the morning I got on my Vespa and went down to the crime scene to pick Rob up. On the way back the roads were all ours, that late, and I was going fast; Rob leaned into the turns with me and the bike barely seemed to feel the extra weight. Two high beams came at us around a bend, brilliant and growing till they filled the whole road: a lorry, half over the center line and coming straight for us, but the bike swayed out of the way light as a stalk of grass and the lorry was past in a great whack of wind and dazzle. Rob’s hands on my waist shook every now and then, a quick violent tremor, and I was thinking of home and warmth and whether I had anything in the fridge.

Neither of us knew it, but we were speeding through the last few hours we had. I leaned on that friendship loose and unthinking as if it were a wall six foot thick, but less than a day later it started to crumble and avalanche and there was nothing in “the world I could do to hold it together. In the nights afterwards I used to wake up with my mind full of those headlights, brighter and deeper than the sun. I saw them again behind my eyelids in that dark lane, and I understood then that I could have just kept driving. I could have been like Lexie. I could have hit full speed and taken us soaring up off the road, into the vast silence at the heart of those lights and out on the other side where nothing could touch us, ever.

me, personally? i am doing not so good.

faithful place. this book suffers from being narrated by frank mackey, a man who sucks. rob, at the very least, had some semblance of self-awareness about his own issues, but frank has this self-righteousness that pervades everything he does and it is deeply aggravating. anyway: this book deals with him returning home to faithful place, where he grew up, after an absence of over twenty years. he’s always thought that he was dumped by his first love on the night they were supposed to elope to england, but when rosie’s suitcase turns up hidden in a chimney in an abandoned house on the street, it turns out that the truth might be slightly different. i loved this book for its incredible evocation of frank’s neighbourhood and the dynamics between the families who live there, the dialogue, the evocation of life in the 80s and how it’s changed now. the dynamic between frank and his siblings (two older, two younger) is perfectly done: the right amount of hate, love, resentment, fear, envy and long, long memory.

broken harbor. the most harrowing of her books by far. scorcher kennedy learns the hard way that the world is not black and white; that bootstrap theory is a myth, that sometimes people go insane for no reason and sometimes people go insane because capitalism is a life-destroying system that chews people up and spits them out when they’re no longer of use. something that i had on my mind while reading this is how clear scorcher’s fallibilities are and how they blind him to what was going on in the home of the spain family, whose brutal murders he is investigating. he’s so convinced of his own reality and way of perceiving the world and he simply can’t conceive of a different perspective. that conviction has its roots in his teenage years and the death of his mother, and a heartbreaking scene at the end of the book reveals exactly why he keeps such a tight control on his own reality—to let go would be absolutely devastating to his psyche. but let go he must, after being put through tana’s blender and forced to open his eyes. woof. this was unputdownable.

the secret place. probably my least favourite of the collection? i love our man stephen, who narrates the novel, but he’s not quite interesting enough to get me really engaged. fresh out of cold cases with a piece of interesting evidence on a murdered schoolboy, he’s partnered up with antoinette conway (more on her later), who couldn’t solve the original case. i really enjoyed the way the past and present narratives wove together in this one, and how deftly tana evokes how obsessive and all-consuming teenage friendship can be. also loved the multiple sequential interrogation scenes, with stephen adopting a new character each time to get the girls to talk.

the trespasser. a close second favourite novel. stephen is now on the murder squad and partnered with conway, who is our narrator and takes absolutely no shit, is tough as nails and would rather die than let the collection of murder squad bullies (all minus stephen who remains a sweetheart) drive her out of her job. this one has the best murder mystery plot of all the novels!! the themes of adopted narratives, perspective, spinning stories to ourselves and others, belief in each other and where it can get you—all present in tana’s other books but here they’re knotted together in such a delicious and tight way. conway’s the perfect person to be in charge of these themes, and i loved her developing partnership with stephen and how finally having someone on her side helps her to unravel those knots and get to the heart of the mystery.

free palestine

a couple of articles that i’ve found illuminating and clarifying on palestinian resistance and october 7.

a practical appraisal of palestinian violence by steve salaita

There is plenty of temptation to wag fingers in the aftermath of the operation, but surely that task is not the domain of academics and activists in the metropole.  Nor should it be the priority of diaspora Palestinians (among whom I include myself).  In our environs, filled with their own kind of hostility, the priority should be to defend Palestinians against the torment to which they have been subjected by the entire industrialized world.  Among politicians, artists, celebrities, and intellectuals, Palestinians have no shortage of critics happy to cosign Zionist genocide.  Those critics don’t need or desire our validation, anyway.  Abandoning our brethren in order to appease the Zionist establishment will deliver no accolades.  In the end, the aspirant to respectability is left only with the shame of conciliation.

Palestinians are perfectly capable of formulating strategy and thinking through complex problems without the guidance of outsiders; they certainly don’t need half-baked moralism from dorks and social climbers in the West.  The Palestinian story isn’t esoteric or inaccessible.  In fact, one can discover the rationale for Palestinian violence anywhere in the great mass of revolutionary writing from Amilcar Cabral to Bassel al-Araj.  That intellectuals who have made lucrative careers with tough-sounding buzzwords were so eager to condemn an actual instance of Indigenous resistance is a damning (and in my mind permanent) indictment of Western academe.

an unyielding will to continue: abdaljawad omar interviewed by louis allday

Many think that solidarity with Palestine is a unidirectional action meant to provide Palestinians with support, a sense of psychological relief that our struggle does not meet deaf ears. I am more interested in the other side of the equation, on what the Palestinian struggle uncovers about the institutional, economic, and structural realities for those in the global north, the Arab world, and global south. To me the Palestinian struggle exposes truths, reveals fascisms, and emboldens trajectories of change, radical political, and economic change in these societies – or at least it should do so. Palestine is not a nationalist, nor a religious, nor a feel-good cause. It is not simply a ceasefire movement. Our gift to the world [was] given through our blood, especially for those interested in a more just, more economically equal, decolonial, deracialized world. The struggle we lead reveals hidden discourses of imperialisms and forces centres of power to reveal their schizophrenic stances and hypocritical posturing. This is why Palestine is a universal struggle, a place for the condensation of truth in a post-truth historical conjecture. It is also a place from which the imperial metropole, and those within it suffering from racialized inequalities, can see in Palestine and its struggle a natural and political affinity. Historically the Palestinian struggle galvanised the left, and helped construct new modes of political engagements. This is precisely the reason why pro-Israel networks are attempting to shut down the discussion through fear and intimidation tactics.

misreading palestine by max ajl

The October 7 operation has perhaps overcome the central role of the Israeli state in accumulation on a world scale: ingraining a state of defeat amongst the Arab working classes, as part-and-parcel of the post-Soviet ideological defeat imposed by capital upon labor globally. Deterrence is the form that defeat takes when pushed to the military plane, and Israel openly admits that its deterrence has been shattered.

Seen from this perspective, the risks run by the western capitalist states – their imposition of fascist regulation against freedoms of speech and assembly, their backing for genocide, their desperation to see the Palestinian armed militia wiped from the face of the Earth – is logical, reasonable, and rational in its sociopathy. It is the logic of monopoly attempting to defend itself and the consciousness which bodyguards it with fire from the sky. It is a logic which fills graveyards, and a logic which makes orphans, and it is a logic which might yet meet its end in that crossroads of continents – that salient, and city and their camps and their people.

miscellaneous

haris running to me to be picked up. visiting a queer community bookshop in folkestone with hareem and sophie. walking along the beach and filling our lungs with salty air. wandering into antiques shops. singing don’t stop believin’ (glee cast version) with elete at karaoke and getting the harmonies exactly right. burnt aubergine pasta. wearing the woolly socks jun knitted for me. iman giving me a kuffiyeh. swapping voice notes back and forth about louis allday. rewatching episodes 26 and 27 of the untamed with hana. meeting hayley’s uncle in the common press bookstore. sakina asking me for marxist reading recommendations. laughing on the phone together. picking the last apple in the orchard with shahla. poetry reading with agnes on the theme of animals & machines. alfie and i doing the scottish accent for many of horror without prior discussion. lydia’s realisation that her, me and dorothy are the trio from mamma mia and also boygenius. meeting shireen and discussing thai bls over lebanese food. visiting new beacon books for the first time with hana. saskia’s spinach, potato and butterbean stew. new wool trousers. ateez performing eternal sunshine (that one was for me). rereading the left hand of darkness with zoë. a long conversation on my sofa with elete (and eating bangers and mash after). chinese food and discussing geopolitics four pints in with abeera. wine and small plates with claire in deptford. gin & tonics at dorothy’s. turkish food for lydia’s birthday. this kathleen spivack poem. this melissa crowe poem. advice from louise glück.

stay safe and warm. see you soon.