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thoughts on ‘the long way to a small angry planet’

I first found out about The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers on Buzzfeed. It was likely the pretty cover that got seventeen-year-old me interested; when I first picked it up, I remember being bamboozled by how I was thrown headfirst into a universe I struggled to orientate myself within. By the end, though, everything had slotted into place. Now it is one of my favourite books, a comfort read for when the world seems particularly dark. Why do I find it so magical? Well, that's what I'm going to try and answer in a disparate list of bullet points.

The stories unfold through the everyday, the quiet, the ordinary. I think that this is so powerful in an age riven by the endless turned-on-ness of social media, the violent hyperbole of modern politics, and the dizzying whirl of consumer capitalism. As someone who is into fantasy and action movies, I am too used to heroes and heroines and chosen ones, to adventures, to the galaxy or world about to end only to be saved at the very last minute. It's exhausting. I love it, but it tires me out. That's why this everyday sci-fi is like bundling up under a big fluffy blanket: characters have bad days until their dads send them unexpected care packages, a character struggles with her toddler who likes to throw his pjs into the toilet. None of them are literary archetypes or burdened with poisonous backstory/glorious purpose. They're just weird and normal and love each other? And that's kind of enough?

The book answers problems in the modern world. It deals with heavy themes like racism, environmentalism, post-colonialism, intercultural conflict, the effect of war, technology, sexuality - but all through the normal every-day of the characters. It echoes what Emilie Cameron writes about stories tip-toeing the line between the personal/particular and the wider socio-political context of their telling.

Chambers also deals with eschatology (the study of the end of the world). Earth was rewilded with the help of the Galactic Commons, but most humans actually live on the (rampantly socialist) Exodus Fleet and have never actually set foot on it. They're a people without a home planet, unlike many other species. This theme is taken ever further with the Grum species, who were ripped apart by a violent civil war - Dr Chef, the Grum character, has had to make peace with the fact that his species will become extinct. For us now, facing the climate crisis and a world that feels obsessed with its own ending, it just feels cathartic to see this kind of narrative boldly confronted?

The way she portrays the galaxy is very hopeful. The Galactic Commons is a cultural melting pot, and the different peoples find each other fascinating, absurd, and aggravating. They don't often agree. Decentring the human race and using alien cultures to poke at things we take for granted - (eg) the reptilian Aandrisks being terribly confused over humans' emotional restraint and obsession with babies - shows the constructed nature of culture as a concept. Despite their differences, most of the species are shown as rubbing along together in peaceful coexistence. This is especially evident on the Wayfarer, the tunnelling ship that is the focus of the first story, or in other places like the planet-side markets at Port Coriol. It's exciting to starkly see the human being as one amongst many, nothing special, and of seeing possibilities for different modes of existence.

The relationship of the story to its nonhuman components is also something that shines. Looking at it through Anna Tsing*'s notion of collaborative survival, you can see the entanglements of the sapients with various things - like fuel, like the sublayer (the gloopy bit between different locations in space) which only one species can navigate without a tunnel, like the plants grown by one of the characters to help mental health on long-haul flights, like AIs, who are the site of arguments about sapience and rights.

There is, of course, a lot more I could say but I don't want to ruin the book for those who haven't read it. Go read it if you want to. I promise that you won't regret it.

*The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing is another cracking read.

written by eliza.

[onpossiblestories-blog]

cafe life #1

i’ve been stressing about assessed blog posts and spending a lot of time at my part-time job at a cafe, so decided to smash the two together on the advice of my classmate. this series of posts is basically me writing about the cafe in the style of various academics that i like.

1. georges perec documents the day to day mundanities of life.

Some infrastructures: A café counter, shiny silver coffee machine piled high with black ceramic mugs, black and transparent automatic coffee grinder. Till - ipad and cash drawer and printer and tiny white card machine, with a tall tip jar nudged in behind it. To the left of this is an open fridge full of cake and sweet treats. Sandwiched between two grumbling escalators. Red chairs and red-topped tables. A shiny wooden floor. More than this, but it would take a book to describe.

Mid-afternoon on a Saturday in February: A steady stream of people going up the up escalator. On the ceiling, there is an incongruous tiled crest with the latin inscription: laboranti bona debentur (english translation: Good things are owed to the one who works hard). [footnote: the debenhams family have obviously never heard of structural injustice to be peddling this myth] A white man removes his headphones. Chatting to my boss (L) about tv shows and movies. Not many people coming into the café. It's storm weather, but not that you'd notice - we're completely isolated from the sky. Fluorescent, yellow light - canned music on repeat. A white couple (the man holding a floral-patterned yellow bag) came to peruse the cakes then went away again. Now talking about how problematic Tarantino's attitude to Margot Robbie was in his acceptance speech for Once Upon A Time In Hollywood with L. A woman in a violently pink anorak gets up from one of tables and leaves. Banter with a nice customer (middle-aged white man in a red anorak) when he couldn't make up his mind. Weather report (I've been asking all day) "dismal." Asian woman came to order a whole cake but we didn't have one in stock. Old white man with a bristly grey beard and a very wet bucket hat came in for an americano. The store manager comes in for his second free latte of the day. The creepy security guard makes a comment from the escalator about not forgetting he's supposed to fix our tap. A white woman with long fawn-coloured hair in a fabulous fur hat and a thick (russian?) accent comes to order. Two more old white couples. This is our usual demographic. The creepy security guard comes to fix our tap. L holds something for him and is pulling "send help" faces at me.

More people go up the escalator.

reading: perec, g (1975) an attempt at exhausting a place in paris, available here.

written by eliza.

[onpossiblestories-blog]

on caretizenship & doing the laundry.

“A society organised around the shared needs of human bodies would be a very different society from the one we know now.” ~ Katrine Marcal, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?

What do you think citizenship should entail? It’s a big question, right? (Political) philosophers have picked over its entrails for millennia, and I think are yet to come to agreement. People have fought and died for the right to have it, and only since the second half of the 20th century with the decolonization, civil rights, gay liberation, and feminist movements has it begun to extend to humans beyond the ideal Man (ie) white, European, middle-or-upper-class.

However in the last decade, there has been an onslaught of neoliberal reforms: making jobs more flexible and less secure in search of profit leading to the rise of a precarious class; the transition from a welfare state (where all citizens are entitled to benefits and support) to a workfare one (where some benefits are reliant on one-size-fits-all back to work schemes or mandatory unpaid labour); the dwindling availability of affordable, let alone social, housing. The post-war ideal of citizenship is being replaced by one in which the individual is entirely responsible for themselves, in spite of the fact that structural injustice makes certain lives into perilous obstacle courses. The citizen is responsible for making their own way, for finding a job even if there are none to be had, for making money and standing on their own two feet. The designation of citizen is one to be grateful for: it marks a person out as belonging to the geographic area in which they reside, it is quickly turning into a privilege and not a right as the recent case of the Jamaica 50 highlights. Is this really the kind of citizenship we want to stand by?

In amongst this mess, scholar Maribel Casas-Cortes (2019) documents a creative alternative way of belonging which was developed by Spanish feminist activists. Termed “cuida/dania” — in translation “caretizenship” — it’s about centring social relations of care, building solidarity and support between all people whilst paying attention to the effect of privilege hierarchies, and basing belonging in the small and everyday rather than on the scale of the nation-state. She locates it in the specific example of “Precarious Offices”, which were set up by feminist groups to provide information and support for those left out of traditional union organising. I think this idea could (and already does) extend well beyond the traditionally political and activist, and I’m going to explore another site in which caretizenship is enacted — through my voluntary work on the night shift at a London homeless shelter.

It is 4am, and I am folding someone’s washing. The other washing and drying machines chunter gently around me, and the laundry door is hanging half-open. I’m drinking ridiculous amounts of tea to try and stay awake, but it’s not really working so I’ve decided to keep busy with all the chores that need doing. It’s mostly the laundry at this time of night, but later I’ll deal with dinner’s leftovers, lay out breakfast for the early risers, and organise the crate of Pret a Manger’s surplus food we get delivered for people to take for lunch.

Doing the laundry is an entirely ordinary part of everyday life; social anthropologist Sarah Pink writes about it extensively, but most of her work is about laundry in the space of the home. What happens when it’s not in the home, done by the person who owns it in a launderette, or performed as part of the capitalist exchange economy? Since the figure of the launderess largely went away in this country with the invention of washing machines, I think that laundry has become quite an intimate task too. This could also be tied up with the increasing individualisation of Western society. Perhaps I say this from my particular position as a white, middle-class woman but I was taught by society that other people aren’t supposed to see you as a messy, vulnerable, dependent body — they aren’t supposed to see what goes on behind the scenes unless they’re a friend or a family member. As an individual, it is expected that you present a polished façade to the world and get on with being a good, working citizen.

At the shelter, the façade necessarily has to crack. Laundry as a social relation begins to involve more people. Guests aren’t actually allowed in the laundry because of health and safety and protocol, so they have to hand us their dirty clothes in a bag and we put on loads of washing throughout the night. Though you don’t think about it when you’re getting on with it, doing a stranger’s laundry is an act of care and trust on both sides — this manifests itself, for example, when some female guests request that only a female volunteer does their washing. In a wider sense it matters too. You handle people’s underwear, their smelly socks. You get up close and personal with this reality that other people have messy bodies like yours. You fold their clean stuff neatly into a bag, and put armfuls of warm, dry towels back on the shelves; you care. You have to.

Caretizenship, in my head, is like this. It’s about working at the small scale, building connections with people who are not your friends, doing what you can to make someone’s day better. It’s about listening to our fellow humans and their stories when they want to talk. It’s about, for once, not being yourself or an individual, but being a node in a network of support and trust that extends beyond the ones you might build out of choice. Because when the traditional ideal of citizenship crumbles and the state actively works to fracture communities rather than support them, caretizenship (especially across demographic divides) is what we need to start enacting.

For me, right now, being a caretizen is doing the laundry at four in the morning and greeting everyone with a smile. What does it look like for you?

written by eliza