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[writtenbyfai]

Self Portrait

a prose poem

I am built out of shell fragments of my mother, glued together, a distorted patchwork of frailty, but pieces of her I don’t want her to forget, shell fragments that flake from her skin, as she loses her home in her body, I become its closest substitute Isn’t it tiring, yes but

She needs me

The paths of rivers bulging from her earth-coloured skin mirror the traces of salt guiding her hands to her cheeks She wants to hide the vulnerable stain from us but I drink in that detail and ask the ocean to swallow up whoever etched these wet scars into her face The ocean swallowed her, instead

Her boyfriend says her mind influenced mine He says I am her mirror image Whether that is a curse or a blessing, however he means it, I love that I was shaped out of my mother’s shadow backlit by a Southeast Asian sun As her pinkie carves me

Blue salt erodes sand, the soles of my feet can’t help but crush the shells discarded by the ocean, jagged pieces catching on the walls of the ocean’s throat Instances of pain as I walk along its lip grow to a near-mute echo somewhere in my conscience

[writtenbyfai]

[writtenbyfai]

I know this is going to make me sound pretensions but I have to get it off my chest. I feel an unimaginable rage when someone posts a photo and is like "this picture looks like a renaissance painting lol" when the photo clearly has the lighting, colors and composition of a baroque or romantic painting. There are differences in these styles and those differences are important and labeling every "classical" looking painting as renaissance is annoying and upsetting to me. And anytime I come across one of those posts I have to put down my phone and go take a walk because they make me so mad

[writtenbyfai]

Fantasy Guide to Employment: Household of a Castle

The castle does not run itself. The castle would remain a pile of stones without servants to keep it running. The guide below focuses on the private household of the lord himself, anybody who worked inside the main keep of the castle. I will be expanding outside the walls in a future post.

The Steward/Seneschal

This person was the head of the household staff. They would have the task of running things on the Lord’s estate. They are the managers, so it is up to them to keep the staff in line. The steward would keep the castle accounts and keep the lord informed of all of the goings on of the lands and tenants. They would have to be educated needing to do accounts and write letters. Though the castle’s Lady would be expected to do all these things, the steward served as a backup and assistant in all the tasks even representing the lord and lady when they were unavailable.

The Chamberlain

The chamberlain is the servant employed to look after the Lord’s bedchamber. He would look after the Lord’s clothes as well and keep track of the other servants’ liveries, the official uniforms of the guards, pages and squires. This was not always the case, some larger households had a separate office but most medium seized manors and castles lumped them together. The chamberlain’s main task was ensuring the lord was kept happy. He would even be the last servant a lord would see at night before he went to bed at night. They would be educated.

The Marshal

A Marshal was in charge of the stables as well as the military presence in the castle. They would oversee the household’s horses, carts, wagons, and containers. He oversaw blacksmiths, horse grooms and stableboys. He also oversaw the transporting of goods. The Marshal was sometimes in charge of disciplining servants. They would likely come from a middle class background as well as having military experience and education.

The Page

A page was a young noble boy about seven years old who would be sent to serve a Lord. He would be in charge of tidying up after the lord, carrying messages to other servants and occupants of the castle and serving him at meals. Unlike others on the list, the page would not be paid. His experience was his payment as he would learn the running of a castle and manners of a lord.

The Lady’s Maid

The lady’s maid is be the female body attendant of the castle’s noble women. She would be in charge of caring for the lady’s chamber and her things. She would dress the lady and attend her wherever she would. (The lady’s maid would basically do all the work a chamberlain would but you know the wage gap…)

Maidservant

A housemaid/maidservant works to clean the castle. She would be among the first to awaken every morning. Her first task would be sweeping the floors. The thing with mediaeval floors a that they were often covered with a thin layer of rushes, a kind of grass. Weekly if not daily, a maidservant would be expected to change out the rushes and scatter new ones. If it really needed it, she would scrub the stone floors which would be done with a soap called lye, made from ashes and lard. The maidservant would also be expected to go into the bedchambers when the occupants awoke. She would empty the chamberpots if need be. She would get rid of the ashes from the fire and ready the fire for later. She would make up the bed or strip it for the laundresses. She would wash anything that needed washing including furniture and ornaments.

Laundress

The laundress was responsible for the cleaning of anything made of fabric in the household. The laundress would have to fetch their own water either from the castle well or from a nearby river. They would heat the water in large vats and add lye soap (the most popular of the cleaning agents). The constant exposure to soap and hot water was physically tough on the hands of the laundresses and their backs. When the detergents were added to the water, the laundress would dump them into the vat and stir that shit like soup. To dry it they would pin it out on lines or beat the water from it. The laundress might make money by selling secrets. Since they are handling unmentionables, they knew what happened behind closed bedchamber doors or what didn’t.

Nursemaid

The nursemaid was in charge of the castle’s children. They would ensure the child was fed, washed and generally kept alive while the parents would either be away at court or busy with the lands. The nursemaid would be a common woman from the surrounding lands who would come in to care for a noble child in the stead of the mother who would be expected to get on with other jobs. The nursemaid would be an underlying of the noble governess, a sort of hands-off nanny.

Cook

The cook was one of the most important servants in the castle. They would have the task of overseeing the running of the kitchens and keeping supplies in order. They would likely be on call at all times. Henry VIII’s cook was often woken in the night because his royal master wanted a midnight snack. The cook was a valued member of the household and would have been highly sought after if they were a very skilled cook. Cooks would have been paid a handsome wage.

Scullion

The scullion was the lowest member of staff. They would be responsible for scrubbing and cleaning the servants quarters and the kitchens. They would scrub floors with lye, scour pots with sand, sweep put the fireplace and clean up after the other servants. They were the first to rise in a castle and tasked to light all the fires in the kitchens.

Payment & Lifestyle

Within the mediaeval household, payment came from the hand of the steward. As the Lord’s manager of accounts, he was in charge of paying staff.

The grander jobs in the castle such as the marshal, the chamberlain, nursemaid and lady’s maid would pay better. They would have certain privileges including better bedchambers.

A nursemaid who was breastfeeding the Lord’s children would be a valued member of staff. She would be fed better than the other servants.

The page would sleep in a chamber off the lord’s bedchamber or sometimes at the foot of the bed. A page would wear the Lord’s livery so he would be dressed on the Lord’s coin.

The chamberlain would have rooms close to the lord and lady, just in case they were needed by the master in any kind of emergency.

The cook would sleep near the kitchens so they were close enough just in case they are needed in the night.

The other household servants would all sleep in chambers together. The women would sleep in one and the men would sleep in another. Nightly dalliances were frowned upon massively.

Most servants came from the surrounding lands of the castle. When the lord and his family were away at court or somewhere else, there would be a drop in employment. Everything would be cut down ex. Instead of three laundry maids, only one might stay on after the lord goes. The steward, the marshal, the chamberlain, the page, the cook, the nursemaid and the lady’s maid were all important staff so their job would be permanent.

[writtenbyfai]

I wish our childhood wasn't / so fleeting / look the cherry blossoms / are peppering / your nose / your cheeks / I wish my glasses didn't dim / of the world / otherwise I might have / drunk all the sharpness / & nostalgia / of colours.

--- another poem by fai.

Credit to owner of gif

[writtenbyfai]

wound round your head

It was a river that ran across my two pressed-side-by-side hands, spilled on either side, a tumbling, shimmering waterfall. It was lavender, as if a bottle of dye that shade had been knocked into the water, forever staining it that way. It was as silky as a ribbon and, when placed around my limp brown hair, would slip off the moment my hands left it unpinned. 

Most people call it a “hijab” or “headscarf”. Technically, it is a long fabric that is wound round your head. One that is clasped with two magnets or snagged with a long rounded pin so it won’t fall from your head. 

When I first wore it, and loved the feeling of being wrapped, of my neck and ears being warm, of never needing to comb my hair with my fingers to fix the locks again, I thought of it as a way of convenience, something to support my established listlessness.

My paternal aunts [now, note here, the word “paternal”; I don’t want to inspire discrimination against my general large family] made it a leash. A chain. 

“Now, there’s a good girl. Finally, you listened. You look very pretty in a hijab, dearie. You’ve saved your father from hell.” This was what they would say.

Ah, I see. I’ve saved him from hell, have I? I wish I haven’t. 

But even as I had uttered that scornful thought to my mother, who shushed me despite silently agreeing, I did not regret a single choice I had made. Deciding to wear a hijab was a liberating action for me, because I chose it. I hadn’t obeyed my aunts’ words months before I started donning it, their relentless urges, their pleas to heed religion, to stop seducing men, to begin a modest life, pave the first stones to the path of a good, obedient wife. 

Wearing a hijab did not -- and still does not -- mean I have succumbed to their pretence of pious women, their revolting accusations, their verbal abuses; it meant I have freed myself from the chains they had tried to fasten me with. The hijab -- also known as the headscarf, the head-covering, the long fabric that is wound round your head -- was my first protector; utilised by my own hands, tied to me by my own will.

[writtenbyfai]

“I’m heavily inspired by all the women in my life, especially my grandmother. Growing up I heard amazing stories of her craftsmanship and how she built her house in the village with her bare hands. These hands represents strength and power, and so does the @romeandtale virtus bracelet she’s wearing. I’m happy I was able to create this moment with her, while I was in Nigeria.” —Prince Aday

NIGERIA. Lagos. 2018. A capture of Mama Aduké’s hands. © Prince Aday

[writtenbyfai]

by Kiel Murray (2019)

[writtenbyfai]

Have you ever thought...

perhaps, life is a thick bundle of wires, intersecting, tangling, falling apart, and our paths snap and unsnap like magnets, nudging our whole worlds into breathless whirlwinds spinning around us. They don't wait for us to set something in motion; like pieces of magnets, they just clasp and spark. Intersect and come away.

[writtenbyfai]

an analysis

seasons inch past...

and before you know it, you end up stuck in the same place, reminiscing what could have been. Or you may have picked up time’s tricks and adjusted to its pace, knowing you could not have changed anything. Or, perhaps, you have been harbouring resentment towards time because it had stolen something dear to you that it can never return, and your only chance at forgiving it is to let things go. The sand in the hourglass catches the sunlight for a moment. The leaves on the branches of trees burgeon, then yellows, cripples, and at last, they wither and fall to the ground. Always shedding. Always passing by, time, even before we realise it, we’ve already missed so much of it. There are many anime films that smote me about time’s properties. ‘The Girl who Leapt through Time’ gave one such notion that time waits for no one. This film is of a similar essence, yet where ‘The Girl who Leapt through Time’ is light-hearted despite the heavy subject of losing a friend and using time for granted, ‘5 Centimetres per Second’ sharpens into clarity the time-impeded hardships and their aches.

‘5 Centimetres per Second’  is a film that struck me through the heart. Compared to the rest of Makoto Shinkai’s works, such as ‘Your Name’, this film doesn’t try to be exciting and fun. It is a slow – and may I say, at first, tedious – drag through murky waters, exploring ugly truths and torturous period of growing up and learning to let go of something that doesn’t belong to you. It is a beautiful, heart-breaking, chest-squeezing masterpiece. This film by Makoto Shinkai, released in 2007, is about two friends – Akari and Takaki – who are driven apart by time and distance. They have to move due to their parents’ jobs. Although they never give up on contacting each other, through letters and, later, emails, time gnaws on the thread of their relationship, pushing them slowly and steadily apart.

In this essay, I will be dissecting some of the things that grabbed me from the start of this film; specifically the journeys of the protagonist, Takaki, and the two deuteragonists, Akari and Kanae. The film is segmented into three episodes, which is a lovely yet unusual way of delivering a fine story, despite it being merely an hour and three minutes long.

Disclaimer: I do not own this film or any of the gif sets. All rights and credits belong to the rightful owners. 

First, the film opens upon two close childhood friends -- Akari and Takaki -- who chose to ally, at the beginning, against bullies in their school. Their friendship begins with this small, trivial fact that Akari pulls out of the spring sky, “…they say it’s five centimetres per second. The speed of a falling cherry petal. Five centimetres per second.” Soon, they stumble into a small world of their own, and, unsurprisingly, feelings blossom. But fate has other plans for them.

Akari doesn’t go to her dream high school with Takaki, as her parents move away from her childhood town. They still keep in contact, no matter how heartbroken they are. Along the way, Takaki’s parents must also move away, but the place they are going to doesn’t close the distance rifting them. It furthers it. Before the week Takaki has to move, he decides he will travel the distance to see Akari one last time, fearing he won’t be able to, later in time. But the journey there is difficult. Frost clenches the rails. Snow arrests the landscape in a cold, merciless way. The wind buries ice into his bones. Due to the weather, the train encounters a delay. The station they pull up at seems as if it’s in the middle of nowhere. Just snow, stretching on for miles. Just the empty, black sky yawning  an unending abyss, so deep for a second you think you might fall into it and never land. Takaki purchases a drink from a vending machine, but when he gropes for coins in his trousers’ pocket, a letter shifts up, the wind picks up and snatches it away. His face crumples into helplessness, as all his emotions written on that letter flies into the winter night. Lost. And you can feel the lostness digging into your chest.

This is where I stopped watching the first time I’d played it. The film drags on upon the cold, dark atmosphere that it builds throughout this scene, accompanied by Takaki’s sorrowful monologue, as if all the weight of the world is caged in his chest. I suddenly felt frigid, like my veins were encased in ice, and the weight of depressing thoughts took hold of me. It’s beautiful, I think, to be able to capture the viewer in such heart-wrenching feelings, but at that moment, I couldn’t bear it. In ‘Your Name’ and ‘Garden of Words’, the characters had fiery, rebellious or humorous personalities; it wasn’t hard to get immersed in the films. However, in ‘5 Centimetres per Second’, neither of the protagonists nor the deuteragonists had this type of attitude; they were hard, struggling people, and their realness was all too much for me. So, I cut off there. It was a long time until my sister convinced me to watch it again, beginning with the seemingly endless train ride. The second time, I understood his feelings. I saw everything from a slightly different perspective, treating the story distantly, so that the more depressing of my emotions wouldn’t get entangled in it.

The weather is still ruthless. The train is still and silent just like the rest of the world. Blowing hot breaths on his cupped hands to keep warm, Takaki whispers in his mind, pleading Akari not to wait for him. It strangles me how much they obviously care for each other, yet the universe is so intent on setting them apart. Takaki, at last, arrives at the station where he’s supposed to meet Akari. Midnight. There, sitting on the benches of the waiting area, is Akari. They only have a few hours left before dawn. But they ignore time, for now, and talk. They eat the cooled dinner Akari had prepared for his arrival. Then, when the station’s about to close, they walk down a snowy, desolate path. Stop under a frosted cherry tree. And they kiss. They never get the chance to express their feelings.

The morning comes to separate them, and sweetly, as you’d expect, they promise to each other they’ll never forget and will always keep writing to one another. This promise carries on, despite the day after that Takaki moves to a town near the sea.

The episode closes, to start a new chapter of their lives.

Surprisingly, we do not find Akari in the second episode of the film. She is absent on the screen, except for her name that Takaki writes and thinks of. His high school life is uneventful. He makes friends easily, achieves great grades, and aspires to go to university in Tokyo, one day. But the wish, the hope, that he might see Akari again and talk to her, urges him to keep looking forward. It seems to be the only thing that makes him want to walk, and be a good person, because apart from that, he is an empty shell who is tugged and swallowed by the same tide, stuck in a motion that never seems to let him go. He is also that tide. His attachment to Akari and his inability to let her go, traps him in the same place.

Meanwhile, a girl from his class, named Kanae, harbours an inexplicable crush on him. We’re introduced to her as a girl who has a passion for surfing, yet spends the afternoon until late in the evening, just to catch Takaki about to go home on his scooter, so that they could drive home together. At first, I thought it was kind of pitiful and pathetic, her loving someone whom she doesn’t really know and who doesn't share the feelings she’s folded so neatly inside her heart.  But, thankfully, Shinkai knew not to drawl Kanae’s character out as a clingy person, ensnared in fantasies. He shows that Kanae has other interests -- has a life -- other than her obsession of Takaki. Her life is complicated, and just as you would expect a normal high school teenager. When it comes to plans for her future, she is clueless, yet doesn’t bother trying to figure it out. Leaving her paper blank, it incites a small conflict between her, her counsellor, and her older sister who’s been taking care of her for an unspecified but long time. She struggles to find who she is.

One evening, after finding that Takaki had gone home early, and she’s driving home on her scooter, she spots his parked on the side of the road, where the land slopes upwards into a grassy hill. She sees him staring hard at his phone, fingers often typing something down, but every minute or so, they also press the delete button a couple of times. The blue light overlays his face, revealing the disturbing toll his distance with Akari over time. He’s conflicted. His jaw clenches and he snaps his flip phone shut; the darkness swallows his features. The unfocused look in his eyes tells Kanae she may be interrupting in a wrong moment, however, awareness sweeps across his gaze and he shifts it towards Kanae. This brief interaction summarises their relationship; Takaki looking forward to a future that is not waiting for him, staring past Kanae, who suppresses her feelings that she knows will never be requited.

Just when a few days later, Kanae produces courage from the depths of herself and she conquers the waves which had swept her constantly, before. She worries she won’t find this thrill, this rush of bravery anymore after that day, so she decides to relieve the weight of her feelings from her chest. But seeing Takaki more distant, withdrawing deeper into a husk of who he used to be, Kanae decides against it.

For many years, it stays that way.

The most impeding mark this film makes is in the third episode, where Takaki has made it to work in a computing company as an unseen employee, but the missingness Akari has left him years ago had carved his soul out. The sceneries are browner, duller, and we see the tiny flat in which he lives in being cluttered. Messed up. And we glimpse his mentality in those flashing moments of disarray as the animated shots show cans of beer and piles of dirty dishes in the sink and discarded wrappers of junk food. It strikes me how, in the second episode, in spite of Takaki’s distractedness, he was a really decent, kind person. His bedroom, then, was tidy, bed made, and I had a feeling that perhaps such was his way of coping; repetitive cleaning, busying oneself with any distractions that kept him from reaching for his phone. But in this third episode, he is exactly the opposite. We are shown how ruined he is inside-out. After all this time, it passing, he has not moved on one single step forward alongside time. He is still trapped in the pain of his attachment to Akari. His narrative constantly laments over the missing piece in his life, a cavern threatening to swallow him in the dark, and sometimes associates that interstice with Akari’s absence and their unsaid feelings for each other.

One morning, Kanae leaves a voice message. They haven’t seen each other since Takaki left for university in Tokyo, according to her narrative. She says she would like to meet him again someday to get some things off her chest. Takaki kills the message, and then the scene switches to Kanae’s life. Although she is an ordinary office worker behind a cubicle desk, she appears to be pleased with how far she’s come from not knowing what she wanted for her future to being there, living her future. Even as she said in the voice message that she wanted to confess her affections for Takaki, it doesn’t seem as if she still possesses the same feelings at the present. She’s moved on, because she has learnt not to dwell on emotions unreturned or it may poison you as you squander it inside. Her simple happiness and Takaki’s gnawing depression underline the change of these two characters in the course of the last few years of their lives; Kanae used to be uncertain about her life, timid and groping blindly in the dark, most of all unable to move on from her unrequited affections for Takaki, but when we look at her state in the last episode of the film, she has become this fiercely-determined, neat person, content with her life despite all hardships – the complete opposite of Takaki, who in his teenage stage of life had worked hard to succeed and be able to enrol at the university closest to Akari’s whereabouts, now is a walking ghost, void of any spark of will, and he drowns his daily sorrows in alcohol.

The scene shifts, then, to Akari. Even though we haven’t seen her in the majority of the film, she is a crucial character to the movement of the plot and the development of the protagonist. She’s all grown-up, now, just like the others, and we find the glint of an engagement ring on her finger as she bids her parents farewell at the station, about to depart for Tokyo to meet her fiancé and plan the wedding there. The camera pans briefly to a young woman and man embracing each other under the sunlight, in the middle of a bustling station. Fleetingly, we know she is also happy and has moved on.

The several minutes following that, seasons shed their previous skins to start anew. We stop at spring the next year, a sort of reminiscent flashback of little Akari and Takaki chasing each other down a quiet street on their way to school, and that innocuous fact about cherry blossom petals falling as fast as five centimetres per second. The camera keeps switching back and forth between the three lives of the characters, catching glimpses of their daily lives. In a quieter part of the city, where train tracks crisscross and the light spring sun sprays every surface of leaf, petal and gravel, a woman and a man walk across the tracks, going in opposite directions. The woman hesitates upon passing the man, yet she doesn’t stop, her bright umbrella twirling over her dark head. But the man – he jerks for a second. The bells ring, warning pedestrian of the train that is about to pass. Uncertainty grips his arms and feet and head in place, and by the time it doesn’t, he’s brave enough to look back – by the time the woman halts in her step to glance over her shoulder – the train whizzes by.

What is mesmerizing about this last moment before the screen goes black is the beautiful animation. Words are not said – and have hardly been uttered throughout the duration of the film – in this specific scene, but the body language, the expressions depicted on these characters and the figurative image of a train cutting the paths of people who’d once crossed and couldn’t untangle from one another, speak with more depth than any words can. The man’s shoulders relax. He smiles. He doesn’t wait for the train to fade from his sight, so that he could see the woman he has been in love with for the majority of his life. He turns around and walks away; that simple movement signifies he is letting go, moving on, at last.

Furthermore, this beautifully-executed film is a reminder that there are many things in life that will slip through your fingers, no matter how hard you try to clench it within your grasp. It tells a realistic story about letting go and learning to walk in time again, not against time.