Message from Features Editor Diana Jenkins
by Diana Jenkins
I want to take the opportunity to wish everyone a very safe and sane end to 2016, a year that’s left many people reeling. I’m still queasy with grief and dismay about the US election – there’s a stubborn part of my brain that just won’t accept the result, as though denying it will somehow alter the terrible course of events that has brought us Donald Trump, President Elect. It’s still so implausible and hideous to me that I gag every time I try saying it out loud. I haven’t even begun to comprehend how he managed to sidestep his appalling, repugnant objectification of half the population (how was that tape not the ignominious end of his candidacy?), let alone the sad fact that the voting men and women of America enabled it.
It staggers and sickens me. I understand American voters were sending a profane, ‘all caps’ message to their political elite – they certainly succeeded there – but I’ll never, ever get over what the whole sorry turd reveals about extant (sadly not extinct) attitudes to women. Recalling Philosophy of Gender undergraduate units I studied with such gusto and conviction, the main thing I want is a refund. I ate that shit up, but shit it has proven to be. Women right around this poor old degraded planet of ours are a long way from done dealing with degradations of our own.
I don't want anyone anywhere murdered for anything, least of all their political affiliations, but let's not forget it was a young woman - a bright young working mum - who was killed during the height of Brexit antagonism. Jo Cox, fresh-faced, hard-working, full of energy and community spirit, slain as she went about her public service. My heart breaks for her little children. Boris and the boys? Still safely tucking into Westminster hot lunches and enjoying medicinal tipples in their private gentlemen's clubs, I'm willing to bet, the biggest strain of the whole ordeal being felt against their belts. Cox - petite as she was - made a much easier target. Women usually do.
Resilience – one of the topics of this month’s interview with playwright Joanna Murray-Smith, by Alumna and ABC journalist Deborah Rice, whom I first met my very first night fireside at Varuna – is most certainly required. So is some noise. Loud women – ha! Don’t the lips curl at nearby tables whenever a coven of cackling women enjoys a high-spirited conversation in public? Oh, they do, you know they do, but I maintain women need to make a lot more bloody noise.
Recalling last month’s interview with the marvellous and inconveniently outspoken Ann Moyal, I’m struck by an observation of hers that Varuna is a women’s place. Of course that is not exclusively the case: I had the good fortune of spending one stay with the thoughtful and unfailingly generous Dr Andrew Kwong, and Ann herself cited a man – the historian, art collector and author Stephen Scheding – as the other half of her most enduring Varuna friendship. A wonderful, gentle man, Mick Dark, gifted Varuna to the writers of Australia; Peter Bishop’s name was synonymous with the National Writers’ House for many years; this site is maintained with saintly patience by our webmaster wizard Mark Watson; and a good deal other men have contributed as writers and Board members to Varuna’s ongoing success and robust Alumni Association over the years. Long may it continue – I love men – nonetheless, it remains a fact that I’ve been in the house with only women save that one week with Andrew, and women writers seem to gravitate to and benefit from the house in a way that doesn’t seem equally true of male writers.
Why is that? The reasons, I think, are myriad, and not really the main point I aim to make here.
Against stiff odds, I want us all to end 2016 feeling optimistic. One way we can do that is by thinking about Varuna writers and the cacophony of our combined voices. We can, if we want to, make some real goddamned noise (for all the prayerful silence in the house until the clocks toll 6 pm). I think of the 2016 that Alumna Charlotte Wood enjoyed as the multi-award-winning author of The Natural Way of Things – arguably the book of the year and fuelled in part by Charlotte’s own deep rage about the flagrant ongoing sexism and misogyny so dominant in our culture, by which I mean our media, our political landscape, our workplaces, our relationships (be they romantic, familial or maternal) and our everyday lives. It’s everywhere I look and breathe, so I love that Charlotte’s novel issued a kind of primal scream to the nation and readers in their droves howled right back.
I think also of Varuna Residential Fellowship winner Clementine Ford, whose feminist manifesto Fight Like a Girl delivered a right cross to the flabby chops of 2016 that this year so richly deserved.
I am sick to death of the broken scales on which we measure our lives, our worth, our work and ourselves. Throw them out; they are worthless and harmful. I remain stunned – STUNNED – by the sheer level of drudgery that accompanies being the mother of small children. That these relentless domestic chores consume so much of my time not only mocks my post-Whitlam free education, like the joke was on me all along, it infuriates me to the point of near violence, so much so that I find my greatest peace in recent weeks has come from taking up a boxing class. I would have found that concept alien and disturbing just a few short years ago, but I’m full of fury now, and I find boxing directs that fury in a very cathartic way.
I wept in the shower the day after the US election, thinking of Hillary Clinton, and how bewildered she must be, because they hate her, but it wasn’t just Hillary: it was about all girls, really – past, present and future – and the ways in which our potential has always been and continues to be thwarted by biology, bullies, boys’ clubs, brute strength and yes, sometimes by each other.
But never are we thwarted at Varuna. I think of every writer I have been with during those sacred stays in the house, all of us emancipated for a full seven days from the worst of our menial duties and society’s ingrained insults, all of us delighting in the power not just of language but of each other. It is electrifying, always, and I do not take a second for granted. I think of you all daily with such love and gratitude, and it’s because of you that I farewell 2016 with optimism and defiance. Your work and your words matter; I hope we continue making a deafening racket in 2017. Let it rip.