Award-winning author Jill G. Hall shares her top tips for how to dive into your latest project head-first.

I didn’t set out to write dual-timeline novels. After leaving a twenty-year career as an educator I thought perhaps I’d write children’s books or maybe a memoir about teaching in inner-city classrooms, but that’s not what happened at all.

I began to attend a weekly drop-in group, that offered prompts with timed sessions. Writing in community helped my pen continue going even when I wanted to stop. Soon characters began to appear on the page out of nowhere. They were from the past and the present unrelated to anyone I’d ever known. They continued to show up week after week, time and again, guiding me to tell their stories. This is how my first novel originated. And that is when I first realized the power of intuitive writing: the practice of learning to trust the heart-hand connection. It means letting go of outlines, plans, and expectations and allowing the power of your intuition to guide you through the writing process. Intuitive writing is creating with your heart first, and not your mind.

(Jill G. Hall: Write With the Heart, Not the Head)

As an intuitive writer, for my first drafts, I put pen to paper and let my characters tell me where they want to go and what they want to do. When I try composing on my computer, I am tempted to make edits, fact check and then I get tangled in research weeds, which interrupts the rhythm and flow of my words.

Writing without an outline, I am compelled to keep writing to find out what happens next. I go deep into my characters with their thoughts and dialog. My characters sometimes come to me in dreams and work their way onto the page. I let them be who they want to be. I don’t try to change them if they’re too sassy, sappy, or sexy. I guess it is a type of unconditional love. The characters lead the story, not me.

After I’ve filled a few journals, I put sticky notes on pages I want to develop further and start typing. It’s not until I’ve typed up a whole draft that I develop my outline. Then on my third draft, I begin putting scenes in order, fact-checking and doing historical research to color in the stories. After I’ve made my manuscript the best it can be, I join a read and critique group facilitated by an expert novelist or hire an editor to give me feedback.

I know this technique isn’t for everyone. Each novelist needs to discover his or her own method. Intuitive writing might take longer than other approaches, but it works for me. Intuitive writing allows my characters to lead the journey. It allows me to follow my breath, fall into the zone, and lose my sense of place and time.

Seven Tips for Intuitive Writing

1. Develop a daily writing practice. We all have different learning styles and I suggest you experiment to find what works for you. I cherish mornings when the house is quiet. I never make early appointments, but rather pour a cup of Chai tea and crawl back into bed with my journal. I let myself write whatever I want: dreams, stream of consciousness thoughts, a poem inspired by the weather outside my window, or if I’m lucky, my characters are with me and show up on the page. Somedays I give myself an assignment to finish a specific scene or draft a pesky email I’d been putting off. I don’t check my phone or turn on my computer until after I’ve filled at least two pages. When I skip my writing practice, I feel off all day.

2. Try writing in community. Writing in community helps keep me going even when I want to stop or when something intimidates me. I continue to attend a weekly group where I’ve been inspired to write some of my favorite material.

3. Be open to surprises and strike when hot. When a great idea comes up, write it down right away! Most of my inspirations come to me unawares and if I don’t write them down, they slip away.

4. Claim your workspace. I type better if my desk is neat without papers and piles spread all over it. I need it to be quiet, but others are more productive with music on. I prefer a pillow beneath me and since I am short, I like a low desk.

(Common Signs You’re in Writer’s Resistance)

5. Connect with a community. Find other writers who can support you along the way and help nourish your work. Take classes and workshops and, when you’re ready, join a read and critique group. In my first typed draft, the scenes were all out of sequence and my technical skills were zilch. But the facilitator and group members were very patient and encouraged me to continue. After writing that full draft, I was able to put it in some semblance of order, and indeed, to my delight, I did have something. I joined another group, did another draft, then drafted more rewrites. Even if you live in a rural area there are now many on-line options you can join.

6. Use prompts. It might be a word, phrase, photo, piece of art, or something in nature. I also like visual prompts such as postcards, photos, and artwork to jumpstart my writing. They keep me focused, and help me go deeper into my characters, settings, and stories. Colors, textures, and details become clearer and flow onto the page with more vividness and sensory descriptions.

(10 Plot Twist Ideas and Prompts for Writers)

7. Set a timer. For me, ten and 17 minutes seem to be the magic numbers. Find yours.

My favorite sources:

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves

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There’s no sugar-coating it: The world of SEO can be tricky to navigate — but it’s absolutely doable, even for the newest of newbies.

It’s so worth it, too. SEO is a powerful long-term approach writers can utilize to boost (free!) traffic to their websites or blogs.

Sure, you can build an SEO article from the ground up. (Might I suggest this writer’s guide to mastering SEO?) But it doesn’t have to be that complicated just yet. You can start by optimizing your existing content.

I’ll walk you through my approach — as a writer myself — to on-page SEO optimizations.

On-page SEO optimizations: What does that mean anyway?

Let’s start with the basics. In the SEO world, there are a ton of technical terms, but don’t let that scare you.

When we talk about on-page SEO optimization, we’re talking about taking an existing article or page and updating it to increase its chances of ranking on Google — aka attracting more eyeballs.

On-page SEO optimizations can be a relatively easy way to step into the SEO world. After all, you already have the content out there. You just need to make some updates so Google will take notice.

How to identify content worth optimizing for SEO

First and foremost: It’s not worth attempting to optimize every single article on your website or blog. You have to remember different pieces of content serve different purposes. Some will work better on social. Others are perfect for your email newsletter audience. And some just might have the potential to rank on Google.

So how do you determine which of your existing articles are worth optimizing?

I suggest starting with the low-hanging fruit. Using a free SEO tool like Ubersuggest, search your website’s URL. You’ll see which pages get the most traffic through Google and with what keywords. You might identify a great opportunity to optimize what’s already working well and climb the (Google) ranks.

If you don’t yet have enough traffic to your site, or you’re not spotting any obvious keyword potential, you can always do a quick DIY survey of your content.

When doing this, I like to think about what folks Google. I look for articles that take the shape of ultimate how-to guides, “best of” lists, product comparisons, recommendations, questions answered… you name it. These posts tend to be more all-encompassing and lengthy in nature. Perfect for Google.

Let’s take a quick assessment of some articles on The Write Life and use them as examples.

I’m seeing articles about the best laptops for writers, how to self-publish a book, how to get paid to write and a guide to Upwork. I suspect people are searching these terms, so these all have the potential to make strong SEO articles. (And in many cases, they do!)

On the other hand, something like “ways writers can recreate the coffee shop experience” probably isn’t something that gets searched a ton, so you probably wouldn’t want to focus your efforts on optimizing it. However, it’s great content for other platforms like social pages, community groups or newsletters.

Once you pluck a few ideas from your site, it’s time to dive in with some keyword research.

A step-by-step guide to the on-page SEO optimization process

This is the fun part of SEO optimizations (at least in my humble opinion). I’ll walk you through each step I take when optimizing an article for SEO.

Step 1: Pinpoint your target keyword

If you don’t already have a selected keyword, you’ll need to do some research. Remember, your keyword is the word or phrase you want to rank for on Google.

Use a keyword research tool for this. We love Ahrefs around these parts, but again Ubersuggest is a great (and free!) alternative.

So let’s say you want to optimize an article about cold brew coffee. Type the core terms into Ubersuggest. In this case, it’d be “cold brew coffee.” Leave out any unnecessary adjectives, prepositions or articles. Here’s another example: If you were optimizing a post about how to self-publish a book, you might simply search “self-publish book.”

Going back to the cold brew coffee example, when you search that term in Ubersuggest, you’ll find there’s a high search volume (49,500 when we looked). That’s great! That means tens of thousands of people are searching the term each month.

However, you’ll see the SEO difficulty (SD) is pretty high. (At the time we checked, it was 58.) The SEO difficulty ranges from zero to 100, and the closer you can get to zero, the better.

If you scroll down, you’ll find more keyword ideas. View all keyword ideas to see what related terms people search. Consider the different angles.

Remember: Your goal is to find a relevant keyword with a high search volume and a low SD.

Also, keep your reader top of mind. The keyword “how to make cold brew coffee” has a lot of potential — 33,100 monthly searches with a 22 SD. But if you want to optimize a review you wrote of the Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew from Starbucks, readers are less likely to click because you’re not giving them what they’re looking for.

For the sake of this example, let’s optimize our hypothetical article with the keyword, “how to make cold brew coffee.” It has a high search volume and a relatively low SD.

Step 2: Read Google’s mind

You’re about to read Google’s mind. Think you’re ready? It’s not as difficult as you might think!

In this step, your goal is to better understand what Google considers top-ranking material for this keyword. Really, you’re just surveying your competition.

Here’s what you’ll need to do: Search your target keyword in Google, and take a good look at the first page of results. Start taking notes on:

• The top-ranking articles: Read through the top three to five ranking articles. What content do they cover? What questions do they answer? Take inventory of headlines, formatting, tables and graphics.
• The featured snippet: For some keywords, Google will populate what’s called a “featured snippet.” This is the box of text that populates at the top of your Google search. Note the content it’s highlighting. This is Google saying, “Hey, here’s the best answer!” If you can rank in this top spot, you’ll get more views, but fair warning: It’s pretty tough.
• People also ask: This box contains questions related to your keyword. Consider: Are these relevant questions you could answer in your article? For instance, people also ask, “Can regular coffee be used for cold brew?” You could probably easily answer this somewhere in your article: “You can use regular coffee for cold brew. In fact, you can use any sort of coffee you’d like.”
• Related searches: Finally, scroll down the related searches at the bottom of the first page. See if anything stands out. You might get some good ideas for topics you can add to your existing content like, “how to make cold brew in a mason jar” or “how to strain cold brew coffee.”

Again, the goal here is to simply take inventory and survey your competition. In a way, you’re getting inside Google’s brain to see what it “likes.”

Step 3: Beef up your article

It’s finally time to write!

With on-page optimizations, you’ll work with the existing content you have. There’s rarely a reason to delete everything and start over. You simply want to beef up your article with additional information, reporting, graphics or sections you noted in step two.

Of course, you never want to copy what exactly another top-ranking site is doing. Make this your own! But maybe one article included a neat graphic, and that sparked an idea. Or maybe another article listed several cold brew coffee recipes at the end of their guide. Perhaps you add one or two of your own. Again, use your research as inspiration and guidance — not your rulebook.

As you work, keep your reader in mind. This is one reason I love SEO writing — your goal is to serve the reader and give them all the information they’re seeking. Now, this doesn’t mean you want to jam-pack your article with every single element you noted from the top-ranking articles.

Instead, ask yourself: If I wanted to learn how to make cold brew coffee, what would I want or need to know?

Additionally, maintain your natural writing style and voice. Although SEO writing may feel a bit more prescriptive, you’re not writing for a robot. Avoid keyword-stuffing at all costs. (That means awkwardly wedging keywords into your post.) Again, SEO is all about the reader.

You’ll want to pay close attention to your headline (or title tag), excerpt (or meta description), you subheads (or H2) and your image descriptions. If you can do so naturally, include your keyword in these.

Links also help boost page rankings, so find opportunities to link out to credible sources. Or, once you republish your newly refreshed article, see if you can find other pages to link to it on your site (again, when relevant!).

Step 4: Give it a week and check in

The optimization process is ongoing, and it’ll likely take a good bit of experimenting.

Once you update your content, give it a week or so before checking in on it. Again, you can use Ubersuggest to peep your top pages and keywords.

After a few months, take another look at what’s ranking on Google for your intended keyword, and see if there’s anything else you can do to boost your rankings.

The ultimate key? Patience and persistence. The optimization process is ongoing. Google is constantly shifting its algorithms, and new articles are jumping in to compete for those rankings each day. Just keep your fingers to the pulse, and keep working. I have faith you’ll land on the magical Page One eventually!

Got an article in mind you’d like to optimize? Share your updates in the comments below!

Photo via franz12 / Shutterstock 

The post How To Optimize and Update Your Published Articles and Blog Posts to Rank on Google appeared first on The Write Life.

Ottessa Moshfegh joined Josie Mitchell to talk about about her novel, Death in Her Name.

They discuss the ‘perfect storm’ trapping us inside with our Zoom-ready devices, the propaganda in the air, and the psychological effects of isolation on the elderly narrator of her novel.

You can read an excerpt from Death In Her Name here. As well as more fiction from Ottessa on our website and in print.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1371667/5656285-ottessa-moshfegh-the-granta-podcast-ep-96.js?container_id=buzzsprout-player-5656285&player=small

Image © Jake Belcher

The post Podcast | Ottessa Moshfegh appeared first on Granta.

Romance author Michelle Major explains her three go-to tips for ensuring your characters have believable chemistry.

What is chemistry? Well, if you ask my two high schoolers, Chemistry is a really hard class that mom the writer can’t help them with at all. And according to Dictionary.com, chemistry is the branch of science that deals with the identification of the substances of which matter is composed; the investigation of their properties and the ways in which they interact, combine, and change; and the use of these processes to form new substances as well as the complex emotional or psychological interaction between two people.

(Michelle Major: The Meat of the Story)

Despite my kids’ doubts, I have a lot of experience with chemistry—at least as it relates to creating it on the page. Chemistry between the hero and heroine in romance is the heart of the story. It’s both that indefinable spark and the deep emotional connection that keeps readers turning pages instead of turning off the light and heading to bed. Here are three keys to making sure your book is binge-worthy.

Three Keys to Crafting Chemistry Between Characters

1. Make readers care. The romance genre gets a bad rap with cliches like “bodice rippers” or “porn for women.” But the best romance books pull readers into the stories with details that make them care about the hero and heroine. Elements such as strong motivations, actions toward a visible goal, and a journey of transformation help readers identify with and relate to your characters. The reader feels what the characters feel toward each other through witty banter or revealing vulnerabilities. There might be a moment of surprise that shifts the dynamic—a push and pull of responses that give readers insight into the hero and heroine that they might not yet have. When we are watching them fall in love and are falling in love ourselves at the same time, it’s a magic moment.

(5 Tips for Writing Engaging Romance)

2. Tension and stakes. Will they or won’t they? It’s a timeless question that keeps readers at the edge of their seats. Whether in books, movies, or with fan-favorite TV couples, there’s an investment in watching or reading a romance play out on the page or the screen. We feel those emotions right along with them and when an author ups the stakes, the reader goes with them for the ride. Make your characters messy and human. They make mistakes and they keep pushing forward, both with their individual goals and as it relates to the romance. Motivate them because the more there is to lose, the hotter the chemistry becomes, and the better the payoff is for the reader.

IndieBound | Bookshop | Amazon

[WD uses affiliate links.]

3. Intimacy at the level of essence. Chemistry is more than a physical connection, although that physical spark can play a big part in bringing two people together. But it can just as easily push them apart. What if your hero is falling for his boss? What if the heroine can’t stop the butterflies that flutter across her stomach at the sight of the guy who once broke her heart? Figure out why your characters are perfect for each other and at the same time the exact wrong choice for what they think they want. Then use that to create intimacy. Not just the mechanics of sex but how they reveal the vulnerabilities behind their guarded hearts. When you allow them to connect at that deep level, the reader has the authenticity of it. That’s how you create characters who live beyond “the end” in our hearts.

Every reader wants to feel something when they dive into the pages of a book. It’s our job to give them that emotional heartbeat. No matter the level of heat you write or whether you add a bit of mystery or paranormal into your romance, the chemistry between your characters is what makes the book unforgettable.

Click to continue.

I

Ko au te whenua, te whenua ko au.

Mauri

Mana

Never thought of my body as separate from the mauri of every living thing or every thing and body that ever existed. Non-human matter and beings encounter one another constantly. For Maaori our bodies are shaped by an awareness of non-human and human dynamics, as we are physically embedded into the whenua (land, placenta) and our bodies stretch up and down like endless poi between Ranginui and Papatuuaanuku.¹

Jane Bennett refers to this matter or what we would call mauri or mana as being the ‘material’ or the ‘thingness’: ‘a cultivated, patient, sensory attentiveness to non-human forces.’ I worry for all of humanity that our relationship with the so-called ‘non-human’ is so detached from our day-to-day lives and written about in such an austere way. I felt frustrated in class recently discussing Bennett’s ‘plant-thinking’ as a kind of adaptation of Deleuzian ‘rhizomes.’

Someone please explain Deleuze to me or I will fucking kill you.

 The everyday entanglement of nature and culture.

I imagine all bodies and all entities like jellyfish or pomegranate seeds or the yellow goop inside a kina or the salty water sack covering an oyster. My brain is a physical entity and gunk and ‘it contains cells, tissue, fluid, neurons . . . blood vessels, matter white and black and grey.’² Shooting electrons swimming under the water in giant, cold, metal pipes. Wet. Moist. Slimey. Dripping. Silicon. Multiple realities are thrown into being. They overlap, map, and diverge across time and space. Time collapses and reveals itself as both porous and arbitrary.

Aura?

Plant-thinking?

When I think of the conception of the ‘soul’, I cannot help but return to the banality of continental philosophy by mentioning Socrates’ view of the soul as trapped inside the tomb of the body, only released upon death. I wonder if a soul is like a wairua, but that seems too limited. I imagine a wairua with the power of a thousand hearts beating together simultaneously in the air, the soil, and in the living and non-living matter that encompases everything. I think of cicadas rippling through the night, of worms soaking deep into tree roots and of weeds boundlessly taking over the cathedral in Ootautahi.

Plants are not a singular organism, but a living totality, reaching up through the plastic and concrete cracks on ancient cobblestones. The ability of plants to grow via roots that sprawl together and react in a kind of utopia reminds me of the ways that hemp plants were used in Chernobyl to clean up nuclear waste. Or how older gorse plants are used for native plant regeneration in the Banks Peninsula. I think too of the watercress that grows at the front of my parents’ house. It is plentiful, but you cannot eat it. Green algae floats around the edges of the swampland as rhododendrons bloom above.

Grain hybrids
Irrigation systems
Fertilisers
Pesticides.
Global food production
‘Green Revolution’
100% pure

‘In decolonization, there is therefore the need of a complete calling in question of the colonial situation.’³

I dedicated much of my life to self-‘improvement’: To be the best of both worlds, which is impossible, because to accept whiteness is to neglect te ao Maaori. When I think of this ideology of improvement – of being the best, of being the winner, of being the most productive – I can’t help but think of how it is rooted in the abstraction of land; using English common law colonists measured land in relation to the labour of cultivation, dividing Papatuuaanuku into usages and rendering her value in the form of commodity production.⁴

Ko au te whenua, te whenua ko au.

Papatuuaanuku’s soil has been ravaged by irresponsible agricultural practices to produce equal amounts of waste as food. This process of extraction is marred by colonialism, not merely because this is stolen land but because it abstracts our bodies from the whenua in order to justify the settler’s presence as part of an endless plunder. This logic of abstraction – title by registration, part of the British colonial project designed to sever indigenous people from their lands – is rooted in the transformation of ‘the idea of property (in land) as a socially embedded set of relations premised on use, political hierarchies, and exchange, to a commodity vision of land that rendered it fungible in the same way as any other commodity.’

As part of the British colonial project land was confiscated based on whether it was deemed agriculturally viable – if certain indigenous people had or had not enacted an agricultural plan based around an idealised European model for production and extraction (commercial trade and marketised exchange). Marx wrote on this disruption of this free-flowing relation between nature and man: ‘Nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.’

The current state of the world, the seemingly irreparable damage done to our waterways, soil and vegetal life is the result of colonialism – of an insidious process of acquisition, extraction, and violence. To take and divide land based on ‘productivity’ debased the ecological protocols indigenous people had had in place to manage resources for millenia.

In Aotearoa before colonisation we had a booming trade system across the Pacific, but we managed our resources, only taking what was needed to survive. This was based around tikanaga specific to different peoples, but incurred invocations or karakia to welcome and thank our ancestors (Rangnui, Tangaroa, et cetera) for these gifts, such as fish from the sea or potatoes from the soil.

 

II

Hiding in kumara pits on the side of volcanoes, I was born with an egg inside me ready to be baked. I dream my skin is made of harakeke. Two estranged friends slowly soften my coarse flesh with oyster shells. I am in pain but they ignore my karanga and I hear their thunderous laughter rolling up towards Ranginui’s echoing sky. Sometimes their laughter is intercut with the Seinfeld theme song. They were trying to make me softer, but I refused.

My whenua is buried at our house on Smith Street in Matamata. My mother told me when my brother was born the nurses had already thrown his whenua away.

My atua waahine streams down my thigh, as I wake dripping in steaming wai. Hine-te-iwaiwa my cycle can’t keep up with your shifting of the moon.

A friend tells me it’s just as well I didn’t have a baby, because of the impending ends of the world. I never thought it was possible to become pregnant because of the amount of irresponsible sex I’ve had that never resulted in a child. So when a ‘thing’ unsuspectedly grew inside me and took over my body I was stunned. In a way that’s still difficult to make sense of, it reminded me of how the gelflings’ blood was drained from their bodies in The Dark Crystal. Carrying a child is a trauma. I had to have two injections in my ass because it was a different blood type to me. I was extremely tired, weak, and sick because my body was overcompensating, giving all my nutrients away. My first doctor objected and the next six or seven appointments were a flurry between English and Português . . . Desculpe, eu não falo Português. Favor fale lentamente. Estou tentando.

When I was pregnant I read about the forced sterilisation of women in Puerto Rico between 1936 and 1968. The United States government justified it by citing rising rates of poverty and unemployment. In Meehan Crist’s essay ‘Is it okay to have a child?’ she takes to task the notion of population control as a means for countering anthropomorphic climate change by intersecting it with colonial histories. Crist critiques Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, in which Haraway suggests the increase in global population expected over the twenty-first century will ‘make demands that cannot be borne without immense damage to human and nonhuman beings,’ and argues for ‘personal, intimate decisions to make flourishing and generous lives . . . without making more babies.’ It would be irresponsible to not consider the violence such a utopia would require.

I kept the ultrasound of my empty womb and thought about my friend who had to have her insides scraped out after a bad miscarriage.

The only way out is through.

 

III

My two favourite shows as a child were Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars. Both were blonde and American. The ideal. Buffy was a teenage girl navigating high school during the day, slaying vampires in the evening. Veronica Mars was a high school student during the day and a private investigator by night. Following the stars with my iPhone app, like my tuupuna did across the Pacific, I would be a sailor. Or I could be a pirate, a clown, undercover FBI, a Josephine Baker-type spy, anything you want.

One aunty I never liked used to call me and my sister patupaiarehe or parahitiki, knowing full well we didn’t speak Maaori. A relative on my mother’s side once stated that one of my dad’s uncles was a ‘rough sort of Maaori’. I never truly felt like I was white or brown; always a spy never truly engrossed in either world. Not white enough or brown enough. Always wanting to feel like I was enough.

Whenever I try and speak Maaori I always struggle to say my ‘t’s with a soft almost-‘d’ sound. You can hear my alienness even if these words on my tongue still lash out in defiance.

Now when I think about being called parahitiki I smile, thinking about my poi made with plastic bags. I’m an urban Maaori, constantly switching and hiding and being ‘adaptable.’ My skin tone fluctuates, but it’s always a point of tension and pain. When people tell me I should just go home it’s hard to explain that I’ve never felt at home anywhere except when I’m swimming in the ocean.

 

IV

We are the descendants of our strongest ancestors.

Maaori women, with the exception of slaves (male and female), were never regarded as possessions and retained their own names upon marriage so their whakapapa was never disregarded or taken from their children.⁵

I have so many rivers and mountains.

You are never alone because your whanau holds you, even when you are scattered across places (Lisboa, Riyadh, Ootepoti, Taamaki Makaurau) or no longer around. It’s the fact that the word in Maaori for father, matua, does not necessarily mean the singular father, but speaks instead to all Maaori men. That whaea denotes all Maaori women. In traditional Maaori society we were raised by our communities and certain work was not relegated by gender. Generations of knowledge flowed together seamlessly.

How do we now stand together again?

The only way out is through.

 

V

If we want to be truly liberated there needs to be a way in which to come together and account for the differences in our experiences and privilege.

I live in a predominantly black and brown neighbourhood in Lisboa. It is a community of people who have come from former Portuguese colonies like Goa, Macau, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissou, and Mozambique, as well as many Romani people who aren’t allowed to enter any spaces guarded by frog statues. It’s an area that is constantly under threat since the 2008 financial crisis and the Portugese government’s subsequent austerity measures (the harshest only abandoned in 2016). This did little to slow the consequences from the boom of tourism, Airbnbs, Lime scooters, and bodies like mine, all making it increasingly expensive to live here. I would never claim to understand experiences of otherness, racism, discrimination that are not my own. I despise the identification many Maaori and other non-black bodies take with black experience and black culture. I feel numbing discomfort at the thought of not giving back to what I’m taking from.

If we want to be truly liberated there needs to be a way in which to come together and account for the differences in our experiences and privilege.

I always think about being mistaken for being Aboriginal in Australia and a girl named Kara, who would make jokes about lynching me. I feel sick to think about the layers of racism being espoused from the mouth of a nine-year-old. It was so common for these kinds of things to be said, but at nine years old I did not have the language to reply. Histories become distorted and entwined, children are taught to hate and fear and to believe that their whiteness affords them superiority.

If we want to be truly liberated there needs to be a way in which to come together and account for the differences in our experiences and privilege.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt – a Jewish philosopher who had fled Nazi Germany – offers her reports on Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s trial in 1961 for the New Yorker. Throughout the trial, Arendt became more and more concerned not by the idea that Eichmann was somehow a monster, but that his evil lay in his thoughtlessness, his impotence, the banality of evil he saw around him. During the trial Eichmann attempted to outline his reliance on a Kantian categorical imperative of carrying out the ‘law.’ But when he was carrying out orders related to the Final Solution it was as though he was no longer able to see reason, or right or wrong, or change anything. He was a ‘thoughtless’ actor in something he had ‘no control’ over. ‘He did his “duty” . . . he not only obeyed “orders”, he also obeyed “the law”.’

If we want to be truly liberated there needs to be a way in which to come together and account for the differences in our experiences and privilege.

We must work through this impotence or thoughtlessness if we are to imagine a future for ourselves. Without a sustained effort at a remembrance marked by nuance, we cannot learn to live with ghosts and so cannot think.⁶ There is much to mourn, but mourning is an action. By dwelling on loss we must appreciate how the world has and can change and how ‘we must ourselves change and renew our relationships if we are to move forward from here.’

Franco ‘bifo’ Berardi describes impotence as the ‘effect of the total potency of power when it becomes independent from human will, decision and government.’ My generation is drowning in student debt, unable to buy homes, poisoned by our atmosphere and waterways, and unable to find meaningful stable jobs. We are watching the planet slowly being depleted of all its resources. We grew up knowing the assumption of infinite growth is a farce. We will work more hours per week than our grandparents did, live shorter lives, and face a multitude of crises that could mean the end of it all. We are marred by political flabbiness, apathy, and even nihilism. We have been watching the fires burning helplessly. I feel shattered trying to simply exist within this constant precarity.

Our bodies are exhausted. Our planet is exhausted. I feel lost trying to figure out what to do besides disappear. I want to hide. The end of the world seems plural, but this also means that there is potential for multiple beginnings. Berardi advocates for solidarity and a rejection of subjectivism. Because friendship transforms – it enunciates change – and because the future is unwritten and does not contain a linear development – there is still possibility. We have the opportunity to come together – to share and recentre our relationships to the mauri of the world. To avoid catastrophe.

If we want to be truly liberated there needs to be a way in which to come together and account for the differences in our experiences and privilege.

I return to Franz Fanon’s descriptions to try and feel hope for a future based around collectivity:

Individualism is the first to disappear. The native intellectual had learnt from his masters that the individual ought to express himself fully. The colonialist bourgeoisie had hammered into the native’s mind the idea of a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity, and whose only wealth is individual thought. Now the native who has the opportunity to return to the people during the struggle for freedom will discover the falseness of this theory. The very forms of organization of the struggle will suggest to him a different vocabulary.

If we want to be truly liberated there needs to be a way in which to come together and account for the differences in our experiences and privilege.

 

VI

Every day I am learning to understand my own history and culture by comparing it to others. Every day I am able to contribute something from my own heritage because it’s marked in my bones. If I stand tall enough with my back straight and with my head strong, leaning up into the warmth of Tamanuiteraa, my tuupuna will stand with me just as tall, keeping me upright when I want to crumble into defeat. I hold them in my body and I continue to carry them forward. I feel fear – the same loving fear for future generations that they must have felt for me.⁷ I know I must be resilient no matter the difficulty. My body being here is proof of their strength, even if I don’t feel very strong right now.

The sly smile ur lips make when you say the first
Tina!
before screaming
Huia e! Taaiki e!

When we introduce ourselves as Maaori we mention a river/sea, mountain, or long-deceased relative, as well as an entire tribe. All beings and objects contain a mauri or mana and are thereby interconnected. It’s not a ‘thingness’ or ‘plant-thinking’; it’s a constant awareness and relationship to the non-human – a relation that respects and manaaki all non-human entities. It’s impossible to explain how vastly our bodies relate to the world – they encompass soil, air, water, corpses, and even worms. Our bodies are the rhizomes, they are dynamic and beat softly in time with the rhythms of this world, because they are connected.

The only way out is through.

 

 

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Please note that this essay uses Te Reo spelling and dialect from Waikato/Tainui.

¹ Te Kawehau Hoskins and Alison Jones, ‘Non Human Others and Kaupapa Maori Research,’ Critical Conversations in Kaupapa Maori. Huia Publishers: Wellington, 2017, 56.

²  Andreas Malm, The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. Verso: London, 2020, 49.

³  Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press: New York, 1968, 37.

⁴  Brenna Bhandar, Colonial lives of property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Duke University Press: Durham, NC, 2018, 74.

⁵  Rangimarie Mihomiho Rose Pere, ‘To us the dreamers are important’ in Mana Wahine Reader A Collection of Writings 1987–1998, Volume 1, ed. Leonie Pihama, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Naomi Simmonds, Joeliee Seed-Pihama, and Kirsten Gabel. Te Kotahi Research Institute, 2019, 7.

⁶  Donna Haraway,Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press: Durham, NC, 2016, 142.

⁷  Günther Anders, ‘Thesis for an Atomic Age,’ The Massachusetts Review 3, no. 3, March 1962, 498.

 

Photograph © Kirk K 

 

 

This essay by Hana Pera Aoake is forthcoming in A Bathful of Kawakawa and Hot Water, available from Compound Press.

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