Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: 2022-orwell-prize‎ (9)

The judge stated:

The remit of t

The judge stated:

The remit of this inquiry is fourfold: to determine whether, as has been claimed, Eva Harcourt-Vane was exploited by the politically-motivated women around her; to establish whether the charity she set up was properly constituted and governed; to determine whether crimes were committed; and to ascertain whether there were conflicts of interest between Eva's, and her colleagues', charitable, social, political and business roles in this island community.

At the beginning, Inga counted up the witnesses they could rely on: Alice, Zoe, Jen, Camille, Mariam, Lucija, Stella, Nina?, Tara, Ruth?, Inga herself. Twelve women, including Eva, some angrier than others. Plus grateful supporters, such as Sister Geraldine, Edna Reynolds and Lucette Smith.

In the middle were women like Felicity, from the museum, and Ursula, from the paper, who refused to come to Cwen or acknowledge any links with Eva’s operation.

On the anti-side were Colin Grieves and the men from the council, Eva’s sons, and various men in entrenched positions of island power

My forthcoming history of the islands of Britain, The Britannias, demonstrates how the patriarchal mainstream has marginalised the ancient tradition of female rule in Britain. But I also wanted to unleash these islands of women into the 21st century in a novel. My novel, Cwen, is set in a fictional archipelago off the east coast of Britain [GY: close to the English/Scottish Border], where I imagine a female coup.

Na praia, na beira do mar, sentada na arcia

Ela disse assim

Aqui, com você, é como se não tivesse ditadura

Como se não existisse e nunca tivesse existido ditadura, nemdos, nem conquistador, nem explorador, nema minas, nem corporaçãoes mineiras, nem imperialistas, nem espies estadunidenses, nem portugueses, nem língua portuguesa, nem Portugal, nem Brasil, nem branco, nem escravidão, nem casa grande, nem senzala, nem varíola, nem rei, nem princesa ou imperador

What will our daughters say of us?

Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?

He wondered brought him to this place so far removed from the world he knew, what forces had led him to leave the life he'd created for himself in India, to come to this place he'd never actually lived, this place that had hardly figured in his life growing up. He wondered what movements of fate had led to his seemingly accidental encounter with Rani in the hospital ward, to her arrival in their home just a few months later, to her unexpected death two days before and his attendance now at her cremation, unable to shake off the sense that his presence in this scene of desolation had been decided somewhere long before, that something inside him had been driving him toward it long be-fore the end of the war, something more than just guilt, some-thing like freedom, even if he could not say what exactly freedom was.

He couldn’t help thinking, as the train hurtled closer toward his destination, that he’d traversed not any physical distance that day but rather some vast psychic distance inside him, that he’d been advancing not from the island’s south to its north but from the south of his mind to its own distant northern reaches.

People would remain who insisted on remembering, some of them activists, artists and archivists who’d consciously chosen to do so but most of them ordinary people who had not other choice … who, in the most basic sense, simply couldn’t accept a world without what’d they’d lost, people who’d lost the ability to participate in the present and were this compelled to live out the rest of their lives in their memories and imaginations, to build in their minds, like the temple constructed by Poosal, the monuments and memorials they could not build in the world outside.

It was only when looking at a horizon that one’s eyes could move past all the obstacles that limited one’s vision to the present situation, that one’s eyes could range without limit to other times and other places, and perhaps this was all that freedom was, nothing more than the ability of the ciliary muscles in each eye—the finely calibrated muscles that contracted when focusing on objects close by and relaxed when focusing on objects far away—nothing more than the ability of these muscles to loosen and relax at will, allowing the things that existed in the distance, far beyond the place one actually was, to seem somehow within reach.

And maybe it was for this reason, it had occurred to him at that moment, that eyesight weakened with the passing of the years, not because of old age or disease, not because of the deterioration of the cornea or the lenses or the finely tuned muscles that controlled them but because, rather, of the accumulation of a few such images over the course of one’s brief sojourn on earth, images of great beauty that pierced the eyes and superimposed themselves over everything one saw afterward, making it harder over time to see and pay attention to the outside world, though perhaps, it occurred to him now, four years later in the country of his birth, walking at the back of the procession bearing Rani’s body for cremation, Rani who’d seen so much that she would never been able to forget, perhaps he’d been naïve back then, perhaps it was not just images of beauty that clouded one’s vision over time but images of violence too, those moments of violence that for some people were just as much a part of life as the moments of beauty, both kinds of image appearing when we least expected it and both continuing to haunt us thereafter, both of which marked and branded us, limiting how far we were subsequently able to see.

The whole complicated system of modernity which had held us up, away from the earth, was crumbling, and we were becoming again what we had used to be: cold, and frightened of the weather, and frightened of the dark. Somehow, while we had all been busy, while we had been doing those small things which added up to living, the future had slipped into the present – and, despite the fact that we had known that it would come, the overwhelming feeling, now that it was here, was of surprise, like waking up one morning to find that you had been young, and now, all at once, you weren’t.

“Without reflection, without the capacity to trace our lives backwards and pick the patterns out, we become liable to act as animals do, minus foresight and according to a set of governing laws, which we have never taken the trouble to explore. Without reflection, we do little more than drift upon the surface of things and self-determination is an illusion.”.

She didn’t have the habit that the rest of us were learning of having our minds in two places at once, of seeing two futures – that ordinary one of summer holidays and new school terms, of Christmases and birthdays and bank accounts in an endless, uneventful round, and the other one, the long and empty one we spoke about in hypotheticals, or didn’t speak about at all..

Rather, it was a kind of furious defiance that had led her to have a child, despite all she believed about the future – a kind of pact with the world that, having increased her stake in it, she should try to protect what she had found to love..

—it wasn’t the end of any world beyond this one. Neither the flood, nor the storm. A few square miles and a handful of people. The same things have happened everywhere, always. But isn’t every ending absolute to those who live through it?.

—You think that you have time. And then, all at once, you don’t..

Books, and all the arts, naturally and endlessly inspire change because they free up the possibilities between reality and the imagination, and the possibilities for change in us. They never stop doing this. It’s one of the reasons the current powers that be are hellbent on controlling the arts, devaluing them, removing easy access to them and controlling history’s narratives. Last week I read a debut novel called Assembly by Natasha Brown. It’s a quiet, measured call to revolution. It’s about everything that has changed and still needs to change, socially, historically, politically, personally. It’s slim in the hand, but its impact is massive; it strikes me as the kind of book that sits on the faultline between a before and an after. I could use words like elegant and brilliantly judged and literary antecedents such as Katherine Mansfield/Toni Morrison/Claudia Rankine. But it’s simpler than that. I’m full of the hope, on reading it, that this is the kind of book that doesn’t just mark the moment things change, but also makes that change possible

Generations of sacrifice; hard work and harder living. So much suffered, so much forfeited, so much–for this opportunity. For my life. And I’ve tried, tried living up to it. But after years of struggling, fighting against the current, I’m ready to slow my arms. Stop kicking. Breathe the water in. I’m exhausted. Perhaps it’s time to end this story.

Let’s say: A boy grows up in a country manor. Attends a private preparatory school. Spends his weekends out in the barn with his father. Together they build a great, stone sundial. The boy, now a young man, achieves two E-grades at A-level, then travels to Jamaica to teach. His sun shadows cycle round and round and he himself winds up, up. Up until the boy, an old man now, is right up at the tippity-top of the political system. Buoyed by a wealth he’s never had to earn, never worked for. He’s never dealt in grubby compromise. And from this vantage, he points a finger –an old finger, the skin translucent, arm outstretched and wavering. He points it at you: The problem.

Always, the problem.

I’ve watched with dispassionate curiosity as this continent hacks away at itself: confused, lost, sick with nostalgia for those imperialist glory days – when the them had been so clearly defined! It’s evident now, obvious in retrospect as the proof of root-two’s irrationality, that these world superpowers are neither infallible, nor superior. They’re nothing, not without a brutally enforced relativity. An organized, systematic brutality that their soft and sagging children can scarcely stomach – won’t even acknowledge. Yet cling to as truth. There was never any absolute, no decree from God. Just viscous, random chance. And then, compounding