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Articles by Melody Nixon
Resist US-led politics while we still can
The presidential resurrection of Donald Trump will embolden our own leaders, writes Melody Nixon. This week’s US election result ushers in a new era of neo-authoritarianism in our world — a neo-authoritarianism that’s been hanging around backstage for the past decade, waiting for its moment to step into the spotlight. And now it’s here. The Trump 2024 world is a world that redefines the Anglophone west.
Through the Eyes of Winged Things: The Birds and Ghosts of Jess Richards — Columbia Journal
This is a text about relating; human-to-human in a time of social distance and collective fear; human-to-natural world, with all its openness and indifference; human-to-supernatural, when a father’s spirit feels impossibly far. Birds become messengers for Richards from beyond the veil; in each bird she hopes for, longs for, the ghost of her father. “A ghost,” she writes, “is a journeying bird.” As the numbers of COVID-19 dead rise, she imagines flocks of spirits rising as birds from the earth.
Cyclone Gabrielle
According to Māori lore, the world was created by the bodies and efforts of children, who forced apart their parents – the earth mother (Papatuānuku) and the sky father (Ranginui) – to let the light in. We live in an in-between space created through destruction. The night Cyclone Gabrielle hit, we were safe in our sixteenth-floor apartment in Pōneke Wellington, far above the waters, in the space between land and sky.
Long Shadows
By MELODY NIXON “Wake up and help us fight before they come for you.” —Oksana Zabuzhko I. 2001. It is a dark night. The expanse of the Black Sea below offers space from Europe’s light pollution. I am sleeping alone in a park in an Eastern European country that I have been told never to come to because the risk of abduction is high for foreigners. That has turned out to be only rumor and speculation, so far—Ukraine is the friendliest and most open-hearted country I have visited.
Oceanic Feeling, After Christchurch
After Jackie Wang and David Lau I. My brother says the “first siren comes, then three more. Then five. Then, they don’t stop. Every siren in Christchurch. Thirty minutes, only sirens. A pause, then they resume, heading in a second direction. II. I’m walking a hillside with Monterey Bay hazy and blue below. My arms hang at my sides, achy sticks. If I keep walking I will, I think, be okay. Big Sur, Esselen homeland, is just a thin-tipped outline across the water.
“I Didn’t Want to Write Another Dead-Mother Memoir”
Sarah Perry’s After the Eclipse is a journalism-memoir hybrid that chronicles the night of the murder of Sarah’s mother, Crystal Perry, and the aftereffects of this harrowing event. Perry combines social analysis and meticulous research with lyrical writing to create an impossible-to-put-down work. Perry avoids the navel-gazing of many memoirs and the “who-done-it” seduction of standard true crime narratives.
Stay by Melody Nixon
In many ways, I have always spoken from a place of privilege. I grew up in the Far Northern sticks of New Zealand. We lived in the bush-clad surrounds of my mother’s retaliation. She had left behind her moneyed family, given up on the big city. Her renunciation took the form of an airy, one-room garage with an outdoor bathtub, a woodstove, and a spring fresh from the damp earth that bubbled with drinking water. Our home.
G Douglas Barrett: Beyond Sound
G Douglas Barrett’s musical art touches upon subjects of psychotherapy, debt, finance, transgender identity, property, and ownership—all without dependence on the element we most associate with music: sound. Where sound enters, it does so in sporadic and nontraditional ways: spoken vocal recitation, the movement of a body through space, the repetitive bowing of an unconventionally tuned violin. As a theorist, author, and artist, Barrett is actively involved in reimagining the limits of music.
Stephen O’Connor
In Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings—Stephen O’Connor’s newest book, and most ambitious to date—the choice of subject matter is deeply problematic and deliberately problematized. At a time when discussions of representation, identity politics, racial privilege, and authorial authority are waking up the publishing world, O’Connor wades into this territory full knowing that his own identity is overrepresented and that his viewpoint is, in a sense, not welcome.
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