Essay - Corpus

Homesickness

23 April 2018 5 Comments

Barbara Brookes

Who hasn’t suffered it? A longing for the quality of the light, the green of the country, the sound of the waves, the language of your origins, or for familiar food. Homesickness might strike at odd times and be triggered by the senses.

Watching Marina Willer’s Red Trees recently, a documentary about Willer’s Jewish refugee father who went to Brazil, I learned a new word, saudade, which her father said he felt for Europe. Saudade has no real English equivalent, though Wikipedia suggests ‘missingness’. In English we might think of nostalgia, a longing for past good times, but we do not have a day of official celebration of this emotion, as the Brazilians apparently do, on January 30^th.

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Invalid country

16 April 2018 2 Comments

Sue Wootton

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship.” Susan Sontag.

The idea that health and illness are different states, sometimes to the point of being completely different territories or countries has proved to be an enduring and powerful metaphor. Virginia Woolf, for example, in her 1930 essay “On Being Ill”, wrote of the distance between the worlds of the well and the ill, and of how different those two worlds feel to their inhabitants. She described the ‘daylight’ quality of health, which is a place of community, purpose, business and busy-ness. But, she noted, in the same way that daylight obliterates the ever-present skyful of stars, so when “the lights of health go down” the “undiscovered countries” of illness are revealed. We all have another homeland, that strange and disconnected place where nothing seems to go to plan:

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” Susan Sontag.

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Free with his fists: trying to make sense of it (Part Two)

26 March 2018 5 Comments

Carolyn McCurdie

(Read the first part of Carolyn McCurdie’s reflections on this topic here.)

There are many, many victim-blaming questions that are asked. Most of them arise from cultural assumptions and I’m as much a product of this culture as anyone. There’s no blaming that anyone could do that I haven’t done to myself. One that caused me years of soul-searching is: but didn’t you see the signs? Surely you should have known.

Yes and no. With hindsight and maturity I can see that he was extremely narcissistic. Everything was about him. I didn’t recognise that. He was a heavy drinker. Every young man I knew was a heavy drinker. I wasn’t alert for trouble. I didn’t know I should be. There was no violence at all. This didn’t begin until about a year into the relationship. By that time I was committed.

So why didn’t I leave? Such a common question, and one much easier to answer.

The people are fighting back – with coffee cups

26 March 2018 Leave a Comment

Paul Sorrell

At a time when communities are being fragmented, human relationships increasingly commodified and people alienated from the political system, signs of resistance are springing up, often in unexpected places. In Dunedin, and particularly in North East Valley, close to where I live, community gardens and self-help groups are burgeoning.

And so is the morning tea movement. Eleven ago, however, when a friend and I started walking up the Bullock Track and along Highgate to a café in Roslyn, we never suspected that we might be a part of something bigger. In danger of burning out from a high-stress job, my friend took the sensible first step of shaving two days off his working week. The next “step” was the walking cure – a brisk uphill trek ending in a caffeinated reward.

Free with his fists: trying to make sense of it (Part One)

19 March 2018 1 Comment

Carolyn McCurdie

I told myself it wasn’t so bad. After he’d knocked me down, he never kicked me. He never broke bones, never did anything that needed medical attention. In eight years, he forgot discretion only twice. Then I had the black eyes, fat lip, swollen, discoloured face that the world could see. I hid inside, rang in sick, made carefree jokes about walking into cupboard doors.

But mostly he punched my upper arms. Often it had nothing much to do with anything I’d said or done. It was stress relief, when life hadn’t gone the way he thought it should. “Pete never allows for a stubbed toe, does he,” someone remarked when she’d witnessed the beginnings of a tantrum, controlled because people were there. I bought blouses with voluminous sleeves, because at those times my arms were too swollen to fit into ordinary sleeves.

Kidney disease: are you at risk?

12 March 2018 Leave a Comment

Max Reid

A couple of Saturdays ago I attended a meeting of Kidney Health New Zealand’s Consumer Council. The Council comprises around 18-20 individuals from around the country, each with kidney disease of varying types and progression. We only meet once a year, and only for around five hours – for those attendees on dialysis, the logistics involved in planning their dialysis around such an event preclude meeting more often or for longer.

Each meeting begins with a round of introductions. How they do that has always been over to the group – but always the format has been the same: name, where they’re from, and the nature of their condition.

“Hi, I’m Ben from Tauranga – on home haemodialysis.”

“Morena. Haami. Northland. In-centre haemodialysis.”

“Hi. My name’s Bridget. I’m from Christchurch, a transplant recipient, but also the mother of a deceased organ donor.”