Ed Husain: WORD Christchurch Festival 2018

Ed Husain has an interesting past; he is a self-described former Islamic radical, having spent five years between the ages of 16 to 21 immersed in radical Islam. He has become one of those rare  individuals to have retracted from his extremist past, to share his narrative and speak out about one of the more secretive and misunderstood religions.

Ed Husain. Image supplied

Today he spoke with journalist Donna Miles-Mojab at the WORD Christchurch Festival. I happily braved the blustery-ness and the coldness and toddled along to witness the discussion at The Piano. The large auditorium was close to packed, with most of the audience being a half century older (and no doubt a good deal wiser and more knowledgeable) than I.

As I set off, it was with an eye to dispel some of the uncertainties surrounding Islam, in my mind anyway, and try to gain some level of insight into a religion that has always piqued my curiosity.

The Talk

The focus was around Ed Husain’s latest book The House of Islam which is an intriguing historical account and firsthand glimpse in to the world of Islam, addressing some of the major issues it faces today and throughout history. Not being religious myself, I am nonetheless intrigued by the complexities of Islam. Surrounded as we are by media reports of terrorism and violence perpetrated by extremist Muslims in the 21st century, how could one not be confused and wary of the very religion such extremists follow and cite as their inspiration? 

The scene of today’s discussion was set with a quick overview of the political environment. The persecution and Islamophobia that exists in many countries (including Europe); forced migration; the internment, high level surveillance and loss of rights of many Muslims in China; refugees flooding into Europe and the issues that is causing; and the general atmosphere of fear and suspicion surrounding Muslims in many parts of the world.

My attention was then further aroused by the announcement that this would be more ‘debate’ than ‘discussion.’ Debate indeed it was, with journalist and author disagreeing on several fronts.

Here are some of the more interesting points that were raised:

That there is currently a “civil war of ideas” occurring in the world of Islam. Ed Husain seeks, through much of his book, to remind Muslims today that traditional Islam upholds values of peace, freedom and free thought. Islam extremists have forgotten (or ignored) this tradition, and have deviated from the path of true Islam. Ed Husain identified three key groups who are responsible for inciting this civil war; the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi salafism and the current Iranian government. (Note: this suggestion provoked some rather entertaining antagonism from his Iranian host, who then tried to steer the discussion away from politics…and prompted Husain to retort: “You don’t want to talk politics when you don’t like the answer!” Indeed.)

That Islam is not so different from other religions such as Judaism and Christianity. In fact Husain likened Islam to an “outgrowth of the mothership” that is Judaism.

Ed Husain does not buy in to the clash between the West and East. Points out that we all pursue our interests, and have done so throughout history.

There was mention of the decline faced by Europe during the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages were marked by the end of free thought, with one brand of Christianity dominating for a long period of time. Husain posited that Islam is now entering its own ‘Dark Age’, and that there has not been, until very recently, a shut down of free spirit and reason such as we are seeing today.

An interesting point was raised that Muslims too have a long history of slavery and conquest; such transgressions are not limited only to the West with its colonialist past. The world would not be what it is today without conquest.

There was then some lively discussion around what motivates Jihadists: Husain suggested that it arose from the desire to bring Islam back the former glory of the Ottoman Empire; for Islam to become once more a dominating power – a stark return to an imperialist mindset. He went on to talk about how the Islamic belief in an afterlife where you are rewarded in death is a damaging and dangerous idea: it makes the real world, and the humans in it seem dispensable. Husain posits that the suicidal tendencies of Islamist extremists is one of the deadliest problems we face. In this issue, Husain and Miles-Mojab depart somewhat. Miles-Mojab points out that most jihadists/Islamic radicals are young men who are unemployed and have a critical lack of understanding of their faith; so that rather than being faith driven they are motivated by other external factors. She points out the growing violence exhibited by alt-right groups and individuals in the US, which are not faith driven; and that more Americans were killed last year by American alt-right violence than Americans were killed by Islamic terrorism. Husain disagrees, believing that faith is the primary driver in radical Islam (but with other factors being additional), and that Islamic extremists are utterly convinced that they will die and enter a new world as martyrs of their faith. He also states that if Jihadists could kill more Americans they would. It is only because of the preventative measures in place, that they are not able to do more damage.

A parting Ed Husain quote:

Those of you who are uncomfortable with a US led world, I invite you to consider a China led world, because that is where we are heading at the moment.

After listening to all of this (and, admittedly, a few historical lessons which somewhat went over my head), I am positively determined to get my hands on a copy of Ed Husain’s book. Christchurch City Libraries has a copy of The House of Islam. He has also written another book about his experiences, The Islamist

If you missed out on today’s talk, Ed Husain will also be at WORD tomorrow (Saturday 1st September; 1-2pm; The Piano) as part of the Disunited Kingdom? talk where he will join forces with author and BBC presenter Denise Mina and columnist David Slack to discuss Brexit and its various consequences.

And there are still two more days of WORD to enjoy!! Many of the events are free, check out the programme.

Enjoy!

Further Reading

• Find works by Ed Husain in our collection
• Follow our coverage of WORD Christchurch Festival 2018

Witches of Gambaga – A Film By Yaba Badoe: WORD Christchurch Festival 2018

Gambaga is a town in northern Ghana, formerly capital of the Northern Region of Ghana. It also serves as a sanctuary for women accused of witchcraft in greater Ghana. Witches of Gambaga is a documentary film, directed by Yaba Badoe, that tells the story of the women who have been condemned to live their lives in the poverty of the witches’ camp in Gambaga. The film follows these women and explores how their lives have been destroyed by accusations of witchcraft.

Yaba Badoe. Image supplied.

Badoe, in her running commentary throughout the film, does mention that superstitions have a role in the accusations of, and continued belief in, witchcraft. However, she examines the prevalence of witchcraft in Ghana through a gendered lens that attempts to explain why it is exclusively women who end up living in the witches’ camp in Gambaga. One of the particularly interesting ways she does this is exploring the relationship that the Chief of Gambaga – the Gambaran – has with the woman accused of witchcraft. Here, the women have to pay the Gambaran for sanctuary, work for him on his property, and when they have proven that are no longer a ‘witch’ they have pay him to return home. In this instance, there is an obvious benefit for him to perpetuate the belief in witchcraft within the superstitious communities. Furthermore, Badoe also explores how all women in the witches’ camp are either elderly or middle aged – with the youngest women in the camp being in her early 30s – reinforcing certain ideas pertaining to women’s value and youthfulness. Through the way that Badoe engaged with the issue of witchcraft in Ghana, it is easy to see how the tradition is maintained through patriarchal beliefs and systems.

The film is striking in its simplicity, letting the situations and stories of the women who the film follows speak for themselves with Badoe offering further explanation when required. This allows the film to overcome the technical limitations of its creation and lead to a fantastically woven narrative explaining the plight of the women concerned.

The film was a surprisingly emotional affair as it humanises the suffering caused by patriarchal superstitions. Over 3,000 citizens have had their lives ruined and families stripped away from them on the basis of how a chicken dies; the main “trial by ordeal” used to determine the whether or not the accused is a witch. I found myself almost tearing up at certain instances surrounding discussions of the women’s families that they were forced to leave behind.

The film does a great job in highlighting how damaging patriarchal beliefs are, how they still linger in some parts of the world, and how they are causing extreme harm to the communities involved. For this alone, Yaba Badoe’s film is to be commended for engaging with this subject and telling the stories of these women.

Yaba Badoe at WORD Christchurch Festival 2018

The Witches of Gambaga Friday 31 August 2.30pm

Starry, starry night Friday 31 August 8pm to 9.15pm

Yaba Badoe: Fire, stars and witches Saturday 1 September 2.30pm to 3.30pm

The Freedom Papers Sunday 2 September 1pm
Edinburgh Festival director Nick Barley speaks to three of the international writers from The Freedom Papers collection – Yaba Badoe, Lloyd Jones and Juno Dawson – about what freedom means to them.

• Find works by Yaba Badoe in our collection
• Follow our coverage of WORD Christchurch Festival 2018

For Book Collectors Old and New: WORD Christchurch 2018

Held in The Piano this was a small select audience of self-confessed book lovers, book accumulators and book collectors. The speakers were Shaun Bythell owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland (and author of novel The diary of a bookseller)and Brian Phillips who has after a long career in publishing in New Zealand now sells collectable New Zealand books.

Shaun, I’m pleased to say, was rocking a “Black Books” Dylan Moran look with a delightfully frayed sports jacket and generally casually disheveled vibe. Excellent. He modestly introduced himself as a general bookseller and someone “generally knowing not very much about everything”.

The Smallest Scottish Bookshop in the World at The Piano

To warm us up we played a guess the value of some dusty old books game. With seven second hand titles from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations to James Clavell’s Shogun, and with a little Harry Potter and Hone Tuwhare thrown in, the books ranged in value from $10 to $500. I can report that everyone including Shaun Bythell got the valuations wrong showing the vagaries and conundrum of book selling and collecting. The book with the highest value turned out to be Shogun.

The conversation meandered somewhat but generally covered: how to sell your own book collections, what to keep and what to collect.

• Brian’s advice for would-be sellers was to consider selling books with a value over $500 at auction, and lower valued stock yourselves online using Trade Me.
• What to keep was easily answered by what you love, book collecting is about passion.
• Finally, what to collect? Shaun praised Folio Society books for their high production standards, beautifully decorated covers and great illustrations. They are relatively inexpensive to buy but exquisite and would hold their value.
• Brian recommended several New Zealand titles to keep an eye out for including Wash day at the Pa originally published by the Department of Education as a bulletin for schools and later withdrawn because of its unflattering picture of Maori rural life, Man Alone by John Mulgan (the 1939 English edition) and South Island of New Zealand from the Road by Robin Morrison, preferably with dust jacket intact.

There was some discussion on the added value of author signatures on books. Here Shaun took the view that an author signature only added 10% to the value of the book unless the author was very famous or very reclusive. Janet Frame was considered a good example of an author who signed relatively few books and was very collectable. Establishing the provenance of the book, and the authenticity of the signature was also something to consider, and several online sites hosting authenticated author signatures were mentioned.

Featherston got, for me, an unexpected shout-out as New Zealand’s first booktown. With an increasing number of second hand bookshops Featherston is positioning itself to join the likes of Wigtown in Scotland and Hay-on-Wye in Wales as a book buying and book event destination. Shaun visited Featherston this week and described it as “rough and ready, not too polished but worth a visit”. He hopes the book trade will help reverse the area’s economic decline.

On a less positive note Shaun described the activities of megalisters, online sellers of second hand books with more than 100,000 listings. In the UK second hand books can be bought from institutions for as little as 10 pence per kilo. These pallets of books are then processed at huge warehouses with little or no attention paid to the individual titles. Re-sold on Amazon and Abe Books these books often make more money for the supplier from the hiked up postage charges than from the value of the book itself but through economy of scale profits are made, and the sustainability of the independent secondhand bookseller made more tenuous.

A slightly blurry Shaun Bythell about to meet a firing squad of librarians

Shaun also saved some scorn for librarians, and our irritating habit of covering library books with plastic covers that leak glue, tape and labels that yellow and cancellation stamps that blot endpapers, not to mention RFID tags, barcodes and all the other staff and customer created mayhem that a poor public library book endures over its short, brutal life. When challenged he did mutter something about libraries as cornerstones of democracy and bastions of learning but I might have imagined that.

A bit more Shaun and a little less Brian, affable and knowledgeable though he is, would have created a better balanced and less parochial workshop but overall this was a super interesting insight into the joys and perils of book collecting and book selling.

Find out more

• Find titles by Shaun Bythell
• Our WORD Christchurch 2018 page
• WORD Christchurch festival programme

Orphans, Immigrants, and Identity – Lloyd Jones: WORD Christchurch Festival 2018

At the lovely Piano venue in Christchurch, Lloyd Jones, one of New Zealand’s most successful writers (author of the Man Booker Prize nominated Mr Pip), sat down for a fascinating interview with broadcaster John Campbell.

Campbell set up the session with a great introduction. He gave the audience an insight into Jones’ latest offering The Cage. Campbell described it as ‘a willfully shocking book… confronting and tough’. No surprises here, as Jones is an author who has never shied away from the brutally honest and even harrowing (Mr Pip had me virtually traumatised for a week, and the movie was probably the most distressing piece of cinema I have ever seen).

Jones explained that The Cage was inspired by his own experience of witnessing the arrival of Syrian refugees in Budapest. He described the sight as harrowing with clusters of families squeezed onto cardboard rafts, and women trying to sweep their small spaces as if to preserve their last vestige of dignity. The Cage was written to stress the importance of having a voice and a conscience when faced with tragedy.

Lloyd Jones. Image supplied.

Jones never tells readers where ‘the strangers’ in the novel are, or where they have come from. He is a strong believer that ‘readers complete a novel’  joining the dots themselves… reading their own circumstances. Jones recalled a book signing for Mr Pip where a young girl asked him if Matilda returned to the island. Jones gave the somewhat disappointing but honest response that he didn’t know, ‘what do you think?’. After a moment, the girl smiled and said ‘Yes’. Campbell concurred that he believed she did too – without a doubt – but not without an admonishment later that Jones ‘did write the bloody book’.

Along with eleven novels, Jones has written short stories, and non fiction including an incredibly powerful autobiography A History of Silence. Endearingly, he shared that he walks the places his characters walk – he walked the orphan museum just like Matilda, and ‘Matilda loved Dickens because the author did’.

Jones commented that people often describe his books as all being very different from each other, but really they are all similar in their exploration of the theme of identity. Orphans also play a big role in Jones writing because, as he observed, ‘my family specialised in them’. Jones’ mother was given away at the age of four, while Jones father went through a series of foster homes after the death of his mother. ‘One does not look back if not taught to look back’ observed Jones.

His history of silence was just that – ‘There was no history… my parents never never spoke about it’. Jones also spoke movingly about discovering the story of his wife’s ancestors (which involved a tragic drowning) from an old man. The same man witnessed the mass shooting of Jewish women and children during the Second World War – the women instructed to lift their babies above their heads to be killed first, then the mothers killed after. “It’s amazing how landscape hides sins” said Jones. Visiting the site later, he would never have known, the world would never have known, had it not been for that man bearing witness:

If we ignore what is happening we are complicit – you cannot un-know something.

The session ended with audience questions but the closing one in particular seemed such a fitting way to end of the session. One audience member asked Jones if he had faith in humanity, to which he replied:

Definitely – every person in this room will have done something wonderful, and every person will have also done something they are not proud of. I do believe though that we still need a set of core values.

While Jones never seeks to give us answers in his books, or indeed pretend for one moment that he has the answers, his writing always manages to do just this – somehow help us to discover core values and what it means to be human.

Lloyd Jones at WORD Christchurch Festival 2018

Lloyd Jones: In Conversation Friday 31 August 1pm

The Freedom Papers Sunday 2 September 1pm
Edinburgh Festival director Nick Barley speaks to three of the international writers from The Freedom Papers collection – Yaba Badoe, Lloyd Jones and Juno Dawson – about what freedom means to them.

• Find works by Lloyd Jones in our collection
• Our Quick Questions with Lloyd Jones
• Follow our coverage of WORD Christchurch Festival 2018

Catherine Chidgey and Paul Cleave: WORD Christchurch Festival 2018

Catherine Chidgey signs my books.

It’s my first day at the fest and it’s a full morning for me with two events one after the other: Catherine Chidgey (Transformations) and Paul Cleave (Crimechurch). Both Kiwi writers and both well known in their respective fields. But how similar/dissimilar are their writing styles? The lights dim, lets find out!

They are both first and foremost writers: This sounds like a really obvious statement to make, but many other participants at festivals are not. They are first adventurers, sportspeople, chefs, politicians or comediennes who later write about those experiences. But Chidgey & Cleave (sounds like an upmarket boutique store written like that) are both individuals who started writing young, and when asked their occupation would be totally justified in replying:”I am a writer”.

They are both internationally known: Catherine Chidgey has strong German roots and has won several UK book awards starting with her first novel In a Fishbone Church (1998). Her well-known novel The Wish Child is due for publication in the States this year. Paul Cleave is an international best selling crime author who divides his time between Christchurch and Europe. He has a receptive readership in both France and Germany and is also (with his next novel) due to break in to the American market.

They both like the creepy and the quirky: Chidgey is drawn to the weird – phrenology, wigs and the weird half-life status of hair, the religious Procession of the Snails in France, her collection of evening bags. Cleave specialises in unforgettably creepy shiver-up-and-down-your- spine characters like Joe in his first novel The Cleaner (2006).  He likes quirky settings too and finds that Christchurch has those aplenty.

But in other ways these two authors are oh-so different.

Research: Cleave hardly does any research. Maybe ten minutes on Wikipedia tops. He does however need to keep an eye on his own writing and research, in a way. This is because he repeats characters in his books, so for the sake of good continuity he needs to check up on exactly what he said about them before. Nowadays he keeps detailed notebooks. Chidgey is a self confessed obsessive. Once she has decided to write on a topic she researches it to the exclusion of all else. Many is the time she has teetered on the brink of the Google Hole fearing that she would end up researching but never actually writing. Now she tries to research and write at the same time.

Personality: Chidgey is an introverted eyes-and-ears person, not that big a contributor to conversations. Cleave is a terrific talker with great rapport with his interviewer and I’d peg him as a high end extrovert. Chidgey draws heavily on family and friends for her inspiration. Cleave never uses the characteristics of friends in any of his books. His family was barely mentioned.

Writing Style: Cleave writes quickly and loves some of his characters so much that he repeats them, like Joe in The Cleaner (2006), who re-appears in Joe Victim (2013). Although his books are stand-alone reads they do loosely form a series. Chidgey writes slowly and contemplatively, sometimes she reworks a sentence 20 times before she gets it right. She had a 13 year gap between Golden Deeds and The Wish Child. Her latest novel The Beat of the Pendulum (2018) was a relatively fast write by her standards because it was written to cover one year of “found events” in her life. If she left long gaps in the writing she could not keep up. It is a challenging but highly creative book.

Here they are in their own words:

Paul Cleave:

My novels are about the characters in them. That’s what you’ll remember long after you’ve finished the book. There are characters that I love so much I want to repeat them in later stories. But I would kill any one of them to progress the story-line. I’m ruthless that way.

Catherine Chidgey:

I want to create something whole and beautiful out of all the white noise, the static, of everyday living.

My first day at WORD 2018, and two very successful writers show that you can never generalise when it comes to writing. There are as many different ways to be an author as there are stories waiting to be written. It was a very good start.

Find out more

• Find titles by Catherine Chidgey
• Find titles by Paul Cleave
• Our WORD Christchurch 2018 page
• WORD Christchurch festival programme

New Regent Street Pop-up Festival: WORD Christchurch Festival 2018

The New Regent Street Pop-up Festival is like the whole of WORD Christchurch distilled into an hour and twenty minutes, and if that sounds intense well, yes, that would be an accurate assessment.

In some ways it’s like trying to pick something off a menu – how do you know what you’ll like the best? What if you choose and don’t enjoy your choice? And just to extend the dining out metaphor, the pop-up festival offers three “sets” of readings in much the same manner as restaurant courses, allowing you to mix and match.

For my pop-up dinner I chose the following:

Entrée: Gory Bits at Crate Escape

Main: Science Fiction Triple Feature at Rollickin’ Gelato

Dessert: FIKA and Friends at Fiksate Gallery

So how did I do choosing a great meal?

Entrée

Robin Robertson about to make everyone feel uneasy. Crate Escape. New Regent Street Pop Up Festival. WORD Christchurch Festival 2018. Thursday 30 August 2018. File reference: 2018-08-30-IMG_0109

Meaty, blood-soaked and best served cold, this was a very enjoyable way to start. True, it’s rather a full-bodied choice for an entree, but if you’re going to have tales of death and fear read to you in the confines of a strange, wooden Antarctic hut fashioned from a shipping container you may as well do it early so it’s still daylight when you leave.

WORD Christchurch Festival director, Rachael King read a suitably gothic, Wuthering Heights inspired passage from her book Magpie Hall, and Brindi Joy’s flash fiction story of the dead that don’t necessarily stay buried had a pleasing rhythm and exotic (for Christchurch) US locale.

But certainly the standout of this “course” was Robin Robertson‘s readings of gruesome death and murder, his voice dragging on certain words, and fairly growling others – at one point his hands held out in the pose of a man strangling his beloved and… well, lovely man though I’m sure he is, should I bump into him in a dark alley while he’s here in Christchurch I’ll probably squeal and run the other way, so affecting was his performance. And I fancied as I left, to the screams of children playing at the Margaret Mahy Playground across the road, that they might not all be squeals of delight…

Mains

After that kind of darkness what you need is something different, distracting and refreshing. Science Fiction Triple Feature offered a trio of writers of different flavours reading stories and excerpts.

A. J. Fitzwater, a local writer of Spec-Fic (Speculative Fiction) opened with a really interesting take on post-apocalyptic tales, telling the story of a trans vlogger and traveller making their way across Europe in the wake of some catastrophic outbreak. They are on the hunt for… tampons. Which is an amusing twist on the usual dystopian scavenging one usually expects from tales like this, and one that I have always wondered about myself. Sure, the characters in The Walking Dead always look sufficiently unwashed and grimey… but they still seem to be able to find their colour of hair dye and everyone’s top lip is still getting waxed so how post-apocalyptic is it really? Yes, I do have tampons in my emergency kit, and yes, so should you.

Another local sci-fi/fantasy writer, Karen Healey then took the mic (in a Thor-themed dress that I am most covetous of) and read from her version of Beauty and the Beast in which Beauty’s quest involves dark, spooky creatures who have possessed her beloved father, a malady that only a strapping magical beast might be able to cure. And American author Ted Chiang read a strange and perplexing story of science used to support fiction – a comment on the nature of faith and truth, perhaps.

Ted Chiang with A. J Fitzwater and Karen Healey. New Regent Street Pop-up Festival. WORD Christchurch Festival 2018. Thursday 30 August 2018. File reference: 2018-08-30-IMG_0119

Dessert

A small sorbet of something completely different was on offer at Fiksate Gallery (a place that I would very much like to go back to) in the form of touching, poignant poetry. Personal tales of a loved one’s dementia, or legendary tales of some guy called “Maui”. Short and bittersweet. The perfect ending course to this pop-up adventure.

New Regent Street Pop Up Festival, WORD Christchurch Festival 2018. Thursday 30 August 2018. File reference: 2018-08-30-IMG_0096

Find out more

• Our WORD Christchurch 2018 page
• WORD Christchurch festival programme

Recent necrology, August 2018

Some well-known people who have died recently

• Kofi Annan, 1938-2018
  Ghanaian diplomat, UN Secretary-General

• Harlan Ellison, 1934-2018
  Science fiction writer

• Aretha Franklin, 1942-2018
  Legendary American singer and songwriter, the Queen of Soul

• Reinhart Langer, 1921-2018
  Renowned botanist

 

• V. S. Naipaul, 1932-2018
  Caribbean writer and Nobel Laureate

• Baden Norris, 1927-2018
  Author who was the driving force behind the Lyttelton Museum

• Warwick Roger, 1945-2018
  Innovative NZ journalist, founder of Metro magazine

• Neil Simon, 1927-2018
  American playwright, screenwriter and author

125 Years – Are We There Yet?: WORD Christchurch Festival 2018

Are we there yet? 125 years on from the historic law change that granted New Zealand women the right to vote, an impressive line-up of women gathered in a WORD Christchurch panel at The Piano to discuss this question. Georgina Beyer, Dame Anne Salmond, Sacha McMeeking, Lizzie Marvelly, and Paula Penfold were chaired by the indomitable Kim Hill.

Things kicked off  in an unexpectedly musical fashion with sparkles and a ukulele as Gemma Gracewood and Megan Salole of the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra led in with a waiata, the workers’ anthem “Bread and roses”, even managing to get the crowd chiming in with a refrain at the end, Gracewood quipping that “it’s in Kim Hill’s contract to be introduced like this at every event she does”, which is most certainly a lie but it’s nice to pretend it’s not.

In panel discussions it can sometimes be a challenge to make sure that each person gets space to share their thoughts though for this event each panellist got their own turn at the podium. Unsurprisingly all of them answered in the negative but were good enough to elaborate on why, and to speculate on how we could, indeed, get there.

Dame Anne Salmond, Georgina Beyer, Paula Penfold, Sacha McMeeking, Lizzie Marvelly, and Kim Hill. WORD Christchurch Festival 2018. Thursday 30 August 2018. File reference: 2018-08-30-IMG_0132

Dame Anne Salmond bemoaned the “experiment” that’s seen public services turned into businesses and the damage it’s done to our communities. “What price work,” she asked “if you have to trade away some of your desires and dreams? What price a thriving economy if we’ve got children dying of Third World diseases?”. Change, she felt,  must be a shared task.

She also queried why, as someone who has an academic background in New Zealand history, and the Treaty she is always being asked by journalists about comments made by Don Brash, someone who has never deigned to study these topics. “Why am I still hearing the same voices?” she wondered.

Georgina Beyer remembered and paid tribute to Sonia Davies, the “lovely little piece of firework” who talked her into joining and running for the Labour Party. Davies’ autobiography (later turned into a movie) took it’s name from the waiata that opened the session.

Beyer outlined the slow, but building momentum leading on from 1893, pointing out that it took many years before a woman was elected into parliament (Lytteltonian MP, Elizabeth McCombs in 1933) but that change has been more rapid in the last few decades. Though parliament is still much more balanced in its distribution of power than the boardroom is.

She acknowledged that in some corners of feminism there was a pushing back against transgender activism, that some felt perhaps that all the work and achievements up to this point were being “ridden on the coattails by this ‘transgender lot’.” But she felt that this division wasn’t helpful and that we need to move forward together.

Although initially reticent to offend – egged on by a throaty “Oh, go ON!” by Kim Hill – Beyer confessed that she felt religious dogma had a lot to answer for, citing Brian Tamaki’s “Man up” campaign as just another way of saying “women, go back to the kitchen”, expressing outrage at Gloriavale as “detrimental” to both men and women, and that “conversion therapy is a breach of human rights”.

Journalist Paula Penfold, who is involved with Stuff’s #MeTooNZ campaign, used her time at the podium to present a “listicle” of good news/bad news facts including such sobering statements as “New Zealand has the worst rate of family and intimate partner violence in the world”, an estimated 80% of which is unreported. That the gender gap is closing… but her mother probably won’t live to see it. But she was hopeful, watching her teenage children engage with these issues, that the “young people are seeing a way forward with this”. Which was something of a life-raft in a sea of not great news, which I’m sure was her intention.

Sacha McMeeking, though thwarted initially by screeching feedback, had the audience in the palm of her hand as she gently and wittily guided us through the complicated topic of how you effect social change, noting that we often try to do this from a very top level way, via laws, or on an individual level but that we need to focus on the part in the middle where we collectively create new social habits. She used the metaphor of desire paths, those well-trodden dirt path “shortcuts” that show where people have chosen to diverge from a paved walkway, the implication being that it’s a repeated wearing down by many feet on many trips that can leave a trail for others to follow.

“Society,” she said “is inherently conservative. The status quo is given every possibility to replicate”. It’s about consciously looking, then, for ways to subvert this. Looking for places to blaze (or just wear down, slowly over time) a different trail. And what was this audience, if not a core of people who might help do that? This was about as uplifting as the evening got, and as such, received the largest round of applause.

Musician and columnist Lizzie Marvelly was at her most compelling when describing the culture shock she felt when, after being raised in a family that valued gender equality and attending the female-centric Rotorua Girls High, she changed schools and became one of a minority of female pupils at Kings College in Auckland. Being rated out of ten for attractiveness by boys via the unexpected medium of vegemite-smeared pieces of toast, or having chants of “get back in the kitchen” called out to girls on the sportsfield. And of course, the sad realisation that she was not allowed to be head prefect because that was a title reserved for boys only.

When questioned by Hill on whether exerting the right to make choices is, in and of itself feminist, Marvelly had this to say:

The fact that we have choices is a feminist victory but that doesn’t mean that every choice you make is a feminist one.

For her, unless the choice you’re making in is in support of gender equality then it’s not a feminist one. I’ve never heard this stated so simply, and it makes complete sense to me, though I imagine, as with most things, the devil is in the details/interpretation.

During question time, the questions were, well, largely musings masquerading as questions. Interesting issues were raised, certainly, but it was hard for most of the panellists to grasp onto an answer when questions were somewhat fuzzy. The exception being Georgina Beyer’s recollection of the pack-rape she suffered as a young woman in Sydney – it was devastating in content, sure, but also in her matter of factness about it. And it exposed the flaw in the questioner’s definition of women as “people with vaginas”, introduced as it was with the wryly delivered, “prior to my having a vagina…”

It was a very sobering and downbeat story to end the evening on, but it was also a session that went significantly over time. And I suspect many of the people in the audience did as I did and talked over the issues with their companion on the journey home.

Are we there yet? No, but not for want of trying.

Find out more

• Kate Sheppard and the Suffrage Movement
• Our WORD Christchurch 2018 page
• WORD Christchurch festival programme

Find titles in the library by:

• Paula Penfold
• Georgina Beyer
• Dame Anne Salmond
• Lizzie Marvelly
• Kim Hill

David Neiwert – Alt America: WORD Christchurch Festival 2018

Two leather chairs, a small table with a bowl of decorative flowers, a rug underneath, all on an otherwise empty stage. David Neiwert and Paul Thomas – of the New Zealand Listener – walk out and take their seats. Thomas introduces the topic and starts the talk with this quote from Neiwert’s book, Alt-America‘:

“America has been very, very lucky so far when it comes to fascistic political movements”.

From here, the magnitude of the conversation to follow is set.

Neiwert was a composed and confident speaker who spoke with the authority that his years of research has given him on the subject. Thomas, as interviewer, did a fantastic job allowing Neiwert space to highlight his obvious expertise on the topic. Together they dived into the depths of the horrifying reality and violence of the extremist right in American politics. The horrifying elements of such a movement were explicitly put forward for all to understand as Neiwert described a scene in which a counter-protester was shot by an Alt-Right supporter 10 metres in front of him – a harrowing example of the violence the new American extremist right is capable of.

Neiwert described Alt-America – the world in which the new extremist right in America appear to live in – as an “epistemological bubble comprised of conspiracy theories, alternative facts, and outright fabrications”. This world, is of course curated and manufactured by various influencers and conspiracy theorist of the far right – including the notorious Fox News and the infamous Alex Jones.

Most chilling of all was the conversation about domestic terrorism in the USA. Here, Neiwert spoke of extremist far right elements in America that have done unspeakable violent acts (such as the one described above). As he spoke about the race based crimes committed by Dylann Roof in a Charleston church two days after Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy, chills ran down my spine at the horror of the reality of it all. This was of course, just one such example.

Something that Neiwert did very well – which sets him apart from over commentators attempting to understand the rise of the Alt-Right as a political phenomenon – is the manner through which he historicises the fascistic tendencies that define the Alt-Right as they have appeared throughout American history. He places a particular emphasis on the conspiratorial militia movement of the 1990s and how a lot of the ideas of the Alt-Right can be directly traced back to this.

Put succinctly by Neiwert himself:

“This isn’t an overnight thing… this has been building for a very long time”.

Given America’s history of flirting with fascism, from slavery, to the KKK, and segregation, it is easy to see his reasoning.

He then went on to discuss how the future is uncertain and that a lot could depend on the 2020 election in America. Not just the outcome itself, but if Trump is defeated in the election, what kind of reaction should we expect from his fan base. They have proven in the past that they are capable of violence.

At the end of the talk the conversation was opened up to the audience for questions. The question that got the most striking response was a question on gender and the Alt-Right. Here, Neiwert explains that the Alt-Right is a fundamentally misogynistic ideology and that a central aspect of their Alt-America belief is that American values are being ruined by women; most notably, feminist women; this continues with the conspiratorial theme of Alt-America.

David Neiwert. Image supplied.

Neiwert is an obviously intelligent man who has braved the depths of far-right politics as a liberal and lived to tell the tale. As harrowing as the topic could be, it was equally informative and explained well the rise of this new radical political movement. Neiwert was a fantastic speaker, and Thomas facilitated the conversation exceptionally well.

This is of course, a chilling subject. Something that is on the minds of many and something that frightens many; understandably so. When Paul Thomas introduced the talk by opening with that quote about America’s luck with fascism up until this point in history he was doing so to highlight the gravity of this talk; is America’s luck about to run out?

Neiwert’s book, Alt-America, is a very well written account of the re-emergence of right wing extremism in America. Through tracing the ideological blueprints of the self-proclaimed ‘Alt-Right’ back to the American Patriot Militia Movements of the 1990s, its mainstream manifestation in the backlash to Obama’s election; most notably in the Tea Party movement that arose, and through controversial conspiratorial politics, he successfully explains the emergence of what was to many a seemingly overnight political phenomenon.

David Neiwert’s sessions at WORD Christchurch Festival 2018

David Neiwert: Alt-America Thursday 30 August 6pm

• Find works by David Neiwert in our collection
• Read Follow the leader: Why did America fall for the alt-Right? Philip Matthews from The Press interviews David Neiwert
• Follow our coverage of WORD Christchurch Festival 2018

Christchurch to Lyttelton suburban Ec electric locomotive undergoing maintenance in the Addington Workshops: Picturing Canterbury

Christchurch to Lyttelton suburban Ec electric locomotive undergoing maintenance in the Addington Workshops. File Reference CCL PhotoCD 11, IMG0054.

Christchurch to Lyttelton suburban Ec electric locomotive undergoing maintenance in the Addington Workshops [ca. 1960].

Built between 1879-1880, the Addington railway workshops replaced an earlier railway workshop (the first in New Zealand) and continued to operate until December 1990. The New Zealand E^C class locomotive was designed by English Electric in 1928 to serve the electrification of the line between Lyttelton and Christchurch. They were decommissioned in 1970.

Do you have any photographs of the Addington workshops or the E^C class locomotive? If so, feel free to contribute to our collection.

Kete Christchurch is a collection of photographs and stories about Christchurch and Canterbury, past and present. Anyone can join and contribute.

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Christchurch To Lyttelton Suburban Ec Electric Locomotive Undergoing Maintenance In The Addington Workshops