I watched a Youtube video of Russel Brand interviewing Vandana Shiva about the nature of globalisation – he asked something like ‘what does the system want from us?’ and she said, ‘to exterminate life.’
It brought to my mind the relentless movements of the tides and rivers, the promise of every spring; that we have enough, that life is enough, and that in order to make profit, we need to believe that we cannot provide for ourselves with our own resources, that our own skills are not enough, our own bodies and hearts are inadequate and sick and there is no such thing as peace.
Shiva has shone a light on the horrific numbers of Indian farmers who have killed themselves because they are in debt having taken out loans to cover the costs of seeds and pesticides marketed by international companies as a solution to their poverty. The pressure of debt and the shame of being unable to stay afloat has lead to tens of thousands of men to take their own lives. It rings a little like the Nestle situation in the 80s, when women were encouraged to abandon their own breast milk and buy powdered milk instead.
I can actually remember the moment when I noticed I was sealing in my own abundance so that I could grab something that seemed better. I had found a solution that seemed too good to be true, all the answers, all the certainty I could dream of. It is like the moment when the farmers must have decided that they would buy the genetically modified seeds and pesticides.
I was 15 and sitting at my desk on the third floor of our Victorian house in Birmingham. It was a Wednesday night, a normal night. I was in a jumper which I had put on over my school shirt and I was happy to be studying. I had gotten a taste of the kick of a good grade. I liked it. I craved it. I took a very methodical approach to my revision that year. I got the syllabuses of the 11 subjects I would be tested on, I read every line, and I ticked off the things as I learnt them.
I didn’t really have any doubt about how well each exam went once I had done it. I pretty much knew I had regurgitated what I had learnt and I would get the A.
I remember that Wednesday night. I was revising for Geography and I was at the part of the syllabus which was describing river features. I was learning ‘meander’ and ‘ox bow lake’, I was learning the exact way to respond to questions of sediment and erosion, and I was learning the answers by heart so that they would be on the tip of my tongue in the exam. I was enjoying it, I liked putting names on things and understanding them.
Suddenly though, and I remember this bit, as if I were there now, my ruler stopped. I had been using it to cover the lines of each definition, and I had the thought: I am disappearing.
Something in the loss of wonder in all these curving, coursing bodies of water, something in the way that now I would have ready-made words for it all, that I had worked it out for the final time: That was the name of the bean-shaped body of water on the side of a hill near a river, an oxbow lake. I was cancelling the mystery, at the time, I think I felt somewhere inside me, that I was cancelling the life of it. The best bit.
I remember I was scared, in a black confusion way, because I was doing nothing wrong. I was a good girl, which sounds trite but it is what I was. Soon after that I remember I started to pretend I was ok by performing my OK-ness from the day before, and I began to marvel at how easy it was to lie, and how long I was going to get away with it. You can look happy, you can perform strong. You just need to learn the definitions, the movements, the words. Line by line. It is hard to explain that the route of my problems came from the ease with which I could learn the definition of an oxbow lake.
