Dear ones,
I’m turning thirty this March.
Many of you have already bravely crossed this threshold. I have teased you for our existential fear of this otherwise seemingly trivial number, all the while holding my breath.
The truth is, for me 30 marks a step into the unknown. All the literary heroes of my youth never made it this far. John Keats succumbed to tuberculosis at 25. Both Anna Karenina and Edna Pontellier, bored, hopeless and unfulfilled, take lovers at 27 and are dead by 28. Lily Bart, heroine of The House of Mirth, refuses to compromise on her aesthetic and moral ideals and so abandons life at 29. And Sylvia Plath, as we know, was lost to the endless February of 1963 in Yeats’ house in Primrose Hill at 30 years, 3 months and 15 days old.
Youth is a beautiful form of narcissistic blindness.
When I finished Anna Karenina in the early hours of the morning on my 16th birthday, I thought I had perhaps at last read everything, learned everything, uncovered everything. I wrote a draft uni admissions essay on the novel. One of my teachers politely told me it was full of shit. Because I knew it indeed was, I politely told him he was full of shit. Because he knew he indeed was, he gave me a glowing recommendation. And he gave me something else, too – his favourite passage from the closing of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed – a science fiction novel I loathed this teacher even more for making me read.
As I begin to shed the cataracts of my youth, the truth is, friends – I think about this passage from this sci-fi novel I loathed, so beloved by the teacher I loathed, basically all the time.
You see, The Dispossessed was published in 1974 and takes place on a fictional planet called Urras. Much like Earth in 1974, Urras is largely divided along the axes of two main superpowers: the capitalist, patriarchal state of A-Io, and the authoritarian, communist state of Thu. Prior to the events of the novel, a revolution funded by Thu breaks out in the developing state of Benbili, which A-Io then invades, initiating a proxy war. (Sound familiar?). A group of anarchist idealists from Urras have seen enough and form a utopian society on Urras’ moon, the mining colony of Anarres.
Skip forward in time and enter our protagonist, Shevek, a brilliant physicist from anarchist, collectivist Anarres who is trying to develop a temporal theory for the greater good of both the Anarresti and humanity throughout the galaxies. Unfortunately, he discovers that aspects of his fledging hypotheses conflict with the prevailing political mores of Anarres, and like all open-minded truth-seekers on the scent of something intriguing, he begins to face censorship.
After a stint in the Anarresti gulag, Shevek renounces his homeland by accepting a scholarship to develop his theory further at a prestigious university in A-Io on Urras, fleeing Anarres a traitor. But alas, ever more disillusioned Shevek comes to discover that Urras really is a capitalist, patriarchal hellhole after all, and the A-Ionians only want to get their grubby capitalist hands on his physics. Teaming up with underground revolutionaries in A-Io, Shevek leaks his science patent-free and abandons Urras. The novel closes with Shevek Anarres-bound aboard a spaceship belonging to the Hainish, a very ancient people from another faraway planet. Here Shevek meets Ketho, a young Hainishman making his first journey to Anarres intrigued by the idealism of its utopian anarchism. The world-weary Shevek tries to caution Ketho against the heartbreak of believing in Anarres, of believing in anything.
And now with all this context, we arrive at the line I can’t seem to help but carry with me – young Ketho’s wise response to Shevek:
“My race is very old,” Ketho said. “We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?”
Isn’t that marvellous? The beautiful, narcissistic blindness of youth that so timelessly retorts to history, “But I have not tried it.”
And isn’t life an experience, wholly each of our own to get to try, to to taste, to savour, to fumble, to feel, to live?
So here I stand at 29, aware that there is nothing new under any sun, and also aware there are so, so many suns amongst the stars whose warmth I have not yet felt on my skin.
As the literary heroines of my youth reveal, women are so often deprived of the chance of ageing, of living, of making mistakes, of getting to experience things for themselves rather than blindly following the dictates of some supposedly sage authority, of writing a shit essay on Anna Karenina and living another decade and maybe writing another, of coming to their own conclusions, of changing their minds, of changing at all. Until writing this, it never occurred to me, or the gravity of it never fully sank into my chest, that if Anna Karenina is 27 when the novel begins, she was married to a man 20 years her senior by 18 and a mother by 19.
Even heavier of a weight is recognising the female icons of my cultural mythology were but mere children.
Did you know that Antigone is, at the oldest, 15 during the events of Sophocles’ play?
Did you know that historians estimate Mary was between 12 to 14 when she gave birth to Jesus?
Did you know Pocahontas was 10 when she first met Disney’s favourite paedophile, Captain John Smith, in 1608?
Ten.
At ten all I wanted was to grow up, or at least someday grow boobs. I wanted to retreat from public gaze into a private chrysalis of puberty and emerge only once I had resplendent wings of my own. At ten the last thing I wanted was to be remembered as the delicate pupa I was.
But at ten is where Pocahontas lives frozen in our cultural memory, the playful, precocious misfit who turned cartwheels with the boys of Jamestown.
Time turns cartwheels of its own and in 1609, when Pocahontas was eleven, the First Anglo-Powhatan War broke out between the English settlers at Jamestown and the Powhatan natives. Pocahontas was captured and held for ransom in a plot hatched between the Patawomecks, seizing the opportunity to act on their opposition to her father Chief Powhatan’s rule of Tsenacommacah1, and the English settlers. She lived captive for at least a year in the English settlement of Henricus, now called Henrico – i.e., my hometown. Like me she spent most her time in Henrico studying English, white people’s etiquette, and the Bible.
In 1614, at 16, her dad finally bothered to negotiate for her release. Princess Pocohantas said no thank you. According to the surviving accounts, she said something roughly translatable as “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” Better to remain with the Englishmen than to be just another sword or axe in her father’s bellicose bargaining arsenal.
As Plath knew best, what’s a girl with daddy issues to do next? Get with an older foreign man, and quick, of course! Just a month later Pocahontas married English tobacco farmer John Rolfe, ushering in an eight-year period of relative peace between the English and indigenous peoples of Virginia. I wonder if she ever thought of her marriage as the diplomacy of which her father was incapable. Rolfe, for his part, thought he was saving her heathen soul. 2 And he probably smugly thought he did, as like the most dutiful of Christian woman, Pocahontas, now baptized Rebecca, promptly bore him a son nine months following the wedding.
In 1616, The Virginia Company sent John, Rebecca and baby Thomas Rolfe to London on a PR tour where she met King James. Legend has it he was so unremarkable that she didn’t realize he was the monarch until someone told her to whom she had just been introduced. (If you’re keeping count, that’s king #2 she made it known she found unimpressive.) She died in Gravesend, England in March 1617 when she fell sick at the outset of the return voyage to Virginia. She was roughly 20.
Rest in Power, Pocahontas-Rebecca. I don’t ever want to speak for you, but I bet you would have loved intersectional feminism and vaccines.
I like to imagine her setting out down the Thames, nursing the cough that would prove fatal, once more travelling between England and Tsenacommacah, between Urras and Anarres, between one false god and another, a princess of no kingdom but her own.
What would she tell young Ketho? Perhaps the same words as Shevek:
“We are all children of time.”
Time – that nebulous Never-Never Land from which none of us can ever be dispossessed.
1 The Algonquian name for Eastern Virginia, which means “densely inhabited land” – a fact that chills the body with its testimony that the indigenous peoples of Virginia, like the oysters of the Chesapeake Bay, though an endangered rarity today were once spectacularly numerous.
2 We know this because he had to write the governor of the Colony of Virginia for permission to wed her. Here, I am reminded of Vladimir Nabokov’s apt observation that the interracial marriage “which is a complete and glorious success” is among the most engrained of American taboos.
This ain't the Chelsea Hotel 