By Shini Meyer Wang
The student flat party in Lisbon / Ben Mullikosson’s The Last Year of Darkness
Just down the street from the student flat in Lisbon, Portugal. Taken by Zeynep Civelek.
So, I’m at this student flat in Lisbon on holiday. It’s where my friend lives and I’m getting to know her flatmates. Seven of us are gathered in her flatmate Martin’s bedroom who’s an eager host, delighting in distributing wine and cigarettes. During this small party, I’m writing my film review for Queer East. My laptop sits a little protectively between myself and everyone else. Thanks to the necessity of my deadline, amidst the confusion of new people, new flavours of conversation, funny and enjoyable, I have some thread of thought to dip my mind back into. The party seems to weave its way into the review.
They ask about my film review and if they can read it aloud. Martin reads it in his German accent. “…The Last Year of Darkness is shaped around the lives of Mullinkosson’s friends, DJs, musicians, drag performers, ravers and particularly queer youth, who do not conform to China’s hyper capitalism and social conservatism. ” He scoffs before the words “queer youth”, something I let fly over my head, as I like Martin and I don’t want things to feel complicated. I’m scared to confront him, but there’s also a secret desire to challenge him, so I quickly concede when asked to show clips from the documentary.
Scared to put myself out there at this party, I find myself showing them clips of Yihao, a person from the film who shares themself with so much vulnerability. Sensitive and uncalloused against the cutting remarks of heteronormative society, they are someone I feel very tenderly towards.
After these clips, Martin without hesitation shares his thoughts. I don’t remember word for word what he said, but I remember thinking that he saw Yihao with pity, not connecting to them or their agency. He seemed to think of Yihao as too far gone. The words that caught me, that Martin said, were “not natural”. Hearing them, I almost blew my top. But what do you mean by natural? I asked. How do you define nature? Martin described a scene in the woods: a lone person trying to survive in nature. If you don’t adapt, you don’t survive. Yihao wouldn’t survive, as if traditional society was a forest and Yihao was an absurd fish.
There were so many things he was missing. To assume that social norms are an immovable kind of nature – this immutability completely antithetical to nature itself – instead of a particular kind of growth and cultivation, is ridiculous. But I was happy to come across such a fitting word – adapt. To have a working definition of nature as a kind of bountifully creative form of adaptation! And is there not incredible beauty in this? These offshoots of growth that burst through wildly.
Ecologist Connor Butler’s “The Birds & the Bees: Queer Ecology Guided Walk”
If I hadn’t taken a garden tour, called “The Birds & the Bees: Queer Ecology Guided Walk”, as part of Queer East, I don’t know if I would’ve felt as assertive in my point of view. Coming out of a dim screening room at the Museum of the Home, we viewers followed each other into the light of the garden, where ecologist Connor Butler was waiting for us. By the end of the tour, you realise nature doesn’t give a fuck about rigid boundaries. There seems to be no rules of what is natural and unnatural. Trees change their sex. Male wasps tunnel out of the fig they hatch in, lose their wings in the process, only to get inside of another fig to mate with female eggs which haven’t hatched yet. Then, they either dig an escape or die, spending most of their lives inside figs. From my human point of view, there seems to be both a severity and a pleasure to nature. There must be a pleasure, as each organism is pulled to do as it does.
Slugs have their own violent pleasures. As they are intersex, both parties can inseminate and get pregnant. Doing their best to escape the burden of pregnancy, they each have an in-built venom to kill the sperm. Nature then takes it a step further, the countermeasure required to reach reproduction. Believe it or not, slugs actually have cannons on their bodies which shoot spears into the other slug to neutralise the venom. I wonder how this sexual warfare is experienced?
River Yuhao Cao’s River is My Hometown
River Yuhao Cao’s River is My Hometown imagines what follows when nature takes over what is familiar to us. Cao writes that his film was in reaction to the 1998 Yangtze River flood, which left 15 million homeless and wiped out his hometown, bringing up the question of Cao’s identity now that the river had supplanted the place he had grown up. A body lies tranquil in a glowing green grove by a bank. Its arm is placed over the heart. Its face is turned away from the camera. The body is exposed to its external environment, skin-to-skin with the grass, which contrasts with how these two points of vulnerability of the heart and face are protected from our view, as if the body’s occupant is turning inwards, deep elsewhere.
The film depicts a mourning ritual. The body in the brush seems like it might be Cao’s, as if he is staging his own wake where nature is his attendant. Goddess-like figures tend to his body. They wear mourning attire – a black veil hung off a wire halo, white ribbons (white is worn for funerals in China) and white chrysanthemums, which symbolise grief and lamentation. We hear a breathy flute rasping through the pattering rain.
In the film’s beginning shots, we experience a moment with nature uncommon to us due to our lack of night vision. In the pitch black forest, the flowers and dewy leaves that are usually unseen to us have presumably been captured with flash or some other form of artificial light. Looking at wild flowers in the dark, the oddity of our presence is made known to us, as if we’re intruding. But am I feeling this intimacy because I’ve anthropomorphised these flowers? While they don’t stare back at me, the white wildflowers seem to glow with a sublime otherworldliness that I can’t understand. The inaccessibility of the non-human sustains this wonder.
These tender moments Cao creates, however, are tinged by this prior knowledge of the flood that destroyed his hometown. The film speaks to how you cannot make a simple value judgement on nature, that is at once a destroyer and creator and impersonally so. In this queer transformational space, Cao loses his fear of destruction. Narrated over shots where the camera wanders over landscapes of the river at night, we hear Cao imagining coming home to his mother. “I saw the river”, he says. “Mom. I’m not afraid.” The river takes on the tenderness of home due to this familial address, and yet there is also a pervasive sense of absence and loss, since Cao’s reunion with his mother is in his imagination. The film suspends us in a moment that is both gloomy and idyllic, just after the end of things and at the very beginning of incipience.
Conclusion
Circling back to Martin after all this meandering, I wonder what I could tell him. I wonder if there’s anything to tell. Perhaps that, used as a metaphor, nature can dismantle our preconceptions, thanks to its complexity and nondualism, meaning its ability to be multiple and sometimes contradicting things at once, showing us that it’s all a matter of our perspective, which nature goes beyond. Thinking of how nature reacts and responds, I wonder if maybe Martin and I’s natural course is to hit each other’s ideological walls and go our separate ways.