I’d unintentionally consumed books and movies this day month with a central theme: identity. Every think piece on it has been written: its creation, malleability, and miscommunication. Precisely why identity is so commonly discussed in online sorters, TED talks, and introspective conversation rests on the belongingness we achieve through it. Even stone walls are porous. We consume, absorb, recycle, and regurgitate. Be it ideologies and stances, movements and sentiments, it’d be naive to say we aren’t echoes of what we observe. We’re relational in nature, sheep to some degree. This is why I think I’m drawn to art and its non-functionality: its independence from moralism and tokenism which sometimes incites controversy. How its most authentic state isn’t a vehicle for mass approval, how it can be the groundbreaker of our generation or something obscure and nondescript. It matters who’s asking though.
I think about long-termism of purpose in work; how business acumen is characterised by horsewhipping potential, leveraging, and trimming prose. (One sec, just let me just conduct my cost-benefit analysis on this, so I can jot it down on my profit-loss statement.) I’m aware I have these thoughts but I want to know if I can sustain this ridicule when I become shaped by my glorious, heaven-sent passion in life to pay off a mortgage, find my Adobe subscription cheap, and buy the Hands Newtown selection (please sponsor me!) I’m still in that disconnect; the girl boss switch is flicked on, sorry. Interning at a brand agency is honestly quite fun, I can’t lie at all.
We hate overworkism, but we’ll forget we do because work becomes our identity through 8 hours in a day for 5 days (unless we live to see the 4-day work week that a hundred companies in the UK have permanently implemented or that New Zealand had trialed with drops of 34% in absenteeism, 33% in stress, and 67% in work-life conflict.) Our sense of purpose will draw on our ability to provide ready-made economically useful output packaged and paid through the attention span currency. We are the knowledge economy, corporate worker or academic in niche research searching for higher truths on paper, which I wholeheartedly respect. Think about it! Being a researcher who counts the calories on thousand-dollar peanut butter or finds chronic disease treatment through sampling cells is pretty mad. With my finals coming to an end, I thought I’d finally stop waffling and get to the meat of the matter—some brilliant works!
Home Fire
Kamila Shamsie
“You arrived at the foothills and your mind catapulted you to the summit.”
Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018, Home Fire is a sobering narrative on identity. It’s about weaving through selfhood when it’s microscopically, monolithically deconstructed through eyes of anyone else but your own.
The Pashas have ambition to burn and vitriol to swallow, insult and injury distilled into the daily motions of life. To sympathise with Isma is to be seen like this: careworn austerity held together by devotion and calculated motion. In defiance, Aneeka is this: a flush of unbridled ambition stiffened only by the type of maturity a childhood like hers could erect. Parvaiz is a flame of young and impressionable passion, stoked by the guilt of stability in his life amidst a war rooted in mangled utopianism and his past.
Sharp dialogue, prose, and metaphorical imagery folded into pleats of Shamsie’s sacred command—this language is pedestrial to replicating the story’s environment. Slow attack, short sustain, long decay. Rather than a metronome ticking with constant reminders of societal pressure, racism, and familial ties, Home Fire jarringly hammers the coexistence of normalcy and love in a blemished media frenzy. Because is it really so wicked to carve out your own hoops to jump through when all that matters to you is missing?
Family cut from the same cloth that’s torn is no different from love that’s lost. All that’s left of the peaches are their pits. People and hope are all we’ve got, and the Pashas are hell-bent on preserving this.
Crying in H Mart
Michelle Zauner
“There was no one in the world that was ever as critical or could make me feel as hideous as my mother, but there was no one, not even Peter, who ever made me feel as beautiful.”
Crying in H Mart is singer-songwriter and now author Michelle Zauner’s poetic pilgrimage on food as a medium. How it untethers itself from a function of mere sustenance, how it fills spaces of grief and self-retribution with forgiveness and warm memories of laughter across the table.
Tart remarks and barbed criticism are simply the nature of coarsened parenting. For most migrant parents in particular, it’s a predestination necessary to a child’s mechanical, surefire success, or so presumed.
We know this narrative all too well, but the self-preservation Zauner’s mum encourages is a fresh perspective. She half-knowingly medicates her daughter’s resentment and explosive confrontation with rich flavour.
It’s clever how the story suspends us in constant transition. We’re caught in between states where there grows a disconnect in persona of an otherworldly, robotic woman who melts the world away with hardened, pure will and a mother who falters in brief pockets of humanity. Couched in fragmentary anecdotes that slowly unravel a panoptic realisation, a daughter settles in between the teeth of grief—fermenting kimchi, simmering doenjang jjigae, and nursing a half-murdered identity.
Fantastic Fungi
Dir. Louis Schwartzberg | Netflix
Did you know that a Japanese researcher in the 90s discovered that certain bioactive compounds in the lion’s mane mushroom stimulated nerves to regrow? Although no large-scale research has been conducted to prove this postulation, it’s been claimed to potentially treat Alzheimer’s disease. In the US, designer Suzie McMurty has created a prototype that automatically dispenses mushroom spores during a wildfire so that the fungi can purify the soil afterwards.
As an avid cottagecore-derivative mushroom lover, my confidence has been reinvigorated in the belief that the future is fungi—or so I like to think. A vibrant documentary on propaganda’s ability to veil important discoveries, Fantastic Fungi demystifies the billion use cases mushrooms have boasted over the last couple decades. Quick breakdown first: all mushrooms are fungi but not all fungi produce mushrooms. Mushrooms are simply fruiting bodies. Known as an agent for regeneration and healing, this organism had been crawling in cancer and mental health research. Paul Stamets, head documentarian, observed an interesting difference in early Western pharmacology that focused on identifying early onset symptoms of disease, while East Asian medicine was more directed toward discovering treatments like these which were heavily advertised as pseudoscience. However, after the peak of its cultural movement in the 70s, widespread prescription of psilocybin (medical mushrooms) had been wiped out of hospitals, a culmination of fear sharpened by conservative propaganda and Nixon’s precarious administration.
It’s a rich piece on media and the government’s ability spin and sedate narratives, but as with recreational and meditational weed, we’ve come to see a reshaping in reputation. Not a dabbler myself, but it’ll be interesting to see how the mushroom movement matures.
The Father
Dir. Florian Zeller | Amazon Prime Video
“I feel as if I’m losing all my leaves […] The branches and the wind and the rain. I don’t know what’s happening anymore.”
Trailblazers Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman star in a stripped back, nearly cast-less, low-budget film that takes emotion to its forefront. Dementia is quite familiar to me, so the course of Hopkins’ representation here was appreciatively accurate. The Father explores a strained father-daughter relationship that projects chronic confusion of pain through spliced timelines, fabricated memories, and illusionary paths taken. Colman brilliantly manifests the nuanced dynamism of a troubled daughter through making amends with the guilt of choosing to live a life beyond the role of primary caregiver. She pleas sympathy and does so with a seasoned actress’ contemplative grace. Throughout the scenes, repetition is a plot driver that hauntingly materialises the marrows of deterioration of self and sensibility. What the film loses in pace, the leads make up for in tunnel-visioning fervour. The climax in its own right was easily Short Film of the Year for me. Get watching, that’s all.
In the end, we’re marathoners in love with luxuries on all ends of the non-monetary and monetary spectrum that we can achieve as an extension of our identity. If I could flick off the switch once in a while and find rich purple prose in all this, then so be it. In the meantime, may these books end up on your shelves and watchlists over the summer break!
An amazing article as always!