Friends, Workers, Colleagues, Corridorists

Friends, workers, colleagues, corridorists is a poetry collection about navigating life in the UK academic system as a brown, trans person balancing community, isolation, visas and depression across two institutions. It seeks to be relatable to those in pain, and a teacher to those who do not know what pain exists in the bodies of those not theirs.

1. Cover Letter

The cover letter is a fantastic beast, and a good cover letter that gets you a job, a rare one. Somehow, it has and can do everything: sell you as a researcher, an academic citizen, a radical, caring human being, and an obedient one, a part of the university and a part of the world, a native English speaker and just spicy enough to be a native of many other worlds, an alien-fun and eye catchy, but in colours that fit the walls and windows of the department; a chameleon- a cover letter is skin on offer.

The skin disguises ideas not quite formed, as ideas that inspire, ideas that shock but not too much, ideas well formulated to then be grants projects and careers; ideas are contained.

You know, ideas- those little floating lit up insects that look the best when free, not lured in a mason jar and shut tight to show; dimming with time, but if they are not in the jar and if they are not written down, are they even real?

2. 404-Web Page Not Found

For the 100th time today i remain unfound, and when i am on the zoom call to get me my next grant so that i can live my life anxiety free for 2 more years, i suddenly do not exist on the black and yellow site- in the world’s university, yet somehow i'm here. i’m always here before
someone thinks i'm not always here, and not working. i’m here for the meetings- 2 minutes or
240. But the web page says otherwise, and the course i designed nights in a row and days in a night exists only in a couple of sharepoint pages and sheets, and of course, in the application sent for permission to exist as a course, as a person, as a teacher, but not on this black and yellow world, where i am a dot only connected to other dots, a pixel that makes the picture but yes, only that. A pixel forming a background of black- i hope they send my mugshot soon because it is the only one i have from the pixel world.

3. Gander

It’s not a problem anymore,

It was a problem all those years ago

We are not like them; we know what went wrong, and we know what can go right. 

But if you are too quiet, i will, of course, speak over you

if you feel you are overworked, i will, of course, ask you to be a better manager of time 

if you feel like you cannot write, i will tell you that you spend too much time teaching

You are better at the students, i’m just bad at teaching

You are a better mentor, like a parent, i’m just bad at caring

if you keep working, i will, of course, have published far more than you

if you say you are tired, i will, of course, ask you to stand up for yourself

Do not self exploit, i will say

But just enough to continue to do the work you have signed up for 

And not

Stand up, but not too much. i still need you here 

The students cannot survive

i cannot survive 

We cannot survive

Without you housekeeping, 

dusting away, soft spoken, stern

The academic house wife; supervisor, manager

You chose to be a housewife for this department; it is probably what you are most comfortable doing.

4. The lift

It has been 6 years and i am always confused about what lifts go where- especially which ones go to the 5th floor. i once had students who did not come to class because they could not find room 563, and they did not know whether the room existed- but then that made me think, do they know we exist here? At the anthropology department on the 5th floor, where only one lift and 5 flights of stairs go?

5. The office

i come to the office for the office, not because of the office filled with tasks but the office filled with things; cards from students, types of tea, turkish delight, lavashak, snacks, ritter sport, books i won't read, books i should read, posters, flags, souvenirs, an office once empty- my little museum of things that matter that remind me that i have had all these little interactions that matter. This office was empty. Many offices are empty but for a mat to take a nap on in the middle of a heavy marking day- marked by the lines on the mat, cheeks hot or cold, slippers for the office, heels and dress shoes for the corridor, it takes 30 seconds a day to decorate, one item at a time. it also takes 30 seconds for an email and sometimes the emails decorate and take up space before little sweet meats can on the shelf.

6. Shelf and Books

She sits in the room in front of me as i set up my surface to begin writing; she turns to me and smiles, “Ready?” as though there is a camera- but no, it's just me. She tells me first, laughing about that book on the shelf, a very thin layer of dust from the construction outside the windows. i haven't been able to read that book in 6 months. The problem is that. It's fiction. And i'm exhausted. i know it will fill my heart with light, but that’s the problem. It's fiction.

7. Mirror Office, Office Mirror

I walk past her in the corridor, and she stops to suggest lunch. This lunch we have been meaning to have for the past year, but somehow never got around to- it's either marking, or office hours, research, marketing, or travel. But i did want to really have this conversation with her- she is so nice, and our work speaks to each other, yet we haven't spoken to each other.
Maybe next term.

8. The square corridor

I never know where the lift begins and ends, in the corridor when i’m running around, looking for a class. i see the most people mid-teaching theatrics, waving quickly as they pass the room, students turning quickly to see two people they haven't seen in the same space, wondering if they know that we have offices opposite each other, or if this is probably just a crossover episode in their minds.

9. Ghosts in the department

Things get done around the department, classes get taught, students get spoken to, and research happens a lot; there’s this floating group of halves- people, researchers, teachers and almosts hanging around in a room near the lift. Little balls of energy that make no email list. They make no discussion and they make no meeting, some only become visible two years post existing. These ghosts in the department only the students and one other person sees; work that just seems to happen to the music of tip toes. Part of being a ghost is that ghosts keep moving, ghosts move through walls, they see everything,

The ghosts conjure time no one else has. Strain to hear the ghosts and invite them to a drink, they are hardly there, making no discussion and making no list, they’re used to it, you see; the ghosts are probably still in that 5th floor room, worrying which patches of them are free.

10. Seman-ticks

Every time i ask for something to be made better, i am asked what it means to be better, as though we have not worked for the past 100 years figuring out what better is. We know what racism means, gender, class, inequality, we understand power, but we let it hang around with us like a growing puffy cloud in the corridors, pushing us back into our little rooms and desks with computers synced remotely, so we take work home. Nobody has the time to dispel the cloud, and we walk around it, pushing our chest out to move around, under and over it. Exhausted, we rest on the cloud, bury our faces in and turn our heads slightly to take a breath- the cloud is soft and comfortable, but we cannot pass it to get to the sunlight. 
We can only get to the next DEI meeting.

11. Wheely Chairs

I practice wheeling around in my wheely chair, spook students who walk quickly down the hallway. A good wheely means a quick turn-around- of the books, papers, pens and sticky notes i need. Like phases of the moon, i look at my laptop before dropping fake tears for fake hydration. No insurance pays for these eyes, my spectacles thicken like the windows with the tabs on this screen, like the residue of the coffee swallowed before mixed. Attached my spine to the wheely chair, sigh, once the email is sent, the wheely chair holds me, my entire back. The closest thing to a hug in this place.

12. Remote Desktop, Remote Working

Switched on, the laptop, but also a button on my forehead, or behind my neck, perhaps that is what the tingle is that i feel when i long-press, click click, enter password in my soft cotton shorts and neatly ironed shirt. “Lots of baggage,” the yoga instructor who came for a “break” during lunch told me, i should have just said i was hungry, and that enforced yoga during lunch is not relaxing, and that the baggage that particular day felt heavier. Instead, i asked, metaphorically? Or is my laptop too heavy? Tingle tingle i felt one at the end of my tailbone and zap, back at the back of my neck, i could only imagine stars, until i began to see them, hungry, meditating, and thinking about a never ending to do list.

13. Trans-gender

Trans in the classroom, teaching when trans. Things i did not think about, forget consider or plan for when i showed up- all of myself, all of my passion, all of my life through a singular voice mixing theory and teaching and my life, my friends’ lives, my family life for my students to pick at the flesh, close to the bone and leave thorns bare on the plate. Like a fish, eye intact.

“I really enjoyed the class, but the activist style isn’t for me”

“I learnt so much, but the teacher is a little too attached to the topics”

How does one teach students who have only learnt detachment from people who have never lived the lives of those they teach? Would assimilating mean ridding my body mind soul of scars and experiences afforded to me by life- the smell of detachment slowly creeps up near my voice box, a black box remembering charted routes, and i swallow it so that it disappears, and i don’t choke the next time i am laid bare. Eyes intact.

14. Classroom

In the classroom, in the smallest one, i feel the most expansive. Like the soul in my body can finally quench every little thirst and hunger, like my body does not have to suggest growth in its 4’11 size. i feel the biggest with my students, almost as though the ceiling breaks open, and we float out and about; not like ghosts but like birds, butterflies and bees, necessary to pollinate and spread, but connected, in connection with people. Every question in the classroom about taking what we know outside the classroom, much less about putting more people in the classroom, but breaking the room of it all, the smallness of it all so that this expanse can be every body’s, like it is, like it always has been.

15. Seminar

As much as human beings like to say that they are far more developed than animals are, we behave the same way in an ecosystem of a seminar. New meat sniffed and scanned for quality, old meat to see if there is any tenderness left. More years, more seminar show-ups, and eventually a Bingo card of comments not questions, connections that don’t exist. Anything but real engagement, because engagement would take response, and response can only occur when the ears come before the mouth.

16. Light at the end of the Gate

My friends stand outside campus gates, the roads that are welcome for virtually anyone to walk through, any one except those hoping for a word stuck in throats and in mazes of semantics and freedom of speech debates to end.

G e n o c i d e 

Say anything but

Password accepted

To enter the best universities in the world 

Outside the gate

Remain camps, remain news, drop it outside the classroom,

It is like the campus is a vacuum, where some classrooms still have light bulbs, where outside the gate there are torch lights and in minds that listen, there is only the light of that which kills.

17. Staff Rooms

We would all probably be better off without offices, but with staff rooms, where the diversity of our lunch boxes can invite each other into the diversity of our minds. Perhaps the problem is the office, and its four walls, a box for character and things that make me something beyond what i am outside its doors.

18. Green Lamps

For the longest time, a green lamp was how i thought i would feel when i had “achieved in academia.” Years and no green lamp later, i know there is no such thing as achievement in a system that rewards only those continuously achieving, with burning eyes, sweet tea 5 times a day and salaries for food that comes in packets- cooking is for those who have too much time on their hands, care is for those who have nothing else to do, emotions are for those who have nothing else to fill their brains papers and books with. But i found love in a library, and in the slowness of a page at a time, a word at a time. In speed, those awarded continue to get awarded, like a generational curse that would only break with refusal, but who has it in them to refuse?

19. Lecture

I stand in front of my 80 strong class, all of 4 feet and 11 inches, my booming voice the only thing that brings their swirling thoughts to a standstill as we bring their discussions of trad wives, tiktok and labubus into the classroom. For the fifth time i grin and tell them that this is not my preferred mode of teaching, “lecturing” someone has never been looked at as a good thing where i come from because it always signalled a power dynamic, unshakeable until those lectured did the lecturing in another 8 years and became part of this MLM scheme. Today, the best way to use the lecture hall is to silently notice its architecture, its workings and the attention on me- in the hopes that the lectured remove me from the unfair expectation and treat me instead like an encyclopaedia or a library, which is the better L word.

20. Short term let/stay, fixed term

I’ve been really courageous this time, putting up plants, pictures, posters and books in an office i have only for a couple of years- much less than any place in any country that i have rented out. Dreams in academic spaces often reveal themselves to be office spaces that one can call their own- so few available, so few only for yourself. i brought the entire world into my office, every person who stops by says “this really is an extension of you”- “i know, i try.”

i would lose my mind if my world outside did not inform, collide and grow with my world in the tower; i have lost my mind thinking about what these posters, pictures and little things i have collected over the years indicate, and what doors have closed for me before i knew they were there. i think often of where these books, posters, gifts from the earth and its inhabitants will go when this nest no longer wants me.

“The nest is a temporary nursery, not a permanent home”.

21. On writing

One deep sniff of the compound herb inhaler, 5 words strung together; Facebook LinkedIn and WhatsApp hovered over and clicked before there could be any semblance of control or thinking. Writing has never taken more effort than it does now. There are so many better things to do than slog away writing, feeling existential and relying on the slowest dopamine hit known to peoplekind. i will not be romantic about this exercise; writing has never taken more effort than it does now. All i can hear when i write is other people’s writing. Before the idea has time to capture me, it is captured by an impending Research Excellence Framework net- the idea does not make it past the first interview, forget getting into the room, or onto the page. There is a box in my mind of non-REFable ideas, and they claw their way out one way or the other. This collection is from one of those breakouts, and man, am i happy that i have beasts in my brain.

22. Chairs and Tables

bell hooks taught me that without moving the chairs and tables in a classroom, nothing much can change- if the shape of the room where we study together cannot be changed by those learning, can the mind truly twist, turn and make itself with new information?

i took these teachings to a class in the UK, and my students whined, every single time, every week, every first 5 minutes of the hour to move and shake the tables.

i went home every day and asked bell hooks what i could, should do if my students refused to decolonise the classroom. What do i do if my students give me harsh feedback for questioning age old theories that are just that, subjective theories from places of bias. What do i do when my students write to me asking for hierarchy to be restored, scared that learning when we see each other as equals is not something they can take back to their homes, to their parents?

She asked me to explain

My every action

My every dream

My every moment fantasising of a different world

i had to let my students in.

Explain why a chair is not just a chair, and a teacher is never just a teacher. That textbooks and how they are written are political, that university architecture is the architect of inequality,

My students explain now, to their students, and to their parents, their colleagues and their minds, that decolonisation starts from when we can each control (and question) how we sit in the classroom.

23. Education is the only way out

A lot of brown bodies like and unlike mine are told that climbing the big stairs of a college education is the only way to escape the hells of social confinement.

i believed it.

Some of us took it to heart a little more than others.

My uncle, the first PhD. 
i, the second, and my brother, who will be the third.

We stepped out of one confinement and possibly stepped into another. The second one was well lit, and offered a life of comfort even though it was in a box of superiority i had to work to challenge every day since.

A lot of brown bodies like and unlike mine fall through the cracks while climbing the great stairs of education; cracks unlit by the stars we are walking towards.

A lot of brown bodies like and unlike mine carefully compose the rules by which the stairs stay lit, in a careful attempt to create a social confinement through which bodies can be filtered on assumed lines of purity and pollution.

Every step of the long winding ladder that some run across and others feel a jolting pain in the thighs conquering, every step i hear the sound of skulls crushing. i wince, both feeling a pain and attempting to feel the pain that doesn’t belong to me but one that i should not escape in the hopes of solidarity. Maybe these stairs moving upwards need to be destroyed in the hopes of a village of friends.

24. Mentors and Rules

i have never understood how people talk mentors into joining their club of academia. The possibility of cold emailing with an entitlement someone should have taught me freezes my entire being. i take 2 business days to defrost. A mentor to me has always been a unicorn- a mystical creature that everyone else seems to have access to and tells me about, someone who understands them squarely, their past, present and future. An academic oracle.

i’ve heard the voice in my mind

Just tell me what to do

How to make sense of this new country, new rules, informal job openings, and informal etiquette. i have a diary where i mark these new things that no one tells each other, a map of social life in the academy in the UK.

Cold emails- generally ok

Direct messages- generally not ok

Asking people about funding opportunities and jobs- if you dare, okay 

Sharing your feelings about the weather- generally ok

Sharing your feelings about being on new antidepressants- will be pretended to be generally ok, but really is not and is considered *new word*- over sharing.

Bumping into someone during a conference, saying hi and talking to them about their latest work - encouraged!

Passive aggression- okay(?)

Asking for non alcohol based social events- ….. [TBD]

Looking for academic oracles who understand these details and are interested in creating guidance on unsaid rules- rules cannot be expected to be followed if they are unsaid, unwritten, uncommunicated and only passive aggressively expected.

25. Laptops on the Plane

“The best place to get some work done is on the flight. Not one soul to disturb you,” he says, and i think of all the glowing lights on a flight, soft faces thinking, doing, writing. Many souls, but not one soul to disturb the other. Finally, a place to breathe, 30,000 feet in the air, where practically none of us can.

Slow walking people with chains attached to the piercings on their back, dragging two phones, a laptop and a tablet. Minimum. How is every conversation online about how to get offline, and every conversation offline about how to translate how it feels to be here and be together online?

“i’m finally going to get some rest in that 12-hour flight”- the most rest i got in the 6 months before it. i unclasp my phone from my back and switch on Airplane mode, the WiFi button lights up-

“free Wifi now on your flight!”