Saturday 4th April 2026
Blog Page 1304

Proposals in Exeter and Pembroke to appoint BME Officers

Alex Doody
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Proposals in Exeter and Pembroke to appoint BME Officers

Exeter and Pembroke are a step closer to appointing JCR Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) representatives after JCR meetings held last weekend.

Exeter JCR passed a motion last Sunday proposing that BME drinks be held to gauge interest in creating a BME Representative, and to create such a position if there was sufficient demand. Charanpreet Khaira, a second year English student, proposed the motion.

Speaking after the meeting, Khaira told Cherwell, “There is a very obvious minority of students of colour amongst Oxford undergraduates, and I think that it’s important for colleges to show that they are aware of this and would like to change it by having a BME rep.”

Pembroke JCR also passed a motion to appoint a Racial and Ethnic Minorities Representative. The role would include liaising with OUSU representatives, as well as working in collaboration with the JCR LGBTQ, Gender Equality, and Disabilities representatives. As a constitutional motion, the matter has to be voted on again at the next JCR meeting before it can be enacted.

Anna Simpson, who proposed the motion, told Cherwell, “We believe that liberation and representation are essential components of every society and that JCR bodies should reflect that. The Pembroke motion mirrors our commitment to promoting these values throughout our undergraduate community, by making sure that everybody feels they have a voice that is listened to in college.

“The motion has already passed the first stage of voting and was met by overwhelming support from our students, proving that Pembroke remains an inclusive and welcoming environment for everyone to live and study in.”

The actions of Exeter and Pembroke JCRs are part of a University-wide effort to appoint BME representatives, encouraged by Nikhil Venkatesh, OUSU’s BME Officer. Speaking to Cherwell, Venkatesh said, “It was a pledge in my manifesto that I would do my utmost to ensure that all common rooms had properly resourced BME Officers of their own, and it is fantastic to see people across Oxford introducing these roles in their colleges.

“BME Officers can be an important voice to represent an often overlooked minority at Oxford, and also provide support to BME students who experience the problems of racism. Each common room will want to go about the process of introducing a BME Officer in a slightly different way, and anyone who wants advice and help in doing so should get in touch with me.”

According to OUSU, 12 JCRs and one MCR have official BME representatives. Jesus JCR President, Jessica Parker-Humphreys, told Cherwell, “As a college, we feel that the significance of having a BME rep is to demonstrate that marginalised voices should be and will be heard and listened to. It’s essential that these voices have platforms whereby they can voice concerns or share ideas that could improve BME students’ time in Oxford.

“I think that BME reps have a particularly vital role to play with regards to access, due to the fact that Oxford’s student body is overwhelmingly white.”

Loading the Canon: W. G. Sebald

Jacob Verter
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Loading the Canon: W. G. Sebald

Refusing to be easily categorized, Winfried Georg “Max” Sebald’s intricate masterpiece, The Rings of Saturn, borrows a French quote from Joseph Conrad and a Brockhaus Encyclopedia entry on the Roche limit as epigraphs, contains a table of contents straight out of a travelogue, and features a black and white photograph of a netted window looking into a monotone blankness on the second page.

The eerie mood of the picture and its jarring inclusion in what is ostensibly a novel begin a feeling of melancholy that impregnates the book, described in the first sentence, “In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.” For Sebald, hope is not easily found, but must be clung to whenever it is unearthed.

Each chapter of The Rings of Saturn starts in the guise of a memoir; indeed, the reader follows the thoughts of Sebald himself. But soon, mimicking the imaginative leaps of the mind, observations about his travels through the British countryside morph into esoteric history lessons. Seeing a fisherman leads into a discussion of the European herring trade, and fish’s tendencies to school – and die – in great masses. A diminutive train supposedly built
 for the Emperor of China gives rise to a series of musings on the Taiping Rebellion, imperial power, and the cruel Dowager Empress, who demanded daily blood sacrifices to appease her silk- worm colony. Even a simple walk to Oxford Castle provokes tales of British World War II scientists secretly devising nerve gas and a biological weapon that could boil the North Sea. Although these myths start from peaceful origins, they decay rapidly into destruction and death, which Sebald identifies as a recurrent motif in human history.

Sebald’s father served Germany in the 1939 invasion of Poland; these oppressive memories certainly inform the shadowy human horrors that haunt his sentences. Yet rather than concluding that “life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder,” as the narrator suggests, threads of hope weave mesmerisingly through The Rings of Saturn, popping up, like Thomas Browne’s quincunx, in the most unexpected places.The Roche limit, for example, is the smallest distance that a satellite can orbit a planet without being torn apart by tidal forces, a fate clearly shared by some of Saturn’s early moons. But unlike those rings, we have the power to resist our entropic predilections. Sebald gives us that power, and is therefore worthy of a place in the literary canon. 

Alice Oswald: the modern epic poet to rival Homer

Rose Sykes
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Alice Oswald: the modern epic poet to rival Homer

Reworking ancient epic, myth and tragedy has been a concern of Twenty First century writers no less than previous generations. If anything, the modern era seems to be witnessing an expansion of genres and forms considered suitable for writing about the classical world – in particular the fraught but inspired Brand New Ancients of rapper-rhapsode Kate Tempest.

Performance is no less important to Devon-based poet Alice Oswald, as exemplified by the recent work Tithonus, her own take on the myth about how the goddess of the Dawn fell in love with a mortal man, kidnapped him, and asked Zeus to grant him immortality but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Oswald’s poem was designed to be performed in real time to musical accompaniment in the exact length that the summer sun takes to rise, as recorded by Oswald in her field-work research for the poem. It’s a seemingly difficult premise, but one pulled off with incredible poetic dexterity.

I first became aware of the importance of the performance element in the work of Alice Oswald – a former student at New College – in a fairly stressful situation about two years ago. Having mentioned her in my personal statement, the tutor interviewing me informed me in a closing conversation that she had recently performed her Iliad-inspired work Memorial in Oxford, reciting it purely from memory. In retrospect, (I think I was too anxious to make much of it at the time) this seems like a serious commitment to recreating the circumstances of the kind of oral and extemporaneous composition that heavily influenced the Iliad. It is this faithfulness to her poetry’s sources, whether ancient epic or contemporary interviews, which makes her stand out among modern poets.

Critics often contrast the magnificent plots and vivid characters that drive Homer’s sweeping epic with Oswald’s emphasis on the experiences of individual soldiers in Memorial. This is satisfying to note, as it demonstrates just how successful she has been in rescuing the Iliad from becoming a “public school poem… a clichéd, British Empire part of our culture”.

This does, however, do Homer some injustice. He was an innovator in the innately conservative tradition of oral epics, handing crowd-pleasing poems and elevating sections of them into some of the finest and most influential literature ever written. He does not achieve this by glamorising and dramatising the emotional dilemmas of a few main heroes to the detriment of other soldiers. Instead, he rescues the patronymics and epithets that would have made up vast lists of the dead from meaninglessness through ingenious narrative detail, through the creative possibilities presented by fathers and sons, armour and gifts, and their ability to suggest a story worthy of epic behind the fate of every soldier.

Oswald, too, achieves something in this tradition, bringing similes and epithets to life in a way that haunts my every reading of the Iliad. The typical “long-shadowed spear” of the Homeric warrior becomes, from the perspective of the victim counting down to his death, “a sundial moving over his last moments”. The murmurs rippling through crowds that are described as being like wind over the sea or through the cornfields, and are used by Oswald to conjure up the desperation and disappointment of grief. “When the west wind runs through a field/Wishing and Searching/Nothing to be found/The corn stalks shake their green heads.”

She is particularly adept at writing about nature, a skill influenced by close observation of the natural world during her training as a gardener, and her chosen subjects put this familiarity to excellent use. Her poem Dart was made partly using interviews with riverside workers and inhabitants, making it a richly coloured, abstract tapestry of nature and history, told through the diverse voices of the river’s people and creatures. The moments of pure description interwoven throughout this poem are made incomparably beautiful by the background texture, becoming, among various accounts clamouring to be heard, moments of reflective quiet in which the effect of each word can be appreciated on its own. “A/Lark/ Spinning/Around/A/Single/Note/Splitting/And/ Mending/It.” 

It is no exaggeration to say that the river Dart itself is the central character, in keeping with her determination to inhabit the mindset of her chosen subject with maximum closeness and accuracy, whether a river, the dawn, or a long dead soldier – a remarkably ambitious mission statement for an exercis in empathy, and all the more remarkable for her success in doing so. She has absorbed the spirit of equality in Homer’s work, recognising the importance of each tale being given a space for its telling.

Oswald is frequently cited as Ted Hughes’ natural poetic successor, but there are times when I think that her work invites comparison with far longer-lived literature, particularly ancient writers such as Homer and Virgil. She is equally comfortable and evocative in the close-up details of private lives as in the expression of sweepingly universal plights. More importantly, she also permits a plurality of voices in her work without making it seem chaotic, letting everything speak for itself rather than attempting to control, confine, or concretely define experiences.

Alice Oswald will be reciting from a selection of her work at Keble College on February 13th.

Review: Plenty

Emma Irving
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Review: Plenty

★★★★☆

Four Stars

Plenty opens with a sprawled, flagrant, brazenly naked Andrew Dickinson, arm flung out in defiance and blood trailed marvelously across his body. ‘How theatrical,’ you might think – and you wouldn’t be wrong. The ‘staginess’, however, feels less a blatant vie for attention (although that was no doubt in director Luke Howarth’s mind), and more a counterpoint on which the rest of the play rotates – a moment of vulnerability and exposure that underpins our interaction with the remainder of the work. Like much of the play, it becomes meaningful when viewed through the lens of recollection.

Plenty is all about artifice. 1950s banality jostles against the artificial emotional high of the war, bourgeois decadence and conventionality that warps and reflects supposed love. Characters display themselves in ‘honest’ monologue until we feel they never can be quite naked. Gráinne O’Mahony, as the lead, manages to strike the perfect note in this stilted landscape, giving a remarkable performance of Susan’s descent into madness as she distills the move from poignant naivety to ultimate desperation. Her performance is cogent, haunting, forcefully charged; it is a brilliant depiction of the ultimate search for meaning.

Aoife Cantrill, as Susan’s debauched sidekick, is almost equally impressive in her portrayal of a troubled, blasé new bourgeoisie. She conveys the moving but inherently flawed love of a mutable best friend. Cantrill heads an overall highly impressive supporting cast, with Andrew Dickinson and Archie Thomson bringing acutely sensitive portrayals of Susan’s doomed love interests. However, it feels at times that Dickinson is overwhelmed by the tour-de-forces of Aoife and Grainne. Highly intelligent comic performances from George Varley and Shrai Popat were also memorable for impeccable timing and how they lifted the work’s otherwise somber mood to give moments of some poignant light relief.

These intimate portrayals, however, would be devoid of much of their emotional potency without the play’s set design. We moved easily between the conventionality of a living room, the brutalized fields of war-torn France and a seedy hotel room, as the designers monopolized the Keble O’Reilly space to maximize dramatic effect. One particularly sensitive detail lies in the transition into an otherwise unused part of the stage when Susan is reunited with her one ‘true’ love, a soldier from the war who she knew only for a night. The move subtly juxtaposes the forced artificiality of the living room and its characters with the poignancy of an anonymous bedroom, tacitly enhancing the work’s intricacies in a way that could have easily been overwrought.

Howarth’s production invigorates this world of barren hope and emotion, bringing freshness to the surprisingly relevant tensions of the post-war period.  And if that isn’t enough, it is, quite simply, worth watching for the cast.

Ashmolean Live Friday: Angels and Demons

Fatima Al-Kassab
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Ashmolean Live Friday: Angels and Demons

Anger at Corpus’ damaged LGBTQ flags

Niamh Mcintyre
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Anger at Corpus’ damaged LGBTQ flags

Corpus JCR has passed a motion of condemnation against unidentified students who tore down LGBTQ pride flags in the college on Saturday evening.
The incident provoked outrage within the Corpus community, especially among its LGBTQ members. Jem Jones, Equal Opportunities Officer, told Cherwell, “As a JCR and a community, we were shocked and angered by these events. That this would happen in Corpus, and in LGBT history month, honestly beggars belief. Whilst the perpetrators may not have any experience of being in a minority group, their opinions are clearly and thankfully in the minority in our JCR.”

An article in The Oxford Student stated, “The Abbotts [sic]… [were] accused of ‘offensive’ and ‘unacceptable’ behaviour after removing the flags”. However, Cherwell understands that there is as yet no sufficient evidence to condemn the all-male drinking society, The Abbots, and that the motion resolved to “condemn the individual(s) who removed the pride flags”, without speculating as to who this might be.

There was an Abbots event being held on the night in question, but it is unclear whether the event was still going on, or whether any members of the drinking society were in college at the time that the flags were defaced.

The defacing of the flags has also provoked a reaction from the wider LGBTQ community. Otamere Guobadia, President of Oxford University’s LGBTQ society, condemned the perpetrators, commenting, “Some belligerent wanker has actively decided to make a mockery of the attempts of a marginalised group to resist their oppression and celebrate the very difference that makes them targets of this kind of bullshit every day.

“I have no idea the extent of the society’s involvement in this stupidity, but frankly the patriarchal, overprivileged groups like these do tend to breed narrow-mindedness.”

The emergency motion, which was passed by a large majority in Sunday’s JCR meeting, also dedicated £75 for the purchase of new flags, as well as ring-fencing a third of Corpus’ annual charity budget for LGBTQ causes.
Many members of the college have praised the motion, and the general reaction of the Corpus community, as a highly positive step to ensure the safety and comfort of its LGBTQ students.

Speaking to Cherwell, Luke Mintz, Corpus’ LGBTQ rep, said, “The actions of this group were unacceptable and potentially very offensive to LGBTQ students. I am glad that Corpus JCR has sent out a strong message of solidarity with its LGBTQ community. I am currently working with our excellent Equal Opportunities Officer to get more pride flags around College during LGBTQ History Month.”

Sandy Downs, Corpus student and Secretary of Oxford University LGBTQ Society, was also very happy with the response of the JCR. She commented, “The queer culture here [at Corpus] is really special. The actions from last Saturday were unusual, and the response of giving £1,000 of our charity levy to an LGBTQ charity and a commitment to display more LGBTQ flags is great.”

Bethany Currie, JCR President, also emphasised that the College will continue to strive to be as LGBTQ-inclusive as possible. She commented, “What happened on Saturday has only stiffened our resolve to work even harder to make Corpus the place that its students believe and want it to be.”

The Dapper Side of Denim

Rosie Gaunt
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The Dapper Side of Denim

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Fashion Matters

Archive
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Fashion Matters

 

After tearfully emerging from my hovel, having sat through the infamous ‘vegan-turner’ documentary, Earth- lings, and swearing off meat forever, I was forced to take a second look at some of our lifestyle choices. I have never agreed with wearing fur. One of my earlier memories is condemning the mink fur family heirloom to a life of solitude in the depths of the attic. It doesn’t take a raging vegan hippy with hairy armpits to be against fur either. Many people with their heads screwed firmly on their shoulders will argue that as we don’t kill these animals to eat them, they should not be killed for our own vanity, particularly when there are some pretty convincing faux options out there.

With the ghost of a still-living flayed fox still burning my retinas, I brought this topic up with some of my (admittedly rather upper middle class) contemporaries. They surprisingly sang its praises, taking the opinion that “if I shot it myself, I can wear it myself”. I found it accompanied their Barbours in quite a satisfying manner. Alright, fur is very warm and yes, people who live in the arctic rely on it to stay alive in the winter, but while the UK is unreasonably cold at times, we don’t need a fur to see us through the cold, unheated nights in student accommodation.

For those who still live innocent, carefree, pre-Earthlings lives, let me gently fill you in a little about the fur industry. After living their days in tiny confined cages, going crazy and circling day after day, the animals are killed as cheaply and efficiently as possible (or in some cases, just skinned alive). The cheapest way to kill animals is, to put it politely, an electric shock administered up the rear. If, even after that, you need another con for your anti-fur list, you smell like a wet dog if you get caught in the rain.

I’m not here to preach to you. You can find out more for yourselves pretty easily. But after lecturing myself hoarse to some pro-fur friends, they looked pointedly at my zip-up Vagabonds with raised eyebrows: Is leather any better? We tell ourselves that it is acceptable because cows die for food any- way, so really we’re just making sure that nothing goes to waste. I would like to point out now that if you happily tucked into a steak last time your parents came to visit, you might not necessarily feel guilty about your fabulous new boots, and fair enough, because that would be a little hypocritical. But actually if you move past the animal rights to the tanning process, which uses extremely toxic chemicals, its not such a faultless system either.

Still, how about setting aside our weeping consciences and buying fur vintage? These animals have been dead for ages and you’re not supporting the industry because those heartless men with the electric probes have probably retired and are sitting warming their leather booted feet on a sheepskin rug. This is a question yours truly has not quite resolved yet. Plus me and my Vagabonds are a romance akin to Elizabeth and Darcy or Christian and Anastasia (maybe not quite, although that brings a number of other misuses of leather into question), and I’m not sure I’m ready to buy vegan footwear. Unless it is Stella McCartney.

Did you clap Le Pen’s speech?

James Elliott
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Did you clap Le Pen’s speech?

Oxford students have been struggling in the past couple of weeks with the question of where we should stand on fascism. Apparently, the old antifascist answer – that the best place to stand on fascism is on its neck until it breaks – has become somewhat passé for the Oxford liberal elite. This unwillingness to aggressively smash fascism, whenever it rears its ugly head, reached its logical conclusion last Thursday night – with dozens of Union hacks lined up in the chamber of the world’s most famous debating society, seemingly breaking out into applause for the world’s most powerful fascist politician, either out of ritual or sinister admiration.

Lots of the debate around the invitation of Marine Le Pen has focused on ‘Does she have a right to a platform?’ or ‘Is this denying free speech?’ and crucially, ‘Will this invitation contribute to increased violence towards Muslims?’, but I would rather ask a different, albeit loaded, question: given that Le Pen’s invite has almost certainly contributed to a rise in legitimacy for the National Front and her brand of fascist politics, what would motivate her invitation?

It would appear, given the history of antifascist organising, that inviting Le Pen was never part of some elaborate antifascist strategy to discredit her. Listening to some right-wing students’ experiences of the event, one suspects that she was invited precisely because of her politics, rather than in spite of them.

In much of the commentary on this subject, students have referred to Le Pen as “a prominent politician”, but can never quite bring themselves to say what she really is: a fascist thug who wants to expel migrants and in 2012 attended an event organised by neo-Nazi group the Olympia Society, which bans Jews and women from its membership. When I challenged students on this in the queue, some said they agreed with her on immigration.

The photos of the Oxford Union members breaking out into applause for this defender of ‘free speech’ tell all. Far from challenging Le Pen, and in a symbolic act of respect, she was clapped into the chamber.

A recent witch-hunt against the OUSU demonstration has challenged students to prove their love of liberty by asking, ‘did you support the protests?’ I think a better question for those who attended the debate within the chamber would be, ‘did you clap Le Pen?’ 

David Browne has written ‘Why we clapped Marine Le Pen’ in response to this article which can be found here.

Some fashions don’t fade fast enough

Rosie Gaunt
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Some fashions don’t fade fast enough

Yves Saint Laurent famously said, “Fashions fade, style is eternal.” Unfortunately some don’t fade quickly enough – they fade out gradually like the highlights in ombre dyed hair. There’s only really one solution to these fashions, and that hair, and that’s the chop. The removal needs to be short and sharp, like pulling off a plaster, and the disposal needs to be permanent, to stop the infection spreading. This week, Cherwell puts a stake through the heart of outdated trends.

Our first victim is denim. While we advocate double denim and dungarees, as per our shoot this week, there are some denim trends that don’t ever deserve to come back. Summer Taylor (below), who’s something of a denim connoisseur after modelling in our denim shoot, addresses denim’s arch-nemesis, the jegging, and denim’s enemy within, super low- rise jeans.

“Jeggings,” she explains, “are denim imposters invented be- cause skinny jeans just weren’t enough for some people. They are inventively named jeggings because they resemble jeans but are made of legging material. The thing is, no one needs to see anyone’s knobbly knees in such high faux denim definition.”

“Another denim style
that is equally abhorrent
is the super low-rise jean.
These are neither aes
thetically pleasing (why
would you want shorter
legs and a longer torso?)
nor remotely practical. Un-
less you want to keep your fingers permanently hooked in the belt straps, perennially hoisting and re-adjusting, low-rise jeans are
a no go. They’re ugly and uncomfortable and ultimately not worth the kidney infection. High-waisted jeans, on the other hand, not only look great but help promote a healthy constitution by keeping your kidneys warm. Ideal.”

This sounds like something my mother would say, in fact I’m sure she has said it, when I was 13 and after a particularly beautiful pair with ‘Von Dutch’ emblazoned across the back. With the benefit of hindsight, and taste, I have to admit that my mother was right. Sigh. She’s also right about two other denim disasters currently polluting Britain’s highstreets: very short shorts on girls and low slung jeans on boys.

Mother Gaunt is happy to contribute some choice words for the young and beautiful. “Girls, I know you have nice legs, and yes I am jealous, but no one, not even you, looks good in those short shorts.”

She continues, “Boys need to put their bums away too! No-one wants to see your grundies hanging out of your low
slung jeans. It may
be comfortable to have your belt on its loosest setting, but even I know that sometimes you have to suffer for your style.” Tallulah Le Merle agrees that comfort cannot always be a deciding factor, as she comes to terms with the ugliness of UGG. “I will be the first to admit they are comfortable. Okay, more than that, they’re like walking on the fluffy clouds the Greek gods had sex on. But they are heinous – the aesthetic is chunky, they make legs look stubby, and the lighter colours get dirty and look horrible in no time. What kind of investment is that?”

We leave you with a few choice words from Benjamin Berry, Cherwell’s resident sartorial sasser. He disses four fashions from four corners of the fashion world: jewellery, hair, knitwear and sportswear…

Jewellery, Chokers: If you want to make an amazing outfit tacky, add a choker. The 90s are over, honey, and the choker belongs at the back of the closet, or preferably, the bin.

Hair, Undercuts: Ellie Goulding may have been ‘it’ in 2012, but undercuts are a thing of the past. Keep grimy in the gutter and don’t burn out with this unfortunate style in 2015.

Knitwear, Ponchos: Although I fully condone knit- wear (keep those cable knits coming!), and the oversized scarves that were all over the AW14 runways, one thing I cannot stand is the knitted poncho. Think M&S before the revamp meets new-age hippy.

Sportswear, Stash: Last time I checked, it wasn’t cool to dress up like a public schoolboy who’s forgotten to change after rugby practice. Stash is one sartorial choice I want to see banished from the streets of Oxford and con- fined to public school sports pitches.

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