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Dora Maar and the Everyday Strange

Olivia Cowley
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Dora Maar and the Everyday Strange

The women of the Surrealist movement have suffered a curious case of the feminine shadow, what could be termed Muse Syndrome. Often, their biographical and artistic legacies have been dogged by their associations to prominent male surrealists; the result, an awkward and myopic epitaph.  

Despite her reflection “I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse”, for many years, Leonara Carrington was largely known in her native England as the 26 years younger wife of Max Ernst. The prescient Méret Oppenheim was often presumptively referenced as Mr Oppenheim. She was never included in any of Breton’s planned, promotional photos of the Surrealist group, despite being a significant and active member. For years after her death, Dora Maar was remembered as Picasso’s “Weeping Woman”, the lachrymose subject of a series of portraits. In 1997 when she died, her obituary in The New York Times contained a familiar genitive – “Dora Maar, a Muse of Picasso, Is Dead at 89’.

The current exhibition of Maar’s work at the Tate Modern is the first of its kind. Put on in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou and the J. Paul Getty Museum, the retrospective assembles over 200 pieces by Maar and some by fellow, contemporaneous surrealists. 

Born Henriette Theodora Markovitch on the 22nd of November 1907, Maar was the daughter of a French retailer and a Croatian architect. While studying at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian (two of the few institutions which offered an unadulterated education to their female students), Maar frequented the surrealist jaunt, Cafe de la Place Blanche, and workshop of André Lhote. Whilst in Paris, she also befriended the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paul Eluard and André Breton. Maar’s career was rarely static; her oeuvre includes painting, filmography, poetry, as well as photography. Her photographic subjects range from the Wall Street Crash to East London’s pearly kings and commissions for Vogue. 

Despite the breadth of her subject matter, Maar’s gaze is persistently singular and always aslant. The Tate exhibition includes Maar’s first paid project as a photographer, catalogue photos of the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel for an art history book. In Maar’s spatially ingenious portraits, the subject of countless dross, glossy postcards is rendered mythical, skeletal (Maar contributed 36 photos to the book, she was only credited for 6). In another of Maar’s early works, an advertisement for hair oil,  an empty ointment bottle floats on a sea of dark locks.

Filing down a row of Maar’s photos is like watching a delightful kinetoscope. Each of Maar’s montages, superimpositions or collages demand from their viewer a child-like and willing imagination, a wax tablet. A two-headed calf springs from a fountain, fingers bathe in an alchemicalblue, an alabaster hand unfurls from a shell. In one of Maar’s most notorious portraits, a soft-shelled creature is photographed at close range in a soft, lambent grain. It is all at once extraterrestrial, porcine and oddly infantile (The photo is titled “Portrait of Ubu” and Maar refused to disclose the species of its subject, scholars eventually settled on a preserved armadillo fetus). 

While much of Maar’s work could be categorised as strictly surrealist or strictly journalistic, she is at her most interesting when she occupies the space between. In one photo, a rabble of ruddy-faced boys play in an ally –  it is only upon a second, more forensic look that we notice a boy in the background running vertically up a wall. 

Even when her photographs are not manipulated, they are still distinctly surreal. Statues covered in muslin occupy Piccadily like muffled ghosts, a man with his head in a manhole is reduced to rhombuses and rectangles. Maar’s work is quick to reveal that surrealism is not strictly an elusive doctrine. If we are willing to look for it, we might find it anywhere. The exhibition terms such an outlook ‘the everyday strange’, an artistic choice which seeks to ‘transform human experience… to reject the rational in favour of a vision that embraced the power of the unconscious mind’. It is by this sensibility that Maar celebrates the sentiment of the artist (and her friend) Brassaï  –  ‘there is nothing more surreal than reality itself’.

Initially focused on her photographic career, the exhibition concludes with the paintings Maar produced later in life. It is at this stage that the looming figure of Picasso enters the gallery, and with him a slight irony. A retrospective of Maar’s work cannot refrain from a significant segment dedicated to the artist, dedicating an entire room to Guernica alone (which Maar photographed). Maar’s individualistic oil paintings are evocative and stark. However, her distinctly Picasso-style cubist paintings (an influence the exhibition identifies – “she was yet to develop her own style”)  are often her least interesting work, some appear even unfinished. It is not to say that this aspect of Maar’s oeuvre ought to be occluded, rather, that the value of emphasising it seems questionable, perhaps an attempt to exploit a connection. Maar once remarked, ‘‘All his portraits of me are lies. They’re all Picassos, not one is Dora Maar’, the exhibition might do well to remember, or at least confront, this. 

The exhibition is also careful not to be too incisive regarding Picasso. The inscription to Maar’s The Conversation –  a tenebrous painting which depicts her seated besides Picasso’s concurrent mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter –  meekly describes the painting as a ‘loaded scene’. Other critics have been less reserved; writing for The New Yorker, Brian Dillon tersely states “Picasso encouraged Maar toward painting and away from photography—and then he left her, for Françoise Gilot”. 

Nonetheless, despite diversions, the exhibition is largely successful in releasing Maar from a role as solely supplement, scribe and documenter of the Surrealist movement. Her artistic agency is celebrated and enormously enjoyable. Gallery-goers can expect to leave the Tate instilled with some of Maar’s own exuberant curiosity. 

Acting Directly: Zoe Lafferty

Lucas Jones
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Acting Directly: Zoe Lafferty

Zoe Lafferty, according to the Daily Mail, is “absolutely one-sided” and “leaves no doubt where her sympathies lie.” The first part may be a crude understatement, but the second is firmly true. Her activism is certainly not limited to theatrical pursuits, but the interplay between those two strands of her personality is what makes her pieces so biting. Lafferty has made it her business to bring disquieting narratives to international stages for more than a decade, even circumnavigating the ban on foreign journalists in Syria to travel there during the Civil War.

Her work in the Middle East began with the Freedom Theatre, a project founded in Jenin refugee camp in 2006. Reflecting on what attracted her to the Freedom Theatre, she talks about the project’s co-founder Juliano Mer Khamis, whom she met while she was training as a director in New York. Driven to America by a desire to connect theatre with its substance rather than studying its form, she was disappointed to find herself suffering the same dilemma she faced training in the UK. That is until she ran into Mer Khamis. “He’s like the Che Guevara of theatre,” she muses, “I really loved the way he was talking about art… as a tool of resistance.” Knowing “nothing about Palestine”, she saved her money for a year and headed out to join him in Jenin.

Freedom Theatre was an attempt by Mer Khamis to train young people to use theatre as a way to express political narratives on stage. In Lafferty’s words: “it’s training young people to be political artists.” There is certainly no shortage of political narratives in Jenin refugee camp, which saw brutal fighting during Al-Aqsa Intifada. Lafferty explains that the Freedom Theatre “comes from a narrative of armed resistance,” but also emphasises that, as much as the Western world would love to hear it, theatre will never be able to replace it. Nevertheless, she concedes, it can give young people a way to have their voices heard without having to take up arms and put themselves in harm’s way. She is, however, painfully aware that even artistic resistance carries serious risk.

Juliano Mer Khamis, Lafferty’s friend and mentor, was murdered in April 2011 just outside the Freedom Theatre. Coming off a high following a particularly successful show, none of the cast had considered the amount of danger they were putting themselves in until that point. “There’s absolutely a risk,” she states sombrely, “most artists are under severe threat.”

That being said, Lafferty is quick to point out that the Freedom Theatre is not looking for pity. “It needs to be on a professional standard, whatever the hell that means.” This drive to produce “professional” artists manifests itself in staggeringly powerful theatre. “The Siege”, which Lafferty directed, retold the 2002 siege of Bethlehem using reports from fighters exiled in the aftermath of the battle. It had an extremely successful, albeit heavily protested, run in the UK. Asked about the problems her shows have faced, she smiles and tells me “If it’s too easy it’s not changing anything.”

The political nature of the Freedom Theatre’s production is driven by the residents of the camp’s desire to have their voices heard. The participants refuse to be called activists, stating instead that they are artists. The fundamental importance of their art as a means of expression is clear through their artistic philosophy: “if you don’t put politics in your art, its meaningless.” Their art is not designed with the primary aim of creating a reaction, but their visceral stories normally evoke one regardless. The director, however, has no qualms about labelling herself an activist.

For Lafferty, theatre and activism go hand-in-hand. Her plays explore conflict and violence through deeply personal narratives often told by the people who lived them. ‘The Fear of Breathing’ brought the twilight of the Syrian revolution to the stage using verbatim reports that Lafferty collected from inside Syria during the Civil War. ‘The Keepers of Infinite Space’ examined the Israeli prison system, while ‘And Here I Am’ paints a picture of a lifetime of oppression and violence through the eyes of one Palestinian boy. Lafferty’s plays are often so personal that they could be accused of voyeurism, were it not for the painstaking research she undertakes before each production.

“Drama therapy is something that’s important,” Lafferty says, “but that should happen behind closed doors.” This is one of the fundamental challenges of her work: telling the stories of vulnerable people without increasing the trauma that they are already dealing with. ‘Queens of Syria’ began as a drama therapy project for women fleeing the Syrian civil war and ended its tour of the UK in front of an audience of 1,000 people. Her plays spring from the personal narratives of the actors and participants, rather than projecting one onto the cast. That, however, poses a dilemma when the personal narratives are so harrowing that repeating them on stage in front of huge audiences would do more harm than good. Lafferty’s challenge is to navigate the razor-thin line that exists between inauthenticity and personal damage, something that she does with impressive tact.

Lafferty’s activism and her art may be inextricably linked, but it is also worth noting that her activism often transcends her art completely. She is less well-known as a climate protester whose work with Extinction Rebellion saw her run as a candidate for the European Parliament in May 2019. Her work is changing; where her activism was previously shaped by her experiences in theatre, her theatre is now being guided by her activism.

“For me I’m interested in narratives that aren’t necessarily being heard… the job of art and artists is to critique.” Climate activism, Lafferty makes it clear, will influence her work in the future. She wants to look at the climate crisis through the eyes of “the people on the front line”, which would continue her work in the Middle East, but also wants to engage with the situation in Britain today. She set up Creative Destruction, a collective that attempts to bring together art and activism, in the wake of the December general election. Her tone is icy as she talks about the result, which encouraged her to refocus on blending art and activism – an “old story” for a woman who has spent most of her career doing just that – with a greater focus on the UK.

Lafferty’s 2020 will be extremely busy. Touring with several plays (though not in the immediate future thanks to a last-minute cancellation from Singapore) and working to grow Creative Destruction into a force for change, she has her work cut out for her. Smiling and optimistic, her friendly demeanour contrasts with the force of her convictions and the dedication she has to her activism. That separation of personal and political, however, has no place on the stages she directs. Her work can only tell a political story by being personal; her activism is both a product of her art and a driving force behind it. Regardless of your own political persuasion, Lafferty shows that art as a tool for resistance is far from dead.

On Rejection

Shuichi Chiba
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On Rejection

You send it off, knowing that you’re probably going to get rejected. But there’s that little bit of optimism, maybe you could even call it hope, that they’ll say yes. You allow yourself to weigh up the odds of success; you reckon that since it’s your 7th attempt, the laws of probability dictate that the outcome will be different and that you’ll be accepted. This is the one, you think. All those other ones, they were just leading up to this success. With a sense of relief that you’ve sent if off and that this is the one, you go about your day, impatient for the result.

You come back and you see something from them. You click on it, glad that they’ve replied. But once again, it’s just the same result. They’ve given you some vague, wishy-washy sentences about how you’re perfectly nice and all, but it feels all a bit robotic. They put some other stuff in, but it just leads up to the same answer that you’ve been dreading, but you know and you have known since you sent it off would be coming: “Unfortunately, we have not chosen to progress your application.”

And the process goes again (and again and again concurrently because you’re probably emailing multiple companies at the same time.)

The impersonal, efficient, opaque way that companies have managed to say no is a very different type of rejection to being told “No” by your parents. All you have is the email, and there’s no real reason about why they have rejected you. For all you know, the HR junior staff member has been given the unenviable task of sifting through hundreds of applications late on a Friday evening, and has skimmed your application, having found the smallest incriminating detail with which to put you into the virtual bin.

Or maybe they’ve fed it through an algorithm, and the algorithm has some obscure reason dreamt up by a programmer in a board meeting 5 years ago with which it is authorised to flag you up and reject you. You’ve been found wanting by a line of code. Maybe a team of people have looked at it thoroughly, diligently reading each one and comparing you to the other applicants. They place you on a whiteboard, and they move you around on a rankings table, and then, all of a sudden, your name has dropped down too far and then you are cut off. I’m not sure which is the most comforting.

Most students in Oxford are probably quite unused to dealing with rejection. The event in their life so far that they were most likely to be rejected was for the Oxford interview, and so they were lucky enough (or unlucky, depending on how your week has been) to escape through that character-building process that is rejection by the Oxbridge admissions system. There were very few opportunities to be rejected. Schooling is compulsory, so by law you can’t get rejected. You could have been rejected if there was an admissions test for your secondary school or sixth form, but again, if you’re at Oxford, it’s unlikely.

But everyone has to get rejected at some point in their lives. It’s a depressingly universal sentiment. No one can ever get everything that they want in life. In some ways, it’s a mark of adulthood. Each time you have success, your confidence balloons and it’s like you have the magic touch. The longer you avoid rejection for, the bigger this balloon gets. Until it pops. It’s obvious that there are lots of things outside of your control, and that some things are just not meant to be. Your expectations are brought down to size, and you start to doubt whether there were exogenous factors that you weren’t aware of that enabled your previous successes.

Being in Oxford probably makes it worse. Doesn’t it always? You’re surrounded by lots of incredible people with lots of intellect and skills and when you imagine who’s got your place, which was never even yours to begin with, you envisage those people having the placement that you wanted, sitting in your seat. Of course the company was right to choose them instead of you, you imagine. People around you might make off-hand comments like “The job market looks good” or “You go to Oxford, that’s your life sorted then.”

And by and large these statements are true. Most people who finish their undergraduate degree at Oxford will go onto a job or go in to further education. Many of those jobs will be well paid and at big companies, and many of those further education courses will be very competitive. 4% of people do not, however, according to the Careers Fair. On the one hand, this is great news. You only need to get accepted for one thing to not be unemployed, and 24/25 is a pretty big probability. On the other hand, as a person that worries too much, every time I get rejected, I probably subconsciously think about whether I will fall into that 4%.

We’re all developing some sort of coping mechanism to deal with rejection; otherwise it would be far too depressing. You think and worry about it less. You joke about it with your friends, knowing that they probably have and will experience something similar. You look up the companies that have rejected you and find that on reflection that they aren’t so good, and that the place that you’re applying to now is much better and has such a good working environment and career prospects.  And before you know it, you’ve got used to it. You think that next time you apply for something, you’ll be so hardened and your skin so thick to the process that it won’t even hurt if you get rejected and that you’ll just move on with your day when you inevitably do.

Personally, I’ve developed the winning attitude. Given the current housing market, I probably won’t be able to afford a place of my own until many years down the line, whether I have a job or not. If I don’t get a job, I won’t have to pay back my student loan. With each rejection, the prospect of living at home with my parents becomes more and more appealing to me.

Maybe companies should be convincing me to work for them, rather than me having to convince them that I should work for them.

Finding and Losing Love at Uni

Isobel Merriman
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Finding and Losing Love at Uni

Love is an elusive beast. It creeps up on you when you least expect it and generally, it messes with your plans. I’d always planned on being single when I arrived at uni – I pictured myself sitting in a lecture swapping coy glances with a handsome stranger, or making eyes over my laptop at a cute fellow intellectual in a chic café. Basically, I predicted a lot of meaningful eye-contact and wooing straight out of an Austen novel. But in my final year of school, I met someone and fell promptly (and inconveniently) head over heels.

We were together for nearly a year, but within three weeks at Oxford it had come to a slightly devastating end. I know it’s not just me and that many people arrive at Oxford determined to maintain long distance relationships that aren’t destined to make it past first term, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less. When you’re battling an onslaught of essay deadlines, societies and socialising, the distance between you quickly shifts from geographical to emotional. I hate to take the stance of a cynic but does Oxford make it easier to lose love than find it? Urban myth tells us we have roughly a 30% chance of finding the person we end up with at Oxford – a statistic that half makes you want to run out and meet as many potentials as possible just to hedge your bets – but the odds still feel fairly stacked against you. Between the bizarre complexities of clubbing culture and hectic Oxford days, it can be difficult to meet the one and harder still to make it work.

I’ve long held a theory that you will only ever meet someone clubbing if you’ve already met them.  Sure, you may flirt with a stranger, you may even go home with them, but I think I can confidently claim that no one has ever found true love in a club. The scene really isn’t set for romance between the inadequate lighting and the antisocial music. It does frankly nothing for me when being hit on equates to a guy bellowing the lyrics to Kanye’s “I love it” in my general direction. If by some miracle sparks start flying, it’s more often lust than love. But going clubbing with someone you’re already interested in is a completely different kettle of fish. Suddenly, you have an excuse to hold their hand whilst you’re navigating through the press of people at the bar and if your hands still happen to be holding later… well, who could blame you? When there’s already been some small-scale flirting, Bridge suddenly transforms into a realm of tipsy possibility, where you can make a move and excuse it on a drink too many if it happens to backfire, or, conveniently, forget it ever happened?

But say you do the impossible – maybe you meet them at a society, maybe they ask you out for a coffee and you get butterflies, dating at Oxford also comes with its own unique struggles. I don’t know about you, but frankly I don’t have time to be interested in anyone at the minute. I’ve got essays, the occasional lecture and potentially a gym membership to maintain this term and I can’t see myself making time for an actual date. When an Oxfess about feeling guilty about taking a shower strikes a chord, you shudder to think about the self-flagellation that would arrive with the time it takes to prepare for a date. So dating at Oxford inevitably becomes a rather casual affair. Maybe it’s just spending some time alone watching a film, or a late night catch up, but it’s unlikely to happen at a time you could be working productively.

So it’s a late evening, probably in your room or theirs, where – if you’re unlucky and you live in a broom cupboard like me – the room is mostly taken up with a bed. The issue quickly becomes clear. Lots of Oxford relationships therefore tend to move quite quickly and a date can turn into a ‘booty call’ in the time it takes to scan the room for a place to sit that isn’t The Bed. But if you’re only seeing each other in snatched moments between essay dilemmas and attempts to have a social life, it can be hard to be truly intimate in a way that isn’t just physical. We joke, but an intercollege relationship often sounds almost as challenging as the long distance relationship that I was in.

However, if you’re in the same college and the person you’re seeing is practically a neighbour it can become harder still to define what you are. It’s almost impossible to ‘date’ if you’re simultaneously sitting next to them in the library or opposite them at dinner. Add onto that the potential triple threat of them being in the same year, the same college and the same course. Whilst that means you’re spending plenty of time with them, if anything were to go wrong, you’re, well… spending plenty of time with them. If nothing else it’s frankly cruel to subject a Tutor to that palpable tension once a week.

So why do we do it? Losing love hurts worse than a scooter to the ankle and the chances of it not working out seem horrifyingly high. But that’s not just the case at Oxford. Maybe here we’re fighting against low lecture turnout, busy schedules and awkward living situations, but we are still fighting. Emblazoning our initials onto puffer jackets and braving the Bodleian in the hopes of an Oxlove. Pre-ing for Parkend or Plush with our hopes high. Maybe even attending a 9am lecture. Because ultimately, we know it’s worth it when it’s real.

Why we need to stop throwing money at the NHS

Rachel Cordery
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Why we need to stop throwing money at the NHS

As the battle lines were being drawn for the General Election, candidates began to make promises and, surprisingly enough, the NHS was once again at the centre of attention.

While this election promised to be designed and determined by Brexit, certain sections of the news continued to be dominated by the fact that our health service is failing and incompetent. As usual, politicians promised to deal with the NHS by throwing more money at the problem.

Labour promised to raise the NHS budget to £155 billion, which would apparently cut waiting times and boost mental health services. This follows from recent reports that hospital waits are worse than ever, and no key governmental targets have been met over the past three years.

Surely, it must be time for the government to realise that blindly funding the NHS does not improve its failing administration. Of course, the NHS does need a massive amount of money to function. If you consider the size and scale of the machine, it is a small miracle that it has survived this long, especially since funding reached an all-time-low under the coalition in 2010. NHS funding should increase, but more attention should be given to how this money is spent and on the fundamental issues of administration.

Last summer, my friend was given an opportunity to look through a small window into the inner workings of the NHS. Working in an administrative team in South London, the tales she told were not of an efficient, well-oiled machine, but of a misguided and ineffective service. Although she was a relatively powerless and minor cog for that month, I can’t imagine her experience was atypical of the national organisation.

When she arrived, this Camberwell-based team was faced with a 6-month backlog. But, the fault was not a lack of funds. Instead of answering the constant phone calls from patients or focusing on the job at hand, most of the team was preoccupied with other affairs, namely coffee breaks or one member of staff’s honeymoon.

Whether this lack of action was due to poor management or other factors, what is evidently clear is that the problems of the NHS run far deeper than financial troubles. With over 1,250 hospitals throughout the UK, the administration of healthcare is no small task. This figure includes the 290,000 doctors of which 53,000 are junior doctors and doesn’t even account for walk-in centres, GP surgeries and more. But you would think, with the constant media and public pressure to reduce waiting times and increase general efficiency, the government would focus more time on the problems at ground level.

Quite simply, if the paperwork is not done, the health service can’t perform, no matter how many doctors there are, or how hard they work. Regardless of its problems, the NHS continues to be one of this country’s proudest achievements and despite its defects, privatisation is not a viable or sensible option.

Free healthcare available for all should not be taken for granted, but the fact that the entire country is affected by various NHS policies, makes the lies and empty promises made by politicians even harder to bear: the big Brexit bus immediately comes to mind.

The NHS has become more and more of a political tool over which politicians bicker. They commit to unachievable goals and then ultimately fail to follow through with them. By using blanket statements, pledging to “outspend the Tories” or “strengthen our NHS”, healthcare becomes a piece in the political game to lure in undecided voters.

In its infancy the idea of a universal health service, as detailed in the 1942 Beveridge Report, was a radical measure in response to the monumental social changes brought by war. The escalation of war on the home front brought by the Blitz and evacuation, brought the problems of health, poverty and welfare to the forefront of politics. After thousands of children were sent from industrial cities to small rural villages, there was a wave of criticism directed towards mothers and society for the relatively poor standard of welfare and life.

The promise of solutions to remedy the country’s social discrepancies, including a national health service, bolstered Labour’s position in 1945, their campaign focused on the fulfilment of wartime assurances.

The eventual implementation of a National Health Service was established in a time of promise and hope after a war that devastated the country. It was the nearest this country has ever come to a ground-zero, in which social policy was reinvented.

In 1945, the offer of free and universal healthcare was enough to satisfy a tired, war-struck Britain. Now, the NHS is a different beast and the public, the majority of who have never known a life without free healthcare, are less tolerant towards the defects of the service.

In the era of modern technology with super-fast internet and high-speed trains, in a world where we can cross continents in mere hours; the idea of waiting for healthcare on the NHS seems unacceptable. At its birth, I doubt the Labour government wished for an 18-week wait for a non-urgent appointment or a 10 hour wait in A&E. But the NHS was created in another world with different priorities.

Nowadays, 70 years on, it is not unreasonable to expect the structural bases of the organisation to be efficient and successful, especially because of the millions that are pumped into it annually. As it grows and evolves with the growing population and diversifying priorities, there is a greater need to reform it at its 1940s roots.

Cracking on Love Island

Isabella Colletta
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Cracking on Love Island

Love Island has returned to our screens for the winter season, bringing back the glossy drama and soft-porn camera shots that have taken over British televisions for the past few summers. Love Island is one of the most popular cultural phenomena of recent times, even traversing continents with last year’s debut of Love Island Australia. The show’s dazzling promise of the swings and roundabouts of a microcosmic two-month holiday romance seems the perfect antidote to a miserable winter, and it is one of the few reality tv shows to survive the producers’ keen oversaturation.

Winter Love Island has awakened the same incomprehensible vitriol as previous editions, with a host of radical Daily Mail columnists begging the question: “What kind of person goes on Love Island?”.

It’s clear that the show has very real problems. Contestants have been raising issue with the show’s level of aftercare for years. The suicides of two previous contestants have ignited a debate regarding the responsibility of reality television to support participant and last year Love Island responded with a far more comprehensive support system. However, as previous contestant Amy Hart reiterated before the airing of this season’s first episode, the barrage of online abuse is more difficult to protect participants from.

Whether they watch the show or not, most people seem to have some sort of opinion about Love Island. The mixture of perfection and vulnerability of the fish-bowl world of the villa brings out a response which pokes, probes and infantilises the contestants and the question of their “real intentions”. The £50,000 that comes with “true love” for the winners gives critics sexist ammunition to fire at the “gold diggers” of the show, with Molly-Mae Hague an obvious example.

Often ascribed as ‘plastic’ representation of love, Love Island actually reflects a broader range of the excitement, insecurity and vulnerability of dating than any recent reality drama. Whilst the ever-present swimwear rule and sharp editing creates a kind of greenhouse of romantic obsession, their experiences are very much grounded in reality. Already this season we’ve seen rejection, jealousy and the kind of insecurity which could only fester in the unstable environment of a precarious early romantic bond. Each attempt to “crack on” with possible partners is an attempt to find something they truly feel like they’ve been missing. It’s awkward, occasionally mind-numbing and always incredibly human.

Fears of rejection are exacerbated by the producers’ cruel snap ‘recouplings’ – a forced establishment of preference in front of a firepit. The drama of having someone explicitly compare you to others is both riveting and horrifying. We watch in hope that every contestant won’t have to face the forced rejection this ritual imposes, and when they inevitably do the only catharsis comes from the gratitude that at least it’s not us.

And for some, the game becomes too much. This year famously posh contestant Ollie Williams left early in the competition after realising he still had feelings for his ex. Last year Amy Hart left after the man she was hoping to express her love to rejected her with a pathetic array of excuses – and we learned as a nation that hiding emotional cowardice behind mediocre salsa skills is impossible. Both stepped past the veneer of the show to demand that their feelings be heard. It’s impossible to view them as the “archetypal characters” that reality television so often relies on in its narrative arcs.

Perhaps this is what is so enthralling about Love Island. – the question of whether it is legitimately possible for someone to put up and maintain a farce 24/7. The people we are watching are unpredictable and at the same time highly sympathetic because, despite the controlled environment of the Villa, their experiences of trying to find the real thing mirror our own attempts. What may rattle people most about Love Island is that any attempt to distance yourself from the people on it is futile. When we watch people recouple and reject, it’s impossible not to relate to their embarrassment. On-screen or off, the sting still feels the same.

Watching people try to fall in love is fascinating. Like many reality TV shows, Love Island captures the vanity, embarrassment, and pain of the entire process. But despite its wealth of flaws, I still like to think that Love Island gives an optimistic outlook. At least once a year people are willing to expose themselves to national television in their pursuit of love, sharing their flaws and attributes in equal measure. Whether they manage to find true love or not, these people understand that regardless of setting, finding love takes real bravery. They are well aware that they will experience untold criticism for a simple human desire so many of us share. Few of us are willing to demonstrate that vulnerability.

Review: ‘A Portable Paradise’

Orna Rifkin
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Review: ‘A Portable Paradise’

In a recent interview with the Guardian, the British-Trinidadian Roger Robinson conjectured that his poetry ‘came out of [his mother’s] storytelling at the dinner table’. The truth of this resounds through A Portable Paradise, the winner of the 2019 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Robinson’s voice is remarkable for its attentiveness to the daily subtleties of life – though his collection may seem ambitious in covering the Grenfell Tower disaster, the theorist Stuart Hall, Windrush, Bob Marley, the Brixton riots and the premature birth of his own son, Robinson displays a telescopic power of observation which cuts through the detritus that complex political subjects can accumulate. What he presents is a faithful vision of distinct realities, tracing the Grenfell disaster to ‘Muhammed’s fridge’, drawing powerful irony from a slave’s ‘cotton shirt’, dissecting mundanities – there is a line in the bitter Citizen I which reads ‘Every second street name is a shout out to my captors’.

Indeed, several of these poems react against the oppressive power of language. Black Olive is a keen, grotesque example of this – the speaker meets a white woman, who flirtatiously proclaims the superiority of black olives before eating one. The speaker is surreally transfigured as the swallowed olive in an indictment of the fetishisation of blackness. In A Young Girl with a Dog and a Page, Robinson uses his poem to rectify the portrayal of an enslaved African in an 18th-century painting, playfully offering his poetry as a means of healing past injuries.

The collection is illuminated by disarming observations which arise from the banal, in a style similar to Larkin’s. Robinson adeptly enters a variety of poetic registers: a humorous Slavery Limerick; a pastoral poem, Day Moon, which is redolent of Housman; and a sequence of poems inspired by Ted Hughes’s Crow that matches the guttural grace of Hughes and Heaney. This sequence, and the collection as a whole, flows together like a well-made album (indeed, music is another of Robinson’s pursuits) – the poems follow each others’ tails fluidly, with distinct tonal modulations. Robinson’s crow humorously mocks a ’lazy human bastard’, then apologises for this in the following poem in an unexpected feat of compassion. Threads of sweat and smoke run through A Portable Paradise, and the eclectic subjects are made congruous by a gentle, pulsing current of humanity.

This humanity can be defined as the appreciation of life that appears variously and often didactically in Robinson’s poetry – from cautioning the young men of Brixton to ‘Keep alive, young brothers, keep living’ to the rhythmic pronouncement that ‘It is the job of the long black hearse/to show we head from death to birth’. Another quietly powerful image is that of those in grief searching ‘like a tongue for a missing tooth’. Robinson’s paucity of language and attention to overlooked details are almost instructive in their illumination of life’s unexplored crevices. The collection is structured in five thematic sections, each of which is concluded by a poem on the theme of paradise, and this sense of death amplifying an appreciation of life is also strong in the fourth of these poems, Paradise, which harbours a warning against utopia.

Another phantom that haunts A Portable Paradise is that of identity, especially an identity defined by the past. Robinson, who was born in Hackney but lived in Trinidad from the age of three, before returning to England at nineteen, has stated that the impulse to write this collection came with his realisation that he would be settling in England rather than returning to live in Trinidad. A large part of A Portable Paradise is Robinson’s attempt to form a new image of paradise that balances these two national identities. This realisation is played out in Bob Marley in Brixton, which follows the reggae musician ‘looking for some saltfish, plantain and cassava’, distinctly Caribbean foods, while simultaneously feeling distinctly alienated from himself – he reaches the conclusion that ‘the old Bob Marley has to be reborn’. Later, in Walk with Me, Robinson suggests that ‘Brixton is not its history/and neither should we be/though we hear the call of the past’, creating a sense of groundlessness that he addresses in The Ever Changing Dot, writing that ‘Perhaps it is in the words/of wanderers we feel truly at home’.

Another poem, ‘Woke’, is a journey through the oppression of black Americans, embarking with the slave ships, making stops at public lynchings and the brutal reaction of Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor’s police force against civil rights protesters in Birmingham, before reaching its destination in the systematic oppression of housing inequality, with the speaker repeatedly falling asleep and waking up to be confronted with each phenomenon. Its title, ‘Woke’, at once brings us into the modern era and foregrounds a historic consciousness of the civil rights struggle. The way the collection flits between subjects, its political contemporaneity and the vivid sensory webs strung by poems like The Human Canvas all produce an vibrant immediacy which reflects Robinson’s roots as a dub poet, and also moves towards a distinct poetic identity. In the title poem, Robinson wills the reader to ‘empty your paradise onto a desk’, just as his mother did by telling stories at the dinner table – the physical book of poems becomes a portable paradise in itself, an artful turn that leaves the reader with a new appreciation for an overlooked, mundane object. 

Boxers Prepare for Two Monumental Shows

Alex Brindle
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Boxers Prepare for Two Monumental Shows

This term, Oxford University Boxing is set to host two massive events. Firstly, an annual staple on the Oxford sporting calendar: the historic Town vs Gown. On the 25th of January, the Oxford Union Debating Chamber will be transformed for the evening, as a line-up of boxers from Oxford University Amateur Boxing Club will step into the ring to face their opponents. The night promises to be an exhilarating one, with the most experienced and skilled squad the Blues have had in living memory. The first ticket release sold out within minutes, with one final additional release coming early in 1st week. 

This year there are high expectations for the squad, as those in the know put good odds on this being the first year that Oxford will not only defeat Cambridge in the Varsity match, but will also win all nine bouts. Town vs Gown will be their first test, where they can prove to their home crowd what they are bringing to the ring in 2020. This will set them up nicely for BUCS the following week, where some will go to Wolverhampton to compete against universities across the country. 

The Women’s team, captained by Katya Marks, have had an exceptional record in this competition, and are ranked among the best university women’s boxing teams in the country. Their exceptional Women’s show, hosted at Iffley, was a resounding success and will undoubtedly contribute to the rapid ticket sell-outs for the upcoming Town vs Gown. 

The Men’s squad, captained by Alexander Brindle, are looking to come back strong from a narrow defeat at last year’s Varsity. This determination for victory has fostered a strong team spirit, which is apparent in their training and group preparation. A number of innovations have been made in the squads training, including extensive use of plans from the squad’s nutritionist, psychologist and strength and conditioning coaches. A large number of boxers have been retained from last year’s squad, and a wealth of new talent has been brought in across the weight classes, making the odds of a 55th Dark Blue victory look promising. 

The Varsity match will be on the 7th of March, in the iconic Town Hall. It will be the 113th, with the score currently neck to neck, with 54 wins each, and 4 draws, since 1897. The Dark Blues will be doing everything they can to prevent the tabs from overtaking them, training with laser-like focus all the way through their camp in Tenerife, Town vs Gown, BUCS, and on to the Varsity, to reclaim the ‘Truelove Bowl’ for Oxford. 

Sainsbury’s ‘IT’ display causes controversy

Trudy Ross
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Sainsbury’s ‘IT’ display causes controversy

‘Incredibly distasteful’ kidnapped child dummies, on display for sales of DVDs for the film ‘IT: Chapter Two’ have been seen in Oxfordshire stores.

A mum, who prefers to remain anonymous, complained to Sains- bury’s after being horrified at a child victim model in a store in Winnersh, Berkshire.

The dummy is dressed in a yellow parka jacket resembling the one worn by little Georgie boy, the child in the film. Georgie famously wears the jacket before being dragged into a drain by the evil Pennywise in the original ‘IT’ film. All items of clothing worn by the dummy were available to buy.

The film’s plot follows a violent and murderous clown who kidnaps children.

The mum told Sainsbury’s she believed the display was inappropriate to place at the front of a shop where young children would be passing. She maintained that it would be upsetting to children, especially those with additional needs.

She was reportedly informed that the display had been designed by Sainsbury’s head office and deemed appropriate to be placed anywhere in stores, though every store was able to choose where to place it at its own discretion.

The display has since been removed from the Berkshire store, but it is unknown whether Oxfordshire stores have followed suit.

The mum said she spoke to a store manager who initially did not understand why children might find the display scary, not having watched the ‘IT’ film. She said: “When I explained the plot (that children get kidnapped by an evil clown) he said, ‘oh I see what you mean, I haven’t seen it.”

“Luckily, I wasn’t with my child – they would have been petrified and refused to go into the store if she had seen it”.

“It’s not an appropriate display for a store where families shop”.

Sainsbury’s released a statement saying: “The Winnersh store’s display has been removed. We have apologised to [anonymous] for any upset it may have caused.”

The film has been awarded a 15 certificate in the UK meaning it is not appropriate for young children.

The Mum added: “And why would they dress up the model in clothes you can buy in-store? Who would see that and think ‘that jacket is great for my child’?”

Oxford City player joins Love Island

Sam Jones
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Oxford City player joins Love Island

Finn Tapp, a footballer for Oxford City, has temporarily left the Club for the newest series of ITV’s Love Island.

On his arrival to the Villa, the twenty-year-old centre-back said: “It’ll be great if I come out the villa with mates, but if I need to step on toes to get the girl I like, I’ll do it.

“I’ve always been loyal. Whenever I start getting the wandering eye, it’s time to break up. Who knows what could happen.”

Tapp entered the South Africa Villa alongside model Connaugh Howard. After the departure of Ollie Williams, the total number of contestants still in the Villa stands at thirteen.

Oxford City were not informed of Tapp’s decision to join the show. In a statement, City said: “The club was not aware Finn Tapp was going on Love Island – this is normal protocol for all contestants. We understand and wish Finn luck on the show.”

Mick Livesy, Oxford City Commercial Director, said: “Of course we’ll miss him but he’s a cracking lad. We support him and wish him the best of luck. We’ve just re-loaned him to Love Island – that’s all. He’s an integral part of the team. He’s a good looking lad, has great physique and a fantastic footballer so I’m sure he’ll do well.”

Tapp started in Oxford City’s previous fixture, a 3-0 defeat to Dartford, but was substituted early on following a clash of heads, reportedly leading to an eight-minute match stoppage.

Tapp was signed by City from MK Dons last summer, making twelve appearances in the National League South for the Club.

Previous sporting contestants that have appeared on Love Island include last year’s winner, and Ireland sevens international in rugby, Greg O’Shea, as well as boxer Tommy Fury and basketballer Ovie Soko.

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