Close Menu
Honi Soit
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
    Trending
    • Skank Sinatra Review: Electric, hilarious, and open-hearted
    • Spacey Jane’s  ‘If That Makes Sense’ and Keeping Australian Music Alive
    • Trump administration issues executive order closing CIA black sites, convinced they are “woke” /Satire
    • “Lawfare”: Jewish staff and students rally behind USyd academics now facing federal legal action
    • Interview with Plestia Alaqad on ‘The Eyes of Gaza’
    • Whose Review Is It Anyway?: NUTS’ WPIIA 2025
    •  “Like diaspora, pollen needs to be scattered to different places to survive and grow”: Dual Opening of ‘Germinate/Propagate/Bloom’, and ‘Last Call’ at 4A Centre of Contemporary Asian Art
    • Akinola Davies Jr. on ‘My Father’s Shadow’, Namesakes, and Nostalgia
    • About
    • Print Edition
    • Student Journalism Conference 2025
    • Writing Comp
    • Advertise
    • Locations
    • Contact
    Facebook Instagram X (Twitter) TikTok
    Honi SoitHoni Soit
    Monday, June 23
    • News
    • Analysis
    • Culture
    • Opinion
    • University
    • Features
    • Perspective
    • Investigation
    • Reviews
    • Comedy
    • Student Journalism Conference 2025
    Honi Soit
    Home»Creative

    Reflections on U.S. Election 8/11/20

    You have looked death in the eyes and he is an American.
    By Zara ZadroNovember 23, 2020 Creative 4 Mins Read
    Image: AS English
    Share
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email

    “A ‘moment of grace’ … [is] the point where people are forced to make a decision that either enables them to transcend a circumstance or succumb to it.” (Simon Joyner on the literature of Flannery O’Connor). 

    “The reader wants his grace warm and binding, not dark and disruptive.” (O’Connor, 1863). 

    (U.S Election, 2016): You watched a play that night, as the old world died somewhere over the water, and the death on stage was far realer than you anticipated. The murder of a virgin— Othello, it was, bloodless and silent, between two swathes of white cloth. When you came out the sky was black like an open mouth full of pearly teeth. You thought, sixteen at the time: This is what death must really be like, in the grown-up world. Acts of violence, committed in the name of love. And from then on it was hard to feel safe again.

    (If you are reading this out loud, look the children in the room in the eyes until they cry, or run away.)

    You know this demagogue now. His words, that exploit all the ways in which you are present. (Rankine, Citizen, 134) His face like a mirror held up for the world to see itself. And you do not think yourself any safer from self-delusion here, across the water. 

    Imagine your Prime Minister says; 

    “Don’t import things happening overseas to our country,”—

    But what if it’s three centuries earlier, 

    Importing white criminals and imperialism? 

    Imagine that a word is just a keyhole for seeing

    But you are squinting through ‘Australia’

    To blur the red around the edges.

    Imagine 

    “We have problems” 

    but also 

    “don’t make this into something it isn’t about.”

    Like it’s not a mindset to unload blame

    Punish responsibility 

    Ignore complicity in a past that still creaks under these floorboards at night.

    Making our steps careful. 

    (If you’re reading this out loud, speak as though you are telling a ghost story around a campfire.)

    Four years older now, you still have no clue about the grown-up world, but you have looked death in the eyes and he is an American. You are drinking to forget the burn of nerves in your stomach, like a bunch of copper wires. Hope flares and quiets like the tongues of flame in the bonfire, the waves of conversation above the inky silence. You aren’t religious but this feels close to it; possibility simmering within you. Gold rings burn into your retinas like some sort of eternal truth-loop of love-hate-hope-despair, making different futures rise and fall away just as quickly, like sand castles.

    (If you are reading this to an audience, perform the sign of the cross with one hand and kiss your thumb at the end of it, like you are kissing a future that only you can see).

    x

    I am looking for someone to tell apart 

    Love and violence for me

    So I can say for sure 

    That there is a difference.

    I am looking for someone to tell apart 

    Love and violence

    Murder and kisses,

    Little moments of life and death in the dark which define us

    And everything we don’t have the words for right now.  

    Violence can shake us out of ourselves too, says Flannery O’Connor.

    Of the truths we have settled for.

    Fear, grabbing us by the throats

    Fear, which is ultimately another name for the horror of self- recognition. 

    And so violence breaks us like seed through soil, 

    And love— like a garden that must be tended for

    May as easily crack our windows with green claws

    Buckle the brick walls and strangle drain pipes 

    Pop open floor boards and drown the sun

    —There is a fine balance between the two, I told you. 

    But there is also violence

    Like the fresh wound of birth 

    Like the cutting away of foliage

    When we have lost sight of our home.

    Progress asks us to transcend what we have, in order to retain who we always were. And so too, this great violence prepares us to love our worlds enough to change them, once again.

    uselection

    Keep Reading

     “Like diaspora, pollen needs to be scattered to different places to survive and grow”: Dual Opening of ‘Germinate/Propagate/Bloom’, and ‘Last Call’ at 4A Centre of Contemporary Asian Art

    $50 million donation to set up endometriosis research institute at UNSW

    The Power of Choice: Capturing Compassion with Andrew Denton and Julian Kingma

    No Soap in the Box

    A Cacophonous Calamity of Queer Community: The Wedding Banquet (2025)

    A Small Inventory

    Just In

    Skank Sinatra Review: Electric, hilarious, and open-hearted

    June 20, 2025

    Spacey Jane’s  ‘If That Makes Sense’ and Keeping Australian Music Alive

    June 20, 2025

    Trump administration issues executive order closing CIA black sites, convinced they are “woke” /Satire

    June 19, 2025

    “Lawfare”: Jewish staff and students rally behind USyd academics now facing federal legal action

    June 19, 2025
    Editor's Picks

    Part One: The Tale of the Corporate University

    May 28, 2025

    “Thank you Conspiracy!” says Capitalism, as it survives another day

    May 21, 2025

    A meditation on God and the impossible pursuit of answers

    May 14, 2025

    We Will Be Remembered As More Than Administrative Errors

    May 7, 2025
    Facebook Instagram X (Twitter) TikTok

    From the mines

    • News
    • Analysis
    • Higher Education
    • Culture
    • Features
    • Investigation
    • Comedy
    • Editorials
    • Letters
    • Misc

     

    • Opinion
    • Perspective
    • Profiles
    • Reviews
    • Science
    • Social
    • Sport
    • SRC Reports
    • Tech

    Admin

    • About
    • Editors
    • Send an Anonymous Tip
    • Write/Produce/Create For Us
    • Print Edition
    • Locations
    • Archive
    • Advertise in Honi Soit
    • Contact Us

    We acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. The University of Sydney – where we write, publish and distribute Honi Soit – is on the sovereign land of these people. As students and journalists, we recognise our complicity in the ongoing colonisation of Indigenous land. In recognition of our privilege, we vow to not only include, but to prioritise and centre the experiences of Indigenous people, and to be reflective when we fail to be a counterpoint to the racism that plagues the mainstream media.

    © 2025 Honi Soit
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms
    • Accessibility

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.