I’m writing this in Singapore, amid the heavy rain of a monsoon surge. I’ve made my last trip to the National Archives at Fort Canning, umbrella extended but my feet still soaked through. When this post goes live, I’ll be in Vancouver, in the spring, catching one of the waves of cherry blossoms on the trees in the West End. We’ll return to a very different Canada, with the first national election I’ll be eligible to vote in on the horizon, and to a very different world. I’ll continue this experience of living in two places in alternation but also, with the assistance of technology, simultaneously, this twice-yearly migration that’s also now becoming overwritten, as I age, by traces of past lives. 

In the last two weeks or so, two elements of this remembrance of the past have come together. I posted last month about the house in London I’m still fascinated by, and the affective community of anticolonial activists that it contained. I’m still exploring how to write about it. Now that the academic paper is out, I’ve experimented by not trying to write a long text, but a series of short fictional fragments that explore characters like the people who lived in the house, passages that build themselves up from objects and other found items. Articles from the Hampstead News in the 1940s have been particularly inspirational. Yet I’ve realised that I enter the house and its community through my own memories of affective communities I was part of in my twenties, when I was the same age as the boarders were in wartime London. 

Working with University Scholars Programme alumni again this semester on Guided Autobiography has made me realise again how important university experiences are in many lives. One important time that informs my writing is thus the four years I spend in London, first as an undergraduate at University College London, and then a year of a pause, when I tried to figure out what direction I would take in life, and worked in part-time, make-work job as an assistant stage manager at a children’s theatre. This was an emotionally and intellectually intense time, in which I became politically conscious and formed many of the values that would guide me in later life. I was part of a community of people, mostly undergraduates the same age as me, who were also exploring. In those years the slowness of a rhythm of university life that has now vanished, with its optional lectures and seminars, an individual tutorial every other week, and assessment by examination at the end of each year, gave us a great deal of space for independent thought and action. Yet the affective community I’ve been thinking most of wasn’t this one, but one that I’d enter immediately afterwards. In the fall of 1984 (and I’m suddenly conscious, in writing this, that I now don’t use the British word “autumn”) I flew to Gainesville, Florida, to start an MA in English Literature at the University of Florida. I was there for two years, part of a new community of graduate students and activists.

Florida was a series of first for me. It was the first time that I’d lived away from the UK for more than a few months. It was the first time that I’d taught in a classroom, and I was surprised how effortlessly teaching came to me, and how this effortlessness in the moment in teaching has stayed with me until today. And it was the first time I really held an important leadership position. I became, through the encouragement of others, chapter president of my graduate assistants union, Graduate Assistants United, and worked through the affiliated National Education Association at both the state and the national level. This set a pattern for me in later life: people thought I’d be a good leader, and asked me to take on leadership positions, each of which I quickly came to find full of irreconcilable contradictions, and which I quickly tried to escape.  I was also drawn into anti-apartheid work, manifested at that time in a campaign to encourage the University of Florida to divest its endowment holdings from South Africa. In all of this, I was part of a community. I moved, early in my stay, into an old wooden shared house in central Gainesville with a rotating cast of students and activists. In those two years my accent began to change, as did the way I dressed, and even the way I greeted people on the street. And then, after two years, I flew on again, to China, and to another life. In those days, before the internet, I’d write to my former roommates from time to time, but we soon lost touch, especially as they left Gainesville and I moved from country to country. 

A year or so ago I spent a week or two looking back at this community in Florida. I had some letters, photographs, and union and anti-apartheid material still with me. I knew that I’d written letters to the press, discovered I could locate them in online databases, and begin to put together a timeline to plot my memories on. I then began searching online for my former roommates and classmates. One had come to Canada, and he was, as a progressive Jew, still an activist, speaking out about the ongoing violence in Gaza. Two more had, to my surprise, never left the Gainesville area. One had become a psychotherapist and seemed now to have retired. Another had become a librarian; I searched for her and found her, and then, searching again, found that the traces of her I’d discovered had now vanished. I remembered less of my classmates, as opposed to roommates or activist friends, perhaps because at that time I didn’t really see myself as continuing in an academic career. But there was one, who I’ll call L. here, whom I did remember quite distinctly, and who’d written to me, somehow, a few years later, when I’d returned from China and Taiwan, and was working with Vietnamese refugees in a reception centre in the middle of the Surrey countryside. I re-read the letter and then put it aside. I began writing about my time in Florida, and found that memories came flooding back. But then, at that time a year ago, I stopped. I wasn’t sure who or what I was writing for, and I had other, more pressing things to do.

In this monsoon surge, this pause before flying off to another life, there have been times of real busyness, but also sudden moments of quiet. In one of them I thought again of Florida and of L. We’d never met again, but I’d searched for her online over the years, and knew that she’d had an academic career at a major state university. From what I could tell, she hadn’t published a great deal, and so she’d remained one of the contingent faculty members whose numbers have increased so rapidly in the last few decades. Yet she had persisted in her profession and in her values, and there was wonderful testimony online from her students about what a caring, witty and thought-provoking teacher she was. A decade ago, when I’d attended one of my last major conferences, she’d been scheduled to speak, and I thought I’d meet up with her, only to find that she’d withdrawn, and to discover, through a chance meeting with one of her colleagues on the bus to the airport, that she had been unwell.

One night a couple of weeks ago, I found myself hunting around on my hard drive, falling back into a web of memories, and then, finally, emailing L. I spent what seemed an age drafting the email to get the tone just right, and sent it off. In the morning, there was a reply from her, short, but full of that casual, unflustered generosity that I remembered so well. We decided to set up a zoom date, even though the time difference would mean that she would be talking late in the day, and she confessed to being tired. Then, two days later, she wrote to me again. Something that she suspected was confirmed: she’d been diagnosed with a fast-spreading cancer that left her with only a few months to live. She couldn’t meet as planned. And so I wrote back, as best I could, trying to empathise but also to affirm her, and how she had influenced my life. I remembered her intelligence, and her immersion in post-structuralist and postcolonial theory that was completely new to me, coming from my British training in humanist and perhaps implicitly Marxist approach to literary texts. More than that, though, her generosity to me, and the way that she made me welcome in the department. In writing to her, I had a very strong, almost physical memory of her presence, the low apartment where she and her husband used to live, its parking lot filling up with puddles in the falling rain. She wrote back with her own memories, and I wished her well, we both agreed that we would try to reschedule our talk if she felt better, knowing that in all likelihood we wouldn’t do so.

Writing this out publicly, I feel a sense of unease, despite the anonymising work I’ve performed. I’m telling only a small part of her story, and my own reaction to it. I cannot enter that other life that intersected with my life briefly, and which is now coming to an end. But writing my will this year in Singapore, and spending time with relatives and friends of an older generation, I’ve lived much more in the presence of death. When my parents passed, I realised that their past was no longer retrievable, but I somehow thought that my own past would continue to be an open book or an infinite source.  I could go back into it at any time, write and the memories would flow, and I could retrieve anything I needed. Now I’m not so sure. I can write pages if I want to. Yet I am forgetting, and at some level it’s very human to want to forget.