From Covid to racism, Jacob Edmond writes on how breath today symbolises a series of catastrophes, and how we might breathe a little easier
Hā ki roto, hā ki waho. Breathe in, breathe out. It’s the simplest thing, the in- and outflow of breath that keeps us alive, so automatic that, most of the time, we hardly notice it.
But it seems harder now not to notice that inflow and outflow of breath. Covid-19, the disease that has changed all our lives, attacks the lungs, making it hard and, in severe cases, impossible for a person to breathe.
Covid not only affects a person’s ability to breathe but also spreads through our breath, so that this most basic part of human and animal existence has become a source of anxiety and fear.
But Covid-19 is not the only reason that breath has become impossible to ignore.
“I can’t breathe,” said George Floyd as he was suffocated to death by police in Minneapolis last year.
“I can’t breathe,” said Eric Garner suffocated to death by police in New York City six years earlier.
“I can’t breathe,” say millions, as they protest against the racism that continues to plague our world.
These words have been taken up not only to protest against the literal suffocation and murder of black people at the hands of the police in the United States; they also voice a wider protest against racism in all its forms.
“I can’t breathe” articulates the impossibility of thriving in a society shaped by prejudice.
“I can’t breathe” also speaks to climate change.
Already in 2015, American poet Ross Gay made this link. He described how Eric Garner worked as a horticulturalist at the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, so “in all likelihood ... put gently into the earth some plants”, whose exhalations of oxygen make “it easier for us to breathe.”
As Nigerian writer Ben Okri put it more recently and bluntly, “‘I can’t breathe’ will become the condition of the world” if we go on ignoring the “warnings of climate catastrophe”.
Breath today marks a series of catastrophes. We have the capacity to address these catastrophes but repeatedly fail.
In each case it is partly words that fail us. They spread racism, xenophobia, nationalism, misinformation; they perpetuate inequality and prejudice, preventing many, sometimes literally, from breathing.
Poets have little power to address these global issues directly, but they are concerned with the power of words and their origin in breath.
As teachers, writers, researchers we also have a responsibility not to waste our breath or our words.
And even more than that, we have a responsibility to allow others to breathe and speak. Our students, our disciplines, our universities, our societies need to provide the cultural oxygen that allows everyone to breath and speak easily, regardless of differences.
We have a very long way to go to achieve this ideal in a society, country, and world all still poisoned by racial and gender discrimination, xenophobia, homophobia, and other forms of prejudice.
In the recently published poem The Air is Thick with Solidarity Maōri poet essa may ranapiri writes about Ihumātao and about the wider struggle to breathe and to affirm collectives in the face of divisions wrought by colonialism:
I am going to start with breathing
what I push out of me and what you push out of you
and what we push out of each other
lungs working like billows
lungs working
sounds you could read on
the air
is angry now
For ranapiri, breath offers a potential bridge between me and you, between an individual and a collective, between one site of struggle and a world of struggles. And yet, that bridge is not easy to build or maintain in a country poisoned by a history of colonialism and racism that drives even the air to anger.
The poem concludes with a fleeting moment of connection: the sharing of breath in a hongi. This shared breath offers a powerful metaphor for the entanglement of our lives. All our lives are affected and shaped by racism and colonialism, by climate change, and by the novel coronavirus that we now face. In ranapiri’s words, “it’s all connected”.
Shared breath offers a metaphor for connection without oneness, meeting without sameness, an alternative to suffocation.
The sharing of breath in the hongi is not a universal human condition but an active choice - one that might be withheld - to form and recognise a connection.
For this reason, although ranapiri’s breath is shared, it is not, or at least not necessarily, shared with me, a descendent of the white colonial settlers who invaded the land and dispossessed their people.
Breath here is not a bridge from the individual to the universal but a constant negotiation of dynamic, sometimes uneasy, and often unequal relationships.
As a Pākehā man, I am still part of a privileged and disproportionally large majority within the professoriate.
Recognising this privilege, I do not seek to substitute my own words, my own breath, for those of ranapiri or of any poet.
The point that I take from ranapiri and from considering the poetry of breath is not to speak for others but to recognise the responsibility that we have to each other to listen and respond.
I also take this image of shared breath to suggest that the role of professors - and of all teachers, writers, and researchers - should ultimately be not to profess but to enable the sharing of others’ breath, voices, opinions, and words, so that we can all learn, so that we can all breathe a little more easily.
Watch Professor Edmond’s full discussion of this topic at his recent Inaugural Professorial Lecture.
