It was a shared experience of loneliness that brought Luci and I together. Admittedly, this came as a surprise. From my initial impression of her that Wednesday afternoon when I first met with the Multicultural Women’s Sewing Group, Luci seemed the kind of woman too practical to be bogged down by loneliness. Walking into the almost bare interior of the Brunswick Uniting Church — pews pushed to the sides of the nave and transept arrayed with plastic foldable tables serving as makeshift sewing stations, reminiscent of little altars — one knew without having attended any of the Sewing Group’s previous gatherings that Luci was in charge. The self-evidence of her place at the head of tables. People coming to her with their problems or questions. How she welcomed and then introduced us to the rest of the group. From our first encounter, Luci’s importance and authority was evident. She was the nucleus, placed at the very centre of things. It was a position I had thought incongruent with the remove and desolation of loneliness.
Not that authority can’t cultivate isolation. Don’t they say it’s lonely at the top? It’s certainly an apt metaphor for the excuses of powerful people when they’re called out for inaction, as if their passivity was consequent of being frozen by the cold climate of the summit. I can’t imagine Luci slowing down, much less being that kind of inanimate authority figure. Even sitting down, she seemed poised to spring up to tackle things directly. Standing at just 170 centimetres including her puff of grey hair, already softened at the edges by passage through middle age, Luci has nevertheless retained an agility honed by those acts of community organising she’s engaged in. Her life’s work imprinted on her very body. The Luci I encountered that first meeting, and in subsequent ones, was a stabilising centre without which I believed people, sewing machines, and clothes that need mending would be flung out of orbit into chaotic disorder.
The building of a better society … irrevocably remove people from their social environment and place them within the timeframe of the lonely project. So says Boris Groys in his essay, ‘The Loneliness of the Project’. Here he saddles the word ‘project’ with an expansive jurisdiction, signifying anything from writing and curating an exhibition to political assassinations and the creation of nation-states. His over-broad definition notwithstanding, Groys asserts that the space-time of a project necessitates the creation of distance. An extraction from the now into the alternate reality of the project which itself is a place of seclusion and self-isolation.
It all amounts to the same sentiment. The need for critical removal to evaluate an artwork, a situation, a person objectively. That somehow being further away from the thing will get you to the heart of the matter. A privilege of distance. I am reminded about Toni Morrison’s desk the same way she was reminded of Emily Dickinson’s. Only a small square spot, encroached on at all sides by life. I think of Joan Nestle, and the archive of lesbian lives that began in the home she shared with her lover. Then there is Luci, always in the thick of things.
Luci came to the Sewing Group in 2019 after she was approached to take over its management as President. The Sewing Group at the time was in dire need of an organisational audit and so Luci stepped in to ensure that all moving parts were “aligned in the same direction”. At the start of her tenure, she helped re-draft the Group’s constitution, crystallising in writing its ethos. As an incorporated association, Luci also had to assemble the Group’s committee, crafting the different office bearers’ roles and responsibilities. Grant applications for funding. Liaising with stakeholders. So much of community building as writing.
On one of my visits-cum-interview, tangled in the strands of Luci’s life and unsure which threads to tease out, Luci tells me that she has a Masters in Russian Literature. At that time, it felt tangential to the parts of Luci’s story I thought I was attempting to put down into words. Luci herself brought it up in a way that framed the organising work she’s doing now as a radical departure from studying writing. Her thesis, written in Dutch, was an investigation on the grotesque in Andrei Sinyavsky’s novels. For Luci, the grotesque was a layering of language that obfuscates meaning, a useful and necessary strategy deployed by authors writing during the Soviet era to mask their dissent or critique. It was a striking reminder that rendering communication convoluted was not always hostile or a foreclosure. That when the space of language becomes heavily policed, we find clandestine ways of meeting each other.
Bordered land begets bordered language. And sometimes even English isn’t enough. Throughout our conversations, Luci has alluded to this. The way her accented English was grounds for an immediate disqualification, if not perceived as an indication of incompetence. Of course, Luci relays it defiantly, as something inevitable but that she’s personally overcome. She’s able to prove people’s assumptions about her — assumptions based solely on how Luci uses and inhabits the mandated English — wrong time and time again. Where I hear a difference is how she talks about her name. Here, there is a faltering of that self-assurance so characteristic of Luci. And always an insistence that the name she’s had to take up and put down in government papers is not hers. But some names are untranslatable.
We are a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural. Often the fruits of loneliness seem only to be destruction. What Luci’s done instead is to build around its baren-ness. She’s told me that the stimulation of organising and creating is ameliorative, framing the work she does more as a means of coping with this feeling. I asked Luci if she feared loneliness, wrongly assuming that we experienced it the same way. She said that “the energy of other people” made it more bearable to navigate, that it transformed loneliness into a kind of solitude. I can see why Luci got involved with the Multicultural Women’s Sewing Group. How the impetus for it resonated with her. And how she might have discerned echoes of her experience in its history, itself encompassing the collective histories of the women who sought refuge in it. Reading the Group’s mission statement, I hear strains of Luci’s stories. The lines about language stood out most. For many coming to this so-called country, English becomes another border that needs to be crossed. Against the violence always attendant in the demarcation and enforcement of such boundaries, the Sewing Group promises to aid in a safe passage. A space where language can become a place of meeting.
The project is at both a spatial and temporal remove. According to Groys, this is because each project is above all the declaration of another, new future. There thus exists an inherent a-synchronicity between the project and the present, this very space-time incongruence the root of the project’s loneliness. For Groys, loneliness is a four-dimensional space.
My attempts to write about Luci, I’ve come to realise, are really attempts to write to her across our differences. I latched onto loneliness as this shared space, defining its perimeter to help place myself and Luci together so that I might more easily find a way back to (writing) her. Speaking to Luci, inhabiting the breadth of life she’s chosen to share, I also faced the impossibility of curation. As I’ve gotten to know her, I became increasingly sceptical and fearful that the representation of parts might somehow diminish the fullness of the life Luci’s led. And then there was the way Luci has told her life to me. A kind of meandering loop that defies chronology, exceeds the boundaries of narrativization. Often as I listened to her stories, I couldn’t help but feel that it has always already contained the future (or present?) that Luci’s helped build.
This felt particularly true when Luci told me about another writing project that she helped organise in the Netherlands back in 1990. Entitled ‘Eindelijk Zelfstandig’ the writing competition prompted teenage girls to write about how they envisioned a future beyond what they were then told was possible. Luci didn’t mince her words. It was an opportunity to look beyond “babies and marriage”. A chance for young girls to write about what independence from patriarchal expectations of confined domesticity meant for them. Again, Luci’s involvement in ‘Eindelijk Zelfstandig’ was a collaboration with and reaching out to her community. She arranged interviews with prominent national figures — including academics, researchers and politicians — that were included in the pedagogical materials the organisers made for schools. Still with sheepish pride, Luci recalled being given a one-minute slot in the local news to speak about the project, her family and friends all tuned in. Luci also speaks in images, and I’m reminded of how she’s described the towers of paper occupying and overwhelming the organisation’s rooms. The submissions, some solely penned but others collectively authored, were drafts for a vision of the future.
During my latest visit, Luci brought out some of the ephemera she saved from ‘Eindelijk Zelfstandig’. On the frontispiece of the project’s didakties materiaal, under the colophon as producer was Luci’s name.
For a while, there has been a certain guilt associated with my writing. It’s often been more akin to Groys’ description as a socially sanctioned loneliness. A sequestered space I’ve retreated into that takes me away from other people.
When I showed Luci my first draft, she asked me where I was in it. I think it’s because, in the kinds of writing she’s done, always other people were present. So it’s no surprise that Luci asked me to make space for myself in the telling of her life. Has moved me into her narrative. Luci’s always brought people to each other throughout the many projects she’s been involved in, this being no different.
