Ennui

My energy waxes and wanes. Lately it's been waning. For weeks on end this year I felt a nameless ennui. I know enough people who've experienced capital D Depression to know it wasn't that. But I've been listless. Tired. Unable to focus. Burned out and cynical about pretty much everything. It's the endless liminality of pandemic life, but it's also the crushing reality of knowing one is living in a dying civilisation. I've never needed a holiday like I needed this Easter break.

It's only been four days and I'm already out of it. A day trip to a botanical garden, out of the house to the other side of the city, seems to have snapped me out of it. Sometimes you just need to get out of your habits, see something new, or see something familiar in a new way. Erika and I did all of that. Grevillea as a hedging plant. A completely dry landscape with the feel of a pond garden. Unexpected fruits.

Since first reading the Ukrainian Library Association's (ULA) initial statement at the commencement of the Russian regime's invasion, I've been turning it over in my mind.

> Libraries are places of power where people find themselves. In daily communication, librarians do their best to make everyone who comes to the library love books, love their language, love Ukraine.

>

> Libraries are a strategic weapon of the state...

I realise there's possibly some nuance lost in the Google Translate process from Ukranian to English, but ...this is forceful language. What does it mean to "make" someone love books, let alone love "their" language, and the political state within whose borders they live? What does it mean for the ULA to endorse the "strategic weapon" of "making" Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine "love" the Ukranian language and the Ukranian state? And what does it mean that Australian librarians were approvingly sharing this statement?

Just as I only really started to see the British Imperialism evident everywhere in Australia after I saw it in Singapore, the ULA statement helped crystalise what it must look like to read statements from ALIA and Australian libraries, when one is on the receiving end of the "strategic weapon of the state". To be an Anindilyakwa person from Groote Eylandt, for example - a group who energetically resisted Christian missionary attempts to teach them to read and write English. To love the Australian (English) language. To love Australia. The government appointed teachers who replaced the missionaries came with official school textbooks designed specifically to assimilate and inculturate Aboriginal people to British norms of domestic life. A strategic weapon of the state.

Initially I was excited and relieved to see the ULA put into writing so bluntly what state endorsed libraries are all about. But I became increasingly unsure as I turned it over in my head. Is this *really* what's going on? Is it that simple? What about all those librarians who don't like the people running our governments one little bit? Does it have to be this way? All libraries? Only public or school libraries? Maybe Ukraine is a special case?

I still plan to write something about this on the big blog, but I don't want to get it wrong. Handled recklessly, it could sound like I'm attacking the ULA, or that I'm focussing on trivia amongst appalling violence. People have strong emotions given the crimes being committed in Ukraine right now. But I still think this is a clarifying statement with importance beyond Ukraine and the current war. Appalling crimes have been committed in other places and other times, in the name of the very things to which the ULA boldly lays claim. They've been committed right here, in the country and city I live in, and in the place where I grew up. They still are being committed, right now.

What does it mean to love reading? To love a language? What could it mean for libraries to think about being part of a place, rather than part of a polity? If libraries are a strategic weapon of the state, can the weapon be turned against a state? Against all states? Against the very idea of states?

If you think about all this for too long without answers, doom scrolling pictures of burned out tanks between deleting listserv emails... Well, it can get a little weird inside your head.

Address of the Presidium of the Ukrainian Library Association to the Library Community of Ukraine dated February 23, 2022