Sunday morning privileges

Here’s one of the things about living with privilege. I have a linoprint cut I did in primary school.

[I must have been in year four or five or six, because it is of my cat Marmalade. I can look at it now and see some modicum of success: it is discernibly a cat; in addition to the white of the background, there are three colours in it. So I was at least diligent enough to cut away lino three separate times. I can also look at it from the perspective of having now seen lino prints executed by people who, ahh, aren’t in primary school, and see that there are errant appearances of colour on the print where there oughtn’t be – that I didn’t remove the lino sufficiently and so the colour adhered to the remnants when I put the black, or orange, or turquoise onto the roller.]

But, it is five decades past, and I have only just made the decision that it is not necessary to keep the lino print rolled up and stored in a corner of my house.

I unfurled so many different layers of privilege when I took out this curio of my childhood, set it down on the floorboards in my Sunday morning home, and pondered what I saw: of a loving childhood home and the knowledge that I could bring a piece of naïve “art” home with confidence; of a stable childhood home that – to this day – still has a “portfolio” of kindergarten art from my brother and myself; of a life lived with physical continuity in the same town with the fiscal means to move from home to home and take things like a primary school lino cut; of a life lived with climate security where childhood renderings of a cat I once had haven’t been caught up in one of the increasingly regular “once in a century” floodings; of a life lived with political coherence where the empire building madness of a penis in power or the cartographic renderings of country by colonial arbiters hasn’t caused lingering resentments that flair one day and force me to run for my life. Of time that is my own, a weekend that exists because I have the capacity to earn sufficiently to stop for a moment and indulge in the process of cutting away my thoughts.