Having assigned the ten students in my feature writing class a short assignment, in which they were to write the first instalment of a column to be called "The personal is political", I could not stop my pen from picking itself up and joining them in the furious scratching on paper. This is what emerged.... Sitting in the classroom, the fan whirrs above my head, casting a rapidly rippling shadow over the lined book-page (does a moving object "cast" a shadow?), making my words seem like they are emerging from under the waters of a flowing river. How is the act of writing, this movement of thought from mind to page, a political act? What is the exercise and expression of power that it implies? Is the political resident inherently in the symbols we create, consciously and otherwise (for one might argue that there can be no true unconscious, everything one does is the sum of deliberations over time)? The fact that I use one turn of phrase rather than another--is that po
making sense of the everyday