My littlest love.

by Cassie McTavish

If neoliberalism is a war on universities, then wāhine are doing more than their fair share in the resistance, battles, organisation, and healing. And, if this is a war I would most certainly write letters home to my loved ones. So that is what I did. Let me share with you some reflections of labouring as a precariat woman in the neoliberal era of higher education and imaginations in the form of a poetic letter home to my daughter.

My littlest love,

You are my home.

My child of the mist over the moana, this is my love letter home to you from the frontlines.

I am pleased to hear you take no interest in the news just yet so that you do not see headlines of women of all kinds being gazed upon. Framed as inferior, stalked, harassed and intimated for their existence, experience, and expertise that flood in all around from the intellectually flaccid and feeblest of sources.

Yet, we begin to be accustomed as we start to assimilate to the awful in our attempts to avoid the absurdly abominable abuse. As if avoiding blades that will tear us, we awaken nimble and able, albeit angry and tired of the relentless call to arms. Affirmed in our aims we continue always checking over our shoulders and asking in on one another because solutions of self-help that isolate us as the problem to be fixed --will --fix --nothing.

Hope is never lost in this place as we continue our craft of care in concert with community. Carrying care carefully, not too much, not too little as to avoid the constant gaze and its consequence of conquest by censorship cage. Care must always continue you see my littlest love, so we are both courageous and conscious of the power of our care.

Not coincidentally, care is also weaponised against us in this place as a tactic of diffusion and controlling narratives and corralling apathy via girl bosses. This is all in a confusion unable to compute into KPI’s or excel sheets the value of such complex labour. The labour that might be so radical in this place, to dare be called the labour of love.

Popping your head above the parapet is dangerous in this place. Precarious positions are pooled as seat warmers until someone or something better or more profitable comes along. We are used in sprinting gig work that sees our batteries exhausted. We are then replaced by the very same reserve army of labour that has been used to silence us, make us small and keep us cheap.

With no benefits, information, or mentoring we are separated from and in competition with one another often paying our own way to keep up here after paying enormous student fees to get a toe in the door. Our alienations are your KPIs. This is openly known, yet we can never question this because responsibility is spread so thin it becomes like vapour, seen but unable to be grasped. Yet through this the winks, inappropriate comments on our wombs our bodies our whānau our tūpuna our knowledge our histories, assumptions of our ability to get up and go again are constant and unchecked.

And so we wonder not why this war began, we-- know --that. We wonder in the quiet still of winter nights if we will wake to the downing of arms in this wicked place so that our bodies, minds and souls may breathe in unison again without worry so weighty we may return to our whānau with arms wide. I imagine that I will return to you not so wrecked you will still recognise and want me, my most precious of loves.

My imagination often takes me to you. I imagine you at school, on the trip I could not attend, at the afternoon assembly I could not make and I imagine you happy. Imagine me that way, see your Mumma laughing loudly. But also see her failing and falling, see her sick and unable at times, see her tender, and brave, and knowledgeable, see her teaching, and caring for when you see me in all my humanity in ways this place is structurally indifferent and incapable of doing so at least you will always see me as worthy of dignity and as a whole when in connection.

These imagined possibilities remind me of Arundhati Roy’s words that, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing” – I hope you choose to read more of her words one day.

And in this other world may we not publish and perish, do more with less and less with less, be digitally dissolved, or battle for resources and breath itself. Instead, we will find peace in security, wisdom in the roll of slow feminist academic pursuit, indigenous knowledge, artistic, radical practice anew and old, joy through our unbound and unscripted care and love as it spills freely into the cracks of neoliberalism while dissolving the colonial hierarchies left by the ghosts who haunt us. She is waiting, we can imagine her, we can hear her calling, we can meet her and like you my darling daring daughter she is absolutely worth fighting for.

You are my home my littlest of loves. Though weary hope is never lost for it is carried in us all, so non oblitus – never forget – my child of the mist over the moana I hope and carry hope always to be with you soon.

Love, Mumma.

Cassie McTavish

My Littlest Love,

(Students Against Cuts Speech – The Neoliberal War on Universities Forum, Massey University, 9th August 2023).