Rebuilding Tomorrow by Tsana Dolichva

Author:Tsana Dolichva [Dolichva, edited by Tsana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Twelfth Planet Press

DISCUSSION

‘I wanted you to have something you loved,’ said Anna, describing how the journal had come into being. ‘And I wanted to be part of what you loved.’ Because she hadn’t been, not really. Not at first. ‘I was just this kid,’ she said. ‘Playing at science to pass the time. I’d been so pleased with myself for cobbling together this little experiment, but you all started trickling in, real scientists, with training and vocation and there I was, messing about, and if apocalypse hadn’t swept down on us I’d never have dreamed that science was something I could make of my life. You made me feel stupid. This stupid kid, dreaming.’

‘We never thought you were stupid,’ Mo interrupted, and Anna waved her off.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘You didn’t think it and you didn’t mean to make me think it. I’m not blaming anyone. It was just overwhelming, you know? One more thing amongst the rest. You just all seemed so capable. It wasn’t because I was blind. I’d worked around that, kept myself alive, started doing science on my own. I was capable too. It was that I was young. I didn’t know as much as the rest of you. I hadn’t been to uni like you had. And it was such a ridiculous idea, this journal. I didn’t know how to put one together or anything. But we had a small library at the lab, so I started going through the back issues. And that was when it hit me.

‘It’s different for all of you. You read science. I listened to it. I took random issues off the shelves and scanned them into my laptop and listened. And there was no rhythm to it. The words were all so ugly. The sentences were all so awkward. And I couldn’t understand half of it anyway.’ She’d trailed around after the surviving scientists, begging for definitions. ‘I remember thinking it seemed like it was created to keep people out. You tried to explain, some of you, why those fancy words were needed. Jargon. I know. It’s for clarity and shit. But those papers I listened to … they weren’t clear.

‘It was just all so closed-in. I remember,’ she said, ‘lying in my bed one night and thinking that all that clumsy, horrible phrasing might actually be the future of literature in this country. It was a horrible thought, I can tell you, but we were all a little morbid back then. It’s just there you were, and nearly all of you were scientists, and I thought If I make this journal, this is how they’re going to write. And there’s going to be no incentive to change, or to write differently, because this is all they know and there’s no one else around, no one not like them, to write differently for.

‘Well,’ she added. ‘Except for me.’

‘So you thought you’d just change a tradition,’ said Mo, laughing, half in pleasure and half in old disbelief. ‘Change a whole professional code.

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