Oh Shit
I wrote this essay in an ethnographic writing class I was taking at The New School. I'm adding it here because I've always been quite proud of it and had nowhere to place it before. It's been a while, but I think I wrote this one to map out some of my feelings about hostile architecture
If you liked it, here is another essay I wrote in this class: Smells like Guilt
As my taxi slowed to a stop, I couldn't help but notice the green tarp obscuring my house. Within the government housing I lived in, all apartments have the same meter tall fence; except, now, my backyard had a 4-meter green tarp propped above it. In the morning, retirees briskly walk across the campus and could peer into the houses along their route. Now, all I can see are their bobbing heads–cut-off–as they sped across the road. This distance might not have been a big deal if we were not also in the middle of a pandemic. Those sweeping green tarps were another barrier between me and the world I desperately wanted to reach.
I don’t know if the tarps are meant to shield or hide us (and our scrawny lawn) away from the world. Maybe, it is there to create a sense of ownership on this land that’ll always belong to someone else. Nevertheless, I don’t understand why it exists, the tarp–that is, and if my mother is reading this, I’d like to make a personal appeal to have it removed. The only thing the tarp did not keep out was that god-forsaken cat. The cat wasn’t cute, it is important that the reader not grow attached to it. It was loud: howling like a newborn for nights together, often disrupting my night zoom classes. Then, it had a bunch of newborns who’d tiptoe around our garden and verandah stamping their soiled paw marks across the tiled floor.
While visiting a friend, I noticed plastic spikes across their balcony: the first line of defence against pigeons that ruled over their apartment complex. They spoke about how the pigeons would wreak havoc on their tailored garden if left unattended; marking the garden as brutally as those pesky kittens. I was conflicted. Did we have so much entitlement over this area to, so aggressively, stop them from roaming around? And equally, why couldn’t my high school have done something like this?
There were countless times I’d be sitting on the field during our lunch break and without warning, a pigeon with land a dump on someone's hair, clothes or worse in their food. Once a girl had to leave school early due to the sheer volume of shit that drenched her in milky, white-green and surprisingly warm liquid. I remember the pigeons would trail around us, picking at food bits left on the pavement like chirping Roombas.
On some days, giant eagles would follow suit and descend onto the field in pursuit of someone’s discarded lunch and I would stare at them at unmatched proximity. Maybe the pigeons brought more (to the non-existent table) than a shitting spree, making us resilient to a bit of surprise in our routines. However, it is hard to gauge whether enduring a meteoric amount of faecal matter was necessary to get the point across.