Hazel has been writing poetry and essays for many years and completed a PhD on feminist art and literature in 2023. Hazel also facilitates learning and discussion with experience across academic, arts, community, and nonprofit settings.
Activists can become evangelical when preaching our unquestioning belief that change will manifest from speaking for ourselves, telling our stories, and making our voices heard.
When the state becomes the corporate parent of a child, it also becomes our biographer. The intimate details and dramas of our early lives are routinely recorded in reports authored by an assemblage of state workers with variable degrees of resemblance to our experiences. Our voices are displaced from our stories, and we become puppets of the state.
When I was 5, I spent hours searching for fairies at the end of the garden, monsters came in the night and day, and adults asked children to tell them the same stories over and over again. A therapist asked me to act out a story with dolls and teddy bears. A social worker gave me a pink notebook with the same puppy pictured on every page and told me to write a story in it. A police officer asked me to tell her what had happened and warned me not to tell stories. All of them wanted me to echo their unfamiliar words rather than tell the stories in words that were familiar to me. Each member of my family told a different story, and those stories were altered in their repetitions across thousands of pages of letters and reports written by people who were identified by titles rather than names.
Speaking became a powerful and dangerous act for a child in the hands of the state. If I said the right word or the wrong word my voice could endanger or ensure the safety of those I loved. I stopped searching for fairies and started to seek out words, which seemed more magical and impossible to grasp. I imagined I could find a spell to save us all.
I became practiced in poetry through years of experimenting with different ways of telling the same stories in fruitless efforts to be heard by the state. By the age of 12 I spent most of my time writing poems and annotating a dictionary while surviving the continuing chaos of everyday life with and without my birth family. I rarely attended school and self-directed my learning to more pressing lessons from mad, bad, and brilliant women in feminist literature and punk rock. I leveraged my perpetual devotion to language to pass my school exams with minimal preparation and submitted a portfolio of my poetry to secure a place at university.
Like most students of literature, I read ‘The Death of the Author’ by Roland Barthes during my undergraduate degree and spent weeks contemplating the dizzying proposition that readers rather than authors create the meaning of texts. A cigar-smoking Frenchman, who lived with his birth mother for sixty years, taught me that there were no words I could have written or spoken that would have saved my birth mother from an early death, or protected my remaining family from the entangled threats of one another and the state. The search for the meaning of the stories we told was the task of our readers and listeners, the social workers, lawyers, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists. I became fascinated with systems of interpretation and especially psychoanalysis, which I came to understand as a poetic pseudoscience rooted in the ritual of confession, the mystery of telepathy, and the denial of routine violence against children and women.
During my master’s degree, our tutors encouraged us to use social issues and histories as materials for our art, playing with the stories and voices of others from a cool distance in the way that gods and children play with humans and dolls. I played with Sigmund Freud’s case studies and plagiarised reports written about me by psychiatric professionals, repurposing their words to spell out some of the ways the system fails to listen to those in its care. My anonymous examiners diagnosed my work with narcissism and awarded me with a distinction. A long-earned distrust in institutions led me to my love of conceptual art and my work with street performances and handmade books, which I pursued for a few years, before I returned to the ivory tower to seek a seat at the hallowed table of academia.
I completed a PhD on ventriloquism after decades of being spoken for and spoken through by the state. While writing about feminist practices and politics of voice in art and poetry, I fell down a reading rabbit hole and started to explore the strange histories of wooden dolls, necromancing witches, and possessed oracles, who speak with voices that seem to come from elsewhere. At first, I was unaware that my unwieldy research was beginning to tell another story about the ambivalent power of voice I had experienced as a child in the hands of the children’s social care, legal, and psychiatric systems. Like many care experienced people, I had developed a habit of filtering out those parts of the stories I told about my life. Years spent thinking about the ancient art of ventriloquism led me to rediscover the roots of my lifelong fascination with the magic of words in my childhood interactions with the state.
State systems require ventriloquism. The labyrinthine legal system insistently untethers the meanings of words from common understanding, so we need lawyers to speak for us. The punitive state psychiatric system locates the problems with social injustices in the victims and survivors who draw attention to them, ensuring our silence with drugs and threats of incarceration. It is logical in these circumstances to equate voice with agency and power.
Activists can become evangelical when preaching our unquestioning belief that change will manifest from speaking for ourselves, telling our stories, and making our voices heard. With our blind faith in revolutionary transubstantiation, we rarely ask fundamental questions like: who is listening?
Institutions with more or less direct connections to the state have implemented novel ways of ordering and obscuring our confessions as our society has become increasingly secular and surveilled by technological apparatuses. We no longer need gods or priests when most of us spend large sections of our days behind screens reporting on our lives and judging the lives of others for the profit of global corporations, which dictate how we communicate with one another. Social media immerses us in a cacophony of voices while our government devalues and dismantles the institutions of art and education that teach us how to read, listen, and interpret them.
I have come to believe that speaking can save us if we restore its relation to listening. One of the most powerful ways I have found to use my voice is in facilitating conversations, and from leading university seminars on art history to chairing meetings with activist collectives, I have encountered little as magical as the dance of speaking and listening. Through dialogue we interweave our stories and create living poetry.