Wendy Parkins
The Beautiful Afternoon by Airini Beautrais (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024), 280pp, $28
In her first major publication since winning the Jann Medlicott Acorn prize for Bug Week in 2021, Airini Beautrais turns to the essay as her chosen form in The Beautiful Afternoon. Or perhaps I should say, returns to the essay form, as Beautrais also won the Landfall Essay Competition in 2016. Beautrais has said that Bug Week was inspired by ‘the female experience, from girlhood through to middle age and end of life’, and the essays in this collection continue this focus on women’s lives, with an unflinching eye and a deeply personal perspective. Whether exploring family and intimacy, ageing and the body, spirituality and politics, touch and trauma, Beautrais brings a fierce curiosity and searing candour in deceptively transparent prose that gives her ideas room to breathe. These are artful explorations, not water-tight explanations or easily resolved dilemmas, and many readers will relate to Beautrais’s journey towards self-acceptance and deeper connection to others.
The title essay recounts an afternoon of intimacy with an unnamed ‘you’ during a summer holiday. In describing the feel of sand in bedsheets, the taste of beer in another’s mouth, Beautrais captures the immediacy of touch and pleasure, but such moments prove fleeting: ‘The beautiful afternoon, which was yesterday, already feels like the distant past.’ She continues her road trip alone, stopping to pitch her tent among noisy families at coastal campgrounds, preparing simple meals in the communal kitchen, showering in the bathroom block, but now the details of bodily and sensory life emphasise solitude, not connection. References to loneliness multiply; being on the road means not belonging anywhere, far from her children and garden at home. It is only being alone, however, that provides the opportunity to observe, to dwell at length on what she thinks and feels. Without the writer’s solitude, perhaps the ‘beautiful afternoon’ would be lost altogether—unrecorded, unacknowledged.
‘Wicked pack of cards’ is also concerned (among other things) with the push-and-pull towards or apart from others. During a time of upheaval in her life, Beautrais goes to a tarot reading by Maria, although she is fully aware of the deceptive simplicity of a ‘three-card spread’: it allows her to seek guidance in making a tough decision without ever doubting that it is ultimately her choice alone to make. Is that not so often what we do, whatever form of external guidance we seek out? We might flirt with the idea that something—fate, God, the stars—could take matters out of our hands, but, as adults, we must make choices that inevitably close down other options. Spoiler alert: Beautrais makes the hard choice, and, in the end, it is ‘painless, like an old scab falling off a healed wound’. The imagery is far from accidental, as the need to heal from the wounds that accumulate over any life is a persistent theme.
One of the cards Maria draws represents surrendering to passion, prompting Beautrais to confess that she has been holding back—both in life and in her writing. ‘I feel like some of my ideas are just too wild,’ she tells Maria, who replies: ‘Just go with them … That is what the world needs, for us, for women, to catch fire.’ Across the sweep of the essays in The Beautiful Afternoon, Beautrais takes Maria’s advice. She allows herself to go with her wild ideas, becoming more direct and disclosing more as the collection continues. These are not essays to be dipped into as in some essay collections, but rather they build, incrementally but not strictly chronologically, from stories of childhood in her family of origin to the present, where in midlife Beautrais is a survivor of abuse and a mother of two sons.
The tarot reading, however, is also one of the ways Beautrais finds to connect with women in her local community—from playgroups to pole-dancing—showing her how women can pool their unique experiences to arrive at a shared understanding of changes in their lives. A unifying thread in this collection concerns the legacy of having grown up in a tight-knit Quaker community that espoused values like simplicity and a suspicion of the modern world. As a young woman, Beautrais wrestled with the fact that Quaker non-conformity—which she had initially taken as permission for her own commitment to resistance and activism—coexisted with a conservative view of female modesty and containment, leaving women vulnerable to self-policing and the need for male approval. In a number of essays, then, Beautrais seeks to untangle self and community, agency and empathy, and recapture a different sense of community in her present life, one that is woman-centred and open to spirituality in many forms, and does not seek to police the boundaries of mind and body.
When ideas run wild, though, it is perhaps not surprising that not all the essays here are equally successful. Not all readers will have read Middlemarch or be interested in the minutiae of the Star Wars saga, but Beautrais’s eye roves freely over daily life at both micro and macro levels—which is what Middlemarch does, too, after all. She situates the most mundane aspects of life within a global context of climate crisis and consumerism, faith and fake news, high culture and pop culture because that’s what we all do every day: in a world where everything that has happened or been imagined is accessible through a device small enough to hold in our hand. It’s almost second nature to us now to scroll from the latest massacre of innocents to the cutest puppy meme while we are waiting for the kettle to boil. The world out there can’t be kept at bay, however preoccupied we might be with our own concerns, and small decisions about what to wear or eat aren’t really small at all, of course. In ‘High cut’, Beautrais takes shopping for a swimsuit as an entry into weighty questions around modesty, disgust, pregnancy and ageing, grappling with the body-shaming passed down from mothers and grandmothers who disapproved of too-revealing swimwear. A visit to a Whanganui supermarket in ‘Holocene wayfarer’ brings to mind animal welfare, fossil fuels, deforestation and colonisation: it’s hard to go through the world, Beautrais writes, ‘noticing and feeling things. The world seeps in through the skin; it is uncomfortable.’
The Beautiful Afternoon is at its most powerful when it is most personal, when Beautrais allows herself to be ‘uncomfortable’, to let things in, to feel and notice things, and when she does, the reader is held right there with her. It is less compelling when essays occasionally get bogged down in theoretical accounts or summaries—and even lengthy footnotes—that don’t seem strictly necessary. In the opening essay, ‘Life of leisure’, though, the balance between the personal and the literary, the historical past and the uncertain present, is successfully brought into alignment, illuminating both with a fresh originality. Readers might not expect a collection like this to open with a consideration of the life and works of Lord Byron, but such is Beautrais’s deftness of style and exploratory range that she makes it seem natural to ponder Byron’s stellar career and early death in relation to the precarity of writers and the living wage in contemporary Aotearoa. At the centre of this essay, and the reason why Byron’s death is on her mind, is Beautrais’s own health scare. She is waiting to have blood taken for testing and recalls that Byron died at thirty-six after a botched blood-letting procedure. Thoughts of Byron then lead to other early literary deaths: Shelley and Keats—and Mansfield, of course. Beautrais reminds us that the frailty of the body and the immortality of words cannot be set apart from an awareness of any writer’s need to make a living.
We don’t learn until much later in The Beautiful Afternoon what prompted the blood test, or its outcome, but ‘Life of leisure’ also introduces another recurring concern: touch. Here, and in other essays where Beautrais recalls the care of midwives during labour, there is an ongoing attention to the diverse forms and meanings of touch. We trust complete strangers to touch us—nurses, hair stylists, dentists—but yet can be harmed by the touch of those we know and love in the privacy of our own home. Once a breach of trust has taken place through intimate violence, it can feel impossible to restore a boundary between self and other without fear. ‘Human touch’, one of the most moving essays in this collection, explores this paradox and what it might mean to rediscover tactility after trauma. To read The Beautiful Afternoon is to understand how ‘The world seeps in through the skin’ and why that might be both the best and the worst thing about the way we live now.
WENDY PARKINS has taught at universities in New Zealand, Australia and the UK. Her books include Slow Living (co-authored with Geoffrey Craig), Jane Morris: The burden of history, and the memoir Every Morning, So Far, I’m Alive. She lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin.
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