Ash Davida Jane
Do You Still Have Time for Chaos? by Lynn Davidson (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024), 224pp, $35
With writers who shift between genres, it matters which one is their starting point. A novelist’s poem is a completely different beast to a poet’s novel. The attention to detail and appreciation for sound that poets tend to bring to other forms results in something particularly compelling. Do You Still Have Time for Chaos? is clearly a poet’s memoir. Each word of Lynn Davidson’s prose feels perfectly weighted and earns its place. There’s a lyrical quality to the writing that carries you through, easing over any fissures or fractures in the plot that might stick out with a less talented writer. The narrative in Davidson’s memoir is fragmented and non-linear, enabling the writer to draw invisible lines between otherwise disparate moments. In many ways it’s a disservice to say ‘the narrative’ because, really, Do You Still Have Time for Chaos? contains a number of stories that intersect and overlap, more like a branching web than a single line. We jump between time and place without feeling erratic or disconnected as multiple generations of a family play out in parallel across different time periods.
The opening chapter sets an underlying question for the rest of the book. As the Covid-19 pandemic shuts down borders globally, Davidson is trying to get an urgent flight back to Aotearoa New Zealand from Edinburgh, where she’s been living. She’s confronted with the question of where her home is. This question of belonging and displacement, of feeling homesick for another place even while you’re at home, hovers over her shoulder for the rest of the book. While she was born and raised in Aotearoa New Zealand, her ancestral home is in Scotland. When your family immigrated as recently as your grandparents with their young children, what does it mean to try and put down roots in a land that historically doesn’t belong to you, where your presence is intertwined with a history of colonial violence and land theft? On the other hand, how can you claim as home a place where you have ancestral roots but have barely visited, especially when your family are all on the other side of the world?
The book’s main character is Davidson’s great-aunt Vida. Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the central tension of the book is whether Vida can be the main character when Davidson knows so little about her. The gaps in her story allow Davidson to imagine various ghosts of possibilities, revealing more about herself in the process than about Vida. We see her fill in the outline of her great-aunt’s character with who she wants her to be, romanticising the scraps of stories that have been passed down the generations. We also see her confronting the uncomfortable reality that Vida may not have been the person she’s imagined but instead just a woman who had a difficult life and hurt the people around her. Through the areas of unknowing and the certainty of a few specific details, this shadowy figure holds just enough shape to stand for a whole line of women stretching back, not connected necessarily through genetics but through their nature. Women who are bold, unhappy without hiding it, or considered mad. Women who break the rules, not just in a brave and empowering way like those who are idolised in contemporary feminism, but in ways that aren’t always palatable and easy to look at. Women whose bad behaviour doesn’t make for a good narrative.
Stuck in a flat in Edinburgh without much to distract her, Davidson dives into her family history. This process of excavating sheds light on the pitfalls of genealogical research. There are many places where the records fail, but the gaps provide an opportunity for numerous potential answers to unfold. The specific ways in which the records fail her reveal a lot about the world of her ancestors. When women are absent from all records except for those of births and marriages, moving from their father’s name to their husband’s name, it’s easy to imagine how they were made to be absent from life as well. Davidson plays with the subjectivity of memoir in exploring how the true stories of her family’s history rely on patchwork memories and insufficient records. A family creates its own mythology with stories passed down and peoples’ memories of each other, inevitably skewed by feelings and blurred by time. In moments where the figure of Vida speaks to us from the page, it feels like Davidson is a conduit for her ancestral spirits, but the author herself is careful to remind us that it’s not that simple.
In the first of two short chapters titled ‘Vida speaks’, Davidson imagines her great-aunt in a ‘parallel life’ to the one we know she had, full of things Davidson struggles to look at directly (from divorcing her abusive husband, to living on the street, to being institutionalised). In this imagined life, ‘Vida is good, like a deep lochen, pool, linn. Lucid.’ She cares for her children and writes to her sister. She arranges flowers to put in the house. But this vision is superficial; it has no real depth. We can’t help but come back to the real Vida, who, even through the haze of time and distance, can’t be shaken off. This Vida refuses to shrink into a more palatable version of herself. She ‘[opens] her mouth and crows fly out’.
Years into reading and writing about her family history, particularly her great-aunt, Davidson is forced to reckon with the fact that this isn’t the story she wanted to find. Rather than being difficult in the dignified, empowered way we want from heroines, Vida might actually have been ‘the boundaryless hard-drinking sort of person’ Davidson finds it hard to be around. This is a dilemma that many memoirists and biographers have to deal with—what happens when your idea of a person and the facts you find don’t fully align? What if they turn out to be someone quite different from the figure you were initially drawn to write about? Davidson brings us along on this back-and-forth, again revealing more of her assumptions in the process. In doing so, she invites us to address our own biases about whose stories are worth hearing and who is deserving of empathy. If someone is pushed to react to abuse and oppression in a messy or violent way that hurts people around them, does that make them a worse person than someone who just quietly suffers the abuse? There are systems of oppression that it’s impossible to get free from without being disruptive, which is by design. It’s easy for the oppressor to paint the oppressed as being violent, crazy, or aggressive if there is no other way for them to push back against abuse. Davidson is writing about one woman, but the questions she asks make us think of power imbalances across history. Her natural response is to turn away from Vida when she finds her drunk, loud and aggressive. Eventually she asks, ‘What did I expect? A tidy life?’ In coming to terms with the parts of her great-aunt that she finds difficult, it feels like she’s forgiving herself, and us by proxy, for being messy and imperfect in our own ways.
Directly following the chapter where Davidson reckons with her urge to turn away from a difficult Vida, she writes about witches. The theme of witchcraft is prominent throughout the book, with the title itself coming from the same quote used as the epigraph—an outburst from Temperance Lloyd as she was tried for witchcraft in 1682. In ‘Tremble, tremble, the witches have returned!’, Davidson describes an exhibition about witch hunts and the historical oppression of Woman. She writes a timeline that helps her (and us) understand the connection between property, power and witches, and considers how ‘the witch is defined as a woman outside of the control of a man’. Juxtaposing this historical overview with her personal struggle with Vida’s story places them both in a wider lineage of women who refuse to lean into their own subjugation. This chapter is, in many ways, the key to the book, providing context for the title and epigraph as well as a framework within which to consider Vida, Davidson, and the other women in their lives. From Scotland to Aotearoa, for hundreds of years, this context affects everything. It’s deeply entrenched in the history of Western civilisation, particularly in Scotland.
When Davidson weighs up two homes to find out where she belongs, she can’t do so without holding space for the histories of both places. The question of belonging is one that many of us are familiar with, and often there’s no straightforward answer. Do You Still Have Time for Chaos? is rich and compelling proof that it’s a question worth grappling with for however long it takes.
ASH DAVIDA JANE is a poet, editor, and reviewer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Their second book, How to Live With Mammals (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2021), won second place in the Laurel Prize. They are a founding publisher at Tender Press.
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