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No Document
A groundbreaking new work of non-fiction by one of Australia’s most respected essay writers.
No Document is an elegy for a friendship cut short prematurely by death. The memory of this friendship becomes a model for how we might relate to others in sympathy, solidarity and rebellion. At once intimate and expansive, Anwen Crawford’s book-length essay explores loss in many forms: disappeared artworks, effaced histories, abandoned futures. From the turmoil of grief and the solace of memory, her perspective embraces histories of protest and revolution, art-making and cinema, border policing, and especially our relationships with animals. No Document shows how love and resistance echo through time.
Anwen Crawford is best known for her writing as a critic, but here she draws on her background as a zine-maker and visual artist, and her training in poetry, to develop a new way of writing about the past, using a symphonic method of composition and collage. No Document is an urgent, groundbreaking work of non-fiction that reimagines the boundaries that divide us – as people, nations and species – and asks how we can create forms of solidarity that endure.
No Document is an elegy for a friendship cut short prematurely by death. The memory of this friendship becomes a model for how we might relate to others in sympathy, solidarity and rebellion. At once intimate and expansive, Anwen Crawford’s book-length essay explores loss in many forms: disappeared artworks, effaced histories, abandoned futures. From the turmoil of grief and the solace of memory, her perspective embraces histories of protest and revolution, art-making and cinema, border policing, and especially our relationships with animals. No Document shows how love and resistance echo through time.
Anwen Crawford is best known for her writing as a critic, but here she draws on her background as a zine-maker and visual artist, and her training in poetry, to develop a new way of writing about the past, using a symphonic method of composition and collage. No Document is an urgent, groundbreaking work of non-fiction that reimagines the boundaries that divide us – as people, nations and species – and asks how we can create forms of solidarity that endure.
160 pages, Paperback
Published April 1, 2021
10 people are currently reading
531 people want to read
About the author
Anwen Crawford
6 books21 followersAnwen Crawford is an Australian writer. She is the music critic for The Monthly magazine, and her essays have appeared in publications including Frieze, Overland and Loops: Writing Music.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
March 19, 2024
***Shortlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize***
"But what if the problem, I said, is capitalism."
There's an undercurrent of anger and sadness running through these pages.
And immense loss.
The essays are set as bite sized snapshots. Some are a single sentence, others run into a couple of lines. Anwen Crawford talks about Art, protests - of which she attended many - and the unfairness of the world. Asylum seekers. Detainees. Various unrests through the ages. Wars. Discontent. The mistreatment of early AIDs sufferers. The Nazis confiscating artworks which they deemed forbidden (as the Artists were against the regime). Injustices. The fact that we don't really learn all that much from history, and continue to make more tragic mistakes.
"Then came the attacks on the World Trade Centre."
Intelligently written, the vast range of topics displays an inquiring mind questioning the world. And yet, I felt too much hopelessness was focussed on. Negativity pervaded the pages.
"I was a teenager in the 90s and it felt like the answer was to die, but what was the question?"
This is also an ode to her friend, the late Ned Sevil, who was lost way too young. And whose loss she feels immensely. Her grief is unfathomable, as it tends to be.
"Your death took the best of me."
2☆ I just couldn't warm to it, as it contains too much angst. While there are far too many injustices in the world, these essays list them, without offering the slightest glint of any hope that things can change.
Trigger warning!
The opening line talks about a documentary (which I'd never heard of and have even less desire to see) called Le Sang Bêtes, by someone called Georges Franju. It describes a white horse being led through the gates of an abattoir. While not overly graphic, it was graphic enough to disturb me. I now have a picture imprinted on my brain which I'd rather wasn't there.
The white horse continues to make an appearance throughout the book.
As is talk of various abbatoirs across Sydney, and the loss of horses used by the military in war. The deaths of other animals.
I understand the book is dealing with the immensity of death and its' aftermath. Also incarceration, both physical and mental, and the toll it takes. But there are some things that are a big no for me, including the mention of this doco. I'd like if books could advise of potential trigger warnings, though I'd imagine this is then a Pandora's Box of what not to include. Food for thought.
"If our natural curiosity hadn't been carefully repressed, we should quite naturally be very interested in what happens in slaughterhouses and go and have a look, and not need films like Le Sang Bêtes."
I can't say I feel the same.
Congratulations to Ms.Crawford for being incuded on The Stella Prize Shortlist 2022.
No Document · Stella
https://stella.org.au/prize/2022-priz...
Shout out to Randwick City Library for having this available as part of their "Hot Reads" section.
"no document can make you manifest;"
"But what if the problem, I said, is capitalism."
There's an undercurrent of anger and sadness running through these pages.
And immense loss.
The essays are set as bite sized snapshots. Some are a single sentence, others run into a couple of lines. Anwen Crawford talks about Art, protests - of which she attended many - and the unfairness of the world. Asylum seekers. Detainees. Various unrests through the ages. Wars. Discontent. The mistreatment of early AIDs sufferers. The Nazis confiscating artworks which they deemed forbidden (as the Artists were against the regime). Injustices. The fact that we don't really learn all that much from history, and continue to make more tragic mistakes.
"Then came the attacks on the World Trade Centre."
Intelligently written, the vast range of topics displays an inquiring mind questioning the world. And yet, I felt too much hopelessness was focussed on. Negativity pervaded the pages.
"I was a teenager in the 90s and it felt like the answer was to die, but what was the question?"
This is also an ode to her friend, the late Ned Sevil, who was lost way too young. And whose loss she feels immensely. Her grief is unfathomable, as it tends to be.
"Your death took the best of me."
2☆ I just couldn't warm to it, as it contains too much angst. While there are far too many injustices in the world, these essays list them, without offering the slightest glint of any hope that things can change.
Trigger warning!
The opening line talks about a documentary (which I'd never heard of and have even less desire to see) called Le Sang Bêtes, by someone called Georges Franju. It describes a white horse being led through the gates of an abattoir. While not overly graphic, it was graphic enough to disturb me. I now have a picture imprinted on my brain which I'd rather wasn't there.
The white horse continues to make an appearance throughout the book.
As is talk of various abbatoirs across Sydney, and the loss of horses used by the military in war. The deaths of other animals.
I understand the book is dealing with the immensity of death and its' aftermath. Also incarceration, both physical and mental, and the toll it takes. But there are some things that are a big no for me, including the mention of this doco. I'd like if books could advise of potential trigger warnings, though I'd imagine this is then a Pandora's Box of what not to include. Food for thought.
"If our natural curiosity hadn't been carefully repressed, we should quite naturally be very interested in what happens in slaughterhouses and go and have a look, and not need films like Le Sang Bêtes."
I can't say I feel the same.
Congratulations to Ms.Crawford for being incuded on The Stella Prize Shortlist 2022.
No Document · Stella
https://stella.org.au/prize/2022-priz...
Shout out to Randwick City Library for having this available as part of their "Hot Reads" section.
"no document can make you manifest;"
Read
August 16, 2021There are books readers like. There are books we love. There are even books that, occasionally, we might say we adore. But there is a fourth category, home to another book entirely: the book we have written.
Not literally, perhaps – self-congratulatory impulses have their limits. Rather, those with which we have lived for so long, bristling with so many of our personal notations – below words, under sentences, around passages, down pages – that it seems as if we had redrafted them. I developed the habit of bringing No Document with me wherever I went. It lay beside me as I wrote; held enough scribblings to warrant being mistaken for a work-in-progress. This, then, is not so much a review, as the story of how I came to live with my own edition of No Document – as, I suspect, many others will.
At the heart of the book is Crawford’s friend, the artist Ned Sevil, lost at 30 to cystic fibrosis. “I find a notebook in which you have written MY WORK – in blunt pencil, as you always wrote – and then crossed out the MY for OUR.” Theirs is the communion of lifelong partnership. He is Crawford’s soulmate, a permanence. As Franz Marc wrote to his wife upon hearing of a friend’s death in the First World War: “Oh dearest, the naked fact will not enter my head.”
Crawford engages the art of taking the line for a walk – “I’ll follow a street to its end for the promise implied in the way that the light falls.” She diagrams affinities between interior and exterior worlds, compressing time to show how bereavement – and coming to terms with its ache – demands its share of space. The communion with the missing (“you wake from being pressed into the hollow of a loss you cannot name”) is as proximate as social catastrophe and upheaval: knowledge of the terrible, the “naked fact”, comes to feel like a personal and political reckoning.
Continue reading: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/c...
Not literally, perhaps – self-congratulatory impulses have their limits. Rather, those with which we have lived for so long, bristling with so many of our personal notations – below words, under sentences, around passages, down pages – that it seems as if we had redrafted them. I developed the habit of bringing No Document with me wherever I went. It lay beside me as I wrote; held enough scribblings to warrant being mistaken for a work-in-progress. This, then, is not so much a review, as the story of how I came to live with my own edition of No Document – as, I suspect, many others will.
At the heart of the book is Crawford’s friend, the artist Ned Sevil, lost at 30 to cystic fibrosis. “I find a notebook in which you have written MY WORK – in blunt pencil, as you always wrote – and then crossed out the MY for OUR.” Theirs is the communion of lifelong partnership. He is Crawford’s soulmate, a permanence. As Franz Marc wrote to his wife upon hearing of a friend’s death in the First World War: “Oh dearest, the naked fact will not enter my head.”
Crawford engages the art of taking the line for a walk – “I’ll follow a street to its end for the promise implied in the way that the light falls.” She diagrams affinities between interior and exterior worlds, compressing time to show how bereavement – and coming to terms with its ache – demands its share of space. The communion with the missing (“you wake from being pressed into the hollow of a loss you cannot name”) is as proximate as social catastrophe and upheaval: knowledge of the terrible, the “naked fact”, comes to feel like a personal and political reckoning.
Continue reading: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/c...
July 29, 2022
This is an exquisite piece of writing. I'm not sure I can do it justice - it's hard, when reading the sentences, to put together what works. I finished it, and then started again - it's that kind of book.
The title, for example, is both about the politics of immigration and who belongs, and heartbreakingly, about the impossibility of replacing what we lose with a record of it. Crawford's prose loops back and forth, from the mundane to the profound, but always searching for the lost. How to reconstruct something out of the experience.
There are some strange intersections, Crawford falls into passion for activism at around the same time as I fell out of passion with it. Her conviction, carried through significant protests of the early 2000s contrasted for me with my growing cynicism at the same events: this glorious unity of S11 united my experiences with the authors.
Crawford uses protest to explore what unites us, and what we need to reach past. All of which is, as I have said, coloured by loss and the glory of having someone to lose. It's something.
The title, for example, is both about the politics of immigration and who belongs, and heartbreakingly, about the impossibility of replacing what we lose with a record of it. Crawford's prose loops back and forth, from the mundane to the profound, but always searching for the lost. How to reconstruct something out of the experience.
There are some strange intersections, Crawford falls into passion for activism at around the same time as I fell out of passion with it. Her conviction, carried through significant protests of the early 2000s contrasted for me with my growing cynicism at the same events: this glorious unity of S11 united my experiences with the authors.
Crawford uses protest to explore what unites us, and what we need to reach past. All of which is, as I have said, coloured by loss and the glory of having someone to lose. It's something.
March 17, 2021
‘I believe in all of us. I don’t see how anything can change, if we don’t.’
This is a book of many parts – part poetry, part memoir, part protest, part extended elegy for a lost friend and kindred soul. Crawford’s writing decries and dismantles capitalism, borders, carceral systems, and the insidious, dehumanising rhetoric and politics that sever empathy and devalue art-making. It’s completely original and cumulatively devastating.
This is a book of many parts – part poetry, part memoir, part protest, part extended elegy for a lost friend and kindred soul. Crawford’s writing decries and dismantles capitalism, borders, carceral systems, and the insidious, dehumanising rhetoric and politics that sever empathy and devalue art-making. It’s completely original and cumulatively devastating.
November 1, 2022
Described straightforwardly - a book on mourning the early death of a friend, read through the townscape of Sydney, Franju's The Blood of the Beasts, the paintings of Franz Marc, and memories of political activism - this might sound like one of those delicate little essay books there's a lot of at the moment (you know, how Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin helped me recover from a twisted ankle, etc) . No Document is not one of those books. The unsentimental, fragmentary writing has a proper anti-bourgeois rage and venom, and the connections that are built up between the life Crawford is remembering and the artworks and moments she frames it around are more like a puzzle that only gradually falls into place than a series of references to be ticked off. It's hard reading at times, and can almost pummel you with its grief, but it is very much worth it.
July 25, 2021
I’m going to focus on the work of some Sydney writers as a way to send love in the direction of that fine city doing it tough right now. Anwen Crawford has one of the best minds of her generation. This essay-length book looks at absences and loss. Her commentary on protest felt especially timely. She uses her grief as a launching pad to consider ideas about what unites and what divides us, about art, about history, about humanity. I was transfixed. This is an incredibly sophisticated work of non-fiction and I can only wait with eager anticipation to see what might come next from this wonderful writer and mind.
January 27, 2022
I first wanted to read this after hearing Anwen speak at a community rally for better read than dead workers. I’m really glad I did because it contained lovely references to art, early 2000s protests in what was almost a goodbye letter to a friend.
December 8, 2025
Things we have excised (*verb*, to remove by cutting):
- Words (censorship, forgetting, revision, mishearing, distance, obsolescence)
- Art (theft, erasure, confiscation, trade, decay, restoration)
- Others (borders, illness, displacement, slaughter, estrangement, death)
Losses we expect in the changing of the guard. Could we only take it all in? Could we only be ourselves whole again? Could we be we even at such great remove?
- Words (censorship, forgetting, revision, mishearing, distance, obsolescence)
- Art (theft, erasure, confiscation, trade, decay, restoration)
- Others (borders, illness, displacement, slaughter, estrangement, death)
Losses we expect in the changing of the guard. Could we only take it all in? Could we only be ourselves whole again? Could we be we even at such great remove?
October 19, 2023
“i’ll follow a street to its end for the promise implied in the way that the light falls”
at once an elegy for a lost creative soulmate and a poetic political protest, anwen crawford has created something so singular and beautiful here. her commentary on partnership, politics, grief, resistance and the power of art is moving and magnetic.
the history attached to the places and objects we connect and interact with is something i often consider, and anwen’s profound analysis of the disruption/destructions of these environments and the impact this sustains on our palimpsest of memories was stellar.
i can’t find the words to do this justice- i think i’ll hold onto this book for a long time.
“we shared some fundamental naivety - that making things could be enough, one heart joined to the next… and in these unearned hours i think
without the wage, without the state, without the penitentiaries
to be unafraid, to be freely indebted to eachother”
at once an elegy for a lost creative soulmate and a poetic political protest, anwen crawford has created something so singular and beautiful here. her commentary on partnership, politics, grief, resistance and the power of art is moving and magnetic.
the history attached to the places and objects we connect and interact with is something i often consider, and anwen’s profound analysis of the disruption/destructions of these environments and the impact this sustains on our palimpsest of memories was stellar.
i can’t find the words to do this justice- i think i’ll hold onto this book for a long time.
“we shared some fundamental naivety - that making things could be enough, one heart joined to the next… and in these unearned hours i think
without the wage, without the state, without the penitentiaries
to be unafraid, to be freely indebted to eachother”
January 14, 2023
3.5 stars. Glad I persisted after a slow start. I found the book frustrating at first - the form is not my favourite - but once I found the rhythm and relaxed into the process I realised it was a remarkable effort. I appreciate the author's reflections and was provoked at various points to engage in my own process of reflection; I've no doubt this will spark conversations with some friends.
Read
February 1, 2023to call it beautiful seems to undersell the rage & grief that take up the text. beautifully angry at the world, anger that is truly creative and will create a new world out of the ashes of the world
sous les paves, la plage!
sous les paves, la plage!
April 19, 2022
'An alternative to speaking. You lead me to your photographs and drawings, or to ours become yours in what death has taken with you, which is us, among the living, in time.'
February 5, 2025
3.9
Beautiful in parts, very cognisant, extremely affecting substance
Found it difficult to penetrate sometimes, and slightly repetitious. Enjoy how this is explores memory’s mutability, but it didn’t always come off for me
Beautiful in parts, very cognisant, extremely affecting substance
Found it difficult to penetrate sometimes, and slightly repetitious. Enjoy how this is explores memory’s mutability, but it didn’t always come off for me
March 27, 2022
A book length essay, in a variety of forms throughout, as a letter to the departed. A collection of memories, unspoken thoughts, muses, and of missing someone. An ode to grief and the untimely, unfathomable loss of a friend.
Woven through a letter to Ned, are memories, research into abattoir, sections of Sydney, reviews of colonial moments, and redacted parliamentary quotes.
The meander around asylum in it's forms - for the mentally ill, for refugees seeking safety, is poignant and compelling. The vivid remembered protest at Woomera detention centre fence. The review of the key boat tragedies that shaped Australian policy. A reflection on borders and documentation, via this grief.
An opportune book to have on people's radars as we come in to Australian election time - the commentary on the policy of detention of people seeking asylum, and turnbacks, and protest and people power, is much needed at this time.
This read needs the reader's patience, presence through the mingling threads, and ultimately our surrender to the atmospheric read.
Woven through a letter to Ned, are memories, research into abattoir, sections of Sydney, reviews of colonial moments, and redacted parliamentary quotes.
The meander around asylum in it's forms - for the mentally ill, for refugees seeking safety, is poignant and compelling. The vivid remembered protest at Woomera detention centre fence. The review of the key boat tragedies that shaped Australian policy. A reflection on borders and documentation, via this grief.
An opportune book to have on people's radars as we come in to Australian election time - the commentary on the policy of detention of people seeking asylum, and turnbacks, and protest and people power, is much needed at this time.
This read needs the reader's patience, presence through the mingling threads, and ultimately our surrender to the atmospheric read.
February 16, 2023
Shortlisted for the 2022 The Stella Prize, Anwen Crawford’s beautiful essay reflecting on a beloved friendship cut short due to death is a powerful read about friends, love and loss. It is also short so if you are looking for something to get your reading groove back this beautiful reflection of a friendship through time and shared events is one that might just switch you back on to reading. And if you are seeking reading inspiration I always include The Stella Prize shortlist in my annual search for a new read as there is always something to challenge you, surprise you and bonus, the stories are from Australians. Crawford herself is best known as a critic, winning the Walkey-Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism in 2021 and her work has appeared in The Monthly, The New Yorker, The White Review and Sydney review of Books. There was certainly no agreement on No Document from literary critics with some reflecting on its failure to resonate, with her prose being criticised as opaque and performative. While others praise her work and the transformative power of sadness that pervades the essay recognising the threads that explore a friendship across time, focusing on the ordinariness of their friendship and how much the friendship meant to Crawford. I am definitely in the camp of those critics who love the writing, connecting profoundly with the theme of loss and love of a friend. Any of us who have suffered grief knows that it can be unending and it would be easier to hold yourself back from caring because to lose someone you love is painful but there is always the joy of remembering and Crawford remembers how they became friends. The structure of the work is layered, with sentences appearing to be out of sync with the narrative – written to her friend and creative collaborator who has died. While No Document is about a personal deeply felt grief for the loss of a dear friend we are treated to a poetical spray of remembrance of that friendship with climate activism, loss of innocence and creative collaboration sprinkled throughout which ultimately brings the joy of having a wonderful friend, even though they have left us. Well worth considering for your read.
September 19, 2022
At first I wasn't sure what to make of this book, but put away all those devices, distractions, and expectations - and just read, immerse yourself in this most unusual of creatures. Part meditation on grief, meditation on borders, documents, authority, and on our relationship with the natural world, the arbitrary power that some of us wield over others, those weaker than ourselves. I'm still ruminating over what I read, and no doubt, I will be opening these pages again to re-read, to feel again.
February 6, 2022
This unique work of non-fiction starts with a scene from Georges Franju’s documentary film, Le Sang des bêtes, with a white horse being led to slaughter, an image that will appear throughout. Anwen Crawford then introduces the death of her friend, someone she met while at art school in Sydney. "I was young for a long time," she writes, "Nobody died". In the first couple of pages she writes of refugees, war, protest, art, the German expressionist artist Franz Marc, perhaps most famous for his impossibly coloured animals. It is from these at first perhaps seemingly disparate impressions that Crawford weaves her investigation into breaking down old worlds and making new ones. She finds a note from her friend after they are gone: seriously what about our plan to take over the world. Read more on my blog.
December 6, 2022
For me, this was my favourite book of last year. Challenging, sweeping, puzzle like — but with a familiarity in the author’s voice that led me willingly through the text. Certain sections have stayed with me quite a long time, and not the ones I expected or ones that I reacted to immediately. The kind of book I’m delaying a second reading of, just so I can sit with the pleasure of the first for longer.
May 4, 2021
This was a big leap out of my usual wheelhouse but it was quite rewarding. Intellectually challenging and very much informed by poetic devices and other art traditions, but incredibly thought provoking and entirely fascinating.
February 27, 2023
Highly experimental in format, this elegy for a close friendship is both moving and edifying.
May 26, 2021
'It is the nature of cities to be changed . . .' -p15
'The places we went, which are gone: this is a loss on top of you. I mean a loss additional.' -p18
'Above my desk I keep a postcard made by a friend and it says: Another world is possible.' -p21
'We wanted it this way. art is not precious, neither is politics, we wrote, and we meant (I think we meant) that neither thing should be remote from the texture of our lives or out of reach of our making.' - p34
'The towers were brought down. Friends phoned late, on the landline, and we watched and watched.
A part of my initial reaction was a feeling that chickens had come home to roost; but how it is easy to use an animal idiom in order to diminish the complexity of human loss . . .
as if animals are any less complex, or deserve their lives less.
The more time has passed the more unbearable I find that day's footage, being not nineteen or cavalier anymore with the idea of my life or anyone's, and knowing now what has come after. . . Of all the eerie things about that infernal loop |: planes hitting tower | plane hitting tower :| the eeriest is the noiselessness of the impact as recorded by a fixed camera at a distance.' -p59
'I felt a kind of craziness that nothing could stop the war.' -p88
'Because we were young and not afraid to die.' -p100
'I got sunburnt at your funeral; I thought I saw you sitting in the distance as your funeral.' -p105
'Dear Alya, The property relations in language - or, more correctly, in systems of writing - require a return to the beginnings of refusal to be ruled. To overturn these records of enclosures, we must keep moving, mourning, making, joining. Scatter, assemble. The border works to constitute us all, and I know that beyond the city's gates is not beyond the city's meaning. What days can we make for us free of the borders, except for the border between you and me. Who might we be.'m -p118
'Yesterday you put on shoes and socks, and so did many other people. But then, you do that every day. So maybe that's not very important. You may not even remember doing it yesterday.' -p128
'I assume that when I search the internet for things like Tomahawk missile, some machine somewhere is keeping a record.' -p129
'When you think of all that happened to you yesterday, as well as to all the other people in the world, that is history.' -p130
'I believe other animals than us wish to live and when we turn them into surplus made to die - we have been turning them - we wrong against the equilibrium of everything.' -p130
'To repeat something is to make it possible anew.' -p130
shouts, whistles, and then people
were jumping from the inside
fence and
over . . . moving again
us moving
again moving
against the violence of the state.' -p133
'There is no parity in mourning; there is no innocence that I could claim as distance from the border.' -p134
'The struggle against borders on a country not my own.' -p134
'what we do
what do we do?
When we bring the fences down:
a return
to the beginnings
of refusal
to be ruled,
but only on the grounds
that nothing is unoccupied;
no land
unmade by precedent
before
the settler
world
is possible.' -p136
'And I don't know that I would act differently in another time, or on another people's country.' p137
'The places we went, which are gone: this is a loss on top of you. I mean a loss additional.' -p18
'Above my desk I keep a postcard made by a friend and it says: Another world is possible.' -p21
'We wanted it this way. art is not precious, neither is politics, we wrote, and we meant (I think we meant) that neither thing should be remote from the texture of our lives or out of reach of our making.' - p34
'The towers were brought down. Friends phoned late, on the landline, and we watched and watched.
A part of my initial reaction was a feeling that chickens had come home to roost; but how it is easy to use an animal idiom in order to diminish the complexity of human loss . . .
as if animals are any less complex, or deserve their lives less.
The more time has passed the more unbearable I find that day's footage, being not nineteen or cavalier anymore with the idea of my life or anyone's, and knowing now what has come after. . . Of all the eerie things about that infernal loop |: planes hitting tower | plane hitting tower :| the eeriest is the noiselessness of the impact as recorded by a fixed camera at a distance.' -p59
'I felt a kind of craziness that nothing could stop the war.' -p88
'Because we were young and not afraid to die.' -p100
'I got sunburnt at your funeral; I thought I saw you sitting in the distance as your funeral.' -p105
'Dear Alya, The property relations in language - or, more correctly, in systems of writing - require a return to the beginnings of refusal to be ruled. To overturn these records of enclosures, we must keep moving, mourning, making, joining. Scatter, assemble. The border works to constitute us all, and I know that beyond the city's gates is not beyond the city's meaning. What days can we make for us free of the borders, except for the border between you and me. Who might we be.'m -p118
'Yesterday you put on shoes and socks, and so did many other people. But then, you do that every day. So maybe that's not very important. You may not even remember doing it yesterday.' -p128
'I assume that when I search the internet for things like Tomahawk missile, some machine somewhere is keeping a record.' -p129
'When you think of all that happened to you yesterday, as well as to all the other people in the world, that is history.' -p130
'I believe other animals than us wish to live and when we turn them into surplus made to die - we have been turning them - we wrong against the equilibrium of everything.' -p130
'To repeat something is to make it possible anew.' -p130
shouts, whistles, and then people
were jumping from the inside
fence and
over . . . moving again
us moving
again moving
against the violence of the state.' -p133
'There is no parity in mourning; there is no innocence that I could claim as distance from the border.' -p134
'The struggle against borders on a country not my own.' -p134
'what we do
what do we do?
When we bring the fences down:
a return
to the beginnings
of refusal
to be ruled,
but only on the grounds
that nothing is unoccupied;
no land
unmade by precedent
before
the settler
world
is possible.' -p136
'And I don't know that I would act differently in another time, or on another people's country.' p137
May 23, 2021
The curious title of this short prose work remains obscure until about halfway, when—as throughout the book—empty space is used to emphasise with devastating impact, the concept of the void. On page 38, there is this:
There is nothing else on the page. On page 52, there is this:
But on page 67:
And it's true. Nothing we can keep or create will bring back the dead.
Neither an essay nor poetry and yet both, this book is filled with shards of grief. It is rebellious, and sometimes angry, recalling shared moments of activism in protests and marches, blockades and picket lines amid the deliberate conflation of dissent with terrorism by the ruling class that still exists:
Images of blood and slaughter are references to Blood of the Beasts (Le Sang des bêtes), a 1949 French documentary by Georges Franju. It contrasted the suburbs of Paris with scenes from a slaughterhouse. This violence is also threaded through the references to the deliberate impermanence of the art they made.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/05/23/n...
No collectables, no commodities.
There is nothing else on the page. On page 52, there is this:
from our
hands, our fumbling and clumsy hands, you write.
But on page 67:
no document can make you manifest.
And it's true. Nothing we can keep or create will bring back the dead.
Neither an essay nor poetry and yet both, this book is filled with shards of grief. It is rebellious, and sometimes angry, recalling shared moments of activism in protests and marches, blockades and picket lines amid the deliberate conflation of dissent with terrorism by the ruling class that still exists:
what might it be
to livewithout the wage / without the state / without
the penitentiaries /to be
unafraid / to be / freely
indebted to each other. (p.64)
Images of blood and slaughter are references to Blood of the Beasts (Le Sang des bêtes), a 1949 French documentary by Georges Franju. It contrasted the suburbs of Paris with scenes from a slaughterhouse. This violence is also threaded through the references to the deliberate impermanence of the art they made.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/05/23/n...
August 20, 2021
This book tells a story of, and feels intensely like, being a teen activist on Gadigal land in love and loss in the early 2000s. The book performs the difficulty of feeling and working things out, in an era between after the end of history and before history had started up again, a dead zone in which we knew too much about the outside but not enough about ourselves and couldn’t learn, fighting culture wars provisionally, with almost no resources.
On page 126 finally the clue I was looking for: “it occurs to me that twenty years of detail has dissolved, and it gets harder to recall, in the absence of collective memory, how we arrived here: that none of this was ineluctable.”
This book feels dry like that time was, a struggle, a quest. This book feels uncomfortable to me, someone who also swam in Sydney activist seas in that time, but it serves as a document or no document of that heavy time for those who weren't there to experience it.
On page 126 finally the clue I was looking for: “it occurs to me that twenty years of detail has dissolved, and it gets harder to recall, in the absence of collective memory, how we arrived here: that none of this was ineluctable.”
This book feels dry like that time was, a struggle, a quest. This book feels uncomfortable to me, someone who also swam in Sydney activist seas in that time, but it serves as a document or no document of that heavy time for those who weren't there to experience it.
August 16, 2023
No Document does not have linear progression or clear form, instead it presents itself as a more abstract reflection on Anwen Crawford's life. Mostly this is a story of grief, Ned Sevil died in 2010 at age 30. Anwen and Ned were frequent collaborators after meeting in art school and this book has the author recollecting both their projects and the authors feelings of loss, nostalgia and meaning.
There's perhaps maybe a few too many topics that Crawford draws on for such a short and conceptual piece. Themes of colonisation, war, protest, capitalism in varies forms reoccur in snippets of articles, letters and other media. These themes amplify the core of friendship and art but it does take some time to pull this together.
It's a compelling read. Says so much without saying much. Evokes strong emotions and own self reflection.
There's perhaps maybe a few too many topics that Crawford draws on for such a short and conceptual piece. Themes of colonisation, war, protest, capitalism in varies forms reoccur in snippets of articles, letters and other media. These themes amplify the core of friendship and art but it does take some time to pull this together.
It's a compelling read. Says so much without saying much. Evokes strong emotions and own self reflection.
April 11, 2022
As slim as it is (it can easily be read in a day), I found this sort of memoir to be a slow burn. I admired the craft in the writing and the innovations with form but wasn't sure the collection of memories of a dead friend and the times they lived through added up to much. By the end, though, the accumulation of fragmentary details felt like it achieved something approaching profundity.
June 6, 2023
"The places we went, which are gone: this is a loss on top of you. I mean a loss additional."
I needed a trigger warning for this one. But I did feel the grief of Crawford as she grieve for the loss of her friend and the loss of the spaces they used to visit together. A bit heavy for me who does not have the headspace for it now. I'll read this again hopefully in a better state.
I needed a trigger warning for this one. But I did feel the grief of Crawford as she grieve for the loss of her friend and the loss of the spaces they used to visit together. A bit heavy for me who does not have the headspace for it now. I'll read this again hopefully in a better state.
November 6, 2022
A containment of love and loss, Anwen shares the depth of a friendship. At times rhythmic, this elegy takes us on a journey of historical colonialist atrocities, protesting for human rights and a poetically crafted reflection of the meaning of love and life. I feel changed forever by this work.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 19, 2024
2.5-3 stars. interesting. plays around with form which i always find intriguing. the mixture of poetry and prose but rarely large paragraphs of personal anecdotes and lots of statistics just made an interesting read.
May 12, 2021
💖💖💔💖💖
May 17, 2022
There was beauty in this, and the writing was incredible. It just wasn’t the right book for me for the time.
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