Hello everyone,
This is the second week of our enquiry into the diary form. We have four contributions that consider the diary, the self and the city.
Noah Lee Swann, ‘Self-Dispenser’
Swann argues in three parts that the diary is a machine for the construction of the self comparable to the city as a machine for the construction of the subject.
Hannah Wickham, ‘Berlin Diaries’
Second, we have the wonderfully sparse, elliptical observations of a flâneur type, by the English writer Hannah Wickham from her diaries kept in Berlin in 2024.
Warrick Sony, ‘Joburg Diary’
A diary entry that reads like a short story, documenting the collapsing infrastructure of Johannesburg.
Firas Ibrahim, from Syrian Diaries
An extract from Syrian Diaries - an ongoing project by Firas Ibrahim - which treats the diary as a public journal to share stories from his home.
In other news, we are excited to announce two new members of Odradek: Nic Snyders and Hannah Wickham, who will be coming on board as editors, running newsletters and helping with The Odd Review.
Thank you for reading and please be sure to subscribe to a free or paid subscription if you enjoy what we post.
Thanks very much.
♡dette ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹
by Noah Lee Swann
diary / state / city
I write down the date: Sunday, July 19. I write down, perhaps, my maudlin state of mind.
Derrida says, “to mark a date in history’ presupposes, in any case, ‘something’ comes or happens for the first and last time, ‘something’ that we do not yet really know how to identify, determine, recognize, or analyze but that should remain from here on unforgettable.”
In the diary, which marks a date in one’s own history, this ‘something’ is the event, usually, of a day: ‘January 9. Rain, on and off, all day. Sat in my office at Metro, writing letters,’ writes Christopher Isherwood in his diaries. Nothing very interesting. And yet, it’s still the form of the diary that we regard as housing some essence of self. When we read the ‘nothing’, or ‘rien’, in Louis XVI’s hunting journal on the day the Bastille fell, don’t we hear a peculiarity? - a plaintive note, perhaps? Most diary entries record little else other than this day-to-day ‘rien’ of a life, but it’s the attitude, the character, or mood of the nothingness, how it shows itself, that seems so full of meaning.
What can we make of Kafka’s entry: ‘Sunday, July 19, slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life’? What is the ‘something’ that is being recorded here other than being in a state of misery. The day or date, the events are really of little interest to us at all. Where the diary becomes of interest, is when this being, through a state of disequilibrium, becomes manifest. The ‘something’ recorded in the diary is this passing event of the self. The subject’s thrownness: this wave of arrival in the world: the date, the place of its occurrence, this state-of-mind’s mind. This light through the leaves: a green light, an italicized, specific light, through those illuminated leaves. Illuminated now, and now, and now. A certain aspect, humour or misery, a slanted handwriting of life: italics of the now. slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.
The subject records the symptoms of its own being-there in various modulations; it transcribes through the grammar of days its spindrift. The diary is a city for these moods or states-of-mind, these multitudes meticulously rendered and domiciled in their dates; it's a city for a soul.
by Hannah Wickham
21st April 24’
Haunted house
A genuine query or an extravagant pick-up line I will never know. I’ve chosen to remember it as the latter.
A woman, early 20s, came up to me while I was writing on a bench. She asked if I spoke German, to which I shamefully replied, no. Relieved, she told me she thought there was someone in her house. She could hear bottles rattling and voices, she said. She asked if I could guard the door while she checked. How funny that we trust a random stranger to possibly protect us from another unknown stranger.
Standing at her doorway, I admired floor-length deep green velvet curtains, a candle-lit chandelier hanging from a mural-covered ceiling, and large abstract black and white paintings decorating the room. I was taken aback by this elaborate beauty.
She returned and we talked for a while. Skipping any form of small talk. Maybe as a result of this strange interaction, we spoke about religion. She ‘believed in belief’ but did not necessarily align with a particular religion. Neither of us being religious, I found it strange and almost intriguing that we only spoke of this.
No Burglar was found.
Binoculars
A Mother to her 8-year-old child in a pharmacy.
‘You don’t need binoculars.
That would be three pairs of binoculars.
You don’t need three pairs of binoculars.
You are one kid.’
16th April 24’
Carrot soup
Last night we made a carrot soup. It tasted like chemical lemon juice. It boiled over, spilling on the surface. Tumeric stained the kitchen tops. Confused, we chucked it and started again. Just before adding our stock water, we realised that there was descaler in the kettle. Our second attempt still tasted sour.
30th April 24’
Manuel
A piece of lined yellow paper is on the pavement floor. Hoping for a love letter, I picked it up.
‘Hello
I wanted to ask if you would like to sell your car.
If yes, please contact me. Or send Mariane a message.
Thanks! Manuel.’
19th May 24’
Change
I’m looking at the perfect scene for a high school art class on perspective. Trees fading into a messy point of green. I can see the moon. Not all of it, but enough. When I started writing there was a pink lining to the clouds. But now that colour has almost completely faded. The sky is muted blue and purple.
12th May 24’
It’s a Sunday. 7,47 pm. I’m walking and I notice a bright green drink on the side of the pavement. It’s separated. Clear electric green liquid sits at the bottom. Muted green froth rises to the top. Next to it lies a perfectly placed receipt. 24,10€ at CityChicken.
by Noah Lee Swann
diary / map / camera
A sense of self, we say, like there is something vague about it. As though there were no certainty or knowledge of this object. Only a mere sense, a glimpse, something without totality. Always dropping out of view, receding, shrinking from the spotlight of the ego.
The diary locates the pronoun “I” in a quantifiable frame of time and space, a plotted graph on the x and y axes. What the diary plots with each entry is this ephemeral, erratic, fluctuating surface of the self. As the mode of the diary is the written word, this self must be translated, moved from the indecipherable fringes of thought, from mood, feeling, full-throated experience, into the well-mannered, circumspection of words. Dates, time, weather, place etc. all the identifications of the diary, are crude attempts at mapping this territory. Like some impressive telescope snapping photos randomly at an unfathomable moon. A way of exposing an image, but only the most rudimentary image - ‘a sense of self’ - a blurred abstraction of absence, a rough hewn Jugannath of the self.
The diary is a machine for self manufacture, a selfing device to counter this insecurity. Each entry is an attempt then at freezing one’s being in order to see, or say, me-me-me. It is a small me-machine, a self-dispenser spitting out small proliferating selves. It is a process of selfing and the little selfings that appear under every date are not completely benevolent creatures: each one affirms the last and precludes a diversion from the mean and discourages outliers.
The work of such selfings is to preserve themselves, to resolve any breaks and maintain the chain of selfings, in order to secure its continued production: maintenant, now; from Latin manu tenere, ‘to hold in the hand’. In this way, they take on an appearance that is not only at odds, but entirely opposed to us: they hold us up, compare us to this aggregated image: this Image-Repertoire, this selfie. We feel them tugging at our shirt sleeves, telling us what we do and don’t like, attempting to set us in this mould.
by Warrick Sony
Thursday 23rd Jan
Mostly an uneventful day. Spent the morning preparing a class for tomorrow. An old friend Dr D⸺ came to drop off some papers and asked to see the property. It belonged to P⸺ and her ex-husband. They had separated many years ago but now wanted to sell. P⸺ wanted to go back to Europe and her ex was living in the Cape. They offered me their spare room while I settle into the city and find some more permanent accommodation.
Dr D⸺ lives only 15-minutes away. In the ‘90s, I’d lived here too with my wife and our two young kids. We all lived close by back then. But in November 1996 coming home one evening were hijacked in front of our gate. They lined us up and shot me in the leg before stealing the car. We moved to Cape Town soon after the incident.
Dr D⸺ and I talked casually as we made our way around the garden. I pointed to the tremendous swimming pool, the jungle of trees and dense, almost tropical plants. The house was built on the hillside of Langermans Kop and had a steep tiered aspect with an incredible view.
“And they only got an offer of R1.2 mil,” I said. “I just can’t believe it. “
“It’s the area and the crime” said Dr D⸺ “people are leaving in droves. I had guys break into my place a few months ago. It’s a city of fuck ups compounded by other fuck-ups.”
We circumvented the house and came around to where we had started, at the front gate. I tried to let my friend out but, to my surprise, the gate was locked. I went to the house to get the electric opener and found I had been locked out. P⸺’s car was gone, too.
“shit,” I said looking at some texts on my phone. “She thought we’d left the house.”
I disconnected the gate from its motor and, pushing, managed to roll the gate open enough to let Dr D⸺ out.
“You’ll be OK.” said Dr D⸺ before leaving. “Don’t worry. It’s actually pretty safe around here.”
When he had gone I texted P⸺ to find out what had happened. A text popped up on my screen a few minutes later.
“decided to take the dog for a walk in Rhodes park. Back in an hour”.
The sun started going down and I was getting cold so I sat in the old Toyota I was borrowing and listened to an audiobook on my phone. A few hours later my phone died. Another hour or so passed. Finally, I saw head lights and the gate began opening. It was P⸺ but another car was behind her. This one, a white BMW, had a flashing blue light on its roof. Seeing me, P⸺ got out of her vehicle. I could tell she was agitated.
“These fuckers followed me here,” she said, pointing back at the BMW, as she came over.
I could smell strong alcohol on her breath. Two men and a woman climbed out of the white BMW. They told me they were police and that P⸺ had jumped their roadblock and was driving recklessly.
One guy had an AK47 pointed at the ground and the other had a pistol in his belt. The woman seemed unarmed. She had long braids. They looked like ordinary civilians. It suddenly crossed my mind that perhaps we were being hijacked. Criminals often masqueraded as cops using a blue light. Without letting the anxiety enter my voice I asked the guy with the AK if he had police ID. He showed me his card. They were legit and, in a way, I felt enormous relief. As it turned out, P⸺ had had a few drinks with some buddies in the park and had driven home. She’d shot past the cops ignoring the blue light and their gestures to pull over.
With drunken bravado P⸺ was becoming belligerent. Winding the cops up, saying she wanted proof they were cops and that this wasn’t constitutional, refusing to comply with the police’s demands, one of which was to close the hatchback of her car.
“Don't worry,” she slurred, “I just have to let the dog out.”
“Don’t let that dog out,” the AK guy shouted.
“Don’t be ridiculous, she’s old and completely blind” said P⸺ stupidly. “She won’t harm you at all.”
The guy with the AK freaked. Raising his weapon, he shouted:
“If you let that dog out I’ll shoot it.”
Like she was in a dream, P⸺ persisted in opening the hatchback and the out jumped the scraggly, ancient dog. At this, I took the keys from her hand, grabbed the dog by the collar and said with as much assertion as I could:
“Hang on guys, I’ll get him to the house.” I quickly frog-marched the bewildered animal down the driveway. I ran indoors, quickly grabbed a jacket (it was freezing outside) and ran back to the situation.
The police had put cables-ties on P⸺ 's wrists and told me they were taking her to the station to do a breathalyser test. I said I would follow but could they drive slowly as I had an old car and wasn’t sure of the area. They were polite and said that it was a good idea that I accompany them.
I had to really work hard to calm everyone, first P⸺, then the cops, especially the woman with the braids who had taken a great dislike to her. I realised that they were actually being quite restrained and that they were pretty cool. I didn’t envy them for their job.
I followed them through the dark city to the depot at the bottom of Eloff St. – almost under the motorway.
They breathalysed P⸺ and sent her to Hillbrow hospital for blood tests and then Jeppe Police Station holding cells for the night. It was, they told me later during the long wait, to teach her a lesson. She was back home knocking on the window at 4am. She told me that she had spent most of the night in a cell with two Congolese women and an old Zimbabwean “gogo” (grandmother). She had a court date set for the following Monday.
The worst of it all, for me, was driving back in the pitch dark that night, to Kensington, through the broken roads, burned out shops, and toppled traffic lights. Steering the old Toyota through the lower end of the city, between silhouetted buildings and fires and people with no features moving spectrally in the shadows. Dystopia is not a fiction here. Entropy. The end of entropy.
by Noah Lee Swann
diary / desire / other
The contradiction of the diary is therefore that these attempts, these mechanics of its form bring us in direct confrontation with the failure of the diary’s own enterprise. Who hasn’t read back on old diaries and been astonished at the inconsistency of a cohesive sense of self? Or, who has not sat down to write a diary entry and felt the shame at confessing the self, of writing “I” over and over again. As though it were something improper, something embarrassing. What is this sense of shame and why do we feel that there is some inauthentic theatrics to the diary?
It is ironic then that what I am brought up against in the diary, what I am made aware of is not myself, but the hesitancy I feel in assuming one of these selves. (These little selfings who I see breaking like waves on the page.) I feel as though this stepping-in, this climbing inside of a self is as ridiculous as wearing a leotard and running onto stage declaring: ‘it is I, Hamlet.’
Not that I feel ‘empty inside’, but rather that my ‘I’ is just not in these words. My ‘I’ if I must have one, is some other place. —Where? —Deferred?
This would be one way of putting it, but maybe the feeling I find more accurate (and perhaps I am wrong) is that the self is buried underneath, or between these words, this language, these dates and locations, these events I record. Somehow this elusive, gelatinous ‘i’ - who bears no gender, race, age, who has no organs. Has no name! No family or nation, this ‘I’ (if it is an I, or an id) is constantly evading these attempts of capture by the self-dispenser (my diary, my phone, my language, my friends, family, nation all of it). And yet, it is this amphibious, allusive sense-of-self, who is a stranger to all selves, the desiring-I, that binds and directs, frustrates, destroys, cultivates, punctuates and irrigates these selfings, these straightbacked letters, these ruined corinthian columns, all over my page: I, I, I.
The ‘desiring-I’ on the contrary is this unstable, unreasonable, urgency to be. It is always trying to make a break with these ghosts, these small, hungry, multitudes of selves, which try to enforce a cohesive bond with the past. As I write, it is, in other words, my difference to these past-versions of myself, these cartoons, that the diary machine reveals me to myself, not as my similarities to the selves of the past: the diary reveals my subjectivity as a lack.
What I feel then, so forcibly at this moment - and this, and this - is that my self is a potentiality to break with it all. An offensive, disruptive potential for complete revolt with myself. A desire and, yes! - a possibility to stream out into the night. To break into a cold wet field of nasturtiums. To see the round green wheels of their leaves with a single silver bead of dew at the centre of each just like I did as a child, and to feel that they are hiding something from me, as you felt that time you walked into a whispering classroom and everyone fell silent and then laughed.
And you wished then, as you do now, that you could suck the globe of dew from the hilt of a nasturtium leaf, turn purple, swell up big as a balloon and float away. Or even just to lie down among them; arrange your head under the liquorice scented leaves so their round, green wheels are above you like cocktail umbrellas, and you are the cocktail.
by Firas Ibrahim
15 of Jan 2025
“Send me an earthquake… or hand me a grenade”
My mother used to say she never missed having a sister because she had Fatima. So, we always called her Aunt Fatima. In turn, she treated us like her own children. When I was unwell, she turned up at our door with a plate of my favourite freshly baked spinach pies. She was mostly known for two things: her kind and generous heart, and her sharp tongue, which always got her into trouble, but she never cared.
I hadn’t spoken to Aunt Fatima for a while. She never owned a mobile phone, so we could only talk on WhatsApp using her daughter’s. The calls became few and far between when her daughter’s family moved to the city of Homs a couple of years ago. So, when a friend from our neighbourhood mentioned that he saw Fatima’s grandchildren on her balcony, I decided to ring her daughter, Samia, straight away.
Fatima told me about the events of the past two days. Her daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren arrived at her flat in the middle of the night. Each parent was carrying a sleepy child. They came in, laid the kids on a prepared mattress in the bedroom.
Samia and her husband had just put the children to bed and were sitting listening to the news in their living room when their next-door neighbour who was part of the Sunni sect, rapped on their door and alerted them. An extremist Sunni group was in the neighbourhood attacking Alawites. The family had just enough time to get in the car and drive to her mother’s flat in Lattakia.
When they arrived, everyone was exhausted and went straight to bed. But a couple hours later, Samia woke her mother. Something was wrong with Samia’s husband. Since the fall of the government and the loss of his job, the poor man had already been under immense pressure to ensure his family had enough food. Fleeing in the middle of the night seemed to be the last straw. He woke up struggling to breathe, and he thought he was having a heart attack.
“Usually, you could call the ambulance; failing that, all you’d have needed was to knock on your neighbours and all would be looked after” Fatima said.
“So, what did you do” I asked.
Fatima gave a long sigh before she responded:
“Nothing”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Son, in daylight, everyone talks of unity, and when darkness falls, everyone is out for themselves. We hear gunshots, thugs in balaclavas knock on doors, and armed groups walk through our streets and stop people. So, after sunset, we just lock our doors and stay in.”
“Couldn’t you ask the neighbours to help?”
“I couldn’t ask them when I know they are as terrified to get out as we are.”
“How is he now?”
“He is fine. We sat with him until dawn when he seemed to calm down.”
“Sorry.”
I heard the word come out of my mouth; I felt how hollow it was. I asked Aunt Fatima if there was anything I could do.
“Send me an earthquake, that would kill us all instantly," she said with cold finality in her voice, “or hand me a grenade.”
END.