Kate Evans is an artist, cartoonist, writer, activist and a
mother. We sat down with her on International Woman's Day to discuss her recent book, Red Rosa: A Graphic
Biography of Rosa Luxemburg and her other works.
Kate: I prefer phone interviews ‘cause email interviews
actually take longer, cause there’s a big long load of questions and 45 minutes
later you’re still typing. But this is good because I can tidy my studio at the
same time.
Describe a day in the
life of Kate Evans, artist, cartoonist, writer, activist and mother.
[Laughs] I don’t know where the activism comes in on a daily
basis.
Does it come through
your art?
I try and be in touch with actual activism, like at the
moment we’re planning the construction of some secret surprise for when Trump
comes to town, an art based secret surprise, nothing too subversive. But, to be
honest, mainly life revolves around the school run.
Oh really?
Well that’s how the day revolves: getting the kids to
school; getting the kids from school. It doesn’t seem very activist-y anymore,
much more suburban housewife really.
I love that though. It
really inspires me how you’re able to create your own art and have a family
life as well.
I always had assumed that the point you have children you
stop doing your own thing or be your own thing. I am in a partnership with
someone who is – I don’t think the word should be supportive when it’s their
kids too. I am in an equal partnership with someone else, that obviously makes
it more possible for me.
I do have to remember that I am creating actual human beings
who will be future members of the society, active in their own way and so that
in itself is a creative and important act. Actually, I’ve learnt a hell of a
lot more about politics and about conflict resolution and about co-operation as
a parent than back in the days when I lived in a tree.
That’s so great to
hear.
Only by learning it the hard way, because everything I did
was wrong.
How do you mean?
Childhood discipline and how we relate to and support mothers
with new babies is a hugely political issue and it’s one that polarises people
in quite predictable ways. Most aspects of your life you can apply a
Marxian/Hegelian Dialectic and I’m hoping for a huge leap forward, a synthesis,
in the way that we support mothers and babies and we can get around some of the
particularly boring parenting lifestyle divisions and find new way of
supporting mums to be able to support the new generation.
Is that why you
decided to create a choose-your-own-adventure book for pregnancy and
motherhood?
Yes! I’m talking about attachment parenting. My first book, The Food of Love, is one that explains
how to make breastfeeding work but more than that, it explains that it’s hard
because there’s more than one way of parenting right. People are stuck in this
“my way is good, your way is bad” dualism and I was trying to overcome that by
writing something that is genuinely non-judgemental and supportive, but at the
same time promoting attachment parenting and people having responsive parenting
with their children. Those two are not always the same thing because not every
child will respond the same way.
Bump: How to Make,
Grow and Birth a Baby is specifically around pregnancy and birth, so I was
The politics in Bump
are about interventions in births and about how few of them are evidence based
or supported and that’s shocking. It was a real eye-opener. I didn’t know at
the point I started the research that there is so much evidence that is so
unequivocal for things like continuous foetal monitoring, which doesn’t improve
the outcome for mothers and babies so why is it being done? That’s quite
stunning really, the medicalisation of birth.
I was speaking to someone yesterday and she said that at the
point she gave birth, in the stirrups and partly anaesthetised, she said she
remembered her mother’s story of her birth and she thought “how have I ended up
in the same situation as my mother did?” Now I’m not saying an assisted birth
was not right for that baby, but it’s the fact that she didn’t feel like it’s a
decision she’d arrived at. She didn’t feel empowered in that situation. It’s
only becoming for political with the privatisation of the NHS which is shutting
down independent midwives.
I think that’s
heartbreaking. The privatisation of the NHS affects everyone: pregnant women,
the young, the elderly.
You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.
Exactly. WoW Fest’s
first event is a Mayday parade and rally through the streets of Liverpool
protesting the fact that there has been cuts and there are so many services
that have been axed. What was the most important thing you have protested about
in your opinion?
That’s an interesting question. Oh god, it’s been a while. I
didn’t even make it to the NHS march at the weekend, it’s that bad. I suppose
my involvement in Climate Camp which was a while ago, we’re talking 10 years
ago, but anything that covers climate change which is really at the heart of
the issue.
There are a lot of ways of being active. Every time you make
connections, create community and get involved on a local level, you’re also
changing the world as well as when you’re hanging banners and throwing yourself
in front of bulldozers. Everything I’ve ever got arrested for or shouted on the
streets for is still happening. I’m now at a point in my life where I can say
“well, I told them not to do that 20 years ago, but did they listen?”
Do you think there’s
still need to protest?
Hang on. Let’s look out the window and have a look at the
storms and the droughts and floods. The world hasn’t got any better in my adult
lifetime. The same issues are still at the forefront, only more so. We’re
seeing more inequality of wealth. Recently I was involved with refugees and
that’s super important. I don’t know why I thought I hadn’t been involved with
any activism recently. I took a trip to The Jungle and wrote a cartoon book
about it. It’s quite a big thing. Now I’m trying to get involved with refugee
support within the UK because that’s so important and a lot more compatible
with raising a family at the same time.
I read Threads, the
cartoon you did about The Jungle that you published through crowdfunding.
That’s the first blog post. I crowdfunded a print run of
15,000 copies of that: 12,000 went out to be sold for refugee support, but I
don’t know what happened to the other 3,000 copies. I must still have a box of
them upstairs. Hopefully, that will have raised up to £24,000 for refugee
action, but I have no way of knowing. That’s up to 70% off. I went back to The
Jungle two more times after that, then I came back and wrote a book – well, it
kind of wrote itself – and I got a book deal and I spend from March, exactly a
year ago, to New Year’s Eve at my desk drawing. I finished that book and it’s
going to be printed next week. That’s going to be out on 3rd June.
Did you find that
experience harrowing in any way?
Massively! It was extremely traumatising. But it’s not you
it’s happening to, it’s the individuals and the families that you meet. Their
stuck in this horrendous situation and you can’t do the one thing which they
actually require, which is to get them over to the UK so they can be reunited
with their relatives, or to start their life in the way they want to with their
perfectly valid asylum claim because they’ve been working for the British army
and that’s why they were targeted in the first place. You can’t do the thing
that they need so you feel so helpless.
That’s the one good thing about doing the comics, is that
you come back and someone asks what it was like and you can’t begin to tell
them because you’ve witnessed these people going through the emotional mangle
and coming out the other side. But by drawing the comic you can make it
accessible and believable. It’s like when someone makes a film about it, or
that series of refugees filming their own journeys which was very moving and
personal, but I couldn’t go over to the Jungle and make a film. That would be
intrusive and unpleasant.
I can reconstruct my own memories. There was a point where
we were filming the British Border Police assaulting this young lad, dragging
him off at the ferry port in Dunkirk, and they made me delete the images off my
phone. But that’s okay, because I have another way of capturing those images,
they can’t delete it off my eyeballs. You can make me delete the photos but the
images are still going to get out there.
Last question, our
theme for this year is revolution so what does revolution means to you?
In my work on Rosa Luxemburg and the representations I was
making of the German revolution, there is the classic socialist ideal of “we
rise, we seize power, and we get massively confused and betrayed by our own
side.” I got a new appreciation of socialism through working on it because I
haven’t ever realised the scale and the ambition of the socialist project and
that was an eye-opener and enlivening that people did as much as they did.
Luxemburg had an interesting take on revolution and how
fundamentally democratic she was about it. She said “history is not making
things easy for us. A bourgeois revolution could simply overthrow the official
power and replace it with a couple of new men. We must work from the bottom to
the top. We can only come to power with the clear and explicit will of the
great majority of the politarian masses. Who knows how long that will take?”
I love her. She wasn’t about dictatorship or freedom of the
press or any of that. She would have been appalled with what happened in the
name of revolution, Stalin and all of that. I think the key to creating social
change is creating community and probably, to go back to the midwifery, the key
to that is continuity of care. What I would like to see is the social structure
in society which changed the way our housing is supplied create genuine
communities and change the way care is provided and schooling is delivered so
that we actually get to know people, and get to know them well. If that were to
happen, I think we’d have a much more resilient society. That would be the
revolution I would like to see. Obviously no one is President of the World yet,
so we haven’t been able to put this into practice, but I think it’s a clearer,
more positive and more achievable idea than the idea that we kick out the rich
people, the poor people become rich and it’s all okay. That’s my idea of
revolution and it means I can start it in the school playground.
Check out our other events here for #WoWFest17
No comments:
Post a Comment