The final chapter of Davina Quinlivan’s memoir Possessions is titled ‘The Future Of Learning’, consistent with the academic setting of most of the previous chapters. Here, she suggests there’s only a few hundred people like her – British women of colour working as lecturers – in the world, relative to two million or so middle-aged white male professors. Those numbers might not fully stand up, though it’s worth adding that in this scenario Quinlivan is also a hologram, her human form having long departed.
If this doesn’t sound terribly like a memoir to you, such is the case for large swathes of Possessions in general. We read at length how the pandemic rendered Quinlivan’s teaching practise impersonal and distant to the point of atrophy, knowledge listlessly disseminated via a thousand awkward video meetings. It certainly proves pivotal in her life and subsequent career choices, but the retelling, which jumps between past and present tense, is decidedly diaristic. Not that that’s an issue in itself, and Quinlivan eclipses the spectre of navelgazing with extensive bouts of dreamstate prose in which various flora and fauna (antlers and betel nuts are repeat motifs) form part of an allegorical tapestry referencing non-Western ancestry, the career ladder, academia as a marketable brand and other concerns.
The early part of Possessions, where Quinlivan recalls her youth in Southall as a child of Anglo-Burmese parents before embarking on a PhD and being taught by influential feminist philosopher Luce Irigiray, is the book at its most accessible (and memoir-like), but the more feverish, polemical sections for which it sets the stall are an oblique pleasure too. Even if you’ve been nowhere near a university in decades, or maybe ever.