I’m finally home! Back in our lovely little London flat after what seems like many months away. And I suppose if you count two months as many, then it has been. The past few weeks in Bolivia and Colombia could be described in myriad ways — unique, breathtaking, awe-inspiring, exhausting, stomach-turning, exhilarating, emotional, eye-opening…
Bolivia in particular was a world of extremes. Rich and poor, high and low, sick and well. La Paz was so dry that it cracked our lips and made our noses bleed. The mountains were jagged and dusty and the sounds of cars and the smell of petrol permeated every corner of the day. But it was also full of colour and kindness and countless Cholitas in their big skirts and top hats selling fruit as fresh as you could ever find.
Just two and a half hours away was Los Jungas. Up a winding road out of the city, over the mountains and through what felt like a portal of mist into an opposite world of humidity and life. Trees and rivers and butterflies and birds. Insects that give you bites in every shape, size, and itchiness. In La Paz, your head feels light from the altitude (3600m!), but in the jungle, you get a little drunk on thick air and bananas that taste like passionfruit.
Putting all these poles into even starker relief was the book that I had brought along with me — Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein (of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine fame).
At the beginning of last month, I was struck by an overwhelming feeling that I was living in some kind of alternate reality. One where things were not at all as they seemed. It was the run-up to a referendum in Australia that would vote on whether to change the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice in Parliament. A voice for the original custodians of the land Australia is built upon. A voice for the people who, since 1788, have had their land, rights, health, freedom, children, culture, and language taken from them, with not all that much in return.
It just seemed like a given to me — like the most obvious thing in the world that the Australian people would vote a big fat yes for this. And looking through my social media feeds, it seemed like everyone I follow felt the same. And yet October 14th came and went and with it the realisation that the algorithm was well and truly fucking with me. The result was 60% No. A fact that sent me over a very tearful edge and which, aside from the disappointment and heartbreak and embarrassment of it all, made me acutely aware of the impermeable bubble that I appear to be living in.
Around the same time, I noticed that Naomi Klein was doing the rounds of my regular podcasts and platforms. Her new book came out in September, and listening to her speak about it made me feel like I wasn’t the only one doing a double-take on the expectations versus realities unfolding around us.
The book — which I finished a few days ago and would highly recommend — was written in response to Klein being continually confused with another outspoken, brunette, Jewish Naomi: Naomi Wolf.
Wolf rose to fame in the 90s when she published The Beauty Myth, a book about the powerful, patriarchal forces that keep women focused on their appearances and adhering to societal standards of beauty, rather than on the more important stuff that men get to keep hold of. But while Wolf started her career championing women’s empowerment and bodily autonomy, she has more recently metamorphosed into an anti-vax, conspiracy theorist, right-wing media regular. You can perhaps see why this would be a bit of a concern for Naomi Klein who has built her career on just the opposite.
“The appearance of one’s doppelganger is almost always chaotic, stressful, and paranoia-inducing,” Klein writes, “and the person encountering their double is invariably pushed to their limits by the frustration and uncanniness of it all.”
This line struck me because earlier this year, around May or June, I came face to face with my own doppelganger. It was at a pub on Battersea Park Road, her name was Annabel, she had blonde hair, ordered the same drink as I did, and was wearing a jacket that looked just like the one I had bought less than an hour before.
The difference between my doppelganger and Naomi’s is that mine didn’t tout any of the questionable rhetoric that Klein’s continues to. Other Annabel and I had a lot in common. But as day turned to night and we ended up at an Indian restaurant on Wandsworth High Street, some familiarities became quite confronting. Frustrating, even. As Other Annabel told her partner to use a napkin or interrupted him when his stories were a little too meandering, I felt like the universe was trying to teach me a lesson or offer me an opportunity to change some of my more irritating behaviours.
But doppelgangers, Klein goes on to say, are not only forms of torment. “For centuries, doubles have been understood as warnings or harbingers,” she says. “When reality starts doubling, refracting off itself, it often means that something important is being ignored or denied — a part of ourselves and our world we do not want to see — and that further danger awaits if the warning is not heeded.”
So, using the red thread of the doppelganger, Klein covers everything from anti-vax sentiment and the spread of medical misinformation to the unexpected buddy-up of the far-right and your local wellness guru. She speaks of being the mother of a child with autism, Isreal and Palestine, the co-option of terms and symbols of oppression, and health individualism’s long and bloody history in fascist regimes. And that’s not even everything!
All these doppelgangers and far-rights and far-lefts and mirror images had me noticing so many uncanny little reflections and parallels on my travels. Like on the salt flats — nature’s mirror, according to Google. One of the most breathtaking and unique landscapes that has existed for 250 million years when tectonic plates brought the bottom of the ocean up to a 3,700-metre plateau.
A little while ago I went to an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery with my friend Margaux. There was a film playing called Flying with Aerocene Pacha and it told the story of the Indigenous people fighting to protect the salt flats from lithium mining. The film made me realise that what seemed like the future of green energy in Europe is, in a very neo-colonial sleight of hand, actually destroying a landscape that we can’t often see. So stepping onto these endless plains of ancient salt, known to some as the breast milk of Tunupa volcano and to others as a cash crop for the future, I was awe-struck by how long they had been there, and sad at how short a time it could take to dig them up.
At the end of our tour of the flats, our guide took us to a spot where water had pooled and the sky and our bodies were reflected beneath us. He took a video of us all walking in a line, rotating the camera as we moved and flipping the ground to where the sky should be.
Looking back at it now — having spent the past week ruminating on Naomi Klein’s Mirror World — it makes me think that we could all do with taking a step closer to our reflections and learning from the things we don’t like so much about them. Step through the glass, move towards the middle, pop the bubbles, realise what good things we have around us, and try our hardest not to spoil them.
I’m not really sure if any of this makes much sense. Maybe I am out of practice.
See you in the next one,
Annabel
Best yet my dear.