When I was a toddler, I told my mum that I wanted to ‘paint the flowers’. I didn’t mean I wanted to scrawl petals in childish brush strokes. I wanted to paint the actual flowers in our garden. I thought that they were so beautiful that some unseen artist must be sneaking into the garden at night and colouring them in.
Needless to say, my fascination with nature started early on. I credit my mum, a prolific gardener, with nurturing it. Thanks to her influence, I’ve chosen to spend much of my adult life working to protect the natural world and, when it comes to my writing, flowers continue to be a very fruitful muse. It makes sense, then, that my first novel is about a woman who is deeply in love with a flowering tree.
As early readers of SEND FLOWERS might recall, Fifi, my protagonist, also wanted to paint the flowers as a child. Yet, unlike me, her emotional connection to the natural world is severed by grief. It isn’t until a houseplant appears on her doorstep that she begins rekindling her relationship with nature, part of which comes from making peace with the sensitivity that allowed her to care so much about the earth in the first place.
Fifi’s sensitivity is at the heart of SEND FLOWERS, or what artist Lora Matis calls ‘radical softness.’ Back in my Tumblr era, I was fascinated by Matis’s work, in particular a series of images that visualised the phrase, ‘radical softness as a weapon.’ In an interview, Matis said, ‘radical softness is the idea that unapologetically sharing your emotions is a political move and a way to combat the societal idea that feelings are a sign of weakness.’
I’ve always been a deeply emotional person – as anyone who attended my Norwich book launch can tell you (I cried a lot). For a long time, my big feelings weren’t something I was proud of. I used to think that to be taken seriously, I needed to be stoic, unflappable, even unfeeling. I needed to mirror masculinity. I have observed women in male-dominated fields who do this and I do not begrudge them for it – sometimes it’s the only way to get ahead. But I couldn’t tone down my emotionality if I tried. And what I have come to realise is that my sensitivity, and Fifi’s, has value.
I learned this in a rather unusual way. In 2016, I was working for Greenpeace on the campaign to ban fracking, staging a series of interventions in Lancashire which was, at the time, the industry’s battleground. During one such intervention, I found myself in a field with Emma and Sophie Thompson, filming The Frack Free Bake Off – a solar-powered spoof of Britain’s favourite TV show. The field in question had been leased to Cuadrilla, a gas company that was preparing to drill there, and was under injunction, making it illegal to enter. Meanwhile, ministers were lobbying to overrule the local council’s decision to reject Cuadrilla’s planning application. Democracy was at stake – not to mention the environment.
As the art director, I was tasked with recreating the Bake Off set, from the kitsch tablecloths to the floral bunting. When it comes to civil disobedience, it was as soft as it gets. The Frack Free Bake Off was disarming by design, poking fun at the establishment and getting the public on side. Yes, we’d broken the injunction, but we’d done so to bake with Nanny McPhee. It was wholesome. So much so that, when the police showed up, they were amused. Yet what happened next was anything but.
Just as the smell of freshly baked cakes drifted across the tranquil Lancashire countryside, a tractor appeared on the horizon. It was the farmer who owned the field. He’d faced years of peaceful protests and that day, something about the whole gingham-infused affair made him snap. He raced towards us towing a slurry tank filled to the brim with toxic cow manure. Yet surely, however infuriating our presence, no one would actually spray a group of whisk-wielding strangers with poo?
But he did. He sprayed it everywhere. Some activists stood in front of the shit chute with their arms splayed, daring him to continue. And what did I do? I cried. Well, actually, I had a panic attack. There was something about his bright red face atop that tractor that terrified me. He was senseless with rage. And the smell! Early readers will recognise this from the novel, too. That farmer, and my reaction to him, had such an impact on me that it kicked-started my own exploration of what it means to be ‘radically soft.’ Both as a means to soothe myself (at the time, I was extremely embarrassed) and to figure out what I, as a highly sensitive person, can offer the climate movement.
As Matis says, softness is a weapon in a world that glorifies violence. This is especially apt when we consider violence as a patriarchal tool – one that is currently being wielded over the world to exert control. Violence is the antithesis of empathy. It requires you to dehumanise your victim in order to condone your behaviour – much in the way the farmer did when he chose to spray us with shit. In this time of relentless upheaval, it is an easy trap to fall into. Empathy takes work. It is exhausting. Compassion fatigue is real. Yet I now consider softness as part of an activist ecosystem that creates effective movements for change.
Whilst non-violent direct action is a core value in many activist spaces, radical softness is different in that it recognises the inherent value of emotionality. In a society where the ‘alpha male’ is reasserting himself, softness is both an act of defiance and a tool. For the more we acknowledge and make space for emotion in activist spaces, the more sustainable and ultimately more human our response to the challenges we face. And when our actions are rooted in humanity, we reach hearts as well as minds. That, I decided, is what I brought to the table. But my ability to do that is not by chance.
In the ten years since Matis did numbers on Tumblr, they have reflected on ‘the privilege of emotional vulnerability,’ deepening their understanding of what it means to be soft in an unjust world. ‘As a white artist,’ they say, ‘it is essential for me to recognize that non-white people don’t get as much room to be emotionally vulnerable, and that ideas of “softness” are used to further brutalize and oppress non-white people.’ In SEND FLOWERS, I reflect that to be soft, you need to be safe. Fifi doesn’t allow her own vulnerability until she is part of a community that accepts her. Even then, she is a white woman, making safety more accessible to her than most. Achieving safety and softness for all is part of a much wider effort to address the injustices that enable machismo – that is, the white capitalist patriarchy. It is at the intersection of race and gender politics, as all inequalities are. For any act to be truly radical, it must work towards untangling a system that makes something as fundamentally human as emotion an inequitable liability, instead of a strength.
Flowers have a long history as activist symbols, from the anti-Vietnam war movement to the Suffragettes. Flowers are soft and unruly, showing up the violence and rigidity of oppressive systems. Although I never fulfilled my childhood ambition of painting them, I write about flowers to contribute to this protest tradition, in the hope that one day, we might all be able to live as flowers do – soft, unruly, and free.
Send Flowers by Emily Buchanan is available for purchase here.