Kaiya Waerea (she/her)
@kaiyawaerea | kaiyawaerea.com
Kaiya Waerea (she/her, Ngāti Kahungunu) is a chronically ill writer and designer from Aotearoa, now living in London UK. Her research is concerned with knowledge produced through marginalisation, particularly as it is produced through moving through this world in a disabled and indigenous body. Kaiya is gluten-intolerant, (mostly) vegetarian, and prefers to eat with others.
Her writing has been featured in Counter Signals 5: Systems and their Discontents (forthcoming), Errant Journal: Learning from our Ancestors, AIGA Eye on Design, Ache Magazine, Sick Magazine, DreamsTimesFree and others. Kaiya co-runs feminist press Sticky Fingers Publishing and teaches on the Graphic Design programme at Camberwell University of the Arts London.
6th June
by Kaiya Waerea
by Kaiya Waerea
This morning I woke late, my bones set so stiffly that for a while I thought I wasn’t going to ever get up again. I did, and luckily wasn’t running so late that I would miss my first student this morning. There was no coffee on, so I just scoffed a bowl of cornflakes, got dressed, and ordered a taxi.
I get taxis paid for through Access to Work, to support my travelling to and from the University. There are a few cabbies who pick me up regularly, but this wasn’t one of them, and he complained in bafflement about the chaos of Peckham Road while I smiled placatingly from the back. He dropped me off and I went straight to the cafe in South London Gallery called South London Louie to get an oat flat white to take away, please. Passing through the barriers into Camberwell UAL, I grabbed a bottle of water too, and made it into the studios with five minutes to spare before my first assessment tutorial.
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Now, the university canteen is to be avoided at all costs. It is overpriced, the dishes overcomplicated, and it is all generally tasteless. On offer is always a soup, a veggie option which today is a vegetable pasta bake, a meat option which today is a pork burger, and then always always always chicken thigh and chips. The sheer quantity of chicken that gets served in this canteen is obscene, even if you like meat. Some days the smell of it is so pungent through the ground floor that it makes me nauseous. There is also a fridge with a few bits, including small packs of sushi that while often being the only gluten free option are upwards of £7.
Today, with my lunch bag full of yesterday's uneaten snacks, I went for soup and chips. The soup was suspiciously just called ‘mixed vegetable’, red in colour and didn’t taste of much. J got his normal egg mayo sandwich and some lentil crisps, and A got the chicken thigh. Behind where you are served is what we call the flavour station, because it contains the only things that will give your lunch any flavour at all: salt, pepper, ketchup, mayonnaise, balsamic vinegar. Occasionally they have sesame seeds and chilli flakes there too, but today there isn’t even black pepper.
After eating, the three of us walk next door back to South London Louie and J and I get coffee. J gets his morning coffee across the road at Toad, and then if we go for second coffees at lunch – which, whenever we are both in, we always do – then we always go here. A comes for the walk because it is the only time we leave campus all day, and in the colder months this is the only time we see any daylight.
For a while the three of us tried to run a lunch club, where we would each take turns cooking for all of us. After the first day of this, where J made a vegetable frittata and salad, we decided it should just be every friday. One thing after another got in the way, and we only ended up doing it once each – I made a vegetable pie, and A made black bean tacos – and we seem to have given up. Who knows though, maybe next term.
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The afternoon drags but at around 6pm A and I get a cab to the Ivy House in Nunhead. The first Tuesday of every month Sticky Fingers Publishing screens a film here. It is a brilliant pub, a co-operative, and about as inclusive as a pub can be. On arriving however I see that their free tea and coffee station has gone, which is a great shame as I was banking on a Clippers instant with oat milk to get me perked up for the evening. Sometime during the 45 mins it takes for us and the entire Ivy House staff to get the sound system working, I order a gluten-free Vegetariana pizza and a pint of lemonade. The pizza comes about twenty minutes into the film which couldn’t be more perfect timing. Tonight we showed Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and I absolutely loved it. The pizza was better than usual too, more of all the toppings, and I doused it in chilli oil as I chomped on it in the dark.
S was there with some friends, and he got a taxi home with me afterwards. I didn’t have anything else to eat when I got in, I just had a shower and got straight into bed, grateful to not need to get up early the next morning.