EThere is no grace period – neither in D Hunter’s book nor in his life. The worst comes at the beginning, in the book with trigger warning. The first text is about Hunter’s grandfather. His father broke his bones and his great-grandfather whipped his wife. Until the grandfather, when he was 15, killed his father and made himself the head of the family, which belonged to the traveling people of the Irish Travelers and finally settled in the north of England. Later, this grandfather raped his own daughter, Hunter’s mother. And him, Hunter, when he was a child, hundreds of nights, alone and with other men. The text is interrupted several times by the lists that Hunter ran through in his head during those nights. “Arsenal: John Lukic, Lee Dixon, Nigel Winterburn . . .” – Players of the football clubs of the First Division, that’s what the Premier League was called back then, in the eighties.
Most of the lyrics in Hunter’s “On Us” tell about a person from his past and his relationship with her. From them emerges, little by little, a picture of his history. Hunter was born in northern England in 1979 or 1980 to a mother of thirteen who moved to Nottingham with her children when he was ten to escape Hunter’s grandfather. But soon she, herself a prostitute, sells her son’s body. He provides for the drug-addicted mother and his sisters through sex work and as a drug courier. He lives in homes and on the streets, is a drug addict and criminal, repeatedly experiences blatant violence, exercises it, is imprisoned and at the age of 25 he goes to a psychiatric ward. There he begins a relationship with a nurse who sexually exploits him – and, even after his release from the clinic, supports him in getting clean, finding a new job, studying. Hunter forms connections with people who support him when flashbacks catch up with him or he relapses. He now lives in Manchester with his partner and child. He is an author and educator and is writing his doctoral thesis on working-class solidarity and what makes it difficult.
Class analysis and class struggle
His book is also about the cohesion in the working class – in its poorest part – about how it is often painfully missing, but can also be great. In his texts, Hunter explores biographical issues theoretically and allows theories to become biographically specific. In a footnote-loaded, yet very readable introduction, he describes his approach as “autoethnography”. He uses his personal experiences as a “springboard” to analyze broader conditions and dynamics in British society, and in particular the poor. He is influenced by approaches of queer theory, critical whiteness research and the sociological class analysis of Pierre Bourdieu.
However, as the book progresses, Hunter’s writings are also academically armed tools of class struggle and political activism, including for the abolition of state institutions such as police, prisons, and the criminal justice system, and for “transformative justice” practices in dealings with acts of violence. In such procedures, a self-organized group supports a perpetrator in dealing with his behavior and its consequences for the victim. His perspective guides the process, which should lead to insight and reparation and to long-term changes, both individually and socially.
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