Author: mascara

A History of What I’ll Become 

By Jill Jones 

ISBN: 978-1-76080-121-2

University of Western Australia Press

Reviewed by ERIN McFAYDEN

Jill Jones’s A History of What I’ll Become practices profusion: formally, across its 85 interlocking poems and reams of reference, and affectively, in its oscillation between deep delight and an equally profound sense of frustration — even with, amongst other things, its own project. In ‘Oh Venus, That Zenith,’ day breaks across the persona: 

Oh Venus I don’t forget you
  in the spread
of tinted morning, the grids
I’ve wandered far in circles
  around your heights
without shoes or sensibilities
        I don’t forget you
and how I’ve climbed
into another balance, cusp
    flexure, fold
another arc and then
another
(23)

That a tinted morning might come over the poem as a ‘spread’ is fitting. We might hear, in these lines, echoes of ‘the spread’ as it’s used as a technical term in debate: a swelling-up of words in excess of grammar, and sometimes of meaning. The novelist Ben Lerner recently brought the phenomenon of ‘the spread’ to the attention of us non-debaters, claiming in The Topeka School that this glamorous (or clamorous) mode of speech characterises much ‘official’ language in contemporary life: ‘these types of disclosure were designed to conceal…even before the twenty-four hour news cycle, Twitter stems, algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the DDoS attack, Americans were getting ‘spread’ in their daily lives’ [1]. Jones’s poems aren’t trying to conceal, so much, but nevertheless their constant movements through the folds and arcs of language are always tailed by a sense of something within this excess evading us, slipping away just as the shifting light breaks over it. All this profusion might not lead us to conclusions, or any fixed answers, that is. 

An interest in the fragment is Jones’s launch point into these twin senses of proliferation and loss. The collection opens with a series of epigraphs drawn from Shelley, H.D., Stein and Sappho. Sappho, especially, has been a long-standing interest for Jones, who has noted in interview that she’d ‘like to hear the ancient Greek metres and how her poems worked whole, rather than as fragments…’ [2]. ‘As Long As You Need / Fragments’ pieces together ‘a series of mistranslations, misunderstandings, or loose versions of several fragments from Sappho,’ and is Jones’s most direct engagement with her throughout the collection. One thing that the poem is, is a paean to desire: 

Remember our burlesque hearts
and heads relaxing on sweaty breasts
in Sydney’s sun ecstasy
in its dusk-pink twinky hours. 

Remember making our way
Among shadowy electro-shapes
no party too hot…no dance
where we were absent.
(60)

Jones remixes Sappho, (mis)translating her for contemporary Sydney, with its little resolute pockets of queerness. The poem doesn’t pretend towards preservation of literary-historical artefact. Nor, really, does it attempt to make Sappho’s fragments whole in some static way, or ‘complete’ in the sense of being finished. Rather, Jones revels in the generative potential of the gap, the trap-doors of language and of imagination that can be opened in Sappho’s fragments: 

Still…to the ends of the earth
Desires! all of them older
all of them younger all now
still lifting above the roof. 

…in fabulous style…just like
honey…for as long
as you need…with these
two arms…
(61)

These ellipses feel like they might have something of the same burlesque about them that hearts do, earlier in the poem: so many bright possibilities spangling across our minds at once. In this sense, A History of What I’ll Become isn’t an archival project in the simple sense of functioning as a record. It even goes further, I think, than art critic Hal Foster’s ‘archival art,’ which makes its source material ‘disturbed or detourné…obscure, retrieved in a gesture of alternative knowledge or counter-memory.’[3]. Rather than just reconfiguring historical narratives, Jones writes a way of looking toward (perhaps, desiring) possible futures that emerge from the ruptures, gaps, and incoherences — as much as from the intelligible material — of various pasts. 

These pasts could be literary-historical, as in references to Sappho and a host of other, largely European and US, poets. They could also be distinctly Australian, or distinctly of Sydney, and autobiographical. Certainly the middle section of the collection is centred on a Sydney recalled both too foggily and too vividly: a Sydney the site of disappointment, decay, or plain grossness. One of the collection’s rare prose poems, ‘All That Shudder,’ sees the speaker returning to the empty set of their youth: 

‘That year, I went back to the city alone, me and all my noisy solitude. Everyone’s gone now. I remember the way we’d gossip stories into night, along those roads, Glebe Point Road, Darlinghurst Road. Or walk to the harbour, listen to the wharves, what’s left of them…

…I remember helping another girl throw up, just here, in another century after a night nearby with booming walls, all of that survival in tune with a kiss, names and numbers on drink coasters, promises as opposed to meanings, too many women not watching you.’
(53)

The deflation of revisiting this personal history is palpable. Jones’s persona herself doesn’t even get to throw up her discomfort; she just has to watch somebody else get their difficult feelings out. Many of these Sydney poems call back to Jones’s earlier work, including Screens Jets Heaven (2002) with its ‘Marrickville Sonnet,’ and the suburban or domestic scenes of The Beautiful Anxiety (2014) and Viva The Real (2018), which work in the same mode and with the same surrounding materials, even where particular place names aren’t mentioned. In this way, Jones engages with pieces of her own writerly past, as much as with an extra-textual personal history. 

So much for this past, then — what about the future, as Jones writes it? For one thing, it’s still the source of an anxiety: Jones writes into the frustration attending encounters with patriarchal or homophobic oppression that doesn’t look like dropping off anytime soon, as well as with the seeming inevitability of climate collapse. How, these poems ask, can we write towards a progressive future in good faith, given the conditions of our present? As with her examinations of Sydney, this frustration has long permeated Jones’s work. In Viva The Real’s ‘Small Things,’ for example, she asks that ‘instead of a dove-grey rapture,’ her reader ‘wake up and arrange your resistance’ [4]. The limits against which a lyric voice breaks impose themselves, still, in A History of What I’ll Become’s ‘Patience Without Virtue’:

Everyone loves the female voice.
Am I forgiven for having one?
I wait patiently, hoping it’s only
to do with simple flowers. It never is. 

I dissent again. The moon goes as it came. (31)

The moon is immune — like the myriad political failures toward which we might also address our lyric plaint — even to a poetry so obsessively interested in it. And, yet, while Jones does scrutinise her own efforts to write a future from fragments of the past and present, the collection doesn’t culminate in any sort of disavowal of poetry. It’s much too joyful in its abundance, its word-play, its feeling and its cleverness for that.

Interested as Jones is in the form of the lyric fragment, and in a lyric lineage from Dickinson through to contemporary phenomenological poets like Vahni Capildeo via John Ashbery, the sense of lyric impulse as ultimately bound up with something hidden, inaccessible, or ineffable could well be at play here. Jones’s refusal of closure is well noted [5], and I want to extend this commentary by suggesting that the irreconcilability of Jones’s work to easy conclusions is a feature of the lyric mode she writes, reads, and thinks in. In this mode, as Alphonse de Lamartine has it in one of Jones’s epigraphs, 

The real is narrow,
the possible is immense…

…and irreducible to its signs, lush as they may be in this work. If Jones refuses conclusions, transcendental proclamations, or delivery of a firm futuristic vision, she does so with reverence to the past and utter delight in the sense(s) of the present(s). There’s something we can’t quite grasp at the centre of this work, but so much flickering light to fold through ourselves in its surface.

Notes

1. Ben Lerner, The Topeka School (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Girroux, 2019), p. 39. 
2. Jill Jones, ‘Jill Jones is Poet of the Month,’ interview in The Australian Book Review no. 382, June-July 2016. 
3. Hal Foster, ‘The Archival Impulse,’ October vol. 110, Autumn 2004, p. 4. 
4. Jill Jones, ‘Small Things,’ in Viva The Real (Brisbane: UQP, 2018). 
5.  See, for example, Aidan Coleman, ‘Let a Thousand Errors Bloom,’ Sydney Review of Books, July 6, 2020. 

 
ERIN McFAYDEN is a writer, researcher, and educator based on Gadigal land. Her work can be found in Artist Profile, Art + Australia, and The Cambridge Review of Books, amongst others.’

Change Machine

by Jaya Savige

UQP Press

ISBN 9780702262869

Reviewed by J. C. MASTERS

This is what happens when you binge
on beauty: eventually the orgy kills
you[.]
(‘The Roses of Heliogabalus’, 19)

If you’ve ever sat in on a literature class, at some point you may have heard someone mention Charles Baudelaire’s description of modernity from The Painter of Modern Life (Le peintre de la vie moderne,1863). His essays are often quoted when describing the transition that Europeans in the 19th century underwent, from functioning as a primarily agrarian society to one that depended on industry and embraced new technology built on principles of speed and transition. Baudelaire defined modernity, and the new sense of ‘being modern’, as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, (and) the contingent”, and suggested that instead of looking to the past for guidance, individuals should embrace the “transitory, fugitive element” of modernity.

Fast forward a little over 150 years later, and though we live in a very different world to the one he described, Baudelaire’s words are still appropriate for describing the sense of fleeting impermanence and rapid, unceasing change that our world tends to impress on its occupants. I am reminded of this when I first open Change Machine by Jaya Savige; from its opening to its conclusion; it is transformation of the self and world that carries Change Machine through to its end. The unevenness and dense patchwork of Savige’s poetry, spread across four chapters titled ‘Mean Time Between Failures’, ‘Biometrics’, ‘Hard Water’ and ‘There There’, results in a deliberately kaleidoscopic collection that depicts the subjective individual at the heart of the world’s flux. At times quietly reflective, and at other times wry and snarky, Change Machine is the story of a stone navigating an ocean; mired in sand but bent and smoothed by the waves outside its command.

Savige’s poetry chronicles the impact of various forces that determine the shape of individual experience. There are moments of both tranquility and motion, interspersed with a variety of referential signposts that assist in orienting the reader in space and time. Many of Savige’s references are specific to his own experience, though others who grew up in Australia in the 80s and 90s will recognise various cultural touchstones, such as his suggestion that ‘For a stack of platypus at the corner store,/Pac-Man was our minotaur’ (‘Études’, 18). Mentions of poetry, literature, art, science and history abound: ‘Rimbaud in Salatiga’ (7) borrows from T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) and begins: ‘This is how the world ends/with strange foliage, ficus and tamarinds’, while ‘a pissed-off Apollo, deciduous Daphne’ mix in ‘Wingsuit Lessons’ (87-89). References pulled from a Western cultural canon mix with modern Australia (‘I interrupt one of the Maroubra boys/to mock his neck tattoo of Ouroboros’ (‘Inferno’, 29), while poems such as ‘The Keeper’ (30) recount aspects of the years Savige spent in London and overseas. However, though the allusive signposts pile almost galette-like on top of each other, it feels like Savige does this intentionally (and as deliberate distraction) while the paradoxical permanence of memory eddies underneath, accentuated by winking jabs at himself and others:

‘The number of fools is infinite,’
          replied the man from Eccles Street,
          Augustine
          Ecclesiastes,
but not the famous bit about there being nothing new under the sun.
(‘Coloratura’, 94)

It is as though Savige is challenging the reader not to be carried away by his nods to NASCAR or James Joyce (‘the man from Eccles Street’ references Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Joyce’s Ulysses) but to ride the wave through to the moments of stillness. Closer to the end of his collection, ‘Coloratura’ lists a number of pop culture moments connected by semi-colons (‘Kylie’s hotpants; Dame Joan’s coloratura; Angus Young for mooning Illinois; Michael Hutchence’s death by autoerotic asphyxiation; [etc.]’) heavily struck through with a black line, suggesting the pieces that make up a life, though coloured by these moments and cultural memories, are not defined by them.

Change Machine is self-reflexive and playful. Savige is proficient and impish in his flirtations with language, and uses cultural markers as entry points into a poem such as the delightfully named ‘Bach to the Fuchsia’. His musing on childhood favourite The NeverEnding Story in ‘The Nothing’ uses the movie’s idea of the creeping, all-encompassing Nothing to describe the sense of alienation that has become attached to modern life as perhaps its most infamous condition:

Compared to the Nothing that is nowhere
yet engulfs all Fantasia
in The NeverEnding Story, all other celluloid villains
a child encounters seem vanilla:
none of Scar, the Queen of Hearts, Cruella de Vil,
Sid Phillips, Voldemort, Vader or Jabba
comes close to its sublime incomprehensibility

There are echoes of Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘Snow Man’ (1921), which concludes ‘For the listener, who listens in the snow,/And, nothing himself, beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.’ ‘Snow Man’ is often discussed in terms of its perspectivism, which suggests that the only way to know reality is through the subjective experience of the self. Savige compares the Nothing from The NeverEnding Story (‘He knew the void, the gist of entropy’) to other ‘celluloid villains’ that are ‘vanilla’ in comparison to the movie’s ominous emptiness. Celluloid means ‘of film’ and references motion pictures and cinema, but the word also implies the one-dimensionality of these childhood monsters; they are single cells in comparison to the multicellular organism of the Nothing. The ‘sublime incomprehensibility’ of ‘the void, the gist of entropy’, is subsequently seen everywhere by the speaker of the poem, once he recognises the Nothing as both existential chasm and the threat of the self’s eventual end that haunts awareness (‘Then you saw it everywhere: in Villon and Nin;/Boundary Street; an episode of Friends; a wind chime;/and later still, in the car park of a crematorium,/say, or a clinical waste disposal bin.’)

The reference to his partner’s miscarriage, explored in more detail in poems like ‘The Cobra of Djemma el Fna’ (5) and ‘Tips for Managing Subsidence’ (70-71), is just one of the many bodies that permeate Savige’s work. He explores human bodies, bodies of water and land, bodies of work, and Savige’s own, but for all the larger and various embodiments of subjectivity, Savige’s poetry manages to create a sense of enduring intimacy that crosses the divide between author and reader. His ode to the humble spork (‘for you were always a bit like me, spork: a half-caste gook, an incendiary Spock’) in ‘Spork’ (78-80) discusses the impact of his half-Asian heritage while growing up in Queensland:

beamed in by genetic monsoon and plonked down hard
          onto a patio on an island
          in Queensland

that gave the most rousing ovation to One Nation;
          a slap in Pop’s face,
          who’d fought in the Pacific;

up-close physical proof of the peril, produced
          in his own
          daughter’s womb.

The distance created in this poem by praising ‘the cutlery of choice in war and prisons’ means that it is heavy with the unsaid. At times, what is unsaid has a more impactful presence in Savige’s collection, due in no small part to the motley of images he collects and arranges. The postmodern proliferation of signs and symbols has tended to function as a postmodern challenge to dominant Western narratives that prioritise a narrow group of ‘classics’ as markers of high culture. Savige aptly reconstructs a vision of what Jean-Luc Baudrillard termed the ‘hyperreal’; an endless generation of images that are copies of copies, while losing any connection to an original. Within hyperreality, experience is composed of auto-referential exchanges and ‘the murderous power of images’ kills any existence of reality beyond that which exists in the reference itself. Savige’s observation in ‘Coloratura’ (94) that there is ‘nothing new under the sun’ (referencing a passage from Ecclesiastes 1:8-10) reveals his postmodern playfulness as deliberately and tightly constructed.

However, one of the effects of Savige’s pastiche is that the iconoclastic assortment of references become just that; pieces of a larger poetics, all equal in allegorical value. In a way, it artfully composes a patchwork quilt of Savige’s life where we are able to take in the cacophony of colour all at once, but it also means that things that could afford to stand out are given the same hierarchical and referential power as Pac-Man and the Maroubra boys. I speak more specifically of Savige’s use of Indigenous place names in poems such as ‘Mirrigin’ (15):

I wish I could say precisely where Yugambeh
ends and Bundjalung begins, but we only had the crumbs
of Indigenous history, local or otherwise, at school.

We were flat out distinguishing Mayor Quimby
of The Simpsons from Chief Quimby
of Inspector Gadget. And sometimes I feel like a fool

or a fraud when I speak with Sam or Tara June, or anyone
really, about the place I come from, grew up in.

While the prophesied effect of hyperreality is that originals are decimated, there is little acknowledgment within Change Machine that this is what is actually taking place, despite the poetry’s strong Antipodean flavour. The original First Nations inhabitants of Australia are given cursory acknowledgment within the collection, and while this lack of presence is noted within ‘Mirrigin’ as being symptomatic of their wider absence in Australian history and culture (which tends to be circumscribed to the last 200 years or so), without greater signposting of significance, Australia’s black history sinks into Savige’s sea of symbolic exchanges.

As the collection evolves, it seems to slow down while simultaneously speeding up. Individual poems, sentences and stanzas get longer, while the flickering rush of images creates a familiar medley. Though it becomes obvious that this is an extended march through the bureaucratic culture machine, Savige’s own self is a constant presence. Quotes from popular songs, newspapers, literary criticism, and 18th century journals dot the pages, while Savige’s ‘Notes’ at the back of Change Machine helpfully explain some of his more obscure references. (This, perhaps, is a kind nod to his audience; one cannot best navigate modern life without advice and assistance from those better-travelled.) Stylistically, longer exhalations formed from luxurious sentences (‘behind the wreck, further up, where the angelfish are flashing/in and out of the rust, and the moon wrasse nose you while egg-hunting’ (‘The Offing’, 32) are counterposed with the crisp staccato of lean word-towers in poems like ‘Work Do’ (21), that emulate the mechanised clicks of clock-in clock-out employment:

Trending
agile
upticks
of rain
ping off
the swish
marquee,

actioning
the specifics
of some
committee
minute
on workflow
policy.

By the fourth chapter, ‘There There’, structures are breaking down and we are left with the self-reflexive pieces of a poetry under pressure. There are hints of this earlier within other chapters; ‘Her Late Hand’ (41) in ‘Biometrics’ splits the poem into two columns and you can read it holistically left to right, or take each column separately. Alone, the right-hand column begins:

wiring hadn’t
handwriting
din, gnat whir
and writhing;
hard tin wing
thawing rind.

nth drawing I hart,
winding…

Savige’s reflections accelerate until they are mostly held together by the community of meaning he has built for us. It is as though language, so ably wielded throughout, has succumbed to the demands placed on it. Context is your map to rebuilding these pieces, which also reflects the necessity of context when navigating the pictures and sounds of an urban environment. In Change Machine, language is simultaneously a vehicle to and obstructor of meaning. In the right-hand column of ‘Her Late Hand’, the final stanza reads ‘rh, giant wind/grand within/writing hand’, which asserts the place of the subjective individual in communication. The emphasis on phonetics helps give the poem a concreteness; words are Savige’s building blocks of meaning but also symbolically function as the divide between the sign and signifier – a divide which is echoed in the distance between image and missing referent, and the Self and the Other. This is highlighted in poems such as ‘Stagger Lee at Her Majesty’s’ (82-83):

Like salacious columnists
                    we’re in bits                    just witnessing
           ‘The Body’            sluice
                      through a bank of tail
           ored suits, still
                             hot as lime juice
on a torn
cuticle,            to blithely dis miss the crab mousse–
                      two decades on            from the all-out
                                 fluorescent assault
of her work          for          Diet Coke in ‘88.

…

My patois is a heady mix of am
                                 nesia, em
                                          and capital

Savige’s ‘patois’ is demonstrated moreso as the collection wraps up. Change Machine ends with the phrase ‘ache hoof hour crate cram shelled wren,/hand haul off there shelled wren to calm’ in ‘Cinemetabolic’ (98-99), though interpretation becomes possible when surveying similar phrases like ‘you shld quit it at ones’ and ‘–yelp, use gassed it–’, which offer clues into his phonetic play. His recollections of an Australia where ‘Chook, Buddha, Wayne, Stink and Rod/rarely conferred/and even when they did they talked/around it:’ (‘Hard Water’, 63) communicate the place- and time-specific role of memory in building the self, which is a self that exists in the physical body as much as the mind. In trying to reconcile the cultural imbalance that has historically privileged mind and reason over the feeling, living body, Savige uses language’s physicality through sound and structure to underscore the importance of the body as the central arbiter of modern experience.

Ultimately, we, as much as the cavalcade of modern life, are change machines. Bodies penetrate all levels of Savige’s poetry in the guise of machines, and machines in the guise of bodies. After the cascade of references ends, we are left with the collection’s exquisite humanity and colour, which are the quiet skeletons in the densely allusive works. Savige’s Change Machine is an extended meditation on the influence of history and culture on the self, while also skilfully exploring how individuals cut across the din of modern life to embrace moments of personal connection.

J.C. Masters is a postgraduate student in English Literature at University of Sydney. She tweets @_jclyons

Throat

By Ellen Van Neerven

UQP

Reviewed by DANIEL SLEIMAN

In reading poetry, we look for those rare moments where a creative sequence of words thoroughly subjects our thinking, our feeling and our knowledge to a momentary realisation of reinterpreted or interrupted truth. There are many of those moments one finds while reading Ellen Van Neerven’s poetry collection Throat (2020). Take these three lines appearing in different poems. 

Take me to the back of your throat, I’ll stay
(p123)

Language is empty without ceremony
(p128)

Climate is our only bank
(p33)

Neerven can say so much with so little. In fact, that’s poetry’s appeal and the/ir craft in writing reflects the tightness and complexity of its form. They display a matured economy of expression but are as comfortable writing longer narrative-driven verse.

One of my favourite pieces in Throat is only ten words long and finds its place in the section called ‘Whiteness is always approaching’. It is a title, which based on the section’s themes, could have easily worked as ‘Whiteness is always encroaching’.  

I was a perfect GF                                                                                    but sometimes I was black.
(p42-43)

These words are presented on two full pages, the otherwise emptiness or silence gives them so much more meaning. One is tempted to even continue the writing with their own insecure reflected prepositions in the empty space. There is so much more to be said, and those thoughts are instinctively taking place in the reader’s cognitive play. 

The conscious stylistic choices are also replete throughout the collection. The use of the Aboriginal flag along with text in ‘Logonliveon’ serves as a punctuating reminder, self-identification and reconstructed meaning to fit the changing moment of technology and living. A treaty is drafted and presented to the reader questioning the/ir relationship with the production of the book but also of white Australia—a status quo, often neglectful of Aboriginal voices on the question of sovereignty. Australia of course remains the only Commonwealth country without a treaty with its Indigenous population. 

‘Treaty’ presents the reader with so many questions to unpack. And Neerven does that poignantly. Hard truths demand hard questions. Neerven takes up the role not only of a poet but as an educator. The book comes with a reading list for ‘Whiteness is always approaching’. It includes writers like Ghassan Hage, Toni Morrison and Vivek Shraya. The white reader is undoubtedly urged to spend some time in this section. 

‘Expert‘ and ‘White Excellence‘ are two poems that really hit the nail when it comes to white presumptions, white language and the critique of Black Excellence centred around the white gaze. 

Think I got
a non-Indigenous girlfriend
who thinks she’s an expert
don’t know how she got her expertise
(45)

There have been too many white ‘experts’ on what matters to Black people. This was especially noted during the #BLM movement where Australian TV panels got a lot of flak for not inviting any Black speakers on issues that directly affected them.

‘White Excellence’ comes in many forms but my favourites are the ones who cook for me. Listen, make space. Buy black books, buy black music. Never assume to know what we think or what we want.

(56)

T.S Eliot once wrote that poetry is ‘the common pursuit of true judgment’. There is a measured concern in Neerven’s writing, whether it’s the devaluing of Indigenous languages, connection to land and water or gendering. It is a judgment both in critique and insight, but one that opens conversation rather than shutting it down. Whilst subtlety has always been the measure of art, there is nothing wrong with calling a spade a spade, and Neerven even titles one of their poems ‘Call a spade a spade’ where they take issue with the mealy mouthed semantics in our everyday political discourse. Don’t say ‘no worries’ say ‘I worry’.

In ‘Four Truths and a Treaty’ they write: 

We gotta talk about sexism, homophobia, and transphobia in the community. No point pretendin it don’t exist.
(58)

Blunt. 

As a queer Black writer, Neerven explores the sometimes-knotty intersection of sex and race politics. It is a lived experience, and it comes through in their words both genuinely, and in exploratory ways giving no defining answers but retaining our attention nonetheless vividly and honestly. In the section titled ‘I can’t wait to meet my future genders’ their poem ‘Body Flow’ imparts a resounding expectation or even resignation in describing their body. 

I guess it would be fitting to describe my body here.
Spidery
Flowy
nothing to hide
hips in the wrong place
unambitious arms
(67)

Neerven’s writing however is anything but unambitious, with Throat being her third published work following on from Heat and Light and Comfort Food. It is a work that tackles familiar themes, but one that is done with a uniquely sustained style and an undeniably fresh voice; a voice that one can return to on the page and in recitation and find added nuance and meaning and a reason to care. One cannot help but to find a certain affinity with the poems, and the writer, as one reads and rereads Throat.  It feels like a crush. 

In ‘Crushed‘ Ellen writes: 

All my crushes
have been books
(98)

What a wonderful way to think about our relationship with books. With a red, sinuously coloured cover featuring lips, eyes, and with an evocative title in Throat many readers will feel attuned to Neerven’s latest work.

Notes

1. T.S Eliot, ‘The function of criticism’ first appeared in the journal he founded, The Criterion, Vol 2, No 5, Oct.1923

The Wandering

by Intan Paramaditha

ISBN

Harvill Secker

Reviewed by GABRIELA BOURKE

Reading Intan Paramaditha’s The Wandering during a global pandemic and in a time where all but essential travel within state borders is forbidden is a strange experience. In the author’s acknowledgement included at the end of this book, Paramaditha writes that the novel was ‘…conceived in New York, published in Jakarta and written over the course of nine years as I moved across continents…’. The imposed stasis in which I read this book though forced a contemplation of some of the most pressing themes of the novel: how do power, position and privilege determine where you’re allowed to go, and perhaps even more importantly, where you’re allowed to stay? Paramaditha’s ‘choose-your-own-adventure’, second-person narrative invites you to jet-set, from Jakarta to New York to Berlin and beyond, the impetus of the story depending on the choices you make and those choices formed by your own desires, ambitions and longings. The Wandering considers what freedom means, in a world where a yearning for elsewhere underpins so many of our encounters, and where travel is borne of boredom for some, but terrible desperation for others.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s line ‘Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living’ occurred to me more than once while reading this novel. A create-your-own adventure story imparts a responsibility: of choosing right, making choices that will carry you to a satisfactory ending. In fact, the decision fatigue I was already feeling as a result of moving house in corona-times was exacerbated by the requirement of choosing a path through the narrative, and by my desire to ‘choose right’. My first foray brought me to an end all too quickly – an ending that did not bring me the satisfaction for which I yearned. Retracing my fictive footsteps and finding a new way resulted in a relationship with an old, white man who seemed to have an obsession with young, Asian women. How did I get here? I wondered, despairing, moving backwards again, hoping there was a better way, and then again, backwards and forwards, realising as I did so that usually a novel, like life, won’t give second chances. In life, death signifies the end of one’s story on earth, whereas The Wandering gifts its reader that fantasy of acting on hindsight. Unhappy with reaching an untimely demise, I return to the point where I can salvage my life. Unfulfilled by a relationship, I travel back, choose someone else, carry on once more.

So who has the freedom to make mistakes? This is the fundamental idea on which The Wandering is built. Who has, as Tiffany Tsao puts it on the back of the book, the freedom to wander the earth? Not Fernando, with whom the narrator flees the US upon Trump’s election in 2016. Not Meena, the narrator’s friend and neighbour whose freedoms are curtailed by geographic and financial borders. What about the narrator herself, who has agreed to a lifetime of wandering, denied forever the opportunity to return home? Paramaditha’s commentary on the nature of globalisation and neo-liberal consumer-capitalism is both thoughtful and provocative. The realisation that the ‘you’ of the story and the ‘you’ who is me reading the text are chasms apart in terms of the restrictions placed on our passports is discomforting. The Faustian pact on which the story is premised forces a consideration of other real-life pacts made by people bargaining for their freedom as borders are erected and both the freedom to move and the freedom to stay is forbidden to all but a privileged few.

The Wandering poses questions, rather than providing answers. The encounters between people and places may bring home the sad realities of life for many, but somehow Paramaditha retains a sense of playfulness and spontaneity that makes this novel fantastically readable. For a novel premised on a Faustian pact and peppered with allusions to Greek mythology and Indian philosophy, sections like the blow imbue liveliness into references that otherwise might be slightly stuffy.

‘How will I be able to reach you when you’re travelling?’ asks Demon Lover. He looks despondent.
You stare at him, stupefied.
‘For God’s sake! Stop snivelling. Since when does a devil need a visa?’(6)

The Qur’an quoting, Cerberean-chihuahua toting Hecate is another good example of this novel’s light-hearted reimaginings of well-known myths and symbols, which provide a necessary counterpoint to the grimmer elements of the story.

In leafing through the book in readiness to write this review, some names and places leapt out at me that I did not encounter on my first reading. This is surprising, as I was diligent in my attempts to locate and travel along all of the offered narratives. I’m interested by these stories I’ve not read, and interested to consider why I’ve not reached them. Are some strains of the narrative too far out of my comfort zone that I subconsciously avoided them? Is not reaching these stories indicative of some truth about my own identity, about the limitations of myself and where I’m willing to go, what opportunities I’m willing to run with?

Paramaditha’s novel allows for a uniquely individual experience, and one which might be borne from the reader’s cultural, financial, generational or other background. An individual’s experience of this book is likely to be as diverse as one’s experience of the world – an admirable feat, and one in which it’s worth immersing oneself. The Wandering may have had some teething issues, but it’s strong enough, creative enough, joyful enough and certainly ambitious enough that I’m already looking forward to Paramaditha’s next book.

GABRIELA BOURKE is a sessional academic and doctoral candidate at the University of Sydney. Her work explores the representation of nonhuman animals in contemporary literature. Her work appears in Southerly and Mascara Literary Review.

Kokomo

by Victoria Hannan

Hachette

ISBN 9780733643323

Reviewed by MEGAN CHEONG
 

In lockdown, distance regained some of its former authority. For six of the last twelve months, many Melburnians have lived, worked and didn’t work within a five kilometre radius of their home. My parents live 22 kilometres away, and though there isn’t a great tradition of hugging in my family, I spent much of lockdown longing to see my two-year-old wrap his arms around his grandfather’s neck.

I think it was this particular longing which made me feel, acutely, the distance between Mina and Elaine in Victoria Hannan’s Kokomo.

‘I guess you know why I’m here,’ she’d said the day before as she’d pulled out a wooden chair to sit opposite Elaine at the table.
‘Why don’t you tell me,’ Elaine said, her voice taut.
‘Mum…’ Mina studied Elaine’s face, her long thin nose, her cool blue eyes; she looked older, tired, just as sad. She wanted to hug her mother, but instead she reached over and put her hand on Elaine’s hand. Her skin felt cold like paper. They sat there for a minute, their hands touching. ‘Are you –’ Mina started, but Elaine stood.
(28)

It has been seven years since Mina left to work in London, and 12 years since Elaine last stepped out the front door of the family home. When Elaine is seen out on the street, Mina is called and immediately flies back to Melbourne full of questions that Elaine seems to have no intention of answering.

Across the road, the Chengs offer a different model of family life. Both Kira and her mother, Valerie, wrap their arms around Mina when they first see her after her long absence. Their house smells like ‘fabric softener on just-washed sheets’ (10) and glows golden, ‘warm light beaming from all the windows’ (33). The contrast between Elaine’s cool reception and Valerie’s garrulous welcome is so stark that I am briefly worried about the dimensionality of the characters. I am tired of reading mothers whose lives seem to begin and end with motherhood, mothers like a stain on the intricate tapestry of the protagonist’s past. Then, gazing at a family portrait of the Chengs in matching red velvet outfits, Mina is struck by a feeling, a ‘want’ that ‘growl[s] and stir[s] deep down inside her’ (11), a surge of unmistakably sexual desire that interrupts my mounting indignation about the prevalence of flat literary mothers.

This kind of uninhibited swerve characterises the acuity of Hannan’s depiction of Mina’s psyche as a tortuous network of lacunae and hunger. Though it is a rare pleasure to read a novel set in Melbourne, and so to be able to fill out the details of the brown brick porches and the birdsong, Kokomo is deeply rooted in the psychological, presenting readers with a highly filtered version of reality. As Mina circles in and around her childhood home, her thoughts range from Melbourne to London, past to present, love to sex, cycling endlessly back to Jack, her co-worker and the object of the desire that permeates the novel. She tugs compulsively at the screen of her phone, waiting for a message, some kind of contact, some sign of reciprocal feeling:

She looked at the message to Jack again. Delivered. Ignored. She knew his phone was never out of reach, that he slept with it under his pillow, that he looked at it when he woke up, in meetings, constantly. He must’ve seen her message. He must’ve. This was the longest they’d gone without talking since they started working together just over a year ago. She reread the message. Maybe it was too cold.
I’m too cold, she thought. I’m a bitch. I should’ve said something cute, something sexy. It should’ve been a small x, two? One big, one small. I’ve fucked it all up.
(98-9)

The swarm of assumptions and images that rush in to fill Jack’s silence and the way in which Mina obsesses over the orthography of her message is uncomfortably familiar. In the moments between Mina and her phone, Hannan captures the work we put into constructing ourselves with embarrassing clarity, yet something beyond flirtation is at stake here. For Hannan, the social media age is one of distance and longing. The distance between who we are and the person we carefully curate in text messages and posts only adds to the distance between me and you. In Kokomo, social media is a form of surveillance, everyone watching each other without ever reaching out, the ‘double tap…an easy substitute for friendship’ (64).

The distance between what is real and what is imagined is situated at the focal point of the novel. As well as struggling to rediscover the self that was swallowed up by the tragedies of her past, Mina works hard to reach Elaine, the Elaine buried under years of motherhood. And far from neglecting the character of the mother, Hannan makes a poignant centrepiece of Elaine’s life in a way that reminds me of all the stories and all the living stored up in every one of us. All of it within reach if you just reach out.

MEGAN CHEONG lives and works on Wurundjeri land. She is currently working as an editor and completing her Masters of Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing at the University of Melbourne. Her work can be found in Overland and Farrago.