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The Journey Home by Sivashneel Sanjappa, shortlisted

Written by mascara on . Posted in Deborah Cass Prize.

Sivashneel Sanjappa is a writer, chef and keen gardener originally from Fiji and currently based in Melbourne. He is currently working on his first novel. His work has been published previously in Verge literary journal. He can be found on Twitter @sivashneel and on Instagram @sivashneel.

 

 

  1. Questions and Answers

For every impossible question that had floated up inside Roop’s thought bubble, there was a very real answer, if one cared to find out.

Was it Roop’s childhood kingfisher that had visited him that morning?

It was not.

Kingfishers don’t live that long. Roop’s childhood kingfisher died well before it could reach its natural lifespan. It died from a dynamite bomb that exploded while it had dipped into the ocean in search of its lunch. After it exploded, the fish died and floated up to the surface. The fisherman collected them and sold them at the Municipal Market that weekend. The kingfisher died and was carried to the beach by the incoming tide. It was lodged in the roots of a na-ivi tree, where it decomposed slowly. Weeks later, the ebbing tide took away its feathers and bones.

It had had three little eggs in its nest, tucked away in the thick of the tiritiri, the mangrove forest. They hatched shortly after it died. The hatchlings starved to death within hours of hatching. Over the years, the entire population of kingfishers in that tiritiri vanished. The Municipal Rubbish Dump on a nearby shore regularly sent an army of plastic bags, nylon sacks and such to the roots of the mangroves. The leachate from the growing pile of decomposing garbage seeped directly into the lagoon, where it travelled up the roots of the tiritiri and suffocated the mangrove trees. The kingfishers, along with the mudcrabs and the herons, either died or migrated to new homes.

The tiritiri that guarded the lagoon near Roop’s current village was intact, but for how long? The beach there had been leased to an overseas investor, who was planning to erect a new marina. Gossip went that he was planning to dredge up the entire lagoon, with the tiritiri, to make way for construction boats.

The kingfisher’s call may soon become a myth.

Did Roop’s butterfly survive its first flight?

It did indeed.

After it disappeared into the canopy of the rain trees in the Library Gardens, after Roop and Zarina went home that morning, it embarked on its life as a free butterfly. It fed on the nectar of many flowers. It fluttered over the tops of the trees, over to the gardens in the villages close by. It mated with many other butterflies. It laid many eggs and, at the end of its life cycle, died a natural death. It lived a short, fulfilled life.

Roop would have been happy to know this. Had he not released it from the jar that morning, it surely would have died a wretched, captive death.

Where did Tinisha, Mrs Murthi’s wedding hairdresser, disappear to?

Well, they fell in love.

One afternoon, a man named Manoj, a regular customer of Tinisha’s, came to the salon for his usual haircut. Tinisha’s heart beat a little faster around Manoj, as it always did. They flirted with each other in their usual, uneasy, secretive manner. Then, out of the blue, Manoj put his hand on Tinisha’s hip. Tinisha took his hand and led him to the back of their salon, behind a short wall.

Tinisha was a lucky point-five, perhaps the luckiest of all point-fives in Fiji. They experienced a first kiss, on the lips. The loving embrace of a strong man. They lay on top of Manoj for some time, caressing his bushy eyebrow, while the Sugar City dismantled itself at the end of the work day and people went home to have family dinners.

Tinisha and Manoj eloped to a small, distant village. Tinisha took him to their brother’s house,  which had been vacant since he moved overseas six years ago. They lit a little fire in the backyard and walked around it seven times, thus marrying each other like Bollywood sweethearts. They lived a brief, blissful married life.

Two weeks later, two men came to the house with cane knives. One of them was Manoj’s tavale, his wife’s brother. Gossip had spread quickly, and because gossip was a more accurate source of information than any media channel, it wasn’t hard to track Manoj down. His tavale had come to take Manoj back to his wife and two children. To remind him of his responsibilities, to hold him accountable. To chastise him for the shame he had brought to their family. To set him back on track.

They beat Manoj up and took him away in a blue van. Before leaving, they locked Tinisha inside a clothes cupboard.

Tinisha spent a day figuring their way out of the cupboard. They managed to break it open from inside. They took a bus back to the Sugar City and waited outside Manoj’s workplace. When Manoj saw Tinisha, as he emerged at the bottom of the flight of stairs that led to his office, terror contorted his face into a grim mask. He pulled Tinisha aside. His forehead was bruised and he had a bandage around a finger. He told Tinisha he had moved on. He begged Tinisha to leave him alone. He asked them to move to Suva or somewhere and start a new life. Then he ran to the kerb and jumped in a taxi, which disappeared into the afternoon dust.

Tinisha, shaken, heartbroken, downtrodden, took their wig off and threw it in a public rubbish bin. They took the bus back to the house where they had got married. They stepped back into the cupboard they had fought their way out of earlier that day, and hung themself from the railing with a wire hanger.

Some weeks later, their body was found by a neighbour who couldn’t handle the stench from rotting corpse any longer. The police tried to contact Tinisha’s overseas brother, but to no avail. Tinisha was burnt in a public crematorium.

Gossip travelled around the country, like a Sunbeam Bus, that they had moved to Suva and opened a stylish new salon.

And, finally…where do bijuriyas go when they’re not dancing at weddings?

Where does lightning go after it has struck?

No one knows.

No one cares to find out.

However, as Roop put his brain to sleep late that night, Shilpa, the bijuriya, sat on a secluded beach a few villages away, gazing at a gibbous moon.

A couple of hours after Roop and Zarina had finished eating their BBQ and driven off, Shilpa had arrived at the Library Garden. They had taken their ghaangra off. They wore a short skirt and crop top. They had reapplied their lipstick, which glistened under the street lamp.

Two women in similar clothes stood at the edge of the garden, keeping an eye on passing cars. Shilpa asked them for a cigarette. One of them handed Shilpa a half-smoked Rothman’s cigarette.

A shiny Mitsubishi drove past and slowed down. The tinted windows were rolled down. Four sets of teeth appeared, floating, inside the van.

The back door opened and one of the passengers, a man, urged Shilpa in.

They were given a cold Fiji Bitter stubby. They sipped it quietly. The man next to them took their hand and slid it into his pants. They massaged the man’s crotch quietly. The man unzipped their fly and shoved Shilpa’s head into his crotch. He held their head down.

It stank.

Still, Shilpa serviced the man’s crotch.

The van drove out of the town, down a windy road, to a secluded beach. The men got out.

Shilpa adjusted their wig and got out of the van. They dropped to their knees, and serviced the four smelly dicks. One at a time, two at a time, three at a time.

They spat out each one’s ejaculate onto the sand.

One of the men, who had the unmistakable overseas aura about him, handed them a $20 note.

Shilpa kicked up a fuss. They demanded $20 for each smelly dick.

“We didnt even fuck you bitch,” they said, and drove off in their van.

“Saala maichod bhatiyara,” Shilpa shouted at the van. They threw a piece of dead coral at the van, but it missed. Shilpa sat on the beach, and watched the gibbous moon touching the ocean, ever so gently. The tide was out. The exposed tiritiri roots jutted into the sand like stiff, sedentary snakes. Little crabs crawled from one hole to another over the wet sand.

Shilpa felt angry, guilty. They hadn’t needed to be a whore that night, they had made enough cash at the wedding. Why had they taken to the street then? Maybe it was dancing in the lap of that beautiful boy with the piercing eyes and bulging eyeballs at the wedding. The force with which he had pushed her off. The disdain, the violence — it had aroused Shilpa, brought their point-five juices alive.

They waited for daylight to break, but fell asleep presently.

They were woken up by the prongs of a crab-spear poking their shoulder. A woman with a big afro like a halo and a charcoal-shined face was asking them if they were alright. The tide was flowing in, lapping at Shilpa’s feet.

“Isa, what you doing here?” the lady asked in Fijian. Shilpa replied, in broken Fijian, that they had been stranded there. The lady introduced herself as Siteri. She didn’t ask Shilpa for details. She invited Shilpa to her house.

It was a tiny tin house, surrounded by coconut trees. Siteri lived alone. She said her children lived near the town, and they visited her sometimes.

In the backyard, water was boiling in a big pot over a fire. Siteri fed more wood into the fire, then plunged the one crab she had speared earlier into the boiling water.

She rolled out a woven mat on the floor of her house. Shilpa sat down.

They drank tea and ate some boiled cassava.

Siteri said the tiritiri was dying. Back in the day, she said she would have filled her basket with crabs.  She would have had enough to give some to her neighbours. Now the white vulagi who bought the beach wanted to dig it all up. She said the whole church was praying to God to save their village.

Shilpa asked Siteri about the charcoal. Siteri told her that it protected her skin from the sun.

When their clothes had dried up, Shilpa thanked Siteri and took their leave. They walked up the dusty road, following Siteri’s directions. They boarded a bus at the junction. The bus was empty, the bus driver didn’t charge them.

Later, around mid-morning, Shilpa arrived at the shack that she rented from a pimp. She shared the shack with two others. One was Julie, who had been forced to the street by her husband and then abandoned by him when he found himself a younger wife. The other girl wouldn’t tell them her name. She was Chinese, so Shilpa and Julie affectionately called her Ching. Ching barely spoke to anyone. She had been brought to Fiji on a student visa and given over to Shilpa’s pimp. The pimp said someone was coming to take Ching away soon, when her student visa expired.

Inside the shack, the bucket in the middle of the floor had filled up with the previous night’s rain (which had leaked in through a hole in the roof) and flowed out. The mattress was wet. Julie was snoring on one end. Ching wasn’t around.

Shilpa took their wig off and fell asleep on the wet mattress.

 

  1. The Much Needed Holiday

As Shilpa fell asleep, a few villages away, Roop sat up in his bed and stretched his arms. He cursed himself for waking up so late — he had probably missed the kingfisher’s call at dawn.

Other than the chickens scratching about on the lawn and the mynahs chirping up in the trees, the only other sound he could hear was the radio in the kitchen. An announcer was announcing funeral notices.

Mr and Mrs Murthi had gone to Sunday Service at the Big Church. Mrs Murthi left the radio on to ward off would-be burglars. She took this extra precaution even though Roop was the lightest of sleepers,

Roop flung his bedsheet off and went to the bathroom. He undressed and studied himself in the mirror. His stubble was overgrown and needed shaving. His unruly hair looked as though it was full of dust. As though dust would fall out if he shook his head.

Veins stood out in his thin arms. The hollows in his collar bones could hold a tablespoon of water each. His ribs were visible in his chest. The one thing he had retained from childhood was his small, round belly. He sucked it in and it disappeared. Then he exhaled and it was back, a little kangaroo pouch. Further down, his penis was limp. The foreskin was shrivelled and pointed slightly to the left. His balls hung heavily, as though gravity pulled them more forcefully than it did the rest of his body. Perhaps gravity was humiliating him for being a twenty-eight year old virgin.

His bum cheeks also hung low, like ripe pawpaws waiting to fall off a tree.

He turned the tap on and stood under the cold water for some time. Then he dressed and went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. The radio announcer had finished with the funeral notices, and played a jolly Sunday morning song:

Khush rehne ko zaroori, kya hai bolo yaar?

Khushi toh milti hai jab, mile kisi ka pyaaaar

To be happy, what do we need friend?

Happiness comes when we someone loves us.

Roop sat down at the dining table with his cup of tea. Yesterday’s newspaper lay open on the table. It was turned to page 13.

TWO MEN IMPRISONED ON HOMOSEXUAL CHARGES, the headline read in bold print.

Roop read the article. An Australian man and a Fiji-Indian man had been found engaging in homosexual behaviour in a hotel room. The Australian homosexual had called the police after he found all his money missing after the Fiji-Indian homosexual made a run with it after their ‘encounter’. The police came and seized the Australian’s belongings. On his digital camera, they found the recording of the ‘disgusting acts’ the homosexuals had filmed. Both homosexuals were arrested and the court sentenced them to prison.

Fiji had been one of the first countries in the world to have a bill of rights that specifically illegalised discrimination based on sexual orientation. But still two homosexuals were in prison. They were charged for filming sex, that is producing pornography, which was illegal. Still, the article made it clear that the two homosexuals were disgusting. A Methodist Church pastor was quoted as saying that.

In a few days, the Australian homosexual would be released and fly back to his country. The Fiji-Indian homosexual would remain in prison. His wife would beg a garment factory owner for a job so she could look after her little son and daughter.

It wasn’t by coincidence that the newspaper came to be lying on the dining table, conveniently turned to page 13. Someone had left it there, for Roop to read. Roop had found a similar newspaper article when he had come home during uni break in 2000, some months after the May 2000 civilian coup.

That time, it had been about John Scott. He was a half-Fijian half-white man who grew up in New Zealand. He had returned to Fiji and worked as a volunteer, and eventually became the Director of the Red Cross. After the ministers in parliament were taken hostage and kept captive in the Parliament House, John Scott had been most active in taking provisions in for them, checking on their health. The country had been awed with his generosity, his bravery. That he risked his life for the hostages. Media channels had praised and applauded him.

Then, one night he had been discovered brutally murdered in his house. His young lover, a kiwi man had also been murdered. The post-mortem results confirmed that the two homosexuals had been subjected to vile torture before being hacked to death. But even before the post-mortem results were released, even before the accused murderer had appeared in court, a senior police officer had made official statements about the case. He said the accused, a young Fijian man, had been abused by John Scott. That John Scott had lured him away from his rugby career in high school with alcohol and drugs. It had mentally disturbed the accused and driven him to this vengeful act. Several months later, the accused was sent to a mental institution and not charged with murder. John Scott, once a generous and brave hero, bowed out of history as a disgusting, alcoholic, drug-addicted homosexual. His body, and his young lover’s body, were both taken to New Zealand by their families for proper funeral services.

Roop finished his tea, and threw the newspaper in the bin. He turned the stupid radio off. Zarina came and picked him up. They drove to Village 4 to see a film. She had been hoping to see Brokeback Mountain, for the rave reviews it had received. She said movie tickets in Melbourne cost 20 Australian dollars. In Fiji, they cost 5 Fijian dollars. Roop told her that Brokeback Mountain had played in the cinemas for exactly two days. Then members of the Methodist Church of Fiji had marched through the streets in protest, demanding the cinemas stop showing it. It was now banned in the country. Zarina was furious. “When will this country move on from these foolish things?” she asked.

They decided to watch the remake of Umrao Jaan.

In the thirty minutes they had to kill before the film started, Roop went to the Internet cafe next to the cinema and printed out the application forms for an Australian tourist visa from the Embassy Website.

~~~

Another Country by Jessie Tu, shortlisted

Written by mascara on . Posted in Deborah Cass Prize.

Jessie Tu’s poems and scripts have appeared in the Australian Book Review, FishFood Magazine and The Voices Project. Winner of 2016 Joseph Furphy Literary Prize in Poetry, she was shortlisted for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2017. She is recently returned from a workshop in creative non-fiction writing at the Iowa Summer Writer’s Festival, University of Iowa. ‘Another Country’, an extract from her memoir-in-progress was shortlisted for the Deborah Cass Prize in 2017, judged by Alice Pung. Her poetry chapbook, You should have told me we have nothing left is forthcoming with Vagabond deciBels 3.

 

Another Country

‘Memory believes before knowing remembers.’
William Faulkner, Light in August

(i) Youth

When I was growing up, my father often told me to find a man who would love me more. Find a
man who will love you more than you could ever love him. As though it were a competition, as
though you could measure love, put it on a scale, graph it, draw charts and predict growth or
recession. Calculable. Everything was measurable. He felt the need to quantify things. Everything
had currency, as long as you knew where to look, how to decipher it in numerical components. That
was how he saw the world and the world saw it fit to bend to his will. After experiencing the grief
of losing a relationship with a man I loved, I came to understand, albeit over several years, what my
father meant by this. I understood that he wanted to save me from the hurt of loving, of being the
doer, not the receiver. The operator, the labourer. The less worthy. The love-er. My mother, being
the more beautiful of them, possessed more power. Beauty had the highest currency. For men like
my father, marriage and love was a sport of acquiring the highest beauty and he was prepared to
pull the highest strings of heaven and hell to obtain her, to garner her approval, to profess a
conquering. His value came from the ability to make the right choice in marriage. But later in life, I
saw how he became tired, exhausted, could no longer put her needs first and I saw how she’d scowl
him for it. Infatuation turned into love, into need, and finally into some dark, unspoken defeat. In
the end, their history was not enough to disregard the resentment they developed for each other.
“Once you spoil a child, there is no turning back time,” my father once lamented. “I did too much
for her.” In the pursuit of his duty to fulfil the life-narrative he was given, he lost himself. He turned
into a man mourning for a boyhood that never existed, and my mother realised she could do nothing
to absolve his trembling grief. Her beautiful face – that exquisite bone structure, perfect lips, soft
eyes, careful expression and tender neck, could not save him. My father became cruel and quick to
judge, spiteful when my mother was not in the room, complaining about what she lacked and all
that she had not become. “She’s sixty-one-years old and still cannot read a map!” On one of our
frequent weekend road-trips outside the city, my father would use the bent street directories,
crinkled at the edges, folded and refolded to the common pages of the city, and our tiny corner of
western Sydney. When we got lost, my father would stop by the side of the road and bark at us. We
were inadequate. We understood this at a very young age. My mother knew this too. She had never
learnt English. She did not know how to recognise the letters, the names. Each time he stopped,
he’d pound the limp directory onto the steering wheel, strip his glasses off, his shoulders a dark
shadow, and curse with force from his lungs. In the backseat of our eight-seater Toyota Tarago, we
learned to stay silent and still. My sister would take my hand and squeeze it, as though to say, “It
will pass. Hold on.”

When I was younger, his periods of silence buried the house in some invisible smoke, heavy,
something I could not name. There is no name for the thing we care about the most. He’d go outside
and stand in the middle of the backyard and I would forget he had a face. From behind, he looked
like the arch of a tunnel leading into a black mountain. He would stand for hours at a time, and all
around him the world would wane. I wondered what he was thinking. I sensed in the state of his
silence that he was far away, that we could not reach him, that we did not have the strength to will
him back to us. He knew the pain of not being enough. I realise now, as I approach my thirtieth
birthday, that my father had struggled with inadequacy too. I sensed too within him, valley deep
variegations of an internal life I had no access to.

“Epigenetics,” my diary told me. “Perhaps it was the grief of all that insubstantiality he felt that
was passed on to his children.” I was back for the third time in under two years, back at my parent’s
home, clearing and re-clearing space for the things I did not need but could not bring myself to
throw away. The plastic box of diaries – from when I was twelve. I took them out, one by one, and
dated them. – Book 1. Book 2. Book 3 and so on, until I reached Book 32. 1999, it began. Then,
2016. I read them and believed I was discovering someone else’s life. The person in the pages was
talking to me, and it felt right to listen to what she had to say. “Maybe all the anger, all the grief of
my father is pouring through the cells in my body. Invariably, there is no use trying to fight it. I am
always sad. And I am always sad because of him.”

On the final page of a long and over-sentimental recount of a failed romantic encounter, I copied an
extract from Melina Marchetta’s book ‘Saving Francesca’ – “Boys don’t like sad girls. So stop
being so sad.”

Perhaps my father and I both knew the power of beauty – that we didn’t possess it, that it would
always be beyond our reach, so we spent much of our lives trying to make up for it. If we didn’t
possess it naturally, we would acquire it another way. He once told me, “Don’t be the one chasing
the boy. You’ll never be enough. You’ll always suffer more.” By then, I’d known already that I
would glean the same fate as him, that my disposition – something I knew from a very young age,
was to be the greedier one, the one who would fill more barrels of tears. I was always wanting
something better. Lover sounded more interesting. Loving seemed to involve more creativity,
required more skills, more resourcefulness, asked for something more challenging than being loved.
To love was to ask something of myself. To improve myself. To change. To throw myself out of
myself. The pursuit seemed more noble. Giving felt bolder than receiving. I fell in love at eighteen,
with an Australian boy I had been friends with since the beginning of high school. He was the first
boy I brought home. We had dumped our bags in my room and emerged seconds later to take our
bikes out for a ride. My father was home early. He did not know about the boy, or that I would be
bringing someone home that afternoon. When he saw us, his expression was mauled with a strange
sort of disgust. In that moment, I felt his anger sear through me, something my small body was not
able to handle. But I received it, and still feel the residue of it simmering underneath my breath
today, at times as evident as blood in the mouth. My father was ashamed of me. The boy extended a
hand to my father. My father did not look at him, simply stared at me with that unforgiving piercing
disgust, and then turned his back to us. I hate the memory of that day. Because that day, I learnt that
I needed to live two lives in order to keep the love I’d accrued over seventeen years. I needed to
split myself in two. Weeks later, when he’d calmed down, I asked my father why he was so angry at
me. He told me that men only wanted one thing from me, and that he didn’t want to see his daughter
be stripped of her body. “When you give yourself to a man, you are ruined.” Was this the way he
was taught to understand sex and love? That it was the boy who took something away from the girl?
My mother remained silent on the subject of love. I once asked her how she knew she loved my
father. “I thought about him all the time,” she said. I sat on the couch beside her, transfixed by her
beauty at fifty-nine, waiting for something more profound, more insightful. But nothing came out of
her mouth and she got up slowly to bend down and wipe the floor. When I was older, she’d tell me
that when I was in primary school, after dinner, I would sometimes sit beside her on the TV couch
and teach her new words.

“You laughed at me each time I didn’t pronounced a word correctly.”
I don’t remember my own cruelty.
Once, when I was making a car insurance claim after a minor accident, I pretended to be my mother
on the phone. The operators demanded oral approval from her because I was under twenty-five.
“She doesn’t speak English,” I told the operator.
“I still need to hear her approval, madam.”
“But how? She doesn’t speak a word of English.”
“Can you please translate to her that she approves of you being the benefactor and just have her say,
‘Okay’?”

I was in the car, alone. My mother was overseas and it was the final day I could make the claim.
“Fine. Let me get her.” I pushed the phone at arms-reach away from me and mumbled a random
string of words in Chinese, then put on a deeper voice and pretended to be my mother. I spoke a
line, then answered myself in a deeper voice. I had to cup my left palm firmly over my mouth to
suppress my laughter. My mother did not sound like how I was portraying her at all, but the
operator did not know this. It did not matter. If only someone had a camera to film it. When I hung
up, my heart subsided to its usual pace and I drove home in a state of elation mixed with guilt. I did
not like the dishonesty of what I’d done, but it had to be done. I recall all the times I had to translate
for my parents when I was a child – the electricity bills and insurance forms and tax returns and
school fees. We didn’t know what voluntary contribution meant, so we paid up, always – scared to
ask questions. When my father was diagnosed with high blood pressure, the doctor sent a three page
print out in the mail on what foods to avoid, what exercises to do, what medications to take and how
often and how much travel he was allowed to take per year. I was petrified of making a mistake.

At eight years old, I skimmed through the medical terms and nodded as my father looked at me,
waiting for me to explain it to him. He was waiting on me, and I was waiting for my intelligence to
catch up so that I could be useful. I hopped over words I didn’t recognise. I was good at hiding my
incompetency. In the end, the only part I could confidently translate was the section on
recommended exercise.

“It says you should walk thirty minutes a day,” I said.
“Every day?” he looked at me with bulged eyes.
“No, of course not.”
“But you just said that’s what they said I must do.”
“It’s saying you should. You don’t have to.”
“Okay, good.”
“And you can swim or run too.”
“No thanks. What else? What about the other two pages?”
“Have you got the medication?”

“Yes, here.” He handed me a white palm-sized box and it felt like he was handing over his life. I
had no idea what it is and no idea how to pronounce the name printed across the box in large capped
blue font, but I nodded and pretended I knew. Despite the pressure of making sure my father did not
fuck up his health – I enjoyed the momentary authority he gave me over his place in the family. As I
grow older, he relied on me less, perhaps he could tell I’d been a fraud all those years.

(v) Scar

One day in May 1987, a few months before I was born, my father received a phone call from his
father. He told him to return home immediately.

“Why? What’s happened?”
“Just come back this instant.”

My father had been at a conference in Tai-Chung, an hour’s drive from their home in Chung-Hua. It
was late in the afternoon. He was stuck in a winding traffic jam. When he finally reached my
grandparent’s house, it had been two hours since the phone call. When he opened the front door, my
grandfather began shouting at my father. He cursed and spat and pointed his finger at him, yelling
repeatedly ‘I hate you! I hate you!’ My father stood at the door, shoe laces still tied, keys still
wedged in the sweat of his palms. When he asked, “What did I do?” my grandfather did not explain.
He continued. “I just hate you! I hate you for what you’ve done!” My father stood at the door and
let the violence of his father’s voice punch him in the chest. He couldn’t understand why his father
was so angry. But he would not make it worse by fighting back. My grandmother sat on the kitchen
table, silent. She kept her eyes on her hands, did not look up, as though she was ashamed of what
her husband was doing. But she too, was angry. She could not look at either man standing beside
her. When the screaming escalated, my grandfather said, “I’m so angry, I could to hit you with this
cup!” My father, unable to contain the frustration and battering, stepped in front of my grandfather,
grabbed the cup off the table and slammed it against his forehead. Blood came streaming down his
face. My grandmother scrambled for a towel and started shouting at my grandfather. “Stop! Stop!
This is all your fault!” At the hospital, when the doctors asked my father what had happened, he told
them he’d run into a wall. My father still bears the scar on his forehead. The six stitches he had that
day have disappeared, but the single white line still runs vertically down between his brows, a mark
from that day, as clear as a fine paint-stoke. He once joked that he was the ‘older, Asian Harry
Potter’.

Later, he found out from my grandmother the reason they were so angry with him that afternoon.
My grandfather had ordered my mother to set aside three boxes of walnut biscuits for my uncle. My
parents ran a small grocery and dried-goods store near the local train station. My uncle would come
by their shop in the afternoon to pick it up. He was on his way to an important business acquisitions
meeting; he must have it. In the chaos of the twilight rush hour, when my uncle finally did visit, my
mother forgot to give him the biscuits. She’d been busy with running the shop herself and trying to
manage three young children upstairs where we’d lived. She was also two months away from giving
birth to me. She was tired, large and exhausted. But in Taiwanese culture, when you did not comply
with your parents-in-law, you were seen as malicious, selfish. They thought my mother had
deliberately chosen not to hand over the biscuits. They became resentful and blamed it on my father.
It was, after all, the husband’s responsibility, the wife he took. My grandparents disliked all their
daughter-in-laws, except for my mother. But after that day, they put my mother in the same box as
my aunts, and they began to despise my father.

“Shame on you for marrying such a woman!” they told him later. My father, at thirty-three, could
not escape the deluge of conflict. He could not make both his mother and his wife happy.
“Do you know which question I cannot bare?” he asked me once. We were both a little older, and
I’d come back to interview him for a book I was writing.

“What’s that?”
“If your mother and wife are drowning in a lake, who would you save first?”

My father had lived a life set out for him by his parents, never straying from the expectations placed
upon him, never stepping outside the rules constructed by his society, found himself still bound, still
not his own man, constrained by a duty to please and serve his parents, to forever perform the roles
given to him with whatever dignity he could muster, to guard his integrity by oppressing it, to
honour his parents and their struggles by dismissing his own self-hood. Between the world and my
father, this was how he found his footing. He fought against himself to please and found love
through obedience and submission. He finally understood that day, the cruel punishment for
divergence, but it was a divergence he had no control over. My father, who once carried me to bed
when I fell asleep on the couch – knew love this way, by the fulfilment of other people’s desires.
My father understood too, the loneliness of a yearning to be freed. His hands were bound. The
obligations became too much in the end, and he ran away with his wife and children. He ran away
to the safety of anonymity and homelessness, to a country that would not punish him for marrying
the wrong woman. A country neither he nor my mother had ever heard of. A country called
Australia.

Dominique Hecq reviews “A Personal History of Vision” by Luke Fischer

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A Personal History of Vision

By Luke Fischer

ISBN 978-1-74258-938-1

UWAP Poetry, 2017

Reviewed by DOMINIQUE HECQ

Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—at most: column, tower… But to say them, you must understand, O to say them more intensely than the Things themselves ever dreamed of being—R. M. Rilke

Luke Fischer’s second collection,  A Personal History of Vision, published earlier this year in UWAP’s Poetry Series, firmly establishes him as a pyrotechnician of language. This is Fischer’s second collection, and like the first, which was commended in the Anne Elder Award, it brings a dazzling range and depth of experience to his writing. Fischer’s ‘Augury?’, included in Paths of Flight, won the 2012 Overland Judith Wright Prize. Fischer is also a scholar of Romanticism, and this informs his poetry in unexpected and delightful ways. He has learned from Rainer Maria Rilke that an attentiveness to language enhances our understanding of things and therefore intensifies our vision. Like Rilke, his purpose is ‘to say [words] more intensely than the Things themselves ever dreamed of being’.  In that, he goes further than Samuel Taylor Coleridge who, in his Treatise on Logic, famously wrote: ‘it is words, names, or, if images used as words or names, that are the only and exclusive subject of understanding. In no instance do we understand a thing in itself’. In the poem ‘Why I write’ Fischer lists, and dismisses a number of reasons he might write for. He settles on the following:

I write for the expansion of the present
vital as breath to an empty lung,
for the garden that grows around me,
whether I’m in the city or on a mountain—
an invisible garden of fruit trees, hanging
wisteria and vines, honey bees, angophoras.

In these deceptively simple yet finely wrought lines, we recognise the path taken by the poet who, in Goethe’s formulation, ‘sees the universal in the particular’.  We also make out the point at which the path forks out into three romantic traditions through specific images, and we hear echoes of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Novalis, Lamartine, Nerval, Baudelaire, Coleridge and Rilke. There may be more. Or less. (I may be seeing and hearing things). This is to suggest how Fischer’s verse conjures up a singularly-layered poetic world that produces a richness of tones and references.

Fischer’s poetic world is formal, philosophical, historical and, to a lesser extent, ecocritical in engagement and the concurrent romantic vision of the redemptive possibilities of art. His domain is ‘Nature’s Temple’ as immortalised in Baudelaire’s credo, ‘Correspondences’. In it, there is wonder, but also the anguish of melancholy, solitude, grief, suffering, dispossession and death. However, against these his poetry essentially offers life-affirming opportunities for delight—delight in the image-making magic of its own plays upon perception and language and, through these, in the multitudinous variety of nature, culture and art. Often cemented in an aesthetic image, or work of art, many of the poems collected in A Personal History of Vision express concern and empathy for the dead, grieving, lost and afflicted, for isolates driven inwards by their own perceptions. Answers are often gestured towards with empathy, and glimpses of the sublime, but they are more often than not cut short, leaving it to the reader to cope with the affect delivered by the last image. In ‘Waiting for the Train’, the sublime takes on surreal qualities on closing as the protagonist is compared to a fly caught in a spider’s web irrevocably breaking free.

Because of the collection’s lingering melancholy, I first wondered if ‘Deadwood’ might be emblematic of Fischer’s method. Behind the poem which evokes Rimbaud through reference to his limp and poetic vision, is ‘a verse that once set me on fire’. Here, the poet sees himself as a fire thief whose ‘text / looks like a poem’ yet ‘is a torch’ and the poets ‘way/into the heart’s subterrane, / a wavering illumination  / of its resistant textures’. Here is Prometheus, classical fire-stealer, the characteristic figure held up by the Romantics (especially Rimbaud and Shelley) as symbol of heroic rebellion, the imagination and poetry. The lessons taken from Rilke are integrated in the poem: acknowledgment of time and experience, facing up to dejection as instructive and potentially ennobling, respect for selfhood in all its particularities, paring the language, finding inspiration in the here and now, and allowing sublime intimations to emerge from the profane.

Each poem in this book is an exploration of the creative possibilities of the poem as self-sufficient construct and affecting world. Each poem strives to bring forth contradictions and resolve them through a controlled expansion of imagery along specific paradigmatic axes  rather than an accumulative proliferation of random images, which ends with some unexpected juxtaposition or reversal. The ekphrastic poems in particular, display this kind of aesthetics, focusing as they do on lines of flight. Thus despite his interest in paring back the expression to perceived essentials, in toughening the poem’s fibre, there is no doubt that Luke Fischer is above all an image maker. This comes with a distrust of adjectives and yet a paradoxical reverence for quaint or obsolete ones such as ‘subterrane’ and ‘halcyon’, which conjure up other languages, other traditions, other dimensions. This is the case in the third poem of the collection, ‘Horizon of Alps (K)’, in which ‘halcyon’ refers back to classical poetry via the French Romantics. This poem in fact introduces a whole cortege of allusions and shows Fischer is at his best: the theme is fully developed, the vision complex yet sustained, the convergence of poetic traditions surprising and the philosophical inferences sophisticated. The poem deserves quoting in full:

Horizon of Alps (K)
At the Château de Lavigny, Switzerland

Always at the boundary of vision, of thought
even when we look the other way. Though
often concealed in cloud and mist
veiled in haze, we know they endure.
Seemingly impenetrable matter
we sense a hidden truth, that they are minds
absorbed in contemplation.

On halcyon mornings Lac Léman
almost renders them as they are
in an image on diaphanous depth.
Their peaks shorn of vegetation, sheer faces
of stone, absolute architecture, prefigurations
of the crystals they hold.

Frozen tsunamis, primeval modernists
their abstraction rises above the lake and
its scattered sails—white chips in blue paint—
above the foothills’ sprawl of villages, the tangle
of forests and human lives, above emotion.

Resembling a heterodox order of monks
great mathematicians, geometers whose bible
was Euclid, their enlightenment consisted
in continuous meditation on the axiom
of axioms, the formula of themselves.

With a sister order they communicate
in antiphon. Snow imparts: Out of moisture
air and cold we make your structures light,
lighter than the empty bones of the tiny birds
that nest in your pockets. They reply:
We keep you from dissolving, lend
you a feeling of permanence.

At times dark clouds envelop the summits,
tense as the disputes at the First Council of Nicaea.
On holidays the iconostasis opens
revealing Mont Blanc, the hooded high priest,
as censers spread their smoke
around the lower pinnacles.

Still epics, skeletons of mythic creatures, crystal skulls
pure forms, the moral law, metalogic, consonants
isolated from vowels. Your secret name:
the voiceless occlusive
k

In a gesture reminiscent of Shelley, Fischer answers the old suggestion that poetry is associated with primitive, indeed ‘primeval’ perception and declines with the advance of civilisation. The poem echoes ‘Defence of Poetry’, where Shelley claims an interrelationship of language, perception and poetry such that poets as contributors to civilisation in all manners aesthetic and philosophical are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ (1821). Lingering here is the romantic emphasis on the imagination, truth, beauty and pleasure allied with Shelley’s provocative definition of the relationship between imagination and morality in the form of the good. The poetic faculty creates ‘new materials for knowledge’ and engenders the asynchronous desire for their rearrangement and presentation. Through the emphasis on the paradoxically ‘voiceless occlusive’ in the French ‘blanc’ Fisher deftly suggests that, as Shelley puts it, poetry ‘is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge’ here epitomised by the Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps. He also, and not without irony, suggests that poets are authors to others ‘of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue and glory’. The irony pertains to the fact that ‘k’ at the heart of ‘Luke’ is indeed far from voiceless. Besides, after Kafka, the letter ‘k’ is loaded with connotations antithetical to the good.  In this poem, the letter ‘k’ goes beyond anchoring metaphoric play: it highlights the classical idea of eternal forms, including the form of the good endorsed by philosophy. It does so only to question and subvert this idea. This is achieved through interplay of semantic binaries.

Diverse in their range and reference, arresting in their statement and wordplay, the poems gathered in this collection are, as ‘Horizon of Alps (K)’ demonstrates, very carefully constructed. Fischer uses the short line and variable stanzaic form with dexterity. The result is a poetry that is conceived with sharp attention to detail, joy in the possibilities of language, and self-consciousness about the seriousness and exhilaration of perception and apperception. This is equally true of the longer questing poems, of the extended ‘Elegy for the Earth’ with its personification of earth as a sleeping woman, and of the shorter inquisitive lyrics such as ‘Glance’, ‘Scene in music’, ‘Anonymous’ and ‘Labyrinth’.

In the poem ‘Certain Individuals’, Fischer ponders what draws us to some people by invoking images rather than traits of character. He begins his meditation proper with the question: ‘But isn’t it that / in one person we sense a clear glinting waterfall / refreshing to sit beside, in another something mysterious / as a fallow field at dusk? I could not resist attempting to qualify his poetry in analogous fashion. Were it a prose poem, or proto-poem, it would be:

Water cascading through a gorge, a pattern of cross-currents forming beneath, around and above stones, causing sudden changes to the water’s flow. The lap and splash of images, nuances, cadences, subliminal rhythms. The attentiveness to form, language and speech: the shapes of words, letters, lines, stanzas. Their resonances, uncanny silences. The larynx’s response to what is heard, recalled and felt, reforming patterns of speech and sense. In winter the snow erases images and emptiness beckons. Calls from the depth of its stillness. Calls for understanding.

With Fischer, the romantic legacy is still with us, whatever modifications are made by changes in cultural perceptions, social institutions, aesthetic preferences and work patterns. In deference to art and in acknowledgement of the metaphoric possibilities of language, imagination allows here for a dialectical interplay of opposite categories that yield a third register.  This register bears Novalis’ aphorism : The separation of poet and thinker is only apparent and to the disadvantage of both…’ Here lies the irresistible brilliance of A Personal History of Vision.

 

NOTE: “The separation of poet and thinker is only apparent and to the disadvantage of both…” –Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) is the key, as it were, that opens Luke Fischer’s website.

 

DOMINIQUE HECQ is a poet, fiction writer, scholar and literary translator. She grew up in the French-speaking part of Belgium and now lives in Melbourne. Her works include a novel, three collections of short stories, five books of poetry and two plays. Hush: A Fugue (2017) is her latest book of lined and prose poetry.

 

 

Brianna Bullen reviews “False Nostalgia” by Aden Rolfe

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False Nostalgia

by Aden Rolfe

Giramondo

ISBN 978-1-922146-99-1

Reviewed by BRIANNA BULLEN

 

 

‘Anamnesis,’ the first poem and section of Aden Rolfe’s brilliant philosophical poetry collection, refers to Plato’s concept of learning as a process of recovering knowledge from within.  This poem presents an initial simple supposition: “We who we are because of / what we remember,” which is then challenged and amended through Rolfe’s poetic interrogation in four sections. This poem introduces the settings—“coastlines and beaches / clearings and trails”—recurring through the collection, and the illusion of coherency, dependent on forgetting incongruities. It sets up the speaker and the addressee, their edited and untethered beings. Memory becomes “a range of values / not definitive states,” contemporary, relational, amendable, and always bittersweet. “They say we’re plural, post-memory / too old not to know / we should be playing what when / instead of / what if.’

In ‘Exchanges’ Rolfe critiques the loss of history and future in the precarious present: “We expected more from the twenty-first / century. Some direction, some push, some instruction / for living in the present-continuous.” There is failure in placing the self in relation to time, a loss reflexivity, which leads to inertia. This is strongly illustrated in ‘What have you been up to,’ its days of “discrete goals, ritual and activity / progression and reversion,” short-term focused nothingness: “but for now / nothing is happening / nothing happened / nothing is going to happen.” Moments of catastrophe and event are exceptions: “We’re drawn to / these scenes, where everything is salted and breaking / down, because it feels like the edge of something” (‘The end of things’). They search for events they can recollect later, to give a sense of having lived moments: “we try to watch the waves so that later we can say / we watched the waves” (‘We watched the waves’), going out of their way in near-pitiful attempts to find meaning. Rolfe diagnoses the millennia’s anxious condition: “The fear of missing out has been surpassed by the fear of going unrecorded, of not documenting our experience,” (‘False Nostagia’). Yet such records only contain what is crafted within them, distorting the event as it was.

There is a great deal of intertextuality, befitting a work dedicated to memory and culture, crafting connection between the personal and collective. Repetitions of photographs, photographers, forests, indistinct roads, coastlines, waves, reading on trains, wind, edges, leaves, lakes and weatherboard houses saturate the poems, recalling one another. There is a flux of representations of nature within culture, of “clearing the landscape for a set piece” (‘Mountainousness’) like gardeners and construction crews. The poet presents his figures as following stage directions, and artificial scripts, the exterior environments speaking for the interior. A road recalls a car ad, a Tarkovsky film reminds him of Lynch, although the former came first: “what comes after can / remind you of what came before. It’s about order of exposure” (On Zerkalo). Chronologies dissolve, over-layered. Personal chronology is privileged over the ‘true’ order, representation the real.  ‘We watched the waves’ takes its title from a Robert Haas poem. Figures fall into convention expected of them (“I picked up some shells, because that’s what you do in places like this” ‘The end of things’) hoping for insight into some deeper truth (“You looked for the sublime / in a box of sultanas” ‘Mountainousness’) which is revealed to be banal repetition of the same.

The second section, ‘Ars memoria,’ moves into a mythic mode, recalling Anne Carson with its interpretation of a Greek myth (Simonides of Keos) in verse. Its hypothesis is “the tale is in the retelling” ‘[Mutatis mutandis]’, a meta-textual awareness of the power of poetry and narrative.  Rolfe poses memory and myth are modes of integrating and interrogating the past. The myth involves a roof collapse at Simonides’s dinner party; all the guests are killed  and Simonides must identify the bodies by way of remembering where they sat, placing name and image to place and in doing so “inventing the art of memory” (‘[Analepsis]’): the new mnemonic device, the method of loci. This section best displays Rolfe’s humor; it also, strangely, seems the most personal, with a raw examination of the speaker’s response to his grandmother’s dementia and his own burgeoning romantic relationship.  Borges’s Ireneo Funes, a literary memory cornerstone character, remembers every moment of his life simultaneously until his death (via consumption), contrasts against his grandmother’s decline into dementia. An excess of remembrance against an excess of forgetting poignantly explores the merits of each function, its dual-process:  “What if forgetfulness were not / a flaw / but the other side of the coin. / A way to stop a surge of detail from bursting / the banks / while its twin, memory, lets us / make sense of the world” ‘[Kindness]’.

It contains two prose personal essays, one a commentary on his own poem and the other, the titular ‘False Nostalgia,’ is an analysis of an unpleasant first viewing of the Haneke film Cache remembered fondly, opinion revised through memory. Neither are straightforward essays, circling around notions of memory, composition, and revision. These essays offer pauses of reflection and variety within the poetry collection that at first seem disruptive to the whole, its different structure proliferating new meaning in its contrast of form. Rolfe goes against Weinberger’s idea of memory-time as fragmented and non-linear, his approach following narrative logic. This approach enables Rolfe to highlight the artificiality of its framework from within.

Of the two ‘A note on ‘We Watched the Waves’’ is more succinct, situating Rolfe’s work within the literary theoretical history of memory (Calvino and Proust narrative precedents) while illuminating the philosophy behind his poetic work. Exploring what happens when recollection and autobiography hinges on a false memory it presents the act of writing as one way of ordering and making sense of discrepancies.  Oliver Sack’s concept of ‘cryptomensia,’ unconscious plagiarism of an idea mistaken for original thought, runs through the collection. The subset ‘autoplagiarism,’ reproducing your own ideas as if encountering them for the first time, becomes not only the final section of the collection, but a structuring principle of the text in its restaging of scenes and phrases, integral for exploring the revision and recurrence in memory. Autobiography ultimately becomes “a theory of your life, not a proof:” its incompleteness and inconsistencies both necessary and productive to coping with the multiplicity of selves, relations, memory, and (dis)continuity.

‘False nostalgia’ puts forward the more radical hypothesis of the text: that a subpar and even unpleasant memory (in this case, watching an emotionally unsatisfying film) can become a form of pleasure in the process of looking back. Rolfe is interested in nostalgia that “looks back wistfully on moments that weren’t happy, on times that weren’t stable, on events that weren’t enjoyable.” This is the nostalgia of the present, a different kind of (bitter)sweetness, one that remembers what happens, its flaws and enduring pain, and sees in it something to celebrate. Pleasure becomes an object in past tense, achievable only creative recollection. Rolfe situates this emotion within a historical tradition of nostalgia, linked back to Hofer’s initial diagnosis of nostalgia as an illness through to its transformation into a poetic trope. Cache is the perfect choice of film to explore memory, full of hidden, unknowable and multiple perspectives, voyeurism, tapes (a key technology in ‘capturing’ memory with invisible subjectivity), and unresolved plot. Although it is a film about cultural amnesia, “guilt and responsibility and collective memory” rather than nostalgia, it opens up questions about the ethics of memory, recording, and witnessing, integral to exploring an ethics of representing nostalgia.

The final section ‘Autoplagiarism’ returns to ‘Anamnesis’, but in a cinematic experimental mode which, while stronger in technique, loses the floating philosophical exploration of the earlier section. These poems do not utilize blank space, so pivotal to ideas of forgetting, as well as previous sections, but increases the clutter, play, and humor, skewering previous preoccupations and earnestness. Things become more chaotic, temporally, with images of dinosaurs emerging onto the beach, a quasi-Schrodinger’s cat, being tied to train tracks, and fairytale wolves emerge in the forest quoting Heidegger in footnotes. Self-awareness is on high “we could go for a drive, perhaps / listen to speech break down on the radio” (‘Purge Landscape (the wolf in the fairytale)’). Liminality and divergences, previously integral, are critiqued: “There’s a difference between open-ended / and non-commital” (‘Everything all the time’). Irony and self-deprecation, lacing previous poems, capitalizes in the final poem, ‘Regression to the mean,’ which critiques not only his use of an empty feminine “you,” but also Rolfe’s methodology: “A jar, a thought, a slight breeze. Who else is tired of these props / and found objects? … the sand, the beach house, the predictable sets.”

Rolfe suggests that the problem of memory enquiry is also its pleasure: its obsession with trying to make moments whole and meaningful out of its jigsaw fragments. Moments get returned to, repeated, reset and reconfigured, and every time this reveals something new while concealing some other part of the scene. It is impossible to reconstruct the moment as it was, but there is a sense of play in the attempt that gives the endeavor meaning.

BRIANNA BULLEN is a Deakin University PhD candidate writing a creative thesis on memory in science fiction. She has had work published in journals like LiNQ, Aurealis, Verandah, Voiceworks, and Buzzcuts. She won the 2017 Apollo Bay short story competition and placed second in the 2017 Newcastle Short Story competition.

Robert Wood reviews “Knocks” by Emily Stewart

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Knocks

by Emily Stewart

Vagabond Press

ISBN 978-1-922181-71-8

Reviewed by ROBERT WOOD

 

There has been an important groundswell of recent feminist poetries and poetics in Australia. As Siobhan Hodge wrote in her review of Bonny Cassidy and Jessica Wilkinson’s anthology Contemporary Feminist Poetry, there is:

…a subtle, cresting sense of activism.

It is there too in Emily Stewart’s Knocks, through its critical, engaged and optimistic hopes that are expressed in specific poems, which together convey a notion of intersectionality conscious of gender. As Hodge herself said of the anthology:

‘There is a reassuring note of solidarity throughout the collection, but a simultaneous celebration of diversity in style, tone, theme and foci.’

One can suggest something similar in Stewart’s collection and which has been noted in different ways by Pam Brown’s launch speech in linked deletions, Amelia Dale’s commentary in Jacket2, and Melody Paloma’s review in Cordite. This dialectical relationship between acute critique and joyful celebration suggests not only that the whole of life is attended to, but also that one can oscillate, converse, play with the variety and possibility of ‘Poetry’ writ large. So what is Stewart railing against and what is she heralding? And, perhaps importantly, where is this leading us and what does it suggest?

To answer those questions is difficult, and it may be more apt to give a summary of what the collection is about in order to gesture at but never arrive at a full understanding of Stewart’s collection. Her voice is multiple, layered, various – there are erasure poems (section two); poems of multiple voices; poems in ordinary plain speech; remixed poems of heightened experiment (section three); poems of repetition (‘Today’). The references are Aussie kitsch, global pop cultural, resolutely local, Anglophonic culture industrial, fun too. This eclecticism of tone, style and reference keeps the volume entertaining, engaging, active. What that means for a reader is that one is being tested and flexed and exercised from page to page in a worthy movement from A to D to Z to B to U and back again all over and through.

There are, of course, personal favourites; poems that resonate, which each reader will find on their own. Needless to say, there are jewels in there that I like too. For example, I responded to ‘Australia’s Largest DIY’, which is a wry listing of commodities, objects, items that could be catalogued from Bunnings or Home Hardware or Mitre Ten. The poem begins:

fencestone, pavers, coloured spit rock
face blocks, colonial cornices, artificial
stone, aluminium step treads, hardwood (18)

Far from being a simple list poem, in Stewart’s hands, it becomes a rapturous sonic apprehension, not a dull rote thing but an event with music in it – ‘fencestone’ goes well with ‘face blocks’, and later on there is ‘urbanite’ with ‘expansion joints’, ‘marble veneer island bench’ with ‘brass compress’. The ordering is such that it makes it plain speech rhapsodic. And of course, one can read into it a post-conceptual politics that would take a found object, retype it and yet slantly embody it with ideological awareness – the phrasing to dwell on in the excerpt above is, of course, ‘coloured spit rock’ with ‘colonial cornices’ and so here and now, we glimpse the shadows of anachronistic Indigenous terms and the images of James Cook, which both come back to haunt the settling mode of the everyday do it yourself brigade. The last line of this poem is ‘how to fix a picket fence’ which not only circles back to the opening word (fencestone) but also allows the reader into a commentary of suburban dreams.

When read with a regard for Knocks as a whole, one notices that Stewart is an adept and able observer of contemporary life in Australia from the criticality of the mundane through to the implications of being here truly. This last sense comes through in the poem, ‘Animal Hands’, that directly follows ‘Australia’s Largest DIY’ though it is there in other, tender if welcomingly ambivalent pieces. Nevertheless it provides a direct counterpoint here, a kind of contrapuntal puncturing of the suburban critique in ‘DIY’. In ‘Animal Hands’, Stewarts writes:

I’ve been unwinding wire
         along the serrated edge
       of these paddocks for a
     long time, pulling it tight (19)

It gives us a sense of engagement with boundaries, with borders, with aging, with process, with education, with tension, and this apparent everyday thinks through feminism, anxiety, and ecology of being with nods to history, emotion and birds. The poem ends with a libidinal and touching, though never sentimental, line:

all I want is your mouth on my neck, wordless and dumb under chilly stars

That is, the knowing poet assures us, all that ‘I’ want – the mouth, object of speech, home of tongue, at the neck, vampiric, teenage, hickies and loving, while the stars, this time chilled not burning balls of gas millions of miles away witness such complicated tenderness. It suggests what might be possible by looking at our immediate surrounds.

I responded to how her gaze falls on the ordinary, the suburban, the quotidian in these poems. This is not the domestic or the everyday or the taken-for-granted, but rather the momentary interruptions of frame against a poetic that is grand, posturing, arrogant. Those moments of defamiliarisation mean we are asked to see the normal anew and that is an important task in bringing to consciousness that which is poetic in the first place. This would seem to be a possibility that Stewart herself is constantly exploring from her writing to her social media, especially her Instagram [link to it – https://www.instagram.com/emstew__/], and which offers one line of productive inquiry that I am very much looking forward to. For this keen reader, the next collection cannot come soon enough.

NOTES

  1. Siobhan Hodge review of Contemporary Feminist Poetry Ed Jessica Wilkinson and Bonny Cassidy  Cordite

 

ROBERT WOOD has degrees from University of Western Australia, Australian National University and University of Pennsylvania. In 2017–2018, He will be an Endeavour Research Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, and a Copyright Agency Emerging Critic with the Sydney Review of Books.

Rose Hunter reviews “Poems of Mijail Lamas, Mario Bojórquez & Alí Calderón” translated by Mario Licón Cabrera

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Poems of Mijail Lamas, Mario Bojórquez & Alí Calderón

translated by Mario Licón Cabrera

Vagabond Press
 
 
Reviewed by ROSE HUNTER

The Poems of Mijail Lamas, Mario Bojórquez & Alí Calderón presents the work of three contemporary Mexican poets, one born in 1968 (Bojórquez), one in 1979 (Lamas), and one in 1982 (Calderón), translated by the Mexican-born, Sydney-residing poet and translator Mario Licón Cabrera. The book begins with the work of Lamas, a good choice since his is in many ways the most immediately personable voice of the three, at least in terms of the selection represented here.

Here are the opening lines of the book:

  1. Refusing to Return

While you refuse to return,
memories reach you as if from a blind well,
and that sun is a copper coin without shine.
In silence you polish its sharp edges
till the memory of the landscape hits you.
You know the sun didn’t feed its pack of dogs,
so you repeat to yourself it’s always summer there
and those are the words that bring you back. (15)

With this beginning we are drawn into a situation of receptivity despite resistance, a mood that continues throughout the selection of Lamas’ poems (which also form a self-contained sequence). One of the many enjoyable things about this anthology is how most of the poems are presented with at least a few others from the same series, providing a useful orientation for the reader as well as the potential for a deeper reading experience. Additionally, themes overlap between poets, for example, both Lamas and Bojórquez make use of the elements of desert and shadow, and both Lamas and Calderón are concerned with religion and death – to name just a couple of the many rich echoes that reverberate over the course of the book.

Smaller correspondences (also the title of Calderón’s book from which the poems in this book are taken) can be noticed as well, for example a coin opens Bojórquez’ section also:

The coin of time burns in my hand
a metal circle without a face
it burns all that I ignore of myself
all that no one suspects of me (57)

These two openings encapsulate many of the differences between the first two poets: the more conversational and inclusive tone of Lamas, and the more distant, compressed tone of Bojórquez.

Lamas’ section reads like a chapbook with a discernible situation and resolution. Throughout it, the elements of heat – including summer, the sun, dust, fire, and ashes – are prominent. The hot climate takes on the character of an oppressive person, who “chases” the narrator (28), and who will “search the cities one by one / until it finds you” (30).

Heat/fire and memory are also inextricable; here is the opening of poem V:

  1. Like Something Extinguished By Fire

I remember my first childhood home
and the second
and the third.
They all are one,
ablaze. (32)

The next poem starts on the next page but is part of number V (no separate title – I like this formatting, present in Calderón as well) – and imagines all the photographs burnt, and wonders if this may have destroyed the memories as well (33). But the narrator pushes on, to find them. The narrator is recalling a literally hot climate (the state of Sinaloa I think, where the poet was born), and as well as that I think about how my older, and not necessarily totally joyful, memories feel like this – a heat in my body precedes the act of remembering, and, depending, impinges upon it or seeks to prevent it. This climate/condition/feeling is used to great (blistering) effect in the entire sequence.

Bojórquez presents us with shorter poems and more compressed imagery, and the spare quality of archetype, as well as revelation and myth. His section is divided into three parts. The one that appealed to me the most was the second, “Of Certain Deserts,” which presents the enticing scenarios of “desert birth,” “desert alive,” “desert exile,” “desert dream” – and so on. To show some of the stark and suggestive imagery on offer here, I’ll quote one of my favourite of the desert poems in full:

Desert Room

The grief of exhausted men
blazes in the desert

There is no horizon

Far beyond the view
lies the sand’s sadness

Where does the wind lift
its dress of thirst?

The dreams of shadow are born
in the heart of the desert

Everything is possible. (71)

In both Lamas and Bojórquez, the landscape (including elements such as sand and shadow) has great life, as a kind of given – “Only men are amazed by their own bodies” (“Desert Alive” 68). Truth is what is spoken in the shadows or by the shadows, which Cabrera’s useful note tells us is a reference to Paul Celan, “Wahr spricht, wer Schatten spricht” (a person who speaks shadows speaks truth) (77). “To speak from the shadow, be the shadow” could be an ars poetica of the Bojórquez poems translated here, even though the line does not appear in his poem titled “Ars Poetica” [rather in “To Say the Shadow” (78)].

After the terse quality of these poems, the poems of Calderón return us to a more open structure (although the voice is more fragmented than that of Lamas). Religion and death emerge as two themes, as the first poem, “Constantinople” brings us a scene in a Byzantine church, which leads later (this is another long poem, divided into sections marked only by page breaks, as in Lamas) to the description of the death of a fish, after the fisherman decides to throw it back:

Now the man has the fish
shakes the air with its body
Seagulls gather round
He throws the fish into the sky
the metallic gleam of its scales
The little eyes look at the sea the relief
just before of gaining great altitude but
suddenly a beak rips its fins
tears apart its body guzzles
in one second the remains

In secret someone was thinking of God
Cruel fisherman of men (90)

Calderón’s unpunctuated lines often allow for rich double readings. Here, for example, the unpunctuated “tears apart its body guzzles” suggests both the bird that swallows the fish, and the image of a fish writhing, taking in air/poison like a thirsty person might desperately guzzle too much water.

These poems are visceral, with frequent mention of blood and other body fluids, contagion, disease, and violence, as well as the human sacrifices of the last poem. The second last poem speaks most overtly about the political situation in present-day Mexico, a country in which 30,000 people are registered as having disappeared, and over 100,000 have died in drug trade related violence over the last decade.[1] Here is the ending of the ironically titled “Mexican Democracy:”

they open the black bag
the stench of rotten flesh:

a new born little girl (110)

I read the book engrossed in the distinct voices of these three very different poets, which is a great compliment to the translator. However, one observation about translation is worth making. Here are those same last lines of the poem “Mexican Democracy” in Spanish:

abren la bolsa negra
el hedor el moho en la carne:

una recién nacida[2]

In Spanish there is no need to do any extra work to specify the gender of the newborn; it is already communicated in the article and in the noun ending. In English, the extra word needed, “girl,” seems to weaken the ending of the poem a bit (seems to raise questions like, why a girl? Worse that it’s a girl? – questions that aren’t the point I don’t think). The gender of the newborn isn’t emphasised so much in the original Spanish, in which everything and everyone has to have a gender. This is not a criticism, just a reminder that grammatical gender is one of the issues that translation from Spanish to English must grapple with.

The pictorial and allegorical style of Calderón’s poems has prompted comparison between his work and the work of the muralist.[3] This is an appealing analogy – the “on-a-wall-like” appearance of the poems (which often run right down the page, unpunctuated and without stanza breaks until the very last, orphaned lines – a nice effect), as well as their grand themes combined with the ability to record those small details of everyday life (for example the fish lines quoted above), does remind me of the drama and scope of the revered tradition of Mexican muralism.

This is a valuable sampling of three contemporary Mexican poets. One quibble might be that there are no women represented here. Perhaps a translation of three contemporary Mexican women poets might be in the future for Vagabond’s growing international catalogue?
 

NOTES
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-violence-idUSKBN1782XN
[2] http://revistaliterariamonolito.blogspot.mx/2015/12/poema-de-ali-calederon.html
Here “Mexican Democracy” does not exist as a separate poem; it is the first part of the next (and last) poem featured in the book, “Piedra de Sacrificio” (“Stone of Sacrifice”).
[3] Javier Lorenzo Candel, “Las Correspondencias, de Alí Calderón.” la estantería, 5 July 2015.
https://resenariopoesia.wordpress.com/2015/07/05/la-correspondencias-de-ali-calderon/
 
 
ROSE HUNTER’s most recent collection, Glass is published by 5Islands Press. A Brisbane poet, she has lived in Canada and not resides in Mexico.

Claire Potter

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

Claire Potter ’s most recent poetry publications have appeared in The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry (edited by John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan), Best Australian Poems 2016 (ed. Sarah Holland-Batt), Poetry Chicago (ed. Robert Adamson), and Poetry Review Ireland. She was shortlisted for a 2017 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize UK and she has published three poetry collections, In Front of a Comma (Poets Union 2006), N’ombre (Vagabond 2007) and Swallow (Five Islands 2010). She lives in London.

 

The Copper Beech

I lie you down, spread your branches wide as wings across the grass
Your leaves flatten like cracked shells, letting the sea out of my ears

Breath has gone out of you

You are at the edge of becoming an object
belonging to the wind

From a distance there is no way of telling your dark fallen leaves
from copper-black feathers––or your red-tongued branches
from a split open nest

I walk amongst purple shadows, I sit within the mess
of leaves

But in writing this I am not unique, nor
are these feelings. This experience cannot be said
to belong to any obstinate sense of me

There are many more who weep when birds and trees are falling, when

the mauve of dusk slowly tapers and pre-emptively disappears
When the bone-heavy moon

carves an ending and turns its back on the sea
     and leaves rattle like pewter shells

returning to the beach.

 

Three Steps Outside the TAB

Pale steps, concrete and absolute
solid and lengthwise between two pillars and a portico
I am waiting on the blue-grey steps
divided into three parts
The first step is physical such that in this heat
my skirt bandages against my thighs
I’ve sat here all afternoon
in this passage of tobacco, jasmine and beer
and I’ve sung, resting my head on my knees
looping prayer with radio
waiting for Grandpa to swing open the doors
scoop my hand into his
and ruminate about the horses
he’s decided not to back
Shiny cars shuffle
across a weft of bitumen and white lines
the rubber tyres wheeze with kids
springing from car doors wanting ice-cream, sherbet
lemonade through a straw
I watch the beetle-tops glistening in the sun––
inside they’re cooking and the steering wheels warp like liquorice
as though I’m Gretel and everything before me
on the steps of this oven, is secretly made for eating
I’m vigilant, too, about Grandpa’s Valiant parked illegally up the kerb
Cabbage-white body, chrome bumper, single front seat, no seatbelts
in the back, two round side mirrors, black
dashboard, chipped, plastic, and a whickering gearbox
Grandpa wears a white shirt––sleeves rolled to the elbows
elbows dry and flaking. Trousers wide
and tall, hoisted with a thin belt
He agrees with everything I say
and these afternoons at the TAB we foist off as dog-walks
Pete in sagging herringbone and rosaceous cheeks
taps my head and comes and goes
through the double glass-doors carrying
a blue plastic shopping bag full of errands and chores
as if it were against his better judgement to be there
I recognise his slippers, Grandpa
wears the same ones, seaweed-brown tartan, thin brown sole
noiseless as he pads across the shopping centre
as if it were his kitchen
and the TAB his blue lagoon
Sunlight passes through an eye of mirror and I squint at it
and begin crying without reason until Grandpa comes out
wipes my eyes with a handkerchief and says he’ll be done soon

The second and third steps are as cold as a whale might be
and beneath my sandals, they’re dimpled with mica and pore
Had I a pocket knife I could chip into them
engrave a heart cordoned with forget-me-nots
or tally-marked with time etched into tiny bales of grey
But I’ll close my eyes against the stone
imagine the rib of steps belongs inside Jonah’s whale
and I’m a barnacle growing there, perchance
or a mermaid in disguise, battering
the hull of this gambling seadog’s skip
with the weight of a huge emerald tail––
but look, he’s smoking at the door with Pete
his spare hand’s outstretched, he wants to go
he’s ready––he heels out his cigarette into a twist of ash
and off the steps, through waves of smoke-blue air
I skip over my tail

 

Kazem

Written by mascara on . Posted in Writers In Detention.

Kazem is a Kurdish musician and poet. He has been held hostage in Australia’s black site on Manus Island for 4 years where he continues to compose and write.
 
 
Un-passable bridge 

My guitar is my soul mate nowadays
I don’t care for the world anymore
I play my guitar with a heart full of sadness
My eyes drizzle like rain.

My heart is absent minded.
It’s going to tell the secret words.
It has a heavy pain to reveal.
It is profoundly sad,
sad like someone who has lost his sweetheart.
It has many words to say
but there are no worthy people to talk to.

My restless heart wants to fly
to take a message to someone.
But what benefit is there when there is no way to fly?
My heart is exhausted from waiting and effort.
It’s breathless and alone.
It’s become weak.
It’s looking for a way to fly.

My heart with a hidden secret
and a world full of wounds in a jail
has no path to freedom.
It’s been condemned to a sorrowful separation.

I wish there was a kind person to give an opening to this prisoner,
Give him a smile as a gift,
To let him free from fetters and alienation.
What a pity that it’s all a dream!
My helpless heart has never seen bliss.
The jailer is bringing new chains to fasten.
This is a different prison
Oh, banish the sorrow of my unblessed heart.

I’m like an iron, you know, I am strong!

The white demons have arrived with anger
to promise another Reza’s death.
They have sharp claws
They are roaring
The ground is wet from blood
though no-one has been killed yet.

They want a volunteer.
Someone like Reza Barrati.
Someone to be annihilated again.
The white demons are starving again.
They want to feed themselves with my own body
and celebrate until the next day.
They have no sorrow, no sadness, no pain.

My mother, my love, be strong.
I know it’s hard to say goodbye to your son.

Without seeing it, I can read the verdict:
My young body must be killed.
There is no sign for humanity.
There are no rights for humanity.
Power is in the hands of wicked people.
They have made the world
an un-passable bridge.

(mid August 2017)

– translation from Farsi to English Moones Mansoube (primary)

and Janet Galbraith

Zachary Ward reviews “Preparations for Departure” by Nathanael O’Reilly

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Preparations for Departure

by Nathanael O’Reilly

UWA Publishing

ISBN: 9781742589459

Reviewed by ZACHARY WARD

 

Preparations for Departure, Nathanael O’Reilly’s second full length collection, is an ongoing journey in which the poet enters the gaps between home and abroad, contentment and discontent, presence and absence, youth and age, the past and the present. These disparities emerge in a suite of fifty-nine free-verse poems spanning across his formative years growing up in small town Australia, to his most recent years living in America. Reflecting a life spent in diaspora, the poems transport the reader back and forth across oceans to land in cities of ruinous decay, preserved in the poet’s mind; to scenes of quiet urbanity and the endlessly silent screams which pervade; to beaches untrodden, and in which we may now see our footprints forever imprinted; the clatter and squalor of marketplaces and the drudgery of the quotidian. A constantly shifting collage of antonymous sights and sounds, these duopolies are best observed in the author’s mind.

The suite’s first poem, ‘Border Crossings’, observes the conflict of duopoly that is constantly being waged across the author’s thoughts. A round trip through Eastern Europe, O’Reilly paints scenes of post-Soviet squalor and abandonment, though always from the security of a moving train carriage. The reader is afforded a sense of detachment, as the poet is easily able to retreat to the comforts of his compartment and those offered by Western influence. When not ‘sipping a glass of whiskey’, the speaker can ‘listen to Nirvana, U2, Springsteen’, willingly flitting between the scenery outside his window, and the familiar manner of those around him. Outside is the other, the old world, different and dark, crumbling and vacant; the carriage is home to Harry Potter, iPad’s and selfies. O’Reilly is never part of the scenery, and is aware of his intrusion into this world. He is more at home among the comforts of the west, and uses the ever-moving shuttle to shield him from the realities of the world he is passing through. A further exploration of this social disparity is explored in, ‘In the Market Place’. Though not protected by the bulk and pace of a train carriage, a description of the grime and poverty of a Ukrainian concourse is delivered briefly and starkly, conveying a desire to,

… simply observe and pass by,
my needs and survival unthreatened.
To them I am a rich Amerikanski,
an alien from a golden dreamland.

The train carriage is no longer required to define and separate, for his ‘clothes and accent proclaim [he does] not belong and never will.’ Unable to escape his heritage and the legacy of his own home and his ancestral homeland, the poet concedes that ‘in three weeks I’ll be gone, back in the West … living in luxury.’

Back in the West, the author’s reminiscences of his upbringing in Australia unearth a struggle to accept age and in so doing, detach from the past. Though far flung from the shores of home, the patchwork of Australia’s sleepy suburban streets, dry crackling long grass and booming coastal shelves are never far from the author’s thoughts. As from a moving train carriage, O’Reilly can observe his youth; a series of flashing images, just beyond his reach or inclusion. Formative years spent among the quiet nature of urban Australia reveals within the fledgling poet an awareness of the world and a greater understanding of a higher culture that might only be attained by sitting on rooftops and listening to Pink Floyd, hoping to glimpse a better view, in ‘The Way We Saw Ourselves’. Being merely a memory, as intangible as the crumbling iron yards of Eastern Europe, the luxury and comforts of the coach are not present; O’Reilly clearly desires to alight here and reassume the uncertainties and expectations of his younger self,

Years ago now, those days
when the world seemed ours
for the taking, when we dreamt
wildly, full of hope
and our own importance.

O’Reilly’s sense of diaspora is not only temporal, but also painfully internal. A victim of nostalgia and an unwitting tourist in his own youth, displacement perpetually plagues the evading poet. Though still capable of marking the parameters of home in his memory, his identity as an Australian of Anglo-Celtic origin turns his sights away from the antipodean land of his rearing, and temporarily toward the British Isles. One senses the poet’s hope of finding some outcrop of ancient rock to which he may find some purchase, and carve into the old-world soil of his ancestral home his own marking among the scratchings of his literary forbears.

Migration affords O’Reilly a semblance of inclusion, extending the exploration of duality beyond the internal and the temporal; it places the speaker at a spatial variance from his thoughts. Dissatisfaction and aimlessness accompany the author’s musings as he attempts to assimilate a foreign landscape. No longer wishing to play the part of the tourist, the reader becomes acutely aware of the sudden reduction of O’Reilly’s protective barriers; the train carriage has passed and the space between the rooftop and his present self has been traversed. In ‘My Inheritance’, the recurrent invasion of the poet’s carefree childhood is once more invoked. Reminiscently wistful, the reader is escorted further down the halls of the speaker’s memory, stopping ‘by barbed wire fences, scattered with droppings and dung’ to ‘suck in the smell of the sheep and the cows, musty hay, molasses.’ These rustic images, dabbed with care upon a palette of recollections to be disturbed by the slash of the artist’s brush and splashed vigorously across his canvas, hang lovingly upon the walls of these thoroughly ventured corridors. Distanced by years and self-doubt, the reader is reminded of O’Reilly’s self-imposed exile, and the ethereality of such careless days by the abrupt return of time and space in the poem’s final stanza,

In my mind the hot north wind
still flattens the brown grass
and carries the smell of sheep
and earth across the Pacific.

The Pacific ocean evokes profundity, and the depths to which the poet plunges to salvage these images, while its vastness suggests they are forever beyond the poet’s grasp in a muddling of past and present.

The remarkably emotive poems in Preparations for Departure read lightly, yet leave deep and perennial tracings. O’Reilly, in a voice sculpted by the world he has ventured, captures the evasive and eternal nature of the wandering spirit; the constantly restless speaker leaves traces of himself across the pages, carefully crafting an impression of having just come and just gone, leaving the reader one page behind. To keep turning is to accept O’Reilly’s invitation and accompany him on his centrifugal journey forward over oceans and back across pools of thought that trickle into the past. As the speaker takes in the sights, the reader may ponder class, wealth, race and age from the not always welcome security of a temporal and or spatial distance. Though the gaps are ever widening, these poems are able to suspend and preserve observances, which continue to question inherited notions of contentment, belonging and identity.

 

ZACHARY WARD graduated in a Bachelor of Communications, major in Creative Writing at UTS. His fiction appeared in the UTS Vertigo magazine.

Fresh Air by Mark O’Flynn

Written by mascara on . Posted in Fiction.

Mark O’Flynn’s most recent collection of poems is Shared Breath, (Hope Street Press, 2017). He has published a collection of short stories as well as four novels. His latest The Last Days of Ava Langdon (UQP, 2016) has been shortlisted for the 2017 Miles Franklin Award.

 


Fresh Air

They hardly ever left the city these days, so it was time. They hadn’t seen their cousins since summer and Naomi and Brent were jumping with rabbity excitement. Perhaps trepidation better described the type of excitement they were feeling. The cousins lived in the country, just beyond Cowra, and were trying, in their way, to be farmers. Naomi and Brent had many sleepless nights in the lead up to a visit to the farm. Darren Twomey, their father, had not spoken to his sister for a long time. Each time, between visits, he wondered if their relationship was reverting to that old enmity, their childhood status quo. As adults it had indifferently thawed. They had gone separate ways. They were so at odds that they each wondered at times how the other managed to survive. Since the death of the parents, long ago, all their battles suddenly seemed old ones. Distant memories. There was no point fighting about them. They were now able to talk to each other as equals. And since the birth of their children, (Lil had three), they had become, well, for a while Darren had thought the word was close.

He felt remiss about not getting the kids out of the city more often. When they were littler Naomi and Brent loved their cousins, although now they were getting to an age where they, too, were finding their lives leading elsewhere. The cousins had not one, not two, but three tree houses. They had their own quad bikes. They had animals. Cats and dogs, of course, but also a constant stream of little yellow chicks, which Naomi would snatch up feeling their hearts vibrating in her hands. Also goats, a peacock, a few cows, a sheep and a great big bull all by himself in the front paddock. Lil and Carlo, her husband, were trying to be diverse-interest farmers. Trying – they were pretty good at it. They wanted to do everything for themselves, grow their own food, make their own clothes, as well as supply what they could to the nation. Subsistence farming was not a phrase Darren could readily throw at them. Nor was impossibly romantic. It must have been hard work. For Lil it was about the survival of the planet, even her clothes were about the survival of the planet, whereas Darren believed the planet would still be here long after he was done with it. Yet they were modest. Lil worked at a high school in Cowra while Carlo, following in his family’s footsteps, worked the land. Not much of interest to Carlo happened beyond his ploughed acres. Lil had an old, self-deprecating joke she would trot out when she thought people had forgotten it: What do you call a successful farmer? One married to a teacher.

The first time they had seen the bull, after the long drive from Sydney, it had its long, pink pizzle out swinging in the breeze. Their mother, Mara, had tried to get them to stop laughing – pizzle was such a funny word, but their father was laughing just as much.

Carlo knew farming. You couldn’t knock that. Darren was slightly envious of his ability to fix, well, anything. His practicality.

‘We’ll twitch it up with a piece of fencing wire.’

That was the panacea he applied to any situation. No problem was too big. Plough up forty acres before breakfast, no worries; change the tines on the harvester, done; slaughter a piglet for dinner, easy. He was the one who had built all the tree houses. An estate of them. Darren resented his own inability to provide as much for his kids. You couldn’t build a single tree house in their inner city back yard no bigger than a couple of picnic blankets. He could barely build a lean-to for the lawnmower. He didn’t need a lawnmower. Carlo did not think much of that. Carlo would have hated being able to hear the neighbours playing their radio, washing their dishes – just there, through the wall. It was one of Darren’s secret pleasures, to see Carlo’s discomfort, on those rare occasions when they came to the city, perched on the edge of a chair as the morning filled with sirens and truck engines and aeroplanes passing overhead. Darren could work the phones and move stock and do a deal on futures trading, but he could not twitch up a tree house with a length of fencing wire.

Naomi at least loved coming here. Lil’s boys were older, closer to her age. Brent was more wary. No one could say they loved the long, dreary drive, but the whole occasion was, for Darren, a shot in the arm. He could leave his phone at home, something that always made him feel liberated, if a little naked. It was as if time sprained its ankle and slowed down. They always slept well. All that fresh air. The vegetables they ate were, frankly, stupendous.

Mara did not love it quite so much. The insects. The animals in general were not her style. If she walked across a paddock she was bound to tread in something. At nighttime it was too dark, the bull shrieking somewhere out there in the blackness like something wounded in no-mans-land. Mara preferred the glow of streetlights coming in the window, the wheezing traffic on rainy roads. She was in her element at a busy intersection, timing her dash across the road.

If she was quizzed closely what it was that disturbed her she was forced to admit she was scared of snakes. And spiders. All the creeping, poisonous wildlife with which the countryside was plagued. She was fearful of wasps and stick insects. She was fearful of sticks that looked like insects. In fact she wasn’t too crazy about sticks in general. And she was certainly no fan of the bull’s pizzle.

‘But there are spiders in the city,’ Darren rationalized.

‘Yes, but they know their place,’ said Mara. ‘They don’t try to dominate the conversation. And they understand spray.’

That was Mara’s panacea – spray.

‘There’s an eagle,’ said Naomi from the back seat and Brent leaned across her to see.

And the house, Mara thought to herself. It always seemed to smell of ash. That would have been because of the open fires. Swallows sometimes flew down the chimney and darted about the room. Every floorboard in every room creaked. You could hear each footstep in the nighttime squeaking their way to the toilet, which took a long time to fill after it had been flushed. Those floorboards were something Darren enjoyed for some reason – talk about irrational. If you looked out any window to any point of the compass there was nothing but grass. Grass, which made Mara sneeze, if they happened to visit during the spring. The first time they had come out here Naomi had cried: ‘Where are the shops?’

Darren had laughed, but Mara knew what she meant.

The joke about how primitive it all was had worn pretty thin after several days of complaint. Carlo found more and more things that needed repair, activities that kept him away from the house for long periods of time. No, he didn’t need any help. He could be seen at odd times bouncing along the horizon on his tractor.

‘There’s no reception,’ said Naomi, shaking her phone and peering at it.

Darren said he would not bring them back again if they were going to whinge and be such scaredy-custards. All the cousins protested at that, so Darren had to back down and rescind his threat. Mara and Lil looked at him, sadly. Brent sniveled most of all because, like his mother, he had become anxious at the unfamiliarity of everything. His cousins had made him stick his finger in a calf’s mouth and he had cried at that strange sensation. He needed some traffic noise to calm him down.

‘What’s that smell?’ Brent asked, his gap-tooth whistling on the sibilance of the word smell. The tooth had come out during some rough-and-tumble with his sister. Hadn’t there been a fuss about that! Mara was like a raptor or the proverbial tigress on the look out for danger to her cub. Poor Naomi had been flayed alive.

‘That’s fresh air,’ said Darren. ‘It’s good for you.’

This nervousness all came back, it seemed, to spiders. The fact that they could kill you. Snakes also, but snakes were more exotic. You wouldn’t expect to find a snake indoors, in your shoe. Spiders were more commonplace; danger lurking in every nook and cranny, in every cupboard where the biscuits might be hidden. This was the kingdom of the spiders.

‘If you leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone,’ said Aunt Lil.

‘But what if you want a biscuit?’

‘You ask for one.’

Brent’s formative consciousness went through a terrible struggle every time Darren announced they were going to visit their cousins. Attractive as the tree houses were, they were full of biting, stinging, lethal bugs. Snap out of it son, he wanted to say, although he knew better than to declare these views in which he heard his own father’s conservative voice. Okay, okay, it was fine for the boy to cry. He didn’t really have to steel himself at all. Manhood still years off. Be a kid. Enjoy it.

Darren bit his tongue. Mara had read all the books. Yes, sensitivity was a virtue, he agreed. If Darren felt that Mara was babying the boy, she for one would not hear of it. Her upheld palm, her whittled disdain, could puncture Darren’s resolve in its womb. He could so easily be reduced to a cliché. All he wanted was for his son to take on the world, not to shy away from it.

So when the long weekend arrived Darren was the least ambivalent about jumping in the car and taking off into the wide green yonder. He would have been happy to go alone, but that was a pathway fraught with its own repercussions. Mara would have grizzled that she was being abandoned to do the child rearing, while he waltzed off on his merry own to enjoy himself in the country. Where was the equity in that? She had a job too you know. They had had this squabble before. Complaints about the wild life, the discomfort, the leaky toilet seemed to be the piper he had to pay to shore up the complaints about neglected responsibilities. He neglected nothing. He thought about everything all the time.

Darren sighed.

He packed the car with far more than they would need for three days. God help them if they had to get to the spare tyre with all this crap on top of it.  But then would he have really known what to do if that need arose? He was ready to leave a full half hour before anyone else. There was make-up to be applied, last minute phone calls to be made. Finally they hit the trail. Stop – Naomi had left her flash drive. Stop – Brent had left his DS with its latest uploads. Stop – Mara had forgotten to set the alarm. There was a hold up on Paramatta Road that delayed their departure even further. They were like pigeons, Darren thought, trapped in the city by the electromagnetic radioenergy of the metropolis. Or something. Where had he heard that theory?

They crawled along in first gear for twenty minutes through the grey fumes of the traffic. Darren watched the temperature gauge climb steadily. It was just approaching the red when the traffic opened out and they were able to speed up. The needle went down, and Darren’s simmering level of stress also subsided.

‘Just wait till we get out to all that fresh air,’ he said, more brightly than he felt.

They played a game where they had to name things they saw in alphabetical sequence. They always got stuck on Q.

Soon enough they fell silent. Naomi listened to her i-pod, lips moving in silent song. After an hour of playing his electronic game Brent said he felt carsick.

‘Look out the front window, mate.’

‘I’m gunna be sick.’

‘Stop the car and let him walk around in the air for a little,’ said Mara.

‘He’ll be fine. Just look out the front.’

‘I’m gunna vomit.’

‘Don’t vomit in the car,’ Darren raised his voice more than was necessary.

‘Then stop the damn car. Let him stretch his legs.’

So Darren stopped the damn car and Brent, looking green about the gills, walked in circles by the side of the road.

‘Brent is gunna spe-ew,’ chanted Naomi, making her own entertainment.

‘I’ll spew on you,’ said Brent, now red in the face.

‘Be quiet,’ snapped Mara. ‘Leave your brother alone.’

‘Why do you always take his side?’

Darren drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Traveling with the children, and with Mara for that matter, always made the journey so much more tedious. No need to go into detail.

In the town of Blayney Naomi observed that the entire town appeared to be closed. Beyond Cowra they turned off the highway down smaller and smaller roads, winding through paddocks revitalized after the breaking of the drought. Finally a corrugated dirt lane brought them juddering in a cloud of dust to Lil’s gate. Mara began to sneeze. The bull was standing in the front paddock staring at them.

‘Hey Brent,’ said Darren, ‘hop out and open the gate for us.’

‘There’s a big bull,’ said Brent.

‘He’s not that big. I bet he won’t even move. Just shut the gate behind us and hop straight back in the car.’

‘Can’t you do that?’ Mara asked.

‘Brent can do it. He’s old enough.’

Brent reluctantly stepped from the back seat. He stood at the gate and fiddled with the chain. Darren loved those chains, although he could not have explained why. If you lived here, he thought, that chain would be the sort of everyday thing you would take for granted. He wondered if Brent would have the gumption to stand on the gate and swing its wide arc like the kids did in the films, but Brent simply walked it open. The bull stared at them like a wharfie at a picket line. Darren drove through and idled a little way up the track. There were potholes full of water, puddles, he supposed you’d have to call them. Probably full of tadpoles. He would like to look. In the rear-vision mirror Brent had his head bent over the chain at the strainer post. The sun came from behind a cloud and the grass, in an instant, appeared luminously green. Then the back door was open and Brent dived excitedly in.

‘That cow’s comin’,’ he squealed.

Again in the mirror Darren saw the gate behind them slowly swing open and the bull ambling towards it.

‘Hey!’

He honked the horn, but this only had the effect of making the bull trot forward through the gate, out onto the road.

‘Shit.’

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Mara.

‘The bloody bull’s got out. Didn’t you shut the gate?’

‘I thought I did,’ said Brent.

‘Jesus Christ. Come with me.’

Darren got out of the car. His tone did not allow Brent to object. Mara’s lips were thin. She stared straight ahead. Brent followed his father. The bull was wandering up the road, what did Carlo call it, the long paddock?

‘What part of shut the gate don’t you understand?’

‘Sorry Dad.’

Darren began to trot after the bull. Brent lagged behind. Darren wasn’t quite sure if this was a wise thing to do, to chase after a bull of unknown temperament, but he could not arrive at his sisters, having not seen her for so long and say: ‘Sorry I’ve let your bull out the gate.’

What would Carlo say? Carlo would think, as he had always thought, that Darren was just another city idiot, about as bright as a pigeon pecking for crumbs in the city square.

Puffing now, Darren caught up with the bull, making sounds as if he was trying to reason with it.

‘Wait. Hold on. Wait up.’

The bull suddenly stopped in the middle of the road, tall grass growing up on the verge at either side. Giving it a wide berth Darren circled around it with the idea of herding it back towards the gate. The bull stared at him. No movement.

‘Go on. Shoo. Move.’

The bull stared. Darren waved his arms. He did not know the preferred method for getting a bull to move. He picked up a stone and threw it at the animal, hitting it square on the forehead with dull thud. The bull blinked. Darren picked up a bigger stone and threw that. It hit the bull on the shoulder. Suddenly the bull turned and snorted and began to trot back down the road.

‘Yah!’ Darren ran along behind it, and there in front of the great beast, the much smaller form of his son standing in the middle of the lane.

Everything happened quickly after that, yet at the same time everything slowed down. Seeing the animal coming Brent turned and ran. The bull, seeing nothing but a smaller, fleeing figure, gave chase. The lane was too narrow. All three of them were running at full pace down the road when the bull caught up with the boy, treading on his heel and sending him spinning. Brent tumbled beneath the hooves of the bull, which ran right over him, legs whirring, and kept going past the gate in the opposite direction. In a moment Darren was there, his son on the ground, gouts of blood pulsing from his mouth with every cough, his left foot twisted at entirely the wrong angle, his eye yellow with dust, staring up at Darren, pleading, too stunned to cry. In the distance, Mara, running down the track from the stationary car, her screams shrill and faint like some hysterical bird in a far off flaming tree, but coming, coming.