I Said The Sea Was Folded

by Erik Jensen

Black Inc

ISBN: 9781760642914

Reviewed by JOSIE/JOCELYN DEANE
 
 
The first poem, chronologically, in I said the sea was folded begins 

I don’t know if you read poetry
I don’t know if I write it.
(p.55)

Jane Hirshfield tells the speaker of the book, in another, that poems “are a diary note/ to remember what happened”. Poetry— its writing, language and the ways it can make sense of love/wounded time— is the first preoccupation of Erik Jensen’s book, in spite of its promotion as “love poems”. 

If I said the sea was folded has a unifying trick, it is the framing of poetry— as an activity, an artefact, a mediation of language—  as inherently concerned with itself. This isn’t new— every kind of poetry is implicated by the limits of its field— but through its dramatization, Jensen makes it the engine of his poems, and the narrative at their core. It insists that any kind of therapy or catharsis poetry can affect first passes through the poem as a text, revelatory and profoundly alienating at the same time, for reader and speaker. It’s no surprise that the book ends with a gloss on what is inexpressible, as “the background against which/ anything I could express has its meaning”; any poetry concerned with itself-as-poetry ends in the same place,  turns liberating and restrictive. 

Most of the poems directly enact this passage through themselves—and the medium of the speaker— detailing their own construction. The book is divided into 3 non-linear chronological segments, starting from the end of a relationship. Some play on a motif that appears across each segment, decontextualizing as time rewinds. Poems refer back to each other, to their germ at the beginning of the relationship, only to emerge bitter and accusatory at the end. A poem about the love language of turtles— precious in its inexpressibility through human terms, its lack of projection— is foreshadowed by its later, first appearance, when the speaker spits 

why did you shout last night, when all we wanted
was to feel the simple, placable love
of a turtle stacked up on a turtle?
(p.14)

Other works— ‘Pinter’s Betrayal’, ‘Nick Payne’s Constellations’— use non-linear time to excavate the normativity of works inspired by love: inverting the dramatic arc of meet cute, juxtaposing romantic gestures with their fizzling out, coupling them the self-interest. It has the effect— ironically— of emphasising the radical contingency of romantic relationships. Something portrayed as normal/monolithic is tessellated with a thousand shards of gender-play, class signifiers and naturalisation.  Addressing their partner, the speaker defines the poems in their book, subject and object, as “the ways I’ve tried to look”, approaching their partner’s non-binary self, “broken off in the parts I’ve wanted to see”. This “trying to look”, defined by its engagement with failure, finds its corollary in the inexpressibility of poetry, that “Words are not enough… they exist too much/ for the people that made them”, as the speaker reports their partner saying.

 If the poems pass through themselves in I said the sea was folded, that passage involves reaching for each other, and— through each other— the absent beloved, remote in space/ time and— the speaker dramatizes— driven away by the normativity of poetic discursiveness and— the speaker insinuates— the speaker’s own norminess, their reproductions of those norms in speech. The poems as a result are sparse, connotative, to the point of vagueness, the recording of imagistic details, juggling/juxtaposing poetic diction with simple, deliberately banal records of the relationship, as if to invite and stave off interpretation. They “hold in place/even when the other/is no longer here”. 

Linguistic reference, not only to themselves but as a whole, becomes a key technical, thematic and ethical concern of the poems. Through reference they transcend, feed back into each other’s use of metaphor/imagery and establish a poetic whole out of the disjointed timeline, all while their essential emptiness and arbitrariness are emphasised. Individually, the poems can read as circling a void. A list of vague, deliberately poeticized descriptions of trees “fixed against the sky… their branches bent/as if the cold had stunted them”, “hedges of agapanthus” and “money/after it had been spent” conclude with “I suppose what I’m trying to say is/ I love you”, direct address immediately couched in/ out of the speaker’s suspicion of language and its stock trade. In one poem the speaker’s grandmother offers a warning, in two lines, “against poems/ she said they are forever”, the rest of the blank page almost a literalisation of this. There’s a sense of almost-tragic irony in the poems: they enact a double movement between sense-making and performative contradiction. In the prologue Jensen offers a mea culpa to the poem’s addressee: “I wish I met you now/but of course I met you then/and the rest of that time/is just what happened”. Reading through the book linearly, using the poetry’s logic to piece the continuity together, following the speaker’s own desire to “let you be/ to feel it for yourself”, we end in a place full of promise and retroactive empathy that cannot be real. 

It’s in this continually moving/retreating space that the ethical desire of I said the sea was folded lives. In writing “love poetry” where the beloved is conspicuously absent, their construction put in air-quotes, Jensen tries to build a space where the deferral of reference comes to signify a queer, non-binary being, the “background against which/ whatever I could express has its meaning” . In this he mirrors, and directly draws on, Maggie Nelson, citing her “complaint/about the instability of likeness” that retroactively informs the poetics of the book. As the speaker murmurs: “one tree is like another tree/but not too much”. In this space hollowed out by the poems— Jensen implies— a love poem that can adequately represent a non-binary beloved, from a cisgender perspective, can take shape. A kind of representation— the paradox is intentional— predicated on inexpressibility, the perfect silence of a “good ally” that doesn’t overstep their boundaries. Jensen frames this as a hard won ethical lesson on his part, after the breakup, “Nothing occurs in order/although it takes a whole life to realise/so I haven’t”. At the same, it’s a lesson predicated on cis incomprehension, and inevitable tragedy. If the cisnormativity of love poetry is critiqued through the book’s structure/poetic style, it seems to conclude in a fatalism complementary to “good allies”: I will inevitably, tragically misrepresent you in my poetry, and I’m truly sorry. My intentions were good. Cis people, this is what you must take heed of to avoid my sorry fate, the limits of my poetic language and world.

 If the poems of the book set up a negative dialectic, opening up space for non-binary reference/critique, the cis speaker remains an unmoved mover, perfectly still, separated from all that gender through their work. But the true issue is, as a non-binary person, I can’t believe in the inexpressible. Or at least the version reified by Jensen or Nelson. A reckoning with what being non-binary implies— a critique of colonial gender construction, the ongoing role of gender in upholding white patriarchy and capitalist accumulation, the kind of limiting subjectivity that is affixed to the “non-binary beloved”— seems beyond it. If non-binary space— Jensen writes— is a kind of via negativa, I couldn’t think of something more obstructive to it than this deployment of the “inexpressible”, or the poetry it suggests. It makes me think of the tweet: a weeping voice tells someone that they can’t simply say everything is a gender. The person, unmoved, points at a weird cloud, a cat, a sloth-mug: gender, gender, gender. 

What does this all add up to? A series of finely detailed, observant poems that don’t hang together? A structure and poetics that turns that lack into a good technique, a kind of join-the-dots that performs an interesting self-critique of poetic language and tradition, which— like Nelson’s work— is more important for what it crystalizes than opens up? In the end, I’m encouraged to take this kind of poetry from cis lovers of non-binary people, in the same way I’m encouraged to accept good allyship… What I have time for in the work I should appreciate, and the idea of the inexpressible I’ll try to disabuse, to prevent it causing potential mischief among the good cis people. Meanwhile, I’ll be over here with my partners.

References:

1. Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts, Minneapolis, Greywolf Press, 2015, print. 

 
JOSIE/JOCELYN DEANE is a writer/student at the University of Melbourne. Their work has appeared in Cordite, Australian Poetry Journal and Overland, among others. In 2021 they were one of the recipients of the Queensland Poetry Festival Ekphrasis award. They live on unceded Wurundjeri land.

Song of the Crocodile

by Nardi Simpson

ISBN 9780733643743

Hachette 2020

Reviewed by PIP NEWLING

To read Song of the Crocodile is to immerse yourself in an unfolding relationship to place. You may not recognise it immediately but the profound connection to place shared by Simpson through this story is a slow build to love, yearning, recognition and respect for Country.  The novel is a confident and accomplished debut by Nardi Simpson, a Yuwaalaraay woman best known for her singing and song writing as a member of the Sydney band the Stiff Gins. It is a profound intergenerational Australian story of family and Country that deserves to be as celebrated and well-read as Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet.

The novel illuminates a way of thinking, of loving and of living. Simpson’s musicality, the fluid way she uses language, both English and Yuwaalaraay, throughout underscores the narrative by creating landscapes of emotion. It reveals connectedness and relationship across time and place, allowing language and Country to breathe. Song of the Crocodile is a lyrical achievement of story, language, and heart.

Set in a time resembling the 1950s, the book opens with Simpson walking us into Darnmoor, a small regional town in the north-west of NSW with the tag line ‘Gateway to Happiness’ on its welcome sign. We see the early morning quiet streets, the shuttered shops and the war memorial in the centre that provides the focus for the town. We walk through the town, leaving the ‘inoffensive, modest and calm’ façade of Darnmoor, to the Council tip, a bora ground now covered in the town rubbish, and then on further to the Mangamanga, a great river near where the local Aboriginal people live on a place called the Campgrounds located at the end of Old Black Road.

This introduction sets the foundation for all that will follow; the demarcation of bodies, dreams and knowledge, and what happens when boundaries are pushed. Powerfully, the story is told only through the experience of the Aboriginal characters. The white characters are significant actors, changing hopes and lives, but they are not the emotional or narrative focus.

The characters

The story is of three generations of women, Margaret Lightning, her daughter Celie Billymil, and Mili, Celie’s daughter.

Living on the Campgrounds and working in Darnmoor, Margaret is quiet and hardworking, navigating the white town with caution. She works at the hospital, doing the laundry and walks into town each day using side streets to reach her destination. The demarcation of race occurs in the hospital too, with Aboriginal patients installed on a side verandah with Margaret acting as their nurse, cleaner and counsellor, and conduit to the white management. Racism is ever present, in the demand that the sheets used for the Aboriginal patients are burnt rather than washed and re-used, in the level of care for the Aboriginal patients, the amount of information Aboriginal patients are provided about their health.

Celie is a kind, calm constant energy in the story. She suffers loss with dignity and determination to provide a future for Mili, her daughter, and she uses her knowledge of the town to create opportunity.

Mili is the future generation. She lives in change, where her newly fashioned hopes are regularly pushed down and obstructed by the white systems of power in the town. Mili becomes a bridge between the Aboriginal and white worlds, a burden of much weight.

Ancestors feature too, some being stars, trees and dust. They are ever present and active, guiding and preparing the earthbound people for the future while drawing on the old ones for advice and support. The sky-bound observe from the ‘the roof of the plains’ and move across the Milky Way, called Warrambool in Yuwaalaraay language.

Some ancestors that drive the story are Jakybird, the Songman who brings the choir together for the song of the crocodile; Garriya, the malevolent single-minded crocodile who lies in the earth far below the town waiting for his chance to return; Margaret and Celie’s lightning kin who herald the rain; Murrudhi Gindamalaa (Laughing Star) who protects and provides for the newly dead; Malawildhuulmuranga (the Littlest Shadow at the Darkest Time Before the Dawn) who disappears into dark nights hiding diamonds, stars, within her; and Burrenjean, (the featherless bird) the human form of magpie lark who ‘makes the country sing’ despite being name-called as mudlark. Her feather father reassures her of the significance of her earth-bound origin when he tells her:

‘The mud is the beginning of our connectedness. The beginning of our responsibility, the reason we are needed…

What is mud but the joining of all that is above and all below?’ (p210)

Connectedness

Simpson seamlessly conveys the world above, on and below the plains as one. Her telling of Aboriginal philosophy, of Country, belonging and lore, details consequence and relationship for all creatures, not just human. In Song of the Crocodile, all things are elemental and connected; all things are in fluid relationship to each other, including the writer and reader.

Her inventive way of weaving Yuwaalaraay words and meaning throughout the English without direct explanation, creates space and invites the reader to read in a different way, from a different angle. There is no singular understanding or story in this novel. It is layered and readers will find different connections within it.

The characters experience connections, often surprising themselves. By the river, when the women gather to comfort Margaret, who has been disrespected and disappointed (again) by white townspeople actions, Idy, an older Aboriginal woman, begins singing. Margaret joins in. She knows the words, and the power of the song, but can’t remember when she learnt it. Celie and Mili both, find comfort from tragedy in the Double D, an ancient coolabah tree by the river that saw the boras, long before the town was first laid out.

Another tree, where Celie’s husband died, along the Old Black Road, draws Celie, newborn baby Mili and Celie’s young nephews:

‘Aunty Ceil, Nan told me about the trees, how they remember everything. How they hold memories for people… But here, around here, is where he lived too. Aunt, sit down.

… Nan taught me all about it. They hold life. The bad stuff they take away through their roots and release it into the ground.’ (p67)

For Malawildhuulmuranga, her connection is planetary, as her Dhaa explains, ‘You are a daughter of dawn, the only thing separating darkness from light and the only thing that joins them.’ (p82)

Jakybird assesses and marvels at Paddy, Mili’s son who is in deep despair:

‘He watched Paddy sway into town, messy, loose, stumbling, but erect. This must have been powerful magic, remaining upright when all conspired to pull him down’. (p344)

Paddy reminds Jakybird of Garriya, now crocodile but who was once a friend, and the connection is made again between the ancient and the now.

The connection of life and death is always close too. At one point, Wil, Mili’s husband who has died, tries to reach Paddy his son, to induce a flicker of hope in Paddy’s heart:

‘High in the star, Wil moved memories into his son. They were only colours: the deep blue of a uniform, the bright orange of a council hat. Flashes of smiles, places they’d been, or the feel of a fishing line or the ruffling of his hair.’ (p350)

Connection is everywhere in this story, connection to all creatures, to the past and to the future. Even when the characters feel most alone, the reader knows they are not.

Demarcations and boundaries

The town geographically delineates between Aboriginal and white clearly. Darnmoor, as most real Australian towns did, corrals the local Aboriginal people outside the white perimeter, past the rubbish tip at the end of the Old Black Road. The history of this practice extends back through to the first settler fence-builders and town planners on this land. For instance, the town I grew up in, Taree on Biripi Country on the NSW mid north coast, pushed/ took/stole/drove local Biripi people to a reserve, Purfleet, south of the town across the river.

Song of the Crocodile reveals these practices as oppressive, common and complex. Some Aboriginal people are allowed inside the unspecified fence, but this comes with negotiation and always a cost. We see the cost to Margaret first:

‘When the purple bush blooms began to thin then disappear and the edge of a tared road loomed ahead, Margaret’s voice began to soften. At the street sign, she pushed the notes further into the back of her throat, constricting their flow and burying them within her body once again. As her shoes hit the asphalt of Charity Street, she fell completely silent.’ (p11).

In the novel, just as in the real world, Aboriginal women use their intimate knowledge of the white world strategically, while the white characters have no insight into how little they understand of – or are required by – the Aboriginal world. This considered and deliberate reveal, of how an oppressed people know their oppressors intimately while the oppressors have no clue, was a highlight in the story for me.

White actions have impacts on the Campgrounds community. These impacts are frequently dismissed – or even unimagined – because white people believe they hold the power and can choose not to notice, not to listen. We see the impacts roll down the generations affecting people and land the same. The white settler idea of progress – unsustainable growth through exploitation of land and people – clashes fundamentally with the integrated, cyclical nurturing and honouring connections to past, present and future that most of the Aboriginal characters carry in the story.

The Darnmoor inhabitants praise the achievements of white men above all else. Like many real Australian towns, the townspeople invest in appearances not community, in short term thinking, unsustainable futures and ignore or decry other ways and other people. The town rubbish tip placed on the bora grounds is just one example. Another is the construction of a levee around Darnmoor to hold back flood waters.

The town celebrates the completion of the levee, but the levee creates further demarcation between the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people of the area. When Mili’s tears begin to flow, and all the travesties of humanity she has had to endure come to fruition, the danger of ignoring Country is clear. Garriya gathers his energy and slowly surfaces, the sky inhabitants dance the old bora grounds, which never disappear or age no matter how significant their apparent destruction appears, and:

‘… the townspeople watched the levee, holding their breath, waiting to see if the mound would breach, wondering if all they had created would be destroyed and washed away.’ (p401)

These practices of demarcation – white choices – are damaging and shamefully long-lived ones. They are still present in many towns across Australia. Through fiction, Simpson powerfully writes the truth of the contemporary relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people.

The gateway

Jakybird warns the sky inhabitants, sitting around icy fires in Warrambool, the Milky Way, that the singing of Garriya ‘… is a hard one; some of you will die a second time in its singing’. (p354).

Darnmoor is not a generative gateway, and certainly not one to happiness as that welcome sign states. Warrambool, the literal heavens, is a gateway to the next place, for some a return to the earth, for others to sing again, others to sleep and wait some more. The act of singing is also a gateway, for it is part of culture, of belonging, of the turnabout of the world. It leads us to another place, another future.

The novel itself is a gateway too. Its landscape is wide and considered as Simpson tells the truth of our ongoing relationship with First Nations people of this Country. She details the changes to landscape that compound negatively and highlights the lack of accountability and short-sightedness of our settler society.

While Song of the Crocodile is a local, family saga, it speaks to our national story, and Simpson, with heart, attention and tenderness, shows readers a perspective that most of us will never have imagined before. This is what great fiction does, implicates and expands the reader’s emotional and philosophical terrain.

Towards the end of the novel, Malawildhuulmuranga asks one of the old ones ‘… why do you want to destroy it?’ and he answers, ‘How do we begin again, if, first, we don’t let go?’. (p365)

These are powerful cycles of renewal. We know change will only be made if we learn the lessons of the old ones. There is hope here, in this story, if we listen and learn.

PIP NEWLING was born on unceded Wirrayaraay Country, grew up on Biripi Country and lives and works on Dharawahl and Gadigal Country. She thanks all Elders from these lands, past, present, emerging and future, for blessing her with the health Country provides and the opportunity to benefit from their custodianship.

The Other Half of You

Michael Mohammed Ahmad

ISBN 9780733639036

Hachette

Reviewed by MICHELLE HAMADACHE

The Other Half of You isn’t written just for all the readers out there who get what it’s like to be the child of migrant parents. It’s not just written for those who know already what it’s like to deal with growing up in a home where the culture on your doorstep is interpreted as threatening by the adults in the house. It’s not just written for those who know what it’s like to grow up where the only home you have known, Australia, consistently rejects you by asking you to be something other than yourself in order to belong. Arab people in particular, Muslim people more broadly speaking—for they are not interchangeable terms—are overwhelmingly regarded with suspicion and hostility here, and that changes what it is possible to say now.

If a book is going to avoid being trapped in a fallen language, where everything it says or does judges and is then in turn judged by others, then it is remembering that stories are uncertain, sometimes difficult, gifts that matters most. Stories are the threads that draw together disparate communities and bind new ways of knowing to a collective consciousness, to forge the newly imagined community.

The Other Half of You is as much about what is, as what might be, and in its gritty, graphic and unforgettable detail, it contains the storyteller’s ability to exchange lived experiences in such a way that those experiences are not just shared with the reader, but integrated, via memory, via the body, as stories with lessons for living. It is the rubber-gloved hand on the delicate skin of a penis that conveys, unforgettably, the lesson: raise daughters solely to be wives to the detriment of all (especially their husbands); marry against your will and risk self-destruction, and, like all the lessons to be imparted by The Other Half of You, these two lessons are underscored by the prevailing moral: if anything is going to get us through the shit we’re in, it’s love.

The Other Half of You marks the end of Bani Adam’s bildungsroman spanning The Tribe and The Lebs. Regardless of whether Michael Mohammad Ahmad intends to continue with Bani, the journey to adulthood ends here. This is because in the birth of Bani’s son Kahlil, and the father’s story of his conception given to his son, a fiercely poetic and mature voice emerges. It is a voice that also channels the energies of rich literary genealogies, that draw together Tolstoy and Thomas Mann, most resoundingly Lebanese diasporic writer and poet Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, for whom Bani’s son is named and from where the novel’s epigraph is drawn. Ahmad also nods to The Book of Khalid, an experimental novel by Ameen Rihani written in 1911, and sometimes referred to as the first Arab novel (with all the contentions that come along with ‘firsts’ and the novel as form and genre).

Ahmad formally organises his novel into three parts, each referring to time and destiny, ‘All That Was’; ‘All That Is’; and ‘All That Will Be’. It is loosely structured as an address, or as a gift, to Bani’s newborn son, Kahlil. In order to explain just how an Alawite Muslim forbidden to marry outside the tribe ends up with his Anglo-Australian wife Oli and their baby, ‘my half-caste, half-insider, half-outsider’, Bani begins with the story of his unconsummated first love, Sahara. Sahara is a Christian Lebanese girl he met online living in a housing commission flat in Glebe with her single mother. It is Bani’s father’s discovery via gossip of this relatively innocent, but consuming, first love that precipitates Bani’s disastrous arranged marriage to Fatima. Fatima is a nineteen-year-old girl looking to escape her father’s household, and it is the inevitable implosion of that marriage that sees Bani ultimately, through despair rather than defiance, reject his marriage and fall into the arms of Oli.

Bani meets Oli at the PCYC boxing gym. It is Ahmad’s strength that he harnesses the metaphoric potential of places like the PCYC. Here, in the egalitarian, if brutal, world of boxing, racial and homophobic epithets abound, yet the atmosphere is inclusive. The boxing ring, despite its violence, its duelling opponents, ironically flattening binaries of us and them, while upholding identities, is a place that binds rather than divides, through the shared understanding of a set of rules that are agreed upon and entered into freely, without eradicating differences. The gym upholds identities, forming something like a Foucauldian heterotopia—a space that exists within the dominant hegemony of white settler Australia.

Bani’s father’s disposal store, like the PCYC where he trains, is another example of the powerful representation of places that resist. The store is aptly named Cave of Wonders and is stocked with wares that draw a variety of customers seeking sleeping bags and the possibility of bartering. Here, Ahmad strategically deploys the history of many Syrian and Lebanese migrants to Australia who were granted provisional, limited, unequal resident status based on their role as ‘hawkers’. Many chose to anglicise their names and erase their origins in order to be accepted into an Australia hell-bent on whiteness.

Jumana Bayeh discusses Patrick White’s problematic characterisation of a Syrian hawker in her Southerly essay, ‘Australian Literature and the Arab-Australian Migrant Novel’. Bayeh poses a perspicacious question: ‘But what story could be uncovered if we were able to hear the Syrian narrate his own life and his experiences in Australia?’ (131). This challenge underscores the silences and erasures that have characterised Australia’s literary spaces to date. The presence of the store in the novel returns this lost history, as does Bani’s acknowledgment of his own family’s history of naming (Bani/Benny 295). In his representation of Cave of Wonders, Ahmad creates a space of reversals, while also memorialising the history of a group of people who came to Australia with a conditional and ambivalent welcome. With its intertextual reference to A Thousand and One Nights, the Cave is a place that gives Bani the opportunity to read Persian poetry, to escape family and wife. It is also where misogyny and racism are given open mic, but where, as the owner’s son, Bani gets to call the shots and thus level the playing field. As always, the representations of sexist and racist outbursts are framed by the novel’s ideological focalisation that captures what is with a deliberate and crafted goal: to bring into the literary space the flawed, the ugly, the inappropriate, the shocking—the human. When Bani grapples with the limits of his own conflicted mixture of feminism and tribalism, it is a dramatized battle that Ahmad is orchestrating.

The mix of autobiography and fiction is part of its fascination: that age-old dilemma concerning itself with ontological distinctions between fiction and lie; truth in fiction. The ideological focalisation of the novel is not sexist or misogynistic, though it certainly represents both standpoints through its characters.

As with The Tribe and The Lebs, this third novel in the series draws on Ahmad’s lived experience. The fictional mode of The Other Half of You means its characters and storylines are both metaphoric and literal. The strength of Ahmad’s prose often rests in his ability to strikingly and relentlessly bring to life scenes: characters, action and setting, from weddings to fights, capturing them in a mix of vivid language and heightened observation. But most importantly, Ahmad’s prose frames these situations in Bani’s unique mix of insouciance and wisdom.

At stake in the story of the love affair between Bani and Oli and the birth of Kahlil, is the knitting together of what, up until The Other Half of You, has been divided, or at least incongruent: the world of children descended from Anglo-Saxon heritage and the world of children descended from everywhere else, and in a context where racism divides and culture prohibits, the romance plot between Oli and Bani is a powerful and productive trope.

If Oli’s characterisation never matches the unforgettable Sahara and Fatima, it is in part because her character is understated. It was always going to be a tough gig for a pale girl with thin arms to compete with Bani’s first love, the hirsute and stocky Sahara, whose thirst to understand apostrophes was quenched during a pizza night in Glebe. Likewise, it is hard for Oli to be as memorable as Fatima, whose desire to leave her father’s house is realised in her marriage to Bani, living in a converted garage, wearing only a G-string and watching never-ending episodes of Friends. Coming at the end of the novel and with so much at stake, a lot of pressure was placed on the realisation of Oli’s character and the introduction of an Anglo-Australian parallel backstory. It is perhaps deliberate that the White girl and her family didn’t hold-up to the depth and the vibrancy of the realisation of the Adam family, Sahara or Fatima.

Even the disastrous arranged marriage to Fatima is propelled by love. It is a marriage Bani enters into from love for the father, the family, the tribe. If willpower and looks alone make a marriage, then on paper the marriage between Fatima and Bani should have been rock solid. Ahmad deploys the perspective of the older narrator which imbues the entire section with a sense of impending disaster, but also allows the younger Bani to blindly suffer through the honeymoon and marriage as they unfold with tragi-comedy and bathos. Perhaps the most poignant moment of the book is the father’s outcry, ‘I should have let him go’. This cry echoes throughout the rooms of this book, because ultimately, Ahmad is telling the story of the break and the fold between father and son, the present and posterity, and of histories based not on continuity but on ruptures.

In many respects, the love Bani feels for his world with all its bathos and brutality, courage and fierceness establishes The Other Half of You as the work of a storyteller, rather than novelist or memoirist. The novel is strongest when it shares experiences, whether lived, observed or imagined, in their raw materiality, boldly capturing what is. This is not lack of craft, rather it’s a concerted effort to create a territory free of the relentless drive towards conformity, or permissible difference that characterises much of contemporary Australian multiculturalism. Within the pages of The Other Half of You, anger, frustration, ignorance and despair hold centre stage with forgiveness, acceptance and the transformative power of love. The novel doesn’t try to silence what is unpalatable about lived human experience. While there might be more information than Kahlil (or any child) wants to know from his father about their conception, and the various sexual experiences that led to that conception, the body is centred as a way of knowing. The ‘over-sharing’ draws attention to the conceit, The Other Half of You is fiction after all, while also consciously drawing on the relentlessness of a confessional mode that breaks down social mores and prioritises the need for a story to be told over and above other considerations.

Randa Abdel-Fattah describes writing as a Muslim writer in Australia as the necessity of writing from a double position: a need to write for a Muslim audience, while writing to a white audience. She describes the frustration of her experiences of being refused the right to write a literature of universal concern, needing to particularise her story, and have it ‘kept’ particular, so that it is heard in a mainstream culture where whiteness is normative. Received literary wisdom that the universal is reached by way of the particular doesn’t apply for everyone. Negotiating this challenge is a task that the writer writing into a minor literature, such as Australia’s, faces, in addition to all the other authorial challenges.

I am not sure that the language exists yet for a relationship of love between marginalised Arabic and Muslim communities and a white settler Australia, but I am sure that it will take novels like The Other Half of You, and writers like Mohammad Ahmad, to bring that language into being.

Consider The Other Half of You as a difficult, uncertain gift. In the words of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet: receivers of the gift, remember, gratitude should have no weight ‘lest you lay a yoke’ upon giver and receiver alike (29). We should have the ability to receive literature as a living thing that needs to grow and change and fail and succeed, all within a single book, so the greater thing of literature, beyond major and minor concerns, might continue to thrive.

Works drawn upon or cited:

Randa Abdel-Fattah, ‘The Double Bind of Writing as an Australian Muslim Woman’, Mashriq & Mahjar, Vol. 4 No. 2, 2017, pp. 97-117.
Jumana Bayeh, ‘Australian Literature and the Arab-Australian Migrant Novel’, Southerly, Vol. 79 No.1, 2019, pp. 129-149.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn, Pimlico: London, 1999, (83-107).
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, Heinemann: London, 1926, repr. 1973.
Anne Monsour, ‘Tell Me My Story: The Contribution of Historical Research to an Understanding of the Australian Lebanese Experience’, Mashriq & Mahjar, Vol. 4 No. 2, 2017, pp. 9-39.
Ameeni Rihani, The Book of Khalid, Melville House Publishing: New York, 2012.

MICHELLE HAMADACHE has had publications in Australian and international journals. She teaches creative writing at Macquarie University. ‘Zohira’, a short story appeared in the British Journal of International Writing 2021.

Second City: Essays From Western Sydney

Edited by Luke Carman & Catriona Menzies-Pike

Sydney Review of Books

ISBN 978-0-6480621-3-4

Reviewed by CHER TAN
 
 
In ‘Second City’, the titular essay by Eda Gunaydin in Second City, an anthology of essays collected and published by the Sydney Review of Books, Gunaydin begins: ‘I spent the summer between 2013 and 2014 as many 20-year-olds do: working at a restaurant.’ It’s a sentence that includes as much as it excludes, echoing the popular internet phrase ‘if you know, you know’. The essay goes on to explore the ramifications of gentrification in Parramatta, alongside a certain gentrification of the self through education and upward mobility. With a stylistic panache and an erudite wit, Gunaydin goes on to ask, towards the end of the essay, ‘… if displacement did not begin five years ago but two hundred and thirty years ago, what use is there in attempting to freeze its current class and racial composition in amber?’ This mode of writing is something I’ve observed amongst writers on the so-called ‘margins’ in the last few years: as writers move away from the giddy nascence of a minoritised literature that is nevertheless situated inside an anglophone canon, narratives become less concerned with a centre and more interested in interrogating the complexities that arise from marginal conditions. Struggle is considered alongside joy, privileges alongside oppressions.

Second City is another anthology that adds to the burgeoning list of anthologies which display a range of writing in its variegated styles, tendencies and textures, particularly in an ‘Australian’ publishing landscape which has historically been exclusionary in both form and identity. Its subtitle, ‘Essays From Western Sydney’, is as sly as it is earnest, a marketing device that winks at you as much as it is true. Without belabouring the point (as I hope no readers of this publication have been living under a rock), Western Sydney is a location that has plagued the popular ‘Australian’ imaginary as a hotbed of chaos since the 1990s, when mainstream news media painted the area as one that was teeming with criminals and drug users. Even today, at the time of writing, certain (working-class and/or POC-majority) suburbs see an increase in police presence ostensibly to curb the spread of COVID-19 in Sydney but which we all know is a ruse to further criminalise bla(c)k and brown people.

As Felicity Castagna notes, in her essay ‘Hopefully the Future is Dark’, ‘The problem is that Western Sydney is a place but it’s also an idea. You can either write to that idea—think Struggle Street, Housos, The Combination, every protest you’ve ever seen on the rooftop of Villawood Detention Centre, every ‘dole bludger’ you’ve seen on A Current Affair—or you can write against it.’ I remember speaking with Gunaydin (full disclosure: she is a friend) about the popularisation of narratives ‘from Western Sydney’, where she observed that some writers from the area would play into preconceived notions of ‘Western Sydney identity’ while the dominant forces of Ozlit would look on with pity, guilt, shame and exoticised fascination. These forces are diminishing as ‘Australian’ publishing enters a new(er) epoch helmed by minoritised writers, creating a stronger understanding there is a need to move away from the centre, but doubtlessly in some circles it is still proliferating. Perhaps this is a paradox that can arise with critiquing marginalisation, which sometimes ends up entrenching those same ideas that resulted in the critique in the first place.

But the essays in Second City would rather dispose of those tendencies, and as a result they are as varied in subject as well as in style—what editor Luke Carman states in the book’s introduction ‘can be represented by no single politics, mindset, opinion, style, aesthetic or poetics.’ Frances An, in ‘(Feminist) Sages’, echoes the above-mentioned conversation with Gunaydin when she refers to ‘postcolonial cults who started every sentence with “as an [ethnic minority] …” and threw in terms like “Otherness” and “decolonise” to assert their status as messiahs of racial justice’, situated within a larger critique about left or left-adjacent movements that are exclusionary in their language and aesthetics even if they proclaim inclusivity. Further complexities are articulated in Sheila Ngoc Pham’s ‘An Elite Education’, an unpretentious personal narrative about the differences between her Vietnamese diaspora family and her husband Josh’s Anglo one, where the former is Liberal-voting and middle-class, and how she is ‘actually not the first in my family to receive a university education in this country’; whilst he is. Zohra Aly’s ‘Of Mosques and Men’ looks into the travails involved in her husband Abbas’s experiences building a mosque in the Christian-dominated area of Annangrove post-9/11, and May Ngo’s ‘Shopping Night’ expresses a vexed relationship to Western Sydney as a returnee.
 
Yumna Kassab’s ‘Borges and the Tiger’ stands out for its experimentalism, as it takes the reader through dream-like vignettes that analyse the work of Jorge Luis Borges and the perplexing allure of writing inside ‘the labyrinth’ (the library). Much like her debut collection of short stories, The House of Youssef, the author possesses a deft hand when it comes to crafting philosophical fables, resulting in a non didacticism that reveal intimacies as much as they allow for imagination to fill in the gaps, like how, as she puts it, reading Borges is ‘to be in a loop of symbols in endless conversation with one another’. In ‘Raise Your Needles in Defence of Public Knitting’, Aleesha Paz writes with a joyous energy, as she revels in making public what is commonly regarded as a private pleasure, while Martin Reyes’s ‘Excuse Me, Tabi Tabi Po’ is a light-hearted essay on his Filipino family’s superstitions alongside a serious contemplation of pre-colonial folklore and attitudes towards natural surroundings and land.

Castagna’s provocation about writing to or against preconceived ideas are at work in some of the essays in Second City: to Rawah Arja (in ‘An Introvert’s Guide to Surviving an Arab Family of Extroverts’), living in Western Sydney growing up was thought to ‘always going to be second best’; Raaza Jamshed (in ‘Muhammad’) recalls moving away from Bankstown because she doesn’t want her kids ‘to grow up as strangers to this country’, and to Ngo her childhood in Western Sydney ‘felt like we were so far away from everything—at least from anything that was interesting, away from the places where things were happening.’ Otherwise Western Sydney is hardly referred to at all; the words ‘Western Sydney’ appear in the anthology only 35 times (or thereabouts, otherwise I apologise for my ineptitude with numbers). The problem that Castagna points out is perhaps the biggest conundrum faced by minoritised writers and artists, that by virtue of our sexuality or our ability or our race or our socioeconomic position or the places in which we reside and/or come from, there is an impulse to either 1) explain, 2) smooth over, or 3) react against the status quo—that which places those preconceived images in the first place. Are there other ways to imagine? Indeed, as Castagna continues towards the end of her essay, ‘It is an invitation to undo the ways ‘things are done’ and invite alternatives into the equation.’

I won’t be so glib as to say that writing against preconceived ideas is easy, especially in a publishing landscape that is at once gatekept, looked at, and attended to by a certain section of society divorced from the so-called ‘real world’. It is even more difficult when they’ve bled into the dominant cultural narrative for it to appear as if it is the inherent truth. As George Haddad writes in ‘Uprooted’, an essay that contemplates identity as he is made to feel like an outsider in the inner city where he now lives: ‘How do I convey this cornucopia of identity to a stranger in a split second?’ Castagna even goes so far as to delineate her multi-faceted cultural background, but with a caveat: ‘None of that really says who I am though. It’s really only just a beginning.’ The fact that some essays in the anthology grapple with these concerns show that the playing field for more complex writing from what has been called ‘the subaltern’—at least within Australian literature—is undergoing a sea change, as many begin to move away from assimilationist desires and questions of what it ‘means’ to be such-and-such identity, instead focusing on minute joys and entanglements that would also rather entertain a devotion towards craft. As such, it would be prudent to consider what Gayatri Spivak once posed in a 1986 ABC Radio National interview about multiculturalism in Australia: ‘[…] the question “Who should speak?”is less crucial than “Who will listen?”’

Second City is one of those books at the precipice of this sea change. In this context, writers on the so-called margins can make the case again and again about why we should be seen and heard and read. But who are we trying to convince? Instead, like this anthology has exemplified, I urge us to continue delving into our myriad obsessions and complexities again and again until it becomes matter of fact.

CHER TAN is an essayist & critic in Naarm/Melbourne, via Kaurna Yerta/Adelaide & Singapore. Her work has appeared in the Sydney Review of Books, Kill Your Darlings, Overland, Runway Journal, The Lifted Brow, amongst others. She is an editor at LIMINAL magazine & the reviews editor at Meanjin.

No Document

by Anwen Crawford

ISBN 9781925818611

Giramondo

Reviewed by NEHA KALE

Anwen Crawford’s No Document, a memorial to the casualties of late capitalism, occupies the space between elegy and witness, language and art. 

In February 1991, a strange billboard materialised on New York’s Van Dam Street, perplexing commuters who happened to be travelling under the overpass. It featured a black-and-white photo of an empty bed curiously devoid of signage, rumpled sheets revealing gradations of light and shadow like mountains covered in snow. Two pillows are arranged, side by side. But the bodies that lay there announced themselves through impressions and indents. Existence and absence, different sides of a concave mirror. Each part, the form itself.

The billboard is part of Untitled (1991), an installation by the Cuban-American artist and activist Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The same year, the artist’s lover, Ross Laycock, died of AIDS complications. The bed in the picture is less cipher than artefact. It’s where the couple slept when they were both alive. 

“I knew that you would die young/ I didn’t know it at all,” writes Anwen Crawford in her book-length essay, No Document. A page before this: “I change tense, and travel back across your death’s border.” What to write when those we love leave us? Can the tricks of grammar reverse the passage of time? 

The elegy is a fixture of art and literature. Gonzalez-Torres’ work, of course, but also Patti Smith’s Just Kids, the poet’s 2010 lament for the New York she once shared with her late friend and co-conspirator, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Above Crawford’s desk, the reader learns, there’s a postcard of Mapplethorpe’s Two Men Dancing, a gelatin silver print in which two figures hold each other made in 1974.

In her first year at the Sydney College of the Arts, Crawford meets the fellow artist, Ned Sevil. “Your brown panelled nylon zip-up jacket; the rat’s tail of red hair that ran below your shoulders,” she writes. They climb silos on Glebe Island. They “photograph using now obsolete materials” and sleep in railway underpasses after “spray-painting stencils of helicopters.” Their friendship burns bright, forged in the fire of art and activism. “So suddenly, vividly; your gentleness, the way you were always proud of me,” she writes. 

At 30, Sevil, who suffered cystic fibrosis, dies of cancer. Crawford returns from New York, where she is working towards an MFA in poetry, six weeks later. “Sometimes, just for seconds the extent of my grief for you reveals itself and my breath dissolves,” she writes in an incandescent passage, “because it has no edges at all […]” 

In Sydney, edges blur. Suburban pavements give way to old waterways. Sandstone cliffs end with a sheer drop into the ocean. For Crawford, grief is fractal. It radiates beyond her own body, into the spaces she moves through.

 She thinks of her friend when “the train lifts from a tunnel and the built world manifests again” and when she sees “a line of three sulphur-crested cockatoos wheeling a line into the sky.” 

When someone dies young, elegy can easily descend into hagiography. But in No Document, the gift of loss is a kind of X-ray vision. It can see beyond the strictures of place, time and history – and understands how these are bound together. 

Crawford watches the planes hitting the twin towers. The pair cut the word ‘terrorist’ out of the newspaper, “spray-painting the letters into signifying order onto lengths of paper” to cover “over a billboard that edges a four-lane highway.” Two pages on, she tells us that the “last Siberian crane reported seen in Afghanistan was shot dead in 2002.” 

Years after they climb onto silos in Glebe Island, Crawford discovers that it was once the site of the city’s first abattoir. Decades before, in 1818, “the first of the white surveyors ventured onto countries past the mountains – Wiradjuri country, Gamilaraay country.” Cattle, she tells us, comes from the Latin for capitale – ‘property, stock.’

Western imperialism changes form, sowing the seeds for modern conquest. Colonialism and capitalism, inextricable forces, knit living creatures into a constellation of death and displacement. 

“Three billion animals have burnt in this place bordered as Australia since I began this, and the fact that all the sound of it is dampened by the painting being paint – well, it haunts me,” she writes. 

No Document pushes up against borders – geographical, historical, imaginary. In a way, to have no document is to engage in the act of trespass, to enter places unauthorised. But who can trust authorities that are the legacy of violent systems? Records, we know, are famously unreliable. East African soldiers, we learn, who died in the First World War for the German Empire, were disappeared from history. 

During the Tampa Crisis, John Howard famously accused asylum seekers of throwing their children into the water. The Australian government’s acronym for boats occupied by asylum seekers – suspected illegal entry vessels – is SIEV. For Crawford, this is “too close to sieve for coincidence.” In the sea, humans leak.  

Throughout the book, Crawford writes letters to Alya Satta, a two-year-old girl who was among the 353 who drowned when the Indonesian fishing boat, SIEV-X, overturned on the way to Australia. “I call myself into this space with you,” Crawford starts. Then, “I redeem nothing: not in words, not any way.” 

Words have their limits. Late capitalism strives to turn writing into content, story into commodity. No Document is interested in what art can do, where language can’t venture. In art school, Crawford studies photography and upon re-reading No Document, sentences reveal their meanings like negatives in a darkroom. 

On my weekly walk, past Glebe Island, the landscape shows its bones. Places acquire a shimmer. I remember that in the 19th century, to take a photo was to render what was missing. That a camera was once considered powerful enough to capture ghosts. 

No Document is a study in blank space. Sentences stand by themselves. Each section is marked by a rectangle. “You scratch the negatives,” Crawford observes of her friend, “sometimes for what the damage signifies: that the document is not neutral but emerges.” 

When her friend Sevil dies, he leaves Crawford a book of images, made from mesh and contact sheets, “the whole thing smaller than a matchbox.” Someone tells her that “objects are just objects.” Friendships exist outside institutions, without ritual. She knows theirs has been “deemed insubstantial.” The book asks you, the reader, to weigh what matters, what to mourn according to an inner calculus. 

There is no elegy without witness, even if “no document can make you manifest.” 

Crawford and Sevil admired artists who died young. “Such an impulse isn’t rare at age nineteen, but for you at least, an early death was neither an abstraction or romance,” she reflects, in retrospect. 

Gonzalez-Torres, who died at 38 of AIDS was among their favourites. Before he left, the artist strung lightbulbs in galleries, allowing them to flicker and fade, as fleeting as a lifespan. He arranged a pair of clocks that ticked together in the knowledge that one battery would fail before the other. That in time these objects – like bodies that exist together – would fall out of sync. 

In 1989, he made sculptures out of block-like stacks of paper. To complete them, viewers were invited to pick up a sheet, to take it home. No Document, too, is an artwork – one that asks us to notice what’s absent. And love, through the act of paying attention, the things that might never return. 

NEHA KALE is a writer, critic and the former editor of VAULT magazine. Her work has appeared in The Saturday Paper, The Sydney Morning Herald, SBS, ArtReview, Art Guide and many other places.

[References]

https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/Felix_Gonzalez-Torres/

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-23486991

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150629-the-intriguing-history-of-ghost-photography

Know Your Country

by Kerri Shying

ISBN: 9781925780765

Puncher and Wattman

Reviewed by DANNI NETHERCLIFT

Mark Berryman’s original artwork on the cover of Kerri Shying’s Know Your Country is a study in aqueous blues and greens, reminiscent of underwater scenes, long neglected sites of lostness and loss, the kind of world inhabited by forgotten shipwrecks. This shadowy opacity seems a fitting introduction to the poems contained within, a nod to the idea of landscapes you think you know but which, diving beneath the surface find you are unfamiliar with after all. This impression limns the sense that a closer reading of your surroundings is required, so sit back and pay attention if you want to in some sense    know your (?) country.

The collection as a whole presents a densely knit weft of landscape, character, voice, detail and sub-text where the poems fully inhabit all of the senses, so as to immerse the reader not only in visual poetic images, but also the smells, sounds and tactility of each scene and place. In this way, I was reminded of the literary localities created by T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland, with its layers of varying interiors, exteriors, sounds, (his)stories and laments.

The almost complete absence of punctuation throughout works to enact a joining of narratives. The fragmented words pieced together eloquently mosaic a whole, a window onto the possibilities immanent in the substances of life in this particular country: earth and seawater, the sticky silver of snail trails and suspicious powders, of human traces, dirt, blood, shit and fragility, of circumstance in every overlooked flavour and hue. This is an inspired vision of country on a micro scale. In these poems, the gaps between the words and phrasing are apertures into spaces of entry, gesturing towards what you think you know and what perhaps you don’t know anything at all about.

The first poem, ‘talented regardless’ ominously foreshadows the dark potential inherent in this locus of page and space, with on the one hand ‘laughter and applause’ while on the other, there is    

     the sound   of burrs being taken
off of knives   and the thump of hessian onto truck beds
(9)

This possible proximity to or for violence is woven through the body of the text of these fifty-five poems, unsettling notions of certainty or firm ground upon which to stand.

 The country of Shying’s vision holds itself open, for instance, to the hypocrisy of those who would stake claims to knowing   better. Poems like ‘in my skin’ talk back and up to the noise of ubiquitous ‘saloon bars’ with resolute retort,

oh   how colossal
the right
that courses through the veins   of every total prick
that questions who we are
(12)        

because the call to ‘know your country’ also enacts a rallying cry to stare racism in the face without looking away,

to tear up the post in post-colonialism, and the notion of assimilation and its insult, as being

the kind of turd who smacks you in the mouth
then says
get up   you’re bleeding on the carpet
(12)   

Correspondingly, the use of Aboriginal language and translation in some of the poems, like ‘galmalngidyalu nhal gaghaanggilinya’ (this song delights me) encapsulates generous notions of inclusion that have most often not been reciprocated. The juxtaposition of these magnanimities of spirit jar tellingly against the past and present policymaking of race but Shying’s work illuminates the power of poetics to transcend, and describes their innate qualities of protection. The claim that

  words are lands and faces    special
tucked inside
(14)

is followed by an appreciation of the true nature of land beneath the surface, where

a million tonnes of ballast sang out a song from beneath me
a million tonne extracted from the soil of everywhere
(14)

which describes also the connection between this ballast – an important motif in both literal and figurative senses – of earth and rock and its corresponding connections to relationships with family, with grandmothers –

I hold tight to all her  stories  given
to me moving  mouth to
ear  mouth to ear  mouth
to ear
(15)

and as in ‘Cootamundra institute of education’, elucidations of both distance and closeness, past and present, and bonds that remain, come what may –

   I wonder if in that other city
my sister’s hair is safe

from magpie swoops
(24)

These ties of memory and reverence for family and belonging bear relation to Natalie Harkins   work in Dirty Words, with its white space, gaps, and recognition/space-holding of untold stories, lost time, separated families, elided pasts.

In the titular poem, ‘know your country’, the opening line, that 

deep roots   fend off heat
(42)

reads as a realisation of the strength and resilience contained within the nexus of family/cultural ties and history. To know your country for the speaker is to write into a hope for future  days

I am planting for the green tomorrow
(42)

that is pragmatically rooted in both what has already been borne, survived and surpassed, and what shared knowledge remains to be drawn upon.

The shapes and hues and hefts of sky, water and soil, of morning, and the stifling forbearance of the hottest summer nights together form a vivid panorama in which the inhabitants reveal themselves in all their shabby, precious smallness; the minutiae of land/urban scapes but also the domestic intimacy of life-scapes. 

An exhortation to smallness is repeated throughout, the text, in the forms of creatures, snails/cicadas, but also in gestures towards modes of existing in the world, where you must 

grow small  grow
small   in thrall

and 

don’t go large   be small
(64-65)

if you wish to live peaceably, and to appreciate the community in which you live for what it is. It is only in being small that one can truly get to know your country, that one might penetrate what has been overlooked within the cracks and crevices and white spaces behind the doors and closed curtains of interior lives. Smallness grants entry to all kinds of environments, from the water to the ballast grounds, to the wet house or the dealer’s kitchen, their bathroom, to the ghastly knife collection of an erstwhile world traveller, though one must also remember, tongue-in-cheek, that 

snails play to the cheap seats
they need the cash
(38)

The poetics of these revealed scenes and vignettes expose unsettling connections between the innocent pleasure of hot chips and  imminent peril in ‘crime lords’, or  visits from clients buying drugs juxtaposed against the domestic niceties of packets of biscuits and flavoured coffee sachets, in ‘crime lords #2’, or relations between seemingly benign ocean shallows and the trauma that it might deliver along with its usual offerings, the nightmare jetsam 

   a mesh of small holes and slits
emerging as a black lacy wrack extending

from the lower back
(47)

of a dead child who washes up, is held in the arms of the speaker, in ‘blue bubble’. Always, there is the sense that if one should scratch the surface veneer of this country, that there is 

   that tiny bit of drama

the half-centimetre
of knife-steel exposed
(57)

but if the poems seem to evoke moods that are often sinister, with their intimations of menace seeding a tension that never quite lifts, they are at other times quelled with tenderness, a sweet give of solace to the edges of days, and even perhaps of history, a consolation gathered in accumulated images of sea/water. In ‘the inbox’

the water laps the sky
(37)

while in ‘hey you’, the speaker of the poem ‘backstrokes’

the lifting sea
(35)

The presence of a newborn baby in ‘unlock’ illuminates another kind of ballast, granting the immensely moving certainty above all that 

I was a mother   nobody
could remove that
(61)

These images of calm steadfastness culminate in the panacea of the final poem, ‘rise’, where

the blue sky is a crutch
(70)

in all its blankness, its possibility, and hopefulness.

DANI NETHERCLIFT lives and works on Taungurung country, surrounded by mountains. She is the winner of the 2020 AAWP / Slow Canoe Creative nonfiction prize and has upcoming work in Rabbit 33, Stilts, and Meniscus.

Where the Fruit Falls

by Karen Wyld

UWAP

ISBN: 978-1-76080-157-1

Reviewed by ANNE BREWSTER

Karen Wyld’s Where the Fruit Falls is an important new novel in the field of Australian Aboriginal literature and a tribute to the work of UWAP under the stewardship of its out-going director Terri-Ann White who, as Wyld says in her Acknowledgements, ‘helped grow UWAP into a treasured Australian publisher’.

It tells a powerful story of an Aboriginal family, focusing largely on the young woman, Brigid, and her twin daughters Victoria (Tori) and Maggie, and their journey to find family, reunite with Country and discover the inland sea where the ‘giant aquatic creatures’ and ‘wondrous beasts’ (287) of Aboriginal cosmology reside. On this journey they struggle against the brutal impacts of racism in rural and metropolitan settings. There are references to the effects of the Protection Era and other events such as the Maralinga bomb tests.

The title refers to the central image of the two very different trees in Brigid’s life, the apple tree of her non-Aboriginal grandmother’s garden (which could be a reference to British colonial immigration) and the Bloodwood tree (and its fruit, the bush apple) under which she was born, shown to her by her Indigenous nana.

There is a striking image of the two trees intertwined at a critical nexus in the narrative. Brigid had grown up with the trees, fruits and plants of her non-Aboriginal grandmother’s garden, and although she has an immense affection for her grandmother who had largely raised her, she has to painfully unlearn her grandmother’s indoctrination that she (Brigid) is a potato: ‘her skin might be brown like the earth, but inside she was [white] just like everyone else’ (12). Despite the damage her grandmother had wreaked in her life, Brigid continues to love her, and to respect the role that trees had in the lives of immigrants’ such as her grandmother.

She tells her Jewish friend, Bethel, whose partner, Omer, had carried a small olive sapling all the way from his homeland to Australia, that ‘my granny also brought treasured saplings from her country … she’d planted them with purpose, to set down stronger roots in a country strange to her. Those trees from her home country helped her to create a new home, for a new family’ (98). In the affectionate portrayal of Brigid’s grandmother and the image of the intertwined bloodwood and apple trees, Wyld seems to be figuring Brigid’s complex and nuanced bi-culturality, or at least the continuing (and sometimes contestatory) interplay of her dual heritages.

The novel demonstrates that racism against Indigenous people remains a constant in colonial and post-colonial (ie the federated) Australia, with even more recent immigrants, as Bethel complains, treating First Nations people ‘with disdain’ (77). However, as Bethel and Brigid’s friendship indicates, First Nations people’s connectivities are multidirectional, and her friendship with Bethel and her partner Omer is vital and life sustaining. Omer observes that war, horror and inhumanity come in many forms and impact many peoples, producing loss and trauma. He suggests that, like many people across the globe, Indigenous people are ‘still engaged in a combat of sorts’ (77). We realize that, in his vocation as an opal miner, Omer has both material and imaginative access to the inland sea for which Brigid searches, with its ancient archive of huge ‘wondrous’ creatures and the ‘carnage’ (288) they index.

In its portrayal of Brigid’s twin daughters, one of whom is dark (Tori) and the other light-skinned (Maggie), Wyld’s novel strenuously uncouples Aboriginality from biology and skin colour. In a powerful narrative, which recalls Tony Birch’s intensely moving recent novel, The White Girl, we see the painful impact of the difference in the way white-skinned Aboriginal people have been treated by white settler-Australians. The many biting ironies of the scopic regime are played out painfully and, occasionally, with wry humour, in Maggie and Tori’s lives.

Brigid and Tori, in particular, struggle with a sense of not belonging, of being outsiders. They are on a journey seeking their family and Country, reminiscent of Sally Morgan’s iconic text My Place. It is indeed fitting that Morgan provides the cover blurb, in which she notes that ‘this evocative family saga celebrates the strength and resilience of First Nation women’. In spite of the lethal impact of violence in their lives, Brigid and her daughters are, in Tori’s words,  ‘strong, independent and fearless’ (233). They defend themselves and each other from the corrosive effect of racist ‘hate’ and the brutal necropolitical drive of colonization, with strength and determination. They sometimes struggle to strengthen their Aboriginality, supported by their connections with birds and trees, with shadowy creatures in the world around them, and with stories from their ancestors.

Wyld also demonstrates the significance of global anti-racist activism from the 1960s onwards, referencing various movements such as the American civil rights movement and black power, borrowing an iconic image to salute ‘the fire in the belly of black peoples fighting for rights’ (287). She shows how the discourse and iconography of global activism gave many Indigenous people in rural and metropolitan Australia the tools to analyse history and to re-shape their understanding of themselves as a collective. Numerous Aboriginal novelists have mapped in fiction the intersection of politicized Aboriginal activism and personal transformation; Tori’s incipient emergence from suffering and struggle reminds us in some respects of Sue Wilson’s consciousness-raising journey in Melissa Lucashenko’s paradigm-shifting novel, Steam Pigs.

Wyld’s homage to global activism is complemented with local references, in for example, what seems to be a nod to South Australian ex-premier, Don Dunstan, who makes an appearance at a political rally that Tori and Maggie attend, as ‘a white man in tiny pink shorts, a white figure-hugging T-shirt and long white socks’ (296). The extra-diegetic references in the novel and Wyld’s interest in the impact of political activism on her protagonists indicate the proximity of some Aboriginal fiction to political activism. In her Author’s Note for example, Wyld suggests that ‘the call for action … often lies hidden in fiction’ (341); she adds that she sees this novel as working to ‘reimagine a more just and truthful present and future’ (341).

The novel’s narrative climax, which unmasks the shocking effects of toxic white masculinity, raises deeply disturbing questions about the graphic representation of racialised and gendered violence and race crimes. It resonates with the broad scholarly field of research on trauma and witnessing, bringing a unique Aboriginal iconography to this field, in the imagery of the three black birds which are Brigid’s witness. (One might also recall the crows in Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise.) In Where the Fruit Falls the toxic white masculinity is offset with the presence of several benevolent, wise, compassionate and resourceful Aboriginal men who adjudicate in the rendition of justice according to Aboriginal protocols (recalling the Aboriginal male elders’ adjudication in Roo’s conflict with his girlfriend’s brother, in Melissa Lucashenko’s second novel Hard Yards).

In a recent article in the Journal of Australian Studies, Indigenous studies scholar, Clint Bracknell, notes the ever-increasing non-Indigenous interest in and demand for Indigenous cultural texts and analyses the impact of this demand on Indigenous researchers and communities. He talks about the lack of space and time for communities to “claim, consolidate and enhance our heritage and knowledge amongst ourselves” (Clint Bracknell JAS, 44.2 :213).

The racialised graphic commodification of Aboriginal women’s bodies which Where the Fruit Falls puts under the spotlight (while simultaneously deftly removing it from that spotlight through the wise actions of the Aboriginal men) raises questions about the non-Aboriginal reader’s presence in conversations about Indigenous literature. As a non-Indigenous reader and reviewer of Indigenous literature I am aware of the implications of Bracknell’s comment for my own work in this review. I aspire to join an ethical conversation about Indigenous literature with Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers, scholars and commentators in a way that is mindful of the conditions of commodification of Aboriginal bodies and texts and seeks to acknowledge and not encroach upon the Aboriginal space that Bracknell identifies.

ANNE BREWSTER is Honorary Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. Her books include Giving This Country a Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia, (2015), Literary Formations: Postcoloniality, Nationalism, Globalism (1996) and Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography (1995, 2015). She is series editor for Australian Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.

Dropbear

by Evelyn Araluen
 
ISBN 978070226318
 

Reviewed by TIMMAH BALL

Dropbear: writing as an act of defiance 

when my body is mine i will tell them
with belly&bones
              do not touch this prefix
              or let you hands burn black
              with your unsettlement
              there are no metaphors here
-decolonial poetics (avant gubba)

Multiple modes and literary disciplines weave through Evelyn Araleun’s first collection Dropbear, shifting between poetry, prose, micro-fiction and essay seamlessly. The taut threads are a reflection of her interdisciplinary work where writing and social justice intersect. There are no metaphors instead resistance is displayed through her piercingly accurate understanding of the flawed settler nation we inhabit. As she describes in the collections notes ‘our resistance, therefore must also be literary’ an acknowledgment that the social, environmental and political change being sought must also engage with the literary culture we inherited such as May Gibbs problematic Australian classic Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. A much loved children’s book series where the bush is represented through terra nullius. As a scholar, poet, teacher, activist, editor, essayist and fiction writer Araleun resists and defies imposed colonialism, which is most fiercely embodied through Dropbear. The collection speaks back to defunct systems and shows that Aboriginal Sovereignty is crystalline. As she writes: 

when I own my tongue I will sing
with throat&finger
              gobackwhereyoucamemfrom
              for I will be
              where I am for

Each stanza in Decolonial poetics (avant gubba) speaks back to white Australia’s dictatorial approach to fixing ‘the Blak problem’ (aka closing the gap) be it through the Avant-garde or government policy which views Aboriginal people through a deficit lens.  The biting tone unsettles the settler writer and wider Australian consciousness whose literary interests in decolonization and institutional preoccupations with reconciliation are hollow. As Araleun writes at the end of the poem:

and when you are dead,
              you can have poems

The incredulous construction of Australia is further revealed in other poems (PYRO, Acknowledgement of Cuntery and Index Australis), which illuminate the chronic power imbalances, where the perpetrator seeks recognition for resolving the damage they covertly maintain. She writes: 

A GIRL IN AMERICA POSTS LINKS TO PURCHARSE HER UPCOMMING CLI-FI NOVEL UNDER HEADLINES FOR THE PYROCOMULUS// SCOTT MORRISON SITS SANGUINE IN A WREATH OF FRANGAPAINI

• PYRO

in the age of entitlement
in the Decolonial Dundee
and well may we say, we will decide
who and how
well may we be not lectured and well
may we do it slow
–Index Australis 

I would like to wear your flag
On shirt and tote and Facebook filter
–Acknowledgement of Cuntery

These poems capture both mainstream and literary preoccupations with Blak rights, climate change and social inequity whereby non-Indigenous writers, policy makers and activists reveal ‘truths’ which are already known, extracting uncomfortable histories and admissions of guilt unaware that this doesn’t undo ongoing complicity. Or as Araluen cheekily laments it is easy to change your social media profile mirroring the latest cause or wear a t-shirt with the flag of oppressed peoples. In a strange social milieu progress is accessorized and often reads more like passing trends as Aussi icons are decolonized and every white girl is writing a book about the anthropocene to grieve. In this era outrage and discomfort is omnipresent and people acknowledge country but radical change still feels distant. Dropbear asks that we don’t let this distract us but instead remain cognitive of its trickery. 

Araluen’s writing emerges from an extraordinary body of work by Blak women and non-binary writers, which re-asserts Sovereignty by dispelling settler myths. Given the literary canon preceding this and the structural whiteness that persists this is important. As Araluen concedes in her Sydney Review of Books essay Snuggle Pot and Cuddlepie in the Ghost Gum a precursor to this collection:

The entanglement of complexes which have, since invasion, structured settler responses to, and representations of Aboriginal land and its custodians, ruptures at its most readable in Australian poetics…… If Aboriginal presence is considered in such work, it is a representation predominantly concerned with symbols of atavistic inconvenience to the colonial project, charged with psychic significance in the symbolic evocation of a ghostly spectre haunting land lost to Aboriginal people, but which ultimately clears space for the discovery and cultivation of that land by the appropriate settler.

Like Alison Whittaker’s Blakwork, Ellen Van Neerven’s Throat, Jeanine Leane’s Walk Back Over, Natalie Harkin’s Archival Poetics, Kirli Saunder’s Kindred, Charmaine Papertalk Green’s Nganajungu Yagu and more recent publications such as Ambelin Kwaymullina’s Living on Stolen Land and Elfie Shiosakis’s Homecoming Araluen fortifies a Blak literary position which defies First Nations erasure and ridicule epidemic in settler Australian poetics. Stylistically she achieves this with subtle lyricism, humor, intertextual reframing of settler texts and a beguiling sense of sadness and hope for a decolonial future. There is great power in displaying work that defies clear categorization or stereotyping as protest poetry. Something that has often characterized Blak writers pejoratively within the wider literary industry suggesting that we have no more to say or are incapable of expressing our survival with nuance and depth. By contrast her work remains transformative and radical but without the troupes a white reader may expect. In the introduction to Shapes of Native Nonfiction the Cowlitz writer Elissa Washuta asserts that ‘Native writers don’t shy away from experimenting with form in order to explore the painful and the violent. However, they refuse a voyeuristic obsession with tragedy as the ultimate contribution of Native literatures to the broader field.’

Dropbear realises this with astonishing precision and power. Pain is evident but it ruminates with a critical awareness, which refuses to excite a non-Indigenous reader. Araluen is aware of these voyeuristic tendencies, which both fetishize and manipulate Aboriginal voices and decolonial agendas but also maintains a sense of urgency and demand to address this nations’ flaws. She writes:

I’ve read the work done to demonstrate how this literature triangulates our elimination against the archipelago where you move to your innocence. But no-one’s ever asked you how we are both colonized by and inheritors of these words. J asks- what is a world, and what does it mean to end it? I want to know what it means to lose the world you’re still standing in.
-To the Poets

These questions linger throughout Dropbear reaffirming that there is no clear answer to the horrors we have inherited but instead a need to confront the messy and the painful with honesty and criticality if we are to find resolve. Araluen is starting conversations that are needed while engaging with the fervent Blak activism driving change. In this way she writes for us and refuses the settler gaze in literature while reminding the white reader to recognize their responsibility. In Colonial Horror, Blak Mediocrity and Mumblecore: A conversation between Alison Whittaker and Nayuka Gorrie Whittaker explains how:

‘There’s not much that unifies blak women and non-binary mob writing except for the drive behind it. I am always surprised by the innovation and genius in blak literature, and it happens as much in the writing of blak literature as it does in the reading of blak literature by mob. It’s networked. It’s plural. It can, when we make it, work like kinship.’

Dropbear enters into this kinship where our words carry power and strengthen communities both in the writing and the reading. Araluen’s critical mind moves between writing, activism and community organising, which elevates her textual output beyond a literary vacuum. Dropbear will be read and praised by the white literary canon but her words hold space within wider public discourses led by Blak thinkers and activists. It’s networked and offers resilience to the Blak readership she writes for.  

Citations
 

Australianama: the South Asian Odyssey in Australia

by Samia Khatun

UQP

Reviewed by MATTHEW da SILVA

Samia Khatun takes a tack pioneered by Peter Drew, an Australian who made posters labelled with the word “Aussie” and featuring a migrant cameleer. He wrote about the development of his art practice in ‘Poster Boy: A Memoir of Art and Politics,’ (2019). It’s a slightly confused account of a life spent looking for battles to fight. Khatun fights her own battle but uses different language and aims stronger barbs at a long-absent colonial power.

As though every question in life might be answered satisfactorily by apportioning blame. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a Jewish author whom Indians cherish as one of their own, uses instead of incisive academic prose the language of sentiment filtered through a screen of humour.

Perhaps their twin aims are not running in parallel, but instead intersect – such as here, now. Khatun provides a much-needed lens through which to view South Asians in Australia in the colonial period. I was enchanted by the propriety of giving voice to such subaltern figures as a Pakistani merchant or an Indian peddler. The “lascars” – South Asian seamen used in the period following the abolition of slavery to crew steamships – also figure prominently in Khatun’s narrative, offering different ways to see White Australia and the developing form of nationalism Khatun acknowledges multiculturalism to be.

Given all these qualifications, how accessible is her book? Who might buy and read it? Is it a book for the general trade market or is it, rather, a work that must lie within the ambit of academic circles? I think that, as in the case of its focus, it is an intersectional work that can fit into multiple settings, much like a designer handbag or a 4-wheel-drive automobile. It will feel just as “right” if you carry such an accessory with jeans or with a Chanel suit. Similarly, with a modern 4-wheel-drive SUV, it looks fine in a CBD carpark or out on the open road climbing up a steep incline among trees with peeling bark that are filled with the sounds of cicadas.

Khatun’s register is elevated and her concern is, as is common with academic writing, to speak truth to power. She won’t concede anything her principles refuse to allow, so, for example, she refers to the Flinder’s Ranges in South Australia as having a name that is “current”. Not conceding allows her to embark upon a radical course of change, and she writes sympathetically of the dispossession of Aboriginal people in the process of writing about South Asians in Australia.

While the language is taut and the plan lofty – bringing the reader into contact with discourse systems that dominate elite circles – Khatun also tells a solid tale, and engages in a bit of novel coinage, as when she uses the word “tracks” to talk about storylines used by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. As such Khatun is writing a new “track” for her own people, locating them within the grip of a trading web stretching from Perth to Medina, and from Mombasa to Dhaka. She early on signals her intention to offer readers an alternative psychogeographical realm within which to tell her stories, and delivers on her promise, dredging up a range of colourful characters, each of whom, like Mohammed Bux, is able to tell stories that help to create new ways of living.

In Bux’s case the telling of stories not only made him a rich man, but saved his life. When on a hajj in the Arabian Peninsula, and robbed of everything including his clothes, it was his ability to describe what had happened to him that led to the provision of not only new clothes, but a place to sleep, and food. Telling stories continues to be an important way for Indigenous people in Australia to achieve their cultural and political goals, and this process is of course contested in the public sphere. Khatun is scathing in regard to former prime minister Tony Abbott and his 2014 “terra nullius” claim, part of a public performance during which, in typically blunt style, the politician tried to settle old scores – the “black armband” culture wars of a decade earlier.

Unsuccessfully, as it turns out. Khatun’s work forms a stepping stone for people who enjoy Drew’s art but my initial reservation – what appears at the outset of this article – should actually be taken as an index of my esteem as I thought that to dwell on such minor matters was unequal to the gorgeousness of what else is conveyed in this marvellous, and profoundly entertaining, work of nonfiction.

I was a tad disappointed that 19th century debates about knowledge that have been abandoned by all but the rumbling amateur and the most reactionary scholar animate Khatun’s narrative, which is otherwise – and, once you get over this opening hurdle – engrossing and rich in design and in execution. I’m really not sure that it’s all that useful to start quoting James Mill and Thomas Macaulay as though they were reliable witnesses to the fact of colonialism. Perhaps they are – in India?

They certainly cannot be in the West. It seems, in any case, unnecessary to drag out these particular skeletons, as though by displaying the bones you can resolve questions about why they’re not suitable to be used in a life drawing class. Nobody nowadays reads Mill or Macaulay anyway. Khatun has to ensure that people read her work. I prefer her investigations into the literatures of the subcontinent, for it is here that the incipient beauty of her text for the first time becomes apparent.

But Australianama not only charts waters rarely ventured into, and communicates effectively with what should be – if there’s any justice in the world (and of this many despair) – a wide audience, it also explores new avenues of enquiry that others might be tempted to pursue. Some of the tracks that Khatun follows reveal surprising truths about, for example, Aboriginal culture and the history of dispossession they’ve faced over much of the past 230-odd years.

Finding herself in the South Australian desert, Khatun takes a lesson in reading tracks left by passing animals, including a lizard that is taken by a snake. She writes:

This episode of high drama that Reg [Dodd] decrypted in the sand lies outside the bounds of what are recognised as significant events in most English-language history books today. In conventional histories of this Arabunna sandhill, the lizard and the eagle would not feature as central actors. And yet, it was this asymmetrical encounter between two creatures that gave me an invaluable insight into some of the principles of Arabunna storytelling. Beginning with the predatory gaze of the eagle, the central motif of these sand dune dramas was one of pursuit and escape, actions that left a trail in the sand. Like so many other narratives imprinted on the sandhill, the tracks of the lizard ended with dismemberment, consumption and disappearance from the face of Arabunna geography. Eating! Here, being eaten, the apprehension of being eaten, and the pursuit of other creatures in order to eat were ever-present prospects shaping how creatures moved across the land. (p.138 – 139)

Dodd had heard a story of South Asian cameleers from his grandmother, Barralda. In the story, two Aboriginal women were waiting for a train but it was late, and would not come. While they were waiting two cameleers arrived, with their beasts, and spoke to them, asking to see their breasts. The women showed the men their breasts. The men then asked to see their thighs. They showed the men their thighs. But in the telling the story evolved in a surprising way as the two women consider eventually – according to each teller of the tale – that the men want to eat them and thus want to see their flesh.

This is the central fact in the retelling as the story was passed down from mother to son, from aunt to niece. A cautionary tale told for the benefit of children, this particular track – Khatun discerned – was anchored in the same dynamic as that which resulted in the leaving of animal tracks upon the landscape. An ephemeral moment in world history, but a telling one.

MATTHEW da SILVA was born in Brighton, Victoria, and grew up in Sydney. He has Bachelor of Arts and Master of Media Practice degrees from the University of Sydney and lived for just under a decade in Tokyo. He has two adult children and lives in Sydney.

Motherhood

by Sheila Heti

ISBN: 9780099592846

Penguin

Reviewed by DIVYA VENKATARAMAN

When I arrive at a decision about motherhood – to be, or not to be? – I almost certainly won’t get there by employing the kind of esoteric abstraction Sheila Heti’s unnamed narrator does. That being said, Heti’s discursive, conversational monologue of a novel is clarifying, poignant and devastating at times in its ability to condense the societal pressures that women – that is, women of Heti’s whiteness and relatively high socio-economic status – face in our age. 

We meet Heti’s narrator just before she turns 37. She’s been bitten by the “bug” of wondering whether she will procreate. “The question of a child is a bug in the brain—it’s a bug that crawls across everything, every memory, and every sense of my own future.” 

Heti’s narrator decides to embark on an intellectual quest, determined to interrogate the reasons for which she does and does not want to have a child. To illuminate her journey, in a common trope, the narrator looks to Eastern wisdom: here, the role of guiding light is given to the Chinese tradition of I-Ching, a method of tossing three coins and gleaning ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers for the combination of faces they show. The answers her coins give her lead her to her next question. There’s a dialogue between coin and question which gives away a great deal in its sparseness.

Heti’s narrator describes the feeling of being left out in the cold of childlessness in a touching, deeply felt way. “I had always thought my friends and I were moving into the same land together, a childless land where we would just do a million things together forever. I thought our minds and souls were all cast the same way, not that they were waiting for the right moment to jump ship, which is how it feels as they abandon me here. I should not think of it as an abandoning, but it would be wrong to say it’s not a loss, or that I’m not startled at being so alone. How had I taken all of us as the same?” The flowing present tense of the novel allows us to weave in and out of New York City life, in and out of her apartment, in and remain mired in, her arguments with her partner Miles. She writes honestly and deeply poignantly about the pain of not knowing how to feel in the face of societal pressure. “I fear that without children, it doesn’t look like you have made a choice, or that you’re doing anything but just continuing on – drifting.” 

The circuitous conversations the protagonist has with herself evoke the circular nature of her mood swings and hormonal fluctuations. While being so concerned with motherhood, an event so rooted in the physical, Heti’s narrator often feels disconnected from her own body. Her period cycles are unpredictable, her moods more so. “On the one hand, the joy of children,” Heti writes. “On the other hand, the misery of them. On the one hand, the freedom of not having children. On the other hand, the loss of never having had them—but what is there to lose?” At the novel’s close, she finds comfort and a hazy kind of bliss in a prescription for anti-depressants. 

The novel reads, in its confessionalism and oscillations of a mind not-quite-made-up, as more of a memoir or extended essay than anything fictional. The unnamed narrator at the centre of the book and the dilemma, frames her decision on motherhood as a choice to be made by the individual and the individual alone. In Heti’s narrator’s world – a white, upperclass heterosexual world – there is firstly a choice about whether or not to become a mother, and such a choice is framed as being one about sacrificing creative ambition and art for the creation of life. Motherhood, for Heti is conceptual, lofty, and understood in the context of a woman occupying several spheres of privilege making claims about motherhood. Should she create life or create art? The novel is driven more by the internal cogitation than any actual events – except for her conversations (which are very Rachel Cusk-esque in the way they are distilled only through the protagonist’s worldview), and the (somewhat repetitive) fights between her and Miles.

While Heti’s protagonist moves through a series of thrice-removed, theorised concepts about the sacrifices and privileges that motherhood will afford her, the decision that so many women around the world take is a result of myriad, competing desires – not exclusive to, but including cultural guilt, familial pressure, and financial stability. But this is not to say that, through her ambivalent, see-sawing conversations with herself about motherhood, she doesn’t delve into misconceptions about motherhood with humour, insight and painful acuity. While it’s perhaps unfair to ask Heti to write from the perspective of anyone else, the novel does not factor into its philosophising any broader sense of what motherhood is as understood in different parts of the world – or even different parts of her own city. 

However, she is comprehensive about and critical of the overemphasis of women’s abilities as child-rearers and the conditioning of women as ‘natural’ in the role, and the challenge they pose to a society organised by nuclear families. “There is something threatening about a woman who is not occupied with children,” says Heti. “What sort of trouble will she make?”

While these quotes, plucked out of context, may spark a feeling of recognition – of being able to relate – it is the process of her repetitive, rhetorical question-asking through flipping coins which grounds them in place. 

While the novel is not as universal as it imagines itself to be, Motherhood is a crucial, deeply personal sketch of the conversations women have with themselves. In it, Heti sums up the anxiety of the constant wavering between freedom and being joyfully tethered – to create art, or to create life? No questions are answered, no conclusions drawn – but she finds a way to give shape to the anxiety and constant, underlying thrum of the indecision she feels as she decides what she will make next. 

DIVYA VENKATARAMAN is an Indian-Australian lawyer and writer based in Sydney. Her writing has been published in Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Time Out, the Sydney Morning Herald, Sweatshop Women and more. She was a finalist for the Newcastle Short Story Award and the Premier’s Multicultural Media Award.

Navigable Ink

by Jennifer McKenzie

ISBN:P 978-1-925760-52-1

Transit Lounge

Reviewed by ANNEE LAWRENCE

Jennifer Mackenzie’s collection of poems Navigable Ink takes inspiration from, reveres and amplifies the life events, writings, reflections and concerns with history of the Indonesian author and activist, Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925-2006). The idea of writing the poems emerged after Mackenzie was asked to translate Pramoedya’s Arus Balik (Cross-Currents) in 1993.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer was born in the small Javanese town of Blora in what was then the Netherlands East Indies. His most famous work, the Buru Quartet novels – This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps and House of Glass – covers, in his own words, Indonesia’s time of Nationalist Awakening during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Based on the life of the pioneer journalist Tirto Adi Suryo ¹, the novels follow a young man, Minke’s, developing political awareness and consciousness of the colonial apartheid system. As his story unfolds, the reader is drawn into an emerging vision of a new country – Indonesia, and of a new national language and cultural identity – Indonesian. ²

When Suharto’s New Order government came to power after a military coup in 1965, it did so by overthrowing the government of the nation’s first President, Sukarno (in power since 1945) ³. The coup unleashed widespread violence and the extrajudicial bloody deaths of more than half a million people who were labelled communist or communist sympathiser. Feminists, trade union leaders, teachers, artists, writers, doctors, farmers, university lecturers, and all kinds of progressive community leaders lost their lives. Of those who survived, many were shipped without trial or sentence to the island of Buru where they were forced to do hard labour.

Pramoedya was imprisoned three times during his life: in 1947-1949 by the Dutch, for nine months in the 1950s by the Sukarno government, and in 1965-1979 by Suharto’s New Order regime. At the time of his arrest and imprisonment in Jakarta on 13 October 1965, his house was ransacked and his library and eight of his manuscripts were burned.

Mackenzie’s poem, ‘Manuscripts in My Library Destroyed by the Mob’ lists Pramoedya’s works and writing that were stolen or burned in 1965 – works about and by Kartini and other women writers before Kartini, a collection of Sukarno’s short stories, a preliminary Study of the History of the Indonesian Language – the list is telling. They represent the voices that must be silenced, histories that must be erased or reinterpreted including that of the birth of the country’s national language. When Pramoedya sought to recover ‘two volumes of Pre-Indonesian Literature’ he was told by the director of the Balai Pustaka (the Government Publishing and Printing House) that they were ‘burned at the request of his superiors’.

After four years in prison, Pramoedya was taken 1500 kilometres east by ship to the island of Buru on 16 August 1969, where he remained as a political prisoner until 12 November 1979. Buru was a barren, infertile swamp and life for the political prisoners was characterised by daily beatings, hard labour, hunger and filthy conditions. In the poem ‘Writing Materials’, Mackenzie captures the insane mechanics of the arbitrary and senseless repression on Buru that denied the author pen and paper.

there was no pen, no paper
then there was
                                          after many years
pen and paper
I wrote
in delirium
                                         I remember none of
it

At the poem’s conclusion Mackenzie does not look away from the trauma that has done its work: ‘nightmares lap the house/which wall is crumbling?’
The eventual provision of writing materials allowed Pramoedya to finally begin to write the four novels of the Buru quartet that had been kept alive in his memory by narrating them to his fellow political prisoners.

On returning home to East Jakarta on 21 December 1979, Pramoedya was placed under house arrest and made to report weekly to the local police station. For almost two decades, he and his family endured constant and systemic discrimination and surveillance. As each of his books was published during the 1980s and 1990s, they were banned – allegedly for spreading Marxism-Leninism and Communism.

During Suharto’s thirty-three-year New Order regime, the gap between rich and poor widened, and corruption, cronyism and fraud became widespread. When the economic crisis took hold in the latter part of 1997, the country’s students faced down the authorities and took to the streets, and the seemingly entrenched President was finally forced to stand down on 21 May 1998.

In Navigable Ink’s opening poem, ‘Before Nightfall’, there is at first moonlight and tranquillity, but attention soon shifts to the sea – gara gara – turbulence, trouble, stormy weather, and ‘frenzied moonlit waves’ that threaten those on board. On the shore there is the howling of forest dogs. From the darkness, having disappeared from view of family and society for more than fourteen years, the political exile returns white-headed to his family, finds his daughters once more at his side, ‘forest and grassland will always greet/each other’, while they giggle and tease ‘You look like Hanuman’, the white monkey general of the Ramayana.

Images of the sea, the coast, boats, boat journeys, and foreign armadas appearing to bomb the islands’ ports with cannon ball – ‘they want to plant their flags on this very shore!’ – are threaded throughout different poems. They mark devastating invasion and journeys into exile. Life goes on and there is a unity of design, the link to precolonial and colonial events, the death or enforced exile of those who use words to agitate and need to be shut up, and the relentless environmental destruction caused by cutting down forests to make way for cash crops (most recently palm oil plantations).

In ‘Daendels as Wayang Puppet Watching Over Us’ Mackenzie draws on Pramoedya’s film essay, Jalan Raya Pos (the Great Post Road) ⁴, with translations of Pramoedya’s text captured on the right side of the poem, alongside the scenes filmed on the road of workers ‘sodden, flooded, collecting sand/this rushing river’, ‘stoking the furnace of the sugar mill’, trying to repair ‘a mudslide’, and of ‘a wayang performance/the puppets of Daendels, the Regent of Sumedang/a cracking gamelan/battle it out’.

The one-thousand-kilometre Great Post Road extends across northern Java, from Anyer on the West coast to the port of Panurukan in the East. It is the ghosted legacy of the Dutch Governor-General Daendels who in just one year in 1809 conscripted Javanese labourers to build it. Many died in the process.

In the film essay, the road remains the lifeblood of transport and communication for cars, carts, public buses, and trucks, but its history echoes the Suharto era’s own use of the unpaid labour of the political prisoners to build roads and bridges on Buru, and the inequality, poverty and poor working conditions of those at work along the road.

One of the scenes of ordinary daily life and survival captured is the attempt of a driver to repair his broken down truck in pouring rain. Mackenzie captures this in ‘Writer’s Block’.

                                                     WRITER’S BLOCK
rain soaking
a break down
diesel fumes rising like clouds
                a rinse in the river of spare parts
                the bus will rattle into life
                eventually
WRITER’S BLOCK

The poem draws on other scenes from the film essay including one in which Pramoedya admits that when he is affected by writer’s block, the study of his homeland and its history are a key tool for organising his thoughts.

The film also bears witness to Pramoedya’s daily routine. The passing of time. The push-ups, the burning of rubbish, the ‘click click click’ of the typewriter. The joy of grandchildren. Trauma kept at bay.

Mackenzie’s poems reflect the contemporary as well as the past. Young people leave their rural towns and villages to seek better lives on the coast where they find themselves living on the margins of broken dreams – as drivers, tea pickers, sand miners, or carting bamboo as in ‘The Buffaloes’:

the buffaloes, in a choreography of the tethered,
lift their feet lightly
above the wagon
drooping bamboo branches
sway, leaves catching the light

at the swirling’s centre the driver’s steady gaze

In the three-part poem ‘Memories of the Revolution’, ‘Bandung Conference 1955’ recalls the coming together of emerging nations called on by Sukarno (as NEFOS – new emerging forces) to refuse allegiance to one or other side of the Cold War. In the second part, ‘Borobodur 1959’ depicts a visit to Indonesia by Che Guevara. In part three, ‘Jakarta 1995’, the Cold War has ended, the prisoners from Buru have returned to their families where they are demeaned and discriminated against as ex political prisoners (TAPOL). This ongoing persecution (denial of jobs and education) under the New Order government extends to their children and other close family members.

In ‘Jakarta 1995’ the snapshot of scenes from daily life at home skews to the right across the page, fulfilling a pattern of days in the present, ‘watering the plants’, ‘gazing over to the/neighbourhood kids/springing about/flying kites’, but still reckoning with the past, still ‘thinking of Sukarno’, and arriving at a single word, ‘sunyata’ – in truth.

For Pramoedya, remembering is agency, truth telling, and revolutionary act. And personal survival, relationship and day-to-day living are necessarily intertwined with the political.

The poems in Mackenzie’s collection are a brilliantly realised weaving of Pramoedya’s preoccupation with the images and episodes of history which flow like ghosts into the present. If the nation could be ‘unified politically and administratively by Soekarno without spilling blood – an exceptional occurrence in humanity’s history’,⁵ – then how are we to understand the widespread horrific violence against their own that exploded in the wake of the US military-backed coup in 1965?

Pramoedya interrogates history and demands that the present be understood, and if it can be understood, he asks, then what is the role of the literary writer? In his essay, ‘My Apologies, in the Name of Experience’ he writes that ‘as a person and a writer who shares in bearing the burden of change’, he regards the era of Sukarno (until 1965) and the Trisakti doctrine as ‘nothing but a sort of thesis. The New Order, an antithesis. Therefore, for me, it is something that in fact cannot be written about yet, a process that cannot yet be written as literature, that does not yet constitute a national process in its totality, because it is in fact still heading for its synthesis.’⁶

In the last poem in the collection ‘Dawn’, the train heads east from Gambir station, crossing through the countryside,

red mounds of earth high as small hills
on either side of the narrow track farewell
what I sense of
           myself

And, at the end, a self that wears the marks and traces of brutal capture and incarceration, but who also goes on amid the details of daily living.

a chattering of bicycles and tea stalls
among the mud and puddles left after rain

my skin,
hoed, black beaten, weathered, flaking away
               my life

Mackenzie’s Navigable Ink honours the inspiring, rich literary legacy of Indonesia’s most notable writer and pays tribute to his refusal to be silenced, subjugated or compromised. It is a wonderful collection that repays multiple readings.

Notes

1. Max Lane translated the Buru Quartet and as he writes in his Introduction to Footsteps (1990): ‘Tirto Adi Suryo was publisher and editor of the first native-owned daily paper, instigator of the first “legal aid service”, co-founder of the first modern political organization, co-publisher of the first magazine for women, and a pioneer of indigenous literature in the language of the nation yet to be born. All this and more is brought to life for the reader in an amazing adventure of intellectual discovery and emotion.’
(p. 10)
2. Max Lane, Introduction, in Footsteps by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Penguin, 1990, p. 10.
3. In 1942 the Netherlands East Indies surrendered to the Japanese and, after the war ended, the
Indonesian nationalist leaders, Sukarno and Hatta, declared Indonesia’s independence on 17 August 1945. Sukarno was the nation’s first president and Hatta its vice-president. After four years of struggle, the Netherlands recognised Indonesian independence in 1949.
4. Jalan Raya Pos 1996, with Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Directed by Bernie IJdis.
5. Chris GoGwilt, 1996. ‘Pramoedya's Fiction and History: An Interview With Indonesian Novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, January 16, 1995, Jakarta, Indonesia’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1: 147-164. http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.uws.edu.au/journals/yale_journal_of_criticism/v009/9.1toer01.html
6. See Pramoedya Ananta Toer, 1991. ‘My Apologies in the Name of Experience’. Translation and
Afterword by Alex G Bardsley, 1996. https://sites.google.com/site/pramoedyasite/home/works-in-
translation/my-apologies-in-the-name-of-experience In the essay, Pramoedya relates that ‘the period of Guided Democracy in the last years of the 50s and first half of the 60s, [was] the period of the Trisakti doctrine – political sovereignty, economic self-reliance, cultural integrity – a doctrine that, while universal among nationalist states everywhere, was, however, a bogey for the countries stuffed with capital, and hungry for new fields of enterprise around the world. History teaches much about the power of capital. … The governments of so many states it turns into mere instruments of its will; and when they are no longer wanted, they are overthrown.'
 
 
 
ANNEE LAWRENCE’S debut novel, The Colour of Things Unseen (Aurora Metro, UK, 2020), engages with the rich cultural life that exists between Indonesians and Australians. She was the inaugural recipient of the Asialink Arts Tulis Australia-Indonesia Writing Exchange in 2018 (at Komunitas Salihara in Jakarta) and has published in New Writing, Griffith Review, Hecate, Cultural Studies Review and the online University of Edinburgh Dangerous Women Project.

Echoes

by Shu-Ling Chua

SomeKind Press

Reviewed by Dženana Vucic

I raced through Echoes the first time I read it. Raced through it the second time, too. At under 85 pages it’s a short book—a chapbook, almost—and easily inhaled over an idle afternoon. If you can resist, the three essays can be spread over a few idle afternoons. But it’s hard to resist—Shu-Ling Chua’s writing is compelling, the kind of simple but lyrical language that propels you through the text at pace. It’s not exactly sparse prose, but unadorned, elegant like a figure-hugging structured dress from Cue. Chua is economical with her words, and direct. She avoids heavy description or lapsing into discursive commentary and instead, she takes the concrete and mundane—clothing, songs, water—as the loci from which to gently probe her broader concern, crystallised in the book’s blurb as ‘what does one unknowingly inherit?’

In the first essay, ‘(Im)material Inheritance’, Chua searches for an understanding of self in photographs of her grandmother, in her seeming divergence from her mother. The essay circles questions of glamour and the feminine, and what it means to dress for the world or for the self. Her economy of language leads to moments of ambiguity and momentary discomfort, as when, for example, Chua writes that she ‘was not like other girls’, a sentiment that lives in the space between the then (she is writing of herself in school), and the now (she is affirming, in 2020, that she was different). It is a niggling tension felt on a personal and political level: we at once know that this is an unfair and sexist disavowal of womanhood and know, too, that we have felt this way, have felt our failures to live up to idealized femininity, and have felt our refusal of idealized femininity as a special badge of honour (indeed, some of us still do). 

In another instance, Chua tells her mother ‘You’re lucky I’m not anorexic,’ and soon after notes: ‘My stomach is not as flat as it used to be. (Neither is my mother’s),’ and the lack of contextualisation, explanation, makes the reader wince. This is intentional, Chua is not attempting to save face; she offers the self in all its embarrassing exceptionalism and cruelty, setting in relief our imposed relationship to beauty, a relationship which sets us to defining ourselves in relation to others in ways that make us feel better and worse, but which also denies us joy in our physicality. The essay traces Chua’s (self-)consciousness of this tension, played out through three generations of women in her family. And though Chua ultimately finds connection to femininity through her grandmother, and with her grandmother to femininity, she lets the tension linger on the page, unresolved.

In ‘Echoes’, Chua sifts through Chinese pop songs and their modern iterations, exploring her interweaving past and present to push at the limits of language and translation, and the gaps in between. Chua was born in Australia to Malaysian-Chinese parents and, like many immigrants and children of immigrants, she inhabits a space of linguistic inbetween-ness, a space whose contours she maps out through her relationship to Chinese music. Chua describes listening to songs whose lyrics she doesn’t fully understand, lyrics that she must google and google-translate and ask friends about. It is an exploration of second language that is full of the wonder of discovery, with that special attention to meaning that non-fluent speakers often have, a tentative peeling back of definitional layers to grasp a word that native speakers take for granted. In this, there is a nostalgia—and hunger—for something only partly-known that I, an immigrant to Australia who lost much of my mother tongue in the move, recognise. 

Though Chinese characters or anglicised Chinese words (Cantonese and Mandarin) appear throughout the book, they are most common in ‘Echoes’. It is a choice that reminds me of Gloria Anzaldúa’s germinal Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), in which Anzaldúa used Spanish and Chicano dialects alongside English in parsing through and representing her multiply inflected Chicana identity. Languages co-existing on the page, without italicization or footnoted definition, is becoming increasingly common as publishers become aware of the othering and English-language hegemony that these choices represent. However the decision to slide between languages is not just political, it is deeply personal too. As Chua, and Anzaldúa before her, show, multi-lingual works are a textual performance of the in-betweeness and multiplicity of their authors’ linguistic and cultural identities, a way of letting aspects of the self sit together on the page without subordinating one to the other. 

For Chua, the decision seems also to perform her coming-to-language, and, in this, a coming-to-be. She is always googling, translating, looking up, asking for help, for information. She takes lessons, practices. Chua is always active in her linguistic and cultural inheritance and she has to be—unlike English language songs, which are so ubiquitous in Australia that you neither have to try (nor even want) to learn their lyrics to absorb them; Chinese songs require effort from Chua. She is forced to use the internet, and youtube in particular, as access points to a culture that she is very much a part of but which a predominantly white, Anglo-centric Australian (and western) media attempt to obfuscate, if not override. Hence the importance of movies like Crazy Rich Asians, the sound track of which is fundamental to Chua’s essayistic musings. 

The decision to leave lyrics untranslated, or partially translated, enacts instances of exclusion for readers who aren’t familiar with the script, forcing them to sit in the discomfort of not knowing and affectively bringing them into an experience paralleling Chua’s own language-acquisition. It forces them into participation. To know how the words are said, or what they mean, the reader must act, must watch the youtube video, must flick between pages to find where a line has previously been given meaning, or look up the songs and seek translations for themselves. The uncertainty and insecurity of this process, felt keenly by Chua, is offered to readers, too. 

For me, it is Chua’s attempt to render as whole a self which is often split into parts that is most moving. Chua describes calling herself ‘half Chinese and half Australian’ in grade 3, while her mother suggest she use ‘ABC… Australian Born Chinese’. Both iterations split Chua in two, both evoking the neat split suggested by the hyphen in ‘Chinese-Australian (or, indeed, Chinse-Malaysian), as though anything could be so neatly parsed or disentangled. Chua does not describe herself, in any bio that I could see, as any iteration of the above, nor does she do so in ‘Echoes’. She has no time for the lazy signifier that is this hyphen and, in each essay of her collection, she speaks to, without directly speaking about, how poorly such a forced construction captures the breadth of her cultural relationality.

The final essay, ‘To Fish for the Moon’, details domestic life, habits and rituals, through water and washing. Chua describes water being saved in her parents’ home, the washing machines she has had, her (great) grandparent’s laundry business, sipping hot water, baths. Each anecdote is dropped into this flow of water and let go. Chua is gentle in this release, but unsentimental. To me, she doesn’t seem to be yearning for an imagined intimacy with the past, but rather seems to create and inhabit a present-future dimensionality that extends in all directions and take all things with it. Water is ordinary but it is also, implicitly, a connecting force, ubiquitous and mundane but life giving. To quote Anzaldúa, ‘I struggle with naming without fragmenting, without excluding… Identity flows between, over, aspects of a person. Identity is a river—a process.’ Chua takes this river, acknowledging the ways that it is communal and ongoing, and offers readers sips along its path. 

Chua is an essayist and poet and in Echoes, her debut collection, these two worlds converge in an unexpected way. Rather than writing poetic lines into the essay form (and thus bearing the risk of sounding overwrought, tedious), Chua seems to do the opposite by writing essayistic sentences which slowly combine and accrete into a poetic form. She favours a sort of nimble restraint and the immediacy of concrete imagery on a sentence by sentence level. This is something of a contrast to the essays themselves which feel uninhibited, with a tendency to drifting: tangents, digressions, fleeting connections, departures and returns. They aren’t meandering per se, but multi-directional. Chua is writing towards knowledge, forgoing conclusions in favour of continuation and discovery. In tracing her connections and inheritances, she documents herself striving towards both, a process of self-actualisation rendered through her familial relationships and connection to things (tangible and otherwise) that bring her joy and pleasure. 
 
 
 
Dženana Vucic is a Bosnian-Australian writer, poet and editor. Her work has been published in Cordite, Overland, Meanjin, Stilts, Kill Your Darlings, Going Down Swinging, Australian Poetry Journal, the Australian Multilingual Writing Project, Rabbit, and others. She is a 2020 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow and tweets at @dzenanabanana.

Peace Crimes: Pine Gap, National Security and Dissent

by Kieran Finnane

UQP

ISBN 978 0 7022 6044 5

Reviewed by TAMARA LAZAROFF

I have to admit I jumped at the chance to review Peace Crimes, partly because I know two of the six so-called ‘criminals’ – the Peace Pilgrims – who are Finnane’s subjects. Andy Paine and I have moved in some of the same circles for close to a decade, including the Brisbane zine community. I have become acquainted with Franz Dowling more recently through my occasional volunteering at the Friday night Food Not Bombs street kitchen in West End, which Franz co-coordinates. Way, way back in late 2016, I also knew that Andy – I hadn’t yet met Franz – had an upcoming trial in Darwin. It had something to do with a direct action, a non-violent trespass into the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (just 19 kilometres outside of Alice Springs), and he was – all six Pilgrims were – facing up to seven years in gaol. But my understanding about what exactly the group did, why they did it, and how their action fit in with the larger picture of war; war crimes, Australia’s involvement, resistance and civil disobedience, was vague. Of the enormity of their considered, courageous act of protest, I had no idea.

Helpfully, Finnane begins her book on the night the Pilgrims begin their journey by foot to the facility. She draws links, and not incidentally, I don’t think. (If anything, the entire narrative’s undercurrent is concerned with our undeniable connectedness.) In any case, in her recounting of that 28 September, 2016 late evening, she is looking up at the starry sky on her bush block on the southern side of Alice while the Peace Pilgrims – Jim and Franz Dowling, father and son, Margaret Pestorius (whom the police cast as an ‘elderly woman’, though she self-describes as a ‘direct action goddess’), Timothy Webb and Andy Paine are only just setting out on their 15 kilometre walk through the darkness, spinifex and scrub, and rocky, unknown terrain, sometimes uphill. It is the very same night that a missile from a US drone strikes the village of Shadal Bazar in Afghanistan, killing 15 people and wounding 19, most of them civilians – though the group do not know this yet. When they reach Pine Gap, Franz and Margaret, who have carried along their musical instruments, a guitar and viola respectively, begin to play a lament for the dead, for the victims of war. Andy livestreams the event on a borrowed mobile phone. They all pray, especially for those who have died by drone strike because of Pine Gap. As Finnane clearly details, this military facility supplies targeting data ‘used for drone killings in war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq and in countries with which Australia is not at war, such as Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen’ (12), making Australia potentially responsible for war crimes and the terrorism that is returned in response, not to mention incomprehensible human suffering. The number of strikes are rising, too. In Afghanistan alone, there are currently about a hundred a month – that’s about three a day. It is this the Pilgrims wanted to draw attention to – even at risk of their own incarceration – and they did. As a result of their on-site arrest, there was the subsequent trial at the NT Supreme Court and the international media interest that followed. Peace Crimes ultimately contributes to and advances this project of awareness-building.

Finnane is a journalist by trade. She is, in fact, one of the founders of the Alice Spring News, which has been publishing since 1994; and she personally reported on, and was present for, the entire two weeks of the Peace Pilgrims’ court case. Her first book, too – Trouble: On Trial in Central Australia (2016) – is focussed on the courtroom, violence (domestic, this time) and is also centred in Alice, where she has been living since 1987. With such long and close links to the town, Peace Crimes definitely has an insider’s perspective – and a lot of heart – alongside being incredibly well-researched, as would be expected. Particularly fascinating – engrossing even – are the sections on the history of the anti-war movement in Australia and overseas, which serve to foreground the Pilgrims’ actions. For example, during the Australian anti-conscription movement of the early 1910s, 34,000 citizens were prosecuted and 7,000 were imprisoned for their anti-conscription activities, including the future Prime Minister John Curtin! These details and more on the purposes, successes and challenges of civil disobedience, recent and past, are intertwined with the history of Pine Gap and those who oppose it (including another former Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser). It is all compelling. Equally compelling is the court case itself – Nobel Peace Prize winner Richard Tanter, among many other public figures, come to give expert evidence for the defence – and the legal machinations on display are also, on occasion, a little farcical. All of this makes for mind-boggling, mind-expanding reading. Really, however, it is the protagonists themselves who shine the most brightly in the story that Finnane tells. She writes:

I was drawn to write about the Peace Pilgrims because of the large view they take of their social responsibilities. They may join campaigns, but really, their field of action is the whole of their life, as far as their capacities and nonviolence can take them. They are connected to movements, and even specific groups within them, but within the bounds of their strong spiritual and moral frameworks they seem remarkably free – unconstrained by waiting for consensus, or theoretical coherence, or numeric strength … (247-48).

For me too, as a reader, it is the parts of the book in which Finnane illustrates the ways the Pilgrims ‘embody justice’ (190) in their everyday lives – not only their more pronounced political actions – that are some of the most engaging, and heartening. Franz Dowling, for instance, co-facilitates a house of hospitality in Greenslopes, which is also his own home, providing free shelter and food for people in need in the Catholic Worker tradition to which he belongs. Jim Dowling, Franz’s father, a long-time peace activist also motivated by his Christian faith, lives in voluntary poverty on a farm in Dayboro with his wife Anne Rampa where they have brought up their seven children. They have a biogas toilet that fuels the stove, and other ingenious green power facilities, including a veggie oil-powered vehicle. Similarly, Timothy Webb, who was raised in hand-built house in New Zealand, lives a life that seeks to harm others as little as possible; his parents, like Franz’s, instilled in him the understanding that ‘the luxury and convenience of Western lifestyles were paid for by the ‘short, unbelievably miserable lives’ of other people halfway around the world’ (24). Andy, too, practises radical renunciation; he lives on less than $5,000 a year (without Centrelink), though his days are filled with endeavour – the production of his weekly community radio program The Paradigm Shift, for one. At the time of the writing of the book, too, he was ‘sailing towards Manus Island with a group intent on protesting Australia’s asylum seeker policies’ (243) in order to, once again, stand up for others. On the other hand, Margaret Pestorius, a social worker and therapist, ‘questions, gently, her friends’ dedication to voluntary poverty’ (25) – though she, too, shares her house Peace by Peace with others, including a friend she was at the time nursing through cancer. At home in Cairns, she has long been involved in organising healing rituals, such as the Frontier War memorial on Anzac Day eve for indigenous and non-indigenous people alike. And finally, Paul Christie – the sixth Pilgrim who walked alone a few days later on 3 October, 2016 and had his own separate trial – moved to a rural cooperative upon the hearing’s resolution as a response to and action against climate change.

Like the Peace Pilgrims themselves, Peace Crimes is an inspiring and radical work – though it shouldn’t be. Hopefully in these post-COVID times we will together begin to recreate our society for the better, and for all, in a spirit similar to the Peace Pilgrims’. For a further taster of Peace Crimes, you can watch this short video of author Kieran Finnane speaking about her motivation for writing the book against the backdrop of Arrernte land and the Pine Gap base, the huge information-collecting radomes in the distance.

*

Here is the link for the bolded section above:

*

TAMARA LAZAROFF is a Macedonian-Australian writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. She lives in Brisbane on Yuggera and Turrbal country. Her collection In My Father’s Village & Other Freedom Stories (Pollitecon Publications) was shortlisted for the 2020 Woollahra Literary Digital Literary Award; and her novella Husk, Root, Bone was recently published by Big Fiction Magazine (USA).

The House of Youssef

by Yumna Kassab

Giramondo

ISBN: 9781925818192

Reviewed by SHEILA NGOC PHAM

“The two chairs: tea, coffee, fruit. They discuss the house, banking, they keep away from the future. The birds play in their bath. She thinks of karma and pain and suffering. There is a world beyond this yard and she knows little of it. Her son used to say to her, There is a whole world beyond this one if only you would reach for it.”—from ‘The Two Voices’ in The House of Youssef 

Yumna Kassab’s debut, The House of Youssef, arrived on my doorstep without forewarning. So this is how I first encountered the author: through her words. Léa Antigny, Giramondo’s then-publicist, sent me the book because she thought I would appreciate it; even though Antigny only knew me through my writing. Later, she suggested to Kassab that I might be a good candidate to speak at the book’s launch. In retrospect, Antigny’s literary matchmaking feels inspired, how her writerly mind was able to see a connection between the two of us before we saw it for ourselves. 

It was an honour to launch such an unusual and accomplished book, and the event marked the start of a lively literary friendship. Reading my launch speech more than a year later, my understanding of The House of Youssefis now coloured by knowing more about the author herself. In any case, my first impressions of the book largely stand, though it’s fair to say how I now see that Kassab’s best work lies ahead of her. 

Revisiting the book now, I find myself once again appreciating the crisp prose; how the restraint on the page demonstrates a woman in command of her ideas. But what struck me most then, and perhaps even moreso now, is the enormous feat of imagination and empathy that Kassab has pulled off. She honours the experiences of migrants without necessarily chastising or valorising them. The House of Youssef expresses the questions raised by the first generation, and attempts to describe the struggles of their offspring to seek answers as they grow up in a different world. In such a scenario, there are no obvious ripostes, only fragments, scenes and moments stretching out over the years. 

“The house, some say it was unlucky. You hear stories, they make you not want to live there. It is good they knocked it down and took out the foundations too. It is a hole now but soon they make it flat and put in concrete and then it will be something new.”—from ‘The House of Youssef’ in The House of Youssef.

The dialogue is sparse, often absent: “The silence, the mountain, the words that will never see the light of day”. Many of us know this silence intimately. Kassab’s book attempts to provide a shape to this mountain, though does not attempt to conquer it. Narrative coherence is what so many of us yearn for—a novel—but perhaps the reality is closer to the book itself: a series of short stories, a novella, and two monologues from elders. What the structure also reveals is something of the fragmentary nature of diaspora, how it feels to grow up in a displaced community; particularly as we find ourselves living in societies which have come to be characterised by at-times aggressive individualism. The children of exiles and other kinds of settlers embody grief in different ways. All of which brings the following passage from Edward Said to mind:

“Exile is…the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever.”

There is nothing heroic, romantic or glorious in Kassab’s stories; on the contrary, by focusing on the mundane her work depicts a community and its many complexities without apology. But that’s not to say that it’s not audacious, which is evident from how she dares to explore the shadows:

“Why a burning? Why not? A burning, a trampling, a stoning, a shooting.”

I recognised the insularity of the community depicted in The House of Youssef as being not dissimilar to what I had grown up with in another part of western Sydney. The specificity of place and culture is, in fact, what made it possible for me to relate in concrete ways. The stories were not a mirror; it’s more that I recognised the depth of feeling and emotional truths of the stories. In ‘Disgrace’, for example, a daughter is rejected by her parents for marrying ‘out’: 

“She had always assumed there was time, that one day they would talk again, that her dad might be a grandfather to her kids. She had assumed that given enough time it would happen; they could be one big happy family.” 

However, it seems important to state that being able to relate to these stories and characters in The House of Youssefis not the book’s key value. There is a strong emphasis nowadays about needing to see ourselves explicitly reflected in art—and how this mirroring needs to be external, with visible markers of our identity such as race described on the page. But this idea strikes me as being potentially solipsistic. While there is no doubt that representation is important as well as the need to enrich our national literature with stories from places like western Sydney, demanding representation at the cost of artistic sovereignty diminishes the power of artists and their works. 

If you wanted to read The House of Youssef as a window into the lives of Lebanese Australians, you certainly could do that though. Kassab provides much-needed nuance, which has helped me to better understand what I have observed in the decades spent living in areas such as Lakemba and Bankstown. A little while ago I stopped by the Abu Youssef Fruit Market in Yagoona. It’s a short walk from home, though I only started visiting it because the pandemic forced me to spend more time in my neighbourhood. It was only on my last visit, however, that I finally noticed its name.

“Who is Abu Youssef?” I asked the handsome young man behind the counter. He’s the one who always calls me sister in a way that makes me want to learn more Arabic.

“He’s my oldest brother,” he said, while weighing the cheaper Chinese pinenuts I had chosen.

“So that means his son is named Youssef, right?” 

I could tell he was impressed at my handle on Arabic titles, no doubt because of my outward appearance as an Asian woman. He went on to explain that the name Youssef has been passed down through every generation in his family. In turn, I tell him about my Lebanese friend who grew up around Parramatta and wrote a book called—The House of Youssef. 

So I did not read this book to learn about a cultural group I feel are profoundly different to me. I have often felt a sense of kinship and even common struggle with the Lebanese I have lived alongside. It’s why I even visited Lebanon to see it for myself some years ago. Having been there made it easier for me to understand the narratives in the book that involved travelling back and forth.

“Why had she come to Lebanon? Everyone had an idea why she was visiting, everyone but her.”

At its heart, The House of Youssef is about the human condition. Understanding the similarities and differences between us is the only way multicultural societies can thrive and how we will ever truly accept each other. This is obvious but is worth restating nonetheless, in these times more than ever. 

At some point, an unnamed narrator towards the end of the novella says, “Keep the plane in the air, keep the plane in the air, you can’t keep the plane in the air.” I paused after that sentence, thinking about the miracle of flight. How understanding the physics of flight does not necessarily make it easier to believe we are able to fly. Perhaps the truth is, sometimes we simply can’t stay afloat and we can’t keep the plane in the air—but we can create something meaningful from the wreckage.

The House of Youssef by Yumna Kassab has been listed for the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (UTS Glenda Adams Award), Queensland Literary Awards and the Stella Prize.

SHEILA NGOC PHAM is a writer, editor and producer working in radio, print, online and film. She regularly writes for a wide range of literary and mainstream publications, and is a current judge for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Sheila has held digital and editorial roles at the ABC and continues to produce radio documentaries and stories for ABC Radio National, most recently Tongue Tied and Fluent, a five-part series exploring multilingualism in Australia.

A History of What I’ll Become 

By Jill Jones 

ISBN: 978-1-76080-121-2

University of Western Australia Press

Reviewed by ERIN McFAYDEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The real is narrow,
the possible is immense…

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

Notes

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

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

Change Machine

by Jaya Savige

UQP Press

ISBN 9780702262869

Reviewed by J. C. MASTERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trending
agile
upticks
of rain
ping off
the swish
marquee,

actioning
the specifics
of some
committee
minute
on workflow
policy.

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

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

nth drawing I hart,
winding…

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

Throat

By Ellen Van Neerven

UQP

Reviewed by DANIEL SLEIMAN

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

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

Language is empty without ceremony
(p128)

Climate is our only bank
(p33)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(56)

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

In ‘Four Truths and a Treaty’ they write: 

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

Blunt. 

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

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

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

In ‘Crushed‘ Ellen writes: 

All my crushes
have been books
(98)

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

Notes

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

The Wandering

by Intan Paramaditha

ISBN

Harvill Secker

Reviewed by GABRIELA BOURKE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kokomo

by Victoria Hannan

Hachette

ISBN 9780733643323

Reviewed by MEGAN CHEONG
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Entries

by Prithvi Varatharajan

ISBN: 9780648511632

Cordite

Reviewed by MIRIAM WEI WEI LO

Reading Prithvi Varatharajan’s Entries, is like tuning in to an erudite conversation. At first my brain struggles. Then, like a middle-aged woman on the tenth day of exercise boot-camp, I suddenly find myself keeping up.

Twelve poems in, I’m not only keeping up, but I’m transfixed by a moment of connection in the (Proustian) prose poem “Speak, Memory”:

Writing memory transforms a beautifully shifting thought-picture into a static one, there for you to re-read but not to re-remember. It preserves memory while at the same time killing it. (15)

Varatharajan is discussing the fluidity of pre-written memory, of how it “seems to be fluid, letting you remember the same event in slightly different ways each time you recall it”. This may seem impossibly intellectual (like, oh, historiography) but I’ve had just that experience when I’ve written down memories of my own. Writing them down seems to kill, or at least fix, them in some way – like a dead butterfly pinned and mounted in a display box.

Other points of connection emerge, like the star-points of a constellation. Before I dot them out, I will venture some comments on form. Most of Varatharajan’s ‘entries’ are prose poems. There is the occasional foray into free verse (playing with many different line lengths), a couple of odes (one very cryptic), and one ghazal (that keeps the radif and dispenses with the qafia). The prose poems push at the ‘poem’ end of the boundary – there is a very deliberate prosaic-ness to their rhythm and diction as well as a palpable resistance to the kind of closure one often expects in a poem: the kind exemplified in, say, the closing couplet of a Shakespearean sonnet. This resistance to closure is also a resistance to synthesis and evaluation – this gives many of the prose poems the feel of an unedited documentary: reading them feels like watching live-stream footage from someone’s webcam. Except there are two crucial differences: first, these episodes include interior monologue; second, these episodes of footage are curated. They are carefully snipped-out portions.

The points of connection that emerge for me from Varatharajan’s curated entries include a sense of ambivalence towards cosmopolitanism. The poem “Inner City Reflection” submerges the reader, via the body of the narrator, in a pool of sparkling light – the inner-city lap pools of a thousand hotels come to mind – as our thoughts are directed to the sameness of the global urban landscape: “I’m in an everywhen of the central business district” (22). Varatharajan is summoning up metaphors for the cosmopolitan urban professional experience – an experience he participates in, like a swimmer entering a pool; but also steps out from, troubled. Varatharajan keeps disturbing the smooth aesthetic surface of cosmopolitan life in subsequent poems:

I was put off, in that group, by the pride taken in an appearance of effortless cosmopolitanism; I say ‘the appearance of’ because I’m sure it’s effortful – going through complex visa and immigration processes, not to mention the daily difficulty of communication in second and third languages (“Sombre Reflections” 71).

Bonny Cassidy, in her introduction to this book, highlights the ambivalence of Varatharajan’s poetic posture and celebrates it as “the most honest position” (xiv). In this instance, the ambivalence is fuelled by tension between the desire to obey the conventions of cosmopolitan etiquette and the desire to achieve more meaningful human contact.

Love and death twine their way through this collection in a double-dance of presence and absence – appearing occasionally as muted erotic touch: “I think of the exact weight and shape of you” (“Love Poem” 4); manifesting in the dead bodies of birds (“Bird Death” 5); materializing in gestures of friendship: “Julene in Spain says next time I’m in Europe she’ll visit me in whichever country I’m staying in” (“Ode to European Friends” 36); and receding through loss: “A Literary Shadow” documents the entry and exit of a significant connection – the South Indian writer Ashokamitran.

Travel is a constant reference. There are major and minor movements. The major movements take place between cities: Turin, Chennai, Adelaide, Melbourne, Istanbul – each of these places, and others, are captured in unique poems of anecdote and description (including “Opera Diary”, “A Literary Shadow”, “City Selves”, and “Nazim Hikmet and Radiohead in Cihangir”). The minor movements are between a succession of share-houses – “(Im)permanence” is a particularly helpful exploration of the difficulties of shared accommodation.
Some of Varatharajan’s most resonant poems, for me, are those that document minority experiences. I admire Varatharajan’s exquisite attention to the detail of these experiences:

The music is folky with paradoxical touches of darkness and whimsy. There’s no-one else like me there, so of course, I wear my difference heavily; of course, I berate myself for being so self-conscious: get over it, idiot (“Identity Anecdote” 23).

I don’t often come across representations of non-white traveller anxiety, so I am grateful for this, from a poem recounting experiences in Budapest:

I’m not sure where my defensiveness has come from … The Hungarian Prime Minister addressed the Viennese parliament today, and said Hungary was not interested in replicating Western Europe’s ‘failed’ experiment with multiculturalism by letting in non-European migrants. That is probably preying on my mind (“Incident in a Café, Incident in a Supermarket” 38-9).

I laughed out loud, with a sense of déjà vu, at this:

What’s to be done about being in the margins, since I find myself here all the time, even if I tell myself, some years, that I’m not going to keep putting myself in that position through my obstinate self-identifications? All that’s left to do now is to get comfortable, put my feet up in this virtual armchair, and find incisive perspectives on the world beyond the margin – perspectives that only a life in the margins could provide. Or – another option – suppress thinking about the margin and the mainstream, because this is after all just a story we tell ourselves, even if that story appears grounded in lived experience (“Occupying the Margins” 52).

I have chafed, as a writer, at the restrictions of the ‘Majority Gaze’ which seems to want to position me, always, in terms of my Asian-Australian ethnicity; with less interest in the many other dimensions of identity I currently occupy (‘housewife’, for example, seems particularly unworthy). I am anxious not to frame Varatharajan in a similarly restrictive manner; his work certainly resists any easy ‘ethnic’ categorisation; and yet, ironically, I am drawn to his poems about family, precisely for the deftness and honesty with which he handles the ethnic dimension of minority experience:

Last night I recorded a conversation in the kitchen … We dig up some dirt from the past. I describe my feeling of being embarrassed by our religious culture as a teenager, being embarrassed to bring my friends home because of this (nearly all my friends were white); I ask whether they were aware of this embarrassment, and if so, how it made them feel. In their answer they describe some of the other things that me and my brother did that were upsetting to them, which are heart-rending to hear; they relate to how we characterised their way of speaking English to schoolfriends we brought home. I say, ‘That must have been hurtful.’ It goes on like this for a while. It’s like a family therapy session (“Memories in the Kitchen” 62-3).

Entries is not an easy read. I confess there are a couple of poems that completely eluded me (“Apperceptions” and “Informal Poetics”) but it is still worthy of close attention. Other readers might like to mine it for its range and depth of literary references. Fans of arthouse films might find their own points of connection too. Readers looking for ‘Australia’ will find it here – in ironic refractions. I’ll conclude with one of them, from “The Australian Bicentenary, and a Memory”:

A friend of mine today recalled how he sat in a cinema in St Louis as a young boy (in 1989 or 1990), watching a selection of footage from the Australian Bicentenary … Going to see the Bicentenary was his father’s attempt to get his son enthused about the country they’d soon be moving to. As he was describing the scene to me – a childhood memory that seemed incongruous (You watched the Australian Bicentenary in a cinema in St Louis?) – I warmed a little, thinking: ‘Ah, this is real. I’m writing about something real.’ (50)

MIRIAM WEI WEI LO is intrigued by complexity and seduced by simplicity. Simultaneously. She teaches creative writing at Sheridan College in Perth, Western Australia. Find her online @miriamweiweilo (Instagram).

The Tiniest House of Time

By Sreedhevi Iyer

Wild Dingo Press

9781925893069

Reviewed by JENNNIFER MACKENZIE

“How will you remember her?”
“As someone who knew so much, and kept it well hidden.” (316)

Sreedhevi Iyer’s The Tiniest House of Time is a book for our time, examining as it does the profound silences that a family lives with, silences embedded in a history of displacement, and the uprooting from what was considered home. In tracking hidden and unspoken histories, of which there is little written record, the author has written something of a psychoanalytically focused and politically acute narrative, as she explores through her finely structured novel, an evocation of generational trauma across migratory continental space. With much sensitivity and intelligence, Iyer delineates the colonial legacy of race relations, and how this legacy weighs down on those societies still navigating them.

The novel begins with Sandhya, who has lived and worked in Melbourne for some time, returning to Kuala Lumpur to be at the bedside of her beloved grandmother, Susheela. It is clear that Sandhya’s departure from Malaysia some years before has been a painful one, with unresolved and awkward family issues emerging as the narrative proceeds.

The scope of the novel, moving as it does from contemporary Melbourne and Kuala Lumpur, Kuala Lumpur in the 1990s during the Reformasi period, and back to colonial Burma in the 1930s, allows themes of recurrent events, of the emotional resonance of love and terror to ricochet over time and place. The structure of the novel is very effective in the way it allows Susheela’s story in particular to emerge in a piecemeal fashion, and to connect it to the growing crisis in the life of Sandhya. Iyer’s skill as a writer is displayed in the way she employs slightly different techniques in the Burma and Kuala Lumpur sections without in any way sacrificing the overall unity of the novel. Somehow, she has managed to pull off a sense in the Burmese sections of both a dreamlike yet naturalistic portrayal of an Indian family’s life in what was then Rangoon. With careful delineation, Iyer, with exceptional clarity and restraint, floods a number of events rich with incipient trauma. Scenes that appear to render the calm placidity of family life, transform into incidents so utterly terrifying that they resonate as a kind of collective and generational stigmata.

The Sastri family is introduced as living a comfortable life, centred on traditional and domestic ritual, in British occupied Rangoon, where the family patriarch works as a Postmaster. His daughter, Susheela, displays a strong relationship with places of ritual, from the family domestic shrine to the imposing structure of the Shwedagon, and inhabiting such spaces becomes for her a source of strength and comfort for the rest of her life.

The security of the family soon appears to be illusory as world events overtake their lives. Being part of the Indian population in Rangoon, a liminal presence between the British colonisers and the subjugated and increasingly restive Burmese, they become a highly visible target for communal violence. A heartbreaking sense of carefully insisted upon racial divisions is highlighted through Susheela’s friendship with Zaw, a Burmese boy, a friendship which results in his public humiliation. The first indication of imminent conflagration is presented in a devastatingly restrained manner in a paragraph describing why Susheela was now staying home from school:

She had been forced to stop school the previous year, but not due to poor results….But one day, the school bus was stopped mid-trip on Campbell Road. All the passengers had to get out. Susheela climbed down with her friends and stood by the side of the road. They watched the Burmese men burn it, with the Indian driver still inside. Since then, Susheela stayed home.. given to sudden quietude that only a trip to the Shwedagon would dispel. (161/2)

The novel also addresses the difficulties and constraints of decision making when the world as one knows it is on the brink of collapse. With the Japanese about to attack as World War Two accelerates, Postmaster Sastri, confounded by his loyalty to, and pressure from, the British, makes two fatal decisions. On seeming impulse, he unaccountably decides to take the family to the Shwedagon, when reports of large-scale trouble are rife, and when the streets are mysteriously empty of the bustle of the everyday. The scenes of their return home from the pagoda are terrifying, and result in family tragedy. His second decision, to delay his family’s departure by boat to India, leads to them joining a very large contingent of refugees who are forced to make the long trek by foot to the relative safety of Assam:

Trudge, shuffle, clink, flap, wail. These were the only noises Susheela could hear from crying babies to clanging pots and pans. From morning, when she stood up from her dry, baked earth, till night, when Father decided they would stop, along with some other families, and rest under a tree. (194/5) and:
Later, Susheela would have no memory of actually reaching Mandalay, the place of a thousand temples. She only would recall reaching a camp with the multitudes who swallowed space till the horizon. (200)

The sections of The Tiniest House of Time set in the Kuala Lumpur of the 1990s reflect the vitality and random topography of a large city. The almost dreamlike Burmese sections here have a different quality of urgency, as the writing becomes more incidental, incremental, and grungy in effect. Just as the narrative in Rangoon is underpinned by Susheela’s relationship with Zaw, and his growing political activism, Sandhya’s engagement with the politics of Reformasi, and the rise and fall of Anwar Ibrahim, is set in motion by her relationship with Faisal. A charismatic student leader, intellectually gifted, multilingual and well-connected, he appears to be too good to be true. A couple of incidents reveal his darker side, and during a massive demonstration, where the crowd is bombarded with water cannon, he is arrested and disappears from Sandya’s life, although he makes a brief and telling re-appearance late in the novel.

The Kuala Lumpur scenes sweep beautifully over the messiness and camaraderie of student life, the excitement of widening political awareness and subsequent disillusionment. The novel describes well the excitement, the current passing through the body, which can accompany political engagement:

She played with the percussion of the movement, acutely aware of being present, being relevant. The thrill of operating underground, of voicing in the streets what they normally shared in whispers. (238)

A crucial event occurs when Sandhya is travelling on a train, after going out to buy Faisal a birthday present. Just as Iyer excelled in presenting scenes of imminent violence in the Rangoon sections, in this episode thugs roam the carriages, shouting “Anwar or Mahathir?”, and brutally beating those who give the wrong answer. Sandhya manages to escape, but in the aftermath, Faisal appears to be more taken by the drama of the event vulnerability, its moral implications, and Sandhya’s vulnerability.

In the wash up, Sandhya is expelled for taking part in the demonstration that sees Faisal arrested. His mother categorically rules out any future marriage, and Sandhya in great distress returns to the family home. With Susheela, she goes to the local temple, and together they partake in ritual catharsis, as Sandhya, with great strength brought upon by overwhelming grief, smashes 108 coconuts. .(prologue, 278)

The Tiniest House of Time is an illuminating portrayal of the Indian diaspora across decades, with a sense of non-belonging, of always being a foreigner. Susheela in particular takes comfort in what remains in any situation, because no matter what difficulty, it cannot compare with the embodiment of the earlier apprehension of the ineluctable nature of trauma. The long trek to India, the disease and filth, the bombing, the sudden disappearance of her Anglo-Indian companion, Stuart, who attaches himself to her family, remain images which can erupt painfully at any time. The contemporary scenes where Sandhya, and a number of family members, visit Susheela in hospital provide the ballast and essential reference point for Sandhya’s growing understanding of forgotten episodes in family history, and provide her with the determination to seek out further information in Burma. These sections could have been shortened, with a few too many family scenes, well written as they are. However, this is a minor issue in what is an illuminating, warm-hearted and courageous novel; a moving tribute to those many who have been caught in a migratory impulse not of their own making.

 
JENNIFER MACKENZIE is a poet and reviewer, focusing on writing from and about Asia. Her most recent book is Navigable Ink (Transit Lounge 2020).

A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina

By Paul Kane

White Crane Books

ISBN 978-0-648337-11-9

Reviewed by PAUL SCULLY

“Paul Kane is a poet, critic, scholar and librettist” who splits his time between Australia (principally rural Victoria) and the USA and is well-known in the former as a driving force in the Mildura Writers Festival, along with Tina Kane, a textile artist and conservator who “has published numerous essays, translations and reviews” in both countries.  “Tina died in Australia on 25 July 2015” after a two-year battle with motor neurone disease.

“The road I walk is one of sadness/ …. /Every time my step falls upon the road, I admit my bondage.” (Ghazal 72)

“Our love was always a response to the anguish of this world/ … / How could our anguish not be beautiful?” (Ghazal 73)

Paul Kane’s A Passing Bell abounds in phrases that could be extracted as summaries of the work.  I chose the above to capture the tones of litany, compulsion and grief that pervade it, and the striving for some species of beauty that is part of all poets’ motivation.

A Passing Bell is book-ended by a Prologue in the voice of a third person commentator, witness or presence – a God or a God-substitute, the unnamed Master (perhaps Hafiz ), the spirit of love – that frames the ghazals that follow as involuntary exercises shaped by “a loss so fundamental he is shocked to be alive.” There is also an Epilogue, which is in Tina’s voice and which acknowledges her role in leading him out of his “underworld” “of cavernous grief” at her death to a point where he can turn his Orpheus away from her Eurydice.

Tina was (remains?) Kane’s wife and collaborator in the 2014 translation and illustration of twelve Hafiz ghazals, so the choice of the ghazal form within the Sufic remit seems natural and even an extension of that earlier work.  (Kane mentions Hafiz by name in Ghazal 8, though he does not venture equivalence between himself and the great poet in any way).  It might even be viewed as another joint project of his words and her animating spirit.  This may speak of a deeper affiliation, it may hark back to collaboration, or it may be the product of aptness to themes. There are signs suggestive of the former– the work’s character as a verbal pilgrimage of sorts, the congruence of earthly and spiritual love, the marriage of truth and love, the invocation of a Master presence, the implication of stages in the grieving process (à la Kübler-Ross) and/or stations of enlightenment, e.g. “Passing” in the title, and references to an afterlife.

The ghazal’s last bayt (couplet) usually mentions the poet or narrator by name or requires a reversion to him or her in some way, whereas this occurs only in the Prologue, and then in the voice of the third person.  All the ghazals in the body of the work revert to Tina and the Epilogue reverts to them both.  This variation is consistent with the work’s inferred joint authorship, and its devotional and Sufic compass – the lover becomes the beloved and both manifest love itself.

While I am not overly familiar with Kane’s other poetry, internet samplings (Cordite, Snorkel, for example) make clear that A Passing Bell is a conscious, if natural, departure from all but the Hafiz translations.  These samplings are quite different in construction and tone, and more modernistic, though there is a not infrequent correspondence in themes. Kane’s career demonstrates both a deep and broad interest in collaboration and cross-cultural forms, such as his and John Kinsella’s Renga: 100 Poems; and it is worth noting that Ouyang Yu has translated Kane’s poetry into Chinese.

There is a concept in the Qu’ran known as tawhid that signifies the uniqueness of God as creator and sustainer of the universe and is sometimes interpreted in Sufism as making us all part of God – in Attar’s A Conference of the Birds, for example, the birds resolve their pilgrimage to find their king, Simorgh, by peering into a mirror.

These comments are not intended as a religious or form-centred reduction of A Passing Bell.  It so pulses with emotion and both light and dark humanity, and so alternates between the dirge-song and the lyric that it can be savoured without religious overtones and resonates beyond the form’s strictures.  Nor do I want to stray into arguments of appropriation.  The poetry is too organic to sustain such an accusation.  Despite its deeply personal content, there is no sense of voyeurism in reading this book, though readers will naturally reach out to their own experiences and that is perhaps intended.

By the publication of A Passing Bell, Kane reasserts his faith in poetry – he is no Laura Riding – despite the traumatic disjuncture of Tina’s death. Meaning is neither necessarily singular nor requires certitude.  Poetry is living by “words whose purpose is to say what cannot be said” (Ghazal 8), though “poetry” is itself “merely a word”.  Poems are “like newborns shocked by the harsh alien air” of utterance and “part of a larger life which includes death, naturally,/ but only because, for them, death is another kind of life”, a life to be treasured “for it has touched you, Tina, and I cannot let it go” (Ghazal 46).  In any event, “I wrote everything for you and waited like a child for notice” and this long poem is “at most a hint, perhaps an invitation or petition” for an acknowledgement in absentia and thus a “prayer” (Ghazal 130).

We all might be warmed by a prayer said by or for us, be it religious, secular or a simple contemplation of nature.  Paul Kane has been brave and caring enough to share his and Tina’s.
 
 
PAUL SCULLY is a Sydney-based writer. His second collection, Suture Lines, was published in December, 2016 by Guillotine Press. His work has been published in print and online journals in Australia and the USA.

Dry Milk

By Huo Yan (trans. Duncan M. Campbell)

Giramondo

ISBN 978-1-925336-99-3

Reviewed by MAKS SIPOWICZ

Huo Yan’s Dry Milk is a book about many things all at once. It is a meticulous character study of an unpleasant man who never quite settles in a new country. It is a philosophical parable about following the path our lives set before us. It is a cautionary tale about greed. Huo draws these threads together in creating the rich world of the book.

Set in Auckland, Dry Milk focuses on John Lee, a Chinese man who married a disabled woman so that he could leave move to New Zealand in search of a better life. Instead, he ends up as the owner of a failing antique store, renting out the spare rooms in his house to Chinese exchange students, and attending meetings of a community group he despises, but which he feels obligated to attend. Huo gives us an idea of the kind of man John is in the second paragraph of the book, in the description of him closing his store for the day: “Just as his last would-be customer was about to enter the shop, [John] flipped over the sign in the front window read CLOSED. Having beaten the customer to the door by a pace or two, John Lee locked it and ducked back out of sight” (1). The pettiness characterizing his behaviour is the guiding force of the entire novella.

We begin on the 30^th anniversary of John’s moving to New Zealand. As an immigrant, John embodies the many aspects of the foreigner’s experience. I was struck by how universal certain parts of his life in New Zealand were. He is uneasy around other Chinese expats, whom he meets as part of their local community group. Equally, he is uneasy about any prospects of a return to China. My own experience as a migrant confirms this – as a migrant one can begin to feel like a tourist not only in one’s adopted home, but at their origin as well. John’s story highlights the additional difficulties faced by migrants at the intersection of race and culture, but also the changing nature of this experience. He remarks that when he first moved, he tried hard to fit in, but now there are young Chinese migrants everywhere. “Walking around nowadays, you see Chinese faces everywhere. This place has become Chinese. John Lee sighed. How careful he had been, thirty years ago, to try to fit in, to try to become like them” (55).

Throughout Dry Milk John reaches multiple times for the Book of Master Zhuang. Master Zhuang, or Zhuangzi as he is also commonly known, was a Daoist philosopher active in the mid-fourth century before common era. His philosophy is characterized by its skepticism about our ability to know about certain kinds of truths and its relativism with regard to morality. For Zhuangzi, the answer to questions about right or wrong depends on who is asking them. This is connected closely with the principle of non-action, that is, acting naturally without having to carefully consider every aspect of one’s action. Acting in a way that comes naturally to us and living our life accordingly is how we can come to embody the Dao (Way).

John is eager to apply these teachings to his life. He thinks much of Zhuangzi is still relevant, and in conversation with a visiting scholar he agrees eagerly to the suggestion that “all of the various truths we moderns talk about were known long ago by the ancients” and that in this respect “nobody can compare with the wisdom of the ancient Chinese” (16-17). The practical aspects of John’s affinity for Daoist philosophy can be seen throughout Dry Milk. For instance, he decides to marry his wife as soon as he hears that the government is intending to send her to live with her family in New Zealand, following a eugenic turn after the Cultural Revolution. Later, John is similarly sure of himself in his pursuit of Jiang Xiaoyu – the student lodger renting a room from him. Each decision, whether it is consciously so or not, seems to be an attempt for John to act naturally. Unfortunately, consistently throughout the book, the lesson John learns from Zhuangzi is the wrong one. Where for Zhuangzi striving to act naturally means we can come to enjoy our lives as we can come to accept what is offered to us, John’s actions produce a string of disappointments, fostering his resentments against his wife, the social workers who come to help him care for her, other members of his community, and the few New Zealanders he interacts with on a regular basis. This pushes him to go on with the opportunity offered to him by a business acquaintance to begin exporting dry milk powder. Ultimately, the only thing borne of John’s constant striving is more darkness.

Huo captures well the sort of social competition and attitudes all too common among long-term migrants. Faced with an increasingly changing reality, wherein his own luck seems to remain poor, John’s finding comfort in classical philosophy underlines the chief source of his discontent – the changing fortunes of those who had remained in China, and its growing middle-class, and experience he feels he missed out on but deserved. Looking at the new wave of migrants, whom he considers to not have to struggle as he had, and who in his mind are not attempting to blend into their new environment, he turns to tradition. Ironically, it is through a visiting scholar who gives a talk on Zhuangzi to the Chinese Community Hope Association he belongs to that John gets elected to the group’s executive, finally gaining some of the status he craves, noting with satisfaction that the jealousy of his rival in the group will become “all-consuming” (59).

Dry Milk is a dark book, but it is not without hope, even if this the kind of hope Josef K is given by Franz Kafka in The Trial. And while its protagonist is unlikeable, abusive, and petty, his flaws and striving for a life beyond the possibilities on offer drew me in even as they shocked me. Duncan M. Campbell’s craft as a translator doubtlessly helps in this – the text is colourful and rich, presenting a vibrant portrait of the community it concerns. Huo captures the sense of foreignness that all migrants experience. Beyond this, she captures the generational differences that are ever present in expatriated communities. At the same time, she gives voice to some of the challenges that are unique to Chinese migrants, and thus offers her readers a perspective that is at once broad and particular.

MAKS SIPOWICZ is a writer and academic living in Melbourne, Australia. His writing has appeared in 3AM Magazine, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Australian Book Review, Colloquy, Parergon, and others. He blogs at Philosophy After Dark and tweets @callmesipo.

Toward the End

By Ali Alizadeh

Giramondo

ISBN 978-1-925818-22-2

Reviewed by KIRAN BHAT

While it was a mainstay of early 20^th century writing, the styles, tendencies, and structures of social realist literature went out of vogue fairly quickly. Perhaps it is because of the proselytising nature of such texts, or because works of only one particular vision or message tend to lose freshness on multiple reads. Nonetheless, we live in a time where plenty has gone awry, and the world needs stronger voices yet. From the pages of Towards the End, it is clear that Ali Alizadeh aspires to be one such voice. He is eager to observe the hypocrisies and toxicities of an Australia connected to the global economy, and he aspires to use poetry as a space to right his country’s wrongs.

Alizadeh is a master of the cynical and the bare. He often likes to string words together into the most uncomplex sentences, to make sure that the theme or topic of his words hit with the greatest impact. The poem ‘Refugee’ begins with the warning, ‘If you come to this country without a visa you won’t be settled in this country,’ just as the poem ‘P.S.’ begins with a proclamation: ‘We are decent. We love our country and our liberty.’ Though Alizadeh is writing so directly, his words do not speak with an intimacy. Rather, there’s a deep frustration embedded at how things are in Australia. There’s a sense that no matter how much people of colour give themselves to Australia, the last thing they will be given is acceptance, or a place in society, and Alizadeh uses his poetry to call it it what it is: messed up.

What makes these poems more than exercises in didacticism is how Alizadeh’s poems move from the stark to the unexpected. Returning to the poem, ‘P.S.,’ one assumes that the poem is meant to be a stripping down of everything that makes Australia an inherently difficult country for its outsiders. What it becomes in the middle is an ode to the impossibilities of capitalism, instead.

‘We dream
of feeling happiness as psyches rejoice
at buying iJunk and designer socks, a life
finally expiating its futility
if lucky, with a (record low) pay rise.’

The tone of the poem remains colloquial, but the jumble of words like ‘expiating’ with ‘futility’ create a unique sound, while images of ‘iJunk’ next to ‘designer socks’ render a clear vision of an archetype – Melbournian, hipster, most likely addicted to anything Apple throws their way – Alizadeh is trying to criticise. But, Alizadeh is not trying to stereotype, nor is he trying to cast judgment. He’s just tired of the way things are, and he wants it to change, hence why he concludes his poem on a summoning of the ‘immeasurable power’ of human will to ‘rupture the reality of the world and instigate new worlds.’

Alizadeh is also a master of wordplay. Most of his poems demonstrate a unique use of vocabulary to allow the sounds of the English language to reach greater heights. Take his poem, ‘Destinal,’ in which one casually intrudes upon sentences like ‘ink stains on the paper occlude the noumenon.’ The long /o/ of ‘occlude’ along with the length of syllables in ‘noumonen’ create an extremely satisfying mouth muddle that is hard to imagine succeeding if penned by another writer. In the poem ‘Post-Marx,’ Alizadeh remarks,

‘Landlords don’t lord
it over overindulged
go-betweens
poised between domination and damnation
by market’s melodramatics.’

Each line is built on an alliteration, and a subversion of words that appear similar in length and consonant (‘landlord’ and ‘lord,’ ‘domination’ and ‘damnation, ‘market’ and melodramatic’).  The meaning of the words clash, however. As a result, the pairing of these words create harmony and cacophony, nonsense and consequence, all at once.

In my opinion, the strongest poem in the collection is ‘Australian Day.’ The poem showcases all of Alizadeh’s strengths in one piece of writing, and does so with cohesion. For example, the beginning few lines have all of the trademark punch and power of Alizadeh’s starts.

‘Barbeque and cricket
and now you’re a citizen. I’d slap
my own ungrateful
subject’s face.’

Yet, lines like ‘I’d kick my heart for its failure to attract another’ inspire a rare empathy and pathos. There’s a sense that as Alizadeh reflects on his inabilities to measure up to the Australian standard, he is more willing to be vulnerable. He even ends his poem on a very real desire that most second generation people feel when they are born and raised in a country that does not understand them.

‘It’s called
hope
for an encounter, a place
in the universe
of the loved.’

Liminal and exciting, deceptively simple on a language level, yet eagerly complex on a conceptual one, Towards the End is a unique space where memory, sentence, and language align. Alizadeh’s lines live in the blasé, and yet yearn for what appears to be futile. Alizadeh wants to see an end towards the oppressions that occur from the awkward alignments of capitalism, racism, and societal socialisation. Towards that end, he has fused all the distrustfulness of his voice with all of the registers of postmodern style and structure, to invent a style of social realism that belongs not only to the early 21^st century, but very much to Ali Alizadeh himself.
 

Newcastle Sonnets

By Keri Glastonbury

Giramondo

ISBN 978-1-925336-89-4

Reviewed by ERIN MCFADYEN

Keri Glastonbury’s Newcastle Sonnets are at their most mimetic when firing off their dazzling one-liners. The collection is interested in the processes of de- and re-composition that make up, continually, the post-industrial suburbanscape of Newcastle. Taking the city as a kind of monkey-bars apparatus for throwing together and for tumbling apart, the Sonnets treat language the same way as the landscape. They revel in the (re)generative potential of double-meanings, puns, and hyper-specific referentiality, but also, in the end, searing take-downs of local teens and late capitalism alike, delivered with a glimmer to the gut.

The weirdly quick, mercurial march of gentrification is right at the centre of Glastonbury’s target. There’s certainly a pleasure in the poet’s sharp wit, if not an entirely easy one for readers complicit in enjoying her knowing ivory tower in-jokes. Glastonbury might, for example, follow the humour of recognition, in passages like

There are still flashers at bus stops
but now the grapevine is virtual
& kids have Fjällräven Kanken backpacks
in candy colours

with wonderful pastiche puns:

The unbearable lightness
                   of rail (34)

These lightnesses, slightly unbearable though our delight in them may be, are fast hits of readerly reward. Often several times over in each sonnet, we’re given viscerally indulgent lines like ‘What is Batman’s guilty pleasure? / Clive Palmer’s soft, shitty body,’ (35) or ‘the thick oatmeal / of Sandliands’ face’ (8). We can smile, satisfied, at jokes overlaying the literary and the local —  ‘Tess of the Erskinevilles’ (7) — and at speculative questioning with one foot in the university and the other in the clouds: ‘what if John Forbes had lived / to live tweet during Q&A?’ (6).

These moments offer us something like shining hard lollies of poetry, sugar hits immediately delicious on the tongue. It’s tempting to suggest that they puncture, redirect, or interrupt what Glastonbury elsewhere describes as a Novocastrian ‘ambient attention’ (4). We can consider that they give us all of our reward at once, a high-energy hit; the laugh, the immediate vision of reference points coming together. Conversely, we can also think of them as spilling our attention outwards, simultaneously in all the directions of the poet’s many gestures: across landscapes, across literary history, across registers and experiences both haptic and intellectual. In both ways, these joyfully — and, yet, not uncritically — hilarious poems lean into the kind of attention deficit that Glastonbury describes in ‘2 Hours South’:

A farrago of ways to be jealous, ways to be vicarious
ways to suffer, swiped away like old screens (71).

 And, yet, to pin these poems as insufficiently attentive would be misrepresentative. Indeed, there’s a way in which they’re exactly the opposite; Glastonbury’s investment in the particularities of the ‘little big smoke’ of Newcastle signals a poet invested in deep attentiveness. Indeed, Glastonbury is critical of views of regional life which deal in broad strokes, in cliché, or in snobbish selectivity. In ‘The White Bird,’ for example, she’s unimpressed that

The metropolitan critic comes to town
& goes only to the regional gallery
— a poetry of complaint, misses the authenticity
of the drying paint. The blacks,
the Prussian Blues (72).

There is certainly a will to recenter the regional in this attitude and in the poems which enact it, positioning Newcastle the minor metropole not simply as secondary or merely aspirational, but as real and affecting and deserving of references that Melbournians might have to Google to get.

Attentiveness to these kinds of details, these minutiae, might be a kind of love. This would be fitting, perhaps, given the nominally generic form of the pieces here — I mean, given that these poems refer to a history of, and are, sonnets. The most obvious point of reference here might be Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, which Glastonbury mines and mimes in poems like ‘Just Quietly Babe.’ Glastonbury’s opening line here — ‘Dear Hamish, hello. It is 5.15am. / Guess we’re more West Coast…’ (29)—  walks behind the eminently East Coast Berrigan, whose second sonnet begins ‘Dear Margie, hello. It is 5:15 a.m’ [1]. Equally explicit, though less exegetical, is Glastonbury’s gesture to Shakespeare in ‘The Pink Flamingo (of Trespass).’ In this instance, ‘the Tromp family’s psychedelic road trip / unfolds like a Netflix folie a deux / as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 127 is read in Noongar’ (67). Sonnet 127 is the first of Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’ sequence. Here, double meanings help to figure an ostensibly unconventional object of love:

In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name;
But now is black beauty’s successive heir,
And beauty is slandered with a bastard shame:
For since each hand hath put on Nature’s power,
Fairing the foul with Art’s false borrowed face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress’ eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Sland’ring creation with a false esteem:
Yet so they mourn becoming of their woe,
That every tongue says beauty should look so. [2]

If ‘beauty’ comes apart from ‘fairness,’ (as in lightness) here, and attaches itself instead to the raven black of the apostrophised woman’s eyes, ‘fairness’ becomes a truly polyvalent term. Both beautiful and opposed to beauty — because it is the opposite of darkness — fairness’s ambivalence is its foundational feature.

Glastonbury’s gesture to doubleness fits her approach to the sonnet form itself. Even with her clear references to the sonnet in its various historical guises, she’s interested in challenging precisely what this form can do, and what it can reasonably ask poets to do. We might configure her use of the form using Berrigan’s phrase, imagining these works as ‘Poem(s) in the Modern Manner’ [3]. The poems in Newcastle Sonnets are 14 lines long, getting us over the line for formally recognisable Elizabethan sonnets, but rhythmically and in rhyme (as well as in geography, in topography, in politics) we are a long way from London. Her treatment of the sonnet shortens and stretches out the lines, swings the rhythm. So considered, Glastonbury can be seen as, at times, crafting an exposed-brick iteration of this historical form, drawing attention to its structural foundations if only to ironically distance herself, and the aesthetic she ends up with, from them. In this, she makes the sonnet something exciting and relevant for the kinds of readers she might teach in her ‘cushy lecturing job in a regional town’ at the University of Newcastle:

…an anthroposcenester, the full cast
of Girls in every class, like every town
has a Kurt Cobain… (77)

Yet, exposed brick doesn’t always signal the fresh, the new, or the thrilling for Glastonbury, who also sees ‘the pebblecrete poles of the East End / speaking to an historicist melancholy’ (11). Indeed, in ‘The Sea Folding of Harri Jones,’ Glastonbury pictures stone not so much as reconstruction, but as ruin:

Someone’s doing parkour on the military ruins,
no one is washing up in Shepherds Hill cottage,
the ghost of artist-in-residence past… (56)

Looking back and documenting decay — as well an enacting it formally, in protracted blank space and grammatical cul-de-sacs — is always at the centre, then, of Glastonbury’s vision of the gentrifying city, and the new sonnet that she writes it in. For this reason, I want to offer the possibility of reading Gastonbury’s attention to Newcastle not only as ‘ambient,’ but also as meaningfully ambivalent. These aren’t poems written by a ‘metropolitan critic,’ but nor are they really poems of home. Glastonbury, indeed, has commented publicly on her arrival in Newcastle as an adult, and her dual senses of intrigue and distance from it at this time [4]. Hers are poems which register decay and hold gentrification in contempt, while still revelling in the vibrancy of locality, sparkling with gleefully specific references, in a voice that might almost sound proud. Perhaps Glastonbury formulates her own attitude most aptly: Newcastle Sonnets feels ‘post-celebratory’ (71), deflating the glamour of new money and construction, but also finding reparative feeling in the forgotten corners of a city living in the shadow of its historical self:

From below the bridge the neon reflections could be koi,
everyday rewards glimmering in karmic glissando (41).

 
Notes

1. Ted Berrigan, ‘II,’ in The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, by Alice Notley, with Anselm Berrigan, and Edmund Berrigan (Berkley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 3.
2. Colin Burrow (ed.), The Complete Sonnets and Poems (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 635
3. Berrigan, ‘Poem in the Modern Manner,’ in Collected Poems, 6.
4. Jim Kellar, ‘Newcastle poet minces no words capturing a city in transition,’ Newcastle Herald, 19 August 2018.

Turbulence

By Thuy On

UWA Publishing

ISBN 978-1-76080-119-9

Reviewed by JACKIE SMITH

If you pay attention to the nation’s arts sector, you’re probably familiar with Thuy On. For many years, she has worked as a freelance writer and arts critic with The Age and The Saturday Paper and Books+Publishing as well as holding the books editor position at The Big Issue. Earlier this year, On released her debut poetry collection Turbulence to rave reviews of her own.

I’ve been wanting to read Turbulence since it was released, largely due to the praise it has received not only from On’s contemporaries, such as Maxine Beneba Clarke and Kevin Brophy, both of whom praise On’s work with Brophy stating, “It’s fluid, it’s vibrant and it doesn’t stop talking to you. Thuy On has (as she says) a cynic’s head and a poet’s heart.” (UWA Publishing 2020)

Reading is subjective. Dependent on the reader, all the accolades in the world mean nothing. On addressed this in a 2013 interview with The Big Issue, “Just because every other critic in the land loves the book and has showered it in accolades, doesn’t necessarily mean that I would feel the same. Diversity of voices in the media culture is a good thing.” (White 2013).

On doesn’t shy away from tackling a wide variety of emotions with her first collection. She touches upon themes of hope, love, loss, dating, envy, and sadness, sparked by the breakdown of her marriage and the relationships she has tried to build in the aftermath. And it’s all tied together with perseverance, as evidenced by the koi that feature on the book’s cover. This is then divided into four parts, which she discusses in an interview with Liminal Magazine. “’Wreckage’ deals with the aftermath of separation, ‘Chimera’ with the trajectory of the affair I had not long after, while ‘Fish’ is about online dating and ‘Turbulence’ is about the general upheavals of life.” (Liminal Magazine 2020)

To say that reading Thuy On’s poetry is as if we are on that emotional rollercoaster with her is an understatement. One minute, you’re excited by the prospect of new love, and the next you’re aggrieved with loss.

And On’s gift is in being able to spark this catalogue of feeling within her readers. But the the skilful way in which she can manipulate words with such vivid imagery that we can almost reach out and touch it is impressive. The opening poem, ‘Surface’, is one example of this.

“Let others wax mauve

about dandelions and baby’s breath

braving cool breezes

that brush off regret

these winsome odes to blades of grass

dewy mists and sheaves of corn. (10)”

While love and relationships are at the forefront of this collection, romantic love is not always the main focus. Featured in the first part of the book, which focused on the aftermath of On’s marriage breakdown, there is a beautiful ode to the maternal love On has for her daughter in ‘Lodestar: For Ava’.

“Your mother

is an inbetweener

from what is

to what will be …

Shield your eyes darling girl

I don’t know

what will become of us …

but you are the lodestar

to light me out

a reminder

of a life to be kissed.”

What I like most about this piece is how vulnerable and honest it is. Most parents in her situation would be hiding the fact that anything is wrong, and trying to be strong for the benefit of their child. In this poem, On acknowledges that it’s not always true and, as much as she is trying to shield her daughter from the worst of her separation, she is still sorting through it all herself.

Another thing that I enjoy about this collection is the way some of the pieces play with language. As an arts critic, On presumably spends most of her working life critiquing books and language in accordance with how literature conforms and disregards these rules. Therefore, it’s refreshing to see her play with those certain rules, or at least acknowledge these metareferences in her use of language with poems like ‘FIN’.

“I’m turning the last page

it was supposed to be a short story

but unwilling for it to end

I kept tacking on chapters

footnotes where emotions cross-refer

erased stet highlighted

blanked out (66)”

This poem, the title of which comes from the French word for finish or ending, is a subtext in itself. It also closes the ‘Chimera’ portion of the collection, which gives it even more of a reference to the subtleties of language and meta-references. But the way On uses references to things like unreliable protagonists and mistakes (things she no doubt would call out if found in a book she was critiquing) is a nice way of tying the collection in with her work sphere. If I was to list favourites from Turbulence, this would be one of them.

With the current political climate, it would be remiss of me not to mention ‘To Date an Asian Woman’ (80 – 81).

“Learn my name

I’m not a mass of continents

a chopstick dish

to be poked.”

There is no denying the poignancy this particular piece has in the midst of Black Lives Matter and race relations protests, both overseas and in Australia. There’s an underlying anger to this poem that comes through quite clearly and if, like me, it’s not something you’d really considered, it’s a little confrontational and unsettling.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, however, at least in my opinion. Part of the reason I enjoy poetry so much is the way it’s able to draw attention to things and feelings you hadn’t considered before, and ‘To Date An Asian Woman’ certainly does this.

I’d also like to draw attention to ‘Vale Anthony Bourdain’(135) ‘Vale Eurydice’ (136). Both are poems of loss, lamenting a life cut short but with more of a public focus, given Anthony Bourdain’s status as something of a celebrity chef during his lifetime and how Eurydice Dixon’s made headlines nationally.

The way these poems are crafted is beautiful yet incredibly respectful of the impact the subject’s passing would have on friends, family members and even strangers. The below snippet of On’s tribute to Eurydice Dixon is an example of how she deftly combines feelings of loss, tragedy, anger and justice to create something that is tender and lyrical.

‘… saying your name

means wide justice

but now once again

shadows will be jumped

twig break a warning

the sky on the crack

of becoming a bruise.’ (136)

It highlights the way in which poetry can draw attention to life’s important moment, shining a light on complex issues and breaking them down for others to understand, and experience.

Despite having been in the arts industry for some time, Turbulence cements On’s place not only as a critic but as a refreshing poetic voice to be heard. If this is any indication of future work, I cannot wait to read more.

Notes

1. On, Thuy/UWA Publishing. Turbulence. UWA Publishing, 2020.
2. On, Thuy/UWA Publishing (2020). Thuy On Reads From ‘Turbulence’. Accessed via <https://youtu.be/uuTn7USYt4w> 28/7/2020
3. White, Patrick (2013). Q & A with Thuy On. Accessed via <https://www.thebigissue.org.au/blog/2013/01/28/q-a-with-thuy-on/> 31/7/2020
4. Liminal Magazine (2020). 5 Questions with Thuy On. Accessed via <https://www.liminalmag.com/5-questions/thuy-on-turbulence> 29/7/2020

JACKIE SMITH is a freelance journalist, editor and proof-reader and marketing graduate based in Brisbane.  Her work has been published through a variety of local and national media outlets. Follow her via her blog, Jackie Smith Writes, or Twitter (@jasmith_89) for regular updates.

Heide

By π.O.

Giramondo

ISBN 9781925818208

Reviewed by ABIGAIL FISHER
 
Trying unsuccessfully to write this review in June, I ride alongside the Eastern Freeway to Bulleen. The gallery is closed but I visit the bees, the bare trees, the corrugated cows. Plaques along the path by the river gloss over the Wurundjeri history of Bolin (‘lyrebird’, later Anglicised to Bulleen) and the process by which Indigenous custodians of the land were ‘driven out’ of the area throughout the 1850s, while documenting with painstaking detail the white settler casualties of severe floods in the following decades. That night I google the scar-tree, a red gum towering over the entrance to the kitchen garden, and learn its Woiwurrung name: Yingabeal, or ‘song tree’. Yingabeal is also a marker tree, situated at the convergence of five song lines and estimated to be between 600 and 700 years old. I am reminded of a line in Π.O.’s Heide:

A ceremony was held
                         under an old Red gum (in
              the Botanic Gardens);
separation from NSW, was officially declared.
                            Without a verb
it’s impossible to make sense of a sentence.
                            A train of thought, doesn’t need a ticket
A honey-bee doesn’t need a compass.
      A council is a group, of people
                            /
                            the tree’s
                                          still there. (29)

Meanwhile, on Instagram, heidemoma reminds me ‘to be sure to pop in for a takeaway coffee and tasty snack’ when ‘taking a stroll through the Heide gardens and sculpture park’, and offers the recipe for Sunday’s Orange Brandy, a ‘simple aperitif that is popular in France’ replete with black and white image of Sidney Nolan, Sunday Reed and Joy Hester around the fireplace.

In Heide Π.O. tackles the sticky, cloying cocktail that is the myth of the Heide Circle — along with the more expansive clique that is the Australian cultural canon — with the same disciplined anarchism that characterises 24 Hours (1996) and Fitzroy (2015), producing a third epic, encyclopaedic volume on culture, power, and place. Heide is the first of the trilogy to move away from the streets of Fitzroy, and away from the attention to migrant and working class lives so characteristic of the previous volumes. Instead Heide focusses primarily on the individuals both central to and marginalised by white settler Australian art history, with particular attention given to bohemian movements in and around Melbourne. The first section focusses on Australian history pre-Federation, with a particular emphasis on art and literature, and part two pivots towards the 20th century and the lives of the Heide Circle: their art, literature and infamous affairs. Π.O. does not shy from the latter subject, but rather interrogates the politics of Bohemian relationships, posing questions that are both nuanced and unashamedly didactic: How are such romantic entanglements anarchic? And how are they conservative? To whom do the lives, the artworks, even the children of the Heide Circle really belong?

In the process of formulating these questions, Heide enacts a number of artistic, literary and personal encounters in a way that is constantly and deeply attuned to the role of privilege in artistic production and consumption. Through imitation, ekphrasis, adaptation, and parody, Π.O. produces a poetics that, like Joy Hester’s art, delights in having ‘[come] into existence rubbing up against other people’s’ (365). Echoing Michael Farrell on Amanda Stewart, we could even say that Π.O.’s technique ‘suggests the copying mode of the lyrebird’ (or ‘bulin’), with both the ‘comic aspect’ that such a repetition entails, but also the ‘sense of both contingency and agency in its song, in that it could always be or have been a different sound that they cho(o)se to make’ [1]. This is Π.O.’s disciplined anarchism, and a joyful challenge to observe. Certainly of the best and most entertaining poems in the collection are reprisals of others’ work — whether offering a doubly parodic rendition of Ern Malley’s ‘Darkening Ecliptic’, (409), or reimagining the work of Lawson (149), MacKellar (164), Durer (242) and Buvelot (71), Π.O. never misses a chance to remind us that ‘Imitation isn’t creation, / it’s re-creation!’ (261).

Typical of Π.O.’s work, there is a preoccupation in Heide with the notion of selection: who gets a seat by the fire when the cocktails are served? This speaks to Π.O.’s complex relationship to the canon, and to his anarchist methods of poetic production. The effect of the encyclopaedic range of facts and source texts in his poetry gives the impression that nothing is necessarily included, but rather that in writing a line he selects from everything in the world, constantly emphasising processes of inclusion and exclusion, emphasis and absence. The effect is that his work simultaneously public and deeply personal, as the ‘character’ of the ever-present selecting agent becomes increasingly distinct. As in Fitzroy, much of the material in Heide is sampled from historical records and newspaper articles, although there is a shift away from police reports towards art reviews, poetry and literature. Π.O. uses dominant material, the fabric of canon, but unpicks the stitches and lets down the hem. In speaking to the lives and labour that Art History neglects, he interrogates the potential for art and literature to hold hegemonic institutions accountable. Heide is history, tribute and protest, all caught up and eddying in Π.O.’s characteristic rivers and creeks of abstracted data and sampled material.

Something that sets Heide apart from Π.O,’s previous works is the emphasis on ekphrasis, the primary method in this work by which Π.O. insists that ‘the (eye) has to be led back to the place it has been ignoring the most’ (226). In a kind of manifesto, the narrator explains that ‘Frank Stella (the artist said, his paintings were “based / on the fact that only what can be seen” / ditto here, / same’ (12); Heide is preoccupied with the materiality of Art on the page, but also on the notion of making the hitherto unseen visible, and challenging our patterns of perception and historical memory. Π.O. unashamedly aligns himself with those whose lives and creative output serve to ‘frame’ the canonical greats — like Tom Robert’s wife, Lillie Williamson, a flower painter who ‘got into carving / “wooden picha frames” / the flowers & tendrils, loops & / vines that run round the edges’ of her husband’s paintings —

                                                                              i.e. the bits that
get “cut” out as irrelevant, when you get to see the painting
reproduced in a book, or online. (145)

This lends nuance to the narrators previous confession that ‘Often, i leave an Art Gallery, or a painting, feeling / uncertain, about what I just saw’ (19). Π.O. experiments with ekphrasis to blend poetic methods with ‘minor’ modes of artistic production, noting that ‘Art distinguishes between paint and stoneware products, (on one hand) and ////// threads and ## fabrics on the other’ (69). This method is neatly expressed in the concrete poem ‘Textiles’ (179), dedicated to the author’s sister Athena, and comprised of diagonally intersecting repetitions of the word TEXT and TILE. Another highlight is the reproduction of Ellis Rowan’s ‘A Bunch of Australian Wild Flowers’, which uses various text sizes, styles and orientation to replicate the artist’s floral bouquet, achieving the same calm discordance as Rowan’s original, a kind of lyrebird cacophony which takes up the statement in the preceding poem on Rowan that ‘Representation absorbs, the object’ (140).

Philip Mead, among others, has pointed out Π.O.’s affinity with the Objectivist poetry movement, given his focus on Breath (spoken word/ performance), the tendency to approach the page as a ‘field’, and attention to the materiality of language. Mead writes that in Π.O.’s work ‘is brusquely impatient of generic comformity, radically insistent on the materiality of language’, thus representing the ‘plain contingencies of everyday speech, but in uncommon, innovative poetic language’ [2]. This is certainly true of Π.O.’s latest volume, in which each poem takes up Olson’s call for words ‘be treated as solids, objects, things’, and thus be ‘allowed, once the poem is well composed, to keep, as those other objects do, their proper confusions’ [3]. Heide responds to Olsen’s insistence that ‘all parts of speech suddenly, in composition by field, are fresh for both sound and percussive use, spring up like unknown, unnamed vegetable in the patch, when you work it, come spring’ [4]. This analogy is particularly fitting in case of the joyfully visceral ‘To Granny Smith’, which ploughs the proper confusions of turnip, carrot, fly, spider, rabbit, wasp, sunlight and caterpillar before relishing the ‘)cHew  CruNch ^ # mUsh ) M*uNch!’ of an apple in a way that distinctly resembles playing with one’s food (163).

At times, Heide veers towards something slightly Edenic, seeming to buy into the ‘fairytale’ of the Heide bohemia, dwelling a moment too long in the delicately-curated-as-chaotic kitchen garden and verging on namedropping the poet’s own connections (perhaps gesturing towards an interesting parallel between the author’s own self-conscious myth-making and that of the Heide Circle). Certainly ΠO is not willing to dismiss his subjects outright. To Kershaw’s question, ‘“just what the hell” was Heide for?’, the narrator asserts ‘Everything!’ and reminds us that ‘we all have “a little Heide” in us yet’ (506). Happily, these sentimental moments rarely come at an expense to Π.O.’s unflinching attention to the white supremacy, sexism, homophobia, elitism and disfunction of the modernist art movement, whether quoting at length John Reed’s racist letter lambasting the artwork of Western Arrernte artist Albert Namatjira (525), or the role of entrenched privilege in founding Melbourne’s cultural bohemia — ‘Love her / hate her / [Sunday’s] father’s / a Bailieau’, and the ‘dead weight of / a Patron’s hand, is always in the work’ (343). In Π.O.’s hands, the fact that ‘John and Sunday are RICH!’ informs a somewhat cynical interpretation of their vision of ‘Art’ as having ‘an organic quality about it’ and thus the necessity for it ‘to grow out of the soil, as it were’ (343).

It would be fair to say that Heide never fully dismisses nor embraces what Alexander Kershaw derided as the ‘collective farming’ of the ‘cocktail-swilling cretins’ out in Bulleen (448). Yet nor does it stroll through the grounds and sculpture park, flat white in hand. Rather, it examines the materiality of culture and oppression, celebrates minor’ and marginalised art forms, teases out the tensions in the Australian artistic canon and interrogates the potential for creative production to be truly radical. At its best, Heide jumps the hedge into the kitchen garden and proceeds, like the larrikins in Fitzroy, to

pull / up the pumpkins
and other plants, and throw
them about /
the place  [5]

 
Notes

1. Farrell, Michael. “The Conceptual Lyrebird: Imitation as Lyric in the Poetry of Amanda Stewart.” Journal of the European Association for Studies on Australia 9.1 (2018).
2. Mead, Philip. “Unsettling Language: π. o.’s 24 Hours.” Aberration in Modern Poetry: Essays on Atypical Works by Yeats, Auden, Moore, Heaney and Others (2011): 161.
3. Olson, Charles. Projective verse. Brooklyn NY: Totem Press, 1959.
4. Ibid.
5. Π.O., Fitzroy: The Biography. Collective Effort Press, 2015.

ABIGAIL FISHER is a writer, editor and part-time Zoom tutor living on unceded Wurundjeri land.

The Girls

By Chloe Higgins

Picador

ISBN 9781760782238

Reviewed by ADELE DUMONT

The title of Chloe Higgins’ debut memoir is shorthand for her two younger sisters, victims of a fatal car accident when the author is aged seventeen. Her family avoids using their individual names, explains Higgins, so that ‘they are separate from us, an abstract thing on which we need not hang our pain’. In her frank depictions of drug use, sex work, mental illness, and her fraught relationship with her bereaved mother, Higgins might be described as unflinching in her approach. But the telling of this story is equally characterised by a flinching: from the memory of her sisters; from her own pain. 

‘In reality, you speak of everything except those who have just died’, says Higgins of the immediate wake of her sisters’ deaths. This reality is mirrored structurally in Higgins’ narrative: the girls themselves are notably absent figures until late in the book. According to Higgins, ‘The most painful part of grief isn’t immediately after the unthinkable happens, but a little later, once the space empties and other people go back to their normal lives’. Her focus is squarely on the aftermath of the accident: how this single cataclysmic event has reverberated through her own life. In this, it bears comparison to Roxane Gay’s Hunger or Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s I Love Elena. The violence at the heart of those memoirs is inflicted, and not accidental, but all three are compelling accounts of how trauma can manifest not only psychologically but also bodily. 

In what Higgins calls her ‘descent’, ‘slowly, the line of what I will and won’t do moves further and further from my pre-accident self’. She fleshes out this gradual unravelling in meticulous and moving detail. In chapters which shift back and forth in time, and which traverse continents (Kolkata, Manhattan, Wollongong) we follow the narrator as her ‘attempts at escape turn into obliterations’. Drugs allow her to live ‘in a world separate from the one the girls have been taken from’, one where ‘everything is all extremes and opposites’. She uses sex as distraction; as an attempt to satisfy her ‘skin hunger’, but ultimately this behaviour leaves her shrouded in shame, and further disconnected from her own body. Eventually, she is admitted into a psychiatric ward. Higgins closes her account of her time in the ward with a skilful shifting into conditional tense; a technique Lisa Knopp calls ‘perhapsing’(1). Here, she draws together what could have been; foreshadows what is yet to come; identifies her incapacity to express her pain as catastrophic ; and deems such expression critical to healing. ‘If I had my time on the ward over’, she writes:

I would have shown them what I couldn’t tell them.

And then when someone came to me, unable to express themselves, I would know what they needed: the space to perform their emotions. 

And maybe this story would have ended more appropriately than injecting heroin into my veins and letting strangers insert body parts inside me because I didn’t know how to say please, someone hold me. 

This is what grief looks like: an inability to speak. (p.131)

As well as charting the author’s gradual unravelling, The Girls traces her incremental growth. Higgins rejects the idea that the grieving process is innate or linear, instead framing grieving as something that we need to learn; like learning to ride a bike, it involves ’falling over and fumbling as we go’. She must learn how to perform her grief; ‘to teach myself to cry at the appropriate times’. Slowly, she learns how to navigate her shame and guilt, and to balance her own need for space with her mother’s competing need for closeness. She learns how to be gentle with herself, and how to live healthily. While the book’s temporal and geographical transitions might indicate a certain vitality, part of Higgins’ growth in fact comes from moving away from this restlessness and towards a place of stillness. Sitting still, she says, is ‘the hardest thing to do’; she finds it is ‘little things’ that allow her to anchor herself: reading, walking, running, swimming in nature. This recalls Jessie Cole’s memoir, Staying, in which the natural world is grounding, stopping Cole from surrendering to a state of grief that has the power to destroy her. 

All memoirists must grapple with the fallibility of their memories, but this dilemma is all the more acute for Higgins, since her own too-painful memories have been the object of her concerted attempts at a ‘forgetting verging on obliteration’. How then to depict her experience on the page? It is a convention of narrative nonfiction to reconstruct scene and dialogue for dramatic purposes, and mostly, Higgins succeeds in rendering her experiences viscerally. ‘Trauma and time erode memory’ though, and this basic truth means sometimes her prose loses precision and colour. A scene, for example, in which she wields a kitchen knife against her mother (‘It will be easier this way… We can all be with Carlie and Lisa again’), no doubt contains a concentration of feeling for the author, but falls oddly flat on the page. Swathes of dialogue feel stilted, and at times veer into the expository: 

‘Are you friends again yet?’ Dad asks the morning after, as he and I are on our way to see the therapist. 

‘Yes, of course. Why?’

‘Because you were so angry at each other. You came to me in tears’. 

‘Oh yeah, but we’re friends again now’. (P.86)

Perhaps in an attempt to patch over the cracks in her memory, Higgins includes lengthy excerpts from her father’s diary; her mother’s Facebook posts; correspondence with her editor. This approach feels piecemeal however, and where Higgins is strongest is actually where she straightforwardly admits to the gaps in her memory, and the shame attached to this. One of the most powerful lines of the entire book: ‘The thing is this: I hardly remember anything about my sisters’. Honouring the murkiness of her memory makes the glimpses of her sisters that do return to her all the more tender. She does not remember being physical with her siblings for example, but then, looking at a photo, she observes how her and Carlie’s bodies are ‘pushed up against one another, our arms meeting in the centre’. ‘This makes me happy’, she says, ‘to know I hadn’t always pushed her away’. 

Of the violence inflicted upon her, Osborne-Crowley says: ‘by far the most dangerous element of my assault was the fact that I lived in a world where it was unspeakable’(2). Maria Tumarkin, writing about the deaths of highschool children writes: ‘No place until recently in our Western anglophone culture for overflowing, unpushawayable grief. Big grief. Long grief’ (3). Higgins is acutely conscious of the unspeakability of what she has experienced. In her Author’s Note she says some people advised her to publish her story pseudonymously, or to leave out the ‘scandalous parts’.

But I’m sick of people not talking about the hard, private things in their lives. It feels as though we are all walking around carrying dark bubbles of secrets in our guts, on our shoulders, in our jumpy minds. We are all walking around thinking we’re the only one struggling with these feelings. And the more I open up about them, the more I realise I am not the only one struggling with my secrets and my shame. (Pp. 305-6)

We might see The Girls as what Laurie Penny calls an attempt at ‘unspeaking’: when it comes to experiences rendered ‘almost unsayable by any number of forces, external and internal’, unspeaking is important in ‘walking ideas and experiences back from the ready-made language and the ready-made audience for their telling’ (4). Higgins’ heartfelt memoir is testament to the power of writing to express the unspeakable, and to help heal. 

Notes
 1. Knopp K, 2012, Perhapsing: The Use of Speculation in Creative Nonfiction, Brevity.
 2. Osborne- Crowley L, 2019, I Choose Elena, Allen & Unwin.
3. Tumarkin M, 2018, Axiomatic, Brow Books
4.  Penny L, 2014, Unspeakable Things, Bloomsbury.

ADELE DUMONT was born in France and moved to Australia before her first birthday. After studying Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, she spent two years teaching English at the Curtin immigration detention centre. She is the author of No Man is an Island (Hachette). She is currently in residence at the Booranga Writers’ Centre.

Thorn

by Todd Turner

Puncher and Wattmann

ISBN: 9781925780635

Reviewed by CAITLIN WILSON

An Uneasy Symbiosis: A Review of Todd Turner’s Thorn 

Todd Turner’s Thorn mines the relationship between the earth and the things which populate it, musing on their motives and daily moves. An uneasy symbiosis between animals and people, the natural and the built, is rendered in detail-oriented odes to memory, observation and wonder. In this, his second volume, Thorn re-treads some of the ground of Woodsmoke (2016), reflecting a similar drive to luxuriate in the minutiae of language. The specificity of Turner’s images allows the reader to see through the poetic eye, lending a haptic quality to his creations. There is a clarity and care to each poem, a tiny world where every word is in its right place, even if everything is not. As the collection’s blurb, written by Robert Gray, explains, Turner has much to draw upon in his rendering of a complex world; “a horseman and boxer on one side, a craftsman who creates artistic jewellery for a living on the other”. This eclectic collection of life experiences is reflected in the breadth of this collection, unconstrained by any one influence or vantage point from which to connect to the world around him. 

The collection’s strongest moment comes early, with “My Middle Name”. The poem is memoiristic and confessional. The speaker explores the power of missing things – words, family, motives. Turner forms a loquacious ode to the power of silence. The festering presence of the unsaid is palpable; the speaker tells of “swallowed silence” (8) and describes his mother’s habit of “trying to air the echo of her father’s silence” (7). Turner gracefully conjures the feeling of holding in words, the ghostly figures of the past lingering on the tips of each character’s tongue.  This is not Turner’s only engagement with silence: Later, in “Switch”, the speaker relates that “a certain silence grew within me-/ an inwardness that only seemed to inflate” (32). Indeed, attention is paid throughout the collection to the power of invisible forces. The wind, silences, unspoken bonds and burdens weigh on the speakers in the early personal poems. In “Tiny Ruins”, the air itself chokes and confines; it “ropes” the speaker with “hefty knots” (22). In “The Raft” (24), nostalgia exercises its invisible power, a mix of crystal clarity and the hazy, rose-coloured mysticism of childhood memories. 

A frequent allusion in section one is the image of the tree, connected strongly with family and heritage. Family history is “sprung in roots” in “Heirloom” (28). A stick, an instrument of corporeal punishment, is “an instrument of my mother’s affection”, “rooted in living memory” in “The Stick” (25). That the tree, particularly evoked in its roots and the knots, appears frequently in Thorn’s musings on family and the past gives an ominous undercurrent to the at times prosaic remembrances of his speaker. Such clean relation of memory is on display in “Dolls” (29), where the imminent death of a mother is presented with care but without overwrought description, its matter-of-factness walloping the reader with the reality of loss. It is a hard poem that demands to be read and remembered. 

Section 2 brings with it observations of the animal kingdom with myriad seeming motives. In “Magpies” (35), “Guinea Fowl” (40), “The Echidna” (45) and “Horse” (51), animals are imbued with a quotidian majesty, watched and set down in detail for their own sake. These poems feel like a walk through the country and pausing to ponder the daily toils of its non-human dwellers. Turner burrows into the metaphoric potential of each creature, for its own sake and in the case of poems like “Villanelle for a Calf “(39) and “The Pigeons” (43), to illuminate something of the human condition. Through the premonition of “The Pigeons” closing stanza – “Poor pigeons, they were only looking for a place to lay their rotten eggs” (43) – Thorn conjures a self-fulfilling prophesy of doom, a pitying external voice which looks down upon the simple desires for home and safety. In “Snail” (44), Thorn takes on the invertebrate as character – lending it the humility of a blue-collar bloke. These poems are a refreshing reprieve from the chore of humanity – they do what good poetry should, taking us out of ourselves for a moment, and ensure we know more about ourselves and our world when we return. They contrast with the arguably more powerful personal poems, never letting the reader dwell on humanistic problems without consideration of our animal counterparts. 

Section 3 deals in the macro and micro earth – spinning out to consider big questions among the celestial imagery of “Solar Lunar” (55). This penultimate section feels loftier, not just in its allusions to technology and the mechanical and its concern with height and a bird’s eye view, but also in its pondering of humanity from the top down. “Theorems of geometry” and “the horizontal lines of the stave” (55) conjure mathematical and musical precision, as opposed to the grubby chaos of creatures both human and not. The loquaciousness of the earlier poems returns in “The Sweet Science”, where a fighter is a “fox-trotting shaman” and a “poetic pugilist” (59). However, this section is primarily concerned with things. Thorn renders them weighty and lit from within by meaning, waiting for someone to puzzle out their importance. Poems like “Stilled” (61) render simple objects like crockery gilded with significance; containers, it says, “seem to reverberate in the mute dust-fall of light and shade” (61). Further dimensionality is added to this third section is Turner’s sources of inspiration for these poems. Turner is in conversation with an eclectic bunch of poets; poems are ‘after’ John Donne, Ted Hughes, Li Po and Jo Shapcott to name a few. This gives the sense of a poet speaking about the world to the world and gives the collection an intertextuality that turns reading into a treasure hunt, sending the reader scurrying to their bookshelf to find the inspiration points for the works. 

Thorn reveals a poet in fine form, wielding language with an enviable control. The collection certainly stands as an excellent work outside of the context in which I read it, though I can’t help but ponder how my appreciation of this collection, so filled with images of the natural world existing without human interference, is enhanced by the state of the world at present. The constant pressing in of news about pandemics, climate change and natural disasters, hammers home the powerless of the individual being. Thorn is a welcome reminder that despite chaos some things go on, perhaps without fanfare or seeming purpose, but steadily and beautifully. 

CAITLIN WILSON is a Melbourne-based student and writer of criticism and poetry. Her poetry can be found in Voiceworks, Farrago and Above Water, and her criticism can be read in Farrago and The Dialog, among others. She was recently accepted into the University of Oxford Mst Film Aesthetics.

Benevolence

by Julie Janson

ISBN: 9781925936636

Magabala Books

Reviewed by HAYLEY SCRIVENOR

‘I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk through the rain.’ (Audre Lorde, 89)

What do we expect stories to do? I have always felt that, deep down, we expect them to tell the truth. I come to fiction for the gut-truth – what did it sound like, smell like, feel like? 

The gut-truths presented in Benevolence are tied to a larger reckoning needed in Australian society – one that involves a centring of First Nation voices, a willingness to address not just a violent history, but a hostile and violent present – and it’s worth reading Julie Janson’s book for this alone. But the reason I will keep returning to this work is the beauty of its language and the connection I felt with its protagonist, Burruberongal woman, Muraging.

This is a story of survival, revolving around love, family and country. We first meet Muraging (or Mary, as she is called by her white ‘guardians’) in her home Darug country (Parramatta) in 1816 and as the story unfolds, we learn of her struggles to flee. We see how she is stalked by hunger and loneliness, deriving comfort and hope from the violin she learns to play at the Native Institution in Parramatta. We watch as she is forced, time and again, to return to her ‘guardians’. In the afterword, we learn that Muraging is based on author, Julie Janson’s great-great-great-grandmother, Mary Ann Thomas. Janson is a Burruberongal woman of the Darug nation, novelist, playwright and award-winning poet. 

As a work of historical fiction, Benevolence offers a satisfying mix of the specificity of fiction (the gut-truth) with true events, and rare insights into what it might have been like to experience the devastation of British colonisation firsthand. I am not a historian, but this book gave me a way into important history – this is the story of a woman’s life shaped by violent and pervasive forces she cannot control, rendered in exquisite and compelling detail.  

Benevolence opens with the following description:

‘The grey-green eucalypts clatter with the sound of cicadas. Magpies and currawongs warble across the early morning sky as the sun’s heat streams down. It is eaglehawk time, the season of burumurring when the land is dry, and these birds fly after small game. Muraging’s clan, the Burruberongal of the Darug people, gather their dillybags and coolamons and prepare for the long walk to Burramatta, the land of eels, and Parramatta town. The old women stamp out the fire, and one gathers the baby boy in her arms and ties him onto her possum-skin cloak.’ (p.1)  

Readers familiar with Julia Janson’s poem ‘Duria burumurrung: eaglehawk time’ (which was co-awarded the 2016 Oodgeroo Noonuccal Poetry Prize) will recognise the below lines in the opening prose of the novel, and the poem echoes throughout the book:

Magpies, currawongs call across morning sky.
Sun’s heat streams down.
Clan gather belongings, dilly bags, coolamons
Walking, walking to a new town.
Old women stamp out fire, gathering babies in arms.

I am always telling my writing students they should look up words they don’t understand, instead of passing them by, assuming they are picking up the meaning from context. You’re missing out on an important part of the story when you do that, I say. The unfamiliar (to me) words in the opening paragraph – ‘dillybag’ (a woven bag), ‘coolamon’ (a carrying vessel) – forced me to slow down a little. 

Reading words in the Darug language is valuable for its own sake, but slowing down, lingering over new words, was for me one of the greatest pleasures of this book. Janson often folds definitions in seamlessly, telling us Muraging hears ‘rattling carts full of waibala, whitefella, and the sound of pots against iron wheels’ (1). Janson is always, generously, teaching the reader how to read the text. Sometimes the Darug words are given context in the sentence itself: ‘Pale dingoes, mirri, walk around a destroyed world and are lost in an empty landscape’ (26), sometimes you will have to remember a word you have been given already, or wait until a word is used several times. It’s always worth slowing down and looking up words that don’t immediately reveal themselves. There is a poet’s care for language throughout Benevolence; In places, a lack of punctuation adds poetic rhythm: ‘She longs for food chews wattle gum to ease her thirst’ (2), and words are placed side by side to hint at a way of knowing: ‘She panics and grips his hand. Alarm rises and her aunt mothers look away’ (2). 

Muraging is the character we follow through this story, but we are not confined to her impressions:

‘She looks at her dark hand in his pink one and can see that his nails are clean and trimmed while hers are dark and filled with ash. He smells of camphor, Russian leather bibles and cedar trees. She smells of eucalypt and smoke. He can see her beauty, again it disarms him.’ (123)

Time and time again we are confronted with the horror of the project of colonisation: at worst the white characters are openly violent and spiteful and at best, mealy-mouthed and ineffectual in their ‘compassion’. The title of the book – Benevolence – is a nod to the absurd and violent distance between the things the white characters say, and the things they do. Their speech is often stilted and strange. At one point, a phrenologist doctor measures Mary’s head. He wishes ‘to take it with him as a fine specimen but it is, inconveniently, still connected to [Mary’s] body’ (103). The following exchange shows the insurmountable disconnect between two ways of being in the world:

‘Why do you want our heads?’ she asks.

‘Young lady, I am scientist. And my craniological specimen studies indicate that the intellectual abilities of natives are by no means despicable,’ he says. 

‘That might be; the people who take our heads are wrong. And if you take them, you might be despicable,’ Mary replies. (103)

In her review of Julie Janson’s first novel Crocodile Hotel (2015), academic Alison Broinowski wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘The problems are too familiar, painful and perennial, and I am squeamishly frustrated because I know too little about them and have no solutions’. Broinowski is talking about contemporary health and education outcomes for Indigenous Australians – but her words speak to the greasy feeling of my own initial reluctance, as a white woman, to engage with the settler colonial history of Australia. After all, reading this book is a vivid and uncomfortable reminder that I live on stolen land, that I am not just a bystander but an active participant in the ongoing trauma of colonisation. As academic and writer Evelyn Araluen points out, ‘Today Indigenous Australians still face significantly reduced life expectancies and significantly higher rates of incarceration, child removal and suicide. The colonisers have not left, but instead police our borders and imprison those who seek asylum from conflicts in which we are implicated.’ 

Of course, white squeamishness is not just irritating or exhausting, but dangerous and insulting for the First Nations activists, academics, community leaders and writers doing the actual work of truth-telling; white squeamishness is fatal. 

It’s one thing to know colonisation changed the landscape. It’s another thing to see the following through Muraging’s eyes:

‘Log-splitting men follow the axe men and the sound is deafening, night and day. Fiery pits burn all night with wasted bark. Her peoples’ footpaths have become bullock tracks with deep greasy mud churned by huge wagons full of logs. The tiny fruits and flowers are being crushed. Nothing is left of the forest’s ceremonial sites. Their stories cannot be told if the places and sites of the ancestors are gone. The waterholes are ruined by cattle and the goona-filled water cannot be drunk.’ (91) 

Water rendered literally undrinkable by colonisers has stayed with me. Gundungurra and Darug women teach Muraging to use coals from the fire to filter the goona (shit) from the water and make it potable (96). This is just one of the thousands of ways Muraging finds to live. 

This shitty water, which Muraging makes drinkable again, matters; to borrow again from Audre Lorde: it’s how we know survival is survival. Benevolence is a book which needs to be read so we begin to know how survival feels, how it smells, what it tastes like. 

Notes
1. Lorde, Audre (2004). Conversations with Audre Lorde. United States: University Press of Mississippi
2. Broinowski, Alison. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/fiction-book-review-the-crocodile-hotel-by-julie-janson-explores-indigenous-themes-20151006-gk230l.html
3. Araluen, Evelyn. https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-227/feature-evelyn-araluen/

HAYLEY SCRIVENOR is a writer, sessional academic and former director of Wollongong Writers Festival who lives and works on Dharawal Country. She was awarded the 2019 Ray Koppe/ASA Fellowship for her novel-in-progress The Push Back, about a young girl who goes missing from a small country town. In March 2020, this manuscript was shortlisted for the Penguin Literary Prize. 

Archival Poetics

by Natalie Harkin

Vagabond

ISBN 9781925735215

Reviewed by GABRIELA BOURKE

It can be tempting to imagine that colonisation is a thing of the past; that posting an infographic on Instagram on Sorry Day counts as activism; that the horrors white settlers inflicted on First Nations peoples can be considered in the past tense. Natalie Harkin’s Archival Poetics reminds us that colonisation is ongoing and that far from fading away, the savagery of colonial oppression remains constant in our communities and our culture. 

Some salient examples: it’s Reconciliation Week, and mining conglomerate Rio Tinto has blown up an ancient Aboriginal site dating back 45,000 years – a site perhaps unrivalled in historical significance. The act of blowing up this site is within the law. It’s Reconciliation Week, and Kamilaroi woman, Cheree Toka, continues to campaign for the Aboriginal flag to be flown on the Harbour Bridge all year round, and not only as a token gesture once a year. It’s Reconciliation Week, and the government has announced funding is to be halved for AbSec, the peak body for the protection of Aboriginal children, even though Aboriginal children make up close to forty percent of children in out-of-home care. It’s been twelve years since Kevin Rudd’s apology speech and ‘Australia Day’ is still being celebrated on a day marking the commencement of the genocide of First Nations people.

 This is the discomforting ground in which Archival Poetics takes root. Harkin’s first few lines about the archive, ‘a small spotlight on the state, its institutions/systems/processes/that generate and maintain particular fantasy-discourses and/representations on history, on people; that actively silence/suppress/exclude Indigenous voice and agency…’ (11) make clear the enormity of the challenge of decolonisation. German sociologist Max Weber defines the state as a ‘…human community that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a territory.’ (Weber, 1946) It’s important to make something very clear here. Weber’s definition clarifies that we are that human community. The violence implicit in the destruction of Indigenous sites and in the removal of funding from organisations tasked with the care of children who have been taken from their families has been legitimated by our government whom we have elected. Not me, I hear you say, nor me, but us as a people. 

Acknowledging this complicity is imperative before entering the landscape of Harkin’s collection, so as to recognise the continuing reverberations of our colonial past in our present and future, and to pay heed to the way our legal system has and continues to fail Indigenous culture and communities. ‘Memory Lesson 2 | Feeding the Fever’ (19) underscores this failure (‘prepare to be drip fed ACCESS DENIED’) and reveals what we already know – that the archive is where bad things are hidden. The narrator’s attempt to reconfigure the shadowy spaces of this country’s history are held up at every turn by the state and its ‘…dystopian-drive to institutionalise/assimilate/control/categorise/collect/contain Aboriginal lives.’ (19) Harkin uses the humble verb in an unusual and powerful way a number of times throughout this collection, accenting the violence of colonial power and conversely, the agency of the Aboriginal people. We see this again in ‘Trace and Return’ which begins: 

return to the concealed origin
trace blood from there
enter spaces invisible
rouse beyond the official (29) 

and, a few stanzas later, condenses into 

return trace enter rouse gather seek
accumulate tend unshackle gather
provoke destabilise expose ignite (29) 

Although this poem comes after some of the others I’ll mention, the sense of energy and painful effort foregrounded by ‘Trace and Return’ is significant. The idea of writing poetry as a kind of restful activity is prevalent in a society that doesn’t particularly value creative endeavour, but Harkin tears this notion to shreds throughout her collection and certainly in this poem. The act of putting together these poems was surely both challenging and disturbing; the act of rendering the genocide of one’s people into poetry traumatising in ways I and other white readers of the collection are not able to comprehend. The poem ‘Dear Sir’ (22), the title of which holds a sickening sense of enforced subordination, is borne of a two hundred page file on a child of the stolen generation. The second stanza brings home this jarring sense of recognition of self and family within the devastation of state records. 

I turn the pages
there she is
perfect old-school cursive
so familiar
never-before-spoken-of      letters
to Inspectors      ‘State-Ladies’   Protectors (22)

The enjambment and punctuation of this poem increases the intensity with which the reader reads and removes any sense of pause which a more traditional structural approach might engender. There’s no holding back when reading these poems, there’s no moment’s reprieve to be taken from the spaces between words. Inspectors, ‘State-Ladies’ and Protectors are one and the same, a realisation which underscores the privilege of not-knowing and the importance of being made aware. The photograph that accompanies the poem, an item woven from the papers of the archive, displays the old-school cursive mentioned by the narrator. The most salient phrase visible is ‘good girl’ on the bottom left of the image, which could belong in the list of adjectives that conclude ‘Dear Sir’ – state child, half-caste, obedient, well-spoken, destitute, neglected (22). 

‘State Lady Report’ (26-28) includes similarly conflicting descriptors of stolen children. Preceded by a quote from Ann Laura Stoler’s Tense and Tender Lies (2006) about the gendered and racialised ‘intimacies of the everyday’, ‘State Lady Report’ explores the all-pervasive nature of state control. (Note: each line is preceded by a box marked with an x to give a checklist impression.) 

State Lady spills kitchen cupboard contents to the page and sniffs at the oven: I noticed an assortment of cakes and buns had been baked that morning. (26)

Then 

State lady inspects my house, body, hair – notes I am not causing trouble, and I am reasonably clean. (27)

All facets of life are under the jurisdiction of the state. An allegation of ‘consorting’ further drives home the kind of social and emotional deprivation employed by the state in achieving domination. The visual elements of this poem – the marked-off checklist, the typewriter-like font in bold to mark out the difference between the ‘I’ of the state lady and the ‘I’ of the narrator – visually repurpose the structures of regulation and control to tell a different story. 

In his review of Archival Poetics, Nathan Sentance points out that the narrative of the archive relies on the suppression of Indigenous voices. He says, ‘This is not to say that we, First Nations people, are not in the archives…we were usually included in archives without our informed consent. Our histories, our cultures, and our people were recorded by those commonly involved in the attempted physical, cultural and spiritual genocide of our people: police officer, government officials, and anthropologists, for example.’ (Sentance, 2019). Archival Poetics is itself an archive, a re-recording of the physical, cultural and spiritual experiences of First Nations people, a repossession and reconfiguration of a history rent with trauma. 

But again: is it history? At the time of writing this review, mass protests are taking place all across the world in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in US police custody. My social media landscape is one of outrage – as it should be – but this sentiment is aimed at American police, at American policy, at American people. The Guardian’s Deaths Inside tracks Indigenous deaths at the hands of police in this country, a number currently at 432 since the end of the commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody in 1991. In a devastating parallel, George Floyd echoed twenty six year old Dunghutti man David Dungay’s cries that he could not breathe while being restrained by police officers in November, 2015. And yet, there were no mass riots in Australia for Dungay, or for any of the First Nations people who have died or suffered abuse at the hands of police. So what are we doing about it? 

Natalie Harkin’s poetry works to decolonise the archive in a way that is distressing, arresting and aesthetic, and tells us that we need to pick up the gauntlet, continue the work and be better. Be better at recognising and rejecting the racism and violence propagated in the spaces we live and work and in our media. Be better at dismantling the systems from which we have profited at the expense of First Nations people. Be better at amplifying Indigenous voices instead of our own. Be better at listening, instead of speaking. Wondering where to start? Get yourself a copy of Archival Poetics.

References: 

Evershed, N., Allam, L., Wahlquist, C., Ball, A. and Herbert, M., 2020. ‘Deaths Inside: Every Indigenous Death in Custody since 2008’ Tracked [online] The Guardian. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/ng-interactive/2018/aug/28/deaths-inside-indigenous-australian-deaths-in-custody> [Accessed 1 June 2020].

Sentance, N., 2019. ‘Disrupting the Colonial Archive’. Sydney Review of Books, [online] Available at: <https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/natalie-harkin-archival-poetics/> [Accessed 1 June 2020].

GABRIELA BOURKE is a doctoral candidate at the University of Sydney. Gabriela is most interested in fictional representations of animal and human trauma, and the ways in which these intersect. Her work appears in Hermes and Southerly.

Where Only the Sky had Hung Before

by Toby Fitch

Vagabond

ISBN 978-1-925735-32-1

Reviewed by Jeremy George

For all the obvious reasons I have been reflecting lately on what Walter Benjamin’s observes in his essay ‘The Storyteller’ ; “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience… [however] his nesting places — the activities that are intimately associated with boredom are already extinct in the city”. If Benjamin draws a causal link between the destruction of experience and the genesis of modern information; the decline of “storytelling” and the rise of “news”, it is hard to imagine what his judgement would be of our relationship to the web today. The internet is, of course, a fundamentally nauseating and overwhelming ex-American military technology of mass surveillance. However, it is simultaneously (and undeniably) the nexus of new “experiences” and modes of living. The internet is an experience, indeed, strictly in Benjamin’s sense. If anything has brought the activities that are associated with boredom back to the city, it is the internet – the inventor of the “infinite scroll” sincerely regrets the consequences of his actions. So, what’s the pay-off regarding experience?

Toby Fitch’s latest collection of poems Where Only the Sky had Hung Before, hinges on this juncture. The index at the back of the collection explains that nearly all the poems are collages, inversions, supercuts, ghostings or ekphrastic renditions of pre-existing texts. Other poems and poets yes, but also, social media streams, news articles, songs, a list of a child’s first words and buzz feed threads; as Fitch says of his own work in a recent interview “my poems are often simply accretions… [I] gather the relevant textual materials together and just play, make Lego of them, see where it goes”. Fitch’s collection asks, what limits the criterion of the “post-ready made” work? What happens if poetry embraces the technological paradigm of “information” to which it has been historically opposed?

The longest sequence in the collection is a sequence titled ‘Argo Notes’; “amorphous calligrammes after Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. It is not coincidental that Fitch categorises the ‘Argo Notes’ as specifically calligrammes as opposed to concrete or visual poetry. Indeed what were Guillaume Apollinaire’s original ‘Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War 1913-1916’ but the attempt to synthesise typography with the burgeoning technology of the cinema and the phonograph. The form of the calligramme itself bespeaks not only the historical imbrication of poetic production and technological “means of reproduction” (as Apollinaire dubbed them in a letter to André Billy), but indeed the precariousness of the poet’s own status as productive as opposed to simply mimetic, an insecurity stretching back to their banishment from Plato’s Republic. In flagrantly anchoring the majority of poems in this collection in techniques of productive plagiarism, Fitch can trade off this age-old tension with its major contemporary iteration (the internet), whilst recognising that despite the major rupture the Internet has induced for poetry, it is not exactly uncharted territory. The calligrammes are significant for a further reason too, as morphing textual forms they perform a queerness that realises the historical etymological root of “stanzas” as body. The conflation of language (which is of course, the first technology) and the sexual; the productive and re-productive culminate and confuse in the queer textual body as:

“pro-Babel & shooting white eggs
Bulbous beautiful
Tears sprouted”
(32)

Following from this point, in ‘Poetry is 99% Water’ Fitch asks us to remember;

“It happened
between 4.5 billion and 3.8 billion years ago,
a period called the Late Heavy Bombardment
and we’ve been recycling poems from these fragments
of larger epics ever since – into whirlpools and tornadoes
and other spinning turbulent flows”
(12)

Fitch’s “whirlpools and tornadoes” recall the epic simile of the swarm, which first appears in Homer’s Illiad, becomes domesticated in Virgil’s Aneiad as the “hive” and reappears as the cacophony of Fallen Angels in Pandemonium, during the first book of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Inserting a poem concerned with (albeit on a comic register) making literal the ‘life-giving’ ability of poetry into this epic lineage points out that whilst the mechanisms of literary history and influence are of course technologies of reproduction and transmission themselves, this is clearly not a death sentence. Therefore, whilst the wasteland logic of the web, as explored in ‘Feel like I’m Somehow Related to Everyone on the Internet’, gives in to the paradoxical stasis of being “relegated to everywhere” (on the internet we are famously ‘alone together’), and it becomes more difficult to discern what you are “trashing” and what you are “recycling” (possibly alluding to Fitch’s own appropriative strategies), poetry and the poet should not submit to nihilism. Indeed, the production of the collection itself, as one that is inextricable from the consequential language, modes of existing and practices that web occasions, performs this defiant gesture;

“no such thing as reproduction
Only acts of production” (28)

In one of the funniest poems in the collection ‘Life Stream’ , Fitch pleads with the reader, or with himself;

“& you can too
APPROPRIATE POETRY’S SENSE OF
WHAT IS MEANS TO BE AN EMPATH” (50)

The poem frenetically replays the condition of living not only the preceding poems of the collection – the “toenail” from ‘Vague or I Can’t Explain It Any Other Way’ makes an appearance. But also the conditions of existence the contemporary poet finds themselves in — the casualised work force of the academy, the reduction of a politics to “flicker Netflix representations”, the anxiety of knowing you’re being surveilled every moment you spend online, which now, thanks to its technological bulldozing, feels like “IRL” itself. And of course, “our notional national poet… his eyes [are] the size of/ thumbnails not poems” (50).
Fitch’s poems are contemporary in that they take as their key interlocutor the contemporary conditions of poetic production in the Internet Age. But they are not symptomatic of this age, in that they do assume de-facto status as poems purely as formally experimental texts that exist within this internet environment. A tweet today is not automatically a poem, as the corporate-poet mercenaries Fitch describes would have us believe; but they can be, maybe. This is the formal question Fitch’s collection interrogates head-on; how do we escape the infinite scroll? Or, under what conditions is the found-poem today categorically defined as the latter? Fitch’s ‘In Memory of My Furlings’ ghosts the first section of the great Frank O’Hara poem, transforming ‘Feelings’ to a noun that seemingly means both an “advanced alien race” from the Stargate universe, and a distance of 220 yards — the web has managed both figuratively and literally to alienate or distance us from our most felt human intensities. O’Hara’s final line is prescient for Fitch;

“and presently the aquiline serpent comes to resemble the medusa” (103)

But Fitch’s poem finishes on a different note;
“the furlings and unfurlings
I continue to have to save and put down” (21)

Keep hitting save is Fitch’s ethical maxim. And it seems right, Where Only the Sky Had Hung Before shows the continuing potential of poesis as a rebellious practice that can re-organise and create anew the techno waste we are enmeshed in. If there isn’t much experiential payoff in boredom being reinstated in the city, Fitch’s collection is at least one.

Notes

1. Walter, Benjamin. “The Storyteller”, Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, Mariner Books, 2019, pp. 26-56.
2.  Fitch, Toby. “The amorphousness of meaning-making”, Cordite Poetry Review, 1/2/2020, http://cordite.org.au/interviews/gomez-fitch/
3.  Apollinaire, Guillaume, quoted in the preface by Michel Butor Calligrammes, Éditions Gallimard, preface copyright 1966), pp. 
4. O’Hara, Frank. “In Memory of My Feelings”, Frank O’Hara Selected Poems, edited by Mark Ford, Alfred A.Knopf Random House, 2008, pp.102-103  

JEREMY GEORGE is a writer from Naarm/Melbourne

Mother of Pearl

by Angela Savage

Transit Lounge

ISBN 978-1-925760-35-4

Reviewed by MEGAN CHEONG

Mother of Pearl: Perspectives on exploitation

When I open a book by a white writer and am confronted by the point of view of a person of colour, my body tenses as if in anticipation of a blow. Rather than reading, I pick nervously at the writing in search of cliché and oversimplification. Because the source of the tension I feel in relation to point of view is less a question of who has a right to whose story than it is one of craft. As Rankine and Loffreda point out in their introduction to The Racial Imaginary, “our imaginations are creatures as limited as we ourselves are” and therefore susceptible to the same preconceptions under which we labour as the products of an entire history of racist culture, politics and violence. The first-principle question is not therefore: “can I write from another’s point of view?”, but instead: “why and what for?”

The narration of Mother of Pearl is shared by three women, each of whom bears a distinct experience of exploitation. Meg has endured almost a decade of infertility treatments at the hands of a for-profit fertility industry in Australia. Her older sister Anna has spent the greater part of her adult life working with the ostracised and oppressed throughout South-East Asia. And early in the novel Mukda, or ‘Mod’, turns to surrogacy in an effort to lift her family out of the poverty endemic to the Isaan region of north-eastern Thailand.

Savage cycles quickly through each perspective to kaleidoscopic effect – each chapter is just a few pages long and written from a different point of view to the one before – and by interweaving Meg and Mod’s trauma, Savage expands the limits of an essentially western narrative of infertility to encompass the non-white suffering that it brings about. Her portrayal of the medical procedures that Mod undergoes are particularly uncomfortable:

‘Inserting the speculum,’ the doctor said to no one in particular.
The slide of cold metal against her skin made her catch her breath.
‘Cleaning the cervix.’
It felt like something had crawled up inside her. Mod bit her lip.
‘Transfer catheter.’

A woman doctor joined them in the room, carrying what looked like a long, uncooked vermicelli noodle. The two doctors glanced at the screen Mod couldn’t see, murmuring in voices she couldn’t hear. She closed her eyes and brought an image to mind of Pui at the market. She’d been buying bplaa krai when a catfish leapt from its basin and slithered through the mud over Pui’s foot, making him shriek with laughter. He’d shown off the muddy whorls on his toes to his grandmother as proudly as if they were new shoes.
(123-4)

The medical staff’s failure to address Mod, let alone guide her through the process of implantation, signals her objectification as a surrogate – within the framework of the surrogacy industry, Mod is nothing more than a receptacle for the embryos of paying customers. As I read these scenes, I recall the gentle and attentive manner in which the midwives and doctors navigated my body during pregnancy, the work they did to keep me informed and seek my consent. Mod’s passivity is both assumed and imposed and elucidates the way in which capital, or a lack of capital, can strip back an individual’s humanity in the eyes of both institutions and the individual themselves. Similarly, the poverty of her circumstances, in combination with the warm rendering of her love for her son, Pui, speak to the illusory nature of choice in destitution. 

By placing the reader on the examination table and leaving their knees dangl[ing] from hard plastic bars (123), Savage embodies the human cost of surrogacy and succeeds in her aim of lessening the distance that “enables overseas commercial surrogacy to happen in the first place”, and yet I am never able to sink into Mod’s world in the same way I do Anna’s or Meg’s. The finer details of Mod’s character are the product of much careful observation and deliberation. Like Anna, Savage spent several years living and working in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam; her research for the novel took her as far as Mod’s hometown of Sisaket; and she revised the manuscript in consultation with a Thai friend. 

The grain of sand in my eye: while there is something in lending your voice to the voiceless, I don’t think I will ever be fully at-ease with characters whose submissiveness so closely aligns with “the kinds of feelings and attributes” that “our culture has imagined over and over again” for Asian women, and at times, Mod’s passivity and generosity facilitate the narrative in such a way as to remind me that writing from another’s perspective is inevitably an act of habitation and appropriation. One that can so easily lead to exploitation.

Savage enacts the awkwardness of her position as an outsider through the character of Anna. Anna’s knowledge of Thai culture, as well as her ability to speak Thai, simultaneously afford her greater access to Thai perspectives, and bring her face-to-face with the limits of her understanding as a farang, or white foreigner. When she expresses concern for the Thai surrogate who will carry Meg’s child, her Thai friend’s wry smile stops her mid-sentence:

‘What? The surrogate mothers are vulnerable, aren’t they?’
Fon shrugged. ‘Probably not as much as cleaner and factory workers. And the salary is better.’
‘So you think it’s okay for farangs like my sister to pay Thai women to have their babies for them?’
‘Why shouldn’t women in my country take advantage of such opportunities? Reuu dtawng gin naam dtai saawk mai?’
The expression was one Anna had heard Fon use before, the Thai equivalent of being satisfied with the crumbs from the rich man’s table. Translated literally, it was more visceral: ‘Must they drink only the water that drips from the elbow?’
‘Being a surrogate mother is a way of making merit,’ Fon said. ‘It’s considered a humanitarian act. A lot better than sex work.’
Anna chased the ice cubes in her water glass with a straw. She’d assumed that as a feminist, Fon would be dead against commercial surrogacy.
‘Neither surrogacy nor sex work seem like great choices to me.’
‘That’s because you’re thinking like a farang.’
(126-7)

This and other similar encounters serve to undermine Anna’s conventional authority as a white woman narrating Asia and in turn, reflects Savage’s awareness of the fraught nature of her own narrative choices. But for all her awkwardness, of the three women, it is Anna who allows Savage to articulate the problems of distance and othering with the greatest clarity. Anna’s acquaintance with the extreme poverty of South-East Asia makes her an exacting judge of others’ suffering. As Australia mourns in the wake of the Black Saturday fires, Anna wonders why those who are poor to begin with don’t seem to make it onto the radar (84) and stroking Meg’s hair at the hospital, where she is being treated for overstimulated ovaries, Anna sees that:

Meg would be all right. She had Nate, her family and friends, a comfortable home, a steady job. Compared with what the people Anna encountered in her work had to contend with, Meg’s sadness was a small burden.
(297)

It is shocking, in a way, to see infertility described as a small burden, yet throughout Mother of Pearl Savage interrogates the notion of ‘infertility’ until it starts to come apart. Reflecting on the last ten years of her life, Meg observes:

Once, a woman in her circumstances would’ve been classified as barren, with no room for ambiguity. But infertility was something else: a diagnosis, subject to an ever expanding array of medical interventions. Even the word infertility carried with it the hope, false or otherwise, of fertility. More than once Meg had thought it would be easier to know that there was no hope, that she would never have children. But no doctor or nurse, not a single professional she had dealt with, ever suggested she give up.
(56)

Mother of Pearl is not, in the end, a traditional portraiture of infertility. Nor is it a blunt condemnation of international surrogacy. Savage writes from the centre of each woman’s hopes and fears and the end product is a complex web of exploitation, accomplishment and loss that reaches farther than any one woman’s story.

NOTES

1.  Rankine, C. and Loffreda, B., ‘On Whiteness and The Racial Imaginary’. Literary Hub, April 9, 2015. https://lithub.com/on-whiteness-and-the-racial-imaginary/
2. Hunter, B., Mother of Pearl. FEMALE.com.au. https://www.female.com.au/mother-of-pearl.htm
3.  Rankine and Loffreda, ‘On Whiteness and the Racial Imaginary’.

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

Blueberries

by Ellena Savage

TEXT

Reviewed by VICTORIA NUGENT

Memoir, poetry, probing essay-style musings and competing inner voices exist side-by-side in Ellena Savage’s Blueberries, a bold and incisive collection of experimental non-fiction. 

While Blueberries is Savage’s debut essay collection, she has been widely published, with her works appearing in literary journals, daily publications and various collections. Many of Blueberries’ offerings have appeared in various publications previously, in differing forms and have now been stitched together to form a well-flowing collection that explores big topics like class, colonialism, feminism, reproductive rights, sex and trauma. 

In her sharp and intimate prose Savage’s essays probe into what it means to be a woman, a feminist, a writer, a modern Australian and a product of a colonial society. While she never shies away from important issues, Savage imbues her work with a warmth and expressiveness that adds levity when needed. 

Keystone work, “Yellow City”, which was last year published in chapbook form, kicks off the collection strongly, taking the form of diary entries tracing Savage’s steps through Lisbon in 2017, a city that she has returned after being a victim of a sex crime there some 11 years earlier. “Yellow City” is haunted by that past incident and by questions about the reliability of memory. 

“—‘My first memory.’
—Is buttressed by recalling it.
—‘My first memory.’ A fiction fixed to the linear self.” (8) 

Savage lays herself bare in this piece, scraping back the layers to show how the trauma had shaped her in the intervening years since the “encounter during which my flesh remembered the possibility of a violent death. When my body understood for a second that corpses are dismembered to cover-up crimes.” (6) 

The second essay, the titular “Blueberries”, explores the learnings that Savage takes from an elite writing workshop she attends the USA, delving into questions of privilege, gender, what it means to be a woman and a writer and what associated obstacles come with those two roles. 

The essay had a cadence all of its own, coming back to the phrase “I was in America at a very expensive writers’ workshop” (41)  or variations of it to drive home each new stanza. Dropped commas make the prose flow with a heightened sense of urgency, a sort of feverish enthusiasm that somehow sounds more like the dialogue might have with an impassioned friend, eager to convey the import of the issue weighing upon their mind. 

The intersection between gender and the creation of art is a key theme of the work, with Savage delving into the role gender played in the dynamics of the workshop and how that mirrored inequality between the sexes in wider society and in the arts.

In many ways, Blueberries could be seen as modern day response to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, delving into these inequalities, even while acknowledging the “thud of guilt knowing that someone, like, I don’t know, my own mother, would have wrung her neck to have been given the opportunity to attend her art’s version of the workshop I was at;” (57)

Savage’s musings hold an echo of Woolf’s own thoughts on women writers, brought into a modern era. Woolf wrote that “it would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only?” (Woolf, 87). I found echoes of Woolf’s frustration in Savage’s own thoughts on the writers’ workshop, where she “was disappointed not for the first time that ‘excellence’ was turning out to be mediocrity dressed up in money and maybe masculinity too, not the masculinity that is visible to us, brawny and street-smart, but real masculinity, which is reedy and tepid and well read and invisible.(42)

The piece also touches upon class and race but only in a relatively minor way. Savage recognises her privilege, pondering on the “kind of class mobility that I have because maybe my race is my class now” (45) and at the same notes that women writers made up “ninety per cent of the cohort, and most of them white” (54). Despite this acknowledgement though, white feminism remains the predominant lens for Savage’s analysis.

“Then one day me and my friend were at a big gallery and I looked at a wall of photographs of famous European artists, artists whose faces you’d recognise as those of famous European artists, and for some reason I saw it all at once laid out and the only thing I could say was ‘Where are all the women artists’, like I had only just noticed, which could as easily have been where are all the Aboriginal artists where are all the trans artists where are all the Asian artists, except that we’re talking about a group that constitutes fifty per cent of any otherwise marginalised population and any privileged one too.” (53)

This quote signifies (intentionally or not) that despite Savage engaging with ideas about how race might factor into marginalisation, her chief  concern regarding representation still remains how much recognition women might receive in artistic spheres. With her argument about women constituting 50 per cent of the population, Savage subtly indicates a belief that the representation of female artists is of more important than that of the other groups she mentions. Women’s issues are thus given prominence over issues facing Asian and Aboriginal artists.  Savage’s analysis stops short of unpacking how women of colour might face further struggles with representation as compared to white women. 

Savage better acknowledges her own limitations in “Satellite”, a musing on her family’s Coburg background and the area’s gentrification, where she likens her roots to “an introduced grass species that thrives everywhere by choking its competitors, that avoids detection by passing for a native species, and this laboured metaphor is trying to say something about colonial figures like me who’d really like to not make things worse than they are, but who by simply accepting the yellow blotted sun through the pane of glass, by accepting the home built atop spirits silent and  angry, have roots that are caught in the seams of rotten foundations.” (79)

Class and how cultural capital is linked to social mobility is another theme Savage takes an interest in. She puts forward the supposition in Blueberries that “the accumulation of cultural capital for the purpose of social mobility is a stone-cold fact of life” (57), but one that is seldom talked about. Savage links this pursuit of elitism to the willingness of writers to pay for courses of “expensive mediocrity” (46) in a liberal arts environment where a kind of morality is associated with eating locally sourced, organic food, stemming from “the entitlement of an elite class to impose its moral directives on the people whose labour allows them to be elite in some way or another” (50). In “You Dirty Phony Saint and Martyr”, Savage writes that she imagined some of her own accrued cultural capital would “morph into material capital, but it has not, yet and might never” (133), as part of an essay in which she touches lightly on “the nexus of power, privilege and prestige in literature” (130).

In “Unwed Teen Mum Mary”, Savage seamlessly transitions from recounting the process of seeking paid work into a contemplation of what the word choice means, specifically in the context of having the agency to make reproductive choices. It’s a powerful personal essay that both takes the readers into the intimacies of Savage’s own life and looks broadly at the cultural narratives surrounding abortion and how Christian tradition has shaped them.

“In my view, any effort to pair femininity with maternity with biological destiny with virgin births with earthy crystal-lovemaking is an effort to relegate the female form to a position of inferiority, to a state of constant need and gratitude and dependence.” (112)

Savage shows a firm grasp of a variety of styles throughout the collection, playing with form in creative and clever, and sometimes disconcerting ways. “Allan Ginsberg” (fittingly) takes a poetic form, while “Friendship Between Women” has a compelling, rambling, stream-of-consciousness feel, rich with poetic description. Another interesting piece is “Holidays with Men”, which juxtaposes two separate works on each page, effectively creating two pieces in one. The first of the two reflects on a series of vignettes Savage once published in a zine, the second is a form of that vignette series, though one anecdote recounted in the companion piece about an acquaintance recognising herself in a vignette indicates that this version of “Holidays with Men” is not the same one. The eye and the mind don’t know which narrative to follow first but once the reader detangles the two, the combined work is a rich exploration of our modern relationship with travel, as well as the effects of travel upon relationships. 

“Travel, in the broadest sense possible,
encompasses the furthest
reaches of a culture. Networks
driven by survival, by desire,
by a twinning of the two, have
flung bodies and stories away
from homes for all of history,
and all of prehistory, too.” (125)

“The Museum of Rape” could also be read in multiple ways, thanks to its use of numbered paragraphs, with the references throughout the text making it possible to skip to other parts of the work for a non-linear experience. 

“8.0
What I am saying is that I understand the total collapse of structured
memory.
I asked myself, what does it mean to anticipate the loss
of one’s rational function (7.0, 7.1, 7.2).” (67)

In the penultimate work in the collection, “Portrait of the Writer as Worker (after Dieter Lesage)”, Savage offers anecdotes of a writer’s life, a series of almost fragmented thoughts that strung together paint a vivid picture of how creation intersects with earning a living. Together with “Yellow City” and “Blueberries”, it can be seen as one of the collection’s key pieces. 

“You are a writer, and you know what that means: you don’t do it for the money. You don’t do it for the money, which is a great reason people have to not pay you for your writing.” (211)

Savage’s works drip with references to other literature… Hemingway, Shakespeare, Elena Ferrante, Jamaica Kincaid, philosopher Theodor Adorno and the list goes on.  By drawing from all these different source materials, Savage expands the scope of the work and imbues it with even more meaning. 

As a debut collection, Blueberries is strong, sharply drawn, thought-provoking and easy to devour. Each individual piece earns its place in the collection, providing depth and insight across a broad range of topics and showcasing a rich toolbox of writing styles. Savage digs deep to scratch at the mysteries of self and of social structure in this personal, compelling work, which defies easy categorisation, revealing more with each subsequent reread. 

References 

Savage, Ellena. Blueberries. Text Publishing, 2020.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Penguin Classics, 2000.

VICTORIA NUGENT is a full-time journalist and part time fiction writer living in regional Queensland.

A Constant Hum

by Alice Bishop

Text

ISBN 9781925773842

Reviewed by H.C. GILDFIND

Just a blur through bushfire glow, on Alice Bishop’s A Constant Hum

In the acknowledgements that append her short story collection, A Constant Hum, Alice Bishop states that her book is intended to keep ‘in mind’ the people who died in Black Saturday (199). Though Bishop lost a house in those fires, she says she cannot imagine ‘how it would really feel’ to have lost family, friends, or a partner (199). Her writing, however, derives from a genuine attempt to comprehend these experiences—and results in a book that acts as a memorial for the dead, as a tribute to the survivors, and as a means for others to engage in the motivated and directed acts of imagination that constitute empathy. 

The collection is divided into three parts: Prevailing; Southerly; Northerly. In the first part, we meet survivors years after the fire, and see how their losses and traumas ‘prevail’ as the world around them moves on. The next two parts move back in time—slowly encroaching upon the fire itself—ending with the stories of people who have just escaped it. This clever structure helps maintain narrative tension (by progressing the stories towards a ‘big event’) whilst also—and more importantly—foregrounding the stories of ‘aftermath’ which are easily forgotten by outsiders and which only begin with the fire’s extinguishment. 

The collection attempts to concretise the abstraction of ‘Black Saturday’ by glimpsing into the lives of many characters: naïve-but-observant children; slangy old bushies; working class folk; aspirational suburbanites; people whose romantic relationships have perished in the flames; survivors seeking justice in the courts; health care workers who treat the wounded, and elderly people who are already well-used to ‘losing old friends’ (155). We also hear the insensitive and coercive voice of the voyeuristic, predatory media: ‘What did you find in the ashes?… For our audience, now, what would you take with you—if you got another chance?’ (187). The book thus reads less as a short story collection than as a polyphonic chorus—one that effectively evokes what was (and remains) both a profoundly communal and individual experience of trauma. 

The book’s many tiny vignettes reinforce this choral effect, especially those which speak from an ambiguous point of view: 

‘We were comforted… that things ended for them together, holding each other under betadine- and copper-coloured smoke… they found them in clusters, mostly—silvers, gunmetal greys and blacks so petrol-pretty you’d think of a currawong’s wing, of a bush-pigeon’s neck, rainbow-flecked.’ (119)

This excerpt shows how the bush is itself a voice that sings in this book, further unifying the characters’ diverse stories in how it shapes imagery and metaphor, and in its provision of a shared setting. All the characters see, hear, remember, pine for—and fear—the bush and its ‘scary hum’ (27), a world where currawongs, rosellas, cicadas, bogong moths, lorikeets, choughs, fairy wrens, kangaroos, wedgetail eagles, and boobook owls live alongside humans in the lush beauty of eucalypts, wattles, charcoal trees, tea-trees, and paperbarks. 

Bishop’s writing is enlivened by her ear for dialogue and eye for salient details. We recognise people by their distinct vernaculars and by the cars they drive, the kinds of homes they live in, the brands they wear, the foods they eat, and the places they work. We recognise country women with ‘splitting… bleach-brittle’ hair and foundation ‘caked-on’ like ‘clay’ (174, 8, 104). These women are different to the ‘City Girls’ who ‘don’t wear as much make up’ and ‘keep the hair under their arms’ (51). Such details make Bishop’s fictional world vivid, whilst evoking what the fires themselves emphasised—namely, the divisions that both define and undermine our so-called Australian ‘community’: rural vs suburban vs urban; working class vs professional class; educated vs uneducated; men vs women (etc.). The story ‘Half-light’ shows the savage indifference—and/or sheer blindness—that can result from such differences: ‘mostly unworried’ wealthy urbanites enjoy a wedding under a ‘billow of smoke’ that has ‘blocked out the sun’ (165). What do they care if the homes of the people who serve them are being razed to the ground? 

Survivors must also learn to navigate the new—and unique—psychological and social terrain left in the wake of the fire. Some characters can no longer identify the divide between the real and unreal, as in the unsettling story ‘Follower,’ where a young man stalks what might be an actual woman or the ghost of a dead lover (she has eyes of ‘smoke and cinders,’ 60). Other characters become ‘unfamiliar’ (35) to themselves. Their self-detachment is only reinforced by the externally imposed label of ‘survivor’ which marks them as isolated outcasts: Rose prickles at the ‘pity’ (35) of her neighbours, whilst a school boy is shackled to his trauma by his new nickname, ‘bushfire kid’ (117). In another story, a man who is overwhelmed by the economic disaster of his rebuild, can only repeat: ‘Guess I can’t complain’ (128). This refrain expresses the guilt and resentment of survivors who are forced to re-evaluate their lives according to the new hierarchy of pain and loss that has been established by the fire—one which no-one else in society has to submit to, and one which easily trivialises their ongoing hardships via relativism. Such characters are trapped in the divide between the past and future: they are alive, but unable to live. 

Some readers might find this book’s relentless ‘flick book of images’ (159)—and its catalogue of sensory horrors—sickening and intolerable. No one wants to see or smell people and animals reduced to ash and teeth—or morphed into ‘blackened statues’ (79). No one wants to contemplate the impossible fact of ‘liquid, silver rivers running over warped tin’ (129)—or comprehend the suffering declared by burnt out cars whose doors remain outflung. However, Bishop’s job is to make us feel what the survivors feel: ‘two kind of sads mixed together,’ one ‘dark’ and the other ‘panicky’ (50). Her job is to make us acknowledge, and at least try to understand, the experiences of those who died, as well as the experiences of the living who are doomed to compulsively think about ‘the burnt things—the forgotten things—all the time’ (109). 

The collection is not, however, one of pure despair and horror. Numerous characters manage to ‘feel a little hope for the future’ (76), including women whom the fire liberates from dangerous and demeaning relationships. The final story, ‘Burning the House,’ epitomises how sadness and hope coexist in the collection. This lyrical, poignant story reads like a love song dedicated to both a family home and a first love: 

‘This house will burn soon, bushfire blue… So sit, right here with me, years ago and before it all goes… Be with me, quietly, before the fire comes and you start to look at me like you’re watching the news’ (196-197).

Despite everything, this narrator finds a painful but empowering wisdom in the rubble: ‘We know, now, that things can go’ (197). 

As one voice in the collection reflects: ‘there are no set rules on offerings for the disappeared’ (33). A Constant Hum is as sensitive, sincere, and compassionate an offering to the dead and the scarred as anyone could hope for. It is a skilfully written, complex and sophisticated attempt to truly imagine the unimaginable totality of loss and suffering that Black Saturday represents. 

H.C.GILDFIND (hcgildfind.com/@ltercation) is the author of The Worry Front (Margaret River Press). Her prize-winning novella, Born Sleeping, will be published by Miami University Press in 2021.

Everything Changes: Australian Writers and China, A Transcultural Anthology

Ed. Xianlin Song and Nicolas Jose

UWAPublishing

ISBN: 978-1-76080-112-0

Reviewed by EMILY ZONG

“Many Chinese names
became strange or lost
in the crossing.
. . .
Perhaps the plum will flourish
on this soil, like the white plum
in our yard, and transplanted,
my daughter can recover
what is lost in translation.
Perhaps she already has.”

(Kim Cheng Boey, “Plum Blossom or Quong Tart at the QVB”)

Born in Singapore, the poet Kim Cheng Boey migrated to Australia in 1997. Like many other writers of diaspora, his poetry invokes recurring themes of loss and reinvention and a quest for belonging between past and present. In “crossing” continents and languages, many Chinese names and cultural specifics get lost in translation, just like the spelling of his daughter’s name mei, which can simultaneously mean plum blossoms and disappearance. Yet similar to a transplanted white plum, the migrant daughter can bring the synergy of multiple cultures to re-root and flourish in Australian soil, proffering hope and recovery after mourning. In another poem titled “Chinatown,” Boey characterises crossing and translation as a default state of the diasporic mind. Menus in Chinatown restaurants are “homesick inventions” that invite translation and cure the “forgotten hunger” for return, revealing how “transit has a way of lasting” and border-crossing and the in-between can become “home.” Boey’s poems are the opening of the collection Everything Changes: Australian Writers and China, A Transcultural Anthology (2019), edited by Xianlin Song and Nicolas Jose, which gathers the stories and poetry of twenty-five Australian writers. While these writers differ in generations, backgrounds, and literary styles, their works converge through common connections to China. These connections, lived and imaginative, materialise in forms of ancestry, travel, cultural exchange, aesthetic influence, and a ceaseless longing for the other that bring together Australia and China in a world whose identities are increasingly nomadic and “transcultural.”

What is meant by “transcultural”? The purpose of the collection, as the editors proclaim in the “Introduction,” is to outline “a field of transcultural writing that invites transcultural reading in response” (1). A recent buzzword in literary studies, the concept of “transcultural” is not new. In 1940, anthropologist Fernando Ortiz coined the term “transculturation” to describe the mixing of cultures in his study of sugar and tobacco in colonial and postcolonial Cuba. Akin to the postcolonial concept of “hybridity,” “transculturation” refers to the blending and confluence of cultures at the contact zone, though it is hailed as transcending postcolonial dichotomies of centres and peripheries and more suitable to capture the synergetic and fluid nature of culture in globalised societies. “Transculturality” is in a continuum with, yet distinct from other pluralist concepts of “interculturality” and “multiculturality” that, as German Philosopher Wolfgang Welsch suggests, presupposes a classical conception of culture as bounded and internally cohesive and risk reinforcing phenomena of “separation and ghettoisation” (4). By comparison, the “transcultural,” according to Song and Jose, is a “process” of dialogic interaction through which cultures become “inseparable” and thus “a factor of the times in which we live, an effect of mobility, migration, globalism, and connectivity, or multiple locations, identities and audiences” (2). In other words, the “transcultural” expresses a cultural sensibility that is more attuned to contemporary cultural horizons where borders of culture, ethnicity, nation, and language are investigated as permeable and identities more internally differentiated and complex. Transcultural writing speaks to literature’s capacity for border crossing, and in this case, for deepening the cultural exchange and people-to-people engagement between Australia and China that has accelerated since the 1980s.

That said, scholars of the transcultural literary discourse variably acknowledge the asymmetry and unequal powers during cultural exchange: “the fluidity of transnational identities in the writers and their writing allows for ‘imbalance, disparity and transformation’” (Song and Jose 2). This nod to dissonance is critical, as Song and Jose refuse to develop transcultural literature in a celebratory manner of reconciling cultural differences. In this sense, the anthology resonates with concurrent projects on transculturality such as that developed by scholar Monica Juneja, who uses transculturality as an analytic mode to investigate:

“the multiple ways in which difference is negotiated within contacts and encounters, through selective appropriation, mediation, translation, re-historicising and rereading of signs, alternatively through non-communication, rejection or resistance—or through a succession/coexistence of any of these.” (25)

These forms of tranculturality manifest in Everything Changes through manifold themes: cultural hybridisation born from the diaspora; Australians’ travel and interaction with a transforming locality in China; imaginative dialogue with Chinese literature; and other embodied, fantastical, and postcolonial mediations of racial and cultural differences. The selected stories and poems are published from 1988 to 2018. Most excerpts were initially published in a collection or as part of a novel, including clippings from Kim Cheng Boey’s After the Fire: New and Selected Poems (2006), Brian Castro’s After China (1992) and The Garden Book (2005), Nicklas Hasluck’s Somewhere in the Atlas (2007), Nicolas Jose’s The Red Thread (2000), Ouyang Yu’s The Eastern Slope Chronicle (2002), Beth Yahp’s The Red Pearl and Other Stories (2017), Alex’s Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), and Bella Li’s Argosy (2017), and so on. These excerpts are chosen for expressing a transcultural mood, despite often in a few pages and decontextualised from its original containers. The fact that these fictional excerpts and poems are retrospectively grouped under the category of transcultural writing reveals how the concept of “transcultural” itself is fuzzy, itinerant, and in process of constant redefinition, which is echoed in the Buddhist teachings in the book’s title “Everything Changes” and the fact that selected works have previously been classified and read under miscellaneous, overlapping traditions of immigrant, ethnic, Asian Australian, travel, postcolonial, and transnational literatures.

Transculturality are ever-present in stories and poems by Asian Australian writers selected in the anthology, as life in diaspora provides conditions for porous boundaries, global mobility, and the negotiation of cultural differences with the mainstream. “There is nothing more difficult . . . than to paint a rose”—Singaporean Australian poet Eileen Chong cites Henri Matisse in her lyrical poem “Only a Peony,” a tribute to the Chinese national flower mudan and the imprints of ancestral culture on the senses and imagination of those migrated. To transplant ancestral culture in a literal sense is as difficult as painting a rose, “What does a peony smell like? I have . . . but breathed nothing . . . Perhaps I needed to have crushed them . . . eaten their petals one by one . . . China’s national flower. Is it? Am I? I’ve forgotten.” What can be relived is perhaps the feeling and energy of that which is lost, re-enacted in text and perceptible, as Chong notes, in exotic objects like peony perfume and patterns on woollen carpets. Other stories of diaspora are more satirical and poignant. Julie Koh’s “The Three-Dimensional Yellow Man” and Isabelle Li’s “A Fish Bone in the Throat” are short stories that cut painfully into the dilemma of diaspora: racism, stereotyping, marginality, and exoticisation. Koh’s is a fantastical, rebellious parody of the entertainment industry that has been white-dominated and prejudiced against Asians who are often pigeonholed as one-dimensional background characters, either submissive or evil. The yellow man’s failure to attain aesthetic freedom beyond his ethnicity knowingly mocks the global book market’s fetishisation of exotic Asian literature—the “transformation of power-politics into spectacle” (14) that Graham Huggan explores in The Postcolonial Exotic. In Li’s story, racial unbelonging coincides with frustrated Asian masculinity and mid-life crisis. For the story’s diasporic male protagonist, acquiring empowerment is a solitary voyage and a prolonged agony of having swallowed a fishbone, a blocked existence.

The other theme of the anthology focuses on Australians’ travel in China. Along this thread, cultural crossings are framed in ways less about race and ancestry, and more about travel, curiosity, and self-reflexivity. While Australians going to Asia in search of spiritual growth and cures for identity crisis is not an unfamiliar topic in Australian literature, these “Oriental Quests” (Zong 1) are usually located in South East Asia, in countries like Indonesia and Cambodia and rarely in China. Everything Changes contributes a valuable cluster of fictional and nonfictional prose narratives to the Australian literary imagination of a changing China: Nicolas Hasluck documents the cultural and ideological divergence in an Hangzhou tea house in Post-Mao China; Linda Jaivin fictionalises a Sinophile’s nightly encounter in a sinuous hutong of Beijing; Gail Jones appropriates dreams to remap the emotional landscapes of Chinese writer Lu Xun on her visit to his Shanghai abode; Nicolas Jose evokes intertextuality to adorn an interracial love affair across places and times in China; Felicity Castagna portrays the friendship between an Australian teacher and a local student in Shanghai; and Jennifer Mill blurs reality with fantasy to unearth the seduction and trappings of foreign visitors getting “too involved” with anti-demolition activism in Beijing. A common feature of these stories is that they bespeak the desire and struggle for, and not always the success of, transcultural connection. There is a degree of humility, self-doubt, and patience in the face of the culturally unknown. The Australian English teacher in Castagna’s story says to her Chinese student, “I’m not sure we are really communicating effectively. I’m not sure that I understand [your diary].” The process of manifesting thoughts on paper is already an anachronistic process, and writing in another language and again being read from another culture is tripe translation. The student later writes in her diary, “Teacher says, sometimes it takes a long time to find out your purpose. Sometimes it takes a long time to work out why you’re HERE.” This statement distances transcultural travel experience from easy consumption and judgment of otherness, as the selected writing in the anthology invites intercourse yet acknowledges disjunction and reinforced prejudices.

It must also be said that transcultural writing, presented in the anthology, is as much a mode of representation by the authors as it is cultural training for readers. The collection sends an invitation and charges a toll: readers must do their work in order to make sense of the obscure cultural references embedded in some works. For example, it is challenging to gauge who exactly is Robert Gray referring to in his poem “The Life of a Chinese Poet” (it appears to be the patriotic poet Lu You in the Song Dynasty). The reading itself is a transcultural experience and demands linguistic and cultural competence. The consequence of this is that at times the anthology is not an easy read, even though a reader will come out of the other end feeling somewhat a “transculturalist.” Although the anthology has an appendix of writers’ brief biographies, some notes on cultural riddles and on the original containers within which excerpts were published are wanting. The questions arise: who is the targeted audience of such an anthology? Is the anthology targeted at a small circle of cultural elites who, after digging into these sophisticated cultural messages, eventually shouts with satisfaction, “viola!”? And isn’t the narrowness of audience, either intended or unintended, a privileging of the transcultural, and thus a contradiction to the cultural métissage and openness desired by transculturalists? Is transculturalism a mere pluralist descriptor, or is it an intermediate step towards realising cosmopolitan ideals? One risk of such an anthology is the danger of parochialism in its reach and ineffective communication with overlapping reader groups: transcultural, migrant, and mainstream.

Nevertheless, Everything Changes narrates that transculturality has become an inevitable reality in our globalised world. Transcultural experience contaminates our pasts, desire, travel, place-making, bodies, names, fantasy, dreams, sensation, and emotions. The selected works in the anthology transpose readers into miscellaneous locations and temporalities, imagined and real, and gift readers with a sense of wonder and lessons from transcultural engagement. The anthology succeeds in enticing cravings for border crossing. Although some transcultural transformation only effectuates in dreams and not on an interpersonal level, they are dreams of becoming and long-lasting enigma. Yet in desiring and dreaming, we would have already morphed.

Works Cited
Huggan, Graham. The Post-colonial Exotic. Routledge, 2001.
Juneja, Monica. “Understanding Transculturalism: Monica Juneja and Christian Kravagna in
Conversation.” Transcultural Modernisms, edited by Model House Research Group, Sternberg, 2013, pp. 22–35.
Song, Xianlin, and Nicolas Jose, editors. Everything Changes. UWA Press, 2019.
Welsch Wolfgang. “Transculturality—the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” Spaces of
Culture: City, Nation, World, edited by Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash, Sage, 1999, pp. 194-213.
Zong, Emily Yu. “Disturbance of the White Man: Oriental Quests and Alternative Heroines
in Merlinda Bobis’s Fish-Hair Woman” JASAL, vol. 16, no. 2, 2017, pp. 1-17.

The Pillars

by Peter Polites

Hachette

ISBN 9780733640186

Reviewed by JEAN-FRANÇOIS VERNAY

In her essay on suburbia, Helen Garner discusses the politics of location in Australia and how real estate, or an acute political sense of place, seems to situate people on the social scale. Back in the 1990s, Helen Garner lived in Sydney’s poshest eastern suburbs (Elizabeth Bay and Bellevue Hill), from which Western Sydney seems to be unaccessible, somewhat too remote to explore, and possibly an eyesore which is best left out of sight. As her essay ends on Gerald Murnane’s tribute to these “lower-middle-class suburbs that no one ever goes to or hears about in the news”(1), Murnane’s recitation of the various modest streets in which he lived in his youth surreptitiously morphs into “a splendid and mysterious poem.”(2) What was perhaps to be primarily taken as a solemn moment of sincerity has been sublimated through Garner’s writing skills. These fine creative skills are largely shared by Peter Polites. Barring the lyrical gloss and sentimentality. 

The Pillars is Peter Polites’ second fiction book, after the much lauded Down to Hume (2017), a queer-noir novel which made it to the shortlist of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2018, in the Multicultural NSW Award sub-category. Modelled on “notorious gay right-wing troll Milo Yiannopoulos”, (3) Pano (pronounced the Aussie way, not Panos!) is an obscure poet who has been given a chance to earn a living though his creative writing skills by ghost writing Basil’s life story. Based in Pemulwuy, an ethnically diverse suburb in Greater Western Sydney whose history is briefly mentioned in the opening chapter, Pano is in a complex cis male gay relationship with Kane, his landlord, sex friend and secret infatuation. Their connection is no Brokeback Mountain bromance. Rather, they have the kind of loose relationship which you find in Tsiolkas’ narratives: random sex, one night stands, and the occasional group sex are spicing up the protagonist’s life whose reliable bedrock is provided by a regular sex partner.

Polites has moved away from the issues of same sex domestic violence which he explored in Down the Hume in order to lay greater emphasis on suburban aspirations and fluctuating identities. However, hyper-masculinity remains a central concern, chiefly epitomised in The Pillars by Basil, a straight self-made entrepreneur, and queer Kane, whose athletic physicality and sexual performances endorse him as the alpha male of the pack.  

Like Christos Tsiolkas — with whom he has been repeatedly associated through various literary events (a discussion at Concord Library in Canada, a conversation at the Wheeler Centre and on the ABC book show)  —, Peter Polites can be defined as a queer, second-generation Greek Australian novelist who articulates the triangulation of gay sex, class conflict and ethnicity in slice-of-life novels. Where Tsiolkas is concerned with grounding his stories in Melbourne’s working-class suburbia, Polites sticks to the impoverished migrant suburbs of Western Sydney. 

Beyond these commonalities (and others which I will not be able to discuss within the restrained scope of this book review), both writers are angry men at society, but each with their distinct voices and crafts. In this respect, it is noteworthy that Polites’ rage, mediated through literary ploys such as irony and satire, appears to be more subdued in his semi-autobiographical novel than the violence which transpires in Tsiolkas’s words, and in the thoughts and actions of his protagonists. For instance, Polites’ characterisation of Basil, Pano’s high school friend, exemplifies the use of bittersweet irony at its best:

“He was one of the first boys in our school to have the hair waxed from his legs, claiming all athletes did it. Later, he was a trailblazer for the young male dogs by using an experimental new laser treatment to remove all his body hair. In our last year of high school, I overheard him talking about how important natural beauty was to him, which was why he didn’t bang wog girls, because they spent too much time on themselves.” (21)

With a keen eye for details, Peter Polites not only examines gay domesticity through the lens of a hyphenated Australian but also presents with a vitriolic social critique of Australia’s consumerism and culture of greed which is depriving the younger generations from affording a home in Sydney’s highly inflated real estate market:

“I stopped at the window of Vas Bros Real Estate and looked at all the apartments for sale, trying to find the logic in a two-bedroom apartment in Bankstown selling for half a million dollars. There were professional photos of men in polyester suits holding gravels and standing outside houses. A human-sized decal of a balding man in his finest suit with dental-work smile grinned at me like I wasn’t in on the joke.” (19)

By foregrounding social advancement and materialistic success in his story of modern-day Australia, Peter Polites is probing the deep-rooted insecurity which underlies this misguided ethnic aspirationalism. His unforgiving indictment of Australia being caught up in consumerism and rapacity is to some extent reminiscent of David Williamson’s satirical plays such as The Emerald City (1987) and Up for Grabs (2000), but perhaps brought to a higher cynical pitch, one which ethical readers might find unsettling. 

Notes
1. Helen Garner, Everywhere I Look (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2016), 25.
2. Helen Garner, Id.
3. Con Stamocostas, “Peter Polites: ‘Mortgage, success, houses, investment. These are Greek values”. (28 September 2019), URL: https://neoskosmos.com/en/146861/peter-polites-mortgage-success-houses-investment-these-arent-greek-values/

 
JEAN-FRANÇOIS VERNAY’s The Seduction of Fiction (New York: Palgrave) and A Brief Take on the Australian Novel (Adelaide: Wakefield Press) were both released in 2016. His latest book, La séduction de la fiction (Paris: Hermann, 2019), which deals with all the cognitive mechanisms underlying literary passion, is yet to be translated. He has just been commissioned to edit a book on international perspectives on Australian Fiction and is completing his forthcoming book in English on Australian fiction and the neurohumanities. 

We’ll Stand in that Place and Other Stories

 
Edited by Michelle Cahill

Margaret River Press

Reviewed by AMY VAN DER LINDEN

‘In the short story form, a writer commits to a vivid and entire world; a world in which voice and dialogue matter exceedingly, sometimes tangentially, and every sentence is measured to carry structural and thematic weight.’

– Michelle Cahill. (vii)

We’ll Stand in that Place and other stories, is the latest anthology of the Margaret River Short Story Competition. The competition is an annual contest, open to authors of any age and nationality. Previous editors have been Ryan O’Neill, Ellen van Neerven, Laurie Steed and Estelle Tang. Nineteen short stories were selected out of over 240 entries. Michelle Cahill, who edited the 2019 edition has compiled a collection of stories covering a range of contemporary themes such as climate change, cultural inclusiveness, complex relationships and emotions, family and the need for queer spaces. Both emerging and established writers whose work highlight features of the short story form are included.

The winning story, titled ‘We’ll Stand in that Place’, by Kit Scriven is both an intense and intriguing story. Upon my first read, I was unsure of the exact events of the story, but was blown away by Scriven’s ability to both conceal and rearrange details. After the second read, it was clear that I had missed the overdose of Andy in the beginning. In her introduction, Cahill writes, “one needs to read attentively to learn that Andy has overdosed; that Baby’s grief is ritualised.” (ix) Scriven uses descriptive imagery and words that are full of deep emotions, both layered and symbolic, as the reader follows the protagonist dealing with the death of his first love. I agree with Cahill when she says Scriven’s craft produces something both “disturbing and unique.” He “marries the beautiful with the sordid.” (ix) As a reader, I was drawn to the character of Baby, because as his name suggests he isn’t your usual grown man. He sees things differently to other characters; he “wasn’t finished properly” and he doesn’t “belong.” (8) This story tells the experience of queer culture in the local and often dangerous streets of St Kilda and the experience of these non-binary and queer characters. The subject matter of this story made me excited for inclusivity in the genre of fiction. A distinctive feature of this story is the way it makes one feel both disoriented and connected. After reading this piece, I found that it continued to linger in my thoughts for a long time afterwards.

Catherine Noske’s ‘Thylacine’, awarded second place, narrates the story of a stay-at-home-wife and her experiences of being home alone during her early pregnancy. Her husband is a geologist who takes frequent field-trips to northern Western Australia as he discovers a rare fossil called the ‘thylacine’. Noske uses her story to fictionalise themes of absence and the hardships of marriage, whilst subtly commenting on the exploitation of Aboriginal land from causes relating to the mining industry and white settlement. Noske uses the finding of the fossil as the central framework of the narrative, and the subtle details of traditional gender norms, broken relationships and dependability soon follow. The wife fills the void between her husbands’ absences by washing his dirty clothes, whilst falling in and out of dream like sequences of happier memories when she and her husband were together. The small details of their absent relationship and wife’s dependency of her husband makes a comment on exposing traditional gender roles as she centres her day around waiting for him to get home from his trips. Whereas the husband uses his field-trips as an escape from his marriage and becomes so used to leaving that sometimes he “tells her it is field trips, but it isn’t. He finds things to do.” (16) Through the third person narration, Noske expresses the distance emotionally and physically between the husband and wife. Cahill comments in her introduction, that the story is “composed of numbered sections, each a possible prose poem”. (ix) This experimental style is exciting as it shines a light on the possibilities of the short story to break the boundaries of conventionality.

Rachel McEleney’s story ‘The Day the Rain Stopped Dancing’, was awarded the South West Prize. This story was one of my favourites because of its creativity and for its futuristic theme. McEleney addresses the two topical issues of climate change and veganism as the framework for her piece. She creates a world that is genetically modified by a US grain called ‘GentaCorp’s GM 21’ which cross-pollinates with other crops and mutates human cells. From naturalistic beginnings a strange, lonely world of climate change and animal extinctions quickly follows. Lily, mother of two and wife to husband ‘Jase’ is watching the news for updates and plans to keep her family safe from the mutating cell. Somewhere along her flashbacks to her childhood and long walks outside in the rain, the reader is aware that her loneliness has slowly driven her to insanity. The reason this story stood out to me was because it commented on a topical issue in an inventive and creative way and the ending was surprising. It creates a powerful message that anticipates a future dystopia that could happen if we fail to act on our environmental crisis today.

It is refreshing to see such a range of impressive stories that defy the conventions in narrative storytelling, especially when we are living in times in which literature is being produced and marketed for mainstream consumption. The collection shines a spotlight on new writers in the form of themes, character voices and the subject matter of the stories. Though no story is like the other, they all interpret the complexity of emotions that “we sometimes fail to honour in our daily lives and close relationships.” (Inroduction, viii.) Whether it is the masculine perspective and tough realism in Mark Smith’s ‘A Concreter’s Heart’, or the heartbreaking and layered emotions of Mirandi Riwoe’s story ‘Cinta Ku’, we see the idea of the complexity of emotions being both explored, discovered and lost.

In Jenni Mazaraki’s story ‘Somebody’s Baby’, K.W. George’s ‘Three Dog Night’ and K.A. Rees’ ‘Butterscotch’, the reader delves into the feelings of a sense of home, whilst also dealing with the complications of feeling lost. Both Justine Hyde’s story ‘Emotional Support’ and Darryl R. Dymock’s story ‘A Tough Little Bird’, both are stories about passengers in flight. Hyde’s use of humour contrasts cleverly with the grief and anxiety that is present in the character’s evident feelings of loss due to the passing of her partner. Whereas in Dymock’s short story, he uses an artificial conversation between two plane passengers, that slowly turns into a truthful and cathartic conversation to help the protagonist dealing with the stress of visiting her ill mother back home. Dymock demonstrates through his writing, how even in the most unexpected of times we can find a sense of hope to deal with our emotions and anxieties.

The nineteen short stories are eclectic in subject, making for a stimulating read. Each invites a discussion on themes from sexual awakenings to complex family relationships, cultural inclusivity and ecological dystopia. Characters are found talking to trees; or on a plane with a unique travelling companion. There’s even a monster in a lake, rendered with suspense and plausibility. The open theme of the competition means that readers are treated to an impressive range, while Cahill offers a neat summary of what makes a good short story. This collection doesn’t feel jolted or messy, but something that is much more than the sum of its parts.
 
 
AMY VAN DER LINDEN is a recent graduate of Swinburne University of Technology. She has graduated with a major in Professional Writing and Editing and a minor in Literature. She is eager to start a career in the literary industry and use the skills she has acquired from her studies in her work.

Rethinking the Victim: Gender and Violence in Contemporary Australian Women’s Writing

by Anne Brewster and Sue Kossew

Routledge

ISBN: 978 1 138 09259 4

Reviewed by SOPHIE BAGGOTT

First of all, I owe readers a disclosure: if this book is an interrogation of power asymmetry and its potential to foster violence, then it’s disquieting that both its authors and reviewer embody a white middle-class lens on experiences largely rooted in less privileged positions across society. 

Brewster and Kossew are acutely aware of this imbalance throughout their dense, often illuminating book, which explores writing about violence from women whom they identify as either majoritarian, Indigenous or minoritised. The theorists tussle with the tension between what they perceive as the need to open up a cross-cultural conversation with radical empathy and the need to avoid “perpetuat[ing] the invasion” (Nicholson, 2000). At several points, they account for their decision to engage with the works of Indigenous and minoritised writers by citing various authors’ own calls for their inclusion in the Australian literary canon. One example is Filipino-Australian writer Merlinda Bobis’s comment during an interview with Mascara Literary Review that her book, Fish-Hair Woman, professes “a reciprocal love between cultures” and her broader comments about the difficulties of “getting through the literary gate” in Australia (p.191 / Bobis 2015).

Rethinking the Victim is divided into four chapters with an overall integrative approach, though the academics focus on Aboriginal poetry in its own chapter (‘Violence against women and girls: Indigenous women’s activist poetry’); this perhaps speaks to the statistics and the specificity of violence against Aboriginal women. In Chapter 1 (‘Intimate violations: gothic and romance’), Brewster and Kossew reflect on wide-ranging texts such as the writing of Yugambeh writer Ellen Van Neerven and of Asian-Australian writer Chi Vu. In Chapter 3 (‘Broken families, vulnerable children’ and Chapter 4 (‘War and political violence’), analysis of CALD writers is again interwoven with reflections on texts by white middle class women.

While paying attention to their own embeddedness in power structures, Brewster and Kossew rightly suggest that cultures do not exist in a vacuum – all gender dynamics occur within the systemic inequality that extends worldwide. Global estimates indicate that one in three women will be subject to violence in her lifetime, and the bleak reality is that one woman is killed by her partner every week in Australia. Despite this horrific universality, representations of violence against women vary significantly. For instance, the theorists point out the “mediatised” way in which Aboriginal family violence is portrayed in the public sphere, with implications that it is distinct and “endemic” (p.94). In contrast, they observe the way in which “violence in the white middle-class home has traditionally been exceptionalised, hidden and relegated to the private sphere”, noting this cultural exceptionalism as a reason for broadening the dialogue around gender-based violence (p.17-18).

Here’s another disclosure: this latter observation was one that hit home, so to speak. It took a long time to face up to the fact that my (white middle-class) household was a place of violence, and that I know what it is to be and to see a girl/woman enduring many years of threats and assaults by a boy/man. I also knew, without instruction but through a hazy sense of loyalty and self-preservation, that the topic was absolutely taboo. Much of this book’s analysis therefore delved into familiar territory: a world of precariousness, futile attempts to ‘fix’ perpetrators, and the incremental ways in which women become trapped. Why am I sharing this? I suppose it’s in the book’s spirit of “reject[ing] the fear of stigma, shame and failure that often prevents white middle-class victims from breaking with notions of propriety” (a function which the theorists attach to novels such as Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing, Emily Maguire’s An Isolated Incident and Anna George’s What Came Before) and in response to the appeal for solidarity that runs throughout Rethinking the Victim (p.18).

Since Rethinking the Victim forms part of the Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures, it is no surprise that both theorists’ research is strongly grounded in contemporary postcolonial literature. This passion comes across emphatically in their literary analysis, and they write extremely persuasively of the intersections between colonisation and violence (particularly in terms of Australia’s “national burial of a suppressed violent past”, p.50). I’d argue that this is occasionally to the detriment of the gender analysis – for instance, their seven-page exploration of Paula Abood’s ‘Stories from the Diaspora’ (2017) is a highly detailed study on race and violence, but barely touches on the aspect of gender (p.203-10). This is perhaps an insight into how gender may be the main issue for white women writers, while for women of colour (such as Abood) race and colonialism are such overpowering oppressions that there is less emphasis on the gendered perspectives.

Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge, the book omits any mention of the gender-based violence meted out to those who are trans or non-binary. According to Transgender Victoria, transgender and gender-diverse people experience physical assault, or threat of physical assault, at a rate of 25% – twelve times the rate of the general population. One example of a fascinating and necessary text that was missed is Australian-American Sarah Krasnostein’s The Trauma Cleaner, which won the Victorian Prize for Literature among other awards. This is a compelling story following the author’s acquaintance Sandra Pankhurst, a trans woman, throughout her life, which includes chronic violence – from a childhood of domestic abuse to the attacks that she endured in Melbourne’s drag scene and sex industry. It’s a book that interweaves closely with numerous strands of Brewster and Kossew’s analysis, and highlights the unreliability of trauma narratives.

Having said that, Rethinking the Victim is a remarkable feat and, notably, the very first book to examine gender and violence in Australian literature. How can it have taken this long? This is an important, intricate book which gathers together a wealth of literary analysis. The breadth of research and the depth of compassion is clear on every page. The astounding fact remains that this is only the first book to study gender violence in Australian literature – and there is much, much more work to be done.

NOTES

1. Wadi Wadi writer Barbara Nicholson writes of how words can “perpetuate the invasion” in Reed-Gilbert, K. (2000) The Strength of Us As Women: Black Women Speak, p.28.

2. Bobis, M (2015) ‘Interview with Emily Yu Zong’ in Mascara Literary Review 

SOPHIE BAGGOTT is a Welsh writer and journalist in the human rights field, currently living in Melbourne and working at the International Women’s Development Agency.

On Shirley Hazzard

Black Inc, 2019

ISBN 9781760640194

Reviewed by JEAN-FRANCOIS VERNAY

“By right of admiration”

Following the publication of Nam Le’s On David Malouf, Black Inc has now released the sixth volume in the Writers on Writers Series. Fiction writer Michelle De Kretser, twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award, has been put to contribution to discuss the works and literary career of Shirley Hazzard. It is noteworthy that On Shirley Hazzard is her first published nonfiction book and chiefly comes across as a labour of love.

For Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016), the novel is an affair of the heart, of its vicissitudes and complexities throughout the world but rarely in Australia. Unsurprisingly, only a portion of her most remarkable novel of the period, The Transit of Venus (1980), takes place in Sydney. A post-World War II expat, Hazzard left Australia at the early age of 16. Her international lifestyle may not impress some fellow writers, like Gerald Murnane who never bothered venturing outside of Australia, but it nevertheless raises interesting questions.

Hazzard’s atypical life journey challenges the boundaries of what can be accurately defined as Australian literature. When Graham Huggan discussed this specific issue in his 2007 monograph (1), he may have thought of her, or else of Peter Carey, or of any other Australian-born writer who ended up building a literary career in the United States: “A more intriguing question is whether it is necessary for a writer to be Australian. Here, it seems reasonable to expect that an Australian passport should be the minimum requirement for eligibility as an Australian writer. However, there are some exceptions to the general rule, and numerous contested instances of dual or changing citizenship — raising the further intriguing question of whether it is possible, say, to be an Australian and a British writer, or an Australian then an American writer, or perhaps all of these at once.”

As a transnational novelist specialised in treating universal concerns, very few of her writings are set in Australia. And it is almost a mystery as to why The Great Fire (2003) was awarded the Miles Franklin Award in 2004, because ultimately even the Australian citizenship of Peter Exley and Helen Driscoll could not obliterate the pervasive international context of this novel set respectively in Asia (Japan, Hong Kong), England and New-Zealand.

Perhaps Shirley Hazzard found herself caught between the temptation to tap into her Australian heritage and the desire to broaden the choice of her subject-matter by colouring her plots with an international flavour — two polarities where every advantage has its disadvantage. Internationalist novelists like her who enjoy a larger readership and greater freedom of expression run the risk of alienating themselves from their fellow citizens by addressing transnational concerns, or in other words, by “look[ing] outwards, away from Australia” (3), as Michelle De Kretser elegantly puts it.
In a series of succinct chapters, readers are introduced to Hazzard’s literary preoccupations, sociological and metaphysical views, left-leaning politics (consistently siding with the subaltern), and innermost convictions which can sometimes be as tranchant as Patrick White’s most memorable caustic quips. She shares a taste for “irony and satire” (36) with the Sydney-based écrivain maudit who quickly gained the reputation of being “Australia’s Most Unreadable Novelist”(2) before he would win Australia’s only Nobel prize for Literature. De Kretser perceptively sees irony and satire as “antipodean weapons, the weapons of the outsider; a way of seeing that punctures and deflates” (37). She also shrewdly hypothesises in a chapter dedicated to The Transit of Venus that Hazzard’s literary hallmark, which was subtly espousing White’s, might have been the psychological cause for White’s rejection of her magnus opus: “He wrote to Hazzard: ‘What I see as your chief lack is exposure to everyday vulgarity and squalor’” (65).

Her poetic style, encapsulated in her use of quaint adjectives which adds a surrealistic touch to her pared-down prose, has a marked rhythm which De Kretser locates in various prosody effects (in her discussions of The Evening of Holiday and of The Transit of Venus) and in a distinctive phonological pattern: “She often ends a sentence with a stressed monosyllable” (20).

Michelle De Kretser astutely conveys her love for reading in the most infectious way, attesting to the lingering consequences of emotionally charged novels which manage to create a bonding intimacy of sorts with impassioned avid readers:

The greedy, gulping way I read The Bay of Noon — a child devouring sweets — returned me to childhood and whole days spent deep in fictional worlds. It was reading as a form of enchantment, a way of reading I continue to value and need. There are novels that, like beloved people, stand between us and the world. They do this by altering our relation to time. They pass through it. They render time irrelevant. (52-3)

The simple fact that “Hazzard had an unwavering belief in the power of art to transform, comfort, reveal”(15) goes a long way to show that she was intuitively aligning herself with what research in neuroaesthetics was later able to articulate at greater length: namely that art somewhat seems to enhance brain function and psychological well-being.
If the “specificity of our own species lies in our ability to represent the world and to share our ideas”, then great novelists like Shirley Hazzard and Michelle De Kretser who are particularly adept at manipulating syntax would be the shining ambassadors of our intelligence as literate animals.

NOTES
1.Graham Huggan, Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 11.
2.This reputation was confirmed in 1956 when “the great Panjandrum of Canberra” described White’s prose as “pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge.” For further particulars, see Jean-François Vernay, A Brief Take on the Australian Novel (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2016), 173-180.

JEAN-FRANCOIS VERNAY’S The Seduction of Fiction (New York: Palgrave) and A Brief Take on the Australian Novel (Adelaide: Wakefield Press) were both released in 2016. His latest book, La séduction de la fiction (Paris: Hermann, 2019), which deals with all the cognitive mechanisms underlying literary passion, is yet to be translated. His Palgrave book is currently being translated into Arabic.

Beautiful Revolutionary

by Laura Elizabeth Woollett

Scribe

ISBN: 978192573039

Reviewed by ELLA JEFFERY

 
Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s first novel, Beautiful Revolutionary, takes the reader into the lives of several members of the Peoples Temple, the socialist church created by the charismatic, manipulative and controlling preacher Jim Jones in California in the 1960s. The novel follows the church’s expansion in America and eventual mass exodus to Guyana where Jones and his devoted followers established a community, named Jonestown, deep in the jungle. There, on November 18, 1978, as a result of Jones’ increasing hysteria, drug use, and paranoia, Jones commanded his followers to commit what he describes in Woollett’s novel as ‘revolutionary suicide.’ The death of 918 Americans at Jonestown is an event that remains deeply embedded in the cultural imaginary, and Woollett’s novel is one of a number of recent works on the event, including Jeff Guin’s non-fiction book The Road to Jonestown (2017), the 2018 documentary Jonestown: Terror in the Jungle and upcoming HBO series Raven, based on a non-fiction account of the same title by Tim Reiterman (2008). When I began Beautiful Revolutionary, I was interested in how Woollett might add to this substantial body of work. What does this book have to give that other documentaries, television series and books on the subject haven’t covered in the 40 years since the event?

Her first book, the collection of short stories The Love of a Bad Man, also includes a story set at Jonestown. In Beautiful Revolutionary Woollett expands on these themes, narrowing her focus to a single historical moment and the chain of events that led up to it. Like many historical novels, the reader knows, to some extent, where the novel is leading us – the inexorable movement towards the final, apocalyptic days of Jonestown ratchet up the pace of the novel’s second half. The great strengths of this novel are Woollett’s convincing rendering of character and setting, and her nuanced deployment of tone and mood. What she gives to this historical narrative is a compelling account of several loosely fictionalised characters, based on real members of the Peoples’ Temple. Woollett’s complex blending of history and fiction is grounded in extensive research; her nuanced ability to make judicious, unromanticised and unpretentious decisions about where the history in her novel ends and her fictionalisations begin makes this a captivating, original novel.

Beautiful Revolutionary opens with Lenny and Evelyn, newlywed college graduates in their early twenties, on the road. It could be any mid-century American scene – the couple have married and graduated, and are moving to Evergreen Valley, California. Evelyn reminds herself that they are going ‘to the new life, and it will be new, and it will be beautiful’ (5). Evelyn’s relentless authoritarian streak will later fully emerge to immense effect, but the early pages of the novel simmer with her desire to dismiss her growing dissatisfaction. Her husband, Lenny, is seen by so many in the novel as a gentle soul, Evelyn’s ‘beautiful blue-eyed boy-husband’ (398), who is ‘sweet and soft and clean’ (38). He wants to get high, watch TV, have sex with his ‘oppressively brilliant’ (5) wife, who the reader quickly realises has ambitions that outstrip Lenny’s milder pacifist ideology in many ways.

Their relationship is rife with mismatched intentions and further complicated when, after a few weeks in their new town, Evelyn – the daughter of a progressive pastor – begins to attend church services at a new church called Peoples Temple and takes her husband along to hear a man called Jim Jones preaching. Evelyn and Lenny Lynden, like many characters in Woollett’s novel, are modelled on real people; in this case, Larry Layton and his wife, Carolyn Layton, who went on to play an instrumental role as part of Jones’ inner circle. For the first third of the novel, the intimate third person narration is closely tied to Lenny and Evelyn as their relationship changes as a result of their growing engagement with Peoples Temple, and Evelyn’s developing personal relationship with Jones. Jones himself is a ubiquitous presence in every character’s mind, but is ultimately a supporting character.

The evocative intimacy of Evelyn and Lenny’s perspectives in the first third of the book gives way to a slightly more unbalanced treatment of other perspectives. The reader is presented with Jim’s wife Rosaline, a fictionalisation of his real wife Marceline, whom Woollett has written about in The Love of a Bad Man, and whom she renders with sensitivity and nuance. The novel also picks up the perspective of Eugene Luce, a white cop whose suppressed homosexuality Jones alternately exploits and abuses him for, as well as a group of slightly younger Temple members as they collectively begin to plan a defection, another evocation of a real-life event that took place in 1973.

While Rosaline and Eugene are closely tethered to the unfolding complications of Evelyn and Lenny’s positions in the Temple, the defection sequence, inserted in the middle of the book, came as a slightly jarring change in direction. Wayne Bud and Bonnie Luce, for example, two fictionalised members of the defecting group, express and interrogate some of the astounding hypocrisies at the centre of the Peoples Temple, such as Jones’ promotion of mostly white people, and mostly young women, to positions of power within the Temple’s organisational structure, and the rife sexual abuse perpetrated by Jones on his male and female followers, even as he proclaims that ‘I’m the only true heterosexual man alive … but the sexual act don’t bring me no pleasure’ (166). Had the whole novel been made up of patchwork-like insights into a range of Temple members, the result might have been a book more similar in structure to Woollett’s first collection of short stories, but I felt that this foray into a broader range of perspectives diluted some of the novel’s tension.

The major counter-cultural shift of the sixties sits at the heart of the novel. Woollett presents the social, cultural and political upheavals of this time as a key motivating factor for new members, like college-educated Lenny and Evelyn, to join the Temple. One of the great strengths of the intimate third person narration is that it reveals the ways in which young people conceive of themselves and their position in the world, and how the older generation view the younger generation as an entirely new type of person. Rosaline, for example, is at first flummoxed by Evelyn’s adamant position that ‘No one can have all of Father … he belongs to the people’, then reflects that Evelyn is ‘maybe not so strange. Maybe entirely typical of the new generation’ (174). Sexual and racial tensions simmer throughout the novel. One of Jones’ aides, Terra, says to Lenny, ‘Some of these old white people, it’s like they’re all about integration on Sundays, but when it comes to living it …?’ (143). Cross-generational encounters in the novel are always inflected with a sense of insecurity that sometimes borders on suspicion, sometimes on the barely-repressed anger, racism or sexism of the older generation, and sometimes on a tenderness that is bound up with nostalgia, eroticism, or both. Eugene, in particular, finds that ‘the impertinence of these new young ladies, it rankles, makes the back of his neck hot and taut’ (153).

For the young people of the Peoples Temple, their positions in the world are almost overwhelmingly charged with the potential to create meaningful change, and this is often the catalyst for them committing to what Jones calls ‘the Cause’ so wholeheartedly. Evelyn’s first encounter with the church is couched in the aftermath of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, and Jones’ rhetoric speaks to her sense of helplessness and anger. Evelyn’s sections in particular convey her industrious, striving devotion to Jim and to the Peoples Temple – the tone of these chapters is decidedly unromantic, unpretentious and this makes them even more unsettling as the novel progresses towards its devastating climax.

Woollett’s prose is lush and erotic without sacrificing clarity. Her ear for American dialogue and the counter-culture slang of the sixties is precise; she is judicious about how and where she deploys words like ‘groovy’ and ‘righteous’; and each character’s voice is consistent and distinctive. It is, ultimately, a book about voices, and the immense power of utterances to invoke rage, devotion, obedience, betrayal, hope. It is Jim’s voice that makes so much happen in the novel – Jim’s voice on the phone to Evelyn in the early pages of the novel, Jim’s voice that Lenny hears in his nightmares at the end, Jim’s voice that gives the final order to the community at Jonestown. Jim’s voice commanding and ordering, cursing, abusing. But for me, this is Evelyn and Lenny’s book, and their voices are complex, authentic, and always freighted with the tension of personal and political history.

Before picking up this novel, I knew relatively little about Jonestown or the Peoples Temple. While I learned much more reading Beautiful Revolutionary, it is not a novel that fetishises trauma, and never panders to the contemporary fascination with cults, true crime and other transgressions. It didn’t, in short, make me want to learn more about Jim Jones; but it did make me want to read more of Woollett’s compelling, intelligent prose.
 
 
ELLA JEFFERY is a poet, editor and academic. Her first collection of poems, Dead Bolt, won the 2019 Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poems, and will be published by the press in 2020. She was awarded a 2019 Queensland Premiers Young Writers and Publishers Award, and her work has appeared in Meanjin, Griffith Review, Southerly, Island and many others. She holds a PhD in creative writing, and lectures in creative writing at QUT in Brisbane.

Ashbery Mode

Ed. by Michael Farrell

Tinfish Press

ISBN 9781732928602

Reviewed by GARETH MORGAN

While the term ‘mode’ suggests something computerish, or mode as in moda, fashion, the poems in Ashbery Mode are less ‘coding’ or ‘trying on’ of style, more an absorption inside of a massive body of work. Ashbery’s poetry is a challenge for critics but great nourishment to poets. As the cover suggests, ‘we’ (koala) look up at these American heads, a cruel joke on the idea of Antipodes and perhaps a version of terra nullius from the American perspective. I am reminded of John Forbes’s ‘Antipodean Heads’, which starts: ‘I wish we could be nicer / like the Americans’, how we know so much of them, and keep looking up that way. In the ‘Antipodean Manifesto’ (1958) a group of Australian artists and the critic Bernard Shaw took a stance against abstract expressionism, the New American Painting exhibition, fearing its influence on local aesthetics. This collection, brought to life by editor Michael Farrell, indulges in North American influence, especially the charm of abstraction, freneticism and freedom of movement in poetry. Featuring poets who encountered John Ashbery and other international modernist poetry after 1958 let’s say, Ashbery Mode charts this epic influence in so called Australia. Just how nice are they ‘over there’? Ashbery Mode considers just how nice Australian poets can be, even and especially under the influence.

Chris Edwards’s poem ‘Rat Chow’ (cute product for a dystopian supermarket!), cannibalises Ashbery’s book length poem Flow Chart to give us a ‘Reconstitution’ of that book. What nutrients did the author ingest before expelling the flesh of Ashbery’s poem? From the difficult puddle surface hidden gems. ‘things keep arriving from the florist’s’ e.g. is typical of Ashbery’s ‘tone’ or ‘imagery’, and perhaps an easy metapoetic statement. The poem is like flower painting, as in decorative; the ‘Ashbery Mode’ draws so much of its value from being an attractive, baroque, shifty surface from which emerges a strange country. These ‘things’ (e.g. ”You’re a grown man now, but must sit in a tub, on a comfortable income and a few puddles of camel-stale, jotting down seemingly unrelated random characteristics.” a quote from the blue and quite a ‘thing’) are good for merely existing, delicious, and being cannibalised into the poem. As Brazilian poet Oswalde de Andrade claim in his Cannibalist Manifesto (1928): ‘Cannibalism alone unites us’. Ashbery’s is poetry that makes you hungry, and poets unite in this collection around this act. To the question of nutrients… is this Mode lifegiving? Yes, through decadence, which Edwards and many others collected here enjoy, like soft cheese.

David Prater’s poem ‘Ninety Nine Rabbits’ hilariously remarks ‘I like John Ashbery’s fingernails’, the dead excess of the poet’s presence (in Aus). Prater’s poem tracks the influence of Ashbery on Stephen Malkmus (of the band Pavement), whose first album Slanted and Enchanted, made him ‘throw up’. What a thrill! (I wonder what Ashbery Mode might sound like anthologised on vinyl…) There is a lot of eating and drinking in this book, which feels like a metaphor for influence’s effect. Stuart Cooke ‘lick[s] the ash / of brie’ on the porch while Oscar Schwartz’s uncomfortably Australian poem ‘Wine’ drinks deep: ‘This is the wine from ripe red land […] This wine is sacred beer. / And it is to be served in jugs’ (‘ripe’—eek!). Poets unite here in the ritual consumption.

*

I am often made to think of Ashbery when reading Gig Ryan (and vice versa). Her poem, ‘Epitome Of Variation’ (from Heroic Money (2001)), is ‘very Ashbery’, but also ‘very Gig Ryan’: ‘The swift barman’s cellophane gloss / glides beyond me / explosive celebrant, stoned croupier / in crushed Adelaide.’ Ryan’s poem is engaged in a struggle for something new (for Adelaide, for Australia), a tough and brutal way of building a scene, melancholic (‘Dwindled day’) and a bit dreamy (‘beige sunset’) always full of jarring turns. Great, influential Australian poetry that takes from Ashbery’s density, flightiness and obscurity.

Bella Li’s prose poem ‘Just Then’, concerns itself with how the local blends with the foreign: ‘Ah California! I’d give my arm leg for a shovel and a fat wheelbarrow.’ It’s a funny poem, a scene in which the speaker waits lakeside for a goose to show up. It mock-begs for Imagist clarity, taking pleasure in the flow of linguistic noise that busts Imagism up. Language runs along hectically, ‘juicy oranges getting juicier’…’fuzzy marmots […] but no goose’. The objective is less goose-hunt than the margins of that. Travelling up to North America, Li’s short poem apostrophises American locations (and rodents) for their importance (and cuteness), but also demonstrates the importance of moving on, losing focus. Something like New York might exist here too, wouldn’t that be cool, and it does, it’s poetry, like ‘chintz in the wild’ that decorates Li’s expanding, expansive view.

The epigraph to Tim Grey’s poem ‘6, From Bio’ regards the influence Ashbery wore on his sleeve: ‘absolute modernity was for him the acknowledging of the simultaneity of all life, the condition that nourishes poetry at every second. The self is obsolete‘ (Ashbery on Rimbaud in his translation of Illuminations). Ashbery’s connection to Rimbaud, whose modernity was perhaps to Ashbery as Ashbery’s is to Li, Ryan, Grey, etc.– is concerned with nourishment for poetry. Grey’s poem is busy, violent, a flipside to Li’s joyous play: ‘taxi ploughing into his bicycle in the box-smoked dusk’ shows off modernity’s simultaneity in a different way.

Louise Crisp’s two comparatively chilled out poems of modernity also pinch from an Ashbery line for their epigraph, from Some Trees: ‘The river slides under our dreams / but land flows more silently’. In ‘Ground’ a man ‘hoes vegetables’ and, digging, finds ‘another layer of ground / under the colour of vegetables / patterned in the shape of his country’. This sombre poem digs with Ashberyan tools, unravelling modernity’s papering over of Aboriginal land.

*

It strikes me that John Ashbery received a National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2011. (Who are ‘our’ equivalent poets? What poetry do our Prime Ministers read and reward outside maybe Les Murray? And when is Michael Farrell gonna get a medal?!) Despite it’s naughty experimentalism, hermeticism and lyric obscurity, one of the curious things about Ashbery’s poetry (at least as it can be / has been in places critically received) is that it ‘stays out of it’ when it comes to politics, or protest. (We might remember that Abstract Expressionism in Jackson Pollock was supported by the CIA). While it would be foolish to pursue this binary too hard, it’s interesting how politics shows up in Ashbery Mode to reflect on Ashbery’s legacy.

Fiona Hile’s ‘Consumption’ is a hot little almost-sonnet that takes on the Capitalist pig. The speaker complains ‘if you say you don’t believe in that thing / about money and desire I’ll just die– […] But that’s okay, I hate work, and, anyway…’ In a tone evoking too the charm of Frank O’Hara, ‘Consumption’s’ lyric investigation of death and legacy ends on the joke that at least of the body ‘Nothing will be wasted’. Full of jokes, like the speaker’s ‘father’s / puns’, the poem combusts in a mess, abandoning the ‘ticklish’ world of novelty the poem is disgusted by. Language under consumer capitalism (‘double absolute modernity’?) will make you sick– luckily we have poetry to help with that. (Help to purge?). Does Hile’s poem diss the baroque novelty of Ashbery’s abstraction, the pursuit of a higher poetic good ‘outside capital’? I’m not sure.

Pam Brown works from Ashbery’s ‘political poem’ ‘Default Mode’, which Brown heard him read in New York in 2008. ‘Antipodean Default Mode’ mirrors the refrain “They were living in America”, inserting ‘Australia’ and animating points from the original, like ‘…living in America fictitiously’. Brown: ‘everything had seen better days / They were living in Australia / just for the heck of it […] like true blue Americans’. The poem absorbs the twin fictions of America and Australia and spits out a flatter version still. Nationhood for settlers is rendered spurious, and the fruits of colonial violence and modernity, like ‘biodegradeable mousepads’, fill out this sad, cutting and funny poem.

*

Farrell notes in his Introduction that the poets included ‘span roughly fifty years’. I’m left wondering what a part two of this collection might look like– another fifty years of influence in the rapidly heating Antipodes should produce some fresh takes on this monolith of modern poetry. The poems vary greatly, but in many there is a sense of poetry in breakdown, a reflection on the passing of a great poet and a changing world. Luke Beesley’s ‘Timber Hitch’ is a short, crumbly prose block below which a scrappy drawing of Ashbery, and the caption ASH. A phoenix… or ashes to dust…

In any case, with a nod to ‘what’s next’, Ali Alizadeh begins ‘The Poet (After ‘the Painter’)’: ‘Crouching between horror and language / I hate writing about this damn world,’ and concludes his polemical response: ‘The age doesn’t demand an image of the world / in any language. Better to tattoo fear / on the page, in a dark inaesthetic poem.’ Alizadeh’s mad sestina is a fine, if random place to stop eating of these poems, and to look forward to ever newer versions of the Mode. Dark, inaesthetic, cruel… tho probably in equal measure desperate attempts to delight oneself and others.

NOTES

Chiasson, Dan. “Postscript: John Ashbery”. New Yorker. 2017
de Andrade, Oswaldo. ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’. trans. Leslie Barry (1991). Latin American Literary Review. 19. 38. 1928 p. 38
Forbes, John. Collected Poems. Brandl & Schlessinger. 2001. p 104

GARETH MORGAN is a poet and co director of sick leave reading series and journal. His work can be found in Rabbit, Cordite, Australian Poetry Journal and other places.

Milk Teeth

by Rae White

ISBN: 978 0 7022 6016 2

UQP 

Reviewed by GABRIELA BOURKE

Rae White might be categorised as emerging, but their success as a poet is established. Winner of the 2017 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, shortlisted for the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry, placing second in the Judith Wright Poetry Prize for their poem ‘what even r u?’ and reviewed favourably in Westerly and Books and Publishing among many others, White’s reputation as a poet continues to ascend.

White’s first poetry collection Milk Teeth has been described as ‘an assured and original debut from a powerful new voice in Australian poetry’ (Culver, 2018). It’s interesting to me that White has chosen to precede their collection with a few lines from another poem, Alex Gallagher’s ‘vague body’, an excerpt which concludes ‘I’m tired of being broken by language/when it is the only safe place I’ve ever known.’ (Gallagher, 2017). This reference situates White’s collection in a tradition of non-binary poetry and at the same time indicates a preoccupation of the collection: that is, the way in which language fails to authentically represent transgender people. These lines provide a lens through which we can begin to approach White’s own poetry, which reconfigures modes of representation by offering an always-vivid, sometimes confronting series of poems which may cause discomfort, but in doing so deftly blast apart cisnormative understandings of gender and identity.

The first of White’s poems, ‘Mother’s Milk’, narrates a person taking a baby tooth from a box under a bed and eating it. The relish with which the tooth is stolen and the rapture with which it is swallowed is viscerally discomforting. ‘I roll it leisurely/with tongue, let it clink/like ice cubes in empty/glass. I swallow/feel it scrape & chafe/lodge in my throat.’ (3). The tooth then sets up residence in the narrator’s throat, resulting in ‘crackle quartz jutting from my neck./It glimmers & hums, my beautiful/crystalline baby/the only jewellery/I’ll ever wear.’ (4) This bodily transformation elicits a pain response from the reader as the molar scrapes and chafes and lodges, whereas the way in which the tooth takes up residence in not just a foreign place, the throat, but a foreign body altogether poses a challenge to the reader. Are we to assume the eating of the molar is a signifier for something else? Or did the narrator really eat the tooth? What does it mean, to eat the tooth? The slippage between the signifier and the signified – the tooth, signifying what – invites a poststructuralist reading for later poems, and decentres the role of language in delineating meaning. White takes a medium with which we are familiar, perhaps with which we even consider ourselves expert, and starts using it in a way unknown to us. In this way we have to be open to learning the language of the poet, to being open to understanding the language as they intend it, rather than as we have known it to be.

The next poem, ‘ambulance symptoms’, offers a brief reprieve with the soothing assonance of the first stanza: ‘july was flushed with winter/ promise: white water breezes/ & steeples of rain.’(5) Closer examination though reveals again that tendency toward brutal imagery: ‘my scarf/was a suspect in your/strangling.’ (5) In ‘Sabbatical’, the narrator of the poem goes fishing and, after hours of waiting, reels in the ‘putrid remains’ of a dead cat, ‘clumps of purple/fur clinging to pitted flesh. She’s not good/for eating.’(16) These poems assail the reader with the grotesque, in the form of violent death, rotting animal bodies or the consumption (or consideration of consumption) of something considered non-consumable. ‘Sabbatical’ concludes with the cat nudged back into the water with ‘…the toe of my pumps… (16); ‘go and gone follows’, concluding so similarly as to be almost identical, as the narrator encounters the dead body of a cormorant and uses the toe of their trainer to push the body into a lake (17). In an interview for Messenger’s Booker, White says, ‘I try to bring … conflicting duality … to my work: to engage the reader through casually unsettling their expectations, asking the reader why they might find something unsettling and why.’ (Messenger’s Booker, 2018)

We are unsettled by the unusual, by the taboo, by people, places and things with whom or which we are not familiar. The sequencing of White’s collection means that by the time we reach poems that are explicit in their commentary on the everyday life and struggles of a non-binary person, we can proceed with an openness, or perhaps willingness that we may have lacked upon first picking up the book. The poem ‘hook-up’ is forthright, unambiguous and unashamed.

picture us spooning
tangled entrails
dripping stink and
spittle. And six
months from now:
my vulva warm
untouched, my mouth dank and tacky. Your musty shirt
puckered on my floor.

In an article for The Guardian, Cat Fitzpatrick said
‘[Works by non-binary authors] go beyond the clichéd trans narrative which cisgender network executives and publishers have decided that “general audiences” want. As a result, they have much more to say, not just to trans people, but to everyone. They tell richer and stranger stories, ask deeper questions about gender, identity and injustice, and are written with the kind of brio, inventiveness and excitement that comes from desperately needing to say the things they are finally finding a way to write down.’ (Fitzpatrick, 2015)

The strangeness and inventiveness of White’s poems build and transform as the reader continues through the journey of the collection, so that by the final poem, ‘Feed your friends’, the funeral wake described opens itself to a range of interpretations, from the literal to the figurative.

It’s always reassuring to see a millennial writer achieving the kind of success White is currently enjoying, in the culture of funding cuts and the disparagement of creativity in which we now find ourselves. White’s poetry is fresh and defiant, and underlines the importance of writing and publishing in returning the space to communities who have previously been silenced.

 Citation
1. Alison Gallagher, Parenthetical Bodies  Subbed In, 2017
2. Tony Messenger interviews Rae White https://messybooker.wordpress.com/2018/09/17/milk-teeth-rae-white-plus-bonus-poet-interview/
3. Cat Fitzpatrick, ‘Beyond the cliches: how the trans poetry community is finding its voice’ The Guardian, 25 November, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/25/trans-poetry-community-literature-writers (Accessed 14 February 2020)

GABRIELA BOURKE is a doctoral candidate at the University of Sydney. Gabriela is most interested in fictional representations of animal and human trauma, and the ways in which these intersect. Her work appears in Hermes and Southerly.

My Van Gogh

By Chandani Lokugé

Arden (2019)

ISBN 978-1-925984-17-0

by Paul Giffard-Foret

Chandani Lokugé’s fifth novel My Van Gogh takes the reader on a romantic and artistic journey across borders, from the rural farming lands of Victoria in Australia, where part of her characters’ family on their father’s side is from, to some of France’s touristic hotspots, including scenic areas of Le Loire Valley, the southeast region of Provence, or its capital city Paris. The metropolitan provenance of the novel is made evident by the design of the book cover. It shows a snapshot of what is reminiscent of the Tuileries Garden, which is located in the vicinity of Le Louvre Museum. This is despite the fact that Lokugé actually writes from the periphery of what constitutes her Sri Lankan Australian background. The terms of “periphery” and “metropolitan” are used here with a postcolonial agenda in mind, to refer to the ways in which the old structures of Empire and European colonialism still play out in our contemporary era. Lokugé is aware of such lingering structures insofar as her oeuvre as a novelist may easily fall under the loose category of “postcolonial fiction”. As an illustration, Lokugé’s second novel Turtle Nest, published in 2003, dealt with the issue of sex tourism and trafficking of local children for Western customers in a small fishing village in Sri Lanka.

We may wonder, then, what postcolonial elements there are in a novel in which the main characters are white and relatively privileged —symbolically at least, being endowed with cultural capital—and where a driving theme is the artistic legacy left by one of the most iconic Western painters and representatives of High Culture, namely Van Gogh? To revert to my earlier allusion to Turtle Nest, this novel shares with My Van Gogh a common concern with travel (and tourism) that itself recurs as a distinct motif in diasporic literatures of dispersal by migrant authors. Yet this time, the gaze happens to be reversed, for My Van Gogh, as its title suggests, does not so much speak of the master painter’s life as it heralds its appropriation by the margins. My Van Gogh’s central Australian-born character, Shannon, sets out on a quest for meaning by travelling to France in very much the same way that the West would journey to the Orient and the Far East in the hope of being “revealed” by the sheer Sublime of the place, by its spirituality, its history, art and craft. The tourist’s gaze operates a process of “museumification” which not only sublimates the real, as Jennifer Straus spelled out during her speech at Lokugé’s book launch, but it also flattens things out by silencing “accidents” of history.

So it is to Lokugé’s credit that the rippling echoes of those series of murderous terrorist attacks which have struck France since 2015 can be felt. These attacks carry along their trail of death haunting memories of a colonial era thought to have been long gone, since the last major terrorist attacks on French soil took place in the context of Algeria’s War of Independence and Algeria’s Civil War in the 1990s. The blight of terror is another common point with Lokugé’s homeland, Sri Lanka. As Shannon and Guy are walking along the promenade in Nice on Bastille Day, they must bear witness to “a ceremony to commemorate the lives lost” (55) on that very same spot and day in 2016, killing eighty-three. Shannon’s prolonged sojourn in France is meant as a way for him to reconnect with his French mother and brother Guy, both of whom are “exiled” in France away from the family farm in Australia, as well as with his great-grandfather Grand Pierre, who fought and died a hero during the Great War of 1914-1918. Yet their mother remains an “absent presence” throughout the novel, having cut off links with her family, while Guy, being now well established in his adopted country, and having started a new life in Paris as an art dealer, feels in some way estranged from Shannon. Grand Pierre’s military heroism, which is very much part of the family’s lore, gets somewhat dampened and overshadowed by the fact that his body remains are yet to be exhumed and identified after all these years.

Their scattering evokes the scattering, more broadly, of family relationships, friends and lovers, and in the final instance, of identity markers themselves, which is an aspect of our postmodern “liquid” selves that transpires in Lokugé’s novel. Put simply, identity relates to people and places, but the latter in My Van Gogh remain loosely connected and grounded. Lokugé highlights her characters’ difficulties to communicate with, and feel for, one another. Her characters, indeed, seem enveloped within a Hopperesque halo of solitude, like a carapace preventing them from facing and sharing with others those vagaries of life that otherwise fill the void of our existence. In this light, Lokugé’s choice of a happy ending sounds like a trompe l’oeil, especially with respect to the book cover. It shows empty chairs lying stranded and looking abandoned, and an individual’s silhouette walking away into the distance towards a vanishing point, being flanked on both sides by rows of tall, erect, autumnal trees. This image intimates that one’s personal journey is a lonely trail, as it must have been for the tormented, maddened Van Gogh.

In effect, the many touristic sites and scenic places (including Van Gogh’s temporary home in Arles), as well as churches and museums, though they are in part aimed at recalling her mother’s presence, all seem but a poor distraction and lack substance in the face of Shannon’s own pill-dependent depressive state. We are told that “for Shannon, also, it had become ordinary, a boring show staged for self-indulgent tourists. That quiet desperation, that unconscious despair that is concealed under the amusements of mankind, Shannon reflected, recalling the words of Thoreau.” (54) I am here reminded of award-winning French author Michel Houellebecq’s dystopian portrayal of France as a theme park for foreign visitors and local tourists in his novel, The Map and the Territory, whereby largely uninhabited town centres have been transformed into standardised temples of consumption and sanitised variations of the picturesque. As a review of the novel published in the New York Times concurred, “Houellebecq’s Paris exists in a state of flagrant social breakdown and the countryside has become an emptied theme park of itself.”

The parallel with Lokugé’s work can be further made here, since both authors have shown a deep, continuous interest in tourism as a powerful metaphor for our globalised era. As the New York Times review added, The Map and the Territory “deals with art and architecture, rather than sex tourism. It is set in galleries and villages rather than S-M clubs and massage parlors.” My Van Gogh similarly deals with the art market as a global form of currency. As earlier mentioned, Guy is a gallerist, and Shannon a student in art history. Shannon’s girlfriend Lilou, besides being a tour guide, is a musician and a painter herself, while Guy’s French lover Julie graduated in Fine Arts. Furthermore, the novel is peopled by references to mythical figures such as Proust, Beckett, Hemingway or Matisse, who at some point lived and worked in France, at a time—at least until World War Two— when Paris happened to be the world’s artistic hub and would attract artists from different nationalities, including Van Gogh himself. So at some point in the novel, Shannon for example goes to visit the southeastern village of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Van Gogh was interned in an asylum for a year there, and where he achieved some of his most famous paintings.

In the same way that Houellebecq is, Lokugé is further concerned in her novel with those children belonging to the post-soixantehuitard (sixty-eight) generation, as they are dubbed in France, who grew up in the wake of the May 1968 Revolution. The upheaval, mostly student-led, entailed among other things a radical dismantling of the traditional family. Lilou, whom Shannon met during his meanderings across France, for instance is said to have parents who lived “wayward, hashish-filled lives—with a tribe somewhere in the Himalayas from what she’d seen in Facebook months ago.” (120) As Shannon tells her: “We are a lost generation—une génération perdue.” (121) This historical allusion to the devastation wrought by the Great War upon the youth in particular points to the existence of a crisis of a spiritual, metaphysical and civilisational nature at the heart of Western, and more specifically, French contemporary society, as Houellebecq himself exposed in The Map and the Territory, which won the Prix Goncourt (the equivalent of the Booker Prize) in 2010. This crisis would ripen to a full and explode in the form of the Yellow Vest protests by the end of 2018. The occupation of roundabouts by Yellow Vests across the French territory, in particular in deserted rural areas where the movement started, represented a desire to rebuild solidarity and cohesion in the face of a torn social fabric, as well as gain democratic sovereignty through this modern version of the Greek agora. Lokugé in her novel summons the imagery of the carrefour (not the hypermarket chain here, but its semantic meaning of a “crossroad” in French) to poetically express the random contingency and situatedness of cross-cultural love, which, as the reader is led to understand, can be undone as quickly as it can be struck. And this is precisely within the knots of this tension that lies the beauty and dramatic force of Lokugé’s prose. To quote from the novel:

Carrefour…
They lay entangled in each other. Her hand in his, a drowsy bird. The room was almost black, a shadow of light across the bed. He could faintly see her face raised beside his. They hardly knew one another. That was beautiful, he said. Thank you, she whispered. It’s a gift then. Whose voice, whose words? Didn’t matter. They were etched in him, deep inside. He kissed the fold of her elbow. Carrefour—he said—meeting place. He felt the texture—this word so foreign to him. Meeting place, she said, lieu de rencontre. (57)

A carrefour implies a certain level of reciprocity and a readiness to let go of one’s own cultural attributes to meet the Other on neutral, naked grounds. Travel narratives usually make for good romance precisely so because the characters in these narratives stand outside of their comfort zones. Standing outside or in-between cultures as do Guy the expatriate and Shannon the traveller make both brothers more easily vulnerable or susceptible to the possibility of yielding to the unknown of cross-cultural romance. As the French Iranian author, Abnousse Shalmani, reminds us, Guy and Shannon are “métèques” (a word originating from Greek and meaning whoever resides away from home). As such, métèques “do not have buried secrets within the attics of country cottages, no class prejudices, no embarrassment vis-à-vis History, culture, language; he or she has in effect left of this behind. The métèque goes beyond rules, common decency, social order.” (Shalmani 106; my own translation) France’s geography, located at the crossroads between six nations (which is why it is known as the hexagon), spans cultural realities as distinct as Provence’s Mediterranean Sea and the wine routes and forests of Alsace in the east. Alsace is probably the most métèque of all regions considering its historical ties in Germany, where Guy and Shannon’s great-grandfather Grand Pierre was killed. As a former imperial power and neo-colonial player, France has often proved unceremoniously unkind and unwelcoming to its métèques. Notwithstanding, My Van Gogh with its wanderings across some of France’s over-saturated historic sites operates a cosmopolitan itinerary worth following for the reader insofar as this scenic drift becomes a pretext for an inward exploration of the human condition itself.

Works Cited
Shalmani, Abnousse. Éloge du Métèque. Grasset, 2019.
Shulevitz, Judith. “Michel Houellebecq’s Version of the American Thriller.” New York Times, Jan. 13, 2012. <https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/books/review/michel-houellebecqs-version-of-the-american-thriller.html> (Accessed 19 Dec. 2019)

———————
PAUL GIFFARD-FORET completed his Ph.D. on Australian women writers from Southeast Asia at Monash University’s Postcolonial Writing Centre in Melbourne, having completed his MA in Perth on Simone Lazaroo’s fiction. Paul’s research deals with gender studies, racial and cultural hybridity, migration, multiculturalism and related issues with a focus on postcolonial and diasporic Anglophone literatures from Australia, Southeast Asia and India. His academic work has appeared in various journals and magazines in the form of peer-reviewed articles and literary reviews.

Rethinking the Victim: Gender and Violence in Contemporary Australian Women’s Writing

by Anne Brewster and Sue Kossew

Routledge

ISBN: 978 1 138 09259 4

Reviewed by SOPHIE BAGGOTT

First of all, I owe readers a disclosure: if this book is an interrogation of power asymmetry and its potential to foster violence, then it’s disquieting that both its authors and reviewer embody a white middle-class lens on experiences largely rooted in less privileged positions across society.

Brewster and Kossew are acutely aware of this imbalance throughout their dense, often illuminating book, which explores writing about violence from women whom they identify as either majoritarian, Indigenous or minoritised. The theorists tussle with the tension between what they perceive as the need to open up a cross-cultural conversation with “radical empathy” and the need to avoid “perpetuat[ing] the invasion”. At several points, they account for their decision to engage with the works of Indigenous and minoritised writers by citing various authors’ own calls for their inclusion in the Australian literary canon. One example is Filipino-Australian writer Merlinda Bobis’s comment during an interview with Mascara Literary Review that her book, Fish-Hair Woman, professes “a reciprocal love between cultures” and her broader comments about the difficulties of “getting through the literary gate” in Australia.

While paying attention to their own embeddedness in power structures, Brewster and Kossew rightly suggest that cultures do not exist in a vacuum – all gender dynamics occur within the systemic inequality that extends worldwide. Global estimates indicate that 1 in 3 women will be subject to violence in her lifetime, and the bleak reality is that one woman is killed by her partner every week in Australia. Despite this horrific universality, representations of violence against women vary significantly. For instance, the theorists point out the “mediatised” way in which Aboriginal family violence is portrayed in the public sphere, with implications that it is distinct and “endemic”. In contrast, they observe the way in which “violence in the white middle-class home has traditionally been exceptionalised, hidden and relegated to the private sphere”, noting this cultural exceptionalism as a reason for broadening the dialogue around gender-based violence.

Here’s another disclosure: this latter observation was one that hit home, so to speak. It took a long time to face up to the fact that my (white middle-class) household was a place of violence, and that I know what it is to be and to see a girl/woman enduring many years of threats and assaults by a boy/man. I also knew, without instruction but through a hazy sense of loyalty and self-preservation, that the topic was absolutely taboo. Much of this book’s analysis therefore delved into familiar territory: a world of precariousness, futile attempts to ‘fix’ perpetrators, and the incremental ways in which women become trapped. Why am I sharing this? I suppose it’s in the book’s spirit of “reject[ing] the fear of stigma, shame and failure that often prevents white middle-class victims from breaking with notions of propriety” (a purpose which the theorists attach to multiple Australian novels) and in response to the appeal for solidarity that runs throughout Rethinking the Victim.

However, as much as Brewster and Kossew state their intentions to create a culture of inclusivity, I have to question why they then isolated Indigenous women’s activist poetry in its own chapter. Perhaps a more interesting and inclusive approach would have been to divide the chapters by the different forms that violence against women can take: physical, sexual, psychological and economic. In my view, this could have been an effective means of highlighting the myriad manifestations of gender-based violence and exposing its pervasive impact across society.

Since Rethinking the Victim forms part of the Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures, it is no surprise that both theorists’ research is strongly grounded in contemporary postcolonial literature. This passion comes across emphatically in their literary analysis, and they write extremely persuasively of the intersections between colonisation and violence (particularly in terms of Australia’s “national burial of a suppressed violent past”). I’d argue that this is occasionally to the detriment of the gender analysis – for instance, their seven-page exploration of Paula Abood’s Stories from the Diaspora (2017) is a highly detailed study on race and violence, but barely touches on the aspect of gender.

Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge, the book omits any mention of the gender-based violence meted out to those who are trans or non-binary. According to Transgender Victoria, transgender and gender-diverse people experience physical assault, or threat of physical assault, at a rate of 25% – twelve times the rate of the general population. One example of a fascinating and necessary text that was missed is Australian-American Sarah Krasnostein’s The Trauma Cleaner, which won the Victorian Prize for Literature among other awards. This is a compelling story following the author’s acquaintance, Sandra Pankhurst, a trans woman, throughout her life, which includes chronic violence – from a childhood of domestic abuse to the attacks that she endured in Melbourne’s drag scene and sex industry. It’s a book that interweaves closely with numerous strands of Brewster and Kossew’s analysis, not least of all the unreliability of trauma narratives.

Having said that, Rethinking the Victim is a remarkable feat and, notably, the very first book to examine gender and violence in Australian literature. How can it have taken this long? Towards the end, I admit I found myself wishing it had instead been titled Rethinking Victimhood. As Wiradjuri scholar Jeanine Leane wrote with regard to her family’s women survivors of sexual abuse:

They were indeed victims of something but they’re not perpetual victims––ultimately they were survivors.

While Brewster and Kossew make efforts to unknot the binarisation of victim/agent, instead framing women who endure violence as “agentic bearers of knowledge”, I’d argue that the potential transience (and transformative power) of victimhood could be better signified in the book’s first impressions.

This is an important, intricate book which gathers together a wealth of literary analysis. The breadth of research and the depth of compassion is clear on every page. The astounding fact remains that this is only the first book to study gender violence in Australian literature – and there is much, much more work to be done.

Notes
1.  Wadi Wadi writer Barbara Nicholson, ‘Something there is…’ in Reed-Gilbert, K. (ed.) The Strength of Us As Women: Black Women Speak 27-30, 2000, p.28
2. Istanbul Convention

SOPHIE BAGGOTT is a Welsh writer and journalist in the human rights field, currently living in Melbourne and working at the International Women’s Development Agency.

On Being a Working-Class Writer

How does a working-class girl from the council estate become a poet? And what’s class got to with it anyway? What does it mean to be a working-class writer? Can I still be a working-class writer now that I work in a university? What do working-class writers write about? Answering these questions requires a story.

I became a writer by accident. When I was at school I wanted to be an artist. I loved art – my brother and I were taken to London art galleries quite often when we were growing up. Bus fares were cheap then and the galleries were free. My Dad was always looking for places outside of Walthamstow to take us out at weekends and holidays because my Mum worked night shift and was the breadwinner. Dad was an autodidact – a working-class man who taught himself how to paint and draw. He worked (when he was employed), as a self-employed sign writer and our flat always smelt of paint and turps. Dad died when I was young and Mum was too busy trying to keep us fed and housed, so as soon as I was old enough, I took myself into central London and visited the galleries again. 

They became my happy places. At school I studied art, but there was no chance that a kid from the council estate was going to become an artist. So I left school and worked in retail.

I had always been a reader. We had books in our flat (1) – Dad read spy novels and racy thrillers. Mum never had time to read when we were young, but she told me that when she was a child she loved to curl up with a book, but would get told off for being lazy by her father (a London Transport bus driver). No one in her household had spare hours for reading – everyone had to work. Mum’s schooling was interrupted by WWII, and despite her wish to continue at school and study to be a nurse, she had to leave at 15 and get a job. I didn’t see her read a book until I was in my teens (although she always did the newspaper crossword). She began reading again when a mobile library started visiting our estate. She liked historical romances, especially those set during WWII. Until her eyesight failed in her 80s, she always had a book on the go.

As a child I spent many hours in libraries. I’d read anything, which is typical of working-class readers. There was no sense of what might be ‘good’ or ‘worthy’ literature. Any book blurb that looked interesting was added to my pile. My local library had an excellent collection of Caribbean and South Asian literature and I worked my way through everything on the shelves.  On a school excursion I saw Dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson (2)

perform. His work showed me that I could write poems using my voice (I didn’t have to sound like Wordsworth or Tennyson – poets we read at school). This was a life-changing experience and the revelation that a non-posh voice could be valid stayed with me. At my working-class high school in the 1980s we had a visit from poet Carol Ann Duffy (3). None of us knew who she was, but a few from the English class went along to her workshop. This turned out to be another revelation. She knew how to talk to us working-class girls and she told us that our stories mattered. A poet from a poor neighbourhood like ours who understood our lives. It was clear to me from then that poetry was for everyone.

This love of poetry and of reading didn’t take me to university though. That was far from my reach. My dream of being an artist faded with the reality of leaving school and I started working full time at Hamley’s of Regent Street(4). I kept on reading (anything); I wrote poems in a notebook and created comical biographical poems for my co-workers between short snatches of time between customers on till roll). I carried on writing poems that I showed no one for years. After leaving Hamley’s to travel with a baby and partner in tow, I carried on writing but never considered publishing my poetry, although I gifted a few friends biographical poems about them. We travelled in our Kombi van around the UK and Europe and then left for Taiwan. I taught English in Taiwan with no qualifications (and likely was responsible for a cohort of Taiwanese kids with Cockney accented English).

Eventually I ended up in Australia with my Australian partner and child and we decided to ‘give uni a go’. When choosing what course to apply for I realised that the thing I’d actually always done consistently since I was a child was write poems and stories. My aspirations to be an artist gradually changed into wanting to be a writer, so I enrolled in a creative writing having little idea of what to expect. I’d never been on a university campus, and my understanding of tertiary education was formed through film and TV. I was required to submit a portfolio of writing with my application and I collected up all the things I’d written over the years and typed them up on a library computer (I couldn’t type – this process was excruciating. I was one of the only girls in my high school who didn’t take typing as an elective). I was called in for an interview at the university and told by the interviewer that my work had ‘potential’ – I had no idea what that meant. 

I was accepted into the course and discovered that what I loved to write about was my experiences of being working class. Of my old home in London, my family, friends and the working-class community that I’d left so far behind in England.

My writing was well received by my tutors at uni and they were very encouraging and supportive. The first poems I started to get published in the late 1990s were centred on life on the council estate I grew up on, and by the end of my undergrad degree I had a collection in print (5). I incorporated Cockney songs into some of these early poems and enjoyed performing them to an Australian audience. I read at venues across Sydney and interstate. I even had a spot at at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in 2001. I was starting to make a bit of a name for myself but there were obstacles. I experienced dismissive and patronising comments from some well-established Australian poets. It was at this time that I realised that the gatekeepers of the Australian literary establishment were generally not interested in, or sympathetic towards, working-class poetry. So I started a PhD (6) investigating the lack of working-class representation in contemporary Australian poetry and discovered that working-class poets had been shut out of the literary mainstream. They found their work dismissed as simplistic or didactic. As sociological or overly political. Lacking in literary technique – not enough use of metaphor. Too focused on the everyday, the mundane. I saw it differently. Working-class poetry was full of life. It was about collective experience. There were poems that focused on hardship, poverty, trauma. Life living hand to mouth. Struggle was common. But there was also celebration of community, of working-class culture, and working-class diversity. The poems were often funny and the poets used humour as a survival tool. The language was simple, not simplistic. And metaphor might have been used sparingly, but that was because the poets wanted to represent the reality of their everyday lives – working class life often didn’t have time for metaphor.

The poets I talked to at the time had all found it very difficult to get published in mainstream literary journals. Many were very popular in their home towns, and drew large crowds to readings. Some self-published and sold many books on their own. Not many found their work reviewed in literary magazines, and they preferred to read at local events in pubs or worksites rather than literary festivals. Aside from a few notable exceptions, the Australian literary establishment gatekeepers were not interested in working class poetry. Or other working class writing. At this time (2000-2007), they were not interested in class at all, and this was a sentiment shared by academia too. As I started my academic career (as a casual academic for the first ten years), I began a battle with academics to recognise class as significant in Australia. I was told that class wasn’t a ‘thing’ in Australia, and I should leave my British class hang-ups behind. I was accused of having a class chip on my shoulder and asked when I was going to ‘get over the class schtick’. 

But you can’t ‘get over’ being working class. It’s possible to hide a class background and learn to speak like middle/upper class people. An accumulation of educational and cultural capital can help with the passing. This means a rejection of family, friends, communities though. A class betrayal. Certainly not my intention. My working-class background has shaped me. I learnt how to survive hardship, to make the most of what you have. To always be ready to help others, to stand up for yourself and your community. My mother taught me these values. She kept us fed and clothed and kept the ‘social’ from the door. I watched her stand her ground in the DHSS office when they refused her emergency payments. She saw off bailiffs and loan sharks. She recognised who was at fault – the government, Thatcher in particular and later, all politicians who cared about making themselves richer. My mother looked after her neighbours and when she needed help, they looked after her. When I wrote my first collection of poetry, she was a big feature – a persona based on her was very important to the collection.

My working-class background is my old school, work friends, neighbours. It’s the council estate I grew up on, concrete playgrounds where I skinned my knees, the local newsagents where we bought sweets. Pubs I went to as a teenager, the street market, local caffs (cafes). Buses I rode, libraries I trawled. It’s everything. I’m proud of my working-class background. My university education and my academic job has not stopped me from being working class. I am a working-class academic. I am fortunate to now have a continuing position and earn a respectable salary, but that’s where my economic capital ends (no inheritance – my mother lived in a council flat until she died). I accumulated cultural capital as an autodidact before starting university as a mature age student. But I don’t have knowledge of the ‘classics’ like many of my middle-class colleagues. Middle-class pursuits are mostly not for me. If there is a working-class play being performed I might go see it, but I’m not interested in bourgeois theatre productions. Films are more my thing – and my love for independent, global art house cinema started off as a working-class teenager looking for cheap entertainment in central London after school (art house cinemas offered good concessions). If I go to a pub, I like one that sells Carlton Draught rather than micro-brewery craft beers. I resent paying more than $5 for a glass of wine that I don’t even like. I watch TV – lots of it. And I don’t have ‘guilty pleasures’. If I watch Love Island, it’s because I like it, not because I’m watching it ironically.

Things are changing. Not necessarily in the world of literary journals in Australia, but more widely. People are interested in class again (7). After all the years of working-class academics and writers ‘banging on’ about class, people are starting to listen. There is a growing volume of Australian fiction set in working-class communities. Books such as Peter Polities’ Down the Hume (2017), and The Pillars (2019) Luke Carman’s An Elegant Young Man (2013), Felicity Castagna’s The Incredible Here and Now (2013), Omar Musa’s Here Come the Dogs (2014), Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Lebs (2018), Tamar Chnorhokian’s The Diet Starts Monday (2014), Claire G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius (2016), Sue Williams’ Live and Let Fry: A Rusty Bore Mystery (2018) and Enza Gandolfo’s The Bridge (2018) show the ways in which class intersects with race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and religion. 

Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip won the 2019 Miles Franklin award. The 2020 Sydney Festival includes Anthem – a play centred on working class characters written by Christos Tsiolkas, Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius and Melissa Reeves. And I have a contract from a publisher to write an academic book on Australian working-class literature.

It’s hard to crack the literary journals though and in Australia there still isn’t a lot of working-class poetry appearing. It isn’t clear why this is the case, and I’ll be investigating this as part of my new research project. The working-class poets I included in my PhD, have mostly stopped writing. Cathy Young, from South Australia had one book published in 2004, but nothing since. Her partner and fellow poet Martin R. Johnson published three collections, but also stopped publishing in 2004. One of the poets who was most prolific at the time was Geoff Goodfellow (also from SA). Goodfellow last published a book in 2014, with a self-curated collection of previously published poems. He hasn’t published any new works since 2012. While I haven’t had a chance to catch up with the poets yet to ask why, it is clear that they were rarely published in Australian literary journals. Young and Johnson concentrated their efforts into publishing locally, and Goodfellow focused on publishing collections with small sympathetic presses such as Vulgar Press (now defunct) and SA Wakefield Press. Most of the other poets in my PhD published sporadically and then disappeared.

A quick survey of 2019 issues of some Australian literary journals reveals some working class poetry. Mykaela Saunders in Cordite with ‘For Cops Who Stalk Children on Houso Estates’ (8). Her poem shows how class intersects with race and gender. In ‘Those Days in the Dirt’ (9) from the same issue of Cordite – Tom Lewin’s narrator reminisces about his days as a manual labourer and the company and camaraderie found among working class men. There are some poems written about working class grandfathers, and there is also some class fetish. Ian C Smith’s ‘Sanctuary’ paints a picture of a homeless man, but the man is observed from a distance – he could be local wildlife. I haven’t come across much in Overland or Meanjin etc lately, but I need to keep digging. Melbourne poet Pi. O. has published a new epic 500 page poem, Heide with Giramondo. Pi. O.’s work has always focussed on working class life, but his obscurity means he is not often featured in the literary mainstream.

So why is working-class experience mostly absent from contemporary Australian literature? What are the reasons for the middle-class domination of the literary scenes? What is the potential impact of the lack of representation? How can this lack of representation be addressed? 

Working-class literature is important, not just because it is the literature of marginalized people, but also because it includes a diverse array of literary styles, techniques and forms. At the same time, there are some commonalities that can be identified and which mark it as belonging to its own specific genre (10). Working-class literature is therefore a rich source of writing and there are various ways that working-class literature can be analysed. This analysis can also be framed around a series of questions; how does working-class writing engage with the working-class vernacular? Is there a sense of working-class culture that runs through the works? How does this manifest? Does work (or unemployment) feature in working-class writing? How is working-class literature political? Are politics explicit in the works or embedded in representations of the everyday for working-class people? And is the diversity of the working class and working-class experience represented?

I’ve been asking these questions for a long time, and every time I encounter some working-class writing, I find myself asking them all again. I have some answers. Working-class experience is missing from contemporary Australian literature because the gatekeepers have been middle class and not interested in working-class life. This middle-class domination is enabled due to structural privileges. Middle-class people are more likely to have university degrees than their working-class counterparts, and are more likely to have degrees in the arts, and to seek work in the creative industries. A lack of representation means that working-class people are not seeing their stories told – this reads as a cultural signifier that working-class experience is not important nor a worthy subject for literature, especially poetry. To address this lack of representation requires more working-class background people in gatekeeper roles, and a willingness on the part of middle-class editors to publish working-class writing. 

To answer the questions that frame analysis of working-class writing is easy. Working-class writing employs a working-class vernacular, and poets use the colour of slang and dialect, and the rhythms of everyday speech in their work. Various elements of working-class culture run through the poetry – this includes working-class pastimes, food, popular culture and the more general culture of collectivism. Working-class poets write about work in all of its forms; manual labour, routine white-collar work. They write about precarity, about bastard bosses, unemployment, fighting Centrelink, union power and the camaraderie of work mates. Politics is embedded in working-class writing. If a poet comes from a working-class background and writes from a working-class perspective, then the poems are inherently political because they are published against the odds. And working-class writing reflects the diversity of working-class people and challenges the media representations of working-class people as white, blue collar male workers.

What would I like to see? Poetry that engages with the working-class everyday. This is poetry that doesn’t hold back, that reveals struggle, but also the positive aspects of working-class life. Writing about struggle works best when it’s been experienced first-hand, otherwise it easily turns into poverty porn. The working-class poetry I would like see is written by poets who understand how class works and how it intersects with race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, ability. This is working-class life. It is diverse. Working class people are not a homogenous group. But there are shared understandings, commonalties such as bosses who exploit, economic insecurity, the fight for decent housing, education, health care. There are differences too – white working-class people experience class discrimination, but not racism. Working-class women often find themselves on the receiving end of sexual harassment at work (and can feel powerless to report). LGBTIQ+ working-class people can feel marginalised in some working-class communities. Working-class disabled people face daily struggles due to expenses involved in accessibility. I want to see all of this in the poetry that is published in Australia. Poetry written, by, for and about working-class people. Class is in vogue again, and hopefully this interest in academic work, memoir and commentary will spill over into poetry and emerging working-class poets will feel inclined to submit their work and show through poetry the struggles faced when working class. If anyone had told that girl from the council estate that one day she would be an academic and a published poet she probably would have laughed. The more that working-class poetry is published, the more likely it is that working-class young people will see literature and art as real possibilities and worth pursuing. And so, I remain optimistic.

 
Citations

1. bell hooks points to the importance of books in working-class households as paving the way for education and the potential transformation that comes with formal education, hooks, b. (2010) Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom, New York, Routledge, p 127
2. http://www.lintonkwesijohnson.com/linton-kwesi-johnson/
3. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carol-ann-duffy
4. Hamley’s is a very famous toy shop in Central London.
5. The thesis is available online: https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/2100/615/2/02whole.pdf
6. Hope in Hell (2002), published by Five Islands Press
7. For a good introduction to Working-Class Studies, see Linkon, S. L., Russo, J. (2005) New Working-Class Studies, Ithaca, Cornell University Press. For books on working-class literature see, Zandy J. (1990) (ed.) Calling Home: Working-Class Women’s Writings, an Anthology, Rutgers University Press and Fitzgerald, A., Lauter, P. (2001) (eds), Literature, Class and Culture: An Anthology, New York, Longman, Goodridge, J., Keegan, B. (2017) A History of British Working Class Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, Coles, N., Zandy, J. (2006) American Working-Class Literature: An Anthology, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
8. http://cordite.org.au/poetry/peach/those-days-in-the-dirt/
9. http://cordite.org.au/poetry/peach/for-cops-who-stalk-children-on-houso-estates/
10.  Zandy J. (1990) (ed.) Calling Home: Working-Class Women’s Writings, an Anthology, Rutgers University Press

SARAH ATTFIELD is a poet from a working-class background. Her writing focuses on the lived experiences of working-class people (both in London, where she grew up and in Australia where she lives). She teaches creative writing in the School of Communication at UTS. She is the co-editor of the Journal of Working-Class Studies.

Damascus

by Christos Tsiolkas

Allen and Unwin

ISBN:9781760875091

Reviewed by JACK STANTON

Damascus seems to be a departure for Christos Tsiolkas. The previous novels of the celebrated Melbourne writer mostly inhabit contemporary Australia and Europe. But that being said, Damascus, as the title suggests, travels back to the life of Saul of Tarsus, or Paul the Apostle, a wrathful persecutor of Christ’s early disciples in Jerusalem who was visited by a vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus. He seems to be playing a different tune from the modern day thematics of, say, Barracuda, his last novel-length offering, which was published in 2013 and told the story of Daniel Kelly, an Ian Thorpe-tier swimmer who crumbled under the immense pressure of national pride, a book that, on the surface, bore all the scars of a potboiler. Indeed I had felt reservations about the book until I read Julieanne Lamond’s essay “The Australian Face: Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas” in Sydney Review of Books. In the review, a mostly positive, although equally measured by its long-form documentation of the complexities and shortcomings of Tsiolkas’s style, claimed that he is an

intelligent writer operating in a literary space which is, in one sense, the holy grail for novelists: he writes good books that also sell. In another sense, he has abrogated the role of the capital-L Literary writer to dance with the dreaded middlebrow.

Yet again, the trenches are drawn between literariness and the ‘dreaded middlebrow’. For me, however, this debate has a short half-life; very soon it begins to feel more like monkeys throwing poo at one another than serious, meaningful debate. But this interpretation is, as I mentioned earlier, only on the surface. If you look a little closer, Barracuda is arguably the finest example of Tsiolkas’s ability as a writer to seemingly effortlessly transgress those fluid boundaries between “literary/important” and “readable/entertaining” fiction. The split between ‘serious’ and ‘entertaining’ fiction is merely a placeholder, a crude representation of certain prejudices that many readers continue to contest and debunk. I, too, treat any kind of literary hierarchy with grave scepticism. Tsiolkas’s work is a perfect example. He has always managed to elude neat classification. His novels are literary, yes, full of complex and oftentimes controversial ideas, but also highly readable, never drawing attention to their own cleverness.

Dr Lamond, however, praises Tsiolkas’s ability to be an unaffected provocateur.

His provocations are deliberate and important. He provokes to bring things that are cast out of the national discussion back into the discussion: class, racism, drugs, desire.

Seen through this lens, Damascus appears less provocative than his earlier work. His enfant terrible status, initially bestowed with his first book, Loaded, which depicted a gay Greek Australian adolescent high on free drugs and hooking-up with self-hating homosexuals, seemed left behind, exchanged by a novelist who wanted to confront broader social and cultural problems. Maybe the terrifyingly candid child had grown up, exchanging shock and squalor for mature, wide-appealing topics.

It is also more universal—perhaps, global—than the strict Australianness of his previous novels, even Dead Europe. Damascus depicts all the signatures of Tsiolkas’s work—grotesqueness and obscenity, characters grappling with their own sense of shame, the pull of opposing ideological forces, and an underlying element of satyrical hedonism—but places them in an historical arena that resonates globally, as the epicentre of Christianity’s development into the world’s overarching system of belief. He achieves this by telling the story mostly through Saint Paul, is a classic Tsiolkas anti-hero. When we meet Saint Paul, he uses his Hebrew name, Saul, and is Christ-hating executioner who prides himself on the brutal capital punishment of heretics and disobedient slaves. By the closing pages, however, Saul has transformed into a wise, loving apostle after famously being visited by the resurrected Jesus. This major story arc intertwines with a number of first-person accounts of various secondary characters who inhabit the same,  de-stabilised and evolving world.

But perhaps the most interesting element of Tsiolkas’s novel is his own troubled relationship to its subject matter. He has always explored queer identities and the societies that surround them. While Damascus shows sodomites gallivanting from slave-boy to slave-boy, the idea of homosexuality, as a way of being, or perhaps I should say as an independent sexual identity, remains unspoken—an amorphous, shameful concept. As an adolescent, Tsiolkas was estranged by the famous scriptures against homosexuality in Saint Paul’s first letter to Corinthians. In the author’s note, he writes, “I could not reconcile my Christian faith with the imperative to honour my own sexuality and independence, and so I became a non-believer.” Anyone with migrant parents who have strong ties to their faith will understand that abandoning belief is no light matter. The passage in question is 1 Corinthians, 6, 9-10, reproduced here from the NIV Bible:

Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolators nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men (10) nor thieves nor the greedy nor the drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

Digging a little deeper into the original greek reveals that the phrase “men who have sex with men” derives from the word arsenokoitai, ‘arsen’ meaning man’ and ‘koitai’ meaning ‘bed’. So literally, ‘men who bed with men’. It becomes clear, then, that the dominance of protagonists in a crisis of identity, torn between the unreconcilable forces of two conflicting ideologies, mirrors Tsiolkas’s own journey of self-discovery. Seen this way, Damascus is hardly a departure at all; rather, it’s an historical expansion of the prevailing themes of pretty much all his fiction, and the result is an intensely readable journey through the ancient world.

Tsiolkas’s Roman Empire is a hellish place, a Hiernonymous Borsch painting come to life, violent, merciless, and cruel—ripe territory for the bloom of Christianity’s teachings. The prologue begins with Saul observing a woman accused of adultery being stoned to death, repeating Jesus’s famous line, “If you are without sin, then case your stone.” From there, we descend into a goulash of blood, guts, and debauchery: unwanted daughters are murdered upon birth; slaves and soldiers dismember one another for sport in the gladiator arena; and I think immediately of the colourless landscape of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as a kind of stylistic brother to Damascus’s world of gore and blood-thirst.

Nearly every page involves the murder, torture, or sexual violations of characters, either as a backdrop or within the immediate drama. In this way, it is, arguably, a true narrativising of the Old Testament. One chapter opens with a many-page, stream-of-consciousness sentence from the perspective of a peripheral character, Vrasas, “Drinking the blood that is pouring over us and it froths and spills from our mouths . . . we will not allow ourselves to spit to waste even a drop of this life for it would be ill-fortuned it would betray the sun the fire The God.” Christianity is thus seen as a revolutionary break from the values of a violent and chaotic world that seemed to have reached a dead-end (literally and figuratively). “Their foul gods know lust and greet and torture and death but they do not know justice,” Tsiolkas writes. “Our God gives us truth . . . a truth that holds for everyone, whether they be master or slave, rich or poor, man or woman, stranger or Jew.”

For contemporary readers, Tsiolkas’s novel does affirm some hopeful Christian mantras in an age where insincerity and ideological deflection continue to reign supreme. Or, in Tsiolkas’s words, “if we do not have faith that the Lord truly knows our suffering, we cannot believe inn a better world to come.” In the author’s note, Tsiolkas speaks to this desire for sincerity directly: “I have wrestled with Paul, wanting both to honour the great universal truths that I find compelling in his interpretation of Jesus’s words and life, but also to question the oppression and hypocrisy of the Churches that claim to be founded on these very same words,” he writes.

The book is essentially about hope, transgression, and the radical experience of shame. These sincere understandings, as Tsiolkas points out, may not immediately hit a sympathetic chord for readers in our secular age. “We might scoff at such an understanding,” he writes, but “we must also acknowledge how it was a promise that gave hope to the most destitute and despised in an often cruel and unforgiving world.” There’s very clearly and underlying parallel between Tsiolkas’s experience of coming-out as a gay man and Paul’s adoption of Christianity. This is most evident in the iconic moment of conversion, struck blind for three days after seeing a vision of Christ. This point, which occurs roughly mid-way through the book, shifts its overall tone, and introduces its treatment of shame.

Hope for the underdogs—yet another of Tsiolkas’s favoured tunes. Here, we see it in Christianity’s egalitarianism, of the kingdom of God as the great equaliser of all people on Earth. The revolutionary power of faith is depicted throughout the novel as a kind of light, glimpsed through the darkness. It is this source of light that empowers slaves and the poor and the condemned to believe in their redemption from a world that offers them none.

They all grasp for the light, trying to snatch parts of it, to hold it in their hands; but the light is as water, it runs through their fingers—but unlike water, it doesn’t drain and vanish, it grows and amplifies: it is all around but can never be grasped. It is everywhere.

It’s this extra-dimension of poetry and duplicity that underlies Damascus that elevates it from a simple stylistic excursion into historical fiction to a continuity of the themes and concerns that have dominated Tsiolkas’s writing since Loaded. There is something heartening about his good old novelist sensibilities, too. By that I mean, the book is full immersion; he’s a classicist. Although I’ve spent this review highlighting some of the subtexts and the crossovers between life and fiction, they’re buried in the tex. Never does the author interject, or rupture the dream. There is a rising popularity in contemporary writing to ensure that the novel ‘says’ something about society, identity, or political thinking. Tsiolkas has never ‘said’ per se, but always ‘explored’ what it means to be human.

What the book really nails is its representation of why Christianity became a earth-shattering revolution in the first hundred years A.D. Near the end of the book, Tsiolkas captures crucifixion-as-symbol in the face of injustice. Contemporary readers may very well forget (and Tsiolkas reminds us throughout) that crucifixion was historically a painful, humiliating and gruesome public affair; its intention was to demean and torture, originally punishment only for slaves. That is why many “would risk the violence of thieves and rapists rather than submit to the impossibility of a crucified and humble saviour”; at the time, a lowly crucified ‘God’ was contrary to the pre-dominant ideals of what God entailed. But Jesus’s crucifixion resonated as a symbol of humanity. In this one particular scene, Saul is speaking to a group of lower-class Romans about the crucifixion of Christ when suddenly a man shouts out the name of his son. “And one by one they begin to stand. A man calls out the name of his brother, a father of his son, another father moans and declares: ‘My son and his son.’”

Whether or not Tsiolkas has managed to accomplish his goal, to reconcile his Christian faith with his sexuality, remains unseen. But his wrestling with Paul’s teachings are evident upon every page, creating a compelling interpretation of Jesus’s word and life that also questions “the oppression and hypocrisy of the Churches that claim to be founded on these very same words.”

Jack Cameron Stanton is a writer from Sydney. His work can be found in The Australian, Sydney Review of Books, Sydney Morning Herald, Southerly, Overland, Sweatshop, The Lifted Brow, and Mascara Literary Review, among others.

Flood Damages

by Eunice Andrada

Giramondo

ISBN: 978-1-925336-66-5

Reviewed by DARLENE SOBERANO

In her debut poetry collection, Flood Damages, Eunice Andrada never explicitly mentions the words, ‘New South Wales.’ Nor does she name ‘Australia’ in any of the 37 poems.

She opts for restraint, often using the word ‘here’ as a substitute for the name of a place. This can be seen in poems such as ‘autopsy’: ‘I complain about the weather here, / how the cold leaves my knuckles parched’; and in ‘Marcos conducts my allergy test’: ‘Maybe he grew up here and my accent isn’t quite / right yet, so he can’t understand me’. I am reminded of André Aciman’s essay, Parallax. Aciman details his ‘dreaming’ of Europe while living in Egypt and he declares, ‘Part of me didn’t come with me. Part of me isn’t with me, is never with me’. He eventually comes to this conclusion: ‘I am elsewhere’. For Andrada’s speaker, the exact place isn’t as important as the fact that it is elsewhere; that it is not the Philippines.

The most explicit name for ‘Australia’ I find in Flood Damages is in ‘alternate texts on my aunt’s lightening cream’: ‘o oceania your body an apartment block / cracked under the spanish the british the / americans the japanese the americans’. Here, even, Australia is referred to within the context of a group. Restraint as technique in poetry can often lead to a tepid vagueness, the poet invulnerable and hiding in the text. In Andrada’s hands, restraint is transformed into a compelling exploration of absence. By omitting Australia, Andrada leaves space for memories and dreams of the Philippines to fill in.

In ‘(because I am a daughter) of diaspora’, Andrada writes in water images to capture the sensory experience of moving through the Philippines—a country made up of over 7,000 islands. Water, for the poem’s speaker, becomes the sensory experiences through which all associations flow, even if she is not there. The ‘daughter of diaspora’ is ‘by default – / an open sea’, whose mother is shamed in their not-Philippine country; ‘They convince my mother / her voice is a selfish tide, / claiming words that are not meant / for her’. The ‘carcass of ocean’ makes ‘ragdolls’ of the speaker and her mother’s ‘foreign limbs’, an image that is immediately followed by this declaration: ‘In the end / our brown skin / married to seabed’. Here, water is a force that drowns as much as it is a force capable of returning the speaker home.

Most Filipinx immigrants flee the Philippines in search of ‘a better life’. Andrada offers two main explanations in Flood Damages: dictatorship (‘Marcos conducts my allergy test’) and displacement due to climate damage.

In ‘(because I am a daughter) of diaspora’, Andrada’s speaker, having fled the Philippines, looks back and discovers the loss of belonging, which is marked by the loss of language:

‘When I return to the storm
of my islands
with a belly full of first world,
I wrangle the language I grew up with
yet still have to rehearse’.

A ‘man in rags’ stops the speaker and asks her ‘in practiced English’ a question: ‘Where are you going?’ This question makes the speaker want to plead to him, ‘We are the same. / Pareho lnag po tayo’. Frantz Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks that ‘mastery of language affords remarkable power’. In ‘(because I am a daughter) of diaspora’, the speaker is sensitive to the absence of language and therefore the absence of power. The difference between ‘the man in rags’ and Andrada’s speaker is so heightened that the speaker is made aware of even ‘the dollars in [her] wallet’—paper money, which is supposedly quiet, yet the speaker can hear them ‘sing another anthem’.

In contrast, Andrada examines communication between mother and daughter in the poem, ‘rearrangement’. In ‘rearrangement’, Andrada peers at the gap between two languages, Tagalog and English, and at two figures who each have different masteries of both of these languages. The mother pronounces ‘too hot’ as ‘too hat’, says ‘open the lights’ instead of ‘turn on the lights’. In contrast, the speaker struggles to say ‘hinihingal’, a word that means, ‘to be gasping’. ‘Hinihingal’ is pronounced in such a way that mimics a gasp; it is almost an onomatopeia. When the speaker ‘disfigures the [word] in [her] mouth’, it is struggle upon struggle; the speaker gasps twice. When the speaker and her mother are in conversation with one another, they constantly ‘mistranslate’ their words and phrases. Mistranslation should expand the gaps between mother and daughter. For Andrada, it is instead a site of wonder: ‘what careful, imperfect truths / we have birthed in this prose of error / and say it again, please’. There is no gap. When they speak, they are ‘saturating one language with another’.

Andrada achieves a similar effect in ‘harbour’. She writes: ‘Pasa sounds like the word / for soaked’. Pasa means bruise; the word it ‘sounds like’ is basa, which can also mean to read, depending on the way it is said. In other words, if there were no difference in the way that soaked and read were conjugated in Tagalog, to read could also mean to make wet. My personal grasp of Tagalog is limited. It is not a language of my present; it is the language of my childhood, with its psychic tendrils touching everything. In my particular linguistic landscape, basa is wetter than soaked; pasa is said quickly, so it is less distressing than bruise. The quickness of pasa also imitates the way in which the bruise might have been formed—object colliding with body. In this way, pasa can almost sound like a verb.

Fanon also wrote in Black Skin, White Masks: ‘To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization’. Language is a tool with which we learn the stories of our lives and our histories before we were possible. The possibility of a voice, saying, This is where we lived. This is where home is. It will always be here. This is how we fell in love. This is why we left each other. This is how we appear human to one another, which is why the forced absence of a home, a site of history, is dehumanising.

The question, ‘Where are you from?’ is a question that many immigrants encounter anywhere—everywhere. A train, a bar, a classroom. In her poem titled, ‘where are you from?’, Andrada answers the question uniquely in two lines:

‘a woman’s ribs / cheating grandfathers /
the confession box / floodwater’.

Here, Andrada writes a complete and complex personal narrative with her first three answers. The tension between them are heightened by virgules. Each virgule reveals the building frustration of the speaker. Andrada ends ‘where are you from?’ with the answer, ‘floodwater’, a resounding word among sentences of the personal. This emphasis works as a reminder that the Philippines is a country that endures severe damage from typhoons year after year. Homes have been drowned, lives have been lost, important family artefacts have dissolved in water. Andrada’s poem, ‘photo album’, then, reads as a firm artefact against erasure—and yet, it is a poem full of physical silence. In it, the speaker imagines many different lives. She imagines her mother’s life in other countries. She is away working as an Overseas Filipino Worker. ‘photo album’ is constructed with sprawling white space, as if silence is Andrada’s true form and language is the failure. Language fails because it is not an alternative to the mother’s presence in the speaker’s life. The speaker’s yearning is so wild that, in her imagination, cities and bodies become equally large: ‘Abu Dhabi, 2009’ and ‘Singapore, 2001’ are captions just as, ‘across ribs, 1998’, ‘on subject’s cheeks (seen above), August’, and ‘pupils, March’ are captions. Similarly, in ‘soft departure’, Andrada constructs a space between every line as such:

‘earlier that day
she mashes chicken liver
into sliced bread
picks us up from school
commits no crimes’.

Viktor Shklovsky once wrote that ‘art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony’—that is, to defamiliarise the reader out of habitualisation, which can ‘[devour] work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war’, and which can, as Shklovsky hints, help to normalise daily oppression. To make the stone stony is to undo the damage of habitualisation. Andrada never writes the word ‘deportation’ in ‘soft departure’. She writes around it, defamiliarises it, refuses to make it another overlooked part of daily life. There is ineffable grief within the many absences in this poem. It is necessary for language to fail, here, so that its failure may leave room for the mother’s return.

Absence in Flood Damages is striking because the book is a physical item. It can be found at a chain bookstore, like Dymocks. It can be found at independent bookstores, like Better Read than Dead, or Hill of Content. It has been shortlisted for the Victorian Premier Literary Award for Poetry in 2019, it won the Anne Elder Award in 2018. Flood Damages is a sizeable presence in the world. It is an artefact that floods cannot destroy. And in it, Andrada tells her many histories—personal, family, country—with lush, specific detail. It is an artefact against forgetting that brown immigrants and their brown families are people. In Flood Damages, that which is human in immigrant families cannot be taken away, despite all efforts to do so. For Andrada, cruelty is decidedly not the point, but its opposite: a tenderness that endures across oceans.

References

Aciman, André. André Aciman: Parallax. FSG Work in Progress, https://fsgworkinprogress.com/2011/10/13/andre-aciman-parallax/.
Andrada, Eunice. Flood Damages. Giramondo Publishing Company, 2018.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Pluto Press, 1986.
Shklovsky, Victor. Art as Technique. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, 1917.

DARLENE SILVA SOBERANO is a Filipino poet. Their work has appeared in Mascara Literary Review, Australian Poetry, and Cordite Poetry Review. They tweet from @DLRNSLVSBRN

Sweatshop Women: Volume One

Ed. Winnie Dunn

Sweatshop

Reviewed by MAGAN MAGAN
 
 
 
What does it look like to tell your own story about love, faith, home and history? It looks like a collection of prose and poetry titled Sweatshop Women written by women from Indigenous, migrant and refugee backgrounds. Writers who courageously tackle difficult themes that demand of us our attention. Sweatshop Women are a collective of new writers based in Western Sydney that was established in 2018 to support women from Indigenous and culturally diverse backgrounds. The collection showcases stories from writers who show us what it means to reclaim a narrative that was taken from them. The powerfully relevant collection is reminder of the importance for a community to come together to tell their own stories away from the lens of the powerful. It is a reminder to resist the objectification of marginalisation. The stories published in the anthology are unsurprisingly as diverse as the authors themselves. The identity of the writers range from countries that border the Indian Ocean, South East Asia, South Central Asia, East Asia, West Africa, East Africa, South America, South Central Asia, including writers who are native to Polynesia, Indigenous, and African American. The critically diverse writers illustrate their understanding about the human condition represented in the stories through prose and poetry – crafting stories that are quiet often untold or deemed unimportant.

Sweatshop Women is a collection fundamentally exploring time whilst simultaneously using time as a necessary tool to illustrate the impact of otherness. The writers centralise the themes of their stories as redemptive subjects and do not fear from speaking truth to power. They humanise the characters in their worlds. They give them a name and a voice. In do so, they hold true to the voice of home and history as oppositional subjects with their own modes of existing in the world. As with any collection that is atttuned to the pulse of the subject, it witnesses untold worlds. The writers do not shy away from writing about loss as loss is indeed as much a part of life as joy is. The collection delves into the reality of the capacity of love to exist despite what it means to be a minority in Australia. This reality gives birth to a kind of exile.

The collection begins with a compelling story titled ‘Boragee’, written by Phoebe Grainer that holds Indigenous self-determination on the unceded land of Australia at its core. What does it mean for Australia to acknowledge it’s black history, much less a black history filled with the resistance and pain of the foremothers of country?
‘Yalla, here in buna I will have my child. I scream. There is no one here to hear but Boogagee. My booroo laying underneath like a stone, heavy and swollen. Soon I will turn this buna to blood, blood of ngyu and the woman who brought life, yalla, yallanya buna’.

Despite class playing a critical role in the material life of many individuals, it is often a subject ignored. While working class people create the wealth of a society, working class people do not benefit from their contribution. Class is a social, economic and political system that divides groups based on their class status. Given that an individual’s proximity to power determines their agency to exercise self-expression and since class as a category plays a fundamental role in a person’s life, how does a person protect their sense of self-expression from the designed limitation of class subjugation? As with Ghanaian-Australian writer Jessica Wendy Mensah, she writes a poem that pulls out the visceral feeling of what it means to be of the working class.

‘NO WORK! NO BUSY!
Peace cleaned the trash
spewing black rain’.

The story of the poem invokes a level of self-actualisation for working class people as Wendy articulates the plight of the working class. What does it mean to move towards empowerment? It means one must speak the truth about their context and connect with their own authenticity and give voice to areas of the world, experience in the world that are hidden as Jessica Wendy Mensah does in her poem:

‘FUCK THEM!
Yoruba packaged their empty
Souls into cubed boxes’

I can’t help but think about James Baldwin when he said ‘The Victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat’. The brilliance in Wendy’s poem is in its ability to show the destructive nature of class all the while providing a sociological imagination to permit resistance.

The nuance required to capture complicated relationships that exist within a context inundated with ignorance is a difficult lived reality to capture. Much of that difficulty lies in the relationships between the people who are marginalised as a result of their cultural background that is politicised. How does one capture the relationship between an immigrant child and their parents? How does one capture the tensions that are born out of a context that place them (migrants) under patrol? In ‘This Ain’t Bankstown’ Aisha El-Cheikh write what it’s like being othered based on ones hyper-visible identity, after visiting her sons future high school. ‘My first born will start year 7 next year. A good school means a good life’. The writer speaks to the experience of being on fringe as ‘little Drew Barrymore yells out and when I look back in her direction, I notice that a lot of the adults here tonight are starring at me too. I can feel the end of my hijab unfolding as if their stares have pulled the pins out’.

The potency of the collection is in its ability to create understanding about worlds that are invisible. The way in which the writers give meaning to the experiences of the characters and of how realism is used by making visible the hidden truths and their essences in the world gives room to posibility. The stories make possible the transformative process to be able to name an experience. In ‘A Curse And A Prayer’ Naima Ibrahim story is example of how ones own subjectivity can be understood as she writes about a mothering struggling to with her son:

‘Hamid held my hands and there were a few seconds of silence as I took a deep breath. Hamid rose from his chair and walked to his room, finally taking his adidas shoes off. There was a gentle lock. And soon after, just finally, I could hear the lowered sound of rap music playing. I sighed, buried my face into my hands and began praying again’.

The collection highlights the importance of a community to tell their own stories. The power of telling ones own stories fosters connection to the self as well as a connection to a force bigger than the individual. The struggle for self-determination through story telling is undoubtedly a fight about love as shown through Sweatshop Women, a collection of stories taking concerted steps to put stories about marginalised people on the map, with all its complexities.

‘Here in the inner-west, I can hear the swoosh-hiss
of compression brakes and beep-beep-beeps
of mothers on school run, shiny in their urban four-wheel drives’.

– Gayatri Nair

MAGAN MAGAN is a writer and poet based in Melbourne. He holds a Creative Writing Degree from Victoria University. Magan was a 2018 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow and a co editor of the Black Inc anthology Growing Up African In Australia (Black Inc, 2019) and The 2019 Volume 7 of the Australian Poetry Anthology.

Sleep

By Catherine Cole

ISBN:978 1 76080 092 5

UWA Publishing

Reviewed by Julie Keys
 
 

‘Will You forgive me?’ Monica asks her daughter, Ruth, in the opening paragraph of Sleep.
‘Forgive?’ I thought. What is there to forgive?’ (1)

As a child Ruth does not understand the angst behind her mother’s question and is dismissive of it. The memory, however, leaves an indelible mark, one of many that resurfaces as she tries to understand her mother’s life and her death.

Ruth is seventeen and a schoolgirl when she meets the elderly French artist, Harry, in a café in London. There is a bond, a recognition of similarity in one another as they converse. Both have experienced trauma and loss. Ruth’s mother has died, and Harry grew up in Paris before and during its occupation in World War II. It is in sharing their stories that a friendship is formed.
Ruth and Harry’s tales intertwine. Author Catherine Cole takes us back to Harry’s childhood in Paris, to the quirks and allure of life beside the Canal St Martin. We hear the voice of his mother calling him from a fourth-floor window. There is his aunt’s cello, his fascinating and vibrant twin cousins. We witness the exact moment Harry stands beside his father observing a painting and decides he will become an artist. This comfortable and contented life sits alongside a shifting political climate. Some ignore the changes but the more vigilant escape Paris and France while they have the chance.

Like Harry, Ruth talks about her family. The resilience of her sister Antoinette and her father, family outings, the sleep therapy that had been the treatment of choice for her mother’s depression as a young woman, and the mother she knew with her increasing propensity for sleep: ‘She’d begun to sleep anywhere: at the kitchen table, on a blanket in the garden, on any one of our beds’ (133).

Trauma, loss and shared memories are not new subjects for Cole. The author of nine books, her work reflects a range of interests and eclectic skills that includes fiction, non-fiction, memoir, literary, crime and short stories. Sleep is an extension of the themes of love, migration, forgiveness and refuge first explored in her short story collection, Seabirds Crying in the Harbour Dark (2017), shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2018. Just as the impact of an elderly artist in the life of an up and coming student was initially examined in the author’s memoir of her friendship with A.D. Hope in The Poet Who Forgot (2008).

Skill and experience are put to the test in Sleep as Cole delves not only into the complexities of these issues but steers away from a traditional plotline – a choice that highlights the novel’s intricate themes and serves the narrative well. This is Ruth’s version of events, her recollections. She narrates the story from a present-day visit with her Great Aunt Elsie and from the safe haven of the Yorkshire Dales. The plot emerges via a kaleidoscope of memories, beautifully rendered passages that draw the reader into each moment as the story finds its shape and unfolds.

Elsie is a natural counterpoint to the memories that consume her niece. She is lucid, sharply outlined, rooted in practicality, a contrast to Ruth’s mother Monica and her torpid life. Elsie has her own memories of Monica, revealing previously unknown layers to Ruth. She moves around her house and Ruth’s life ‘setting things to rights’(32). There are pots of tea, the smell of lavender, stories about the war and the depression. She bids Ruth not to spend her time on Harry’s stories at the expense of her own and warns, as her mother once warned her to ‘be careful what you remember and when’ (33).

Cole brings a familiarity to the settings – London, pre-war Paris, and the Yorkshire Dales – and is tender in her portrayal of Monica, ‘a shadowy figure behind the door, a lump of sadness on the battered couch, a pair of long white feet under a red and purple hippie skirt. Hair across her face, she weaves, moans’ (161). But Sleep does not always follow a comfortable line. As a reader, I felt unsettled over Ruth and Harry’s meeting. Was it really the result of chance? There was also some discomfort in observing Ruth and her growing obsession with unravelling Monica’s past as she tries to forage out those who might bear some responsibility. As in life, nothing is straight forward and moments of ill ease provide fuel for reflection.

Harry reminds us that despite trauma there is the possibility of resolution. For him art is the healing salve, the restorative that has provided some balance to what has happened in his life: ‘Art allows us to make something lovely of self-delusion and pathos and longing and fear.’ (105). Harry is his most persuasive as he encourages Ruth to find the art in her own life. The conversation between the older Harry and the younger Ruth who equate with the past and the present, threads its way through the narrative debating the conundrums. Can we always forgive regardless of the circumstances and is consolation a worthy alternative to justice?

Harry argues that; ‘You must forgive. Revenge hurts only those who desire it’ (63), all the while understanding that it is Ruth’s decision to make.

In her acknowledgments Cole describes Sleep as ‘a generational conversation about art and loss [that] speaks also of the need to ensure that we learn from history by understanding how easily past horrors can resurface while we sleep or turn a blind eye.’ (246). In this sense Sleep is a timely novel that extends beyond the last page as we ponder the shifts in the world around us and contemplate how our own somnolence has contributed to the social, environmental and political catastrophes that to some degree we now live with and have come to accept.
 

JULIE KEYS has recently completed a PhD in Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong. Her Debut Novel The Artist’s Portrait was shortlisted for the Richell Prize for Emerging Writers in 2017 and published by Hachette in 2019.

Yellow City

by Ellena Savage

The Atlas Review

Reviewed by ADELE DUMONT

Yellow City charts Ellena Savage’s travels in Lisbon, a city she returned to having experienced an assault there eleven years prior. Framed as a set of journal entries spanning three weeks in 2017, the chapbook records the author’s attempts to locate the archived court files pertaining to this crime. Savage is a kind of detective in her own case: accompanied by Dom, her lover-slash-sidekick, she navigates the cobbled footpaths and the local bureaucracy.

Savage’s younger, gap-year self-will be recognisable to many readers: her sense of ease in feeling she ‘could talk to any person in the world’; her characteristically Australian perspective of Europe as a collection of cities to be ’stepped through’; a sense that the future (or even a single night out) is ripe with serendipitous possibility.

‘I had fast learned how to sleep in any number of positions: between the farts and fucks and snores of adolescent adults in hostels; on a row of couch cushions laid out by earnest Belgian students on their Erasmus year, or with my head resting on the shoulder of a fleshy Brazilian on an overnight bus.’ (p.5)

And Savage’s coming-of-age will be deeply familiar to many female readers, where growing up is understood to involve a contraction of the self; a process of learning not to trust: ‘…the fantasy that things are somehow safe, which you need to have if you are to do anything at all, had been pulled right out from under me.’ (p.22)

The journal format, with its exact dates punctuating the text, suggests that this is an unmediated, authoritative account of the writer’s firsthand experience as it unfolds from one day to the next. And yet, very early on, Savage disrupts her own journal-entry voice:

I was a general, all-purpose, adaptable person. All my unrealised potential suggested that I might become exactly like any one of the people I encountered.
– In becoming specific, narrower, more difficult, you, you don’t have much left to give.
-But it’s true. We dress the same, she and I. And we didn’t get any better. (pp.5-6)

Such interjections persist throughout Yellow City. Reminiscent of a Greek chorus commentary, they seem to represent facets of Savage’s own mind; self doubting and self-excoriating. The way they jut into the story is unsteadying. You and I and she and we here all seem to refer back to the one person. Can I only ever denote someone in their present form, and if so, how many third person past selves do we each possess? What can the reader hold onto here, if even subject pronouns are this slippery? In prompting the reader to ask these sorts of questions, from the outset Savage undoes any illusion that her ‘I’ is delivering a cohesive, chronological narrative.

Throughout Yellow City, Savage alerts us not only to language’s slipperiness, but also its power to mask the truth. Words here cannot be trusted, and especially not the official kind. While ostensibly in search of documentation, she knows that ultimately her efforts are futile since the files have ‘absolutely no meaning’. She puts off calling the police, wanting to ‘preserve the self’ she is used to living with and not wanting to know the ‘words she gave’ them. Tellingly, even her own name has been mis-spelled in the official records. She provides us, verbatim, an email home in which she assures her brother that ‘it’s all over’ and that ‘apart from all that, I’m fine’. But of course it turns out that not even these words (her own, and fresh from the time in question) contain much truth.

Along with language, memory, too, is depicted as fallible and unstable. At the police line-up she describes her own memory as ‘altered… amorphous…composite’. The particulars of the crime; what she drank on the night in question; the location of the apartment where she was attacked; the appearance of her assailants, are hazy. One detail she does recall is the ‘skin-tight’ jeans she was wearing. Though Savage never spells it out, we can imagine that it is these kinds of details (or lack of) which a court would fixate on, and which are routinely used to undermine a victim’s credibility. Lucia Osborne-Crowley, reflecting on her attempts to write about her own abuse, talks about her discomfort with the gaps and inconsistencies in her memories since these ‘could look to readers a lot like lies’. But Osborne-Crowley and Savage each succeed in resisting any urge to inject consistency or clarity where there is none. Osborne-Crowley writes:

After months of gruelling work, I had some details. I had pieced some parts of this memory back together. It was terrifying. It was exhausting. It was necessary. I finally have the contours of my story, and I have written it down. I have tamed it as best I could. What I now know about this memory is enough. It is horrifying enough. It is detailed enough. It is enough.

Reading Yellow City and hence newly attuned to the workings of my own memory, I am dismayed to see just how unreliable it is. I believe I am reading Savage’s words attentively, and yet when it comes to piecing together this review, I need to keep checking that I’m not mixing up fragments of Ellena’s narrative with that of Coetzee’s Disgrace, which I am reading simultaneously, and which also contains sexual violence. Even with their starkly different contexts I find bits of the two stories becoming tangled together. I am reminded too, of an interview I saw Emily Maguire give about her novel, An Isolated Incident. In writing the rape and murder of a young woman, Maguire very consciously omits any gratuitous detail whatsoever. And yet, readers when discussing the story with her are often convinced of one or another detail, which Maguire knows for a fact does not appear anywhere in her book. I can’t recall exactly how Maguire explained this phenomenon – my memory fails me – but it was something to do with us humans being uncomfortable with unknowns; our minds leaping to fill in any gaps.

If language and memory are unstable, Yellow City seems to suggest that the body holds some deeper truth. For all her probing intellect, Savage’s own physicality is hyper present: her itchy legs; the hot slipperiness of her period; the acid in her belly. We can in fact map how profoundly the attack has impacted her through the details she reveals to us of her body. Her younger self has an ease in her own skin; we are told she falls asleep on stranger’s shoulders. In contrast, her present self carries the marks of trauma: there is tension in her gut; tears threatening to burst forth; urges to run. So even though intellectually Savage believed she had ‘recovered’, her body tells us (and her) a different story. It possesses what she calls ‘flesh knowledge’; memory is ‘held’ in her skin. The body is keeping score.

What struck me, too, in Savage’s writing is the absence of a certain kind of lexicon, of the sort that proliferates in media testimonies relating to sexual assault. Not once, for instance, does Savage use the terms ‘victim’ or ‘survivor’ or ‘perpetrator’. She describes scenes which a modern reader might quickly label a kind of ‘triggering’ or a ‘panic attack’ or a ‘post-traumatic response’ and yet that language would feel oddly out-of-place here. When she does at one point refer to her ‘trauma’ it is only to point out that she’d never before conceived of her experience in this way.

At the heart of Yellow City is Savage’s struggle to find her own words for this thing that has befallen her, this thing that reverberates through her life. She grapples with what to call the attack itself, introducing it first simply as ‘it’ and then turning over multiple possibilities: an ‘almost-rape’; an ‘attempt’, a ‘scare’. Rita Bullwinkel says Savage ‘translates the memory of violence’ into language.’ The choice of verb ’translates’ is apt here, implying as it does that memory (however imperfect) is the original source, of which language is only an approximation at best. When Savage does try to put the thing into her own terms – ‘an encounter during which my flesh remembered the possibility of a violent death’… [which] threw a girl’s sense of being into chaos’ – it feels to me a kind of reclaiming. Even if she cannot hope to find answers in the court documents, it feels to me that she is finding it in language. Her grappling never feels futile.

What keeps me returning to Savage’s writing again and again is above all her voice: intimate, embodied, sparklingly-smart, and at moments flat-out hilarious. The experience of reading Yellow City is not to feel defeated by language’s fallibility or its imprecision, but to be newly excited about its possibilities, for in Savage’s hands language is alive and ablaze.
 
 
Citations
Savage E, 2019, Yellow City, TAR Chapbook Series.
Osborne-Crowley L, 2019, ‘Write what you want to forget’, Bookanista.
Maguire E, 2016, Interview at St Albans Writers’ Festival.
Bullwinkel R, 2019, https://www.theatlasreview.com/store/yellow-city-by-ellena-savage

Room for a Stranger

by Melanie Cheng

TEXT publishing

Two strangers from completely different backgrounds with seemingly little in common thrown together, it’s a common enough set up for a novel. But in Room for A Stranger, Melanie Cheng uses that premise exceptionally well to create an undeniably pleasurable read, rich in texture and feeling.

Room For A Stranger is Cheng’s debut novel, following up from her acclaimed short story collection Australia Day, the 2018 winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction. 

The novel opens with Meg, an elderly woman, feeling vulnerable after an encounter with an intruder in her backyard. She is convinced now that ‘every black pane of glass concealed a lurking predator’ (4). With only her African grey parrot, Atticus, for company, she is drawn to a homeshare program to regain some feeling of control. So Andy, an international student from Hong Kong, moves into her suburban home. 

With both ill at ease, it is almost immediately obvious that it won’t be a smooth melding of lives.  Cheng deftly paints the story of how they connect and the cross-cultural and cross-generational challenges to that process. Communication, food and hygiene are just some of the points of difference that make it harder for the pair to understand each other. 

The juxtaposition of chapters focusing on each protagonist’s perspective allows their different world views to be contrasted and compared.  Meg faces the challenges of ageing, both physical and mental, while at the same time exploring what it means to date in later life. Andy is weighed down by the dual pressures of wanting to succeed in his studies and live up to his family’s expectations, while also hoping to gain the attention of female classmate, Kiko. 

The most minute details of suburban Melbourne life give the setting extra depth, with Andy’s first observations of his new neighbourhood centring around ‘the smell of damp leaves, burnt toast and decomposing vegetables.’ (11) Through Meg’s eyes, the reader sees too how the suburb has evolved within her lifespan:

‘The suburb had changed so much since she and Jillian were kids, back when they could buy sixpence-worth of their favourite lollies- freckles and snakes- from the milk bar.  Now the main street boasted an organic food store, a nail salon and a pilates studio with a terrible name : Keeping Karm. Every week Anne declared how much the suburb had evolved – as if rather than a postcode, it was some kind of living, breathing organism.’ (26)

A great attention to detail and astute observations breathe an extra level of complexity into the novel. Smell in particular plays a big role, from Andy wondering what Kiko might smell like ‘something citrusy, he imagined, something like freshly peeled mandarins’ (35) to the scent of oil, ginger and spring onions coming from the fast food restaurant where Andy meets Kanbei, who will sit Andy’s exam for the sum of $3000. At one stage, Andy, speaking to Meg, even spells it out for the reader, telling her that the part of the brain responsible for smell ‘connects directly to the memory centre.’ (94)

Cheng doesn’t shy away from racism, portraying clearly the kind of insidious everyday discrimination that is instantly recognisable for how true it rings to Australian life. An incident on a tram where a man shouts anti-Asian slurs is one such moment but  ‘after three stops people were chatting again as if nothing happened. Only the Chinese students remained shaken- theirs heads hanging, their shoulders collapsed, their chests caving inwards.’ (81)  As a counterpoint to the overt racism of this incident is in the overly jocular but ultimately patronising nature of comments by Patrick, Meg’s paramour, who talks to Andy about how he sees Hong Kong as having ‘done well’ and that it was ‘in large part because of the British.’ (114) Assumptions made by Meg’s friends about her new house guest also serve to highlight racial stereotypes as Anne guesses that Andy is ‘studious, I bet… They always are.’ (30)

Food plays a large role in the book, highlighting key differences in characters’ lives and experience and also acting as a touchstone for cultural backgrounds. From the pineapple upside-down cake Meg makes for Andy’s birthday to Patrick’s recount of scones at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong with rose-petal jam to Andy taking Meg for dinner in Chinatown, mentions of food usually convey something about one or more characters’ experiences and world view.   

Cheng deals with complex issues with aplomb, including navigating mental health carefully. The reader learns of Andy’s mother’s own postnatal depression before gradually getting a picture of Andy’s own anxieties and the ‘exhaustion of being himself. ‘ (155). Early in the novel, Andy has a moment of being jealous of the blanket over Atticus’ cage, wishing ‘someone would smother the endless chatter of his brain with a big black sheet.’ (23). Even the appearance during a tram trip of ‘a man with leaves in his hair talking loudly to an invisible companion.’ (153), draws attention to nuances in mental state, highlighting the complexities of the very concept of mental wellbeing. 

Disability too is explored, through Meg’s recollections of late sister Helen, a paraplegic since an accident as a child. Tied up in these memories is Meg’s grief which for years after Helen’s death came in ‘paroxysms of sorrow that would arrive without warning, like a strike to the head from an unseen stalker.’ (68). Through such memories of grief, a funeral of a friend and even Meg’s own ageing process, the ideas of death and loss permeate the novel. They are tied up with the very concept of what illness means, as Meg tries to ignore warning signs while Andy struggles with his own decline in health. 

Room For A Stranger is a novel which deftly paints a picture of the modern Australia known by so many; a miasmas of culture and world views.  It’s a page turner of a book, an engrossing, easy read, but one with many layers of flavour and depth. With its accessible style, it’s not hard to imagine it becoming a common book club pick within coming years, and hopefully one that helps readers consider a wider range of perspectives and how two people can come at a situation with very different takes depending on their personal life experiences and backgrounds. 
 
 
VICTORIA NUGENT is a full-time journalist and part time fiction writer living in regional Queensland.

Infinite Threads

Ed.  Alison Whittaker

Xoum

ISBN: 9781925589795

Reviewed by HARRY GODDARD

Alison Whittaker begins her foreword to the 2019 UTS Writers’ Anthology with an image of infinite threads converging ‘through some tiny waterways and floodplains and mudflats’ (p.vii). She traces these pathways through the soles of our shoes as they melt onto a road, up through our tongues as ice disintegrates from body heat, and onto a train as we are carried deeper into the country of writing. As readers, we can escape to somewhere less sweltering.

‘Breath defies us to appreciate the scale of it all,’ (p.viii), Whittaker says, trying to encapsulate our relationship with the ecological systems that we have abandoned – the ones that are fast abandoning us. The 33rd UTS Writers’ Anthology was developed in early 2019, during one of the hottest summers in Australian history.

In Infinite Threads, climate anxiety is linked with a desperate, profound hope, the courage to imagine something better, and the strength to argue on behalf of these possibilities. These are the rivulets that make up this collection: 29 works of fiction, essay, poetry and playwriting from current UTS students and the student-led team that collated and edited them.

Helen Meany’s ‘The Stars, Millie’, begins in the dark: ‘Proper dark. Safe Dark. The sort of dark you could hide in forever’  (p.1). A single mother, with her kid asleep in the back seat, cleans animal corpses from the side of the Hume Highway. Distinctly Australian Gothic, the rotting creatures reek of guilt, questioning the isolation she’s built for herself and her child. The story hints at past abuse when the protagonist mentions the woman who worked the job before her: ‘Her ex had tracked her down, somehow, so she just dropped everything and left.’ (p.3). But she focuses on the next day of school, and latches onto moments of security. She cleans snot off her daughter’s nose without waking her.

The theme of abuse recurs in Christine Afoa’s ‘Halfling’, a story about a young woman coming to terms with her life in Sydney while processing a disconnection from her Samoan heritage. We are taken into a moment of violence, this time from the perspective of a daughter: ‘Mum’s bedroom door slams shut and I hear her voice, dulled by his shouting. Like
vinegar on oil’ (p.35).The two stories are linked: motherhood and its apprentice, daughterhood, stand against abuse as generational stages of survival.

Many stories focus on motherhood in its most physically intimate stages, right down to the sensations and transformations of pregnancy. In Verity Borthwick’s ‘Chrysalis’, motherhood becomes a metonym for hope. The story charts a week-by-week account of a mother’s pregnancy as she witnesses the inverse process of a friend fighting cancer – of dying, while life begins. For the tiniest moment three lives are held in a balance: ‘Much later, when we visit her in the hospital and she is in too much pain to hold him, I lay him on the bed beside her.’ (pp.212-213).

Hope is challenged by uncertainty in Cameron Stewart’s ‘Deep Valley, Twinkling Lights’. In a couple’s bedroom, late at night, a void grows between two people who are trying to conceive. There is a deep-seated fear within the relationship, a niggling doubt at the back of their minds, compounded by the constant presence of paralysing backache: ‘Any wrong movement delivers jolting pain, and Lucia has to hold on grimly until something unclamps to release her from the agony.’ (p.176). Perhaps it’s just ‘cold-feet’, but Stewart plants the seeds of doubt and leaves the reader speculating.

Our fears for the future – the manifestation of our interlinked hopes and anxieties – forms the core of Infinite Threads’ sensed reality. Will we ever be good enough? In Benjamin Lee’s ‘Breaking Point’, within the claustrophobic din of a plastics factory, a young woman operates the same machine where her mother worked herself to death. ‘There are still some instructions on it in her handwriting, basic operations, warnings.’ (p.245).These shadows of connection are the only things guiding her – hands moving in the same patterns, bodies giving in to the same pressures while a ruthless production schedule looms overhead.

Motherhood reflects our connection with nature; our bodies are changing, our rivers are drying. Sydney Khoo’s poem ‘Bak Kut Teh’, perhaps recalling the spare rib soup of a childhood past, renders this relationship into intensely personal expression. Khoo’s writing is confidently expressed, animalistic and vulnerable. It contains the same echoes of loneliness as ‘Breaking Point’, with roots reaching backwards into time:

“You are a sapling
As your mother was once
She planted you on the same earth
In a different time
This rain will taste different
In your new veins”
(p.23)

Veins, extending through ourselves and into the lives of others, into the knowledge of the past and burden of the future, are a perfect representation of the stories contained in this anthology. Khoo encapsulates this in their poetry, which was an absolute pleasure to read.

The world our children will inherit has been put into question; our disconnection with ecology makes it difficult to justify bringing ‘new life’ into this world. In Catherine Mah’s ‘The Towers’, childhood innocence is set against an uncaring, irradiated backdrop. Mah’s writing depicts a flicker of imagination lost against a barren, unfeeling setting – a quiet, unseen tragedy.
Zerene Joy Catacutan’s ‘Gayuma’, set in Intramuros, Manila, is a similar examination of loss, in which a humble, personal tragedy – the loss of a daughter – is overshadowed by the looming dread of World War II. As war erupts, a family’s trauma is forgotten. Both ‘Gayuma’ and ‘The Towers’ end with despair – not with exaggerated, drawn out darkness, but blunt, chilling understatement.

Judi Morison’s ‘Coast Line Dreaming’, takes a different path, arguing for resilience over despair. On the South Coast of New South Wales, a sister returns to her hometown – skipping uni classes she can’t afford to miss – after her brother is caught driving under the influence of ice. In Morison’s story, isolation doesn’t come from a fear or misunderstanding of the land, but from a sense of disconnection within it. ‘Not sure who my mob is, bruz. You know how it is’ (p.15). But this loneliness is countered by the warmth of community, a spark of hope, a connection and a possible romance. The characters in Infinite Threads find strength in small things.

A sense of resilience is shared in Lachlan Parry’s ‘Unwritten, Undelivered, Unopened’ – a series of epistolary pieces which discuss our bodies and the control placed upon them by external factors. A mother writes to her long-distant child, refusing to acknowledge their gender identity; a survivor writes to their sexual abuser, refusing to forget; and a teenager writes to his biological father – he’s dating an older man and everyone says it’s because of a missing ‘father figure’. The pieces can be brutal and manipulative in the way that people can be when they are close to you: ‘I miss my baby boy. I miss the little man who would win every soccer game.’ (p.63) But they end in defiance, with a moving declaration of resistance and pride.

Erica Wheadon’s ‘The Gospel of Kai’, is set against a call towards a supposed utopia, where those who fit into the patriarchal designations of society can expect to survive, if only to be subjugated. A telling allegory that echoes current, online trends of renouncing or mocking feminism. The story takes a firm stand, sets itself down in tribute to women who live on the outside of mainstream gender roles.

Chloe Michele’s ‘Ways to Exist in Fields out of Reach’ is an insightful personal essay that investigates the expectations of Sydney’s class culture while taking us through the song titles of a Violent Femmes tape. Michele illustrates how it feels to step beyond what is expected of you, to exist in a third space beyond what you know and where you came from. It is a portrait of the gratitude and guilt attached to our parents, and a scathing critique of Sydney’s insidious, segregated cultures.

An amazing aspect of these stories, and a testament to the skill of their writers, is how they give us room to examine ourselves in the spaces outside of a relentless neoliberal society. We can witness the interactions of locally famous weirdos, their rituals, their overarching reliance on gambling and beer. We see sexism, addiction, and strangely enough, a desire for community. This is exemplified in Susie Newton’s ‘Robertson Inn’, which brings us to a pub where lonely people gather away from family and work. From the point of view of someone working behind the bar, cleaning the ashtrays and turning on the TVs in the TAB, we can observe the underlying insecurities of Australian culture.

By examining these physical locations we can begin to process our losses. Luka Skandle’s ‘Gumbramorra Pond’ alternates between a history of Sydney’s colonial heritage and a contemporary experience of a friend dying from cancer. ‘It changed the course of our lives, the pathways of our friendships, the ways we look back and forward to what must come’ (p.49.) Skandle’s perfectly balanced writing examines the trajectory of human lives, how the spaces around us hold our tragedies and our potential.

Similarly, Jane Sharman’s ‘Darryl of the Sea’, a biographical piece, portrays a man dealing with his loss in a peculiar way: living out of the back of his van after relinquishing various properties to a series of ex-wives. He has found a life by the sea, surfing and doing odd jobs around the Northern Beaches. The piece is a reassuring image of a kind, gentle figure. Someone we can relate to, laugh with. As Darryl says, ‘We create the world we live in,’ (p.220), so perhaps we should lighten up.

It is curious to think that these stories share so many similarities. There was no specific call out to fit a particular theme, and the student editors did not assemble Infinite Threads to fit a rubric. Instead, each piece was chosen based on their individual strengths.

But these shared meanings are more than coincidental. The stories are underpinned by central questions about our world’s insecurities: motherhood, and the self-doubt and fragile hope that it represents; abuse and domestic violence, how families – women across generations – help each other survive.

Whittaker ends her foreword with an image of ‘a stranger on the train with you to somewhere with a cool breeze’ (p.ix).  We are connected to this stranger, to each other, through our melting shoes, through the rivulets within the soil, and into the ocean of our collected doubts.

HARRY GODDARD is a Sydney-based writer with an interest in Speculative Australian Gothic (SPAG) short fiction. He has written for Going Down Swinging, Seizure Online, and previous editions of the UTS Writers’ Anthology. .

Crow College: New and Selected Poems

Emma Lew

Giramondo

ISBN: 978-1-925818-05-5

Reviewed by ROSE LUCAS
 
 
 
 
This year, Giramondo has released a new selection of the poems of Emma Lew. An notable poet in the Australian poetry scene for over twenty years now, this edition includes poems from Lew’s two previous collections, The Wild Reply (1997) and Anything the Landlord Touches (2003). Both these collections made an impact: The Wild Reply won the Mary Gilmore award and The Age Poetry Book of the Year in 1998; Anything the Landlord Touches was the Victorian Premier’s Prize winner as well as the Judith Wright Calanthe Prize for poetry in 2003. To be able to revisit some of the key poems from these collections is both to keep them alive within the fabric of Australian letters and to introduce them to new readers. These previously published poems are supplemented by a treasure trove of new poems – some of which were also published in Vagabond’s Rare Object Series, Luminous Alias (2013) – which demonstrate both continuities and new directions in the work of this influential poet.

As Bella Li notes in the Introduction, Lew’s poetry, in all its moods and stylistic manifestations, takes us to places of strangeness; her poems tend to be inflected with uncertainty, refusal of resolution, the hauntings of people, places, feelings and ideas which are only traces, wisps of possibility. This means that a reading of Lew’s poetry can be a vertiginous experience, a journey of moments of beauty but also profound discomfort. Lew’s work foregrounds poetry’s ability to evoke and to suggest – rather than to pin down – and in so doing, to take the reader on unexpected paths of sensation. In the poem ‘Holes and Stars, for example, we are taken into a space where an interior world, finely attenuated, intersects only tangentially with the chimera of an external world:

I just got my memory back.
Few loons and I would live
in a corner at the airport,
not for the sequence
but the agony we had to be,
running off with the money
and faking our own deaths.
Will technology make me remote?
I don’t know where I am,
I never know what’s going to happen.
(p. 7)

Alongside the speaking voice in the poem, the reader is led to inhabit this knife-edge of perception, this dizzying perspective of a self on the brink of dissociation from itself, yet still able to prise open windows of insight.

Lew makes use of mythic tropes – again, not specifying, but evoking. A poem such as ‘The Wild Reply’ provides a different and unsettling use of the image and associations of fire, for example, with its capacity to devour as well as illumine and maybe even provide a segue from the prosaic to the extraordinary, even the explosive:

I must not touch fire
Myth fire, adder’s fire
Sensual and deaf
The deep, swift fire
…
The smelting and the forging
I have flame and lack nothing
Beast in my footsteps
Light up, burn
(p. 29)

This array of poems also shows Lew’s technical range. Her work utilises a range of stanza formations and groupings to pull the reader through different rhythms and patterns of meaning, different clusters of emphasis and image. As well as in the examples above, this extends to the prose poem form, as in a poem such as ‘Bounty,’ where uncertainties of love are expressed in a claustrophobia of line and seasickness:

These precious months have been like the withered rose. I say to myself that I am now suffering. Absence binds us, and in the fallow badinage of a ship’s deck, my former calm and piety are returning. O my darling, the rigging swarms. Help me out of this blind life. The shouts of gulls, the groping reefs…
(p. 44)

‘Anything the Landlord Touches’ makes use of the form of the pantoum, where lines are repeated and varied, as one four-line stanza blends into the next – almost a signature style for Lew’s work. The circularity of this form, with its seasickness of echo and variation, the rise and ebb of different and same, both provides a kind of ballast in the wash of feeling and imagery as well as echoing the tenuousness, the almost-ghostliness of what is present, subsides, returns – only to slip away again:

I break things because I am afraid and I spend my time repairing
It’s almost the expression of love
I found these beautiful machines abandoned here
Sometimes there is nothing to inherit

It’s almost the expression of love
To hunt, to seduce, to deal with a stone
Sometimes there is nothing to inherit
Footprints on the path that leads to the house
…
(p. 77)

The ‘New Poems’ continue the style and mood of the earlier collection, while perhaps becoming somewhat bleaker in tone. The ambience created by these poems remains at an edge of external threat and a fear of an internal collapse of meaning. Although the ‘speaker’ of the poems is not usually identified, a form of dramatic monologue often takes us – glancingly – into someone’s life, someone’s particular story. In ‘A Crushing Spring,’ for instance, the poem provides an unsettling movement from attempts at objective perspective to interior confusion and suffering:

People pity me for marrying a blind man,
but I possess a small oval face.
We travel in the carriage with the ordinary passengers.
Switzerland, so the water is very clean.
…
I behave like an angel when he stumbles in the garden.
The summerhouse is on fire.
Do you see how it is, how I am bound here?
I feel so perfectly sure the final blow has been struck.
(p. 83)

Similarly, without explicitly naming, ‘Freight’ suggests the Nazi movement of people like inanimate cargo, ‘Relocated to the east/in autumn, but is that so important?’ (p. 97). The technique allows us to inhabit a kind of protracted present experience with the speaker in the poem, a view from the train – before it has a name, a history, a moral judgement: ‘The forest runs along the border…And/the moon is in the heavens,/fighting to get free when held.’

Once again the pantoum form is used in a number of poems to evoke a cycling which has a number of effects: it stitches a kind of structure into what might otherwise be an emotional maelstrom, while also enacting a process of repetition and return which haunts and disrupts. In ‘Poem’ (p.100) for example, while the opening and final line might suggest some kind of containment or border around the problem– ‘Adultery fucks a family up as much as poverty’ – the recurrent lines signal pain’s ongoing disruptions:’That’s a lot of hatred from a mother,’ ‘It was like an acid eating into me, ‘Can’t stop love from doing its damage,’. Or in ‘Avalanches’ (p. 114), the line ‘I travelled like a curse’ is played across a dreary and icy landscape of violence and threat, again embodying a fearful overlapping in internal and external malaise.

While individual poems can evoke a luminosity of image or feeling, Lew’s is in general not an easy poetic. It is however a courageous one, one willing to explore beyond more straightforward limits of inside and outside, what makes meaning and how meaning might collapse in strings of dissociated feeling and observation, forcing us to consider the ways in which we might ‘travel like a curse’ across the terrain of our lives as well as the ways in which the articulation of our experiences and the building of the poetic line might also construct the possibility of connection.
 
 
ROSE LUCAS is a Melbourne poet and academic at Victoria University. Her first collection, Even in the Dark (UWAP 2013) won the Mary Gilmore award; her second collection, Unexpected Clearing was also published by UWAP in 2016. She is currently completing her third collection, This Shuttered Eye.

Sun Music

by Judith Beveridge

Giramondo

ISBN 978-1-925336-88-7

Reviewed by CAITLIN WILSON

“I often think about
The long process that loves
The sound we make.
It swings us until
We’ve got it by heart:
The music we are” 

“Girl Swinging”

Judith Beveridge tells us what she is. In the introduction to her collection Sun Music: New and Selected Poems, she describes herself as a lyrical poet, and discusses her belief that poetry must be a “showdown between the word and the poet” (xv). 

She begins her introduction with her ‘why’. A shy child, she found comfort and company in books and her own imagination, something she credits with drawing her into poetry: “I could manipulate words to sound more confident” (xiii), she says, and that her use of “masks and voices” (xiii) allows her to open up. For someone who doesn’t “particularly like” talking about her own poetry, this introduction illustrates an ability to zoom out, adopting a self-aware bird’s eye view of her own poetic idiosyncrasies and inspirations.

Echoes of this interest in shaping and moulding abound within the collection: in “Invitation”, the speaker does this with food; “I try to steer the flavour, arrange the colours on a plate” (38).

However, her most striking confession is how her childhood shyness inspired her love of nature, a fascination which proliferates in her work and in this collection. She explains that “the natural world didn’t make demands of me to speak to it”, something which is clear in her poignant and meticulous observations of nature (xiii). Her poems are earthed and earthy, giving the impression of a poet bewitched by the simple wonder of the world. Nature as a lively yet undemanding presence operates in Beveridge’s work as both a jewel to behold and describe, valued in its own right, and as a gateway into an examination of humanity, womanhood, personhood. In kitchens and gardens, nature is sniffed and poked, something to be moved by and something which, of its own accord, moves. Beveridge paints us a nature that is elegant, blunt, and vibrant, but never uncommunicative. 

The introduction prefigures a curation of some four decades of a much beloved and awarded work, as well as thirty-three new poems. Once delved into, this collection ebbs and flows, widens out and narrows in with pin-point focus on facets of a rich and richly observant creative life.  

Her earlier work, sampled here from The Domesticity of Giraffes (originally published in 1987) and Accidental Grace (1996), wafts from the page in familiar spirals. These poems are soft-edged, recognisable. They could be written about moments from a hundred Australian childhoods, or the subject of a thousand lunchtime daydreams. It says something about what we ask of poetry that I need to clarify I mean this as a compliment. The poems aren’t out to skewer a broken world: they speak to it and about it with gentle care and curiosity. This work is invested in the flux between indoor and outdoor, the grey space between inertness and liveliness. Symbols weighty with meaning are juxtaposed against the everyday – in For Rilke, ‘our hearts – they’re like utensils’ (7) and in The Fall of Angels are ‘faces cracked like china plates’ (33). This early work is also ripe with soundscape, fitting for a collection collated around its namesake. Yachts (86-87) asks the reader to hear the small symphony of seaside sounds – “the call of an oriole”, “the sharp strike notes of bellringers”, “a child count the stars in the water off a rickety pier”. The way her speaker conducts the soundscape changes – “if you can hear” becomes “you’ll know”, becomes “maybe you only hear”, and “perhaps you hear”. This vacillation between certainty and uncertainty, concrete and imaginary, leave the reader suspended in a moment at once real and magical. Dichotomies abound in Beveridge’s work. 

Through her title Sun Music, Beveridge rightly draws our attention to her preoccupation with poetry’s sonic and rhythmic potential, encouraging us to hear the poems she crafts. However, it is her use of another sense that charmed me most. Scents drift up from her poems – a “dark potato” and the leaves and lemon the speaker uses to try to cover its funk in “Flower of Flowers” (30) tickle something in the back of the reader’s mind, a curiously powerful invitation to enter a poem through the nose. Perfume plays a strong part through the decades, a seeming favourite motif of Beveridge’s. It makes sense: smell is hugely connected to memory, and perfume, in particular, is something man-made that gestures toward the natural. Hints of rose and sandalwood are concocted to remind us of the beauty of the earth, to allow us to wear it. Beveridge’s use of scent activates something almost primal in her reader, leaving them no choice but to live through the poem, to step into it like an herbaceous bubble. 

The works taken from her 2003 collection Wolf Notes are populated with more spectres of the human than the earlier selections. These characters are at once strong and vague, often more archetypal than wholly ‘real’. The mysterious ‘she’s of “The Lake” (102) and “Woman and Child” (105), the titular Fisherman’s Son (109), “The Artist who Speaks To His Model” (116). The animals remain, in Wolf Notes (112), and the birdsongs of “Woman and Child and Whisky Grass” (107), though their existence is often filtered through a character’s sensory experience of them. Visuals, too, are sumptuously laid out. In “The Dice-Player”, dice are “an affliction of black spots” (99). 

“Marco Polo’s Concubine Speaks Out” (61) and “The Courtesan” (119), written some seven years apart, illustrate Beveridge’s ability to return to characters and images and develop, deepen and darken them. The speaker of the first tells us the  “wind is blowing in the chrysanthemums”. In the second, the courtesan describes how “lightning flexed its muscled whip”. Whether this marks an overall turn to the darker, harder and more visceral in Beveridge’s oeuvre depends on how you receive the images she offers, part of the beauty of her work. 

The Storm and Honey selections, from 2009, shift pre-occupations from the earth to the sea. Beveridge conjures fishing metaphors and watery imagery with (perhaps verging on tiring) frequency, though her gemlike capturing of moods and moments is omnipresent. There is a sense of looking out, looking beyond in these works that feels like an exhale. 

The new poems, however, begin with a look back. “I rarely come here now, once or twice since you died” begins “Revisiting The Bay” (175), an achingly nostalgic memorial poem for Dorothy Porter. They are littered with memories, with preferences and perspectives earned by a life of creative observation. There is a sadness to these poems, though she warns us of this in her introduction: “I hope there’s enough overall sense of joy and wonder to override a creep into these darker tones” (xviii). These darker moments are, indeed, visited upon but never lingered in unduly, and she looks to the future here alongside remembrances. Her natural affinities remain but seem more charged with worry now. The poems show an enhanced sympathy and affinity with animals, beyond passive but loving description. They are impassioned, and loaded with a satisfying punch of righteousness. “To My Neighbour’s Hens” (178) is explicitly animal-rights (or at least chicken rights) oriented, with its plea that the sweet hens next door need never experience “slopped wire floors” and “battery cages”. “A Panegyric for Toads” (214) is a masterclass in balancing levity with the deep and dark. 

Beveridge’s poems are all about balance – conversational and musical, weighty yet light as a perfumed breeze. They give the reader the space to live with them, comfortable and churning, until a line strikes you like a sparkling melody, lingering long after the music stops. 

 
CAITLIN WILSON is a Melbourne-based student and writer of criticism and poetry. Her poem was recently short-listed for the University of Melbourne Creative Arts poetry prize, and her criticism can be read in Farrago and The Dialog, among others.