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Joshua Pomare reviews “A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work” by Bernadette Brennan

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A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work

by Bernadette Brennan

TEXT

ISBN: 9781925498035

Reviewed by JOSHUA POMARE

‘Garner has always been a boundary-crosser. Refusing the constraints of literary genre she has sought to write across and craft her own versions of them’ – Bernadette Brennan.

It is at these boundaries, the rough torn edges of art and artist that we understand our subjects best. A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work by Bernadette Brennan is a remarkably shrewd study of Garner’s work knitted with a tender representation of her personal life. Brennan dives into the murky grey depths that separate ‘literary critique’ and ‘biography,’ choosing instead the more ambiguous denomination of ‘literary portrait.’ This bifurcation of sub-genres might seem like literary posturing; such distinctions are often made by marketing teams as opposed to the author themself. However the language we use to segment books into genre is significant for readers and thus important to authors in terms of distribution and readership.

Finding an audience for books that exist outside of genres can prove a challenge. For Garner, this is familiar territory, early in her career she leapt from genre to genre, often landing in the areas between, and muddied the waters further by splicing non-fiction and fiction. For many readers taste determines reading preference and consequently genre. Savvy publishers seek to typecast authors early in their career to maintain a base of readers which to many is contrary to genuine artistic pursuit. The true artist has no consideration of audience, let alone the intricacies between sub genres, between fact or fiction, between form and style. Brennan’s previous book, The Works of Brian Castro, is a monograph, shelved in the recesses of academic libraries. However in A Writing Life Brennan shows she is equally as prepared to defy genre as her subject.

With over thirty pages of notes and references, it is clear Brennan is a fastidious reader and researcher however in spite of her academic background, she chooses to employ simple accessible language. At once she delves into the workings of Garner’s relationships, and reflects on the ways in which life events contextualise Garner’s work. Indeed many of the models for Garner’s fictional characters inhabited her personal life. Brennan probes the real events that inspired much of her work including the poignant and challenging relationship with her dying friend Jenya Osborne, which Garner explores in The Spare Room, and the resistance and confusion Garner faced from third wave feminism as a consequence of the The First Stone.

Garner possesses an immense self-awareness and an almost refreshing uncertainty that is absent in most non-fiction. James Wood in his profile for The New Yorker describes her is ‘a savage self-scrutineer.’ This introspection and ceaseless self-assessment allows the ‘I’ to creep into the narrative of her stories. Garner is forever querying herself and her motives, and documenting her findings. Here we find the origin of the genre fluidity she affords herself. Garner herself, as a prominent thread in the literary culture of Australia, tends to defy any delineation outside of the broadest labels: writer, artist.

Without Garner’s introspection and sincerity on the page Brennan may not have the access to paint a complete portrait. When in The Spare Room ‘Helen’ the character notes, “I had always thought that sorrow was the most exhausting of the emotions. Now I knew that it was anger,” a reader gets great insight into Garner’s own thoughts and feelings.  Few artists are lucky enough to encounter subjects with such self-awareness and clarity of thought, fewer still will find one honest enough to share such insights.

One does get the sense that Brennan, although meticulous in her research and earnest in her approach, refuses to employ Garner’s imbuing of the text with the ‘I.’ Brennan at times seems to approach a counterpoint to Garner’s arguments without letting the thought reach the page as it forms in her own mind. Her voice is clear, objective and sensitive at times. The subtext, two years of conversations between Garner and Brennan, rises through the text softening the edges of the moral and ethical conundrums readers familiar with Garner’s non fiction may find themselves asking as they’re whisked along the summary of Garner’s work – each part of the novel represents in chronological order both a Garner novel and the period of Garner’s life in which the novel was written. One can’t help but consider Garner’s reflection and the fallibility of memory, and how this may indirectly shape the retelling of those long past episodes. This is another blurred line. It’s impossible for Brennan to maintain objectivity when such conversations are taking place, particularly considering the private letters Garner had shared with her.

Perhaps literary portraits require this input in the same way a painter might sit a subject down and constantly refer to her. If the subject moves, or changes expression the end product becomes a sort of amalgamation. We have twelve Helen Garners in A Writing Life; in the closing pages we get a final look at this ultimate Helen Garner in an email exchange with Brennan. It is here, in the final pages, that Brennan finds herself traipsing into the narrative. Brennan asks of Garner “Do you have another tale to tell me?” Garner recalls her recent experiences with her reading group, how the group grappled with a complex text, and in the penultimate line she asks Brennan, “Is that a story?”

A Writers Life, is published by Text Publishing in Melbourne. Text happens to be the publisher of all of Garner’s recent novels. It’s clear that Brennan has gone to considerable lengths to respect the wishes of Garner and has likely worked with Text for this reason. Garner has always been quite clear that she does not want a biography, however for this reader the biographical elements are the most important. Understanding who Helen Garner was at different stages in her life, how her opinions and worldview developed and of course how her life influenced her writing deepens one’s understanding of her work. Being such a devoted Garner scholar, Brennan possesses a knack for concision, clarity and an eye for detail but unlike Garner’s work we see it all from an arm’s length. Brennan is prepared to delve into Garner’s thoughts and motivations but not her own, certainly not with Garner’s characteristic candour. In this case, the artist and the art remain for the most part distinct. However, through dogged scholarly research, analysis, unparalleled access to Garners archive in the National Library of Australia and interviews with the subject herself, Brennan has weaved a complete and comprehensible portrait of Garner and her work. This is a book not only for Garner enthusiasts but Australian literature lovers in general.

 

JOSHUA POMARE is a writer living and working in Melbourne. His work has appeared in Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin and Takahe among others. He is also produces the podcast On Writing

 

Alice Allan reviews “Writing to the Wire” edited by Dan Disney and Kit Kelen

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Writing to the Wire

Edited by Dan Disney and Kit Kelen

UWA Press

ISBN  9781742588667

Reviewed by ALICE ALLAN

To live on the Australian continent is to be aware of the people who are excluded from it—those who are currently incarcerated in places coolly dubbed ‘detention centres’. Writing to the Wire, edited by Dan Disney and Kit Kelen, presents the work of poets grappling with this reality alongside that of poets actually living it.

An anthology such as this can be successful in a number of ways. At the very least, it can record a perspective beyond what Disney and Kelen describe as the ‘shameless procedural narratives’ that ‘damage our collective ethics and our nation’s sense of identity’. The recording of this perspective alone makes Writing to the Wire a necessary document. Even if Australia’s detention centres are shut down tomorrow, their repercussions will be felt for generations. In the aftermath, we will need to know how our poets responded.

We can also evaluate Writing to the Wire in terms of its position as an activist anthology. The editors admit that the collection is perhaps ‘a little like bashing your head against a brick wall’ or ‘like speaking to a wall’, but we do not have to link these poems to concrete political change to consider them valuable. Each poem is itself an act against what Kelen and Disney call ‘mute complicity’, registering ‘shock, disbelief, disgust, dismay, despair, contempt, cold fury’—never acceptance.

Another question we can ask of a collection like this is to what degree it amplifies the voices of those behind ‘the wire’. One of the most striking aspects of this anthology is the strong contrast between poems by those seeking asylum in Australia and poems by Australian citizens. Consider, to begin with, ‘My soul died years ago’ by poet NH, who was seeking asylum at the time of publication:

There are butterflies in my stomach.
I am very very very cold.
I have been dead for years
but my body is screaming.
It hits itself to the ground
and shouts: ‘I am tired of compulsory life’.

Reading these lines, the ‘mute complicity’ inherent in a comfortable Australian life is starkly obvious. While there are just 18 poems by people who have gone through the process of seeking asylum included in the 204-page collection, their resonance is such that the impact of many of the surrounding poems becomes muted. This is particularly apparent when it comes to poems written by Australians that examine an asylum seeker perspective. In ‘Illegals’, for example, Mark Tredinnick encircles all experiences of exile by writing of an ‘us’ that comes ‘just as far, across the hungry infernal sea’:

But the new land when we step down
onto its abstemious beaches
is so much more like a prison than home,
Another jail to break, another hope to abandon
Like memory in the sea.
Later we learn the language
of freedom, all its civil syllables,
But our tongues, parched from cruising so shabbily and so long into exile,
Will never learn to say our own names again

While there is no question of poetic quality here, there is a distance between the two writers’ experiences. Tredinnick is not alone in writing from the perspective of those seeking asylum—a number of poets have taken this approach to create their contributions. Again, these poems are the result of skilful, considered writing, but their inclusion also highlights the fact that those writing from outside the wire can only ever reach toward understanding, while those inside, in poet Ravi’s words, ‘have come into your very deep water / and have now sunk / in that deepest suffering’.

In making their selections, Disney and Kelen could have taken the same approach as the editors of the more recent anthology They Cannot Take the Sky, which is limited to writing by people who have experienced mandatory detention. The wealth of work by those who have no direct experience of detention in Writing to the Wire creates a broader conversation—a space where Australian poets can examine, in the editors’ words, ‘the idea of being Australian’.

While this is clearly a worthwhile task, the cumulative effect of the many poems by Australian writers somehow fails to amplify their impact. In fact, there’s often a sense of interference, especially when poems that are extremely strong cover the same or similar ground as those that are less accomplished. There’s an obvious irony in arguing for a more stringent selection process here—Kelen and Disney explicitly state that they were ‘guided by principles of inclusivity, pluricentricity and multivalence’—but perhaps fewer poems may have resulted in stronger collection overall.

All that said, Writing to the Wire also includes many poems by contributors who recognise where their understanding falls short and reveal this gap in thoughtful ways. In ‘Nationality II’, Melinda Smith uses found text from the Australian Human Rights Commission’s The Forgotten Children report to bring voices other than her own onto the page:

I feel like a killer
when they use my boat number.

The flat dead eyes of the mother. The gouges
on her son’s forearms.

Boat number has become like our first name.
The glut of bread that sticks in the craw.

This juxtaposition of Smith’s own words against those from the report addresses the question of whether her subject has been seen or merely spoken for. Other poets are more direct in marking their position as outsiders. Peter Minter’s ‘A Letter to You’ begins ‘I can’t think of anything. / I have nothing to say.’ Heather Taylor Johnson’s ‘In the Bottom Eight’ asks ‘What else to do but clear the table and bring out the next course? Bleu cheese goes best with a third bottle of wine, not racism.’ Brook Emery’s ‘Return to Sender’ ends with that bleakly familiar phrase ‘you can bloody well go back where you belong.’

Disney and Kelen explicitly state in their introduction ‘We do not speak for the people incarcerated by Australian governments: they are speaking for themselves here’. While this may not be true of every single poem in the collection, it is clear that the editors are aware of their responsibility to elevate the voices of ‘people who would like to be Australians’. The fact that this problem of ‘speaking for’ is on editorial agendas, in writers’ minds and obvious to readers is exhilarating. It suggests historically silenced voices are becoming more audible.

Representing the experiences of asylum seekers, either directly or from a remove, is not the only focus of this anthology. Many of the poems here also bring to light what Kelen and Disney call ‘a collective burden of shame’. In ‘Queue-jumping’ Anthony Lynch catalogues positions of privileged safety in a poem that reads like a judge’s sentence:

When the pact was signed
I was eighth in line for a decaf.
When the navy arrived
I poured myself a second Scotch.
When the boat was towed
I sent my tenth email of the day.
When security tightened
we bought the fourth-best house in the street.

Along with shame, the ‘cold fury’ Disney and Kelen describe is another key theme, most obvious in poems addressing Australia’s politicians. In ‘Reply to a father from a Federal Member’, Nathan Curnow writes in the voice of politician giving parenting advice after two young boys hear about a detention centre suicide:

Tell them we’re calmly implementing policies.
In fact try saying it was ‘a horrible, tragic death’,
keep repeating it like a sober example,
after all, we’re in the business of saving lives
and that phrase helps discourage the journey.

Each of the poems in this anthology reveals an Australia so many would prefer to ignore. Nevertheless, Kelen and Disney position Writing to the Wire as ‘a book of hope—a book to make us look and think and feel again’. The collection begins with a poem in which Kelen asks a simple question:

And: For those who’ve come across the seas
We’ve boundless plains to share. Remember?

By the final page, each contributor has done their part in this work of remembering, adding a new layer to a complex and confronting picture.

In the unlikely event that Writing to the Wire inspires no action at all, it will at least endure as a record of Australia’s policies towards those forced to seek asylum here. By collecting the words of those who continue to feel the full force of these policies alongside the bewilderment of those who are watching their effects unfold, it answers its own epigraphic question, posed by Julian Burnside in his Hamer Oration: ‘What have we become?’

ALICE ALLAN is a writer and editor living in Melbourne. Her work has been published in journals such as Rabbit, Cordite, Going Down Swinging and Offset.

“Exhibits of the Sun” by Stephen Edgar reviewed by David Gilbey

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imagesExhibits of the Sun

by Stephen Edgar

Black Pepper 

ISBN 978 1 876044 88 6

Reviewed by DAVID GILBEY

‘… the sinople eye of a butterfly wing …’ Sarah Howe

Edgar’s poetry is like that – detailed, deceptive, minutely crafted, significant and changing – implicating both the watcher and the watched. In Sarah Howe’s ‘Two Systems’ lecture at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute last year, speaking of her own poetry’s slippage between different cultural and historical referents, she cited Heather McHugh’s dictum ‘All poetry is fragment … shaped by its breakages at every turn.’ Edgar’s is like that too: shardish, provisional, ‘hispid’ (to poach one of his clever, obscure words).

In the Old Century, and before it became unfashionable, we might call his poetry metaphysical – for its blend of complex thought, vivid imagery and iconoclasm. I can imagine Samuel Johnson complaining ruefully that Mr Edgar ‘… doth tempt … not with the softnesses of love but … with nice speculations of philosophy’ as well as Helen Gardner’s (and Yeats’) praise for his poetry’s ‘passionate intensity’ – though maybe Edgar’s steady iambics regulate passion to an intellectual pace …

And there are other voices in/behind Edgar’s finely-wrought surfaces too: Milton, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hopkins, Hope, Slessor, Stewart. So Edgar’s poetry is steeped in literary echoes, producing a richness of reference and tone belied by the elegance and lightness of his touch.

There are, simply, so many terrific poems in Exhibits of the Sun – this is ‘great’ poetry in that traditional sense of grand in scope, significant in thematic preoccupations, supply-artificed and multiply-perspectived. In the first section alone ‘Off the Chart’’s playful Australian metaphysics (a rotary hoist mirroring the planetary cycles) is framed by ‘The Representation of Reality in Western Art’ (playfully interrogating Proust and Magritte) and ‘Steppe’ (a virtuoso poetic essay in tercets conjuring a universal figure in a landscape as an image for poetry’s sublime possibilities). These poems hold and play with the reader’s mind and imagination – telescopically and microscopically.

One of Edgar’s persistent concerns is how poetry can see and know. Take ‘Morandi and the Hard Problem’ with which Edgar begins his third, and final, section in Exhibits: focussing on the objects, planes, arrangement and light in Morandi’s paintings, Edgar writes:

Nothing’s more abstract than reality,
These surfaces propped up against the day
To hold the light.
(p.50)

This is the paradoxical heart of Edgar’s poems – a koan becoming a conceit. The ‘hard problem’ is what we might call the ‘sentience of objects’: ‘what process could endow / Mere matter with the power to wake and feel.’ (p.49) The poem plays ekphrastically with Morandi’s paintings, displacing the human viewer as the centre of perception in favour of the objects’ capacities

… to see behind
The facile complications of event
… and view
What lies below the shining incident.
(p.49)

The poet/perceiver is a product/victim of his experiences and watches the sun’s power to ‘[shift its] abstractions once again’.
(p.50)

Edgar’s poetry echoes Coleridge’s thinking styles, especially the Conversation Poems (on the Imagination and Pantheism). There are echoes of Coleridge’s phrasing (‘esemplastic’, ‘pictures / shine in those walls’ etc) time and time again in Exhibits and there are pervasive hints of Wordsworth’s ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ as well as the thinking and feeling of The Prelude. And we are held by the imagery, the cadences of the verse – this is poetry that persistently claims, implicates and apostrophises the reader.

‘The Trance’ begins with a dramatic, sustained conceit of a ‘gale kept feeding through the canopies / Like timber through a mill’ (p.21), becoming more like a conversation poem as it links this to a remembered childhood experience which is then framed ‘organically’ by the mother’s death. ‘Euroka’ too – camping near Glenbrook – repositions a Wordsworthian sense of place:

… the trees
Which reeve the boulders to the sky, the wide,
Light-dusted river that’s about to stall,
So slow its downstream glide:
You’re spellbound by inaudibilities.
(p.59)

Edgar’s (Miltonic) scope and tones can be seen admirably in ‘The Angel of History’ for example, with which he begins his second group of poems. An extensive prefatory note (thankfully) directs us both to Walter Benjamin and Klee’s Angelus Novus so we can get the picture/references as we need. The poem opens with an epic sense of physical and spiritual stress: ‘agape’, ‘mingled fascination and alarm’, of being in the middle of an ‘impending’ and harmful dilemma: ‘He reaches out as he is forced away’ (p.25) – the iambics enforce the paradoxical weight of the problem. The angel sees all humanity’s particular and collective histories

strewn out – achieved or botched, or incomplete –
Along the road’s
Unravelled pageant …
Like Himalayas hurled before his feet.
(p.25)

– the scope of the simile is impressive. There is a sense (again, Miltonic) of the regret the angel might feel in surveying the scene but he is compelled, ‘swept’ (by the imminent problems in Paradise) to leave – his back to the future,  facing the past, ‘his task and vice, / But to record, not to restore, the toll’ (p.25) – a kind of allegory, reprising the traditional debate articulated by (amongst others) Sir Phillip Sidney in his Apologie for Poetrie about the essential conservatism and limitations of history (in contrast to both philosophy and poetry).

By contrast, the final poem in this section, ‘Pictures in the Water’ (is ‘this interlude and idyll’ a painting or a memory?) antiphonally focuses on a particular moment that might have been seen by the Angel of History. Reminiscent of Slessor’s yachts/harbour, the poem, echoing the preceding ‘Vantage Point’ and ‘Saccade’ (‘Its constant sense being constantly unmade’, p.43) proposes the frail significance of the micro against the inevitability of the macro.

Edgar’s opening poem is the justly praised 2011 Dorothy Porter Prize joint-winner ‘All Eyes’ – a clever, conceptually enthralling and linguistically transforming poem. The image of Saturn as a ‘ghostly Ferris wheel frozen in space’ is arresting enough but the subsequent lines ‘with all its shattered rings of icy lace / Exquisitely beyond repair’ (p.3) accrete and multiply understanding, giving what FR Leavis might have called a ‘felt’ seriousness. The brilliance of this poem is partly in positioning the reader with Saturn’s moon Titan, as a both close and distant perspective (the terms stretch to almost meaninglessness in a ‘felt’ sense) from which to (try to) contemplate what can’t actually be seen in deep space:

Who knows what sown and pullulating planet
Has come and gone, an ark of evidence
Interminably circling where it cannot
Be salvaged by the optic nerve?
(p.3)

Edgar’s resonant and charged adjectives in the first line above give way to a jostle between science and religion, resolved by a Miltonic sense of a lost paradise which cannot be physically perceived. This is a poem full of seeing (Saturn is juxtaposed with fossils found in shale/slime and sunflowers whose ‘yellow is the synonym for Look’) and brings the reader back to a fallible, challenged anthropocentrism (‘Was it for this the aeons fashioned us?’) displaced by a valuing of the intricacy of a ‘moth’s wing’ and ‘the fleck of matter in the nucleus’ which, in a dextrous twist, Edgar turns into a metaphysical compliment: ‘Your face which never fails / To show me what I cannot know’. (p.4)

In ‘Moonlight Sculptures’ Edgar contemplates another Saturn, apostrophising his partner asleep in their stifling moonlit bed: she is exhibited as an object seen from different perspectives – disembodied and fractured ‘intermittent anaglyphs’ – so at times she is a ‘swathed mummy’ or an avatar of Eve, or (affectionately and voyeuristically) ‘The world’s unspoken origin, / So openly depicted by Courbet’ (p.5). The poem becomes an aubade praising the different selves of his love, produced in a night of exhaustion for/by the moon, now eclipsed by its living creation.

‘Man in a Boat’ continues Edgar’s flickering essay on epistemology, focusing on the hyper-reality of the acclaimed Ron Mueck sculpture and, similarly to the Morandi poem, is concerned with the impermeability of the objectified (or painted) other. Edgar explores the defiance of art/image and the corresponding impotence of the beholder, an ongoing tension in Exhibits. The poem compels us to acknowledge the poet’s anxiety and recognition of his essential passivity – like the Angel of History, he can only record, not change, though perhaps, by another Coleridgean trope, the poet as Aeolian harp can hauntingly express what he imagines and constructs.

‘Paris’ too is about representation and its impossibilities – comprised of three quite separate stanza fragments, under Daniel Dennett’s whimsical epigraph ‘a film can be about Paris but Paris is not about anything’. Beginning with an exploration of Beraud’s Entrance to the Universal Exhibition, 1889, Edgar’s images cascade through the lines to arrive at

“…What’s it all about?”
Come on. No Jokes. Don’t say: “It’s about to snow.”
Don’t tell me it’s about three forty-five.
(p.28)

There is such pleasure in the playfulness of language and his own poetics. Stanza two recalls Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation lecture on Romanticism and Beethoven’s music:

… outcrop of dark rock
Juts minimally, intermittently
From masses of sea swell …
(p.29)

The final stanza begins ‘Across a fissured butte in Arizona / A wingèd shadow glides’: another Angel of History (or ‘Haunted Pane’) – something presaging harm? In this instance Edgar’s agnostic optimism is modernist rather than Romantic.

‘The Transaction’ and ‘Clues’ focus particularly on the different (masculine and feminine) nuances in comprehending past encounters and relationships. In both poems, Edgar is pointing to barely noticeable signs of trauma ‘Like an infection floating on a cough / Or swimming on the lip gloss of a kiss’ (p.33). ‘They found in her their metamorphosis’ sounds like the two understandings correspond but ‘she’ is an anarchic signifier pointing to the inevitably irreconcilable versions/views. His memory is sexual:

Still hidden like the blue tattoo
Of a hummingbird that flutters underneath
Her restless skirt.
(p.33)

Hers is of violation: ‘Knowing that rogue survives to gloat’.  ‘The Transaction’ ends with a troublingly ambiguous image of masculinity.

Almost as a comment, ‘Peony’ explores the difficulty/impossibility of making sense of memories (and perceptions) ‘You have no sense that they make sense’ but its final image is of the peony’s generative power:

… in a garden bed
More wounding than a work of art,
The peony’s packed, swollen buds, which hold
Whole galaxies of red
And forces too immense to be controlled

Wait quietly to tear the day apart.
(p.42)

Many of Edgar’s poems play with the ways words create, fracture, problematize and reposition perception. ‘Grand Canyon’ (p.61f) and ‘Cinéma Vérité’ (p.66f) play masterfully with perspective. The watcher is watched. The poet is an ‘Ibis trying to prise apart a tub / of salad’ (p.66).

And I must not forget the butterflies – eg. in ‘A Scene from Proust’ (also ‘Govett’s Leap’) – Edgar’s miniaturist and imagist subtleties propose (echoing Douglas Stewart?) a minute signifier which the ‘whole of history has unravelled’ (p.65). Like Fuyue Anzai’s famous one-line modernist poem (a haiku without the line breaks?), 1929: ‘A single butterfly passed over the Tartar Strait’, Edgar has managed to grasp the world in fists of words.

Occasionally there are grandiloquent awkwardnesses such as ‘self-unfolding zone of plenitude’ and ‘thrumming potencies of un-ness’, both in ‘Exclusion  Zone’ (p.51) but for the most part, these ‘exhibits’ are absorbing, subtle, beautifully crafted conversations.

In the final poem, ‘Rembrandt with Seagulls’, the last lines celebrate stillness, beauty and the (Brennanesque? Slessorian?) eye of the beholder:

Luminous and remote
Under the strobe-lit passage of the day,
The circling seagulls float
Somewhere that you can only see from here.
(p.69)

Exhibits of the Sun is poetry of glittering fragments and multivalent complexity, its fissuring and layering conjured up and held by Edgar in his ‘artist’s isolating eye’.

 

DAVID GILBEY is Adjunct Senior Lecturer in English at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, and President of Booranga Writers’ Centre . His most recent collection of poems is Pachinko Sunset (2016, Island Press).

Hayley Scrivenor reviews “We Need New Names” by NoViolet Bulawayo

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays.

We Need New Names

By NoViolet Bulawayo

Vintage Books

ISBN 970099581888

Reviewed by HAYLEY SCRIVENOR

We Need New Names is a work of literary fiction about hunger of all kinds. Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel begins in Budapest. Darling, an eleven-year-old girl, runs with her friends through a community of gated houses (named for the Hungarian capital) in an unnamed country in Africa. Darling and her friends have come to these gates and the large, clean houses they conceal to steal guavas.

In Paradise (the incongruously named shanty town in Zimbabwe where Darling lives), she and her friends Stina, Godknows, Chipo, Bastard and Sbho play games like Find bin Laden, Andy-over and the country-game. Success in the country-game is dependent on what country you are assigned before the game has begun. The friends vie to be the USA or the UK. No one wants to be countries like North Korea and Ethiopia. No one wants to be the country that they all live in either: ‘who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart? (49). The bulging belly of Darling’s friend, the eleven-year-old Chipo is a constant reminder of the threat of violence, sexual and otherwise, in Paradise—we are told in passing that ‘somebody made her pregnant’ (2).  A scene where Darling, Chipo and a girl named Forgiveness ceremoniously prepare to ‘remove Chipo’s stomach’ is understated. The children imagine they are playing out a scene from ER.  Forgiveness bends a rusty coathanger out of shape. This ‘play’ abortion (which is cut short) is a reflection of the realities that the girls have heard or know about, but do not really understand.

Darling’s descriptions are startling and often, quite funny. She describes economic collapse, poverty and political unrest with child-like concern for detail: the impossibly appetizing smell of baking bread, a grandmother who counts her money ‘like somebody told her it lays eggs overnight’ (22), the ‘o’ formed by the lips of a dead woman like she was ‘maybe interrupted in the middle of saying something’ (17). Most pressing is the constant hunger the children feel:

We shout and we shout and we shout; We want to eat the thing she was eating, we want to hear our voices soar, we want our hunger to go away (10).

Darling has been dreaming of ‘Destroyedmichygen’ for a long time. The promise that her aunt (who lives in Detroit, Michigan) will send for her sets her apart from her friends. The process of getting to America is deftly described as ‘harder than crawling through the anus of a needle’ (240). And yet, Darling’s journey from Paradise to the USA is not is the focus of the book. Indeed, the physical journey from her home country, away from hunger and guavas to American excess and a new kind of poverty is barely touched on. Instead Darling (already in America for a period when the book takes up her story again) invites us to ‘come here where I am standing and look outside the window’ (147) as she turns her frank gaze on her new life in America. Darling’s migration is, at first, perfectly legal. She attends high school, works part time jobs. When her visa expires she joins the ranks of undocumented workers, at one stage working as a housecleaner for someone her Aunt knows. In America, the memory of a faded orange Cornell t-shirt worn by Bastard, Darling’s playmate in Paradise, is thrown into sharp relief by the beautiful daughter of Darling’s employer who attends Cornell, but refuses to eat:  

I just kill myself with laughter. Because, Miss I Want to Be Sexy, there is this: You have a fridge bloated with food so no matter how much you starve yourself, you’ll never know real, true hunger. (268)

And yet Darling own hunger doesn’t end when she leaves Paradise and arrives in Detroit. It’s only exchanged for a new hunger, shared by outsiders everywhere. Darling’s unease and dissatisfaction are sharpened by thoughts of her home, the friends she has left behind.  

While most of the story belongs to Darling and her distinctive impressions, there are a few significant point of view changes. The passage below employs the third person, adding depth to Darling’s story of leaving her home country:

Moving, running, emigrating, going, deserting, walking, quitting, flying, fleeing—to all over, to countries near and far, to countries unheard of, to countries whose names they cannot pronounce. They are leaving in droves (p, 145).

One of the most interesting chapters in the book is ‘How They Lived’, a chapter told entirely from a collective point of view using the first person plural. Instead of Darling and her friends, this ‘we’ seems to consist of a range of people who have left their countries to come to the USA:

Because we were not in our own country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised. When we talked our tongues thrashed madly in our mouths, staggered like drunken men. Because we were not using our languages we said things we did not mean; what we really wanted to say remained folded inside, trapped. In America we did not always have the words. It was only when we were by ourselves that we spoke in our real voices. When we were alone we summoned the horses of our languages and mounted their backs and galloped past skyscrapers. Always, we were reluctant to come back down. (240)

Although the first person plural could be accused of wearing away the individual edges from the narrative, these sections told using ‘we’ broaden the book, make it about more than one girl’s journey. As Darling bemoans in the novel, Africa is often thought of by the people she meets as one place, with one story. This book joins others like Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Taiye Selesi’s Ghana Must Go that are complicating those assumptions while exploring the experiences of characters who leave their homes to travel to a new reality.

Viktor Shklovsky said of Tolstoy that the writer ‘describe[d] an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time’. The small details recorded and defamiliarised by Darling are the real strength of this book: a slice of pizza described by someone who has never encountered one—slices of pepperoni ‘the color of burn wounds’ (6)—and a calendar Jesus who ‘has women’s hair and is smiling shyly, his head tilted a bit to the side; you can tell he really wanted to look nice in the picture’ (23). There’s also a friend from Darling’s high school who’s ‘got this chest like she’s going to breastfeed the whole of America’ (220). When Darling misses her country, she describes a sky ‘so blue you can spray Clorox on it and wipe it with a paper towel and it wouldn’t even come off.’ (151). More than these details, it’s Darling’s even gaze, her frankness that stays with the reader. We Need New Names is a visceral, embodied book where hunger is more than a motif. It’s a book where hunger—for food, for love, for home—and the experience of being alive are inextricably intertwined. As people continue to move across the globe, playing their own version of the country-game, carving out new homes in places often hostile to them, We Need New Names is a book that helps us see these migrations on a human scale.

 

HAYLEY SCRIVENOR is a writer and PhD candidate at the University of Wollongong, Australia where she also lectures in creative writing. Her research areas include the first person plural and empathy. She is the director of Wollongong Writers Festival, held annually in November www.wollongongwritersfestival.com. You can find more of her writing at her website: www.hayleyscrivenor.com.

 

Dimitra Harvey reviews “Fragments” by Antigone Kefala

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Fragments

by Antigone Kefala

Giramondo

ISBN 978-1-925336-19-1

Reviewed by DIMITRA HARVEY

Stark, radiant imagery; lean punctuation; the slightly disorienting effect of the syntax; an imaginative vision of sensuous waking life enmeshed in subterranean realms of memory and dream, struck me on my first encounter with Australian poet Antigone Kefala’s work: an English-Greek bilingual edition I stumbled across several years ago containing selections from each of her then published collections, The Alien (1973), Thirsty Weather (1978), European Notebook (1988), and Absence (1992). Fragments (2016) represents Kefala’s first collection of new poems in more than twenty years. Like those earlier collections, Fragments effects Banksy’s famous maxim, that ‘art should…disturb the comfortable’.

The voice of Fragments travels across countries – cities and shorelines, edgelands, bushland, and dream – as it attends to states of grief and aging, to the intricate entanglements of sensory experience, memory, and imagination. Kefala’s attention to these entanglements disrupts what theorists Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch conceived as the ‘political-cultural construct’ of modernity – the ‘seamless continuum’ of rectilinear time (Seremetakis 19-21). Oriented towards the past, rendered ambiguously as ‘a coolness / we thirst for… / a poison / we thirst for’ (7), and by which the present is constantly interrupted, judged, made sense of, and ‘reimagine[d]’ (75) – the collection resists the future-orientation of setter-colonial society, its practices of’ ‘concealment’ and ‘amnesia’ (Rose 16, 11).

Kefala engages the senses with startling vividness. Fireworks pour from the Sydney Harbour Bridge as ‘a rain of stars… / crushing against the polished / marble of the waves’ (25). The eyes of kangaroos are ‘large sequins / splashing in the night’ (31). In the divers of ‘The Bay’ (26), we meet ‘strange amphibious creatures / with black rubber skins / wrestling the waves’. Throughout Fragments, the interplay of sensuousness and memory evokes non-linear temporalities. In the opening poem, ‘the sound’ of a voice thrusts from memory to synaesthetic presence: the speaker feels her ‘veins full of ice’ as the voice ‘travel[s] / at high speed / releasing fire’. The sensory-emotional cascade ruptures unilinear time as the speaker observes ‘this return / the past attacking / unexpectedly / in the familiar streets’ (3). Akin to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of time-knots, which identifies ‘a plurality of times existing together, a discontinuity of the present with itself’ (in Rose 25), in Kefala’s poem we witness the past violently rupture the present – ‘return[ing]’, resisting closure – and implicating the experience of time in layered, cyclical trajectories.

Trajectories of return permeate the collection. In poems such as ‘On Loss’ (40), remembering the dead embodies the ‘contradictory, equivocal, and ambiguous’ return of exhumation (Danforth 69). As anthropologist Loring Danforth points out, ‘the return that takes place upon exhumation should be an occasion for joy. But an exhumation is not a joyous return…The exhumed remains are above ground, no longer separated from the world of the living, yet they are only bones’ (66-69). In ‘Letter II’ (4), the ‘light…clean as if made of bones / dried by a desert wind’ reminds the speaker of the ‘you’ she addresses. The implication is clear: that person is dead, the body decomposed. The poem pivots on the paradox of being a letter to one who is no longer alive to read it – reminiscent of poems such as Donald Hall’s ‘Letter with no Address’ (103); however, in Kefala’s poem, the crystal hardness of the imagery generates the aura of a rite. Light exhumes memory even as it returns knowledge of total separation: ‘nothing will bring you back’. Like the ‘hard white bones’, evincing ‘[t]hat which has been separated so painfully cannot be rejoined… and the contradiction between our lives and our deaths can never be resolved’ (69), the speaker in ‘Letter II’ acknowledges that there is ‘only this light / falling… / in an unbearable indifference’.

Kefala links the seasonal cycles with aging and death. The title of ‘Moon Wolf’ (33) reverses the Native American seasonal term, specifying the full moon of midwinter associated with death vis-á-vis extreme cold and scarcity. The speaker sees the moonlight ‘aiming at [her], swooping down / a bird… / its hollowed eyes / pencilled in crimson / its incandescent tail… / searing through the air / …closing in / burning the ground’. The sense of the speaker as prey and her awareness of her mortality crystallise in the image. In the suggestion that the speaker has approached the ‘winter’ of her life, the threat and proximity of death is intimated as both material fact and something that preys upon her mind. This is unnervingly intensified in the final observation of the moon’s light stalking ‘at [her] feet’: ‘the white wolf / the tense arch of its back / blue phosphorescence’.

The cyclical trajectory of aging emerges within poems such as ‘Letter to Chitra’ (42), where the subjects take on the appearance of pre-adult states: ‘Our friends are… / holding themselves / in their emaciated bodies / exposed faces that have acquired / the look of adolescence’. In ‘Birthday Party’ (67), ‘she was waiting on the couch / very pale, white dusted / incredibly small now… / not coping with her glasses / that had grown / to a giant size’. Much of Fragments meditates on the physical and psychological impacts, as well as social alienation, of aging, in a culture that largely dismisses its elderly; ‘a culture’ – as Dmetri Kakmi points out, ‘that has set a taboo on ageing, and makes a cult of youth and the inordinate preservation of the body’ (103).

The biting poem ‘The Neighbour’ (43) lists the actions carried out after an elderly woman dies:

On Monday, she said
they took her away
on Tuesday
the dog was put down
on Wednesday
the furniture went.

And poor bob
still at the Resting Home
that nice place
the walls white, the bed covers red
and he sitting there in his pyjamas
drinking tea
unaware of the maple coffin
and she lying dead
and all the lovely flowers.

The noting of perfunctory tasks trivialises the woman’s death, reducing her life to material fragments, easily dismantled. The casual, conversational tone amplifies the brutal apathy of the failure to notify the nursing home-bound husband, making the poem a pointed critique of neglect.

In ‘Day by Day’ (75), cycles and seasons correlate with backwards and downwards trajectories that gesture to moral accountability. The speaker’s observation of ‘another spring / the peach tree in flower again’ spurs the looping verse of the second stanza: ‘backwards me turn / we turn backwards / measure our failures’. ‘Day by Day’ contests the ‘deflection of responsibility’ embedded within what Deborah Bird Rose describes as the Australian settler-colonial ‘paradigm of progress’. Oriented to the ‘future that will emerge from, and will be differentiated from the present’, as the present was from past, and through which ‘current contradictions and current suffering will be left behind’, ‘progress’ encourages ‘us to turn our backs on… social facts of pain, damage, destruction, and despair’(16-18). Yet for the speaker of ‘Day by Day’, the past appears as neither closed nor disjunctive with the present. Retrojection enables her to ‘measure our failures / with infinite patience’. Kefala traces the past underfoot as well, with pigeons ‘assiduously tapping the earth’ alluding to the underworld and the dead who become soil where the peach tree sets roots. In order to ‘reimagine the times’, we also must ‘assiduously’ touch, tap, turn up, examine the past. Kefala resists the notion that we should ‘accept an account of history that enables us to feel “comfortable and relaxed”…[or that] amnesia should surround that which causes discomfort’ (Rose 11).

Poems such as ‘The Snake’ (48), ‘The Fatal Queen’ (50), and ‘Pilgrim’s Tales’ (51), also offer resistance to these paradigms, embodying the ‘post-mythic’ storytelling mode explicated by anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis (31). The speaker of ‘The Snake’ situates herself and an accomplice – possibly the reader – in the narrative: ‘Dusk, the two of us / waiting in silence / at the waterhole’. She describes a failed attempt to seize a powerful, ancestral-like being, evoking the ‘substance and fragments of myth’, and fusing them to the present. The omission of the verb ‘to be’ (i.e. ‘are’ or ‘were’) in the first stanza, as well as the final stanza, ‘We still at the edge / watching the water’, makes the tense ambiguous, inferring and enmeshing multiple temporalities, creating ‘passageways between times’. ‘The Snake’, and others like it, interrupt contemporary ‘myths’ which quarantine the past from the present and portray them ‘as separate homogeneities’ (Seremetakis 31).

Kefala’s critics over forty years have almost obsessively characterised her poetry as ‘foreign’. A great deal has been made of the fact she’s a migrant, and of her writing’s (non-Anglo-Celtic) European, and apparently therefore ‘un-Australian’ sensibilities (Duwell in Radford 200; Page in Gunew 210). But perhaps these characterisations demonstrate more the insularity of the hegemonic white literary landscape. These characterisations enable Kefala’s critics to cauterise the disruptive ethical and cultural implications of her work, which remains firmly rooted in the modern Australian condition.

WORKS CITED

Dandforth, Loring M. The Death Rituals of Rural Greece. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 1982. 66-69.
Gunew, Sneja. ‘“We the only witness of ourselves”: Re-reading Antigone Kefala’s work’. Ed. Vrasidas Karalis & Helen Nickas. Antigone Kefala: A Writer’s Journey. Melbourne: Owl Publishing 2013. 210.
Hall, Donald. The Selected Poems of Donald Hall. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2015. 103.
Kakmi, Dmetri. ‘On Poems – a bilingual edition in Greek and English’. Ed. Vrasidas Karalis & Helen Nickas. Antigone Kefala: A Writer’s Journey. Melbourne: Owl Publishing 2013. 103.
Radford, Kristian. ‘Antigone Kefala: Alien Poet’. Ed. Vrasidas Karalis & Helen Nickas. Antigone Kefala: A Writer’s Journey. Melbourne: Owl Publishing 2013. 200.
Rose, Deborah Bird. Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press 2004. 11, 16-18, 25.
Seremetakis, Nadia. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1996. 19-21, 31.

DIMITRA HARVEY has a Bachelor of Performance Studies from the University of Western Sydney and a Master of Letters in Creative Writing from the University of Sydney. Her poems have appeared in Southerly, Meanjin, Mascara, and Cordite, as well as anthologies such as The Stars Like Sand and A Patch of Sun. In 2012, she won the Australian Society of Authors’ Ray Koppe Young Writer’s Residency.

Robert Wood reviews “Annihilation of Caste” by Ambedkar, introduced by Arundhati Roi

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Annihilation of Caste

B.R. Ambedkar

UWA Publishing 

ISBN 9781742588018

Reviewed by ROBERT WOOD

When I was living in Chembur (Bombay) in 2016, there was a statue of a portly and bespectacled B. R. Ambedkar at the end of my street. This suggests he has been lionised in India, if not quite canonised, something aided in ‘the West’ by Arundhati Roy’s well-publicised talk ‘The Doctor and the Saint’ that favourably compares Ambedkar to Gandhi. And so, it was with the contour of knowledge that I opened Annihilation of Caste. I do, of course, come from an Indian family and have parents who were born as colonial subjects in occupied Kerala. But our path to liberation was different from the national story, inflected by a regional identity, a Communist atmosphere and a Catholic bent. So what was I to make of the lessons in Annihilation of Caste and what can we learn from them to make sense of contemporary India?

The Annihilation of Caste was a radical work for its time, a critique too of the establishment as it set about decolonising itself. Its central plank revolves around the negative impact of the caste system as it matters for ‘untouchables’ like Ambedkar himself. This was about the liberation from a centuries old social structure that oppressed a huge number of people. Ambedkar highlights one particular case, where Hindus demanded that Balais (‘untouchables’) follow the rules listed below:

Balais must not wear gold-lace-bordered pugrees.
They must not wear dhotis with coloured or fancy borders.
They must convey intimation [=information] of the death of any Hindu to relatives of the deceased—no matter how
far away these relatives may be living.
In all Hindu marriages, Balais must play music before the processions and during the marriage.
Balai women must not wear gold or silver ornaments; they must not wear fancy gowns or jackets.
Balai women must attend all cases of confinement [= childbirth] of Hindu women.
Balais must render services without demanding remuneration, and must accept whatever a Hindu is pleased to
give.
If the Balais do not agree to abide by these terms, they must clear out of the villages.

Having established this as a fact of dalit life, Ambedkar asks a series of rhetorical questions to political-minded Hindus, namely:

Are you fit for political power even though you do not allow a large class of your own countrymen like the untouchables to use public schools? Are you fit for political power even though class of your own countrymen like the untouchables to use public schools? Are you fit for political power even though you do not allow them the use of public wells? Are you fit for political power even though you do not allow them the use of public streets? Are you fit for political power even though you do not allow them to wear what apparel or ornaments they like? Are you fit for political power even though you do not allow them to eat any food they like?

The effect of this is to pierce the Hindu consciousness, to highlight the inequality through emphasising the basic conditions of India at the time. This political question, or the question of political reform is coupled with social reform and economic reform, thinking through the entirety of Indian society from the perspectives of dalits. For Ambedkar, it is caste that prohibits real progress including the ability to form a truly national society; it is caste that prevents a fellow feeling of social inclusion; caste that inhibits uplift of aboriginal peoples. His ideal social contract is one of true equality and liberty, an India of genuine freedom at all levels of society. To destroy the caste system is possible only with the destruction of the shastras and so Annihilation of Caste ends up being a critique of the holy scriptures of Hinduism itself as well as its material manifestations. This is a critique levelled with passion, logic, panache, flair and evidence. It is written from a truly subaltern perspective and informed by liberalism, freedom and personal experience. Reading Ambedkar today still gives one nerves, hope and possibility.

The caste system is still one of the central aspects of Indian politics, society and economy today. However, and thanks in large part to Ambedkar’s articulation, there is most definitely a self-aware subaltern politics just as there is a broader sectarian/communal question that focuses on religion in general. However, both of these seem to prevent a conversation about gender rather than leading to liberal intersectionalities as they matter in ‘the West’. The true liberation of India must involve the material freedom of women, girls and those who female identify. That is what it is to read Ambedkar now and learn from his example. One can only hope that the opening he makes in the field can lead us away from female infanticide, the negative aspects of the dowry system and towards femme empowerment in the workforce and home as well as making public space safer on the whole. It is not only the annihilation of caste that we seek then but also the annihilation of chauvinism in the 21st century.

ROBERT WOOD grew up in suburban Perth. He has published work in Southerly, Cordite, Jacket2 and other journals. At present he lives at Redgate in Wardandi country and is working on a series of essays.

Geoff Page reviews “Bull Days” by Tina Giannoukos

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Bull Days

by Tina Giannoukos

Arcadia Press

ISBN

Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE

Tina Giannoukos’s first book, In a Bigger City (Five Islands Press 2005), was a highly evocative and rather unsparing portrait of Melbourne at the time. The observations were close and clear-eyed, the tone generally colloquial. There was also a considerable social range in the poems though many of the protagonists seemed to be somewhat down on their luck.

Giannoukos’s second book, Bull Days, a collection of 58 sonnets, is very different and not just because of the stricter form employed. Sonnet sequences go back to the late Middle Ages and in their contemporary form (where rhyme and consistent line length are not considered essential) they offer poets considerable flexibility as well as an impression of on-going form.

Almost all the poems in Bull Days are written in the first person and are seemingly confessional (though, of course, this may not be the case). As in most of In a Bigger City the narrator is not very fortunate in love and many of the poems lament poor treatment by lovers who have proved to be less worthy than they seemed at first. A few poems are specifically erotic; most are more generalised. Occasionally, as in “Sonnet  X” and “Sonnet XII”, the narrator seems to change. In the first we have the lines “These breasts are honey to your eyes, / nipples harden as lips close around them”. In the second we have “Her breasts are honey to my eyes, nipples / harden as lips close round them.”

In other poems the (presumably) female narrator seems to identify with a bull being slowly tormented and killed in an arena — along perhaps with mythical suggestions of the minotaur. The last ten lines of “Sonnet XX”, for instance, do much to explain the book’s title and dramatise the “lover’s complaint” theme that runs through most of the collection. “Sex is not easy, but it is natural. / I am your bull charging you and you, / a working matador, show your control, / drive the steel into my heart. / When you removed your blackwinged hat, / recall her to whom you dedicate this bull’s death. / What trophy to keep? My ears, my tail, my hooves? / No, throw the body parts to your sweetheart. / I hope she hurls flowers at you for it. / The crowd will wave their handkerchiefs.”

To some readers this extended metaphor will be poignant and effective. To others, it may seem excessive as do some of the book’s metaphors to this reviewer.  I think particularly of “the mellifluous alphabet of ache” (“Sonnet XV”) or the simile “his sensuous fringe / like blond rivers of yearning” (“Sonnet XXIII”).

Not all of the book, however, is at this level of emotional drama. Occasionally, Giannoukos returns to the colloquial which was such a feature of her first book. “Sonnet XVIII”, for instance, begins with the feisty lines: “All this politicking. It’s a sign. Yeah! / Nothing in it if you’re single. Fuck! / Thirty per cent of women live alone. Whoa! / Let’s work out a way to tax silence. Cool!” Bull Days could probably have benefitted from a little more of this kind of thing.

“Sonnet XXI” is also a welcome change from the tearful and revisits the talent for sardonic social observation which characterised In a Bigger City. At times the integration of dialogue and clever rhyming is reminiscent of Sydney poet John Tranter’s skill with the form — and it’s no coincidence, perhaps, that twelve of this poem’s lines rhyme in the way one might expect. The first four lines establish the tone: “ ‘At the café? Eat in? Or take-away?’ / Oh, that’s my lover being open-handed. / That’s fine for him. He says it’s so passé / the wine-and-dine obsession. I’m branded … “

Taken as a whole, Bull Days, has the flexibility and variety we have come to expect of the sonnet sequence over the centuries. It has more than a few entertaining moments, as the above indicates, but it also strays into the over-written at times. Some readers may complain (in an old-fashioned way) that most of the sonnets don’t rhyme and that many don’t use the pentameter consistently but these features operate mainly to enhance the book’s diversity of tone and manner — which is considerable.

It’s an interesting exercise, on finishing Bull Days, to look back over the opening lines and see what they promise. “Sonnet II” starts: “When you touch me it is the hand of God”. That sounds a bit grand. “Sonnet XLIX”, on the other hand, begins: “My lover is shitty-eyed” and goes on engagingly to point out that: “He will not sit with my friends, whom he calls amoral, / so he sits alone relishing his principles. Now he’s forlorn / and a hypocrite, enjoying surreptitiously / the wobbles of the waitress’s sallow breasts.”

It is in poems like this that Giannoukos is at her artful best: those alliterating “w” sounds (“wobbles of the waitress’s”), the hissing onomatopoeia of “surreptitiously — and so much of the narrator’s irritation and resentment packed into that single word “sallow”. 

It is also good to to see the Melbourne-based Arcadia imprint making one of its relatively rare excursions into poetry on this occasion.

 
GEOFF PAGE’s 1953 (UQP) was shortlisted for the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for poetry. He lives in Canberra and has published 21 poetry collections, as well as novels, memoir and biography. He edited The Best Australian Poems 2014 and 2015 (Black Inc.) Hard Horizons is forthcoming in 2017 from Pitt St Poetry

Geoff Page reviews “The Blue Decodes” by Cassie Lewis

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The Blue Decodes

by Cassie Lewis

Grand Parade Poets

Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE

The Blue Decodes is the latest collection in a now considerable list from Grand Parade Poets, going back to 2011. It’s a diverse stable ranging from young avant-gardists (such as the late Benjamin Frater) through to Selected Poems from well-established, but somewhat neglected, senior poets such as Evan Jones.

Cassie Lewis’s book also has a sense of retrieval about it. Her three earlier works reach back to 1997 but the most recent, Bridges, came out eleven years ago. The Blue Decodes thus comprises work written in the San Francisco Bay area and upstate New York over the past decade or so. One can consider Lewis either an Australian poet-in-exile or a fully-assimilated American poet who happens to have been published in Australia.

The American influences on Lewis’s work here are strong and go back to her youth in Melbourne in the 199Os where the impress of the “New York” school of poetry was still fairly strong. It’s no surprise to see a reference to An Anthology of New York Poets ed. Ron Padgett and David Shapiro (1970) in the Acknowledgements.

Like much (but not all) of the work by “New Yorkers”, Lewis’s poetry has a surreal tinge and a considerable opacity. It’s as if she’s taken Emily Dickinson’s injunction to “tell it slant” literally. Unlike most Australian avant-garde poetry, however, Lewis’s work has an attractive musical surface which leads one back to subsequent readings and further understandings.  

Lewis’s play with ambiguity begins, rather cutely, with the title itself where the word “Decodes” could be either a verb or a noun and “Blue” could be either a noun or an adjective. Similar games with parts of speech occur in poems such as “Postcard #15”, short enough to reprint in full: “So cold my ears listen / to bells! Snow / its hush. Snow has / fallen a starry blanket.” Again the first use of “snow” could be either a noun or a verb. By removing the putative comma after “fallen” we also have a momentary sense of “fallen” as a transitive verb rather than the intransitive one it normally is. The “blanket” could have been “fallen” by the snow. Even a “blanket” of snow being described as “starry” is arresting enough.

Fortunately, The Blue Decodes is not all games. There is considerable social (and aesthetic) commentary as well. In “Postcard #12”, immediately before the poem just discussed, we have a telling sense of an Australian poet not entirely in love with her new country. “I’ll pay more attention to Chet / Baker. I want to, honest. / And to this country, land / of unsought-for liberty, / where freedom comes disguised / as a book of poems.”

Like much of Lewis’s other work this, despite its apparent simplicity, is not an easy poem to interpret. We can take Chet Baker,  the great jazz trumpeter, as a signifier of U.S. culture at its best (despite his addiction to heroin) or we can make the inference that even one of America’s best musicians is not really worth the effort of listening to closely (“want to, honest”). “Freedom”, of course, is meant to be a prime American virtue but Lewis seems to dismiss it as “unsought-for” (tell that to George Washington) and merely a dimension of the pervasive pop culture from which the only escape is a “book of poems” — by the New York school presumably! However the reader ends up interpreting the poem, there’s obviously a lot happening in a few lines.

The “New Yorker” jibe may be unfair, however, since there are references in The Blue Decodes that range well beyond that coterie — to Keats, for instance; to Theodore Roethke and, in “Lordy, Lordy”, even to William Blake. “Do you ever have William Blake days? / I do. They start amiably enough —  coffee, toast — and lead / into a forest thick and lush as childhood.”

The Blue Decodes is broken into five loosely-grouped thematic sections, ranging from a concern with language, geography, history and the suburban quotidian through to the diaristic final section, “Bridges”. Of these perhaps the most striking are the seven prose poems in “Maps”. Its first poem, “Queenscliff” has a drily complex tone which is characteristic of Lewis’’s work more generally and is  clearly manifest in its last two sentences: “ And from memory, that bus shelter at the edge of the world, with its wads of chewed invective, I see my absent father; mourning, directing cranes over the skyline. Labouring under the illusion that he of all people wasn’t loved.” It’s a disconcerting but stimulating worry that the cranes here may be birds “directed” by an unhappy father or building machinery he is in charge of.

One problem with playful, quasi-surreal, New York influenced poetry is that it can almost forget to be moving —  or perhaps regards such a demand as a bourgeois distraction. It’s encouraging then to read a poem such as “Sophie” where Lewis seems to be writing about her own daughter’s birth and the primal bond that has existed between them from that moment. The poem ends, very convincingly, with these five lines: “But your light is entirely new. / You arrived here from a new charter. Cities so torn / but you were flying, you were running water. Biology is our bedrock. / In labour I woke up, and the nurses brought me you. // I was the door you chose to walk through.”

One has the feeling, after all the “slanted” games and the “trying to seem modern” (as Lewis jokes in “Bridges”) that this “bedrock” of biology is where the centre is — or what The Blue (eventually) Decodes. If you get my meaning.

 

GEOFF PAGE’s 1953 (UQP) was shortlisted for the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for poetry. He lives in Canberra and has published 21 poetry collections, as well as novels, memoir and biography. He edited The Best Australian Poems 2014 and 2015 (Black Inc.) Hard Horizons is forthcoming in 2017 from Pitt St Poetry.

Gay Lynch reviews “A Chinese Affair” by Isabelle Li

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A Chinese Affair

by Isabelle Li

Margaret River Press

ISBN 9780994316769

Reviewed by GAY LYNCH
 
 
In 2016, I met short story writer and poetry translator Isabelle Li at the inaugural Australian Short Story Festival in Perth. In conversation she conveys a graceful attentiveness. She tells me that she values the Chinese artistic tradition of training and craftsmanship and hopes her debut collection of stories will appeal to a broad readership.

Several are focalised through Crystal [Xueqing], an adult Chinese expatriate living in Sydney and her child persona, who convey the intergenerational trauma brought about by the Cultural Revolution. Crystal morphs into a minor character in one story and is renamed in others. Like Li, these young women take their hard-won education and migrate, to Singapore, London and Australia. Their psychological perspicuity and bold cleverness enliven the text:

I can afford to be controversial. I can blink my almond-shaped eyes and make provocative statements to people’s faces. I once said over family dinner, ‘The world is made of strings of energy. A brick and I are made of the same elements. The strings vibrate differently to form different particles’ (8).

Several of them have a yen to write creatively. Li confesses to her Perth audience that many of her stories are semi-autobiographical.

A Chinese Affair is structured in four sections, each containing four stories, some of them continuous or linked, many set in China, the first and last bookending Sydney.  The action shifts back and forth between these places, traversing the psychological and physical journeys of the characters. Li’s writing is evocative. Sea, sky and weather adjust narrative tension: ‘The air is damp and heavy, the moon is hiding behind a cloud. The wind chime too makes a timid sound, as if it too is afraid to break the silence’ (14); ‘the sky is still fish-belly white and the clouds scaly silver’ (303); Stories are framed by nature and seasons that convey mood and foreshadow events: ‘everyone’s anxious, waiting for the tempest’ (304).

The authorial voice in A Chinese Affair is somber, questing and humble. Key characters are soft and tough.

…in a Chinese costume, which makes me feel like a porcelain vase, exquisite and brittle, to be treated with care, by others and myself’ (7)

I do not want to be special. I am not an exotic bird and have no interest in showing off my plumage. I am Crystal, perfect in structure and form, hard and clear in every molecule (105).

These images carry the dignity and restraint of their creator.

In the title story, ‘A Chinese Affair’, a Mandarin interpreter married to an older Australian man who has ‘had the snip’, seems resigned to her fate but, nevertheless, pursues IVF. Many of Li’s protagonists long for a child. After visiting home in China, Crystal experiences depression. Her husband advises her to listen to rock music, arguing that there ‘is nothing to get angry about in his society’ and that her sense of dislocation is ‘a Chinese affair’ (9). The reader will be aware that ‘affair’ has at least two meanings and that homesickness is a double-edged sword.

The stories are well paced rather than relentlessly action-packed. Most turn on a dramatic event: a diabetic coma, a murder, a betrayal. Li relates to the Perth conferees how every afternoon during the second school sitting – she attended morning sessions – she listened to radio and read and rote-learned poetry, locked behind a barred wooden door for safety, in a violent neighborhood. Her collection is well balanced, with passages of introspection and rapid descents into chilling backstories.

Common subjects and themes pervade the texts, throwing light upon a Chinese historical need for discipline, to survive great trials and threats of violence, to find the courage to leave, to achieve good mìngyùn/ fortune. Characters meditate on education, the art of love and fertility, exile and loneliness, violence and ambition. They have the kind of industry necessary to write one letter each week, 208 letters before joining the army, or to house sit and finance a portfolio of shares or a block of land in the Blue Mountains.

Gender inequity simmers below the surface of many stories. But suffering is dealt out evenhandedly between girls and boys. In ‘A Fishbone in the Throat’, the only story told entirely from a male perspective, Li offers a western role reversal with Chinese economy, when a husband loses his job as a fitness coach and teacher, becomes a cleaner and suffers heart disease. His wife berates him about cigarettes, alcohol and cholesterol. Ironically she escapes to Australia as a refugee after government persecution for her practice as a member of Falung Gong. Li’s women suffer stoically–taking on domestic work as well as big careers, aspiring to help their children leave. Contemporary expat partners tend to be supportive even when culturally perplexed. Women ignore or enact infidelities.

‘Further South’ addresses domestic violence. It could be argued that family violence occurs everywhere, along with corporal punishment, self-harm, adultery and incest, rape and assault, kidnapping, suicide and femicide. Li suggests, perhaps, that Chinese history exacerbates it. Many stories refer, sometimes obliquely, to horrible violence, springing from injustices and cruelty during the Cultural Revolution, reconstructed from Li’s memory of that time: for instance, a boy beaten to death, frozen, dumped next to a pile of Chinese cabbage; a teenage lover who meets a similar fate. Li paints a grim picture of injuries caused by manual labour in heavy industry and the consequences of socialised medicine and poverty.

The child voice in ‘Fountain of Gratitude’ and in other stories affords Li a construction to contain universal childish activities – climbing trees, turning cartwheels, sucking nectar from flowers, catching dragonflies, collecting birds eggs, making slingshots and pancakes, riding bicycles, eating sunflower seeds, acting out television series and ice skating. Set against the hardship of a Japanese invasion in which the fictional child narrator’s father was killed, the narrative presents efflorescent violence more pervasive than the child’s capacity to comprehend or articulate. But Li’s juxtaposition of innocence against violence is deftly done, offering readers none of the irritations of twee-ness, precocity or maudlin victimhood brought by some writers. Dark forces – occasionally understated – dislocate the rhythms of Chinese childhoods. Little Third suffers blow after blow until he disappears at the end of ‘The Floating Fragrance’. Li describes a mother’s hanging corpse ‘facing the wall, like a set of clothes dangling from a hook. Her right hand was in front of my eyes, small, smooth, yellowish, as if she is wearing a rubber glove’ (130).

At the conclusion of ‘Blue Lotus’, this titular flower is described as ‘a symbol of hope, of perseverance’ (126). The human discipline required to survive historical Chinese violence and material deprivation, falls into striking relief against Li’s depiction of Sydney dinner guests discussing ‘the perfect cup of coffee and lamenting the hardship of finding one’ (123). The narrator is disoriented by their comparative decadence: ‘As if walking in a snowstorm, I look back to find my footprints have been erased. I do not know where I am and can no longer find my way back’ (123).

In ‘Two Tongues’, the book’s final story, a poet suggests that ‘exile is not a subject on its own but a state of existence whence all poetry arises’ (318). Li applies metafiction to Crystal’s riffs on translation as an income source that leaves a writer free to write their past and to settle their aesthetic. The enlarging of sympathy in trying to understand another point of view sharpens acuity and skill. Memory and translation can commingle or diverge: ‘translation is like a woman, either faithful or beautiful, but not both’ (330).   Li’s narrative sparkles with wit and energy and the narrative ends on a happy note. Perhaps love may be possible. In ‘Narrative of Grief’, researcher Lili hypothesises that ‘the very act of writing will change the nature of memory’ (275).

‘Amnesia’ is the only story in which I found language overblown, some of it cliched and self-consciously straining for effect but, in such a good collection, I might pass this off as characterisation. Olivia is ‘highly synaesthetic’ and mediating on grief with an analyst who, unprofessionally, stalks her and lusts after her during consultations. She seems close to psychosis: ‘I want to sail towards you in the black sea’ (195). The narrative is unreliably focalised through the young therapist and features Gothic undertones.

Li’s stories will hold wide appeal for general readers but especially for those interested in the effect of trauma on memory. Millennial readers may find the protagonists’ resignation and courage inspiring, particularly in stories like ‘Lyrebird’. In an age of global migration Li’s redemptive stories hold up a beacon of hope to those longing for a safer, happier future. The Chinese Londoner counsellor in ‘Narrative of Grief’ laments that ‘There are many who do not want to share their stories for fear of losing them’ (273). Li is not among them.

GAY LYNCH is a creative writing academic, working adjunct to Flinders University. She has published academic papers, Cleanskin, a novel (2006) and short stories: most recently, in Griffith Review (2016), Best Australian Stories 2015, TEXT (2015), and Sleepers Almanac: 8, 10 (2013, 2015). Two pieces of life writing are pending (2017). She was Fiction and Life Writing editor at Transnational Literature ejournal from 2011-2015. Her historical novel is presently being read by Picador.

Stacey Trick reviews “Portable Curiosities” by Julie Koh

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Portable Curiosities

By Julie Koh

University of Queensland Press

ISBN 978-0-7022-5404-8

Reviewed by Stacey Trick

“There is something wrong with those who won’t see the laughing, and something is wrong with those who won’t see the crying. Don’t play dumb with me, China Doll.” ~ ‘Sight’ in Portable Curiosities.

The short story form, historically, has been regarded as a literary art form in its own right that often creatively explores the zeitgeist of a particular time and the psyche of the human condition. Throughout history, celebrated writers have often influenced a fixed supposition in their reader’s imaginations. When we think of Ernest Hemingway, the trials and tribulations of being a poor writer and expatriate during war times particularly in Paris comes to the forefront of our minds. To think of Arthur Conan Doyle evokes, at once, impressions of Sherlock Holmes solving mysteries in the bustling streets of London during the Victorian and Edwardian periods, between about 1880 to 1914. And certainly, when Edgar Allan Poe comes to mind, impressions of macabre and mystery influenced by the darkest corners of the human psyche are often explored in the most extreme and grisly circumstances.

The short story form invites us to dig deep within ourselves and search for meaning and connection to the external world around us; connection to the other; and ultimately, connection to our own internalisation of social, historical, and cultural world views. No other genre of literature has the same power and potential for such deep meaning-making. You may have heard the adage ‘everything is all well and good in hindsight’. This is particularly true when trying to make sense of the current zeitgeist of our times due to being so immensely involved in it. It can be incredibly difficult. However, a rising short story writer, Julie Koh has done quite an extraordinary job of exploring many different aspects of our zeitgeist and the internalisation of certain social issues. It seems that a new wave of literary satire is prevalent in Australia and a new notable author has been compared to the likes of Nic Low, Sonja Dechian and Marlee Jane Ward.

In her collection of darkly satirical and witty short stories, titled Portable Curiosities, Julie Koh explores issues in contemporary society including rampant capitalism, toxic masculinity, sexism, racism, and even our obsession with reality television series. Born and raised in Sydney, Koh came from Chinese-Malaysian heritage and studied Politics at University, before giving up a corporate career in Law she pursued a career in fictional writing. The new Australian success in the literary scene, Koh’s stories create new ways of understanding the societal, historical, and cultural issues in contemporary society. Koh was shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction 2016 and shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards in the Australian Short Story Collection: Steele Rudd Award, 2016.

Portable Curiosities, published in 2016 by University of Queensland Press (UQP), is Koh’s first collection of short stories. The collection consists of ‘Sight’, The ‘Fantastic Breasts’, ‘Satirist Rising’, ‘Civility Place’, ‘Cream Reaper’, The Three-Dimensional Yellow Man’, ‘Two’, ‘Slow Death in Cat Café’, ‘Inquiry Regarding the Recent Goings-On in the Woods’, ‘The Procession’, ‘The Sister Company’, and ‘The Fat Girl in History’.  

In Koh’s Portable Curiosities, her reoccurring thematic approach of the entrapment of the individual in social structures are explicit and painfully pertinent in each story. In each story, Koh delivers a satirical twist in critiquing contemporary society’s pervasive and entrenched consumerism, casual misogyny, and the insidious nature of fearing otherness. Brimming with a unique and social critique from the mundane aspects of the everyday human life such as work to sexism, capitalism, racism, objectification, egos, and politics.

Koh’s literary style and techniques are used expressively in portraying those contemporary issues in a way that positions the reader outside of their comfort zone. She reveals truths that hide deep in our society; deep in our history; and deep in our culture. Throughout the collection, Koh experiments with style. Her short stories incorporate elements of science fiction, speculative fiction, magical realism, as well as satirical journalism. Koh imagines worlds where skyscraper floors are limitlessly high, a third eye can see ghosts, spirits embody lizards, and ice-cream eating is a sport worth dying for.

Julie Koh, a writer of satire; it only seems fitting to mention a particularly intriguing story titled ‘Satirist Rising’. Koh blurs the boundaries of fantasy and reality by embodying satire itself. Satire is an actual person in this story; the last living one to be precis. Another mentionable story in the collection, also brimming with social satire, is ‘Civility Place’. A man finds himself stuck in the never-ending loop of work that he cannot seem to physically escape. Koh explores the internalised entrapment humans have when it comes to capitalism and work.

The ‘Fantastic Breasts’ is pointed at the sexual objectification of women. In our zeitgeist, Koh’s story is highly relevant particularly in relation to the political turmoil our society is facing, rife sexism, and the consistent objectification of women. The following is a fine example of Koh’s satirical approach to literary style and social critique in this story:

“And as I sit there, stroking them to sleep, I think about how the Fantastic Breasts need me and how the metropolis, in turn, needs the Fantastic Breasts and therefore how, without my continued commitment to the care of the Fantastic Breasts, the metropolis faces doom. Then I close my eyes and I don’t feel so bad anymore, comforted by the knowledge that I am the manliest man the world has ever seen”.

The language used here implies that a woman is nothing more than her breasts; than an object purely for the purpose of a man’s ego. The short story form is a certainly an effective choice for Koh’s stories. This particular story touches on feminist critique and egocentrism which again, is rife in our zeitgeist. Many of Koh’s stories are intelligently written and her subject matters are chosen incredibly wisely and with tact.

The social satire and critique in Portable Curiosities is not only entertaining and thought-provoking to the literary community and the avid reader, but it is highly effective in encouraging ourselves to be mindful of our own prejudices and to question why we do the things we do. As an enthusiastic consumer of Australian literature, it is rare to come across an author with such a unique style and perspective on contemporary issues expressed so compelling in literature. Koh’s work is an incredible credit to her originality and has certainly set a benchmark for other Australian writers looking to make their mark in the literary world.

 

STACEY TRICK is a freelance book reviewer and journalist based in Brisbane. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Professional Writing and Publishing, specialising in Creative Writing and English Literature. Stacey is currently writing her debut novel and blogs about her experiences as a writer at StaceyTrick.com.