The Great Undoing

by Sharlene Allsopp

Ultimo Press

ISBN: 9781761151668

Reviewed by DEBORAH PIKE

Sharlene Allsopp’s debut novel, The Great Undoing, has a great cover that undoes history with a red crayon. Ernest Scott’s A Short History of Australia (1916) is struck out and bold typeface declares an angry and urgent call for a different version to be told. As Allsopp writes, ‘After all, only the winners write history.’ The ‘story stealers’ (1) have already written theirs, clearly, the time is ripe for a re-write.

I looked up Scott’s book, with some curiosity, to find virtually no information except advertising from antique bookshops via eBay. And now I am assailed by emails and popups, recommending Scott’s volume for purchase. But how long can these versions of history last, I wonder?

As more and more First Nations writers confront questions of representation, voice, colonisation and sovereignty, previous stories and histories of Australia will need to be thrown into question. History, it seems, is being rewritten by First Nations authors like Sharlene Allsopp, Claire G Coleman, and Alexis Wright – via fiction. Fiction has become the space for dismantling empire and for writing and rewriting history into an imaginary place or into a speculative future.

The Great Undoing is set some time, decades ahead, where the world is run by a technology called BloodTalk. Allsopp writes, ‘Everything that we are is stored in our body’ (17). Initially an immunity tool, it is soon used to track people and their locations as well as their bank accounts; it becomes a form of border control.

But the future is not all bleak, certain things are being rectified: Australia has its first Indigenous Prime Minister, ‘Ruby Walker’ who ‘enacts the Truth Telling Policies’ (34). Scarlet, an Australian refugee is tasked with the job of updating the archives and going through curricula to make sure that these are more historically balanced and that more voices are heard, presumably in a way that includes and details Indigenous stories, names and languages.

The novel flashes back and forth from Then to Now. While Scarlett is working in London, she forms a passionate relationship with a rock musician, Dylan. But there is a widespread mass blackout and a breakdown in communications. Everything is in chaos and borders are shut. Scarlet then meets David and they both travel, seemingly illicitly, across the globe to return to Australia, each for a different reason. Scarlet resorts to paper and pen to recount her experience of her ‘great undoing.’ All she has to write on is a copy of Scott’s A History.

But what is Scarlet undone by? Is it the great global technological disaster itself? Or Empire that stripped her of her story? Or is she ‘undoing’ Empire through her truth-telling work? She writes, ‘My father’ – a Bundjalung man – ’was my great undoing’ (25). Is his racial identity the source of her undoing? Or, later, we might ask, is she ‘being undone,’ in a steamy way – as she narrates her romantic encounters with poetic, scintillating prose: ‘[h]e was undoing. I was undoing. And, right then, right now’(67)?

Allsopp suggests that Scarlet’s undoing lies in all of these things, but ultimately, however, it is the undoing of identity, the pursuit of it, that sweeps the story along; the book is a meditation on both the complexity of identity and the nature of textuality – and their interwoven relationship.

In parts, the novel reads like a response to Wiradjuri author, Stan Grant’s brilliant, (if somewhat controversial) essay On Identity (2019). In his book-length essay, Grant argues against the limiting categories of identity – ‘Identity does not liberate, it binds,’(43) explaining that ‘[t]hat’s the problem with identity boxes: they are not big enough to hold love’ (19). He Writes:

If I mark yes on that identity box, then that is who I am; definitively, there is no ambiguity. I will have made a choice that colour, race, culture, whatever these things are… (25)

The result is that by ticking that box, he denies the other parts of his identity which do not fit into that box, ‘we participate in an infinity of worlds’(24), says Grant, citing Alberto Melucci, which such boxes cannot possibly contain. In a similar vein, Allsopp writes:

There have always been tiny, neat boxes to tick. Nationality Box, ethnicity box, gender box, religion box. If you tick or cross you are contained within that box. (195)

Grant attributes his influences to many writers of all colours and persuasions, insisting that many writers are Aboriginal (48), even if their genetic code would tell you otherwise, because (quoting Edouard Glissant),‘“you can be yourself and the other”’ (43) and this is what literature allows us to do. . Allsopp is also interested in showing her indebtedness, her connectedness, to a wide range of writers such as David Malouf, Rebecca Giggs, Claire G Coleman, Christos Tsiolkas and, even J. R. R. Tolkien, among others, all of whom she refers to in her book and occasionally quotes.

Arguably, however, in its attempt to reclaim Indigenous language, storytelling and identity, Allsopp’s main literary influence is that of Tara June Which and her novel The Yield, which Allsopp explicitly mentions. This is because, for Allsopp, as for Winch, language is crucial:

Language isn’t just a tool to share information or to record history. Expressed thought is powerful. It declares truths that are, and truths that are not-yet. Language breathes power into discourses of liberation AND oppression, both creating and destroying futures. (105)

Since language shapes our perception of truth, or ‘frames’ it as Scarlet tells us, it is directly linked to history, and to her job of setting it right. This is a challenge when so many Indigenous languages have been lost. In an insightful (and amusing) discussion of the power of language, Scarlet warns us that much language is used and has been used mistakenly, to wield forms of control, however unconsciously in so many ways: ‘Our language frames us all with penis-envy,’ but when considering its marvellous capacities, ‘It should be vagina-envy, baby.’

Truth telling is also central to the novel’s concerns. But this is not straightforward, ‘When a nation is built on a lie, how can any version of its history be true?’ (119). Allsopp is deeply interested in how truth can be conveyed through narrative, even hinting that there lies the possibility for multiple and perhaps even conflicting ‘truths.’

The Great Undoing examines the ways that narrative structures our perception of both cultural artifacts and the world around us. It exposes the rotten imperial core of major museums and institutions, and gloriously imagines, however briefly, how all this might be remedied. The novel is interspersed with historical tracts and extracts; it is highly experimental fiction, and robustly formally inventive. It is in some ways a narratological compendium, exploring different forms of textuality – in a bid, perhaps, to showcase the breathtaking heterogeneity of various versions of ‘truth’ and history.

In terms of style, the writing is refreshing, bracing and often affecting. Allsopp combines high literary elements with aspects thriller and romance. This genre-bending attests to the possibilities of narrative – and to the difficulty of containing or accommodating certain stories and fractured histories. It could have been the limitations of this reviewer, but at times, I found The Great Undoing difficult to follow.

Despite this reservation, The Great Undoing is exciting reading and it is a pleasure to encounter fiction that is so ambitious, conceptually intellectual, and yet at the same time, also thoroughly immersive. This is an important book.

The novel’s sense of urgency is compelling:

But what if no one tells our stories? What if there are no records left? Can they live on if they only exist in our memories? What if everything I have ever done, every truth I have ever retold, is erased? (169)

Allsopp wants to right the wrongs of the past, reclaim memory, unravel the mystery of identity, throw a tin of paint on the face of history, nudge to possibility – convey the complexity of all these things – as well as give us a rollicking good adventure. Who can ask for more?

Citations

S. Allsopp. The Great Undoing. Sydney: Ultimo Press, 2024.
S. Grant. On Identity. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2019.
 
 
DEBORAH PIKE is a writer and academic based in Sydney and an associate professor of English Literature at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney. Her books include The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald, which was shortlisted for the AUHE award in literary criticism. The Players, her debut novel is now out with Fremantle Press.

The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat

Sara M Saleh

UQP 2023

Reviewed by KATIE HANSORD
 
 
 
 
How to begin to do justice to reviewing a book of poetry this important, this powerful, and in this moment? If I were to recommend one book to people this year, it would be this. And it has been. I have told everyone I know.

As Edward Said has written, for Palestinians, “… they could never be fit into the grand vision…Zionism attempted first to minimize, then to eliminate, and finally, all else failing, to subjugate the natives.” (Said, 85). Sara M. Saleh is a powerful award winning writer, human rights lawyer, poet, “the daughter of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Egyptian migrants…based on Bidgigal land” (n pag). Saleh’s writing, reminds us again of Said’s point, her Instagram bio adding to this impressive list of occupations that she is an ‘agent of chaos’ (according to the ‘Israeli’ ambassador). Whatever kind of order would seek to eliminate any of us, I believe requires our opposition, and in its limited view, chaos, if that means the very existence of life-affirming exceptions to its brutal “vision”.

I think firstly though, maybe we must return to the question of what poetry is, because really poetry is a part of everybody, it is for everybody, and it holds such incredible power to inspire new worlds of creativity and imagination. A portal to something beyond that sits already within us. Still, I so often see people feel intimidated, or dismissive, and / or put off by it. And when I say everybody should read this beautiful book of Sara M Saleh’s incredible debut collection of poetry, I truly mean it. Everybody should have it read to them if not, should have the chance to love it and feel its love. I have easily fallen in love with this little book, from its warm peachy-coloured cover and beautiful woman bathing calmly in a teacup, right to its final page. I already want to read it again.

Last night, one of my teenage sons came into my bedroom to chat, and we got onto the subject of poetry because he knows it interests me. I said that I felt poetry was like undiluted cordial in comparison to say a novel; much more intense. “Nobody drinks undiluted cordial you maniac!’ he said, and we were laughing. I concede that I didn’t really think this metaphor through… then I said, perhaps it’s a bit like like how people feel astrology is somehow ‘fake’ somehow a lie or trick, not scientific, but either way it clearly offers us a way in to understanding and speaking and thinking about our own growth and our inner and outer experiences, poetry can do that too in a connected way through someone else’s experiences. Then he said he finds ‘themes’ as a concept the least appealing of the trilogy of plot, character, and themes, the expected elements in a story, and themes are the all of poetry it seems. I say there are many stories and characters in poetry anyway…and so he allows me to read him one poem, from this book.

I choose the final one, ‘Love Poem to Consciousness’ (‘A love poem?’ he looks quite wary. ‘Yes’, I smile, ‘but don’t worry – it’s to consciousness’) …he nods and I read:

I have dreamt of Jenin and her groves,
the figs and orchards, almonds and apricots,
the olives that ripen and ricochet between fingers.

I have wedged and waded my palms
through the soil, marinating in its wetness
the rivers of olive oil spouting even in drought.

I have grazed the Central Highlands of al-Khalil
where the ravines roll and rise,
the terracotta terraces kiss the vineyards,
dark grape hyacinths panting,
the cicadas’ wings glimmering like broken glass.

I have tracked down the oldest soap
factory in Nablus, one of two remaining,
a rush of milky rivers, baches of bars froth
into a foamy afternoon.

I have stepped onto the cobblestones
of al-Naserah, of prophecies and freshwater
spring, plumes of sacrament smoke
Strangle the indigo dusk.

I have gazed at the crystalline waters of Akka,
Felt the sting of salt puffy on my
lips, where I drank the undulating
ocean, and it drank me back.
…
I know this now, my being contracts and expands
with the land, boundless.
I know this, too: If ancestral homeland
gets me killed someday,
I’ll die like our trees, standing up.
(100)

My son does enjoy this poem – how could anybody not? It is clearly bursting with magic (perhaps another name for love, or life) after all. The final lines conjure for him the image of a pirate he had heard of, shot down, but still standing upright somehow, in defiance even of gravity itself.
The next day I woke to randomly discover a snippet of an interview by Kate Bush, an old interview from Irish television and her words struck me: “Most of my other inspiration comes from people, people are full of poetry you know, everything they say. Maybe the way they say it has its magic, all sparkly. And people are always saying things that inspire me. I mean, people are just full of wonderful things.” (Kate Bush, 25 March 1973, interviewed by Gay Byrne on the late late show.)

It resonated so heart-breakingly, with an image I had shared months ago, written much more recently this year, it was pink text on a paler pink-coloured background that was unattributed. It read:

“They’re killing poets, and not just the ones we know about.
The children who told the best jokes, the grandmothers with the funniest nonsense songs, the fathers with the turn of phrase to break your heart.
The archives replete with the words of the ancestors, now in ash.
Thousands of stories lost to the ether.
They’re killing the storytellers. And they’re doing it on purpose.”

What a thing for a heart to have to hear…

Stories connect our hearts and we know that Sara M Saleh is a brilliant storyteller, as well as a poet. Her novel Songs for the Dead and the Living was amazingly also published in 2023, in a prolific burst of gifts, the same year as The Flirtation of Girls, which is no exception, full of story, and characters, and yes, themes too.

Her use of words to convey all of these is so skilful and creative and brilliantly done, I am not sure how to show it. In the poem ‘Reading Darwish at Qalandia Checkpoint’ just this one tiny section alone demonstrates her incredible talent and wit and power as a writer:

Police investigation still pending.
The evidence – REDACTED
His rights – REDACTED
His childhood – REDACTED
(20)

There is a story here, and it is one of negation and terrible harm. A character too. But what does it mean to speak this? To show us, in the very struck out words, what has been redacted and to tell us yes, in all caps, yes – it very much has been? It somehow undoes a part of this harm, undoes its very future, as it unveils a part of what has been intentionally taken, hidden, suppressed, and it shows us how we might be able to witness and then speak back to that. Reimagine the very existence of an imperialist colonising violence… A childhood, unquestionably, should not under any circumstance be struck out or redacted! This will catch you in the heart, like it should. The poem concludes:

I flip through the pages of
my book. Reading Darwish at Qalandia
is a provocation.
I confront the bare Iron grids,
they are bone waiting for skin,
the toothed bars not wide enough
to squeeze a single orange in.
(21)

To even read poetry, here the poetry of Darwish, in such a context is a provocation. Like the final lines of ‘Love Poem to consciousness’ it is impossible to not confront:

I know this now, my being contracts and expands
with the land, boundless.
I know this, too: If ancestral homeland
gets me killed someday,
I’ll die like our trees, standing up.
(100)

Faced with confrontations of the most unjust and horrific death, of horrors seemingly unimaginable, as well as the knowledge of so much love and beauty in our hearts, I suppose some people also feel poetry is somehow a trivial response, somehow just a frivolity in the real fight against oppression or the deep appreciation of nature, life, humanity. This, Sara M Saleh’s The Flirtation of Girls reminds us, is simply not the case. Her poetry is about our very humanity, all of our humanity, it is life affirming, a powerful part of remembrance, for grief, and therefore love, and a powerful way for us all to imagine the world we need to exist into being. It is utterly crucial. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, it is stunningly brilliant. Saleh is a truly incredible poet and this is an astonishing debut that everyone should read.
 
 
Citation
Said, Edward W. The question of Palestine. Vintage, 1992.
 
 
KATIE HANSORD is a writer and researcher living in Naarm. Her PhD was completed at Deakin University. Her research interests include gender, poetry, feminism, disability justice, decolonisation and anti-imperialism.

Dirt Poor Islanders

by Winnie Dunn

Hachette

ISBN 978-0733649264

Reviewed by ISABEL HOWARD
 
 
Intercultural struggle is the main question at hand in Winnie Dunn’s Dirt Poor Islanders: how do you define yourself between two different cultures that shape every aspect of your life? Dunn’s novel is written from the perspective of Meadow, a young, mixed-race Tongan and white girl growing up in Mt Druitt in the Western suburbs of Sydney and traces her gradual assertion of who she is as she becomes a young woman. With a liberal peppering of millennial Australian and Tongan cultural references it explores themes of girl and motherhood, sexuality and poverty. But at its crux, it provides an internal viewpoint for readers to witness Meadow’s evolution from rejection of herself and all things Tongan, to understanding where she belongs between two cultures and racial identities, and within the complex map of her family.

Built around Meadow’s gradual growth and self-acceptance, the novel adopts the arc of a bildungsroman, and is split into four sections: Soil, Bark, Salt and Blood. At the start of each section, we’re greeted by a written retelling of a traditional Tongan story, such as the story of Va’epopua at the start of Soil:

The lagoon stretched further and so too did the demi-god. From coral to seaweed to salt to wave – it became clearer to him that everything emerged in pairs. Somehow, he knew that he could not be made of woman alone. So, when the demi-god’s calves became as wide as stumps, he questioned his grounded mother yet again. ‘I am made from what?’

Slowly planting taro with her stiff knuckles and gnashing inside her cheeks, Va’epopua whispered, ‘Different.’(4)

Each of these retellings foreshadows its respective section, like the parallel in this excerpt between Meadow’s mixed racial identity and Va’epopua’s son’s parentage. By using and repeating particular Tongan phrases and motifs in these retellings, Dunn alludes to a long-lived oral history and a set of values that differ from dominant Western ideas held in Australia, and she weaves connections to these retellings throughout the story as important symbols of Tongan identity, such as childbirth, soil, and Tongan foods. In fact, the whole novel is a collection of experiences laden with meanings and lessons that help Meadow make sense of her identity, emulating the nature of oral storytelling as a means of transmitting history and values.

At first, I felt that this structure meant that the story lacked a momentum I’ve come to expect from Australian fiction, in that it was missing a central conflict or mystery to drive the plot. However, as Matthew Salesses’s explains in Craft in the real world, “causation in which the protagonist’s desires move the action forward” (27) has been dictated by dominant Western ideologies of literature as the hallmark of effective fiction, leading us to undervalue traditions that have priorities other than a story’s start or end (98). Thinking about this made me realise that it was my expectation that was lacking: Dunn’s work doesn’t offer a denouement of practical solutions to Meadow’s problems because it rejects this Western storytelling vehicle in favour of a form that resembles cyclical storytelling. It emphasises understanding and interconnectedness and, basing my knowledge in Dunn’s retellings, it engages with the essence of Tongan storytelling traditions. It’s an innovative choice, and its delicate execution marks Dunn as both an original and skilled writer in the Australian landscape.

Beyond structure, Dunn centres Tongan-Australian experiences through just about every aspect of the novel. She provides nuanced representations of Tongan-Australian people, spaces, language and kinship, suffused with so much detail and feeling that her lived experience shines through, as seen in careful details like these:

My grandmother stepped out, dressed in an entirely new outfit – a shimmery puletaha with gold embroidery. Holey ta’ovala around her waist. Ta’ovala was funny like that; the poorer it looked, the richer it was, because it meant the garment had been passed down for generations. (206)

But Dunn resists one-sided glorification to represent the complexity of Tongan-Australian culture in full. She underscores the strong bonds between Tongan people and their “togetherness,” (40) but doesn’t shy away from how those bonds can become problematic, such as how Meadow’s family expects her aunt to sacrifice her intimate relationship with a woman for the sake of their traditions (163). As a woman personally living these experiences, in a country where Tongan people are plagued by negative stereotypes, I’m certain that this is a challenging step for Dunn. But by taking it with care, she’s created an earnest picture of what it means to be Tongan in Australia: the beauty and the ‘dirt’.

By being selective and sparing in how she explains Tongan culture and language, Dunn is unapologetic about prioritising a Tongan-Australian audience and making them the cultural insiders of Dirt Poor Islanders. For those who aren’t cultural insiders, this could make the novel an occasionally alienating experience – some might even argue that the lack of explanations, or the lack of provision for cultural outsiders, prevents them from identifying with Meadow and takes them out of the flow of the story. However, Dunn has made her choice clear, and I would argue that, in a publishing industry where this is the very first novel written for a Tongan-Australian audience, it adds significant value for cultural insiders that would be diminished by catering to the white gaze. Rudine Sims Bishop explained that seeing ourselves represented is a powerful and validating experience, and it’s just as important to be exposed to the experiences of others – a statement I take to mean as that, for some readers, being made to feel like an outsider by Dunn’s work is a good thing.

As someone who isn’t Tongan nor speaks Tongan, I did occasionally get thrown by Dunn’s frequent Tongan references. Upon reflection, though, I realised that this kind of partial understanding is also a common mixed race, or ‘third culture kid’, experience that I can identify with: growing up surrounded with a mix of cultures and languages, I was often in situations where I didn’t understand the words or references around me. It’s a common, isolating experience that Dunn teaches and encourages readers to empathise with by presenting it through Meadow, who partially understands everything herself.

In a similar vein, Dunn explores racial identity for mixed race and Tongan people in Australia with sensitive accuracy. Racism is the very first thing we see Meadow experience: her white neighbour yells racist abuse at Meadow’s Tongan grandmother, causing Meadow to decide to never work with her on a ngatu again (10) and sparking her association of being Tongan with dirt and muck (112). Further on, there are frequent references to Meadow or others wanting to be pālangi (50), and accusations that Meadow is not Tongan enough: ‘Me and Nettie steered clear of proper Islander girls when we met them at Sunday school in the halls of Tokaikolo. Those mohe ‘ulis demanded we spoke Tongan too, and when we failed, they mocked us. Together, Tongans were always trying to prove how real or fake each of us were. Nettie and me, we were plastic.’ (89)

With passages like this, Dunn draws attention to the ways in which we racialize people based on their cultural or linguistic knowledge and language. She shows how external messages can influence one’s racial identity and foster internalised racism, in that Meadow initially hates being Tongan, but also defines herself ‘as half and never enough, hafekasi’ (271). But to rebut the often harmful assumption that these feelings might be intrinsic or inevitable, Dunn presents us with Meadow’s rage at the injustice of racist stereotypes during class (141) and, eventually, her realisation that she can define herself differently: ‘No one could live as half of themselves. To live, I needed to embrace Brown, pālangi, noble, peasant, Tonga, Australia – Islander.’ (275)

Dunn actively rejects the ways in which Tongan and mixed-race people are stereotyped and made to feel less than their counterparts in Australia, and it’s this aspect of her writing that I’m most grateful for. Many of Meadow’s experiences and feelings are reflected in my own life as a mixed-race Filipino-Australian woman, and it’s refreshing to not just see those experiences on the page, but to see how Dunn presents them as steps in a journey of understanding oneself.

There’s plenty more to examine in Dirt Poor Islanders, such as sexuality, motherhood, and family violence. But in the interest of writing about what I know and what I believe to be the heart of Dunn’s novel, I’ve focused on her exploration of race and culture. Despite the differences between being Tongan and Filipino, reading Dunn’s work felt like slipping on a well-worn t-shirt in how empathetically she writes growing up not-quite-white in Australia. It’s a generous, powerful debut novel, narrated with a vulnerable voice, and much like Meadow’s many mother figures, it challenges its readers while fostering love and understanding.
 

Citations

Salesses, Matthew. Craft in the real world. Catapult, 2021.
Bishop, Rudine Sims. “Windows and Mirrors: Children’s Books and Parallel Cultures.” 14th Annual Reading Conference 1990, California State University, 5 March 1990, pp. 3-12, files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED337744.pdf#page=11.

 
ISABEL HOWARD(she/her) is a Filipino-Australian writer based in Lutruwita / Tasmania. Her creative work has appeared in kindling & sage, and she is currently in her Honours year studying creative writing at the University of Tasmania.

Kairos

by Jenny Erpenbeck

translated by Michael Hofmann

ISBN 9781783786121

Granta

Reviewed by GAN AINM
 
 
 
 
It’s hard to avoid the idea of allegory when approaching Jenny Erpenbeck’s International Booker Prize-winner, Kairos. Right from the cover, we are told by Neel Mukherjee that ‘Erpenbeck has written an allegory for her nation, a country that has ceased to exist— East Germany’. The Booker Prize’s own website asks us to consider the merits of reading Kairos allegorically, and most reviews will come down on one side or the other regarding the device’s efficacy.

The story of Hans and Katharina, two East German citizens in the latter years of the state, begins at a moment of, seemingly, good fortune; a chance meeting on a bus in which passions are ignited and an affair ensues. The novel itself, however, begins long after this, when Katharina hears of Hans’ death and begins to sift through boxes of letters, diaries, notes and other refuse of their relationship. Hans is a former Hitler Youth, current writer, and married with a child. Katharina, far younger, was a member of the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation, a socialist youth group collective designed to uphold the values of East Germany. Hans wields a patriarchal authority over Katharina, as well as, via his several affairs, his wife and child. He is well-travelled and learned, and his experience of life before (and beyond) the wall lends him an autocratic propensity that he wields culturally, familially, and sexually. There is, then, from this initial kairos, or ‘critical moment’, of their meeting, a disparity between the two lovers, one reflective of those between East Germany and its citizens. The GDR was the socialist-controlled portion of Germany following the end of WWII. To maintain order and prevent dissent, the government placed restrictions on the freedoms and movements of its citizens to travel to the capitalist West Germany over the Berlin Wall. By the late 80s, when the pair meet, they are living in a failing state, where the tensions spawned by government overreach would soon cause its complete (and in the case of the Wall, literal) collapse.

The novel makes this allegory clear through its explicit positioning of the personal and political:

Up and down. End of season sales, says her cousin. Bargain basement prices. Words Katharina needs to learn. She tries to remember what she was taught in civics about the difference between use value and exchange value. // And not once does the phone ring. // Is Hans sleeping with his wife on their vacation? Up and down, up and down, until everything that’s for sale is practically given away.
(p. 77)

Step by step, Katharina measures herself against her state, which has been generous to her and now counts on her to be generous in return. // Did he give himself up to her, or she to him? Or, if love is serious, are they indistinguishable?
(p. 86, 98)

The same can be said of the novel’s conspicuous allusions to walls:

Before they head out again, Katharina sees a photo of Hans on the desk. Can I have that? she asks, and Hans asks back: As a wall to contain imagination? (p. 30)

The immediacy with which these comparisons and references are made (being set up and paid off within a few pages if not the same paragraph) can sometimes work against the novel and reveal the limitations of a simple A = B, B = A comparison. However, I mention the debate around the novel’s allegorical reading up front in order to posit that Kairos is in fact far more interesting than the elevator pitch version of its premise; it is evident that the majority of Erpenbeck’s actual compositional choices point towards something at once broader and deeper.

Tension and unease is baked into Erpenbeck’s writing. The lack of clear subjects and verbs throughout the novel’s persistent use of sentence fragments leaves the reader dependent on their surrounding context, perhaps reflecting not just the young Katharina’s dependence on Hans, but the dependence of both upon the state. The use of run-on sentences speaks to a similar kind of reliance, this time the need for those in power to connect dots, draw conclusions, stoke suspicions; their frenzied amalgamation and need to reach and infiltrate everything is a kind of paranoia based in the fear of the agency of others, and the possibility for freedoms to undermine the (im)balance of power. Control is the shared element of these two seemingly incongruous techniques, and it is a control wielded by Hans as well as (and because of) the GDR.

Having lived through its creation, Hans sees the socialist utopia (and, because he is the one betraying his wife, the affair) as generative. It is not a preconditioned, or in any way stable, S/state, but a system which requires maintenance, regulation, continual reassertion and the quelling of potential threats to its stability. Such betrayals take the form of infidelities (against him) which engender ever greater controls that limit the freedom of dissidents. What Katharina’s affair-within-an-affair seems to represent for Hans, then, is the fear of her freedom, of her agency in moving beyond imposed bounds and barriers, and a choice in where her loyalty, her love, her body, can lie. As with all betrayals by combatants, there are punishments, and in her reaction to these, we again see the infusion of the personal and political, with Katharina initially reluctant to cross the Berlin Wall to the (comparatively) free and capitalist West. These sharp psychological observations shine through, and indeed create a powerful parallel between the troubled lovers and the collapse of East Germany, and yet Erpenbeck pushes her writing further.

There is a conspicuous and purposeful lack of speech marks throughout the dialogue, and even occasions when dialogue is not laid out traditionally:

Well, says Hans, I can’t swim. Why’s that? The water was too cold for me. Katharina shakes her head, disbelievingly. Really? she asks. And he replies: No, not really.
(p. 57)

This technique may again point towards the idea of control and the compelled language of totalitarian states; arranging the dialogue as we would a traditional paragraph seems to take away the agency of what is being said. However, it may also represent a kind of finality, or perhaps inevitability, and this may be the book’s most devastating decision.

If speech here is not granted a special, interventionist category, via speech marks, then these are not assertions being injected into the world, but solidified, spatio-temporally fixed elements of the world. They are past, no different in kind from the scenery or sensorial recollections of a now-defunct nation, recalled in imperfect fragments by the frame narrative. This device, where we find an older Katharina reflecting back with a general lack of the dependent fragments, furthers this conclusiveness with a perspective of birds-eye omniscience:

It feels good to be walking beside him, she thinks. // It feels good to be walking beside her, he thinks.
(p. 19)

He thinks, as long as she wants us, it won’t be wrong. // She thinks, if he leaves everything to me, then he’ll see what love means. // He thinks, she won’t understand what she’s agreed to until much later. // And she, he’s putting himself in my hands. // All these things are thought on this evening, and all together they make up a many-faceted truth.
(p. 27)

This all-knowing perspective, like the other devices here, speaks towards a certitude, to what is doomed to happen within an imbalanced relationship from the instant of their meeting; that critical moment contains within it a ‘good fortune [which] implied always [a] misfortune that was not just equal and opposite, but in its potential for harm, perhaps even much greater’, where ‘anything seems possible, anything good, everything bad’ (p. 91, 117).

To speak briefly of Michael Hofmann’s English translation of these techniques and themes, the aforementioned devices are all preserved effectively and reverentially. Other moments, however small, seem to take more liberties; it’s difficult to see, for example, how the line “that strange word ‘believe’, with ‘lie’ in it, is still going through her head when he has pulled down the straps of her dress” could maintain its specific wordplay (and implication) in the original German (p. 46). While this might seem pedantic, I mention it only for those with the capacity to read this text in its original language.

Erpenbeck’s book is crushingly absolute. It is tinged not just with the finality with which a memory is remembered, or a fragment recollected, but the finality that reveals the inevitable, and within the inevitable lies the inherent. Power imbalances do not become manipulative and abusive, but are abusive, always and already; they require a monopoly on agency, increasing coercions and restrictions on freedom lest the authority be challenged, or abandoned.

Everything in Kairos seems to speak towards this certitude, but it is hard to see the novel as defeatist. If the book does indeed function as an allegory, then it is, like all allegories, a warning, and an act of defiance. A warning cannot be for ‘a state that has ceased to exist’. It can only be for a potential, a future, dare we say a present, one in which there opens up the chance to heed the warning; to do, to act, to be, better.
 
GAN AINM is a writer born, raised and living in Lutruwita/Tasmania, currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Tasmania, and whose fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Island Magazine, and received second place in the University of Essex Wild Writing Prize.

Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

Pan Macmillan

ISBN: 9781035026074

Reviewed by JAMES GOBBEY
 

If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among those that survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself—which, because it is inevitable, means nothing.
(250)

Dying is individual, but death punctures the social, diffusing its impacts among those that remain. Martyr! then asks: is there meaning to be found in death? What lives on with the people that remain? What makes a martyr?

Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, Martyr!, sees the established Iranian-American poet turn his attention to a new form. His novel asks uncomfortable questions in the name of identity and grief, culminating in a work that attests to the singular devastations that make up collective loss. And yet, despite a fascination with the lingering potential of death, Akbar achieves a lightness that lifts his novel beyond simple pessimism.

Martyr!’s focal character, Cyrus Shams, is surrounded by death. It permeates his life: he works at a hospital, playing sick for medical students to practice counselling the terminal; he is a recovering addict, sure that every day of sobriety is a day of life he should never have seen; he is haunted by the memory of his mother’s murder in the downing of a commercial flight by a US navy cruiser. All of this death culminates in Cyrus’s fixation with, and desire to begin writing on, martyrdom.

The above extract, ruminating on the sins of suicide and the martyr, forms part of Cyrus’s work-in-progress: “BOOKOFMARTYRS.” This book helps structure Akbar’s novel, seeing the inclusion of poetry dedicated to famous martyrs, as well as passages of essayistic prose. These textual interludes feature at the turn of each chapter, alternating to also include transcripts, emails, and further details surrounding the flight on which Roya Shams lost her life. Because, ultimately, it is the ongoing impacts of Roya’s death that drive much of this novel. 

Roya’s death is folded into the missile attack of Iran Air flight 655 by the USS Vincennes in 1988, which resulted in the murder of 290 civilians. The public memory of this attack is a site of contestation between Iran and the United States. In an interview with Nylon, Akbar explains, “When you say the Vincennes incident, people of a certain age will furrow their brows. It’ll sound vaguely familiar, but they won’t remember 290 innocent lives shot out of the sky. I’m fascinated by that. In Iran, they put it on postage stamps. They propagandize it. I’m fascinated by that, too.” The propagandization of flight 655 serves to make the civilians killed into martyrs. Their deaths assert the indiscriminate nature of the United States war machine, particularly when held against the failing memory of the United States public. In the aftermath of the downing of Iran Air flight 655, these deaths are given an ulterior meaning. 

For Cyrus, this moment of tragedy is a starting point. When asked about the kind of book he conceives of “BOOKOFMARTYRS” being, Cyrus explains: 

My whole life I’ve thought about my mom on that flight, how meaningless her death was … The difference between 290 dead and 289. It’s actuarial. Not even tragic, you know? So was she a martyr? There has to be a definition of the word that can accommodate her. That’s what I’m after. (75). 

Cyrus initially determines his mother’s death to be without meaning—simply a number among many. And although we must reconcile that Roya’s death is “not legible to empire” (75), this novel expounds a more expansive view of the potential meanings that death can carry. 

Foremost, Martyr! is a novel that takes the individual loss present in mass death and inspects it. Because, on some level, Cyrus is right. How do we feel the difference between 289 and 290 deaths? Rather than succumbing to the generalised negativity of significant loss, this novel takes a step forward to invigorate the connectivity of a single life—one marred by tragedy on a mass scale. 

I purposefully call Cyrus the focal character of this novel. It is a simplification to call him the protagonist—or even the main character. Martyr! uses Cyrus as a centre from which to work outwards, extending from him to offer life and voice to surrounding people and characters. Primarily, these voices belong to family and friends, but genuine martyred lives are also evoked: namely those of Bobby Sands, Bhagat Singh, Hypatia of Alexandria, and Qu Yuan. These martyrs each feature as poetic subjects of “BOOKOFMARTYRS,” their historic deaths speaking to Cyrus’s negotiations with his own time and identity. Bobby Sands, for instance, has a poem written to him that begins: 

there’s a Bobby Sands Street in Tehran

one block over from Ferdowsi Avenue, 

that’s true, Ireland, Iran, interchangeable mythos
(97)

This poem binds Ireland and Iran, recognising their shared suffering at the hands of colonial powers; it draws together Sands and Ferdowsi—a Persian poet whose story is later retold in Martyr!—creating a textual crossroads at which the two meet. Through Cyrus, through his human ties and writing on martyrdom, a world of active social ties is revealed. 

The connectivity of Martyr! rejects the individualism that separates us from others, perpetuating apathy. In Akbar’s novel, the relationships that spring from Cyrus allow us to feel more. Throughout the novel we touch on the real lives of martyrs, but we also encounter Cyrus’s family and friends. We meet Ali, Cyrus’s father, who made ends meet throughout Cyrus’s childhood by working on a chicken farm; Arash, Cyrus’s uncle, whose time in the Iranian army was spent riding through fields of the dying dressed as an angel of death; and it is through chapters and passages such as these that we meet a clearer version of Roya, unaltered by the filter of Cyrus’s faded childhood memories—a woman who reveals, “I never really loved being alive” (145). These affecting connections extend to include others important to Cyrus: his best friend Zee, and the Iranian artist, Orkideh, whose imminent death becomes an art installation. By allowing the presence of this whole network of characters, we become more able to comprehend the dispersal of feeling that takes place when loss occurs. 

Akbar does something vital in his depictions of social connectivity. He allows these characters the use of their own voices, rather than limiting them to the details known by Cyrus. Formally, as the novel shifts between characters, the point-of-view changes from its standard third-person to a more transparent first-person. While Cyrus is the centre through which we come to each of these characters, access to their experiences—their emotions—occurs through their own words. From this use of voice, these characters each come to exist as the centre of their own worlds, not exclusively the periphery of Cyrus’s, establishing the reality of their own personal connections, and a network that expands on and on. 

This connectivity, this network of people who know and feel for each other to varying degrees, is how we come to parse through the distinct losses that make up mass grief. Martyr! does not deal with the problem of mass death—with the difference between 289 and 290—but it does create the space for us to feel the expansiveness of a single death, and from there we can begin to imagine the social impact of death on a large scale. 

The expansive network depicted in Akbar’s debut novel alters how we come to understand the martyr, though perhaps creating more questions than answers. Finishing Martyr! I wonder if connection, if closeness, is one of the ways in which martyrs create meaning in death? Martyrdom does not exist in isolation: it holds meaning because of the life lost, and, crucially, the lives impacted. Cyrus Shams asserts that death, “because it is inevitable, means nothing.” But, death carries weight for those that remain. Grief is a testament to the life that did exist. Death’s inevitability does not necessitate the loss of meaning, rather meaning lives on with those that remain. 

There is also something else buried in claims that death means nothing. Consider the civilian deaths of Iran Air flight 655: the grief felt for the victims; the meaning attributed to their lives; the violence of the US—none of this should be lessened by death’s inevitability. As state sanctioned mass murder continues in Gaza, we cannot say that death means nothing. To disregard the significance of death is to render oppressive systems acceptable, and, ultimately, this undermines the social world that connects us. 

Works Cited:

Akbar, Kaveh. Martyr!. Picador, 2024. 

Akbar, Kaveh. “In Martyr! Kaveh Akbar Is Thinking About Eternity.” Interview by Sophia June, Nylon, 2 Feb. 2024, https://www.nylon.com/life/kaveh-akbar-martyr-interview.

JAMES GOBBEY (he/him) is a writer and bookseller from lutruwita/Tasmania. His work has previously been published by Aniko Press and Togatus Magazine.

Moon Wrasse

by Willo Drummond

Puncher and Wattmann

ISBN 1922571679

Review by MISBAH WOLF

When I first picked up Willo Drummond’s debut poetry collection, Moon Wrasse, I was torn between a deep panic of knowing I wanted to become mixed up in the muck, blood, and bloom of the work and wanting to also turn away from the words. Words are spells. Words are little invisible ties between what is captured and what is lost, and somehow, as if by magick, portals are opened for us to walk through. In a true sense, this is an offering from Drummond of a portal of initiation—you choose which kind—one you’ve already been in parallel with, one you have no memory of, or one you care enough to walk along with to experience and become more completely human.

I opened the book to the poem ‘Seed’ which, in a sense, introduces what I see as a quartet of work. I read;

At this season’s out-swelling
after the mangrove moon
she sets her grief in a small seed pod.
(7)

 I, myself, had been dealing with ‘unexplained infertility of ten years, and I wasn’t ready to read it, but the book called out for a conversation with me. I recognized it within my own immediate framework as a book of invisible connective tissue, a witch’s book of shadows, both literary and psychic, between the dead, the dreaming, grief, the acute attention to the breath of things and the indexing of transformations. This is a book where surfaces appear deeper once immersed, where continual intertextuality adds further dimensions, and no energy is ever lost since all is transmuted. A pause must be taken, and a return, like a Joseph Campbell Hero/Heroine, is undertaken; 

She’s looking for
a future to enframe the past

as it exceeds
it. Flickering familiar
like the pulse
of being needed.
(7)

Reading this work, I was able to chart a ship in the shadows of Drummond’s glorious book—through my own grief over childlessness, my estrangement from others/lovers, my deep love for ecology, for the mud and muck of various things I have lost, found, and re-imagined. These things grow in Drummond’s poetry through mud and shadow like mother mangroves, endangered blooms, and conversations with visceral transformations under ‘dappled light’. (60) Such love is to be invoked in the poem “Moon Wrasse” where the narrative etches through the shifting cycling as a lover/other/self that is;

here, moving in
our translucent
cocoon
‘self-made’ and safe
as houses— (60)
It is an homage to great love transforming and witnessing the beloved’s
new lucency—
clear as the blue
of your new man suit
                                sweet as the day
                               true as the day (60)  

This enamoured lover/narrator bears witness/encourages and celebrates this alchemical corporeality with tender reassurance in this delicate liminal space, 

holding hands
like younger lovers
in a film
in a dream.” (60)

The shape of the month as I read this work was also colored by other books at the same time. Fitting for such a book that plays, converses, and returns to dialogue entries, quotes, and habits of other poets and writers. Rest assured, Drummond includes notes about particular moments, words or passages from other writers in this book to show how interwoven and entangled this book is with others’ work. In The Childless Witch, Camelia Elias says: ‘The age we live in is, indeed, no longer an age of lamentation. We lost that art long ago’ (Elias, 2020). The reason I’m including this quote from Elias is that Moon Wrasse has developed a very delicate language of lamentation, with images of ‘striking,’ ‘scraping,’ and ‘digging,’ further propelled after Louise Glück—as in Drummond’s ‘The Act of Making,’ (11) using techniques of alliteration, words beating against each other, switching to words that require the tongue to be pushed gently through lips—there is a feeling when reading this poem and many like this, of incanting. In ‘The Act of Making,’ Willo Drummond employs a rich array of poetic techniques that enhance its incantatory quality. Vivid imagery and sensory language, such as ‘gardens fecund with memory'(11) and ‘imagined blooms heavy with the scent of hope,'(11) create an immersive experience, while enjambment ensures a seamless flow between lines, propelling the reader forward, as in 

          .How can you bear
so many imagined blooms heavy with the scent of hope
let go? (11)

The use of repetition and parallelism, like ‘day after day,’ adds musicality, and the alliteration and assonance in phrases such as ‘fluffed intentions’ and ‘solitary bees’ create pleasing sound patterns that my mouth wants to vocalise. Caesura introduces rhythmic breaks for emphasis/division/rupture of grief; 

                  Unwomanly. Bent queen
brimful of love shame with nowhere to dig
in (11) 

Also, the sharp juxtaposition of contrasting ideas, such as ‘love/shame’ and ‘hope/let go,’ deepens the poem’s emotional impact. Symbolism, unconventional syntax, and strategic line breaks contribute to the poem’s unique rhythm and pace, while personification and metaphor, like ‘remembrance scratches your knuckles’ and ‘bees hover, uncertain,’ imbue the poem with lyrical depth. These elements combine to make Drummond’s poem feel rhythmical and lyrical, making me want to read it out loud. And I do speak them and it is a pleasure to let the words slip and pause between my teeth and tongue.

We can look further into such poems as ‘Note to Self (in Novel Times)’ that inscribes like graffiti on an ancient/new wall to a future/past/now self, on a fridge pinned up by magnets to;

Remember to love
the world. Love
the wailing, rolling world;
the air; the wildness
of wind lifting a million kites
of change (72) 

Such a poem circles back through voice, through lamenting, through oracle (as Earth) as change always present to call one back home. In The Childless Witch, Elias also reframes such a being as ‘able to cast a powerful spell of movement, a movement that goes from trembling, to dance, to the use of voice, the oracle and a state of grace’ (Elias, 2020). Looking through Drummond’s book, these states of ecstatic magic—shadowy and bright—are evident in the language and invocations that run rife throughout this collection. There is a language of lamentation here, as previously suggested—of that which will not grow among the commonly seen, and offers instead the witch’s second sight such as in the poem ‘Ways of Seeing.’ This narrator is pensive with ‘portents’- where moon cycles are traced and named; 

While others turn with such precision,
radiant orbs—content
filled—I dream of conjunctions
luminous alignments
stackings of hope  (20)

This second sight seems always pensively aware of the delicate nature of life in ‘The Art of Making’ that we as readers intrude/bear witness/are gathered round to see ‘Somewhere, a ghost orchid blooms’ (12) This rare orchid/child/being blooms only once a year, pollinated by mimicking male sphinx moths deep in forests where it sucks the moisture from the air.

With this invitation from Elias—’trembling, dance, voice, oracle, and grace’ resound through Drummond’s work. There is even a further complexity established by which Drummond records in her notes at the back of Moon Wrasse that the line from the poem ‘Seed’, 

where what cannot be
is (8) 

gestures to Jennifer Moxley’s claim that ‘lyrical utterances record voices structurally barred from social and political power.’ (Drummond, 76). This first poem is set adrift from the four sections as a poem in motion, of coming up from elsewhere by will; 

here in the lyric tense

she stills to witness
each furred pod/
gain its wild purpose—’ (7) 

This feels like an invocation to voice, to the tiny seed to speak its will, to inscribe and to create. Again, a voice unheard/heard is set in motion in ‘Sail,’ where the other’s silent voice is;

voice, a gaping mouth, calls
from a crack in the world: desolate
wind, sweep my knowledge
into oblivion, drop me back
into the well. (21)

Read it aloud, read it softly and it could well be the words of shamed/guilty/lamenting Medea, such a misunderstood and maligned witch, also a favourite childless witch of discussion for Elias. (Elias, 85)

I have enjoyed framing Drummond’s work as part of a Quartet, a story perhaps like a cycle connected in four parts, likened to the four major phases of the moon—the new moon, the first quarter, the full moon, and the last quarter—because so much of the work makes invitations, invocations, and references to the moon. In Drummond’s section ‘The Art of Losing,‘ ‘Of Finding and Not Finding Levertov,’ ‘Forming and Transforming,’ and ‘Arriving,’ why not take this as a template, traversing phases of the moon? Considering that in my reading, I felt poetic tidal shifts under the witch’s tools of moonlight and water, whether inscribed as bodies, mangroves, fish in moonlight, or rare blooms sucking at the mist. I enjoy mysteries and puzzles and esoterica, so I have dug into this deep pleasure in making these connections through the language or merely literary pareidolia. But there are clues to make such connections, such as mention of the ‘spun to song of sun played at waning moon‘ (61) in ‘A Promontory/A Memory,’ and, of course, the poem ‘Moon Wrasse’—the fish that changes sex to mate and has a crescent moon on the caudal fin, the energy of such seems to suggest a letting go of what has been and finding hope in a ‘translucent cocoon'(21) moving towards the new moon. The new moon is, of course, the dark unseen moon. It is the place that calls for presence and to explore the unseen, and I pose that this is the beginning phase we enter from the start of the book, with poems that seem to scry into the unseen. Considering the first poem ‘Seed’ moves from the lines; 

In waning luminescence
on the aqua-terrestrial shore

she trains her eye
to velvet vivipary
on very salty water

She’s looking for
a future
to enframe the past
as it exceeds it. (7) 

It is the entrance towards the darkness of the new moon in the first quarter ‘The Art of Losing.’ In the new moon phase, there is no visible moon in the sky, and it is the time to explore the unseen, to call for presence, and to stretch the grief unfathomable into song and poetry.

The first poem of this quarter, “The Act of Making,” is indeed what Camelia Elias calls ‘the lost art of lamentation’(Elias, 15),  again inscribing vividly with a question; 

How can you bear
so many imagined blooms heavy with the scent of hope
 let go?” (11) 

Set behind this poem is hauntingly Glück’s ‘The Wild Iris’ (“Hear me out: that which you call death I remember”) like the wild Iris, reborn, returning from dissolution to ‘find a voice’—here Drummond masterfully extends the deep mystery of Glück’s poem of death and rebirth, and continues the esoterically charged moment to look for portents, to have knowledge of the rare ghost orchid ready to be born.

In this first quartet too, ‘Up to Our Knees in It’ explores the unseen mother mangrove beneath the surface, extending and connecting, living anywhere despite the ‘cinema seats and soft drink cans‘ (15) thrown into the waters.

Furthermore, Drummond’s poetry, particularly in the sequence ‘The Rilke Index’ and ‘Open Secret,’ showcases a profound engagement with the poetics of Rilke and Levertov. By using index items as titles and integrating verbatim citations, Drummond creates a rich intertextual dialogue. This approach pays homage to Levertov’s method of personal indexing and underscores Rilke’s enduring influence on Levertov’s work, which in turn feeds and nourishes Drummond’s. The titles and substantive material, marked by italics for Rilke and inverted commas for Levertov, reflect a meticulous synthesis of response, citation, and allusion (Drummond, 2021).

Central to Drummond’s poetry is the theme of attention and participation, echoing Rilke’s poetics. In ‘The Rilke Index,’ phrases such as ‘True singing/ is a whispering’ (35) and ‘It hums along the avenue of original grief polished as a stone’ which highlight the importance of quiet, attentive engagement with the world (Drummond, 2021). Similarly, ‘Open Secret’ uses the imagery of a Peltops singing her inwardness to suggest a deep, participatory observation of nature.

Drummond’s work exemplifies Rilke’s Ding or thing poetics through its focus on sensory, concrete experiences. The detailed imagery in ‘The Rilke Index’ and the tangible descriptions in ‘Open Secret’ underscore the importance of observing and interacting with the material world. This attention to the physicality of things aligns with Rilke’s belief that true insight comes from an intense, participatory observation of one’s surroundings.

Reflecting deeply on the nature of creation and the self, Drummond’s poems reveal a continuous journey of self-discovery. ‘The Rilke Index’ and ‘Open Secret’ meditate on the interconnectedness of self and creativity, suggesting a composite identity shaped by various influences. Drummond’s imagery, such as ‘the owl afloat, the white egret’ and ‘the blood, the plough, the furrows made,’ captures the essence of seeing with ‘second sight,’ a deeper, intuitive understanding of the world (Drummond, 2021). This second sight is the sight of the witch, the seer, the being that dares, even when nothing necessarily will come of it—to look and to record presence/absence. Not only is second sight present here, but also the Owl—the totem of Hecate—Queen of Witches, and the action of tilling the land with blood and earth, much like the ingredients for a spell.

Willo Drummond’s poetry collection extends the poetics of Rilke and Levertov, emphasizing immersive conversations with the world—the unravelling power of careful observation and recordings. This work also creates carefully layered, intertextual dialogues. These inscriptions highlight the profound connection between self/other, the environment/body, second sight/inscription—all of which is the (witch’s) work of invocation with moon, of birth, death, rebirth, of longing (and the language of lamenting), and a complete presence of ritual observation, a conversation with invisible/visible forces transmuting. This book is an homage to love and magick and finding ways to reinscribe very necessary and vital voices and existences that have slipped/been silenced/written over/unpublished/forgotten. But it is also more than an homage—it is script that spells out the nature of time, looks closely at the Fibonacci spiral of bodies in presence with each other, of lamentation and joy rupturing through—detailed and woven with the echoes of other writers and poets, insistently in deep relationship to ecology, to the unseen dance of interconnection, such as the spellcasting in ‘All of it’ as ‘an ecology of selves’ (67) which with tremulous blooms/hands/words/voices reimagined worlds, relationships and love.

References:

Drummond, W. (2021). The Rilke Index. TEXT Special Issue 64: Poetry Now, eds. Jessica L. Wilkinson, Cassandra Atherton & Sarah Holland-Batt.

Drummond, W. (2023).  Moon Wrasse. Puncher & Wattmann. 

Elias, C. (2020). The Childless Witch: Trembling, dance, voice, oracle, grace. EyeCorner Press. ISBN 978-87-92633-57-6.

The Djinn Hunters

By Nadia Niaz

Hunter Publishers

ISBN: 978-0-6453366-9-6

Reviewed by JAVARIA FAROOQUI 

The Djinn Hunters is a literary fusion of colours, words, shapes, and heritage, which has been carefully crafted in very interesting and distinct poetic styles. Nadia Niaz plays with the strands of her memories of Lahore to build evocative narratives in the short space of her poems, which occasionally carry elements of horror and the uncanny. Each of her fifty-one poems in this collection exhibits a wide range of expression and literary finesse that provides a refreshing, consistently engaging reading experience. 

The horror in The Djinn Hunters is not meant to surprise the readers into a terrifying shock, rather it aims to disturb the very core of everyday existence. The first poem, “A Map of Mothers,” is primarily about the transmission of traits from female ancestors and the genetic inheritance that spans generations. However, Niaz’s dexterous use of simple words infiltrates the generational story line, unsettling readers with the image of grandmother and great-grandmothers haunting the voice of the persona. Absence of punctuation not only scaffolds the sense of continuity but also a deep feeling of horror:

I carry my mother in my mouth
in teeth and warm
bladed tongue

one grandmother, long absent
haunts my speckled skin
the rhythm of my feet

the other finds herself
in the set of my chin
the stubborn song in my belly
(1)

The poem starts with the imagery of carrying the mother in one’s mouth and concludes with varied maternal legacies interweaving and moving towards a surreal and ambiguous sense of belonging. The absence of pauses around “home” emphasizes the continuous evolution of human inheritance and gestures towards the uncanny behind the word that mostly signals safety and surety. The way in which the poem moves forward accentuates the haunting presence of ancestors within an individual’s identity, reminding us of pasts that perpetually influence the present:

great-grandmothers twine
in my hair, lurk in my bones
score my palms with their directions

each one pulling a different way
each one pointing towards home
(1)

The collection boldly utilizes poetic forms that blend verse and prose in engaging ways. The experimentation with form sometimes includes lines of varying lengths or concrete shapes, or some visually absorbing style like the one used in “A Dream of Daadi’s Paan Daan.” The consumption of paan, a mouth refreshment made from betel leaf popular in South Asia, has strong associations of tradition and culture. The paan holder, or paan daan, has a significant material value because of its association with the elders in South Asian households, and as such it symbolizes a sense of cultural rootedness and refinement. Niaz enhances this cultural reference by incorporating a unique visual element in her poetry. She prints four words, “roll,” “chew,” “spit,” and “fold” in grey ink behind the main text in black, inviting readers to decipher the entire process of paan consumption that involves rolling and folding the leaf, chewing the leaf, and spitting out the excess red substance (3). This creative approach not only adds depth to the poem but also engages readers in an interactive exploration of cultural heritage. 

The Djinn Hunters extends its thematic reach well beyond its primary focus on djinns and a distinct sense of horror, to present a rich tapestry of different subjects. As a native of Lahore, I found Niaz’s striking and picturesque descriptions of the city’s sights, sounds, and smells particularly resonant and evocative. She manages to capture the essence of Lahore with meticulously crafted sensory details that allow readers to become part of the vibrant atmosphere displayed on the page:

The corners of this city sag under stories of generations
more numerous than the grains of imported sand lining
its avenues poised to be mixed into concrete buildings
(“Fine Aggregate” 23)

Heritage, continuity, culture, and belonging are the themes that run throughout this collection and scaffold the stylistic experimentations. There are sub themes of romance, politics, and feminism that emerge from the crafted verses in the form of powerful statements and images. For example, in the poem quoted above, a simile of pomegranate is used for young women walking on the streets:

Young women wander under strict instructions to stay close
crowded as pomegranate seeds, skins leathered against leers while
their mothers pick stones from rice and dhal and swallow smoke
(23)

The mothers and the young women are bound by traditional roles and surrounded by misogyny. In this collection of poems, Niaz often juxtaposes the push and pull of cultural and heritage to paint the ways in which women are marginalized in patriarchal societies. “August in Lahore” questions the socio-economic class divisions and the misogynist attitudes prevalent in Pakistani society. While the boys from the lower working class have the freedom to “dive” in the dirty canal, upper-middle-class college girls keep sweating profusely in their modest outfits of “starched muslins and lawns” (20). The socio-economic class of the characters in the poem is determined by the “burned earth brown” bodies of the boys and their usage of the city’s “filthy oasis” to find relief from hot weather, and the connection of cars and cell phones with the girls (20). The four stanzas of the poem are precisely divided into six lines, which consist of a single sentence that duly ends with a full stop, representing the restricted existence of young women. The young woman who is traveling in cars and studying in colleges gets to listen to the humble start of her father who used to swim in the canal like the boys. The classed and gendered differences between the boys and the female protagonist in the poems are emphasized when the girl’s father looks back at the freedom and lack of social capital in his youth but makes “no wish” for the daughter to experience something similar. The “filthy oasis” of the city’s “refuse” in which the boys are swimming implies a disadvantage and a reduction, which finds an echo in the feeling of “drowning” that envelops the upper-middle-class privileged woman. She is wrapped in “days” that are like a “wet sackcloth, a dragging, dripping/weight that air-conditioning cannot lift” (20). The extended metaphor of “filthy ocean” epitomizes the socio-economic and gendered restrictions in a patriarchal and underdeveloped country.

The Djinn Hunters finds its pace in the exploration of the human and extra-human existence. The collection presents temporal reflections on heritage, culinary practices, cultural rituals, and the nuances of different spatiotemporal settings. Niaz experiments with a wide range of literary forms in this book, taking considerable creative chances. Her methods include visual construction of landscapes of words, code-switching to Urdu, and inclusion of Pakistani locales and subtle cultural differences without any explanation for the intended global readership. Her willingness to push limits and provide readers with a diverse and multicultural experience is evident in these daring stylistic choices. Readers can indulge in the The Djinn Hunters experience for leisure reading purposes or choose to let the book take them on a literary journey. In either case, it will provide them with new insights and coerce them to view the world through an inclusive lens with literary sophistication. 

Dr JAVARIA FAROOQUI holds a PhD from the University of Tasmania, Australia, and works at COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus, Pakistan. Her recent book, Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic.

Az is a 26-year-old trans wheelchair user with an acquired brain injury. His works of both fiction and non-fiction have appeared in such publications as Voiceworks, Archer, Overland, Mascara Review, ABC News, and the 2023 anthology of the Australian Short Story Festival. He is currently completing a Master of Literature and also graduated with distinction with a Bachelor of Biomedical Science in 2017. He was recently one of the 2023 ABC Regional Storyteller Scholars, and is also an enthusiastic user of social media. When he’s not writing, he’s spoiling his assistance dog, Ari, working out, or getting yet another tattoo.

When I listened to the audiobook recording of Lauren Groff’s Matrix, I could hear those men in the kitchen, the ones with scarred knuckles and violence in their hearts and between their legs. Inside my empty stomach, the familiar icy snake of fear writhed. I gripped my pocketknife and repositioned myself on the pillow I had wedged under my butt to prevent pressure sores. I tried to ignore the acidic flush of anxiety and focus instead on the excellent narration by Anjoah Andoh.

As the night progressed, the murky yellow light of my room in the crisis accomodation building—the “house of horrors” my friends and I have come to refer to it—faded, and was replaced by the clean, bright air of a nunnery in medieval England. Instead of the pall of cigarette smoke, I inhaled the scent of fresh bread and the vague musk of manure. Instead of the sound of my housemate pissing loudly with the bathroom door open, I heard space cracked open, expansive—a placid quiet in the time before motorisation, broken only by bird calls and the hushed voices of nuns passing below my open window.

Matrix had been a gift from my cherished friend and author, Katia Ariel. I wish I could do more, she said (or rather typed, as we are geographically separated by a state line) but it is the understatement of the century, or at least of my year: she had in fact given me an entirely new world.

Matrix tells the story of a community of nuns led by a character named Marie, who is based on the very real figure of Marie de France, a woman who lived in the 12th century and is considered by many historians to be one of the first writers of French prose. In the first couple of pages, we are introduced to both the Abbey and the language Groff uses, which is wonderfully evocative of the decadent prose of high fantasy:

‘She sees for the first time, the Abbey: pale and aloof on a rise in this damp valley; the clouds drawn up from the ocean and wrung against the hills in constant rainfall.’
(Chapter 1, 00:35-00:45).

However, while the language used in Matrix sates the guilty craving that high fantasy indulges, it describes a reality not too far removed from our own. Matrix presents a version of history close to that which likely did exist but was never documented: one full of queer desire and love and unapologetic feminine power. These are historical wounds that have long scarred, but which, through fiction, Groff somehow manages to draw fresh blood. Or, maybe not blood, but something else: something iridescent and shimmering.

My phone dings and it is a message from a member of my personal squadron of superheroes, all of whom are women. Here, from a desire for political correctness, I am tempted to replace the word “women” with “people of gender diversity”, but, while there are people, precious beyond words, of diverse gender identity in my life, it is simply true that my first line of defence during that time were all cis women. These women were the ones both willing and able to drop everything and rush to my aid, the ones with both the will and the resources to save me, to pluck me from between the teeth of the corrupt machine of a society that still feeds on bodies that don’t fit into the silhouette of the norm. Women. I will refer to them as they are (I will not erase them, as has happened enough in mainstream history. To celebrate women is not to erase the trans and non-binary experiences, but to honour the historical bedrock that underpins gender divergence.)

The message reads: Are you OK to talk? The question is an unfortunate necessity, because often the answer is “no”. Our conversations are shrinking and hushed things. Our voices—the differing pitches forming a euphoric contrast—weary with a history that we share, an inheritance of silence that runs deeper than the testosterone that now courses through my blood. But occasionally our muted whispering lights up with the sparks of genuine human connection (sudden laughter, a moment of dorky enthusiasm, the sound of her toddler daughter’s voice—soft and sweet, shy—in the background).

Those moments led me to a truth: that, though vastly different, both the lives of these women and my own curl from a shared historical line.

I was a daughter, I say to my therapist, and am stunned into silence by the truth of it, how much it explains of me. And lately, it is a truth that I can’t stop thinking about. I think about it when I listen to the news and hear that, in 2024 so far, in the so called “lucky country”, a woman has been killed on average every four days. I think about it when I hear the names of the five women killed in the attack at Bondi Junction in April (I say them under my breath: Ashlee Good, Pikria Darchia, Yixuan Cheng, Dawn Singleton, Jade Young), and when it is reported that during a wave of national protests calling for action against gendered violence, the ex-partner of WA woman Erin Hay is charged with her murder.

Maybe, at last, change will come. But maybe not. I can’t be sure. All I can be sure of is this: women are fucking amazing. And though I am not one, I am incredibly proud of the history that we share.
A similar sentiment is at the core of Matrix. It is fundamentally a celebration of women; Specifically of female wisdom, made literal by the “visions” experienced by Marie. In the description of the first of these visions, language that is decadent and richly evocative blooms like colour from the page, as sudden and overwhelming as a thunderclap:

“Lightning sparks in the tips of her fingers, swifter than breath it moves through her hands, the flesh of her arms, her inner organs, her sex, her skin, and settles jagged and blazing in her throat.”(Chapter 1, 04:09-04:20).

While Marie attributes such visions to the Virgin Mary, the otherworldly figure that appears “wears the face of her own mother”(Chapter 1, 05:40), and when the vision fades, Marie finds herself “in a ring of her own daughters.”(Chapter 1, 06:07). While the exact cause of the visions is not made clear, what does become apparent is that with the bending of reality, the maternal line does not break. Indeed, it reappears, intact, woven through the rest of the book, and the reader need only turn a few pages before encountering some variant of the words “mother” or “daughter”.

Throughout the novel, the nuns retreat further and further from the rest of society. Under Marie’s instruction, the Abbey is fortified by the construction of a labyrinth through the forest, and all men are exiled from its grounds. While in today’s context, this narrative might seem to reinforce the rigid essentialist rhetoric of “man-hating” feminism, which gave rise to the TERF movement, a la J.K. Rowling, we must read Matrix as what it is: a breathtaking piece of historical fiction written to embody the reality faced by women in the 12th century.

The women in my life continue to astound me. They are women with eyes of steel, painted nails and hands that never tremble. They are women with a love for their daughters so blisteringly intense that I almost can’t bear the heat that radiates from it.

I celebrate these women every time I rub my hand in awe over my stubbled chin. I celebrate them every time I trace an ecstatic arc with a dumbbell curled towards my torso, every time I absently lay my palm against my top surgery scar and feel my heart beating just beneath the surface.

Matrix is a celebration of the history that these women have passed down to their daughters, and that I, too, have inherited. It is a celebration that transforms a history riddled with gaps, silences, into one fissured with crystal.

Note
Voicestamps from Matrix, Lauren Groff audiobook, 23/09/2021, Language: English
Penguin Audio Whispersync for Voice-ready

meditations with passing water

Jake Goetz

Rabbit Poetry

Reviewed by HOLLY FRIEDLANDER LIDDICOAT
 
 
 

It’s a sophisticated piece of work that imparts its subject matter through its form. This is what I distinctly remember from first reading Jake Goetz’s ‘meditations with passing water’, in one sitting, in 2018, and what still rings true on re-reading five years later. The opening lines flow and hum like currents—lines jut out from left to right, lap at page edges, then recede. Their layout instantly brings to mind gentle river waves. This flow-form continues throughout, a steady constant.

flexing against sky
ripples of sun and cloud
      knead through greens
and browns
(3)

‘meditations with passing water’ is a series of four long poems that chart experiences of the Maiwar (Brisbane River). It is not an exhaustive history. I’ve often referred to it as a book-poem in four parts, but Jake has just as often disagreed with me. In both ways, the poem-parts connect to share the river’s stories—focusing on contemporary experiences of the Maiwar, juxtaposed with British colonisation and its enduring legacy for both the traditional custodians, primarily the Jagera and Turrbal peoples of the Brisbane catchment, and others that live at its shores. As a Sydneysider living in Brisbane at the time of writing, Jake explores the river’s ‘mutterings’ by using the psychogeographical concept of dérive, undertaking many unplanned journeys through the landscape and juxtaposing these with text from scientific textbooks, found texts, newspaper articles, texts on First Nations and colonial history, and John Oxley’s 1823 Governor Report.

As a title, ‘meditations with passing water’ captures the book’s essence. If you get a chance to hear Jake read from this work, his aural performance adds further depth—the gentle, slow readings of each line lull you along the river, where you are buoyed by sound and feel. The form underpins the meditative feeling—the narrator is always meandering along the river bank, watching, “a group of Kiwis swimming in T-shirts / smoking cigarettes” (4), “each apartment Coles pram-pushing mother” (7), “two bottles of XXXX / covered in mud” (13). River as meditation. Walking along river as meditation. Sound of lapping water as meditation. 

Yet the idea of a river’s meditative calmness is juxtaposed with meditation’s truest aim—the making of mental space to find deeper meaning. What does a river do? It feeds. It houses. It runs. It stagnates. It floods. It dries up. It sustains and kills fish. It dreams. It divides. It’s the graveyard for trolleys, bodies, tires, oily mess. “it carries / the syntax of the city / on its back (30).” As a receiver of human decisions, it tells a thing about a psyche.

Jake finds our psyche by contrasting contemporary experiences of the Maiwar and its western archives. In the here and now, Brisbanites jog along it; donut, jetski and boat on it; suicide into it; as plastic bottles bob forever alongside. Its is very Brisbane—through its named local heroes (Uncle Sam Watson, Darren Lockyer, David Malouf, (Ken) Bolton, a little (Liam) Ferneyian experience) and unnamed. Brand names are markers of ongoing colonisation and signal the omnipresence of capitalism—they are always popping up, always visible, mostly because they are literally towering over the river (Meriton, Santos, Telstra, Suncorp, Mercure, Marvel). The branding of housing (Mercure, Meriton) and “RIVERFRONT APARTMENTS COMING SOON” (32), “ZEN cranes meditating on apartments” (20) showing it’s all for sale. Company omnipresence grates uncomfortably against ‘corporate responsibilities’—for example the 2017 newspaper text reporting our once national darling, Qantas, letting 22,000 litres of toxic foam flow into the Maiwar.

for what is Brisbane as a river
      but that man
            holding a signed figurine
      of Darren Lockyer
            in his hands
Gold Coast bound on origin night
(21)

Contrasting this with historical markers, Jake returns to concrete form, carving whole rivers of negative space out of colonial archives. The balance of archival poetics with the everyday is what makes this book exciting and accessible to a contemporary reader. In the second poem-part, “Highgate Hill to Hamilton / The Flood of 1823”, Jake quotes from John Oxley’s early recordings of his ‘discovery’ of the Brisbane River. Textually, distinct images of tributaries are carved out of text blocks. These concrete images, over and over again, reinforce that this is a poem-book about a river. And then, throughout the section, the river overpowers language, the source text becoming harder and harder to read. By removing more and more words from the original text to create the engorged river-image, the historical narrative becomes corrupted by the river—the Maiwar charting its own course regardless, reinforcing its place. 

As contemporary readers, we keenly feel the irony of the chosen text, the instability of western logic. “There was no appearance / of the River being / even occasionally flooded” (30). And yet in 1893, “Sunday morning in Brisbane never dawned / on so much desolation” (53). And then again, we now know, in 1974. 2011. 2022. With climate change and increased urban density, the risk of extreme flooding is likely to increase. History as teacher is being degraded, words harder and harder to read, the meaning murkier, the bottom difficult to see—“the negation / of knowledge / of progress / of the fixity of things” (29). As the greens turn to brown, we are threatened by our inability to see and act clearly—“a culture is no better than its woods (Auden)” (54).

the rise  to work   and fall as a city
that forms around   across   beneath
beyond yet
always from this river
(54)

To find ultimate meaning through meditation you must sit through the discomfort. Meditation is intensely challenging—your body hurts as you sit for long periods unable to move, your mind shrieks at you that you can’t do it, while sometimes being in the stillness releases all negative thoughts—and the point is to sit and breathe anyway. Like a sore body, the collection offers an uneasy feeling of place, “being from a nation / on a groaning earth / that fluctuates like an excess of alcohol / in the stomach” (6). Natural disasters are frequent, like the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef (10), cyclones near wrecking ships (27), “I don’t think people are aware / just how bad it is” (11). At the core of this, Jake struggles with what it means to live on unceded Aboriginal land. He moves between reportage about an Aboriginal flag painted on a major intersection as an angry response to gentrification (18), to records of the atrocities committed by early settlers, to asking if he, or “this” (poem?) has “ruined it”—the idea of “country as myth” (29).

That discomfort is metaphor for life, and meditation teaches that reconciling with that feeling is a path to freedom. This is the real heart of the book—that by delving into the discomfort/shrieking feeling of colonial impacts we can perhaps find a deeper truth. Perhaps a different way of engaging. Jake is not overtly didactic. But history is, if we allow it. The discomforting (more than discomforting) reality is the destruction our nation was built on, the myth like life buoy we settlers cling on to, and the destruction of climate that will relegate us to history if we don’t act fast and immediately. The Jagera and Turrbal people consider the Maiwar “the source and support of life in all its dimensions—physical, spiritual, cultural (Gregory 1996, p.2)” (Note on the text, 62). We must reconcile our relationship with Country, with climate, with First Custodians in order to (re)build a wholistic and ongoing life and a new relationship with this place.

Being with this discomfort, being open to change, to other ways of being. To deeply understand the intersections of the river and life, its interconnectedness, the looping in on time and space. The dreaming stories shared, how the first Mairwah (platypus) came to be. The polluting of the river that sustains us. Our complicity in our own destruction, as if we were above and beyond nature “a comfortable residence / smashed against the Victoria Bridge / like an egg in a strong man’s hand” (51). For all of the destruction the river has caused through flood, for all the destruction we cause it and its First Peoples, both offer us other ways of being (“the water was that clear / that we used to have a competition / to find the penny first in amongst the nice clean boulders”) (16). For the convicts that first arrived in Brisbane before Oxley, shipwrecked and lost, the Quandamooka people looked after them. Convict Thomas Pamphlett records that a local man stayed the night to “keep up the fire…” (60) and

            nothing could exceed the kindness with which
                  we had been treated by the natives
who had lodged us in large huts by ourselves
                   and given us as much fish as we could eat
(61)

The ongoing generous, openhanded spirit of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in this country. Our ongoing failure to rise to the invitation of compassion, reconciliation, of truth-telling. Our slow rise and response to what Country, its rivers, are telling. For us to bring our water-particle bodies together as a course for change. ‘meditations with passing water’ does not offer us explicit answers—rather shifts through the Maiwar’s sediment, lays bare the layers for us to see, to feel, and to know.
 
HOLLY FRIEDLANDER LIDDICOAT has previously been published in Cordite, Overland, Rabbit, Southerly, The Lifted Brow and Voiceworks, among others. She’s edited poetry for Voiceworks and the UTS Writers’ Anthology. Rabbit Poetry published her first collection CRAVE, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Mary Gilmore Award. In 2022 she undertook a Bundanon residency and in 2023 her unpublished manuscript Doghouse was shortlisted for the Helen Anne Bell Bequest.

The Open

by Lucy Van

ISBN: 9780648917601

Cordite Books

Reviewed by LUOYANG CHEN

 
Perth is getting colder and I am getting cold. I am on my way to get some jumpers from Target. Writing this review in my head while walking to the bus stop, I am thinking: This is great. I want to test the limits of this review like Lucy Van tests the limits of poetry in The Open.

With being open comes full disclosure. I disliked Van the first time I saw her. It was early in the morning roughly 5 years ago and it was a poetry lecture on Sappho and O-. For someone like myself who only started eating breakfast about 2 days ago, Van’s monotone was pretty awful, adding agitation to my already agitated mood. I needed something more engaging! As the semester went, I became intimidated by her. Then I wished I were her. And then it was me who cried hysterically in her lecture because of “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong”(1), because of Bhanu Kapil’s lying nakedly on the ground, drinking peepees(2), and Ban(3), because of the context of bringing personal experience into reading poetry of others, because of the context of interpersonal and institutional racism. And then, as it went, Lucy sent me an email, offering unconditional support to someone who she barely knows. Because it was not an act of kindness but kindness of an act. I did not reply to her email though because I could not make sense of what it is like to be on the receiving end. Then it was The Open. 

Gareth Morgan’s review (4) on the “sentence structure” (?) is pretty good. Angelita Biscotti’s take on “open relations”(5) is fantastic. And because they did that I am doing something different. 

Van brings poetry into living, not life into poetry. In The Open, the poet-speaker (or Van herself) narrates stories of her lively interactions with friends, families, strangers, and literature. On the surface level, I would be lying if I say it is not tempting to categorise the book as a travelogue. Melbourne, Perth. Saigon. Wangi… But let’s pretend that it is a travelogue, then poetry is nothing but documentation of descriptions, representations, observations, and self-reflections. This is to say that the poet makes poetry out of their lived experience. This is also to say that life is the raw material for poetry. In this sense, poetry is pretty much dead. That’s cool. What is cooler, though, is that (I feel) that is not what The Open is about. If anything, it is about testing the boundary of poetry, about redefining poetry as a verb, about poetrising (not poeticising) life, about making poetry alive, about making poetry become life. To write better is to live better. 

How to live better? 

For example, one can start, like Van does in the first line that opens the first poem, Hotel Grand Saigon, by brining writing poetry present in the here and now. Van writes: “I have gone back and now I am here” (p.3). Where is she? She is “facing a lifeguard’s chair and a lifesaver” in “a colonial swimming pool” in Saigon. Where did she go? Did her mind travel back to Australia? This first line is genius for its simplicity with great intensity. Ambiguous colonial identity (i.e., being the colonial subject and object at the same time), power imbalance, privilege, guilt, trauma, violence, and history are unleashed in the act of going back and coming here. “I have gone back and now I am here” is vitally apostrophic despite not having an obvious “O”. One way to start living better is to be aware of the background, the system that makes now now and makes here here. But where does poetry have a play in this living? Well, to me, this way of living itself is poetry. It is meaningful. It is aesthetic. It engages with the world. It has at least a point of view, a voice, a poetic technique, a form, a sense of weirdness…

How to live better? 

Van continues in sequence V of Hotel Grand Saigon, wherein she argues for the ethics of writing in her assertive NEVER. She writes, “Never write a poem about a boat. In fact, never translate and never use metaphors. Never use verse to pray for the sight of land nor record the anguish of typhoon season. This is when you leave because no one expects escape under these conditions” (p. 7). What more can I say here? Two things. One: do not write about experiences that are not yours. Two: even if it is your own experience, writing about it does not represent or transform that experience. Bombs are bombs. Typhoon is typhoon. Writing about this might make the writer and the reader feel better, but it can never negate the atrocity of the source of violence. Having said that, what Van does here is writing about not writing it. It seems like Van is unable to reconcile the paradox of this writing/living. However, if The Open is not poetry but life, or The Open is the redefinition of life as poetry, then it makes sense for Van to say NEVER. Because to say is to do. To say NEVER is to NEVER do. 

How to live better?

In her interview with Cher Tan on Liminal, Van said that “tennis is a major structuring principle of The Open”. What is tennis? Van explains,

“Tennis has no time limit. The question, ‘When does the match end?’ makes no sense. Tennis just goes on. Like other things that are real, there is no limit. Except for violations. If you have a problem with this, you don’t like the good tennis” (p. 39).

The Open is tennis! The Open is full of violations. For example, Van uses the real names of the real people. This is a violation of privacy. Another example, Van is an Aussie traveller who does “nothing for [her]self because the workers do everything for [her]” (p. 7). Last example, the life/poem is narrated in Australian English. None of these is Van’s choice. And yet. And yet, understanding these violations and the attempt of trying to reconcile these violations are present throughout the moments of life. And because I have no problem with this, nor does Van, The Open is a good tennis, good poetry, good life. 

I want to return to Van’s kindness, to my interactions with her. We never really spoke in person. In fact, we barely message each other over social media. To some extent, I am still intimidated by her. From another angle, I feel like she is a kin to me. But this is pure fantasy and imagination and it is full of this “I”. Van would probably think: What the hell. But consider this a violation.

Notes

1. This is a poem by Ocean Vuong.
2. To share the bodily experience of what it is like to witness and then experience racism in her childhood (i.e., a white-supremacist youth used to wake up very early in the morning so he could urinate into the milk bottles of Bhanu’s Gujrati and Kenyan neighbours), Bhanu Kapil drank her urine in front of a live audience at Harvard University in 2015. A recording of this performance can be found on YouTube
3. Ban is Ban en Banlieu (Nightboat Books, 2015), a body-poetry collection by Bhanu Kapil.
4. Gareth Morgan’s review titled “Shitheads: well are we doing this” was published in Overland Issue 245 Summer 2021.
5. Angelita Biscotti’s review titled “Open Relations” was published by Liminal on 30 November 2022.
 
LUOYANG CHEN currently lives on the unceded Whadjuk Noongar Boodja. Flow (Red River/Centre for Stories, 2023) is his debut poetry collection. He has another poetry manuscript and is currently writing “Who Live More”.  He was born and raised in Fujian, China.

Breath

by Carly-Jay Metcalfe

ISBN 9780702268359

UQP

Reviewed by LIZ SUTHERLAND

Breathing was one of the few things in life I took for granted. Until I was 20, out with pneumonia for four months, three fractured ribs from excessive coughing. Then again at 32, post-COVID coughing for three months, two fractured ribs that time. Sickness and disability have a way of reframing things we otherwise consider inevitabilities: breathing; life.

Metcalfe establishes the tone for her bodily experience of Cystic Fibrosis (CF), and of the relentless heartbreak of losing friends to CF, at the outset of Breath. As a reader, I’m scraping into ‘stiffly laundered white sheets’ (5) with her as she wonders if these same hospital bed covers were recently the shroud of a child who’d just died. A morbid thought I push to the back of my mind anytime I walk the halls of a hospital. Places where people, lovers, significant others have died. Will die. Metcalfe reminds us of our mortality in the same breath as calling out the West’s culturally ingrained fear of death and dying.

‘The only thing promised to us in life, is death’ (211).

This inevitability, and our cultural reticence to witness it, is the pulse of Metcalfe’s memoir and her broader vocational drive. She doesn’t shy away from the impetus of her career and life choices: how they’ve been shaped by her experiences with CF and everything the illness created in, and stole from, her life. Where her fragile human body experienced intense and prolonged trauma and grief, came out the other side, survived. Against all odds, when others did not. Survived, but at what cost?

‘Some kids held on for weeks, while others only took a few days, but the end result was always the same: we were left breathing out our guilt in their absence’(17).

Breath centres on a lung transplant Metcalfe received at the age of 21, oscillating forward and backwards through time. She wields memory as a literary device and plays on subjectivity, flicking between past and present tense and timeframes, sometimes within the space of neighbouring sentences. At times dizzying, it’s articulated with self-awareness of how memory melds and warps with time: ‘I have a knack for opening jars of memories, but these moments are often trapped with an eternal present, and I can’t reconfigure them into a memory because they are so pervasive’ (34). Metcalfe struggles with forgetting: she can’t.

She expresses her ‘catalogue of traumatic events’ (11) as almost viral. Clinging tightly to her cells and nerve endings and brain paths as the decades pass. It may have been easier if she were able to fall into self-protective amnesia like some of the people in her life. But as her experiences with CF were grounded in the visceral, so too were her memories sutured deep under the skin.

‘Over the years, a faint memory – of surgeons pushing through skin, muscle, and fascia, and cutting through the strata of my chest until they strike bone – grows into something more tangible […] What happens in our lives writes itself into our flesh. There is wisdom in the body – a deep wisdom that beats its way through your blood. The body remembers’ (94).

Metcalfe’s memoir truly shines when she relates this pervasive, almost viral nature of living with CF to that of COVID and HIV. When she speaks of COVID from her perspective as an immunocompromised person, it is hard to ignore the mass disabling event that has created another layer of fear of death and dying. Where governments worldwide in the 2020s have decided that the economy is worth more than people, especially disabled and immunocompromised people, governments of yesteryear made the same calculations with queer people, sex workers, and people who inject drugs. Metcalfe compares cancer in the early 1980s with AIDS, similarly stigmatised and misunderstood. The kids with cancer were housed in cubicle A of Turner Ward, a ‘trinity of linoleum, stainless steel and suffering, it was a waiting room for death within the Royal Children’s Hospital’ (12), whereas the kids with CF stayed in cubicle E. This ghostly estate forms the backdrop of much of Metcalfe’s memoir. A spectral character in its own right. The harsh words of doctors clogging up its arteries. Dying children’s struggling breaths inflating its lungs. In speaking with a doctor who worked with people with HIV/AIDS on Oxford Street, Sydney in the 80s, Metcalfe realises their survivors’ guilt are kin.

‘We were talking about how many CF friends I’d lost, and he shared his own experience of collective and cumulative grief from losing hundreds of people in his community’ (177).

But where there is mutual understanding in some ways, Metcalfe seems to pull away from the possibility of camaraderie. Referencing Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, Metcalfe refutes the universality of the concept of a “before” and “after” illness. Her experience is that of being born into illness; born into a constant state of grief and resilience. This does lend her to being uniquely qualified to write this book, but I found myself frustrated that connections of this nature weren’t explored more fully, despite, or even due to, what set them apart.

As Metcalfe herself notes: ‘sickness has a way of making people seem less banal and far more interesting than they actually are’ (128). Though balancing the personal with the political or social in memoir is a tightrope act that rarely executes a perfect performance, I wished she went deeper into her own and other philosophical beliefs and mythologies around death and histories of CF and other chronic illnesses. There are moments when she leans into tangential storytelling as a reprieve from the self-contemplative nature of memoir, linking the personal to the other. These reflections are fleeting, however, and tend instead towards the rhetorical.

I recognise, though, that it’s in the personal that disability justice and medical advocacy becomes most effective. Metcalfe transmutes her survivor’s guilt into action by bringing to light some of the many facets of receiving medical care in this country. She recounts cavalier and callous medical professionals, many of whom were doing their best under a system of budget cuts and not enough staff. Some of whom resorted to eye-rolling and dismissing her pain post-op. Others who tactically and maliciously abused her and other CF children.

Metcalfe undoubtedly traversed harrowing and traumatic terrain over the course of her life thus far, and reading even a glimpse of it engenders an affinity for her perspective. Where I struggle with personal disability advocacy, however, is when it veers into violent illusions and exclusionary language. At times, Breath feels insensitive to the situations of other people, using them as metaphorical fodder to get the point across: ‘Ollie and I drove to McDonald’s, then we stopped at a lolly shop where I scraped half a kilo of diabetes into a brown paper bag, before driving back to Ollie’s where I ate like a starving refugee on his bed’ (66). Comments like this, and others centring around fatphobia, were difficult to read as a disabled person with a history of eating disorder.

It struck me as odd in a memoir about death literacy, disability justice, and advocating for organ donation, that Metcalfe at times eschewed specificities in lieu of generalities. I wished that she’d taken readers on her interior investigations into why she occasionally defaulted into using well-trodden and discriminatory phrases to describe something about her life. Questioned what it is that draws to the plight of people fleeing genocide and persecution to illustrate a personal experience? Even in our advocacy, we must still be aware of how our nation has treated people of refugee status for decades, and how our society and medical industry treat fat and disabled people. But none of this should be taken to minimise the impact that Metcalfe’s Breath will hopefully have on public opinion and public health systems as they view and relate to those with chronic illness and disabilities. 

‘More than once, I’d felt the breath of my friends’ departures, the timbre of their spirit winding down, the sad predictability of history repeating’ (5).

Despite its limitations, Breath is both a love letter and a call to action. Honest, lyrical, raw, and moving. It remembers the ones who died too soon, and reminds us to embrace this body, this life we have right now. Because we never know when this breath we take for granted will be our last.

Works Cited

Metcalfe, Carly-Jay. Breath. UQP, 2024.
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.

LIZ SUTHERLAND (they/them) lives on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. Liz is studying a Master of Arts (Writing and Literature) at Deakin University, is the COO of a nonprofit organisation, and recently joined the Board of Overland. They were a finalist in the Pearl Prize 2024 and the 2023 OutStanding LGBTQIA+ Short Story Awards. Their writing has appeared in the Hunter Writers Centre Grieve Anthology, the Wheeler Centre’s Spring Fling event ‘Stripped Queer’, ScratchThat Magazine, Into the Wetlands Poetry Anthology, at Q-Lit festival events, and more.

Leaf

By Anne Elvey

Liquid Amber Press

ISBN 9780645044966

Reviewed by JENNIFER COMPTON

Anne Elvey was recently shortlisted for the David Harold Tribe Poetry Award for one of her elegant, prayerful compositions, that hardly seem to be composed of words as we know them, and yet I suppose they must be. They lift up off of the page, they seem to linger in the air.

Don’t get me wrong, I was very taken with all of the shortlisted poets, as I hunkered down on Zoom, and any one of them could have won and I would not have been disgruntled.

But I was so taken with the flavour and intent of Elvey’s work, all over again, that I returned to re-read and reconsider her 2022 collection Leaf. This is a handsome book issued by Liquid Amber Press, the brainchild of Pauline Brightling and Rose Lucas, whom I can only suppose had a rush of blood and decided to test their relationship and work very hard, whilst ripping up $10 notes, bedazzled by something ineffable.

So, I am coming at this book for the second time. And this time through I pause to dwell on the epigraph from John Charles Ryan’s book Plants in Contemporary Poetry. Because, after all, a poet would not go to all the trouble of choosing a suitable epigraph, and seeking permission etc, unless they trusted their choice would illuminate the thrust of the book and guide the reader. 

‘How do we imagine plants? How might plants imagine us?’

Indeed, it may even have been the spark that lit the tinder that set the fire of imagination roaring. Because immediately, in ‘Part 1 To listen for the leaf’, in the first poem ‘Leaf’, Elvey sets about the task of addressing, if not answering, these questions. 

you touch from inside’s
other     vein and skin
silver

to a spot of rust     smooth
to the swell of an insect’s
egg     held in fingers

breath
becomes     a word
(p3)

The necessity of breath, which the leaf understands, as it converts light into sustenance into oxygen, again and again and again, is acknowledged and honoured. An ancient pact, a symbiosis, almost, indeed, a cabal. And there is a kind of psychometry in this first section, as if hands can hear, as if hands had another sort of ears that listen for and to the unsayable, that can know, ‘beyond the break and repair of language’ what is not unknowable.

                         Ask what
answer your hands should

give. It is time. It is time
they listened for the leaf.
(p12)

And so, the preamble done and dusted, Elvey sets to work in “Part 2 The dark industry of life” amplifying the musicality of the daily round. In “Artefact” the wooden table contains hidden messages. It’s just a matter of knowing where to stand in the angle of the light to decipher them. And in ‘Taking leave of no. 5”  the trees are condemned, the landlord is adamant. But do you listen when they tell you not to look back? No, you don’t. Not when you are imbued with a reckless generosity and also like to keep a sanguine eye on circumstance. The times. How do they do? Do they do well? Do they do ill? And how does the weather, the soil, and every other constituent of the macrocosm? Take your lesson from the tree. Take advantage.

A tree takes
gives. Prudence

means nothing
to a tree.
(p22)

The book swirls on through ‘Part 3 Luring water’ and ‘Part 4 These knuckles’ welt on wood’ and ‘Part 5 Not to spoil the well’ with a limpid and supple assurance, ‘like a liquid handling a thing.’ Or, like a walking meditation, which is the next best thing to prayer. As if prayer is doubting and hoping in equal part whilst moving mindfully. In ‘Leaf and tumble’, which I find to be the apotheosis of this book, and which I happen to know was the poet’s preferred title, comfort is sought, out in the natural world, within its blithe imperatives and its deep and deepening mysteries. 

Did I imagine the whispered
intent, the certainty of my ground

as way to go, the tether
of limb to trunk, until I could

no longer suppose you were
or are? My feet unrooted

from earth, what answer comes
to my tentative cry? Without

a word wind lifts
again. Leaf tumbles.
(p45)

Elvey’s craft is gentle and! astute. She untethers her mode of enquiry from antique certainties and shibboleths to, as it were, begin again. To see afresh what can be seen and to understand, feelingly, what can be understood. To ask questions that, as of yet, cannot be answered. 

From ‘Under the rotary clothesline’

               Reaching               for a peg
I wonder       how might
        I have looked
                                  to another
(p67)

JENNIFER COMPTON is a poet and playwright who also writes prose. She lives in Melbourne on unceded Boon Wurrung Country. Recent Work Press published her 11th book of poetry the moment, taken in 2021.

Women & Children

By Tony Birch

UQP

ISBN: 9780702266270

Reviewed by PIP NEWLING
 
 
Tony Birch holds a rare place in Australian literature – a male writer focused on telling domestic and working class stories. His pages shimmer with the dirt of hard work, difficult choices, and  everyday of life. The joys in reading his stories are intimate and quiet: a secretive embrace, a hand reaching to another, a warm blanket, a story, a memory shared. As simple as his narratives may appear though, the lives of Birch’s characters are rich and their journeys complex. Aboriginality and the intergenerational impacts, including violence, of the colonial project surface in all his work, exploring questions of belonging, of inescapable difference, of class, of gender and of how racism, sexism, disrespect, judgement and exclusion shape people. Women & Children though, delivers a key change to his previous stories and novels. While no different in its motifs and themes, here there is a subtle and soft joy, a quiet heartfelt hope lifting through the journeys of the two children.

The novel tells the story of Joe and Ruby Cluny, a brother and sister, their mother, Marion and aunt Oona, and their grandfather Charlie, a close-knit group. It is mid-1960s inner suburban Naarm. Joe is 11 years old and Ruby, 13 years. Birch reveals their world through the Sister Mary’s of the Catholic school that Ruby and Joe attend. The hierarchical authoritarian nature of the school flows into the streets of the surrounding suburb, a reputation for ‘hard men’, and for violence both on the street and behind closed doors.

Joe sees the world with a humane and gentle heart, a rare and precious kid, and one who is appreciated and understood intimately by both his mother and grandfather. The rest of the community are uncertain how to respond to him, his questions, his perspective, or the birthmark on his face, a legacy of his Aboriginal ancestry. At school, the nuns always call him out in class as a dreamer, a disruptor, as a low achiever and Joe believes their hellfire and brimstone stories. They have him convinced he is un-save-able. He lives with a very real fear of eternal Hell.

His sister, Ruby, is more socially mature, more attuned to the machinations of the world. She has developed a strategy. She has witnessed the pain and the hurt the nuns cause other children and has realised that if she behaves, and is an excellent student, it will be to her benefit. She understands from a young age how to get ahead without compromising her own values.

Marion works at a dry cleaners, a job she has held since she was 16 years and has brought the children up on her own. She has provided a calm and loving home for her children. Marion’s father, Charlie, has just retired from a council street sweeping job he held for over thirty years. ‘Char’, as Joe calls Charlie, lives by himself, after his wife, Ada, died 5 years ago. Without Ada to stop him, Charlie is slowly bringing his ‘collectables’ (p50), street-found riches – bottles, books, records, marbles, and boxes of other people’s lost photographs – into the house from the large hoard he maintains in the backyard.

Joe and Charlie’s relationship is one of the delights of this novel. Charlie listens to and discusses Joe’s questions; he doesn’t steer away from the open-hearted curiosity that rests deep in Joe. He openly loves the boy and Joe shines under his gaze. Ranji, a scrap metal and junk merchant and one of Charlie’s oldest friends, provides a foil for Charlie. They are both gentle respectful men of the community – Ranji with his prayers and Charlie with his belief in the good of the world. Both have stories of faith and fathers to tell each other.

Oona, Marion’s younger sister and beloved aunt of Ruby and Joe, is in an abusive relationship with Ray Lomax, an entrepreneurial electric goods salesman.

While Ruby has explained to Joe that he must never mention the bruises on other children’s bodies when they go to the local swimming pool, neither Ruby nor Joe have ever witnessed violence in their home. Birch conveys the intimacy of their shock, first for Joe when Oona turns up to Marion’s seeking help and then for Ruby, when she visits Oona unannounced. From the doorway of Oona’s flat, Ruby sees Oona’s beaten face and has an uncontrollable physical reaction. These scenes are crafted carefully and are as shocking for the reader as for the characters. Birch is clear-eyed about the impacts of violence. He knows that violence should always be shocking, and he tells it true.

Marion and Charlie are both devastated by the assaults on Oona but for different reasons. Marion is desperate and angry. At herself. At all the men in her life who choose not to assist Oona. Marion knows they see the unrelenting beatings as something private that Oona has signed up for. She feels the powerlessness, silence and shame that frequently come with family and domestic violence. Silence is a key theme in the novel. When Charlie asks Marion when Ray started to assault Oona, Marion tells him of how his daughter changed once the couple moved in together.

‘Oona never said a word to me, but I knew. Not so much the bruises. She did a reasonable job of hiding them. It was her mood.’
‘How so?’ Charlie asked. ‘I didn’t notice any change in her.’
‘Sorry to tell you this, Dad. But men never do. She went so quiet. Lost her voice.’
(p200)

When Charlie says he knew nothing. Marion counters gently.

‘Maybe you did know, Dad? I think we all know. The biggest secrets on these streets are the ones that we share, but somehow find ways to ignore. And to pretend… all along I knew I was lying to myself. I think we always know, Dad.’
(p200)

Charlie feels he has let Oona down, and that he is a foolish old man. He feels he needs to protect his child but is bewildered because he can’t. He also worries – remains guilty – about a time when, he tells Marion, ‘I was like him. Almost.’ (p172): a time before Marion was born when he and Ada argued, and his anger overwhelmed him.

‘In that moment,’ Charlie said, ‘I knew what my father would have done… He would have put that woman in her place and kept her there… All of them years, when I was a boy cowering in my bed, hearing him beat my mum, although I didn’t know it at the time, he’d been teaching me how to be a man.’
(p174)

There are stories within stories in this novel – parables of sorts. One of Charlie’s collections is a jar of glass marbles. He tells Marion of their significance in a wonderfully tender scene:

‘Mum took one in her hand and explained to me that there was life inside. A world in miniature. All I had to do was look closely and I would see it. Each marble had its own story and its own people. She told me these stories for days.’
(p197)

Charlie reflects further: ‘A simple act from my mother. It taught me such a lesson… ‘Care.’ Charlie smiled. ‘It costs nothing.’ (p199)

Early in the novel, Joe asks Charlie what he could do for work when he is older and is surprised when Charlie suggests that Joe could ‘become a writer’. (p62) Joe had no idea that being a writer could be a job and Charlie goes on to tell him that, ‘There are stories about this life … that will one day need to be told.’ (p62)

Over the course of the story, Joe learns an intimate truth. Through Charlie’s gentle guidance and his mother’s defiance – on Joe’s behalf – he comes to understand that his way of seeing and being, the way he feels the world, is a decent and humane perspective and that stories are inherently valuable. Equally, Ruby’s self-directed strategy is successful. She wins the holiday, and she realises her confidence about her own academic and social opportunity is sound. She knows what she wants, and she can see how to achieve it. She stands up to the boys at the pool, and coaxes Oona out of her flat. Her trust and confidence in herself, in her physicality and her value, grows.

Ruby and Joe may still be branded by society as different, lesser, working class, but they each come to see pathways for themselves beyond the kitchen tables, back lanes, and violent men. They are destined for other futures. For Charlie, the ‘good man’ (p174), the dilemma isn’t resolved. Is the good man the one who turns away from violence? If so, what good is he when violence turns up on the doorstep? Charlie has to re-negotiate his value with himself. Marion’s care and love are never diminished, and she comes to realise she has some control, can exert some power.

Women & Children reveals that Birch – who is also a son, father, brother, grandfather – has found hope for the future. For Birch, it is possible to break the hand-me-down pattern of violence, traits and class, but to do so requires women and children be supported. And for men to care.

Murnane

by Emmett Stinson

Melbourne University Publishing

ISBN: 9780522879469

Reviewed by SAMUEL COX

Emmett Stinson’s Murnane offers a critical and enlightening assessment of the Gerald
Murnane’s four late fictions, and through these incredibly self-reflexive works, a reading of
the eponymous author’s entire oeuvre. Stinson’s superb introduction gives way to chapter-
length considerations of Barley Patch (2009), A History of Books (2010), A Million Windows
(2014) and Border Districts (2017), before concluding with an assessment of Murnane’s ‘late
style’. The study confirms this late style is intensely introspective and genre-bending –
somewhere between novel, memoir and essay – as Murnane seeks to retrospectively reform
and recontextualise his entire body of work.

If this then provides a faint outline of Stinson’s method and the briefest summary of his
results, I would like to focus on pursuing what I see as the two most intriguing and important
lines of investigation that underly Stinson’s study and make it utterly compelling: his
exploration of the entirely ‘singular’ phenomenon that is Murnane, and, deeply interrelated,
his recurring pursuit of the enigma that is the author’s lack of widespread recognition in the
country of his birth.

I’ll begin with the second question, as it appears, initially at least, the more straightforward to
answer. Whilst noting Murnane’s unfashionable peculiarities, which form the bones of this
study, Stinson rightly invokes Patrick White’s criticism of Australia’s aesthetic inclination
towards ‘the dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism’ (qtd. in Stinson 15). From
the Ern Malley affair, through to the harsh local critiques of White’s early works, and similar
treatment that influenced Randolph Stow’s decision to leave the country, the cultural
philistinism of settler-colonial Australia has long cast a dark shadow over any emergent local
avant-garde. Overall, literary modernism in Australia remains a critical frame that, if not
abhorred, then has largely been ignored.

An intriguing counterpoint to Murnane is David Malouf, a writer of a similar era who achieved widespread literary fame and popularity. If we admit that Malouf’s use of modernist techniques
has a lighter and less experimental (and thus more palatable) touch, then we can also see that to answer this question, we must return to the first line of investigation I proposed and seek out a deeper exploration of what Stinson repeatedly refers to as Murnane’s ‘idiosyncratic’ and ‘singular’ nature. Brilliantly characterising Murnane as ‘a homemade avant-garde of one’ (103), Stinson reveals the unique breadth of literary influences on Murnane’s work, but it is the unique ‘homemade’ peculiarities that appear essential to understanding the riddle that is Gerald Murnane.

Stinson establishes that it is precisely Murnane’s distance – not just today but across his
career – from intellectual trends, his singular even perverse pursuits, which have opened him
to criticism; however, as his body of work has grown, these traits have increasingly set him
apart as his obsessive pursuits have made him an original, adding a unique chapter to the
literary explorations of the human condition.

It should be noted that, on the surface, many of Murnane’s concerns appear to align with the
well-established conventions of literature. J.M. Coetzee has described Murnane as a ‘radical
idealist’ and his relentless probing into the power and truth of inner imaginative worlds is not,
in and of itself, unique. Indeed, Murnane’s insistent interest in the imaginative life is in many
ways one of the timeless pursuits of art and literature; rather, it is the inimitable
idiosyncrasies of Murnane that make him utterly unique. What rises irrepressibly from
Stinson’s work is the deeply paradoxical elements that shape Murnane and fuel his fiction.

Murnane is a novelist who ‘never tried to write fiction’ (21); an avant-garde
modernist who has barely left his own state, let alone the country; a working-class writer who
persistently aestheticises reality; an author whose embrace of the ordinary often leads the
reader into sensing the mystical qualities of the extraordinary; an experimental author who is
a stickler for ‘traditional grammar’ (qtd. in Stinson 33). He is a writer who roundly criticises
literary criticism and yet Stinson notes that ‘he is technically the first author of a critical work
about the complete oeuvre of Murnane’ (16). Despite his deeply introspective explorations,
and his endless returning to the same images, scenes and themes, the authorial self remains
remote and inaccessible for Murnane. Stinson isolates a moment at the conclusion of
Murnane’s A Million Windows that represents this truth when the narrator glances up at the
window of a writer: ‘I looked up and saw… a window and behind it a drawn blind. In short, I
learned nothing’ (qtd. in Stinson 67).

This moment is echoed in the 2019 interview with Stinson that is included as something of an
afterword. Murnane retells how he became convinced that a filmmaker who had bought the
rights to Inland didn’t understand the book, so he set out to explain it: three quarters of his
way down the page he realised that even he ‘wasn’t on the right track’ admitting that, ‘I don’t
think I even know what it’s about’ (qtd. in Stinson 116). It is not everyone who is going to
read a Murnane book and enjoy it. Certainly, many in Australia weren’t ready when he started
his career. Indeed, as Stinson notes, some have even been repulsed by his interest in the
obsessions and perversions of lonely, monastic men. His work pursues a
relentless, at times forensic examination of the self through writing, even as he recurringly
acknowledges that this is in part a futile exercise: the writing self is multitudinous; both true
and false.

A casual reader who might have only encountered Murnane’s older works, particularly his
most well-known and influential work, The Plains, might question Stinson’s decision to focus
on his late career. It could even be considered – unsurprisingly, given Stinson’s approach is
deeply informed by the author’s work – something of a Murnanian conceit. However, what
uniquely emerges in Stinson’s study is how his late career works create a mirage-like
refraction of his early career works that radically reframes them. For example, aspects of The
Plains, like the filmmaker’s literary patron and its isolated ‘secular monastery’ of a manor
(Stinson 58), become linked to longstanding and recurring concerns of Murnane’s fiction.
Finally, Stinson presents a detailed argument that Murnane’s final novel, Border Districts,
reconstructs The Plains as it was originally intended – as part of a dyad or textual diptych.
New readings of The Plains are offered and whether they are superior appears beside the
point. Instead, Stinson forces us to reconsider The Plains, and indeed Murnane’s entire
oeuvre, through what he terms the ‘retrospective intention’ of Murnane’s late career works, as
the aging author attempts the daunting task of shaping his disparate body of work into the
‘seeming coherence’ of an ‘aesthetic totality’ (81). If, in reality, this totality ultimately lies
always just out of reach, like the distant horizon of the plains, then Stinson shows us that its
simulacrum is given form by its continual refraction throughout Murnane’s fiction.

We inevitably return to the lingering question of his unsure place within the literary
canon of this country. In Nicholas Birns estimation he is the ‘most Australian of writers’ and
‘the least Australian of writers’ (qtd. in Stinson 90). This is a man who has barely left the
state of Victoria, is obsessed with horse racing and currently lives in the small rural town of
Goroke in the Wimmera, Victoria. As J.M. Coetzee has noted, the underlying dialectics of
Murnane’s narrators can be traced back to the lingering imprint of Australian Irish
Catholicism. Many of the landscape images that recur across his fiction are characteristically
Australian in nature. And yet, the authors he is in conversation with not only remain classed
as ‘difficult’ by most Australian readers, but they are also distant from these shores in both
space, and, increasingly, time – Joyce, Rilke, Proust, Emily Bronte, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo
Calvino, Henry James, are a just a few that Stinson recognises.

Murnane’s long and persistent struggles with publication and readership over his career, pose
big questions over whether we can accept and support challenging and self-critical art in this
country, even when it is unfashionable. A further problematic is that it is not just new and
emerging voices who struggle for readership and attention – Australian literature as a broad
category remains criminally underread and understudied. As Ivor Indyk, Murnane’s editor at
Giramondo, has noted, ‘most of our literary tradition is out of print, undertaught and largely
unknown to the Australian public.’ It was Giramondo’s unwavering support of Murnane that
brought him out of his self-imposed retirement and enabled these four late career novels to
emerge in their desired form. If Giramondo stands out like a beacon in an Australian literary
landscape that has lost some of its lustre, then so too does Gerald Murnane – the ‘homemade
avant-garde of one’ who, after years of persistence in the wilderness, is enjoying a well-
deserved late career resurgence.

Stinson’s treatment is deeply sympathetic and yet even this importantly represents the current
moment that seemingly demands a revaluation of Murnane’s work. His claim that Murnane is
‘the most original and most significant Australian author of the last fifty years’ (104) is bold,
but international acclaim and murmurings of Nobel Prize nominations surely mean even local
critics cannot deny that Murnane now must have a place in the conversation. For those
seeking an entry point into the complexities of Murnane and his fiction, Emmett Stinson’s
Murnane presents the clear place to start.
 
 
SAMUEL COX teaches Australian literature at the University of Adelaide. His work has been published in JASAL, The Saltbush Review, Westerly, ALS, Motifs, SWAMP and selected for Raining Poetry in Adelaide. In 2022, he received the ASAL A.D. Hope Prize. He was awarded the Heather Kerr Prize, and was a joint winner of Australian Literary Studies PhD Essay Prize with Evelyn Araluen.

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

by Lara Vetter

Reaktion Books

ISBN:9781789147599

Reviewed by NAOMI MILTHORPE

It may say more about my own tastes than about the culture more broadly, but most of my reading in the past months has been about misunderstood and multifaceted women. Lara Vetter’s slim critical life of the modernist poet H.D. has slid snugly between Anna Funder’s ponderous counterfiction Wifedom (2023), Katharine M. Briggs’s neglected 1963 witchy Scots fairy tale, Kate Crackernuts, and Nancy Mitford’s 1952 fizzing biography of Louis XV’s official mistress, Madame de Pompadour. It’s important to state at the outset that Vetter’s book is fundamentally unlike any of these books – neither ponderous nor witchy nor particularly fizzing. Yet in focusing on a woman who thrived exploring experimental modes of writing and relished occupying new forms of identity and relationship, it offers an engrossing contrast to the picture these other books offer, of the way history, circumstance, and choice, impact upon women’s lives. H.D. has been taken as a biographical subject by a number of earlier writers, including most recently Francesca Wade in her excellent 2021 group biography Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars. As Wade writes, ‘A biography offers one version of a life, and H.D. lived several.’(1) In living several ‘lives’ – or as Lara Vetter suggests, in living a life that flourished through contradiction and multiplicity – H.D. is also a fascinating subject for readers interested in what it takes to live, thrive, and create through cataclysmic social and political change.

She was born Hilda Doolittle in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1886, the daughter of Charles, an astronomy professor and Helen, a musician and painter. Hilda was the only daughter of six children. The Doolittles were members of the Moravian church, an evangelical German Christian sect that focused on community, family, and ritual, including a strong devotion to music. H.D.’s early life – portrayed by her in autobiographical novels like HERmione, written in the late twenties but published in 1981 – was bounded by both the pleasures and frustrations of this life. As a scientist her father encouraged his children to closely observe nature in their rambling garden and the surrounding forest. Hilda’s elder brother Eric also taught astronomy and tutored his siblings in botany and ecology, which Hilda was fascinated by: ‘There were things under things, as well as things inside things.’(2) Helen passed on her skills in music and the arts, with Hilda playing piano and participating in musicals and Shakespeare performances. Hilda taught herself ancient Greek; throughout her life she remained deeply inspired by Greek history and myth. Hilda enrolled in Bryn Mawr College, studying the classics, and meeting Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams along the way, but dropped out after three semesters to focus on her writing.

It was meeting the poet Ezra Pound, and the mystic and writer Frances Gregg – both fellow Pennsylvanians – that caused the first cataclysm of her early life. The three were caught in a tumultuous love triangle for several years. Pound called Hilda ‘Dryad’, and for him, she was a muse that haunted his early poems. Pound and Hilda became engaged and then broke it off. But the relationship with Frances Gregg was the more electrifying. Both Hilda and Gregg viewed sexuality and gender as non-binary, and both (at this time) were polyamorous. Pound went to Europe in 1908, and Hilda and Gregg followed in the summer of 1911. Although the romance ended (Gregg returned to the U.S. and married, a profound betrayal for Hilda), Pound and Hilda would stay in Europe for good, entangled in each other’s lives and writing until well into the thirties.

How Hilda became H.D. is literary legend, sketched by H.D.’s. earlier biographer Barbara Guest: Hilda, sitting with Pound in the tea room of the British Museum in 1912, showed him some poems. ‘But Dryad, this is poetry.’ Then, in his manner, he made some adjustments, and signed them off for her, scrawling H.D., Imagiste, at the bottom of the pages and posting them to Harriet Monroe at the then newly-established magazine, Poetry. (3) These poems – ‘Hermes of the Ways’, ‘Epigram’, and ‘Priapus’ – were published in January 1913 and Hilda, now H.D., became the figurehead for what Pound hoped would become a revolutionary literary movement, Imagism. He would expound these theories in one of his early aesthetic manifestos, ‘A Few Don’ts By An Imagiste’, as well as in some now-much-anthologized poems like ‘In a Station of the Metro’. H.D.’s husband Richard Aldington suggested, though, that Pound’s theories were ‘based on H.D.’s practice’ (4). While the literary notice was gratifying, H.D. was soon embarrassed by the ‘Imagiste’ moniker and asked Monroe to remove it from any subsequent poems she published. In 1916 her first collection, Sea Garden, was published, to both acclaim and puzzlement – especially over gender identity, for some reviewers veiled by those obscure initials. Throughout her life, H.D. would experiment with multiple nom-de-plumes, relishing in the simultaneous effacement and expansion of identity they offered.

It is still often for these early poems that H.D. is best known – poems like ‘Oread’, ‘Sea Garden’, and ‘Sea Rose’. The adjective ‘crystalline’, was attached to her poetry so doggedly that she began to resent it, especially given her later experiments with long form verse and prose. But as Vetter ably argues, reading H.D. only for the poems published in the 1910s risks understanding only a fraction of her life and writing, which were deeply intertwined and profoundly multifaceted. Vetter sees her as dramatically inconsistent, ‘swing[ing] wildly between poles’ of personality according to who is giving the account of her (5). But consistency of self is only a problem for the biographer, not for the liver of the life (as many of H.D.’s biographers, Vetter included, are well aware). As Vetter writes, ‘Work did not reflect life. Rather, she wrote her life into existence. She was ever-mindful that it is narratives that construct identity, and not the other way around.’(6) For H.D., who variously embraced and was challenged by the profound changes witnessed in the 20th century (cinema, psychoanalysis, total war, gender fluidity and sexual experimentation), the capacity to lose an identity, as she wrote in her 1928 poem ‘Narthex’, was ‘a gift’(7).

Vetter has previously published extensive scholarship on H.D.’s later work, especially her prose. As Vetter shows, any account of H.D.’s long and varied life needs to carefully weigh Imagism, which she left behind in the twenties, with her other creative endeavours and personal milestones. These include her writing for and about film, pursued in the pages of the landmark film journal Close Up but also through film-making such as in the avant-garde feature Borderline (1930) in which she acted opposite Paul Robeson; book length poems such as Trilogy, written in response to World War Two (published between 1942 and 1946), and Helen in Egypt (1961); her writing on Shakespeare (By Avon River, 1949) and Freud, with whom she entered analysis in 1931 (Tribute to Freud, 1954); and her autobiographical novels, such as Paint it Today, Asphodel, HERmione, and Bid Me to Live. Many of these novels – besides Bid Me to Live – remained unpublished in H.D.’s lifetime, which explains why her reputation was, for so long, based on the early poetry. But the novels provide rich evidence for her life, relationships, sexuality, and literary development; they also emphasize, as Vetter argues, ‘the self as object of narration’(8).

In her personal life – which H.D. viewed as a source of art – she was similarly uninterested in conventionality as it was defined in the early 20th century. Though married to, and living with, Aldington throughout the twenties, she pursued other romantic and sexual relationships with both men and women. Her daughter, Perdita, was the child of a relationship with Cecil Gray, a Scottish composer whom H.D. lived with in Cornwall in 1918, though Aldington was named on the birth certificate. But neither of these men were Perdita’s primary carer. Though she initially thought she might raise her daughter alone, at the end of the Great War Hilda met and began a relationship with the heiress and writer Bryher (Winifed Ellerman), who became her lifelong partner. Bryher and Hilda were, as Perdita later wrote, her two mothers (Vetter suggests Bryher may today likely have identified as transgender, having in 1919 been reassured by the sexologist Havelock Ellis that ‘she was only a girl by accident’(9)). The relationship was romantically and creatively nourishing – Bryher shared H.D.’s enthusiasm for film and travel – and, thanks to Bryher’s immense wealth, protected H.D. from the need to write for commercial reasons.

Anna Funder’s Wifedom is focused on the traps which heterosexual marriage, home keeping, and motherhood seem to lay for many, especially low-income women. In comparison, Vetter’s study shows the relative freedom H.D. enjoyed in pursuit of love and art. Where Funder portrays Eileen Orwell chained to the home, mucking out blocked toilets and making endless rounds of tea, devoted in unpaid servitude to the project of George Orwell’s writing, from which she was studiously erased, Vetter shows H.D. able to combine parenting, travelling, loving, and learning, with writing. Hilda was not bogged down in wifedom (neither, I should add, was Bryher, though both according to Perdita, were devoted parents). H.D.’s adherence to the first principle of art = life meant that she devoted her whole existence to creative and personal liberty. Of course, Bryher’s independent wealth, and the freedom of movement permitted to their white bodies, enabled their living largely unthreatened by the injustice and oppression central to, and ongoing beyond, the 20th century.

Part of why H.D. was forgotten by the academy following her death in the 1960s may have been her unclassifiability. By the end of her career, she could no longer be called simply an ‘Imagist’. But part of the reason she could be recovered by feminist researchers in the 70s and 80s was because she kept so much of her unpublished writing, and so many of her letters and notebooks. This is another point of comparison with Eileen Orwell, whose archival existence is, comparatively, slim. H.D. is a creation of paper, self-fashioned by her own autobiographical writing, and by her early deposit of a ‘shelf’ of manuscript papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library. Writing was H.D.’s motivation for living, and living fuelled her writing. As the poet Robert Duncan wrote in his monumental work, The H.D. Book, ‘she took whatever she could, whatever hint of person or design, colour or line, over into her “work”.'(10) It is fortunate that ongoing editing and publication since the 1980s by the publisher New Directions has made so much of her writing accessible to the general reader.

This ‘Critical Life’ of H.D. is necessarily an introductory one, especially given the wealth of published and unpublished material to cover. Vetter states from the outset that this book is intended for those mostly unfamiliar with H.D.’s life. Vetter manages the breadth and depth of materials with deftness, moving between archival and literary evidence to create a portrait of an individual who was totally unique but not at all one-dimensional. It is worth the attention for those who are interested in understanding this fascinating poet and her devotion to art.

Cited
1. Francesca Wade, Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (Faber, 2020), p.38.
H.D., Tribute to Freud (Carcanet Press, 1997), p.21
2. Barbara Guest, Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and her World (Doubleday, 1984).
3. Letter from Richard Aldington to Hilda Doolittle, 20 March 1929, in Lara Vetter, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), p.48.
4. Vetter, p.14.
5. Vetter, p.12.
6. Quoted in Vetter, p.15.
7. Vetter, p.101.
8. Quoted in Vetter, p.80.
9. Robert Duncan, The H.D. Book (University of California Press, 2011), p.242.
 
NAOMI MILTHORPE is Senior Lecturer in English at the School of Humanities. Her research interests centre on modernist, interwar and mid-century British literary culture, including most particularly the works of Evelyn Waugh. Naomi is currently completing a scholarly edition of Waugh’s 1932 novel Black Mischief, volume 3 of Oxford University Press’s Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh.

But The Girl

Jessica Yu

Penguin

ISBN: 9781761046148

Reviewed by HOLDEN WALKER

 
 
Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s novel But The Girl (2023) is the story of protagonist and narrator “Girl”, as she embarks on a study abroad experience in the UK while immersing herself in British culture, contemplating her thesis, attempting to write her novel, and sharing her innermost thoughts with the reader. Yu’s novel possesses intimate autofictional narration, inspired by the oeuvre of Sylvia Plath and animated by intertextual allusions to her work. But The Girl explores various other subjects, from the creative process to the Malaysian-Australian experience; however, Yu brings personality and uniqueness to this novel by examining femininity in the postmodern and postcolonial context while commenting on the Australian “cultural cringe”.

 In the context of Australian postcolonial literature, the “cultural cringe” was coined by literary critic A.A Phillips in a 1950 essay published in Meanjin literary magazine. The phenomenon describes a feeling of inferiority (felt particularly by Australians) in their own culture, including the feeling that Australian culture is embarrassing compared to other cultures. The Australian cultural cringe is well documented, even before the time of Phillips, as Henry Lawson provided an extensive diatribe in the preface to the 1894 edition of his Short Stories in Prose and Verse, stating that Australian writers were always in the shadow of British and American writers, and this frustrated him to no end (Rodrick, 1972).

Yu brings the same sentiment into the twenty-first century, breathing new life into a conversation as old as Australian literature itself. She writes:

“Feeling embarrassed about Australia’s provincial personality…had always been automatic to me and everyone I knew. A sense that we were no one, that we had nothing, that spending your whole life secretly trying to get away from the huge yawn that was Australia made you somehow important. Sometimes I wished my parents had immigrated somewhere else…” (p.17).

Yu’s writing, as evidenced by this excerpt, achieves a level of relatability that is likely to enchant many Australians, whether they arrived on Australian shores recently or their ancestral ties to the land span the entire history of the continent. Although we may not be able to point to a shared “Australian experience”, I imagine many have, at one stage, envied the marvel of Britain’s castles or been starry-eyed at the innovation of the capitalist mega-utopia that is America. After a while, our cultural signifiers no longer seem impressive, for “we are no one…we [have] nothing.”

Throughout the novel, Yu continues to explore the feeling of being unable to compete with the UK as an Australian, an emotional experience that may very well be symbolic of the immigrant experience in Australia. However, Girl challenges the notion that her postcolonial novel will inevitably draw from the ‘immigrant novel’ genre. Girl’s hesitation to write an ‘immigrant novel’ reminds me a lot of Nam Le’s ‘Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice’, a short story in which Le contemplates whether to write the inspiring ‘immigrant novel’ that is sure to be an instant classic, or something much more personal to him. For Girl, and by extension, Yu herself, But The Girl is a clear example of taking the second path, as she finds the intersection between postcolonial criticism and Sylvia Plath that is the subject of her thesis, and in a less explicit way, Yu’s novel.

As Girl contemplates how she will address Plath from a postcolonial perspective, Yu implements an arguably genius metafictional strategy by taking direct inspiration from Plath’s The Bell Jar and reinventing the novel to detail an Asian-Australian experience, all while keeping the autofictional style of Plath’s novel. In my view, But The Girl serves as a text that fills an emotional gap identified by the narrator, for although she finds The Bell Jar to be an incredibly powerful text that shaped her adolescent experience, it is clear that certain elements of Esther Greenwood’s narrative are unrelatable.

“When I read The Bell Jar for an undergraduate women’s writing class, I felt something new, brand new. It took me in from the start with its woozy charm and kidnapped my mind clean away. Which meant that it hurt like hell when she wrote about being ‘yellow as a Chinaman’ and worse when a few pages later there was ‘a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman . . . staring idiotically into my face’” (p.30)

In light of its flaws, Yu brings the feminine experience of coming of age in an academic setting into the twenty-first century, reinventing Plath in a way that caters better to modern, Australian, and diasporic readers. While there is no doubt that this updated classic will resonate with mainstream audiences, it should also serve as a love letter to Plath fans. Although I hate to disrespect Lawson and continue the vicious cycle of comparing Australian writers to their more recognised foreign predecessors, I can’t help but suggest that Australian literature has found its Sylvia Plath in Jessica Zhan Mei Yu, and in But The Girl, it has found its The Bell Jar.

Yu’s context, audience, and style deviate from Plath’s, who favoured a razor-sharp and occasionally even confrontational method of prose. Yu exhibits writing that is more contemporary and discursive, while still maintaining the “heart-on-her-sleeve” narrative style often associated with Plath. As a result, the novel provides detailed and intimate accounts of the experiences we often associate with coming of age, such as the struggle to establish our own identity. Girl often references the complicated intersection between being an educated woman who is a second-generation immigrant in the era of what she calls the “bimbo.”

Yu’s narrator identifies many facets of femininity, from the hyper-feminine facades of womanhood from her youth to the strong and empowered women she read about in her gender studies class. Girl struggles to find what types of femininity “fit” her, a feat complicated by her complex relationship with her family.

“Once, when I was walking home from dinner after an undergraduate class with some girls…A car full of young men had slowed to yell obscenities at us…one of the girls had stuck her finger up [at them]…I didn’t do anything to back her up. I reasoned that my parents hadn’t brought me to this country only for me to be found dead on a street somewhere near the university…unlike her parents, mine would never forgive me for dying on them.” (p.29)

Girl’s thought-provoking observations and accounts of how she navigates the world as an Asian-Australian woman in the process of defining her own understanding of womanhood serve as the perfect representation of her desire to examine Plath through a postcolonial lens. Readers witness Girl’s writing endeavours and the memories of her youth play out alongside each other, a sequence of juxtapositions that reveal the possibility that the inspiration for the narrator’s thesis had been hiding in plain sight all along. 

Further, Yu also touches on the feelings of shame that plagued Girl’s adolescence and young adulthood, a facet that contributes significantly to the relatable tone of the novel and allows readers to see their own anxieties reflected in the text, eliciting greater reader engagement through the process of identification with the narrator. The theme of shame can also be tied into the concept of the “cultural cringe” that is explored in this novel, as Girl recounts a feeling of shame that came over her when she visited the Oxford campus in the UK, as it reminded her that Australia doesn’t have grand and prestigious schools like Oxford, just pastiches of them. 

In a similar vein, Yu also explores the shame of femininity and how cultural perceptions of female adolescence impacted Girl’s self-esteem and ability to take herself seriously.

“When I was a teenager, I had thought that there was nothing more embarrassing in the whole world than being a teenage girl…And even more embarrassingly, no one cared about your humiliations because they didn’t matter that much anyway in the ‘grand scheme of things’…” (p.39)

The concepts come together to create a narrator who uses her life experiences as a catalyst to explore the complex emotions associated with coming of age in Australia, a subject matter that is bound to resonate with many readers, particularly those whose identities intersect with Girl’s in some way, be they PhD candidates, women, second-generation immigrants, or all of the above.

But The Girl is a testament to Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s technical skills as a novelist, her appreciation for Sylvia Plath’s impact on emerging female writers, and the desire for women of diverse backgrounds to see themselves represented in the stories that define our youth.

 In essence, I believe Yu achieves Girl’s dream of writing a ‘postcolonial novel’, arguably surpassing that ambition by also composing a text that has the potential to be highly influential on the emerging generation of young Australian women. A likely candidate for canonisation alongside Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi and Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, as well as being a stand-out contributor to the developing canon of Asian-Australian literature. In the same intertextual vein as the thematically similar Daisy & Woolf by Michelle Cahill, But The Girl is a title amongst a growing collection of texts that represent the contributions of Asian-Australian novelists to the historically white-dominated field of feminist literature.

Citations

Phillips, A 1950, The Cultural Cringe, Meanjin, viewed 17 March 2024,
Rodrick, C 1972, Henry Lawson: Autobiographical and Other Writings 1877-1922, Angus & Robertson, pp. 108–109.

Slipstream

By Catherine Cole

Valley Press

ISBN: 9781915606341

Reviewed by CAROLINE VAN DE POL

As an admirer of Catherine Cole’s earlier novels, short story collections and memoir such as Sleep, Seabirds Crying in the Harbour Dark and The Poet Who Forgot, I awaited the publication of her new book, Slipstream: On Memory and Migration, with great anticipation. I was not disappointed. The book’s subject matter of memory and migration had its appeal for me as the daughter of an Irish immigrant and Australian mother.

The book was inspired by a flight between Australia and the UK when Cole sensed that she ‘had been infected in some way by a blight common amongst the children of migrants; that desire to experience a life missed in the country abandoned by my parents.’ (Cole, p. 12). A little while later during her Hong Kong stopover she enviously watched the locals laughing and sharing stories or pointing things out to one another. ‘The city teemed with families who seemed welded to their lives there. They went back a long way, I decided, generations and generations, or so it seemed to me on that humid, solitary day.’ (Cole, p.14)

Cole dedicated the book to her brother, Brian, who as a small boy, travelled with his parents in 1949 from Yorkshire in northern England to Australia under the Ten Pound Pom scheme to Bankstown in Sydney’s South Western suburbs. Brian died in 2022 so he didn’t see the book in print but he and Cole spoke regularly about his memories. This loss of a brother adds a tinge of sadness to the book, an imperative also that we need to talk about our lives and acknowledge the courage with which we live them. I have lost family members too and this plangency echoed with me. I was drawn also to Cole’s thoughtful examination of what migration means to people and communities, especially her parents’ experience of migration.

There were many moments during my reading of Slipstream when I thought about family and friends from Vietnam, China and India who also have shared both joyful and devastating memories of migration. These dichotomies are well illustrated in the book in its reflections on the wider themes of migration and also in stories about what Cole describes as ‘reverse’ migration, her six years spent in the north of England. Cole also challenges the idea that Australia is a new country. In her chapter, Becoming Australian, she notes:

It rankles when people speak of Australia as a new country or part of the ‘new’ world. That is a colonial construct about who ‘discovered’ the place, denying its original people their land and culture – the oldest continuous surviving culture in the world – asserting that the continent was empty. In fact, we live on a thin veneer of history, a ‘relatively short span of Australia’s British settler colonial history, a history that has barely scratched the land’s surface.’ (Cole, p 123)

The layering of wider issues beyond migration, of the split self as depicted in Cole’s reminiscing and reflecting, is a feature of the texture of this tale of contrasting worlds: the sacrifices of leaving home and family in search of a better life. Migrants leave their old homes to seek a new one in a new place. Like so many post war migrants, Cole’s family built their own home first living in a garage sized temporary homes as the permanent home took shape. Cole reflects on what this rehoming means and how home takes on a whole new meaning when sacrifice and optimism meet. She quotes the social historian Ghasan Hage who wrote that a home:

has to be a space open for opportunities and hope. Most theorizations of the home emphasize it as a shelter, but, like a mother’s lap, it is only a shelter that we use for rest before springing into action and then return to, to spring into action again. (Hage in Cole, p102)

Slipstream also explores what has changed since the post war experience of migration and why we are far less tolerant towards migration today. Early in her book, Cole poses the question of changing sympathies for migrants and refugees. While her parents’ journey in 1949 was part of one of the world’s largest mass migrations and one in seven people have now made a new home somewhere in the world, she interrogates this shifting attitude:

Why then, are we so unsympathetic to those who need a safe place? When watching as people flee wars, march towards closed borders or apply fruitlessly for economic migration, it is easy to forget just how fortunate our own families were. (Cole, p 16)

Slipstream also examines the impact of migration on family members, especially those families where some of the children were born overseas and others in the new land. Cole explores a migrant’s grief and loss and the way in which they often cling to their former cultural identity to assuage these feelings. Slipstream offers a humorous and heart-warming story of Cole’s own split between two worlds (the one of her parents in northern England and that of the sandy shores and sunburn of Sydney) while also witnessing from a young age, the struggle of her parents to ‘fit in’. She writes, ‘I want to chronicle how they plaintively memorialised the old world while staying ambitious and optimistic for the new one.’ (Cole, p20) This chronicling takes a number of forms throughout Slipstream. As well as her reflections of migration history and the ways in which other writers have pursued the topic, Cole uses anecdotes and memories to heighten the book’s atmosphere and affect. In one she recalls the way the old world entered the new Australian one via letters and parcels from Yorkshire:

One of the first things my father built on our block of land was a letter box, a neat tin affair with a sloping lid that made it look like a little tin house on top of a post, or like one of my brother’s Hornby tin train stations. The number 80 was painted clumsily on the front. It waited daily for the postman, who rode on his bike down the hill to our place, to deposit whatever thin aerogramme he had in his mail pouch that day. Sometimes he brought a parcel wrapped in canvas or parachute silk, but as time progressed these thinned out to birthdays and Christmas. (Cole p109)

Cole’s search for self in this classical memoir is engaging and offers a balance of distance and introspection. She longs for more detail about her parents’ former lives in their Yorkshire mining village and the shock of Sydney’s western suburbs in comparison. Yet she manages to draw a rich portrait of those early years:

I also want to revisit my parents’ old ‘stomping grounds’ to talk to the ghosts who populate their former lives. What might I gain from these encounters? Self-understanding, historical context, peace of mind in regards to my oddly misshapen identity, that layered self I carry about with me; Australian, British, global, one of the ‘citizens of everywhere and nowhere’. (Cole, p.20)

A feature of Cole’s approach in this important memoir is the inclusion of other views, writers and academics who have looked closely at migration and what it means for them personally and for society. The discussions of migration’s impact on individuals and communities offers perspectives, including writer George Kouvaros who wrote that migration is about a ‘dispersal of the narrative details that we use to understand the people close to us’. The book also draws on the research of historians Paula Hamilton and Kate Darian-Smith, and Hammerton and Thomson in the UK whose research focused on families such as Coles, calling them ‘Australia’s Forgotten Migrants.’

The ways in which the children of migrants feel torn between their parents’ old culture and their own new one offers reflections on the passion for travel that Cole and her peers pursued in backpacking holidays to the ‘old’ country. Cole made several such journeys to her parents’ homeland, the first a six-week journey on a ship bound for England, as a backpacker when she was still a teenager. The significance of the sea – its moodiness, the inability to hold on to it, this kind of ‘slipstream’ permeates Cole’s story and travels. She notes that it is no accident that she first travelled to England by sea – all her life she had heard stories about her family’s passage to Australia on the Empire Brent and here was her opportunity to experience their sea voyage in reverse:

Travelling by sea seems to open vast philosophical conundrums. It causes you to rethink your size and shape and mobility. It offers danger, beauty, secrets. You ponder them at dusk as the sun sinks into the ship’s churning wake and syrens call you to them.’ (Cole, p 41)

Reading about Cole’s desire to trace her parents’ footsteps around northern England – in particular, the roads and lanes and coal mines of Yorkshire – I was reminded of my own desperate longing to live the life I felt I missed out on. This desire to keep our dead relatives living through writing is well-documented by memoirists around the world. Cole writes about her journey through Yorkshire with the ghosts of her family, following them north across Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumberland to their stepping off point on the Clydeside docks of Glasgow. In similar sentiment of the longing and remembering shared by Palestinian author, Atef Abu Saif, Cole shares her yearning to keep her family and her dying brother alive and moving forward.

Cole’s travel is revelatory. She waits ‘like an animal ready to pounce’ on any new insights or stories that help her to understand her own family and their place in the world’s migrant stories. All the while, she is wishing for the conversations with her parents – more stories, more jokes or explanations – she never got to fully enjoy before both had died. It’s true that our thanks to our parents for their sacrifices often come too late. ‘Waiting for the next story and the next,’ she writes, ‘those narratives which, stitched together, make a person who they are and what they understand of themselves.’ (Cole, p 210)

The shape and structure of Slipstream is both meandering and provocative, encouraging the reader to see more than one view of the places Cole visits or where she resides, Bankstown, Liverpool, London, Melbourne, Sydney and of the people and politics she encounters. A favourite part of the memoir for me was a recall of her university days and the reforms made possible to our generation by the Whitlam Government of 1972 – 1975. Those years transformed Australia with their visionary changes, including those to migration policies and multiculturalism under the guidance of Ministers such as Al Grassby. Slipstream also captures the tyranny of memory and the ways in which we remember our families. One particular passage felt particularly poignant as the child Cole lines up for a family photo underneath a flowering jacaranda tree:

Our family home in Bankstown also retains a tyranny of memory. Now both parents are dead, my siblings and I rarely talk about the house, nor about those unsettled early years when we became Australians, in theory at least. The house might rise before us when a memory needs verification. Was it then? Where was that? Waiting for older siblings’ memories to act as the binding agent for something not quite formed. Our parents can’t be asked at all. But the dead speak through photographs and tape recordings, in a flickering family home movie of us all standing self-consciously in front of the flowering jacaranda opposite the back door, its bell flowers drifting above us like purple snow. (Cole, p.113)

Cole’s migrant parents sacrificed so much of themselves and their history for her and her siblings but their story suggests they had no regrets about leaving. Once settled in their new lives they eventually embraced Australia’s way of life, all the while retaining their quintessential Yorkshire ways and accents. Now Cole’s extended family is a multicultural one. The Cole children marries partners from Maltese, English, Irish, Austrian, Indian, and Italian backgrounds. The opportunities of work and education available in Australia in that era are well documented in Slipstream too and they convey how much countries benefit from and can support diverse communities. This is the hope and promise of migration.

Carapace

by Misbah Wolf

ISBN 978-1-925735-41-3

Vagabond

Reviewed by LISA COLLYER
 
 
You can imagine tracing the spiral on the white snail shell on the front cover of Misbah Wolf’s second poetry collection, Carapace to find yourself centred in a temporary house. Wolf’s scintillating and edgy collection of prose poems form individual houses with their fully justified box-shape with an entrance and an exit. Each house is named for their characteristics experienced subjectively by the poet, an experience of phenomena that transcends walls, closets, and beds, and rather how houses shape the inhabitants. In ‘COMMON PEOPLE HOUSE’ (p.21) the female residents transform into ‘witches’ (p.21) as they ‘tuck him (‘a man almost dead drunk’) in again, us in our dark robes/ muttering over his body and bringing water to his lips’ (p.21) in an alchemical reinvention of self.

Wolf opens the door on the house, and the mysteries of poetry with the use of the egalitarian form of the prose poem, a revitalised form that is on trend for its sense of breaching genre boundaries. We, the readers are invited in, to follow the inner perimeter of house. There are entry points and exit points, but this is not a linear progression, the spiral turns in on itself, in an attempt, to find itself at home, unrealised until the final poem, ‘THIS MUST BE THE PLACE HOUSE’ (p.45). But first there is a journey into strangers’ homes like in ‘HOUNDS OF LOVE HOUSE’ (p.9) where possessions are so limited, they can be ‘bundled into four garbage/ bags’ (p.9). Unlike the objective account of a home that appears on paper to be inviting, the ‘kitchen was white marble’ (p.9) the phenomenological experience is alienating ‘a middle-aged woman/ who never wanted to talk to her’ (p.9) and ‘a/ fridge stocked with food that was not hers.’ (p.9) Perhaps the symbolism of ‘white’ is the dominant racism that the POC poet suffers. The speaker’s dreams help her make sense of her rootlessness as she is transferred symbolically into a ‘tiny white poodle incessantly scratching at her bedroom door…’ Won’t anyone let me in?

This search for home is at times a plea in ‘H IS FOR’ (p.10) and conjures Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space in the way it takes root in the sensory and experiential relationship to setting. This longing to be let in, to find a house that feels like home, is a desire to belong where the senses reign supreme, the urge to ‘run my hands through the dad’s hair’ ‘over the dirty knives on the kitchen counter, block/ out the telly with my form’ (p.10) is perhaps a need to take up space, inhabit a setting, to be seen inside as part of the furniture and therefore safe as houses.

Wolf is unapologetic in her honesty of the most intimate goings on in-house. This is what makes the collection so authentic; it doesn’t gloss over the abject nature of ablutions and sex. In ‘MRS ROBINSON’S HOUSE’ (p.25) the speaker enters a prohibited space with a tryst with a married man, hence the allusion to the film ‘The Graduate’ and theme song. The drole tone with the familiar yet unlikely excuse ‘You were married but you had an understanding with your wife’(p.25) follows the abject ‘You slipped your finger over my bloody menstrual pad which only/ amplified the sincerity of your next move’ in homage to Kristeva, the abject and desire are intermingled into the most confessional and private moment in the hunt for transcendence. And we know this, and we’ve all been there, but Wolf gives this space in the most personal of place, the home.

The sense that faraway places inhabit our beings and form our sense of self is captured in the lusty ‘JE TE VEUX HOUSE’ (p.31) where Tibet inhabits ‘The house (that) stretched like a big turd that’s been freshly shitted from a gigantic/ brick beetle (even though it)…was 9351 Km (away.)’ (p.31) The bodies are separated, not by proximity but spirit of affiliating with another country being occupied by the lover, invaded by the raider, and discarded like the two-timer is sensuously rendered ‘In the night a ribbon-like body of water called you and I realised/…there was now a ravine between us.’ (p.31) The speaker addresses the lover with the direct ‘you’ and we the reader are invited to be privy to the affair that coils to a fever pitch only to be discarded for a new temporary abode, another shell, perhaps new shelter.

The prose poem is an outlier: its form is defiant as is Queer space, an intimacy seen as genre bending. Hence, the form has taken off with Queer expression that is flammable in ‘UNDER THE PINK HOUSE’ (p.32). The poem begins ‘It was pornographic science fiction’ with the premise of speculative fiction, ‘What if?’ laying down a dare to imagine Queer space as mainstream. The speaker’s passion is whipped into a sexual frenzy that ‘lassoed me to the bed, and your pussy adopted/ the same penetrating gaze’ disrupting the male gaze for the queer gaze and the site of cunt power. The pluralism of female genitalia embodies Luce Irigaray’s book, ‘This Sex which is not One’ in its celebration of the layers and multiplicity of that which is considered ‘one’ ‘hole’ ‘empty space’.

‘In the centremost labyrinth of your labia, I unintentionally/ scryed your future and saw echoes of tall trees in gentle winds, fingers/ turning pages of burning books with images of hungry baby birds that/ would be unlikely figures of your liberation.’

The ‘L’ word is tossed around in a search for togetherness but like the search for home, it is elusive. In ‘WILD HORSES HOUSE’ (p.12) there is a violence to the coupling ‘This awkward painful screwing that will bleed/ out.’ (p.12) and is perhaps significant of the first time, or sexual violence, or just bad sex. The futility of life is expressed through allusion to Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ where the speaker’s bleak life is reflected upon with ‘This/ cannot be it, surely’ demonstrating the restlessness of the speaker and the hope for so much more. The violence or just lack of real affection is amplified with the only tender touch to be that of ‘Kafka roaches’ soft antennae combing her face in the/ night.’ A sense of annihilation is vividly rendered with the very stark image of ‘cockroaches may survive up to a week without a/ head by just breathing through their skin’ (p.12) and we reflect on what seems the futility of everyday life.

The poem ‘THE CONSTRUCTION OF LIGHT HOUSE’ (p34) reads like an inventory of a rental account of a shared house: a bit battered like its residents but will do as a temporary space, but there is more than just ‘mustardy yellow cupboards’ ‘unpolished wood’ (p34) and ‘windows looking on to a sloping backyard’(p34): there are also ‘contrails’ (p34) on the floor, residue of a face planted, the imprint a person leaves behind on the house, and the marks left within the bodies of the experiential ‘this line/ cuts through time and flesh.’ (p34) This poem is an homage to the share house, to temporary house buddies who are everything in that sliver of time, but will not live on in your next transformation and the boy who will ‘never make it as a writer’; he too is a passing fling, like the ‘stray (cat) who wandered in one day and/ never left. You end up belonging to each other.’ (p.34) And like the temporary houses we call homes, they too are like a beacon of hope, where when the lights go out, love, lust and violence happen. Most of all Carapace is about the discarded shells and the resonance of those shelters that live on and on in our bodies, our only permanent homes.
 
 
LISA COLLYER is a poet and educator and the author of How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up (2023)
Life Before Man Books, Gazebo Books. She was short-listed for The Dorothy Hewett Award
and was an Inspire writer-in-residence with The National Trust of W.A.

The Detective’s Chair

by Anne M. Carson

LiquidAmber Press

ISBN 9780645044980

Reviewed by JENNIFER COMPTON
 
 

Poetry has many pleasures, and, as quite a few of us might suspect, an almost equal share of pains. But every so often, every so often, a book comes along that panders to my desire to loll about reading a detective novel, one hand dipping into the box of chocs and riffling the paper cups to come upon an orange cream, which is my favourite. I am aware, out of the corner of my eye, of the literature outlining the comfort of a rules-based, escapist genre, where the murder victim is rarely, if ever, someone you have come to like. But it wasn’t until I read Carson’s “Reflections on writing The Detective’s Chair” at the back of this book, that I twigged that what I am really liking is the almost preternatural intuition of the crime solvers.

‘The insight came to me while I was sitting in my favourite red, upholstered chair with my legs curled beneath, a pot of Madura tea to hand: my favourite fictional detectives solve crimes similar to how I write poems. They are essentially creative people – and solving crimes is an essentially creative act.’

Then I surrendered, willy nilly, to my baser nature and riffled through the pages to check out my favourites. My orange creams. Miss Jane Marple of St Mary Mead. Who, whilst weeding her herbaceous borders, looks boldly into the dark heart of wickedness. And Detective Chief-Inspector Adam Dalgleish, of Scotland Yard, who resorts to writing poetry – your actual slim volumes – between cadavers. Although he is appropriately self-deprecating. And, of course, Inspector Kurt Wallander in Ystad, Sweden, shambling around in a welter of piles of dirty laundry and unmet obligations –

‘ … desperate for a few motionless
moments to let his thoughts run unfettered. A niggle, just out of
reach, an uneasy ache he knows holds vital clues. Something
someone said or didn’t say–elusive since the first murder. If only he
could sit quietly, listen long and open enough for it to unfurl, maybe
it would crack the case wide open.’ (p65).

Now this poem is called “Uneasy ache” but I first came upon it when it was called “The Detective’s Chair” – a singeleton, an outrider, the harbinger of plenty – and I was very much struck with the intersection of popular culture and poetry. I may have become forceful in my desire for more. I remember discussing the difficulties of tackling Commissario Guido Brunetti, because he is happy, as Anne and I took our keepcup coffees down to Carrum beach during the longeurs of Covid lockdown.

‘There is nothing noir about Guido Brunetti. Noir needs ground of
loneliness, food of melancholy. Crime-solving gets him down from
time to time but he is reflective, philosophical, dives into Herodotus
for distance. On the case, he is professional, meticulous; his nose
and native cunning winkle clues out. He doesn’t come home from
violence to empty taunting rooms, to the siren song of ghosts -’ (p11).

However, I am not meaning to imply that this is not poetry of the most serious intent and of the highest order. It understands its place within the oeuvre, it invokes tried and true devices, it succeeds as poetry. But, because it is entangled with another genre, there is a kind of slippage, and also of homage. Carson has laid down solid rules for herself, in the spirit of the genre she has playfully appropriated. Each take on a detective is a fourteen line prose poem. I suppose you could almost aver – sonnets of the prose poem ilk.

Quickly, I must mention, one of the delights of this delightful book, produced by the indefatigable Liquidamber Press, are the quirky illustrations by René Carrasco, which seem to glow with nostalgia for a simpler age. As does the dedication to Dorothy Porter for her heroic ploy to get poetry out of the bottom shelves at the back of the book shop into the display stands at the front with The Monkey’s Mask. That worked well for her, but that was 1994. However it was a bold move, and it made its mark.

‘Jill’s too busy courting trouble on the mean streets for
time in a chair, feet-up. When she grabs moments from the
malestrom, it’s her backyard fishpond which settles her. She
becomes mesmerised by the gold swirl and swish beneath, the
glimpse of a tail, hypnotic lure of dreamy movement and then the
shape of an idea emerges from the depths, leading to her next step.’ (p7).

Please do buy this book for a childhood friend or a brother-in-law or a great-aunt who isn’t quite sure they like poetry much, but who you know devours detective fiction. And then watch them forget that it is poetry they are reading, as they flick back and forth checking out whether Carson has included their particular favourites, and also to get ideas for authors new to them to chase up. And then watch them becoming absorbed and reflective as the poetry does its work.

 
 
JENNIFER COMPTON is a poet and playwright who also writes prose. She lives in Melbourne on unceded Boon Wurrung Country. Recent Work Press published her 11th book of poetry the moment, taken in 2021.

Every Version of You

by Grace Chan

ISBN: 9781922806017

Reviewed by Zowie Douglas

In 2022, as AI-generated images began to populate our social media feeds, RnB artist SZA released Ghost in the Machine, in which she sings: ‘Robot got future, I don’t.’ The future and the present are uncomfortably close in Grace Chan’s Every Version of You, where the characters inhabit a world that is startingly familiar to ours. The protagonist, a young woman named Tao-Yi and her partner Navin live in Southbank, Melbourne, where the average outdoor temperature is too hot for prolonged exposure. Other than the climate, places such as Berwick, Townsville and Port Douglas are recognizable. Most people wear ‘Revisions’, AI-augmented interfaces which filter the world and provide useful information, including temperature, radiation, and airborne pollution levels. Characters consume ersatz food like Koffee and use robotic vacuum cleaners. Nursing homes employ droids to deal with old people. All these things build on current trajectories to create a mid-2100 era that feels too close to home, from technology to language use. Internet slang like ‘meatspace’, for example, has been adapted to become vernacular to describe the physical world as opposed to being in Gaia, where most of the characters in Every Version of You spend their time.

The novel plot turns on the decision to ‘upload’, that is whereby characters physically die, giving up their bodies in exchange for eternal ‘life’ in hyperspace. In this way, Every Version of You introduces humanoid technologies similar to other recent works of science fiction, such as Olga Ravn’s The Employees, whose narrator says: ‘It’s my job to get rid of terminated workers and, in a few instances, bodies left over after sickness or re-uploading.’ Instead of being a ship steward, Tao-Yi is a woman overboard. The plot of Every Version of You operates as an Odyssey of sorts: Tao-Yi could upload to Gaia with her lover and ‘exist’ in a state of eternal youth, but she decides not to; instead, she remains on earth, where she is determined to return to her grandmother’s ancestral home. Tao-Yi grew up in Malaysia, where her attachment to earth appears to be rooted in childhood memories and obligations: ‘Honouring Poh-Poh is more important than playing with friends in a make-believe world,’ her mother, Xin-Yi scolds a young Tao-Yi. ‘How would you feel if no one paid respects to your soul after death?’ To which Tao-Yi replies, ‘I’d be dead, so I wouldn’t feel anything.’

In Every Version of You, hyperspace becomes the locus of existence, even though its permanent residents are technically, corporeally dead. Those who visit Gaia experience a host of larger-than-life experiences, while life on Earth is stifling and depressing. Tao-Yi’s partner Nevin, who suffers from chronic kidney disease, is one of the first characters to abandon the crumbling spectre of Melbourne to upload into Gaia. Notably, the first subject to undertake the uploading process is a disabled woman. ‘A car accident at the age of three rendered Marisa quadriplegic. She moved and fed and bathed with integrated assistive technology.’ Here, Marisa’s state of being is similar to the experience of people who access Gaia inside the Neupod, a kind of isolation tank filled with gel. The user needs to shave their head to attach the equipment, rendering them infant-like in appearance. There is an element of body horror to the book’s tactile fleshiness; while the user is physically motionless, the body breaks down in graphic detail. In this way, the world building of Every Version of You is not always the most original, but it builds on influences from The Matrix and other science fiction in a compelling fashion, tempered by detailed character arcs and emotional depth.

In terms of augmented reality and artificial intelligence, the book feels prescient. In August of 2023, a 47-year-old woman was able to speak for the first time in 18 years through an avatar with the assistance of a brain-computer-interface, or BCI. The woman had lost her mobility at age 29 as a result of a brainstem stroke. The BCI is attached via electrodes to an area of her brain and runs a on language model similar to Chat GPT, where her electrical signals are ‘translated’ into words and conveyed by an avatar on screen, simulating speech much more quickly and accurately than earlier speech synthesisers.

In a similar way, language and technology are tightly intertwined in Every Version of You, where everything is bodily, earthy, tactile. Tao-Yi’s Revision is ‘clotted’ with advertisements. Bundles of wires are described as being like ‘spilled guts’. Nevin and Tao-Yi argue ‘with their mouths to each other’s ears, breathing in synchrony.’ Nevin is far less attached than Tao-Yi to the physical world. ‘We kill off our old selves all the time,’ he says to Tao-Yi. This idea of reinvention as self-obliteration is a recurring duality in Every Version of You, alongside the blurred border between information and language, mind and body.

Throughout the novel, Tao-Yi is haunted by her grandmother’s history of depression. ‘Her poh-poh died in 2043, fifty-four years old, alone in a hotel room in Kuala Lumpur. A suicide note, torn from the pages of a journal, crumped between the sheets.’ Tao-Yi’s maternal lineage forms a bastion of reality that is returned to over and over, bringing her literally down to earth while her peers are rushing to escape into hyperspace. ‘The earliest Uploaders will be seen as pioneers,’ said Zach, a friend of Tao-Yi and Navin. Here, I was reminded of Shoshana Zuboff’s nonfiction book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, in which Zuboff likens the advance of Big Data as a kind of digital dispossession, harvesting private citizens’ information to enrich tech empires while controlling their access to the online world. But those who upload see themselves as explorers of a new frontier, even as their memories are being absorbed into servers at a high financial and physical cost.

Gaia might provide an escape from mortality, but it’s no panacea. As Tao-Yi says, ‘We built the same spaces and borders, the same sort of bodies, and set everything ticking to the same flow of time.’ To this her friend Zach replies, ‘We stick to the boring utopias.’ I was reminded of Steve Toltz’s novel Here Goes Nothing, where heaven turns out to be a bureaucratic world of austerity, full of the same inconveniences and absurdity of earthly life.

In Gaia, the line between commerce and life remains nebulous, creating an anxiety between what is ‘real’ and what is artificially manufactured: ‘Her tummy grumbles. Is the system telling her that her actual tummy is grumbling, or has the Neupod tracked her blood sugars dropping and triggered an artificial signal? Or has the cafeteria paid for hunger triggers?’ Marketing imbues the world in ‘comm’ speak, and most human art including music is widely designed by algorithm. The characters inhabit a world where mathematical order rules, but this tends to recreate inequalities rather than level them out. For instance, bots abound in poorer, outdated districts: ‘Some have been bought by earnest shopkeepers from developing countries, taking advantage of the cheaper real estate to find a way into Gaia.’

In any case, for Tao-Yi and those few who remain on earth, their commitment runs through the knowledge that they are the outliers in a world saturated by artificial intelligence, a kind of hanger-on to a sinking ship as the earth’s regulatory systems break down. They are the ghost in the machine, even as the avatars who flit between servers lose their bodily forms.

ZOWIE DOUGLAS-KINGHORN lives in Tasmania. Her work has appeared recently in Overland, Island, Meanjin, The Age and others, and her essays and short stories have been awarded the Scribe Nonfiction Prize and the Ultimo Prize for Young Writers. She is the previous editor of Voiceworks.

she doesn’t seem autistic

by Esther Ottaway

Puncher and Wattman

ISBN 978-1-922571-76-2

Reviewed by DOMINIQUE HECQ

Esther Ottaway’s third book of poetry, she doesn’t seem autistic, explores a neglected area of psychological medicine: autism in women. It is by default that Ottaway herself was diagnosed, when a specialist established that her youngest daughter was autistic. Although partly autobiographical, the persona in the poems is ‘a composite woman and girl,’ Ottaway tells us in her foreword: she wants ‘to show [us] a profile of autism that [we] are not familiar with’ (12). 

The collection documents the symptoms of female autism across a spectrum as well as the inevitable misdiagnoses. It also poignantly exposes the core of the speaker’s humanity—in this case, what affects her. In Andy Jackson’s words, the book is ‘a revelation.’

Symptoms of female autism include empathy arousal, rejection sensitive dysphoria, alexithymia, situational mutism, masking, echolalia, ADHD, sensory processing disorder, dyspraxia, hypotonia, dyscalculia, avoidant/restrictive food intake syndrome, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, delayed sleep disorder, narcolepsy, pathological demand avoidance, dysautonomia, panic disorder, depression, etc. Repress the desire to laugh, because this is not funny. Miss Diagnosis is psychological medicine’s own worst symptom. As Ottaway shows triumphantly towards the end of the collection, labels come unstuck. Are torn to shreds. And yes, as she affirms in ‘Joy to my world,’ her own ‘revelation’ (74) means a belief in change.

And the poems? Ah, the poems. They show how poetry is created from the bodymind, its affects and memories. Riposting to Ottaway’s dismissal of the word ‘good’ in ‘How are you?’ (57), I’d say the poems are achingly good. These are not poems trapped on the surface—the surface of observation, information, narration, sleek language.  Here, there is rhythmic intensity that fuses emotion, breath and thought, incorporating profound, associative insight.

Consider, for example the opening to ‘There is always a giraffe,’ which takes us back to the persona’s childhood:

Cool as a whale
Mrs Haydon is stepping backwards through water

patient with this small giraffe
who has failed at every sport

all neck and skittery hooves,
large-eyed, patterned with shame.

Consider how it catches gracefully the movement it needs for grief. How it carries with dismay the child’s terror, and then with respect the newly found knowledge of death, ‘asking if it’s worse to drown, or fall’
(28).

Perhaps these unknowns associated with terror and death present Ottaway’s powering creativity with a tempering negativity. This would seem to be the implication of the book’s first poem, ‘After writing a book on female autism, I decide to bury it,’ where birth and death, breath and dread are intertwined in the figure of ‘that bleating woman’ (13) who nonetheless dares to offer the danger of poetry. 

‘The shamed body addresses its owner,’ responding to a sense of dissociation, is achingly good, too: its feeling is finely judged, its observation has a convincing mix of deflection, fixation and ambivalence. It is almost speechless:

You say my names: but will you introduce me
to your friends?  Are you still ashamed –
(52)

Another standout in this collection is ‘Illanelle,‘ where the body is at war with itself, its ‘lifelong illness… auto-immune,’ adumbrating as it does its own ‘release’ (53). There is something about death that is teaching Esther Ottaway’s layered poetry a new clarity. Perhaps it is a particular kind of newly found carelessness. Or confidence.

At another level, it encourages just a little too much care, as if presence, evoked through sensate detail, might compensate for absence, as in ‘Perennially gaslit, the autistics reject humanity,’ where the persona talks to (her)self and needs more detachment so that desire can get free of guilt and shame:

We aren’t’ wanted,
won’t be missed. Little wonder
that we shy now at this pillory

go to the insects, plants, land, sky. (65)

In the face of such debilitating condition, Ottaway finds in poetic practice a way of enacting a discipline. It might seem effortless, but not many poets can achieve this balancing of the imponderable and impermanent, this balancing of lines so that they incorporate at once the movement of breath and bodymind. Ottaway has learned how to set her subject free: she exercises a discipline of line; she practices precise observation and sometimes self-deprecation; she discreetly deploys a specialised lexicon and, above all, empathy. Some might say that she writes without ego, but I disagree: wit and humour undercut a refreshing self-consciousness.

In ‘Neurodiverse’ Ottaway achieves a level of imaginative embodiment I find puzzling. Through a linguistic play of deferrals and reversals, the poem achieves something close to spiritual power. Something I only experienced by accident in a yoga practice I failed at again and again—and have long since abandoned. Here suffering, emptiness and desire coalesce:

Deserve in our
derive. No ruse.
Revise, undo re
overused rein.
Never die sour! (75)

The imaginative process rests on inter reaching reciprocities; it is useless to want one dimension to explain another, as if the poem were a response to an idea that had some temporal, causal and linguistic priority. It is a pared down, even compact poem. And yet it spawns innumerable interpretations through letter reconfiguration and linguistic border crossing.  Never die sour / [nev-uh-duh-zai-uh]. Rein / rien (nothing). Derive / dérive (drift). Who is writing here? Esther, or me? Until fairly recently, ours (ours?) was not a subject-position from which autism was usually considered, writes another poet grappling, as I do, with what it means to write from the perspective of an autistic subject.1

Themes recur and resonate throughout Esther Ottaway’s work: pregnancy, parenthood, loss, grief and more generally, family ties, but it seems to me that she has found ways to embody them more fully in she doesn’t seem autistic than in her two previous collections to amplify the architecture of her poetry so that what might have been mere observation or information acquires layers of narrative and thought that convey a more profound, a more fully realised experience of interconnectedness. Here is the opening to ‘How to have an autistic friend,’ where the syntax performs this interconnectedness:

See that my scales flash gilt:
the prowess, gift.
Acknowledge the lack in me,
how baffling the lacunae.
Invite me, fit the schedule to me.
If I can’t answer. If I forget,
remind. Remind anyway. When I can’t follow through,
be kind. Remember the iceberg
balancing under this peak,
how intensely I’m thrashing
underwater. See
what can’t be seen, like city stars. Give me rest
and more rest, time, time
and more time.
(79)

Above all, what strikes in this collection is the inventiveness of the language. Enjoy the full response to ‘How have you succeeded despite having autism?’. Here is the hilarious beginning:

At first, I am disauder, distressed auganism. I cannot count on the
audinary. Efforts come to naut – I triage, relinquish, harden up: hindsight
and forethaut my advisors, flight my reliable last resaut. I am an auphan
in this singular authogenesis, autonomous but so hamstrung, my
writing my only authodox ability, stamp on my passpaut…

My own revelation comes intertwined with an anecdaut. 

… empathy arousal, rejection sensitive dysphoria, alexithymia, situational mutism, masking, echolalia, sensory processing disorder, avoidant/restrictive food intake syndrome, delayed sleep disorder, pathological demand avoidance, panic disorder, depression… mania and hypervigilance …

My youngest (a boy) says: We’re all on the spectrum, mum. That includes you. My jaw drops. F. labels. Mind the book’s last poem, ‘The autistic woman’s self-compassion blessing,’ I sway to myself. 2

Notes:

1 Joanne Limburg 2017 ‘The Shape of the Problem’, The Poetry Review, 131.
2 Pun intended.

DOMINIQUE HECQ was born in the French-speaking part of Belgium. She now lives on unceded Wurundjeri land. Hecq writes in English and French. Her creative works comprise a novel, six collections of short stories and  fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry. Her latest publications  include After Cage (2^nd ed., 2022, Liquid Amber Press) Endgame with No Ending (2023, SurVision), winner of the 2022 James Tate Poetry Prize, and a bilingual poetry sequence titled Songlines / Pistes de rêve, with photographs by Natia Zvhania (Transignum, 2023).

We Need To Talk

by Manveen Kholi

ISBN-10 ‏  9392494297

Red River Press

in partnership with Centre for Stories

Reviewed by VARUNA NAICKER

We Need To Talk is raw, truthful and confronting. Manveen Kohli, a British-Indian poet, captures the brutal hypocrisy of what it is like to live in a society where the existence of women is a contradiction. The honesty in which Kohli writes her poetry leaves the reader nowhere to turn but to confront the harsh truth that we force young women into a lion’s den without raising a finger to tame the many lions. From the title, Kohli had my attention. We Need To Talk. The masterful 4 words instill an alertness for what is to come next. The title foreshadows the content of the entire book: I need you to listen to what I have to say. 

The first section of eight, the poem “When My Home Country isn’t Home” dives headfirst into exploring the contradictions of Indian society. What is immediately noticeable is the choice of language Kohli employs. Her verses are sparse and not overly layered with descriptive metaphors and similes. She lets the subject matter do the talking and her poetry is all the more powerful for it. “When My Home Country isn’t Home” immediately acknowledges Kohli’s position to the reader as an Indian living outside of India; an insider and outsider in the eyes of Indian society: 

These people always remind me
that India is home,
but won’t ever talk about how I am treated
as a foreigner.
(13) 

She quickly transitions topic, highlighting the unbalanced accountability women and men are subject to in this society. Using emotive religious language, Kohli drives home the point that piety is preached whereas respect for women’s bodies and their agency are not: 

an uncle will put his hands
on his niece’s body
and use those very hands to pray,
(14) 

The verses move quickly and cut to the heart of the issue. The minimal, blunt language creates a sombre tone which aids Kohli’s overall objective; this is necessary conversation, not a nice one. 

As We Need To Talk continues, it is clear that the entire book will be unapologetic in its commentary of the society the author sees around her. For some, this may be confronting but if so, that is all the more reason why it is needed. This is incredibly true for the next two poems “Daddy’s Issues” and “Don’t Call Me Pretty”. The two poems are dark and reference the violence the author is subjugated to by those she trusts. In “Daddy’s Issues”, Kohli challenges the primordial pedestal which the concept of ‘family’ sits upon within Indian society. 

She refuses to dilute the experiences of her father’s abuse to save their relationship, challenging the patriarchy entrenching Indian society through her closest source: her father. Indian women see this time and time again. We are told to forget our grievances in favour of protecting the family dynamic. Familial domestic violence is punctuated with an asterisk as if to say that it is less severe than violence outside the home because forgiveness is waiting behind the door, biding time until the victimised family member walks through. But Kohli draws a clear line in the sand, instead opting to not absolve her father of his crimes; she will not carry the burden of forgiving him, as if she does, she is betraying herself:

so I will stop here
because Dad,
writing about you
is like returning
to war while
still having PTSD.
(24) 

“Don’t Call Me Pretty” returns to examine the societal contradiction rooted in misogyny where women are framed as instigators, despite the fact that sexual violence being inflicted upon them. The repetitive phrase: 

Didn’t you know?(30) 

The phrase punctuates each double standard, reinforcing femininity as dangerous for purely existing: 

Didn’t you know that
your breasts and legs
should have
been concealed
for your body is a meal,
(30) 

The verses poke holes in how we understand consent through a harrowing account of sexual violence. The author begs the question: what is the point of teaching girls consent when it is the boys who need to learn? The simple, plain language puts the irony of blaming women front and centre. The reader is hard pressed to concede that this is anything but injustice at its worst. 

While the earlier poems in We Need To Talk are imbued with anger, grief, and a demand for accountability from the external forces at play, Kholi’s later poems take on an introspective and reflective nature: they are letters to herself (in fact one is titled “Love Letters to Myself’). “Intrusive Thoughts” uses perhaps the most poetic language out of the entire collection. Kohli describes to the reader how insidious her anxiety can be and the various ways it manifests itself by sabotaging her daily existence. She does not break away from her pattern of using minimalist language, and although the tone is still direct, there is a trepidation that is not as apparent in her previous poems. It only adds to the rawness of her work and shows that We Need To Talk encompasses many topics that are not broached in Indian society, mental health being a core one. The juxtaposition between the fleeting nature of anxiety attacks, yet its anxiety’s permanency demonstrates Kohli’s talent at communicating the visceral through language: 

Sometimes anxiety
feels like the only
constant in my life
for it may leave
for a while but
never permanently,
and when it reappears,
it grips me with
such ferocity
that it takes
the oxygen
out of my body.”
(45) 

We may not see her anxiety but we feel it. 

Kohli’s skill as a poet is flexed as she traverses many different emotions without losing the reader’s attention through the directness in her address. “Tribute” is an ode to the loved ones in Kohli’s life. In the last verses, Kohli proves that she does not paint men with a broad brush stroke. The verses concerning her grandfather, her brother and her lover are written with tenderness and love. For me, the poems serve a dual purpose. They are an homage to the men who showed her true love, and on a broader level are a reminder that misogyny is not a sickness, where the sick have no choice but to succumb. The tales of her brother and his love for her demonstrate that men have agency to choose love over complicit violence, and this love the author basked in: 

Having a father
who starved
me of love
and a brother
who gave it
in abundance
taught me
one of the most
important lessons
of my life.
A man is not
always defined
by the one
who raised him.”
(81) 

The final verses bring We Need To Talk full circle, with Kohli dedicating her last sonnets to her mother’s experiences dealing with the very same patriarchy and misogyny examined in prior pages. There is solace in Kohli’s words to her mother and she acknowledges that the grief she feels, her mother is not a stranger to either. 

We Need To Talk is a holistic retelling of what it means to be a young Indian woman. The ferocity in its censure of Indian society, of the reproduction of toxic masculinity, to me, comes from needing to speak the truth into existence so that these topics do not remain in the shadows. The power of Kohli’s poetry comes from interweaving the bad and the good, the light and dark, to create a complex world that is brave and truthful to the experiences of many Indian women. The poems will no doubt spark discussion and be the catalyst for inspecting how we replicate the world around us in our own relationship dynamics. We Need To Talk is a work that deserves a wide audience and pause for conversation for many years to come. 

VARUNA NAICKER is a Fijian-Indian writer from Penrith, immigrating to Australia when her parents moved from Fiji in 1999. She holds a Bachelor of Communication degree and a Master’s degree in Public Policy and Governance. Varuna has deep interest in how social institutions form people’s perception of themselves and the perception of the world around them. She has worked in various media, including film and writing.

Pink Slime

By Fernanda Trías

Scribe

ISBN:9781922585356

Reviewed by NATALIA FIGUEROA BARROSO
 

Within the womb we are connected to our mothers by an umbilical cord. After birth, that cord is cut, but our psychological attachment remains no matter the complexities of our relationship. Under the metrics of neoliberalism, the inequalities of carbon trading and the forces of neocolonialism our connection to Mother Earth is obscured.

Peeling back the layers of motherhood and caregiving and mother earth-hood, right to the muscular tissue, multi award winning Uruguayan author Fernanda Trías’ latest sci-fi novel Pink Slime, translated from Spanish to English, by Heather Cleary is an agonisingly beautiful read. 

Written in first person peripheral, but often slipping into future tense, a nameless narrator waits for her ambiguous end, in a nameless port, in a raceless society, in a timeless era, all alone. Through this unnerving and anonymous lens, the narrative unfolds amid a bloodcurdling toxic pink algae-born disease that brings forth lethal red winds, baptised, El Principe (The Prince). Next the fish die, followed by the birds disappearing. Then the haves flee Inland while the have-nots stay behind to fend for themselves.

If anyone becomes infected by this deadly eco-superbug phenomenon their “skin cracked open to the muscle” (p. 17). The city’s inhabitants are forced into lockdown with their cans of Meatrite, “twenty grams of protein per portion, served in a plastic cup” (p. 83). This food product goes into such high demand that its processing plants spit out pink slime, the origin of the title (p. 83). However, it’s the setting’s tone and mood, where this book stands out, well, that and, its striking poetic prose. 

Although, Pink Slime is set in a sci-fi post-apocalyptic setting, it is not too far removed from reality, where the global south suffers from environmental pollution, lack of quality healthcare and economic inequality, trapping its disadvantaged citizens in crisis after crisis, directly and indirectly caused by the global north. 

Within this grim and contagious environment, Trías examines human nature, relationships and isolation. The nameless narrator ignores her body’s demands, surpassing hunger and survives by keeping herself busy. She quits her copywriting job at a content agency and dissects her days and nights among visiting the last that remain close to her, risking the kiss of death from the not so charming El Principe. 

She checks in on her bedridden childhood sweetheart and ex-husband Max, who’s been infected in a self-destructive moment and now a patient at Clinics, conveniently (and inconveniently) not too far from her rundown apartment. And lives with Mauro, a morbidly obese boy with a nameless disability that she’s paid to care for by his affluent and aloof parents, “to watch him get fat and eventually (when?) to watch him die, without feeling the pain a mother would” (p.95).

Oddly she drops in, uninvited, at her mother’s, whom she’s both estranged from, and geographically distant. Their relationship is uncomfortable, like sunburnt skin. Her mother lives Inland, up north of the (almost) nameless South American country near Brazil (p.54). I say almost because there are little clues, in particular for Latinx readers, like the insertion of the sweet, dulce de leche (p. 92), a word used in Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Ecuador and parts of Colombia and Venezuela. But the inclusion of the tart, pastafrola (p. 100), a dessert that Italian immigrants brought to Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, refines the location of this book.

Cyanobacterial blooms in Uruguay’s Río de la Plata are a common occurrence. Now with climate change at our riverbanks, ever more so. And as I dive into each sensory image in Pink Slime, such as, “Unless you’ve lived it, you could never imagine the nauseating stench, the sudden heat, the river swelling like an octopus, foam tinted crimson by algae” (p.15), my mind travels back to Uruguay, January 2016, when I held a glass filled with tap water to the sunlight and found: tiny phlegm-like blue-green algae floating in my drink at my sweaty pale grip. 

This memory triggered by the novel’s atmosphere, made me wonder where Trías got the grim, but brilliant idea for her Orwellian narrative. I close its pages for a moment and google the following:

“It began with a nightmare. Night after night, I would dream about pollution spreading in waves and ripping off my skin. I would look down and see my skin hanging off me in strips.” (Trías, F. 2023, Scribe Publications)

After reading the author’s note the novel’s non-linear structure makes even more sense to me, as the beginnings and endings, and the passing of time itself are questioned throughout the story’s arc. The beginning of this book is not the true beginning of this dystopian world. As the nameless narrator on the first page declares, “I was never any good with beginnings,” and it’s not until page 154 that she redeclares, “This is how our new official story begins.”

As well there’s the motif of inhabiting a timeless world, where Trías explores living in a place where clocks and calendars are a thing of the distant past.

Take the following:

“… time was measured by a different kind of clock: wind or fog, grey or red, power or blackout; it passed according to Mauro’s cycles of hunger, the preparation of meals, and my ability to keep my distance from Max. So when I talk about days, weeks, and hours, I do it as a way to organise my thoughts, to give meaning to the stagnant memory” (p.194).

The novel’s structure flows like an unnerving nightmare. As a reader I am thrown from one timeless moment to the next, and a lot of foretelling occurs as I land in different points in this non-time within the narrative, creating a cunning sense of dramatic tension like an anxiety blistering at the face of the environmental, the viral and the emotional. 

“I was afraid the world would come crashing down around me if I stopped moving, and when I say the world what I mean is the past, because the fragile and wavering present I’d had until a few hours ago was coming to an end” (p.135).

I am hooked, even at the face of the utterly uninviting. 

Additionally, the juxtaposition of the ecological catastrophe alongside the sluggishly painful ending of the nameless narrator’s complex relationships with her mother, ex and Mauro, generates a visceral sense of an outer and inner turmoil. This is further coupled with anonymity of self, place, and time evoking an ingenious metaphor for an emotional world in crisis, which again adds to the dramatic tension. 

Hopelessness and meaninglessness are prominent themes in the plot. And the strong visual imagery that represents these ideas, in addition, become metaphors for the nameless narrator’s state of mind. Such as, when she wakes up exhausted next to Mauro, and continues doing her caregiving task mechanically and absentmindedly, and expresses how, “Sometimes I picture myself digging a long, deep tunnel to another land. But all my escape routes led me back to Max, like those circular highway exits that spit you back out right where you started” (p. 87). 

A few pages later in the novel, in another timeless moment, the nameless narrator dials for a taxi out of the port and to the Inland, and is led to an automated message with three options to press. But unfortunately, like her internal predicament she, “circled around the maze of options leading nowhere for a while …” (p. 93).  

Finally, I want to bring attention to Trías’ gorgeous poetic prose through her use of poignant similes, as they added an extra layer of skin to peel back and examine throughout the text. When describing her mother’s ironically named, country suburb of Los Pozos (The Pitts), at the non-beginning of the novel, when the nameless narrator goes to visit her, she compares it to, “It was as if the clouds formed there, exhaled by the earth itself, and you could feel the moisture on your face as slow and cold as a slug’s trail” (p. 8).

Immediately, I feel uncomfortable arriving at Los Pozos as I read this. Making me innately mimic the protagonist’s internal world in calamity via Trías’ clever use of one emotionally stirring comparison.   

I adored Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías translated by Heather Cleary, its atmosphere, its poetry, its politics, its humanity peeled back to the muscular tissue like a lab rat under the knife of a scientist, and I would be more than happy to reread it in Spanish. Perhaps by revisiting it in my mother tongue, I too could circle back to a new beginning. 

Mugre Rosa was released 5 October 2020, and its translation Pink Slime was released 1 August 2023. Follow the author on Instagram: @triasfernanda.

NATALIA FIGUEROA BAROSSO is a Uruguayan-Australian poet and storyteller of Charrúa, African and Iberian origins who lives on Dharug Country. Her work has appeared in the collections Sweatshop Women: Volume One, Racism: Stories on Fear, Hate & Bigotry, Any Saturday, 2021. Running Westward and Between Two Worlds and various literary magazines. Natalia’s currently working on her debut novel, Hailstones Fell without Rain (2025, UQP). She posts at @ms_figueroa_barroso

Admissions

Ed. David Stavanger, Radhiah Chowdhury, Mohammad Awad

Upswell

ISBN: 9780645248098

Reviewed by NICOLE SMITH
 
 

Within these pages is a cohort of activist consumers, neurodivergent creatives, psychiatric and trauma survivors, dreamers, community leaders and mind-bending writers.

I dive into Admissions: Voices Within Mental Health. A mosaic of 105 Australian voices follows, in the form of poetry, short fiction, rap lyrics, essays and illustrations. Well-known names Anna Spargo-Ryan, Krissy Kneen, Omar Sakr, Felicity Ward, and Grace Tame are anthologised with 30 emerging writers who were chosen through a 2021 MAD Poetry callout by Red Room Poetry. The foreword affirms: 

Everything within these pages is someone’s truth.

The editors pledged to approach the works in Admissions with ‘radical empathy’ imploring readers to do the same, because we are all human, regardless of mental health challenges. As Luka Lesson reminds us:

There are 206 bones in our bodies
and mine
are just like yours.

The readers are reminded of this shared humanity so that they may come to the anthology without prejudice and join the writers and editors on a mission to rid the world of stigma around mental health.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is only cited twice, demonstrating that the anthology’s interest does not lie in pathology, but in the interpersonal experience of living with such challenges.    

In the words of editors David Stavanger, Radhiah Chowdhury and Mohammad Awad Admissions seeks to show how: 

…art and language can expiate suffering. Art as release, art as relief, art as recovery, remission, remediation.

Such words are echoes lines by Quinn Eades that evoke the complicated relationship we have with writing, and explore writing as therapy:

we are mad to write and mad to not write we carry this book for so long that it is become
un bearable

Artist and contributor, Amani Haydar’s cover image shows a woman with one eye closed, symbolising both a phobia of seeing ourselves, and a desire to be acknowledged by others.

The anthology is organised in reverse alphabetical order by surname, echoing Alice Blayney’s inclusion ‘The Z-A of Crazy’. Each piece questions and reframes stereotypes of mental illness, and associated trauma and recovery, using different tones and a vast vocabulary to regain power and convey identity.

The collection has narratives, in the first person such as Chowdhury’s ‘Motherlines’:

In our preliminary session, my first psych told me that I should think of treatment and recovery as a nonlinear path with an ever-shifting end point.;

the second person, such as Hefferan’s ‘from the book of puns and other altered sentences’:

it is twenty minutes since you took your meds Zyprexa, the communion wafer the blasphemous one instead of taking it on the tongue you take it under the roof of your mouth.;

and third person, such as Mununggurr’s ‘Point of No Return;

She closes her eyes
only starless skies, opens then
Still only darkness.

The collection explores a variety of environments and themes including the uncertainty of COVID-19, the emotional turmoil caused by intrusive thoughts, body image, growing up with a parent with mental illness, psychiatric hospital stays, face-blindness on a first date, swimming with dolphins as treatment for depression and smart ovens keeping the lonely company. This variety, while certainly part of the book’s charm, is one reason I would caution against reading Admissions in one sitting. The use of figurative language and symbolism means some lines delight in ways that can be easily missed. Here is an example from ‘The Bedroom Philosopher’:

I ran a bubble bath, it went flat
I had a falling out with myself, I’m not talking to myself anymore.

My favourite are the grounded memoir pieces, particularly those with a familial focus, for example: Kristen Dunphy struggling with a loss of control surrounding her wife’s illness and a feeling of helplessness when supporting their daughter:

When will Mummy stop being sad? She asks me. …The woman I married is no longer here. She is the ghost of her former self.

The genetic nature of mental health is referenced by Samson L. Soulsby :

Madness runs in the family like greyhounds.

Krissy Kneen continues the familial thread:

I am learning about time
from men
who look nothing like my father
who remind me of his absence.

The familial theme takes a hauntingly beautiful turn with the inclusion of a piece by Annette and Stuart Baker reflecting on their deep sorrow on the loss of their daughter Mary. The reflection is placed directly after Mary ‘s poem ‘The Key’, in which she speaks of freedom and longing to break out of a cage like a bird:

So unravel this cocoon of your protection,
Untie this chain of your love
Open the door, release me.
Trust that I won’t fly away.
But if I do, Trust that it is for the best.

The inclusion of Mary Baker as well as Benjamin Frater, two artists whose mental health battles also ended in suicide is evidence that words live on and emphasises the strength of those fighting mental ill-health.

Parts of Admissions feel frenetic, especially those written in a loud collective voice (often written in capital letters) such as Steven Oliver’s CARRY ALL THE HURT AWAY. 

The abstract nature of the poetry is admirable yet alienating. At times it feels the poetry is deliberately obscure, as I was left to infer meaning from syntax, structure and meter I’d never seen before. No doubt many of the poems are it is intelligent, and evocative, however the non-linearity meant I had to read the poems multiple times which prevented me from becoming fully immersed. One wonders I wondered if the chaotic and at times nonsensical elements are included to evoke the disconcerting nature of dissociation and ill-health ‘episodes’. For, as the anthology makes clear, although there can be a sense of pride for those with diverse brain chemistry, many wish to no longer be on the outskirts of their own lives.

Conversely, the pieces that read as inner monologues, for example, Olivia Hamilton’s ‘Time Lapse’, or have excerpts of academic text, for example, Martin Ingle’s exploration of OCD ‘A victim who feels like a villain’ are consumed with ease.

A word of caution: the book takes a candid approach to taboo topics such as sexual assault and rape that may prove confronting for some.

The contributions by First Nations writers Brooke Scobie and Kirli Saunders conjure the Australian landscape, flora and fauna, connecting it to vulnerability and emotions:

 …measured by acacia blooming, echidna trains, winds that change, moon who wanes.

Throughout Admissions, the failing mental health system, and its need for more funding is variously hinted at and explicitly stated. At times, readers could be forgiven for thinking that works are set in prisons, rather than mental health facilities. For example, KJ writes:

 Escorted to my room My packed-the day-before bag holds my hand
Inside the remnants of my sanity; 

And Jacobson:

I was not there in my self while my body
lay on the bare mattress and screamed
for my return.

However, as Jeffs reminds us:

The madwoman in this poem
is everywoman
is any woman
is a mother, daughter, sister, lover, friend –
the madwoman in this poem –
is me.

Admissions reminds all of us that as beautiful, confronting, confusing, funning, disorienting, brave, sorrowful, infuriating or joyous the experience of mental illness can be, these writers are us. These stories are, or could be at any moment our stories, and it is in all our interests to pay attention to, and improve the narratives surrounding mental health in Australia.
 
 
NICOLE SMITH is a writer with Cerebral Palsy living and working on Wurundjeri land. She has a blog where she interviews social entrepreneurs. Last year she was a Storming the City mentor with the Writeability program and ran an ‘Effective Interviewing’ workshop.

Inland Sea

by Brenda Saunders

Gininderra Press

ISBN 9781761091445

Reviewed by BEN HESSION

Inland Sea is the third full collection by Brenda Saunders, a Wiradjuri writer, following a somewhat lengthy hiatus. Saunders’ last collection, The Sound of Red, was published back in 2014. Her debut volume, Looking for Bullin Bullin, had won the 2014 Scanlon Prize for Indigenous poetry. Like that collection, Inland Sea, provides a particular focus on Aboriginality, although doing so via the intimate connection with Country through which the impact of colonization is also examined. The title, itself, is an ironic play on that body of water which had eluded the expectations of the English explorer, Charles Sturt. We see in Inland Sea Saunders conducting her own explorations from an Aboriginal perspective and throughout the collection, her poems are infused with energy and precision, marking a welcome return.

Importantly, Saunders is not solely a writer, but is also a visual artist, with ekphrastic poetry being a significant feature of her work generally. The Sound of Red, for instance, had seen Saunders respond to paintings by Rothko, de Chirico and Goya among others. Ironically, with ‘Reinventing the landscape’ Country is viewed through the literal and figurative framing of a non Aboriginal painter, Fred Williams. Yet, as the concluding stanzas show, there is a kind of retrieval of an Aboriginal perspective through an intensely personal response to Williams’ portraits:

I move through rooms of golden summers, smell the sun
in scumbled oils. A patch of yellow becomes a sway
of native grasses. Across a field his stunted bushes
hold the horizon against the white heat of the sky.

If I could reach out. I would follow the fence line
finger my way through a patch of scrub. Rows of acacias
in scabby dots, the stumps of trees felled after a fire.
Feel charcoal under my nails, bush crackling as I pass.
(76-7 The Sound of Red)

Arguably, for Saunders, this is a continuation of her interpretation of five portraits of Aboriginal people by Russell Drysdale, another non-Indigenous painter, in Looking for Bullin Bullin, where also, there have been acts of retrieval, with the most overt being in ‘Mother and Child’

Subtle fingers control her son ready
to leave this three-minute sketch.
Her eyes look out to a distant time
when the tribe roamed freely
out of the white man’s gaze.
(69 Looking for Bullin Bullin)

And in ‘Sketch of a girl’, as well:

She looks up, her stance demure
Uncertain under the artist’s scrutiny.
His pen scratches bold lines,
captures her image as ‘exotic other’
framed to a white man’s needs.
(70 Looking for Bullin Bullin)

With Inland Sea, the poem ‘Figures in a Landscape’ has Saunders continue this practice of retrieval, as well as re-inscribing the Indigenous history of place as she responds to Charles
Conden’s painting, Sydney Harbour:

I am not in this picture. Invisible, I fall
easily into shadow, watch the ladies walk
float as white sails on water. Ignore
the man waving from the house.

They wander, as dark clouds mass above
peer into rock pools, where we once
collected guatuma, a fishing site
of the Gadigal we still call Banarung. (67)

In ‘At the Falls’ I and II, she goes further, detailing the impact of settler presence on Country:

This is no place of wonderment or renewal.
There is no magic, no sprites to leap from
the bower. Darker forces half-revealed
hide behind the weight of water. Whispers
of ancient rites surface on shallow ponds.
Below the falls, stories of desecration
and death flow on through tribal memory. (71)

For the most part, however, in this present collection, Saunders has eschewed the white Australian filter in re-tracing identity. What comes first in the collection – and what puts these latter ekphrastic pieces into context – are the direct responses to Country that Saunders paints with vivid detail. As we see in ‘Spinifex rings’:

These creatures hide in rasping folds
of hummock grass, hunt with night vision
for invisible gnats breeding in shadow

caught off guard by a cloudy moon.

Corellas fly low over lignum bush, swing
and dip on a spinifex stalk. Sharp eyes
spy a beetle or moth in their path (10)

Here, a crisp lyricism of action highlights the vitality of Country, raising it from abstraction and affirming its essence. With the poem, ‘inland sea’ Saunders, again, focuses on a ‘micro cosmos/ teeming with life’:

Red-finned gobies
flash a miniature flame
through tiny succulents
carnivores varied as coral
wave vivid flowers
trick insects
to their water garden (12)

With short lines and sans punctuation, Saunders allows a greater sense of flux among the depicted activities. From this perspective, the inland sea reveals itself as something brimming with promise, rather than an appellation for disappointment. What this poem demonstrates also, as does ‘Spinifex rings’ and others in this collection, is a kind of Imagist restraint, with ‘presentation rather than representation’ (Jones 31) being at the fore. It is perhaps no surprise that we find in the second part of ‘bird brain’:

lovebird

captive
he kisses
chips
at his lover
trapped
in the cold glint
of mercury (48)

The direct treatment of phenomena allows the life within Country to appear as an innate language and voice within itself. Yet, Country is not solely a physical presence, as Saunders observes from the start in ‘Echidna Chasm’, it is necessarily born from the Dreaming:

She leads us through a narrow cleft
sheer walls scraped clean
with her spiny back a gorge red hot
bounces from white light to shadow
the sky a blue slit above

Rounded sockets mark her journey
the ball of a heel a trail left behind
as she rushes through mud shaping
Bungle Bungle Country (9)

The acknowledgement of the Dreaming offers a holistic understanding of place, where the land, and the world it supports, are viewed as a single entity. This is contrasted in the collection with the European empiricism and its consequent logic. In the poem ‘Dead Centre’ Saunders quotes Sturt’s observation that the ‘scrub without a break in its monotonous surface’ should be necessarily indicative of an interior coastal shore. Thereafter, she juxtaposes Aboriginal perspectives of Sturt’s expedition with those of his own. Finally, we see Sturt defeated, his thoughts pooling in an intermittent stream of consciousness:

hope

a promised sea
shimmers the horizon

a wooden boat
rides waves
of disbelief

endeavour
tests mortality
dead centre

dominion
drives every footstep
of the valiant (15)

Elsewhere, the settler colonial perspective that quantifies Country is also shown to commodify it. One of the central themes in Inland Sea is the conflict between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal conceptualisations of land – somewhere to find harmony within it versus exploiting its resources, especially for individual or corporate profit. In the poem,‘Inland Sea’, for example, farming competes with wildlife for water (13). In ‘Scarred Landscape’ ‘ Moving like ants, giant loaders dredge the inside out of the iron ore plain’ (16). Against this, we may compare ‘Black boys’, ‘Wild Honey Tour’ and ‘Mulga stories’. Here, in this latter poem, we can see:

He speaks fondly of this ancient tree
of many cycles yielding flowers
and seeds, a steady food always
ripe for picking. Shows us bark
easily shed for a woman’s carry-all
wood that burns brightest, cools
to a white ash, good for Ceremony (59)

The poem, ‘Red Centre’, notes with a laconic sense of humour the treatment of cultural connection as a spectacle:

Mpartntwe springs lie reflex blue in a rim of rock
From the camp nearby women shuffle red earth
Dance a mulga ant story. Amaze the drop-in tourists. (17)

The sad impact of this, however, runs deep, as does the consequent irony:

Some take souvenirs, send them back, complaining
of bad luck. The Mala woman’s grief weighs down stones
in their pockets. She sighs, finds her tchurunga stolen,

stored in a city museum, for safety and prosterity. (17)

The tension is more pronounced where, in ‘Cullen Bullen’, the violence inflicted on Country, is mirrored by that suffered by local Indigenous people:

This working mine has cut a swath for miles
worked underground ‘til the last seam is spent
Up close, I find a hill sliced in two, the cliff-face
                                  left gaping red

Remember fragments passed down. Generations
              of hillside burials, ground slaked
with the blood of Ancestors after ‘the Round Up’ (73)

The poem reflects on the attempted erasure of history and connection:

The web reports on wealthy Developers
              building roads over hunting tracks
Woodland cleared to mine the black rock
              in the name of progress

Has nothing to say on our history. First People
living, thriving here, who left without a trace
Driven off Country. Lost in plain sight. (74)

In Poor fella Country connection and erasure are particularly current concerns:

Scattered clans can no longer care for Country
Without Language, the Elders have no power
Over young ones living the white man’s dream

I see sorrow in our people sitting on Country
Wasted in spirit, they suffer, hold a sickness
inside, as mining grinds their stories away. (23)

In an article for the Writing NSW website, Saunders, herself, says she seems to have been writing for her community all her adult life. (Writing NSW) This may not have always been obvious in her previous collection, but it is certainly clear in Inland Sea, where it finds expression replete with skill and confidence. In the same article, she adds: ‘Our cultural history has survived dispossession: ties to Country continue to sustain Aboriginal people today and, as a poet, I feel impelled to write to this power.’ (Writing NSW)

The final poem of this collection, ‘Singing the land’, echoes this statement, where there connection remains, there is a vibrant continuity and an intrinsic sense of hope:

Along the quay painted Kooris
play the didge add clapsticks
chant to sell their CDs
Amplified     the music thunders
              under my feet
wakes the yidaki spirit     first music
      sings this ancient land. (81)

As we see here, the politics of identity is not without passion. This is true throughout Inland Sea. More than retrieval, perhaps, the collection is about reclaiming and a re-affirmation of Indigeneity. In this it may be viewed as a return to first principles, and articulating the voice of Country, which, despite the referendum result, as Saunders shows, will not be silenced.
 
CITATIONS

Imagist Poetry, ed. Peter Jones, Penguin Classics, London, England, 2001
Saunders, Brenda. Looking for Bullin Bullin, Hybrid Publishers, Melbourne Victoria Australia 2012.
Saunders, Brenda. The Sound of Red, Ginninderra Press, Port Adelaide, 2013.
Saunders, Brenda. ‘Feature Articles/ Brenda Saunders on writing about, for and within communities’, Writing NSW, March 29, 2022, writingnsw.org.au/brenda-saunders-on-writing-about-for-and-within-communities.

BEN HESSION is a writer and critic based in Wollongong, south of Sydney, Australia. His poetry has been published in Eureka Street, the International Chinese Language Forum, Cordite Poetry Review, Mascara Literary Review, Bluepepper, Marrickville Pause, The Blue Nib, Live Encounters: Poetry and Writing and the Don Bank Live Poets anthology Can I Tell You A Secret? Ben Hession is also a music journalist and is involved with community broadcasting.

Son of Sin

By Omar Sakr

Affirm Press

ISBN: 9781922711038

Reviewed by JOSHUA KLARICA

On Laylat al-Qadr, Islam’s sacred Night of Power, the young protagonist of Omar Sakr’s debut novel, Son of Sin, dies. Jamal is dead, if death is to be filled with the absence of what life could have been. On the night angels descend to wipe clean the slate, Jamal finally gives himself to desire of another boy and so comes alive in the same moment he suffers a more ancient, eschatological demise. Sakr’s novel then obsesses over the subtle parallels – simultaneous yet unable to meet – between what one can be born into and born as: into a lineage of faith and adherence, as a bisexual male. One demands the refusal of the other, and here begins the stasis from which young Jamal is ruled.

A prominent Sydney-based poet, Sakr’s turn to fiction is similarly preoccupied with the themes of The Lost Arabs, his earlier collection. Jamal is queer, gauche, third-generation Turkish Lebanese and subject of the novel’s bildungsroman plot. Like his counterparts in poetry, Jamal is cornered by the intractable ties of family and a modern identity floundering on diaspora legacy. Unrest is commonplace, thickening ‘the air, a vestige of the wars that flung his people here’ (p193). Yet life in Australia is preferred to Turkey and Lebanon, and such tension is ‘the smallest price to pay’ for it (p93). So, Jamal becomes the reprobate to this history’s largesse, the unbeaten track keeping in line of sight the path clearly set out by the labours and pains of his forbears.

The novel is demarcated into two passages of Jamal’s life. First, with his family during Ramadan as his schooling comes to an end, and, afterwards, temporarily relocating to Turkey to live with his estranged father. Jamal is a zombie throughout, fixated on desire yet pulled through events as though unable to oppose them, though agency were something not yet bestowed upon him within the echelons of family. The twain embodiments of Jamal’s sexuality and faith – obligations he vacillates between – accumulate victories against the other and in doing so gradually wear down Jamal’s resolve, a sort of death spiral that none around Jamal can name. Sakr offers the trials of a queer Muslim teenager as introspection on the mechanisms that drive these adjectives and challenge their absolutes.

To love a man as a man is the ultimate sin, and no shortage of his community fail to remind Jamal of this. His body tied to his sin, Sakr imbues Jamal with the ability of flight, often described as vacating the space he is in: Jamal disappears beside his mother as she smokes (p43); absents his body as he becomes a spirit up alongside the bats in the trees (p53); inhabits the feeling ‘inside (of) Ali’s heart,’ before ‘falling out of Jihad’s eyes,’ as his cousin’s battle (p62). By quitting the present so frequently, Jamal remains without voice to challenge while proving unable to detach from his community. Earlier in the novel, Jamal laments that ‘[t]here was no proof you could trust, except the word – that was the measure of faith, and perhaps why they kept failing’ (p26). There is no word to absolve Jamal. Community sustains the sublunary quagmire that jars Jamal’s psyche, burying him.

Sakr advances the plot chronologically but refuses to let Jamal dwell in the present. Jamal’s imaginative and histrionic nature, his circumstance, his criticism: all form a dragnet that preoccupies him. He yearns to be good but cannot wholly convince himself of what this means or looks like. Frequently, an instance of the present has its roots located far deeper within Jamal’s psyche: police violence harks back to Jamal’s first trip in a paddy wagon (p63); waving to the neighbours dredges up the confusion of Christian youth group attendance in boyhood (p78). Sakr insists we return to the origins of tragedy and tenderness as they continue to reappear. This is the world of which Jamal is convinced: everything comes from everything before it, blossoming, smothering, trampling.

Sakr’s prose is certainly fluent enough to accommodate this movement in time, however in pursuit of instantaneous depth Sakr can err toward an overreliance on this tool. Jamal routinely obsesses over what might have been and the ‘moment of possibility’ lost to him forever (p46), and such relentless undulations across time can begin to lose their punch. Take the example in which Jamal parses the wrong look that ignited the Cronulla Riots as comparable to the private instance of an irate cousin’s glare (p94). Electing to process such largescale violence through the prism of ones limited lived experience is consistent with Jamal’s impression of his centrality to misfortune, yet even by this relatively early stage of the novel such propinquity to this violence can seem somewhat shoehorned, while the motives of the riots require little interpretation.

Set circa 2005 and beyond, Jamal endures violence-induced lockdowns in Sydney’s west, the 2017 plebiscite and its bigots, toxic masculinity, Trump’s Muslim ban – all beside life’s more penetrating tragedies, the loss of loved ones, abandonment, sexual assault. Sakr constructs a teenager who is dramatic and colourful but withdrawn, so couples some of the darker moments of recent history with a difficult and burdensome teenage coming of age and coming out. Jamal does not have the fortune of subtlety in either of these quests, and Sakr doesn’t pretend he does.

In lesser hands, Jamal’s pessimism, buttressed by deleterious events, could threaten to overcook the significance of a life Sakr wants us to value. Yet while these events pile up, what rubbishes any threat of monotonality is the vitality of Sakr’s prose. In juxtaposition to Jamal, who has no ease within his language, Sakr shows how effortlessly he is able to move through it. Applying the poets whet for register, Sakr can make delicate the injustice of attacking, swarming police like water to sand (p61), and then describe someone as, simply, ‘fucking funny’ (p69); replacing page breaks with ampersands furthers the notion that this narrative is happening, and happening, both breaking the idea of chronological time and stuffing it; engaging motifs of bats, snakes, and ropes; the application of green and blue adjectives as markers of masculinity and caution – Sakr’s bag of tricks is precise and calculated, rendering the lines of Son of Sin with precision and care, leavening ruin with beauty, horror with lyric.

And yet, while queer stories like Jamal’s can often carve out a small space in which the subject achieves dignity and the welcome of complacency, make no mistake that Sakr is tempted here. Despite Jamal’s learning he has always been visible, and always held space, Sakr refuses to indulge this position as a resolution. Setting the narrative before significant social events of the recent twenty-first century seeks to remind the secular world that despite what progress may have been made, Abrahamic faiths remain bound to the word. For subsequent generations, diaspora presents an incongruity between old world virtues and contemporary practice. Jamal grapples with a family life that has ‘unconsciously replicated a way of being that no longer exist(s)’ (pg179), and always will, and so Jamal will continue to live a life on the edge, along the contiguous lines of faith: in what he is, and what he believes.

Following a skirmish between the police and his family, Jamal overhears his cousin, Fatima, recounting the story to friends. What starts as ‘tremulous’ and exciting eventually, by way of repetition, settles. Our stories can be sharp with life, says Sakr, though ‘each telling dull(s) the edge’ (p64). Jamal’s story is not unique of its time, yet its experience in Sakr’s hands is acerbic and candid and dedicated, like the first telling of a story. Rather than dulling, Son of Sin further prepares Australian literature for the normalising of queer religious lives within it, colouring a quietly suffering concentration of its populace, and suggesting there is a space to be held, if we allow there be.
 

Hospital

by Sanya Rushdi
translated by Arunava Sinha

ISBN 9781922725455

Giramondo

Reviewed by MEETA CHATTERJEE

Hospital was released in May this year and has been very favourably reviewed. Reviewers
have commended it as a remarkable study of self and of ‘mind outside of its mind’ (Eda
Gunaydin). Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll sum up the novel astutely when they recommend that it should be read by psychiatrists, ‘because it gives a sharp and humane perspective on the narrowness of medical approaches to mental health, queries whose interests are being served, and explores with subtlety how social and cultural considerations can influence the experience of mental illness, and come into conflict with assumptions underlying treatment, further marginalising already vulnerable patients’. Rushdi’s novel has also been praised as ‘unadorned, powerful, and raises big questions about society, the self and what passes as sanity’ (Chris Fleming). The insightful comments above set up high expectations that the book lives up to.

Sanya Rushdi’s Hospital plunges us deep inside the distressing world of the mentally ill.
The cover image of the book shows a crowd of people with undifferentiated, tense faces
descending the stairs of a building uneasily reminding one of images of herds of animals
readied to be shipped to their slaughter destinations. This analogy may seem brutal, but the
dire situation of the mentally ill is strongly established at the outset. Rushdi’s debut novella written originally in Bengali in 2019 and translated very competently by Arunava Sinha was published earlier this year by Giramondo. This work of autofiction explores the inner world of a devout Bengali Muslim woman in her thirties who is struggling to process her experiences of psychosis and her treatment for it in a Melbourne hospital. A clear narrative arc is established in the novel and the plot is neatly arranged so that the story captures the instances of hallucinations leading to a couple of psychotic episodes to a finale, perhaps a recovery.

The characters are not complexly presented. Perhaps, an intentional authorial choice to stay
focused on the theme. The protagonist/writer, Sanya, finds solace in the holy Quran, wears a
veil and feels strongly about living in accordance with Islamic faith, for example, she plans to
refuse taking interest from her bank in deference to Islamic principles. Her family seems to
be nurturing and affectionate. Her mother cooks her favourite meals, her father reads verses
of the Quran with her even if it is the middle of the night and her sister encourages her to use
art as a creative outlet to process her intense reflections on the world and herself. Strewn
through the novel are endearments in Bengali such as Sanya’s parents calling her, ‘baba’
(father) or ‘ma’ (mother). In Bengali, these endearments are markers of a tender, caring bond.
There seems to be no evidence of ruptures in family connections that could be a cause of a
break down, but that is what happens in the story.

After the instances of hallucinations, the Crisis Assessment and Treatment Team recommend
that Sanya spend some time at a community house. The community house is an enormous
building where Sanya ends up feeling overwhelmingly alienated and excluded. The mechanisms of exclusion are subtle. An instance of this is when the residents, who prepare the meals preparation for the group, add ham to a dinner of chicken parmigiana so that as a Muslim, Sanya would not be able to partake of the meal. Her stint at the community house, despite minimally imposed restrictions, turns out to be unpleasant. Her condition deteriorates further so that she is coercively taken to a hospital in Melbourne as a critical case. It is in this stultifying space that most of the story unfolds.

A beautiful metaphor embodies Sanya’s state of mind in the hospital:

I could see three trees as long as there was daylight, the leaves they had shed were gathering in ones and twos at their feet. Falling off the branches to which they had clung lovingly, they added to the pile of leaves like children gathering at an orphanage. Then a gust of wind scattered them; whatever refuge they had from one another was lost. Now all they had was themselves, along with the wind and its whims. Where will this take me, this wind, this system? (p. 49)

The extract captures the momentary solidarity with the other patients/fellow sufferers of
various mental health conditions. But the incompatibility and agony of an individual trapped
in an incomprehensible system becomes an all-consuming fear for Sanya. Sanya protests against the doctor’s mantra of, “Lithium, lithium, lithium” (p. 71), and suggests counselling as a more effective approach for her psychosis to cope with fear and unbearable sadness. The hospital professes all the right things by announcing its mission:

‘Working collaboratively to provide individualised care that promotes wellness and
recovery’. However, in actual practice, patients’ voices are drowned in assertions made by the doctors that, “In the case of science, though, evidence-based research is the new trend” (p.108).

Sanya is baffled by the duplicity and feels trapped in the system.

‘Language alone can unsnarl it (the mind), medicine cannot’ (p.107) is Sanya’s strongly held
belief despite being aware of the complexities of language. Four languages jostle in her:
Bengali (her first language), Arabic (the language of Quran) Urdu/Hindi (language of the
ghazals/bhajans that eulogise unrequited love) and English a language in which she grapples
with Vygotsky’s Thought and Language. She tries to make sense of the theory and practice of
language. One of the perceptive remarks that she makes on language reflects her doubts about
its capacity to ‘unsnarl’ the mind: ‘One might assume that everything will become easier if
you and the members of this ‘different’ society use the same language. But this is not always
true. Those who speak the same language often introduce complexities and nuances into their
discussions by the very virtue of using the same language, which speakers of the different
languages cannot’ (p. 88). Barriers to inclusion are set by different registers and discourses
that are impenetrable to the those who do not have the linguistic capital in the dominant
language.

Ultimately, Sanya resigns herself to the rituals of medication, listening to the sounds of the
food trolleys trundling down the corridors, prayers and brief periods of relief offered by the
camaraderie of other patients in the smoker’s zone. However, she is unsure of how reliable
these experiences are as one of the patients says to her, ‘…we are in an artificial environment,
it’s difficult to judge what’s true and what’s false, what is right and what is wrong…’ (p. 73).
She realises eventually that the only way she can win small freedoms and eventually get a
discharge is through compliance. It is by surrendering to the system, the regime of
medications, that she is finally released.

Hospital has the look and feel of an autoethnographic study. It reads like a collection of qualitative data, that needs to be sifted through to make sense of a research question. Snatches of conversations are inserted in the form of texts seemingly extracted out of an interview/journal entry in the form of quotations often followed by a deconstruction of the exchange, but this is not always the case. For most part, dialogue/conversations are reported within quotation marks in the novel. However, sometimes exchanges are inserted into the narrative as if from a script of a play. It is hard to tell what the writer aims to achieve with this intriguing technique. On one hand, this element, along with a conspicuously pared down language signals an cautious exploration of a research topic in a mental hospital setting. On the other hand, it seems as if Rushdi highlights the exchanges as a performance of sorts that deserves scrutiny beyond the realms of research findings to interrogate the universal struggle of mental health patients against inflexible, medical systems.

‘The translated text must allow itself to be read in all the different ways that the original can, and since the translator can never know what all these ways might be, the only choice is to adhere to the text and the text alone’, responds Arunava Sinha to a question on the responsibility of a translator. It seems that the ambivalences and the tone of the authorial voice has been rendered intact in this book. It is great to read such an extraordinarily moving novel published in translation by an Australian publisher.

Notes and References:

Chris Fleming, review of Hospital, https://giramondopublishing.com/books/sanya-rushdi-
hospital/).
Eda Gunaydin. review of Hospital, https://giramondopublishing.com/books/sanya-rushdi-
hospital/).
Rushdi, Sanya, and Arunava Sinha. “5 Questions with Sanya Rushdi and Arunava Sinha.”
LIMINAL Magazine, 27 June 2023. Sourced at: https://www.liminalmag.com/5-
questions/hospital.
Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll June 30, 2023. The review of Hospital is part of a
few other books with the title, ‘Everything’s fine’: Can two political rivals fall in love?

MEETA CHATERJEE is a retired academic from the University of Wollongong. She is an
independent scholar, writer, and poet and is the co-editor of Of Indian Origin: Writings from
Australia. She lives in Canberra. Her area of interest is diasporic writing.

Untethered

By Ayesha Inoon

ISBN: 9781867267065

HarperCollins

Reviewed by MISBAH WOLF
 
 
In the act of reading, an ostensibly solitary and intimate experience unfolds as a journey not just within the pages of one book but as an exploration of the myriad conversations that books engage in with each other. Books, whether intentionally or not, are in perpetual dialogue. This review of Untethered, penned by Sri-Lankan writer Ayesha Inoon, is composed in reflection of this notion, emphasizing how literature shapes, challenges, and informs our understanding of the world.

At the time of beginning to read Untethered, I was coincidentally reading the 1970s feminist science fiction novel The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, and I began to see a conversation occurring between them. By juxtaposing Untethered with The Dispossessed, we unearth a rich tapestry of themes, exploring how contemporary post-colonial fiction intersects with feminist science fiction from the 1970s.

Untethered and The Dispossessed may initially seem worlds apart in genre and narrative, but they share a profound kinship in their exploration of clashing ideologies and the quest for knowledge unburdened by constraints. Le Guin’s work portrays two contrasting planets, one driven by anarchic feminist ideals and the other by patriarchal capitalism. This cosmic juxtaposition finds an unexpected resonance in Untethered, where Zia, a Muslim Sri Lankan woman, confronts the realities of religious and cultural clashes after she emigrates to Australia with her family. She moves from one set of intricate ideologies that value obedience, faith, inter-family loyalty and connection, caste and wealth systems to a world that values independence, the nuclear family, wealth, and white privilege—cross-overs from one planet—I mean one country—are inevitable.

As a reader with a culturally and linguistically diverse (CaLD) Muslim background and a personal history of defiance against authoritarian religious figures, I find myself simultaneously sympathizing with and feeling at odds with Zia’s character. I share a profound impatience for Zia’s liberation from the patriarchal confines of her religio-cultural background. I also see the wealth entitlement she inhabits in Sri Lanka, which is mostly taken for granted until she gets to Australia. I know deep in my heart that Zia and I could not be friends; I would seem like a working-class betrayer of faith. My impatience extends to Zia’s tolerance of her husband’s violence, which is juxtaposed with her husband Rashid’s own experience of oppression in a racist Australian culture that fails to recognize his qualifications. Rashid reminds me of my own father, who, despite holding a Masters in Business and Teaching, struggled to find work and was subsequently attacked in a factory, resulting in the loss of an eye. This occurred in the 1980s, almost 34 years before Rashid’s experience of discrimination. The ties that bind me to this story cross over from fiction to fact.

Zia’s journey in Untethered unfolds as a classic Hero’s journey, with Zia assuming the role of the Fool in the Tarot Deck. She ventures into an unfamiliar land, seeking to shed the safe yet restrictive bonds of her family in pursuit of a better life in Australia. This experience mirrors the Stranger’s journey in The Dispossessed, where one risks everything to impart knowledge to an ostensibly advanced society, only to uncover latent forms of oppression within this new planet of opportunity. Zia, having the new vast spaces of Canberra to explore is limited to catching erratic public transport until she gets her driver’s licence. For a large part of the novel, she is still trapped within the house, scrounging away with food to make meals that will bring comfort for her isolated husband, who is also undergoing his own forms of oppression.

Although Zia eventually finds support that encourages her independence, her husband also grapples with systemic oppression that favors highly qualified white individuals over equally qualified immigrants of color. Can you imagine if Rashid, Zia’s husband, was called Ray and hailed from England, Sweden, or New Zealand? Ray would likely transition seamlessly into a job commensurate with his skills and education. This aspect of the novel compels readers to confront the uncomfortable reality of racial discrimination in Australia, what ‘passing’ as Aussie looks and sounds like, and how tokenistic acts of ‘discrimination awareness’ are just that, when this society still continually validates and supports rich white privilege.

The novel introduces a cast of characters, such as the driving instructor and the independent single-mum friend Jenny, who serve as archetypes along Zia’s heroic journey. These characters, though seemingly alien to her, embody facets of her own identity and aspirations. One represents independence and love, while the single mother symbolizes the freedom to prioritize oneself over marriage. This intricate character development enriches Zia’s narrative.

Furthermore, Zia’s character exhibits resonances with Jane Austen’s heroines, particularly evident in her admiration for Austen’s works. Austen’s novels consistently challenge societal expectations of marriage and advocate for female agency and independence. Zia’s reverence for Austen adds layers to her character, highlighting her desire for autonomy.

Zia’s early life in Colombo, marked by a clash between her literary passion and her parents’ traditional expectations of marriage, underscores the tension between individual aspirations and societal norms. Despite her inner disappointment, Zia complies with her family’s wishes, participating in traditional wedding preparations and embracing her role as a devoted wife. This conflict between personal desire and familial obligation serves as a central theme in the novel.

The novel navigates the complexities of familial relationships and societal expectations, highlighting the interdependence within Zia’s family as the bedrock of stability and identity. Yet, this interdependence also reinforces traditional gender roles, emphasizing the importance of procreation and adherence to religious and cultural norms. Amid these familial dynamics, the novel weaves a backdrop of political instability and religious conflict targeting Muslims in Sri Lanka. This context intensifies the family’s need to preserve their religio-cultural identity while living as a minority within Sri Lankan culture. It also fuels their fear of being targeted as Muslims. This motif drives Zia, her husband, and daughter to seek a new life abroad.

The extended family dynamic further illuminates the theme of otherness, as Zia’s mother-in-law quickly admonishes the darkness of Zia’s skin. Unfortunately, Zia was not “blessed” with her mother’s lighter complexion, instead inheriting her father’s darker skin tone. This difference serves as a poignant reminder of the deeper seeds of racism and the enduring caste system that associates lighter skin with higher status in many countries other than ‘European’. This insidious system, as I emphasize, persists across oceans.

In summary, Untethered is a masterfully crafted novel that deftly interweaves themes of cultural identity, feminism, discrimination, and the pursuit of independence. Through the lens of Zia’s journey, readers are confronted with the complexities of societal expectations, the strength of family bonds, and the enduring impact of discrimination. My personal connection to the narrative underscores the novel’s ability to evoke empathy and challenge readers’ assumptions, making it a poignant addition to contemporary post-colonial CALD Australian literature. And in Zia’s own story-making and telling, as she shares her cultural identity with her daughter, we witness her claim her power as a writer and a guardian of her heritage, enriching the narrative tapestry of Untethered with the echoes of her own voice, woven into the fabric of her family’s story.

The novel compels readers to reflect on their own experiences and the stories that shape them, ultimately urging us to confront uncomfortable truths about discrimination and otherness within this great unceded First nations land. And in Zia’s own story-making and telling, as she shares her cultural identity with her daughter, we witness her claim her power as a writer and a guardian of her heritage, enriching the narrative tapestry of Untethered with her coming home to her love of story-telling.

So, how much further can Zia rebel? What would be the last great act of emancipation from all-consuming ideologies of patriarchal power and belief? I’ll leave that decision up to Zia to make, and if she wants to have a conversation about the kind of faiths we might need to hold onto, and the ones that if we let go of, may mean re-writing entire narratives of belief, then I’d love to have one with her.
 
 
MISBAH WOLF, a multi-dimensional artist holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of QLD and post-graduate qualifications in Research Methods, resides on Wurundjeri land.She has served as a poetry reviewer for Hecate Women’s Journal and was a guest editor for Mascara Literary Review in 2014. Wolf is the author of Rooftops in Karachi (Vagabond Press 2018) and Carapace (Vagabond Press 2022), has been active in poetry for over 15 years, participating in festivals like Queensland Poetry Festival and the Sydney Writers Festival. She also contributed to the Melbourne Fringe Festival 2019 as a costume and art developer for theater. Wolf was awarded a Creative Victoria Grant in 2022. She performed her work, including a feature at La Mama Poetica and the Emerging Writers Festival and participated in a radio podcast in 2023. Explore her journey at www.misbahwolf.com, where she continues to engage in various artistic projects.

The Archipelago of Us

by Renee Pettitt-Schipp

Freemantle Press

Reviewed by ADELE DUMONT
 
 
 
 
 
 
Renee-Pettitt Schipp first journeys to Christmas Island in early 2011, arriving in the immediate aftermath of a boat tragedy which has claimed the lives of some fifty asylum seekers. Some of the victims, she assumes, would have become her students. What strikes her, foremost, is the silence surrounding the incident. Nobody ever informs her which of her new students have lost family members in the accident; at the memorial service, no asylum seekers are even present – they’ve been ‘carefully edited out of official versions of their own story’ (158). Nor is she permitted to talk about her teaching experiences: ‘my class full of children bursting with life was not to be spoken of, never to be named’ (130). By the time Pettitt-Schipp returns to the island, in 2016, the island’s detention centre facilities have either been drastically scaled down, or vanished without trace. This pattern of concealment, of strange suppression and disappearance is, of course, in keeping with Australia’s maritime border policies, and the excision of Indian Ocean Territories from Australia’s migration zone and from our sovereign obligations. It is this silencing which Pettitt-Schipp wishes to redress; she wants to ‘resist the forces of forgetting’ (76).

The Archipelago of Us is mostly framed as a present-tense narrative, unfolding over the ten days of Pettitt-Schipp’s return trip to Christmas Island (and then Cocos (Keeling) Islands, where she subsequently worked). But the past intrudes into her present: in the opening chapters, she repeatedly alludes to what she has ‘witnessed’ on the island, which was the reason for her departure, and which troubles her deeply, still. This creates a real curiosity, on the reader’s part, to know what, exactly, she has borne witness to. But before sating this curiosity, Pettitt-Schipp provides extended (at times over-written) descriptions of place – of birdlife and sealife and graveyards; factual information about the British Phosphate Commission and the island’s local residents; and details of her own present-day health scare. This stalling of the narrative might be attributed to the author’s understandable resistance to revisiting certain memories, stirred up by being in situ. As a readerly experience though, this with-holding is somewhat frustrating. 

Once interviews with various island residents are underway, the book finds its rhythm. Christmas Island is typically viewed in terms of its remoteness from the mainland; the book’s own blurb describes it as ‘out of sight and out of mind’. But it is also its own place, and so it’s refreshing that Pettitt-Schipp centres the voices of locals, for whom the island is home. Several of her interviewees describe the island’s appeal in similar terms: it’s a place where life is pared back; ‘raw and elemental… there’s not a buffer here… It is not very often that you are really up against things in such an immediate way on the mainland’ (147). As a narrator, and as an interviewer, Pettitt-Schipp is sensitive, always ready to reconsider her own beliefs and preconceptions. Zainal Majad (President of the local Islamic Council and mine-worker), for example, sees value in the island’s white, Chinese, and Malay populations being distinct, and maintaining their cultural integrity; Pettitt-Schipp admits her surprise, for she had assumed integration was the ideal. For Zainal, mining on the island is a source of employment and of future prosperity, giving the island ‘vitality and holding the community together’ (118), whereas Pettitt-Schipp had only ever equated the industry with devastation of the local ecosystem. 

And while in the (mainland) Australian imagination island territories like Christmas Island are typically viewed through the lens of ‘border protection’, we’re reminded of the island’s broader history and cultural makeup. Peter Wei Cheon Ch’ng, for example, recalls the hostility he faced as a Chinese person growing up here in the 70s: for a period, ‘Asians’ were not allowed to swim in the ‘white’ swimming pool; white people could call the police if an ‘Asian’ so much as walked through Settlement. Pettitt-Schipp’s return visit coincides with the Festival of the Hungry Ghost. The tables of food, a man tells her, ‘are for the people who were buried but do not have a grave’ (139): at one level, this description might be read as a subtle honouring of those who’ve lost their lives at sea, but at another, it provides a window onto the local Chinese community, and their Taoist and Buddhist traditions. Pettitt-Schipp’s vignettes of the natural world serve a literary function in providing a helpful reprieve for the reader from some of the book’s heavier contents, but they are also quite simply a reminder of the island’s rich biodiversity. She describes the lichen and mosses, mineral formations, mist, and the ‘glinting cerulean plain’ (88) of the ocean. Hughs Dale is ‘a place of beauty expressed in the extreme’ (86), and the Blowholes have a ‘striking, mythical feel’ (102). The book’s twinning of present and past timelines complicates the island’s depiction; though its darkness haunts the author, she concludes that ‘perhaps this place has reclaimed a measure of what seems like a former innocence, a side of this island I was previously unable to see’ (143). 

When it comes to detention-related material – which is likely what will draw readers to this story – the memoir contains one particularly powerful interview with “Tom”, who gives a first-hand account of watching the Janga boat tragedy unfold. Here, and elsewhere in the book, Pettitt-Schipp retreats, resisting the urge to provide too much commentary or response; ‘I don’t move, don’t make a sound, just try to hold, to contain the weight of what he has just told me’ (79). She also summons memories of some of the children in her charge, skilfully conveying the intimacy of the classroom, all the more precious for being situated in an otherwise hostile environment. When, newly returned, she has to drive past the turn-off to the North-West Point Detention Centre, ‘even the thought fills me with rage, and I thump the steering wheel, feel my shoulders tense’ (83). In fact, recollections of her time inside the centres are scant. The scenes she includes instead focus on the instances when she was able to organise for two asylum seekers, Massom and Ehsan, to leave the centre for a few hours. In one poignant scene, Massom hand-feeds pieces of coconut-meat to a crab; in another, they happen upon a girl in a bikini standing under a waterfall. Each time she takes Massom out, Pettitt-Schipp tells us:

He stood taller, his eyes became animated, responding more and more to the world around him. I was heartened. It was breathtaking to watch, a confronting power to own. For just a moment, I was able to gift another human being their freedom… I had never seen Massom look so alive and was moved that something so simple could bring so much pleasure to another human being (97).

It’s an interesting artistic decision, on the author’s part, to depict asylum seekers outside the centre in this way, given this was such an extremely rare occurrence and one that the overwhelming majority of detainees were denied. Was she unwilling to revisit distressing memories of detention head-on? Or did she decide not to add to the stock of narratives, reports, and inquiries published, which all already testify to the damage that prolonged detention can wreak? Is it, after all, more humanising to depict incarcerated people momentarily unburdened? Whatever the reasoning, her decision means the usual tropes of books set in detention (guards, razor wire, security cameras) are mostly avoided, and the reader is entrusted with more imaginative work. 

Cocos (Keeling) Islands is a ‘similarly excised world’ (200) to Christmas Island. When Pettitt-Schipp first moves there in 2012, the arrival of asylum seekers is virtually unheard of. The tone of the island changes, though, once boats do begin to arrive: the locals have seen what played out on Christmas Island, and the price that small community paid when swamped by transient workers. What impels the author to return to Cocos, on her 2016 trip, is not what she witnessed in the two ‘largely peaceful’ (191) years she spent teaching there, but rather a ‘vague need to address what I had experienced as an unsettling silence, in part when inquiring about the atoll’s history’ (191). Her focus in this latter section of the book is on the Clunies-Ross family, who were the original settlers of the island, and who have a reputation as caring colonalists. Elder Nek Su tells Pettitt-Schipp a starkly different story though: the family with-held education from the Coco Malay people, severely limiting their freedom of movement and communication. 

Throughout her memoir, Pettitt-Schipp is overwhelmed by her own ‘powerlessness’ (121) and ‘impotence’ (123) in the face of such ‘pointless suffering’ (125), and she concludes that ‘even in their diversity, these stories point to the common conclusion that our present hostilities at the border are not an aberration… ‘Fair Go’ Australia is a myth’ (289). Despite this, The Archipelago of Us remains a quietly optimistic book, for in the individuals she interviews, Pettitt-Schipp finds immense generosity, courage, and open-ness. In her doctoral thesis (out of which this book grew) Pettitt-Schipp refers to the field of ‘tidalectics’, an approach which challenges traditional binaries such as land and sea; self and other. The Archipelago of Us encapsulates this approach in its shifts between the natural and the historical; its organic interview style; and its blurring of the author’s past and present worlds, such that nothing and no-one is ever fenced in, and all is fluid. 

ADELE DUMONT is the author of No Man is an Island. Her second book, The Pulling, is forthcoming with Scribe in early 2024.

Coming out as Dalit

by Yashica Dutt

Aleph Books

Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET

Yashica Dutt’s memoir about coming out as Dalit, written in the tone of a manifesto, ought to be seen against the backdrop of a burgeoning literary scene by lower-caste women authors hailing from the Indian subcontinent or the diaspora, including recent publications such as Kalyani Thakur Charal’s poetry collection I belong to Nowhere: Poems of Hope and Resistance, or Anjali Kajal’s short story collection Ma is Scared and Other Stories. Although Dutt’s text is non-fictional (part autobiographical, part sociological), its aesthetic quality shares with these publications a language and style whereby the personal is political and ‘herstory’ part of larger allegories of collective struggle, suffering and resilience, but also self-assertion, autonomy, and success. As Dutt reminds, Dalit authors are often taxed with “lacking aesthetic sophistication [though] many took inspiration from the works of African American authors like James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, and wrote rich, deeply painful stories” (123). Dutt also stresses Dalit activists’ debt to the politics of black liberation, from the Black Panthers Party to the Black Lives Matters movement, to bell hook’s pamphlet-like seminal text Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism.

Dutt displays an acute awareness of the intersectionality of identity formation, as well as a cross-cultural sensitivity towards the intricacies of expressing and representing what being Dalit means. Her opening statement, “I hope to speak for those whose voices haven’t been heard before” (x), is to be nuanced in light of queries coming forth later on, as to the epistemic violence involved when speaking of/about an oppressed group while claiming to reach out to this group from a (relatively) privileged position, as does Dutt. These are issues Gayatri Spivak, who made Columbia University her new home after migrating from India like Dutt, has written about extensively. Dutt does not shy away from tackling these issues head-on, and her memoir regularly morphs into a valuable social commentary on race, caste, gender, class, and to a lesser extent sexuality (the phrase ‘coming out’ is a vivid evocation of the queer community from which it was borrowed).

Being lower-caste, or Dalit, in effect cuts across very different realities and experiences (in classical Sanskrit, ‘dalita’ stands for ‘divided, split, broken, scattered’). Dutt’s memoir is both a celebration of, and a coming to terms with, the sheer diversity of Dalit lives and trajectories. Her own family is a good illustration of what French philosopher Michel Foucault dubs heterotopia (From Ancient Greek, ‘different place’). Dutt’s family history comprises ‘untouchable’ sweepers and toilet cleaners, also known as manual ‘scavengers’ (her grandmother) but also small (her father) and bigger (her grandfather) functionaries, while she herself managed to attend some of the most prestigious educational institutions, both in India and the United States. Bearing this heterotopic social tapestry in mind, Dalit stories making headway into the mainstream run the risk of falling prey to ‘cannibalistic’ appropriation and at times point-blank plagiarism on the part of unscrupulous intellectuals, academics, researchers, journalists, or artists, especially if these are Dalits playing the role of ‘native informants’.

The recent controversy in which Dutt has become embroiled over an episode of the Indian romantic drama web series Made in Heaven, produced by Amazon Prime, is a case in point. In one episode of Season 2, ‘the Heart Skipped a Bit’, the lead female character Pallavi Menke, who studied in Columbia, confesses about her Dalit origins. She mentions her grandmother, who happened to be a manual scavenger. The similarities with Dutt’s life-story are striking, and Dutt should have been given due credit for it. Its director Neeraj Ghaywan (himself a Dalit) must have deemed it was sufficient to acknowledge her name only in passing by means of an Instagram post. Following heated exchanges with Dutt on social media, the show later retracted from identifying Dutt’s book as an obvious source of inspiration, thereby denying Dutt the right to claim her own story back. This goes to show the extent to which Dalit labour and property remain vulnerable to exploitation, abuse, and theft. Having passed as upper-caste most of her life, Dutt was herself ‘bypassed’ and her Dalitness usurped by one of the biggest corporations in the world at the point when it had been so rightly represented on screen, as Dutt noticed with bittersweet pleasure.

Portraying Dalits remains a fraught exercise, on screen as elsewhere, if only because lead roles end up being almost always upper-caste. Whether conscious or not, minoritizing strategies rely on bypassing, as in the case of Dutt’s row with Made in Heaven’s producers, but also involve trespassing (not to say trampling or violating) as well as passing by without a sign of acknowledgement. In so doing, one deprives the ‘Other’ of the possibility of agency by reducing the latter to a state of social invisibility or to the status of a mere passer-by as passive victim. Thus, the difficulties of giving full justice to the constellation of practices characterising Dalits amount instead to a ‘single story’ (158). Dutt borrows the phrase from the Nigerian authoress Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who also studied in the United States. Both Dutt and Adichie are commanding enough to allow for a fairer, more balanced, and nuanced characterisation, beyond victimising or wallowing in ‘poverty porn’ (176).

In his 1952 novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison captured the condition of being Black in America, in particular having to face indifference from (white) society. As Dutt recalls, the novel proved highly popular among an emerging Dalit middle-class readership who could identify and sympathise with the main character’s feeling of anomie and ostracised position as an outcast, all the more since caste unlike race or gender forms an ‘invisible package’ (90) turning out to be just as pernicious. Growing up ‘Bhangi’ (the name of a Dalit caste used as a cuss word in India) while pretending to be Brahmin (upper caste) helped Dutt pass various interviews and entrance exams at convent, private schools like St Stephens College in New Delhi. Yet her performances would have to mean surpassing herself, both financially and academically, this at the risk of passing out or even away like her tutelary figure Rohith Vemula, a Dalit student and activist at Hyderabad University whose suicide letter triggered Dutt’s outing and was written in the wake of seeing his scholarship blocked. As she puts it: “I had to work harder so ‘they’ could overlook my ‘inferiority’. I couldn’t pause to recognize my ‘triumphs’ or take it easy every now and then because then I would fall behind and they would stop respecting me.” (37)

Internalised casteism in part stems from the belief that mimicking the upper-caste through adopting their lifestyle and codes of conduct may save one from persecution and offer a pathway to a better life. It means believing life is undeserving as it is, without merit, and worthless to such an extent that a quota-based system of affirmative action known as ‘reservation’ in India, is needed to compensate for otherwise menial, mediocre, and miserable career prospects. Hence, passing-as-hiding both serves as an existential act of survival and an economic necessity. Part of the disguised performance involves, above all, the mastery of the former coloniser’s medium of communication – namely the English language. Ironically, English allowed for the upper-caste to pass as Western (and for Dalits to pass as upper-caste), alongside bleaching or wearing ‘ubtan’ (face mask), as Dutt was ritualistically forced to as a child in the hope of posing as fair-skinned. In a poignant passage, Dutt describes Dalitness as a ‘carcass’ to be borne (perhaps an allusion to the Chamar caste’s disposal of dead cattle as tanners) and English at which she excelled, as a ‘crutch’ to lean on:

English—the language I had hoped would help me escape my own Dalit identity. The language I had stubbornly practised since I was five. Flawless English was supposed to bring me to the same level as my upper-caste classmates in school and college. I leaned on it when the carcass of my Dalitness became too heavy. Later, writing in this language became my career. It is very likely that English was Rohith [Vemula]’s crutch too. He was probably still honing it so he could stand tall against those he had decided to take on—those who perhaps equated his Dalitness with an inherent sub-humanness. (xiv)

Following independence from Britain in 1947, India abolished the caste system that the British colonisers had exploited to their benefit, relying as they did on upper-caste Brahmins to fill up the ranks of their bureaucratic apparatus. India now projects itself as a caste-blind society despite having a head of state as a Hindu nationalist whose latest stunt was to rebrand India as ‘Bharat’. Chaturvarna’ (the caste system) is a legacy of Vedic scriptures and of Hinduism though it extends across other religions of the Indian subcontinent. The spiritual concept of ‘karma’ has been central to the maintenance of a caste-based, endogamous, apartheid-like structure, and to the acceptance of their lower status by Dalits as “pay[ment] for the sins of previous lives in subsequent lifetimes” (12).

Dutt’s memoir shows contemporary discrimination against Dalits to be rampant, even in urban, cosmopolitan settings like New Delhi. One falls under the impression that Dutt, while working there as a journalist for the fashion industry, was indeed better off hiding her caste, since it gave her privileged access (passe-droit in French) to an otherwise exclusive, glamorous milieu. The dressing up of her origins behind the make-up of her impeccable English, somehow to be expected from her, did not matter so long as it was swept under the carpet as mentioning her caste would have been socially awkward – a fatal faux pas deemed de mauvais goût. This is testament to the level of hypocrisy and corruption of Indian society, especially among the brightest and best educated sectors. To paraphrase a famous line, it feels while reading Dutt as if something is deeply rotten in the state of Hindustan (the land of the Hindus).

The fiction that India is a meritocracy also seeps into Dalits’ minds, and many regard education as a shield against casteism and vehicle for social ‘upliftment’ – a term Mahatma Gandhi himself was particularly fond of using concerning those he patronisingly called ‘Harijans’ (God’s children), to mean Dalits. By contrast, Dutt’s vehement defence of reservation, from which she benefited, originates in her understanding that sheer merit plays little or no part in order to climb the social ladder. This comes in spite of her reluctance to see herself classified among the Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and Other Backward Castes (OBCs), and stigmatised as such. To quote from her memoir:

A month after the admission interview, I attended the ‘first assembly’ at St. Stephen’s. Mum had hastily sold off the land that had been our backyard garden which she had lovingly tended. The money would cover the rent for a shared PG I was to stay in. As we filled out the admission form, Mum suggested, for the very first time, that I tick the box that said I was an SC/ST candidate. Like so many Dalit students who don’t understand how systemic casteism works and buy into the casteist narrative of ‘proving themselves without a crutch’, I didn’t think I needed reservation. If I checked that box, I would taint my achievements with the ‘quota student’ tag. My lifetime of lessons to successfully appear upper caste would be rendered useless with that single stroke. But I didn’t have a choice. I needed the financial aid and scholarships to pay even the heavily subsidized Delhi University fees. (60)

The reservation system remains limited in scope as it covers the public sector only, which has historically provided Dalits with employment opportunities that come with the hope “that some of the respect linked with a civil service position might rub off on them and go some way towards negating their Dalitness” (1), even though Dalits disproportionately occupy the lower rungs of government. However tepid and timid, attempts by the Indian state to redress inequalities have come under fierce attack from some of the most conservative, reactionary corners of society, paralleling the US supreme court’s recent decision to overturn affirmative action in US colleges. Dutt writes about the anti-reservation demonstrations that took place at a medical school in Delhi in 2006, though in effect, it is the lower-caste and religious minorities who face daily discriminations at colleges and universities, including ‘hazing’ and ‘ragging’ (73). Anoop Kumar’s documentary film The Death of Merit forcefully chronicles these practices in India’s higher ed (74).

Dutt’s narrative is a treasure trove of intertextual references facilitated by her background as a journalist. Her blog, ‘Documents of Dalit Discrimination’, for instance inventories both testimonies and eye-witness accounts of casteism. Secondary sources Dutt builds upon in her memoir include Kakoos (2017), a documentary on the officially abolished practice of manual scavenging, or English Vinglish (2012), a film dealing with India’s “unnatural deference to English [which] is a result of our internalized colonial hangover” (21-2). Dutt’s ability to shed light on Indian contemporary society by means of her personal – and at times heart-rending – family history (her dad’s alcoholism, her mother’s suicide attempt, or Dutt’s inner turmoil while growing up), is what makes her memoir so vibrantly lively. Precious in particular is her overview of India’s media landscape, ‘culture wars’, and Dalit activism. In spite of India’s hardening stance and crackdown on dissenting voices under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s term (the latest controversy being the assassination of Sikh leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, on Canadian soil), Dutt shows independent news reporting to be thriving thanks to the use of social media and alternative news outlets on Dali issues such as RTI, Ambedkar’s Caravan, Savri, Velivada and Dalit Camera (166).

While reminiscent of the divide between white and black/brown feminists in the US, her depiction of an ongoing rift between ‘Savarna’ (upper-caste) and ‘Bahujan’ (people’s) feminism is proof of the rise and empowerment of Dalit women in India. Though Dutt admits Dalit stories and struggles still find it hard to break into the mainstream, she makes a point of ensuring these will not go unheard of in her memoir, which was published by an independent publishing firm in India. The case of 23 years old physiotherapy student Jyoti Singh Pandey (Brahmin), gangraped and left dead in a moving bus in Delhi in 2012, helped shift public opinion by initiating a national conversation about sexual violence and abuse in India. This outpour of support must be weighed against the similar fate befalling 29 years old law student Jisha (Dalit) in 2016, which comparatively generated little reaction from the media. The alleged ‘availability’ and ‘impurity’ of Dalit women as peddled by the dominant masculinist, casteist discourse make them particularly vulnerable to rape culture, so the onus is on journalists and progressives to spotlight their case.

In the same vein, Dutt recalls the 1927 Mahad Satyagraha initiated by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar for the untouchables’ right to use water in public tanks (‘satyagraha’ standing for a non-violent act of resistance and civil disobedience). This historic event was overshadowed three years later by a march against British colonial rule’s imposition of a salt tax, led by the well-known (upper-caste) figure of Mahatma Gandhi. Ambedkar’s writings and actions, including the drafting of India’s first constitution, have provided Dalits with spiritual solace and guidance, and his momentous legacy hovers over the pages of Dutt’s memoir. Not incidentally, Ambedkar would need a nod from another public (upper-caste) intellectual, Arundhati Roy, for his writing to find a larger echo, although “in the introduction to Ambedkar’s most radical and significant work [Annihilation of Caste], Roy positions Gandhi front and centre” (173).

As Dutt’s book unfolds, its aim stands clearer: to popularise and position Dalit stories ‘front and centre’ by capitalising on Dutt’s vantage point as a New York-based, Columbia graduate like Ambedkar, who received his PhD in economics from this same Ivy League institution in 1927. Hence, Dutt’s outing reveals itself as a deeply altruistic, humanist gesture instead of an attempt to take all the credit, as some of her detractors following her dispute with the producers of Made in Heaven have hinted at. Her memoir is an invitation to – quite literally –come out and take to the streets as Dalit and can be seen as part of a recent rise in Dalit militancy. In 2016, Dalits from the Chamar community in Modi’s historic state of Gujarat withdrew their labour by refusing to pick up carcasses of cows. The disposal of dead cattle is an activity traditionally reserved to the lower-caste, who find themselves looked down upon as manual workers and violently targeted by Hindu hardliners as ‘meat-eaters’ – “vegetarianism [being] the gold standard for caste purity” (xiii). Upper-caste mobs severely beat up strikers with police complicity, although “the simple gesture of Dalits refusing to do the job that the caste system had forced on them for centuries had such a powerful effect that it led to months of protests across the country and ultimately resulted in one of the largest Dalit uprisings in thirty years” (48). It led in particular to the Azadi Kooch March for equality, justice, and land reform – “land that had been allotted to thousands of Dalits on paper but was still waiting to be assigned after decades” (48).

As Dutt’s memoir moves to its final sections, the word Dalit gets hammered into, as if to suggest Dutt is now on her way to recovery after many years of self-loathing and denial. It also leaves the reader with a sense that Dalit lives matter; an allusion to the name of the Black Lives Matter-inspired movement that, as stated on its website, aims to “build constructive resistance against caste-based inequalities, indignities, and adversities globally”. As the generic character of Dutt’s book title suggests, coming out as Dalit (as opposed to ‘a Dalit’) is to belong to a community and be part of a collective with a rich and proud heritage attached to it. That Dutt will be able to share this heritage again through a US reedition of her memoir, out in 2024, is a gift worth waiting for. It is no small treat (and feat) either that in 2020, the book won India’s National Academy of Letters award for outstanding young writers, the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. Readers who may not be familiar with India’s caste system will find a useful, thorough introduction on the subject while a more attuned audience may also enjoy Dutt’s bold journalistic cross over to the autobiographical genre.

Works Cited
Dalit Lives Matter

PAUL GIFFARD-FORET obtained his PhD from Monash University, Melbourne, on the subject of Southeast Asian Australian women’s writing. He lives in Paris, where he teaches English across various academic locations and carries out research on postcolonial literatures while being politically committed as an activist on the French far left.

Borderland

by Graham Akhurst

UWA Publishing

Answers Deferred

Graham Akhurst’s debut young adult novel Borderland is a tour de force. It is a coming-of-age story, set on the lands of the Turrbal, Yuggera and Gungarri people. We are introduced to Jonathan Lane, the first-person narrator, who has just graduated from St Lucia Private, an oppressive private secondary school where he had been a scholarship student. His time at St Lucia had not been an altogether happy experience for him. We are told that he ‘hated the attention he got for looking different and being poor in a school full of rich white kids’ (6). 

The novel opens as he and his best friend, Jenny Pohatu – who also graduated from St Lucia – have enrolled at the Aboriginal Performing Arts Centre (APAC) in Brisbane where they are studying acting and dance. Jenny is a beautiful, popular young woman – warm, intelligent and articulate – and a supportive, caring friend and mentor to Jonathan. But Jono does not completely fit into the social world at APAC. He struggles with identity issues. He lives with his mother – a single mother – but knows little about his family: only that his mother grew up in Cherbourg with her parents and that her father was a lawman who also worked as a police officer and later died in jail (72). Jonathan does not know from his mother who his people are or where his Country is (71). He feels like he is in limbo, with ‘no community, language or tradition’ (68). The moving portrait of a struggling young man who doesn’t know his ancestry recalls in some respects Melissa Lucashenko’s powerful second novel, Hard Yards.  

Self-doubt and insecurity plague Jonathan at APAC where he struggles to fit in and feels like a ‘fraud’ (22), convinced that people see him as an ‘impostor’ (22). He tells us that he measures himself even against Jenny. She ‘owned her Ngarabal heritage proudly’ and was active in the community. She ‘tried to get [him] to go to all the rallies at Musgrave Park and every other Black event in town’ (6). He feels that ‘she knew so much more about mob and culture than [he] ever would’ (6). At APAC, some of the other students mercilessly torment him as a coconut and he has major issues with anxiety as a result. On top of all this, he has a huge crush on Jenny, who is busy flirting with other students. 

Jonathan seems to be spiralling downwards, mired in anxiety and feelings of worthlessness, when he has a stroke of good fortune in landing a short acting role in a documentary film being made for the Aboriginal community about mining on First Nations Country. Jenny has a factotum role in the same production and the two head off excitedly to the fictional town of Gambarri, for what they think will be a fun adventure in the Queensland bush. The trip turns out to be far more difficult than anyone in the group expected with strange happenings disrupting everyone’s plans and delaying the making of the film. Jonathan’s encounter with the land and the people in it is hugely challenging and transformative, opening up the possibility that he may be able to find a way through his crippling self-doubt and move his life forward.

These opening scenes establish the novel as a bildungsroman about the yearned for – but painful getting of – knowledge. They are a powerful evocation of the inner world of a young Aboriginal man, infused with searing affect – strong conflicting feelings of love, fear, remorse, hope and responsibility – as he slowly learns about his heritage and the urgent obligations and sacrifices this knowledge brings with it. 

As Jonathan struggles with the aggression and violence directed to him as a so-called ‘coconut’, he becomes aware of a different terrifying liminal zone impacting on him and his life – physically and psychically – but not in ways which he initially recognises or understands. Magpies dive apparently threateningly into his personal space, and, as the action ratchets up a level, strange ‘hallucinations’ beset and derange him. These ‘horrific visions’ set off panic attacks. He feels his life is in mortal danger after he encounters a malevolent spirit from the Dreaming. Eventually, after numerous false leads, he meets an ally who can provide a measure of guidance and help him protect himself from the ‘sickness’ in which he is enmeshed. He finds answers to some of the questions that have tormented him. But, in the process, further questions are raised.

Akhurst chooses a non-realist mode of fiction to invoke the Dreaming and the young man’s acquisition of difficult knowledge (which is both dangerous and protective). In numerous ways the narrative does touch upon the referential and documentary real – for example it acknowledges Country paratextually in the book’s front matter and outlines the consultation process Akhurst undertook in writing the novel. Further, within the narrative there is a documentary recognition of histories of struggle such as that against the damage caused by fracking in Gungarri Country. Nevertheless, a hybrid non-realist textuality emerges at points where it facilitates the fictional figuring of the Dreaming and of Jonathan’s engagement with the spirits of the Dreaming. Akhurst identifies this non-realist narrative practice as ‘the fictional… rendering of cultural and cosmological elements’ which has been undertaken in an ethical way which avoids ‘the appropriation of story, intellectual property, and heritage’ (ix).

Akhurst insists on the fictionality of the ‘cultural and cosmological’ aspects of the novel and makes a significant paratextual interjection to differentiate fiction (characters and imaginative events) from the specific materiality of the real (in this instance Country). However, it is beyond the purview of this short, non-Aboriginal authored review, to detail the binary between the real and the imaginative. Both elements are entangled within the narrative. A Kokomini man, Akhurst outlines the protocols which guided his writing practice:

While this novel is set primarily on Turrbal, Yuggera, and Gungarri Country, specific places, characters, and events existonly in the author’s imagination. Great care was given to the fictional rendering of cultural and cosmological elements in thisnovel to avoid the appropriation of story, intellectual property, and heritage. All Dreaming stories and cosmological elements are fictional. The stories and totemic symbolic meanings in this book are fictitious and of the author’s imagination. (ix)

*  *  *

In the ‘fictional rendering of the cultural and cosmological’ the novelist portrays Jonathan gaining insight, physical strength, knowledge of and connection with his ancestors and an ability to protect Country. When Jonathan returns to Brisbane and his mother, he is ‘a new man’ (71), as his mother had predicted, with new friendships forged and old friendships reconfigured. But it is also with a new awareness of his and others’ mortality. 

Is this entanglement the ‘borderland’ of the title, where the cosmological meets the everyday, and where First-Nations novelists carve out new imaginative temporo-spatial textual zones for action and transformation? The borderland also seems to me a trope for the bildungsroman, Jonathan’s passage from anxiety and doubt to self-realisation and well-being as a young First Nations person. This is itself a troubled and fraught process for Jonathan. Towards the end of the story, for example, when he has established a more secure sense of belonging, Jonathan pauses to reflect on his journey: ‘it felt as though my identity was something others decided’ (197).

Jonathan’s psychical journey is embedded in his physical journey into rural Queensland. The crew with whom Jonathan is making the film is a motley group with their own crises, confused agendas and troubled identities. In negotiating the relationships between these complicated personalities Jonathan also comes to understand more about the film they are making and the implications it has for all of them. He also comes to a political awareness of the need to protect the land from exploitation and expropriation. 

Needless to say, the novel is not dry or didactic. Akhurst is an adroit storyteller and has a keen ear for the nuances of dialogue. This allows him to flesh out his characters as complex and believable, revealed to Jonathan and themselves as at times vain and a touch self-seeking. There’s plenty of clever humour here and some of it is quite far-reaching such as the irony with which Jenny is portrayed (which, it seems to me, is both gentle and potentially devastating). However, essentially, this book has a light touch even if there are many twists and turns, including adjustments to some of the characters’ most cherished beliefs. Some, like Jenny, have answers deferred. Perhaps Akhurst is setting up the narrative for a sequel. Borderland is an assured and well-crafted book. Akhurst handles all aspects of the multi-layered and challenging story adroitly, especially the suspenseful and charged connections between the key characters. Here is an example of the novel’s narrative intensity:

The lights in the house came on suddenly and I saw the dark figure of a man in the window. It looked as though he was staring directly at me. He moved to the front door and the entrance to the verandah lit up. A blackfella around Keith’s age walked slowly down the front stairs, his dark eyes, under a furrowed brow, locked on me. I felt incredibly uncomfortable but returned his gaze. He had thick wavy grey hair. His skin was dark and weathered; his body wiry. He wore similar clothes to Keith without the wide brimmed hat. He had a rifle strapped to his back. He looked familiar but I couldn’t quite place where I’d seen this man before.

‘This is Norman, my head ringer,’ said Keith.
‘Evening all,’ Norman said, and nodded. His wavy white hair moved in the wind. ‘I’m gonna head out and take a look at that fence real quick.’
‘Yep, see you in the morning,’ Keith said. ‘Now everyone, grab your bags and let’s head in.’

I could feel Norman’s eyes on me. When I reached the car I turned, and he was standing right in front of me.

‘I see you, boy,’ he said. A vein pulsed along his temple as he clenched and unclenched his jaw. I didn’t know what to say. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Norman’s steely eyes stared through me for a moment before he spoke again.

‘And so does Wudun.’ (150)

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.

Text Messages from the Universe

by Richard James Allen

Flying Islands Press

Reviewed by MARK SETON

It’s 2023, and our world flounders under an encroaching deluge of Artificial Intelligence apps, especially ChatGPT, that might enable anyone to ‘generate’ poetry, so why bother! The good news, I believe, is that the poetry that touches us, moves us and connects us still emerges from a living, breathing, feeling, embodied poet. That’s what Richard James Allen generously offers the reader in his latest work Text Messages from the Universe. And it’s fun too!

This is the fourth work of Allen’s that I have reviewed over the years and he never ceases to delight and surprise with new modes and constructions of words and images that overlap and bounce off each other. The initial treats of this new work are the physical size (the book of poetry fits in the shape of one’s hand) and, accompanying the text, one encounters colourful pages of photographic images, many incorporating dancers in bright, flowing strips of cloth, intermingled with textures and ambiguous light sources. It’s all an invitation to enter into the flow of sensation before making any attempt at meaning-making.

In a past life (or maybe it’s just an ongoing present life?) I’m sure Allen was/is a detective, a Philip Marlow of the 21st century. Through an omnipresent framing of address, in second person, he asks you, the reader, numerous investigative questions. He proffers multiple, possible meanings. He knows he sometimes makes miscalculations. He acknowledges that life can be messy. And he asserts that life is worth living no matter how short it is. I suspect there is a clue to the puzzle of this text, proffered in his dedication – “for my Virgils” – a reference, perhaps, to the ancient Roman poet, Virgil, a master poet of antiquity, who structured his most famous poetic epic Aeneid into several ‘books’. Likewise, Allen crafts a textual container of two parts, collectively containing three chapters.

Part One consists of two counter-pointed chapters, ‘An Introduction to Dying and An Odd Way to be Born.’ Two confronting themes, yet Allen seduces the reader to keep reading by means of playful, image-triggering phrases about the reader’s mind and body that strangely convey an everyday normality within the fantastical – “Your head feels like it is under attack from a swarm of alien starships, trying to blast their way through your mind core” (p.9) followed shortly by “The vehicle [body] is so tremendously powerful. It’s the Holy Grail for floating spirits, waiting aeons for the chance to act again in the world” (p.15). The second theme invokes a ritual-like multiplicity of ways to be ‘born’. Almost every page insists that you “wake up!” and offers you various narratives that you might choose to bring you into some new state of being and becoming. This section of texts is most powerfully counter-pointed by the photographic images of dancers in various modes and moods of movement – sometimes their eyes address the reader, sometimes their eyes indicate where the reader might go. But it is the dynamism in their frozen moments of ‘the dance’ that is most striking in how it shapes one’s feeling and/or interpretation of these different story offers. This second theme wanes, at a critical transition, where the message of the Universe observes, “You’ve got it all wrong, strange things happen to everybody – it’s just that mostly they don’t pay attention to them, or if they do, they don’t tell anyone about them, they just keep them a secret” (p.47).

This launches the reader into a wilder ride through Part Two of this collection of messages, entitled ‘The Book of Bad Dreams’, that are far more scattered between pages of dancers and textured lighting, creating a sense of acceleration towards some kind of finality or paradoxical crisis/opportunity. It’s almost like a textual version of the psychedelic ‘stargate sequence’ in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. As the textual messages seem more urgent and demanding of a readerly response, it’s in these latter pages that the very words begin to blur into a stream of consciousness:

If you were to speak the perfect words, what would they be? The onlythingyourememberisthatthebodyyou entered, or thought you entered, was walking across, a street talking on their phone. You can’t remember to whom. The conversation was interrupted by a text message.(p46)

This becomes the point of no return – or unending return – where texts finally subside and lift the reader to a place where there is no place or need for text messages. Only bold colours, dynamic dancers and sensual textures remain to fill in the last few pages of this playful, provocative and in-sight-ful work. Another sensual, innovative and rewarding accomplishment from the embodied exploration and expression of the poet who is Richard James Allen.

Once a Stranger

by Zoya Patel

Hachette

ISBN 9780733647079

Reviewed by KAVITA NANDAN
 
 
A significant part of the success of a story is the degree to which we are moved by it in some way. Once a Stranger, a novel about the search for acceptance, is written with heart and an awareness of loss in the negotiation of relationships with family, history and home. At first glance, the novel’s structure and conceit seem too straightforward – the past and present are navigated by the sub-headings ‘before’ and ‘now’ and feelings are conveyed quite simply: ‘Ayat felt the loss as deep as a punch to her stomach’ (48). However, while the language may sometimes be humble, more so in Part One than in Part Two in which the metaphors of belonging and alienation deepen, the message is not.

This novel is told from three points of view, those of two sisters, Ayat and Laila, and their mother, Khadija. It is about their relationships with each other and to the new home, Australia. The central narrative is Ayat’s, the younger sister and daughter, who is separated from her family in Canberra as a result of the mother’s ultimatum that she choose between them and that other life: Melbourne and her white Australian boyfriend, Harry. Ayat is wounded by her mother putting Islam and its traditions above her. She is also hurt by her sister, Laila, who sacrifices their sisterly relationship to win the approval of her mother. Laila pursues the life of a “a good Muslim girl”. As a school girl she spends her time studying, accepting that there will be no sleep overs and no boyfriends. Afterwards she responsibly gets a job and enters an arranged marriage to a Muslim. At moments in the story, this binary is questioned – is Khadija really that blind? Is Laila really that one dimensional? Even her mother, at some point, wonders if her older daughter is supressing her real self.

The novel interweaves between the past and the present to show that the present can make sense in the light of the past. We learn that the girls’ father and Khadija’s husband, Ahmed, dies in a tragic accident, leaving their mother as the sole protector of her family and even more vulnerable in the new country. Both Ayat and the reader begin to understand to a greater extent, the mother’s strict choices. Would she have behaved as stubbornly with Ayat if Ahmad were still by her side? Khadija’s rigidity is also offered as being characteristic of the behaviour of a first generation migrant who persists in maintaining the culture and values of a previous homeland in the new country. The catalyst for reconciliation is a stark email from Laila to Ayat, telling her that their mother is very sick.

Once a Stranger is an inter-generational story of migration. On her first day of school when she feels rejected by the other kids, Ayat wraps her hands around her waist to make herself smaller, mimicking her mother who does this intuitively when she feels rejected by Australians. This gesture is a motif carried through the novel by mother and daughter. When Ayat experiences a lack of reflection of herself in others, it brought me back to my first days at primary school in Canberra, being one, out of the only three, non-white kids in the entire school. The distance between Melbourne and Canberra is eight hours but the gulf between Ayat and her mother and sister is far deeper. The micro narrative of the family’s rejection of Ayat is paralleled with the macro narrative of the rejection of this Muslim family by white Australians.

Part Two is more sorrowful and hopeful at the same time. For Khadija, Australia is still a foreign country: “Decades in Australia hadn’t changed Khadija’s allegiance. India was not just a country, it was an entire world that she had lost, one she wasn’t able to let go of.” (134)
This point of view is written with sympathy: “this was the place where her mother made sense, where her history became real” (167). When Ayat travels with her mother and sister to India, she has a greater understanding of her mother’s perspective. This helps Ayat to begin to forgive her mother and ultimately herself while at the same time realising that some differences are irreconcilable.

The novel suggests that migrants live with uneasy contradictions and not in a state of happy hybridity. They survive psychically by aligning themselves to one kind of cultural illusion or the other, whether it’s feeling at one with the crowd in India or, as Khadija does, wanting the solidity of Islam for Ayat, knowing that she didn’t wholly fit in, but with an edge of awareness. For all her stubbornness, Khadija knows that life is dynamic:

Children were always leaving, from the moment they were born. They exited her womb, and kept going, stepping further away from her with each act of independence until, eventually, she became to them what her own mother had been to her – the past. (233)

The experience of migration involves both loss and acceptance. This novel gives an important voice to young migrant people in an accessible and palpable way. It ends with the past and the future coalescing. Laila is able to acknowledge both the loss of all those years without her sister and the joy of her child. The novel ends positively with the hint that the youngest clan member, Aysha, may not have the same struggles, unlike her grandparents who found it the hardest to adjust, and her parents who are still negotiating their mixed identities. This is a story about the love between mothers and daughters. If Khadija can’t let go of her own feelings of not-belonging, she can accept that Australia is the way forward for her daughters.

Ayat’s boyfriend, Harry, while not being one of the major characters in the novel is worth mentioning here because of his symbolic weight: he represents the Other for the migrant or what the migrant is travelling towards – a new country and a new life. Both a feeling of homesickness and home are attached to him. Living with him reminds Ayat of the family she is separated from and being away from him when she goes to Canberra and India makes her feel like a part of her is missing.

It was a clever narrative choice to make Harry join Ayat in India, as his courage in making himself visible to her family is a trigger for Ayat’s acceptance of the different parts of herself. There are barriers between Harry and Ayat; Ayat for example is portrayed as being uncomfortable with Harry’s affections – people from an Indian culture are often brought up in a way that traps them between their own desires and their parents’ approval. But this dis-ease is what the novel is about. Harry is both her anchor in the new world and the difference she battles with:

But something in her was too fragile now. It was as though there was only space in her for Harry or her family. They had never existed alongside each other, and Ayat still didn’t know how to surpass the discomfort she felt at her dual identities mingling. She hadn’t had time to learn how. (195)

While the Rushdian sense of a happy mongrelisation and ‘contaminated’ migrant identity is helpful in contending the idea of mythic purity, living with disharmony is not easy. Ayat finds herself caught between the diverse worlds of family bonds, loyalty, past identities and the challenge of integrating into a new world. Canberra becomes as important a place as India in this journey of reconciling with family and country. Although, the specifics of my background maybe different, I felt many moments of recognition when reading this book and I believe that other migrants will feel something similar. A significant achievement of the novel is giving voice to the non-Anglo migrant experience. Once a Stranger’s narrative engagement with familial relations is a vital expression of the female experience of the effects of migration.
 
 
KAVITA IVY NANDAN was born in New Delhi, grew up in Suva and migrated to Australia in 1987 after the Fiji military coups. She completed a PhD in Literature at the Australian National University. She taught at both the ANU and the University of Canberra before moving from Canberra to Sydney in 2017. Besides being a writer, Kavita teaches Creative Writing at Macquarie University. She is the author of a book of poems, Return to what Remains (2022) and a novel, Home after Dark(2014). She is currently working on a novel, The Smallest Hands. Kavita has edited a book of memoirs, Stolen Worlds: Fiji-Indian Fragments and co-edited of a book of essays, Unfinished Journeys: India File From Canberra and an anthology of poetry and short fiction, Writing the Pacific. Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction are published in ABR, Adda Magazine, Asiatic, Island Review, Landfall, LiteLitOne, Mascara Literary Magazine, Meniscus Literary Journal, Mindfood, Not Very Quiet, Poetry D’Amour Anthology, Ross Spencer Anthology and Transnational Literature.