Author: mascara

The Office of Literary Endeavours                                                                                                 1.

Mark Roberts

5 Islands Press 2025

ISBN 9781923248090

Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK

In his third poetry book, The Office of Literary Endeavours, Mark Roberts embraces many interlinked themes, dealing mainly with the relationship of the poet, or any individual, to the land we stand upon. The eponymous poem, whose title smacks of Orwell’s Ministries in Nineteen Eighty-Four, encapsulates the collection, its three parts coming at the beginning, middle and end of the book.  

In part 1, maree, on her way to the office, “before beginning her poem…slipped and fell/ into the valley/ her death”. However, the poem finds its true home:

the poem remained
etched into her bones
as her skin fell away
the words in her fingers
toes belly and heart
dissolved into the earth
(p.2)

This interconnection reverberates with the issue of land and Aboriginal dispossession:

even in daylight
stories are hidden here
at night they call to us
singing across country
(p.3, “Returns”)

and Black history:

     language carried on wind
               a history
we can’t read ………….
 built over silenced
                     genocide
     this was never
     our country
(p.22, “Wolgan Valley”)

2.

In “Gweagal Shield,” we’re reminded of the battles during first contact:

                       For the English
this is empty country terra nullius−
the confrontation an inconvenience.
and the theft of weapons for display in the British Museum:
A shield pierced by shot is dropped.
Collected and catalogued
it becomes the first spoil of a long war.
(p.22)

Like the campaign for return of the shield to country, “river poem” is a plea for the return of Aboriginal place-names:

I want
to know
the real name
of this river

not the name on your map
I want to know the name it has had for ever
(p.24)

Closely linked to this theme are poems recalling Roberts’ heritage and the relationship between his progenitors and the land. “Returns” is a sequence of four poems detailing a journey from Melbourne to Ireland, where the family began:

We have left behind my great grandmother’s
sea chest which contained all her possessions
when she travelled to Sydney 150 years ago.
(p.3)

Leaving Strokestown Park, the poet recalls his grandfather’s stories of “home”:

We drive out through the gates
the chill in our bones
a reminder of a history
that follows us down
these short country roads.
A land that tugs at memory.
(p.4)

3.

Back in Australia, poems revisiting places inhabited by the immigrants reinforce the connectedness with country, despite colonisation:

                                                                                   This is a return
to a place, a connection with country stretching through my family,
the hints and suggestions of a buried history, a land that fills the
imagination. (“Gaanha-bula”, p.10)

Other poems exemplifying this subject are “Wassail, Cargo Road, Lidster, N.S.W., 1937”, “Learning to Shoot” and “cargo road”.

The second half of the collection is thematically more diverse. Poems like “Sediment” speak of the difficulty of maintaining this connection:

                           history
layering onto a recent garden
hard to sense connections
buried  by guns
                          and imported gods
(p.33)

The future is bleak, an unreal city, its citizens lacking in empathy:

Meanwhile we rush towards the station anxious
to make the train home, giving the man in a dirty sleeping bag,
sheltering in the pedestrian tunnel, a wide berth.
Then on Friday night, gathered on the rooftop ,
we watch the pretty explosions of fireworks
and listen to dogs barking in the street below.
(p.31,“Armistice Day 2023”)

Yet rejuvenation is still possible, as in “cutting the grass”:

he told them that he remembered
where the grass had been

they took away his mower
within days
the first green shoots
appeared through cracks in the concrete
(p.43)

4

Many of the poems in this section wittily re-invent movies and plays of the modern era.

“The Office of Literary Endeavours 3” concludes the volume. Here we learn that maree’s books and papers have not arrived, the road to the town has been cut by rebels, a bridge blown up and a levee bank destroyed. It is not clear when the office will be reopened. 

Like his subject matter, Mark Roberts’ poetic language can be humorous, contemporary or, at its finest, evocative and lyrical. One last poem, “limestone,” deserves special mention:

memories of fish
swim through the darkness
of an ancient coral mountain
above
fluorescence
from horizon to a forgotten shore
we shrink
to an imagined significance
a point between a grounded history
and an infinite curve of time
a choreographed immigration
                            of rock and earth
a beauty that no ideology
                            can prevent

*

Margaret Bradstock, a Sydney poet, critic and editor, lectured at UNSW for 25 years, has been Asialink Writer-in-residence at Beijing University, co-editor of Five Bells for Poets Union, and on the Board of Directors for Australian Poetry. Poetry collections include The Pomelo Tree (winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Prize) and Barnacle Rock (winner of the Woollahra Festival Award, 2014). Editor of Antipodes, the first Australian anthology of Aboriginal and white responses to “settlement” (2011) and Caring for Country (2017), Margaret’s ninth poetry collection is Alchemy of the Sun (Puncher & Wattmann, 2024).

Lithosphere

Ben Walter

Puncher & Wattmann

ISBN: 9781923099685

Reviewed by ZOWIE DOUGLAS-KINGHORN

Ben Walter’s poetry collection sits between a rock and a hard place. It’s difficult to do nature writing without tumbling into a didactic crevasse, or bathing in the seductive, never-ending wellspring of descriptive language. But the poems that Walter hews together are curiously delectable in their deviance from both. The term ‘lithosphere’ was famously coined by the geologist Joseph Barrell during the early 1900s to describe the earth’s crust; the rocky outer shell that sits between the atmosphere above and the asthenosphere below, where things start to heat up and become liquid. The geological theme calls to mind Walter’s 2017 novella, titled Conglomerate (published with the Lost Rocks series by A Published Event), where he writes of a group of bushwalkers hiking in the southwest of Tasmania. A sense of propulsion emerges as the distinctions between the hikers and their surroundings are dissolved by walking, speech and muscle movement. The narrator poses the question: “How to square such sensations? The inner and outer slowly eroding, a curse on their bodies and a blessing for their minds.” This sense of oneness suspends his hikers in the present, giving them a brief reprieve from the halting anxiety of debt, familial illness and relationship breakdowns, being surrounded by the “indifferent plains that let them wander where they wanted.” This may be another nod to Gerald Murnane, a feature of another one of Walter’s stories, ‘Landscape Within Landscapes’, from his collection What Fear Was (Puncher & Wattman, 2021). It’s a sense of escapism that imbues Lithosphere as well.

At a time when writers are compelled to respond to the urgency of the current moment, Lithosphere retreats into obscure intricacy in a way that is both intriguing and baffling. Stones have evidently preoccupied Walter for a while, as we have gone from his novella, Conglomerate (2017) to the poetry collection Lithosphere (2025) in the space of a decade. True to form, these poems are amassed from publications over the years. There is granular detail on every page, with delicious morsels of verisimilitude. You might expect to be bored by a book about rocks, but Lithosphere is full of delights. The strength of this collection is its geographical multiplicity, the way it shows the faultlines between nature and people, pastoral and urban, suburban and wild landscapes. There’s a sense of friction where Walter seems determined to write against the grain of more popular lyric poetry in nature writing, and one that has titillating results. But some of its poems feel a little bit stubborn in their opacity—almost as if they are trying too hard to hem themselves into their own little niche.

Nevertheless, Lithosphere encapsulates the multiplicity of Tasmania beautifully, such as in the poem ‘Knocking’: ‘

and open walls
framing a view
of the cold,
a painting
or triptych
of spooling fog
the suburbs and
all the same sun
(p.9)

It is an experience one has when looking through windows in Hobart, where different parts of one room could show the mountain, river, or an industrial park. It frames these snippets with a collage-like texture, challenging the idea of wilderness as a pure or remote concept that exists somewhere far away. Instead of wilderness being a place cordoned off, everyday objects are animated by their own wildness. In ‘Knocking’, the stone huts are animated by “draft-drunk doors.” In ‘Apples’, fruits are characterised by their names in proximity to young people:

 … croftons and jonathans,
bustling eyes, other names like children,
older children waiting in the fields;
(p.70)

Here, I was reminded of how teachers often use the apple skin analogy to describe the thinness of the earth’s atmosphere in comparison to its overall mass—if the atmosphere is the apple skin, then the lithosphere is the crunchy outer layer. It makes you think about the atmosphere as something precious, rather than a limitless expanse to be polluted ad infinitum. Perhaps in a similar way, what Lithosphere does best is make us think more closely about the natural world—close in a literal sense. For example, in the poem ‘Mt Styx’, nature is portrayed as an ailing body: ‘gum splints on the roads; /the fractures are healing,’ (p.39) This image reminded me of Anna Krien’s 2017 Quarterly Essay, The Long Goodbye: Coal, Coral and Australia’s Climate Deadlock, where Krien likens global warming to a fever. It’s a way of flipping the concept of ‘the environment’ inside out, bringing it from an idea that exists on the margins of the human experience and into the physical centre of it. This is the kind of nature writing that gets under your skin, reminding us that the earth is inseparable from its human inhabitants, that the hard border between the self and the world outside is itself a fiction. 

Other phrases in ‘Mt Styx’ that lampoon linguistic flexibility are ‘regeneration burns’, a term loosely applied across Sustainable Timbers Tasmania’s harvesting operations to justify its wholesale razing of forests. The ‘mythic river’ mentioned here belies the river Styx’s naming. Running from the Needles, or Mt. Mueller (also the title of another poem in the collection), the Styx River in Tasmania is punctuated by fallen trees, and so it was colonially known as the ‘River of Sticks’ until the spelling was changed, according to the journals of the Land Commissioners for Van Diemen’s Land. Of course, the Styx is also one of the rivers of the underworld, as well as the name of the Greek goddess. According to Hesiod’s poem Theogony, the monster Echidna may have been born to Styx, but this isn’t explored in Lithosphere.

Walter’s voice is brusque, his narrator’s stoic landscapes made up of ‘grinding stones’. The phrase brings to mind the process of digestion in dinosaurs, breaking down the tough fibres of cycad plants by ingesting rocks to assist the gut bacteria. This ruminative mode is a feature of Walter’s nature writing. What if we were to look at the stones beneath our feet as organisms with lives and stories? Or even just look beneath our fingernails and acknowledge the fact that we are all made up of microbiota? Animals and plant life make up more of our microbiome than anything else. As writer Jane Rawson writes in Human/Nature, human bodies are more like swamps than a discrete entity. Ben Walter’s Lithosphere abounds in such littoral zones. From the cover image of the dead tree flooded by lake water to the poem ‘The Oysters Roar’, where there are ’rounds of unshucked applause / bursting from the silt.’ Oysters filter pollutants from the sea, turning food particles into pearls. Geographies are shaped by their underlying geologies. The ‘pink and white stones’ at the end of Conglomerate are reminiscent of the boulders across Tasmania’s west coast, which are known as conglomerate rock for their being many rocks ground together under the weight of glaciers.

It’s the slow transfiguration of a landscape that makes this collection so enjoyable, and at some points a little under stimulating. The collection feels too contained at times, and perhaps a little too safe. These are poems that are hard and sparkling and perfect, splendid in their fixity. But maybe that’s the point.

ZOWIE DOUGLAS-KINGHORN lives in lutruwita/Tasmania, where she writes, rollerskates and sells flowers. You can usually find her snipping mountain gum on the side of a highway somewhere.

Insurgent Visions: Feminism, Justice, Solidarity

by Chandra Talpade Mohanty

 Duke University Press (2025)

ISBN: 978-1-4780-3222-9

Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET

Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s latest book published in 2025 by Duke University Press is an event in itself, if only because her previous and only other book was published more than twenty years ago in 2003 by the same publisher, but also because Mohanty’s radical feminism has inspired generations of politically committed academics across the world and in particular in the Global South for her astute, complex and sophisticated, yet forthright analysis of systems of oppression and exploitation from the standpoint of some of the most marginalised communities — immigrant women of colour, female workers in sweatshops, Indigenous people, refugees or noncitizens fighting for survival in borderlands ranging from Mexico to Kashmir or Palestine. If Mohanty is not what may be called a prolific writer, it is likely due to her militant work outside of the academy. Being an ‘activist scholar’ as Mohanty has described herself takes a lot of time and effort despite being poorly valued and appreciated by the neoliberal corporate university. As Mohanty writes in Part Two of her book on “Neoliberal academic landscapes, transnational feminisms, cross-border solidarity”: “In North America, the binary that distinguishes the “academy” from the “community” or the academic from the activist […] has assisted in the creation of apparently distinct spaces where the former is privileged over the latter.” (164) 

     Mohanty’s critique of US higher education and of academia in particular is one of the many enlightening, thought-provoking aspects of her book. Elsewhere in a chapter running as a discussion with other feminist activist scholars and originally published in 2015, Mohanty quotes fellow academic Leila Farah on the woman of colour’s burden. Unlike Rudyard Kipling’s so-called white man’s burden, tasked with having to ‘civilise’ the non-western world, diasporic women of colour like Mohanty are posited as native informants whose insurgent knowledges from the ground up risk being co-opted, appropriated, commoditised, and ultimately domesticated by the US academy. As Farah puts it: 

Since all institutions are complicit with the neoliberal project in many ways, those who straddle academic lives and employ feminist praxis within communities outside of the hallowed halls often are positioned to act as intermediaries, breaking the age binaries of formal and informal education and knowledge production, bearing a great burden in repositioning and reconciling these multiple spaces. Unfortunately, that increasingly seems to be women of color who are non-US based originally… (97)

While those age-old binaries are still effective in 2025, even the problematic positioning of immigrant women of colour within the US academy has been rendered precarious and is now potentially under threat following the far-right accession to power under the aegis of the Trump administration. This non-negligeable shift may be a reason for the publication of Insurgent Visions. Indeed, it is not just that insurgent disciplinary fields such as gender, queer, postcolonial, indigenous or environmental studies have been disconnected from the social movements from which they emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, or that they have become increasingly institutionalised as a result of a broader shift toward a money-spinning, profit-run, fee-paying higher education industry. As the far-right is winning the battle of ideas (the so-called ‘culture wars’), those abovementioned disciplines have been falling under repeated attacks through defunding, the closure of entire departments and their replacement with conservative, traditional value-oriented curricula that promote heteronormativity, white supremacy, hypermasculinity, or climate-denialism instead. 

    While Mohanty’s tone may at times sound alarming (and rightly so), her analysis of the historical moment we are in remains by and large hopeful that with the disappearance of ‘intermediaries’, to quote Farah’s term again, new opportunities will open up that “recall the genealogy of public intellectuals, radical political education movements, and public scholarship that is anchored in cultures of dissent,” (162) as well as “examin[e] those knowledges that derive from political mobilizations that push up, in, and against the academy, ultimately foregrounding the existence of multiple genealogies of radical transnational feminist practice.” (163) Mohanty extensively draws upon two recent grassroots mobilisations in the US context — the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020, and the university campus encampments in the wake of the war on Gaza in 2025 — to prove her case that a revival of a revolutionary spirit of revolt and resistance is possible amongst younger generations, this even in a dire context whereby, as Mohanty acknowledges, “both US foreign and domestic policy at this time are corporate and military driven. Both have led to the militarization of daily life around the world and in the United States — specifically for immigrants, refugees, and people of color.” (146) 

     The fact that these two protest movements quickly spread beyond US borders is significant insofar as another key aspect of Mohanty’s book relates to the question of the transnational. Her skillful ability to unpack, deconstruct, and remobilise this much-touted term for militant purposes shows Mohanty at her best as she smoothly and elegantly deals with the whole gamut of available theory at hand while simultaneously placing her intricate theoretical reflections at the service of community organising at a ‘glocal’ (global and local at once) level. Whereas, as Mohanty deplores, “ “transnational” often becomes a placeholder for business as usual, marked as “progressive” in the face of a conservative, xenophobic backlash,” (134) she also asks in her conclusion to a chapter entitled “Transnational Feminist Crossings: on Neoliberalism and Radical Critique”: “What would it mean to be attentive to the politics of activist feminist communities in different sites in the Global South and North as they imagine and create cross-border feminist solidarities anchored in struggles on the ground?” (201) 

     Through her attempts to articulate a transnational frame/network of solidarity across multiple faultlines (racialised gender, the international or sexual divisions of labour, or the North/South divide), Mohanty in her book seeks to build and elaborate upon those two academic essays for which she is most renown, namely “Under Western Eyes [UWE]: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (1988) and “Under Western Eyes Revisited [UWE-R]: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles” (2003). Whilst, on the one hand, UWR (a reference to Joseph Conrad’s novel) strived to carve up space for a nascent third world critique of white feminism in the wake of decolonial national liberation movements of the 1960s/70s and neoliberal structural adjustment programs of the 1980s/90s targeting what would become known as the Global South following the Fall of the USSR, on the other hand, UWE-R aimed to grapple with the reality of a New Global Order under the American umbrella (so-called Pax Americana) concomitant with the rise of anti-globalisation/capitalist protest as in Seattle or Genoa. 

     Insurgent Visions may be construed in this regard as an effort to reconcile or ‘dovetail’ (to use one of Mohanty’s most favored word in her book) the ‘particularist’ bend of UWE with the ‘universalist’ penchant of UWE-R in light of the fact that we now live in a highly ‘uneven and combined’ world (to use Leon Trotsky’s phrase) following the gradual decline of the global American hegemon (a decline that dates back as early as the 2001 Twin Tower attacks and has been compounded by the Afghanistan debacle of 2021). Hence, do we find scattered across her book elements of what could be dubbed Mohanty’s third conceptual shift: 

Our conceptual foci would need to shift, and that might be possible when different cross-border practices, spaces, and temporalities are brought into ideological and geographic proximity with one another in ways that produce connectivity and intersubjectivity (albeit a tense or uneven one) rather than an absolute alterity. (177)

This question about the connectivity of multiple though unequally organized geographies, temporalities, and interests […] raises additional questions about the analytic and political consequences of deploying an either/or framing: either connectivity or separation. (174) 

This shift begins in the lives of women, learns from their perspective, and formulates policies that are attentive to local, place-based struggles as they exist within structures of privilege, power, and inequality. (78) 

While place-based struggles and contextual approaches to women’s resistance […] are key to understanding larger struggles for gendered economic justice, it is the universal principles embodied in the right to equity and dignity […] that constitute the broad parameters of our vision of gender justice. (61-2)

     In her deployment of a radical transnational politics, Mohanty chiefly deals with, and moves back and forth between, three geographical locations and contexts in her book, while embracing an intersectional approach that helps her nagivate and find commonalities of struggle. Whether it be in the context of justice for Palestine, the US carceral/military state, or Hindu fundamentalism (Hinduvta) in India, it is mostly poor (and in India lower-caste Dalit), Brown/Black (but also White, itself a colour as Mohanty emphasises), queer, indigenous, and/or Muslim women of colour who must bear the brunt of institutionalised social stigma imposed upon them. As Mohanty argues: “Since the early 1990s, the geopolitical triad of the United States, Israel, and India have shared a vision of threat and security based on Islam and Muslims as the common enemy, cemented through close and ongoing economic and military alliances.” (122) One also has in mind those trans/homophobic policies implemented in the Trump era (one of the most recent being a ban on transgender people in the military), or the way that the US privatised prison industry has disproportionately targeted poor women of colour in recent years, all the more so since, as Mohanty adds, “mass incarceration is the other side of the coin of mass deportation” (122) through the separation of Brown and Black families, women and children at the US/Mexico border. At the grassroots level, though, the insurgent visions of Dalit, Palestinian, and Brown/Black communities in the US all point to a common, universal horizon begging “the larger question here [on] how to move from the politics of representation to a politics of equity and justice.” (68) 

Yet perhaps the most essential question raised by Mohanty in her book (a question that will bring us back to the figure of the activist scholar) bears upon the ethical (one may even say moral) responsibility that each one of us in our respective constituencies hold: “Who resides in which spaces? Who belongs and who are rendered outsiders? Who is constituted as the knowledgeable and the unknowledgeable? Which knowledges and ways of knowing are legitimised and which are discounted?” (165) From her privileged position as a US resident-citizen and established academic, Mohanty has chosen throughout her professional life to invest and redistribute her time and effort into “knowledge [that] is produced by activist and community-based political work” (68), while speaking truth to power without at the same time capitalising on it to advance her own career. To herself as well as to the educated, left-leaning reader of her book who may share Mohanty’s insurgent vision, she thus asks as a leitmotiv and a source of motivation at once: “What am I doing with my power and my privileges? To me, that is the question that people who live in the United States need to ask. What are the privileges that you have, and what are you doing with those privileges?” (44)

PAUL GIFFARD-FORET holds a Ph.D. from Monash University in Australia. His thesis focused on the literature of Australian women authors of Southeast Asian background. He now works as a lecturer at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle University in France. 

Past & Parallel Lives

Kaya Ortiz,

UWAP

ISBN: 978-1-76080-298-1

Love Like This Isn’t Harmless

Bron Bateman,

 Fremantle Press

ISBN: 9781760995355

Reviewed by NATALIE DAMJANOVICH-NAPOLEON

Time travelling: Creating Triumph from Love’s Harm and Fractured Selves

In their debut poetry collection, Past & Parallel Lives Kaya Ortiz weaves the recurrent themes of time travel, and the lives we could have lived or may live, against the backdrop of their queer and Filipino identity. Examining the multiple renderings of identity and place through list poems and free verse poetic forms, they show us how coming out does not happen only once, but rather as a series of repeated revelations to live openly, “my body un / becoming // …over and over again”. Ortiz explores the early blooming of lust, love, and Trek-inspired alien and queer desire in this release. Bron Bateman’s fourth poetry collection, Love Like This Isn’t Harmless, examines a mature queer poet’s heartbreak. In this collection Bateman takes stock, looking back on her life, the cost of love and how to live authentically as a crip, gay woman. Both Ortiz’s and Bateman’s re-makings and revelations are hard fought and won, revealing to the reader the unique struggles of living as one’s true self in a world that seeks conformity.

Migration, discovering oneself and coming out are recurrent themes in Ortiz’s collection, but one of the most compelling through lines is the poet’s exploration of alien characters in Star Trek as a metaphor for queerness and migrant otherness. In “First Contact” the poet reminds us, from an outsider’s perspective, “to remember the self is / secondary to language.” They know the dangers that come with being labelled by others and conversely, how we can define ourselves with language. “Distant Origin” explores the parallels between Ortiz’s life and Star Trek’s B’Elanna Torres, who is half-human and half-Klingon, as “I, too, am split- / between // a star in every quadrant / and home / too many lightyears / away.” Examining this parallel later in “Self-insert Trek: Flashback”, B’Elanna Torres “cleaves and falls into herself, a shattered identity” and through this mirroring process the poet’s “ruptured” self is “reborn.       Rebuilding”. Other poems take deep dives into Trek characters like Seven of Nine, Michael Burnham and Jadzia Dax. Each of these characters struggles with their hybrid identity and outsider status, shows us that “the closet is a matter of time and space”, and contends with epic battles of the self to eventually triumph or be reborn – literally in Jadzia Dax’s case, who is a Trill that has lived seven lives. The Star Trek characters and the additional metaphors of time and space employed by Ortiz bring the reader along with them on a journey that playfully examines what it is to be queer, alien and other while also showing us the possibilities time and space allow us to re-write our past and future selves.

In Bateman’s collection life is complicated and fraught with the trappings of what we lose of ourselves to love another. The twelve poems in the second section “love that crouches, raging” each contain the word “love” with the lengthy titles reading like whimsical poems themselves, such as “To love is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly”. From the ache of infant loss to the vagaries of straight and queer love, Bateman sees love in the aforementioned poem as:

A kiss, a sucker punch, a glance,
all delivered forms of intimacy,
                                        ascending through the bruise-
blue darkness as an idea born
of repetition

The collection’s theme of love’s harm is delivered in the implied violence in the “sucker punch” and “bruise-blue darkness” of the latter lines. As the adage tells us, love is a verb, and in this collection love is measured by these repeated actions, it is not a static state of safety. The loss of a child at three months of age results in grief’s “raging,” and a “Love with nowhere left to hide.” Here grief and love are tethered together, yet love, as always, contains hope. This hope arises in the baby the poet and her partner are expecting, “her parts knitting together / like spring, / like a longing for plum blossoms.” Bateman’s collection examines love through the lens of a mature woman who in “Weightless” she explains, has “come this far, survived this much”. She knows who she is and she knows her wounds, yet this doesn’t stop her moving forward past loss.

Both poets explore the impact of religion and God in their reckoning with love and their queer identity. In two list poems Ortiz speaks to the Catholic doctrine that does not accept queer people. “Hell” is structured around the “Hail Mary” prayer, with the fourth item on their list suggesting other, radical ways of seeing, hinting at a female god, “4. Learn love the way you learn god – unable to look her in the eye”. “The Etymology of Palaam” (goodbye) recounts the tension between religion and being queer where Ortiz creates a mash up of the Filipino language, “Our Father” and the poet’s own prayers, including the exquisite line —their body a metaphor for inedible communion bread — “3. for all that is holy.  my body is / 4. a loaf made of stone”. For the strengths of Ortiz’s utilisation of list poems in this collection, at times the form appears forced, just as form can inspire a poet it can also stifle their expression. Some poems may have benefitted from being written in pure free verse, enabling the poet to stretch their wings when required. In “There was love, like a great, glass eye” Bateman reviews her childhood beliefs in an omnipotent God and her mis-spent faith, “But where was God? She prayed and prayed…// But he closed his eyes to her suffering, // splashing abundance where it didn’t matter / onto endless golden paddocks with myriad insects”. It is an indictment of modern Christianity that neither poet found space for themselves or their sexuality in the church. Yet, as poets, they continue to see awe and beauty in the world without the restrictions of organised religion.

In the opening poem of Bateman’s collection, “Betrayal”, co-written by Andy Jackson, they explore crip-embodiment and how disabled people are viewed as “invisible [by]…infirmity” writing “I extend my cane towards the ground / like a diviner – this path, / this body, not the only crooked things.” It is a compelling metaphor for a collection that stretches the reader out past the crooked path that most lives take to “crip promise,” embracing pain, along with the welcome and unwelcome gifts that it offers. Bateman’s skill as a poet lies in her ability to translate pain in its terror and beauty to the transformation of the self. Whereas, like a magician, Ortiz transmutes their growing pains as an immigrant and coming out as queer into poems that defy time and space. The precision of their words, their blending of Filipino and English, and the architecture of their list poems reveal a poet who has arrived to us with a vision that appears almost fully-formed, for this reason it is no wonder this collection won the 2024 Dorothy Hewett Award. Both poets show us that even through fracture, pain and a world that seeks to erase queer, crip and migrant identity they can emerge triumphant, if not unharmed.

Jessica D’cruze is a storyteller, photographer, emerging writer, and artist, as well as a social worker. Diagnosed with ADHD at 36 years old, she embraces nonlinear thinking and creativity in her multidisciplinary work. Jessica explores trans-migrational experiences through food, imagery, and writing, with a strong focus on photo essays as a storytelling medium. She holds a Bachelor of Photography from RMIT and a Diploma in Community Development and recently completed her Master of Counselling at Victoria University. Her multidisciplinary work has been showcased in various projects—her images, words, and short film were featured in TakeBack, a project presented by Multicultural Arts Victoria in 2021.  Jessica’s essay, Mustard Koi Fish, was published in Kindling & Sage Magazine.

The Religion of Cricket

It was just past 1 a.m., March 4th, 2022. I’d fallen asleep moments earlier, after bingeing an entire season of Stranger Things on Netflix, when my friend Apu, from Canada, DMed me on Instagram:
‘Jess! Shane Warne is dead. I’m devastated.’

I squinted, rubbing my eyes—the rush of adrenaline had woken me up. I tapped the notification to read it properly.

‘I’m crying and drinking.’

Apu and I were a couple of OCIs (Overseas Citizens of India), connected across oceans by a rectangle full of lights and clockworks. It had been years since we’d seen each other face to face.

I replied with the brown-toned surprise emoji and tried to slip back into my hard-earned REM sleep. With ADHD, the circadian rhythms are delayed—melatonin released ever so slowly, little dribs here and drabs there…

More notifications pinged. I squeezed my eyes shut. Faint memories surfaced: I watched Shane Warne perform an impeccable leg-spin bowl—and faded into sleep.

Shafts of morning light refracted through my window while night settled over Toronto. It was past 7 a.m. I doom-scrolled Warne’s death and texted back.

‘I’m sorry, mate. Drink up.’

I first met Apu when I was living in London in 2010, on the now-defunct social platform Orkut—Third World’s Facebook. We shared a love for photography. At the time, Orkut was the leading social network across Asia, Africa and South America. People from the South Asian diaspora used it to stay connected to their motherlands.

Apu was based in Dublin, studying Biochemistry at Trinity College. I was just beginning my backpacker journey around Europe, having recently completed a degree in Commercial and Editorial Photography at RMIT. Before I left Melbourne for the UK, I DMed him on Orkut:

‘Apu, I’m moving to the UK for two years and will visit Dublin. Please, let’s catch up and take photos together.’

In India, Hindus represent roughly 79% of the population, while only about 2% are Christian. But it doesn’t matter that Apu is Hindu and comes from an upper caste Brahmin family, and that I’m Catholic. It doesn’t matter that he’s a man, and I’m a woman. It doesn’t matter that he’s an Indian living in Canada, and I’m an Indian living in Australia. Cricket is our unifying religion, one we rapaciously devour, like gulps of hot, milky, syrupy tea followed by a collective exclamation of ‘ahhhhh.’ The subcontinent has numerous faiths. We have our disputes—but cricket is the love and commitment that binds us.

A memory flashes—as if a projector is whirring, gearing up. The picture is blurred at first, then sharpens—my mind’s film reel begins to replay a specific day: I’m transported back to my family home in Kolkata, India.

It’s 1996. The Wills World Cup is here, and it’s the quarter-final match between India and Pakistan. In the D’cruze living room, we’re watching our 32-inch black and white Videocon TV. On screen, rows and rows of spectators from all walks of life wait for the match to begin in the stadium in Bangalore, Karnataka. I see the cricket grounds lined with ads for Benson & Hedges cigarettes and Cadbury Dairy Milk. In the scorching heat, from pavilion and grandstand seats to sponsored corporate boxes and budget-friendly nosebleed sections, crowds sway and dance—clapping, screaming, praying, hyperventilating, whistling—creating impromptu poetry and singsongs. My eye zooms in on the flag of India painted on so many faces. Their excitement and anticipation are palpable. That same anxiety churns in my preteen stomach.

When India plays Pakistan, the love for cricket brings both nations to a halt. It happened then. It happens now. And it always will—in the history of cricket.

*

That Saturday, the quarter-match brought the city to a standstill—like a ratty, jumpy local train from Kolkata to rural Bonga, screeching to a stop unceremoniously and hurling passengers from their seats.
The game was scheduled for an early start. Local shopkeepers, often open late, grumbled about lost business—‘We will lose money!’—yet they, too, were swept up in the anticipation. Most stayed open until midday, before surrendering to the fever that gripped the neighbourhood.
Radios crackled from verandas and windowsills. I remember the sound of shutters slamming closed in the warm March arvo. On every street, people rushed home, chappals slapping the pavement in a chorus of urgency.

It was hot, burning-the-hairs-on-my-head hot. Umbrellas-over-everyone’s-heads kind of hot. It was also a Saturday, and thank you, Jesus, Mary and Joseph (and St. Anthony, too): no school.
That morning, Ma had forced me to finish my English homework, and I—begrudgingly as those shop owners forced to close early—attempted to memorise the poem I needed to elocute for school.
Shortly after, she lathered Navratna Tel into my hair. Its coolness bloomed across my scalp as I rushed into the living room—my lanky eleven-year-old self, dressed in cotton crumpled shorts and Papa’s oversized T-shirt. I carried with me the intense herbal fragrance of japa, bringhraj, bharmi, amla— of thyme and rosemary oil—which mingled with the electrifying energy of the living room. The rickety ceiling fan groaned furiously, and the humid air lifted the oil’s cooling vapours up and around the bustle.

Pressing my tiny palms together in prayer, I muttered, ‘Hail Mary full of grace, let Tendulkar hit lots of fours and sixes, please!!!’—the relentless drone and commotion of my own overlapping thoughts finding a singular purpose.

When I opened my eyes, I was clapping along with the crowds on TV, the collective cheer swelling into a chant as the players walked onto the field. India had won the toss and chose to bat first.
All afternoon, scores and commentary blared from TVs and radios, weaving through the narrow lanes of the Christian para (neighbourhood). If you’d peered through any of the green-slatted windows, you’d have seen the same edge-of-your-seat squats, the same expressions of excitement and dread etched into every face.

I can still hear my drumming heartbeat, feel the restlessness of that one jittery leg, that twitchy eye. Feel the beads of sweat dripping from my scalp to my brow, the nail bitten off too close to the quick. The whole country held its breath as if on the brink of an anxiety attack—but it wasn’t. It was just cricket.

*

The commitment to the match begins with errands completed—groceries picked up and dropped off, arms heavy with bags from the bazaar and neighbourhood shops—everyone hurrying home before the batting begins.

Kids are bathed, their hair slicked with oil, dressed in breezy cotton to survive the heat. They’re fed and settled, while mothers, aunties, and grandmothers set huge pots of tea on the stove, letting the brew darken and deepen just enough before adding milk, sugar, ginger, cardamom, and cloves. Stacks of Britannia biscuits, purchased in bulk, sit ready to be torn open.

The swirly smoke of smooth-tailored cigarettes lurks around uncles who can afford them, while the raw, pungent stink of bidis (unprocessed tobacco) clings to those who can’t. Smoke mixes with the steamy chai aroma and curls into the warm air, settling into our clothes and into our conversations.

For cricket season, households gather in one bubbling, buzzing spot—the home transformed into a makeshift stadium—where every over, wicket out, and sixes scored dictates the mood and rhythm of the day.

These gatherings were the social glue of our Christian para; and our home in Kolkata—the compound—was one such meeting ground. This was where I lived with my parents, uncles, aunties, cousins, and grandparents—the extended D’cruze clan. The hub where we all conversed, laughed, argued, and cheered in a thick, overlapping chorus.

\
During games, Kaka (my father’s brother) wore his manky, needing-a-wash-real-bad ‘lucky’ towel wrapped around him. People avoided sitting next to him. Kaka’s ritual was bound to help Tendulkar score some solid, soaring sixes. Surely.

Papa closed his tailoring shop early the day of the ‘96 quarter-final match. Since the children didn’t have school, we were allowed to sit with the whole family. It came with a catch: alongside memorising that darn poem, I had to put in two full hours of chemistry homework. But the reward was a prized seat among the hyped-up adults. It really couldn’t get better than that.

My giddy, jet-black-hair-platted-down-by-back self plonked herself on the concrete floor, right in the thick of it. The chai. The smoke. The warm air. The blaring radio. The nervous murmurs. And it was all mine.

2014
Fast-forward eighteen years. It’s the ICC World Cup hosted by Australia and New Zealand. My best friend is performing in the opening ceremony, and thanks to her, I get to attend. It’s been 13 years since I migrated to Australia, and now the match is happening in my new hometown—right here in Melbourne, at the G.

Cricket has long faded into the background of my life. I’ve hardly attended a match in years. But as the ceremony begins, for a few seconds, my mind’s projector whirs to life: I see my family back in Kolkata, huddled around the TV, just as they always do. Through my best friend, I feel connected to them again. They know I’m here, in the audience, as they sit on the edge of their seats, glued to the screen.
My Huawei smart phone buzzes. A trail of WhatsApp messages lights up the screen:

‘Wow Didi! Cannot believe you’re at the MCG!’

‘How far are you from it? Do you live close by?’

I’m living in North Fitzroy with my best friend, I reply:
‘Just a 15-minute tram ride, bhai.’

We text back and forth in real-time as the performance continues. No radios blaring. No frantic commentary on the streets. No chappals slapping the pavement. Just a quick tap into the Cricinfo website—refresh, repeat. Scores updating in neat digital lines, replacing the crackling voices of my childhood para.
The projector whirs again…
Jadeja—royal family member turned cricket star—scores a SIX!!!!!!!
Guttural screams erupt, reverberating through the concrete walls of our L-shaped house. The whole para is there. Papa, Kaka, and their mates grab whatever they can—steel and brass utensils—hatha, khunti—and transform them into instruments of wild, unhinged joy. They bang and clang, hooting, singing.
Kids leap and twirl, stomp and spin to the rhythm of this impromptu music. Oh, Holy Cricket—you are a unifying religion indeed!
Thick, syrupy tea, swirling with steam, is passed around like blessings in an unending ceremony—the high of the game, the high from the sugar, the high of being together.
For days, weeks, we’ll replay the thrill of each crack of bat on ball, every smashed wicket, every moment of comic relief from the commentators.
What’s this, if not community prospering?

*

In 2014, I was dating a man from New Zealand. With India out of the finals, I decided to support his team. Flatscreens blared commentary and scores in sticky pubs across the city. Aussie and Kiwi accents roared from every corner. I was surrounded by white boys in board shorts and chappals—they call them thongs here—reveling in the dry, non-sweaty heat.

I tried to assimilate, to pump myself up with borrowed excitement—tried to summon the joy I once felt in that living room in Kolkata.

Pints of beer with foamy heads overflowed from icy glasses—overtired bartenders slammed them onto tabletops. Bowls of wedges with sour cream and sweet chilli sauce were passed around.

A sixer was hit. It was Australia’s Ricky Ponting. The pub erupted. A blonde dude ordered shots of tequila—or was it Jägerbombs? One was passed to me like a communion cup.

I took the shot. Chased it with a gulp of beer. Exhaled the sticky scent of hops and yeast. I closed my eyes. Imagined inhaling the scent of syrupy tea.
And just like that—I was back in 1996.

Innings Break 1996
Thakuma (my father’s mother), with her little feet, gathered and nudged us into the prayer room. After a few mutterings of the Christian rosaries, she dedicated one, especially, to the players.
Slip a little prayer.
Call up on Mother Mary.
One saint, two saints.
Which God and Goddess are the Hindus praying to?
What prayers are being offered to Allah?
Is Guru Grant Sahib ensuring we score high, beyond Pakistan’s reach?
Run, run, run, Jadeja, run like a trooper Tendulkar.
Slurp that tea.
Oil that hair.
Tie it up in a tight bun.
The house filled with relatives, the anticipation thickening. Bang, bang, bang, went the utensils—a firecracker popping and bursting in the distance.
Big steel bowls of rice crisps, coated in pork vindaloo masala, were passed around. Bits of shredded pork appeared in the crisps like revelations. Past celebrations and festivities had mostly emptied out the big fleshy, fatty pieces, leaving only the essence, the residue of the flavour.
Why was it so good? What was it about the stacked flavour of food that had reveled in its own richness for days—then ruptured open in your mouth?

*

I decided to dial Apu. I wanted to participate in his grief. His grief over Shane Warne.
To share mine over my lapsed Catholicism. My lapsed Cricketism.
I asked him, ‘Who is Dhoni? Who is playing these days, I don’t know.’
I no longer recognised the faces, just as I no longer recognised where my own excitement had gone. Kellogg’s rice bubbles had replaced rice crisps. Papa’s pork vindaloo was too rich, too unlike Thakuma’s, too like the white world. I didn’t know where to begin when it came to connecting with the cricket-watching, chai-loving Indians down under. I didn’t want meat pies slathered in sauce to celebrate the game. I didn’t want the Coles and Woolies snags. Fuck the bland snags.
Apu said he was making chai, the proper kind, in a pot with milk, sugar, and a bit of ginger.
‘Why don’t you make some, too, Jess?’
I dunked my masala tea bag from the Indian grocery shop in Holden Street in a cup of boiling water, and we reflected on why I’d removed myself from cricket entirely.
‘The love I had is the love I ignored, Apu. I ignored it because I was alone.’
I confessed as if confessing my sins to the priest back in Kolkata’s convent school. I didn’t have much community living here; I bargained.
After moving to Australia—an only child living in the far-from-everything eastern suburbs of Frankston in the early 2000s—cricket had not been my priority. My parents worked egregiously long hours trying to provide for me and my family back home. I diverted my attention to other interests. I developed an antipathy for sport. Contracted tall-poppy syndrome, caring only for art and music, and took up photography. My mates were European Australians—predominantly goths, metalheads, and artists. I suffered from the hipster disorder of anti-sport sentiment. I distanced myself from the sport and the community. I couldn’t connect to its culture here. I didn’t give a shit, mate. Maybe because there was no one to give a shit with?
I travelled back to 1996 as Apu narrated Shane Warne’s excellent spin ball techniques. I recalled how the Bengalis gathered to debrief and analyse the game in post-victory bliss.
India had won the game against Pakistan, and despite Sri Lanka winning the World Cup that year, that match remained one of the most memorable for me.
Discussions erupted from every corner of the house about the great and poor performances of the cricketers. Rational and irrational theories were tossed around: Who had taken bribes? Which sportsman’s wife was leaving them? Would their wives distract them by being in the stadium?
I still hear their overlapping voices, echoing through the walls, as if descending from on high.
The rounds of tea were endless.
Sometimes, I grew irritated at the thought of Pishis (aunties) and Ma having to be in the kitchen—boiling the water, brewing the tea, adding the sugar—missing out on the discussions, while the Kakas and Papas waffled on.
At the time, I didn’t fully understand the gender gap, but I felt it. I wanted more female voices screaming with me. But Thakuma was there—her sole presence so steady, it had kept that thrumming energy alive for years.

January 2025

It’s peak summer in Melbourne, which means the weather swings from glaring sun on Tuesday to pouring rain on Wednesday. I’ve just returned from a South Asian meet-up where we all spoke of isolation within our community. How the different states, faiths, cultures, and castes struggle to mix, connect, and see each other as one. We share a collective hope of changing that.
I dial Papa.
‘Papa, I have tickets to a cricket match at the MCG. Shall we go?’
‘Of course.’

What Kept You?

by Raaza Jamshed

Giramondo

ISBN 9781923106413

Reviewed by ROUMINA PARSA

The monster in Frankenstein is a literate creature. He becomes fluent in three languages within his first year of existence, giving him the preternatural gift of communicating directly with his creator. 

‘If I cannot inspire love,’ he tells Victor, ‘I will cause fear’ (1). 

But in screen adaptations, the creature is non-speaking. He is ossified in joints and feeling. Burning cottages down not from the pain of his own unhomeliness but simple malice. Rendered without agency or reason, he is made monstrous by his non-speech, leaving the audience with only an image of his destruction. 

If defying nature mythologises new monsters, then defining their essence is also a constructed practice. It depends entirely on their representation; on who is speaking when telling the story. This is an understanding that Raaza Jamshed brings to What Kept You?, a novel roaming with beasts of language and with hauntings of intergenerational trauma. The protagonist, Jahan, is an immigrant from Lahore, a city that has witnessed and survived the sufferings of the India Pakistan partition. Her ancestors come from Kashmir, a state divided and controlled by both countries as a result of post-imperial cartographies in the subcontinent. This political violence is a monster of its own. But alongside memory and the mythical, Jamshed also explores another kind of created monster: the migrant. Spoken of and for, isolated, othered and silenced. Feminist philosopher Kelly Oliver says gaining subjectivity as an “othered” individual requires becoming a speaking subject (2). Raaza Jamshed writing her novel is an act of becoming a speaking subject. My reviewing her novel is an act of becoming a speaking subject. Yet, subjectivity can only be gained when the dominant group ‘recognises something familiar in that other…when [they] can see that the other is a person too’ (3, p.9). It’s not enough to merely speak. The unmuted monster – the migrant, the other – must also be understood. 

Jahan is aware of these nuances of speech. Like Raaza Jamshed, she lives in Sydney with her Middle Eastern husband, volunteering at creative writing classes for children from various backgrounds. Stories, Jahan teaches, can be one’s compass. In the midst of grieving her Nani (grandmother), processing a miscarriage and navigating an approaching bushfire, Jahan returns to the formative tales inherited from her matriarchs. Tales of girls going missing in the night. Demonic figures. Moving shadows and houses built on bones. The result is a series of letters from Jahan to her late Nani, a meditation on which stories to carry and which to abandon.  

Like much anti-colonial literature written in English, the language in this novel is required to turn against itself, to do ‘a different cultural work’ (4, p.4) than that historically inherent. At times Jamshed’s execution of this is clear, focused. Jahan’s mother adopts a British accent to ‘tell someone off without raising her voice’(p101). A student mocks Jahan’s enunciation, ‘cuntinue’(p40). Simultaneously, Jahan insists, English is a toothless conduit. It’s a ‘second tongue that my country forced down my throat’ (p159). English is removed from ‘the abstract coils of fear that could only be made concrete in Urdu’ (p135) – her Nani’s warnings of ‘beasts. Ghouls. Demons. Monsters’ (p134). The historical power of English is invoked in order to undercut it. Appropriated only to highlight its own imposing inadequacy when another language is held at the centre.

When non-English words are used – as is the case with Urdu and Arabic by Jamshed – the linguistic disruption expands. The reader is called to attention. “Foreign” words made natural to the novel’s landscape cause a specific unsettling: reader turned migrant. (Or even more startling, native English speaker turned migrant.) As Jahan reflects on her youth in Pakistan, the reader is immersed within a different time, space and language, creating an almost fantastical context. Location becomes a metaphysical meeting point where it is the English speaker, and not the other, who is suspended in incomprehension. 

Teamed with first-person narration directed solely towards her Nani, Jahan signals to the reader that they are a witness to rather than the intended recipient of her words. It’s a layered rejection of Kelly Oliver’s theoretical path towards subjectivity. ‘Story, perhaps, is the only English word I’ve found whole, unsullied by insufficiency,’ says Jahan, ‘it conjures the word house, one storey stacked upon another’ (p12). It feels purposeful that she doesn’t instead use the word home. A refreshing sidestep of that old question, on what it really means for a migrant and every answering variation of both/ neither/ either/or. I’m not writing to be understood, Jahan seems to be saying. In fact, I am sacrificing understanding for an attempt at a truer expression. For the building of something new, unceded, unclaimed. 

Such is the ultimate migrant goal. An existence outside the parameters of performance. With a background in architecture, Jahan enacts this in the literal sense. She walks Sydney’s streets and imagines them altered. Draws parks, trees and swings in different configurations. Buildings are toppled by her pen. Elsewhere, grass and weeds overtake busy roads. Sometimes, she’s in the sketches. But most of the time, she’s omitted, ‘as if only [her] absence could make the scenes whole’ (p45). Again, the air of the fantastical is summoned. A subversion of the “invasion” of migrants, our presence so quiet it turns us invisible. And even further, an invisibility that can also be neutral, even joyous: ‘I yelled ‘whale!’ in the steamy dusk light when I saw something grey and sleek break through the water’s surface and was glad no one had heard me’ (p117). 

Yet, like using English to critique English, the fantastical can too easily sit in contradiction with the material. Maintaining subversions requires holding a constant mode of destabilisation; in adhering to a set of rules that are not only unreal, but in defiance of those that are. It is, somehow, Frankenstein’s made-up heart beating, and also feeling love. Writing about migration in English in a way that rejects the dominant mode of thinking is by nature oxymoronic. This is not to say it is impossible. It requires building a new world, or at least, imagining one. To turn invisible in this world is to placate. The alternative world of What Kept You? is largely just as oppressive.

The fictive power of What Kept You? struggles to carry out its general political ideas through to the specific. What Ursula Robin-Shaw has observed in antipodean literature as a reliance on the ‘mere suggestion of the thing’ that just ‘adequately satisfies consumer expectations of politicised representation’ (5). As such, it ends up reverting back to traditional “racialised” writing that is over-interested in the textures of diversity rather than its dimensions. Its tastes and smells, its touchstones, its traumas. Such writing appears as a consequence of Jahan’s personal distance from the cultural elements she means to make commentary on. She describes eating a dolma as transporting her to ‘balconies draped in rustling gauze; the book, Orientalism, from my third-year syllabus suddenly alive on my tongue’ (p60). It’s an ironic reference that undoes itself not only in the context of the book, but within the very sentence it’s written in. Middle East equals dolma equals Edward Saiid. Yellow tinged filter and chaotic bazaar implied. 

Jahan’s core driving force, that people are more than the stories assigned to them, continues to be undermined almost any time she departs from self-representation. She describes her exes as a series of nationalities: ‘A freckled South African boy… The Indian boy… A Chinese boy…’ (p63). Our introduction to her husband, Ali, is through his implied possessiveness: his ‘dark eyes’ imploring her to discard a small bag of seeds a gardener with ‘bright blue eyes’ gifted to her (p.7). His callous response to her miscarriage, ‘it is just a bunch of cells’, is attributed to the fact that ‘in his first tongue a foetus remained a ghost until it crossed the threshold of time and shape’ (p163). In direct opposition to Jahan’s racialised conservatism, Jahan’s one white friend, Ingrid, dresses in men’s clothes and binds her chest; a ‘beautiful woman bent on looking like a man’. Unable to wholly create the fantastical reality, Jamshed must borrow from our existing one. Unfortunately, this also includes our shaky stereotypes that are built on simplified binaries. 

If what’s initially at stake is, as the blurb states, ‘the radical freedom of choosing one’s own ending’, by novel’s end it’s unclear what Jahan has “chosen” that is so radical. The letter structure acts as a trap. The post-humous dialogue with her grandmother binds her inextricably to the demands of political exile, the leaver expected to always look back on those left. She is directed constantly to the past, to things that already exist, even after they no longer do. The reader’s takeaway is absolutes, like, language is an uncrossable divide. Middle Eastern men are cruel and backwards. All white people have blue eyes and blonde hair and Australia is bushfires and jarrah and Brown women are always escaping and existing for their female ancestors. 

It’s not that these elements, in isolation, can’t be true. Rather, it’s that with each repetition this particular combination of opposing elements forms a familiar narrative. Diversity again comes to mean a feeling. Foreignness, pining, suffering, existing within the same story which we must try to write out of. We remain as Jahan says of her lost great-grandparents ‘suspended in a state of transit, endlessly en route, [our] footsteps carving a path through time and space, never arriving’ (p22). Certainly, this book approaches an alternative. Stories can be one’s compass and English is a toothless conduit. Frankenstein speaks and so do I: the migrant as a new kind of anti-hero. But when Jahan concludes her journey by joining her husband in the thick of the bushfire, I’m not sure where that version of her goes. Back into the same void of the missing girls she dreams of maybe; loyal to their own demise, but at least once, defiant in a way that could be fantastical. 

NOTES

1. Shelley, M. (2012) Frankenstein. London: Penguin
2. Oliver, K. (2001) Witnessing: beyond recognition. London: University of Minnesota Press
3. ibid. 
4. Ashcroft, B. (2001) Post-colonial transformation. London: Routledge
5. Robinson-Shaw, Ursula. (2022) Dissociating the Novel. Sydney Review of Books.

ROUMINA PARSA is an Iranian-Australian writer based in Melbourne/ Naarm. She appeared in the 2024 Emerging Writers’ Festival, was shortlisted for the 2022 Catalyse Nonfiction Prize, and her work has previously featured in Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Meanjin and more.