Author: mascara

Cannon

Lee Lai

Giramondo

ISBN 9781923106406

Reviewed by ISABEL HOWARD
 

The first thing I noticed when I received Lee Lai’s Cannon, slipping it out of its envelope in my quiet living room, was how heavy it was. A large, squarish slab, I imagined it could cause some serious damage if it landed on my toes. Or squish a large cockroach, if I had nothing else at hand. 

Sitting on the couch, I was around twenty pages in when I noticed something strange. There was a weight resting in my body, not unlike the book itself: dense, ungainly, with hard edges that feel awkward in a human hand. It made me want to curve my body inward, or hold my breath, like I was preparing myself for some kind of onslaught. So, I closed the book. I got up and did things I’m supposed to do. Empty the dishwasher. Fold the laundry. As I moved around, the feeling shrank. But it didn’t disappear. 

The life of the titular character, Cannon (known by her family as Lucy) is the focus of Lai’s graphic novel. In the very first scene, before we even reach the title page, she stands in a restaurant, surrounded by broken furniture, shattered crockery and spilled condiments. She’s struck with panic as she takes in the scene, but before abandoning it, she smashes one last plate. 

Rewinding to three months earlier, the novel starts again with a portrait of Cannon’s day-to-day. She’s a Chinese-Canadian, queer young woman who takes care of her ageing gung-gung (grandfather) and works as a chef. She watches horror films with her best friend, Trish, and she runs regularly to a podcast that tells her to ‘release tension’ and ‘breathe’. Her peers refer to her as ‘stoic’ and ‘reliable,’ and her expressions are flat and devoid of emotion, but as the story progresses, we learn that Cannon’s calmness is on a precipice. Magpies gather around her, which no one else can see. Her work goes unappreciated, her hurts go unacknowledged, and she begins having panic attacks as her composure falls away. When her friendship with Trish is about to breakdown and her boss makes a pass at her, she cannot take anymore. Her anger overflows, and she trashes the restaurant in a violent episode where the pages are flooded with red. Afterwards, she slowly begins to rebuild, having learned what pushed her over the edge. 

Lai’s graphic novel is preoccupied with responsibility and rage. Until Cannon’s breakdown, her efforts to be dutiful and unflappable are relentless. She cleans for her gung-gung while her mother ignores her texts. She cooks for Trish, who secretly uses Cannon for creative inspiration. She tries to keep the peace at work while avoiding her lecherous boss, and when her co-worker describes Cannon’s care for her gung-gung as ‘wholesome’, Cannon responds with ‘I just have to do it’. Despite the clear frustration in Cannon’s silences and facial expressions, she acts sensibly and responsibly, refusing to acknowledge pain, accept praise, or ask for help, even when her feet begin blistering, and her doctor asks, ‘my goodness, what have you been doing to yourself?’ But acting in accordance with what other people want and stymieing her own feelings are what build her anger to the point of violence. Trish pinpoints this right before Cannon breaks down in the restaurant:

‘It’s not my problem that you’ve sidelined all of your twenties to deal with other people’s shit. There’s no virtue in being so solitary and self-effacing and resentful, you know.’

Cannon asks questions about how we fulfil our obligations to our family and friends, how we address our own wellbeing, and whether we must sacrifice either. These questions are likely to show up in every life, but their significance in Cannon’s echoes what some describe as ‘the eldest daughter’ experience, where daughters, particularly those in Asian families, feel pressure to take on caretaking and emotional responsibilities from a young age (Chau, Vadakumchery). 

Upon reaching Trish’s words above, I realised these questions were also, in fact, the source of my own discomfort. Having grown up in an Asian immigrant family, these pressures are disturbingly familiar: should I prioritise my personal needs, or the needs of my loved ones? Should I express my own hurt, even if it risks destroying a relationship? Lai does not delve into an examination of how gender, race or sexuality may factor into these questions, but the uneasiness I felt shows just how effectively she brings them to life. 

Riding the wave of her anger, a slightly different Cannon emerges after the trashing of the restaurant. She tells Trish to delete the writing about her, breaks off a confusing relationship with her co-worker, and insists on a response from her mother. After over two-hundred pages of compliance, her confrontations are satisfying to watch, and in response, her friends and loved ones shift toward her rather than away: several coworkers cover up her wrecking of the restaurant, her mother starts engaging with her gung-gung, and Trish takes care of Cannon’s meals. This shift paints anger as a tool for catharsis and communicating one’s needs, rather than one for inflicting damage, or cutting people and responsibilities ‘out’. Even Trish’s response to hearing about the magpies, which have always appeared when Cannon feels overwhelmed, reiterates the idea of rage as helpful: ‘They’re probably just looking out for you.’ 

In a final scene, Cannon receives the news that her gung-gung has died in hospital. At this point, I wondered if his death would be framed as some kind of ‘freedom’ for Cannon: his care is potentially the most onerous of her responsibilities, which are already in quick decline. However, after hanging up the phone, she sits alone and cries, surrounded again by magpies. At the end of a novel that largely presents Cannon’s efforts as challenging and unappreciated, her grief complicates the idea that care becomes a burden when it is unreciprocated. 

I have not read many graphic novels, but Lai’s skill with the form is obvious even to me. The writing is almost exclusively dialogue, and her illustrations are deceptively simple: black and white, with minimal shading on soft, curved faces and bodies. Wordless panels, both close-up and wide, evoke lonely silence and unease, while moments of fury are punctuated with swathes of red. Throughout, Lai skilfully shows how Cannon’s relationships transform, often via conversations that feel innocuous until the characters’ expressions and quiet reactions are revealed. Additionally, Cannon’s racial and queer identity is acknowledged on the page without interrogation, making for a sincere, refreshing representation of realities we often do not see in fiction. 

Rather than an escape, Cannon is a painfully and earnestly realistic graphic novel. It explores Cannon’s struggles with her commitments, her restrained anger, her fraying friendships, and ageing family, and her emotions are so vivid that I could feel her anxiety spiralling across each panel. It centres Cannon’s perspective as a queer, second-generation Chinese woman with a level of honesty that feels rare, but every experience and character is so fleshed out that the novel’s strength becomes its ability to show life’s tenderness and cruelty, and the mundane parts in-between. For that reason, I think there is much more that could be said about Cannon besides the things that struck me hardest. But now that I know what Lai’s capable of, I look forward to reading her past work, and anything she releases in the future.  
 
References

Chau, Shannon. ‘The curse of the (eldest) Asian daughter.’ The Oxford Student, 20 January 2024. www.oxfordstudent.com/2024/01/20/the-curse-of-the-eldest-asian-daughter. 
Vadakumchery, Tracy. ‘Is It Eldest Daughter Syndrome, Or Is It Something Else?’ The Bad Indian Therapist, 29 October 2025. thebadindiantherapist.com/indian-therapist-blog/south-asian-eldest-daughter-syndrome.
 
ISABEL HOWARD is a Filipino Australian writer based in Nipaluna / Hobart. Her work has previously been published by Mascara Literary Review, Contemporary Art Tasmania’s Journal, kindling & sage, and more. Having completed her Honours in creative writing at the University of Tasmania, she is currently working towards completing a young adult fiction novel.

Bathypelagia

by Debbie Lim

Cordite Books

ISBN 978-0-6457616-6-5

A review by LISA COLLYER

Bathypelagia is Debbie Lim’s first poetry collection (a chapbook Beastly Eye  appeared in 2012, with Vagabond Press) and is similarly preoccupied with the blurred line between human animals and wild fauna. If Bathypelagia is read in the context of production of the global shit show, the descent into the midnight zone seems a place of respite. There is a domestic feel to these poems, following a lover, a child, or the petrified remains of ordinary people in the wake of a volcanic eruption. The descent into the farthest and furthest depths of the ocean also hint to rising seawaters in the context of the Anthropocene, and the necessity to look towards havens of resilience when the lights go out.

The first section of the collection, ‘Midnight zone’ begins profoundly in the bathyal zone and is a pragmatic exploration of romance in the dark. The poem ‘Love Below 2000 Metres’ (p.3) is sensually survivalist, as sex takes place grappling in the dark, wrought out of desperation to feed, to hide, to spawn, and accidentally consummate.

It is difficult to speak of love at these depths.
Instead we live by other callings: attraction, hunger,

a fatal curiosity. Attempts at transcendence merely
destroy us. The only way to survive: make a bower

out of darkness. Or invent your own light:
worm of deception, burning weed, false ship of safety.

‘Love Below 2000 Metres’
(p.3)

If transcendence is the goal of art, then Lim’s poems are the benchmark to erasing the spatial borders between beings. In ‘My Son the cephalopod’ (pp.8-9) the zoomorphic characterisation of the small child slipstreams between octopus and infant. The camouflage of beast or baby, only a mother could love (fuelled by chemicals) with its oversized head, and mercurial moods: love and hate sidle. The poem tracks the tireless work of a parent dealing with the dependent yet independent-seeking child: their tentacles grasping for choke hazards, or projecting food for wall art. Finally, the parent’s attempts at constraint are tentacles cradled beneath the covers and the embrace of sea swell.

‘Every night
I rattle on about the moon, tuck tentacles down
and attempt to rock in a way that resembles
the movement, the approximate weight
of an ocean.’

‘My son the cephalopod’
(pp.8-9)

In the witching hour, men sleep, in a unique ecosystem on the bottom of the ocean while the speaker (perhaps female) observes and acts: a nod to the lion share caring load women carry. There is talk of coupling for reproduction and a setting free of offspring. Occasionally there is longing when a flash mob of top feeders or a sinking carcass bedazzles. But a resigned lack of romance prevails, except the sensory rhythmic patterns gently lulling the reader into a comforting acceptance of life without light.

Sometimes I miss the old life.
Occasionally, we receive fresh news
from above (a flash migration, the latest slick)
but the buzz rarely lasts. Then it’s back

to the grind as usual.

‘A Bar in Bathypelagia’
(pp.10-11)

Lim’s animal explorations are landed too, in museums or conserved in fossils, indicating the longevity of life beyond the watery depths, in poems, such as ‘A Taxidermied Sunfish’ (p.12) and ‘The Fossil Maker’ (pp.13). This continuous lineage works elegantly with the themes of reproduction, memory, and culture that emanate across this sumptuous collection, with its lullaby rhythms toing-and-froing like the baby being swooned to sleep. We too, are invited to sink and accept the darkness, make our own light, and find ways to cope.

There is tension in the second part ‘Fin, Bone’ where the domestic transforms to a suffocating cage where untamed mythic beasts seek freedom in a series of intertextual explorations. The blistering poem, ‘Love Note from the Medusa’ (p.21) uses the first-person speaker to occupy the gorgon in kinky overtures, one who speaks of agency and unyielding desire.

‘Underestimated,
I trail my tangled
boudoir, chains
lit up with toxins.
I am (in fact) not
vain, simple self-
sufficient, loyal
to the old currents
and my own
slow lacy appetites.’

‘Love Note from the Medusa’
(p. 21)

Transformation also comes in the form of bound feet, in a numbered poem, that reads like an instruction manual with imperatives on how to turn feet into lotus bulbs. The complicit mutilation is instigated by the mother on the daughter and continues (until outlawed), following cultural traditions, in an eerily prosaic tone. Beauty and abjection embrace and repel beneath the sole. There is an intersectional feminist probe: of gender, culture and class here, where the bound feet transform the woman with lotus feet into one, who is waited upon, rather than being the one to serve.

4.
Every second day
turn your ears to stone. Unwrap
the bandage and ignore her crying

as you re-bind them,
each time tighter. Remind yourself,
as your own mother did,
that there is no such thing as a truly
liberated foot.’

‘How to Grow Feet of Golden Lotus’ (pp. 32-34)

Lim’s poems converse with one another, often with the the motif of stone. Whether it be ‘ears to stone’ (‘How to Grow Feet of Golden Lotus’ (pp. 32-34) or passive representations of ‘Women in classical Chinese love poems’ (p.35) to the petrified ‘Bodies of Pompeii’ (p.36). Recall the Medusa? The mise-en-scene of an unexpected domestic death are bodies mid-sentence, crawling away, and halted by the infamous volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in 79 BC. The abrupt endings of each line mimic the truncated lives, yet entombed in legend, ordinary lives now transcended to museum artefacts.

‘Unburied, they weigh more than bone ever could.
They have shaken off the ash and refuse to rest. So many

stopped limbs. Mouth holes, eye holes, a balled fist.’

‘Bodies of Pompeii’ (p.36)

The concluding section ‘Air’ draws breath and brings life to ground, beginning with our museum obsession with exhibiting exotica. The violent romance of ‘Hauling the Sunfish into the Gallery’ (p. 45) speaks to the human desire of scientific classification and public curiosity. We are challenged to see our perverse curios as rebirthed, while the ungainly wrenching from the ocean is cleverly wrought in a one-way bargaining agreement between collector and fish.

‘I have noticed the fused bones of your mouth
set in their small surprised o. How, tentative,

you near my gaping window. I say only this:

think of it as a second birth, your odd calling.’

‘Hauling the Sunfish into the Gallery’ (p. 45)

Lim’s poems often sit side by side in a conversation of opposites, like ‘Captive’ (p. 50) where death (a blue ringed octopus) is caught then humanely released, and ‘Praying Mantis’ (p.51) the only living thing in a brush of dead wood. Or ‘Gift of the Sloth (p.52) another instruction manual on occupying tree habitat, and the way in which the fur of the sloth is habitat to ‘beetles, moths and mites’ (p. 52). This poem is juxtaposed to ‘Etiquette for Trees’ (p. 53) with directives of courtesy for the sake of safety in polite (arboreal) society.

‘Respect the branch tips
of others. Learn to get by
on minimal sleep (which is, in any case,
intended for the weak and mobile).
But travel your roots boldly
through darkness and to great depths’

‘Etiquette for Trees’ (p. 53)

Lim’s Bathypelagia is a collection of multidimensional expansiveness. The auricles of an ear, the habitat of sloth fur, or the plumbs of the ocean are occupied by beings of fur, fin, and flesh interchangeably. The domestic zone (a cage of sorts) is transcended with imagination that migrates beyond atmospheres, beneath and above. The lines between these zones are blurred and the status of beings transcended. A bound foot is a girl mutilated, yet elevated; or the noxious fumes of a volcano elevate everyday life to exhibit status.
 
LISA COLLYER is the author of two poetry collections, Gold Digger (2025) and How To Order Eggs Sunny Side Up (2023), the latter being short-listed for The Dorothy Hewett Award, and both published with Life Before Man Books. Her personal essay, ‘Prolonged Exposure’ is published in the anthology, Women of a Certain Courage (2025) with Fremantle Press. Her poem, ‘The Grape Pickers’ was short-listed for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize (2025). She was a recent artist in residence for The National Trust of W.A. and Bundanon Art Museum. She is currently writing a literary novel on grief, booze and jazz.

Growing Up Indian in Australia

Edited by Aarti Betigeri,

Black Inc

Reviewed by MISBAH WOLF

 

Growing Up Indian in Australia is a collection that resists neat summary. What it offers instead is an accumulation of lived moments—memories, ruptures, negotiations of identity—that sit between cultures, between generations, and between belonging and estrangement. The stories do not attempt to resolve these tensions. Rather, they dwell within them, allowing multiple, sometimes contradictory experiences to coexist.

Reading this collection, I found myself engaging as a reader, but as someone who also exists between worlds—raised in 1980s Brisbane with a Pakistani father who did not speak much English and a white mother. Many of these stories felt deeply familiar to me. Not identical, but recognisable in their emotional texture: the small humiliations, the negotiations, the quiet adaptations. There is a shared undercurrent across the anthology that belonging is not simply given, but continually shaped through memory, environment and social expectation.

One of the most striking formal elements of the collection is the inclusion of childhood photographs alongside many of the stories. These images create a subtle but powerful dialogue between past and present. It feels as though the adult voice is in conversation with the child self—the child finally being given space to speak, to be seen, and to be understood. The result is not nostalgic, but reflective and, at times, reparative—it is in a true sense the Hero/Heroine’s Journey.

Across the anthology, many of the stories begin with a single, cutting line that anchors the reader in a moment of exposure. In Shamna Sanam’s Dual Identities Down Under, the opening—“Ever since primary school, I have felt out of touch with my Australian peers”—immediately establishes a sense of distance. This is grounded in everyday experiences: bringing idli and coconut chutney to school with embarrassment, anticipating comments about smell, and being asked reductive questions such as “Do you speak Indian?” or whether Indians “eat curry every day.”

What is particularly striking is how these external moments become internalised. Sanam poses a series of questions: “Is it bad if I keep hold of my culture? … Is it bad if I hate Vegemite? … Is it bad if I’m not the smartest in maths and science?” These culminate in the more confronting question: “Is it bad if I and other Indian women, men and children don’t meet your standards?” Here, Australianness is revealed not as neutral, but as a set of expectations against which difference is measured. At the same time, the piece moves toward a more reflective position, acknowledging that some of these early encounters are shaped by childhood ignorance and that identity does not need to be hidden in order to belong.

Michelle Cahill’s A Chutney Alphabet of Anglo-Indian Spells approaches identity through fragmentation, using the structure of an alphabet to move between memory, language and experience. Familiar elements—food, family, ritual—sit alongside moments of racialisation and erasure. The line “My Australian school friends overlooked the dark history that textbooks erased” situates personal memory within a broader national context, where histories are selectively remembered or omitted, and we do indeed live in a country that was invaded and an entire history and place never ceded.

Sharon Verghis’ A Tale of Three Beaches reconfigures the Australian beach as a shifting and politically charged space. What begins as a site of “camouflage and acceptance and a tribe” becomes, in the context of the Cronulla riots, a site of exclusion. The movement between Klang and suburban Sydney highlights the sensory dislocation of migration, contrasting dense, layered soundscapes with an almost artificial quiet. The story ultimately gestures toward a form of reclamation, suggesting that identity is something carried across places rather than fixed within them.

In Natasha Pinto’s When I’m in Australia, and When There’s No One I Know, identity is shaped through inherited memory- the memories we carry from our mothers, our fathers and those silences too. The opening image of a mother falling near a train station, alone and unaided, becomes foundational—an expression of vulnerability that carries across generations. The pressure to belong manifests through code-switching, altered accents, and the striking image of a child flipping her hand to reveal a “white” palm as proof of belonging.

Questions of gender and performance emerge in Hardeep Dhanoa’s Feeling Free in Kings Cross, where the expectations of being a “good Indian girl” are set against the desire for autonomy and self-expression. Similarly, Kishor Napier-Raman’s An Incomplete Guide to Every Type of Brown Guy in the West uses humour and classification to catalogue different masculine archetypes, revealing the confusion and contradictions that arise within diasporic identity.

Kavita Bedford’s Practising Yoga explores cultural appropriation and internal dislocation in a globalised context. The narrator reflects on the experience of seeing her cultural heritage reframed through wellness spaces, where “200-hour Anglo yoga teachers” become authoritative voices. The question—“Just because I can say the words and have the blood, does it really mean I have some claim over them?”—captures a deep ambivalence. The story moves between these spaces and broader geopolitical realities, creating a dissonance that culminates in the repeated line, “I am scared, I am scared, I am scared.” The question that follows—“What is the child’s pose for being trapped between worlds?”—resonates as one of the central tensions of the collection.

In Rachael Jacobs’ My Other Mother, the relationship to the “motherland” is framed as both formative and confronting. The narrator’s encounter with India as a child introduces an awareness of inequality, complexity and responsibility that cannot be undone. “The knowledge of the life you could have lived is a blessing and a curse,” she writes, capturing the enduring impact of that awareness. The story moves beyond pity, instead holding both the beauty and difficulty of that connection.

Across the collection, there are also quieter but persistent traces of longer histories—colonial entanglements, cultural translation, and the afterlives of empire. These are not always foregrounded, but they are felt in the tensions that run through the narratives, in the sense that identity is shaped not only by personal experience but by historical forces that continue to reverberate.

With its range of voices, Growing Up Indian in Australia does not attempt to present a singular account of identity. Instead, it offers multiplicity—stories that sit alongside one another without needing to resolve into a unified whole. What emerges is a collection that creates space: for reflection, for contradiction, and for voices that articulate what it means to live between worlds- liminal but very deeply corporeal.

 
MISBAH WOLF is a poet and performer, and the co-editor of Crip Stories. She was shortlisted in the Wesley Michel Wright prize for Rooftops in Karachi. She has received a grant from Creative Victoria, and is a Red Room Poetry Fellow in 2026.

The Drop Off

by David Stavanger

Upswell

ISBN 978-0-6459840-8-8

Reviewed by PAUL SCULLY

David Stavanger’s The Drop Off is a reflection on divorce and shared parenthood and a paean of sorts to his son, interrupted by expressions of world weariness with the institutions of modern capitalism, an alternative alienation, and near-ekphrastic reactions to a painting by Marcel Duchamp and a photograph George Karger (of Marcel Duchamp). Stavanger’s evident love and admiration for his son, to whom the work is dedicated, offsets the bitterness that surfaces occasionally and withstands the humour that tends more to sublimate than expunge the irony. It is hard to gauge when the divorce poems might have been written given his son is almost an adult by the end of the collection.

Stylistically, The Drop Off is a collage of forms–verse and prose poetry, satire, the recompilation of found or invented phrases, redactions, what might pass as micro-fiction and even a table of wordplay he labels ‘Dad/Bingo’, and is framed as one continuous collection. Within that, ‘The Drop Off’ is a sequence of sixteen parts that starts at no. 3. It is prefaced by ‘The Chess Game’, the first of the Duchamp poems where, perhaps somewhat tartly, “we’re willing to sacrifice our Queens” and “One day we’ll play/without consent order/on the outskirts of Paris” (p11); ‘I’ve been thinking about your birth lately’, in which “I crave the crown of fine hair, the physicality of the child” (p12) and “It’s hard to say what kind of parents we will become./ There’s no way to inoculate against this future heartbreak” (p13), the second line of retroactive effect; and ‘Joint Statement’, which abounds in seemingly cut-out “post-truth” (p14) euphemisms that attempt a positive and mutual gloss on the decision to separate, e.g. “parting ways is as natural as procreating” (p14) and “we have mutually resolved to end this transaction amicably” (p14) yet, at the same time, “it’s really hard to hard-launch this divorce” (p15). This is humour with a sardonic edge and pleads for a human place in the production process that divorce has become.

‘The Drop Off’ itself chronicles the immediate aftermath of the divorce, that “modern dilemma” (p16), the new rituals of the drop off, the pick-up and the “duck pond” (p18) as neutral territory, the recalibration of Father’s Day, a move interstate and chaperoned flights, a third person “care navigator” (p27) to oversee exchanges, the emergence of new partners and the distance that might overtake communications with an ex-partner. The final stanza of this sequence (p31) captures the dislocation and loss engendered by these experiences but also the acceptance that his son needs to chart a way through them to find their own place:

Last night you dreamt about receiving a call
requesting you come down to the station
to verify your son’s identity. You offered
the officer memories, together and apart.
The dream police don’t accept these as proof.
They show you a photo of who your son could be.
When you are awake, they are free to choose their fate.

Stavanger changes tack for the next twenty pages or so and, four poems in, to prose formats. As suggested earlier, these changes are not announced by a new section, but are offered possibly as the next movement in a symphony of sorts that will return eventually to its underlying theme in later movements. Things are not as sequestered as this sounds and concerns occasionally bleed across each other as you might expect in something that is as both conscious and sub-conscious as poetry. An alternative take might be that the poet has been rendered generally out-of-joint with the world.

This is not intended to invalidate the concerns he expresses which range across the environment, militarism and commerce. The personal also intrudes in a variety of medical settings. Examples of the poetry here include:

If it burns, tax it. If it keeps burning, regulate it. And if it stops
burning, subsidise it. I am sick of the government being in my life.

– ‘[We’re going to get nailed]’, p33.

Henry Kissinger is dead.
Never a war he didn’t adore.
‘Credible military threats’ can be subdued.
– ‘Disconcerting tendencies’, p34.

… our lungs are an auditorium of unsustainable applause.

– ‘recline’, p36.

“The kidney that was removed when I was seventeen
is still out there seeking sensations, ghosts of organs

[3]

never mature into a functioning self”
– ‘Cystometrogram’, p38.

… Dentistry VS Psychiatry. Being in people’s mouths versus being in people’s heads. Psychiatrists =
no expensive equipment or supples. Still get to drill holes in people. Dentist = based on science and a
love of soft drinks. Still get to have an intimate relationship with someone in a chair.

– ‘← Intensifier →’, p42

The oscillation between oculist and occultist,
the crumpled coat on the road vs a dead body
[knowledge of the measurable/knowledge of the hidden].

– ‘Vision’, p50

The two currents merge more fully in ‘The Experience Economy’, which is presented in square-bracketed paragraphs and as extended, satirical wordplay. The poem journeys from childbirth, “a destination”, where “goods and services” are required as well as “unpaid labour” for the “assembly” work, the product of “the sensation of desire as existential demand, delivery as constant supply” and the “first-born … a non-fungible commodity” (pp54-57). The poem continues in this vein until “a shared calendar” emerges where “coloured squares will remind you who you planned to love”.

After traversing topics that range from swimming with his son, jaffas at the cinema, almost anachronistic perhaps, the Lindt café siege, a previously unknown sister from an out-of-wedlock relationship of the poet’s mother, kale as a substitute mother, buying a dog, child support, Texan relatives and the life of a tenant, the collection arrives at another important sequence with numbered instalments and concomitant with the parent theme, ‘Fifteen ways to be erased’, co-written by Stavanger and his son, Saul. It is an exploration of bullying, which “is a sea of faces, morphing and changing. Its only desire is to consume itself is consume itself” (p85). It is also an experience shared in different ways and times by father and son. There are aspects of refuge, subterfuge, moving schools and tendencies for authority figures to doubt the veracity of the report and advise parent and son to ignore name-calling. The latter are perhaps as damaging as the bullying–“Hesitation marks appear in the margins of my son’s learning. They begin to doubt words, even when they were written down or bolded in emails or on their own lips …Every adult … becomes unreliable” (p83). ‘Montage’ offers a happy ending of sorts where the protagonists’ relationship attains a warming and assured integrity–“David is holding the compression of time. Both hands are closed and open. Stills are spilling from his mouth (positive and negative). There are no other props or cast nearby” (p100).

David Stavanger is a wry commentator with a propensity and fondness for bons mots, but who nonetheless feels deeply. For me the two strands are not always double-helical, nor is the interweaving of the social with the intimate across poems in this unbroken collection. This is probably as much personal preference as criticism. What cannot be disputed is Stavanger’s love for his son and their graduation into a self-sustained life. Love strikes me as the ultimate destination of this collection, and we can all arrive happily there.

 
PAUL SCULLY is a Sydney-based poet with four published collections, the latest being The Literary Detective and Other Crimes published by Bonfire Press in 2025. He holds a Doctor of Arts from Sydney University. His work has been commended and shortlisted in major Australian poetry prizes and published in print and online journals in Australia, Ireland, the UK and USA. His website is http://paulscullypoet.com.au/.

Hollow Air

by Verity Borthwick

Ultimo Press

ISBN 9781761154195

Reviewed by LUCY CHRISTOPHER

When I finished Hollow Air by Verity Borthwick and turned off my tiny reading light, it was suddenly tar-dark and death-quiet. Borthwick’s book had swallowed me; I was still stuck deep underground, navigating dusty tunnels, feeling my hand across sharp rock to get out and away. My heart was racing. I breathed deeper and listened to the room’s blackness in the hot late-summer night. Soon, I distinguished their breathing: my husband deep and steady, my daughter lighter and with a musical hum; both very much here, both real. I tried to ascend from the story that had gripped me by the throat until I discovered its end. My skin prickled with sweat, and there was grit stuck to my back and dust caught in the corners of my eyes.

This is how Hollow Air stayed in my body. For days afterward, my mind returned to the twisting underworld of the abandoned mining tunnels in the novel’s final, nightmarish scenes. Over and again, I imagined being trapped in the tunnels, contorting my body through ever-smaller gaps, scaling spider-like up crumbling walls with yawning chasms below. Unlike Sarah, the protagonist who eventually does discover a way through this erebus, I imagined being trapped forever underground, unable to ever see again, relying on touch and smell to find the possibility of an exit. I felt dirty and dusty and ill at ease, with a powerful desire to never visit the abandoned mines of far north Queensland, where the novel is set.

Notwithstanding my strongly visceral reaction, Hollow Air is a curious novel to describe. Various reviews have labelled Borthwick’s debut as a psychological thriller, a piece of rural gothic, or a modern Australian ghost story. Roslyn Jolly, in the Sydney Review of Books describes it as “…the latest addition.. [in the]…flourishing” canon of texts that is the “Australian mining novel.” In truth, it is all these things and yet, it is none of them deeply.

Set mostly in and around a mine in monsoonal, sweltering Queensland, the novel shifts between two timelines: an historical narrative from 1910 about the descent and ultimate death of Samuel and Tom in the Ada Dulcie mine, and the current-day story of Sarah, a geologist stationed alone at the same mine site, tasked with an unenviable job of trying to discover rock valuable enough to reopen it. Sarah’s isolation is shattered when a new team, including the sultry geologist Cole, arrives to start drilling, forcing her to re-navigate and position her body in an all-male environment. Though Sarah’s story is given the most weight, and page time, the back story of Samuel and Tom’s deaths intrudes and infiltrates everywhere, pressuring Sarah’s story with constant threat of ghostly presences and the sense that the past, and the deceit and tragedies that occurred there, will always erode the present.

Hollow Air is no doubt a novel preoccupied with the body. Borthwick’s writing is deeply sensory and atmospheric, her landscape never a passive setting but a seductive and fierce character and body in its own right. Throughout reading, I was tense, uncomfortable, looking over my shoulder for predatory creatures or questionable Australian men. There are many physical jumps and bodily prickles throughout the book – the near miss of a snake bite, the constant feeling of being watched, and many times where Sarah is surprised by a sudden arrival of a human, animal or something dead.

Borthwick cleverly brings the body, and its physicality, into this book in other ways too. Throughout, Borthwick describes the arid land as, and in parallel with, a human body:

“She could never get over the feeling of being the first human to lay eyes on this rock sliced out of the ground – was this how the early anatomists had felt when they cut into the body and saw the sinews tangled there? …. Like a doctor listening to a heartbeat with a stethoscope, you could feel the edges of the organ and wonder at its function, place your palm above it and feel the muscle pulse beneath your fingertips….” (97)

Borthwick also draws parallels between the land and Sarah herself, often suggesting the land is embodied, marked, and vulnerable in ways that mirror her own physical and psychological state: “…like the ground left behind when the ore was removed, she too was riddled with holes.” (49) At times, it even seems that the mine and Sarah’s body become entirely one being: “… she felt she had become part of the mine, that it now flowed in her veins and pooled in her gut.” (287-288)

The threat of danger – both to the land and to Sarah, the novel’s two central “bodies” – is ever-present, as is the potential for exploitation and abuse. Sarah, like the mined land she inhabits, has been shaped and damaged by her interactions with men, and both she and the land must ultimately have their cores cut open and their insides examined to uncover meaning in their own stories. Additionally, both Sarah and the land inflict their own suffering to the men who interact with them. Sarah misses her own engagement party to sleep with fellow geologist Cole, and the land traps and injures men who dare to transgress it. In this way, perhaps Borthwick’s novel seeks to examine how deeply our lives are entangled with the patriarchal and colonial mining industry we hold an uneasy relationship with; an industry that exploits and harms, leaving behind scars that are difficult to heal, yet one we remain dependent on for survival and prosperity in modern, settler Australia.

Throughout, Borthwick’s knowledge of her subject matter is assured and a significant strength of the novel. After reading, I felt not only dusty but as if I’d learnt something about how geologists assess a mining landscape in terms of its value as well as a deeper understanding of a mine’s sedimentary beauty. I also appreciated Borthwick’s female FIFO protagonist, whose capability is consistently evident; as physically and mentally strong as any other mining character ever written. However, while Sarah is no doubt a fascinating character, I did not find her particularly appealing or one always easy to understand. I struggled to grasp what Sarah saw in her fiancé Scott, or why she hadn’t ended the engagement earlier. We’re given little sense of what attracted Sarah and Scott together in the first place, or whether she was always so closed-off towards him. Cole, too, the book’s mysterious and threatening love interest, is not given much character depth. What is he beyond a beautiful body and bundle of secrets? What might he have brought to the story apart from threat and desire? Although, Borthwick’s landscape is layered with remarkable depth and texture, it seems the characters are, at times, afforded less of that same complexity.

Overall, Hollow Air is a significant and vivid Australian novel, one that places women in a role rarely seen in fiction and interrogates Australia’s relationship with its mining industry from the inside out. It’s exploration of the cost of concealing our ‘dirty little secrets’, whether they be personal or public, feels fresh and interesting. Ultimately, though, it is Borthwick’s ability to embed the sensory details of this world inside the bodies of her readers that make this novel linger long and uncomfortably. I am fascinated to see what she writes next.

Cited

Jolly, Roslyn. ‘Critical/Mineral’. Sydney Review of Books, 01 December 2025. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/reviews/criticalmineral

 
LUCY CHRISTOPHER is an award-winning author for young adults, children, and adults, with wide readership. Release, her recent psychological thriller for adults, was shortlisted for a Davitt Award and is currently in development for a TV series. She has worked as an academic in Creative Writing for twenty years, beginning her career at Bath Spa University, where she was a Reader in Creative Writing and Course Director on the world-renowned MA in Writing for Young People. She now works as Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Tasmania, while juggling her best creative output yet: her daughter.

The Nightmare Sequence

Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed

UQP

ISBN 9780702268908

Reviewed by KATIE HANSORD
 

Omar Sakr, readers will already know as an incredibly talented, prolific, and award-winning writer. Yet this collection is beyond, and so crucial in this moment. It is immensely powerful, intense, raw, and immeasurably heavy, yet it is at the same time delicately crafted, deeply sensitive, and soft. The poems are illustrated with beautiful artworks by Safdar Ahmed. This is a collection of poetry and illustrations that is on another level. Sakr’s poetic voice is a call to moral clarity and humanity that is so desperately needed in this moment. A call to humanity from the soul of heartbreak. The collection is a series of poems titled variously ‘…in the genocide’. A circling repetition that situates us always within the nightmare that the media and powerful would prefer to ignore, minimise, or outright deny, yet which cannot be unseen and must be confronted. As Randa Abdel-Fattah notes, this book is an “astonishingly original collaboration by two artists who are committed to the intimacies of humanity, the details of injustice, and uncompromising truth-telling” (n. pag.). These poems that Sakr originally shared on Instagram, as the genocide unfolded on our screens in horrific unbearable footage of children, babies, bodies, unfathomable destruction and anguish before our very eyes, forever changing everything. Some of these Nightmare Sequence poems were also originally published in various journals such as Westerly, Cordite, and Southerly, ‘Walking to day care in the Genocide’ (Southerly p.108), and have also appeared as translations, such as ‘Graze in the Genocide’ appearing in Cordite and Point de Chute, in which personal parenting experiences are simultaneously contextualised and contextualising the genocide within these deeply realised themes of love, protection, human connection, and care. The poems each hold a light of truth, grief, witness and care, like the many candles of a vigil, lit from the flame of love, together forming a beacon of hope to insist that this genocide is always the context, that this cannot be forgotten, normalised, accepted, and that we can never become numb to it.

In the face of such extreme dehumanisation and disregard for the enormous number of people, and the extreme number of children killed in Gaza – Sakr writes: ‘Every child’s corpse is mine, I fear / Not being able to undo this grim fatherhood, / I fear its undoing even more’ (‘Limits in the genocide’ 80). This profoundly emotionally honest collection opens with two quotations, and each poem intricately carries their traces, in its own ways. The first, from Isabella Hamad, who wrote the lines “To remain human at this / juncture is to remain in agony. Let us remain there: /It is the most honest place from which to speak.”, which is echoed in Sakr’s dual fears of not only ‘this grim fatherhood’ but the fear of ‘its undoing even more’ (80) – the undoing which would mean the undoing of truth, and of humanity itself. As this repetition in the titles continuously calls the reader back to this context of the unfolding nightmare, and the ongoing acknowledgement that each thing, each day that takes place does so ‘…in the genocide’. It is recalled, remembered, re-centred, repeatedly in a sequence of days, in the passage of ‘normal’ time and abstract, in its usual calendar of days marked and unmarked by holidays and observances of altered importance: in the minutia of the day-to-day, and in the cumulations of days – ‘100 days in the genocide’, ‘300 days in the genocide’, Ramadan, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Easter, in the genocide, and of specific dates. Sakr’s poems insist, rightly so, that everything we experience, is occurring ‘in the genocide’ – even that one date so centred by the western media, is here ‘October 7th in the Genocide’ a poem in which Sakr writes:

You think I fear to enter October 7th?
Habibi, I never left. I’m still there with you
Dying as I do every day. I admit I can’t see
the murdered you heap murder on.
…
For me the world breaks every day.
(65)

We, as readers, are reminded repeatedly that there need be no such reminder, and that nothing, for people of conscience, can ever be experienced ‘as usual’ without this outrage beyond comprehension being the wider context, and without its relationality to this unthinkably inhumane imperial genocide, being brought continuously back into both questioning and heartbreak. To not see things as the western media has presented them, but rather in terms of ‘humanity’ and its antithesis, hearts beating with love or death for us all – including the death of the heart. Sakr writes ‘My hands are cramped around a million epitaphs. / It will take me roughly all the time in the world to get there.’ (65)

On the facing page to ‘October 7th in the genocide’ is a high contrast black and white illustration by Safdar Ahmed. These artworks are interspersed throughout the collection and interact powerfully with the poetry. In this image, part of the ‘Genocide Culture’ series, there is a young, frightened child being held in a choke hold by a soldier with their military uniform, hat, gloves and equipment strapped on and wearing dark glasses covering the face, while the child is in a plain t-shirt with wide open eyes, this juxtaposition of power imbalance with the words ‘GENOCIDE’ and ‘CULTURE’ placed top and bottom in alternating black and white. A similar illustration faces the poem ‘Say in the genocide’

Say this has no purpose.
Say no one reads it.
Am I not alive to myself?
Say it is meaningful.
Say everyone reads it.
More, say it’s understood.
Now we’re talking.
Say my feeling meets yours
And together they deepen…
(p.54)

This precise meeting and deepening of feeling, in reading Sakr’s poems, feels impossible not to experience. This is the emotional level on which they operate, and readers in reading it enter into the second option, the creation of meaningfulness. Facing this poem is the illustration of men rounded up, sitting on the ground, their eyes covered with blindfolds, their hands tied behind their backs while an armed soldier stands over them. In the notes to these illustrations, these are described as ‘a series of images that attempts to highlight what our leaders cannot be brought to admit: that a ‘close friend’…is committing the most abhorrent crime humanity is capable of.’ (158).

Bearing witness to this nightmare, and embracing remembrance, solidarity and truth-telling, are linked themes. These are ways of maintaining our humanity, in the face of inhumanity, evoked here from the outset. We bear witness. Poems that emerge from living through a nightmare, terror, something that seems so horrific and so abhorrent to our moral values as human beings as to be beyond reality – the disbelief of immense grief as it is experienced.

This response recalls again the quotation from the eminent Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish:

“‘Who remembers the Armenians?’
I remember them
and I ride the nightmare bus with them
each night”

‘I remember them’ from Darwish’s 2014 Collection Nothing more to lose, the first collection to appear in English language. Darwish’s poem continues: “and my coffee, this morning /I’m drinking it with them”. Not only collective remembrance is being signified here but also a collective poetic solidarity, a reminder that, despite cultures of individualism, mythologies of the lone poet, we are not actually alone in our grief, or resistance, in our remembrance and our speaking against genocide, we are part of a larger thing, a collective of people who refuse to accept this horror. It recalls in turn Sarah M. Saleh’s lines from the poem ‘Say free Palestine’ – ‘for I love you say free Palestine’ – conveying this same sense that remembrance, and grief, which may be another side of resistance and liberatory will, permeates everything, each day, from coffee, to words to walks to daycare, to poetry to love to death. In ‘200 days in the genocide’ Sakr writes

I poem this.
Everything in the genocide
Is the shadow of a real
Me: a blunt tear
In the mouth of an angel.
(103)

To face the truth and express our grief and resistance, is a way to reach each other, to do so together.

References

Darwish, Najwan, Nothing more to lose, Penguin, 2014
Sakr, Omar, ‘Walking to day care in the Genocide’, Southerly, January vol. 80 no. 1 2025; (p. 108)
‘Graze in the Genocide’, Omar Sakr, 2024, Cordite Poetry Review, 1 February no 111 2024
‘Graze in the Genocide’ Omar Sakr, 2024, Point de Chute, Spring no. 8 2024
Saleh, Sarah M., The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat UQP 2023
 
 
KATIE HANSORD is a writer and researcher working on unceded Wurundjeri lands in Naarm. Her interests include poetry, intersectional feminism, anti-imperialism and disability justice. She is co-editor of Crip Stories (NewSouth). Her work appears in Unusual Work, Mascara, Southerly Long Paddock.

Discipline

by Randa Abdel-Fattah

UQP

ISBN 9780702271014

Reviewed by KORALY DIMITRIADIS

Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah’s novel Discipline is a narrative enquiry into politics, activism, power, and the hierarchies that exist within it through the third-person perspectives of Ashraf, a university academic of Lebanese descent, and Hannah, a journalist of Palestinian descent working for a right-leaning newspaper. Abdel-Fattah hooks you in immediately with relatable, vulnerable, witty and intelligent protagonists, characters and observations, her prose effortlessly shifting between melancholy, feminism, and humour, smashing stereotypes and giving us a real taste of multicultural Australia. 

Hannah is a young mother, married to Jamal, from Gaza. Ashraf is divorced, navigating a complex digital co-parenting dynamic, lamenting why ‘religion make[s] such fools of people’ (p.2) after his wife abandoned feminism for a strict Islamic life, moving to Yemen with their daughters and remarrying. As a single mother who has co-parented, I felt Abdel-Fattah captures the struggles of co-parenting, and motherhood, accurately.  

Set in Sydney-Australia’s Middle Eastern diaspora during Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza, Discipline explores the guilt, privilege and responsibility of living so far away from your homeland when it’s hurting.  

Hannah knew that Jamal had learned to compartmentalise his rage and grief, had learnt a level of self-restraint that can perhaps only come from living through slow-cooked trauma (p.62)

Abdel-Fattah paints a picture of the diaspora and the way it functions and lives. Hannah mocks motherhood with an infectious dry sarcasm, clearly showing the reader that while she does follow some aspects of her culture like fasting, she certainly does not live a lifestyle of consumerism like many in the diaspora. Hannah cares more about human rights than being ‘pretentious enough to spend two hundred dollars on a [baby] dress that would end up covered in pureed apple and carrot stains’ (p.10). 

While Hannah and Jamal’s marriage operates in a more equal fashion than one might expect in immigrant communities, Abdel-Fattah still highlights disparity in gender expectations within such communities. When Jamal is confused about where the Dior baby dress is as Hannah is rushing out the door to work, Hannah instructed the night prior by her mother to ‘dress up’ Aya up because she has plans to ‘show off her grandchild’, Hannah responds to Jamal, ‘you’re capable of doing a PhD. Find it.’ (p.10). 

Hannah navigates frustrations like road rage and why we have to pay for toll roads that are slower than free roads, balancing her rage with her faith, relatable to those who are religious or grew up religious, as I did: 

She banged her hand on the steering wheel as she considered: Does swearing invalidate my fast? […] She lent out of the window and yelled, ‘Dickhead!’
(p.17)

This is how she begins, how she captivates you, her prose masterful, gently weaving in her politics as the novel unfolds, until you’re having uncomfortable conversations you’re not sure you should be having. But too bad. By that time, you’re invested. 

Discipline mimics the current toxic, entitled, white-washed status quo in Australia’s media and academia. While the Australian literary landscape is not covered, it most certainly isn’t any different, as all three sectors are interconnected. One would expect Discipline to be a dense read due to the subject matter, yet it isn’t, it’s light and engaging. Abdel-Fattah is controversial and brave in what she puts on the page, presenting arguments from many angles, even perspectives she might not agree with, gaining trust with the reader and giving them space to form their own judgments. 

People like Jamal and these flag-burning protesters were delusional if they didn’t comprehend that their moral absolutism only resonated with their echo chamber of keyboard warriors and angry rent-a-crowds. […] The world was selfish, ugly, unjust and expensive to live in. Free Palestine, sure, but nothing in this world was for free […] (p.161, p.162)

Discipline depicts such an unbelievably sad state-of-affairs that the prose actually tips into black comedy just to keep itself from jumping off a cliff.  

There was a moment of silence between them, interrupted by Hannah letting out a short, forced laugh in an attempt to diffuse the tension […] Hannah felt as if she might explode and, at the exact same time, she wondered what Peter would make of her thinking about exploding.
(p.33)

What’s uncanny is that Discipline explores censorship and cancel culture and Abdel-Fattah was cancelled from Adelaide Writers Week where she was programmed to speak about Discipline. Judging by the redacted names of people and institutions in the Acknowledgments, Abdel-Fattah repeatedly experiences such censorship. Abdel-Fattah in early 2025, also had her research grant into Arab & Moslem Australian social movements suspended.  

There were people who tried to stop this book from being published. They failed.
(p.245)

Fifteen years of being in this industry and the way it operates still baffles me. It is a tokenistic, racist, hypocritical, unethical system where who you know and what your politics are matters more than the quality of your writing. And when you are given the opportunity to write, you better behave. Through the character of Hannah, Abdel-Fattah captures the frustrations of journalism and how a writer’s words are often re-written without consultation when you are at the bottom of the pecking order. 

[…] why was she such a naïve fool looking for poetic justice in an industry that was driven by a corporate model of subscriptions and advertising? […] She was sandwiched between racism and sexism by people who gave speeches at international Women’s Day breakfasts and pasted Acknowledgements of Country in their email signatures.
(p.21, p.29)

Systems and structures are controlled by white people, and you either sell your soul to cater to their narratives and be rewarded, try to find a way to work within their system but the compensation won’t nearly be as good, or take the gamble and abandon the system all together and who knows how you’re going to survive but at least your soul is intact. The system is designed to pit us against each other, and it takes a tremendous amount of ‘discipline’ just to survive. 

He was exhausted. The academy was like one big chess board […] he would never have the power of checkmate, not in a game that was rigged against him […] he would at least try to make his small corner […] strong (p.196, p.197)

As a Cypriot-Australian writer who has worked in journalism and academia, and who writes fiction and non-fiction; as a writer who has been cancelled unjustly in her career, I don’t agree that this book was published because of the ‘artistic freedom’ Abdel-Fattah believes her publisher University of Queensland possesses (p.246). I am too jaded and have had way too many knives stuck in my back to believe that. Yet, I don’t think I am naïve to believe that Abdel-Fattah wrote her book for people like me. After reading Discipline, I agreed with author Michael Mohammed Ahmad, ‘[…] the very existence of this book provides hope […]’. 

It is relevant to talk about the politics surrounding Discipline because Discipline explores those very dynamics. My perception of Abdel-Fattah before reading Discipline was that she belongs to a politically correct, literary-industry-accepted-and-supported popular clique. Recently, these cliques have come under threat, as powers greater than them yield their own agendas. While I didn’t agree with the government interference regarding Adelaide Writers Festival, at the time I questioned why Abdel-Fattah was complaining when she had been part of campaigns to cancel other writers she didn’t politically align with. 

At times in Discipline I felt Abdel-Fattah was criticising the very behaviours she has engaged in. As I read on, the same question resurfaced: who is allowed to speak? Should I, now, be further vilified and blacklisted if I write an opinion someone doesn’t like, even when I, myself, belong to a marginalised community? Should I be crucified for it? Our world has become fast-paced, judgmental, no time to breathe in social media land

‘[…] if you are a journalist of colour […] and you’re using diluted language, you’re really just a stenographer perpetuating the pro-Israel status quo […] ’ […] She was no stranger to the comments section […] she didn’t feel […] upset […]. She just felt gross (p.186, p.187)

There are times in Discipline where Hannah’s rage spills over, even towards the marginalised.  

Stupid cow, Hannah thought. Fine, keep your head down. I wasn’t expecting anything from you (p.75)

Discipline shows us clearly where the power lies. Gatekeepers don’t need permission to speak, they simply assign permission when they feel comfortable to do so, in their devaluating manner.

Barnaby explained [to Ashraf] that he was fed up with the way institutions used diversity as window dressing instead of valuing the decolonial, alternative knowledge and perspectives of scholars of colour […] ‘You need to find a way to tap into that, prove that our diverse JBU community here is not cynical tokenism but meaningful on its own terms.’ (p.36, p.37), and the rest of us are left to fight it out amongst ourselves.

Family security worries Ashraf: “Were his mother and sister safer now that he was facing a possible misconduct case? Always acting with emotion, never intellect, never diplomacy or reason. It was the miserable fate of Arabs, indeed the Arab and the Muslim world.” (p.221, p.222) with gatekeepers oblivious to their privilege:

Faye had grown us in Yass, for crying out loud. He’d asked her: why Middle Eastern politics? She said she’d […] ‘fallen in love with Arabs’
(p.15) 

Abdel-Fattah had to make us laugh in this book; it was the only way to win us over, to give us hope.

The convention centre was doing an excellent job of burning the planet in order to run the air conditioning at uncomfortably cold levels as they all discussed decolonial approaches to climate change (p.12)

My rage was captured in the character of Hannah, and in the character of Ashraf, who represent opposing ways of operating within systems. I emerged from Discipline teary, to be honest, questioning my black and white thinking. But not in a way that made me feel ashamed, quite the opposite, I felt heard by Abdel-Fattah, which is quite ironic in the context of it all. One can only conclude then that Abdel-Fattah is a skilled writer. I found comfort in this novel. It made me feel less alone as a writer, as a Cypriot in the diaspora fighting for the freedom of my homeland from occupation and colonisation, and as a human fighting for a free Palestine and end to war. 

[…] to my readers. May we remain undisciplined. It is the only hope for this broken world
(p.247). 

I have to be honest, when I was asked to review Discipline, I hesitated. I didn’t think Abdel-Fattah’s writing, based on what I knew about her, would be to my liking. But So, I am shocked to say that I fell in love with Abdel-Fattah’s writing reading Discipline. Any preconceived ideas I had about her have been challenged and shattered. This is despite the hurdle I had to overcome on the Dedication page, which risks alienating readers Abdel-Fattah might otherwise convert through her exquisite prose

I humbly dedicate this book to all the Palestinian academics and journalists killed in Gaza who would be alive if academics and journalists in the west had spoken and acted when they had the chance (p.0). 

Discipline is a highly educational, politically informed book, told through very real characters and real-life situations. It has the potential to shift opinions, create change. It took me time to learn about the politics surrounding Gaza. I am not to blame for the war crimes of others. 

This is where I must raise one of the downfalls of this book. While it does begin strongly, with the characters and their story and trajectory key narrative drivers, a third of the way in the characters start to feel like vehicles for delivering politics, the author’s voice and rage interjecting, with scenes sometimes feeling rushed, without enough build-up. 

It was at these times that I questioned the intended audience. Was Discipline written for a well-educated audience? Or for an audience that wanted to know more? At times I would have preferred the latter, more accessible language, and a little more explanation for those who might not know as much, more character emotional depth, thus bringing the reader closer and widening the reach and impact of the book. I would have liked more in the way of relationship dynamics, especially between Hannah and Jamal. 

But I forgave Abdel-Fattah for this. I have an exceptionally high bar for fiction. It is rare I am hooked from the first page. I read the book quite quickly, another difficult thing to achieve for me. Her words grabbed at my heart very early on and refused to let go, her pain and frustrations became mine, her rage shrilled with mine, even at times when I felt extremely resentful and uncomfortable with the words I was reading, I sat with her, because by that time, she had already won me over. We forgive her transgressions and minor issues because we come to understand that as a Palestinian author, Abdel-Fattah is navigating one of the most difficult political terrains, and she does it eloquently, with class, though nobody’s perfect. 

KORALY DIMITRIADIS is Cypriot-Australian writer, performer and poet who creates film and theatre with her poetry. She is the author of Love and Fk Poems (also translated into Greek), Just Give Me The Pills She’s Not Normal, That’s What They Do, and the short story collectionThe Mother Must Die (Puncher and Wattmann). Her poetry films have screened at festivals, have been televised, and won prizes internationally. Yiayia mou (my grandmother) was screened on SBS and at the Sydney Opera House (Red Room Poetry), and was shortlisted for the Woollahra Digital Literary Awards. She was the recipient of a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship, and the UNESCO City of Literature residency in Krakow, for her debut fiction manuscript, We Never Said Goodbye. Koraly’s opinion articles and essays have been published widely internationally.

Desolation

by Hossein Asgari

Ultimo Press

ISBN: 9781761154133

Reviewed by ROUMINA PARSA

In 1988, civilian flight Iran Air 655 was shot down by U.S. Navy guided missiles while on its daily route from Bandar Abbas to Dubai. All 290 passengers and crew onboard were killed. An investigation into the incident found a succession of errors by the crew of USS Vincennes, concluding in two naval officers pressing at least 28 incorrect buttons to confirm the firing of the missiles. The U.S. government characterised the killings as an instance of “mistaken defensive action” – an error for which then-President George Bush awarded the captain with the Legion of Merit medal, as well as Navy Commendation medals for the two officers in their ‘heroic achievement’ of combat systems management (1).  

The tragedy of IR655 is unknown to most outside of Iran, including the narrator of Hossein Asgari’s Desolation. In this frame narrative, a fiction writer in an Adelaide café is accosted by a stranger insistent on him retelling his story of “truth”. The stranger, Amin – though that may not be his real name – knows the downing of IR655 intimately. It is his centre; the point from which his life pivots. Amin’s brother, Hamid, was one of the 290 passengers. Over ensuing meetings, the brutish Amin engages the writer in a one-sided confessional, divulging the chaos of love, loss and revenge spawned in the slipstream of his brother’s death. 

Consistent with his debut novel, Only Sound Remains (2), Asgari is intentional with constructing a world of binaries to explain the Iranian condition. East vs West, Regime vs Revolution, Old vs New, or rather, Old vs Ancient. Readers enter Desolation through two doors. The introduction quotes both the Quran, ‘And reckon not those who are killed in Allah’s way as dead: nay; they are alive (and) are provided sustenance from their Lord,’ as well Bhagavad Gita (as famously referenced by Robert Oppenheimer), ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of the worlds.’ Superficially, these conflicting quotes purport to mimic the most classic binary of Good vs Evil. Yet the particularity of referencing martyrdom and nuclear weaponry is an almost comical nod to the specific modern politics of Iran, where religion and violence do not contest, but collide. Interpreting Desolation demands understanding this doublespeak. In this book, as in the lives of Iranians, opposites are not so simple. 

Since the Revolution of 1979, those both within the country and in diaspora have largely divided into two camps that favour directly contrasting ideologies. Those in favour of the theocratic regime see its opponents as vessels of Western imperialism, while these opponents see regime supporters as extremists betraying the Iranian people. In Desolation, this spectrum is primarily represented by Amin’s brothers: ‘Hamid… an almost atheist (or as Vahid called him, the West-Maniac)’ and ‘Vahid, the devout Muslim (or as Hamid dubbed him, the Sheik)’ (p11). The brothers stand in as one-dimensional narrative cushions to freely absorb all stereotypes. Hamid has the ‘logical brain’ (p14) – trained in mathematics, dispassionately objective, appreciative of Western intellectualism and classical music. Meanwhile, Vahid is a man of purely theistic reasoning, moving from prayer to emotional outbursts at Hamid’s provocations. The traits portrayed by the two characters are depthless – almost satirically so. Hamid’s intellectual superiority fails him in his morality, for example, telling Amin, ‘[when] someone can benefit from it, then it’s only logical to lie’ (p17). Meanwhile, Vahid struggles to be cognisant of his own behavioural irony, yelling at Hamid, ‘screw you!’, as he leaves for the mosque (p16). The brothers exist exactly and only in response to each other; an inverse relationship reflecting the hollowness of political polarisation. With no shared traits but an equal outwards repulsion, Hamid’s insistence to be X forces Vahid to be Y, and vice versa. Neither is able to possess true self-determination, both instead suffering a loss of their own dimensionality. Establishing the division between the brothers early on positions these characters as both political and poetic signposts; stagnant constants between which nuance can be located. 

It is fitting then that the principal challenger of Iranian binaries in Desolation is its female characters. Commendably, a recognisable objective of Asgari’s work is to communicate the inherently patriarchal nature of the Islamic Regime. In Only Sound Remains, Asgari executed this through a paternal character’s unrequited love for Forough Farrokhzad – the feminist Iranian poet who often wrote on sex and sensuality – leading to her death. In Desolation, a Farrokhzad-esque character returns in the form of Amin’s neighbour, Parvaneh. 

Parvaneh is the young daughter of a family who move from Tehran to Amin’s hometown of Mashhad to gain safety from the war. Upon meeting, Amin immediately perceives Parvaneh as ‘different’ on a superficial spectrum of Westernisation. She is unlike the girls he knows who ‘didn’t wear any make-up and neither tweezed their facial hair nor plucked their eyebrows’ (p13). After sharing a secret phone call, the two begin meeting at Parvaneh’s house alone, enacting classics Western “dates”. They watch Western movies, listen to Western music, kiss, and steal alcohol to drink from her parents’ stash. It is through Amin’s lens that Parvaneh’s house is constructed as an Eden, with Parvaneh playing the role of Eve. She is sinful and sensual; as sickly sweet as the ‘sugar cube from the sugar bowl’ he toys with when discussing her with Hamid (p17). 

While Amin portrays Parvaneh to the reader as his temptress, his internal monologue betrays any semblance of his own pureness. His desires for her stem from a craving for possession and power. He lusts for her even as he critiques her, ‘He was aroused. Not because of the make-up, which he could tell was done poorly, but because she had done all that for him’ (p35). As their relationship develops, his surface level understanding of her as “a girl who plucks her eyebrows” does not. Rather, his growing sexual fantasies override his perception of her humanity. This dynamic is at its most critical when Parvaneh reveals that she, like Farrokhzad, is a writer, and Amin asks her to read him a story even though ‘he wasn’t really interested’ (p40): ‘She stood there for a moment as though she wasn’t sure why she had the notebook in her hand, vulnerable and fragile,’ Amin thinks, ‘like a young girl who was about to get undressed in front of someone for the first time in her life’ (p41). 

Importantly, Parvaneh’s story cleverly serves as a metaphor for the Islamic Regime. In her auto-fictive piece about a girl named Shadi – meaning joy – she writes: ‘On the school bus, Shadi is thinking about how she would love to wear a yellow scarf the same colour as the butter in her sandwich when two fire engines overtake the bus; their sirens, loud, almost angry, pierce her ears. Is there any resemblance between that fierce noise penetrating one’s ears and losing one’s virginity? She wonders’ (p43). Moving from the contrasting elements of a school bus to sex via ‘loud, almost angry sirens’ is a purposeful clash of binaries by Asgari. A child’s daydreams are aggressively interrupted, her innocence invaded. Simultaneously, the reality of her “innocence” is also challenged, as readers must consider the double meaning of ‘scarf’. Does Shadi dream of a knitted item to be worn in the cold? Or is it more likely that she instead refers to the headscarf required to be worn of school-attending girls in Iran? Readers being forced to contend with this story within a story (within a story) is a further manifestation of the complexity of Iranian subjugation. The question of “freedom” as false joys. The past, and perhaps even the future, as simply more colourful fictive versions of existing oppression. Consistent with the rest of their interactions, the story is something about Parvaneh that Amin is unable to comprehend: ‘‘I think it’s very good,’ he lied. He had found it slow and boring’ (p45). 

Asgari further likens Amin’s apathetic sexual gaze to the Regime’s gendered violence through the introduction of another female character, Marziyeh. Like Parvaneh, Amin first perceives Marziyeh on a superficial spectrum of Westernisation, as a woman in a ‘black Arab chador’ (p77). Again, like Parvaneh, this perception does not develop but grows increasingly sexualised: ‘Amin didn’t want to be around Marziyeh either. Was it because she was still young and beautiful, with her coffee-coloured skin and black eyes? Because wrapped from head to toe in that black cloth and silence, he found her irresistible?’ (p83). Even as Amin concludes he ‘could never love a woman like her, conservative and ordinary’ he still ‘desire[s] her… staring at her body under that long black chador… on her knees, her upper body straight, rubbing the cleaning liquid off the glass door’ (p87). Like Hamid and Vahid, Marziyeh and Parvaneh are Iranians existing in opposition. Yet while the male characters do so through their own self-representation, the female characters are assigned their positions purely by Amin’s perception. Ultimately and most pertinently: neither women are safe from his dehumanisation, as no women are safe under the Regime’s patriarchal rule. 

While Desolation is successful in collapsing binaries amongst Iranians, it conversely bolsters problematic distinctions between the Middle East and the West. Asgari has argued: ‘what fiction can achieve that historical texts cannot, is illustrate the interior life of people. And I think by doing that novels can get closer to certain social and psychological truths that a history book cannot lay claim to… [we] should include as many perspectives as possible in order to get closer to the “truth” (3). This expansive pursuit of truth through the personal is a valid feat. Afterall, as the saying goes, the personal is political. Asgari enacts this by sidelining the actual downing of IR655 to instead explore its ricochet effects through Amin. Yet by placing inadequate weight on the event itself, what Asgari identifies as ‘his grief… his not-so-elegant understanding of fate, and faith, and free will’ (4) struggle to locate plausible grounding. Instead, the “true” Iranian experience collapses inwards. Amin descends into sexual depravity, cruelty and religious devotion. When the book climaxes with Amin almost joining Al Qaeda, Iranians return to violent geopolitics as our immoveable base. Most dangerously, the conversation on terror in the Middle East is reduced to being understood as a response that is not only equal to trauma, but also intrinsically cultural. 

At the time of writing this review, the U.S and Israel have launched operations against the Islamic Regime. Ayatollah Khameini and many of his leadership team have been declared dead. Iranians, and many others, have continued the outwards drift to ideological opposites. Perhaps the most prevailing lesson Desolation can provide through its mediations on “truth” is the starkest one: that the greatest threat remains the loss of our humanity. To be made as Amin becomes and remains even at the novel’s conclusion, unable to be decisive of his own actions, enacting a cruelty that knows neither reason nor end. In the West’s eastward gaze, these Iranian stories are just things that happen In That Part of The World. Rumi wrote long ago: ‘the Friend comes into my body looking for the centre, unable to find it, draws a blade, strikes anywhere’ (5). Yes, these are things that happen in that part of the world. What Desolation warns us against is making these traumas our centre and mistaking these narratives for our only “truth”. 

NOTES

1. Ghasemi, J (2004) Iran Chamber Society: History of Iran – Shooting Down Iran Air Flight 655.
2. Asgari, H (2023) Only Sound Remains. Puncher & Wattmann. 
3. Asgari, H (2026) Matilda Bookshop: Hossein Asgari Q&A.
4. ibid. Rumi, J and Barks, C (1996) The Essential Rumi. Harper.

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.

Astraea

by Kate Kruimink

Weatherglass Books

ISBN: 9781739570767

Reviewed by FERGUS EDWARDS

Astraea is set on board a ship transporting female convicts from England in the early 1800s. We do not see them depart, and we will not see them arrive: they will never be on solid ground. The crew is entirely male, the cargo entirely female, and we share the anxious bemusement of the fifteen-year-old convict Maryanne Maginn as she and her ‘maybe-friend Sarah Ward’ (p.9) negotiate existence inside ‘a series of confines between which she might move but not escape’ (p.44). The two of them join a group of women who might be prostitutes, madwomen, and witches aboard the fictional Astraea: named after an immortal virgin from Greek mythology, the near homophone is surely not accidental. The novella shows us individual and collective persistence in the face of barely constrained institutionalized and systemic violence, and Kate Kruimink ensures that it is the women, and not the violence, who are in the foreground. 

The book establishes the truth of these voyages by printing a facsimile image of a ‘List of the Female Convicts on Board the Lady Penrhyn’ (p.2) from the National Library of Australia before its opening sentence. The list is just one of the thousands of surviving contemporary records that we have of transportation; yet from the driest bureaucratic files to the most emotionally charged diary entries, almost every source seems to have been written by a man. Even the pre-eminent study of transportation, Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore, which calculates that one in every seven transported convicts was female – ‘about twenty-four thousand’ (1) women in total – quotes from material sent to wives or about female convicts, but does not offer a single extended quotation from a transported woman in the twenty pages (of six-hundred and seven) that are devoted to them.

By contrast, the male voice—and gaze—is a rare, unwanted intrusion in Astraea.  Here, women are the subjects of their own sentences, speaking for themselves and among themselves. Mary Christie, for example, can rely on the other women getting the joke when she declares herself to be either a witch, or a madwoman, or a criminal: they ‘had got the measure of each other […] almost immediately’ (p.10). Less conspicuously, the text resists the administrative division of the women into either specific individuals or undifferentiated groups, often attributing experiences to ‘her,’ ‘she,’ or ‘the girl,’ allowing a meaningful sense of a female collective to emerge.

Giving these women voices is one of the many ways in which Astraea can be read as an exploration of haunting. Haunting requires a past that insists on being present; but it also requires that the present is resisting the past. Colonial England attempted to forget these women by transporting them to the other side of the world; but we forget them a second time if we fail to notice the absence of their voices in the written record. That makes their re-apparition here very welcome. 

Other hauntings are more complicated. The central character was christened ‘Marie Antoinette’, but, through a crude act of abbreviation by a lazy bureaucrat writing a list of convict names, she has been re-named ‘Maryanne’. Numbed after her newborn child was stripped from her at birth, she is determined to entertain only those thoughts that will help her survive transportation,

Maryanne welcomes the new name as an opportunity to obliterate her past self. She actively chooses to ‘scrape her mind clean like a farrier scraping a horse’s hoof’ (p.15) as she tries to create an untrammeled self; one that might be ‘fifteen in body, but truly, as a person, […] far younger even than that. She was quite new’ (p.18). 

While she observes and occasionally engages with life on the ship, Maryanne is haunted by memories she does not want. Surrounded by water she cannot drink, she recalls ‘a poem about that, […] precisely that’ (p.14), though she does not ‘know it beyond a few words and a suspicion that it might speak to her’ (p.15). Those few words are, naturally, ‘water, water, everywhere,’ (p.15), from Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,’ Coleridge’s poem of a sailor’s ‘thirsty and unlucky’ (p.15) survival at sea. Despite Maryanne’s reaffirmation that ‘memory was not her business’ (p.15), the words trigger memories of her mother ‘joyless and grey and with no heart for poetry’ (p.14).  Maryanne’s attempt to reject a traumatic past and choose an untainted future has a clear emotional logic, but the lines from the poem recur twice more in the novella, again accompanied by unwanted memories ‘of the mother of the girl with the French name’ (p.32) as the memories will not be resisted. The use of the poem resonates further, suggesting that Maryanne may even be haunting her future self: Kruimink’s first, Vogel award-winning novel, A Treacherous Country, is set in van Diemen’s Land some years after Astraea, and it quotes both ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ as it follows a young man searching for ‘a woman called Maryanne Maginn’ (2). 

On board the Astraea, Maryanne is committed to the solitary darkness of the coal hole as a punishment with not a dead albatross but ‘a thick glass bottle of water […] hung on a cord about her neck’ (p.57). Amidst desperate hallucinations of her lost child, she hears the cry of an actual newborn and her ‘breasts began to prickle with milk’ (p.65). Her body remembers her own baby and Maryanne is overwhelmed by the ‘ache of a particular absence’ (p.65). Later, barely aware of what she is doing, Maryanne acts as a wet-nurse, able to offer relief and sustenance and a degree of hope only because of her own loss. Kruimink’s spare, emotive writing presents these as human acts without comparing, measuring, or justifying them; the absence of a utilitarian calculus suggesting that each of our griefs is irreducibly private. In Maryanne’s case, it is only when she allows herself to fully acknowledge the suffering ‘she knew and had always known’ (p.65) that she can begin to live again.

One question raised by Astraea’s hauntings is whether we can, or, perhaps more properly, whether we should, try to forget experiences of trauma. Are we right to be frightened by the fate of the mariner, cursed never to forget his own dreadful story? In the case of the real-life women who were transported the answer seems obvious: effacing their lives means misunderstanding our own Australian history. Even if the story scares us, their lives are worthy of remembrance in and of themselves. We owe them each the belated recognition of their own particular human dignity. Memorialising them is necessary work, and Astraea aids it. In the case of the individual human being, especially a mother suffering the immeasurable pain of losing a child, the answer is far more difficult. Perhaps we cannot understand ourselves without acknowledging our deepest traumas. Perhaps our integrity, our dignity, our sense of self depends upon such an acknowledgement, however unutterably painful. Not the least of Kruimink’s achievements is creating a space in which we can consider such a confronting possibility.

Cited

1. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (Vintage, 2003), p. 244
2. K. M. Kruimink, A Treacherous Country (Allen & Unwin, 2020), p. 14.

FERGUS EDWARDS is a Lecturer in English at the University of Tasmania.  His research interests centre on the relationships between literature, performance, and philosophy, particularly the plays of Tom Stoppard and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.  Fergus’s next academic publication will be in Modern Drama, discussing Stoppard, Havel, and plays of censorship.

The Vegetarian 채식주의자

by Han Kang

translated by Deborah Smith

Granta

ISBN: 9781846276033

Reviewed by JASMINE DARWIN

Does Eating Meat Make You Squirm? Try Going Without It. No, Really

 Set in contemporary South-Korea, The Vegetarian, 채식주의자 written by Han Kang and translated by Deborah Smith, is a gripping novel that follows one woman’s slow descent into insanity as she struggles to come to terms with the threads of her own destiny. Split into three novelettes, in the first, The Vegetarian, we watch protagonist Yeong-hye through the eyes of her husband, Mr Cheong, an egotistical, self-serving salaryman who cannot help but gawk at her downfall through a self-pitying eye. At first, he may gain our sympathies: his diet is ruined, and his wife, who suddenly refuses to eat meat, will not cook the bountiful, blood-adorned meals he once upon feasted. ‘How on earth could she be so self-centred?’ he asks, looking down at his bowl of misty seaweed soup while dreaming of the ‘caramelised deep-fried belly pork’ (p.13) and the ‘wafer-thin slices of beef’ (p.15) his wife once fed him. But our sympathies are short-lived. 

As Yeong-hye’s body shrivels, and her sanity slips into a state of clear and utter delirium, Mr Cheong fails to see his wife as a figure worthy of his empathy and instead turns himself into the victim of gross injustice. 

I thought I could get by perfectly well just thinking of her [his wife] as a stranger, or no, a sister, or even a maid, someone who puts food on the table and keeps the house in good order. But it was no easy thing for a man in the prime of his life…to have his physical needs go unsatisfied for such a long period. So yes, on nights when I returned home late and somewhat inebriated after a meal with my colleagues, I would grab my wife and push her to the floor…She put up surprisingly strong resistance and, spitting out vulgar curses all the while, one time in three I would manage to successfully insert myself. Once that happened, she lay there in the dark staring up at the ceiling, her face blank, as though she were a ‘comfort woman’ dragged in against her will, and I was the Japanese soldier demanding her services.
(emphasis added, p.30)

Unable to see beyond his own desires, he discounts Yeong-hye’s protest as childish. But Mr Cheong is also not so oblivious. The clarifier is loaded with guilt: So yes, Mr Cheong knows his actions are reprehensible. He actively confesses to the raping of his wife. But his crime is absolved by a patriarchal logic of possession which he weaponizes as her husband to reframe his crime as retaliatory. That is, she failed to live up to the expectations of a wife, and by denying him unfiltered access to her body, he is justified to retaliate. 

Riddled with sexual violence, bodily harm and immense physical and psychological suffering, The Vegetarian is an exploration of the violence and the deterioration of women’s bodies under the double-weight of capitalist and patriarchal pressures. In fact, the female body has a particular focus in this novel. When Yeong-hye begins to starve herself, Mr Cheong observes her transformation with a discerning eye. ‘At first she’d slimmed down to the clean, sharp lines of a dancer’s physique,’ he says, ‘and I’d hoped things might stop there…’ But when she doesn’t and continues to fall deathly underweight, he remains blithely ignorant to the dangers of her condition deciding instead that ‘this situation has nothing to do with me.’ (p.17-18)

His cowardice is something to be thankful for, and following their divorce, she seems to be happier and healthier. But it also leaves her open to other men who wish to exploit her. In the second novelette, Mongolian Mark, when her brother-in-law uses her body as a canvas for his own artistic endeavours, he describes her as a body from which ‘all desire had been eliminated.’ (p.80) And yet, this hardly stops him from taking advantage of her, and soon he enacts his own fantasies upon her figure. Yeong-hye attempts to wrestle back control, but her attempt to gain autonomy over her own body presents itself as delirium, which in turn, leads to an increasingly violent intervention as the people in her life struggle to “normalise” her. 

Normality, then, becomes more of a question than a given, and the ways in which Yeong-hye’s body is exploited and penetrated by male authority figures doubles as a metaphor for the ways in which the novel grapples with madness. Like psychiatric patients, straight-jacketed and tranquilized, Yeong-hye’s body is manipulated by the men in her life to appear docile or “normal.” But with growing expectations pressed upon women to be a good wife—or maid, mother, cook, cleaner, sister, muse, sexual-gratifier and to be financially and independently successful, it is unsurprising that Yeong-hye goes completely mad. Who wouldn’t? 

Yet, to me, Yeong-hye’s madness seems to be more-or-less deliberate. Yeong-hye’s delirium is no simple glitch of the mind. No malaise or malfunction. Rather, she deliberately descends into a cocoon of delirium to protect herself.

This I found incredibly interesting. As an object of desire, she intentionally disfigures her own body, turning herself into a skeletal-like creature to be shunned in a psychiatric ward and away from preying hands, as an act of self-defence. She makes herself deliberately undesirable—mentally and physically—to assert some form of control over herself. But the problem, we learn, is not with the body itself. It is the idea of her body, commodified and possessed by others, which prevents her from ever gaining the autonomy she desires; and—even as a shell of a human—when her cocoon is shattered, and control continues to be wrestled from her grasp, she pushes herself to the absolute extremes to regain her autonomy.  

At this point I found the novel particularly difficult to read. The final novelette, Flaming Trees, is jarringly violent and Yeong-hye’s acts of self-harm become more and more sinister. Often, I was forced to put it down. But this struggle, I would argue, is much the point. 

The harm Yeong-hye enacts upon her own body is hardly different to that inflicted upon her by the men in her life: her husband rapes her; her brother-in-law chokes and objectifies her; her father beats her blind; and the doctor subdues her body through injections, force-feeding and straightjackets. Yet, when this violence is self-inflicted, it seems all the more unnatural. Why is it, then, that when a woman commits harm against herself that we are only then forced to question it? 

Han Kang neatly exposes the fallacy of this position. That when the men surrounding Yeong-hye commit violence against her, it is normalised by discourse. But the violence itself is unnatural, and the reactions provoked by Yeong-hye’s acts of self-harm only prove this. “Normality,” then, has a different twist to it, and the author plays witness to how blame and violence is used to maintain social norms—despite these norms proving to be harmful. Indeed, there are numerous occasions when the novel uses Yeong-hye’s delirium to reflect upon the label of insanity itself. When In-hye, Yeong-hye’s sister, comes to visit her at the psychiatric hospital and witnesses a woman shrieking obscenities in the foyer, she observes how ‘blasé’ she has become to seeing the ‘mentally ill,’ and ‘after all these visits to the hospital, sometimes it’s the tranquil streets filled with so-called ‘normal’ people that end up seeming strange.’ (p.142)

Such strangeness is not without its own complications. Yeong-hye is not a loveable character. She causes nothing but disruption for the lives of those around her. She is sullen, stubborn, and sometimes stand-offish, but the commitment with which she upholds her inconvenience—completing her hour-long headstands, refusing to eat meat, and to the dismay of her husband, sporting her bare chest in public—begs the question: why does she behave in such a way? And what has prompted such a rapid transformation?

Importantly, we never hear the answer from Yeong-hye herself, and as her resistance becomes more sinister and her silence more obsolete, we watch as the character who surround her are forced—through immense violence and psychological contortions—to self-reflect and to consider the answer to these questions themselves. 

I will not spoil the conclusion. It is rather beautiful, if not dangerously, and perhaps a little too alluring. But I found it intriguing that the only figure who ever comes close to reaching Yeong-hye’s minds-eye is her sister. While the men in her life, namely, Mr Cheong and Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law, seldom question her behaviour, (Mr Cheong simply ignores her, and while her brother-in-law probes a little—‘Why is it you don’t eat meat?’(p.90)—he is distracted by ‘the sexual images [of her] that were running in his head,’) it is her sister, another woman, trapped in the chains of social expectation, who finally crosses that unspeakable bridge. 

The Vegetarian is a haunting and disturbing read and, while it can often feel a little over-indulgent in it’s depiction of violence—teetering into trauma-porn—it is important, nonetheless; and its commentary on the ways in which women can be so casually treated like livestock prompts significant reflection upon the ways in which we treat others—human or otherwise. Not to be corny, but this novel is definitely something to chew on. 

JASMINE DARWIN is a Sydney/Eora based writer with a special interest in feminist writing, literary fiction, nature and ecology. She works as a bush regenerator and when not trampling through the bushland and swimming on the east coast, you’ll find her curled up with a book, a cuppa’ of earl grey and a pen and paper.