September 15, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt
by Elena Gomez
Puncher and Wattmann
ISBN 9781925780741
Reviewed by Dženana Vucic
To read Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt (2020), Elena Gomez’s second full-length poetry collection, is to be propelled headlong through the dizzy intersect of postmodernity and Marxist-feminist critique, to be flooded with possibilities for distraction, and for engagement. It is a work that not only demands rereading but requires it. Which is not to say that it cannot be drunk down along with your breakfast coffee (it’s slim enough that this is possible), but it is to say that the work is best enjoyed over a series of re-readings, with time for the ideas to settle into your insides, digest.
In the first instance, one can let the references wash over them, become background to the compulsion forward and through. The writing is pacey, and the direct, sometimes conversational tone—so removed from the intellectual posturing that marks much academia-adjacent work—allows readers to slip easily into the pages without getting hung up on their theoretical or historical underpinnings. The critique is there, underscoring everything, but the first reading can be one of pure pleasure. Slowing down, or (as in my case) re-reading, leads to uncovering.
Gomez peppers her work with references to revolution, to Marxist-feminist theory, to pop culture and to our contemporary and each reading unfolds possibilities, invites further study and collaboration in meaning making. Names and dates appear with little preamble or explanation and re-readings lead to google searches and rabbit-hole Wikipedia binges, the collection sitting at the centre of a web of connections from which the reader is pushed to questioning what it means to exist in postmodernity. Objects, in particular, are everywhere in the work, cast into affective relation to one another, to world structures and to readers. There are batteries, bobby pins, snap back caps, calico rugs, silk scarfs, black patterned shawls, bloodstained bedsheets, mulberry lipstick, cowskin purses, pools, headphones, babydoll dresses (Courtney Love’s, in peach), ungainly frocks, pianos, lavender mist pillows, and more. The excesses of capitalism fill the pages, are turned and refracted across vectors of desire, need and obligation. For example, of a ‘ribbed cream short sleeve maxi’, Gomez writes:
Her judgement takes into account the labour involved
in anger vs the labour involved in disappointment.
She is to be worn by someone who withstands rotating
modules for productivity
Readers are gently oriented through Gomez’ experiences as a cis Woman of Colour and arts worker, and through this prism Gomez explores legacies and realities of labour, care, gender and bodies under neoliberal capitalism. The collection is a snapshot in time, but one which is careful to capture the generational nature of the project—the past and the present are in intimate communication, inextricable in a Marxist-feminist poetics that captures the Russian Revolution, the early Soviet era, the mid-to-late-20th century and our post-GFC moment.
The collection is at once an epic poem and a series of poems, each page offering both a discrete moment and a continuous slippage into past and future. This is evident from the first page where Gomez seems to draw the poem to a close only to throw it wide open again upon the turn:
ready 2 enable
like how you enable
me to be
demanding of pleasure
Gomez’ writing makes clear that history is open-ended and incomplete, ongoing. So too is the revolution.
The future is evoked too, through Gomez attention to intertextual clues and the paths she is sending readers on, and in her use of frequent rhetorical questions, calling the reader to attention: ‘Am I too far inwards? Is this a way to conduct a mob?’; ‘What does aesthetics even do these days’; ‘What kinds of poetry are you making? Why is this so hard to contemplate?’; ‘Could you shout more or are we sufficient’.
Alexandra Kollontai, revolutionary, politician, Marxist theorist and writer, is a central and recurring figure, one who allows Gomez to explore the gendered nature of precarious and unwaged labour, particularly in literary and/or artistic communities. Gomez calls to her, an apostrophic address that, through its invocation of one who cannot respond, implicates the reader in the search for answers:
dear Alexandra please where are the new women were the
old women somewhere is the un-born woman anywhere or
does work also abolish the rest
…
dear Alexandra how many lovers does it take to bring
down an empire
Kollontai, an oft-forgotten figure who experienced something of a revival in the seventies, was especially interested in parsing love, desire, gender and family under communism, weaving her lived experience with her theories of communist futures and often using literature to elaborate her ideas (for example in her novel Red Love (1927)). Her interests have been taken up by Gomez and reframed through our contemporary, and through poetry.
There’s a delicious irony in critiquing capitalism through poetry, a form which has little to offer in terms of ‘market value’ and a form which traditionally skews away from the type of ‘rationality’ underscoring capitalism as an economic system. Despite its low ‘profit margins’ and understanding the privilege inherent in having time to write, poetry allows a certain freedom to make this critique since poets know very well that they are mostly exempt from the limitations imposed by market pressures. Gomez nods to this, writing:
There is a question surrounding us i.e. how may poems
will recuperate the surplus value produced by a worker
who must read in order to produce the company’s
commodity
There is a curious balance, too, between surreal elements (I climbed away/ A mountain goat/ found me weeping / and I refused its offer’) and riffs on the language of work-place (A keyboard shortcut; you could’ve said something. / I watched for a bit before we packed up the office./ Whatever else was going on/ You were still supreme at note-taking / When pamphlet distribution was at an all-time low’). At moments these disparate threads meet:
After a boss leaked the surplus
labour all over your standing desk
we divided the chips from my
snack pockets. I was too girly
and it showed.
All through the collection, Gomez nods to the un/reality of our situation and to that which distracts us from this, in particular to objects and pop culture, offering us possibilities for reframing. For example, drawing on Kim Stanley’s utopian Mars trilogy she writes: ‘I am meant to be thinking about revolution RIGHT NOW/ but all I can think of is outer space.’ This, I think, neatly summarises the focus of the collection: the way that we are distracted (by neoliberalism, by the realities of waged and unwaged labour, by our many objects, and indeed, by love and desire) from our revolutionary goals and how we can reframe those distractions for revolutionary ends.
Dženana Vucic is a Bosnian-Australian writer, poet and critic. She has received the 2021 Kat Muscat Fellowship and a 2020-21 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship to work on an autotheoretical book about her experience as a refugee, the Bosnian war, identity, memory and un/belonging. Her writing has appeared in Cordite, Overland, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Australian Poetry Journal, the Australian Multilingual Writing Project, Rabbit, and others. She tweets at @dzenanabanana.
September 12, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
British India, White Australia
by Kama Maclean
ISBN 9781742236216
New South Books
Reviewed by JOSHUA BIRD
Perhaps one of the most under-appreciated elements of systems of racial discrimination is their sheer banality.
Whether it be the efficient genocidal bureaucracy of the Nazi holocaust or the complex racist laws and policies that held together the system of Apartheid in South Africa, their existence reminds us that racism and prejudice are not just the remit of bad people—‘racists’—doing ‘racist’ things. Rather, racism is a concept that explains—indeed generates—entire systems of oppression and exclusion. Such systems are administered soberly and dutifully by governments and their representatives often in pursuit of their own perception of the common good.
For a real-world example of countries whose histories are informed by the administration of racism you could not find two clearer cases in India and Australia. Both countries are connected by a shared experience of colonialism of the British variety yet they participated on quite different ends of the imperial spectrum. The central explanation of that difference is, of course, race. Australia was not only a part of an empire constructed with Whiteness at its core, it was a nation who had only just recently declared most proudly its intention to be the purest, whitest nation in the British Empire. India, on the other hand, was a proud ancient civilisation now denied equal standing within the Empire, despite representing its largest source of resources and income, solely on the basis of its non-White status.
Using race and colonialism as a common thread, British India, White Australia, by Kama Maclean, attempts to explore this complex set of inter-relationships between Australia, India and Britain (as both nations and peoples) from Australian Federation in 1901 until India’s independence in 1947. In the first half of the twentieth century, British propaganda efforts went to great pains to emphasise the kinship of the Imperial relationship. This narrative was particularly emphasised during World War II when the survival of the Empire itself rested very heavily on India’s contribution to the war effort. Yes, despite this narrative of brotherhood, it would be some time before Australia even approached recognising India as a sovereign nation.
Historically, Australian perspectives on India were mediated through the triangulated prism of Britain – and the British Empire. For example, while Australian trade to India was robust, such trade was transacted largely with British colonial enterprises and seen as a component of global Imperial Trade rather than a bilateral economic relationship with India itself. India’s economy was shackled to Britain’s as a prime source of raw materials for British industry and a captive market for British manufactured goods. As Maclean notes, “India was more imagined than experienced in Australia, with the vast majority of transnational connections heavily mediated through the white mechanisms of the British Raj” (Maclean, p55). This was not an accident. Rather, it was by British design and intent.
From India’s perspective, the ties of Empire served to increase tensions with Australia rather than bind them closer. Australia’s stridently racist immigration policies—which treated British Indians just as unfairly as Chinese or other non-whites—put it at odds with a country looking to assert itself on equal footing within the Empire. Australia, for its part, tended to see Indian criticism of its restrictive policies as indicative of the Indian people’s ‘hyper-sensitive’ nature (Maclean, p233), rather than a genuine grievance borne of justifiable concern. In international forums Australian diplomats did their best to frame the country’s policies of prejudicial exclusion in economic terms rather than explicitly race-based ones. Australia’s concern was with non-whites’ willingness to work for low wages without union membership, it was argued, rather than any sense of racial superiority or prejudice that motivated Australia’s actions. Those paying attention will recognise similarities to contemporary Australian political discourses around migration (for both refugees and non-refugee).
Arguably, for much of the 20th century content to follow Britain’s lead, Australia was most active internationally when combating attempts to progress racial equality. For the antipodean colony, the issues of challenging apartheid, softening the White Australia policy and Indian home rule were all connected—each an equally slippery slope which must be defended against at all costs lest the Empire come undone. Most famously, the advocacy of Australian Prime Minister Hughes was instrumental in halting a resolution in favour of a racial equality clause during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Maclean covers negotiations of this kind in great detail in the book, although the casual reader may find the content covering various international agreements and domestic legislation a dense read.
However, British India, White Australia is as much about British hypocrisy on the issue of race as it is about Australia’s own discriminatory policies in relation to Indians. While Britain often joined India in showing dismay over Australia’s policies, this was only because of their perceived impact on the stability of the Empire rather than any higher moral argument. Indeed, Maclean argues that Australia’s race-based immigration regime was entirely consistent with the Empire’s principles and values rather than an aberration from them.
Race and inherent white superiority were used to justify Britain’s refusal to extend self-rule to India just as much as they were used to justify the exclusion of non-whites from Australia. As Australia’s third Prime Minister Chris Watson argued:
“The British Government do not think of putting the Hindoo (sic) or any other native of India upon the same plane as the people of the United Kingdom. The ground I take is that the natives of India are British subjects and subjects only, whilst the people of the United Kingdom are citizens as well, and British subjects in Australia are citizens also. That constitutes a wide distinction” (Maclean, pp25-26)
The sensitives of relations within the Empire meant that the reasoning for this distinction was seldom explicitly stated—the racist assumption that Indians were not capable of self-rule (at least not currently). Similarly, Australia’s selective application of a theoretically colour-blind language test allowed the country to effectively bar the migration of non-Whites without stating their true intent.
Ironically, Australians themselves balked at Britain’s use of bureaucracy to discriminate against them in the form of access to roles in the Indian Civil Service (ICS). At the time, Britain required applicants for work in the Indian colonial administration to attend examinations that were held in London, thus limiting access to only those Australians with the time and funds to allow for the trip to Britain. Australian lobbying for the holding of examinations locally were resisted by Britain at least partially on the grounds that giving in to such a request would increase pressure on them to hold similar examinations in India itself—thus opening the door for increased numbers of Indians working in the ICS. As with Australia’s language test, Britain felt the need to maintain a veneer of procedural fairness in enacting its racial discrimination. As Maclean notes, “discrimination was effectively concealed in the garb of the efficient and procedural bureaucracy of the examination” (Maclean, p41).
While the low numbers of Indians migrating to Australia in the early Twentieth Century meant that they were never a target of specific legislation or policies to curb their numbers or influence, they nonetheless suffered at the hands of Australia’s racist policies which aimed to discriminate against all non-Whites equally. Indeed, it was this failure to give British Indians the proper standing expected of fellow members of the Empire that was the greatest source of grievance for Indians in Australia.
Those Indians resident in Australia balked at their second-class standing and were very active in petitioning governments—both domestically and internationally—for a recognition of their special status. Having spilled blood for the Empire in the recent war, surely they had done enough to prove themselves loyal subjects and worthy of respect? ‘No’, was Australia’s response. If anything, Indian migration to Australia represented a new threat to the Australian worker and fed into the long-running inferiority complex of the Colonial Australian. The expansion of Western models of education to the Indian middle classes, including English language training, had created a generation of Indians who could not only compete with Australian workers but exceed them in capacity and skills.
Despite these tensions, there was engagement and contact between Indians living in Australia and local people. However, given the scarcity of first-person Indian accounts, Maclean is generally forced to adopt the perspective of non-Indian Australians in painting a picture of the lives of Indians in Australia at the time. This includes a fascinating analysis of the presence of Indian hawkers through the family photos and remembrances of those rural Australian families with whom they traded. For many of these isolated families, particularly women, the arrival of a travelling Indian hawker represented an opportunity to sample new wares, share local gossip and access the world beyond the farm. However, such representations are just snippets; distant and casual.
While Maclean herself acknowledges the limitations of first-person sources, the book would have benefited from more illustration of the internal life of Indians resident in Australia at the time. How did they reconcile their identities as Indians, Australians and British subjects? Instead, the greater availability of official documentation over personal accounts means that much of the book is concerned with the formal administrative aspects of Indian identity in Australia in the early twentieth century—such as the advocacy for equal legal and/or residential status.
In the end, Australia’s reticence in engaging directly with India and Indians gave way to shifting political realities. Even by the 1920s, Britain’s primary role in mediating the Australia-India relationship had started to recede. This allowed for both parties to establish more direct engagement for the first time. Oftentimes this engagement was led by niche organisations; Communists, Theosophists and Friendship societies. The Australian public’s impact on India’s independence movement was minimal at best. Despite this, the book explores the activities and internal machinations of a number of these well-meaning but ultimately ineffectual efforts.
With Britain’s retreat from Asia during World War II and India’s newly won independence, Australian policy-makers quickly acknowledged the need for a recalibration of its diplomatic priorities. As European powers retreated from their former colonial territories in the region Australia was now looking at a more isolated future. Cultivation of stronger diplomatic ties with India was needed as Australia pivoted to face a new foe—global Communism. Soon both countries would establish respective diplomatic representation, opening channels for direct political communication without British involvement. This would eventually be followed by the first cracks in the White Australia policy, allowing Indians to study, work and migrate to Australia.
In recent years, political necessity sparked by shifts in international power relations has once again seen Australian political leaders turn their attention to India. This time, however, it is China to whom the West seeks India’s help in balancing. India has become one of Australia’s key strategic partners in responding to the growing economic and military might of China, joining the United States and Japan as members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (‘the Quad’). On the economic front, Australia’s two-way goods and services trade with India now totals a massive $24.4 billion per year, and has become a key market for Australian exporters looking to avoid an over-reliance on China. At the individual level, engagement has never been higher. India is now the second largest country of origin for overseas-born Australian residents, and last year well over 100,000 Indians studied in Australia. Exchange goes both ways, as Australian cricketers ply their wares throughout the Indian Premier League and Indian cuisine and culture now firmly within the mainstream.
And yet, the central question raised by British India, White Australia remains. Do Australia and India truly share a set of common values and understandings? The poor treatment of Indian-Australians trying to return to Australia during the recent surge of Covid-19’s Delta variant revealed fractures in the relationship. Racist incidents, such as the apparent targeting of Indian taxi drivers in Melbourne, have also undermined any argument that racist attitudes towards Indians are now in the country’s rear-view mirror. While some may suggest that any hope for long-term engagement between India and Australia rests on an embrace of their common history, others like Maclean will continue to assert that in fact it is this shared colonial experience that has prevented the relationship from evolving beyond its racist origins.
JOSHUA BIRD is a community development specialist and scholar who focuses on minority rights and multicultural policy. He has spent the last twenty years living and working across the Asia-Pacific and has a Masters of Asia-Pacific Studies (2010) and a Doctor of Philosophy in China Studies (2016). Joshua is a regular contributor to the Asian Review of Books and Cha Asian Literary Journal, and his first book Economic Development in China’s Northwest: Entrepreneurship and Identity Along China’s Multi-ethnic Borderland was published by Routledge in 2017.
August 29, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Mother Wound
Amani Haydar
Panmacmillan
ISBN 9781760982454
Reviewed by ANNE BREWSTER
Strong Women
Amani Haydar’s powerful memoir takes its title from Dr Oscar Serrallach’s term ‘the mother wound’, which describes how ‘the relationship between mothers and daughters is affected by unhealed traumatic experiences passed down matriarchal lines’ (333). In her family, Haydar says, the wounds have been inflicted by male aggression, war and migration (329).
If memoirists produce memoirs in order to make their lives count in the public record, Haydar’s memoir is motivated by the strong imperative to make her mother’s life count – for it to be recorded and commemorated publically – as her mother, Salwa Haydar, was the victim of lethal violence at the hands of her husband, Haydar’s father. Amani Haydar has a high profile as a writer, artist, lawyer, community activist, media commentator and advocate for women’s rights, and has talked a lot in the media about her mother’s death so I expect it’s not a spoiler for me to identify this as the event that galvanises Haydar as a memoirist. She herself refers to her mother’s passing proleptically early in the book, before the narrative has even touched much upon her mother.
Haydar spends the first section of the memoir establishing the close and mutually respectful (67) relationship she had with her father as a child and the way he had inspired and dominated her sense of herself and her future. This is a deftly written memoir which skilfully records the changing narrative point of view of the protagonist/memoirist. Haydar describes how as a child she internalised her father’s view of the world, and saw the world in effect through his eyes. This included being inadvertently complicit from the sidelines as a child in his disparagement of her mother. Haydar recognises all too late that her father’s pattern of coercive, controlling, belittling and intimidating behaviour comprises the gendered domestic abuse that would prove fatal to her mother (91). The memoir thus traces Amani Haydar’s rites of passage as she comes to understand the functions of patriarchy as they intersect with gender and race. It describes her dissatisfactions with mainstream feminism and her efforts to ‘carve out’ (58) a feminism that would account for these intersectional complexities.
The feminism that The Mother Wound articulates is informed by scholarship (in particular the history of Muslim women’s writing and feminists working in Islamic frameworks), grass-roots and local activism, and debates on social media. This repurposed feminism allows Haydar to address issues such as the pernicious stereotyping of Arab and Muslim people in the media (for example, the correlations of Muslims with violence), and to challenge the entrenched binaries that promulgate these stereotypes (such as the binary of ‘traditional’ versus ‘modern’ which besets representations of CaLD communities and individuals, a binary mobilised by both the mainstream media and her father’s family alike, to the detriment of Muslim and Arab women).
Haydar identifies the ‘double bind’ that Muslim woman activists and survivors of gendered abuse often find themselves in of having to fend off Islamphobia on the one hand and to challenge patriarchy in their own communities on the other (304). This can result in self-censorship and a reluctance on the part of Muslim and Arab women to ‘share their truth freely’ (304). Haydar’s memoir makes an important contribution to Australian public life in countering this silence and I urge all Australians to buy and read this important book. Beautifully-written, intelligent and passionate, The Mother Wound is profoundly moving in its bravery and breathtakingly astute in its analysis of the operations of race, gender and class. It makes a paradigm-shifting contribution to the genre of life-writing and memoir in Australia.
In the course of reading this book I enthusiastically recommended it to a number of white friends and colleagues. It elicited virtually the same response: ‘oh, that sounds a bit grim’. Why are some things just too unpalatable for white readers? Haydar talks a lot about the lack – in the period following her mother’s death – of the recognition of and adequate ethical responses to her and her sisters’ grief: from her father’s family, the community, the mainstream media and other actors. The book forcefully draws my attention to a significant component of toxic whiteness – its refusal to acknowledge and commemorate the griefs of minoritised peoples and respectfully accord them mainstream space in public culture.
If Amani Haydar’s memoir is a commemoration of her mother and her untimely passing before she had time to realise the many different goals and ambitions of her public and private life, it is also a gesture to her grandmother and her shocking death in the South Lebanon conflict some years earlier. Haydar’s Teta was in a civilian convoy of three vehicles travelling through the countryside to escape shelling when they are killed in an apparently inexplicable Israeli drone attack. As one of her relatives stated: ‘there was nothing around the area where we were attacked, only fruit orchards – no people and no fighters. It was an empty area… we were clearly civilians, we had white flags’ (69).
Haydar meditates on the fact that the mortalities occasioned by war can leave people with a feeling of helplessness, and the sense that there is no recourse to justice. In her work as a lawyer she had attended a workshop on the investigation of war crimes with lawyers and investigators who had worked at the Hague Convention. She found the statistics of civilian mortalities particularly disturbing; ‘In modern warfare it is estimated that eighty per cent of casualties are civilians and seventy per cent of those civilians are estimated to be women and children’ (54). The rationale of ‘acceptable collateral in military operation[s]’ (55) was equally disturbing for her, given her family history. As the only Arab in the room at the workshop she was acutely aware that her own proximity to the Israeli-Lebanese war made her uncomfortable and distressed with the approach of the workshop to this material on civilian deaths which was on occasion cheerful and even jocular (55).
Haydar’s memoir demonstrates the many ways that war intrudes into diasporic peoples’ lives, not just in professional settings like the workshop but also their private living rooms: her family received news of Haydar’s Teta’s death in a tv news report. Hearing of her mother’s violent death with no warning in this way was deeply traumatic for Haydar’s mother and other family members (61). Haydar’s memoir raises the question for me: how can space be made in the national social imaginary (beyond the significant memorials in local communities) for the commemoration of those wars from which diasporic Australians have fled? The memory of these wars already exist within the memories of individuals and collectives; how can they be recognised at the national level?
In its dual homily to her mother’s and grandmother’s untimely deaths, The Mother’s Wound forensically analyses the intertwining of gender and violence in both the settings of the private home and in warfare. It aims to record truths that often remain unrecognised and unacknowledged. This analytical and memorial work comes at a cost. Haydar describes her acute sensitivity to war and violence; even watching the normalised stream of violence on mainstream tv provokes anxiety in her. The imagery is overwhelmingly immediate, real and ‘fleshy’ (129), reminding her inescapably of ‘a heightened sense of [her] own mortality, and the mortality of those around [her]’ (129). She describes numerous occasions when journalists and other people seeking to report on and commodify the grief of Haydar’s family (on the occasions of both her mother’s and her grandmother’s egregious deaths), showed little ethical awareness of and response to Haydar’s and her sisters’ grief. These anecdotes about normalised invisibility of minoritised people’s suffering make me as a middle-class white woman very much aware of the risk Haydar exposes herself to in offering her story to a variety of readers and audiences; and of my own responsibility to try to avoid contributing to this violence and harm.
Haydar insists that in spite of their violent deaths her mother and grandmother were strong women. Although she was indisputably the victim of wrong doing her mother was not only a victim but also a courageous and loving woman, an activist who ‘fought misogyny’ (93) and who left a legacy of resilience, intelligence and helping others (254). In bearing witness to the stories of her mother and grandmother Haydar herself celebrates the spiritual resources of gratitude, faith and joy (307) which sustained her during her writing of the memoir as well as her art practice, her family, community and her activism as a survivor-advocate.
ANNE BREWSTER is Honorary Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. Her books include Giving This Country a Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia, (2015), Literary Formations: Postcoloniality, Nationalism, Globalism (1996) and Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography (1995, 2015). She is series editor for Australian Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
August 26, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Gunk Baby
by Jamie Marina Lau
Hachette
ISBN 9780733646270
Reviewed by MEGAN CHEONG
Consumption and corporeality in late capitalism
A reading of Jamie Marina Lau’s Gunk Baby
After the deliquescent dream of Pink Mountain on Locust Island, Jamie Marina Lau’s Gunk Baby is a wake-up call from a silent number in the small hours of the morning. Leen lives in the fictional outer suburb of Par Mars, a typical sprawl of shopping centres, housing estates, and units fronted by flat open lawns. Yet just beneath all the grass and concrete runs an undertow of surveillance and violence that feels both strange and strangely familiar.
The most remarkable (and terrifying) feature of Lau’s hyperreality is the Topic Heights shopping complex which Leen selects as the site for her new business: a healing studio where she plans to offer the traditional Chinese ear-cleaning services she has learned from her mother. Topic Heights is ‘a perfect centrum, the exact summation of every need and every personality of the people residing around its hems. Where we get our clothes, where we find things to eat, what the inside of our houses look like.’ (7) Conversant with the comforting ‘sameness’ of the shopping complex are Leen’s reflections on the mind-body relationship and her role as a healer:
I tell her I’m passionate about relieving stress and tension in physical bodies and that we often abandon the concept that our nervous system, muscles, joints and organs carry the weight of us around. So much of our soul lives in our eyes and our fingers. The rest of our body gets heavy from being a vehicle for it. It needs relief. We have to start from the nervous system, the mind. (52)
The hypnotic slide between the philosophy of Chinese medicine and anatomisation of the capitalist machinery grinding away in the bowels of Topic Heights speaks directly to the reader as body and as consumer. My initial excitement at finding myself in a setting so familiar yet so under-scrutinised in contemporary literature was gradually subsumed by a profound discomfort stemming from a growing awareness of the myriad ways in which a life might be manipulated, even choreographed, by the insidious forces of late capitalism. Like so much of the novel, however, this discomfort, as well as a certain heightened consciousness of the sensations experienced by my ‘physical body’ (grasping my phone, peering at my computer screen), felt necessary, felt like waking up after drowsing for an indeterminate period of time in a malaise of uninterrogated habits.
Leen’s liminal status as a new business owner affords her a simultaneous view of both the exterior façade and the internal workings of the Topic Heights economy. Even as she curates furniture and music for her healing studio, carefully arranging her face and her words in accordance with the tenets of Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power to obtain and maintain custom, she spends her breaks luxuriating in the infinite showrooms and product ranges of K.A.G., a fictional but uncannily familiar international chain store that sells minimal basics, stationary and homewares. Leen’s own awakening is instigated by Jean-Paul, her housemate’s disgruntled co-worker at the Topic Heights’s pharmacy. Talking incessantly, Jean-Paul half-asks/half-demands that Leen drive him to a ‘discussion group’ where members of the Par Mars community use Heidegger and Hegel to dissect the managerial practices of the franchises that populate Topic Heights.
The number of men and white women who talk without listening throughout the novel underscores Leen’s relative passivity, or more accurately the practised resignation from which she observes the power plays that propel the world around her. Leen shares her narratorial detachment (or, as Lau describes it, ‘existential boredom’) with Monk, the fifteen-year-old protagonist of Pink Mountain on Locust Island. But while Monk’s status as an observer is largely a function of her disempowerment as an adolescent girl, Leen’s torpor is a product of the absurdities and violence of racism. As a young woman of colour Leen is less an actor than a body to be acted on, a view frequently embodied by her male clients:
I tried to pass him a sheet. But he didn’t take it, just smiled, his breath under his pressed lips. His body lurched, tilting a bit forward, as if ready to impel himself on me. A foully carnal exhale coming from his nostrils.
‘Take,’ I said. Basic English, no emotive words.
I tried not to look where his dick was. He performed a sort of sneer and went over to the massage table, leaned up against it. He looked down. His body looked like a pouch compared to it.
‘You take,’ he said, this time using a slight accent, or perhaps I had become too paranoid at that point. He had a ten-dollar bill scrunched between his fists. ‘You take.’ (138)
Although Jean-Paul never seems to pose a similarly physical threat, occupying space with his words rather than his body, the entitlement and rage of his rants flow forth from the same arterial vein that carries the violence coursing everywhere beneath the suburban monotony of Par Mars. In an effort to bring about ‘palpable change’, Jean-Paul begins to plan and carry out a series of ‘Resisting Acts’ – strange but harmless pranks designed to unsettle any Topic Heights managerial staff who he believes are too accustomed to and comfortable in the seat of power. In this way, the violent energy that surges beneath the surface of the novel has both reactionary and revolutionary origins. Yet if the ‘late’ in late capitalism hints at the imminence of revolution, with its odd cast of misfits, Gunk Baby wonders who will be driving the revolution and where we will end up.
MEGAN CHEONG is a teacher, writer and critic living and working on Wurundjeri land. Her writing has been published in Kill Your Darlings, Going Down Swinging and Overland.
August 21, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anonymous is a POC health worker and poet living in one of the LGAs on unceded Gadigal country. They write on the Covid delta strain crisis.
Let it RIP, Australia
The dawn of a new decade came with a sting
that became an explosion,
a sniff of opportunity.
And the powerful lined up to strut and pose
they got through 2020 by sheer luck, rising,
as they silenced and crushed all opposition!
They spun a smorgasbord of false narratives
to keep the masses asleep.
They reminded us in other countries
women get shot.
December 2020 Israel vaccinates, Australia is silent.
If there’s a goal, it’s secret and hidden.
Inside the dark wooden cabinet of white men
is a vaccination vacuum.
Strut, pose, wait and watch the world. It’s not a race!
Smiling and lying, they squander the gains,
strutting, posing and rewarding the sycophants
Only 4% fully vaccinated when Bondi starts
as it spreads to Walgett, and Victoria,
New Zealand even. A catch-up game
No intention of defeating this plague.
Deliberate, calculated spread
because when it is everywhere
there is nothing to lose in opening the borders. Ha ha!
1200 cases today and we smile and boast
dissonant, cheerful one-liners.
The price is paid in the hospitals of Sydney
by the beaten and battered clinicians,
falling one by one to radio silence.
By patients who came in for gallstones
but never left because of COVID.
In small country towns where there is no hospital
and no prospect of evacuation because Dubbo is falling
in the dark corridors of the prisons
and the forgotten people in Wilcannia
starving and unvaccinated
Is this planned genocide?
While the experts muse about global equit
While Pfizer is fast-tracked to the Eastern suburbs
So they can be free sooner
Strutting. Posing. The strong will survive and the weak….
Well they were unvaccinated. Ha ha!
Let’s go full Great Barrington today, Haha, they laugh.
Live with COVID, haha!
The children are the sacrifice,
held up to the money god.
The ultimate sacrifice in cringing worship of the UK
Desperate doctors whisper about whole wards infected
Hospitals crumbling
Emergency beds prepared in concrete car parks
Hastening death with morphine and midazolam
to allow new admissions.
Live with COVID, they say, as they strut and pose.
We have thousands of ventilators. Haha!
It’s just the Untermensch that are dying
Westies and Muslims.
Not the important people of Mona Vale.
In the rich suburbs a lady browsing in a non-essential shop
was heard saying “That’s not us. It’s just the LGAs”.
The experts who built their careers trumpeting their commitment
to the vulnerable and disadvantaged
are silent, still grovelling for small favours like obedient dogs
Servants to the state with one foot
crushing the heads of the dying, so eager to help
masturbating at the fate of the poor
as the carnage flows
as the merchants of death conduct their deadly orchestra
with glee
The complicit media who fawned and enabled this symphony of sorrow
are starting to fidget and fuss
Some sense belatedly they are stakeholders too.
Their children will be sacrificed. Oh no.
A few speak out and finally ask the right questions
Too little too late.
A small group of besieged warriors
fought for what was right
but were silenced and destroyed
by the despots and their fawning colluders
by laws twisted to punish
those who dared to speak truth
North Korea style.
The righteous painted as bad guys.
Black is white
And white is black.
Some lost their jobs for speaking up.
While the posing pretenders climbed higher
on the bodies of the dead
and the mountains of their profit
shouting out their propaganda
We have to live with COVID!
Death is inevitable!
August 19, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Monsters
by Alison Croggon
Scribe
ISBN 9781925713398
Reviewed by GAYATRI NAIR
I initially didn’t want to review this book. It is written by a white woman, and as a person of colour (POC) who wants to elevate diverse writing, I thought it was important to only review other diverse writers. However, after discussion with a mentor and writer I realised that it is also important that we, as POC women especially, participate in criticism, not just of diverse literature but also more established writers. It is possible also to challenge and change traditional criticism by introducing diverse perspectives from diverse critic-subjects. This is called auto-ethnographic criticism, which acknowledges the inextricable link between the personal and the cultural and makes room for non-traditional forms of inquiry and expression. It is a way to quietly address the assumed authority of the ‘literary review’ or the role of ‘critic’. So, in this way it’s subversive for a POC to review white authors and writing.
Alison Croggon I think would appreciate and understand this. Her work ‘Monsters’ – part essay, interwoven with part memoir – interrogates her role as a white woman and how colonialism and the establishment of the empire has caused harm, not only to those outside it but those who built it. She asks difficult questions, not only of herself but of the reader.
“This figure I see in the foreground, this me. How monstrous am I? What does it mean to be a monster? From Latin monstrum, meaning an abomination…grotesque, hideous, ugly, ghastly, gruesome, horrible …” (pg 160)
Croggon is herself an immigrant, she researches her family’s heritage through murky British military history to both South Africa during the Boer War and India; her family were foot soldiers of the empire. She questions how she can escape this dynasty including spending her formative years under apartheid – and the most racist country in the world.
Croggon’s descriptive way with words and unexpected adjectives and sentence structures demonstrate her expertise as a poet. The rhythms of her writing replicate the ocean and we are sometimes dragged within its depths. The references to other writers, especially poets like Arthur Rimbaud and Sylvia Plath are interlaced with her own criticisms in unique ways. But the stories she tells of her family life and in particular her motherhood are glittering, told with both stylistic prowess and integrity. The way she writes about being a woman, her mother and her own experience of domestic abuse which fractured her life and relationships, and her later recognition of what it was is both compassionate and unrelenting. Her refusal to be a nice woman, her anger at structures that contain women is refreshing.
The critical relationship explored in this this book though is the one with her sister, which is sometimes hard to read. Their relationship is marked by cruelty and stems from their experiences as children, the violence Croggon describes as well as the anger is at once palpable, intimate but also sometimes uncomfortable in its intimacy. Their subsequent estrangement marked by their shared inheritance of violence is traced back in a wonky line to their history as colonisers. This is not an easy read.
“When people feel there isn’t enough to go around, conflict can be vicious. Maybe that’s part of what happened between me and my sister, that sense that there was so little of everything. There wasn’t enough money, there wasn’t enough love. Everything turned into a deadly competition. And we both lost.” (pg 154)
The book asks questions, but it doesn’t give answers. As a reader this can sometimes be frustrating as we are dragged along, it can feel relentless, and it’s unclear what Croggon wants from us as the reader. But there is also an understanding that the reader can accept that life doesn’t have neat conclusions and we can sit with her in trying to make sense of it.
Croggon’s critique of colonialism, which threads its way through the entire book, is her most interesting but also at times jarring. She traces a faint line through her lineage as colonisers and their cruelty to her family’s recent experiences of violence which led to both the fracture in her parents’ relationship and her relationship with her sister. She investigates the idea that like patriarchy hurts everyone (including men), white supremacy also hurts white people. Not only does it hurt those that are colonised, but it also hurts those that perpetrate it. Croggon explains:
“I’m not interested in writing a mea culpa. I’m not interested in throwing ashes on my head and throwing myself on the ground in penitence. I’m not interested in displays of my guilt or my culpability. Take this as read: I was raised in a racist, sexist, hierarchical culture, and just as I had to learn (am still learning) how to undo all the prohibitions imposed by the patriarchs, rows and rows of them in their robes like in medieval paintings, leading all the up to the Throne of God, so I am learning to unlearn racism.” (pg 241)
Whilst this is a novel and valid theory that deserves to be interrogated further, one of the problems with this assertion is that too much focus is on the white experience and not enough on the experiences of those who were oppressed. To her credit Croggon acknowledges this but some of it does feel a bit self-pitying and has elements of white saviour complex. Whilst it is a memoir and this self-reflection is important, there is perhaps too much focus on this narrative when she could have further amplified the stories of the oppressed. She does refer to other Black and brown thinkers like Audre Lorde and Ruby Hamad, but it also feels like a checklist in a post #blacklivesmatter world. This narrative takes away from the stories that need to be told.
Her descriptions and unravelling of the misogynies in canonical works are sharp. And the way she uses theory to unpack her own personal history whilst at times raw is also compelling. Croggon’s use of the English language is superb. Her condemnation of the empire, its inheritance and how it’s destroyed not only external, but her inner world is both uneasy and powerful.
“I was born as part of a monstruous structure – the grotesque, hideous, ugly, ghastly, gruesome, horrible relations of power that constituted colonial Britain. A structure that shaped, me that shapes the very language that I speak and use and love. I am the daughter of an empire that declared itself the natural order of the world.” (pg 160)
“Those voiceless ghosts, only audible in their absence.” (pg 35) By writing her own story, and asking these questions, she gives those ghosts a voice and encourages other stories by those that have been oppressed, to be told. In Monsters, Croggon also makes space for these questions to be answered.
GAYATRI NAIR is an Indian-Australian writer, poet and DJ based on the land of the Wangal people of the Eora nation in Sydney’s inner west. She is a member of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement and has qualifications in Law and Arts, working in human rights policy, research and advocacy. Gayatri has been published in Sweatshop Women and Swampland Magazine.
August 19, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Against Certain Capture
by Miriam Wei Wei Lo
Apothecary Archive
ISBN: 978-0-6488079-7-1
Reviewed by JACKSON
The interestingly eccentric Apothecary Archive recently re-issued Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s collection, Against Certain Capture, which won the 2004 WA Premier’s Book Award for Poetry.
Like many Australian citizens, Lo has a complicated background. She was born in Canada and grew up in Singapore. She has Chinese-Malaysian and Anglo-Australian parents (Lo, About), and their meeting is part of the story of this book, which presents two parallel biographies, one of her Chinese paternal grandmother 梁月仙 (Liáng Yuè Xiān) and one of her Australian grandmother Eva Sounness.
While a prose biography may be lengthy and detailed, a successful verse biography is like a good biopic: it showcases the pivotal events, allowing the reader to extrapolate the story and its significance. Against Certain Capture adopts this approach, offering 21 shortish poems, devoting half to each grandmother. Within their brevity, Lo lucidly evokes these women’s characters and times.
She does so by subtly deploying poetic craft. The life of 梁月仙 amid the scrabble and crush of twentieth-century China and Malaysia, choosing romance over money and giving birth to Lo’s father in a narrow room above a shop (Lo, Home), is given quick-stepping lines, free-flowing, fast-changing stanzas, and fragments of Chinese. A striking example is “Run”, which appears on the page in three narrow columns, suggesting not only the young woman’s literal and metaphorical journey but also the vertical presentation of traditional Chinese poetry. It opens:
Sometimes life
narrows down
to this
a path
cut shoulder-wide
into grass
two feet
that run
between the
rubber trees
on this
five acres
梁月仙
you hold
your name
and run
Through Lo’s skill with phrase and pattern, we feel the young woman clinging to her cultural identity while labouring for her family’s survival (“the coffeeshop / bankrupt”).
In contrast to 梁月仙, Sounness raised ten children in the dry, expansive Australian rural landscape. Accordingly, her section tends toward slower, prosier lines and more regular stanza patterns. Assessing the farmer she would marry,
she notes that his arms are steady, although his dancing
leaves something to be desired. As they move, she weights
his soberness against bandy legs, his shuffling
two-step, the smell of the farm on his collar. She sways.
(“Saturday Night Dances”)
These examples illustrate how throughout this book the style serves the subject matter. There are no egregious verbal gymnastics. As Andrew Burke comments, Lo’s “diction is so unobtrusive you never notice the words — just what they’re saying”. After all,
There are no pretty words
for hunger.
Only a thin white dribble
squeezed from a cracked nipple,
(“No Pretty Words”)
and dignified maturity deserves understated metaphor:
Eva rises, drawing her years about her —
a cloak of thick and silvering hair
that hangs past her shoulders.
(“Silver”)
Refreshingly, this book is written in the third person. This enhances the sense of intermittently peeking at the two families’ lives as if through a camera. Elsewhere, Lo remarks that she likes “experimenting with aesthetic distance. The practice of Keats’ negative capability … of writing without drawing attention to oneself … was in the back of my mind” (Brennan, Interview).
Sounness, especially, is seen from a distance. In an essay, Lo compares the experiences of researching and writing the two lives. She says writing about Sounness was much more challenging although — and maybe because — she was still alive and Lo interviewed her instead of replying solely upon others’ narratives. This made creating a coherent story more difficult (Lo, “Reconfiguring” 205–207). Perhaps as a result, the Sounness work tends, for me, to be less successful. In particular, there is a good deal of quoted speech which, although Lo handles it skilfully, appears to have been somewhat resistant to rendering in verse. These lines do not ring in my mind after reading like the ones in Lo’s own voice.
Nevertheless, the poems memorably capture the tone of Sounness’s life. Michael Brennan comments that through her poems, Lo “explores family histories with openness, sincerity and a gift for characterisation, giving detail and depth to the conflicts and prejudice, nurturing and love, of the strong women of her family.” He calls Against Certain Capture “an adroit sequence of poems” in which “Lo’s formidable grandmothers … are vividly present” (Miriam). Intriguingly, no-one ever describes a man as “formidable”. Lo herself comments, “I wrote about my grandmothers partly because we live in a world that does not take old ladies very seriously, when I feel that they ought to be taken very seriously indeed” (Brennan, Interview).
Sounness’s recollections are taken especially seriously in “Between a Mother and her Mongol Child”, which juxtaposes the book’s only foray into mid-line whitespace and chopped-up syntax (“connectthe wiring start / the stop heart startstop / the stopheart”) with a passage from Sounness’s journal (“It took some time before the Mongol became a child”) to vividly express Sounness’s conflicting feelings about raising a child with Down syndrome.
I hope that dated term “Mongol” makes you squirm as I did upon encountering it quoted by a person with Chinese heritage. One reason we read poems is to examine ourselves. As Brennan notes, Lo’s work highlights the “ethnic, cultural and political divisions and contradictions from which contemporary Australian identity evolves, as well as a vital and realistic picture of how the minutiae of culture and identity reshape us over generations” (Miriam).
I would add that the reason Lo’s poems do this so well is because she chooses not to delineate her sociopolitical concerns explicitly. Hence, readers are free to experience her work on multiple levels, see its connections for themselves, and draw their own conclusions.
Lo herself comments on this. Discussing poets she terms “hybrid” or “multi-racial” whose work she read as background, she says:
I was also bothered by a general obsession with alienation and the way in which the poetry seemed to become a repetitive performance of various poets’ marginal credentials. I wanted to write something that emphasised not only the relational and communal context of experiences of cultural difference, but also the positive possibilities of hybridity as a mode of being that does not have to be characterised primarily by alienation. (Brennan, Interview)
Perhaps the most important reason Lo writes about her grandmothers is to articulate her personal definition of hybridity, a theoretical term she seems to find apposite, but also uncomfortable because of its “dark linguistic history” (Lo, “Towards” 9–10). To be able to use it, she defines it as seeing oneself as a collection of cultural “parts” in “relationship with each other”. She comments that these “parts” are shaped by familial and historical “factors” and that by writing about her grandmothers, she is attempting to create a “positive” view of hybridity without forgetting how it is affected by prejudiced discourses (“Towards ” 13–14).
One way to do this is through language. The 梁月仙 poems, like Lo, use English as their first language and Chinese as a second (Lo, Home; Brennan, Interview). Because of their appearance and sound, the Chinese fragments significantly enhance the poems’ atmosphere. Lo explains that using Mandarin helped her get inside her grandmother’s head and milieu (Lo, “Towards” 16). It helps the reader, too:
花样的年华,
来如春梦不多时,
去似秋云无觅处。
(“Like the Autumn Clouds, They Are Gone”)
Um … something about flowers and years? I turn to Google, which translates the first line idiomatically as “In the mood for love”, adding wistful romance to Lo’s English version, which beautifully preserves the poetry:
Like flowers, the days of my youth —
they came like the sweet breath of spring
in my dreams, like the autumn clouds
they are gone where they cannot be found.
As Burke observes, this 32-page book is large “in intention and scope”. On finishing it, I felt a little short-changed! I wished I could learn more about the grandmothers’ fascinating lives.
I would also have liked more of the poetry to savour. As Lo herself remarks, “Poetry has to be about pleasure (poetry for its own sake) and it will be relevant and valuable as long as some of us enjoy reading and writing it” (Brennan, Interview). I have certainly enjoyed reading and contemplating this book.
References
Brennan, Michael. Interview with Miriam Wei Wei Lo. July 2011, https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/cou_article/19021/Interview-with-Miriam-Wei-Wei-Lo/en/tile.
Lo, Miriam Wei Wei. Sept. 2009, https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poet/14885/Miriam-Wei-Wei-Lo/en/tile.
Burke, Andrew. Miriam Lo’s ’Against Certain Capture’. Sept. 2004, https://hispirits.blogspot.com/2004/09/miriam-los-against-certain-capture.html.
Lo, Miriam Wei Wei. About. 2021, https://miriamweiweilo.com/.
“Home” FAQ. 2021, https://miriamweiweilo.com/home-faq.
“Reconfiguring a Necessary Entrapment : A Tale of Two Grandmothers.” Beyond Good and Evil? : Essays on the Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific Region, edited by Dennis Haskell et al., University of Western Australia Press for the Westerly Centre, 2005, pp. 199–209.
“Towards a Particular Hybridity: A Beginning.” Westerly, vol. 44, no. 4, 1999, pp. 9–20, https://westerlymag.com.au//wp-content/uploads/2016/02/WesterlyVol.44no.4.pdf.
JACKSON was born in Cumbria, England, and lives in Australia and New Zealand. Her four full-length poetry collections include A coat of ashes (Recent Work Press 2019) and The emptied bridge (Mulla Mulla Press 2019). Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, notably the Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry. Her awards include the Ros Spencer Poetry Prize. In 2018 she completed her PhD in Writing at Edith Cowan University, winning the University Research Medal and two other awards. During 2018 and 2019 she taught English in China. She works as a poetry editor and casual academic. thepoetjackson.com
August 11, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
I Said The Sea Was Folded
by Erik Jensen
Black Inc
ISBN: 9781760642914
Reviewed by JOSIE/JOCELYN DEANE
The first poem, chronologically, in I said the sea was folded begins
I don’t know if you read poetry
I don’t know if I write it.
(p.55)
Jane Hirshfield tells the speaker of the book, in another, that poems “are a diary note/ to remember what happened”. Poetry— its writing, language and the ways it can make sense of love/wounded time— is the first preoccupation of Erik Jensen’s book, in spite of its promotion as “love poems”.
If I said the sea was folded has a unifying trick, it is the framing of poetry— as an activity, an artefact, a mediation of language— as inherently concerned with itself. This isn’t new— every kind of poetry is implicated by the limits of its field— but through its dramatization, Jensen makes it the engine of his poems, and the narrative at their core. It insists that any kind of therapy or catharsis poetry can affect first passes through the poem as a text, revelatory and profoundly alienating at the same time, for reader and speaker. It’s no surprise that the book ends with a gloss on what is inexpressible, as “the background against which/ anything I could express has its meaning”; any poetry concerned with itself-as-poetry ends in the same place, turns liberating and restrictive.
Most of the poems directly enact this passage through themselves—and the medium of the speaker— detailing their own construction. The book is divided into 3 non-linear chronological segments, starting from the end of a relationship. Some play on a motif that appears across each segment, decontextualizing as time rewinds. Poems refer back to each other, to their germ at the beginning of the relationship, only to emerge bitter and accusatory at the end. A poem about the love language of turtles— precious in its inexpressibility through human terms, its lack of projection— is foreshadowed by its later, first appearance, when the speaker spits
why did you shout last night, when all we wanted
was to feel the simple, placable love
of a turtle stacked up on a turtle?
(p.14)
Other works— ‘Pinter’s Betrayal’, ‘Nick Payne’s Constellations’— use non-linear time to excavate the normativity of works inspired by love: inverting the dramatic arc of meet cute, juxtaposing romantic gestures with their fizzling out, coupling them the self-interest. It has the effect— ironically— of emphasising the radical contingency of romantic relationships. Something portrayed as normal/monolithic is tessellated with a thousand shards of gender-play, class signifiers and naturalisation. Addressing their partner, the speaker defines the poems in their book, subject and object, as “the ways I’ve tried to look”, approaching their partner’s non-binary self, “broken off in the parts I’ve wanted to see”. This “trying to look”, defined by its engagement with failure, finds its corollary in the inexpressibility of poetry, that “Words are not enough… they exist too much/ for the people that made them”, as the speaker reports their partner saying.
If the poems pass through themselves in I said the sea was folded, that passage involves reaching for each other, and— through each other— the absent beloved, remote in space/ time and— the speaker dramatizes— driven away by the normativity of poetic discursiveness and— the speaker insinuates— the speaker’s own norminess, their reproductions of those norms in speech. The poems as a result are sparse, connotative, to the point of vagueness, the recording of imagistic details, juggling/juxtaposing poetic diction with simple, deliberately banal records of the relationship, as if to invite and stave off interpretation. They “hold in place/even when the other/is no longer here”.
Linguistic reference, not only to themselves but as a whole, becomes a key technical, thematic and ethical concern of the poems. Through reference they transcend, feed back into each other’s use of metaphor/imagery and establish a poetic whole out of the disjointed timeline, all while their essential emptiness and arbitrariness are emphasised. Individually, the poems can read as circling a void. A list of vague, deliberately poeticized descriptions of trees “fixed against the sky… their branches bent/as if the cold had stunted them”, “hedges of agapanthus” and “money/after it had been spent” conclude with “I suppose what I’m trying to say is/ I love you”, direct address immediately couched in/ out of the speaker’s suspicion of language and its stock trade. In one poem the speaker’s grandmother offers a warning, in two lines, “against poems/ she said they are forever”, the rest of the blank page almost a literalisation of this. There’s a sense of almost-tragic irony in the poems: they enact a double movement between sense-making and performative contradiction. In the prologue Jensen offers a mea culpa to the poem’s addressee: “I wish I met you now/but of course I met you then/and the rest of that time/is just what happened”. Reading through the book linearly, using the poetry’s logic to piece the continuity together, following the speaker’s own desire to “let you be/ to feel it for yourself”, we end in a place full of promise and retroactive empathy that cannot be real.
It’s in this continually moving/retreating space that the ethical desire of I said the sea was folded lives. In writing “love poetry” where the beloved is conspicuously absent, their construction put in air-quotes, Jensen tries to build a space where the deferral of reference comes to signify a queer, non-binary being, the “background against which/ whatever I could express has its meaning” . In this he mirrors, and directly draws on, Maggie Nelson, citing her “complaint/about the instability of likeness” that retroactively informs the poetics of the book. As the speaker murmurs: “one tree is like another tree/but not too much”. In this space hollowed out by the poems— Jensen implies— a love poem that can adequately represent a non-binary beloved, from a cisgender perspective, can take shape. A kind of representation— the paradox is intentional— predicated on inexpressibility, the perfect silence of a “good ally” that doesn’t overstep their boundaries. Jensen frames this as a hard won ethical lesson on his part, after the breakup, “Nothing occurs in order/although it takes a whole life to realise/so I haven’t”. At the same, it’s a lesson predicated on cis incomprehension, and inevitable tragedy. If the cisnormativity of love poetry is critiqued through the book’s structure/poetic style, it seems to conclude in a fatalism complementary to “good allies”: I will inevitably, tragically misrepresent you in my poetry, and I’m truly sorry. My intentions were good. Cis people, this is what you must take heed of to avoid my sorry fate, the limits of my poetic language and world.
If the poems of the book set up a negative dialectic, opening up space for non-binary reference/critique, the cis speaker remains an unmoved mover, perfectly still, separated from all that gender through their work. But the true issue is, as a non-binary person, I can’t believe in the inexpressible. Or at least the version reified by Jensen or Nelson. A reckoning with what being non-binary implies— a critique of colonial gender construction, the ongoing role of gender in upholding white patriarchy and capitalist accumulation, the kind of limiting subjectivity that is affixed to the “non-binary beloved”— seems beyond it. If non-binary space— Jensen writes— is a kind of via negativa, I couldn’t think of something more obstructive to it than this deployment of the “inexpressible”, or the poetry it suggests. It makes me think of the tweet: a weeping voice tells someone that they can’t simply say everything is a gender. The person, unmoved, points at a weird cloud, a cat, a sloth-mug: gender, gender, gender.
What does this all add up to? A series of finely detailed, observant poems that don’t hang together? A structure and poetics that turns that lack into a good technique, a kind of join-the-dots that performs an interesting self-critique of poetic language and tradition, which— like Nelson’s work— is more important for what it crystalizes than opens up? In the end, I’m encouraged to take this kind of poetry from cis lovers of non-binary people, in the same way I’m encouraged to accept good allyship… What I have time for in the work I should appreciate, and the idea of the inexpressible I’ll try to disabuse, to prevent it causing potential mischief among the good cis people. Meanwhile, I’ll be over here with my partners.
References:
- Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts, Minneapolis, Greywolf Press, 2015, print.
JOSIE/JOCELYN DEANE is a writer/student at the University of Melbourne. Their work has appeared in Cordite, Australian Poetry Journal and Overland, among others. In 2021 they were one of the recipients of the Queensland Poetry Festival Ekphrasis award. They live on unceded Wurundjeri land.
July 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
We’re thrilled to announce that the winner for the 2021 Mascara Bundanon Writer’s Residency is
Isabelle Li
Isabelle Li is a Chinese Australian writer and translator. She has published in various anthologies and literary journals in Australia including The Best Australian Stories, Southerly, Westerly and UTS Writers’ Anthology. Her collection of short stories A Chinese Affair was published by Margaret River Press in 2016. Her prose translations have appeared in Sydney Review of Books and her poetry translations in Mascara, World Literature and Works. Her Chinese translation of Sebastian Barry’s novel The Secret Scripture is published by Zhejiang Literature; Art Publishing House. Isabelle is currently studying her Doctor of Creative Arts at Western Sydney University.
JUDGE’S COMMENTS
Isabelle Li’s ‘The Northern Tomb’ is exciting, engaging, and very promising. It employs a smooth narrative voice, suffused with telling details and implications of character; a facility for drawing the way characters gently push and pull against each other. There are many clever, artful details about the narrator, her son Dawei, and Mr Zhao. It is confidently handled. There are also clever hints throughout about the cultural setting and details of contemporary life. Li shows a deft touch and subtle hand for the telling detail. Straightforward and raw, it inscribes real and personal experiences in Australia and provincial China, replete with their violence and personal destitution. The emotional leaps are handled well through stoicism and resignation. Her writing is a mature example of the trans-migration of the imagination and its understated translation into melancholia and dislocation.
We thank our 2021 judges: DECLAN FRY and BRIAN CASTRO
A few words from Mascara
“The applications we received speak to the sheer talent, voice and diversity of stories, essays, mixed media and poems in our cohorts. We were thrilled with the response, the vividness and creative lifeblood infusing the projects.”
About
In partnership with the Bundanon Trust, the inaugural Mascara Bundanon Writer’s residency is an exciting opportunity for an emerging or established First Nations or CaLD writer with an innovative project that pushes their writing craft into new expressive and conceptual territory. We received applications in poetry, fiction, non-fiction, graphic fiction. The winner receives a two week residency at Bundanon, a stipend of $1,000 and a manuscript reading to be arranged with Ultimo Press. A chance to immerse in the layered landscape and history of Bundanon, a place of renewal, where new relationships to country, history and creative practices are formed. We thank the Wodi Wodi and Yuin people for their care of and connection to land, culture and community.
SHORTLIST
Timmah Ball
Timmah Ball is a non-fiction writer, researcher and creative practitioner of Ballardong Noongar heritage whose practice is influenced by a short career in urban planning. Her writing has appeared in a range of anthologies and literary magazines such as The Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin, The Griffith Review and Columbia University’s The Avery Review. In 2016 she won the Westerly Patricia Hackett Prize and is currently an Arts House Makeshift Publics artist in resident and editor of First Nations writing for The Westerly Magazine.
JUDGE’S COMMENTS
Timmah Ball’s Blue Print for Another World is remarkable for its melancholic tone and questions the power of conceiving design and planning to refigure Australia as ‘a multifaceted continent whose unique and divergent cultures make up a complex ecosystem rather than the western construct of states border, regions and capital cities.’ It is marked by its searching, frank assessments of self and place and the contradictions of reflecting on change within the luxuries of capitalism: ‘in the cycle of deep discussion we only ever brush the edge of change.’ This is a work of ficto-criticism and it cleverly reconstructs a map viewed from a complex First Nations ecosystem. Her writing is richly engaged, revealing a strong social commitment to the connection between poetics and cartography, between language and country.
Luke Patterson
Luke Patterson is a Gamilaroi poet and folklorist living on Gadigal lands. He is interested in the ways bioregional identities and consciousness are expressed through localised and vernacular forms. Luke’s research and creative pursuits are grounded in his extensive work with Aboriginal and other community-based organizations across Australia.
JUDGE’S COMMENTS
TEK expands on the “Authority” and constitutes a poetic and methodological experiment that plays on the anthropologically derived term “traditional ecological knowledge”. Patterson’s poetry is muscular and sinuous. Its interlaced rhyme patterns and use of assonance and slant rhyme are notable, providing music and movement to the verse. He has a great command of language and his commitment to ecology and the environment is unquestionable since he combines this with knowledge and history. The cadences and rhythms of his work are outstanding: city and country; capitalism and indigeneity; climate and chaos.
Saba Vasefi
Saba Vasefi’s personal lived experience as a refugee and exiled feminist poet and writer together gives her unique experience and insight. Since seeking asylum in Australia and started to write in English, I have been focused on completing my PhD and fulfilling my journalistic work. For four years, she was director of Sydney International Poetry and Arts Festival, and two years director of Diaspora symposium. Recent Work Press has published her current project the Borderless, A Transnational Anthology of Feminist Poetry.
JUDGE’S COMMENTS
Saba Vasefi’s poetry is dramatic and lyrical. There is a conflation of poetry and autobiography, which gives her work a frankness that is limpid and clear-sighted. Saba Vasefi’s poetry is notable for the contrasts it draws between the mundane and violent: ‘No matter how many holy verses / they made my mouth express, / no prayers found their God.’ A highlight is ‘The Forbidden Gender’ which begins with a contrast between its quotidian details and the shock of the last line: ‘The road had potholes, / the school had veils, / and the students / lay dead under their burqas in a well.’ It includes perhaps one of the best couplets in the collection: ‘Instead, we were free / to die as much as we desired …’
July 7, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Song of the Crocodile
by Nardi Simpson
ISBN 9780733643743
Hachette 2020
Reviewed by PIP NEWLING
To read Song of the Crocodile is to immerse yourself in an unfolding relationship to place. You may not recognise it immediately but the profound connection to place shared by Simpson through this story is a slow build to love, yearning, recognition and respect for Country. The novel is a confident and accomplished debut by Nardi Simpson, a Yuwaalaraay woman best known for her singing and song writing as a member of the Sydney band the Stiff Gins. It is a profound intergenerational Australian story of family and Country that deserves to be as celebrated and well-read as Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet.
The novel illuminates a way of thinking, of loving and of living. Simpson’s musicality, the fluid way she uses language, both English and Yuwaalaraay, throughout underscores the narrative by creating landscapes of emotion. It reveals connectedness and relationship across time and place, allowing language and Country to breathe. Song of the Crocodile is a lyrical achievement of story, language, and heart.
Set in a time resembling the 1950s, the book opens with Simpson walking us into Darnmoor, a small regional town in the north-west of NSW with the tag line ‘Gateway to Happiness’ on its welcome sign. We see the early morning quiet streets, the shuttered shops and the war memorial in the centre that provides the focus for the town. We walk through the town, leaving the ‘inoffensive, modest and calm’ façade of Darnmoor, to the Council tip, a bora ground now covered in the town rubbish, and then on further to the Mangamanga, a great river near where the local Aboriginal people live on a place called the Campgrounds located at the end of Old Black Road.
This introduction sets the foundation for all that will follow; the demarcation of bodies, dreams and knowledge, and what happens when boundaries are pushed. Powerfully, the story is told only through the experience of the Aboriginal characters. The white characters are significant actors, changing hopes and lives, but they are not the emotional or narrative focus.
The characters
The story is of three generations of women, Margaret Lightning, her daughter Celie Billymil, and Mili, Celie’s daughter.
Living on the Campgrounds and working in Darnmoor, Margaret is quiet and hardworking, navigating the white town with caution. She works at the hospital, doing the laundry and walks into town each day using side streets to reach her destination. The demarcation of race occurs in the hospital too, with Aboriginal patients installed on a side verandah with Margaret acting as their nurse, cleaner and counsellor, and conduit to the white management. Racism is ever present, in the demand that the sheets used for the Aboriginal patients are burnt rather than washed and re-used, in the level of care for the Aboriginal patients, the amount of information Aboriginal patients are provided about their health.
Celie is a kind, calm constant energy in the story. She suffers loss with dignity and determination to provide a future for Mili, her daughter, and she uses her knowledge of the town to create opportunity.
Mili is the future generation. She lives in change, where her newly fashioned hopes are regularly pushed down and obstructed by the white systems of power in the town. Mili becomes a bridge between the Aboriginal and white worlds, a burden of much weight.
Ancestors feature too, some being stars, trees and dust. They are ever present and active, guiding and preparing the earthbound people for the future while drawing on the old ones for advice and support. The sky-bound observe from the ‘the roof of the plains’ and move across the Milky Way, called Warrambool in Yuwaalaraay language.
Some ancestors that drive the story are Jakybird, the Songman who brings the choir together for the song of the crocodile; Garriya, the malevolent single-minded crocodile who lies in the earth far below the town waiting for his chance to return; Margaret and Celie’s lightning kin who herald the rain; Murrudhi Gindamalaa (Laughing Star) who protects and provides for the newly dead; Malawildhuulmuranga (the Littlest Shadow at the Darkest Time Before the Dawn) who disappears into dark nights hiding diamonds, stars, within her; and Burrenjean, (the featherless bird) the human form of magpie lark who ‘makes the country sing’ despite being name-called as mudlark. Her feather father reassures her of the significance of her earth-bound origin when he tells her:
‘The mud is the beginning of our connectedness. The beginning of our responsibility, the reason we are needed…
What is mud but the joining of all that is above and all below?’ (p210)
Connectedness
Simpson seamlessly conveys the world above, on and below the plains as one. Her telling of Aboriginal philosophy, of Country, belonging and lore, details consequence and relationship for all creatures, not just human. In Song of the Crocodile, all things are elemental and connected; all things are in fluid relationship to each other, including the writer and reader.
Her inventive way of weaving Yuwaalaraay words and meaning throughout the English without direct explanation, creates space and invites the reader to read in a different way, from a different angle. There is no singular understanding or story in this novel. It is layered and readers will find different connections within it.
The characters experience connections, often surprising themselves. By the river, when the women gather to comfort Margaret, who has been disrespected and disappointed (again) by white townspeople actions, Idy, an older Aboriginal woman, begins singing. Margaret joins in. She knows the words, and the power of the song, but can’t remember when she learnt it. Celie and Mili both, find comfort from tragedy in the Double D, an ancient coolabah tree by the river that saw the boras, long before the town was first laid out.
Another tree, where Celie’s husband died, along the Old Black Road, draws Celie, newborn baby Mili and Celie’s young nephews:
‘Aunty Ceil, Nan told me about the trees, how they remember everything. How they hold memories for people… But here, around here, is where he lived too. Aunt, sit down.
… Nan taught me all about it. They hold life. The bad stuff they take away through their roots and release it into the ground.’ (p67)
For Malawildhuulmuranga, her connection is planetary, as her Dhaa explains, ‘You are a daughter of dawn, the only thing separating darkness from light and the only thing that joins them.’ (p82)
Jakybird assesses and marvels at Paddy, Mili’s son who is in deep despair:
‘He watched Paddy sway into town, messy, loose, stumbling, but erect. This must have been powerful magic, remaining upright when all conspired to pull him down’. (p344)
Paddy reminds Jakybird of Garriya, now crocodile but who was once a friend, and the connection is made again between the ancient and the now.
The connection of life and death is always close too. At one point, Wil, Mili’s husband who has died, tries to reach Paddy his son, to induce a flicker of hope in Paddy’s heart:
‘High in the star, Wil moved memories into his son. They were only colours: the deep blue of a uniform, the bright orange of a council hat. Flashes of smiles, places they’d been, or the feel of a fishing line or the ruffling of his hair.’ (p350)
Connection is everywhere in this story, connection to all creatures, to the past and to the future. Even when the characters feel most alone, the reader knows they are not.
Demarcations and boundaries
The town geographically delineates between Aboriginal and white clearly. Darnmoor, as most real Australian towns did, corrals the local Aboriginal people outside the white perimeter, past the rubbish tip at the end of the Old Black Road. The history of this practice extends back through to the first settler fence-builders and town planners on this land. For instance, the town I grew up in, Taree on Biripi Country on the NSW mid north coast, pushed/ took/stole/drove local Biripi people to a reserve, Purfleet, south of the town across the river.
Song of the Crocodile reveals these practices as oppressive, common and complex. Some Aboriginal people are allowed inside the unspecified fence, but this comes with negotiation and always a cost. We see the cost to Margaret first:
‘When the purple bush blooms began to thin then disappear and the edge of a tared road loomed ahead, Margaret’s voice began to soften. At the street sign, she pushed the notes further into the back of her throat, constricting their flow and burying them within her body once again. As her shoes hit the asphalt of Charity Street, she fell completely silent.’ (p11).
In the novel, just as in the real world, Aboriginal women use their intimate knowledge of the white world strategically, while the white characters have no insight into how little they understand of – or are required by – the Aboriginal world. This considered and deliberate reveal, of how an oppressed people know their oppressors intimately while the oppressors have no clue, was a highlight in the story for me.
White actions have impacts on the Campgrounds community. These impacts are frequently dismissed – or even unimagined – because white people believe they hold the power and can choose not to notice, not to listen. We see the impacts roll down the generations affecting people and land the same. The white settler idea of progress – unsustainable growth through exploitation of land and people – clashes fundamentally with the integrated, cyclical nurturing and honouring connections to past, present and future that most of the Aboriginal characters carry in the story.
The Darnmoor inhabitants praise the achievements of white men above all else. Like many real Australian towns, the townspeople invest in appearances not community, in short term thinking, unsustainable futures and ignore or decry other ways and other people. The town rubbish tip placed on the bora grounds is just one example. Another is the construction of a levee around Darnmoor to hold back flood waters.
The town celebrates the completion of the levee, but the levee creates further demarcation between the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people of the area. When Mili’s tears begin to flow, and all the travesties of humanity she has had to endure come to fruition, the danger of ignoring Country is clear. Garriya gathers his energy and slowly surfaces, the sky inhabitants dance the old bora grounds, which never disappear or age no matter how significant their apparent destruction appears, and:
‘… the townspeople watched the levee, holding their breath, waiting to see if the mound would breach, wondering if all they had created would be destroyed and washed away.’ (p401)
These practices of demarcation – white choices – are damaging and shamefully long-lived ones. They are still present in many towns across Australia. Through fiction, Simpson powerfully writes the truth of the contemporary relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people.
The gateway
Jakybird warns the sky inhabitants, sitting around icy fires in Warrambool, the Milky Way, that the singing of Garriya ‘… is a hard one; some of you will die a second time in its singing’. (p354).
Darnmoor is not a generative gateway, and certainly not one to happiness as that welcome sign states. Warrambool, the literal heavens, is a gateway to the next place, for some a return to the earth, for others to sing again, others to sleep and wait some more. The act of singing is also a gateway, for it is part of culture, of belonging, of the turnabout of the world. It leads us to another place, another future.
The novel itself is a gateway too. Its landscape is wide and considered as Simpson tells the truth of our ongoing relationship with First Nations people of this Country. She details the changes to landscape that compound negatively and highlights the lack of accountability and short-sightedness of our settler society.
While Song of the Crocodile is a local, family saga, it speaks to our national story, and Simpson, with heart, attention and tenderness, shows readers a perspective that most of us will never have imagined before. This is what great fiction does, implicates and expands the reader’s emotional and philosophical terrain.
Towards the end of the novel, Malawildhuulmuranga asks one of the old ones ‘… why do you want to destroy it?’ and he answers, ‘How do we begin again, if, first, we don’t let go?’. (p365)
These are powerful cycles of renewal. We know change will only be made if we learn the lessons of the old ones. There is hope here, in this story, if we listen and learn.
PIP NEWLING was born on unceded Wirrayaraay Country, grew up on Biripi Country and lives and works on Dharawahl and Gadigal Country. She thanks all Elders from these lands, past, present, emerging and future, for blessing her with the health Country provides and the opportunity to benefit from their custodianship.