Author: mascara

Motherhood

by Sheila Heti

ISBN: 9780099592846

Penguin

Reviewed by DIVYA VENKATARAMAN

When I arrive at a decision about motherhood – to be, or not to be? – I almost certainly won’t get there by employing the kind of esoteric abstraction Sheila Heti’s unnamed narrator does. That being said, Heti’s discursive, conversational monologue of a novel is clarifying, poignant and devastating at times in its ability to condense the societal pressures that women – that is, women of Heti’s whiteness and relatively high socio-economic status – face in our age. 

We meet Heti’s narrator just before she turns 37. She’s been bitten by the “bug” of wondering whether she will procreate. “The question of a child is a bug in the brain—it’s a bug that crawls across everything, every memory, and every sense of my own future.” 

Heti’s narrator decides to embark on an intellectual quest, determined to interrogate the reasons for which she does and does not want to have a child. To illuminate her journey, in a common trope, the narrator looks to Eastern wisdom: here, the role of guiding light is given to the Chinese tradition of I-Ching, a method of tossing three coins and gleaning ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers for the combination of faces they show. The answers her coins give her lead her to her next question. There’s a dialogue between coin and question which gives away a great deal in its sparseness.

Heti’s narrator describes the feeling of being left out in the cold of childlessness in a touching, deeply felt way. “I had always thought my friends and I were moving into the same land together, a childless land where we would just do a million things together forever. I thought our minds and souls were all cast the same way, not that they were waiting for the right moment to jump ship, which is how it feels as they abandon me here. I should not think of it as an abandoning, but it would be wrong to say it’s not a loss, or that I’m not startled at being so alone. How had I taken all of us as the same?” The flowing present tense of the novel allows us to weave in and out of New York City life, in and out of her apartment, in and remain mired in, her arguments with her partner Miles. She writes honestly and deeply poignantly about the pain of not knowing how to feel in the face of societal pressure. “I fear that without children, it doesn’t look like you have made a choice, or that you’re doing anything but just continuing on – drifting.” 

The circuitous conversations the protagonist has with herself evoke the circular nature of her mood swings and hormonal fluctuations. While being so concerned with motherhood, an event so rooted in the physical, Heti’s narrator often feels disconnected from her own body. Her period cycles are unpredictable, her moods more so. “On the one hand, the joy of children,” Heti writes. “On the other hand, the misery of them. On the one hand, the freedom of not having children. On the other hand, the loss of never having had them—but what is there to lose?” At the novel’s close, she finds comfort and a hazy kind of bliss in a prescription for anti-depressants. 

The novel reads, in its confessionalism and oscillations of a mind not-quite-made-up, as more of a memoir or extended essay than anything fictional. The unnamed narrator at the centre of the book and the dilemma, frames her decision on motherhood as a choice to be made by the individual and the individual alone. In Heti’s narrator’s world – a white, upperclass heterosexual world – there is firstly a choice about whether or not to become a mother, and such a choice is framed as being one about sacrificing creative ambition and art for the creation of life. Motherhood, for Heti is conceptual, lofty, and understood in the context of a woman occupying several spheres of privilege making claims about motherhood. Should she create life or create art? The novel is driven more by the internal cogitation than any actual events – except for her conversations (which are very Rachel Cusk-esque in the way they are distilled only through the protagonist’s worldview), and the (somewhat repetitive) fights between her and Miles.

While Heti’s protagonist moves through a series of thrice-removed, theorised concepts about the sacrifices and privileges that motherhood will afford her, the decision that so many women around the world take is a result of myriad, competing desires – not exclusive to, but including cultural guilt, familial pressure, and financial stability. But this is not to say that, through her ambivalent, see-sawing conversations with herself about motherhood, she doesn’t delve into misconceptions about motherhood with humour, insight and painful acuity. While it’s perhaps unfair to ask Heti to write from the perspective of anyone else, the novel does not factor into its philosophising any broader sense of what motherhood is as understood in different parts of the world – or even different parts of her own city. 

However, she is comprehensive about and critical of the overemphasis of women’s abilities as child-rearers and the conditioning of women as ‘natural’ in the role, and the challenge they pose to a society organised by nuclear families. “There is something threatening about a woman who is not occupied with children,” says Heti. “What sort of trouble will she make?”

While these quotes, plucked out of context, may spark a feeling of recognition – of being able to relate – it is the process of her repetitive, rhetorical question-asking through flipping coins which grounds them in place. 

While the novel is not as universal as it imagines itself to be, Motherhood is a crucial, deeply personal sketch of the conversations women have with themselves. In it, Heti sums up the anxiety of the constant wavering between freedom and being joyfully tethered – to create art, or to create life? No questions are answered, no conclusions drawn – but she finds a way to give shape to the anxiety and constant, underlying thrum of the indecision she feels as she decides what she will make next. 

DIVYA VENKATARAMAN is an Indian-Australian lawyer and writer based in Sydney. Her writing has been published in Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Time Out, the Sydney Morning Herald, Sweatshop Women and more. She was a finalist for the Newcastle Short Story Award and the Premier’s Multicultural Media Award.

Navigable Ink

by Jennifer McKenzie

ISBN:P 978-1-925760-52-1

Transit Lounge

Reviewed by ANNEE LAWRENCE

Jennifer Mackenzie’s collection of poems Navigable Ink takes inspiration from, reveres and amplifies the life events, writings, reflections and concerns with history of the Indonesian author and activist, Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925-2006). The idea of writing the poems emerged after Mackenzie was asked to translate Pramoedya’s Arus Balik (Cross-Currents) in 1993.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer was born in the small Javanese town of Blora in what was then the Netherlands East Indies. His most famous work, the Buru Quartet novels – This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps and House of Glass – covers, in his own words, Indonesia’s time of Nationalist Awakening during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Based on the life of the pioneer journalist Tirto Adi Suryo ¹, the novels follow a young man, Minke’s, developing political awareness and consciousness of the colonial apartheid system. As his story unfolds, the reader is drawn into an emerging vision of a new country – Indonesia, and of a new national language and cultural identity – Indonesian. ²

When Suharto’s New Order government came to power after a military coup in 1965, it did so by overthrowing the government of the nation’s first President, Sukarno (in power since 1945) ³. The coup unleashed widespread violence and the extrajudicial bloody deaths of more than half a million people who were labelled communist or communist sympathiser. Feminists, trade union leaders, teachers, artists, writers, doctors, farmers, university lecturers, and all kinds of progressive community leaders lost their lives. Of those who survived, many were shipped without trial or sentence to the island of Buru where they were forced to do hard labour.

Pramoedya was imprisoned three times during his life: in 1947-1949 by the Dutch, for nine months in the 1950s by the Sukarno government, and in 1965-1979 by Suharto’s New Order regime. At the time of his arrest and imprisonment in Jakarta on 13 October 1965, his house was ransacked and his library and eight of his manuscripts were burned.

Mackenzie’s poem, ‘Manuscripts in My Library Destroyed by the Mob’ lists Pramoedya’s works and writing that were stolen or burned in 1965 – works about and by Kartini and other women writers before Kartini, a collection of Sukarno’s short stories, a preliminary Study of the History of the Indonesian Language – the list is telling. They represent the voices that must be silenced, histories that must be erased or reinterpreted including that of the birth of the country’s national language. When Pramoedya sought to recover ‘two volumes of Pre-Indonesian Literature’ he was told by the director of the Balai Pustaka (the Government Publishing and Printing House) that they were ‘burned at the request of his superiors’.

After four years in prison, Pramoedya was taken 1500 kilometres east by ship to the island of Buru on 16 August 1969, where he remained as a political prisoner until 12 November 1979. Buru was a barren, infertile swamp and life for the political prisoners was characterised by daily beatings, hard labour, hunger and filthy conditions. In the poem ‘Writing Materials’, Mackenzie captures the insane mechanics of the arbitrary and senseless repression on Buru that denied the author pen and paper.

there was no pen, no paper
then there was
                                          after many years
pen and paper
I wrote
in delirium
                                         I remember none of
it

At the poem’s conclusion Mackenzie does not look away from the trauma that has done its work: ‘nightmares lap the house/which wall is crumbling?’
The eventual provision of writing materials allowed Pramoedya to finally begin to write the four novels of the Buru quartet that had been kept alive in his memory by narrating them to his fellow political prisoners.

On returning home to East Jakarta on 21 December 1979, Pramoedya was placed under house arrest and made to report weekly to the local police station. For almost two decades, he and his family endured constant and systemic discrimination and surveillance. As each of his books was published during the 1980s and 1990s, they were banned – allegedly for spreading Marxism-Leninism and Communism.

During Suharto’s thirty-three-year New Order regime, the gap between rich and poor widened, and corruption, cronyism and fraud became widespread. When the economic crisis took hold in the latter part of 1997, the country’s students faced down the authorities and took to the streets, and the seemingly entrenched President was finally forced to stand down on 21 May 1998.

In Navigable Ink’s opening poem, ‘Before Nightfall’, there is at first moonlight and tranquillity, but attention soon shifts to the sea – gara gara – turbulence, trouble, stormy weather, and ‘frenzied moonlit waves’ that threaten those on board. On the shore there is the howling of forest dogs. From the darkness, having disappeared from view of family and society for more than fourteen years, the political exile returns white-headed to his family, finds his daughters once more at his side, ‘forest and grassland will always greet/each other’, while they giggle and tease ‘You look like Hanuman’, the white monkey general of the Ramayana.

Images of the sea, the coast, boats, boat journeys, and foreign armadas appearing to bomb the islands’ ports with cannon ball – ‘they want to plant their flags on this very shore!’ – are threaded throughout different poems. They mark devastating invasion and journeys into exile. Life goes on and there is a unity of design, the link to precolonial and colonial events, the death or enforced exile of those who use words to agitate and need to be shut up, and the relentless environmental destruction caused by cutting down forests to make way for cash crops (most recently palm oil plantations).

In ‘Daendels as Wayang Puppet Watching Over Us’ Mackenzie draws on Pramoedya’s film essay, Jalan Raya Pos (the Great Post Road) ⁴, with translations of Pramoedya’s text captured on the right side of the poem, alongside the scenes filmed on the road of workers ‘sodden, flooded, collecting sand/this rushing river’, ‘stoking the furnace of the sugar mill’, trying to repair ‘a mudslide’, and of ‘a wayang performance/the puppets of Daendels, the Regent of Sumedang/a cracking gamelan/battle it out’.

The one-thousand-kilometre Great Post Road extends across northern Java, from Anyer on the West coast to the port of Panurukan in the East. It is the ghosted legacy of the Dutch Governor-General Daendels who in just one year in 1809 conscripted Javanese labourers to build it. Many died in the process.

In the film essay, the road remains the lifeblood of transport and communication for cars, carts, public buses, and trucks, but its history echoes the Suharto era’s own use of the unpaid labour of the political prisoners to build roads and bridges on Buru, and the inequality, poverty and poor working conditions of those at work along the road.

One of the scenes of ordinary daily life and survival captured is the attempt of a driver to repair his broken down truck in pouring rain. Mackenzie captures this in ‘Writer’s Block’.

                                                     WRITER’S BLOCK
rain soaking
a break down
diesel fumes rising like clouds
                a rinse in the river of spare parts
                the bus will rattle into life
                eventually
WRITER’S BLOCK

The poem draws on other scenes from the film essay including one in which Pramoedya admits that when he is affected by writer’s block, the study of his homeland and its history are a key tool for organising his thoughts.

The film also bears witness to Pramoedya’s daily routine. The passing of time. The push-ups, the burning of rubbish, the ‘click click click’ of the typewriter. The joy of grandchildren. Trauma kept at bay.

Mackenzie’s poems reflect the contemporary as well as the past. Young people leave their rural towns and villages to seek better lives on the coast where they find themselves living on the margins of broken dreams – as drivers, tea pickers, sand miners, or carting bamboo as in ‘The Buffaloes’:

the buffaloes, in a choreography of the tethered,
lift their feet lightly
above the wagon
drooping bamboo branches
sway, leaves catching the light

at the swirling’s centre the driver’s steady gaze

In the three-part poem ‘Memories of the Revolution’, ‘Bandung Conference 1955’ recalls the coming together of emerging nations called on by Sukarno (as NEFOS – new emerging forces) to refuse allegiance to one or other side of the Cold War. In the second part, ‘Borobodur 1959’ depicts a visit to Indonesia by Che Guevara. In part three, ‘Jakarta 1995’, the Cold War has ended, the prisoners from Buru have returned to their families where they are demeaned and discriminated against as ex political prisoners (TAPOL). This ongoing persecution (denial of jobs and education) under the New Order government extends to their children and other close family members.

In ‘Jakarta 1995’ the snapshot of scenes from daily life at home skews to the right across the page, fulfilling a pattern of days in the present, ‘watering the plants’, ‘gazing over to the/neighbourhood kids/springing about/flying kites’, but still reckoning with the past, still ‘thinking of Sukarno’, and arriving at a single word, ‘sunyata’ – in truth.

For Pramoedya, remembering is agency, truth telling, and revolutionary act. And personal survival, relationship and day-to-day living are necessarily intertwined with the political.

The poems in Mackenzie’s collection are a brilliantly realised weaving of Pramoedya’s preoccupation with the images and episodes of history which flow like ghosts into the present. If the nation could be ‘unified politically and administratively by Soekarno without spilling blood – an exceptional occurrence in humanity’s history’,⁵ – then how are we to understand the widespread horrific violence against their own that exploded in the wake of the US military-backed coup in 1965?

Pramoedya interrogates history and demands that the present be understood, and if it can be understood, he asks, then what is the role of the literary writer? In his essay, ‘My Apologies, in the Name of Experience’ he writes that ‘as a person and a writer who shares in bearing the burden of change’, he regards the era of Sukarno (until 1965) and the Trisakti doctrine as ‘nothing but a sort of thesis. The New Order, an antithesis. Therefore, for me, it is something that in fact cannot be written about yet, a process that cannot yet be written as literature, that does not yet constitute a national process in its totality, because it is in fact still heading for its synthesis.’⁶

In the last poem in the collection ‘Dawn’, the train heads east from Gambir station, crossing through the countryside,

red mounds of earth high as small hills
on either side of the narrow track farewell
what I sense of
           myself

And, at the end, a self that wears the marks and traces of brutal capture and incarceration, but who also goes on amid the details of daily living.

a chattering of bicycles and tea stalls
among the mud and puddles left after rain

my skin,
hoed, black beaten, weathered, flaking away
               my life

Mackenzie’s Navigable Ink honours the inspiring, rich literary legacy of Indonesia’s most notable writer and pays tribute to his refusal to be silenced, subjugated or compromised. It is a wonderful collection that repays multiple readings.

Notes

1. Max Lane translated the Buru Quartet and as he writes in his Introduction to Footsteps (1990): ‘Tirto Adi Suryo was publisher and editor of the first native-owned daily paper, instigator of the first “legal aid service”, co-founder of the first modern political organization, co-publisher of the first magazine for women, and a pioneer of indigenous literature in the language of the nation yet to be born. All this and more is brought to life for the reader in an amazing adventure of intellectual discovery and emotion.’
(p. 10)
2. Max Lane, Introduction, in Footsteps by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Penguin, 1990, p. 10.
3. In 1942 the Netherlands East Indies surrendered to the Japanese and, after the war ended, the
Indonesian nationalist leaders, Sukarno and Hatta, declared Indonesia’s independence on 17 August 1945. Sukarno was the nation’s first president and Hatta its vice-president. After four years of struggle, the Netherlands recognised Indonesian independence in 1949.
4. Jalan Raya Pos 1996, with Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Directed by Bernie IJdis.
5. Chris GoGwilt, 1996. ‘Pramoedya's Fiction and History: An Interview With Indonesian Novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, January 16, 1995, Jakarta, Indonesia’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1: 147-164. http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.uws.edu.au/journals/yale_journal_of_criticism/v009/9.1toer01.html
6. See Pramoedya Ananta Toer, 1991. ‘My Apologies in the Name of Experience’. Translation and
Afterword by Alex G Bardsley, 1996. https://sites.google.com/site/pramoedyasite/home/works-in-
translation/my-apologies-in-the-name-of-experience In the essay, Pramoedya relates that ‘the period of Guided Democracy in the last years of the 50s and first half of the 60s, [was] the period of the Trisakti doctrine – political sovereignty, economic self-reliance, cultural integrity – a doctrine that, while universal among nationalist states everywhere, was, however, a bogey for the countries stuffed with capital, and hungry for new fields of enterprise around the world. History teaches much about the power of capital. … The governments of so many states it turns into mere instruments of its will; and when they are no longer wanted, they are overthrown.'
 
 
 
ANNEE LAWRENCE’S debut novel, The Colour of Things Unseen (Aurora Metro, UK, 2020), engages with the rich cultural life that exists between Indonesians and Australians. She was the inaugural recipient of the Asialink Arts Tulis Australia-Indonesia Writing Exchange in 2018 (at Komunitas Salihara in Jakarta) and has published in New Writing, Griffith Review, Hecate, Cultural Studies Review and the online University of Edinburgh Dangerous Women Project.

Echoes

by Shu-Ling Chua

SomeKind Press

Reviewed by Dženana Vucic

I raced through Echoes the first time I read it. Raced through it the second time, too. At under 85 pages it’s a short book—a chapbook, almost—and easily inhaled over an idle afternoon. If you can resist, the three essays can be spread over a few idle afternoons. But it’s hard to resist—Shu-Ling Chua’s writing is compelling, the kind of simple but lyrical language that propels you through the text at pace. It’s not exactly sparse prose, but unadorned, elegant like a figure-hugging structured dress from Cue. Chua is economical with her words, and direct. She avoids heavy description or lapsing into discursive commentary and instead, she takes the concrete and mundane—clothing, songs, water—as the loci from which to gently probe her broader concern, crystallised in the book’s blurb as ‘what does one unknowingly inherit?’

In the first essay, ‘(Im)material Inheritance’, Chua searches for an understanding of self in photographs of her grandmother, in her seeming divergence from her mother. The essay circles questions of glamour and the feminine, and what it means to dress for the world or for the self. Her economy of language leads to moments of ambiguity and momentary discomfort, as when, for example, Chua writes that she ‘was not like other girls’, a sentiment that lives in the space between the then (she is writing of herself in school), and the now (she is affirming, in 2020, that she was different). It is a niggling tension felt on a personal and political level: we at once know that this is an unfair and sexist disavowal of womanhood and know, too, that we have felt this way, have felt our failures to live up to idealized femininity, and have felt our refusal of idealized femininity as a special badge of honour (indeed, some of us still do). 

In another instance, Chua tells her mother ‘You’re lucky I’m not anorexic,’ and soon after notes: ‘My stomach is not as flat as it used to be. (Neither is my mother’s),’ and the lack of contextualisation, explanation, makes the reader wince. This is intentional, Chua is not attempting to save face; she offers the self in all its embarrassing exceptionalism and cruelty, setting in relief our imposed relationship to beauty, a relationship which sets us to defining ourselves in relation to others in ways that make us feel better and worse, but which also denies us joy in our physicality. The essay traces Chua’s (self-)consciousness of this tension, played out through three generations of women in her family. And though Chua ultimately finds connection to femininity through her grandmother, and with her grandmother to femininity, she lets the tension linger on the page, unresolved.

In ‘Echoes’, Chua sifts through Chinese pop songs and their modern iterations, exploring her interweaving past and present to push at the limits of language and translation, and the gaps in between. Chua was born in Australia to Malaysian-Chinese parents and, like many immigrants and children of immigrants, she inhabits a space of linguistic inbetween-ness, a space whose contours she maps out through her relationship to Chinese music. Chua describes listening to songs whose lyrics she doesn’t fully understand, lyrics that she must google and google-translate and ask friends about. It is an exploration of second language that is full of the wonder of discovery, with that special attention to meaning that non-fluent speakers often have, a tentative peeling back of definitional layers to grasp a word that native speakers take for granted. In this, there is a nostalgia—and hunger—for something only partly-known that I, an immigrant to Australia who lost much of my mother tongue in the move, recognise. 

Though Chinese characters or anglicised Chinese words (Cantonese and Mandarin) appear throughout the book, they are most common in ‘Echoes’. It is a choice that reminds me of Gloria Anzaldúa’s germinal Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), in which Anzaldúa used Spanish and Chicano dialects alongside English in parsing through and representing her multiply inflected Chicana identity. Languages co-existing on the page, without italicization or footnoted definition, is becoming increasingly common as publishers become aware of the othering and English-language hegemony that these choices represent. However the decision to slide between languages is not just political, it is deeply personal too. As Chua, and Anzaldúa before her, show, multi-lingual works are a textual performance of the in-betweeness and multiplicity of their authors’ linguistic and cultural identities, a way of letting aspects of the self sit together on the page without subordinating one to the other. 

For Chua, the decision seems also to perform her coming-to-language, and, in this, a coming-to-be. She is always googling, translating, looking up, asking for help, for information. She takes lessons, practices. Chua is always active in her linguistic and cultural inheritance and she has to be—unlike English language songs, which are so ubiquitous in Australia that you neither have to try (nor even want) to learn their lyrics to absorb them; Chinese songs require effort from Chua. She is forced to use the internet, and youtube in particular, as access points to a culture that she is very much a part of but which a predominantly white, Anglo-centric Australian (and western) media attempt to obfuscate, if not override. Hence the importance of movies like Crazy Rich Asians, the sound track of which is fundamental to Chua’s essayistic musings. 

The decision to leave lyrics untranslated, or partially translated, enacts instances of exclusion for readers who aren’t familiar with the script, forcing them to sit in the discomfort of not knowing and affectively bringing them into an experience paralleling Chua’s own language-acquisition. It forces them into participation. To know how the words are said, or what they mean, the reader must act, must watch the youtube video, must flick between pages to find where a line has previously been given meaning, or look up the songs and seek translations for themselves. The uncertainty and insecurity of this process, felt keenly by Chua, is offered to readers, too. 

For me, it is Chua’s attempt to render as whole a self which is often split into parts that is most moving. Chua describes calling herself ‘half Chinese and half Australian’ in grade 3, while her mother suggest she use ‘ABC… Australian Born Chinese’. Both iterations split Chua in two, both evoking the neat split suggested by the hyphen in ‘Chinese-Australian (or, indeed, Chinse-Malaysian), as though anything could be so neatly parsed or disentangled. Chua does not describe herself, in any bio that I could see, as any iteration of the above, nor does she do so in ‘Echoes’. She has no time for the lazy signifier that is this hyphen and, in each essay of her collection, she speaks to, without directly speaking about, how poorly such a forced construction captures the breadth of her cultural relationality.

The final essay, ‘To Fish for the Moon’, details domestic life, habits and rituals, through water and washing. Chua describes water being saved in her parents’ home, the washing machines she has had, her (great) grandparent’s laundry business, sipping hot water, baths. Each anecdote is dropped into this flow of water and let go. Chua is gentle in this release, but unsentimental. To me, she doesn’t seem to be yearning for an imagined intimacy with the past, but rather seems to create and inhabit a present-future dimensionality that extends in all directions and take all things with it. Water is ordinary but it is also, implicitly, a connecting force, ubiquitous and mundane but life giving. To quote Anzaldúa, ‘I struggle with naming without fragmenting, without excluding… Identity flows between, over, aspects of a person. Identity is a river—a process.’ Chua takes this river, acknowledging the ways that it is communal and ongoing, and offers readers sips along its path. 

Chua is an essayist and poet and in Echoes, her debut collection, these two worlds converge in an unexpected way. Rather than writing poetic lines into the essay form (and thus bearing the risk of sounding overwrought, tedious), Chua seems to do the opposite by writing essayistic sentences which slowly combine and accrete into a poetic form. She favours a sort of nimble restraint and the immediacy of concrete imagery on a sentence by sentence level. This is something of a contrast to the essays themselves which feel uninhibited, with a tendency to drifting: tangents, digressions, fleeting connections, departures and returns. They aren’t meandering per se, but multi-directional. Chua is writing towards knowledge, forgoing conclusions in favour of continuation and discovery. In tracing her connections and inheritances, she documents herself striving towards both, a process of self-actualisation rendered through her familial relationships and connection to things (tangible and otherwise) that bring her joy and pleasure. 
 
 
 
Dženana Vucic is a Bosnian-Australian writer, poet and editor. Her work has been published in Cordite, Overland, Meanjin, Stilts, Kill Your Darlings, Going Down Swinging, Australian Poetry Journal, the Australian Multilingual Writing Project, Rabbit, and others. She is a 2020 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow and tweets at @dzenanabanana.

Peace Crimes: Pine Gap, National Security and Dissent

by Kieran Finnane

UQP

ISBN 978 0 7022 6044 5

Reviewed by TAMARA LAZAROFF

I have to admit I jumped at the chance to review Peace Crimes, partly because I know two of the six so-called ‘criminals’ – the Peace Pilgrims – who are Finnane’s subjects. Andy Paine and I have moved in some of the same circles for close to a decade, including the Brisbane zine community. I have become acquainted with Franz Dowling more recently through my occasional volunteering at the Friday night Food Not Bombs street kitchen in West End, which Franz co-coordinates. Way, way back in late 2016, I also knew that Andy – I hadn’t yet met Franz – had an upcoming trial in Darwin. It had something to do with a direct action, a non-violent trespass into the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (just 19 kilometres outside of Alice Springs), and he was – all six Pilgrims were – facing up to seven years in gaol. But my understanding about what exactly the group did, why they did it, and how their action fit in with the larger picture of war; war crimes, Australia’s involvement, resistance and civil disobedience, was vague. Of the enormity of their considered, courageous act of protest, I had no idea.

Helpfully, Finnane begins her book on the night the Pilgrims begin their journey by foot to the facility. She draws links, and not incidentally, I don’t think. (If anything, the entire narrative’s undercurrent is concerned with our undeniable connectedness.) In any case, in her recounting of that 28 September, 2016 late evening, she is looking up at the starry sky on her bush block on the southern side of Alice while the Peace Pilgrims – Jim and Franz Dowling, father and son, Margaret Pestorius (whom the police cast as an ‘elderly woman’, though she self-describes as a ‘direct action goddess’), Timothy Webb and Andy Paine are only just setting out on their 15 kilometre walk through the darkness, spinifex and scrub, and rocky, unknown terrain, sometimes uphill. It is the very same night that a missile from a US drone strikes the village of Shadal Bazar in Afghanistan, killing 15 people and wounding 19, most of them civilians – though the group do not know this yet. When they reach Pine Gap, Franz and Margaret, who have carried along their musical instruments, a guitar and viola respectively, begin to play a lament for the dead, for the victims of war. Andy livestreams the event on a borrowed mobile phone. They all pray, especially for those who have died by drone strike because of Pine Gap. As Finnane clearly details, this military facility supplies targeting data ‘used for drone killings in war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq and in countries with which Australia is not at war, such as Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen’ (12), making Australia potentially responsible for war crimes and the terrorism that is returned in response, not to mention incomprehensible human suffering. The number of strikes are rising, too. In Afghanistan alone, there are currently about a hundred a month – that’s about three a day. It is this the Pilgrims wanted to draw attention to – even at risk of their own incarceration – and they did. As a result of their on-site arrest, there was the subsequent trial at the NT Supreme Court and the international media interest that followed. Peace Crimes ultimately contributes to and advances this project of awareness-building.

Finnane is a journalist by trade. She is, in fact, one of the founders of the Alice Spring News, which has been publishing since 1994; and she personally reported on, and was present for, the entire two weeks of the Peace Pilgrims’ court case. Her first book, too – Trouble: On Trial in Central Australia (2016) – is focussed on the courtroom, violence (domestic, this time) and is also centred in Alice, where she has been living since 1987. With such long and close links to the town, Peace Crimes definitely has an insider’s perspective – and a lot of heart – alongside being incredibly well-researched, as would be expected. Particularly fascinating – engrossing even – are the sections on the history of the anti-war movement in Australia and overseas, which serve to foreground the Pilgrims’ actions. For example, during the Australian anti-conscription movement of the early 1910s, 34,000 citizens were prosecuted and 7,000 were imprisoned for their anti-conscription activities, including the future Prime Minister John Curtin! These details and more on the purposes, successes and challenges of civil disobedience, recent and past, are intertwined with the history of Pine Gap and those who oppose it (including another former Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser). It is all compelling. Equally compelling is the court case itself – Nobel Peace Prize winner Richard Tanter, among many other public figures, come to give expert evidence for the defence – and the legal machinations on display are also, on occasion, a little farcical. All of this makes for mind-boggling, mind-expanding reading. Really, however, it is the protagonists themselves who shine the most brightly in the story that Finnane tells. She writes:

I was drawn to write about the Peace Pilgrims because of the large view they take of their social responsibilities. They may join campaigns, but really, their field of action is the whole of their life, as far as their capacities and nonviolence can take them. They are connected to movements, and even specific groups within them, but within the bounds of their strong spiritual and moral frameworks they seem remarkably free – unconstrained by waiting for consensus, or theoretical coherence, or numeric strength … (247-48).

For me too, as a reader, it is the parts of the book in which Finnane illustrates the ways the Pilgrims ‘embody justice’ (190) in their everyday lives – not only their more pronounced political actions – that are some of the most engaging, and heartening. Franz Dowling, for instance, co-facilitates a house of hospitality in Greenslopes, which is also his own home, providing free shelter and food for people in need in the Catholic Worker tradition to which he belongs. Jim Dowling, Franz’s father, a long-time peace activist also motivated by his Christian faith, lives in voluntary poverty on a farm in Dayboro with his wife Anne Rampa where they have brought up their seven children. They have a biogas toilet that fuels the stove, and other ingenious green power facilities, including a veggie oil-powered vehicle. Similarly, Timothy Webb, who was raised in hand-built house in New Zealand, lives a life that seeks to harm others as little as possible; his parents, like Franz’s, instilled in him the understanding that ‘the luxury and convenience of Western lifestyles were paid for by the ‘short, unbelievably miserable lives’ of other people halfway around the world’ (24). Andy, too, practises radical renunciation; he lives on less than $5,000 a year (without Centrelink), though his days are filled with endeavour – the production of his weekly community radio program The Paradigm Shift, for one. At the time of the writing of the book, too, he was ‘sailing towards Manus Island with a group intent on protesting Australia’s asylum seeker policies’ (243) in order to, once again, stand up for others. On the other hand, Margaret Pestorius, a social worker and therapist, ‘questions, gently, her friends’ dedication to voluntary poverty’ (25) – though she, too, shares her house Peace by Peace with others, including a friend she was at the time nursing through cancer. At home in Cairns, she has long been involved in organising healing rituals, such as the Frontier War memorial on Anzac Day eve for indigenous and non-indigenous people alike. And finally, Paul Christie – the sixth Pilgrim who walked alone a few days later on 3 October, 2016 and had his own separate trial – moved to a rural cooperative upon the hearing’s resolution as a response to and action against climate change.

Like the Peace Pilgrims themselves, Peace Crimes is an inspiring and radical work – though it shouldn’t be. Hopefully in these post-COVID times we will together begin to recreate our society for the better, and for all, in a spirit similar to the Peace Pilgrims’. For a further taster of Peace Crimes, you can watch this short video of author Kieran Finnane speaking about her motivation for writing the book against the backdrop of Arrernte land and the Pine Gap base, the huge information-collecting radomes in the distance.

*

Here is the link for the bolded section above:

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TAMARA LAZAROFF is a Macedonian-Australian writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. She lives in Brisbane on Yuggera and Turrbal country. Her collection In My Father’s Village & Other Freedom Stories (Pollitecon Publications) was shortlisted for the 2020 Woollahra Literary Digital Literary Award; and her novella Husk, Root, Bone was recently published by Big Fiction Magazine (USA).

The House of Youssef

by Yumna Kassab

Giramondo

ISBN: 9781925818192

Reviewed by SHEILA NGOC PHAM

“The two chairs: tea, coffee, fruit. They discuss the house, banking, they keep away from the future. The birds play in their bath. She thinks of karma and pain and suffering. There is a world beyond this yard and she knows little of it. Her son used to say to her, There is a whole world beyond this one if only you would reach for it.”—from ‘The Two Voices’ in The House of Youssef 

Yumna Kassab’s debut, The House of Youssef, arrived on my doorstep without forewarning. So this is how I first encountered the author: through her words. Léa Antigny, Giramondo’s then-publicist, sent me the book because she thought I would appreciate it; even though Antigny only knew me through my writing. Later, she suggested to Kassab that I might be a good candidate to speak at the book’s launch. In retrospect, Antigny’s literary matchmaking feels inspired, how her writerly mind was able to see a connection between the two of us before we saw it for ourselves. 

It was an honour to launch such an unusual and accomplished book, and the event marked the start of a lively literary friendship. Reading my launch speech more than a year later, my understanding of The House of Youssefis now coloured by knowing more about the author herself. In any case, my first impressions of the book largely stand, though it’s fair to say how I now see that Kassab’s best work lies ahead of her. 

Revisiting the book now, I find myself once again appreciating the crisp prose; how the restraint on the page demonstrates a woman in command of her ideas. But what struck me most then, and perhaps even moreso now, is the enormous feat of imagination and empathy that Kassab has pulled off. She honours the experiences of migrants without necessarily chastising or valorising them. The House of Youssef expresses the questions raised by the first generation, and attempts to describe the struggles of their offspring to seek answers as they grow up in a different world. In such a scenario, there are no obvious ripostes, only fragments, scenes and moments stretching out over the years. 

“The house, some say it was unlucky. You hear stories, they make you not want to live there. It is good they knocked it down and took out the foundations too. It is a hole now but soon they make it flat and put in concrete and then it will be something new.”—from ‘The House of Youssef’ in The House of Youssef.

The dialogue is sparse, often absent: “The silence, the mountain, the words that will never see the light of day”. Many of us know this silence intimately. Kassab’s book attempts to provide a shape to this mountain, though does not attempt to conquer it. Narrative coherence is what so many of us yearn for—a novel—but perhaps the reality is closer to the book itself: a series of short stories, a novella, and two monologues from elders. What the structure also reveals is something of the fragmentary nature of diaspora, how it feels to grow up in a displaced community; particularly as we find ourselves living in societies which have come to be characterised by at-times aggressive individualism. The children of exiles and other kinds of settlers embody grief in different ways. All of which brings the following passage from Edward Said to mind:

“Exile is…the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever.”

There is nothing heroic, romantic or glorious in Kassab’s stories; on the contrary, by focusing on the mundane her work depicts a community and its many complexities without apology. But that’s not to say that it’s not audacious, which is evident from how she dares to explore the shadows:

“Why a burning? Why not? A burning, a trampling, a stoning, a shooting.”

I recognised the insularity of the community depicted in The House of Youssef as being not dissimilar to what I had grown up with in another part of western Sydney. The specificity of place and culture is, in fact, what made it possible for me to relate in concrete ways. The stories were not a mirror; it’s more that I recognised the depth of feeling and emotional truths of the stories. In ‘Disgrace’, for example, a daughter is rejected by her parents for marrying ‘out’: 

“She had always assumed there was time, that one day they would talk again, that her dad might be a grandfather to her kids. She had assumed that given enough time it would happen; they could be one big happy family.” 

However, it seems important to state that being able to relate to these stories and characters in The House of Youssefis not the book’s key value. There is a strong emphasis nowadays about needing to see ourselves explicitly reflected in art—and how this mirroring needs to be external, with visible markers of our identity such as race described on the page. But this idea strikes me as being potentially solipsistic. While there is no doubt that representation is important as well as the need to enrich our national literature with stories from places like western Sydney, demanding representation at the cost of artistic sovereignty diminishes the power of artists and their works. 

If you wanted to read The House of Youssef as a window into the lives of Lebanese Australians, you certainly could do that though. Kassab provides much-needed nuance, which has helped me to better understand what I have observed in the decades spent living in areas such as Lakemba and Bankstown. A little while ago I stopped by the Abu Youssef Fruit Market in Yagoona. It’s a short walk from home, though I only started visiting it because the pandemic forced me to spend more time in my neighbourhood. It was only on my last visit, however, that I finally noticed its name.

“Who is Abu Youssef?” I asked the handsome young man behind the counter. He’s the one who always calls me sister in a way that makes me want to learn more Arabic.

“He’s my oldest brother,” he said, while weighing the cheaper Chinese pinenuts I had chosen.

“So that means his son is named Youssef, right?” 

I could tell he was impressed at my handle on Arabic titles, no doubt because of my outward appearance as an Asian woman. He went on to explain that the name Youssef has been passed down through every generation in his family. In turn, I tell him about my Lebanese friend who grew up around Parramatta and wrote a book called—The House of Youssef. 

So I did not read this book to learn about a cultural group I feel are profoundly different to me. I have often felt a sense of kinship and even common struggle with the Lebanese I have lived alongside. It’s why I even visited Lebanon to see it for myself some years ago. Having been there made it easier for me to understand the narratives in the book that involved travelling back and forth.

“Why had she come to Lebanon? Everyone had an idea why she was visiting, everyone but her.”

At its heart, The House of Youssef is about the human condition. Understanding the similarities and differences between us is the only way multicultural societies can thrive and how we will ever truly accept each other. This is obvious but is worth restating nonetheless, in these times more than ever. 

At some point, an unnamed narrator towards the end of the novella says, “Keep the plane in the air, keep the plane in the air, you can’t keep the plane in the air.” I paused after that sentence, thinking about the miracle of flight. How understanding the physics of flight does not necessarily make it easier to believe we are able to fly. Perhaps the truth is, sometimes we simply can’t stay afloat and we can’t keep the plane in the air—but we can create something meaningful from the wreckage.

The House of Youssef by Yumna Kassab has been listed for the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (UTS Glenda Adams Award), Queensland Literary Awards and the Stella Prize.

SHEILA NGOC PHAM is a writer, editor and producer working in radio, print, online and film. She regularly writes for a wide range of literary and mainstream publications, and is a current judge for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Sheila has held digital and editorial roles at the ABC and continues to produce radio documentaries and stories for ABC Radio National, most recently Tongue Tied and Fluent, a five-part series exploring multilingualism in Australia.

A History of What I’ll Become 

By Jill Jones 

ISBN: 978-1-76080-121-2

University of Western Australia Press

Reviewed by ERIN McFAYDEN

Jill Jones’s A History of What I’ll Become practices profusion: formally, across its 85 interlocking poems and reams of reference, and affectively, in its oscillation between deep delight and an equally profound sense of frustration — even with, amongst other things, its own project. In ‘Oh Venus, That Zenith,’ day breaks across the persona: 

Oh Venus I don’t forget you
  in the spread
of tinted morning, the grids
I’ve wandered far in circles
  around your heights
without shoes or sensibilities
        I don’t forget you
and how I’ve climbed
into another balance, cusp
    flexure, fold
another arc and then
another
(23)

That a tinted morning might come over the poem as a ‘spread’ is fitting. We might hear, in these lines, echoes of ‘the spread’ as it’s used as a technical term in debate: a swelling-up of words in excess of grammar, and sometimes of meaning. The novelist Ben Lerner recently brought the phenomenon of ‘the spread’ to the attention of us non-debaters, claiming in The Topeka School that this glamorous (or clamorous) mode of speech characterises much ‘official’ language in contemporary life: ‘these types of disclosure were designed to conceal…even before the twenty-four hour news cycle, Twitter stems, algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the DDoS attack, Americans were getting ‘spread’ in their daily lives’ [1]. Jones’s poems aren’t trying to conceal, so much, but nevertheless their constant movements through the folds and arcs of language are always tailed by a sense of something within this excess evading us, slipping away just as the shifting light breaks over it. All this profusion might not lead us to conclusions, or any fixed answers, that is. 

An interest in the fragment is Jones’s launch point into these twin senses of proliferation and loss. The collection opens with a series of epigraphs drawn from Shelley, H.D., Stein and Sappho. Sappho, especially, has been a long-standing interest for Jones, who has noted in interview that she’d ‘like to hear the ancient Greek metres and how her poems worked whole, rather than as fragments…’ [2]. ‘As Long As You Need / Fragments’ pieces together ‘a series of mistranslations, misunderstandings, or loose versions of several fragments from Sappho,’ and is Jones’s most direct engagement with her throughout the collection. One thing that the poem is, is a paean to desire: 

Remember our burlesque hearts
and heads relaxing on sweaty breasts
in Sydney’s sun ecstasy
in its dusk-pink twinky hours. 

Remember making our way
Among shadowy electro-shapes
no party too hot…no dance
where we were absent.
(60)

Jones remixes Sappho, (mis)translating her for contemporary Sydney, with its little resolute pockets of queerness. The poem doesn’t pretend towards preservation of literary-historical artefact. Nor, really, does it attempt to make Sappho’s fragments whole in some static way, or ‘complete’ in the sense of being finished. Rather, Jones revels in the generative potential of the gap, the trap-doors of language and of imagination that can be opened in Sappho’s fragments: 

Still…to the ends of the earth
Desires! all of them older
all of them younger all now
still lifting above the roof. 

…in fabulous style…just like
honey…for as long
as you need…with these
two arms…
(61)

These ellipses feel like they might have something of the same burlesque about them that hearts do, earlier in the poem: so many bright possibilities spangling across our minds at once. In this sense, A History of What I’ll Become isn’t an archival project in the simple sense of functioning as a record. It even goes further, I think, than art critic Hal Foster’s ‘archival art,’ which makes its source material ‘disturbed or detourné…obscure, retrieved in a gesture of alternative knowledge or counter-memory.’[3]. Rather than just reconfiguring historical narratives, Jones writes a way of looking toward (perhaps, desiring) possible futures that emerge from the ruptures, gaps, and incoherences — as much as from the intelligible material — of various pasts. 

These pasts could be literary-historical, as in references to Sappho and a host of other, largely European and US, poets. They could also be distinctly Australian, or distinctly of Sydney, and autobiographical. Certainly the middle section of the collection is centred on a Sydney recalled both too foggily and too vividly: a Sydney the site of disappointment, decay, or plain grossness. One of the collection’s rare prose poems, ‘All That Shudder,’ sees the speaker returning to the empty set of their youth: 

‘That year, I went back to the city alone, me and all my noisy solitude. Everyone’s gone now. I remember the way we’d gossip stories into night, along those roads, Glebe Point Road, Darlinghurst Road. Or walk to the harbour, listen to the wharves, what’s left of them…

…I remember helping another girl throw up, just here, in another century after a night nearby with booming walls, all of that survival in tune with a kiss, names and numbers on drink coasters, promises as opposed to meanings, too many women not watching you.’
(53)

The deflation of revisiting this personal history is palpable. Jones’s persona herself doesn’t even get to throw up her discomfort; she just has to watch somebody else get their difficult feelings out. Many of these Sydney poems call back to Jones’s earlier work, including Screens Jets Heaven (2002) with its ‘Marrickville Sonnet,’ and the suburban or domestic scenes of The Beautiful Anxiety (2014) and Viva The Real (2018), which work in the same mode and with the same surrounding materials, even where particular place names aren’t mentioned. In this way, Jones engages with pieces of her own writerly past, as much as with an extra-textual personal history. 

So much for this past, then — what about the future, as Jones writes it? For one thing, it’s still the source of an anxiety: Jones writes into the frustration attending encounters with patriarchal or homophobic oppression that doesn’t look like dropping off anytime soon, as well as with the seeming inevitability of climate collapse. How, these poems ask, can we write towards a progressive future in good faith, given the conditions of our present? As with her examinations of Sydney, this frustration has long permeated Jones’s work. In Viva The Real’s ‘Small Things,’ for example, she asks that ‘instead of a dove-grey rapture,’ her reader ‘wake up and arrange your resistance’ [4]. The limits against which a lyric voice breaks impose themselves, still, in A History of What I’ll Become’s ‘Patience Without Virtue’:

Everyone loves the female voice.
Am I forgiven for having one?
I wait patiently, hoping it’s only
to do with simple flowers. It never is. 

I dissent again. The moon goes as it came. (31)

The moon is immune — like the myriad political failures toward which we might also address our lyric plaint — even to a poetry so obsessively interested in it. And, yet, while Jones does scrutinise her own efforts to write a future from fragments of the past and present, the collection doesn’t culminate in any sort of disavowal of poetry. It’s much too joyful in its abundance, its word-play, its feeling and its cleverness for that.

Interested as Jones is in the form of the lyric fragment, and in a lyric lineage from Dickinson through to contemporary phenomenological poets like Vahni Capildeo via John Ashbery, the sense of lyric impulse as ultimately bound up with something hidden, inaccessible, or ineffable could well be at play here. Jones’s refusal of closure is well noted [5], and I want to extend this commentary by suggesting that the irreconcilability of Jones’s work to easy conclusions is a feature of the lyric mode she writes, reads, and thinks in. In this mode, as Alphonse de Lamartine has it in one of Jones’s epigraphs, 

The real is narrow,
the possible is immense…

…and irreducible to its signs, lush as they may be in this work. If Jones refuses conclusions, transcendental proclamations, or delivery of a firm futuristic vision, she does so with reverence to the past and utter delight in the sense(s) of the present(s). There’s something we can’t quite grasp at the centre of this work, but so much flickering light to fold through ourselves in its surface.

Notes

1. Ben Lerner, The Topeka School (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Girroux, 2019), p. 39. 
2. Jill Jones, ‘Jill Jones is Poet of the Month,’ interview in The Australian Book Review no. 382, June-July 2016. 
3. Hal Foster, ‘The Archival Impulse,’ October vol. 110, Autumn 2004, p. 4. 
4. Jill Jones, ‘Small Things,’ in Viva The Real (Brisbane: UQP, 2018). 
5.  See, for example, Aidan Coleman, ‘Let a Thousand Errors Bloom,’ Sydney Review of Books, July 6, 2020. 

 
ERIN McFAYDEN is a writer, researcher, and educator based on Gadigal land. Her work can be found in Artist Profile, Art + Australia, and The Cambridge Review of Books, amongst others.’