Author: mascara

The Other Half of You

Michael Mohammed Ahmad

ISBN 9780733639036

Hachette

Reviewed by MICHELLE HAMADACHE

The Other Half of You isn’t written just for all the readers out there who get what it’s like to be the child of migrant parents. It’s not just written for those who know already what it’s like to deal with growing up in a home where the culture on your doorstep is interpreted as threatening by the adults in the house. It’s not just written for those who know what it’s like to grow up where the only home you have known, Australia, consistently rejects you by asking you to be something other than yourself in order to belong. Arab people in particular, Muslim people more broadly speaking—for they are not interchangeable terms—are overwhelmingly regarded with suspicion and hostility here, and that changes what it is possible to say now.

Second City: Essays From Western Sydney

Edited by Luke Carman & Catriona Menzies-Pike

Sydney Review of Books

ISBN 978-0-6480621-3-4

Reviewed by CHER TAN

In ‘Second City’, the titular essay by Eda Gunaydin in Second City, an anthology of essays collected and published by the Sydney Review of Books, Gunaydin begins: ‘I spent the summer between 2013 and 2014 as many 20-year-olds do: working at a restaurant.’ It’s a sentence that includes as much as it excludes, echoing the popular internet phrase ‘if you know, you know’. The essay goes on to explore the ramifications of gentrification in Parramatta, alongside a certain gentrification of the self through education and upward mobility.

No Document

by Anwen Crawford

ISBN 9781925818611

Giramondo

Reviewed by NEHA KALE

Anwen Crawford’s No Documentt, a memorial to the casualties of late capitalism, occupies the space between elegy and witness, language and art. 

In February 1991, a strange billboard materialised on New York’s Van Dam Street, perplexing commuters who happened to be travelling under the overpass. It featured a black-and-white photo of an empty bed curiously devoid of signage, rumpled sheets revealing gradations of light and shadow like mountains covered in snow. Two pillows are arranged, side by side. But the bodies that lay there announced themselves through impressions and indents. Existence and absence, different sides of a concave mirror. Each part, the form itself.

The billboard is part of Untitled (1991), an installation by the Cuban-American artist and activist Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The same year, the artist’s lover, Ross Laycock, died of AIDS complications. The bed in the picture is less cipher than artefact. It’s where the couple slept when they were both alive. 

“I knew that you would die young/ I didn’t know it at all,” writes Anwen Crawford in her book-length essay, No Document. A page before this: “I change tense, and travel back across your death’s border.” What to write when those we love leave us? Can the tricks of grammar reverse the passage of time? 

The elegy is a fixture of art and literature. Gonzalez-Torres’ work, of course, but also Patti Smith’s Just Kids, the poet’s 2010 lament for the New York she once shared with her late friend and co-conspirator, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Above Crawford’s desk, the reader learns, there’s a postcard of Mapplethorpe’s Two Men Dancing, a gelatin silver print in which two figures hold each other made in 1974.

In her first year at the Sydney College of the Arts, Crawford meets the fellow artist, Ned Sevil. “Your brown panelled nylon zip-up jacket; the rat’s tail of red hair that ran below your shoulders,” she writes. They climb silos on Glebe Island. They “photograph using now obsolete materials” and sleep in railway underpasses after “spray-painting stencils of helicopters.” Their friendship burns bright, forged in the fire of art and activism. “So suddenly, vividly; your gentleness, the way you were always proud of me,” she writes. 

At 30, Sevil, who suffered cystic fibrosis, dies of cancer. Crawford returns from New York, where she is working towards an MFA in poetry, six weeks later. “Sometimes, just for seconds the extent of my grief for you reveals itself and my breath dissolves,” she writes in an incandescent passage, “because it has no edges at all […]” 

In Sydney, edges blur. Suburban pavements give way to old waterways. Sandstone cliffs end with a sheer drop into the ocean. For Crawford, grief is fractal. It radiates beyond her own body, into the spaces she moves through.

 She thinks of her friend when “the train lifts from a tunnel and the built world manifests again” and when she sees “a line of three sulphur-crested cockatoos wheeling a line into the sky.” 

When someone dies young, elegy can easily descend into hagiography. But in No Document, the gift of loss is a kind of X-ray vision. It can see beyond the strictures of place, time and history – and understands how these are bound together. 

Crawford watches the planes hitting the twin towers. The pair cut the word ‘terrorist’ out of the newspaper, “spray-painting the letters into signifying order onto lengths of paper” to cover “over a billboard that edges a four-lane highway.” Two pages on, she tells us that the “last Siberian crane reported seen in Afghanistan was shot dead in 2002.” 

Years after they climb onto silos in Glebe Island, Crawford discovers that it was once the site of the city’s first abattoir. Decades before, in 1818, “the first of the white surveyors ventured onto countries past the mountains – Wiradjuri country, Gamilaraay country.” Cattle, she tells us, comes from the Latin for capitale – ‘property, stock.’

Western imperialism changes form, sowing the seeds for modern conquest. Colonialism and capitalism, inextricable forces, knit living creatures into a constellation of death and displacement. 

“Three billion animals have burnt in this place bordered as Australia since I began this, and the fact that all the sound of it is dampened by the painting being paint – well, it haunts me,” she writes. 

No Document pushes up against borders – geographical, historical, imaginary. In a way, to have no document is to engage in the act of trespass, to enter places unauthorised. But who can trust authorities that are the legacy of violent systems? Records, we know, are famously unreliable. East African soldiers, we learn, who died in the First World War for the German Empire, were disappeared from history. 

During the Tampa Crisis, John Howard famously accused asylum seekers of throwing their children into the water. The Australian government’s acronym for boats occupied by asylum seekers – suspected illegal entry vessels – is SIEV. For Crawford, this is “too close to sieve for coincidence.” In the sea, humans leak.  

Throughout the book, Crawford writes letters to Alya Satta, a two-year-old girl who was among the 353 who drowned when the Indonesian fishing boat, SIEV-X, overturned on the way to Australia. “I call myself into this space with you,” Crawford starts. Then, “I redeem nothing: not in words, not any way.” 

Words have their limits. Late capitalism strives to turn writing into content, story into commodity. No Document is interested in what art can do, where language can’t venture. In art school, Crawford studies photography and upon re-reading No Document, sentences reveal their meanings like negatives in a darkroom. 

On my weekly walk, past Glebe Island, the landscape shows its bones. Places acquire a shimmer. I remember that in the 19th century, to take a photo was to render what was missing. That a camera was once considered powerful enough to capture ghosts. 

No Document is a study in blank space. Sentences stand by themselves. Each section is marked by a rectangle. “You scratch the negatives,” Crawford observes of her friend, “sometimes for what the damage signifies: that the document is not neutral but emerges.” 

When her friend Sevil dies, he leaves Crawford a book of images, made from mesh and contact sheets, “the whole thing smaller than a matchbox.” Someone tells her that “objects are just objects.” Friendships exist outside institutions, without ritual. She knows theirs has been “deemed insubstantial.” The book asks you, the reader, to weigh what matters, what to mourn according to an inner calculus. 

There is no elegy without witness, even if “no document can make you manifest.” 

Crawford and Sevil admired artists who died young. “Such an impulse isn’t rare at age nineteen, but for you at least, an early death was neither an abstraction or romance,” she reflects, in retrospect. 

Gonzalez-Torres, who died at 38 of AIDS was among their favourites. Before he left, the artist strung lightbulbs in galleries, allowing them to flicker and fade, as fleeting as a lifespan. He arranged a pair of clocks that ticked together in the knowledge that one battery would fail before the other. That in time these objects – like bodies that exist together – would fall out of sync. 

In 1989, he made sculptures out of block-like stacks of paper. To complete them, viewers were invited to pick up a sheet, to take it home. No Document, too, is an artwork – one that asks us to notice what’s absent. And love, through the act of paying attention, the things that might never return. 

References

https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/Felix_Gonzalez-Torres/

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-23486991

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150629-the-intriguing-history-of-ghost-photography

NEHA KALE is a writer, critic and the former editor of VAULT magazine. Her work has appeared in The Saturday Paper, The Sydney Morning Herald, SBS, ArtReview, Art Guide and many other places.

Know Your Country

by Kerri Shying

ISBN: 9781925780765

Puncher and Wattman

Reviewed by DANNI NETHERCLIFT

Mark Berryman’s original artwork on the cover of Kerri Shying’s Know Your Country is a study in aqueous blues and greens, reminiscent of underwater scenes, long neglected sites of lostness and loss, the kind of world inhabited by forgotten shipwrecks. This shadowy opacity seems a fitting introduction to the poems contained within, a nod to the idea of landscapes you think you know but which, diving beneath the surface find you are unfamiliar with after all. This impression limns the sense that a closer reading of your surroundings is required, so sit back and pay attention if you want to in some sense    know your (?) country.

The collection as a whole presents a densely knit weft of landscape, character, voice, detail and sub-text where the poems fully inhabit all of the senses, so as to immerse the reader not only in visual poetic images, but also the smells, sounds and tactility of each scene and place. In this way, I was reminded of the literary localities created by T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland, with its layers of varying interiors, exteriors, sounds, (his)stories and laments.

The almost complete absence of punctuation throughout works to enact a joining of narratives. The fragmented words pieced together eloquently mosaic a whole, a window onto the possibilities immanent in the substances of life in this particular country: earth and seawater, the sticky silver of snail trails and suspicious powders, of human traces, dirt, blood, shit and fragility, of circumstance in every overlooked flavour and hue. This is an inspired vision of country on a micro scale. In these poems, the gaps between the words and phrasing are apertures into spaces of entry, gesturing towards what you think you know and what perhaps you don’t know anything at all about.

The first poem, ‘talented regardless’ ominously foreshadows the dark potential inherent in this locus of page and space, with on the one hand ‘laughter and applause’ while on the other, there is    

     the sound   of burrs being taken
off of knives   and the thump of hessian onto truck beds
(9)

This possible proximity to or for violence is woven through the body of the text of these fifty-five poems, unsettling notions of certainty or firm ground upon which to stand.

 The country of Shying’s vision holds itself open, for instance, to the hypocrisy of those who would stake claims to knowing   better. Poems like ‘in my skin’ talk back and up to the noise of ubiquitous ‘saloon bars’ with resolute retort,

oh   how colossal
the right
that courses through the veins   of every total prick
that questions who we are
(12)        

because the call to ‘know your country’ also enacts a rallying cry to stare racism in the face without looking away,

to tear up the post in post-colonialism, and the notion of assimilation and its insult, as being

the kind of turd who smacks you in the mouth
then says
get up   you’re bleeding on the carpet
(12)   

Correspondingly, the use of Aboriginal language and translation in some of the poems, like ‘galmalngidyalu nhal gaghaanggilinya’ (this song delights me) encapsulates generous notions of inclusion that have most often not been reciprocated. The juxtaposition of these magnanimities of spirit jar tellingly against the past and present policymaking of race but Shying’s work illuminates the power of poetics to transcend, and describes their innate qualities of protection. The claim that

  words are lands and faces    special
tucked inside
(14)

is followed by an appreciation of the true nature of land beneath the surface, where

a million tonnes of ballast sang out a song from beneath me
a million tonne extracted from the soil of everywhere
(14)

which describes also the connection between this ballast – an important motif in both literal and figurative senses – of earth and rock and its corresponding connections to relationships with family, with grandmothers –

I hold tight to all her  stories  given
to me moving  mouth to
ear  mouth to ear  mouth
to ear
(15)

and as in ‘Cootamundra institute of education’, elucidations of both distance and closeness, past and present, and bonds that remain, come what may –

   I wonder if in that other city
my sister’s hair is safe

from magpie swoops
(24)

These ties of memory and reverence for family and belonging bear relation to Natalie Harkins   work in Dirty Words, with its white space, gaps, and recognition/space-holding of untold stories, lost time, separated families, elided pasts.

In the titular poem, ‘know your country’, the opening line, that 

deep roots   fend off heat
(42)

reads as a realisation of the strength and resilience contained within the nexus of family/cultural ties and history. To know your country for the speaker is to write into a hope for future  days

I am planting for the green tomorrow
(42)

that is pragmatically rooted in both what has already been borne, survived and surpassed, and what shared knowledge remains to be drawn upon.

The shapes and hues and hefts of sky, water and soil, of morning, and the stifling forbearance of the hottest summer nights together form a vivid panorama in which the inhabitants reveal themselves in all their shabby, precious smallness; the minutiae of land/urban scapes but also the domestic intimacy of life-scapes. 

An exhortation to smallness is repeated throughout, the text, in the forms of creatures, snails/cicadas, but also in gestures towards modes of existing in the world, where you must 

grow small  grow
small   in thrall

and 

don’t go large   be small
(64-65)

if you wish to live peaceably, and to appreciate the community in which you live for what it is. It is only in being small that one can truly get to know your country, that one might penetrate what has been overlooked within the cracks and crevices and white spaces behind the doors and closed curtains of interior lives. Smallness grants entry to all kinds of environments, from the water to the ballast grounds, to the wet house or the dealer’s kitchen, their bathroom, to the ghastly knife collection of an erstwhile world traveller, though one must also remember, tongue-in-cheek, that 

snails play to the cheap seats
they need the cash
(38)

The poetics of these revealed scenes and vignettes expose unsettling connections between the innocent pleasure of hot chips and  imminent peril in ‘crime lords’, or  visits from clients buying drugs juxtaposed against the domestic niceties of packets of biscuits and flavoured coffee sachets, in ‘crime lords #2’, or relations between seemingly benign ocean shallows and the trauma that it might deliver along with its usual offerings, the nightmare jetsam 

   a mesh of small holes and slits
emerging as a black lacy wrack extending

from the lower back
(47)

of a dead child who washes up, is held in the arms of the speaker, in ‘blue bubble’. Always, there is the sense that if one should scratch the surface veneer of this country, that there is 

   that tiny bit of drama

the half-centimetre
of knife-steel exposed
(57)

but if the poems seem to evoke moods that are often sinister, with their intimations of menace seeding a tension that never quite lifts, they are at other times quelled with tenderness, a sweet give of solace to the edges of days, and even perhaps of history, a consolation gathered in accumulated images of sea/water. In ‘the inbox’

the water laps the sky
(37)

while in ‘hey you’, the speaker of the poem ‘backstrokes’

the lifting sea
(35)

The presence of a newborn baby in ‘unlock’ illuminates another kind of ballast, granting the immensely moving certainty above all that 

I was a mother   nobody
could remove that
(61)

These images of calm steadfastness culminate in the panacea of the final poem, ‘rise’, where

the blue sky is a crutch
(70)

in all its blankness, its possibility, and hopefulness.

DANI NETHERCLIFT lives and works on Taungurung country, surrounded by mountains. She is the winner of the 2020 AAWP / Slow Canoe Creative nonfiction prize and has upcoming work in Rabbit 33, Stilts, and Meniscus.

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.