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Alison J Barton is a Wiradjuri poet based in Melbourne. Themes of race relations, Aboriginal-Australian history, colonisation, gender and psychoanalytic theory are central to her poetry. She was the inaugural winner of the Cambridge University First Nations Writer-in-Residence Fellowship and received a Varuna Mascara Residency. Her debut collection, Not Telling is published by Puncher and Wattmann. www.alisonjbarton.com / Instagram @alison_j_barton
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The World With Its Mouth Open
Zahid Rafiq
ISBN 9781959030850
Reviewed by AASHNA JAMAL
The men are restrained and evasive, the women are waiting for something that never arrives. A sense of resignation pervades the eleven short stories in Zahid Rafiq’s debut short story book collection, The World With Its Mouth Open published by Tin House. “He hadn’t lowered the memory of his brother into the earth, and I couldn’t shoulder his grief.”(‘Bare Feet’, p.58). Zahid’s characters are grounded in their own narratives, but Kashmir, Srinagar, with its majestic vistas are ever present, in stark contrast to stories, taut and simple, lived in a land where indigenous political aspirations are muted.
Zahid’s collection does away with what is expected of a writer from a region of conflict. His stories are not about the gun; no one other than Kashmiris take the limelight and in their labour of living, the reader becomes an unwieldy witness, for once we have seen, we cannot look away. One of Zahid’s influences is Flannery O’Connor and much like her celebrated short story collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge, Zahid’s primary characters do not want to yield sympathy, but in the face of difficult well drawn secondary characters, they cannot help but engage, often losing a part of themselves in the process. People might protect themselves, defences up, but it’s in their relations with others that they flounder till they are completely ensnared. In ‘The Man with the Suitcase’ a son stops fighting with his mother who is waiting for her other dead son. Afterall, he too looks for signs everywhere, following a man he has never seen or spoken to before.
The collection explores the stillness and acceleration of Kashmir, taking us through narrow alleyways which Zahid seems to know well. His stories are a gradual unravelling of different kinds of lives all drawn from the same spool. Deft sentences bring uncanny sight to the reader. The city is a character, its bylaws, its people, their eyes, the sounds, even crows and dogs. The characters know them intimately – a journalist browsing a papier-mâché shop in ‘Small Boxes’, a boy looking at descending birds in ‘Crows’ – and by the end of the collection, the reader starts beginning to understand how people are placed on this vast canvas. Only just. Zahid’s work is an injunction for those who try to distil Kashmir into a singular experience, a unitary problem. Readers are not promised full comprehension. That’s their homework on their own time.
Zahid is excellent at drawing inner monologues. Thoughts gather, circumambulate, meander and then keep returning to the central worry of the character, building like a crescendo, often ending in futility, as his writing keeps showing so much is out of our hands in a place like Kashmir, where individual wants are tempered by the limits of spatiality.
‘Drops of water slipped down the tall glass, just as they had on those Pepsi bottles …She had never understood where the water came from, believing for a long time that it oozed from the inside, but then she knew better, and yet she had never found out where it really came from.’
(‘The Bridge’, p.14.)
Themes of fear and want go hand in hand in all the stories. People persist in what they desire, exulting in the scariness of not knowing and going in headfirst anyway. They all want more than is given to them, political or material: Nusrat, a woman seeking a hakeem after multiple miscarriages; a boy who fears his tuition teacher; an inquisitive young man swept by the thoughts of the neighbour’s daughter; Mansoor, a shopkeeper whose new mannequin looks sad; Mr. Hussain, a refined store owner who becomes paranoid about death and mothers and brothers who wait for those who will not come back. Zahid moves the needle away from pedantic headlines about Kashmir to a spotlight on its restive veins – blue, maroon and pink, its people, vesting them with unabashed agency:
‘a little earthworm had been torn into two. ‘They will both live,’ she said. ‘Now there will be two of them.’
(‘Flowers from a Dog’, p.85.)
The women are often referred to by their social standing in association with a man – ‘Sham Saeb’s wife’ in ‘Flowers from a Dog’, ‘the owner’s wife’ in ‘The House’, ‘his wife’ in ‘The Mannequin’. But I liked these nameless women, precisely because they understand their place in the system and subvert it:
‘In my husband’s absence?’ She stared at him. ‘Is that possi-ble? I am a woman, after all. I can’t decide on my own.’
(‘The House’, p.106.)
The ‘owner’s wife’ acts obtuse when the labourer Manzoor asks decisions of her she does not want to make. Wives ask their husbands to solve things for them but the only way out of quagmires is for them to claw at the seams. Menfolk are ill-equipped to imagine what women really want. In ‘Flowers from a Dog’, a man longs for a dead woman, who has long left him. But in her leaving, she chose what she wanted; dead or alive, she was not his to own, as much as he mourns her.
In a recent interview, Zahid says ‘the best stories make us inhabit another life and thereby somehow our own, more fully, more consciously’. If there is a pervasive universal truth, his stories repeat it again and again to the reader, and you’re left longing for, and shuddering at his characters. Do we want to be them? No. Can we look away? No. Readers want to solve, to apply salve, but Zahid will not give them an opportunity:
‘… why look into its eyes, useless, to bring a dead thing to life. The dead are for the dead.’
(‘Dogs’, p.124. )
His writing is confrontational in the simplest ways, by repeating the truth again and again, across different stories, so love, grief, malice, jealousy, paranoia, all come together and we are left with an indelible feeling of what being human is.
Having grown up in Kashmir, and then not having lived there for a long time, I felt a sense of nostalgia as well as guilt. Therein, lies our hubris, as readers and altruists who want to solve Kashmir for its people. If the conflict is a constant in Kashmir, what changes? Its people. They change. They do things differently, each time, till in all timelines, they cannot be pinned down, only observed. They will save themselves if need be; by living their lives fully, as characters in stories both fictional and nonfictional, and perhaps in the real world as well.
Citations
1. 5 Questions for Zahid Rafiq, with Michelle Johnson. World Literature Today, January 2025
AASHNA JAMAL is a writer from Kashmir. Her stories appear in Fountain Ink, Muse India, Caravan, Inverse Journal, The diplomat, and Bebaak Jigar- Of Dry Tongues and Hearts, a print anthology of Indian fiction. She is a 2024 Sangam House writer resident and a 2022 South Asia Speaks Fellow. She is working on her debut novel. She is currently an economic advisor to the government in Somalia.
Politica 
by Yumna Kassab
ISBN: 9781761152009
Reviewed by ALISON STODDART
Coming late and virginal to Yumna Kassab’s literary work, Politica is written in what I now know is her trademark fragmentary style, something that invites the reader to commit to. But commit I did and was well rewarded with a novel of war and its subsequent fallout of
disorder.
Politica is Kassab’s latest novel and set in an unnamed country in the Middle East. It’s a
difficult read, divided into innumerable chapters and densely packed with characters, many of
whom are memorable. Each chapter’s title is a hint to deeper meaning. Titles like ‘A
Martyr’, ‘Human Shields’ or ‘An Ode to Reason’ unlock the characters. The war seen
through their eyes, creates a complex narrative on the far-reaching impact of war.
The many people who live through this turmoil, some who reappear throughout the book,
some who are referred to only once and some who aren’t even named, convey the lives of
ordinary people and the effect war has on idealism, identity and social structures.
It’s a novel alive with characters but no plot or storyline. We are brief visitors bearing
witness to Jamal, a student who desperately wants to pick up a gun and join the war effort as
an escape from the conflict at home with his father. Or the inappropriately named Yasmeena,
leader of a revolution whose name means flowers and delicate things. We get to know her
father, Abdullah who once was an idealistic political student who wanted to bring freedom to
his people.
It is through these sparsely sketched characters that we experience the atrocities of war. But
Kassab dilutes the unexplainable with stories that can be identified with. Stories of love, loss
and defiance. We are privy to villagers who visit the town’s well. People like Um Kareem
whose husband wishes to take another wife. Or Amira whose son Khaled has been killed in
the fighting, but she does not know this yet and still has hope, a misguided hope that
survivors of war cling to with feigned ignorance, because she ultimately knows that few
soldiers survives war.
These people could be anywhere. Kassab decontextualises where they are because what they
are suffering through can happen anywhere and to anyone.
War is political because it is always happening. There is no plot in this novel because,
according to Kassab, there is no beginning, middle or end to war and her novel reflects this.
The chapters in Politica are simply vignettes of humans existing in the continuous tale of
dispossession and displacement.
Many of the chapters are snapshots of an event, something that ultimately results in said
event being used to for political gain. In ‘Human Shields’ a young girl out walking with her
mother, is shot and killed even as her mother tries to shield her. But twenty years later
dispute is still raised over who was the shield and who was shielded, and how truth is the first
sacrifice. ‘The mother’s name was Fatin and her daughter’s name was Rayan. These are
facts. The rest is a feast for the dogs. In this way Kassab portrays how war turns all aspects
of human existence into fuel for propaganda.
In between these chapters of each character are interspersed brief paragraphs of insight.
Kassab is adept at profound explanations of attributes of war. From propaganda, ‘how do you
strip people of their culture? First you take their language and then you outlaw their beliefs’,
to the futility of war ‘once injustice is dead, it will find life somewhere else’.
The sparsely written prose is allegorical in places. The sentences are sharp and complex
which often requires a rereading to grasp the meaning. Kassab cuts off any narrative just as
you start to work out. If you are not interested in plot but enjoy vignettes with insight, then
this is the novel for you.
So where does Politica fit in current society? As of the time of this review the Gaza war is in
its second year, the Russia/Ukraine war grinds on and the world is about to have a new leader
of the free world who wants to own Greenland and may not rule out military might to do this.
It is an apposite time to read this novel. It’s a timely book about war when the world is
undergoing more than enough. ‘The personal is political’ is the opening quote of this book.
But everything is political if you make it that way.
Kassab is Australian, born and raised in the western suburbs of Sydney and, interestingly for
someone so literary, is also a science teacher. She has been appointed the City of
Parramatta’s first Laureate in Literature, a position she will use to write about growing up in
the diverse community of Parramatta.
She attributes her sense of self to being raised in this multicultural area of Sydney but not
entirely because of the family and friends surrounding her. It is her fascination with the
community that grew up around the emergence of the football team, Western Sydney
Wanderers that cemented her love for the west. In an interview with ABC Online’s
Rosemary Bolger, Kassab observes ‘it kind of centred the community, and people who
previously wouldn’t have said they were from the area, suddenly were saying they were from
the area’. Kassab’s interest in how communities can unite, and regions re-emerge in
favourable circumstances are themes that can be found in Politica. Dispossession and
displacement can be stopped.
Sonia Nair in her review for the Sydney Morning Herald points out the tie between the power
plays of the western world with the wars of the middle east. Sometimes war is a short-term
act of violence to achieve a specific aim, but Kassab does not believe dictators or
revolutionists rain down from the sky. She is more aware of the prolonged impact of war and
the way it echoes down the generations.
Would I recommend this novel? This is not a story. If you are someone who likes decoding
literary writings and revelling in the discovery of literary devices, then Kassab is your author.
If however, you are the type who likes to pick up an airport novel for reading on the beach
then perhaps Politica is a step too far
Undeniably, this is a worthy book. An erudite reader that can put in the effort to discover
Kassab’s insightful prose will benefit from its resonance. It’s a difficult book that rewards
perseverance. A second read of this novel provided more clarity and understanding of
Kassab’s worldliness and she writes against a background of humanity, and what it means to
be part of a collective. Politica offers profound reflections on the convergence of politics and
the individual. Kassab makes is clear that choice in war is idiosyncratic, and the personal cost
of that choice is forever borne.
ALISON STODDART is a country born and bred, Sydney writer currently undertaking a master’s degree at Macquarie University which she is hoping to finish soon. She completed her BA Degree majoring in Creative Writing in 2020.
Twitter @a_hatz5
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Beck Rowse is a queer writer and Creative Writing Honours student at the University of Adelaide. His work has been published in On Dit and showcased at No Wave, a monthly reading series. Beck writes queer fiction that blends literary and magical realist elements to explore themes of mental health and intimacy.
Rusted Teeth
I made a mistake when I gave my shadow a name. If I hadn’t, maybe Colton wouldn’t be taking out my teeth right now. I’m curious what he’ll say with them… If I were Colton I would scold me. After all, he was unable to speak while I stood silent and Rhys left. Every tooth taken is replaced with a rusted nail. To distract from the pain I watch how the moonlight eats the wall, and how Colton eats the moonlight. I see a crooked tooth. I try to tell him but the blood from my severed gums plugs my throat like thick honey. Colton’s crooked tooth bothers me more than the nail in my mouth. I tell myself I can’t control the world. I often do that. Rhys thought it was bullshit and I think Colton does too. The rain outside my room is a humble drone. The smell of damp concrete through the window reminds me of being a child. I think about how I loved to play in the rain. Colton would always cry when it rained though, I felt bad for him. The tears of a shadow are like ink from a broken pen, they won’t wash off. Now that Colton has teeth I can hear sound echo in his mouth. His cry sounds like the incessant high and low buzz of machinery, with the constant crackle of a record.
Rhys and I met through music. We bonded in class over a shared love for the piano playing of Thelonious Monk. Every lunch we would hire the music hall and imitate him the best we could. Off-notes and all. Because I was stuck inside all my teenage life I was great at piano. Rhys not so much. Though he had something I didn’t have, whenever he played he would smile. It was the only time I could see him smile actually. He would cover his mouth when around other people. Afraid they would see his missing front tooth and laugh at him. A habit from childhood he told me. I told him that at university people are mature enough to not bully a person over a missing tooth. He replaced it with a gold tooth anyway. It was then that he started to sing, and hum when he wheeled me around campus. His voice was sweet and candied like honey. It would drip down into my chest and soothe my panic like a cough drop. I wish I could hear that voice now while Colton takes my teeth. The cry changes with the addition of a new tooth. And I realise now that he’s not crying, he’s trying to sing.
Despite the tone being muddled, coarse in texture like a fresh batch of cement, it sounds familiar. Colton picks up another rusted nail. I hum to help myself remember the name of the song but Colton’s hand cramped in my mouth softens the sound to a useless mute. The rhythmic hit of the hammer draws a percussive breath from my stomach. Meanwhile, the wet wind through the window sweeps in tone. Colton sways softly side to side to our song, and in the slow dance I remember. “Moonlight Cocktail.” It was the song Rhys and I danced to at the Winter ball. The sweetest night of my life, and the sourest.
Rhys took me to a bar before the dance. Apart from a few other people, it was empty that night, but the clustered mahogany furniture still made the room feel claustrophobic, the glum wood seemed to swallow the amber light of the afternoon. At the bar Rhys had ordered a Wisconsin old-fashioned for us both. He wore a Dior checkered brown shirt that complimented his gold tooth and exposed a collar bone. Rhys had an eye for colour and knew how to put together an outfit. The only shirt I had for an occasion back then was from my dead father, it was the one he had married my mother in. So that was what I wore. The bartender resembled my father in the way he smiled at me. It was soft, but demanded your attention. I never returned the smile because I found my mind hooked on a small decayed tooth he had. It looked like a baby tooth that had never grown up. It seemed like the decay had kept it young at a cost. Rhys and I watched the man work. He crushed together a cherry and an orange wedge into the corner of two stocky glasses with the rounded end of a metal bar spoon. It made me feel sick the way that the mangled cherry violently took over the vibrant hue of the orange. I turned away instinctively and found myself caught in the reflection of a mirror on the back wall. I noticed how Colton covered Rhys, and stole the natural tan of his skin. I pushed myself toward the counter and moved Colton out of the way. The counter reeked of an orange scented chemical likely used to clean vomit. I picked up a napkin and held it over my nose to cover the smell. The bartender eventually buried the corpsed fruit in crushed ice, and poured two syrupy shots of Lepanto brandy over the top. He gave me another smile to signify that they were done. I wondered why he had not removed the decayed tooth. I put the napkin in my pocket and paid for the drinks. Rhys and I sat at a table by a window and talked.
“Lay some tasting notes on me!” Rhys said wide-eyed.
I let the old-fashioned soak into my gums for a second, “Grassy…” Rhys smiled and urged me to continue, his gold tooth was out in the open like his collar bone, “Sweet and syrupy, but mature,” I concluded.
He raised the glass to his mouth and I watched his Adam’ apple, speckled with patches of amber light, pull the liquid down his throat. “I wish I had the gift of the gab like you,” he said, “It really does taste exactly how you said.”
I’m not good with compliments. My thank you was a weak smile.
“I wish I could pick the right words like you always do,” Rhys studied the dead orange in the glass with one eye shut, “It would help.”
I was uncomfortably aware of the saliva in my throat.
“I have something to tell you,” Rhys picked out the orange peel and played with it.
I wanted to press him for an answer but I worried the words would come out as spit. I swallowed shards of ice to calm my throat.
“Ah, crap,” Rhys stood, “How about I tell you after we have some fun?” He dropped the orange peel back into the drink. We left the bar soon after. Rhys trailed behind with Colton on the walk to the university.
I don’t flinch when Colton takes out the next tooth. The nerves in my gums have been severed beyond repair. Instead I notice how the clouds warp the moon outside. They shift Colton around the room. I feel him move over my stomach. Acid crawls up my oesophagus and brings blood along with it. I throw up on my legs and a burn stays in my throat. The wind carries the smell around the room. I can’t control where it goes. With my head tilted to the ground I watch Colton unscrew another rusted nail from a birdcage. This time when he inserts it into my gum he stands over me, his mouth hovering over my ear. The volume of his voice seeks to burst my eardrum. I think back to the dance once more.
Rhys was greeted at the hall by a girl. Her features were classically beautiful. She reminded me of Billie Holiday. The girl had a perfect set of teeth, and they were highlighted by red lipstick that had found a way onto them. I had the idea to give her the napkin in my pocket, but I thought that I should give her and Rhys privacy. To pass the time I looked around the room. An arched window towered over us and the newborn moonlight split Colton across the polished floor. A breeze of grass and tobacco came through from outside. I noticed Colton eavesdropping on Rhys’ conversation. He told me that they talked about the horrible rain. And then he cried. At that moment Rhys knocked on my shoulder with an elbow and told me he was going off to dance. He would be right back, he said. When I looked up to nod and give him a smile that said, I’ll be okay here, he had already vanished into the crowd, the girl by his side.
It was just me and Colton then, who had crawled on to my lap. I told him that the rain wouldn’t last. That the wind would take it away at any moment now. That it would take it to a place far away and lock it up in a cage made of iron. He told me that the cage would eventually rust; that the rain would escape and come back for him. I told him that he can’t control the world. I felt horrid. Anxiety did not mix well with alcohol. I tried to distract myself by watching Rhys dance but the crowd of couples was a sick blur to me. Nausea overcame me and a small portion of puke came up. I held it in my mouth, the vile taste soaked into my gums. It tasted like brandy but with a stark note of salt from the acid in my stomach. I was glad to have kept the napkin.
Rhys returned quickly, he must have noticed. He locked his arms under my armpits and lifted me out of my wheelchair. Colton’s cry stopped, and he laughed for once. Over Rhys’ shoulder I saw the girl from earlier. She was shocked. Some students pointed at us and laughed. I let myself enjoy the moment. I knew I couldn’t control what they thought. Colton danced and mingled with the other shadows on the floor. Rhys hummed to the tune of the music and the burn in my chest faded. I had begun the opening crackle of a sentence but I was stopped short when Rhys’ hum changed to a cry. I felt a wet face on my ear, and a word enter.
“Goodbye,” Colton says. I bite my lower lip with my new, rusted teeth, Colton finishes the sentence anyway, “I’ve been given an order,” his hoarse voice bleeds into my ear like a picked scab, The words sway through my mind endlessly. I want the wind to travel through my ears, into my skull, and to take the words away with the rain. The sentence I left unsaid that night is now rust in my mouth. Colton with a full set of teeth moves behind me, and the heavy wind outside covers the sound of my crying. He grips the handles of the wheelchair and pushes me with help from the breeze. I submit myself to his control, and I let him take me where he wants to.
The wind gets us to our destination swiftly, and I know why Colton took my teeth now. I try to tell him that he can’t control the world but the rusted nails in my mouth gate the words. Flowers decorate Colton on the ground and the wind draws a sweet, grassy scent from them. I have always hated the smell of flowers. Colton points to a headstone in front of me. Unbleshimed, and marble. I hear a groan crawl, and slither in Colton’s throat. Regret sits in my stomach. Finally, a gust of wind blows the words out of his mouth. Regret gurgles up out of my stomach, and I don’t hear the sentence over the sound of vomiting. The wind carries his voice away to an iron cage. Far, far away.
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Translations
by Joumaana Abdu
ISBN 9781761343872
Reviewed by ROUMINA PARSA
For people in diaspora, the perceived value of our creative expression has traditionally been contingent on the telling of familiar stories. To write into the demands of “authenticity” is to perform with pre-existing notions of our identities as the baseline. The market-prescribed version of diaspora is one in which the pool of our experiences is all made of the same still water, its depth swelling with each faltered variation from the retelling of “loss-exile-return”. As a knowable thing, it’s a comfortable iteration of the foreign because it can be named; “home” as the shared contested nebula of our personhood. Yet I question, if we are to always operate with this struggle as our centre (working either to reject or affirm it) are we truly distancing ourselves from the violence of our oppression, or cementing its bind through relentless association? It is perhaps this consideration that has allowed Australian diasporic writers to stray from the confines of mainstream narratives. Picking up Translations by Jumaana Abdu, I craved to not hear a familiar story. And Abdu, a bold and poetic POC voice in Australia’s literary sphere, got close to not telling one.
Translations follows a divorced Muslim woman, Aliyah, moving to a run-down property in rural New South Wales with her young daughter. Between shifts as a nurse, Aliyah works on transforming the property with the help of a Palestinian imam hired as a farmhand, nicknamed Shep. Here, Aliyah must navigate the notion of “home” as a haunted space, as a reunion with an old friend, dreams of the previous owners, and interactions with Indigenous Peoples intensify the question of what it means to belong.
Abdu’s cited intentions with her debut novel are noble ones. Aware of the hyper-visibility of Middle Eastern and Muslim suffering, particularly in the past year, Abdu approached the representation of her characters with a commendable objective: ‘I wanted to afford my characters the dignity of ambiguity, to prove ambiguity was possible despite the demands for explanations that have infiltrated identity politics’ (1).
In refusing to exist in the loaded context of the “other”, Abdu allows herself to create in the space left by what is negated. The decision to leave Shep’s real name unknown, for example, is one such praiseworthy move towards what is traditionally only afforded to white characters: assumed neutrality.
This manifests in a refreshing depiction of the Middle Eastern/ Muslim/ female body that is not focused primarily on its experience of pain. The “neutrality” is emphasised through descriptions of Aliyah’s physical labour. When Abdu writes ‘her body had become unbearable’ (p62), it is not connected to her identity but to the corporeal; her working on the land. Cleverly, when Abdu does position the body within a meaningful framework, she relies not on the hyper specific, stereotyped experiences of WOC, but traces its sinews out to the universal.
It comes out most beautifully in her simpler sentences: ‘I forget what it’s like outside myself. Right now, out here… the wind and all the rest’ (p269).
The temptation could be there to suggest Abdu does go back on her promise of characters who ‘demand compassion without having to bleed’ (2). Aliyah recalls a traumatic miscarriage, her mother’s unexpected death, and her friend Hana is revealed to be a victim of interfamilial abuse. And yet, the foundation of universality grounds these characters’ pain in their lived experiences not as Muslim POC, but as people – or more poignantly in these instances, as women. This avoids what Edward Said called “self-orientalisation” (3), while also underscoring cultural traumas to be understood as such. Shep detailing his personal connection to Gaza, for example, is a purposeful and necessary distinction of the Palestinian experience that can be witnessed, but not claimed, by the collective. This is tenderly communicated through the imagery of a splinter in Shep’s finger, that is never removed by Aliyah, a nurse, despite repeatedly seeing it.
In play with contrasts, this physical distance between Shep and Aliyah accentuates her nearness to Hana, and it is here that Abdu’s writing truly shines. Her appreciation for Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series is apparent in this portrayal of a female friendship with cosmic closeness. But more distinctly, it is the added element of religion that takes readers to a rarely represented intersection: Islam and queerness. Abiding by her premise of ambiguity, Abdu never explicitly defines the women’s relationship.
Instead, it is expressed once more through the body: ‘The girls threw their arms around each other, pressing hard to leave a mark, or better yet a scar, something lasting, something to span a vastness, to absorb and hold and revisit’ (p93).
In a novel that explores the notion of a homeland, there is something uniquely moving about two women being each other’s mooring, through distance and time. In a standout line, she writes: ‘What was a country? Here was a beautiful girl.’ (p87).
The infused undercurrents of queerness within Aliyah, a hijabi Muslim, applied in tandem with her distinctive independence and assertiveness, affords Abdu the opportunity to dispel the archetype of the Middle Eastern woman presented in traditional media. Yet this nuancing of “the Muslim woman” is unfortunately undercut by the degree to which Abdu applies strict conservativism to the relationship between Aliyah and Shep. The two cannot share a car, with Aliyah instead riding in the back of his ute. The two cannot be indoors alone, expressing the desire for a chaperone mid-conversation. They react with embarrassment when Aliyah’s 9-year-old walks in on them at the cusp of a vulnerable discussion, and they opt to utilise two iPhone cameras as a make-shift mirror so Shep can cut his own hair and be untouched by her. As the fresh fluidity and raw physical expression of Aliyah with Hana is stunted with Shep, the female-Middle Eastern-Muslim body is returned to the original politicised position Abdu had valiantly rerouted from. It is a regretful undoing of the best part of the text. A retracing of the long shadow cast by men over Aliyah, and even larger, over women.
This pervasive conservatism clashes once more against an additional element: Abdu’s understandable, but ultimately unnuanced, commitment to re-imagining Islam in the reader’s eye from beneath the Western gaze. Utilising Shep as a “translator” of Islam to the uninitiated reader, Abdu emphasises the liberal elements present in the religion – particularly feminism – in his sermon dialogue. Literarily, this poses a contradiction; Aliyah is presented as both the maverick – divorced, queer, feminist – and the conformist – willing to consider a marriage proposal from Shep’s friend who she interacts with once at a sermon. Here Abdu’s ambiguity clause results in a weakness in her character’s verisimilitude. Without knowing how Aliyah is led by her faith, and why, her varying beliefs construct her not as a person of multitudes, but one of unexplained inconsistencies.
Culturally, Abdu’s rose-tinting of Islam as a religion in line with the collective oppressed highlights an area where greater perspectives could have been considered. At a sermon where a man is raising money for Yemen, Abdu writes:
‘[He] called them my people though Aliyah knew him to be Lebanese. But the white woman on her right with a redheaded baby nodded to agree, my people, and the Bengali grandmother handing out dates on her left nodded, my people, and the children, like a pocketful of gems, nodded my people, and every Arab and Malaysian, my people, my people, with a pride so boundless it seemed that if one Lebanese man could feel a kinship with the countrymen of Yemen, then any one man could feel a kinship with the countrymen of the world.’
(p251)
By underpinning Islam as the foundation of community, belonging to the choir of voices (both displaced and not) singing “my people”, Abdu omits the voices of those who experience Islam as a force of oppression. Neglected is the historic Arab colonisation of the Middle East and beyond, the rise of extremist powers such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, the IRGC in Iran, and further Islamic theocracies such as Saudi Arabia and Mauritania, in place of a sentimentalisation of worldly kinship under Islam.
She continues:
‘Here were people who loved belonging to each other across oceans, swept into a corner of the Australian bushland, huddled in a barn doubling as a place of worship because the townspeople had no room for Pangea in the streets.’
(p251)
This emphasis on the idealised unity of diaspora, in contrast to “the townspeople”, fails to honour the book’s initial, exciting venture into the negated, universal space. It instead decorates the existing depiction of diverse peoples in Australia as a monolithic community united and isolated through our sole identifier: oppression. Perhaps most unfortunately, Abdu’s dilution of difference between those in varying forms of exile also extends to the depiction of Indigenous Australians, at one point connecting their experiences of unhomeliness to ‘hijabis in France’ (p267). The ungroundedness of this approach has a ricochet effect. Aliyah’s indigenous coworker Billie expressing belief that Shep’s Muslim mother was the spiritual reincarnation of her deceased uncle (the only Muslim she had known) comes across as a one-dimensional interpretation of Indigenous beliefs, rather than an expression of POC connection.
In Translations, Jumaana Abdu invokes the philosophies of Edward Said in writing: ‘I think it matters what people see. It depends – depends on who’s making the image, who the image is for’ (p146). A new image is quietly born in her work, and bravely so, but it is just as quietly buried. Against the aesthetic touchstones of “the Middle Eastern” – desert dunes, a headscarf turning into a flag in the wind, hardcover editions of One thousand and One Nights – Abdu’s strength in imagining a new way of belonging is muted. We are returned to those still waters, uniform and indistinguishable, denied once more the individuality afforded to whiteness. Perhaps, the alternative is a story that is yet to be translated.
NOTES
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Antonia Hildebrand is a poet, short story writer, screenwriter, novelist and essayist. Her first published short story appeared in Downs Images and in Woman’s Day Summer Reading and she has since been widely published in journals, magazine and anthologies in Australia as well as Britain, the USA and Ireland. Many of her short stories have been broadcast by Radio 91.3FM Yeppoon. She is the author of nine books, including three books of poetry, two short story collections, two essay collections and novels. Her novel The Darkened Room was published by Ginninderra Press in 2022. Her poetry collection, Broken Dolls was published by Tangerine Books in 2024.
King Crab
When I was twelve, my mother got cancer. It was 1966, the Vietnam War was on TV every night, and no one really seemed to have much idea why this war was happening, so I accepted on that basis that disasters just happened. Not that anyone admitted that my mother’s situation was a disaster. It was discussed behind closed doors, but I was protected. It didn’t matter. I knew everything and especially the things they didn’t want me to know. My mother had a tumour on her thyroid and it was malignant. There was some complication and they couldn’t operate. She was going to be in hospital for weeks having radiation and chemotherapy.
Dad and I were living in a borrowed beach house about a half hour drive from the hospital. It had been loaned by Dad’s mate Greg. He was a wheeler-dealer always buying and selling things he had acquired in mysterious ways. So it wasn’t that surprising that he turned up one day with a king crab- a huge thing built like a tank. Its claws were bound but it was still alive so it was moving its claws around –or trying to. It has tiny eyes which I imagined were focused on me, furiously, as if I was to blame for its suffering. He had huge, meaty claws, sprinkled with red decoration and tipped with black. I knew that in the zodiac, the sign of cancer was symbolized by a crab, so the link between him and my mother’s disease was there from the minute I set eyes on him.
We had left our farm in the care of Dad’s brother, Kevin, and I was determined to get back there, back to the cows and the little white farm house that had been my world until Mum got sick. And it was simply unthinkable that we would go back there without Mum. King Crab, as I thought of him, was put into the tub in the laundry and I suppose my father planned to make him into our dinner the next day. I decided that given that a crab had my mother held hostage in the hospital, killing and eating this crab would be very bad juju. I became convinced that it would doom my mother. The huge crustacean focused his tiny eyes on me and made impatient gestures as I formulated a plan to free him. I could hear the hum of Dad and Greg’s conversation. I knew what they would be talking about. It wasn’t hard to imagine. How foolish they were, I told myself, to think that killing and eating this crab would not have terrible consequences. I knew I had to act.
After Greg left, Dad seemed listless. Talking about what had happened to Mum only drained him of hope, I could see that.
‘I think I’ll have a lie down, Alan’, he said with the ghost of a smile and he went into the bedroom and shut the door.
I could hear King Crab rattling around in the tub demanding his freedom. I would give it to him and in exchange he would give me back my mother. I even went into the laundry and looked into what I supposed was his face and said,
‘Is that a deal?’
King Crab stopped moving his claws and was completely still. I took this as agreement to my plan. In the beach house you could hear the ocean. The waves seemed very close and King Crab could hear them too, I supposed. He wanted to go back to his home as much as I did.
As the sun balanced on the ocean like a big orange ball and then sank down into it, extinguished for another day, and darkness fell over the beach house like a net, I waited patiently for Dad to turn in for the night. He wasn’t hungry so we had toasted beetroot sandwiches for tea with ginger beer for me and real beer for him. He watched the news after tea; I couldn’t understand why. I thought he had enough troubles of his own without taking on everyone else’s. Then he fell asleep on the couch and began to snore.
‘Dad’, I said, touching his shoulder. ‘Go to bed. You’re asleep on the couch’, I said, stating the obvious.
‘Okay’, he mumbled. ‘Turn off the TV, will you? Goodnight.’
He went to bed. I turned off the TV. In the house now the only sounds were the waves and King Crab rattling and struggling around in the tub, wanting to get back into the ocean. Soon my father’s snores chimed in.
I had to transport a very large crab and even though it was pitch black outside, I had to put him in something. I didn’t want random witnesses possibly reporting to my father that they had seen me walking to the beach holding a big crab if any neighbours happened to witness my nocturnal journey. I looked out the window up at the sky- the big fat moon was shining like a spoon, to quote a song I wouldn’t hear until 1968. I took this as a sign- the moon would light my way. It was after midnight by that time, no one would be around I hoped. I found a sturdy shopping bag. I was scared of King Crab, I thought he would struggle and I might drop him-but when I reached out to pick him up and take him out of the tub, he kept perfectly still, the way he had when I asked him about our deal. I slipped him into the bag, found the key to the back door and let myself out, carefully putting the key in the pocket of my jeans. I had grabbed the kitchen scissors on my way out and I put them in another pocket. I would need them to cut his bonds once we reached the beach.
I knew the way to the beach very well. Dad and I took a walk there most days. I saw no one as I trudged along with the crab in the shopping bag. I was impatient to reach the beach and free him because then I knew my mother would get better. The crab had been still but as we got closer to the beach he began to move around. I held the bag tighter. I mustn’t drop him. If I did his shell might crack. I knew next to nothing about crabs but I knew a cracked shell would not be good. And the deal was that he be delivered alive to the ocean. Otherwise it wouldn’t work. At last the ocean came in sight. The moon shone a silver road across the ocean as the waves rolled and crashed to shore. King Crab was now doing a jig but I had to cut his bonds and I thought as close to the ocean as possible was the best way to do it. So I walked towards the ocean thinking how nice it would be to walk along the silver road that stretched out before me, glowing like silk on the ocean. Down I went on to the beach, the waves roaring in my ears. I took the scissors out of my pocket and reached into the bag and cut the bonds that bound King Crab’s claws. Then I tipped him out on to the beach. He looked at me with his mask of a face. Then he did a sideways charge into the ocean and was swallowed by the waves. I stood there for a minute under the big fat moon that was shining like a spoon. Then I put the scissors in my pocket, picked up the shopping bag and went back up the cold, soft dunes to the road. I walked back through the empty streets certain my mother would live.
We had five good years after that. We went back to the farm. Back to the cows and the little white farm house. Back to normality. My mother was pale and her hair had fallen out but back on the farm colour returned to her face and her hair grew back. My father had stared in disbelief at the empty tub the morning after my walk to the beach in the dark.
‘Where’s the crab?’ he yelled. ‘Did the damn thing escape?’
I tried to look innocent but my father knew. I thought he would be angry but he burst out laughing. It was the first time I had heard him laugh in months.
‘You let it go, didn’t you? I suppose next you’ll be a vegetarian.’
I shook my head.
‘Okay, have a shower and we’ll go and see Mum.’
He was actually smiling.
My mother died, of course she did- five years later. But I’ve always been sure King Crab thought he kept his part of the bargain. He probably would have said, ‘I never promised you forever.’ And, of course, no one can. I often thought of the crab over the years, out there in the ocean and wondered if, five years after I released him, he was caught again. At which point our deal was null and void. But that’s magical thinking: something only a twelve year old boy with a sick mother would believe. That’s what I tell myself.
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Roumina Parsa is an Iranian-Australian writer based in Melbourne/ Naarm. She appeared in the 2024 Emerging Writers’ Festival, was shortlisted for the 2022 Catalyse Nonfiction Prize, and her work has previously featured in Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Meanjin and more.
The internet has a beating heart and it goes to the rhythm of –
When you don’t open an app for a while it will gain sentience. I tried taking a week off of social media and got to five days (also a working week for the unemployed) and each day my phone came more alive talking that internet language:
Redacted and 64 other accounts you follow have posted on Instagram. Redacted uploaded a story on Facebook. Redacted recently shared a new reel. Do you know redacted? Do you want to sync redacted from your contacts? Do you want to follow redacted? Do you want to hold redacted’s hand and tell them your secrets and braid each other’s hair?
It reminds me of when I was 12 and had my first blow of agoraphobia, though I didn’t know then that’s what it was, an event made up of no understanding and all experience. The suddenly inability to go to school, to sleep alone, to exist as a human how I had before. It was all very dramatic. My parents were forced to worry about me in a way they’d never needed to and it didn’t suit any of us well.
I had to go see the school counsellor who sat me down and said much of the same as my apps; that my friends were making new friends, and things were changing, and I was being left behind. At 12 you can’t know what that all means. The passage of time, the concept of things moving on without you. It just sounds like being dead. And what’s a 12 year old supposed to do with that? What’s the threat of time passing when you can only perceive forever?
The counsellor was too old and too mean to change me anyway. So far removed from the quietness of a child’s defiance to understand it was only made of fear, all the way through.
Is that what you want? For all your friends to forget about you? She’d asked.
Oh brother, I’d thought, my stomach hurts.
In abstinence from the apps my hands grew idle and my mind quiet from the voices of others and I felt again in an old way what it meant to be singular. At the centre of your own world but on the periphery of that great other, where everything was happening and where you were not. It made me think of Bane and his monologue in the Dark Knight Rises – him telling Batman how he was born in a pit, and that made him one with the darkness on a level that
Batman never could be; he who chose it. I couldn’t decide which one I was, Bane or Batman – the chosen or the chooser of the deep dark.
The apps pierced through: are you sure you don’t know redacted?
I didn’t know redacted. I knew my whispering girl on YouTube, the only app I decided to keep using, staying away from the comments and the shorts. I have a premium account on it that I worked real hard for, downloading a proxy to connect to Turkey where I could get it cheaper so someone could whisper-read me a book and tap on its cover as I fell asleep without an ad interrupting.
[I do often consider what my ancestors must think of me, the rotten fruit of their labours. All those soldiers and mothers and otherwise wounded warriors looking down at all this (I’m pointing, round and round, at my many comforts) and seeing someone crouching beneath a tall ceiling, collapsing under the weight of nothing. It’s fine though, really, and if it’s not I can bring the ceilings down lower, and if my ancestors hate that too – well, what can any of us do for the aches of the dead?]
My whispering girl only chooses books I’m pretentious enough to think are stupid, lending themselves so easily to boredom and the eyes closing. She’s younger than me but/ and pregnant and has started inviting everyone to take a deep breath with her at the beginning of her videos. Naturally, I comply. Thinking, nothing is happening and maybe that’s it.
I started wondering though if anyone from my apps missed me. If anyone had even noticed I’d been gone. What was the weight of one person’s absence? What was the sound withheld from the collective of voices? I knew what I was asking was much bigger, the tiniest babushka doll in the set of worries I was too defiant to open.
For those who’ve seen it, you know Bane’s monologue ends on this, a note of defiance. But maybe you hear the fear also, all the way through, when he says: I didn’t see the light until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but blinding!
When I log into my apps again it’s to see the photos my friends had posted of us – the friends the counsellor had long ago threatened I’d lose. They picked the ugliest ones but it’s fine because I’m in them, because I was there. Because I wasn’t born here; not in this darkness, not in this pit, not even in this country. I was brought here by a patchwork of choices, made by and for me, and that’s the least important part actually. The darkness doesn’t belong to me, or to you. It holds no loyalties, it promises no victories. It denounces itself with its own emptiness. It falters with what it means to use as a threat; some substance of the very end.
That’s only for the dead though, for us alive and itching and and online and pleading, it is still redacted.
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The Great Undoing
by Sharlene Allsopp
ISBN: 9781761151668
Reviewed by DEBORAH PIKE
Sharlene Allsopp’s debut novel, The Great Undoing, has a great cover that undoes history with a red crayon. Ernest Scott’s A Short History of Australia (1916) is struck out and bold typeface declares an angry and urgent call for a different version to be told. As Allsopp writes, ‘After all, only the winners write history.’ The ‘story stealers’ (1) have already written theirs, clearly, the time is ripe for a re-write.
I looked up Scott’s book, with some curiosity, to find virtually no information except advertising from antique bookshops via eBay. And now I am assailed by emails and popups, recommending Scott’s volume for purchase. But how long can these versions of history last, I wonder?
As more and more First Nations writers confront questions of representation, voice, colonisation and sovereignty, previous stories and histories of Australia will need to be thrown into question. History, it seems, is being rewritten by First Nations authors like Sharlene Allsopp, Claire G Coleman, and Alexis Wright – via fiction. Fiction has become the space for dismantling empire and for writing and rewriting history into an imaginary place or into a speculative future.
The Great Undoing is set some time, decades ahead, where the world is run by a technology called BloodTalk. Allsopp writes, ‘Everything that we are is stored in our body’ (17). Initially an immunity tool, it is soon used to track people and their locations as well as their bank accounts; it becomes a form of border control.
But the future is not all bleak, certain things are being rectified: Australia has its first Indigenous Prime Minister, ‘Ruby Walker’ who ‘enacts the Truth Telling Policies’ (34). Scarlet, an Australian refugee is tasked with the job of updating the archives and going through curricula to make sure that these are more historically balanced and that more voices are heard, presumably in a way that includes and details Indigenous stories, names and languages.
The novel flashes back and forth from Then to Now. While Scarlett is working in London, she forms a passionate relationship with a rock musician, Dylan. But there is a widespread mass blackout and a breakdown in communications. Everything is in chaos and borders are shut. Scarlet then meets David and they both travel, seemingly illicitly, across the globe to return to Australia, each for a different reason. Scarlet resorts to paper and pen to recount her experience of her ‘great undoing.’ All she has to write on is a copy of Scott’s A History.
But what is Scarlet undone by? Is it the great global technological disaster itself? Or Empire that stripped her of her story? Or is she ‘undoing’ Empire through her truth-telling work? She writes, ‘My father’ – a Bundjalung man – ’was my great undoing’ (25). Is his racial identity the source of her undoing? Or, later, we might ask, is she ‘being undone,’ in a steamy way – as she narrates her romantic encounters with poetic, scintillating prose: ‘[h]e was undoing. I was undoing. And, right then, right now’(67)?
Allsopp suggests that Scarlet’s undoing lies in all of these things, but ultimately, however, it is the undoing of identity, the pursuit of it, that sweeps the story along; the book is a meditation on both the complexity of identity and the nature of textuality – and their interwoven relationship.
In parts, the novel reads like a response to Wiradjuri author, Stan Grant’s brilliant, (if somewhat controversial) essay On Identity (2019). In his book-length essay, Grant argues against the limiting categories of identity – ‘Identity does not liberate, it binds,’(43) explaining that ‘[t]hat’s the problem with identity boxes: they are not big enough to hold love’ (19). He Writes:
If I mark yes on that identity box, then that is who I am; definitively, there is no ambiguity. I will have made a choice that colour, race, culture, whatever these things are… (25)
The result is that by ticking that box, he denies the other parts of his identity which do not fit into that box, ‘we participate in an infinity of worlds’(24), says Grant, citing Alberto Melucci, which such boxes cannot possibly contain. In a similar vein, Allsopp writes:
There have always been tiny, neat boxes to tick. Nationality Box, ethnicity box, gender box, religion box. If you tick or cross you are contained within that box. (195)
Grant attributes his influences to many writers of all colours and persuasions, insisting that many writers are Aboriginal (48), even if their genetic code would tell you otherwise, because (quoting Edouard Glissant),‘“you can be yourself and the other”’ (43) and this is what literature allows us to do. . Allsopp is also interested in showing her indebtedness, her connectedness, to a wide range of writers such as David Malouf, Rebecca Giggs, Claire G Coleman, Christos Tsiolkas and, even J. R. R. Tolkien, among others, all of whom she refers to in her book and occasionally quotes.
Arguably, however, in its attempt to reclaim Indigenous language, storytelling and identity, Allsopp’s main literary influence is that of Tara June Which and her novel The Yield, which Allsopp explicitly mentions. This is because, for Allsopp, as for Winch, language is crucial:
Language isn’t just a tool to share information or to record history. Expressed thought is powerful. It declares truths that are, and truths that are not-yet. Language breathes power into discourses of liberation AND oppression, both creating and destroying futures. (105)
Since language shapes our perception of truth, or ‘frames’ it as Scarlet tells us, it is directly linked to history, and to her job of setting it right. This is a challenge when so many Indigenous languages have been lost. In an insightful (and amusing) discussion of the power of language, Scarlet warns us that much language is used and has been used mistakenly, to wield forms of control, however unconsciously in so many ways: ‘Our language frames us all with penis-envy,’ but when considering its marvellous capacities, ‘It should be vagina-envy, baby.’
Truth telling is also central to the novel’s concerns. But this is not straightforward, ‘When a nation is built on a lie, how can any version of its history be true?’ (119). Allsopp is deeply interested in how truth can be conveyed through narrative, even hinting that there lies the possibility for multiple and perhaps even conflicting ‘truths.’
The Great Undoing examines the ways that narrative structures our perception of both cultural artifacts and the world around us. It exposes the rotten imperial core of major museums and institutions, and gloriously imagines, however briefly, how all this might be remedied. The novel is interspersed with historical tracts and extracts; it is highly experimental fiction, and robustly formally inventive. It is in some ways a narratological compendium, exploring different forms of textuality – in a bid, perhaps, to showcase the breathtaking heterogeneity of various versions of ‘truth’ and history.
In terms of style, the writing is refreshing, bracing and often affecting. Allsopp combines high literary elements with aspects thriller and romance. This genre-bending attests to the possibilities of narrative – and to the difficulty of containing or accommodating certain stories and fractured histories. It could have been the limitations of this reviewer, but at times, I found The Great Undoing difficult to follow.
Despite this reservation, The Great Undoing is exciting reading and it is a pleasure to encounter fiction that is so ambitious, conceptually intellectual, and yet at the same time, also thoroughly immersive. This is an important book.
The novel’s sense of urgency is compelling:
But what if no one tells our stories? What if there are no records left? Can they live on if they only exist in our memories? What if everything I have ever done, every truth I have ever retold, is erased? (169)
Allsopp wants to right the wrongs of the past, reclaim memory, unravel the mystery of identity, throw a tin of paint on the face of history, nudge to possibility – convey the complexity of all these things – as well as give us a rollicking good adventure. Who can ask for more?
Citations
S. Allsopp. The Great Undoing. Sydney: Ultimo Press, 2024.
S. Grant. On Identity. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2019.
DEBORAH PIKE is a writer and academic based in Sydney and an associate professor of English Literature at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney. Her books include The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald, which was shortlisted for the AUHE award in literary criticism. The Players, her debut novel is now out with Fremantle Press.