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Anna Kazumi Stahl translated by Alice Whitmore

Written by mascara on . Posted in Featured Writer.

Anna Kazumi Stahl is a fiction writer based in Argentina. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation on transnational (East-West) identities in South American, U.S. and German literatures. Her current research explores South-South and East Asian-South American transnational cultural expressions in literature and visual media.As a fiction writer, she works almost exclusively in Spanish. Her book-length works are: Catastrofes naturales (Editorial Sudamericana, 1997) and Flores de un solo día (Seix Barral, 2003), the latter a finalist for the Romulos Gallegos Prize. Stahl’s fiction has appeared in anthologies and journals in Latin America, Europe, Japan, and the USA. She is currently completing a novel based in Buenos Aires, in the southern neighborhoods where historically an Asian immigrant enclave took root and later other immigrants and regional migrations passed through.

 

The Crab and the Deer

Ten days ago my brother came back from the war. Two days ago they let me see him. He is sick, and has wounds that haven’t healed well. He has a bad fever and it makes him say things in his sleep. He’s been having nightmares. I can see from his eyelids how the monsters slink around inside his head, hurting him. But there’s nothing I can do. I can’t wake him; they’ve explained to me how dangerous it is to wrench a person with a sick heart and lungs out of a deep sleep. And I can’t reach the ghosts that are hunting him. So I sit and stare at his eyelids, where I’ve seen them moving. I try to send him as much strength as possible, so he can defend himself.

This is the first time I’ve ever met my brother. I’ve never met him before because he went away to military service when I was still inside mama’s belly.

The war ended. Finally. It ended not long ago. I say finally because it lasted a very long time, years and years. On the radio they announced “the end of the conflict” and people went out into the streets to discuss it in more detail, I guess. But nobody celebrated. That’s because we lost; as a country, we lost, and as people, each one of us lost too. Amputee is a word I learnt. So many of the things we had before are now missing: a mother is missing, or a father; a son, a brother, a cousin; houses are missing, and hands, and eyes. When peace came there was a lot of fuss. The city overflowed with people looking for work, food, medicine. Because they come from other parts of the country, the people speak funny and act different. But my brother also re-appeared.

I don’t know why there are wars, I don’t know what they’re for, but as soon as my brother wakes up I’m going to ask him. He’s the only person I know who actually fought in the war – as a conscript, they told me, which means he didn’t want to be sent, but he was sent anyway, and that’s why I think he must know something and can help me answer my questions.

For now, he sleeps all day and all night. He seems to be resting, but I hear the doctor talking to my father and he says something about a rapidly accelerating infection. The words sounds mechanical and I don’t understand how to relate them to my brother. I don’t have anyone to explain them to me (mama died in the first round of bombings, when everything was just beginning, and I don’t want to annoy my father – I’m afraid of how he might react, especially now that we’ve lost the war). It’s better if I try to figure it out on my own. That’s why I listen to everything, even though I don’t always understand it.

A nurse comes in with the doctor. I have to leave my brother’s room while she works. I hear water splashing and in my mind I see the nurse rinsing a small white towel to refresh my brother’s face and hands. But he doesn’t wake up.

When they let me back in, I sit in a corner while the doctor examines my brother. The doctor gives him medicine, and writes some notes down on a form that he then puts into a briefcase. When he’s finished I get closer. My usual place is right next to the bed, at head height. I watch my brother sleeping. There are things I didn’t see the first few times I visited, but now they are very clear. I—— has the same eyebrows as mama, thick in the middle and long, reaching almost to the temple. His forehead is like our father’s, and his mouth, too; the same fine, delicate lips, almost like they’ve been drawn in pencil. When I notice these traces of mama and papa in my brother’s face, I realise that he and I must look alike. I go to the mirror near the entrance, with the door open so I can see myself properly in the daylight, and it’s true. The eyebrows, the nose, the mouth – the similarity is there. Nothing else is left of our mother; we have her big cooking pots, her tea set, the little box of needles and thread, a basket with remnants of different-coloured fabrics, things she used to use and now nobody uses. But that small detail in my brother’s face, and in mine – the form of the curve above our eyes – means mama is still here, somehow.

When I’m in his room my brother has a nightmare: the globes of his eyeballs roll around behind the closed lids, and suddenly he opens his mouth so wide that a wound on his lip splits open and starts to bleed. He makes a strange sound, like a boiling kettle, and then screams: “Crabs! Save me!” He is still asleep but he arches his back and throws his head back so far that it looks like he’s about to break his neck. I don’t know what to do. I put my hands on his chest and push; as I’m doing this, another part of my mind thinks that my brother’s chest is like the wooden washboard we use for washing our clothes, with its deep grooves, and I realise this just means my brother is skinny, but then I get the thought that my brother might be turning into a machine, or an object, and the thought scares me. A moment later, the violent tension is gone. My brother goes back to how he was before, quiet and still, breathing deeply with his eyes closed. I look at him for a while until I also feel calmer. Before leaving, I clean the wound on his lip.

The doctor and the nurse don’t come for several days. Maybe my brother is better. He’s still asleep, but he hasn’t had any more fits or nightmares. Is he better? I visit him after we’ve taken our tea. He is very still. He seems to be breathing, but I can’t be sure. I approach him and touch his skin. He is freezing. I make a tent with my hands over his shoulders and breathe into it. My breath warms his chest. But his chest is only small, and he is big. By the time I reach his legs, his chest will be cold again. I don’t have time to go to the hospital for help; by the time I get back he’ll be worse, he’ll have turned to wood or ice or evaporated into steam, like a ghost. But as I’m thinking all of this the nurse and the doctor arrive, I don’t know if by chance or by good luck, but they arrive and I say: “Just in time!” They don’t say anything in reply, and they don’t turn to my brother, either. They grab me and force me to the ground. The nurse washes my hands with alcohol. She tells me I won’t be able to see my brother or anyone else for a week. I have to be quarantined.

I spend the week locked in a bedroom. The blinds are always down and eventually I lose track of how many days have passed. I watch the light at the borders of the windows, and think about the movement of the sun.

*

Today my brother is awake. I can’t believe it, but there he is, awake. When I enter his room I see a cup of tea in his hand, which is almost empty. I feel relieved that he’s drunk so much of the tea. It’s proof that he is better. I approach his bed and speak to him softly, in case he’s still not used to loud noises, but I feel an urgent need to know what happened, what he saw, what he did, because if I know then maybe I can figure out the solution, the cure.

“Brother,” I whisper. “Please tell me, Brother. Why are you like this? What was it that hurt you?”

He looks at me. He seems to know who I am. Now that his eyes are open, I don’t have to look in a mirror to see that we look alike.

“In war,” he says, looking at me the whole time, “doesn’t matter if you win or lose, you end up sick. If you want to learn something about life, Little Sister, you’re better off asking the animals. Forget human beings. That includes me. Forget about me.”

I’m horrified. “No!” I cry, and the nurse comes to separate us, to calm him down and to calm me down. But I don’t stop: “No, never, I won’t forget you! Do you hear me? Never!”

“You should go, Little Sister. I want to sleep.”

The nurse doesn’t have to escort me out – I respect my brother, so I leave. I go out into the garden. It’s a humid afternoon, warm. I can hear the toads singing, the birds, the odd cricket. I’m confused and worried by what my brother said.

Then, one morning, I run away. I can’t stop thinking about him. I know how easy it is for someone to die. I decide to take his advice: I’ll go and talk to the deer in the park of the old Temple of Dreams. They roam freely there, because they’re not regular animals, they are the messengers of the gods. I know this from reading a lot of kids’ books, and from my religion lessons, and now after what my brother said I think it might be true after all. Anyway, it’s the only option I have. If I don’t ask the deer, I’ll have to go back to depending on my father and the doctor and the nurse.

Sneaking out of the house is easier than I’d feared; nobody comes to stop me, or even asks what I’m doing.

As soon as I enter the park I start to feel dizzy, so I close my eyes and lean closer and closer to the ground until I’m squatting there. I think I might have a rest, but then I hear the heavy footsteps of an animal coming along the gravel path. With my eyes still closed, not daring to stand, I stretch out one of my hands. Nothing. Just air. I lift my hand a little higher and my fingers brush fur. There are only deer in this park, so it can’t be anything else, but how am I supposed to know if it’s The Deer? The deer who carries the message for my brother and I? As I’m thinking this I start to get a hot feeling. The deer is radiating heat, but not a heat like my brother’s fever – it’s like an internal force transforming into something that I can touch with my hands. I open my eyes and see the enormous, dark brown body. I am crouching right next to one of its front hooves, looking towards its stomach, which is like a big orb, because it is round, or like a planet, because it seems to have its own force of gravity, which pulls me to it like a magnet. I rest my cheek, my right hand, my shoulder against the deer’s body; I let my whole weight fall against it. And then I feel how the heat invades me, entering through the palm of my hand and travelling through my wrist, moving up my arm towards my shoulder, filling my lungs, my heart, my whole belly, and continuing to pulse into my legs, my ankles, right down into the soles of my feet. Suddenly all of me is strong, and I am shining – I can’t see it, but I’m sure I am because of the sensation – like a tiny sun.

Then, in a clear and melodic voice, as if singing it to me, the deer gives me the message: Put your eye into the crab and be like him. He adapts to the earth and the sea. He looks ahead and walks towards the shore. He sees everything one hundred times, and he is not bothered by any of it.

I keep listening but the deer doesn’t say anything else. Suddenly the strength leaves me, and it’s as if I am deaf. I blink in the midday sun. My deer has left. I didn’t even see him go.

The next time I speak to my brother, I don’t ask him about his experiences. I tell him about mine.

“I went to the park of the Temple of Dreams. To see the deer. And it was easy, one came to find me. He told me I have to be like the crab.”

“Ah, of course,” my brother replies, in a strange tone I now recognise as irony. “You have to follow his lead. Like Robin Hood.”

“Who is Robin Hood?”

“A Nobody. A character from long ago.”

“And who is the crab?”

“Who? No. What is it? It’s an amphibious crustacean.”

“I know that: it adapts to the earth and the sea. The deer told me. And why is that good?”

“Because, even if your environment changes, you survive. It’s like Confucius said: When things get bad, don’t act; hide.”

“Isn’t that what cowards do?”

“No. It isn’t.”

“Have you seen any?”

“Any what?”

“Crabs. Have you seen any?”

He hesitates before answering. After a while he says: “Yes, but they weren’t alive.”

“Where did you see them?”

“South of H——, in a barrel that was used to trap them, but it had been left on the beach for many days, weeks even, so they rotted in there.”

“What were you doing with a barrel like that?”

“No, I got inside it. I was in a barrel like that.”

“Why?”

“To get away from the war, to hide until peace came. Or to die, whichever came first.”

*

A little while later, he is sicker again. For several days they don’t let anyone visit him. The doctor comes and goes. In the evening I hear the voice of the priest who looks after our family. When I go to see my brother the nurse tells me to act as if everything is fine, because that will give him the strength to get better.

I ask him: “Are you the crab?”

“You tell me. The deer spoke to you. It didn’t tell me anything at all.”

Suddenly, I’m not sure why, I start whispering to him quickly, telling him what I’ve heard here in the house: “Everyone here – the doctor, the nurse, even papa, thinks you’re going to die, but not me. I know you are the crab and you’ll come walking out the other side.”

The next morning he wakes up feeling good. Strong, lucid. He gets out of bed. The first thing he does is go to the garden. Then he gets dressed and says: “I’m going out with my little sister. For a walk, then we’ll come right back.”

He shows me the indoor market. I see some enormous buckets with a sign that says CRABS, and I ask to look at them up close. The crabs have tiny spherical eyes, like black beans, sitting on top of these flexible sticks that point around all over the place.

“Look at their eyes!” I say to my brother, excited by the discovery. “Are they blind?”

“No, actually they can see very well.”

“That’s right, I remember: they see everything one hundred times. Why is that?”

“I’m not an expert on crabs, but I know their eyes are formed sort of like prisms, and they capture images from many different angles. I learnt that back in high school, before the war. You’ll learn it too, now that you’re going back to school. Make the most of it.”

“What else can crabs do?”

“That’s enough for now. Let’s go for a walk. You ask too many questions. It’s not good for you to be so stuck on one thing. It’s not worth the effort. Look around you” – and he points at the young women standing near us, carrying their babies on their backs and baskets of vegetables in their hands, or the old women balancing loads wrapped up in fabric on their shoulders, or the young girls less fortunate than me selling rags in the street, trying to earn some money or trade something for a bowl of rice. “You have to get those ideas out of your head, Little Sister. Don’t go back to see the deer. Go to school and pay close attention to everything they tell you. Don’t believe all of it, but listen, investigate it as deeply as you can.”

After that day, my brother has a terrible relapse; his cough turns violent, his fever won’t go down, and blood comes out of his nose and mouth. Our father calls the doctor. In a calm but serious voice, the doctor tells us my brother won’t live through the night. Later I hear my father talking to the doctor; he asks if it’s really worth buying his son a cemetery plot and engraving his name of a piece of marble, since in the end he was nothing but a failed soldier.

I spend the whole night waiting outside my brother’s room, listening to the fierce, awful sounds of sickness. Then I don’t hear anything. It descends in an instant, or at least that’s how it seems: a silence that freezes me to me bones. I try to stand up but I fall to my knees; as I open the bedroom door my hands are clumsy, like gloves filled with stones. The room is semi-dark. The silence echoes off the walls like an earthquake. A voice inside my head says: Prepare yourself. You are the first person to see him. Prepare yourself for that, and for what comes next. But when I get to the bed, I see it is empty. The first light of the morning is just appearing at the window, and I can see him standing there, looking out. He turns and smiles at me, but I am frightened, because he is shining; I know he is shining, even though at the same time I want to doubt it, to deny it. The light is fine and soft, like a sun shower or the reflection thrown by the moon. He comes towards me and crouches down to tell me something in a soft voice; he smells like soap and cotton, and cough medicine. He whispers: “I’m all right. Don’t tell anyone.” His voice is clear, and he smiles at me again.

Surprising, incredible, says the doctor when he sees my brother later that morning. I listen silently. My brother starts walking around the room as if trying out his body. I watch him, his hair falling over his forehead, nearly reaching his eyebrows, and I see him concentrating, biting his lip like mama used to do when she was sowing. I don’t want to leave him ever again. Everything he does gives me strength, too, or something like strength. Sometimes the feeling reminds me – though it is much less intense – of when the deer gave me his energy.

A few days pass. My brother still hasn’t left his room (the doctor won’t let him) but one morning I go to see him and all his things are packed up. Some things – most of them – are in boxes, ready to be thrown out, and the rest is in a small bag sitting inside the doorway. His hands are dirty; there is a black crescent moon beneath every fingernail, and his knuckles have traces of ink or oil on them. I bring the washbowl to him so I can wash his hands, but he does it himself so I just watch, taking in every detail: the shallow pool of water at the bottom of the bowl; the hard, off-white soap; the old scrubbing brush with its yellowed fibres; the discoloured but clean hand towel, which has been dried in the sun. I notice the way he does everything carefully, as if learning it for the first time. He scrubs his sudsy hands without splashing the water, he cleans each nail one by one, and presses his thumb into the palm of his hand as if feeling for the many tiny bones and tendons beneath the surface. Then everything is put away neatly: the soap and brush don’t drip any water or create any puddles, and he dries his hands with slow, precise movements. When he’s finished he says, not to me but to the room, to the air: “So pure, and so simple.” And in that moment I know that his good health will stay with him forever.

He leaves the house before his scheduled medical check-up. I go with him.

*

At first we earn a living helping with the fruit harvest. Whenever we can, we take the train into the capital to visit the central market. We go there to buy crabs, as many as we can carry, and we take them home alive; we don’t plan on eating them. The fishmonger doesn’t know that. He thinks they’re destined for the cooking pot. I smile at the fishmonger, especially if he says: “Enjoy!” It makes me happy. I love those crabs. Then smell good, like the sea, like the Inland Sea of my country (which, by the way, has no more armies – no army of its own, and no occupying armies). I love my brother. He knows how to live, and he’s teaching me, and that’s the most important thing.

‘De Hombres, Ciervos y Cangrejos’ (‘Of Men, Deer, and Crabs’)first appeared in ADN Cultura, Cultural, La Nacion, 26 January 2008, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Translated from the Spanish by Alice Whitmore.



ALICE WHITMORE is the Pushcart Prize and Mascara Avant-garde Award-nominated translator of Mariana Dimópulos’s All My Goodbyes and Guillermo Fadanelli’s See You at Breakfast?, as well as a number of poetry, short fiction and essay selections. She is the translations editor for Cordite Poetry Review and an assistant editor for The AALITRA Review. Her translation of Mariana Dimópulos’s Imminence is forthcoming in 2019 from Giramondo Publishing. 

 

Gabriella Munoz reviews The World Was Whole by Fiona Wright

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays.

The World Was Whole

By Fiona Wright

Giramondo

ISBN: 978-1-925336-97-9

Reviewed by GABRIELLA MUNOZ

 

With four published books, poet, essayist and critic Fiona Wright has become an important voice in the Australian literary scene. Born in 1983 in New South Wales, Wright published her first collection of poems, Knuckled, in 2011. In it, she explores issues such as belonging, identity and sense of place, three themes that constantly re-emerge in her writing. Knuckled was followed by the book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger (Giramondo, 2015), where she writes candidly about her anorexia. This condition, which developed as a consequence of a rare stomach problem, has marked her adult years by triggering questions of what it means to live in a changing and often foreign body. For this book she won the 2016 Nita B. Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for non-fiction. The book was followed by the collection of poems Domestic Interior (Giramondo, 2017), in which, as Magdalena Ball explained, Wright is skilful in conflating ‘the domestic or familiar with the moment of transformation’.

Her fourth book, the collection of essays The World Was Whole (Giramondo, 2018), is the follow-up to Small Acts of Disappearance and a powerful reflection about the frailty of our bodies and the journey to find and build a home. The 13 essays, some of which had been previously published and were edited for this collection, are a mix of sociological observation, generational manifesto and historical account of Sydney’s utopian suburbia and newly gentrified inner-city suburbs. The title is borrowed from Louise Gluck’s poem ‘Aubade’. Wright references this poem in the eighth essay of the collection ‘The World Was Whole, Always’, in which she chronicles her move to a new shared accommodation in one of Sydney’s inner west suburbs, where most of the essays in this collection take place.

The starting point, however, is suburbia and Wright’s initial bouts with illness. In ‘To Run Away From Home’, she revisits her childhood suburb, Menai, in the outskirts of Sydney to give the reader a picture of life in the suburbs. Wright is no stranger to writing about the suburbs. Her PhD dissertation, Staging The Suburb Imagination, Transformation and Suburbia in Australian Poetry, which gave way to the poem collection Domestic Interior, explores the Australian suburbs and how they have changed, and in ‘To Run Away From Home’ she gives us a panorama of suburbia from its invention at the turn of the 20th century to the present, introducing the reader to her experience and readings of the suburbs and how they have changed particularly over the past two decades, when as Wright notes, renovation became a trope of suburbia:


‘Renovation, in the last 20 years, has become as much a trope of suburbia as lawnmowers, Hills hoists and Sunday car-washing were for the generations that preceded mine: it’s no longer just about keeping house but remaking it, physically marking our dominion over our domain’ (11).

In her reflection about the suburbs the poet connects the house and the body and quotes from French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, to analyse her relation with the places she has lived in, particularly her first home, and her body. Bachelard argues that the places we inhabit become inscribed in our body and that our body shapes our home (we scratch walls, leave hair and skin cells on surfaces). That is to say, we carry our homes within our bodies. For Wright, however, this connection was fractured when she was diagnosed with anorexia. As she writes, ‘Illness is a state we do not think of as everyday, but it affects those of us it impresses itself upon every single day. Those baseline expectations I had to reset, and it’s hard, sometimes, not to long or grieve for my younger, healthy self, whose world was unruptured, who was still able to forget.’ (5)

Almost at the end of ‘To Run Away from Home’, Wright explains that what she likes about Bachelard’s notion of ‘the house we were born in physically inscribed in us all’ is that it gives hope because the idea of homeliness is always in us; a thought that seems particularly relevant for those whose bodies feel sometimes foreign, or those who are chronically ill, and for those who can’t afford to buy a house and can be evicted any time. Bachelard suggests that ‘a house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality.’ In this collection’s essays Wright seems to be doing this, re-imagining her reality to find a sense of place, of homeliness.

In ‘To Run Away From Home’, Wright also draws a parallel between her body and the social and cultural transformation of her hometown. It also gives way to the essay, ‘Back to Cronulla’, where the author talks about the Cronulla Riots, a series of racially-targeted violent acts which took place between 11th-13th December, 2005. These events marred the country and revealed longstanding, but often ignored, racial tensions that are alive and well today. The poet and critic delves into what existing  in such a place meant to her and her sense of self at the time:

My friends and I were outsiders in Cronulla — and would have been too, in the earlier Cronulla of Debbie and Sue — but we wore this proudly … The difference wasn’t only territorial, I suppose — my friends and I prided ourselves on dressing differently, with the coloured hair and mismatched clothes of the tail end of grunge. Maybe it was gendered, because we were all women; it may also have been racialised — my school drew students from the length and breadth of southern Sydney, so we were a diverse crew, and this became all the more obvious against the prevailing whiteness of the beach — although I don’t think I understood this at the time. (45)

When years later, Wright goes to an Italian restaurant in Cronulla to celebrate her parents’ 40th anniversary, she uses the experience as a pretext to talk about the way the suburb has changed and how Sydney’s inner west, where she lives now, is changing too. The connection brings up, again, questions of place and home and the way in which urban and suburban spaces are being modified: ‘But it also seems to me that this very urban space is suburbanising — more chain shops, more baby shops, more renovations — while at the same time Cronulla, and so many suburbs like it, has been urbanising. The inner-west is also the only area in Sydney that has grown less culturally diverse each time the Bureau of Statistic takes its measures.’ (53)

Wright’s attempts to find a home are not dissimilar from those of a generation who can’t save for a mortgage and don’t have traditional 9-to-5 jobs but are part of the gig economy. After receiving another eviction notice, Wright is forced to find new accommodation and this becomes the subject of ‘Perhaps This One Will Be My Last Share House’. In her journey, the author touches upon the housing crisis in Sydney and reflects (and makes the reader ponder) on what the concepts of family, friendship and home mean for people in Australia who need to rent and share accommodation. ‘And it’s only this that I want: shelter, and security, a stable base from which to build myself and life without constant inconsistency, without the everyday threat that it could all, that day, be once again taken away.’ (105) She also describes sharply the process that getting a new lease means — phone calls, open houses, applications, the news your applications came second, bad timing, the uncertainty of not knowing if you’ll have a place to move to when your lease expiries.

The essay ‘Relaxed, Even Resigned’ is perhaps the most moving of the collection. Here, the author delves into the concepts of body, home, food and ritual, four elements ever so present in this book and in some of her previous work. Here she narrates how after her condition worsens and her anxiety escalates she is admitted to a hospital as in-patient to receive treatment. Removed from her rituals and her home, Wright doesn’t spare in the descriptions of the hospital and her feelings. The conclusion, however, offers the reader hope and also finds the author in a place of self-acceptance:

I’d missed my home, the habits I have and are shaped by it, the small delights it gives me across the day. I felt collected, grounded. And I thought, I must remember this, in the coming months, as my habits and routines become once more invisible because of their ordinariness, their everyday repetition. I must remember how they help me, hold me. I walked along King Street, just to feel it on my skin. (86)

Key to this book is empathy. The author feels empathy, even guilt, towards those who are vulnerable, but also towards herself. The World Was Whole is not only a personal analysis of our convoluted times but also a glimpse into a journey of transformation and acceptance, and a search for beauty in the ordinary. These essays are a poetic approach to place and the importance of paying attention to the minutiae of daily life.    



Notes

Bachelard, Gaston. La Poétique de l’Espace  (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1958) translated by Maria Jolas The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964) p.4

Ball, Magdalena. ‘A review of Domestic Interior by Fiona Wright’ in The Compulsive Reader http://www.compulsivereader.com/2018/04/12/a-review-of-domestic-interior-by-fiona-wright/

GABRIELLA MUNOZ is a Melbourne-based writer and translator. Her non-fiction has been published in The Sydney Morning Herald, Eureka Street and The Victorian Writer, among others. Her fiction has been published in Mexico and Australia. She’s the inaugural digital writer in residence at Writers Victoria and is currently working on her first collection of short stories.

Hoa Pham reviews No Friend But The Mountains by Behrouz Boochani

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays.

No Friend But The Mountains

by  Behrouz Boochani

translated by Omid Tofighian

Picador

ISBN: 9781760555382

Reviewed by HOA PHAM

Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, playwright and activist whose book, No Friend But the Mountain was written by text message over a couple of years on Manus Prison. The resulting work is a powerful, readable memoir with poetry that is a searing indictment of the offshore detention regime. His other works of documentation include writing for The Guardian, a play ‘Manus‘, and a film ‘Chauka, please Tell us the Time‘.

Behrouz’s Boochani’s choice of words describing Manus Island as a prison is deliberate as is the positioning of his book by his translator, Omid Tofighan, as more than just refugee literature. Tofighan sees the work as part of a tradition of prison literature, which includes Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, a memoir from Auschwitz. As well, he considers it to be transnational literature in nature. 

Like Frankl, Behrouz has chosen to resist the oppressive system of the prison thus retaining his humanity in the face of inhumane acts. For instance he withdraws from the community of the prison and craves solitude. He chooses activism and to maintain an intellectual life with artistic pursuits regardless of his surroundings. He is a keen observer of what is around him and much of the book consists of his detailed descriptions of his fellow inmates.

Behrouz terms the socio-political order of Manus Prison the Kyriarchal System in which prisoners are set up to hate each other and the power of Australia’s industrial colonial complex which is made apparent through the hierarchy of the Australian guards, officials, and the local Papu (Papua New Guinean) guards.

Behrouz Boochani describes what happens to prisoners individually, a piece of meat with a mind, where daily routine is meaningless. Memories of childhood emerge and the mind turns in on itself, he reflects. This happens to Behrouz when he in a moment of respite, climbs onto the roof of the prison and remembers his war torn childhood. He does not know who he is anymore nor does he know what he will become.

The Kyriarchal system drives one to collapse and demise. Boochani  reveals the state of his mind and his suffering through poetry which punctuates the written text. The poetry brings a sense of immediacy to the work and intimacy with Behrouz’s experiences. However, one wonders what has been lost in translation especially after reading Tofighan the translator’s notes which refer to the Kurdish literary traditions Behrouz draws from, which are unfamiliar to most Australians.  His prose in English is simple and direct; the descriptions evoke details that horrify in a matter of fact way.

Creativity, Boochani feels, is one of the only ways to resist the Kyriarchal system. He chooses art and literature, feeling it is the best way to depict the horror of Manus Prison.

Behrouz Boochani tells a tale of two islands. One is Australia where the settlers are imprisoned. The other is Manus Prison where the incarcerated refugees’ minds are creative and free. Behrouz comments in the notes that all Manus prisoners have evolved into creative beings, a transformation that is remarkable. Boochani writes of one of the prisoners, Maysam the Whore, who sings and dances every night in the prison:

“Someone who is so brave and so creative; he flexes these attributes through his muscles, muscles he uses to challenge The Kyriarchal System of the prison. He employs a beautiful form of rebellion that has enormous appeal for the prisoners. A man with boyish features who uses them to peddle poetry and to satirise all the serious aspects of the forlorn prison. The spirit of Maysam The Whore contrasts with the desert of solitude and horror of the prison. This is like a reward for the prisoners; a gift in the form of a collective response, a collaborative effort among men who have been banished.” (Kindle Locations 2244-2248).

Tofighan describes the work as horrific surrealism with psychoanalytical tendencies. The characters described by Behrouz are amalgams of real refugees. They tap into archetypes such as Our Golshiftel (the Mother,) Maysam the Whore (trickster and entertainer,)  the Smiling Youth, and the Gentle Giant. Only the latter two are given names, at their times of death in the narrative, Hamid and Reza respectively.

The beauty of the prose and poetry of this work uplifts what is terrible subject material. Somehow it manages to impart the best of humanity through Behrouz’s eyes, and the communal ability to survive horrific circumstances. The acts of kindness and brotherhood exhibited by the prisoners to each other are preciously detailed. He says of a prisoner, Reza, who offers mangoes to others despite the Kyriarchal System:

“The Gentle Giant challenges this way of thinking with his childlike generosity. He confronts them with a different way of being, he offers them new horizons, access to a better reality.” (Kindle Locations 3628-3629).

Tofighan questions whether empathy can ever truly be achieved through literature. I believe that Behrouz’s words do create empathy and illustrates the truth of offshore detention.

In No Friend But the Mountain, Behrouz Boochani wishes to hold a mirror to the system, dismantle it and produce a historical record of it. Boochani has certainly depicted the inhumanity of Manus Prison. By documenting and publishing he has produced a historical record. The transfer of men for medical reasons from Manus by the Morrison government has been delayed till at least February so it is yet to become history; it is still very much part of the present suffering for the men left behind. This document pays testimony to their plight and experiences and one hopes it will become history sooner rather than later.

Citations

Boochani, Behrouz. ‘A Kyriarchal System: New Colonial Experiments / New Colonial Resistance‘

Boochani, Behrouz. No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, Pan Macmillan Australia, 2018. Kindle Edition.

 

HOA PHAM is an award-winning Vietnamese Australian author who lives in Melbourne. Her latest book is Our Lady of the Realm.

 

The Heart and the Choke by Michelle Hamadache

Written by mascara on . Posted in Fiction.

Michelle Hamadache has had publications in Australian and international publications such as Southerly, Island, Cordite, Parallax and Antipodes. She is a lecturer at Macquarie University and managing editor for Mascara Literary Review.

 

 

 

 

The Heart and the Choke

‘Les Kabyles, ils faisent les bombes.’

These were the words spoken by a small tourist from Avignon to my mother-in-law, Fatima, while she and I were standing in a queue for crepes at our local markets, one wet Sunday morning in August. Were it not for my hubris and my love of artichokes, Fatima and I would never have been at those damned markets in the first place.

I’m not really territorial, but when ymar suggested that I should do my shopping over in Greenacre, where my brother-in-law lives, I was offended. It’s true, Sydney’s northern beaches are expensive. What with the beaches and headlands, we like to call the peninsula God’s Country. There’s no doubt you pay more to live here. $3 dollars an artichoke in Woolworths. Sometimes more.

‘Wesh tercul, Michelle? Karnoun?’

Though it wasn’t quite seven in the morning, the decision about what to cook for dinner is made early when ymar is staying. Karnoun, cooked with grated onion and cinnamon, is one of my favourites dishes, but in what was either a dig at the prices in Dee Why or a genuine act of forgetting, ymar shook her head and said, but no. Not karnoun. Artichokes cost too much over here.  Bizef. You can get a bunch for $5 in Greenacre. Still too much, but what can you do? Hagdah.

‘We have Sunday markets. We do—let’s go. We’ll take the girls.’

Ξ

Les Kabyles, ils faisent les bombes. A foreign language can be off-putting.

Ξ

I was nineteen the first time I saw an artichoke. I was handed a list torn from the small black spiral notebook Signora Crivelli-Visconti carried with her for such occasions when she felt sure that I would be unequal to the task of committing to memory her shopping list, or when I was just so seriously ignorant of even the nature of the items requested, she despaired not just for my fate, but for the fate of Australians in general. Una razza incredibile, if I were anything to go by.

    1)  3 carciofi
    2) gli odori di brodo
    3) un’ etto di parmigiano grattugiato

Later that evening—after I had mutely handed over La Signora’s list to Clara at the fruttivendolo on the corner of Via Pinturicchio and Corso Garibaldi, and Clara had handed me back a plastic bag with three thorny looking things and a carrot, onion, a piece of celery and a sprig of parsley, and I had then walked to the alimentari, cleared my throat and asked for un etto di grana padana . . . grattugiato, per favore, then dawdled home, lighting a cigarette and stopping along the way for a café corretto alla sambucca—Signora Crivelli-Visconti disarmed me of my paring knife and set to work on the artichoke-things herself. You are no more useful than a drowned baby.

Ξ

‘Les Kabyles, ils faisent les bombes.’

I really can’t explain why, when my French is pretty good, and I’m married to a Kabyle Algerian, have three half-Kabyle-Algerian, half-Australian children, I couldn’t work out what the short tourist from Avignon, with his silver sideburns and tired-looking wife, was saying to Fatima. I understood when he asked Fatima where she was from when he overheard us speaking in French—the language, mixed with Algerian, that Fatima and I share. I understood when Fatima replied that she was Algerian. Even a dimwit would understand when Avignon queried if she were Kabyle, to which Fatima assented. So why I couldn’t understand Avignon when he stated that Les Kabyles, ils faisent les bombes, I can’t explain. Especially considering the fact he repeated the accusation three times.

I can’t imagine anyone, even someone who didn’t speak a word of French, not figuring out that ‘bombes’ = bombs.

‘Les Kabyles, ils faisent les bombes.’

‘Il y a des mauvaises partout,’ replied my mother-in-law.

Ξ

Kabyles

Now a family of eight needs approximately 120 kilos of wheat for just one month’s worth of bread. I was told that the indigents (italics mine) I saw had to make their 10 kilos last the entire month, supplementing their meagre grain supply with roots and the stems of thistle, which the Kabyles, with bitter irony, call the ‘artichoke of the ass.’

Albert Camus, Algerian Chronicles

Ξ

I really have a lot to thank Signora Crivelli-Visconti for:

1) Mastering the fine art of manifesting polite disinterest when hand-washing dirty undies under the supervision of the owner of said dirty undies

2) Not firing me when I broke an 18th Century family heirloom when dusting on my second day at the job

3) Gaining competency in the highly versatile and sought-after skill of artichoke preparation.

Ξ

 ‘Les Kabyles, ils faisent les bombes.’

‘Il y a des mauvaises partout,’ replied my mother-in-law. At the time that seemed like a strange, rather serious, observation to make in passing to a stranger, though, of course, it is true that there are bad people the whole world over. I nodded amicably, firstly to my mother-in-law, then to Avignon. Besides, ymar looked so regal, so wise and imperturbable, in the carmine marl of her headscarf that I would have agreed with her no matter what she said.

Ymar = mum ≠ mother-in-law.

I turned and smiled at Avignon, which oddly, I thought, made him repeat for the third time, Les Kabyles, ils faisent les bombes, with a rather lingering gaze at me.

I’m friendly by nature, disingenuous even, so I broadened my smile to include his tired-looking wife in our exchange. The inclusiveness of my smile was rewarded by the wife, who informed me—in a French I understood aucune problème— she was enjoying her holiday in Sydney, though she’d wished they’d been able to travel over Christmas, when they’d have missed out on a northern winter and would have had the opportunity to swim at Australian beaches. Winter in Sydney can be miserable, I commiserated. She was a high-school teacher, and the rather drab casual wear and the worn backpack that looked as though it travelled with her through the school term as well as over the seas gave the impression they were budget travellers. I’d gamble that this was the furthest they’d been, maybe even a trip of a lifetime, but they looked to me like they weren’t enjoying their holiday.

To be fair to them both, it was very cold too—in fact, I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say the rain had turned to sleet, and the markets, never good in the wet, had transformed into a slush pile.

You’d think the rain would put people off, but the need for soda bread, organic vegetables and cheeses fermented in someone’s garage was far more pressing than the opportunity to sleep in on a Sunday. Market-goers pressing in, irritated that you were blocking the thoroughfare, though all you were doing was standing in line for crepes.  In one way or the other, the markets that day were a strong contender for a modern day fourth, or maybe seventh, circle of hell and our own quest for artichokes took on diluvial dimensions.

Ξ

Kabyles

I am looking right now at the time cards of farmworkers on the Sabaté-Tracol estates in the region of Bordj-Menaïel.

On one card I see the figure 8 francs, on another 7, and on a third 6.

The official estimate of the value of a day’s labor service is 17 francs.

The sirens at Tracol Farms sound during the high season (which is now) at 4 A.M., 11., A.M., 12 noon, and 7 P.M. That adds up to 14 hours of work.

I want to mention that the unjustifiable length of the working day is aggravated by the fact that the typical Kabyle worker lives a long way from where he works. Some must travel more than 10 kilometers round trip. After returning home at 10 at night, they must set out again for work at 3 in the morning after only a few hours of heavy sleep. You may be wondering why they bother to go home at all. My answer is simply that they cling to the inconceivable ambition of spending a few quiet moments in a home that is their only joy in life as well as the object of all their concerns.

Albert Camus, ‘Wages’ The Algeria Chronicles

Ξ

Just one artichoke, but Signora Crivelli-Visconti’s kitchen table is such a mess of sharp little petals, some shorn off with the serrated knife La Signora left out, some torn away by anxious fingers afraid of getting in trouble for being too slow, for not having followed the very simple instructions La Signora meted out on her way out the door. Remember, I’ve shown you once already.

Anxious fingers. A hand that briefly held the artichoke aloft in the empty kitchen as though it were a sceptre, jousted with it once, before the owner of the hand felt so silly because after all she was nineteen, not nine, that she got to work, but not before the macabre thought crossed her mind that the owner of the hands was also something of a butcher.

There’s so little of the artichoke you can eat, but when you stare into the pale denuded heart of the thing, with its coronet tinged with violet, what you see is a tiny bowl. When you look even more closely, you see that the bowl is marked like skin, or like a geometric pattern repeating over and over again, until it feels as though you’re falling and you want to reach your finger into that tiny vaulted surface, as though your finger were the finger of god and the world were turned upside down, inverted, so the ceiling of heaven, of the Sofia mosque, was right there beneath your poised fingertip waiting for you to reach into it, but then you don’t because you are snapped to attention by the turn of a key in a twice-locked door and the flick of switch in a dusk-darkened room so that a cruel light explodes and all is lost.

Ξ

When Algeria was a colony of France, Algerians ended up with roughly a seventh of the 588 million acres that make up Algeria. There’s just no point putting the effort into empire unless the profit margins are good—but Algeria is tough going. 80% desert. A lot of really steep mountains that are like a great wall that run the breadth of the country. No major river systems. Just a few small tracts of fertile land that are as perfectly suited to viniculture as to the growing of wheat.

Ξ

I saw some Arabs lounging against the tobacconist’s window. They were staring at us silently, in the special way these people have—as if we were blocks of stone or trees (54).

Camus, Albert, The Outsider, Penguin Books: Great Britain (1966).

Ξ

GLOBE ARTICHOKES
3 for $10

Ξ

Without the three years working for Signora Crivelli-Visconti, I would never have gotten the job of aged-carer at Wesley Gardens: Italian Division. $11:45 an hour. A whole $1 more than my monolingual fellow carers because I could speak Italian and prepare both il brodo and artichokes: lessati and al forno.

Signora Falvo, from Giuzzeria, Calabria, wasn’t a ‘Signora’ with a ‘La’ and a capital ‘S’, though she was over ninety. Most days Signora Falvo worked in her garden, where she primarily grew tomatoes and beans.  Her son worked at the family fruit market and would bring home a clothes basket full of artichokes, mostly with drooping stems and sagging crowns because they’d sat so long on the shelves and were really ready for composting. I’d sit at the table with Signora Falvo, who’d lost her sight, but could still reduce an artichoke to its heart without drawing blood, and together we’d boil them up and bottle them.

Signora Falvo lived through famine. The famine in Southern Italy at the turn of the twentieth century that sent waves of Italian migrants rippling across the oceans. You don’t throw away anything when you’ve lived through famine. Not even a rotting thistle.

Ξ

Karnoun isn’t a favourite dish of the Hamadache family. It’s right down the list, beside la pate (pasta) and le riz (rice), and divides the family down the middle: those who’d prefer to eat karnoun than go hungry, and those who’d prefer to go hungry than eat artichoke. Either way it’s an economic dinner.  My husband learnt first to accept karnoun from his mother. Then he learnt to accept the dish served up by his wife.

Ξ

It’s just so excellent to have a territory that is both yours and not yours. Yours enough to set-off a bomb legitimately, but not yours enough for it to matter what happens after the bomb.

Gerboise Bleue: detonated 13th February 1960. Reggane, Algeria. 70 kilotons

Ξ

The Algerian summer of 2001 was the summer of war.  I was young enough to still feel that I needed to shuffle my mother-in-law down in the order of my husband’s heart, and every encounter between the two of us was either a triumph or a defeat. No married man should adore his mother the way Amine does. My mother had told me a son was a son until he found a wife. The real estate of my husband’s heart was mine. It’s a primal thing, and so it was a war of the artichokes, though only I was fighting. Fatima’s fingers are short, better suited to speed, but then I’d been a kitchen hand for years.

Fatima gave me the sink—she took the bench. In hindsight, I think she knew. We were back to back, Fatima and I. Each of us a catafalque of artichokes at our side. The kitchen was hot. 47° Celsius. August heat is infernal, and it completely makes sense to cook lunch at seven in the morning, but don’t you think a cold lunch—salad, a sandwich—would do? Do you know how many artichokes it takes to feed a family of 10?

Ξ

After the bomb. Après la bombe. Dopo la bomba. بعد القنبلة. I want to make a concrete poem with all the words for bomb in all the languages of the world shaped into a giant mushroom cloud.

Ξ

Artichokes are cheap in Algiers, which makes sense. Aren’t thistles more of a weed than a plant? Are they sown and then reaped, or reaped without sowing? Or is it that all plants are weeds? All weeds plants? Or are thistles a family all of their own? Does a plant need to be grown in a row, as part of a larger field, fenced in and belonging to someone in order to be civilised? How should I know? Let’s ask Avignon. Anyway. You’re looking at about 1 cent per choke, and at a pinch a meal of thistles will keep starvation for another day.

Ξ

The loneliest photo I’ve ever seen is in the Museum of the Martyrs, Algiers. On the small brass plaque of my memory the date below the photo is November 1, 1954. The photo is equal parts sky and ground and the only way you know the terrain is steep is because there is a single figure halfway between earth and sky positioned in a way that only happens when the rise is almost vertical. He is walking away from the photographer. There are no clouds, no trees. Just bitten-back grass, rocks and clods of dirt.

The figure in the photo is a peasant-man. Thin. His burnoose and headdress have the coarseness of textiles not produced by machine. Threads woven as fine as fingers can. The drift of continents beneath his feet, degraded soil, and the settling of his will and destiny in a camera lens and soft tissue of a photographer. I think of a man whose days are about to be done by what he carries on his back. I think of a man who came into this world a bloody newborn. All the days of his life that escaped this photo. I think of waking up in a world where I can’t lie down when I’m tired, can’t eat when I’m hungry. The small cruelties of words and looks.

Ξ

Abbreviated Chronology of the Events of the Algerian War for Independence from France (1954-62)

November 1, 1954: Toussaint Rouge. All the bloody saints. All the bloody bombs.

Ξ

Avignon didn’t order a chocolate crepe—he had one with smoked salmon and crème cheese that arrived before his wife’s crepe, or ours. I wondered at the way he ate: a livid sliver of salmon remaining on his lips a second too long, the spittle a thin white-coat until his tongue flicked it off. Not a ‘don’t mind me starting’ to his wife, not so much as a nod to us.  Later, as ymar, the girls and I were driving back home from the markets, I turned to ymar and asked what was that French man saying. Schmait. Il a dis que les Kabyles faisent les bombes, and of course because it was ymar, I understood immediately. The story Avignon shared with us was the story of himself. The one he held to, recited, brought with him across the seas, would return with, whispering in the ear of his wife when she was near enough to hear. The story he read in his morning paper, watched on the evening news while sipping the head from his evening beer. The story repeated, no doubt to anyone who would listen, including those, like me, who just couldn’t hear what he was saying. I can’t imagine a story like his, so I’ve held onto that story differently. Returned to it and pondered it like it were a strange beast guarding the gates of hell.

Ξ

KARNOUN
1000 DA

Ξ

A SMALL FRENCH MAN FROM AVIGNON WHILE HOLIDAYING IN SYDNEY SAYS TO A HEJAB-WEARING ALGERIAN THAT KABYLES MAKE BOMBS.

Although the older woman, who didn’t want her name released, replied that there are bad people everywhere, the tourist repeated the racially-motivated attack three times. Witnesses, who didn’t speak French and admitted to speaking only English, had no idea what had just occurred. More disappointing was that the woman’s daughter-in-law, who speaks both French and English and also asked to remain anonymous, didn’t do a thing, so that the Sunday Fresh Produce Markets, usually a mecca for shoppers looking for an alternative to leviathan conglomerates, was transformed into a site of racial vilification. The French man repeated his attack not once, not twice, but three times. Kabyles make bombs. Kabyles make bombs. Kabyles make bombs. As though only Kabyles make bombs. As though the bombs of the Kabyles made were somehow worse than the bombs made by good Christians. As though the bombs of the Kabyles were somehow more reprehensible than the mushroom clouds above and the tumorous debris below of the nuclear bombs dropped in Hiroshoma, the Sahara and the Pacific Atolls. Maralinga. The ally bombs that drop today, right now, this minute, in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan.

Ξ

Transcribed from an interview with Kateb Yacine, Algerian Kabyle writer.

Camus? Camus? You think about Faulkner. That man was racist. But you know what? At least Faulkner wrote African Americans characters. At least there are black characters in his books. Camus. He doesn’t even know us.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WBHq-m5WHQ

Ξ

After my third choke, despondency. I couldn’t see Fatima’s progress, but I could feel her little tomato knife sawing away at outer leaves, the twitch of tough petals tearing from their centriole with a sound like second-hands ticking. Fatima’s sure fingers holding the little goblet-hearts aloft briefly before sousing them in lemon. The satisfaction. The satisfaction.

The cut along my palm wasn’t big. More of a jab than a slice, which meant it wasn’t so impressive a wound once we’d washed it clean and stopped the bleeding, but it was deep, I assured her.

‘Mais, c’est profound,’ I repeated, knowing with that groping part of my mind that profonde was the word I was looking for.

Ξ

We left the markets with:

  1. 2 kg potatoes
  2. 1 kg onions
  3. 1 cabbage
  4. 1 Irish soda bread
  5. 12 artichokes

We also bought 2 litres of first-press extra-virgin olive oil; mulberry jam; organic juniper hand cream and a potted red geranium for the balcony.

Ξ

The choke is white. Fibrous in a way that makes you think it would turn your throat hot, swallowing the thistledown. Spokes, a thousand-thread of strokes, the heat of asphyxiation turning vessels tight, walls thinned, translucid before bursting. A kitchen after the slaughter, before the meal: carnage of dismembered limbs lying all around—all artichokes are monopedes, did you know? Occasionally you’ll find a two-headed choke, a little like a Janus-head. One more head and you’d have a Cerberus. And afterwards, always, everywhere, pyres of littered petals, the heart nowhere, already gone.

Ξ

I blame the architect for the bomb. I blame the wall for designing the projectile. I blame Avignon for not knowing that the first bomb in the Battle of Algiers was planted in the Kasbah by a French man. I blame the newspapers for dedicating a single column to the death of x sleeping Algerians in 1956. I blame the papers for dedicating page after page, week after week, year after year, decade after decade, all the time, all the right-now, to the bombs set by Kabyles. I think you’ll find it’s called implicit bias.

Ξ

Things I wished I’d said to Avignon:

    1) It is your fault/how dare you?
    2) It is your fault/how dare you?
    3) It is your fault/how dare you?

Ξ

Who ever thought an artichoke might be edible—there’s an individual with imagination. A very, very hungry human. What you have to do to get to the heart.

Ξ

That morning of hellish heat so many years ago, Fatima took my bleeding hand to her lips. I sank my cheek to her shoulder. She gave me back the knife, and I took up the last artichoke. Beneath her steady gaze, without haste, I cut through violet petals and whittled away the toughest layer of the stem. Without embarrassment, the ghost of Signora Crivelli-Visconti banished, as though I held the palm of a child in mine, knowing ymar watched, I drew circles with my finger in the hollow of my final choke. I understood. There is no order in my husband’s heart. There are no walls around the garden of his love.

 

 

 

 

Adventures in the Panoramic Delta: An Interview with Chris Andrews, Translator of Marcelo Cohen’s Melodrome  

Written by mascara on . Posted in Interviews.

Chris Andrews’ latest translation, Melodrome (2018), published here in Australia as part of Giramondo’s Southern Latitudes Series, is a novella by the Argentine science fiction writer, Marcelo Cohen (1951-). The author of 14 novels, 5 story collections, many essays and countless translations, Cohen is already well-known in the Spanish-speaking world. He lived in Spain from 1975 to 1996, during the dictatorship in Argentina, and has been publishing fiction since the early 1980s.

In Melodrome, as in several other fictions written since he returned home, Cohen focuses on an alternative universe, the Panoramic Delta. An archipelago of loosely associated city states, it might be a near-future Argentina or a world remade in the country’s image by neoliberal capitalism and rising sea levels. Rather than improve living standards, technological and social change – including cyborgs, fly cars and a kind of telepathy called pan-consciousness – have universalised Argentina’s early 21st century experience of austerity economics. Cohen’s novella, published in Spanish as Balada (2011), concerns the aftermath of a turbulent affair between a psychoanalyst, Suano Botilecue, and his beautiful, temperamental patient, Lerena Dost. The two rekindle their relationship during a road trip in search of a folk singer-turned cult leader, Dona Munava. It’s an intriguing introduction to an author whose rich oeuvre is still largely unknown in the Anglosphere – but won’t be for long. I corresponded with Chris Andrews by email to learn more.

 

James Halford (JH): This is the first of your translations of Latin American writers to have been published in Australia. How did it come about?

Chris Andrews (CA): Marcelo Cohen participated in a symposium on literary translation organized by the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University in 2010. I had read some of his fiction and essays before that. Ivor Indyk was one of the organizers of the symposium, so he met Marcelo there. When Balada was published in 2011, Marcelo sent me a copy. I read it and really liked it; I found it haunting. Some years later, in 2016, I think, Ivor was invited to visit Argentina, and met up with Marcelo again. When he came back, he asked me if I would translate Balada for Giramondo, and I said yes. So it came about in a circuitous and rather slow way.

JH: Would it be fair to say Cohen’s work hasn’t yet been widely translated? How did you first encounter his writing and what attracted you to bringing it into English?

CA: I think it’s fair to say that, perhaps because it’s quite tricky to translate, for reasons we’ll get to in a minute. I first encountered it in the book of stories La solución parcial (The Partial Solution), which is a kind of selected stories, published in Spain in 2003. Although the stories predate the construction of the Delta Panorámico, they are part of what Cohen calls a “fantastic sociology”: they’re set in a future world where social, political and technological conditions are at least initially unfamiliar to the reader. What attracted me was that within this speculative frame, Cohen was always interested in capturing and transmitting sensations, feelings and emotions.   

JH: Cohen has an extensive back catalogue. Why did you choose Melodrome as an introduction to his work?

CA: Well, as I said, I really liked it, and Ivor Indyk is particularly interested in short novels and novellas (he has a series entitled Shorts). That’s an aesthetic interest, but translation is an extra cost in publishing, a cost proportional to length, since translators are paid by the word (or the thousand words), so starting with a short book is financially prudent too.

JH: Cohen often coins neologisms for everyday objects in the Panoramic Delta – cronodión for clock which you translate as chronodeon; farphonito for mobile phone, which you translate as farfonette. What was your approach to finding English equivalents?

CA: Sometimes the objects named by the neologisms are everyday objects or relatives of things that we have and use, as in the examples you cite. And those two words were relatively straightforward to translate, because English has some cognate morphemes that I could use: chrono- for crono-, and -ette for -ito. Far in farphonito is a “translation” of the Greek-derived prefix tele- (“far off”), and I toyed with translating that component into Spanish: Lejofonette. But the result seemed too cumbersome and opaque, so I stuck with far. In other cases, it was more complex, either because the referent was not as easy to place, or because the word itself was not made up of recognizable morphemes, or for both reasons. To take just one example, at one point, Lerena thinks: “She could no doubt have found an even better position in some other company, but she couldn’t see how she would ever disguise her character well enough to stop [ningún binimucho] shrivelling up with fear.” Binimuchos must be fearful, spineless people. One thought I had was that perhaps the word referred to the opposite of a marimacho (butch woman), i.e., an effeminate man. But I wasn’t really convinced by that gendering. In the end, the “equivalent” that I came up with, more or less intuitively, was nambicle, from the adjective namby-pamby plus the diminutive suffix -icle, which we find in the names of various small body parts (testicle, cuticle, clavicle). In forging these new words, I let myself be influenced by the rhythmic context of the sentence and the paragraph, because that’s what Cohen seems to have done when writing.  

JH: The translated title doesn’t appear anywhere in the text. How did you arrive at the lovely and resonant: Melodrome?

CA: Credit where it’s due: that’s the invention of Nick Tapper at Giramondo. We were looking for an alternative to Ballad, and Nick came up with Melodrome. He put it out there half playfully, but I liked it straight away, because of how it sounds and because it’s so suggestive of the book’s content. You can analyse it as the combination of two Greek roots: melos, song, and dromos, course. Most appropriate for a road trip in search of a singer. And then the book is a kind of narrative palindrome, because the way there and the way back almost coincide.

JH: Cohen is a formidable and prolific literary translator in his own right, who has produced Spanish versions of writers like J.G. Ballard, Martin Amis, Clarice Lispector, William Burroughs and even Henry James. Did you have any contact with him while working on your English version? What was it like translating a translator?

CA: Marcelo sent me a glossary of deltingo, that is, words he has invented for the Delta Panorámico. Many of the invented words in Melodrome are not in the glossary, but it was a real help, and a fascinating document in itself. I also asked him questions when I was approaching the end, and he helped me to clear up some doubts. In one way it’s intimidating to translate such an eminent translator, but in another way it’s reassuring: I knew that he would understand the problems that I was facing.

JH: Roberto Bolaño once said that everything he had written was a love letter or a farewell letter to his own generation. That is, the generation of Latin American writers who were born in the 1950s and had the misfortune of being young during the military dictatorships of the 1970s. César Aira and Marcelo Cohen are also of that generation. What, if anything, do these very distinct writers share?

CA: Stylistically and thematically, they don’t share much at all: each is quite different from the other two. Bolaño and Cohen shared the experience of exile in Catalunya. Bolaño is the only one of the three to have thematized the dictatorships directly, but in that he is representative of his generation, while Cohen and Aira are exceptional. Your question has made me realize something, though: all three are novelists for whom poetry is important, who go to poetry as a space where literary language is reinvented. Bolaño began as a poet (and went on writing poetry up to the last months of his life). Cohen and Aira have both written wonderfully about poetry, Cohen in his book-length essay Un año sin primavera [A Year Without Spring] and Aira in his books on Alejandra Pizarnik and Edward Lear.

JH: Historically, there hasn’t been much direct literary exchange between the Anglophone and Hispanic Souths. Even for those with an interest in Latin American writing and some language competency, it isn’t always easy to keep up to date with the Spanish-language literary scene from Australia. How do you do it?

CA: The internet has made a big difference. I read reviews in a range of places. Otra parte semanal, edited by Marcelo Cohen and Graciela Speranza, is an excellent review site with new content each week: http://revistaotraparte.com/semanal/. Another good source of news, interviews, extracts etc. is the blog published by the bookshop and publishing house Eterna Cadencia: https://www.eternacadencia.com.ar/blog.html

JH: I also like podcasts. There’s a weekly books podcast on Radio Nacional de Argentina called Resaltadores: http://www.radionacional.com.ar/category/resaltadores/, and there’s one called Recital (it’s on the iTunes store), in which a writer chooses and reads a story by another writer: very simple, but the choices are interesting, not the same old names.

And, of course, I ask friends for recommendations.

JH: Your academic work has framed contemporary Latin American fiction as a literary laboratory – a place where experimental forms are tested. What could a deeper engagement with writing from the region offer Australian writing?

CA: I think that deeper engagement with the literary culture of any part of the non-English-speaking world is bound to enrich Australian writing, but in ways that are hard to predict because they will depend on singular encounters. Fans of Alejo Carpentier or José Donoso might hope to see Australian authors enlarging their sense of the plausible, but writers will work with what works for them, and they might be inspired instead by all the patient fieldwork and sharp listening that goes into Leila Guerriero’s narrative non-fiction. There’s no point being prescriptive in this area.

JH: Thanks very much, Chris.
 
 
Marcelo Cohen (Buenos Aires, 1951) is a widely respected and highly innovative Argentinian novelist, who has invented a distinctively South American kind of speculative fiction. In an ambitious series of novels and stories he has constructed a future world, the Panoramic Delta, in which he imagines in detail a range of changes beyond those wrought directly by technology: political, cultural and emotional. One of the most agile stylists writing in Spanish today, he is also an internationally renowned translator, critic and editor. An fundamental name in Argentinian literature of the last two decades.’— Fernando Bogado, Radar‘

 

CHRIS ANDREWS is a leading translator of contemporary Latin American fiction, the author of two poetry collections and a literary critic. He made his name internationally as the first English translator of the Chilean novelist, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003). His translations of By Night in Chile (2003), Distant Star (2004) and Last Evenings on Earth (2006) – published in the wake of the author’s untimely death from liver failure – helped establish Bolaño as the biggest name in Latin American writing since Gabriel García Márquez. Since then, the Australian has been a translator in demand. Over the last fifteen years, he has curated an impressive reading list of Latin American fiction for English-speaking readers, much of published in the USA through New Directions. In addition to ten of Bolaño’s books, most recently the posthumous collection of short stories & ephemera, The Secret of Evil (2014), Andrews has translated nine titles by the prolific and inventive Argentine, César Aira: The Linden Tree (2018), and one by the Guatemalan surrealist, Rodrigo Rey Rosa: Severina (2014).

JAMES HALFORD is a Brisbane writer whose creative work and criticism have been widely published in Australia and abroad. He holds a literature degree and a creative doctorate from the University of Queensland, where he now teaches, and he has studied Spanish in Argentina, Mexico, and Spain. The recipient of a 2016 Copyright Agency/Sydney Review of Books Emerging Critics Fellowship, his academic research focuses on contemporary Australian and Latin American literature in transnational reading frameworks. His first book, Requiem with Yellow Butterflies, a Latin American travel memoir, will be published in early 2019 by UWAP.