Monsoon Seems Promising This Year

By Rudra Pati

Tristoop

Translated from Bengali by Matralina Pati

Reviewed by NITHYA ELIZABETH SAM

Rudra Pati’s Monsoon Seems Promising This Year is a heartfelt journey through the life of marginalized farmers in the village of Manbhum. The drought-prone Purulia region of Manbhum lies to the extreme west of West Bengal, bordering Jharkhand. It is a hilly area with red laterite soil, which often makes the land rocky and infertile. The extreme climate and the water bodies that dry up in summers mark the tough fate of farming and tribal communities that reside there. Pati’s poetry collection acts as a window to rural life and practices while inviting the reader to empathize with the farmers. The seventy-one poems, originally written in Bengali and translated to English by Matralina Pati, successfully capture the essence of rural existence and cultural depth. The reader becomes a participant in the poems and by the end of the collection, we are no strangers to the scorching heat, the relief of rain, the weight of exhaustion and the inevitable grip of poverty, all of which are blended into their life in Manbhum.

Life and nature are deeply intertwined in Pati’s poetry, as he challenges conventional ideas through his portrayal of nature. In the opening poem, ‘Imprints’, the plight of the trees mirrors the farmers’ lives. Manbhum’s experience of deforestation under colonial rule, provides more meaning to the lines,

The injured tree, too,
Nurses her wounds in secrecy.
Her vengeful hungers thrive
In the obscure recesses
Of her strong deep roots.
(p 20)

The destruction caused for resource extraction and revenue generation had a long term impact on the tribal communities who were economically exploited and suppressed. Rains became a reason for celebration with the lingering sense of uncertainty. Visual and auditory imageries in the poem bring us a unique reading experience. ‘The Long Days of Wait’ echoes the sound of a farmer’s breaking heart as a call for monsoon and ‘Protests’ metaphorically presents the struggle of plants against rain. It mirrors the forbearance of people confronting their struggles. Pati impressively captures the monotonous yet arduous life of farmers through his portrayal of daily routines and unforgiving conditions in lines like,

Beside the plough, the day
Dies a slow death.
(p 21)

These lines highlight how their days begin and end in the fields, marked by hard work and dedication. Additionally, Pati uses words and colours to paint the farmers’ lives, emphasizing how harsh climates do not break them, but continues as a part of their existence. Poverty gnaws at their lives, but they continue to endure, finding solace in prayer and the little moments of joy nature sometimes offers.

Matralina Pati’s translation deserves praise for preserving the vividness and authenticity of her father’s words. Through her careful choice of language, readers are transported into a world where nature is both a giver and a taker. Ruthless storms and unforgiving summers are portrayed as part of their daily lives, even when the “savage fun” of nature takes a toll on the farmers. Despite technological advancements, relief remains distant in their vision. The farmers’ parched lips and throats reflect the persistent challenges they face in a consumerist world. The farmers continue to struggle as power hubs and technological interventions fail to free them from their hardships. The farmers’ contributions to the nation often go unnoticed and they continue to face challenges due to long-standing neglect.

The poems act as a testament to the important role undertaken by women of the village. The poems capture everyday practices and rituals, showing women as caretakers, workers and spiritual anchors. The poet says that they light lamps, anoint conch shells and pray collectively while being active in the field as well. Themes of marriage, death and continuity are woven into his portrayal of rural life, emphasizing the role of women in shaping their community. Additionally, Pati questions the societal norms that celebrate the birth of a female calf but not a female child. This further examines the societal norms grounded around gender. The poet challenges the readers to break their biases and ponder on their perceptions of value and worth.

One of the central themes in the collection is the relationship between farmers and nature. In the poem, ‘The Pariah’, Pati draws a contrast between the city and the rural landscapes, portraying the village as a pariah within the nation. Pati masterfully depicts how the city overlooks the struggles of the village that feeds it, highlighting the alienation of farmers within their own country. Another poem, ‘The Tale of Sickly Exchange Card’, reaches out to the farmer’s dreams and aspirations that were shunned, running behind this vicious cycle of life. Pati reflects on it through the lines,

Through the innocent hands of children
My sickly exchange card has reached the sky.
(p 38)

This captures the fleeting hope that remains even during adversity. It also resonates with the farmers’ hope that someday, their efforts will bear fruit. In ‘Poetry from the Farmer’, Pati emphasizes the crucial role of farmers in sustaining the nation. The unpredictability of monsoons directly impacts not just the farmers but the entire country, a reality that often goes unnoticed. Religion and devotion become a source of comfort for the farmers in these situations. Even when faced with challenges, their power to maintain a smile, holding onto hope for the next generation is very well portrayed through the poems.

Pati’s poetry is not mere storytelling, rather it can be seen as a critique against the disparities and a platform to indulge and empathise. The vivid imagery that the poet employs, brings the rural landscape alive. The simple language remains a major factor of the poetry collection and it preserves the authenticity of the rural experience. These untranslated, culturally rooted words bring originality to the poems. Colours hold symbolic significance throughout the collection, as seen in the lines:

In a dream, the blue village gleams
With green light.
(p 50)

The lines convey the farmers’ dreams of a better life, while painting the rural aesthetic through words. One particularly moving poem, ‘We Both Pen Letters’ explores the inherited cycle of poverty. It becomes evident how the farmers’ lives follow repetitive patterns, passed down from parents to children. In ‘Acid, Acid’, Pati addresses industrialization’s impact on rural communities, highlighting issues of caste and untouchability. Through ‘An Introduction’, Pati reveals the struggles he faced during his futile job search and his family’s economic hardships. His words capture the helplessness of being educated yet unemployed. Despite this bitterness, a ray of hope persists as Pati envisions a future, where education and awareness will transform rural life.

The last three poems of the collection are extremely powerful and foster a strong hope for the next generation. Through the poem, Monsoon Seems Promising This Year, the poet manages to condense all the themes of the collection in one place. It embodies the fear, joy, longing, agitation, helplessness and the desire to protest against all the injustices. The poet shares his dream of retiring from poetry, once the voices that were stifled all these while rise to create a change. The closing poem, ‘Poetry from a Farmer for You’, carries a message of hope and resistance. Pati looks forward to the day when the city acknowledges the value of the village and the contributions of farmers. He says that neglecting rural communities is like binding the hands that feed us.

Ultimately, Monsoon Seems Promising This Year serves as an enlightening collection of poetry with a vision. Pati’s insightful portrayal of the farmers’ lives acts as an inspiration to readers to open their eyes to the spirit of rural communities. Purulia’s tale of struggle and survival resonates through the lines that capture the arid climate, abrupt harsh rains and vagueness of life. Even though the collection is bound to the region of Manbhum, it crosses geographical boundaries and reminds us of the universal struggles of those who labour to sustain the world. Pati’s poetry rooted in realism and raw emotion leaves its mark on readers, urging them to view rural life with empathy and respect.

NITHYA ELIZABETH SAM is an aspiring writer from Kerala, currently pursuing Master’s in English literature. Her passion lies in poetry and storytelling; to capture life in its essence.

Heartsease

Kate Kruimink

Picador

ISBN  9781761561955

Reviewed by NINA CULLEY
Some novels announce their ghosts; others let them quietly inhabit the edges. In Heartsease, the second novel by award winner Alice Kruimink, ghosts live on: in muscle memory, in unfinished conversations, in the residue of grief.

Where Kruimink’s debut, A Treacherous Country, explored the weight of colonial history in Tasmania, Heartsease —winner of the 2025 Tasmanian Literary Awards Premier’s Prize for Fiction —is quieter and more fluid. The novel’s title borrows from Viola tricolor, a flower historically used to soothe heartache, famously referenced in a love potion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s also the flower that Ellen (Nelly) Llewellyn—one of the novel’s narrators—is unknowingly given by her mother. The naming becomes emblematic of Kruimink’s central preoccupation: the gaps in memory, and how misrecognition can shape, strain, and sometimes redeem our most intimate relationships.

Set in present-day Hobart, Heartsease opens with Nelly—thirty-two, adrift, partial to Fruity Lexia and assisting her friend Josh with his artistic visions — on her way to a silent retreat in rural Tasmania. The trip, long-postponed, has been arranged with her older sister Charlotte (Lot), an employment lawyer and mother who has spent much of her adult life quietly caring for Nelly following the early death of their mother, Nina.

The retreat itself is an intriguing opening: Nelly arrives first and surveys the other participants, internally mocking the garish velvet upholstery and plastic apples, and leaving notes for Lot – ‘1. smell after rain ask Lot’; ‘2. Geraniums ask Lot,’ (p11). But the silent retreat, for all its symbolic potential, is soon abandoned once Lot arrives and the pair escape to a nearby pub (Nelly isn’t great at staying sober). It’s a curious narrative decision: Kruimink gives us a vivid setting and a cast of side characters, only to leave them behind.

And yet, I think I understand it. I did a silent retreat in Thailand in 2024, and for weeks afterwards I wrestled with how to translate the experience into something narrative or meaningful. But in hindsight, it wasn’t a story; it was a kind of holding space for interiority – one that doesn’t move the narrative forward but deepens the emotional experience. In Heartsease this remote location becomes a crucial point of departure—not only for Nelly and Lot, but later for Lot and Josh, who take a fractured road trip home, first in separate cars and eventually together, leaving two cars behind. One of these cars is Nelly’s—and by the third chapter, we know why: she has died.

It takes a moment to realise it. The narrative shifts suddenly. One minute you are reading Nelly’s candid first-person voice, the next you are in Lot’s more restrained third-person perspective, assembling fragments. It’s a devastating blow in that you lose not just a character but also a narrator; it’s a special kind of bereavement for readers. And a risky structural move, one that recalls the narrative handover in Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (2014) or the tonal pivot in Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing With Feathers (2015). Like Porter, Kruimink seems less interested in conventional plot than in the messy mechanics of mourning, and the way memory–subjective, recursive, unreliable–becomes its own form of storytelling.

Kruimink observes: ‘We don’t live linearly. I think we live partly in the present and a whole lot in the past, with an undercurrent of future always there.’ (1) This idea echoes what philosopher Henri Bergson called ‘durée’, a continuous, qualitative experience of time that defies the segmented chronology of clocks. Bergson, the son of a composer, believed that listening to music is the perfect model of durée in that it best illuminates time: ‘Duration is the continuous progression of the past, gnawing into the future and swelling up as it advances.’(2) He wrote: ‘Our personality constantly sprouts, grows, and matures. Each of its moments is something new added onto what came before.’(3) Kruimink articulates this not just thematically but formally:

‘Time was beginning to congeal like hot sugar…And although the day had just been a day, full of its measure of twenty-four hours, now as we slid into night those hours had swollen like leeches at the vein and were dragging fatly by. Some forwards, some backwards.’ (p112).

Kruimink conveys the non-linear movement of memory through a layered narrative structure, allowing multiple timelines to emerge: one follows the sisters’ final trip together, another traces Lot’s reckoning in the days after Nelly’s death, and a third drifts between spectral presences—ghosts of the past (or glimpses of the future?) For instance, after leaving the retreat in search of a pub, Nelly has the uncanny sense that Josh has been in her room. Though confused by the feeling, she describes his presence as a ‘kind of new memory’ (p.154). Later, she reflects: The moment feels out of place—until later, after her death, when Josh returns to collect her belongings from her room, retroactively confirming her intuition.

As a teenager, Nelly attended what the novel calls a ‘special support school for troubled teens,’ where she jokes that the only thing she really learned was the Venn diagram. That image becomes a quiet, recurring symbol throughout the novel. The intersection—the slim overlap between two circles—represents the emotional space Nelly shares with those closest to her, particularly Lot, and occasionally Josh. It’s where their connection is strongest: over drinks, in humour, in memory. They often joke that they can read each other’s minds. But when they drift out of that shared centre—especially when their mother, Nina, comes up—the space between them grows. After disagreeing on the notion that nothing matters because ‘the sun’s going to explode in six billion years anyway…’ (p.164) the sisters stand in silence, staring at each other through the speckled mirror of a pub bathroom. Nelly thinks:

‘And the Venn diagram of us split apart again… How could I bridge the galaxies? I don’t know but I had to try,’ (p.164).

Like in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), where familial intimacy is peppered with silence, pain, and failed communication, Heartsease dwells in the ache of proximity—that we can be physically close to someone and still unable to reach them.

Hence the ghosts. From the novel’s first line – ‘I saw my mother for a long time after she died,’ (p1) – Kruimink signals the spectral. But Heartsease isn’t a ghost story in the way of misty graveyards or icy hallways. Its hauntings are ambiguous: are they memory, time loops, energy, or muscle memory? The novel shares tonal and structural DNA with Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House, in which a character also named Nell is haunted by visions of the ‘bent-neck lady,’ only to discover she is seeing herself from the future. Nina haunts Nelly, and later Nelly haunts Lot through anecdote, through the syntax of remembered conversations, through the rituals of her sister’s grief. In one of the most moving scenes, Nina’s ghost slides beneath Nelly’s electric blanket:

Ellen says, ‘…I never really felt like you liked me.’
Nina replies: ‘What a silly thing to say.’ And later: ‘Your eyes remember me… Your ears remember me. Your heart remembers me.’ (p. 92–93)

In this liminal space—between connection and estrangement—distance is most keenly felt. Connection is possible here, but fragile. And more often than not, it’s what remains unsaid that creates the fracture: Lot not telling Nelly she loves her in the bathroom; Josh never revealing to Nelly that he is asexual; Nina and her mother Anna’s fractured relationship.

A central theme of Heartsease is memory’s unreliability, particularly around childhood. Nelly, for instance, is preoccupied with the time she shot her friend, Lily McGrath, with an arrow. She recalls an image of Lily lying ‘plank-like’ in the backseat of a car. And yet, even as she narrates the scene, doubt creeps in:

‘This can’t be a true memory, of course. Surely they would have called an ambulance.’ (p.113).

This slippage between memory and reality is like Sigmund Freud’s concept of ‘screen memories,’ where emotionally charged or traumatic events are overwritten by more banal details, or remembered in displaced, symbolic form. Less threatening childhood memories – like falling leaves in a storm – veil painful ones. Similarly, in Heartsease, Kruimink allows the unreliability of Nelly’s recollection to do more than suggest faulty memory; it becomes a device through which grief, guilt, and trauma persist, unprocessed.

Kruimink also explores memory’s material trace. Nelly is an organ donor; her heart lives on. This literal transference becomes a metaphor for how the world remembers the dead. Later in the novel, Josh reads Lot a sci-fi story he’s created in which the captain of the ship, upon encountering death, sees the hugeness of the light in the spaces between the growing spots of darkness and knows it doesn’t matter at all:

‘The molecules of their bodies will just carry on.’ (p238).

Of course, molecules don’t just carry on, they change. As a reader, you hope the scientific fact offers Lot the same strange comfort it once gave Nelly, widening the small overlap of their Venn diagram. In this way, Heartsease is less concerned with what happened than with how we remember what happened—and how those memories, incomplete and refracted, move us forward.

Heartsease is not so much a novel about death as it is about the enduring complexity of love—between mothers and daughters, between sisters, between the living and the dead. And perhaps more elusively, between reader and character. Like all great novels, Kruimink achieves something wonderful: she keeps her characters—especially Nelly—alive not through molecules, but through voice, memory, and the intimacy of the page.

Citations

1. https://www.theaureview.com/books/author-interview-kate-kruimink-heartsease/
2. Bergson.Creative Evolution(Ch. 1, pgs. 4-6), New York, Camelot. (1911) https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26163/26163-h/26163-h.htm
2.https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/henri-bergson-biography/

NINA CULLEY is a Thai-Welsh writer and critic based in Naarm. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Aniko Press, Mascara Review, and more. As a theatre, arts, and literary critic, her work is regularly published in Time Out, Limelight, and ArtsHub. In 2024, she was named one of Mascara’s Emerging Critics, and she is a 2025 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow. Nina previously worked as Editorial Assistant at Kill Your Darlings.

If there is a Butterfly that Drinks Tears

by Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon

Gazebo

ISBN: 978-0-6456337-5-7

Reviewed by HEATHER TAYLOR-JOHNSON

In the opening poem of If there is a Butterfly that Drinks Tears, Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon writes,

I want to write
structure will work: a sonnet, a sestina,
a couplet—the baby
sh—
its

In these five lines the poet marries both the possibility and actuality of a mother’s daily
routine, more specifically, the creative mother’s daily routine. As the structure of the poem
proves, in mothering, best intentions fall apart. The lines are indicative of what to expect
from the collection in terms of form: sestina and couplets, yes, but also a villanelle, cento,
erasure, ghazal, prose poems, tiny poems, those poems that read as near-lists and those poems
that work with opening-line repetitions. As evidenced in the nine erasure poems that cradle
the nine months of pregnancy, taken from Markoff and Mazel’s What to Expect When You’re
Expecting, Damjanovich-Napoleon stresses playful craft and showcases her originality. The
first month opens with:

Welcome to your pregnancy!

Maybe it’s     tender

But
your

body is                      making to

be

In ‘Maybe it’s tender’ the poet begins with what might be considered a romanticisation of
pregnancy, but then the syntax gets jiggy and excites. Lines two through four don’t work,
then, as a countering device to the warmth of the opening lines, but rather a positive boost.
The following stages of pregnancy continue to be a rather jolly ride, and by the time
we get to the ninth month, the last lines read:

the longest month

the longest

measuring

life on the outside

umbilical

suckle

Here’s exciting news:

Again, in overturning grammar by ending with a colon, the previous lines seem to shine a
little brighter.

In some poetry collections, the inclusion of formed poetry, such as erasures, can feel
workshoppy, but similar to David Stavanger’s Case Notes – a collection of poems on mental
illness and the health systems in place – If there is a Butterfly embraces a plethora of styles as
a way to show the many facets of the core theme, which in this instance is motherhood. The
poet comes off as frisky and fun – even funny – because of her chosen structural diversions,
setting this collection apart from others exploring motherhood by seemingly saying It’s not
rocket science! No, in this collection it is struggle, tenderness, absurdity, disaster and the
overwhelming, all-important love. The messiness of motherhood in Damjanovich-Napoleon’s
hands thrives on and creates energy.

In the same way that the poems’ configurations inform the many layers of mothering
on an emotional level, so too do they apprise Damjanovich-Napoleon’s categorisations of the
mothering concept. Early on in the book is a poem about the morning-after pill, which
implies timing and circumstance are enough for a woman to make a choice, and that the
choice is indeed an important one. Following on that, there are poems about abortion,
miscarriage, phantom pregnancies, infertility and endometriosis, which sit beside those of
incubating, birthing and nurturing. Women who are not mothers know what mothering is
because, first of all, and for the most part, they were mothered, and secondly, and for the
most part, they have a body that is built for birthing and live in a society which expects
birthing, so whether they have children or not, motherhood is highly impressionistic. Aware
that motherhood is also a personal construct, If there is a Butterfly is Damjanovich-
Napoleon’s own.

Having lived in the United States for the decade that delivered the birth of her son and
encapsulated the early years of his life, American politics beyond motherhood comes into
play. There is mention of Obama, school shootings and Trump’s wall, and though the latter is
largely amusing – and scary – the former two stick to the brief, in which the subject is held by
instances of mothering. The following is from ‘We Will Not Speak His Name’:

[…]You wake up, but before you do, he tries to make butterfly kisses, pressing his
face and eye into your cheek. These are not butterfly kisses, but you don’t care. ‘More
more,’ he says. You wake up, but before you do it’s the questions, ‘Fire in sky?’ ‘Yes,
that’s the sun.’ ‘Burns?’ ‘Only if you get too close.’ You wake up, turn on the TV, 20
children and 6 adults have been killed in a mass shooting at a grade school in
Newtown, Connecticut… . You wake up. Toast burnt, scrape, Jam, peanut butter.
‘Triangles please, mama.’ You stare out the kitchen window at the rising sun – today
it is fogged over, distant, struggling to climb.

The world does not stop for tragedy, nor does mothering, which is a world unto itself, so
though this poem is about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, Damjanovich-
Napoleon does not waiver from the book’s premise, and the collection is stronger for it. In
fact the majority of the poems adhere so fully to the motherhood motif that when one does
not, it feels out place, a questionable anomaly.

Just as Damjanovich-Napoleon adopts forms that adhere to rules, she also works with
original, fresh and satisfyingly surprising structure, placing the poet in the realm of creator,
where mothers also exist, and this duality of creatorship feels entirely intentional. In the poem
‘The Punctuation Of Infertility’ (recalling that Damjanovich-Napoleon’s concept of
motherhood would and must include those who cannot bear children but long to), she enlists
a punctuation then gives it a title:

!          [the first year]
!?          [the second]

and so forth until we reach

/ /          [how I learned to live with it]

The poem’s singular structure is what makes it so personal, even beyond the line that reads

X           [one year after my father died]

It’s a pity that this type of innovation covering an entire poem doesn’t always transfer to
single words, though, as in the opening line of ‘Papercuts’:

Papercut on my tongue, the metallic taste of bro-

ken
words

In this case the shape of the word ‘broken’ predictably follows its meaning, and the pathos is
overstated. This is very different from the opening poem I cited above, when the baby
characteristically

sh—
its

In that instance, the reader is suitably asked to make meaning rather than have the meaning
handed to them.

Poets who write about their own children might find it difficult to balance the
gruelling tussle with the heartfelt delight and might lean toward either frantic frustration or an
over-ripeness of an unconditional love. In these cases the best we can hope for is lack of
cruelty and a minimalised sentimentality, respectively. If Damjanovich-Napoleon wobbles,
it’s toward that over-ripeness of an unconditional love, as in ‘On Dropping My Favourite Tea
Cup After Five Hours Broken Sleep’. The prose poem begins with ‘I feel as vulnerable as a
tea cup with a broken handle; as fresh milk left on the countertop in 40-degree heat;’ and
continues with a list of susceptible items or animals, then ends with ‘as a mother holding her
newborn for the first time.’ Most every collection has a few ‘filler poems’ – poems that are
nice, that are good, but aren’t challenging or exceptional – and maybe that’s where her more
maudlin ones lie. As a whole, though, as a body of work, If there is a Butterfly that Drinks
Tears accomplishes the desired balance so well that it deserves respect, and beyond that, it’s
a truly entertaining book.

HEATHER TAYLOR-JOHNSON is a recent South Australian Arts Fellow. She writes novels, autofiction, poetry and essays recognised in prizes such as the Readings Prize for New Fiction, ABR’s Calibre Prize and Island’s Nonfiction Prize. She lives and writes on Kaurna land.

The Pulling

by Adele Dumont

Scribe

ISBN 9781922585912

Reviewed by AZ COSGROVE

Ostensibly, Adele Dumont’s collection The Pulling (2024) is about the author’s experience of
trichotillomania, or compulsive hair pulling. Importantly, I myself have never experienced
trichotillomania, and I refuse to participate in the historical silencing that has too often been
directed towards those of diverse and marginalised embodiment—I know that chloroform ache
all too well. Instead, as Joan Didion writes in ‘On Keeping a Notebook’, I will write ‘How it
felt to me,’ (1) — I keep this sentence in a folder on my computer called ‘Good Words’, and I
open it when I need to remember that, like Dumont, I love words. With words, we can perform
magic. It allows us to articulate the inarticulable, to crack open the world. With words, we can
transform that serrated knife-flash that some of us see glinting in the eyes of our reflections into
something beautiful, iridescent. It’s miraculous, like water into wine. (Or, like the class at
Hogwarts I dreamt about as a kid before I grew up and JK became a massive TERF.) This
magic is what Dumont achieves in The Pulling, and it is the core function of Own Voices
literature, the category to which this collection emphatically belongs.

In parallel to her writing career, Dumont also works as an English teacher, and each
word of these essays feels deliberately chosen, the sentences like carefully placed
brushstrokes. In ‘Psychologists’ she writes how her father observes that she’s ‘always arranging
things into patterns’ (135). she describes how she carefully eats mandarins, ‘holding each
individual segment up to the light, like a jewel’ (136), dissecting the seeds with her teeth to
reveal their insides, ‘waxy smooth and immaculate’ (136).

In these essays, the patterns are made of words. They are arranged in golden spirals
that open up again and again. In the essay ‘Anatomy of Pulling’, for example, Dumont provides
scrupulous, almost encyclopedic, descriptions of individual hairs—‘some kinked like old wire;
some whisker-thin’ (38), their roots ‘pearl white and translucent, cleave[d] to the hair like muscle
to a bone, and the very tips as black as can be’ (42)—and the granularity of detail transports us
into a new world: one viewed through a magnifying glass, where hairs are as big as trees, and
the scalp is a vast ‘swathe of land’. In this world, even time is distorted, it’s usual linearity
replaced with an ‘eternal present’, as if told by a clock dripping from the wall. This is Dumont’s
own version of Wonderland. Worlds like this are created by damn good storytelling. Suzanne
Keen calls this “narrative empathy” (‘A Theory of Narrative Empathy’, 2006), and it is one of the
most sociologically potent functions of literature.

Occasionally, in just one or two graceful, tilt-shift sentences, Dumont renders vast shifts
in scale that hurtle us from a minute, Lilliputian world to one that is vast, geological:

‘If individual hairs are sufficiently resisted and survive this precarious phase,
and achieve some extra millimeters of length, then they become the most endangered-feeling of all,
like they’ve somehow outlived their prognosis, like storm clouds heavy with rain, like the
temptation of overripe berries to birds.’ (39)

This cinematic style reminds me of writing by Virginia Woolf—aeroplanes and snail shells, words
stretched, made thin, like streaks of cloud.

However, as a reader, I found myself unable to become fully immersed in this collection.
While the decadent style of writing was initially very effective in evoking the firsthand experience
of Dumont, I found that, after a while, it became a bit overwhelming, and I felt there was an
imbalance between the attention given to the microscopic and macroscopic. While we are
permitted brief glances of the world she inhabits—the vineyards where she spent much of her
childhood, the ‘slick’ (103) rooms of the hair clinic that she began visiting as an adult, where the
division between real and illusory is barely intact.

But for the most part, the story-worlds in these essays are largely bounded within Dumont’s fingertips,
or just beyond, in her brain. I was left wanting more: I wanted to know the heat of the sun, the smell
of ripe oranges. While Dumont gives us a thorough psychological description of her partner (mysteriously
referred to as ‘M’), we aren’t given any details about what he looks like. Likewise, we don’t get much
of a picture of the house they share. Is it brick or weatherboard? What is the colour of the carpet in
the living room,or are the kitchen bench tops? It would be harsh to call this writing ‘lacklustre’,
but it did lack a kind of three-dimensionality. It created a world without gravity—where a person can
begin to forget the weight of their body, their flesh—an ironic impression for a collection, in the
first place, about a bodily phenomenon.

The use of second person narration in these essays is notable. This style creates a
dynamic between the reader and narrator that is quite distinct from typical narrative structure,
and which must be carefully navigated, particularly in memoir. While I can appreciate how this
mode of narration can create a powerful sense of intimacy—take, for instance, Ursula K
Le Guin’s short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ (1973), the beautiful novella
Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang (1998), and contemporary works of memoir like Katia Ariel’s
The Swift Dark Tide (2023) and Akwaeke Emezi’s Dear Senthuran (2021) — I found that here it
often gave the essays an uncomfortably confessional tone, like the experiences of Dumont’s
‘second, secret life’ were sins whispered between the cubicles of a church confessional: ‘How
your face will pucker, your eyes narrow, like you’ve bitten into something unripe’ (37). However,
as someone who themselves has a body and experience that is unarguably other, I can
appreciate that this is an expression of the internalised shame (appropriately, a title of one of the
essays in this collection) that our rigidly normative society and culture inflicts on us.

After my brain injury, I remember swimming back towards consciousness and looking at
the pale, arachnoid thing that was my hand on the hospital bed beside me, thinking: how can
that possibly be my hand? I have learnt that this thing—that I know now to call “Otherness”—is
not singular, static: it’s highly individual, a thing curled differently in every life, like the coils of
acid inside each of our cells, in each strand of hair. These essays are stories of Otherness—and
these stories help us to better map the world, our culture, our minds.

‘I feel, I feel, I feel,’ (13, 51, 56, 167) writes Dumont, again and again, and the words
echo: ‘I am, I am, I am.’ (2)

Citations

1. Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1967: 134)
2. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, (1999:189)

AZ COSGROVE is a 27 year old trans wheelchair user and an emerging writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His work has appeared in such publications as Voiceworks, Archer, Overland. He is currently completing a Masters of Literature and also holds a Bachelor of Biomedical Science. In 2023, he was one of the ABC Regional Storyteller Scholars.

Vessel

by Dani Netherclift

Upswell Publishing

Reviewed by ADELE DUMONT

On its opening page, with very little in the way of preamble, Vessel establishes its central
incident:

1993. A Saturday. Thirty-eight degrees Celsius. I don’t know what time it is when I witness
my father and brother drown, minutes – perhaps only seconds – apart (11).

Vessel’s narrator writes that in these moments, time seems to have ‘turned outside itself’ (11).
The gushing water of the irrigation channel, which stems from Victoria’s Waranga Basin, is
‘turning in on itself’ (13). Structurally, Vessel likewise resists a linear, straightforward
progression. Described by author Dani Netherclift as an ‘elegiac lyric essay’, it moves in
spirals and loops, returning, always, to that key moment of witnessing.

Early on, Netherclift makes reference to various documents: coroners’ reports, police witness
statements, newspaper articles, and obituary columns. Vessel might be seen as an attempt to
write beyond the limits of this official record. This is more than a filling in of detail, or an
injection of feeling. Rather, the book’s lyric essay form is one that welcomes ambiguity and
fragmentation. It’s one with ample room for silences and white spaces, and therefore an
apposite form for writing about something as amorphous as grief.

Repeatedly, Vessel’s narrator revisits what she has already established. She questions, for
instance, how much she really ‘witnessed’ (23), given the impossibility of actually seeing her
father’s or brother’s underwater struggle. She also clarifies that at the time, she didn’t realise
what she was witnessing was a drowning per se: ‘It took a long time for that knowledge to
settle’ (20). The coroner’s report, she informs us, described her brother’s body as ‘wedged’
(21) against a pylon, but later on, she wonders whether actually the word used was ‘nestled’
(38). On page 83, she tells us that a Mickey Mouse doll was placed in her brother’s coffin,
but on page 158 reveals that she actually later found this same doll in among a bag of her
brother’s belongings. That Netherclift does not attempt to iron out these inconsistencies and
slippages is one of the book’s strengths. Vessel is not a constructed representation of
an event
already wrestled with: it charts the narrator’s ongoing wrestling, and is all the more alive for
it.

Vessel accretes by fragments, gathering meaning through associative logic. A reference to
research on the foetal cells of babies remaining in the mother’s body for decades transitions,
for example, into Netherclift wondering whether her brother’s cellular traces might also
remain in the body of water where he drowned. A vignette of the author’s mother kissing her
great grandmother’s lips a final goodbye is juxtaposed with imagery of roadkill, and of
drowned refugee bodies, in turn shifting to list the various offerings placed in her brother’s
and father’s caskets. In this way, Vessel moves beyond the level of personal bereavement,
and into a richer meditation on loss.

One of Netherclift’s preoccupations is time, its strange elasticity and malleability. The three
days it takes for her brother’s body to be recovered is an ‘in-between place’ (19); the six days
between the accident and funeral ‘suspended time’ (64). The accident has cleaved time in
two: the before, and the after. From one paragraph to the next, Netherclift skips deftly
through decades past, the accident casting various memories in a new light, and lending them
new significance. Netherclift’s personal experience of grief is given especial resonance by
being tied to wider phenomena. She writes, for example, of bodies which are never
recovered, and of the living who as a result are stranded in limbo-time. In that strange,
interim time when some of her family members are yet to learn of the drownings, she
recognises what Anne Carson calls the ‘impending approach of unknown absence’ (67).
Their lives are still ‘intact’ and ‘uninterrupted’ (66).

Netherclift honours the blank spaces in her story. There are, foremost, the stark spaces left
behind by her father and brother. But there’s also the incompleteness, and shakiness of her
memories of each: at times she hardly recognises others’ versions of them. Occasionally, she
leaves several centimetres of blank space on the page, for instance when turning to her loved
ones’ last, ‘unfathomable’ (16) moments. Netherclift never actually sees her father’s or
brother’s body (the funeral director refuses her) and, in accordance with the findings of the
studies she cites, she instead conjures ‘horrible outlines of an unknown shape’ (78).
Netherclift’s own unresolved loss is tied to a more overarching, societal discomfort (in
Western cultures) around dead bodies, and damaged ones especially. Vessel writes its way
into this uncomfortable space.

As well as the two drownings, Netherclift describes various deaths among her extended
family and her ancestors. She weaves in portraits of a US couple who devote their retirement
to searching for long-lost bodies; of free diver Natalia Molchanova, whose body was never
found; of Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself. There is also reference to morgues; to
memento mori; to bodies hit by trains; to Norse bog bodies; to lynchings; and to the
Holocaust. This is undeniably heavy material, and mostly this is leavened by the delicacy of
Netherclift’s language, and the fact she handles her research with a lightness of touch.

Nevertheless, some readers may wish for more moments of reprieve. There are scanned
colour images throughout Vessel (mostly envelopes from letters written by the author’s great-
grandfather to her great-grandmother, from the trenches of WWI) and these do provide small
pockets of readerly pause. But tonally, the prose is earnest and sober, and unrelentingly so.
It’s a tricky thing, when writing about something as unremitting as grief, to know just how
much the reader can sit with. Some may find the experience of reading Vessel occasionally
wearying, while others may find it a source of great solace.

In recent times, psychologists have recognised the therapeutic value of writing in helping
individuals process grief and trauma. Netherclift states that, through the writing of Vessel, she
was able to ‘transform the bodies of [her] father and brother into bodies of text and enact a
sense of closure’ (1 ). In interleaving her own family’s narrative with the writing of others, Vessel
transcends personal elegy, and becomes something more ambitious: writing as testament; as
reclamation; as communion.

Notes

1 Interview in Brightside Story Studio: Dani Netherclift on Writing to resolve grief.
https://brightsidestorystudio.com/2024/10/28/dani-netherclift-on-writing-to-resolve-grief/

ADELE DUMONT is a writer and critic. Her latest book is The Pulling (Scribe Australia & UK).

Empathy

By Hoa Pham

MIT Press

ISBN 9781913380618

Reviewed by JUDITHH HUANG

In Empathy, a speculative fiction novel that blends some of the most potent concerns in our post-pandemic world, Hoa Pham has created a dystopia in which unethical medical experiments involving human cloning and mass pharmaceutical control are not just practiced but accepted as a given. In this paranoia-soaked novel, we follow two young women, Vuong in Vietnam and My in Germany, in interlacing narratives centred around their experience of Empathy, the latest psychotropic drug permeating the party scene in the nightclubs of Berlin.

Vuong is one of five clones (termed “multiples” in the novel’s parlance) brought up by the shadowy Department in Vietnam. One of two multiples living in Vietnam, she is also employed by the Department as a psychology researcher. When we first meet her, she is meeting the other Vietnam-based multiple, Lien, who has been kept in far more deprived circumstances and who has just murdered her foster father for killing and eating pigs. With this bang of an opening we are plunged into a world of clandestine government operatives, Hui circles that may have ties to Cold War spy agencies, and international conspiracies involving mood-altering drugs.

Meanwhile, My meets Truong in Berlin, a bad boy complete with ponytail and dragon tattoo, and predictably falls for him when he gives her Empathy at a nightclub. These two narratives are intriguing enough to propel the reader through the book to uncover the conspiracy behind Empathy, the secret of its origins and the purpose for its distribution. To this reader, one of the most compelling themes of the book was the authenticity of emotion. Hoa Pham depicts the delicate line between real and synthetic emotion in her characters’ minds with a deft hand. This is especially resonant to me, as my experience with taking psychiatric drugs has meant a constant questioning of the authenticity of my emotions. In the book, emotional responses are affected by Empathy the drug as well as the “organic” Empathy that courses through the veins of the five multiples, leading to an ecstatic sense of connection as well as discomfort at the blurred lines of consent. The line between mental health and illness under the influence of Empathy, and the question of whether My’s paranoia is justified, is also a thread that runs through the book.

Closely related to this is the push and pull between individualism and group identity, perhaps best understood in the multiples. Separated at age five, Vuong and Lien in Vietnam, Geraldine in Australia and Khanh and Giang in Aotearoa/New Zealand have an insatiable longing for each other, a longing which eclipses their various romantic partnerships. Khanh and Giang were raised as a pair, and share an extraordinary bond. When the question becomes whether the distilled essence of this bond, the drug Empathy, can lead to world peace through the sublimation of individual identity, even the multiples, who have been raised their whole lives as laboratory experiment subjects, seem to favour the use of Empathy to control the population.

The multiples themselves present an interesting “quintuplet study” of what happens when identical clones are raised in laboratory conditions in Asia versus the West, with two of them brought up in Asia while the other three were brought up in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Geraldine, the Australian multiple, and Khanh and Giang, the “twins” brought up in Aotearoa, move with greater privilege and self-assurance than the Vietnamese multiples, being assured of the rights of their citizenships even though they are still clearly highly manipulated test subjects. The implications that unethical experiments are “outsourced” to poorer countries with fewer legal safeguards, and that democracies enshrine certain individual rights better, are clear.

But even Vuong notes that, when all five are linked through their natural Empathy, “the majority would get their way” (p 163) because of how overwhelming their influence is with the heightened connection – perhaps in itself a critique of majority rule in a democracy.

Where the novel succeeds most is in conveying the paranoia, control and surveillance that test subjects in a government program live under. Human clones raised as lab rats for life in a developing country where not too much scrutiny is paid seems eerily plausible in our world. Hoa Pham creates an atmosphere of oppressive control in details like Vuong being shocked at Lien’s statement, “We don’t talk about the past here. We talk about the future, what we’re going to become.” The Department mantra coming from Lien’s mouth without a hint of irony frightened me.

(p8)

This atmosphere is again present in the jokes that are more than jokes, which reveal anxieties about rumoured horrors: the “running joke that they did interrogations on the higher levels. At least, we thought it was a joke.” (p32) These small details of hearing government slogans parroted back even by the Department’s victims, and the gallows-humour jokes that are a coping mechanism in the face of unscrupulous authorities, are familiar to me as someone who grew up in another tightly-controlled Southeast Asian country, Singapore, and deeply relatable.

The double-edged sword of Empathy in the novel (and empathy in our world) is revealed in the fact that too much empathy leads to the murder of the foster father in the first chapter, as Lien thinks of the pigs raised in that household as “we” as well – i.e. she identifies with them as much as with her fellow multiples. “You can’t show the same empathy to animals as humans and survive. Not in Viet Nam, anyway.” (p11) Can too much empathy become a problem? Does it lead to weakness, or even violence? And if it can lead to world peace, is that at too great a cost to individual liberty and autonomy? These are the questions that Hoa Pham presents us with. But does she succeed in exploring them?

Empathy has a page-turning quality, but perhaps suffers from its fast pacing. Certain revelations can feel rushed, without enough development to make them feel real. In particular, My’s motivation is a little lacking and her decision to undertake certain drastic actions in aid of Truong’s drug ring was not believable, given that she is not pressed for money and doesn’t trust Truong.

A later plot twist that relies on My being an unreliable narrator is also both too telegraphed and unconvincing, and the final chapter, which brings Vuong’s entire narrative and the reality of more than half the cast into question, is also disappointing in relying on the trope of mental illness leading to delusions, and undermines the compelling themes that Hoa Pham built in the world of the book.

The Department, the main antagonist of the book, also seems ubiquitous without ever feeling like a real threat, as the main characters manage to undertake many actions without significant barriers. The Department’s omniscient and omnipresent nature is certainly unsettling, and feeds into the paranoid atmosphere, but it never actually rises to the level of an existential threat.

Hoa Pham’s prose is workmanlike, functioning like Orwell’s window-pane, but occasionally veers into the lyrical, especially when describing the experience of being inside a multiple’s head and thinking as “we”. However, sometimes when plot developments are introduced in the default matter-of-fact voice, the tone and abruptness blunts their impact. As a result, this is an action-packed novel, very rapidly paced and lacking in description or space to digest the implications of certain plot points.

The book also touches on the proliferation of conspiracy theories and vaccine paranoia in the wake of the pandemic, particularly when the multiples seek to go public with their existence only to have the only channels open to their story be conspiracy sites. However, while this is touched on, not much is made of the point. Thus Empathy is a post-pandemic novel that acknowledges the rifts in culture since the culture wars over conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers, and fake news without really endorsing any side.

Hoa Pham also centres the Vietnamese diaspora experience in the book, with parents’ Hui circles as networks, My dating a fellow Vietnamese-German Truong but being questioned by her mother if his family was from the North or the South, and a particularly poignant mother-daughter relationship where My wishes for Empathy-like closeness with a mother who barely communicates about her life and is hardly seen between her shifts at work. My’s bisexuality is also introduced in a matter-of-fact way, although her romances are, again, a bit rushed. This queer representation without any angst or fanfare is much appreciated.

Upon closing the book, this reader is left with a deep sense of unease. A lot of emotions are attributed to Empathy, whether in the veins of the multiples or induced through the heart-shaped drugs. But in empathizing with these characters, some of whom may or may not be entirely imaginary, what settles in is a sense of helplessness in the face of the shadowy powers that be. Perhaps that is the prevailing sentiment in the world after the ravages of the pandemic, with its lockdowns, near-mandatory vaccines and dystopian slogans. If so, then Empathy has distilled that sense of helplessness into a pill. Would you take it?

JUDITH HUANG is an Australian-based Singaporean author, poet, literary and science fiction translator, composer, musician, serial-arts-collective-founder, Web 1.0 entrepreneur and VR creator @ www.judithhuang.com. Her first novel, Sofia and the Utopia Machine, was shortlisted for the EBFP 2017 and Singapore Book Awards 2019. A three-time winner of the Foyle Young Poet of the Year Award, Judith graduated from Harvard University with an A.B. in English and American Literature and Language and taught creative and academic writing at the Harvard Writing Center and Yale-NUS College. She has published original work in Prairie Schooner, Asia Literary Review, Portside Review, Creatrix, The South China Morning Post, The Straits Times, Lianhe Zaobao, QLRS and Cha as well as being a founding member of the Spittoon Collective and magazine in China, which currently has branches in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Xi’an, Dali, Tucson (AZ, USA) and Gothenburg (Sweden).

The World With Its Mouth Open

Zahid Rafiq

Tin House

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

Ultimo Press

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

Stamatia X

by Effie Carr

ISBN: 9780648170716

Primer Fiction

Reviewed by ANGELA COSTI

Stamatia X is a novel fuelled by Greek philosophy, grammar, poetry and history to tell the riveting story of a Greek-Australian, migrant family’s return to their “homeland”. Nostalgia has no place to dwell in this book as the family of five return to civil unrest, violence and the absurd, rampant malpractice of a military dictatorship. The year of their return to Greece is 1973. This is the year of pent up, popular protest against the ruling colonels, when students occupied the Athens Polytechnic calling themselves the “Free Besieged”, demanding “Bread-Education-Liberty!”But then to be brutally bulldozed by a tank crashing the gates of the Polytechnic, leading to deaths, including 24 civilians. In the chapter titled, “17 November”, Effie Carr utilises the complexities of her main character, Stamatia, to reimagine this definitive historical event – the outcome is extraordinary.

Although Effie Carr’s Stamatia X was formally released in 2018, it wasn’t until 2019 at the Greek Writers’ Festival, based in Melbourne, that the book gained wider recognition among the literary community. It went on to be highly commended for the Book Prize 2019 by the Greek-Australian Cultural League. With its intricate weave of mythology, history and use of grammatical trope, it’s certainly deserving of a larger, international readership.

The third-person narration begins in 1970s Australia and is mostly told through Stamatia, a 13-and-a-half-year-old female, born in NSW of Greek migrants. Stamatia in Greek means “stop”. Stamatia is keenly aware of her father’s disappointment in her gender as he wanted his firstborn to be a son: “She thought her name was appropriate given that her father wanted to stop having any more female children” (9). Greek Orthodox patriarchal traditions are questioned through Stamatia’s intellect and distinct gift for learning. She has a photographic memory and significant synesthesia, enabling her to effortlessly recite the entire 158 stanzas of the ‘Hymn to Liberty’, a poem written by Dionysios Solomos, which is used as Greece’s national anthem. Her mother, Maria, despairs at Stamatia’s intellectual capacity:

Why did Stamatia have to be this way? She thought Stamatia had to learn to conform and become more selfless. Or else, be forced into it. No good could come of such an individualistic nature. There were more prospects in silent conformity. (36)

After Vasili’s alcoholic dejection at Stamatia’s birth, he grows to rely on his daughter’s resourcefulness and “studious disposition” (39). As the first born and the daughter, Stamatia is in the unenviable position of “parentifying” Vasili with his decision to return to Greece. In a surge of emotion, Vasili pushes the responsibility of making the decision to return to Greece onto Stamatia, and she unfortunately accepts:

She felt ashamed for him, that he was so confused and troubled. She was angry. She felt lost. She was floating in a vacuum… It was her decision, her journey now. She would have to make it her journey. By force if necessary. (39)

With resonances to Odysseus’s journey of return, Stamatia has quests and challenges to face before she disembarks in Greece. In particular, she is expected to know the Greek language as fluently as a well-educated, Athenian-born speaker. For the past four years she has been “in training”, “much like an Olympic athlete” (21). Vasili believes it’s imperative that his daughter “assimilate into the Greek high school system” (22) and so Stamatia is tutored rigorously for two hours, three times per week, by the perfectionist, Mr Lalas, a classics expert with one seeing eye “who had fled from Greece when the Junta had staged a military coup in 1967”(14).

The relationship between Mr Lalas and Stamatia is intriguing as it wavers between mutual respect (as if they’re philosophical peers) to one of mutual antipathy, as they labour over gruelling grammatical rules:

Stamatia loved studying the stories of the revered books, but found the endless conjugation of verbs and the outrageously huge tome of classical irregular verbs tedious and oppressive. (15)

As Stamatia conjugates verbs – delivering them from the past to the past continuous, and from the present to the present continuous – she realises her life seems stuck in the continuous present, the constant act of here and now without any sense of future.

In another reflective lesson with Mr Lalas, they explore the meaning of the word epistrophe. Although commonly known as a noun, its etymology is Greek and it means “to return”, “to turn upon” and further:

In music it meant a refrain, to return to an original melody. It was one word with so many possibilities. She loved that Greek had the capacity for expanded meaning. One small word could mean so much. (17)

This word, epistrophe, services the novel’s narrative arc splendidly. Its literal meaning in Greek is “turning about” which is what the final chapter conveys. As the story returns to the original migration from Greece to Australia. The journey embarked on by Vasili and Maria aboard the famous ship, the Patris, is told mainly through Maria, the young wife and mother-to-be. Maria is pregnant with her first born, Stamatia. As a developing foetus, Stamatia, expresses her dilemma from the womb:

How do I keep my head above water? I’m suspended yet connected to a giant placenta ball, which is connected to her. She feeds me. Breathes for me. Could I play with the placenta ball? Will this make me a boy? It could be good practice for when I’m in the park with my father. My mother is so worried. (238)

The refrain throughout the novel is how parental expectations of, and roles for, a Greek daughter are unequal and unfair in comparison to that of a Greek son. Stamatia’s two younger siblings are boys, and although they are not teenagers yet, their world of toys and games doesn’t seem to be compromised by responsibility or duty. Indeed, this story of inequality for Greek-Australian females within the Greek Orthodox social code is acknowledged through oral histories, news articles, the arts and literature. On a personal level, my own experience as the eldest daughter of a conservative Cypriot Greek household aligns with Stamatia’s discrimination and mistreatment.

Significantly, Effie Carr’s detailed rendering of Stamatia shows a multi-faceted character preventing shallow tendencies towards pitying women from culturally diverse backgrounds who experience oppression. Stamatia is both fascinating and feisty. Even as a six-year-old, she recognises the painful truth “that she had been supplanted, uprooted in her parents’ affection”(63) by the birth of her younger brother, Christos. But this little girl doesn’t hide from her anger and jealousy as she tries in desperate ways to regain her parents’ love and attention. There is her failed attempt to smother Christos with a pillow and then developing an eating disorder:

Stamatia realised that it was easy to stick her fingers down her throat and purge the

small quantities of food she was forced to eat. It was strangely satisfying to be able to do this. The reaction she got from her parents thrilled her. This was the final straw for Stamatia’s mother, who made an appointment with a child psychologist. (71)

From birth, Stamatia was destined to interrogate the status quo with her inquisitive mind and thirst for knowledge, therefore attempts to erase her identity and dignity are her epistrophe. The X after her name is apt. In Greece, when her father is ludicrously imprisoned by the corrupt regime, her status is elevated as her father’s saviour. She gives a most precious medallion, her only connection to her deceased Grandmother (Yiayia) Fotini, in exchange for her father’s release.

Still, on another level, we come to understand “the X factor” that drives Stamatia as human and signifies her as symbol. Her female body is acknowledged and activated in a sexual encounter in Greece with Philip, an 18-year-old. Although she is four years younger, she takes the lead, but panics when she hears her mother’s urgent voice, as she realises she’s no longer a virgin. She decides that her destiny differs from that of her mother’s: “She never wanted to marry a nice Greek man.” (128)

Stamatia’s story is also part of “the Greek continuous past” (112) as the novel is interspersed with vivid stories and memorable characters within the context of Greece during WWII, including its civil unrest and military dictatorship (during the early to mid-20^th century). There’s Yiayia Fotini with her colourful dresses and swimming regime, the poignant war story of Giovanni Modeno and Sophia, as told through young Vasili, and the explosive incident that caused a gifted and political Lalas to lose his eye.

Stamatia X is another creative documentation of Greece’s history. One that doesn’t shy from showing complete systemic failure for Greeks who stayed and those who returned. It places the Greek daughter squarely in the foreground as she navigates between duties to her family and their country and finally, to herself.

ANGELA COSTI is known as Αγγελικη Κωστη among the Cypriot diaspora, which is her heritage and ancestry. She is a poet, playwright, reviewer and essayist. Her latest poetry book is An Embroidery of Old Maps and New, Spinifex 2021. Her latest chapbook is Adversarial Practice, Cordite Poetry Review, May 2024.

A Brief History of Australian Terror

By Bobuq Sayed

ISBN

Common Room Editions

Reviewed by DAVID COADY

Bobuq Sayed, a non-binary member of the Afghan diaspora, has put together a brief chapbook of three essays on Islamophobia in Australia. This is a timely and insightful contribution to public debate. The subject, however, cries out for a full-length book, updated to address the surge of Islamophobia since the beginning of the Gaza genocide.

Sayed briefly mentions that Islamophobia in Australia can be traced back to the nineteenth century, but his focus is on recent history, especially the history of the so-called ‘War on Terror’, since the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001. Sayed writes about the subject from a highly personal perspective. This is appropriate because it touches his identity closely, especially his identity as a Muslim person of colour; it is also an identity which is glaringly under-represented in Australian public debate. I think it is appropriate that this review should be equally personal. Of course, there is no shortage of people such as myself (white, straight, cis males, brought up in a mostly Christian culture) being given platforms to opine about this, and every other conceivable, topic. Nonetheless, this is the only perspective from which I can write, and any attempt to adopt an objective stance toward a highly subjective book would miss the point of it.

Sayed writes that “a white Australian could have made the exact same criticisms” of Australian Islamophobia that he and other people of colour have made “with none of the accompanying backlash (p. 35)”. That seems to me to be a slight exaggeration. What is true is that white Australians face much less backlash than non-white Australians when they speak out against Islamophobia. After all, Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Antoinette Lattouf were sacked by the national broadcaster for hurting the feelings of Islamophobes and racists, while Laura Tingle was merely reprimanded and forced to undergo “counselling” for essentially the same thing. But less backlash is not no backlash, and many white Australians have been deterred from speaking out against Israel’s genocide, out of fear of negative social and professional consequences; and both the genocide itself and the repercussions for speaking out against it are, to a great extent, the product of Islamophobia. Yet, precisely because the backlash white people face for speaking out is less, our obligation to do so is all the greater, and the silence of many of us can only be understood as timidity and, in some cases, cowardice.

The backlash against people of colour who speak out is even greater when they have, like Sayed, been granted political asylum in Australia; in which case they are expected “to tow a respectful line” to the country that gave them sanctuary (p. 34). This expectation, of course, ignores Australia’s role in creating refugees in the first place. It is particularly outrageous to expect Afghan refugees, like Sayed, to refrain from criticising the Australian government, given that Australian troops have recently been found by the Brereton Report to have committed numerous atrocities against unarmed Afghans.

Sayed has the courage to talk about Australia as a perpetrator of terror and about Muslims as its victims. This is, of course, a reversal of conventional wisdom, according to which terrorism is, almost by definition, carried out by Muslim insurgents who “enact callous bloodshed against American and European powers for no reason other than their hatred of our freedom and our wealth” (p. 24). As Sayed says, the purveyors of this conventional wisdom are not only committed to a demonstrably false account of the actual motivations of those usually categorised as ‘terrorists’, they are also oblivious to the fact that the freedom and wealth which these ‘terrorists’ allegedly hate come to a great extent “at the expense of the rest of the world, whose resources, labour and land are expropriated” (p. 25).

Sayed is keenly aware of how dangerous this ignorance is. He points out that Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to the American People” is virtually unknown in America or elsewhere in the West. This letter makes it clear that 9/11 was, to a great extent, motivated by the occupation of Palestine. Sayed quotes bin Laden’s own words on the subject:

The blood pouring out of Palestine must be equally revenged. You must know that the Palestinians do not cry alone; their women are not widowed alone; their sons are not orphaned alone.
(p. 28)

Sayed is not an apologist for bin Laden. He objects to bin Laden’s frequent conflation of Zionism with Judaism, and suggests that it is due to such “legitimate shortcomings that the letter is largely discounted and that its intended audience, the American people, are mostly ignorant of the fact that it even exists” (pp. 28-29).

This seems unlikely. The conflation of Zionism with Judaism, so far from being peculiar to bin Laden and his followers, is absolutely pervasive in the West. This conflation has always been central to Zionist ideology, and it has been used for the last 76 years to promote Western hegemony in the Middle East, and to smear the Palestinian solidarity movement. Most people in the West are ignorant of the actual motives of bin Laden and other Muslim insurgents, not because those insurgents conflate Zionism with Judaism (most of them don’t), but because Western governments and media outlets conflate Zionism with Judaism (and anti-Zionism with anti-semitism). Hence, we are constantly told, and a depressing number of us actually seem to believe, that indigenous resistance to ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and now genocide, must be motivated by anti-semitism. The lie that anti-semitism is principally a Muslim, rather than a European, phenomenon is central to contemporary Western Islamophobia.

Sayed is adept at identifying ways in which imperialists “dominate accounts of language and temporality” (p. 26). The automatic labelling of resistance to occupation as ‘terrorism’ is a particularly clear example of the former. Sayed says that “whether terrorism as a term is salvageable is yet to be seen (p. 12).” Unfortunately, Sayed doesn’t tell us how it could be salvaged. My own view is that the term is unsalvageable. It does no good; there seems to be nothing we can say with it that we can’t say equally well or better without it. And it does considerable harm, by systematically discrediting resistance to imperial aggression.

Public discussion of Palestine is a clear example of imperialists dominating accounts of temporality. Israel’s attack on Gaza is presented as a response to the Hamas attack of October 7 2023, while any discussion of what preceded the Hamas attack is frowned upon. Similarly, Israel’s behaviour is routinely justified by reference to the Holocaust (even though that had nothing to do with Palestinians), while few people in the West have even heard of the Nakba. In short, we can go back to October 7th, but no further, and we can go back to the early 40s, but not to 1948. Finally, we can go back to the destruction of the 2nd Temple in Jerusalem, but not to subsequent millennia of largely Arab civilisation in Palestine.

Sayed is aware that not all victims of Islamophobia are Muslims. Anyone who can be racialized as Muslim is a potential target of Islamophobic hate. Sayed speaks of his family feeling compelled to try to pass as Italians, in order not to be identified as Muslims (p. 19). There is clearly a lot of overlap between Islamophobia and racism, but they are not the same thing.

It seems impossible to separate the racism from the Islamophobia in Australian attitudes to Palestinians. Islamophobia and racism work together to make Palestinians seem an undifferentiated mass, which makes it possible for us to ignore their slaughter.

Sayed has made an excellent contribution to an important topic. I’m looking forward to hearing more from this promising young writer.

DAVID COADY’s current work is on applied philosophy, especially applied epistemology. He has published on rumour, conspiracy theory, expertise, blogging, fake news, post-truth, extremism, and democratic theory. He has also published on the metaphysics of causation, the philosophy of law, climate change, cricket ethics, police ethics, fatphobia, the ethics of horror films, and ‘scientific’ whaling. He is the author of What to Believe Now: Applying Epistemology to Contemporary Issues, the co-author of The Climate Change Debate: an Epistemic and Ethical Enquiry, the editor of Conspiracy Theories: the Philosophical Debate, the co-editor of A Companion to Applied Philosophy and of The Routledge Handbook of Applied Epistemology.