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Hani Aden

Written by mascara on . Posted in Writers In Detention.


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Hani is a young Somali writer. She writes poetry and prose and previously wrote and published a small newspaper called CC Weekly. Her work is vibrant and her spirit strong. Hani writes from within Australian Immigration Detention where she has been held for 11 months – and where she remains detained. Hani is a lead member of Writing Through Fences and is working toward her goal of becoming a journalist. She is an honorary member of PEN International.

 

 

I will rise

You now lock me in detention
and damage my hopes
but it’s like dust
and one day I will rise.

You may avoid my sadness
and send me to Manus
but one day I will rise.

You may hide the reality
and break my heart
but one day I will rise.

You may send me somewhere else.
Why can’t you help me?
I may be a female of under age
who needs assistance from you.
You may send me to other countries
and shoot me with your words
but one day I will rise.

You may punish me
by saying lies
but one day I will rise.

You may kill me with your hateful action
but it’s like air
and one day I will rise.

You may never care about my awful past
and enjoy my tears
but one day I will rise.

I may have bad memories
rooted in pain
but one day I will rise.

I may have left a fearful life of horror
but one day I will rise.

Does my mind upset you
so full of thoughts?
I am an asylum seeker
who seeks for freedom and doesn’t
have anywhere else to go.

Does it come as a surprise to you
that whatever you have done to me
I will forgive you?

Wherever you send me
as long as I see the sun rise and the moon come up
I will rise…

 
 

I will live and Survive and Be Asked

How dangerous was it to leave my country alone?
How my family allowed me to leave?
How afraid I was for my self – that I would be raped or killed?
How I made the decision to travel alone?
How I survived without food some days?
How I walked bare feet – even as I got more injured?
How I allowed them to lock me inside a toilet?
How I stayed inside the toilet for hours?
How I jumped from far places and got damaged?
How I knew I had come to the right place?
I will live and survive and be asked:
How I felt to come by boat?
How I felt to risk my life?
Did I know I would stay in detention?
Did I know I had come ‘illegally’?
But I will smile –
and I will listen to them –
because when I survived the sea
I thought I was born again.
When they ask:
did you know the law was changed?

I will tell them:
I didn’t have a choice
When they say:
Doesn’t it hurt you to remember?
I will answer them:
it is past.
When they ask:
What are u planning now?
What do you want to be in the future?
I will answer them:
I am planning to live in Australia
and I want to be a journalist.
They will ask:
what about if they send you somewhere else?
And I will say: “As long as I breathe I will reach my goals”.

 
 

David Malouf

Written by mascara on . Posted in Featured Writer.

malouf-author-pic-hi-res-photographer-conrad-del-villarDavid Malouf was born in Brisbane in 1934. Since ‘Interiors’ in Four Poets 1962, he has published poetry, novels and short stories, essays, opera libretto and a play, and he is widely translated. His novels include Ransom, The Great World (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ prize and the Prix Femina Etranger), Remembering Babylon (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), An Imaginary Life, Conversations at Curlow Creek, Dream Stuff, Every Move You Make and his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street. His Collected Stories won the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award. His latest poetry collection is Earth Hour(UQP), while his compiled essays, A First Place are published by Knopf. He was awarded the Scottish Arts’ Council Muriel Spark International Fellowship and was the sixteenth Neustadt Laureate. He lives in Sydney.

 

 

     Photograph: Conrad del Villar

 


Aquarius

One of those sovereign days that might seem never
intended for the dark: the sea’s breath deepens
from oyster-shell to inky, blue upon blue,
heaped water, crowded sky. This is the day,
we tell ourselves, that will not end, and stroll
enchanted through its moods as if we shared
its gift and were immortal, till something in us
snaps, a spring, a nerve. There is more to darkness
than nightfall. Caught reversed in a mirror’s lens,
we’re struck by the prospect of a counterworld
to so much stir, such colour; loved animal
forms, shy otherlings our bodies turn to
when we turn towards sleep; like us the backward
children of a green original anti
-Eden from which we’ve never been expelled.

 

Toccata

Out of such and such and so much brick-a-brac.

Cut-glass atomises. An Evening in Paris
stain, circa ’53, on taffeta.
Four napkin-rings, initialled. Playing cards, one pack
with views of Venice, the other the Greek key pattern
that unlocked the attic door our house
in strict truth did not run to. A wrist
arched above early Chopin: bridge across water
to a lawn where finch and cricket take what’s given
as gospel, and even the domino I lost
in the long grass by the passion-vine
fits white-to-white, four voices in close canon.

Where in all this are the small, hot, free
-associating selves, a constellation
of shoes, sweat, teacups, charms, magnetic debris?

In the ghost of a fingerprint all
that touched us, all that we touched, still glowing actual.

 

Earth Hour

It is on our hands, it is in our mouths at every breath, how not
remember? Called back
to nights when we were wildlife, before kindling
or kine, we sit behind moonlit
glass in our McMansions, cool
millions at rehearsal
here for our rendezvous each with his own
earth hour.
            We are feral
at heart, unhouseled creatures. Mind
is the maker, mad for light, for enlightenment, this late admission
of darkness the cost, and the silence
on our tongue as we count the hour down – the coin we bring,
long hoarded just for this – the extended cry of our first coming
to this ambulant, airy
Schatzkammer and midden, our green accommodating tomb.

 

Shy Gifts

Shy gifts that come to us from a world that may not
even know we’re here. Windfalls, scantlings.

Breaking a bough like breathy flute-notes, a row
of puffed white almond-blossom, the word in hiding

among newsprint that has other news to tell.
In a packed aisle at the supermarket, I catch

the eye of a wordless one-year-old, whale-blue,
unblinking. It looks right through me, recognising

what? Wisely mistrustful but unwisely
impulsive as we are, we take these givings

as ours and meant for us – why else so leap
to receive them? – and go home lighter

of step to the table set, the bed turned down, the book
laid open under the desk-lamp, pages astream

with light like angels’ wings, arched for take-off.

 

These poems appear in Earth Hour, first published in 2014 by University of Queensland Press, and reprinted here with permission.

******

 

The Making of Australian Consciousness

1

The Island

Looking down the long line of coast this morning, I see the first rays of the sun strike Mount Warning and am aware, as the light floods west, what a distance it is to the far side of our country­ ─ two time zones and more than 3000 kilometres away, yet how easily the whole landmass sits in my head. As an island or, as I sometimes think of it, a raft we have all scrambled aboard, a new float of lives in busy interaction: of assembly lines and highways, of ideals given body as executives and courts, of routine housekeeping arrangements and objects in passage from hand to hand. To comprehend the thing in all its action and variety and contradiction is a task for the imagination, yet this morning, as always, it is simply there, substantial and ordinary.

When Europeans first came to these shores one of the things they brought with them, as a kind of gift to the land itself, was something that could never previously have existed: a vision of the continent in its true form as an island, which was not just a way of seeing it, and seeing it whole, but of seeing how it fitted into the world, and this seems to have happened even before circumnavigation established that it actually was an island. No group of Aboriginal Australians, however ancient and deep their understanding of the land, can ever have seen the place in just this way.

It has made a difference. If Aborigines are a land-dreaming people, what we latecomers share is a sea-dreaming, to which the image of Australia as an island has from the beginning been central.

This is hardly surprising. Sydney, in its early days was first and foremost a seaport; all its dealings were with the sea. Our earliest productive industries were not wheat-growing or sheep-raising but whaling and sealing. It took us nearly thirty years to cross the first land barrier. Right up to the end of the nineteenth century our settlements were linked by coastal steamer, not by road or rail. In his sonnet ‘Australia’, Bernard O’Dowd speaks of Australia’s ‘virgin helpmate, Ocean’, as if the island continent were mystically married to its surrounding ocean as Venice was to the Adriatic.

As the off-shoot of a great naval power we felt at home with the sea. It was an element over which we had control; more, certainly, than we had at the beginning over the land. It was what we looked to for all our comings and goings, for all that was new ─ for news. And this sense of being at home with the sea made distances that might otherwise have been unimaginable seem shorter. It brought Britain and Europe closer than 10,000 miles on the globe might have suggested, and kept us tethered, for longer than we might otherwise have been, by sea-routes whose ports of call, in the days before air travel, constituted a litany of connection that every child of my generation knew by heart. Distance is not always a matter of miles. Measured in feelings it can redefine itself as closeness.

And this notion of an island continent, contained and containable, had other consequences.

Most nations establish themselves through a long series of border conflicts with neighbours. This is often the major thrust of their history. Think of the various wars between Germany and France, or Russia and Poland, or of British history before the Union of the Crowns.

Australia’s borders were a gift of nature. We did not have to fight for them. In our case, history and geography coincided, and we soon hit upon the idea that the single continent must one day be a single nation. What this means is that all our wars of conquest, all our sources of conflict, have been internal.

Conquest of space to begin with, in a series of daring explorations of the land, which were also acts of possession different from the one that made it ours merely in law. This was possession in the form of knowledge; by naming and mapping, by taking its spaces into our heads, and at last into our imagination and consciousness.

Conquest of every form of internal division and difference: conquest of the original possessors, for example, in a war more extensive than we have wanted to recognise. Later, there was the attempted resolution, through an act of Federation, of the fraternal division between the states; and, longer lasting and less amenable of solution, of the conflict, once Federation had been achieved, between the states and the Federal Government. Also, more darkly, suppression, in acts of law-making and social pressure and through subtle forms of exclusion, of all those whom we have, at one time or another, declared to be outsiders among us, and in their various ways alien, even when they were Australians like the rest.

That early vision of wholeness produced a corresponding anxiety, the fear of fragmentation, and for too long the only answer we had to it was the imposition of a deadening conformity.

In time, the vision of the continent as a whole and unique in its separation from the rest of the world produced the idea that it should be kept separate, that only in isolation could its uniqueness ─and ours─ be preserved.

Many of the ideas that have shaped our life here, and many of the themes on which our history has been argued, settle around these notions of isolation and containment, of wholeness and the fear of fragmentation. But isolation can lead to stagnation as well as concentrated richness, and wholeness does not necessarily mean uniformity, though that is how we have generally taken it. Nor does diversity always lead to fragmentation.

As for the gift of those natural, indisputable borders, that too had a cost. It burdened us with the duty of defending them, and the fear, almost from the beginning, that they may not, in fact, be defendable.

Our first settlements outside Sydney, at Hobart in 1804 and Perth in the 1820’s, were made to forestall the possibility of French occupation (and it seems Napoleon did plan a diversionary invasion for 1804). Then, at the time of the Crimean War, it was the Russians we had to keep an eye on. The Russian fleet was just seven days sailing away at Vladivostok. And then, from the beginning of this century, the Japanese.

This fear of actual invaders, of being unable to defend our borders, led to a fear of other and less tangible forms of invasion. By people, ‘lesser breeds without the Law’, who might sully the purity of our stock. By alien forms of culture that might prejudice our attempt to be uniquely ourselves. By ideas, and all those other forms of influence, out there in the world beyond our coast, that might undermine our morals or in various other ways divide and unsettle us. All this has made little-islanders of us; has made us decide, from time to time, to close ourselves off from influence and change, and by settling in behind our ocean wall, freeze and stop what has been from the beginning, and continues to be, a unique and exciting experiment.

From The Boyer Lectures, 1998, first broadcast on ABC Radio, later published in A Spirit of Play, ABC Books, 1998 Published in A First Place, by Knopf, Random House, 2014

This extract is published in the chapter, titled, ‘A Spirit of Play’  page 124-129 from the collection of essays,  A First Place, by Knopf, Random House, 2014

******

 

Lucy Van reviews Earth Hour by David Malouf

Written by mascara on . Posted in Featured Writer.

0003242_300Earth Hour

By David Malouf

University of Queensland Press

ISBN

Reviewed by LUCY VAN

 

David Malouf lives in Sydney. This banal-sounding fact actually tropes a major concern across Malouf’s works. What does it mean to live in a place? How do spaces inform the duration of a life, and how does time fill the houses, suburbs and stretches of bays that our bodies occupy; that, having lived in those spaces, our memories occupy? A virtuoso of memory, Malouf creates cosmologies around what we normally take to be ordinary spaces, most famously suburban Brisbane in works such as Johnno and 12 Edmondstone Street. One does not simply live in Sydney or Brisbane, or for that matter London or Rome. Translocal, cosmopolitan subjects live in the interstitial zones imagined by global topographies. And through memory one simultaneously occupies the places in which we have lived before, and to which we have travelled and passed through in other times. A certain simultaneity of space and time is prefigured by the title of Malouf’s tenth poetry publication. Perhaps borrowing from contemporary ecological idiom, the title Earth Hour suggests a kind of suturing of global space to global era, and the collection of poetry continues Malouf’s career-long exploration of the flesh of experience that weds space to time.


Spatial Memory

In her analysis of Malouf’s ‘Bay poems’[1] the novelist and literary critic Emily Bitto writes of Malouf’s poetic process as ‘a vital act of imaginative creation’ (92). Alluding to the parallels Malouf has drawn between the places referenced in his works and other fully-imagined places such as Dickens’ London and Dostoevsky’s Petersberg, Bitto considers Malouf’s ‘invention’ of the Bay through her notion of ‘spatial memory.’ More than simply recalling the spaces and places significant to the author, spatial memory implies a re-visioning where spaces are ‘repeatedly re-inscribed with new meaning and value until they become mythologised spaces’ (92). For Malouf places become real as sites of imagining and invention, not as ‘embodiments of fact’ (‘A Writing Life,’ 702). Through the spatial memory process a place is doubled. If created with sufficient imminence the imaginary place will replace the original site. For Bitto, Malouf’s Bay poems document the very process of spatial memory. Over the course of Malouf’s career as a poet, the bay transforms beyond ‘simply a “space-time” of the past which the poet can revisit from time to time, [to] a mythical space-time in which some part of the poet always resides’ (101, emphasis added).

Earth Hour opens with ‘Aquarius,’ a work rich with temporal and geographical signifiers that recall Malouf’s previous Bay poems. Breath, light, enigmatic night, expansive time and gilded space converge at a point where excess transmutes into enchantment:

One of those sovereign days that might seem never
intended for the dark: the sea’s breath deepens
from oyster-shell to inky, blue upon blue,
heaped water, crowded sky. This is the day,
we tell ourselves, that will not end, and stroll
enchanted through its moods as if we shared
its gift and were immortal, till something in us
snaps, a spring, a nerve. There is more to darkness
than nightfall.    (1)

Bitto’s argument for spatial memory as a process  the oeuvre of the Bay poems themselves document finds support in this most recent work. ‘Aquarius’ depicts the speaker dwelling in an ‘enchanted’ temporal zone, a colour-saturated day the inhabitants of the poem tell themselves ‘will not end.’ The speaker’s relation to space as an (anti-) Edenic realm ‘from which we’ve never been expelled’ suggests that this charged memory-space is not one to which the speaker simply returns from time-to-time, as Bitto suggests of Malouf’s earlier Bay poems (97-98), but rather one that functions in a radically continuous sense of mythological, non-linear time. Part of the speaker does not leave this imagined site. This, at the very least, is the fantasy proposed by Malouf’s vital ‘counterworld.’

The mythological resonances – in the title connoting both astrological discourse and ancient Babylonian/Greek knowledge systems, and in the allusion to the Old Testament expulsion from Eden – mark the notion that time once began and from thence could be measured as history. Yet their intertwining, by way of transition from title to final line, suggests also that languages of the past are multiple, hybrid and synchronous in the space of the present. The title rejects specificity of location in favour of an impression of what the act of remembering a sea-space engenders. Aquarius as a ‘water bearer’ hints that the poem itself bears an imaginary site of dreamy potentiality, in which present, past and future mingle in suspended langour. This opening poem successfully establishes Malouf’s sense of time throughout Earth Hour. Time is a play of expansion and contraction: the hour of dusk is opened-out, ‘embellished with all its needs,’ (‘An Aside on the Sublime,’ 22); and conversely, epochs pass unremarkably: ‘waiting is no sweat. Centuries pass/unnoticed here’ (‘At Laterina,’ 48).

In other poems Malouf suggests a specific sense of time and place by deploying titles such as ‘Writer’s Retreat: Maclaren Vale, 2010,’ ‘A Recollection of Starlings: Rome ’84,’ and ‘Australia Day at Pennyroyal.’ Against the collection’s more abstract titles, including ‘Radiance,’ ‘Entreaty,’ and yes, ‘Abstract,’ the significance of this specificity is emphasised, but one might venture that rather than contrast, an unexpected consistency emerges. Across the collection’s poetic imaginings, particular times and places become, if not quite abstractions, then somewhat abstracted, mythologised memory places. In ‘A Recollection of Starlings: Rome ’84,’ one single dusk, cast off from a day that ended thirty years ago, is brought into a lively present as words dart across the page:

A flight
of starlings at dusk
the wing-clatter
of a typewriter
scatter
of letters as a poem
gathers and takes shape             (38)

 

The speaker brings two times into simultaneity – the time of the original sighting of the  starlings as a cloud of ‘hip-sways in tornado twists above the Eternal/City,’ and the time of memory-assemblage as the poet types. Through the metonymic shift from the spontaneous gathering of birds to a spirited collection of words, distance and time collapse beyond their conventional boundaries. The page represents a coterminous moment, where Sydney and Rome, 2014 and 1984 occupy the same stroke of a key as it scatters across the page. Malouf’s sense of dwelling in a mythological space-time is prefigured through the poem’s reference to Rome as the ‘Eternal City.’ Part of the speaker continues to reside in this imagined Rome of ’84, a presence that presides over poetic staging as the ‘new draft/           of sky,’ merges with ‘A clean sheet/   of daylight’ (39).

 

Collective Memory Places

Bitto points out that ‘the relation between individual and collective memory is a fraught one’ (101) but suggests notwithstanding that it is both possible and productive to consider memory in Malouf’s poetry beyond the realm of individual experience. Contending that Malouf memorialises the experiences of a wider community, Bitto invites future critics to consider Malouf’s poetry in relation to various collective identities with which he may be associated: people of a particular generation, people of migrant heritage, expatriates, travelers, post-settler-colonial subjects, and ‘the amorphous group of people designated as “Australians,” “Queenslanders,” or “Brisbanites”’ (102). ‘Inner City’ registers a shift in the dominant imagined space of Australia, where symbols of the iconic quarter-acre and Hills Hoist have been replaced by,

A picture-book street with pop-up gardens, asphalt
bleached to take us down a degree or two

when summer strips and swelters. All things green,
wood sorrel, dandelion, in this urban village    (20)

The speaker uses conspicuous signs of gentrification in ‘pop-up,’ ‘all things green,’ and ‘urban village’ to describe Chippendale in an era of chai lattes and food miles. But the ‘picture-book’ cheesiness of this contemporary scene is not set up for lampooning, despite the gentle teasing of ‘the soy of human kindness.’ Malouf depicts local space in a mode of planetary awareness, elevating collective belonging in this moment of transition: ‘Good citizens all// of Chippendale and a planet sore of body/and soul.’ Contemporary Chippendale functions as a chronotope, memorialising an age where civic duty seemingly rests with the earnest and playful – the poem records a time and place where the colossal task of planet saving demands colossal optimism. Although this poem inhabits a contemporary scene, it makes strong allusions to the social practice of memory building. The memory place, the imagined Chippendale of the poem, is the culmination of the labours of the collective, the poem tellingly eyeing ants ‘in their gulag conurbations’.

Earth Hour is animated precisely this pursuit  – asking what lies beneath the surface of the contemporary. In ‘Blenheim Park,’ the sediment of history fills the earth, where what appears as a green idyll ‘of shade-trees, level grass, cattle grazing’ reveals an entry into a temporal loop:

In fact a battle plan
is laid out here. Thousands
of dead under the topsoil
in High Germany
stand upright still in lines as in the rising
groundfog of dawn (55)

The poem enters ‘the slow mouths/ of centuries,’ layering the time of the untroubled present against the ‘green pause’ of a battalion awaiting their Commander’s order to charge. Anchored by the same green location, this potent moment tumbles into the present as the same pause of an ‘untroubled forenoon.’ Time is presented as a palimpsest, where the present is inscribed with the violence of the past, and the past’s victims are ‘dismissed from history,’ transmuted into the natural world ‘striding tall over the lawn.’

 

Yesterday’s Heroes

Across this collection not only does history inscribe cartography, it breathes life into the words and attitudes of yesterday’s heroes. But beyond poems after Charles Baudelaire and Heinrich Heine, there’s also particular delight taken in the figure of the aging poet. Who is yesterday’s hero today? In ‘Footloose, a Senior Moment,’ dedicated to Chris Wallace-Crabbe approaching eighty, the text appears unmoored, adrift across the page. The broad spacing of the lines evokes on one hand the tidal glimmer of Malouf’s Bay, and on the other the layered thought-lines that are casually cast when  a poet considers time’s touch:

An after-dinner sleep
Not
a bad place to arrive at
The big enticements may be
a matter of memory but isn’t
memory the dearest
and cheapest of luxuries
and of its kind one of our rarest
gifts
The footloose present
Not to be going
anywhere soon   (8)

Contrary to the singular implied by the title, the poem actually presents two footloose moments. After reifying a certain notion of the present, the speaker examines the body as time’s subject. Suggesting perhaps an impulse to render collective, rather than individual memory, the speaker takes the body, the ‘being still from toe to fingertip’ into a plural realm ‘at home in our own/skin’ (emphasis added). The subject slides into fluidity – ‘unmoored       afloat               the Bay’ – into a new mode of being ‘[n]either/earthbound nor even maybe/sky-bound.’ The second footloose moment occurs as the delirious consequence of this unmoored subjectivity, exploiting the potential of liminality as the subject travels as an unnamed star, far out in ‘the foggy galaxies.’

Touch

By way of conclusion, I draw attention to the fact that Earth Hour is full of musical references. There is the ‘touch of diminuendo’ in ‘Footloose, a Senior Moment,’ ‘Eine Kleine Background Music,’ in ‘An Aside on the Sublime,’ and many others throughout the collection. While never truly residing in the background, classical music is brought especially to the foreground in ‘Toccata,’ ‘Rondeau’ and ‘Toccata II.’ These titles borrow from the taxonomy of musical pieces, with ‘toccata’ quite aptly the name for a virtuoso piece usually for keyboard. Malouf exhibits his technical mastery over the internal rhythms of language, with each line of ‘Toccata’ mimicking the inverted stresses of a Bach exposition:

Out of such and such and so much bric-a-brac.

The thrill of this stylistic declaration matches the aesthetic anachronisms that fill the poem – napkin rings, taffeta, cut-glass atomisers, attic doors. These raw materials of memory are charged as ‘charms, magnetic debris’ by the rhythm of the poem, whose very physicality reminds us that the original meaning of ‘toccata,’ from the Italian ‘toccare,’ is ‘to touch.’

To touch lies at the heart of Malouf’s endeavour, where even in the more abstract poems, the flesh of experience inscribes the words that seduce us on the page. Like music, the enigmatic touch of Malouf’s poetics lodges its listener in a perpetual present, even in obscure or nostalgic moods. Throughout the collection the poet’s technical flair is beyond doubt and nearly beyond delight – the work carries both the whimsy and gravity of mortality with the radiance of a master poet. The endeavour to restore the place of memory to a mythological cast of present would not seem so urgent and compelling without Malouf’s touch recording a multitude of quiet lived experiences: a particular quality of light, the warmth of the dark, the silence after talk. Many writers of prose also write poetry, but rare are the novelists who are also major poets in their own right. It is sometimes forgotten that Malouf’s writing career began in the genre, but this collection reminds us he is a heavyweight of Australian poetry. In its ecstatic totality and stunning execution, Earth Hour is sure to be one of the finest poetry publications of 2014.

 

WORKS CITED

Bitto, Emily. ‘ “Our Own Way Back”: Spatial Memory in the Poetry of David Malouf.’ JASAL 8 (2008): 92-106.

Malouf, David. ‘A Writing Life: The 2000 Neustadt Lecture.’ World Literature Today 74.4 (2002): 701-705.

[1]Malouf’s ‘Bay poems’ are the works which over decades continue to focus on the region that encompasses Moreton Bay and especially Deception Bay.

 

DR LUCY VAN teaches at the University of Melbourne. She is a freelance reviewer.

The Skit by Roanna Gonsalves

Written by mascara on . Posted in Fiction.

IMG_8071Roanna Gonsalves is an Indian Australian writer. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, Australia, researching how writers are created in the contemporary Indian literary field. She is the founder-moderator of the South Asian Australian Writing Network.

 

 

 

One November night in Sydney, Roslyn adjusted the dimmer on her new Ikea floor lamp. Her living room was full of the Bombay gang. They had gathered to meet John Greenaway. He was Paul’s client, and the Director of the Australia India Festival of Culture, Social Harmony and Business. Roslyn had been adjusting that dimmer every time she walked past the lamp, going brighter, going darker, until she was satisfied that the room looked cosy yet sophisticated, much like the cover of the Ikea catalogue itself.

Suddenly, Sushma clapped her hands and said, “Okay everyone, Lynette has written a skit. She’s going to read it out now.”

Roslyn, by then, was at the breakfast bar, arranging her beef roulade on brand new Belgian crystal. She had been saving up her last packet of Goan chorizo just for tonight’s beef roulade. She would welcome John with a plate full of this offering in her left hand. Her right hand she would leave free to place on his back and guide him in. When Sushma made this totally unexpected announcement, she said, “Er, Sushma, we’re expecting John any minute now.”

Paul said “He’ll be late, he just messaged.”

Sushma looked at Roslyn for permission to continue. Roslyn shrugged her shoulders.

Most of the Bombay gang were still on student visas, still drinking out of second hand glasses from Vinnies, and eating off melamine plates while waiting and waiting for their applications for Permanent Residency to be processed. Lynette was one of them. She was Paul’s neighbour from Bombay, now enrolled in an MBA at a university in Sydney. Paul and Roslyn were the lucky ones. They came to Sydney not as students, but on a secondment from Paul’s multinational accounting firm. It was Roslyn who convinced Paul that they should stay on, become Australian citizens, because it thrilled her to be anonymous yet striking in the undulating uniformity of Sydney’s affluent lower North Shore.

In the background Elvis was booming through Paul’s new Bose speakers, You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Hound Dog. Lisbert, an accounting student, had just stood up, stretched out his arms towards Lynette, about to ask her to jive. But when he heard Sushma’s announcement he retracted his arms and sat down again.

“Oh,” said Paul, turning around. “A skit? You mean like a play? Didn’t know we had a Salman Rushdie in Sydney.”

“Salman Rushdie doesn’t write plays,” said Sanjay, another accounting student. “Novels he writes.”

“Same thing yaar, for any kind of writing-viting you have to have a good command of the language”, said Paul.

“I always say, if you have the Queen’s English you have everything”, said Roslyn.

“If you can write novels, you can write plays,” said Paul. “Salman Rushdie, if he tries to write plays, again he will make millions, again he will get a fatwa, again he will marry a model…”

“But Paullie, do you really think novels are the same as skits?”

“C’mon, let’s hear it,” said Sushma. “She’s written it, let’s hear it!”

Lynette opened the embroidered cloth folder and lifted a few handwritten sheets of paper into the white light.

Lisbert turned down the volume and turned on the yellow house lights. Lynette nodded ever so slightly, without taking her eyes off her script. She began to read. “It was a dark November night …”

Suddenly Roslyn stood up.

Lynette stopped reading.

Roslyn said, “One sec Lynette, I’ll draw the curtains.”

When she was done she sat down again and flicked her hand indicating that Lynette could continue. So Lynette started again.

This was the first time she had ever read her writing aloud to anyone, let alone to a whole group of people. She faltered at the start, her tongue tripping on the opening lines of dialogue. But soon, she took the silence in the room for interest, and was encouraged.

The story was an amalgamation of many stories in the newspapers that year. A girl comes to Sydney on a student visa, attends a private college, and studies hairdressing. Like many others before her she has been promised Permanent Residency in Australia, or PR, by her migration agent, by her private college, and by the man who stamped her visa. The fees are more than what was advertised in the brochure. When she complains to the Student Welfare Officer, he is very sympathetic, invites her to his house, and after a glass of Reisling, begins to kiss her. She initially resists like the good woman of Hindi films and convent schools. But he is cute and keen and accurate. She succumbs to the callings of her own body and his. However, in the throes of passion he says, “Call me Mountbatten”. Then, eyes closed, he breathlessly proceeds to call her a stinking curry muncher cunt. She is stunned. She runs away immediately and decides to lodge a complaint of sexual assault and racism through the local courts. He contests the allegations and, playing on the latest cricket match fixing scandals between India and Australia, he counter alleges that she was attempting to buy him with sex. The story climaxes with a dramatic courtroom scene, and ends with the girl being deported and the Student Services Officer going scot-free.

Lynette finished reading.

There were brand new crystal glasses on the coffee table in front of Lynette. The light from the floor lamp made them glow like compliments.

She asked, “So? Was it ok?”

Still, there was silence.

Then Roslyn said, “Oh my! That was, that was…. God! You poor thing, why didn’t you tell us you were going through all this!”

Lynette had imagined all kinds of feedback. For weeks she had practiced witty comebacks to questions about the dialogue, the sex scene in the story, the decision to reflect India through the broken mirrors of diasporic memory. But the assumption that the skit was autobiographical took her by surprise.

“No no, I didn’t go through any of this…”

Again, a silence full of pity and a collective Catholic ache to be helpful.

“Really! Nothing like this happened to me. Seriously.”

“You mean to say you made it all up?”

It’s…what’s it called…fiction or something?”

“Yes,” she said.

“So it’s not true then.” Roslyn got up and pulled the curtains back.

“No.”

Sushma’s eyes were red from the tears she was freely shedding. “Such a beautiful story!. You are so brave, I mean, the girl is so brave and … so….so…. Poor thing.”

Lisbert said, “Forget your MBA, you should take up writing. See J.K. Rowling, she’s rolling in cash. What will your MBA give you? Nothing compared to that!”

Paul, who had not even taken one sip of his whisky during the entire reading now drained his glass and said, “Lynette, Lynette! Who would have thought the little two year old girl I saw running around in her panties in Barfiwalla Building in Byculla would one day write plays like Salman Rushdie!”

Sanjay inhaled sharply, but Paul ignored him and continued, “Superb! So proud of you, my girl! Didn’t know that students who come here suffer like that. So terrible that she was deported.”

Sushma said, “Shit yaar! What a heart-wrenching ending! Forget Hollywood! Forget Bollywood! This is heaps better! You can start an Aussiewood all by yourself!”

Sanjay reached for the beef roulade and put a piece in his mouth. The only other time he had heard of beef and pork together was in relation to the bullets, smeared with the fat of the cow and the pig, that sowed the seeds for 1857, the First War of Indian Independence.

“Nice bullets” he said, and gobbled up a second piece.

“Beef Roulade. High time you Hindu buggers learnt the proper names for Catholic food”, Roslyn said.

“Sorry. I was just…”

Sushma interrupted Sanjay. “It was so real what you wrote! So typical of men in power, they always abuse it, especially when there is a succulent and exotic thing in front of them.”

Sanjay said, “Lynette, give me your autograph now only yaar, when you become famous you’ll forget all of us.”

Sushma said, “This John Greenaway who is coming, read it to him, maybe he will…he will…requisition it, put an encumbrance on it, or whatever it is they do with plays, you know what I mean.”

Lynette said, “If John Greenaway likes it, then who knows, I’m ready to quit the MBA and write full time.”

She looked at Paul and Roslyn. “It’s ok if I read it out to him, isn’t it?”

Paul poured himself another stiff drink. He was drinking scotch because he couldn’t find the feni, made by his uncle in Saligao, Goa. The minute you opened the bottle the aroma spread across the room, it was that good, the feni. He took a sip of his scotch and said, “Of course. Read it, read it, he’ll be very impressed. A female Salman Rushdie in Sydney, he’ll be impressed. And my neighbor after all. Tell him you got it all from me!”

Sanjay inhaled sharply again, but Roslyn said, “You know me, I don’t beat around the bushes. The play is great, you are a great writer. But when you talk about the Student Welfare Officer, he’s Australian?”

“Yes”, said Lynette.

“A proper Australian?”

“Yes”, said Lynette.

“White?”, asked Roslyn.

“Proper Australians are blacker than us”, said Sushma.

“White, white”, said Lynette.

“Like John Greenaway,” said Roslyn. “We don’t want to offend John Greenaway. He’s also Australian. He’s also in a position of power. He should be here anytime now. What if he thinks you had him in mind?”

“I didn’t…”

Paul added, “Poor fellow just got divorced.”

“Wife left him,” Roslyn interrupted, “Don’t want to offend him.”

“That’s true,” Lisbert said. “Don’t want John Greenaway to get the wrong impression about you”.

Lynette looked at him, pushed her hair behind her ears.

“Yes, better leave him alone”, Paul said, “Recently divorced…”

“Wife left him,” Roslyn interrupted again.

Lynette began to look through her manuscript.

“What if I make the Student Services Officer half white and half Aboriginal?”

“You mean like that newsreader on TV?” Sushma said.

“That way John Greenaway won’t be offended,” said Lynette.

“What if John Greenaway has Aboriginal blood too?” Lisbert asked.

“Arre baba, Sanjay said, “See, if Aboriginal people can be white, then white people can be aboriginal, right or not what I am saying?” All Whites in this country have Aboriginal blood in them”.

“You mean on them”, Sushma said.

“In them”, Roslyn corrected her. “Queen’s English.”

Sushma stayed silent. This was Roslyn’s house.

“You can’t make an Aboriginal character a perpetrator, even if he is only half Aboriginal,” said Sanjay

“Who says?” said Lisbert.

“It’s just not done!”, Sushma said.

“It’s all politics…” said Lisbert.

“Arre! Forget politics-sholitics” said Sushma, turning to Lynette, “First the blacks will kill you. If you are still not dead then those Greens will eat you alive.”

“Greens? But they’re vegetarian.” said Lisbert.

“Doesn’t matter. For her they will make an exception.”

There was a pause. Then Rosyln said,

“You’ll just have to take out the Student Services Officer”.

Sanjay reached for the beef roulade and put a piece in his mouth.

Lynette said, “Take out the Student Services Officer? But…”

After he had swallowed the beef roulade, Sanjay said, “Lynette, one small thing, but I think I should mention it, don’t want you to get into trouble.”

Lynette turned towards him.

“In the court room scene, you actually mock the judge! That’s a bit risky, don’t you think?”

“Very risky”, Roslyn said.

“I mean, you’re a superb writer”, Sanjay continued. “What emotions you have captured! But why risk it? So many years, so much money you have spent here, lakhs and lakhs of rupees. Why risk your PR application being rejected?”

“That’s true,” Lisbert said. “You really deserve to get PR Lynette.”

“You have to make the judge look good,” Paul said.

“Just take out the judge,” Roslyn said.

“Take out the judge?”

“As long as it’s grammatically correct. Queen’s English.”

“But the judge is…”

“You don’t need to have all that drama in the court room. Just make her get a letter or something at the end, giving the details of the verdict. You can do the letter in capitals so we know it is different from the other parts of the story. Times New Roman.”

“But you can’t see Times New Roman on stage.”

“The point is this. It has to be the Queen’s English.”

Paul opened the showcase to look for the feni but he couldn’t see it. So he poured himself another scotch.

“Do you know John Greenaway’s wife?” he asked.

“Ex-wife,” Roslyn said.

“John Greenaway’s ex-wife. You know she’s some big shot Professor, femin…femin…

“Feminist”, said Roslyn.

“Feminist”, said Paul. “She was going on marches-farches when she was young. Sharlene Connor I think her name is.”

“Oh! Sharlene Connor! I know her. She’s at our uni, right Sushma?” asked Lynette, “In the Arts Faculty, Humanities Faculty, whatever it’s called.”

“She’s at your uni? You purposely made the victim into a man-hater? Because of John Greenaway’s wife?” Paul asked.

“Ex-wife,” Roslyn said.

“She comes across as a man-hater?”

“No no”, said Lisbert.

“Yes, yes, very hateful”, Paul said.

“I didn’t know she was his wife!”

“But if John Greenaway hears the victim’s speech and he finds out which uni you are in, he will think that you are mocking him, that WE are mocking him!” said Paul.

Roslyn said, “You know I like you Lynette. Don’t get me wrong. But John Greenaway is coming home to relax, get some comfort after his wife left him, eat some homemade vindaloo, not just curry from a Patak’s bottle or something.”

“I’m so sorry I…”

“He’s a great lover of Indian culture. He should be here anytime now. He’s going to support our Indian Catholic Association of Sydney. Now you will go home and go to sleep. Life will go on for you. But what about us? We are the ones who will be blamed. After all he is coming to our house. Your play mocks him in our house. He will think we are taking the mickey out from him. Even the Queen’s English cannot hide this fact.”

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean…”

“No need to say sorry, it’s not like you’ve sinned or something.

“Thank you for…”

“I know you didn’t do it on purpose.”

“I didn’t.”

“And I know very well about metaphors and metonymy.”

“She is first rate in Grammar and Composition”, said Paul.

He’s Paul’s client, don’t forget that. You know what Gandhiji said. Customer is God. So I say John Greenaway is God.”

He’s divorced, watch who you’re calling God” Paul said.

“Wife left him”, she reminded him, “not like it was his fault. You know what white women are like.”

Sanjay reached out for the beef roulade again and put another piece in his mouth. Just then a cock crowed. It was Paul’s phone. Roslyn reached across to the mantelpiece, picked up her Japanese hand fan bought on a holiday in Boston last year, and began to fan herself quickly.

“Same as Indian women” Paul said as he put his phone on silent without even looking at it. Then he cleared his throat.

“If you want to be Salman Rushdie you should be prepared for a fatwa,” he said.

Lynette cracked her knuckles.

“But why a fatwa when you’ve spent so much, waited so long, worked so hard for permanent residency?” Lisbert said.

“A fatwa is not a good idea on a student visa,” said Sushma.

“Tear it up,” Lisbert whispered in her ear, holding his face close to hers for a moment longer than appropriate.

She turned her face to him and for the first time, looked into his eyes.

“I’m tearing it up”, she said.

She didn’t recoil when his hand squeezed hers.

Then she said loudly, “Don’t say anything to John Greenaway when he comes. About my skit.”

Sanjay found a napkin and wiped his oily hands clean.

A breeze of absolution blew across the room and recalibrated it.

Sushma hugged her.

Roslyn looked at the crystal plate and saw that there was only one piece of beef roulade left on it. She put the plate away in the oven.

Lisbert went across to the CD player and turned up the volume. By then the CD had moved on to Love Me Tender. He held out his hand to Lynette. She took it. They danced in front of everyone, not quite cheek to cheek, but there would be time for that.

Paul spotted the feni at the back of the showcase. He brought it out carefully, poured a neat peg for Roslyn and presented it to her.

But she had already rewarded herself with Riesling. She turned off the houselights and sat in her favourite armchair, watching the pirouette of the Bombay gang. Crossing her legs, she held her brand new crystal goblet in her left hand. Her right hand she dangled over the armrest. She brought the wine to her lips. She breathed in the room unfurled before her. It was now enveloped only in white Ikea light.

 

Mario Licón Cabrera translates Ali Cobby Eckermann

Written by mascara on . Posted in Translations.

MLCMario Licón Cabrera (1949) is a Mexican poet and translator living in Sydney since 1992, he has publishe four collectios of poetry and has translated many Australian leading poets into Spanish . He’s currently conducting a Creative Writing and Reading workshop (in Spanish) at The Nag’s Head hotel, in Glebe, NSW every first Saturday of each month.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Kami

I walk to the south
I walk to the north

Where are you
My warrior?

I sit with the desert
I sit with the ocean

Where are you
My warrior?

I sing in the sand
I sing with the the rocks

Where are you
My warrior?

I dance with the birds
I dance with the animals

Where are you
My warrior?

Heaven is every were
Where are you?

 
 
 
 
Abuela

Camino hacia el sur
Camino hacia el norte

Dónde estás
Guerrero mío?

Me siento con el desierto
Me siento con el océano

Dónde estás
Guerrero mío?

Canto en la arena
Canto con las rocas

Dónde estás
Guerrero mío?

Danzo con los pájaros
Danzo con los animales

Dónde estás
Guerrero mío?

El cielo está por todas partes
Dónde estás tú?

 
 
 
 

Wild Flowers

Mallets pound fence posts
in tune with the rifles
to mask massacre sites
Cattle will graze
sheep hooves will scatter
children’s bones
Wildflowers will not grow
where the bone powder
lies

 
 
 
 

Flores Silvestres

Los masos golpean postes de cercas
a tono con los rifles
para ocultar los sitios de la massacre

El ganado pastará
las pesuñas de las ovejas dispersarán
osamentas infantiles

Las flores silvestres no crecerán
donde el polvo de los huesos
reposa

 

Crows

early dawn crows
tell of your impending arrival
that first day I wait
I fall asleep in the street
an earth angel comes
siting beside me
to divert the traffic.

the second day
neighbours wave brooms shouting
we don’t understand you,
you’re too different,
please don’t visit anymore
above my sobbing I heard the crows
tell me you’re closer.

on the third day
a blanket of crows
curtains my bedroom window
I stay in bed until
the knock on the door.

 
 
 
 

Cuervos

temprano por la madrugada los cuervos
hablan de tu inminente arrivo
ese primer día de mi espera
caí dormida en la calle
un ángel terrestre llega
se sienta a mi lado
para desviar el tráfico.

el segundo día
los vecinos agitan sus escobas gritando
no te entendemos,
eres muy diferente,
por favor no vuelvas más
arriba de mis sollozos oía a los cuervos
diciéndome que estabas muy cerca.

al tercer día
una parvada de cuervos
acortina la ventana de mi recámara
me quedo en cama hasta
el llamado en la puerta.

Luke Fischer translates Evening Poems by Goethe, Trakl and Ausländer

Written by mascara on . Posted in Translations.

Photo Luke FischerLuke Fischer is a Sydney-based poet and scholar. His publications include the poetry collection Paths of Flight (Black Pepper, 2013), a monograph on Rilke and phenomenology (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2015) and a book of bedtime stories (The Blue Forest, 2014), as well as poems, translations and articles in Australian and international journals. He won the 2012 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize and was commended in the 2013 FAW Anne Elder Award for a first book of poems. In 2008 he was awarded a PhD in philosophy from the University of Sydney. He has held post-doctoral fellowships and taught at universities in the U.S. and Germany.

 

WANDRERS NACHTLIED II

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch.
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.


––Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

VERKLÄRUNG

Wenn es Abend wird,
Verlässt dich leise ein blaues Antlitz.
Ein kleiner Vogel singt im Tamarindenbaum.

Ein sanfter Mönch
Faltet die erstorbenen Hände.
Ein weisser Engel sucht Marien heim.

Ein nächtiger Kranz
Von Veilchen, Korn und purpurnen Trauben
Ist das Jahr des Schauenden.

Zu deinen Füssen
Öffnen sich die Gräber der Toten,
Wenn du die Stirne in die silbernen Hände legst.

Stille wohnt
An deinem Mund der herbstliche Mond,
Trunken von Mohnsaft dunkler Gesang;

Blaue Blume,
Die leise tönt in vergilbtem Gestein.


––Georg Trakl (1887-1914)

VERWANDTER TRÄUMER

Abend
verwandter Träumer
mit Schweigen
begabt

Du zeigst
dem Menschen
das Ziel
das sanfte Hinüber
in eine
andere Welt

––Rose Ausländer (1901-1988)




WANDERER’S NIGHTSONG II

Calm is
Over every hill,
In all the canopies
You can feel
Barely a breath.
The birds in the forest keep silent.
Wait a while and
You too will rest.




TRANSFIGURATION

When the evening comes
A blue face quietly leaves you.
A small bird sings in the tamarind tree.

A gentle monk
Folds the lifeless hands.
A white angel distresses Mary.

A nightly wreath
Of violets, grain and purple grapes
Is the year of one who sees.

At your feet
Graves of the dead open up,
When you lay your brow in silver hands.

Upon your mouth
Silently dwells the autumn moon,
Dark song drunk on poppy-sap;

Blue blossom
That quietly sounds in yellowed stone.




RELATED DREAMER

Evening
related dreamer
gifted
with silence

You show
human beings
the goal
the gentle transfer
into
another world