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Autumn Royal

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

unnamedAutumn Royal is a poet and PhD candidate at Deakin University. Autumn’s writing has appeared in publications such as Antipodes, Cordite, Rabbit, and Verity La.

 

 

 

Strained

I saw my heart on the airport terminal floor,
and gasped at how my misunderstanding bled
into fibres scarred by shoes and suitcase wheels.
My organ’s meatiness was too raw to keep in mind,
so I bought a New Idea predicting my horoscope for 20__.
I rolled up the magazine and squeezed,
hoping for a meaning to drip from the gloss.

 

Kevin Brophy reviews Backyard Lemon by Wendy Fleming

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays.

143043 MPU Backyard Lemon COVER SinglesBackyard Lemon

Wendy Fleming

Melbourne Poets Union Series

ISBN 978-0-9925020-0-3

Reviewed/Launched by KEVIN BROPHY


 
The first thing we might say is that the backyard lemon tree is an iconic fixture in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, as heraldic as the Hills Hoist clothes line is for the rest of Australia’s backyards. The lemon is a humble icon, usually hard working, long living, and it packs loads of zing. Those who know Wendy Fleming, and that is most of us here today, know that she is a Melbourne icon, she is hard working, she has endurance, and she packs considerable zing. I have never been able to say no to her.

It is worth noting that Wendy took particular care to choose the lemon on the front cover photo. It had to be a lemon that showed signs of being battered by the weather, knocked around by insects, blemished by life. So, you can take the lemon as a kind of self-portrait of Wendy.

This is Wendy’s first book, after 25 years of writing poetry, and even longer reading poetry. In fact, the first piece of writing Wendy had published was in Going Down Swinging, when Myron and I were the editors, a short story called ‘The Mission’, featuring a nurse caring for a woman who had killed her baby, a very going down swinging story. The nurse was no accidental character because, as you know, Wendy spent most of her working life as a nurse and nurse educator, beginning at St Vincent’s where she trained and lived with a group of 15 other young women, most of whom are still in touch with each other. In fact, the recent deaths of two of these almost lifelong friends and comrades form the material for poems of grief in her chapbook.

Wendy began writing poetry in earnest by going to a workshop at the Victorian Writers Centre when it was located in George Street in Fitzroy. That is where she met Connie Barber (who seemed to be in charge of the group), Charles D’Anastasi, Leon Shann and Marietta Elliott Kleerkoper. It was from this group, and with this group’s support that she found her way to her pivotal place in the Melbourne Poets Union. Wendy knows how to work with people.

Her acknowledgements page impresses on us the fact that she is part of a family she has long loved, and she is at the centre of a wide community of poets. Even though writing is a solitary vocation, we poets know that there is a deeply felt communal, even tribal element to our particular kind of writing. The scratch of the pen is balanced by the buzz of the spoken word for poets. We cannot help but come together to speak our poems to each other, and eventually form committees and workshop groups and fund raising events of one kind or another. Wendy has been part of this activity for a long time, and all of us want her to keep doing it.

She has also been away by herself with her keyboard and pen, doing what poets must do when they are left to themselves: write poems.

Wendy’s book presents 21 poems to its reader. Each one of them is as real, as pungent, as marked by weather, time and experience as any lemon worth its juice hopes to be. The first phrase in the first poem is one that might fill the head of every lemon that ever lived: ‘The morning sun’.

Titled, ‘The New Order’, and beginning as it does with a breakfast scene, it promises to be a domestic poem, an aubade perhaps, welcoming reader and sunlight to a new beginning. But it is a far darker affair than that, and more complicated, because it is about, as it turns out, how to start a new day alone, suddenly, after thirty years of marriage, family and companionship. The beauty of the poem is in its spareness, its brittle sparseness, combined with a vivid sense of line and image. Wendy uses the ten-syllable, five-beat line neatly and persuasively with ‘The garden beds soak up the recent rain’—a line that also makes music with the chiming of garden with recent, and the alliteration in ‘recent rain’. Similarly, she knows how to use the spondee, in the strong phrase of one-syllable words: ‘full buds ripe’ a couple of lines down. What I am wanting to point out here, is that at the level of the word, phrase and line this poetry has been attended to with care, with clippers, with a no-nonsense attitude towards shows of fussiness in language. I can’t resist bringing your attention to Wendy’s sly humour too in the construction of her lines. The second poem in the book, ‘Changing’, begins with the line ‘I’m good at getting into my clothes’, a wonderfully curious and eccentric observation, making me want to go on with that poem. This is an artfulness that makes an art of speaking plainly, of bringing art out of the galleries and academies, and into the streets, onto the trams, into the homes, airports and change rooms of our ordinary lives.

I want to say more about this form of artfulness in a moment, but first, I want to step back a little further to see what kind of stories, what kinds of thinking and feeling are going on in these poems. They seem to be so smoothly accomplished, so sure in themselves of their range of diction and voice that you don’t expect them to be coming up against the difficult themes that do emerge.

That first poem deals with imposed change, including the losses that time and aging must bring, and the second poem too, contrasting two women in a public change room, one older and the other so young that ‘in a T-shirt neck to thigh/her two new bumps barely move the cloth’, brings us up against the knowledge that life imposes change upon us. There is the frightening poem, ‘Hannah’, a glimpse of the holocaust juxtaposed with the images of cleaner and nurse. Her poem, ‘Beijing Airport 1998’ might be the one that brings to the fore a line of thinking running through the book: a series of reflections and observations on the way we ‘follow the coloured lines to Go’. She writes of her experience:

[I] go through x-rays, checks and gates,
point at the pictures in my passport,
(not a good likeness). No one cares.
Take directions from Mao-jacketed

Women, unsmiling, wordless ….

What I find here is a detached voice, an observing woman acutely aware of the way time and life impose themselves upon us. ‘I stand bereft on this side of the eternal flow,’ Wendy writes. When I told Wendy that I found the voice and stance of her poetry a steady, detached one, she agreed and had two comments to make. Firstly, she said that through her nursing training she has become an accomplished diagnostician. She is always working out what is wrong with the people she knows and meets — medically wrong. I couldn’t help it, I asked her what was wrong with me. ‘I’m not telling you,’ she said. So there. The second comment she made was that her detachment is part of her being a third child. The third child has to please everyone, she said. The third child cannot take up too much emotional space in a family, and must become self-reliant. Wendy has perfected this stance of the diagnostic outsider. This stance of detachment is not all there is to the book in the way of themes and emotions (The final poem, ‘Letter to my Husband’ is as powerful a love poem as you could ever wish to read: in fact there are a series of poems that are love poems to her husband).

To return to the theme of change imposed upon us, ‘Sylvan’, makes the point most starkly: her companion tells her, ‘There is no five year plan.’ Indeed, there is no plan without that plan’s helplessness in the face of both the unpredictable and the predictable ends and impositions we face. The paradox here is partly the perfection of the poems as they speak so tellingly of helplessness, and also the sense of indestructible force in the voice of each poem as it tells us of the mist spraying over us, silent and insidious, obliterating us. Even the lemon tree, in its poem, is the scenery for a photo shoot featuring her friend, ‘elegantly gaunt’ after treatment for cancer. The speaker in the poem, asks, ‘Grant me a moment to complain’, but of course that moment does not arrive, because these are no poems of complaint in this book, the poems are something else, something more difficult to pin down and sum up.

Perhaps, all across this book, like a mist weaving though it, is that feeling we call grief, and for Wendy, it is the loss of her husband in stages to absence, illness and death, and the recent loss of good friends. The poems that detail these experiences are not strictly autobiographical. They are in fact calmly, delicately, unswervingly observed. The poetry is committed always to what images, scenes and sense experience might show us. The poem, ‘The Message of Flowers’, is one of these, superb in its attention to detail, and both tough and poignant in its approach to the relation of language to feeling. Her repetition, of ‘blooming, blooming; blooming not dying’ in the final line of this poem takes up an echo of the grief expressed in Tennyson’s most famous poem, ‘Break, break, break,/On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!’

It is utterly fitting that in the centre of her book there is a poem on Ron Mueck’s sculpture exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2010. Ron Mueck’s is an art without art. When Marcel Duchamp upturned a urinal in 1917 and presented it as an art object, it was art because he found it, he chose it, and he recognized its possible strange doubleness as urinal and fountain, as hardware and art. Ron Mueck has made his utterly real sculptures art through isolating them as figures for us to inspect. This is not the realism of a Vermeer or Rembrandt because technique is not the point. Making vivid, for once, or once again, what has always been in front of our eyes is the point. When Wendy writes,

Each sculpture is a masterpiece of detail
Very lifelike, every hair, skin pore, crease
Of thigh, arms, chest, tits, and vulva
Reproduced in fiberglass. Silicone. Epoxy resin

And ends with, ‘It is very real and it doesn’t feel like art’, we know she has found a way of describing what she does herself in her own poetry. In the repetition of that word ‘very’ I hear her voice too.

And is it art or is it simply documenting the world? Wendy Fleming is working in this highly contemporary documentary tradition, perhaps most spectacularly exemplified by the English artist Damien Hirst, and also she works in the now hundred-year-old tradition of William Carlos Williams and the imagists that followed him. The historian of modern poetry, David Perkins, made the observation that William Carlos Williams’ ‘naturalness and ease involved a lowered pressure or intensity and for his followers made poetry easier to write’ (p 254 A History of Modern Poetry Vol 2). It might have seemed that this new poetry of plain speaking was not artful, or not artful enough. It can seem spontaneous at times, and at other times it might seem merely simple. But I hope that you can understand by now through my comments that this mode of poetry in fact activates reflection, and provides for the reader what Williams called ‘a fresh beginning’—and by that he meant each moment we live must in some sense un-do, must subvert the previous moment. He wanted poetry to ‘breathe the air of the present-day’ (Perkins p 263).

In his uncompromising poem, ‘Credences of Summer’, Wallace Stevens declared,

Let’s see the very thing and nothing else.
Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight.

By keeping her poems clear, uncluttered and unscattered, by allowing the nuances of speech and thought to work on us if we are attentive enough to the attentiveness of her poetry, Wendy Fleming achieves a fine fire of sight, burning everything to ash that need not be there. Admiring her spare poetry immensely, I asked her if she might, after publishing this book, move to a more expansive mode of poetry. She told me that sometimes you workshop the poems and people cut things out, then they cut more things out. I know what she is talking about. She confessed that there are some poems in this book where she has not in fact cut out as much as her workshop group wanted her to. Strangely enough, her editor for this book, Garth Madsen, urged her to be more expansive sometimes.

All of which brings us again to the community that surrounds Wendy. A book of poetry is not produced in isolation, and during those final months of preparation, poets often lean upon friends and editors. In this case, Garth Madsen has been the critical eye and the strong support the poet needed to get through to the end and to find the book that was always there in potential. Wendy and Garth have made a great little chapbook. The chapbook does carry the shadow of a poem that Wendy wanted to put in because, she said, ‘People love it,’ though her editor didn’t, and her editor’s judgment won the day. All poetry books carry the shadows of poems that almost made it in but didn’t, and this is the mark of books that have been brought to us with love for poetry and respect for the reader who wants only the juiciest, most pockmarked, and character-filled lemons between the covers. Buy it. Taste it. Enjoy it.
 
KEVIN BROPHY is the author of thirteen books of poetry, fiction and essays. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. His latest book is Walking,: New and Selected Poems (John Leonard Press, 2013)
 

Michelle Dicinoski interviews Tom Cho

Written by mascara on . Posted in Interviews.

tomcho_authorphotoTom Cho is an artist whose fiction pieces have appeared widely. Among his 70 short fiction publications to date, he has pieces in such outlets as The Best Australian Stories series, Asia Literary Review, Meanjin and The New Quarterly. Before its release in North America and Europe, Tom’s book, Look Who’s Morphing, was originally published in Australia. It was shortlisted for three awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, and is now in its second Australian printing. Tom has performed his work on the stages of many festivals, from Singapore Writers Festival to Sydney Mardi Gras. He has a PhD in Professional Writing and is currently writing a novel about the meaning of life. His website is at www.tomcho.com
 
 

MD: Your wonderful book Look Who’s Morphing (Giramondo Publishing 2009) was just republished by Canada’s Arsenal Pulp Press. Can you tell us about the events leading to its publication in North America and Europe?

TC: I originally wrote Look Who’s Morphing for a world audience and while writing it, I frequently felt that it could find appreciative audiences outside of Australia. But although the Australian edition did well critically and commercially, it proved a struggle to attract any interest in the book from overseas publishers and I eventually gave up on my ambition to see the book published elsewhere. Then, in late 2012, I did an artist residency at Vermont Studio Center in the US. I had to give a reading as part of my residency and I read a piece from Look Who’s Morphing. The audience response was so positive that I decided to revive my old ambition. I was about to do some overseas travel anyway, so I decided to use my forthcoming travels in North America as an opportunity to build local interest in the book.

Well before Arsenal Pulp Press published the book, I had been gradually accruing interest in my work from outside of Australia for many years, particularly through scholarly networks in the arts and humanities. This interest increased after the Australian publication of the book. One of the scholars who had come to be a great supporter of Look Who’s Morphing was Larissa Lai, also a fiction writer and poet, who is based in Vancouver. Two of Larissa’s books were published by Arsenal Pulp Press. So, last year, when I decided to go to Canada as part of my travels, Larissa arranged a reading for me in Vancouver and brought my work to the attention of this excellent publisher.

 

MD: You wrote and published six issues of a zine, Sweet Valley Zine, between 2000 and 2004. For those of us who might not be very familiar with zines, can you talk a little about how you came to write SVZ, and how zine culture and your involvement with it might have shaped your subsequent work?

TC: In its early days, my career was nurtured via some great support from Australia’s youth arts sector. Probably the most pivotal example of how this support changed my practice was in 1999, when the youth arts organisation Express Media included me in a contingent of young writers that was travelling to Newcastle to attend the second National Young Writers’ Festival. This festival’s vision of writing included (and was not limited to) comics, graffiti, MCing, spoken word, blogging and zines. It was through this festival that I was first exposed to zines and came to produce my own zine, Sweet Valley Zine.

Years earlier, when I had studied creative writing at university, literature was presented to me as largely comprising fiction, poetry, non-fiction and play scripts. In that vision of literature, prose and poetry were mostly to be found in literary journals and in perfect-bound books. It was a very limited horizon for me, even if I didn’t know it at the time. So it wasn’t even so much zines specifically but my experience of that entire festival in 1999 that dragged me out of my more silo-ed and purist idea of literature and helped to cultivate my cross-artform sensibilities. As a result, these days, I tend to see myself less as a writer and more as an artist whose primary practice is writing fiction. I think that kind of inter-disciplinary horizon can absolutely be seen in Look Who’s Morphing.

The zines that I most admired contained personal writing and had an explicit political orientation. This was a world away from the literary restraint that I had been drilled in as a creative writing undergraduate student. The kind of anti-didactic, impersonal restraint of “Show, don’t tell” that I’d been schooled in could never have accommodated the political rants and diaristic reflections that I found in my favourite zines. There was also collage, a staple aesthetic technique in zining that permitted a much more free-ranging and lateral use of reference and allusion than I had ever attempted in my own work at that stage of my development. Moreover, some of my favourite uses of collage in zines were those that were done for the purposes of parody. So I think zines loosened my grip as an artist in some important ways: I became less invested in an ideal of an impersonal and restrained author, and I took a more playful and, in a sense, a more promiscuous approach to textual reference.

The writing that I began to produce out of that period was not likely to attract interest from many publishers, but fortunately what I also took from the culture of zining was an interest in doing literature “otherwise” – in finding different models of disseminating writing and also in better appreciating smaller readerships where the engagement with the work often felt more personal and intimate.

 

MD: Many of your stories, including “Dirty Dancing” and “The Sound of Music,” re-write classic film narratives in inventive and humorous ways. How great an influence has fan fiction (including slash fiction) been on your work?

TC: There was actually a stage in the life of Look Who’s Morphing when I was asking myself if the book could itself be considered a work of fan fiction. My fiction pieces have mostly circulated in literary journals and at performances for arts festivals and other arts events. So the book is unlikely to fit a more narrow definition of “fan fiction” that rests upon participating in the kinds of critique and dissemination that exist within fanfic communities. I’ve never done any of that. Then again, we could instead drift towards a broader and more open-ended definition of “fan fiction” as involving, say, creative production by fans in response to other texts. If we do that (which is what I’m inclined to do), things get a bit more interesting. At any rate, it would be ill-advised to try to settle the matter once and for all – the whole endeavour of defining fan fiction needs to remain open to revision as new fanfics and theorisations of fanfic are produced.

There are traces of slash influences in Look Who’s Morphing (and I was also especially interested in the Mary Sue genre of fanfic while writing the book). That said, once again, I’m more inclined to drift towards a broader view. What impulses led me to incorporate a queer relationship into my response to the film “Dirty Dancing”? On one level, the answer is “an interest in slash fiction” but more broadly, the answer concerns my queer desires. It was these desires that prompted me to realise a potential for the film “Dirty Dancing” to be read and written queerly.

Incidentally, what I’ve also been thinking about lately is that all of these creative readings of books and films that I do aren’t confined to the world of texts. For example, my practice of reading queerly pertains not only to classic film narratives but also how I might read, say, the gaze of a person I might encounter on the street or at a park. What can I say? Sometimes, I have this hope that I might be able to live with as much imagination and suppleness as I try to bring to the books, films and other things that I read.

 

MD: Some of the stories that ended up in Look Who’s Morphing first appeared in some form in Sweet Valley Zine. Some were later published by literary journals and magazines before appearing in Look Who’s Morphing. Since the collection takes morphing as one of its main themes, I was wondering if you could comment on your writing process. How did the stories shift over their writing periods? And is this an approach that continues in your work to this day, in that you revise over a period of years?

TC: Look Who’s Morphing had a long gestation: about 9 years from its beginning to its Australian publication. And you’re right – during that time, many of the pieces materialised across various contexts: in the pages of literary journals, in my zines, at various venues as part of readings and performances that I gave, over the course of Giramondo’s editorial process, and even over the course a doctoral research process when I incorporated the book into a PhD in Professional Writing. It was a rich mix and it no doubt enriched the manuscript and it was entirely in keeping with the kind of polymorphous and poly-morphing project that Look Who’s Morphing turned out to be. Doing readings was a great way to test how the work was resonating with those whom I consider my core audiences. And one of the wonderful things about working with Prof Ivor Indyk, my publisher at Giramondo and also one of my PhD supervisors, was that he could not be so easily seduced by my popular cultural references. I remember when he saw a very early draft of the manuscript. On one of the pages for my piece “Suitmation”, he asked: “Who is Tony Danza?” I knew at that moment that I would have to work hard to impress him. He is a very astute reader. When I wrote the piece “Cock Rock”, which heavily draws on Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels, he responded with his own commentary on Swift’s work. His contrasting reading tastes and academic background enmeshed very well with the project and working with him was, shall we say, a great cross-cultural experience.

Throughout my writing process, I wanted to write this open-ended work that would reward creative readers and tease them, in the best possible way, with codings (“in-jokes”, I once called them) or at least the promise of codings in the text that would speak to them and their desires. This is at least one reason why the book is so slippery and multi-layered, and why it can and has been read as Asian-Australian literature, as queer literature, as transgender literature and yet also none of these. Maybe it’s also why some readers of an academic bent have imagined that I have a background in cultural studies or gender studies, amongst other academic disciplines. Developing the project across so many different contexts enabled me to progressively cram more influences into the work and to in turn create more possibilities to tease and speak to readers and to provide the conditions for them to feel, I hope, in some way recognised and energised and even appreciated by what this text might offer them.

My novel-in-progress has longer chapters that don’t lend themselves so easily to readings and publication in journals. I no longer have a PhD process either. Nonetheless, this current project is benefitting from another long gestation and is again being enriched by a fantastic mix of influences, including my continuing and very important work with Ivor Indyk.

 

MD: Speaking of the writing process, would you like to talk about the novel you’re currently working on?

TC: I’m still trying to find the language for talking about my novel-in-progress (which is an issue that’s entirely in keeping with the kind of project it is). The way that I’ve been describing it lately is that it’s fiction “that is not only informed by the philosophy of religion, but fiction that might, in some small way, do some of the work of philosophy of religion”. Under the umbrella of its plot, it explores some key questions pertaining to the philosophy of religion – questions about the occurrence of suffering, about the nature and existence of God, and the like. Importantly, it has far too many robots and other anime-inspired influences in it to be as dry and boring as what that description might suggest to some. Also, the plan is to close the book with a response to the question “What is the meaning of life?”, which should also keep things interesting. Hence the working title of the book: The Meaning of Life and Other Fictions.

It’s been invigorating to work with a new set of pop cultural influences and with subject matter that departs so sharply from what I’ve written about before. It’s also been hugely intimidating because when I started this project, I’d had no prior academic engagement with the philosophy of religion and had done very little formal study of philosophy in general. When I was writing Look Who’s Morphing, it was a great challenge for me to find a corpus of language that I could use to discuss identity in fresh ways that resisted solidification. Writing about religion has proven to be perhaps even more difficult because the language comes with so much baggage and, as I once said on another occasion, words don’t grip very well when talking about divine figures such as, well, You-Know-Who. In the end, when I wrote Look Who’s Morphing, I think I found not so much a corpus of language but an array of techniques. Now that I think of it, I think this is what’s happening with my second book too. It’s been very exciting for me.

I’ve been progressively sending chapters from the second book to Ivor Indyk and have been greatly encouraged by his comments. I really do think that this next book is quite special.

 

MD: In the final issue of Sweet Valley Zine, you write:

At present, I am finding that I don’t really need many labels for myself…except for one that might look like this:
*subject to change without notice

Similarly, on your website you write about revising a chapter from your work-in-progress, which examines the attributes of God. You write: “The question of God’s attributes, then, is one that I’ve had to revisit a few times. But a revisable response, one that is not too sure of itself, is what this question requires.” Would you say that a revisable response is what the questions require in all your work? Is everything still morphing?

There’s an open-endedness in my work that rightly suggests that we – both myself as author, as well as my readers – should resist the urge for pat and final answers. As I have said before, fiction and life need mystery, if only to keep our sense of mastery in check. The kinds of questions that I explore in my work don’t lend themselves very easily to conclusiveness anyway. Besides, once read, any literary work is subject to being re-read. And re-readings, like re-writings, inevitably involve some level of revision.

I should add that the metaphor of morphing, when used in a more indiscriminate way, can become banal. And a state of “all-morphing, all-the-time” sounds exhausting too. Maybe it’s more the case that we can and should allow ourselves some moments of stability of knowledge, however tenuous and projected that stability is. This is also something I’ve written of before – that, in amongst those moments of apparent stability, we are trying to discern what’s knowable and what seems to work. Sometimes it’s hard to make our knowledge coalesce and the insights that we glean can be so fleeting, but perhaps that sort of piecemeal approach is not only more doable in life but to some extent inevitable.

 

~~~

MICHELLE DICINOSI is the author of Ghost Wife: A Memoir of Love and Defiance (Black Inc, 2013) and the poetry collection Electricity for Beginners (Clouds of Magellan, 2011). A Hedgebrook alumna and recipient of a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, Michelle has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Queensland. She has taught writing at various universities over the past decade, and is the creative non-fiction editor of Mascara Literary Review.

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.

 

Ron Pretty

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

In Barcelona copyRon Pretty’s eighth book of poetry, What the Afternoon Knows, was published in 2013. An updated edition of Creating Poetry will be published later this year. He spent six months in Rome in 2012, on a residency granted by the Australia Council.

 

 

 

Translation

She could not speak to her mother
when they met. She had just turned
twenty one, but had never seen this
small dark woman until then, except
in photos. Harris sat beside her, his smile
inviting them to break the silence.
He would translate, he said, if only
they had something to say. Mother and
daughter looked at one another, tears
on their cheeks. Tell her, she said to Harris,
tell her I did not know where she’d gone,
which country she went to. I used to
watch the planes fly over, she said,
and wonder where they were going,
and if she was on them. Alana
– for that was the daughter’s name –
reached out to her without a word.
She took her hand. Visanthi,
the mother said, that was your name.
And still it is, the daughter cried.
Tell her, she said through her tears,
tell her that’s what it is. Star sapphires
falling as tears, and a second mother,
in her pale silence watching
Alana Visanthi there in that room,
Sri Lankan sun streaming in where
mother and daughter are holding hands
having no language except its loss.


Dreams

Krystel said, I am happy with my mother,
my family here; I have no need to go
seeking for that distant other on that island
I have no wish to see. You do not feel
there’s something missing, her lover asks,
his pale hand caressing her straight black hair.

A long time ago her infant self was flown
out of penury into suburban class.
She’s never been back to see the village
she was plucked from; she loves her parents
who brought her home, happy they’d never
have to face again the heat, the beggars
on every corner, the guns at every checkpoint.

This is my home, she tells him, I have no other.
She will not tell him how she dreams, some nights,
of elephants wading a stream, a road side stall
selling papaya flecked with lemon, a cripple
begging under a figtree. The dreams recur,
but she has decided her life is here; she wants
only her mother and a lover who holds her
in his strong white arms as he kisses
and kisses again the warm dark skin of her face.