November 20, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Knocks
by Emily Stewart
Vagabond Press
ISBN 978-1-922181-71-8
Reviewed by ROBERT WOOD
There has been an important groundswell of recent feminist poetries and poetics in Australia. As Siobhan Hodge wrote in her review of Bonny Cassidy and Jessica Wilkinson’s anthology Contemporary Feminist Poetry, there is:
…a subtle, cresting sense of activism.
It is there too in Emily Stewart’s Knocks, through its critical, engaged and optimistic hopes that are expressed in specific poems, which together convey a notion of intersectionality conscious of gender. As Hodge herself said of the anthology:
‘There is a reassuring note of solidarity throughout the collection, but a simultaneous celebration of diversity in style, tone, theme and foci.’
One can suggest something similar in Stewart’s collection and which has been noted in different ways by Pam Brown’s launch speech in linked deletions, Amelia Dale’s commentary in Jacket2, and Melody Paloma’s review in Cordite. This dialectical relationship between acute critique and joyful celebration suggests not only that the whole of life is attended to, but also that one can oscillate, converse, play with the variety and possibility of ‘Poetry’ writ large. So what is Stewart railing against and what is she heralding? And, perhaps importantly, where is this leading us and what does it suggest?
To answer those questions is difficult, and it may be more apt to give a summary of what the collection is about in order to gesture at but never arrive at a full understanding of Stewart’s collection. Her voice is multiple, layered, various – there are erasure poems (section two); poems of multiple voices; poems in ordinary plain speech; remixed poems of heightened experiment (section three); poems of repetition (‘Today’). The references are Aussie kitsch, global pop cultural, resolutely local, Anglophonic culture industrial, fun too. This eclecticism of tone, style and reference keeps the volume entertaining, engaging, active. What that means for a reader is that one is being tested and flexed and exercised from page to page in a worthy movement from A to D to Z to B to U and back again all over and through.
There are, of course, personal favourites; poems that resonate, which each reader will find on their own. Needless to say, there are jewels in there that I like too. For example, I responded to ‘Australia’s Largest DIY’, which is a wry listing of commodities, objects, items that could be catalogued from Bunnings or Home Hardware or Mitre Ten. The poem begins:
fencestone, pavers, coloured spit rock
face blocks, colonial cornices, artificial
stone, aluminium step treads, hardwood (18)
Far from being a simple list poem, in Stewart’s hands, it becomes a rapturous sonic apprehension, not a dull rote thing but an event with music in it – ‘fencestone’ goes well with ‘face blocks’, and later on there is ‘urbanite’ with ‘expansion joints’, ‘marble veneer island bench’ with ‘brass compress’. The ordering is such that it makes it plain speech rhapsodic. And of course, one can read into it a post-conceptual politics that would take a found object, retype it and yet slantly embody it with ideological awareness – the phrasing to dwell on in the excerpt above is, of course, ‘coloured spit rock’ with ‘colonial cornices’ and so here and now, we glimpse the shadows of anachronistic Indigenous terms and the images of James Cook, which both come back to haunt the settling mode of the everyday do it yourself brigade. The last line of this poem is ‘how to fix a picket fence’ which not only circles back to the opening word (fencestone) but also allows the reader into a commentary of suburban dreams.
When read with a regard for Knocks as a whole, one notices that Stewart is an adept and able observer of contemporary life in Australia from the criticality of the mundane through to the implications of being here truly. This last sense comes through in the poem, ‘Animal Hands’, that directly follows ‘Australia’s Largest DIY’ though it is there in other, tender if welcomingly ambivalent pieces. Nevertheless it provides a direct counterpoint here, a kind of contrapuntal puncturing of the suburban critique in ‘DIY’. In ‘Animal Hands’, Stewarts writes:
I’ve been unwinding wire
along the serrated edge
of these paddocks for a
long time, pulling it tight (19)
It gives us a sense of engagement with boundaries, with borders, with aging, with process, with education, with tension, and this apparent everyday thinks through feminism, anxiety, and ecology of being with nods to history, emotion and birds. The poem ends with a libidinal and touching, though never sentimental, line:
all I want is your mouth on my neck, wordless and dumb under chilly stars
That is, the knowing poet assures us, all that ‘I’ want – the mouth, object of speech, home of tongue, at the neck, vampiric, teenage, hickies and loving, while the stars, this time chilled not burning balls of gas millions of miles away witness such complicated tenderness. It suggests what might be possible by looking at our immediate surrounds.
I responded to how her gaze falls on the ordinary, the suburban, the quotidian in these poems. This is not the domestic or the everyday or the taken-for-granted, but rather the momentary interruptions of frame against a poetic that is grand, posturing, arrogant. Those moments of defamiliarisation mean we are asked to see the normal anew and that is an important task in bringing to consciousness that which is poetic in the first place. This would seem to be a possibility that Stewart herself is constantly exploring from her writing to her social media, especially her Instagram [link to it – https://www.instagram.com/emstew__/], and which offers one line of productive inquiry that I am very much looking forward to. For this keen reader, the next collection cannot come soon enough.
NOTES
- Siobhan Hodge review of Contemporary Feminist Poetry Ed Jessica Wilkinson and Bonny Cassidy Cordite
ROBERT WOOD has degrees from University of Western Australia, Australian National University and University of Pennsylvania. In 2017–2018, He will be an Endeavour Research Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, and a Copyright Agency Emerging Critic with the Sydney Review of Books.
November 11, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Poems of Mijail Lamas, Mario Bojórquez & Alí Calderón
translated by Mario Licón Cabrera
Vagabond Press
Reviewed by ROSE HUNTER
The Poems of Mijail Lamas, Mario Bojórquez & Alí Calderón presents the work of three contemporary Mexican poets, one born in 1968 (Bojórquez), one in 1979 (Lamas), and one in 1982 (Calderón), translated by the Mexican-born, Sydney-residing poet and translator Mario Licón Cabrera. The book begins with the work of Lamas, a good choice since his is in many ways the most immediately personable voice of the three, at least in terms of the selection represented here.
Here are the opening lines of the book:
- Refusing to Return
While you refuse to return,
memories reach you as if from a blind well,
and that sun is a copper coin without shine.
In silence you polish its sharp edges
till the memory of the landscape hits you.
You know the sun didn’t feed its pack of dogs,
so you repeat to yourself it’s always summer there
and those are the words that bring you back. (15)
With this beginning we are drawn into a situation of receptivity despite resistance, a mood that continues throughout the selection of Lamas’ poems (which also form a self-contained sequence). One of the many enjoyable things about this anthology is how most of the poems are presented with at least a few others from the same series, providing a useful orientation for the reader as well as the potential for a deeper reading experience. Additionally, themes overlap between poets, for example, both Lamas and Bojórquez make use of the elements of desert and shadow, and both Lamas and Calderón are concerned with religion and death – to name just a couple of the many rich echoes that reverberate over the course of the book.
Smaller correspondences (also the title of Calderón’s book from which the poems in this book are taken) can be noticed as well, for example a coin opens Bojórquez’ section also:
The coin of time burns in my hand
a metal circle without a face
it burns all that I ignore of myself
all that no one suspects of me (57)
These two openings encapsulate many of the differences between the first two poets: the more conversational and inclusive tone of Lamas, and the more distant, compressed tone of Bojórquez.
Lamas’ section reads like a chapbook with a discernible situation and resolution. Throughout it, the elements of heat – including summer, the sun, dust, fire, and ashes – are prominent. The hot climate takes on the character of an oppressive person, who “chases” the narrator (28), and who will “search the cities one by one / until it finds you” (30).
Heat/fire and memory are also inextricable; here is the opening of poem V:
- Like Something Extinguished By Fire
I remember my first childhood home
and the second
and the third.
They all are one,
ablaze. (32)
The next poem starts on the next page but is part of number V (no separate title – I like this formatting, present in Calderón as well) – and imagines all the photographs burnt, and wonders if this may have destroyed the memories as well (33). But the narrator pushes on, to find them. The narrator is recalling a literally hot climate (the state of Sinaloa I think, where the poet was born), and as well as that I think about how my older, and not necessarily totally joyful, memories feel like this – a heat in my body precedes the act of remembering, and, depending, impinges upon it or seeks to prevent it. This climate/condition/feeling is used to great (blistering) effect in the entire sequence.
Bojórquez presents us with shorter poems and more compressed imagery, and the spare quality of archetype, as well as revelation and myth. His section is divided into three parts. The one that appealed to me the most was the second, “Of Certain Deserts,” which presents the enticing scenarios of “desert birth,” “desert alive,” “desert exile,” “desert dream” – and so on. To show some of the stark and suggestive imagery on offer here, I’ll quote one of my favourite of the desert poems in full:
Desert Room
The grief of exhausted men
blazes in the desert
There is no horizon
Far beyond the view
lies the sand’s sadness
Where does the wind lift
its dress of thirst?
The dreams of shadow are born
in the heart of the desert
Everything is possible. (71)
In both Lamas and Bojórquez, the landscape (including elements such as sand and shadow) has great life, as a kind of given – “Only men are amazed by their own bodies” (“Desert Alive” 68). Truth is what is spoken in the shadows or by the shadows, which Cabrera’s useful note tells us is a reference to Paul Celan, “Wahr spricht, wer Schatten spricht” (a person who speaks shadows speaks truth) (77). “To speak from the shadow, be the shadow” could be an ars poetica of the Bojórquez poems translated here, even though the line does not appear in his poem titled “Ars Poetica” [rather in “To Say the Shadow” (78)].
After the terse quality of these poems, the poems of Calderón return us to a more open structure (although the voice is more fragmented than that of Lamas). Religion and death emerge as two themes, as the first poem, “Constantinople” brings us a scene in a Byzantine church, which leads later (this is another long poem, divided into sections marked only by page breaks, as in Lamas) to the description of the death of a fish, after the fisherman decides to throw it back:
Now the man has the fish
shakes the air with its body
Seagulls gather round
He throws the fish into the sky
the metallic gleam of its scales
The little eyes look at the sea the relief
just before of gaining great altitude but
suddenly a beak rips its fins
tears apart its body guzzles
in one second the remains
In secret someone was thinking of God
Cruel fisherman of men (90)
Calderón’s unpunctuated lines often allow for rich double readings. Here, for example, the unpunctuated “tears apart its body guzzles” suggests both the bird that swallows the fish, and the image of a fish writhing, taking in air/poison like a thirsty person might desperately guzzle too much water.
These poems are visceral, with frequent mention of blood and other body fluids, contagion, disease, and violence, as well as the human sacrifices of the last poem. The second last poem speaks most overtly about the political situation in present-day Mexico, a country in which 30,000 people are registered as having disappeared, and over 100,000 have died in drug trade related violence over the last decade.[1] Here is the ending of the ironically titled “Mexican Democracy:”
they open the black bag
the stench of rotten flesh:
a new born little girl (110)
I read the book engrossed in the distinct voices of these three very different poets, which is a great compliment to the translator. However, one observation about translation is worth making. Here are those same last lines of the poem “Mexican Democracy” in Spanish:
abren la bolsa negra
el hedor el moho en la carne:
una recién nacida[2]
In Spanish there is no need to do any extra work to specify the gender of the newborn; it is already communicated in the article and in the noun ending. In English, the extra word needed, “girl,” seems to weaken the ending of the poem a bit (seems to raise questions like, why a girl? Worse that it’s a girl? – questions that aren’t the point I don’t think). The gender of the newborn isn’t emphasised so much in the original Spanish, in which everything and everyone has to have a gender. This is not a criticism, just a reminder that grammatical gender is one of the issues that translation from Spanish to English must grapple with.
The pictorial and allegorical style of Calderón’s poems has prompted comparison between his work and the work of the muralist.[3] This is an appealing analogy – the “on-a-wall-like” appearance of the poems (which often run right down the page, unpunctuated and without stanza breaks until the very last, orphaned lines – a nice effect), as well as their grand themes combined with the ability to record those small details of everyday life (for example the fish lines quoted above), does remind me of the drama and scope of the revered tradition of Mexican muralism.
This is a valuable sampling of three contemporary Mexican poets. One quibble might be that there are no women represented here. Perhaps a translation of three contemporary Mexican women poets might be in the future for Vagabond’s growing international catalogue?
NOTES
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-violence-idUSKBN1782XN
[2] http://revistaliterariamonolito.blogspot.mx/2015/12/poema-de-ali-calederon.html
Here “Mexican Democracy” does not exist as a separate poem; it is the first part of the next (and last) poem featured in the book, “Piedra de Sacrificio” (“Stone of Sacrifice”).
[3] Javier Lorenzo Candel, “Las Correspondencias, de Alí Calderón.” la estantería, 5 July 2015.
https://resenariopoesia.wordpress.com/2015/07/05/la-correspondencias-de-ali-calderon/
ROSE HUNTER’s most recent collection, Glass is published by 5Islands Press. A Brisbane poet, she has lived in Canada and not resides in Mexico.
October 30, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Claire Potter ’s most recent poetry publications have appeared in The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry (edited by John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan), Best Australian Poems 2016 (ed. Sarah Holland-Batt), Poetry Chicago (ed. Robert Adamson), and Poetry Review Ireland. She was shortlisted for a 2017 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize UK and she has published three poetry collections, In Front of a Comma (Poets Union 2006), N’ombre (Vagabond 2007) and Swallow (Five Islands 2010). She lives in London.
The Copper Beech
I lie you down, spread your branches wide as wings across the grass
Your leaves flatten like cracked shells, letting the sea out of my ears
Breath has gone out of you
You are at the edge of becoming an object
belonging to the wind
From a distance there is no way of telling your dark fallen leaves
from copper-black feathers––or your red-tongued branches
from a split open nest
I walk amongst purple shadows, I sit within the mess
of leaves
But in writing this I am not unique, nor
are these feelings. This experience cannot be said
to belong to any obstinate sense of me
There are many more who weep when birds and trees are falling, when
the mauve of dusk slowly tapers and pre-emptively disappears
When the bone-heavy moon
carves an ending and turns its back on the sea
and leaves rattle like pewter shells
returning to the beach.
Three Steps Outside the TAB
Pale steps, concrete and absolute
solid and lengthwise between two pillars and a portico
I am waiting on the blue-grey steps
divided into three parts
The first step is physical such that in this heat
my skirt bandages against my thighs
I’ve sat here all afternoon
in this passage of tobacco, jasmine and beer
and I’ve sung, resting my head on my knees
looping prayer with radio
waiting for Grandpa to swing open the doors
scoop my hand into his
and ruminate about the horses
he’s decided not to back
Shiny cars shuffle
across a weft of bitumen and white lines
the rubber tyres wheeze with kids
springing from car doors wanting ice-cream, sherbet
lemonade through a straw
I watch the beetle-tops glistening in the sun––
inside they’re cooking and the steering wheels warp like liquorice
as though I’m Gretel and everything before me
on the steps of this oven, is secretly made for eating
I’m vigilant, too, about Grandpa’s Valiant parked illegally up the kerb
Cabbage-white body, chrome bumper, single front seat, no seatbelts
in the back, two round side mirrors, black
dashboard, chipped, plastic, and a whickering gearbox
Grandpa wears a white shirt––sleeves rolled to the elbows
elbows dry and flaking. Trousers wide
and tall, hoisted with a thin belt
He agrees with everything I say
and these afternoons at the TAB we foist off as dog-walks
Pete in sagging herringbone and rosaceous cheeks
taps my head and comes and goes
through the double glass-doors carrying
a blue plastic shopping bag full of errands and chores
as if it were against his better judgement to be there
I recognise his slippers, Grandpa
wears the same ones, seaweed-brown tartan, thin brown sole
noiseless as he pads across the shopping centre
as if it were his kitchen
and the TAB his blue lagoon
Sunlight passes through an eye of mirror and I squint at it
and begin crying without reason until Grandpa comes out
wipes my eyes with a handkerchief and says he’ll be done soon
The second and third steps are as cold as a whale might be
and beneath my sandals, they’re dimpled with mica and pore
Had I a pocket knife I could chip into them
engrave a heart cordoned with forget-me-nots
or tally-marked with time etched into tiny bales of grey
But I’ll close my eyes against the stone
imagine the rib of steps belongs inside Jonah’s whale
and I’m a barnacle growing there, perchance
or a mermaid in disguise, battering
the hull of this gambling seadog’s skip
with the weight of a huge emerald tail––
but look, he’s smoking at the door with Pete
his spare hand’s outstretched, he wants to go
he’s ready––he heels out his cigarette into a twist of ash
and off the steps, through waves of smoke-blue air
I skip over my tail
October 21, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Kazem is a Kurdish musician and poet. He has been held hostage in Australia’s black site on Manus Island for 4 years where he continues to compose and write.
Un-passable bridge
My guitar is my soul mate nowadays
I don’t care for the world anymore
I play my guitar with a heart full of sadness
My eyes drizzle like rain.
My heart is absent minded.
It’s going to tell the secret words.
It has a heavy pain to reveal.
It is profoundly sad,
sad like someone who has lost his sweetheart.
It has many words to say
but there are no worthy people to talk to.
My restless heart wants to fly
to take a message to someone.
But what benefit is there when there is no way to fly?
My heart is exhausted from waiting and effort.
It’s breathless and alone.
It’s become weak.
It’s looking for a way to fly.
My heart with a hidden secret
and a world full of wounds in a jail
has no path to freedom.
It’s been condemned to a sorrowful separation.
I wish there was a kind person to give an opening to this prisoner,
Give him a smile as a gift,
To let him free from fetters and alienation.
What a pity that it’s all a dream!
My helpless heart has never seen bliss.
The jailer is bringing new chains to fasten.
This is a different prison
Oh, banish the sorrow of my unblessed heart.
I’m like an iron, you know, I am strong!
The white demons have arrived with anger
to promise another Reza’s death.
They have sharp claws
They are roaring
The ground is wet from blood
though no-one has been killed yet.
They want a volunteer.
Someone like Reza Barrati.
Someone to be annihilated again.
The white demons are starving again.
They want to feed themselves with my own body
and celebrate until the next day.
They have no sorrow, no sadness, no pain.
My mother, my love, be strong.
I know it’s hard to say goodbye to your son.
Without seeing it, I can read the verdict:
My young body must be killed.
There is no sign for humanity.
There are no rights for humanity.
Power is in the hands of wicked people.
They have made the world
an un-passable bridge.
(mid August 2017)
– translation from Farsi to English Moones Mansoube (primary)
October 19, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Preparations for Departure
by Nathanael O’Reilly
UWA Publishing
ISBN: 9781742589459
Reviewed by ZACHARY WARD
Preparations for Departure, Nathanael O’Reilly’s second full length collection, is an ongoing journey in which the poet enters the gaps between home and abroad, contentment and discontent, presence and absence, youth and age, the past and the present. These disparities emerge in a suite of fifty-nine free-verse poems spanning across his formative years growing up in small town Australia, to his most recent years living in America. Reflecting a life spent in diaspora, the poems transport the reader back and forth across oceans to land in cities of ruinous decay, preserved in the poet’s mind; to scenes of quiet urbanity and the endlessly silent screams which pervade; to beaches untrodden, and in which we may now see our footprints forever imprinted; the clatter and squalor of marketplaces and the drudgery of the quotidian. A constantly shifting collage of antonymous sights and sounds, these duopolies are best observed in the author’s mind.
The suite’s first poem, ‘Border Crossings’, observes the conflict of duopoly that is constantly being waged across the author’s thoughts. A round trip through Eastern Europe, O’Reilly paints scenes of post-Soviet squalor and abandonment, though always from the security of a moving train carriage. The reader is afforded a sense of detachment, as the poet is easily able to retreat to the comforts of his compartment and those offered by Western influence. When not ‘sipping a glass of whiskey’, the speaker can ‘listen to Nirvana, U2, Springsteen’, willingly flitting between the scenery outside his window, and the familiar manner of those around him. Outside is the other, the old world, different and dark, crumbling and vacant; the carriage is home to Harry Potter, iPad’s and selfies. O’Reilly is never part of the scenery, and is aware of his intrusion into this world. He is more at home among the comforts of the west, and uses the ever-moving shuttle to shield him from the realities of the world he is passing through. A further exploration of this social disparity is explored in, ‘In the Market Place’. Though not protected by the bulk and pace of a train carriage, a description of the grime and poverty of a Ukrainian concourse is delivered briefly and starkly, conveying a desire to,
… simply observe and pass by,
my needs and survival unthreatened.
To them I am a rich Amerikanski,
an alien from a golden dreamland.
The train carriage is no longer required to define and separate, for his ‘clothes and accent proclaim [he does] not belong and never will.’ Unable to escape his heritage and the legacy of his own home and his ancestral homeland, the poet concedes that ‘in three weeks I’ll be gone, back in the West … living in luxury.’
Back in the West, the author’s reminiscences of his upbringing in Australia unearth a struggle to accept age and in so doing, detach from the past. Though far flung from the shores of home, the patchwork of Australia’s sleepy suburban streets, dry crackling long grass and booming coastal shelves are never far from the author’s thoughts. As from a moving train carriage, O’Reilly can observe his youth; a series of flashing images, just beyond his reach or inclusion. Formative years spent among the quiet nature of urban Australia reveals within the fledgling poet an awareness of the world and a greater understanding of a higher culture that might only be attained by sitting on rooftops and listening to Pink Floyd, hoping to glimpse a better view, in ‘The Way We Saw Ourselves’. Being merely a memory, as intangible as the crumbling iron yards of Eastern Europe, the luxury and comforts of the coach are not present; O’Reilly clearly desires to alight here and reassume the uncertainties and expectations of his younger self,
Years ago now, those days
when the world seemed ours
for the taking, when we dreamt
wildly, full of hope
and our own importance.
O’Reilly’s sense of diaspora is not only temporal, but also painfully internal. A victim of nostalgia and an unwitting tourist in his own youth, displacement perpetually plagues the evading poet. Though still capable of marking the parameters of home in his memory, his identity as an Australian of Anglo-Celtic origin turns his sights away from the antipodean land of his rearing, and temporarily toward the British Isles. One senses the poet’s hope of finding some outcrop of ancient rock to which he may find some purchase, and carve into the old-world soil of his ancestral home his own marking among the scratchings of his literary forbears.
Migration affords O’Reilly a semblance of inclusion, extending the exploration of duality beyond the internal and the temporal; it places the speaker at a spatial variance from his thoughts. Dissatisfaction and aimlessness accompany the author’s musings as he attempts to assimilate a foreign landscape. No longer wishing to play the part of the tourist, the reader becomes acutely aware of the sudden reduction of O’Reilly’s protective barriers; the train carriage has passed and the space between the rooftop and his present self has been traversed. In ‘My Inheritance’, the recurrent invasion of the poet’s carefree childhood is once more invoked. Reminiscently wistful, the reader is escorted further down the halls of the speaker’s memory, stopping ‘by barbed wire fences, scattered with droppings and dung’ to ‘suck in the smell of the sheep and the cows, musty hay, molasses.’ These rustic images, dabbed with care upon a palette of recollections to be disturbed by the slash of the artist’s brush and splashed vigorously across his canvas, hang lovingly upon the walls of these thoroughly ventured corridors. Distanced by years and self-doubt, the reader is reminded of O’Reilly’s self-imposed exile, and the ethereality of such careless days by the abrupt return of time and space in the poem’s final stanza,
In my mind the hot north wind
still flattens the brown grass
and carries the smell of sheep
and earth across the Pacific.
The Pacific ocean evokes profundity, and the depths to which the poet plunges to salvage these images, while its vastness suggests they are forever beyond the poet’s grasp in a muddling of past and present.
The remarkably emotive poems in Preparations for Departure read lightly, yet leave deep and perennial tracings. O’Reilly, in a voice sculpted by the world he has ventured, captures the evasive and eternal nature of the wandering spirit; the constantly restless speaker leaves traces of himself across the pages, carefully crafting an impression of having just come and just gone, leaving the reader one page behind. To keep turning is to accept O’Reilly’s invitation and accompany him on his centrifugal journey forward over oceans and back across pools of thought that trickle into the past. As the speaker takes in the sights, the reader may ponder class, wealth, race and age from the not always welcome security of a temporal and or spatial distance. Though the gaps are ever widening, these poems are able to suspend and preserve observances, which continue to question inherited notions of contentment, belonging and identity.
ZACHARY WARD graduated in a Bachelor of Communications, major in Creative Writing at UTS. His fiction appeared in the UTS Vertigo magazine.
August 23, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mark O’Flynn’s most recent collection of poems is Shared Breath, (Hope Street Press, 2017). He has published a collection of short stories as well as four novels. His latest The Last Days of Ava Langdon (UQP, 2016) has been shortlisted for the 2017 Miles Franklin Award.
Fresh Air
They hardly ever left the city these days, so it was time. They hadn’t seen their cousins since summer and Naomi and Brent were jumping with rabbity excitement. Perhaps trepidation better described the type of excitement they were feeling. The cousins lived in the country, just beyond Cowra, and were trying, in their way, to be farmers. Naomi and Brent had many sleepless nights in the lead up to a visit to the farm. Darren Twomey, their father, had not spoken to his sister for a long time. Each time, between visits, he wondered if their relationship was reverting to that old enmity, their childhood status quo. As adults it had indifferently thawed. They had gone separate ways. They were so at odds that they each wondered at times how the other managed to survive. Since the death of the parents, long ago, all their battles suddenly seemed old ones. Distant memories. There was no point fighting about them. They were now able to talk to each other as equals. And since the birth of their children, (Lil had three), they had become, well, for a while Darren had thought the word was close.
He felt remiss about not getting the kids out of the city more often. When they were littler Naomi and Brent loved their cousins, although now they were getting to an age where they, too, were finding their lives leading elsewhere. The cousins had not one, not two, but three tree houses. They had their own quad bikes. They had animals. Cats and dogs, of course, but also a constant stream of little yellow chicks, which Naomi would snatch up feeling their hearts vibrating in her hands. Also goats, a peacock, a few cows, a sheep and a great big bull all by himself in the front paddock. Lil and Carlo, her husband, were trying to be diverse-interest farmers. Trying – they were pretty good at it. They wanted to do everything for themselves, grow their own food, make their own clothes, as well as supply what they could to the nation. Subsistence farming was not a phrase Darren could readily throw at them. Nor was impossibly romantic. It must have been hard work. For Lil it was about the survival of the planet, even her clothes were about the survival of the planet, whereas Darren believed the planet would still be here long after he was done with it. Yet they were modest. Lil worked at a high school in Cowra while Carlo, following in his family’s footsteps, worked the land. Not much of interest to Carlo happened beyond his ploughed acres. Lil had an old, self-deprecating joke she would trot out when she thought people had forgotten it: What do you call a successful farmer? One married to a teacher.
The first time they had seen the bull, after the long drive from Sydney, it had its long, pink pizzle out swinging in the breeze. Their mother, Mara, had tried to get them to stop laughing – pizzle was such a funny word, but their father was laughing just as much.
Carlo knew farming. You couldn’t knock that. Darren was slightly envious of his ability to fix, well, anything. His practicality.
‘We’ll twitch it up with a piece of fencing wire.’
That was the panacea he applied to any situation. No problem was too big. Plough up forty acres before breakfast, no worries; change the tines on the harvester, done; slaughter a piglet for dinner, easy. He was the one who had built all the tree houses. An estate of them. Darren resented his own inability to provide as much for his kids. You couldn’t build a single tree house in their inner city back yard no bigger than a couple of picnic blankets. He could barely build a lean-to for the lawnmower. He didn’t need a lawnmower. Carlo did not think much of that. Carlo would have hated being able to hear the neighbours playing their radio, washing their dishes – just there, through the wall. It was one of Darren’s secret pleasures, to see Carlo’s discomfort, on those rare occasions when they came to the city, perched on the edge of a chair as the morning filled with sirens and truck engines and aeroplanes passing overhead. Darren could work the phones and move stock and do a deal on futures trading, but he could not twitch up a tree house with a length of fencing wire.
Naomi at least loved coming here. Lil’s boys were older, closer to her age. Brent was more wary. No one could say they loved the long, dreary drive, but the whole occasion was, for Darren, a shot in the arm. He could leave his phone at home, something that always made him feel liberated, if a little naked. It was as if time sprained its ankle and slowed down. They always slept well. All that fresh air. The vegetables they ate were, frankly, stupendous.
Mara did not love it quite so much. The insects. The animals in general were not her style. If she walked across a paddock she was bound to tread in something. At nighttime it was too dark, the bull shrieking somewhere out there in the blackness like something wounded in no-mans-land. Mara preferred the glow of streetlights coming in the window, the wheezing traffic on rainy roads. She was in her element at a busy intersection, timing her dash across the road.
If she was quizzed closely what it was that disturbed her she was forced to admit she was scared of snakes. And spiders. All the creeping, poisonous wildlife with which the countryside was plagued. She was fearful of wasps and stick insects. She was fearful of sticks that looked like insects. In fact she wasn’t too crazy about sticks in general. And she was certainly no fan of the bull’s pizzle.
‘But there are spiders in the city,’ Darren rationalized.
‘Yes, but they know their place,’ said Mara. ‘They don’t try to dominate the conversation. And they understand spray.’
That was Mara’s panacea – spray.
‘There’s an eagle,’ said Naomi from the back seat and Brent leaned across her to see.
And the house, Mara thought to herself. It always seemed to smell of ash. That would have been because of the open fires. Swallows sometimes flew down the chimney and darted about the room. Every floorboard in every room creaked. You could hear each footstep in the nighttime squeaking their way to the toilet, which took a long time to fill after it had been flushed. Those floorboards were something Darren enjoyed for some reason – talk about irrational. If you looked out any window to any point of the compass there was nothing but grass. Grass, which made Mara sneeze, if they happened to visit during the spring. The first time they had come out here Naomi had cried: ‘Where are the shops?’
Darren had laughed, but Mara knew what she meant.
The joke about how primitive it all was had worn pretty thin after several days of complaint. Carlo found more and more things that needed repair, activities that kept him away from the house for long periods of time. No, he didn’t need any help. He could be seen at odd times bouncing along the horizon on his tractor.
‘There’s no reception,’ said Naomi, shaking her phone and peering at it.
Darren said he would not bring them back again if they were going to whinge and be such scaredy-custards. All the cousins protested at that, so Darren had to back down and rescind his threat. Mara and Lil looked at him, sadly. Brent sniveled most of all because, like his mother, he had become anxious at the unfamiliarity of everything. His cousins had made him stick his finger in a calf’s mouth and he had cried at that strange sensation. He needed some traffic noise to calm him down.
‘What’s that smell?’ Brent asked, his gap-tooth whistling on the sibilance of the word smell. The tooth had come out during some rough-and-tumble with his sister. Hadn’t there been a fuss about that! Mara was like a raptor or the proverbial tigress on the look out for danger to her cub. Poor Naomi had been flayed alive.
‘That’s fresh air,’ said Darren. ‘It’s good for you.’
This nervousness all came back, it seemed, to spiders. The fact that they could kill you. Snakes also, but snakes were more exotic. You wouldn’t expect to find a snake indoors, in your shoe. Spiders were more commonplace; danger lurking in every nook and cranny, in every cupboard where the biscuits might be hidden. This was the kingdom of the spiders.
‘If you leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone,’ said Aunt Lil.
‘But what if you want a biscuit?’
‘You ask for one.’
Brent’s formative consciousness went through a terrible struggle every time Darren announced they were going to visit their cousins. Attractive as the tree houses were, they were full of biting, stinging, lethal bugs. Snap out of it son, he wanted to say, although he knew better than to declare these views in which he heard his own father’s conservative voice. Okay, okay, it was fine for the boy to cry. He didn’t really have to steel himself at all. Manhood still years off. Be a kid. Enjoy it.
Darren bit his tongue. Mara had read all the books. Yes, sensitivity was a virtue, he agreed. If Darren felt that Mara was babying the boy, she for one would not hear of it. Her upheld palm, her whittled disdain, could puncture Darren’s resolve in its womb. He could so easily be reduced to a cliché. All he wanted was for his son to take on the world, not to shy away from it.
So when the long weekend arrived Darren was the least ambivalent about jumping in the car and taking off into the wide green yonder. He would have been happy to go alone, but that was a pathway fraught with its own repercussions. Mara would have grizzled that she was being abandoned to do the child rearing, while he waltzed off on his merry own to enjoy himself in the country. Where was the equity in that? She had a job too you know. They had had this squabble before. Complaints about the wild life, the discomfort, the leaky toilet seemed to be the piper he had to pay to shore up the complaints about neglected responsibilities. He neglected nothing. He thought about everything all the time.
Darren sighed.
He packed the car with far more than they would need for three days. God help them if they had to get to the spare tyre with all this crap on top of it. But then would he have really known what to do if that need arose? He was ready to leave a full half hour before anyone else. There was make-up to be applied, last minute phone calls to be made. Finally they hit the trail. Stop – Naomi had left her flash drive. Stop – Brent had left his DS with its latest uploads. Stop – Mara had forgotten to set the alarm. There was a hold up on Paramatta Road that delayed their departure even further. They were like pigeons, Darren thought, trapped in the city by the electromagnetic radioenergy of the metropolis. Or something. Where had he heard that theory?
They crawled along in first gear for twenty minutes through the grey fumes of the traffic. Darren watched the temperature gauge climb steadily. It was just approaching the red when the traffic opened out and they were able to speed up. The needle went down, and Darren’s simmering level of stress also subsided.
‘Just wait till we get out to all that fresh air,’ he said, more brightly than he felt.
They played a game where they had to name things they saw in alphabetical sequence. They always got stuck on Q.
Soon enough they fell silent. Naomi listened to her i-pod, lips moving in silent song. After an hour of playing his electronic game Brent said he felt carsick.
‘Look out the front window, mate.’
‘I’m gunna be sick.’
‘Stop the car and let him walk around in the air for a little,’ said Mara.
‘He’ll be fine. Just look out the front.’
‘I’m gunna vomit.’
‘Don’t vomit in the car,’ Darren raised his voice more than was necessary.
‘Then stop the damn car. Let him stretch his legs.’
So Darren stopped the damn car and Brent, looking green about the gills, walked in circles by the side of the road.
‘Brent is gunna spe-ew,’ chanted Naomi, making her own entertainment.
‘I’ll spew on you,’ said Brent, now red in the face.
‘Be quiet,’ snapped Mara. ‘Leave your brother alone.’
‘Why do you always take his side?’
Darren drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Traveling with the children, and with Mara for that matter, always made the journey so much more tedious. No need to go into detail.
In the town of Blayney Naomi observed that the entire town appeared to be closed. Beyond Cowra they turned off the highway down smaller and smaller roads, winding through paddocks revitalized after the breaking of the drought. Finally a corrugated dirt lane brought them juddering in a cloud of dust to Lil’s gate. Mara began to sneeze. The bull was standing in the front paddock staring at them.
‘Hey Brent,’ said Darren, ‘hop out and open the gate for us.’
‘There’s a big bull,’ said Brent.
‘He’s not that big. I bet he won’t even move. Just shut the gate behind us and hop straight back in the car.’
‘Can’t you do that?’ Mara asked.
‘Brent can do it. He’s old enough.’
Brent reluctantly stepped from the back seat. He stood at the gate and fiddled with the chain. Darren loved those chains, although he could not have explained why. If you lived here, he thought, that chain would be the sort of everyday thing you would take for granted. He wondered if Brent would have the gumption to stand on the gate and swing its wide arc like the kids did in the films, but Brent simply walked it open. The bull stared at them like a wharfie at a picket line. Darren drove through and idled a little way up the track. There were potholes full of water, puddles, he supposed you’d have to call them. Probably full of tadpoles. He would like to look. In the rear-vision mirror Brent had his head bent over the chain at the strainer post. The sun came from behind a cloud and the grass, in an instant, appeared luminously green. Then the back door was open and Brent dived excitedly in.
‘That cow’s comin’,’ he squealed.
Again in the mirror Darren saw the gate behind them slowly swing open and the bull ambling towards it.
‘Hey!’
He honked the horn, but this only had the effect of making the bull trot forward through the gate, out onto the road.
‘Shit.’
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Mara.
‘The bloody bull’s got out. Didn’t you shut the gate?’
‘I thought I did,’ said Brent.
‘Jesus Christ. Come with me.’
Darren got out of the car. His tone did not allow Brent to object. Mara’s lips were thin. She stared straight ahead. Brent followed his father. The bull was wandering up the road, what did Carlo call it, the long paddock?
‘What part of shut the gate don’t you understand?’
‘Sorry Dad.’
Darren began to trot after the bull. Brent lagged behind. Darren wasn’t quite sure if this was a wise thing to do, to chase after a bull of unknown temperament, but he could not arrive at his sisters, having not seen her for so long and say: ‘Sorry I’ve let your bull out the gate.’
What would Carlo say? Carlo would think, as he had always thought, that Darren was just another city idiot, about as bright as a pigeon pecking for crumbs in the city square.
Puffing now, Darren caught up with the bull, making sounds as if he was trying to reason with it.
‘Wait. Hold on. Wait up.’
The bull suddenly stopped in the middle of the road, tall grass growing up on the verge at either side. Giving it a wide berth Darren circled around it with the idea of herding it back towards the gate. The bull stared at him. No movement.
‘Go on. Shoo. Move.’
The bull stared. Darren waved his arms. He did not know the preferred method for getting a bull to move. He picked up a stone and threw it at the animal, hitting it square on the forehead with dull thud. The bull blinked. Darren picked up a bigger stone and threw that. It hit the bull on the shoulder. Suddenly the bull turned and snorted and began to trot back down the road.
‘Yah!’ Darren ran along behind it, and there in front of the great beast, the much smaller form of his son standing in the middle of the lane.
Everything happened quickly after that, yet at the same time everything slowed down. Seeing the animal coming Brent turned and ran. The bull, seeing nothing but a smaller, fleeing figure, gave chase. The lane was too narrow. All three of them were running at full pace down the road when the bull caught up with the boy, treading on his heel and sending him spinning. Brent tumbled beneath the hooves of the bull, which ran right over him, legs whirring, and kept going past the gate in the opposite direction. In a moment Darren was there, his son on the ground, gouts of blood pulsing from his mouth with every cough, his left foot twisted at entirely the wrong angle, his eye yellow with dust, staring up at Darren, pleading, too stunned to cry. In the distance, Mara, running down the track from the stationary car, her screams shrill and faint like some hysterical bird in a far off flaming tree, but coming, coming.
August 22, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Robbie Coburn was born in Melbourne and grew up on his family’s farm in Woodstock, Victoria. His poems have been published in various journals and magazines including Poetry, Cordite, The Canberra Times, Overland and Going Down Swinging, and his poems have been anthologized. His first collection, ‘Rain Season’, was published in 2013 and a second collection titled The Other Flesh is forthcoming. He lives in Melbourne.www.robbiecoburn.com.au
The Nurse
I often ask for the ending.
blood-soaked white sheets you wake to each night
beneath their betrayed minds abandoned to your care.
I am sorry the body does not decide when.
and that you see me in the hollowed faces and knife-dreams.
not in your duty, all empathy soon becoming misery —
late one night you called through our silence,
a strange voice that spoke as if crying.
your mother was in another town asleep,
your father away at war, further from you than hours could say.
all distance finds loneliness in time.
I often ask for the ending.
no way to reassemble this.
no handbook or tested process written into your tongue.
only this strange voice I still hear
the night shift dragging to dawn
the mercy you breathe.
The Colt’s Grave
I stand at the paddock’s edge
the colt’s grave still visible
where dad has heaped wet dirt.
the ill and lanky body had fallen
several paddocks away, clean wind across the property
drying blood caked to his flanks.
a heartbeat ticking
through the electric fence
that formed a barricade around his small corpse
my father looking on
beyond my interminable confusion
inside my body, something changing
some future trying to enter the landscape.
I walk across the dilapidated horse track
waiting for the rain again.
from the weatherboard house
my breath is carried,
the unmistakable sound of crying.
August 22, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Constitution
by Amelia Dale
Inken Publisch, 2017
ISBN 9780987142351
Reviewed by TONY MESSENGER
Ben Lerner in his 2016 essay “The Hatred of Poetry” reminds us of poetry’s activist, historical participation in politics; “Plato, in the most influential attack on poetry in recorded history, concluded that there was no place for poetry in the Republic because poets are rhetoricians who pass off imaginative projections as the truth and risk corrupting citizens of the just city, especially the impressionable youth.” Sydney poet, Amelia Dale, has taken Australian poetic political agitation to a new level, with her new book, Constitution.
If the etymology of ‘constitution’ is from the Latin ‘constitutio’; regulations and orders, then Amelia Dale has launched an attack on Australia’s political cornerstone; she has trashed the order, challenged the regulations, declinism is rife. As she says, “Being an ‘Australian poet’ with all that entails, it seems to me that the starting point has to be to try, as much as you can, to undo and damage ‘Australia,’ the nation state. This is not to say that I have any delusions that my book will enact in real terms political change. But I turned to the Constitution because to vandalise the Constitution seems like the sensible, the only thing to do.”
Constitution is constructed to mirror the format of the Australian Constitution, with all sections, chapters and parts replicating the format of the foundational document. Consisting of 128 parts catalogued into eight chapters, and with reference to the document establishing “Australia,” it provides an activity recommended for all readers. The “Covering Clauses” in the Constitution, become “So It Is” in Dale’s table of contents or “Overwhelmingly, I Focus on the Big Issues”. In the text itself, the alignment of the political rhetoric to established clauses uses a profundity of knowledge of the defining first national document. (p xi)
Constitution is presented as official Government paper, with the royal blue and coat of arms mimicking an Australian passport, the font copying official Government documents and the paper even similar to legal tomes found in Hansard or departmental publications.
Dale takes verbatim interviews with the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, on the current affairs program “The 7.30 Report”. Having edited thousands of words of transcripts she presents these back in poetic construct. The resulting book subverts the standard media text and political rhetoric;
Well everybody knows that their prosperity depends on the prosperity of their employer. And if they’re working for business, as most people are, they want to know. You see everything we’re doing is going. And I know you don’t want me to refer to the Labor party, but I do have to note that their policies will reduce investment. Well I assume that they – I assume – well leaving aside the – the bellicose metaphors…
As Dale explains “the text is edited transcriptions of interviews with Malcolm Turnbull from the 7:30 report. There are no other speakers. It is all Turnbull. I’ve deleted some words but all the text, the weird phrases, the odd metaphors are all his.” This editing, bubbling a lyrical poetic interpretation of rhetorical political language to the surface, removes the essayistic element, confounding the reader as any good politician would do.
Australia’s current political debate about “recognition”, and Aboriginal Australia’s rejection of “constitutional recognition” in favour of a voice in parliament and a treaty, makes this a timely release. With only 8 of the proposed 44 amendments being historically made to the Constitution, the majority being administrative alterations such as Senate amendments, State debt and retirement of judges, the “bellicose metaphor”, notations, footnotes, and references provide no clearer picture on the original document; the poetic construction mirrors reality.
In the poet’s hands the 1967 amendment to section 51 (xxvi) from “the people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws”, to “the people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws” becomes rationalised by “but most importantly by what other countries were doing.” (p 22) The superficiality of these amendments and the construction of a verbose document has been well researched and defiantly debunks “a lot of naval-gazing introspection.” (p vii)
Amelia Dale says “it’s the language of cold neoliberal power” and her masterful construction highlights the confusing, circular, meaningless political speak. Using the interviewer, Leigh Sales, as interlocutor, the condescending, demeaning speak becomes increasingly obvious as Amelia Dale, uses headlines such as, “Leigh, I think you’ll find”, “Well Leigh”, and “I’ll tell you something, Leigh”. The poet explaining “We can all speculate on his own reasons for needing the buffer, for needing an interlude. I just wanted to make the convolutions of his speech visible.”
Politically humourous, Dale’s book also uses visual and textual ploys to entice her readers. The title page lampoons publication details by changing standard text, such as copyright information, and rights reserved text to political quotes;
This is a Liberal National Government. So they’ve got to – so freedom is – the key point. I mean, it’s perhaps a bit simplistic but one way you could say it – you can describe it is that the, and I could make the same point about, we believe that, so – so that’s a fundamental thing. But there are some very key priorities, Leigh, tight now. One of them, principally, is we have to ensure that, how to we maintain that? Well there’s a – with, you know, many more, and that’s very exciting. But we need to be, be need to above all be more innovative.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull advises us, in the text, “The truth is that all of us are a bit liberal and a bit conservative in differing degrees.” Our writer disagrees: “Claims for a sensible or objective “centre,” the idea that the grown-up place to start is compromise makes me nauseous. Turnbull of course markets himself as a kind of socially “progressive” left-of-right figure. We’re supposed to be happy that he doesn’t commit Abbott-level macroaggressions and not be angry that his policies kill people.”
What is next for Amelia Dale ? “I’ve determined that all my poetry for the rest of my life will be inspired by, about and against white male politicians. I’m about to move to Shanghai, so Kevin Rudd might be an appropriate muse.”
As Amelia Dale has shown us, in the current political climate, there is room for poets, passing “off imaginative projections as the truth”, let’s hope the art can continue “corrupting citizens of the just city, especially the impressionable youth”.
CITATIONS AND NOTES
1. Lerner, Ben. The Hatred of Poetry (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016) p 25
2. private correspondence with the author is quoted in this review with the poet’s permission.
TONY MESSENGER is a Melbourne based blogger who focuses on translated literature and Australian poetry and poet interviews. He can be found at https://messybooker.wordpress.com/ and actively tweets using the handle @messy_tony
August 22, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
By Roxane Gay
Hachette
ISBN: 978-1-4721-5111-7
Review by HAYLEY SCRIVENOR
Roxane’s Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is an obsessive book in many ways. It’s an obsessiveness that characterises the relationship that I, and many women I know, have with our bodies. It’s also an obsessiveness familiar to anyone who has been stuck on a past trauma or who can’t stop thinking about someone who has hurt them. The memoir centres on Gay’s body. She notes that her BMI places her in the ‘super morbidly obese’ range (9). Gay tells us early on that this will not be a book about weight loss. Hers, she warns, ‘is not a story of triumph… this is not a book that will offer motivation’ (2). It’s worth noting that a visceral account of a violent assault is something the reader will encounter if they decide to proceed past this warning.
The furore around Mia Freedman’s disappointing and insulting written introduction to a podcast where she was to discuss this non-fiction book with Gay, and the subsequent flaccid apology, is well documented outside this review. A book like this, the reaction it gets, does not exist inside a vacuum, and nor do responses to it, including my own. Freedman’s tone-deaf response reminds us how often privilege is not thinking that you have privilege. In Freedman’s case, privilege was reading and professedly loving Gay’s book, a place where Gay shares her experience as a fat, queer, woman of colour, and still carelessly humiliating Gay in a professional setting.
Gay’s memoir centres on a particular instance of horrific abuse that has left an indelible mark on her entire life. She tells us:
One of my biggest fears is that I will never cut away all that scar tissue. One of my biggest hopes is that one day I will have cut away most of that scar tissue (275).
I ran my first creative writing subject at a university in the first half of this year. I wrote and presented the weekly lecture for third year creative writing students and ran the tutorials. It was daunting. Standing at the front of the classroom each week made me empathise with Gay who throws up before presenting her first composition class (97). Gay’s fear is tied to what her students will think of her appearance, and she is relieved to survive ‘fifty minutes of being fat in front of twenty-two eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds’ (98).
Through the weeks of the course I urged my students to strip and to cut until they were left with something that said what they are trying to say in as few words as possible. The only reason any of them so much as pretended to listen to me was my position at the front of the classroom—a question of context. I told my students that they don’t get the benefit of context when they submit their stories. Their readers will not lean in until they feel there are capable hands ready to catch them. Their opening sentences need to be able to cut through the thick tread of an off-road tyre, and every word should be carefully chosen. There were pages in Hunger that I initially itched to take to with a red pen—certain words and phrases are repeated in a way that I initially found grating. Gay tells us ‘During my first two years of high school, I ate and ate and ate and I became less than nothing’ (57). Less than two pages later, ‘I ate and ate and ate at school’ (59). She also tells us ‘I did not go hungry even as I hungered for so much’ (90) and then, on the very next page ‘…and though there were many days I was fuelled by ramen, still I did not go hungry while I hungered’ (91). The words ‘good Catholic girl’ or simply ‘good girl’ pop up at least a dozen times in the text at my count (37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 45, 46, 49, 53, 74, 78, 86).
And yet this is largely a story about the way that the mind turns on and returns to moments of trauma. It’s a question of context. With Gay we know we are in safe hands. Those hands lift us in and out of moments of incredible vulnerability on the author’s part. The repetition of certain words and ideas that I originally found discomforting are reflective of the very thought-processes I recognise in myself. Negative self-talk is inescapable, it whispers the same words over and again. Sentences like ‘I was a good Catholic girl’ have such a huge psychic importance, Gay cannot say them once and move on. When Gay tells us at a certain point of weight loss she feels an unstoppable urge to once again make her body ‘like a fortress, impermeable’ (14) we are told this more than once, because it is something Gay herself must live again and again. It’s a cycle of hope and failure that feels inescapable. When Gay says ‘I often refer to my twenties as the worst years of my life because that’s exactly what they were’ (105) we might think that ‘The twenties were the worst years of my life’ should suffice. But there are shades of difference between the two sentences. Instead of just asserting the fact, Gay refers explicitly to the things she has told people, a subtle nod to the fact that not everything we tell others is true. This is particularly significant when we consider that Gay has not been able to tell her family about something that marked her so indelibly.
Self-proclaimed ‘bad feminist’ Roxane Gay writes not only from her position as a woman of size (her term, 272) but as a woman of colour. The strength of this book is the access it provides to the internal monologue that we otherwise don’t get to hear. It is lived experience, writ large in all its glorious and obsessive, detail. Gay leaves space for the contradictory nature of our desires in her sentences that are subtle riffs on one another, and in her equivocations. She tells us that ‘What I know and what I feel are two very different things’ (15). Gay’s use of brackets is also notable as it allows us to hold two opposing thoughts in our heads, a kind of doublethink we all experience:
I (want to) believe my worth as a human being does not reside in my size or appearance (15).
And:
I had (and have?) this void, this cavern of loneliness inside me that I have spent my whole life trying to fill (44).
I saw Roxane Gay at her appearance at the University of New South Wales in the lead up to the Sydney Writers Festival. She is a funny and compelling interview subject. There are flashes of the same dry wit I saw on stage on display in her book.
Every time I watch a yoghurt commercial I think, My god, I want to be that happy. I really do (italics in original, 123).
And:
This is a popular notion, the idea that the fat among us are carrying a thin woman inside. Each time I see this particular commercial , I think, I ate that thin woman and she was delicious but unsatisfying’ (italics in original, 126).
Aside from these flashes though, the book can be tough going. The reader gets a sense of Gay’s hopelessness, of the difficulty of her position as someone who strongly believes that women are valuable beyond their bodies, while struggling to genuinely ‘feel’ feelings of positivity about her size in a society openly antagonistic to fat people. People feel entitled to comment on Gay’s body and even take food from her trolley (143), and there is the physical discomfort that is her constant companion in public space.
In the opening pages of the book, Gay tells us:
‘This is a book about my body, about my hunger and ultimately, this is a book about disappearing and being lost and wanting so very much, wanting to be seen and understood. This is a book about learning, however slowly, to allow myself to be seen and understood.’ (3)
This wording reminds me of the flow of Sara Ahmed’s sentences throughout her book Living a Feminist Life (2017):
Feminism is wherever feminism needs to be. Feminism needs to be everywhere (4).
In her book, Sara Ahmed highlights the connection between remembering and sharing experiences, and the work of feminism:
Feminist work is often memory work. We work to remember what sometimes we wish would or could just recede. While thinking about what it means to live a feminist life, I have been remembering; trying to put the pieces together. I have been putting a sponge to the past. When I think of my method, I think of a sponge: a material that can absorb things. We hold it out and wait to see what gets mopped up. It is not that memory work is necessarily about recalling what has been forgotten: rather, you allow a memory to become distinct, to acquire a certain crispness or even clarity; you can gather memories like things, so they become more than half glimpsed, so that we can see a fuller picture; so you can make sense of how different experiences connect (22).
The strength of Hunger is the way in which it allows the reader to connect their own experiences with those of Gay. It speaks to the way we all feel that we are being watched with derision by those around us (which is not to detract from the very real discrimination that Gay experiences). The surprise Gay feels to discover that she really is loved, that people see her positive qualities and her growing awareness of same remind the reader to be kinder, to others but mainly to themselves. We can always empathise with the essential disconnect between the idea that we are worthwhile and are loved, and the subsequent feelings that we deserve to be punished for the incredible hubris we display in simply living our lives in ways that strive to be free from abuse. With this book, Gay carves out space for the insurmountable thoughts and emotions she discusses, allowing us to see what she deals with on a daily basis. We get to see a fragility that throws Roxane’s strength into an even sharper relief. As Gay asserts ‘I am stronger than I am broken’ (35). It sounds like a reminder, both for Gay and for the reader. It’s a reminder that we are not our bodies, but we live in them, and we could all be much kinder to ourselves and others.
WORKS CITED
Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life, Durham, Duke University Press 2017.
HAYLEY SCRIVENOR is a writer and PhD candidate. She is the director of Wollongong Writers Festival, which runs in the final weekend of November every year.
June 22, 2017 / mascara / 0 Comments
Kate Murphy is a writer based in North America who writes fiction and poetry. She lives full-time in an RV with her husband and two dogs and is currently working on her first novel. While she loves being near her family, it has always been a dream of hers to travel the world and experience different cultures and ways of living in order to gain knowledge and experience that would be invaluable to her writing.
In Mourning
All the stars that fracture the sky –
they look like a splintered mirror
or pixelated static or
withered harebell scattered carelessly by god.
Is it the night that breaks me
or is it this sod, riddled with weeds
when he was four years old and
would bring me dandelion bouquets?
the prettiest I could find
for my pretty mama
The fate of that tender thing –
of gathered flowers and
untrained kisses.
I can almost see him waddling towards me
carrying a freshly picked bouquet
with stems smashed together and
a giddy smile.
But there are no more dandelions.
They’ve faded away;
shrunken petals dust the lawn like dying stars.
All I have left is a crescent moon.
A sliced, sharp white
forced to carve itself down
until it is nothing.