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"Women and Children" by Tony Birch cover photo

Pip Newling reviews Women and Children by Tony Birch

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays, First Nations.

Women & Children

By Tony Birch

UQP

ISBN: 9780702266270

Reviewed by PIP NEWLING

 

Tony Birch holds a rare place in Australian literature – a male writer focused on telling domestic and working class stories. His pages shimmer with the dirt of hard work, difficult choices, and  everyday of life. The joys in reading his stories are intimate and quiet: a secretive embrace, a hand reaching to another, a warm blanket, a story, a memory shared. As simple as his narratives may appear though, the lives of Birch’s characters are rich and their journeys complex. Aboriginality and the intergenerational impacts, including violence, of the colonial project surface in all his work, exploring questions of belonging, of inescapable difference, of class, of gender and of how racism, sexism, disrespect, judgement and exclusion shape people. Women & Children though, delivers a key change to his previous stories and novels. While no different in its motifs and themes, here there is a subtle and soft joy, a quiet heartfelt hope lifting through the journeys of the two children.

The novel tells the story of Joe and Ruby Cluny, a brother and sister, their mother, Marion and aunt Oona, and their grandfather Charlie, a close-knit group. It is mid-1960s inner suburban Naarm. Joe is 11 years old and Ruby, 13 years. Birch reveals their world through the Sister Mary’s of the Catholic school that Ruby and Joe attend. The hierarchical authoritarian nature of the school flows into the streets of the surrounding suburb, a reputation for ‘hard men’, and for violence both on the street and behind closed doors.

Joe sees the world with a humane and gentle heart, a rare and precious kid, and one who is appreciated and understood intimately by both his mother and grandfather. The rest of the community are uncertain how to respond to him, his questions, his perspective, or the birthmark on his face, a legacy of his Aboriginal ancestry. At school, the nuns always call him out in class as a dreamer, a disruptor, as a low achiever and Joe believes their hellfire and brimstone stories. They have him convinced he is un-save-able. He lives with a very real fear of eternal Hell.

His sister, Ruby, is more socially mature, more attuned to the machinations of the world. She has developed a strategy. She has witnessed the pain and the hurt the nuns cause other children and has realised that if she behaves, and is an excellent student, it will be to her benefit. She understands from a young age how to get ahead without compromising her own values.

Marion works at a dry cleaners, a job she has held since she was 16 years and has brought the children up on her own. She has provided a calm and loving home for her children. Marion’s father, Charlie, has just retired from a council street sweeping job he held for over thirty years. ‘Char’, as Joe calls Charlie, lives by himself, after his wife, Ada, died 5 years ago. Without Ada to stop him, Charlie is slowly bringing his ‘collectables’ (p50), street-found riches – bottles, books, records, marbles, and boxes of other people’s lost photographs – into the house from the large hoard he maintains in the backyard.

Joe and Charlie’s relationship is one of the delights of this novel. Charlie listens to and discusses Joe’s questions; he doesn’t steer away from the open-hearted curiosity that rests deep in Joe. He openly loves the boy and Joe shines under his gaze. Ranji, a scrap metal and junk merchant and one of Charlie’s oldest friends, provides a foil for Charlie. They are both gentle respectful men of the community – Ranji with his prayers and Charlie with his belief in the good of the world. Both have stories of faith and fathers to tell each other.

Oona, Marion’s younger sister and beloved aunt of Ruby and Joe, is in an abusive relationship with Ray Lomax, an entrepreneurial electric goods salesman.

While Ruby has explained to Joe that he must never mention the bruises on other children’s bodies when they go to the local swimming pool, neither Ruby nor Joe have ever witnessed violence in their home. Birch conveys the intimacy of their shock, first for Joe when Oona turns up to Marion’s seeking help and then for Ruby, when she visits Oona unannounced. From the doorway of Oona’s flat, Ruby sees Oona’s beaten face and has an uncontrollable physical reaction. These scenes are crafted carefully and are as shocking for the reader as for the characters. Birch is clear-eyed about the impacts of violence. He knows that violence should always be shocking, and he tells it true.

Marion and Charlie are both devastated by the assaults on Oona but for different reasons. Marion is desperate and angry. At herself. At all the men in her life who choose not to assist Oona. Marion knows they see the unrelenting beatings as something private that Oona has signed up for. She feels the powerlessness, silence and shame that frequently come with family and domestic violence. Silence is a key theme in the novel. When Charlie asks Marion when Ray started to assault Oona, Marion tells him of how his daughter changed once the couple moved in together.

‘Oona never said a word to me, but I knew. Not so much the bruises. She did a reasonable job of hiding them. It was her mood.’
‘How so?’ Charlie asked. ‘I didn’t notice any change in her.’
‘Sorry to tell you this, Dad. But men never do. She went so quiet. Lost her voice.’
(p200)

When Charlie says he knew nothing. Marion counters gently.

‘Maybe you did know, Dad? I think we all know. The biggest secrets on these streets are the ones that we share, but somehow find ways to ignore. And to pretend… all along I knew I was lying to myself. I think we always know, Dad.’
(p200)

Charlie feels he has let Oona down, and that he is a foolish old man. He feels he needs to protect his child but is bewildered because he can’t. He also worries – remains guilty – about a time when, he tells Marion, ‘I was like him. Almost.’ (p172): a time before Marion was born when he and Ada argued, and his anger overwhelmed him.

‘In that moment,’ Charlie said, ‘I knew what my father would have done… He would have put that woman in her place and kept her there… All of them years, when I was a boy cowering in my bed, hearing him beat my mum, although I didn’t know it at the time, he’d been teaching me how to be a man.’
(p174)

There are stories within stories in this novel – parables of sorts. One of Charlie’s collections is a jar of glass marbles. He tells Marion of their significance in a wonderfully tender scene:

‘Mum took one in her hand and explained to me that there was life inside. A world in miniature. All I had to do was look closely and I would see it. Each marble had its own story and its own people. She told me these stories for days.’
(p197)

Charlie reflects further: ‘A simple act from my mother. It taught me such a lesson… ‘Care.’ Charlie smiled. ‘It costs nothing.’ (p199)

Early in the novel, Joe asks Charlie what he could do for work when he is older and is surprised when Charlie suggests that Joe could ‘become a writer’. (p62) Joe had no idea that being a writer could be a job and Charlie goes on to tell him that, ‘There are stories about this life … that will one day need to be told.’ (p62)

Over the course of the story, Joe learns an intimate truth. Through Charlie’s gentle guidance and his mother’s defiance – on Joe’s behalf – he comes to understand that his way of seeing and being, the way he feels the world, is a decent and humane perspective and that stories are inherently valuable. Equally, Ruby’s self-directed strategy is successful. She wins the holiday, and she realises her confidence about her own academic and social opportunity is sound. She knows what she wants, and she can see how to achieve it. She stands up to the boys at the pool, and coaxes Oona out of her flat. Her trust and confidence in herself, in her physicality and her value, grows.

Ruby and Joe may still be branded by society as different, lesser, working class, but they each come to see pathways for themselves beyond the kitchen tables, back lanes, and violent men. They are destined for other futures. For Charlie, the ‘good man’ (p174), the dilemma isn’t resolved. Is the good man the one who turns away from violence? If so, what good is he when violence turns up on the doorstep? Charlie has to re-negotiate his value with himself. Marion’s care and love are never diminished, and she comes to realise she has some control, can exert some power.

Women & Children reveals that Birch – who is also a son, father, brother, grandfather – has found hope for the future. For Birch, it is possible to break the hand-me-down pattern of violence, traits and class, but to do so requires women and children be supported. And for men to care.

Dr PIP  NEWLING reads and writes on unceded Dharawahl Country. She has published memoir and essays, including Knockabout Girl (Harper Collins, 2007).
Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

Samuel Cox reviews Murnane by Emmett Stinson

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Murnane

by Emmett Stinson

Melbourne University Publishing

ISBN: 9780522879469

Reviewed by SAMUEL COX

 

Emmett Stinson’s Murnane offers a critical and enlightening assessment of the Gerald
Murnane’s four late fictions, and through these incredibly self-reflexive works, a reading of
the eponymous author’s entire oeuvre. Stinson’s superb introduction gives way to chapter-
length considerations of Barley Patch (2009), A History of Books (2010), A Million Windows(2014)
and Border Districts (2017), before concluding with an assessment of Murnane’s ‘late style’.
The study confirms this late style is intensely introspective and genre-bending –
somewhere between novel, memoir and essay – as Murnane seeks to retrospectively reform
and recontextualise his entire body of work.

If this then provides a faint outline of Stinson’s method and the briefest summary of his
results, I would like to focus on pursuing what I see as the two most intriguing and important
lines of investigation that underly Stinson’s study and make it utterly compelling: his
exploration of the entirely ‘singular’ phenomenon that is Murnane, and, deeply interrelated,
his recurring pursuit of the enigma that is the author’s lack of widespread recognition in the
country of his birth.

I’ll begin with the second question, as it appears, initially at least, the more straightforward to
answer. Whilst noting Murnane’s unfashionable peculiarities, which form the bones of this
study, Stinson rightly invokes Patrick White’s criticism of Australia’s aesthetic inclination
towards ‘the dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism’ (qtd. in Stinson 15). From
the Ern Malley affair, through to the harsh local critiques of White’s early works, and similar
treatment that influenced Randolph Stow’s decision to leave the country, the cultural
philistinism of settler-colonial Australia has long cast a dark shadow over any emergent local
avant-garde. Overall, literary modernism in Australia remains a critical frame that, if not
abhorred, then has largely been ignored.

An intriguing counterpoint to Murnane is David Malouf, a writer of a similar era who achieved
widespread literary fame and popularity. If we admit that Malouf’s use of modernist techniques
has a lighter and less experimental (and thus more palatable) touch, then we can also see that to
answer this question, we must return to the first line of investigation I proposed and seek out a
deeper exploration of what Stinson repeatedly refers to as Murnane’s ‘idiosyncratic’ and ‘singular’
nature. Brilliantly characterising Murnane as ‘a homemade avant-garde of one’ (103), Stinson
reveals the unique breadth of literary influences on Murnane’s work, but it is the unique
‘homemade’ peculiarities that appear essential to understanding the riddle that is Gerald Murnane.

Stinson establishes that it is precisely Murnane’s distance – not just today but across his
career – from intellectual trends, his singular even perverse pursuits, which have opened him
to criticism; however, as his body of work has grown, these traits have increasingly set him
apart as his obsessive pursuits have made him an original, adding a unique chapter to the
literary explorations of the human condition.

It should be noted that, on the surface, many of Murnane’s concerns appear to align with the
well-established conventions of literature. J.M. Coetzee has described Murnane as a ‘radical
idealist’ and his relentless probing into the power and truth of inner imaginative worlds is not,
in and of itself, unique. Indeed, Murnane’s insistent interest in the imaginative life is in many
ways one of the timeless pursuits of art and literature; rather, it is the inimitable
idiosyncrasies of Murnane that make him utterly unique. What rises irrepressibly from
Stinson’s work is the deeply paradoxical elements that shape Murnane and fuel his fiction.

Murnane is a novelist who ‘never tried to write fiction’ (21); an avant-garde
modernist who has barely left his own state, let alone the country; a working-class writer who
persistently aestheticises reality; an author whose embrace of the ordinary often leads the
reader into sensing the mystical qualities of the extraordinary; an experimental author who is
a stickler for ‘traditional grammar’ (qtd. in Stinson 33). He is a writer who roundly criticises
literary criticism and yet Stinson notes that ‘he is technically the first author of a critical work
about the complete oeuvre of Murnane’ (16). Despite his deeply introspective explorations,
and his endless returning to the same images, scenes and themes, the authorial self remains
remote and inaccessible for Murnane. Stinson isolates a moment at the conclusion of
Murnane’s A Million Windows that represents this truth when the narrator glances up at the
window of a writer: ‘I looked up and saw… a window and behind it a drawn blind. In short, I
learned nothing’ (qtd. in Stinson 67).

This moment is echoed in the 2019 interview with Stinson that is included as something of an
afterword. Murnane retells how he became convinced that a filmmaker who had bought the
rights to Inland didn’t understand the book, so he set out to explain it: three quarters of his
way down the page he realised that even he ‘wasn’t on the right track’ admitting that, ‘I don’t
think I even know what it’s about’ (qtd. in Stinson 116). It is not everyone who is going to
read a Murnane book and enjoy it. Certainly, many in Australia weren’t ready when he started
his career. Indeed, as Stinson notes, some have even been repulsed by his interest in the
obsessions and perversions of lonely, monastic men. His work pursues a
relentless, at times forensic examination of the self through writing, even as he recurringly
acknowledges that this is in part a futile exercise: the writing self is multitudinous; both true
and false.

A casual reader who might have only encountered Murnane’s older works, particularly his
most well-known and influential work, The Plains, might question Stinson’s decision to focus
on his late career. It could even be considered – unsurprisingly, given Stinson’s approach is
deeply informed by the author’s work – something of a Murnanian conceit. However, what
uniquely emerges in Stinson’s study is how his late career works create a mirage-like
refraction of his early career works that radically reframes them. For example, aspects of The
Plains, like the filmmaker’s literary patron and its isolated ‘secular monastery’ of a manor
(Stinson 58), become linked to longstanding and recurring concerns of Murnane’s fiction.
Finally, Stinson presents a detailed argument that Murnane’s final novel, Border Districts,
reconstructs The Plains as it was originally intended – as part of a dyad or textual diptych.
New readings of The Plains are offered and whether they are superior appears beside the
point. Instead, Stinson forces us to reconsider The Plains, and indeed Murnane’s entire
oeuvre, through what he terms the ‘retrospective intention’ of Murnane’s late career works, as
the aging author attempts the daunting task of shaping his disparate body of work into the
‘seeming coherence’ of an ‘aesthetic totality’ (81). If, in reality, this totality ultimately lies
always just out of reach, like the distant horizon of the plains, then Stinson shows us that its
simulacrum is given form by its continual refraction throughout Murnane’s fiction.

We inevitably return to the lingering question of his unsure place within the literary
canon of this country. In Nicholas Birns estimation he is the ‘most Australian of writers’ and
‘the least Australian of writers’ (qtd. in Stinson 90). This is a man who has barely left the
state of Victoria, is obsessed with horse racing and currently lives in the small rural town of
Goroke in the Wimmera, Victoria. As J.M. Coetzee has noted, the underlying dialectics of
Murnane’s narrators can be traced back to the lingering imprint of Australian Irish
Catholicism. Many of the landscape images that recur across his fiction are characteristically
Australian in nature. And yet, the authors he is in conversation with not only remain classed
as ‘difficult’ by most Australian readers, but they are also distant from these shores in both
space, and, increasingly, time – Joyce, Rilke, Proust, Emily Bronte, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo
Calvino, Henry James, are a just a few that Stinson recognises.

Murnane’s long and persistent struggles with publication and readership over his career, pose
big questions over whether we can accept and support challenging and self-critical art in this
country, even when it is unfashionable. A further problematic is that it is not just new and
emerging voices who struggle for readership and attention – Australian literature as a broad
category remains criminally underread and understudied. As Ivor Indyk, Murnane’s editor at
Giramondo, has noted, ‘most of our literary tradition is out of print, undertaught and largely
unknown to the Australian public.’ It was Giramondo’s unwavering support of Murnane that
brought him out of his self-imposed retirement and enabled these four late career novels to
emerge in their desired form. If Giramondo stands out like a beacon in an Australian literary
landscape that has lost some of its lustre, then so too does Gerald Murnane – the ‘homemade
avant-garde of one’ who, after years of persistence in the wilderness, is enjoying a well-
deserved late career resurgence.

Stinson’s treatment is deeply sympathetic and yet even this importantly represents the current
moment that seemingly demands a revaluation of Murnane’s work. His claim that Murnane is
‘the most original and most significant Australian author of the last fifty years’ (104) is bold,
but international acclaim and murmurings of Nobel Prize nominations surely mean even local
critics cannot deny that Murnane now must have a place in the conversation. For those
seeking an entry point into the complexities of Murnane and his fiction, Emmett Stinson’s
Murnane presents the clear place to start.

 

SAMUEL COX teaches Australian literature at the University of Adelaide. His work has been published in JASAL, The Saltbush Review, Westerly, ALS, Motifs, SWAMP and selected for Raining Poetry in Adelaide. In 2022, he received the ASAL A.D. Hope Prize. He was awarded the Heather Kerr Prize, and was a joint winner of Australian Literary Studies PhD Essay Prize with Evelyn Araluen.

"H.D. Hilda Doolittle" by Lara Vetter cover photo

Naomi Milthorpe reviews H.D. Hilda Doolittle by Lara Vetter

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays.


H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

by Lara Vetter

Reaktion Books

ISBN:9781789147599

Reviewed by NAOMI MILTHORPE

 

It may say more about my own tastes than about the culture more broadly, but most of my reading in the past months has been about misunderstood and multifaceted women. Lara Vetter’s slim critical life of the modernist poet H.D. has slid snugly between Anna Funder’s ponderous counterfiction Wifedom (2023), Katharine M. Briggs’s neglected 1963 witchy Scots fairy tale, Kate Crackernuts, and Nancy Mitford’s 1952 fizzing biography of Louis XV’s official mistress, Madame de Pompadour. It’s important to state at the outset that Vetter’s book is fundamentally unlike any of these books – neither ponderous nor witchy nor particularly fizzing. Yet in focusing on a woman who thrived exploring experimental modes of writing and relished occupying new forms of identity and relationship, it offers an engrossing contrast to the picture these other books offer, of the way history, circumstance, and choice, impact upon women’s lives. H.D. has been taken as a biographical subject by a number of earlier writers, including most recently Francesca Wade in her excellent 2021 group biography Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars. As Wade writes, ‘A biography offers one version of a life, and H.D. lived several.’(1) In living several ‘lives’ – or as Lara Vetter suggests, in living a life that flourished through contradiction and multiplicity – H.D. is also a fascinating subject for readers interested in what it takes to live, thrive, and create through cataclysmic social and political change.

She was born Hilda Doolittle in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1886, the daughter of Charles, an astronomy professor and Helen, a musician and painter. Hilda was the only daughter of six children. The Doolittles were members of the Moravian church, an evangelical German Christian sect that focused on community, family, and ritual, including a strong devotion to music. H.D.’s early life – portrayed by her in autobiographical novels like HERmione, written in the late twenties but published in 1981 – was bounded by both the pleasures and frustrations of this life. As a scientist her father encouraged his children to closely observe nature in their rambling garden and the surrounding forest. Hilda’s elder brother Eric also taught astronomy and tutored his siblings in botany and ecology, which Hilda was fascinated by: ‘There were things under things, as well as things inside things.’(2) Helen passed on her skills in music and the arts, with Hilda playing piano and participating in musicals and Shakespeare performances. Hilda taught herself ancient Greek; throughout her life she remained deeply inspired by Greek history and myth. Hilda enrolled in Bryn Mawr College, studying the classics, and meeting Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams along the way, but dropped out after three semesters to focus on her writing.

It was meeting the poet Ezra Pound, and the mystic and writer Frances Gregg – both fellow Pennsylvanians – that caused the first cataclysm of her early life. The three were caught in a tumultuous love triangle for several years. Pound called Hilda ‘Dryad’, and for him, she was a muse that haunted his early poems. Pound and Hilda became engaged and then broke it off. But the relationship with Frances Gregg was the more electrifying. Both Hilda and Gregg viewed sexuality and gender as non-binary, and both (at this time) were polyamorous. Pound went to Europe in 1908, and Hilda and Gregg followed in the summer of 1911. Although the romance ended (Gregg returned to the U.S. and married, a profound betrayal for Hilda), Pound and Hilda would stay in Europe for good, entangled in each other’s lives and writing until well into the thirties.

How Hilda became H.D. is literary legend, sketched by H.D.’s. earlier biographer Barbara Guest: Hilda, sitting with Pound in the tea room of the British Museum in 1912, showed him some poems. ‘But Dryad, this is poetry.’ Then, in his manner, he made some adjustments, and signed them off for her, scrawling H.D., Imagiste, at the bottom of the pages and posting them to Harriet Monroe at the then newly-established magazine, Poetry. (3) These poems – ‘Hermes of the Ways’, ‘Epigram’, and ‘Priapus’ – were published in January 1913 and Hilda, now H.D., became the figurehead for what Pound hoped would become a revolutionary literary movement, Imagism. He would expound these theories in one of his early aesthetic manifestos, ‘A Few Don’ts By An Imagiste’, as well as in some now-much-anthologized poems like ‘In a Station of the Metro’. H.D.’s husband Richard Aldington suggested, though, that Pound’s theories were ‘based on H.D.’s practice’ (4). While the literary notice was gratifying, H.D. was soon embarrassed by the ‘Imagiste’ moniker and asked Monroe to remove it from any subsequent poems she published. In 1916 her first collection, Sea Garden, was published, to both acclaim and puzzlement – especially over gender identity, for some reviewers veiled by those obscure initials. Throughout her life, H.D. would experiment with multiple nom-de-plumes, relishing in the simultaneous effacement and expansion of identity they offered.

It is still often for these early poems that H.D. is best known – poems like ‘Oread’, ‘Sea Garden’, and ‘Sea Rose’. The adjective ‘crystalline’, was attached to her poetry so doggedly that she began to resent it, especially given her later experiments with long form verse and prose. But as Vetter ably argues, reading H.D. only for the poems published in the 1910s risks understanding only a fraction of her life and writing, which were deeply intertwined and profoundly multifaceted. Vetter sees her as dramatically inconsistent, ‘swing[ing] wildly between poles’ of personality according to who is giving the account of her (5). But consistency of self is only a problem for the biographer, not for the liver of the life (as many of H.D.’s biographers, Vetter included, are well aware). As Vetter writes, ‘Work did not reflect life. Rather, she wrote her life into existence. She was ever-mindful that it is narratives that construct identity, and not the other way around.’(6) For H.D., who variously embraced and was challenged by the profound changes witnessed in the 20th century (cinema, psychoanalysis, total war, gender fluidity and sexual experimentation), the capacity to lose an identity, as she wrote in her 1928 poem ‘Narthex’, was ‘a gift’(7).

Vetter has previously published extensive scholarship on H.D.’s later work, especially her prose. As Vetter shows, any account of H.D.’s long and varied life needs to carefully weigh Imagism, which she left behind in the twenties, with her other creative endeavours and personal milestones. These include her writing for and about film, pursued in the pages of the landmark film journal Close Up but also through film-making such as in the avant-garde feature Borderline (1930) in which she acted opposite Paul Robeson; book length poems such as Trilogy, written in response to World War Two (published between 1942 and 1946), and Helen in Egypt (1961); her writing on Shakespeare (By Avon River, 1949) and Freud, with whom she entered analysis in 1931 (Tribute to Freud, 1954); and her autobiographical novels, such as Paint it Today, Asphodel, HERmione, and Bid Me to Live. Many of these novels – besides Bid Me to Live – remained unpublished in H.D.’s lifetime, which explains why her reputation was, for so long, based on the early poetry. But the novels provide rich evidence for her life, relationships, sexuality, and literary development; they also emphasize, as Vetter argues, ‘the self as object of narration’(8).

In her personal life – which H.D. viewed as a source of art – she was similarly uninterested in conventionality as it was defined in the early 20th century. Though married to, and living with, Aldington throughout the twenties, she pursued other romantic and sexual relationships with both men and women. Her daughter, Perdita, was the child of a relationship with Cecil Gray, a Scottish composer whom H.D. lived with in Cornwall in 1918, though Aldington was named on the birth certificate. But neither of these men were Perdita’s primary carer. Though she initially thought she might raise her daughter alone, at the end of the Great War Hilda met and began a relationship with the heiress and writer Bryher (Winifed Ellerman), who became her lifelong partner. Bryher and Hilda were, as Perdita later wrote, her two mothers (Vetter suggests Bryher may today likely have identified as transgender, having in 1919 been reassured by the sexologist Havelock Ellis that ‘she was only a girl by accident’(9)). The relationship was romantically and creatively nourishing – Bryher shared H.D.’s enthusiasm for film and travel – and, thanks to Bryher’s immense wealth, protected H.D. from the need to write for commercial reasons.

Anna Funder’s Wifedom is focused on the traps which heterosexual marriage, home keeping, and motherhood seem to lay for many, especially low-income women. In comparison, Vetter’s study shows the relative freedom H.D. enjoyed in pursuit of love and art. Where Funder portrays Eileen Orwell chained to the home, mucking out blocked toilets and making endless rounds of tea, devoted in unpaid servitude to the project of George Orwell’s writing, from which she was studiously erased, Vetter shows H.D. able to combine parenting, travelling, loving, and learning, with writing. Hilda was not bogged down in wifedom (neither, I should add, was Bryher, though both according to Perdita, were devoted parents). H.D.’s adherence to the first principle of art = life meant that she devoted her whole existence to creative and personal liberty. Of course, Bryher’s independent wealth, and the freedom of movement permitted to their white bodies, enabled their living largely unthreatened by the injustice and oppression central to, and ongoing beyond, the 20th century.

Part of why H.D. was forgotten by the academy following her death in the 1960s may have been her unclassifiability. By the end of her career, she could no longer be called simply an ‘Imagist’. But part of the reason she could be recovered by feminist researchers in the 70s and 80s was because she kept so much of her unpublished writing, and so many of her letters and notebooks. This is another point of comparison with Eileen Orwell, whose archival existence is, comparatively, slim. H.D. is a creation of paper, self-fashioned by her own autobiographical writing, and by her early deposit of a ‘shelf’ of manuscript papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library. Writing was H.D.’s motivation for living, and living fuelled her writing. As the poet Robert Duncan wrote in his monumental work, The H.D. Book, ‘she took whatever she could, whatever hint of person or design, colour or line, over into her “work”.'(10) It is fortunate that ongoing editing and publication since the 1980s by the publisher New Directions has made so much of her writing accessible to the general reader.

This ‘Critical Life’ of H.D. is necessarily an introductory one, especially given the wealth of published and unpublished material to cover. Vetter states from the outset that this book is intended for those mostly unfamiliar with H.D.’s life. Vetter manages the breadth and depth of materials with deftness, moving between archival and literary evidence to create a portrait of an individual who was totally unique but not at all one-dimensional. It is worth the attention for those who are interested in understanding this fascinating poet and her devotion to art.

Cited
1. Francesca Wade, Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (Faber, 2020), p.38.
H.D., Tribute to Freud (Carcanet Press, 1997), p.21
2. Barbara Guest, Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and her World (Doubleday, 1984).
3. Letter from Richard Aldington to Hilda Doolittle, 20 March 1929, in Lara Vetter, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), p.48.
4. Vetter, p.14.
5. Vetter, p.12.
6. Quoted in Vetter, p.15.
7. Vetter, p.101.
8. Quoted in Vetter, p.80.
9. Robert Duncan, The H.D. Book (University of California Press, 2011), p.242.
 
NAOMI MILTHORPE is an Associate Professor in English at the School of Humanities, the University of Tasmania. Her research interests centre on modernist, interwar and mid-century British literary culture, including most particularly the works of Evelyn Waugh. Naomi is currently completing a scholarly edition of Waugh’s 1932 novel Black Mischief, volume 3 of Oxford University Press’s Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh.

"Slipstream" by Catherine Cole cover photo

Caroline van de Pol reviews Slipstream by Catherine Cole

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Caroline van de Pol reviews Slipstream by Catherine Cole

Slipstream

By Catherine Cole

Valley Press

ISBN: 9781915606341

Reviewed by CAROLINE VAN DE POL

As an admirer of Catherine Cole’s earlier novels, short story collections and memoir such as Sleep, Seabirds Crying in the Harbour Dark and The Poet Who Forgot, I awaited the publication of her new book, Slipstream: On Memory and Migration, with great anticipation. I was not disappointed. The book’s subject matter of memory and migration had its appeal for me as the daughter of an Irish immigrant and Australian mother.

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Maja Rose

Written by mascara on . Posted in Flash Fiction.

Maja Rose has returned to her hometown of lutruwita (Tasmania) having lived in London, Brighton, Melbourne, and Sydney. She completed a BA in English Lit/Media (Hons) at La Trobe University, and a Creative Writing residential summer at Oxford University. She has a background in screen production and currently works in the library at Risdon Prison.

 

 

 

Movement

My father, Otto, is gutting fish on a makeshift table in the backyard, a thick piece of wood with a surface of dusty splinters laid out on some iron contraption that in hindsight, maybe he keeps just for this.

Skrrth, skrrth.

The edge of his knife flicks scales off the plump bodies in easy, smooth movements of his nut-brown, knobbled wrist. Silver flecks winnow up into the air, caught for a moment by the wind before they fall into the grass. Tiny mirrors, reflecting nothing.

“Have you ever seen a squid beak?” he asks me.

He caught all yellowfin mullet, one calamari squid. I took a photo of the bucket, a mass of shining light in blue plastic before he turned the hose on them and the blood I hadn’t been able to see rose up from the bottom and turned them all muddy.

“I don’t think so,” I say, and come to stand beside him.

He rummages through the squid’s face. An eyeball pops out, and I have to look away before I gag.
Then he pulls out the beak, a little knot of black.

“See?” he says, making it open and close. “Just like a parrot.”
*
My other father, biodad, sends me a message on Whatsapp.

I’m about to board the plane now, darling. I’ll call you when I land in Paris, if you’re still awake.
Sometimes I wonder how we came to this gentle, easy way of talking. There’s a part of me that thinks it’s because I stopped caring. I no longer have expectations, so he can no longer let me down.

The day I saw him in Bangkok and realised that, in 25 years, I had never spent a night alone with him, I came to an understanding.

This is just a man. A man who you are only connected to through blood and semen. What a strange thing. What a pointless reason to be in this airbnb together.

But I don’t feel anger anymore. I don’t think.

Is it worse to feel nothing?

When I see that he’s landed, I don’t open the message. I’ll wait until later. It’s too early to call.

*

When I was very young, a year into Otto’s arrival into my life, we made up a game together. A friend had made a chaircover out of knitted soft toys, little clowns and dolls and bears that held you up as you curled tight and read a book (I had just learned how to read).

On the left arm, there was a tiny little postman, with a hat that you could remove, and a red satchel with a bone button that you could flick open with one finger. The satchel was very small, but big enough to hold a note, if you folded it up very tight.

The postman would carry notes between Otto and I, and I think I believed that the postman was also, perhaps, a fairy. Overcomplicating things for the sake of magic was a common pastime of mine.

Would you like a cup of tea? Otto’s note might say.
Can I call you dad? said mine.

*
I had an argument with dad after I first flew home from living overseas. My grandmother—biodad’s mum—had just died, and I’d scattered her ashes with my cousins on the river. Mum was in a new relationship for the first time in years, and it made me feel uneasy, unsure for the first time where I stood in my relationship to her. I felt like a kid, even though I was 29.

My grandmother dying was a reminder that I was on the outside of that side of the family, both because of my dad’s actions and my own. I had put up boundaries in my teenage years to stop myself from hurting, but it had kept me from connecting with the rest of the family, too. I felt guilty about having been away while she was dying, and guilty about having been away from everyone for longer than the three years in Thailand would account for.

*
Dad has had another daughter. I think she’s so beautiful, the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen. I was on the beach on Koh Kradan when he called to tell me.

On the other side of the world, the sky was orange and pink with sunset, and I had taken a photo a few minutes before he called. I’d like to think it was taken as she emerged into the world, and I had felt it and knew I should document it.

When I come back home, dad has too many glasses of red wine and tells me I don’t love him, or any of my family, because otherwise I never would have left.

“Say goodnight,” dad says to my sister, waving her chubby little hand at me. “Say goodnight to your big sister; she’s going to leave you again. And this time she isn’t coming back.”
*
Biodad told me that he’d wanted to marry my mum when he found out she was pregnant with me. He spun a fantasy that I desperately wanted to believe.

When I told mum, stars in my eyes, eighteen and stupid, she laughed so hard she fell to her knees.
“Oh really?” she said, still wheezing on the floor. “And when was he going to propose? Before or after he recorded our phone conversations to give to his lawyer?”
*
Dad holds the squid beak in his hand, clicks and clacks it shut as if it’s speaking. My sister runs up on steady legs, demands to see. Dad smiles at me, sunshine in his leathery face.

“Can you pick her up?” he asks me. “My hands are dirty.”

We stand together, all three of us, the fruit trees’ heavy perfume mixing with the tinny stink of fish guts. Dad nudges me, winks as he makes the squid beak clack in my sister’s face.

I wonder what he would say if I told him I was thinking of moving away again.

Sevana Ohandjanian

Written by mascara on . Posted in Fiction.

Sevana Ohandjanian is a writer, translator and film programmer of Armenian descent, living and writing on Wallumedegal land. Her work can be found in Meanjin, Chogwa, The Suburban Review, Shabby Doll House, The Wrong Quarterly, Tincture, SBS and more. Her unpublished manuscript Black Grass was shortlisted for the 2017 Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Prize. Find her online @ichbinsev.

 
 
 

DRIP

The drip started when I came back. Or maybe it had always been there and I just hadn’t seen it. Felt it. You’re always leaking, faulty, dispensing parts of yourself unknowingly. The drip begins and you simply continue. There’s no before or after timestamp. A faucet with the slightest leak, a midnight droplet that gathers on the showerhead and plops down with its weight, a drop in the ocean. But the ocean is a sponge and it soaks everything in. My drip is expelled from what it feeds on.

I wanted her to have become ugly. But she looks the same. Maybe I can’t see her any other way. Standing at the back of an Armenian Saturday school classroom, I watch the children clamouring to get her attention. Miss Lily! Miss Lily! Every child is a remodelling of prepubescent me, enamoured.

When Lily sees me, blood flushes my face, my breath caught. Caught like a 10-year-old being told for the first time, “You’re my best friend”; caught like a girl found out. She smiles, approaches.

She stands beside me during the principal’s announcements. Leans towards me to speak softly.

“It’s been a long time, Eva. Are you married yet?”

“No? I’m sorry. What?”

“I’m engaged.”

“Congratulations?”

“Thanks.” Her bunny rabbit teeth briefly appear when she smiles at me. “I haven’t seen you around here in a long time.”

“I was living in London for a while.”

“I know, I saw the photos on Insta. How come you’re here though? I didn’t think you kept in touch with anyone from school.”

“I’m just doing a favour for one of mum’s friends. They said they needed another teacher.”

“Yeah, Ani had to quit. Her baby’s due in a couple of months.”

“Sure. Right. Then I’m here to replace Ani.”

“Are you back in the suburbs then? With your mum?”

“Yeah. You know, trying to take care of her.”

“And you’re not engaged?”

“No.”

“In a relationship?”

“Nope.”

“Dating any boys?”

“That’s also a no.”

I had arrived airtight, the excommunicated package returned to sender, not a leak to stain the exterior of me. But questions kick my sides into dents. I’m devoid of meaning in this place. Yet I can’t resist the urge to ask.

“So, who are you marrying?”

“You know him actually! He was a year above us–”

The principal calls to me: “Eva, we’re ready to start, let me show you where your classroom is.”

I’m tasked with overlooking the work of three pre-teen girls in the back of a classroom, minimal responsibility while an experienced teacher manages older students emanating static exam preparation energy. The room coils with summer heat, brick-encased sweat, blinding yellow sun glow. The girls kick their feet and rapid-fire questions. We’ve never seen you before Miss, where are you from Miss, how come we don’t know you Miss, did you come to this school too when you were learning Armenian, Miss?

The heat brings the warm sweat drip. Frizzed ends of hair damp at the nape, elbow crease droplet a wet snake. Soles melting into asphalt, fire hits hot, until it swallows feet and turns into statue grey stone. I’m pebble-footed, fog-headed, standing in front of these children, teaching them words I’d forgotten.

Afterwards in the parking lot, my car idles as I avoid the touch of molten metal fixtures against bare flesh. An atomic sizzle between my fingertips and steering wheel, my skin branding and moulding itself to machine. Gathering itself back together, water to jelly to rock. Baby hairs dance around in air conditioning vent choreography, and I see her, striding gracefully towards an electric blue car. Nissan Skyline, Fast & The Furious fantasy for the high school dream boys with fade cuts and bubbling aggression.

The car pulls out, drives by me.

—

There’s nothing to do here besides walk through grass smoked into hay, and stare into people’s backyards. Jumping back when a dog comes barking up a driveway, its snout snarling through the gate. Hearing trucks barrelling down the main highway. Driving for the sake of hearing an album through car speakers, to give it motion. Other peoples’ houses and time-haunted shops, the only places to go.

Western Sydney suburban ennui cushioning my red skin, my squinting eyes, dripping into my vision when shut, all squiggly flashing lines. I can’t leave it. I’ve taken it with me to every city I’ve lived in. An empty street is home even if it’s hollow.

The shopping village that still holds the dirty yellow glow of too-low lighting and too-dark corners. Butcher meat stink pulses, bakery loaves expand in their racks, the newsagency ceiling fan whirrs dust over untouched magazine covers.

In the unnaturally bright grocers, I’m slumped over a shopping trolley in the produce section, eyeing off the fruit, willing light to disperse me amongst the blood red apples.

A hand on my shoulder brings me back, collecting and rearranging me. Of course she’s here. Actualised from my mind where she’s found residence since I saw her in the classroom a week ago.

Carrying a shopping basket like a handbag in the crook of her elbow, she is what activewear ads convince me I could be: slimmer, fitter, happier, wearing leggings to the shops after the gym session. She exudes a glow that highlights my dullness.

She’s talking to me but I’m still the pillow crease from the morning, blue light shining in my face. My finger surfing over my phone screen at speed with a tender touch, cautious voyeurism. She is amalgamating before my eyes: crucifixes, gold and silver, shiny helium anniversary balloons, lace and chiffon. His pink nose filtered to snowy white, tight shining faces dripped together and melted, pushed in so close as if to pull apart would tear the conjoined sinew.

She’s inviting me to a party in her backyard. As I agree, I’m thinking of excuses not to go.

—

I have been here before or I haven’t. Down cul de sacs lined with palms, into townhouse driveways signposted with identical beige postboxes. Two years of sucking in smog and suffocating sound is compacted into the back of my mind, an already othered memory.

The backyard grips me by the neck, thrusts me face-first into nostalgia. Plastic white chair-seated men, hookah pipe passes, women in constant motion to buckle a trestle table with food.

This is every backyard from high school house parties when we’d stand around, flip phones grasped like prizes, being fed alcohol by parents who didn’t care for local laws. The so-small world looking remarkably wide in a fenced-in, half-concrete yard.

He’s not beside Lily, he’s amongst the white chair men. Legs spread, possessive eyes, shisha in hand. Déjà vu so strong I’m convinced he hasn’t moved an inch since 2004. His nose the same ruddy pink as that hot humid day, when I had squirted my water bottle at him while we waited to climb into the school bus. The second last day of school. Giggling to coax male fury off the ledge when he said, “I’ll get you for that”.

My skin pink the next day walking down the highway home, water dripping from hair and hem timed with shivers. Truck drivers honking at my now transparent cotton sports uniform. My ears echoing the smack of litre on litre pouring over my head. Ice cold shivers from frozen water bottles, then lukewarm waterfalls from orange juice-stained canisters. His deep laugh slicing through the cascade.

Now, a bead of sweat tickles down my back. I plant myself in a corner, let my sandaled feet brush grass. Sinking myself in deep, deep enough to become a nutrient for the soil, enough that I might fertilise and dissolve. As I watch him watch her, I know when she is watching me.

There’s small talk and a barbecue, drinks and cigarettes, heels poking holes into garden grass. My eye can’t leave the white chair corner, even while three ex-classmates come to interrogate me. They’re trying to strike gossip gold to take home tonight. Lily joins and stands across from me, that beaming warmth enveloping.

“Having fun?” she interrupts the conversation to ask me.

“Yeah, thanks for inviting me”.

“Of course. You should come to the wedding too, maybe you can meet a nice Armenian guy, make your mum proud.”
She laughs, a delicate thing. How is it so intimate yet the furthest thing from close. A reminder that the space is so vast between us, it is practically solid.

I move closer to Lily as someone takes a drum out, slapping a rhythm that draws people into hand-held circles. An unrushed dance, hands grasped with strangers, two steps forward and one back. A movement that should be in my feet already, a genetic predetermination. She’s the centre point of it, like a fountain timed to music, her hair splaying out, her body spinning, her arms elegantly shaping in the air. When our eyes meet briefly, my smile is second nature. I feel stripped down, heart stuck in throat. Melted as if to expose the centre of myself.

She is the person they sing about in the song, and I’m the person who dances to it.

—

Heat has a personality of its own. It demands. Craves the attention of all your senses. Heat sticks in your throat, it inflates humid into the lungs, it sinks into pores and forces your insides out.

I stand under the lazy ceiling fan in the classroom, in another lesson that has blurred into the weeks preceding it. Saturday mornings of burning sunlight and irritable children desperate to be elsewhere. Lily in the morning gathering, hearing her voice ring out an octave higher than the students during the national anthem. Afternoons of parking lot small talk, disappearing into cars and separate worlds.

The fabric on my skin is becoming one with me. Cotton tendrils sneak into microscopic pores, latching onto cells and choke-holding them until shirt is body and body is shirt. I want to flatpack myself. Ship myself back across oceans, until all that falls on me are snowflakes turning water, until my hair is drenched and my breath is tangible fog.

Once the bell has rung, I turn off the lights and stand in empty midday darkness. The stale air, the flecks of dust, the beige brownness of it all. I was never afforded silence in this space. Even now, I can feel the squeeze of time against me. Siren songing me into the past, into a safety that regresses and reidentifies.

Lily is sitting on a bench outside the school gates when I approach her. A backpack sat at her feet, she types speedily on her phone and doesn’t look up until I’m sat beside her.

“Did you have a good day today?” she asks, looking up from her phone, eyes directly on me.

“Same same really. I don’t know if I’m actually helping these kids learn anything.”

“I’m sure you are. They’re good kids.”

“Do you need a ride?”

“No, Sako will be here soon. We’re going to get a late lunch.”

The sun is bearing down on my unprotected face, marking its spot red. The drip is puddling around me, forming a lake on which I’m drifting. When was the last time we sat so close.

Back when she was ankle socks and me regular-length folded and pushed down. Back of the school bus giggles, we’d gotten lucky that the older kids let us sit there. We felt older than our 12 years with the privilege of hiding in the corner, huddled close. Grease of morning margarine sandwiches still on our lips, discarded foil crunching beneath our feet. She told me her underwear was black. Everything I wore underneath was a virginal white. Show don’t tell, we lifted skirts, reached across and under as if to confirm that the differences between us ended at the colour of our underwear. A Year 10 girl turned around to look at us and we knew somehow this wasn’t allowed.

We’re in a cone of cool silence now. The heat is away, the drip has stopped. Like an ice cube down the back of the shirt, there is something kinetic here. Something that wants to burst out of my pores and slide over the seat. Where are the lines drawn on our bodies now, that didn’t exist then.

“Do you remember those bus rides we’d have to take here every day?” My voice is not my own. It’s liquid turned sound, moved its way from stomach to trachea and out.

“They took so long! How did we even do it. They were so boring.”

“I liked them.” Me and you. Shoulder to shoulder, arm to arm, leg to leg, knee to knee. Gossip and giggles, a level playing field.

“Sako used to ride on that bus too, you know? He said he had a crush on me even back then”. Glimmering eyes, bunny teeth, the child peeking out of the adult. “But he never did anything about it.”

A car honks and the sun hits my eyes, firing down my face. She walks away, a gentle wave, a slide in and shut door.

I drip away in a sun melt. Until I can fall from the bench in droplets, slink my way down the gutter, foist myself into the drains. Let myself be carried to the dam, rushed alongside the drips of others, funnelled into drains mapping our suburban yellow underground. Until I slip down her tap, into her glass, and am entirely consumed.

Justine Vlachoulis

Written by mascara on . Posted in Creative Non-fiction.

Raised in Whyalla and now residing in Adelaide, Justine Vlachoulis studies literature and film at The University of South Australia. She endeavors to explore the stigmas and stereotypes surrounding the contemporary sex industry, while also sifting through the past to discover and retell the comical and thrilling stories of her Greek migrant family. When not rambling to anyone who will listen as to why Anton Chekov and Thomas Hardy are her literary heroes, she enjoys baking, photography, and short walks.

 

 

I Found You in the Supermarket

I’m in a supermarket trying to find you. This was one of the last places I saw you. I drift past pyramids of orange and avocado and stare across at shiny packets of red meat. My legs carry me to a loaf of Wonder White bread. All the voices start singing in my head. All the voices wishing you weren’t dead…   

‘Agapia Mou, my love,’ she whispered.    

In the village, Agía Eiríni, Saint Irene, in a crumbling house, alone in the dark, a mother held her baby and prayed. 

The baby still wrapped in it’s amniotic sac, a caul of hunger and want, was doomed by the poverty WWII brought as German and Italian soldiers filled their bellies while waiting for war. 

The next morning the mother filled threaded bags with olives from the family grove. Beneath the shade of a nearby tree, baby George lay asleep.

Mother Adrian wasn’t lean and tall like the women from Athens or Thessaloniki. Rather she had wide hips and a beaming mouth that stretched across her square jaw. Under the beating sun two rows of perfect white teeth flashed bright, as sweat seeped its way into her short black hair. It never aged white or grey. 

After George, she gave birth to another boy, but before them, there were seven more. The first son Andrew died, and when three girls followed, Olga, Ketie, and Reubina, Mother Adrian and Father Gerasimos despaired. Who was going to work? But five babies came along, and they were christened Danny, Andrew, Thomas, George and Sammi. All the children were blessed with mesmerizing hazel eyes, but from their heads grew unruly tangles of dark brown frizz. George’s hair grew to be closer to black then it was brown. The day after each birth, Mother Adrian laboured in the groves wearing her thin floral dress and brown leather sandals. 

There was a year when all the Vlachoulis children went to school at the same time. They’d leave in the morning and return in the afternoon and they’d each wait their turn to use the household pencil to do their homework. 

In the mornings, the three youngest, Thomas, George, and Sammi would sprint through blades of grass to suckle on hard rough udders and in the evenings steal fruit and scamper home to offer their treasures. 

The Vlachoulis house was small, so the boys shared a bed, and so did the girls. They lived in an area of Agía Eiríni called Vlahoulata, and Vlahoulata was small, so the village rooster’s song carried far enough for all to hear. Thomas, George and Sammi called the village rooster ‘rooster clock’.   

One morning, when the sun hadn’t yet stretched its rays, and the world was still painted in pastel hues of purple and blue, tiny pairs of feet crept through Agía Eiríni’s empty streets. Three small figures darted from one house to the next, bare little tummies holding their breaths. The boys were all the village had seen since their Father Gerasimos had stumbled around drunk a few hours earlier. 

Asleep inside the shade of a wooden hut, was their rooster clock. His scraggy feathers and clawed feet were whisked away by a child’s sturdy hands. With heads held high Thomas, George, and Sammi walked in a line, and George held rooster clock clamped to his chest. 

They went to a clearing, and the sun rose higher, casting olive tones on their skin.    

George gave the orders. 

‘Thomas hold the neck.’

Thomas secured the neck. 

‘Sammi, feet.’

Sammi secured the feet.

Then George swung an axe he’d stolen from Father Gerasimos over his head and brought it down through the bird’s stomach. The boys watched with gleaming teeth as rooster clock’s insides showed. They stroked tentative fingers over dripping red feathers and then dug determined thumbs into slimy pale guts, each of them searching for the round prize with ticking hands. 

The minutes dragged on, but eventually, each boy had to stand back. 

Sammi frowned, and pointed a gunky finger at the bird, ‘Where is it?’   

Thomas shook his head, ‘I don’t know.’

They both looked up to George, who stood with the axe over his shoulder, but he looked back at them, just as confused. 

With a shrug, he said, ‘I don’t know where the clock is. Maybe the head?’

Maybe it was there or maybe it was lodged in the rooster’s heart, but the boys would never know. Hearing the stomps of Mother Adrian’s feet sent them scurrying away like the street rats they were. When her screams replaced rooster clock’s song all the villagers gathered to watch as George tugged his brothers back to publicly face the burn of their mother’s left shoe.

At night, when she thought all her children were asleep and her husband Gerasimos had passed out from too much to drink, Mother Adrian prayed. She fell to her knees and the flame from the kantili, oil candle lamp, flickered like a body that hangs from a noose, throwing the deep shadow of a cross over the warm red walls. Her prayers raised a storm of desperation up to the heavens, and God held back tears as he observed the long-suffering woman.   

That evening George had given his share of fruit to Sammi and now his rumbly tummy made him crawl over his brothers’ limbs in search of his mama. George found her descending and stood still as he watched her large back curl over in defeat, a black aching mountain standing alone under a red burning sky. Then her lips murmured a prayer that peeled childhood clean off George’s bones. 

‘Please Panagía, most blessed. Virgin Mary, pray to your son. Intercede and ask him to kill someone in the village so one of mine can take their place and receive prósfora, the communion bread.’

On Sunday George emerged from church with a tiny square of bread and a cup of koliva, a wheat dish made to honour the dead. He couldn’t concentrate seriously to the priest’s sermon, for rather that image of his mother down on her knees praying, submitting herself completely, memories of his father coming home and giving her a beating, taking all the money they had to fill his glass flagon, those were things young George took seriously… 

The wonder white bag is cool beneath my fingertips. Reminds me of the chilled dead forehead that once frightened my lips. Long black skirts and buttoned-up shirts cast shadows longer than the Eucalyptus trees over burning Whyalla red dirt. Can you miss someone you’ve never known? Is memory the lingering of a still loved soul? My giagiá, grandmother, my theíes, aunties, my theíoi, uncles, my father, painted the white walls of my childhood home with their memory’s song. 

I veer from the bread rack and venture to a tower of tomatoes. I reach out my hand to the plump, firm fruit…   

As George finished primary school, the island of Kefalonia was shaken by an earthquake measuring 7.2 on the surface wave magnitude scale. The 1953 Ionian Earthquake left the Vlachoulis household without bread for six months. 

George had to leave. He ventured to Kefalonia’s main town, Argostoli and earnt enough money to send home by rebuilding the earthquake rubble into homes. A couple of years on, with the houses complete, he opened a café, and it was there he heard about a ship that’d be coming to the main port. 

At 17 years old, with his hair freshly trimmed, George shut up shop and rode his bike up the dirt path that ran parallel to the shining Ionian Sea. As he expected a ship was at the main port, and a long line of men waiting to board. At the start of the line, George could just make out a freakishly tall and flailing figure.

A man in white pressed pants and brown polished shoes stood on top of a crate and flung his arms around, like a red-faced demon, sweating, and agitated by the heat and something else that George discovered as heard him bellowing, ‘I need a volunteer! Errands must be run, or this ship isn’t leaving!’ 

As round hazel eyes doubled in size, George pedalled vigorously, the muscles in his stomach clenching tight as he yelled, ‘I can do it!’  

The red-faced man snapped his neck down to see swift spinning wheels cruise past a line of unmoving men. He darted his eyes between George and them and then he barked, ‘Get over here!’

For the next two days George’s deep-set eyes beamed with their natural smile while he rode hungrily through the Argostoli streets. He picked up food, dropped off clothes, and collected supplies for the man he discovered was the ship’s medical officer. The medical officer had grown fond of George, and the evening before the ship was to leave, he asked, ‘When we arrive where will you go?’

The medical officer thought George was waiting to board with the rest of the men. He thought George to be well over 18, with his completed military service and the papers signed and stamped to prove it. 

Calmy, George responded with, ‘Sir, I don’t know.’

‘What do you mean you don’t know? Are you unsure?’ 

George shook his head, ‘Sir I’m 17. I can be 18. I can be anything you want.’

No signed papers, and not even a boat ticket! George had no chance… but in a crisis of conscience the medical officer said, ‘You’ll need signatures from your village leader and your parents showing that they support you coming to Australia.’     

‘How long have I got to get these to you?’ 

‘You have the night.’

So, bound for Agía Eiríni on his rickety old bike George peddled, grabbing hold of the back of the bus heading for Poro Port and then the mainland to help him along the way. The mayor and his parents signed the papers, but before George left Mother Adrian passed him a brown suitcase that held a small icon of Ágios Gerásimos, Kefalonia’s patron saint, inside. He smiled at her with two rows of perfect white teeth, and when he left, her own didn’t shine under the sun for what might have been weeks. 

  •     

When he got off the ship George found himself in southeast Australia at the Bonegilla migration camp. From there he was shipped to Whyalla and put to work as an indentured labourer in the shipyards. He worked for a few years, but he barely made enough money to buy new clothes, let alone enough money to send back home.  

So, he took a risk. He went into business with a man called Elias Stamoulis, and on the corner of Essington Lewis Avenue, they opened a shop called Pan Continentals. Their supermarket was small, but George would drive to Adelaide to purchase special salamis, sauerkrauts, and gherkins and all the immigrants would flock inside, as the standard supermarkets, like Woolworths, neglected the gourmet needs of the immigrant population. They also sold golden crumbed fish and hot salted chips to the cinema patrons, who would come during the 15-minute intermissions from the open-air cinema from across the road.

The day George married, straight off the train from Melbourne, he brought his wife to Pan Continentals and with a sorry smile put her to work in her nice new wedding clothes. She stuffed white bags with boiling hot potatoes and burnt the skin of her small tender palms.  

Angelique came from Yianakata which was the neighbouring area to Vlahoutlata in Agía Eiríni. In the schoolyard, George would find her and bounce the curls that dangled around her head. Both children had to leave Greece, George to Whyalla and Angelique to Melbourne. Then in June 1959, the man whose photograph Angelique secretly kept tucked beneath the elastic strap of her bra knocked at her front door. 

They had a son, and he was christened Gerasimos.  

It was now 1965, and 18 people were living in one house on Gowrie Avenue. George and Elias had made enough to buy a home and sponsor some of their family members from Greece to come over to Australia.  

One of these family members was the eldest Vlachoulis brother, Danny. Danny didn’t know a lot, but what he knew, he knew well, and he knew how to tend a garden; so, on the right side of the yard, he made a garden bed. His skin was as brown as burnt butter from spending weekends out in the yard and from the kitchen window, all the wives would see Danny hunched over, his spine sticking out from beneath a cream linen shirt. Hanging above him were bright red plump tomatoes, teasing to be plucked, washed, and cut fresh for a salad. Danny gardened so diligently he was soon able to sell some of his produce to the locals.  

At the time, Elias Stamoulis had a younger brother who was also living at the house and one morning when the kitchen was empty, he snuck into the garden, stole Danny’s tomatoes, and then sold them for himself. 

When Danny came home from work and saw the vines stripped back and no fresh salad in the fridge, he whispered to George that there might be a thief in the area. George told Danny to have a shower, it had been a long day and then he went and asked Elias for a private word. 

The two men walked outside and stood at the foot of the garden bed, with their hands resting deep in their pockets. Their bodies lightly swayed. 

George repeated what Danny had said, and Elias came back with, ‘Well this is my garden he’s planting those tomatoes on. So, we should get half of what he makes.’

The Whyalla air, thick and sticky, poured around the men’s figures like cement as big black flies buzzed around their slow-beating chests.

A minute passed and then George said, ‘You want to live in halves now Stamoulis?’ 

In comparison to George, Elias was taller, darker, and more rounded in the middle and he slid his hands out his pockets and placed them firmly on his hips. 

The two men faced each other, but after a minute of silence, George dropped his head down to the garden bed. Big black flies darted around his thick lashes, but it wasn’t their irritating buzz that made him snap his face back.  

He declared to Elias, ‘This will be our half of the garden,’ and Elias frowned as George bent down and drew a line with his finger in the dirt between their shoes.

George stood back up and smiling with his perfect rows of teeth, said, ‘And that’s your half,’ and then with a firm point behind Stamoulis’s back, he shouted, ‘And this!’ and lunging over, gripping the thick green vines into his tanned hands, yelled, ‘Is YOUR bloody tomato BUSH!’

George yanked the plant from out the Earth and the two men watched the dangling ugly roots dance in the air before crashing down onto Stamoulis’s side of the garden. 

Years later Mother Adrian would arrive in Australia. 

George was now living in his own house on Hincks Avenue, where in the backyard, he had planted an orange grove. It was in that yard that Mother Adrian showed her grandchildren, Gerry, and Helen, how to chop off a chicken’s head. Not a rooster’s head, but a chicken’s. 

She raised an axe over her head, and as two round pairs of hazel eyes stared at the chicken, Gerry’s alarmed, Helen’s calm, Mother Adrian remembered Thomas, George, and Sammi trying to find the clock in Vlahoulata’s rooster. She remembered the sight of George tugging on his brothers’ arms, as he forced them back to face her fury, and she remembered that he was one the to step forward first to face her…

I stare down at the tomato I’ve cupped in my palms, and whisper, ‘Pappous, Grandfather, George.’

After the tomato incident, you walked out on Stamoulis and marched over to the bank asking for a loan. It was risky because you didn’t have any money, but your determination would lead you to build your own supermarket, which you called 5%. It would go on to become South Australia’s first smart scanning supermarket, which ran live in 1983. 

As I’m getting older, I’m having to shop at the supermarkets more and more by myself. With a small shopping list written for one, I go in to buy the week’s loaf of bread and select myself glossy tomatoes that I can toss into a Greek salad. My dad Gerasimos is no longer the one holding the list and my Giagiá Angelique isn’t dragging me to the confectionary aisle and yelling at me until I’ve picked myself a treat. 

Your wife, your sons, your daughters, your grandchildren, all the people you left behind would tell me that, ‘You were, you were, you were,’ and as they did your life would sit on the tip of my tongue and say, ‘You are, you are, you are.’  

 

Ledya Khamou

Written by mascara on . Posted in Creative Non-fiction.

Ledya Khamou is currently an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne where she is studying English and Creative Writing.

 

 

Houses and Homes

I

I grew up in a house I do not remember.

In Iraq I recall an indoor balcony, overlooking what I now perceive as a courtyard. I recall an instance (or maybe a dream, though something grounded in reality) of waking up, a nervous child, and, smiling coyly, following my aunt with her washing, up the stairs. Finding my uncle with my sister and brother throwing mattresses from the balcony onto the main hall.

Outside: cracked asphalt, dusty roads, fields yellow and dry. In photographs there is always somebody’s son in a white shirt, squinting against the sun, arms spread against silver-glinted gates.

When I remember the house, I feel an urge to relate it to Iraq as a whole, perhaps my entire upbringing, or rather how childhood felt. An ornate, dusty structure, beautiful architecture worn and shaved by inheritance and time. Family everywhere, huddled into rooms with no dining table, no chairs, eating from pots on the floor, fingers greasy with dolma and shorba. There was an inflatable swimming pool, and a gate opening. Stairs all the time. And within that gorgeous, great emptiness, a sense of the closeness of relation—of my cousins in the cornershop, of arms soaked with bubblegum faux-tattoos, and aunties pinching cheeks with their tobacco-stained fingers. 

Then, when family left, and we were left without direct relation, it must have been Syria, or Jordan, or somewhere in-between: 

The one bedroom we all slept in, tucked between my brother and sister on thin mattresses on the floor, tiptoeing to the bathroom, waking dad to open the tall door. A single green bulb on the ceiling. Mum above us, her hands clasped together, and us clumsily repeating her assured words to a night-time prayer we did not understand, and didn’t need to, really.

God was a crinkled, velvet-cornered photograph; Jesus a suffering accessory on my grandpa’s rosary, brushing his thumb as he counted the wooden beads; and Mary a weeping canvas print before blue backgrounds. I often wonder whether there was ever a part of me that genuinely believed in their existence, but that doesn’t seem like a fair question to ask of my past self. God and Jesus and Mary were as real as distant relatives, the nameless, indistinguishable faces of aunties and uncles who proclaimed with lipsticked mouths or bearded beer-breath, “I remember when you were this little!” Mum and dad pointed them out in photo albums (“you know, she used to change your nappy”) and I nodded obediently, distantly awed.

 The green-lit room in Syria (or somewhere in between) is the only part of the house I tangentially remember, and in my memory it is both sparse and overcrowded. Mine and my sister’s Barbie-themed runners scuffed in the corner next to our school backpacks. Thick blankets kicked to the foot of the mattress, spilling over and slipping under our feet in the morning, scurrying out of the house, always late, always meaning to leave.

Later, in stuffy high school classrooms smelling of sharpened pencils, squinting at the crusty print of a Gatsby passage about the green light, I’d think initially of Syria’s single green bulb, of that desperate, uncomfortable room—then, immediately, without particularly meaning to, I would dismiss the memory. It became a habit: leaping toward Australia, methodically replacing the Assyrian with the English until ABCs became natural, became the first tongue. English was a means of practical survival, then a means of distance, until eventually, it became mine.

It’s hard to describe losing Assyrian without making it sound like some sort of escape. Struggling against the hot, rough-voweled breath of Assyrian on my neck, shedding its dampened hold, and splashing into the cold green-chlorine of English, with its tall-cut letters, its sardonic, suit-and-tied consonants. It reminds me, distantly, of thirty-degree school days, panting red-cheeked from a game of tag back into an AC-ed classroom after lunch. The smell of the teacher’s staff room lasagne and glossy picture book pages and a bruised, warm apple snatched out of somebody’s backpack. Something close to hope, like the breathless, cruel beauty of a glinting city skyscraper—though something I can never really reach.

 

II

Still in Syria, though hardly at home: we attended some sort of educational institute for to-be migrants. We spent every day there, as if we were cramming Western-isms before the official test of immigration.

My parents sat in a lecture room learning elementary English phrases. Us, the children—either shoved on a table in the corner, or in an entirely different kids’ room—drew crayoned monsters on every white surface available. Fluorescent lights, early morning toothpaste mouth, awkward air. On the projector screen, there was a slide of example sentences located on the beach, or maybe about beach etiquette (“Hello, is this your towel?”), and I remember the ripple of low laughter in the room, occupied mostly by middle-aged, conservative Assyrians. Chaste women who covered their hair in church, and respectable, God-fearing men who lined the front church pews, bowed their heads before a mightier patriarch. No, we would not be wearing bikinis and shorts on the beach. Though, in retrospect, their chuckles could have been an excited, incredulous sort of laughter—an “imagine us, out of our stuffy one-bedroom apartments, laying on the beach.”

Everything in me hesitates to admit any excitement in relation to arriving in Australia. Writing this as the person I am now, after being fed on white media about people gratefully ‘escaping’ third-world countries for a so-called ‘better’ future in Western countries, I desperately want to divert any trope tinged with white supremacy. My memories are so transparent, so flimsy and fragile, that I can easily twist them into a transgressive story debunking popular myths about refugees.

Though, truthfully, I think I recall the exact moment that we received our visas. I remember distinctly that it was a moment caught off-guard, across the street from the education institute, or maybe the post-office—across somewhere from where everybody else was, lining up. A white envelope, an ineligible, thick document, my dad’s quietly gleeful grin. My dad must have called out to his classmates across the street, and there must have been a celebratory cheer from them, all lining up, waiting for the exact same letter. Walking home, there was an explanation from mum about what a visa was, and what it meant for us, and a sense of the ground shifting, a breathless air opening before us.

 

III

My dad is the youngest of his two brothers, but older than his sisters. He is a shabby young man posing in a bomber jacket in one photo, then my mustached, serious father in the next. I know that he went to university, or pursued a higher education than my mum, because there is a photo of jean-clad young adults wearing familiar faces in front of a large, smart building. But other than that…

Once, on a video call with my aunt, he reminisced about a camping trip wherein his brothers shot stray dogs for sport, and teased him when he, scared and hesitant, refused. Or maybe I misheard (or my brain mistranslated the words when I was eavesdropping, or I’ve forgotten the exact turn of phrase he used) and my dad meant that he missed the shot, rather than refused. Still, in my imagination: coarse, dried grass, brown jackets and muddied boots, a brutal green-blue sun, sweaty palms on a rifle (not the more practical shotgun, my mind decides, for some reason) foam-mouthed dogs jumping in the dimmed distance. I’d like to think that my dad refused, instead of attempted, and missed.

My mum was a farm girl. She dropped out of high school as soon as she could, professing to enjoy home life more than education. In childhood, she was protected by a throng of older brothers and a gentle, gravel-voiced father, his dark face wrinkled like a date. At least that’s how I see my grandfather now, in his old age: his voice a sweet, weathered cloud of cigarette smoke, his skin tough leather. My mum fondly reminisces about her family’s backyard full of chickens, who peck-kissed her when she fed them. Now, watching the pigeons and crows eat the rice she made for lunch outside our front door, her eyes grow watery and distant—when I crack a joke, she glances up blankly, as if she didn’t expect me there, this Australian stranger who will never know her childhood.

In one photo she is unsmiling and doe-eyed, ringlets in her hair, in an 80s shoulder-padded suit. In another, she is my mother, rounded and red-cheeked. There is an Arabic turn of phrase, a compliment for a kind person, that roughly translates to “(their) blood is sweet”, “sweet” pronounced in the pitched, sickly warmth of “sugar”. Though I do not know how to say the phrase, its shadow passes my mind in every photo I see of my mother. We share a birthplace—Iraq lives in my mum, a nestled, golden nostalgia sugaring her veins. But it eludes me.

 

IV

So: Australia. A ‘better’ future. In Australia, there are calendar dates, and places I can point to in Google Maps, and names on my phone that I can text.

Our first Australian house was our cousins’ house. A brief holiday, a dreamy lapse into the before-days, close relation again. Play-Station days and barbecue picnic days and ice-cream days and TV marathon days. Big couches, too intimidating to sit on, glass-surface coffee tables, and high, plush mattresses against headboards decorated with baby pictures. In the backyard, unruly grass overlapped concrete (always planning on adding more concrete, my uncle with his hands behind his back, sucking a toothpick, discussing construction with my dad), and half-deflated soccer balls shot cruelly to paunchy, well-fed stomachs. The garage door gaped open and faulty water-guns were fished out of the cluttered cardboard boxes, teams arranged for a battle of boys vs girls—screaming bloody murder until we were ordered back indoors.

Our second and third and fourth homes—houses—were rented. Here, memories scurry from me yet again. In the second house: an unusually wide hall as soon as you walked in, empty like Iraq, except for a computer on a desk in the corner. In the third house, there is nothing. The fourth house was directly across the street from our high school—the school bell blaring, the rapid, chattering silhouettes of after-school kids filtering in through the windows. Summer was inescapable walls and a living room with one couch and suitcases still unpacked, sparse cutlery in the drawers. Looking back, the fourth house could have been a brief stint before:

The fifth house—home—was bought. This home is still lived in. I find that it’s hard to write about places that I have not yet left.

The belly of my life, the spine of who I am, was formed in Australia. Dusty libraries and humming computers and blistering summers. Now, I resist the urge to contrast Melbourne to Mosul.

Instead of the closeness within the wideness in Iraq, Melbourne is a compact, familiar closeness that is cooled with an innate distance. A detachment which gnaws, and haunts, and, in its clinginess, forces a friendship. I form myself from Melbourne’s indifference. Empty, carpeted school corridors make me teary. I befriend buses and trams and train routes, and form a mix-and-match friend group composed of strays from previous friend groups. I can joke about my past selves, because I created them—in photos I can laugh at my bulging under-eye circles in primary school (when I had nothing to be tired about) and my disgruntled, angsty disposition in high school (when I had invented a lot of things to be mad about).

Occasionally, I think: this is me, living in the ‘better’ future.

My dad tells me about racist encounters he faces as a casual UberEats driver. I have learned about race and xenophobia and class and sexuality and gender. I know how to write research essays about genocide and white supremacy and classism. I know how to trace everyday exhibitions of prejudice to their root, historical cause. If academically necessary (say, for a creative writing assignment) I could throw my ‘immigrant experience’ under a microscope, dissect the points of injury, all the ruptured cells, and bleed them into a narrative, into cause and effect. But when my dad says, “That Woolies employee would not have spoken to me like that if I were Aussie,” I cannot think of a succinct response. Unspoken, it simmers inside me.

Here I am in my ‘better’ future: adequately educated and entirely helpless.

 

V

In my bedroom, above my mattress: blu-tacked poems printed out from the local library. They are not my poems, but they are something of me. Books tabbed and annotated and highlighted and underlined, a desperate library of anything that makes me feel. Desk of knick-knack stationery, cheap pastel plastic, acrylic crochet tid-bits. Burnt matchsticks. Half-filled notebooks. Sludgy coffee grounds in cooled mugs. Hollow energy drink cans. A solitary dinner after work with the yellow lamp for company, awake and alone in the exhausted creaks of a begrudgingly loved home.

Mum hangs a wooden-beaded rosary off my headboard, though it barely clings on. In the mornings, scrambling out of bed, I accidentally knock Jesus to the floor and curse at him for being in the way. Coming back home, he is a pitiful, betrayed father on my bedroom floor, and I am a bad daughter, a faithless Christian, hanging him back on a headboard that does not want to hold him.

Cousins now behind phone glass, pixelated social media presences. I wonder if her parents know that she’s dating a white boy or dating at all. I would never ask her.

Now, I spend my days walking up and down stairs and elevators, and arriving nowhere. I am the same age as my mother was when she married my father, and in the same age bracket as my parents when they left their beloved homelands for foreign territory. I cannot imagine marrying anybody; and I lack any maternal ambitions or instincts; and though I profess that I hate Melbourne, I cannot imagine living anywhere else. I have lived in Australia for longer than I was in Iraq, or Syria, or the general Middle East. What does this mean? Overseas, my home, my emergency touchdown, would be the Australian embassy. Here, I would never call myself an Aussie.

Now, at a birthday party, somebody shines a lighter over a green Sprite bottle, and I am back in Syria, repeating my mother’s prayers. Then I am mute in the backseat of an Uber heading home, tired of myself and my friends, wanting my bed with its annoying rosary, with its dead poets.

Or not my bed but a mattress, flung off a balcony, bouncing off the concrete, or shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor, locked in. Wanting a home I can only remember in inflatable swimming pools, in out-stretched, tongued runners, stomping up the stairs all petty with childish arguments, to that room with its flickering green light. 

 

Suyanti Winoto-Lewin

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Suyanti Winoto-Lewin lives by the Derwent in lutruwita/Tasmania. She is an ecologist working in consulting and land management. Her creative work has been published in Overland Journal, and her research has been published in the Australian Journal of Botany.

 

 

 

 

On my friend’s ankle

Tipping Points

On my friend’s ankle, painstakingly inked with individual pricks of a four-pointed needle, is a symbol that ecologists may recognise as a sign of our times.

A sine wave steadily swells and falls across their skin, holding two seeds in its valleys. One rests sleepily at the base of a valley. Another, one wave to the right, is climbing steadily up the rollercoaster. Bit by bit it climbs, defying gravity. Once it reaches the peak it is in danger of rolling unimpeded into the next dip.

This symbol represents the concept of alternative stable states and tipping points. Each valley represents a state in which a system can be. Even when the system is perturbed (that is, internal or external pressures cause a system to become off-balance), negative feedback loops draw it back to its stable norm. However, large changes, either sudden or occurring in persistent increments, can push a system to a tipping point, where the seed rolls down to the next valley, a new state of being which is reinforced by a new set of feedback responses.

We feel our present to be a precipice. We stand at the edge of all manner of tipping points. One push, and we could roll in any direction away from all the patterns and truths of the system we know. The picture is of chaos and off-balance, any new stable regime on the other side of the hill far away and unknown.

I imagine the seeds on my friend’s ankle racing over the hummocks, careering off the end of the line and rolling down his foot, over his toes, into the dirt beneath his feet.

Circles

When I was young, I would crouch in the soil of my mum’s garden in naarm/Melbourne, watching the buds of poppies intently. Surely, if I looked for long enough, I would catch the moment when the first petal peeped out from the green. I never did.

The continent known as Australia travels north at a steady pace of 7 centimetres per year, yet rarely do we feel the ground shift beneath our feet. It has been resolutely ploughing away from the south pole since it started to pull itself free of Antarctica, a divorce which begun about 30 million years ago. I am intrigued by the idea of a moment in which the final tear occurred between the two land masses and water rushed into the scar. That gap allowed an oceanic current to form a tight, ceaseless ring, circling round and round the south pole, unimpeded by land. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (AAC) is the only oceanic current to circumnavigate the world. The formation of this current barred Antarctica from warmth delivered south from the equator by the East Australian Current and the Leeuwin Current, which could not pass the ceaseless whirl of the ACC. Though Antarctica sat over the south pole long before the formation of the ACC, only when this current gained momentum did it lose its forests to a permanent blanket of ice. This change, like so many of the catastrophes of geological history, happened unimaginably slowly. Even so, the glaciation of Antarctica formed part of the mass extinction event which marked the end of the Eocene epoch.

In that forested southern world over 30 million years ago, as Tasmania drifted north and ocean started to gather its furious momentum around Antarctica, I imagine the tree ferns and myrtle beeches unfurling fertile growth and sending their spores and seeds off into the wind. Some of those seeds may have caught a northward breeze, or hitched a ride on a dinosaur feather to land on fertile soil of the new island of lutruwita/Tasmania. As I walk amongst myrtle beaches and tree ferns in the Gondwanan forests of lutruwita, I imagine that I am shaded by the descendants of some of these refugees. As I breathe in the perfume of a leatherwood, I imagine its ancestors summoning Antarctic insects with their scent.

Antarctica has been trapped within a whirling ring of cold water for about 30 million years—time enough for some of the hardiest and most specialised marine life forms on our planet to evolve. A complex community of tiny animals, fungi, bacteria, protists and stranger things creep across the dark underside of the icepack or thrive within the network of briny channels etched within sea ice. Like most beings, their energy comes from the sun, alchemised from within the ice by algae.

In this frozen world, each fraction of a degree of warming makes some difference; more briny channels; less light as snow heaps up on top of the sea ice; changing growth rates of organisms. Trophic webs flail, recalibrate, adjust. But it is when the temperature crosses melting point that we humans stand to attention. Glaciers calve in loud surrender and the comfort of predictability is lost. Creatures which rely on sea ice die, while other waiting spores bloom. We watch the seed topple from a rise to a deep crevasse.

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is changing. Driven by the roar of increasing westerlies, eddies which fling warm water south through the ACC are becoming stronger. This warm water travels under the sea ice pack and melts it from below, allowing glaciers to speed up behind it. The ACC long ago condemned Antarctica to apocalypse, but now protects the unique systems which have evolved there. Recent research warns that we have reached a critical threshold of warming, a tipping point, which determines even if we stop emitting fossil fuels today, the icepack of the West Antarctic Peninsula will continue to melt at increasing speed for the next one hundred years.

Spirals (contacting)

At the time of writing, there are 686 species of plant, animal, algae and insect recognised to be at risk of extinction in my home state of Tasmania. Climatic tipping points endanger many more. Some of these species have existed since Antarctica was lost to the cold; they may call that white continent their ancestral home.

Though I don’t feel that I am ready to grieve, the work I do as an ecological consultant resembles a form of mourning. I spend my working days documenting the decline of species. The small losses; a trigger plant smaller than a fingernail growing in drainage depressions of the site of a new factory; a skink distinguished by the arrangement of scales on its head losing habitat to a road. My job is to survey areas proposed to be covered in concrete or dug up for minerals, searching for signs of these 686. What I find, I carefully identify, count, photograph and map. I may make 500 mapping points in a day marking threatened plants, hollow bearing trees and vegetation communities. My colleagues produce a map and upload the information onto Tasmania’s online database called the ‘Natural Values Atlas’. We write a report describing all the life in that area that we can. The proponent then applies for a permit to ‘take’ any threatened species we have identified within their project area. Unwilling to stand in the way of development, government generally grants these permits. Concrete is poured. With a disturbing symmetry, living beings are lost in the physical world just as they become represented in the virtual. The state database collects points on a map as if this could substitute for plants in the soil, as if to codify what we have lost is to justify losing it. The Natural Values Atlas is becoming a virtual graveyard where we may visit and grieve. Our report becomes a callous obituary.

Sometimes, the design of a project will be altered somewhat to avoid harming some critters considered significant. Often, conditions of the permit require an environmental offset – take from here, but protect over there. Offsets only make sense if a norm of destruction is assumed, so that even decreasing the possibility of destruction can be considered a positive action. Further, offsets deny individuality, functioning on the premise that individuals lumped under the same name by taxonomists, or vegetation communities considered similar by ecologists, are interchangeable. Recent legislation provides for a ‘Nature Repair Market.’ Though this offers some promise of promoting good restoration work, it is based on similar principles of interchangeability. Our ‘natural values’ have become currency; the rarer the more valuable.

The independent review of our current federal environment laws found that ‘surveillance, compliance and enforcement under the EPBC Act is ineffective.’ The legislation relies on developers self-assessing whether the impact they will have on natural values is ‘significant’ or not – only if a developer decides their impact is significant will they present it to the federal regulator for assessment. This means that the regulator does not see most of the projects which chip away at our continent’s ecosystems. When a project is referred, the odds are on the side of approval, with only 13 projects out of over 7000 refused approval between 1999 and 2022. Often a permit has conditions, but there is little to no oversight on whether these conditions are followed. In the decade from 2010-2020 the federal regulator issued $230,000 in fines for compliance breaches. By comparison, Hobart City Council expects to issue 8.3 million in parking fines in 2023-24.

I recently met with a representative of Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water (DCEEW) about offsets for a road project. She calmly informed us that ‘in perpetuity’ means ‘20 years.’ I was stunned, as she only looked about 30 herself. A standard logging cycle for eucalypts is about 80 years. It takes at least one hundred years for a eucalypt to form hollows suitable for birds or gliders to raise their young in. 20 years is less than a human generation, a mining lease, a life sentence in jail. In 20 years’ time, that offset will have done its job. It can either be destroyed or it can be used to justify another round of destruction. So we spiral inward, towards extinctions.

While the separation of Antarctica and Australia occurred (and is occurring) at a speed beyond the comprehension of human senses, and human induced climate change can be perceived within my own 26 years, many of the factors causing extinctions occur at the pace of a bulldozer or a supertrawler. Whales which depend on the sea ice-reliant Antarctic krill were almost driven to extinction long before the effects of global warming were recognised. Today, regional overfishing of Antarctic krill is adversely affecting colonies of krill-dependent species such as penguins and seabirds. Scientists worry that catch limits for krill do not take into account the effects of climate change on krill populations. Australia has lost 38 mammal species in the 250 of European colonialism which has brought feral predators, habitat loss and hunting. These are threatening processes which have barely relented their breakneck pace for the past 200 years. They continue in the form of some of the projects I work on. Each extinction, each loss of a population of a species or a of community of beings, reduces our resilience to global warming and adaptive capacity in the face of change.

The seed

As a young person peering over the precipice of the present while grieving the past, I cling to uncertainty as a tired polar bear clings to drift ice. Planetary systems are so complex we can never fully emulate them within our computer models, which seem to spit out the future like a curse. We don’t know how the ground will shift beneath us, only that it will shift. We don’t know which way the seed will roll, nor in which valley it will get trapped. For me, uncertainty provokes hope and curiosity.

Ecologists use the word resilience to describe the ability of a system to remain stable in the face of environmental perturbations. This could mean raising those hills higher, so that the seed has a little further to climb before it falls to other side. It could also mean forming that seed into a tough little bugger with a thick skin – a system with high adaptive capacity. One of the key ways of building adaptive capacity and maintaining resilience of a system is by nurturing diversity. This includes diversity in genetics as well as in human communities, and importantly, in relationships. This is the work of our generation—a turn back to nurture and stewardship. A building and rebuilding of relationships in creative ways. We also need fertile ground, places for seeds to land as continents shift, such as healthy soil, hollow bearing trees for breeding critters and unpolluted waterbodies.

So, whilst we do all we can to slow the climate crisis, we must take loss of biodiversity on home soil seriously. Even ‘single-mindedly,’ the term Tasmania’s liberal government recently used to dismiss advice against a windfarm offered by experts on migratory birds. Themselves employed by the government, these experts cited the harm it may do to critically endangered orange-bellied parrots. We are not supported by the good nature laws we need, but our government is rewriting them, and there will be opportunities for community to be involved in this process. Rather than turning the protection and rehabilitation of particular ecosystems into a commodity that becomes more valuable as each one becomes more rare, stewardship of nature needs to become standard practice, written into law rather than governed by economy. Offsetting needs to be tightly regulated, and permit conditions policed. In a political and social environment in which protecting planetary resilience is as ordinary as maintaining public infrastructure we can find a more creative form of development. We can strengthen the seed and nurture the soil.

*

As the individual pricks of a tattoo artist’s needle create an image on skin, ecologists’ mapping points paint lines and blots across the landscape. Often these draw out patterns of destruction that follow mineral riches, ever expanding roads and fertile soils. But there are also patches of growth such as where plans have changed to avoid harm to critters, where rehabilitation has occurred, or where seeds have been collected to spread to new places.

Our current system shows that we can take notice of diversity, and record it with the precision of an artist. If we add an artist’s intentionality to this, and take note of the bigger picture we are drawing, we can create a constellation of hope at the scale of our continent. With our actions and our noticing of the beings around us we can create an image that, beyond the uncertainty of tipping points, holds fertile ground where resilient seeds can grow.

Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn reviews Every Version of You by Grace Chan

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn reviews Every Version of You by Grace Chan

Every Version of You

by Grace Chan

ISBN: 9781922806017

Reviewed by Zowie Douglas

 

 

In 2022, as AI-generated images began to populate our social media feeds, RnB artist SZA released Ghost in the Machine, in which she sings: ‘Robot got future, I don’t.’ The future and the present are uncomfortably close in Grace Chan’s Every Version of You, where the characters inhabit a world that is startingly familiar to ours.

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A D John

A.D. John

Written by mascara on . Posted in Fiction.

A. D. John is a Wiradjuri writer residing on Gadigal land. He is a recipient of the 2023 Penguin Random House “Write It” Fellowship and the 2023 Writing NSW Diverse Writers Mentorship with World Fantasy Award finalist Eugen Bacon. He is currently studying for an MA in creative writing at the University of Sydney.

 
 
 

My Blood, Your Blood

Beyond the distant scrub on a strangled ridge, rhythmic rifle fire snapped and cracked – the powder smoke lifting like a delicate veil and dispersing as it cleared a dense regiment of parched saplings. Jimmy heaved the saddle onto the officer’s horse as another volley of shots pierced the damp evening air. He watched as the men around him flinched. 

“Jimmy,” a white officer called from his seat near a smouldering fire. “You see them boy?”

Jimmy shook his head. “Nah boss, can’t see a thing in this light.”

The officer scratched at his shabby beard, nodded and went back to stoking his piteous heap of embers. 

It was a lie. Jimmy could see the soldiers perfectly but was in no mood to play “spot the white fullah.” He secured the saddle and started with the bridling. 

They called him Jimmy Jackson. That’s how he introduced himself around camp and to his troop, even though he hated the name. It was a white fullah’s name, and it didn’t fit. Whenever he got the chance, he would introduce himself with the name his mother gave him – Mugi. The night before her son was born, she dreamed of birthing an eaglehawk and took that as a sign, dubbing him accordingly. Like the formidable raptor of his name’s sake, Mugi had the gift of sight. Put a jag-spear, knife, or rifle in his hand and he’d find his mark – sometimes from hundreds of metres away. 

His sight wasn’t limited to hunting. 

Mugi could cast visions of the abstract and slip into a place most other folk couldn’t. He’d soar above the hushed paddocks and the dense, suffocating scrub bordering their perimeters, rushing high over the magnificence of gumtrees. From up yonder, he took in everything. His mind’s eye traversed the expansive, sapphire skies tangled with wisps of cloud and surveyed the ravaged landscape below. 

He was all at once untethered up there in the eternal blue, but a slave chained mercilessly to the earth. Mugi would never mention the Dreaming to the white fullahs. He could only imagine they’d hack off his head or burn him alive. These men only believed in the Bible and that was that. 

 

Every so often, Lieutenant Wilson would be full of the spirit, rum or a mixture, and he’d limp up onto a discarded supply crate and begin spitting verses from his tattered St James Bible. There he’d be, unsteady in his boots, swaying and gabbling, fighting to keep his eyes from rolling back into his skull, as spittle caught in the nest of hair around his mouth. He’d speak of the end of days and Mugi wondered if those times had already come for his lot.

“Watcha doing?” A voice called from behind him.

Mugi turned to see Paul standing next to an open tent, its flaps whipping and snapping in the wind.

Paul was Koori as well, but no one knew his real name. He was tall, lanky yet strong. His skin stretched taut across his face and betrayed a menacing intent when he smiled – like he was now.

“I’m saddling the horse for the Lieutenant.”

“Which?” Paul’s eyes squinted into slits. He spat a peach seed that landed not far from Mugi’s boots.

“Daniels.”

“Uh huh, goin’ get it done then.” 

Paul buttoned his jacket and marched into the open tent. 

*

Mugi had noticed Paul striding through the camp from time to time as if he owned the place – like he was one of the white fullahs. This was his first interaction with the man, and it went as well as he imagined. The other Kooris nicknamed Paul “the White Dog”. Stories about him spread through the troop quicker than any cold or flu. These weren’t the type of tales Mugi would have recounted to his nephew back home. Rumours were that Paul played his part in desecrating a whole mob close by. The mob were charged with stealing cattle – so the settlers said. 

Other Kooris told Mugi that Paul had unsheathed his sabre during the battle and hacked at limbs and sheared off heads, all the while grinning that maniac grin of his. Mugi had seen enough bloodshed to last him an eternity. He could feel the malevolence of the mission weigh damp and heavy on his spirit. 

Mugi and his unit were sent to arrest the warrior Dawarang, whose mob was accused of disturbing the day-to-day lives of the nearby settlement. Mugi knew what it meant when white fullahs said “arrest.” Dawarang and his mob’s so-called crimes were miniscule to start with. Snatching a few chickens here, some pigs there. When cattle began to vanish, the settlers called in a local regiment of soldiers. 

Then there was the clash and the mob speared a few of the soldiers, one fatally. This was the story that the white fullahs drilled into their heads along the dusty trails all the way from Wagga Wagga. A young Koori officer named Dirru spread rumours that the real reason they (the white men) wanted Dawarang and his mob gone had less to do with protecting settlers and more to do with panning for gold. 

*

Mugi had spotted unfamiliar faces mulling around the creek beds with all sorts of equipment – he’d never had the chance to stand still long enough to gander at what they were up to. He also noticed they were clearing the forests slowly, two or three trees at a time. Mugi was beginning to agree with Dirru. There was foulness in the air, and he wanted to know which direction it was blowing in from. 

Mugi didn’t want to fight anymore. He wanted to go home. He wanted to hunt, cook damper and brew billy tea with his nephew. This wasn’t his nation. This was some other mob’s and now he was here trying to pry it away on behalf of these white bastards. 

He hated the way the white fullahs strode around like they had a right to it all – like they were some kind of gods. The only thing godlike about them was their opinion of themselves. He’d seen them bleed just like his mob. They weren’t anything ethereal. Just blood and bone like anyone else. Mugi wasn’t sure what he despised most: the white dog’s greed or their ignorance. They wanted to take, conquer and rape the land. Like it was a prize to be won. They had their heads so far up their own arses they didn’t realise how deluded they truly were. The land wouldn’t allow itself to be conquered. It wasn’t some fruit that sat heavy and plump on the lowest limbs of a tree. It was as harsh as it was beautiful, and it could show you who was really in charge if you were stupid enough to give it a good hard poke. 

Mugi closed his eyes so he could recalibrate. He was doing this for his sister and her boy back home.  That’s why he was here, no other reason he could think of. 

After they came in and stole the land from his people, they sold it back to them. They called it civilisation, but Mugi couldn’t find the civility in anything they were doing. The only white folk he gave a good goddamn about were the Irish. They were the only ones that seemed to cop it as sweet as the Kooris did. Poor bastards – all of them – poor, poor bastards. His lot and theirs. 

Mugi stood there with his eyes closed. The breeze lapped sweat from his cheeks. He imagined peeking through the kitchen window of his sister’s house. Her and the boy would be making damper or soda bread and laughing and gently elbowing each other. A fire blazed somewhere and it cast a long shadow that moved back and forth like someone pacing. He saw her, in his mind’s eye, the woman from the creek. 

Then he remembered he did have other reasons for being out here.

*

At night Mugi would sneak away. He crept past the tents and the officers snoring like smokestacks of old locomotives. He stayed low to the ground and waded through waist-high grass. He dove into the deep, cool shadows of the towering gum trees. He sprinted, hard, into the heart of the bush. His legs burning and his chest heaving until he reached the creek.

Until he reached her.

*

Mugi rounded a clump of tents. As he crept past the last one, he heard Captain Miller conversing with Lieutenant Daniels. The night had truly settled over the camp now and he crouched down behind a stack of logs, assured that the darkness would shroud him from the camp’s collection of paranoid eyes. 

“I don’t know how they know we’re coming. It’s like someone is giving us up.” Captain Miller’s voice was distinct—rough and deep like a rockslide in a quarry.

“Yes sir. It is quite perplexing,” Daniels said.

“I’m glad to hear you’re perplexed, Lieutenant. It shows you care. I was beginning to think you wanted to tend the land and raise cattle here.”
“Sir?”

“We should have dispatched this Dawarang fellow weeks ago and been back home with our wives and children. I was beginning to think you liked it out here so much, you wanted to stay.”

Mugi listened as Daniel’s cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, sir, I am not following.”

“If you truly hated the heat and the stink and the general sense of melancholy this place imposes on one, really felt it on a day-to-day basis, I’d have thought you’d do everything in your power to achieve your objective?”

“Yes, sir I –”

“I don’t want to hear any more words from you Daniels. I want action. You hear me? Action.”

“Yes, sir,” Daniels said again.

“Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags bloody full, sir. Just find the bastard, understood?”

There was the loud sharp click as Daniel’s snapped the heels of his boots together and then – silence.

Mugi waited in the shadows, waited for the tent flaps to open and the light to spill out and a dejected Daniels to slink past. A few seconds and nothing. Mugi froze as he heard hurrying boots clomping towards him. He turned to see Daniels striding for him, the weight of his footsteps kicking up plumes of dust. He must have exited Miller’s tent from the rear.

“You, there. What the hell are you up to?” 

Daniels stood over Mugi – a looming storm cloud.

Mugi began to gather logs from the pile and bundle them into his arms. He stood so he was face-to-face with the lieutenant.

“Sorry, sir, I’m just collecting wood for the fire.”
Daniels looked him up and down, his thin lips curling into a sneer.

“Well bloody hurry up then will you. Get back to your tent officer. I’m imposing a curfew tonight.”

Mugi saluted, almost dropping some of the logs. Daniels didn’t break eye contact until he’d stomped off behind one of the tents. 

*

Mugi knew that when a curfew was imposed, the white fullahs employed an extra level of vigilance. They’d have sentries strewn all around camp. Most officers who had the pleasure of a night shift were already exhausted and it was inevitable that they’d nod off – it was just a matter of time. Then there was the lackies, like Paul, who loved to catch a dissenter just so his white masters would pat his head and say “good boy.”

*

The horse Mugi had saddled earlier was still tied to the log where he’d left him. No officer had bothered to investigate why one of the horses wasn’t back in the stable with the rest, or why it was still wearing a saddle.

Mugi stalked his way toward the animal. The horse dug at the dirt with its hoof and whinnied when it saw him approach. 

“Shhh, ya dumb bugger,” Mugi said.

The horse flicked it’s head up and down and started pulling at the rope clipped to its bridal. Mugi reached the animal and stroked its mane, until it stopped jerking.

A calm fell over beast. 

Mugi spotted one of the sentries standing in the paddock only a few meters away. Yawning, the officer gazed up at the luminous stars that exploded across the canvas of the night sky.

Mugi searched around in the dust. He stood once he found it, a small round stone. He ran his fingers over the rock’s smooth edges and then lined up his target. 

 “Sorry, Brother,” he said. He wound back his arm and snapped it forward in a fast whip. 

The stone cut through the cool night air and struck the distracted sentry on the back of the skull. He didn’t want to cave the man’s head in – just blow out his lights. 

Mugi watched the man’s knees buckle and his whole body seemed to crumple in on itself and the tall grass swallowed him.

The sentry now asleep—probably the deepest he’d had since being deployed—Mugi didn’t waste any time. He knew there’d be more sentries milling about and didn’t think there’d be enough rocks for all of them. 

He led the horse through the long grass, making sure to crouch down and stay out of sight. He appreciated the symphony of insects. Crickets and frogs and the slow buzz of cicadas. He reached the middle of the clearing when a bat screeched and swooped overhead. 

Mugi felt his heart slide into his throat and stood frozen until he was able to regain his composure and push on. As he reached the deep, elongated shadows of the tree line, he glanced up at the sky. He could see why the sentry had been so enraptured. Thousands of jewels burned through the blackness, their sharp trails of light reaching down toward him. 

Mugi sunk into the darkness of the thick bushland, and he and the horse clambered over the dense scrub and fallen branches. They crept carefully through the brush until he could no longer smell the whispers of the campfire. He then mounted the horse and charged towards the creek.

He heard the creek before he saw it. The burbling of tannin-stained water trickling over the pock ridden stones that cut the bed of water in two. Mugi jumped from the horse and tied it to a nearby tree branch. He went on foot until he reached the creek bed, lit by the radiance of the full moon. 

She was there. 

The woman knelt by the bank, her hands cutting circles in the water, humming an unfamiliar tune. She turned ever so slowly, and her onyx eyes caught his in their rapture. Mugi felt his heart soar. No matter how many times he saw her, he swore she was the most beautiful vision. She was the ethereal shimmer of the moonlight.  Her name was Alinta, a name that meant fire or flame, he couldn’t remember which. The woman rose and floated towards him.

Mugi didn’t move – couldn’t move. 

Alinta threw her slender arms around his neck. Mugi felt the chill of her flesh, which soothed him. He slipped one arm around the small of her back and pulled her body tightly against his. Eyes shut, two white hot mouths heat seeking, soft wet lips melting together. It took everything Mugi had to breakaway away from the ache of her want.  

“We don’t have much time,” Mugi said. “Those dogs mean business this time. You must warn Dawarang. You must tell him to leave this place.”

Alinta smiled, and she let go of Mugi.

“He can’t leave this place. It’s not that easy. This place owns him. Needs him.”

“I’ve seen what these bastards are capable of. They’ll burn this place. They’ll take it all.” Mugi stood closer to Alinta and took a handful of her soft curls, spinning them around his fingers.

“It’s getting harder to leave,” he said. “What if I can’t tell you when they’re coming for yas?

Alinta swatted away his hand and smiled again. 

“Let them come, let them see what happens.”

There was a sharp crack as a heavy footstep splintered a branch, then a metallic click. Mugi and Alinta turned to see Paul, the White Dog, who had thumbed back the hammer of his rifle.

“We’re already ’ere.” He smiled that sadistic grin of his and levelled the weapon at Mugi’s chest and pulled the trigger. 

Mugi felt the impact snatch the breath from his lungs and the creeping heat of the wound slowly enveloped his entire body. He fell backwards onto the soft wet earth of the creek and tried to cough up the torrent of blood lurching through his windpipe. He waited to die, waited for Alinta to scream but instead thought he saw her laughing. 

“What are you smiling at ya daft bitch,” Paul said as he began to slide the rifle’s trigger back.

What happened next, Mugi thought was conjured from the dying embers of his imagination. 

The trees seemed to move. Not like they did in the wind. They appeared to take steps. Their roots tore free from the ground dredging up dirt and dead leaves. They circled Paul like a pack of ravenous dingos. Their skeletal branches tore at his clothes, grabbed at his arms and he dropped the rifle. 

He screamed as angry limbs hoisted him high into the air and, as if they’d practiced it a thousand times before, they wrenched his arms and legs from their sockets simultaneously. His body broke and shuddered violently. Paul’s eyes were wide and Mugi thought they’d burst but they grew dim and closed. His mouth went slack and hung open in a frozen twisted howl.

Alinta kneeled and ran her hand over Mugi’s chest, slick with blood. Her soft caress stole his mind from thoughts of death that swarmed like flies.

Those eyes locked onto his and she grinned.

“See,” she said. “Let them come.”

Olivia De Zilva

Written by mascara on . Posted in Creative Non-fiction.

Olivia De Zilva

Olivia De Zilva is a writer based in Meanjin. She was awarded the Deakin University Non-Fiction Prize by Express Media in 2019, shortlisted for the University of Queensland Press Mentorship Award and The Deborah Cass Prize in 2022. In 2023, she was shortlisted for the Richell Prize for Emerging Writers and 20/40 prize by Finlay Lloyd. Her work has been published in The Guardian, Westerly, Liminal, SBS, Cordite Poetry Review and Australian Poetry Journal among others. She is currently working on a full-length creative non-fiction manuscript.
 
 
 
 
Swimming Lessons

During the school holidays, we make the journey up and down the hill to the Adelaide Aquatic Centre every day. O’Halloran Hill is a long bus ride to the city and I try to pass the time by counting each McDonalds we pass on the way. There’s Flagstaff Hill with all the cars parked out in front, South Road with the massive Drive-Thru line and West Terrace where all the workers smoke cigarettes out the front and share bubble gum by the bins. 

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Dominique Hecq reviews she doesn’t seem autistic by Esther Ottaway

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays.

she doesn’t seem autistic

by Esther Ottaway

Puncher and Wattman

ISBN 978-1-922571-76-2

Reviewed by DOMINIQUE HECQ

 

Esther Ottaway’s third book of poetry, she doesn’t seem autistic, explores a neglected area of psychological medicine: autism in women. It is by default that Ottaway herself was diagnosed, when a specialist established that her youngest daughter was autistic. Although partly autobiographical, the persona in the poems is ‘a composite woman and girl,’ Ottaway tells us in her foreword: she wants ‘to show [us] a profile of autism that [we] are not familiar with’ (12). 

The collection documents the symptoms of female autism across a spectrum as well as the inevitable misdiagnoses. It also poignantly exposes the core of the speaker’s humanity—in this case, what affects her. In Andy Jackson’s words, the book is ‘a revelation.’

Symptoms of female autism include empathy arousal, rejection sensitive dysphoria, alexithymia, situational mutism, masking, echolalia, ADHD, sensory processing disorder, dyspraxia, hypotonia, dyscalculia, avoidant/restrictive food intake syndrome, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, delayed sleep disorder, narcolepsy, pathological demand avoidance, dysautonomia, panic disorder, depression, etc. Repress the desire to laugh, because this is not funny. Miss Diagnosis is psychological medicine’s own worst symptom. As Ottaway shows triumphantly towards the end of the collection, labels come unstuck. Are torn to shreds. And yes, as she affirms in ‘Joy to my world,’ her own ‘revelation’ (74) means a belief in change.

And the poems? Ah, the poems. They show how poetry is created from the bodymind, its affects and memories. Riposting to Ottaway’s dismissal of the word ‘good’ in ‘How are you?’ (57), I’d say the poems are achingly good. These are not poems trapped on the surface—the surface of observation, information, narration, sleek language.  Here, there is rhythmic intensity that fuses emotion, breath and thought, incorporating profound, associative insight.

Consider, for example the opening to ‘There is always a giraffe,’ which takes us back to the persona’s childhood:

Cool as a whale
Mrs Haydon is stepping backwards through water

patient with this small giraffe
who has failed at every sport

all neck and skittery hooves,
large-eyed, patterned with shame.

Consider how it catches gracefully the movement it needs for grief. How it carries with dismay the child’s terror, and then with respect the newly found knowledge of death, ‘asking if it’s worse to drown, or fall’
(28).

Perhaps these unknowns associated with terror and death present Ottaway’s powering creativity with a tempering negativity. This would seem to be the implication of the book’s first poem, ‘After writing a book on female autism, I decide to bury it,’ where birth and death, breath and dread are intertwined in the figure of ‘that bleating woman’ (13) who nonetheless dares to offer the danger of poetry. 

‘The shamed body addresses its owner,’ responding to a sense of dissociation, is achingly good, too: its feeling is finely judged, its observation has a convincing mix of deflection, fixation and ambivalence. It is almost speechless:

You say my names: but will you introduce me
to your friends?  Are you still ashamed –
(52)

Another standout in this collection is ‘Illanelle,‘ where the body is at war with itself, its ‘lifelong illness… auto-immune,’ adumbrating as it does its own ‘release’ (53). There is something about death that is teaching Esther Ottaway’s layered poetry a new clarity. Perhaps it is a particular kind of newly found carelessness. Or confidence.

At another level, it encourages just a little too much care, as if presence, evoked through sensate detail, might compensate for absence, as in ‘Perennially gaslit, the autistics reject humanity,’ where the persona talks to (her)self and needs more detachment so that desire can get free of guilt and shame:

We aren’t’ wanted,
won’t be missed. Little wonder
that we shy now at this pillory

go to the insects, plants, land, sky. (65)

In the face of such debilitating condition, Ottaway finds in poetic practice a way of enacting a discipline. It might seem effortless, but not many poets can achieve this balancing of the imponderable and impermanent, this balancing of lines so that they incorporate at once the movement of breath and bodymind. Ottaway has learned how to set her subject free: she exercises a discipline of line; she practices precise observation and sometimes self-deprecation; she discreetly deploys a specialised lexicon and, above all, empathy. Some might say that she writes without ego, but I disagree: wit and humour undercut a refreshing self-consciousness.

In ‘Neurodiverse’ Ottaway achieves a level of imaginative embodiment I find puzzling. Through a linguistic play of deferrals and reversals, the poem achieves something close to spiritual power. Something I only experienced by accident in a yoga practice I failed at again and again—and have long since abandoned. Here suffering, emptiness and desire coalesce:

Deserve in our
derive. No ruse.
Revise, undo re
overused rein.
Never die sour! (75)

The imaginative process rests on inter reaching reciprocities; it is useless to want one dimension to explain another, as if the poem were a response to an idea that had some temporal, causal and linguistic priority. It is a pared down, even compact poem. And yet it spawns innumerable interpretations through letter reconfiguration and linguistic border crossing.  Never die sour / [nev-uh-duh-zai-uh]. Rein / rien (nothing). Derive / dérive (drift). Who is writing here? Esther, or me? Until fairly recently, ours (ours?) was not a subject-position from which autism was usually considered, writes another poet grappling, as I do, with what it means to write from the perspective of an autistic subject.1

Themes recur and resonate throughout Esther Ottaway’s work: pregnancy, parenthood, loss, grief and more generally, family ties, but it seems to me that she has found ways to embody them more fully in she doesn’t seem autistic than in her two previous collections to amplify the architecture of her poetry so that what might have been mere observation or information acquires layers of narrative and thought that convey a more profound, a more fully realised experience of interconnectedness. Here is the opening to ‘How to have an autistic friend,’ where the syntax performs this interconnectedness:

See that my scales flash gilt:
the prowess, gift.
Acknowledge the lack in me,
how baffling the lacunae.
Invite me, fit the schedule to me.
If I can’t answer. If I forget,
remind. Remind anyway. When I can’t follow through,
be kind. Remember the iceberg
balancing under this peak,
how intensely I’m thrashing
underwater. See
what can’t be seen, like city stars. Give me rest
and more rest, time, time
and more time.
(79)

Above all, what strikes in this collection is the inventiveness of the language. Enjoy the full response to ‘How have you succeeded despite having autism?’. Here is the hilarious beginning:

At first, I am disauder, distressed auganism. I cannot count on the
audinary. Efforts come to naut – I triage, relinquish, harden up: hindsight
and forethaut my advisors, flight my reliable last resaut. I am an auphan
in this singular authogenesis, autonomous but so hamstrung, my
writing my only authodox ability, stamp on my passpaut…

My own revelation comes intertwined with an anecdaut. 

… empathy arousal, rejection sensitive dysphoria, alexithymia, situational mutism, masking, echolalia, sensory processing disorder, avoidant/restrictive food intake syndrome, delayed sleep disorder, pathological demand avoidance, panic disorder, depression… mania and hypervigilance …

My youngest (a boy) says: We’re all on the spectrum, mum. That includes you. My jaw drops. F. labels. Mind the book’s last poem, ‘The autistic woman’s self-compassion blessing,’ I sway to myself. 2

Notes:

1 Joanne Limburg 2017 ‘The Shape of the Problem’, The Poetry Review, 131.
2 Pun intended.

DOMINIQUE HECQ was born in the French-speaking part of Belgium. She now lives on unceded Wurundjeri land. Hecq writes in English and French. Her creative works comprise a novel, six collections of short stories and  fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry. Her latest publications  include After Cage (2nd ed., 2022, Liquid Amber Press) Endgame with No Ending (2023, SurVision), winner of the 2022 James Tate Poetry Prize, and a bilingual poetry sequence titled Songlines / Pistes de rêve, with photographs by Natia Zvhania (Transignum, 2023).

Varuna Naicker reviews We Need to Talk by Manveen Kholi

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays.

We Need To Talk

by Manveen Kholi

ISBN-10 ‏  9392494297

Red River Press

in partnership with Centre for Stories

Reviewed by VARUNA NAICKER

 

We Need To Talk is raw, truthful and confronting. Manveen Kohli, a British-Indian poet, captures the brutal hypocrisy of what it is like to live in a society where the existence of women is a contradiction. The honesty in which Kohli writes her poetry leaves the reader nowhere to turn but to confront the harsh truth that we force young women into a lion’s den without raising a finger to tame the many lions. From the title, Kohli had my attention. We Need To Talk. The masterful 4 words instill an alertness for what is to come next. The title foreshadows the content of the entire book: I need you to listen to what I have to say. 

The first section of eight, the poem “When My Home Country isn’t Home” dives headfirst into exploring the contradictions of Indian society. What is immediately noticeable is the choice of language Kohli employs. Her verses are sparse and not overly layered with descriptive metaphors and similes. She lets the subject matter do the talking and her poetry is all the more powerful for it. “When My Home Country isn’t Home” immediately acknowledges Kohli’s position to the reader as an Indian living outside of India; an insider and outsider in the eyes of Indian society: 

These people always remind me
that India is home,
but won’t ever talk about how I am treated
as a foreigner.
(13) 

She quickly transitions topic, highlighting the unbalanced accountability women and men are subject to in this society. Using emotive religious language, Kohli drives home the point that piety is preached whereas respect for women’s bodies and their agency are not: 

an uncle will put his hands
on his niece’s body
and use those very hands to pray,
(14) 

The verses move quickly and cut to the heart of the issue. The minimal, blunt language creates a sombre tone which aids Kohli’s overall objective; this is necessary conversation, not a nice one. 

As We Need To Talk continues, it is clear that the entire book will be unapologetic in its commentary of the society the author sees around her. For some, this may be confronting but if so, that is all the more reason why it is needed. This is incredibly true for the next two poems “Daddy’s Issues” and “Don’t Call Me Pretty”. The two poems are dark and reference the violence the author is subjugated to by those she trusts. In “Daddy’s Issues”, Kohli challenges the primordial pedestal which the concept of ‘family’ sits upon within Indian society. 

She refuses to dilute the experiences of her father’s abuse to save their relationship, challenging the patriarchy entrenching Indian society through her closest source: her father. Indian women see this time and time again. We are told to forget our grievances in favour of protecting the family dynamic. Familial domestic violence is punctuated with an asterisk as if to say that it is less severe than violence outside the home because forgiveness is waiting behind the door, biding time until the victimised family member walks through. But Kohli draws a clear line in the sand, instead opting to not absolve her father of his crimes; she will not carry the burden of forgiving him, as if she does, she is betraying herself:

so I will stop here
because Dad,
writing about you
is like returning
to war while
still having PTSD.
(24) 

“Don’t Call Me Pretty” returns to examine the societal contradiction rooted in misogyny where women are framed as instigators, despite the fact that sexual violence being inflicted upon them. The repetitive phrase: 

Didn’t you know?(30) 

The phrase punctuates each double standard, reinforcing femininity as dangerous for purely existing: 

Didn’t you know that
your breasts and legs
should have
been concealed
for your body is a meal,
(30) 

The verses poke holes in how we understand consent through a harrowing account of sexual violence. The author begs the question: what is the point of teaching girls consent when it is the boys who need to learn? The simple, plain language puts the irony of blaming women front and centre. The reader is hard pressed to concede that this is anything but injustice at its worst. 

While the earlier poems in We Need To Talk are imbued with anger, grief, and a demand for accountability from the external forces at play, Kholi’s later poems take on an introspective and reflective nature: they are letters to herself (in fact one is titled “Love Letters to Myself’). “Intrusive Thoughts” uses perhaps the most poetic language out of the entire collection. Kohli describes to the reader how insidious her anxiety can be and the various ways it manifests itself by sabotaging her daily existence. She does not break away from her pattern of using minimalist language, and although the tone is still direct, there is a trepidation that is not as apparent in her previous poems. It only adds to the rawness of her work and shows that We Need To Talk encompasses many topics that are not broached in Indian society, mental health being a core one. The juxtaposition between the fleeting nature of anxiety attacks, yet its anxiety’s permanency demonstrates Kohli’s talent at communicating the visceral through language: 

Sometimes anxiety
feels like the only
constant in my life
for it may leave
for a while but
never permanently,
and when it reappears,
it grips me with
such ferocity
that it takes
the oxygen
out of my body.”
(45) 

We may not see her anxiety but we feel it. 

Kohli’s skill as a poet is flexed as she traverses many different emotions without losing the reader’s attention through the directness in her address. “Tribute” is an ode to the loved ones in Kohli’s life. In the last verses, Kohli proves that she does not paint men with a broad brush stroke. The verses concerning her grandfather, her brother and her lover are written with tenderness and love. For me, the poems serve a dual purpose. They are an homage to the men who showed her true love, and on a broader level are a reminder that misogyny is not a sickness, where the sick have no choice but to succumb. The tales of her brother and his love for her demonstrate that men have agency to choose love over complicit violence, and this love the author basked in: 

Having a father
who starved
me of love
and a brother
who gave it
in abundance
taught me
one of the most
important lessons
of my life.
A man is not
always defined
by the one
who raised him.”
(81) 

The final verses bring We Need To Talk full circle, with Kohli dedicating her last sonnets to her mother’s experiences dealing with the very same patriarchy and misogyny examined in prior pages. There is solace in Kohli’s words to her mother and she acknowledges that the grief she feels, her mother is not a stranger to either. 

We Need To Talk is a holistic retelling of what it means to be a young Indian woman. The ferocity in its censure of Indian society, of the reproduction of toxic masculinity, to me, comes from needing to speak the truth into existence so that these topics do not remain in the shadows. The power of Kohli’s poetry comes from interweaving the bad and the good, the light and dark, to create a complex world that is brave and truthful to the experiences of many Indian women. The poems will no doubt spark discussion and be the catalyst for inspecting how we replicate the world around us in our own relationship dynamics. We Need To Talk is a work that deserves a wide audience and pause for conversation for many years to come. 

 

VARUNA NAICKER is a Fijian-Indian writer from Penrith, immigrating to Australia when her parents moved from Fiji in 1999. She holds a Bachelor of Communication degree and a Master’s degree in Public Policy and Governance. Varuna has deep interest in how social institutions form people’s perception of themselves and the perception of the world around them. She has worked in various media, including film and writing.