Author: mascara

Praiseworthy

by Alexis Wright

ISBN 9781922725325

Giramondo

Reviewed by THEODORA GALANIS
 
 
 
‘Listen!’ cries an oracle. ‘Look proper way. Carefully. See detail, if you want to see properly.’ (p.368).

This instruction arrives almost halfway through Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy, opening the chapter titled, ‘Goddess of Scales’.

Before I had reached this page, I was having doubts about writing this review. Praiseworthy is a text that rightfully challenges the plucky critic who thinks they can take it on in a thousand words. One of the novel’s narrators pre-empts my concern: why risk sounding like ‘a little academic who thought he knew it all’? (p.368).

The call to ‘listen’ and ‘see detail’, however, felt like a generous invitation. It prompted to me think about how I had been reading this novel – or rather, how the novel had been asking to be read.

Following the oracle’s imperative, this review is in part a reflection on what Praiseworthy has to tell us about a slow reading practice and why it matters.

***

Praiseworthy is set in a fictional town of the same name somewhere in dust storm smothered country up in the north of Australia. This story begins ‘once upon a’ good for some and bad for others time: the dreaded present of the Anthropocene, of global warming and global pandemic, of hate speech and social media, of Intervention violence and Closing the Gap talk.

Here, under the ‘sulky’ orange haze, we meet the Steel family. The father, Cause Man, is a pain in the ‘ass’ entrepreneur who is terrified about global warming. He dreams up a plan to make an international fossil-fuel-free transport conglomerate fuelled off the backs of feral donkeys. His wife, Dance, thinks this is a load of bulldust. She’s a sensible woman who is better off spending her time flitter fluttering with the moths and butterflies than tidying up after his mess. They have two children, the aspiring boxer and in-love eldest son, Aboriginal Sovereignty, and his younger ratbag brother, Tommyhawk.

Praiseworthy stages the interconnected journeys of these characters as they each embark on a quest of sorts: Cause is looking for the perfect platinum donkey to be the ‘mask-head’ of his company, Dance traces her ancestral links to China, Tommyhawk begs for a one-way ticket to Canberra, and Aboriginal Sovereignty looks for, well, maybe somewhere to offer up his love.

Across the breadth of her oeuvre, including titles like Plains of Promise (1997) and The Swan Book (2014), Wright demonstrates a commitment to exploring what it is to write an ‘Aboriginal sovereignty of the imagination’. In her essay ‘On Writing Carpentaria’, she describes this as:

Just such a story as we might tell in our story place. Something to grow the land perhaps. Or, to visit the future.

In Praiseworthy, questions surrounding sovereignty of the imagination are focalised through the Steel family’s eldest son. We learn early on that he commits suicide by walking into the sea. This event embroils the people of Praiseworthy in a search of their own. Variously motivated, all kinds of folk from ghostly-looking fishermen to pandanus-fanning power ladies to fanatical church goers sift through the sand in search of his life. Even the anthropologist-cum-copper called Maximum Security combs the beach for evidence.

Aboriginal Sovereignty’s haunted presence is the ‘mystery death thing’ that percolates through the novel(p.368). Held in the arms of the ‘giant sea lady’, his story is always filtered through her tidal movements which wash in and out of narrative focus. Each time I felt myself sucked away from the drought-stricken dust country and pulled into the lap of the sea, I returned to the question of his absence a little differently. Why did he die? Or, did he really die?

***

The epic size of Praiseworthy poses a direct challenge to the tik-tocking attention spans of iPhone-loving brains like Tommyhawk’s. The writing demands sustained focus on a sentence as it sprawls over four, five, six lines. The reader is asked to consider a single image or colour for minutes on end, like the meditation on the colour grey that spans some seventeen pages.

As is characteristic of Wright’s rhythm, such wondrously long passages are often punctuated with an exclamation. My favourites include, ‘So!’, ‘Well!’, ‘But!’, ‘Sovereignty!’, ‘Bang!’ ‘Yep!’, ‘Whatever!’, ‘Sea!’(pp.290, 301, 307, 317, 334). These percussive beats interrupt the hypnotic effect of the sounds that preceded it, offering a moment to pause and reflect. Or to switch gears and wake up a bit. It almost feels like a little clip around the ears: Hey! You still listening?

Oracles are called to ‘speak up’ at the beginning of each chapter, marking the oral storytelling traditions which have been fused into Wright’s earlier takes on the epic form (p.164). The multiple narrators each shape the story with their own inflections and points of emphasis. There is no universalising voice in Praiseworthy. But, how could there be? These oracles are attempting to fathom ‘real quests of importance’ about ‘the interconnectedness of survival simultaneously occurring throughout the cherished lands of traditional country’(p.96). In a story of this size, a single perspective will simply not suffice. A narrator remarks:

“How could one person become so worthy of being – the epic? Of being that special? Were the storytellers too lazy these days to look further into the human abyss, or too unimaginative to be bothered to create a more diverse catalogue of stories?”(p.25)

It is this ambition – to tune in to the several overlapping, and sometimes contradictory, stories of country – that Praiseworthy strives towards. Cause Man Steel obsessively concerns himself with problems on a planetary scale (so much so that he picks up the nicknames ‘Planet’ and ‘Global Warming’). In contrast, it is Dance who often brings the focus back to the smaller details. As moth woman, the ‘moth-er’, she has gift for tuning into the inaudible frequencies of insect life. She listens to ‘two ants arguing for hours over a crumb of bread’ and a ‘far-off moth or butterfly splashing into the ocean’. Elsewhere, she is described ‘reading the unfathomable or innumerable messages held in the billions of microscopic scales stacked like sets of roof tiles on the wings of the moth’. The use of the word ‘scale’ here is most intriguing, for its relation to ideas of measurement, weight, size, shifts, balance, proportion, and too of skin, reptilian, insect and piscine.

The sliding movement between scales of stories is something Wright deftly handles in Praiseworthy. The locus of the narrative continually shifts from the inaudible and invisible stories, the hidden-beneath-your-shoe stories or the hiding-at-the-bottom-of-the-sea stories, to the grand master stories, the atmospheric stories, the old as time stories. Take this sentence, for example, as a small instantiation of the kind of scaling effect that characterises the broader narrative form:

Country always tells its people that there are endless ways of reading its world, depending on whether you are a moth, a butterfly, a dragonfly, a mountain chain, the sea, a river, moon, or stars, or the atmosphere itself.(p535)

From the tiny to the cosmic, the elements are held together in mutual significance to the epic story of country.

The interplay between local and planetary forces is a source of great energy in the text. There is an emphasis on the importance of the local, and yet an attention to what occurs elsewhere. Epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter reflect this planetary focus, with quotes drawn from the Waanyi Dictionary to Jorge Luis Borges to former Hong Kong politician, Alvin Yeung. These wide-reaching references, alongside others scattered throughout the prose, place Wright’s work within global circuits and planetary frames.

***

Against the scarcity logic defining so much talk about the Anthropocene, in Praiseworthy Wright offers stylistic abundance in such a way that could be characterised as, quoting the novel, ‘over-imagined and overgrown’(p.316). The sheer poetic density is a defiant protest against a contemporary compulsion toward speed, minimalism, and efficiency.

Praiseworthy swirls over itself again and again. In the first chapter, we are introduced to many of the narrative strands that Wright picks up on at later stages – albeit with a different voice, from a different vantage point. As if whirling through an oceanic gyre or a cyclonic wind current, readers are repeatedly drawn back into almost-familiar scenes to re-witness characters in the ongoing negotiation of life in and beyond the hazy town.

Despite its energetic rhythms, in moments it can feel as if you’re moving slowly through Praiseworthy. It really did take me quite some time to read this book. That’s not just because it’s big – though, mind you, everyone who’s seen me carrying it around has commented on its size (Bloody hell! That’s a doorstopper, said the bus driver yesterday).
I think the effect of moving slowly is kind of the point. The wise ‘extinction-less’ elders explain the significance of this:

With old-world thinking, you have to reach down into the depths of time to raise it to the surface and compete with the faster-than-thought new world twaddle dazzle skimming across the skin of the spirit. Well!(p.291)

Old-world thinking doesn’t happen in a jiffy. And in Praiseworthy this is not simply advocated through certain voices but materialised at the level of form: the long sentences, the swirling structure, the dense imagery and the number of pages all ask readers to slow down. To go back and look properly. To see detail. When moving carefully through Praiseworthy, we notice things that may otherwise pass us by in a blink.

In paying attention to the formal qualities of Praiseworthy, I have not intended to sidestep the politics of the novel. Rather, I posit slow reading as a practice that further attunes us to the complexities and violences of the colonial condition. Slow reading leaves space and time to do the deep, hard work of listening. Slow reading is a politics. Praiseworthy calls readers to take part.

Works Cited

Wright, Alexis. Praiseworthy. Giramondo, 2023.
—. ‘On Writing Carpentaria’, Indigenous Transnationalism: Essays on Carpentaria, edited by Lynda Ng, Giramondo Publishing Company, 2018, pp.217-232.

THEODORA GALANIS is a PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide. She researches oceanic imaginaries in contemporary Australian literature. Her project forms part of the Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative, ‘Between Indian and Pacific Oceans: Reframing Australian Literatures’.

Cities

by Petra White

ISBN  978-1-925735-30-7

Vagabond

Reviewed by PHYLLIS PERLSTONE

Each time I have read Cities, I have felt more of the affect of the poetical language. Yet there is a way of looking at it as a whole. Given Petra White’s themes, I can’t help alluding to Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, also Sylvia Plath’s last book Ariel. White dives into the myths to find past definitions for past and present human roles : “Tell me what a mother is”.

The book begins with “Demeter’s Song”. Trying to define a mother within the ancient Greek myth of Hades – the god of the underworld who carries off Persephone, Demeter’s daughter to marry her. This suggests many sorts of darkness:

“Sing to me daughter
Upwards through the darkness”

White uses Persephone’s abduction to be perceived by her simply as growing away from the mother to adulthood. The grief of a human persona over a death (later in the poems) who is now a mother herself, links knowing death with the source of love. This is within the perception of a human mother. The early poems use the myth to personify similar human emotions.

In the second poem, “Demeter”, portraying someone who loves and loses, we are sent straight into the myth of Persephone, lost to Demeter in Hades. By casting the world into the ‘darkness’ of winter, when no crops grow and a depression then overcomes the world, White mirrors Demeter’s own loss. 

Whether the words evoking this depression suggest Demeter’s loss and provocation to revenge, or whether they suggest the response of grieving where she can neither act nor provide anything – as in the poem “Corn”– is not certain. Adrienne Rich.in her early work, Of Woman Born, argues that the “un-mothered mother” is neither able to guide nor, in the worst  cases, avoid being destructive. Demeter’s cry implies that she hears her inaction as criticised in a troll-like outburst. White incorporates  contemporary  nuances, as in the words, “I could hear them, / She lives through her daughter! / She is depressed! A monster !”

Demeter calls out, “Oh hideous love / that a mortal knows –/what you love you must lose./ But accept it? / Impossible as breath/under water”. White’s Demeter holds an ambivalent tone here. Her usual work can’t be done, it is just “Impossible as breath/ under water.” But that recognition of being like humans in their mortality, holds up the state of human imagination – the acceptance or not of death. 

These early poems are not broken into stanzas. They beautifully sustain short lines in one whole –give  recognition to mythical personifications – of human perceptions of their feelings. But the words in “Demeter” describing birth are heavy too  – “they heaved her on to my stomach/ like an anchor”, mirroring a mortal’s bodily awareness both physically and metaphorically. This is about being stopped in her singularity, taking the mother to a standstill – unable to be part of the rushing world around her. The lines are tempered though, and made ambivalent in tone again by the words about the baby : “When I held her I diminished/and grew all at once”. 

White’s Persephone has her definition  of her mother – “My mother is not human, cannot keep / her soul in quiet perspective” – implying that a human can. But here, Persephone is complaining of this wildness – its effect on her. The affect of the lines is also of hearing a protest that resists fate – echoes of  Dylan Thomas’ “Rage against the dying of the light”, or the mocking poetry of Sylvia Plath whose persona cannot relinquish what the poems satirise. In “The Applicant” and “Lady Lazarus”; a persona mocks herself in her suicide attempts – “I do it exceptionally well”.

Persephone tries to describe how she now thinks of this as a realisation that she is growing into adulthood. What that means. She is drawing away from her mother, but there is a conundrum in going into Hades to become a ‘shade’. “I had met myself as a shade. But how/ thrillingly alive I felt.” The poem ends with a surrender to her fate. Yet, she considers her new role as an honour: “Oh my dead, I will be your queen.” The next poem “Persephone at 40” tells of her still struggling with her and her mother’s goddess immortality. She has a deceptive disdain for Eurydice who dies after all. Also, she yearns to understand love, which she believes can only come with knowing death.

“I could love her more if I knew she would die.” Here the tone is of dramatic cynicism: “if I could hold / like flesh the empty air / and pray and cry and do all that”. The evocative language of knowing death is countered by “.. but in that other world /of streets and running children, / anonymous trees and painted cottages, / rivers that slump along ungrandly.” Persephone is caught between the status of ruling over the dead – and life in all its ordinary forms. There is, also, a compassion for the dead, their “faces folded up from animal sleep”. The lines beautifully contrast and balance the imagery. To this point White has drawn attention to the theme of mothering – its effect. “My mother tells me I am wild / but I am not motherless” attributes her behaviour to learning by example.

In the second section the theme of growing away from the mother is intensified. It deals with men and what to know about them – a satirical list alluding to traditional ways of deferring to men. There is also a poem, “Motherless”, and then poems about the death of the speaker’s mother – a human one now but now addressed as if she were a human ghost: “You knock like an accidental noise, and you / staring all through me / with curious half frightened eyes. / Now I have a daughter, I see how you loved me.” Here is another allusion to love and mothers and mothering. 

In Section III, what seems at first a bifurcation of theme, signalled by the book’s title, Cities, suggests ‘reality’ supplanting myth. The theme of reality becomes part of the second poem, “Marriage”. This section begins with “To London”. No longer diving into myth it starts with a real plane journey to a city; it concerns the new life separating her from her country and her mother. The mortal daughter, a mother herself, talks of mutual support between bread-winner husband and stay-at-home wife/mother. Fear of failure of the couple, as against the tiny baby’s happy responses, “waking to beam at the stewards/as if joy is default”.

Then, in “Journal in November”, in the light of what was reflected upon about myth in Section I, we read “Mortal love in the hands of lovers”. This is a telling insight of affective language : “a raucous mortgage, a ticking foetus”. The half-rhymes and onomatopoeia signal the sounds to beware of – the harsh sound of money’s need and the warning of time’s heart-beat of life. Finally, “We turn our heads to the most fantastic gods,/and pray, like lovers, for the small and large of our lives.” This suggests mortal love as only a romance, echoing Demeter’s “Oh hideous love that a mortal knows”.

This leads to “And I tell the psychoanalyst / I live in two worlds” – a swift, pared-down way to give a new character to what is introduced as mental ill-health. It evokes and echoes Persephone’s and Demeter’s worlds apart and the sense of an isolated mother’s life. Through this poetry the emotions easily dismissed as invisible or belittled are enlarged upon with great economy.

Within “Cities”, in the present as against the agrarian world of the ancient Greek myth, we begin to see other contrasts. “The homeless man’s camp is gone / hoovered up with the efficiency it lacked. / Night flutters around me in scraps? Car after car scrapes past.” “Journal in November” in numbered stanzas, brings up in a nuanced way a pared, precise account of the urban world, apologising for the narrator’s observations – the reasons for feeling the unmanageable view of “two- worlds”. The treatment here concerns another consequence – a quite ‘dark’ account of the mental sickness felt by the “traditional’ wife/mother in managing the “two worlds”. In stanza 5, Petra White’s narrator observes a wintry and un-mothered world: “In every head a piece of maniacal war, / a new shard of melting ice, / a bear cub climbing to its mother / up a perpendicular slope / pursued by a desperate drone / treefuls of images / we try to unstitch ourselves from”.

The lyrical disillusion and sometimes optimism of the rest of the poems (until the final “Home”) are laid out first in “Autumn Leaves” which recalls, in fantastical imagery, the beginning of love and the attempt to repair it. Finally, “a leaf caressed me/shyly as a hand turning away.” The softness of sad or dystopian observations is an effective part of Petra White’s beautiful word-managing.

The final poem  “Home” turns to a different myth, Odysseus and Penelope, falling back on another patriarchal theme. This time, a woman’s power is compromised; the power of the wife is subservient to that of her wandering husband.

Here we find the question of ‘home’ – what it is. Mother, father, child? What poetry does – what Petra White does – is far-ranging. In calling upon myth and reality, or present-day tropes of fears or contentment, lyricism is uppermost; it rescues the ‘dark’ things as well as portraying the better, simply by evoking them – lassoing them while they are moving in front of her, and capturing them in words to be seen and heard and read.

PHYLLIS PERLSTONE first an artist and experimental filmmaker, turning to poetry in 1992, studied poetry at the New School for Social Research, New York. Awards include the NSW Women Writers Poetry Prize 2004; second in the National Women Writers Poetry Prize 2005. She has published in many journals and anthologies. Her books are: You Chase After Your Likeness (2002), The Edge of Everything (2007), shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize, the  Premier’s Award NSW in 2008; Thick and Thin Lines (2012), The Bruise of Knowing(2014). But Now is published this year.

Daisy and Woolf

by Michelle Cahill

Hachette

Reviewed by ANNE BREWSTER
 
 
 
 
 
Michelle Cahill’s debut novel Daisy & Woolf is accomplished and exhilarating. A re-reading of Virginia Woolf’s iconic modernist novel Mrs Dalloway, it excavates and reconstructs the literary worlding of a minor character, Daisy Simmons – the ‘dark, adorable’ Eurasian woman that Clarissa Dalloway’s longtime admirer, Peter Walsh, plans to marry. If you are thinking about the coupling of Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre you are on the right track.

Daisy & Woolf relates the journeys of two Anglo-Indian women – Daisy, as she travels from Calcutta to London in the 1920s to meet her beloved Peter Walsh and her subsequent peregrinations in England and Europe – and Mina, the present-day writer recreating Daisy’s story in her own novel as she follows in Daisy’s footsteps, and as she re-traces the geographical trajectories and geopolitical underpinnings of Woolf’s writerly life.

The novel has been widely – and mostly positively – reviewed. Reviewers have acknowledged the significant cultural work that the novel undertakes in investigating the impact of race on women of colour. Marina Sano, for example, praises the novel’s ‘organic’ treatment of this issue (Books+Publishing) and Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen in the Sydney Morning Herald comments on the book’s challenge to the whiteness of the western canon, saying that there is something ‘wonderfully subversive’ about taking ‘a well-known Western text and flipping it inside out to reveal societal truths’ as Cahill does in Daisy & Woolf. 

An exception to these reviews is a review which simply fails to recognise the workings of race as they are laid bare within the poetic aesthetics of this powerful and complex novel. Attending to this omission is important, I suggest, as it indicates to us how resilient white power is in reproducing itself and how the operations of race remain invisible and unremarked in so many locations. It prompts me to respond by analysing the novel’s deconstructive aesthetics and how Cahill skilfully borrows from Woolf to rewrite the racialising narrative.

***

I was more than a little taken aback by the reviewer’s comment that the novel offers 

‘scant insight into the degree to which Daisy’s race (as opposed to her class or the scandal of her adultery) affects either her social standing or her eventual fate. The only time we are jolted into acknowledging the social and political repercussions of her Anglo-Indian heritage is when she is refused the designation “British subject” on her passport because her ‘skin colour is too dark.’
(Stubbings, 2022)

I was surprised that anyone could miss the novel’s forensic examination of the multiple ways both Daisy and Mina (and their families) have been racialised through the operations of the category Anglo-Indian/Eurasian. 

Mina, the young writer whose story becomes intertwined with Daisy’s reflects, in the first few pages of the novel, on Australia’s colonial history and the little-recorded history of the early migrants on the south coast of NSW where her family lived. She thinks about the Bengali lascars who, as indentured non-Indigenous labourers in the British colonies, represent ‘the invisible ink in the history of cross-cultural connections between India, China, Australia and England’ (6). The novel introduces us early to the tropes of migration/travel and ‘cross-cultural connections’ which comprise the overarching narrative framework of the novel and inform the character arcs of three central writerly female figures of the novel (Woolf, Daisy and Mina). Each of these women is cosmopolitan, cross-hatched by multiple cultural connections, translations and globalised histories. 

The canonical weight of Virginia Woolf and the privileged sure-footedness of her creation, Mrs Dalloway, serve as both inspiration and challenge to Mina and to Daisy. Cahill’s novel excavates Woolf’s familial connections (via Empire) with India and Sri Lanka/Ceylon. While Mina acknowledges, in the first pages of the novel, that ‘Woolf sought to question … empire’ (13), the novel proceeds to demonstrate the shortcomings of this enterprise. It problematizes Woolf’s representation of India and Anglo-Indians and demonstrates that, in Mrs Dalloway, Woolf ultimately could only ‘ke[ep] Daisy stunted’ (75), rendering her through the trace of stereotype. It would seem that Woolf did not have the imaginative resources – that is, an adequate political understanding and knowledge of the classed and raced history of empire – to create for Daisy any substantive ‘interior space’ (248) within the novel in spite of its experimental approach to literary realism. Ultimately, Mina insists, Daisy’s world was impenetrable to Woolf: ‘Daisy walks the streets of … postwar London in a way that Clarissa Dalloway cannot appreciate’ (177). Woolf’s apparent cosmopolitanism was marked by classed and raced elisions and disavowals which reproduced the hegemonies she aimed to challenge. 

This cultural blindness is understood by Mina as Woolf committing a discursive violence on the Anglo-Indian gendered subject, of whom Daisy is indexical. These discursive elisions become wider acts of gatekeeping by the literary industry; Mina reflects on the fact that Woolf and ‘the critics that came after her’ in effect ‘refus[e] to let Daisy in’ (69) or to give her a substantive presence within the narratives and the literary worldings that comprise the Anglophone canon. As Mina observes, ‘there’s barely a critic who is aware of, let alone interested in, poor Daisy Simmons’ (76). Indeed, in reality, even in progressive criticism Daisy has been mis-read, for example as ‘an English woman in India’ (Reed Hickman, 65). We can understand Daisy’s exclusion from canonical literary texts as being aligned with the exclusion of Anglo-Indian (along with other BIPOC) writers from the canon.

In her depiction of Daisy’s world, Mina, in a corrective move, decenters Mrs Dalloway’s hegemonic view of the ‘post-war London’ (177) to showcase the other aspects of that city and its denizens that Woolf’s novel largely omits – the many exiles, activists and impoverished people who call it home (however partially or temporarily). Cahill’s novel (like other literary work by BIPOC writers in other contexts) brings the spotlight to bear on the histories and bodies of minoritised people and their struggles against the hegemonic cultural and political histories we see enshrined in the literary canon and its aesthetics. 

***

However, this is not to argue that Mina or the novel, Daisy & Woolf, rejects Woolf and her work tout court. Mina avers an affiliation with Woolf as a feminist who fought against ‘the gender binary and patriarchy’ (175). She affirms that Woolf  ‘knew that women’s bodies are exploited and pursued’ (118). For example, she salutes Woolf for her efforts in testifying to the sexual abuse hidden beneath the niceties of upper-class English life, acknowledging Woolf’s courage in disclosing her sexual abuse at the hands of her half-brother (18).

Nor, despite its criticisms of Mrs Dalloway, does Daisy & Woolf advocate casting Woolf on the scrapheap of what we might call dead white women, or banishing the novel in disgrace. As well as mounting a sturdy and unflinching critique of Woolf’s classism and racism as they manifest in her representation of Daisy, Daisy & Woolf constitutes a homage to Woolf’s radical modernist aesthetics. Mina’s writing is an important and generative site of experimentation and subversion of literary realism (175). Mina admires Woolf’s interest in what she calls ‘the malleable nature of experience’ and ‘the trick of narrative’ (176). Further, Mina applauds Woolf’s efforts in forging a ‘new form’ (118), hailing her as ‘perhaps one of the first to attempt the novel-essay’ (176). 

Woolf’s aesthetics, I’d suggest, have deeply inspired Cahill’s own work. I’d argue, for example, that the novel-essay intersects with and informs Daisy & Woolf’s literary project. In reflecting on how to shape and fashion Daisy outside the strictures of the orientalising colonial gaze, Mina says:

Is it right to assume that a story alone can liberate Daisy of race and gender? Without an argument, without a history, Daisy’s voice is exotic or historical fiction [my emphasis]. (176)

Mina explains that the novel-essay – made up of historical fact and documentary material which in turn is combined with fictional speculation – is the genre which provides the means to ‘liberate’ Daisy. So can we identify the two constitutive elements of the novel-essay – argument and history – in Daisy & Woolf, and what literary work they undertake there?  

As I have argued, the novel documents the historical operations of white power, race and class and their impact on Daisy and Mina. When Daisy writes to Peter Walsh of the Anglo-Indians/Eurasians in India that ‘all our communities have been woken to the politics and economics of the times’ (27), she is summarising what we could, in effect, describe as one of the novel’s implicit ‘arguments’ about minoritised identities in the aftermath of colonisation, namely, that minoritised identities are shaped on multiple fronts by racialising forces beyond their control. Further, they are cognisant of these forces which many white constituencies disavow. In her portraiture of Daisy, Mina documents the historical context of the Anglo-Indians/Eurasians in both India and the UK. For example, Daisy’s decision to leave India is motivated not only by her desire to be with Peter Walsh but by her sense of the precarity of the Anglo-Indians’ position there. Mina makes reference to the stirrings of the political unrest and violence – along lines of racial/ethnic and religious difference – that we know would lead, twenty years later, to Partition (33). 

Mina’s family (like Daisy’s) is constantly sensitive to racialised tensions in India (and in her case, East Africa), which impact on them as Eurasians and precipitate their multiple migrations. Racialisation meant that issues of citizenship and identity loomed large for both Daisy (55) and Mina’s mother (72). Mina describes the ambivalent positioning of Anglo-Indians/Eurasians within the colonial governance in India which had ‘taught them to assimilate and to behave in all ways as if they were English’ (50-51). She outlines the stigma of ‘mixed ancestry’ (51) and the structural poverty which beset Anglo-Indians after the late 1900s (50). Mina writes, ‘I felt ill when I was growing up encountering some Indians: the ridicule and scorn they heaped on us’ (51). When her family migrated to Britain the racism continued. She described how her mother internalised the ‘colour conscious’ (49) racism in Britain; how Mina and her siblings were teased for being coloured and how, as a result, Mina ‘avoided other children’ (50). These racialised tensions persist in the contemporary world. While researching Woolf in Britain some years later, Mina is acutely aware of the racialised violence constantly profiled in the media there (such as the Westminster attack by Khalid Masood) (20). 

I quoted above Mina’s statement – ‘without an argument, without a history, Daisy’s voice is exotic or historical fiction [my emphasis]’ (176) – suggesting that argument and history might be read as the core elements of the novel-essay. Daisy & Woolf, as a novel-essay, can be understood as emerging at the intersection of these two discursivities. In my reading of Cahill’s novel, to this point, I’ve argued that Mina’s documentation of how her own and Daisy’s complex worlds are shaped by colonial histories allows us to understand the two women’s fraught positionality as Anglo-Indians. This documentary discursivity, I’m proposing, could be identified as the ‘essayistic’ trajectory of Cahill’s novel-essay. Mina asserts that research on/documentation of Anglo-Indians is indispensable to her novel whose main work, she declares, is ‘the historical restoring of my community’ (75). There is a convergence here between her work and Cahill’s.

The relationship between Mina and Cahill is complex. At the core of the novel is Cahill’s project to resurrect Daisy. Daisy’s story is in part Mina’s story which in turn resonates with autofictional echoes of Cahill’s life. These complex layerings are mediated by the epistolary first-person address, which both Mina and Daisy adopt. We can note the significance of the analytical, investigative, first-person voice in the context of the documentary imperative of the novel where Daisy and Mina – in their letters and journal entries – observe, chronicle, and salvage the daily and the political life of the world around them. (They draw on the same style of ‘moments accruing’ (171) through which Mrs Dalloway records her world). Their end goal, however, as I have argued, is quite different from Woolf’s. It is to ‘refus[e] demise’ (291) of what Mina describes as ‘my people’ (16) and, further, to ‘control their own destiny’ (219) through acts of narration. The immediacy of the first-person in Mina’s and Daisy’s stories bears a personalised testimony to the silences, elisions and losses which, when exhumed, bring to light a newly recognised history. We must not forget that this is Daisy’s story too; the reviewer quoted at the start of this review comments that Mina’s story overpowers Daisy and ‘swamps’ her. This comment is hard to justify given the complex and rich evocation of Daisy’s journey and its beautifully elaborated water themes; her psychological journey through grief and spurned love which shadow her physical voyage, and the motifs of travel as survival and reinvention.

Daisy and Woolf is an outstanding contribution to the global literary canon in general, and to localised and specific canons such as Australian literature, women’s literature, and literature by people of colour (POC), to name but a few. Cahill’s ground-breaking novel, in its layered inter-textuality, in effect maps out the dialogues and traffic between these various canons, outlining the discursive politics which inform their (troubled) white histories of inclusion and exclusion, of orientalism and subordination.

Works Cited

Cahill, Michelle. 2022. Daisy & Woolf. Sydney: Hachette.
Hickman, Valerie Reed.”Clarissa and the Coolies’ Wives: Mrs. Dalloway figuring transnational feminism.” Modern Fiction Studies 60.1 (2014): 52-77.
Stubbings, Diane. July 2022. “Delible Impressions Liberating Daisy Simmons”.  Australian Book Review.

ANNE BREWSTER is Honorary Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. Her books include Giving This Country a Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia, (2015), Literary Formations: Postcoloniality, Nationalism, Globalism (1996) and Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography (1995, 2015). She is series editor for Australian Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

A Kind of Magic

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

Ultimo Press

ISBN: 9781761150739

Reviewed by ADELE DUMONT
 
 
 
From its outset, A Kind of Magic establishes two distinct kinds of language. There’s Spargo-Ryan’s narration, as she recounts meeting with her new therapist: this voice is warm and confiding. The language she employs is vibrant and all her own: she likens her anxiety, for example, to ‘being trapped in jelly and also being allergic to jelly’(6). It’s laden with humour and irony, too: the narrator worries that the thongs she’s worn to the appointment are going to make a bad impression, and what’s more, their slapping sound might disturb the ‘sick people’ in the medical centre; the ‘patients with actual problems’(4). Within this same opening chapter, we’re introduced to a medical lexicon, which Spargo-Ryan informs us she’s become well-versed in: ‘I feel dissociated, I have intrusive thoughts’(6). These two sorts of language indicate two spheres of knowledge: the first, clinical and official; the second, intimate and embodied. The therapist’s PhD in clinical psychology is displayed on the wall; she is a ‘specialist in anxiety and psychosis’(4). But Spargo-Ryan tells us she is ‘also a specialist’ in these conditions, ‘but in the other way, where sometimes they try to kill me’(4).

This juxtaposition of the official and the personal persists throughout the book. Chapter headings borrow from technical definitions of various mental illnesses: ‘recurrent and persistent thoughts, urges or impulses’; ‘a mood disorder associated with childbirth’. The chapters themselves flesh out how these symptoms and diagnoses manifest in Spargo-Ryan’s lived reality. Though this reality is often incredibly difficult, its domestic, suburban trappings will be familiar to readers: for a period, driving her kids to school feels insurmountable; she develops an intense fear of Sundays, and spends her entire weekends curled on the couch; at one point, she celebrates being able to walk to the end of her verandah. Other sections of the book – particularly those detailing breaks in conscious thought – describe a reality that will be less recognisable to many readers: she describes, for example, watching her fingertips melt into the floor. One of the book’s overarching achievements is to illustrate just how individual and multifaceted the one illness (and even the one feeling) can be. Her mother’s way of being anxious (worrying about others’ safety), for example, is different from her grandmother’s (checking things). Psychosis for one person might involve grand delusions, but for Spargo-Ryan, it is more ‘quietly disruptive’ (101), involving a fogging of her senses. When she experiences post-natal depression, she realises there are different ways to feel sadness: her usual, existential dread now co-exists with another, more acute despair. And while A Kind of Magic is ostensibly about darker emotions, Spargo-Ryan makes room for pleasure, tenderness, desire, and fun. It’s possible, she tells us, to be at once depressed and optimistic; sometimes she is ‘overwhelmed by a kind of uncut joy’ (316).

In this way, A Kind of Magic works to undo and complicate some of the entrenched and insidious stereotypes associated with particular mental illnesses. But more than that, by choosing to foreground her personal (messy, chaotic, magical) reality, Spargo-Ryan exposes the (sanitised, cold) reductiveness of standard medical literature, with its tendency to generalise, and to deal in abstracts.

Underpinning A Kind of Magic is a search for the right words; ones that will do justice to the author’s experience in all its specificity. Society, according to Spargo-Ryan, will only tolerate ‘a few of the broad-brush words, like depression and anxiety’ (132) but we are still ‘a long way from having an accepted vocabulary to describe mental health concerns’(134). The words we do have can have too vast or muddy a meaning, or they can carry stigma and value judgement; what’s more, these labels are routinely revised and re-categorised. Spargo-Ryan’s solution to this deficiency of language, both in the therapeutic space and within this book, is to create a language for herself. Often this language is richly allusive: she describes feeling ‘like my soul is a few inches to the right of my body’(205); elsewhere, she tells us that ‘all the breath was pulled from my body like a clown’s infinite handkerchief’(232). Aged nineteen, before she’s ‘learned any of the vocabulary for this’, she tells one therapist, it’s ‘like there’s a layer of cling film over everything’(120). Some passages, mirroring the author’s state of psychic disorder, fragment syntax and loosen the rules which usually govern written language: ‘…get out of my way don’t breathe just force the air in grab it fistfuls of it shove it drink it punch it you will suffocate…’ (17).

This search for a more precise language is more than a literary exercise; according to Spargo-Ryan, language matters deeply when it comes to a patient’s treatment. Correct diagnosis relies on an individual’s capacity to articulate their experience, ‘and if you can’t find the words (medical professionals) will find them for you’(129). Because the vocabulary we have to hand is so limited, ‘what we mean could be worlds apart from what they hear’(135). Further, clinical language can strip a patient of ‘autonomy, boldness and authority’(139).

While Spargo-Ryan doesn’t privilege clinical language, not does she completely discount it. Her idiosyncratic personal narrative is interspersed with sections breaking down technical terms such as ‘identity diffusion’, ‘complex post-traumatic stress’ and ‘autonoetic consciousness’. Readers of Spargo-Ryan’s previous works of fiction won’t be surprised by her literary flair in A Kind of Magic, but here she demonstrates a separate skill for the pedagogical. In highly accessible language, she’s able to explain, for example, how memory is critical to the formation of identity; the phenomenon of mental time travel; how a fear of abandonment can develop.

In interrogating the intersections of medicine, language, narrative, and selfhood, A Kind of Magic represents a vital contribution to the emergent field of ‘medical humanities’. It is part of a growing body of nuanced, personal accounts of mental illness by Australian writers. From a medical humanities perspective, such accounts are valuable in enriching medical practitioners’ understanding of particular conditions and highlighting how professional, technical language can create a gulf between doctor and patient. One of medical humanities’ hopes is that an emphasis on subjective experience will lead to more compassionate, communicative doctors, and better health outcomes for patients (1). In an interview, Spargo-Ryan expresses delight at some readers reporting having used her book as a tool to help explain their experience to loved ones, or to psychologists. Even if her words don’t quite fit someone’s own experience, she says, still ‘it gives them a starting point to go: yeah, that kind of is what it’s like, except for me, maybe it’s a little more like: I’m the colour blue!’2.

A memoirist must always grapple with memory’s instability and fallibility, but particularly so when the author’s mind is afflicted by serious, chronic mental illness. Spargo-Ryan is acutely aware of this, repeatedly drawing attention to the constructed-ness of her written narrative and pointing out that trauma can have the effect of melding an individual’s past and present. She’s quick to acknowledge that which she doesn’t quite remember (often the who/ when/ where) and that which she does (often sensory details, like ‘the sound Dad’s wipers made as they slapped against the rain’ (196). She includes alternative possible origin stories for her own illness, and in some instances even provides multiple versions of the one specific memory. Aged nine, she believed her mother had literally died on the couch; as an adult she reframes the scene thus: ‘She had panicked, and I had understood that to mean she was dead/ in danger/ unable to take care of me/ didn’t love me’ (34). Crucially, Spargo-Ryan points out that her adult understanding doesn’t negate her child’s experience: to this day, this is the most distressing childhood memory she holds; ‘in reality, the lasting impact was as traumatic as I felt it was’ (35). Most compelling of all, she questions whether the unverifiability of memory even matters. At a psychological level ‘even if I recognise the events never happened, the foundations they created for me are real’(36).

Spargo-Ryan’s sparkling optimism infuses A Kind of Magic. The personal narrative she charts — from her grandparents’ generation, to her own upbringing, and through to her own parenting — parallels a broader evolution in mental health literacy, an evolution which books like this one will surely contribute to.

Cited
1. “The medical humanities: literature and medicine”, Femi Oyebode, in Clinical Medicine, 2010.
James and Ashley Stay at Home Podcast, May 2nd, 2023.

ADELE DUMONT is the author of No Man is an Island. Her second book, The Pulling, is forthcoming with Scribe in early 2024.

After the Rain

by Aisling Smith

Hachette

ISBN 9780733648793

Reviewed by ALISON STODDART

After the Rain is the debut for Melbourne-based author, Aisling Smith, a previous winner of the Richell Prize for Emerging Writers. The novel is an enticing exploration of diaspora and all its inherent obstacles encountered by migrants, including the internalised racism that simmers beneath benign white Australia of the 1970’s. 

After the Rain exposes generational trauma, but not in the traditional sense.  Its themes are childhood angst and the way childhood parameters influences our adult lives.  Family life is explored: divorce, raising children, sibling rivalry, all the usual expectations and disappointments.  

The narrative point of view rests with its three female protagonists and is mainly focussed on Benjamin, Malti’s husband and father of their two daughters Ellery and Verona. Each women’s relationship with Benjamin alters the different ways they perceive him.  His presence is felt in every facet of the novel, but the reader only gets to know him through the eyes of the three women.  Benjamin does not have a direct voice or point of view.

Malti Fortune is a young woman of Indian-Fijian heritage who moves to Melbourne from Fiji in the mid 1970’s to study law at Melbourne University.  At university that she meets Benjamin, an aspiring linguist who likes to draw attention away from himself with clever use of language. The pair fall in love and marry despite Malti being in contempt of the institution.

The novel opens with Malti and Benjamin taking possession of their new home and Malti is pregnant, a harbinger child who doesn’t come to fruition. We see how she views the actions of Benjamin for this brief period of time, the first year in their house. Malti, a lawyer, is calm and matter of fact. But there are contradictions in her personality. She carries superstitions from her childhood growing up in Fiji. She is also unreliable as a narrator, as disturbing aspects of her marriage are easily noticed by the reader but seem to pass Malti. Benjamin is not present for the relocation to their new house which Malti conveniently makes excuses for. This suspicious behaviour which Malti doesn’t seem to be able to recognise, is readily apparent to the reader.  

There is foreshadowing early in the novel of impending trouble in the marriage with a recounting of their wedding anniversary dinner. Malti and Benjamin’s exchange of gifts is suggestive of where this marriage is heading.  A boring unimaginative pair of cufflinks for Benjamin ‘she had been working in the CBD too long, this was a present for a lawyer rather than a linguist’ (p 7). And a foreboding filled present of sharp kitchen knives for Malti ‘sharp presents sever relationships’ (p 8).

Smith does not assign blame wholly to one party but rather hints at a lack of insight in Malti’s character as well.

Ellery, the elder daughter takes up the perspective in Part 2. Her’s is a troubled relationship with Benjamin as she experiences early on in her childhood the unreliable and undependable aspects of her father’s nature.  Facets which she cannot find within herself to understand and forgive.

Part 3 is by Verona, the conflicted youngest child who likes to think she is Benjamin’s favourite. Like all last born, she struggles with her own worth and the jealousy that is inherently present in the youngest.  These children who carry the legacy of coming into the family last and therefore not establishing themselves fully in parental eyes.  Ellery and Verona both struggle with the highs and lows of their upbringing and all three women are seeking answers, each haunted by her own ghosts, and by Benjamin.

An overarching theme of the novel raises the question of where does a person feel most at home? Is it in their culture or in their geographical location? Where does one get a sense of place? Do you need to have ancestors to appreciate a country, and if this was so then would new migrants ever be able to settle, to feel a kinship and love for a place?

Smith cleverly references this idea of inherited superstition with the inclusion of three different takes on Fijian folklore that impact each female character.  Early in the novel we learn that Malti believes in Udre Udre, a famous cannibal who pursued immortality by eating 1000 bodies.  Malti is taken to visit his grave as a child and upon driving away, glances uneasily over her shoulder, checking that he is not following. The unwitting handing down of Malti’s belief in Udre Udre, Ellery’s discovery and entertaining of the belief of Kuttichatham and Verona’s ghost Bhoot cast a dark cloud over all three women.

Smith also makes reference to the Fijian coups that occur in Malti’s homeland three times over the course of her adult life.  Although she is a citizen of her new land and a willing participant in its daily life, she still takes interest, and is drawn constantly, to her homeland, helped along by the fact her parents still live there.  With Malti’s reading in newspapers of the coups, Smith is able to draw a parallel between the despair felt by a child of a country that is slowly cannibalising itself and the same sense of despair Malti’s two daughters feel about their father’s diminishing interaction in their lives.  He too is becoming a shrinking image in their rear vision mirror.

While thought provoking and well executed, the novel lacks some punch in the engagement of the reader. Its timeline jumps around the linear progression of the narrative arc, which is sometimes hampered, and which in turn can lose the interest of the reader.  Smith does get back on track with the switching to each new narratorial perspective.

Further, the storyline does not build to any sort of crescendo or climatic ending.  It is more about families, relationships, generations and inherited familial traits like superstition. A strength of the novel lies in how the characters reconcile differences between family members and find ways around the disparity in expectations to move forward. 

Smith’s debut is very much a generational novel although Smith does not seem to explore fully the relationship between Malti and her own parents.  Noticeably strange was that Malti never takes her own daughters back to Fiji to visit.  But there is a definite impact of Malti’s childhood on the family.  The feel of Fijian/Indian culture is dotted throughout with the references to blue water and yellow sands and childhood superstitions like Udre Udre.  And when the girls are older and the perspective switches to Ellery and then Verona, they often mention Fiji when they are thinking about their mother.  They even ask their mother why they never went to Fiji and how they would have liked to have visited. Perhaps this can be answered by the act of sole parenting which if Malti is to undertake successfully, she has to take into account her feelings for Benjamin, and also to understand the role her relationship with her parents has in her own parenting.  

There is a coda chapter at the end of the novel that serves to bring the story arc full circle but also provides some lovely insights into the forgotten aspects of a broken relationship.  Smith beautifully alludes to memories that were never made. One such example is the miniscule event of her first baby, the one that never came to pass. Malti refers to them as ‘fermented wishes and lost hopes’ (p 353). When timelines abruptly stop, something that is often forgotten can whisper through the mind when one is looking at old photos. 

Ultimately the reader is left with the melancholy feeling that Malti is also thinking of Benjamin as well, the father of her children and someone she once loved deeply, who will forever hover as memories but also in the faces of Ellery and Verona.

After The Rain is a moving and thoughtful journey from an exciting new literary talent. It raises the question of generational trauma.  Is childhood trauma ubiquitous? The influence of parents is undeniable, yet their own trauma and manifestations always need to be taken into consideration when reflecting on diaspora and migrant life.

ALISON STODDART is a country born and bred, Sydney writer currently undertaking a master’s degree at Macquarie University which she is hoping to finish soon. She completed her BA Degree majoring in Creative Writing in 2020. Twitter @a_hatz5

Anam

by André Dao

Penguin

ISBN:9781761046940

Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET
 
 
André Dao’s debut novel Anam is like a house with many rooms and windows, to use an image employed by its author. Its multiple locales account for the shattering, scattering, and smattering of Vietnamese people across the globe, and their resettlement in outer migrant suburbs, in Paris’ Boissy-Saint-Léger or Melbourne’s Footscray. Alongside a distinctly cosmopolitan, diasporic feel, the novel opens up a thought-provoking cultural conversation on Vietnam’s colonial and postcolonial histories – and in so doing, digs up a lot of mud. This endeavour may have been facilitated by Dao’s outsider perspective as a Viet Kieu (Overseas Vietnamese) born and having grown up in Australia, which provides him with sufficient hindsight. It is no surprise, then, that the names excavated from Vietnam’s past ought to be figures of exile, beginning with Dao’s grandfather. While a Penguin review noted how this “work of autofiction, this part-memoir, part-novel is twelve years in the making”, Dao’s grandfather spent ten years throughout the 1980s at the infamous Chi Hoa jail located in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) as a political prisoner of conscience under the Communist regime, before being sent away on a plane to France upon release. The narrator compares his grandfather to those decimated Angolan antelopes who are the victims of inter-imperialist rivalry and proxy wars in Africa – “he, a colonial subject of an empire that no longer exists, a forgotten ghost of an already embarrassing past”.

Exile
Despite associating with a political current of anti-colonial Catholic nationalists, his grandfather collaborated both with the French and Americans in their fight against Communism, failing to understand, after the Fall of Saigon in 1975, that he was now on the losing side of history. Identified as a traitor, he is reluctant to leave the scene and defers his departure from Vietnam. The themes of losing, failing, and waiting (until it is too late) recur over and over again in Dao’s novel. This makes his characters all the more humane and sympathetic as anti-heroes. Dao’s grandfather’s failure to exist in the nation’s archives echoes a fêlure (French for crack, a homonym of the word ‘failure’) in Vietnam’s psyche through its inability to reconcile both streaks of its identity: North and South, East and West. In identifying with none, the narrator looks up instead to interlopers such as Tran Duc Tao or Ngo Vinh Long for authoritative models. The former’s life as an intellectual trained and versed in Western philosophy but keen on liberating his country from colonialism led to the silencing of his voice and turned him into an outcast, both in France and Vietnam. The latter became the first Viet to go to Harvard on a scholarship, in part thanks to his role as native informant (“at fifteen he convinced American officers to hire him as a map-maker”) and ‘mimic man’ (“He taught himself English with a bilingual dictionary and a copy of Great Expectations”). Yet his later involvement in, and commitment to, the anti-war movement would be mocked and dismissed at Harvard, while “on the anti-war speaking circuit” he remained sidelined as a “token Viet”.

Much of the story’s appeal precisely comes from Dao’s refusal to play the token Viet in the eyes of Australia. Indeed, can a narrative taking place to a large extent in France and in Cambridge, England – where the narrator writes his thesis and contemplates settling down on a permanent basis – still be called Australian, or Asian Australian for that matter? Do these territorial labels still make sense when one is aware, as Dao is, of the fact that mapping (of the imagination) precedes and to a certain extent forecloses the possibility of place? When asked whether Australia is home during an interview with an academic researching on an oral history of second-generation Vietnamese in Australia at a community centre in Footscray, the narrator’s answer is no:

She didn’t seem convinced. She pressed me: But you were born here, you grew up here, didn’t you? Your family lived here. Your daughter was born here. How can you say Australia isn’t home for you? Haven’t you had a good education here? Haven’t you prospered here? If Australia isn’t your home, then what is it? A playground, or a marketplace from which you grabbed what you needed? And now you’re off to England, to Cambridge. Will that be home? Or will you wander the earth like – she stretched for the right words – like a rootless thing, like one with no place to rest?

The narrator’s superficial emotional attachment, though, does not stem from lack of care or cold materialism but from the multiple fêlures opened up by the failures to remember and to forget/forgive the past at once. One therefore cannot be nostalgic about home when home no longer exists or never existed, except as a figment of the imagination. One can only melancholically mourn the ghostly traces of that which remains, those haunted fragments or slices of life we dare to call memory, and which make Being a deeply traumatic, problematic event in itself. Though chiefly focused on an attempt at memorialising his grandparents’ and grandfather’s life in particular (whose half-effaced photo features on the book cover), Dao’s novel thus raises metaphysical, existential questions that are larger than the merely anecdotic. In researching on memories of his grandfather, the narrator ends up projecting his personality onto him as a prodigal son of sorts, feeling guilty about endlessly postponing the writing of his memoir. Yet the exercise remains an arduous task, akin to observing far-away galaxies, which, owing to the speed of light, may already be long gone and dead by the time their image reaches the astronomer’s telescope. It means accepting to warp and write oneself into another’s spatial temporality in the disjointed mode of future anteriority. The narration of the novel, indeed, starts off by means of such a mode and creative black hole: “This will be the last time that I will have begun again – the last, because I will have learnt to see what I failed to see at the beginning.”

Exist
The novel’s title, Anam (otherwise spelled Annam), once referred to the French protectorate for Vietnam, which was part of French Indochina. Its lost currency as a term allows Dao to recall the spirit of Vietnam, which under its spectral shadow becomes the site of an aporia. Dao throughout the novel asks: What makes a people’s collective unconscious when riven by guilt and strategic amnesia and erasure of its own past, as is Vietnam? Can it possibly be based on remembering, on traditions passed on from one generation to the next, when this heritage appears dubious and truncated? As a result, Anam is not a hagiography of Dao’s grandfather, who never had the benefit of having his bronze statue sitting “in pride of place” in the middle of his relatives’ wealthy home in Hanoi, unlike his brother, a former general to Bac Ho (Ho Chi Minh). Nor is it, strictly speaking, a biography since Dao is aware of the shortcomings of reception and representation of someone else’s experience, especially one as incommensurate as the collective famine that took place in 1944-5 and is believed to have killed between one to two million Vietnamese (about one tenth of the total population). Instead, Dao in his writing deploys a number of devices to circumvent some of the pitfalls associated with the literary genre of the memoir. To start with, he makes frequent use of interpolation (i.e, the insertion of something of a different nature into something else) by interweaving and blurring borders between sundry narratives (actual, remembered, imagined), discourses (academic, historiographic, personal) or registers (factual, introspective, fictitious). Interpolation can be opposed to interpellation, that is, the hailing or arrest of the sign and memory attached to it, thereby leading to its reification as monument (like his great-uncle’s bronze bust at the narrator’s relatives’). Another device related to that of interpolation between the author-as-narrator (Dao) and the narrated (Dao’s grandfather) is anamnesis (i.e., the recollection, especially of a supposed previous existence). Dao is acutely cognizant of those filial echoes of the past repeating upon the present and does not seek truthfulness at all costs, only its effects and affects, instead working in part through blind faith in his task as ghost-writer walking in the footsteps of his predecessors and eager to repay his debt. He will work as a lawyer, partly to please his grandfather and partly because his father had failed to do so, owing to the interruptions of war. As a review of the novel by Tess Do reminded, Dao is “a refugee advocate who co-founded Behind the Wire, an oral history project documenting people’s experience of immigration detention”. The narrator’s function is that of an amanuensis (i.e., a literary assistant taking dictation). Hence, the narration bears from within a ventriloquising resonance as Dao records his grandparents’ voice in their tiny apartment on the outskirts of Paris in Boissy-Saint-Léger, where the Eiffel Tower can be seen in “the far distance, a little upright prick on the horizon”, or as he listens to the audio recordings of S., a refugee from Sri Lanka indefinitely stuck in an offshore prison facility by Australian customs on the remote Pacific Island of Manus.

Exit
S.’ reported predicament operates a further line of flight as parallels are made with the narrator’s grandfather’s time at Chi Hoa, and with other celebrated manuscripts about, or devised in, jail, from Gramsci to Mandela. Dao does not seek to hide the traces of these multiple transfers but instead questions his legitimacy upon visiting and inhabiting them through his writing, having never been incarcerated himself, albeit also hailing from a family of refugees. Thus, Dao’s novel is also a book about other books (yet another interpolation), besides dealing with family. His philosophical musings embrace the thoughts of Derrida, Levinas, or Arendt, but Dao is especially interested in phenomenology (i.e., an approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience), perhaps because in so doing, he hopes to grasp the unfathomable trauma endured by jailed refugees or political dissidents lingering in limbo, or the shared atrocities of the Indochina and Vietnam Wars. Though we may wish to rank one atrocity above the other in a magnitude scale of suffering, pain can hardly be measured up. Eventually, it has little to do with issues of right or wrong, with political or ideological affiliations and leanings, harkening back instead to our being (all too) human as suggested in this exchange between the narrator and his Vietnamese Australian interviewer in Melbourne’s Footscray:

When we compared crimes – me, the 1945 famine caused, I said, by French and Japanese and American imperial policies, her, the kangaroo courts and summary executions of landlords and wealthy peasants and the socially unpopular during the mid-fifties land reforms in Communist DRV, me, the Agent Orange and the millions of tons of bombs dropped on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, her, the massacre at Huê during the Têt Offensive, me, Lieutenant William Calley and My Lai, her, the re-education camps and prisons like Chi Hoa where for years and years men and women, including my grandfather, rotted away (a mistake, that, to use the cliché about rotting – it made it so much easier for me not to hear, not to feel, the sting in her words) – when we compared crimes like that, we were really trying to interrupt the other’s nostos, their return home.

While indicative of a failure to commiserate with the Other, these interruptions (from the Latin inter ‘between’ + rumpere ‘to break’) are also the site and the expression of a reciprocal fêlure, thus marking the possibility of an exit breakthrough in the form of a pause or a cesura – a suspended truce of sorts for want of reaching a final truth, which would allow for redemption. A small victory still for a hugely promising debut novel and writer.
 
 

CITATIONS
“This ‘transcendent’ new novel is a must-read for literary fiction fans.” Review of Anam, by André Dao. Penguin Books Australia, 12 May 2023.

Do, Tess. Review of Anam, by André Dao. The Conversation, 30 April 2023.

PAUL GIFFARD-FORET obtained his PhD from Monash University, Melbourne, on the subject of Southeast Asian Australian women’s writing. He lives in Paris, where he teaches English across various academic locations and carries out research on postcolonial literatures while being politically committed as an activist on the French far left.

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens

by Shankari Chandran

ISBN 9781761151408

Ultimo Press

Reviewed by MARIE-CLAIRE COLYER
 
 
 
Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, Shankari Chandran’s third published novel, is a narrative of substance. You could be excused for expecting a light-hearted romp through an old people’s home, if you judged this book by the cover and title alone. Indeed, there are light-hearted moments. But this is so much more. Beyond its cover illustration lies a powerful and interlaced tale.

Encompassing years of the Sri Lankan civil war, dispossession and migration, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens presents the hurdles many migrants to new lands face in merging with the accepted norm. The characters have powerful narratives to tell. Secrets that they hold close and divulge only in cathartic moments of revelation. A layering of two timelines, past and present, this is a novel about people and their stories, set against a backdrop of personal and national histories. Stories of resilience, sorrow and depth told with warmth and gentle humour. Darker moments are offset by the diverting interactions of the colourful residents of a nursing home in Western Sydney. The characters weave their lives into a rich tapestry offering insight into the dynamics of family and friendship, racism and identity.

Maya and her husband Zakhir are Tamil refugees, forced to flee the Sri Lankan civil war and settle in Australia. There they resurrect a neglected nursing home, providing a place of peace and inclusion for many senior residents, including other Tamils. We learn that Maya, matriarch, and owner of the nursing home, grieves for the loss of her husband scarred by his past. Their pasts unite and yet in many ways isolate the residents, haunting many of the characters, underpinning daily life. What is unresolved, what needs rectifying drives Maya’s husband Zakhir to return to a homeland where he is considered a traitor. And it is the interweaving history of Zakhir and another central character, Ruben that simmers until boiling point.

A Tamil refugee, Ruben is one of the many who fled under duress from a country divided. Chandran keeps us waiting to discover how Ruben is connected to Zakhir. Unravelling these interlocking experiences over the length of the novel, she provides flashes of the trauma so many Tamils endured. A trauma that few privileged within Australia know intimately.

Maya is a strong woman, with an empathy for history; both of country and of individuals. She unearths personal pasts, using these observations in the creation of a nursing home that best embraces each of the inhabitants’ needs. Facing inequality as an ethnic author, alongside her focus on the nursing home, Maya comes to write successfully under the pseudonym of a white Australian. A name that gives her national standing and influence when later confrontation erupts. As such she is a projection of writers of ethnic background straining to find a foothold in western literature.

A subplot is revealed through the course of the novel. Maya’s daughter Anjali and her husband Nathan are buttresses for their friend Nikki navigating her own loss. The devastation of parents whose estrangement becomes pronounced in suffering the death of a young child. Recriminations and blame eventuate, locked behind the cold demeanor of unburdened grief. Nikki acknowledges the distance between her and her husband Gareth, as she turns to the comfort of Ruben. Gareth lashes out at Ruben in his own struggle to cope with the loss of his daughter. The gulf between Gareth and his wife, Nikki propels the novel into an exposé on tolerance.

In the novel, Gareth is the antagonist. He counts Maya’s family as friends, offering the outward appearance of inclusivity. But by the close of the novel his reticence is unveiled, shouting through the cracks in his façade. Fuelling his indignation is the discovery of Maya and Zakhir’s toppling of a statue of Captain Cook. When he brings an accusation of anti-colonialism before The Human Rights Commission the national backlash is immediate. These incidents are sparks that set aflame smouldering racism in a community that now feels justified to revile immigrants. It is an excuse for open expressions of hatred, leading to the response of those taking a stand for minority groups.

In Gareth and the xenophobic we see the ugliness of fear. A mistrust of those that are unlike us. Just as we can in the flashbacks to scenes in war, recognise a universal fear. The apprehension of not being accepted, the trepidation of loss. We glimpse a part of ourselves. An embodiment of humanity at its worst. And a wish to do better. This vulnerability makes Gareth human. His clinging to the world as he knows and wants it to be.

Tensions are visible threads that emerge as a wider description of Australia as a whole, exposing an often-shunned view of ourselves. The ways in which the diaspora is integrated into the fabric of society; the way they can be stymied by our reluctance or resistance in accepting those with differing backgrounds. Perhaps more so because of physical dissimilarities than culture.

Chandran’s willingness to bring these incidents to light, is commendable. Events and prejudices are revealed from the perspective of the Tamil people of her ancestral home. Though not always the case, Chandran here presents intolerance towards migrants entering a culturally different established group. She explores how through familiarity and routine people tend to hold to what they have been informed is their birthright. Whatever that upbringing may be, whether born into this society or assimilated into it. It is this turning over of the histories we have been aligned with, those indoctrinated through our education and the nation’s psyche where the book finally comes to rest.

Shankari Chandran paints a picture of Australian society that bares the fissures and flaws, the divisions that we tend to gloss over and hide. She states her position with a willingness to see beyond embedded opinions to the more subtle layering of what drives behaviour. And as such, her work is an exploration of human nature.

Chandran’s work addresses nationality, that of the Australian and Sri Lankan people. It offers glimpses of history; the histories we’ve been taught and those that have been rewritten or suppressed. It shows alternate notions of what we have taken for granted. And through the eyes of its characters allows us to experience cultures and antipathy many have never been exposed to.

The only comment that I would give is that I would have liked the inclusion of an intolerant, less obliging character of ethnic origin to offset the real bigotry in a segment of white society. But that perhaps is the mirror to discomfort in my own evaluation of the divisions inherent in the society I live in and my placement within it. There is in Chandran’s story, a wide margin in likeability between the main characters of different cultures, with Nikki being the chief favourable representation of white Australians. That is not to say that Chandran’s depiction of immigrants is homogenous. There are minor characters with personalities that I would find testing. But there is a tendency, which aligns with her message, to portray more racial acceptance or at least amiability from ethnic people and more intolerance from white. This though also relates to the pressure placed upon her characters to prove themselves as Australians grateful to be given sanctuary. Something that white Australians are not obliged to do.

It is refreshing to read a novel that calls us out on ingrained prejudice or habitual ways of thinking and regarding the world. Like in all Chandran’s work, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens turns a spotlight on the judgement, rejection and antagonism towards a minority ethnicity wanting only to live a peaceful life. It poses questions we as Australians and indeed those of other nations should contemplate. History is written by the victorious. This book asks us to contemplate parallels between the suppression and alteration of histories and identity of both Tamil and First Nations people. Ultimately, the question of who we are. To quote the novel in Maya’s words, ‘…we are all immigrants on stolen land.’ (p310). Further, a quote by Maya’s father, ‘…possession of land is nine-tenths of the law; possession of history is nine-tenths of the future.’ (p 233).

Disclosure: The writer knows the author personally, however the opinions expressed are her own.
 
MARIE-CLAIRE COLYER is an award-winning Australian wildlife artist and writer. Her work covers personal essay, memoir, poetry, mainstream and literary fiction. Her writing and art have been published in magazines, journals and newspapers both in print internationally and online. www.marieclairecolyer.com

Funny Ethnics

by Shirley Le

ISBN: 9781922863737

Affirm Press

Reviewed by MEGAN CHEONG

My greatest flaw as a critic is my inability to maintain critical distance. I actively seek out books that I expect will resonate with me: a novel about a mother who writes poetry, a collection of essays exploring the nature of intergenerational trauma. Shirley Le’s debut novel, Funny Ethnics, is about Sylvia Nguyen – the only child of Vietnamese refugees – and the formative experiences that are supposed to culminate in her ‘coming of age’. Instead, Sylvia exhibits Sinbad levels of endurance as she sweats through multiple cycles of the same institutionally-inflicted suffering (tutoring centre, selective high school, law degree) until she is rendered ‘physically incapable of absorbing any more dry information’ (213). This reads like a criticism but is, for me, the most relatable aspect of Funny Ethnics, as well as the characteristic that gives the novel its curiously flat topography.

Other, arguably less profound but no less familiar details of Sylvia’s world: the ‘cork coasters of all shapes and sizes’ (1) deployed to protect the prized marble dining table where Sylvia strategically chooses to announce her decision to drop out of law and pursue writing ‘Just in case things became physical’ (1). The hilariously militaristic but actually dead-serious sentiment underlying her selective girls’ school motto, ‘Work. Conquers. All.’ (84). The catalogue of media clips showcasing Australia’s particular brand of early 2000s racism (John Marsden’s Lee, Chris Lilley’s Ricky Wong). The cringing parody of her dad, with his ‘beaming moon face’, (2) and her mum, first glimpsed praying to Buddha beneath a ‘hairspray-lacquered’ (2) perm. Funny Ethnics made me laugh so hard it induced a kind of out-of-body event in which I saw, with perfect horror, that I was laughing at the same Asian stereotypes that I’ve been laughing at, for the sake of everybody else’s comfort, my whole life. It is precisely Le’s ability to write in that uncomfortable sliver of an intersection between stereotype and reality that makes her novel so funny – I laughed because it was true, and to relieve myself from the discomfort of the fact that it was true.

Yet though Sylvia spends much of the novel criticising her ‘stupid brain’ (191), hers are not the kind of ‘self-hating jokes’ (147) for which she dismisses Fat Pizza’s Tahir Bilgiç. Beneath the fear that she cannot fulfill her parents’ dreams of entering into the sort of profession that would earn their community ‘a bit of respect’ (9), and beyond the realisation that she has no desire to be a lawyer/banker/doctor, is a bedrock of pride in Western-suburbs Vietnamese culture, and in her family. This pride lends the caricatures of extended family members and other noteworthy personalities in the Viet community the affectionate tone of family anecdotes and directs the pointy end of her observational satire at the encompassing society that denies her and her community respect in the first place. While some of the girls at Sydney Ladies’ College shriek when the ibises that inhabit the school grounds get too close, Sylvia knows from ‘a 7am Google sesh in the computer room’: that the ibises had been displaced from their natural marsh habitats due to urbanisation and river regulation. It didn’t make sense to paint them as pushy or ill-mannered animals when it was our fault they had to make a home in the city, sifting through human trash. (87)

Similarly, Funny Ethnics critiques Australian society for upholding an immigration system that relegates those asylum seekers who are permitted into the country to the literal fringes of the city, at the same time as looking down on the ‘bird-brained Asian’ (68) approach to migrating towards the centre. As one ABC listener whines midway through the book, ‘I drive past a selective school every morning and there are so many Asian students. How do we fix that?’ (57).

Rather than taking the well-trodden path of attempting to garner empathy for the Other by offering up a model of the model minority, Le gives us Sylvia, who consistently fails to flourish in the self-fulfilling machine of Australia’s allegedly meritocratic education system. Instead of expanding, Sylvia’s world contracts when she enters Sydney Ladies’ College. Within the hierarchy of the school, in which the ‘long-legged white girls’ are considered ‘rare and exotic beauties in a sea of ethnics’ (87), the Vietnamese Dux bemoans coming ‘second to a curry’ (82) on a Chemistry exam, and the Chinese and Hong Kong girls gossip about ‘how stuffed’ Vietnam must be ‘if Angelina Jolie had to adopt kids from there’ (172), Sylvia’s only closest friend is Tammy, ‘another Viet from out west’ (63). Sylvia’s days are truncated by the long commute to and from the city centre and continue to be curtailed by the ‘four trains’ she has to take to and from uni: ‘Yagoona to Lidcombe, Lidcombe to Strathfield, Strathfield to Epping, Epping to Macquarie Uni – and back’ (190). Her love interests are few and decidedly uninspiring, if not outright repellent, and over time, she even falls out of touch with Tammy, eventually listing Janine, ‘a Christian Leb chick from Blacktown’ (153) and her only friend at university, as her emergency contact on her first visit to the gynaecologist. I find myself bracing for the kind of prologue in which the protagonist ends up utterly alone and chronically depressed, when, very near the end of the novel, Sylvia attends a poetry slam at the Bankstown Arts Centre where she finally encounters a mirror of the self-respect that has, up until this point, made it so difficult for her to get on with her life.

I loved Funny Ethnics. Not, in the end, for the many ways in which it resonated with me but for the ways that it makes space for itself within the coming-of-age genre: for Le’s rejection of the narrative shapes readily available to her as a novelist, and of the cliché of the quietly brilliant Asian just waiting to be noticed. Sylvia’s story is less one of self-discovery, than it is a long and arduous journey towards understanding that it is a failure of Australian society that there isn’t somewhere for everyone to belong.

MEGAN CHEONG is a teacher, writer and critic living and working on the land of the Wurundjeri people. Her writing has been published in Sydney Review of Books, Kill Your Darlings and Meanjin. She is the recipient of a 2022 CA-SRB Emerging Critic Fellowship.

Harvest Lingo

Lionel Fogarty

Giramondo

ISBN 9781925336177

Reviewed by SAMUEL COX

Despite having been named the ‘poet laureate’ of Aboriginal literature by author Alexis Wright and the ‘greatest living poet in Australia’ by poet John Kinsella, Lionel Fogarty’s poetry, previously published by small independent presses, has remained both critically and popularly underappreciated. I count myself as a relative newcomer to Fogarty’s work, but with the weight of his body of work growing, the publication of his fourteenth collection, Harvest Lingo by Giramondo, presents the perfect opportunity to become acquainted with Fogarty’s fiery and yet sophisticated poetics. As Fogarty reminds us in this collection, being a poet, let alone a black protest poet in Australia, is bloody ‘Hard Work’ (4). However, for those readers who are ready to roll up their sleeves, this collection offers a rich harvest indeed: lingo that unearths a sense of global solidarity through transit across cultural and linguistic boundaries, disrupting underlying assumptions that form the solid ground of the English language in the process.

Lionel Fogarty is a Yugambeh man from South Western Queensland who, since publishing his first collection in 1980, has built up a formidable body of work. His longstanding commitment to poetry is deeply intertwined with his experiences as an Indigenous rights activist, which led Fogarty to arrive at the realisation that poetic understanding must precede (and enable) politics. Fogarty’s Harvest Lingo is divided into four sections and taking a cursory look across the poems in this work, the reader will recognise the Indigenous fight for land and rights in Australia as a common theme. However, what makes this collection especially distinctive is the geographic reach of Fogarty’s work, most strikingly in Section Two’s ‘India Poems,’ but also apparent in poems such as ‘Aloha for Aotearoa,’ ‘Save Our Inland Sea G20,’ ‘By Our Memories Zapata.’ Fogarty looks out onto the world, often to inevitably look back upon Australia, finding common cause in Trans-Indigeneity, revolutionary spirit and with those who Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano famously referred to as ‘Los Nadies’ (The Nobodies): the poor and the oppressed of the world. Underlying Fogarty’s Harvest Lingo is a rich lingua franca of experience and history that has slipped through the cracks of official records.

The collection opens strongly, with the second poem ‘Hands Bleeding,’ allusively grabbing the attention. On the back of this edition, Fogarty declares that he seeks to use English ‘as a tool,’ and this poem reminds the reader of the complexities of this undertaking. Fogarty self-reflexively writes of the ‘protest poet’ (4) struggling with his task. This ‘protest poet’ must labour in the open fields of language, even as his very tools and hands – calloused, we must assume, by the difficulty of the task – drip with blood. Fogarty writes, ‘massacre the thoughts of murderers’ before concluding, ‘Be a Poet: Fucking Hard Work’ (4). This final line not only resonates with Fogarty’s present personal precarity (https://www.gofundme.com/f/donate-to-support-lionel-fogarty), but undoubtedly refers to the protest poet’s task of grappling with politics, history and that double-edged tool (the English language itself), which finds itself implicated in the very thoughts he seeks to fight.

Patrick White once spoke of struggling with the rocks and sticks of words to describe the struggle to match the English language to the Australian environment. For an Indigenous writer, this difficulty is doubled by the need to fight against oppression in the very language of the oppressor, with poetics – the question of how we represent – the natural and arguably the most fundamental battleground. Fogarty labours, hands bloody, at his task – ‘Fucking Hard Work’ – but it is not simply the author who toils; Fogarty puts his reader to work, defamiliarising the working tools that create that seemingly stable ground of the English language, disrupting the established roots and spreading new tendrils, only to enlist the resulting harvest in the fight. Familiar words combine in unusual ways, as language takes on an opacity that makes the familiar terrain of English appear suddenly a foreign land.

The ‘fields’ Fogarty is tending might have deep resonances with the history of colonial oppression, but they are conceptually antagonistic to that heritage. He makes this clear in the final poem of Section One, ‘Modern Canvas Boats Comfort Who Cares’:

This world is not homeland
The earth is a homeland …
Seasons are the timeless fields
Set them to write speak sing the struggles
(18)

Fogarty seems to suggest that this world, in its current form, shaped by Western modernity through colonialism (often mediated through the English language), offers a false home. The earth, which is in many senses has become merely another of the oppressed, is truly home and this collection suggests that it is not only the Indigenous people of Australia but the native and exploited people of the world who possess the knowledge to ‘write speak sing’ its song.

However, the English Language is not merely a tool of oppression; its spread across the globe has led to creolisation and the development of many keys and registers, not least, the Aboriginal English within which Fogarty has been said to operate. Tyson Yunkaporta has noted that English was a trading language – a conduit to other places and lingo – and Fogarty retraces some of these routes: through dirty back streets and tea fields of the subcontinent; over the Tasman and out into the Pacific; across to the revolutionary plantations of Central America, even as the roots of his poetry are grounded in those who ‘write speak sing the struggles.’ Inverting many of the dominant associations and viewpoints of one who might travel through these regions using the English language, Fogarty finds common cause in Trans-Indigeneity, those who are native, and solidarity with the poor underbelly of society in all places. There is a sense across this collection that these are the places where the fight (for land and rights), human life (intertwined with the earth), and even language itself truly flourishes, yielding lingo ripe for the harvest.

‘Ideal Crowded Streets’ from Fogarty’s India poems catches the many moods and sheer dynamism of India’s street life; however, his authentic sense of identification with the underclass of Indian society speaks to a common cause that elevates his work beyond what we might deem ‘touristic.’ From this place of authenticity, there is a rich cross-pollination of lingo and resultant ideas. ‘Dalit Lets Fees Histories’ (22) references ‘Dalit’ identities and the oppression that has subjugated those previously known in India as ‘untouchables’. Fogarty uses wordplay and the fertile shifting ground between languages to great effect. The poem continues with ‘Coffee pays fees, tea rewriting history’ (22), drawing on two colonial ‘harvest’ crops, before Fogarty plays on the presence of the abbreviation ‘lit’ for literature in ‘Dalit’, writing, ‘Lit area coming century / Dalit must light the writers / Where multilingual arise powers must’ (22). Fogarty appears to suggest that in this century, it is the Dalit – the broken and scattered in society – where stories will flourish. His final sentence shows how his disruption of conventional sentence structures is not merely a technique of defamiliarisation, as I have highlighted, but is a tool to undermine the emphasis and meaning of words. A conventional construction of this sentence might read, ‘Where multilingual powers must arise’; in Fogarty’s creation, instead of the emphasis falling on ‘powers,’ which evokes the nation-state and geopolitics, it centres on ‘multilingual,’ altering the hermeneutic yield.

Such techniques are evident in the excellent and expansive poem that dominates Section Three, ‘Aloha for Aotearoa,’ where Fogarty utilises the homophonetic similarities between ‘Murri’ and ‘Maori’ (39) to poetically and humorously entwine the two; this is a fraternal and sororal relationship based on the shared groundwork of Trans-(Tasman-)Indigeneity. Native is a term Fogarty uses throughout the collection, and like so many English terms it carries with it colonial baggage, but Fogarty imbibes it with fresh meaning when he writes, ‘… Maori brother and sister are native wise bright’ (43).

‘Aloha for Aotearoa’ references 1840 as the year of The Treaty of Waitangi, but this date is also roughly approximate to when Europeans first entered Yugambeh lands, a connection Fogarty appears to draw upon in Section Four’s ‘MINYUGAI (WHEN) BUD’HERA.’ Seemingly asking ‘When Good’ (78) the poem begins:

DIRTY ORIGIN
HARVEST LINGO
1840 IS NO DIFFERENT
BAD BLOOD BREW
(78).

On one hand, the poem confronts the endurance of racialised ideas and structures in society, a reminder, as the collection opened, that Fogarty’s poetics is gritty and even bloody work; on the other hand, it draws upon the global connections he has mustered across this collection. Fogarty alludes to these connections through the modern technological language of networks, presenting a ‘bite-sized’ ‘international interface’ of ‘modules’, and intertwining them with ‘warrior’ encounters and strategies (78).

Fogarty’s final poem, ‘By Our Memories Zapata,’ expands this interface to include the iconic Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, who led a people’s revolution centred on land rights and agrarian reform, based on the premise that the land belongs to the tiller. Making common cause, Fogarty declares ‘We are these Mexican Australian’ (84), connecting the year of Zapata’s birth, 1879, with August 2018, a month in which far-right politics made an obvious resurgence as One Nation Senator Fraser Anning advocated for the return of the White Australia policy in parliament. In response the poem, and indeed the collection, concludes defiantly:

… rasping flags causes we’ll
Sone your ideas down.
Non poets never revolutionary
Señor ZAPATA
VIVA
(84).

Cultivating his poetics through outrage at enduring colonial and societal oppression and a deep sense of relation to the earth, Fogarty has his hands on the tiller: the resulting yield is one that lingers and continues to grow, in the mind of this reviewer at least, long after the initial harvest.
 
 
SAMUEL COX is a PhD candidate and researcher of Australian literature at the University of Adelaide. His work has been published in The Saltbush Review, Westerly, JASAL, ALS, Motifs, SWAMP and selected for Raining Poetry in Adelaide. He won ASAL’s A.D. Hope Prize in 2022.

I Have Decided To Remain Vertical

by Gayelene Carbis

ISBN: 978122571489

Puncher and Wattmann

Reviewed by MARION MAY CAMPBELL

I Have Decided To Remain Vertical is an exhilarating extension and intensification of some of the major themes of Carbis’s first collection Anecdotal Evidence: her never leaving Carnegie; a family strangely functional in the wake of brokenness, as poesis summons vivid mosaics from the fragments; the devastated heart and the paradoxical sustenance it finds by revisiting the penumbra of relations; the contradiction between word and gesture; the magnetism of the loving body while the erotic body feels cancelled in its relegation to mere companionship, and the fearless probing of domestic anguish in the wake of paternal carelessness.

Memory is performed as always transformative of the event it revisits—so true to what’s known of the mnemonic process—it’s volatile, apt to ignite the scene and act out the shadow-fire of rage or panic in the domestic or intimate space. The wonder of several key poems in this new collection is their integration of heartbreak, loss, even terror, and of comic, Alice-like defiance. Surreality is presented with hyperreal acuity. Carbis’s dream-envoy arrogates agency at her risk and peril to rescue the very poem we’re reading. This kind of mise-en-abyme or nesting, whereby the making of the very poem we’re immersed in is narratively embedded in the text is a feature here: poetry-making, often snatched from the jaws of disaster, is both agent and catalyst for the ‘I’persona’s survival, no matter into what pits life and love have thrown her. This is done with great comic brio and, often, hilarity, all the more liberating for the catastrophe she skirts.

The collection is framed by two brilliant poems, ‘Marrying Freud’ (p. 13) and the final ‘The Memory of Colour’ (p. 102) containing the title line, both of which manage, in their formal economy, to conduct the lightning of insight and offer fierce, earthy resistance to a perceptual charge that otherwise might blow things apart. The dream scenario of ‘Marrying Freud’ conveys a sense of wild exuberance, not just through its refusal to espouse the Great Man myth, but also through the matter-of-factness which domesticates Freud, turning him into a kind of housemaid. Again, it’s Dora’s revenge; ‘Dora’ being the pseudonym for the gifted young woman of Freud’s ‘Case Histories’ who dared dismiss him, he said, like a maid of all work. Freud here expects to be both sexually and domestically serviced. This savage brand of feminism is all the more hilarious through its continence in constraining form. Freud awaits in the marriage bed whose sheet he has folded back (he’s already unconsciously become the chamber maid) in anticipation, while his dream ‘wife’ in the kitchen, through the night, writes her glorious resistance—the poem we are reading, refusing to bring the anticipated coffee: ‘I’m not his fucking mother’ (p.14).

In ‘Our house’ (p. 20), the domestic sphere is a charged space, where contradictions stage their tug-of-war; where vitriolic fury and loving acceptance are veined together in an always-compromised stream. The forensic eye returns unflinching in memory, telling it without a hint of pastelised sentiment. It is thus acutely recognizable as authentic to the reader, beautiful, heartbreaking and, at times, irrecoverable from—as in ‘The Price we Pay’ (p. 25), for instance.

In ‘The Baker’s Daughter’ (p. 31)—an allusion to Shakespeare’s Ophelia’s invocation of the owl—Gayelene indicts a weakness that countless feminine avatars of Ophelia share, imploring fathers as potential saviors, recued neither by generations of Poloniuses nor Hamlets: these superbly haunting lines brought the shiver of the graveyard to my warm living room:

        too mindful, we die to our truer selves, calling father!
        But the fathers, all air, walk as ghosts over the grave ground            (p.31)

There’s genius in the spooky effect of the caesura after ‘all air’ (and, as we know, garrulous Polonius was all air), and in the fatefully sounding final spondee ‘grave ground’. This double stress (and alliteration) brings home how hanging on the father’s word kills ‘our truer selves’: bang bang. In variously inventive ways, Carbis’s work so far in her plays, stories and now, two poetry collections, has explored both the comedy of feminine identifications and the devastation wreaked by the models of masculinity that men and boys strive to enact or refuse at their peril. How does the golden-haired little boy, hauled along the swimming pool lane on his father’s back become, freely and creatively, a man, when this same loving father subsequently seems to enact man-as-flight-from-responsibility-and-presence? (‘Love Like This’, p. 24)

If compassionate identification is not enough to save from mortality—art, whether painting or poetry—gives back life, as in the beautiful ekphrastic ‘Red Horse by the River’ (p. 64) that takes off from Anselm van Rood’s ‘St Kilda Morning’. What does save, after relationship breakdown (‘I made Tarek and Egypt into a story’, ‘St Kilda Morning’, p. 46 ), is the openness to wonder beyond the pathways of flatfooted rationality: the red horse appears in its transcendent beauty by the river: ‘But your eyes were always open to the light’ (‘St Kilda Morning’, p. 47).

And consider ‘After Sylvia’ (p. 41)

        Don’t editorialise. Just say it. Read Sylvia.
        Her poems. For their surgical precision.’

        He adds: ‘You need to take up that scalpel.’

The lover-friend-mentor instructs, if not how to heal, then at least how to make a better poem by taking up the scalpel, to lay bare, with forensic wit, the damage he bequeaths her. And does she ever. Again, the last line is a unmitigated triumph: ‘I hold my pen—like a knife’.

Then, reading ‘Family’ (p. 53), I am breath-taken by Carbis’s metamorphic verve, up there with Ovid and Calvino—

        The tree told us we were temporary guests.
                […]
                Our sanctuary
        wouldn’t save us. We swept our tears into
        the streets, hid in the bark of our brooms
        as if wood had become new skin.
        (p. 53)

Here fabulism triumphs over sadness though magical metamorphosis: the humble domestic broom, remembering its origin, offers a retreat.

With several poems it’s art itself that bonds, that connects and transfigures. With ‘Writing Companion’ (for Alicia Sometimes, p. 74), language is celebrated as a reciprocal giving of nurture, a companion being etymologically, as Gaylene’s epigraph points out, a sharer of bread—thus the synesthetic transfer of shared words, whereby sounds become taste:

        … The taste of
        sounds on the tongue,
        the sharp tang
        of consonants,
        how the vowels curl.
        (p.74)

This oblique and all the more haunting ekphrastic magic runs right through the ‘Red Horse by the River’ section.

What is said and what is not said, the throat-freezing unspeakable features heartbreakingly in ‘The call’ (p. 82), where the screen topic of daughter-mother conversation is about a hairdresser’s phone number, but the not-so-well-hidden content is a mother’s possibly impending death from cancer:

        Her voice was full of stones
        I heard the dampness in her breath.
        […]
        Stones in my throat, as I
        hung up the phone and watched the brilliant lights
        of the train hurtling closer and closer.
        (82-83)

The brilliant lights of the hurtling train are the onrush of death as the terrifying real.
What is not said, the ellipsis, becomes literalised, actually materialised, in ‘Annotated Memories’ (p. 84). Here, the persona seems to have set herself the punishing task of making, for the ex-lover’s birthday, an annotated collage of his previous lives and loves; how then can she find the words for her own absence? The pendant to this conundrum is magnificently realised in ‘The Day You Left’ (pp. 88-90) where the imminently massive absence, the negative shape of the departing ship (taking the now ex-lover definitively from her), diminishes, in inverse proportion, all the wonder of the world—the moon being reduced to only a mention, a speck (p.88):

        And then, the absence
                of the ship

        I stared at the space
                where the ship had been

        And I thought
                now I understand.

        Negative capability
                Finally made sense to me.
        (p. 88)

The layout and lineation enact the cumulative insistence of absence. Here Gayelene makes over Keats’s phrase negative capability—to mean gaping absence, one that takes on more density and potency than presence.

Losing language as mediating and instrumental, Carbis lets the strangeness of body sensation impinge; it’s no longer a question of fatality, but of body as an improvisation. The deliberately anachronistic quill in ‘Embodiment in Quill’ refers to the bodily empowerment of a Victorian woman writer. Things and beings lose their names: through entries and exits and passages—vectors become all:

     A living being is making his way through the house.
        I shut out dishes in the kitchen,
        and keep my door open.
(p. 99)

In the closing, brilliant sequence culminating in ‘The Memory of Colour’, we are returned to the marvellous metamorphic power of art. Beyond the visual, Carbis writes the sensation—

        The walk back is about twenty steps
        and sometimes that is all it takes
        to remember green, to feel it

        in your feet. To feel practically feline.
        I hover on the first step then wade right in.
        I hold the colour of the sky
        in my arms, and swim.
        (p. 102)

The passage towards the water is shot through with EE, thus sending the sense of greenness coursing through the reader’s limbs and preparing an openness in the reader for the colour of the sky. Notably, this provides a space for readers to paint themselves in. Is the sky cerulean blue; is it egg-yolk yellow; or is it a thundery gunmetal? Thus armed, we slide with Carbis into the gorgeously embodying element: it’s performed in the transition from in to swim.

Finally, then, whatever our physical propensities, it’s the synaesthetic power of this whole collection that lends us such imaginative embodiment: eyes for the colour of the sky and arms to swim with.

 
References

Keats, John 1958 [1817] re. ‘negative capability’ see The Letters of John Keats, ed. H E Rollins, Vol I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958 , pp. 193–4.
Freud, Sigmund 1990 [1905] Case Histories 1: ‘Dora’ in The Penguin Freud Library,Vol.8, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1990.
 
 
MARION MAY CAMPBELL is an acclaimed poet and novelist, and essayist. Marion has taught literature and writing in various universities, including Murdoch University, the University of Melbourne and, most recently, at Deakin University. She now lives in Drouin in GunaiKurnai country with her two border collie companions.