July 23, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
The following two-part interview, first with the author and then with the illustrator of Biota (Apothecary Archive, 2022), was conducted by Urn Yoda inside a fully restored Poké Ball
Dan & Joel: First, we would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and the Dharawal people, the Traditional Custodians of the lands upon which Biota was both written and drawn. And we would also like to pay our respects to their Elders past and present. Furthermore, we will both be voting yes in the upcoming referendum for an Indigenous voice to parliament.
Interview With the Poet, Martian Cumulonym (aka Joel Ephraims)
Urn Yoda: Biota, a book with a ‘double-theme’ – this would be ‘biota’ and the ancestor shrines?
Martian Cumulonym: Yes, haha. Though now that I think about it I don’t think ‘double-theme’ is accurate to my intentions. From the start I envisioned a book with a main theme, that of ‘biota,’ a specialised term from the natural sciences that means, as stated in the book, ‘the organisms that occupy a place, habitat or time together.’ This is meant to be, and is metonymically presented in the book as, a self-reflexive metaphor for both my poetry specifically and language generally – that is, language and poetry as a living system in relation to other world systems. I had three main loose-ish influences here: the title of what is considered to be John Ashbery’s first book of poetry, Some Trees; Jack Spicer’s concept of a Martian poetry, a poetry transmitted through mysterious radio broadcasts to the poet from unknowable Martians (I like how ‘biota’ is about everyday biology but sounds perfectly alien); and then I like how the term extends, complicates and abstracts another natural sciences phrase that continues to be emblematic of Australian poetry, ‘flora and fauna.’
So, the main theme of ‘biota’ you could say is the first sphere of the book. The second, concentric, focuses that theme into my everyday life, bridged between Vietnam and Australia from 2017 until 2021. Encompassing my life as an English teacher in Ho Chi Minh City before Covid-19 and then my return to Australia at the start of 2020 and my life through the global pandemic experienced as a PhD student in Sydney. Through the lens of a second-generation Sri Lankan migrant, the continuing wavering othered-ness of that experience, and then seeing one alien country reflected in the other, Australia from the distance and prism of Vietnam, and then Vietnam from the distance and prism of Australia, one-inside-the-other within a 21st century hyper-capitalist, hyper-globalised, hyper-speed context. Anyway, so that’s the main thematic situation. Rather than being a second theme, the shrine poems and their accompanying illustrations are a complementary formal dynamic (what you might call also a light form of conceptual writing) that both refracts and focalises a two-way cultural situation and comparison.
They began as tiny poems influenced by Les Murray’s Poems the Size of Photographs (2002). (Fun fact: the one time I met Les Murray he stole my pen. That is, refused to give it back). He has a shrine poem in there, the idea and form of which I essentially lifted. Following Murray, my shrine poems are slight poems which, at their base form revolve around a single whimsy, a single blade of wit, a single idiom or idiomatic fragment or a single profundity – offered up to the reader as a piece of sustenance or nourishment, a trail of incense momentary as a skimmed newspaper cartoon – standing in relation to the full-length poems of the book as excited and critical conversation between a cinema audience before and after and sometimes during the movie; or as a light smattering of extra-terrestrial clouds over an extra-terrestrial landscape. From a formal perspective I like that juxtaposition of being inside and outside, substantial or insubstantial, conversational or densely literary etc. etc. At heart we are creatures of dichotomy.
Another influence on them is the idea, inspired by John Ashbery’s description of his own poetry in relation to the Victorian poet John Clare, of poetry being a pastoral walk through a landscape, only the landscape is a landscape of ideas. At some point my brother Tayne, who also lived in Vietnam at the time, along with me and Daniel, talked about his idea of creating ancestor shrine models containing, rather than the sacred statues and icons of traditional Buddhism (and there are many different strands of Buddhism in Vietnam), Marvel and DC superhero action figurines. I’m sure he got this idea both from the popularity of these Western superhero movies in Vietnam as well as from our writer-idol Donald Barthelme, whose novel Snow White (1967) appropriates the Disney movie to make an exploration and Joycean critique of American consumer culture and its mythologies. Seeing Coke-a-Cola and Sprite can pyramids within many of the ancestor shrines in Vietnam, along with Tayne’s idea, made me reflect on how these shrines could be used to represent a space of cultural influence and transition and how they might be used as a literary metaphor for consumer worship and the sustenance and nourishment we take from consumer goods. That they would also be a useful space for representing a two-way relationship between the culture industries of East and West, of Australia and Vietnam, proliferating industries in which consumerism has dimensions of mythology would also become central to my representation.
Going back to Ashbery and Clare, I was captivated by the prospect of recreating the physical experience of how ancestor shrines in Vietnam pop up unexpectantly, as wonderful surprises, in restaurants, in gardens, in roofs, everywhere, with their dusky incense and flashing green incandescent Buddhas like sacred dioramas. And then interrupting the poems as is the custom of enthusiastic Vietnamese cinema goers in relation to movies. And then, also, the religious level of there being two simultaneous worlds, one big, one small, the world of the humans and the world of the spirits, both ever physically present.
Urn Yoda: How did you write Biota into a postcolonial context?
Martian Cumulonym: Let’s start with the human world and then move to the spirit world. My approach with all the poems in Biota was to stick with my experiential perspective as an Australian expat teaching English and living in Ho Chi Minh City, which I did for only three years (and which, I note, as a stipend-less PhD student am again now). As a Western-foreigner with developed-world degrees I was in a privileged position. One that, being paid Australian-comparable wages in US-dollars in a low cost-of-living country in-itself had colonial overtones. In Biota I tried to be self-reflexive and self-critical to that. But an over-insistence of that position would also be colonially rife. Vietnam is an accelerating economy in a globalised world. It doesn’t need my overtures. So, firstly, I made sure to stick to my compromised, outside perspective. My other approach, involved with that, was to ensure that I kept a representative distance from Vietnamese culture and traditions while ensuring that I had researched enough to represent them accurately. This is especially the case with the ancestor shrine poems, which I presented at the general, blurred level of ‘Buddhism’ without focusing on any specific religion in Vietnam. In regards to using religion for literary purposes, I’d again emphasise that I was doing so not for surface aesthetics but to represent a new historical global and Neoliberal situation in Vietnam. My main influences on literary explorations of religion were Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Andy Warhol’s Catholic iconography art, and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob. Religion has always has a special pull for me. My conversion and subsequent apostacy from Christianity remains perhaps the most significant event of my life. One which, at its core was purely fictional but which traumatically upheaved both my life and the world around me (see my poem ‘Apostate’s Elegy’ in this book.) All of which is nothing to the past, present and future suffering of historical colonialism – shadows of which have touched and shaped my life too.
Since writing Biota, I’ve had some time to reflect on how I might have approached the colonial situation better. Firstly, I would have liked to give more explanation at the front of the book as to my goals and intentions. Notably, I didn’t clearly present what is the main positionality of my ancestor shrine representation: that of a two-way relationship between Eastern and Western, Vietnamese and Australian culture. Secondly, I would have liked to have conducted more in-depth research into ancestor shrines in Vietnam and then presented key sources, again at a representational distance, at the end of the book. Thirdly, after delving more into Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, I would prefer to have embodied my treatment in a more fictional mode, abstracting from the actual religion and thereby allowing me to explore it in more detail at a more sensitive, abstracted remove – and to delve deeper into its profound and huge human truths.
Everything I have represented of Vietnam in Biota is only at a surface level. I can speak very little Vietnamese. But, surface holds depth. And, as conceptual writing shows us, negative positions can be generative. My in-translation and non-verbal perspective on Vietnam must bring forward its own representational truths into relief, benefiting from outsider, hybrid and distanced, uncomprehending perspectives. I’d also like to note how Vietnam has morphed the colonial cultures which have repressed it into its own: its architecture, café culture, cinema, to name but a few. McDonald’s umbrellas at the local Vietnamese café. Brilliant, provocative.
Our publisher, Gareth Sion Jenkins, under his enigmatic press, Apothecary Archive, has kindly given us the opportunity to revisit Biota. As a taste of what is to come, here is an alternate prologue for the book that I look to include in a new version (we are considering more than one) and which addresses and realises some of the ideas I have referred to above. Emphasising a two-way cultural relationship. Employing a more fictional mode, in this case amalgamating the mirroring traditions of ancestor shrines and their ancestor worship with tomb stones in Australia and how we also worship our ancestors and loved one’s by the placement of physical things in sacred spaces. A more specific but abstracted research-based approach. Here ‘children on their birthdays’ loosely echoes the Vietnamese folklore tradition of the ‘Hungry Ghosts Festival’ when ‘according to Vietnamese folklore, in the seventh month of the lunar calendar, the gates of Hell will open to allow ghosts and spirits to roam the earth’ and where ‘in some regions, children are allowed to grab the [offering] food for themselves’ (https://www.sbs.com.au/language/vietnamese/en/article/explainer-taboos-and-rituals-of-the-hungry-ghosts-festival/jszzsx40z; https://saigoneer.com/saigon-culture/19162-ghosts-and-other-myths-how-vietnam-celebrates-the-7th-lunar-month). Furthermore, my fictionalised mythology relates full-circle to the title poem of Biota, in which enlightenment ideals (globally) are metaphorically embodied as thousands-of-years-old children.
The poems are houses.
The tiny poems are tomb shrines.
Tomb shrines are for the sustenance of ancestor spirits,
called back from the netherworld by singing of children on their birthdays,
whether of family blood (those shrines placed inside:
in foyers, in restaurants, in TV rooms) or of strangers’ blood,
(those shrines placed outside: in tile roofs, in forests, on highway side),
giving sustenance through offerings of food, loved objects, flowers
or sacred icons lest the roaming spirits suffer a final implosion
and become auto-cannibal ghosts,
those lost spirits that alternatively inhabit deep trees and the thick sky
and leave their implosion food and implosion goods
amongst the food and latest things of the living.
The world of the dead
smaller than the world of the living.
The material world
holding gravity beyond even the grave.
Urn Yoda: More tell me about your neo surreal style?
Martian Cumulonym: I believe that John Ashbery coined the term as an update of the capital letter ‘S’ French Surrealists who emphasised writing from the unconscious but who were also homophobic. A simpler way of stating it is just to say a lower case surrealism, one removed from the historical movement, which shares its drive to represent the working of the unconscious mind and the profound input of the unconscious mind into society and human affairs through automatic, abstract modes of writing but which also brings the conscious mind back in, so that the representation is fuller, the unconscious in tandem with the conscious – ie. lived experience. I don’t want to toot my own horn here too much or stifle my poetry with didacticism (didacticism is another trend in Australian poetry that I am striving to break away from, the idea that in an urgent political environment poetry must be self-explanatory, conventionally rhetorical, essayistic etc. – sometimes to the point of not really being poetry at all) but I will offer a few thoughts on my own style, which falls under the umbrella of what Michael Farrell has termed the ‘Ashbery mode.’ Following the later poetry of Ashbery, which became much more self-reflexively political, my style uses a mode of metonymic distance. I don’t say it is a pirate ship. I offer you a skull pondering a desert upon which the shadow of a passing plane makes a cross-shape, upon which lie the fossilised remains of ancient sea creatures, upon which a lumbering wheeled vehicle crawls, the silhouettes of gauntleted arms visible in its eerie, opalescent windows.
What Ashbery does is present background worlds as foreground. Strategies of inversion and subversion of surfaces and the conspicuous or inconspicuous depths they are made up of. For example, take the surface propaganda and obfuscation of discourse in Australian democracy and fragment it so that its duplicitous and contradictory edges come into relief. And then, separately, as an ironic and parodic gesture, literalise obfuscation as a total way of looking at and speaking about the world. People say that Ashbery’s poetry is too complex, that his images and lines are often too obscure. I see it in an opposite way. His lines simplify complex relational situations in society by presenting them in condensed fragments of inter and intra-relation at the level of language. They clarify through sharp-focus societal situations that are otherwise diffuse and smoky. And make plain the contours of puppet master multiplicity that loom in the shadows all around us, human or otherwise. The purpose isn’t to befuddle but to re-fuddle. Anyway, that’s how I read Ashbery and it’s what I seek to do with my poetry. A kind of Rubik’s cube choreography. The poem as a puzzle. Not in an absolute way, where you have a set solution the reader is challenged to solve, but in the sense that the world is made up of puzzles, mostly unsolvable, and that language itself, following Wittgenstein, is made up of complex language games. So, what we do is make puzzle mirrors and puzzle windows that simplify the puzzle forest they look into and frame, not departing from the puzzle essence and puzzle materials that are our and every writer’s main concern – something like that haha. I guess that it’s show don’t tell at the level of language. The action is the creation of puzzle experiences that are really kinds of carnival mirrors, condensed reflections, reflections of more cryptic puzzle situations in real life through the creation of a word puzzle whose twisting edges are also keys to ‘solutions’ – to
new awareness. The mode of simultaneity and amalgamation – which is the natural mode of the neo cortex.I don’t want you to come away from my writing affirming what you already know, I want you to come away seeing, feeling and experiencing things differently. Differing from Ashbery, and the general Ashbery mode, perhaps, I have sought to move in and out of this counter-discursive mode of writing. I wilfully present lines of poetry at the barebones, literal extreme end of the poetry spectrum and then, without notice or warning, plunge my reader into the densest of abstract jigsaw foliage, then back again to sipping a cà phê sữa đá and blank mist drifting over a mountain. My hope with this is to present the double perspective that Ashbery’s mode explores intrinsically: the world that is discursively and verbally presented to us, and the way this presentation finds unique expression and modulation in the verbal, imagistic and emotional fusion of our reactor minds. For example, take these lines from different stanzas in my poem ‘Canary’ (Biota, pp 88):
…it’s fair to posit you have a material existence,
that the same kinds of rungs hammer our umbrella spheres…
I’d travelled with you in the taxi
and thought of you,
our hands had brushed
finding our seat-belt buckles.
Urn Yoda: Asymmetrical, symmetrical?
Martian Cumulonym: I certainly overshot this aspect of Biota, which is another reason I look forward to re-visiting the project. When I wrote Biota I was under a double-duress. Firstly, the whole of the Covid-19 pandemic and its lockdowns and pressures on my mental health. Secondly, for the final stretch of the book, finishing the manuscript, the whole illustration collaboration phase and then editing and finalisation, I adamantly insisted on bringing the book to publication in time for me to reapply for the Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) stipend scholarship for my fulltime PhD in creative writing at the University of Sydney (my PhD is for another book, please refer to my bio). Not the ideal circumstances to write a poetry book, to say the least. ‘Asymmetrical, symmetrical’ is intended to embody Noam Chomsky’s statement that language is both finite and infinite through a conceptual writing set up influenced by the conceptual writing of writers like Christian Bök, Raymond Roussel and Toby Fitch. At the time, I was juggling too much at once. The parenthesised reference to ‘Asymmetrical, symmetrical’ in Biota at the end of the presented description for the term ‘biota’ would serve better to be clearer. And most unfortunately where I overshoot most is with my execution of the conceptual set up. I wove into the manuscript several repetitions of different words, with no set numerical pattern, with the intention of the repetition emphasising the finiteness or symmetricity of word usage generally, by bring into relief the extent to which our language is conventional and repetitious, even those words we might take to be rare. In the editorial stage, when Gig Ryan asked me why there were so many repetitions (asked to do an endorsement she kindly offered me some editorial advice), I panicked under pressure and then removed many of them but arbitrarily left others so that what remains probably appears as just laziness. Anyway, I am excited at the prospect of properly introducing a conceptual set up to a new version of the book, in a more sophisticated and better communicated way. I want to explore micro and macro levels of language (or biota) and how they interrelate to make and unmake meaning, especially within the triangle of grammar, lexis and discourse. I also like the idea of a writer applying a conceptual set up to their pre-existing work, as Christian Bök would say, introducing a machine. So please keep an eye out!
In the meantime, I would like to introduce my illustrator, Floating Amoeba (aka Daniel de Filippo) whose surrealist translations of my surrealist shrine poems often outshine their shrine poem counterparts, with a blunt and delicate chiaroscuro style that brings to my mind both Hayao Miyazaki and Max Ernst. But if I can steal one more moment of you time, I’d also like to mention that Jake Goetz has just released his second collection of poetry with Apothecary Archive, Unplanned Encounters (2023) (see the link at the end of our interviews), which makes light of our dire and breezy contemporary Australian situation in all senses of making light or light making (cosmic, botanical, quotidian, comedic…).
Interview With the Illustrator, Floating Amoeba (aka Daniel de Filippo)
Urn Yoda: (After a glass or two of John and Zizi’s shiraz) Thank you, Daniel, for joining us to discuss your involvement in Biota. Can you start by telling us about your inspiration behind the illustrations in the book?
Floating Amoeba: Hi. Yes. The inspiration for the illustrations in Biota stems from, firstly being able to create something with my close friend Joel, and second, the ideas and thoughts that could be explored in this particular book were quite powerful for me. On one hand, I was drawn to the concept of ecological and social interconnectedness and the idea of organisms coexisting in various physical and geopolitical spaces – in Vietnam, in Australia and also globally. At the same time, making surreal translations of ‘ancestor shrines’ presented an intriguing challenge. I wanted to capture the essence of sacred spaces and the cultural and mythological elements they encompassed. By creating drawings that served as translations collaborating with and accompanying their poetic counterparts, I aimed to evoke a sense of the ephemeral and the shimmering presence of the shrine poems’ ghosts.
Urn Yoda: Fascinating how you merged ecological concepts with surreal translations of shrine poems and shrines in Biota. How did you approach this process of surreal translation into visual imagery?
Floating Amoeba: The translating process was a deeply engaging one done over several drafts. I immersed myself in the themes and emotions conveyed by each poem, allowing them to guide my artistic choices. There was reflection and revisiting between the shrine poem and image as I captured the essence and meaning of the shrines. While working on the illustrations, I aimed to maintain a balance between honouring the cultural context and infusing my own surrealist interpretations. This involved careful consideration of symbols, and composition to evoke their metaphysical and social significance.
Urn Yoda: The book encompasses elements of autobiography alongside the surrealist illustrations. How did you navigate this throughout the book?
Floating Amoeba: Exciting and challenging. We had lengthy discussions about Joel’s ideas of carefully curating the placement of the illustrations within the book. I approached my illustrations as visual counterparts to the written content, striving to complement and amplify the themes explored in each section. Some are autobiographical, some are commentary, in the shrine contribution, both are part of a tapestry of Joel and Daniel experiences.
Urn Yoda: How engage with Biota readers you hope?
Floating Amoeba: My hope is that readers will be intrigued by it. That the shrines evoke a sense of wonder and contemplation, encouraging readers to reflect on the complexity of the natural world and its intersections with complex human beliefs.
Urn Yoda: What’s next for you as an artist? Are there any upcoming projects or themes you’re excited to explore?
Floating Amoeba: Currently, I’m excited to continue illustration. A few projects are already in the pipeline. In the works are two projects further exploring shrines, including an update with Apothecary Archive of Biota. Another project in the early stages I’m working on will expand what drawing, a ‘traditional medium’, can do when in intersection with new technology. This is a project that applies my background in interactive and participatory art installation. I will be working throughout various artistic disciplines and will create immersive experiences participants can share in.
Joel Ephraims is a South-coast writer of Sri-Lankan heritage who has published two books of poetry, Through the Forest with Australian Poetry and Express Media’s New Voices Series in 2013 and, most recently, Biota with Apothecary Archive in 2022. In 2011 he won the Overland Judith Wright Prize for new and emerging poets and in 2016 he won the Overland NUW Fair Australia prize for poetry. In 2018 he was longlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize and in 2022, for work on his conceptual, participatory novel and PhD thesis, 15238, he was granted a David Harold Postgraduate Research Fellowship by the University of Sydney. Joel’s poetry has appeared extensively in Australian literary publications for over a decade, in such places as: Griffith Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Marrickville Pause, Australian Poetry Journal, The Red Room Company, Overland, Rabbit, Seizure, Mascara Literary Review, The Australian Weekend Review and Otoliths, among others. An updated version of Biota (in collaboration again with the illustrator, Daniel de Filippo) is in the works with Apothecary Archive. Joel’s third book of poetry, Vaanya’s Ghosts, will soon be forthcoming. He can be contacted at: ‘jeph3931@uni.sydney.edu.au’.
Daniel de Filippo, a multi-disciplinary artist hailing from the Illawarra, has exhibited works in galleries that range from wax sculptures to screen-based work. As a film director, he won the Newcastle Real Film Festival’s best short film with “Thirteen Things To Say When You Are Breaking Up With Someone” (2013). Other than Biota, Daniel’s most recently released work “Register” (2021) explored the role technology plays in organising human beings. Biota is Daniel’s first time published as an illustrator, despite many years practicing underground. He currently works at Beyond Empathy and can be contacted at: ‘dandefilippo1@gmail.com’.
You can read more of and purchase Biota (2022) with Apothecary Archive
You can read some of and purchase Jake Goetz’s Unplanned Encounters (2023) with Apothecary Archive
July 12, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
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.
July 1, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
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
June 30, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
James Salvius Cheng was born in Myanmar, though he lives and writes in Western Australia. When not writing he works as a doctor. His poetry has been published in Meniscus.
History intrudes upon the marketplace
Your body walks in grey space under grey light.
People whisper and tongues weave their bright
memory. The little ones flicker, pluck and pull, pushing
by tall men with dirt upon their elbows. You, pulling
the log from your eye, will pluck a needle from the shelf, will stray
to the counter and stare unblinking in the stranger’s eye.
Your mind returns then to soft lips, to softer
fingers, to the warmth of old nights and winedrawn laughter.
You leave behind your love, yielding to the flat gaze,
your palm, holding white, smooth and eternal.
June 28, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Leila Lois is a dancer and writer of Kurdish and Celtic heritage who has lived most of her life in Aotearoa. Her publishing history includes journals in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA. www.leilaloisdances.com/writing
Fade into you
At the airport, teary-eyed, I reach for Coco Mademoiselle, sparkling jasmine, rose, patchouli.
I want to remember myself in my breathless twenties. I confused departure lounges with
home as a child. Doesn’t age bring both depth and anxiety? I order a glass of wine on the
flight, listen to Handel’s Oboe Concerto, & think of all the poems I want to write about you
as if no one has ever been in love before, your heart dances in your chest, which is beautiful
by the way, statuesque. Last night, Hope Sandoval sang “I want to hold the hand inside you”
& your finger was inside me, our bodies signing infinity. You are every dark lover in new
wave cinema, every soft-papered love letter ever penned. I drift, zero gravity, the aircraft
scaling the sky. I never want this feeling to end.
June 25, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
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.
June 13, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
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
June 8, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
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.
May 31, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Liel (she/they) is a writer, trainer, Psychologist (Provisional) and a disability and justice advocate based in Naarm. Her work is published in ABC Arts, MamaMia, the anthology We’ve Got This published by Black Inc. and Scribe UK, and Hireup, amongst others. Liel was the 2022 editor of Writing Place magazine, and is the creator and host of the (Un)marginalised podcast. She not-so-secretly enjoys singing along to the Frozen soundtrack with her kids, and is somewhat fixated on parenting related humour. Find out more about Liel’s work on her website and follow her attempts to keep up with social media via @LielKBridgford.
Marble Track
I slice a piece of me out and quickly amend the rest, the icing dropping around my layers in the heat of the moment. Presenting myself on an ornamented plate to another, pushing away that piece alongside the feeling of Other.
I taught myself to push things down so well that at times nobody can tell it is happening, myself included. I can even laugh at jokes that the whole of me doesn’t find funny, because that part of being a person doesn’t go together with the rest. It is too complicated, and my father warned a boyfriend once that I like to take the hard way forward.
What neither of them understood, nor ever will truly understand, is that I cannot fit into the easy way. The path they are describing has been created for perfectly made creatures. This path is like the present that someone who doesn’t have children bought my eldest: a narrow and precise marble track. But I am not a marble, more like a kubebah, a word that in my first language means a fat, uneven, hand-made ball-like mass. A kubebah can easily disintegrate, especially upon throwing at something, or someone.
Lots of people are like marbles, and they travel round the track effortlessly, at times carelessly. I have never got on track, not because of lack of desire or the stubbornness my father refers to, nor due to lack of effort. I have laboured to become a marble using any weapon or tool at my disposal: controlling my food intake and energy usage, censoring my language, hiding parts of my physical body, accentuating others, surrounding myself with marbles, acting like I am one. I followed the direction of this track for years, looking up at it like an elevated rail and wondering what people travelling up there were feeling.
I spent the better parts of my life wishing I was somebody else, more marble-like, more perfect or right. And each time I looked up, the shame inside me grew. That shame became so large that it stopped being distinguishable from me, it had invaded all my organs and crawled up from the pit of my stomach all the way up and around my throat.
The best decision I made was to throw myself against some things, and watch me and the shame fall apart just enough so I could see it. It had a dark purple colour not dissimilar to my open flesh, and distinguishable only by its pace. It moved and grew quickly in front of my eyes when we were both splattered on the floor.
Then with the help of fellow kubebahs I collected myself, and left the shame behind. Without my flesh, and in the sunlight, it dries up. When I moved away from the shadow of the marble path and into the open air and sun of my endless possibilities, I set myself free.
People still look down at me sometimes and ask why I am not up there where they are, but now I am moving through my own path, and unlike a marble track, it only goes upwards.
Every day I do a little less cutting out, and serve more of myself to the world as I am: the disabled me, the gender non-conforming me, the immigrant me, the atheist me, the culturally Jewish me, the politically radical me, the dreamer me, the parent me. I am a proud kubebah.
May 21, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
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.