Hospital

by Sanya Rushdi
translated by Arunava Sinha

ISBN 9781922725455

Giramondo

Reviewed by MEETA CHATTERJEE

Hospital was released in May this year and has been very favourably reviewed. Reviewers have commended it as a remarkable study of self and of ‘mind outside of its mind’ (Eda Gunaydin). Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll sum up the novel astutely when they recommend that it should be read by psychiatrists, ‘because it gives a sharp and humane perspective on the narrowness of medical approaches to mental health, queries whose interests are being served, and explores with subtlety how social and cultural considerations can influence the experience of mental illness, and come into conflict with assumptions underlying treatment, further marginalising already vulnerable patients’. Rushdi’s novel has also been praised as ‘unadorned, powerful, and raises big questions about society, the self and what passes as sanity’ (Chris Fleming). The insightful comments above set up high expectations that the book lives up to.

Sanya Rushdi’s Hospital plunges us deep inside the distressing world of the mentally ill. The cover image of the book shows a crowd of people with undifferentiated, tense faces descending the stairs of a building uneasily reminding one of images of herds of animals readied to be shipped to their slaughter destinations. This analogy may seem brutal, but the dire situation of the mentally ill is strongly established at the outset. Rushdi’s debut novella written originally in Bengali in 2019 and translated very competently by Arunava Sinha was published earlier this year by Giramondo. This work of autofiction explores the inner world of a devout Bengali Muslim woman in her thirties who is struggling to process her experiences of psychosis and her treatment for it in a Melbourne hospital. A clear narrative arc is established in the novel and the plot is neatly arranged so that the story captures the instances of hallucinations leading to a couple of psychotic episodes to a finale, perhaps a recovery.

The characters are not complexly presented. Perhaps, an intentional authorial choice to stay focused on the theme. The protagonist/writer, Sanya, finds solace in the holy Quran, wears a veil and feels strongly about living in accordance with Islamic faith, for example, she plans to refuse taking interest from her bank in deference to Islamic principles. Her family seems to
be nurturing and affectionate. Her mother cooks her favourite meals, her father reads verses of the Quran with her even if it is the middle of the night and her sister encourages her to use art as a creative outlet to process her intense reflections on the world and herself. Strewn through the novel are endearments in Bengali such as Sanya’s parents calling her, ‘baba’ (father) or ‘ma’ (mother). In Bengali, these endearments are markers of a tender, caring bond. There seems to be no evidence of ruptures in family connections that could be a cause of a break down, but that is what happens in the story.

After the instances of hallucinations, the Crisis Assessment and Treatment Team recommend that Sanya spend some time at a community house. The community house is an enormous building where Sanya ends up feeling overwhelmingly alienated and excluded. The mechanisms of exclusion are subtle. An instance of this is when the residents, who prepare the meals preparation for the group, add ham to a dinner of chicken parmigiana so that as a Muslim, Sanya would not be able to partake of the meal. Her stint at the community house, despite minimally imposed restrictions, turns out to be unpleasant. Her condition deteriorates further so that she is coercively taken to a hospital in Melbourne as a critical case. It is in this stultifying space that most of the story unfolds.

A beautiful metaphor embodies Sanya’s state of mind in the hospital:

I could see three trees as long as there was daylight, the leaves they had shed were gathering in ones and twos at their feet. Falling off the branches to which they had clung lovingly, they added to the pile of leaves like children gathering at an orphanage. Then a gust of wind scattered them; whatever refuge they had from one another was lost. Now all they had was themselves, along with the wind and its whims. Where will this take me, this wind, this system? (p. 49)

The extract captures the momentary solidarity with the other patients/fellow sufferers of various mental health conditions. But the incompatibility and agony of an individual trapped in an incomprehensible system becomes an all-consuming fear for Sanya. Sanya protests against the doctor’s mantra of, “Lithium, lithium, lithium” (p. 71), and suggests counselling as a more effective approach for her psychosis to cope with fear and unbearable sadness. The hospital professes all the right things by announcing its mission:

‘Working collaboratively to provide individualised care that promotes wellness and
recovery’. However, in actual practice, patients’ voices are drowned in assertions made by the doctors that, “In the case of science, though, evidence-based research is the new trend” (p.108).

Sanya is baffled by the duplicity and feels trapped in the system.

‘Language alone can unsnarl it (the mind), medicine cannot’ (p.107) is Sanya’s strongly held belief despite being aware of the complexities of language. Four languages jostle in her: Bengali (her first language), Arabic (the language of Quran) Urdu/Hindi (language of the ghazals/bhajans that eulogise unrequited love) and English a language in which she grapples with Vygotsky’s Thought and Language. She tries to make sense of the theory and practice of language. One of the perceptive remarks that she makes on language reflects her doubts about its capacity to ‘unsnarl’ the mind: ‘One might assume that everything will become easier if you and the members of this ‘different’ society use the same language. But this is not always true. Those who speak the same language often introduce complexities and nuances into their discussions by the very virtue of using the same language, which speakers of the different languages cannot’ (p. 88). Barriers to inclusion are set by different registers and discourses
that are impenetrable to the those who do not have the linguistic capital in the dominant language.

Ultimately, Sanya resigns herself to the rituals of medication, listening to the sounds of the food trolleys trundling down the corridors, prayers and brief periods of relief offered by the camaraderie of other patients in the smoker’s zone. However, she is unsure of how reliable these experiences are as one of the patients says to her, ‘…we are in an artificial environment, it’s difficult to judge what’s true and what’s false, what is right and what is wrong…’ (p. 73). She realises eventually that the only way she can win small freedoms and eventually get a discharge is through compliance. It is by surrendering to the system, the regime of
medications, that she is finally released.

Hospital has the look and feel of an autoethnographic study. It reads like a collection of qualitative data, that needs to be sifted through to make sense of a research question. Snatches of conversations are inserted in the form of texts seemingly extracted out of an interview/journal entry in the form of quotations often followed by a deconstruction of the exchange, but this is not always the case. For most part, dialogue/conversations are reported within quotation marks in the novel. However, sometimes exchanges are inserted into the narrative as if from a script of a play. It is hard to tell what the writer aims to achieve with this intriguing technique. On one hand, this element, along with a conspicuously pared down language signals an cautious exploration of a research topic in a mental hospital setting. On the other hand, it seems as if Rushdi highlights the exchanges as a performance of sorts that deserves scrutiny beyond the realms of research findings to interrogate the universal struggle of mental health patients against inflexible, medical systems.

‘The translated text must allow itself to be read in all the different ways that the original can, and since the translator can never know what all these ways might be, the only choice is to adhere to the text and the text alone’, responds Arunava Sinha to a question on the responsibility of a translator. It seems that the ambivalences and the tone of the authorial voice has been rendered intact in this book. It is great to read such an extraordinarily moving novel published in translation by an Australian publisher.

Notes and References:

Chris Fleming, review of Hospital, https://giramondopublishing.com/books/sanya-rushdi-
hospital/).
Eda Gunaydin. review of Hospital, https://giramondopublishing.com/books/sanya-rushdi-
hospital/).
Rushdi, Sanya, and Arunava Sinha. “5 Questions with Sanya Rushdi and Arunava Sinha.”
LIMINAL Magazine, 27 June 2023. Sourced at: https://www.liminalmag.com/5-
questions/hospital.
Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll June 30, 2023. The review of Hospital is part of a
few other books with the title, ‘Everything’s fine’: Can two political rivals fall in love?

MEETA CHATERJEE is a retired academic from the University of Wollongong. She is an independent scholar, writer, and poet and is the co-editor of Of Indian Origin: Writings from Australia. She lives in Canberra. Her area of interest is diasporic writing.

The Archipelago of Us

by Renee Pettitt-Schipp

Freemantle Press

Reviewed by ADELE DUMONT

Renee-Pettitt Schipp first journeys to Christmas Island in early 2011, arriving in the immediate aftermath of a boat tragedy which has claimed the lives of some fifty asylum seekers. Some of the victims, she assumes, would have become her students. What strikes her, foremost, is the silence surrounding the incident. Nobody ever informs her which of her new students have lost family members in the accident; at the memorial service, no asylum seekers are even present – they’ve been ‘carefully edited out of official versions of their own story’ (158). Nor is she permitted to talk about her teaching experiences: ‘my class full of children bursting with life was not to be spoken of, never to be named’ (130). By the time Pettitt-Schipp returns to the island, in 2016, the island’s detention centre facilities have either been drastically scaled down, or vanished without trace. This pattern of concealment, of strange suppression and disappearance is, of course, in keeping with Australia’s maritime border policies, and the excision of Indian Ocean Territories from Australia’s migration zone and from our sovereign obligations. It is this silencing which Pettitt-Schipp wishes to redress; she wants to ‘resist the forces of forgetting’ (76).

The Archipelago of Us is mostly framed as a present-tense narrative, unfolding over the ten days of Pettitt-Schipp’s return trip to Christmas Island (and then Cocos (Keeling) Islands, where she subsequently worked). But the past intrudes into her present: in the opening chapters, she repeatedly alludes to what she has ‘witnessed’ on the island, which was the reason for her departure, and which troubles her deeply, still. This creates a real curiosity, on the reader’s part, to know what, exactly, she has borne witness to. But before sating this curiosity, Pettitt-Schipp provides extended (at times over-written) descriptions of place – of birdlife and sealife and graveyards; factual information about the British Phosphate Commission and the island’s local residents; and details of her own present-day health scare. This stalling of the narrative might be attributed to the author’s understandable resistance to revisiting certain memories, stirred up by being in situ. As a readerly experience though, this with-holding is somewhat frustrating. 

Once interviews with various island residents are underway, the book finds its rhythm. Christmas Island is typically viewed in terms of its remoteness from the mainland; the book’s own blurb describes it as ‘out of sight and out of mind’. But it is also its own place, and so it’s refreshing that Pettitt-Schipp centres the voices of locals, for whom the island is home. Several of her interviewees describe the island’s appeal in similar terms: it’s a place where life is pared back; ‘raw and elemental… there’s not a buffer here… It is not very often that you are really up against things in such an immediate way on the mainland’ (147). As a narrator, and as an interviewer, Pettitt-Schipp is sensitive, always ready to reconsider her own beliefs and preconceptions. Zainal Majad (President of the local Islamic Council and mine-worker), for example, sees value in the island’s white, Chinese, and Malay populations being distinct, and maintaining their cultural integrity; Pettitt-Schipp admits her surprise, for she had assumed integration was the ideal. For Zainal, mining on the island is a source of employment and of future prosperity, giving the island ‘vitality and holding the community together’ (118), whereas Pettitt-Schipp had only ever equated the industry with devastation of the local ecosystem. 

And while in the (mainland) Australian imagination island territories like Christmas Island are typically viewed through the lens of ‘border protection’, we’re reminded of the island’s broader history and cultural makeup. Peter Wei Cheon Ch’ng, for example, recalls the hostility he faced as a Chinese person growing up here in the 70s: for a period, ‘Asians’ were not allowed to swim in the ‘white’ swimming pool; white people could call the police if an ‘Asian’ so much as walked through Settlement. Pettitt-Schipp’s return visit coincides with the Festival of the Hungry Ghost. The tables of food, a man tells her, ‘are for the people who were buried but do not have a grave’ (139): at one level, this description might be read as a subtle honouring of those who’ve lost their lives at sea, but at another, it provides a window onto the local Chinese community, and their Taoist and Buddhist traditions. Pettitt-Schipp’s vignettes of the natural world serve a literary function in providing a helpful reprieve for the reader from some of the book’s heavier contents, but they are also quite simply a reminder of the island’s rich biodiversity. She describes the lichen and mosses, mineral formations, mist, and the ‘glinting cerulean plain’ (88) of the ocean. Hughs Dale is ‘a place of beauty expressed in the extreme’ (86), and the Blowholes have a ‘striking, mythical feel’ (102). The book’s twinning of present and past timelines complicates the island’s depiction; though its darkness haunts the author, she concludes that ‘perhaps this place has reclaimed a measure of what seems like a former innocence, a side of this island I was previously unable to see’ (143). 

When it comes to detention-related material – which is likely what will draw readers to this story – the memoir contains one particularly powerful interview with “Tom”, who gives a first-hand account of watching the Janga boat tragedy unfold. Here, and elsewhere in the book, Pettitt-Schipp retreats, resisting the urge to provide too much commentary or response; ‘I don’t move, don’t make a sound, just try to hold, to contain the weight of what he has just told me’ (79). She also summons memories of some of the children in her charge, skilfully conveying the intimacy of the classroom, all the more precious for being situated in an otherwise hostile environment. When, newly returned, she has to drive past the turn-off to the North-West Point Detention Centre, ‘even the thought fills me with rage, and I thump the steering wheel, feel my shoulders tense’ (83). In fact, recollections of her time inside the centres are scant. The scenes she includes instead focus on the instances when she was able to organise for two asylum seekers, Massom and Ehsan, to leave the centre for a few hours. In one poignant scene, Massom hand-feeds pieces of coconut-meat to a crab; in another, they happen upon a girl in a bikini standing under a waterfall. Each time she takes Massom out, Pettitt-Schipp tells us:

He stood taller, his eyes became animated, responding more and more to the world around him. I was heartened. It was breathtaking to watch, a confronting power to own. For just a moment, I was able to gift another human being their freedom… I had never seen Massom look so alive and was moved that something so simple could bring so much pleasure to another human being (97).

It’s an interesting artistic decision, on the author’s part, to depict asylum seekers outside the centre in this way, given this was such an extremely rare occurrence and one that the overwhelming majority of detainees were denied. Was she unwilling to revisit distressing memories of detention head-on? Or did she decide not to add to the stock of narratives, reports, and inquiries published, which all already testify to the damage that prolonged detention can wreak? Is it, after all, more humanising to depict incarcerated people momentarily unburdened? Whatever the reasoning, her decision means the usual tropes of books set in detention (guards, razor wire, security cameras) are mostly avoided, and the reader is entrusted with more imaginative work. 

Cocos (Keeling) Islands is a ‘similarly excised world’ (200) to Christmas Island. When Pettitt-Schipp first moves there in 2012, the arrival of asylum seekers is virtually unheard of. The tone of the island changes, though, once boats do begin to arrive: the locals have seen what played out on Christmas Island, and the price that small community paid when swamped by transient workers. What impels the author to return to Cocos, on her 2016 trip, is not what she witnessed in the two ‘largely peaceful’ (191) years she spent teaching there, but rather a ‘vague need to address what I had experienced as an unsettling silence, in part when inquiring about the atoll’s history’ (191). Her focus in this latter section of the book is on the Clunies-Ross family, who were the original settlers of the island, and who have a reputation as caring colonalists. Elder Nek Su tells Pettitt-Schipp a starkly different story though: the family with-held education from the Coco Malay people, severely limiting their freedom of movement and communication. 

Throughout her memoir, Pettitt-Schipp is overwhelmed by her own ‘powerlessness’ (121) and ‘impotence’ (123) in the face of such ‘pointless suffering’ (125), and she concludes that ‘even in their diversity, these stories point to the common conclusion that our present hostilities at the border are not an aberration… ‘Fair Go’ Australia is a myth’ (289). Despite this, The Archipelago of Us remains a quietly optimistic book, for in the individuals she interviews, Pettitt-Schipp finds immense generosity, courage, and open-ness. In her doctoral thesis (out of which this book grew) Pettitt-Schipp refers to the field of ‘tidalectics’, an approach which challenges traditional binaries such as land and sea; self and other. The Archipelago of Us encapsulates this approach in its shifts between the natural and the historical; its organic interview style; and its blurring of the author’s past and present worlds, such that nothing and no-one is ever fenced in, and all is fluid. 

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

Coming out as Dalit

by Yashica Dutt

Aleph Books

Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET

Yashica Dutt’s memoir about coming out as Dalit, written in the tone of a manifesto, ought to be seen against the backdrop of a burgeoning literary scene by lower-caste women authors hailing from the Indian subcontinent or the diaspora, including recent publications such as Kalyani Thakur Charal’s poetry collection I belong to Nowhere: Poems of Hope and Resistance, or Anjali Kajal’s short story collection Ma is Scared and Other Stories. Although Dutt’s text is non-fictional (part autobiographical, part sociological), its aesthetic quality shares with these publications a language and style whereby the personal is political and ‘herstory’ part of larger allegories of collective struggle, suffering and resilience, but also self-assertion, autonomy, and success. As Dutt reminds, Dalit authors are often taxed with “lacking aesthetic sophistication [though] many took inspiration from the works of African American authors like James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, and wrote rich, deeply painful stories” (123). Dutt also stresses Dalit activists’ debt to the politics of black liberation, from the Black Panthers Party to the Black Lives Matters movement, to bell hook’s pamphlet-like seminal text Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism.

Dutt displays an acute awareness of the intersectionality of identity formation, as well as a cross-cultural sensitivity towards the intricacies of expressing and representing what being Dalit means. Her opening statement, “I hope to speak for those whose voices haven’t been heard before” (x), is to be nuanced in light of queries coming forth later on, as to the epistemic violence involved when speaking of/about an oppressed group while claiming to reach out to this group from a (relatively) privileged position, as does Dutt. These are issues Gayatri Spivak, who made Columbia University her new home after migrating from India like Dutt, has written about extensively. Dutt does not shy away from tackling these issues head-on, and her memoir regularly morphs into a valuable social commentary on race, caste, gender, class, and to a lesser extent sexuality (the phrase ‘coming out’ is a vivid evocation of the queer community from which it was borrowed).

Being lower-caste, or Dalit, in effect cuts across very different realities and experiences (in classical Sanskrit, ‘dalita’ stands for ‘divided, split, broken, scattered’). Dutt’s memoir is both a celebration of, and a coming to terms with, the sheer diversity of Dalit lives and trajectories. Her own family is a good illustration of what French philosopher Michel Foucault dubs heterotopia (From Ancient Greek, ‘different place’). Dutt’s family history comprises ‘untouchable’ sweepers and toilet cleaners, also known as manual ‘scavengers’ (her grandmother) but also small (her father) and bigger (her grandfather) functionaries, while she herself managed to attend some of the most prestigious educational institutions, both in India and the United States. Bearing this heterotopic social tapestry in mind, Dalit stories making headway into the mainstream run the risk of falling prey to ‘cannibalistic’ appropriation and at times point-blank plagiarism on the part of unscrupulous intellectuals, academics, researchers, journalists, or artists, especially if these are Dalits playing the role of ‘native informants’.

The recent controversy in which Dutt has become embroiled over an episode of the Indian romantic drama web series Made in Heaven, produced by Amazon Prime, is a case in point. In one episode of Season 2, ‘the Heart Skipped a Bit’, the lead female character Pallavi Menke, who studied in Columbia, confesses about her Dalit origins. She mentions her grandmother, who happened to be a manual scavenger. The similarities with Dutt’s life-story are striking, and Dutt should have been given due credit for it. Its director Neeraj Ghaywan (himself a Dalit) must have deemed it was sufficient to acknowledge her name only in passing by means of an Instagram post. Following heated exchanges with Dutt on social media, the show later retracted from identifying Dutt’s book as an obvious source of inspiration, thereby denying Dutt the right to claim her own story back. This goes to show the extent to which Dalit labour and property remain vulnerable to exploitation, abuse, and theft. Having passed as upper-caste most of her life, Dutt was herself ‘bypassed’ and her Dalitness usurped by one of the biggest corporations in the world at the point when it had been so rightly represented on screen, as Dutt noticed with bittersweet pleasure.

Portraying Dalits remains a fraught exercise, on screen as elsewhere, if only because lead roles end up being almost always upper-caste. Whether conscious or not, minoritizing strategies rely on bypassing, as in the case of Dutt’s row with Made in Heaven’s producers, but also involve trespassing (not to say trampling or violating) as well as passing by without a sign of acknowledgement. In so doing, one deprives the ‘Other’ of the possibility of agency by reducing the latter to a state of social invisibility or to the status of a mere passer-by as passive victim. Thus, the difficulties of giving full justice to the constellation of practices characterising Dalits amount instead to a ‘single story’ (158). Dutt borrows the phrase from the Nigerian authoress Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who also studied in the United States. Both Dutt and Adichie are commanding enough to allow for a fairer, more balanced, and nuanced characterisation, beyond victimising or wallowing in ‘poverty porn’ (176).

In his 1952 novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison captured the condition of being Black in America, in particular having to face indifference from (white) society. As Dutt recalls, the novel proved highly popular among an emerging Dalit middle-class readership who could identify and sympathise with the main character’s feeling of anomie and ostracised position as an outcast, all the more since caste unlike race or gender forms an ‘invisible package’ (90) turning out to be just as pernicious. Growing up ‘Bhangi’ (the name of a Dalit caste used as a cuss word in India) while pretending to be Brahmin (upper caste) helped Dutt pass various interviews and entrance exams at convent, private schools like St Stephens College in New Delhi. Yet her performances would have to mean surpassing herself, both financially and academically, this at the risk of passing out or even away like her tutelary figure Rohith Vemula, a Dalit student and activist at Hyderabad University whose suicide letter triggered Dutt’s outing and was written in the wake of seeing his scholarship blocked. As she puts it: “I had to work harder so ‘they’ could overlook my ‘inferiority’. I couldn’t pause to recognize my ‘triumphs’ or take it easy every now and then because then I would fall behind and they would stop respecting me.” (37)

Internalised casteism in part stems from the belief that mimicking the upper-caste through adopting their lifestyle and codes of conduct may save one from persecution and offer a pathway to a better life. It means believing life is undeserving as it is, without merit, and worthless to such an extent that a quota-based system of affirmative action known as ‘reservation’ in India, is needed to compensate for otherwise menial, mediocre, and miserable career prospects. Hence, passing-as-hiding both serves as an existential act of survival and an economic necessity. Part of the disguised performance involves, above all, the mastery of the former coloniser’s medium of communication – namely the English language. Ironically, English allowed for the upper-caste to pass as Western (and for Dalits to pass as upper-caste), alongside bleaching or wearing ‘ubtan’ (face mask), as Dutt was ritualistically forced to as a child in the hope of posing as fair-skinned. In a poignant passage, Dutt describes Dalitness as a ‘carcass’ to be borne (perhaps an allusion to the Chamar caste’s disposal of dead cattle as tanners) and English at which she excelled, as a ‘crutch’ to lean on:

English—the language I had hoped would help me escape my own Dalit identity. The language I had stubbornly practised since I was five. Flawless English was supposed to bring me to the same level as my upper-caste classmates in school and college. I leaned on it when the carcass of my Dalitness became too heavy. Later, writing in this language became my career. It is very likely that English was Rohith [Vemula]’s crutch too. He was probably still honing it so he could stand tall against those he had decided to take on—those who perhaps equated his Dalitness with an inherent sub-humanness. (xiv)

Following independence from Britain in 1947, India abolished the caste system that the British colonisers had exploited to their benefit, relying as they did on upper-caste Brahmins to fill up the ranks of their bureaucratic apparatus. India now projects itself as a caste-blind society despite having a head of state as a Hindu nationalist whose latest stunt was to rebrand India as ‘Bharat’. Chaturvarna’ (the caste system) is a legacy of Vedic scriptures and of Hinduism though it extends across other religions of the Indian subcontinent. The spiritual concept of ‘karma’ has been central to the maintenance of a caste-based, endogamous, apartheid-like structure, and to the acceptance of their lower status by Dalits as “pay[ment] for the sins of previous lives in subsequent lifetimes” (12).

Dutt’s memoir shows contemporary discrimination against Dalits to be rampant, even in urban, cosmopolitan settings like New Delhi. One falls under the impression that Dutt, while working there as a journalist for the fashion industry, was indeed better off hiding her caste, since it gave her privileged access (passe-droit in French) to an otherwise exclusive, glamorous milieu. The dressing up of her origins behind the make-up of her impeccable English, somehow to be expected from her, did not matter so long as it was swept under the carpet as mentioning her caste would have been socially awkward – a fatal faux pas deemed de mauvais goût. This is testament to the level of hypocrisy and corruption of Indian society, especially among the brightest and best educated sectors. To paraphrase a famous line, it feels while reading Dutt as if something is deeply rotten in the state of Hindustan (the land of the Hindus).

The fiction that India is a meritocracy also seeps into Dalits’ minds, and many regard education as a shield against casteism and vehicle for social ‘upliftment’ – a term Mahatma Gandhi himself was particularly fond of using concerning those he patronisingly called ‘Harijans’ (God’s children), to mean Dalits. By contrast, Dutt’s vehement defence of reservation, from which she benefited, originates in her understanding that sheer merit plays little or no part in order to climb the social ladder. This comes in spite of her reluctance to see herself classified among the Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and Other Backward Castes (OBCs), and stigmatised as such. To quote from her memoir:

A month after the admission interview, I attended the ‘first assembly’ at St. Stephen’s. Mum had hastily sold off the land that had been our backyard garden which she had lovingly tended. The money would cover the rent for a shared PG I was to stay in. As we filled out the admission form, Mum suggested, for the very first time, that I tick the box that said I was an SC/ST candidate. Like so many Dalit students who don’t understand how systemic casteism works and buy into the casteist narrative of ‘proving themselves without a crutch’, I didn’t think I needed reservation. If I checked that box, I would taint my achievements with the ‘quota student’ tag. My lifetime of lessons to successfully appear upper caste would be rendered useless with that single stroke. But I didn’t have a choice. I needed the financial aid and scholarships to pay even the heavily subsidized Delhi University fees. (60)

The reservation system remains limited in scope as it covers the public sector only, which has historically provided Dalits with employment opportunities that come with the hope “that some of the respect linked with a civil service position might rub off on them and go some way towards negating their Dalitness” (1), even though Dalits disproportionately occupy the lower rungs of government. However tepid and timid, attempts by the Indian state to redress inequalities have come under fierce attack from some of the most conservative, reactionary corners of society, paralleling the US supreme court’s recent decision to overturn affirmative action in US colleges. Dutt writes about the anti-reservation demonstrations that took place at a medical school in Delhi in 2006, though in effect, it is the lower-caste and religious minorities who face daily discriminations at colleges and universities, including ‘hazing’ and ‘ragging’ (73). Anoop Kumar’s documentary film The Death of Merit forcefully chronicles these practices in India’s higher ed (74).

Dutt’s narrative is a treasure trove of intertextual references facilitated by her background as a journalist. Her blog, ‘Documents of Dalit Discrimination’, for instance inventories both testimonies and eye-witness accounts of casteism. Secondary sources Dutt builds upon in her memoir include Kakoos (2017), a documentary on the officially abolished practice of manual scavenging, or English Vinglish (2012), a film dealing with India’s “unnatural deference to English [which] is a result of our internalized colonial hangover” (21-2). Dutt’s ability to shed light on Indian contemporary society by means of her personal – and at times heart-rending – family history (her dad’s alcoholism, her mother’s suicide attempt, or Dutt’s inner turmoil while growing up), is what makes her memoir so vibrantly lively. Precious in particular is her overview of India’s media landscape, ‘culture wars’, and Dalit activism. In spite of India’s hardening stance and crackdown on dissenting voices under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s term (the latest controversy being the assassination of Sikh leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, on Canadian soil), Dutt shows independent news reporting to be thriving thanks to the use of social media and alternative news outlets on Dali issues such as RTI, Ambedkar’s Caravan, Savri, Velivada and Dalit Camera (166).

While reminiscent of the divide between white and black/brown feminists in the US, her depiction of an ongoing rift between ‘Savarna’ (upper-caste) and ‘Bahujan’ (people’s) feminism is proof of the rise and empowerment of Dalit women in India. Though Dutt admits Dalit stories and struggles still find it hard to break into the mainstream, she makes a point of ensuring these will not go unheard of in her memoir, which was published by an independent publishing firm in India. The case of 23 years old physiotherapy student Jyoti Singh Pandey (Brahmin), gangraped and left dead in a moving bus in Delhi in 2012, helped shift public opinion by initiating a national conversation about sexual violence and abuse in India. This outpour of support must be weighed against the similar fate befalling 29 years old law student Jisha (Dalit) in 2016, which comparatively generated little reaction from the media. The alleged ‘availability’ and ‘impurity’ of Dalit women as peddled by the dominant masculinist, casteist discourse make them particularly vulnerable to rape culture, so the onus is on journalists and progressives to spotlight their case.

In the same vein, Dutt recalls the 1927 Mahad Satyagraha initiated by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar for the untouchables’ right to use water in public tanks (‘satyagraha’ standing for a non-violent act of resistance and civil disobedience). This historic event was overshadowed three years later by a march against British colonial rule’s imposition of a salt tax, led by the well-known (upper-caste) figure of Mahatma Gandhi. Ambedkar’s writings and actions, including the drafting of India’s first constitution, have provided Dalits with spiritual solace and guidance, and his momentous legacy hovers over the pages of Dutt’s memoir. Not incidentally, Ambedkar would need a nod from another public (upper-caste) intellectual, Arundhati Roy, for his writing to find a larger echo, although “in the introduction to Ambedkar’s most radical and significant work [Annihilation of Caste], Roy positions Gandhi front and centre” (173).

As Dutt’s book unfolds, its aim stands clearer: to popularise and position Dalit stories ‘front and centre’ by capitalising on Dutt’s vantage point as a New York-based, Columbia graduate like Ambedkar, who received his PhD in economics from this same Ivy League institution in 1927. Hence, Dutt’s outing reveals itself as a deeply altruistic, humanist gesture instead of an attempt to take all the credit, as some of her detractors following her dispute with the producers of Made in Heaven have hinted at. Her memoir is an invitation to – quite literally –come out and take to the streets as Dalit and can be seen as part of a recent rise in Dalit militancy. In 2016, Dalits from the Chamar community in Modi’s historic state of Gujarat withdrew their labour by refusing to pick up carcasses of cows. The disposal of dead cattle is an activity traditionally reserved to the lower-caste, who find themselves looked down upon as manual workers and violently targeted by Hindu hardliners as ‘meat-eaters’ – “vegetarianism [being] the gold standard for caste purity” (xiii). Upper-caste mobs severely beat up strikers with police complicity, although “the simple gesture of Dalits refusing to do the job that the caste system had forced on them for centuries had such a powerful effect that it led to months of protests across the country and ultimately resulted in one of the largest Dalit uprisings in thirty years” (48). It led in particular to the Azadi Kooch March for equality, justice, and land reform – “land that had been allotted to thousands of Dalits on paper but was still waiting to be assigned after decades” (48).

As Dutt’s memoir moves to its final sections, the word Dalit gets hammered into, as if to suggest Dutt is now on her way to recovery after many years of self-loathing and denial. It also leaves the reader with a sense that Dalit lives matter; an allusion to the name of the Black Lives Matter-inspired movement that, as stated on its website, aims to “build constructive resistance against caste-based inequalities, indignities, and adversities globally”. As the generic character of Dutt’s book title suggests, coming out as Dalit (as opposed to ‘a Dalit’) is to belong to a community and be part of a collective with a rich and proud heritage attached to it. That Dutt will be able to share this heritage again through a US reedition of her memoir, out in 2024, is a gift worth waiting for. It is no small treat (and feat) either that in 2020, the book won India’s National Academy of Letters award for outstanding young writers, the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. Readers who may not be familiar with India’s caste system will find a useful, thorough introduction on the subject while a more attuned audience may also enjoy Dutt’s bold journalistic cross over to the autobiographical genre.

Works Cited
Dalit Lives Matter

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.

The Jaguar

Sarah Holland-Batt

UQP

ISBN 9780702265501

Reviewed by NINA CULLEY

Sarah Holland-Batt’s Stella Prize-winning poetry collection, The Jaguar (2022), is entirely absorbing and accessible. It does not work to evade or obscure, rather its precise language and imagery culminates in a narrative that is incisive and moving. The collection is structured into four distinct parts with each section comprising profoundly visceral and poignant poems and elegies that unify and harken back to the traditional elegy form, in the commemoration and celebration of painful relationships.

Admittedly, poetry has often felt alien to me, a sentiment that resonates with many reviews of the collection. This might be attributed to poetry’s niche within the broader literary landscape. Despite poetry’s smaller readership compared to other genres, as perceived by the publishing industry, it maintains a dedicated and passionate movement, with authors like Holland-Batt leading the charge.

The Jaguar is Holland-Batt’s third book of poetry, following on from The Hazards (2015) and Aria (2008). Her first book Aria won a number of national prizes, the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and the Anne Elder Award. The Hazards won the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award and her latest novel, The Jaguar, took out the 2023 Stella Prize and The Australian Book of the Year 2022, and was either shortlisted or longlisted for a sleuth of other accolades. Interestingly, Holland-Batt marks the second consecutive poet to claim the Stella Prize, after Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear, following poetry’s inclusion in 2022. In addition to her poetry, Holland-Batt published Fishing for Lightning (2021), a collection of essays on how to read, understand, and love poetry. This publication is an informative read alongside The Jaguar, offering technical knowledge as well as context and shape to Holland-Batt’s own works.

Holland-Batt commences The Jaguar with a couple of lines from the ancient Greek poet and songwriter Sappho. It goes:

‘yet to sing love,
love must first shatter us.’

This feels like the perfect prelude to the collection, a work that emerges as a deeply personal memoir. Rarely has a poetry collection made me teary, but this one managed it on the first page. Truly, Holland-Batt doesn’t mess around with the poem titled “My Father as a Giant Koi”; it’s a devastating and affecting poem and for me, the most memorable from the collection. Holland-Batt suspends readers in underwater quiet whilst metaphorically depicting her father during his most vulnerable state.

‘He has been down there for years –
ancient god of the dark, keepers of the single koan,
moving in currents only he can sense,’ (p3).

Following this initial impact, subsequent poems follow a similar tonal and visual current, centring on Holland-Batt’s father and his battle against an unspecified illness, which is later revealed as Parkinson’s disease in the poem “In My Father’s ​Country.” Despite the challenging subject matter and the hints of possible neglect he may have experienced during care, the author handles his deterioration with touching dignity. In her Stella Prize interview, Holland-Batt stated that her interest lies in exploring the difficult aspects of life. She’s “interested in contemplating the things that are difficult to look at: decline, death, violence, grief, sadness, and ageing. Holding the gaze when the gaze is hard seems to me to be the essential task of a ​poet.”

Fittingly, the collection’s second section tackles grief and loss, flitting breathlessly between fond memories of her father and his enduring battle with Parkinson’s disease. These poems combine the pedestrian details of hospitals – chemotherapy drips, buzzers, and the white sneakers of nurses – with colourful imagery of the natural world. This juxtaposition is most powerful when the language converges, notably ‘injections of nectar’ and David Attenborough’s whispers under the fluorescent lighting of hospital wards. Still, the devastation lies in the duality of author and father, both of whose stubbornness and strength persisted despite the odds. It’s best expressed in the poem “The Midpoint” the closing lines read:

‘Still I want
What I want –
Which is to endure,” (p37).

In part three, the lyricism takes on a folkloric quality, roving and delicious, thanks to Holland-Batt’s controlled use of metaphors, similes, and parables. Moments of absolute ferociousness punctuate the narrative, as the author paints exotic getaways, transitioning from hospital visits to French lingerie, super yachts in the wind, and magnums of Pol Rodger in gold tubs. Hyperbolically named “Mansions” and “Ode to Cartier”, these poems depict the allure and hollowness of the tumultuous relationship that anchors the narrative. The poem “Instructions for a Lover” highlights the glittery highs and lasting lows of this relationship: ‘pull me closer, push me away’ (p59) and is followed by “Epithalamium” – a type of poem for a bride on her way to marriage. “Epithalamium” employs several poetic devices including the repetition of ‘to believe’ and a clever fourth wall break, both of which create a sudden intimacy with the reader.

‘… to love a narcissist you have to believe, and reader, I ​did…’ (p60).

Satirical humour adds another layer to the narrative, capturing undercurrents of anger, chaos, and escapism. The narrative wraps up in satisfying conclusion with the author in “Serious Moonlight” wistfully stating that I will go ​alone,’ (p81).
Here and throughout the collection, Holland-Batt engages the first-person perspective, creating further intimacy between the reader and the text, and raising questions about who is speaking and what is meant by the use of “I.” The incorporation of first-personal perspective becomes more intriguing when considered alongside her employment of “lyric apostrophe,” a term rooted in Greek literature denoting the act of “turning away” – issuing both directives and admonitions to simultaneously come closer and turn away.

The final section serves as a roadmap of Holland-Batt’s time abroad in Egypt, Morocco, and Andalusia, and is bookended by her relationship with her father. Holland-Batt’s skill in depicting the natural world here is effortless. Her brush strokes craft loaves of limestone, lilac mist, and cinder blocked hills. Settings unfold like passing clouds, seamless and gentle, until sharp, frenetic language snaps you back to reality. It’s a feeling like whiplash and there’s no reprieve until the concluding poem, “In My Father’s Country”, which sprawls across fourteen pages to capture the ‘creeping lisp of Parkinson’s’ …

‘…I hate that you’ve stayed. You took your mind ​​first…’ (p112).

The collection’s title and bold cover – The Jaguar – appears consistently, taking the form of a drug dealer’s pet, a toast with jaguar’s blood, and a jaguar’s breath. At one point, the jaguar transmogrifies into a forest-green vintage 1980 XJ; ‘a rebellion against his tremor,’ (p42). The symbolic nature of the jaguar varies across cultures, but largely it’s celebrated for its power and strength, both of which are compelling motifs throughout the collection. The jaguar isn’t the only animal that makes an appearance, in fact various animals – farm animals and sea creatures – are used to symbolically explore the gentle equilibrium between life and death, human and animal.

The Jaguar is a compelling introspection into what it means to be human. It accomplishes precisely what Holland-Batt advocates as the power of poetry in Fishing for Lightning, namely, the ability to evoke emotions; “bringing chills and solace, beauty and devastation” This collection fearlessly delves into themes of heartbreak, grief, regret, and, above all, ​love, and the powerful ways these experiences intersect. It’s emboldened by the ferocity and complexity of love and its inevitable decline, particularly in the context of neurodegenerative disease, and the ways that we as humans, as animals, suffer but also the ways in which we endure.

NINA CULLEY is a writer, reviewer and educator based in Naarm. She’s the Studio Manager and Director of Melbourne Young Writers’ Studio where she teaches creative writing. Her works have appeared in numerous publications including Kill Your Darlings, Aniko Press and Eureka Street.

Icaros

by Tamryn Bennett

Vagabond Press

ISBN 978-1-925735-56-7

Reviewed by JENNY HEDLEY

The use of medicinal plants or herbs originates from Indigenous knowledge systems which predate colonisation by thousands, or in the case of Aboriginal pharmacopeia, tens of thousands of years. Phytotherapy, a science-based medical practice first described by French physician Henri Leclerc in 1913, uses plant-derived medicines for prevention and treatment of ailments. Today, industrial pharma hacks plants’ intrinsic biotechnologies for maximum profit, producing pills and potions engineered to ease mental and physical maladies. What has been overlooked by the dollars that be (aka extractive capitalism) is the use of traditional plant medicines for diseases of spirit.

Tamryn Bennett’s Icaros sings into that supernatural vegetal space of mystification, ritual and holistic therapy. ‘Icaro’ comes from the Quichua verb ikaray: ‘to blow smoke for healing’. Icaros are traditionally sung by curanderx or shamans during plant ceremonies which originated in the Amazon basin.

Medicine songs
ancient as jungle
we’re passengers of the plant,
the dying, deaf and addicted. (32)

Not to be approached lightly, ayahuasca ceremonies demand discipline, respect, and abstinence from sex, drugs, alcohol, salt, sugar and some animal products. Set, setting and intention must be considered.

Wrapped in net
Ayanmanan asks your intention
           holds a fuming stone
           and a basket of shadow.

                 chhhh chhhhh chhhh
                 chhhh chhhhh chhhh

Follow the chakapa
           rattle of ritual
Drink the vines to know
the pattern of all things. (32)

During ceremony, the Banisteriopsis caapi vine interacts with the leaves of the Psychotria viridis shrub to produce beta-carbolines that restrict the ability of a person’s monoamine oxidase enzyme to degrade the N, N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) present in the sacred vine. The DMT acts on the central nervous system, allowing people to access a state of nonduality or oneness.

This is where amnesia and healing
           begin, along the worn path
           a wreath of hedera helix. (22)

Bennett’s spirit songs carry us into this alternate reality, performing a pas de trois between English, Spanish and verdant language where plants speak and we listen. In Covert Plants, Baylee Brits and Prudence Gibson define ‘plant writing’ as being receptive ‘to sentience, sapience, and forms of life that are distinctly botanical’ [1].

This Is Your Mind On Plants author Michael Pollan writes, ‘Psychedelic compounds can promote experiences of awe and mystical connection that nurture the spiritual impulse of human beings’ [2]. Clifford Pickover, who received his PhD from the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale, hypothesises that ‘DMT in the pineal glands of biblical prophets gave God to humanity and let ordinary humans perceive parallel universes’ [3].

If philosopher Simone Weil were inspired by herbaceous delights and ‘[f]our billion years of infinite / combinations’ (21), rather than the Christian God, perhaps these are the aphorisms that would flow:

How do you want to die?
That’s how you must live.

           What are the seeds in your heart?
           That’s the tree you will become. (17)

She might channel this ‘voice from the other world’ that ‘tells us to taste / the deities of dirt’ (45), to ‘remember where you hid the key’ (79):

when the world gets too heavy
lay yourself down
be still a hundred years

let go of the paper lives,
what could you carry
all these seasons anyway?

breath, sun, rain…
none are ours to keep
leaves are lessons of release (29)

Illuminated by artist Jacqueline Cavallaro’s otherworldly paper-based collage, compressed from three dimensions into two, Icaros extends the collaboration between poet and visual artist as exhibited in Bennett’s debut phosphene, published via Rabbit Poetry Journal’s Rabbit Poet Series in 2016. In both volumes, the visual amalgamation of figurative fine art with zoological and botanical sketches decentres the human, imbuing the vegetal with eyes that see. These uncanny, surrealist compositions of art and text, whose title-page glyphs suggest a relationship between story and stardust, or perhaps the origin of language, invite the reader to open themselves to ancient ways of knowing. Bennett presents a reality where everything living derives from the cellular—a ‘fistful of galaxy reassembled on shore’ (19): it is all a matter of scale or time.

In the introduction to phosphene, Bennett describes her poems as ‘fragmented elegies’ and ‘prayers for the wind, for buried cities, for the invisible and the sacrifice’ [4]. She takes us with her as ‘at the temple of letters’ (4) she ascends ‘two thousand stone steps / into cloud’ (6). Where her debut poetry collection invites a collaboration with her ‘plant symphony’ project co-artist Guillermo Batiz, whose Spanish translations precede, follow or are interwoven with Bennett’s, Spanish seeps seamlessly into her sophomore collection. Each method lends a sonorous quality to the text: in phosphene it presentiments, echoes or proffers a call and response; in Icaros, bi-linguistics perform alongside onomatopoeia, the hissing of fire, the incantation of song, a rattle’s percussive hiss.

In Icaros, Red Room Poetry’s artistic director, Bennett, who received her PhD in literature from the University of New South Wales, remembers the women who were burned at the stake, for those whose ‘Plant knowledge comes with a price, / hide it or be set ablaze’ (40). She acknowledges the creep of colonisation, ‘Languages leaving, / little extinctions in the dunes’ (68). She walks us through preparations for ceremony—‘we pick sage by barbed wires / weed plastic bags from prickly pear’ (48)—and into ritual itself:

Palo santo on the abdomen
to cut the cords of attachments,
for the ones that left
and children who were not.
Collect kindling to reawaken. (49)

I am a little bit obsessed with the form of Icaros. Where phosphene presents four poems which sing, reverberate and refrain across a number of pages, Icaros divides a series of poems into four sections: Marrow, Ritual, Remember and Matter. While each section’s ten to seventeen poems are titled in the contents, the titles emerge directly from the text and are indicated in each poem’s body by bolded font. This integrated technique permits an uninterrupted reading of each section as if listening to a chant or Benedictine chorus, creating a sensation of ongoingness evocative of oral storytelling, where shadow and light play tricks of perception around flickering fire.

In Art Objects, Jeanette Winterson argues that artful writing demands that the writer’s breath be evident in the cadences of lines; in rhythms, breaks and beats shaped together as if sung; in a pulse echoing that of the writer’s body [5]. Slow down, is Bennett’s injunction. Breathe. Bennett’s phosphene and Icaros withdraw me from the hurried vacuum of life, an act of self-care.

Bennett’s writing arrests me, disinters the salty banks memories, transposing me to the late 1980s (I am lying on the grass at recess, staring up at light dazzled through spring’s lush foliage as my friend traces her hand along the undulating groves of a tree’s trunk, thanking it for shade). To the ensuing Women Who Run with the Wolves era that inspired our mothers’ escape to Esalen for wild women dances and shamanic healing, leaving us to our SARK workbooks. A temporal dislocation where sage lingers post-smudge, where bears and rattlesnakes portend, where butterflies are saved and named only to be surrendered to earth.

Lie on trunks of drowned forest
sharing how the heart trips and flies open.
What we leave of ourselves
for the raptors (27)

Winterson assigns to the poet the job of healing the breakdown between language and the unlanguageable. She notes that art as an ‘imaginative experience happens at a deeper level than our affirmation of our daily world’, challenging our notion of self (15). We construct our own versions of reality every day, turning to faster news cycles and social media echo chambers, becoming stuck in the mire of unquestioned feedback loops. Bennett, who believes that ‘poetry enables us to shape sounds and symbols that tie us together in the uncertainty [of] our shared existence’ cautions against trading ancient wisdom for extractive capitalism [6]:

and rivers damned
to sew the desert
in straight lines
and milk it for lattes

For the mountains
clear cut
to make toilet paper,
Masonite
and pizza coupons

For ancestors, animals,
panacea and songs…
erased (69)

Here Bennett returns us to our roots—‘in every culture a cosmic tree’ (71) — to our stellar origins — ‘Past the waves we are particle, equations of universe’ (81)—to our interconnectedness—‘if we could remember how / we’d bow our heads, trace cords / to the mothers we were cut from’ (56)—and asks, ‘How many symbols will we need / before we trust the currents?’ (87). Icaros and its predecessor phosphene are an injunction to the cycles of nature, the alchemy of ritual and the rhythms of remembering along an axis of deep time.
 
 
Notes

Brits, Baylee, and Prudence Gibson. Covert Plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World, Punctum Books, 2018.
Pollan, Michael. This is Your Mind On Plants: Opium—Caffiene—Mescaline. Allen Lane, 2021.
Brown, David Jay. Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Bennett, Tamryn. phosphene. Rabbit Poetry Journal as part of the Rabbit Poets Series, 2016.
Winterson, Jeanette. Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. Vintage International, 1997.
Bennett, Tamryn. ‘Outside the Lines’. Sydney Review of Books, 10 May 2021. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/outside-the-lines/
 
 
JENNY HEDLEY is a neurodivergent writer, PhD student and Writeability mentor whose work appears in Archer, Cordite, Crawlspace, Diagram, Mascara, Overland, Rabbit, TEXT, The Suburban Review, Verity La, Westerly, and the anthologies Admissions: Voices in Mental Health and Verge. She lives on unceded Boon Wurrung land with her son. Website: jennyhedley.github.io/

The Dancer

by Evelyn Juers

Giramondo

Reviewed by GURMEET KAUR

The Dancer is an unusual biography. Dedicated to the subject, it is written ‘for’ rather than about Phillipa Cullen. The author’s close relationship with Cullen determines the biographer’s intentions — Juers and Cullen were university friends and remained in touch until she unexpectedly died at the age of 25. The book is a memorial, an extended eulogy and an archival object that solidifies Cullen’s legacy in Australian experimental dance history. It is also a poetic narrative that documents the events, ideas and people orbiting around Cullen in 1960s and 1970s Australia.

On biography, Hermione Lee writes that it’s ‘like lives…made up of contested objects – relics, testimonies, versions, correspondences, the unverifiable’. Juers spends years researching Cullen’s life, starting with a single folder of letters that extended into an archive taking up ‘a whole filing cabinet, large storage containers, much of my computer desktop and the top of my desk (7)’. The result is an extensive narrative totalling 550 pages, made up of first-person accounts detailing Cullen’s life through letters, interviews, reviews and diary entries. These ‘relics’ help Juers to animate Cullen’s voice and ‘let her speak for herself as much as possible (6)’, while the author’s research places Cullen in a broader history of colonialisation and global travel. Juers balances this tension between letting ‘contested objects’ speak for themselves and using historical research to contextualise and problematise the subject. However, in some places, the writing also reproduces the inequities of the time.

Born in Melbourne in 1950, Cullen enrolled in dance school at an early age, before moving to Sydney as a young child where she remained. She attended University of Sydney, studied Anthropology, English, Italian and Philosophy and taught dance on the lawn of the university quadrangle. Cullen experimented with dance and electronics in this early digital era with theremins, an electronic instrument that played music by controlling the electromagnetic field around the instrument rather than any direct contact. Cullen choreographed performances with theremins controlled by the dancers’ movement to generate music. She applied for funding from the newly formed Australia Council in 1973 and travelled to UK, Germany, Netherlands, Ghana, Nepal and India to refine her practice. On her return to Australia in 1974, she was invited by cultural institutions across Australia to perform but felt ‘frustrated by Australia’s cultural cringe and lack of responsiveness to her own work’ (478). In April 1975, Cullen returned to India but quickly became sick and died within months of being in Kodiakanal, India.

Divided into four sections, The Dancer begins with Cullen’s ancestral history. Spanning as far back as 14th century, Juers maps Cullen’s origins in Leicestershire, London and Cornwall in England and Kilkenny in Ireland, threading tenuous connections to ancestors who moved with the British empire to India, Tobago, Jamaica, and more. In Australia, they arrived as ‘free settlers’, playing an active part in the colonial project:

By the early twentieth century the Aboriginal population south of Sydney had diminished to thirty survivors. Their descendants preserve their culture, tell their stories and mourn those who were killed, who died of disease, or who were dispossessed in the frontier wars between the Indigenous people and the newcomers (29).

Decades before Cullen is born, this is the horrific history of slavery, genocide and dispossession on lands her ancestors ‘settled and this was the history – Aboriginal and colonial – in which they and others of their family played a part (34)’. This truth-telling however raises more questions than it answers, particularly in the use of colonial language. Examples like above are counteracted by pages of colonial history written from the oppressor’s view:

Some have argued that in his plan to civilise Aboriginal people, Macquarie is well intentioned. He had a scheme. Ceremoniously he presented tribal chiefs with engraved breastplates. At Parramatta he established a Native School. Some children came voluntarily while others were abducted and forcibly taken there. People started hiding their children for fear of having them stolen. He held a series of Native Conferences, where he served roast beef and ale and let the chiefs sit on chairs. When Aboriginal people visited him, he was a genial host. To those who were most friendly and useful, he gave gifts, including land, livestock and boats (33).

Perhaps Juers’s preference here is to present a historical account authenticated by voices of its time, leading her to borrow language from primary archival materials. But placed against colonial brutality, such summaries are jarring to read, especially when the minimising, bureaucratic and colonial language is not sufficiently contextualised, simply taken from the past and placed into the present. For instance, could the word ‘civilised’ and ‘native’ have been in quotation marks so that it is clear it belongs in the past? Could the idea of ‘gifts’ have been further analysed through the explanation of terra nullius, knowing that the land Macquarie ‘gifted’ was stolen? Could the ‘friendly and useful’ behaviour have been further explained, perhaps as a protective mechanism against a belligerent colonial campaign of genocide? There are repeated uses of words like ‘explorer’, ‘expedition’, and land ‘grants’ across this section, all of which centre the perspective of the coloniser without additional interrogation.

This reproduces colonial violence, recentering the colonial narrative, and the absence of Aboriginal voices (historical and contemporary) relegates First Nations people to a mythic past. Even though Juers later writes that ‘we now regard those settlers’ histories through a different lens, in which the colonists’ gains were the Aboriginal people’s tragic losses (53)’, it does not negate for the surprising amount of space given to colonial voices through which First Nations history is mediated. The link between Cullen’s story as a dancer and her ancestral past feels arbitrary at times; Juers’s desire to include this genealogical research is possibly weighted here with the responsibility to write ‘for’ Cullen rather than the contemporary reader.

Pre-empting this critique, Juers states in the prologue that her aim is to take ‘a larger perspective, which allows intrinsic and extrinsic material, the wondrous and the mundane, the directions and the digressions, to determine the shape of this biographical narrative (8).’ This expansive approach does lead to some interesting research which places Cullen in the wider post-colonial context. Cullen ‘felt a strong affinity with Eastern forms of dance (235)’ and was drawn to learn about ancient practices, to ground the development of her new ideas. In an era of New Age spiritualism, the hippie trail, and the founding of self-determining nations, Cullen travelled to the township of Auroville in Tamil Nadu, India. Established in 1968 by the French spiritualist Mirra Alfassa, Auroville is dedicated to the teachings of the Indian spiritual guru Sri Aurobindo and was founded as a place to practice his philosophy, quickly becoming a ‘colony of foreigners. A postcolonial extension of the age-old colonial civilising mission (423)’, Juers’s historical research in this part holds westerners to account, highlighting their role in perpetuating colonial structures even today as Auroville ‘relies largely on Tamil labour and still adheres to colonial hierarchies (424)’. Devoid of local cultural practices, the Auroville project participated in historical and political amnesia, its early promotional material offering it as ‘a physical space wherein individuals could leave both the past and the present behind (423)’ at a time when the Indian Civil Rights movement was successful in ejecting Britain and the nation was coming to terms with its political self-determination.

This setting situates the reader in understanding why Cullen and her contemporaries like Viidikas, Leves and others gravitated to India in places like Auroville and later Kodaikanal (‘a small town created in the 1840s by American missionaries (514)’) in South India, rather than other places in the subcontinent. This was a politically conscious time around the world and especially in India in the aftermath of Partition and the Bangladesh Liberation War. It makes sense that westerners seeking spiritual guidance in post-colonial India ended up in sheltered ashrams (often designed with them in mind like the one in Auroville) and perhaps also why Cullen wanted to return to Auroville to better understand ‘an enlightened movement groping for holistic reality (344)’.

While Juers’s primary materials raises questions about discriminatory attitudes of the time, the writer attempts to balance this mostly with historical research to frame the past. But in sections when Juers strips way both archives and research and leans into memoir, the writing becomes most moving. Towards the end of The Dancer, Juers describes Phillipa Cullen’s life as ‘a scattering. A gathering. A ballet. Pain. Body twists, leg extensions, pulling by arms, slow rolls, improvisations, hip socket rotation, inhale and exhale, rise and fall (532).’

In this final section, Juers’s grief for her lost friend is palpable as she asks ‘at dusk, before she lost consciousness, what came to the fore? A summoning of strength? A parade? (532)’, her syntax becoming fragmented, arranged in a heavy block, before drifting again on white page. Although The Dancer provoked discomfort in its complicated portrayal of colonial and post-colonial histories, Juers’s biography is most successful when it explores her personal response to the tragic death of Phillipa Cullen.
 
GURMEET KAUR is a critic and poet living on Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung Country. Her work has appeared in Ambit, Cordite, Sydney Review of Books, Peril, Kill Your Darlings, The Victorian Writer, and elsewhere. She is currently one of KYD‘s 2023 New Critics.