Joel Ephraims and Daniel de Filippo in conversation with Urn Yoda

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

Adventures in the Panoramic Delta: An Interview with Chris Andrews, Translator of Marcelo Cohen’s Melodrome  

October 26, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments

Chris Andrews’ latest translation, Melodrome (2018), published here in Australia as part of Giramondo’s Southern Latitudes Series, is a novella by the Argentine science fiction writer, Marcelo Cohen (1951-). The author of 14 novels, 5 story collections, many essays and countless translations, Cohen is already well-known in the Spanish-speaking world. He lived in Spain from 1975 to 1996, during the dictatorship in Argentina, and has been publishing fiction since the early 1980s.

In Melodrome, as in several other fictions written since he returned home, Cohen focuses on an alternative universe, the Panoramic Delta. An archipelago of loosely associated city states, it might be a near-future Argentina or a world remade in the country’s image by neoliberal capitalism and rising sea levels. Rather than improve living standards, technological and social change – including cyborgs, fly cars and a kind of telepathy called pan-consciousness – have universalised Argentina’s early 21st century experience of austerity economics. Cohen’s novella, published in Spanish as Balada (2011), concerns the aftermath of a turbulent affair between a psychoanalyst, Suano Botilecue, and his beautiful, temperamental patient, Lerena Dost. The two rekindle their relationship during a road trip in search of a folk singer-turned cult leader, Dona Munava. It’s an intriguing introduction to an author whose rich oeuvre is still largely unknown in the Anglosphere – but won’t be for long. I corresponded with Chris Andrews by email to learn more.

James Halford (JH): This is the first of your translations of Latin American writers to have been published in Australia. How did it come about?

Chris Andrews (CA): Marcelo Cohen participated in a symposium on literary translation organized by the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University in 2010. I had read some of his fiction and essays before that. Ivor Indyk was one of the organizers of the symposium, so he met Marcelo there. When Balada was published in 2011, Marcelo sent me a copy. I read it and really liked it; I found it haunting. Some years later, in 2016, I think, Ivor was invited to visit Argentina, and met up with Marcelo again. When he came back, he asked me if I would translate Balada for Giramondo, and I said yes. So it came about in a circuitous and rather slow way.

JH: Would it be fair to say Cohen’s work hasn’t yet been widely translated? How did you first encounter his writing and what attracted you to bringing it into English?

CA: I think it’s fair to say that, perhaps because it’s quite tricky to translate, for reasons we’ll get to in a minute. I first encountered it in the book of stories La solución parcial (The Partial Solution), which is a kind of selected stories, published in Spain in 2003. Although the stories predate the construction of the Delta Panorámico, they are part of what Cohen calls a “fantastic sociology”: they’re set in a future world where social, political and technological conditions are at least initially unfamiliar to the reader. What attracted me was that within this speculative frame, Cohen was always interested in capturing and transmitting sensations, feelings and emotions.   

JH: Cohen has an extensive back catalogue. Why did you choose Melodrome as an introduction to his work?

CA: Well, as I said, I really liked it, and Ivor Indyk is particularly interested in short novels and novellas (he has a series entitled Shorts). That’s an aesthetic interest, but translation is an extra cost in publishing, a cost proportional to length, since translators are paid by the word (or the thousand words), so starting with a short book is financially prudent too.

JH: Cohen often coins neologisms for everyday objects in the Panoramic Delta – cronodión for clock which you translate as chronodeon; farphonito for mobile phone, which you translate as farfonette. What was your approach to finding English equivalents?

CA: Sometimes the objects named by the neologisms are everyday objects or relatives of things that we have and use, as in the examples you cite. And those two words were relatively straightforward to translate, because English has some cognate morphemes that I could use: chrono- for crono-, and -ette for -ito. Far in farphonito is a “translation” of the Greek-derived prefix tele- (“far off”), and I toyed with translating that component into Spanish: Lejofonette. But the result seemed too cumbersome and opaque, so I stuck with far. In other cases, it was more complex, either because the referent was not as easy to place, or because the word itself was not made up of recognizable morphemes, or for both reasons. To take just one example, at one point, Lerena thinks: “She could no doubt have found an even better position in some other company, but she couldn’t see how she would ever disguise her character well enough to stop [ningún binimucho] shrivelling up with fear.” Binimuchos must be fearful, spineless people. One thought I had was that perhaps the word referred to the opposite of a marimacho (butch woman), i.e., an effeminate man. But I wasn’t really convinced by that gendering. In the end, the “equivalent” that I came up with, more or less intuitively, was nambicle, from the adjective namby-pamby plus the diminutive suffix -icle, which we find in the names of various small body parts (testicle, cuticle, clavicle). In forging these new words, I let myself be influenced by the rhythmic context of the sentence and the paragraph, because that’s what Cohen seems to have done when writing.  

JH: The translated title doesn’t appear anywhere in the text. How did you arrive at the lovely and resonant: Melodrome?

CA: Credit where it’s due: that’s the invention of Nick Tapper at Giramondo. We were looking for an alternative to Ballad, and Nick came up with Melodrome. He put it out there half playfully, but I liked it straight away, because of how it sounds and because it’s so suggestive of the book’s content. You can analyse it as the combination of two Greek roots: melos, song, and dromos, course. Most appropriate for a road trip in search of a singer. And then the book is a kind of narrative palindrome, because the way there and the way back almost coincide.

JH: Cohen is a formidable and prolific literary translator in his own right, who has produced Spanish versions of writers like J.G. Ballard, Martin Amis, Clarice Lispector, William Burroughs and even Henry James. Did you have any contact with him while working on your English version? What was it like translating a translator?

CA: Marcelo sent me a glossary of deltingo, that is, words he has invented for the Delta Panorámico. Many of the invented words in Melodrome are not in the glossary, but it was a real help, and a fascinating document in itself. I also asked him questions when I was approaching the end, and he helped me to clear up some doubts. In one way it’s intimidating to translate such an eminent translator, but in another way it’s reassuring: I knew that he would understand the problems that I was facing.

JH: Roberto Bolaño once said that everything he had written was a love letter or a farewell letter to his own generation. That is, the generation of Latin American writers who were born in the 1950s and had the misfortune of being young during the military dictatorships of the 1970s. César Aira and Marcelo Cohen are also of that generation. What, if anything, do these very distinct writers share?

CA: Stylistically and thematically, they don’t share much at all: each is quite different from the other two. Bolaño and Cohen shared the experience of exile in Catalunya. Bolaño is the only one of the three to have thematized the dictatorships directly, but in that he is representative of his generation, while Cohen and Aira are exceptional. Your question has made me realize something, though: all three are novelists for whom poetry is important, who go to poetry as a space where literary language is reinvented. Bolaño began as a poet (and went on writing poetry up to the last months of his life). Cohen and Aira have both written wonderfully about poetry, Cohen in his book-length essay Un año sin primavera [A Year Without Spring] and Aira in his books on Alejandra Pizarnik and Edward Lear.

JH: Historically, there hasn’t been much direct literary exchange between the Anglophone and Hispanic Souths. Even for those with an interest in Latin American writing and some language competency, it isn’t always easy to keep up to date with the Spanish-language literary scene from Australia. How do you do it?

CA: The internet has made a big difference. I read reviews in a range of places. Otra parte semanal, edited by Marcelo Cohen and Graciela Speranza, is an excellent review site with new content each week: http://revistaotraparte.com/semanal/. Another good source of news, interviews, extracts etc. is the blog published by the bookshop and publishing house Eterna Cadencia: https://www.eternacadencia.com.ar/blog.html

JH: I also like podcasts. There’s a weekly books podcast on Radio Nacional de Argentina called Resaltadores: http://www.radionacional.com.ar/category/resaltadores/, and there’s one called Recital (it’s on the iTunes store), in which a writer chooses and reads a story by another writer: very simple, but the choices are interesting, not the same old names.

And, of course, I ask friends for recommendations.

JH: Your academic work has framed contemporary Latin American fiction as a literary laboratory – a place where experimental forms are tested. What could a deeper engagement with writing from the region offer Australian writing?

CA: I think that deeper engagement with the literary culture of any part of the non-English-speaking world is bound to enrich Australian writing, but in ways that are hard to predict because they will depend on singular encounters. Fans of Alejo Carpentier or José Donoso might hope to see Australian authors enlarging their sense of the plausible, but writers will work with what works for them, and they might be inspired instead by all the patient fieldwork and sharp listening that goes into Leila Guerriero’s narrative non-fiction. There’s no point being prescriptive in this area.

JH: Thanks very much, Chris.
 
 
Marcelo Cohen (Buenos Aires, 1951) is a widely respected and highly innovative Argentinian novelist, who has invented a distinctively South American kind of speculative fiction. In an ambitious series of novels and stories he has constructed a future world, the Panoramic Delta, in which he imagines in detail a range of changes beyond those wrought directly by technology: political, cultural and emotional. One of the most agile stylists writing in Spanish today, he is also an internationally renowned translator, critic and editor. An fundamental name in Argentinian literature of the last two decades.’— Fernando Bogado, Radar‘

CHRIS ANDREWS is a leading translator of contemporary Latin American fiction, the author of two poetry collections and a literary critic. He made his name internationally as the first English translator of the Chilean novelist, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003). His translations of By Night in Chile (2003), Distant Star (2004) and Last Evenings on Earth (2006) – published in the wake of the author’s untimely death from liver failure – helped establish Bolaño as the biggest name in Latin American writing since Gabriel García Márquez. Since then, the Australian has been a translator in demand. Over the last fifteen years, he has curated an impressive reading list of Latin American fiction for English-speaking readers, much of published in the USA through New Directions. In addition to ten of Bolaño’s books, most recently the posthumous collection of short stories & ephemera, The Secret of Evil (2014), Andrews has translated nine titles by the prolific and inventive Argentine, César Aira: The Linden Tree (2018), and one by the Guatemalan surrealist, Rodrigo Rey Rosa: Severina (2014).

JAMES HALFORD is a Brisbane writer whose creative work and criticism have been widely published in Australia and abroad. He holds a literature degree and a creative doctorate from the University of Queensland, where he now teaches, and he has studied Spanish in Argentina, Mexico, and Spain. The recipient of a 2016 Copyright Agency/Sydney Review of Books Emerging Critics Fellowship, his academic research focuses on contemporary Australian and Latin American literature in transnational reading frameworks. His first book, Requiem with Yellow Butterflies, a Latin American travel memoir, will be published in early 2019 by UWAP.

Emily Yu Zong interviews Merlinda Bobis

October 1, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments

‘I Have to Recuperate Love, and Grow it Back’—An Interview with Merlinda Bobis

Merlinda Bobis is an award-winning author and performer of four novels, five poetry books, a short story collection, seven performance works, and a monograph on creative research. She was born in the Philippines and now teaches creative writing at University of Wollongong. She writes across multiple languages and cultures and her works are notable for their transnational expansiveness. Her first novel Banana Heart Summer (2005) was short-listed for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and her novel Fish-Hair Woman (2012) won a 2014 Philippine National Book Award. She is also the winner of the Australian Writers’ Guild Award, the Steele Rudd Award for the Best Published Collection of Australian Short Stories, and the Philippine Balagtas Award (a lifetime award) for her poetry and fiction. This interview focuses on her fourth novel Locust Girl. A Love Song (Spinifex) launched in July 2015, with occasional reference to her third novel Fish-Hair Woman.

Emily Yu Zong (EZ): Locust Girl really challenges my expectations, especially if we consider your previous works. I mean, usually we get the impression of a combination of your Filipino sensibility with a focus on the Australian readership. Most of your works are set in the Philippines, including the first novel Banana Heart Summer (2005) and the second novel The Solemn Lantern Maker (2008) Fish-Hair Woman (2012) and White Turtle (1999) are set across the Philippines and Australia. But this one stands out distinctly and appeals to a wider audience in the world. Can you share with us the inspirations for this book? And what motivated you to jump out of that trapping/productive dialectic of Filipino/Australian to write this novel?

Merlinda Bobis (MB): When I write, and I think when anyone writes, it is towards a story in search of a form and a location, while responding to one’s own location in the world. I write about what worries me. Australian playwright Katherine Thomson says that we write about what we worry about. I started writing Locust Girl in 2004, when George Bush declared his global ‘War on Terror,’ and I worried no end. How do you respond to this worry? Back then the question was, ‘Are you with us or against us?’ The border was so clear-cut. I felt the air we were breathing was full of fear, hate, and the judgment of the other—anyone who is not like us, those who are outside of our border. I am talking here about anyone’s positioning from whatever side of a border, whatever politics. We have created very entrenched borders because of this fear of the other. This judgment of the other is made by all sides of the border about their own other in terms of race, culture, or gender. So to respond to this worry, as a writer, I could not just remain in my Filipino-Australian imaginary. I had to break out of it and dream globally. When you think about territory globally, you often think in terms of borders: physical borders, cultural borders, and political borders, etc. In this case, we are all thinking about (or worrying about) geopolitics externally. But my main worry in 2004, and what I was more afraid of, was the border within that cuts the heart. At the height of Bush’s global war on terror, we were worrying about that external explosion—but what about the internal corrosion or even implosion? We were so engrossed in looking out at the other that we forgot the internal impact of the fear, hatred, and the judgment of the other that we nurtured within. I thought that we had developed an ‘inner dry,’ which then became the main landscape of Locust Girl: the desert. This became the terrain of the human heart: dry, without water. And this is what should truly terrify us. In Fish-Hair Woman, there are these lines that evoke something similar: ‘In a while, dryness will slip into malice, where it will feel at home, because there is never any moisture in malice. Malice is always deprived.’ This dryness in the human heart is the state of lovelessness, an inner death, no vegetation—we become as dry as kindling, thus the possible implosion and self-destruction. But how do you respond to this worry, or one might say, this existential terror? Well, as a writer I have to recuperate love, and grow it back, and make it the major premise of this book. I have to write the outer and inner borders, and to interrogate both. But at the same time, I don’t want this framework to point to a specific culture, because this is what we’ve already done to the planet—we have made its geography, its resources, its worries/problems/blames so culturally/racially specific, when, in fact, all of these are shared, and must be shared for our survival as a species. So the novel is open to all cultures and differences, while also illuminating/interrogating our fixation on differences. This means I cannot be culturally specific. I have to set the novel in an allegorical place; I have to create a mythical space. So the story can be owned by anybody, even the names. I invented the names, from A to Z. There is no specific clue to the setting. The whole point is that this story is about all of us. I have to write outside of my culture/s, I have to imagine something that accommodates all: the heroes, the villains, the victims, the perpetrators. But everything (love-and-the plague) is shared. Everyone is us.

EZ: Does this mean you would rather be known as a writer, instead of a ‘Filipino-Australian’ or ‘Asian-Australian’ writer?

MB: Well, even if I write this ‘global vision,’ the imaginary that drives it still originates from the Philippines, because I came to Australia when I was 31 and my sensibility was fully formed then. I write my memories (both stories and modes of storytelling), and wherever I go, I carry them. When I write, it feels like I’m going home. Writing is a literary homecoming. When I was writing Fish-Hair Woman, I’d close my eyes and would be back instantly in my grandmother’s house—which incidentally became the ancestral house of the novel’s protagonist. I think that even if I write about other things or places, this is the base, my Filipino sensibility: my ‘ancestral house.’ Even in Locust Girl, even in this mythical space, its ‘once upon a time’ mode of storytelling is, I believe, evocative of how my grandparents used to tell stories. Until now, I still introduce myself as a Filipino-Australian writer, because of that pull of the ancestral home. It’s like gravity, it pulls you back—but I will not be trapped by it. I can do other things; dream up other spaces. The world is bigger than one’s culture!

EZ: This gives rise to cognitive transformations in the readers too. When we interpret Asian-Australian literature, we are forced to go beyond this dialectic: Asia/Australia.

MB: Exactly. I don’t want you to think of the work or of me in binary terms. Of course, I could be as guilty of this dialectic, but I can also break out of it and hopefully be as multiple as anyone else. I don’t want to be trapped in the framework ‘Asia/Australia’ or ‘Filipino/Australia.’ Sometimes I find I am also trapping myself in binaries—because if you’re producing that binary all the time, you have a problem. I think Locust Girl attempts to address this problem. But the premise of Locust Girl is already embedded in Fish-Hair Woman, a transnational novel that escapes the trap by crossing cultures and professing a reciprocal love between cultures. Locust Girl goes further, though. In fact, here, I am questioning that reciprocal act (or expectation) of love: must love be reciprocal, for it to be love? In all my books, even in my poetry, there is a continuum of thinking and questioning of myself as well. The following book could be an argument against the previous book. For instance, in Fish-Hair Woman, I set up the idea of accommodating both self and other: ‘… how much can the heart accommodate? Only four chambers, but with infinite space like memory, where there is room even for those whom we do not love.’ This is echoed in Locust Girl, which adds reciprocity to the accommodation, but in the end, I argue against the expectation of reciprocity. You won’t give me water, even if I’m dying of thirst, because I can’t pay for it—but I have no resources to pay for it! Or you won’t give me water because you believe I haven’t cared for it according to your idea of caring—but isn’t that the same water that you siphoned from our wells a long time ago? Reciprocity is more complex than simple give and take. These are some of the questions and arguments in Locust Girl. So this is what I mean by continuum: you could build upon an idea/theme/vision in a previous book, or you could argue against it, or you could do both—because you keep learning new ways of knowing, thinking through, and articulating the world, as you ‘grow up’ as a storyteller.

EZ: Considering the book’s allegorical frame, would you call Locust Girl a dystopian, post-apocalyptic novel about the global challenges of our age?

MB: It is definitely a post-apocalyptic novel set in this futuristic nightmare, but not without hope. However, it is also very much about the present times. It is about the colonisation and control of resources, sometimes in the pretext of preserving them—but who are you preserving them for? Who are you conserving the earth for—only for your people? These realities of colonisation (and globalisation) have been happening through the ages. In the novel you have ‘the familiar’ Minister of Mouth and Minister of Legs—what are they doing here? They are controlling resources and the movements of peoples, and preventing them from crossing the border to the last green haven on earth. Then you have the Minister of Arms, the defence force. You have these Ministers controlling the seeds, the oil, and the water. They’re making sure that the earth’s last resources are preserved only for the elite, ‘the Kingdom builders.’ It’s happening now. Yes, Locust Girl is post-apocalyptic, but what I am saying is that we are already experiencing the post-apocalyptic. The post-apocalyptic is already in us. It is part of our reality now.

EZ: By depicting another take on our society, our culture, and the world, do you think fiction can influence people in ways that politics and newspaper headlines cannot do in our times?

MB: I am not the ‘art for art’s sake’ type, or someone that privileges text above all things. What I really believe in, paraphrasing novelist Alexis Wright, is the seeing-and-acting. You cannot divorce the two. In fact, for me, apprehending and acting form an organic whole. I believe in feeling-thinking-doing. You can’t just feel and think and do nothing. Writing is a doing process. When I read, I like books that make me actively do something. I remember being in a panel at the Sydney Writers Festival, and we were talking about war and trauma in literature, and there was this question from the audience (I’m paraphrasing this from memory): We’ve been talking and telling stories about these for a long time, but humanity never learns. We keep repeating history, so do these literature still matter? My answer was: When you read a book that affects you, if the next day you are a little kinder to your wife or your husband, or your neighbour, that is something. It is action, even if it’s small. Something happened within the reader, so something concrete happens from and outside the reader—because of that story. And I wish that this happens for all ages. These days, when I write I really want to write something that an adult and a child can ‘get,’ in their respective ways. I want a twelve-year-old and a fifty-year-old to be able to read Locust Girl, albeit in different ways. I want a twelve-year-old to be able to read Locust Girl as a fairytale about friendship between two girls lost in this strange desert, and somehow learn about love and the other. And I want the fifty- or the ninety-year old to be able to go beyond the fairytale and appreciate the novel as political allegory. I like writing layered texts. The style and aesthetics of Fish-Hair Woman are complex, it’s densely layered and a difficult read—but with Locust Girl, while also layered, I wanted even a child to ‘hear’ the simple storytelling, the singing. I’d like you to hear it when you read, and to listen to the musicality of this lovesong, because the novel is indeed my lovesong to the reader. I am not a composer, but the songs of Locust Girl just came as I wrote. I even sing them now.

EZ: The novel reminds me of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, particularly on the parts of authoritarian rules. In the Orwellian authoritarian rule, there is ‘thoughtcrime,’ but here you carry that further to ‘singingcrime.’ Were these Orwellian texts paratextual points of reference for Locust Girl?

MB: I haven’t read 1984, a shameful confession, but I read Animal Farm a long time ago. After finishing Locust Girl, I thought people would read it as Orwellian. If there is anything I borrowed from Orwell, it’s the idea of the ‘political fairytale’ or ‘political fable.’ In fact, I also describe Locust Girl as a political fairytale/fable in its use of allegory and the fantastical in narrating the political exigencies of our times. But I do not want to describe my novel as Orwellian, because this is such a masculine brand. I think Locust Girl does something else. It’s mythical and proudly wears the ‘once upon a time’ tone, and its protagonists are two girls. Initially I was a bit worried that the novel won’t be taken seriously by Australian critics, as it’s too strange compared to what’s being published here. Then my publisher Susan Hawthorne assured me that Locust Girl reminds her of a number of South American and European (with links to Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian tradition) novels written by women. She mentioned some names: Cristina Peri Rossi, Luisa Valenzuela, Marta Traba, Claribel Alegria. I’m comforted that I’m not alone, and that I’m in a good company of women! I hope critics/readers do not just reference the masculine model, the Orwellian tradition, when they read Locust Girl.

EZ: Again our imagination is pushed to the fore here. In Fish-Hair Woman there is Estrella with her twelve-metre-long, ever-growing hair that functions as a tool for salvation. In Locust Girl, there is a locust buried in the brow of the protagonist Amedea. It is ‘a sensing compass’ that copies sounds, reveals interior landscapes, but also at times betrays her, mocks her, and argues with her. How to make of the locust? Does it allude to our human ego, or the ability to love that we don’t know about ourselves, in the sense that we all have a locust in our forehead, waiting to be released?

MB: We are afraid of the song of the locust, because the moment the farmers hear it, we know we’ll suffer the plague and then, possibly, hunger. But I am subverting this locust stereotype. The songs of the locust in Locust Girl are the compass helping us find water, find our journey out of devastation, find each other, find love, and find redemption. But it’s also a warning. We all have a locust (both plague and redemption) inside us, and it is trapped, snug and hidden. Amedea’s singing locust gets buried in her brow, after the bombing of her village, but the realisation comes in the end that, in fact, we all have it: small, snug, and hidden. I think of the locust as the doubleness of humanity. We have a capacity for the plague and destruction that we do to the environment and to each other, but we also have the capacity for love and the capacity to redeem ourselves and our environment. We are all a plague to each other, but we are also each other’s lovers and beloved. That’s why the locust sings to Amedea, gives her hope, but also mocks her. It’s an alter ego, yes, but then the real point, as the locust sings, is this:

What greater plague is there
Than what we do to each other
What greater love is there
Than what we do for each other (175)

It’s this doubleness that matters. Remember, as far as Amedea’s hungry village is concerned, the locust is no longer disgusting or a source of fear, but a source of protein when their food rations from the Kingdoms never arrive. This employment of a subverted/subversive image is similar to what I have done in Fish-Hair Woman: when people go through trauma, their hair grows grey overnight or they lose their hair, but I subverted this expectation. Instead of losing her hair, the opposite happens to the protagonist Estrella: her hair grows longer.

EZ: Furthering this point, when you start writing, how do you employ the aesthetic tools of magic realism and the uncanny?

MB: The word ‘magic realism’ was initially coined by the German art critic Franz Roh. In Latin America, they call it ‘lo real maravilloso,’ ‘the marvelous real’ conceptualised and developed by French-Russian Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier. It’s a literary genre that’s often related to the uncanny, which has also been theorised in literary studies. But in the Philippines, we’ve had the tradition of magic realism since pre-colonial times, long before it became a literary genre. We have beliefs in which the magical and the real are one, organically explaining daily life. And we have always known the uncanny and believed it. As a writer, I am informed by my Filipino traditions of magical realism and the uncanny, but I am living and writing in the West now, and I am also equipped with Western aesthetics to write for my Western audience. So I can play with magical realism and the uncanny as aesthetic tools familiar to the West, using both as a means to create metaphor and allegory that engender political critique and subversion, and, let’s not forget, the layered story that produces literary delight and magic. However, I think what drives the creative urge to put something on paper the moment I visualise and imagine it, is very much the magical and the uncanny from my first home. Everything originates from that tradition: the seamless connection among cultural beliefs, environment, and daily life.

EZ: Is the singing in Locust Girl also related to the Filipino tradition of singing, weeping, and telling stories?

MB: Where does the singing come from? Again, it comes from my own culture, because we sing stories. Even if I am writing about another place, the story grows out of the pull of gravity: the pull of the ancestral home, which I mentioned earlier. The orality of the telling is very much a Filipino tradition. My early works of poetry in Australia, particularly Cantata of the Warrior Woman Daragang Magayon, the epic poem that I did for my doctorate, is also performance. I’ve performed it in various countries as a one-woman show, as I’ve performed River, River, my one-woman play adaptation of Fish-Hair Woman. You see, even if I’m working with text for the page, I’m already singing it in my head, in my body. It is easy for me to chant it, to sing it, because it is inevitably returning to the tradition that my body and my sensibility know. The musicality of Locust Girl also returns to that storytelling-singing tradition. I remember that when my grandparents told stories, they took on an almost singsong tone, with a particular rhythm: ‘Kaidtong enot na panahon—Once upon a time . . . ’

EZ: Are the magical and the uncanny also part of the ‘survival mechanism’ of the people of a particular locality?

MB: In fact, that’s what I touched on in Fish-Hair Woman. When you are in the village of Iraya during a Total War, a village locked in with no resources, no food supply, and the river (the main source of water), is contaminated by corpses, what helps you survive? The beliefs in the magical, the uncanny, the salvation of the dead, and the redemption of the living. You believe you can have a ‘fish-hair woman’ to save you. Every culture, including Western cultures, have or used to have their own magical-survival beliefs. But we are becoming enslaved by rationalism. We have just shrugged off these survival beliefs and we have created a rational and distinct border between the magical and the real worlds. I remember being told by a publisher (to whom I was pitching Locust Girl initially) that they’re not interested in the novel because they publish literature about ‘the real world.’ What is the real world, and who defines/demarcates realness? Remember, there are many things that we still don’t understand about the earth, the planet/s, our brain, and our bodies. How are indigenous people’s beliefs explained through theory? Not possible; you just believe, and this very belief helps you survive natural catastrophes that no science, technology or the rational brain can hold back, even if they can explain most of these phenomena though not all of them, not completely or perfectly. The magical and the uncanny are sources of strength that we can draw from. And also, how boring would the world be if we’re reduced to this: I believe this is a table because there is a corporeal table before me, and I can see and touch it!

EZ: Let’s talk about the ending of the novel. I almost hoped there would be a revolt to overthrow the pseudo-democratic rule of the Kingdoms. But in the end, Locust Girl is consumed and burnt by the combustion of multiple voices inside her, the weight of multiplicity and history. She acts out that giving of love. How does that ending work, considering that redemption is a consistent theme in your fiction?

MB: Yes, the weight of multiplicity is such a burden. Amedea, the Locust Girl, literally implodes and is destroyed when she starts accommodating all the voices inside her, singing all of them. It is true that the accommodation of the other/s is difficult, even a burden, and entails self-sacrifice. Somehow the self cedes power as it accommodates the other/s. So, accommodating all, Locust Girl implodes. She has had a choice, and she could have denied that option of multiplicity, but instead she accommodates all voices. Because she wants to show everyone that regardless of borders, we are all in this together—in this love-and-plague or redemption-destruction of our world, or what we have reduced it to. But everyone around her in the Five Kingdoms is in search of a culprit, someone (an other) to blame, in order to save the self. And in a moment of doubleness (again), Locust Girl takes on the burden of both culprit and lover. She wants to save, an urge that is born of love. Hers is the greatest sacrifice: self-immolation. She accommodates everyone and she implodes. This time, the negative premise of implosion (because of the ‘inner dry’) at the beginning is turned on its head: it becomes the ultimate act of love. And from the ashes, she rises: both phoenix and female Christ. I think I have subconsciously employed the Christian ideal love called Agape. Agape is selfless and unconditional love, and is very much about the other. Agape is Christ’s love for humanity when he dies on the cross. It sounds ideal (or ‘magical’ for the doubting, hard-core realists?), but considering the fact that we manage to dream about it, the fact that we have an idea for it and have worded it—agape—then it is possible. In times of conflict, people do heroic things and they totally forget themselves to save, to extend compassion and to redeem the other. If we have the capacity to talk about Agape, we can possess part of it. In fact, we have it and we have to set it free. It should not remain small, snug, and hidden.

EZ: I am very interested in the character of Beenabe with whom I actually identify more than with Amedea. She achieves the awakening of love in the end, but she is also torn by hesitation and mixed allegiances. Can you talk about her as well?

MB: The protagonist Amedea is the transcendent one, but Beenabe is more like the rest of us, the ordinary. She is more real, and she is vain. There is her vanity, human frailty, jealousy, and the rejection of her friend Amedea’s monstrosity. But there are also moments when she rips off her own clothes to clothe Amedea. Beenabe is more like us. We have the burden of ambivalence and mixed loyalties. We get confused because we are always looking after Number One, and how we can remain Number One. Human beings are selfish and vain, but we also have the capacity to love, and love deeply. But ‘Love is clumsy, because it has so many hands’—Beenabe’s love is clumsy, because she has to deal with many exigencies for her own survival. Her love is not the Agape kind. She has become a trafficked sex worker in the Kingdoms, and she is there to service. But she says it’s love and that she is loved—she needs to trick herself into believing this in order to survive. She says she has crossed the border and has become a Kingdom builder, already accepted by the elite, but very clearly the Ministers declare that she is and will always be an outsider. But within this enslavement, she tries to muster some dignity, some humanity, and she does—but her love is clumsy. And can we fault her for this? Love is clumsy: such is our burden as human beings, whether or not we are in a difficult circumstance like Beenabe. Our love is clumsy, so we trick ourselves into believing that we are better than this, better than who we are, and sometimes, we do become better. Remember, we have a locust in our respective hearts or brows, this love-and-plague capacity—and while we plague each other and our earth, sometimes we surprise ourselves in moments of transcendence when we suddenly forget the self for the sake of the other. And we soar!

EZ: Thank you Merlinda, for sharing with us your creative ethics and the powerful songs of Locust Girl.
 
Interviewer:
Emily Yu Zong is a PhD candidate at the School of Communication and Arts, the University of Queensland. She works on diasporic Asian women’s literatures and the transnational critique. She has published academic essays and book reviews on diasporic Asian identity, hybridity, female agency, and cosmopolitanism.

Harriet McKnight interviews Laurel Fantauzzo

September 29, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments

Laurel Fantauzzo is a writer and teacher. Much of her work finds her studying appetite, identity, the signals for real love, and the search for home. She is largely a nonfiction writer and an essayist, but she also writes young adult fiction. Laurel Fantauzzo was born in Southern California to a Filipina mother and an Italian-American father.

Harriet McKnight currently lives in Melbourne. In 2014, she was shortlisted for the Overland Victoria University Short Story Prize. In 2015, she was shortlisted for the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Her work has been published in The Lifted Brow and The Suburban Review digital editions and she has worked since 2013 as the deputy editor of The Canary Press.

Ali Cobby Eckermann in conversation with Jaydeep Sarangi

April 12, 2015 / mascara / 0 Comments

Writer, Ali Cobby Eckermann was born in 1963 at Brighton, Adelaide, on Kaurna Country, however, she grew up on Ngadjuri Country. She has travelled extensively, living most of her life on Arrernte, Jawoyn and Larrakia country in the Northern Territory. When she was 34, Eckermann met her birth mother Audrey, and learnt that her birth mob were the Yankunytjatjara people from north-west South Australia. Her mother was born near Ooldea, south of Maralinga on Kokatha Country. Eckermann relates herself to the Kokatha mob too (Ali Cobby Eckermann 2013). Her first verse novel is His Father’s Eyes, and her second verse novel, Ruby Moonlight, won the Kuril Dhagun Indigenous Writing Fellowship, which is part of the black&write! Indigenous Editing and Writing Project sponsored by the State Library of Queensland. Ali has won several awards including: First Prize in ATSI Survival Poetry competition in 2006, First Prize Dymocks Red Earth Poetry Award NT in 2008, and was Highly Commended for the Marion Eldridge Award in 2009. Her poetry has been translated and published in Croatia, Indonesia, Greece and New Zealand.  Ruby Moonlight was published in 2012 by Magabala Books, and won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and was awarded the “Book of the Year” at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2013. Ali Cobby Eckermann, a Nunga poet, is the second Aboriginal writer to win the top prize in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, in consecutive years. Ali Cobby Eckermann’s important works include:

little bit long time APC, 2009
little bit long time reprinted by Picaro Press, 2010
Kami Vagabond  Press, 2011
His Fathers Eyes Oxford University Press, 2011.
A Handful of Sand: Words To The Frontline co-edited with Lionel Fogarty Southerly Journal 2011
Ruby Moonlight Magabala Books, 2012 Deadly Award Outstanding Achievement in Literature
Love Dreaming & Other Poems Vagabond Press, 2012
Too Afraid To Cry Ilura Press, 2013

JS: Could we start with you telling us a little about your childhood, schooling and tertiary education?

ACE: My childhood may sound unusual but it was a regular childhood for many Aboriginal children born in the 1960’s. I was adopted as a baby by the Eckermann family and grew up on a farm in the mid-north of South Australia. Mum and Dad couldn’t have their own children, so adopted the four of us kids. It was a good life: baby lambs and chickens, kittens, the cubby house, gardens and orchards, and the iconic tennis court!

Our family was German Lutheran so we grew a passionate respect for good food and the sharing of it. Collectively our family was self-sustaining, We had a dairy, milked cows every morning and every night. So as children we learnt the practise of hard work. At a young age we learnt to grow sweetcorn, watermelon and tomatoes. My parents were kind people, and I remember their generosity to others. But it was the social arena outside the family group that I found confronting. Even at a young age I remember racism; I did feel that I did not really belong here. Of course this became more evident in my teenage years, at high school, when I met other Aboriginal students, some adopted and some with their families. I had no concept then of the extent of the Stolen Generations in Australia.

JS: You have a strong need to educate and also give a voice to those, who for whatever reasons (lack of education, poverty, marginalisation), cannot get their stories told. Do you know of any specific reasons you care about this why you care so much about this?

ACE: Mostly I feel I have this obligation to myself. In hindsight I grieve the fact that when I was a teenager, and life became very difficult, I can’t remember anyone asking me if I was okay. As an angry young person I did not know how to voice my emotions, and as a result I succumbed to the adoption of my only son. This led to many years of addiction. And it was years later during rehabilitation, that I began to recognise the value of every story, and how to value my own. These skills were reinforced after finding my family, especially by the Aboriginal Elders. It is a true value of my culture, to care for others.

JS: What are the traditions of Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Lionel Fogarty?

ACE: Actually, Lionel Fogarty is one of my best friends. He has been an incredible mentor to me, in my early years, as an up and coming writer. I find his writings powerful; much of what he wrote 35 years ago is relevant today. I was somewhat sad to find Oodgeroo Noonuccal at a mature age; I regret that I did not learn about her poetry whilst in school. Sally Morgan’s My Place was the only book of Aboriginal writing that I discovered and read in my young years.

JS: Who are Nunga?

ACE: Nunga is a collective term for Aboriginal people who live in South Australia. In Queensland the term is Murri, in other states the term is Koori. My traditional family in the desert are known as Anangu.

JS: How are they different from other Aboriginal communities in Australia?

ACE: I believe, in respect to Aboriginal literature, there is a collective spirit. As Aboriginal writers we need to truly support each other, and support each other to mentor the craft. Each writer will identify by their Language Group name, and may casually refer to the collective terms. Mostly I identify as a Yankunytjatjara writer, and most of my poetry is influenced by the natural landscape of my people.

JS: Who are some of the important contemporary Indigenous writers ?

ACE: Lionel Fogarty is one of Australia’s most important writers. He first published his poetry as a young man in his 20’s. The journey of his life has been shared through his poetry, and is a truly honest gift to the world. Kim Scott and Alexis Wright have both won the Miles Franklin Award, the most prestigious literature award in Australia.

A Facebook site BlackWordsAustLit is the best resource of Indigenous Literature in Australia. It is both an archive and an introduction to our newest writers. Check it out and follow the prompts.

JS: How many Indigenous authors write in English?

ACE: Most Aboriginal authors and poets write in English. I believe the publishing world requires this, for the selling of our books. It is also a legacy of the removal of so many of us from our family. And the cost of translation in Aboriginal language is very expensive. I feel sometimes the cost is the preventative, and of course we are not empowered to change this. On the other hand the resurgence of Aboriginal language, at a community level, is truly inspirational. Many families and young people are relearning these ancient languages; our mother tongue.

JS: Tell us about the Stolen Generation?

ACE: My mother was separated from her mother at the age of seven. This is very confusing for her, as the mission where they lived had a Children’s Home, to prevent the removal of children. It seems my mother was an amazing student, and it was deemed that continued association with her family would be detrimental to her education. She told me that she would watch from the window as her siblings went with Kami and other family members to hunt for lizards and other bush tuckers. She told me she felt sad. And this is one of the main legacy’s of Stolen Generation removal, the sadness that still exists inside us.

I was 33 when I found my mother. At the time she was the Co-Chair for National Sorry Day, an annual day of remembrance and celebration dedicated to the Stolen Generations. Her legacy in life is amazing.

JS: Many of your poems start with “ooooo’. What does this mean?

ACE: This was an error, a typo. The title of these poems is clear. I did get a shock when I saw the publication of this. Now it remains as a mystery for the readers.

JS: What are your important themes of writings?

ACE: I would hope all my writings achieve my basic goals; to promote healing and understanding between Aboriginal people and the rest of the world. As I travel internationally I often hear how media has portrayed us incorrectly, that our rights have been returned to us, how past issues have been resolved. This is not the truth!
I do enjoy meeting writers from other cultural backgrounds. Mostly our issues are similar, and often we share a similar expressionism. This has an empowering effect on me. I love reading global poetry.

JS: Could you please mention a few poems which represent you as a Nunga writer?

ACE: Circles & Squares, First Time, Love Dreaming, Ribbons, Wallaroo

JS: You have written verse novels. What stories do they tell?

ACE: My first novel His Fathers Eyes was commissioned to explain the Stolen Generations to upper primary and lower secondary students. It is published by Oxford University Press in the series Yarning Strong. My second verse novel Ruby Moonlight is a story of massacre, the often unmentioned history of colonial impact. It tells the story of Ruby, who survives the massacre of her entire family. I set this story in the 1890’s. I was moved beyond words in 2012 to receive the Deadly Award for Outstanding Achievement in Literature (an Aboriginal Award) and again in 2013 when Ruby Moonlight won the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize and the NSW Premiers Book Of The Year. This book should be in every school library.

JS: You have already attended translation workshops in India. What is your experience? Do you think that translation works are close to text/original?

ACE: The experience of the Autumn School for Literature Translations is an amazing experience. The passion of the selected students is paramount to the success of this. I was immersed into wonderful conversations; I shared many photos of my family and traditional lands. We discussed every detail. And my heart told me during the final recitals that the students had achieved the best translations of my work.

The unforeseen publication of my poems by the Deptartment of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University is a testament to this. Some of my poems will sit with two or three translations. I am proud that the student’s names and their work will accompany my words. I believe this will become a unique handbook of international translation, due to this shared experience.

JS: What do you hope your work will achieve?

ACE: I write in the hope that my grandchildren will be safe in their true identity in Australia. I write that they will not have to assimilate or change any cultural aspect of themselves to achieve what they want. I write in the hope that Australia will become more mature, to embrace the values that only diversity can bring, to be kinder to the impoverished and the poor, and to stop pretending that these issues do not exist within the national identity.

JS: Are you familiar with Indian Dalit writers?

ACE: In 2012 the University of Western Sydney hosted a two-day festival for Australian and Indian writers. Alexis Wright and I were invited to open panel discussions with two Dalit writers who had travelled from India for this event. It will remain a highlight of my writing career. The panel was judged one of the highlights of the festival.

The opportunity to return to Kolkata, to travel to New Delhi and attend the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2015 will allow me to meet with Dalit Writers again.

JS: Can you describe an “average” working day for you?

ACE: I day dream a lot! Much thought goes into my writing, long before it reaches the page. And some time ago I quit my regular job and returned to visual arts; I love sculpture and painting. I find these two artforms compliment my artistic process. My visual arts actually funds my writing career. So my life is frugal and exciting. There is no ‘average’ day.

JS: If you were to prepare an anthology for school students would you include some of your own poems?

ACE: Of course. Our literature is necessary to inform that our culture still exists, beyond tourism. I would also include oral readings of Aboriginal poetry by Aboriginal poets. I believe our voices bring a beautiful timbre and rhythm of our words, which is both healing and powerful.

JS: Do you believe in Literary Movements? What are its weapons?

ACE: I guess my ‘literary movement’ is the establishment of my Aboriginal Writers Retreat. It is an environment for all writers, however it is Aboriginal themed. Every participant must ‘leave their ego on the highway’ and arrive to a place of equality. This is how we learn. I have enjoyed sharing my space, and watching the outcomes in people. Lionel Fogarty was my first Writer-In-Residence and we co-edited Words To The Frontline: an edition of Southerly, Australia’s premier literary magazine.

Originally I established the retreat in my home at Koolunga, in South Australia. However my personal career has grown beyond my wildest dreams. So I am now in process of mobilising the retreat, and am looking for sponsorship to purchase a caravan. The caravan will be customised to include a workspace and include an extensive library of Indigenous literature. Many grassroots Aboriginal writers have not been exposed to multi-cultural writings. Sometimes there is no literature of any kind in their home environments.

It is my wish now, to travel to communities and transport my workshops there. I believe the main benefit will be tri-generational story-telling and writing workshops.

JS: What are your current engagements?

ACE: Currently I am in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in America. It is a three month residency and is funded by the US Deptartment of State. The program has been running since 1967 and has allowed Iowa City to become the only UNESCO City Of Literature in America.

JS: Would you please share a recent poem  with us?

Ngingali

my mother is a granite
boulder I can no longer climb
nor walk around

her weight is a constant
reminder of myself
I sit in her shadow

gulls nestle in her hair
their shadows her epitaph
I carry

a pebble of her in my pocket

* Ngingali is Ali’s mother’s traditional name

JS: Thank you! You are an amazing source of inspiration.




Jaydeep Sarangi, is a bilingual writer, academic, editor, translator, and the author of a number of significant publications on Postcolonial issues, Indian Writing in English and Australian Literature in reputed journals/magazines in India and abroad. He has recently collaborated as peer reviewer for CLR, Universitat Jaume I, Spain. He is one of the Editors, “Writers Editors Critics” and the Vice President of literary organization, GIEWEC (head office at Kerala).  Widely travelled and anthologised both as a poet and a critic, Dr Sarangi has delivered keynote addresses in several national and international seminars, conferences and read poems/research papers in several continents. He is Associate Professor in the Department. of English,  Jogesh Chandra Chaudhuri College (Calcutta University), 30, Prince Anwar Shah Road, Kolkata-700033, WB, India. E mail: jaydeepsarangi@gmail.com