Announcing the 2021 Mascara Bundanon Writer’s Residency Winner

July 13, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments

We’re thrilled to announce that the winner for the 2021 Mascara Bundanon Writer’s Residency is
 
Isabelle Li

Isabelle Li is a Chinese Australian writer and translator. She has published in various anthologies and literary journals in Australia including The Best Australian Stories, Southerly, Westerly and UTS Writers’ Anthology. Her collection of short stories A Chinese Affair was published by Margaret River Press in 2016. Her prose translations have appeared in Sydney Review of Books and her poetry translations in Mascara, World Literature and Works. Her Chinese translation of Sebastian Barry’s novel The Secret Scripture is published by Zhejiang Literature; Art Publishing House. Isabelle is currently studying her Doctor of Creative Arts at Western Sydney University.

JUDGE’S COMMENTS

Isabelle Li’s ‘The Northern Tomb’ is exciting, engaging, and very promising. It employs a smooth narrative voice, suffused with telling details and implications of character; a facility for drawing the way characters gently push and pull against each other. There are many clever, artful details about the narrator, her son Dawei, and Mr Zhao. It is confidently handled. There are also clever hints throughout about the cultural setting and details of contemporary life. Li shows a deft touch and subtle hand for the telling detail. Straightforward and raw, it inscribes real and personal experiences in Australia and provincial China, replete with their violence and personal destitution. The emotional leaps are handled well through stoicism and resignation. Her writing is a mature example of the trans-migration of the imagination and its understated translation into melancholia and dislocation.

 
We thank our 2021 judges: DECLAN FRY and BRIAN CASTRO

A few words from Mascara

“The applications we received speak to the sheer talent, voice and diversity of stories, essays, mixed media and poems in our cohorts. We were thrilled with the response, the vividness and creative lifeblood infusing the projects.”

About

In partnership with the Bundanon Trust, the inaugural Mascara Bundanon Writer’s residency is an exciting opportunity for an emerging or established First Nations or CaLD writer with an innovative project that pushes their writing craft into new expressive and conceptual territory. We received applications in poetry, fiction, non-fiction, graphic fiction. The winner receives a two week residency at Bundanon, a stipend of $1,000 and a manuscript reading to be arranged with Ultimo Press. A chance to immerse in the layered landscape and history of Bundanon, a place of renewal, where new relationships to country, history and creative practices are formed. We thank the Wodi Wodi and Yuin people for their care of and connection to land, culture and community.

SHORTLIST 

Timmah Ball

Timmah Ball is a non-fiction writer, researcher and creative practitioner of Ballardong Noongar heritage whose practice is influenced by a short career in urban planning. Her writing has appeared in a range of anthologies and literary magazines such as The Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin, The Griffith Review and Columbia University’s The Avery Review. In 2016 she won the Westerly Patricia Hackett Prize and is currently an Arts House Makeshift Publics artist in resident and editor of First Nations writing for The Westerly Magazine.

JUDGE’S COMMENTS

Timmah Ball’s Blue Print for Another World is remarkable for its melancholic tone and questions the power of conceiving design and planning to refigure Australia as ‘a multifaceted continent whose unique and divergent cultures make up a complex ecosystem rather than the western construct of states border, regions and capital cities.’ It is marked by its searching, frank assessments of self and place and the contradictions of reflecting on change within the luxuries of capitalism: ‘in the cycle of deep discussion we only ever brush the edge of change.’ This is a work of ficto-criticism and it cleverly reconstructs a map viewed from a complex First Nations ecosystem. Her writing is richly engaged, revealing a strong social commitment to the connection between poetics and cartography, between language and country.

Luke Patterson

Luke Patterson is a Gamilaroi poet and folklorist living on Gadigal lands. He is interested in the ways bioregional identities and consciousness are expressed through localised and vernacular forms. Luke’s research and creative pursuits are grounded in his extensive work with Aboriginal and other community-based organizations across Australia.
 
 
 
 
JUDGE’S COMMENTS

TEK expands on the “Authority” and constitutes a poetic and methodological experiment that plays on the anthropologically derived term “traditional ecological knowledge”. Patterson’s poetry is muscular and sinuous. Its interlaced rhyme patterns and use of assonance and slant rhyme are notable, providing music and movement to the verse. He has a great command of language and his commitment to ecology and the environment is unquestionable since he combines this with knowledge and history. The cadences and rhythms of his work are outstanding: city and country; capitalism and indigeneity; climate and chaos. 

 
 
Saba Vasefi

Saba Vasefi’s personal lived experience as a refugee and exiled feminist poet and writer together gives her unique experience and insight. Since seeking asylum in Australia and started to write in English, I have been focused  on completing my PhD and fulfilling my journalistic work. For four years, she was director of Sydney International Poetry and Arts Festival, and two years director of Diaspora symposium. Recent Work Press has published her current project the Borderless, A Transnational Anthology of Feminist Poetry. 

JUDGE’S COMMENTS

Saba Vasefi’s poetry is dramatic and lyrical. There is a conflation of poetry and autobiography, which gives her work a frankness that is limpid and clear-sighted. Saba Vasefi’s poetry is notable for the contrasts it draws between the mundane and violent: ‘No matter how many holy verses / they made my mouth express, / no prayers found their God.’ A highlight is ‘The Forbidden Gender’ which begins with a contrast between its quotidian details and the shock of the last line: ‘The road had potholes, / the school had veils, / and the students / lay dead under their burqas in a well.’ It includes perhaps one of the best couplets in the collection: ‘Instead, we were free / to die as much as we desired …’

Matthew da Silva reviews Invisible Eye by Gayatri Chawla

May 6, 2020 / mascara / 0 Comments

Invisible Eye

by Gayatri Chawla

Authorspress

ISBN-13: 9789352072736

Reviewed by MATTHEW da SILVA

Themes surrounding politics emerge organically in some of the poems in this book especially as it relates to the 1947 partition of British India into two (and, later, three) countries. To start with there are some place names: one of these is Sind (part of which is in today’s Pakistan) and another is West Bengal (in today’s India; part of what was originally called “Bengal” now comprises the country of Bangladesh). It turns out that an individual’s feelings with respect to this event can be complex, particularly so if you are a woman. 

The ways that these things are communicated often rely on the everyday. Names of mundane things appear that are particular to the subcontinent. “Papad” is a kind of savoury baked item that is made from seasoned dough made out of a pulse. It is commonly called “papadum” and is served as a side dish with meals or as an appetiser. “Kulfiwala” is a seller of a frozen dessert called “kulfi” that is indigenous to South Asia (not just the subcontinent; “wala” is a Hindi word that can mean a vendor of goods or of a service), “kokis” is a deep-fried, crispy Sri Lankan food made from rice flour and coconut milk, “gram dal” are whole pulses, “sandesh” is a Bengali sweet made with milk and sugar. 

To understand the cover images I asked a friend of mine who is from India. She said that the man carrying the woman on his back probably refers to the partition; the woman is tired and cannot walk anymore. About the other woman whose image appears on the book’s cover and the scarf she is using to cover part of her face, my friend said: “If it’s part of the saree you’re wearing it’s called ‘pallu’. If you’re wearing a ‘kameez’ it’s called ‘dupatta’. If you’re poor, it’s just a piece of cloth.” These words, she went on, are used right across the country and veiling of the face, the way the woman on the cover is shown doing, is a sign of modesty. There is one poem in the collection named ‘Purdah’ which talks about other feelings that can stem from this emotion. Google defines “purdah” as, “The practice in certain Muslim and Hindu societies of screening women from men or strangers, especially by means of a curtain.” The word can also refer to the curtain itself.

Like the many listed above, there are other markers of identity used in the book but the author does not labour her points. Feelings stemming from the displacement that is mentioned in the Amazon blurb relate to her father’s forced removal from that part of Sind that is now located in Pakistan, a place where he had lived. This theme emerges in some of the poems with a sometimes-subtle force. 

Time spent with the poems reveals a rich patrimony. These are genuine poems that reach out in order to grasp truths that could not be revealed any other way. Chawla’s voice, furthermore, comes across as authentic. Many of her insights are original though some of the poems are more successful than others. 

‘Hyperopia’ (it means “short-sightedness”) is, fittingly, a short poem: it runs to only six lines. What it lacks in volume it makes up for with expressive power and the richness of detail it offers the reader. It is like a haiku in that it captures a moment in time, an instant of personal observation: a woman is sitting at her desk looking at her PC’s screen. She normally wears glasses to see the computer programs she uses but at this moment she does not have them on. She looks out the window and sees things clearly there: the washing on the clothesline. Inside the room she can see a figure of the baby Krishna in a painting on the wall. On the kitchen windowsill is a pottery vessel.  But what is on the PC’s screen is just a blur. 

Given the context that I have already discussed, such a poem is eloquent. It speaks about the inability of people to clearly see the things that are closest to them. What does she see on the computer display? It looks like “bluish purple bruises”. People might easily identify faults that are apparent in other countries, but at home they might not be able to discern them. As a poem, this small addition to the volume is very strong. How did the bruises get there? What made them? Who made them? Nothing is crystal clear but much is implied.

‘Sweet Bengal II’ also contains echoes of events in the distant past (a past that, still, from reading what this author writes, are relevant today). On its surface the poem is about the confection “sandesh” mentioned at the top of this article. The person through whose perceptions the poem is focalised is talking about her love of this type of food but there are subtexts available if you spend a bit of time with the poem. These lines, for example, contain larger themes:

Self-centred pistachios sit uptight
pristine islands in butter paper
heady mix of cottage cheese and saffron
Sandesh dear, I love you.

Something good can come from the mixing of many different kinds of ingredients. In the case of this food, chenna (cottage cheese) is used as the base but it can be mixed with saffron for colour and flavour. On top you can put pistachio nuts to give it extra piquancy. Given this piece of encomium, Chawla’s other views about her country (she was born in Mumbai, an entrepot drawing people from different parts of the country) seem contextualised intelligently and with nuance. Here is the type of thing that only poetry can deliver: a complex insight into a large issue that affects many people that is given through the lens of the individual. One person’s feelings about a favourite food can be made to stand in for the feelings of the multitude.

‘Cocoon’ (the title itself is redolent with meaning in the context of things already spoken about in this review) gives you another personal view of the world. In this case, the idea of the twin is linked with another idea: the mother. On a mantlepiece is a matryoshka doll (a Russian children’s toy that comes in a form where smaller dolls, of different sizes, are contained within larger ones). Layers can be revealed by removing the outer casing, but there are two dolls sitting on the mantle side by side.

they look related
distant cousins,
cousins distant over a family feud.

Another toy, a snow globe, appears near the end of the poem. It contains an empty bench (perhaps a bench where a famous dollmaker put together his creations?) Suddenly, in the final two lines, the eyes of the person who focalises the poem return to the task she is performing in the kitchen: possibly preparing for dinner some potatoes, which have their own eyes. In this revelatory series of images, as in the case of the even shorter ‘Hyperopia’, a hundred different feelings converge in a poem of 17 lines. One thing leads to another as the eyes of the person focalising the action flit around the room and as her mind restlessly wanders, finding thoughts emerge unbidden.

‘Concealer’ is also complex, and centres on a woman seen in the street by the person focalising the action. The person seen appears to be superficial: the clothes she wears and her accessories point to conspicuous consumption. But suddenly the poet shifts perspective and you are transferred to a place within the life of the woman seen. Here, a darker truth appears suddenly, at the end of the poem, like an accusation. Why the “scars”? Who is superficial? And then: what can we really know of the lives of others? This theme had already been alluded to in ‘Cocoon’ in the word “sondering”, which I had to look up. Google defines “sonder” as, “The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passed in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own, which they are constantly living despite one’s personal lack of awareness of it.”

In ‘Fidelity’ the author turns to look at her parents. In this poem, feelings associated with parents – common to people everywhere in the world, it would appear, and commonly full of conflict – rise to the fore. Once again, you have eloquent details from observations made in the domestic sphere. The eye might be invisible, but still it sees everything. 

One of the most wonderful things about reading fiction is being exposed to the ideas of people who write books available in translation. But even – as in the case with the present collection of poetry – where the language used is English, a book written by someone from a foreign country can be full of insights into other cultures and societies. But no matter how different they might be, it always turns out that people, wherever they are born and brought up, are broadly comparable in terms of their motivations, desires, and dreams. The context might differ but humans are always humans.

MATTHEW da SILVA is a journalist and writer who lives in Sydney.