May 5, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Javeria Hasnain is a Pakistani poet and writer, a Fulbright scholar, and an MFA student at The New School, NY. Her prose and poetry have appeared/is forthcoming in Poet Lore, The Margins, Isele, and elsewhere. She was a runner-up for the 2022 The Bird in Your Hands prize and an honorable mention in the 2022 Penrose Poetry Prize. She currently works at Cave Canem and reads poetry for Alice James Books. She has received support from Tin House Workshops, The Kenyon Review, Sundress, and International Writing Program.
BRIDE
Every evening in Ramzan, alone in my Bed-Stuy apartment kitchen, I pick three bananas, an apple, a peach, and an orange. I slice the bananas, dice the apple and peach, mix them in a small tupperware that belonged to the previous tenant. I punch a hole in the orange and squeeze its juice directly into the fruit mix. I let loose in the melodic tunes of Sabri brothers’ Tajdar-e-haram—grip the orange harder as it creates more holes, filling my palms with pulp that drips, drop by drop, into the mix. I don’t care for the seeds or the grime that infiltrates my otherwise purified delicacy.
Every evening during this small ritual, I think of Mama, my aunt, the eldest of all seven siblings who cooked the best food. No one could return from her home hungry or underwhelmed. Every Ramzan, she called everyone at least once for iftar. I have the most vivid memory of her making fruit chaat, squeezing the orange into the fruit mix with naked hands, grime mixing with pulp. She didn’t care for the seeds either.
I was an unhappy child and only I knew that. I was embarrassed by my father’s hiroof van and preferred going and coming back with other friends in their regular-roofed cars. I was embarrassed by my small home and never invited any of my friends over. So whenever I saw Mama, I fixated on things she lacked, which were (to my defense) abundant. What was more surprising to me was that she never did.
She had a love-marriage at 25 to a Navy Captain. She recalled with an arrogance peculiar to her how all the neighborhood girls and her cousins, even her aunts, were extremely jealous of her. Owing to the long stretches of work in the Navy, her husband used to be away for weeks, sometimes, even months. He left for work one day, and never returned. She never married again.
After my nana passed away, she kept shifting to various apartments, never living in any one for more than a year, tagging her brother that she cared for along as well. At one point during this five-year-long cruise, maybe in the third year, she stopped unpacking most of the stuff. Cupboards were replaced by cartons and beds by air mattresses. Whatever little room for furniture the apartment provided remained empty. Her dark circles had deepened further and light-spots occurred unevenly on her face, probably because of smearing very old, often expired, make-up products that she bought from the local Sunday bazaar.
She was keen about appearing pretty. She always dressed nicely and scolded my mother and khala when they didn’t. Several times she handed me or my sister, whoever was nearer, a hair plucker (a staple of her make-up bag) to clean out her chin or upper lip or the middle part of the eyebrow, just above her nose. Oh, she absolutely loved her nose! She wore a little pea-sized gold nose ring shaped like a flower. It was a joy to watch her put on make-up before leaving for the office. Dressed in a lilac & pink Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) uniform, hair tied in a tight bun secured with a black net, black pumps with heels—she looked exquisite. After she left, the smell of her make-up and perfume lingered around the apartment for hours.
Mama—that’s how every kid in my family addressed my aunt—worked at PIA as a Boarding Officer at Jinnah International airport in Karachi. She received a discount coupon book for the airport McDonald’s and the breakfast lounge at the start of every month, which she spent all on her siblings and their children. Almost every weekend, we gathered at her place and went to the bus-stop to wait for the 4K bus. It was a thrilling adventure. I always felt anxious that somebody would be left behind in the bus because they were not vigilant and the bus only paused for three seconds at a stop before it sped up again. The drivers do not care about anyone. Karachi bus-riding is a high-stakes game, everyone is looking out for only themselves. If you are not fast enough, you will end up at Saddar even though you journeyed out for Nazimabad. Although, when she had money, we took a taxi. Amma usually offered to pay the taxi fare, “bachhon ko taxi mein le jao,” a gesture we all anticipated, and welcomed when it came, including Mama. After all, the taxi took us all the way to McDonald’s, whereas, the nearest bus-stop to the airport was a good 15 minute walk away.
My cousins and I spent many weekends at her apartment, nights sleeping like sardines on separate mattresses joined together. She woke up early in the morning to pray fajr, and immediately afterwards, switched on the TV to 9XM, the Bollywood music channel, still sitting, cross-legged on her prayer mat, her fingers rolling one bead after the other of the tasbih. We woke up, one by one, irritated at the noise getting louder, the sun shining directly on our skin, piercing the eyes. When we protested she closed the curtains and turned off the TV so we could sleep in peace, she laughed. Then she said, “if you go back to sleep, no parathas for you.” And none of us were stupid enough to say no to her parathas.
Mama was the only one interested in our teenage love lives, and the only one we weren’t scared to tell them to. On weekends with her, we stayed up through the night talking about the people we had a crush on and stalking them on Facebook. In return, Mama told us about hers. She was so nonchalant about the men—like those heroines you see in Bollywood films. Too cool for the boys. Casual and unbothered, and secretly playing hard to get. I could still sense some sadness in how she talked, so dissociated from herself, as if recounting a story from a past life, or of another person. She never told us about her husband or her marriage. And we knew better than to ask.
As I was growing up, my relatives, including distant cousins, started saying I resembled Mama. One of my aunts used to say I looked more like Mama than my own amma. The same round face, a delicate nose piercing, the penchant to appear beautiful. I got offended at such comments, even though I knew they were true.
In the summer of 2015, she announced she could no longer live in Karachi. She told my mother and khala that she was bored. We had also grown older and busier with studies taking priority, and didn’t visit her as often. Her friends had also moved to other cities and countries. “Moreover,” she said, “there are financial issues. And I am tired of having to move houses every year.”
A month later, she took my mamu, the brother she cared for, and moved to Rawalpindi. Her office relocated to the Benazir Bhutto International Airport in Islamabad. She said the pay was better and she had two friends living with their families in the same apartment building. Her other brothers weren’t happy with her decision and persuaded her to come back. When she remained firm on her decision, they distanced themselves from her.
Mama often called my mother to tell her about the weather in Islamabad or its tasteless food and ask what she had made for lunch. She occasionally messaged me to ask about the meaning of a difficult English word or phrase, to which I always responded only hours later, with an irritation peculiar to teenagers. She often said she missed us, but she was building a life for herself. She missed us but she did not want to come back.
Early in 2016, Mama called to tell amma about a man she recently reconnected with. They had been friends for a long time who lost contact with each other due to adulthood and distance, both physical and otherwise. He was a veterinarian, divorced, and had two kids; a boy who was seven and a girl who was 15. Mama had developed a good relationship with her son, who now also called her “Mama.” Mama said he reminded her of me: the boy also loved reading and writing stories and topped his classes.
On December 29 2016, I woke up to a loud scream. In the dining room, baba was holding amma’s one hand, while she cried holding a phone to her ear with the other. He asked me to switch on the TV in the next room. The little red ticker in the bottom of the news channel read one after another: “a hotel in Islamabad burned down,” “one casualty known,” “the body identified to be of a PIA employee.”
We were later told the fire erupted around 4am and that Mama died of suffocation from the resulting smoke. All the other guests had fled the building. A man who was staying in the next room told us they knocked at her door repeatedly to wake her up and help her escape. When they finally reached the room, they found her on the bathroom floor passed out.
On New Year’s Eve, one of Mama’s brothers and his wife flew to Islamabad to bring back Mama’s body. She was brought back to Karachi, to one of her brothers’ homes. It was time to look at her and say goodbye. She looked so beautiful. Draped in the simplest white. She would have never liked it. I imagined her saying, “White is so boring! Bury me in red.” But of course she never said it. We never talked about death. We actually didn’t talk much at all. She never even told us about her navy husband. She never told us why she didn’t marry all these years. I never asked. I always thought I would have enough time to talk to her once I’m older.
The day she was leaving for Islamabad, amma, I, and my sister had gone to drop her at the airport. There was still some time left in her flight, so she took us to McDonald’s to spend the last few coupons she still had. My sister and I bought Oreo McFlurries and amma and Mama bought soft serve vanilla. She looked at me while slurping her cone, her eyes glassy as if brewing tears, and kept looking for what seemed like a long time, her lips quaking steadily. She cried all the way walking to her terminal.
Now, when she lay so still, all I wanted was to hear her laugh. I gawked at her as if drawing her inside my mind. I thought if I gazed at her long enough, I may always remember her face—round, high cheekbones, a protruding chin. Her lips, small and pink, like a baby’s. Her petite nose that she was extremely proud of, “Hum Nagpur waalon ki naak sabse achi hoti hai.” Every inch of her crystalline—no spots, no burns.
All of us who have left homes, families, countries—willingly or reluctantly—know it is devastating. Also liberating. I could not understand why I began thinking so much about Mama’s life as I was starting my own, in a new country, two oceans away from that of my birth. I understand now. We had more in common than we cared for. We both wanted to make something of our lives.
On phone calls with amma, I hold back telling her how much I miss her. It’s true that I miss her. It is also true I do not want to go back. Now whenever I am flaneuring in the streets of Manhattan, kissing men I do not intend to kiss a second time, dancing to cheap Bollywood songs in bars, I feel her in myself and it makes me happy. This feeling comes after years of feeling myself in her, and being angry and sad because of it.
Throughout Mama’s funeral processions, my amma and khala were told of how Mama was a shaheed. And martyrs never die.
I continue to bear witness to her life. In my dreams, she is always dressed as a bride.
May 1, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
I Have Decided To Remain Vertical
by Gayelene Carbis
ISBN: 978122571489
Puncher and Wattmann
Reviewed by MARION MAY CAMPBELL
I Have Decided To Remain Vertical is an exhilarating extension and intensification of some of the major themes of Carbis’s first collection Anecdotal Evidence: her never leaving Carnegie; a family strangely functional in the wake of brokenness, as poesis summons vivid mosaics from the fragments; the devastated heart and the paradoxical sustenance it finds by revisiting the penumbra of relations; the contradiction between word and gesture; the magnetism of the loving body while the erotic body feels cancelled in its relegation to mere companionship, and the fearless probing of domestic anguish in the wake of paternal carelessness.
Memory is performed as always transformative of the event it revisits—so true to what’s known of the mnemonic process—it’s volatile, apt to ignite the scene and act out the shadow-fire of rage or panic in the domestic or intimate space. The wonder of several key poems in this new collection is their integration of heartbreak, loss, even terror, and of comic, Alice-like defiance. Surreality is presented with hyperreal acuity. Carbis’s dream-envoy arrogates agency at her risk and peril to rescue the very poem we’re reading. This kind of mise-en-abyme or nesting, whereby the making of the very poem we’re immersed in is narratively embedded in the text is a feature here: poetry-making, often snatched from the jaws of disaster, is both agent and catalyst for the ‘I’persona’s survival, no matter into what pits life and love have thrown her. This is done with great comic brio and, often, hilarity, all the more liberating for the catastrophe she skirts.
The collection is framed by two brilliant poems, ‘Marrying Freud’ (p. 13) and the final ‘The Memory of Colour’ (p. 102) containing the title line, both of which manage, in their formal economy, to conduct the lightning of insight and offer fierce, earthy resistance to a perceptual charge that otherwise might blow things apart. The dream scenario of ‘Marrying Freud’ conveys a sense of wild exuberance, not just through its refusal to espouse the Great Man myth, but also through the matter-of-factness which domesticates Freud, turning him into a kind of housemaid. Again, it’s Dora’s revenge; ‘Dora’ being the pseudonym for the gifted young woman of Freud’s ‘Case Histories’ who dared dismiss him, he said, like a maid of all work. Freud here expects to be both sexually and domestically serviced. This savage brand of feminism is all the more hilarious through its continence in constraining form. Freud awaits in the marriage bed whose sheet he has folded back (he’s already unconsciously become the chamber maid) in anticipation, while his dream ‘wife’ in the kitchen, through the night, writes her glorious resistance—the poem we are reading, refusing to bring the anticipated coffee: ‘I’m not his fucking mother’ (p.14).
In ‘Our house’ (p. 20), the domestic sphere is a charged space, where contradictions stage their tug-of-war; where vitriolic fury and loving acceptance are veined together in an always-compromised stream. The forensic eye returns unflinching in memory, telling it without a hint of pastelised sentiment. It is thus acutely recognizable as authentic to the reader, beautiful, heartbreaking and, at times, irrecoverable from—as in ‘The Price we Pay’ (p. 25), for instance.
In ‘The Baker’s Daughter’ (p. 31)—an allusion to Shakespeare’s Ophelia’s invocation of the owl—Gayelene indicts a weakness that countless feminine avatars of Ophelia share, imploring fathers as potential saviors, recued neither by generations of Poloniuses nor Hamlets: these superbly haunting lines brought the shiver of the graveyard to my warm living room:
too mindful, we die to our truer selves, calling father!
But the fathers, all air, walk as ghosts over the grave ground (p.31)
There’s genius in the spooky effect of the caesura after ‘all air’ (and, as we know, garrulous Polonius was all air), and in the fatefully sounding final spondee ‘grave ground’. This double stress (and alliteration) brings home how hanging on the father’s word kills ‘our truer selves’: bang bang. In variously inventive ways, Carbis’s work so far in her plays, stories and now, two poetry collections, has explored both the comedy of feminine identifications and the devastation wreaked by the models of masculinity that men and boys strive to enact or refuse at their peril. How does the golden-haired little boy, hauled along the swimming pool lane on his father’s back become, freely and creatively, a man, when this same loving father subsequently seems to enact man-as-flight-from-responsibility-and-presence? (‘Love Like This’, p. 24)
If compassionate identification is not enough to save from mortality—art, whether painting or poetry—gives back life, as in the beautiful ekphrastic ‘Red Horse by the River’ (p. 64) that takes off from Anselm van Rood’s ‘St Kilda Morning’. What does save, after relationship breakdown (‘I made Tarek and Egypt into a story’, ‘St Kilda Morning’, p. 46 ), is the openness to wonder beyond the pathways of flatfooted rationality: the red horse appears in its transcendent beauty by the river: ‘But your eyes were always open to the light’ (‘St Kilda Morning’, p. 47).
And consider ‘After Sylvia’ (p. 41)
Don’t editorialise. Just say it. Read Sylvia.
Her poems. For their surgical precision.’
He adds: ‘You need to take up that scalpel.’
The lover-friend-mentor instructs, if not how to heal, then at least how to make a better poem by taking up the scalpel, to lay bare, with forensic wit, the damage he bequeaths her. And does she ever. Again, the last line is a unmitigated triumph: ‘I hold my pen—like a knife’.
Then, reading ‘Family’ (p. 53), I am breath-taken by Carbis’s metamorphic verve, up there with Ovid and Calvino—
The tree told us we were temporary guests.
[…]
Our sanctuary
wouldn’t save us. We swept our tears into
the streets, hid in the bark of our brooms
as if wood had become new skin.
(p. 53)
Here fabulism triumphs over sadness though magical metamorphosis: the humble domestic broom, remembering its origin, offers a retreat.
With several poems it’s art itself that bonds, that connects and transfigures. With ‘Writing Companion’ (for Alicia Sometimes, p. 74), language is celebrated as a reciprocal giving of nurture, a companion being etymologically, as Gaylene’s epigraph points out, a sharer of bread—thus the synesthetic transfer of shared words, whereby sounds become taste:
… The taste of
sounds on the tongue,
the sharp tang
of consonants,
how the vowels curl.
(p.74)
This oblique and all the more haunting ekphrastic magic runs right through the ‘Red Horse by the River’ section.
What is said and what is not said, the throat-freezing unspeakable features heartbreakingly in ‘The call’ (p. 82), where the screen topic of daughter-mother conversation is about a hairdresser’s phone number, but the not-so-well-hidden content is a mother’s possibly impending death from cancer:
Her voice was full of stones
I heard the dampness in her breath.
[…]
Stones in my throat, as I
hung up the phone and watched the brilliant lights
of the train hurtling closer and closer.
(82-83)
The brilliant lights of the hurtling train are the onrush of death as the terrifying real.
What is not said, the ellipsis, becomes literalised, actually materialised, in ‘Annotated Memories’ (p. 84). Here, the persona seems to have set herself the punishing task of making, for the ex-lover’s birthday, an annotated collage of his previous lives and loves; how then can she find the words for her own absence? The pendant to this conundrum is magnificently realised in ‘The Day You Left’ (pp. 88-90) where the imminently massive absence, the negative shape of the departing ship (taking the now ex-lover definitively from her), diminishes, in inverse proportion, all the wonder of the world—the moon being reduced to only a mention, a speck (p.88):
And then, the absence
of the ship
I stared at the space
where the ship had been
And I thought
now I understand.
Negative capability
Finally made sense to me.
(p. 88)
The layout and lineation enact the cumulative insistence of absence. Here Gayelene makes over Keats’s phrase negative capability—to mean gaping absence, one that takes on more density and potency than presence.
Losing language as mediating and instrumental, Carbis lets the strangeness of body sensation impinge; it’s no longer a question of fatality, but of body as an improvisation. The deliberately anachronistic quill in ‘Embodiment in Quill’ refers to the bodily empowerment of a Victorian woman writer. Things and beings lose their names: through entries and exits and passages—vectors become all:
A living being is making his way through the house.
I shut out dishes in the kitchen,
and keep my door open.
(p. 99)
In the closing, brilliant sequence culminating in ‘The Memory of Colour’, we are returned to the marvellous metamorphic power of art. Beyond the visual, Carbis writes the sensation—
The walk back is about twenty steps
and sometimes that is all it takes
to remember green, to feel it
in your feet. To feel practically feline.
I hover on the first step then wade right in.
I hold the colour of the sky
in my arms, and swim.
(p. 102)
The passage towards the water is shot through with EE, thus sending the sense of greenness coursing through the reader’s limbs and preparing an openness in the reader for the colour of the sky. Notably, this provides a space for readers to paint themselves in. Is the sky cerulean blue; is it egg-yolk yellow; or is it a thundery gunmetal? Thus armed, we slide with Carbis into the gorgeously embodying element: it’s performed in the transition from in to swim.
Finally, then, whatever our physical propensities, it’s the synaesthetic power of this whole collection that lends us such imaginative embodiment: eyes for the colour of the sky and arms to swim with.
References
Keats, John 1958 [1817] re. ‘negative capability’ see The Letters of John Keats, ed. H E Rollins, Vol I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958 , pp. 193–4.
Freud, Sigmund 1990 [1905] Case Histories 1: ‘Dora’ in The Penguin Freud Library,Vol.8, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1990.
MARION MAY CAMPBELL is an acclaimed poet and novelist, and essayist. Marion has taught literature and writing in various universities, including Murdoch University, the University of Melbourne and, most recently, at Deakin University. She now lives in Drouin in GunaiKurnai country with her two border collie companions.
April 24, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mohamed Irba / محمد (he/him/هو) is an Omani Lebanese cis man who came to Australia in 2007 at sixteen to study and stayed for safety. He is an active member of his communities and continues to explore the meaning of belonging in everyday life and the intersections of his identity as a Queer Arab person living with HIV.
Taaf طاف
I was 16 years old when I landed in Melbourne airport on a cold winter morning. I came to study but stayed for safety.
My new guardian was waiting to pick me up. “Your English is really good!” she said. I will never forget her surprise and relief that I could speak. I was bewildered by that as most people spoke English where I came from, and sometimes English would be the third or fourth language. It was more than a statement. It came with a history of society that looked at me as uncivilised and barbaric. I also had not experienced winter before and could not stop shivering.
I wish I could hold my younger self now. I know he would never believe we could be writing a story like this one; telling my story to help others. I would not change any of my life experiences but I need to stop burying them deep inside where I cannot even remember them. If I do not speak of it, there can be no healing and I want to make sure my lessons are passed on to those who face similar challenges.
From the beginning, I had the responsibilities of the eldest son to carry. My culture puts so much pressure on the eldest son to be successful, study, get a well regarded job, marry and have many children. The parents are often called “Abu” and “Om” (name of eldest son) and it is very shameful if their son is not successful. These responsibilities meant additonal pressure. I was not “worldly” but I knew I was different and had to escape. I was the darkest out of my siblings and I was reminded of it daily. My mother tried to scrub the black out of me every day as a child. It did not work. If she knew about my difference, no doubt she would have tried to scrub that out too. Words like “queer” and “gay” were not in my vocabulary. Though it would be years before I learned, somehow I embodied them. In the sense of defiance, standing out, being strange and different. The words I did have were “haram”, “deviant”, and “pervert”.
I had so many questions for my parents and the answer was always, “We do not talk about these things, do not ask again,” with fear in their eyes. I knew that my urges were seen as sinful, so I pushed and pushed until I could not feel them, but there was no end to the racism and colourism I experienced and saw. No end to consumerism and obsession with material things, money and brands. I hated the focus on class and family origins that were so rooted in the culture, and convinced myself I did not belong in my desert home.
There was a fairy-tale across the sea, and I pointed to it: freedom of speech, democracy, minimum wage, queerness, dressing as you please, everything you could want.
Or so I thought, until I found my way here. Initially things were good, I loved the public transport and uncensored internet. Having access to all the knowledge I wanted and porn could not have come at a better time! I surfed websites such as gaydar.com, manjam, and manhunt and indulged the urge I couldn’t even name. It was like opening a big bucket of Maltesers and not being able to stop (which also happens). Despite the pleasure, these experiences still brought on extreme guilt. All the Islamic teachings from my parents and school did not suddenly go away. I felt like the worst person, that I was going to hell for sure. As my Islamic studies teacher taught me: “The fires of hell never stop and you will be tortured by their flames up until the brink of death only to be brought back again and go through the whole experience once more and more and more.”
Yet this did not stop me, and I fell for every (white) boy under the sun. What I did not know is that chasing these fruits would bring so much sorrow. Using these hook-up apps and websites muddied my understanding of what I was feeling, and of love itself. What I wanted more than anything was validation, but for every gratifying reply to my messages, there were hundreds of others that went ignored or blocked. Sex became my new hobby. I never had hobbies growing up as studying was my only purpose. I was to become the successful first born son that would make my parents proud and that was drilled into me before I was even ten. But sex was so much fun. I kept a record of them all—43 in the first 30 days I would proudly boast! I did it with everyone: old, young, educated, rich, poor, but especially white as that is what I was taught counted as “beautiful”. It took 10 years to unlearn this toxic and damaging racism, a product of how I was brought up, a product of white supremacist ideology.
Yet before I could unlearn the racism that plagued me, I practised it. I experienced it. Words like “sand monkey”, “N*****”, “curry muncher” (yes, I got the pleasure of receiving slurs for Arabs and South Asians too), “terrorist”, “takeaway”, and many more micro-aggressions. “What natio are you?” was the most common response I got. Brown skin stopped the white gaze at its place and resulted in a block. And still, I wanted their validation. I wanted a white prince to fulfil all my dreams and I would do anything for them. I was stereotyped, humiliated, and fetishized, yet I played along and laughed. The validation was too strong and I had nothing to fall back on anyway.
I wanted to fit in. I wanted it all. I remember going to my first gay bar called “the X-change” in Melbourne, the energy and excitement. I stared at every person without a shirt on kissing another, or more. I stared at a freedom I’d never imagined. I had fun, took on the Australian culture of over-drinking, danced, partied and met many temporary friends. “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga and “What’s my name?” by Rihanna were on repeat as I washed away the past with binge drinking and blacking out.
At some point, I developed my own way of “coming out”. In order not to be discovered by family and friends back home, I did not talk to them. I deleted them all from social media so as not to accidentally be tagged in a “gay” photo. I wanted it all but would not risk it all. Time to make new friends, I said. No time for homophobia. And by homophobia I meant my own culture. I did everything I could to block it off. Like it never existed. This is Australia. I stopped using my mother tongue, and wouldn’t use it consistently for at least ten years, until I even started to lose confidence speaking it. There are displacements forced upon us, and there are displacements we put upon ourselves. What I really needed was real friendship. But it would take another few years to realise that.
My obsession with sex translated to what I thought was love and that was the beginning of many important life lessons. Relationships certainly started off strong and I insisted on moving in quickly even though I did not really know these men. I was seeking validation and safety in the wrong places again. The amount of emotional abuse I took on was compounding on my lack of self-worth and co-dependence. When I got my permanent residency through a de-facto relationship, his friends judged me and openly joked that I was an “overseas bride”. It reminded me of the white woman at the airport, the condescension. The way she spoke to me back on the first day I landed was that of an exotic being that she could not understand. The way they spoke to me now felt the same, as someone othered. I am not an Aussie and would never be, even as a resident. even as a citizen. I laughed it off as I have before. I knew it was wrong but I was so madly in love. Nine years later at the age of twenty seven, I finally ended the fairy-tale and saw reality.
Nothing prepared me for the disillusionment, the sense of rootlessness, the loss of identity, survivor’s guilt, the helplessness when things go wrong. I was so alone and yet did not know it. Sex did not equal friendship. Sex did not equal love. Sex did not equal validation. White Patriarchal Supremacy is in place and I will never gain its approval, which I no longer want, nor its validation, which I do not need.
I think many of us seek to escape to the West for the fantasy of safety and freedom. We all have our own personal journeys and this is mine. Lately, I have started reconnecting with my culture through language, books, food, music, films, and visits where possible. Finding other Queer Displaced people to connect with has been magical to me. I have also started helping others still in the homeland through online support groups who provide advice and information. Activism is extremely difficult and dangerous as it can result in arrest and prison sentence, but small actions like providing support through the knowledge gained here or the people on the ground providing safe spaces and social connections can help. This is very important to me—through it I’ve regained a sense of my own identity and purpose.
I am still not exactly sure what belonging means. This is my home now and a home should function as a safe haven for its occupants. I like to think I can still bring my culture to it. I do not have to assimilate in a way that erases me but rather, belong in a way that I can be proud of. With a long road ahead to acknowledging the history of this land and oppression facing First Nations peoples, I am grateful to be here. I am reminded of this not only by First Nations peoples but by others whose ancestors laid claim to the land. The colonial oppression continues here and overseas with our homelands continuing to suffer daily whether it is from real warfare or intergenerational and systemic damage caused by colonisation. We need to acknowledge as displaced people here that we are benefiting from stolen lands and colonisation, and that moving forward any progress has to benefit the First Nations peoples of this land and not come at their expense.
I do not want to beg or claim a space where others are in power and I am not. We are already here. We are to be acknowledged as part of the conversation and more importantly as active members of decision making.
There is freedom in being here and much to gain, but also loss. Loss does not go away easily. You do not have to disassociate from your cultures to belong. It’s a harder road but worth taking. Our existence is resistance, but we deserve more than to be seen only in opposition: we can and we will thrive.
I want to stand tall in front of you, I am a voice for others like me everywhere I go, and a changemaker. Speaking up is something I have struggled with as I sought to fit in and not cause waves. I am not afraid anymore; I look to the ocean which is not afraid of land, not afraid of itself. Waves that are powerful in unity and move where the sea goes. Waves that heal.
Note:
Taaf طاف: A word used in Khaleeji Arabic meaning to float but also as a means to brush someone off and not give them attention.
March 1, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Laura Pettenuzzo: Junior Commissioning Editor
Laura (she/her) is a disabled writer living on Wurundjeri country. She writes Plain and Easy English content for various organisations and has been published by The Big Issue, ABC Everyday, The Age and SBS Voices. Laura is also a member of the Victorian Disability Advisory Council.
लेश करण Lesh Karan: Poetry Editor
लेश करण (Lesh Karan) is a Naarm/Melbourne-based poet and essayist. Recent publications include Admissions, a Red Room Poetry anthology, Best of Australian Poems 2022, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Island, Mascara Literary Review and Rabbit, amongst others. She was shortlisted for the 2022 Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and is currently completing a Master of Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing at the University of Melbourne. Lesh is of Fiji Indian heritage.
Monique Nair: Marketing Manager
Monique Nair is a Melbourne/Naarm based writer of Indian-Italian-Polish heritage. She was a participant of the West Writers program with Footscray Community Arts and is a screenwriter for an upcoming anthology feature, My Melbourne, produced by Mind Blowing Films and supported by VicScreen and Screen Australia. She has performed her work at Emerging Writers’ Festival and other events and her writing is published in Peril, Voiceworks, Kill Your Darlings and The Indian Weekly.
Carielyn Tunion: Multimedia
Carielyn is a multimedia artist, content producer & cultural worker, working from a decolonial perspective to promote the social & holistic wellbeing of marginalised peoples & communities. Drawing on her background in video and screen production, Carielyn uses videopoetry to explore the impacts of colonialism, intergenerational trauma and recovery. She also dabbles in writing, illustration, pin-making and works as a professional arts model. Carielyn occupies space as an immigrant-settler woman of colour in the matrix of coloniality – and identifies as a Tagalog daughter of the archipelago beyond the gender binary. She currently lives on unceded Darkinjung country.
Michelle Cahill: Artistic Director
Michelle Cahill (she/they) is of Goan Anglo-Indian heritage living on unceded Guringai lands. An award-winning novelist and poet, their collection Letter to Pessoa (Giramondo) won the UTS Glenda Adams Award and was shortlisted in the Steele Rudd Award. Cahill was awarded a Red Room Poetry Fellowship and was shortlisted in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, the ABR Peter Porter Prize and the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize. Daisy & Woolf is published with Hachette. Cahill’s essays have appeared in the Sydney Review of Books, The Weekend Australian and Wasafari
February 13, 2023 / mascara / 0 Comments
Naomi Williams writes on Kaurna Country. She enjoys experimenting with poetry and prose. Her poetry has been published in Raining Poetry in Adelaide in 2022 and her ekphrastic prose in FELTspace Writer’s Program 2021. She is a lyric writer and was a creative collaborator with the UNESCO Creative Cities Equaliser Music Video Project in Adelaide 2021. She has recently completed her Honours in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. Naomi enjoys performing spoken word at open mics around Adelaide and performing comedy raps as part of the duo Bubble Rap.
Oranges and Soccer
Orange is the colour of passion that burns so bright it’s almost NEON.
It catches in a retina forever.
Orange on the horizon, the orange I eat with my fingers spills juice and tangs my lips, cell
walls as soft as lips, they burst, or am I thinking of a mandarin?
When was the last time I ate an orange?
They never tasted so good than at my soccer game half-times, the mingled aromas of sweet
orange and fresh mud.
When did I last play soccer?
With my dog in the backyard. She carries that deflated ball in her mouth. A man was
throwing them out one day.
“The boys have got new ones,” he said. “They didn’t want to pump them up.”
The bounce of a ball on grass, the thunk of a boot sending it into the swish of a net— poetry.
I wasn’t fast enough, forgot the value of being alive.
I watched from the sidelines as boys from school played at lunchtimes, legs itching to run for
the ball.
Some lucky times it went near me and I could kick it back.
I only joined in once with a friend.
I was too embarrassed otherwise.
The pack of boys, only the good, or the popular got a kick.
I was neither.
Torturous to watch.
Now I play with my dog.
She’s a bad bitch.
She boops the ball back into my hands like a pro.
October 8, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mascara Literary Review is delighted to announce the contributors of RESILIENCE, an anthology of poetry, fiction and essays, to be published with Ultimo Press in November 2022.
We received an impressive number of high quality submissions for this anthology, which made the selection process incredibly competitive. Thank you to everyone who submitted their work and have been patient with us as we worked through the process.
We are excited to share that the RESILIENCE contributors are…
Hani Abdile | David Adès | Jessica Alice | Frances An | Alison J Barton | Fleur Lyamuya Beaupert | Luke Beesley | Behrouz Boochani translated by Moones Mansoubi | Anne Brewster | Simone Busch | Effie Carr | Luoyang Chen | Angela Costi | Lucia Cupertino translated by Mario Licón Cabrera | Sarah Day | Josie/Jocelyn Deane | Lyn Dickens | Koraly Dimitriadis | Sam Elkin | Susan Fealy | Holly Friedlander Liddicoat | Dominique Hecq | Matthew Hooton | Barbara Ivusic | Anna Jacobson | Bec Kavanagh | Michelle Kelly | Simone King | Lee Kofman | Jo Langdon | Bella Li | Debbie Lim | Miriam Wei Wei Lo | CB Mako | Nicole Melanson | Guido Melo | Dani Netherclift | Dawn Nguyen | Daniel Nour | Brian Obiri-Asare | Thuy On | Suneeta Peres da Costa | Felicity Plunkett | Stephanie Powell | Isabelle Quilty | Christopher Rees | Claire Miranda Roberts | Seth Robinson | Jurate Sasnaitis | Paul Scully | Christine Shamista | Maria Takolander | Lucy Van | Ellen van Neerven | Beau Windon | Grace Yee
Pre-order a copy of RESILIENCE here!
This project is made possible by the support of the Australian Council for the Arts and Creative Victoria.
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 …’
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.
October 2, 2019 / mascara / 0 Comments
Traverse
by Tineke Van der Eecken
Wild Weeds Press
ISBN 978-0648320678
Reviewed by SAMANTHA TRAYHURN
Traverse by Tineke Van Der Eecken is a novel about the micro-offences that culminate in the end of a marriage. Physical distance and emotional distance. Wandering minds, snide remarks, broken trust. Part travel memoir, part personal reflection, it shows how a relationship doesn’t dissipate with a single wrong doing, but is slowly eroded by tides of actions that break a person down. At the core of the memoir, a wife (Van der Eecken) recounts a 5-week traverse through rugged Madagascan terrain – the territory of her husband’s affair with a work colleague – as she accompanies him on a field trip in an attempt to save their marriage. The premise alone is enough to pique interest. Some readers will identify this as an act of bravery, and others complete reckless abandon. Who would want to sleep in the same villages, swim in the same rivers, and eat the same meals, as their husband and his lover? This isn’t a typical divorce narrative, but we soon learn that there isn’t much that is typical about the relationship we observe.
Tineke and Dirk are a Belgian couple who spent their courtship and early married life in Africa, before moving to Australia and then England, following Dirk’s work as a geologist. At the time that the narrative takes place they have two children, and have just uprooted a life they had grown to love in Australia, to settle in Cotgrave, a small English village. As part of his new role, Dirk takes frequent field trips to Madagascar where he meets and falls in love with logistical manager, Fara. Tina is left to try and assemble a new life in Cotgrave, while sensing that her husband is drifting away from her.
We had met in Africa and we had married in Africa… We had our children in Africa. Was I now becoming associated with middle-class English life for him? I had no part in the choice of our home base, but it became clear that he was looking at me across a distance… (39).
After each trip Dirk returns more and more enamoured with Madagascar, and Tina soon learns that it isn’t just the place, but also another woman, that has won his affections.
Early on in the Prelude we learn that this story is being recounted six years after the fact, and is a collection of memories filtered through anger and a sense of betrayal, but most of all a desire to comprehend just what went wrong. “I must do this – must record to understand,’ (12) Van der Eeken states as she sits down to write her memoir.
With this proclamation readers quickly understand that this isn’t a travel story simply penned for entertainment and a love for far off lands. If anything, to Van der Eecken, Madagascar evokes at best discomfort, and at worst disdain. The country becomes entangled with her bitterness so much so that it becomes a third accomplice in the affair. It is after the first part of the book (Tremors) when Dirk’s unfaithfulness is revealed, that Tina decides she must overcome her negative feelings towards the place, and embark on his final trek with him, if the marriage has any hope of survival, “We would not be able to continue together unless we resolved what separated us most. I needed to go to Madagascar with him.” (71).
From the converted railway carriage where the author writes, it is as though even after an extended period of time, the act of writing is a salve for a deeply personal wound that can only be truly healed by retracing.
At times while reading, I felt weighed down by the repetition and self-pity of the narration– it is difficult to endure the circulatory thinking of a scorned partner, perhaps because it recalls repressed feelings, or makes us think about how we would behave in the same situation. That being said I found myself drawn in: I wanted to know just what the author was capable of enduring, and how she was able “to traverse and emerge on the other side” (9). Van der Eecken’s writing is at its strongest when she is truly present and offers her observations of the landscapes and cultures she experiences: “The roads built by the French reminded me of other rural roads in Africa. Once the industrious (and mineral greedy) colonial administrations had left, the roads had gradually deteriorated and made it impossible for motorised transport to pass. Now they looked like honeycomb.” (121). “In the last few years vanilla has increased from 30 to 190 euro per kilo” (133). “There were no independence monuments, no little shops, no signs of any contact with the outside world.” (151). These interesting facts and tidbits not only provide a counterpoint to Van der Eecken’s internal conflict, but also give an insight into who this woman is when she isn’t pining for her husband. She is worldly, compassionate, astute, creative, strong. It is a stark reminder of what jealousy and fear of rejection can stir in a person.
Many readers will find it hard to like Dirk, let alone understand the author’s desire to remain married to him. He is presented as belittling and mean; self-absorbed and cold. When Van der Eecken expresses that she misses her career, he responds off-handedly, “what career? You never had one” (56). When she talks about the book that she has been working on for a number of years while juggling family life, he snidely comments, “you’ll never finish that book… You better look for a real job” (29). When she is seized with fear and can’t cross a makeshift bridge during the trek, he scurries past her and utters over his shoulder “crawl if you have to” (162), never offering a hand. Of course, we are receiving one-sided memory, but the cracks in the relationship seem clear early on. Perhaps this callousness is Dirk’s way of distancing himself so he can pursue the love that he feels for Fara. So, when Van der Eecken documents moments of affection or making love, I was always surprised and a little bit disappointed. I suppose I wanted her to deny him, but I was reminded of how when anger and love mingle, things are only ever further complicated by these fleeting moments of romance.
One of the biggest questions that Traverse raised for me is, how much is a sense of place tied to a sense of self? Here, a woman who has been following her husband and his career all over the world senses that she has lost something along the way. In the final section of the book (Postlude: A sense of home) when Van der Eecken thinks back to sitting outside the renovated railway carriage in Australia with her friend Ros, she realises that by identifying a sense of belonging, she feels at ease: “I felt like a river that, after a long drought, had returned to its riverbed” (211). In this section Van der Eecken goes on to hint at the true motive for penning her story: overcoming an acceptance of betrayal that began with her father and followed her all her adult relationships.
I had lost all trust in my father, and by extension, in men. When the man I loved back then betrayed me in a similar way, it was the beginning of false starts in my own relationships, the compulsion to follow my parents’ patterns (211).
While not a perfect piece of literature, Traverse is a real account of the complexities of relationships, and is a rewarding reading experience that demonstrates how one can marry physical adversity with emotional adversity to gain the strength to go on.
SAMANTHA TRAYHURN is a writer living on the Central Coast of NSW. Her work has appeared in Westerly, Overland, LiNQ Journal, eTropic, and others. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Western Sydney University. She is also the editor of Pink Cover Zine.