Pier Alice James Books
2011
by Janine Oshiro
ISBN: 9781882295883
Reviewed by WENDI M LEE
Janine Oshiro’s first poetry collection, Pier, is a haunting masterpiece tinged with fantasy and the shifting landscapes of nature, decay, and creation. Oshiro writes of family histories: a deceased mother and ailing father, growing up in Hawaii and living on the Mainland. This is far from narrative poetry, however. Strangeness lurks on every page. Spoons swim through the ocean, dancers twirl without the use of legs. The possibility of dark magic is imminent. Oshiro’s beautiful, off-kilter images are often tempered with large segments of white space, revealing to the reader what cannot be expressed with words alone.
Everywhere is a potential
exit, except the door
I drew a high wall at the skin;
at the bottom I drew a gutter.
I was eleven.
These are the words I have for it.
Creation plays a central role in this collection. In “Praise,” the speaker “is clapping my hands” in anticipation for her siblings to “invent the world” via the stage, a world closed to her by normal means. The elegiac “Move” is composed of very short stanzas, hinged upon an image reminiscent of a biblical creation story. “On the first day,” is the recurring phrase here, as we move from “sea squirts” and “frogfishes” to the slow and steady disintegration of a beloved father.
In “Anniversary,” a kingdom is erected piece by piece, the protagonist carefully inserting houses and daughters into a landscape of wildness, willing domesticity and nature to collide. Order is of utmost importance here, perhaps to soften the chaos of everyday life, but so is the bated apprehension of disaster.
I kept an eye on the animal and nothing happened.
The mountain blistered and popped into its plural.
I kept an eye on the animal.
The sky remained where it was, distant.
The obedient daughters kept their houses neat.
Creation then is uncertain, a metamorphosis always on the brink of occurring, a disappointment when it does not arrive. Sight and language also produces unease and uncertainty. Potentially traumatic events occur without the awareness of the protagonist, yet nonetheless accepted as factual. Sometimes these experiences can be named. Others are so mysterious they remain shrouded in the spaces off the page, referred to only in passing.
Having not seen it
happen but knowing
it happened
a black snake
crawled down my spine.
Even sight ultimately proves to be unreliable as what is proven to be “fact” crumbles. A mother’s likeness is caught in a passing cloud formation. Ghosts walk unbidden into rooms, to reassure grieving daughters. Nature itself becomes a landscape of startling revelation.
Before I saw snow, I saw
pictures of snow and believed
in it. And so of bears.
Snow blinded I am. A bear
is nothing like its picture.
The dichotomy of what is seen/not seen, witnessed/believed resonates. What gives these poems so much power is Oshiro’s ability to transform the landscapes of her experiences. I also grew up in Hawaii, but the world she presents to her readers exists in the twilight of unreality, where grief and beauty can be fully explored. Her words illuminate and mystify in equal measures. Pier is an impressively startling first collection, and well-deserving of the 2010 Kundiman Poetry Prize. I am fascinated to see what she has to offer next.
______________
WENDI LEE was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and currently lives in Pittsburgh. She has a chapbook, Knotted Ends, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press, and poetry and fiction published in Karamu, Portland Review, Oyez Review, weave, Passages North, and Hawai’I Pacific Review.
Since its inception just over a year ago, Math Paper Press’s Babette’s Feast chapbook series has introduced a host of new voices to the literary scene in Singapore. The voice that emerges in Carol Chan’s first collection is lyrical, ‘ever soft, gentle and low’, and, like Cordelia’s in King Lear, it is both compassionate and unafraid to speak its truth. The World Must Weigh The Same is an examination of the connections between the personal and political in contemporary Singapore – a tentative attempt to articulate a vaguely-felt malaise that Chan names in one poem as ‘first-world boredom’ struggling to find purpose in the face of ‘human dreams’.
It is hard not to take a topical reading of some of the pieces here. Published in 2011 after Singapore’s watershed May 7th polls, the collection contains coy references to ‘elections’ and ‘rallies’ tucked into poems addressed to unnamed interlocutors who could be friends, lovers, government, or State. ‘Common State’ is perhaps the most successful of these, and incidentally, also the most representative of the concerns of the collection as a whole. Read as a love poem, it is a heartfelt plea for ‘difference’ in a relationship that has gone stale from too much predictability; read as a political poem, that same plea acquires additional resonance in the context of a ‘dead silent country’ where the ‘future you think is possible’ is ‘one I do not see’. These would have been brave words twenty years ago, before Alfian Sa’at’s One Fierce Hour, especially in a first collection. Now, they are typical of a sentiment that, thanks to the Internet, has become a commonplace. Lamenting a lack of vision in the nation’s leadership and bemoaning a sense of personal disempowerment have become national pastimes, like shopping and eating. And Chan does it more eloquently and poignantly than most; at times, as in ‘Electives’, even playfully:
& not to be soggy but there are limits to how much
we care about whatever. Say nothing / say love / say war.
In ‘State’, the speaker wonders if
…… what you run
up against
is only the lines
from your dreaming
or the language to speak
out of line.
The self-reflexive awareness of the perils of sogginess, of our complicity in our disenfranchisement, rescues these poems from cliché.
Yet, the question is – what is the expected readerly response to such discontent? At the risk of reproducing the standard discourse pattern of Singaporean bureaucracy, the instinctive reaction is to wonder what sort of aesthetic vision is being offered as an alternative. ‘Briefcase’, the gem of a short story that opens the collection, proposes an answer – love, commitment, the comforts of familiarity and domesticity, and the hidden beauty of the everyday. After going through something of a midlife crisis in which he questions, for the first time, the way his life has turned out, protagonist Mr Zhang arrives at a place of contentment, learns compromise. Forget politics, forget idealism – there is ‘something precious’ in the life that happens to us, or, at best, that we meander into. ‘(T)he memory of soft-boiled eggs with dark soy sauce’, a letter from a daughter, these are the compensations for our choices – or non-choices, enacted in the very language of the story: an ordinary, homely diction most noticeable for its plain-spoken poignancy. And this in itself isn’t a bad answer. It may not even be an unsatisfactory answer. I like the empathy, and the clear-eyed honesty – these qualities were what first drew me to Chan’s writing, and make for a heartfelt story that gently criticises without condemnation. But the story’s placement at the start of the collection, rather than at the end, suggests a tentativeness, a refusal of closure; and the reader is left looking to the rest of the pieces for some development in the dialogue, a new way of seeing, perhaps, or an aesthetic space with room for imagination and change.
And there is certainly some of that. ‘Key Performance Indicators’ satirises standard bureaucratese with deliberately unintelligible consequences; while ‘File > My Scans’ fits a series of gnomic musings into the linguistic structure of a computer filing system. And then there is the delightful whimsy of ‘Trees Don’t Have Midlife Crises’ that segues into a quiet meditation on identity and change. On the whole, though, the collection doesn’t quite take flight. The reader is left with the sense of having been comfortably disturbed, but the sparks of conflict and friction are never allowed to develop into a full-blown conflagration, which, granted, was probably never Chan’s intention in the first place. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if it is possible to write about smallness and limitation, in a way that transcends, or at least, transforms that limitation, makes it new – and does so in ways that do not sacrifice sense in the process. What to make, for instance, of lines like these?
Say the answer lies
in our denial of this crate;
Don’t pretend
the lack of dream thinks.
Why ‘crate’, and what is it a metaphor for, and even supposing that the closing of ‘State’ is an abstract, Ashbery-esque comment on how a lack of vision (‘dream’?) is often excused in the name of reason or rationality (‘thinks’?), the suddenly awkward syntax is distracting and not well-integrated with the rest of the poem.
Such awkwardness is, thankfully, confined to only a few of the socio-political pieces in the collection. Where Chan excels, however, is in her sensitive rendering of the personal and familial. And when the personal becomes a lens through which the political is examined, it reveals a subtle, self-questioning poetic sensibility that should, with time, grow in its ability to weigh the world without getting weighed down by the world.
Prose poetry is essentially an urban form, although we should do better to refer to it as both essentially and existentially an urban form. A cursory look at the development of the prose poem in mid-nineteenth-century France provides an insight into just why and how this form came to embody the modern metropolis in which it is invariably set and with which it coincides.[1]
As Baron Haussmann’s wave of urban renewal swept through Paris, bringing it—expropriations and all—from the Middle Ages right up to the cutting edge of Modernity, with which it became instantly synonymous,[2] Charles Baudelaire was achieving fame as the author of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). But even as his fame spread, Baudelaire’s disenchantment with the lot of the poet, and his verses, was leading him towards a new mode of expression. Where, famously, he had previously painted the poet as, inter alia, an albatross, majestic in the air but clumsy on the ground, he now sought to bring poetry down from the abstract objectivity of the Heavens into the mundanity of the city streets. And if he chose to smash the verse form of his art against the cobblestones of Paris, it was precisely because the city was as much beyond his comprehension as his poems were to the man in the street. The Paris that he remembered was fast becoming a mythology as the Paris that met his senses morphed ever faster into a space that was not his. In short, Paris was no longer what it had once been. And yet, of course, Paris was still undeniably Paris, with all that this signified. The new poetics that Baudelaire created captured this tension between the Paris that was and the Paris that was not. It was a poetics to encapsulate this paradox, both overarching it and pulsing at its heart: it would simultaneously present Paris in its everyday, prosaic reality and re-present it in all its poetic associations.[3] The new poem symbolized a new critical stance in relation to the modern world and quickly became the instant-belated lens of Modernity itself: the oxymoronic ‘prose poem’ got both inside Paris (with the close-up of the developing art of photography) and soared above it (like the Montgolfière that adorned posters of the expositions universelles), capturing it doubly, (re)presenting it as the auto-antonymic capital of the alienating new urban experience.
The oxymoronic nature of the prose poem cannot be overstated—it is markedly not a prosaic form of poetry or a poetic form of prose. It makes no attempt to synthesize the binary terms of the albatross’s predicament. Instead, Paris is now both on the wing and on the ground, poetic and prosaic, at the same time. As Baudelaire notes in his prefatory letter to Arsène Houssaye, his collection of little prose poems, or Paris Spleen “has neither head nor tail, since, on the contrary, everything in it is both head and tail, alternately and reciprocally”.[4] In this way, every line of every prose poem serves no purpose other than to pose the conundrum of prose poetics, and in so doing to perform Parisian self-alterity. Thus, the poems typically balance on a central axis, ostensibly offering two distinct halves (a poetic one and a prosaic one). But on closer inspection, the poetic half exalts the Beauty of “things” and the prosaic half teems with capitalized Abstract Values; indeed, the central axis itself (marked by a knock on a door or a disingenuous adverb of concession) functions as a problematic limen, both demarcating and promoting transgression.
Nowhere is this structure more flagrantly displayed than in the French title itself, Les Petits Poèmes en prose : Le Spleen de Paris, which lends itself to a chiasmatic analysis. The axis is the colon that separates title from subtitle, and the two halves, thus formed, reference each other across it. Notice how the littleness of the prose poems is elevated by French title capitalization on the one side and how the visceral reality of spleen is identically altered on the other.[5] The initial oxymoron of the prose poem suggests, chiasmatically, that Paris (in all its glory) opposes spleen, but the capitalization of Paris, which cannot be written any other way, simultaneously veils and symbolizes its double meaning. Paris then both opposes spleen in the subtitle and picks up the upwards motion of Spleen (its elevation from the splenetic to the ethereal), tending to overarch the dynamics of the combined title. In this way, Paris equals prose poem, always already. Which means, of course, that in addition to being, always and only, prose poetry, the prose poems are also, always and only, Paris, whether their action is set in a city street, a desert island or nowhere at all. Hence, the famous “Any Where out of the World”, which is all about aspiration to travel and not about travel per se. For, in all the prose poems, intense motion (and counter-motion) is brought back to earth as powerfully as it transcends. This is the centrifugal and centripetal power of the city. And this is why prose poetry is, essentially and existentially, an urban form.
Alistair Rolls,
The University of Newcastle, NSW
[1] For a history of the British prose poem, see Nikki Santilli, Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002)
[2] Arguably, Paris was not only synonymous with Modernity as it unfolded in France, but the French capital’s ultra-reflexive reappraisal of itself made it metonymic of Modernity worldwide. See, for example, David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York; London: Routledge, 2003) and Patrice Higonnet, Paris, capitale du monde (Paris: Tallandier, 2006).
[3] For an excellent reading of presentation versus representation (or re-presentation) in Baudelaire’s prose poems, see Michel Covin, L’Homme de la rue : Essai sur la poétique baudelairienne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000).
[4] I am quoting here from Louise Varène’s translation of Les Petits Poèmes en prose : Le Spleen de Paris, published as Paris Spleen (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. IX.
[5] For a more detailed analysis of Baudelaire’s title along these lines, see Covin, op. cit.
Silencing Voice, Voicing Silence: A Review of Fish-Hair Woman
Silence
In her previous novel The Solemn Lantern Maker, Merlinda Bobis had developed what the literary critic Susan Sontag once called as an “aesthetic of silence”. Bobis’ sparse, economical style so unlike the usual lyricism of her prose reflected her central character’s very own muteness (aptly named Noland), as well as the difficulty of expressing what can hardly be represented in words, but perhaps only felt catachrestically. Noland’s grim story of child prostitution and abject poverty in the Philippines imposes silence because, and as Sontag argued, ‘ “silence” never ceases to imply its opposite and to depend on its presence.’[1] What happens out there in the so-called “Third World” thus looms large over our consciousness, disturbingly close from home – and in this silence, we as readers cannot but feel complicit:
There is no room for another time. The hut is too small even for the present. Life must be squeezed to pocket size, breath must be kept spare, so there’s enough left for the next day, so the walls hold up. Be frugal where life is fragile.[2]
What Sontag viewed as a form of ‘impoverished art, purged by silence’[3] also constituted an attempt by the author of The Solemn Lantern Maker to paradoxically draw attention to the particular timbre of her literary voice, an act of resistance in the face of censure and overdetermined readings of her work. This gesture was similar, albeit in another context, to Arte Povera’s minimalism in the late 60s as a means of thwarting philistine approaches to use-value and the seamless transparency of meaning in art. In her essay, ‘‘Voice-Niche-Brand: Marketing Asian-Australianness’, Bobis quotes Frederic Jameson on the work of Ernest Hemingway to remind that “ethnic” writers, beyond their nationality or gender, are first and foremost artists in their own right.
It is a mistake to think that [his books] deal essentially with such things as courage, love, and death; in reality, their deepest subject is simply the writing of a certain type of sentence, the practice of a determinate style.[4]
The “Gate”
While this is not a review of The Solemn Lantern Maker, this novel and the aesthetic of silence impregnating it informs in turn the story behind Bobis’ first (and until now) unpublished novel Fish-Hair Woman (2011). If her previous novel represented an outcry of a mute sort, and had to be first published in the United States after facing initial rejection in Australia, Fish-Hair Woman stands as revenge against fate and what Bobis defined elsewhere in a recent essay as the “gatekeepers” of the Australian publishing industry. In effect, it took more than seventeen years for the novel to be published, interspersed by multiple rejections, editing, and ‘silence.’[5]
As it happens, the novel’s chief “vice” is that it is set in a militarised village in the Philippines during the Filipino government’s crackdown on communist insurgency from the late 70s onwards, and that, therefore, Australia and the “Australian story” appear marginalised. Bobis prefers to deal instead with subaltern voices and to ‘privilege the underclass – peasants, labourers, and the like – as agents of historical change’[6] in what represents a decolonising gesture akin to the work of Filipino scholars known as Pantayong Pananaw (‘for-us-from-us’ perspective).
The culture industry and its tendency towards compartmentalisation does not wish a diasporic author like Bobis to “dabble” with style; neither is it inclined to giving full reign to the diasporic voice unless it is domesticated, made heimlich. The dominant paradigm for the Asian Australian author has so far been the “migrant story”, a movement from A (Asia) to B (Australia), and sometimes back to A so as to remind the reader that the “Asian story” is Australian enough but not quite. In so doing, the Australian “gate” is safeguarded while “enriched” at the same time. However, Fish-Hair Woman, like Simone Lazaroo’s Sustenance (2010) a year before, reverses this movement in a “conspiratorial” attempt (Bobis’ own term) to regionalize Australian identities and open the floodgates by immersing white Australian characters in foreign, menacing Asian settings instead.
In so doing, the garde-fou (French for parapet, literally “madness keeper”) is let loose, perhaps irreversibly, as an effect of globalising trends and the fact that (Asian) Australian authors are now transnational in what may be deemed a post-diasporic world. In this new paradigm, the hyphen in Asian-Australia is not a straightforward road from A to B that can be easily co-opted into the migrant narrative, but a conflictive zone of incommensurability and “abject” resistance writing back to the gatekeepers of the industry.
Behind the Philippine Commercial and Industrial Bank, among the garbage bags, a vagrant is abusing the security guard. […] He’d been scavenging, throwing out ‘unusable’ garbage onto the street before the guard found him. […] Suddenly, the vagrant jumps up, gripping Luke’s arm and shouting, ‘Mr Amerkano, Mr Amerkano, my bank, my bank!’ He’s pointing to the garbage, demanding affirmation. (119)
As Bobis reflects in her essay: ‘Should one exit from the diasporic narrative to break this bind? Why not shift the gate?’[7] This is what Bobis does in Fish-Hair Woman, and by shifting the gate she also shifts perspectives. The novel starts off in the century-old tradition of an ‘Australian thriller about a past crisis in some Asian country [with] the questing Australian male (usually) who was tempted and challenged, and muddled through mayhem.’[8] Centered on the mysterious disappearance of Australian writer Tony McIntyre in the Philippines and his son Luke who sets out to find him, and with all the ingredients of the oriental thriller in place – including a revolution, a corrupt leader, and a love affair with one of the “natives” – Fish-Hair Woman however quickly departs from what the Australian literary critic Alison Broinowski once described as ‘the fictional Asia we used to know and love (or not know and fear).’[9]
It is in that sense that this novel can be deemed “avant-gardiste”, that is, at once one “story ahead” and standing before, rather than inside or outside, the gate.
Luke freezes, unable to look away from the man’s demented eyes, the whites turned blue by the light. Stella shouts at the vagrant to back off, he does, and she grabs Luke and they both run to the Australia Centre. Behind them the altercation continues: ‘My bank, my bank!’
She leans against the silver column, both hands catching her brow. ‘I’m sorry…I’m sorry for my country.’
She’s apologising to me? But Luke misses the tone of despair in which he does not even figure. (119-120) (italics mine)
“Text-ility”
Merlinda Bobis has often described herself as a “border lover” with a deeply humanist and planetary vision. Her work travels wide and far, relentlessly straddling various art forms, genres, languages and cultures, inscribing difference and alterity in place of reified categorisations and the strangleholds of identity-thinking as few writers have been able to. For Bobis, literature starts with the body, ‘a technique which is not just of the word, but of the body.’[10] Through the bodily metaphor of hair-growing, weaving and unknotting, remembering and forgetting, the reader is caught into the rhizomic nets of “text-ility” in this magico-realist tale of a woman with twelve metre-long hair who fishes out the dead river bodies of a torn cultural fabric, the product of a ‘senseless war’ (9).
My memories weave in and out of death and love. […] I wept over the enemy as my hair grew, its red and black strands shooting from all ventricles up to the scalp, to declare that the heartspace is not just the size of a fist, because each encounter threads a million others. The capillaries of love and war flow into each other, into a handspan of hair. (142)
While we are told that there is no hero in this story, with ‘too many stories weaving into each other, only to unweave themselves at each telling,’ (259) there are also too many vividly painted characters in this family saga à la Garcia Marquez to give them full justice here. The novel spans across three decades and continents, from the Marcos regime’s “Total War” against the Maoist New People’s Army (NPA), the military wing of the Communist Party, through to the February 1986 People Power Revolution and onto the year 1997, as Luke flies to the Philippines from Sydney on a cryptic note sent his father after thirteen years of silence that the latter is dying. There he meets instead with Dr. Alvarado, just returned from years of political exile in Hawaii and who claims to have known his father very well.
These are stories that demand to be told – and heard – stories all too familiar for anyone who is aware that ‘beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror’ (6); stories of farmers’ expropriation, being pushed off their land and turned into landless wage labourers by power-greedy mestizo elites like Dr. Alvarado, alias Governor Estradero and his private army, the Anghel de la Guardia; stories of rape, torture and murder by the State with the complicit backing of the West, including Australia; stories of first-world do-gooders and eco-tourists who ‘look for villages still at one with nature, unadulterated by progress [but] who might just run into problems if the farmer in the village suddenly demands. ‘But I want your BMW too, and your toilets that flush and all your wonderful amenities. Is this possible?’ (121). For those who refuse to hear and see, Bobis will ‘weave an alternative tale about us nice folks brewing this exotic spot with coffee cups on our heads and dancing up a fiesta. A postcard shot if you wish…so you can quell your shudder with a longing sigh for this village in the East.’ (57)
Voice
Finally, there is the author’s own meta-story, Bobis’ awareness that she, too, is partly complicit in that ‘your [her] author is only interested in saving a white man [Luke’s father]’ (227). Professor Inez Carillo’s husband was murdered while investigating on the deaths of the villagers of Iraya, north of the island of Luzon, where Bobis was born. As she further explains to the Australian diplomat Matt Baker: ‘the worst are our own expatriate writers, those migratory birds. First they abandon us to fly to greener pastures, then return as vultures to feed on our despair. Then they take off again. Take, then take off.’ (226)
In this complicity, we as readers, along with Bobis’s fish-hair woman, cannot but feel silent – an oxymoronic act of penitence for an author and a book with so fulsome and generous a voice that it leaves one emptied out at the reading end.
But can words ever rewrite a landscape? Can the berries suddenly uncrimson with talk? Can bullets be swallowed back by the gun? Can hearts unbreak, because for a moment its ventricles are confused at the sight of a refurbished coffee grove, besieged by peace and domesticity?
I can dive a hundred times into the river, fish out this or that beloved and tenderly wrap a body with my hair, then croon to it in futile language such as this, but when I lay the dead at the feet of kin and lovers, their grief will just shame my attempt to save it from dumbness. Listen to the mute eloquence that trails all losses, the undeclaimed umbrage at having been had by life. This is a silence no one can ever write and least of rewrite. (58)
[1] Sontag, Susan. ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’. Styles of Radical Will, Penguin Classics, 2009, p. 11.
[2] Bobis, Merlinda. The Solemn Lanter Maker, Pier 9, 2008, p. 24.
[4] Bobis, Merlinda.‘Voice-Niche-Brand: Marketing Asian-Australianness’, Australian Humanities Review, Issue 45, Nov 2008, p. 119
[5] Bobis, Merlinda. ‘The Asian Conspiracy: Deploying Voice/ Deploying Story’, Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3, Oct 2010, p. 15.
[6] Reyes, Portia L. ‘Fighting Over A Nation: Theorizing a Filipino Historiography’, Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3, 2008, p. 241.
[7] Bobis, Merlinda. The Asian Conspiracy, opcit, p. 10.
[8] Broinowski, Alison. ‘The No-Name Australians and the Missing Subaltern: Asian Australian Fiction’, Asian Australian Identities Conference, 27-29 September 1999.
New and Selected texts are increasingly popular with well-established poets and are, in fact, a good way for readers to gain an insight into their manifestos and technical development. This is particularly so in the case of Gig Ryan, who, as a poet, is judiciously enigmatic and always one step ahead of her readership. In this collection, Ryan has put together her choice of landmark poems from her previous five books and added a section of new poems written since then.
In her first collection, The Division of Anger (1980), appear most of the hallmarks of Ryan’s technique and avant-garde approach to her subject matter − the metaphysical similes, the fractured syntax (resisting any kind of predictability) and the almost complete absence of lyricism. Clichés and worn-out tropes are mockingly undercut. Nowhere is this more evident than in the iconic “If I Had A Gun,” which concludes the selection from this book.
Ryan’s similes in her early poems rely on shock value and violence, sometimes unerring in their aptness (“His sincerity clacking like chainmail”; “His eyes/ romantic as aluminium strewn against a sea-wall”), sometimes bizarre (“the water lies down like a saint”; “worries like a tablet”), but never willing to be ignored. At times this full-on technique may irritate, threaten to overwhelm the reader with its close-packed mixed similes, but bombardment may well be the intention, or at least the outcome, as in the poem “Getting It”:
He kisses, his pale guilt blowing
like a flower. You’re luxurious, unsure.
Your eyes opening like telescopes
on a clean brain.
You’re so silly in the kitchen, like a new appliance.
(p.5)
More complex, and equally effective, are similes that merge into metaphor (“I will go down into the black water/ and peel its wetness back into the shore/ where it will shiver like a dress”). In later collections, Ryan uses similes more sparingly, often developing them into extended metaphors that control the poem as a whole.
The Division of Anger and the next two collections, Manners of an Astronaut (1984) and The Last Interior (1986), share a subject matter of inner-city politics, of sex, drugs and jazz, and an ‘angry’ take on conformity, further disrupting the comfort-zone of the reader. Dramatic monologues intensify the ironic stance of the poet/persona. In “The Buddha Speaks,” a serious message underlies the flippant exterior:
I have eliminated the possibility of pain.
The slopes are crawling with pain.
Any movement, after all, is futile,
so I have cut down on aid generally
and talked myself out of violent feelings
(p.31)
In “Half Hill / Half…”, one of the best poems in this section (Manners of an Astronaut):
The bars of the street go to the new next place
where your yearly emotion won’t come
and don’t hail me like letters. You don’t need to.
I mean, you’ve lined the walls and sucked drugs.
………………………………………………………………….
The world holds you in place like hairspray.
I walk home stoned, eating my favourite apple,
hearing birds fall out of trees,
super-conscious of walking.
How can you explain boredom in 10 minutes?
(p.40)
The short selection from The Last Interior features a number of dramatic monologues utilising phatic ‘nothings’, clichés and conventional rhetoric, sometimes curtailed to emphasise the predictability of colloquial conversation. Likewise, the endings of poems are incomplete, not needing completion (“I mean, that’s not correct etiquette is it. If I/ could just find out the correct behaviour, the pattern,/ and learn it and learn it”; “My religion’s too strong inme, though he turned at the end,/ a gesture. He was that sort, you know,/ £5, you got roses./ the handsomest man I ever”).
Excavation (1990) shows a more measured and integral use of simile, a widening of perspective and a political component. Examples in this New andSelected text include “On first looking into Fairfax’s Herald” and “1965.” In the whimsical “Six Goodbyes”:
Surf music seeps from the separated father’s flat
A madman in the lane shouts nothing
The walls shudder with the traffic
The Government doesn’t know you from a bar
I plug my ears with wax to hear the sirens
Every second weekend his kids invent a yard
between stumps of furniture, a tin shed and a gate
The fridge is tanked with frost
(p.69)
In poems like “Napoleon,” “Penelope” and “Achilleus,” historical and legendary figures begin to make their appearance, albeit in modern guise, exploding the conventions/pretensions of love and its conformities. In later collections, there’s a shift in the functioning of such figures. “Electra to Clytemnestra” and “Ismene to Antigone” (from Heroic Money), while relying on a similar approach, together provide a balanced argument on the subject. The new poems “Ismene” and “Antigone,” the imagistic references increasingly double-edged (“your wine-dark car turning in the drive”), contrast attitudes of the two sisters to the ‘truths’ embedded in their mythologies.
The collection Pure and Applied, which won the 1999 Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry, is strongly represented here, believed to be Ryan’s best book to date. Again we come to grips with dramatic monologues, ironised by representational handling of the subjects’ own rhythms of speech and confessional stance. In “London Saver,” for example:
probably Istanbul or Spain the guys’re divine
There used to be an eleven but they’ve all pitched off
into Outer Mongolia or something She throws the fags
It was lashing everywhere when I clicked the tickets
deciding on a country
(p.84)
And in “Eating Vietnamese,” “This restaurant’s divine They’re refugees/ Asians are beautiful don’t you think, quite hairless/ She wore apricot chiffon There were kids everywhere/ So demanding” (p.106). “Interest Rates” is even more savage in its revelation of personae through self-delusion and banal diatribe:
‘I used to be like you, full of icy self-regard
but life monotonously catches up and culls you
and all the others’ Things begin to glow
like your own house, car, and love’s equivalent
You get sick of being alone and raddled, and he’s a real pet
…isn’t he? So I buckled under, got a richly job
and I’m, you know, fulfilled. Before that it was just a covey of unrealistic aims
Everybody told me.
He dusted me off
who had once been lost
Now it’s solid, tangible
The baby’s like cement to me
Otherwise the million things I wanted every cider brick
I’d be just drifting or immersed’
(p.104)
By contrast, “Two Leaders” returns to the authorial voice, exposing these easily-recognised political figures with considerable contempt. The pièce de résistance, however, is the title poem “Pure and Applied,” denouncing the news media in different styles and voices.
Heroic Money, shortlisted for the 2002 NSW Premier’s Prize for Poetry, seems stylistically a bridging text between what has gone before and what is to come. Poems evince the characters of the ancient Athenian world but also continue to take in contemporary cultural constructs. “Eurydice’s Suburb” (pre-empting, perhaps, Adamson’s lambent “Eurydice in Sydney,” though located differently) is an assured portrait:
The wings of home enfold you and lock
under the city’s poisoned coronet or halo
You gaze at the supermarket’s petrified food
and respond like a zombie to the past’s ghosts
and semblance of meaning
(p.133)
“Profile” gives us an exposé of the poetry world in dramatic monologue form, some of the details of which may suggest an aspect of self-mockery or, at least, a well-trodden path :
‘I started out with a frayed and urgent lyric
I suppose it was a comparative poverty
then learning appealed to me, though the past scared
then the Orpheus poems
a sort of self-commentary
You’ll see in my second book how I’ve
tackled national themes
(p.140)
When we come to the new poems, there’s considerable continuity, both of theme and style. Some of the poems appear to move in the direction of new lyricism (“The Last Spring”, “Ismene”, “Antigone”), until the reader is confronted with the way they function to explode stereotypes, “illustrating a cliché.” There is more inter-textual wordplay (from poets, proverbs, legends, nursery rhymes), and many opportune similes and metaphors. With surreal and unsettling imagery, the poem “Iphigenia” both evokes and dismisses a nostalgic preoccupation with the past. It is worth quoting in full:
Ships slinged in low elastic waters knock
who chug you to the altar
where old blood crumbles.
Orange fire tassels air.
You look out from the coast
back when twisting horses rise…
and clay figurines scout on your shelves
or back, lost geraniums shimmered August
and then expunge, then ‘fluey tenants later, then tied between two screens
your binary presence more real than soft dawn
when ritual tatters
and reversible names converse over the galloping maps.
Her teary pillar shrives a velour sea.
Your hair tacked with daphne and myrtle. Birds creak, a charmer −
nett bridegroom, mock stag −
to keeling ships, to dimple wind
coins close your eyes
(p.197)
At the end of the collection, there is a brief page of notes, referencing a handful of allusions. At the risk of advocating the scenario of the poem “Profile” (“Later I was avant-garde/ You can read the accompanying text’s/ explication of process”), I feel that a few more references might help the reader. Not too many, because in the end Ryan’s impact relies more on an apprehension of superb poetry than on textual exegesis.
MARGARET BRADSTOCK has five published collections of poetry, including The Pomelo Tree (awarded the Wesley Michel Wright Prize), Coast (2005) and How Like the Past (2009). Her sixth collection, Barnacle Rock, is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann in 2013. Margaret recently edited Antipodes, the first anthology of Aboriginal and white poetic responses to “settlement” (Phoenix, 2011).
A salient quality of the Ern Malley hoax is its incommensurability. There is something about it that, no matter how hard we try, how far we go, where we look, will never be properly explicated, never entirely understood. This quality is shared by the poems but this isn’t unusual with good poetry; whereas those works the circumstances of whose composition remain enigmatic are rather fewer: Coleridge’s Kubla Khan is the most famous example. It is the mysterium surrounding the writing of the Ern Malley poems, as much as the poems themselves, that has kept people coming back to them; and now we have, in David Brooks’ wonderful The Sons of Clovis, a sustained attempt at an inquiry into that particular circumstance.
Brooks says at the outset—and who could deny it?—that we would be foolish to take at their word admitted hoaxers when they describe the way they made their hoax poems. If they invented a poet and his poems, might they not also have invented the circumstances in which (they say) the said poems were composed? Of course they might. They probably did. Not that Brooks attempts to deny the Saturday afternoon in the Victoria Barracks alibi; he is after something larger and far more interesting: a genealogy for the poems themselves, their DNA perhaps: where, as poems, do they come from, what is their provenance, what their affinities and their contraries?
His suggestion, maugre the received version—the poems represent a kind of DIY antipodean surrealism mixed in with a bit of impromptu automatic writing indulged in by a couple of bored soldier-poets on a lark—is that their roots lie principally in the writing of the French Symbolistes; and that the means of their transmission can be traced, via Australian poet Christopher Brennan, into the early work of the hoaxers, James McAuley and Harold Stewart. As the sub-title indicates (‘Ern Malley, Adoré Floupette and a secret history of Australian poetry’), Brooks feels he has discovered, in the French hoax poet Floupette, an actual precursor for Ernest Lalor Malley. Not the sole precursor—one of the most entertaining things about this very entertaining book is its discussion of other literary hoaxes, including an illuminating account of the Demidenko Affair—but certainly the main one.
It seems on the face of it an audacious speculation, difficult to sustain, let alone prove; but this is where the secret history becomes so fascinating. Christopher Brennan, it turns out, corresponded with Stéphane Mallarmé in the late nineteenth century. He owned a copy of Les Déliquescences by Adoré Floupette (Paris, 1885), perhaps acquired during his European travels in the 1890s and certainly the only one in Australia at that time; astonishingly, the original of two versions of the painting by Evariste-Vital Luminais that gives its title to the first poem in Floupette’s collection—Les énervés de Jumièges—is in the Art Gallery of NSW and has been since it was purchased on behalf of the gallery, for an unknown sum, by an unknown person, in Paris in 1886. This is the same work that, under its alternate title, Brooks uses for his book.
James McAuley, in the immediate pre-war years, wrote his MA thesis on the Symbolistes. At around the same time Harold Stewart was spending time in the State Library of NSW copying out, by hand, poems by Mallarmé and other French poets, which he then translated and published in student magazines. Whether either had in fact read Floupette, or even knew of his existence, is more difficult to establish but Brooks does show that McAuley, at least, could have done so: Brennan’s library, containing Les Déliquescences, was available to him.
The point of these connections is that they allow the speculation that, in creating Ern Malley, the hoaxers were, in part, indulging in a Yeatsian argument with their own younger poetic selves. This is a central point in Brooks’ thesis, one he develops in detail, and credibly, over the course of the book; and it gives a possible answer to the question as to why the Malley poems continue to emit such a strong emotional charge: they are not simply a hoax, they are not just parody. They stem directly from the chaos of two versions of the poetic unconscious where psycho-sexual battles are fought and lost or won.
As Brooks follows this line—with many twists and turns and a number of digressions, all of which are enlightening—a curious thing happens: one of the hoaxers, Harold Stewart, more or less disappears into the shadow cast by the other, James McAuley. It does seem likely that McAuley was the senior partner; it’s certainly the case that he is much better known in Australia than Stewart, who spent the second part of his life in Japan and whose later work is obscure and in some cases still unpublished. But you can’t help thinking also that McAuley, the tortured Anglo-Catholic alcoholic, the literary cold warrior, the politician of poetics, is more susceptible of analysis than the semi-retired, comprehensively veiled, homosexual Buddhist living anonymously in Kyoto.
McAuley, you come to feel as you read through The Sons of Clovis, is the sole clerk of [his, that is Malley’s] metamorphosis; while Stewart is not just hidden but, in Brooks’ own words, hiding something, perhaps even from himself. I put this forward, not as a criticism of the book so much as an index of how the Ern Malley imbroglio continues to elude explication, even in the consciousness of as sophisticated and erudite a commentator as Brooks. As I read on, and there was less and less about him, I found myself thinking more and more of Harold Stewart: as if he were yin to McCauley’s yang; the secret heart of the poems perhaps; the key to their darkness, their obsessive invocation of absence and loss.
Brooks is a superb close reader of texts and much of the interest of the book lies in his ability to get inside the words of poets—Malley is by no means the only one he eviscerates—and also in the way he casts his net wide enough to include in the discussion figures as disparate as Frank O’Hara on Manus Island and Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon; but there isn’t any mention of an intriguing adjunct to the Malley poems: the eleven, perhaps twelve (one seems to have been lost) Ern Malley collages put together by Harold Stewart some time after the poems were written. Perhaps they are too faux-surrealist to be of real interest, though I still like the iteration of wraithy, disembodied hands therein. They suggest the twinning of McAuley and Stewart: some kind of intrinsic relationship which meant that each supplied the other’s lack. And that together they made a third.
And twinning is the point: the sons of Clovis, two mutilated young men wounded and set adrift by their own mother on the waters of the Seine, recur as avatars through Brooks’ book; which, inter alia, is preternaturally alive to correspondences of many kinds. His language crackles off the page with a type of manic intensity that recalls the ticks of a Touretter. There are asides upon asides, parentheticals within parentheticals, footnotes on footnotes: indeed, early on he distinguishes, typographically, between crucial and non-crucial footnotes in an attempt to compel the reader’s attention towards the former.
He also suggests at several points that readers might wish to skip a chapter or two and obligingly informs you where you should go to pick up the main line of the narrative. These provocations, which I ignored (I read everything, including the non-crucial footnotes), are in a confidential tone of voice which, as it were, ushers you through a hall of mirrors pointing out reflections within reflections within reflections; and remarking on those junctures where the maze discloses a recursive, indeed infinite, regression.
Some of these lead to alternate (or parallel) traditions, including one in which Ern Malley influences Frank O’Hara and John Ashbury who then, in appropriately clandestine fashion, transmit the influence back, via Donald Allen’s epochal anthology, to Australian poets of the Generation of ’68: a kind of future in the past that is both credible and a revelation of the occult and serendipitous manner in which literary influence, skipping time, from self to fractured self, does in fact work.
I don’t think I’ve enjoyed an excursion into Malley land as much as this; it deserves to stand next to Michael Heyward’s very different (and at one stage apparently definitive) The Ern Malley Affair (1993); and some other examples of a small but compelling genre: works like Nick Groom’s The Forger’s Shadow (2002) which take as their subject the always fertile field of literary forgery, frauds and hoaxes; and show us how closely skeined together, indeed Janus-faced, are the twinned acts of faking and making.
By invitation this paper was presented at The Political Imagination, a Conference on Poetry held by in April 2012 at Monash and Deakin University co-ordinated by Dr Ali Alizadeh, Dr Ann Vickery and Professor Lyn McCredden. I wanted it to be considered for a journal of literary scholarship and so, after some consideration, I submitted it to an on-line refereed journal. Notwithstanding my independently-situated research the essay was returned to me within four days without readers’ reports and with the following comment:
Thank you for your submission to —-. After an initial read, the editors feel that —- isn’t the best match for your submission. Although very interesting and well-written, the piece would be better suited to a cultural studies or postcolonial theory journal. We do hope that you pursue publication with a different journal, one that could offer a better fit for your article. Thank you very much for your interest in contributing to —- .
This may be fortuitous as Mascara has, I suspect, a wider national readership than the journal in question. I don’t think the concerns this essay raises should be quarantined.
The Poetics of Subalternity
This essay attempts to assemble a radical critique of contemporary Australian literature, which in its orientation and its networks of power and interest inaugurates itself as a subject in the guise of nationalism while ignoring the divisions of cultural capital and labour. This is an exclusive and essentially White paradigm that articulates difference in Euro-Imperialist terms, elaborating discourses of difference, counter-narratives, multiculturalism, postcolonialism and non-determination while concealing its agency, its neo-colonisation and domination of Otherness. And by “Other” I am referring generally to those marginalised and disempowered by the narratives of Australian literature, history, law, political economy and adopted ideology (of the West, that is) and I am speaking as an Asian Australian writer unfortunately privy to the gatekeepers of Australian literary culture. I’ll have to ask you to indulge me in that my essay is an intentionally polemic commentary, embedded in a space I enter as a writer of colour, hybridity and Asian background rather than as Anglo-academic or cultural theorist. And I make this entreaty because in advancing my argument I am aware of causing dichotomies to arise within the trace of this text.
So how does the term “subalternity” come into all of this? I would like to argue that Spivakian subalternity emphasises the notions of economic disenfranchisement and how representation of such groups by the empowered intellectual West is co-opted into a cultural domination. I argue that this parallels our Australian postcolonial context with respect to how disenfranchised groups are being represented.
For instance Australian literary and specifically poetic representations of Asia are most frequently configured from European philosophical perspectives on ethnography, desire, grammatology, materiality etc. They may appropriate or fetishize Asian culture or themes as objects of knowledge. Some poetic representations are touristic or voyeuristic. Invariably they fail to articulate the complex sense of inheritance and belonging embodied in Asian-Australian identity. More broadly speaking, there is a lacuna in the representation of the Asian Australian presence in our literature across all genres. Relatively few numbers of Asian-Australians are being supported for cultural residencies through Asialink or indeed being nominated for awards or being reviewed in mainstream publications and journals. They are not able to hold the same expectations as their Anglo-Australian colleagues. Does this make them subaltern? No, that is not my point. Many of these imbalances reflect institutional legacies but they also constitute a covert discourse which privileges, in economic and cultural terms, coteries of race and class. Ouyang Yu’s essays on multiculturalism “Absence Asia: What’s Wrong With Australia?” first brought my attention to these alarming discrepancies. Yu’s oeuvre has since been absorbed into the postmodern mainstream, abetted by lines of patriarchal mobility and access denied to those marginalised.
So why have I chosen this seemingly obscure term? I turn to Spivak for three reasons. Firstly because she inspires me as a poet of philosophy and multi-lingual translator of Derrida, whose work in relativising the transcendental I deeply admire for its ethical applications and anti-logocentrism. Secondly because she is an engaged feminist who has critiqued the global alliance politics among women of dominant social and cultural groups, and thirdly because she is a diasporic South Asian; if not a Goan, she is a Bengali, so to reference her work opens up for me a transnational and interdisciplinary dialogue with which I can connect. Spivak provides us with a brilliant methodology, a set of analytic tools, to work towards the establishment of agency and the lines of mobility and to situate the body as the site of metonymy and resistance.
If we are to describe a poetics of subalternity we need to consider the various resonances of the term “subaltern”. The term was used by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci as a synonym for subordination of the rural based southern Italian peasantry in his memoir Prison Notebooks, however translators point out that during Gramsci’s fascist incarceration, the term ‘subaltern’ was a code word for the Marxist term proletariat, and also that at times Gramsci uses the term to mean ‘instrumental’. If so this complicates the Marxist notion of the proletariat being revolutionary in character as a result of their economic conditions but it does invite an appreciation of the common nature of the subaltern, their intrinsic weaknesses and strengths. For the Subaltern Studies Collective, the term was used to describe a class or group of contingent militant activism which was heterogeneous and discontinuously organised compared to the more national agitation during anti-Partition and Independence resistance, yet who were unable to represent themselves in the elite historiography. Subaltern Studies historians point out that such a history is grounded in British colonial ideology. These historians, people like Guha and Chakrabarty, attempted to recuperate the consciousness and intent of the subaltern in a positivist way, and moreover they reframed the social and political changes, to quote Spivak:
“ in relation to histories of domination and exploitation rather than within the great modes-of-production narrative”
(CSS )
So while their postcolonial framework provides an interpretation that exceeds the Marxist modes of progression from feudalism to capitalism, Spivak critiques their discourse which she sees as “insidiously objectifying” the subaltern, thus positioning her inquiry in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
But Spivak’s main concern is with the occlusions in political thinking by the Western male intellectual as proxy for the disempowered. Contentiously she critiques Deleuze and Foucault of being blind to the international division of labour. She critiques them for conflating the desire of the oppressed with the interests of the radical Western intellectual, thereby essentialising the concepts of power and desire to construct an undivided political subject “the oppressed who can know and speak for themselves.” She deconstructs representation, emphasising its double meaning, political representation being interdependent of aesthetic representation and she argues that it is from beyond both of these spaces that oppressed subjects speak, act and know for themselves. Now clearly a concept such as this has resonance with an Asian Australian poetics, which is a marginalised poetics. Apart from tokenism, what kind of endorsements or validity do these groups receive in terms of their political representation vis-a-vis other cultural subjects or agents? Aesthetic representation is related but not the same as its political counterpart. What are the obstructions and limitations being imposed upon us, and by who? Why are there only certain kinds of narratives being articulated and whose narratives are they? Who are the arbiters determining our cultural paradigms? How come our representing academics and creative writers remain so quarantined? Let’s stop to consider how many marginalised writers simply leave this country or become economically and physically exhausted, if not overwhelmed by insanity at the kind of indifference that their work receives. I’d like to suggest that this constitutes a form of epistemic violence, a set of pathologies imposed by neo-colonialism which critics like Fanon alludes to in his postcolonial classic, Wretched of the Earth.
If you require further evidence consider how our aesthetic representation has been repressed and Orientalised; examples of this include the Windchimes anthology, which contains many more Anglo-Australian poets writing about Asia than Asian poets, an imbalance that Kim Cheng Boey et al. are hoping to address in a forthcoming Puncher and Wattmann Anthology. It is in this respect that Spivak asserts that subalternity is a position without identity, without access to lines of social or cultural mobility. This is not to say that the subaltern cannot speak. The essential argument of Spivak is that when the gendered subaltern performs an act of resistance without the infrastructure that would make us recognise resistance, her act goes unnoticed, it is not registered as a sovereign speech act. Or in other words, it is not that she cannot act or speak, it is that there is nobody listening. Subalternity provides us with a powerful metaphor then. It enables us to more fully acknowledge that it is the sovereign speech act, the endorsement, the registration of identity within speech that ultimately confers agency or subjectship.
What does this mean for us? The implications are that to simply ventriloquise the Other as a gesture of empathy or refined embarrassment is to conceal one’s own conspiracy with the kinds of linear, institutionalised narratives that exclude the Other. What needs to happen is the infrastructure to enable subject formation of those marginalised and disenfranchised. It’s intriguing that Spivak advocates a redistribution of cultural capital through rehabilitated education. She emphasises the importance of imaginative constructs which enable us learn from the subaltern, to become sensitive to the fact the reason is not our sole European master, that there is no singularity of reason but rather many kinds of reason and that we can foster this kind of suppleness in our minds. But this suppleness would require both a resistance and a negotiation. Because to be tolerant without resistance is ultimately to transcendentalise the belief or territory on which we stand, but this desire can be halted or transgressed if we follow the traces of other texts and if we keep in mind the traces of suffering, trauma and epistemic violence. It’s in this respect that subalternity aligns itself with deconstructionism.
Spivak adopts a revisionist critique and reconstruction of Marxism thinking in order to make it relevant to the postcolonial world. But this is complicated by the situation where colonisation is no longer being driven by nationalism but by transnational economic interests in globalisation. The relationship between colonist and colonised is no longer simply the relationship between Empire and metropolis, though we also need to consider the relationship between emerging nationalism and globalisation through foreign policy. Literary critics like Jahan Ramazani proposes that it is from a transnational or cross-cultural framework of analysis that we need to consider the ruptures of decolonisation, migration, diaspora. In his book A Transnational Poetics he argues boldly for a reconceptualization of 21st century poetics straddling various geographic, historic and cultural divides, a circuitry between global North and South, East and West. While he acknowledges the homogenising model of globalisation, his aesthetic analysis eruditely maps the confluences that exceed national paradigms. But there is a difference between the concept of transnationalism and the category of ‘A Transnationlist Poetics’ which Ramazani undertakes with what becomes an essentialising discourse from which the subaltern is discussed but conspicuously absent.
Ramazani’s analysis is inclusive of postcolonial criticism, and beautifully traces the Trans-atlantic modernist tradition and is particularly strong in its exegesis of certain elements: decolonisation, mourning, modernist bricolage. Arguably the book describes but does not sufficiently differentiate its own categories of “postcolonial”, “translocal”, “diaspora” “migration” While it celebrates an energetic circuitry, “the rich self-divisions and split-affiliations, the imaginative exuberance” (162) of cross-cultural forms, its focus is to universalise the poetry of transition, decentering and renaming, and it fails to adequately describe those excluded or marginalised by its own paradigms. While referencing various appropriate historical and political events it is underpinned by a political tolerance and by a capitalist interest in the expansion of its own burgeoning field of literary criticism. If postcoloniality is the condition of a comprador groups of Western-trained intelligentsia mediating between the third world and the West through cultural capital as Appiah claims (132) then a transnationalist poetics may well constitute a similar group mediating through global networks for their own benefit in a post-political mis-en-scene. It may be a group who consider themselves politically, geographically, culturally and linguistically radical, while not necessarily being anti-capitalist or committed to developing a more democratic cultural sphere.
Can we even consider Australian poetics to be transnational? I think journals like Cordite with their Australia-Korea feature in particular, and journals like Mascara are leaning strongly in this direction. Meanjin has published many Asian writers and Australian Poetry Journal has made a promising start. Southerly, under the editorship of David Brooks and Kate Lilley has run recent issues on Transnational Mobilities, India, China, Indigenous Literature showcasing a diversity of counter-nationalist narratives emerging in this country. I feel that Overland’s focus is more local though the journal undoubtedly publishes some migrant and Indigenous writers. The experimentalism is risk-taking but is it too narrowly pitched? What about journals like Australian Book Review, Kill Your Darlings, Westerly, Island, Wet Ink, Griffith Review? Let’s consider the publishers. Thankfully some, like Vagabond, 5IP, UQP and Giramondo have supported collections by a sprinkling of migrant poets. But overall, the trend has and continues to be towards the European migrant over the coloured or Asian Australian reflecting the entrenched cultural legacies of the racist White Australian Immigration policy, which took 25 years to legally dismantle. Some scholars, like postcolonial feminist, Mridula Nath Chakraborty from UWS have gone so far as to ask the rhetorical question, “Which Asian are we talking about?”
But even if there are forays into the Asian encounter, how deeply does Australian poetics engage with this Otherness? My research has been external to a pedagogical space, though dallying with it in a sense. I have studied philosophy, theory and creative writing at a graduate level but my deepest influences have been drawn from my independent study of Hinduism and Buddhism. They are comparative spiritual practices in which the notions of time, self, birth, decay, dream, wakefulness and reality differ markedly from Western configurations, where logic, rationality and language take primacy. In this respect the craft of many Asian writers may be evaluated in negative terms such that sensuality or perceptual expression is described as ‘exotic’, ‘ephemeral’, ‘transcendental’ or even ‘anthropomorphic.’ This kind of Orientalist, colonial view of Asia by Australia infuses many of our literary encounters to varying extents. Both Said and Spivak have argued that writing as a cultured and gendered space is colonised by language and its philosophical assumptions, preserving the West as its subject and method. As Said reminds us, in 1914, 85% of the earth’s surface was under European control. Said applauds writing as a decolonising practice. In Culture and Imperialism Said describes the ideological resistance which extends and legitimises a fundamentally political and legal process:
“Culture played a very important indeed indispensable role” (221) in validating and justifying Empire, securing it, as well as in eroding and undermining it. Unlike some Third World theorists, like Chinwezu, who propose a poetics that is purged of foreign contamination in the guise of European models, diction, imagery and tones, for Said cross-cultural affiliations and hybridity are crucial to the poetry of decolonisation.
We are familiar with strategies of hybridity which can be performative and subversive of speech acts, materially and symbolically, but I’d like to reference métissage as an interstitial space, an interlacing between cultures and languages, between genres, texts, identities, praxis. If subalternity as a concept can metonymise the Subject of its own text, so métissage can be a metaphor for the creative strategy of fluidity, of braiding. Métissage is performative, inquiring, discursive, ambivalent, narrational often autobiographical, situated, ethical and embodied. I think of the bricolage of Adam Aitken, or Sudesh Mishra; the cross-cultural narratives of Miriam-Wei Wei Lo; the post-confessional hermeneutics of Dipti Saravannmuttu, the transliterations and abstractions in my own collection, Vishvarūpa. These poetic encounters with Asia are extremely varied but what they share in their personal journeys of identity and agency is to speak for themselves, to find a language for this contingent identity. This latent transformation, this recasting of history and power is a form of political representation exceeding aesthetics, to return to Spivak’s analysis. As a decolonising performance, it diverges, and should be differentiated, from counterpart poetic encounters into Asia (such as those of Kerry Leves, Margaret Bradstock, Judith Beveridge, Vicki Viidikas, Caroline Caddy, Kit Kelen, Chris Mooney-Singh). But such creative efforts to locate resistance beyond the constructs of Orientalism would need to be understood in a framework that exists outside of Australian nationalism. By geographical and historical determinants many Asian-Australian poets are writing from diasporic contexts.
So how does this situate poets of the Asian diaspora within Australian postcolonialism? Spivak attributes diasporic qualities to subalternity when she defines it as a differential space, a polytropos, wandering, fluent in its forms. Polytropos was Homer’s epithet for Odysseus. This word in its Greek origins describes the turns and twists of fortune as well as the strategic resourcefulness, the many minds of Odysseus. The word also breaks down into trope, in one sense meaning ‘figures of speech’.
Perhaps transnationalism like subalternity is more useful to us as a concept, rather than as a category. Concepts, like signs, may be structured and decentered in relation to one another. Not only does categorical analysis of literature risk becoming hierarchical, it is envitably aligned to publicity and marketing which oversimplifies its differences. In the case of a moniker like ‘Asian-Australian’, Simone Lazaroo (among others) has written about the complexities and limitations of the category, in terms of sterotypes, labels, oversimplified analysis which sometimes leads to inappropriately filtered reviewing. So how secure are designations like Asian-Australian and what is their purpose? Strategic essentialism can be a useful way for minority groups to utilise their common ground to achieve political goals. Spivak has largely retracted her use of the term, but she distinguishes it as a strategy from a theory. As a strategy which is not didactic or explanatory, it may help to provide a more situated account of agency for disempowered groups. If I was to describe myself, I would refer to my ethnicity as Goan-Anglo-Australian rather than as Asian-Australian. The former designates the singularity of my identity whereas the latter is a way of tracing aspects of my writing that connect in ways which record meaningful alliances with other writers. Both are decolonising strategies. Both operate to resist the assumptions implied by the cultural homogenisation of colonialism, as well as the discourses of social institutions which act as interlocutors to construct my gendered subjectivity.
In Australia our experience remains grounded in nationalisms and neo-colonialism. Our critics tip toe around the sensitive and dangerously porous term ‘transnational’ with oblique descriptions like “multicultural”, “cosmopolitan” or even “non-Anglophone.” This betrays anxiety about the future and uncertainty. But does it not also weaken the political representation of the groups to whom it refers? Is it not a less specific kind of essentialism? Timothy Yu in his essay on Transnationalism and Diaspora in American Literature refines the nuances of Ramazani’s discussion by raising the very real threat that Transnationalism poses for Asian-American studies, and by referencing the blurring of concepts like ethnicity and diaspora. Diaspora, Yu argues is becoming a preferred paradigm for theorists describing the work of Chinese, Black and Asian poets, connecting them with communities and cultures that cross national boundaries not solely as exiles of colonial expansion but by global dispersal. A diasporic account reappraises the Harlem Renaissance, shifting it from an African-American counter-poetics resisting an elite Eurocentric modernism, towards a more transnational axis in which blackness is being framed across a range of national identities. Yu suggests that the transpacific diaspora with its historical and cultural flows to/from America provides another node of exchange by which American national frameworks may be reimagined. He outlines some of the limitations for these poets and describes a poetics in which subjectivity is continuously renewed by movement, impermanence, fluidity, while at the same time registering national boundaries.
But whether we are talking about the cosmopolitan expatriate or what Yu describes as the “transnational circulation of migrants, capitals, texts” (636) we are not talking about the subaltern, we are talking about the dominance of globalisation and its compounding interests, its theorising intellectuals. Spivak is one of the few intellectuals seriously engaged in the economic and material issues that are external to discourse, language and identity, between the globalised north and south: namely armaments, commodities, drugs, exploitation, debt, migrant labour.
So to summarise, subalternity is perhaps most useful to Asian Australian poetics as an abstraction, a way of metonymysing, a way of imagining what kind of infrastructure needs to be built to establish agency of the disenfranchised. An abstraction can build a discourse not for any moral superiority, but simply and practically to fill the fault lines in our fractured spaces of theoretical crisis. If we return to Gramsci’s use of the subaltern, it is with some probability a code word for instrumentality as well as for subordination. What subalternity offers as a concept is a form of activist thinking that challenges us to rethink our poetics more radically, whether that be via the nexus of parochialisms, nationalisms, or transnationalisms. We can use its analogy to dissect the differences between material and creative capital, political and aesthetic representation. It drives us as a global community of writers and intellectuals to expunge the conflations, by which with complicity, we oppress and exploit Otherness, to deconstruct capitalism’s ethics-shaped hole. Because ultimately, speech is about recognition, and subalternity is about the division of labour and which side of that divide you happen to stand.
Cited Works
Fanon, F. Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith,. New York: International.
Lazaroo, Simone. “Not Just Another Migrant Story” Australian Humanities Review,45, 2008http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-2008/lazaroo.html Ramazani, Jahan. A Transnationlist Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Noel Rowe, Vivian Smith Ed Windchimes. Pandanus, 2006.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993, 221.
Spivak, “Can The Subaltern Speak” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988: 271-313. Yu, Ouyang, “Absence Asia: What’s Wrong With Australia?” from Bias: offensively Chinese/Australian Melbourne: Otherland, 2008.
Yu, Timothy. “Transnationalism and Diaspora in American Poetry”in Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry New York: OUP, 2012: 624-637.
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MICHELLE CAHILL writes poetry and fiction. She was short listed in the ACT Premier’s Literary Award for her first collection The Accidental Cage and in the Alec Bolton Prize for Vishvarūpa. Her work is anthologised in Alien Shores, Escape, 30 Australian Poets, Ed. Felicity Plunkett (UQP) and The Yellow Nib Anthology of Modern English Poetry by Indians Ed. Sudeep Sen and Ciaran Carson (Belfast, QUP). She is one of the Red Room Company’s Disappearing Poets.
Another Babylon is the first collection of Vlanes (or Vladislav Nekliaev); it was the recipient of the 2010 Thomas Shapcott Prize and its author has been a Brisbane-based poet since 2001. His Russian heritage and rich experience of languages remain an intriguing counterpoint to his poems: born in Astrakhan, Russia, he emigrated first to Athens and then to Australia and has an active linguistic life that encompasses not only Russian and English (and, as Jena Wodehouse says in her launch of the collection, he did not step foot in an English-speaking country before he was thirty), but Latin and ancient and modern Greek.
This counterpoint makes itself felt in the freshness, even slight ‘strangeness’ of Another Babylon’s combinations of language, rhyme and metre (I am thinking of the word in the sense of Heidegger’s Unheimlich and not as a marker of awkwardness). This is unsurprising in the case of a prolific and gifted translator and tends to give Vlanes’s poems themselves the particularly arresting air of translated poetry I have always found attractive. Ultimately this setting, whether relevant to the poems’ conception or not, leads us to the subtler complexities of a volume attuned to the treasures and losses of new homes found within the old, and the continual recreation of the ancient.
The poet’s ‘Babylon’ is a concept entirely placed, as he tells us in the closing, title, poem, within his body. Upon waking, the speaker says ‘by the breath in my lungs / I pump a cool gust over my Babylon’, and that ‘the pulsation of my awakening heart / populates my Babylon with shouting people’ (111). It is a gesture that refocuses the whole volume’s pervasive awareness of the body, and its exploration of the connections between the body, poetry and the statues, friezes and other physical remains of an ancient culture’s art and people that is one of the most fascinating strengths of this volume.
We encounter it first in ‘Mother bathing’, as the speaker looks
at the enormous plateaux of her hazel eyes
populated, like Babylon itself,
with garden-growing nations
where a nomad
need no longer thirst for home. (22)
A few poems later there is a different mother, yet she alludes to this same impulse. ‘Mother Tiamut’ is the Sumerian mother-goddess, half of whose body, after she was killed by Marduk, was used to create the earth, and the other half to create paradise and the underworld. In this, one of many portraits of artefacts in Vlanes’s book, Tiamut holds a pomegranate
while Time, her hungry cub,
bites off a piece
now of the fruit’s crimson
grainy pulp,
now of her vermilion fingers,
as the goddess smiles
and condescends
to sample absence. (30)
The spare, measured grace of this short poem is indicative of Vlanes’s style, which achieves a wonderful balance between a restrained, allusive classicism and the rich, visceral imagery of the body’s life and death. The collision in this poem between rock and flesh (echoed in its combination of structured brevity and pungent language) is a signature of this volume, repeated in many different situations and coloured by different moods. In ‘Men and monsters’, the speaker is playful; he visits the temple and looks at the ‘simple columns and friezes’:
The broad-eared twin brothers,
armed with an axe and a saw,
attack a lurid serpent
stretched all the way to the temple door.
So many strikes,
but the serpent lives on
rolling his chiselled eyes
and chewing a large moon.
He comes to a statue of a young goddess and, leaving offerings at her feet, a kiss on ‘her narrow toe-ring / made of streaky lazurite’, he says, [I]
…then dash out
and climb the hissing stairs
to help the twin brothers
or perhaps the serpent. (9)
In ‘Procession’ the speaker gazes at a frieze of a funeral procession:
A dead king on a chariot,
his face like a mountain valley
beaten by storm, swathed in evening mist.
This is more than metaphorical; we learn that the king is no longer visible on the frieze, only his female slaves walking behind the chariot, where they are ‘singing in unison’ and ‘pace in pairs / with slender flasks of poison’. It is a beautifully poignant image of loss and strangely, as Vlanes goes on to suggest, freedom:
You can also see
on the other side of this mortuary
a throng of freshly woven souls
stepping out of the plaster walls:
they no longer know who is king,
who is woman, who is a horse,
but cling together
and then burst scattering
over the sun-smeared grass,
while the procession continues
and women enter
through the eager door,
and the living sing louder
for those who sing no more. (100)
This picture of the endless procession of lives traversing the boundary of life and death is one example of how this threshold is echoed throughout his book in transformations of body and stone. I feel the presence of an Orphean impulse within many of Vlanes’s poems: he taps that animating principle of poetry that wants to bring the dead to life, to recover the lost. It is, above all, a belief in the power of poetry.
In the way this belief is often manifest in inanimate figures finding life, or new life, there is a parallel movement in his work of the ephemeral finding solid form and flesh calcifying into stone. In ‘On the roof’ the speaker imagines that
The raw tablet of my body
with writing pressed through it
bakes in the sun and grows hard:
soon nothing can be added
to the syntax of my veins and wrinkles (57)
In ‘A passage from Gilgamesh’ the ‘clay tablet’ drinks in the beauty of sunset, as the light ‘fills the wayward / depressions in the clay / with triangles of trembling cerise’, and leaves Gilgamesh ‘glowing on its own / now that the sun has gone’ (3).
This reciprocity in his work, between the world and poetry, and the alive and the ancient, expands to the relationship of heaven and earth through his recurrent vertical imagery: ziggurats, walls, mountains and trees are frequently central to the poems, as are the concepts of gravity and weight of heaven. In ‘The load of heaven’ the speaker’s reveries on gods and demons and ‘planets spiralling, ever steeper, / towards the dreary disk of the Sun’, make ascension to heaven seem a waiting accident:
I realise how much weight,
how much effort
it takes heaven
to keep me down.
And when I kiss
your moth-like fluttering eyelids,
it nearly fails.
His intriguing concern of where we humans belong, spatially, in the worlds of earth, heaven and hell, joins the play of gods and demons throughout the poems to express an awareness of the diametrical forces of creation not surprising in a volume so placed in the world of Sumerian mythology. In ‘A round bowl’, the inner wall of the large bowl is decorated with Sumerian creatures: ‘a green-tongued lion’ with ‘a mane / of jumbled lapis hairs’, a ‘frisky griffin’ with ‘thin feathered paws’ and ‘catfish fin’:
The animals stand still,
frightened by the outpour
of a clanging crystal
cascade of water
twined
with pitch black hair:
like good and evil
entangled
in a deadly knot,
rushing to create
a new world. (42)
So many poems in this collection have caught the air of myth. There is a self-contained quality, as if the poems belong in their recurrent images of bowls, asking to be returned to and gazed at again and again until what they are teaching us is learnt. Creating Another Babylon is an invocation of order, a coagulation of difference and randomness into the flesh of the written word and the body. And yet, this invocation knowingly fails, the poems realising that it is through the broken vases and statues eaten by time that life shines through. One of the most beautiful poems of the volume, so wisely chosen to be the first, places this lesson of mythology in entirely human terms:
From the unseen sea
my mother brought a crab
wrapped in a silken wave
that hugged him like home.
I remember the knocking
of his claws on the wooden floor,
his boisterous brown certainty
that the sea was behind the door.
For two days he roamed my room,
on the third he understood.
His twinkling pinheads
stared and stared at me.
I promised to carry him back,
where I did not know.
He waited, dry, in a pine box
for a year before it was lost.
The dragonfly-god took it away
and flew at once to the sea,
knelt in the lazurite sand
and wrenched off the latch.
I never knew
that it takes a death
and a broken promise
for a dream to come true. (1)
In the lead-up to the launch of his first full-length book, ‘and then when the’, Dan Disney wrote me a letter in his spidery, spontaneous hand from Korea, where he teaches. He wrote, looping words eating up the white photocopy paper, ’I have been looking forward to this book for … oh … 40 years’.
This is what I appreciate so much about poets. No matter what their achievements, the best of them remain humble, wait to be measured against the tide of words from the past and wait until what they have wrought is fine and then remain excited by publication, by reaching an audience through the page or through their voice. Such tiny fragments to shore up against our ruin, and yet poets continue, heroically, against the odds (Kindles; the murderousness of profit and loss for small presses; and that distinct sensation – in the face of MasterChef – of cultural irrelevance).
So what do we get for 40 years in the making? There are twenty poems in this collection, a mere 44 pages of poetry. So what is it about this collection which impresses as a taut and strong collection?
The tenor of the work can be found in its title. ‘And then when the’ is a prose phrase. Such a phrase is the part of language which is generally removed from poetry. Why? Because those monosyllables ‘and then when the’ are the tools of narrative. Yet this book references narrative a fortiori because it comprises so many journeys made by the persona —and by the poet — within Australia and overseas. The title, like much of the book’s content, speaks of what poetry is and what it is not.
Poets
as if
there’s graveyard dirt on our soles, as if we live
in houses with covered mirrors, as if
each mid-morning there’s no right side to climb from our beds
so many muttering about silence,
spruiking the godhead
non-descript as our job descriptions and
making memos to the immemorial
so many thinking on time, on love and where that goes, on nothing,
some days hearts may shudder
as we stoop, moan, and blink
below an audience of stars arriving early
(44)
Much of the poems’ content (though not what I have just quoted) is celebratory of the intellectual. Here are references to Sartre, Latin riffs, artists and artworks, Wallace Stevens, philosophers, recent fiction, Plotinus, Mary Shelley, Horace and more. Cross-referencing like this allows us a hypertext into those other works. Referencing others’ work is the lifeblood of poets; nay, of artists. Quoting, re-imagining, ripping. It keeps us on our toes, pays homage, re-writes history as a living thing and incites to aspire to these reference points in our evolving culture.
However intellectual, this work is grounded in experience. Disney takes us on a Verlaine/Rimbaud roller-coaster of wildness, like a spare 21st century beat poetry, where persona/reader experience the journeys, the drugs, absinthe and a smattering of Burroughs. Like Burroughs, there is a restless intellect and a steely eye for the hilarious details of life presented as the surreal. Here we have the great melting clocks of Disney’s imagination on display.
A trapdoor has been opened in the head. Inside, historical figures are rowing, spectred
And quaffing logos at the feet of mountains. See here: among them Ern Malley’s shape,
toasting Plato and the Elysian mosquito swamps. In the next boat, glass to ear, Buddha …
(“… never come to thoughts. They come to us” [Martin Heidegger: Poetry, Language, Thought], 36)
Disney changes text. He leaves font alone but occasionally orients poems on the page so one reads the title horizontally, then to read the balance of the poem, one must rotate the book. The two poems which do this begin, respectively, ‘A trapdoor has been opened in the head’ and ‘take a gun’ and the poems start by the centre seam of the book. This is not concrete poetry, but poetry of architecture on the page and disorientation and subversion of the norms.
‘How to hunt March hare’ is a brio example of his style when he is being subversive and humorous:
Take a gun (unloaded) to the hole one moonless night. Call your closes taxidermist friends and tell them
to stay at home. Take a portable fence on which to sit …
Kick down the portable fence. Maintain focus. Take some speed. Take some mescaline. Quote Machiavelli
through a loudspeaker from the back of a military-green shrub. Shake your fists at a god and the stars …
(“How to hunt March hare”, 16)
The book, because of its size, is knowable; it can be contained within one’s attention. But it is worthy of the quote from Mallarmé: ‘all earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book’ and much of it is here in this slim volume of modern Australian verse. Words work hard because the language is wrought and curated. It invites the magnifying glass.
Nonetheless it retains a casual tone because of the wittiness, the tall tales and the Australian-abroad perspective. This is a brain let loose on the world tour of the colonials of yore. From this perspective, we are provided an assessment of ourselves:
‘Is this
the shape of us? Always stricken, homeless amid monuments,
shambling slowly as though those who have travelled
such little distance
that everything seems ordinary.’
(“Still lifes [i.m. Gianluca Lena]”, 38)
Along the way we are shown some examples of our ‘metaphysical homesickness’ … that is, Disney tells us we have lost our understanding of our raison d’être. Whether you like the insight and conclusion or not, this is a summation of where Australians stand in the world, and what that means.
Thankfully, there are consolations. The first is humour. There is nothing which cannot, in this book, be cured by wit and laughter. It is one of the reasons it endears itself to me.
A thing eats a thing
and is eaten
by another thing.
This thing
not lasting long, is eaten
by a further thing
the further thing eaten by something again, eaten
soon after
by something else….
This thing is eaten by another thing called Craig
Craig
though perhaps never believing in the unstoppable nature of destiny
is also eaten.
(“Ecce Hombres”, 17)
It offers , nevertheless, at least one salvation. Disney quotes from Wallace Stevens’ Miscellaneous Notebooks: ‘reality is a cliché/ from which we escape by metaphor.’ Metaphor, then, has the capacity to transport us. It makes our world new again. Here is the exquisite ‘Swifts Creek’, from the strong sequence ‘Smalltown Etudes: Omeo Highway, Great Dividing Range’:
The creek bends over stone, a snake unskinning itself. Hats gather
at the servo and trucks slough past
unloading clear-fell at the mill. A bus draws in to school,
freckled generations
at its windows. Up the road, the cemetery
is carved with phonebook names.
(“Swifts Creek”, 11)
All, therefore, is far from lost. In fact it is richly moving, beautiful and ugly, very real, extremely surreal, and subject to the entropy which is part of our existence.
This is a sure-footed sampling of this strong new voice whose work is worthy of close attention and whose voice is engaging , engaged and filled with the power of all that it is to be a poet at this time, working out of this heritage.
On April 11, 1984, the major New Zealand artist Colin McCahon disappeared unaccountably in the Sydney Botanic Gardens. McCahon and his wife Anne were visiting Sydney as guests of the Sydney Biennale when McCahon, then aged 64, disappeared during a walk through the gardens. He was found five or six kilometres away, disoriented and suffering memory loss, in a routine patrol of Centennial Park in the early hours of April 12. He carried no identification with him, and could not say who he was. When he was taken to hospital, he was diagnosed as suffering cerebral atrophy, probably the result of his long-term alcoholism.
What happened to McCahon during those lost hours? Where did he go, whom might he have met along the way, and what did he see on this “dark night”? These are the questions that provoked Martin Edmond to write Dark Night: Walking With McCahon, a creative non-fiction account of Edmond’s attempt to imagine, through walking the same part of Sydney, McCahon’s lost hours. Edmond explains:
I thought and thought about it, and at some point conceived the idea of replicating that lost journey—not in search of authenticity, nor documentary truth, nor even simple verisimilitude, since all of these were by definition impossible. Rather I wondered if I could arbitrarily choose a route and along it find equivalents for the fourteen Stations of the Cross?
(21)
The Stations of the Cross is a representation, in fourteen parts or ‘stations,’ of Christ’s last hours, beginning with his being condemned to death, and concluding with his death and entombment. In churches, visual depictions of the Stations of the Cross become stations through which worshippers pass on a circuit of devotion. Edmond’s decision to try to encounter McCahon and map equivalents for the Stations of the Cross through this ‘arbitrary’ route is not itself an arbitrary choice: McCahon’s work engaged with matters of faith, though he himself was not religious—“not anything”, as he strikingly put it.
Dark Night is structured in four parts. The first, “Testimony,” describes how Edmond’s life has briefly connected with McCahon’s in a few instances. Most importantly, Edmond spent his childhood in a bedroom in which a McCahon painting hung on the wall. The painting fascinated Edmond even as a small child; his curiosity with the artist and his art has been lifelong. The second, and longest, section, “Psychogeography,” describes Edmond’s journey through what might have the route that McCahon took in his lost hours, a route which is structured around the Stations of the Cross and ends in Centennial Park. The third section, “Dark Night,” describes a night spent in Centennial Park itself, and the fourth, “Beatitude,” takes Edmond back to New Zealand in a kind of coda.
As perhaps may be evident from this structure, Dark Night is ambitious, but it also meanders, in the sense that it is willing to follow and linger along the routes of a curious mind, however non-linear those routes may be. Initially, it seems that Edmond is setting out in pursuit of something, though what it may be is unclear. What the book becomes, however, is something else. Edmond produces a kind of meticulous account of a small stretch of a city, a detailed and sharply observed portrait of Sydney a decade into the 21st century. It is a city of convenience stores and pubs, of homeless men sleeping in doorways, “each with his hands tucked between his thighs the way little children sometimes sleep,” of midnight parks in which the author claims to see the trees breathing.
As he walks, Edmond also muses on a remarkable range of topics: his own father’s alcoholism, methods of crucifixion, how Torahs are constructed, the sex trade at the Wall, the development of Christian Science. When we roam with Edmond, we roam not only across the physical spaces of Sydney, but also more extensively through Edmond’s mind and the connections that he makes across time and space, between an older and a newer Sydney, and between his own life and McCahon’s, between the city and its people. He wonders about meaning, and connection, and creativity, and about faith and its absence, and how they affect lives generally, and McCahon’s life and work in particular.
The structure of the book is shaped by its author’s range of interests, by his musings, and also, inevitably, by the impossibility of resolving his questions about McCahon. As Edmond himself remarks, quoting from a Pasternak poem: “To live a life is not to cross a field.” Edmond has worked as a cab driver, and his range of knowledge and his way of telling stories—picking up here and dropping off there—in some ways reflects the episodic nature of that work. But this is a book that is walking paced, and seen from the footpath rather than the street. Edmond is a flâneur, a stroller of the city, a walker who seeks to know the mind of another man by walking, and by spending a long night on a park bench.
One of the book’s greatest achievements is its depiction of Sydney now, in a now that has inevitably already passed. Edmond records highly specific details: how much change he has ($27.75) after paying his train fare ($3.80) to the city, the schooner he buys (Reschs, $5) at a pub (The East Sydney Hotel), and the discussion about the tenth Doctor Who, David Tennant, that takes place as he orders, the prints on the pub’s walls (Magritte, van Gogh, Cartier-Bresson). He describes churches, homeless shelters, excavation work, convict graffiti, contemporary graffiti, prostitutes, taxi drivers, revellers emerging from a gay club at dawn. His depiction of himself can be just as precise: he carries with him on one of his journeys “a thermos of black coffee laced with St Agnes brandy; a ham, cheese, and tomato sandwich; a banana; a tin or Café Cremes, ten small cigars of the vanilla-flavoured variety called Oriental”—along with warmer clothing and two different translations of St John of the Cross’s poem “Dark Night of the Soul.”
Dark Night is a serious book with extensive research behind it, as can be expected of a work that is, at least in part, a biography. Edmond has written across a range of genres, including screenplays and poetry, and his exacting care for language is quite delightful. His descriptions of places are particularly striking, as when he writes of visiting a friend in an art deco building, Mont Clair, on Liverpool Street in Darlinghurst in the 1990s:
the air inside Mont Clair was cool and smelled strange, like embalming fluid or formaldehyde; a wan yellow light fell across the dark varnished wood from deco lamps high up on the walls and the vacant concierge’s booth always felt inhabited by some phantom interlocutor. The lift clanked and sighed in protest as it hauled me upwards and my reflection in the mirrors with which it was lined always looked vaguely corrupt if not actually demonic. The other residents in the building were rarely seen and, when spotted, seemed pale and affrighted …
(75-76)
And so Edmond takes us there, through Sydney past and present, and all its ghosts, in search of another kind of ghost. It is what we can see—a remarkable city, a fascinated and fascinating writer—that makes the lasting impression. McCahon, the brilliant artist, is a fugitive here, as perhaps he was in life. But what Edmond finds in his pursuit makes for a memorable portrait of a city and a man —not the man who came to Sydney in 1984 and was lost, but the man who came a quarter of a century later and tried to understand.
MICHELLE DICINOSKI’s memoir Ghost Wife will be published by Black Inc. in 2013. Her poetry collection Electricity for Beginners was highly commended in the Anne Elder Award 2011, and she was awarded a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship (Poetry) in 2012-2013. She lives in Brisbane.
