May 17, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Coda For Shirley
by Geoff Page
Interactive Press
ISBN 9781921869303
Reviewed by LYN HATHERLY
What a shame that light verse is currently not the most popular genre. For Geoff Page’s new book Coda for Shirley is playful, intriguing and beautifully constructed. This verse novel makes you wish that other poets might ‘Bring Back Scansion! Bring Back Rhyme’ as it does its best to persuade readers and other poets to share Geoff Page’s love of formed verse and the music that accompanies it. Geoff himself it seems has much in common with the gentle and ironic tutor who taught Shirley:
to master my tetrameters,
avoiding, with more stringent pen,
the doggerel of amateurs. (p.8)
Since these verses never lapse into doggerel, or waste words, they are both stringent and nicely astringent. Perhaps Geoff Page, like Whitman has found:
that free verse wafted off a little;
rhyme stayed closer to the ground. (p.5)
This verse novel follows on from Geoff Page’s 2006 verse novel, Lawrie & Shirley: The Final Cadenza, and like that book it’s amusing to listen to as well as to read. It must have taken Geoff some time to get the metre and rhymes right, and I’m sure there were times he was tempted to give up the struggle. Finally, I think the effort is well worth it since these satirical tetrameters managed to fix themselves in my mind as mnemonics and stay there echoing through my dreams and days, entertaining me long after I’d put the book down. Geoff Page might be modest but this book is an immodest celebration, of love and poetry and joy, as well as a further addition to the definition of Aussie culture. As an example, his view of life in a nursing home is as darkly irreverent as it is comic:
Each day comes and each day goes,
the next exactly like the last
with all the shipwrecked sprawled in chairs,
thinking only of the past,
a small Titanic, if you will,
with one great iceberg up ahead,
our buoyancy half-gone already,
the lookout, in a deck-chair, dead. (p.29)
His older readers may not be reassured but they are amused. This latest verse novel also confirms the fact that this award winning writer is ever prolific, since he has now published eighteen collections of poetry as well as two novels, four verse novels and several other works including anthologies, translations and a biography of the jazz musician, Bernie McGann.
Except for Lawrie Wellcome who appears in Coda for Shirley only in memory, the characters from that previous verse novel carry on in this new narrative, one that is again unique in theme and narrative style. Each member of the cast is memorable and sharply drawn and the situations and antics in which Geoff Page involves his characters are fun to read or hear (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmsniQUuDKw ). His stars may not be young, but I appreciate the way they remind us that uproarious life and love and sex do go on after 60 or 70 or even 80. The memory of Shirley’s affair with Lawrie and his caresses wafts musically throughout this book:
that sweet cadenza to his life
a duet only love can sing – (p.4)
Geoff treats his characters tenderly and with affection so they charm or intrigue their readers. No euphemism here; the characters are all too honest, human and multi-dimensional. Shirley, ten years on from the first verse novel, is still witty, passionate and insightful in regard to herself and those people she loves. The action in Coda for Shirley revolves around her final will or coda and the way, in life and after death, she is determined to enforce her wishes on her daughters, Sarah and Jane. It was these errant progeny who tried to undermine her relationship with Lawrie, her great love, while Sarah’s children, Shirley’s grandsons, supported that relationship. There’s irony in the way she settles her possessions and those who inherit them. The book begins with Shirley’s voice, idiosyncratic and always amusing. She sets the scene, reminds us of past events, and introduces the other characters. While she may concur with Geoff Page about matters such as rhyme and metre, she’s very much her own woman.
Coda for Shirley has three sections and three sets of voices and each tells one version of the story and gives a response to Shirley’s coda. The book begins affectionately and directly and with some mystery:
Dearest daughters, Jane and Sarah,
You’ll read this only when I’m dead.
I’ll leave it with my cheerful lawyer
who, with her very well-trained head,
has seen how things might be arranged
when I am truly ‘done and dusted’,
about what goes to whom and who
might, at the end, be truly trusted.
The language seems clear and unambiguous but there are layers and certainly a hint of what’s gone on before. ‘Trusted’ gives a firm ending to the stanza but it’s also quite suggestive. And I like the collusion of ‘cheerful’ with ‘when I’m dead’. It does set a tone for the book and its author’s attitudes to life and death. The poetic lines of the first section reverberate through the second as Shirley’s dearest but unsympathetic daughters, Jane and Sarah, come to grips with their loss and their mother’s wishes:
The funeral was bad enough;
their mother’s poetry is worse,
reciting all their ‘failures’ via
the rigours of accented verse.
There’s some resolution in the moment when they finally accept that perhaps Shirley’s affair with Lawrie Wellcome may have been more positive that they previously wanted to believe. I like the way Geoff Page takes time for transformations and affirmations in this verse novel:
They stop a moment; both are smiling,
There’s not a smidgeon of chagrin,
They strike their glasses once together.
‘Here’s to Shirley’s “year of sin!”’
The characters from the third section who take the novel into the future are Shirley’s grandsons Giles and Jack. In the previous verse novel, Lawrie & Shirley, they were sent by Sarah as shock troops to remind Shirley of her grandmotherly duties. Even as teenagers they were smart enough to see that love is not only more important, it had made Shirley happy and more beautiful. Now, having retreated from their parents expectations of ‘law and med’ they are working, each in their own ways, to improve the world. They seem to be as clear-sighted as Shirley and to have been blessed by the terms of the coda that so annoyed their aunt and mother:
‘Correct,’ says Giles, ‘but in proportion
it’s mainly down to Grandma Shirley.
She left her money straight to us,
not worrying about how surly
such a move would leave her daughters.
She knew how it would leave them numb,
those two up-market girls of hers –
one of whom is still our mum. (p.74)
So the book begins with mystery then sings and plays through three generations before it ends with joy and hope for the future. There is whimsy and rhyme and rhythm but also irony. There is death here but it not tragic and comedy overcomes any negative moments. Geoff Page’s character studies are, as Peter Goldsworthy remarks, ‘scalpel-sharp’ and his characters are always entertaining. They made me want to go back and read the first and connecting verse novel: Lawrie & Shirley. Geoff’s second verse novel is satirical and can, at times, show us life’s shadows. But it is such fun to read. Coda for Shirley is a celebration of life, love and a distinctly Australian way of speaking and thinking.
May 15, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
To Silence
by Subhash Jaireth
Puncher and Wattmann
2011
ISBN
Reviewed by MRIDULA NATH CHAKRABORTY
The titular aptness of Subhash Jaireth’s latest offering cannot be overstated. If silence can indeed be voiced, here it is, speaking volumes. The slimness of the book belies its depth of thought and profundity of expression. In three short vignettes, Jaireth manages to bring to us whole universes: worlds as far-flung as fifteenth-century India, seventeenth-century Italy and nineteenth-century Russia. Using the genre of the monologue, Jaireth brings alive for us the milieus of Kabir, the weaver-poet of the Bhakti movement; Maria Chekova, Anton Chekov’s less-known self-effacing younger sister; and Tommaso Campanella, the Calabrian theologian whose heterodox views brought him into conflict with the Inquisition and who intervened in the first trail of Galileo Galilei.
Kabir’s biological son seeks to make a claim to the heritage of his father’s lyrics. In the face of his son’s insistence that the famed words be written down properly for profit and for posterity, Kabir, an illiterate man, finds it impossible to see in the inscribed verses any of the verve or versatility of the spoken and sung language. What flowed with the ease of water now freezes upon the page of the amanuensis. This refusal to be pinned down in conventional inscription becomes a metaphor for the figure of Kabir himself, whose corpse is coveted by both Hindus and Muslims as a religious symbol after his death. Kabir again denies any attempts at memorialisation, leaving behind a resounding silence where the clamouring voices would have claimed him, thereby making his subsumption into the dead of the night as seamless as the fabric of the songs he spun during his lifetime.
Maria is tormented by her own silences as well as by that of her writer brother. Every opportunity that presents itself with the promise of an independent life for Maria is met by the silence, and therefore non-permission, of the brother for whom she keeps house. She herself embraces the silence as the price to be paid for the patronage of a successful sibling. However, the silence which bursts upon her with the clap of thunder is the larger, historical one of the collective silence Europe maintained in the face of atrocities against Jews, a silence in which she herself participates, not by commission, but by convenient omission. Maria’s own experience collides with that of an entire people. In bringing together the personal intimate history with a public one, Maria’s monologue asks whether it is indeed possible to separate the two. Silence here is the ultimate accuser and mute witness of history.
Tommaso’s silence is the most painful one: that of being silent in the face of a forbidden love. His monologue is literally unable to give voice to the longing which possesses him, and for which he undergoes silent suffering. Among the three characters, he is the only one who does not remain entirely silent in the face of historical events: he does write a letter of support to Galileo Galilei, commiserating with him. That letter is never sent, but is left among the relics of his other papers and testimonials. This brief moment of solidarity is contrasted to a much larger silence about a commonplace crime he witnesses. The burden of that silence lies heavily upon him on the nights that he spends wandering about the streets of Rome. No absolution seems possible for his confessional, shrouded as it is within cloak upon cloak of his own spiritual, and all-too fleshly failure. The only thing that remains to haunt him is a catalogue of admissions: about insanity, sentiment, ecstasy, sin, and finally, grace, as if in the utterance of this monologue, some mercy may show its face somewhere.
What is remarkable about each of these voices is the intimacy with which Jaireth animates them. He seemingly effortlessly slips into the clothing and consciousnesses of all three of his subjects: that of an aging poet-philosopher from an impoverished weaving guild who has to come to terms with the mortality of his legacy; that of a taken-for-granted martyr-like sister who has had to sacrifice her own dreams and desires of a more complete life at the altar of a famous, selfish and extortionate sibling; that of a monk of the Dominican Order, sworn to the cause of truth and godliness who has to encounter the ghosts of his own past transgressions, of the all-too corporeal failings of his own spiritual life.
What apparently unites these three voices is the prospect of imminent, inevitable Death, the Great Silencer. However, the silence pined for and practised by the persona in each case is only an incantation of that ultimate confrontation with truth that all human beings yearn for in their lives and in preparation for their tête-à-tête with the void. These are not confessionals occasioned by any external or material compulsions, any religious or political contingencies. Their sole guiding principle is an undeniable spiritual appeal to understanding, for the peace of mind, and for forgiveness, so that one can, in the dusk of one’s life, go gently into the night of eternity.
Having established the commonality of each partaker of and participant in silence, it also has to be acknowledged that the silences that each voice meditates upon have different meanings in their respective monologues. Jaireth interprets silence to convey, by turns, reconciliation, reckoning and regret. These are the silences which speak of a life well-lived where one must take leave without any concern about the people left behind, of a life taking stock of the historical events one witnessed and shaped, of decisions one might have made and did not, of weighing the terrible consequences of ones actions and non-actions.
Kabir, the song-weaver’s silence rests in “an absence of songs… [His] mind enthralled exclusively by songs without words—no words and hence no anxiety about meaning” (17). Maria Chekova’s silence, with regards to her own personal decisions and with respect to the curveball of history, comes from the realisation that in life, “the burden of knowing so much is hard to endure” (47). For Tommaso Campanella, silence is “the feeing of being not alive and still remaining conscious of that sensation” (107). Each one of them has to encounter this meaning of silence, in the sense of both ‘facing’ and ‘countering’ the ways in which knowledge comes to them, and the way in which they have to live with it. They have to embrace, with full consciousness, not only the bodily weight they will carry into their graves, but the unspeakable knowledge of human life in all its enticements and entrapments, its ravishment and ravages.
This is a writer who knows his medium. He knows how to construct a monologue of a bygone past and place that transports us away from the here and the now, but at the same time makes us utterly aware of the contemporaneity of the human condition. He can softly, and yet with steely craft, weave language in all its felicity and fragility, in order to make the poignant palpable, and the hush of the sands of life trickling away hum louder than words. It is not possible to convey the subtlety of the skein of silk with which Jaireth spins his tales; one has to resort to giving an example from one of his stories: “The wings the words span isn’t limitless; often they fail to fly and it would be prudent to remain cognisant of their failure; if they cause infliction, the cure for it resides in close proximity to them, and the cure, my dear friend, is silence.”
Jaireth is not interested in silence only as a metaphor or as philosophy. He literally performs silence as a trope of writing by thematically emphasizing it in the form of his chosen genre of historical fiction. Instead of being chronologically linked narratives that propagate official history, his spatially and temporally distant imaginative recreations disrupt the Eurocentric notion of time as linear. The monologues are sequentially interrupted and intentionally complicate the idea of authoritative story-telling. The characters are figures whose perspectives have been occluded and ignored by conventional hierarchical privileges of speech. The monologues intervene in the verbosity of official, received history and reveal the silences implicit in them. As such, they may be seen an examples of revisionist, or even redemptive, history. A must read for anyone interested in the long march of history and the frailty of the human condition itself.
May 5, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Honey Thief
by Najaf Mazari and Robert Hillman
WILD DINGO PRESS
ISBN: 9780980757040
Reviewed by ABDUL KARIM
In a small village in Afghanistan, a man by the name of Abdul Hussain who stole honey hives was taken as apprentice by the honey hives’ owner because of his extraordinary skills for caring for the bees. It is this story that makes the title of the book, The Honey Thief, a collection of oral stories, which has been co-authored by Najaf Mazari and Robert Hillman. This follows their successful book, The Rug Maker of Mazar-e-Sharif, set in the Woomera detention centre, detailing the journey of Mazari to Australia.
Robert Hillman is a Melbourne based writer. Najaf Mazari, a Hazara refugee from Afghanistan who arrived to Australia in 2001. Although from such different cultures, their companionship found common thread in the tradition of storytelling. In the breaking down of these cultural barriers an interesting story emerges.
As an Afghan and a Hazar like Najaf who migrated to Australia, I read this book with much curiosity and interest. In the first chapter, Najaf Mazari tells the readers that the stories in the book are the ones he has heard from his brothers and were common in his village, some of which are based on actual events and real characters, some are not. This is not a book about the whole of Afghanistan, the authors reflect on Hazara experience and identity.
‘Perhaps this is because we are a mystery people; no one knows for certain where we came from, and we have been resented for generations by those who live in Afghanistan in greater numbers than ourselves.’
Although the Hazara situation has changed somewhat in the post-Taliban period, talking about past injustices against Hazara is still taboo in Afghanistan. For example, in May 2009, officials from the Afghan Ministry of Information and Culture threw tens of thousands of books relating to Hazara history into the Helmand River because they believed the books would promote disharmony in Afghan society. In Afghanistan, the publication of this book would never have been permitted. The condition of exile has provided Hazaras like Najaf some freedom to speak out without the fear of censorship.
The Honey Thief offers an insight into Afghanistan political complexities that goes beyond the contemporary conflict and particularly the ethnic tension. The focus on the Hazara experience is an attempt to provide a narrative for the Hazara people, who after many generations in Afghanistan are still considered outsiders there. A good portion of the fourth chapter describes in detail the massacres of Hazara that occurred in the late nineteen century.
‘The great massacre became part of who we are – we, the Hazaras. I say ‘part of who we are’ rather than ‘part of our history’ because history is a thing apart; something that you can study, if you wish, and write books about. The massacres are not ‘history’ in that sense; they have a place in our minds and our hearts from which they can’t be torn. But don’t imagine that it is something we wish to have living inside us. No, it is a burden. It is like the burden of the Jews. They can’t stop being Jews – they are Jews every second of their lives, being a Jew means carrying a burden of grief, because the Jews too had an Abdur Rahman in their past.’
The book is structured into thirteen chapters, so that the reader leaps from fairy tales to real life; from ordinary people to heroes; from rural to city. The last two chapters are about Afghan recipe. In a lengthy two chapters, the authors recount the horrifying story of Abdul Khaliq, a young Hazara boy who killed Nadir Shah, an oppressive ruler in Afghanistan.
‘It seems more likely that Abdul Khaliq decided to kill the King to avenge the murder of hundreds of thousands of Hazara years earlier,’ the authors write in page 62. ‘But it is not Mohammad Nadir he will be killing; it is a symbol of the oppression that the Barakzai family has subjected the Hazara to for fifty years.’
The king assassin, Abdul Khaliq, is portrayed not as a modern martyr going to heaven to meet virgin girls but somebody who stood up against injustice so those he left behind could live in dignity. But it came with a heavy price for him and his family. Although he was alone in the act, he was hanged along with his friends, school teachers, his father and uncles, all of whom who had nothing to do with the killing
Some of stories in The Honey Thief are fictitious -stories about demons, devils and superstitions that are deeply rooted in Afghanistan culture and manifested in the characters’ dialogue and thought. In the second to last chapter, Jawad rescues his parents from the scaffold by delivering gold dug from the hard earth to the doorstep of the Myer of Kandahar. ‘Jawad swung his pick at the hard earth, and again, each time he struck the ground, nuggets of gold came to the surface.’ The book blends facts with fiction in a way that is sometimes indistinguishable.
Some of the strongest themes are about forgiveness and resilience in a country that has been torn apart by war and enmity. In chapter nine and ten, a beekeeper, Abbas was summoned by Abdul Ali Mazari, a great leader of Hazara. During the Soviet Union occupation, Mazari asked the beekeeper to travel to another province in Afghanistan to ask for forgiveness for a dying patient who had betrayed his grandfather during the rule of Zahir Shah. He accepted this mission reluctantly and met the dying patient. On his returned he was a changed man. On the way back, he had lost his accompanying friend in a Russian air attack which killed another two bandits – Mujhid (fighters). The only surviving person from the incident was an injured young Russian soldier. The beekeeper nursed his wounds, fed him, saved his life and asked his leader to release him.
Najaf and Robert’s style is simple, following the oral storytelling tradition and yet remaining somehow formal. At times, I wanted the story to be more detailed and reflect the local dialects and lyrical language. But this is probably because of the difficulties of two writers from such different cultures collaborating and also because Robert Hillman, the main writer has not lived in Afghanistan. The stories in The Honey Thief are contemporary stories mostly drawn from personal anecdotes and do not reflect folkloric popular stories that are the most common among Hazaras for example Buz-e-Chini. As a Hazara, I could only relate to the story about Abdul Khaliq but the rest were unfamiliar to me. This shows that even a small village in Afghanistan is pregnant with so many stories.
Over all this is a compelling read in a political climate where there is little understanding of the Hazara who in fact make up the majority of asylum seekers from Afghanistan. Using the power of storytelling, it narrates the past suffering of Hazaras in Afghanistan in ways that surprises and astound us with insights and interesting tales. They are the first stories to appear in English language and so the authors should be commended. It also highlights the rich culture that remains so hidden behind the current conflict.
ABDUL KARIM is a freelance writer based in Sydney and a former refugee from Afghanistan. He has participated in many forums, conferences and media debates focussing on refugee issues. He has participated in the Sydney Writers’ Festival and his articles on refugees have appeared in The Australian, National Times, The Age. A photgraphy exhibiton, Unsafe Haven, has showed at UTS and currently at RMIT Gallery.
May 5, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Speak Now
Edited by Victor Marsh
Clouds of Magellan
ISBN 978-0-9807120-9-4
Reviewed by FIONA McKEAN
As Australia is currently poised to answer the question of whether it will say “I do” to same-sex marriage, it’s difficult to imagine a more topical publication than Speak Now, a collection of essays and creative non-fiction pieces on the theme of same-sex marriage. Since Speak Now was published in October 2011, the Queensland Parliament has passed legislation recognising same-sex civil unions—a compromise between marriage equality and lack of relationship recognition—and the first of these have been registered. Comedian Magda Szubanski has come out on national television for marriage equality, and the Australian Labor Party has changed its policy platform in favour of same-sex marriage. And two of the contributors to this volume, Elaine Crump and Sharon Dane, have dined with Prime Minister Julia Gillard at the Lodge to argue for marriage equality. Debate is intensifying, rather than diminishing. So what does Speak Now bring to the table?
Speak Now is a wide-ranging collection of 35 different essays, memoirs, and personal responses to same-sex marriage. As the content is truly eclectic—varying widely in stance, genre, and style—the entries are organised in alphabetical order by surname, rather than grouped thematically. This makes for something of a “lucky dip”. Michael Kirby’s foreword and Victor Marsh’s introduction provide an appropriate entrée, echoing as they do the most clearly recognisable division—between the more formal, academic and legal essays and informal personal accounts. Marsh’s introduction is particularly welcoming, and reassuring to any readers who might fear the presence of earnest, 90s-style oppression-speak in the pages that follow. After all, weddings are supposed to be fun!
The academic essays are uniformly well-researched, but vary in degree of accessibility. Wayne Morgan’s history of relationship law reform excels at the latter, and is logically structured and clearly written. He demonstrates how legal protection for all relationships in Australia has evolved over time, and how formalising same-sex unions builds on these previous reforms.
In “Christianity, Marriage, Love and Friendship”, Michael Carden provides a detailed historical analysis of marriage and marriage-like rituals, including adelphopoiesis, a formalised recognition of friendship. He examines the roles of patriarchy and capitalism in marriage before advocating a renaissance of friendship rituals, rather than adherence to a narrow construction of marriage.
Academic and activist Dennis Altman dryly questions whether gay people should rush to “buy into the myth of monogamous marriage, whose record is generally not inspiring” (5). Ryan Heath offers the confronting statistic that, on a global scale, “ten times as many countries imprison their citizens for homosexual activity than allow them to marry” (74). In an essay that blends personal experience with research, he uses such statistics to warn against apathy for those who question whether “enough” equality has been achieved, and invites personal involvement.
I can’t remember which Australian politician declared it was the personal stories of same-sex couples that finally altered his stance in favour of marriage equality, but I suspect he’s not alone. It’s in the unique stories of individuals—and the capacity for empathic connection they invoke—that potential for change exists. And it’s the personal accounts I connected to most strongly in this collection. To an extent, these were reminiscent of those in the seminal Word is Out: Stories of Some of our Lives. Decades have passed since its initial publication, but its power lay in the revelation of simple details of the everyday lives of lesbians and gay men. And it was the differences in these stories, rather than any monolithic representation of “gayness”, that enabled readers to identify with their narrators and demonstrated varied ways of living gay lives.
So, too, with Speak Now. The personal stories are narrated by same-sex partners, parents of same-sex children unable to marry, helping professionals and marriage celebrants, and vary as widely in tone and stance as the essays. The very title of Deb Wain’s contribution, “I Got Married, Some Can’t. That’s Not Fair” is both striking and succinct. She is similarly unsparing on religious objections to same-sex marriage:
There are a number of things that the bible says and there are a number of ways in which to quote the bible itself in rebuttal to these arguments. I’m not going to even bother doing this here for the simple reason that Australia has a secular government… The bible has no legitimate place in this argument. (236)
The tone of the personal recollections ranges from Deb Wain’s pithiness, to the sincere—Luke Gahan’s “The Ins and Outs of Marriage (and Divorce)”—to the slightly satirical, as in Tiffany Jones’s “Tying the K(NOT)!” Gahan retains an unwavering dedication to a romantic ideal of marriage, despite a same-sex divorce in his twenties. He speaks of the pressures he experienced in his marriage from both within and outside “the gay community”—from some of the latter, a lack of recognition and acceptance; from some of the former, pressure to accept infidelity and act as some sort of marriage movement martyr or role model. Gahan’s story explicates the reality beyond the fairytale, and debunks the notion that the fact a same-sex relationship may end invalidates formal recognition in the first place.
For me, the two outstanding pieces in this anthology are Donald Ritchie’s “Customs” and Michelle Dicinoski’s “How to Grow a Lawn”. Both are beautifully written accounts of marriages recognised in Canada, but not in the authors’ home country, Australia. Ritchie allows himself to hope that he may receive a positive response to his marriage from a Customs official, or at least recognition: “in that moment I think it may be different this time” (203). But this does not eventuate, and Ritchie observes “somewhere over the Pacific, at thirty-nine thousand feet, I lost a husband” (204). Similarly, Dicinoski retains hope despite the distinctly unneighbourly response of her neighbour, Bob, to news of her marriage. For these writers, gentle humour and controlled use of metaphor accomplish what browbeating never could.
Regardless of the diversity of their stances, none of the contributors seems to wholly oppose same-sex marriage. I found myself agreeing with Michael Kirby in his foreword (xxiv) and fellow reviewer David Allan that the collection might have benefited from the inclusion of some of these contrasting viewpoints. But readers may have been exposed to enough reductio ad absurdum arguments along the lines of “same-sex marriage will lead to people marrying their dogs” outside these pages to be relieved not to be meeting any more here within them.
According to the Speak Now blog, the collection has been criticised for the fact that “it doesn’t speak with one voice on the issue of marriage and that politicians could be ‘spooked’ by the proposal of polyamory expressed by some of the contributors”. But to me, this editorial risk-taking is one of the strengths of this collection. It exemplifies the principles of parity and inclusion that underline the push for marriage equality. To speak “with one voice” might be politically expedient, but it risks enforcing a new, albeit non-heterosexual, orthodoxy. The editor has chosen instead to embrace and celebrate the multi-faceted realities of people’s lives and heterogenous perspectives. To do otherwise would reinforce the misconception that the diversity within these pages somehow stands outside of—rather than is synecdochal of—human experience as a whole.
Because this collection is so eclectic—with variations in genre, exact topic, and approach—it would have benefited from an index. This is not a book to be read straight through. Rather it is one to dip into, put aside for rumination, and dip into again. As the personal pieces often introduce concepts expanded upon in the academic essays, an index would help to explicate these links. For example, Deb Wain’s assertion that marriage “as a concept and social construct … predates the Christian church” (236) could be cross-referenced to the essays expanding on this concept. For those interested in further reading, an index or select bibliography would also help to locate passing references to secondary sources in some of the essays.
The danger with a collection such as Speak Now is preaching to the choir—that it will primarily attract an audience already receptive to, and interested in, same-sex marriage. But the book’s diversity of voices prevents this. Victor Marsh’s admission of his own change of heart in his editorial introduction is not only disarming, it’s canny. By acknowledging his own shift in perspective, he opens up breathing space for readers to do the same.
Speak Now documents an array of different attitudes and approaches to same-sex marriage at a pivotal time in Australian political life. It will make a valuable contribution to queer historical scholarship in Australia. For the newly out or curious, it showcases some of the varied possibilities for living a queer life. Speak Now deserves a wide, enquiring readership. I hope it finds one.
You can access the accompanying blog for Speak Now at http://speaknowaustralia.blogspot.com.au/
Works Cited
Adair, Nancy. Word is Out: Stories of Some of our Lives. Delacorte Press, 1978.
Allan, David. Rev. of Speak Now: Australian Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage. Ed. Victor Marsh. GayLawNet 20 November 2011. <http://www.gaylawnet.com/ezine/books/speak_now.htm>
“Wendell Rosevear Speaks Now”. Speak Now. http://speaknowaustralia.blogspot.com.au/2011/11/william-rosevear-speaks-now.html
FIONA McKEAN is a postgraduate student at The University of Queensland.
May 5, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Furious Triangle
by Catherine Vidler
Puncher and Wattmann
ISBN
Reviewed by BONNY CASSIDY
Readers of a contemporary online poetry journal like Mascara Literary Review are probably among those most comfortable with the idea that a poem can be found or generated in any manner of ways. We accept that modern poetics has become happily detached from the notion of authorial integrity. After Surrealism, Ern Malley and John Ashbery – and through their heirs, of which Australia has many including John Tranter and Michael Farrell – we continue to be delighted by automatic poetics of all kinds. This delight has only been stoked by the arrival of our creature, the WWW; which, when charged, speaks back to us in our own language.
And such delight sparkles in the first full-length collection of poems by Sydney writer and Snorkel founding editor Catherine Vidler. Furious Triangle is a dynamic combination of poems: electronically generated and found in non-literary material; imagistic lyric sequences; and concrete and typographical poems. While its selection does not always feel like the strongest possible showcase of Vidler’s skill, the book explores the compelling relationship between these modes within her work.
Its reader is immediately aware of motifs of star and numeral, which come to represent the lyric and abstract poles that guide Vidler’s writing. Numbers rule her titles, there are several poems about counting, and Vidler’s suite of source code poems is replete with numerals as typographic image and as symbol:
5: define SF_CENTER 1 # Star at center of image
define SF_MARK1 2 # Mark stars in first image
define SF_MARKALL 3 # Mark stars in all images
*
338: / / Consume any number of stars.
while ((c = in.read()) = = ‘*’)
At first it seems that numerals, like source codes, are an abstract language with which Vidler undermines the lyrical cliché of stars. But Vidler isn’t merely reminding us that poetic language is also a code denoting a correlative meaning; she’s also demonstrating that any code may be poetic, and does so repeatedly through electronic sources such as OneLook Reverse Dictionary and Google Poetry Robot utilised in Furious Triangle. A convention that has been most thoroughly exploited by Tranter, Vidler provides notes to the poems that not only allow but clearly invite the reader to research and “source” her poetic process.
However, in its fascination with the seeming consciousness of electronic language, Vidler’s work tells contemporary readers something else about the fallacy of authorship. It seems to suggest that intentionality isn’t a fallacy at all; or, at least, that we desperately wish for the fallacy to be disproved. Her source code poems are disturbing, because, for a fleeting moment the code appears to be alive and thinking, as though a voice was speaking out from within. It’s the combined voices of the poet and reader, of course, which drive the vehicle of language. This “triangle” is concretely illustrated in “10 two-word poems”:
ellips(is land)mass
va(st ar)dent
fini(sh ine)ffable
gra(sp ill)usory
fla(sh immer)sion
bri(sk y)awning
enli(ven n)exus
ventu(re ad)venture
id(le af)lutter
lea(f ind)ex
The poem literally sets up: the intersection of language, which provides each original pair of words; the poet, who provides the suggestive parentheses; and the reader who enjoys the affect of the third, captured word. Each of these new or meta-words suggests between-ness, distance and ground, overlap and discovery. This poem and its counterpart, “20 one-word poems”, is a simple, quiet game one might play with a child – finding words within words. When I searched Wikipedia for “venn” I was reminded of high school “diagrams that show all possible logical relations between a finite collection of sets”. Vidler searches for this vortex in the most familiar and banal language codes.
As this poem demonstrates, Vidler’s sensibility as a concrete poet is constantly at work in Furious Triangle. In the best of her poetic experiments, there’s just enough authorial suggestion to affirm a second reading, and a third, as we arrange Vidler’s lists and lines in potent ways. She’s in full flight when representing this twisting relationship through image. The book’s opener, “No stars tonight”, creates a kind of imagistic chiasmus:
No stars tonight,
cloud only,
only cloud.
*
The steaming river
is upside down,
a stun of star-fish
clings
to its hidden floor.
*
But something more,
(I overlooked)
the darkness,
strung
like an old guitar
or a boat;
supple, fantastic, afloat.
In two other wonderfully unnerving poems, “At Taronga Zoo” and “Proportions”, Vidler returns to decoding lyrical habits. In “At Taronga Zoo” she seems to be playing the strings of metaphor and metonymy simultaneously; using a subject to suggests a literal predicate, which in turn offers a metaphorical description of the subject:
11. Zebras calmly stand their ground.
12. Hunched chimps concentrate the heat.
13. Wallabies loll like an indulgent audience.
14. Harbour views unwrap their surprises.
In such poems, language is at aptly crossed purposes. Simile and metaphor are shiny surfaces that catch Vidler’s attention, and she swoops. Elsewhere in the book, this focus is evident in the echoing forms of sestina and villanelle, and concrete poems of tapering and inversion.
Like Farrell, Vidler reveals herself undertaking live tests of language in front of an audience. In the ideal poetic scenario the reader’s participation will complete the act. In too many poems in Furious Triangle, however, it’s a risky business and a weakening rather than strengthening element. In one instance, Vidler creates her own eye chart using only the letters EYE (made by a website dedicated to the task), and unfortunately this simplistic gag is not reproduced well in the book. Vidler’s source code “translation” of a digital concrete poem by the Wellington poet, Bill Manhire, looks good but seems to take her earlier experiments beyond readability. In one of her more conventionally formalist poems, “Ernie and Bert sestina”, Vidler recycles lines from the Sesame Street scripts but doesn’t convey quite enough for the found lines to mean anything. Uncannily, Ernie and Bert also make an appearance in Farrell’s poem, “Tit for tat”, in his 2011 chapbook, thempark – this is worth mentioning because, through form as much as image, Farrell’s poem transports these familiar and utterly unthreatening puppet characters to a flimsy cardboard “ipod world” of adult desires and frustrations. His poem makes compelling use of disrupted language, whereas Vidler’s feels like a minor exercise.
Despite its lesser poems, Furious Triangle can be thrilling: its better poems convince me that poetry still has something to do; revealing the secret world inside words, their unseen intentions, forgotten lineages and unexpected bonuses.
BONNY CASSIDY is a Melbourne poet and writer. She has recently completed the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship for Poetry, and her first full-length collection of poems, Certain Fathoms, is published by Puncher & Wattmann.
May 5, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Bearded Chameleon
by Chris Mooney-Singh
Black Pepper Press
ISBN 9781876044718
Reviewed by PHILTON
There are poems for the page and poems for the stage. Chris Mooney-Singh is an established live performer. His second poetry collection, The Bearded Chameleon, transposes his performative skills into poetically good reading. Mooney-Singh is a chameleon because his ‘makeup’ stems from two cultures: his native Australia and India where he has mostly lived in recent decades. He is never quite at home in either, his ‘colours’ change according to which country he’s in. His adoption of the Sikh faith, which forbids cutting hair, has him bearded. This theme is encapsulated in 40 end-rhyme couplets tightly presented with perceptive cultural observations (‘village life is one food chain’). India, exuberant and traumatic, contrasts with Mooney-Singh’s other life:
Suburbia was a dumb cartoon:
here, typhoid sweats through each monsoon;
There’s exquisite images of interaction between the newcomer and villagers:
I wet my tongue, pretend what’s best
and they are kind, pretend the rest.
An ‘internal ode’ to the poet’s fauna namesake weaves engaging snippets; the chameleon is ‘prehistoric, spiky, punk’ for whom ‘sun-bathing is the reptile’s art’. ‘Abstract Studies with Monsoon Green’ distils the adopted environment’s fecundity’:
The days of humid blindness are upon us,
the rain has left a steamy haze of green.
The mulberry limb drips into the milk pail,
green are the tears upon the chilli plants.
There’s an innovative reprint of humanity’s footstep:
I follow footprint puddles to the pump.
Mooney-Singh aims to
…learn the way of planting rice:
green thumb, invite the fingers to make friends.
Among captivating images of India there’s a night-driving view of a truck’s decorated rear: ‘Krishna and the milkmaids/ were dancing in our headlights’. ‘Indian Standard Time’ includes ‘eating pakoras and deep-fried gossip’ and ‘yesterday or tomorrow, neither too late, nor too early’ whether that be ‘in this birth or the next’. There’s arresting street-graphics:
the lifters of dead-cows,
cremation-ground caretakers,
collectors of the shit-bins,
bottom-feeders, vultures.
And vivid imagery that could be from anywhere such as this forest-after-rain metaphor:
sunlight opens up its peacock tail
Personal aspects of Mooney-Singh’s journey embrace the evocative pain of witnessing his (first) wife’s death.
I was helpless, a passenger
during the final act of her breathing
that slipped beyond even its coma
as the taxi halted at the traffic light.
Aftermath is poignant:
…I lift your old cup from a suitcase
of last things you touched on earth.
I see the lipstick: two firm petal prints.
I will never clean away the kiss.
‘My Fallen’, images of deaths in Mooney-Singh’s family, innovatively commences ‘These last photos I don’t have’. Significant memories are often associated with background detail and these are captured with powerful brevity:
The strident starlings of 2001
still halo your head on soft grass.
Mooney-Singh produces striking aphorisms including ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is a clear conscience’. ‘To the Dalits’ demonstrates well-crafted rhyme is effective for invocation of traditional Indian folklore. Tradition is also invoked with the ‘ghazal’, a love song comprising couplets with an end-rhyme refrain that usually repeats the same word; Mooney-Singh diffuses the refrain’s monotony by introducing ‘unattached’ prefixes which form cross-rhyme patterns — neither end-rhyme nor internal (within-a-line) rhyme, but constructed on rhyming words appearing within different lines:
Make money, not art, says the plastic rose.
I have no nose for that stillborn rose.
Poetry got divorced from the rose,
yet the New Thing’s still a fresh-worn rose
Seventy million years of the rose:
fossils lime the time-sworn rose.
The cross-rhyme is ‘stillborn/fresh-worn’ etc. Creating effective cross-rhyme is difficult. Kipling, Hopkins and Swinburne were the only poets of whom I was aware to have crafted it well until I encountered Mooney-Singh’s ghazals; in this challenging form he rubs shoulders with the best. Innovation doesn’t always work. Coining neologisms (new words) has potential pitfalls – they can seem forced, too-clever or obscure. A neologism in ‘I Come in Winter to a City Without You’ doesn’t suffer these flaws; the now Australian-based poet and his (second) wife (temporarily in Singapore) communicate by mobile and internet, chatting in ‘glocal tongues’. ‘Glocal’ is an engaging creation: these technologies may be global but they allow for an intimacy which is effectively local. Attractive eclecticism is quirkily reflected in ‘found poems’ of Indian highway-side graffiti including ‘riotous’ examples like ‘HORN IS TO HONK/ PLEASE DO IT ON MY CURVES’.
Mooney-Singh’s India is not all traditional. A woman who dares to reject her violent husband by deserting his family’s home evocatively observes:
To move in public is no easy choice
if you wear divorce’s question-mark
upon your forehead.
With riveting figurative language she urges:
…more women
also swept beneath the family carpet.
Fight! I say…
Never shall we let them make us feel
like wedding ornaments, like nose-rings
returned dishonoured to the jeweller’s shop.
The Bearded Chameleon has a piece de resistance, ‘Another Bhagwanpur’, which opens:
A country village stuck in the buffalo mud
piles up its cow-pats, balancing clay pots
of mosquito water on the heads of women
who wear pregnancy under flimsy shawls.
The metaphorically stuck-in-mud village is personified by its ‘orchestration’ of cow-pats and women’s actions. The stereotypical heads balancing pots become thought-provoking with ‘mosquito’ water — potential drama not associated with the image. Women ‘wear’ prominent pregnancies. We learn much from skilfully packed lines:
The village council of five cannot fight
the school’s wrong sums and cane-learning;
cement walls, white-washed by government,
the young men employed by opium.
There’s doctors who ‘deal in snake-bite mantras’ and this arresting portrait:
…the last Gandhian freedom-fighter
props up old glory on a walking stick.
More transfixing language concludes this village vignette: ‘the night-long typhoid prayers to Ram.’ Sixteen lines have the reader experience a tour de force.
There are flawed moments. If information becomes a poet’s ‘driver’ the poetry usually suffers; this happens with Mooney-Singh’s portraits and some traditional-story retelling. ‘Mr Chopra’ is mostly prosaic description. ‘Apartment of a Bombay Millionaire’ and ‘Mrs Pritima Devi’ are generally similar and include unnecessary didacticism. In ‘Yogesh Meets Ganesh’ and ‘Advice From An Uncle’ storytelling dissolves the poetry. There are moments when things don’t work. ‘A Punjabi Leda and the Swan’ presents an ostensibly good metaphor between the Western myth and a man raping a woman in contemporary India, but there’s awkward passages; the mental wrestling needed to wrap one’s head around these reduces effectiveness — a forced sensibility suggesting the legend doesn’t fit the poem’s context. Sometimes poetically good ‘moments’ are undermined by additional figurations:
Saffron priests say Out!
like big sticks hunting rats
along the temple drains.
The images of saffron priests and big sticks hunting rats in drains are vivid; but the linking simile is not – verbal commands and running with sticks are dissimilar actions. The ‘common ground’ is intensity, a minimal likeness. Since the commands are projected by priests, effectiveness is further reduced; whatever the faith, clerics don’t undermine their authority with doing-the-shitwork frenetics. The collection has instances of overwriting.
I look out into the darkness for you.
Rest is the wraith
that will not let me sleep.
This image’s potential is under-realised with the superfluous ‘out’ and the prosey ‘let me’. Direct ‘ownership’ of the wraith and tighter presentation like (for example) ‘Rest is my wraith that will not sleep’ increases metaphorical impact. ‘I Come in Winter to a City Without You’ is curiously headed by this Mallarmé quotation: ‘Oh so dear from afar and nearby’. What is this quote’s purpose? True, it fits the theme – but Mooney-Singh’s poem says it much better than this (unusually) ordinary Mallarmé line; a redundant epigraph, it may imply credibility is sought through an artificial hitch to the famous. High-profile quotations can be epigraphically effective. But there’s risk that contrast with iconic lines may diminish one’s own and inclusion may appear to ‘name-drop’. If the same poem’s ‘the god of small transactions’ is an allusion to Arundhati Roy’s Booker-winning Indian novel The God of Small Things, should this be acknowledged? Or is it a subliminal reference to the novel? Could it be pure coincidence? Of course the reader is never ‘party’ to writers’ thoughts. It’s suffice to say that if Mooney-Singh was aware of his line’s similarity to Roy’s title, it was advisable to not use it and rely on his own words.
There are minor irritants; an alcoholic’s problems are lessened with a cliché (‘all have raised a storm’) and curiously excessive use of colons and semi-colons. These ‘punctuations’ enhance pauses but frequent use impairs poetic flow and produces a ‘boy who cried wolf’ effect – reduced impact of their effective moments. The poem ‘Families’, mostly a prosaic list, has poetry in its rhythm, which leads to the other key feature of Mooney-Singh the poet: performance. It was informative to attend the collection’s launch. Prosey patches were enlivened, reflecting that a not insignificant proportion is ‘poems for the stage’. His performance embraced skilful light/shade vocals and effective nylon-string guitar accompaniment. The Bearded Chameleon progresses strong poetic qualities Mooney-Singh crafted in his first collection The Laughing Buddha Cab Company (2007). To gain full appreciation one should experience the performance.
PHILTON’s poetry and short fiction have appeared in Overland, Island, Quadrant, Envoi (UK) and translated into Chinese for Chung Wai Literary Monthly.
May 5, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Australians love to venerate and immortalise their outlaws as heroes, seeing rebelliousness and the concept of a ‘fair go’ as part of their cultural identity. Men such as Ned Kelly, Mad Dog Morgan and Jack Doolan have been celebrated in both film and song for sticking it to the authorities and battling for the ‘little man’ but two other non-white figures going back to the first days of colonisation have until recently flown under the radar: John ‘Black’ Caesar, a black African who was Australia’s first bushranger and Pemulwuy, an almost mythical Aboriginal warrior who led the indigenous resistance against the fledgling British settlement.
It comes as a surprise to most Australians that there were 11 black men on the First Fleet in 1788. Caesar was one of these. His journey probably began in Madagascar. Taken as a slave to work in the fields in Virginia in the United States, he became one of the hordes of slaves to take refuge behind British lines in the American War of Independence. After the defeat of the British in 1783, a fleet carrying many runaway slaves and black loyalists fled to Nova Scotia. Caesar, thought to be 14 years old at the time, was one of them. The Minerva then took him to England in the same year, joining an estimated 9000 other slaves who had also left America.
Even though London was unquestionably the world’s greatest city and for some the streets were paved with gold, for most it was an unforgiving place full of danger and vice. For most of the former black loyalists the situation was dire and some, like Caesar turned to crime to survive. In 1786 in Kent, he was convicted of stealing money and soon was in the Ceres; a fetid, disease ridden prison hulk on the Thames. This was merely a precursor to being chained between decks for the trip on the Alexander to that outpost of the Empire, Botany Bay.
It is impossible to know for certain which black was in the initial work party at Botany Bay, but with Caesar’s imposing stature and immense physical strength (he was thought to be the strongest convict in the First Fleet) it wouldn’t be far fetched to say that he was one of the men sent ashore to try and carve something from the black sandy soil. Aboriginals from the Eora tribe who met the party must have not only been confused by the white convicts and marines in their strange garb but also by a pitch black man in the self same get up talking the same language as these otherworldly creatures. Finding Botany Bay not to their liking the entire fleet moved north to Port Jackson a few days later.
From our vantage point of history it is difficult to comprehend but in terms of European civilisation the First Fleet literally had nothing and the 732 convicts with their inadequate tools had to start from Year Zero. The rules they worked under were simple and brutal. Anyone caught stealing would hang. If they didn’t work, they didn’t eat and anyone trying to enter the woman’s tents would be shot. Of course this last rule lasted about as long as the ink took to dry and one officer in a letter home to his wife recalled that the woman’s camp soon resembled ‘whoredome’. The rations supplied to the convicts for their back breaking tasks were too little and in a couple of months were further reduced. Quite simply, for a man of Caesar’s size the rations were not enough and as noted by the man who would soon to become his nemesis, Marine Captain David Collins, Caesar was always ravenous. As such, Caesar’s first infraction in the new colony was when he was accused of stealing four pounds of bread from the tent of another convict. Although the surviving records don’t show Caesar’s punishment it is safe to assume he was tied to a tree and given 100-300 lashes. On this occasion it is also likely to assume that still swinging from the same tree that Caesar was tied to was a 17 year old youth who had been hung for stealing bread. The savage parameters of the new colony had been set but did little to stop the settlement sliding further into hunger as crops and animal rearing failed and dysentery and scurvy raised their ugly heads.
In April 1789, in what was to become a pattern, Caesar appeared in court for stealing. This time he wasn’t flogged but received a much worse punishment as his sentence was increased from seven years to life. Seeing a lifetime of punitive brutality and hunger stretching before him, Caesar made the first of his escapes. With a stolen musket and cooking pot, Caesar ventured into the great unknown beyond the settlement but was captured shortly after, weak with hunger and offering no resistance. This time, Caesar was sentenced to death.
The evocative alleged last words of Ned Kelly ‘Such is Life’ now feature on tattoos and on Eureka Stockade flags co-opted by drunken louts on Australia Day, reinforcing Kelly’s status as Australia’s folk hero of folk heroes. Caesar’s nonchalant reply on sentencing should also be duly celebrated but problems of translation may hinder this. He told the judge, “if they should scrag him he would quiz them all and show them some gig at the nubbing cheat, before he was turned off.” A loose translation of this convict argot was that he would play a trick on the executioner and get a laugh for both he and the crowd before he was hung. Judge Collins, who at various times called Caesar ‘ a wretch’, ‘a mere animal’ and ‘insensible alike to punishment and kindness’ did not want Caesar to become a symbol of convict resistance, something which may have eventuated if the proposed execution was turned into some sort of theatre. Instead Caesar, who was not averse to hard work was sent to work in chains on Garden Island, in the middle of Sydney Harbour, from where the settlement’s vegetables were supplied.
Even though he was allowed to supplement his meagre rations with what he grew Caesar again escaped in December 1789 after convincing sympathetic guards to remove his chains. Taking a canoe and a week’s worth of provisions he headed into the interior, stopping only to steal a musket from the settlement. He roamed for six weeks until he was recaptured suffering from severe spear wounds. Various accounts have been put forward as to how he had come to be speared; from his own unlikely tale that he had been trying to drive a lost herd of cattle away from Aborigines back to the settlement to the idea that he had tried to integrate himself with the Aborigines but had committed a cultural error and was cast out. The most probable cause was Caesar (who had no ammunition for his musket) would descend on Aborigines when they had anything on the fire, swaggering and brandishing his musket. The Aborigines who had no idea that Caesar had no ammunition and knowing the power of the weapon, scattered. That was until he lost his musket and was attacked. Again given the sentence of death, he was sent to hospital to recover until fit enough to hang.
Probably realising at this stage it was far easier to get rid of Caesar (in a geographical sense), he once again escaped the noose and in 1790 was sent to far away Norfolk Island. On Norfolk, with the incentive of more freedom and food Caesar threw himself into his work and took a wife, Anne Poore. Making a good go of it, Caesar worked his one acre plot for three days a week, providing not only enough for himself but also his family which now included a baby daughter. Even so, not all was rosy on Norfolk Island and circumstances were again conspiring to change the trajectory of Caesar’s journey. When soldiers from the New South Wales Corps (a body of men whose self penned motto of profits over glory attracted a less than desirable bunch) replaced the Marines on the island they demanded land of their own as well as women. Being a law unto themselves, their demands were taken very seriously and to avoid bloodshed, ‘trouble makers’ like Caesar were sent back to Sydney in 1793. His family was not permitted to come with him.
During the time that Caesar had been on Norfolk, Pemulwuy had also put himself on the British hit list by spearing John McIntyre, one of Governor’s game hunters. The spear (used by the Bidjigal clan of the Eora peoples) had been designed to cause a slow and painful death with barbs meant to come off when the spear head was removed from the body. A reprisal operation took place (interestingly led by another black convict, John Randall) which was supposed to capture Pemulwuy and bring back the heads of another six Aboriginal men. This grisly operation was an utter failure with no Aboriginals found but Pemulwuy was now too, a marked man.
A distraught Caesar arrived back in Sydney with the settlement careering towards starvation. The only thing not in short supply was alcohol, which like most saleable items was controlled by the New South Wales Corps. Almost as if he had come full circle, Caesar again absconded and following the same pattern was caught and flogged unmercifully. But like a scene in ‘The Proposition’, Caesar, with flesh hanging from his back and the flogger wiping gore off the cat of nine tails after each stroke, refused to buckle telling Collins that ‘all the flogging in the world would not make him better’. In the eyes of the other convicts Caesar’s acts of defiance as well as his swift turn of phrase gained him an almost legendary standing amongst his fellows.
Pemulwuy and the Eora had also become a bigger problem as the settlement spread from Sydney and Parramatta, further encroaching on Aboriginal land and chasing away more game. In a series of co-ordinated attacks, Pemulwuy’s gang (which included a couple of Irish runaways who helped with information about the settlement and military tactics of the British) raided settlers farms stealing ripening crops and provisions. The British put these raids down to the Aboriginals having taken a liking to corn, not giving the Aboriginals credit enough for an organised coherent strategy designed to get them out of their hunting lands. The attacks pushed the settlement to the brink and the British responded by retaliating harshly. Pemulwuy responded in kind and dead were left on both sides in a series of gruesome attacks and counter attacks. For a time it looked as though the raids and guerilla tactics would prevail as amongst the British there was talk of abandoning prime farming land and looking for new sites. One can imagine the British wondering who was the biggest scourge to the new settlement, the Aboriginal warrior Pemulwuy or the incorrigible Black Caesar.
This was especially so when Caesar escaped ‘honest labour’ again. This time, however he was more successful as like other bushrangers after him, he was able to get arms, ammunition and supplies from the growing number of ex-convict settlers who sympathised with him and his stand against oppression. Nor was Caesar the only runaway and soon a ragtag gang had formed around him. The legend of the first Australian bush ranger had been born. Although death would be the only thing that would make Caesar ‘acceptable’ to the British authorities he achieved a notion of acceptability when he clashed with Pemulwuy. The swirling miasma of history has obscured the reasons for this clash (some have suggested that Pemulwuy and Caesar had joined forces) but the bloody conflict left Pemulwuy severely wounded with a fractured skull and musket wounds. At first, the rumours that filtered back to the settlement stated that the feared Aboriginal warrior was dead, cheering the authorities no end. Judge Collins still considered Caesar as a ‘savage of a darker hue, and full as far removed from civilisation,’ but having removed one of the obstacles to the success of the colony sent word to Caesar that he was ready to cut him some slack. Caesar from bitter experience had become inured to the broken promises and savagery of the British laughed off the offers and continued on his newly found bush ranging ways. Caesar’s continued defiance and resulting embarrassment to the authorities led to other offers of conditional pardons but Caesar, echoing villains past and present sent back word he wouldn’t come in or be taken alive.
In January 1796, an official notice was published which made every scoundrel in the colony sit up and take notice. ‘Whoever shall secure this man Black Caesar and bring him in with his arms shall receive as a reward five gallons of spirits.’ As alcohol was more plentiful than food and more important than money this large reward attracted more than its fair share of bounty hunters. As time went by and Caesar was still at large, his legend and celebrity grew until every crime in the colony was being attributed to him and breathless reports built him up to almost invincible proportions. Alas, this was not the case and on the 15th of February 1796 at Liberty Plains west of Sydney Cove, Black Caesar was shot down in cold blood by an alcoholic ex-highwayman, John Winbow who may have been part of Caesar’s own gang. An unflinching Collins when hearing the news of the death of the first icon of convict resistance wrote, ‘thus ended a man who certainly during life could never have been estimated at one remove above the brute.’
If the British thought getting rid of Black Caesar would calm things down they were sadly mistaken as in February, 1797, a fully recovered Pemulwuy managed to attack the small outpost of Toongabbie, five miles west of Parramatta. With many of the Eora nation’s sub groups attracted to his cause, much of Toongabbie was burnt and ransacked as it became the first town in the new colony to be taken by the indigenous peoples. Even though this attack sent shivers down the spines of both settlers and authorities alike, it was nothing like March of the same year when the stronghold of Parramatta was attacked in what became known as the ‘Battle of Parramatta’. Much of the town’s population retreated to the military stockade as many of the farms and houses on the outskirts were hit in the audacious attack. Fierce battles broke out with losses on both sides. Much to the authorities embarrassment, this ‘riotous and primitive savage Pemulwuy’ managed to take the town briefly before he was felled, shot seven times. He was captured and taken to a hospital, near death.
Pemulwuy, amongst his own people was known to be a ‘clever man’, that is someone associated with being able to harness supernatural powers. His escape from jail only emphasised these claims as after all how could a severely wounded man in leg irons, get away. To the Eora, the explanation was simple, he had turned himself into a bird and flown away … The white settlers, some already half believing the rumours that bullets couldn’t kill him (they somehow passed right through him) and that he could be in several places at once became even more skittish after Pemulwuy recovered and resumed his attacks. This time, his main weapon was a terrifying ally that his people had used for millennia, fire.
Burning down crops and the areas surrounding farms, Pemulwuy sowed seeds of terror and again pushed the settlement towards famine. Wheat Protection Squads were set up but Pemulwuy changed his tactics again, letting the men protect the crops as he attacked the homes, terrifying the women and children. Soon, the Protection Squads were useless as the men refused to venture far from their terrified families. Added to this, the bushrangers Thomas Thrush and William Knight were thought to be in cahoots with him. Interestingly enough, it wasn’t until late 1801 (and after 11 years of resistance) that Pemulwuy’s name was recorded in an official document ̶ a sign perhaps of the whitewashing of history that occurred after his death. The all powerful New South Wales Corps seeing their profits being snatched from them with the continual attacks and fires around Parramatta and its prime farming land, responded in kind. Every known Eora campsite was to be attacked and anyone found there, killed. Massacres of children, women and the elderly followed. Already decimated due to an outbreak of influenza, the indigenous Eora teetered on the brink of extinction.
Coupled with this was the staggering reward put on Pemulwuy’s head: 20 gallons of spirits, free pardon and two suits of clothes. In June 1802, Pemulwuy ‘The Rainbow Warrior’ (so called because he wore the various colours of the distinct groups that made up the Eora nation) was shot dead, his head cut off and sent to England for ‘scientific’ purposes. Even his enemies had to acknowledge, ‘although a terrible pest to the colony, he was a brave and independent character’. His son Tedbury continued the fight until, he too, was killed in 1810.
Although being seen as a heroic figure by the Aborigines, Pemulwuy has also gained recognition in the wider community: a suburb in Sydney was named after him, as well as a park. Prince William, on a recent visit to Australia was presented with a petition to have Pemulwuy’s remains brought back to Australia. One can hope that these are the first steps in acceptance being gained by a true Australian hero. Hopefully the same can also be said of his one time adversary, the giant Black Caesar.
Michael Spann is currently trying to piece together the links between Australia and the mysterious German author B.Traven. He currently lives in Brisbane, Australia.
April 28, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Everyday Static
by Toby Fitch
Vagabond Press
16 pages
Reviewed by ASHLEY CAPES
There is a fascinating tension in Toby Fitch’s Everyday Static, where beauty is wrung from points where the cityscape and the natural world intersect. On one hand the city is a great provider of poetry for Fitch, both through its parade of objects (especially objects of transit, like trains and cars, even shopping trolleys) and the way it stars in many of the poems within. At the same time he presents the city as a place accented by the images and hints of the natural world, where it presses in and survives, in mountains beyond busy harbours, in rain, in clouds, sunbeams and the moon.
The opening poem “On the Slink” embodies this idea, where the owls are placed beside wires, alley cats beside bottles in gutters
Sobering up, a breeze –
if I cast a stone up through the air,
between the wires, the tooting owls,
beyond the rooftops
into the twisting funnel of stars –
I could almost crack open the night
and swig
Set against the natural world is the street, with its traffic jams and stoplights and gutters, like a great, frozen urban river. An undercurrent to the collection is the theme of movement suspended, or even denied. Fitch places the reader inside the car in poems like “Tangents”, “Everyday Static” and “Junction” or within adjunct spaces, beneath lampposts and walking the streets, effectively trapping us in the narrative. It reveals a real disappointment when such movement is denied, a place of potential that has become but a place of traffic jams and bottlenecks. We look through his windshield and feel the same city
Driving along alone
between unforgiving buildings,
raindrops flicked up by tyres,
airwaves breaking
like rain on a windscreen
from “Everyday Static”. In “Junction” we see traffic “piled up in the rearview mirror/like a whitewash of words/none of which can tell me the right way.”
But in the street, in the jam, in the collection itself even, water is often a saviour. A titular poem “Everyday Static” exemplifies this, where the crush of routine and being trapped with flat tyres and tired windscreen wipers, is challenged by the water, which holds the potential for escape:
the world at water level as we pulled up
and gazed out into the harbour,
mountains and rain dissolving in lumpy waves
and in “Reaching Out” where we might
scale the ocean’s abyss,
soar up, above,
beyond the last port of call
and leave behind
a thousand thoughts,
a hundred hearts,
ten nicknames
Fitch’s poems possess strength of imagery and metaphor, one that lies often in their unexpectedness within the context of a given poem. In fact, it’s really pleasing to see such inventiveness, such surrealism at times, in the pieces. Perhaps my favourite stanza in the collection (from “The River Seine”) reveals this skill best “you can see the horn-sounds/as colour above the river.” “Floe” is another example, we are given an ocean liner wedged in “fat” ice within a “skull full of hard rain” or the “wheezing stars” from “Irritations” and in closing poem “Winded on a Trampoline” an explosion of colour:
I clutch at clouds, burn my brow on sunbeams, lick blue moons with a rainbow scythe.
“Meanwhile”demonstrates the same stunning imagery, where falling snowflakes are “emptying the sky of stars” which are later thrown like “great shooting snowballs.” “Meanwhile” is one of the poems in the collection, which stands out, partly because we catch a glimpse of Fitch in a more relaxed frame as a writer, and the poem is beautiful in part due to this lessening of tension.
Everyday Static is cohesive collection of fourteen short poems that develop an undercurrent of struggle between movement and stasis, city and natural landscape, one that impresses not just with the narrator’s role within the themes, but with its attention to image, juxtaposition and metaphor.
Felt
by Johanna Featherstone
Vagabond Rare Objects
14 pages
Reviewed by ASHLEY CAPES
Johanna Featherstone has collected an intimate group of (mostly) short poems in her chapbook Felt, poems that explore the personal and universal with a welcome attention to detail.
Take the opening poem “Expectant”, which reveals that attention to meaningful or evocative detail that is a hallmark of the entire collection. It offers a gentle beginning on a beach where “boats nose the horizon” and small hands collect objects hurled up by the deep. The short poem is like a film or an experience, where we as readers see a clean moment in time without having it described to us. It is this deft touch that I enjoyed so much throughout the collection, a touch that draws memory from the reader, linking it to the poetry.
Featherstone’s imagery is often an effective mix of the abstract and the beautiful or the innocent and the worldly. “Argyle Diamond Mine”, “Toyko Metro” and “Bedside Table” are but three which rely on such juxtaposition. The miners in “Argyle Diamond Mine” for instance, hide walls “stuck with glow-stars and fast-car posters” but are also presented as dealing stoically with the realities of adult life, where “…each man de-underpants/for the shower, swaying as he shaves and soaps free grit/from under the hood of his penis.”
In the meditative “Bedside Table” we see the world around a nursing home described most convincingly, through Featherstone’s use of colour, enjambment and her haiku-like eye for detail
Waking up in the same space teeth
brush after teeth brush, from below, a
gentle snare drum swish,
the ground is being
patted and brushed in ‘shhh’
steps: fluorescent green vest of a mammoth
council path sweeper, against
a newly popped orange rose.
The other great strength Felt possesses is its heart – making ‘Felt’ an apt title. The autobiographical elements of the chapbook are not self-indulgent; they balance personal remembrance and universal detail. They reveal a poet aware of language’s power to stir emotion, especially when it is used to describe objects which take on new and different meanings after momentous events, like the beautiful portrait of “Woodwork Classes” or “After the Funeral”, which hits hard
Toiletries, wallet things,
collected from the hospital, weigh down the single bed
that recently held his butterfly body…
…Fuzz settles on rubbish bags
packed with his clothes, ready for the tip.
A sense of loss and the sharpness of memory are themes returned to throughout the collection, usually as they can be applied to immediate family groups or friends. In “Mother looking into her son’s bedroom” the idea of loss is many-fold, but most interesting is where Featherstone includes the heartbreak associated with lack of mobility. The poem touches on the struggle associated with ‘care’ and weaves through memories that heighten the loss
After decades of friendship, he remains bedridden. Once, with a surfer’s frame, he’d ribbon through Bronte’s tides. Every Saturday, with friends, fry eggs on hot, waxed boards.
Featherstone places my favourite poem “Toyko Metro” toward the end of the collection. This compact but richly poetic piece stands out the context of surrounding pieces, by nature of its subject matter. It does not deal directly with family, but rather places familiar people within a snapshot of Japan’s train system; schoolgirls, “palm-sized grannies” and “loyal businessmen.” Here, as elsewhere, the poet’s descriptive skill holds attention
Toyko Metro
Thigh-high in uniforms, a posse
of pigeon-toed girls flirt through text
messages & languid blinks
palm-sized grannies fold into bows & nap
alongside loyal businessmen who store
years of sleep in bags beneath their eyes
everyone dreams between stops
on these overpopulated trains,
silent as chopsticks on rice.
The poems in Felt are refreshingly free of conceit to my eye, poems written with care and respect, wasting no syllables and punctuating for clarity. It would be interesting to see how Featherstone might bring the strength of her economy, restraint and tact to longer narrative pieces.
April 28, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Monsoon Bride
by Michelle Aung Thin
TEXT
ISBN 9781921758638
Reviewed by Paul Giffard-Foret
Politics of Desire and the Colonial Machine
In the much politicised and somewhat romanticised discourse around present Burma (a.k.a. Myanmar) in the Occident, Michelle Aung Thin in her debut novel The Monsoon Bride has chosen to explore the nation’s British colonial past instead in such a way that encourages the reader to trace a historical lineage of oppressive power structure between the current Burmese military-based dictatorial regime and the colonial state that preceded it.
Michelle was born in Rangoon, Burma, and moved to live in Canada with her family as a child. She completed her PhD in creative writing in Adelaide under the supervision of Australia’s acclaimed author Brian Castro, and now lives in Melbourne. The Monsoon Bride is the product of her doctorate. Like Castro, her novel demonstrates a strong interest in questions of identity, belonging, and hybridity.
Two of its main characters are from mixed-raced, Eurasian backgrounds. This “third field” of vision is I believe what allows Aung Thin’s novel to distance itself from traditional Orientalist narratives of Burma and the East more generally, as well as from “nativist” discourses of authenticity which in the politically-charged context of Burmese intestine wars is a potential asset and the producer of valuable critical insights.
Chiefly drawing from family tales and personal research rather than memory or the actual experience of living in Burma, The Monsoon Bride is not a historical novel, but rather a fictionalised account of life in Rangoon in an attempt at capturing what Aung Thin herself describes at the time as ‘a very vibrant city [with] different people from all over the world who’ve come to make their fortunes.’[1]
The year is 1930, in an in-between time of ontological uncertainty directly following the stock market crash with the rise of Burmese independent movement and the gradual decline of Britain’s colonial grip over Burma’s internal affairs. Not incidentally perhaps, as Aung Thin commented elsewhere, an earthquake happened in 1930, a year she sees as ‘formative’, for ‘those are the pressures that have created the Burma that is there today.’[2]
In the words of Mary Callahan in her political essay on ‘Myanmar’s perpetual junta’ published in New Left Review, ‘the [British] decapitated the indigenous social order, and instituted a policy of ethnic divide-and-rule – ‘martial’ frontier races against the centre – that was extreme even by imperial standards.’[3] As she adds: ‘If the military and jurisdictional division of the country had first been imposed by British colonialism, its continuation after independence represented both a political and a moral failure on the part of the Burman-dominated state.’[4]
Nationalism
With such legacy in mind, The Monsoon Bride, like most postcolonial fiction, remains wary of the nationalist project that led to independence. As an illustration, Aung Thin’s depiction of the nationwide Dobama Asiayone, or “Our Burma Association”, formed in 1930 and mainly composed of students and lawyers, is particularly scathing. The association aimed ‘to promote unionization and worker-peasant solidarity [against the colonial administration] and was in the forefront of the strikes and demonstrations of the time.’[5]
So at the start of the novel, Winsome, a convent girl from the countryside recently married off to Desmond, of mixed-race too, finds herself submerged by a seawave of protesters marching in the streets and shouting ‘ ‘we’ (or maybe ‘us’) and this we/us was repeated again and again.’ (30) The sense of collectivity, of ‘be[ing] one among so many,’ (31) is however called into question as she realises how ‘we/us so easily might mean not-you.’ (30)
The individual’s dilution into ‘one seething skin, born from that one voice, we/us’ (31) in which she felt entirely alone (31) gives way to a larger critique in the parodial mode of the Thakins’ movement (meaning ‘master’ in ironic defiance of the British’s paternalistic attitude towards the colonised) and the Marxist project to which they subscribed.
Of middle-class background, highly educated, some of them in London, and with ‘an unwavering faith in ‘progress’ and modernity,’[6] as Callahan argues, their portrayal by Aung Thin in turn reduces them to “mimic men” – ‘ for they were all men…black men, brown men, yellow men…hard-eyed with thin, pinched faces’ (30) – with ‘no centre and no direction’ (32) and who play at being, rather than are, communists, as evident in one of the rare women present at the demonstration and the speech she delivers to the crowd:
‘My friends’, came the girl’s voice through the megaphone, a little reedy for being further away, ‘my comrades, we share a cause.’ There were jeers from the labourers – comrades, they would be laughing at the very idea – but of course this did not deter that steely young woman, who merely adjusted the angle of her attack. ‘Wealth,’ she cried, ‘is the foundation of all power. And we shall be poor no longer.’ (32)
Desire
Contra the “Great March of History” and the big narratives of modernity, Aung Thin as a writer with an interest in subjectivity and interpersonal relationships instead articulates in her novel what may be defined as a politics of desire through focusing on the triangular love affair between Winsome, Desmond, and his British employer Jonathan Grace.
The novel however does not fall into the postmodernist trap of removing the Subject from history or agency. Personal desire is primarily shaped by external factors, colonialism in particular. Such is in effect the driving force and law of (e)motion behind the characters’ actions – what constitutes in the incipit a metaphor for those “lines of flight” that Winsome seeks as she boards the train toward a new life in Rangoon:
She had felt a violent lurch to the left and when she looked out the window into the dark night, there was the gleam of a new track running along them. That glimmer was a sign the city was close and indeed she could feel this imminence in the train’s momentum. ‘Soon, soon, Rangoon, Rangoon…’ (3)
Perhaps Aung Thin’s greatest achievement in The Monsoon Bride is the way she powerfully communicates the paradoxical sense of Oriental lethargic spleen and langor, ‘boredom and loneliness’ (18), decay and disease, as well as a feeling of agitation, over-excitement and rebirth, which is not so much symptomatic of Rangoon’s tropical climate as it characterises the stulsifying rigidity, the ‘sucking stillness’ (14) of the colonial theatrical decorum and its stratisfied hierarchies.
This is how Winsome reviews her surroundings at the European Refreshment Room:
Around the room, white men and women in expensive travelling clothes watched from over their own cups while along the walls, behind the boilers, black eyes stared out of impassive brown faces. The bearer waited. Desmond stood stiffly, his arms at his sides. (14)
Ultimately, both are forced to leave since they do not fit into the picture, neither black nor white.
Within the colonial machine, based on ‘an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ maintained by a small set of rules’ (188), desire – the desire for transcendence, for love, for being able to reach the ‘Other’ – occurs through simultaneous ‘revulsion’ and ‘desire’, ‘one so like the other’ (104). Colonialism and the longing (and fear) of becoming-other – ‘between here and that other life, like the space between one heartbeat and the next, the difference between who you were and who you might become’ (190) – is what pushes Winsome and Jonathan towards each other and what eventually pulls them apart.
As newness enters the world toward the end of the novel, and as Jonathan and Winsome are forced beyond the illusion of romance to confront hard facts, love is temporarily stripped bare of its social weight to become “pure” desire: ‘He moved his hands across her lips, over her hair, her breasts, he rubbed his face against her skin, his fingers searching for this new woman, measuring her against the one he had known.’ (223)
Again, desire in the novel is not merely sexual, but (bio)political. Such is the strength of The Monsoon Bride that it always associates physical desire with the lack of, or hunger for, a world beyond the colonial machine: ‘There was a word for it, a word like poverty. Paucity. That was it. She would have said it out loud if he had not been beside her. It meant not enough, never enough.’ (136) The impending Burmese revolution itself is in fact driven by a politics of desire.
This is how Winsome’s employer, a respected Burmese photographer and a representative of Rangoon’s aspiring middle-class as well as a supporter of the Thakin Movement, describes her sojourn in Europe: ‘It was not awe that she felt among those much lauded icons of their civilisations, not jealousy either, but something worse; it was as if she had lived through a famine and could never again have enough to eat.’ (161)
Becoming-woman
In her essay, ‘The Name Game’, Michelle Aung Thin expressed her fear that the word ‘bride’ in the title of her novel may seem too ‘girly’: ‘You see, while I write like a woman I find that I am worried about being read as one.’[7] Like her female character Winsome, Michelle’s writerly journey is driven by a similar desire to subvert socio-cultural expectations of a woman (writer)’s place, and her awareness that ‘only a fraction of women are reviewed in the major literary magazines compared to men.’[8]
In this regard as in many other aspects, The Monsoon Bride is a immense success. As for Winsome,
These were heaty days, when something in the thick air loosened her joints and razed her judgment so that she looked when she should have turned away, stared when she should have cast her eyes down. It was on a heaty day that she first realised Rangoon was a city of men; men pulled rickshaws, drove buses, important men in light-coloured suits rushed along Phayre Street, holding their noses against the smell of drains. White men, brown men, black and yellow men, bunched like so much ripening fruit. She imagined them falling, warm from the branch, onto the flat of her hand. (27)
[1] Aung Thin, Michelle. ‘Interview’.
<http://rastous.podomatic.com/player/web/2011-08-24T18_07_46-07_00>
[2] Aung Thin, Michelle. ‘Interview’.
<http://podcast.3cr.org.au/pod/3CRCast-2011-09-15-70155.mp3>
[3] Callahan, Mary. ‘Myanmar’s perpetual junta’, New Left Review 60, Nov-Dec 2009, p. 56.
[4] Ibid, p. 31.
[5] Ibid, p. 36.
[6] Ibid, p. 39.
[7] Aung Thin, Michelle. ‘The Name Game’. (2010)
<http://wheelercentre.com/dailies/post/ed76a7fe9b16/>
[8] Ibid.
April 28, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments
Every Man in this Village is a Liar
by Megan Stack New York,
Doubleday, 2010 This edition: Scribe, 2011
ISBN: 9781921844096
RRP $24.95
Reviewed by TESSA LUNNEY
As it turned out, the first thing I learned about war was also the truest, and maybe it’s as true for nations as for individuals: You can survive and not survive, both at the same time. (4)
This book is Megan Stack’s education in survival. The quote summarises the Prologue in which she first learns about war through the combat duty and subsequent suicide of her uncle. The survival she is educated in is not physical. Corpses litter the pages, both materially and in the imagination. It is the corpse in the mind and the physical body in the world that she is interested in, how the two co-exist and how to navigate the slippages and cracks between them.
Stack tells the reader where she is going, but it takes a while to get there. She starts out almost as naïve as when she heard about her uncle surviving a bombing in Beirut in 1982 (1). In Afghanistan, in 2001, in the first flush of war with its 9/11 rhetoric, her first war, Stack is preoccupied with truth. Chapter One, Every Man in This Village is a Liar, starts with Stack being sexually harassed by an Afghan warlord who is leading her to stories. This develops into a discussion of the title of the chapter and the book:
Back in Pakistan, before I crossed over into Afghanistan, somebody said to me: “Every man in this village is a liar”. It was the punch line to a parable, the tale of an ancient Greek traveller who plods into a foreign village and is greeted with those words. It is a twist on the Epimenides paradox, named after the Cretan philosopher who declared, “All Cretans are liars.” It’s one of the world’s oldest logic problems, folding in on itself like an Escher sketch. If he’s telling the truth, he’s lying. If he’s lying, he’s telling the truth.
That was Afghanistan after September 11. (9)
Both as an idea, and as a metaphoric representation of eight years in the Middle East, this idea is important. Firstly, due to her lack of experience and her outsider status, there was no way to work out who was lying and who was telling the truth. Secondly, it shows her journalistic drive for a real story, and not just gossip. Thirdly, it sets up the environment where stories of bombings were denied by the US Government and her paper wouldn’t run them, where she was denied access to information because she was a woman, where she could not foresee the consequences of her actions as the regimes she was working within were opaque. Finally, it goes back to the paradox of survival, where the Cretan can be lying and telling the truth at the same time, Stack can survive and not survive, both at once.
Stack’s reportage is well written in clear, concise language that quickly conveys the political complexity and emotional nuance of a situation. Like Geraldine Brooks’ Nine Parts of Desire, it tells stories of the Islamic world from a female perspective, but in a new century, with new wars. It is geographically broad, but tightly focused on the details of the consequences of war in an individual life. By writing about several countries, it departs from the usual trope of reportage, found in such works as Dispatches by Michael Herr or War by Sebastian Junger, where the author takes the story of one conflict and creates a narrative around their tour. Stack’s ‘tour’ was too long and fragmented for such a neat story-telling device, and her journey was not of herself through a war, but herself within war. “The war no longer feels temporary”(237) she writes in the second last chapter. Writing in the present tense, and then placing this sentence near the end of the book, shows that there is no end to the war she experiences, nor to the way of life within it. It is interesting to read this book in late 2011, after the Arab Spring protests and the changes that daily occur in the region. The chapters on Libya and Egypt show a world only just gone, and sketch the fomenting passions of oppressed people. My knowledge of Middle Eastern news is patchy and gained in a haphazard manner, and it was excellent to have this solid, personal context for the events of earlier this year.
The book is subtitled “An Education in War”, and in many ways feels like a series of lectures by a journalist living in the Middle East. Each chapter looks at a different country, or a different aspect of a country, in a region that stretches from Afghanistan to Libya. Iraq and Lebanon feature heavily, with the invasions that tore them apart in the years in which Stack was reporting. Only in the third chapter does she go home, after her first tour to Afghanistan in 2001, and realises that if you are not in sync with your compatriots, home can be a foreign place too. Few of the people she talks about able to move beyond the borders of their own conflict, and therefore also remain bound by their own chapter. But Stack looks at their lives in context, how their lives intersect with her own. In Chapter Fifteen, she writes about Ahmed and his girlfriend, and their view of Iraqi life from the bottom of society. She looks at how she might have endangered their lives simply because they agreed to talk to her. She has no idea what happened to them, and can only write their story as well as possible. This chapter is a tipping point, and in Chapter Sixteen, Killing the Dead, she traces her trauma and pain with firmer lines, using her scramble through the Lebanese countryside as Israeli bombs are falling to chart her own breakdown.
But the education she gives the reader is not on Middle Eastern politics, nor the rise of Islamism, nor the structure of oppressive Arabic regimes. It is on the details of daily life, and therefore the details of mental, emotional and physical survival. Her focus is personal, about a particular constellation of bodies of how she negotiated her way through them. The portraits she draws of the locals who work with her are brilliant, but fleeting. The real subject, as the only constant, is herself, and herself in war.
A focus on oneself, both as a journalist and as an individual citizen, is one of the most exciting things about extended, book-form reportage such as this. The ideal of objective reporting is dropped, and all the intangibles that make a life present in the writing are put back in. We read about the smells and tastes, about the rumour and gossip, about the bad vibes, coincidences and lucky escapes that are not news and, in particular, she writes about how the situations made her feel, charting her emotional progress through the years. In Chapters Seven and Nine we read about a young woman who goes clubbing with her translator, who is high on watching history as it happens. By Chapter Sixteen, we read about her as a much older woman, one who is dealing with the consequences of seeing so much conflict, and who can longer separate herself from her story. This is not done without artifice, and at the end of the book you get a strong sense of the craft of her writing. She talks about her boyfriend Tom in the final chapter, and how he had been present with her through much of her time in the Middle East (245). Tom is her husband in the Acknowledgements (254), so we can only guess at the extent of his influence. Her family is rarely addressed directly, and the same goes for her American colleagues at the LA Times. This is to be expected, but nonetheless shows how her personal, emotional stories are still a crafted political point.
The clarity of her writing in the final chapters gives a perfect summary of this political point:
When the adrenaline really gets going you can’t get sick, you don’t need sleep, and you feel you can do anything. I know when this is over it will be like dying. (230)
It was festival night in Amman… Underneath the cleanness of the non-war, I was still not there. I had survived, I was alive. The shadow of death had passed over my body. But I had left myself there, in the salt and blood and crazy sunlight. (245)
In Iraq, 4,369 U.S. soldiers have died, and 873 in Afghanistan, and more all the time. That is not counting the deaths of local people who are tallied as combatants, or wading in the question of whether they were or weren’t. Either way, that’s six digits of people, dead for a cause I cannot articulate except in the most abstract terms. (251)
That you can survive and not survive, both at the same time. That in war, every man in this village is a liar.
TESSA LUNNEY is undertaking a Doctorate of Creative Arts at the University of Western Sydney. She is looking at silences in contemporary Australian war fiction, and is writing a novel as the bulk of her dissertation. She has previously published reviews in Southerly, and poetry and short fiction in Illumina, Hermes and Phoenix. She lives in Sydney.
Coda For Shirley
