January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness, Ghosts from Elsewhere
By Tabish Khair
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2009
ISBN 978 0 230 23406 2
Reviewed by MICHELLE CAHILL
http://us.macmillan.com/thegothicpostcolonialismandotherness
Tabish Khair’s, The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness, Ghosts from Elsewhere provides new readings of how the colonial/racial Other is negotiated through Gothic tropes in the work of colonial and postcolonial writers. Khair describes how the Gothic genre first emerged in a Eurocentric context as a narrative engagement with displacement, terror and the racial Other. He is less concerned with how postcolonial literatures reconstruct identity using Gothic characters and settings, an area that has already received much attention. His concerns are with the “invasion” of the centre, rather than with depictions of the racial Other in the colonies. This interest leads him to evaluate the theories of subjectivity and difference, of emotion and identity which are relevant to Gothic and postcolonial literary texts as they test the boundaries between Self and Other, between home and elsewhere.
Khair’s career as an expatriate Indian poet, novelist, critic and academic equip him to write the kind of book that might appeal to both the creative and critical reader. He writes with clarity, restraint and erudition. There is a fluidity to the way in which he references the relevant historical, philosophical and literary influences and traditions which shape his arguments. The book’s ordered structure comprises essay chapters which develop a hardly surprising binary dialectic that weighs the strengths and failures of the Gothic against those of the postcolonial. The scope and frame of the research here is sensibly delineated to Gothic writing from the British empire in English and its postcolonial counterpart. Khair’s interpretations of how the Gothic arose and how it may be read is, to his credit, always appropriately and carefully referenced. These interpretations extend beyond theories, to a review of historical research, such as the work of Nabil Matar and R Visram which documents the presence of Moors, Jews, Arabs and Indians in the port cities of Elizabethan, and later eighteenth century England. Khair’s own research in travel writing acknowledges the entry to England of black American soldiers, slaves, servants and lascars after the American War of Independence, as well as settlers returned to the motherland from the colonies.
Further historical excavation is undertaken to locate colonial Gothic texts: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is read with consideration to Malchow’s theory that slave revolts in the Caribbean were contemporary influences. The negroid depictions of Frankenstein, the racial depictions of Satan and the racial associations of cannabilism are elucidated with purpose. A chapter devoted to the evolution of the Satanic imaginary describes its gradual emasculation from the era of the Middle Ages when science and alchemy, when piety and barbarism were not seen as absolute opposites. Sketching the development of Gothic literatures as a reaction to the logocentricity of the Enlightenment, Khair shows how, as a literature, it engages with Otherness, and the fear provoked by the Other, be it Satan, demon, vampire, monster, immigrant; racially or sexually different.
The “invasion” of England by outsiders from the colonies, and the terror this stirred in ‘the literature of nightmare,” to quote Elizabeth MacAndrews, is narrated as a half-presence, a ghosting of the racial Other in Gothic literatures. Khair adopts familiar critical perspectives in his book, observing how these characters and presences are partially narrated. He argues that either they have hidden origins, like the protagonist of Lewis’ The Monk, or they remain obscure and mysterious, like the Indians in The Moonstone, or like Bertha Mason, Rochester’s mad Creole wife in Jane Eyre, who becomes the protagonist of Wide Sargasso Sea. Khair alludes to how this reversal of dramatic tension as a narrative choice is a familiar and potent postcolonial strategy.
Influenced, perhaps, by Terry Eagleton’s Lacanian analysis of the law in Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, Khair gives an insightful reading of Heathcliff as a terrorist, a displaced and disturbing persona from elsewhere attacking the centre and the heart of English civilisation:
Imagine an intelligent dark-skinned person, slipping into the countryside of a peaceful European country from somewhere disturbingly ‘postcolonial’, lying dormant for many years and then snaring the families that harboured him in a net of violence, revenge and terror. It might sound like an account of the so-called ‘sleeper agents’ that organisations like Al Qaeda are said to send into the heart of Europe, but actually it would be one way of describing Heathcliff. (p 64)
To know the nature of terror is vital to a deeper understanding of globalisation, this book suggests. Moreover, we are reminded that terror has economic causes; the choice to be local or global is essentially one of the empowered. Khair’s concerns expand thus into contemporary colonial encounters and to social contexts of racial and religious intolerance. Terror is that which threatens or complicates identity. “I am Heathcliff!” Catherine speaks, in what is arguably one of the most profoundly disturbing and beautiful passages in English literature. Drawing from and quoting notions of alterity proposed by Levinas, Buber, Bhabha, Todorov and de Certeau, Khair convincingly shows how “the relationship of ‘elsewhere’ to home is also the relationship of the Other to the ‘Self’.” (71)
Khair’s analysis of the philosophies and critical studies on emotions draws from the work of Nussbaum, Punter, even Aristotle. Emotions which arise when the self interacts with the Other have the potential to destroy or complete. Emotions are evidence of alterity, exceeding the language of the speaking subject. It’s an engaging theme in the book, and a turning point for its premise. Khair shows how this is problematic for postcolonial narratives, which seek to narrate the Other predominantly in language, and to avoid what he describes as “the negative half of the rationality-emotionality binarism.”(97) The Spivakian question of whether the subaltern can speak facilitates his perspective that the Other exists in a language beyond the language of the Self. He argues that since the subaltern is constituted by a relationship of power, and since language is an agency of power, so the Other, when narrated in the language of the Self, becomes the subaltern, reduced to the same.
Some repetition of these ideas in the book borders on tautology, and perhaps an inclination to over ponder the philosophies at the expense of textual analysis. This is noticeable in the analysis of Peter Carey’s eponymous Jack Maggs, a novel which intertextualises with Great Expectations. According to Khair, the alterity of Magwitch is created by Dickens’ gaps and silences, whereas, Carey’s Maggs is narrated with such detail that his otherness is erased. Yet Carey’s novel is also a contested space. Hermione Lee notes the many overlooked Other(s) in Jack Maggs: hurt children, freaks, prisoners, the displaced and the dispossessed. Khair’s analysis does expose the problematics for transparent or easily consumed narrative tropes. He is critical of conflated forms of hybridity which are deficient in, or careless about structure, having no cause for a relation to the real. While he gives due respect to writers like Rushdie and J.M. Coetzee, who narrate, speak and write back to the Empire, he highlights their extensive reliance on the language of the Self. This materiality, while being a strategy of empowerment, carries with it, for Khair, a predicament of its own. The Gothic, with its transcendent elements creates a space of ambivalence. It locates an imaginary for the excesses of terror and horror, where the Other resides.
This book may be open to criticism for its very binarism, the way it pivots Self and Other, materiality and space, verbosity and the non-verbal as opposites, since this establishes a criteria founded on dialectic tensions. There is a subsequent tendency to shape the author’s analysis towards the philosophical and away from the literary or the cultural, although he is always responsible and careful in how he negotiates this path. In some instances one wonders if a more literary analysis of postcolonial texts is warranted. The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness is intrepid and objective in its critique of postcolonialism and in its defence of the tangential possibilities of Gothic narratives. The book is an important text, particularly for its transhistorical (and ethnographic) analysis of colonial Gothic fictions. With a compelling scrutiny it explores how the ambivalences and tensions of consciousness are constructed and narrated.
WORKS CITED
MacAndrew, E. Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, p3
Eagleton, T. Heathcliff And The Great Hunger.Verso: London: 1995, 46
Hermione Lee reviews Jack Maggs by Peter Carey http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/1997/sep/28/fiction.petercarey
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Trans-Pacific writer and photographer Alex Kuo’s most recent books are White Jade and Other Stories, and Panda Diaries. His Lipstick and Other Stories won the American Book Award, and recently he received received the Alumni Achievement award from Knox College.
Having taught creative writing in the US as well as in Hong Kong/China, I have experienced the major difference that evolve from one very significant cultural/educational background: history.
In the US, as far as I can determine, individual creative writing courses were taught at Yale and Columbia in the early 1920s. J.D. Salinger is rumored to have taken a short story writing course at Columbia in 1939. And full-blown programs leading to graduate degrees in creative writing slowly started emerging in the late 1930s.
The historical difference is quite dramatic.
I may be corrected, but I believe the first creative writing course taught in a Hong Kong university occurred in 1996 at Baptist University, and the first in China in 2005 in Beijing Forestry University. That same year the English Department at Fudan University in Shanghai flirted with the idea of becoming the first Chinese institution to offer a creative writing program, but the concept fell apart mostly from incompetency and in-fighting within the department, a most common phenomenon in English departments on all sides of the Pacific.
When I entered Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop forty-nine years ago in 1961, there were only four creative writing programs leading to a graduate degree in the United States, University of Iowa, Stanford University, University of Oregon and Columbia University.
A student had two concentration options, fiction or poetry.
When I received my MFA in 1963, there were two recipients of that degree in poetry—the other was Marvin Bell. Including fiction, Iowa awarded seven graduate degrees in creative writing that year. Adding Stanford, Oregon and Columbia’s, the total that year was about 15 for the entire country.
In the next half-century, graduate degree programs in creative writing in the US have been the fastest growing cottage industry in American academia, at the amazing rate of five new ones every year. At last count, there are two-hundred-and-forty five such programs. California leads with 25, followed by New York with 21, then Texas and Illinois with 13 each.
Today a student has a wide range of concentration options besides fiction and poetry. They include non-fiction, the memoir, script writing, young-adult fiction, even Christian fiction.
A conservative estimate of the number of graduate degrees in creative writing that will be awarded this 2010 year: 2,500. Wow! A nation of 300 million produces 2,500 talented writers every year from its MFA factories. Too bad our schools can’t even turn out that many readers.
With this astronomical number, the teaching of creative writing has been professionalized since 1967 with the establishment of the Association of Writing Programs that lends respectability to its members. Today, writers are joiners and networkers who go to conferences, our professional identity socially and academically stapled to tenure, promotion and bureaucracy. This international organization now has more than 500 member colleges and programs. Its services include publications such as the program directors handbook. Oddly enough, such a how-to manual does not exist for any other academic field, physics, law or history.
Starting at the end of the 1960s, the number of students choosing to major in English nationally has plummeted, until Arizona State University responded by developing an undergraduate degree in creative writing, a stimulus package to its English Department. While the overall enrollment hemorrhaging has not abated, the majority of English majors across the country have elected to focus on this creative writing track, accounting for 60-80 percent on most college campuses. While some programs such as that at the University of Washington has been selective in responding to this student interest and screens its applicants, others such as Washington State University accepts any student taller than an AK-47, even when it appears that many are those who have failed to get into the communications program.
How do we apprehend this dramatic change, especially in an era when the publishing industry is looking at something such as literary fiction as an anachronism in much the same way that the music industry has been on the endangered species list for more than a decade.
In apprehending this popularity, it might be useful to re-visit some of the historical discussions surrounding the inclusion of creative writing courses in the academic curriculum. Can creative writing be taught? Should it be taught? What is talent? How should the students be marked/graded? Who is qualified to teach it? And what should be taught? What is a writing workshop?
While it is relatively easy to look at this change from an exclusively binary model—that the old programs were elitist and exclusive, and the new more responsive and egalitarian—I think it’s more complicated than that.
It could be argued that these four highly respected creative writing teachers of the 20th century, Donald Justice, Ted Roethke (who refused to read any of his students’ writing and therefore did not make any writing assignment), Yvor Winters and J.V. Cunningham challenged and encouraged their students to produce literature; but it should also be pointed out that some of them were mean sons-of-bitches whose behavior pushed too many of their students to an early exit from the program and the university, and terminated their habit of buying books and reading them.
They despised the memoir, and believed that creative writing must not be confused with self-expression. Their students were made to conform to their view that writing is art, and not to dwell on the ordinary pathetic little lives of everlasting unimportance. Most of the time they would praise such writers as Donald Barthelme, Amy Hempel, Robert Coover, Barry Hannah, Cathy Aker, Gilbert Sorrentino, George Chambers, Thomas Pynchon the same writers who would find it very difficult to get their work published today.
But they made the writing workshop work, in which they validated the peer criticism of students in their early twenties with no publication history—and many have no reading history either—and validating self-expression from those who’ve never had a thought in their head. (I might add that today these students have no reading history either.) Today, the successful management of the workshop classroom has become a litmus test in assessing a candidate for a creative writing hire or tenure, as if management and teaching were the same thing.
Some have argued that the workshop has worked so well that its original intentions of encouraging excellence has resulted in compromises and consensus, so much so that many editors of publications warn against submissions that look as if they have been workshoped, that the writing programs have eroded into the lowest common denominator.
I’m nearing the half-century mark of my creative writing teaching career. But those initial questions still haunt me each time I walk into a writing class, especially if writing can be taught at all. I try to turn the students in a certain direction, but remind them that my voice is only one of many in their writing lives. I encourage them to read day and night, and not just what’s on the page or on the screen, because I tell them that’s what a writer does, to see all, remember all, and understand as much as possible. Cut loose and take a chance. And hopefully, don’t write about anything that is not important. Sometimes we have to confront and work through the screaming cultural conflicts of what we deem is important.
Most of the lives of most of us are filled with the repetitive, pedestrian and unimportant. Is it the social, herding glue in us humans that makes us want to write and read about it? Isn’t good writing always about writing across cultures, about the other, even when we ourselves may be the other? Writing that will startle and astonish us, make us jump, stir doubt and dread, perhaps even change our lives? Aren’t we always reading across cultures to escape from our narrow-mindedness, to see what Anna and Vronsky felt and believed, but not to have lived through the consequences of their decisions? To look beyond our inviolable lives? And how to write as witness?
Is this what our creative writing programs are encouraging, I ask.
Maybe one possible consideration for the development of creative writing programs is to adopt the requirement of merging with a second area of study such as microbiology or economics, so that our graduates would be knowledgeably engaged in producing that I call informed public writing (see George Orwell on England’s coal miners or James Agee on tenant farmers), substantial writing that would offer some important insight that would generate interest in the public and not just in family and friends, such as dependence on oil, the adopting/stealing third-world children by fundamentalist Christians, or why China’s football team was eliminated in the early rounds of this year’s World Cup.
I for one believe that we do not write in a vacuum. Likewise, we do not teach in a vacuum. Creative writing is fast emerging as a very popular course of study in Asia. Aside from the complex issues of mother-tongue, diaspora of who we are and what is home, and indeed other elements that define and signify what are we and what are the other, Asian programs can perhaps learn from the American mistakes and develop its own distinctively, one unique program at a time.
Finally, are our programs producing writers whose work will be read, and will they be imprisoned, exiled, or killed? It is of course easy for me to raise these questions in this sanitized multi-media center. But I want to raise one more question: can we produce such writers in our programs? If we can’t, what the f* are we doing besides holding down an unimportant day job.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Best Australian Poems
Edited by Robert Adamson
Black Inc. 2009
ISBN 9781863954525
Reviewed by CAMERON LOWE
http://www.blackincbooks.com/books/best-australian-poems-2009
The first thing to say about this anthology is that it is full of birds. Currawongs, crows, egrets, magpies, cockatoos, finches, owls—the list could go on. This is hardly surprising given Robert Adamson’s preoccupations with birds in his own writing. The second thing to say is that while birds—and the natural world more generally—are a common thematic in the anthology, it is a less pervasive theme than a first reading might suggest. Adamson’s anthology is far more than the sum of its birds.
None of which is to imply that there is anything wrong with writing about birds. On the contrary, A. Frances Johnson’s ‘Black Cockatoo: Calyptorhynchus funereus’, Barry Hill’s ‘Egret’, or Lia Hills’ ‘an anatomy of birds’—a beautiful meditation on a bird’s skeleton—show clearly that Adamson is not the only contemporary Australian poet writing excellent poems structured around bird as subject.
The value of these annual collections—and the UQP anthology should be recognised in this respect as well—is not simply limited to providing an interesting batch of what are arguably the best poems written in the past twelve months or so. They are also, in a sense, a meeting place, where readers may engage with writing by celebrated poets, as well as work from talented new (or lesser-known poets). Additionally, although in a perhaps less tangible way, they are also a meeting place for the poets themelves; as Adamson somewhat romantically notes in his introduction, ‘the poets sing to each other and their poems set words dancing in our souls’.
The coming together of the new and the established is a major feature of these anthologies, one that Adamson has been keen to continue. Interestingly, for Adamson it was the work of lesser-known writers emerging out of the selection process that excited him most: ‘the exuberance in the language and ideas of poets whose names I hardly knew…started to threaten to take over the space reserved for those whose poetry I have been following for many years’. Just how ‘new’ is new is of course problematic; most of the poets represented in the anthology, even the younger ones such as Lucy Holt and Elizabeth Campbell, have published at least one full book-length collection of poetry. One notable exception is Sarah K Bell—younger again than Holt and Campbell—whose ‘Reconstructing A Rabbit’ was first published in Cordite Poetry Review, underscoring the value of including on-line publications within the scope of these anthologies. While it is understandable that Adamson may be unfamiliar with many of these poets, it is also worth noting that in most cases they have been publishing in newspapers and journals for some time.
Adamson’s stated intent for the ‘book to be a fairly inclusive survey of the “best” poetry written in Australia in the last year’, has led to the anthology being relatively long, with this year’s version nearly seventy pages longer than that of 2008. Additionally, there are no biographical details of the poets in this anthology, which means even more space is dedicated to the poetry itself. While this is seemingly positive, in that a larger number of poets are represented, there is also a concern that such a long anthology potentially dilutes the overall quality of the writing. As with most ‘best of’ collections—and without wishing to unfairly single out individual poems, or more pertinently the poets—readers will undoubtedly come across poems in such a large anthology that don’t seem to make the ‘grade’. Happily though, judging by the majority of Adamson’s selections, Australian poetry is in a pretty healthy state.
One of the benefits of Adamson’s inclusive approach is the diversity of the writing. From Ali Cobby Eckermann’s powerful performance piece ‘Intervention Pay Back’—a highly political work focused on recent events in the Northern Territory—to Stephen Edgar’s formal rhyme scheme in ‘Murray Dreaming’, the anthology covers a wide range of poetic voices and styles. Indeed, Adamson has even included the lyrics to two songs by Paul Kelly, and while they may lack somewhat for musical accompaniment Kelly fans will still hear the musician’s distinctive vocals while reading the poems.
There are many fine poems from established poets in the anthology. Peter Rose’s ‘Morbid Transfers’—a response to the fifth poem from Bruce Beaver’s Letters to Live Poets (1969)—is a disturbing account of a young man dying while playing table tennis. Rose’s poem, like Beaver’s, articulates at once the fragility of life and the seeming indifference of those bearing witness:
Finally, a bouncing ball invaded the mortuary
and the server, too spirited for niceties
or condolences, stepped over the low excluding fence,
negotiated the crumpled mystery at his feet
and retrieved his urgent ball without a word.
Ken Bolton’s ‘Outdoor Pig-keeping, 1954 & My Other Books on Farming Pigs’ is also a wonderful poem. Written in the unmistakable Bolton style, the poem takes a haunting turn when the narrator imagines a farmer, alone at night, writing on the methods of farming pigs in an exercise book that once belonged to his dead daughter:
Perhaps he writes with
extra care because it is her book. Perhaps he writes
because it is her book. He has not written
anything else before. He writes now
because she is gone.
Other worthy poems from the established poets in the anthology include Philip Salom’s ‘Reading Francis Webb’, John Watson’s long poem ‘Four Ways to Approach the Numinous’, and Meredith Wattison’s brilliant ‘Holbein Through Silk’ where:
Death, the cool, black ambassadress, is foetal, rigor,
silk in that rough skull’s glass mouth.
Death, she sits, the foliate weave of her fingers
is their tender matrix. The intuitive, the profane,
the incalculable, the vernal seat, indulged.
Of the less established poets, at least as far as published books are concerned, David McCooey’s ‘Memory and Slaughter’ is deserving of attention. Unusually long for McCooey, the poem explores the gaps and imperfections of our memories, where much of our personal history is an act of re-imagining the past, an act of writing it into being. In McCooey’s case the result is a narrative of hazy details in which ‘memory now repeats, like / a stone skipping across bright water’.
Equally impressive is Lisa Gorton’s ‘A Description of the Storm Glass and Guide to Its Use in Forecasting Weather’. Gorton’s beautiful imagery has a dream-like quality, where crystals of ‘fantastical ambition’ create:
…tomorrow’s weather
haunting a small room. Clouds, which hurry for no one,
which, amassing, betoken
that undifferentiated grudge some call ambition, here confide
motive without gesture
As if to say There is
another world.
Anne Elvey’s ‘Between’, like Gorton’s poem, also works to make the familiar strange. A poem of approaching loss, Elvey has crafted a work that speaks of the limits of poetry as much as it does the inevitable coming of death:
A speck on the horizon! Charon comes
but not tonight. And my fingers tell you I can’t go
past the thin place between the word and the thing,
nor write the way for you, in the hieroglyphs of home.
Elvey’s poem has an elegiac tone, is in a sense an elegy for what will soon be lost. There are many other fine elegiac poems within the anthology, such as Pam Brown’s ‘Blue Glow’, or joanne burns’ ‘harbinger’. But perhaps most successful is Martin Harrison’s superbly understated ‘Word’, in memory of Dorothy Porter: ‘in which briefly suddenly one voice’s glimmer is lost’.
And finally, still on the subject of loss, it is worth noting Fiona Wright’s ‘Kinglake’. Now that it is slightly more than twelves months since the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, Wright’s poem returns us to the horror of that weekend, but finishes with a note of hope: ‘I send you irises, / and try to write / some kind of greening.’
There are, of course, many other fine poems in such a large anthology that have not been mentioned in this review. Readers will find them for themselves, which is one of the joys of reading new books of poetry; finding that image that resonates, that sequence of words beautiful just for their sound. Black Inc. should be commended for continuing to publish the work of our finest poets, as should Robert Adamson for his efforts in compiling this impressive collection of poems.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Possession
by Anna Kerdijk Nicholson
Five Islands Press, 2010
ISBN 978 0 7340 4111 1
http://www.fiveislandspress.com/newbooks.html
Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK
Following on from her poetic achievements of The Bundanon Cantos (FIP, 2003), and co-editorship of the journal Five Bells from 2000-2003, comes Anna Kerdijk Nicholson’s immaculately presented collection, Possession.
There are as many interpretations of Captain Cook as there are writers about him, each version taking on something of the personality and vision of the individual biographer. A tradition arises. As a Yorkshire-born woman herself, Kerdijk Nicholson is well positioned to grasp the underlying forces that went towards creating James Cook, navigator, and to express them through poetry:
From the first you knew it –
at Aireyholme Farm you knew. Out the door, up the hill,
you weren’t like the other lads…………………………
…………………………..You’d wind your scarf
across your chest and be out, round the curtain, through
the door, off into the wilding wicked stuff
and all the time your eyes were gathered to the coast
for you could smell it, touch it in your mind, that
which would let you leave this filthy soil and muck
behind and take your breath, your muscle, take
your lily-white body and brown arms off-shore
………………………………………………..
So long as you are let to live
you will mimic it: others stream before it,
shelter, or break, or are lifted up and carried away;
but you have let it into your bones so it flutes you.
You are, for this life’s breath, one,
and you take on its traits: you are whimsical,
caressing, cruel, strong, each of these things;
but above all, you are never wrong.
(16-18)
Three storylines interweave in this book – the literal journey undertaken by Cook; the philosophical or emotional response of protagonists, as represented in poems from the “lost manuscript”; and, finally, the poet/persona’s own voyage of self-discovery.
Like the chronicler Vanessa Collingridge, but at a deeper level of metaphysical apprehension, Kerdijk Nicholson follows Cook on his personal odyssey, experiencing and retrieving each stage of the journey :
Anchored: the time before dark is reflective. Candles
are lit in the Great Cabin, but the great black
is still visible and noises come from without
– which Banks’ dogs bark at – things
move at the corner of the eye. There’s enough light
inside for your standing apart to be shown
in the glass and for you to see the vastness outside.
You watch for the showing of unfamiliar stars.
The gentlemen work on. With daylight gone,
your time for charting’s done. You make your way
to the quarter-deck and wait for the track of a meteor,
once-only-given, and your unstoppable breath in:
(28)
A postcolonial slant on events allows us to go beyond recorded history, to subvert the chronological account with contemporary awareness:
You take possession of islands every day: every
thing within range of your eye seems capable of
dissolution and reconstitution at the tip of your pen.
It is ‘all for the Glory of God and for your King’,
they say; but only the sons of bitches could say that:
in this phosphorescent age, you are footprints on the moon.
(37)
The “lost manuscript” provides closer identification with the subject, a rendering of imagined thought processes and philosophical reflection, as in “You, the one who stands for us”:
What you started to measure, we have measured.
We have counted the words
of the world.
We have catalogued ourselves,
the outcomes of your dreams. (20)
or “Ambition is such a small thing”:
It is like the pip in the haw, hard
nor is there much flesh on it.
How is it that such a small thing
once it takes hold, hedges acres in?
If hacked at the base, slit
and laid, it still binds on,
thorny covetous bugger. (36)
“Today the distance between the threads of the net” enters into an imaginative re-creation of Cook’s state of mind after completion of his appointed tasks, the gap between intention and outcome:
Let us imagine it is the width of a chink of light
falling near her foot as she passes her husband’s door;
the worn dip in a butcher’s block on the Mile End Road;
the width of a carriage rut in the mud in York;
the fatness of folded secret orders from the Admiralty;
or perhaps as thin as a quill in an ink pot
on the St. Lawrence River; but how shall it be measured
now, and how will we know when it is done? (51)
The poet/persona’s own voyage of discovery parallels Cook’s, and is seamlessly interwoven into the narrative. Again it is about possession, the desire for appropriation, and the need to come to terms with these ambitions in some cognitive way. Like its namesake, A.S. Byatt’s Possession, the juxtaposed text reveals that research can, in the end, bring to light as much about the persona’s own story as it does about the subject. This progression emerges in the series of poems at Kangaroo Valley, and several in England and Torrox, Andalucia in the early 21st century, disturbing certainties and rearranging chronological ‘truths’ to create new meaning.
The different strands are interlinked by recurrent themes, motifs and references, which reverberate throughout the collection as a whole – preoccupations such as codes, maps, recording, measurement, even the reassuring barking of dogs. Pre-eminent is the cultural significance of naming, as though the act of naming might pin down an object/concept, allow ownership and prevent loss. This is exemplified in the poem “How strange to have a name, any name…”:
These huge blank territories are down to you to name.
Will those going where you have come before
touch the maps, lick their fingers and know you –
or just your salty aftertaste? (39)
Words themselves are signifiers, value laden, time and culture-specific, as in “Their words what the beads say”:
Do words have a price? Do they change
in value according to place or day? What does
with the Consent of the Natives mean?
Beads meaning ‘friendship’ or perhaps ‘no war’ are not
‘take our beads and you give informed consent’.
As language has no plumage or scent, how do you
reach the code-breaker for intent? (41)
This is one of the very few poems to register an Indigenous perspective, indirectly, via situational irony. The poem on p.42 is another. The overall lack of such representation is perhaps intentional, given that the collection is directed through the subjectivity of Cook.
Words can be obfuscating, hiding meaning, as in “Each word is a failure”:
Spills of madeira and wax
record events; words let you down.
You make a fair copy. Nor it nor your journal
get you where you were; not how you are,
or where you’d like to be…………………….
You are sick, of obfuscating lexicology. (46)
Naming is seen as no protection against loss:
When you’d got to the Cape, de Bougainville’s name
everywhere: how he gave Tahiti the Name
Cypre. Naming issued no protection.
Baptism didn’t stop your two being taken –
fragile life, one jolt and the future’s out,
bleeding at its parents’ feet. You press your eyes,
succumb to leaden Yorkshire skies.
She says, What’s the name of the place
We’ve just been through? You say you can’t recall
but does she think perhaps it will rain?
(48)
The ephemerality of words and their link to meaning, yet the need to pin down the unnameable, is encapsulated in the poem “It is difficult to live so long without words”:
There is a space on the table for a bowl
but that is all. The air is thick with words
breathed in, breathed out, read, some uttered;
some of them hooked up with meaning, carrying it
like a rosella’s tail; others still in their state of code,
…………………………………………………….
There are books in the cabin with lists of meanings and uses:
attempts, laughable, made by one or a committee:
what do we know of words’ origins and where they might go? (49)
As a paradox to this questioning, Kerdijk Nicholson’s own linguistic pyrotechnics control the voyage of discovery and its meditations:
a celestial map, up is the flat black, fat black
glittering, not the stuff for feet and dirt.
……………………………………………..
then there’s trees and clouds and neighbours’ lights:
I’m not getting it at all, I’d lose myself if I had to navigate
back to the front door. Would I keep my eyes on
one constellation or its feature, follow it for all
I’m worth – but what about its pace, if I’m a liner or a dhow,
does it make a difference how I keep a grip on the pin pricks?
I start to muse on the same old stuff – we’re made from
the dust of stars, every bit of me’s recycled, I’m drinking
water which passed through other beings
many times before. What profound need or compulsion
would get me out there spotting Magellanic clouds?
(32)
Both narrative lines end with a sense of dubiety and loss, the ongoing futility and importance of human endeavour. In the wake of such iconic texts as James McAuley’s Captain Quiros and Kenneth Slessor’s Five Visions of Captain Cook, Kerdijk Nicholson’s Possession is an impressive contribution to the poetic reinterpretation of history.
WORKS CITED
Byatt, A.S. Chatto & Windus Ltd: London, 1990.
Collingridge, Vanessa. Captain Cook: Obsession and Betrayal in the New World (Ebury: London, 2002).
McAuley, James. Collected Poems (Angus & Robertson: Sydney, 1971).
Slessor, Kenneth. Poems (Angus & Robertson: Sydney, 1957)
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Water the Moon
by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Marick Press
2009
ISBN 9781934851128
Reviewed by KIM CHENG BOEY
In his essay “Transnational Poetics,” Jahan Ramazani argues that mononational narratives of modern and contemporary poetry are inadequate in view of the cross-cultural mobility and rampant border-crossing-and-straddling that many poets of “transnational affiliations and identities” perform. Convincingly, Ramazani traces the beginnings of transnational poetics to expatriate modernists like Gertrude Stein, who announces “America is my country and Paris is my hometown.”
The transnational poetics Ramazani advocates is necessary to understanding the works of contemporary poets with multiple cultural and national affiliations, a good example of whom is Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who like Stein, has made Paris an adopted hometown. Born in Singapore, Sze-Lorrain is an acclaimed gucheng (Chinese zither) whose international performing career from a young age ensures that she is well-travelled and global in outlook. In these exquisitely tuned poems of her debut collection Water the Moon, her musical vocation is translated into poetic terms, the lyric ear trained to capture the subtlest shifts in cadence, weaving into the lyric line a range of geographical and cultural locales and remembrances. Around Paris the collection orbits, including elegies and tributes to Steichen, Arbus, Bonnard, Van Gogh, Man Ray, Picasso, all revealing an eclectic, cosmopolitan passion that seeks to absorb into the lyric influences from the visual arts. Paris and its cosmopolitan air also provides the springboard and counterpoint for the more intimate poems of familial history that return to the poet’s ethnic and cultural roots.
Perhaps the most compelling moments in the collection occur when Sze-Lorrain transplants her cultural inheritance into the international milieu of Paris, mining her Chinese and Singapore past for memories that could mediate between expatriation and loss. These happens mostly in the first part of the triptych that forms the collection; it is primarily memorial in tone and familial in focus. The key figure here is the poet’s grandmother, a presence/absence that is also an emblem of national and cultural origins. The opening poem “My Grandmother Waters the Moon” deploys the culinary trope that is common but vital to Chinese diasporic writing. Here the tradition of making and eating mooncakes is celebrated in absentia – the grandmother is dead and the poet is now displaced from the country where the ritual originated and the other country where her grandmother had made it a special occasion for the grand-daughter. The poem begins with a vivid re-enactment of the ritual, a rehearsal of the grandmother’s mooncake recipe, with the matriarch in the kitchen preparing the ingredients. Then it shifts from the indicative to the imperative, the baking instructions placing the poet and reader squarely in the midst of the grandmother’s domain, revealing memory’s power to transcend time and place. Embedded into the familial narrative is also the historical origin of the mooncake festival; the mooncake was used to conceal messages inciting rebellion against the Mongols during the Yuan Dynasty:
About histories, she is seldom wrong.
Time to transform the mooncakes golden —
oven heat for thirty minutes. Her discreet
signature before this last phase: watering
green tea over each chalked face. What is she
imagining again? That someday grasses
sprout with flowers on the moon?
All autumn she dreamt of stealing
that cupful of sky. A snack
to nibble for her granddaughter, the baby
me, wafts of caked fragrance
a lullaby, tucked in an apron, sleeping on her back.
The vignette braids memories of her grandmother and homeland into a lyric that salves the pangs of loss attendant upon taking up an expatriate or emigrant life in the west, evoking a moment of generational intimacy and continuity.
But the nostalgia is not simple; there are also gaps and absences that memory fails to resolves. “Reading Grandmother” grieves over the death of the poet’s grandmother while “Par avion” reveals the physical and emotional distance between father and daughter who are “two cultures apart.” If the grandmother represents the matrilineal heritage that the poet reveres and identifies with, the grandfather is a more remote figure and problematic figure. In “The Sun Temple” the poet is alienated from her grandfather and what he represents – Confucian values and the repressive patriarchal structure that her grandmother was at home in: “I tremble to realise that I can no longer/ remember my grandfather – I am merely a tourist.”
While the first part returns to ethnic and cultural sites, the second suite of poems is located in Paris and deals with the migrant’s narrative of settlement and acculturation. As in the first section, culinary motifs perform a mnemonic and mediating role between the present and the past, Paris and the ancestral homeland. While the culinary images in the first section connect the poet with her cultural and familial origins, the gastronomic tropes here explore the poet’s migrant experience. In “Breakfast, Rue Sainte-Anne” a bowl of Chinese porridge triggers off memories of a more authentic cuisine, and of the poet’s father and the “old rickshaw streets of Shanghai.” The other gastronomic poems – “Snapshots from a Siamese Banquet,” “L’Assiette des Trois Amis,” “Eating Grilled Langoustines,” while finely crafted, are perhaps too conscious of their delectable themes and textures, to offer any memorable insights into the relationship between food and identity. Perhaps the strongest lyric is “Rendez-vous at Pont des Arts,” inspired by Brassaï’s soft-focus black-and-white photograph of the bridge:
Days connect years, years become place —
You travel over dreams or on bicycle.
Will I find you at Pont des Arts?
Moon crossing bridge in vanishing starts.
This is classic Paris, but refreshed and made more resonant by a migrant Chinese perspective, the central image of the moon illuminating a sense of fleeting love and belonging:
The last section, appropriately captioned “The Key is Always Open,” advances the poet’s aesthetic credo. It pays homage to a host of artists and writers, among them Celan, Steichen, Chopin, Van Gogh. The globally encompassing reach reveals the diverse formative and sustaining sources of the poet’s lyric art, and at the same time allows her to transcend her ethnic and cultural origins. “Instructions: No Meeting No World” enunciates a transnational, cosmopolitan poetics above one’s cultural heritage; it counsels “Leave your roots. Leave your ancestors,” as “No life is measured by absence.” The ars poetica embraces a melange of cultural and national sites and practices, weaving them “so that past, present and future/
swells in one immense ocean.”
Water the Moon is a fine example of Ramazani’s “poetic transnationalism,” which allows us to “read ourselves as imaginative citizens of not one or another hermetically sealed national or civilizational bloc, but of intellectual worlds that ceaselessly overlap, intersect, and converge.” There is passion balanced with meditative calm, memory tuned by harmonies of the past and present, and above all a graceful, elegant music in these probing poems of displacement, love, art and loss.
BOEY KIM CHENG teaches writing at the University of Newcastle. He lives in Berowra with his wife and children.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dark Bright Doors .jpg)
by Jill Jones
Wakefield Press
ISBN 9781862548817
Reviewed by KERI GLASTONBURY
The titles of Jill Jones’ most recent full-length collections, Broken/Open (Salt Publishing, 2005) and her latest, Dark Bright Doors (Wakefield Press, 2010), have the contrariness of koans. There is something deliberately ‘puzzlingly poetic’ about them, and as in Jones’ poetry language is deployed as a decoy. Part of me resists this residual idea of the poet as a kind of sage, with the reader positioned as an initiate who must work for cathexis, yet I am also conscious that the experience of reading Jill Jones’ work is an active one. The act of reading becomes a participatory force, necessary to re-energise the detritus of language once the poet has left it. If the nervous system is the body’s communication network, then rather than ethereal disembodiment perhaps Jones allows for the synaptic relationship of poet and reader, from one nervous system to another.
A quietly prolific poet in many respects, Jones does seem to embrace poetry as an everyday ‘practice’. In her review of Dark Bright Doors (ABR, June 2010) Gig Ryan refers to the book’s ‘repetitive vocabulary’, and she isolates two distinct poetic modes that Jones employs: one relying on a form of phenomenological gesture and the other more ‘grounded in the everyday’. I think Jones’ poems work best and are at their most experiential when these two elements are combined, realising the chiaroscuro of the title’s Dark Bright Doors and most effectively capturing the duel sense of ‘being-in-the-worldness’ that the poet strives for. Some of the shorter gestural poems read more like philosophical exercises and I preferred the poems that also contain cultural—as much as natural—weathering, or poems where the transcendental image is usurped by a pithy turn of phrase: ‘gulls riding / what’s left of the air’ (High Wind At Kekerengu). While still predominantly a poet of city and suburb any dichotomy between nature and culture is a false economy in Jones’ poetry, with Jones positioning herself as an intermediatry (not afraid to invoke birds and clouds and flowers). It’s as if she won’t allow the so-called ‘school of quietitude’ to have a monopoly over the metaphysical (as is foregrounded in the somewhat cliché choice of quote on the front cover: ‘poetry of unsettling mystery and beauty’).
Last year Jill Jones co-edited with Michael Farrell Out of the Box: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Poets (Puncher & Wattman, 2009) which was notable for its post-identity poetic. I can’t help but read Jones as part of a lineage that would see her partly inheriting and partly resisting the poetry of, say, Pam Brown and Joanne Burns (the poem ‘Esplanade Blues’, for example, could have just as easily have been written by either). Overall, however, I find Jones writes with Burns psychic radar, but less ironic distance and Brown’s interest in the contemporary moment, sans the critical personism. Perhaps the link is as much that all three poets seem to have been recently widely published, with the inevitable risk of establishing individual orthodoxies. That said, of the three, it is Jones who has taken her work into the ‘realm of the senses’ and somewhat changed ‘camps’. Where Burns and Brown remain sceptical, Jones’ work absorbs a recent turn to the language of imagination and ecology. Jones’ resistance to the traditional lyric ‘I’ seems more broadly linked to post-humanist philosophies. This may also have come out of her Doctorate of Creative Arts at UTS with Martin Harrison, another Out of the Box poet whose influence I can read in Jones’ recent poetics, along with the American Objectivists in poems like ‘The Thought Of an Autobiographical Poem Troubles & Eludes Me’:
So I’ve been leaning against
the names of things
not just walls but the very air
the rug, the pen
the silver garbage bin.
and even William Carlos Williams (in poems such as ‘Sorry I’m Late’).
Fittingly for a book published by Wakefield Press (considering Jones now lives in Adelaide) it is possible to read some autobiographical trajectories into Dark Bright Doors, particularly in the poems that refer to Adelaide (however obliquely), New Zealand, Sydney and Paris. It’s a book about movement and distances, but refuses to indulge in direct declamation, as Scott Patrick Mitchell writes in his review of the book: ‘It tetters on the edge of things with a sensual energy’ (Out in Perth). Sometimes I find Jones’ obfuscations too ponderous and in this era of climate change her references to the weather akin to dressing up old poetic tropes as contemporary geosophy. The many shorter poems in this collection, however, build a pressure system much like a weather map with lows and highs, often coming together exquisitely in the more dense poems such as ‘O Fortuna’.
…Surely
the end is nigh and it’s a faith squeeze, when to be
heterodox, when to hold the line, which comes at you
up front and always, always leaves you past, belated,
but still humid with life at the turnstyles pushing
another weekly into the slot, watching it burst
up again. While folding your damp umbrella
into these sharp hectic hours, you keep appearing.
Jones’ poems are the Dark Bright Doors of perception of the title. This collection continues an experimental tradition in contemporary poetry that refuses some of post-modernism’s past binaries and opens up poetry’s radar as a par exemplar for registering life’s and language’s atmospherics, ensuring (to borrow from another book title) that everything is illuminated.
KERI GLASTONBURY is a lecturer in Creative Writing at The University of Newcastle, her poetry collection ‘grit salute’ will be published by SOI3 in 2011.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Symptoms of Homesickness.jpg)
by Nathanael O’Reilly
Picaro Press, 2010
ISBN 9781920957896
Reviewed by EA GLEESON
With dedications to Conlon and Quigley and geographical cues such as Yambuk, The Lady Bay Hotel and The Moyne, the nomenclature of Symptoms of Homesickness orientates us towards the Irish Australian Diaspora and particularly as it is lived out in Victoria’s South West. Closer reading reveals a wider geographical terrain but the real landscape of this poetry is the cultural and emotional territory explored through childhood, teenage years and young adulthood.
O’Reilly has paid attention to experience and brings it to the reader in a poetry that is descriptive. The opening poem in ‘Deep Water’ places the reader in a childhood place many might choose not to remember.
On winter mornings, the State
Put children to the test
…
While teeth chattered,
Swimming caps squashed
Ears, testicles retreated.
More enticing to those who thrive on nostalgia might be O’Reilly’s description of ‘Stopping for Fish and Chips’.
the sweaty package
Of butcher’s paper and grabbed hot
Handfuls. Escaping steam fogged-up
The windows. We gripped sleeves
In our fists and wiped windows clear.
…
More of the poems have to do with burgeoning sexuality, friendship and risk taking.
I enjoy the way O’Reilly plays a situation to transform a seemingly ordinary activity such as waiting in the library for the protagonist’s dad to collect him, into a chance to explore some of the adult magazines housed in the library.
I could not
Imagine the flat chested, uniformed girls
In my class with ribbons, baubles and pig-tails
In their hair developing such adornments,
Shamelessly spreading themselves on car bonnets.
(“Afternoons Waiting in Libraries”)
O’ Reilly’s approach is to tell. This is reflected in titles such as ‘Folk LPs and No TV’, ‘Stopping for Fish and Chips’ and as cited above, ‘Afternoons Waiting in Libraries’. Events are reported in detail.
Evenings were spent at home
Drinking my parents’ wine
Eating thick slabs of cheese
Grilled on toast while watching
Day night cricket matches on telly.
Or if the Austudy hadn’t run out,
Drinking Carlton Draught downtown
In the Shamrock Hotel or the Rifle Brigade…
Events of the heart are often presented in a similarly descriptive style, “oscillating between melancholy and desire” (Anna Karenina in Canberra), with a reliance, sometimes, on the use of adverbs.
She needed someone to hold.
I eagerly took up the task,
Tracing the contours of her
Delicate face with my finger,
Gratefully inhaling her warm breath,
Entwining my limbs with hers…
(“The Present”)
I think the impact of this can be to emphasise the physical detail at the expense of the emotional impact and hence, to lessen the likelihood of surprise. I found myself sometimes wishing O’Reilly would place more trust in his reader. On the other hand, I was taken with the way he presented some of his ideas so evocatively. His strongest poetry alluded to possibilities. This was particularly evident in some of his endings:
“Saying yes, yes to the unknown” (The Present) or “you showed us the world, then let us go” (Mentor) and the last line of the book, “The Trinity of your Australian Life”.
This final example ends one of the most moving poems of the collection, ‘Requiem’, in which the internationally situated grandson is not able to attend his grandfather’s funeral in Australia due to the pending birth of his child. A poem based on such poignant points of the cycle of life, with the inherent knowledge that this man was not able to hold his dying grandfather and the great-grandfather will never hold his grandchild would have to affect the reader. But it is the details of the grandson that made this poem live for me. Images of the expatriate grandson; opening the package containing his grandfather’s “duct-taped binoculars and dusty green corduroy cap”, being held by his wife “as he sat on the toilet and wept”, of remembering his music and stories and potato crop while he held his newly born daughter. Poetry rich with imagery but controlled by emotional truth is a potent poetic combination.
The title poem “Symptoms of Homesickness” works differently from others in this book, but cleverly. The expatriate protagonist laments somewhat ironically, the aspects of Australian life he misses, and with his musings, the tone shifts from poignant to self- deprecating to funny. So it is a shock when the final lines read,
When the pain is almost too much to bear.
Wondering how much it costs to fly a body home.
Although I would call for a tightening of the poetic technique and editing in Symptoms of Homesickness, it is a work that has me buzzing. Its content is interesting and does the important work of preserving a unique cultural history within the Australian experience. Most significantly, it projects work with a distinctive Australian voice. Elements of the poetry are entertaining, beautiful and frank. I am grateful to the poet-teacher in ‘Mentor’ who “convinced a roomful of teenagers that poetry matters”. The most significant poems have me excited about the future possibilities that we are likely to see from this poet. I will be queuing to buy his first full-length manuscript.
E. A. GLEESON‘s poetry collection, In between the dancing, received the award for Best First Manuscript and was published by Interactive Press in 2008. Anne lives in Daylesford, Victoria where she works as a Funeral Director.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dog Boy.jpg)
by Eva Hornung
Text Publishing, 2009
ISBN 9781921520099
Reviewed by KATHARINE GILLETT
What is it that makes us human? In Dog Boy, Eva Hornung examines the instinct to nurture and protect, not as an inherently human trait, but as one belonging to the invisibly marked territory of a pack of stray dogs.
Four-year-old Romochka is abandoned by his mother at the onset of a Russian winter. As the chill begins to creep under his blankets and the sky loses its light for the season, he is driven by hunger to take to the streets. When he follows a dog to her home under an old church on the outskirts of Moscow, it is the beginning of a new life for Romochka and suckling alongside the dog’s pups he feels the safety and warmth denied him by his human mother. Almost immediately, the themes of loyalty and love take hold and as the next few winters unfold, we see Romochka’s education extend beyond the primal need for survival.
Perhaps in order to understand what it is like to begin again, Hornung—who previously wrote as Eva Sallis and is the author of journey-themed Hiam and The City of Sealions among other works—travelled to Russia to research the book, which is based on the true story of a boy living with dogs in Moscow. Her cultural immersion extends in the novel to a linguistic one, resonating Romochka’s loss of his human language, which is, of course, useless in his new surrounds:
There was so much in the new world to be learned that he quickly forgot anything that didn’t touch him. This new world had immutable laws. It was divided into realms of danger and safety; it had clear enemies and its own demons. (p. 38)
In a book largely without dialogue, Romochka must learn to rely on his senses: ‘Day was a brief visitation of many greys. Romochka could see the dogs’ eyes and shapes inside the lair only at midday. Otherwise he could see nothing, but could hear and feel where each of them was’ (p. 67). Exiled at the edge of the city, straining to see in the dark or attempting to smell the threat of a stranger, Romochka’s intuitivism takes over, as if he has been reborn.
While the story of the wild boy is not new, Dog Boy explores another aspect of this age-old tale through Romochka’s knowledge of what it means to be human. There is no need for the question raised in Malouf’s An Imaginary Life: ‘What species does [the wild boy] think he might belong to? Does he recognise his own?’ (p. 52). Romochka knows he was once a boy and his contact with humans is frequent and, ultimately, essential. Indeed his reflections on his past life are fundamental to his character:
Romochka could remember this place, but it seemed utterly changed. He savoured the memory, curious. He had been a boy then, with a missing mother and uncle, following a strange dog. He remembered how cold and hungry he was. How unknown the trail ahead. (p. 40)
Romochka quickly adapts to his new life and Hornung convincingly describes what it might be like to live in a wild world. She shows Romochka and ‘black sister’ sharing a slippery rat, each inclination of a paw as loaded as language; Mamochka, his dog mother, licking Romochka’s sores as his clothes tighten or lie wet on his skin; and Romochka’s developing understanding of the territory as marked out by the scent of his brother, ‘black dog’. Romochka becomes so immersed in his dog-world, boundaries begin to blur and the story not only becomes plausible, but realistic and entirely believable.
The language is terse and tight, perhaps reflecting the fact that Romochka has little time to meander; he must quickly move between the hunt for food and the hunt for warmth. In brief moments of abandon he connects with his dog brothers and sisters, tumbling and biting in play, but the frivolity is always short-lived and we are soon drawn back into his isolated life. Given Hornung’s background as a human rights activist, the isolation and exile Romochka experiences could be suggestive of asylum and other states of displacement where the absence of language becomes, like detention, a barrier to inhabiting place. Similarly, although Romochka is accustomed to the harsh Moscow winters, the cold weather, at its extreme in the concrete bunker of the dogs’ den, does little to ease his transition to his new life. Romochka spends long stretches of time unable to face the outdoors, to fend for himself, instead relying on the dogs to bring him food, a practice he finds demeaning, even in his vulnerable state.
Although there is scope for action and tension in Romochka’s situation, little seems to infiltrate the dogs’ world. Any sense of danger is quickly resolved, and, as a mother would reassure a child, the support of Romochka’s dog family is quick to materialise. Because Romochka lives in an in-between world, he is accepted on the periphery of existence: tolerated and feared by humans and dogs alike. The nearby residents who scavenge on the rubbish mountain and the population in town largely ignore them. When a threat finally comes, it is not in any physical sense, but in an emotional sense, when Momochka brings another human baby back to their home. Here, emotions that have no place in a dog’s world start to surface and our concerns begin to shift away from the present—where the family have proven their resilience time and time again—to each boy’s future. That it takes the introduction of another human to bring about the crisis is an inevitable consequence of such a new and complex emotional world; in dealing with his boy brother, Romochka is forced to confront himself.
There comes a moment in the second half of the novel when Romochka sees himself in a mirror for the first time. When he sees a boy—a boy with wild black ropes and tendrils for hair instead of fur—he is shocked: ‘He wasn’t what he thought he was … His calloused paw and scarred forearm were stringy, bald, filthy, long. Wrong’ (p. 161). It is almost a relief to see Romochka in this way, shocked into his own existence. It’s a timely reminder that he is a boy and a life beyond the lair beckons. As he stares at his reflection, all he has come to believe starts to unravel and it’s hard to imagine what the future holds for him and his brother. Can they survive in a human world? We do know that whatever happens, it won’t be an easy journey. After all, the question of how to bridge the indefatigable space between worlds is a question not even humans can answer.
KATHARINE GILLETT has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Newcastle and a background in community publishing and cultural development. She is the coordinator of the Newcastle Poetry Prize.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
The English Class 
by Ouyang Yu
Transit Lounge, 2010
ISBN 9780980571783
Reviewed by SALLY FITZPATRICK
Having resisted colonial forays for millennia, China is ironically westernizing itself, a cultural revolution with arguably as much impact as that of the Great Proletarian Revolution. Even the poorest Chinese peasant, willing to dismiss the intense beauty embodied in the Chinese language, may believe the English language has the power to transform their life. This belief in the transformative power of English is the driving ambition, and perhaps the flaw, in the heart of Jing, the hapless, truck-driver protagonist of Ouyang Yu’s recent novel, The English Class.
Although Jing’s aspiration leads to his downfall, his character provides an ingenious vehicle for Yu’s endless curiosity with both the Chinese and English languages. Yu’s prolific output, to the order of an average of two books per year for the last twenty years, speaks of a man whose fascination with language acts like adrenalin in his blood. In The English Class, as he explores the idiosyncrasies of language, Yu ploughs the cultural wealth hidden within the fields of the two languages, fertilizing, cross-pollinating and producing a delightful linguistic hybrid.
The effervescent energy of this novel, and the charm of its innocent protagonist, compel interest throughout the entire four hundred pages. Reminiscent of the picaresque hero Don Quixote, the hapless truck-driver, Jing, tilts at the windmill of the English language as he bounds around in the Unique, his rattling, truck-without- breaks. More aptly perhaps, Jing resembles Sun Wu Kong, the famous Monkey King, hero of the Chinese classic, Journey to the West, who lampoons the phantasmagorical world of Chinese Buddhist and Taoist belief.
Like Sun Wu Kong, Jing also takes a journey to the West, albeit a West that is now located south, in Australia, where he believes he can rise above the material world, if only he can master the English language. “I can read and speak some English, whereas they can only read and speak Chinese,” Jing thinks about his workmates at the truck depot. “All I ever wanted to do is move away from people, from them, from a life bound by materialism into a life of metaphysics. Truck driving is all about moving goods from one place to another. I want to do something like thought driving, moving thoughts from one place to another.” (115)
Yu brings the flavour of the truck depot to life in precisely rendered characters, such as the fastidious Canton, who “just sits there, his left leg thrown over his right while his right knee constantly jerks up and down as he makes a sucking noise through his big-holed nostrils.” (15) The dialogue makes for effortless reading, humouring the reader as it seamlessly segues the two languages. Gu, the story-teller workmate,scoffs at the aloof Jing: “You think people who go to universities are smart? Goupi! Dog fart nonsense. The xiao bailian, small white face, doesn’t even know how to change a tyre properly and he’s learning ying ge la xi, Englishit!” Mundane English expressions permeate with new meanings and with comedy as Jing attempts to memorize one hundred English words every day at the wheel of his truck. “He knew what egg stood for but what was egg on? . . . he could hardly make any sense of it.” (22)
When he enters University in Wuhan, Jing obsessively unpicks phrases and expressions, as if at a sub-syllabic level, some kind of power will be released, like splitting the atom, which will finally provide the desired transcendence. Investigating the many ways the ideas of yin and yang pervade the Chinese language, for instance, Jing notices that yin, female, is both more prolific than yang, and always bad:
. . . yin wind, yin shadows, yin cold, yin darkness, yin privacy, yin conspiracy, yin danger, yin soul, yin clouds, yin thief, yin world . . . Are there other cultures out there that are only concerned with the yang as opposed to the yin? Is English as bad? Jing could only remember an English word, history, which seemed to suggest that it was a man’s story, not a woman’s. His memory became blurred as sleep pervaded his senses. He thought he fell off a cliff into the pond behind the hill. (155)
Yu balances dark consequences, the barest foreshadowing of the blurring to come, with whimsical touches that keep the text light and delightful.
While Jing idolizes English, a realistic undercurrent flows through the text. This tension between the ideal and the real is the source of the humour that pervades the novel. Yu satirizes Australian society, holding up a mirror that reflects an undeniable cultural poverty in the suburbs. The new English teacher at Wuhan University, the Australian Dr Wagner, muses to himself:
Already he was faced with a class of young people whose aspirations travelled far beyond the borders of China, whose motivation was like nothing he had ever seen in a comparatively dreary Australian suburb, and whose learning skills were amazingly intuitive, coupled with a respect for their teacher that few of his peers could experience in Australia. (240)
Yu’s prose is vibrant with his original and creative English, which he tints with the colours of Chinese literary tradition:
The falling sun would set the lake waters ablaze with fire throwing down a long wide shaft of myriad colours and hues. The air was scented with wild flowers mixed with the smell of raw fish, and memories of the recently dead . . . in the distance was the university hidden among dense foliage with the roofs of its buildings half visible, most conspicuously a column of black smoke twisting every other way above the old library at the top of Luojia Hill. It took Jing quite some time to work out that the smoke was formed by millions of mosquitoes flying together towards the sky. (159)
Here we see the classic antithesis that enlivens Chinese language and poetry, with its surprising juxtaposition of fish and flowers, smoke and mosquitoes. The writer’s prose style resonates at the same time, with alliterative English. Yu revives and rejuvenates language, with his use of archaic expressions, perhaps unearthed as a result of the Chinese government’s exclusive use of romantic era texts for its English curriculum:
“A penny for your thoughts, E Jing, you are in a brown study again!”
“No,” Jing said. “I’m actually in a green study.” He said this as his hand swept the air in an arc that included the tree-lined bank encircling the lake and greenish hills beyond. (236)
Even Yu’s use of words, such as ‘greenish’, maybe considered vague by a native English writer, provide subtlety and charm, while contextualising the received language of the protagonist and the narrator.
The third and final part of the text leaps forward twenty years to a suburban garden in Melbourne where Jing struggles to align his dreams with reality. Here, the narrative also becomes blurred and sometimes hard to follow, as the voice changes between characters, locations and time frames. Even so, Yu maintains humour in the bleakest of situations. As Jing becomes unhinged, he is diagnosed as suffering from:
. . . cultural disorientation and bilinguistic confusion . . . exhibiting such symptoms as a difficulty in switching back into a ‘foreign’ culture after living in his ‘mother’ culture for a brief time; a constant need to assert the superiority of his former culture over the present culture in public while unreasonably denouncing his former culture in private; and a perennial sense of victimization that he did not enjoy full rights as his other fellow citizens did because of his ‘wrong’ skin colour, his wrong shape of eyes and his wrong gait. (365)
Crash landing in the wasteland of the West, the windmill is destroyed and Jing’s identity disintegrates under the impact. Instead of the hoped for transcendence, Jing finds alienation in the face of cringing racism. Ultimately, however, there is a strange surrender to ockerism and the ordinary, which suggests Jing may yet revive himself.
While the Chinese and much of the Asian block scramble to learn English, Australia remains aloof, providing the merest tokens of Asian language education to their young, and failing to provide the means for a meaningful cultural exchange. The English Class is a work that shows the rich cultural potential of language contained within Australia’s immigrant population, a potential for which our previous Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, aka Lù Kèwén or 陸克文, was openly aware. Australia could embrace its place in the East, become better acquainted with its neighbours, and even learn from their ancient philosophies and languages. ‘Easternization’ is a foreign concept, and as yet, an uncoined word. Ironically, spell-check corrects it to ‘westernization’. Let the easternization of Australia begin! Meanwhile, we can look forward to more from the writer of the adventures of Jing.
SALLY FITZPATRICK is completing a Masters Degree in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. She is currently writing a memoir about her time following the footsteps of her daughter in China.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Feather Man
by Rhyll McMaster
Brandl & Schlesinger, 2007
ISBN: 9781876040833
Reviewed by DEBBIE LIM
What repels can often also compel. In Feather Man, author Rhyll McMaster seems to know this as she draws us into the life of Sooky – a girl who is sexually abused by her neighbour in 1950s suburban Brisbane. The story opens with Sooky helping her perpetrator, Lionel, in his chook yard. By the third page, we cannot help but read in growing horror as Lionel commits the violation that will set up the damaging patterns that define Sooky’s relationships in adulthood.
The confronting scene in the chook shed could be a microcosm of the novel’s world. This is a visceral place that’s stifling and grubby, where women rank low in the social pecking order. But it’s also in these early pages that Sooky’s gift for observation becomes apparent:
I saw a pair of chook’s legs walk by my head. Even the chooks acted as if everything was normal… But my thighs looked unusual, the way Lionel had jacked them up and spread them apart. I wasn’t used to seeing them that way. They looked pale and nude, the inside of frogs’ legs, as if they were too unripe to be like that.
This ability to ‘see’ leads Sooky to become a successful painter in later years. Her capacity to find an idiosyncratic beauty amongst the urban squalor is also what allows us to venture into what could otherwise be a bleak setting. One morning, for example, when the adults are still asleep after a night of partying, she goes outside:
I walk out onto the grass in the sloping backyard and bend down. There is much to look at in this close-up world. The heavy dew lies in tiny round crystal balls on the clover. A grasshopper with a green spike extending from its head springs out of nowhere onto my hand. Its mandibles graze my skin. I can feel it eating me…I am queen and king of this region and nothing can harm me.
Ultimately, Feather Man is a novel about self-identity. In Sooky’s case, it’s less the search for identity than a struggle to reclaim the ‘ordinary’ self that was taken from her by Lionel as a young girl. For while her artist’s eye is acute, her heart still knocks to the dysfunctional rhythms of childhood. After breaking off an engagement to a besotted but conventional footballer, Sooky marries her childhood idol, the charming Redmond – who is also the son of her abuser Lionel.
For Sooky, the attraction is primal:
The first and most important thing to mention about Redmond is his burnished hair. It is the colour my father brings up out of mahogany, as he polishes in small oily circles. The fox coat. Deep and rich, active, alien.
But Redmond also turns out to be a cruel narcissist. This becomes increasingly apparent after Sooky marries him and they move overseas so he can forge a career in the London art world.
It could be said that none of the characters in Feather Man are particularly likeable. Even Sooky is not conventionally endearing: she is blunt, obstinate and unpredictable. But it is also her lack of convention that makes her such a sympathetic character.
Neither is Sooky one of the two stereotypes she might easily have been: the victim quietly nursing her wounds or the veering car crash leaving a trail of debris. While she has aspects of both, she is intelligent, resilient, introspective and, perhaps most importantly, has agency. Her dispassionate observations can be blackly funny. For instance, during the first time she has sex with Redmond:
The moment has a flavour of clinical deadness. He has taken off his trousers and his shirt and I see he wears a string singlet. Oh, Redmond, I grieve.
Below the dreadful singlet, in the light from the street, I can see his erection. That looks funny too, a polyp or sea worm waving around in the current. I admonish myself: It is not really waving.
One of the achievements of Feather Man is that, via Sooky’s internal reflections, it explores the complicated and enduring relationship between victim and abuser. It is due to McMaster’s skill that, rather than bog down the narrative, these sections deepen the complexity and our understanding of the issue. With Sooky’s eyes, we see how the beast of abuse wears a coat of subtle shades of grey, how it operates in the liminal zone, where the back fence is ignored and boundaries blurred.
Since its publication in 2007, Feather Man has won the 2008 Barbara Jefferis Award. It remains a relevant and powerful book. I was also happily surprised to discover that Rhyll McMaster’s personal website provides detailed notes on the novel’s development. This includes original sections that were later edited out and even the initial reader’s report by the book’s publisher, Brandl & Schlesinger. It’s a fascinating and refreshingly open look into the author’s creative process.
Readers familiar with McMaster’s poetry (she has published six books of poems) will likely be fascinated to learn that her debut novel incorporates poems from two of her previous works (Flying the Coop and Chemical Bodies). According to McMaster, poems have been re-worked as prose in an ‘attempt at post post-modernism’. Also woven throughout are numerous references to fairy tales and nursery rhymes.
The pages of Feather Man bristle with animal imagery. This is skillfully used to depict humans in all their brutality and strange complexity. Sooky’s father, for instance, keeps a tank of sea horses and anemones. However, his seeming fascination with the creatures reflects his disconnectedness and lack of self awareness:
He liked the idea of horses and flowers underwater. He searched for the ridiculous or the out-of-place, the askew, the left-handed, like himself… He looked at those sea horses with so much incomprehension.
In another passage that echoed vaguely the voice in Nabokov’s Lolita, Sooky likens her susceptibility to Lionel’s attentions as unavoidable as basic cell replication:
Lionel, how I loved you…I was a plate of medium in a laboratory ready for someone to seed me with the bacteria of love. Anything might have stuck. Healthy, unhealthy, fungoid, parasitic. I couldn’t discern between them.
McMaster frequently uses animal similes to describe the characters, resulting in vivid portraits. It also lends a sense of dissociation, a certain fantastical edge. The ultimate beast, of course, is Lionel who is the menacing ‘Feather Man’ of the title. As the name suggests, he looms as a type of half-man half-animal, the childhood monster from the henhouse that eludes capture.
The actual animals that appear in the novel typically don’t fare well under the custodianship of humans. The seahorse tank cracks and gushes its inhabitants onto the carpet, chickens are scalded and disembowelled, while the family cat is put down without warning and perfunctorily replaced. Overall, humans are seen as negligent and with a tendency to abuse power.
In Feather Man, life is a savage place where only the fittest survive. This is a powerful and uncomfortable work that refuses easy rescue. Although self-empowerment through art is one of its themes, in the end this is not a lofty tale. There are feathers on the ground, grit under the fingernails, and a sense that the wolf will always be watching from the shadows. Even so, in McMaster’s hands, there is a strange poetry to be found for those whose gaze remains unflinching.